N+I Suffers Sharp Drop In Number Of Vendors At Show

the show.

New York-based Entuity plans to meet with prescheduled sales prospects rather than trying to grab attendees walking the show floor, said Jeremy Tracey, vice president of corporate strategy

at the network management vendor.

At the show, Entuity plans to demonstrate Eye of the Storm 2.8, the forthcoming upgrade to its network fault, performance and inventory management software.

Version 2.8, scheduled

to ship at the end of next month, includes 3-D

topology mapping and support for ATM infrastructure such as switches and router ports, Tracey said.

"We expect the amount of traffic to be quite light, but from a visibility perspective, there's certainly an advantage to being there," he said.

Also at the show, San Francisco-based fault and service management software vendor Micromuse plans to announce the availability of its Netcool/SLA manager, an application that measures and reports on service performance relative to service-level agreements.

In addition, systems management vendor Altiris, Lindon, Utah, plans to unveil Asset Mgmt Suite 5.6, its latest software for tracking hardware and software assets. The new version offers improved user interfaces, scalability and performance, Altiris said.

New vendors at the show include Cingular and Sun Microsystems, said Valerie Williamson, president of Interop Worldwide, part of Key3Media. About 200 exhibitors and between 20,000 and 30,000 attendees are expected, she said. About 400 exhibitors and 20,000 attendees participated in last year's event, according to Key3Media.

"We don't have anybody heading down," said Brian Hepburn, executive vice president at Empowered Networks, a network integrator in Toronto. "May's [NetWorld Interop in Las Vegas was pretty slow. There wasn't a lot of action there, so I think we're going to sit tight this time."