The Las Vegas Interop conference is upon us once again. At one time, Interop was all about networking, and the conference would devote multiple tracks to network technologies such as ATM. At this year's conference, there are tracks on a wide range of topics, including Enterprise 2.0, Green IT, cloud computing and virtualization. 

Jim will be heading to Interop and you can follow him on Twitter using ashtonmetzler. One of Jim's roles in Vegas is to be the moderator of the only track that is devoted to networking. Taking a look at how the Interop conference has lessened its attention on networking, it would be easy to conclude that networking has become staid, almost passé. As we will explain in this WAN newsletter, nothing could be further from the truth.

In some previous newsletters (How current WAN firewalls are flawed; Next-generation WAN firewalls: First, a history lesson) we discussed some of the issues that we see with the current generation of WAN firewalls. Because of those concerns, we created a session that will be held at Interop that is entitled “What’s Wrong with the WAN Firewall?” We have speakers from three companies: Juniper, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks. The speakers have all been given two key directives. One directive is that they cannot just make a blatant sales pitch. The second directive is that we don’t want this session to be an example of ‘Death by PowerPoint.” In particular, the speakers have been tasked with being very specific about what works today, and what does not work and identify why. They have also been tasked to be specific in terms of their company’s approaches to implementing a WAN firewall so that the attendees come to understand where they agree on an approach, and where they don’t. If you cannot attend the session, you can read about it in Jim's application delivery blog.

Analogously, in some recent newsletters (The impact of VDI; The impact of server virtualization; The challenges of virtualization) we discussed virtualization and some of the challenges that it creates. Because of the popularity of virtualization and the fact that there seems to be little discussion in the industry about the associated challenges, we created a session that is entitled “The Impact of IT Virtualization on Applications & Networks.” We have speakers on this panel from Cisco, F5 and CA. The speakers were given the same directives as mentioned above: no blatant sales pitch and no death by PowerPoint. If you cannot attend the session, it too can be found on Jim’s application delivery blog. 

In the next newsletter we will discuss a few more Interop sessions that you should attend if you are going to the conference. In the meantime, feel free to follow Jim on Twitter as he works with vendors and end users to determine what is real and what is hype.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.