Well, Interop is now officially over. For me, anyway. I believe they have some events lined up for tomorrow, however, I am excluded from due to having only an Expo pass. The event was very exciting, and it was a real treat to get such a candid view into the current state of the IT industry. As a developer, I often forget that it is the IT guys who keep the lights on, and the servers running when it comes to the web and other networking technologies.
I spoke with many of the booth representatives who were on-site over the last 3 days, obtaining business cards, catalogs, free trials, promotional items, and of course -- information. Without further ado, I will give a couple details about some of the technologies which impressed me. Keep in mind that this is based on my understanding of the IT industry, so some of these things went right over my head, and as such might not have impressed me as much as they otherwise would have. Here goes!
The first company which really caught my eye was NEC. Their technologies ranged from manual network routing application to face scanning technology. A couple of their representatives were kind enough to show me demos and refer me to their other exhibits and technologies after they had explained the one which they were presiding over. The first technology which was demoed for me was one which uses Software Defined Networking to allow human manipulation of network traffic, to avoid broken links and so on. The next demo which was shown to me was for a facial scanning display which will look for people who are within a pre-defined database. It was explained to me that they are using this at a Universal Studios in Europe to allow easier access to the park by scanning faces instead of making people wait in a line. The final piece of technology which NEC showed me was a similar technology, which scans faces and estimates age and gender for demographic and marketing purposes.
Another booth which I feel like I learned a lot from was the Dreamhost booth. This one landed a little bit closer to my area of knowledge, so I was better able to ask the questions which would get me the most practical information about it. I was shocked to be told that some other hosting companies out there control multiple hosting sites, and you may switch from one hosting company only to end up back in their grasp on a different hosting site. Dreamhost will be a definite consideration when I begin looking for a shared hosting provider in the coming months.
Of course, being that I am a student, I visited several booths relating to learning and classes. Of those, I was very impressed by IEEE Computer Society and Pluralsight. IEEE is a paid training service which provides training in the form of documents and publications. Pluralsight, which is apparently running a 10 day trial for new users trains jQuery, PHP, and Java, of which I am very interested and may check out.
In the spirit of keeping this post from getting out of hand, I will end it here. I collected business cards from Peer 1 Hosting, Netreo, SanDisk, Zenimax, Server Monkey, Cormant, KnowledgeNet, Altima Technologies Inc, Giglinx Global, and Intersog as well as flyers from the University of Denver, ProfitBricks, Solarwinds, Rose Electronics, and Newegg.
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