So what are the big topics at Interop Las Vegas? Cloud and virtualization are definitely top of mind. There’ll also be some fantastic conference sessions. Some of them include “Hybrid Cloud Integration” and “Server and Desktop Virtualization Crash Course”. The Wireless and Mobility Track has expanded at this year’s Interop Las Vegas. Due to the continuing and rapid evolution of wireless and mobile technologies, this track is a vital resource for knowledge, education, practical advice, optimal strategies and a debate on the hot topics that define the wireless and mobile space today. It’s all mobile these days!

You’ll also hear keynotes from industry leaders whom will inspire you to change at how you look at your IT infrastructure. Keynote speakers include:

• Padmasree Warrior – CTO, SVP Engineering & GM Enterprise Business, Cisco 
• Allan Leinwand - Chief Technology Officer, Infrastructure, Zynga
• Marc Randall – Senior Vice President & General Manager, Avaya
• Bill Chang – Executive Vice President, Business Group, Singapore Telecommunications Limited
• Steve Herrod – CTO and SVP of R&D, VMware

Don’t Forget Anything—Here’s Your Checklist for the Event

• Pack some clothes and shoes. You are going to need them at Interop Las Vegas.
  • Tuesday May 8 is Tie Tuesday – Wear a tie and high five other attendees that are wearing a tie!
• Download the Interop Mobile app and create your own personalized schedule
• Visit the Community Hub for an entirely new social experience including complimentary education, networking and more
• Follow Interop GM, Jennifer Jessup on Twitter, who’ll share her perspective on Interop Las Vegas
• Follow the #interop hash tag on Twitter, so you don’t miss the TweetUp locations, any of the news or discussions taking place
• Tour the event network and attend classes led by InteropNet engineers
• Booth Crawl: Enjoy vendor-hosted beverages while you check out the latest products and services in the Expo
• Participate in the Passport Program for a chance to win an iPad
• Check out the Cloud Virtualization Zone to what new innovation cloud vendors are launching
•  “Like” the Interop Facebook fan page to stay up to date on event news, post your photos, and chat about the event

Don’t delay — register today with Priority Code CPQJNL01 for a Free Expo Pass or to save 25%* on conference passes.

Questions about the event? Post them here on the blog and we’ll be sure to get back to you!

See you at Interop Las Vegas 2012 next week!

Cheers,

Jason

Feel free to follow me on Twitter for more inside Interop updates.

*25% off discount applies to Flex and Conference Passes. Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Proof of current IT involvement required. Prices after discount applied:
Flex: $2,471.25
Conference: $1,721.25

Some of the other changes involve technology, such as a wide range of virtualization technologies that are being developed.  It is fair to say that in the current environment everything is being virtualized and virtualization changes everything.  It was not that long ago that the word “virtualization” almost always referred to server virtualization.  While server virtualization is still very important, other forms of virtualization, such as the virtualization of desktops and appliances such as WAN optimization controllers (WOCs), are taking hold.  Some forms of virtualization create challenges for networking organizations.  For example, moving virtual machines between physical servers provides agility, but supporting this movement places significant demands on the network.  Other forms of virtualization have the promise of making our jobs easier.  Virtual WOCs, for example, make it easier for IT organizations to conduct a proof of concept trial and to ship a WOC to where it needs to be.

For the last fifteen years data center LAN design has been very staid.  Most large data centers LANs were based on a three-tier architecture comprised of access, distribution and core switches.  In addition, virtually all data center LANs were based on the use of the spanning tree protocol, keeping the LAN and SAN separate and using Ethernet on a based effort basis.  Today all of the assumptions that were used over the last fifteen years to design data center LANs are being questioned.  The good news is that IT organizations that are looking to redesign their data center LANs have a very wide and growing set of technologies from which to choose.  The bad news is that it can be very challenging to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these technologies as well as the likelihood that they will be successful in the marketplace. 

The goal of the networking track is to help IT organizations evaluate the technologies that they can implement today to solve today’s challenges while also providing insight into a wide range of emerging challenges and the technologies that are intended to respond to those challenges.

• See all the latest IT solutions from 350+ leading technology companies.
• Attend 50+ sessions open to all attendees covering the full range of IT issues.
• Hear keynotes from industry leaders.
• Tour the network that powers Interop, built by volunteers with hand selected vendors. Attend classes led by InteropNet engineers.

Enhance your Interop Experience

Interop Mobile: Visit m.interop.com on your mobile device to download Interop’s iPhone app or view the mobile website on Android, BlackBerry and other smartphones. Get event information at your fingertips including exhibitors, sessions, events, news, floorplan, new products and show specials. Advanced features provide a personalized experience: Get suggestions based on your interests, create short lists, plan your agenda, take notes, get directions and more!

Booth Crawl: Enjoy vendor-hosted beverages while you check out the latest products and services in the Expo.

Community Hub: This year at Interop Las Vegas we’ll be bringing an entirely new social experience to the expo floor! We are launching the Community Hub (booth 1175), an open space for social discourse where you will have the opportunity to network with other IT professionals, speakers and the Interop team. The Community Hub offers unique opportunities in education and networking.

T-shirt: Collect poker chips by visiting participating vendors and redeem for a free Interop t-shirt.

Become an IT Hero: Interop gives you the most important technologies and essential strategies to drive business value from your IT organization.

Wow. I can’t believe I wrote a blog that did not mention any basketball references.

Cheers,

Jason

Feel free to follow me on Twitter for more inside Interop updates.

*25% off discount applies to Flex and Conference Passes. Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Proof of current IT involvement required. Prices after discount applied:
Flex: $2,471.25
Conference: $1,721.25

More than 130 companies’ submitted products for consideration but only 24 can be finalists.  So, just this week, the finalists across eight different categories were announced and include the below:

Cloud Computing & Virtualization

Cisco – Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card 1240

Citrix Systems – Citrix VDI-in-a-Box

Kontiki, Inc. – Kontiki Enterprise Video Platform

Collaboration

Alcatel-Lucent – Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch Conversation

Avaya, Inc. – AvayaLive™ Engage

HD Distributing, LLC – SCOPIA XT5000

Data Center & Storage

Ceph Storage, Inc. – Ceph

Panzura – Panzura Quicksilver Global Cloud Storage System v3.0

Riverbed Technology – Granite

Management, Monitoring & Testing

NEC Corporation of America – NEC ProgrammableFlow Controller, PF6800

Net Optics – Spyke

Riverbed Technology – Virtual Cascade Shark

Networking

Gnodal – New GS-Series Switch

Mellanox Technologies – SX1024

PLX Technology – TeraPHY TN8045 10GBASE-T Tranceiver

Performance Optimization

Cisco – AppNav Virtualization Technology

Citrix Systems – Citrix NetScaler 10

Riverbed Technology – Steelhead Cloud Accelerator

Security

Avaya, Inc. – Avaya Identity Engines

ManageEngine – Firewall Analyzer

McAfee – McAfee Network Security XC Cluster

Wireless & Mobility

Broadcom Corp. – BCM43460 – 5G Wifi System-on-Chip (SoC)

Cisco – Aironet 3600 Series Access Point

Cloudpath Networks – XpressConnect Enrollment System

So there you have it!  Winners will be announced onsite, May 8^th on the show floor.  We’d encourage you to stop by their booths and get the inside scoop on the latest innovations that could likely help shape your business technology strategy this year.

Congrats again to all Best of Interop finalists!

Collaboration is the right name for this track because that’s what we’re trying to enable with communications technology: We’re giving end users the tools to work with each other in whatever medium is either available or preferred—whether that be voice, video, instant messaging, social business tools, or (increasingly) some combination of these.

As the Collaboration track chair, Interop comes at a great point in the year for me, because we’ve just completed Enterprise Connect, a sister event to Interop that’s devoted exclusively to enterprise communications and collaboration. I’m the program co-chair of Enterprise Connect, so I’m just coming off an intense week of engagement with enterprise decision-makers who are charting their next course to provide the best, most flexible and powerful underpinnings for the collaboration that their end users want to perform.

This is an area of rapid change, much of which is driven by technologies that spill over into other Interop tracks: Mobility has been a huge driver of new collaboration methods, and the cloud is becoming an increasingly important way of supporting communications infrastructures for collaboration. These subjects will almost certainly make their way into the conversations that we’ll have in our sessions during the Collaboration track.

But the sessions themselves are focusing on some of the core communications technology trends, and how you can use them to promote more effective collaboration for your end users. Of course, there’s no better place to talk about UC Interoperability than at Interop, and this is an area that’s increasingly becoming a pain point for enterprises. Communications infrastructures are growing highly complex, as enterprises attempt to interwork voice, video, messaging, social, and other systems. Enterprises want these systems to interwork more seamlessly and with less complexity, across multiple vendors’ products, but realistically, we’re a long way from getting there.

Even if we can’t have total, system-wide interoperability, there are still high hopes that, at a minimum, we can integrate communications technologies with some of the most business-critical applications, so as to enable better collaboration for the users who work in these applications. Our session on this topic includes a couple of powerhouses, Microsoft and Google, who will describe their different approaches to this challenge. Both the Interoperability and Application Integration sessions will be led by Marty Parker, who has vast real-world experience in these two areas.

We also have a panel on Session Management, which is the closest thing we have to a concept for a “next-gen PBX.” PBXs (which still run essentially all enterprise voice systems today) handle setup for voice calls, and the idea is that in the new world, a core platform will use the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to set up sessions among two or more users, in all the media available to that system, dynamically within sessions. The classic example is: You begin by IM’ing someone, decide that you need to talk to them and so you click-to-call within the software client that you used to open the IM session. Then, at some point, you want to initiate a video, so you’re able to add that medium with another click, and when you decide it’s time to whiteboard with that person, you’re just a click away from desktop sharing or web conferencing. And when you need to add another person to your collaborative session to get their input, there’s a click or drag-and-drop (mouse or touch-screen) for that function as well. So how close are we to realizing this potential? Zeus Kerravala, a veteran analyst, will lead a discussion to help us understand.

We’ve also got two sessions devoted entirely to video, which has become a very hot topic at Enterprise Connect over the past couple of years. Video isn’t coming to the enterprise—it’s here. The question is what do you do about it—i.e., Who gets what kind of video, and how do you support video (and possibly also protect the rest of the network from video’s effects on bandwidth consumption)?

The first point—the Value of Video—has to do with who gets to do video at what level: Do you need “immersive” telepresence? What’s the business case for room video conferencing? What about the desktop—should you implement an enterprise system on the desktops, or let people just use Skype? Or, for that matter, should you not let people use Skype, for security reasons as well as the aforementioned bandwidth-management issues?

That leads to the technology/architecture questions about video; as we put it in our session description: “Whether video as an application is ready to move into the cloud (and what kind of cloud—public, private, or hybrid); and whether you’re ready to deal with the impact that video traffic will have on your network.” Those two questions may be related in your enterprise, or they may not—but if video is a significant part of your enterprise’s collaboration style, they’re issues you’ll have to deal with.

Finally, our track closes with a look at Social Networking for collaboration—specifically, its impact on the contact center, and the different approaches taken by the leading vendors in this space: Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, and Oracle.

If collaboration is a business imperative for your enterprise, I hope you’ll find some of these sessions helpful in making your plans to provide the technology underpinnings of those collaborative processes. I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

At Interop 2012, I’ll be hosting a session, “Less is More: Why SSL VPN is NOT What You Think It Is” that explores the inherent flaws of SSL VPN. The reality is, SSL has been buoyed by a staggering number of myths and security assurances promised by vendors and assumed as safe by VPN users. But in fact, high profile security breaches have occurred as a result of using key security building blocks of SSL VPN technology. These have included various Certificate Authority (CA) breaches, such as those at ComodoDigiNotar, GlobalSign, Gemnet and KPN.

So, why is this happening? Do users implement the technology incorrectly, or is it simply not as good as all the hype makes it out to be? Is there something else or different we should be doing? What are solutions to the underlying problems?

These are the very questions I’ll answer in this session, drawing upon my 20 years of experience in the networking and security industry. As CTO, Americas for NCP engineering – I’m confronted with examples of SSL misunderstanding and misuse on a daily basis. With this session, I’ll expose SSL VPN security myths and dispel dangerous hype, which is leading to over-reliance on the protocol. I’ll also leverage real-life examples and provide practical ways you can strengthen your remote access connectivity.

Clearly, confusion exists about the security capabilities of SSL. Ultimately, this misinformation undermines the technology and lessens its appeal in scenarios where SSL is an ideal solution. This session will put the most persistent SSL myths to rest and clarify the technology’s capabilities – and its limitations. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

The session Less is More: Why SSL VPN is NOT What You Think It Is will be held Thursday, May 10, 2012, 11:30am – 12:30pm at Interop 2012.

In order for organizations to achieve long-term strategic returns on their investments in information security and risk management they must complement their technology investments with ones that focus on the creation of a risk aware and security conscious culture.  This will require the introduction and maturity of business driven and supported threat and risk identification and management methods and practices, comprehensive and recurring education and awareness campaigns instead of point in time events, and the introduction of policies, processes, procedures that support information risk management and security management as a business as usual activity instead of one that requires constant oversight and policing.

The information security and risk management track at Interop Las Vegas 2012 will attempt to address these needs by bringing together some of the best and brightest industry thought leaders to provide their insights and knowledge.  Sessions in the track will focus on effectively identifying and understanding attacks as well as provide useful and pragmatic insights on how to effectively defend against them. Sessions whose speaker’s will provide thought provoking insights as they reexamine existing technologies such as SSL, Virtualization, Browsers, and others for their security capabilities and current day usage considerations. The information risk management focused sessions will discuss concepts including intelligence gathering and usage concepts, culture change within organizations, and discussions of current and future trends.

Have You Registered?

Register now  for a 25% Discount* on Interop Flex and Conference passes or a free expo pass by using the following Priority code: CPQJNL01. All of these registration packages give you access to the InteropNet classes. Thanks in advance for all of your help!

Jason

Feel free to follow me on Twitter for more inside Interop updates.

*25% off discount applies to Flex and Conference Passes. Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Proof of current IT involvement required. Prices after discount applied:
Flex: $2,471.25
Conference: $1,721.25

Virtualization and cloud computing continue to be top IT priorities for 2012, with increasing adoption and penetration, and yet I continue to be amazed at how much confusion and debate is still occurring within IT organizations around differences between virtualization and cloud.  Our most recent research shows over 90% of organizations have adopted server virtualization, and 71% are using, planning or considering private cloud.  We estimate that 40-50% of servers have been virtualized, but most organizations are still working to address the pain points of expanding virtualization, and organizations are at varying stages of the road to private cloud.  

• Optimizing the infrastructure (compute, storage and networking) for virtualization/cloud
• Evaluating and implementing management and automation tools (which increasingly must be multi-hypervisor) to reduce costs and speed time to value
• Transforming data center operations to the new world of self service provisioning and service catalogs.  

Virtualization has become a foundational technology, not only for consolidation and cost reduction, but for data center transformation —to increase agility and reduce time to value, and focus on delivery of IT as service.  And the virtualization/cloud ecosystem continues to change constantly, with new vendors and solutions merging and emerging daily.

Virtualization is also transforming user computing with desktop and application virtualization, and and increasing number of organizations are embracing a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy.  After early failed attempts at VDI, we are now seeing many successes in desktop transformation projects, incorporating multiple technologies, including VDI, hosted applications, client hypervisors, application virtualization, remote sessions from smartphones, tablets, kiosks, zero clients and new devices arriving all the time.  With 30% adoption of desktop virtualization to-date, we are seeing another 30% currently in the planning stages.  There is much to be learned from the successes and failures we’ve seen on the desktop front, and still much debate on what the “Desktop of the Future” will look like.  With many potential potholes in the road, desktop transformation is clearly an area where “what you don’t know can hurt you”.

So whether you (or your organization) are virtualization experts or newcomers, hypervisor geeks or desktop jockeys, virtualization management gurus or cloud orchestration stack players, we’ve got workshops (ECS Private Cloud and Desktop Transformation) and sessions (concepts and practices, desktop virtualization and the road to cloud mini-tracks)  for you.   Come learn, share, discuss, debate and prepare for your next transformation, whether it’s the datacenter, the desktop and/or the cloud.

Barb Goldworm, President and Chief Analyst, FOCUS       

But most IT professionals haven’t really embraced what IT as a service means. They equate cloud computing with virtual machines, seasoned with a bit of automation and a lot of vendor-driven definition jerrymandering.

Clouds aren’t about machines. At best, a machine is a convenient unit of measure—like a foot, or a knot, or horsepower. It’s an analogy from a soon-to-be-bygone era. No, clouds are services. They’re platforms on which you can stand, foundations to build upon. CIOs who ignore this fact are doing their organizations a huge disservice. By clinging to old models of computing, they’re kneecapping their organizations’ ability to compete.

A decade ago, driven by IT Information Library (ITIL) proponents and the rise of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), everyone claimed to embrace IT as a Service. Few knew what that really meant, other than being nicer to end users, and fewer still actually implemented it.

It took cloud computing—and its ability to sneak past corporate IT’s immune system—for IT as a Service to really penetrate enterprises. For enterprise IT monopolists clinging to their private servers, it’s death by a thousand tiny contracts. Regardless of their resistance, clouds are here to stay, and with them a service-centric architecture. On-demand computing has so insinuated itself into the way we think about building applications that it’s only a matter of time before we embrace clouds almost by accident.

Ultimately, we like clouds because they let us focus on what we’re good at, while delegating the stuff we don’t want. Moving virtual machines around is not a good example of these: it’s not a value-added activity for the business, and it’s better left to the cloud providers. No, we want clouds for what we can build with them, and how easily we can build it.

At a recent cloud event, Google’s Peter Magnussen talked about pipelining. Google converts millions of documents a day from one format to another as part of its Google Docs offering. So when a developer using Google’s App Engine cloud wants to convert a document, should they write the code to do so themselves? Of course not. They should call Google’s document conversion API, because doing so is orders of magnitude more efficient—they piggyback on the highly optimized pipeline of document conversion.

Google doesn’t just convert documents. They authenticate users, rotate pictures, send emails, and do hundreds of other things that developers also want to do. In a cloud, developers call a pipeline the way they used to call a subroutine. In doing so, they stand on the shoulders of giants, and achieve levels of efficiency they could never reach alone.

It’s not just Google. Many other Platform as a Service providers, such as Force.com and Windows Azure, have libraries developers can call that are far faster, cheaper, and more efficient than home-grown routines. Smart architects build atop services like Amazon’s DynamoDB rather than coding their own storage systems. There’s a reason it’s called Amazon Web Services, not Amazon Cloud, after all.

Even if you’re writing on-premise code, spinning a costly function into an elastic cloud is possible. I recently saw a demo by startup Bitdeli, in which a particularly onerous task (such as filtering the Twitter firehose) happens in the cloud, and local code simply calls the result of that task. It’s such a good example of hybrid computing it might even make me rethink my earlier abuse of the “hybrid cloud” moniker.

Make no mistake: Platform as a Service, and replacement of function calls with cloud services, are the arrival of IT as a service. They’re fundamentally changing how we build applications. If private clouds don’t wrap their core compute capability in a rich set of services, then applications built on those clouds will cost more, and take longer to build, than their public-based competitors.

The rest is just Darwinism. This is why, at this year’s Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas, we’ll be focusing on platforms for the first day of the event. Platforms are up the stack—towards services—and into the public cloud, where compute tasks are pooled with others’ to achieve unmatched efficiency.