This week"s Comdex may have been short in numbers of exhibitors and attendees, but it did bring out a large contingent of storage vendors, both on-site and off-site, showing a variety of products mainly for the small and midsize business space.
Most storage vendors with booths on the show floor said they felt that the attendees of this show were better qualified, and more able to talk business, than in the past.
Several of the storage vendors who said they had good booth traffic were those who had solution providers in their booths to talk to customers, including Nexsan Technologies, Computer Associates and Qualstar.
Diamond Lauffin, senior executive vice president of Nexsan, which manufacturers ATA hard drive-based storage arrays, said that in his 10 years of going to Comdex, 2003 was the best show he has ever seen in terms of new business. "We expect to pay for our presence here by three (times) or four times just from the first day," he said.
Lauffin footed the bill for a number of solution providers to join in part to show that his company has no direct sales. "For resellers, Comdex is still a valid vehicle," he said. "We have capitalized on the lack of interest from Sun and Hewlett-Packard in releasing new products here."