ISPCON Continues to Grow

The ISPCON tribe is providing ever greater value to both attendees and exhibitors, but ISPs have to go to Washington, D.C., which is exactly where the next show will be held.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 26, 2003]

ISPCON this fall was bigger, better, and longer than it has been for a while. While the show has an august history dating back to BBSCon in the early nineties, its recent history has been, like the ISP industry itself, a story of renewal.

Former ISPCON keynote and current advisory board member Rich Bader, president of EasyStreet Online Services, business-oriented ISP in Oregon, summed it up nicely.

"Now that all the hype is gone from the Internet, the folks that are still in this business love it enough to want to stay in and are smart enough to be able to succeed at it. Those are the folks that came to ISPCON this session. Three years ago, while the number of attendees was huge, finding your peers was like finding a needle in a haystack. Now virtually everyone you meet is worth chatting with."

Industry veteran Guy Decatrel, vice president of sales and marketing for wholesaler Brand X Internet, said, "The turnout seemed good, considering everything of the past two years. I will be there next year because I expect it to be better yet."

Decatrel enjoyed the conference sessions. "What was good there was seeing what others are doing, learning, or simply validating your own approaches."

But for attendees like Decatrel, the bottom line was lead generation. He said, "I have already won a customer that we are implementing, and have two more prospects. So this show had a great ROI for me."

Exhibitor Chuck McGee of Fused Solutions, an outsourced tech support and contact center provider, was also pleased by the ROI of the show. "The attendees knew what they were looking for when they stopped by our booth and we were able to take away a decent amount of leads that fit within our target demographic."

He added, "a couple of accounts are near signature only a week or two after the show ended. We will be attending future ISPCon shows and think we found a place where we belong as an exhibitor."

Peter Christy, co-principal of NetsEdge Research Group, saw an industry consolidating. "I think that the consumer business will rapidly roll up into a few major players starting with AoL, Yahoo and MSN, precipitated by things like mobile phone email being a reality and people wanting finally an integrated inbox (so the overall system complexity is higher than most ISP's will really want to operate)."

Christy said independent ISPs will still be in business, but will have to find a niche. "I have come to believe that the ISP space will rapidly transform into a quite different business where the remaining small ISP's will survive by focusing on providing services to local and regional businesses (e.g. what EasyStreet or iQuest are doing respectively)."

Joe Commendatore, account executive at Hula Networks, a company that sells new and used equipment, disagreed. "The good things are coming back," he said. "The show as a whole, and the exhibitors and people coming to check it out, increased substantially since last year."

Hula had the most flamboyant booth on the show floor. The company was serving quality beer (Samuel Adams and Hefeweisen) and was staffed with beautiful women. Attendees thought the company had hired actresses, but Commendatore said, "no, no, it was just our receptionist and her friends."

For Hula, too, success was about signing up new clients. But the company also signed up two new equipment brands. It signed up attendee Fortinet, a security appliance company whose boxes serve businesses of all sizes.

The company also signed up its neighbor on the show floor, EmergeCore, a company whose product provides every IT service for a small business, including WLAN, DNS, mail server, Web server, and more.

Dave Brown, EmergeCore's president and CEO, told us he was happy to be Hula's neighbor on the show floor. When we spoke to him, he did not know that the two companies would soon become partners.

That's how the ISP business works. Many small companies mesh together, and the sum of the parts is greater than what any individual company could provide.

You may be wondering what happened to Jim Pickrell, who was a last minute speaker at ISPCON and featured in our article about his lawsuit demanding open access to cable networks.

He was in Washington, D.C., talking to the FCC. We'll have an update on his case next year, right around the time of the next ISPCON, which is in Washington, D.C. on April 14 through 16, 2004. It's a town that ISPs will have to visit more often, because the laws being made there are having an impact on the business.

— End