FREMONT, CALIF. -March 7th, 2006 - KIS, the leading provider of information technology consulting and solutions, announced their participation in Novell's BrainShare Global 2006 Conference.

Allan Hurst, KIS’ Technical Principal and Director of Linux Strategy, will present two sessions each for three different seminars at BrainShare 2006. "Over the years, we've developed a set of best practices around Novell technologies.  As a Novell Platinum Partner, we feel it's important to share this information with the rest of the Novell community, to encourage and spread the use of Novell technologies."

Session topics include "TUT204: A Preventative Approach To Resolving Critical Server Issues", "IO315: Open Enterprise Server for the Experienced NetWare Administrator", and "TUT218: Pure IP Made Easy". 

As in previous years at BrainShare and other trade conferences, Allan will present TUT204 in conjunction with Dirk Smith.   Over the years, Allan & Dirk have become known in the Novell community as "The Crash Dummies", taking a serious topic - server crashes - and making the material fun and easy to understand. 

This playful yet technical approach also applies to Allan's other sessions (IO315, TUT218), both of which started as interactive workshops for NOBUG (Novell Oakland Bayarea Users Group), the NUI (Novell Users International) chapter for the San Francisco/East Bay area.

Allan is especially pleased to debut the session "IO315: Open Enterprise Server for the Experienced NetWare Administrator".  "This is a brand-new session which I wrote specifically to address common fears held by Novell administrators facing a migration to a Linux platform.  We tested this session at NOBUG meetings, and quizzed audiences at the 2005 NetWare Advisor Conference to discover people's primary concerns about migrating to OES. Those concerns and questions were built into the final version of the session for BrainShare."

The response to session "TUT218: Pure IP Made Easy" both gratifies and puzzles Allan.  "This is one of the very first technical tutorials I wrote several years ago, for an NUI presentation.  Every year, I swear I'll retire the session, because I figure everybody who's going to migrate to pure IP must have done so by now.  And every year, this session consistently draws rave reviews and large audiences.  For three years, I've joked about this being `The Session That Wouldn't Die'."  Still, audiences seem to love the session.  "There are some people I've seen sitting in this session three years in a row at the NetWare Advisor Summit."

The version being presented this year at BrainShare has been updated to talk about Novell's Open Enterprise Server running on Linux.  Allan admits to being a little surprised at the large numbers of people signing up for the session.  "This (2006) seems to be THE year that people are seriously migrating or planning to migrate their Novell services to Linux, and they need to first move to a Pure IP-based network in order to do that."

In other news, KIS announced that three partners and three senior account managers will participate in this year's PartnerNet Summit at BrainShare.  John Marciano, COO &Director of Sales, expressed his enthusiasm.  "We're bringing our top sales people as well as our partners to PartnerNet, to better prepare our sales organization for the Novell-related growth we're predicting in 2006."

About BrainShare
The conference will be held on March 19-24th, 2006 at Salt Palace Convention Center, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Additional information regarding the conference can be found at http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16844.html.

About KIS
Keep It Simple (KIS) is a privately held Network Solutions firm headquartered in Fremont, CA. As a professional services organization, KIS has served major corporations, education, and government organizations since 1988. KIS provides strategic network design, network security, network management, integration, and support services.