Vignettes from Interop

Just got back from Interop -- brain's still a bit foggy for the usual trans-Atlantic reasons -- but one thing that sticks with me is the emphasis put on cloud computing. Everyone I spoke to had an angle on it, whether they're wireless vendors, networking vendors, or server vendors.

All see the shift of applications into the cloud as a definitive shift in the way that computing services will be delivered to us in future.

While we seem to have been here before, with the application service provider frenzy at the top of the dotcom craziness, this time it appears that more prerequisites for software as a service, or cloud computing, or utility computing, or grid computing -- choose your favourite terminology -- are in place, in particular the prevalence of high-speed wide-area networking. People are taking this trend very seriously indeed, with industry veterans saying that they've never seen anything take off so quickly.

I spoke to Interop's general manager Lenny Heymann, and he put it at the top of his top trends list too. People were looking to get a sign of where the industry is, he said. While he admitted that the recession has resulted in a smaller show, there's a lot of energy and innovation, he said.

What was also notable was that Cisco decided to display only a cursory presence, which resulted in other big players -- you know who they are -- make noises in private about whether they might be there next year. But, as one big player said to me, if you're there it costs you half a million dollars and you can't show a return on that investment. If you're not there, everyone thinks you're going down the pan and your share price suffers. So you have to be there....

And before you ask: Las Vegas is still Las Vegas...