By Brian Boyko,
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Right now, some of NetQoS’s best and brightest are at the Interop conference in Las Vegas. (Our booth number is 1853, and that should be easy to remember – it’s the same year the Crimean War started.)

I’m not with them. Not so much that I’m not one of the best and brightest here, but after casually mentioning offhand at last year’s Interop that I seemed to prefer Atlantic City for my entertainment/gambling needs, the entire town of Las Vegas grabbed their emergency pitchforks and torches (stashed conveniently under the baccarat tables) and ran me out of town.

Other than that, it was a pleasant trip.

The thing that gets me about Interop is that it’s a trade show, yes, but it’s more than just a networking trade show. The conference really revolves around the massive network set up on-site. It’s an interesting trial-by-fire where different network vendors get to find out in a real-world environment exactly how well their products interoperate (hence the name) with others.

Douglas Gourlay at Cisco, who has been to many more Interops than I have, talks about the Interop spirit, if you will:

Back when Interop started no one was certain which protocols would win, whether bridging or routing was the way to go, whether it would be Ethernet, ATM, Token Ring, or FDDI/CDDI to the desktop, etc. What Interop did was force multiple vendors to work together to build a network to support the show floor in a matter of days. There were also interoperability tests of new protocols and such between multiple vendors hardware, software, protocols, etc. In the end it became a gathering place for 20,000+ network professionals to see what worked, what didn't, hear about the latest and greatest…

And watch forklifts get driven into McAfee’s booth.