Opinion
The Importance of Interop Mumbai
By Val Souza
 When the first edition of the television show Indian Idol was nearing its conclusion in early 2005, I remember one of the judges admitting to initial apprehension and expressing relief that the participating singers hadn’t let India down and had ensured that the show was as good as, or even better than, the forerunning British and American versions that it was modeled on.
When I set out a few months ago as Conference Chair to devise the conference program for Interop Mumbai 2009, I had similar apprehensions. Where would we find so many speakers? Would the speakers be good enough? Would we be able to deliver a conference and exposition of this scale in Mumbai?
After all, the Interop brand has a huge equity and a legacy that goes back to the time when TCP/IP was still being perfected. To get a sense of the Interop heritage, let me quote from A Brief History of the Internet (Barry Leiner, Vinton Cerf, et al): “…Dan Lynch [one of the TCP/IP and Arpanet pioneers] in cooperation with the IAB arranged to hold a three day workshop for ALL vendors to come learn about how TCP/IP worked and what it still could not do well… After two years of conferences, tutorials, design
meetings and workshops, a special event was organized that invited those vendors whose products ran TCP/IP well enough to come together in one room to show off how well they all worked together and also ran over the Internet.
In September of 1988 the Interop trade show was born. 50 companies made the cut. 5,000 engineers came to see if it all did work as was promised. It did. Why? Because the vendors worked extremely hard to ensure that everyone’s products interoperated with all of the other products—even with those of their competitors. The Interop trade show has grown immensely since then and today it is held in [several] locations around the world each year to an audience of over 2,50,000 people who come to learn about the latest products, and discuss the latest technology.”
Over the years, Interop evolved into a broad-based business technology event. Now, 21 years on, after Las Vegas, New York, Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Moscow, Interop has finally arrived here and I am confident that Interop Mumbai (7-9 Oct 2009) will be everything that everyone has come to expect from the leading business technology event worldwide.
We have over 60 speakers from all over the world, spread across 20 sessions including keynotes, panel discussions, and workshops, in 4 parallel tracks. The icing on the cake is the large exhibit floor adjoining the conference halls, where latest technologies will be showcased by 50 leading vendors.
India is at a critical juncture in its quest to achieve “developed country” status, and I believe prudent deployment of IT will help us get there quicker. I am further convinced that events such as Interop serve as enablers for IT managers, aiding them in making sound decisions for effective deployment of IT in their organizations.
Interop Mumbai 2009 will definitely be a landmark event in the annals of the evolution of enterprise-IT in India. Do join me on October 7th at the Bombay Exhibition Centre—and be a witness to history in the making! |