"Application Optimization & DC Virtualization Seminar" successfully concluded on 24th March 2009 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Muscat. The seminar was hosted by Gulf Business Machines (GBM) Oman, the Gold Partner and Learning Partner for Cisco, in the collaboration of Cisco Systems.

Commenting on the Seminar, Olivier Mouries, Country General Manager, GBM Oman said, "At GBM, we strive to improve customer satisfaction as a key long term success factor. Through seminars as this, we aspire to further assist our customers in assessing the effectiveness and potential of their IT infrastructure. These optimization initiatives also enhance user needs and user experience in order to increase productivity, amplify the impact of employees and invariably reduce costs."

He further added, "Optimization enables a business to realize the full value of its IT infrastructure and platform investments and establishes IT as a strategic business asset that can facilitate innovation and help organizations respond quickly to change." As companies continue to grow, automation of business processes and enhanced productivity is increasingly reliant on business applications. The challenge is to consistently maintain the integrity and efficiency of the application whilst extending the capabilities across the extended enterprise. This includes employees in branch offices connected over bandwidth-constrained Wide Area links, and customers connected to applications over Internet links with varying bandwidth capabilities. Many companies have found that the Return on Investment from extensive new Application Infrastructure deployments is lower than expected due to slow performance across the infrastructure.

In addition companies are looking to centralize their key Application/Data assets in a new class of Data Centre. This creates challenges both at remote locations in terms of application delivery and at the Data Centre in terms of cost consolidation.

Mr. Emmanuel Schupp, Regional BDM of Data Center Business, Cisco Systems "Virtualizing your IT infrastructure allows you to do more with less and save on energy consumption. Leveraging advanced virtualization technologies can dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of an IT environment while increasing the agility to simply adapt, manage and grow an organization's computing infrastructure. This timely seminar looks at new best practices that public and private organizations are adopting to streamline IT using server consolidation, virtualization, and open source methods."

The attendees also gained insight on companies across the world that have realized significant productivity and cost benefits by deploying Cisco's WAN Optimization technology which makes Cisco the fastest growing vendor in this market segment with recently announced Number 1 Market Share. The seminar concluded with a timely discussion on "Building the Green Data Centre", which highlighted the value Cisco may offer in building new generation Data Centers which optimize power, cooling and cost.

Increased demand for IT capacity to support business growth, increased energy use by the data center, rising energy costs and environmental concerns are coming together to define a new field of competition for the enterprise-data center energy efficiency. An energy efficient data centre enhances a company's competitiveness in a business environment where energy is becoming more and more expensive.

Attended by representatives from the public and private sector, the seminar was addressed by Samer Nader, INSS Manager GBM Oman, Saad Syed, Advanced Technology Manager from Cisco, Aaron White, Partner Business Manager, VM Ware (MENA) and Emmanuel Schulp from Cisco Systems.