Interop Wrap-up and on to Cisco Live!

June 2nd, 2009 by Julia Lim

This is my first opportunity since the show to just sit down and get a post out about Interop in general with some hopefully funny (to you) stories.

The boys will do a wrap-up of InteropNet – with status on what EM7 monitored on the show network. They did a great job. As usual, if you didn’t hear about a big outage, you know they got the job done. Our own Alejandro won an iPod Shuffle during the Exhibitor Dance-Off but was too naturally shy to go all the way and rip his shirt off during the finals – which memorable scene I remember from last year’s winner.

It was with a lot of curiosity and I’ll admit a bit of nervousness that we exhibited at Interop this year. The economy is stalled if not moving backwards and there didn’t seem to be a lot of hope on the horizon yet. We had just been at FOSE – which had actually increased attendance – (they do have a rather captive government IT audience in DC) – but had a fair share of exhibitors who actually paid for their booth space but were no-shows at the event. For some, they couldn’t afford to send their booth and people (always a big cost at shows); for others, they were just no longer in business.

We’ve followed and written a bit ourselves about what the economic climate is doing for our industry. With the credit crunch, VC’s are tight with their money and the companies that were getting by with infusions of VC capital because they just aren’t profitable yet don’t have a lot of options. Some have been sold in fire sales – and those are the “lucky” ones. Others have simply shut their doors. It was at Interop that I got an email from my friendly neighborhood industry analyst letting me know that Cittio is gone, with some of their “assets” snapped up by Nimsoft. No wonder I didn’t see them at the show this time around…

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Solarwinds, a competitor at the low-end, did a public offering that netted them about $80 million – not enough to pay back all that debt to investors – but enough to give them a very nice billion dollar valuation, which is great for them and good for all of us in the industry.

So Interop – of course there were the no-shows, but not as many as I feared. Interestingly, Solarwinds was noticeably absent. I’ve got a bit of an inside track on why they weren’t at the show (track me down and I’ll tell you in person), but as a marketing person, I have to say they really should have been. I heard a rumor that when the CEO was interviewed on the day they went public (during Interop no less), they actually filmed the interview in front of Interop. Was it a green screen thing? Did they “announce” from the show but not actually exhibit? If any of you know, please share.

As soon as you walked into Interop, you saw a gorgeous swoop of blue coming down from 30 feet in the air – the HP booth front and center, that I will admit inspired some booth envy but mostly a sense of satisfaction that the show looked great. (finally a compliment from me for HP!)

Attendance was down some, but at least for when I was in the booth, the attendees seemed to be better targeted people – the right titles and looking for solutions, serious about getting value out of the show beyond the tchotchkes. What company can afford to send people on a Vegas boondoggle (a word coined by Dave’s own grandfather, scoutmaster Robert H. Link)? None according to President Obama, although he later recanted.

Now it’s on to Cisco Live at the end of the month in San Francisco. There is no rest for the weary. We have been hard at work doing a lot of instrumentation in the EM7 products to deeply monitor a wide variety of Cisco gear and services out of the box – plus our latest version of EM7 G2 (V6) introduced the capability to use  SOAP to communicate with Cisco devices. We expect the show to be great – held right downtown at the Moscone Center. Cisco Telepresence is going to have a big “presence” themselves at the show, and we’ll be finally sharing all the work we’ve done around monitoring that plus all the rest. Stay tuned!

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