If the annual Interop conference in Las Vegas is a bellwether of industry health, than the recent show reflected a certain vibrancy. Attendee levels seemed steady and show goers packed into conference sessions to hone their knowledge and roamed the floor to see the latest tech wares.
If the annual Interop conference in Las Vegas is a bellwether of industry health, then the recent show reflected a certain vibrancy. Attendee levels seemed steady and show goers packed into conference sessions to hone their knowledge and roamed the floor to see the latest tech wares.
Interop’s hot new tech products
HP had the big anchor booth front and center, which was bordered by large Cisco and Avaya pavilions, all of which were well traveled. But two of the hottest booths belonged to VMware (which you would expect given the virtualization craze) and Arista, which used the expo to showcase the 7500 it announced late last month, the industry’s highest density 10G Ethernet switch.
One distressing sign: there were only a few vendors in Start-up City, presumably a reflection of the tight capital markets. But one start-up flying its colors was JouleX, a company selling an agentless energy management system designed to monitor equipment energy consumption and control usage with policies. JouleX is headed by Tom Noonan, formerly CEO of Internet Security Systems, which IBM bought in 2006.
Of course a lot of show talk swirled around cloud computing. IBM gave one cloud keynote address and another featured speakers from VMware and Citrix. But the conference sessions on cloud weren’t overly packed, showing the vendors are still way out in front on this one, waiting for buyer interest to materialize.
One vendor telling a sensible cloud story at the show was F5 Networks, which unveiled a parcel of tools designed to help maintain the security and performance of, and access controls for, increasingly mobile virtual resources, even if those resources are just moving around inside a private cloud.
Other vendors at the show with interesting stories included NComputing and Internap.
NComputing’s booth was packed with folks who wanted to learn more about the company’s low-cost virtual desktop offerings. CEO Stephen Dukker says desktop virtualization hasn’t taken off because the mainstream players are charging too much. Virtual desktop tools have to provide front-end and CAPEX savings, he says. That’s hard when the virtualization layer alone costs $200 per desktop. His company offers the software layer and the thin client starting at $100.
And Internap used the show to introduce Accelerated IP (XIP), a way to natively accelerate wide-area IP traffic by up to 400%. XIP complements the company’s Performance IP service, through which Internap routes customer traffic across the best possible ISP links — it has relationships with all the big outfits — based on current performance metrics. XIP then tunes the TCP session by futzing with things like recovery rates to further optimize performance, all without requiring additional appliances or other changes.
Taken together, the developments at Interop made it clear that tech buyers are still looking for answers to complex questions and innovation continues apace. IT still matters.
