Event Overview

The rapidly changing business environment has had a mixed impact on IT. While it has helped catapult IT into a mainstream strategic initiative, it has also placed tremendous pressures on IT professionals to do more with less. CIOs have come to realize that they need a different IT to meet the new expectations of the business; something that is dynamic enough to cope with the rapidly changing needs of the business, yet not lose its scale, availability, and credibility. The challenge is not so much around building new infrastructure but rather to transform the old IT fabric, which has inherent complexities that inhibit change that is less costly and disruptive. 

Many organizations, largely pioneers, have embarked over the past few years on reducing or removing these complexities through consolidation/integration and even outsourcing parts of their infrastructure. Important lessons have been learnt along the way and there is now a critical need for the right solution that can help to pave the path for a smoother and smarter transition to the next generation data center.

As CIOs become increasingly pressured to align their IT organization with the business and prove value, infrastructure managers are, in parallel, addressing demands for increased service levels, power and cooling, and speeding time to market and application performance.

The past few years have given birth to solutions such as data management and virtualization that can help end-users plan their data centers better. While IT managers struggle with managing, simplifying, and making available complex IT infrastructure, datacenter managers are increasingly concerned with very real and sometimes limiting factors, such as floor space, power and cooling, datacenter consolidation, and staffing. 

Also worth noting are new issues such as energy efficiency which have become mandates from some governments. 

The transformation of the data center relies on the IT organization's ability to deliver increased levels of flexibility and service. IT budgets, often strained by the need for real estate, power, and cooling, will shift toward building new applications and IT services that are specifically developed to drive new business. As a result, virtualization, simplification, optimization, and automation will become key drivers influencing the successful transformation of the data center.

While everything seems relevant, end-users are struggling to put their hands around what to prioritize. Indeed, there is lack of awareness around select core issues often giving rise to the belief that certain solutions are too sophisticated/expensive for the simple needs of a company's burgeoning datacenter. 

There are always a few paths to a goal, and the trick is to recognize and choose the most compatible one. It could take time but the relief comes from knowing you are on the right course. How do end-users decide whether they are on the right course? Do they know if they are even heading in the right direction?

IDC's InfraVision 2007 aims at providing answers to these questions. The daylong event will offer insights from industries leading datacenter solution providers on a varied set of issues, including:

• Enterprise architecture: What are the datacenter infrastructure requirements for power and cooling, capacity planning, change control processes, system utilization, compute density, and alternate power? 

• Datacenter technology trends, innovation: What are the technologies for the next-generation datacenter? 

• IT and business direction: To which macro trends are data centers responding to ensure a viable, reactive, and agile IT organization? 

• Agility and the dynamic IT agenda: How do agility and dynamic IT fit into the datacenter agenda? 

• Business alignment: How do data centers assess their alignment with key business objectives? 

• Strategic vision: What issues, opportunities, and threats do data centers foresee as they plan for the next 5-10 years?