Comdex expands to MGM with speech, meetings

Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2000 | 11:10 a.m.

Las Vegas' largest convention is outgrowing the four venues it usually uses and will spread out some more, to the city's largest hotel.

Comdex, the massive computer exposition that draws about 200,000 people to Las Vegas every November, will use the MGM Grand Conference Center as one of its meeting venues and will stage the kickoff keynote address by software guru Bill Gates at the MGM Grand Garden arena.

Gates, Microsoft Corp.'s chairman and chief architect, has addressed the opening session of Comdex for several years. It's so popular that the event usually draws about 6,000 people to the location of the speech and 6,000 more in satellite halls that project closed-circuit television images on massive screens.

"This is an event that we'll get 12,000 into a room," said Bill Sell, vice president and general manager of the Comdex show. "They're going to set it up with the same layout they had for Bruce Springsteen."

With seating on the floor of the arena and the grandstands, the Grand Garden arena has a capacity of about 17,000.

In addition to the crowd at the arena, thousands are expected to watch the Gates speech as it is broadcast live over the Internet.

Sell said the new venues are needed because Comdex has outgrown the meeting rooms at the Las Vegas Hilton and the Venetian hotel-casino. Panels and presentations will be conducted at those two locations as well as the 380,000-square-foot MGM Grand Conference Center.

The 21st Comdex show, which occurs Nov. 13-17 this year, also includes a trade show that fills about 1 million square feet between the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Sands Expo Center, which is connected to the Venetian.

This year, Comdex will have exhibitions in tents erected in the parking lot at the northwest corner of Paradise Road and Convention Center Drive. Registration will occur in tents in the main parking lot. That arrangement probably will be necessary for Comdex 2001, since the new 1.3 million-square-foot Convention Center expansion isn't expected to be ready until early 2002.

Sell said much of the show's growth is fueled by the nearly 400 new companies that will exhibit at Comdex 2000. The reason for the sudden interest: Many networking and wireless companies are displaying products because they are offering more than telecommunications and getting into the data-transmission business.

Comdex this year will have about 2,100 exhibitors for a net gain of about 200. Sell said many small companies exhibit only when they have a new product for release.

Among the new entrants at Comdex this year will be San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp., Brampton, Ontario.

Sell said the exhibitor list could grow some more because many small companies wait until the last minute to commit to displaying since they don't have the marketing budgets that enable them to commit to space without knowing whether a particular product they're showing will be ready.

"Sometimes they'll wait to the last quarter and see what products they're shipping before determining whether they'll exhibit or how much space they'll need," Sell said.

The international presence at Comdex also is expected to grow, Sell said, as Asian and Latin American companies continue to recover from economic doldrums of the late 1990s. He added that some companies from Taiwan also are recovering from natural disaster -- an earthquake delayed shipment of products from that country last year.

Sell said the panel and conference venues will be grouped by "communities" so that technologists with similar interests will attend presentations in the same building. They may also share conversations on bus rides between the venues.

Most large conventions have elaborate shuttle bus schedules to transport conventioneers between trade show floors at the Convention Center and the Sands Expo Center. Sell said that with the addition of the MGM Grand as a venue, the convention will increase its chartered shuttle bus fleet by about 15 percent from approximately 200 buses.

The Gates speech is the only keynote address planned at the MGM Grand Garden. Other speakers -- Carly Fiorina, president and chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, and Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Computer Corp., among them -- are scheduled to speak at the Las Vegas Hilton.

Last year, the keynote addresses were conducted at the Venetian.

Sell said the way the Las Vegas Hilton convention area is set up, it's best suited for the keynote addresses. The large halls are divided by common-area corridors that provide access to the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Last year, Comdex launched the LINUX Business Expo in 50,000 square feet -- room for about 500 booths -- at the Hilton. This year, the LINUX exhibits will be moved to the Sands Expo Center.

"We will have conferences in the Las Vegas Hilton, as the space there breaks out into conference rooms nicely and the Conrad/Barron Ballroom combined is the perfect size for keynotes," Sell said.

Richard Harper, vice president of sales for the MGM Grand, said efforts to attract the convention to the property began shortly after the 1999 show ended.

"We actively went to Comdex and asked them how we could be more of a player," Harper said. "We wanted to reintroduce ourselves and expose them to some of our new products."

Harper said the company expects to profit from hosting the Gates speech and some of the meetings and evening hospitality events, but he had no estimates on how much the hotel stands to gain. The hotel occupancy won't be any different from a normal Comdex week -- the 5,034-room hotel is always sold out during Comdex, filled with conventioneers.