Most CIO’s and IT leaders are familiar with virtualization and are probably using some form of it today to consolidate IT resources and gain cost efficiencies. Many of them are also asking themselves, “Now what?” or “Where do I go from here?”. Attend this session and learn how you can maximize your virtualization investments and achieve greater levels of cost efficiencies, service levels, and business agility. Senior VMware representatives will share real-world customer examples and best practices you can use and provide a glimpse into the future of virtualization and how you can accelerate the journey towards “Your Cloud”.

In order for society to grasp and embrace issues of security and privacy we are going to have to make such education a part of the public education curriculum. It will only be once we have a generation of teachers raised with education about social engineering prevention, and basic security and privacy practices that we will be able to make inroads into a society that grasps the fundamental concepts to be more resilient to cyber attacks. Even then, as has been the history of crime, there will be no nirvana, however we can evolve from the wild west of the internet to a more manageable crime rate.

For many organizations, the IT and Marketing departments are like oil and vinegar: When stirred well and with the right spices, they work great together; but often times they just don’t mix. Bridgeline’s CTO Brett Zucker is joined by their Vice President of Digital Strategy Becki Dilworth to offer 10 tips to ensure a solid relationship between these two critical components of every business.

Cloud technologies are creating an inflection point requiring IT professionals to consider a hosting alternative for even the most mission critical websites and applications. And while cloud is for everyone, it is not for everything. Rackspace Hosting will demystify “the cloud” by sharing how customers are adopting cloud computing for various types of applications, explaining the advantages of cloud over dedicated hosting and the new trends in cloud – including managed cloud and hybrid hosting, that combines the best of both worlds. Using cloud resources as an extension of an existing dedicated infrastructure combines the customization of traditional servers with the automatic scaling and cost effectiveness of the cloud. Rackspace will also cover OpenStack™, the open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.

Is the time right for you to consider unified communications (UC)? In this presentation, we’ll discuss

With threats escalating and becoming more sophisticated and targeted, how do you keep your enterprise secure?  What new security solutions are critical to enable new strategic technologies like virtualization and cloud computing, mobile applications and Web 2.0 communications? 
 
In this informative and interactive seminar, we will discuss how Check Point 3D Security redefines security as a business process combining policies, people and enforcement for stronger protection across all layers of security—including network, data, applications and mobile access.

Even in a difficult economy, data continues to grow exponentially. IT departments worldwide have made data backup, recovery and archive a spending priority, despite flat or shrinking budgets and staffs. As an industry leading provider of data protection and management solutions, Quantum Corporation is making waves in the areas of data deduplication, replication, and long-term access to data. This session will explore the data protection challenges companies face, and provide an overview of key solutions to consider when protecting the world’s most important data – yours. 
 
Colorado continues to serve as a center for data storage expertise and innovation. Quantum has an extensive presence in Colorado – over one third of the company’s 1,800 employees are located in three Front Range facilities where all of Quantum’s disk based deduplication appliances and enterprise class tape automation systems are designed and manufactured.

The IT Match is the CIO advocacy program that provides IT executives with the medium to make better and faster buying decisions through peer collaboration. We create focused local and regional executive meetings for IT buyers who share similar purchasing objectives and timelines. Each meeting includes vendors, hand-picked by the IT executives, that provide brief presentations to the CIO group, and address the executives’ specific purchasing and technical issues. Once the vendor presentations conclude, the executives engage in a vendor-free discussion to share their feedback, to discuss the presentations and vendors, and to help each other make their purchasing decisions.

At the intersection of business and technology, the City and County of Denver is driving strategic innovations that deliver real business value through Geographic Information Systems integration.Denver GIS has deployed a number of key projects, as milestones to innovation, to improve the customer experience by extending geospatial functionality into business applications. The business context and customer needs are used to define, evaluate, and prioritize service requests and drive future technology investments, planning, and operations.  The result is a richer, more compelling customer experience, with operational efficiencies that are changing the culture of the organization, where innovation happens as a matter of daily business, to meet the increasing demand for complex service delivery.Joining David is Esri State of Colorado Account Executive Wade Kloos, who will provide an overview of enterprise GIS and answer questions from the audience.

In 2008 at this same forum, Then Deputy CIO Al Rosabal presented Technology Services’ Strategic Improvement Program to transform the City’s delivery of information technology services.  Three years later, this session explores the progress of that program – the successes to date, the obstacles we encountered, and our lessons learned.  As we approach a continued cloudy future, we will discuss our next steps and path ahead.

Hear how Michael Lani, Director of IT at Rio Blanco County, simplified his county’s network with Meraki’s cloud controlled networking. Cloud networking is a fast-growing network architecture that provides centralized management and security over the web, eliminating the high cost and complexity of traditional networking systems. Meraki is the leader in cloud networking, with over 17,000 networks deployed worldwide. This seminar, rich with live demos, case studies, and technical best practices, will leave you with a thorough understanding of cloud networking.

As we look out across the information technology landscape for the past 10 years we see the ground swell surrounding IT Service Management (ITSM) and more specifically ITIL. It came across the ocean from the UK about a dozen years ago, but are we in the US any closer to seeing value from the “best practices” than we were before ITIL landed on our shores?  Maybe it is time to reassess the Americanized view of what ITSM is all about and revisit where we expected ITSM to take us and determine if it is really getting us there.  In this brief discussion we will examine the question “Why are we doing all of this anyway?” and determine if we can be successful given the current models.