March 29, 2010

Day 1 Summary

8:30 a.m.  Seventy something degrees and sunshine greeted IMF members attending the “Designing and Running IT” forum  in San Antonio, Texas.  After a round of introductions in the primary meeting area at the McDermott House on the USAA campus, members indicated that their organizations were looking to further consolidate their data centers through virtualization efforts. In addition members shared trends of their IT budget, some indicating that it was dependent on its business, while others indicated flat to nonexistent growth.

9:00 Rick Schlitt, Senior Vice Presidnet of IT Operations, began the morning by introducing the USAA organization and discussing the strategy that enabled them to operate with low cost and high quality. Schlitt summarized the organization’s strengths which include: a corporate environment that enables IT to be successful, ability to invest, automation implementation, and quality focus- among many other strong points.

10:30 Dale Seavey, Director of Architecture, Design and Engineering at Cisco Systems, Inc. presented technologies and trends to enable the future workforce. With the “internet generation,” whose definitions of privacy and security are seemingly lenient in comparison to prior views that existed, organizations will have to find new ways to engage their employees. Among the trends that Seavey indicated include the idea that operating systems will be browser based and applications will move to the cloud.

12:30  After a fulfilling lunch, members were taken on a brief tour of the USAA facilities beginning with a brief history of the McDermott house. The group then toured a part of the 5 million square feet grounds that gave them the opportunity to get a brief glimpse into the various pieces that make up the facilities’ fairly large mosaic.

2:15 John Holt finished the last of the afternoon’s scheduled presentations by discussing the concept of the shared nothing computing cluster. He offered details about the programming model and indicated the necessary steps of completion. The shared nothing cluster of commodity is inexpensive platforms. However, it is difficult to use. The ECL language enables the programmer to offer a solution in an abstract manner that is functional and independent of the parallel and distributed aspects of the platform.   

3:15 Attending members leveraged peer knowledge through discussion of top-of-mind issues prompted by the day’s sessions. Members engaged in active conversation and offered their points of view about their organizaitons’ practices that were completed in the past. 

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