EMC World
The intersection of cloud and big data was the theme of this year’s EMC World, where more than 6,500 IT professionals descended on the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.
Continuing our 15-year relationship with EMC, Brocade had a huge presence as an Elite Sponsor to help build awareness and sustain momentum following our CloudPlex launch at last week’s Tech Day, as well as to show a strong alignment with EMC’s “Big Data in the Cloud” strategy and showcase our integrated marketing campaign.
Like the casinos on The Strip, the action at the Brocade booth was fast, furious and continually packed, situated at the entrance to the Sands Convention Center, right next to the main EMC booths.
Day one started with a sponsored lunch for all attendees and after the exhibit hall opened, more than 5,000 shirts were distributed in an hour and a half. Brocade t-shirts were a requirement to win the main prize of $16,000 in cash – a promotion to highlight and celebrate Brocade’s new end-to-end 16GB FC solutions.
Day two was just as exciting, featuring a live interview with CEO Mike Klayko on The Cube, which was not only viewed by attendees, but by thousands watching the streaming Internet feed on SiliconANGLE TV.
As the Las Vegas weather warmed, Day three didn’t cool off at the Brocade booth. Hundreds of attendees qualified for the $16,000 giveaway, and spilled into the isles for the grand prize drawing.
Brocadians were also busy with presentations at EMC World, with Sue Hartford, Mark Cincotta and Duke Butler discussing optimizing virtualized applications in the Microsoft booth. AJ Casamento delivered well-attended general session presentations on Network Infrastructure for the Private Cloud and The Future of Data Center Networking.
Interop
Meanwhile, the energy level at Interop Las Vegas is noticeably up from last year, and it’s night-and-day from the depths of the recession in 2009. As with many tradeshows, vendors tend to gravitate to a common theme. This year was no different with cloud commentary and clever puns plastered across exhibitor booths promoting their solution to tap into the cloud.
Brocade’s Ken Cheng was a speaker on two panels at the first annual Carrier Cloud Forum hosted by Light Reading. In the first panel he was joined by industry experts from BT, Oracle and NetScout to discuss and debate building cloud infrastructure or a manageable and billable cloud.
The premise centered around the fact that service providers have capitalized on their existing data centers and global IP networks to roll out cloud services, in some cases partnering with other infrastructure and networking providers. Going forward, as cloud computing becomes more widely deployed, service providers need to achieve greater integration and efficiency for their cloud offerings.
Ken provided his thoughts on what telco network operators need to do to prepare and manage their networks, including breaking down internal barriers between the network transport and IT functions of the carrier operation, as well as opening up to third-party application providers, designing billing systems for pay-as-you-go charging models, and preparing back-office operations to deliver on SLAs for cloud customers.
The afternoon panel with Ken and members of Juniper, Cisco and Spirent drew a larger crowd leaving only standing room in the back edge of the convention room.
Telecom chief editor for Light Reading and industry veteran, Carol Wilson, hosted the panel focusing on two key aspects of cloud consuming the thoughts of network operators: performance and security.
While the term cloud is relatively new in networking, the technology has been part of the Internet for years. The earliest cloud offerings were Web-based services, but as telecom service providers move into the cloud, they promised to bring more secure services, safe from possible intrusion or data breaches; better guaranteed service quality and SLAs; and broader global footprint and integration with IP transport.
Much of the discussion circled around the kind of infrastructures service providers need to build in order to deliver on those promises and to differentiate their services in quality and the functionality.
There were many excellent points made but one of the topics Ken brought up that drew a great deal of attention and chatter within the room was around a new practice Brocade developed named Service Creation.
“Traditionally, infrastructure vendors primary function was to sell equipment to the customers and the more sophisticated ones sell them solutions,” said Ken Cheng. “And with cloud computing, vendors need to step up and help their customers’ go-to-market. With this in mind, Brocade developed a practice called Service Creation; we actually go to our customers to help them define services, do regression analysis to identify which service can take advantage of the competency and their assets, and ultimately help them build a business case to effectively enter the market with a credible solution.”
This is a fundamental shift in the relationship between infrastructure vendors and customers. What’s next for the cloud? …vendors transforming into service providers themselves?
