A View From the Show Floor: The Chatter at Interop Las Vegas

We’re exhibiting at Interop Las Vegas this week (come visit us at booth #1240!). It’s always great to “get out of the building” and hear what’s on the minds of 13,000+ IT professionals. Here are a few things we’ve heard:

1) IT Operations Tools Are Out Of Hand

We had a large governmental agency visit our booth at Interop. They described a scenario that we hear often: over the past couple of years they’ve been implementing one-off IT operations tools to detect malware, monitor CPU usage, track devices, and the like. While these tools are great for serving their intended purpose, this organization now has almost a dozen different tools running on their network … and the manpower costs of monitoring these tools is out of control.

How are they looking to solve this problem? By implementing a single tool that can manage security, performance, and provide real-time analytics about their network on one platform. We gave them a demo of how AccelOps can do this for them, and look forward to them soon benefitting from streamlining their IT operations tools.

2) Smart Companies See IT as a Strategic Resource, Not As Traffic Cop

This morning’s keynote, “A Passion for the Possible: How a Technology Culture Pays Off” was by Larry Quinlan, CIO at Deloitte. He gave some great advice on how IT can work more effectively with business units, and, in turn, become a strategic resource to the organization.

His advice? Ask business units “What do you need?”

Although this sounds simple, it’s an important change from the role IT plays in many companies today. Take BYOD as an example. Some IT departments will take the role of evaluating, selecting, purchasing, and distributing devices … only to find that half the users still use their existing devices because they prefer them.

By asking, “What do you need” an IT department could change its role to understanding what devices the business is currently using and how they are using them. Then IT can determine the best way to secure and manage the devices that are already in use – rather than dictating a rule that may meet with resistance – and therefore become a strategic resource for the business unit.

In the second scenario, what will the business unit do when they want to implement a new CRM system or collaboration tool? They’ll look to IT for help rather than “going rogue” and making their own IT decisions in a vacuum.

3) The Internet Of Everything Is … Well, Being Talked About Everywhere

From tomorrow’s keynote by Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby on “The Internet of Everything: A CIO’s Point of View” to The Internet Of Things Summit, the IoT hype machine continues.

The Internet of Things is a great aspirational vision for our product roadmaps. We dream about how can we make our alarm clock talk to our shower and tell it to turn the spigot on 30 seconds before we wake up … then we can have our shampoo bottle talk to our coffee maker so our double latte is waiting on the kitchen counter when we’re on our way out the door.

Along with the excitement of the human impact of the IoT, IT departments have already started thinking about the security aspect of everything being connected.

The recent Target breach is an example of the IoT of things in full bloom: When Brian Krebbs broke the news that the Target breach was caused by a hackers breaking into an HVAC system, I think I heard the collective IT community say, “Mmmm … what?”

Target taught us is that the Internet of Things is already here. A hacker used a refrigerator to talk to a few cash registers to test if their malware worked. Once they completed their QA, those cash registers proliferated the software across Target’s 1,700+ locations nationwide.

If that isn’t the IoT, I don’t know what is.

Want to talk about how AccelOps can help you prepare for the Internet of Things? Then feel free to contact us; we’re here to help.