What we saw at Interop NY

Last week’s Interop in New York City was eerily normal considering the carnage Wall Street was experiencing just blocks away. Although attendance was modest, vendors told us there were enough qualified and savvy buyers to make the show worthwhile for them. Word is that IT budgets are not being frozen despite economic uncertainty—at least not yet.

The coolness factor of the show was kicked up several notches by the fact that a third of the hall was devoted to Web 2.0-themed exhibitors with names like KickApps, Yuuguu, Kapow Technologies, and Zude. The Web 2.0 portion of the show drew bigger crowds than the “legacy” portion as curious attendees explored new (and opportunistically repositioned) wares. A small portion of the hall was also devoted to Mobile Business Expo, which had a legacy feel to it.

All things virtual featured prominently at this fall’s show, telepresence came into its own, and desktop videoconferencing solutions were prominent. With travel costs skyrocketing, we predict telepresence and desktop video will be up front and center at Interop next spring. Desktop videoconferencing has been around a long time, and may finally be catching on. If so, brace yourselves for a Pandora’s box of enterprise network headaches opened by new infrastructure and large bandwidth demands. The sheer scale of desktop deployments can quickly overload network links and QoS deployments.

We noticed yet more specialty network management vendors, leading us to wonder how the market can support such a plethora of them, and we felt empathy for IT teams that have to master yet more interfaces.

An extraordinary number of booths had a security spin. Even vendors for whom security is a sideline played up their security stories. Our interpretation is that vendors believe security products are less likely to fall victim of the IT budget axe than other offerings.

Application performance management and application acceleration vendors were well represented. Such products play well in today’s climate because they allow enterprises to get the most out of existing IT investments instead of buying more “stuff”. One particularly interesting vendor we talked to was ScienceLogic. They are integrating IT infrastructure and application monitoring into a single, not-very-expensive platform that will serve mainstream business well. This is smart, and we predict they will give the CA’s, BMC’s, HP’s and IBM’s of the world a run for their money. We’ll tell you more about them in a future post.