I’m looking forward to returning to Interop Las Vegas in under two weeks. Where has the winter gone? I know, I’m in Northern California, I can’t complain much about the weather.

Click above for conference details, or visit this link for a free expo and keynote pass.

There are three aspects of Interop that I’m looking forward to.

First, I’m looking forward to meeting some Twitterverse friends, and maybe a Twitter-averse friend or two, as well as contacts I’ve made at my conferences last year. I will be dropping in on the Interop HQ and Social Media Command Center to see how the UBM team handles social media on-site. As my friends at @CiscoLive and VMworld know, I find the social media aspect of a conference to be as important as the formal content. Networking and getting advice and answers as you go makes the event more efficient and useful, and it’s always good to say hi to the folks who make it happen. I also hear there are collectible pins, and those of you who know where I work know we’re known for our pins, among other things.

Watch the hashtags #Interop and #CloudConnect and follow @interop for the latest news from the events.

Second, I’ll be trying to take a bootcamp or two at the Cloud Connect Summit  and come up to speed on some technologies that are newish to me. There’s an AWS Boot Camp presented by Bernard Golden (alas, it’s not hands-on, so I’m not sure I’d call it a boot camp), and an OpenStack Boot Camp that looks promising as well. These may end up just being focus opportunities, or I may change my plans, but they look interesting. And as a guy who’s mostly running bare metal big data on a daily basis, it’ll be good to get some exposure to the virtual side of things outside of VMware.

Third, while I’m attending with my press hat and not my mouse ears, I do work in a sizable technology environment, so I’ll be checking out some larger technology options that may not find their way into my lab but may find their way into my day job.

Highlights in the enterprise space for me (alphabetically): Arista Networks, Cisco, Juniper Networks.

Fourth, I’ll be joining the Tech Field Day Roundtables again this year. HP Networking will be presenting at this event, and they tie in with POHO below as well. Also presentingwill be a company rather dear to my heart in a strange way, Avaya. At the turn of the century, I worked for the Ethernet Products Group (or whatever we were called that quarter) at Nortel Networks, and my team’s flagship product was the Nortel Passport 8600 routing switch. Imagine my surprise when I ran across a slightly different color of 8600 (with much newer line cards) at the Interop network last year, now known as the Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8600. A couple of my Rapid City/Bay Networks/Nortel Networks coworkers are still at Avaya, or were until fairly recently… so it’s sort of a family thing for me.

If you can’t make it to the roundtables, we usually live-stream the presentations, or have them posted afterward, at TechFieldDay.com. Check it out and track #RILV14 and #TechFieldDay on Twitter for the latest news.

And last, but not least… there’s POHO. The Psycho Overkill Home Office, a gateway to big business functionality on a small business budget, is a topic near and dear to my blog, my budget, and my two home labs. I will be stopping by to speak with several vendors at Interop whose products intersect with the burgeoning (and occasionally bludgeoning) home lab market and the smaller side of the SMB world (I’m taking to calling it the one-comma-budget side of SMB).

Some of the POHO highlights that I’m seeing so far (in alphabetic order) include Chenbro Micom, Cradlepoint, Linksys (now part of Belkin), Memphis Electronic (think 16GB SODIMMs), Monoprice, Opengear, Shuttle Computer Group, Synology, and Xi3.

There are a lot of other names on the exhibitor list who will appeal to anyone, and if you’re going to be there with an exhibitor who you think would be of interest to my POHO audience, feel free to get in touch (I’m on the media list, or contact me through this blog).

And if you noticed that I went down five roads instead of three, give yourself a pat on the back. I should’ve seen that coming.