Important CIO Lessons Revealed At CDM Media's Finance Summit

VDI and virtual application delivery are critical components for these firms due to the distributed workforce. Instead of managing and refreshing individual desktops, many firms are simply centralizing the desktop builds and delivering them to thousands of desktops. Sound like a familiar problem?

• Business continuity is an enormous driver as they want employees to be able to work from any desktop if something bad happens

• Audits are another driver - it's much easier to secure desktops and execute reporting requirements with centralized application management

• M&A is also a critical driver for a VDI. Some of the firms are being forced to buy banks while others are capitalizing on the economic crisis to buy smaller banks. These transactions have become such a regular occurrence - with many deals occurring in disparate geographic areas - that centralized IT departments on the buy side have no choice but to find ways to simplify the integration as regulators are watching very closely. Many use VDI to get data off of desktops and virtualize application delivery so they can monitor security for auditing purposes

Mainframe is making a big comeback. This, according to almost every attendee, is the easiest way to consolidate systems right now. Almost everyone I spoke with said that they were going to run / upgrade to the largest Mainframes they could buy and separate them into Logical Partitions. They then planned to run Linux on these LPARs to consolidate applications. Most people are using little pieces and virtualizing them to build a virtual mainframe - these guys are using a physical mainframe to create virtual pieces. Interesting.Many attendees commented on how much of a mess certain applications and associated business processes were because of distributed systems. Server virtualization, and the success of VMware, is actually teaching them how to leverage the mainframe.

• Several attendees also said that the mainframe was going to be their 'private cloud." Hmmmm.

• Brian also commented on the true meaning of mission critical applications - we are talking billions of dollars passing through a system every day. One guy said that if a farm of 100 servers slows down - we cannot clear local bank deposits for all of Canada. And there is no way they are going to run these on 'virtualized' servers - way too risky. If they aren't on a mainframe, they are on AIX and UNIX. Meet the new boss - same as the old boss!!