Interop Las Vegas 2012: A Big Thanks to the Speakers

Interop Las Vegas 2012 is over. It was a good show--and I'm not saying that because my company, UBM Techweb, runs it as well as Network Computing. I enjoy going to Interop. I've been to 30 (two a year for 15 years), I run into a number of people I know, and I get to meet many more. Some have become good friends and colleagues. Attendance for the Data Center and Storage track sessions—the two tracks that I chair—were up from last year, and we had some good interaction between the speakers and audience during and after the sessions. That's what I call success.

I mainly want to say thanks.

Thanks to the audience members who attended the sessions. I know the speakers appreciate you coming and asking questions. There were a number of good sessions each day; making a choice of where to go was difficult.

Thanks to the track speakers, in no particular order: Dave Peters from ESRI, Kurt Marko from InformationWeek, John Burke from Nemertes, Sam Barnett from Infonetics, Frank Wiener from Cyan, Eric Shepcaro from Telx, Barry Dykes from ViaWest, John Abbott from the 451 Group, Duncan Cambell from HP, Brendon Howe from NetApp, Stephen Steir from VCE and Dheeraj Pandey from Nutanix. The Data Center track was informative, and I'm sure the Interop Las Vegas audience learned from your sessions.

On the Storage track, thanks to Stu Miniman from Wikibon, Howard Marks from Deep Storage.net, Stephen Foskett from Gestalt IT, Randy Kerns from the Evaluator Group and Sandeep Singh from HP. In particular, Marks and Foskett agreed—I still don't know why—to engage in a "Cloud storage is DOA" debate, with Foskett arguing it isn't and Marks arguing it is. (Marks doesn't really think cloud storage is DOA, he was just arguing the point.) It was fun, funny and informative. Marks won by a landslide, but that was due to releasing his inner thespian. You can catch the debate on YouTube.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with:

There were lots of good conversations that I'll dig into later.

If you missed the Las Vegas Interop keynotes, you can catch them at Interop TV. We're getting ready to work on Interop New York, coming Oct. 1 through 5. We should be going through the call for papers and putting together the sessions. I know Jim Metzler and I will do the SDN and Data Center LAN Design workshops again.