Economic troubles have chalked up another casualty: Novell BrainShare 2009.
Novell Inc.'s annual weeklong conference at the Salt Palace has been canceled for next spring because of attendees' budget troubles.
The first BrainShare conference was in 1984, and this past year's event in March had about 5,500 attendees from 58 countries. It had more than 65 sponsor and exhibitor companies and featured general sessions, more than 250 business and technical breakout sessions, a technology laboratory and more.
The company on Tuesday decided to cancel the 2009 event.
"We started to talk to the customers and partners that obviously are the attendees for the event, and when we talked to them, there was a very high interest in finding out news from Novell, finding out about new products, hearing announcements we planned to make, getting the training they get at the event," said Novell spokesman Ian Bruce.
"But pretty uniformly, they were also telling us they were having budget issues, especially around discretionary spending like travel. With the current economic climate, this isn't so much of a surprise. So when we listened to that, we decide to try to use our resources more effectively to reach the audience — and it's a worldwide audience — more effectively."
Novell is considering delivering conference materials online or conducting smaller, more-regional events "that will allow us to get face time with folks but would be more locally based so that, again, we'd get around some of the travel restrictions that our customers and partners have," Bruce said.
The company will release details in January about how it will proceed, he said, adding that Salt Lake City remains an option for a regional event, should the company select that type of event as an option. "We'll know more about those in January as we start to figure out locations, times, schedules and what our customers require," he said.
In announcing the 2009 cancellation, John Dragoon, Novell's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, noted that BrainShare "is a tradition we are proud of. I also know that our customers and partners always look forward to this conference."
The Massachusetts-based company, with about 1,200 of its 4,000 employees in Provo, develops enterprise infrastructure software for companies.
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