Business Problem: For businesses to succeed in today's increasingly competitive marketplace, they must stay on top of changing technology trends, in addition to managing daily execution. Don Rippert, Accenture's Chief Technology Officer, will share the results of research from the Accenture Technology Labs on the future of technology over the next five years. The trends are important for every CIO in the public and private sectors to watch, as they develop their own plans for IT investments.

Business Problem: The inclusion of emerging technologies into IT architecture often requires CIOs to re-examine strategic plans and existing architectures. Using real world examples, Accenture will facilitate an interactive discussion focusing on the impact emerging technologies have made on the IT landscape. We will discuss successes and challenges of integrating these trends into strategic plans.

Discussion: An informal and interactive discussion with today’s search industry leaders. Find out: what they hear from prospective clients, what skills are needed to be successful, why do CIOs loose their jobs, what are prospective employers looking for, how do you get on their radar screens, which resumes get their attention, what is the future state of the CIO. This is your chance to hear it from the experts.

Business Problem: Lack of end to end visibility across operating units, within the enterprise, that are engaged in the “innovation” functions

Discussion: The nature of innovation is changing at a pace unheard of in modern history -- it is now increasingly open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary and global. To reap the benefits of this evolution, an organization's processes and practices must adapt. In this talk, Nick Bowen, VP of Technical Strategy & WW Operations in IBM Research, will cover Ten Future Technologies that will have an impact on all IT organizations. Material will be from active research projects at the IBM Research Division and from two critical strategic processes at IBM, The Global Technology Outlook (GTO) and The Global Innovation Outlook (GIO). The GTO is IBM Research’s vision of the future for information technology (IT) and its impact on industries that use IT. It highlights emerging software, hardware, and services technology trends that are expected to significantly impact the IT sector in the next 3-7 years. The GIO, is a process where IBM has opened up technical and business forecasting processes to include external leaders from business, academia, the public sector, NGOs and other influential constituents of the world community. The GIO takes a deep look at some of the most pressing issues facing the world and works toward providing solutions to those needs.

Business Problem: Today's IT leaders have more on their plates than ever before. Data centers have grown in size and complexity. More systems are mission critical, requiring 24x7 availability. Redundancy, security, and even multiple sites are often a necessity to support the business’s continuity and compliance requirements. But how do you satisfy these requirements cost effectively and reliably?
IT Solution: Consolidating systems, establishing redundancy, improving power, cooling and security, implementing hot sites and selectively outsourcing are several ways to solve the challenge. This panel will highlight both the business and technology challenges in today’s data centers and share the decision making process our panel executives are currently leading within their organizations.

• How do I protect my business and stay one-step-ahead of the auditors?
• How do I consolidate data centers and processes post acquisition to drive cost effectiveness?
• How can I effectively power and cool today’s high-density systems?
• When to I buy vs. build new data center capacity?

Discussion: This high caliber group if experienced CSOs and IT leaders will offer practical advice on a variety of issues including:

• What are the current/future challenges?
• How can intellectual knowledge be protected?
• Does physical or cyber security enter into IT responsibilities?
• Where does the function of Security and Privacy report within the enterprise?

In addition the panel will involve the session attendees by soliciting their questions and comments to the critical IT challenge of Information Security and Privacy.

Discussion: It is abundantly clear that the continuing rapid change of both the IT landscape as well as the awesome changes in Enterprise direction has caused a perpetual challenge for the CIO to constantly measure their skills in meeting their respective current/future responsibilities. This said, and as in many present CIO issues, the challenge is all to obvious but the "solution" may not be. This distinguished panel, representing a cross section of business/technology experiences will attempt to address the respective "solution" by examining the question, "What make an Effective CIO?". Several CIO effectiveness areas to be explored will include leadership style, experience credentials, academic achievements and personality traits. Most important however, will be an open discussion/participation by the sessions attendees to maximize the topics "solution" through audience comments to the question of "What Makes an Effective CIO?".

Discussion: Establishing close alignment between business and IT is critical for every company. This session examines the benefits of establishing an IT Brand Strategy and execution plan. Our session will bring together leading CIO's to discuss:

• How to formulate a brand strategy for IT? (i.e. defined the experience your customers will have when they work with IT, hear about IT, learn about IT on the intranet, need something from IT, etc.)
• How do you go about creating your IT brand systematically and manage it like a campaign
• Lessons Learned; what worked well and what didn't work at all?

Discussion: CIOs play key roles in positioning their firms to move quickly to exploit opportunities to move into new markets, buy and sell businesses, change business models and partners, and introduce new products and services. The APC has recently sponsored research that provides answers to various aspects of enabling organizational agility through IT. This session will share the highlights of these findings, including:

• Enterprise architecture – What are the characteristics of modular enterprise architectures that facilitate agility? How do you evolve to that stage? Can you skip some stages and still be successful? Which enterprise architecture management practices are used by successful firms?
• Far-flung teams – What practices and technologies best support the work of far-flung teams which must deliver innovative solutions quickly despite geographic distance and across organizational boundaries?
• Wikis – How can Wikis help your firm to increase participation in sharing mission critical knowledge fully and quickly?

Discussion: The PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is hailed as one of the most specific privacy guidelines for protecting the sensitive information held by corporations that store, process or transmit cardholder data. However, to fully comply with PCI 12 multi-faceted requirements, companies need to implement strategies and technologies to ensure that effective privacy safeguards are in place. Join this interactive panel discussion on how companies are addressing PCI requirements, and learn about solutions that support compliance initiatives to include:

• Understanding how safeguarding customer data protects a company's bottom line
• Assessing the impact of PCI requirements on retailers, merchants, banks, and other affected corporations
• Overcoming the fears associated with implementing technologies to become/remain compliant with PCI
• Discovering how PCI compliance can be leveraged to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency

Discussion: Presidio, a leading Technology Infrastructure Integration company, will lead a panel of CIOs from area companies focused on the next wave of cost reducing technologies available from leading vendors. Discussion areas will include: Server Virtualization to improve Quality of Service, Availability and Business continuance, storage Centralization to simplify the management of data and data value. New alternatives to tape will also b e discussed as a means to reduce cost while significantly improving backup and recovery times. Unified Communications to improve productivity through convergence of voice, data and video over IP.

Discussion: Information Technology (IT) is seen by most companies as a significant cost center and liability. As the role of IT continues to increase strategically, the ability for companies to measure ROI and determine the value of IT becomes more and more important. IT is no longer just supporting the business. In some cases, it is actually introducing new competitive business models and changing the way business is done. Considering these dynamics, it is critical that ROI and IT value be measured. This panel will examine these key areas and how IT value is measured by businesses. Topics such as business and IT alignment, measuring ROI, the role of strategic planning and using IT as a revenue generator and/or to enhance competitive position will be explored.

One of the more significant features of the CIO Forum and Executive IT Summit is the opportunity to meet with your peers and discuss and explore solutions to common issues. To facilitate this human resource networking capability we have initiated and installed in the Forum's agenda several "Birds of a Feather" quorums. They are designed to be simple, informal and very discussion oriented. Yet at the same time they will be facilitated by an experienced professional in the subject matter field. We are confident that as an attendee to the “Birds of a Feather” you will gain maximum benefit from your presence and participation.

Discussion: CIOs and other executives continue to evaluate, measure, and challenge the return on IT investments and what quantitative business value these programs create. Trying to find “linkage” between IT investments and benefits such as increased revenue, earnings, and cost reduction is very difficult as these IT projects don’t generate value directly. Instead, these initiatives, along with enabling or exposing new business processes and/or technological innovation in product/service developments, do create opportunities for sales growth, productivity gains, and reduced costs.
This panel will discuss these challenges and how CIOs and their IT organizations can successfully deliver and demonstrate business value (outside of and excluding the traditional IT cost programs that impact IT only). Join us for an interactive session as we address these and related topics in Delivering Value through IT.

Discussion: According to analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group's (ESG) iSCSI research report in late 2006, users are in fact experiencing the benefits long touted for iSCSI, including reduced operational costs, simplified management, and reduced training and staff costs. Join this presentation to learn more about how you can take advantage of the favorable ROI of iSCSI, without compromising the enterprise-class feature set you've come to expect from fibre channel. Sophisticated clustering architectures allow iSCSI SANs to provide a new level of scalability, availability and performance that offer significant advantages over monolithic fibre channel SANs. This presentation will describe the architectural benefits of clustering enterprise-class x86 servers to build an iSCSI SAN:

• The ability to scale storage capacity, disk performance and network throughput with each additional clustered storage server node;
• Advanced data protection, availability and performance
• Enhanced disaster recovery solutions via synchronous data replication, snapshots and remote copy;
• Optimized volume management and storage utilization through thin provisioning and auto-grow functionality;
• Centralized management of all SAN resources, regardless of location.

Discussion: As the closing Keynote for the conference this panel of renowned IT visionaries will look forward and discuss the issues facing CIO including Real Time Infrastructure, Web 2.0 and how the design and delivery of software will change over the next few years including Open Source, Software as a Service and thin clients. Additional topics for discussion include Obtaining Value from Decades old Legacy Systems including ERPs, Is SOA Real or a Marketer’s Delight?, Risk Management as it pertains to both Security and Compliance, Mobility and Collaboration for Flexibility, IT Governance for Business Alignment, Outsourcing/Offshoring and Globalization—Are there limits?, Impact of Virtualization, New Directions in the Internet and others. Come join us for a look at your future and to enjoy the extensive audience interaction.