[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szRy6Kxt0eE&w=560&h=349]

David Berlind, Chief Content Officer of TechWeb, the company that produces Interop, has been coming to this conference and reporting on it for years. He’s the host of the Interop live stream and one of the best people to ask, “What’s everybody talking about Interop?” I asked him to give me the highlights of the show, and here’s what he boiled it down to: No surprise, it’s the cloud: As compared to last year, the discussion and services being offered has increased dramatically. According to some survey data from TechWeb, about 3/4ths of all companies are either moving into the cloud, or have plans to move into the cloud. Hardware vendors are catching up to cloud issues: Before hardware vendors only had to worry about selling equipment to public cloud providers. But now there’s a new market of enterprise companies who don't want to be in the public cloud but want all of the advantages of the cloud through their own private cloud. Platform as a Service (PaaS) gets you all the way there: Why invest in just a cloud service which requires more development, when you can have an entire platform that has the flexibility of a cloud? Interop is about connectivity and working together: All the vendors have to work together, because everything at Interop is about things working together. There’s one or two degrees of separation of all these vendors. Interop is about connecting everything up and making it work cheaply.