Brainshare Sponsors

In order to keep costs to us walking sales leads down, Novell solicits sponsors for BrainShare to help subsidize the whole event. There is nothing wrong with that, it means a lot of potential freebies for the people who are good at saying No politely ;).

So I'm offering this list of companies who have booths at BrainShare, what Novell product they're primarily interested in, and how it relates to me. The PDF I'm sucking this off of is this one of the Sponsor Hall.

• SAP. The 'Cornerstone Sponsor'. I think everyone who reads my blog knows what they do. At a guess, their primary interest is in Identity Manager. SCT Banner is the ERP for the .EDU space, so we don't use 'em.
  
• IBM. From last year, it's clear this is their Hardware division. So their primary interest is in SLES. We're on a different hardware platform, but... it's hardware. I'll still drop by to look at the pretty.
  
• GWAVA. They make message filtering software for GroupWise. If you need anti-spam/virus for your GW installation, you're probably running GWAVA. We don't use GroupWise, so they have nothing I need.
• GroupLink HelpDesk. A Helpdesk product that appears to be cross-platform. Their product is probably Linux, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they still have a lot of NetWare hiding back there. We use Magic Helpdesk for that function.
  
• Microsoft. You know who they are. Officially their product is SLES but... who knows what they'll bring. We use a LOT of them around here, what with being an Exchange deployment and owning 96% of the desktops.
• Messaging Architects. They are a more general email security and archiving provider. Their product is GroupWise, but they also sell some appliances that I could theoretically use in front of our Exchange servers. We've settled on a product from a much bigger vendor for that function, but still.
• Novacoast IT. A consulting firm specializing in Novell. Their products are a wide gamut of Novell stuff, SLES, ZEN, IDM, and GroupWise. We're a poor .EDU, and can't afford consultants.
  
• Honeywell. Honeywell is kind of like GE and IBM, they do a little of everything. I don't know what their Novell tie-in is.
• Syncsort. They were one of the first backup products to fully support OES1. They are arguably the backup software that supports Novell stuff the best. Their products are SLES, OES, and NetWare. We looked at them when we were looking for a new backup vendor, but they didn't quite measure up for various reasons. I just might drop by.
  
• Omni. Another consulting firm that specializes in Novell products, but they also have some discrete products. Their web-site says they do SLES, OES, NetWare, GroupWise, and NetMail (now a Messaging Architects product). We're a poor .EDU, and can't afford consultants.
  
• HP. They do hardware. Their booth isn't as big as it was last year, so there will be less pretty to look at. Their product is SLES/OES. They're our hardware vendor, so I'll be talking real good with these folks.
• Condrey Corporation. Another consulting company specializing in Novell products. They do IDM, Novell Storage Manager, NetWare, and probably OES/SLES. Poor .edu, can't afford 'em. yadda yadda. Also, we built our own IDM stuff so don't need no steeenkin other stuff.

And a bunch more vendors in smaller booths. Some big names (Blackberry), some not so big (idEngines).

There are exceedingly few (two, really) vendors there that can expect to see any of WWU's money any time soon. Nor is that at all likely to change. Our user head-count (21,000+) and FTE count (13,000+) combine to mean that anything that charges per-user is going to be out of our price-range pretty quickly, or will be subjected to a bidding process. We build our own solutions to problems a lot of the time because of this.

Which means that I'm a very poor sales lead.

It also means I feel a bit guilty trading my contact info for Shiny! during Vendor Night since those vendors are sooo going to strike out when they call me in April.