You're probably double-checking your agenda to make sure you've booked the most interesting sessions at the Gartner Data Center Conference this week.  Let me help you by sharing a few sessions that you don't want to miss.  And if you attend one of these sessions and fill out the questionnaire, you'll be entered in a raffle for a$500 American Express gift card.

The Evolving Data Center: Past, Present, and Future
Innovation is crucial for IT infrastructure to take advantage of new technology trends, including cloud computing and "big data," while supporting current and emerging applications. Customers will derive the greatest value from the tight integration of emerging software approaches with the underlying hardware infrastructure. This session explores the newest developments in the Cisco Unified Data Center platform, which unifies computing, networking, security, and management to deliver business agility, IT simplicity, and financial efficiency.

This is a must-see presentation from one of the Cisco's top senior executives in engineering -mark your calendar now and add it to your agenda.

Speaker: David Yen
Location: Venetian Ballroom F
Session Type: Solution Provider Session
Monday, December 3.
2:30 PM to 3:30 PM
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The Programmable Cloud
Trends such as social apps, cloud, and BYOD offer the opportunity to significantly improve customer experiences and increase worker productivity. Making the most of these trends, however, is going to require some new thinking about infrastructure. This session will explore how to build on your existing investments and create a programmable data center that will give you the agility and flexibility to keep up with today's on-demand world.

In this session, you'll hear from Cisco IT's senior vice president of infrastructure -featuring "Cisco on Cisco" initiatives using our Unified Data Center solutions.  See a demo of Cisco IT's internal private cloud and learn about our 'enterprise store' service catalog initiative for BYOD -powered by Cisco Intelligent Automation software.

Speaker: John Manville
Location: Titian Ballroom 2301A
Tuesday, December 4.
1:45 to 2:45 PM
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Cloud Supply and Demand: The Customer Perspective
Cloud represents one of the most disrupting trends in IT today. Cisco has been working with both enterprises and service providers to address both the "supply" (public cloud) and "demand" (private cloud) sides of the equation to optimize the customer experience and options. This session will explore the perspectives of a cloud service provider and an enterprise customer that has chosen to both build their own cloud and use external cloud services.

Don't want to miss this session where you'll hear Cisco customers, PayPal and CSC, share their perspectives from the demand and supply sides of cloud computing. Learn some of the best practices from their cloud deployments built on Cisco's Unified Data Center solutions and VCE's Vblock platform.

Speakers: Ryan Carrico, Giuliano Di Vitantonio, Siki Giunta
Location: Veronese Ballroom 2401B
Wednesday, December 5.
9:00 AM to 10:00 AM
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Don't forget to visit Cisco's booth (#432) to see our Unified Data Center solutions in active -we're showcasing several exciting product demos. Fill out a questionnaire after viewing one of these demos and you'll be entered into a raffle to win a$250 gift card(one raffle drawing per day).

If you're interested in private cloud, make sure you see a live demo of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC), learn about the exciting new version 3.1 release, and get the latest onour cloud management support for OpenStack. With our new multi-cloud solution accelerator kit, Cisco IAC can run on OpenStack,  VMware vCloud Director, and Amazon Web Services. See the demo here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oj2GHnsY8Gg

VCE now resells Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, and you can find more information on Vblock cloud management from theEngineers Unplugged video channelthe week after Gartner Data Center.

You can also learn about the recent announcement ofCisco's intent to acquire Cloupiaand what it means to Cisco's Unified Computing and Unified Management software portfolio -with powerful new converged infrastructure management capabilities.

Finally, make sure you check out our demo showcasingCisco Tidal Enterprise Schedulerand workload automation for Big Data. Learn the power of our Hadoop integration, and see a live feed where we run Hadoop MapReduce jobs to track social media activity at the event.  Don't miss this opportunity to learn about new ways of extracting value from Big Data, using Cisco workload automation and Hadoop in combination with Cisco's compute and networking infrastructure.

We hope to see you there!