One of the largest Internet auto lenders, Capital One Auto Finance is investing millions this year to create a better customer experience, with IT playing a central role. "IT is everything, data is everything in this business," explains CIO Don Goin, who joined the subsidiary of $19 billion Capital One Financial last September. "If you have more advanced analytics, you can price your loans lower, control the risk better, and offer consumers something more attractive while still making the same profit." His list of critical IT initiatives for 2012 includes revamping the lender's direct-to-customer business and more than doubling the size of the current IT staff to reduce heavy reliance on outsourcers. In this opening keynote address, Don will talk about the evolving role of the IT organization in this dynamic, fiercely competitive industry.   

Innovation can drive a company forward if the senior leadership team knows how to lead the charge. In this afternoon keynote, longtime IT leader Tom Nealon, formerly of Frito-Lay, Southwest Airlines and JCPenney, will bring his expertise to bear on how to effectively position IT as a strategic, highly-valued business partner.  As the Senior VP and CIO at Southwest Airlines, Tom was responsible not only for IT but for leading the company's process improvements and change initiatives.  As Group Executive VP at JCPenney, Tom's responsibilities grew beyond the CIO role to include IT, corporate strategy, jcp.com, customer strategic insights and digital ventures.

Enterprise Data continues to expand by 40% per year. One of the most powerful emerging movements in IT technology to keep up with this pace is purpose-built hardware/software solutions and "appliances" from such giants as Oracle, IBM, HP, and EMC. With ever growing data volumes and high demand for processing data quickly and efficiently, the big IT technology players are introducing an array of combined hardware/software to market at an incredible pace. As an Oracle Platinum Partner, Enkitec will explore the value proposition of "engineered hardware/software solutions" and appliances that has hit the market recently, discuss some of the pros and cons, and share customer stories.

Cloud technologies are creating an inflection point where many enterprises must at least consider hosting alternatives for even the most mission-critical websites and applications. And while cloud may be available for everyone, it is not the best choice for everything. In this breakout session, Rackspace Hosting will demystify the cloud by sharing how enterprise customers are adopting cloud computing for various types of applications. Learn how a hosted solution can enable your organization’s innovation by cost-effectively overcoming the challenges of scaling, availability and performance. Rackspace will also share information about OpenStack™, a game-changing open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.

An increasingly mobile workforce, a growing influx of consumer devices at work and the rapid transition of cloud computing from buzzword to reality are all having a huge impact on business value delivery in today's enterprise. These trends bring with them tensions in the CIO role around enablement vs. security, agility vs. integration, and business vs. IT in technology resource control. In this engaging panel discussion with prominent local CIOs from a variety of industries, you’ll hear how their companies are managing these tensions as they update their technology roadmaps, compete for new customer bases and respond more quickly to the demands of business in a hyper-connected online world.