One of the more interesting personalities at the interop event is Keith Ballinger whom I had the pleasure of sitting next to. He's a boisterous young man of 25 with a no-nonsense approach to interop. The general discussions that are going on are often punctuated with his booming voice sending out a targeted message. "Hey BEA!", he would call out and then proceed to describe some unexpected results he had with their endpoint. A few minutes later the gentleman from BEA passes by and politely asks for Keith to retest. The new results are much improved, but there are some lingering issues. Later Keith confers with Simon and then addresses the whole room to ask for guidance in resolving a question. After some discussion, Keith understands why what Simon is sending is valid and goes back and promptly goes back and files a bug report to get one of the developers back home working on a fix. Once the future is taken care of, Simon and Keith briefly caucus to see what they can do to increase interop in the present. A while later, the cycle start up again: Keith looks to his right and addresses the person at the far corner of the table with a "Hey CapeClear!" and another technical question. At which point, the representative from The Mind Electric responds that he isn't CapeClear. Unphased Keith turns to the left and repeats his greeting and question again.