State of Alaska IT Transformation

  Presented by Bill Smith • Chief Information Officer, State of Alaska

The State of Alaska is currently engaged in centralization of services and transforming the structure of Information Technology delivery. This presentation will provide insight into the driving factors of transformation, a description of the current state, as well as an overview of future plans.

Bill Smith began his current role as State of Alaska Chief Information Officer in November 2019. In this position, he is responsible for the direction of the Office of information Technology, managing all information technology services and related resources within the executive branch of the State, and providing strategic oversight of the State enterprise systems and infrastructure.

Bill has over 28 years of experience leading teams of all sizes in both the public and private sectors. During his successful career in the United States Army, he was a lead participant in several high-level Headquarters, Department of the Army projects involving operational forecasting, and national force structure. Additionally, he was called upon to direct combat military operations and develop an innovative aviation organization and training program to meet critical Army intelligence collection requirements.

Bill chose to stay in Alaska after he retired from the Army and entered the private sector with a major Alaska-based broadband and communications provider. Over the course of several years, he served in senior product, project and program management roles, covering the spectrum of technology solutions provided to business, consumer, and government agencies in Alaska. In his role as the Senior Manager of Customer Support, Bill redesigned the company’s service assurance manager program to provide improved and deeply engaged customer support to strategic partners.

Bill and his wife Jo have three children and have resided in Alaska for over 13 years.

Find Your Balance in the Cloud

  Presented by Quest Software

Feel like you’re performing a high-wire balancing act in your role as IT Manager or Infrastructure Admin? Performance monitoring and capacity planning can be a real challenge, regardless of your infrastructure design. You’ve got to decide what compute and storage resources are needed and predict when they’ll be needed. You’ve also got to balance the competing priorities of staying within budget and providing acceptable service levels to users. But these days you’re no longer simply managing an on-premises data center, you’ve also got to figure out which workloads to move to the cloud, how best to get them there, and how to manage them in the cloud for the long term.

With all this increased complexity, comes the need for more robust performance monitoring tools to help you manage your hybrid environment and give you the means to resolve issues quickly. Finding the right solution can even help simplify the planning and execution of your cloud migration. Come join Quest to learn more.

SD-WAN Edge Transformation for the Cloud-First Enterprise

  Presented by Silver Peak

As cloud adoption and SD-WAN innovation hastens, global enterprises are transforming how they build and secure wide area networks. Leveraging automation, enterprises can deploy, connect and secure hundreds of sites per week, a feat not possible with a traditional device-centric approach.

During this session, we’ll discuss how the unification of SD-WAN, WAN optimization, routing and security in a single, centrally orchestrated platform:

  • Delivers superior application performance wherever apps are hosted
  • Increases the quality of experience for end users and for IT
  • Simplifies branch WAN edge architecture

Gain Confidence, Skillsets, and Knowledge to Migrate to The Cloud

  Presented by Alaska Communications

This discussion will focus on the methodology and criteria when selecting business applications for migration to public cloud. Topics will include myths debunked, collaborative applications, IT support following transition, and OPEX versus CAPEX. Hear from experts that have helped moved business applications to both public and private cloud instances.

Transforming IT Ops and Network Experiences with AI

  Presented by Juniper Networks

Today’s networks and IT teams are challenged by the soaring numbers of mobile and IoT devices and apps. Learn how data science, AI, and a modern microservices cloud architecture can deliver the agility, scale, and reliability that businesses need to succeed. We are transforming user and IT experiences with an AI-Driven Enterprise through proactive automation and relevant insights while ultimately evolving towards a self-driving network.

In this session, you’ll learn why three of the Fortune 10 companies, along with thousands of other organizations, are AI-driven wired and wireless networking customers, to deliver new services, assure network performance, and streamline help-desk operations.

Deliver Amazing Branch Experiences

  Presented by Aruba

A software-defined wide area network delivers secure connectivity with enterprise-level performance over disparate WAN links and technologies. SD-Branch extends beyond SD-WAN to support all elements of the branch – WAN, WLAN, wired networks and security to address all your IT network connectivity needs. Attend this session to learn how to achieve simplicity at scale and deliver amazing branch experiences all the way to your workers, customers, patients, guests, students, and more.

Leave Legacy Behind and Drive Better Business Outcomes

  Presented by Nutanix

Flexibility and choice have become the cornerstone of long-term decision making for IT leaders, yet the leading legacy hardware manufacturers of the past 20 years have struggled to match that demand. Companies are all too often pushed to lean on one manufacturer’s server, storage, and virtualization products, or commit completely to the public cloud to achieve necessary business agility.

Unshackled by legacy lines of business that have stifled innovation in the datacenter, Nutanix was free to take a different approach. Please join us to learn exactly how they did it, and how their private cloud platform, built from the industry-leading HCI solution, has helped organizations of all sizes deliver positive business outcomes inside data centers – internal or external.

Find Your Balance in the Cloud

  Presented by Quest Software

Feel like you’re performing a high-wire balancing act in your role as IT Manager or Infrastructure Admin? Performance monitoring and capacity planning can be a real challenge regardless of your infrastructure design. You’ve got to decide what compute and storage resources are needed and predict when they’ll be needed. You’ve also got to balance the competing priorities of staying within budget and providing acceptable service levels to users. But these days you’re no longer simply managing an on-premises data center, you’ve also got to figure out which workloads to move to the cloud, how best to get them there and how to manage them in the cloud for the long term.

With all this increased complexity, comes the need for more robust performance monitoring tools to help you manage your hybrid environment and give you the means to resolve issues quickly. Finding the right solution can even help simplify the planning and execution of your cloud migration. Come join Quest to learn more.

Simplifying Container Orchestration

  Presented by IVOXY Consulting & NetApp

Public clouds set a high bar for IT expectations of agility, scale, and services. Regardless of location and infrastructure, teams’ consumption experience with public cloud providers is driving their decisions and spending on IT today. Along with the ability to consume services across a choice of public and private clouds, teams must consolidate enterprise workloads without performance impact, deploying from a private cloud platform with service catalogs. Public clouds automate management and lifecycle, and they simplify how users consume IT.

Attend this presentation to learn how to simplify container orchestration and automation across the hybrid multi-cloud.

SD-WAN Edge Transformation for the Cloud-First Enterprise

  Presented by Silver Peak

As cloud adoption and SD-WAN innovation hastens, global enterprises are transforming how they build and secure wide area networks. Leveraging automation, enterprises can deploy, connect and secure hundreds of sites per week, a feat not possible with a traditional device-centric approach.

During this session, we’ll discuss how the unification of SD-WAN, WAN optimization, routing and security in a single, centrally orchestrated platform:

  • Delivers superior application performance wherever apps are hosted
  • Increases the quality of experience for end users and for IT
  • Simplifies branch WAN edge architecture