The 451 Group's CEO, Martin V. McCarthy, welcomes customers and attendees with a discussion of the day ahead and observations on innovation and the importance of tracking it. Key areas of innovation emerging in the specific areas of focus of The 451 Group's Third Annual Client Conference include carrier infrastructure and the rise of the cloud, infrastructure computing for the enterprise (ICE), and cross-border convergence issues such as identity and security, mobility and virtualization.

A dozen of the world's most innovative companies are highlighted in our second track, Innovator's Showcase, this afternoon. 451 Vice President of Research Services Simon Carruthers moderates this lightning-round elevator pitch as these cutting-edge companies convince audience members to learn more about them - and why delegates should miss main-stage presentations and panels in order to do so.

Nick Selby, the Research Director of The 451 Group's Enterprise Security Practice (ESP) discusses high-level trends in enterprise security from 2009 to 2012, then focuses in on a key area of disruption for discussion with a panel of end users.

Over the next three decades, the worlds of business and technology will undergo a startling transformation. Energy will become more expensive and, for many, more difficult to source. And IT will be required not only to reduce its own carbon footprint, but to monitor and help reduce the footprint of all other business activities. Andy Lawrence will discuss the most pressing issues as companies seek to build eco-efficient strategies with this end-user panel.

Research Director Rachel Chalmers, who leads The 451 Group's Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise (ICE) practice, will debate Tier1 Research Vice President Dan Golding on precisely where cloud computing meets the world of carrier business.

Nick Patience, The 451 Group's Managing Analyst and Research Director for Information Management, will discuss how proactive risk management and eDiscovery is changing information management in the enterprise.

The 451 Group's Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) practice area offers analysis of open source technology providers, their business models and their competitive positioning at various levels. It also provides in-depth case studies on the challenges and opportunities faced by early adopters across various levels of the software stack. This panel of end users will discuss the impact of open source software on their businesses.

BlackBerry is the de facto standard for the mobile enterprise due in no small part to passionate support from enterprise IT. The rise in popularity of smartphones – and an increasing number of competing players targeting enterprise workers directly or indirectly as users bring them to work – pose a challenge to the dominance of BlackBerry. Can users' desires win over IT? What impact with this have on enterprise IT security and mobile application deployment? Adding to the complexity of this problem is the growing number of mobile operating systems, which, in the near term, looks set to only increase. Also discussed is what the future of location-based services will be beyond turn-by-turn navigation.

Disappearing investment banks, dried-up credit market and swooning stock prices... what does it all mean to corporate acquirers and the startups looking to sell to them? We'll hear first-hand from those who ink the deals.

With increasing regulatory pressure to retain corporate data and an exponentially increasing business need to leverage corporate information, the enterprise storage segment continues to be one of the fastest-growing in IT. 451 Research Director for Storage Simon Robinson discusses high-level trends in enterprise storage, and leads a vendor panel on the opportunities and pitfalls.

Please join 451 Enterprise Software analyst China Martens for a lively vendor panel debating the next twists and turns in the application deployment journey that is software as a service. We'll see how panelists' definitions of SaaS present and future line up, and determine whether SaaS will end up subsumed by cloud computing. We'll also examine the pros and cons for users going all-out SaaSy versus an on-demand and on-premise hybrid approach.

Trends in content management: Is it all social? Putting all the '2.0' hype aside, social software is changing the way organizations communicate, collaborate, sell and serve. So it is safe to assume that enterprise social software is the market to be in, right? This presentation will examine this question, looking specifically at the market impact of changes in the way content is created, leveraged, managed and discovered. It will look to identify which areas of social software and content management are ripe for growth and which are likely to suffer most in a protracted economic downturn.

The debate over where grids meet clouds and how clouds become enterprise-ready carrier-delivered services continues.

For decades the enterprise database management sector has been dominated by the relational database model. In recent years, however, it has become clear that a number of distinct new database markets are evolving as the use of database systems begins to reflect distributed architectures and cloud computing. This panel will examine the potential for enterprise use of online distributed databases, simple data query services, Web-based database applications and cloud-based relational databases.

451 Cofounder and Chief Analyst John Abbott leads this vendor panel, discussing the changes in mainframe and large computing systems in the enterprise, with issues including the evolution of high-availability computing from 2009 to 2012.

Your votes are tallied, and the startup with the most innovative approach is awarded a highly prized trophy (last year it was a stuffed dog).

The 451 Group's CEO, Martin V. McCarthy, wraps up our third annual Client Conference.