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Over the past few years, a number of independent Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendors were acquired by bigger players. In late 2010, HP scooped up market leader ArcSight for $1.5 billion. Last year, McAfee purchased Nitro Security while IBM acquired Q1 Labs.

Solid-state Storage is all the rage right now....while its potential for high performance is well understood (at least at a high level), the fact that it can usually deliver economic value is only beginning to be appreciated.

Well I've been out of Las Vegas for several days now so I've had time to adjust back to normal society and reflect a bit more on Interop2012. My colleague Bob "LAN" Laliberte met with nearly everyone in the industry and while I don't remember every encounter, here are a few final thoughts:

The Social enterprise is quickly becoming a mature technology. The IT infrastructure to support it hasn't matured as fast. Data protection especially lags behind what is offered for other enterprise applications. This is a gaping hole in the Social Enterprise ecosystem but also an opportunity for an enterprising company.

I'm busy working on my EMC World preso, which will be Thursday May 24, at 8:30 AM - and well worth waking up hung over for, post Adam Levine the night before.

I'll be introduced by marketing genius, Roger Sterling of Mad Men (aka John Slattery), and quite frankly, it's hysterical.

Just about everyone I speak with – vendors, IT managers, even end-users – agrees on one thing about the Social Enterprise. They all say that it needs to be tied into everyday work, to what the average knowledge worker does on a regular basis. New research by ESG shows that end-users are not regular users of social tools, only occasional ones. This bodes poorly for the Social Enterprise since its real value will only come when everyone becomes a participant.

Having left Las Vegas in the rear view mirror and enjoying a lengthy plane ride home gave me time to reflect on my time at Interop 2012. As the title of this blog indicates, many that I spoke to felt as though the show this spring had a definite network focus. You might be saying, duh, it is a networking show, and you would be correct, but there seemed to be less cloud washing and more about the Network, like Software-defined Networking, support for BYOD environments and even low latency Ethernet.

Trying to explain to my friends and family what it is I do is always an interesting conversation, but every time I mention I work with companies like Citrix, they immediately reply “oh, the GoToMeeting company.” While that is true, it is an astute observation and an impression Citrix is out to change. Is Citrix the “online meeting and collaboration company,” the “application delivery company,” or the “cloud company?” Citrix would like us to associate them across all these categories, but the fact remains that most customers would say they are a XenApp, GoToMeeting, XenDesktop, etc, customer, but few are Citrix customers consuming across each of its portfolio of products.