The Holy Grail for IT is to ensure that rapidly changing business service level requirements are met in the most efficient manner possible. This panel explored the pitfalls of betting on a particular technology solution such as Grid and the unacceptable constraints this imposes and instead looks at the emerging trend towards the creation of a real-time infrastructure that puts the business first and understands how to use orchestration to harness various technologies including virtualization and provisioning tools and the role of middleware to create the right environment at any given moment.

• Pete Harris, President, Americas and Editor at Large, A-Team Group (Moderator)

• Richard Croucher, Associate Partner, Citihub

• Andrew Duncan, SVP, Business Development, Scalent

• Duncan Johnston-Watt, CTO, Enigmatec Corp.

• Patrick Kerpan, CTO, Cohesive Flexible Technologies

Many data centers today require predictable behavior. Predictable response can only be achieved, however, if operating systems, networking, and storage work together in unison. Distributed application design is widely being leveraged to explore parallelism, bringing emphasis to network and storage latency. Virtualization improves utilization, but exponentially increases the number of objects that require management, and requires careful planning to ensure performance. How do you ensure quality of service (QoS), from both your physical and virtual resources, in the date center of the future?

Enterprise real time operating systems from Novell, with their deterministic behavior and low latency characteristics, are being used by leading Wall Street firms today to dramatically improve the performance of their market data feeds and algorithmic trading applications. Next generation enterprise real time operating systems are increasingly being used by global enterprises of all types to improve quality of service and optimize data center resources. Attendees found out more about how Novell is developing and integrating the kernel, virtualization, fabric, messaging and tools technologies required to help its customers maximize performance, ensure QoS at even individual level, and optimize their heterogeneous data center environments.

Moiz Kohari, Vice President, Engineering, Open Platform Solutions, Novell

Corporate governance, risk management, compliance requirements and industry regulations can all be approached collaboratively to save time, decrease costs and improve operational efficiencies.

CSI and panelists from the Bank of New York Mellon, Alfresco and the Software Freedom Law Center discussed how financial firms can apply this approach anywhere the benefits of commonality (application-wise or within the code base) outweigh competitive advantage.

Specific topics included the BITS Financial Institution Shared Assessments Program, Basel II Compliance requirements, Know Your Customer (KYC) applications and more.

• Stuart Cohen, CEO, Collaborative Software Initiative (Moderator)

• Matt Asay, General Manager, Americas and VP, Business Development, Alfresco

• Eben Moglen, Director and Co-Founder, Software Freedom Law Center

• Stanley Rose, Managing Director, Technology Risk Management, Bank of New York Mellon

It’s been over a year since Microsoft and Novell announced their ground breaking agreement to collaborate on solutions for customers with both Windows and Linux. The reaction from customers has been overwhelmingly positive and the relationship is still going strong.

Microsoft and Novell provided details on what has been accomplished and future plans that you can take advantage of to achieve higher value for mixed IT environments. This interactive session included detailed information on the business solutions for customers, technical roadmaps, demos and Q&A.

• Paul Brown, Microsoft Alliance Executive, Novell

• Peter Rodriques, Director, Customer Advocacy and Licensing, Microsoft

• Jose Thomas, Senior Sales Executive, Microsoft