BrainShare has been cancelled this year

[kgroneman]

I hate to be the one to break bad news to you folks, but BrainShare 2009 has been cancelled. See Novell BrainShare: A Note from John Dragoon, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Novell, Inc.

Keep in mind, I'm no official spokesman for Novell but I do work here and many of you folks are my personal friends so I'll do my best to try to explain the hows and whys and what nows.

Unless you have been living in a cave, you realize that there are currently economic problems around the world and that government agencies, companies, and individuals are cutting back on their expenditures. Many folks that usually attend the BrainShare event, our loyal customers and partners, are under pressure to reduce their expenses where they can and this usually starts with travel budgets. Because of that, registrations for BrainShare have been very low to this point. That's unfortunate for everyone.

Even though our customers haven't been able to register for BrainShare, they continue to express interest in our technologies and solutions so the Novell Corporate Events team is regrouping and starting to work on alternatives to get the information and training to you folks. No details yet but this will likely include some online offerings we haven't had before as well as some possible regional events that are a lot easier on your travel budget. We will do our best to provide most, if not all the deliverables people expect out of BrainShare (White Papers, demos, training, etc.). Stay tuned for news about this in the next couple of weeks and months.

The possibility of waiting another month or so to decide if BrainShare would be cancelled was discussed and though it is possible that registrations would have been coming in later than normal, we couldn't take that chance with your plans and money. Better now than after you have booked your flights and cleared your schedules. Also, to be honest, our events team needed to notify suppliers, partners, hotels, vendors, the Salt Palace, etc. as soon as possible as cancelling the event later would have caused everyone more headaches. Again, being honest, yes Novell will save some money by canceling the event this year, but I can guarantee you that wasn't the motivation. Do you really think we wanted to make a brilliant marketing move in announcing to the world our event was cancelled? ;-) Of course not. The motivation was the feedback received from customers and partners about their travel budgets.

And to answer the question I'm sure some analyst will read into this...no this does not mean there will never be another BrainShare. These are special economic times for everyone that hopefully won't last too long, and we fully plan to do BrainShare next year if the circumstances of our customers and partners permits you to travel to the event.

Of course, all registration fees will be refunded immediately....no worries there. There is one thing you need to do, however, if you have already registered and booked a hotel: Call the hotel directly and cancel your reservation. I'd hate for you to get slapped with a room charge because this step was overlooked.

To those of you who this is an inconvenience, I apologize on behalf of Novell. I hope you can understand why this very difficult decision was made. I've been to BrainShare for many, many years and have made friends with a lot of you out there (and hope someday, maybe next year, to make personal friendships with more of you). You an I are in business together and we have fun together in the forums and communities. Let me know what questions you have and I'll do my best to answer them. I'm not part of the corporate events team, but my office is right next to them here in Provo so I'll do my best to get you answers. - Kim