IDC’s Smart IT Buyer Forum 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. IT spending has been significantly impacted by the storms of economic recession since the second half of 2008. How do we best survive this period of global volatility and uncertainty? What are the bright spots and pockets of opportunity that IT Heads need to focus on in the next 12-18 months? What strategic impact will the economic storm have on IT spending plans, in both the short and long term?

The year 2010 is forecasted to be much more difficult due to the overall slowdown of the global economy. 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:

2010 and Beyond: How will the role of IT Managers change?

IT Managers understand that the future of IT rests on their shoulders. How can they change the way they approach organizational issues and innovation to get where they need to go? How can they craft a more positive, exciting future within their organizations? This presentation underscores the vital importance of managing the forces of rapid technology change and business disruption, especially given these uncertain times. That process of rebuilding and enabling an ever-faster-moving enterprise calls for IT managers who are experts at managing technology for maximum value delivery.

Virtualization – Way forward in these uncertain times?

• Using virtualization to be more efficient and productive in the current economic environment.
• Effectively implementing desktop virtualization — managing cost, complexity, and control
• Deploying security in a virtualized environment.
• Cloud computing in the data center of the future.
• The impact of a virtualized infrastructure on storage.
• Cost effective disaster recovery and business continuity solutions using virtualization tools.

Collaboration, Web 2.0 and Social Computing

• Web 2.0 and how to build better business applications
• Control of enterprise collaboration environment: Can CIOs harness the power or unleash the devil in the process?
• Mash up and business applications: Who should be managing this new layer – IT or business?
• Realities of social computing in enterprise environment: While social networking evolved in the consumer Internet, it will have significant impact on enterprises and business relationships. In turn, this increase in enterprise velocity will give corporations who effectively deploy social networks a significant competitive advantage.

Managed Print Services

• The drive for managed print services opportunities will get even more aggressive with new vendors joining the fray, and the use of software tools and communication of financial benefits will serve as key differentiators.
• Given the demanding economy and the need to obtain best-of-class services, large companies will be looking to reduce their suppliers to a strategic number that can provide hardware, solutions, and services.
• Additional focus on MPS is expected to be seen in small-to-medium-sized businesses, with dealers and other channels increasingly offering MPS to customers with smaller fleets.

Datacenter of the Future: Inside the IT Command Center (Technologies, Designs, People, and Green)

• Radical changes are ahead for the future datacenter and it is not just about technology. Virtualization, blade servers, emerging management frameworks, ILM strategies, and energy efficiency are the end result of a need to shift the fundamental economic equation for the datacenter.
• Significant innovation is already emerging within systems infrastructure. This will help support increasingly larger infrastructures but will necessitate a shift in IT processes and staff skill sets.
• Virtualization and storage: Innovations for the future datacenter.