I haven’t been everywhere on the show floor yet and it is only day two, but here is a list of things usually found at Vegas tradeshows that are noticeably scarce or absent at NXTcomm08:

Porn flyers and cards littering the halls and bathrooms

The smell of too many people in a small space

Small booths of consumer grade trinkets

Mentally ill people posing as reporters

People sitting on the floor

Lines for the bathroom

Wheelie bags

Beach attire

Complaint

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there is nobody here.  There are plenty of people milling around and getting down to the business of doing business.   They are just being surprisingly polite and professional about it!

Having walked the NXTcomm show floor for a while I have a few observations to share:

The overall impression I get from the show floor is that of civility with an underlying buzz of excitement and possibility. It is a pretty open floorplan with wide isles that give a light and airy feel.  It feels more like a high school reunion than a dance club.

I can’t remember ever seeing a more diverse crowd at a tradeshow.  Men and women, young and old, black, white and every shade in between, the level of diversity among attendees is truly striking and reflective of the global reach of the telecom industry.

Large tradeshows are often a mile wide and an inch deep in terms of their industry reach and coverage.  But the products on the NXTcomm show floor represent the entire telecommunications chain from mobile data centers and outdoor enclosures to set top boxes and customer management software.  NXTcomm maintains an undiluted focus on improving revenue for the attendees’ businesses rather than being just a showcase for hyped technologies.

There seems to be quite a lot of actual work getting done here.  There are lots of groups standing and sitting around, introducing themselves, and conversing.  This is a much different environment than the shows that have people herding around and bumping into each other in narrow isles.   Many booths have large offices and there seem to be lots of meetings going on all the time.

During Tuesday morning’s keynote, Randall L. Stephenson, Chairman and Chief Executive
Officer, AT&T Inc. described his vision for the future of telecom.  In
short, there isn’t on.  Rather than simple wired and wireless voice and
data, Stephenson envisions a future of voice, video, data and other services
served over IP networks at unimaginable speeds.

“We are in the very early stages of a major shift in telecomm that will have
a major impact of the way we live,” Stephenson explained. “We are doing
things with technology today that we couldn’t have imagined a few years
ago.”

Stephenson illustrated his point by pointing out that eighty percent of the
world’s population lives within range of a cell tower, wireless voice minute
use is growing ten percent year over year and wireless data traffic is
quadrupling annually while landline home phone use continues to fall.

“To realize the full potential of all this connectivity, it takes the
combined efforts of many different companies and technologies,” Stephenson
explained.  “NXTcomm brings all the players together to accelerate this
innovation, improve quality and reduce coasts.”

Sol Trujillo, CEO, Telstra expanded on Stephenson’s remarks when he took the
sage immediately afterward.  Trujillo explained how he is leading
Australia’s largest telecommunications company through a five-year
transformation based on detailed customer research.

“Our industry has the best opportunity for growth since the mid nineties,”
Trujillo said. “But this time it is being driven by consumer needs.”
Trujillo stressed the need to continuously research and re-evaluate consumer
needs and desires.

According to Trujillo, consumers want uncomplicated, intuitive, time saving
personalized devices that are easy to use and offer a lot of value for the
money. Trujillo believes that network’s performance now has a larger impact
on the consumer’s experience than does the design of the hardware or human
interface.

Both Trujillo and Stephenson mentioned the importance of a seamless
ecosystem of hardware, software and high-speed networks in delivering
consumers a quality experience.  Their compelling and energizing vision
opened NXTcomm08 show floor on a high note.

To be honest, I’m a hardware guy.  I like giant racks of equipment with neat rows of lights and cables, huge metal boxes with vent louvers and case fans, big antenna arrays and of course small consumer electronics products.

NXTcomm08, is a business to business show so I expected to see a lot of products that weren’t even nouns; “cutting edge solutions,” “innovative services” and the like.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find booths full of actual stuff!  There are huge boxes mounted on phone poles, home networking equipment mounted between studs and CE gear in display cases.

NXTcomm isn’t kidding when they say, “NXTcom08 is the one event delivering the entire ecosystem of network-enabled voice, video and data.”  Believe it!

As a company, Verizon isn’t necessarily known for its willingness to publicly disclose their long-term plans or the strategies behind them, but during a presentation at NXTcomm08 today, Christopher Gesell, Director of Global Product Marketing, IT Solutions did just that.  In a keynote entitled Computing as a Service: Next Frontier in On-Demand Computing, Gesell outlined Verizon Business’s plans to offer Computing as a Service (CaaS) to business consumers in the first quarter of 2009.

Gesell described today’s enterprise IT systems as largely underutilized, overly complex and difficult to manage with a high upfront cost.  To provide Verizon Business customers with an alternative to this system, Verizon is building on-demand computer centers on their global IP backbone to create an on-demand platform that delivers next generation application performance and management solutions.  By converging computing and the network Verizon Business plans to manage in real-time the capacity, availability, infrastructure and applications for their enterprise customers.  In his remarks, Gesell described the framework of Verizon’s Advanced Workflow and Automated Resource Engine (AWARE) that allows them to add, turn down and restore virtual and physical servers dynamically.

Gesell justified the aggressive timetable by pointing out that tomorrow’s IT pro won’t be wedded to the idea of having a local copy of everything on their hardware.  They already buy, manage, consume and store their critical personal data on the Internet.  He went on to explain that centralization, virtualization and automation already are common IT practices that are milestones on the path toward cloud computing.

It was a convincing and even somewhat inspiring presentation, especially given the esoteric nature of the topic.  I came away really impressed that such a large company would aggressively pursue such a grand vision.