It can’t be coincidence that “Trade Show” is an anagram of “Sweat Hord”. This week saw the annual IP Expo event at Earl’s Court in London and there were indeed hords and sweat. Some of the sweat was mine. But it was good to see the size of the event and the number of attendees up on last year, and there were relatively few quiet moments.
As usual the event clustered around WAN Optimization, Cloud, Networking, Storage, and Virtualization.
So what was new? Well to be honest, I didn’t see anything new – pretty much every technology or service on offer was mainstream and I don’t recall seeing anything that made me think “wow”. The products go faster, have an extra bell or whistle, or both, fit in a smaller footprint, use less power, can be managed more effectively, etc but that’s about it. I startled several vendors by wandering onto their stand and asking “So what’s the latest stuff?” and without exception they looked at me as if I was mad and dangerous (and I am only one of those things) and then struggled to think of a good answer.
My takeaway though was the trends continue – WAN Optimization is going virtual for most use-cases and no-one now pretends otherwise. Mobility is huge – the workforce is working from everywhere on a range of devices and managing those devices and the performance of the applications is becoming the single biggest headache for the IT manager. Replify provides part of the solution but as life gets more complicated for the customer, they will need vendors to provide more integrated and manageable solutions (MDM plus Mobile WAN Optimization anyone?), and in many cases they’ll be delighted to source those services from the cloud, with no footprint in their own data centres, and managed through an elegant, friendly, cloud-console.
There was one thing I didn’t see much of, and this did surprise me, and that’s Software Defined Networking. As my regular reader will know (that’s you Sean) I believe SDN is transformational, but we’ll ride the usual hype curve. I think we’re about to hit the excitement phase and 2013 will see most vendors talking enthusiastically about how their product fits with the SDN model and technologies. Disillusionment will come in 2014, but long term its going to be at the heart of our networks.
