Fall Interop succumbs to industry malaise

ATLANTA - If you've been thinking about going to NetWorld+Interop in Atlanta someday, you'd better decide soon while there still is one.

Once the marquee fall network event, N+I Atlanta - not to be confused with the spring N+I extravaganza in Las Vegas - dwindled for the last several years then took a turn for the worse. The economy went south, driving away exhibitors and attendees, then last year the show opened on Sept. 11.

The projection for N+I Atlanta attendance this year, which opens in two weeks, is 30,000, down from 50,000 in the glory days.

And many big-name companies won't bother to make the trip, including Alcatel, Avaya, Broadwing, Cable & Wireless, Citrix, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Network Associates and SBC Communications - all of which exhibited last year.

Microsoft and Novell, which were listed as exhibitors in some early show brochures, are no longer listed on the show's Web site. Valerie Williamson, president of Interop Worldwide, says Microsoft instead will run educational programs out of a conference room in the building.

Other vendors are staying away because they can't afford it. Even efforts to enhance the show by concurrently staging a Comdex in Atlanta hasn't helped. Last year's exhibitor tally of 360 has plummeted to 180.

"One of the things we're cutting back on is trade-show expenditures," says an SBC spokeswoman.

These are tough times in the trade-show business generally, and it is exacting a heavy toll on Key3Media, the firm that runs N+I, Comdex and other shows such as Voice on the Network and Next Generation Networks.

Attendance, revenue and square footage were all down for the second quarter of this year compared with last, according to the company's most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The company's stock was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange last month when its stock price plunged below $1 on its way to a low of less than a nickel per share. Since then three company directors have resigned.

In a written statement in reference to its strategic review of how it does business, the firm says: Until it has completed this review, the Company does not intend to comment on its future plans.

In the SEC filing, Key3Media says it is in the midst of a strategic review of its business. "All aspects of our operations are being reviewed, including our cost infrastructure and senior management roles," the SEC filing says.

"We're a reflection of the industry," Williamson says. "There are companies that were on the show floor last year that may not be around today or may have been acquired by somebody else."

Will N+I Atlanta even be around next year? "I don't have the answer to that," she says.

Some of the blame can be laid on the languishing IT industry. IT spending was down 5% in 2000 and is expected to rebound only 4% this year, according to a study by Giga Information Group.

And that's taking a toll on vendors. In all, 69% of the network companies listed in the Network World 200 - the largest in the network business - posted losses last year, with some, such as Qwest, Lucent, Level3 Communications and Nortel, tallying shortfalls in the billions of dollars.

Cisco wasn't listed as an exhibitor in early promotional material, but Williamson says Cisco signed on last week.

People who used to attend the Atlanta show and the Las Vegas one also are traveling less. "If going to trade shows is seen as half perk and half work, whenever the sector tightens they say we can't afford this perk anymore," says Mike Lutz, a former IT executive who is now protocol researcher for Telemics, a wireless telemetry company in Louisville, Ky.

Others don't see the need for two N+Is. Tony Crognale, a network technician at Arizona's Scottsdale Insurance, a subsidiary of Nationwide Insurance, says one is enough, and he prefers the one in Las Vegas.

"Everything they have [in Atlanta] I could pick up in Las Vegas. I pretty much limit my travel as best I can," he says.

Still, for those who go, the Atlanta show will offer a battery of educational sessions split into categories ranging from infrastructure management to mobile computing to WAN strategies.

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