In this opening visionary keynote address, Mr. Smith will discuss the necessary skills that today's IT professionals must have to a) rise through the IT ranks to become an IT executive, b) grow IT and business acumen proficiency required for today's complex business and technology environments, and 3) ensure that actions and thinking is more strategically aligned to meet company missions and increase growth.

Mr. Smith will discuss the state of the CIO profession and talk about key technologies and shifts within the IT industry (social networking, collaboration, cloud computing, wireless technologies, business intelligence, web analytics, the IT governance framework of the future, etc.) that are important to understand and master to stay competitive in today's market. In addition, he'll discuss CEO expectations, highlight common gaps between CEOs and CIOs, and talk about how today's CIOs must be the technology"teacher" for the C-suite (CEO, COO, CFO, CMO).

Mr. Smith will conclude with a discussion on risk-reward, common mistakes CIOs make today in business and what it means to be world-class. At the end of this discussion, Mr. Smith will leave participants with needed information about today's IT industry that some of the best CIOs in the world are leveraging to be cost effective enablers of business and mission growth.

Social media (read Facebook) has entrenched itself across every enterprise with excitement and expectation of great customer insight and exponential revenue growth. More so in the retail industry where the opportune connect with the consumer happens every day. The journey to 1 million likes took more than 18 months, the target 5 million is expected to be achieved over the next 12 months. What does this mean for the enterprise and the CIO. How to manage expectations, insights, and create value.

Business Transformation primarily involves aligning People, Process & Technology to Business Strategy. Businesses may transform structurally to achieve synergy, for example, by implementing a Hub & Spoke architecture. Businesses may transform by altering their partner ecosystem and sourcing, for example by Outsourcing and Shared Services. The objective of such transformation is to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of business objectives. Subsequently, such improvement is translated into a deliverable for the customer and ultimately the end consumer who pays for the product or service.

Business Transformation in essence involves the refinement of the Business Strategy itself. Business can no longer dictate strategy and depend upon process and technology to align to it. By including the potential of the enabling technologies in meeting business objectives, business vision may be altered or enhanced. An example is that Nokia is the world's largest manufacturer of cameras.

In all of the above examples, enhanced consumer experience resulting in the adoption of the change made the transformation for the business successful. The benchmark for measuring Business Transformation, therefore, is increased value to customer along with an enriched experience.

In today's increasingly sophisticated, complex and demanding corporate environment, it is not only important but in fact becoming mandatory for corporates to have a well defined policy and mechanism for Corporate Governance, Risk Mitigation and Compliance. Recent corporate scandals have exposed the basic lack of a systems framework, governance mechanism and the need to focus on systemic improvements and strengthening in built controls. The CIO has to play a very important role in this process by not just technology enabling the process, but working closely with key stakeholders and the CEO to create an IT Landscape which uses a Framework of Risk Assurance. This Keynote session will focus on the various challenges posed by statutory regulations, regulatory authorities and how a CIO can deliver value to the Board and the Organization, ultimately creating a 'Rest Assured - Risk Assured' Framework for GRC !!!

Today's enterprise workforce is technologically advanced but require freedom from any enforced limitations, and the CIO has to enable this. Enterprise mobility helps organization enable applications over multiple mobile devices without compro-mising security needs. Adding the right blend of seamless interface with office LAN can provide the same experience they get in the office across multiple mobile devices.

With the explosion of power consumption in Data Centers, the new number one global issue for CIO's is achieving Energy Efficiency, its monitoring, conservation and management. What can be measured can be controlled is the Mantra. What can be monitored can be optimized. By understanding how energy efficiency monitoring and management solutions, as part of Critical Space Management covering both the IT and Utilities be harnessed, IT managers can effectively manage incremental business growth, scalable infrastructure requirements, power utilization, capacity and change management, thereby be well able to balance the thin line between the pace of business growth and the impact of its carbon footprint on the environment. Join Amit Verma in this inspirational talk as he takes you through how to demystify the challenges faced by CIO's today.

CIOs Perceive IT's Role as increasingly focusing on improving business functions. "Improve end-user/workforce productivity" & "Provide Innovative new market offerings or business practices" are among the top five expected IT contributions to the organizations. "By 2015, more CIOs will be fired for poorly supporting personal productivity than for inefficient operations. " Source: Gartner Organizations must adapt to the changes taking place in the world. It needs to disrupt a little the status quo of its organizational culture to start making it more dynamic, inquisitive and reforming. The objective is to learn something and show there is room for innovation. In this thought provoking keynote, listen to Sanjay Singh as he elaborates on the three key constituents in enterprises, the areas of innovation that will increase end-user productivity and user experience and last but not the least, guidance on the choice between facilitation and innovation to enable profitable revenue.

Enterprises are increasingly relying on the Internet to drive business agility, speed products and solutions to market and collaborate efficiently with key stakeholders such as partners, suppliers, employees and customers. However the inherent performance, reliability and security concerns surrounding the Internet inhibit companies from realizing the full potential of their Web applications and web sites. Learn best practices to overcome these problems cost effectively with an enterprise class managed service backed by an SLA. Also see how the Internet can be leveraged to support cloud initiatives and support remote access strategies.

Security intelligence matters most. The talk touches upon virtualization, cloud computing, the threat landscape, IT consumerization, consolidation & complexity, data security and loss, Web 2.0 & social media, governance, risk & compliance (GRC), cost reduction and green IT.

Advancing technologies and their swift adoption are upending traditional business models. Senior executives need to think strategically about how to prepare their organizations for the challenging new environment. The increasing strategic nature of the network, the large correlation between collaboration and productivity, the making of the Internet much beyond computing devices, getting anything as a service are some of the few trends that are shaping the CIO's top consideration list.

CIOs and IT leaders the world over are streamlining and improving their customer experience in a bid to maintain a consistent user experience across all communication channels. From a business perspective, the era of IT consumerization has meant that great experiences realized by consumer brands is forcing CIO departments to replicate the same with customers interfacing with their enterprise. In the end analysis, customers must find all interaction with a company intuitive, user-friendly and efficient. Understand best practice approaches your peers are adopting in their enterprises to differentiate themselves, forge greater loyalty and build more profitable and sustainable relationships. It's an approach that not only makes sense, but also saves dollars!

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has grown tremendously since its inception in 2006 and is now the underlying infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. Companies of all sizes, across all industries have been using AWS's infrastructure services to power their Web sites and workflows - everything from SaaS applications to social networking sites. Attend this session to find ways to cut fixed infrastructure costs while increasing reliability and scalability. Hear about the latest services and features from Amazon Web Services and learn how to integrate them into your business.

Understand how 'Your Cloud' will address your needs as opposed to a one cloud-fits-all approach. At the end of the talk, you will understand why cloud computing must align to your business & approach to IT, leverage existing IT investment & be flexible enough to securely use both on and off premise resources.

In this inspiring keynote address, CtrlS Datacenter's CIO, Anil Nama, takes on the speculation and hype surrounding and driving cloud related conversations in rooms full of CIO's today. His talk will cut through the hype and demonstrate clear and tangible actions and deliverables that today's CIO's can turn into business-oriented results. This keynote will delve into the growing need of common concepts such as Just-In-Time and Pay as you grow models, as well as evolving offerings around "DR as a Service", to provide a versatile platform for customers.