May 19th, 2009 |
I was planning to start the morning with a Monday-evening wrap-up, but I overslept (more about that when the wrap-up comes), and so the first post of the day comes from the morning Keynote session. The format for the keynotes is to have three speakers in each 90 minute session. This morning, we’ll hear from Marius Haas, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HP ProCurve Networking, Hewlett-Packard Company; Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett-Packard Company; and Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO, VMware. I’ll keep you posted on what they say, but I think that Marius Hass’s presence is a sign of how Interop is changing and expanding to include application delivery (from server to workstation) along with the traditional network infrastructure emphasis.
The session hasn’t begun and the room is about three-quarters full, with more folks streaming in. I’m not sure precisely when bass-heavy high-volume music became required for these events, but we’ve got dance club music and flashing lights going on — welcome to the morning! It makes me feel just a tiny bit sorry for all the folks who were still at the Foundation Room when we left last night (about which, more later…)
Interop general manager Lenny Heymann got the ball rolling with some remarks about the nature of the market right now. He showed some slides giving information on survey results from questions asked to Interop attendees. The short take: organizations are implementing cloud computing, virtualization, and Enterprise 2.0 collaboration functions at a high (and increasing) level.
Interop general manager Lenny Heymann introduces the first keynote session of Interop Las Vegas 2009
Hass leads with a video (and more bass-heavy percussion music) gives a bit of corporate information, then introduces Ann Livermore and a Microsoft rep, who are going to talk about a new collaboration effort between HP and Microsoft for unified communications. Livermore goes deeply into the investment they’re making ($180 million), and the sort of unified communications, conferencing, integration, and adaptive infrastructure that the joint efforts will bring to market.
Marius Hass of HP Procurve discusses the company’s growth in the network infrastructure space
Ann Livermore of HP discusses the collaboration between HP and Microsoft in unified communications.
Now, two engineers (one from HP, one from Microsoft) come on stage and start a demonstration of Office Communicator on HP hardware. In a cool interoperability moment, the first call they make is to someone outside either company — and some who’s using a Mac on the desktop. It’s a good thing to see interoperability at Interop.
UPDATE: 9:21 AM
Ann and Stephen begin a demo of video conferencing products, with the first example of a one-to-one conference with HP and Microsoft employees in Bangalore. The key, here, is that the Las Vegas end of the conference is a basic PC, with a large monitor attached to let the audience see.
Next, they went to a three-way video conference by adding a participant from Cathay Pacific airlines in China.
In general, a very impressive demo with no audio stutter and no disconnect between audio and video at any point in the conversations. I’m a big fan of video conferencing (I spend a fair amount of time on video with Brian Chee when we’re collaborating on various projects), and this seemed to work very well.
On another note, during the first few minutes of this keynote, the room filled up — it’s been standing-room only since about ten minutes into the session.
UPDATE: 9:33 AM
Stephen Herrod of VMWare has begun his address, and he’s talking about the vSphere architecture and how it can be used to build an internal cloud. He’s working on the notion that internal clouds are the next logical step from “simple” virtualization, and that interoperability between internal and external clouds is a key issue for data architects as they move forward.
Stephen Herrod of VMWare discusses ways to implement internal and external clouds
One of the points he’s making is that system performance (particularly I/O performance) has become dramatically better over the last three years, to the point that virtualization can be considered a performance booster, rather than a drag on a system’s performance. When put together with blade servers, he’s describing a new generation of mainframe (or even supercomputer) level performance possible with PC-class foundation components.
