Strong showing raises hopes at EMC Inform

The conference was delayed by 15 minutes as presenters waited for attendees to make their way into the hotel's main ballroom.

Over 1,200 for the event, which was held for EMC's largest customers and partners. EMC partners with stands at the event included Thomas Dureya Consulting, Dimension Data, Tripoint and Brennan IT.

The healthy turnout was hopefully an indication that SMEs would continue spending on IT, said EMC representatives.

"The signs are positive," said Aaron Crowther, EMC's communications manager. "The mood is good and people are asking serious questions."

Over 40 IT executives and managers had travelled up from Canberra by coach at 4.45am that morning. IT managers from Woolworths, Optus and Integral Energy told CRN that the newly formed partnership between VMware, EMC and Cisco was a positive step.

"In good times vendors will sit on the fence and work with everyone," said Clive Gold, EMC's product marketing director. When times are tough customers want more value so vendors work together, said Gold. Integrating products from different vendors saves customers money and the hassle of integrating technology themselves.

The keynote, titled "virtual data centre of the future" and presented by the local chiefs of the three vendors, laid out a roadmap for connecting external managed services (or cloud computing) to internal data centres (or "private clouds") through virtualisation in the operating system, storage and networking. SMEs would draw on external resources and services to supplement their own infrastructure as needed.

The expo was a demonstration of EMC's investment in the channel, said David Henderson, EMC's general manager of partners and alliances.

"Partners are going to ask themselves - where are you going to invest your money? If you don't have a position on cloud or managed services, in 36 months you're going to be irrelevant to your customers," said Henderson.