Tier1 Research’s summit series brings together enterprise IT executives with some of the largest hosting and colocation providers in the market today. The Silicon Valley event will address reducing capital expenditures, meeting the needs of business stakeholders and sharpening the RFP process to ensure that the most value is extracted from IT investments. DTSSV has been structured to provide IT decision-makers with a full range of data center information, including the type of data centers that are best-suited for their business, the build vs. lease decision, the brewing storm around data center regulation and the future of data center architecture.

“In bringing our Datacenter Transformation Summit to the West Coast, we were determined to provide enterprise IT executives with the invaluable resources that they would need to make more informed decisions around their infrastructure management,” said Daniel Golding, Vice President and Research Director of Tier1 Research and Conference Chair. “Given the current economic climate, we cannot stress to enterprise IT executives enough the importance of ensuring that their infrastructure is not only reliable, but that it also has minimal impact on their company.”

Scheduled speakers include:

* Mark Waddington, president of Quality Technology Services
* John Sheputis, CEO of Fortune Data Centers
* Billie Haggard, VP, Data Centers at CoreSite
* James Kennedy, senior manager of facilities, RagingWire
* Michael Tobin, CEO, Telecity Group

See the Datacenter Transformation Summit web site for more details.

But Affinity president John Maffei said that was no longer the case. “At one point, the company owned IGE but it was sold this spring,” Maffei said on the Wowhead announcement FAQ page. “It was a private transaction so we can’t reveal details.” It turns out that a number of forums reported the sale back in April, including F13 and an April 30 thread at the Allakhazam forums, in which site operator Allakhazam says that IGE had been sold a month earlier to John Yantis, an RMT veteran who built up MySuperSales and then sold the company to IGE in 2004.

But others are alleging that ties remain between Affinity and IGE. And if IGE was sold months ago, why was Affinity CEO Brock Media at the Virtual Goods Summit doing an interview with CNet about the eroding profitability of the RMT market?

“Affinity is finding it harder and harder to make the big profits it used to,” CNet’s Daniel Terdiman writes of his dicusssion with Brock. “And that’s because, he said, virtual assets are increasingly a commodity and, therefore, the margins on sales of WoW gold and other virtual goods are rapidly shrinking. In fact, he said, as Chinese competitors get more and more sophisticated, they are also willing to accept less and less profit margin. And that means, ‘they’re perfectly happy to accept $20,000 in profit on $2 million of revenue.’ ”

It’s interesting to see all this intrigue about the ownership status of a major RMT exchange emerge even as the Virtual Goods Summit is demonstrating the growing interest in virtual currency among investors and venture capitalists. Is a corporate-friendly discussion of “virtual goods” superseding the debate and controversy about “real money trading”? Is the entire undertaking being rebranded to appeal to the money crowd? Stay tuned.