Note: this is as close to live blog as I could get … I couldn’t get on the wireless and then I realized I left my adapter in the hotel room. This is my first time covering a conference in Europe for me…I’m learning! I’ve edited the notes mostly so they would make sense to others (not just me).

Waiting for the keynote – there is **live band**. Pretty cool! It’s probably a good thing I’m not tweeting, I don’t think I can overemphasise the coolness of the live band. 🙂 The band is Jeff Hanson and Blue Stone Circle. I was told that the band members are actually Symantec employees..can anyone confirm this?

They are showing a Symantec video and the track is the live band.

Steve Morton, VP product marketing for Symantec, hosted the keynote. I really liked the format, it was casual. No one went through PowerPoint presentations. It was more like a David Letterman show. Everyone just talked.

1st Guest: John Brigden, Sr VP Symantec for EMEA . He said his customers are asking for more for less and virtualization is biggest topic with customers right now. He also said cloud adoption in Europe is challenging because of secuirty and EU laws. He did a demo from his iPad, which the camera guys captured for the audience (fingerprints and all).

2nd Guest: Enrique Salem, President CEO of Symantec, laid out the themes for the conference:
1. Information explosion
2. Threats – 71% EMEA companies targeted by threats. Targets = individuals, businesses, governments
SCADA attacks – espionage –> sabatoge. (I have to read more about SCADA attacks..).

3. Mobile – Dec 2010 more smart phones sold than PCs – those go out of store onto your network. 68 million iPads by end of year. Mobile data usage up 4K%

4. Virtualization – everything virtualized. By 2014 70% all servers will be virtualized (according to Gartner).

5. Cloud – how do we manage security, keep systems highly availables, slas etc. 80% in EMEA have cloud projects, only 20% completed due to lack of expertise

Symantec’s vision is world revolves around people and info. There should be device independence
Environments should be more scalable, more cost effective, and customers should have access to info where ever they are.

Taming info explosion starts w categorization
Backup windows need to be eliminated – 1st step should be deduplication
Threats: reputation based security. 75% of attacks hit less than 50 computers (customized threats)
Mobile: anywhere, any time, any device.
Need comprehensive endpoint protections, encryption, identification, data loss prevention, & device mgt
Virtualization: application ha
Cloud: does not come in a box
Onscreen blurb: Do virtualization & cloud change the fundamentals?

Guest #3: Anil Chakravarthysr VP Storage & Availablity Management Group Symantec. His mission: get the private cloud you want from the infrastructure you’ve got.
Any complex biz service (eg SAP) is a group of applications running on different tiers, different platforms
Second demo on an Android hand-held device. This time they cleaned the screen first (could see fingerprints on the last demo).

Customer – Dr Udo Seidel of Amadeus. Travel business. Huge capacity problem during the iceland volcano issue.

Guest #4: Steve Shakespeare, Intel European director of software sales and marketing. He said the tones for Intel are called the “Intel bong”. Get vouchers for going to Intel sessions, and you can go to a website to donate for charitable things Intel. He talked a bit about Intel’s built in hardware tokens (I need to read more about this). Encryption – Intel calls it anti-theft. Built into chip. Disk can be totally encrypted, discs are bound to the physical device. Also ability to send a poison pill to turn pc into a brick

Trendwatch 2011 (I told you this was like a Letterman show…):

• Angry birds is hot 50 million users, most of them at work (Symantec gets requests from companies needing to block Angry Birds)
• iPhone 5: announced today
• Gold covered tata nano 3.5 million euro

Guest #5: Sean Regan Director Product Marketing Information Management Group Symantec
v-Ray from Symantec – idea you need xray vision into your physical and virtual machines. Most recoveries are for an individual file.
You can’t protect what you can’t see.

Guest #6: VP & GM PLE Dell – Stephen Murdoch
Everyone spends too much on storage. Fluid data architecture + symantec can reduce costs by 80%
Liquid finds most efficient path – same w data. Get it to right tier, at right cost, at right time.
Compellent has unrestricted thin provisioning.
Not all data is created equally – of all data created 90% is never looked at after its created
Remaining 10%, only 2/3 is looked at only once. Can’t all go to tier 1 –
Symantec + Dell: Dell’s promise is open, capable, affordable.  Symantec is true to that principle
Hot Seat:
1. Will you be wearing a kilt? few legs look as good as his!
2. Why can’t you just call yourself Steve: Steve is an English derivative. Scottish people will say “Stevie” but its hard past the age of 10 to go by that
3. Whats your fav Scottish invention: no definitive proof haggis or bagpipes are Scottish. Scottsman organzied American Navy and telephone.

Guest 7: CJ Desai Sr VP Endpoint & Mobility Group Symantec: Continue to see increase in malware

Guest 8: Art Gilliland SR VP Info Security Group Symantec
3-5% data in orgs = structured data. Mobile devices – need to protect data on device and access from devices. Apple ios is being supported by Symantec DLP. Symantec wants to help IT orgs embrace new tech w/o losing security best practice etc

Customer: Ariel Pisetzky CIO of 888 Holdings (a gaming company). They watch internal and external movement of data.Gaming customer – most important data to them is customer info.

Interesting – political silos around information was mentioned as an endpoint

Side note – no women on the stage? Maybe tomorrow will be better on that front (fingers crossed!).