Last Thursday around 240 IT Managers and Directors joined EACS for their ninth annual strategic IT update – Optimise IT. This year’s event was held at The Wellcome Trust Conference Centre near Cambridge for the second year running. Below is a summary of the event:
Mike Dearlove, Managing Director of EACS, kicked off Optimise IT 2010 with a video of EACS collecting the Corporate Reseller of the Year award at the recent CRN Awards. Click here to see the clip.
Keynotes from Microsoft and Intel
In the first keynote James Akrigg, Head of Technology for Partners at Microsoft, looked at the latest client and server Windows releases and explained how through Unified Communications Microsoft is enabling ‘Communications for the New Decade’ to enhance and extend the way we do business. The session also included an early look at Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Click here to hear an interview with James following his speech, where he answers questions on the recent release of Windows 7.
David Fuller, Sales Team Leader, then announced that EACS has decided to focus the business on technology pods – Desktop & Application Delivery, Virtualisation & Infrastructure, Control & Collaboration, as well as Services & Support. He explained how this would bring additional benefits to our clients.
In the final keynote Steve Shakespeare, European Director of Enterprise Solutions and Services at Intel, outlined tools and metrics that can be used to financially justify the ROI realised from refreshing your IT infrastructure. He discussed the challenges Intel’s IT department faced in justifying IT investment and what was learned from this experience. In addition Steve briefed the audience about the most recent Intel technology developments.
54 Focused Breakout Sessions on Major IT & Business Issues
Following the keynotes delegates were able to select from over 50 focused breakout sessions. Some of the most popular were:
- Microsoft – Changing the way you communicate with Unified Communications
- Microsoft – Virtualisation: The R2 Wave
- VMware – Business Continuity: Taking availability to the next level with vSphere 4
- Citrix – Desktop Virtualisation
- C2C – Email Archiving: Winning the Argument
- EACS – Cloud Computing
Over 25 exhibitors – live demonstrations of cutting edge technology
On the EACS exhibition stands visitors were able to see the following demonstrations:
- Desktop & Application Delivery - Citrix XenDesktop 4 and VMware View 4
- Virtualisation & Infrastructure - VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as NetApp storage technologies
- Control & Collaboration - OCS, as well as the new features of Exchange 2010, Windows 2008 R2 and Microsoft TMG
Other exhibitors included Bakbone, C2C, Citrix, Dell, Double-Take, Harvard Training, HP, id7, IGEL, Intel, Lumension, Marathon, NetApp, NetResults Forum, ONI, Signify, Targus, TomTom WORK, Virtual Machine Company, VMware and Websense.
Closing Speech
Finally to draw a close to the day Mike Dearlove announced the winners of the prize draws where prizes included a Nintendo DS Lite (donated by IGEL), Nintendo Wii and tickets to Wembley and Brands Hatch.
Customer Comments
“From my perspective the event was a great success and a day well spent. It has clarified a number of points for me and also raised more questions/plans for future changes. So not wanting to get too excited, I’m trying to restrict myself to focusing on Virtualisation for now!”
“I really got a lot out of the day (seven pages of notes) plus useful chats with a number of the vendors, lots of information, a few nice freebies and an excellent lunch! But for me, the best of it was that I came away feeling enthusiastic and keen to get back to the office today to start looking at how we can make the most of some of the technology.”
If you missed the event but would like to have access to the presentations, please contact us to submit your request.
