Keynote Abstracts

Technocon 2010 was proud to feature the following keynote presentations.

Building a Smarter Planet, One City at a Time
Chris Pratt, IBM Canada

As the economy recovers, there is an opportunity to drive changes that will have a lasting impact on industries, processes, workforces and society. Technological advances in computational power, pervasive technologies, data analytics and telecommunications are enabling cities to digitize and connect systems to analyze, model and attempt to optimize the city as a holistic system.

More than ever before Governments, Educational Institutions and Businesses need to work together to build a world class infrastructure that ensures future success for the individual business, the cities and the countries worldwide.

Today it is not a question as to whether the technology to build a smarter planet is real, it's about knowing where to start. IBM Strategic Initiatives Executive, Chris Pratt, will discuss in his keynote the city as a system - indeed, a complex system of systems - from transportation, to energy, to healthcare, to education, to security, to food and water and beyond. Chris will share some real examples of what world class organizations are doing locally to create effective and efficient systems that will make them successful in delivering on its goals and adding to our smarter planet.

Building a World Class Culture
Greg Zeschuk, BioWare

Technical and development organizations all over the world are facing trying times via a combination of increased global competition and decreasing budgets. How do you weather the storm and end up stronger, more agile and better positioned than your competitors? You need to focus internally on maximizing not only the potential of your people via training and education, but also on engaging them at unprecedented levels. Greg Zeschuk will talk about the success and failures of building the high performance culture at BioWare, a globally respected video game developer, that has consistently top quality, award-winning games.

IT Transformation Through Deploying Enterprise Compute Clouds
Ronnie Scott, Cisco

This session will provide a current and real world look into the state of Enterprise Compute Clouds, and how they can be used to provide cost-effective, scalable and flexible compute environments for use throughout large Enterprises.

While Internet based cloud computing offers significant value for select application sets, large enterprises stand to gain significant benefits from building their own private clouds inside their own environment. This would include compute, network, and storage resources, that can be virtualized to provide secure, segmented, application environments for departmental use throughout the organization.

The session will discuss the differences between private and public clouds, the benefits of private clouds to the organization, security functions inside private clouds, and models to build and deploy them. Ronnie will also look at some of the upcoming capabilities which will allow for the creation of virtual data centres, where private clouds will be able to span between Data Centres in different locations.

Open Government: Engaging Individuals, Empowering Business and Driving Efficiency
John Weigelt, Microsoft

Governments around the world are transforming how they deliver services to individuals and businesses, enabling positive and meaningful relationships with their constituents. This transformation is not only occurring on the public facing side of the government; it is also occurring inside governments as departments and ministries work more collaboratively. Working with both community participants and industry partners, governments across Canada are playing a leading role in building out solutions using open data, open standards and open collaboration. Join John Weigelt as he discusses leading examples of open government, the technologies that support it and its impact on organizations.

Open Government and Citizens: Transparency, Trust and Collaboration
Mack D. Male

There's a lot of buzz around the concept of "open" lately; open source, open data, open standards, open government and the list goes on.

The web has dramatically altered many facets of our lives, including the relationship between government and citizens. In the age of participation, we need government and citizens to work together. We face problems that cannot be solved by a single person or organization, and we're always forced to do more with less. Open government and open data can help by facilitating transparency, trust and collaboration.

But being open is about more than just data, tools and technologies. It's a mindset, a culture. This session will explore what is meant by the term "open", how it has come to be applied to government, why it's important, and where it's going.

Transformation: Subscriber Convergence
Ibrahim Gedeon

Networked commerce and applications have proliferated our lives today. People have multiple identities for various transactions and social networking. The desire for a single sign-on is barely scratching the surface and the future is in networked identities. A high level view of what TELUS plans will be shared with the audience. The reality that all enterprises are networked service providers through the web, devices, TV and other mediums will be highlighted. Identity peering is the way of future.