From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

What does the former CTO of XenSource - now CTO of the virtualization and management division at Citrix - have in common with the founder and CEO of PlateSpin, now VP of Business Development at Novell? The answer is that they are both speaking in June at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City, along with the CTO of Egenera, the Technical Director and Chief Technologist at Sun, the VP& CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, the CTO of BMC Software, the VP & CTO of EMC, the co-founder & CTO of Neocleus, the CTO of Xsigo Systems, the CTO of Brocade, the Chairman and CEO of SIMtone, the Founder & CEO of ScaleMP, the founder and CTO of VirtualLogix, the Chief Strategist of Appistry, the CTO of Marathon Technologies, the CTO & Co-Founder of Reflex Security, the VP of Research and Development at DataDirect Technologies, the CMO of GigaSpaces, and the IT Director at Fidelity Investments.

SYS-CON's Virtualization Journal announced today its first annual Virtualization Readers' Choice Awards. SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards, also known as the "Oscars of the Software Industry" has been one of the most prestigious industry award programs for more than a decade. This year's virtualization awards will be given in 17 categories and award-winning products and services will be selected by Virtualization Journal readers.

SOA World Magazine announced that nominations are now open for the SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards, which recognize excellence in the software, solutions, or services provided by the industry's top vendors. SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards, also known as the 'Oscars of the Software Industry,' has been one of the most prestigious industry award programs for more than a decade.

RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. The theme of this October's AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 West is 'Beyond AJAX to the RIA Era' and the Call for Papers, which is currently still open, specifically encourages submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases of the fast-emerging RIA alternatives.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

'Virtualization is already widely used, but primarily for the first-order benefit, namely server consolidation,' notes Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, in this Exclusive Q&A in advance of the 3rd Virtualization Conference & Expo. 'The second-order benefits of agility, availability and manageability of the IT stack are now becoming better understood,' Crosby continues, 'and as a consequence virtualization has moved from a tactical tool for gaining immediate savings, to become a key strategic theme for every IT department.'

PlateSpin provides a unified suite of solutions to help enterprises adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualization in the data center. PlateSpin's patent-pending workload profiling and portability technology liberates software from hardware and streams server workloads (data, applications and operating systems) over the network between physical and virtual infrastructures.

The continuing success of SOA World Conference & Expo, now in its 13th successive iteration - this time in June, on the East Coast, in the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City - has led SYS-CON Events to expand the its reach by adding a co-located parallel event, DataServices World. The full details of this major new initiative are as follows...

At this year's Virtualization Expo event, learn how Intel's latest virtualization technology advancements are designed to increase performance while simplifying IT management, reduce the number of physical servers and balance compute workloads on virtual machines. Maximize the flexibility of your assets and get more from every system. All without costly datacenter expansion.

Virtualization is quickly becoming a staple technology for enterprise IT. The theme of this November's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo is 'The Next Generation of Virtualization.' The Call for Papers, which is now open, welcomes submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT.

International Virtualization Conference & Expo faculty alumni include such notable speakers as: Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat; Stephen Harrod, CTO of VMware; Vern Brownell, founder and CEO of Egenera; Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of Citrix XenSource; Zoran Cakeljic, CTO of Virtual Iron; Hubert Yoshida, vice president and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems; Jeffrey Nick, CTO of EMC; David Greschler, director of Virtualization Strategy for Microsoft; Hal Stern, vice president and distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems; Andrew Hillier, founder and CTO of CiRBA; Alex Vasilevsky, founder and CEO of Virtual Iron; Jack Zubarev, founder and COO of SWsoft; Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin; Brett Adam, founder and CEO of rPath; Kevin Brown, founder and CEO of Kidaro; Bob Lozano, founder and CEO of Appistry; and Harry Ruda, founder and CEO of Desktone.

After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.