Ford's keynote will address challenges organizations face when moving from dedicated environments to virtual ones and how to work with business users to gain the greatest benefit from virtualization technology. Ford will also join a panel on September 24 focused on successful migrations to virtualized environments.

The full agenda features strong end user voices throughout the Case Studies Track where IT experts representing AT&T, Merrill Lynch, the City of Richmond, Time Warner, Credit Suisse, Lessard Group, Apache, US Foodservice, Clarian Health Partners and Pennsylvania office of the attorney general will share their virtualization experiences, challenges and results. The Deep-Dive Technical Track will discuss what executives need to know to build a strategy, migrate to virtual systems, monitor VMs and scale a virtual infrastructure.

Ford was selected to keynote because he led USi's effort to move to a virtualized environment, which resulted in USiPinnacle, a virtual infrastructure that manages the workload between processors, storage, memory and networks to cost-effectively meet fluctuations on-demand. Many of USi's service offerings today run on USiPinnacle, saving clients money and providing them scalable infrastructure to meet peak demands of their businesses.

USi announced last week that it has partnered with collaborative monitoring solutions firm Webmetrics to jointly deliver an e-commerce performance analysis service to clients.