VMworld revived the IT conference landscape by being open and energetic. I remember being totally stoked at VMworld a few years ago in LA by the enthusiasm nearly everybody had for the event - vendors and customers alike.
Brian Madden has interpreted this years VMWorld sponsor and exhibitor agreement as being much less open in the past by not allowing demonstrations of competing products. The comment thread on his blog will likely grow by leaps and bounds today, so people interested in this discussion might want to link over to his blog and follow it. Scott Lowe has also posted on this on his blog.
So far, most of the reaction has been to ask VMware how they could do this and to point fingers at Microsoft for having closed conferences. Some people will do anything to take a swing at Microsoft. If VMware is doing this in reaction to anything Microsoft does with its conferences, then I'd say their motivation is backwards.
The great love-fest of VMworld has served VMware very well. The show helped create a community - not just for VMware - but for the entire virtualization industry. The first job in any new industry is to create a market and VMware has certainly done that. Having done that, VMware has moved on to optimizing VMworld for its business opportunities - and that means for the ecosystem that is aligned with it's technologies. VMware is not in the conference business and it needs to focus on its big and challenging business agenda, not on producing a love fest for virtualization. This is an opportunity for conference producers.
I wouldn't expect EMC to open up EMC World to 3PAR and other vendors that compete vigorously with them. Why would they go to the effort of producing an event that would risk losing customers to other vendors? That would be insane. I don't see why VMware should be any different.
Marc,
To a certain extent, I agree with you. A vendor has every right to block competitors to an event they are organizing. However, you *cannot* claim for your event to be THE annual event for your industry and then block others in that same industry. To be specific, then, VMware cannot claim VMworld to be THE virtualization industry event and then block other virtualization players. That is the primary basis of my argument.
Posted by: Scott Lowe | May 29, 2009 at 07:35 AM
It has always been great to see the competing products because at the end of the day you likely ended up buying VMWare anyways. This move takes away a lot of value from the event and I think it's telling that they are now feeling a bit threatened by those they patted on the head (awww how cute) in previous years.
On the other hand, there are far more complementary products for show than competitive so there's still a lot to see and do. Too bad for Citrix, Microsoft, Virtual Iron and Parallels, though. If there's other VMWare competitors I missed... well who cares cause you don't matter anymore :)
Posted by: Chris Fricke | June 01, 2009 at 09:18 AM