ATLANTA - Key3Media Group is scrapping the NetWorld+Interop conference in Atlanta next year as part of a broader pullback in its North American IT trade show lineup. The company says financial troubles on the part of exhibitors is to blame.
Along with N+I Atlanta, Comdex in Chicago, Vancouver and Montreal, and Seybold Seminars in New York also will be canceled next year.
The demise of these long-time Key3Media events reflects travel cutbacks among businesses and the reallocation of marketing dollars by technology vendors away from trade shows, observers say. Key3Media has seen vendor and show attendee numbers decrease at many of its technology events, including its flagship N+I conference held in Las Vegas in May.
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"In the market we're living in, all of our clients are going though huge economic issues," says Fred Rosen, chairman and CEO of Key3Media. "They've only got so much money" and less of it is being spent on trade shows.
"We've seen these shows decline . . . in the amount of square footage and in the amount of marketing we sell," Rosen says of those shows that were canceled.
In the case of the biannual N+I, Rosen adds, "Our clients are telling us that they don't want to support two shows every year."
Although Key3Media says it has not tallied final attendance numbers for N+I Atlanta, which ran Sept. 9 to 12, the company says it expects attendance at the show to be off about 40% from the 2000 peak attendance of 50,000.
"The quality of the [N+I Atlanta] hadn't changed at all in recent years," says Craig Mathias, a principal at network consulting firm FarPoint Group, who has attended and led sessions at N+I Atlanta for the past five years. He says the dwindling numbers in Atlanta this year were a real warning sign. "There were not as many sessions, and the show wasn't as big as in years past, but the level of discussion at the show has always been very high."
With Las Vegas now the only N+I show in the U.S., Mathias says network professionals on the East Coast will lose out as travel budgets shrink.
"It's unfortunate in that some people will have less access to the kind of information you can get only at a conference like [N+I]," he says. "In cyberspace, you can't strike up a conversation with someone sitting next to you that leads to new friendship. It's all about human interaction."
Key3Media's major North American trade shows for 2003 will include Comdex Fall Las Vegas and Comdex Canada, N+I in Toronto and Las Vegas, and Seybold Seminars in San Francisco.
The company says it also will keep its smaller shows, such as BioSecurity, Voice on the Net, Opticon, Next Generation Networks and Java One. n
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