Ted Bahr, president and CEO of Melville, N.Y.-based BZ Media, said now is the right time to launch a new show his company’s been strategizing about for a while: InterDrone, the International Drone Conference and Exposition will debut Sept. 9-11 next year in Las Vegas.

“We have been tracking this market closely for two years and are convinced that this growing industry needs an event 100 percent focused on the commercial drone market and that the right place for that event to thrive and grow is Las Vegas,” Bahr added.

He said, “Our goal is the build the largest dedicated commercial drone event in North America.”

More than 2,000 drone builders, flyers, and buyers are expected to attend the first annual event bringing together all the key participants in the growing market for commercial drone aircraft.

The three-day event will feature a two-day technical conference for drone-building engineers and software developers and an overlapping conference for the buyers and flyers of commercial drones, with more than 60 classes, panels and keynotes in all.

There also will be an exposition with 70-plus exhibitors expected to display their latest products and technology.

Bahr said of the timing of launching the show now: “It just feels like the market, although still heavily regulated by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), is ready to take off.”

He added, “We wanted to make sure that we did not conflict with the big association show for unmanned systems, UAVSI, which is held each May, and, at the same time, give ourselves a full one-year run-up to the event to make it really big. Otherwise, we probably would have launched sooner.”

Drone is the familiar name for what are alternately called unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), unmanned air vehicles (UAV), or Unmanned Systems. The work of peaceful commercial drones is surprising people with the dozens and dozens of practical uses being written about nearly every day in the press.

While the defense market for drones dwarfs commercial spending today, a BI Intelligence analyst report expects nearly $12 billion to be spent on commercial drones over the next decade, with growth ramping up quickly.

The exposition will allow manufacturers of drones to both source product from OEM exhibitors as well as meet and sell to professional commercial drone buyers in the agriculture, journalism, film, search & rescue, real estate, and many other industries.

“This will be a one-stop and a must-attend event for builders, buyers and flyers of commercial drones,” Bahr said.

The exposition will also include a drone demonstration area, the Yes Fly Zone™, in the exhibit hall.

BZ Media produces the world’s largest Android developer conferences; Big Data TechCon, the how-to technical conference for IT professionals implementing Big Data; the largest independent SharePoint conferences, and Wearables TechCon, for the builders of wearable computing technology.

BZ Media also publishes SD Times, the leading magazine for the software development industry. Bahr previously founded the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in 1989, which covers much of the underlying technology used in drones.