N+I conference on tap in Las Vegas

Computerworld - The NetWorld+Interop conference opens tomorrow in Las Vegas with keynote speeches from vendor executives who are well versed in trying to cope with tough financial situations.
Michael Capellas, CEO of MCI Inc., is expected to showcase network services that his company will announce at N+I, including the addition of a DSL-based version of its Advantage voice-over-IP offering. Capellas' keynote speech is to come three weeks to the day after MCI formally emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Linda Mills, vice president of voice applications at MCI, said the DSL-based VoIP service will start at $200 monthly for 384Kbit/sec. performance, with business users getting unlimited local and long-distance calls, data access and some Centrex features for transferring calls and setting up conference calls.
Malcolm Collins, president of enterprise networks at Nortel Networks Ltd. in Brampton, Ontario, will also speak on the first day of N+I. His speech is taking place two weeks after Nortel ousted its CEO, chief financial officer and controller because of accounting issues that are being investigated by securities regulators in both the U.S. and Canada.
Also scheduled to speak at the conference is William Nuti, president and CEO of Symbol Technologies Inc. in Holtsville, N.Y. Nuti, who is due to speak on Wednesday, took over as CEO at Symbol last December, when the company restated its financial results back to 1998 in connection with an investigation by the SEC.
About 20,000 people are expected to attend N+I -- about the same number as last year, said Lenny Heymann, general manager of the show, which is produced by MediaLive International in San Francisco. About 350 exhibitors are expected, up 25% year over year but well below the 800 exhibitors that took part in the event in 2000, when N+I had about 50,000 attendees.
The vendors that plan to announce products at this year's conference include Marlboro, Mass.-based 3Com Corp., which will introduce change-management software that is called 3Com Network Director and starts at $3,495.
The University of Maryland Eastern Shore has been a beta-test site for the new software, using it to identify network configuration errors and find the cause of intermittent performance problems, said Manny Maldonado, the school's network manager. He added that the university, which is located in Princess Anne, Md., plans to buy the software.
Enterasys Networks Inc. in Andover, Mass., is due to announce upgraded network security tools for its Matrix N-Series line of switches. New functions include the ability to identify and authenticate individual users or networking devices.
Singlestep Technologies Corp. in Seattlewill preview Unity 2.0, an upgrade of its network event management software, and Coradiant Inc. in Newton Centre, Mass., will announce a Web application performance monitoring appliance called TrueSight Real Transaction Monitor.
And Avaya Inc. in Basking Ridge, N.J. will preview an integrated video softphone currently under development in alliance with PolyCom, Inc. a vendor of video and voice conferencing products.