LA Lakers vs Boston Celtics...
The legendary rivalry is renewed! Join us for the nail-biting Game 5 of the NBA Finals. Enjoy cocktails and "game time" food while watching the greatest rivals in NBA history.

With special guest appearance from San Francisco 49er linebackers Travis LaBoy and Takeo Spikes!

Sponsored by IBM and Juniper Networks

Each session will bring together industry leaders and senior IT executives to probe a critical cloud issue, outlining challenges to adoption and hashing out the work that needs to be done. Moderated by leading IDC analysts and IDG journalists, these sessions will include:

Security & Compliance: Assessing and managing risk with your cloud deployments
Moderated by: Laura Dubois, Vivian Tero

Interoperability, integration and management: How do you avoid ending up with multiple clouds that don’t speak to one another, and provide a high performance environment across services obtained from different providers?
Moderated by: Rick Villars, John Gallant

Application development for the cloud: Methodologies, workloads and other considerations for engineering and integrating cloud-based applications
Moderated by: Robert Mahowald, Steve Hendrick

Cloud strategies for global organizations: Challenges and considerations of using the cloud when your data centers, offices and end users are all over the globe
Moderated by: Melanie Posey, Anne McCrory

The cloud has crossed the threshold from a point of debate to a mandate to remain competitive. Clearly, there is not enough space, energy or compute power to address the escalating IT needs of the business. Through trusted,orchestrated cloud services, organizations can manage off- and on-premise data, lower operational costs, provide transparency and enable collaboration effectively across public and private networks. The challenge lies in how and where to fully exploit cloud to yield the greatest return and capture maximum business advantage. How do you identify the ideal business process workloads to move to the cloud? What about security and compliance requirements? This session will explore how organizations should start from a business process perspective in order to best capitalize on immediate and longer term cloud opportunities.

Cloud services offer a major opportunity to reduce costs and improve productivity, but the benefits don’t come without risks. In this session about the practical benefits of the cloud, Domnick Parretta, Managing Partner with Valorem Consulting, will use case study examples of Microsoft BPOS and Azure implementations to show why some organizations are choosing the cloud, which workloads are offering the most benefit, and some of the common challenges they’ve encountered.

In an effort to improve agility and lower costs, more and more of today’s IT and business executives are evaluating cloud-based technologies to leverage the Internet’s global access and reach. Yet despite the cloud’s promise, very little is known about how cloud strategies impact a company’s critical enterprise applications. How do technologies dependent on the Internet and the cloud deal with mission-critical challenges like application performance, scale, availability and security? With customers, partners and employees distributed over vast geographies, how can cloud-based solutions deliver timely, reliable service from their source? And what strategies and tactics are companies using to optimize their Internet-dependent computing platforms? Get answers to these questions and more in this session.

Challenges and Opportunities for a Cloud-based Application Delivery Strategy
Join us for an interactive discussion on best practices and pitfalls of leveraging the public cloud to delivering mission-critical applications — and how to optimize performance, availability, scalability, and security.
Hosted by Akamai

Is the Cloud Transformative or For Efficiency -- or Both?
How are other companies developing a strategy to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing? Are they choosing the cloud as a transformative measure for the business,  or step-wise to improve IT efficiency and business agility? Attend our table discussion to find out how others perceive and find value with the cloud.
Hosted by PwC

Realizing the Network Advantage in the Cloud
Join us for a discussion of cloud service delivery enabled by combining virtualized datacenter and network resources.  We’ll explore Cisco’s approach to interconnecting public and private clouds and the need for multi-directional cloud centric networking capabilities.
Hosted by Cisco

Cloud computing challenges traditional thinking about the delivery of services from a datacenter. For example, when you combine geographically dispersed datacenters with workload portability and an “as a service” model, you can experience multi-directional traffic prone to unpredictable spikes. This calls for a “cloud aware” infrastructure that can dynamically adapt to these changing demands and facilitate optimal placement of workload within the cloud. In this session, we’ll discuss how creating a secure virtualized infrastructure that combines the capabilities of the datacenter and network is essential to delivering a trusted end-to-end cloud offering.

As one of the hottest topics in the IT industry, cloud computing has changed the way we work and live. Willy Chiu will share some of his experiences working with leading edge clients from around the world as they adopt cloud computing to transform the way they do business.

Accelerating Customer-Driven Product Development with the Cloud
Meraki's whimsically-named "make a wish" feature provides a direct channel between customers and developers, and their cloud-based architecture delivers new features and enhancements to customers instantly.  Join us for an interactive discussion of best practices in using the cloud for customer-driven development, and how connecting customers with product teams, and delivering products instantly over the web, improves revenue and customer satisfaction while lowering support costs.
Hosted by Meraki