VMTN Blog

The Solutions Exchange room was much larger this year -- as you'd expect for a much larger conference. But with that size came a much more commercial-feeling exhibit floor. It didn't quite rise (descend?) to the level of dot-com craziness, but there seems to be a lot of marketing dollars available to hire booth babes and do giveaways this year. That being said, I hoped you picked up your vmworld.com t-shirt at the VMware Communities Lounge from our booth babes Robert, Eric, John, Tony, or Amitabh. :-)

Mark Roddis:

The solutions exchange has been very useful this year with lots of exhibitors and the chance to spend quality time, talking through solutions and ideas. On top of this, the freebie count was on a level not seen for many years. So far I have in my hotel drawer:

• 9 T shirts
• 2 Caps
• Books
• Mouse Mats
• Loads of pens
• Puzzles
• Illuminated fans
• Flashing things (I have no idea what or why)
• Other desk junk

Then to top it off, last night a card with a prize draw ticket was
passed under the door of all rooms in the hotel with the invitation to
take it down to the 3Par stand to see if you had won the grand prize.

So the grand prize of a Nintendo Wii is now sitting right here with me so thankyou to the 3Par guys.

treesum:

VMWorld SWAG stats:

SHIRTS		- 9
PENS		- 8
YO YOs		- 2
HATS		- 2
CUPS		- 1

Bridget Botelho and Jan Stafford are also overwhelmed by their bags of swag:

MattG at the VMTN Community has a related rant about marketing vs technologists in the booths this year:

Inevitably every year I go to the Solutions Exchange trying to get technical details on a vendors product only to be told the they only have sales reps here and not technical people. Last year it was Doubletake and this year it's Dell.

After hearing Dell tout their AMD Quad core virtualization optimized server at the Barcelona release party, I figured I'd mozy on over to Dell's booth today to find out what differentiates their virtual optimized servers from their competitors. As soon I started asking technical questions the sales rep says he is not sure. I ask him if their technical rep is around so that I can ask him/her and he says that they do not have a technical person at the conference. Huh? Why even bother showing up? This is a technical group of attendees and you are touting a new server that we should be excited about. Why not just put the physical product on a table and have a kiosk with a browser pointing to the tech specs.