While working on the post that I just published about whether data that’s stored in the cloud is really safe or not (answer: your mileage will vary), I came across a post from Michael Arrington that speculates on whether Google’s forthcoming super secret announcement on April 7th is that Google’s App Engine platform-as-a-service will support the Java programming language. Last week, during a cloud computing panel in NYC that I moderated (in front of an audience of Java developers), I asked Google App Engine product manager that exact question.

If you listen to the audio recording from that panel discussion, Koomen does in fact say that App Engine will support other languages and that they’ll have an announcement coming pretty soon. App Engine currently supports Python. That was on Wednesday, March 18. Relative to March 18th, April 7th is just about right for “pretty soon.”

So, I think that improves the odds that the announcement will involve App Engine. What’s not clear is whether the next language to be supported by App Engine will be Java or not.

Incidentally, Koomen’s remarks on the discussion panel came during the part of the conversation when we were talking about application portability. For example, let’s say you have a custom application running on-premises that was written in Python. Is that application easily migrated into the cloud? The answer is not really. Based on what Koomen said, organizations should probably not be considering App Engine as a target for existing applications, even if those applications were written in a language that App Engine current supports or plans to support.

With no change to its business model or pricing (subscription-based support starting at $349 per server), Novell launched version 11 of it Linux distribution known as SUSE Enterprise Linux. For the first time, according to Novell officials, support is now available for running applications that were originally designed for Microsoft’s .NET or Silverlight platforms. But, given how IT shops are starting to pinch pennies by moving to the cloud, must Novell change course?

In my podcast interview (press the tiny play button to hear it) with Novell’s vice president of marketing Justin Steinman and senior vice president of Open Platform Solutions Markus Rex, I asked if long term, Novell will have to target providers of the cloud instead of end-users. According Steinman:

Nobody wakes up in the morning and says “I want to buy an operating system today.” They wake up in the morning and say I’ve got a business intelligence problem….

…It’s always dangerous to speculate on the future of Novell. What I will speculate on is the future of our operating system business. It’s really going to be in providing the ISVs with the tools to go into the cloud. Where I think Novell’s business could be is it could be an arms vendor to the cloud.

The question in my mind is what will it take for those ISVs to bite. For example, one of the big challenges when it comes to building scalable and cost-efficient clouds is in designing multi-tenanat systems. A cloud business isn’t very scalable if there’s a one-to-one relationship between new customers and gear the way Cisco must install a minimum of two appliances (one in the primary datacenter, one in the failover datacenter) for every customer that it signs up to its so-called “cloud-based” IronPort security service.

When asked if Novell was re-engineering SUSE Linux to support the sort of multitenancy that cloud providers will need to buy or develop (the way Google and Salesforce have developed it), Steinman unequivocally said “yes.” But to be honest (and you can hear it for yourself in the podcast), the tone of his answer lacked conviction.

Linux is already a multiuser system. But delivering turnkey multitenancy in, what for most cloud providers will undoubtedly be some sort of clustering situation that’s tightly tied to the performance of the application service itself, is a different challenge altogether. Today, multitenancy among cloud providers is pretty much homegrown. In fact, for most cloud providers, it’s part of the secret sauce. If Novell, Red Hat, or Sun can deliver a turnkey multi-tenant platform to ISVs looking to go cloud, we could see a major uptick in cloud offerings.

Speaking of Red Hat, it’s this version of SUSE that really puts the squeeze on the North Carolina-based distributor of Linux. Back in 2006, Microsoft struck a deal with Novell to work more closely in aligning the two company’s technologies (and to promise not to sue Novell’s customers for any sort of intellectual property infringement). For what seemed like forever, Miguel De Icaza’s Mono project has offered the promise of running .NET applications on Linux servers. But until this latest version of SUSE Enterprise Linux, doing so was never officially supported. Now, according to Steinman and Rex, it is. So too is Moonlight — a technology for running Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) designed for Microsoft’s Silverlight platform.

In the podcast interview, I also ask Rex about the sudden arrival of netbooks on the scene and in particular, the growing interest in running them with Google’s Android rather than Linux. Rex commented that it’s still very early and Steinman jumped in to tell me how well SUSE Linux was running on his netbook — an HP 2140 — which was sitting on the table.

One other key message for Novell is the customizability of SUSE Enterprise Linux 11. Through an online tool called SUSE Studio (I’ll publish a screenshot below when Novell gets me one), users will be able to build their own distributions of SUSE Linux whittling out components from one side, adding new ones to the other, in such a way that they’ll be able to click one button to see if Novell will support the configuration. Steinman’s message was very much about having Linux where you want it, how you want, when you want it and he says the company is committed to supporting myriad configurations but I’m not sure how far you can veer off the Novell reservation (turning to 3rd party componentry) before it tells you that you’re designing an unsupported configuration.

While at Sun’s CommunityOne East Developer Conference where Sun announced a pretty compelling entry into the cloud computing market (called the Sun Cloud, see the details and listen to the podcast), I caught up with Sun Cloud Computing CTO Lew Tucker who sat down with me to demo a GUI-based virtual datacenter deployment tool (all in a Web browser). Perhaps Sun should call it 4D; Drag, Drop, Deploy, and (voila!) Datacenter (in Sun’s Cloud that is). I caught the entire thing on tape as one of our video ReviewCams (below).

We didn’t get to walk through the entire service front to back. But the ReviewCam below will give you some idea of how groundbreaking the Sun Cloud will be once it comes out of beta later this year (text continued below).

Based on Flash, the tool’s left pane lists the different sorts of gear that you might put into your datacenter as drag-and-droppable objects. The objects can be Linux servers, Windows servers, Solaris servers, firewalls, Web servers, load balancers, caching servers, databases, networking switches and so on. Some are standard configurations that Sun will offer. Others, like the AMIs that exist for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, can come from other users of the Sun Cloud and you can copy them. On the right is a blank pane representing an empty cloud that’s waiting for you to drop your personalized virtual datacenter into.

What happens next could not be simpler. You start picking up servers, switches, firewalls, etc., and you just drop them into the cloud. Then, you connect them. Certain objects like servers can be configured. For example, you can describe a server’s processor attributes (GHz rating, core count, memory, etc.) and the resulting pay-as-you-go cost depends on that configuration. More cores, more memory, more GHz… more cost.

The ReviewCam does this GUI far more justice than does any text can do. So, give it a watch. It’s less than 7 minutes long and Tucker walks me through everything he’s doing one step at time so you won’t miss a trick.

The Web is brewing with analysis of the news that IBM is in talks to buy Sun. Most of it covers the sensibility of IBM buying into Sun’s existing businesses and customers. But, should IBM acquire Sun, it will also get a portfolio of cloud offerings that are being announced later today at Sun’s CommunityOne East Developer Conference in New York. Given the traction that cloud computing is getting and how IBM isn’t viewed as a cloud player (by a long shot), an acquisition of Sun would instantly put IBM in the game against the likes of Amazon and Google with a new offering that actually packs quite a punch.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math. It’s been known for quite some time that Sun was planning to make its cloud announcements at today’s developer conference in New York. Clearly, there would be a developer angle to those announcements and sure enough, that is the case. Not that this is unusual. Pretty much every cloud offering in the market — particularly the ones that offer Infrastructure (server CPU time, storage) as as Service (IaaS) — is invokable through application programming interfaces that are invoked by developers.

But, what makes Sun’s offering (the gory details of which can be found on its Project Kenai Web site) special is the way in which it tucked an entire virtual datacenter (including the option of having firewalls, clusters, databases, etc.) behind a RESTful interface where simple GETs and POSTs result in an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting.

By pressing the tiny play button here you can listen to my podcast interview with the vice president of marketing for Sun’s Cloud Computing Group Juan Carlos Soto regarding today’s announcement.

If you lift up the hood on what Sun has done with its API, you can see how Sun has in some ways intersected the idea of the “read/write Web” with cloud computing. Sun’s director of Web technologies Tim Bray has been actively involved in Atom standards for the read/write Web (a.k.a. The Atom Publishing Protocol or AtomPub) and according to him, his work in that area ultimately helped to inform the RESTful architecture behind the Sun Cloud.

Via basic Web GETing and POSTing, the Sun Cloud returns to developers everything that’s needed to work the knobs and levers of their virtual data center in JSON structures. For example, in this basic “Hello Cloud” sammple on the Project Kenai Web site, you can see how a simple HTTP GET results in the creation of a virtual datacenter that includes a cluster (into which one or more virtual machines can be loaded), a firewall, a private network, and a public IP address, the handles to all of which are returned via a JSON structure.

You don’t necesarily have to be a developer to understand the elegance of what Sun has done here. The key is that Sun has put all of the tools to bring up, provision, and tear down a full-blown virtual datacenter with little more than than Web URI representation.

Another key part of the announcement is that Sun is essentially open sourcing the entire specification using a Creative Commons license. By opening the specification up, Sun’s hope is that other cloud providers will make their resources available through the same RESTful syntax. Should other cloud providers (for example, Amazon) embrace Sun’s specification, it could pave the way towards greater interoperation between clouds from different providers. Cloud interop is routinely listed as one of the biggest concerns among organizations that are considering moving some or most of their IT into the cloud. Whether or not other key cloud players embrace Sun’s open cloud specification remains to be seen.

Whether de facto or de jure, such “open standards” are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they’re very beneficial to users and buyers and subscribers of/to technology and, in this case, services. On the other, they dramatically lower the barrier to switching technology providers — something that competing cloud providers like Amazon may not be keen to allowing (at least so easily).

According to Soto, you can expect all the common operating systems (Linux, Windows, and of course Solaris) to be supported in Sun’s cloud. But he was also clear that Sun’s cloud will not be limited to Intel-based compute cycles and that for certain customers that require it, Sun will offer AMD and — are you ready for this? — SPARC in the cloud as well.

Although she dodged the question at the end of my podcast interview (below), Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal can’t help but think that history is going to repeat itself. Following Cisco’s acquisition of Crescendo Networks in the ’90s (where she worked), Ullal ended up working for Cisco for 15 years. Notwithstanding its newly announced Intel-based blade servers, Cisco usually prefers to buy than build. If everything Ullal says about Arista’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and “the cloud’s” appetite for them is true, she’ll probably end up at Cisco again (by way of acquisition).

If Cisco doesn’t end up acquiring Arista, maybe Sun will. After co-founding Sun Microsystems (his claim to fame is being employee No. 1) back in the 80’s, Arista co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim has busied himself with building and selling companies to — you guessed it — Cisco and Sun. Bechtolsheim and Ullal worked together while both were at Cisco and now the dream team is back together at Arista expanding on their high-speed networking pedigree.

Click the tiny play button to listen to to my podcast interview with Jayshree Ullal.

For their encore performance, Ullal, Bechtolsheim, and the other co-founder David Cheriton are once again going after “purpose-built” (as opposed to mainstream) gear. In this case, Arista believes it’s on to something with its 10-Gb Ethernet switches, particularly when it comes to high performance and cloud computing situations where a lot of data is getting moved around and there’s little tolerance for latency or downtime or the traditional expense associated with overcoming either problem in mission critical environments. For example, the trading floor of a stock exchange where availability is imperative and nanoseconds can translate into millions of dollars (giving new meaning to “time is money”).

The inspiration for Arista’s 7100 series switches, says Ullal, comes from the efficiencies that are characteristic of cloud computing. On average, typical IT infrastructures — the systems, the storage, and the networks — run below 50% utilization (Ullal cites 20%). But one of the driving forces behind cloud computing is virtualization and the push towards using every single cycle [sic] of compute, storage, and networking power. With the processing power of modern servers doubling (or more, thanks to multicore) every 18 months (Moore’s Law) and those servers (where deployed in clouds) running at near 100% utilization, the network becomes the bottleneck and it’s those environments that Arista is specifically looking to target.

Ullal claims that Arista’s 7100 series of 10-Gg switches’ port-to-port latency comes in at around 600 nanoseconds — performance that she claims only InfiniBand comes close to meeting. But what could really make Arista’s gear interesting to the operators of public and private clouds is the operating system inside the switch (Arista calls this the Extensible Operating System or “EOS”). According to Ullal, regardless of what agents are running in the switches (routing protocols, command line interfaces, etc.), the switch can be live-patched without having to bring down the network it supports.

Part of the EOS, according to Ullal, is a database to which the switch’s state is constantly mirrored. Should a patch have to be deployed to the switch, the network barely hiccups as the state information from just before a patch’s deployment is recalled from the EOS’s database.

For networks that can’t tolerate any downtime, availability is often guaranteed through the deployment of redundant switches. When one switch is brought down, a standby switch takes over. The problem with this architecture is that the cost per supported device (server NIC or storage) link doubles. Doubling or tripling up on “older” 1 G-bit switched Ethernet links for the sake of performance can also result in the same net effect on cost (double or triple the cost). At $500 per 600 ns latency port without the need for redundant switches (because of the live-patching capability), Ullal claims there’s no match for Arista’s switches (which start in the $10,000 - $20,000 range).

If that’s truly the case (admittedly, I don’t have all-seeing visibility into the market for 10-Gb Ethernet switches), it’s only a matter of time before this networking team cashes in one more time. Give the podcast a listen and tell me (and the rest of TechWeb/InformationWeek’s audience) what you think in the comments are below.

Stealing a page from the playbook it used to launch the Liberty Alliance (and undermine Microsoft’s Passport service in the process), Sun Microsystems’ newly appointed cloud computing chief governance officer, Michele Dennedy, tells me in this podcast how she now has her sights set on forming a similar industry consortium for governance and privacy in the area of cloud computing. Additionally, Dennedy’s appointment is one of many ducks that Sun is getting in a row as it gears up to make some allegedly blockbuster cloud computing announcements in New York City on March 18.

Based on what I’m hearing on the backchannel, Sun’s forthcoming announcements will indeed merit the attention of any enterprise that’s considering a move to the cloud. Sun will make its cloud announcements at its CommunityOne East Developer Conference where, in addition to reporting on the news, I’ll be moderating the closing panel session with executives from Sun, Google, Salesforce.com, and RightScale (Disclosure: Sun is NOT paying me to moderate this panel and has given me full editorial latitude in terms of questions and guests selection beyond Sun’s cloud computing CTO, Lew Tucker.)

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to connect the dots here. Amazon.com’s cloud offerings (Elastic Compute Cloud, S3, etc.) are typically invoked by developers via Amazon’s Web services application programming interfaces. CommunityOne is a developer event at which Sun will be making some cloud computing announcements, and it has no doubt learned a thing or two from Amazon’s success. So the big questions are, what sort of Sun-based cloud will developers be able to invoke and what makes it so special when compared with other market offerings?

According to Dennedy — a lawyer by trade who was once a member of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s Liberty Alliance execution team and later Sun’s chief privacy officer — one of the main reasons she accepted Tucker’s invitation to join Sun’s cloud computing group was because of how her job will involve the conversion of the market’s privacy and governance concerns into code that she’ll be responsible for baking into Sun’s solutions.

Press the tiny play button to listen to my podcast interview with Dennedy. Alternatively, down the left side of the page somewhere (lower left), you should see a tab for exposing the podcast player (clunky, I know).

Amid a complicated labyrinth of multijurisdictional (international) privacy and governance-related regulations, moving to the cloud will be easier said than done for most enterprises. This is particularly true of publicly held companies or of applications that will be storing sensitive employee or customer data (just examples). It’s apparently Sun’s hope that it can set itself apart from competitors like Amazon and Google by assisting enterprises with the navigation of that complicated labyrinth — essentially coming up with sets of best practices for enterprises moving into the cloud as well as the cloud providers themselves.

But Dennedy doesn’t want Sun to unilaterally come up with these privacy and governance practices. Telling me that she wasn’t just “hinting,” it’s Sun’s intentions to pull the industry as well as customers together to come up with a set of best practices that are multilaterally developed. Said Dennedy:

We need to formalize some things and make sure some of the really big players are in the room. … We don’t want it to be just Sun and Sun’s customers in the room.

Whether Sun can actually pull another Liberty Alliance off remains to be seen. For starters, unlike when the Liberty Alliance began and there was a bogeyman (Microsoft) that everyone had to keep an eye on, there’s no bogeyman to rally against this time. In other words, it’s going to be harder to get the same sort of attention. Additionally, armed with little more than its forthcoming announcements, Sun is not exactly looked upon as a credible leader in the cloud computing space — one that’s worth following down the proverbial open industry consortium path. At least not yet.

A lot will depend on the potency of next week’s announcements and the traction they get with customers, partners, and to some extent, competitors. If, post-March 18, Sun is suddenly regarded as a contenda [sic], Dennedy’s efforts in the market could have the much-needed credibility to pull such a group together.

Based out of Reston, VA, ScienceLogic CEO David Link is no Silicon Valley insider. He might as well be though because the technology that ScienceLogic has cooked up in the form of it’s 7-in-1 EM7 datacenter management appliance is the sort of solution that usually requires a patchwork of solutions from the management titans normally associated with such functionality: BMC, CA, IBM, and HP.

In this, my third podcast episode of Interop Insider (Episode #1, Episode #2), Link and I chat about the company’s EM7 appliance (which starts at $25,000), the history of the relatively young ScienceLogic (he founded it in 2003), and the company’s role with respect to the InteropNET (the short-lived but nontheless complicated network that serves as the backbone to Interop which takes place in Las Vegas from May 17 to May 21 this year Register Here).

To listen to my interview with David Link, click this play button or click here to grab the MP3 file so you can listen to it later.

The EM7 is a single appliance that, according to link, covers seven primary administrative and management functions that are normally associated with separate solutions from other providers (solutions that are often integrated after purchase). The EM7 is designed to cover ScienceLogic’s customers for their needs in the area of network management, application management (particularly as it relates to the expected network behaviors of enterprise applications), systems management, and asset management.

OK, so that’s only 4 of 7. To the extent that each of the four categories involves events that could require the intervention of IT personnel, one key feature of the EM7 is to aggregate those events into a single event stream that’s consistently presented and therefore easier to manage (than separate event streams from separate management systes). So, this cross-discipline event handling is the EM7s fifth function and to the extent that intervention to deal with events is required, the EM7’s sixth major area of integrated functionality is a trouble-ticketing system (so, there’s no need to go out and buy a separate one of those either).

Finally, the last function which is probably more useful to service providers that most IT shops helps to keep track of service levels. This features is particularly useful in situations where service level agreements (SLAs) require accurate reporting and transparency with respect to a service’s availability and response times.

Although the technique is not unique to ScienceLogic or its management applicances, the EM7 starts out by baselining the normal behavior of the networks and applications that it’s assigned to monitoring. Once the thresholds are set, any network or application activity that exceeds those thresholds ultimately triggers a resolution. According to Link, should a problem self-heal or correct itself, the associated alerts are automatically withdrawn. Said Link:

If we go from error state to corrected state, you get a healthy notice that cancels the unhealthy state and a notification goes out to everyone basically calling-off the troops.

Founded in 2003, ScienceLogic is based in Reston, VA and has about 40 employees. The company is privately held and running at an annual revenue rate of about $15 million per year with 100 percent year over year growth. Not surprisingly (given it’s location), about 35 percent of the company’s business comes from the US government — a door that Link says was opened when certain partners brought ScienceLogic into the government projects that they were working on. Link expects that he’ll have 6 to 8 of ScienceLogic’s appliances connected to the InteropNET in Las Vegas this May.

David Berlind is an editor-at-large with InformationWeek. David likes to write about emerging tech, new and social media, mobile tech, and things that go wrong. He can be reached at dberlind@techweb.com and you can also find him on Twitter and other social networks (see the list below). David doesn’t own any tech stocks. But, if he did, he’d probably buy some Salesforce.com and Amazon, given his belief in the principles of cloud computing and his hope that the stock market can’t get much worse. Also, if you’re an out-of-work IT professional or someone involved in the business of compliance, he wants to hear from you.

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Google adds comments to Google Reader http://bit.ly/8B2Jr Just too bad there isn’t an interop protocol for Disqus-like comment networks. ~

In this, my second installment of Interop Insider, Cisco e-mail security group product manager Nick Edwards explains the company’s newest foray into the cloud — that of reproducing the e-mail security functionality found in the company’s IronPort appliances as a cloud-based service offering. With Interop in Las Vegas just around the corner, I’ll be publishing an entire series of Interop Insiders (each with a write-up and podcast interview) to give you an idea of what can be found at the show.

Cisco is, of course, no stranger to the cloud. We sometimes forget that one of the original cloud-based companies — WebEx — is a part of Cisco. You can listen to the interview by pressing the play button below.

Listen to my interview with Cisco’s Nick Edwards about the new cloud-based offering.

But as Edwards explains in this podcast interview, Cisco has other cloud moves up its sleeve, and one of those moves is to re-create all of the IronPort e-mail security functionality in the cloud. As Edwards put it, organizations can choose from one of three approaches offered by Cisco: to go solely with IronPort appliances on premises, to go solely with the IronPort functionality in the cloud, or to take a hybrid approach.

One reason Edwards thinks this makes sense is because all of the anti-spam and malware-stripping work gets done before the e-mail even enters the enterprise network. In other words, should you subscribe to the service, all of your inbound e-mail makes a pit stop in Cisco’s IronPort Cloud where it gets scrubbed down for nefarious activity before it ever comes close to your firewall.

The idea isn’t new. Webroot has offered a similar cloud-based service for some time. Another interesting twist to Cisco’s offering that you don’t see too often is that the cloud-based service costs 25% to 30% more to organizations than taking ownership of an IronPort e-mail security appliance instead. Edwards estimates that the cost for a 5,000-person company to use the cloud-based service will come in at around $13 per user per year.

One reason is that Cisco hasn’t gone to the trouble of reengineering its e-mail security appliance into a scalable multitenant system, the costs of which can be spread across many Cisco customers. Instead, if you end up subscribing to Cisco’s service, the company takes some of its IronPort appliances off the shelves, puts them in its data centers, and runs them on your behalf. Edwards says that customers were nervous about the idea of running e-mail security on an infrastructure that’s shared with other companies. I’m not so sure given how much other data (e.g., customer data at Salesforce.com) has been entrusted to such other multitenant systems.

As you will hear in the podcast, the “hybrid” approach (where some is done in the cloud and some is done on premises) is a big part of Cisco’s message here. This allows customers to do the e-mail cleansing in the cloud, but the other e-mail security functions (e.g., data retention) on premises. Also, the IronPort reporting functionality that network managers would use to keep an eye on the overall health of the IronPort appliances works across both the on- and off-premises devices.

In the interview, Edwards also confirms that for each appliance that Cisco runs on behalf of customer in its main data center, it has one on standby in a redundant data center in the event that the main data center experiences a catastrophic problem.

Another subject we cover is the thorny problem of e-mail encryption. Edwards talks about how, with Cisco’s products, it’s easier to carry on a fully encrypted e-mail dialog, even if the recipient of a Cisco-encrypted message doesn’t have Cisco’s gear to help decrypt it. It’s a step in the right direction. But I encourage you to listen to the podcast because it’s not as perfect a world as Cisco might lead you to believe.

If you’re going to Interop and want to check out the IronPort solutions (both appliance and cloud-based), my friends over on the Interop side of the company tell me that Cisco will be at booth 1719.

I’ve decided to start publishing a new series of podcasts that I’m calling Interop Insider. After all, in addition to publishing InformationWeek, TechWeb also is the producer of some great events like Interop. So, given that us InformationWeekers can get an inside track on what’s happening with our sister events, why not jump on that track early and develop an audio series that can be heard over time, or piled in its entirety into your iPod for en-route (to Vegas) listening? My first guest for this episode? Interop head honcho Lenny Heymann.

Lenny’s the general manager of Interop. No one gets in or out of Las Vegas while Interop is running unless Heymann says so (Yo Len-nie!). OK, all kidding aside, at nearly 25 years old, Interop is the one show that has survived every swing of the pendulum that the IT industry (and the economy) could throw at it.

Whereas other megashows have gone *poof!*, Interop still stands. Heymann talks about why that is in the interview. One of the keys has been the show’s ability to stay relevant. Not just in terms of subject matter covered. But also in terms of all the different things you can do (none of which have to do with Las Vegas) from the time the preshow begins on the morning of Sunday, May 17, until the main exhibit space closes up at the end of Thursday, May 21.

With so many different things to do over the course of several days — educational series, CIO Boot Camp, the main exhibit show floor, “Virtualization Day”, a conference track dedicated to the data center, etc., Heymann likens Interop to a “Super Bowl of sorts.” You can hear my interview with Heymann by pressing the play button (or you can download the interview to your MP3 as a tantalizing soundtrack for your next workout).

Heymann and I got one of the tough questions out of the way first: why, in these tough economic times, should IT professionals open their wallets (or, their company’s) to travel to Interop. Answer? According to Heymann, Interop rolls together both education, exhibit floor, and so many different topics, that he sees it as the most efficient event for anyone to stay abreast and to learn what’s important in the industry and the direction the industry is heading. Just as important (and perhaps a bit more subtle) is the fact that traveling to Las Vegas is cheaper than it has ever been.

Given the state of the economy, not only are the flights ridiculously cheap, but there are a lot of empty hotel rooms these days, which means the hoteliers are willing to cut some deals. In other words, if you’re going to travel to one IT event this year, not only does Interop paint a broad enough brush to fill your dance card, it won’t break your company’s piggy bank, either. According to Heymann, attendees can practically “work the event” 24/7 the entire time they’re in Vegas.

According to Heymann, CSI SX, CIO Bootcamp, and Energy Camp (a day-long event that I’m presiding over) are just three of the programs that prove how there’s something for the birds of just about any IT feather. CSI SX is for security specialists and will cover a range of topics from a security perspective including virtualization, Web 2.0, compliance, and cloud computing. According to Heymann, CIO Bootcamp is where people who have an interest earning their stripes as a CIO will get to rub shoulders with those who already have held the post (and learn from their experiences). Energy Camp is an unconference where anybody who wants to gather or share information about reducing the carbon footprint of IT can get together for a day of open discussions on how to actually achieve that objective.

In the podcast, we also talk about the famed InteropNet and how, for those who can’t make it to Interop in Vegas, there will be other opportunities to attend in New York City, Mumbai, and Tokyo.

If you have suggestions for topics to cover on future editions of Interop Insider, be sure to let me know.

David Berlind is an editor-at-large with InformationWeek. David likes to write about emerging tech, new and social media, mobile tech, and things that go wrong. He can be reached at dberlind@techweb.com and you can also find him on Twitter and other social networks. David doesn’t own any tech stocks. But, if he did, he’d probably buy some Salesforce.com and Amazon, given his belief in the principles of cloud computing and his hope that the stock market can’t get much worse. Also, if you’re an out-of-work IT professional or someone involved in the business of compliance, he wants to hear from you.