The Remarketer

Interop Las Vegas 2007 was a successful show for Vibrant. We met many current networking clients as well as hopefully several future ones. There are definitely many end-users and resellers interested in used Cisco, used Servers and the secondary IT hardware market.

The show was very active with close to 20,000 attendees, 450 exhibitors and all varieties of stunts, costumes and give-aways. Vibrant gave away two Night Vision Monoculars (to spot our great Cisco deals ). The winners guessed the correct number of Cisco Thing-a-ma-jigs in a fishbowl (38), which drew many questions and were actually old school cable management kits. Congrats to our two winners!

What is a Twitter hunt?

It’s a simple treasure hunt, except the clues are given out via Twitter. In our case, we’ll be giving out $200 in chips to the person who can find Vibrant’s own Lindsi Gish somewhere within Interop Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

Between 2 and 4PM on Wednesday, May 23rd, clues will be given out every 10-15 minutes via Vibrant’s Twitter profile (www.twitter.com/vibrant) regarding the profile and location of Lindsi. The first one to find her wins.

What is Interop?

There are endless numbers of tech bloggers online, but finding those that cover enterprise IT is a bit more challenging. For the past several months, I’ve been compiling a list of the best that I could find.

Quick observations: Sun is the runaway blogging leader. HP has a ways to go, as does Cisco, but they’re finally getting there. Storage Execs are your buddies in the blogosphere, as they go by their first names (i.e. Chuck’s Blog, Dave’s Blog, Hu’s Blog, etc…)

General IT Bloggers
- Some great writers and thinkers covering Enterprise IT of all flavors:

I don’t know if I would expect any less from the people behind NetworkWorld Magazine, but the material that is regularly turned out at NetworkWorld.com’s blogs is engaging, interesting, topical and funny. I’ve been converted to a daily reader.

NetworkWorld.com Community
- A rolling update of the latest blogs by their staff, plus occasional entries by site users

NetworkWorld Blogs
- A list of their 11 networking and enterprise IT blogs with current posts (podcasts too)

Here are a couple of recent highlights from NW:

Enough with the alerts already
- “What is up with all these Cisco security alerts lately?”

Paris Hilton and Cisco’s rise in the storage networking market have followed surprisingly similar paths to success. At face value, you wouldn’t believe it (and the term success is certainly subjective here), but stay with me for a moment and follow the timeline below:

Cisco Storage and Paris Hilton Timeline:
A) Introduction
- Backed by strong corporations, two offshoots take significant steps forward. Many doubt their capabilities to succeed, yet both gleam with familiar star qualities.
2001: Cisco Enters Storage Switch Marketplace, doubters in tow.
2001: Paris Enters Hollywood with a cameo in Zoolander, no talent.

There are surely more than 7 ways to say “used router,” but these terms are the most frequently used (and sometimes confused).

The modifier here is “used.” Some are legit substitutes and others are poor representations or marketing puffery. Not just used for routers and switches, you will encounter these descriptors in the server and storage markets as well.

1. Used Router (the classic)
   Cut and dry. A router was previously owned for any period of time, unpackaged and powered on. Perhaps it was used just once or maybe for years, but either way it qualifies as “used.” Marketers will sometimes pump these up as “barely,” “slightly” or “gently used.”

Google says we are; that must count for something, right? A vanity search for “Vibrant” at Yahoo shows they think we’re even more vibrant. Google at least had the sense to place us 2nd to an aftermarket auto parts company. (We can’t argue with that.) Stay tuned for a future collaboration featuring optional ground effects for servers and routers.

From a literal standpoint, Vibrant is our company name and URL. I think the question implies a deeper answer though; how can an IT hardware remarketer, in the land of ice and snow, be bold enough to represent itself as Vibrant?