Cebit is down but not out

I’ve been attending the annual Cebit IT show in Hanover for many years and reports of its demise seem to be consistently exaggerated.

Though official visitor numbers for Cebit 2007 have not yet been released, my initial impressions of the first two days suggested that fewer punters turned up this year. I’ve always felt that taxi queues and traffic jams are a far more accurate indicator of visitor numbers than the official figures, and this year at Cebit the queues were the shortest I’ve seen.

Nokia and Motorola were among the more notable absent vendors, but anybody in the business of mobility is bound to question the wisdom of manning another major show so soon after February’s 3GSM event.

Other enterprise vendors reeled off the usual complaints about Cebit: it is too geared towards the German market; and too focused on consumer and small-business technologies. But few took the risk of not being there at all.

But for people who travel to IT shows with the intention of actually buying something or to extend their knowledge of a particular technology, Cebit seems no less useful now than before. The fact that the show largely caters for people whose first language is German can seem a barrier, but English too is widely spoken.

No other show or retail outlet can demonstrate the breadth and variety of IT products that Hanover’s Deutsche Messe houses each year. The only alternative for hard-pressed IT managers looking to evaluate specific products is either to spend more time and money visiting smaller, more specialist shows (if they exist), or to invite individual salesmen to visit their offices.

The number of journalists attending the show this year also seemed to be down, judging by the number of empty seats in the press room. On the other hand, most IT journalists nowadays come pre-equipped with Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, so the need to rub shoulders with massed ranks of fellow hacks to check their email is no longer a priority.

Certainly, Hanover is a difficult town to visit during Cebit week, and just finding what you are looking for at an event that fills 26 halls and covers thousands of square metres can be a struggle.

The good news is that dwindling visitor numbers and a revamped focus on core IT technologies could actually make things easier for both potential buyers and exhibitors.