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Did you ever think you would get the chance to see Carrie Underwood, Peyton Manning or even Bill Clinton in person? Well, you’re in luck as they will be at respective IT conferences during March. Find out if can go see them live!

1. The SharePoint Technology Conference (March 3-6, San Francisco, California)

2. IBM Pulse 2013 (March 3-6, Las Vegas, Nevada)

3. HIMSS13 (March 3-7, New Orleans, Louisiana)

4. Disrupting Dublin (March 4, Dublin, Ireland)

5. TechMentor Conference (March 4-8, Orlando, Florida)

6. Disrupting London (March 5, London, England)

7. Disrupting Amsterdam (March 6, Amsterdam, Netherlands)

8. Disrupting Berlin (March 7, Berlin, Germany)

9. XChange Solution Provider 2013 (March 10-12, Orlando, Florida)

10. TechTarget: The Consumerization of IT (March 12, Seattle, Washington)

11. TechTarget: The new rules of backup and data protection (March 14, Los Angeles, California)

12. Gartner CIO Leadership Forum (March 17-19, Huntington Beach, California)

13. Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit (March 18-20, Grapevine, Texas)

14. Gartner Master Data Management Summit (March 20-22, Grapevine, Texas)

15. TechTarget: CW500 Club (March 20, London, England)

16. TechFuse 2013 (March 21, Minneapolis, Minnesota)

17. TechTarget: Desktop Virtualization 2013 (March 21, Tampa, Florida)

18. IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering IC2E 2013 (March 25-28, San Francisco, California)

19. TechTarget: Desktop Virtualization 2013 (March 28, Phoenix, Arizona)

We’ll be sharing IT events each month here on the Enterprise IT Watch blog. Got an event to add to our list? Let us know via Twitter (@ITKE) or email. Going to one of these events? Share your takeaways (and photos) with us!

Disclaimer: All videos presented in the “YouTube IT Video of the Week” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com community managers and staff for entertainment purposes only. They are not sponsored or influenced by outside sources.

Event image via Shutterstock

Dreaming of a trip to California or Florida to start off the New Year? Well, you’re in luck as several high-profile IT events will be hosted there. Make sure to check out these great conferences!

1. NMX 2013 New Media Expo (January 6-8, Las Vegas, Nevada)

2. MediaX 2013 (January 8, Stanford, California)

3. 2013 International CES (January 8-11, Las Vegas, Nevada)

4. The Intersection (January 19, Mountain View, California)

5. Renaissance: The iOS App Makers’ Conference (January 21-23, San Francisco, California)

6. IBM Connect 2013 (January 27-31, Orlando, Florida)

7. FETC 2013 (January 28-31, Orlando, Florida)

8. Customer Loyalty Marketing Summit (January 28-30, Orlando, Florida)

9. DistribuTECH (January 29-31, San Diego, California)

10. Macworld/iWorld 2013 (January 31-February 2, San Francisco, California)

We’ll be sharing IT events each month here on the Enterprise IT Watch blog. Got an event to add to our list? Let us know via Twitter (@ITKE) or email. Going to one of these events? Share your takeaways (and photos) with us!

Check out Ron Miller’s post to see which platform was the big winner on Black Friday.

IBM Holiday Benchmark Infographic BF2012

Mainframe image via Shutterstock

On September 5, 1980, the last IBM 7030 ‘Stretch’ mainframe was decommissioned at Brigham Young University. The stretch was known as the first IBM computer to use transistors instead of vacuum tubes and was the world’s fastest computer from 1961-1964.

Each Tuesday, the ITKE team will take you back in time, as we take a look at the events that have changed technology history. Have a tip for us? Email mtidmarsh@techtarget.com or find us on Twitter (@ITKE).

Disclaimer: All posts presented in the “This week in tech history” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com community managers and staff for entertainment purposes only. They are not sponsored or influenced by outside sources.

From: OnlineColleges.net

Most of that criticism pales in comparison, however, to the bad blood that apparently flowed between Gartner and IBM in the 80s, as recounted by now-departed Gartner founder Gideon Gartner.

A Sordid tale in Three+ Parts

The early giant of IT advisory has apparently decided to air grievances from early on in his company’s history, which has provided for some fascinating inside-baseball in what always proves to be a controversial field. For starters, a lot of IT professionals are fairly skeptical of how unbiased and accurate analyst firms can be: Many of the smaller shops, for instance, write up sponsored white papers outlining strategies that align (or even rely on) the sponsoring vendor’s technology. In essence, technically useful (hopefully) advertorial.

The largest firms avoid this pay-to-play practice, but much of their income comes from “advising” the tech giants on how to build out their products, while at the same time advising purchasers on what technology is gaining an edge. Do payments from one end influence recommendations on the other? It’s doubtful, but an appearance of conflicts of interest clouds the public perception.

To complicate things further, it’s not uncommon for individuals to jump from being employed by a vendor, an analyst firm, and a trade publication, depending on their qualifications and interests, meaning the person advising you on what wireless networking equipment to buy might have used to work for the vendor they’re now recommending – or even worse, might be eyeing a job there the next opportunity they get.

Gideon, however, faced an entirely different problem: He was formerly an executive at IBM, then the 800-lb. IT gorilla, and now his former company was stomping mad, trying to clampdown on roadmap leaks while worried that competitors had an “inside man” leaking information.

Gideon’s recounting of the drama reads like a corporate espionage spy novel: Illicit “Top Secret” notes stapled to papers, codenames, vague legal threats:

On September 20 another IBM executive, Don Otis, called me. He said IBM was watching O.A. “like a hawk”, and we had to watch our step as well! Don also criticized one of our recent client communications “suggesting” certain specifics of IBM’s build plan and its backlog. I didn’t know what Don was talking about, and responded that he must know that leaks from IBM salespeople were rampant, often “shooting their mouths off to IBM’s large accounts”.

The accusations, insinuations, and counter-proposals have spanned three posts (so far), and provide an interesting look into how IBM wielded its power at its height. Read the full series and let me know what you think.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

• 10 racks of 90 Power750 servers
• 2,880 cores in Watson’s system
• 15 terabytes of RAM
• Equivalent of about 6,000 high-end home PCs

In addition to the enviable hardware setup, Watson’s software included the ability to understand language, making it possible for it to compete in the game show. Ferrucci’s team of two dozen wrote a mixture of algorithms in an attempt to emulate the human brain. To aid the supercomputer in recognizing letters of the alphabet, IBM input millions of images to allow Watson to determine recurring qualities in order to recognize the form of a letter it hadn’t yet seen.

Because Watson couldn’t be connected to the Internet during the game, Ferrucci’s team input information from The World Book Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.org, the Internet Movies Database, a large portion of the New York Times archives, and the Bible. The software is also capable of synthesizing data, or machine learning: With each question Watson gets correct, it is able to gather the commonalities amongst correct responses and improve its game.

No reason to panic, though. IBM’s Ferrucci assures the public that Watson is not the first step toward a realization of iRobot. If it is, however, we still have Asimov’s three laws to protect us:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

The requirement for devices to access the desktop? If your device is capable of connecting to the server via a browser, you’re in. VDI, IT’s latest buzz acronym, appears to be stumping enterprises big and small. Aimed at companies from 100 to 1,000 end users, IBM’s virtual desktop offering provides VDI without the complexities SMBs can’t afford to navigate for just $150 per user, per year. The service is available through IBM’s approximately 100 resellers and integrators around the world.

Not quite as simple as Kaviza’s VDI-in-a-box offering, IBM’s virtual desktop requires configuration, design, and installation. The VDI package runs on IBM System X server running Suse Linux and VERDE, altogether with the capacity for up to 200 desktops on a server.

The offering is exciting for the desktop virtualization market for a couple reasons. IBM isn’t really known for its partnership with SMBs, save perhaps Lotus Foundations – a hardware and software solution that provides SMBs with collaboration tools such as email. Not only is IBM’s catering to SMBs a plus, but its incorporation of outside software and resellers gives good reason to believe the market will be opened up a bit more. As Bridget Botelho of SearchVirtualDesktop.com observed, many companies are afraid to invest in virtualizing desktops through a smaller company for fear they’ll be bought out or, worse, go under. With leading IT companies such as IBM stepping into the ring with more specific and focused offerings, perhaps 2011 may actually live up to some of its potential as the year of desktop virtualization.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

With public customers like Polycom reducing storage needs upwards of 60% on everything from disaster recovery backups to Oracle databases, it’s no surprise IBM took notice, offering Storewize’s STN-6000p series through its business partner program.

Organizations could certainly use any opportunity to cut down on storage demands: While costs per gigabyte continue to drop, facilities costs for data centers remain high and the amount of data that needs to be stored has increased six-fold in the past four years with no signs of slowing.

Are we seeing the beginnings of a storage compression war, just as we saw a storage deduplication war start three years ago? Quite possibly: The Register reports that Storewize competitor Exar will likely get a boost as other storage vendors look to beef up their own optimization offerings. If war is imminent, vendors and users alike might take Arun Taneja’s advice from last time around, when he warned that while the need was very real, results and benefits from the current technology need to be fully vetted:

So, be prepared to see a barrage of data coming your way. I am suggesting to the vendor community that they run their products using a common dataset to identify the differences in approaches. I think you should insist on it. Without that, the onus is on you to convert their internal benchmarks to how it might perform in your environment. You may even need to try the system using your own data

What do you think? Are storage compression appliances going to be standard issue in your upcoming storage deployments, and can you trust the public case studies to apply to your situation? Let me know in the comments or e-mail me directly.

Michael Morisy is the community editor for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.