Distree XXL 2007 was all about the memory

HARD DRIVES and memory, that is what dominated this years Distree XXL event in Monte Carlo.

More than 800 people showed up to try to make the IT business in Europe, Middle East and Africa a little bit better.

The general focus is on eastern Europe, where some markets such as Romania show growth rates of up to ninety five percent. Those figures vary, depending on the company, but such was the claim made by BENQ.

Everyone expects that Vista will boost the sales of computers and peripheral parts and the industry needs it. That is the biggest thing for 2007.

We saw an incredible number of memory vendors and we learned quite a few interesting thing about this business. Companies such as Apacer are selling the memory to Acer, while Patriot is selling the memory to Dell and Alienware.

Seagate and Western Digital showed up at the conference as well but there where no big announcements they just wanted to steal as much of the market as possible off each other. Toshiba focused on laptop drives more than anything else.

Only a few graphics faces showed up. We saw some channel and sales people from AMD previous ATI. Nvidia's XFX, Prolink was also there but they didn't pack any surprises. Sapphire showed its dual X1950PRO card that we saw back at CES 2007 and we heard Connect 3D wants to get stronger in 2007, especially in Northern Europe.

We can call the event success, as the vendors get to meet many potential customers and the small distributors and etailers/retailers are trying to get the best deal out of the vendors.

This game has been played for a few decades now and it doesn't have any tendency to change. Gala dinner, well we missed it but it will be a stonker, we're sure. µ

Booze

And schmooze