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We expected another NXTComm in Chicago in 2009, but we instead got promises of a summertime return to the SUPERCOMM title, which was later pushed back by several months to land in October.
While latter-day SUPERCOMMs failed to live up to the bubble-days glory, the otherwise-named shows that took place in 2006-2008 were even weaker. Numbers dipped well below 20k, and other shows in the wireless and cable space have grown stronger as SUPERCOMM has dipped.
However, SUPERCOMM 2009 was a chance for a rebound. It took place at the peak of the fall show season. It was a return of the SUPERCOMM badge. It was in a town that’s a little sore from its Olympics loss, but eager to draw as much convention traffic as it can fit into its expo space (which, with McCormick Place’s West building complete, is a heck of a lot).
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The (expo) booths are only necessary for brand awareness. |
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industry. Productive meetings – the kind that lead to sales -- no longer take place on the expo floor. For companies like the OSS/BSS players we generally work with, an expo is not really an avenue for customer and potential-customer meetings. The booths are only necessary for brand awareness, and in a show like SUPERCOMM, smaller OSS/BSS booths are easily lost in the noise. Furthermore, in spite of telco CTOs blasting net neutrality, a lot of the major innovation in the space is taking place among third party companies who are developing the content and apps that people are clamoring to use. These companies were almost completely absent from the event. That left us with a tradeshow with precious little to trade.
As far as news goes, there was relatively little of that as well. There was a time when
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Unfortunately, the show wasn’t a return to glory. It wasn’t a triumphant coronation to former prominence. It was… by SUPERCOMM standards… quiet.
Official numbers from the show haven’t been released, but word in the pressroom was that unofficial numbers placed the event at around 7,000 attendees. The show floor had greatly decreased in size from its original design, and a peek behind divider curtains at the rear of the exhibition floor revealed a cavernous bare space of polished concrete that the show floor would have covered in years past.
Now, there are many reasons for the dip: The economy is still rocky (and was, even more so, when expo contracts were signed) and the show dates had changed fairly late in the game.
However, I think there’s something even more fundamentally problematic about the model of the expo-style trade show in this
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companies would be sure to save news for SUPERCOMM. Not so this year. However, we did have a few news releases we wanted to mention.
Pitney Bowes Business Insight, which is a capable billing vendor tucked behind a larger corporate name we generally associate with postage, was at the event with a release on the newest version of their MapInfo MapXtreme software development kit. This was version 7.0, and is designed for use by Microsoft .NET developers looking to create map-centric and location-based applications.
Mu Dynamics also had a release at the show (available in its full form on Pipeline’s NewsWire here: http://www.pipelinepub.com
/pipelinednn/static/NewsArticle.aspx?ItemID=93) on their new test suite. Mu does interesting things on emulating logic of an IP service to enable testing of a full system, rather than just individual components. In addition,
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