Avtex had a number of folks present, as you can see from the blogs here, at the recent TechFuse 2012 conference. This was a great conference and was very happy that the attendees, according to their evaluations at least, were very pleased with the sessions. I won’t mention my 6.8925 out of 7 eval scores – oops but I delivered a fun, Why Cloud, Which Cloud, Mobile Cloud session that looked at Mobile/BYOD and iPads and how Cloud is fueling this mobile growth. We looked at Why/When to consider the Cloud and then lastly, Which Cloud is best for your oganization drilling into GAPE, Office 365 and Zoho.

I also enjoyed delivering a Rich Coexistence session that was wrongfully re-titled Deploying Hybrid Configuration. Microsoft decided, wrongfully, to rename Rich Coexistence to Hybrid Deployment, which it is not. There are really four ways you can deploy finished applications like Exchange;
1) On Premise – deployed and managed locally
2) Hosted – somebody else hosts your finished application (Exchange)
3) Segmented – some users remain on prem and some users are in Cloud.
4) Hybrid – some services run on prem and some run in Cloud.
Everybody in the world is familiar with on prem (I stop at on prem because I hate saying on premises) and has run Exchange on prem since the very beginning. Folks started hosting Exchange around 1999 and many organizations build a nice model around hosting Exchange, SharePoint and other finished applications for customers many years ago. Segmented is a recent phenomena, but has taken off and is now the area that I receive the most questions about–This is where you keep some of your mail boxes in the Cloud and others on prem. A healthcare organization I worked with kept their payors, payees and admin folks on Exchange on premise but moved their Nurses and Physicians to the Cloud. A logistics firm moved their truck drivers to the Cloud but their corporate folks remained on prem. This is user or application segmentation. You are segmenting your users and the services they use. Lastly, Hybrid almost always referrers to keeping some of your services on prem (like Exchange) while running other services (like filtering, archiving and hosted encryption) in the Cloud.
What my (highly rated) talk was about was using rich coexistence migration and how you can segment your users and keep some on premise and move others to the cloud to get a great cost blending and higher availability. I think you can access the slides and content by going to the following. Or if you want to learn more, leverage our Silver Lining Services at Avtex!

http://www.benchmarklearning.com/Event/TechFuse/allsessions/day1.aspx