Intel Scraps Intel Developer Forum Event To Deliver More Targeted Gatherings For Product Builders

Intel has pulled the plug on its annual show, Intel Developer Forum, which the company has used for almost 20 years as a launching pad for new product announcements.

"Intel has evolved its event portfolio and decided to retire the IDF program moving forward.," said the company on its IDF website. "Intel has a number of resources available on Intel.com, including a Resource and Design Center with documentation, software, and tools for designers, engineers, and developers. As always, our customers, partners, and developers should reach out to their Intel representative with questions."

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Intel also canceled its flagship Intel Developer Forum show in China.

[Related: 20 Mind-Blowing Products At The Intel Developer Forum]

Intel has typically launched new products, including Client Compute processors like Skylake and Kaby Lake, at the Intel Developer Forum. But the company in an interview with Anandtech said that the change is in part due to Intel is not as PC-centric as it used to be, and has a wider range of products – including IoT modules and microcontrollers, Optane storage and FPGAs.

That was certainly true during last year's show, where the company introduced an array of products – from its Joule platform, which was a module built for IoT applications, to its Knowledge Builder Toolkit, which enables developers to create intelligent sensing applications that run directly on Intel’s low-power Curie module solution for wearables.

Kent Tibbils, vice president of marketing at ASI, a Fremont, Calif.-based Intel system builder, said that the cancellation of Intel Developer Forum "is not completely surprising" given the changes overall at the company.

"Using IDF, which had a set yearly time schedule for big product announcements, seems challenging as most new technologies like Kaby Lake and Optane were already well known long before IDF," he said. "Intel’s always used IDF to show how their technologies are powering other devices, other user experiences, and creating new markets so it may be more of a timing issue for the launch of new technologies as well as an audience reach consideration."

Moving forward, Intel told Anandtech, the company will instead have a greater variety of smaller, "targeted" events, as opposed to one broad conference. Tibbils said the cancellation of the event might help solution providers tighten their focus in vertical markets, if Intel were to host specialized conferences for various vertical markets and specific products.

For instance, said Tibbils, if Intel wants to highlight their technologies in the auto industry then it would make sense to focus on events that already target that market as opposed to trying to attract those different groups to IDF.

"With Intel technologies being used as well as targeted at so many markets, new and traditional, I think it could be difficult to leverage IDF as a large scale product announcement event," said Tibbils. "I do think Intel needs events but not necessarily their own. They will obviously participate in events that have established audiences for the vertical they are working with."