Interop Turns 25: Scenes From Interop's Big Anniversary

Happy Anniversary, Interop!

Interop turned 25 this year, and the massive tech show pulled out all the stops to celebrate its quarter-century. From industry luminaries to big vendors making big announcements, Interop Las Vegas 2011 had it all.

There was a lot going on, and you were sure to miss something. Here are 25 scenes from Interop's 25th anniversary … in case you missed it.

Cisco Best Watch Out

HP Executive Vice President and General Manger of Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking Dave Donatelli showcased HP's new FlexNetwork offerings, which he said beat out Cisco in a host of performance categories.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Packed House

A capacity crowd sits and listens to the keynotes at Interop Las Vegas 2011.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Standing Room Only

Some Interop attendees were forced to find a seat on the floor during the Tuesday morning keynotes.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Cloud And Consumerization

Citrix CEO and President Mark Templeton took to Interop to implore attendees to embrace the shift toward cloud computing and the consumerization of IT; two forces that are changing technology as we know it.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

The Expo

The Interop crowd converges on the show floor, where hundreds of vendors showcase their latest and greatest products.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Punch Out!

Interop attendees duke it out at the Blue Coat booth, beating up on poorly performing WANs.

Get With The Times

Cisco Senior Vice President and CIO Rebecca Jacoby (front) and Cisco Senior Vice President Brett Galloway used their keynote to show how Cisco is using emerging technologies like virtualization and video to save big bucks and boost productivity internally.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Melting Away Risks

Security is a slippery subject and security vendor Faronics proved that with this nifty ice sculpture in its booth.

No Bull!

Fusion-io let Interop attendees channel their inner cowboy with this mechanical bull at their Interop booth.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

And Then There's Woz

Fusion-io was offering an iPod signed by its top dog, Steve Wozniak. Dancing With The Stars fans and Apple geeks rejoice!

Ghostly

NetOptics rolled out this Phantom Roadster to entice Interop attendees to its booth.

Vroom!

E-mail security player Securence gave Interop attendees a taste of the high life with this yellow Lamborghini, which was on display in it Interop Las Vegas 2011 booth.

Save Money On Cloud

Microsoft General Manager of Azure and Middleware Zane Adam took to the stage to talk about the economics of public cloud, and how much users can save.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Vinton Takes The Stage

Vinton Cerf, Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, took the stage to discuss the history of the Web and where it's going. Cerf was instrumental in many of the advancements that led to the Internet of today.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Awkward!

David Yen was scheduled to take the Interop stage as executive vice president and general manager of Juniper's Switching Business Group. But just days before Interop, Yen was wooed away by Cisco to head its UCS division, leaving no time to change conference literature.

Juniper Comes Through

Alex Gray, senior vice president and general manager of the campus and branch networking division at Juniper, took the stage in David Yen's absence and gave the Interop crowd an overview of the "exponential data center" required to power today's massive IT environments.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

CIOs Are Rethinking IT

Scott Hopkins, general manager of IBM Global Technology Services, took to the Interop stage and told how the massive growth in server and storage architectures, coupled with miniscule IT budgets, are forcing CIOs to rethink their IT strategies.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Inside InteropNet

A look inside the network operations center that powers all of Interop.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

All Shook Up...Over InteropNet

Outside of InteropNet was perched this Elvis doll, bringing a little touch of Las Vegas to the Interop show floor.

Trippy

Is she for real? Nope! Transition Networks showed off this hologram at its Interop Las Vegas 2011 booth.

Grab Something Good

F5 enticed Interop attendees with this claw game.

What A Character

In the Xerox section of the Cisco booth -- the two recently partnered for a managed printing and cloud initiative -- this caricature artist drew renditions of attendees.

Careful!

At one Interop booth, presenters juggled knives. Surprisingly, no one was hurt.

Photo courtesy of Interop.

Amazon Ramifications

During a cloud computing discussion at Interop, a panel of experts discussed the fallout from Amazon's cloud outage. From left to right: moderator David Berlind, chief content officer for UBM Techweb; Simon Crosby, CTO, Citrix Data Center and Cloud Division; Randy Roland, Terremark Senior Vice President of Product Development; and Andy Schroepfer, Rackspace Vice President of Enterprise Strategy.

A View From Above

The Interop Las Vegas 2011 keynote crowd.

Photo courtesy of Interop.