A Tale of Two Trade Shows

Ah, springtime – for the technology industry, that means only one thing – tradeshows! And this April was most definitely a doozy. RSA, CTIA, Web 2.0, NAB, Interop and a bunch more were all scheduled one after the other. Elke and I have managed to hit all of them, so we thought we would provide a brief report on what we saw.

First, CTIA. For those of you unfamiliar with the organization, this acronym stands for the Cellular Telecommunications Internet Association and is dedicated almost exclusively to wireless operators. The website will say different, including consumers and enterprises in that mix, but anyone perusing the hundreds of booths will quickly determine otherwise. In terms of content, 90 percent of this show was split between infrastructure vendors and handset/device manufacturers showcasing their latest wares.

Although nothing compared to a CES, this show still managed to deliver some flash, with booths providing onsite gelato vendors, oxygen bars, mechanical bulls, live bands, life-size Iron Man figures and, on occasion, actual product demonstrations to view. In an industry as diverse as wireless, there were certainly a lot of different aspects to focus on, but I’ll try to narrow down the field to those that kept my attention.

I’ll start with some folks that certainly commanded attention, but didn’t really deliver on the promise of a new Mobile Internet - the handset vendors. While Ericcson, Nokia, LG, Kyocera, Samsung and the rest most definitely had the biggest impact visually, with enormous booths that contained sparkly and relevant attractions such as a nude, rotating chromed angel, the handsets that were displayed were almost all models that anyone visiting a store had already seen. Even those that purported to be the newest thing were, for the most part, incremental improvements on existing designs. The one exception to this was Nokia’s WiMAX handset, which was essentially more of a mini-tablet computer, but one that sported a significant feature set. This should be a promising beginning to a real WiMAX service.

Of course, there really aren’t any mobile WiMAX services deployed just yet (and only a few pockets of fixed WiMAX), but that didn’t stop most of the vendors at CTIA from acting as if this technology was already mass deployed. Sprint/Clearwire even had a XOHM booth set up (this is the WiMAX service that Sprint/Clearwire have announced), although the future of this service is in doubt. That said, there was a lot of positive talk around WiMAX, with the general feeling that even if the Sprint/Clearwire deal had serious issues, there were too many interested vendors to allow the technology to fail without seeing at least some deployment. Broadband wireless, whether via WiMAX or its more cellular-oriented sibling, LTE (short for Long-Term Evolution and championed by Qualcomm among others), was the talk of the town, with every piece of the puzzle focused on getting this service deployed. From backhaul to power generation to content development, broadband wireless is clearly the most significant variable driving this industry.

Which brings us to my biggest surprise of the show – the focus and interest in most of the infrastructure vendors. I remember going to CTIA in New Orleans 4 years ago with some infrastructure vendors and most of their booths had tumbleweeds drifting through them with a soundtrack of crickets (not our client’s booth of course – we kept that one hopping). This year, one of the most crowded booths I found was a semiconductor company. Other companies also focused on technologies like backhaul, FMC, power generation had good crowds. For my part, I think this answers the “chicken or the egg” portion of the broadband wireless question – carriers are focusing on infrastructure now while making handsets a lower priority. After all, many chipsets for those devices are done, but the additional intelligence and capacity required for the network still needs to be put in place.

RSA was our next stop. As quick background, RSA is North America’s most important security conference and is usually held here in San Francisco. We had a number of clients – old and new – there this year, including Juniper and NETGEAR. RSA had nothing of the flash of CTIA (the best Lisa and I saw was an Ozzy Osbourne look-a-like), but had a lot more consistency in terms of theme – almost every booth we saw focused on NAC, compliance or management. This speaks to a couple of trends that have become clear in recent months. First, a lot of companies feel strongly that they have the necessary security infrastructure in place, but don’t have the visibility required to manage their events properly. As one of our old clients used to say, “Security is now an adjective, not a noun. You have secure networks, secure routers, etc. – not just security functions.”

Additionally, policy compliance is still a big issue for IT. Which makes sense since they’re on the hook to validate the millions spent on third-party auditors. I can’t imagine explaining to my boss that they would have to re-do a security audit because I couldn’t ensure compliance!

Overall, both shows gave us a great opportunity to sit down with some of our key media contacts and visit with friends new and old. It was impressive for me to see the great relationships Liam and Lisa Eskey had developed. Liam was able to ensure Jim Carroll of Converge! Network Digest made his flight by pulling him out of the back of the taxi line and bringing him up with us. Meantime Lisa had me stopping every 5 minutes to chat with a colleague, including folks from SC Magazine, TechTarget and various analyst firms.

Elke has also been busy on the trade show circuit, so I’m sure her experiences with NAB, Web 2.0 and Interop will be interesting. Stay tuned for more!