After a one-year hiatus, Novell’s BrainShare conference will be returning in 2010, bigger and better than ever.

In December last year, Novell took the unprecedented step of cancelling the BrainShare conference scheduled to have taken place in March 2009.  'Unprecedented' as this was the first time it had failed to run in its 23-year history.

At the time, John Dragoon, Novell’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer was quoted as saying that Novell's customers "are under increasing pressure to reduce travel and other controllable expenses and are hesitant to commit to attending our BrainShare 2009 conference."  This was clear and unequivocal evidence that the Global Financial Crisis was biting hard.

Both Dragoon and Kim Groneman, a Novell forum administrator (who first broke the news of the cancellation) stressed that the cancellation was expected to be for a single year and that they expected BrainShare to be back bigger and better in 2010.

With that in mind, iTWire took the opportunity to discuss next year's event with Troy Monney, Novell's Vice President of Corporate Marketing.

iTWire: How was the cancellation of 2009 received by "the faithful" - having become a BrainShare Alumnus myself, I'm sure there are plenty of people disappointed to miss out.

Monney: "Last December we took the difficult but correct decision to cancel our BrainShare conference.  While most of our customers, partners and employees understood and supported the decision, we heard loud and clear from the faithful that they wanted  the event to return in 2010. And we have responded. Not only is Brainshare returning to Salt Lake City, Utah, where it has been for more than 20 years - after a five-year hiatus, we will be holding a BrainShare event May 18-21 in Europe as well."