Top speakers at local seminar on future trends of IT clouds

The transition to the private cloud, from a virtualised IT environment, features at the top of today’s chief information officer’s priorities. Systec Ltd has addressed this issue by bringing together Microsoft, VMWare and Hewlett Packard on the same platform. All three presented their vision for this transition to the cloud at a recent half-day seminar at the Hotel Meridien, St Julian’s.

This fifth annual virtualisation conference was very well attended by CEOs, CIOs, IT managers, IT consultants and executives.

“This was a unique opportunity to understand the strategy and direction of the IT world’s dominant players, first hand, at one event in Malta,” explained Raphael Micallef Trigona, Systec’s managing director, who opened the seminar.

The keynote speech was delivered by Microsoft’s multi-country general manager for Central and Eastern Europe, Takuya Hirano, who looked at the latest worldwide IT cloud trends and highlighted Microsoft’s vision for the next few years.

Hewlett Packard’s strategy for transformation from the virtualised model to the private/hybrid cloud models was explained by Szilard Bolla, HP Cloud Lead for Central and Eastern Europe.

An interesting video interview was shown of eBay’s datacentre, while cloud computing senior executive Dean Nelson discussed how eBay’s processes had to be optimised before moving to become the largest cloud marketplace based on HP services and solutions.

IT business management together with transformation from a VMWare datacentre to a private cloud was the topic addressed by VMWare’s Anthanassios Sioutas, senior systems engineer for Greece. He highlighted the significant role played by VMWare’s IT business management solutions in a successful transition to the cloud.

The Microsoft Cloud is proposed as a cloud dedicated to its corporate owner. This was the theme presented by Athanassios Kladakis, Microsoft Solution specialist, Greece. Microsoft portrays a cross-platform approach to the cloud and cloud system centre management where the user may select his preferred cloud approach when transitioning from a virtualised IT infrastructure.

The round-table discussion, chaired by Nuno Fernandes, Systec’s technology solutions manager, allowed HP, Microsoft and VMWare to air their views on various issues, and explain how their particular strategy differed from the others.

Mr Micallef Trigona concluded: “Systec is 10 years old this year and we are proud to have been able to present world-class speakers to address the local IT community at this seminar.”