This article provides a debrief on our 2016 conferences and a call for speakers for our 2017 conferences. To register your interest in attending our conferences in 2017 please complete this form.

2016 Conference Debrief

September and October this year saw the first ever ITAM Review conferences at USF St. Pete’s, Florida, USA and Twickenham Stadium, London, UK. I would like to send a sincere thank you to our sponsors, speakers, delegates and readers for making them such a success. They were fun to deliver, we had an awesome time meeting everyone and had a blast!

Our first ITAM Review conferences

It was fantastic to put names to faces after so many years for our delegates and speakers, some of which had travelled half way around the world (India, Australia and Japan) to come and visit the conference.

Whilst our speakers, location and format scored well we are of course keen to keep improving and deliver an even better conference experience in 2017.

We collected feedback at the conference itself via feedback forms and also opened our reader survey at the start of October. This has already had over 100 submissions which will shape our content and conference agenda for next year (See ITAM Review reader survey).

Richard Spithoven from b.lay leading a Oracle audit defence role play session with volunteer Colin Simmons.

There has been lots of encouraging feedback (e.g. “Keep doing what you are doing”) but also some constructive feedback on approaches and topics to explore. In particular, the workshops were as popular as ever, but we’ll be working on ways to give these more structure and perhaps make them longer to allow deep discussion and around particular topics. I found some of the workshops seemed to finish just as they were beginning to get started!

UK Conference Video Summary

2016 Speakers

In terms of our speakers:

• For the USA Mike Austin was highest rated on day one and day two, Gillian and Tony, Filipa Preston, Richard Spithoven and Brian Ross were highest scoring on day two.
• For the UK Gillian Leicester had the highest rated plenary session with Danny Begg and Colin Simmons with the highest rated workshops. For day two Guy Tritton and Kylie Fowler were highest rated plenaries.

I particularly enjoyed the session from Brian Ross at Veritas on the vendor’s perspective on audit defence and noticed, with Brian and other’s sessions, the emergence of a new maturity of audit defence, that of audit prevention (See image below). I look forward to digging into this in more detail in 2017.

Another interesting perspective from our US audience, when digging into the results of our 12 box maturity assessments, was that any ITAM maturity is a by-product of ITSM maturity. Again, something I look forward to digging into in 2017.

USA Speakers

USA conference speakers, St. Pete’s Beach, 19th-20th September 2016

UK Speakers

UK conference speakers, Twickenham Rugby Stadium, 4th and 5th October 2016.

All presentations are available on Slideshare here: http://www.slideshare.net/MartinThompson2/presentations

A huge thank you to our 2016 conference sponsors

USA Sponsors:

UK Sponsors:

2017 Call for Speakers – UK, USA & Australia Conferences

Do you have a success story or opinion to share? Do you want to get on your soap box and raise your profile with The ITAM Review audience? We want to hear from worldwide ITAM professionals who want to speak at our conferences in UK, USA and Australia (Note: There is a separate call for speakers form for our Dutch conference here).

Closing date: 28th February 2017 

Dates:

• UK Conference, June 2017
• USA Conference, September 2017
• Australia Conference, November 2017

Call for speakers submission form:

https://itamreview.wufoo.eu/forms/itam-review-annual-conference-speaker-submission/

Guidelines

• ITAM Review readers want to be educated – but also want to hear from other end user professionals who have done it before
• Preference will be given to the sharing of hands-on experience and case studies
• Presentations from consultants, partners, service providers and tool manufacturers are most welcome, but are more likely to be successful if shared with an end user presentation (For example, a shared presentation with your customer)
• Content must be educational, compelling and original.

Our wish list of topics for 2017:

Our wish list is based on reader feedback. This list applies to our conferences, webinars and contributed articles for 2017.  

ITAM in the cloud era

Cloud based topics

• Containing costs for IaaS (Google, Amazon, Microsoft)
• Managing SaaS and subscriptions
• SPLA management
• Virtualization (Identifying candidates, transition, cost management)
• Virtual desktop. Streaming – how to control and optimize

Hardware Asset Management

• Financial accounting, stock keeping assets
• Closing the gap between discovery and inventory
• Desktop inventory, discovery and Hardware asset management basics / fundamentals
• Hardware asset management best practice, datacenter HAM
• Hardware disposal best practice
• Mobile / data / risk reduction, management, optimization mixed ownership environments

Licensing

• BYOL
• How to substitute / work with vendor specific tools e.g. ILMT
• Licensing on any major licensing program / vendor
• Mergers and Acquisitions (For organizations, when a vendor mergers)

Strategic

• Migrating to Windows X
• Document, optimize and automate any ITAM process (e.g. How to optimize and automate the LEAVERS process)
• How ITAM can add value to security
• ITAM policies and how to build, evangelize and enforce
• Migrating to Office 365 / Renewal / Optimization
• Promotion of ITAM internally / help evangelize / spread the word
• Women in ITAM
• Career paths and opportunities in ITAM
• Data Center modernization

Call for speakers submission form:

https://itamreview.wufoo.eu/build/itam-review-annual-conference-speaker-submission/

A final thank you…

Last, but by no means least, thank you to the rock star team Glenn, Karen and Victoria who pulled it all together and who have been a pleasure to work with (Left to right: Myself, Karen, Glenn and Victoria). I look forward to smashing it with you in 2017!