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Comments to Our Article “Storage Giants Investing in Private Rather Than Public Shows”

By organizer of SNW Europe

Following our article Storage Giants Investing in Private Rather Than Public Shows: SNW Europe Suffering, we have received these comments by Bill Dunlop, CEO of Angel Business Communications, the organizers of the Powering the Cloud events.

While we agree that that some of the ‘big’ names in the industry are doing fewer public shows and investing in their own events – for example HP who has its own event in Frankfurt within one month of ours (which is the reason it has chosen not to participate this year) – we are quite comfortable with our results so far. In recent years many sponsors have delayed decisions until September before committing to participate; in fact since our press release last week we have already signed and received commitment from several companies you list as not having returned: these include Syncsort, Dot Hill and SGI, with Oracle confirming its return as a Platinum sponsor for 2012 – plus we have other new names to add to the list of sponsors which you will see in due course. Also please note that Intel is listed on the press release of 23rd August.

If you look back – at the end of September last year we had secured 62 sponsors’ support and we are confident that we will match that figure this year and get close to our record at the event of 2010, which in an industry full of acquisitions and mergers is a great result. In terms of balance, you make no mention in your article of the continuing success of the events to attract new sponsors: this year that includes Kaspersky Lab, Solar Winds, Xsigo (before it was acquired by Oracle), LG, Whiptail, Nexenta, Inktank, SMART  Storage, Synology, OCZ, Progress DataDirect and SafeNet with more on the verge of signing.

Finally, our highest level sponsor (Platinum and Gold) numbers are up this year – 12 so far compared to 10 in 2011 – and include VMware as a full Platinum partner this year for the first time along with gold returnees Brocade (absent in 2011) and companies investing more in 2012 than previous years like Emulex and NetApp.

At the end of the day the key measure of success is in the attendee numbers and the quality of those delegates which is what pulls in the sponsors and brings most of them back year after year, and that is our primary focus now – we look to seeing you in Frankfurt and reviewing our results.

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