Interop Spells Opportunity

The CMP Media-sponsored show, which takes place April 30 through May 5 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, will host a range of speakers from Google, Avaya, IBM and AT&T, as well as a plethora of product announcements.

Cisco Systems, San Jose, Calif., will be at Interop to show off its revamped 7200 router line, complete with new modules that promise performance improvements for aggregation of services such as security and VoIP from branch offices. The 7200 now scales up to OC-3/Gigabit Ethernet speeds. The 7200 VXR Network Processing Engine-G2 doubles its predecessor’s service performance, while the 7200 VXR VPN Service Adapter triples IPsec VPN service performance.

End users and channel partners are eligible for trade-in rebates on the modules, which make them an enticing upgrade option, said Ethan Simmons, partner at NetTeks Technology Consultants, a Boston-based solution provider.

“It comes at a good time because we’re seeing some Juniper resellers going after that base,” Simmons said. “Now you can’t just forklift and go with Juniper when Cisco is making it so attractive to keep the 7200s in place,” he added.

Citrix Systems, meanwhile, is expected to have a few surprises up its sleeve. News about its NetScaler 12000 Web traffic appliance is expected to break at Interop.

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix will also shed more light on its new desktop application streaming technology, code-named Tarpon. The new technology offers resellers an excellent opportunity to sell additional licenses and services and further develop their existing accounts, said John-Marc Clark, senior director of product marketing, Emerging Products Group, at Citrix.

Expand Networks, Roseland, N.J., for its part, plans to unveil Accelerator 7940, its latest data center appliance for application acceleration. The device offers 45 Mbytes of throughput and supports up to 200 remote sites and up to 1,000 users, combining WAN optimization, compression, quality of service, application delivery and Wide Area File Services capabilities.

It also includes six hot-swappable 500-Gbyte drives for a total of 3 Tbytes of storage capacity, full RAID redundancy and dual power supplies. Accelerator 7940 is scheduled to ship in the second quarter.

Vernier Networks plans to take the wraps off EdgeWall 8800, a network access control offering that companies can use to enforce user-based security policies on high-speed enterprise LANs. To ensure all end points are in compliance with corporate security policies, the EdgeWall 8800 looks at all the traffic flowing over the network using a full-blown intrusion-detection and -prevention engine, said Rod Murchison, vice president of marketing at Vernier, Mountain View, Calif.

“The future of NAC is moving into this realtime inspection capability,” Murchison said.

Dan Riekes, executive vice president at Affidia Systems, an Encino. Calif.-based solution provider, plans to leverage the EdgeWall 8800’s high throughput to offer his customers more robust NAC solutions. “The fact that it’s a clientless solution also allows people to work without a lot of disruption,” he said.

In other show news, Aventail plans to unveil enhancements to the mobile offering it debuted last September. Dubbed Aventail Mobile 2, the beefed-up product adds the ability to remotely control access to end-point devices and a watermarking feature to identify devices and render them useless if they’re lost or stolen, said Chris Witeck, senior product marketing manager at Aventail, Seattle.

Cliff McElroy, vice president of enterprise sales at solution provider Datec, Seattle, plans to use the offering’s new mobile roaming feature, which enables users to move from cellular to Wi-Fi networks without reauthenticating to the VPN. “Having that type of application persistence can be very valuable,” he said.

Internet Security Systems, meanwhile, is slated to debut its Virtual Security Operations Center for managed security services. Rick Miller, vice president of managed security services at Atlanta-based ISS, said Virtual-SOC fits into the vendor’s protection-on-demand vision by providing an online platform companies can use to manage their security infrastructures. ISS also plans to roll out security event and log management services, which will be managed through the Virtual-SOC platform.

In addition, Adtran is expected to debut its Advantage Partner Program for U.S. solution providers. The program splits partners into Silver and Gold levels and adds optional technology specializations for Gold partners in internetworking, wireless, IP telephony and carrier infrastructure, which give them steeper discounts.

“We’ve tried to design a program from the ground up that puts a lot more incentives for what I would call ‘missionary’ selling,” said Steven Harvey, vice president of enterprise sales at Adtran, Huntsville, Ala.