Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote entitled "The Future of the Virtual Enterprise" at SYS-CON's  Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco.

"Virtualization is the hottest subject today," said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Stevens has over 20 years of enterprise engineering experience in UNIX and Linux technologies, including work as a developer on the first commercial release of the X Window System. Since joining Red Hat's senior management team in 2001, he has been critical to the company's enterprise operating system, storage, and clustering strategies. He now leads the Emerging Technologies group.

In his keynote, Stevens considered how the astonishingly rapid rise of virtualization technology has made it a vital component of any Enterprise IT strategy today. "The technology is triggering dramatic changes in product offerings and business practices to support virtualized operational models," he noted.

"These breakneck speed developments have lead to a plethora of solutions, with the attendant confusion that typically surrounds fast moving technologies."

In his keynote Stevens also outlined current trends in virtualization technologies and examine their potential impact on, and benefits for, future Enterprise IT deployments. Topics will include tradeoffs between open source and proprietary solutions, hardware integration efforts, deployment models, and long-term, high-volume serviceability/security considerations.