IM Local Edition – San Jose – Infrastructure Masons

Infrastructure Masons (IM) is joining forces with the Technology Convergence Conference (TCC) held on February 23rd at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose, CA to provide a powerful day of Infrastructure collaboration, networking and education opportunities. The TCC’s sessions address real, end user problems aligning with IM’s charter to help members connect, grow, and give back.

Infrastructure Masons Members receive discounted tickets to the conference. Register here.

IM Mainstage

Track A 11-11:40pm

Topic: IM Women In Technical Infrastructure (WITI)

Recent statistics show that only 18% of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26% of computing jobs are held by women. It also shows that only 5% of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women. This issue punctuated at the first Infrastructure Masons Leadership Summit, where only 5 of 105 attendees were women. Members commented that the pipelines for female candidates interested in Technical Infrastructure positions are empty. Infrastructure Masons will be targeting solutions to narrow this diversity gap in 2017.

Join Maricel Cerruti, IM Board Member and leader of the IM Women in Technical Infrastructure (WITI), as she gains insight from women in leadership positions at Facebook, Siemens, and Uber. How/why did they chose this career; What barriers are there for women participating in this industry; and strategies on how to attract more women to this field.

IM Lunch Session

Track A 12:20-1:30 pm – Private IM sponsored lunch session

Topic: Coming Soon!

IM Working Session 1

Track A 1:40-2:20 pm

Topic: Data Center Performance Rating System

Today’s data center standards do not represent the needs of infrastructure professionals. There is no standard way to objectively evaluate the performance of a data center portfolio including owned and leased locations. To compound this problem, most data center site selection processes are usually based on a checklist written by procurement teams or consultants, not on actual sustained performance of the data center. Members have shared that they contracted “Tier IV” data centers with providers guaranteeing 99.9999% availability, only to have them fail. While there were financial penalties in the contracts about not meeting the availability SLA, it was pennies compared to the revenue impact from a single second of power loss. Dean Nelson and Mark Monroe will lead the working session where members will review a new rating system to measure the actual performance of the data center.

IM Working Session 2

Track A 2:35- 3:15 pm

Topic: Infrastructure Resource Gap

The current generation of Infrastructure Masons leaders recognize the immense size and robust growth of this industry can only be sustained by continuing to attract and developing talent across a broad spectrum of necessary skills. Winston Saunders, leader of the IM Education Workgroup, published a new Thoughts Paper on the topic titled, Cornerstones of Infrastructure Masonry. This effort faces two primary challenges; perception and structure. First, the technical infrastructure industry is mostly unknown and not on the radar of students. Second, colleges, universities and certification bodies do not offer comprehensive education and workforce development programs focused on the skills required to enter the technical infrastructure space. Winston Saunders and Mark Monroe will lead this working session where members will tackle how to address this challenge.