Squid and their relatives have eyes that are sensitive to polarised light and to them and are known to use it to signal to one another. Their predators on the other hand, like seals or whales, don't share this ability and cannot see the squids' signals.

Most of all, the polarised iridescent light, is not affected by the chromatophores and passes through unaltered. This means that camouflaged squid can have entire visual conversations while remaining invisible to passing predators. In the world of squid, conversations carry secrets wrapped in lies.

I plan to blog about my progress (and share it) if there's not already a built-in solution out there.

By all accounts the show did go on, and we have some very interesting results to share with you all.

Take the Top Challenges question. Once again, “Supporting New Technologies/Enabling Innovation” was most popular. But that’s a no-brainer and as one memorable respondent told me, “the definition of what I do”. What was more important was seeing the big jump that “Reducing Management Costs” made on the list, from #5 last year to #2 this year and only 1 percentage point behind #1. Tightening the belt is top of mind for everyone. (As I write, the Dow closed down today over 700 points)

Overall, IT professionals told us they were tackling the practical projects that should and could get done – from deploying Security Information Management solutions to getting Asset Management and Inventory Tools in place. For the first time, we saw a close correlation between what people said was important and what actually got done. Of low importance and even lower actual deployments – ITIL and CMDB, IPv6, Green IT and Cloud Computing.

And perhaps people “fessed” up about virtualization. Instead of the usual “high importance, not so many deployments now, but more deployments planned” theme we’ve been seeing around virtualization adoption, this year the very hot trend seemed to lose a bit of steam. Across the board, the numbers were down for virtualization management, with close to 50% of respondents telling us that their businesses were less than 10% virtualized (4% of that with no virtualization at all).

2008 Detailed Results – showing trends year over year

Comparison of Results from Interop NY 2008 vs FOSE 2008 (government IT)

Does Oracle run the world? I would have to say no but Raj (Larry Ellison is his idol) and the 40,000 Oracle customers that descended upon SF last week might beg to differ. What do James Carville and Mary Matalin have to do with enterprise software? Pretty much nothing, except for the fact that they delivered the opening keynote for Oracle OpenWorld. (And that’s the only and last politically-oriented thing you’ll hear from me as we run up to the election). For a surprisingly funny and extensive photo gallery of the eye-popping event, check out cdye1’s photostream on Flickr.

But UB40, Elvis Costello and Seal aside, Oracle OpenWorld did offer training, certifications, and always entertaining speeches by Ellison. Ben Worthen’s favorite – “Larry Ellison’s Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant” delivered to analysts on Thursday. From Ben’s slightly-edited excerpt:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

So did everyone catch that? Cloud computing is complete gibberish and idiocy, but apparently Oracle’s already been doing enough around it to advertise the fact. I will have my cake and eat it too!

We’ve been pumping out the posts from the shows we went to – let me tell you, live-blogging is hard when you’re trying to share apparently miniscule amounts of bandwidth with 14,000 other attendees – and we have even more to share as we step back, contemplate and describe how some of the announcements, info and especially roadmaps fit into our overall picture over here at ScienceLogic.

For example, we released the results of our annual industry IT survey last week. Twice a year – at FOSE (for Government IT) and at Interop NY (for enterprises) – we take advantage of the fact that we have a big beautiful booth at these shows and offer a fabulous ScienceLogic t-shirt in return for a couple of minutes time with attendees living the problems we try to solve. Instead of telling people what their problems and priorities are, we like to ask.
Interop NY Survey - Trends and Challenges
Detailed Reports on Trends and Comparison to Government IT

And I just had to share this one because it is so bizarre. Are VMware and Paul Maritz guilty of plagiarism? You have to check this out to get even part of the picture. Apparently this guy has posted his slides (we know they are from VMworld 2007 because it says so in the lower-right-hand corner…) which prove that the “virtual datacenter operating system” idea was his idea a year before it showed up on Maritz’s keynote this year. Hmmm. And then after posting all these slides and making all the connections between his presentation and Maritz’s, he says he’s just kidding about the plagiarism. Can anyone sort this out and let me know?

I’ll tell you who wasn’t kidding when I went by their booth at VMworld – a certain chargeback vendor and VMware “partner” who was quite shocked two months ago when they walked into a meeting with VMware about future roadmap. Apparently, the slides they saw (preview of VMware’s announcement re adding extended chargeback capability within vCenter management services) were mighty might similar to slides they had given in a presentation to VMware about their own roadmap. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide. And I’ll also say, their strategy to combat this – support for Hyper-V coming early in 2009.

TIBCO Software Inc. (Nasdaq: TIBX ) continued its market leadership in the fast-growing Complex Event Processing (CEP) space, according to a new report from IDC. TIBCO thus marked another year as the undisputed CEP leader, with a market share of 40.2 percent — twice the share of its closest competitor-while experiencing 52 percent year-over-year growth, according to the IDC study.

“CEP is the fastest-growing segment of the global event-driven middleware market,” according to Maureen Fleming, director of IDC’s BPM and middleware research program. “We expect this growth to continue as enterprises build event-driven applications that, in essence, act as real-time navigation systems for business.”

Reference (PRNewsWire):

TIBCO Leads Fast-Growing CEP Space, Says Leading IT Analyst Firm

We chatted about the growth of the show and how much that growth reflects the industry itself. Since the bust earlier in the decade both Interop Las Vegas and New York shows have grown year over year – not just in attendees and exhibitors but in topics covered in the conference tracks. As any of us who are in the space know, it’s a rapidly changing market and Interop strives not just to cover the latest trends but also to get ahead of them while still making sure that they are relevant.

The show’s mission overall has expanded beyond “just” networking to cover performance and new trends like virtualization, cloud computing and SAAS that all affect network performance. It is a mirror for the demands on the network (and network admins) and the convergence we see going on that make managing the network so complex today.

Responding to criticisms about the lack of interoperability at the show, Lenny says, “Our special sauce is interoperability.” And in fact the expanded mission of the show ensures that there are more interoperability issues to deal with and he invites the community to comment and share feedback on this core mission.

Last, we talked about InteropNet. We’ve loved our participation in it this year for a variety of reasons – from the opportunity to work with other cool vendors in an intensive and real-life/real-time environment to the true sense of camaraderie and “getting it done” that everyone shares on the InteropNet team to the wonderful atmosphere of hard work AND hard play that you have to experience to believe.

We talked with Lenny about how he measures InteropNet “success” and the answer was illuminating. They’ve got high expectations at Interop; they expect the network to just work, so the focus is actually not on uptime and SLAs – that’s a given. “Nothing less than perfection works here.” (Let me tell you, after my horrible experience with the super slow and inaccessible network at the VMworld conference, that is definitely not always the case. Maybe InteropNet should sell its services…hmmmm…) Rather, it’s about being able to showcase technologies and strategies for networking and interoperability – or as we’re interpreting that, basically “walking the walk – which in the end is what InteropNet is all about.

See the full video here.