Mike Fratto
Summary Bullets:
- The upcoming Interop event in Las Vegas will offer lots of sessions and workshops from fellow IT professionals and experts to attend and get current on your interests.
- Take part in the social gathering to meet old friends and make new ones. Personal networking is as important as anything in your career.
Interop is next week and I am looking forward to catching up with old friends, peers, and colleagues and making new acquaintances. Still, the draw for me is meeting with vendors and attending a few of the presentations over the course of the event. The content this year is very solid and there’s something for everyone.
SDN is going to be top-of-mind at Interop, with half-day workshops on Monday and Tuesday and shorter hour-long sessions the rest of the week. You may think you know SDN, but it’s still a rapidly evolving topic; there’s always more to learn that you can apply in your organization. In addition, there will be a number of vendors announcing products and providing demonstrations. There are also sessions such as “The Ethernet Switching Landscape” (parts 1 and 2) and “802.11ac: Not Just a Networking Phase” if SDN isn’t your bag. Take the time and see what the state of the art is.
If you are feeling contrarian with all of the hype around mobility and BYOD, the “You Can Say No to BYOD” session discusses accommodating BYOD without giving away the farm. If you are worrying how new trends will impact you personally, “Will SDN Make Me Homeless?” should be on your list to discuss your concerns, or the concerns of your employees, with a panel and your peers in the audience.
If you are looking for a reality check from peers, there are plenty of topics to explore. Case studies such as “Cloud Adoption One Year On: Lessons Learned” from Harvard Business School Publishing and “What They Don’t Tell You About IaaS” should shed some insights into the how organizations are moving to cloud computing. “A CISO’s Perspective: Making WISE Choices About Information Security” reveals how Western Union turned information security from a roadblock to an enabler. If you ever wondered whether software-defined storage is a reality, the “Software-Defined Storage: Reality or BS?” session should answer those questions.
Be sure to catch the special events such as the Best of Interop awards ceremony on Tuesday from 5:30 to 6:00 and the Startup Hot Seat on Wednesday from 1:30 to 2:30. Finally, when you want to socialize, the welcome reception on Tuesday, the Booth Crawl on Wednesday, and the Interop Party Wednesday night should be on your schedule.
Whether you are a vendor employee doing booth duty or an IT professional coming in for week-long immersion on new technology, you will find more than enough to do while you are there.
