Storage Giants Investing in Private Rather Than Public Shows

Now in its ninth year in Frankfurt, SNW
Europe, coupled with Virtualization
World and Datacenter Technologies, will happen on October 30-31 2012
under the topic Powering the Cloud.

The organization has recruited 47 sponsors (or exhibitors) so far. This
figure could grow in the two coming months but it will be far from the
record of 72 in 2010 and 70 in 2011. We’ll see if the number of visitors is going to  reach all-time record of 1,854 last year.

       Number of booths at SNW Europe

* up to now

Sponsors at SNW Europe 2012 up to now:

• Platinum: DataCore Software, Dell, Fujitsu, VMware
• Gold: Brocade, Emulex, HDS, Kaspersky Lab, NetApp, Quantum
• Silver: Amplidata, Avere Systems, CommVault, F5 Networks, Fusion IO, Intel, LSI, Methode, Nexenta, Overland Storage, Progress Software, QLogic, Riverbed, Rosenberger OSI, SafeNet, Scality, Smart Storage Solutions, SolarWinds, Spectra Logic, STEC, Synology, Trend Micro, Veeam Software, Viking Technology, Virtual Instruments, Xsigo
• Silver: Fast LTA, Inktank, LG, NovaStor, OCZ Technology, PoINT, Qnap Systems, qSkills, SmartOptics, Texas Memory Systems, Whiptail

Some big names are missing including EMC, HP and IBM (these two last ones were platinum sponsor last year) or Symantec as well as hundreds of other mid-sized storage companies.

Acronis, Bull, Dot Hill, EMC Isilon, FalconStor, Huawei, Imation, Intel, Netgear, SGI, Syncsort have disappeared this year.

Storage giants now generally prefer to invest into their own private show. It costs a lot to organize but the spending is compensated by their partners that have to pay their booth to show their products.

Here are some of the private shows organized
this year by biggest storage firms in 2012:

• Dell Storage Forum (June, Boston, MA)
• Dell Storage Forum (November, Paris, France)
• EMC World (May, Las Vegas, NV), probably the biggest storage show in the world
• HP Discover 2012 (December, Frankfurt, Germany)
• IBM Edge2012 (June, Orlando, FL)
• Symantec Vision (May, Las Vegas, NV)
• VMworld 2012 (August, San Francisco, CA) that has a huge success as virtualization is pushing new offerings in storage – there will be another VMworld in Barcelona, Spain in November (Nevertheless VMware is a platinum sponsor at SNW Europe.)

Among the biggest ones, HDS and mainly NetApp do not invest in big private events – and consequently are exhibitors at SNW Europe.

At a certain time, some people were thinking that the new way to communicate, Ethernet, was going to destroy IT shows. Not really true.

As Comdex died, general IT events like CeBIT are going down, but some exhibitions, on hot IT markets where there are a lot of storage firms, are really a success.

Best two examples are probably IBC, next month in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, covering 14 halls, that was gathering 1,330 exhibiting companies (at the beginning of July) in electronic media and entertainment content. Last January at Las Vegas, NV, CES, focused on technology for the consumer market. was enormous, and increasing, with over 3,100 exhibitors this year.

Some smaller events focused on a category of storage products, the most successful ones, are booming. Look at the recent Flash Memory Summit last month in Santa Clara, CA, attracting more than 80 sponsors (including EMC, SanDisk, Seagate and WD).

There are two other SNW events each year, both of them in USA, SNW Spring that happens last April in Dallas, TX, and SNW Fall next month in Santa Clara, CA (with only 25 sponsors so far).