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The computer industry's most prominent trade show is alive and well, but will be smaller and more IT-focused, its new manager says.

Eric Faurot, vice president and general manager of Comdex, says the show that will emerge this fall from the ashes of former owner Key3Media's bankruptcy won't be as large as the behemoth of years past.

However, he says new owner Medialive International plans to make the gathering more focused and, therefore, more useful to attendees. This reworking will help Comdex remain the must-attend event of the $870 billion IT industry, Faurot says.

New Fees, Focus

"We're a B-to-B, IT industry event," Faurot says. "The show needs focus. It can't be relevant if it's not focused."

To help ensure that focus--and bolster the bottom line--nonexhibitor attendees will have to pay to enter. Fees will be $50 in advance or $100 at the door, a change from the free admission of past years.

The show will also lose some of its consumer froufrou: "No massage chairs," Faurot says.

He expects an attendance drop as a result, from about 100,000 last year to between 60,000 and 75,000 this fall. But the attendees will be more in tune with the show's renewed focus, he says. Faurot estimates 35 percent will be technology professionals, and another 35 percent will be so-called line-of-business people, who make technology-buying decisions for businesses but are not in technical jobs. A smaller group, about 8 to 10 percent, will come from the developer community, he says.

Faurot says the show will concentrate on seven technology categories: Digital Enterprise, On-Demand Computing, Open Source, Security, Web Services, Windows and .Net, and Wireless and Mobility.

Night Moves

While vendors will be discouraged from promoting their consumer lines on the show floor, Faurot says a new series of Comdex After Dark events will allow informal networking and promotions.

Faurot says he's making a concerted effort to bring back to the show floor companies such as Dell, which in recent years has abandoned the Las Vegas Convention Center in favor of private events at area hotels.

Speaking somewhat ruefully, Faurot acknowledges that the industry has become skeptical about Comdex's future. For example, surprise greeted the recent announcement that Microsoft Chair and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will make his twentieth straight Comdex keynote address.

"It was always the show you loved to hate," Faurot says. He attended Comdex as an executive at CMP Media, until he was hired recently by the show's new parent company.

Other keynoters announced earlier this week include Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems chair, president, and chief executive; Sanjay Kumar, Computer Associates chair and CEO; John Thompson, Symantec chair and CEO; and David Nagel, Palmsource president and CEO.

Future Still Hazy

Despite the distinguished list of keynote speakers, at least one industry veteran questions whether Faurot and his team can succeed in restoring Comdex's luster.

"Comdex stopped being the must-attend show of the IT business three or four years ago," says Rob Enderle, a Forrester Research fellow.

"The difficulty is that the buyers are not going to shows, and unless these folks get a lot more creative about how they do this ... this is one of those things that is part of an era that is [in the] past," Enderle says.

He notes that the recent CeBIT America show in New York tried to draw the same IT crowd that Comdex wants, but was a very quiet event. Both shows suffer from problems that all trade shows share in the Internet age: Buyers don't want to travel, don't have a travel budget, or don't need to travel to get the information they used to gather at shows. They can find it online.

Shortened product cycles are another issue: "As the products matured, they just didn't lend themselves to an annual show," Enderle says.

Enderle concedes that people still need and want to meet and network, but he suggests that trade show organizers might have to come up with some kind of virtual-show approach to succeed.

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