I’m here at the Gartner DataCenter conference in Las Vegas. It is well attended this year. The top attendee groups appear to be Government, Services, Financial and Healthcare.

The first three keynote presentations were great. In the first, Thomas Bittman discussed The Future of Infrastructure and Operations, specifically oriented towards cloud computing. Bittman made a strong argument that the current migration towards virtualization will ultimately drive processing towards cloud computing. He also made a strong case that virtualization has changed computing as we know it, moving us from a component oriented architecture to one of layers, then on to business. He indicated that non-traditional vendors, such as Amazon and Google, will be providing cloud services. He stated that although they are able to provide economies of scale for small and medium businesses, they do not have the quality of service management disciplines that internal companies enjoy. Ultimately he sees these merging.

For more information on his presentation, visit Rich Miller’s take from Data Center Knowledge.

The second presentation covered data center architecture of the future and was presented by Donna Scott and Paul McGucken. They cover such areas as resiliency, location, and management.  Again, they looked at strategy more as an architecture within which we need to operate. I thought it was a great presentation.

The final morning session was delivered by world renowned author Jason Jennings. He discussed the four traits of the best performing business leaders. It was a great presentation and revealed some surprising (to me) results. The four traits are:

• Turning what they do into a cause
• Let go
• Get everyone in the organization to think and act like owners
• Great leaders are stewards

After listening to him speak, I need to buy his books. He has some valuable information to share.

More to come Later.

Ron