IT has a great opportunity to become a center of excellence for alignment, collaboration and innovation in most organizations; however, few organizations truly capitalize on IT’s value. This robust discussion will include the inhibitors for IT’s evolution and what the IT workforce can do to become transformative change leaders in an organization.

What is the state of the cloud today? Hype vs. reality? What are the emerging cloud delivery and workload models? How are businesses implementing cloud computing and taking actions to build a more dynamic infrastructure? Does cloud computing really enable business innovation? In this session we’ll address these questions, and take a look at some real customer examples driving real results.

Consolidation and shared services are becoming more mainstream as budgets tighten. Come listen to cost saving examples from local government regarding active shared service projects. See what is being done, how it is being done and learn what else is needed to make shared services successful. This will be an interactive question and answer session with the audience.

Learn how businesses are deploying internal clouds and augmenting their infrastructure with external public and private clouds to meet growing business demands and challenges.

Throughout organizations of all shapes and sizes, WiFi networks have moved from a luxury to a necessity. Employees expect wireless in conference rooms; visitors need to get online; and workers from retail to manufacturing rely on wireless hand-held devices to do their jobs. At the bleeding edge, organizations are forgoing wired networks altogether. This is made possible by 802.11n, the recently ratified wireless standard that finally delivers Ethernet-like speeds. Yet history show that what is on the bleeding edge today will be the mainstream tomorrow. In this talk, we will discuss 802.11n, showing how it delivers faster speeds, greater coverage, and improved reliability over its predecessors. We will also cover wireless management, the frontier in wireless innovation that more often than not makes the difference between a wireless success and a wireless failure. Most excitingly, the industry is now bringing cloud computing to bear on wireless network management, bringing leaps in ease of use and flexibility. We will discuss how cloud computing intersects with wireless management, and what that means for administrators, budgets, and end users.

A review of the lessons learned from existing Wi-Fi and cellular deployments leading to the delivery of system architectures capable of delivering the same service levels as wired Ethernet. Some technical level data regarding the radio frequency issues and considerations are also covered.

Large IT organizations consistently face the challenge of delivering value in the context of the broader mission. Establishing a clear and executable IT strategy is of paramount importance for success in making IT investments valuable and sustainable. Communicating this strategy in a way that resonates with technical staff, business owners, sponsors and decision makers is also critical to success. A cogent IT strategy must establish a clear direction, a reason for why IT thinks the way it does, and the reasons why stakeholders should care about how IT makes decisions in a sea of technical options. The city has been on a journey of consolidation, shared services, and enterprise technology investments, and a strong IT strategy is more important now than ever.

Cloud Services are changing the way businesses – from the Enterprise to the Small Business – are looking at computing. Discover the three types of cloud services, what cloud computing can and cannot solve, why a business should consider the cloud, and why choice in computing is so important. During this presentation we will also briefly demonstrate Windows Azure, and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite.

The social networking sites available offer advantages to the businesses that can use them wisely. To not establish clear policy and train the employees in how to reduce the risk of social network use is courting business disaster. This presentation will discuss some of the risks associated with business use of social networking along with benefits and means to control the risks,

Rick Bauer, IT manager and thought leader in security, storage and cloud computing, will give an overview of the present and 12-18 month landscape for cloud computing. In addition to highlighting progress on security, deployment, and information assurance in the cloud, Rick will also present information on the development of much-needed specifications and standards in this technology area. Always informative and entertaining, Rick brings a seasoned experience managing complex IT architectures with a teacher’s care to communicate.