The New Face of NXTcomm

NXTcomm’s Wayne Crawford

You’ll notice a new face at the podium this month at NXTcomm. His name is Wayne Crawford, and he’s the executive director of this event.

TIA’s Grant E. Seiffert

Along with USTelecom President and CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr. and TIA’s new President Grant Seiffert (long-time TIA President Matt Flanigan retired at the end of 2006), Crawford will make up the master of ceremonies triumvirate for the show later this month in Chicago.

While Crawford is new to the telecom side of trade show management, he’s a 20-year veteran in the exposition industry, and a proven entity on the communications trade show front. Prior to joining NXTcomm, Crawford played an integral role in two of the country’s largest shows — NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters) and CES (the Consumer Electronics Show). At NAB, he led exhibit sales efforts and new business development, including initiatives for next-generation content delivery technologies. For CES, he developed strategies and worked with internal sales, marketing, public relations, operations, registration and finance divisions to produce the event.

At NXTcomm, Crawford’s central role at the show is more than just superficial; it signals a complete overhaul in the way USTelecom/TIA trade shows now are put together. NXTcomm is a corporation, so it operates independently of both associations, and has its own board of directors, which consists of folks from both associations, says Crawford. That’s unlike SUPERCOMM, which was not a separate corporation, but rather was run as a partnership of USTelecom (then known as USTA) and TIA, which was considered the managing partner.

NXTcomm also now has its own internal staff, headed by Crawford, who says: “We’ve made huge strides in terms of adding key people to the exhibit production staff of the show.” Exhibition trade magazine Tradeshow Week in a recent article called the NXTcomm group a “dream team,” mentioning the recent hiring of Jim Forlenza and Bill Herman, former owners of Agile Events, which produced the Latino-focused home show Expo Tu Casa in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and also worked together at E.J. Krause & Associates. Forlenza is director of public relations and business development. Herman was brought on as director of administration and operations.

Another notable member of the NXTcomm staff is Michael Cerami, who for eight years worked in sales for the CTIA show. He joined the NXTcomm team in February as director of sales.

It’s this team that came up with the direction for the show, says Crawford, adding that video will be one key theme at NXTcomm, given it is driving much of the infrastructure development at service providers these days.

In addition to the network side of the video equation, NXTcomm has partnered with Digital Hollywood, which will run a three-day conference about content at the show.

But overall, NXTcomm will be about convergence — the convergence of technologies, the convergence of different kinds of companies on similar service sets, and the convergence of TIA and USTelecom. “NXTcomm represents all of that,” Crawford says. “Our heritage began with SUPERCOMM, and that went on for close to 20 years. The two organizations that put SUPERCOMM on the map — USTelecom and TIA — had parted ways for a couple of years and decided to come back together.” He adds the two opted to reconnect “in response to a stated desire of both the manufacturers and the carriers. Again, much of it was political. Both organizations thought that they could run a quality event without the other. Both of them were very respectable. But, in the end, the industry wanted a unified event, a unified voice.”

The Chicago event expects to attract 20,000 attendees and close to 500 exhibitors. That’s in contrast to the 17,000 attendees and 425 exhibitors at TIA’s Globalcomm last year, and TelecomNEXT’s 10,000 visitors and around 100 exhibitors, according to Crawford.

As for 2008, add NXTcomm to the long list of telecom-related shows that will be in Las Vegas. Beyond that, however, Crawford says NXTcomm has not yet committed to a venue, but may rotate the event between Chicago and Las Vegas. The Chicago event expects to attract 20,000 attendees and close to 500 exhibitors.

Walter and Matt’s Wild Ride

It’s been a wild ride for NXTcomm, yet the event hasn’t even made its debut. That happens this month in Chicago. But NXTcomm, which is more or less a reincarnation of SUPERCOMM, has had a strange and colorful history.

USTelecom’s Walter B. McCormick Jr.

As you probably already know, TIA (the Telecommunications Industry Association) and USTelecom (formerly known as USTA) had for 17 years worked together to put on SUPERCOMM, the largest domestic telecom show of its time. But trade show relations between the two organizations — the former made up primarily of telecom vendors, the latter controlled by incumbent telcos – soured over time, and the associations decided to go their separate ways following SUPERCOMM 2005. That’s when a five-year contractual relationship between the two expired.

Word circulating in the industry was that USTA President and CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr. wanted a bigger slice of show revenue, but neither USTA nor TIA ever would officially comment on that. In any case, McCormick and his bunch at USTA had been running their own “TELECOM”-branded events for several years prior to the demise of SUPERCOMM and, despite a tough economy, were building steam. USTA told xchange in 2004 that attendance at its TELECOM event increased by 165 percent from 2002 to 2003 and was on track to double again in 2004.

Matt Flanigan

Meanwhile, attendance at the much larger SUPERCOMM plunged in 2002 following the implosion of the telecommunications industry. There was a further decline in attendees the following year. But attendance and exhibitor numbers rebounded some at SUPERCOMM 2004.

As TIA and USTA announced they were pulling the plug on SUPERCOMM, USTA detailed plans to sponsor an expanded TELECOM ’06 that was to be held in October in Las Vegas. Then, in June of 2005, USTA changed the name of its trade show effort to TelecomNEXT, which McCormick pronounced was the replacement for SUPERCOMM. The first TelecomNEXT event was scheduled for spring of 2006. Of course, that would’ve all been well and fine had TIA not been planning to hold its own SUPERCOMM replacement event, called Globalcomm, just months later in Chicago.

Many exhibitors and attendees participated in both events to “test the waters,” making 2007 the deciding year for the success of the respective events. But for most, which had become much more conservative with their marketing dollars following telecom’s “nuclear winter,” the cost and time of exhibiting at two major events so close to one another was just too much to bear. So, many of these companies exhibiting at TelecomNEXT and Globalcomm expressed to xchange their intentions to lobby TIA and USTA to realign on the trade show front.

“Two shows were a disaster,” Gary Bolton, vice president of marketing and product management at mid-band Ethernet equipment provider Hatteras Networks Inc., said in an e-mail interview with xchange this spring. “We want to put all our wood behind one arrow. Also, TelecomNEXT competed on the same dates with COMPTEL PLUS (a huge CLEC show for us), and we not only had to split our show budget for two shows (versus one SUPERCOMM/NXTcomm), we also had to split our sales and marketing staff between COMPTEL PLUS in San Diego and TelecomNEXT in Las Vegas.”

So, in October of 2006, just months after the first Globalcomm and TelecomNEXT events, Matt Flanigan, who was then president of TIA, and McCormick, of what by then was USTelecom, announced they would renew their partnership for a single telecom industry event in 2007, and NXTcomm was born.

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