IOD Offers Information about Information

Information on Demand helps organizations get the most from their information

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Few, if any, assets are as mission-critical to an organization as its business information. And in today's challenging business climate, increasing the ROI of information is one of the best available strategies.

Consider, for instance, how information is leveraged every day in most organizations to suggest new services, quantify the success or failure of old ones, and fulfill service requests – in short, drive ongoing operations of every kind. Clearly, the better an organization can protect, share, store and analyze its information, whenever, wherever and however it’s required, the better the business outcome is likely to be.

Toward that end, an exceptionally useful resource is the annual IBM Information On Demand 2009 global conference, which addresses these and many other related issues in order to help organizations today solve their most pressing information challenges, obtain leading insight and best practices and, in short, get the best possible return on investment from both their information and their information infrastructures.

To be held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Convention Center in Las Vegas, from October 25-29, this year’s show promises to deliver more value, in more ways, than ever before. Sessions will be available in three programs, each based on information complexities as seen through different lenses:

Technical Skill Building: More than 400 sessions will concern new tools, integration possibilities and other types of technical content designed for professionals interested in the nuts and bolts of information architectures of many kinds.

Business Leadership: A more abstract perspective on information architectures and information management will be offered in the more than 100 sessions of this program, which will revolve around new ways to capitalize on information in order to drive business success.

Business Partner Development: For IBM Business Partners, this program will represent a great opportunity to interact with IBM, obtain sneak peeks at new solutions and roadmaps and develop a strategy designed to position the organization better for an increasingly information-centric future.

IBM Tivoli solutions empower superior information management

Customers of the leading IBM Tivoli service management portfolio will be pleased to find there will be many engaging showcases available, of several different types, to illustrate the strong value proposition offered by IBM Tivoli thought leadership, solutions and services in the information management space.

An excellent example will be the featured session given by Doug Brown, IBM Vice President of Marketing, Service Management and Tivoli Software, on "How A Dynamic Infrastructure Powers a Smarter Planet." In the face of many new challenges and complexities, organizations must strive to reduce their costs and mitigate their risks, yet also drive up service levels. How is this possible? IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure vision offers one persuasive answer to that question through converging the management of business and technology, spurring business agility and scalability via virtualization/consolidation and SOA strategies, and capitalizing on many IBM Tivoli solutions to enhance overall visibility, control and automation. In this way, organizations can gradually centralize and evolve IT, via a path suggested by their specific needs and contexts, from a loose array of technology silos into a unified, coherent engine of business strategy.

Of course, a key part of leveraging information for best business value lies in shielding it from threats. Pertinent here will be a business leadership session—"Best Practices in Overcoming Data Security Challenges”—given by Craig Smelser, IBM Vice President of Storage and Security Development. Central points will involve security infrastructure assessment, to establish strengths and weaknesses; the creation and deployment of a new security model to ensure data is archived and protected, yet easily and quickly accessible when required; and quantifying/anticipating the ROI of an effective data security strategy.

Mr. Smelser will also be hosting a second business leadership session: "Evolving Information and Storage Demand." Organizations today face both rapidly-escalating data volumes, and also a rapidly-escalating business utilization of data in many respects to achieve many ends. Correspondingly, it's become more important than ever for storage solutions to meet both challenges through highly scalable design and performance, while simultaneously delivering simplified overall management. Smelser will explore IBM's leading offerings and unique strengths as a solution provider in this space.

For those seeking specifics on particular technical tools, or other forms of detailed information related to information architectures, abundant content will be made available at the conference. One example: IBM Architect Chris Zaremba's technical skills session. The session, on IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager, will showcase how this engaging new offering gives organizations the power to create application-aware snapshots of different types of information pools (IBM DB2, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, among others) to achieve superior business resilience, yet create little to no impact on business operations, thanks to its exceptional performance. Furthermore, a demo of this offering will also be given by Rick Higgens, IBM Marketing Manager, to show exactly how easy it is to deploy, how efficient it is in action and how substantial the business benefits are in consequence.

Composite applications represent another element of the information architecture for many organizations to consider; by logically connecting business databases, Java code, core systems and other technical elements, they create new business possibilities, yet also introduce new troubleshooting challenges. Steve Curtis, IBM Tivoli Product Marketing Manager, will explore the IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager suite of tools and how it can help improve the performance of even the most complex composite application chains through end-to-end management, isolating problems as they occur to deliver significantly faster time-to-resolution.

And for those seeking a holistic answer to a broad range of security complexities and threats facing the information infrastructure today, in order to comply with both internal security policies/mandates and external government regulations, IBM Tivoli Data and Application Security represents a complete solution. IBM Marketing Manager Russ Warren will be on hand to give a demo of how the solution provides holistic protection of sensitive data across different types of storage, as well as within different application contexts, through high-end encryption, fine-grained access policies, and content-aware controls to match specific security implementations to business requirements.

Register for the conference and qualify for special discounts

If you haven't already registered for the conference, now would be a great time; many discounts and special promotional offers are available. Among others:

Those who book before the conference begins October 25 will receive admittance for $100 less.
Attendees who are interested in obtaining IBM Web-Based Training courses will receive a 65 percent discount on them.
Books sold at the conference bookstore will be discounted at a full 20 percent.
IBM Group Travel has extended its travel discount to all conference attendees: eight percent off when flying through American Airlines.
For every ten members of your organization who attend, an eleventh may attend for free.
Even more substantial discounts may be available for exceptionally large groups of attendees.

Contact IOD2009@meetingconsultants.com for more information today!