As the dust is settling and attendees are catching up on being out of the office for a few days, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at SNW and what we may have learned, albeit in my case from the outside looking in.
In the interest of full disclosure, which seems to be of particular interest to some in light of the recent FTC ruling, none of our clients in the storage industry or outside were consulted during the preparation, creation and finalization of this post.
# of news releases issued with SNW timeline/dateline (source: BusinessWire, PR Newswire, PRWeb, Marketwire): 33. My personal favorite is a release that was issued on Oct. 20. The release announced a company's customer that had been named a Finalist in the Best Practices in Storage Awards held in conjunction with the conference. Pity award winners were announced a week earlier, on Oct. 13.
# recap stories covering off on all the news/announcements (source: Computerworld/IDG, Enterprise Storage Forum, Google, InfoStor, Network Computing, SearchStorage/TechTarget, The Register: 31 (not including syndication). Among the highlights include, Hitachi Data Systems "Agile Cloud Solutions," WhipTail Technologies Racerunner version of its SSD appliances, ProStor Systems new model in the InfiniVault system series, Olocity StorageIM Professional Edition management software, LSI three new host adapters that support 6Gbps SAS and 3Gbps SATA, The Storage Performance Council new benchmark – the SPC Benchmark 1/Energy, and SNIA's new Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI Phoenix?) to name a few.
# media/analysts on the "official SNW Fall Press and Analyst List" as of 10/9, the first day of the conference (source: Topaz Partners): 45
# media/analyst organizations represented (source: Topaz Partners): 28.
# average pitches most media/analysts received to "meet" at SNW (source: media/analyst attendees): 20-25
# average meetings most media/analysts conducted during the course of normal business hours: 15-20
# Tweets emanating from SNW, about SNW, from the outside looking in at SNW and using hashtags #SNW and #SNWUSA (source: Social Mention): 132, much lower than originally anticipated. Much of this can be due to a few reasons. Fewer storage industry Twitterers attending, including many that were actively Tweeting during the Spring 09 conference. Few using hashtags to indicate conversations/topics were emanating from or about SNW. Also, SNW coordinators did not end up retweeting everything from their own Twitter handle like they did in the spring, something that met with mixed reaction. I am curious to hear how SNW CONNECT was received and if it became a "useful professional networking platform that connects attendees, exhibitors and sponsors of SNW in a virtual network" it was billed to be. Personally, Storage Monkeys is hard to beat in that regard.
Most used hashtag (source: Social mention): #SNW with 113 instances (as of 10/23). Putting to rest the discussion of which hashtag to use #SNW or #SNWUSA.
# Most prolific Twitterer using a hashtag (source: Social Mention): Jay Livens @SEPATONjay with 24; Dave Vellante @dvellante a close second with 13. It was somewhat disappointing to apparently see the numbers for Tweeting in general so low. Perhaps it's more an indication of how Twitter is and is not being used still. Or, it could be due to the fact that Tweeting was happening but because few used hashtags, who knew it was about the conference? I guess there's a tree falling in some forest analogy here somewhere. There are many active Twitterers in the storage industry that may just not have paid as much attention to SNW as they may in the past. Or, preferred less "socially media" friendly tools to communicate.
# Conferences happening at same time as SNW in the U.S.: 7 including Oracle Open World also worth noting, Storage Expo in the U.K. was happening at roughly the same time.
# "Hot" Topics: 6, including Cloud, Deduplication, FCoE, SRM, SSDs, and Virtualization. While perhaps not SNIA's charter, I tend to agree with those that weighed in especially in the recent InfoSmack Podcast hosted by Greg Kneierman. The discussion focused around the fact SNIA may have lost an opportunity to rise above the finger pointing in the media around Microsoft/Danger/Sidekick and Swissdisk cloud related hiccups to rise above that din and take a leadership role in discussing the importance of standards, security, and assurance in light of events.
# End User Attendees (source: varied among blogosphere and conference organizers): 800-1,200. About 900 seems to be the safest bet. It may not have been as high as some years past, but still an impressive number.
It seems that while fewer vendors participated, this Fall's event was better attended by end users. That is good news. Perhaps, as some have indicated recently, this is just one more light that is starting to burn brighter at the end of the recessionary tunnel. And, could bode well for those of us that heart storage.
