REVIEW: FAST Annual Conference 2010

ITAM News & Analysis

REVIEW: FAST Annual Conference 2010

Last week saw the welcome return of the UK FAST Conference after a four year sabbatical.

FAST Ltd is part of IRIS and provides software, education, consulting and managed services to UK companies. The event was held at Mercedes Benz World in Surrey, UK.

The conference started with a great keynote by Lord Rupert Redesdale, Liberal Democrat peer and House of Lords Climate Change Committee representative.

His challenge to the audience was to ask how they planned to run their businesses in the future when the UK Government has a target of an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Lord Redesdale also very succinctly identified the role of IT in this reduction by stating that 1% of UK energy consumption goes towards water treatment compared to 6% in UK data centres.

Lord Redesdale also suggested that the age of a free and open internet will need to be re-framed in a carbon economy; when all activity, from web hosting, delivering service and even sending a simple email – will involve a carbon calculation. For example once most organizations have built their internet infrastructure the economies of scale of sending an additional email are infinitely small. But factor in the carbon consumed in delivering email and we may well need to rethink our IT consumption strategies (See also Computer Weekly: Businesses may have to ration e-mail and internet use to control energy costs).

FAST Ltd also presented a high level overview of their plans for the coming year including broadening their compliance centric portfolio to include more SAM elements and introducing services to address specific member issues such as managing cloud and virtual environments.

Matt Barnes, Managing Director at FAST Ltd said he was delighted with the success of the conference and is looking forward to planning the FAST Annual Conference in 2011:

“The conference was dedicated to helping end users and FAST customers understand more about SAM and IT compliance.  TCO, cost control and better management of software are important in today’s economic environment as we look to drive down costs as well as make our IT departments more efficient.  We were extremely happy with the uptake at this year’s conference and we’ve had great feedback so far which will put us in good stead to deliver an even better conference next year.”

Sue Madden, Senior IT Network Compliance Analyst at AMEY Group, and FAST Ltd customer said:

“The speakers were great and delivered interesting and informative presentations that were really relevant to what we are doing at AMEY Group. It was a really great venue and the whole event was just run really well.   I was definitely impressed and I’m looking forward to the next one!”

FrontRange Solutions, as key sponsor, gave a good overview of how a Service Catalogue can help with the delivery of an effective SAM practice. It was refreshing to see FrontRange (my former employer) address the market with a strong and coherent SAM message again after what seems a period of regrouping following the acquisition of Centennial Software back in 2008.

FAST Ltd’s software offering, FAST Compliance Manager (FCM) has been independently reviewed by The ITAM Review. Competitive analysis and benchmarking for FCM is available to members. Click here to learn more about membership.

Can’t find what you’re looking for?