The rise of China is a daily topic in the media, and the challenge that this poses to the rest of the world are substantial and complex.

McCarthy has just returned from a “Track 2” mission to Beijing, where he participated in 3 day meeting, known as “Trialogue 21”, along with 40 other leaders from the US, EU, and China, drawn from the fields of policy, business, academia, military and research. Topics addressed included innovation, energy, security and globalization.

Innovation has been named a leading priority for China by its leaders. This address will pose and answer the question “Will this be the Chinese Century?”

Open source remains a disruptive force in the software industry. Having moved beyond its early roots in academia and as a driver for social change, open source is now playing a role in traditional software markets, as a driver of transformation, or in some cases, a source of new competition. This presentation will take a look at the impact that open source is having on software vendors, end users and the investment community; where it fits and where it still struggles to provide value; the role of commercialization; and the outlook for open source moving forward.

Unstructured data has long been the elephant in the corner of the information management room. We started tracking the growth of this elephant some six years ago. In that time, it has impacted markets including search, legal discovery, business intelligence, customer relationship management, government intelligence, compliance, anti-data-leakage, warranty analysis and records management. Key to all these scenarios is text analysis, a deep understanding of what is actually meant by the vast volumes of text created each day. This presentation will examine the state of the market now and in the future, touching on a broader information management strategy that aims to enable organizations to get their arms around their information, be it unstructured, semi-structured or structured.

Enterprises large and small are in the midst of a top-to-bottom re-think of the 'classic' perimeter-based, defense-in-depth security model, in the wake of the introduction of seismically disruptive technologies. As usual, there's no consensus. The Jericho Forum advocates totally abandoning firewalls, while Cisco and other network access control vendors propose introducing even more. This presentation will describe the state of enterprise security three years hence, and quantify some of the more painful aspects of how we transition from where we are today to where we will be in 2011.

Mobile advertising, mobile banking, location-based services and social/business networking, coupled with the relatively low cost of high-end smartphones, have not only pushed the pure consumer side of mobility, but have also pushed the consumerization of the enterprise. This, in turn, has finally put mobility on the strategic enterprise map. This session will provide insight into this phenomenon and examine which mobile pure plays are likely to benefit from it, and why.

The once-clear lines between content management and collaboration products are blurring as user-generated content in the form of tags, shared bookmarks, blog posts and wikis is affecting both markets. This presentation will explore where content and collaboration are headed, with an eye on how social software, SaaS, Microsoft SharePoint, Google and open source are affecting investor, vendor and end-user strategies.

Technology companies are bullish about M&A in the coming year, with more than 85% of buyers saying in a recent 451 survey that they plan to increase or maintain current levels of M&A in 2008. In this panel, corporate development executives from actively acquiring companies discuss their M&A outlook for the coming year, review key case studies and tell us what they look for (and don't look for) in acquisitions, as well as how the acquisition and valuation process typically works and what happens after the deal.

This presentation will provide insight into and analysis of the dominant and emerging themes in the enterprise storage marketplace. This will include The 451 Group's take on emerging 'next-generation data protection' technologies such as de-duplication and online backup, analysis of which vendors are poised to win and lose in this cutthroat market, and an overview of which hot new technologies and startups the smart money should be following.

IT hosting is one of the fastest growing trends in enterprise computing. Will IT hosting rise to the challenges offered by the enterprise and become the third way of doing enterprise IT, or simply become a niche market, feeding on the cast-offs of the major IT outsourcing firms? We look at the hottest issues facing enterprise IT and ask if hosting is the answer.

IT has suffered an 'eco black eye' over the course of the past year. It has been accused of being a primary contributor to global warming, despite its contributions being minimal when compared to other sources. This presentation will examine the facts and suggest ways in which IT can assert its role as a positive force for change while embracing innovative technologies to improve energy efficiency across the enterprise.

The 451 Group's 5+ years of work with some 250 early adopters of grid computing indicates that in addition to the kinds of specific tasks it was created for – high-performance computing – grid techniques are now being combined with technologies such as virtualization and open source to support the organizing principles that are driving IT evolution today. These include enterprise utility models (distributed, pooled resources); shared services architectures; and eco-efficient IT. As a consequence, there is a resurgence in the use of grids. This talk will examine how grid technology is being deployed as part of enterprise computing strategies, as well as the business drivers, the roadblocks on the journey to adoption, and approaches to overcoming these. We'll examine the likely impact of multicore technology, acceleration, virtualization and development tools over the next five years, as well as what organizations will need to do in order to take advantage of them and what tools they will need.

How long until the first effective hypervisor root exploit? Is live migration really the datacenter's killer app? Can VMware and XenSource possibly justify their dot-com-era valuations? As the International Year of Obsessing Over Virtualization draws to a close, we'll take a snapshot of the state of the art, run root cause diagnostics and project performance trends for the next couple of years.