Proven under pressure: a global congress in Paris

A global research congress is unforgiving infrastructure. Abstracts, registrations, schedules and thousands of delegates all converge on a fixed date in a single city — and at peak, everyone reaches for the same system at once. For ISPAH’s 2024 Congress in central Paris, the platform had to hold up live, in real time, in front of an international audience.

It was also the first time our custom-built abstract management system would run a congress of this size — still in beta, with everything to prove.

ISPAH’s 2024 Congress in Paris was the first congress to run on our custom-built abstract management system. Still in beta, it was put through its paces in earnest — 918 abstracts and close to 1,000 delegates accessing it live, at peak, in real time.

Handling that load reliably is an infrastructure problem as much as a software one: concurrent access at peak, fast queries against a large abstract library, and no margin for downtime during a live event. The platform held — and real-world use at that scale surfaced exactly what a research congress demands.

We took the system forward from there. The lessons from Paris fed directly into a far more advanced platform — the one that now powers congresses end to end, from abstract submission and review through to registration, e-commerce and on-site delivery.