Looking forward to N+I

It costs a lot of money to fly out to Las Vegas to attend trade shows, but if you’ve budgeted in a trip to NetWorld+Interop in May, leave time to attend the Secure Sockets Layer VPN Pavilion.

This section of the show floor will feature booths sponsored by seven of the SSL vendors as well as its own calendar of presentations by the vendors and other industry experts.

The organizers promise that the demos and talks will be delivered in a “non-sales environment,” and even if that’s not the case, it’s convenient to have several of the vendors right next to each other. That makes it much easier to compare and contrast products and grill them about their claims.

With devices right there, show-goers can find out for themselves just how easy or difficult it really is to provision them and decide whether the technology is a fit for their businesses.

The list could grow, but so far, Aventail, AEP, Caveo, Check Point, Netscaler, Permeo and Whole Security have signed up for booths at the pavilion. Other vendors – Cisco, Nortel, F5, NetScreen (Juniper) – will be at the show as well but so far have not signed up to be in the SSL VPN Pavilion.

Topics for the education sessions include: SSL vs. IPSec; total cost of ownership of SSL remote access; SSL remote access and wireless networks; certification criteria for SSL remote access; purchase criteria for SSL remote access gear; the future of SSL remote access.

The NetWorld+Interop exhibition runs May 11-13.