The conference website of Interop mentions it as “the leading independent technology conference and expo designed to inspire, inform, and connect with the world’s IT community.” As someone who has been attending this conference for several years now, I would have to agree.
Listening to the keynote speeches is always a delight at Interop – hearing the views of the greatest minds in the technology domain is always exciting. This year seems to be no different – there’s a great mix of topics from innovation, cloud, SDN and freedom of information.
One of the interesting things at the conference is the SDN Lab, which they are introducing for the first time at Vegas this year. The Interop team aims to create a lab to test Software-Defined Networking (SDN) systems and applications – including open source software and vendor hardware and software. I guess along with an education of SDN concepts, we will get to check out interoperability of open source and vendor products in a variety of scenarios. I will surely drop by!
I am always curious to understand the latest news from the Storage space. With a dedicated storage track (supported by our very own, VMWare), the sessions are super interesting covering a wide range of topics from Hyper-convergence, big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and of course, Cloud. All the sessions in this track appear to have some bearing for those in the Storage business.
Going beyond technology, one needs to understand the impact of technology on business and I am happy to see that the Virtualization track is trying to address the points related to business impact and benefits. The questions are transforming from “what” and “why” to “how” – “How to contain costs, how to extend the benefits further into the infrastructure?” and so on. I am keen to hear the views of the experts and practitioners on how to take advantage of the next generation of technologies to create a true business impact.
I think that following themes are going to be hot at Interop this year
- Impact of Big Data Analytics and IoT on storage industry
- The era of virtualized hyper-convergence
- Cloud Strategy
The website tells me that there are going to be 300 exhibitors too – I am not sure how to find time to interact with all of them but I am going to try my best. Here’s an idea for those hard working folks organizing Interop – is it time to some kind of Conference planner online to plan for the conference?
Overall, looks like an interesting conference. What are you expecting from the show – maybe we could meet up while we are there?
Anupam Bhide | Calsoft Inc.
