Cost cutting and optimisation within the IT industry will be the focus for the IBM Virtualisation Road Show when it comes to town next week.

The event, which is being held by BCS, IBM's Bermuda agency, at the Elbow Beach Resort on Thursday, October 22, will look at how companies can reduce their overheads, fully utilise their resources and improve operational efficiency, all through virtualisation.

Industry research has revealed that 40 percent of businesses have cited a downward pressure on their IT budgets, resulting in an increased concentration on cost cutting and maximisation.

The half-day event, which will seek to address these issues, will run between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m. and feature guest speakers from VMware, NetApp and IBM offering insights on how server and storage virtualisation can deliver in all areas.

"We recognise the pains that many businesses are facing right now," said Aaron Smith, BCS general manager, "with IT budgets being squeezed, IT costs escalating due to increasing numbers of servers and storage, and the difficulty in quickly responding to changing business demands due to the complexity of managing IT infrastructure.

"We have seen a movement towards server virtualisation recently, but virtualising servers is only half the story. We need to consider storage as part of the total solution to realise the promise of a truly virtualised environment."

Server virtualisation has set the stage for those who were rethinking how they design and implement their IT solutions. IBM's Virtualisation Road Show will include new ways to lower cost, improve scalability, or enhance service level agreements, and integrating storage as part of the overall solution.

The road show will feature a number of topics from the combination of VMWare and IBM NSeries/NetApp solutions helping to reduce cost, maximise storage utilisation, and increase operational efficiency, customers lowering data centre costs by saving up to 50 percent on storage power, cooling, and space, the choice of iSCSI, FCP, or NFS connectivity on a single storage platform, and scaling a virtualised environment and accommodating data growth without degrading performance or investing in new technology.

Presenters for IBM will include David Earle, IBM System x and Blade Senior sales specialist, responsible for the Caribbean and Atlantic Canada. Mr. Earle is one of the longest serving x86 server specialists with IBM Canada, having worked on large Blade, Virtualisation and Consolidation projects with a variety of organisations, ranging from small business to large enterprises such as provincial governments, banking and insurance, universities, hospitals, regional telecom and large retail and manufacturing companies deploying hundreds of servers.

Presenting for NetApp will be Andrew Grimes and Philip Sebok.

Mr. Grimes has more than nine years experience working with disk technology in the storage industry.

Mr. Sebok is regional director for Central America & Caribbean at Netapp, with more than 13 years experience in the IT industry. Based in Miami, Florida he is responsible for increasing the company's sales and channel presence.

Presenting for VMware is Jorge Gomez, partner business manager for VMware, who is responsible for enabling international channel partners.

Attendees present at the event will be eligible to receive a free server consolidation study.

To sign up for the road show or for more information visit the BCS website at www.bcs.bm or contact Celina Florendo at celina@bm.ibm.com