In any technology conference keynote, the main message is always commentary on the latest advancements in technology, and the same is true of this morning’s keynotes. Beyond focusing solely on new trends and products, I noticed a strong underlying theme that was consistent among all of the keynote speakers this morning, and that is embracing change. With the massive transformation the industry is experiencing as we move towards cloud architectures, mobility and trends like consumerization, businesses are being faced with the most demanding and rapid pace of change in history. The message at Interop today was that, as difficult and complex as these changes may be, they are positive and have the potential to drastically improve operations and productivity, and that solutions providers have newer and better products and solutions to help organizations manage the complexity and maximize the positive impact that change can bring.

Dave Donatelli, EVP/GM of Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking at HP started the morning off with a keynote clearly aimed at Cisco, stating “We want to transform the networking industry going forward”. Donatelli noted that competition in any industry is a critical force to bring meaningful innovation. Competition has been lacking in the largely vertically integrated networking industry, and this lack of competition has hurt the industry and consumers, “The network is stifling Innovation”. According to Donatelli, the lack of competition that has plagued the networking industry is changing. He cited several metrics that indicated HP networking is being increasingly considered in enterprise networking purchases. Donatelli went on to showcase several networking products and in each case compared the products directly with similar products from Cisco, and provided metrics to indicate that HP products were vastly superior (the same message as nearly every vendor at the show). Donatelli made two points that I found interesting; First, he claimed that many network vendors have very different products for different areas in enterprise networks such as Data Center, Campus, Branch, Teleworker, Wireless, Security, etc. He claimed that HP networking products would have a more cohesive management and appearance across these domains … though he offered little to demonstrate how they would accomplish this. Finally for the most interesting part of his presentation Donatelli was joined on stage by HP distinguished engineer Les Stuart who gave a live demonstration of HP’s next generation Integrated Management Center . HP claimed that their management center was the answer to managing every aspect of end-to-end IT infrastructure in a single pane of glass. My take on this is that while the product looked promising, there are several enterprise management platforms making this same claim, and what I typically find is that to realize these benefits, organizations need to purchase dozens of very expensive modules. While this was a promising demo, organizations should consider how this will integrate with existing management platforms, and also evaluate updated products from their existing vendors and other ITSM vendors as there are many making similar advancements. Organizations should also perform a detailed investigation of how they would need to adapt their operational processes to take advantage of the potential benefits these management platforms offer.

Next up was Citrix CEO Mark Templeton, who focused on the impact of consumerization on IT organizations. Templeton noted that increasingly consumers are bringing their own devices and applications to work, and that this trend often resulted in significant productivity and morale improvement, and that consumerization is “The most powerful force we’ve seen in computing”. He noted that organizations should not seek to stop this trend but to embrace it, saying “don’t fight it, feature it” and to invest in solutions that can allow personal technologies to be used in a manner that limits corporate risk. He made a delineation between what he called “Old IT” and “New IT” with the inference that the job of ‘Old IT’ was to provide every single device and application that an employee could use, whereas he compared ‘New IT’ to a cable set top box model where the cable company provides access to consistent services but allow the user to select their own TV, Entertainment center and complimentary applications. Templeton noted that organizations need a way to manage hybrid services from public, private and personal cloud environments, and that Citrix offered an answer to this challenge. One example of how Citrix would provide this is via a universal client that would provide access to these services across varying devices and platforms. Templeton also highlighted as the mix of IT services changes to incorporate hybrid clouds, the network needs to adapt to facilitate this transformation, stating that the network needs to evolve into a “seamless service delivery fabric”. He offered the Netscaler SDX platform as the solution to provide this service delivery fabric. I have to say the SDX looks like a very interesting platform, and highlights how Citrix is leveraging the XEN hypervisor strategically. The SDX appears to use highly optimized networking hardware, and uses the XEN hypervisor to offer up to 40 virtualized appliances on a single platform. It is clear that there is a need for greater application intelligence in the network, and the SDX platform clearly has something to offer here. This whitepaper from Citrix captures the message delivered by Templeton and provides additional details.

Dan Lynch and Vint Cerf engaged in a very interesting on-stage conversation and provided some personal insight into their experiences participating in the birth and formation of the internet. For me the highlight of this conversation was Vint Cerf’s commentary on Google’s aggressive approach to embracing risk and change. He noted that Larry Page encouraged employees to aim high, even when the goal may seem too lofty, if you aim high your end result will be a higher result than what you would have achieved if you had started off aiming low. He noted the critical importance of embracing risk and accepting failure. I know that these are not new ideas, but in my experience very few organizations have adopted this cultural trait. In the past many organizations were blindsided by disruptive changes in technology, and today the tools and knowledge to identify disruptive shifts have become more commonplace, however I have noticed that a common response is to seek to slow and control these disruptive changes to attempt to ensure that dominant organizations remain dominant across these disruptive shifts. This may seem like a good strategy for business, but it is bad for consumers, and in my opinion the consumerization trend will not allow for organizations to slow and control the pace of disruptive change. Consumers now not only compare industry leaders with their competitors, but they compare them with completely different industries … consumers know what is technically possible and they demand it. AS the consumerization trend proliferates, organizations will have to face a cultural shift and embrace a culture of continuous innovation, which necessarily entails embracing risk and accepting failure.

Finally Rebecca Jacoby and Brett Galloway from Cisco offered there perspective on how pervasive network connectivity will create new possibilities on how we work. They started with a entertaining video showcasing a wide variety of potential uses of the powerful combination of pervasive network connectivity, new forms of devices such as smartphones and tablets, and cloud applications. Jacoby highlighted Cisco’s internal transformation to a private cloud model, noting that 57% of their business applications are now delivered in a private cloud architecture, and showcased some of the financial and productivity benefits that Cisco has experienced from this. They also provided a concept demo for network access control, highlighting how the technology could be leveraged to provide both user and location based access control not only for access to the network but also for access to specific applications and files. My perspective on this is that this level of access control is important and will enable new levels of documents to be digitized … but while the Cisco demo makes this functionality appear as a standard product feature, the reality is that it would require a very high level of custom integration that would only be palatable by organizations that have a compelling business case for this feature. More work still needs to be done to make features like this more accessible, which will likely happen as network API’s become increasingly robust and standardized. This should serve as a reminder for organizations to increase pressure on their vendors to standardize API’s so that applications can dynamically deliver performance and security requirements to the network. While it was an entertaining presentation, it was essentially the same messaging from other recent Cisco presentations with nothing significantly new announced.

Overall it was an entertaining morning which highlighted several areas of progress that are important to organizations. First that the network industry needs competition and open platforms to drive innovation and improve economics, and second that industry suppliers are getting better at managing the significant changes that organizations are facing, and they are making progress in delivering new applications and services to help organizations manage these changes.