My Father-in-Law always uses this line "What do you expect from a pig, but a grunt". It had been almost two years since I attended the last AIIM/On Demand Show in Phili and quite a few years since the last one in NYC. Last year the show was held in Washington, DC and ran in the same building as the ITEX show. However questex media that runs all three of these shows did not allow ITEX visitors into the AIIM/On Demand and visa versa. Well the AIIM/On Demand Show in Washington, DC was a flop and this year in NYC it was..... a shell of the formed shows that were held in NYC.
From a copiers guy point of view it was nice to have this local show for the Print On-Demand, if you were or wanted to be a player in copier and production print the On-Demand Show was the place to be! I had heard from on of my DSM's that Ricoh and KonicaMinolta were not going to be there this year, however I assumed that HP (indigo), Xerox, Oce andCanon would be there. I made and ass out of my self because no major manufacturer was there with production print equipment. There was one Ricoh C751 there and one Color KM system there and they were being promoted by a NY dealer. What a shame for a show that once took up two floors was reduced to maybe 80 companies.
When going to the On-Demand show you also had access to the AIIM side of the show, the AIIM side of the show was geared for content management software players. All of the major players like Adobe, Abby, Hyland, and many others were also absent from the show.
I'm kinda blaming the On-Demand side on Drupa this year, however with the absence of so many major software ECM companies I'm not sure that the Drupa idea holds water.
Attendance from what I saw was poor. What once took me all day to walk the floor took all of two hours today and after the two hours there was not the need to go back and take a second look at the products. I had thought that maybe I should have checked the list of exibitors before I left, I checked tonight and couldn't even find one on the questex site. I had a couple of good lines and the best way that the "private sector (business) was doing just fine", most laughed in agreement.
I was able to meet three P4P members at the show and we had some fun reminising the old shows that were held at the Javits Center in NYC.
I did pick up a few good contacts and saw wome value in four to five exibitors. I will try and post that information in a few days for every one. Otherwise the show was a bomb and would not recommend it next year.
Art
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