Performance Optimization & Testing Winner
Talari Networks: Adaptive Private Network (APN) 3.0
Category Judges:
Mike Fratto, Senior Analyst, Current Analysis
Don Magrogan, Chief Technology Officer, Fusion PPT
Talari's Adaptive Private Network (APN) 3.0 won Best of Interop's Performance Optimization & Testing category because APN offers a dynamic, simple, and robust private network over existing WAN technologies and requires minimal configuration and management. Server virtualization, cloud computing, distributed data centers, and increasing application demands place pressures on the network to deliver fast, robust connectivity that traditional network architectures can't keep up with.
Optimizing application traffic over the WAN that uses multiple technologies such as VPN, MPLS, load balancing, and routing can't respond quickly enough to changing demands or outages. APN 3.0 build a mesh network between destinations and tunnels network traffic through the best path, automatically ensuring good application performance regardless of what occurs in the underlying network.
In the event of a link failure, APN provides sub-second failover; compare that to existing technologies which can take upwards of 30 seconds or more to detect and recover from failure, all while increasing packet loss and application performance issues.
APN learns about new nodes in the network and adapts the forwarding paths to take account of new capacity and shorter paths between destinations. APN automatically maintains application priority to ensure high priority traffic receives preferential treatment during times of congestion and dedicates more capacity when it's available. APN's management system also contains performance monitoring showing the state of links, network outages, and traffic patterns. – Mike Fratto
Security Winner
The Hacker Academy: The HackRack
Category Judges:
Tim Wilson, Editor, Dark Reading
John Pironti, President, IP Architects, LLC
This year's security category entries for Best of Interop offered some major advances in security technology, from firewalls to application security. But there was only one entry that addressed a problem in today's organizations: the shortage of skilled security pros.
The Hacker Academy's HackRack is a leap forward in the way security professionals are trained, both in school and on the job. Using a virtualized training environment, HackRack provides the potential for enterprises to give security and IT people a simulated attack environment, enabling them to learn how to respond to specific threat scenarios and technical environments. In a sense, HackRack is to security training what flight simulators are to airline pilot training.
Using a customized, virtualized environment, HackRack enables enterprises to train IT and security professionals in secure software development, Web application security, or overall enterprise security. The scenarios it provides enable enterprises to tailor the experience to help trainees work on specific problems, such as a particular type of attack and/or a particular vertical-market security environment. It can be used as part of a broader training program, or as part of a tabletop exercise to help security people prepare for future attacks.
A Hacker Academy executive describes HackRack as "bridging the gap between what you learn in your SANS Institute workbook and what you see in real life." It lets students and professionals engage in simulations and capture-the-flag-type competitions to learn the disciplines they need in order to understand the latest attacks and how to respond to them. While there have been other tools used to give practical experience in security response, this one is faster and more versatile, and could go a long way toward helping enterprises get the skills they need to respond to the latest attacks. – Tim Wilson
Wireless, Mobility & BYOD Support Winner
Citrix: Mobile Solutions Bundle
Category Judges:
Lee Badman, Network and Wireless Engineer, Syracuse University
Chris Hazelton, Research Director, Mobile & Wireless, 451 Research, LLC
The MDM industry is about bringing order to chaos. Citrix's Mobile Solutions Bundle is a total solution for enterprise environments that need to demystify mobile device support. Whether mobile devices are corporate-issued or BYOD, the Mobile Solutions Bundle takes care of management but also delivers productivity through several features that earn Citrix's offering this year's award.
Though Citrix is hardly alone in the growing mobility management space, the company leverages its deep security and productivity roots from the desktop realm into an end-to-end product that works very well for mobile users and those administrators responsible for their success. With an emphasis on ease of use for both the user and administrator, the Mobile Solutions Bundle provides granular role-based experience and management, secure browsing and email, app provisioning, virtual desktop functionality and more. It's delivered in a framework that makes it the product of choice for customers that range from chain restaurants seeking efficiency of workflows to major medical facilities with complex regulatory requirements.
BYOD and mobility bring not only incredible competitive advantage, but also the need for strong defenses against data leakage and the ability to deliver solid audit trails throughout the mobile environment. Citrix makes short work of a complicated challenge. – Lee Badman
Best Startup
VDO360
Category Judges:
Andrew Conry Murray, Editor, Network Computing
Steven Hill, Lead Judge, Best of Interop 2013
Videoconferencing can be a powerful tool for a variety of business and educational applications, but with turnkey systems often costing five to six figures, the price point puts them out of the range of many customers. Our best new startup company for 2013, VDO360, offers a highly-functional USB camera and UC conferencing cart combination at a fraction of the cost of many current conferencing systems.
Aside from price, what makes VDO360's story compelling is its philosophy that the advances in underlying videoconferencing technology should let companies use commonly available, thus less expensive, hardware. VDO360 argues that that the codecs and control plane are already out there and stable, so why not combine that with simplified hardware at a substantially reduced price? It's hard not to agree.
To prove its point, the company offers the VDO 360 SB HD PTZ; a powerful, flexible video conferencing camera which is available at a fraction of the cost of similar devices and operates using a simple and open control interface.
Moreover, the matching VDO360 UC conferencing cart system is a surprisingly cost-effective turnkey conferencing solution that's compatible with most of the popular software codecs available, such as: Skype, Cisco Jabber, Vidyo, Lifesize Communicator, Microsoft Lync, Seevogh, Polycom m100, and Avaya/Radvision Scopia. We salute VDO360's goal of making teleconferencing accessible to budget-challenged organizations and we're pleased to name them Best of Interop 2013's Startup of the Year. – Steven Hill
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
