CDNLive! 2008 - San Jose: A brief Re-cap

Wow - what a great time I had attending this year's CDNLive! 2008 event in San Jose. You can read the details in my prior posts from last week, but I'll provide a brief re-cap here:

• By far, the most valuable aspect of attending CDNLive! is networking with customers and Cadence people. I heard this from all customers I spoke with and personally agree. Meeting the many customers I've worked with as an Application Engineer in Customer Support over the years was rewarding. There are some extremely talented customers both new and experienced.
  
• There were about 1100 attendees this year (including Cadence folks). About 183 companies were represented.
  
• Vince Di Lello won the People's Choice Best Paper award in SPB - his presentation was "Cadence Allegro Editor (V16.01) - Allegro Tips - Did You Know ...".  This is Vince's THIRD year in a row he's won this award. Congratulations to Vince! I hope he'll work-up another presentation for next year's event.
  
• The SPB Techtorials on Monday were well attended.
  
• In addition to the customer interactions with Marketing and R&D through the Roadmap and Ask The Experts sessions, some customers engaged in smaller personal sessions during lunch. This again provides value at the personal and company level.
  
• The Cadence Technology Night allowed customers to see the latest SPB16.2 product features.
  
• The Design Expo was a great "mini-DAC" for Cadence customers - I think there were at lest 40 companies represented that Cadence customers can leverage products in their local company environments.
  
• The new nTag device (an electronic name tag) was a great cool tool that allowed attendees to exchange virtual business cards, maintain their personal schedule, automatically track presentation/function attendance, electronically complete surveys for all presentations, functions, etc. After the event, we received a login/password to a web page where we can view all these details, print a trip report, save contact details to Excel/PDF files, etc. I hope we'll be using these in the future. Using the nTag device was part of Cadence's Green initiative to save paper.
  
• We had fun every night - from the Cadence 20th Anniversary celebration to the Poker Tournament.
  
• I had a lot of fun presenting my paper to the SPB customers!
  

Congratulations to the CDNLive! Steering Committee and Cadence event staff for a successful CDNLive!

For those who attended, please let me know what you found most valuable and areas where we can improve for next year.

Jerry GenPart