LinuxWorld Spreads to More Countries
By Margo McCall -- Tradeshow Week, 10/11/2004
IDG World Expo is exporting its LinuxWorld Conference & Expo brand to two more countries, and could add several more nations to the roster by year's end.
Canada and South Africa are the latest locales to be selected to host the open-source event, joining China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The brand got its start in 1999 in the United States, where 50,000 net square foot events are held in San Francisco and Boston. David Korse said the tradeshow had several international versions when he became president of IDG World Expo in the spring of 2003. Since then, the pace of international expansion has picked up, driven by business adoption of the Linux operating system, a rival to Microsoft's Windows.
While IDG World Expo events such as Wireless Sensing Solutions and Bio-IT Conference & Expo are still too nascent to export abroad, Korse said LinuxWorld is at the perfect stage of development. "It's a 5-year-old brand. It's very well-established. It was deemed that LinuxWorld was a very good opportunity for us," he said, adding that the market it serves is "active and healthy and growing."
Each international agreement is different. Some are joint ventures, some are agency agreements and some are licensing agreements. IDG World Expo typically uses in-country producers to leverage their knowledge of local markets, rather than producing international shows from the company's Framingham, Mass., headquarters.
"We're designing a relationship that works best with that market and whoever we work with as a partner," Korse said.
In the case of Canada, IDG World Expo formed a joint venture with Toronto-based IT World Canada, which was already a publishing affiliate of IDG World Expo's parent company, IDG Corp. The joint venture, called IT World Expo Canada, acquired Real World Linux and Real World Networks from a Toronto company called Plum Communications. The expositions were rechristened as LinuxWorld Conference & Expo and NetworkWorld Conference & Expo, in keeping with the IDG magazine of the same name.
Plum has been retained to manage the events, which will be collocated at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre April 18–20. This is not the first show sale for Plum, founder of the Real World Linux event. In 1998, Advanstar Communications snapped up its newMedia, a 14-year-old digital content industry tradeshow that drew 20,000 visitors and featured a 40,000 net sq. ft. showfloor with 200 exhibitors.
Plum's Jai Cole said Real World Linux in April drew 2,650 attendees and featured a 20,200 net sq. ft. showfloor with 190 exhibitors. Plum was launching Real World Networks next year to coincide with its Linux event at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Cole and Korse both said there's demand for IT tradeshows in Canada now that MediaLive Intl. has indefinitely postponed COMDEX Canada, a horizontal show last held in 2002. Cole, however, said Real World Networks was planned as a vertical event to draw senior management and IT professionals.
Meanwhile, Exhibitions for Africa, producer of 15 exhibitions in various sectors, will collocate LinuxWorld with its Futurex exposition May 17–20 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg. The inaugural 2004 Futurex, aimed at the enterprise IT market, drew 16,000 attendees and featured a 3,000 square meter (32,300 net sq. ft.) showfloor.
In August, IDG World Expo signed a licensing agreement with XPO Events, producer of the LinuxUser & Developer Expo, to produce LinuxWorld Oct. 6–7 at London's Olympia Exhibition Centre.
