NXTcomm continues to spread wings

NXTcomm, the telecom industry’s largest trade show, is continuing to try to expand its reach, attracting more enterprise customers by co-locating with the InfoComm show this year at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and expanding beyond network equipment to applications and even content.

To highlight the latter, NXTcomm today announced Mark Burnett, the man who launched the reality television era by creating Survivor, will be a keynote speaker at this year’s show, set for June 16-19 in Las Vegas.

By co-locating with InfoComm, a trade association show focus on Audio-Visual technology for the corporate audience, NXTcomm will be able to build on the already growing based of enterprise, Executive Director Wayne Crawford told a press conference today.

“On the enterprise side, that’s about 20% of our market right now,” Crawford said. “The key vertical markets that InfoComm is targeting are important to us – government, military, healthcare, education. The enterprise piece of this is something that has grown for us in the last two years and we see a lot of our future growth in that area.”

As part of the co-location, registered attendees from each event will be able to participate in educational sessions and the exhibit floor of the other event. The two have been set up to overlap – NXTcomm runs June 16-19 and its exhibit floor is open June 17-19 in the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. InfoComm runs June 14-20 and its show floor, in the North and Central Halls, will run June 18-20.

“There is intentional overlap,” said Randal Lemke, executive director, InfoComm. “They open a day earlier and we run a day later. The big advantage to our members is that they only have to make one trip.”

Lemke and Crawford said exhibitors from both shows also will benefit from the opportunity to make contact with each other.

“We know they will be busy, but they will find ways to go over and meet up and match up with manufacturers of NXTcomm show,” Lemke said.

“One of the things we liked about this partnership is when we compared exhibitor lists, we found very little overlap between the two shows,” Crawford said. “For example, Cisco Systems is a big supporter of NXTcomm but Cisco didn’t have a big presence in InfoComm, but their telepresence product straddles the two – and they can get a lot of exposure for that.”

The two shows held a joint exhibitor meeting in Las Vegas last week and received a positive response to the co-location plans. The two shows won’t collocate in 2009, however, when NXTcomm returns to Chicago.