Russia makes strong showing at German show: What about the United States?
Special reports from Network World Lab Alliance member Tom Henderson, who is at Germany’s huge CeBIT 2007 conference this week. Look for updates as the week goes along.
No fear, no loathing
Dr. Sven-Michael Prueser smiled and almost laughed out loud. Prueser, the senior vice president of CeBIT Hannover, told us about the fact that several notables aren’t exhibiting this year. In reality, he said, these “missing” companies that have been highly profiled as losses to CeBIT are in reality prominently here in partner booths in a big way. Indeed, rumors of an imminent and rapid downsizing of CeBIT, the world’s largest ICT (information, communications, telecommunications) event, have had some recent prominence in the international press, but Prueser just smiled. Conferences such as the recent 3GSM show held in Spain are for partying, he said. If you want to do the real business, it’s at CeBIT.
The facts are that CeBIT has interesting expansion. Participation by Latin America is up 128%, he said. Taiwan is still dominant, but the People’s Republic of China is growing rapidly. The former Soviet Eastern block is also showing phenomenal growth. Indeed, this year’s CeBIT has 400,000-plus registered showgoers and more than 6,000 stands with more than 280 million square meters of show space under 27 roofs. And Russia has become a strong partner at CeBIT. It makes one wonder where U.S. vendors are. More than 50% of CeBIT exhibitors come from outside Germany, but no longer is the next biggest exhibiting country the United States. It hasn’t been for a few years.
Wednesday night, Dr. Angela Merkel, chancelor of Germany, is to keynote the CeBIT Opening Ceremony, followed by Pat Russo, the CEO of the newly merged Lucent-Alcatel. It’s then followed by a little party for about 4,000 exhibitors, press, and industry leaders.
Along the product way
Numerous high-profile companies are announcing products either at or in sync with the CeBIT wave. Altiris is riding the wave with a fresh new weapon that sandboxes misbehaved products that won’t play nicely under Microsoft’s Vista operating system. The idea is to allow these misbehaving apps to work safely under Vista without setting off all of the wiggy alarms we’ve noted that Vista flags like a nervous chicken.
Software is also the theme behind an announcement from the newly merged American Power Conversion-MGS offering. The big news is strong network operations center (NOC) design software. The idea of InfraXure Enterprise 4.0 is both to monitor NOC infrastructure components — rack temperature, humidity, alarms, etc. — and additionally find optimized placement for new components, rather than the “any old hole in a rack someplace” mentality that exists in many data centers. The capacity and change-management components of the software also allow proposals to be exported into several formats, including AutoCad.
Broadband over powerlines also has received a boost, as Intellon announced 80Mbps HomePlug AV chips for home HD IPTV, broadband networking, and other apps over home powerlines without the RF interference associated with other broadband-over-powerline schemes. Intellon’s ICs connect to motherboards also being announced at CeBIT.
Henderson is principal researcher at ExtremeLabs and a member of the Network World Lab Alliance.
