The Road to InteropNet: 5 Weeks and Counting

March 28th, 2008 by Julia Lim

I don’t think I can quite express our feelings upon learning we had been selected for InteropNet. There was certainly elation – after months of talking about it, submitting the proposal for the RFP and then the long tense wait to hear. We had been hoping for an early Christmas present and had to leave for our holidays still waiting. And then the news. The entire office stopped what we were doing and had a toast.

Being chosen for InteropNet is a milestone for the company – a validation of sorts that we’re on the right track, if we had any doubts. Sure we could point at our customer list and especially some of the marquee names we have on there – don’t think we don’t celebrate those as well. But when you’re a young company like ScienceLogic and competing against giants like the Big 4 – HP, IBM, CA, BMC – validation like this is pretty sweet.

We had been tracking the INTEROP show for a while and finally decided that its growing focus on network performance management and optimization went beyond the network-centric/network-only focus of the show in the past into the area where we play – comprehensive IT operations management or performance and fault management for everything on the network, plus ticketing plus asset management. It’s that holistic view of IT service delivery that we think should be the monitoring holy grail, yet still giving each IT guy/gal the individual and granular views and tools for what they have to track.

So first came elation and then hard on its heels the realization of just how big a bite we’d taken. This thing is huge! The show network is meant to be a showcase of technology on quite a large scale. One of the vendors is bringing 30 people with them to support InteropNet – that’s more than we have in our whole company. INTEROP Vegas itself is going to have over 750 exhibitors and over 35,000 attendees. The logistics alone for planning, building, and deploying the show network and coordinating 17 very different vendors plus all the volunteers is mind-boggling. And they do this for every show. Hats off to Geoff Horne and Valerie Bojarski!

In the end we’re committed to not just getting it right, but to shine while we do it. And that means supporting Geoff’s goals for InteropNet. Goal #2 is about monitoring – and not just monitoring but in Geoff’s own words, “This year we intend to do the impossible and we want to know about all the network problems before anyone tells us about it. To that extent we’ve put in a huge effort to ensure that every device, link, path and protocol is managed monitored and distilled up into a single reporting system.” That’s us – EM7 in a nutshell.

5 weeks and counting to INTEROP Vegas. If you’re coming to the show, you can see for yourself how well we did. We’ll be on big screens as you walk by the glassed-in NOC area. And check back here on the blog as we share tales along our road to InteropNet.

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March 28th, 2008