Please plan to join CIO members and invited guests at the February 15th meeting of the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum. This meeting is a Roundtable Plus meeting. The Forum Roundtable meeting consists solely of CIO members and guest CIOs. At a Roundtable Plus meeting, the roundtable format is in effect with the additional step that each CIO member is welcome to invite one guest to the meeting. This is the second Roundtable Plus meeting of the current Forum year. All members and invited guests will have signed a non-disclosure agreement.

What makes this meeting special? Microsoft and Oracle, in exclusive meeting segments, will present and dialogue with our CIO members and guests in a CIO friendly environment. It gives you the special opportunity to hear and discuss strategies, products, challenges and provide input both individually and as a focus group of CIOs with Microsoft and Oracle and with peer IT executives. It is an opportunity to hear and be heard on strategic topics and practical matters with both of these major vendors.

In planning for this meeting, our members have submitted topics they want to be addressed with each vendor. For both vendors, the CIOs have asked for updates on the company vision, current strategies, impacts of acquisitions, directions for certain product environments, licensing, customer relations, software assurance, and impacts of vendor product roll-outs on decision making and budgets of IT organizations. The session with each vendor will include a keynote speaker who will update you on many of these topics. In addition, the keynote speaker and other vendor managers will then join the roundtable to continue the discourse, but, at that time, the topics will be what each participant wants to raise. We have provided each vendor with a list of probable topics for the roundtable discussions that our members have given us, but the roundtable will determine what actual topics are discussed in this part of each session. Keynote speaker for Microsoft is Mr. D.P. Brightful, Senior Director of the Technology Specialists Group. His keynote will include Microsoft's vision of its people ready IT and business unit alignment strategy and an overview of the Microsoft Technology Roadmap of products and solutions,. Mr. Brightful was pulled from a launch event scheduled for the same day in Philadelphia for the Microsoft Vista/Office System to speak to the Forum. He will include some of the launch information about Microsoft Windows Vista/Office to the roundtable. The keynote speaker for Oracle is Ms. Susan Cook, Group Vice President, whose keynote will contain an update on current and future company strategy including Oracle acquisitions and their impact on product offerings in Business Intelligence, ERP and CRM, strategy for Fusion, Server Consolidation, and the ideal underlying OS(Linux, Red Hat, Microsoft).

Please join our members at the Roundtable Plus meeting! The meeting starts at 8:00 AM and ends by 1PM. Brunch and lunch are provided. Pre-registration is required. If you are a CIO member of the Forum, when registering, please provide the name, title, and contact information of your guest. Meeting logistics including agenda, directions to the meeting place and parking information will be emailed to you after you register. For registration for this meeting, please contact: Catherine Swift at cswift@towson.edu or 410-704-4252.

To make inquiries about this meeting or about membership in the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum, please contact: