SubOptic 2007: “The Event and Beyond” By John Horne By the time you read this article I suspect you will be just about to board your flight to Baltimore MD, to attend SubOptic 2007, which is being held there from May 14-17th, 2007. If so I look forward to seeing you there, but if you have decided to give it a miss, I will give you a very short preview on what you are missing, and you really will regret this. But then remembering we also have to PULL as well as PUSH, I will give you a view of the work SubOptic will be doing over the next 6 months or so to ensure you do not repeat this mistake for the next event. So as you can guess the first part of the article is a little promotional, but the second part reflects my view about the vision for the future of this great conference series. Firstly SubOptic 2007 - the SubOptic Executive Committee (EC) and Tyco Telecommunications, the Host Organisation have been repeatedly saying that this is the MUST ATTEND event for anyone associated with the undersea communications business – and by associated we mean this in the broadest possible sense, from the purchasers and suppliers of systems and capacity, marine service providers, financiers, regulatory and environmental specialists to the organisations interfacing with the end customer who uses international capacity to help deliver their product set.
Why is this, well with over 500 registered attendees from over 150 different companies, over 50 booths in our Exhibition Hall, and a range of networking opportunities, some organised by SubOptic and others by major companies in the industry, where else can you find a meeting place like this within our industry.
True there is a technical side to our conference, which makes it unique amongst conferences in our industry, but there has always been a large and growing strategic, business, financial and marketing element to our program. This can be demonstrated just by looking at our Roundtables, which cover the following topics:
If you want to meet with your peers, customers, suppliers, competitors, etc, no other conference comes anywhere near assembling this critical mass of people and organisations associated with our industry.
Roundtable 1 to be held on Tuesday, May 15 is entitled “Demand Drivers and the Global Bandwidth Supply Chain”. It will be moderated by Stephen McClelland and preceded by a presentation from Alan Mauldin, Research Director of TeleGeography on supply, demand and pricing trends.
And that’s before we even talk about the programme. Previous articles in Subtelforum have talked in some detail about the oral presentation sessions, the oral spotlight session, the poster session, the tutorials and our Keynote Speakers, and the Program outlining these is available on our website www.suboptic.org. Here I would only like to talk a little bit about the three Roundtables we will be presenting. Many non-attendees think that SubOptic is a Technical based conference, inward looking and focussed principally on the engineering and implementation of undersea systems. This has never been solely true and over the past couple of events has been completely untrue.
Roundtable 2 to be held on Wednesday, May 16 is entitled “Finding Economic Equilibrium: Impossible Dream or Worthwhile Pursuit”. It will be moderated by Howard Kidorf of pioneer Consulting and preceded by a paper from Geoffrey Thornton from Don Quixote, well known for his thought provoking views. Roundtable 3 to be held on Thursday, May 17 is entitled “The Future of Marine Maintenance”. It will be moderated by Frank Cuccio from Tyco Telecommunications and preceded by a number of short papers designed to stimulate the debate. Lets now talk a little about the principles behind SubOptic, its evolution and what our thoughts are for the future.