Novell Cancels BrainShare Conference After 20 Years

by Lisa Hoover - Dec. 17, 2008Comments (10)

Novell's Senior Vice President and Chief Market Officer, John Dragoon announced today that it has cancelled its annual conference, BrainShare, after more than 20 years. In an open email to Novell's customers and partners, Dragoon says the move is in response to industry-wide budget tightening and a generally sluggish economy.

"I also know that our customers and partners always look forward to this conference. Despite this, many of you have indicated that because of the current economic climate, you are under increasing pressure to reduce travel and other controllable expenses and are hesitant to commit to attending our BrainShare 2009 conference," says the email.

Instead of the traditional in-person conference originally slated for March of next year, Novell plans to offer online classes and virtual conferences to make education and training available to more people at a lower per-head cost to companies.

Though the cancellation of BrainShare after 20 years will no doubt come as a surprise to many people, I hope is a harbinger of things to come. While I know there is tremendous value in educational conferences, there are so many these days -- many that simply regurgitate the same information to the same attendees -- that their value is quickly becoming diluted.

Furthermore, tech workers are no longer concentrated in Silicon Valley and other urban areas. Yet the east and west coasts are the primary hosts of these important events, making them largely inaccessible to the busy developers and engineers they're meant to attract.

Some may see the cancellation of BrainShare as a sign of doom and gloom. I see it as a response to the changing needs of companies, developers, and the open source community at large.


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10 Comments
 

With such a large portion of Novell's income allocated to marketing instead of R&D, I disagree that this isn't doom & gloom. BrainShare was always huge in reaffirming the beliefs of the Novell faithful. Without this yearly event, I think reality will set in with their customers with more of them waking up and jumping ship. Plus they must be feeling quite a hit financially to cut out BrainShare completely instead of just scaling it back. Expect to see Novell return to unprofitability for this year at least without a further cash injection from Microsoft or a lawsuit settlement/payout.


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I am the senior engineer of a 5000 seat company who was up until the last year and a half a complete and total Novell shop. Netware, Groupwise, Bordermanager, IChain, eXtend, iManager, all that stuff. To to tune of about half a million dollars a year we were paying Novell to LEASE licenses under their MLA agreement and get support. After years of promises of a better product (Groupwise) and an easier to manager server / directory services system (Netware and NDS/Edir) the return on investment we were making ANNUALLY were just not there. No one is writing any software for netware or edirectory anymore, it is full of proprietary junk that no one bothers to mess with, its a nightmare of incompatibility. Netware itself had really not evolved since 4.1, they were (still are) selling a product in Netware 6.5 that is really no better than Netware 5.1 (whose only real difference over 4.1 was that it had java). And they still charge rediculous prices for their products. They have just about priced themselves out of the game and have made no product improvements in their core (OS/directory services) in YEARS. Groupwise certainly has advanced, but it is BEHIND Exchange and Outlook at this point and has been since roughly Exchange 2000. The only reason Novell is still in business is because they have a BLINDLY loyal customer base who are too afraid to move on. I was one who drank the red Kool Aid back in the day, but have moved on. Our ROI was about 2 years.


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You're absolutely right about development for Netware and eDirectory. And both are going away, eventually - Netware first, eDir soon after. There is exactly ONE person writing any code for Netware at Novell and he only does so 50% of his time. The Groupwise client has paled next to Outlook for nearly a decade, but the back end is MUCH better than it is on Exchange, always has been. Novell's licensing model isn't much different than Microsoft's, but recent changes to the support entitlements are nothing more than moves to prop up the margin. Novell has a stunning lack of R&D and Quality Assurance - when was the last time they developed a product internally? Zen Configuration Management 10, and that was released approximately a year behind schedule (based on original timelines) and a year too early (based on the number of bugs and lack of functionality). Novell is getting by on acquisitions (Tally, Senforce, eSecurity, Platespin, Managed Objects) when it comes to product development.


There's still good value at Novell, but you have to know what to look for and where to find it.


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As a ECNE since 1993 I fell realy sad with what happened with Novell. I remember in 1995 had 5500 registered guests in Brainshare.


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What bunch of BS. eDir is not going anywhere.


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eDir is so much easier and secure than AD, we recently went to AD it sucks big compaired to eDir. try downloading and running the 9999.bat file....hahaha you know why it doesn't work? AD is a FLAT FILE not a true directory service.


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Our eDir to AD migration was a miserable experience, so we kept Novell on the backend, and found their having them as an Infastructure was far more stable than AD. Now with OES 2.1 we can manage both directory services from one locaiton...plus run my AD from OES 2.1, that rocks.


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Once again Novell shoots itself in the foot. As a CNE I have been trying to keep the ship afloat. My boss is a Microsoft Junkie and only sees MS blue. Because that is what everyone else is running.

We are moving to all MS in the first quarter. Novell costs us 50,000 the same in MS land cost 300,000. Also MS gives NO SUPPORT for that money. Novell gives support and all the servers you want.


Its a shame Novell cant get it right. I wish they would just kill it all and get it over with.


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Why does every article that mentions Novell have to turn into a fanboy dissertation. "Novell Cancels BrainShare Conference After 20 Years" digressed to "AD is a FLAT FILE not a true directory service" in only six posts..


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"I also know that our customers and partners always look forward to this conference. Despite this, many of you have indicated that because of the current economic climate, you are under increasing pressure to reduce travel and other controllable expenses and are hesitant to commit to attending our BrainShare 2009 conference," .. This is the most spun statement I have read in a long, long time. Let me decipher the spin..


"All 6 of our remaining customers and partners (is there is difference at this point?) indicated through annoying phone 'polls' that they had no intention in attending our Linux, er.. Novell-centric conference. With this in mind, and to spare us the expense of an otherwise embarrassing situation.. we are canceling the BrainShare 2009 conference."


At least now the history books will have an accurate perspective...


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