This weekend I attended Camp SysAdmin, a get together of leading IT professionals in the Bay Area. The event was sponsored by Bay Lisa, LOPSA (league of professional system administrators), NaSPA (network and system professionals association), Splunk, SysAdmin Magazine and Usenix. What all of the sponsors of the event share in common is a commitment to improving the everyday lives of system administrators by fostering a dialog around the growing challenges facing IT professionals in an increasingly complex world. There is no doubt, as the world becomes more on-demand, the demand for system administration is on the rise. This year more than $100B will be spent managing the worlds data centers and that number is growing at more than 2.5 times the rate of new hardware spend. The current or imminent deployment of new technologies like VOIP, Web Services, Virtualization, competing Open Source solutions just to name a few will mean solving more difficult problems and working longer hours.I’ve always been surprised at the lack of dialog regarding system administration challenges, both in the popular IT press, but also among the system administration community itself. Camp SysAdmin was a useful forum to spark more conversations, connections and solutions for us all. Campers were able to participate in two of five potential tracks discussing a wide range of system administration topics. We had Brian Aker of MySQL fame discussing troubleshooting Open Source technologies. Ethan Galstad, lead Nagios contributor, joined the campers in exploring operations collaboration in the data center, including the impact of outsourcing data center operations. Richard Whitehead, CTO of Clarus Systems, led a roundtable on IP Telephony and Eric Allman, author and Chief Science Officer at Sendmail helped campers explore all aspects of administering messaging infrastructures.The day was filled with incredible conversation and intense exchanges of opions and ideas. Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to make the event possible and to all the campers who participated. If you were not able to attend, the sponsors will be making the recorded audio of the roundtables and the results of the camp survey available soon. If you are interested in getting involved in Camp SysAdmin email me at thebaum@splunk.com. Technology Industry