I'm at the Gartner Datacenter event this week and wanted to share some of the the highlights from the sessions that I attended today and jot down some key ideas that we can explore in future posts.

It turns out that my manic tweeting actually makes for pretty good notes and captures key soundbites from the sessions. You can browse all of them at your leisure on the Day 1 Storify that I created.

If you don't have time to go through them all, here's the crib notes:

Consumerization of IT - Don't fight it. Embrace early adopters to pick up new ideas and generate value.

Thailand floods are having major impact on HDD prices, but what you need and not anymore until prices stabilize again.

IT energy consumption needs to be kept track of closely; it's the new critical KPI

The Cloud - It's everywhere and in all forms, public, private, and hybrid. Most enterprises will stick to private and hybrid options for the most part, for now.

Social and IT - It's gong to happen with or without you.  Stop being afraid and come up with a plan already.

Services - make sure everyone who uses this word knows the definition and uses them consistently.

Application performance management - It's where you should spend your $ to know how your services are really performing.

DevOps challenges IT dogma and allows you to drop IT debt of old process, tools, management approaches

DevOps requires communication and collaboration. It's about people breaking down silos to increase velocity and deliver value to the business more quickly.

I also had some really interesting conversations about the future of Service Desk products and the most innovative work being done in this space.  But that's a topic for another post.

Watch the blog more posts this week as well as a set of follow up posts on various topics where we'll dig into social tools for IT Ops and DevOps in more detail.

Abbas.