This week is Interop Las Vegas 2010, arguably the largest industry conference in North America targeting IT professionals. While the event has its roots in networking, today’s Interop has 13 tracks ranging from cloud computing and virtualization, to mobility and video conferencing, to governance, risk, and compliance. I’ve had the pleasure of chairing the data center and green IT tracks at the last three Interop Las Vegas and New York events.

Don’t have the opportunity to be at Interop in person? Forrester has you covered…

Fellow Forrester analyst, Rachel Dines, and I are onsite at Interop and we will be posting the key takeaways for IT Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) professionals here on Forrester’s I&O blog. We encourage you to check the blog over the next few days for Forrester’s insights on the following data center and green IT sessions:

  • The data center track will lead with “Bridging The C-Suite Gap: How To Build The Business Case For Data Center Transformation” to help all IT professionals — not just leadership — demonstrate value, justify spend, and communicate successes of their data center investments. From there we’ll discuss emerging technologies and processes to optimize your data center, starting with “Virtualization And Automation: How Dynamic Is Your Data Center?” followed by “Planning For Server, Storage, And Network Convergence.” The data center track will close with “How Data Center Managers Should Evaluate The Cloud And Cloud-Like Efficiencies” to help data center managers use this new form of data center ownership, budgeting and provisioning to their advantage.
  • The green IT track will get started with a session from yours truly on “The Evolution Of Green IT: Projects That Cut Cost, Avoid Risk, And Grow Revenues” to help IT professionals plan for green IT’s current and future state backed up with a number of real-life examples. From there, “Delivering Business Value With A Comprehensive Green Data Center Framework” will help IT professionals start their journey to a greener data center by identifying projects across their server, storage, network, and facility environment. Next we’ll examine a real-life example of green IT in action with a “Case Study: How Greening IT Infrastructure Saved The State Of California $44M” and then close with “Cutting Costs With PC Power Management: Approaches, Pitfalls, And Best Practices.”