This week, my colleague, David Berlind and I talk about the Data Center, some of the upcoming announcements we expect to see at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, and we rant about all of the social platforms that continue to sprout like nasty weeds (this week's culprit: Google Buzz).You can download the audio of The Fritz & David Showor click the little play button in this sentence. The podcast player should appear as a pull-out tab near the lower left hand side of your browser's window.

Earlier this week, InformationWeek's editors (namely editor-at-large, Charles Babcock, Analytics Managing Director Art Wittmann, Network Computing's Editor Mike Fratto and I) hosted a series of meetings in our San Francisco offices. The goal was to learn some of the upcoming plans and strategies of the biggest data center players in the market. We invited companies that provide networking, storage, servers and management (and all of the above), deprived them of food and water, and tortured them with questions that would drive most people to drink. After which we took them all to a bar, just to show that we're all still friends.

We'll be writing more about what these companies are up to, but just to provide some early insight, nearly everyone we met with, from the biggest (HP) to the smallest (Xangati), seems to be driving toward this notion of "data center in a box," or, as Brocade's executives put it (and I'm paraphrasing liberally here): re-creating the mainframe, as if the data center platform was a single machine. This will require not just your typical hardware and connectivity, with some virtualization thrown on top, but an entirely new approach to managing that virtualization intelligently. We heard a great deal about thin provisioning, virtual stacks and oh, so much more.

But we also heard was plenty of swipes at Cisco. Nearly every company we met with attacked Cisco. In some ways, this isn't new, but for a while there Cisco did a good job of creating an ecosystem of partners, some of whom it competed with on certain fronts, and cooperated with on others. But the company's march into the server business put more than a few companies on alert. Note that IBM's networking partner these days is Juniper. And while most of the teams we met with were keeping an open mind regarding their current deals with Cisco, most seem to believe that the aggressive moves in the data center (Cisco's Unified Computing System to be precise) will alienate not only partners, but customers.

Cisco never responded to our requests to sit down during our day-long strategy sessions.

For an excellent view of what's happening in Data Center, you can download our digital issue of Network Computing here.

Next week is Mobile World Congress. It's one of my favorite conferences because it brings together the entire mobile ecosystem from around the world. It's the only place where you have to squeeze through elaborate booths from the biggest handset makers one second, and then walk next door to the sterile booths of the big equipment providers the next. Carriers, manufacturers, chip makers, content companies, development frameworks, and just about everything in between (usually there's a mobile film contest as well). This year will see Google's CEO Eric Schmidt for the first time, along with the CEOs of Microsoft, Research In Motion, Adobe and some of the world's biggest carriers.

The major races: 4G, more on the platform front (we expect a big announcement from Microsoft here), new devices (Sony Ericsson, Samsung, HTC) and plenty of talk on the application development side. We'll be reporting from Barcelona all week long (yeah, I know, life is hard).

Finally, David and I end this week's Podcast with a rant about social platforms. Simply put: there are too many and it's getting more difficult to stay on top of it all. This week alone we saw announcements from Google (Buzz) and even a company (Bubble Motion) that makes a voice blogging tool. Makes me want to be anti-social. David has a solution: a set of protocols, in some cases around the winners in certain areas (like Twitter or Facebook or AOL instant messaging), allowing for some choice and innovation.

Fritz Nelson is the editorial director for InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

Follow Fritz Nelson and InformationWeek on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn:

Twitter @fnelson @InformationWeek@IWpremium

Facebook Fritz Nelson Facebook Page InformationWeek Facebook Page

YouTube TechWebTV

LinkedIn Fritz Nelson on LinkedIn InformationWeek