The rumors that circulated for months are now officially confirmed: VMware postpones the VMworld Europe from Q1 to Q4, just one month after the North America main conference.
This means at least three things:
- The Europeans that planned to go to the VMworld 2010 instead of the imminent VMworld 2009 in San Francisco to limit the travel expenses will have to wait an entire year instead of just few months.
- All the exhibiting vendors will have to build two conference teams to manage the two VMworld logistics with just one month of delay from each other.
The biggest companies are perfectly ready to do so but the smallest VMware partners may have issues. - Some customers that plan to attend both events won’t be able to do so because the quarter budget probably doesn’t allow to do so.
The early feedbacks expressed by well-known members of the virtualization community are not exactly positive: here, here and here.
Anyway VMware may have a few reasons to do so:
- Reduce the total amount of attendees for the North America conference
Last year VMworld 08 scored over 14,000 attendees. Worldwide crisis aside, if this trend continues to grow the profit will certainly increase but also the logistic issues.
The company may want to rebalance the attendees across the regions and simplify the event management. - Give more relevance to the European conference
It’s not a secret that VMware marks the North American event as its flagship conference.
European attendees prefer to go there because everybody does the same, so they get more networking opportunities, prime-time speakers and fresh announcements. - Disturb the Microsoft conference business
In Q4 Microsoft arranges its TechEd Europe conference, and while the audience is only partially overlapping with VMworld, those attendees are extremely interesting to VMware.
So far Microsoft didn’t dedicate much TechEd space to virtualization and it certainly doesn’t have a dedicated virtualization conference.
Virtualization still is one of the main priorities in many European companies and a system administrator with budget for a single event in Q4 may end up choosing VMworld over TechEd.
VMware has a VMworld fan page on Facebook. It may be worth to express some feedbacks there.