Although Interop boasted a new name and was hosted in a new venue, the hot issues at the show last week were largely the same as last year: convergence, security and wireless.

The conference returned to its roots by dropping "NetWorld" from its name and shifted out of the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center to Mandalay Bay's convention facilities, which better suited the show at its current size - 300-plus vendors, a fraction compared with when it filled two huge halls across town.

But attendee traffic was thick, and vendors were pleased with the buyers they were seeing. In fact, show organizer MediaLive is confident enough in the show's direction to make another go at the East Coast: It announced it will stage another Interop this December in New York. The last East Coast Interop was in Atlanta in 2001.

One of the standouts at this year's show was the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) interoperability demonstration. The InteropNet Labs VoIP network linked SIP gear from 25 vendors and supported four-digit-extension dialing. At the heart of the network were SIP proxy servers from eight vendors, including Avaya, 3Com, Zultys, PingTel and Nortel.

Despite the achievement - a compelling example of what SIP can do - convergence vendors at the conference seemed more interested in talking about VoIP over Wi-Fi. Siemens, for example, rolled out HiPath Wireless, a family of wireless LAN products based on its acquisition of Chantry Networks, that it is positioning as ideal for both voice and data.

As part of that announcement Siemens also showed a slick, well-designed Wi-Fi phone called OptiPoint that will be available in August for $495. The SIP-based phone apparently will work on any 802.11 infrastructure.

While security vendors were also in abundance at the show, one booth demonstration that was eye-catching was by Solsoft, which offers a tool that can be used to automate the configuration of security devices.

In the demo, the product's graphical interface was used to draw a line between a branch office and a finance Web portal. The tool then compiled the changes necessary for the Juniper NetScreen, Cisco PIX and Cisco routers to make the link possible, and pushed the changes through.

You can do in 5 to 10 minutes with Solsoft what would take you 1.5 hours to do manually, Solsoft says. The company, which says it has 200 customers, supports equipment from Cisco, Juniper, Check Point, Nortel, Symantec, Internet Security Systems and others.