10:30 AM -- As chair of Light Reading’s Ethernet Expo America’s 2010, I want to express appreciation for all individuals and companies who directly participated in this year’s event and helped make it a networking success for service provider, enterprise, investor, press, analyst, and technology professionals. This year’s event broke multiple records. The number of live attendees (excluding non-vendor sponsors) skyrocketed 45 percent to 855 professionals, blowing away last year’s record number of 588. About 600 of the attendees in 2010 were from the service provider community, while about 100 were from enterprises and financial institutions. We had a record number of 70 companies participating in the event and -- within this figure -- a record number of 31 participating service provider/service exchange companies.

Our keynote and service-provider speakers helped keep us focused on many of the developing trends and hot-topic issues like 100Gigabit Ethernet, service management/OAM solutions, customized Ethernet business and wholesale services, global Ethernet interconnection, Ethernet service exchanges, cloud services and network infrastructure, and Carrier Ethernet for mobile backhaul. I especially want to thank keynote speakers Joe Weinman ( HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ)), Kevin Daines ( Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN)), Rajiv Datta ( AboveNet Inc. (NYSE: ABVT)), Jarrett Appleby ( Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX)), and Nan Chen ( MEF ) for sharing their visions about where the industry is headed next.

We are now shifting attention to Ethernet Europe 2011, which will be held during April 12 and 13 in London. We have the event Website up and will be populating the agenda soon, so stay tuned for more information.

— Stan "EtherMan" Hubbard, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading, and Chairman, Ethernet Expo Americas 2010