Hoov's Musings (volume 3, number 4)

noti@nplusi
Mark Hoover, President, Acuitive, Inc.

I’ve recently had a lot of people inquire whether I was going to be at the upcoming N+I in Las Vegas. Others just assumed I would be, and based on that premise proposed some meetings or other events.

But I am not going to be there. There are several reasons for that:

My wife won’t let me
I hate Las Vegas
I waited too long to make reservations
No client is paying me to go

Any one of these is probably a compelling enough reason to miss the show. But in combination, it’s a no-brainer.

However, had these situations not existed, I still probably would have resisted going to the show. Why not go? Well, I think the question is ‘Why go?’

Back in the “old days” I was a faithful attendee and participant at Interop. But that was when vendors were displaying crimping tools for connecting transceivers to Ethernet cables, when long haired, freaky-looking people were “flocking” together in rooms to work out interoperability issues with TCP/IP implementations (what could be more fun than a room full of Hooman Behestis?), and when engineers and product managers from the vendors, often scruffy looking from having spent the entire night getting the demo running or getting the product working at the Interoperability booth, did booth duty to explain what they do and why.

Although the show was much smaller than it is today, with far fewer vendors, it took a lot longer to experience all that was there to be learned. Each booth visit, each conversation with each vendor, each side meeting, and each presentation was full of detailed technical information, interesting abstractions, competitor bashing, and predictions, all of which needed time to be understood and fully absorbed. And then there was the anticipation of the Cisco party, to see how they had managed to top last year’s. For a variety of reasons, one couldn’t really adequately cover an Interop back then.

Nowadays, the event is much bigger, physically. Too big for the San Jose Convention Center and for the Moscone Center combined. So it has migrated to Las Vegas, at least for one instantiation per year.

Nothing is too big for Las Vegas. No bet, no ego, no casino/monument, no enhanced breast, and certainly no trade show can outsize Las Vegas. If there is not enough room, Las Vegas can just sprawl a little more into the desert to accommodate things.

So there you have it. N+I bigger and badder than ever. Yet you go there and walk the floor (or should I say floors) and after about half a day you say- “OK, I’m done. What’s next?”

Why is this?

I attribute it to the invasion of people who wear ties and nice dresses. The entire thing has become a marketing event, rather than an industry development event. Marketing communications managers and temporary workers staff booths. You can’t get an answer to any question of any depth about the vendor or their products, but you can get your card swiped and take away a shopping bag or a bouncy ball or a coffee mug. The whole thing has become a battle to see who looks biggest, glossiest, prettiest, and loudest. As each vendor endeavors to cut through the noise, the level of marketing volume and hype incrementally increases, requiring the other vendors to increase their decibels, and the cycle continues. The result is no information at all. Thirty to forty vendors claim to be “industry firsts” in VoIP, or VPNs, or Edge Routing, or MPLS, or (historically) SNMP, Frame Relay, ATM, etc.

In lieu of substance, consumer-marketing techniques have come to flourish. But where are the consumers? My observation the last time that I went was that the sparse crowds at most of the booths were marketing people from other vendors. (The easiest people to market to are other marketing people. They’ll fall for anything. They just can’t allow themselves to get cynical about marketing as practiced today). When an industry event becomes a big internal group hug, with vendors marketing to one another, you know it’s in trouble.

The other constituency represented well in my informal poll was financial analysts and consultants. So where are all the end customers? Well, I believe that the smart ones either (a) aren’t at the event at all, or (b) are engaged in some form of Las Vegas debauchery.

This leads to another situation that is fun to observe – the marketing of the N+I show itself by the N+I people to the vendors who fund the show. Many vendors have expressed to me that they are looking to cut down on the number of trade shows they support and the investment they make in each trade show. That’s a big threat to N+I. As the quality of the attendance (if not the quantity) has diminished, the N+I people need to search for other compelling reasons to attract vendors.

Las Vegas debauchery aside, there does remain three good reasons for end users to attend N+I:

1) to attend the seminars and tutorials, which are generally pretty good

2) to visit Start-up city, which in some ways is a throw back to Interop’s past

3) to check out the temporary workers staffing the booths

For the vendors, you can add two reasons to that list:

4) to meet with other industry people who are required to go to the show, such as industry analysts, press, and executives from other companies

5) to announce a new product.

On that last point, N+I has traditionally been a good venue to announce new products. You can meet with a lot of the press and analyst community that you normally would have to go on a road show to meet, and you can leverage the advertising and marketing communications that surround the N+I show itself.

It used to be that a large percentage of new product announcements were done at or just before a large trade show such as N+I. That percentage is diminishing, however. These days, one has to think twice about whether that is the best approach. The show is so big, you can get lost in the noise of all the vendors doing such announcements in such a compact period of time. If you are in a choir of 100 people, is your voice really heard? (In my case, the answer is yes, but that’s an issue related to my voice and not to good marketing practice).

However, if you do announce close to or at N+I, you can almost be guaranteed of some form of “Best of Show” award. Most people don’t know that to be eligible for these awards, you have to announce your product in a tight time window around N+I. This is their attempt to keep N+I news worthy and viable.

The N+I people are smart. They hand out roughly a zillion “Best of Show” awards in a large variety of categories. The names of the awards are suitably abstracted so that they are more compelling when you see them later on the vendors web site, with shortened titles such as “Best New Product”. But the official title of the award was really “Best New Hardware Appliance Performing Bandwidth Management in a Taupe Colored Box Announced On Tuesday Morning By A Company Representative With A Southern Accent.”

But if that title were required to be used by the vendor, there would be one less reason for them to attend the show at all, and everyone would be at the Next Generation Networks Conferences with people like me.

(volume 3, number 4)

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noti@nplusi Mark Hoover, President, Acuitive, Inc.

noti@nplusi
Mark Hoover, President, Acuitive, Inc.