Newspaper story about conferences, Hotsos Symposium

Many of you attended our Hotsos Symposium in Dallas earlier this month. You might be interested in an article (below) that was published in the Dallas Morning News about a week ago.  

Thanks, Jared, for giving me the okay to pass this on to the list.  

Cary Millsap
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
http://www.hotsos.com

Upcoming events:
- RMOUG Training Days 2003 <http://www.rmoug.org> , Mar 5-6 Denver - Hotsos Clinic <http://www.hotsos.com/training/clinic101> 101, Mar 25-27 London  

Page at:
<http://www.dallasnews.com/business/columnists/agoldstein/stories/021903 dnbustechcol.5ccdb.html>
http://www.dallasnews.com/business/columnists/agoldstein/stories/021903d nbustechcol.5ccdb.html

 Trading size for substance  

 Attendees now prefer smaller tech shows over mega-conferences  

 02/19/2003  

 TECHNOLOGY    With technology spending way down and no recovery in sight, this might

 not seem like the best time to debut a software-related trade show.  

 But Southlake-based Hotsos Enterprises Ltd. launched a three-day event

 last week that attracted about 270 people from around the world, enough

 of a success to begin planning for a second annual conference.  

 That kind of attendance might represent a rounding error for many of the

 technology industry's mega-conferences such as Comdex, which at its peak

 two years ago attracted more than 200,000 people.  

 But when it comes to trade shows lately, smaller, more focused events

 are better.  

"If I go to a smaller conference, my expectation is it'll have more

 substance and less marketing," said James R. Foley, a database

 administrator for aerospace giant Boeing Co. in Seattle, who was

 attending the Hotsos conference at a Dallas-area hotel.  

 Hotsos (pronounced "hot sauce") helps corporate customers run their

 Oracle-based database systems more efficiently.  

"I don't go to the larger shows anymore," said another attendee, Jim

 Boles, a database administrator from NCS Pearson Inc. in Eagan, Minn.

"They're not specialized enough."
 

 The big time  

 A few years ago, anyone in search of the next big thing out of the tech

 industry had little choice but to brave the throngs at huge trade shows.

 Attendees regularly groused about getting shoved and jostled in

 overcrowded convention halls, hotel ballrooms and at late-night parties.

 They would wait impatiently through long lines for restaurants and

 taxicabs.  

 The crowds have never really bothered me. I've always liked tapping the

 energy of the big shows, where industry executives premiere their

 strategies in keynote addresses -- or at least sling amusing verbal

 arrows at one another.  

 Big shows are valuable for their critical mass of expertise. I once met

 a valued source in an airport bus leaving the convention center in

 Manhattan. A conversation that I overheard on a packed flight out of Las

 Vegas led to a decent news story.  

 These days, though, many big conferences have a lot more breathing room.  

 Attendance at Comdex in Las Vegas in November fell by nearly half from

 its zenith in 2000. The show's organizer filed for bankruptcy protection

 this month.  

 Other shows are struggling, too. Journalists have been joking that

 they've outnumbered industry attendees at some of the major trade shows

• and it hasn't seemed like much of an exaggeration.

 Blame the weak economy and a lot of corporate skepticism about whether

 technology investments are worth all the trouble and expense.  

 Businesses that once sent teams of staffers to the mega-shows to learn

 about hot Internet strategies have sharply curtailed spending for travel

 as well as for technology. Tech companies that used to feel obligated to

 exhibit at all the venues have slashed their marketing plans -- or gone

 out of business.  

 Tighter focus  

 Those who still get to travel to conferences are being told to choose more

 carefully, said Gary Goodman, co-founder and manager of Hotsos.  

"People might say, 'I can only do one show this year,' " he said. "So

 they can go to a big show and get a trickle of information about a lot

 of things, or come here and drink from a fire hose."  

 Hotsos' message is tailored for tough times. Its conference focused on

 how database administrators can improve performance by reducing the

 demand on existing equipment, rather than making additional purchases.  

 One of the speakers I heard exhorted customers to set priorities in how

 they tweak systems -- making improvements only where they'll have the

 greatest impact. Sensible stuff.  

 Some large expositions are still thriving, but they're more focused than

 the broad and diffuse Comdex. The Consumer Electronics Show is now the

 biggest trade show in North America; the event last month in Las Vegas

 hosted more than 100,000 attendees. The annual Cellular

 Telecommunications & Internet Association show remains indispensable for

 people in the wireless industry.  

"People have a no-nonsense attitude about conferences, a back-to-basics

 approach," said Amnon Aliphas of Global Technology Conferences Inc. in

 Boston, which is organizing a technical event in Dallas focused on

 applications for digital signal processing chips.  

"It's nice for people to have a good time. But they need to ask what
good

 it will do for their company."      

-- 
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Author: Cary Millsap
  INET: cary.millsap_at_hotsos.com

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