Interop 2012 was a decent show with some good discussions and presentations to get you thinking about IT topics and best practices. Vendors delivered the keynotes twice a day with three different speakers taking a slice of the allotted time. Some (like Cisco) did a decent job of talking at a high level and not openly pitching product but stayed very high level (as keynotes often do). Others (like Aveya) just promoted their product complete with a live demo and pleas to come visit them at their booth. As a desktop guy, I was less interested in many of the networking and infrastructure focused breakouts but was happy to find enough virtualization and cloud topics to keep me interested. I branched away from this track when the topic grabbed my interest (like Social Media and Security). Overall it was a good event and while I found it a challenge to create notes worth sharing for some of the sessions I attended, they all were good for getting you thinking with more of a discussion vibe than one of training (arguably a good thing).  Like the recent MMS 2012 event I attended, I’m sharing my notes here on ITNinja and I hope you’ll find them helpful on there own or at least provide some insight as to if you’d want to attend Interop yourself next year. This list will grow and get links during the week long event as I get my notes together…

• The Dark Side of Virtualization: 10 Reasons These Are Not the Virtualized Apps You're Looking For Presented by Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security, Trend Micro
• Securing Social Media in the Enterprise Presented by Nicholas Arvanitis, Security Consulting Services, Dimension Data
• Desktop Virtualization - The Highs and Lows from the Field Presented by Don Krueger, Principal Consultant, GlassHouse Technologies
• The Future of the "Desktop" or the "Desktop" of the Future was a pannel discussion featuring Glenn Wilson, Product Manager, Google, John Burke, Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research, and Roberto De La Mora, Sr. Director, Collaboration Solutions Marketing, Cisco