Interop is my favorite IT Conference. I have been to many other conferences including vendor sponsored events and for me, Interop stands out. The vendor related conferences almost always have a spin to it. Since InteropITX is a independent conference you don’t get all the hype. There was a lot of changes this year, for me and the conference.
- Interop was rebranded to InteropITX
- Jennifer Jessup left the Managing Director role after almost 5 years, Meghan Reilly took over
- Interop left the Mandalay Bay in favor of the MGM. I am not sure when they started in the Mandalay, but it has been there since I have been going.
- I opted for the Workshop/Seminar pass this year instead of the normal Conference pass.
- I actually left Vegas after Interop with more money then I came with!
Even with the name change and the new location the biggest change for me was the Summit\Workshop pass. My engineer joined me at the conference and he took the more technical tracks (like the Packet Pushers Future of Networking Summit) so I went through the leadership track. My first two sessions with Rob Cordova was awesome. In the morning he went over how to continue to develop your people and in the second session he talked about how to innovate, specifically for IT. He kept the room entertained while actually providing some great insight and many ideas and skills I am sure everyone in the room found useful. I tried to go to a couple of technical sessions on Day 2 but they filled up quick so I ended up in another two leadership sessions. They weren’t as good as Rob’s (he set a high bar), but I still left with some good information.
On Wednesday I caught up with the guys at Tech Field Day and got to sit through a presentation from Paessler, the makers of PRTG. After the presentation I spent some time on the show floor talking with companies like portnox and Raritan (I didn’t even know they were still around!). I will have a couple of follow up posts on these companies to go in to a little more detail. I couldn’t spend as much time as I would have liked on the show floor because we were planning and performing an infrastructure upgrade in our Las Vegas branch, but I did spend enough time to see the joke of a Cisco booth. Not sure what that was all about, but it seemed like someone was on an episode of Punk’d.
Overall, it was a great conference and I think I will be attending again next year.