SNW Europe: 73 Sponsors, 1,647 Attendees

SNW Europe closed its doors on October 31, 2012 in Frankfurt, Germany. The two-day event got a record of sponsors (73, +4% compared to last year) and registrations but less visitors (1,647, -11%) including 1,200 “quality delegates” (end user, channel, press, analyst, blogger).

It’s probably the biggest independent storage event in the world in spite of the competition with private shows, as we already wrote. Big companies like EMC (even if Wayne Adams, chairman of SNIA co-organizing the event, is from this company …), HP and IBM were not among the sponsors because they prefer to settle their own shows. EMC Forum will take place on November 15 in Paris, and HP Discover 2012 on December 4-6, also in Frankfurt. Dell is an exception, being platinum sponsor at SNW Europe even if it will have its own Dell Storage Forum on November 14-16 in Paris. Note also that there was another smaller independent event, Storage Expo at about the same time (October 31 – November 1) in Utrecht, The Netherlands.That’s the same with Fujitsu and its Forum 2012 (November 7 -8) which is being held at ICM in
Munich, Germany.

Well-organized SNW Europe is a good business for the organizers (Angel Business Communications, ComputerWorld and SNIA) and is an excellent place to go if you are interested by storage as you can look at the most recent technologies – with a lot of start-ups being there – and participate to numerous conferences.

It’s a much bigger show than the other three SNWs (Fall, Spring in USA, and another one in Beijing, China on December 4, 2012). There were only 26 sponsors at SNW Fall 2012 last October 16-19 in Santa Clara, CA.

Frankfurt is also a great place for vendors to meet the European press. But the journalists – they were 60 – were relatively frustrated because there was no big worldwide announcement. There was only one press conference by a vendor, Oracle … and it was unknown by the official press office of the show.

SNW Europe seems to reach today a limit in term of sponsors and principally attendees. It continues to be mainly a local – not an European – show, with 75% to 80% of the visitors being German. Our opinion is that the organization does not invest enough in marketing to attract people from other countries. And it’s not a question of travel budget for end users: we just pay €96 for a Paris-Frankfurt return ticket by train.

Next SNW Europe will take place in Frankfurt on October 29-30 2013.
Six Years of SNW Europe

*end user/channel/press/analyst/blogger