What Happens In Vegas: 25 Scenes From Interop 2009

Interop Las Vegas 2009 has ended, and the hangovers (whether from being overworked or overindulging) have faded. The week saw tens of thousands of IT professionals storm the Mandalay Bay Convention Center to check out the latest products, discover new tips and techniques and network with peers.





It was a whirlwind week in which a lot happened. In some cases, if you blinked, you may have missed something. Here are 25 scenes from Interop Las Vegas 2009 -- in case you missed it.

HP's presence at Interop couldn't be ignored. The company's booth was front and center on the show floor and in the opening keynote, Marius Haas, senior vice president and general manager of HP's ProCurve Network division, talked about the state of networking.







"Networking is becoming overly complicated, expensive and proprietary," Haas told the crowd. "There is absolutely no reason why the network architecture can't change."

Nortel Networks didn't hide its face at Interop Las Vegas. Instead, the struggling company, which is still in the throes of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, rolled out a bunch of new gear in its bid to regain traction in the enterprise. On the show floor, Nortel was all about straight talk with customers and potential customers in what it called its "No BS Zone."

Dovetailing with ProCurve's Haas' keynote address, Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group (front) and Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, took the stage to discuss the two companies' joint $180 million investment in unified communications and collaboration.

Here, HP's Livermore and Microsoft's Elop conduct a meeting via HP's Halo Telepresence Solutions. As part of their four-year plan for unified communications, the two companies have integrated Halo on the desktop.

Behold InteropNet, Interop's Network Operations Center (NOC). Inside this gigantic enclosure is all the gear and all of the people who powered Interop's network this week.

In Vegas, it's almost customary to live a rock star's lifestyle. On the show floor, attendees got pictures to prove it, posing in rocker garb to have their pictures taken at one exhibitor's booth.

VMware CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod took to the keynote stage to give attendees an outline of VMware's plans for virtualization of servers, virtualization on the desktop and virtualization on smartphones.

Wireless vendor Xirrus staged a battle royale between Wi-Fi and wired networks, going so far as having live boxing in its booth on the show floor. Here, pugilists representing wired and wireless networks duke it out for network dominance.

Telecom brokers knew how to drive booth traffic: Give away shot glasses and hold drawings for high-end bottles of tequila.

Stefan Oberg, Skype for Business' vice president and general manager, took to the stage to discuss the VoIP provider's plan for the enterprise, which will soon include launching a channel program.

Micro Tek played upon the child in all of us to draw attendees to the booth, letting show-goers build their own Lego people.

Gigamon, known for its striking orange GigaVUE data access switches, kept the orange theme going, serving up fresh-squeezed OJ from this state-of-the-art juicer.

With a host of server managers in attendance, whoever made this T-shirt was likely looking over their shoulder throughout most of Interop.

ROI is nice and all, but the promise of free beer is good in any economic environment.

During an after-party at the Red Square vodka bar at Mandalay Bay, ProCurve Networking by HP offered up ice-cold shots of premium vodka.

Fusion-io showed off its storage capabilities, streaming 1,250 DVD-quality videos from a single drive.

Rock Solid Technical Services, a virtualization training and consulting firm specializing in VMware, had a beachy booth with bikini-clad babes. We're not sure what virtualization and bikinis have in common, but it certainly worked on the Interop show floor.

Remember these? F5 Networks sure did, passing out these ridable bouncy balls to attendees. Only question is: How the heck are people getting these home?

Kaspersky Lab pulled no punches against its competition in the security space, calling other security solutions "positively medieval" and suggesting they retreat from battle.

Interop exhibitors strutted their stuff on the dance floor at the Interop exhibitor's party Wednesday night. Here, a contest participant tears it up.

Along with a dance-off, Interop organizer TechWeb also held a fund-raiser at the exhibitor party. The fund-raiser was held for Science Buddies, a nonprofit charity organization that promotes science literacy by providing free science-fair project ideas, answers and tools to teachers, parents and students. TechWeb agreed to match donations dollar-for-dollar. Here, TechWeb's Eric Faurot kicks off the event, which brought in more than $5,000 for Science Buddies.

Interop this year also included the Enterprise Cloud Summit, an integrated conference that discussed all things cloud computing. Here, Russ Daniels, vice president and CTO of cloud services strategy for HP, discusses the cloud and his theory that eventually the cloud will offer "everything as a service."

John McAdam, president and CEO of F5 Networks, took to the Interop keynote stage to discuss IT and business agility, noting that "IT affects everybody's lives. It's not just about cool technology; business models are pretty damn important as well."

And for those who missed the show, here's one last look at the entrance to the exhibit hall for Interop Las Vegas 2009.