For those who couldn't attend the event, below we've provided a recap of the following IT Connection breakout session topics: Matt Mills's How to Advance Your Career through Business Networking with AITP, Travis Krischke's Track – Manage – Secure with Absolute Software, Jim Beggans' HP Converged Storage: A Vision for Storage Simplicity with HP, Richard Murray's Bringing Clarity to the Cloud of Carrier Sales, Ashley Dreier's Project Prioritization and Setting Customer Development Expectations You Can Meet with HealthEquity, and Darren Wesemann and Jeff Philips' Big Data at UofU with the University of Utah.
Matt Mills is currently the IT Systems Administrator with Ensign Engineering, and the President of the AITP – Utah Chapter. As the lead representative of the newly formed chapter, Matt explained that AITP is the leading worldwide society of professionals in information technology. The key to surviving and thriving in the IT field is to network or make friends. This is reinforced with a statistic provided by ABC News, “80% of jobs are found through networking”. Joining the AITP gives IT professionals the opportunity to network; engage the collective with issues they are facing and mentoring; and scout for up and coming talent currently in the college pool of IT study.
Travis has several years in the technology security industry. Most recently he is representing Absolute Software as a Senior Partner Executive, and presented at IT Connection. Travis started off by offering a couple of quick slides that show the growth Absolute has undergone since its inception in 1993, along with its OEM persistence with almost every manufacture in the industry. He stressed the advantage of having OEM persistence with manufactures, by explaining that with Absolute on the motherboard of a machine, hackers and thieves are unable to wipe a computer or replace pieces of hardware to overcome their security. Absolute can do everything from tracking, securing, and wiping a device upon command.
Jim has over twenty years in the IT industry, the bulk of which is with HP, where he is currently a 3PAR Category Manager with HP storage. Jim started his presentation with a slide that talked about how the world of storage is changing and accelerating at a rapid rate. With the growth of technology and tools, industry storage requirements are trending off the charts. He emphasized that system-based storage data isn’t what is growing, but rather the explosion of unstructured data. HP offers three products and one management tool to make sure companies can find something tailored to their environment: HP 3Par StoreServ, HP StoreVirtual VSA, HP StoreOnce Backup, and HP OneView Converged Management.
Richard has been the President and CEO of CarrierSales for the last thirteen years, and has spent most of his career in the telecommunications side of the IT industry. Richard started off by talking about some of the basics behind CarrierSales. Founded in 2001, CarrierSales offers the best of the breed in cloud, contact center, network, and mobility. They represent 200+ providers, which helps them know and understand the industry better than anyone. Richard stressed that customers don’t always get what they need or want from a solution because the solutions can be confusing and difficult to sort though. His goal, through CarrierSales, is to offer organizations simplified cloud computing.
Ashley Dreier has spent the last couple of years as the CTO of HealthEquity, and has worked for companies like GE and Boeing. Ashley discussed how to foster an outcome-focused organization through both initiating priortization based on value, and prioritizing initiative-delivery based on value. Once you have a prioritized list of planned initiatives, you need to determine where to “draw the line” and revisit these initiatives monthly. The chance of success increase once you master the ability to break down work into manageable, controllable chunks, and making sure to complete small complete parts on a daily basis. Sometimes you need to reduce or sacrifice portions of your plans if time and money are fixed points.
Jeff Phillips is currently the Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and the Director of the Data Management and Analysis Track with the University of Utah. Jeff presented alongside Darren Wesemann on the topic of Big Data at the UofU. Discussion centered on working with the scientific paradigm, and how using the modern data science model can lead to a conclusion where crossover between needs, requirements and information occur.
We would like to thank the many individuals who participated in the breakout sessions, and encourage you to look for the second blog post in this series of two.