Since I have been back from CeBIT for more than 2 weeks now, it is about time I told you about some of the stuff there. The show itself had a lot of rumours; yes there was more room in the aisles – thank god – and there were a lot of carefully crafted open spaces where exhibitors went MIA, but the show was busy, interesting booths were overflawing and I got that buzz again I get each time. The show is certainly not dead, certainly not judging by these bad economic times.
I have been going to CeBIT since the early nineties when I was still at Compaq, it was big then with Hall 1 crawling with companies that sold typewriters and money counting mahcines, and then they added the whole telco stuff. It became too big. I like it better now, more focused, and still 400.000 people stopped by... I always enjoy it, always get excited by all the new stuff, the crazy asian booths ( I lugged a new PC case home one year), the super clean German Messe and the Munich beergarten on the fair ground, yes you read it right... See picture.
OK, the good news is the Sun booth in Hall 6 was really very busy, my colleague Joerg at the OpenSolaris booth lost his voice the first day. The amazing news was that Duke is back ! See picture...
Also near the Sun booth was the open source pavillion with interesting booths from Drupal, Mozilla foundation (nice pins...) and freeBSD. The latter had an interesting A4 flyer that summarizes very nicely the virtues of the ZFS file system, I scanned it and you can find the pages here and here. The Webciety corner for web 2.0 startups was less interesting I thought, although it was fun to see Youtube there with a booth. After a twitter message I went over to the Attentio booth and met with Simon and Monica.
An eye opener for me – and I am sure to shock some people that know me – was the huge Microsoft booth in Hall 4. They are a Sun partner, so I can say that... This is really a new company in motion as I saw before in Amsterdam. I followed the presentation about Azure, as I am very interested in cloud computing, and saw a demo of mesh services. The guy synced a picture on his phone to mesh services and then to desktop. At the end he stated a Mac client for mesh services was available for download... This is Microsoft, people ! Also impressive again is Hyper-V and what they are doing with System Center. The new version I was shown can now manage Citrix Xenserver images and Vmware images... Next to Microsoft was Citrix, who recently announced Xenserver is basically a free product now... This really leaves me wondering where VMWare is going ... MS will become a dominant player in virtualization I think. Lastly at the Microsoft booth I followed an Antme demo, a great tool to learn to program in any of the Visual languages. And yes I played with Microsoft Surface and it is cool...
An exciting trend was that surely 8 out of 10 booths now had a Mac to do the presentation stuff... Very remarkable trend. Of course the number of Macbooks and iPhones was even bigger, you also saw more startups with iPhone solutions like Wefind, a search engine for iPhone and Android.
Conspicous by absence were NetApp, EMC and daughter company VMWare, as was HP. Intel and Dell were sponsoring a games hall – for whatever reason you want a hall crawling with 16-year old school kids at a trade fair – but were absent otherwise, as was AMD.
A last recommendation from a seasoned CeBIT'er; I always get in by train or car and find a hotel cheap on sites such as booking.com or hotel.de. I booked only 3 weeks in advance and got a 4-star hotel in the Tiergarten at a very reasonable price. If you are going next year, check out sites such as heise.de, a German IT publisher, they have resources like a daily list of booth parties...
