Network World

5 Technologies That Will Change IT
As CIO for Deloitte LLP, Larry Quinlan must deliver quality IT services to a demanding audience of more than 150,000 employees in nearly 150 countries. To do that, he has to stay on top of technology trends. In this session, you’ll learn about the five technologies that Larry expects will fundamentally change IT. You’ll find out how Deloitte is putting them to use today to gain a competitive edge and how the organization plans to employ them in the future.

-- Larry Quinlan, CIO, Deloitte LLP

Moderated Panel Discussion: Generation Transformation – How Younger Hires are Drastically Changing Business and IT Paradigms
If you’ve spent time with someone born after 1980, you know their brains are wired differently from those born before then. The younger the person is, the more dramatic the distinction. They have grown up with video games, computers, chat, and mobile devices, and the post-1990 crowd has text messaging and social networking, as well. Simply stated, they know how technology can make them more productive and keep them better connected. As these people enter the workforce and elevate to management positions—within or outside of IT—their comfort level with technology will change the way businesses run. Their influence also stands to raise the relevance and significance of IT staffs. This lively panel will discuss the influence of the younger generation today and tomorrow—and how you must prepare for the paradigm change in a way that benefits the business, the IT team, and you as an individual.

Moderator:
-- Robin Gareiss, Network World Columnist , Executive Vice President & Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

Panelists:
-- Andreas Antonopoulos, Network World Columnist and Senior Vice President & Founding Partner, Nemertes Research
-- Jim Metzler, Network World Columnist and President, Ashton Metzler & Associatesh

SaaS, Cloud Computing & Managed Services – Sorting Out the Realities from the Myths
All the talk about SaaS, Cloud Computing and Managed Services is creating more confusion than clarity, and posing more challenges for IT/business decision-makers who are trying to determine how they can leverage these new solutions to meet their corporate objectives. This session will clearly define what each of these offerings is all about and show how organizations of all sizes can capitalize on these ‘on-demand’ services to overcome the ongoing challenges of traditional IT and applications. It will also discuss the key issues that need to be carefully considered before adopting these services and selecting a strategic vendor, including security, reliability and performance.

-- Jeff Kaplan, Network World Columnist, Founder & Managing Director, THINKstrategies

Virtualize, Adapt, Improve
Nearly all data centers now have some virtual servers. The question organizations face is no longer whether but when and how to virtualize. Drawing on interviews with innovative and effective IT practitioners, Nemertes brings attendees the distilled wisdom of those who have successfully reaped the benefits of server virtualization: hardware consolidation, lower capital expense, and reduced operating expenses up front; increased resilience, agility, and flexibility longer term. Far fewer organizations virtualize desktops yet. Capital cost reduction is possible there too, but is less compelling than reduced operating expenses and improved security, manageability, and even performance. To fully realize the benefits of virtualized servers and desktops, organizations will need use an array of enabling technologies. The session will illustrate how these all fit together to create a newly coherent, rational, efficient, and effective paradigm for engineering IT services.

-- John Burke, Network World Columnist and Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research

The Transformation of Network Management
There is relatively little discussion of network management, automation and control in the trade press. That is unfortunate for two reasons. One reason is that all of the new technologies such as virtualization that are being deployed are driving fundamentally new management requirements. The second reason is that the role of network management is in a state of flux. This session will discuss how the role of network management has changed and how it is likely to change over the next two years. The session will also discuss the challenges created by the deployment of technologies such as virtualization and will analyze how IT organizations can respond to these challenges.

-- Jim Metzler, Network World Columnist and President
Ashton Metzler & Associates

The Borderless Network
Jobs are becoming more and more globalized and our workspace is no longer defined by walls in the office. In essence, today’s work model is now borderless. Not only that, applications are more pervasive and complex and video usage is on the rise. This calls for a new kind of architecture. Marie Hattar, Cisco VP of Network Systems and Security Solutions, will discuss how Cisco’s vision for this new architecture can help business and IT transform and how processes based on mobility, video, collaboration and virtualization can be accelerated in game-changing ways.

-- Marie Hattar, Vice President of Network Systems & Security Solutions, Cisco Systems, Inc

Application Delivery in a Virtualized, Distributed and Economically Challenging Environment
In the last few years, ensuring acceptable application performance has gone from a nice to have to a mandate for most IT organizations. For example, a few years ago it was rare to find an IT organization that provided its internal users with a service level agreement (SLA) for application performance. Today, it is somewhat common. Unfortunately, whether or not an SLA is provided, the task of ensuring acceptable application performance is extremely complex. This session will analyze some of the factors that complicate the task in the current environment and will discuss factors that will further complicate the task in the near term. This session will also discuss a wide range of technologies that IT organizations can use to improve their ability to ensure acceptable application performance.

-- Jim Metzler, Network World Columnist and President
Ashton Metzler & Associates

Planning and Enhancing the Resilient, Dynamic Data Center
Whether you’re building a new data center, managing an existing one, or procuring services from an outsourcer, the challenges are multidimensional. You have to plan for growth, manage power and cooling issues, and ramp up to handle ever-increasing demands for servers, storage and bandwidth. How do you fit it all in one building? What are the options for outsourcing? Which contractors and professional services organizations really know how to help? How to you use new technologies and new strategies to manage growth? Can you take it a step further and deliver improved services to the business – faster provisioning of resources and lower cost?This session examines the data center trends and the challenges data center managers face. It provides clear strategies and solutions for both new and existing data centers.

-- Johna Till Johnson, Network World Columnist and President & Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

Success Strategies for Green IT
Green IT is more than just a buzzword. It’s about rolling out critical technologies and policies that enable organizations to reduce costs while reducing their carbon footprints—all while increasing agility. This session helps IT practicioners develop a workable green strategy that delivers measurable results. Attendees will learn how which technologies are "low-hanging fruit" and which policies are most effective. You’ll learn the critical success factors that ensure a green IT strategy will actually work. And you’ll come away with a checklist of technologies to explore and assess for your organization.

-- Johna Till Johnson, Network World Columnist and President & Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

Organized Crime Meets the Distributed Enterprise: Adapting to the New Threat Landscape
Over the past several years the security threat landscape has evolved, suddenly and dramatically. Today's threats are stealthy, subtle and web-based. The motive behind attacks is easy profit from identity and resource theft. At the same time, companies are more vulnerable than ever because they are morphing from centralized and closed environments to distirbuted, mobile, interconnected and open environments. These two trends collide, forcing us to re-evaluate everything we knew about security: perimeter defenses, defense-in-depth, compliance, audit. In this session, Network World columnist and expert Andreas Antonopoulos brings you an exciting, entertaining and insightful view of the latest developments in security.

-- Andreas Antonopoulos, Network World Columnist and Senior Vice President & Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

Crafting Successful Landline, Wireless Network Strategies
With enormous demand for high-speed, voice, data, and multimedia applications available to any device at any location, the need for a robust network is stronger than ever. This session helps you understand how to select, contract, and implement the latest landline WAN technologies, as well as wireless options for both fixed locations and mobile users. When should you use MPLS vs. Ethernet services? What about SIP trunking? How do you make sure the network is optimized for top performance? How do you narrow down the provider choices and select the right one using a "matrix RFP?" And, what’s the best way to develop and enforce a consistent networking approach across numerous branch offices so each location isn’t an isolated island? Learn how to evaluate, select, and contract for the optimal mix of products and services for WAN and LAN.

-- Robin Gareiss, Network World Columnist, Executive Vice President & Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

Integrating UC, VOIP, and Collaboration to Improve Efficiency
The integration of collaboration, social networking, enterprise applications, and VOIP into a UC architecture is one of the most complex, pressing projects in IT today. UC strategies require massive involvement from all IT disciplines, as well as a compelling business case. Nearly 90% of businesses operate a virtual workplace, and effective communications capabilities are crucial to working in a distributed enterprise

This session will provide best-practices recommendations and answer: Which technologies make the most sense, when, and why? What are the key pain points? What’s the best way to manage design, implementation, integration and ongoing operations? Is access to social networking sites cause for legal concern? What’s the best way to leverage social networking and other collaborative applications? Learn how to architect and implement the most effective UC strategy for your organization.

-- Robin Gareiss, Network World Columnist, Executive Vice President & Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

New Generation Server Load Balancers
This presentation discusses new generation server load balancers to meet today's application delivery requirements. A case study example includes solutions that a large financial institution leverages to increase application performance and lower latency

-- Todd Harcourt, Senior Systems Engineer, A10 Networks

Virtualization and Business Continuity
We have seen throughout history how long standing technologies are quickly adapted and integrated with emerging technologies providing cultures and businesses cost effective and efficient solutions driving competitive advantages. The Virtualization and Business Continuity presentation will discuss how current, emerging technologies are coalescing into practical and cost effective business solutions. Attendees will learn how technologies like virtualization, disk-to-disk backup solutions, hardware and replication software are combined to create simpler more cost effect disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

-- Clinton Gatewood, Vice President, Corporate Development, Zenith ARCA

Mastering Service Delivery: The Future of Application Delivery
The presentation discusses how assessment, planning, optimization and process improvement improves the ability of the IT organization to manage application and service performance. A case study demonstrates how a high tech manufacturing organization was able to implement a solution that proactively identified application degradation problems.

-- Michael Vallado, Product Marketing Manager, NetScout

Consolidation through Virtualization
The Conservation & Liquidation Office for the state of California essentially takes over failing insurance companies on behalf of the insurance commissioner. As such, it often winds up with a hodge podge of IT systems – and lots of them. To help deal with the issue, and to further its green IT efforts, the agency has turned to virtualization technology to reduce the number of physical systems it has to manage.

-- Jennelle Crothers, Sr. Network Administrator, Conservation & Liquidation Office

Toward a Greener Campus
UCSF is taking a comprehensive approach to Green IT, stretching from the data center and all across campus. Initiatives range from power conservation in the data cener to auto-shut downs for monitors and a collaboration with PG&E. Jeff Fritz will detail what the university has accomplished to date, where it’s going and his wish list for the future.

-- Jeffrey Fritz, Director, Enterprise Network Services, OAAIS, University of California, San Francisco

Collaborating for Better Designs
The clothing manufacturer Byer California relies on its far-flung team of designers and manufacturers to deliver innovative clothing designs season after season. As CIO, Fernando Gonzalez has to give them the tools to perform at their best. He’ll explain how a mix of VOIP, unified communications and collaboration tools such as Sharepoint are making employees more productive day to day.

-- Fernando Gonzalez, Chief Information Officer, Byer California

Protecting PII – with your AV
The protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) - customer records, healthcare records, employee details – is subject to compliance with government and industry regulations. Protecting data can be costly and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Learn how you can protect your data with your anti-virus budget and resources.

Sophos will help you de-mystify PII and outline technologies for protecting PII. Sophos’s data protection expert John Metzger will discuss these key topics and show how a regional Carolina bank was able to stop malware, protect their data, and save.

-- John Metzger, Product Management, Sophos

Streamlining Global Server Support with a Unified Management Solution
As power and real estate costs grow, site selection criteria for datacenters is being heavily weighed by overall operational costs and not just availability of staff. The presentation covers ways to simplify management of datacenters as more of them are located remote from the staff. A case study of SAS shall further illustrate real life usage of all technologies discussed. The presentation also discusses ways to monitor and manage capacities and costs in order to ensure the optimum use of existing infrastructure.

-- Warren Kamealoha, Dell Field Application Engineer, Avocent

Security Threats & Trends in 2009
Security threats to organizations are taking on new forms as well as expanding on time tested attacks. Social attacks, hacker exploits and multiple forms of computer targeted threats occur daily on a global basis. Cisco will discuss their findings from their Mid-Year Security Report and unveil where the biggest challenges are and what we expect in 2010.

-- Fred Kost, Director, Security, Cisco

Advancing the Economics of Data Center Networks
Today’s data centers are overbuilt, underpowered and overly complex. Too many devices run too few apps wasting precious time and energy—not to mention your money. In this session, you will learn a set of best practices for simplifying your data center architecture. Key topics covered will be: reducing the amount of managed devices with Virtual Chassis technology; collapsing layers to simplify the architecture; consolidating and virtualizing security services; lowering operational expense with a single operating system extending virtual networks between data centers; and simplifying management and orchestration.

-- Mike Banic, Vice President, Product Marketing, Ethernet Platforms Business Group, Juniper Networks

Building an Agile Foundation
Faced with rising cost pressures, higher service expectations and ever-evolving risks and threats, a company's success is largely determined by the overall health, agility and flexibility of its business and its interconnected business and IT infrastructure. How do you create a network infrastructure that drives down cost and enables innovation and productivity? That helps standardize and automate services? That is intelligent, security-rich and resilient across both the IT and instrumented business assets? That is as dynamic as today's business climate? In this session, learn how to:

· Determine where your organization is now on the path to realizing that strategy
· Develop a detailed roadmap for getting the rest of the way there
· Focus on addressing today's challenges while building for tomorrow's opportunities

-- Cindy Klepich, Director Networking Strategy, Optimization & Integration Services Integrated Communications Services, IBM

The Deep Data Center Network
In this presentation, you’ll learn about the latest trends in building data center network infrastructures for the resilient data center — including the effect of network infrastructures on the data center, and how the requirement is increasingly to build a deep data center network built out at both the LAN, as well as the SAN levels. You’ll not only understand the benefits a two stage, deep, data center network delivers for server virtualization, as well as business continuity, but you’ll hear about trends to be aware of when architecting the deep data center network.

-- Jason Lamb, Solutioneer, Brocade

A Place in the Cloud
Richard Wenn has found some applications that work well in a hosted environment and others, not so much. He’ll explain how he assesses whether outsouring a given application makes sense for WestEd, detail the experiences he’s had to date with managed providers and outline the company’s strategy going forward.

-- Richard Wenn, Director, Interactive and Information Services, WestEd

Unified Services Delivery Management: Key to Assuring Services to the Business
The presentation discusses the reality of managing the modern IP network in which monitoring the health of individual infrastructure elements no longer guarantees success. In order to be successful, IT organization must focus on monitoring business services in a manner that assures the quality of the user experience. A case study demonstrates how a healthcare organization implemented effective service delivery management.

-- Michael Vallado, Product Marketing Manager, NetScout

Raise Your Wireless Network to the Power of N
Mobility has become a business expectation. IT is coming face to face with an increasingly savvy user community demanding the wireless performance required to deliver a ubiquitous computing experience. Wireless technologies are striving to keep up, and the ratification of 802.11n promises to unleash the true power of mobility. This session addresses the benefits of high performance wireless and provides prescriptive guidance on how IT can harness the value of 802.11n, while avoiding the pitfalls. You’ll learn the latest on this technology transition and leave with a checklist of best practices for how to best integrate 802.11n into your enterprise network.

-- Chris Kozup, Senior Manager, Mobility, Cisco

Securing a Mobile Deployment
Sutter VNA and Hospice, the homecare division of Sutter Health, is in the midst of rolling out an electronic health records system deployed on smart phones. Given the sensitive nature of patient data, and the need to comply with regulations including HIPAA, security is obviously paramount. IS Director Phil Chuang will outline his strategy for ensuring the rollout complies with all required policies and procedures.

-- Phil Chuang, Director, Information Services, Sutter Health

Building on a Budget
Like most organizations these days, the University of California San Franciso needed more data center space but had limited budget with which to play with. Kevin Barney, data center operations manager for the university, will explain the LEED-certified design he came up with that meets today’s needs but also allows for future growth.

-- Kevin Barney, Data Center Operations Manager, University of California, San Francisco

Extended-Net Networks Strategies and Best Practices
MPLS has become ubiquitously available and enterprises are looking to build their networks with one carrier that can support their growing communications needs throughout the world. Dealing with one carrier instead of multiple carriers allows for companies to save money, cut down on cycles, and focus on their business rather than managing numerous global carriers. In this session, get an understanding of the unique attributes of extended-net networks and inter-carrier interconnects, best practices with a seamless implementation, and what to look for and how to ensure that one network provider has enough experience to deliver a “best-of-breed” global MPLS network solution.

-- Rex Stover, Vice President of Enterprise Business Development, PCCW Global

More Bandwidth for Less
Magnum Semiconductor needs fast, reliable wide-area connections to support the live video streams it needs to move across the globe. While Magnum has been using both Internet connectivity and MPLS for years, neither could adequately meet its growing demand for bandwidth at sites from the West Coast of the U.S. to Beijing. John Wunder, director of IT for Magnum, will explain how he found a solution in Adaptive Private Networking technology, which allows him to combine the company’s Internet and MPLS links into one fast, reliable connection – while saving money.

-- John Wunder, Director of IT, Magnum Semiconductor Inc.

Green IT Solutions For Your Business
Green IT now has two definitions. One typically thinks of “going green” as saving the environment. But, there are economic benefits of going green, as well, and organizations can control costs simply by implementing Green IT solutions. Verizon Business and Cisco, two leaders in implementing Green IT will share what they are doing internally, and the solutions they are providing to their customers to help them "Go Green". They will also share best practices of organizations that are harnessing technology solutions to control costs, enhance their operations and improve the environment.

-- Richard Greene, Strategic Solutions Consultant, Verizon Business
-- Joel Conover, Senior Marketing Manager, Cisco

Compliance on a Shoestring
Budgets are tight but companies can’t afford to skimp on security, especially in a highly regulated environment such as health care. Christopher Paidhrin, chief security officer for Southwest Medical Center, will explain the strategies he uses to keep his organization in compliance without breaking the bank.

-- Jim Ratchford, Chief Information Officer, Seattle Public Schools

Improving Network Performance – Without Funding
Jeremy DeVoll joined the St. Joseph Health System charged in part with evaluating the IT group’s greatest needs and has spent more than a year working with the network group on some significant improvements. As with most companies in these challenging economic times, however, he didn’t have additional funding to play with. But by taking a fresh look at the group’s heavy reliance on outsourcing and changing the way the group deals with vendors, he’s managed to deliver big improvements without breaking the bank. Jeremy will detail the strategy he’s using at St. Joseph’s and offer up some tips for how others can achieve similar results.

-- Jeremy DeVoll , Senior IT Architect, St. Joseph Health System

Application Transformation: Bringing Legacy Apps to a Web World
Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. is in the final phases of a project aimed at completely transforming its application infrastructure, bringing more than 20 policy administration systems into a single Web-based system. Sissi Tchehrazi will discuss the process and pitfalls involved in integrating the new application infrastructure with some 18 legacy systems and bringing it all to a team of independent agents around the country.

-- Sissi Tchehrazi, Senior Director of IT Transformation, Fund Insurance Company

Improving the Business of IT: The ITIL Approach
As IT becomes ever more important to achieving business goals, IT needs to run itself more like a business. Bio-Rad Laboratories, a 50-year-old leader in the life sciences & clinical diagnostic industries, has turned to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) approach to help it improve the way IT functions and aligns itself to the business. Now more than a year into the process, CIO Kim Barrier will report on the process the company employed to “sell” ITIL to management and IT staff alike, as well as the progress the company has made in areas including service, data center and network management.

-- Kim Barrier, Chief Information Officer, Bio-Rad Laboratories