Granted, it was a rush job, and attendance was lighter than expected, but the bottom line is that USTelecom and TIA no longer are pulling the industry — and marketing budgets — in two different directions. And for this year, at least, that was enough.
NXTcomm Executive Director Wayne Crawford |
Some 500 exhibitors occupied more than 200,000 net square feet of exhibit space this summer at NXTcomm, which reported attendance for its 2007 Chicago show at 15,273. That is significantly lower than the 20,000 attendees the show had hoped for, and even well short of the 18,500 visitors at the TIA-run GLOBALCOMM. Still, there seemed to be few complaints from exhibitors, who tended to fall into the glass-half-full camp — happy they no longer had to split their efforts between TIA’s GLOBALCOMM and USTelecom’s TelecomNEXT events, which each side launched after parting ways in 2005 following their 17-year partnership around SUPERCOMM.
“Two shows were a disaster,” said Gary Bolton, vice president of marketing and product management at mid-band Ethernet equipment provider Hatteras Networks Inc. “We want to put all our wood behind one arrow.”
In releasing the 2007 show’s audit numbers, NXTcomm Executive Director Wayne Crawford said: “The success of NXTcomm 2007 was underscored midway through the show, when 81 percent of the 2007 exhibit floor was rebooked for NXTcomm 2008 in Las Vegas.”
Now NXTcomm needs to attract attendees to yet another show in Vegas by expanding its roster of speakers and sessions to go beyond its telco roots. It may be able to do that by bringing in top-notch keynotes from the programming, Web 2.0 and consumer electronics worlds. That way it can address the interests of telcos — which are expanding into such new frontiers as TV services, Web services and more — as well as appeal to other potential attendees from the CLEC, cableco, managed service provider and Web 2.0 worlds both in the United States and abroad.
| Links |
| NXTcomm www.NXTcommShow.com |
