2010 Interop New York Speaker List

The role of network management has fundamentally changed. It is no longer just about the availability of networks. In now includes managing the performance of networks and applications. In addition, the continued deployment of new functionality, such as mobility and the virtualization of just about every component of IT, is making the task of network management significantly more challenging. Thankfully there has been a lot of investment in network management and the panelists in this fast paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising of the emerging network management technologies.

Desktop and application virtualization hold the promise of solving many of the desktop management problems that have been plaguing IT since PCs first began to multiply in corporations in the early 1980s. How can these various technologies help reduce desktop and application management nightmares? Where should they fit into an overall desktop management strategy? What benefits can be gained and what pitfalls can be avoided? What is involved in evaluating, planning and implementing them? How should desktop management change to best leverage these technologies? How do SBC/hosted applications, VDI/hosted virtual desktops, client hypervisors, application virtualization and user virtualization fit together? Learn best practices for implementing various desktop and application virtualization technologies and how you might incorporate these types of solutions into your desktop and application management strategy.

Just last year Polycom and Tandberg were the top two players providing primarily room-based video conferencing equipment running H.323 to enterprises, with a number of additional players in the market working hard to take away some of their market share. Suddenly we have Cisco as the largest video vendor and HP announcing a strong new line of products with their partner Vidyo. Desktop video conferencing is on the rise. Unified Communications (UC) architectures are becoming the core of the video infrastructure involving Microsoft, IBM and Avaya in the fray, and using SIP as the standard for video signaling. How will all this settle out? If I am making a video conferencing decision now that I want to sustain my company for the foreseeable future, which way should I go?

In this panel, the video conferencing vendors will discuss these key transitions and how they see the market shaping up as we move forward. Join us to see if they agree or disagree, and learn which vendor’s vision best suits the requirements of your company.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day One of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Tales from Top-of-Tech
• The CIO Role Today
• The IT Organization of the Future
• IT in the SMB World – Issues, Realities & Best Practices
• Health Care IT
• Business Analytics
• CIO Unplugged

For more information click here.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day Two of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Vendor Management
• Managing the Next Technology Portfolio
• Green IT/Sustainability
• Managing Social Media
• IT Leadership

For more information click here.

Private clouds can be a stepping stone to a hybrid public/private architecture. This session will look at workload portability, focusing on which applications are candidates for public clouds and how to prepare applications that can run in several environments.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

One of the biggest concerns companies face with public clouds is the storage of their secrets in third-party locations. Moving confidential data into on-demand environments may violate laws, weaken copyright claims, and put the organization at risk. In this session, we'll separate legitimate concerns from the unjustified fears of server-huggers.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

IT professionals are split on cloud security: half of them see it as a way to get stronger, more reliable computing that's secured by experts and far from the risk of in-house fraud; others see it as a terrifying loss of control that may violate privacy and compliance regulations. Either way, clouds call many security assumptions into question. This debate-format session will give proponents and detractors their chance to convince the audience.

Choosing a video conferencing system is daunting. You face a sea of choices. Solutions range from multi-million dollar telepresence suites to desktop software available for pocket change. Your supporting infrastructure can be ad hoc, centralized within your enterprise, integrated with voice or unified communications solutions, or outsourced to a managed services provider. Which technologies will best suit your needs? This session presents a decision tree approach for sifting through vendor offerings and hype so you can determine the right size, bandwidth, features and infrastructure to meet your visual communications needs.

Real-time traffic (voice and video) demand that the network provide low latency, low packet loss and low jitter. Today’s dynamic networks are constantly changing, and the distributed nature of network configuration often lead to errors in design or implementation that can cause quality problems for voice and video conferencing applications. A new breed of testing methodologies and tools is required to test or monitor networks and to isolate problems. This session will explore the need for these tools, will categorize the tools and will list vendors that provide the different kinds of solutions needed to manage today’s complex converged networks. You’ll also learn how to use these tools to troubleshoot when problems do arise.

Video conferencing is arguably the toughest application your enterprise network must support. It gobbles bandwidth while demanding priority treatment (QoS). Designing the right network solution to support enterprise video conferencing is key to its acceptance as a business tool. This session will explore technical aspects of designing, testing, and managing an enterprise network to support high quality video conferencing and telepresence -- and dive deeply into security, LAN QoS, and WAN QoS issues.

Just last year Polycom and Tandberg were the top two players providing primarily room-based video conferencing equipment running H.323 to enterprises, with a number of additional players in the market working hard to take away some of their market share. Suddenly we have Cisco as the largest video vendor and HP announcing a strong new line of products with their partner Vidyo. Desktop video conferencing is on the rise. Unified Communications (UC) architectures are becoming the core of the video infrastructure involving Microsoft, IBM and Avaya in the fray, and using SIP as the standard for video signaling. How will all this settle out? If I am making a video conferencing decision now that I want to sustain my company for the foreseeable future, which way should I go?

In this panel, the video conferencing vendors will discuss these key transitions and how they see the market shaping up as we move forward. Join us to see if they agree or disagree, and learn which vendor’s vision best suits the requirements of your company.

Enterprises are universally considering and installing features of Unified Communications. The forces of Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Mobility are driving change into every aspect of enterprise communication. Learn how Unified Communications will become ubiquitously deployed as these technologies sweep through the workplace. ShoreTel’s Founder and CTO, Ed Basart describes the future of enterprise communications.

The role of network management has fundamentally changed. It is no longer just about the availability of networks. In now includes managing the performance of networks and applications. In addition, the continued deployment of new functionality, such as mobility and the virtualization of just about every component of IT, is making the task of network management significantly more challenging. Thankfully there has been a lot of investment in network management and the panelists in this fast paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising of the emerging network management technologies.

Are public cloud providers ready to offer meaningful service level agreements? How can we monitor their performance and availability? In the last year, there's been considerable research into the reliability of on-demand platforms, and in this session, we'll look at the tools and techniques you can use to measure cloud SLAs and keep providers honest.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

As we try to use clouds for increasingly mainstream, production-grade applications, performance and reliability become a greater concern. In this session, we'll review existing studies on cloud performance, and look at what and how to measure cloud performance.

Armed with a set of services, the platforms on which they run, and the management tools to control them, it's time to turn things over to the users. Self-service controls let those users provision, deploy, and relinquish the IT services they need in minutes rather than days. This session will look at how self-service controls should be delivered to ensure reliable, adaptable use of resources in real time.

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

Virtualization impacts every major compliance standard and requires fundamental changes to security practices. What should this mean to you? This session will discuss what gaps are introduced in the move from physical to virtual where compliance is concerned, and prescribe specific steps to ensure compliance for production deployments. Regulatory areas discussed will include FISMA, DIACAP, PCI, HIPAA and SOX/GLBA. The session will also discuss how to build a framework for securing virtual data centers and private clouds, and how to take physical security constructs like Zones and propagate them to the virtual infrastructure to enable consistent security across the entire data center. You will learn how various hypervisor security architectures coupled with VM Introspection and automation can deliver dynamic, granular insights into security.

Cloud computing is the great leveller--replacing upfront investment with pay-as-you-go pricing, and making new kinds of companies possible. For many early stage companies, the economics are unbeatable, encouraging them to experiment while reducing the amount of investment needed to get to an initial product. This panel of startups and web companies will tell us what they learned as they built their new ventures on cloud platforms.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

Private clouds are built atop several fundamental components: virtualization, automation, self-service, redundant storage, and predefined components. We'll chart IT's progress from bare metal computing towards cloud technologies. You'll understand where your organization sits on this journey and what comes next.

As we try to use clouds for increasingly mainstream, production-grade applications, performance and reliability become a greater concern. In this session, we'll review existing studies on cloud performance, and look at what and how to measure cloud performance.

With Wi-Fi now the primary or default access in enterprises of all sizes and types around the world, future success depends upon a detailed understanding of the evolution of both the standards and the specifications that determine key product capabilities going forward. This session will provide a detailed look at current and future developments in all aspects of wireless-LAN technologies, featuring the experts from industry responsible for bringing new capabilities to market.

Security budgets have recently come under intense scrutiny and often are being cut or left the same as previous years even in a climate where security threats and attacks are on the rise. In these conditions where do you invest your available budget? Why isn’t the technology you have invested previously solving your security problems? How do you use the technologies and capabilities that you already have more effectively? How do you convince your management and leadership that security is still relevant and important? What should you be thinking about next? This panel discussion will answer these questions and more by providing knowledge and insights from professionals who are successfully overcoming these challenges every day.

The mega vendor storage world is filled with the inefficiencies and inequities of bloated, archaic legacy storage companies unable to tap the SMB market. This market has long been disregarded, leaving a huge segment of users to make do with stripped down enterprise products, or a personal storage device left to under deliver. As digital data continues to grow, and data retention regulations and compliance filter down to SMBs, the benefit of data storage is fully felt at all levels.

Public clouds aren't just for startups. Enterprises are using them for training, QA, and other non-production applications. They're also leveraging their elastic capability for all manner of bursty applications, from monte carlo simulations to genomics to architectural modeling. This panel of established enterprise users will show us how on-demand computing is changing the way they run their businesses, and what convinced them to embrace third-party IT models.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

This intensive workshop offers a critical, independent evaluation of SharePoint, detailing the platform's strengths and weaknesses culled from customer experiences and hands-on testing. Through presentations and discussion, the workshop helps you figure out how, where, when, and why to use SharePoint -- and reviews how well SharePoint "fits" into different types and sizes of enterprises with different business objectives.

The workshop will also prepare you for developing a SharePoint strategy for your enterprise, empowering business and technology managers to reach a common assessment of what SharePoint can and can't do effectively for your enterprise. This course will enable you to confidently assess and plan any effort to extend SharePoint beyond a set of departmental installations into an enterprise-wide platform.

Course Outline
* What Is and Isn't SharePoint
* How SharePoint 2010 Changes the Picture
* SharePoint Architecture for Business Managers
* Evaluating SharePoint's Core Features and Functionality
* SharePoint as an Application Development Platform
* Enterprise Architecture and Operations
* Evaluating the SharePoint Ecosystem
* Best Practices and Looking Forward

Who Should Attend and What You Will Learn

* Business analysts -- to learn what SharePoint does and doesn't offer out of the box, and what are the likely costs
* Enterprise architects and IT managers -- to better guide business colleagues about choices and impacts before they try to dive into SharePoint, by understanding architectures, governance, critical 3rd-party modules employed at the enterprise level
* SharePoint project managers, senior architects, and lead developers -- to understand what you're about to get into, with respect to architectures, licensing, and functionality, as well as different approaches for customizing and extending SharePoint
* SharePoint evaluation teams -- to level-set understanding and terminology among the team, and make more informed choices about whether and where to employ SharePoint
* Information and Knowledge Managers -- to compare SharePoint against other information and knowledge management tools in your enterprise, as well as what key investments need to be made to up-size SharePoint for the enterprise
* Consultants -- to understand where SharePoint works well, and where it does not, as well as how to improve SharePoint implementations through better governance and 3rd-party tools
* Anyone who wants to understand the impact of SharePoint 2010 on any existing deployments

To date, technology analysts have quite properly focused on the social and business aspects of social software. And yet, social software tools (including collaboration suites, pure-play blog / wiki / social-networking products, and revamped portal products from major vendors) differ quite substantially in maturity, approach, and support. This session will share customer research from noted evaluation firm CMS Watch on leading social software technologies, and provide a framework for customers to evaluate the marketplace based on their own needs.

While major wireless security concerns have long since left the front page, security is the one area in IT (and especially in mobile IT) where “done” is never achieved. New challenges and outright threats appear on a continual weekly basis, and it’s vital to keep up with the ever-changing security landscape. Our objective for this session is to look at the latest in mobile security threats, and how new solutions are enabling mobile users to go about their business without compromise to sensitive corporate assets.

Desktop virtualization has become one of the hot spots for 2010, in part because many of the barriers of the past have been eliminated. Along with the promise of solving the decades old problems of desktop management and support, desktop virtualization is bringing with it a renewed look at thin client (now also zero client) computing. How do server hosted applications and desktops relate to thin client computing and thin/zero client devices? How have these technologies changed/improved to become strong solutions for today's desktop challenges. Where do other technologies like Windows 7, smartphones and iPads fit in? Learn if, why and and how all these technologies should fit into your desktop strategy.

Articles often describe the value that virtualization technologies can bring to IT but what are the realities of implementing server and desktop virtualization? Do they really offer the benefits that vendors are touting? What are the "gotchas" to avoid? Hear about the experiences of those who have implemented various virtualization solutions. Find out what strategies worked and which ones didn't. Listen to accounts of life in the trenches, and learn next steps to consider in your own implementations of virtual infrastructure.

Virtualization impacts every major compliance standard and requires fundamental changes to security practices. What should this mean to you? This session will discuss what gaps are introduced in the move from physical to virtual where compliance is concerned, and prescribe specific steps to ensure compliance for production deployments. Regulatory areas discussed will include FISMA, DIACAP, PCI, HIPAA and SOX/GLBA. The session will also discuss how to build a framework for securing virtual data centers and private clouds, and how to take physical security constructs like Zones and propagate them to the virtual infrastructure to enable consistent security across the entire data center. You will learn how various hypervisor security architectures coupled with VM Introspection and automation can deliver dynamic, granular insights into security.

Anyone deploying mobile applications of any form is faced with a broad range of key decisions: Local apps or Web services or a hybrid? What tools should be used for current (and future) app development, deployment, and management? And how can mobility managers pick the best apps from a sea of hundreds of thousands? This session will provide practical advice on this key element of a successful mobility strategy.

One impact of the movement to use more private and public cloud computing solutions is that it increases the likelihood that IT resources will be accessed over a relatively low capacity, high latency WAN. Even worse, in some cases these IT resources will be accessed over multiple WAN links. The panelists on this session will identify both the performance challenges associated with cloud computing as well as myriad technologies and services that IT organizations can use to mitigate the impact of those challenges.

Public clouds aren't just for startups. Enterprises are using them for training, QA, and other non-production applications. They're also leveraging their elastic capability for all manner of bursty applications, from monte carlo simulations to genomics to architectural modeling. This panel of established enterprise users will show us how on-demand computing is changing the way they run their businesses, and what convinced them to embrace third-party IT models.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

Hacking is a profitable business, and like any business, to achieve scalability, it must become organized and various groups must become specialized. At its core, industrialized hacking can be understood by looking at three areas including the roles and responsibilities of the individuals involved, the optimization of compromised resources, and the automation of the attack vectors. This presentation will explore research that has been done around the industrialization of hacking. It will include an analysis of processes and techniques such as automated attacks and business logic attacks that are being used by modern attackers as well as countermeasures to thwart them.

The last few years has seen a great growth in the deployment of virtualized servers and storage. We are now seeing the deployment of software based application delivery appliances such as WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) and application delivery controllers (ADCs). These devices hold the promise of fundamentally changing application delivery. The members of this PowerPoint-free session will discuss the pros and cons of these appliances. What kind of performance improvements will you experience with a virtualized appliance? How will these devices be managed? Do they work with all hypervisors? Are they integrated with other branch office or data center functionality? Are they certified with any major software or storage vendors? How are they priced vs. a traditional appliance?

Virtualization management is the key to successfully moving beyond basic server consolidation to an agile virtual infrastructure to a private cloud. A well managed virtual environment must include performance and capacity management, automation of virtual operations, troubleshooting and root cause analysis through the virtual and physical infrastructure, lifecycle management, and more. Learn how layering the right management capabilities onto your virtual environment will improve your IT operations and build the foundation for a private cloud.

Having trouble telling the difference between a Web App Firewall and an Application Aware Firewall? between a UTM and an XTM? How deep is this deep packet inspection versus that one? How many network security appliances do I need anyhow? Which "products" should really be features? With so much marketing and vendor FUD, how can anyone tell what they really need? How do virtualization, clouds, and APTs affect my ability to do Network Security - or at least change requirement priorities? Together, we will map all legacy network security appliances to a common model and the OSI stack and discuss key changes in the threat and technology landscapes - cutting through marketing and history. Participants will leave better informed and more equipped to save time, money, and hassle going forward.

The first step in any cloud is to make workloads virtual and portble. This session will look at application virtualization in a cloud environment, from "naked" machines to predefined stacks of machine, operating system, and application.

Armed with a set of services, the platforms on which they run, and the management tools to control them, it's time to turn things over to the users. Self-service controls let those users provision, deploy, and relinquish the IT services they need in minutes rather than days. This session will look at how self-service controls should be delivered to ensure reliable, adaptable use of resources in real time.

In this concluding session, we'll look at what private cloud adoption means for enterprises. Once IT is democratized, how does the IT team's role change? What's on the horizon? What skill sets are needed to survive and thrive in an on-demand, self-service world?

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

In this opening session, we'll look at the cultural changes that cloud computing brings to enterprise IT. Clouds are more than just a set of technologies--they're a shift away from IT as a monopoly towards IT's new role as a steward of applications and services.

The pace of innovation in cloud computing is breathtaking. In the last year, providers announced dozens of new features and services, and it's only getting faster. Keeping up with provider offerings is a full-time job; on this panel, we'll sit down with some of the leading cloud platforms to discuss their roadmaps and the features customers can expect from them in the year ahead.

As we conclude the New York Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll look at the mainstreaming of cloud computing. Within a few short years, IT won't be asking what it can move to on-demand platforms -- it'll be asking what it has to keep operating on its own. As this happens, the role of enterprise IT professionals will change dramatically. We'll speculate on how this change will happen, and look at what the IT industry can do to prepare for the shift.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

Cloud Computing is part of a more fundamental shift in IT: from a monopoly to a democracy. Once, computers were expensive, and the people who built applications for them were specialists. Today, however, computing is nearly free and everyone's a technologist. IT is shifting from a monopoly to a free market, much as other legal monopolies -- the phone company, the railroads -- were eventually forced to give up control. This presentation will take a step back to look at the big picture of ubiquitous, cheap computing and what it means for IT.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service computing uses the virtual machine as its fundamental unit: a single computer, rented by the hour. It's the ultimate in flexibility, but it burdens you with all of that machine's maintenance and scaling. On the other hand, Platform-as-a-Service promises virtually limitless scalability and freedom from low-level operations, at a price: custom APIs, limited choice, and even rewriting your code. This session will compare the two fundamental models of cloud computing, arming you to choose the right one for different situations.

Experts agree that the IPv4 address space will be depleted in about two years. In this session, John Curran, the president and chief executive officer of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), will identify the challenges that IPv4 depletion presents to networks and the Internet community as a whole, and how organizations can prepare for these challenges. The session will discuss the considerations for IPv6 adoption, as well as how to get involved in the community-driven public policy process that dictates how the remaining IPv4 address space is allocated.

It’s safe to say that any data center manager worth his or her salt will be familiar with the four level data center tiering system popularized by The Uptime Institute. But how much weight should the data center tiering system really carry when designing a new facility? Or when you’re evaluating a data center colocation or outsourcing partner? And is tiered data center really more reliable and efficient than one without a tier classification? To answer these questions, this session will evaluate data center tier standards and classifications, the pros and cons of them, and alternatives to existing standards that data center managers should consider.

The need for a definitive cloud architecture for the enterprise is addressed by Morphlabs' session on Enterprise Cloud Architecture (ECA). Enterprise Cloud Architecture (ECA) describes the building blocks and binding components of a fault tolerant, elastic and highly automated platform to run highly reliable applications and services. ECA implements the complete platform combination for cloud computing (also known as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). In this 20-minute session, the elements of ECA, functional definition and the layers that comprise ECA will be introduced.

As cloud computing becomes more prevalent and moves from an option to an edict, it is important to understand the framework that makes it reliable and scalable. This session will discuss the building blocks of the cloud architecture and the functional innovation it brings:

* The "Assumed Failure" model of deployment

* Mechanics of self-healing and autoscaling for clouds and applications

* Application high availability vs VM high availability;

* Interoperability (and what it means for your deployment)

* Why standards are necessary

Most IT organizations are taking IT resources such as servers, applications and storage out of branch offices and placing them in centralized data centers. This raises some critical questions: How can IT organizations overcome the impediments to the broad deployment of virtual desktops? Should the next generation branch office be serverless? What type of device(s) needs to still be in the branch office and how is it managed? What techniques can be used to overcome the performance issues? The speakers on this panel will answer those questions and will present alternative designs for your next generation branch office.

One impact of the movement to use more private and public cloud computing solutions is that it increases the likelihood that IT resources will be accessed over a relatively low capacity, high latency WAN. Even worse, in some cases these IT resources will be accessed over multiple WAN links. The panelists on this session will identify both the performance challenges associated with cloud computing as well as myriad technologies and services that IT organizations can use to mitigate the impact of those challenges.

Just last year Polycom and Tandberg were the top two players providing primarily room-based video conferencing equipment running H.323 to enterprises, with a number of additional players in the market working hard to take away some of their market share. Suddenly we have Cisco as the largest video vendor and HP announcing a strong new line of products with their partner Vidyo. Desktop video conferencing is on the rise. Unified Communications (UC) architectures are becoming the core of the video infrastructure involving Microsoft, IBM and Avaya in the fray, and using SIP as the standard for video signaling. How will all this settle out? If I am making a video conferencing decision now that I want to sustain my company for the foreseeable future, which way should I go?

In this panel, the video conferencing vendors will discuss these key transitions and how they see the market shaping up as we move forward. Join us to see if they agree or disagree, and learn which vendor’s vision best suits the requirements of your company.

Given the rapid rate of change in wireless and mobile technologies, services, products, and applications, it’s no surprise that the experts will disagree as to what the single most important item on your mobility to-do list should be. This session, nonetheless, will provide just that – a compilation of expert opinions as to the single best idea, with subsequent debate to enable you to pick what needs to be at the top of your list. Join us for a fast-paced session that will bring the entire range of wireless and mobile opportunities into focus.

Cloud computing is the great leveller--replacing upfront investment with pay-as-you-go pricing, and making new kinds of companies possible. For many early stage companies, the economics are unbeatable, encouraging them to experiment while reducing the amount of investment needed to get to an initial product. This panel of startups and web companies will tell us what they learned as they built their new ventures on cloud platforms.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

Virtualization management is the key to successfully moving beyond basic server consolidation to an agile virtual infrastructure to a private cloud. A well managed virtual environment must include performance and capacity management, automation of virtual operations, troubleshooting and root cause analysis through the virtual and physical infrastructure, lifecycle management, and more. Learn how layering the right management capabilities onto your virtual environment will improve your IT operations and build the foundation for a private cloud.

The data center is a common starting point for most green IT initiatives. Data centers not only consume a tremendous amount of energy, but are riddled with IT inefficiencies. Take, for example, the average server environment where 30% are of servers are “dead” — consuming energy, but performing no useful work. And data center managers have ample opportunity to improve efficiencies across other IT systems, like storage and networks, and facilities equipment, like power distribution and cooling. This session will help data center managers develop a comprehensive green data center framework across their server, storage, network and facilities assets to deliver financial and environmental savings.

While major wireless security concerns have long since left the front page, security is the one area in IT (and especially in mobile IT) where “done” is never achieved. New challenges and outright threats appear on a continual weekly basis, and it’s vital to keep up with the ever-changing security landscape. Our objective for this session is to look at the latest in mobile security threats, and how new solutions are enabling mobile users to go about their business without compromise to sensitive corporate assets.

Articles often describe the value that virtualization technologies can bring to IT but what are the realities of implementing server and desktop virtualization? Do they really offer the benefits that vendors are touting? What are the "gotchas" to avoid? Hear about the experiences of those who have implemented various virtualization solutions. Find out what strategies worked and which ones didn't. Listen to accounts of life in the trenches, and learn next steps to consider in your own implementations of virtual infrastructure.

Virtualization impacts every major compliance standard and requires fundamental changes to security practices. What should this mean to you? This session will discuss what gaps are introduced in the move from physical to virtual where compliance is concerned, and prescribe specific steps to ensure compliance for production deployments. Regulatory areas discussed will include FISMA, DIACAP, PCI, HIPAA and SOX/GLBA. The session will also discuss how to build a framework for securing virtual data centers and private clouds, and how to take physical security constructs like Zones and propagate them to the virtual infrastructure to enable consistent security across the entire data center. You will learn how various hypervisor security architectures coupled with VM Introspection and automation can deliver dynamic, granular insights into security.

Desktop virtualization has become one of the hot spots for 2010, in part because many of the barriers of the past have been eliminated. Along with the promise of solving the decades old problems of desktop management and support, desktop virtualization is bringing with it a renewed look at thin client (now also zero client) computing. How do server hosted applications and desktops relate to thin client computing and thin/zero client devices? How have these technologies changed/improved to become strong solutions for today's desktop challenges. Where do other technologies like Windows 7, smartphones and iPads fit in? Learn if, why and and how all these technologies should fit into your desktop strategy.

The great growth over the last few years in the use of Web applications combined with the recent interest in cloud computing has caused IT organizations to realize that simple server load balancers can’t keep up with the emerging demands. What is needed is an application delivery controller (ADC). In addition to balancing traffic, an ADC offloads computationally intensive tasks off of a server farm. However, the ADCs that are currently available in the market differ dramatically in terms of their underlying architectures and the functions that they provide. In this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session, leading ADC vendors will be asked questions that serve to identify the similarities and differences between their products.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

In this session, we'll look at where public clouds are today. In just a few short years, they've gone from unreliable and unpredictable to global and highly available. But are they ready for production code? Is it a one-horse game? What new features and capabilities might swing the balance from private to public?

The first step in any cloud is to make workloads virtual and portble. This session will look at application virtualization in a cloud environment, from "naked" machines to predefined stacks of machine, operating system, and application.

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

Cloud computing is a cost effective and efficient way for enterprises to automate their processes. However organizations need to be aware of the pitfalls of the many cloud-computing solutions out there - one of the main ones being security. Most of these solutions were built for ease of use and without necessarily security in mind. Companies should ask the solution provider the security measures used in developing the application and get an independent verification to make sure there are no gaping holes. With over 75% of attacks occurring through the Web, any attack through these applications can lead to leakage of confidential information and embarrassment. This session will highlight the security considerations an organization needs to take into account when adopting cloud computing capabilities.

Just last year Polycom and Tandberg were the top two players providing primarily room-based video conferencing equipment running H.323 to enterprises, with a number of additional players in the market working hard to take away some of their market share. Suddenly we have Cisco as the largest video vendor and HP announcing a strong new line of products with their partner Vidyo. Desktop video conferencing is on the rise. Unified Communications (UC) architectures are becoming the core of the video infrastructure involving Microsoft, IBM and Avaya in the fray, and using SIP as the standard for video signaling. How will all this settle out? If I am making a video conferencing decision now that I want to sustain my company for the foreseeable future, which way should I go?

In this panel, the video conferencing vendors will discuss these key transitions and how they see the market shaping up as we move forward. Join us to see if they agree or disagree, and learn which vendor’s vision best suits the requirements of your company.

Data storage is just one element in the application delivery ecosystem, but it turns out that it is often the critical performance bottleneck. A number of new technologies have come out in the recent years to optimize storage performance. This session reviews several of these innovations and explains how some performance-optimization technologies can be easily integrated into the existing storage infrastructure. Topics include spindle aggregation, various storage acceleration devices, application-level QoS techniques, and caching or hot-spotting with solid state disk. Specific attention will be given to accelerating network file systems, MS Exchange, and SQL databases.

Physical servers now support multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) that can be provisioned and moved between servers in a matter of minutes. There is just one huge problem – today the supporting network and management infrastructure is still largely static and physical. So while it is possible to move a VM between data centers in a matter of minutes, it can take days or weeks to get the supporting infrastructure in place. The panelists on this session will discuss solutions to this problem including new standards like IF-MAP, automation of functionality such as IP address management and the deployment of a new class of management product – the orchestration engine.

While convergence of many forms remains a key topic in enterprise IT, we’re seeing just the opposite in handsets and mobile operating systems: continuing and even accelerating diversity. This has led many to ask a number of key questions with far-reaching impacts on both IT and the bottom line: Which platforms survive? What will these look like going forward? And how can the enterprise successfully plan the evolution of mobility given these shifting sands? This session will feature a debate of the key issues and opportunities surrounding these vital concerns.

Desktop virtualization has become one of the hot spots for 2010, in part because many of the barriers of the past have been eliminated. Along with the promise of solving the decades old problems of desktop management and support, desktop virtualization is bringing with it a renewed look at thin client (now also zero client) computing. How do server hosted applications and desktops relate to thin client computing and thin/zero client devices? How have these technologies changed/improved to become strong solutions for today's desktop challenges. Where do other technologies like Windows 7, smartphones and iPads fit in? Learn if, why and and how all these technologies should fit into your desktop strategy.

The concept of thin provisioning is not new, but the state of the art has advanced, adding awareness between the operating system and storage device for enhanced efficiency. This session introduces the value proposition and concept of thin provisioning, covers the technology of the major thin storage vendors (3PAR, BlueArc, Compellent, Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, Pillar) and operating system integration layers (Symantec, VMware, and T10), and presents novel approaches from Data Robotics, Apple, and cloud storage systems. We will present the pros and cons of these various approaches in the context of enterprise storage management.

With Wi-Fi now the primary or default access in enterprises of all sizes and types around the world, future success depends upon a detailed understanding of the evolution of both the standards and the specifications that determine key product capabilities going forward. This session will provide a detailed look at current and future developments in all aspects of wireless-LAN technologies, featuring the experts from industry responsible for bringing new capabilities to market.

Trends such as the adoption of virtualization are fundamentally changing how IT organizations need to architect their data center LAN. For example, the introduction of server virtualization and blade servers means that the traditional three tier data center LAN is expanding to where it now has as many as five layers. These extra layers can introduce unacceptable cost, complexity and delay. While all of the LAN switching vendors are aware of the problem, they have different approaches to solving it. In this session, Mike Fratto, Editor, Network Computing and Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates will identify the emerging approaches to architecting a data center LAN and will discuss the pros and cons of each.

Having analyzed the emerging approaches to architecting a data center LAN it is now time to drill down into which technologies you should incorporate into your new data center LAN. In this PowerPoint free session, Mike Fratto and Jim Metzler will question LAN switching vendors about a number of topics including the pros and cons of FCoE vs. iSCSI; the viability of separating the LAN switch’s control and the data planes; the pros and cons of virtual switching and multi-chassis LAGs; the need for services such as QoS or security; as well as the alignment of each application VM with its own virtual NIC and virtual switch port.

With Wi-Fi now the primary or default access in enterprises of all sizes and types around the world, future success depends upon a detailed understanding of the evolution of both the standards and the specifications that determine key product capabilities going forward. This session will provide a detailed look at current and future developments in all aspects of wireless-LAN technologies, featuring the experts from industry responsible for bringing new capabilities to market.

Join us for a rare opportunity to hear from managers and users putting mobility into practice across a wide array of applications. We’ll examine what works, what doesn’t, and what key requirements have been identified for the next generation of applications. We’ll also explore cost issues and how to make the best decisions regarding the marriage of applications and mobility.

Vulnerability management has become a key component to information infrastructure security, however, it needs to evolve quickly to stay ahead of the hacking community and become more useful to IT Leadership. In order to keep up with the ever-growing threat landscape of technical vulnerabilities it is important to understand where you are vulnerable from both an application and network perspective. Traditional vulnerability management capabilities, techniques, and technologies may no longer be sufficient and can produce mixed results due to both the volume of vulnerabilities and credibility of the results. This session will focus on the current leading practices and the next generation of tools and techniques organizations can deploy for effective and realistic vulnerability management including:

* Prioritization of exploitable vulnerabilities

* Vulnerability enumeration techniques

* Remediation management concepts

* Compliance reporting capabilities

Organizations are increasingly looking for opportunities to save energy outside of their data center. Why? According to Forrester Research, more energy may be consumed by distributed IT assets outside of the data center – like PCs and monitors – than within it. To reduce energy consumption and other environmental impacts of the PC environment, organizations can not only source more energy efficient PCs, such as thin clients, but then power down PCs at nights and over weekends when they’re not being used. This session will help IT professionals understand the tactics used to green their PC environment for cost savings, estimate the extent of these savings.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

PCs, smartphones, and Web-based services create a fractured personal computing experience, with data and content scattered across diverse devices and online services. To solve this, service providers are building the next form of personal computing: the personal cloud ecosystem. Personal cloud services will include a combination of a data center cloud software platform, browser-based code to enable rich Web experiences, and device-level player or presentation code for richer experiences than the browser can provide. And they will create an ecosystem of complementary software and service providers on top of their own offerings.

There’s more confusion surrounding the contemporary “Gs” of wireless than most areas of IT and even wireless overall. This session will provide a detailed look at the practical side of next-generation mobile broadband, presenting a look at the performance, timetables for deployment, and additional advances in this key capability. With so much riding on the broadband services embodied in handsets, this session is a must for anyone involved in setting the direction for enterprise mobility initiatives.

One of the biggest concerns companies face with public clouds is the storage of their secrets in third-party locations. Moving confidential data into on-demand environments may violate laws, weaken copyright claims, and put the organization at risk. In this session, we'll separate legitimate concerns from the unjustified fears of server-huggers.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

With the looming move to Windows 7, IT organizations are faced with how to manage the upgrade of every desktop and application in their company. Desktop and application virtualization hold the promise of solving this problem along with the many desktop management problems that have been plaguing IT for decades. But until recently, multiple barriers prevented widespread adoption of virtual desktop technologies, and in fact, many early desktop virtualization projects failed as a result. This workshop will discuss previous barriers, how they now have been eliminated and why 2010 is becoming the year for desktop virtualization. Learn about all the various options available today - from major virtualization vendors to emerging startups - and why one size does not fit all. Hear the latest about the available desktop and application virtualization technologies, how to assess user desktop requirements across your entire organization, and determine how to successfully select and implement the right technologies for your organization.

For more information click here.

Once an organization has completed the initial server virtualization/consolidation phase, it becomes clear that the right advanced management tools along with the right policies and processes are required to better monitor, manage, secure, troubleshoot and tune this new virtual infrastructure, to reap the full benefits of operational efficiency and IT agility. IT managers have to sift through the plethora of virtualization management solutions to identify which products are really ready for prime time, and how to match their particular needs with available solutions. In addition, many shops with traditional Enterprise Systems Management solutions are wondering how new management tools integrate with and utilize what they already have. Beyond operational management, successfully moving towards full virtualization requires optimization and automation of the virtual infrastructure -- creating a self-managing compute factory. Add self-service provisioning and a service catalog to the mix and you have a private cloud, which may extend to public/hybrid cloud computing.

For more information click here.

Feeling bewildered by a slew of new acronyms, technologies and concepts describing virtualization? Need a high-level overview of what the different types of virtualization mean to you and your business? Do you want to get your arms around server virtualization, hypervisors, OS virtualization, hardware assists, virtual desktop architectures, application streaming and isolation, and where all the various virtualization vendors fit? This is the session for you.

Moving to a virtual infrastructure brings both significant benefits and challenges in terms of data protection and availability. A well managed virtual environment should include leveraging virtualization and newly available tools to improve the way you implement Backup, Disaster Recovery, High Availability and possibly Fault Tolerance. Learn how various virtualization capabilities fit on the continuum of protection and availability and hear best practices involving various technologies including image backup, VM and storage snapshots, replication, HA clustering, and fault.

As virtualization implementation progress, the key to realizing the full potential of virtual infrastructures is though advanced management, optimization and automation. This session is a primer on advanced management capabilities such as dynamic workload balancing, high availability, disaster recovery, capacity and performance management, and automated policy-based workflows. It will discuss the value of implementing advanced management features and describe the landscape of solution vendors, from start-ups to long-time industry leaders.

Virtualization management is the key to successfully moving beyond basic server consolidation to an agile virtual infrastructure to a private cloud. A well managed virtual environment must include performance and capacity management, automation of virtual operations, troubleshooting and root cause analysis through the virtual and physical infrastructure, lifecycle management, and more. Learn how layering the right management capabilities onto your virtual environment will improve your IT operations and build the foundation for a private cloud.

Desktop and application virtualization hold the promise of solving many of the desktop management problems that have been plaguing IT since PCs first began to multiply in corporations in the early 1980s. How can these various technologies help reduce desktop and application management nightmares? Where should they fit into an overall desktop management strategy? What benefits can be gained and what pitfalls can be avoided? What is involved in evaluating, planning and implementing them? How should desktop management change to best leverage these technologies? How do SBC/hosted applications, VDI/hosted virtual desktops, client hypervisors, application virtualization and user virtualization fit together? Learn best practices for implementing various desktop and application virtualization technologies and how you might incorporate these types of solutions into your desktop and application management strategy.

Everyone is talking about desktop virtualization, but what does it really mean? It certainly includes virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) based on server virtualization technologies. But taking a broader look, there are a variety of virtualization technologies for delivering, provisioning and managing desktops and applications. This session will offer a view of desktop virtualization which includes and explains VDI, server-based computing/session/presentation virtualization, hosted applications, terminal services/RDS, client hosted virtualization, client hypervisors, server-side and client side application virtualization, user virtualization/personalization and more, and how to match these technologies with user requirements.

The data center is a common starting point for most green IT initiatives. Data centers not only consume a tremendous amount of energy, but are riddled with IT inefficiencies. Take, for example, the average server environment where 30% are of servers are “dead” — consuming energy, but performing no useful work. And data center managers have ample opportunity to improve efficiencies across other IT systems, like storage and networks, and facilities equipment, like power distribution and cooling. This session will help data center managers develop a comprehensive green data center framework across their server, storage, network and facilities assets to deliver financial and environmental savings.

Recent data breaches have taught us that we cannot solely rely on Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) alone to identify security challenges. Enterprises need to take a proactive approach to securing their network and applications by implementing a log management system that allows for real time access to data and reports so problems can be stopped before they start. This session will discuss the current industry leading methods and practices for log management.

One impact of the movement to use more private and public cloud computing solutions is that it increases the likelihood that IT resources will be accessed over a relatively low capacity, high latency WAN. Even worse, in some cases these IT resources will be accessed over multiple WAN links. The panelists on this session will identify both the performance challenges associated with cloud computing as well as myriad technologies and services that IT organizations can use to mitigate the impact of those challenges.

Moving to a virtual infrastructure brings both significant benefits and challenges in terms of data protection and availability. A well managed virtual environment should include leveraging virtualization and newly available tools to improve the way you implement Backup, Disaster Recovery, High Availability and possibly Fault Tolerance. Learn how various virtualization capabilities fit on the continuum of protection and availability and hear best practices involving various technologies including image backup, VM and storage snapshots, replication, HA clustering, and fault.

A key direction for enterprise mobility management is to extend the edge of the organization’s network all the way to the mobile device - handsets and other mobile subscriber units can now be managed just like the rest of the network. But there are many possible directions, choices, and options to be considered in this rapidly-evolving field, and this session will examine key alternatives in what is becoming a vital concern – and opportunity - for organizations on the go.

Once an enterprise has in-house computing in a private cloud, it's time to link to public clouds for elasticity, disaster recovery, and cost efficiency. But connecting public and private systems isn't straightforward: workloads may not be portable, and policies between on-premise and on-demand platforms have to be enforced. This session will examine the integration of public cloud platforms with in-house private clouds, and the creation of self-regulating "hybrid" cloud architectures.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day One of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Tales from Top-of-Tech
• The CIO Role Today
• The IT Organization of the Future
• IT in the SMB World – Issues, Realities & Best Practices
• Health Care IT
• Business Analytics
• CIO Unplugged

For more information click here.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day Two of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Vendor Management
• Managing the Next Technology Portfolio
• Green IT/Sustainability
• Managing Social Media
• IT Leadership

For more information click here.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day One of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Tales from Top-of-Tech
• The CIO Role Today
• The IT Organization of the Future
• IT in the SMB World – Issues, Realities & Best Practices
• Health Care IT
• Business Analytics
• CIO Unplugged

For more information click here.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day Two of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Vendor Management
• Managing the Next Technology Portfolio
• Green IT/Sustainability
• Managing Social Media
• IT Leadership

For more information click here.

With most network management and analysis solutions you slice and dice data to deal with network traffic from 10 Gigabit (10G) network segments. You’re forced to chose between real-time network performance statistics and network forensics. Learn best practices for achieving real-time visibility and storage of historical network data.

With Wi-Fi now the primary or default access in enterprises of all sizes and types around the world, future success depends upon a detailed understanding of the evolution of both the standards and the specifications that determine key product capabilities going forward. This session will provide a detailed look at current and future developments in all aspects of wireless-LAN technologies, featuring the experts from industry responsible for bringing new capabilities to market.

Virtualization is causing the convergence of server, storage, and network platforms. At the same time, fewer CAPEX dollars coupled with rising energy costs is promoting data center managers to incorporate energy efficient and highly utilized IT equipment in the data center. This session will help data center managers understand virtualization’s role in convergence and plan for a more efficient and highly utilized server, storage and network environment.

There’s more confusion surrounding the contemporary “Gs” of wireless than most areas of IT and even wireless overall. This session will provide a detailed look at the practical side of next-generation mobile broadband, presenting a look at the performance, timetables for deployment, and additional advances in this key capability. With so much riding on the broadband services embodied in handsets, this session is a must for anyone involved in setting the direction for enterprise mobility initiatives.

Given the combination of the economic malaise and the sensationalism that surrounds topics such as cloud computing and server virtualization, it is possible to surmise that nothing of significance is happening in the networking space. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venture capitalists and others have been funding significant investments in a wide range of networking technologies and the results of those investments are beginning to hit the market. The panelists in this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising emerging networking technologies. Attend this session to get an early look at what could be some significant networking breakthroughs.

The data center is a common starting point for most green IT initiatives. Data centers not only consume a tremendous amount of energy, but are riddled with IT inefficiencies. Take, for example, the average server environment where 30% are of servers are “dead” — consuming energy, but performing no useful work. And data center managers have ample opportunity to improve efficiencies across other IT systems, like storage and networks, and facilities equipment, like power distribution and cooling. This session will help data center managers develop a comprehensive green data center framework across their server, storage, network and facilities assets to deliver financial and environmental savings.

Given the combination of the economic malaise and the sensationalism that surrounds topics such as cloud computing and server virtualization, it is possible to surmise that nothing of significance is happening in the networking space. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venture capitalists and others have been funding significant investments in a wide range of networking technologies and the results of those investments are beginning to hit the market. The panelists in this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising emerging networking technologies. Attend this session to get an early look at what could be some significant networking breakthroughs.

Organizations are increasingly looking for opportunities to save energy outside of their data center. Why? According to Forrester Research, more energy may be consumed by distributed IT assets outside of the data center – like PCs and monitors – than within it. To reduce energy consumption and other environmental impacts of the PC environment, organizations can not only source more energy efficient PCs, such as thin clients, but then power down PCs at nights and over weekends when they’re not being used. This session will help IT professionals understand the tactics used to green their PC environment for cost savings, estimate the extent of these savings.

Security budgets have recently come under intense scrutiny and often are being cut or left the same as previous years even in a climate where security threats and attacks are on the rise. In these conditions where do you invest your available budget? Why isn’t the technology you have invested previously solving your security problems? How do you use the technologies and capabilities that you already have more effectively? How do you convince your management and leadership that security is still relevant and important? What should you be thinking about next? This panel discussion will answer these questions and more by providing knowledge and insights from professionals who are successfully overcoming these challenges every day.

Private clouds can be a stepping stone to a hybrid public/private architecture. This session will look at workload portability, focusing on which applications are candidates for public clouds and how to prepare applications that can run in several environments.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

The great growth over the last few years in the use of Web applications combined with the recent interest in cloud computing has caused IT organizations to realize that simple server load balancers can’t keep up with the emerging demands. What is needed is an application delivery controller (ADC). In addition to balancing traffic, an ADC offloads computationally intensive tasks off of a server farm. However, the ADCs that are currently available in the market differ dramatically in terms of their underlying architectures and the functions that they provide. In this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session, leading ADC vendors will be asked questions that serve to identify the similarities and differences between their products.

While major wireless security concerns have long since left the front page, security is the one area in IT (and especially in mobile IT) where “done” is never achieved. New challenges and outright threats appear on a continual weekly basis, and it’s vital to keep up with the ever-changing security landscape. Our objective for this session is to look at the latest in mobile security threats, and how new solutions are enabling mobile users to go about their business without compromise to sensitive corporate assets.

Amazon Web Services are the de facto model for public cloud platforms: a core offering of virtual machines, surrounded by a range of storage, messaging, and mamnagement service. For many companies, this will be their first taste of a public cloud. In this session, we'll walk through deploying your first application atop AWS -- from evaluating your workload profile, to selecting the right services, to migrating and configuring the application itself.

While major wireless security concerns have long since left the front page, security is the one area in IT (and especially in mobile IT) where “done” is never achieved. New challenges and outright threats appear on a continual weekly basis, and it’s vital to keep up with the ever-changing security landscape. Our objective for this session is to look at the latest in mobile security threats, and how new solutions are enabling mobile users to go about their business without compromise to sensitive corporate assets.

It’s safe to say that any data center manager worth his or her salt will be familiar with the four level data center tiering system popularized by The Uptime Institute. But how much weight should the data center tiering system really carry when designing a new facility? Or when you’re evaluating a data center colocation or outsourcing partner? And is tiered data center really more reliable and efficient than one without a tier classification? To answer these questions, this session will evaluate data center tier standards and classifications, the pros and cons of them, and alternatives to existing standards that data center managers should consider.

As you consider the most secure and cost-effective ways to take advantage of cloud computing in your enterprise, there are several factors you should assess for your strategy. Attend this session to learn about the technical, operations and business decisions that are the keys to a successful cloud implementation.

There is continued pressure in today’s corporate environment to do more with less, to reduce costs and to become more agile in order to meet rapidly changing business demands in a difficult global economy. Outsourcing IT Security services is often senior management’s response to these challenging times, so the question is not if it will happen, but rather when and how it will happen, if it hasn’t already. However, has anything really changed, though? What is the true impact of the decision to outsource IT Security services? When IT Security is outsourced, what are the hidden challenges? This session will be presented from the perspective an enterprise security manager who has first-hand knowledge of how outsourcing certain IT Security services can help meet the resource and costs pressures of an organization without compromising its IT Security posture.

Security budgets have recently come under intense scrutiny and often are being cut or left the same as previous years even in a climate where security threats and attacks are on the rise. In these conditions where do you invest your available budget? Why isn’t the technology you have invested previously solving your security problems? How do you use the technologies and capabilities that you already have more effectively? How do you convince your management and leadership that security is still relevant and important? What should you be thinking about next? This panel discussion will answer these questions and more by providing knowledge and insights from professionals who are successfully overcoming these challenges every day.

As we try to use clouds for increasingly mainstream, production-grade applications, performance and reliability become a greater concern. In this session, we'll review existing studies on cloud performance, and look at what and how to measure cloud performance.

In the first of three end user panels at this year's Enterprise Cloud Summit New York, we'll hear from companies who've built and run their own private clouds -- what worked, what didn't, why they chose to build their own, and what they plan to connect those clouds to in future.

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

Server memory is a critical resource constraint in datacenters and as demand for virtualization and cloud applications continues to increase; this limitation will have economic and operational impact. This presentation explores the new HyperCloud memory technology from Netlist and how it can maximize server utilization, improve productivity and reduce TCO.

GCE, a leader in cloud-computing technology for enterprises, implemented a government agency-wide financial system overhaul within the Department of Labor in early 2010. Through this implementation, GCE has built a best-practice case for adoption, transition and implementation of cloud-based systems that can be applied to other enterprise-class systems. The mission-critical implementations include sensitive financial information management tools such as automated workflows, world-class reporting tools to provide immediate visibility to data, elimination of hardware, software and hosting management, flexibility and scalability as the user's mission changes, security and a quick ramp-up to launch, while staying on budget. Ultimately, the solution will enable an organization to focus on its core mission.

Virtualization is causing the convergence of server, storage, and network platforms. At the same time, fewer CAPEX dollars coupled with rising energy costs is promoting data center managers to incorporate energy efficient and highly utilized IT equipment in the data center. This session will help data center managers understand virtualization’s role in convergence and plan for a more efficient and highly utilized server, storage and network environment.

By adopting server virtualization we’ve reduced the number of physical servers in the data center but the proliferation of separate storage, data, management and VMotion networks has made the back of our server racks look like an explosion in a spaghetti factory. Now that 10Gigabit Ethernet is widely available several solutions have arisen to consolidate network and storage I/O onto a smaller number of higher bandwidth connections. With consolidated networking users can stop playing the game of one cable, two cable, orange cable, blue cable.

With Wi-Fi now the primary or default access in enterprises of all sizes and types around the world, future success depends upon a detailed understanding of the evolution of both the standards and the specifications that determine key product capabilities going forward. This session will provide a detailed look at current and future developments in all aspects of wireless-LAN technologies, featuring the experts from industry responsible for bringing new capabilities to market.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day One of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Tales from Top-of-Tech
• The CIO Role Today
• The IT Organization of the Future
• IT in the SMB World – Issues, Realities & Best Practices
• Health Care IT
• Business Analytics
• CIO Unplugged

For more information click here.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day Two of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Vendor Management
• Managing the Next Technology Portfolio
• Green IT/Sustainability
• Managing Social Media
• IT Leadership

For more information click here.

Organizations are increasingly looking for opportunities to save energy outside of their data center. Why? According to Forrester Research, more energy may be consumed by distributed IT assets outside of the data center – like PCs and monitors – than within it. To reduce energy consumption and other environmental impacts of the PC environment, organizations can not only source more energy efficient PCs, such as thin clients, but then power down PCs at nights and over weekends when they’re not being used. This session will help IT professionals understand the tactics used to green their PC environment for cost savings, estimate the extent of these savings.

Desktop virtualization has become one of the hot spots for 2010, in part because many of the barriers of the past have been eliminated. Along with the promise of solving the decades old problems of desktop management and support, desktop virtualization is bringing with it a renewed look at thin client (now also zero client) computing. How do server hosted applications and desktops relate to thin client computing and thin/zero client devices? How have these technologies changed/improved to become strong solutions for today's desktop challenges. Where do other technologies like Windows 7, smartphones and iPads fit in? Learn if, why and and how all these technologies should fit into your desktop strategy.

You’ve heard the messages over and over: everyone, everywhere is going wireless. Far be it from us to belittle the migration to mobility, but a reality check is in order: can an enterprise go entirely wireless? If so, what will IT infrastructures look like going forward? And, if not, what roles will wire play as at least the edge of the network cuts the cord? This session will provide a lively debate of this critical strategic issue.

This presentation will discuss 10 years of research and benchmarking of 1,000 organizations by the IT Process Institute, that uncovered the 20% of IT controls that deliver 80% of the performance improvement, as well as creating a sustainable and secure controls environment. Case studies of effective organizations will be discussed as well as observations and conclusions that where developed as a result of the research.

The last few years has seen a great growth in the deployment of virtualized servers and storage. We are now seeing the deployment of software based application delivery appliances such as WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) and application delivery controllers (ADCs). These devices hold the promise of fundamentally changing application delivery. The members of this PowerPoint-free session will discuss the pros and cons of these appliances. What kind of performance improvements will you experience with a virtualized appliance? How will these devices be managed? Do they work with all hypervisors? Are they integrated with other branch office or data center functionality? Are they certified with any major software or storage vendors? How are they priced vs. a traditional appliance?

The last few years has seen a great growth in the deployment of virtualized servers and storage. We are now seeing the deployment of software based application delivery appliances such as WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) and application delivery controllers (ADCs). These devices hold the promise of fundamentally changing application delivery. The members of this PowerPoint-free session will discuss the pros and cons of these appliances. What kind of performance improvements will you experience with a virtualized appliance? How will these devices be managed? Do they work with all hypervisors? Are they integrated with other branch office or data center functionality? Are they certified with any major software or storage vendors? How are they priced vs. a traditional appliance?

The media is overflowing with discussions of the benefits of adopting cloud computing and enabling technologies such as virtualization. What has been missing from that discussion is an analysis of what has to happen to the network to enable it to support cloud computing. For example, a new LAN access layer has emerged that is comprised of the vSwitches embedded within the hypervisor software. However, these vSwitches typically have poor management scalability and limited traffic visibility. Today’s typical WAN can not effectively support the dynamic movement of VMs nor cloud bursting. It also is not experiencing the same type of price reductions as are computing and storage resources. In this session, Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates will describe in detail the set of challenges created by cloud computing and will also provide an overview of the emerging networking, optimization and management technologies that hold the potential to mitigate these challenges.

Trends such as the adoption of virtualization are fundamentally changing how IT organizations need to architect their data center LAN. For example, the introduction of server virtualization and blade servers means that the traditional three tier data center LAN is expanding to where it now has as many as five layers. These extra layers can introduce unacceptable cost, complexity and delay. While all of the LAN switching vendors are aware of the problem, they have different approaches to solving it. In this session, Mike Fratto, Editor, Network Computing and Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates will identify the emerging approaches to architecting a data center LAN and will discuss the pros and cons of each.

Having analyzed the emerging approaches to architecting a data center LAN it is now time to drill down into which technologies you should incorporate into your new data center LAN. In this PowerPoint free session, Mike Fratto and Jim Metzler will question LAN switching vendors about a number of topics including the pros and cons of FCoE vs. iSCSI; the viability of separating the LAN switch’s control and the data planes; the pros and cons of virtual switching and multi-chassis LAGs; the need for services such as QoS or security; as well as the alignment of each application VM with its own virtual NIC and virtual switch port.

Given the combination of the economic malaise and the sensationalism that surrounds topics such as cloud computing and server virtualization, it is possible to surmise that nothing of significance is happening in the networking space. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venture capitalists and others have been funding significant investments in a wide range of networking technologies and the results of those investments are beginning to hit the market. The panelists in this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising emerging networking technologies. Attend this session to get an early look at what could be some significant networking breakthroughs.

The great growth over the last few years in the use of Web applications combined with the recent interest in cloud computing has caused IT organizations to realize that simple server load balancers can’t keep up with the emerging demands. What is needed is an application delivery controller (ADC). In addition to balancing traffic, an ADC offloads computationally intensive tasks off of a server farm. However, the ADCs that are currently available in the market differ dramatically in terms of their underlying architectures and the functions that they provide. In this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session, leading ADC vendors will be asked questions that serve to identify the similarities and differences between their products.

Most IT organizations are taking IT resources such as servers, applications and storage out of branch offices and placing them in centralized data centers. This raises some critical questions: How can IT organizations overcome the impediments to the broad deployment of virtual desktops? Should the next generation branch office be serverless? What type of device(s) needs to still be in the branch office and how is it managed? What techniques can be used to overcome the performance issues? The speakers on this panel will answer those questions and will present alternative designs for your next generation branch office.

Physical servers now support multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) that can be provisioned and moved between servers in a matter of minutes. There is just one huge problem – today the supporting network and management infrastructure is still largely static and physical. So while it is possible to move a VM between data centers in a matter of minutes, it can take days or weeks to get the supporting infrastructure in place. The panelists on this session will discuss solutions to this problem including new standards like IF-MAP, automation of functionality such as IP address management and the deployment of a new class of management product – the orchestration engine.

The role of network management has fundamentally changed. It is no longer just about the availability of networks. In now includes managing the performance of networks and applications. In addition, the continued deployment of new functionality, such as mobility and the virtualization of just about every component of IT, is making the task of network management significantly more challenging. Thankfully there has been a lot of investment in network management and the panelists in this fast paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising of the emerging network management technologies.

One impact of the movement to use more private and public cloud computing solutions is that it increases the likelihood that IT resources will be accessed over a relatively low capacity, high latency WAN. Even worse, in some cases these IT resources will be accessed over multiple WAN links. The panelists on this session will identify both the performance challenges associated with cloud computing as well as myriad technologies and services that IT organizations can use to mitigate the impact of those challenges.

We’re kicking off this year’s Wireless and Mobility track with a detailed look at the often confusing and complex world of wireless technologies. These key elements form the basis of modern wireless communications, and this session is designed to provide enterprise decision-makers and practitioners with all they need to know to pick the best solutions for requirements at hand, as well as to detail the still-evolving wireless landscape so as to best address upcoming user and application demands efficiently and cost-effectively.

Given the combination of the economic malaise and the sensationalism that surrounds topics such as cloud computing and server virtualization, it is possible to surmise that nothing of significance is happening in the networking space. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venture capitalists and others have been funding significant investments in a wide range of networking technologies and the results of those investments are beginning to hit the market. The panelists in this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising emerging networking technologies. Attend this session to get an early look at what could be some significant networking breakthroughs.

Virtualization management is the key to successfully moving beyond basic server consolidation to an agile virtual infrastructure to a private cloud. A well managed virtual environment must include performance and capacity management, automation of virtual operations, troubleshooting and root cause analysis through the virtual and physical infrastructure, lifecycle management, and more. Learn how layering the right management capabilities onto your virtual environment will improve your IT operations and build the foundation for a private cloud.

Given the combination of the economic malaise and the sensationalism that surrounds topics such as cloud computing and server virtualization, it is possible to surmise that nothing of significance is happening in the networking space. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venture capitalists and others have been funding significant investments in a wide range of networking technologies and the results of those investments are beginning to hit the market. The panelists in this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising emerging networking technologies. Attend this session to get an early look at what could be some significant networking breakthroughs.

One impact of the movement to use more private and public cloud computing solutions is that it increases the likelihood that IT resources will be accessed over a relatively low capacity, high latency WAN. Even worse, in some cases these IT resources will be accessed over multiple WAN links. The panelists on this session will identify both the performance challenges associated with cloud computing as well as myriad technologies and services that IT organizations can use to mitigate the impact of those challenges.

Physical servers now support multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) that can be provisioned and moved between servers in a matter of minutes. There is just one huge problem – today the supporting network and management infrastructure is still largely static and physical. So while it is possible to move a VM between data centers in a matter of minutes, it can take days or weeks to get the supporting infrastructure in place. The panelists on this session will discuss solutions to this problem including new standards like IF-MAP, automation of functionality such as IP address management and the deployment of a new class of management product – the orchestration engine.

Virtualization impacts every major compliance standard and requires fundamental changes to security practices. What should this mean to you? This session will discuss what gaps are introduced in the move from physical to virtual where compliance is concerned, and prescribe specific steps to ensure compliance for production deployments. Regulatory areas discussed will include FISMA, DIACAP, PCI, HIPAA and SOX/GLBA. The session will also discuss how to build a framework for securing virtual data centers and private clouds, and how to take physical security constructs like Zones and propagate them to the virtual infrastructure to enable consistent security across the entire data center. You will learn how various hypervisor security architectures coupled with VM Introspection and automation can deliver dynamic, granular insights into security.

While major wireless security concerns have long since left the front page, security is the one area in IT (and especially in mobile IT) where “done” is never achieved. New challenges and outright threats appear on a continual weekly basis, and it’s vital to keep up with the ever-changing security landscape. Our objective for this session is to look at the latest in mobile security threats, and how new solutions are enabling mobile users to go about their business without compromise to sensitive corporate assets.

The first step in any cloud is to make workloads virtual and portble. This session will look at application virtualization in a cloud environment, from "naked" machines to predefined stacks of machine, operating system, and application.

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

In the first of three end user panels at this year's Enterprise Cloud Summit New York, we'll hear from companies who've built and run their own private clouds -- what worked, what didn't, why they chose to build their own, and what they plan to connect those clouds to in future.

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

It is estimated that by next year, most data centers will have doubled their power consumption over a five year period. This session examines how companies can reverse the power consumption trend and extend the life of the data center through best practices, holistic planning and new technologies. By using a combination of consolidation, systems management, and green technologies, companies can get more capacity out of their current data center while allowing them to be more efficient in their business.

Virtualization is causing the convergence of server, storage, and network platforms. At the same time, fewer CAPEX dollars coupled with rising energy costs is promoting data center managers to incorporate energy efficient and highly utilized IT equipment in the data center. This session will help data center managers understand virtualization’s role in convergence and plan for a more efficient and highly utilized server, storage and network environment.

Physical servers now support multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) that can be provisioned and moved between servers in a matter of minutes. There is just one huge problem – today the supporting network and management infrastructure is still largely static and physical. So while it is possible to move a VM between data centers in a matter of minutes, it can take days or weeks to get the supporting infrastructure in place. The panelists on this session will discuss solutions to this problem including new standards like IF-MAP, automation of functionality such as IP address management and the deployment of a new class of management product – the orchestration engine.

Multivendor interoperability is a must if UC is going to take off; few if any enterprises will get all of their UC infrastructure and applications from a single vendor. But the vendors, to date, have been busy defending their turf and trying to grab others’ territory, so they are lagging in interoperation standards and testing. This session will highlight the interoperation needed for the top UC applications and will help you understand how much has really been accomplished, and how much farther there is to go. A panel of leading vendors will respond with their claims, commitments and directions and will comment on industry efforts to establish standards via the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) and the Internet standards bodies.

In the first of three end user panels at this year's Enterprise Cloud Summit New York, we'll hear from companies who've built and run their own private clouds -- what worked, what didn't, why they chose to build their own, and what they plan to connect those clouds to in future.

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

Description to come.

Network utilization and error monitoring, throughput measurement, and device monitoring - these can all be done using free Open Source tools available today on the Internet! This workshop focuses on a handful of tools that can be used for troubleshooting a wide variety of network and application problems.

The instructor will take attendees through each one of these tools, showing how they can be easily installed and configured.

Course Outline
• Open Source Troubleshooting Tools, Best of the Best
• Iperf for throughput monitoring
• Cacti for monitoring network utilization
• nTop for monitoring conversations
• SmokePing for monitoring response time and packet loss
• OpenNMS for monitoring device availability

You Will Learn
Attendees will learn how to measure network throughput and monitor network utilization all using Open Source tools.

Who Should Attend
This course is intended for network administrators, designers and analysts that are responsible for determining why network and applications are not running as fast as they should.

Wireshark® has become one of the most popular protocol analyzers available to network administrators today. While it provides an easy means to capture packets, it is not always easy to interpret the contents of those packets. In this session we will take a detailed look at how to reliably capture and analyze network traffic. We will use trace file examples to demonstrate a number of common network protocols. Examples will be given of how the network traffic should look when it is working properly and what it looks like when it is not working properly.

As part of this course the attendees will be taken step by step through the process of building a capture to disk appliance using freely available software.

Course Outline
• Packet capture techniques
• Creating capture filters
• Creating display filters
• TCP traffic analysis
• Using the Expert Information to quickly isolate problems
• Reassembly of Voice over IP traffic
• Use of graphs to visually analyze traffic flows

Who Should Attend
This course is intended for network administrators, designers, and analysts that are responsible for monitoring and troubleshooting network traffic.

You Will Learn
Students will be prepared to reliably capture and analyze network traffic.

The data center is a common starting point for most green IT initiatives. Data centers not only consume a tremendous amount of energy, but are riddled with IT inefficiencies. Take, for example, the average server environment where 30% are of servers are “dead” — consuming energy, but performing no useful work. And data center managers have ample opportunity to improve efficiencies across other IT systems, like storage and networks, and facilities equipment, like power distribution and cooling. This session will help data center managers develop a comprehensive green data center framework across their server, storage, network and facilities assets to deliver financial and environmental savings.

While major wireless security concerns have long since left the front page, security is the one area in IT (and especially in mobile IT) where “done” is never achieved. New challenges and outright threats appear on a continual weekly basis, and it’s vital to keep up with the ever-changing security landscape. Our objective for this session is to look at the latest in mobile security threats, and how new solutions are enabling mobile users to go about their business without compromise to sensitive corporate assets.

It may not be the sexiest technology, but there’s plenty to love about the kinds of cost savings you can get with SIP Trunking—not to mention the fact that SIP trunking is the only way to do true end-to-end UC within your enterprise. SIP Trunking remains one of the most talked-about topics in enterprise communications because the potential benefits are so great, while the availability of SIP trunk service offerings, and the maturity of those offerings, still falls short. In this session, the leading expert on SIP trunks will help you understand how to find a service provider, and how to get the right service for your enterprise.

An effective Information Risk Management and Security strategy allows an organization to define how it will operate in order to achieve its business goals and requirements while still effectively protecting its information infrastructure and data assets. If developed properly strategy provides a roadmap for success that includes the definition of the capabilities, goals, timelines, functions, requirements, and metrics required to develop and implement an effective set of capabilities. It also assists an organization to answer the vital question of how much is enough? This session will focus on the key concepts and capabilities that should be considered when developing an Information Risk Management and Security strategy. Case studies of strategy development and implementations will be utilized throughout the session as well as discussions of current industry leading concepts and practices.

Security budgets have recently come under intense scrutiny and often are being cut or left the same as previous years even in a climate where security threats and attacks are on the rise. In these conditions where do you invest your available budget? Why isn’t the technology you have invested previously solving your security problems? How do you use the technologies and capabilities that you already have more effectively? How do you convince your management and leadership that security is still relevant and important? What should you be thinking about next? This panel discussion will answer these questions and more by providing knowledge and insights from professionals who are successfully overcoming these challenges every day.

Join us for a rare opportunity to hear from managers and users putting mobility into practice across a wide array of applications. We’ll examine what works, what doesn’t, and what key requirements have been identified for the next generation of applications. We’ll also explore cost issues and how to make the best decisions regarding the marriage of applications and mobility.

As we try to use clouds for increasingly mainstream, production-grade applications, performance and reliability become a greater concern. In this session, we'll review existing studies on cloud performance, and look at what and how to measure cloud performance.

To run private clouds efficiently, you have to instrument and manage them. But cloud management is a different beast, requiring a multi-user approach with a greater focus on billing and utilization. It also demands new tools to protect your users from one another -- and from themselves. This session will look at how private clouds are changing IT management.

On-demand computing resources are the most disruptive change in IT of the last decade, and much of that disruption begins at home. Day One of Enterprise Cloud Summit will focus on private clouds -- radically new ways to combine virtualization, automation, and self-service models in order to change how you deliver IT to your business.

For more information click here.

Public clouds aren't just for startups. Enterprises are using them for training, QA, and other non-production applications. They're also leveraging their elastic capability for all manner of bursty applications, from monte carlo simulations to genomics to architectural modeling. This panel of established enterprise users will show us how on-demand computing is changing the way they run their businesses, and what convinced them to embrace third-party IT models.

On Day Two of Enterprise Cloud Summit, we'll turn our eye outward to look at the many public cloud offerings that are levelling the IT playing field. Public cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go economics and tremendous flexibility; but they also create new security, portability, and performance concerns. Once the exclusive domain of web startups, today enterprises big and small are finding ways to incorporate public cloud platforms into their IT strategy. Whether you're deciding how to embrace them or want to learn from what others are doing, Enterprise Cloud Summit is the place to do it.

For more information click here.

This two day tutorial focuses on specific steps you can take to improve your IT organization, business model, tools, staffing and skill levels, as well as your policies and operational procedures. In an environment of constant change, IT accountability has taken on new levels of urgency. IT departments regularly struggle with staffing levels, turnover, burnout, lack of credibility, or end-user and managerial dissatisfaction. If you're questioning how to satisfy the end user, control or cut costs, and still offer a balanced and fulfilling career progression to IT professional staff, we have answers for you.

Course Outline
* How to develop a new framework for the business of IT
* How to formalize policies and processes
* How to map the organization to new business models and processes
* How to re-engage your technology roadmap post recession
* How to manage customer expectations and set customer service levels
* How to develop end-user and IT buy-in
* How to build executive management commitment
* Know the critical success factors * How to make it all happen

You Will Learn
Principles that can develop or enhance your own IT policies, processes, organization, and practices, thus creating a more effective IT business unit.

Who Should Attend
* Directors and managers of IT organizations or units
* IT and IS professionals
* Anyone who needs to realign IT with the business

Hear from past attendees of Principles of Effective IT Management:

-If I implement just a few of the gems he provided I will improve my IT department in big ways. Tom was very impressive.

-This workshop was perfect as it touched on a lot of activities that are currently being worked on or are in process to be implemented.

-Thomas was an excellent presenter, who related with everything that my business is going through at the moment.

-Best speaker I've seen in ages. Very relevant to my work.

-Very impressed with this workshop.

-Without a doubt, this has been one of the most informative classes I have attended in the past three years I have been attending Interop.

-I was one of the lucky people who managed to attend Principles of Effective Management. The information presented is going to be very beneficial as I work towards improving my IT department process.

This two day tutorial focuses on specific steps you can take to improve your IT organization, business model, tools, staffing and skill levels, as well as your policies and operational procedures. In an environment of constant change, IT accountability has taken on new levels of urgency. IT departments regularly struggle with staffing levels, turnover, burnout, lack of credibility, or end-user and managerial dissatisfaction. If you're questioning how to satisfy the end user, control or cut costs, and still offer a balanced and fulfilling career progression to IT professional staff, we have answers for you.

Course Outline
* How to develop a new framework for the business of IT
* How to formalize policies and processes
* How to map the organization to new business models and processes
* How to re-engage your technology roadmap post recession
* How to manage customer expectations and set customer service levels
* How to develop end-user and IT buy-in * How to build executive management commitment
* Know the critical success factors * How to make it all happen

You Will
Learn Principles that can develop or enhance your own IT policies, processes, organization, and practices, thus creating a more effective IT business unit.

Who Should Attend
* Directors and managers of IT organizations or units
* IT and IS professionals
* Anyone who needs to realign IT with the business Y

Hear from past attendees of Principles of Effective IT Management:

-If I implement just a few of the gems he provided I will improve my IT department in big ways. Tom was very impressive.

-This workshop was perfect as it touched on a lot of activities that are currently being worked on or are in process to be implemented.

-Thomas was an excellent presenter, who related with everything that my business is going through at the moment.

-Best speaker I've seen in ages. Very relevant to my work.

-Very impressed with this workshop.

-Without a doubt, this has been one of the most informative classes I have attended in the past three years I have been attending Interop.

-I was one of the lucky people who managed to attend Principles of Effective Management. The information presented is going to be very beneficial as I work towards improving my IT department process.

As we try to use clouds for increasingly mainstream, production-grade applications, performance and reliability become a greater concern. In this session, we'll review existing studies on cloud performance, and look at what and how to measure cloud performance.

Articles often describe the value that virtualization technologies can bring to IT but what are the realities of implementing server and desktop virtualization? Do they really offer the benefits that vendors are touting? What are the "gotchas" to avoid? Hear about the experiences of those who have implemented various virtualization solutions. Find out what strategies worked and which ones didn't. Listen to accounts of life in the trenches, and learn next steps to consider in your own implementations of virtual infrastructure.

As the world of information technology changes, the skill set required to lead your IT organization continually evolves. Attend Day One of this intensive two-day CIO Boot Camp to learn firsthand from successful CIOs at billion-dollar-plus organizations. Hear about common mistakes, how to avoid making them and how to apply their lessons to your world.

Topics include:

• Tales from Top-of-Tech
• The CIO Role Today
• The IT Organization of the Future
• IT in the SMB World – Issues, Realities & Best Practices
• Health Care IT
• Business Analytics
• CIO Unplugged

For more information click here.