Of particular relevance here, it is also where we are now blogging!

Please bookmark http://my.interop.com and see what’s going on.

Over 20,000 leads were generated on the expo floor from business technology decision makers from organizations like Accenture, Deutsche Telekom, Oracle, US Navy, State Farm, WebMd, Northrop Grumman, ABC Television, JCPenney Co., General Dynamics, C-SPAN, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Kaiser Permanente, Nike, Tyco Electronics, Pfizer, NBA, New York Life Insurance Company, Visa, Inc., Warner Bros. Entertainment, Bloomberg LP, REI, JPMorganChase, KPMG, TIME Inc., WPP Group, ESPN, BAYER Corporation, ADP, Cablevision and Wells Fargo.

Read what others had to say about Interop New York:

Interop New York 2009 kicked off this morning with General Manager, Lenny Heymann’s optimistic and future-looking remarks for the gratifyingly large crowd.  – ScienceLogic

I had a great set of meetings at Interop today and the energy at the show was quite inspiring. – TMC

Yesterday, I spent the day in a room meeting a stream of vendors. It was like speed dating, but more fun. There are definitely some interesting products coming out of large and small vendors alike. – Network Computing

@scottsanchez: Nice crowd at #interop. Hard to move around, actually.

@Tommyo_snom: In NYC attending the Interop show. Amazing traffic could be one of the best shows we’ve attended all year!!!

Other highlights include:
• Over 250 companies exhibited, including 48 new exhibiting companies and Interop’s Global Partner, Cisco
• 120 registered media and analysts attended the event which lead to extensive media coverage
• Over 40 press releases went out announcing new industry partnerships, strategies and ground-breaking technologies
• InteropTV broadcasted live from the show floor throughout the event

Interop will return to New York October 18-22, 2010.

Up Next:
Interop Las Vegas: April 25-29, 2010

Interop’s next show will be Las Vegas, April 25-29, 2010. Interop attendees are directly responsible for leveraging technology for their business. According to a recent attendee survey 95% are active in the purchase process. They have immediate purchasing needs which require a comprehensive, integrated view of technologies, tools and services to make smart purchasing decisions and ease deployment

Virtual Interop – May 20, 2010

Interop, the leading business technology event, extends its reach through virtual events. Interop’s highly qualified audience attends to gain insight into the most important technologies to sustain a competitive advantage in today’s evolving marketplace. Virtual events simulate the activity and impact of face-to-face events while offering the ease and economy of the web.

Thank You

Thanks for making Interop NY 2009 a terrific success. We hope to see you again, in Las Vegas, spring of 2010! In the meantime, check out videos, photos, and more from the 2009 NYC event. Don’t forget. You can keep up with all things Interop by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan of Interop on Facebook or join MyInterop, our new social networking community for business and technology leaders.

Cheers!

Jason

1. JetBlue is a good airline

Yeah, I know that they kept passengers locked on a plane for six weeks last winter (maybe it was a little less time, but the passengers were really upset), but they seem to have their act together now. The planes are nice (plenty of leg room), the first bag is free (as are the snacks and satellite TV), and the people are friendly. To top it all off, the fares are low. Put it all together and it’s a darned nice package for an airline today.

2. Ink48 is a great little hotel

It’s not in the fashionable part of Manhattan (way over on the west side between 47th and 48th), but it’s high-fashion on the inside of this brand-new hotel. The room was extremely nice, the Internet access (for Kimpton frequent sleepers) was free, and the staff was simply great. It’s just a few blocks to Times Square and the Theater District, a pleasant walk to Javits, and you get to see (and smell) horses in the evening. It’s my new favorite hotel in New York (even if the cabbies don’t know where it is, yet).

3. There is decent barbecue in Manhattan

As a child of the South, I can get pretty religious about good ‘cue. Daisy May’s (on 11th at 46th) isn’t “authentic” Southern (or Texas) barbecue, but it’s darned good stuff, nonetheless. The ribs were tasty and tender, the dirty rice and beans were good, the collard greens were wonderful, and bourbon peaches were simply divine. Carol reports that the red velvet cake was great, as well, so this is a hit in every direction. In something that’s becoming a theme, the staff was friendly (the manager came out and talked with us for a while), and the country music wasn’t too modern for my tastes. Highly recommended.

4. The reputation of New Yorkers is a lie

OK, I’ve been to New York when it seemed like every encounter with a doorman or waiter was a variation on hand-to-hand combat. On this visit, though, every person I dealt with in the Tri-State area was helpful, friendly, and a joy to deal with. How complete was the friendliness? The TSA agents at Newark this morning were pleasant, helpful and (I don’t want to get them in trouble) actually friendly as they helped me and others get through the lines. It’s like someone exploded a “nice bomb” over Manhattan and the fallout has hit a lot of people. It may have been the good weather that put folks in a great mood, but this has been one of the most pleasant business trips I’ve had in years.

5. There’s no substitute for getting out of the office

I love webcasts, video conferencing, and email. I spend too much time on Instant Messaging and texts through my cell phone. With all the contact those technologies allow, there’s still no substitute for getting out, meeting people, and allowing for the chance encounters that enrich business and personal life. Go to a show, eat lunch with a stranger, shake hands at a booth you’ve never seen before. Get out there and make things happen. You’ll be glad you did.

They’re calling my plane, but I’ll have more later. Thanks for all the comments — I’ll look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

OK, so there is a way. head over to MyInterop and sign up if you haven’t already. It’s a good site to use when you’re preparing to come to one of the shows, but it’s also a great place to keep conversations going and stay in touch with vendors, conference speakers, and other attendees. We’re going to be continuing to blog there and you’ll find other interesting content on the site as we work to make Interop a 365-day-a-year place to meet, rather than just a great event that happens a couple of times a year.

Now, nothing is going to replace a face-to-face meeting at the “Live-space” Interop. I’m going to have a couple of blog posts on just that subject in the very near future. But if the NOC team has taught me anything it’s that the contacts you make at Interop are far too valuable to leave for once or twice a year–it’s important to keep the discussions going year-round.

Speaking of keeping things going, if you want to see more of Interop, check out the Interop photostream at Flickr! There are some great shots in there, and you might even see yourself (a useful tool for convincing your boss/spouse that you were actually at the show).

Let us know what you think, and check in on us at MyInterop. It’s a solid professional tool that can be a great personal networking tool all year.

Jim Metzler starts off saying that network performance monitoring is hard now, and will be an order of magnitude harder with cloud computing. This is especially true with public clouds, and that’s made more difficult because there are so many different definitions of cloud computing.

Jim says that, in the trio of “better, faster, cheaper” that cloud computing offers two out of three: it can be faster and cheaper, but it’s probably not better in any traditionally-measurable sense.

Now Steve Shalita is talking about the challenges of measuring network performance. He’s first running through the definitions and configurations of physical clouds (stratus, cirrus, etc.) and comparing those to IT clouds. He draws some good analogies boiling down to the idea that business dependence on clouds is growing along with their complexity. He defines clouds by the abstraction of services from infrastructure, with on-demand and at-scale delivery thrown in for good measure.

Looking at cloud transactions and the systems involved — a critical step in beginning to understand how to measure performance. There’s no question that it’s an extension of the problem of measuring performance and impact of applications in a virtualized environment — it’s just as important to understand what is being virtualized, and which segments of the network are being hit by each. Steve is talking about the necessity for visibility into the cloud — this may be the most significant issue in understanding what’s really going on with your application.

Another great session, and the room continues to fill, but there are more things at Interop for a roving blogger. More in a bit…

We hear about different operating systems (including a pitch for us to try Ubuntu — I’ve got to load that onto one of my spare laptops when I get back home), and different hardware platforms. He then goes on to say that one of the models we’ve been using for mobile computing — the “take it all with you” model — is inherently broken. We’ll be hearing about alternatives for the rest of the session.

OK, this is interesting — we’re hearing about LodgeNet (those good folks who bring you TV and Internet in lots of hotels), and the possibility of linking a handset into the network for controlling all the various functions of my hotel stay. Why can’t I, for example, use my handset to control the room temperature, check in and check out, make purchases at the hotel, and get me into my room? With proper authentication (and perhaps a good USB key containing data), I should be able to use that nice, large monitor in the room as my window on the Internet. The point is, with my handset and the right infrastructure at the hotel, I really shouldn’t need to carry a laptop computer. Hmmm.

Now, Craig is looking at another mobile option, the Novatel MiFi that we heard David Pogue talk about yesterday. It’s a product we’re hearing more people talk about, so it is going to bear some more watching in the future…(on a personal note, I’d love for AT&T to get one of these, hint, hint…)

Now we’re touching on mobile device management, a field that’s going to be a much bigger issue as companies put more applications and services on mobile devices. Craig’s major question is how mobile management tools work with devices that are owned by the employee. He sees this as a larger issue as more companies allow employees to use their own devices as corporate tools. Again, this ties into one of the things we heard about in yesterday’s keynote address, when Mark Templeton spoke about the consumerization of enterprise IT.
The ultimate limitation on handsets, Craig says, is batteries. He;s not a fan of fuel cells (actually, he’s not a fan of gaseous hydrogen as an energy storage medium), but thinks that better batteries and super-capacitors will help.
The final area here is “Openness 2.0″ which will include, he thinks, net neutrality and open access. He thinks that traffic prioritization will be allowed, rather than pure network throttling, I agree that it’s going to be very interesting if we’re able to take any phone onto any carrier’s network.
The wrap-up is that mobile life, rather than mobile work will be the future. We’ll ultimately, though, be doing it in a device-independent way. So far, carriers and vendors have tried to use mobile devices to constrain consumers, but the end-game is using them to enable users rather than limiting them. He points out that the sociological implications haven’t been fully explored (and he’s right, though I’ve seen some good work from a uses & gratifications viewpoint) and that there is good work to be done here.
This was a high-level session, but that’s good — you don’t need everything to be on the level of the very technical sessions I sat in on yesterday. That’s one of the great things about Interop — there are sessions aimed at all kinds of IT pros, from implementers to managers. Now, on to the next session,..

The speakers take us through the major trends in computing and security and there’s really nothing surprising here, but it’s interesting to hear new confirmation of the things I’ve written about for the last couple of years. The biggest issues they cover are that mobility and social networking are increasing, that rapidly-evolving threats using social networking are increasing, and that regulatory compliance is an ever-greater driver of security spending.

The biggest surprise is a question from the audience about how to convince management that security is a real issue. I would have thought everyone was on board with this by now, but I’m apparently wrong. The basic answer is that you should be concerned if you have employees, customers, or revenue. If you have none of those, then you have issues well beyond security’s ability to address.

This is a cool session, and it’s going to get better, but there are other sessions I want to peek into this morning, so it’s on to the next room…

First, while there is a mobile networking section of the exhibit floor, it’s not as large as I would have imagined. That’s not because there aren’t mobile apps and services here, but because mobility is increasingly a function within larger applications and technologies — a feature rather than a category. That’s an interesting evolution, with some fairly significant ramifications for companies. It’s also a sign, I think, that “mobile” is become the accepted way of doing business rather than an exception to the rule. As one of the speakers pointed out today, “Business is becoming some thing you do, rather than someplace you go.”

Next, security remains huge. A piece of that is companies trying to figure out how to secure all those mobile users, but there are other things at work, too.

One is that demonstrating compliance with regulations is now as much a driver as merely being secure. Another is that everyone has finally gotten the message that taking care of customer and partner data is worth doing, even if it costs money to make sure it happens. The costs, it seems, are less for security than for compensating victims. How appropriate.

While a lot of vendors are still focused almost exclusively on the large enterprise market, a growing number recognize that there are a ton of smaller companies growing and building their IT infrastructures. At lunch, I sat at a table with an IT manager from a small (140-employee) energy company who’s dealing with virtualization, server consolidation, mobile applications, security, and regulatory compliance — with a staff of about four people. For him, it’s not a question of what to do (since he’s charged with doing it all), but finding products that make it easy to do the things he must. He really needs to spend his time learning the basics of security, for example, rather than the intricacies of a particular IPS. I’ve already seen this driving user interface design in the security space, and it’s coming in more and more examples of complex network infrastructure components.

This last conversation, in my opinion, was also a great example of why a conference like Interop is valuable. I’d never met this gentleman, will likely not see him again, but we shared a great conversation at lunch, and I learned quite a bit about the things he’s struggling with as he does his job. That’s highly valuable for me, and I could have tweeted a request all day long and never gotten a response that would have led me to such a conversation. Serendipity is a wonderful thing, and I’m looking forward to more of it tomorrow.

I’ll be hitting the conference early, then the exhibit floor, then back to the conference for the early-afternoon keynote. It should be a good day — let me know if there are any things I need to keep my eyes open for while I’m here!

I’d love to tell you what the panel was discussing, but I can absolutely tell you that people are serious about cloud computing at Interop. We can debate questions like the one asked in the session title, and we can even ask whether cloud computing is “real”, but regardless of our answer the attendees are certain: cloud computing is real, and they want to know more about it.

In a very real way, this ties back to the first couple of speeches in the keynote this morning. Cloud computing is an extension of virtualization, and a serious continuation of the software-as-a-service model. It’s new enough that many of its applications have hit consumers first, but the enterprise customers are coming because the model just makes too much sense.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t significant questions to be answered, especially around security and regulatory compliance issues. The key, though, is that there is enough entry to force the questions to be answered, and answered sooner rather than later. This won’t be the last time we see standing-room only crowds for cloud sessions at Interop, and I see things only getting stronger from here.