Big Names, From NBA to Walmart, Graced Interop’s Stage

Big Names, From NBA to Walmart, Graced Interop’s Stage

by Sean Michael Kerner

Interop 2015 Held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Resort

Once again, the Interop conference was hosted at the Mandalay Bay amid the bright lights and casinos of sunny Las Vegas.

Biggest Names in IT Appear on Interop Show Floor

The exhibitor hall at Interop was a showcase of the biggest names in networking, including Cisco and HP.

Cisco Brought Its Switches and Routers

Perhaps the largest booth at the Interop 2015 event was that of networking giant Cisco. In the booth, Cisco showed off its ASR and ISR routers, Catalyst and Nexus switches as well as its UCS servers.

Walmart’s CIO Calls Legacy IT ‘Classic’

Walmart CIO Karenann Terrell explained that the retailer has a different view on how it looks at legacy IT assets. “We prefer to call it ‘classic’ rather than ‘legacy,'” Terrell said.

NBA CIO Talks Big Data

Michael Gliedman, NBA CIO, explained in his session that the basketball league captures 160GB of data per video angle for each game. Gliedman added that the NBA gets 12 video angles per game, and sometimes there are as many as 15 NBA games going on at the same time.

ConocoPhillips Fuels Its Pipelines With Data

Mike Pfister, ConocoPhillips CIO, explained the critical role that data and analytics play in helping his organization be successful.

Adobe CIO Discussed How to Make IT Better

Adobe CIO Gerri Marting Flickinger shared her views on how to improve IT. As CIO, Flickinger said she has three core responsibilities: business relationship management, supplier management and IT alignment.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Details NSA Surveillance

Kurtl Opsahl, general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), outlined the questionable data acquisition techniques the U.S. government has used.

What Google Learned Building Global Infrastructure

Urs Holze, senior vice president of technical Infrastructure at Google, provided insight into how the tech giant has built out its hardware and software to scale to meet global demand.

Looking for IPv4 Address Space on the Show Floor

The freely available global pool of IPv4 address space is dwindling, which is leading to a new secondary market of vendors. One such vendor is RentIPv4.com, which provides IPv4 address space on a rental basis.

Playing Old-School Games With Akamai

While most of the Interop show floor was all business, Akamai treated those who visited its booth with a pair of old-school arcade games.

IDC Reports on Enterprise Networking Market

According to IDC, the 2014 worldwide enterprise network market generated $40.2 billion in revenue, with 49 percent of revenue coming from network switches.

Interop Is Coming Back for 2016

While Interop 2015 is now history, the 2016 event is slated for May 2 to 6, 2016.