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A Microsoft executive speaking at Interop Thursday unwittingly highlighted the challenge his company faces in building brand recognition around its Bing search engine. The exec told audience members seeking his contact info to "Google me."

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Look up in the sky and you might see cirrus, stratus, or cumulus clouds. Similarly, cloud computing comes in multiple flavors. The one you should choose depends on, among other things, how much vendor lock-in you’re prepared to accept in exchange for banishing complexity from your IT organization.

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The classic Internet search model, where users type in a query and are confronted with page upon page of links ranked by someone else’s idea of relevance, is giving way to a more efficient paradigm in which results are informed by who the searcher is, who his or her friends are, where they live, and other user-centric data.

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It took them long enough, but HP is finally really gunning for Cisco as a networking vendor. That ambitious tack is on full display here at Interop, from copious keynotes to a huge exhibitor booth.

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If networking is cool at Interop, then testing, the red-headed stepchild of networking, is going to make itself known. Factors like data center consolidation and virtualization are changing the demands made of the network for more resilient, low latency and high speed capacity.

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The afternoon keynotes at Interop saw IBM, HP and SAP giving their visions of cloud computing. While the companies had a number of real deliverables to talk about, the keynotes also showed that vendors continue to confound and confuse with their various conflicting definitions.

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This morning, HP announced that it would soon begin selling IP desk phones, a potentially lucrative way to inch up competition with Cisco in networking and communication. However, it's already uncertain just how much HP really cares about phones.

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So, here's something I didn't expect from Interop: I met Ozzy Osbourne. I didn't realize he was standing just a few feet away from me, near the Nokia booth, until he walked up and urged me to fill out a form that someone else had just handed me.

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Announced at Interop, Endace Analytics Center 2000 provides network analysis for Endace's NinjaProbe, while Solera Networks announced an OEM program providing data-capture services to others. In both cases, the ability to play back captured network traffic eases troubleshooting and resolution.

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Halfway through NAC Day at Interop, I moderated a panel populated by representatives from the sponsors. What became clear during and after the panel is that attendees are very concerned about standardizing NAC. Who wants to buy a proprietary product that won’t play well with others?

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Purpose-built accounting machines? Water-cooled servers? IBM is taking a page from its past to deliver energy-saving systems for today and tomorrow.

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Earlier this summer I was tapped for NAC Day 2008. It's a day-long event on the topic of Network Access/Admission Control at Interop NY held at the Javits Center. I'll agree to almost anything if I can get a trip to Manhattan out of the deal. I hope to cover nearly every aspect of NAC in 5 hours and 45 minutes.

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Once again, on Monday, Sept. 15, for one day only, I will be performing my latest one-man show, The Disaster Recovery Cookbook: Recipes for Recovery, as a workshop at Interop at the fabulous Jacob Javits (a New York liberal, Republican senator, and Lantzman. You don't see those together very often anymore) Convention Center in The Big Apple (New York). Over the day we'll explore how to make your organization's IT infrastructure disaster tolerant with an emphasis on solutions that are affordable for midsize organizations that don't have the open-ended budgets of our friends on Wall Street.

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After a flawed experience with one of the first Windows Mobile-based Motorola Q's, Microsoft outfitted me with a Samsung SCH-i760 smartphone which, from an industrial design perspective, is one of the best designs for a smartphone I've ever experienced (more on that in a second). Unfortunately, integrating WinMobile 6.0's version of Outlook with Google Apps-based Gmail was so problematic that I gave up in favor of a company-furnished BlackBerry. BlackBerrys are rumored to work well with Gmail. But is that really the case and why doesn't stuff like this just work? It's an interop nightmare.

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I heard opposing voices at Interop about whether the bad economy will drive companies to software as a service.

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Here at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas, IronPort (a division of Cisco) is showing off its latest security solutions -- the S650 and the S350 Web Security Appliances. The S-Series was a finalist in this year's Best of Interop competition. In the new security appliance, the company leverages its SenderBase anti-spam reputation management technology to determine what parts of a Web page (if any) to let through to users' browsers. In the video below, IronPort product manager Samantha Madrid tells me more about the S-Series.

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At Interop, Oracle execs pitched the company's efforts to bring social computing to the enterprise. They might be on to something.

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I'm sure competing solutions exist (or maybe not -- you tell me). But this year's Interop marks the first time I've ever seen an intelligent patch panel: one that drives the visibility into your network another layer deeper than the visibility that might normally end with your routers and switches. The offering -- a Best of Interop finalist -- comes from Panduit, and about the only thing I can imagine coming next might be intelligent RJ45 jacks. Actually, after I finished my video interview with Panduit's Mike Pula (below) and sarcastically mentioned that idea, he didn't laugh and said the idea actually solves a problem.

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You've programmed your firewall to block the ports that some unwanted app is using and that app turns up on your net again. Net-enabled applications don't tie themselves down to one port the way the Web (HTTP, port 80) and other apps do. After some firewall shuts their ports down, they find another port. Using traffic profiles instead of ports to identify more than 600 applications, not only did Palo Alto Networks' series win InformationWeek's Best of Interop in the security category, it took the grand prize as well. In the video below, Palo Alto's Lee Klarich walks me through some of the firewall's innovations.

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Here at Interop in Las Vegas, a handful of exhibitors who also are Best of Interop finalists are waiting to find out if InformationWeek's editors have singled them out as winners or not. One of them is Alcatel-Lucent, who is here showing off its XML API-enabled Omnitouch Advanced Communications Server (ACS). Via those APIs, director of product management Peter Anderholm (pictured below left) claims that enterprises can, for collaborative purposes, easily integrate point-and-click voice conferencing into any application. I caught Peter on the show floor for a video interview.

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The anti-spam appliance vendor learned about the value of archives the hard way -- by getting sued by Trend Micro.

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Sure, open source software is free -- as in beer. It can also get you sued if you're not cautious.

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It's the eve before Interop here in Las Vegas and we've just wrapped up Energy Camp where, as can be seen from the user-decided agenda, the conversation went deep and wide on a variety of subjects related to the reduction of information technology's carbon footprint. Two key takeaways for me were (1) many so-called "green" remedies have a dark enough side to them that they may not be as green as we think they are, and (2) it may take another 15 or 20 years before we have it all sorted out. It's not as bad as it sounds, but ...

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Business travel hasn't waned much, if at all, despite the emergence of globe-shrinking technologies like Web conferencing and virtual worlds. Will the green movement finally kill it?

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How much are you paying to run your servers? A study on server electricity consumption says the utility bill for U.S. servers came to nearly $3 billion dollars.

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In the e-mail world, where possible, I used to urge organizations to stick with the Internet-standard Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) instead of using the addictive proprietary alternatives from Microsoft and IBM Lotus (found in Outlook/Exchange and Lotus Notes). Now, thanks to Google's GMail service, I realize I may have been mistaken.

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Are you coming to Energy Camp on April 28 where we'll be having an open conversation about green technology? If not, why not? Why do I ask? I was just checking the logs on our YouTube channel (TechWebTV) and noticed something unusual. Or maybe not.

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If you're an IT professional, solution provider, or someone else with an interest in how to trim back the energy consumption of technology (especially if you're someone with domain expertise to contribute to the broader conversation about "green IT"), then I hope you'll join me and Energy Camp master of ceremonies James Governor (blog) for Energy Camp in Las Vegas on April 28 (just prior to the start of Interop). Registration is free and it gets you a coveted hall pass into Interop, too.

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E-mail and group calendaring are 1990's technologies. Yet, for some idiotic reason, they still only work well when everyone is on the same vendor's system. Interop's general manager Lenny Heymann, who uses Lotus Notes, can invite me to a meeting that ties in a Cisco MeetingPlace-based teleconference, and thankfully, I can accept that invitation in Gmail. But what if that meeting moves to a different time (as meetings so often do)? That's where the interoperability ends. If Lenny changes the teleconference time in MeetingPlace, the notification I get is an abomination of technology that can't interoperate with the originally booked meeting. Who's to blame?

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There's no hiding from it. Mobile instant messaging is creeping into the enterprise whether IT departments like it or not. Enterprises can embrace it or resist it, but they won't be able to prevent a new generation entering the workforce from using mobile IM and other less traditional collaboration tools.

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It's a purely unscientific and anecdotal perspective, but here are my picks for most interesting and most needed technologies from Interop this week, plus the most startling stat I heard in my New York City travels.

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The concept of "telepresence" is brilliant when it comes to meeting your peers face-to-face without ever having to step foot on an airplane. But not many companies are willing to shell out $300,000 to put such a system in place. That's why one startup, called LifeSize, caught my attention at Interop when it showed off its affordable high definition videoconferencing system.

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NetQoS marketing VP Steve Harriman noted at Interop that a customer of his application performance-measurement company has brought together two teams that in many companies today still barely speak to each other: application development and IT infrastructure.

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I expected my blog on net neutrality to draw plenty of flames, and I was right. In this new post I'll round up the arguments that readers have expressed in favor of net neutrality, respond briefly, and hopefully point the debate in a new direction. I can summarize the objections to my stance – that the price of access to privately owned networks ought to be determined by economics, not idealism – in four main categories: a) I'm a moron who doesn't understand the term "net neutrality" in the first place; b) we already pay for bandwidth, and adding premium pricing for heavy usage would be double-dipping, or even worse a form of Net taxation (shudder); c) there is no free market for network access because the telcos are greedy, evil, and mendacious; and d) I'm just a moron.

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In a conversation at Interop, Novell VP of product management Alan Murray noted that a recent InformationWeek cover story showing the Linux penguin sweating profusely due to having a gun pointed at its head representing the imminent threat of litigation from Microsoft was missing something.

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It's been awhile since we've talked of browser wars, but a new round could be upon us.

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LifeSize Communications competes with Cisco in the Web video business, but John Doyle says he's grateful for all the attention Cisco CEO John Chambers is giving to the promising new technology because there's huge opportunities to compete at different price points with varying levels of complexity for installation, deployment, and management.

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What happens when storage demand is growing at close to 80% and apps must be rolled out and available globally while consolidation is taking place across servers and data centers and branch-office infrastructure and virtualization is believed to be the cure for all ills?

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While various naysayers have tried to argue that RFID's time has come and gone, infrastructure player Reva Systems says the uptake for the technology is coming along quite nicely.

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Wireless and mobility were big topics at this year's Interop. Let's take a look at the wireless news in review.

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Most big companies have yet to install Internet-based phone systems, but many are considering it. Here's a warning for them: VoIP presents big security risks, a pair of Interop speakers said Thursday.

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Picture a beautiful sunset over the desert, the glow of the Vegas skyline in the distance. Then a towering wave of flames leap into the air that crackles with the heat -- a man just set his computer on fire.

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In its 22-year history, the Interop trade show has been synonymous with networking, and this year's exhibitors are true to that heritage. But there's a recurring, software-oriented theme from many of the vendors I met with: the impact of Salesforce.com on the networking business.

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I have heard a lot about seamless mobility -- the dream of universal wireless access where users can roam freely between wireless LANs and cellular networks and back again -- this week at Interop. I keep hearing vendors promise dual-mode access, but when I raise the issue of the pink elephant in the room, the vendors just smile at me and change the subject.

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It's about time someone stepped up and offered a useable optimization platform for smartphones. Do your smartphone applications run too slow?

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I was wandering around the outer bounds of the Interop show floor this afternoon and stopped by a booth from a company called SpectorSoft, which sells Internet monitoring software for small businesses and home use. Never having tried their software, I can't comment on it; from the short demo that I saw, it looked like it could be quite effective. It was the booth that made me feel a bit uneasy.

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At Interop in Vegas, reps from tech services companies were pounding a familiar mantra: Offshore outsourcing is necessary because there aren't enough tech workers in the U.S. to meet demand. Will the Senate listen to them?

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Here at Interop, there's a lot of focus on security and a lot of that security attention is aimed right at network access control. It's a hot-button topic here. The question plaguing many IT and security managers, though, might be where to get started.

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Hosted software provider Zoho this week at Interop launched its new multimedia writer, called Zoho Notebook. So, is it any good? Zoho first showed off Notebook at DEMO but didn't release a public version until yesterday.

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Positive Networks, a provider of hosted VPN services, is using Interop to promote a two-factor, telephone (land-line or cell)-based authentication system for users looking to access corporate applications. The company will look to hook customers with the authentication technology -- it's free -- then sell a series of add-on services.

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