Midsize Enterprise Summit Focuses On Virtualization, SaaS, Security
Next week, hundreds of IT purchasers will attend Everything Channel's Midsize Enterprise Summit in Orlando, Fla., to identify solutions that can help them through lean economic times.
The conference kicks off with Dale Vecchio, a vice president in Gartner Research, hosting a session called titled "IT Modernization - Closing The Gap Between Yesterday's IT Implementations and Tomorrow's IT Demands," and many more sessions will focus on helping customers do more with less.
Whether its through blade technology, virtualization or "ERP on a Budget," the show hopes to help end users identify the right technology to solve their business needs.
"A lot of times you don't know what can make your life easier. The vendors that attend usually do a really good job explaining what they do. That would really help me," said Jim Murphy, director of information technology for Quincy, Ill., a 40,000-person city.
Like a lot of people planning to attend the show, Murphy said he's looking for better infrastructure management solutions, including virtualization technology.
"Virtualization, we're looking at it more for our disaster recovery site. It would allow us to hot swap if our main location were to go down. There are other plusses, like [lower] energy costs too," he said. "We're also looking at upgrading our network software, our server software to see how that could help our users."
The city of Quincy's IT budget, recently approved, is about flat compared to last year, but it should allow Murphy do do the things he wanted to do, he said.
"Our biggest pain point now is bandwidth. We have 14 different locations that we support, and a public safety infrastructure and an infrastructure that provides free Internet to all our schools," he said. "As they try to do more with video, bandwidth is our hot topic. We want to give them more bandwidth and run our current infrastructure more efficiently."
About 60 vendors and 360 attendees are expected at the event, which begins Sunday night and concludes Wednesday. Other sessions include subjects such as software as a service, e-mail and content retention strategies and business intelligence marketplace dynamics.