IDC’s IT Manager Forum: Smart IT Buyer brings together business and technology experts from across the region to present best practices on how to become a smart IT buyer in a crisis situation. Organizations need to make smart decisions in order to protect their bottom line, maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, and build competitive advantage in often unstable and constantly changing markets. The new economic reality means intense pressure on every aspect of business operations to curtail capital spending and reduce operating expenses. The squeeze is especially difficult given the ongoing need to support operations whilst enabling new growth and cost-containment initiatives.

IDC wants to demonstrate that ICT technologies, if used wisely, can be part of the remedy for dealing with the fallout of the crisis. Many solutions, from information management and IT outsourcing through business intelligence, virtualization, and green IT to VoIP, unified communication, and IT consolidation, can be applied to improve efficiency, lower costs, and keep profitability high.

Key Themes for Smart IT Buyers:

This pioneering full-day conference will feature high-impact presentations from some of the region’s most influential ICT thought leaders on the subjects of most importance to today’s IT Managers, including:

The Art of Business – IT Alignment

• What strategies should IT Managers pursue to cope with this uncertain environment?
• How IT must focus on ROI and Alignment (strategies for success)
• How to capitalize on IT to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, improve the bottom line and safeguard your customers
• Technologies that encourage business IT alignment

Is Managed Services Right for Your Company in Today’s Climate?

• Where Managed Services come from
• What benefits it can bring to an organization
• How Managed Services is relevant today
• What future developments managed services will bring

SOA and BPM: Overcoming Organization, Technology, and Industry Barriers

As the link is forged between service oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM), vendors are now seeking ways to expand their tool offerings to reach from high-level planning and modeling to application development

• Are organizations ready to take on what the industry is unleashing for this next generation of highly collaborative and dynamically integrated systems?
• To what extent are organizations aligning skills, behaviors, structures, and assets to embrace SOA and BPM requirements?

The Business Intelligence Revolution

In 2009, business intelligence (BI) is more than the data warehouses, data schema and reporting tools that combine to deliver information to business users; it’s a philosophy of how to accelerate your business by making money from insights. This session will kick off a robust discussion about the key drivers, decisions and outcomes of BI projects.

The Next Revolution of Data Storage

IDC believes that the way users and applications will interact with data storage and the ways storage systems are architected are going through yet another revolution. This session aims to detail how changing end-user demands are driving changes in the interaction between servers and storage. This will ultimately lead to the development of a new generation of storage systems, which unlike previous generations will focus primarily on data objects.

Business Impact of Security

• Demonstrating IT Security ROI
• Optimizing IT Security Spend
• Financial Impacts of Security Breach
• Business Advantages of Managed Security Services