Friday, May 13, 2011

Interop Las Vegas 2011, Best of Interop – IV

Traffic was good but not packed, at Interop Las Vegas on Wednesday. The Gigamon presentation was well attended over the course of the day. Their big giveaway was an Apple Airtouch.

“Virtual” seems to be the second work bubbling up at Interop Las Vegas, after the word “cloud”. It seems to be an unwritten requirement at the show.

Sound bites from some of the internet security vendors. ESET pushed their consecutive number of VB100 awards (and got testy when asked if awards and results more than three years old really made a difference). Test results they were showing were 1+ years old. Comodo was pleased with their survey results. GFI and Comodo both talked about how user interfaces were as important as “capture rates”. Trend Micro had their presence in the Cisco booth, talking about the Cisco ASA 5500 and their own content security software.

Watchguard mentioned their 2-year relationship with AVG Technologies and having AVG technology under the hood for their security appliances. Watchguard uses a different vendor for email gateway security.

The name of the game among a number of vendors was WAN acceleration. Secure web gateways were being shown on the floor as were NGFW’s, next generation firewalls.

On Wednesday, the energy level picked at 3 o’clock for the pub-crawl. Sizable amounts of alcohol seemed to be consumed.

The “vendor” party was held Wednesday evening. It had a sort of 80’s theme, and was held in Haze, one of the clubs at the new Aria Casino. It got crowded after 10. Some of the cocktail servers were channeling Devo with red flowerpots on their heads. Madonna songs played frequently.

The Best of Interop 2011

InformationWeek Analytics had 135 finalists for the Best of Interop awards. Below is a listing of the winners. For the complete article, a list of the finalists, and more information, go to http://www.bestofinterop.com/winners/

• Best of Interop (Overall) and Cloud Computing Category Winner - VMware - VMware vCenter Operations Standard 1.0
• Collaboration - Vidyo Inc. - VidyoMobile
• Data Center & Storage - Alcatel-Lucent – Alcatel-Lucent Data Center Switching Solution Blueprint
• Infrastructure - NEC Corporation – NEC ProgrammableFlow Switch
• Network Management, Monitoring and Testing - BreakingPoint Systems, Inc. - BreakingPoint FireStorm CTM
• Performance Optimization - Talari Networks - Mercury T750 APN Appliance
• Security - Barracuda Networks, Inc. - Barracuda Flex
• Wireless & Mobility - Citrix Systems - Citrix Receiver for the iPhone
• Best Start-Up - Ciphertex Data Security

You would have to say that traffic was overall, okay. Perhaps akin to that of people strolling along Claude Debussylaan. The lunches are probably better at Bolenius than inside the exhibition hall at Interop Las Vegas.

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