Interop Las Vegas 2011 – III

It was a low-key day at Interop Las Vegas the first day the exhibition hall was open. One thinks that that this year’s Interop may be a bit slow when they have drawings for iPads at the keynote. The giveaway du jour at this year’s event is remains the iPad, similar to RSA San Francisco, several months ago.

Traffic on Interop Las Vegas exhibition floor seemed okay, though not stupendous. Rows began with 500, rather than 100. Interesting… Best tchotchke? A car giveaway is going on. The iPad giveaway seems to be fairly common. Shirts are not as prevalent as they once were.

McAfee put out a press release about their cloud security platform but were referring people to their parent company, Intel, to learn about it. Perhaps it was discussed during the presentations. Riverbed Technology and Akamai announced a partnership. Results of this partnership will not be seen until 2012. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/10/akamai_riverbed_cloud_optimizer/ . Trend Micro? No booth but they were talking about their cloud offering in the Cisco booth and will be giving a session on “The Evil Hack in the Sky, Cloud Security”, on Wednesday. Blue Coat Systems is leading three sessions, “The New Age of Wan Optimization” (Thursday), “Breakthrough Wan Technologies” (Wednesday), and “Cloud, Video and Internet: Redefining the Requirements for WAN Optimization” (Wednesday). Blue Coat also had a pair of press releases on Tuesday, “Blue Coat breaks the Barrier for Public Cloud Optimization” and “Blue Coat Defines Next Generation WAN Optimization”.

Workouts people could have at the show for prizes? Virtual boxing, putting, riding a mechanical bull, and racing miniature racecars.

Internet Security vendors ESET, Comodo, McAfee, and G Data were all within close proximity of one another on the floor. No barbs were being thrown. ESET had the largest booth and tallest employee. Comodo seemed to be talking partnerships.

If you had to pick one booth for having the hired booth staff that most epitomized Las Vegas? Securence.

Wednesday should be the busiest day on the show floor in the afternoon with the 3:00 to 5:00pm pub-crawl.

They keynote panel on Wednesday “How to Avoid Post Cloud Traumatic Stress Disorder”. Representatives from Citrix, Terremark Worldwide, and Rackspace Hosting will be on the panel. http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/conference/keynote-speakers.php