Interop is coming! And Riverbed is all over it!

Are you going to be at Interop '11 at the Mandalay Bay in Fabulous Las Vegas starting on May 8?  Riverbed sure will.  We're going to be all over this show.  There's so much going on it's hard to know where to begin.

First of all, we are a global Interop sponsor and the sponsor for registration. 

There's the CIO Boot Camp on Sunday and Monday the 8th and 9th.  We're also a sponsor of that event, and we'll have a couple of speakers there:

Our customer Ben Bailey of AVST will be joined by Riverbed's CIO, Thomas Bakewell, for a presentation called Case Study: Developing Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, Monday from 1 to 1:30. 

Steve Riley, one of our most prolific bloggers and a member of Riverbed's Office of the CTO, will take part in two panel discussions at Interop:

• Optimizing Hybrid Cloud Communications Monday at 3:35pm and,
• The New Age of WAN Optimization Thursday at 11:30am.

As for the IT Expo (the vendor fair) which opens Tuesday at 10am, we'll have the largest booth in Riverbed history (1500 square feet!); you shouldn't have a lot of trouble finding us in Booth 1927.  Among the things you'll find going on in the booth are:

• Ongoing live product demonstrations at six different stations:
  • Steelhead appliances
  • Cascade
  • Steelhead Mobile
  • Riverbed Services Platform (RSP)
  • Whitewater
  • Cloud Steelhead
• Presentation Theater, where a rotating group of Riverbed people (including yours truly... come by and say hello!) will give live 5-10 minute presentations and demos throughout the IT Expo.  All attendees get a free t-shirt, and are entered for a chance to win an iPad 2 each day.  There will also be some customers and other presentations mixed in.
• Wednesday at 3pm, we're taking part in the Interop Booth Crawl, which means that not only will you be able to learn all about Riverbed and WAN Optimization, but you'll also be able to have some adult beverages served to you by our own bartender.
• We'll also be running a Twitter-based contest called Speed The Cloud, where you'll have another chance to win a $500 Apple Gift Card by guessing how long it'll take to download a file from a Cloud provider in Virginia to our Interop booth, both optimized and unoptimized.  The winner will be entry with the closest guesses, based on the results of a live booth demonstration at about 2:00pm on Thursday, the final day of the IT Expo.  Details coming soon. 

If you're going to be at Interop '11, make sure you stop by the booth and get a t-shirt, and say hi.  We'd love to hear from you!