Is Interop about inter-operational anymore?

Here in Atlanta waiting for the red eye connection home to Florida and wanted to quickly jot down some reflections on Interop.  The show seems to have settled in nicely at the Mandalay Bay venue.  It seems the right size and not too crowded.  In fact Vegas itself was not very crowded this year. I guess the economy is hurting the town. It used to be said that Vegas was rescission proof.  The worse the economy got, the more people gambled.  But with so much of Vegas not about gambling, I guess the economy has a big effect.  Anyway, back to Interop. 

At one time this show was called Networld+Interop.  The Interop portion was very much about how different networking technologies inter-operated with each other and how you could use products from disparate vendors to run and manage your network.  The labs and noc at Internet was full of engineers from different companies having their products working together.  I don't think that is what the show is about anymore.  It is all about network infrastructure for sure, but the vendors care less how their products work together and more about why you want to buy them.  Even the NAC vendors don't seem to be as focused on it anymore.  Yes, Joel Snyder and his Interop labs NAC team do a nice job of showing how the frameworks work well, but frankly that is a small percentage of the NAC vendors.  Juniper and Microsoft, Microsoft and Cisco and than a bunch of other vendors who try to show how their equipment can fit into the NAC equation.  Some like the switch vendors who are integral to the process and some like Arc Sight how are trying to move beyond SIM and think SSH'ing into switches is a scalable way to perform NAC enforcement, but really don't fit.  Most of the other NAC vendors frankly don't even give much lip service to interoperability.  The same is true for many of the networking vendors as well.  What is the shiny new box from Foundry or HP ProCurve.  Who has a bigger booth, whose booth is smaller than last year? How many people has this company laid off and how much run way do they have left? Who is giving away the best stuff and where is the cool party to go to tonight.  These are the questions of the show.  BTW, the Network World folks threw a great party at the Ghost Bar at the Palms Hotel.  Anyway, Interop has become a great show, but I seriously question how much of it is about interoperability anymore.  There is nothing a matter with it not being so interoperability focused by the way, I think it is just the evolution of this show taking on a life of its own.  Now if it were just not so close in time to RSA.

One thing about this show versus RSA, is that a lot of the attendees are buyers.  End users who come looking for solutions.  They have projects and budgets and want to find the best solutions for their needs.  This is in contrast to adult trick or treaters and business development meetings that have become standard at many other shows.  We saw a marked increase of people with NAC projects stopping by the booth this year, which is encouraging to say the least. 

Anyway, I have had my fill of Vegas, at least until Black Hat this summer.  Will be interesting to see if the casinos are more crowded then.