Big Fat Interop Photo Show: HP Mainstreams Unified Comm, Show Floor ShotsBig Fat Interop Photo Show: HP Mainstreams Unified Comm, Show Floor Shots

OK, so I only actually have four photos so far. But they're fresh from the morning keynotes, where HP announced its unified communications alliance with Microsoft, and VMware discussed how virtualization has become a serious enabling technology for cloud computer. I'll be tweeting (@awolfe58) and posting more photos throughout Interop. Click ahead to see the first batch.Before we get to the pictures, some initial impressions. Let's take HP and Microsoft first. The alliance between the two raises unified communication higher on the radar screen than it's ever been. Heretofore, I'd argue, it's been one of those technologies which comm-aware folks keep telling everyone is important. Yet the masses outside of that sector haven't really "gotten it." Now they will.

Specially, the deal is a a four-year strategic initiative -- added onto the existing HP-Microsoft Frontline partnership -- to deliver an end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solution. The two will pony up $180 million in investments to make it happen.

What struck me most during the keynote was probably something which HP executive vice president Ann Livermore and Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop didn't intend. Namely, they positioned the deal as a unified comm pact (which it indeed is), and used their keynote time to demonstrate how easily it'll make desktop-centric video communications. (They hooked up, visually, with team members in Bangalore and Singapore.)

Anyway, so for me during the whole demo I was wondering why unified communications is in essence being technologically ghettoized by the very use of that term. Because what I saw was PCs being used in an easy and natural fashion for collaboration, with video as the medium by which that's done.

So my takeaway is that unifed comm is about to go mainstream in a big way. At which point, we won't talk about it as a separate thing, because it'll be under the hood. It'll just be PCs doing what PCs do. (And, hey, it's finally a way to make sensible use of all that desktop processing power. Though I do wonder about the increased bandwidth needs of all this stuff. Paging Cisco!)

The second leg of the Tuesday morning Interop keynote came via VMware CTO Stephen Herrod, who offered some interesting insight into virtualization. The top-line takeaway from his talk is that virtualization is becoming a critical enabling technology for cloud computing. Herrod talked up VMware vSphere, which is positioned as the industry's first cloud operating system.

We'll have a news story by Nick Hoover on the keynotes posted on information.com shortly; go there for more detail.

For now, here's my early photostream:

Update: Here are other pictures, added after the keynote above. These are mostly from the show floor. The coolest one, shown first, is from the Fusion-io booth, where 600 DVDs were simultaneously streamed. The two SAP architecture slides are from the Tuesday afternoon keynote by SAP chief technology officer Vishal Sikka.

Follow me on Twitter: (@awolfe58)

What's your take? Let me know, by leaving a comment below or e-mailing me directly at [email protected].

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of information.com.