Interop Is On!

Many major business trends, including the wide-spread use of cloud, digital transformation, and the mainstream use of sophisticated analytics and artificial intelligence are outpacing legacy infrastructures. At this year’s Interop Digital conference, our networks and infrastructure track explores strategies, new technologies, and best practices to provide a secure, robust infrastructure that cost-effectively delivers the performance, flexibility, elasticity, scalability, and reduced management burden needed to support today's modern applications.

While I prefer in-person events, one advantage of having this week's conference online is that we were able to get some speakers that would not have been available if they had to travel, and spend two or three days to deliver a 30-minute talk.

As with past Interop conferences, we lead off the week with training and certification courses. A good example is Dr. Jim Metzler’s half-day training session on Choosing Your SD-WAN Provider.

We also have other training sessions Monday and Tuesday on:

If you are reading this article early in the week, there is still time to register. But you must hurry.

Join Network Computing online @Interop Digital October 5-8, use code NC50 for a FREE Business Hall pass, or 50% off any other pass.

Networking and Infrastructure Track Highlights

I have helped put together conference tracks for more than 20 years. I feel like the topics we picked, and speakers we were able to recruit for our networks and infrastructure track are exceptional.

The entire program for this conference track can be found here. I’d like to highlight a few to point out the quality of our speakers and that we’re covering the most critical topics IT managers and enterprise architects face today.

Some of our sessions are forward-looking, giving you insights into what to expect so that you can ensure you are ready for upcoming changes. Examples of this type of session include:

What Does Networking Circa 2022 Look Like? In this session, Dr. Jim Metzler will lead a discussion where the panel includes Partha Narasimhan (CTO, HPE/Aruba), Raj Yavatkar (CTO, Juniper Networks), and John Apostolopoulos, Ph.D. (VP & CTO, Intent-Based Networking Group & Innovation Labs, Cisco).

We also have sessions on 5G, network automation, software-defined networking, and more.

Quite interestingly, a couple of topics we had in mind when planning the conference (well before the pandemic upended business) have become ever-more important today. They include sessions on: 

Zero-trust networking: Why is it important? Cyber incidents, threats, and vulnerabilities continue to rise. Complicating matters is the new "work from home" norm that extends the corporate edge into virtually every employee's home. To address the latest challenges, traditional security approaches are being complemented with emerging technologies like zero-trust network access (ZTNA).

Co-location: Co-location has been used for years. What’s changed? Co-location lets enterprises scale quickly as needed and house data closer to end-users. Both characteristics are essential with work changes brought on by COVID-19.

Join Network Computing online @Interop Digital October 5-8, use code NC50 for a FREE Business Hall pass, or 50% off any other pass.