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Great Debates Conference Track

Everyone appreciates a spirited and informative debate between experts, especially with opposing views. This year, the Interop New York 2011 conference features debate format sessions on compelling and often controversial IT topics in wireless, networking, cloud computing and storage. Come to these sessions and prepare to leave each one both entertained AND informed.

Wednesday

Thursday

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Wednesday, October 5
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM Great Debate: Is Your Next Notebook A Tablet? Location: Room 1E08 How many mobile devices do you want to buy, carry, and manage? A handset is a given, but can a tablet really replace a notebook? Will the huge (and increasing) diversity of tablet devices and operating environments give new life to the notebook, or are we in the early stages of an epic transition that will fundamentally transform mobile IT? Join us for a detailed exploration beyond the consumer-driven hype to the enterprise issues that really matter. Moderator - Martha Walz, Editor in Chief, World Trade 100 Martha is a the editor in chief of World Trade 100 and a freelance writer covering emerging technologies in the enterprise mobility space. Martha previously served as editor in chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine and R&D Magazine. She holds a BS in Mathematics and a BS in Physics from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and an MS in Physics from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Panelist - Chris Hazelton, Research Director, Mobile & Wireless, The 451 Group Chris runs the Mobile and Wireless research practice, which covers hardware, software, and services for both enterprise and consumer mobility markets. Chris’ research focuses on mobile device management as well as application development platforms that target smartphones and tablets in the enterprise. He is primarily interested in the shift in enterprise computing from desktop to mobile. Prior to joining 451, Chris covered worldwide smartphone trends for IDC. He focused on the convergence of mobile air interface technologies and advances in device component technologies which impacted the designs and capabilities of smartphones in both consumer and enterprise markets. Chris has been quoted on mobile technology issues by publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CBS, ComputerWorld, Fox Business, InformationWeek, Investors Business Daily, MacWorld, TheStreet, Reuters and Wired. He sits on the Editorial Advisory Board for Mobile Enterprise Magazine, and is a columnist for FierceMobileIT. Chris has presented and moderated panels at numerous events such as CES, CTIA, venture capital tech days, as well as serving as director for 451’s Client Conference. Chris earned his MBA and MS in Information Systems from Boston University. During his graduate course work, Chris conducted market research for Lucent Technologies, leading a team in the development of a demand creation strategy for 3G data services. Chris also received a BS in business from University of Richmond with a concentration in finance. Panelist - Paul DeBeasi, Research Vice President, Gartner Paul DeBeasi is a research VP within Gartner IT Professionals Research. Mr. DeBeasi manages the research agenda for the Burton Network and Telecom Strategies coverage area. He performs wireless and mobility research in the areas of wireless LANs, mobile cellular, wireless security, and mobile device management. Prior to becoming an analyst, Mr. DeBeasi spent 12 years working at communication companies (Cascade Communications, NetSuite, IPHighway) in product management roles. He worked as VP of Product Management for seven of those years. Before that, Mr. DeBeasi was an engineer for 12 years, working at various communication companies (Bell Labs, Prime Computer, Chipcom).
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM Great Debate: We Will Always Have Private Clouds Location: Room 1E08 Following in the footsteps of our recent Great Debate on cloud security, this session pits two teams against one another. It's one team's job to convince you that we'll always have on-premise private clouds, and the other's to argue that we'll eventually move to a utility model where you never touch your servers. Following the Oxford Debate format, you'll hear imploring arguments and fiery rhetoric as you decide who makes the best case. Moderator - Alistair Croll, Founder, Bitcurrent Alistair is the principal analyst at Bitcurrent; an executive at CloudOps; an advisor to various technology venture firms; the founder of the Bitnorth conference; and the founder of the Human 2.0 blog on emerging technologies. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded startup accelerator Rednod; web performance management firm Coradiant; and Networkshop, a research firm. He has also worked as a product manager for 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology. Alistair is the content chair for Cloud Connect, the industry's largest cloud computing event; the track chair for cloud computing and the Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop; and the co-chair of O'Reilly Strata. Alistair is a frequent contributor to a range of technology publications. He has taught at industry conferences such as Web2Expo, IGT, Interop, Structure, Enterprise 2.0, Velocity, Mesh, and eMetrics. He is also the co-author of Web Operations (2010, O'Reilly), Complete Web Monitoring (2009, O'Reilly) and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks (1999, Prentice-Hall). Panelist - Brian Butte, Founder, BePublic Loud Brian Butte has focused on cloud, grid, and utility computing for the past nine years as an Enterprise Architect. Brian has architected multiple virtualization solutions for Fortune 500 clients including internal infrastructure as a service, workload overflow, internal storage clouds, and grid enabled ETL. Brian's varied background including plant floor automation, embedded systems, enterprise applications and call centers across multiple verticals gives him a unique perspective on the application of cloud technology. Brian is Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, member of the PwC Cloud Action Committee, PwC Cloud Solutions Team and subject matter expert within the Technology Advisory practice. Panelist - Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research, salesforce.com Peter Coffee, former technology editor of eWEEK, works with corporate and commercial application developers to build a community based on Force.com, salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud computing platform. With 25 years experience in guiding the adoption and management of innovative information technologies, Peter has been a keynote speaker, moderator or presenter at IT events throughout the U.S., England, Canada and Australia. Peter holds an engineering degree from MIT and MBA from Pepperdine University, with faculty appointments at Pepperdine, UCLA and Chapman College. He is the author of two books, How to Program Java and Peter Coffee Teaches PCs. Panelist - Peter Magnusson, Engineering Director, Google, Inc. Panelist - Ian Rae, CEO, CloudOps
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Thursday, October 6
10:30 AM – 11:20 AM Great Debate: Is this the End of Physical Appliances? Location: Room 1E08 For well over a decade most IT infrastructures have relied on physical appliances including physical routers, WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) and application delivery controllers (ADCs). However, over the last few years, an increasing number of virtualized appliances have entered the marketplace. These appliances have the potential to provide dramatically lower cost and dramatically increase agility. That raises the question: Is there any longer a need for physical appliances? The panelists will discuss their stances on this question and will provide you the information you need to determine what makes the most sense in your environment. Moderator - Jim Metzler, Vice President, Ashton Metzler & Associates Jim has a wide background in the IT industry. This includes being a software engineer, an engineering manager for high-speed data services for a major telco, a product manager for network hardware, a network manager at two Fortune 500 companies, and the principal of a consulting organization. In addition, Jim has created software tools for designing customer networks for a major IXC, and directed and performed market research at a major industry analyst firm. Panelist - Alan Murphy, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, F5 Networks Panelist - Mark Day, Chief Scientist, Riverbed Mark Day, PhD. came to Riverbed from Cisco Systems, where he served as technical lead for content networking product management. A senior member of the Office of the CTO, Dr. Day is part of the team responsible for Riverbed’s technology direction and strategy. He works closely with Riverbed customers, solving some of the most technically complex and challenging issues associated with application acceleration and Wide Area Network optimization. Dr. Day also invented the SSL optimization technique that is a core feature of Riverbed’s flagship Steelhead products. This development has that made it practical for enterprises to accelerate secure SSL traffic. He holds 19 patents in distributed systems, presence, streaming media, content networking, mobile communications, and telephony, and has chaired several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups. Dr. Day has held an adjunct appointment at Harvard University teaching graduate computer science, and received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1995. Panelist - Grant Asplund, WAN Optimization Evangelist, Blue Coat Panelist - Kevin Murphy, VP of Product Management, Certeon Kevin Murphy has more than 15 years leading successful products into emerging markets defining and delivering distributed systems for telecommunications, CDNs, IT infrastructure, virtualization, and cloud solutions. Prior to Certeon, Mr. Murphy was the CTO of NEI where he was responsible for their software, cloud, and virtualization strategy as well as expanding the IP portfolio. Mr. Murphy also led the architecture, design, and implementation of GE Intelligent Platform's cloud and virtualization solution for the Proficy product line. Most recently Mr. Murphy was at VCE where he was responsible for defining the security and management of the Vblock Platforms. He holds 2 patents and a BSEE from UMass Lowell.
3:15 PM – 4:15 PM Great Debate: iSCSI Beats Fibre Channel Location: Room 1E08 Which one wins is the topic of hot debate as the storage landscape is changing. Is Fibre Channel on its last legs propped up by an entrenched storage ecosystem or is it going to continue to evolve and remain relevant and viable in the enterprise? Will iSCSI supplant FC as the primary storage protocol by breaking out of it's departmental pigeon hole and into the main stream? This debate will ask attendees to vote at the start of the session and again at the end after the arguments are heard. Bring your questions to stump out panel. Moderator - Howard Marks, Founder and Chief Scientist, DeepStorage.net Howard Marks is the Founder and Chief Scientist at DeepStorage.net, a Hoboken NJ based networking consultancy. In over 25 years of consulting he has designed and implemented networks, management systems and Internet strategies at organizations including American Express, JP Morgan, Borden Foods, US Tobacco, BBDO Worldwide and Foxwoods Resort Casino. Mr. Marks has been a speaker at industry conferences including Comnet, PC Expo, Neworld+Interop and Microsoft’s TechEd since 1990 on topics including LAN and WAN infrastructure, systems management and web hosting. He is the author of Networking Windows and co-author of Windows NT Unleashed (Sams) along with over 100 articles in publications including PC Magazine, Network Computing and Network World. He is currently the "Backup and Business Continuity" blogger at InformationWeek.com Panelist - Stuart Miniman, Senior Analyst, wikibon Stuart is the networking and virtualization research lead for Wikibon. Before becoming an analyst in 2010, Stuart's past positions (EMC, Lucent Technologies and APC) including sales, product management and strategic planning, Stuart has focused on the needs of customers by working with partners to deliver the solutions or information that the customers require. Stuart holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Bryant University. Stuart is engaged in the technical and social media communities; find him on the Wikibon blog and on Twitter @stu. Panelist - Stephen Foskett, Community Organizer, Gestalt IT Stephen Foskett is an active participant in the world of enterprise information technology, currently focusing on enterprise storage and cloud computing. He is responsible for Gestalt IT, a community of independent IT thought leaders, and organizes the popular Tech Field Day events. A long-time voice in the storage industry, Foskett has authored numerous articles for industry publications, and is a popular presenter at industry events. His contributions to the enterprise IT community have earned him recognition as both a Microsoft MVP and VMware vExpert. Stephen Foskett is principal consultant at Foskett Services.
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