It’s nearly April, and that means Interop.
Since 1994, I’ve been attending and participating in the Interop show. It’s an incredible endeavour; the world’s largest production network gets set up and torn down in just a few days. The show’s been around for so long, it has its own class A address block. Seriously, check it out.
One of the reasons for the show’s longevity has been its focus on education. Rather than just being a sales convention, it’s a source of learning for the internetworking industry. A while back, this meant proving that one VPN could talk to another. Before that, it was simply getting two Ethernet hubs to communicate.
Today, however, those interoperability issues are long over. Instead, we worry about how IT will work in the future, and how different services or different companies can interoperate.
