TechEd 2007 - Day 2

10:30 Today I'm attending a specific IT manager's track today at TechEd, and this has started with a great talk from Brian Gammage, vice president at Gartner research about the future direction of infrastructure and operations.  The session reinforced the need for IT individuals, teams, and companies to focus on the business output - the actual value of what they do in their environment as we go forward.  I'll share one slide here with you, being the current top 10 CIO concerns, according to Gartner:

• Delivering projects that enable the growth of a business
• Linking business with IT strategies and plan
• Improving the quality of IS service delivery
• Demonstrate the business value of IT
• Attracting, Developing and Retaining people
• Provide new information (analytics)
• Provide a flexible technical infrastructure
• Building business skills into the IS organisation
• Leading change initiatives (both IT and wider business)
• Improve IT governance

Very business biased and notably absent is security - and in a world where including consumers, IT spend is now breaching $3 trillion annually.  The reason?  Security is no longer a strategic priority.  It is simply expected.

14:45  I've been through two further sessions since my first post - about desktop management in the enterprise and how to build the datacentre of the future.  Of course - since this is TechEd, we're talking about how to do this with Microsoft's technologies (http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter).

And Microsoft have got some challenges themselves  - currently supporting some 80,000 servers with growth expected to reach 400,000 servers by 2011.  Supporting such an infrastructure is almost unimaginable, and this makes no reference to any clients connecting to those services, expecting it to be available, 24x7.  So I'm quite excited about the services being offered and what they can mean for me and my teams - it is quite refreshing to see a powerful tool for SME companies that don't want to rollout of a huge system like HP OpenView's System Manager (here) - whether for cost or value.  The Microsoft service will in the future also include change, problem and incident management tools as well as a CMDB solution, similar to these solutions and we've been speaking to a host of companies working to include plugins for non-Microsoft technologies.  One specific feature that I can absolutely see value in is that the Configuration Manager service has built in content to help you with the attainment of compliance standards - for example to check that all servers have the same local security restrictions applied.