Reunited, and it feels good

The reunion of the telecom industry's top two trade associations in planning a single major trade show event can only be good news for all segments, including service providers, equipment vendors and anyone hoping to sell to, buy from, partner with or observe those segments.

Granted, the teleconference held to announce the new show, NXTComm, was greeted with some skepticism by industry observers, who wondered why leaders of USTelecom and the Telecommunications Industry Association didn't just come out and admit they made a mistake in 2005, when they decided to replace their jointly sponsored show, Supercomm, with two separate events — TelecomNext and Globalcomm, neither of which lived up to the predecessor in impact. Those two events are now mothballed.

Both Matt Flanigan, president of TIA, and Walter McCormick, CEO and president of USTelecom, are insisting what counts more than their past disagreements is the future of NXTComm and the ability of their two groups to create an event that can facilitate and even help shape what everyone agrees will be a very different future for telecom service providers. Instead of needing a trade show at which TIA members could sell their wares to USTelecom members — which is what Supercomm was, McCormick said — the industry now needs an event that will draw new industry segments, including content creators, applications providers, wireless innovators and others engaged in helping telecom establish itself as an integral part of a digital lifestyle for consumers and a more cohesive and productive communications partner for businesses.

“This is a new world, and this is an entirely new event,” McCormick said. “The member companies have been moving aggressively into new technologies, new services, new applications — it is an entirely new world in communications, and we are looking not to what was yesterday but to what's next.”

In creating one major show, the two associations also position the telecom sector more effectively against other industry segments — cable, consumer electronics, broadcasting and wireless — each of which has a single major industry event.

“In our business, scale matters,” McCormick said. “It matters to our members, and it matters to us.”

In fact, the continued consolidation within the industry is one of the factors driving USTelecom in this direction, he said.

“When we started Supercomm, USTelecom's members were the local exchange carriers,” McCormick said. Interexchange carriers (IXCs) and wireless operators were separate. Now the two largest IXCs — AT&T and Verizon — are part of USTelecom and also operate the two largest wireless companies, and they are moving into video as well.

NXTComm will look very different from all of its predecessors, despite the fact it is taking over Globalcomm's dates in Chicago — June 18-21, Flanigan said. Supercomm, though jointly owned, was managed and operated by TIA, which planned the program and the exhibit floor. NXTComm will be a separate limited liability corporation, with a separate general manager and staff, likely drawn from today's USTelecom and TIA operations. Its board will be divided 50/50 between the two associations.

“We will be taking the exhibitors who had signed up for TelecomNext and Globalcomm and designing a whole new floor layout, with more pavilions — we'll have pavilions for IP telephony and wireless, and content is going to be a very big part of this show,” Flanigan said. “We think that one show will prove to be a bigger show. People that come speak want a couple of thousand people in the audience, and we can deliver that.”

After its Chicago debut, NXTComm might move to Las Vegas for 2008, in part to meet the 2007 obligations of the now-cancelled TelecomNext, but that is still being negotiated, Flanigan said.