The Interop show in Las Vegas is always a good bellwether for enterprise technology trends, and perhaps the most striking thing about the recent show was how little the term "network fabric" came up.

LAS VEGAS -- A healthcare network in Illinois is investing $40 million in Alcatel-Lucent switches to consolidate data centers into a private cloud.

LAS VEGAS -- HP says it has all of the necessary orchestration tools for its software defined networking strategy - the big question is, will it build its own controller?

The server has been virtualised, now it's time for the rest of the datacentre - including the network - to catch up. That's the message form VMware at this year's Interop, as the company seeks to ensure it remains a major enterprise IT player while the software-defined networking trend continues to gain momentum.

LAS VEGAS -- While few doubt the importance of maximizing the energy efficiency of their corporate data centers, executive vice president of data center technology for Las Vegas-based Switch, Mark Thiele's talk at Interop this week showcased just how much companies might still be missing. 

The need for a dedicated physical appliance to handle WAN optimization tasks, in many cases, is a thing of the past, according to experts who participated in a panel discussion Tuesday at Interop in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS: Software-defined networks (SDN) have the capability to provision applications in minutes instead of months, and speed deployment into the cloud, according to the head of HP Networking.

LAS VEGAS -- Services providers that have traditionally offered infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds are beginning to move up the stack into the platform as a service (PaaS) market in an effort to diversify their portfolio and respond to increasing customer demand for cloud-based development services.