Gartner IT Infrastructure & Operations
Management Summit

Keynote:10 Critical Trends Impacting I&O in The Next 5 Years

Strategic planners have long realized that efficient planning must be accomplished by looking from the outside in. There are internal trends, market trends and societal trends rapidly converging, and many of these dramatically affect Infrastructure and Operations planning. Discover which ones you should keep in your line of sight and track with a critical eye over the next five years.

Keynote: IT Operations Management: Critical Factors in Your Future Success

IT operations continue to undergo significant changes to help the business grow. It is expected to be innovative and agile while also achieving higher levels of availability meet compliance requirements and reduce per-unit service delivery costs. What’s more, it is faced with the challenge to implement and manage new technologies, such as virtualization, composite applications, and cloud-based services, as well as investing in ITIL and process improvements. Given this broad mixture of demands and opportunities, where should IT operations management invest time and energy, and how should it measure business value?

Keynote:AN I&O Perspective on MegaVendors: Why Everything you Thought You Knew About the Vendors and Market is Wrong

Market consolidation continues. New alliances have formed, old pacts are shattered, and existing providers have jumped into new categories. What’s more, many of the tacit rules under which these providers once operated have been discarded. The implications are significant. Here’s a critical overview of the seismic changes that have occurred in the market, designed to help you fine-tune your vendor strategy so that you can mitigate risk and maximize value.

Closing Keynote: Ten “Hot” Take-aways in Infrastructure and Operations

Over the conference’s three days, participants will have been exposed to critical trends, relevant scenarios, proven best practices and plenty of practical insight. But how do you apply it all? Our closing keynote provides the answers. We’ll identify and summarize the conference’s key strategic and tactical takeaways, along with a wealth of actionable advice, so that upon your return to the office you’ll hit the ground running.

Building a Strategy and Business Case for Unified Communications

This workshop provides attendees with a framework, a high-level roadmap, and examples for building a strategy and business case for unified communications.

Building an IT Disaster Recovery (IT-DRM) Modernization Business Case

New technologies and enhanced business demands are driving IT Disaster Recovery Modernization (IT-DRM). At this workshop, you’ll develop a business case that can help justify the implementation of a new IT-DRM strategy. Additionally, you’ll learn the key success factors of IT-DRM and work with peers to share best practices and lessons learned.

Knowledge Management success can transform your company and improve enterprise efficiency.

Knowledge Management is critical to the reuse of information, efficiency of your support organization, and providing fast, consistent, cost effective solutions for business users. This presentation will give an overview of Paychex's Service Support knowledge management implementation, showing how the culture and process were changed for both the Service Desk & the enterprise, and most importantly, the significant results achieved.

Snapshot and Replication – The new backup

An increasing number of organization are augmenting and even replacing conventional backup and recovery applications with snapshot and recovery. Come learn why a growing number of organizations are embracing new methods, technologies and vendors and what their experiences have been with regards to: cost, improved service levels and ease of management.

GlaxoSmithKline Case Study: Achieving Visibility, Optimization and Control of Hosted and Cloud-Based Applications

Consolidation of corporate data centers and the increased utilization of cloud services can sometimes result in significant global service management challenges. This case study session will discuss these challenges, as well as the technology modernization and process improvement steps taken by a leading healthcare company to manage this hybrid IT infrastructure. The specific changes made in IT service delivery management , as well as the related business benefits, will be discussed in detail.

Preparing the WAN for cloud communications

Most enterprises have sketched strategies to transform their datacenters to support internal and external cloud functionality but have not factored in the wide area network. This roundtable will focus on user feedback around assessment, architecture and procurement to support availability ,security and scalability of the wide area network.

Big Data – Do You Have It, and What Are You Doing About It?

“Big data” is a new term that describes huge volumes of data with complex and varied structure, and special requirements for access, processing, storage, protection and archiving. How are you dealing with big data – do you have it, are you treating it differently? What are other organizations doing to address this challenge?

Journey to wherever you are going: server provisioning & configuration management, data center automation, private cloud and real-time infrastructure

Where are you in managing the server provisioning and configuration management life cycle? Are you looking at it holistically from a data center automation perspective? Are you starting by addressing just a few specific problem areas (patching, compliance, provisioning), or are you focused on one specific area of your infrastructure to more dynamically utilize pooled resources in a real-time infrastructure. Are you worried about the impact of virtualized servers: sprawl, configuration consistency, etc. Join us at this user round table to discuss with your peers where and how they are addressing efficiency and improved availability by adding automation to server.

Hosted Virtual Desktops

HVD implementations continue to grow. In this roundtable organizations will share practical experiences they have garnered from experimenting, deploying, and justifying this alternative desktop strategy. Understand why HVDs are of interest, how to best test and deploy, and gather justification for further rollouts.

Managing the Movement from Virtualization to the Cloud*

The adoption of virtualization platforms necessitated changes in IT operational processes, tools and support structure. Will we need to re-visit these again as we move towards cloud computing? We’ll discuss the ramifications focusing primarily on private cloud implementations

Dealing with the invasion of consumer technology

Everyday, Gartner takes calls from its IT clients overwhelmed by the demands of end users for what it considers consumer technology. Whether its smartphones, tablets, Facebook or Twitter, these products have not been architected to fit into the enterprise model of security and manageability. This session will discuss how these technologies are being managed within our customer base.

Optimizing Asset Management in the Data Center

This analyst user roundtable looks at how advancements in technology can assist IT organization to make the data center audit process faster, make records more accurate to address compliance requirements, make facilities more secure and allow the assets to perform longer. We will discuss the issues and solutions at a single location to provide security, environmental monitoring, facilitate inventory management as well as developing a taxonomy to aggregate of data from multiple sites.

Backup/Recovery Modernization

Come discuss with your peers how new technologies like deduplication, VTLs, CDP, snapshots and replication can be applied to your existing environment and how others are also protecting not only traditional corporate data center workloads, but new environments like virtual machines, remote offices and desktop/laptops.

Virtualization - What’s Next*

Most data centers have virtualized. However when moving from 20-60% workloads virtualized, what you virtualize and when makes a real difference to the costs and savings. Come discuss what you’ve learned from your virtualization experience to date, and more importantly what your plans are for going forward.

Best Practices in Data Center Design & Retrofit

As organizations plan for growth many have realized that their current data centers are not adequate to support their long term needs. But planning for a significant upgrade or a new data center can no longer follow the rules of the past – especially with the use of high density computing, Green initiatives and the increasing costs of energy. This session will discuss current best practices in building energy efficient, highly scalable and cost effective data centers.

Storage Infrastructure Modernization*

Share with your peers your experiences in deploying new storage architectures and technologies such as thin-provisioning, automated storage tiering and solid state drive (SSD), scale-out storage systems and new replication solutions. Plan on sharing pleasant surprises, disappointments and insights into vendor support capabilities

Successful Strategies for Virtualization in the Public Sector

Through 2012, virtualization will change virtually everything, including how you plan, buy, deploy, manage and charge for IT services. Virtualization not only saves money, but it can also enable faster deployments, better disaster recovery, more robust accounting, holistic capacity planning, and more. But a virtualized environment can introduce unique challenges for public sector organizations. Come to this roundtable to identify those challenges and discuss how you and your peers can best address them.

ITIL Implementation Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Many organizations are in the process of implementing guidance from the IT Infrastructure Library and a growing number are leveraging ITIL version 3. Learn from peers what has worked for them, and perhaps more importantly what they would do differently if given the chance.

Green IT and the Data Center

Green IT has become a leading topic in the span of two years. It has grown from a whisper to a major theme for most vendors. While couched in an environmental coating the main thrust has been aimed at saving money along with surviving the power and cooling crunch many data centers are experiencing. IT organizations must decide on how they are going to participate and if they are going to go beyond the economics and into the environmental aspects. Join us at this user round table to discuss with your peers what steps others are taking and how they view Green IT initiatives.

Data Center Storage & Networking Architectures

The hype surrounding emerging data center networking technologies continues. Virtual I/O, convergence of storage and data networking, the migration to 10G server connections and Top of rack switching are all being discussed. The round table session will explore what organizations are actually doing and where they see opportunities to use these technologies to improve their operations.

Best practices in CMDB

CMDB’s continue to progress. IT organizations are taking them beyond their initial focus of impact assessment, but there are plenty that are still at the beginning of their CMDB journey. Understanding the what, when, where, and even why to do a CMDB are still the compelling questions for many IT organizations and CMDB stakeholders alike. There is significant enlightenment from enterprises on what it actually takes to implement a CMDB and all of its associated baggage- service modeling, dependency discovery, resource allocation, etc. Join us and share your experiences with your peers! You’re sure to get some take-aways that will help you no matter where you are on your CMDB journey

TBD