The Interop Business Technology conference, held annually in Tokyo, New York, Mumbai and India, is underway. This is the 26^th year for conference, being held May 6-10, in Las Vegas. This year’s conference features keynotes from the CTOs of Cisco, VMware, Zynga and Rackspace  and offers dozens of sessions organized in eight tracks:

• cloud computing
• collaboration
• data center
• information security and risk management
• networking
• storage
• virtualization
• wireless and mobility
• IT management

This year’s tracks are very similar to the topics discussed in 2011, but enterprise 2.0, future of work, service delivery, unified communications and video have disappeared from this year’s agenda. The conference may be packed with content and opportunities to network with peers, but that isn’t stopping vendors from using the gathering of thousands to technologists to make announcements.

A constant stream of technical news is coming from the conference. Chinese networking provider Huawei unveiled a new data center switch, the CloudEngine 12800 that will compete with providers like Dell and HP in the small and medium business market, a new distribution agreement with Synnex and  several new low cost smart phones the company plans to introduce in the U.S. market. Hewlett Packard (HP)announced its deepening its relationship with F5 Networks to automate the process of deploying applications to wired and wireless network to support personal mobile devices in the enterprise. HP also introduced a new 10500 series campus network core switch, which the company says will reduce latency in rich media applications by 75%.

In addition to its relationship with HP, F5 Networks also announced it is supporting SPDY. SPDY is a protocol primarily designed by Google that speeds web page load times by reducing network latency using compression, prioritization schemes and multiplexing. This makes F5 one of the first major networking providers to support the technology. Avaya entered the consumerization/BYOD market releasing Avaya Identity Engine 8.0, which allows companies to secure and manage mobile devices.

Cisco unveiled a new router and related technology that provides to voice networks the same level of security and control that enterprises use for their data networks. In addition, Cisco released the results of its customer survey of 100 IT executives in 13 countries. The survey found that only 5% are using the cloud to deliver the majority of their business applications, but the 20% expect to do so by the end of the year. Surprisingly, survey data showed that technical leaders consider networking issues the biggest problem associated with cloud adoption. This is a shift in attitudes; most analyst research before this year listed security as the primary concern.

Cisco wasn’t  the only company releasing study data at Interop. Spiceworks, Inc, a social business network, released it bi-annual State of SMB IT survey results, which captures technology trends in companies with less than 1000 employees. The data showed small and medium business (SMBs) IT budgets rising and staff headcount increasing in over 30% of the companies. In addition to operational insight, survey results indicated that 62% of SMBs have deployed or plan to deploy a tablet in the next six months, which a 12% increase from the second half of 2011.

Many more announcements have been made at the conference as vendors try to create buzz with attendees  and the public. A list of press releases from the conference is available on the Interop site.