Microsoft Events for 2016
Microsoft announced the Ignite move to September along with a review of their top tier events for the year in a blog post, Microsoft’s 2016 event lineup from Chris Capossela, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer.
As a reminder, Chris runs down the four top tier events and positions them as follows:
- Convergence – for Business Leaders seeking to explore emerging trends, discover new solutions and realize the opportunity to achieve more.
- //Build – for Developers looking for the latest vision and direction from Microsoft.
- Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) – for Partners focusing on how they can drive business growth with us and our partner channel to deliver solutions to our mutual customers.
- Microsoft Ignite – for IT Professionals looking for what’s next in technology and skill building across Microsoft’s technologies.
He doesn’t give much of an explanation for the change in dates for Ignite, other than to say:
we’ve continued to listen to your feedback and use it to refine our approach. To that end, we have made the decision to shift Microsoft Ignite from spring to fall.
I’m not sure what feedback they’re referring to specifically, but I’m guessing that they want to spread out the conference season and not have all of the events bunched up in the Spring and Summer.
So the change for Ignite means the lineup looks like this:
- Build: Spring 2016 in San Francisco
- Convergence: April 4-7, 2016 in New Orleans
- WPC: July 10-14, 2016 in Toronto
- Microsoft Ignite: September 26-30, 2016 in Atlanta
Expect to see these events stick to these timeframes going forward. The blog indicates that they want to make it easier for us to plan for these events each year with some more predictability.
We’ll be relatively consistent with the timing of these events going forward so you can plan around them. Each year the exact dates will vary, while remaining within the similar time period.
Note that this lineup makes no mention of any foreign editions of Ignite. It doesn’t mean they won’t continue to happen, like the upcoming Ignite Australia. But this can’t be encouraging to IT Pros in Europe who are asking for an Ignite Europe for ages now as shown by this Online petition to bring Ignite to Europe in 2016.