ISPCON

An ISPCON regular since 1996 writes about what to look for and whom to learn from at the Fall show in Santa Clara.

by Mike Cassidy of ISP-Market [October 14, 2005]

With headlines like this, ISP Industry Event, ISPCON, Sells Out Exhibit Space and Continues Rapid Growth in Attendance more than 100 companies participating how could you miss the fall ISPCON show? Once again our industry is heading back to the 80 degree weather in Santa Clara for the meeting of ISP minds.

This year's fall show is packing in the largest number of exhibitors the show has seen since the dot com bust. The show management has also spent a lot of time fattening up the sessions. My hat's off to Jon for getting the CEO of Covad for the keynote speech and I understand Tim Sanders was awarded the assist. This should be a very interesting keynote coming off the heals of Covad's announcement of the purchase of NextWeb.

The other keynote, Hosting 2.0: Building the Über-host also looks very interesting. Paul Stapleton alone is interesting. Paul has been around since the early days, seen it all, and always has great insight that he is not hesitant to share. Rounding out the panel is representatives from GoDaddy, EV1 Servers, and Peer1 Networks.

This year's session grid is broken out into Wireless, Hosting, Technology & Customers, VoIP and Business. Once again it may be tough getting to all the sessions of interest. One nice thing the ISPCON folks have done is post the audio from many of the sessions from last years show on the ISPCON blog.

Giveaways!
iPODs a plenty! At the spring show more iPod's than you can find in a 7th grade classroom were given away. The fall show giveaways include putters, Digital Stereo Voice Recorders, an Online Backup Software package worth $18,000 and yes, iPods. Check out the Exhibitor Show Specials and Giveaways section of the site for details. Maybe you will be lucky enough to win a new ISPCON HHR from Chevy.

New to the show
A brand new Demo theater and Start up city is a welcome addition to the show. In the Demo theater companies such as Microsoft, Trango and o1 Communications will be speaking right on the exhibit show floor. 8 new vendors will be showcasing their products for the first time at ISPCON in the start up city booth.

Exhibitors of Interest
Always On Wireless has an interesting all in one VoIP/Hot Spot/Print Server product they just announced.

Hula Networks always a show favorite. "Budget Routers, Beers and Babes"—what a combo.

Adzilla is back with their very unique offering. Just the communications piece of their solution alone is worth taking a look at if you are looking for a better way to sell Value Added Services and take care of deadbeat customers not paying bills.

CISPA has a booth. Check out the member's' survey they have put together. Great idea, vendors should take a look and join as a member. CISPA also has their member meeting Tuesday night.

FarStone Technology has PC and network-based personal disaster recovery, digital content replication and management solutions. I looked at them at the spring show, great idea.

Five Across provides the technology platform for ISPs to offer blogging, podcasting, photo sharing, video blogging, web publishing, web hosting, messaging and community building services. Is this a VAS opportunity for ISP's?

IKANO Communications is there with a new CEO and a $16.5 million war chest.

PacWest will be talking up their new nationwide expansion plan.

NEWCOMERS TO THE SHOW
KEMP Technologies Inc. is a newcomer with their Server load balancing (SLB) and SSL acceleration appliances. Appliance pricing begins at $2,490, interesting. Netintelligence is also a newcomer with a parental control solution. ParetoLogic Inc. is targeting ISP's with a solution for unwanted spyware, adware, malware, keyloggers, unwanted toolbars, browser hijacking, spyware pop-ups. PCT International Inc. is new to the show with optical networking and RF products for broadband communication networks.

Mirapoint is there; Ironport is not.

Sessions/Speakers
John McKown, President & CEO, Delaware.Net
One of the best to learn from, John started Delaware.Net, Inc. out of the IT needs for his own business, and was initially a dialup provider only. Today, Delaware.Net, Inc. is focused on building and hosting web-based applications, ecommerce web sites, and providing local IT services. John is one of the success stories on how to move from a traditional Dial-Up ISP into a thriving Internet "Service" Provider in 2005.

Arthur G. Giftakis, Vice President—Engineering and Operations, TowerStream WiMAX: Experience from the Field

TowerStream is competing head to head with RBOCs in major metropolitan areas including New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles. Should be interesting hearing from the front lines of WiMax deployments at TowerStream. Completely bypassing the RBOCs, something we all should be interested in. What also makes this compelling is Covad's recent purchase of NextWeb for $23 million. Is TowerStream next?

Brent Arslaner, VP of Product Strategy, Jamcracker
Rebirth of the ASP—Profiting from SaaS and Managed Services
ASP was the 3 letter word that could have been a 4 letter word. The interest in becoming an ASP has grown once again. Remember ASPCON?

Eden Recor, Owner, Grand County Internet Services

First Four Years as a WISP
Has it been four years already? This is on of the great things about ISPCON. You get to hear a WISP talk about offering BBW southwest of Denver Colorado near Rocky Mountain National Park.

Gary Getz, Director, Strategos

Customer-Centric Innovation to Drive Growth

This session will describe how organizations can use customer-centered innovation techniques to expand their markets. Discover how to anticipate the future needs of existing customers and prospects. Hear how organizations can combine insights from customer experiences with other perspectives to generate rule-breaking new growth ideas, and how to convert those ideas into action. Wait a minute, listening to your customers to plan for growth?

Muni Networks and You: Embracing the Reality

"Like it or not, Municipal Networks are here to stay and coming soon to an RFP near you." This is a great line and should wake you up as an ISP. Breaking down the hype and FUD and get to the issues at hand, the key drivers as well as the opportunities and threats for independent providers. Potential outcomes, failed attempts, models for success and first-hand experience will help shed light on this new reality and what it means to you and your competitive environment and what to do about it. A great panel also:

Moderator:
Rich Bader, President and CEO, EasyStreet Online Services

Panelists:

Gene Crick, Executive Director, TeleCommunity Resource Center

Layne Sisk, President, ServerPlus LLC

Greg Richardson, Managing Partner, Civitium, LLC
Paul Butcher, Marketing Manager—State & Local Government, Intel Americas, Inc

Haralds Jass, CEO, HopOne Internet and Superb Internet

Maximizing Your Data Center Dollars
Haralds Jass is the CEO of HopOne Internet and Superb Internet. HopOne operates multiple data centers. Haralds started in 1996 and has grown with the times. I am looking forward to hearing his session

Financing Strategies for Broadband Wireless

Investment capital has been relatively slow to flow into this sector. So learn from a panel of leading telecom private equity investors and operating companies what sources of capital are available and what strategies will be successful in attracting investors. Since the FCC ruling this is a must attend.

Vendor sessions of interest
IntelaCom (ICC) will be introducing a one stop total telecommunications package for ISPs, webhosting companies, VISPs and others.

Gary Stanley, President, IntelaCom

Applications Hosting: What Are the Success Factors?

The presentation covers the approaches to beating the access services commoditization trend and how to extend managed services reach to the SME markets. The particular focus is given to the similarity of SME's needs to the ones of the larger organization, and the different approach to the SME's budgets and in-house capabilities.

Ivan Wells, Business Development Manager, EMS-Cortex Ltd.

What Keeps You Awake at Night?
Phoenix Technologies would like ISPs to sleep better by cutting your customer support costs, and reducing customer churn, capturing new revenue streams and differentiating your company from the competition.

See you at the show. I'm looking forward to talking with old friends and making new acquaintances much like I have since the 1997 ISPCON show.

BTW, Donny Smith's hat was missing at the last show. If you came across it, let me know.

— End

Note: The parent company of this website, Jupitermedia, has a minority interest in ISPCON.