August 21 – 24, 2023, at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. November 6 – 9, 2023, at the Fira Gran Via in Barcelona, Spain. Additionally, building on Korea on April 6 – 7 and India on April 11 – 12.
Whats the chances that these will actually happen?
They cancelled the SpringOne in person conference in SF moscone this past December that brings in several thousand. They did this just a month or two before the event so the cost to cancel can’t be that high.
I believe the 2023 events will go ahead irrespective...
Venue contracts are signed at least a year out and are often multi-year (may even be some roll-over from pandemic induced postponements, hotel block bookings not far behind so cancelling this year makes little sense... pay venue costs, some hotel costs, no sponsor revenues and then pile on top of that spooking customers already jittery about VMware direction.
“ Even in our experience, what exactly does Explore do for us?”
It makes our customers happy to have a small working vacation and keep them easily in the VMware fold.
Now we will just beat our customers over the head with oppressive price increases and automated support that pipes logs into /dev/null.
“Greed is great” - Dell, Tan, Durban
The three thieves
The cancellation will be a wake up call to many. It won’t be the most important of concerns for folks in the new world order. Enjoy these speculative times, it won’t last much longer.
Explore will likely not survive. I'm sure VMware has language in the legal agreements that allow it to pullout if Hoc decides to do so post-acquisition. See similar example from previous acquisition CA. Broadcom does not believe in these things like conferences. Even in our experience, what exactly does Explore do for us? Let's be honest... nearly nothing. Broadcom has a very different mindset. Expect everything to change.
https://techmonitor.ai/hardware/ca-world-cancelled
The pressure from Hrock Tran will be to shut it down in person and do virtual for post acquisition dates. The earlier the acquisition, the better the chances that it goes virtual.
I guess it would depend on the spend and how long the deal keeps getting dr-g on.
Stuff in April? The EU will not be done until at least May (15th I think) so figure a June 1 minimum just based on that. So april events are in.
August and November. Those are bigger fish. Though I think once they sell passes to people and hotels and flights start getting booked, they (even broadcom) would not want to cancel due to the payout of refunding the passes and maybe even being hit to refund hotels or non-refundable flights. It will be telling to see WHEN registration opens for each of these events. the earlier they open registration the more likely it is to come off.