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SHARE Continues its Founding Mission

SHARE President Pamela Taylor says cloud computing is a key topic for the Denver conference

IBM Systems Magazine recently talked with SHARE President Pamela Taylor about the upcoming conference, scheduled for Aug. 23 to Aug. 28 in Denver. SHARE hosts two conferences per year to provide a forum for attendees to interact, learn about issues most relevant to their business needs and gain access to the industry’s latest products and services. The upcoming conference sessions center on total enterprise virtualization and service orientation. 

Q: Why did SHARE select virtualization and SOA as the main focus for this years’ conferences? 

A: We sat down and looked at what were the issues that were either top of mind in the technologists’ arena or even for their CIOs–the things that people are having to address in their day-to-day activities–and started thinking about how we could bring some focus to the program beyond just the breadth of technical sessions that we offer. Those two things really stood out. We also had a lot of input and insight from individuals we consulted who varied from enterprise architects to individuals who were fairly close to the CIO level in their organization and also paid attention to what we were observing from the analyst community and from the trade press relative to what the really hot topics for the IT industry were for this year. 

We’ve actually found that it was probably serendipitous that we chose virtualization as a theme this year. Our sessions in the virtualization theme room speak to server virtualization, some elements of storage virtualization, and we’re beginning to do a little bit in the area of application virtualization. They speak to how the technologists who have to implement things where the rubber meets the road are able to actually make things work in those environments. Presenters are also speaking to issues of security and configuration management, those kinds of issues that come up in a highly virtualized environment. The fact that cloud computing has become an extremely hot topic in our industry over the last few months means we are well placed to have technical sessions that cover both the infrastructure virtualization components that enable cloud and then the larger issues around cloud computing: 

• What does cloud computing mean for organizations? 
• How do you implement cloud computing? 
• How do you make business decisions about adopting cloud computing? 
• What is cloud computing in a mainframe environment? 
• How does this play out in Linux on System z? 

Q: What can attendees expect from this conference that is different or new from previous conferences? 

A: One of the most obvious differences is going to be that we actually have four keynote sessions. We’ve always had our general session as a main tent session and had a speaker there who spoke broadly on the area of IT. This time we have Daniel Burrus who is speaking on IT trends and how they are going to affect the way we as technologists do our jobs. We also have decided to make the theme keynotes main tent sessions as well. Within that context we have a main tent session on virtualization, one on service orientation and one for System z. The rationale behind this was that that the individuals we’re bringing in for those sessions are true leaders in our industry and have important insights that we believe every one of the attendees should have an opportunity to hear. I’m really excited about this change and hope it turns out to be informative for everyone.

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