Networking Interop

By Heidi Genoist -- Tradeshow Week, 5/29/2006

Las Vegas—Show managers: Want to offer free Internet service to all your exhibitors? All it takes is four staff members who spend half their time finding vendor sponsors to donate the equipment and managing the dozens of industry volunteers who put it all together.

Oh yeah, and a venue that's willing to give up its Internet service revenue.

That's exactly what is behind InteropNet at CMP Media's Interop, the annual information technology tradeshow for networking professionals.

According to preliminary numbers, this year's show April 30–May 5 at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino drew 18,300 attendees (including exhibitors) to visit 375 exhibiting companies, none of which paid a single dime for their booth Internet service.

Because Interop is now the country's largest and longest-standing convention and exhibition for Internet technology, participants see it as the ideal place to show off their latest equipment to a captive audience. They do this by building and running the show's network, InteropNet, from the ground up, including cables, switches, servers, routers — the whole shebang.

It's a mammoth undertaking. Glenn Evans, the lead network engineer for CMP's business technology group, said the project takes up half of his time.

By all accounts, the volunteers are key to the project's success.

"They're the reason this works," Evans said. "For us to make it happen, all the vendor egos have to be checked at the door."

For this year's show, 15 unpaid volunteers gave up to six weeks of their time to make InteropNet happen. After participating in the design process, they travel to Belmont, Calif., several weeks before the show and build the network in an empty warehouse. Once it's operable, they take the whole thing down, ship it to Las Vegas, and put it together again at Mandalay Bay.

During the show, nearly 75 people (including staff and on-site volunteers) work on the project. Some get paid leave from their companies, but others don't.

So, why do they do it?

"In my day job, I manage network engineers. I like to go back to my roots and personally put things together," said Brandon Ross.

His day job is as director of network engineering for traffic optimizer Internap, but he's spent more than a month as an InteropNet volunteer for each of the past 10 years. This year, he was a team leader.

Participating in the project has tangible benefits. Vendors submit their latest and greatest inventions to be included in the network. Staging them this way allows for beta testing in an ideal environment.

In addition, CMP promotes InteropNet heavily, meaning that for vendors, as Evans said, "it's a marketing tradeoff."

Sometimes, though, it's not exactly a fair trade. This year, for instance, Evans said InteropNet really tried his patience.

"This time around, we got a lot of new equipment coming in," he said. "The new cable was a couple days late. It's been a bit of a tough one."

The trials didn't go unnoticed to users, either. "You know how it is with anything new that you're trying for the first time," said Patrick Du, technical engineer for flagship exhibitor Cisco Systems. "We had quite a few problems on the first day. Overall, though, it went relatively smoothly."

Perhaps InteropNet's most surprising aspect is that it's even allowed by Mandalay. Exhibit halls are increasingly conscious of exploiting every possible revenue stream.

Yet Evans said it has been easy working with Mandalay Bay's in-house team. The MGM Grand-owned hotel-casino provides the telecom services for the show and lets Interop handle all the networking.

A few members of the hotel's IT team even volunteered to work on InteropNet as a learning experience — and they weren't alone. Local convention telecom and Internet provider Priority Networks also sent some of its engineers to help with InteropNet.

"We've had friction in the past with convention center ISPs (Internet service providers)," Evans said, "but not with Mandalay Bay. It works very well here."

Despite changes in the show's ownership — going most recently from MediaLive Intl. to CMP — organizers feel strongly about continuing the project.

"This will not be killed," said Evans. "It's too cool."