If you could stand the cab lines, keep yourself from sweating through your suit in the 90-degree heat and live through the endless prattlings of marketing folks and their PowerPoint presentations, some fun stuff actually went on at the show last week. Here is our compendium of some of the weird, or at least mildly amusing, events:
Vendor learns how to feed demand
Equant Network Services, an international frame relay/ATM and IP carrier, knows from experience that Interop attendees are not only hungry for seamless broadband services, but just plain hungry. Visitors to Equant's booth got a little box of cereal with the legend, "The world is waking up to Equant, global network of champions." Equant officials considered that an improvement over last year's show when they introduced their Integrated Voice and Data service with an orange juice container reading "Freshly squeezed voice and data." Problem: The container had no juice, and people complained, says Laurence Huntley, Equant executive vice president. "So this time we gave them something in the box," he says.
Shagging, VPN style
At times the show felt more like a Hollywood movie preview than Interop. With Star Wars' Princess Leia in one booth and Austin Powers in another, attendees were treated to a sneak peak of the upcoming summer sequels to their favorite movies, network style. TimeStep's shaggadelic Powers takeoff called "Awesome Powers" had scores of gawkers crowding in to watch an episode with the Mad Hacker. Powers had one message for prospective customers: "VPNs are groovy baby." Who knew?
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Alien Part Deu
xFujiFilm was quite the hit this year, but not just because of its new line of storage products. Despite the fact the company's booth was located in the far caverns of the convention center, a large and steady crowd of attendees made the trip not because of technology, but graft: a blow-up alien squeaky toy. The dolls were a hit at the fall Interop, but many people thought the dolls' expressionless faces were too creepy. This time, they had smiles on their kissers.
Is it ION, or is it Memorex?
During his keynote address, Sprint CEO William Esrey treated attendees to a demonstration of Sprint's Integrated On-Demand Network (ION) voice/data service from a small office or residential set-up with a colleague in Kansas City. Esrey cautioned that the small-office version of ION is still being tested and that the integrated-access device used at the Kansas City location was a prototype. But he boasted that the calls and data connections were running live over ION. Well, sort of. Sprint officials later admitted that the box involved was a FORE ATM switch - not exactly the kind of gear you'd ordinarily install at home - feeding traffic over a dedicated permanent virtual circuit to Las Vegas on Sprint's ATM network. Meanwhile, Sprint and partners Cisco and Telcordia (formerly Bellcore) are still developing a $200 to $300 hub suitable for those installations.
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