The VAR Guy

Despite the recession, two areas of the IT channel — open source companies and managed services specialists — are pressing ahead with partner and customer conferences. The latest example involves Pentaho, an open source business intelligence company that plans to host a partner summit in April.

From NetApp Accelerate to Novell Brainshare,  the recession has forced many partner and customer conferences to shut down — at least for this year and perhaps forever. (Side note: Some companies, such as Cisco Systems, are pressing ahead with their partner conferences. But elsewhere, big events seem to be struggling to find an audience this year.)

Filling the Void

But small, nimble software companies seem to be pushing ahead with their partner and customer events. Examples include:

• Pentaho Partner Summit (April 2-3, Menlo Park, Calif.): The event comes only a few weeks after Pentaho launched its Gold level partner program. Pentaho was ranked No. 3 in The Open Source 50, which tracks the most promising open source partner programs.
• Openbravo World Conference (April 17-19, Barcelona, Spain): Openbravo specializes in commercial open source ERP (enterprise resource planning) and POS (point of sale) software. Ranked No. 10 in The Open Source 50, Openbravo says IBM, Oracle, Pentaho and Alfresco all plan to have major presence at the partner event.
• MySQL Conference and Expo (April 20-23, Santa Clara, Calif.): While parent Sun Microsystems struggles, the MySQL division continues to grow.
• Autotask Community Live (March 29-31, Nashville, Tenn.): VARs and solutions providers continue to embrace Autotask’s Professional Services Automation (PSA) software. Autotask rival ConnectWise also will host a major partner conference later this year. And MSP software industry leaders like Kaseya and Ingram Micro Seismic continue to push forward with partner events.

How can those companies host partner and customer conferences amid such a deep recession? Fact is, IT spending hasn’t stopped. And face-to-face conversations are more important than ever.

A case in point: While Novell canceled its large Brainshare conference, the company is launching a Data Center Evolution and IT in Action event series.

The VAR Guy’s conclusion: Small, highly-targeted events involving growing software niches remain hot destinations for VARs and solutions providers.

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