Powering to another success

The Powering the Cloud conferences SNW Europe, Virtualization World and Datacenter Technologies have established themselves as must-attend events in the calendars of European IT professionals looking to stay ahead of recent developments in data storage, virtualisation, networking and other data centre technologies. The organisers pride themselves on the fact that they offer delegates the only truly independent event in Germany dedicated to these topics with over 130 conference sessions focused on education and information. This year’s events will be held on 29th and 30th October in the Congress Frankfurt. We spoke with Bill Dunlop, CEO of Angel Business Communications, organisers of the Powering the Cloud events.

SNW Europe is celebrating ten years in Frankfurt this year. In that time, many specialist trade fairs have come and gone. What is the secret to SNW Europe’s lasting success?

The key is to strike a balance between being too focused and trying to appeal to too many people. While other shows and events have either remained solely focused on one area or are too generalist – such as CeBIT where next to no storage vendors exhibit anymore – we have continued to adapt SNW Europe to the changes in the industry, integrating new topics such as big data or virtualisation. At the same time, we never lose sight of the three cornerstones of the infrastructure which form the basis of our event: where you store your company’s information, where and how you process that information and how you make sure the information is where it needs to be when it needs to be there. These three aspects will never change regardless of the evolution in our industry. Even as cloud infrastructures become more popular, for example, these three cornerstones still apply.

How and why has the event evolved over the last 10 years?

When the SNW Europe show first came to Frankfurt back in 2004, the focus was on storage networking. What at the time was a new and quickly evolving element of the storage industry is, however, now a given. Trends such as virtualisation have led to an evolution in networking and data management and the event has evolved in parallel with those changes.

Have the demographics changed over the years? Has there been a change in the level of employee and job titles attending?

Despite the economic downturn, the percentage of international visitors has remained steady. Regarding the kind of delegates attending, SNW Europe has moved from a very technical show in the early days to attracting a higher percentage of channel and independent consulting firms as well as IT manager level delegates from a wide variety of industries. While we used to primarily welcome storage administrators, we are seeing a steady increase in attendance from decision makers and management teams in related areas of IT such as security, networking or server platforms.

Five years ago, you chose to expand the show and added Virtualisation World and Datacenter Technologies. Why?

This was a consultative move by SNIA Europe and Angel Business Communications to make it clear to the market that SNW Europe had evolved from its storage roots. Although we were already including virtualisation and data centre related topics in our agenda, we realised it was important to expand the brand to cover these aspects and promote them more directly to the audience as integral parts of the event.

Why did you choose the umbrella name “Powering the Cloud” to group the three events?

For the first two years, the three events were given the umbrella name “The Power of Three” to reinforce the fact that we had expanded the base of the show. We then changed this to Powering the Cloud to reflect the significant trend in the industry at the time. It became a natural theme because of what was top of mind for the delegates. In the future, we may well adapt the umbrella theme again as the industry continues to evolve.

What can visitors to this year’s events expect? What will the hot topics be? Are there any new additions to the programme?

Last year, we introduced a new format with focused half-day spotlight tracks led by industry analysts which proved very popular with delegates and speakers. This year, we are evolving and refining that format based on feedback we received in 2012. We will not have as many themes but shall spend more time on each one and shall be positioning them as CTO / CIO level spotlight sessions. The hot topics we are focusing on are big data, securing data, IT and information management, enabling 'new & old world' enterprise scale applications and rethinking the data centre architecture.

What role has the SNIA played in the event’s success? How exactly is SNIA involved in the creation of the agenda and in the organisation of the events?

SNW Europe is SNIA Europe’s flagship event in Europe and the association has been instrumental in the event’s ongoing success. The European board of directors spends a lot of time providing direction for the agenda and SNIA contributes a significant percentage of the content itself with the highly popular SNIA-run sessions. It is very much a consultative relationship between ourselves and the association and we hold regular meetings to discuss, review and update the agenda.

How do you make sure the conference agenda is up to date and meets the needs and interests of those attending?

In addition to SNIA, including the local SNIA Europe German committee led by Fritz Hartmann of Brocade, we consult relevant user groups such as BITKOM, Cloud Security Alliance, Data Centre Alliance, EuroCloud Deutschland, GSE and SANBoard as well as working closely with the independent analyst community including The 451 Group, Evaluator Group, IDC, Josh Krischer & Associates, Neuralytix and Storage Switzerland. We also liaise with the organisers of CloudCamp Frankfurt, an “unconference” where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.By including input from a broad range of industry and end-user associations, we can ensure that we are not missing any key issues and address the concerns that are being faced by end-user community today and in the future.

In economically difficult times, you have seen sponsor numbers grow. Are these mainly new or recurring sponsors? How do you attract new vendors to invest and why do some companies come back year after year?

In 2004, we had 28 sponsors. Since 2010, we have annually welcomed over 70 sponsors. We noticed a particularly significant jump in sponsor numbers between 2009 and 2010 after introducing and establishing Virtualization World and Datacenter Technologies. On average, between 25 and 30% of our sponsors each year are new. This is important because of the consolidation in our industry. We need to attract new companies on a regular basis. In addition, a number of vendors, such as Brocade and LSI, have returned as we have evolved the events. Despite all the changes in the industry, we are proud of the fact that there are around ten companies that were at the first event and have invested in every subsequent show.

What have been – for you – the key developments in the storage and related industries in the past 10 years?

Developments such as virtualisation and thin provisioning have been particularly key in the storage industry as they have led to significant changes in the way companies manage their storage resources, enabling them to have a utility model and manage storage in a more utility-like way. The natural next step has been the emergence of the cloud. These developments are all driven by the evolution of new technologies that help end users run their IT effectively.

On the flipside, it has been interesting to see how for ten years, the demise of fibre channel has been continuously forecast but hasn’t happened despite the emergence of Ethernet. These protocols co-exist but fibre channel is still dominating the high-end.

Who are the “vendors to watch” this year?

One of the most interesting areas of technologies to watch this year will be the flash / SSD space with lots of new vendors emerging to take on the established players. In addition, we expect to see considerable buzz around vendors offering simpler management interfaces which allow organisations to keep control of their IT resources whether in a physical or a virtualised cloud environment.

One of the most important developments, where we are seeing both the emergence of new vendors and the refocusing of existing vendors, is in ‘Software Defined’ architectures. This is not only in designing data centre and storage infrastructures to support specific software application deployments but also in dynamic infrastructures that can automatically react and reconfigure based on application usage and data types.

Where do you see the Powering the Cloud events in 10 years’ time?

While we will certainly be evolving the events to keep them fresh and up to date, there is no reason that Powering the Cloud, in whatever form it might be, will not be in Frankfurt in ten years’ time. The rationale in holding the events there in the first place remains the same. Frankfurt is a major business hub at the heart of Europe and allows easy access from around the continent. In addition, the agenda will still be addressing the three cornerstones I mentioned at the beginning, namely the storing, processing and provisioning of information. Despite the growth in popularity of online events and vendors’ own customer forums, we strongly believe there is still a place for shows such as SNW Europe, Virtualization World and Datacenter Technologies which provide an independent platform for end-users to come together and interact to share their experiences and learn from each other.

Powering the Cloud will be taking place at the Congress Frankfurt on 29th & 30th October 2013. IT end users and channel partners can register for free using promo code P2M13 at 

www.poweringthecloud.com