I was at the Systems 2008 show in Munich this week. My primary reason for being there was to assist our Sendmail Gmbh team on stand duties to provide technical support, product demos and product presentation. It’s a pleasure to help out because the last time I visited Munich was over 20 years ago. Great city for its beers. I especially enjoy the fantastic local Bavarian food.
The venue was at the Munich Trade Fair Center which usd to be the old Munich airport. I was quite impressed by the size and how well it was organized. This year the exhibition took place in five of the usual six massive halls. Getting to the Sendmail stand in Hall B3 at the far end of the exhibition complex was quite a walk from the main entrance. But it did help in digesting the heavy early morning breakfast.
As this was my first Systems show, I didn’t have a pre-conception of what to really expect, except I was told it is the second largest IT show in Germany after Cebit Hanover. On the way to the stand, I had to walk by two other halls. The first impression I got was that the exhibitors were well represented. IBM, who returned to the show this year, were in hall B2 just before ours. Their stand seems to have been the largest. It must have been over 600Msq in floor space.
The IT security exhibitors were all in our hall together with some misplaced vendors selling computer racks, power management, hard disk shredding and electronic door security devices. There were a mix of email security companies, mobile device security, removable storage security, penetration testing and firewall security companies amongst a few others in with us. The largest stand in the hall was occupied by Cisco Ironport. They took center spot and had the most people staffing it.
My tour of duty was for three days. The show opened from 9am till 6pm. Day 1 started with very slow traffic. Hardly a trickle until mid morning. It did pick up a little after that but consisted mainly of young high school students. Very enthusiastic, but they had one purpose in mind. Yes, you guessed it. The freebies. The hot items on request were USB sticks (pen drives). Traffic grew a little more and stayed that way for the rest of the day. Visitors to the Sendmail stand included quite a number showing interest in the Sendmail Modern Message Processing Infrastructure. A number of press and magazine representatives also came by to hear about Sendmail’s market positioning.
Day 2 had much better traffic; in fact, it was the busiest of the three days that I was there. Day 3 for me was similar to day 1. Again, the attendees included quite a number of students. In general, interest shown to email messaging security was not as much compared to mobile security & removable devices security. Even the likes of Ironport, Barracuda, ClearSwift, and PGP were employing all available manpower to entice the less-than-expected stream of visitors onto their stand.
So why is this my last Systems show? On day 2 we received official communication from the Show’s organizers confirming that although there was a large turnout of exhibitors this year, the Systems Exhibition was to end at the end of the year and be replaced by two new events with formats providing innovation to meet modern IT needs. One of the new events will continue to address IT Security but making it more focused on an international audience instead of just the German market. The second event is still undecided at this time.
In summary, Systems 2008 visitor attendance seemed to reflect the state of the current global economic climate.