Interop 2014 kicks off Monday in Las Vegas. Here is a sneak peek of technologies to monitor.

Interop Las Vegas opens Monday on the Mandalay Bay Convention Center amid a time of increasing change. Change was a continuing inside the technology industry, however the pace of change seems to maintain getting faster, as futurist Ray Kurzweil argued in 2001.

Much of the hot change have been driven by IT trends just like the shift toward mobile devices, cloud computing, and the networking of everything. That and the necessity to store petabytes of cat videos, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Then there’s the truth that software, as Marc Andreessen once put it, is eating the arena. In his keynote presentation on the conference, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, plans to spotlight how virtualization and cloud computing have led software-defined datacenters to overshadow hardware-defined facilities, a shift he characterizes as “tectonic.”

Alan Hase, Avaya’s VP of networking, points to software-defined networking (SDN) as a neighborhood of vibrant change. “You will see a growing number of vendors specializing in the technology and realizing the potential for software-defined networking,” he said in a telephone interview.

Hase says such change has made simplification more important than ever. “IT budgets and staff are being constrained, the extent of IT experience in teams is decreasing, but level of complexity of the technology is increasing,” he said. “Customers are struggling and seeking out solutions that simplify their lives and decrease downtime.”

Avaya’s Fabric Attach technology, a Better of Interop finalist inside the networking category, represents an try to meet that need. It allows networks to automatically add end-user devices, corresponding to wireless access points, IP cameras and phones, and non-fabric switches. “Our goal is to continue to simplify how networks are deployed, to lead them to more resilient, and to drive toward a 0-touch edge,” said Hase.

The Better of Interop awards deal with nine categories near and expensive to the hearts of IT professionals: Cloud, Datacenter, Management, Mobility, Networking, Performance, SDN, Security, and Storage.

There shall be a keynote session on SDN on Wednesday, featuring panelists from Cisco, Dell, and HP. BYOD gets some attention tomorrow, with in a keynote session featuring representatives from Citrix, HP, and Microsoft. When people bring their very own devices to work, companies need to adapt: new policies are required, new applications must be created, and network architectures should be re-evaluated — to address the cat videos.

These are several among many issues in an effort to be explored at Interop, with the intention to include for the primary time the Cloud Connect Summit and our personal InformationWeek Conference. Now try some new technology highlights we think on the show.

Thomas Claburn have been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications together with New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio

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