News
IT & Security Forum 2009 Results
IT & Security Forum 2009, the largest in the Volga Region, has finished recently in Kazan. It is traditionally organized by ICL-KME CS. The conference is held in Kazan on the annual basis and encompasses more and more participants from various regions of Russia.
Press Conference
«The results are beyond our expectations,» said Aidar Guzairov, Director of System Technologies Centre, ICL-KME CS. «In spite of the current economic downturn, the value of the event is very high: the audience of the forum has nearly doubled, compared to the last year. This year more than 180 representatives of the largest Russian companies and over 50 vendor representatives have taken part in it.»
IT & Security Forum traditionally arouses great interest of enterprises from different economic sectors. Review of its audience during the last years showed that 31% represent energy sector, 23% — finance sector, 20% — industrial enterprises, 8% — telecom, 15% — government bodies and 3% — large trade networks.
Opening and main arrangements
Nikolai Nikiforov, Director of Information Technology Centre of the Republic of Tatarstan. Opening of the plenary session
The highly topical conference programme provided a comprehensive information about business optimization, support and development with the help of IT. Plenary session was opened by Nikolai Nikiforov, Director of Information Technology Centre of the Republic of Tatarstan, who mentioned impressive number of the leading IT vendors attending the forum and relevance of presented solutions and technologies.
Then representatives of ICL-KME CS and Citrix Systems took the floor. (Citrix Systems was the Platinum sponsor of the conference.)
Sergey Kuznetsov, head of Citrix Systems in Russia & CIS
«The conference features favourable business climate that encourages an open dialogue between the participants and establishing of business contacts,» said Sergey Kuznetsov, head of Citrix Systems in Russia & CIS, greeting the audience. «It is high competence and skills of the speakers and professionalism of the ICL-KME CS experts that allowed it. As we mentioned before, in terms of business it is probably one of the most efficient regional meeting which our company recently took part in.»
Demo zone
The conference included a number of section tracks, round table and expert class where the participants could personally work with the offered solutions and vendors’ representatives. In the hall at KORSTON conference centre ICL-KME CS organized a large showcase area where its experts represented a wide range of solutions mentioned by the speakers at the conference.
«We take part in IT & Security Forum for the third time and are eager to go on with it in future. I’d like to emphasize that IT & Security Forum year by year gathers steam and becomes more and more meaningful for IT market,» said Alexander Rozhkov, Symantec account manager.
IT & Security Forum 2009 was attended by many people renowned in IT community. The first speaker at the plenary session was Fabian Kienle, Business Development Manager at Citrix Systems — a guru in virtualization technologies and the author of two bestsellers: Citrix Security and Friends of Access. Maxim Kazak, Chief Editor of CNews, informed the participants of the forum about the current IT situation around the world and in Russia, and about future trends. Sessions devoted to information security and to finance were attended by Alexey Lukatsky, a recognized information security expert at Cisco, and Pavel Teplov, Cisco Unified Communications.
Besides, representatives of Gazprom and its affiliated companies annually take part in the conference, too. Traditionally they had a separate workshop. The discussions dealt with information security within Gazprom and aroused keen interest among the affiliates.
New names
IT & Security Forum introduces new software/hardware manufacturers each time it takes place. This year is not an exception to the rule. TANDBERG, Imperva, АМР and Riverbed Technology — these are new entrants to the forum.
«This is an excellent experience, very interesting and effective. Lots of companies have difficulties today and try to retain their achievements, others develop their own paths to leadership positions. All of them are looking for the most up-to-date solutions enabling flexible and low-cost update of existing information infrastructure to manage business process changes. We are grateful to ICL-KME CS for the possibility of participation and meeting representatives of the largest corporations of Tatarstan and Russia,» said Rustam Khametov, Regional Sales Manager for Russia & CIS, Riverbed Technology.
Videoconferencing
This year, organizers of the forum have decided to make special reference to direct face-to-face communication of participants, and not only expand demonstration zone where one could see the use of all innovations offered, but arrange round tables and expert classes to make available communication between the participants and vendors.
Round table organized with the assistance of TANDBERG
A vivid example of such communication was a round table organized with the assistance of TANDBERG, a leading global provider of high-definition video conferencing solutions. Real time telepresence of the Head of a large enterprise located in Moscow allowed him to report about their experience in use of VCS in day-to-day work and to answer the questions.
«The forum provided an excellent site for demonstration of our solutions and for meeting with would-be customers,» comments Irina Sukhova, Channel Sales Manager for Russia, CIS and Baltics, TANDBERG. «Going into Tatarstan market was extremely important for our company. The objective of the forum was discussion of such topical issues as optimization of IT budgets, development of business with the help of information technologies and improvement of IT projects efficiency. We managed to blend splendidly into conference programme, since our technologies do help enterprises solve their problems.»
Guests of the forum enjoyed everyday entertainment program: river trips along the Volga, aircraft show, fireworks etc. Platinum, Gold and Silver sponsors of IT & Security Forum were respectively Citrix Systems, Microsoft and Symantec. The event was held with the support of world IT leaders such as EMC, VMware, НР, Check Point, Oracle, АРС, Cisco, Websense, IBM, InfoWatch, TANDBERG, Riverbed Technology, AMP. Internet link was provided by Beeline Business.
Among media and e-media partners were CNews, CIO, The Business Quarter magazine, Vremia i Dengi, Gde Dengi newspapers, Tatcenter.ru, Business Online and Еtatar, mskIT, spbIT, nnIT.
