Author Profile - DC Palter is the President of Apposite Technologies, a leading vendor of easy-to-use, professional quality WAN emulation products. He previously held positions in marketing and engineering at Mentat/Packeteer (now Blue Coat), Hughes Electronics, Kobe Steel, and Honeywell. Mr. Palter is the author of two textbooks on WAN acceleration and the Osaka dialect of Japanese, and holds patents in network acceleration, satellite networking, and combustion technology. He earned an MBA from UCLA and a BS in Energy Eng. from Northwestern. Mr. Palter can be reached at dc@apposite-tech.com.
I’ve been attending Interop almost since the dawn of Internet time. I’ve seen the show grow from a network interoperability test forum (hence the “Interop” name) with a few vendor exhibitions, to a Vegas monstrosity complete with dancing girls and magicians, its implosion after the end of the tech bubble, and its recent resurrection. I’ve seen it combined for most of its time as the junior partner with Networld, Novell Netware’s show, and watched Novell – originally the big name in networking – decline to the point where it isn’t even at the show.
In fact, I originally met my business partner in Apposite Technologies at Interop in 1995 in Atlanta (the only convention center on the East Coast large enough to hold it.) We were both involved in an interoperability demonstration of IPv6. Don’t get me started on IPv6 -- I’ll leave that whole ugly topic for a future article. I’m going to stick to comments about Interop today.
One thing that I’ve noticed about Interop is that every year there is some new hot topic. And it’s not the buzzword of the day that the show is promoting. One year it was ATM, the next year it was VPNs. Last year it was 10 Gig networks. Every vendor was either selling 10 Gig boxes, or being asked when they were going to support them.
But a funny thing seems to happen on the way to the Forum, or inside Caesar’s Palace. The hot topic one year fades into obscurity the next. ATM, which conventional wisdom (or at least convention wisdom) declared to be the future of networking, got obliterated by fast Ethernet, then quietly resurrected as MPLS where it runs the backbone while we continue with cheap GigE on the LAN.
Which raises a separate digression. Go to Supercomm and it’s all MPLS; go to Interop and everything is Ethernet. Telecoms and networking folks use different technologies and speak a different language, which is one of the big problems when we need to work together to pass the same packets from one side of the world to the other.
Anyway, back to Interop. Last year’s 10 Gig craze has also faded away. Sure, there’s now plenty of products that support 10 Gbps, including our own 10 Gbps network simulators, but honestly, not many end users have upgraded to 10 Gig networks yet. Last year it was a had-to-have; customers were getting ready to migrate within days, minutes if they could. This year it’s a wait-and-see-we’ll-need-it-eventually-but-not-yet-we’ll-call-you-when-we’re-ready kind of thing.
So the question is: what was this year’s big topic? It wasn’t the buzzwords that the show was promoting – cloud computing and mobility. I’d love to give you a self-serving response like “WAN emulation,” but honestly, it wasn’t. The answer, unfortunately but not surprisingly, was the economy. That’s all anyone, exhibitors and attendees, was talking about.
Sure, there were plenty of vendor announcements. Apposite had three separate announcements – new XFP interfaces for our 10 Gig box, a new firmware release with some useful improvements, and a partnership with another vendor that uses our simulators to test their own boxes. In other words, run of the mill, prosaic stuff, covering up with volume the lack of a big announcement of some best-thing-since-wonderbread new product.
Which leads me to two possible, slightly contradictory conclusions. First, that the Great Recession has changed our priorities. Instead of the usual announcements of bigger, faster, newer, the networking industry has refocused a bit on cheaper, better, and more stable. A welcome change if you ask me, but it still doesn’t win you a Best of Show award, or even a paragraph in Network World.
When the economy improves, will we return to business as usual? Will we go back to building the biggest, fanciest, most complicated products possible to wow customers, journalist, and investors, or have we matured and are suddenly content to build products that solve customers’ real problems, and keep it simple, affordable, and easy-to-use? It all depends on what sells, but this year’s message seems to me to be based more on desperation than conviction.
My second, and somewhat sad conclusion, is that Interop has lost some of its former glory, never to return. It’s probably inevitable that many of the success stories have outgrown our little show. Cisco doesn’t make their big announcements at Interop any longer; they’ve got separate conferences for users, partners, and investors that are each bigger than Interop. As does HP, Citrix, EMC, Juniper, and many other of the important vendors.
Nevertheless, Interop still remains the one show for enterprise networking, the one place to shake hands with the customers that you’ve emailed and phoned for years but never met in person, the one place to spy on your competitors, and have a beer with your friends from the last place you worked.
And the good news amongst the chatter and gossip, repeated endlessly, is that the economy does seem to be looking up again, knock on wood veneer laptop case. Attendance at the show seemed down a bit, but it wasn’t the ghost town I had been expecting, and for the most part, the people who were there seemed to be looking for real solutions for real problems, not just checking out the latest and greatest on a company-funded boondoggle.
So in the end, it was a week of hard work for us in the booth, with fewer people working longer shifts this year, and considerably less eye candy around the floor, but it was still worth it. If you weren’t able to attend this year, we’ll be back next year. Stop by our booth and say hi.
And now to justify the time my company is paying me to stare at the computer screen and procrastinate while I try to think of the words for this article – the obligatory product pitch: You really need a network simulator. Trust me. If you don’t believe me, read my last article, or my next. Buy one from our competitors if you really must, but ours is better. At least promise you’ll give us a look.
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