June 28, 2018 — In collaboration with academic and industry partners in the enterprise computing community, Marist College hosted the tenth annual National Enterprise Computing Community (ECC) Conference earlier this month.

Originally funded by a 2-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2008 the ECC has collaborated to address anticipated skills shortages in large systems computing and to develop ideas to introduce these concepts earlier in a student’s educational experience.  The 2018 conference themes were Disruptive Technologies in the Enterprise and The Internet of Things (IoT).

“Industry and government are struggling to attract new technologists to replace aging workers who manage the enterprise computing systems that are vital to continued economic growth and national security,” said Dr. Roger Norton, dean of the School of Computer Science and Mathematics at Marist. “This will leave gaps in the workforce in a variety of areas critical to our country: banking, commerce, healthcare, public safety, transportation, and the military.”

During the two and a half day event, participants heard keynote presentations from Don J. Duet '88, President and COO of Vapor.io; Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Emeritus, IBM; Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow, MIT; Markus van Kempen, Executive Architect and Venture Capitalist, IBM and Bill Thirsk, Vice President and Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of Marist College.  The conference also featured a presentation from Tony Sager, SVP & CTO Commercial Markets. In addition, there were a variety of technical presentations, panel discussions and student research project poster displays, and excellent opportunities to network with students, faculty, vendors and industry professionals.

The conference was free to all and there’s no cost to join the ECC community thanks to the generosity of corporate and academic sponsors including IBM, NewEra Software, Mainline Information Systems, CA Technologies, Vicom Infinity, Rocket Software and the University of Arkansas and IDCP at Marist College.

For more information and to view the 2018 conference presentations, visit https://ecc.marist.edu/web/conference2018.