 That was a real shock for me, when I got the first rumours and later on the confirmations, that there will be no BrainShare next year in Salt Lake City. For me Brainshare was a personal MUST HAVE event. I would have paid private money and would have take holidays to attend Brainshare. So from an emotional point this is hurting me privately. But leaving the emotional area and thinking about it in a professional way: I think Novell had to take this hard decision.
And my definition of thinking professional is always not looking to much backwards (only try to learn out of history), but to look forward. So in Europe we already experienced, that Brainshare Europe was cancelled some years ago. For those (including myself) which attended both SLC and/or Barcelona, these events could not be really compared. SLC was the real Brainshare, Barcelona was a not well done copy of it. However for a lot of customers and partners in Europe it has been the only Brainshare they know about. And it disappeard. But Novell in Europe is still alive. And it is doing better then in other regions. One of the very important factors of that is, that Europe does have huge communities. We do have all the local GroupWise User Groups, starting with the historical No. 1 UK, the groups in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Middle East, South Africa having the strong Novell groups in Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland) and having lots of other activities in countries like Poland, Bulgaria, Czech, Slovakia, .... So we are community and this is helping us (and Novell).
Open Horizons and all these local communities/initiatives have created a varity of local events (e.g. Open Horizons EMEA Tour, Open Horizons Regional Summits, Open Horizons EMEA Summit) which are delivering high-quality content on different Novell solutions like GroupWise, ZENworks, Teaming + Conferencing..... So we are probably much less dependend on Brainshare. And that is very good. We need these local events, because Europe is still not one strong market with one language and no borders.
So Brainshare is gone - we should take that just as a given fact now. Open Horizons is still there and is going to continue and increase their events, trainings, services....
Merry chrismas to all of you and your families.
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