The Independent IT Influencer Event
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: Citrix Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: Citrix Systems
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Personnel: Kiran Ghodgoankar
Get an overview of the Citrix platform, the Citrix approach to zero trust, and the evolution toward a modern, secure application delivery architecture built on zero-trust principles. This session serves as an introduction to the rest of the presentation with key concepts and how Citrix embraces them.
Event: AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Appearance: Ignite Talks at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Company: Ignite
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Personnel: Kurtis Kemple
Kurtis Kemple’s talk at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1 explores the democratization of AI and its potential to transform lives beyond the enterprise sector. He begins by highlighting the current focus of AI on improving business efficiency and productivity, which, while necessary, has limited the technology’s reach to a broader audience. Kemple shares his personal journey from incarceration to becoming a senior director at Slack, emphasizing how technology, particularly AI, can be a transformative force for individuals who traditionally lack access to it. He argues that for AI to achieve mass adoption, it must become more accessible and user-friendly, addressing the needs of non-technical users who are currently excluded from its benefits.
Kemple identifies several barriers to AI adoption among the general public, including the complexity of AI systems, issues of intellectual property theft, and a significant lack of trust. He points out that the current AI landscape often requires users to become skilled prompt engineers to interact effectively with AI models, which is not feasible for everyday users. He draws an analogy to Steve Jobs’ introduction of the iPod, suggesting that AI needs to be as intuitive and user-friendly as revolutionary consumer products. Kemple stresses that the blank canvas problem, where users are presented with an empty text field and little guidance, is a major obstacle to AI’s widespread adoption.
To overcome these challenges, Kemple proposes a shift towards collective intelligence, where numerous specialized models are made accessible through a marketplace. This marketplace would support both free and paid models, offer no-code tools for fine-tuning, and provide educational resources to empower experts from various fields to create and share their models. He envisions an intelligent orchestration layer that can route user queries to the appropriate models, simplifying the user experience. Additionally, Kemple emphasizes the importance of building trust through open-source foundations, transparent data sets, and credible model training by recognized experts. By making AI more accessible, trustworthy, and tailored to diverse needs, Kemple believes that AI can truly transform lives and reach its full potential.
Event: AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Appearance: Ignite Talks at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Company: Ignite
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Personnel: Brian Booden
Brian Booden’s Ignite talk at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1 details the integration of WhatsApp with Qlik Sense SaaS, a business intelligence (BI) tool. Booden, with a background in data and analytics, highlights the importance of conversational analytics in today’s data-driven world. He explains that while Qlik integrates with various tools like Slack and Teams, WhatsApp is notably absent. This absence is significant because WhatsApp is widely used for personal communication, making it a more immediate and engaging platform for users. Booden emphasizes the unique engagement factor of WhatsApp, where users are more likely to respond to messages due to the platform’s notification system, which includes read receipts.
Booden outlines the technical architecture required to connect Qlik with WhatsApp, focusing on the need to minimize data transfer points for security reasons. He explains that the integration involves using WhatsApp APIs to facilitate direct communication between Qlik and WhatsApp, ensuring data protection and compliance with privacy regulations. The challenge lies in WhatsApp’s stringent policies, as it is part of Meta (formerly Facebook), which requires business messages to be pre-approved and triggered by specific actions. Booden has spent the last 18 months developing a solution to navigate these complexities, enabling seamless data interaction through WhatsApp.
In his live demonstration, Booden showcases two use cases: structured data interaction and unstructured data interaction using Qlik’s recently released LLM (Large Language Model) called Qlik Answers. The first demo involves pulling customer data from a Qlik dashboard and generating a PDF report, all triggered through WhatsApp. The second demo focuses on querying unstructured data, such as troubleshooting a printer issue, using natural language processing. Booden concludes by emphasizing the growing importance of conversational analytics, predicting that the demand for instant, mobile-friendly data interactions will continue to rise. He believes that integrating BI tools with widely-used communication platforms like WhatsApp can significantly enhance user engagement and efficiency.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: SonicWall Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: SonicWall
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Personnel: Tarun Desikan
Tarun will introduce SonicPlatform, our integrated management console for service providers and customers. In the demo he’ll show how a unified platform combined with a 24/7 SOC staffed by experts is essential to protect against modern threats.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: SonicWall Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: SonicWall
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Personnel: Chirag Saxena
Chirag outlines SonicWall’s network security portfolio with common deployment scenarios, and demos how organizations can secure their sensitive data across branches, HQ, and distributed hybrid workforce.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: SonicWall Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: SonicWall
Video Links:
Personnel: Tarun Desikan
Tarun introduces SonicWall’s newest offering – Cloud Secure Edge (CSE), formerly Banyan Security. He demos how to apply a Zero Trust security model to enable your workforce to securely access any resource from any device.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: SonicWall Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: SonicWall
Video Links:
Personnel: Chirag Saxena
SonicWall has transformed from a traditional network security vendor to a comprehensive modern cybersecurity platform. Chirag will introduce the new SonicWall platform and detail its adoption by our partners and customers.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: Dell Technologies Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: Dell Technologies
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Personnel: Steve Kenniston
In this wrap up, Steve Kenniston discusses how Dell is building a holistic cybersecurity solution for the future that embraces key technology advantages. Included is a discussion of post-quantum cryptography and how Dell will be implementing these new standards.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: Dell Technologies Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: Dell Technologies
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Personnel: Brian White
In this session, Sr. Consultant Brian White will discuss how Dell Technologies helps elevate customers cyber resilience strategy to preserve the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data to ensure recoverability in the event of a cyberattack.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: Dell Technologies Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: Dell Technologies
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Personnel: Adam Miller
In this session, Adam Miller will discuss Dell Technologies’ strategy to help customers quickly detect and respond to threats across their organization, exploring what we’re hearing from our customers and how solutions from endpoints to managed services can.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: Dell Technologies Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: Dell Technologies
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Personnel: Sameer Shah
During this section we will examine ways to minimize cybersecurity vulnerabilities and entry points. We will discuss strategies, best practices, and how Dell products and services help our customers advance these objectives.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: Dell Technologies Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: Dell Technologies
Video Links:
Personnel: Steve Kenniston
In this session we will review Dell’s overall cybersecurity strategy from the ground up starting with our Secure Supply Chain and a review of our key practice areas, Reduce the Attack Surface, Detect and Respond to Cyber Threats and Recover from a Cyberattack to leading with zero trust principles. We will outline how Dell approaches customers to help solve their most critical cybersecurity challenges.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: DigiCert Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: DigiCert
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Personnel: Frank Agurto-Machado
In the final portion of the presentation, we provide a demonstration of DigiCert’s Trust Lifecycle Manager product. This demo showcases how the platform streamlines the lifecycle of digital certificates, from issuance to expiration, across a variety of use cases. By illustrating key features like automated workflows, certificate tracking, and centralized management, attendees can see firsthand how the solution enhances security, reduces risks, and simplifies digital trust management in complex environments.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: DigiCert Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: DigiCert
Video Links:
Personnel: Mike Nelson
In this portion of the event, we go over how DigiCert plays a crucial role in establishing and managing digital trust by issuing and overseeing infrastructure that verify identities, encrypt communications, and secure online interactions. We delve deeper into how DigiCert helps mitigate security risks and fosters a trusted, transparent digital environment.
Event: Security Field Day 12
Appearance: DigiCert Presents at Security Field Day 12
Company: DigiCert
Video Links:
Personnel: Mike Nelson
This portion of the presentation provides an overview of who DigiCert is today, highlighting its current role as a global leader digital trust. Here, we explore DigiCert’s evolution, its contributions to digital trust, and its commitment to future-proofing security in an increasingly digital world.
Event: AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Company: Pure Storage
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Personnel: Robert Alvarez
In this presentation, Pure Storage outlines its approach to help organizations meet their AI storage needs while accelerating and simplifying adoption of their AI initiatives. With the Pure Storage platform, organizations can maximize performance and efficiency of AI workflows, unify data, simplify data storage management and take advantage of a scalable AI data infrastructure.
Scaling AI workloads—including large language models (LLMs), retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and computer vision applications—introduces practical challenges that extend far beyond theoretical storage capabilities. AI environments require vast amounts of data, and as models grow in size and complexity, traditional storage systems can struggle to keep up with the demands of AI training and inference. Based on real-world customer experiences, this presentation shares valuable insights into building efficient, scalable, and reliable storage infrastructures to support these complex AI pipelines. We’ll explore how organizations can address storage bottlenecks and optimize their systems to ensure seamless AI operations at an enterprise level.
Presented by Robert Alvarez – Consulting Solutions Architect, Pure Storage
Event: AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Company: Pure Storage
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Personnel: Boris Feigin
In this presentation, Pure Storage outlines its approach to help organizations meet their AI storage needs while accelerating and simplifying adoption of their AI initiatives. With the Pure Storage platform, organizations can maximize performance and efficiency of AI workflows, unify data, simplify data storage management and take advantage of a scalable AI data infrastructure. An essential cornerstone to it is Pure FlashBlade, a powerful scale-out storage solution specifically designed to meet the unique demands of AI workloads. It simplifies the integration and deployment of all scales of training and inference routines, and helps democratize AI to enterprises looking to accelerate their AI initiatives.
This section looks at the internal details of FlashBlade and Purity//FB, the software stack for FlashBlade. This part of the session focuses on the building blocks as well as the core architectural decisions that enable FlashBlade to shine in modern AI environments across many use cases. Central to Purity//FB’s success is its ability to handle massively parallel data processing, which is a crucial AI data infrastructure requirement for large-scale datasets. This part of the session will cover the modularThis section looks at the internal details of FlashBlade and Purity//FB, the software stack for FlashBlade. This part of the session focuses on the building blocks as well as the core architectural decisions that enable FlashBlade to shine in modern AI environments across many use cases. Central to Purity//FB’s success is its ability to handle massively parallel data processing, which is a crucial AI data infrastructure requirement for large-scale datasets. This part of the session will cover the modular design of Purity//FB, illustrating how its distributed architecture efficiently manages data flow.
Presented by Boris Feigin – Technical Director, FlashBlade Engineering, Pure Storage
Event: AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Company: Pure Storage
Video Links:
Personnel: Hari Kannan
In this presentation, Pure Storage outlines its approach to help organizations meet their AI storage needs while accelerating and simplifying adoption of their AI initiatives. With the Pure Storage platform, organizations can maximize performance and efficiency of AI workflows, unify data, simplify data storage management and take advantage of a scalable AI data infrastructure.
An essential cornerstone to it is Pure FlashBlade, a powerful scale-out storage solution specifically designed to meet the unique demands of AI workloads. With parallel data architecture and multi-dimensional performance, FlashBlade ensures minimal latency and high bandwidth, to accelerate model training and reduce time to AI results.
This section introduces FlashBlade’s design tenets that make it so well suited for AI projects, and deep dives into the technology that enables Pure’s industry-leading energy efficiency and helps customers overcome data center power constraints in their AI build-outs. The discussion in this section also includes Pure’s DirectFlash module which communicates directly with raw flash to enable greater control, optimized performance, and reduced latency.
Presented by Hari Kannan – Lead Principal Technologist, Pure Storage
Event: AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Appearance: Ignite Talks at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Company: The Futurum Group
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Personnel: Stephen Foskett
Stephen Foskett considers agentic AI, a transformative approach to automation quite unlike popular generative AI models. Unlike traditional AI applications that rely on user inputs, agentic AI involves autonomous agents that act on behalf of users, automating various processes. These agents can either run continuously, collecting information and performing actions, or serve as the glue in business process automation tasks. Foskett emphasizes that agentic AI can handle unstructured inputs and generate well-formed outputs, making it a powerful tool for business process automation. He draws parallels to existing automation tools like Zapier and IFTTT but highlights that agentic AI goes a step further by incorporating a level of intelligence that can adapt to changing inputs and unexpected scenarios.
Foskett provides practical examples to illustrate the potential of agentic AI. He describes scenarios where these AI agents can manage complex tasks such as processing photos, sensors, or handling enterprise data like insurance audits. These agents can adapt to various data formats and incomplete information, making decisions and taking actions autonomously. For instance, an AI agent could convert a PNG file to a JPEG if needed or wait for an upload to complete before proceeding with the next steps. This adaptability makes agentic AI particularly valuable in fields like sales automation and cybersecurity, where the ability to respond to real-time data and adjust actions accordingly can significantly enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
However, Foskett also addresses the challenges and ethical considerations associated with agentic AI. While these agents can act autonomously, they are not infallible and can still make errors or “hallucinate” incorrect data. This necessitates the implementation of guardrails to prevent costly mistakes. Additionally, there are ethical concerns about the promises these agents might make on behalf of businesses, which could lead to unintended commitments. Despite these challenges, Foskett is optimistic about the future of agentic AI, seeing it as a paradigm shift that will revolutionize customer service, operations, and business process automation. He believes that the rapid adoption of AI agent-based platforms is inevitable and will be the next significant wave in AI applications.
Event: AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Appearance: Solidigm Presents at AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1
Company: Solidigm
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Personnel: Ace Stryker
In this presentation, Ace Stryker from Solidigm discusses the company’s unique value proposition in the AI data infrastructure market, focusing on their high-density QLC SSDs and the recently announced Gen 5 TLC SSDs. He emphasizes the importance of selecting the right storage architecture for different phases of the AI pipeline, from data ingestion to archiving. Solidigm’s QLC SSDs, with their high density and power efficiency, are recommended for the beginning and end of the pipeline, where large volumes of unstructured data are handled. For the middle stages, where performance is critical, Solidigm offers the D7 PS1010 Gen 5 TLC SSD, which boasts impressive sequential and random read performance, making it ideal for keeping GPUs maximally utilized.
The presentation highlights the flexibility of Solidigm’s product portfolio, which allows customers to optimize for various goals, whether it’s power efficiency, GPU utilization, or overall performance. The Gen 5 TLC SSD, the D7 PS1010, is positioned as the performance leader, capable of delivering 14.5 gigabytes per second sequential read speeds. Additionally, Solidigm offers other options like the 5520 and 5430 drives, catering to different performance and endurance needs. The discussion also touches on the efficiency of these drives, with Solidigm’s products outperforming competitors in various AI workloads, as demonstrated by the ML Commons ML Perf Storage Benchmark results.
A notable case study presented is the collaboration with the Zoological Society of London to conserve urban hedgehogs. Solidigm’s high-density QLC SSDs are used in an edge data center at the zoo, enabling efficient processing and analysis of millions of images captured by motion-activated cameras. This setup allows the organization to assess hedgehog populations and make informed conservation decisions. The presentation concludes by emphasizing the importance of efficient data infrastructure in AI applications and Solidigm’s commitment to delivering high-density, power-efficient storage solutions that meet the evolving needs of AI workloads.
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