Case Study

Moxa · DTECH 2026

Moxa’s products succeed by never being noticed — decades in substations without an incident. DTECH was the week to be noticed.

DTECH 2026 put 20,000+ utility and energy professionals in the San Diego Convention Center alongside 700+ exhibitors, including the giants of grid infrastructure. Moxa — thirty-five years of industrial networking that only makes news when it fails, which it doesn’t — needed a 20 × 20 island that made invisible reliability visible. Pure Exhibits built it around the only honest demo there is: the real hardware, racked, cabled and running live.

Moxa 20x20 custom island booth at DTECH 2026 with multi-tiered circular hanging sign, LED video wall, teal reception counter and green accent lighting at the San Diego Convention Center
20 × 20
Custom Island Exhibit
San Diego
San Diego Convention Center
February 2–5, 2026
Event Dates
DTECH 2026
DistribuTECH International

How do you exhibit uptime?

The grid is mid-transformation — distributed energy resources, AI-driven management, cybersecurity pressure, electrification — and DTECH is where that industry meets to decide what to buy next. The aisles belong to giants: GE Vernova, ABB, Schneider Electric, each with the floor space to build a small city. Moxa’s position is different. It makes the switches, gateways and controllers that sit inside substations and control rooms for decades — equipment whose entire value is that nobody ever has to think about it. That is a hard product to put in a booth, because reliability has no moment to demonstrate. It is the absence of events.

The brief compounded the problem: four distinct solution areas — commercial and industrial microgrids, IT/OT integration, data center connectivity, and the openADR ecosystem — for an audience of engineers who dismiss marketing on sight but will stop for a live rack. The 400 square feet had to work as both showcase and consultation space, and it had to hold its own in a hall where the neighbours measure their booths in thousands of feet.

“Secure and reliable network devices, trusted for over 35 years — connecting the systems that power the world.”
Moxa, DTECH 2026
Green LED accent lighting inside the Moxa island booth at DTECH 2026, backlighting monitors, structural bases and glass pillars across the demo zones

Engineering trust you can walk through

Dual-monitor demo workstations and the LED video wall inside the Moxa booth at DTECH 2026, with real industrial networking hardware mounted in open rack displays
01

Real Racks, Running Live

The defining decision was to let the hardware make the argument. Managed switches, industrial controllers and networking modules were mounted in open server-style racks, cabled and powered — not display props, working equipment. Engineers who have specified Moxa into substations could put their hands on the exact gear they deploy, and the labelled workstations turned inspection into live microgrid and IT/OT demonstrations. Nothing on the floor claimed reliability; the running racks implied it.

02

Four Zones, One Grid

The 400 square feet split into four purpose-built areas — commercial & industrial microgrid, IT/OT integration, data centers, and the openADR ecosystem — walked in the order a utility actually modernises. Each zone self-contained, each flowing into the next through the open plan, so a substation engineer and a data center architect both found their conversation within ten feet of the aisle.

03

Green Means Online

Every operator knows the colour of a healthy network. Green LED backlighting ran behind wall monitors, along structural bases and inside vertical glass pillars — the status light of a running system, scaled to architecture. The glow encoded the brand promise without a word of copy: this booth, like the equipment in it, is up.

04

Fins, Not Walls

Staggered dark grey vertical fins divided the demo zones — semi-transparent boundaries that gave each conversation a sense of enclosure while letting sightlines run clear through the booth. Separation without isolation, in the same precision-machined language as the products on the racks.

05

The Entry Sequence

From the aisle, the sequence was deliberate: a high-definition LED video wall cycling partner-ecosystem and product content, fronted by a teal-lit reception counter with the backlit Moxa mark. Attention, orientation, conversation — the video wall pulled visitors in, the counter told them where to go, and the zones took it from there.

Multi-tiered circular hanging sign above the Moxa booth at DTECH 2026, internally lit with the Moxa logo and Trusted for Over 35 Years messaging visible across the hall
06

A Canopy of Trust

Overhead, a multi-tiered circular sign — internally lit, concentric rings, the Moxa logo in teal with “Secure & Reliable Network Devices” and “Trusted for Over 35 Years” — read from every approach in the hall. In a venue where the neighbours are GE Vernova and ABB, the overhead structure did the positioning: not the biggest booth on the floor, but unmistakably an anchor of it.

The Moxa custom island booth at DTECH 2026 under show conditions at the San Diego Convention Center, with demo zones, fin screens and circular hanging sign in view
The completed 20 × 20 at DTECH 2026 — not a trade show booth so much as a networking operations centre built for the show floor.

Experience the booth

A walkthrough of the Moxa 20 × 20 island at DTECH 2026 — past the video wall and reception, through the four live demo zones, under the circular sign.

The build at a glance

20 × 20
Custom Island Exhibit — 400 sq ft
4
Live Solution Demo Zones
35+
Years of Industrial Networking Trust
20,000+
Utility & Energy Professionals at DTECH
DTECH 2026
San Diego Convention Center  ·  February 2–5, 2026

Secure & reliable, made tangible

The booth’s bet was that this audience trusts evidence over adjectives. Utility engineers have Moxa gear in service today — in substations, control rooms and field cabinets — and most of them have never seen the company at full scale. Putting the real hardware in open racks, running live, converted a quiet incumbency into a visible one. Visitors didn’t read that Moxa equipment works; they watched it working, ten feet from where they stood.

The zoning made a broad portfolio walkable. Grid modernisation arrives at a utility as four separate projects — microgrids, IT/OT convergence, data center buildout, demand response — and the booth gave each its own labelled station rather than one undifferentiated pitch. An engineer arrived with a specific problem and left having handled the specific answer, with a consultation counter in between.

The architecture said the rest. The circular sign overhead claimed anchor-exhibitor presence in a hall of giants; the green LED glow encoded “online” at the scale of a building; the machined fins framed every conversation in the same precision language as the products. Four hundred square feet argued what thirty-five years of uneventful uptime cannot argue for itself — and at DTECH, being noticed was the whole assignment.

Credibility is a design problem

Live hardware needs power, racking and cable management the show floor never makes easy; demo zones need separation without walls; and a 20 × 20 next to thousand-foot neighbours needs overhead structure that claims its place. Pure Exhibits designs and fabricates custom exhibits from 10 × 10 inlines to full-hall islands for industrial, energy and infrastructure companies at DTECH, Hannover Messe and beyond — every build 100% pre-assembled and photo-approved before it ships, with fixed, transparent pricing.