"Uh oh. This is not going to be good."
I had just spent half an hour thumbing through the official "Program & Exhibits Guide" for COMDEX Las Vegas 2003 and I was in shock.
For 14 of the past 16 years I have made the pilgrimage to Sin City each November to help launch, promote and check out some of the coolest technologies to grace this planet.
And for the past 24 years, the COMputer Dealers EXposition has been the place to be each November if you worked in the information technology space.
So there I was, sitting in the media room inside the Las Vegas Convention Center a week ago Sunday, and I had not found a single Utah company listed as an exhibitor at COMDEX. Not a single one — ugh!
Then it got worse.
Finding an unguarded door into the bowels of the LVCC, I surreptitiously snuck my way inside the actual exhibit area only to find that nearly one-third of the Central Hall had been curtained off.
In other words, where the granddaddy of United States-based technology trade shows had once filled all of the LVCC, two floors of the Sands Hotel convention center, and several other venues near the strip, it appeared that COMDEX was now struggling to even fill one hall in the LVCC.
In the end, it turns out there were two Utah companies actually on the show floor at COMDEX: LearnKey of St. George and Cerberian out of Draper.
A third Utah firm, Franklin Covey (NYSE: FC) of Salt Lake City, was also in Vegas as a participant in a Sunday evening media reception, while Lindon-based SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) participated in the brand new CDXpo, a competing technology conference held across town in the Mandalay Bay Resort convention area.
After walking the COMDEX show floor on Monday and Tuesday along with the other 50,000 attendees, I came away from the show with several observations.
One, obviously 50,000 attendees is a dramatic decrease from a top-end attendance of more than 200,000 people that had descended upon COMDEX in 1999.
Two, dropping from more than 1 million square feet of exhibit space to roughly 100,000 square feet of exhibit space is similarly a dramatic drop.
Then again, trade show attendance and exhibitor trends tend to be trailing economic indicators as most decisions to attend a trade show are often made a year or more in advance.
Additionally, following last year's COMDEX when attendance dropped to roughly 80,000 people from 120,000 the prior year, Key3Media (the then owner of COMDEX) filed for bankruptcy.
This fact, coupled with the point that the high-tech industry was still mired in the midst of the greatest recession this country has seen in 40 years, make's it easy to understand why it is that both the number of exhibitors and the attendee totals at COMDEX would be down for the fourth year in a row.
However, with COMDEX now owned by a new private company that has refocused the show back to its business-to-business roots - no more Mercedes Benz or high-falutin' furniture companies exhibiting on the COMDEX show floor — I truly believe that COMDEX will see an upsurge in both exhibitors and attendees.
Part of this belief stems from my prediction that 2004 will see continued growth in sales to corporations and organizations that have survived since late 1999 with pre-Y2K purchased technologies — systems that are nearing the end of their useful lives.
So although the aisles in Vegas were a bit sparse this past week, I believe we've now seen and experienced the bottom of the technology trough and that 2004 will be the beginning of a new upsurge in the B2B space for COMDEX and the industry at large.
David Politis leads Politis Communications, a public relations, investor relations and marketing communications agency specializing in the high-tech and life science markets.
E-mail: dpolitis@politis.com.