News
Live from TechMentor!: Notes from the Exhibit Floor
There's a sea of vendors on the joint exhibit floor here at the TechMentor and VS Live! conferences. On the IT side, I caught demos from KACE, Barracuda and Ipswitch.
Quest KACE creates the KBOX series of security
appliances, a slick-looking blade-like unit. The company just released its KBOX
systems Management 1200 and Systems Deployment 2200 appliances aimed at the
medium-size business market. KACE has beefed up security by partnering up with
Lumension Security to give the boxes some automated patching and recovery capabilities.
Barracuda has been honing its enterprise-class spam killer appliances. The company says it blocks about 95 percent of the 1 billion-plus spam messages squishing through its boxes every day. The company also has tools for filtering Web site and IM applications, as well as a nifty message archiving box, which I didn't have time to learn about, but will look into further.
Finally, Ipswitch's booth got some good
foot traffic due to its oddly named WhatsUp Gold. Version 11 is like Microsoft's
NetMon on steroids, with a nifty GUI for discovering every manner of IP-based
network devices, monitoring of SNMP and WMI, constant monitoring of state changes
across the network, and comprehensive trending and reporting of network devices
and information. The newest version, which was released earlier this year, supports
IPv4 and IPv6, and the addition of new reporting tools.
Several development-focused exhibitors were on the floor as well. At the Sparx Systems booth, talk of OOP and data modeling brought me back a
decade, when I used to write for a programming magazine. The company's Enterprise
Architect UML 2.1 is the latest, and reminds me of Visio on overdrive, with
the ability to provide software project models fully compliant with the unified
modeling language.
EA UML 2.1 provides support for all UML 2.0 diagrams that can be tapped into
Visual Studio .NET for immediate code generation, as well as source code control
and version control support. Find out more at www.sparxsystems.com.
Also making an appearance was Apress,
with a few new software developer titles from VSLive! speakers like Deborah
Kurata (Best
Kept Secrets in .NET, Doing
Web Development: Client-Side Techniques) and Rocky Lhotka (Expert
VB 2005 Business Objects, Expert
C# 2005 Business Objects).
RIM demo'd apps on the BlackBerry, and Schneider Electric's U.S. recruiter
was on the lookout for good developers. Need a job? Find out more here.
This conference was a case of too many vendors, not enough time.
About the Author
Michael Domingo has held several positions at 1105 Media, and is currently the editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine.