On my way back from SNW
… so I thought I’d do a quick recap.
Fortunately, much of the work has already been done by the press, analyst
and blogger community.
The big SNIA news was
the announcement of the Cloud Storage Initiative, which was covered quite
succinctly by Lucas Mearian in ComputerWorld. The other SNIA news announcements were
around SMI-S, Solid State Storage and the recent governing board elections. For
details, see the SNIA
Newsroom.
There was a fair amount
of product announcement activity at the conference, summarized very well by
Dave Simpson in InfoStor. George Crump gave us an exhaustive
rundown of what was going on in his Live
from SNW – Day 1 and Day
2 blogs. In addition, Dave
Simpson has a more expansive view of the conference in his blog.
Of course, if you’re
not in IT or the storage industry, SNW might mean something different -- in which
case, this is the
website for you.
So, what did I think
about SNW?
Well, everybody’s first
question is about attendance. My
estimate is that IT end user attendance was at about the same level as Spring,
which was pretty much level with last Fall. In terms of vendor attendance, my guess is that it was about
the same as Spring, which was significantly down on the Fall show (fewer
vendors, each sending fewer representatives). There were signs of an uptick in vendor activity and
engagement, but this was negatively impacted by the schedule conflict with
Oracle Open World (which is a major show for many storage vendors).
However, judging by the
number of product announcements and the jostling for visibility in hot new
trends and technologies (cloud, solid state, FCoE, storage efficiency, etc)
this continues to be an important event for vendors.
For IT professionals,
it continues to be the best place to get an in-depth understanding of storage
technologies, products and trends – judging by the strong attendance in
educational sessions, their feedback, and the fact that IT attendance has held
up despite the economic downturn.
Bottom line, SNW continues to be relevant
and to provide value to both the IT community and the vendor community. The big
question is can it they stay relevant as the industry changes, and more industry
interaction is virtual – but that’s a question for all industry events, and SNW
seems to be is in much better shape than many.
