Barbara Gomolski

Frances O'Brien

Microsoft continues to made changes to its software licensing agreements and licensing practices. Understanding the context of these continual changes is vital for determining license entitlements and negotiating good deals.

• How will changes to Microsoft's software licensing practices affect your licensing costs?
• What are the critical success factors for structuring a good deal?
• What issues will you face when negotiating with Microsoft?

Ben Pring

SAAS is an alternative to the dysfunctional aspects of traditional client/server. A broad industry consensus holds that SaaS is valuable and no longer the "lunatic fringe". This presentation examines the SaaS wave, where it will go during the next five years, how users can derive maximum value, and how providers can leverage this moment of market discontinuity and opportunity.
Key Issues:

• How significant will SAAS be over the course of the next five years and in what areas will SAAS make the most impact?
• What steps should users take to successfully utilize SAAS?
• How can software and service suppliers maximize the potential of SaaS and minimize its associated risks?

Matt Cain

Everyone hates it but we can't live without it. This presentation looks at strategies for coping with the increasing onslaught of email, including designing an email retention strategy that users and lawyers can live with, helping users cope with overflowing mailboxes, and delivering on user demands for mobile access to email.

• What are the options for creating an email retention policy?
• Are there ways to cut email volume without impacting business cycles?
• What email trends should organizations be preparing for?

Eric Thoo

Poor data quality is an often-overlooked business issue but it can have a large negative impact. This session will describe how data quality issues hurt the business, and explore strategies for how to best align resources for achieving lasting improvements in data quality.
Key Issues:

• What is data quality, how does it impact your business, and how can you justify taking action?
• Why does data quality improvement require a focus on people and process issues?
• What is the role of technology in data quality improvement, and how will data quality technology evolve

Dave Russell

Organizations struggle with determining and then implementing the best practices for effectively managing data protection to meet the demanding data availability requirements of users, applications and regulations. The top key issues in data protection are addressed with insight and advice provided to enable you to make the best decisions for your business.

Ted Chamberlin

9/11 and Hurricane Katrina proved how vulnerable networks are to disasters. Now, the scare of pandemics could send everyone out of their offices for weeks or months. Most companies have a backup solution for their data, but not backup communications plans for more distributed processing than ever. The carriers cannot solve the entire problem. This tutorial discusses how to develop a network recovery plan that meets current and future business needs.

Dave Russell

Every organization struggles with their backup/recovery practice. The server farm, number of applications and the network infrastructure have grown tremendously in recent years, but often the backup approach has not kept pace. Now IT organizations are being asked to protect remote office and mobile employees as well. Learn what new technologies are available to help you better address your current and the upcoming recovery challenges

Matt Cain

Many organizations are facing an exponential growth in email, instant messaging, and other content. The challenge is assessing what to keep and what to delete in order to meet operational and compliance requirements. This presentation will help you develop the email and content retention strategies and deploy the right technologies to address this growing challenge.

• What are the trends influencing email and content retention policies?
• What technologies can be deployed to support email and content retention?
• What are the best practices for email retention and content archiving?

Kurt Schlegel

CIOs indicate Business Intelligence is their top priority. No other area of technology investment has as much potential to improve business performance. However, most BI deployments are overly focused on grass roots reporting. BI deployments must also provide analysis capabilities to discover new insights and integration capabilities to weave those insights into the business. This presentation will discuss how organizations are leveraging their investment in Business Intelligence by aligning BI deployments with the overall corporate strategy and individual business processes.

Kurt Schlegel

The Business Intelligence marketplace is facing radical change. With the traditional vendors that pioneered the BI space being acquired by the mega vendors, many are questioning if this is the end game for BI. Can we expect any new innovations from business intelligence? The answer is a resounding yes. There is an enormous amount of innovation yet to be gained from Business Intelligence. This presentation will explore the anticipated evolution of the BI Vendor landscape and the implications for those IT leaders that must make investment decisions.

Bob Anderson

Midsize businesses now have many more options and best practices at their disposal to achieve high performance and ROI from their ERP deployments despite their limited resources. This presentation will illuminate the ERP lifecycle and identify areas you can focus on to improve your own performance.

Adam Hils

Information security is a top priority among midsize enterprises, and IT leaders are under tremendous pressure to commit a significant portion of their strained resources to the security effort. To make intelligent investment decisions intelligently, decision makers must take stock of their current security posture, identify gaps between their current and desired states, and make technology decisions that fill in the gaps without breaking the budget. This presentation provides a framework to show IT leaders where they stand on security readiness, and points toward specific steps they can take (and steps they don’t have to take) to bring their security postures to the right level.

Neil MacDonald

Information Security spending increases continue to outpace IT spending increases. Information security, like the rest of IT, needs to provide more functionality each year for the same or less cost. Attend this session and learn 15 ways to reduce security spending and improve your security profile.

John Girard

All forms of wireless access continue to evolve and create opportunities for new disasters. This presentation analyzes the strategic considerations for architecture, integration and security strategies that will enable enterprises to stay ahead of users’ demands for new wireless technologies and make sure they are used safely and securely. We will explore typical-use cases of wireless technology and provide action-oriented decision frameworks for choosing the most efficient and effective security solutions.
What strategies, best practices and technologies will enable wireless security?
Which technologies, devices, infrastructure, applications and services will need to be integrated to assure secure use of wireless technology?

John Enck

Blade-server technology clearly supports virtualization; however, what is less clear is when it is advantageous to deploy server virtualization without blades, or blades without virtualization. This presentation examines the complementary and conflicting strengths and weaknesses of blades and virtualization by examining these Key Issues:

• What are the drivers and barriers for server virtualization deployments?
• What are the drivers and barriers for blade deployments?
• What guidelines should you use for deploying blades with virtualization (and vice versa)?

John Enck

Server virtualization technology addresses a number of difficult server issues, including optimizing server efficiency, facilitating disaster recovery, and increasing administrative agility. The presentation examines the evolution and deployment of server virtualization technology by looking at these Key Issues:

• What are the current adoption trends for server virtualization?
• What are the current best practices for deploying server virtualization?
• What are the future trends for server virtualization?