Many Interop Highs, Manilows

No music and passion?!" groused the Grimalkin, la-menting the fact that his Interop Las Vegas schedule at the Mandalay Bay and Barry Manilows gig schedule at the Las Vegas Hilton overlapped. The Mousers unfulfilled Manilow mania nothwithstanding, Interop attendance was on an upswing from last year. The Furball felt the shows keynotes needed pizzazz, however, and would have benefited from some Manilow magic.

Tuesday, May 2, saw Gordon Stitt, co-founder of Extreme Networks, and Don Peterson, CEO of Avaya, sitting side by side, chummily taking questions from an analyst and apparently enjoying the fruits of their multiyear partnership. On Wednesday, Scott Kriens, CEO of Juniper Networks, and Dave Girouard, GM of Google Enterprise, may as well have been at different conferences. The Baron of Babble wished they had more interaction, considering the fact that their companies are on different sides of the net neutrality debate. The Furry One felt there could have been some fun fireworks if theyd debated the merits of charging content providers versus keeping the Internet operating at a flat fee. Alas.

Ciscos booth was crammed with folks, as usual, although the buzz on the show floor was that Ciscos open NAC (Network Admission Control) program isnt really that open—at least, its not if youre going to compete with Cisco switches. Cisco sent ConSentry Networks a cease-and-desist letter, telling the company to back off its participation in the program after ConSentry introduced a competing network switch. ConSentry, which had joined the program to be able to integrate with Ciscos NAC implementation, obliged.

Soon, the KattPhones new ring tone, "Copacabana," brought forth a call from a crony in the Big Apple. The caller claimed a billboard unveiled by AMD in Times Square designed to show how much businesses would save on their electric bills if their servers ran on Opteron chips had a little trouble with its ticker. The sign started counting up from $1 billion and read just over $1.065 billion seconds later when the ticker—and likely a few AMD hearts—stopped shortly after. Fortunately for the chip maker, the sign restarted a few minutes later, said the crony.

"Its a miracle," sang Spence as he bid his pal adieu and refocused his attention on the show floor. The Lynx latched on to some rumors flying about Interops Performance Zone, dubbed "Acceleration Alley" due to all the application acceleration/WAN optimization vendors gathered in the same area. There, the Lynx heard that bandwidth management provider Packeteer is rumored to be close to acquiring Tacit Networks. The Kitty also heard that Force10 Networks was about to file for an IPO earlier this year, but something went amiss and the company ended up booting its CFO. Force10 is once again on the IPO track and may file any day now. "Ready to take a chance again," mouthed the Manilovian Mouser upon hearing the news.

LitterBoxLynx

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