LAS VEGAS - A smaller venue and larger turnout last week helped infuse Interop 2005 with long-absent excitement about the network industry.

The event drew 17,000 attendees and featured a ton of wireless and security products, as well as news that a second show - Interop Fall 2005 - will be coming in December to the Jacob Javits Center in New York.

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The conference featured keynote addresses on back-to-back days by Cisco CEO John Chambers and his counterpart at rival Juniper. They laid out distinct paths users can choose when building secure, wired and wireless corporate networks: one-stop-shop vs. multi-vendor.

Chambers emphasized that businesses are looking for vendors to act as strategic partners, rather than buying individual, task-oriented products from a gang of companies. Products that can offer lots of things in one box, or a vendor with many different products that are co-developed and tied together, are preferable, he said.

"Very few customers buy technology anymore based on feeds and speeds and price," Chambers said. When it comes to deploying infrastructure that's secure and can handle voice, video and data, "your support cost for all those different pieces are going to be huge if they all come from different vendors." Any savings will be lost on time and money spent trying to get products to work together, he added.

Kriens' keynote took the opposite view. Juniper's technology focus is solely on secure and fast network transaction processing, with multi-vendor partnerships for other areas of expertise, the CEO said.

"One of the claims I would not make is that we have all the answers," Kriens said. "We don't claim to do all things, but we claim to do some things that are really important, really well."

However, Kriens did say industry conditions make it hard for smaller vendors to survive, citing his company's own acquisition of two smaller players - Peribit Networks and RedLine Networks - last week. Kriens also emphasized Juniper's Infranet and Enterprise Infranet initiatives, which look to build multi-vendor standards for securing the public and private business networks. To this end, he cited the partnership announcement last week with Avaya, where Juniper and Avaya will co-market and resell security and VoIP gear.