Interop IT conference finishes in New York

Interop, a prominent touring IT conference and expo, wrapped up its final stop on Friday for this year's tour at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO and the first keynote speaker at Interop New York, addressed the pressing issue of the cost of IT development. Whitehurst asserts in his presentation that functionality "should be exploding and costs […] plummeting," which is currently not the case in the economy.

Whitehurst cites IT vendors as the ones to blame in the equation, stating that the prevailing trend in how vendors interact with IT departments is dated and that "no change in productivity [has occurred] in 30 years." At the rate IT spending is proceeding, $500 billion is wasted out the annual trillion dollar global IT budget.

To improve the IT spending situation, Whitehurst suggests bringing customers into the process, and switching over to more efficient IT approaches, stressing in particular the effectiveness of cloud computing.

With a designated portion of the expo devoted to it, cloud computing seemed to be an overarching theme at Interop, with 38 exhibitors – including industry giants such as Amazon Web Services, Dell, HP, McAfee and Microsoft – supporting the initiative.

Whitehurst and other IT leaders anticipate that cloud computing will replace conventional hosting methods. Cloud computing differs from traditional forms of hosting in that it is sold on demand, it is flexible in allowing users to have as much of a service as desired at any given time, and it is completely managed by the provider.

Amazon Web Services is representative of a public cloud provider, supplying an "infrastructure-as-a-service" model of cloud computing in which consumers pay for only the amount of capacity needed, with the option to increase this capacity by paying when needed, much in the same way one pays for electricity or other utilities.

Aside from cloud computing, other intriguing technological products and accessories were also presented at the event.

3M was one of the notable companies marketing accessories, namely its trademark Notebook Privacy Filters and Privacy Films to allow travelers to protect any sensitive proprietary specifics.

Dirk Gates, founder of Xirrus and keynote speaker at Interop New York, presented a live demo of a Xirrus wireless access tower which allowed 96 iPads to simultaneously stream video and access web content. Gates firmly believes that new wireless standards like 802.11n are faster and as secure as wired local area networks.

In the realm of network security, McAfee promoted its next generation firewall which allows for more specific exception rules for blocking certain aspects of a program (for example, prohibiting the file sharing aspect of a messenging program, but not the entire messenging program) and for more specific rules that block programs based on IP address (such as allowing program access to only a certain department instead of the whole company).

Interop 2011 will resume its tour on May 8, stopping first in Las Vegas, NV.