When the first edition of the television show Indian Idol was nearing its conclusion in early 2005, I remember one of the judges admitting to initial apprehension and expressing relief that the participating singers hadn’t let India down and had ensured that the show was as good as, or even better than, the forerunning British and American versions that it was modeled on.

When I set out a few months ago as Conference Chair to devise the conference program for Interop Mumbai 2009, I had similar apprehensions. Where would we find so many speakers? Would the speakers be good enough? What about the workshops and demos? Would we be able to put together and deliver a conference and exposition of this scale in Mumbai? (a city notorious for its woeful lack of world-class convention infrastructure).

After all, the Interop brand has huge equity and a legacy that goes back to the time when TCP/IP was still being perfected and the fledgling Internet was just about spreading into the realm of business. That’s way beyond what any TV reality show can ever hope to claim. To get a sense of the Interop heritage, let me quote from A Brief History of the Internet (Barry Leiner, Vinton Cerf, et al): “…Dan Lynch [one of the TCP/IP and Arpanet pioneers] in cooperation with the IAB arranged to hold a three day workshop for ALL vendors to come learn about how TCP/IP worked and what it still could not do well… After two years of conferences, tutorials, design meetings and workshops, a special event was organized that invited those vendors whose products ran TCP/IP well enough to come together in one room for three days to show off how well they all worked together and also ran over the Internet. In September of 1988 the first Interop trade show was born. 50 companies made the cut. 5,000 engineers from potential customer organizations came to see if it all did work as was promised. It did. Why? Because the vendors worked extremely hard to ensure that everyone’s products interoperated with all of the other products—even with those of their competitors. The Interop trade show has grown immensely since then and today it is held in [several] locations around the world each year to an audience of over 250,000 people who come to learn which products work with each other in a seamless manner, learn about the latest products, and discuss the latest technology.”

Over the years, as interoperability became less and less of an intractable problem, Interop evolved into a more broad-based business technology event. Now, 21 years on, after Las Vegas, New York, Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Moscow, Interop has finally arrived here in India and I am pretty confident that Interop Mumbai (7-9 Oct 2009) will be everything that everyone has come to expect from the leading business technology event worldwide.

We have over 60 speakers from all over the world spread across 20-plus sessions, six keynotes, three plenary panel discussions, and several workshops and special sessions, in four parallel tracks. My approach has been to provide a mix of subject experts, experienced practitioners, distinguished analysts, tech gurus and promising young enterprise-IT professionals from India. To give a realistic practical dimension to the conference, most of the sessions will be chaired by leading CIOs from various industry verticals. The icing on the cake is the large exhibit floor adjoining the conference halls, where delegates and visitors can see the latest technologies being showcased and demonstrated by close to 50 leading vendors, all in one place.

India is at a critical juncture in its quest to achieve “developed country” status, and I firmly believe that prudent deployment of Information Technology is one of the important factors that will help us get there quicker. I am further convinced that events such as Interop serve as enablers and triggers for enterprise IT managers, aiding them in making sound decisions for rapid and effective deployment of IT solutions in their organizations.

As the date for the event approaches, the excitement is palpable, and inexorably rising to a crescendo. Interop Mumbai 2009 will definitely be a landmark event in the annals of the evolution of enterprise-IT in India. Do join me on October 7th at the Bombay Exhibition Centre—and be a witness to history in the making!

- Val Souza

Conference Chair, Interop Mumbai 2009

 (valsouza at ubmindia dot com)

Advertisement