Gabe, Emily, and I just launched a new blog called "The Road to BriForum." We're going to post to this blog each Friday, writing about all the behind-the-scenes stuff it takes to make BriForum happen each year. This year we also have a TON of new ideas and new things that we're doing, and quite frankly, we want a chance to brag about them a bit! :)

For this first post about The Road to BriForum, I'd like to talk a bit about the vendors who will be at this year's event. As you're well aware, we've struggled over the past several years to find the right balance of vendor presence at BriForum each year. This culminated with sort of mea culpa post I wrote last August asking you, the community, to help us do the "right" thing with regard to sponsors and vendors at BriForum. The conversation around that blog post was EXTREMELY helpful to us. The three of us (Gabe, Emily, and me) spent hours and hours discussing every single idea and thought posted. Then we reached out to our vendors and sponsors of previous events and talked to them about what they liked and where we could do better. After that we talked to former BriForum attendees about their ideas of how we could engage and interact with our sponsors.

After three or four months, we've come up with several new ideas that we're really excited about. I can truly say that the interaction with our vendors at BriForum this year will be very different than in previous years, and we're giving the vendors a LOT more for their money. (I won't go into all the details here, but you can check out the list on our "Why Sponsor BriForum?" page on BriForum.com.

That said, there is one thing that I'm particularly excited about, and that's the DEMO Lab that we're going to have at BriForum this year that will replace our traditional sponsor area with DEMO space for our vendors.

So what's the difference between a DEMO Lab and a general exhibit floor area? Well I guess not too much really, except for (1) the vendors will have much more room to set stuff up, and (2) we have a lot more electrical power. Really though it's a matter of positioning. We're encouraging our exhibitors to bring servers and clients and hardware and to set up their products so that BriForum attendees can take a look at them. We're talking with several vendors about their setups right now, and I can tell you that thre will be some really cool stuff on display!

Actually, we've seen our exhibitors show off some amazing products over the past five BriForums. (Kemp load balancers, DataCore's virtual storage, and Provision's all-in-one VDI+TS suite were among my favorites in 2007.) One of the problems though was that we encouraged vendors to bring cool stuff without really telling attendees about the cool things that were on display. So this year we're working with the vendors to learn exactly what they're showing off so we can let attendees know what they're in for. Even though BriForum 2008 Chicago is still over four months away, we have several companies lined up for our DEMO lab:

Ericom will forever had a special place for me because they were the first VDI product I saw. I'd known them from the TS add-on days when they primarily competed against Citrix MetaFrame. When they first told me about their VDI products several years ago, I was like "What? Who would ever do this VDI thing?" I guess they were a bit ahead of me. :) They'll be demoing their latest PowerTerm WebConnect software which combines VDI and TS application delivery.

eG Innovations is in the application monitoring and management space. They're somewhat famous for their "Prove it's not Citrix" ad campaign where they show you that by using their products, you can prove that not everything is a "Citrix" problem. At BriForum this year, eG will demostrate their platform which can monitor Citrix, VMware, and just about everything else you have from one single place and one single console.

Quest Software made big news this year by buying Provision Networks. Provision has been to BriForum in the past, and they'll be there again this year with their new "Quest" shirts. Provision has been around for a long time. Their main product, Virtual Access Suite, combines TS-based application delivery, a VDI connection broker, and all the "other" stuff you need (printing management, profile management, security and lockdown, etc.) into a single suite called the Virtual Access Suite.

So that's a quick preview of our DEMO lab. If you have other ideas about what you'd like to see on display, don't hesitate to let us know!