Interop Vegas 2009 Kicks Off

May 19th, 2009 by Julia Lim

Interop General Manager, Lenny Heymann, kicked off the show by acknowledging the tough economic times but remained upbeat and hopeful about the advances in technology that will help us all weather the storm and, not so coincidentally, are being displayed at Interop Vegas this year.

Interop ran some surveys of attendees to get their take on the new technologies and where they are in terms of adoption:

1.     Cloud Computing
13 % already using it
11% plan on using in the next 12 months
35 % interested in/considering using
41% have no plans
(These numbers seem really low to me. As always, maybe the problem is in the as yet hazy and ill-understood definition of cloud computing.)

2.    Server Virtualization
43% already using it
12% have no plans
18% interested in/considering using
15% plan on using in the next 12 months
12% don’t know

3.    Unified Communications
27% have already implemented unified communications
17% planning to implement
24% interested/considering implementing
18% have no plans
14% don’t know

Keynote Part I – HP/Microsoft “Unified Communications Offering”
(Note: since HP is a competitor of ours, you have to take what I say here with a grain of salt, but I’m not the only one perplexed by the HP/Microsoft announcement of the Unified Communications and Collaboration plans. I mean, is it enough to say that you’re going to invest $180 million in R&D over the next 4 years in UCC but not actually say what you’re going to deliver?)

Marius Haas, Senior VP for HP ProCurve Networking, delivered what was meant to be a rousing speech about the joint Microsoft/HP announcement that very few people in the room (by a show of hands) had actually heard about yet. Perhaps it did not help that he spoke after a very loud, scattered HP video intro – which made up in volume what it lacked in substance. There were several seconds of dead silence after the video and before he started speaking – literally dead; I think people were trying to figure out what the point was. And it didn’t get much better after that.

HP’s Ann Livermore launched into the most high level description of the UCC solutions possible – “next step in our long-standing partnership”, “joint R&D to transform communications and collaboration” etc. Still scratching our heads.

The keynote began to get a bit more concrete and ended with a demo of the “end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solution powered by Microsoft and HP”. Kudos to the demo guy, he tried to make it as “unboring” as he possibly could, which was not an easy task.  In a nutshell: combining existing HP products and Microsoft software (if you’re an $11 billion company like Cathay Pacific and can dedicate a person to UCC) can achieve UCC.

No future products announced.

No packaged offerings announced.

No pricing.

No details.  Rather a non-starter until that $180 million starts to deliver.

Keynote Part II – VMware’s Product Plans
Dr Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware, had the unenviable task of following the underwhelming HP/Microsoft talk…or maybe not, because the bar had been set pretty low.  Herrod started off by talking about what an exciting time it was at VMware, which is extending what was once a data center solution (server virtualization) to the desktop and eventually to mobile phones.

If you went to VMworld last September or even read the blog posts we did from there, you will know that VMware has got a lot of initiatives going on – most with the ambiguous delivery date of “2009.” The overall plan is to “Help Deliver IT as a Service” and yes, the cloud is a part of this.

Herrod then outlined some upcoming VMware initiatives (and some even have hard timelines!):

In the data center – Cloud OS
VMware vSphere 4 is shipping this month, self-proclaimed as “the best platform for building cloud infrastructures.” The goals of vSphere 4 are:

• Efficiency – cut capital and operational costs by over 50 percent for all apps
• Control – while automating QOS
• Choice – independent of hardware, operating system, application stack and service providers

The main message here is that VMware wants you to think beyond the initial use of their virtualization technology for server consolidation. With their additional instrumentation and leveraging multi-core hardware capabilities, VMware is now ready to virtualize all apps, in particular the IO-intensive apps that were virtualization-proof previously. Their numbers make the new VMware-virtualized apps capable of serving up to 3 billion page views per day. As a comparison, on a typical day, eBay serves up 1 billion pages.

vCloud
Herrod also discussed VMware’s efforts to build private clouds through the application of vSphere.  VMware’s private cloud comes to fruition (hypothetically depending on your definition of private cloud) by combining vSphere and internal cloud management with vSphere and external cloud management and then using some type of data federation to connect the two (I’ll confess I found this slightly confusing in the image Herrod provided).

But what was not confusing was the Terremark demo on their provisioning and management console for cloud computing – pretty cool and the least boring part of the entire keynote.

vClient – Desktop as a Service
Finally we got to vClient, which is scheduled for a complete rollout in 2009 and delivers centralized management tools with a thin client user experience and a local client virtualization platform on a laptop.  For example, it enables you to work offline on a plane and then when you step off the plane, vClient can stream the “differences” in the client to the cloud.

VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform
In the “vague future plan” category, VMware also plans to deliver a VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform as phones increasingly become PCs. This was pretty cool; imagine having the same virtual machine and being able to move it to different phones. Or having multiple VMs on the same phone – different apps on different OS/platforms.  Hello iPhone apps on Android…and vice versa.

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