Young AFCEANs Glimpse Possible Futures

The chapter's Young AFCEANs hosted an Industry Tour and Tech Day in April, which took approximately 30 college students, industry professionals, and government and military personnel to the offices of Oracle and Dell Computer Corporation in Austin, Texas. Industry Tours are a way of introducing Young AFCEANs who may have had little prior experience in the private sector to business models and practices at top-tier technology corporations. The tour began early at Oracle, where the break room is furnished with Starbucks coffee and a foosball table to help employees keep their energy and creative juices flowing. Once seated in a large classroom, the group heard from Oracles principal sales consultants, Dave Polete and Ben Brown. Each shared a part of their personal story, including steps in their career progression and current areas of focus. The discussion largely centered on Oracle's corporate goals, services and current trends. For example, Oracle's RedStack offering—which comprises applications, middleware, database services, operating systems, virtual maintenance, servers, storage, network fabric, enterprise manager, operations center and information assurance capabilities—is used to support the Defense Department, the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Information Systems Agency. Asked to give advice to college students preparing for an information technology career, Oracle's Polete emphasized that skills in virtualization, cloud computing and cybersecurity are increasingly in demand. SAN and Solaris skills with Defense Department experience are hard to find, he added, saying new graduates should use that as a guide to career development. During the visit, the Young AFCEANs also toured Oracle's Chip Modeling Center and, much to the delight of many, received posters from Oracle's recent collaborations on Hollywood films Iron Man 3 and The Avengers. The next stop took the group to Dell's Executive Briefing Center for a discussion on mobile computing and bring your own device (BYOD) policies. Kris Applegate, a Dell Solutions Center solution architect, spoke to the necessity of containerizing BYOD to mitigate risk and ways to ensure that containers are secure. Containerizing allows a company to place a company file on an employee's device and set strict access requirements—including allowing the company to control and, if necessary, delete the file. Applegate also gave a preview of a new device that Dell is developing, dubbed Project Ophelia—an Android-powered device designed to plug into any TV or monitor, giving access to local files, desktop remote access and any of the apps, movies and TV shows in the Google Play store. It is as small as a USB flash drive and will cost less than $100. Other presentations included aspects of cloud computing and Dell's Open Stack system. The Young AFCEANs also toured the Dell Solutions Data Center and Modular Data Center for a hands-on experience with the equipment.

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