Flat SNW Europe 2011

SNW Europe in Congress Frankfurt, Germany on November 2-3, 2011 attracts about the same number of visitors (1,806 compared to 1,764 in 2010) and sponsors (70 vs. 72 in 2010). The SNIA also organizes twice a year SNW in USA. There were 72 sponsors last April at SNW Spring in Santa Clara, CA, and 52 at SNW Fall in October in Orlando, FL.

                 

                          
The two UK main guys
              behind the organization of SNW Europe:
             
Paul Trowbridge, program director, and
       Bill Dunlop, MD, Angel Business Commuications

At the event – born in 2004 and always perfectly organized -, this time under the topic Powering the cloud and comprising SNW Europe, Datacenter Technologies and Virtualization World, the large majority of the end users were German as usual (81% from DACH last year for end users, professional services and resellers). And this year, "German attendees were up due to current travel budget restrictions", according to the organization.

In term of sponsors, dynamic and authoritarian PR Fred Monsone told StorageNewsletter.com that a number of storage companies were acquired last year but that there was 25% new ones at the show.

There was not really big news, new trend or killing application revealed in Frankfurt.

Note to our readers: to get about all the news published during the event, look at the home page of this web site, and on top left, in "Themes and Channels", click on "Go" for "SNW Europe 2011."

Symantec didn’t reserve a booth. Other big storage companies didn’t invest a lot. For example, HP showed only a bar on its booth, not one piece of hardware.

The main discussions in the exhibition concern the impact of Thailand floods on the price of HDDs. There is no storage without disk. And the prices are skyrocketing. Roger von Tesmar, senior project manager at Boston, distributor of WD, told us:" The costs have increased from 50% to 60% and they are changing each day." We learned that Dot Hill just made an order of $10,000 in HDDs at once to avoid the shortage in the forthcoming months. The only happy guys on the subject were members of SSD companies as they hope that the lower difference of prices between mechanical and silicon disks will increase their market share.

For the press, this event offers the the possibility to meet a bunch of storage companies in only two days. That’s why the show attracted a bunch of 59 European journalists, bloggers and analysts. They were 52 last year.

One executive of a storage company said:" We rent a booth to meet the ecosystem and to increase the visibility of our company by meeting the press, not to find new customers."

He added that he spends around €10,000 to be at SNW Europe. The cost varies between roughly €10,000 for a Silver accreditation to €40,000 to be Platinum sponsor.

Next event for German users, organized by UK people and promoting mainly U.S. companies will take place on October 30-31, 2012.

                                      
Five Years of SNW Europe
                            
* end user/channel/press/analyst/blogger