Interop inspires industry veterans and newcomers alike to put on display their most innovative products, hoping to catch the eye of network managers with IT problems to solve.

While established vendors splurge on big booths, some younger vendors set up shop in Interop's Start-up City to showcase their technologies and tools. This year the handful of residents ranged from newbies such as Blue Spinner to more familiar names such as open source router maker Vyatta.

Solera Networks President and CEO Steve Shillingford says this is his company's second stay in Start-up City because Interop draws target customers and peers with the best knowledge of this industry. "Interop offers us a chance to be a part of a lot of thought leadership in security, management and networking," he says.

Here are details on five residents of this year's Start-up City:

Company: Blue Spinner

Founded: 2008

Headquarters: Phoenix

Management: Dutch Kaplan, president

Product: Blue Spinner offers a Web-based incident management system to customers via a software-as-a-service delivery model. The company says its product includes built-in workflow, document control and change management features, and can be used as a help desk, incident tracking or customer service system, depending on the customer environment. The subscription service, also called Blue Spinner, has been used by a Fortune 500 company for the past two years and now the company is making it available to others. Pricing is based on a per-user basis.

Company: FastSoft

Founded: 2005

Headquarters: California

Management: Steven Low, co-founder, chairman and CEO

Product: FastSoft's E-Series of Accelerators use the company's FastSCP technology to ensure components inherent in TCP don't slow down file transfers. The company employs a single-appliance model -- meaning customers need only install an appliance on one end of a WAN connection -- and FastSCP gets around TCP's packet loss limitations to reduce latency over wide areas. Company officials say the technology can speed transfers up to 30 times, depending on network connections. Pricing for the E-Series appliance starts at US$10,000.