Registration Opens and Continental Breakfast

Four Seasons Foyer

IT Roadmap: Welcome and Overview

Four Seasons Ballroom 3&4

Enabling the Borderless Organization

Scott Ogrodnik, Director, Borderless Networks, Cisco Systems

 A Wireless Foundation for VoIP and Collaboration

David Bond,
CIO, Falcon School District 49

Optimizing Management of a Virtual Environment

Christopher Steffen,
Principal Technical Architect,
Kroll Factual Data

Convergence: Building a VOIP and UC Business Case

Johna Till Johnson,

Network World Columnist; President and Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

Data Center Best Practices: Thriving When Staff Costs are Cut

Bringing Cloud Security Down to Earth

Andreas Antonopoulos,

Network World Columnist; Senior Vice President and Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

2:10pm - 2:50pm

Best Practices for Reaching 100% Availability

 Application Delivery: Adding Scalability and Flexibility While Reducing Costs

Bruno Van Dierendonck,

Senior System Engineer,

A10 Networks

Top 25 Problems Lurking in Your Network Today

Tim Connelly,

Director, Systems Engineers, Netcordia

 The Business Case for Data Center Asset Management

Johna Till Johnson,

Network World Columnist; President and Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

VOIP and UC Implementation Strategies

Wireless LANs and Dealing with RF Ambiguities

GT Hill,

Director of Technical Marketing, Ruckus Wireless

Cocktail Reception and Passport Drawing in the Expo - Fantastic giveaways! You must be present to win.

Four Seasons Ballroom 1&2

Abstracts

Cloud Computing and Virtualization: How the Global 2000 Are Evolving Their IT Infrastructure
Ken Male, Executive Vice Chairman and Founder, TheInfoPro

How are the Global 2000 transforming their IT infrastructure?  How is virtualization a key building block in the transformation?  What lessons are they learning?  In this session TheInfoPro’s Ken Male will present findings from thousands of one-on-one interviews with Global 2000 IT decision makers.  You’ll learn how they are employing internal and external cloud architectures -- and find out how virtualization is playing a key role in the evolution.

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Managing, Controlling and Optimizing Application Delivery
Jim Metzler, Network World Columnist; President, Ashton Metzler & Associates

It was only a few years ago that IT organizations began to systematically focus on ensuring acceptable application delivery.  They did so by deploying a first generation of solutions that were intended to mitigate the impact of chatty protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System), to offload from servers computationally intensive processing such as TCP termination and multiplexing, and to provide visibility into the performance of applications.  While these solutions continue to play an important role, additional challenges – and solutions – are emerging to deal with the issues raised by server, desktop and storage virtualization as well as public and private cloud computing. In this session, you’ll understand some of the new and long-standing application  delivery challenges -- and how to apply contemporary strategies and solutions to your best advantage.

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Securing Against the Evolving Threat Landscape
Andreas Antonopoulos, Network World Columnist; Senior Vice President and Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

In their constant arms race with cyber-criminals, security professionals must refresh and broaden their knowledge. New technologies and applications—cloud computing, social computing, rich internet applications and collaboration—make that a constant and growing challenge.  Continuing changes in building and delivering applications demand new security strategies, architectures and technologies, forcing us to re-evaluate everything we knew about security: perimeter defenses, defense-in-depth, compliance and audit. What are your most critical assets? Where do you apply security devices and controls? How do you manage risk and without sacrificing agility? 

This session provides actionable guidance on how best to protect critical assets in the face of ever-increasing threats. Beyond exploring security trends and best practices, it lays out a critical roadmap to refocused, improved security for enterprises facing rising compliance burdens while increasingly mixing in-house and outsourced services, federating with partners and suppliers, and providing ever greater access and services to users.

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Crucial Intersection: IT Converges Applications, Services, & Infrastructure to Support the Distributed Enterprise
Irwin Lazar, Network World Columnist; Vice President for Communications and Collaboration, Nemertes Research

The convergence of all types of traffic over wireless and wireline infrastructure is vital to improving competitiveness. A growing virtual workforce requires access to data and applications in central data centers. Ballooning demand for high-speed voice, data, and multimedia applications available to any device at any location increase the need for a robust network.  IT, networking, and applications teams must, therefore, provide a reliable, robust communications infrastructure, supporting a variety of integrated applications, including voice, high-definition video, Web conferencing, streaming media, text messaging, Web 2.0, and more.

This session will provide best practices recommendations to answer: Which WAN, wireless, and mobile technologies make the most sense for your organization? What should be in your branch and mobility strategies? What unified communications and collaboration architectures should you deploy? How difficult is integration among vendors? When should you rely upon managed service providers? Learn how to architect and implement effective converged communications for your organization.

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Architecting for Data Center Agility
Johna Till Johnson, Network World Columnist; President & Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

Business needs and technological advances pull the data center in more directions all the time, and require it to change directions quickly and cleanly. To meet these challenges, IT must reassess and re-imagine its data center strategies. By making wise and flexible use of the spectrum of sourcing options available, from do-it-yourself to infrastructure-as-a-service, IT must put agility, risk management, and cost management at the center of its thinking about how to provision and deliver services. 

This session will explore current trends in data centers, examine how enterprises should make choices about sourcing, and discuss the roadmap for re-architecting the in-house data center in ways that allow it to scale services up or down on the fly, to waste fewer resources (power, space, human), and to turn on a dime to pursue new opportunities or abandon failed strategies.

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Enabling the Borderless Organization

Scott Ogrodnik, Director, Borderless Networks, Cisco Systems

There is a phenomenon underway – millennial applications are changing life as we know it.  Technology has enabled a dramatic change in behaviors.  We expect the next-generation workplace to have no borders and for businesses to comply with an individual’s choice of location, device, and application.  At the foundation of this movement is the ability of the IP network to keep it all seamlessly connected and secure.  Success depends on the way we manage, secure, scale and govern networks – the very network that can make or break the experience of a mobile generation.  A Borderless Network Architecture provides a way for businesses to be more agile with a services-based platform that can help business and IT transform and accelerate mobility with media-rich video applications and energy management in secure, game-changing ways.  Scott will demonstrate key Cisco innovations that help IT professionals ensure a mission-critical mobile network in a borderless world of hyper-connectivity.

Toward 100% Availability
Jeff Pelot, Chief Technology Officer, Denver Health

As it is in many industries, technology is bringing big changes to the healthcare arena, improving the way medicine is practiced and making it easier for practioners to get the right information where and when they need it. Denver Health Hospital provides a good example, as the hospital’s recently implemented clinical  data warehouse is dramatically improving patient care – effectively keeping patients from having to come back – while a sophisticated rules engine helps flag drug interaction problems. But the hospital is far from satisfied. Jeff Pelot’s goal is to achieve 100% data and application availability across all clinical systems in all clinical settings. He expects technologies including internal cloud computing will bring the efficiency, resiliency and availability he’s after while allowing for the kind of data aggregation, presentation and persistence his environment requires.  Jeff will outline the gains the hospital has made to date and how he plans to achieve his lofty goal.

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A Wireless Foundation for VoIP and Collaboration
David Bond, CIO, Falcon School District 49

Colorado’s Falcon School District 49 sits on the fringe of Colorado Springs, covering some 100 square miles of both urban and rural areas. To connect its 18 locations, the district has constructed a fixed wireless broadband network over which it runs a VOIP network supporting some 1,200 handsets.  CIO David Bond will explain the benefits the district is getting from the converged network and his most recent additions, including a SIP-based unified communications solution that brings unified messaging, instant messaging and Web-based conferencing tools, enabling teachers and staff to more easily collaborate.

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Next-Gen IT Ecosystem: A Jefferson County Perspective
James Lindauer, Chief Architect, Jefferson County IT Services

A Jefferson County Perspective: Data Centers obviously require a significant investment to build and operate, so designing an infrastructure that provides the flexibility to meet business objectives while maximizing the ROI is an IT priority.  James Lindauer will discuss several ongoing architectural initiatives that help Jefferson County meet its requirements, including consolidation through virtualization, judicious use of cloud computing and a multi-jurisdictional consortium that offers significant savings and operational efficiencies.

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Optimizing Management of a Virtual Environment
Christopher Steffen, Principal Technical Architect, Kroll Factual Data

Kroll Factual Data delivers credit reports to everyone from small mortgage brokers to large banks and they all expect the same thing: fast, accurate delivery of credit data on a 24x7 basis. To meet that need, Kroll has invested heavily in virtualization technology as well as tools to effectively manage its sprawling environment, which now numbers some 1,700 virtual servers.  Christopher Steffen will outline the steps the company has taken to automate management of those virtual servers and ensure that all customers have ready access to the data they need whenever they need it.

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Keeping Safe and SOX-Compliant
Terry Read, Manager Network Operations, Cimarex Energy

As a public company, the Denver-based oil and gas exploration and production company Cimarex Energy is subject to Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, along with all the usual security concerns facing any large organization. Terry Read will discuss his approach to keeping the company safe and in compliance, which includes a mix of intrusion prevention, anti-spam, firewall and VPN products, along with a SharePoint-based collaboration environment to help with change control, workflow tracking and security reporting.

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From Virtualization to the Cloud
Bill Ferguson, CIO, Colorado Dept of Public Health and Environment

Having virtualized much of its server and storage environment, the Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment is now looking to take the next step and see what benefits it can wring from cloud computing technology. CIO Bill Ferguson will explain what his agency, which is one of the five largest in the state, has done to date with virtualization technology and the benefits it is bringing. He’ll also report on the roughly 100 of his employees who are living in a cloud world for their day-to-day office applications and where he sees that technology fitting in for the long-term.

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Application Delivery: Adding Scalability and Flexibility While Reducing Costs

Bruno Van Dierendonck, Senior System Engineer, A10 Networks

IT professionals are constantly challenged to balance the pressure of increased application performance and the need for new functionality with reduced capital and operational expenditure.   In this session A10 Networks discusses how the AX Series Application Delivery Controllers reduce CAPEX and OPEX , including key savings through server reduction, increased performance, virtualization and data center consolidation of legacy load balancers.

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Problem-Solving Technical Tutorial: Wireless LANs and Dealing with RF Ambiguities
GT Hill, Director of Technical Marketing, Ruckus Wireless

While Wi-Fi networks deliver great freedom they also create great problems when it comes to throughput and coverage. Controlling the shared RF domain and understanding channel planning is fundamental to a successful wireless deployment. Join Ruckus Wireless for an exciting and informative chalk talk on dealing with RF management issues...and with no PowerPoint!

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