Step Up to the Microphone at Pulse 2010

Speak at Pulse and get free conference admittance, access to the VIP lounge, and promotion for your organization

Service Management in Action Pulse 2010 will be the premier service management event of the year—and you can be a part of it.

Staying abreast of the latest developments in service management is no simple task, but for service management professionals worldwide, it's also mission-critical to help their organizations remain competitive in a tough economy. The questions they confront are: How can they most easily and efficiently get the information they need? How can they focus on the most pertinent challenges facing their organizations going forward? And how can they share what they've learned with others?

Pulse—IBM's unified showcase of service management content—is an elegant answer to that question. To be held next year at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, from February 21st-24th, Pulse 2010 will be a platform for leading service management professionals worldwide to share their insights, experiences, advice and best practices.

And toward fostering that collaborative discussion, IBM has, as of August 17, announced a call for speakers. Anyone interested in presenting at Pulse is welcome to submit a proposal, and those who are selected will enjoy many benefits as a result.

Consider, for instance, that invited client speakers will receive free attendance to the event—a full conference pass currently valued at more than two thousand dollars. Presenting at Pulse, in other words, is an investment that will pay off instantly; in return for their contribution of time, speakers will be able to attend as many other talks as their schedules will accommodate without charge. Admission to the IBM VIP client lounge will also be granted to all speakers, representing still another learning opportunity.

Furthermore, the benefits of presenting at the show will extend not just to the speaker, but to the speaker's organization as well. When the speaker returns from the event, information obtained at Pulse will translate directly into business value in the form of new ideas, strategies, technical information or business processes—all designed to help bring services into close alignment with the needs and requirements of paying customers.

Additionally, there are promotional benefits to consider. Those whose submissions are accepted will have their abstracts and presentation titles posted to the Pulse 2010 website—worldwide exposure for their organizations, free of charge—and of course the talk itself will be attended by leading service management professionals from around the world. A third promotional possibility comes from the fact that awards and other forms of recognition will be presented at the conference to leading contributors. For example, in the case of submissions pertaining to IBM Maximo asset management topics, an award will be given for Maintenance Best Practices.

The better the presentation, in other words, and the more benefit received by the audience, the more benefit will accrue to both the speaker and the speaker's organization.

Talks will address a diverse audience of service management professionals from around the world

Who is that audience likely to consist of? As the premier service management event of the year, Pulse 2010 will be attended by an anticipated audience of some 5000 professionals, ranging from managers to directors to C-level executives and many other decision makers coming from a wide variety of industries.

Successful talks will contribute to the business, technical and professional education of one or more of the following groups:

IT Director/Managers
Architects
Systems Administrators
Security Analysts
Storage Managers
Data Center Managers
Plant/Facility Managers
Maintenance Supervisors
Production Personnel
Supply Chain Managers
Network Managers
Operations Managers
Developers
Process Managers
Infrastructure Managers & Executives
Business Transformation Managers
Business Executives
Strategy & Technology Executives

Additionally, talks will fit into one of the four content streams at Pulse, each of which are themselves divided into specific tracks.

Service Management for Information Technology

This stream addresses some of the most crucial and dynamic IT issues organizations face today. As IT has increasingly become the central nervous system of the organization, and the basic mechanism by which services are delivered, optimizing IT has correspondingly become a key strategy to enhance service management.

For most organizations, that will mean reconsidering and reimplementing certain aspects of the way IT operates. Sometimes that may simply mean revising business processes. In other cases, it will mean evolving the infrastructure to become more dynamic in logical stages, and thus more responsive and agile in addressing unpredictable workloads or new strategies suggested by changing business requirements.

The six tracks within the Service Management for Information Technology stream thus directly address emerging complexities or exciting new possibilities of fulfilling service management goals through IT operations.

Service Delivery and Process automation: Creating a more agile, consistent and cost-effective service delivery architecture by applying intelligent automation where possible
Service Availability and Performance Management: Ensuring services stay up and running, and service levels remain high
Security, Risk Management and Compliance: Giving the right people the right access to the right resources in order to minimize risks and comply with government regulations
Storage and Information Infrastructure: Implementing storage as a dynamic, resilient and scalable resource
Energy and Efficiency: Going green to contain costs and free funds for strategic innovation
Cloud Computing: Creating a highly efficient and scalable platform of automated IT service delivery

Service Management for Enterprise Operations

A key consideration in this area is organizational assets and how they are managed. For organizations to deliver superior service management, getting best business value from all assets, both on and off the IP infrastructure, is critical. Effective asset management can help link domains of information that can be leveraged to minimize costs or improve forecasting, as in the case of software licensing information that relates to the number of copies the organization has (and requires going forward), which can help determine future budgets. And when assets are managed optimally, their lifespans increase; this means funds currently allocated to acquiring new assets can be reallocated in favor of innovative business strategies with higher priority or more immediate significance.

Also important in this context is network and service assurance. How well is the complex infrastructure fulfilling service management goals? Is it possible to deliver scalable new services on demand, in accordance with customer requirements or interests? Are services delivered at appropriate levels of performance and reliability, and how can the organization proactively ensure that that will continue? And how can the customer experience be determined and quantified?

These and related questions are addressed in the two tracks:

Asset Management: Achieving holistic, end-to-end management of all assets throughout their lifecycles
Network and Service Assurance: Verifying that target service levels are achieved, and optimizing the infrastructure accordingly

Service Management for Business Leaders

Technology is, of course, only one lens through which to perceive service management—and ultimately, technology must serve business goals. For many organizations, in fact, improving service management will mean shifting the focus from technology-centric silos per se to the logical services that span them. In the end, it is the services, not the technology supporting them, that clients and customers pay for and experience.

Tracks within this stream explore different facets of this important premise, including:

Service Management for Your Industry: How service management means different things in different business contexts
Hot Topics in Service Management: Emerging issues and complexities
Service Management for Mid-sized Businesses: How mid-market, growing organizations can achieve highly effective service management while also containing costs

Software Delivery Lifecycle Management

Achieving a competitive distinction in a tough economic environment like the one we face today will often mean innovating—offering new services or products that competitors don't, and that correspond closely to the services and products customers want most. IT development is chartered with creating the software required to support those services and products.

Software delivery, however, is a complex process that must be carefully managed at every stage. If you conceive of software as having a lifecycle—beginning with conception and ending with retirement—it follows that best results will come from improving every element in that lifecycle. Without effective stakeholder collaboration, workflow integration, and real-time progress reporting, for instance, software development projects may spiral out of control, ultimately creating costs instead of business value for their host organizations.

The three tracks in this stream are:

Smarter Products Delivery and Management: Infusing new intelligence into offerings to achieve innovation and address customer interests
Quality Management for Applications and Services: Ensuring that software development projects meet quality expectations—on time and within budget, through minimized risks
Change Management for Applications and Services: Implementing change in software development projects an effective and cost-effective manner through improved collaboration, transparency, automation and decision-making.

Submit proposals now to deliver a talk at Pulse

Within those guidelines, the possibilities nevertheless remain endless. If you have insights, best practices or success stories to share, IBM invites you to submit a proposal and play a part in making Pulse an even more richly rewarding experience for everyone concerned.

To do this, you will need to create and fill out a speaker profile, then subsequently fill out the proposal details. An IBM ID will be required; this can easily be obtained online. Proposals can be submitted until October 16th, and those who submit proposals will be notified of their application status by November 16. Speaker registration will open the next day.