The Vendor Perspective
Meager foot traffic and the quality of show sessions may have made for favorable impressions of the show from attendees, but what did vendors think? Lieberman Software President and CEO Phil Lieberman thought that Microsoft's product pipeline would soon be delivering a large nbumber of siginificant product upgrades, and that the show sessions did a good job of preparing attendees for the upcoming product upgrade cycles. "It was good to see that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 were almost here," Lieberman said. "Those are really good signs. Microsoft also admitted their weakness with Windows Vista, which was an obligatory mea culpa on their part."
Lieberman did mention meager show attendance as a negative from a vendor perspective. "Attendence was dramatically lower that last year, but Microsoft has more products coming out [over the next 18 months] than they've had in years. On the product side, many of the attendees I spoke with saw the show content as being extraordinarily valuable, and they were saying positive things about the quality of the new products they've seen. A lot of people I spoke with have already installed Windows 7, and we're having good results with it," Lieberman said. "A lot of the people I talked to about Windows Server 2008 R2 really see that as a VMware-killer [with the new Live Migration feature]."
TechEd 2010: New Orleans Bound
Tech Ed 2009 may be in the rearview mirror, but TechEd 2010 will likely be a much more well-trafficked show. Microsoft has an unprecedented number of new products shipping over the next 18 months: Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, SQL Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Windows Mobile 7, and more should be available or in late stages of product development by June of next year. Given the sheer number of new product releases, there should be plenty of new things to talk about at the show.
Related: