CIOs from leading telecommunications companies gather at Citrix and IBM CIO event

90% of global telecommunications companies use Citrix Application Delivery to deliver new services and attendees included high ranking decision makers from leading companies such as DU, Etisalat, Batelco and Oman Mobile, will discuss their own partnerships with Citrix. While guest spokesperson Olivier Marchal, France Telecom/Orange France, will be delivering a presentation on the benefits of a centralised data centre.

As IT Manager of France Telecom, Marchal will discuss the challenges of enabling over 100,000 users across 3000 branches to access more than 80 applications that are managed on his company's centralised data centre, and how the telecommunications giant reduced their cost and increased the agility of their organization whilst sustaining growth with Citrix and IBM infrastructure.

"We are delighted to have such a distinguished group of people join us for this year's Citrix and IBM CIO event," said Antoine Aguado, Middle East Regional Director, Citrix.

"The purpose of these events is essentially to allow industry leaders to share knowledge and discuss latest trends for the coming year, and this year's hot topic is surely virtualization."

During the event representatives from both Citrix and IBM will be demonstrating the reasons why joint IBM and Citrix infrastructures are the best choice for telecommunications companies today, as well as the type of performance IBM systems offers virtualized environments today.

With virtualization becoming the most talked about topic in the industry, the Citrix and IBM CIO event will be heavily focused on this new trend and both IT giants will be discussing what IBM systems can offer for virtualized environments, and why virtualization is set to be the 2008 revolution in enterprise computing.

"The general concept of virtualization is equated with the specifics of server virtualization quite frequently," added Aguado. "That is because server virtualization on the mainframe has been a fixture of the IT landscape for decades. However virtualization can be applied to all IT resources from servers to storage to networks to desktops and is not one-size-fits-all. This event gives CIO's the chance to explore what virtualization can do for their individual organizations in order to solve key application and service delivery challenges".