Posted: 01/2000

All The Right Stuff
TRA Expo Lures Innovators for ‘Round the Clock
Networking

"The people who come by are not just people in off the street,"
said Tom Tilton, vice president of General Telecom Inc. (www.general-telecom.co.uk),
a switch-partitioning company, surveying the show floor at the
Telecommunications Resellers Assoc-iation (TRA) Fall ’99 show in Dallas.
"These are people who know what they want."

The exhibition hall, in a conference center across from the Adams Mark Hotel
downtown, was filled with what Tilton and several other exhibitors think are
exactly the right kind of people–about 2,500 of them, according to officials of
TRA (www.tra.com).

The show was full of companies doing new things, trying to do new things or
thinking about doing new things–and with companies prepared to tell them how to
do it and/or sell them the equipment and software they’ll need to do it.

"This is the exact audience that most exhibitors want to
reach," said Linda Gimmich, a principal in The Management Network Group
Inc. (www.tmng.com), a consulting firm.
"These are people who can really use our services–entrepreneurs who are
driving change, looking for answers."

While TRA had increased the size of the show to accommodate
more–175–exhibitors, there were still 25 other companies on the waiting list.
"At our spring conference in Philadelphia in 2000, we’ll go up again to
200," says TRA President Ernest B. Kelly III. "We can still manage
this size of a show in one hotel without having to move it into a conference
center."

Aside from greater numbers, exhibitors represented a broadened scope of
providers, which now include application service providers (ASPs), for example.
Also noteworthy were the number of companies (50 percent of the exhibitors)
selling wares and services to support the sell of local exchange services.

Dotti Garland, senior account manager for Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com),
said there also seemed to be more equipment vendors at the expo than previous
shows, pointing to a trend for companies "to be facilities-based rather
than looking for cheap minutes."

On the last day of the exhibition, executives from Garland’s company welcomed
executives from the vendor’s new acquisition Excel Switching Corp., Hyannis,
Mass., to the team in an impromptu ceremony at the Lucent booth.

"It’s wonderful to have these guys join us," said Bill Plunkett,
senior sales vice president of Lucent, of the official closing of the
acquisition. "Since we’ve really been concentrating on our voice over IP
products, Excel really fits into this."

While industry old hats were closing deals, a newcomer to the show was hoping
to open some at TRA Fall ’99. "This was an excellent show," said Hal
Stringer, a vice president and consultant for Technologies Management Inc. (TMI)
(www.tminj.com). "It gave us a chance to
meet a number of new faces and see some of our existing clients," he said.

Paul Logan, national sales account manager for PriceInteractive Inc. (www.priceinteractive.com),
an interactive voice response (IVR) and third-party verification (TPV) services
provider, also was eager "to see if all the people that expressed an
interest [will] follow up." If that’s the case, Logan may have his hands
full, since he added that quite a few companies expressed an interest in
PriceInteractive’s services.

Regulatory consultant Andrew Isar, who counts TRA among his clients, called
the show "wildly successful." "This is where all the business
gets done," he saids. "Where else can you see all your clients in one
place?"

Getting noticed by those clients was a horse of a different color, and
exhibitors had their share of creative ways to secure the spotlight. On the
final day of exhibits, Picabo Street, a downhill ski Olympic medal winner in
1994 and 1998, signed autographs at the Sprint Corp. (www.sprint.com)
booth. Network One (www.networkone.com),
Atlanta, used a sly-witted magician to lure attendees to the booth with his
sleight-of-hand card tricks. And did you catch the marching squad that traipsed
through the exhibit hall?

Away from the action on the show floor, TRA Fall ’99 also featured the first
annual presentation of the TRA-PHONE+ Telecommunications Competition Award.
Recip-ient Roy Wilkens (profiled in the December issue of PHONE+), a veteran of
the carrier’s carrier business, is chairman of the board for Williams
Communications Group Inc. (www.wilcom.com).

The agenda was highlighted by a rousing, candid keynote address by former
U.S. President George Bush, co-sponsored by TRA and Global Crossing Ltd. (www.globalcrossing.com).
Bush told a standing-room only crowd that if the government "can do it
right and stay out of the way," telecom will continue to progress, thrive
and prosper.

Once session rooms and the exhibit doors were closed for the day, there was
plenty of evening activity–including a concert sponsored by Williams Network
and Lucent Technologies and featuring swing band Big Bad VooDoo Daddy and a
party hosted by Sprint with none other than entertainment personality Dick
Clark–to keep attendees busy ’round the clock.