Just as I finish recovering from CES, we started planning for IT Expo East in Miami, Feb. 2-4.  It looks like I'll be available for meetings from sometime on Monday afternoon through Tuesday evening.  

When it comes to an IP telephony-focused channel partner/VAR show, IP Expo seems to be the biggest game in town. Enterprises can find themselves over at VoiceCon, and service providers will split between CompTel and SuperComm.

It'll be nice to catch up with a lot of people at the show and watch how everyone showers love on the channel people that show up. There's a lot of coin being spent to get mind-share with the tip-of-the-spear crowd, but are there enough resellers to match up with the ambitious dreams of everyone exhibiting at the show? Put another way, all channel partners will not sell all the goods and services on display at IT Expo. Some exhibitors really need to do more than just pick up 20 or 30 new people to occasionally pump their products and services.

I guess I'm jaded from the briefings I've had this fall.  Everyone has figured out that channel partners are vitally important to make sales in 2009. They need to have their stuff put on the bid paperwork as an alternative to Cisco, because everyone is going to put Cisco in as the high-bid and nobody every got fired for buying Cisco. But that may be two or three alternatives - not twenty.

Nortel's sudden demise will generate business for some of the exhibitors at IT Expo.  At the same time, channel partner/VARs should be taking a hard look at presentation and the business fundamentals of the folks they plan to work with over the next 12 to 18 months. One would hate to be ditching Nortel's replacement shortly after ditching Nortel.

- Doug [1]