Strong line-up for IP EXPO

A strong line-up of industry experts has been drawn together to ensure the inaugural IP EXPO is an informative and memorable affair.

When IP EXPO debuts in three weeks time, high calibre speakers will present over 40 seminars covering numerous aspects of IP networks, virtualisation and cloud computing. Experts from hi-tech vendors will shed light on these three IT trends poised for major growth, while other speakers will address general industry trends and business processes.

Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx, will present new local research into cloud computing among South African businesses, assessing the current level of usage and the potential growth to give the audience a sense of how fast or how slowly their competitors are moving. The research has been commissioned specifically for IP EXPO.

One technology already identified as a hot topic in South Africa is desktop virtualisation. David Angwin, Wyse Technology’s director of marketing for EMEA, will cover that in a session examining the value of virtualisation in corporate South Africa and cloud computing from a client perspective. David will address another hot topic later when he evaluates low-energy ICT solutions, including solar-powered computers.

Data Information Management will be analysed by Simon Gregory, business development director for CommVault’s international region, who will assess which approaches and which technologies are having the biggest impact on capital and operational costs. Based on customer and partner feedback, Simon will detail how to handle the ramp-up in data quantities, where to find savings and how to effect changes that deliver both cost and operational efficiencies.

Warren Olivier, senior technical systems engineer for Veeam Software will discuss how to accelerate the adoption of virtualisation. For many enterprises, physical server consolidation resulting in reduced costs, power and cooling advantages is by far the top benefit of virtualisation, yet businesses must look beyond virtualising simple file, print, and web servers towards virtualising mission-critical applications if they are to really benefit from the additional advantages that virtualisation has to offer. Warren will explain how by converting these Tier 1 applications, enterprises can improve Disaster Recovery and Data Protection dramatically by reducing Recovery Time Objectives and increasing efficiency and compliancy within the business. These are now the two chief advantages of virtualising more physical workloads within the IT infrastructure.

Businesses running a combination of physical and virtual Windows and Linux servers will learn how to turn their virtualisation resources into a disaster recovery site in a session by Wouter Vancoppenolle, sales director for Vision Solutions in the Middle East and Africa regions.

Martin Walshaw, field system engineer at F5 Networks, will focus on the current lack of understanding about the available applications and how to manage them. Walshaw will stress that managing application delivery isn’t just about network components: it’s also about understanding how users are interacting with those applications in real time.

Mitel South Africa’s managing director Andy Bull will cover voice in a virtual world, and explain how the latency barrier has been conquered which enables the deployment of a real-time voice application in a virtualised data centre environment.

Other sessions will be presented by speakers from Internet Solutions and Huawei, while key industry players will participate in a panel debate about the threats inherent in cloud computing and the solutions designed to overcome those risks.

A strong line-up of speakers is an established feature of IP EXPO’s sister event in London, which welcomed Apple Computer founder Steve Wozniak as its keynote speaker at its seventh annual show recently. Wozniak now runs the data storage and server company Fusion-io.

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