This week’s tragedy in New York City and Washington, D.C. has also hit the Network+Interop conference and exhibition in Atlanta.
As of 10:00 AM EDT today, the following had been canceled:
- W825 – DSL: Technology, Standards and Deployment for Digital Subscriber Lines
- W832 – Bluetooth: How it Works
- T302 – TCP/IP: Implementation and Internals
- T320 – Everything You Need to Know About Internet Protocols to Enhance Network Performance
- T353 – Network Security: Practical Approaches from the Front Lines
- T291 – Windows 2000 System and Network Security
- Best of Novell Brainshare
As originally scheduled, the show’s exposition floor was closed today. The show ends today, as well.
Winners of the both the Best of Show People’s Choice Awards and the Interop Infrastructure Awards will be posted later this week at the main Interop Web site. The respective ceremonies for both awards, which were supposed to occur the past two days, were canceled.
Show attendees can call 888-886-4057 or go to the N+I show Web site for up-to-date information.
On Tuesday, the day of the attacks, show officials closed the expo floor at 2:00 PM EDT. Organizers had expected 50,000 attendees at the show, but the show floor was a virtual ghost town as of mid-day on Tuesday. Many of the remaining attendees were huddled around television screens, monitoring live news coverage of the unfolding events.
The main cause for anxiety by attendees wasn’t necessarily the potential of attack at the show itself, but rather the physical location of the show. CNN Center is across the street from the Georgia World Congress Center.
Then on Wednesday, traffic on the show floor was sparse, both in terms of attendees and exhibitors. Many large vendors pulled out of the show, leaving dark and uninhabited booths in some of the busiest areas of the show floor. Novell, which used N+I as the platform for announcing the impending release of NetWare 6, had a minimal staff manning just one theatre area in its large floor area. Novell workers were told by the company’s executive staff that the booth was scaled back in response to yesterday’s tragedies, allowing families to reunite.
Other large vendors pulling from the show included AT&T Business, Visual Networking, Broadwing, and IDG. Microsoft’s booth was home to two extremes: its Windows XP Professional Hands-On Lab was packed, while its .NET partner pavilion was closed and dark.
On Thursday, the show floor again closed at 2:00 PM. Several educational sessions were canceled as well.
NOTE: Kevin Reichard contributed to this article from the N+I show.
