The first day kicked off quite early with Gartner presenting top 10 major IT trends and then they had several individual sessions.   Some notes on Big Picture trends:

1. Physical Infrastructure management is becoming very critical.  One stat shared was that one data center could consume many time more  energy than 100 offices that depend on those data center application and services.

2. Compute Fabrics are starting to emerge in the enterprise and it is going to accelerate.  Compute fabrics are also known as Cisco UCS and HP
Converged Infrastructure and refer to the ability for the enterprise to seamlessly add and expand compute capacity that comes pre-integrated with server, storage and networking elements.  Our perspective has been ”Converged Management for Converged Infrastructure”.  If  infrastructure is converging, why shouldn’t management.

3.  Hybrid clouds are going to be the norm.  Hybrid clouds are going to be driven more by need to focus core capabilities within the firewalls and
outsourcing non-essential applications.  This is differentiated than enterprises using hybrid clouds purely for bursting capacity.

4.  Challenges in cloud computing are going to be around integration and security.  Specifically around integration they mentioned that integration costs could get so high that the gains from cloud could often be lost in the integration costs.

Would love to hear your thoughts.