IP Communications and Beyond

I'm nearing the end of my trade show travels this week, and finally have some time to share my observations about the two shows that occupied most of my time.

First off, hats off to Fred Knight and Eric Krapf and the rest of the VoiceCon crew! The event in Orlando was buzzing, with an exhibit floor that according to reports experienced double-digit growth and was the largest in the event's history. The venue -- the Gaylords hotel and conference center -- was packed with an upbeat crowd and by all appearances at least the enterprise IP communications marketplace is as healthy and robust as ever. I came away extremely impressed by the way the event was executed and disappointed that I didn't budget another day to attend (I only attended the first day, on Monday.)

VON in San Jose, on the other hand, was a different story. I arrived midday-Tuesday, and it appeared the show was definitely showing signs of stress, as the exhibit floor and exhibitor count was noticeably truncated and attendance appeared to be light -- this based on visual observation and polling of various vendors' booth staff. I did hear that an "official" number of 3000 attendees was being circulated, but I'm not sure where that emanated from. The VON Unconference apparently had about 30 attendees.

I must state, however, that from the perspective of an attending analyst, I did have a productive time at VON, and was able to book a good number of informative meetings with vendors from across the IP communications landscape (I will be blogging my insights from some of these meetings shortly). I might have felt very differently, however, if I was manning a booth on the show floor.

The press room was staffed by Ally Forbes and Todd Keefe of FIRPR, and my hats off to them for managing a well-run meeting place (and the press-pool laptop that was Ethernet-cabled to the network saved my neck on several occasions, as the WiFi in the San Jose convention center was spotty and extremely unreliable).

VON and PulverMedia certainly has a few challenges in front of them, and it remains to be seen if they can pull themselves out of the doldrums they find themselves in. It must be said that Jeff Pulver managed to right the VON ship several years ago when a similar challenge presented itself after he sold the company the first time around. He ended up buying it back and making it more successful than ever.

For those of you that don't know, Jeff has recently sold most if not all of his company's shares to publicly traded Technology Investment Capitol Corp (TICC), so perhaps this scenario will play itself out once again...