What to Look Forward to at Gartner ITxpo 2014

This year’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is just a few weeks away. Advanced Systems Concepts is once again looking forward to the event as it gives us an opportunity to talk with analysts and IT executives about IT automation and their individual needs. We are especially excited for this year’s keynote speakers, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and Chief Scientist at Fusion-io, Peter Thiel, Technology Entrepreneur and Investor, and John Zimmer, Co-Founder & President of Lyft Inc.

The topic of this year’s Symposium is “Driving Digital Business”. As businesses increasingly rely on technology to be more competitive, CIO’s and senior level IT executives must redefine their role in the organization and learn how to optimize digital opportunities and align new technologies with business needs. In particular, we’re excited to hear what new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has to say given the changes he’s made since taking the helm at Microsoft seven months ago.

In Nadella’s July 10^th email to employees, Nadella noted “we are moving from a world where computer power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.” As people are inundated with data across all of their devices, getting someone’s attention with useful data is at an all time premium.

Nadella also described his vision of the new Microsoft as moving away from the Windows-centric “devices and services” strategy under former CEO Steve Ballmer and towards a “productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.” Under Nadella’s lead, it appears Microsoft will be heavily focused on the cloud and driving digital business to create rich user experiences.

Cloud computing is a particularly interesting topic when it comes to workload automation. Intelligent workload automation solutions are combining both historical and predictive analytics to anticipate computing capability needed at a given moment.

Businesses are turning to the cloud during peak processing times so that they can utilize resources when they need them, rather than having those resources lying around during non-peak times.For example, if an e-commerce travel company has a pattern of getting a lot of traffic right before a holiday, instead of adding more physical computing power, they would turn to the cloud in order to get the necessary resources only during peak times.

These modern automation solutions are transforming the use of cloud and virtual assets by provisioning resources on the fly to minimize the risk of SLA breaches and meet other business needs. For example, if you need to meet an SLA at 3 p.m., and it is in jeopardy of being breached, you need a solution that can: (1) detect whether workflow parallelization is present and, if present, (2) scale up the number of machines in order to provide more resources towards completing the job and meeting the SLA. On the flip side, automation solutions can also shut down idle machines and allocate unused resources, resulting in a lower total cost of operations (TCO) and better overall resource management.

Today’s IT landscape is increasingly expanding with more and more game-changing technologies and applications moving to the forefront of business. Emerging technology movements like the cloud are actively changing the approach to IT automation. Businesses need a solution that covers the breadth of their IT operations while having the flexibility to accommodate new technologies and methods. In addition to the cloud, we are interested to see how the top IT business and thought leaders at ITxpo will approach key topics such as Big Data, DevOps, and mobile devices.

Advanced Systems Concepts will be on the main floor giving live demos of our workload automation solution, ActiveBatch®. ActiveBatch redefines today’s approach to IT Automation by removing the complexity and minimizing the expense of developing and maintaining custom scripts that legacy schedulers use to automate business and IT operational processes.

If you are attending ITxpo, stop by to chat or get a live demo at Booth #1050.

We will also be live tweeting throughout the event to give non-attendees a window into the various keynotes and lectures taking place at ITxpo. Follow us on Twitter or become a subscriber to our blog to hear about the key ideas and discussions happening at the 2014 ITxpo, as well as other industry events such as Gartner Data Center and Microsoft TechEd.