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Major vendors to hold giant open air board meeting
Byte Night brings together unlikely bed-fellows

By silicon.com

Published: Wednesday 15 September 2004

For tech's giant vendors, board meetings over the years have taken all sorts of forms. There tends to be an image of stuffy, mahogany-clad boardrooms back at the HQ. This publication even once reported on a well-known hardware vendor that has one such room about the size of a basketball court - not to be outdone by any regional offices, perhaps.

But get-togethers of execs needn't all be so stuffy. In fact, with annual UK technology charity Byte Night rapidly approaching - and many of those making up the UK boards of vendors such as Cisco, HP, Intel and Sun sleeping out under the stars, for children's charity NCH - we decided to ask about the strangest board meetings executives have attended.

Rick Skett, director and country manager for Intel UK and Ireland, listed Las Vegas casinos as prime locations.

But we thought we could do better than the usual hotels. Michael Avis, marketing director at Sun Microsystems, also listed such places but also his UK MD's yacht and sports venues. The Rugby Football Union at Twickenham and Brandshatch race track are two of them.

Never ones to ignore the chance to eat their own dog food (as they say), the higher-ups over at Cisco told us how tech often comes to their rescue, meaning individual board members 'meet' when they are in all sorts of odd places around the world.

Nick Watson, Cisco UK and Ireland MD Enterprise UK, said that in line with his company's "famed ethos of frugality and diary management challenges, our board meetings are regularly partially virtual".

IP-based video conferencing from various time zones around the world - who'd have thought it?

And while these days board meetings are held in all sorts of places and ways that business people a generation ago couldn't have imagined, the idea of dozens of rivals bedding down together - and not complaining - seems even less likely. But it happens.

It's still not too late to get involved in Byte Night or if you would like to sponsor silicon.com editor Tony Hallett, who is among those sleeping out this year, click here.