- Industry majors back summit

(London, 22 August 2011) IT Europa and Angel Business Communications announced today that the first UK Managed Services Summit that will take place on 13th September 2011 in London has received the enthusiastic backing of leading vendors, service providers and delegates. The summit will focus on helping resellers and systems integrators develop an effective and profitable managed services business, and the large numbers of senior decision makers from a broad spectrum of these organisations signing up for the event shows how important this for the future health of UK IT channel organisations.  Well over 100 CEOs, Managing Directors, Business Development Directors and other senior figures from channel organisations involved in IT service delivery have already registered for the summit.

Sponsor support has also been outstanding. Leading sponsors signed to-date include: Brocade, Fujitsu, Kaseya, Trend Micro, Autotask, CA Technologies, Cisco, EBRC, Equinix, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Ingram Micro, Zenith Infotech, Alvea Services, Huawei Symantec and QLogic.

The summit’s agenda features a high-level conference programme exploring some of the latest research on cloud-based managed services and looking at how the market is segmenting into Managed Support Services, Information Protection, Unified Communications and Collaboration, SaaS (Business Productivity Suites & Business Process Management), Cloud Infrastructure Services and Communications services.

The agenda features a mix of plenary panel debates, looking at the market opportunities and the role of the channel and the business partnerships they will require to be successful. In between these panel sessions there will be separate streams that will examine some the building blocks that are essential for a Managed Services Practice including: infrastructure management services, the importance of automating workflow and business processes, developing a cloud infrastructure plus the issues arising from the delivery of business applications in a managed services model including the network integrity and access and data security.

Running alongside the conference is an exhibit / networking area with facilities for pre-booked 1:1 meetings to facilitate further interaction between delegates and sponsors.

“Since announcing the summit, the response from the industry, both in terms of sponsorship and delegate registrations, has been overwhelming,” says Alan Norman, Managing Director of IT Europa. “It is clear that the role of ICT channel companies is changing rapidly, driven by new technologies, delivery models and customer business imperatives. The UK Managed Services Summit 2011 provides a unique opportunity for vendors, VARs, integrators and service providers to come together to address the issues and opportunities arising from these changes.”

The UK Managed Services Summit 2011 will take place at IET London, Savoy Place on 13 September 2011. A few delegate places are still available so resellers and integrators wishing to attend the event should register online ASAP at: www.managedservicessummit.com