Why is cloud computing relevant today from an economic, business and technology standpoint? What are some potential benefits – and pitfalls – of moving to the cloud? What should you look for in a cloud computing provider to ensure the security of your data and applications?

In an October 8 interview from Times Square, Sam Gross, vice president, Global Information Technology Outsourcing Solutions, Unisys Corporation, will answer these questions and more. Sam will talk about how the economy is accelerating a tectonic shift in IT and how it supports the business. He’ll also discuss how to transform a traditional data center that is inflexible less flexible and costly to a cloud computing environment that is secure, virtualized and automated – requiring less investment.

A recognized industry expert and thought leader in business and IT alignment, application management, service level management and enterprise systems management, Sam leads the vision, strategy, technology development and implementation for Unisys innovative global IT outsourcing solutions.

With more than 20 years of experience leading transformational IT change in the United States and abroad, Sam has driven innovation across strategic planning, IT process reengineering and implementation, and technology and product management.

Follow Sam_Gross on Twitter, for insight and commentary about cloud computing and end-user outsourcing and support services.

Most business problems today - customer interactions, BI, compliance, marketing - require access to internal, external, structured and unstructured information. Yet SOA initiatives based on traditional technologies have narrow scope or lack flexibility to solve business needs quickly. Data Mashups is a holistic approach to data integration that deliver virtualized or batch access to internal and external information as Data Services. It is also significantly faster and less costly but works with existing middleware. This session will explore 3 design patterns for Data Mashups showing when and why leading companies are adopting them for projects: a) Data Services to support Single View, b) Operational BI & Composite Dashboards and c) Web Automation for Partner Processes

Suresh Chandrasekaran leads the sales and marketing in North America and APAC for Denodo Technologies, the leader in Data Mashups software. Suresh brings strategy consulting and enterprise software product management, marketing and sales experience on a worldwide basis in several middleware and Web technology companies. Prior to Denodo, Suresh held executive positions at Vitria Technology, Epicentric (now Vignette), AltaVista, and Compaq, and was a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton serving many different vertical industries. Suresh has an MBA from the University of Michigan.

How can you effectively send mass permission-based email at scale? That’s the question Bryan Wade, Director, Channel Partnerships for ExactTarget, tackles head-on in this session. Sending and tracking the impact of messages sent at massive scale can be a daunting task – tracking each individual open, click, and bounce can easily become too intensive for back-end systems to handle. Come learn how to effectively send mass email at scale by integrating ExactTarget into your cloud platform, and find out why so many ISVs, Social Networks, and large-scale senders are using ExactTarget to manage mass commercial and transactional messaging. If you’re thinking about adding an “MTA or SMTP in the Clouds,” or just want to learn more about sending mass messages at scale, this session’s a must.



As Director of Channel Partnerships, Bryan sets the vision for how the ExactTarget SOA interface integrates with software companies, social networks and ISV platforms to enable email marketing within their applications. Under his leadership, ExactTarget has developed partnerships with the world’s largest software companies to bring email marketing powered by ExactTarget into partner applications. Over his four year tenure with ExactTarget, Bryan has implemented over 200 of the world’s largest email programs for Retail, Enterprise and B2B companies. Before joining ExactTarget, Bryan was an IT consultant and database developer in the telecommunications, retail and pharmaceutical industry.

Enterprise IT organizations are increasingly becoming service provider organizations, creating internal clouds of IT and computing resources to serve customers and business units. Cost savings objectives are no longer enough; IT organizations are adopting virtualization as an architecture to reliably capitalize on the promised business and operational transformation, efficiencies, and extended cost reduction without risking performance, business continuity, security, compliance or control. Learn how CA leads IT and business leaders by empowering them to extend their virtual and physical infrastructures through business driven automation, standardized processes, and best practices. We will explain how CA’s virtualization management solutions help enterprise and cloud computing customers produce critical business results such as improved agility, improved service quality, increased efficiency and mitigated IT and business risks.



Stephen Elliot is vice president of strategy for CA’s Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation business unit. In this role, he is focused on key areas such as business unit technology, strategy creation, analyst relations, market positioning, partner development, and customer deals. Prior to CA, Stephen was research director for IDC's Enterprise Systems Management Software Service and Industry Insights' IT Management Service. In this role, Stephen’s primary focus was research, analysis, and strategy advisory on enterprise management markets and the impact of emerging and evolving technologies on IT organizations. Stephen earned a B.A. from the University of Southern California and completed graduate work at American University. He has also completed Harvard Business School's Executive Education course on Strategic Financial Analysis for Business Valuation

The technology of desktop virtualization is moving forward rapidly but what is the real goal? This session discusses the overall objective of desktop virtualization and how technologies available now or in development contribute to that objective. By looking at the future directions of the principal virtualization technologies (hardware, operating system, application and user) and where they can be used (hosted, client and cloud) it equips you to evaluate all the technologies, their relevance for your users and the benefits you should expect.

Martin Ingram provides the strategic direction for the AppSense products, ensuring that they meet with current and future customer requirements. He is widely recognised as a visionary commentator on the whole desktop virtualization space. He has driven the expansion of the AppSense Management Suite to encompass the broader array of application delivery technologies. Ingram also provides vital guidance to the research and development team around information security, corporate compliance and the legal issues of technology. He has 15 years industry experience and has held senior strategic product management and engineering positions at leading technology companies in the US and UK, including: Kalypton, Clearswift, Baltimore Technologies, Content Technologies, Avid Technologies and Tektronix.

Cloud Computing will have major impacts to the way in which IT is delivered from the data center to its many clients. For the CIO, this can be perceived as a threat to the way in which they manage data center capabilities. In reality, cloud computing offers a huge opportunity to the CIO who now has the capability to offer more responsive, scalable, and available IT services. This presentation provides a perspective on cloud computing's future and illustrates how the CIO can appropriately leverage cloud to become the hero again.

Mike Hill is Vice President of Enterprise Initiatives for IBM, responsible for the development and delivery of new IT technologies and services. With an initial focus on Cloud Computing, Mike is leading the IBM sales, services, and business development teams to provide a portfolio of Cloud-delivered solutions for clients.

Other positions have included Vice President of Business Transformation and Chief Information Officer responsible for IBM's global voice and data infrastructure and application development. Mike also was a member of the executive team managing IBM's internal transformation to an e-business in the 1990’s, an initiative which helped turn IBM’s business into a new model of growth in the 21st century. Prior to this, Mike held many sales and executive management positions including General Manager of IBM Southeast and South Asia.

In these difficult economic times, IT leaders are re-evaluating their one-server-per-application strategy and looking for new solutions to help increase responsiveness, scalability, and agility while reducing energy costs and improving resource utilization. IBM's new Dynamic Infrastructure vision and evolutionary approach can help customers achieve these objectives through the implementation of virtualized IT environments. Learn why virtualization is an essential IT investment today, how its role and benefits will grow in the future, and why it will be vital in implementing the dynamic infrastructure required for smarter business solutions.

Jim Rymarczyk joined IBM in 1968 as a programmer working for an IBM Fellow on the design of an experimental time-sharing system. He subsequently served as a principal hardware logic designer for the IBM 3033 processor, as Manager of S/370 Performance Analysis and Measurement, as Manager of S/390 Processor Architecture and System Structure, and as Program Manager of S/390 Product Design and Verification.

Jim is currently the Chief Virtualization Technologist for the Systems and Technology Group, leads the corresponding development community, and co-leads the IBM architecture board for Dynamic Infrastructure and Cloud Computing. He also does frequent customer briefings on the expanding role that virtualization will play in reducing IT complexity and cost.

Freedom OSS understands the energy and value of creativity. Our customer centric teams accurately translate your goals into Practical IT solutions that work. We call it Upstream Architecture™. It means our brain trust is right there working hand-in-hand with your most creative employees to address the most complex technology challenges and turn them into opportunities. In dynamic business environments, it's crucial for organizations to quickly embrace change. FreedomOSS architects combine our professional expertise with a practical approach, helping move your company into a new era of growth. Our skilled industry teams are available to address your most complex technology challenges and turn them into opportunities.

FreedomOSS is an international professional services firm with over 120 architects and engineers and offices across the United States and Eastern Europe. Freedom's staff has earned numerous awards for Technology Innovations , including JBoss SOA Innovation Awards, Red Hat Innovation Awards and Practical SOA Champion Award.

Max Yankelevich is responsible for Strategic Technology Direction and Business Development at Freedom OSS. Mr. Yankelevich is a seasoned Architect with over 15 years of hands-on experience in large scale, distributed applications, Service-Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Integration. Prior to joining Freedom OSS, Mr. Yankelevich provided architectural guidance to Fortune 500 companies, such as JP Morgan Chase, Credit Suisse, AIG, Deutsche Bank, ADP and Amerada Hess. Mr. Yankelevich holds a BA in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The events of the second half of 2008, where established financial institutions vanished overnight, have sent ripples through the entire fabric of the world’s economy. This means that nimble new competitors can seize both global and regional market opportunities that previously have been taken for granted by the established multinationals. Unfortunately, the traditional IT infrastructure, responsible for facilitating changes demanded by the business, often falls short of being able to do just that. Cloud Computing can help companies achieve their process changes faster – to gain greater speed to revenue, more cost effective operations, and bring more agility and scale. However, Cloud Computing must offer more business activities instead of merely technology services. As long as Cloud Computing needs developers to function, it will never reach its full potential.

Mr. Comas specializes in using business process management techniques to create innovative solutions to solve business problems. Mr. Comas is a 15 year veteran of the financial industry. Prior to Cordys, Mr. Comas was VP of Technology at JPMorgan Chase where his roles included IT Risk Management, Business and Chief Technical Architect. Mr. Comas earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University.

RIA platforms increasingly offer an identical set of basic UI features, so how do you pick? Come and see a "short list" of capabilities that go beyond simply UI, and that a RIA platform should provide in order to be seriously considered. Rather than a fluff session about "scalability", "robustness", and the usual buzzwords, we will look at a series of concrete use cases that come up in the development of every RIA application, and the features that a RIA platform should provide to handle them. Find out what a next-generation RIA platform can do for you - and see one in action.

Charles Kendrick is CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, which he co-founded in 2000 to pursue more powerful and flexible ways of building software via DHTML — today’s AJAX.

Charles is the architect of the SmartClient AJAX platform, technology which powers many of the world’s most sophisticated AJAX RIAs and is relied on in critical, high volume systems throughout the Fortune 500.

Prior to co-founding Isomorphic, Charles worked on a variety of enterprise and consumer applications and platforms in roles at HP, Siemens and several start-ups, where he collected and refined the best practices and patterns now found in SmartClient.

When not working, Charles can be found surfing, making unusual vodka infusions, or cooking with his fiancé. Charles is an alumnus of Stanford University, where he studied symbolic systems.

Successful virtual desktop rollouts can only be realized if user acceptance is equivalent to that of a local PC. Standardized virtual desktops must be ‘personalized’ on-demand by treating the user as another ‘layer’ of the desktop.....this is user environment management. You will learn about managing the most important component of the desktop – the user personality.

Jon Wallace is a Principal Technical Consultant for AppSense with over 10 years experience. Having begun his technical career with an ASP before moving to AppSense he has a rounded understanding from the end user, reseller and software company perspective. It is for this reason Jon runs a technical evangelism program to technically develop the AppSense channel and transfer this knowledge to them. Jon continues to work directly with end users in AppSense’s white glove accounts to help keep him up-to-date with the latest technologies.

The industry is buzzing about the promise of Rich Internet Applications and Cloud Computing. Although these new applications and method for implementing technology offer many advantages, they also compound underlying complexity, presenting new challenges for Web and application developers as well as IT professionals who are charged with developing, testing and delivering high-performing, highly-available applications.

On the Rich Internet Applications front, technologies such as AJAX and Flash deliver radically different user experiences based on rich interfaces, live data and instant feedback enabling the personalization and control users appreciate. At the same time, Cloud Computing is providing the industry a way to increase capacity and add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel or licensing new software.

As enterprises consider deploying next-generation applications and implementation models, they need to be aware of how Web performance will be impacted through increased complexity and dependence on the Web.

Being able to test and monitor Rich Internet Applications, especially as they are deployed in the cloud, will be critical to success. In this session, Ben Rushlo will examine discuss performance issues Web developers will face as they look to develop Rich Internet Applications and utilize Cloud Computing. Rushlo will cover how to combat these issues to minimize potential downfalls and ensure optimal performance through testing and monitoring.

Ben Rushlo, Sr. Consulting Manager at Keynote Systems is one of the world's leading Internet performance experts. Ben advises Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies in the Retail, Automotive, and Financial Services industries, helping to transform their global sites into high- performing, highly available Web assets that provide excellent customer experiences every time.

Before joining Keynote, Ben was a Senior Performance and Capacity Planning Engineer at American Express, where he served as a core member of the team that launched American Express on the Web.

With more than 10 years of experience in Internet and intranet technologies, Ben has expertise in Internet performance and performance tuning.

Ben is a frequent speaker at executive summits, industry symposiums in retail and financial services, and test and performance conferences and appeared on CNBC live broadcasts.

Data services are critical to the predominant and emerging architectures we're embracing for building new systems. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a standard enterprise architecture and Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) is enabling organizations to pull together data from multiple sources and services. Cloud computing is an architecture that provides high-performance computing, massive data storage and scalability at commodity pricing.

With all modern computing architectures, the need for robust technologies for data access and data integration has become more critical then ever before. Due to the vital role that data plays both in business and systems operations, database architectures, information specialists, data integration experts, and anyone responsible for data persistence in an organization are increasingly being called upon to contribute to their organization's SOA and other computing initiatives - whether or not this was intended at the onset.

In this presentation, we will review the technologies, best practices, and patterns that are shaping the way we utilize enterprise data for SOA, WOA and cloud computing.

Rob Steward is vice president of research and development for DataDirect Technologies. He is responsible for the development, strategy and oversight of the company's data connectivity products including the Shadow mainframe integration suite client software and the industry-leading Connect family of database drivers and data providers: Connect for ODBC, Connect for JDBC and Connect for ADO.NET. Additional product development responsibilities include DataDirect Sequelink, and DataDirect XQuery, as well as the management of DataDirect's Custom Engineering Development group.

Steward has spent more than 14 years developing database access middleware, including .NET data providers, ODBC drivers, JDBC drivers, and OLE DB providers. He has held a number of management and technical positions at DataDirect Technologies and serves on various standard committees. Earlier in his career, he worked as lead software engineer at Marconi Commerce Systems Inc. Rob holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

Come to this presentation and find out how BAE Systems leverages the AJAX capabilities of ICEfaces to deliver revolutionary, web-based solutions for Homeland Security. You will witness live demos of incidentOS, one of the most sophisticated AJAX-enabled applications ever developed. You will see AJAX taken to the max, and you will see how ICEfaces makes it achievable. Notably you will be introduced to key capabilities in ICEfaces like AJAX Push, and Portal Integration - both being fundamental to incidentOS. You will leave with a greater understanding of how ICEfaces can take your web application development to the next level, and you might just feel safer knowing technologies like incidentOS are helping secure the Homeland.

Stephen Maryka is CTO at ICEsoft Technologies Inc., and leads the ICEfaces open source project. He has been involved in Java-based AJAX techniques since 2003 - a time before the term "AJAX" was even coined. Prior to joining ICEsoft, Steve was co-founder of AudeSi Technologies where he served as VP of Technology and led Java product development for Internet appliances. After AudeSi was acquired by Wind River Systems in 2000, he served as a principle technologist there until joining ICEsoft.

Open Source. Open Standards. Open Collaboration. For the past 15 years, Linux has served as the benchmark of a successful global open source project. The impact has been far reaching: today it powers the Internet, a significant portion of the datacenter, is the emerging market choice for the desktop, and soon will likely be on your phone. Over the last 5 years, this open community has turned its attention to virtualization.This talk will discuss what has been achieved and what is under development, and most importantly why open source is critical when building integrated infrastructure solutions.

As Red Hat's Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering, Stevens leads the strategic direction of the company's product and technology initiatives. Stevens manages the R&D organizations responsible for delivering Linux, Virtualization, Systems Management, Security, and Messaging/Grid.

Since joining Red Hat's senior management team in 2001, Stevens has been critical to the company's enterprise operating system, storage, and virtualization strategies. As CTO and VP Engineering, he manages the R&D organizations for Linux, Virtualization, Security, Messaging, and Systems Management.

Stevens received his B.S. in Computer Science at the University of New Hampshire and his M.S. in Computer Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He and his family reside in New Boston, New Hampshire.

Static HTML wireframes are no longer sufficient to prototype today's rich internet applications (RIAs) built on syndicated content, widgets, DOM manipulation, AJAX calls, and often a substantial amount of custom JavaScript.

What if you could build the user interface prototype in a matter of days or weeks without a single line of server-side code or even a datamodel? What if the business owner could not only play with this prototype, but also provide context specific feedback seamlessly while exploring the prototype? Finally, what if the prototype wasn't a prototype at all, but was the actual user-interface of the final product (zero throwaway code)... even if you haven't decided which server-side technology you want to use (Java, .Net, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl)?

Matthew Quinlan is vice president of community development at Appcelerator, an open source rich Internet application company. Quinlan has been programming continuously since 1981. He has focused on Web technologies since 1997, when he became chief architect of ValueAmerica.com, one of the first online retailers. As a professional consultant, Quinlan provided guidance on Web development, architecture and content management to Motorola, UPS, Sprint, Vanguard, Intel and dozens of other companies. He has taught courses on Java and J2EE and was a founding member of the JBoss evangelist team, where he spoke about open source software, Java/J2EE and Web application development at industry events and users groups around the country. Quinlan holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Purdue University.