June 25, 2007 | Posted By : WHIR TV at 7:45 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (0)

LT Pact 2007 - Day 2

Layered Technologies' second annual partner event LT Pact 2007 continued on Friday with a full day of sessions and panels furthering the dialogue on the advantages of grid and utility computing.

The day started off with a session by Rob Cameron from Microsoft about enhancing Web experiences with ASP.NET, Ajax and IIS 7 where he covered some of the key enhancements introduced in IIS 7.0 including extensible, modular architecture, integrated application stack, delegated management tools and comprehensive diagnostic support.

Jonah Stein from Alchemist Media continued the day with his session titled, "User Centric Selling: Data Mining Your Web site Leads to Bigger Profits," where he guided attendees through real-life Web projects and showed them the steps in a user-centric selling process.

The next session, which seemed to be one of the more anticipated ones of the day, was, "Understanding Grid and Utility Computing," where Bert Armijo from 3Tera reviewed the rapid advancements in grid and utility computing and how its creating new opportunities for hosting, SaaS, Web 2.0 and managed service providers. He also presented a compelling discussion focused on technology directions and how providers could capitalize on utility computing.

Following Bert's talk was a related panel discussion titled, "How You Need to be Involved in Grid Computing," where Isabel Wang from IsabelWang.com and Layered Technologies experts Jeremy Suo-Anttila, Michael Platner and Steve White expanded on the information and concepts presented by Bert.

Michael Platner, CEO of Layered Technologies shared experiences on how embracing utility computing has impacted his company and discussed the idea that hardware has become almost irrelevant with utility computing while giving users substantially more control. Utility computing also offers more automation, high availability and overall more reliability than ever before, says Michael. He also said that although he and the company believed that mostly Web 2.0 companies and application providers would be interested in its virtual private data center, he has seen tremendous unanticipated interest from the IT industry and some Fortune 100 companies.

In the next panel, titled "Is your Business Web 2.0 Ready? Web 3.0 Ready?" Isabel Wang led a discussion with Mike Majarov from Savvis, Mark Spilotro from iKnowWare.com and Todd Abrams from Layered Technologies on the idea that new Web 2.0 technologies have made it easier to implement powerful Web services, changing the way people and businesses work together, and offered tips on how attendees could prepare their businesses to take advantage of these technologies.

Isabel shared her insight by advising companies to offer more than just infrastructure to their customers because reliable hosting will not only be expected, but it'll be taken for granted, meaning that it'll be the services that will differentiate companies from their competition and what will matter to customers in the end.

Tommy Toles from AMD presented the next session about the future of computing and discussed AMD's strategy for serving the enterprise server market over the next several years. Tommy gave an overview of key technologies and shared a sneak peak of AMD's upcoming quad-core X86 processor.

Another anticipated presentation was William Toll's panel titled, "Tap the Marketing Power of SEO, Blogs and Other Techniques," where Matt Mullenweg from WordPress, Jonah Stein from Alchemist Media, Ben Fisher from TechPad Agency and Howard Oliver from What IF What Next shared strategies on how to utilize blogs, social networking sites and SEO to market one's business and maximize results through the Internet.

The final panel was titled, "Strategies for Mitigating Top Security Threats in 2007," where representatives from Savvis, Netarus, Layered Technologies, StrongMail and Vyatta shared tips on how to prepare for and overcome cutting-edge security threats. The event ended with a casual dinner gala featuring entertainment from attendees (like poetry reading, telling jokes, magic card tricks and all those strange little skills entrepreneurs have the ability to pull out of their sleeves on a whim) and of course the Texas Hold'em Tournament.

Be sure to check out video interviews from the event in the following weeks starting with a one-on-one with Michael Platner, CEO of Layered Technologies in the next couple of days.