Dell is staging its first worldwide conference but is inviting only a handful of resellers from EMEA and is not banking on many of them turning up anyway.

The DellWorld gig held at the eponymously named tech titan's home town in Austin, Texas, will run from 12 to 14 October with guest speakers including the big cheeses at VMware, Intel and salesforce.com.

Top brass at Dell will take to the platform on the theme of "Unlocking Innovation in the Virtual Era", with keynotes due from the CEO and the global heads of the consumer, SMB, public sector and large enterprise divisions.

Paul Shaffer, exec director of global channel marketing, told The Reg that it plans on offering places to 100 reseller partners in total, primarily from North and Latin America, but it was unable to provide details of the total number of attendees expected.

"We do intend to extend the invitation to a few partners in Europe but we expect the acceptance rate to be fairly low," he said.

This is despite Shaffer describing the speakers' line-up as "compelling, and a huge draw for partners to attend". Obviously he means resellers Stateside.

There will be no channel-specific content but dealers who attend the conference will get a special dinner to round it all off, presumably to keep them away from cosying up to IT user businesses directly, after all that is Dell's job.

However, Dell is eyeing up a local event a week after the global conference, inviting 300 dealers across EMEA to the third Annual Euro Channel Solutions conference, to be held in Barcelona.

"We didn't think we could get attendance to both events in back to back weeks, particularly with one being in the US," said Shaffer.

If you offer free beer, they will come. ®