9/24 TLA Morning Meeting

TLA September 24th Meeting Announcement

Technology Leaders Association (TLA) was established to help senior level IT executives develop and manage their careers. As part of this effort, we hold monthly meetings to network, share ideas, and learn from featured guest speakers in the strategy, information technology, and career management fields.

From Microsoft, our September speaker is Deepak Rao presenting: “Cloud Computing – What is it and why should you care?”

Like those before it, cloud computing is a promising trend deserving attention balanced with a good dose of business sense. The topology of application delivery has changed several times throughout the (roughly) 50 year history of computing. Originally, everything was centralized in an on-premise mainframe. Then, along came timeshare supported by primitive public networking. Then, with the dropped cost of computers, came centralized minicomputers followed by distributed PC-based client/server. Next came remote computing via the Internet and now comes cloud computing. The point of these changes is they were not merely fashionable initiatives. Each represented a significant improvement in computing capability, driven by the advance of technology, and each resulted in a massive change in infrastructure, protocols, connectivity, and hardware.

Date: Friday, September 24rd
Where: Acxiom, located at 3333 Finley Road in Downers Grove (8 story building)
Cost: No charge

Special thanks to TLA member and Acxiom employee John Costanza for hosting us this month.

As a special facilities note, all TLA members must be escorted throughout the Acxiom facility. Please do not leave the conference room without an escort.

For reservations, (1) Please sign up online on the TLA website (www.techleaders.net) under ‘Events’ – or, if you don’t have access to the website, (2) Please reply to Patrick.Moroney@gmail.com with your name and telephone number.

For location information: Contact Jim Anfield at jdanfield@illinoisalumni.org.

Reservations must be made before noon on Thursday, September 23nd with the first 80 reservations accepted. No walk-ins please.

If you have reserved and are unable to attend, please send a note to Pat Moroney.

Directions
Acxiom is located near the intersection of I-355 and I-88 in Downers Grove. Get off the Butterfield Road exit of I-355 and go east to Finley Road. Go south on Finley Road for about a half-mile and Acxiom is located on the east side of Finley. Go to the main entrance of the eight-story building for check-in. Do not go to the other four-story Acxiom building. Parking is available just west of the eight-story building in the parking lot.

Agenda
7:00am – 7:15am Check-in and coffee
7:15am – 8:30am Structured networking – two table rounds
8:30am – 8:40am Announcements
8:40am – 9:30am Deepak Rao
9:30am Adjourn

Structured Networking
Structured networking is a technique used at most major executive transition groups. It is meant to be a powerful method of generating ideas that might help each of our searches. During this process, we will quickly brainstorm potential job lead ideas, gain networking contacts at desired companies, and generate advice from the members by sharing our backgrounds as well as our career objectives. It is designed to generate ideas, but given the time constraints, not get into immediate detailed discussions. You should plan on following up with anybody who may have had an interesting idea or a good contact.
Please bring business cards, handbills (career overview) or resumes (plain paper is fine) to pass around if you have them. Figure on about 20 copies of the resumes/handbills and 50 business cards.
We will run our networking, dividing the room into small tables of a maximum of 8 people and doing 2 table rotations before our speaker begins. At each rotation, you will have 90 seconds for your pitch and about 90 seconds for Q&A. Spend no more than 1/3 summarizing your past (this is not the time to rehash your resume), then spend about 1/3 on what you are looking for and 1/3 on what we can do to help (such as target contacts) or ask for advice on an issue.

Speaker Bio
Deepak Rao is Microsoft’s Central Region Sales Director for Cloud Computing. He has been with the company seven years. During his twenty-five year career, he has worked in manufacturing production planning, software development, pre-sales as an application specialist, and he has managed both technology specialists and sales specialists in several businesses including Oracle, Microsoft. He also been part of several VC backed start-ups including Alventive Incorporated.