ClearCenter has a presence on the Silicon Slopes of northern Utah, in league with the other famous tech development regions like Silicon Valley and Silicon Glen. Living in this area it's an amazing realization that there is a high density of innovative, technology-driven startups and prominent industry heavyweights. Maybe just about everyone has hundreds of catchy geek billboards lining their freeways (Omniture, Mozy, OrangeSoda), but in Utah we take pride in building a strong community, especially around the high level of open source software development at the core of many of these ventures. That's why the Utah Open Source Conference is a special event every year in Salt Lake City.

Our own team of open source enthusiasts packed up a hefty trade show display and squeezed into a corner between Novell's OpenSUSE and RedHat's Fedora booths. The conference was well represented by the open source desktop distros, GNU/FSF, and local service companies. Naturally, we had a lot of explaining to do with our new name and branding (we lured a lot of visitors to our booth with free bottled water). Admittedly, our booth was vague on the nature of what we provide, draping wispy marketing terms in broad white sheets over shiny metallic girders, but our visitors soon caught on and visibly lit up with a spark of interest. First of all, we clarified that ClearOS is a Linux distribution for servers, and then we dropped a reference to ClarkConnect to help jog their memory. We then highlighted the enhanced Service Delivery Network features that ClearCenter provides to deployed ClearOS servers to seal the deal. We're back at the drawing board thinking of some kind of panoramic, animatronic display to portray this whole concept for our booth, but for now our attraction is our pure spring water, ClearSDN-branded refreshment.