Interop 2012 Hot Topics

By Mike Anderson

Interop 2012 was held May 6 through 10 in Las Vegas this year, and BYOD was with me again throughout the show. Interop had a broad agenda including cloud computing, networking, wireless and mobility, virtualization, data center, storage, collaboration, information security and risk management, and IT management. Making networks work received lots of attention and resource management tools garnered awards, but BYOD was a hot topic for everyone.

Interop: Software Defined Networks

A big message at this event was the software-defined network. Both Hewlett-Packard and VMware used the keynote stage to promote the concept to simplify and significantly speed up provisioning of applications. The vision of a software-defined data center is behind VMware’s message, with a future where a management console can be used to configure and deploy applications and the compute, storage and network resources. Speed and flexibility are part of the promise, making it easier to take on big data analysis and growing mobile applications.

 

 

Interop: Mobile and mobility management

Using software to abstract and simplify the underlying hardware model was central to the mobile message at Interop. Mobile is the hottest thing going. Enterprises are challenged on all fronts to deal with the devices, link with their mobile customers, and figure out how their software portfolio can go mobile. Moving beyond the device focus of MDM was part of the Interop agenda across all mobile sessions. Our upcoming research and Aragon Globe take on this issue and address the need for a holistic approach for enterprise mobile management.

Interop: BYOD has everyone scrambling

At Interop BYOD was everywhere. Nearly every booth on the show floor had a sign or session with the BYOD theme. Attendees flocked to the mobile sessions, nearly every one of which had a BYOD hook, and more than one of which was standing room only.

Interop was the place to go for a BYOD solution. The answer to “BYOD done right” was there, at least I found no fewer than four different answers on the show floor with such a message on vendor signage. The networking vendors have an answer, the telephony vendors have another, and more than one integration and services vendor can solve this problem. App stores, mobile device management and mobile app management can all help to rein in the impending chaos of users and devices overtaking the enterprise with BYOD.

Catch our upcoming webinar on May 18^th, “BYOD: Your Future Workplace”, where we’ll dig into the BYOD challenge.