NetApp Shutters User Conference Amid Economic Fears

By Joseph F. Kovar, CRN October 29, 2008

NetApp has San Francisco hotels scrambling to find new bookings in the wake of its decision to scrap its NetApp Accelerate user conference.

One more casualty of the economic downturn, eh?

That conference, originally announced in August and scheduled to run from February 23 to 26 at the Moscone West conference center, was slated as the storage vendor's first user conference. It was expected to borrow heavily on the formats of such successful events as Oracle OpenWorld.

Now NetApp will have to find another first user conference.

And now San Francisco will have to find more visitors to replace the expected 3,000 visitors to the conference.

One of my colleagues, currently attending a conference in the city, said he is hearing that hotels are scrambling to make up for the lost bookings.

I suppose this also means another hit for Starbucks, which could have sold a gazillion cups of coffee to conference goers.

NetApp said in a statement that the cancellation was caused by "customer feedback about increasing restrictions on corporate travel," as well as "today's climate of economic uncertainty."

Shades of Comdex? Remember that the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon hit the attendance at the Comdex 2001 and hastened its demise.

NetApp was not able to confirm how many customers had signed up to attend the event.