Almost there

I am told that the art of blogging is to keep your communications regular and interesting - but I am afraid dear reader that while (I hope) my posts have been somewhat of interest to you - they certainly have not been regular for the past few weeks!! As always, you start with the best intentions, but the build-up of work over the past month has seen that little window that keeps popping up saying 'SNW blog post' from my outlook calendar getting snoozed longer and longer.

Until now !!

So the team has finally put to bed the conference guide, the signage, the feedback forms, the show-daily brochures, the final stand layouts, the catering plans, the meeting room schedules, the press invitations and travel support plans and of course the continual registering of delegates - and a whole lot more - and with less than two weeks to go everything is in place and looking (dare I say it) good.

From our side - i.e. the agenda content speaker program - my colleague Sue Parish (without whom this woudl not be possible!) and I have had all the usual last-minute changes and adjustments and unfortunately a couple of speakers who in the end, despite their own best efforts, just could not make it. But we have another wide range of topics and sessions across all the aspects of the events that (we hope) are important to you in your IT environment.

Here are the numbers - we have 130 sessions scheduled across our three conferences and we are operating across NINE tracks at most times of the event, so our conference team will need to be well drilled and we will be relying on our speakers to observe their time slots to keep everything in sync.

If you add in the sessions being hosted in Frankfurt by our conference partners like BITKOM, SANBoard, GSE, IDC, Cloud Storm and The Cloud Storage Initiative, there are almost 150 individual sessions and speakers.

Our work continues over the next 10 days as we review the content of the speakers' presentations to try to ensure that the integrity of the main conference sessions are maintained, with our focus being on educational value to you, our delegates.

We have two tracks this year in the 'Show Floor Presentation Suites' where we are more relaxed and the speakers there will talk more directly about what their organisation does and how it can help you.

With over 70 companies participating in the exhibition this year we have set another new record - and with 30 organisations sponsoring one of the events for the first time we have more 'first-timers' than we had total sponsors at the first SNW Europe in Frankfurt in 2004 - a tribute to the event's success.

Finally to you - our delegates - registrations are tracking at over 10% up over 2009 which itself was record year, so we hope that you will be with us in Frankfurt - you still have time to recommend a friend or colleague to register and invest in what we believe is one of the top conferences on IT servers, storage, virtualization and datacenter technologies in Europe today.

I look forward to meeting many of you there !!