At the top of the escalator she was greeted by an identically-dressed young woman. That’s when it clicked in my sleepy head. Booth babes!

Booth babes (or spokesmodels if you prefer a less pejorative term) are ubiquitous at trade shows that draw a heavy male audience. Car shows. Computer graphics conferences. IT shows. These are women hired for their looks. They are sex objects. There’s no getting around that fact. And the companies that hire them do a grave disservice to the industry.

I can appreciate an attractive woman like any other guy. However, as a journalist who covers the IT industry, I lose a lot of respect for companies who rely on them. I passed by booths belonging to Net Optics and Barracuda Networks several times on my way to other meetings and I did not fail to notice the platoon of scantily clad women hired to lure men close enough to scan their Interop badges. Anything for a sales lead, right? Are those sales leads really worth it when you’re promoting sexism?

I’m probably in the minority on this issue, but I am sick of the atmosphere created by these smokesmodels (And I’m not just saying that because my girlfriend might be reading this). I refuse to stop at any booth that features these women. These companies should find a better way to attract potential customers than fast cars and beautiful women. Leave cheap tricks like that to the auto industry. I don’t want to be associated with something like that, so I’ll stay clear. There are plenty of companies who rely on industry professionals to engage the media and potential customers at the show.

Moreover, there are a lot of professional women on Interop’s showroom floor — marketing professionals, engineers, IT managers, technology executives. Men outnumber women ten-to-one in this industry, and we all know there are a many reasons for this. Reason number one is staring you right in the face when you let some teenage girl with a winning smile and fishnet stockings scan your badge. They might have a nice smile, but companies that hire these models are creating a hostile work environment for our female colleagues. That’s not just some politically correct term. It’s a fact.

In my last post I quoted a description of a phone from Craig Raine‘s poem “A Martian Sends A Postcard Home:”

“In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.”

Who knew that the end of my last post would be a prelude to my time at Burton Group Catalyst Conference last June. I ended up unknowingly booking at a haunted hotel! (“In [hotels] a haunted [Tessa] sleeps…”)

And I’m not one to believe in ghosts, but the Travel Channel, hotel maids and several newspapers insist there is a presence of an other-worldly being at The Horton Grand Hotel — in the room next to where I stayed.

Though I didn’t end up seeing the so-called “roger the lodger” (the name of the mostly-friendly ghost), the other form of ghosts (described in the poem) did a bit of their own haunting…

 The reason why was made clear to me after I attended the “Do I Really Want to Be Anywhere at Anytime?“ session, presented by Burton Group Executive Strategist Jack Santos.

Santos said “You can work from anywhere on earth and you can access just about anywhere on earth, [but] there are implications that go along with that.”

The implications were listed in Santos’ consequences of pervasive mobility: The first one being “the organization effect” where instead of individual knowledge we now have the ability to share knowledge across a group; knowledge is easily transferred from the individual to an organization. The second consequence was “message bloating:” One thought suddenly spawns many messages. Then came what Santos called “royalty syndrome:” Once a client or manager had your number they could call you at any time to ask you to work for them now. The last notable consequence was “total serfdom.” Santos said that “people have to have their devices.”

The last two consequences of mobility I find particularly vicious: If you have to have your device, then you consequently have to receive calls from your boss asking you to work for them then, which means you’re never fully away from work.

There were, of course, positives to having pervasive mobility. For instance, Santos said “there’s remote-ability, accessibility … and the ability to extend organizations,” which can not only save organizations, but also save individuals commuting fees.

Do these positives outweigh the negatives, though? In this information age, we are experiencing information overload — which is almost as bad as no information at all.

Worse still is the idea that “we’re leashed on a wireless leash,” said Santos.

This concept of a “wireless leash” is something even the general public feels the weight of. Take Jonathan Clare, for instance in his blog post on humans complicating their lives with technology:

“Cell phones are probably the most handiest and intrusive technology today. They are life savers when you need them, and they create stress when you don’t. You are always reachable… always. This leaves little space for privacy.”

What’s really unnerving is that people attached to their devices and computers all day and night are finding normal conversation difficult. “Live talk — conversation between real people — is awkward,” says Santos.

I can attest to this in my own experience when I work for prolonged periods of time by myself in my home office. I often find verbalizing thoughts extremely challenging. And human interaction isn’t made any easier when you realize it’s not acceptable to hold up a sign that says “BRB” — you have to figure out how to express your need to leave a conversation momentarily in a tactful manner. After a while you begin to forget what tact and acceptable exchange is.

I remember a person who would start a conversation, and midway through — without warning, excuse or farewell — would simply walk away. He did this with everyone he spoke to.

That loss of tact and respect was something Santos saw as a consequence of pervasive mobility: “We need to define a work in this culture of civility and respect … we’re losing these things.”

So how can we do this? Santos suggested we switch from pervasive mobility to pervasive civility. “Let’s not forget the human element,” he said. My personal suggestion is to start talking to people in the cubicle or desk next to you. Not IM — or, god forbid, text.

In Santos’ session synopsis he wrote: “Hammers will be given out at the end of the talk to destroy Blackberries, iPhones, and other mind-threatening paraphernalia that is ending life as we know it.” 

They weren’t given out, but we were strongly urged through a march-like mantra to “turn off your mobile phones!” “turn off your devices!” “go to places where you don’t have service on the weekend.” — which was a tune I happily marched to, and have no qualms about singing now.

March of the Peabody Ducks:
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Evolution — Oh Sherrie:
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Evolution — Don’t Stop Believing:
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After an opening segment with loud music, colored lights and 11 screens displaying attendees’ favorite sports teams (on which they “collaborated” via text message), Chambers got down to talking about Cisco’s ability to stay abreast of market transitions. He explained that Cisco will leverage their position as the market leader to facilitate “any device, any content” communications and collaboration, which he sees as the market transition that is happening now.

Major components of this collaboration scenario, according to Chambers, are social networking and video — in fact, he said that “visual networking is the future.” But Chambers said Cisco plans to add vision to social networking, putting structure behind Web 2.0-type tools like Twitter or Facebook (he alluded to the way “kids” use social networking tools here), validating their use as business tools.

A highlight of the session was the demonstration of WebEx Connect and how Cisco’s latest and greatest collaboration technology (brought about by Cisco’s recent WebEx acquisition) will enable us to communicate differently. Jim Grubb — jokingly dubbed “chief demonstration officer” — joined Chambers on stage for the demo. They showed off one-touch meeting functionality and something called “casting,” which I captured in this short video.

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Chambers reiterated the theme of his March VoiceCon keynote that the focus of online video collaboration (a.k.a. telepresence) is not only about cutting down on travel costs or “going green” by reducing associated emissions, but also, and more importantly, about changing business models to increase productivity.

As proof that Cisco is eating their own dog food (so to speak), Chambers gave some statistics about the growth of social networking use at Cisco, including blogs, wikis, discussion forums, and something called C-Vision, which he said was like “YouTube for the Enterprise.” (Later in the day, Chambers also answered user questions online in Second Life, underscoring his company’s interest in using social networking tools for business. Somewhat ironically, a glitch in the program made Chambers’ avatar’s virtual pants render as sort of an “image loading” error message.)

Other prominent themes of the keynote were Cisco’s focus on innovation, as evidenced in their I-Prize program, and on virtualization — not just in the data center or server, Chambers said, “virtualization in everything you do.” An example of this was Cisco’s virtual launch of their ASR 1000 product.

Of course, I’m always skeptical, and wondered whether the network having to deliver all communications is really going to be such a good thing. One, there’s the increased reliance on technology — which, let’s face it, no matter how good Cisco makes the product, can still fail. Two, there’s the problem of user integrity; virtual tools only work really well when users take the time to create fully-fleshed out profiles and enter all their contact information — and social networking tools enable the delivery of not just productivity, but lots of twittering about our cats, poking and ROTFLing. Then again, I’m not so sure that’s completely different from real life collaboration.

“The margins aren’t good in storage devices,” Chambers added. He said prefers more modest acquisitions, companies with a large staff of engineers that’s about to take a a new product to market, for instance.

Last month, some Wall Street analysts and journalists had speculated that an EMC acquisition by Cisco might make some sense for the company, but it looks like simple wishful thinking at this point.

Chambers also revealed that Cisco is currently evaluating its potential for growth in the consumer technology market. He said Ned Hooper, senior vice president of corporate development and the consumer and small business group, owes him a plan for consumer brand development within the next 12 months.

Chambers said Cisco’s current consumer play sits at around $3.5 billion ($1 billion in business from its consumer wireless router Linksys brand and $2.5 billion from its Scientific Atlanta set-top box business). He said Hooper, who is known as a merger & acquisition guru at Cisco, is evaluating whether Cisco can push its consumer business to $10 billion.

Since Chambers also revealed that he envisions consumer adoption of Cisco’s TelePresence technology to take off once the company can offer a $10,000 price point for a home solution, a $10 billion consumer business might not be out of the question.

Dave Roberts, Vyatta’s VP of Strategy, spoke on a panel session called “Open source networking: An insanely smart idea?” at Interop Las Vegas 2008. I asked Dave whether open source networking was making any progress against the common arguments against its use in businesses, such as companies wanting the assurance of “one (vendor’s) throat to choke” should they have problems with the technology. Dave says that issue is “exactly the problem Vyatta was created to solve,” and said that they wanted to bring together all the disparate open source parts to become the “Red Hat of the networking industry.”

In this video, Dave talks a little bit about where Vyatta is now, some of the company’s recent price/performance successes, and new features they’re offering.

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Dr. Jim Metzler warned attendees during the “Managing and Controlling Application Performance” session on Tuesday that in the next five years the combination of application acceleration, virtualization, and service oriented architecture will create a perfect storm. He said the resulting complexity of technologies may be something we are unable to manage. That’s quite an unsettling thought, especially coming from Jim, who may be the most influential expert in network and applications management today.

Taking a brighter view, other experts and vendors referred to the network and its new role as the “application delivery network” and emphasized the need for IT professionals that understand all aspects of delivering applications from end to end. These new application delivery specialists are most likely to come from a networking background, they agreed, because they have the knowledge of the complex infrastructure already in place.

So is the glass half empty or half full? Or maybe we just need to build an ark to weather the perfect storm. As Burton Group analyst Eric Siegel quipped to me at the end of the Metzler session, “You know what my plan is? In five years, I’m just going to retire!” If only we could all do that…

• Be sure to check out more Interop news and insight on our special coverage page
• Shout out to network management compadre Denise Dubie at Network World for her work with the aforementioned Eric Siegel on this useful guide to Assembling a ‘Network A-Team’

You can see the survey results in this PDF file on Motorola’s web site. Indeed 56% of companies intend to increase their spending on WLAN technology over the next 12 months. Only 4% plan to cut their spending. This is surprising, given how shaky the economy is right now.

Motorola is showcasing its “all-wireless” enterprise concept at Interop this week. The company is demonstrating how its new line of mesh-enabled, 802.11n wireless LAN technologies and its high-powered point-to-point wireless technologies can be used to network a multi-location campus with wireless technology. Motorola appears to be one of the pioneers in this area. If the market for WLAN does stay strong, we could see some interesting deployments this year. I’m hoping to write up a case study or two on this soon.

There’s only so much ink in my pen, so you won’t hear all those stories. I apologize for that. But we’ll be bringing you as many interesting bits of news on this show as we can.

As a favor to you, our readers, we’ve reached out to some of the experts who will be speaking at Interop this year to get their insight on what to expect from the show. I caught up with Anne Skamarock, research director at Focus Consulting, who will be taking the stage several times to talk about virtualization. I asked her to tell us what to look for on the virtualization front at Interop.

Tessa Parmenter chatted with wireless networking expert Lisa Phifer about WLAN topics at Interop, Kate Dostart talked mobile apps and devices with Farpoint Group’s Craig Mathias, and Kara Gattine tracked down Burton Group’s Paul DeBeasi and picked his brain about enterprise wireless deployments.

We hope this whets your appetite for Interop news. We’ll be publishing news, blog posts and video from this show. Keep an eye on our Interop Las Vegas 2008 special news coverage page for all the news that’s fit to print.

Earlier this week, I wrote a post about the SHARKFEST conference, a small and focused networking event that features some very high-powered speakers, namely Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and protocol analysis expert Laura Chappell.

Tim O’Neill has posted a video and uploaded the slides of Vint Cerf’s presentation over at LoveMyTool, if you’d like to check them out. Vint’s talk covered Internet usage and growth in the 21st century so far, how technology and protocols are changing, what the drivers are behind that change, and how standards groups are working on adapting technology to meet future demands.

Laura Chappell has quite an extensive recap of SHARKFEST posted on her Inside Laura’s Lab blog. If you can make it through her entire post, you’ll truly feel like you were in attendance! Also stay tuned to SearchNetworking.com for more from Laura; she’ll be joining us soon for a virtual trade show on network monitoring. For now, click over to her latest animated article at Novell Connection Magazine. This one explains everything you need to know about TCP connection loss.

(Updated 4/8/08.)