Originally posted by Bob Gourley on CTOvision
One of the challenges in very popular events like the FedForum is the breakout sessions are all worth attending but you can't be in more than one place at the same time. Fortunately much of the content from these sessions has been captured. You can see video and download slides from all the sessions.
The most important session, to me, is the very short introduction by Anthony Robbins, Vice President of Federal for Brocade. It was important and well worth re-watching because he set the context for the full day in about 2 minutes. He outlined that network and IT infrastructure transformation to improve citizen services, improve agency missions, and reduce cost are very possible. Anthony spelled out how much money can be saved in hardware, software and people by modernization. He mentioned the debunking of myths of multi-vendor networks. He referenced MeriTalk surveys on infrastructure independence that found up to 11B in savings may be found. Anthony spelled out that the transformation in government IT networking is important for many reasons and underscored them by the metaphor of a road system. Most communications capabilities in enterprises today are like an old road system that was put in place a long long time ago. But since that old system was put in place every other component of technology has been modernized and improved.
Watch this short video but don't stop there. The CEO of Brocade, Lloyd Carney, provided great context on the industry and information relevant to any technologist or executive in the federal space. Lloyd underscored the importance of improving IT architecture to support today's challenges and discussed a vision for data center networking. I found out in personal discussions later some more of his background. It was great learning that early in his career he was a technologist supporting the US Navy, supporting R&D and operations and making advances in capabilities from drones to helicopters. Lloyd's message: It is amazing how things have changed in technology, except in one area: networking. In every other area, from servers to operating systems to applications to storage have changed. But if you were the networking guy, you would see and understand how the switches and routers and cables connect them all. You would control them in ways that are just exactly the same as 20 years ago. He also provided info on how organizations are leveraging the rise in processing power and decrease in memory cost to improve data center performance through virtualized data center resources. Lloyd's conversation and presentation is very important to watch, it was great context. Find his presentation here.
Those were the first two of what ended up being a fantastic day of sessions, most of which were filled to standing room only capacity. View them all at: http://www.federalforum2013.com/
