BizTech Brief #16 - Define Tomorrow Edition

Week Commencing 14th November 2016 

This week was one of the biggest of the year for the ComputerWorld team as we held our third Define Tomorrow event. The event summarised all the content from both VMworld US and Europe this year and highlighted other key news within the IT industry from 2016. This issue of my BizTech Brief is a brief outline of the keynote presentations from the day and touching upon other aspects of the day.

Define Tomorrow VMware Update Event 2016

This event was our biggest that we have held yet with over 200 people in attendance, over 10 of our key partners sponsoring the day and some of the biggest names in the industry delivering our keynote presentations and demonstrations. 

The day was kicked off with a brief presentation from our own Operations Director and vExpert, Barry Coombs who set the scene for the day about where the IT industry currently is and how the keynote speakers of the day will set their vision for the future. 

We were extremely lucky to have our first keynote presentation from Joe Baguley, VMware CTO and VP. Joe's presentation was thought provoking and visionary around Virtualisation and Cloud. Joe introduced the VMware vision and strategy for the future that all business is digital business and that we live in a hybrid world. In the past businesses have started their IT strategy with the business in mind, now the business needs to start this process with the user. 

Joe spoke about the 3 ways that we have faced IT from the datacentre to the analysis and how the last way is only being achieved by a few of those who kept adapting their strategy to get ahead of the competition by putting their user's first (image to the right). 

Joe introduced VMware's new Cross Cloud Architecture that was announced at VMworld Us earlier this year which delivers vSphere, vSAN, NSX and SDDC Manager. VMware's technology and vision has developed and improved in order to help their customers get round this loop faster than their competitors. 

 To watch the full recording of Joe's presentation and see a copy of his slide deck, click the button below.

Our next keynote presentation was by AppSense CTO, Simon Townsend who took us through the evolution of the user workplace, where End-user computing is today and what we can do to make the future of EUC, being focused around apps and data, easier by bridging the gap between users and desktops today.

Simon spoke about how the users are now working on more devices than ever before and each device seems to have more applications downloaded on them than the one before. Although this is great for the users that they are able to have their apps and devices wherever, whenever this has a huge effect on how IT can manage and update all this whilst data is never at rest. 

Simon touched upon the new GDPR legislation that will be implemented in 2018 and the major implications this may have on your business if you were to lose any of your data. With the user workspace evolving onto many devices and applications and the users revolutionising and expecting more from IT, the need to protect your data is ever increasing, however so is the difficulty level of doing so.

There are a larger number of ransomware attacks on a daily basis and are now more vicious than before as it now holds you to ransom. It is now easier than ever for an individual within an organisation to be attached through cyber crime as the attacker is no longer attacking the firewall or the web services, they are targeting your end user.   

To watch the full recording of Simon's presentation and see a copy of the presentation slides, click the button below. 

In the afternoon we then had presentations from Dell's VMware Technology Lead around Hyperconverged and Dell's EMEA Channel Director for Dell Networking, Mark Pearce. Both presentation slides from the Dell presentations can be found at definetomorrow.co.uk/vmevent. 

We ended the day with four technical deep dive conversation round tables. The subjects of these round tables were focused on our key pillars, Virtualisation and Cloud, Workspace Transformation, Networking and security. These round-tables gave our attendees the opportunity to ask the experts from ComputerWorld and our partner's questions about the technology and have deep discussions into the topics. 

If you would like to see any of the presentation slides from the day or recordings of the presentations, please visit definetomorrow.co.uk/vmevent.