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.
A couple weeks after returning from Las Vegas Interop, it was off to Tokyo for Interop there. I’ve spent considerable time in Japan in the past, and have attended Interop Tokyo before, but not since the end of the bubble, so this was not unlike a return to a hometown long after your parents and friends had moved away and nobody knows you anymore.
Everyone who travels to Japan for the first time imagines it to be an unrecognizably alien lifescape, something between a samarai drama set and Blade Runner. So the first impression is that, "Hey, this really isn’t much different from anywhere else. They’ve even got McDonalds and 7-11 on every corner, and Dominos delivers once you get sick of raw fish." By the second day, you realize that things really are different here: that cup of McDonalds coffee holds about 2 ounces, and the Dominos pizza is topped with corn kernels. And tuna fish. Hmmm. Better stick with the raw fish and green tea.
So it’s not surprising that the Tokyo version of Interop differs from Vegas. To start with, it’s in Tokyo, not Vegas. Vegas is for visitors. There’s no networking industry there, and few large enterprise networking professionals that vendors like Apposite shell out tens of thousands of dollars for the chance to meet. Everyone comes in for the week, and that limits attendance to vendors, analysts, and the few people who can afford to spend a week away from the office looking at products that they could see on the web.
Interop Tokyo isn’t actually in Tokyo, is really Chiba – the equivalent of holding Interop NY in New Jersey. Not quite downtown, but only an hour commute away, and close to where many of the downtown workers actually live. And unlike the U.S., where corporate headquarters are spread around the country, Japanese business activity is unimaginably concentrated in Tokyo.
Take all of the government and military organizations in Washington, the entire finance industry of New York, all the educational institutions of Boston, the technology business of Silicon Valley, the retail companies based in Chicago, and the import-export business of Los Angeles, and plop them all down in one city of 35 million people, and you have Tokyo.
Of course, this extreme level of concentration means that space is at a premium, and all the complications the come with that. There’s a reason riders are crammed onto the subway like sardines. So the gateway to Japan, Narita Airport, was built far outside the city. If you thought Dulles was a trek, try placing the only major airport for Washington in … Pennsylvania. The taxi ride from Narita into town runs $200, though only a clueless foreigner would take a taxi when the train will get you there in half the time for $35. Still, after a twelve hour flight, the last thing I wanted was two more hours on the train before I could reach my bed.
The net result is that Interop Tokyo is both bigger and smaller than Vegas. The physical size of the show seemed to take up about half the floor space of Vegas, and that’s after combining Interop, RSA, and a digital signage show. Most of the booths were not individual vendors but distributors. For example, Apposite Technologies which had a small booth at Interop Vegas, was just one product in our distributor’s booth in Tokyo. There were very few 10 x 10 booths (the most basic size), and I can’t remember seeing any locally developed products.
And yet, in this small area, they had attendance of 131,000 people, ten times as many as Interop Vegas. Ten times. I suspect there’s some double and triple counting, and the number is down considerably from previous years, but it’s still impressive. And crowded.
And really hot. If you want one anecdote to understand Japan, here it is: to reduce oil consumption and meet obligations to combat global warming, the government this year urged people to cut down on air conditioning. Japan weather is much like Washington, DC – hot, rainy, and unbearably muggy in the summer, cold and brittle in the winter. To make things more comfortable, the government also urged people to take off their suits and dress more casually.
Well, the air conditioner was on low, if it was on at all, everywhere I went. The convention center must have been over 85 degrees, and 95% humidity. And yet, almost everyone was wearing a suit, with a tie. Gaman, enduring trials and tribulations without complaint, is burned into the Japanese spirit, along with collective decision making, obedience to authority, and not standing out from the crowd. Some days you think Japan is not so different, and some days you just want to scream, "Take off the damn tie!" Once you understand why they can’t, you’ll realize why GM is bankrupt.
But sometimes the differences just make you smile.
First, there’s the eye candy. Nearly every booth had a collection of “campaign girls,” cute young women in sexy uniforms and high heels. Not the booth babes of Vegas, but more appealing, with wholesome smiles and light bows, standing in a row in front of their booths, waving you in. At the beginning of the day, as I sauntered down the aisle to our booth in the back, hundreds of them were lined up in a gauntlet of smiles. I had planned to include a few photos with this article, but let’s just say that my wife found me spending a little too much time sorting the pictures from the show and deleted them all.
Click here if you want to see what I manage to find on the web giving our readers an idea what I am talking about.
I spent the better part of three days standing across a narrow aisle from ten girls like these. It’s enough to make you forget how to say “WAN emulator” in Japanese. (If you’re curious, the Japanese word for WAN emulation is “WANエミュレータ”, which is read: “WAN e-myu-rei-ta.” Seriously.)
Note to wife – I didn’t talk to the girls. Not a single one. I swear. Not even a konnichiwa. Well, maybe an occasional konnichiwa, but nothing more. Really.
Second was the hotel. In the land of the $60 melon, I had a nice hotel room for $80, across the street from the convention center, with a hot spring-style bath. For recovering from standing in a booth for an entire day, sweating in a suit, there is nothing quite like soaking in a steaming bath outside as the cool, damp air off the bay blows over you.
And then there’s the sake. Not sure if it’s jetlag or whether I still have a hangover. If you’ve only had the cheap stuff they serve in sushi bars in the U.S., you haven’t had sake. Go to Japan, find a good liquor store, and buy a few bottles of the good stuff. If you bring them by our office, we’ll supply the dried squid.
And now to justify the cost of flying to Tokyo, staring at pretty girls and drinking sake so I could write this report for you – the obligatory product pitch: You really need a network simulator, whether you call it a WAN emulator or a WAN e-myu-rei-ta. Trust me. If you don’t believe me, read my next article. Buy one from our competitors if you really must, but you’ll like ours better. At least promise that after you’re done staring at the girls, you’ll take a look of our products by clicking the following.
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