Comdex, the technology industry’s annual Las Vegas exhibition, may have been the bash of year in the past, but it was more like a tea party this year.
Even with attendance off by 40% this year, many Orange County companies still sent delegations to at least meet with customers, if not to occupy a space on Comdex’s massive exhibition floor.
Kingston Technology Co. was one of the former. While the Fountain Valley-based memory maker opted out of the huge parties and huge exhibition floor spreads it had mounted in the past, the company sent a cadre of sales staff to meet privately with computer makers to convince them to buy memory.
“Memory is getting more expensive,” said Kingston spokeswoman Heather Jardim.
Kingston,along with other memory makers,has been grappling with falling memory prices in the past year.
Neither Conexant Sys-tems Inc. nor Broadcom Corp.,which had thrown huge parties and taken out a lot of space in past Comdex events,even did so much as place an advertisement this year. Both companies did take out rooms in the Bellagio Hotel & Casino to hold private meetings with customers and prospective customers. The same went for disk drive maker Western Digital Corp., which met privately with customers in its own hotel suite.
Even though space on the exhibition floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center,which had been severely scaled back this year,went for a premium, several companies still booked large areas to show off their newest technology.
And some of the brashest exhibitors were also some of OC’s smallest. Irvine-based IOGEAR Inc., which makes equipment that helps users interact and operate computers, had a 30-by-30-foot space filled with its flashiest new toys. The company was bumped from the Sands Convention Center after Comdex organizers cancelled reservations there because attendance was so low.
“We had a space over there that was even bigger,” said Joyce Lu, a marketing assistant for IOGEAR.
The company had enough acreage to show off some its hottest products, including switches that help manage several different peripherals and special drives that write on flash memory cards.
Another big OC attendee was home-networking gear maker Linksys Group Inc. The company also pulled a 30-by-30 space on the exhibition floor to show off its entire line of routers and home networking gear. Hordes of Comdex-goers circled around the company’s new Wireless Presentation Gateway,products that allow for presentations to be conducted with a projector to be done wirelessly.
While some companies saw Comdex as a chance to get their names out and push products to a wide swath of people, other companies saw it as a chance to appeal to a focused group of customers.
“The people who are here have made an extra effort to get here, so you know they’re serious about buying products,” said Ariel Perez, a sales manager for Irvine-based SMC Networks Inc.
Among the gear at its exhibit, SMC pushed a special 24-port switch, which helps direct data traffic between more users than in other models, to people wandering around its massive space on the exhibition floor. “We’re trying to focus people on this stuff because it’s one of our higher-margin products,” Perez said. But even as SMC aggressively pushed gear, the company planned to reconsider how much space it will reserve at next year’s Comdex. SMC had decided on a larger space last year and was forced to stick with that despite a much slower Comdex this year, Perez said.
Storage networking companies, including Aliso Viejo’s QLogic Corp. and Costa Mesa’s Emulex Corp., found their space just right in the storage area network area. Among its efforts, QLogic pushed a kit,costing $9,999,that allows small business owners to network storage devices easily.
While it had a smaller space than QLogic, Emulex showed how its host bus adapters could work with other fibre channel gear. And not all of Emulex’s visitors were technology people looking for the newest thing. “It’s interesting, but we’ve seen more financial types that have been coming along here,” said one Emulex exhibitor. “These guys must be checking on the technology to see if they should approve it for their own company.”
Even with the reduced attendance this year, many companies still saw Comdex as a must. With a small space in the corner of the convention center, Irvine-based Gigaram Inc.,a local memory products maker,said Comdex had given it a leg up in years past and would do so again this year.
“This has a real positive influence on our company,” said Sia Batman, a sales manger at Gigaram. “Many of our partnerships have come about just because we were located next to them here at Comdex. It’s great for visibility.” n
