Futher Comments About Interop and Interoperability

May 16th, 2008 by David Link

A friend of mine Alan Shimmel writes a very interesting and well visited blog. We had a nice chance to catch-up at Interop and had a blast at a late night party that ScienceLogic sponsored during the show.

Recently Alan wrote an interesting post about the lack of “interoperability” at Interop, but we saw just the opposite.

Because we were a very active part of InteropNet (EM7 provided the network monitoring and help desk solutions), our perspective is completely different. InteropNet (and iLabs) are by nature meant to be examples of very large multi-vendor efforts to build interoperability solutions that literally run the show floor and are available for all attendees to inspect – via the NOC tours.

Maybe it all comes down to perspective? From Alan’s perspective, vendors at the show did their own thing and cared less about how their products worked with one another and more about why people should buy them. Of course they did; exhibiting vendors market their own solutions for proprietary technologies. From our perspective, we spent something like 6-8 man-weeks over the last few months building and managing InteropNet with the other 16 technology sponsors that had to come together and work together to deliver the largest temporary network in the world.

So, to Alan’s point, perhaps there is more that Interop could do to get the word out about interoperability achievements. Beyond the NOC and iLabs tours, the show could hold attendee sessions or tape a video documentary on how InteropNet is built – to borrow a few ideas from Michael Wilde of Splunk. And how about an “Interop Historian” who captures just such stories at the show? I think it’s far more compelling to read about multi-vendor solutions and how they operate in the real world than one more story taken from a press release a vendor did just to have news at a show.

So Alan, one question for you since you brought it up.What has StillSecure done to create interoperability with other vendors that you could promote at Interop?

Popularity: 43% [?]

May 16th, 2008