A Proposal to Rejuvenate Interop in 2010

We attended this year's spring Interop show and found it sleepy--and quite frankly a bit dull.  Attendance was down, which is understandable in this economy.  However, the big disappointment with Interop this year and in recent years is that it has lost its mojo.  But we have a proposal to wake Interop from its doldrums next year--make interoperability testing for application delivery system (i.e. WAN optimization) vendors a centerpiece of the show.

A bit of history is needed here.  Interop was the brain child of Dan Lynch, who envisioned it as a place for vendors to test the interoperability of their TCP/IP implementations.  The Defense Data Network (DDN) had just become operational and there were thousands of hosts that needed to connect to the DDN with the new unknown protocol called TCP/IP.  We know whereof we speak when it comes to Interop lore, since Peter has attended Interop since the very first meeting in 1985, and Rebecca since the early 90's. 

All of the host vendors were still forcing their customers to use their own proprietary protocols like DECNET, IBM SNA, IBM 32xx, Burroughs Poll/Select, Banyan VINES, Xerox XNS, Novell NetWare, ARCNET, etc.  The DoD had a huge problem trying to figure out how to implement or buy TCP/IP software for the existing hosts.  A few companies had just emerged to supply the software.  Interop was the venue for people to learn about TCP/IP--and more importantly see intercommunication among the vendors operating on the show net.  That, for you youngsters out there, is why Interop has a show net.

An interesting thing happened as time went on.  Sun Microsystems showed up at Interop in one of the early years with TCP/IP built in.  This propelled Sun from a small player to a big success in DoD computing.  It also caught the attention of the big computer vendors who suddenly started putting TCP/IP into their operating systems and stop stonewalling the new standard.  Sun still had the lead when the Web came along.  But by then the "slow-to-get-it" computer vendors were gone or played no role in the Internet wave.

Today there is little, if any, interoperability testing or demonstration at Interop.  It is time to bring it back.  We challenge TechWeb to return Interop to its roots and host ADS vendor interoperability testing by next year's show.  We describe the need for this testing in yesterday's blog.

What a great way to celebrate Interop's 25th anniversary--with a revitalized agenda that moves the industry forward!  Without this we fear that next year's Interop will be even more dull and headed towards extinction. How sad that would be.