WebProNews

Category: MultiCloudPro

  • Business Prioritizing Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage, Says Equinix CEO

    Business Prioritizing Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage, Says Equinix CEO

    “We’re seeing right now continued strength across our business because people are prioritizing digital transformation as a way to gain competitive advantage,” says Equinix CEO Charles Meyers. “The reality is people who are responding well to that are thriving and people that are not are being left behind. What companies (like Walmart) are doing essentially is using a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy. They have private infrastructure that they may house in a significant caged environment at Equinix but they interface it then with the public clouds.”

    Charles Meyers, CEO of Equinix, discusses their huge under the radar role in facilitating the massive digital transformation in progress with companies worldwide. Meyers was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    There’s A Very Deep Demand Pool For Data Centers

    We continue to see a really strong set of underlying secular demand drivers for the business. We’re seeing real strength in the business globally right now. Broadly, we’ve seen the sector respond very well. We think there’s a very deep demand pool for data centers. I do think that Equinix plays a very unique role in the market and our differentiated position is allowing us to even outperform relative to our peers. Public cloud adoption is a major catalyst for our business. As enterprises are adopting public cloud and looking at hybrid and multi-cloud as their architecture of choice we’re seeing really strong demand.

    We may not be a household name but I think it’s pretty safe to say we’re probably impacting the lives of millions of consumers on a day to day basis working with (many big-name companies such as Salesforce and Netflix). We play a very important role in terms of interconnecting our customers sometimes to public cloud providers, sometimes to SAAS providers like Salesforce, sometimes to other members of their supply chain, and sometimes to networks. A really big part of our legacy and history has been interconnecting people to networks. The interconnection story is a really central piece of the Equinix story.

    Equinix Is The Best Representation Of The Digital Edge

    Equinix is in fact the best representation of the digital edge today. That is the point at which people are interconnecting their private infrastructure with public cloud infrastructure, with networks, and with other members of their supply chain. When you hear about edge, oftentimes that edge is in fact within an Equinix facility and being interconnected over private interconnection facilities that are facilitated by Equinix.

    Typically, when inside one of our facilities, we’re unlike some wholesalers which might have one or a very small number of customers, we tend to have a larger number of customers in any individual facility. They are distributed across the site typically in private cages or sometimes in shared caged environments or shared rack environments and they have their equipment. They’re all obviously very secured and something that’s available just for them to access. But they’re all across the facility. You typically wouldn’t be able to see who the customer is because they are very sensitive about that from a security standpoint.

    Firms Prioritizing Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage

    We’re seeing right now continued strength across our business because people are prioritizing digital transformation as a way to gain competitive advantage. The reality is people who are responding well to that are thriving and people that are not are being left behind. So we’re seeing strong demand. I think the trade tensions, etc. probably affects some level of sentiment but we have not seen that impact the demand profile for our business.

    What companies (like Walmart) are doing essentially is using a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy. They have private infrastructure that they may house in a significant caged environment at Equinix but they interface it then with the public clouds. They’re using a variety of public clouds to house some of their workloads. So that hybrid multi-cloud environment is really the architecture of choice for enterprise customers of all sorts. Retail is actually an incredibly strong segment for us. That architecture of choice, hybrid and multi-cloud, is a major driver for Equinix’s business.

    Business Prioritizing Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage – Equinix CEO Charles Meyers
  • Rockwell Automation Taking Manufacturing To Whole New Level

    Rockwell Automation Taking Manufacturing To Whole New Level

    “The acquisition today of Fiix is a really exciting one,” says Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret. “It spans the gap that’s traditionally existed between manually entered keystroke data and real-time data that’s coming from the equipment itself. This helps take maintenance and automation really to a whole new level.”

    Fiix Inc. is a privately-held, AI-enabled computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) company. Fiix, founded in 2008, is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

    “We’re really taking manufacturing to a whole new level,” added Moret. “We’re taking the traditional operational technology and know-how that’s existed on the plant floor for so many years and we’re marrying that with IT technology and bringing those together. It’s really unlocking a whole new level of productivity across all the industries that we serve.”

    Fiix’s cloud-native CMMS creates workflows for the scheduling, organizing, and tracking of equipment maintenance. It connects seamlessly to business systems and drives data-driven decisions. The company’s revenue grew 70% in 2019 with more than 85% recurring revenue.

    “We believe that the future of industrial asset management is performance-based,” said Tessa Myers, vice president, product management, Software & Control, for Rockwell Automation. “With the addition of the Fiix platform and expertise, our customers will benefit from a 360-degree view of integrated data across automation, production, and maintenance, helping them to monitor and improve the performance of their assets and optimize how maintenance work is done.”

    James Novak, Fiix CEO, said, “From the beginning, Fiix has been on a mission to connect maintenance and operations teams to the tools, resources, and technology they need to modernize and join the future of maintenance. Joining Rockwell Automation will allow us to help even more companies modernize maintenance and increase asset performance by connecting to industry-leading data, automation, and production systems.”

    The company says that the addition of Fiix directly aligns with Rockwell Automation’s software strategy.

    Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret also discussed their involvement with COVID treatments and the vaccine:

    “We’re involved with virtually all of the manufacturers who are working on the treatments and the tests and the vaccines around the world for the COVID virus. We’re really helping them and helping the world to recover. So we’re involved in the formulation, the packaging, the tracing, and you obviously have to do this at unbelievable scale to be able to meet the need.”

    Rockwell Automation Taking Manufacturing To Whole New Level
  • It Is a Multi-Cloud World, Says VMWare COO

    It Is a Multi-Cloud World, Says VMWare COO

    “VMWare allows the datacenter to act like a public cloud,” says VMWare COO Sanjay Poonen. “It is a multicloud world. While AWS will be first and preferred for us, we want every customer that has VMWare in the private cloud but AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba, those are the top five hyperscalers, and all of them have embraced VMWare.”

    Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMWare, discusses the incredible growth of VMWare which is driven by their ability to connect companies to any and every cloud in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Software Is Defining Everything

    We had a great quarter. You have to put the bigger picture in perspective. We’re in the golden age of software where software is defining everything. Software companies, in general, are doing well. What we have done as a company is focus on making the datacenter software-driven and we think there is a bright future there. We showed some examples of that in hyperconverged  (HCI) and in software-defined networking (SDN). 

    We also showed some incredible momentum with our partnerships in the hybrid-cloud. Amazon is obviously first and preferred there. We announced a partnership with Azure. There is also the digital workspace which is all of the devices. We think our future is bright and we just have to keep executing. Our view is always the long-run. 

    In This Software Future We Are Not Tethered To One Company

    I think there is a little bit of a misperception that we should nip in the bud (regarding correlating Dell’s earnings with VMWare). First off, VMWare’s business with Dell in these areas like hyperconverged, we’ve now surpassed companies like Nutanix who are number one in hyper-converged infrastructure, and in the digital workspace where we are partnering with Dell Laptops, those are going very well. We want Dell and VMWare to do well together. In the datacenter we work with Dell, HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, etc. There is no one hardware player that is the majority of our business. 

    In cloud we work with AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, and IBM. You won’t find another company that has got as many hybrid-cloud partners. In the digital workspace, we work with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In this software future, we are not tethered to one company. We are optimized to Dell, we are not tethered to them. You need a software-based solution for any of these areas, the datacenter, the cloud, or the digital workspace during tough times and in good times. 

    It Is a Multi-Cloud World

    You should think about applications like mobile homes. They’re going to move from the datacenter to the cloud on this freeway called VMWare. The mobile home could go to one cloud and may come back. VMWare allows the datacenter to act like a public cloud. We make the hardware datacenter look like Amazon. Now if you are an Amazon customer, and they have 30-35 percent market share, number one in the market for cloud, they are our preferred cloud partner, we can help customers. We have many customers who are adopting VMWare cloud in AWS. 

    For those customers who said we are not an Amazon shop, for example, we quoted Walmart in our earnings announcement, they are using Azure. They have an option now because we announced a partnership with Azure. There are some customers that are going to have some other clouds. It is a multicloud world. While AWS will be first and preferred for us, we want every customer that has VMWare in the private cloud but AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba, those are the top five hyperscalers, and all of them have embraced VMWare. 

    IBM is a great partner of VMWare. We love their services business. IBM Cloud has 2,000+ customers. We are going to partner really well with Ginni Rometty and the team. We compete with a small part of Red Hat’s business in containers. Over 80 percent of Red Hat’s business is Linux, a good part of their business which is OpenShift and JBoss, is not doing so well. The future of containers is a small part of the business. We can walk and chew gum. We can partner with IBM and compete with that small part of Red Hat and that’s our focus. We want a big tent at VMWare. We want to partner with as many people as possible and compete with as few people as possible. 

    Make Your Story Sesame Street Simple

    First off, if you want to serve your customers well start by serving your employees. One of my professors at the Harvard Business School, Len Schlesinger, wrote an article and book on service profit chain. What he talked about is if you want to create shareholder value focus not just on customer satisfaction but satisfied employees. Hug your start. Take care of the best and brightest who come in there. 

    The second one is something that all of us can do which is make your story Sesame Street simple. All too often, I see product managers and account executives blabbering on with PowerPoints. Let’s tell the story just like you are telling the story to your mother or to your kids. Ironically, when you make things simple you’re going back to the basic principals of Steven Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People. It’s not that complicated. Have customer empathy.

    It Is a Multi-Cloud World, Says VMWare COO Sanjay Poonen
  • Google Acquires CloudSimple, A Company Once Crucial to Microsoft

    Google Acquires CloudSimple, A Company Once Crucial to Microsoft

    Google announced in a blog post today that it has acquired CloudSimple, a company once central to Microsoft’s cloud ambitions.

    CloudSimple is a “secure, high performance, dedicated environment in Public Clouds to run VMware workloads.” Google struck a partnership with CloudSimple in August, following a convoluted series of events.

    Microsoft, in an effort to catch up with AWS, needed to bring on as many VMware customers as possible to its cloud solutions. CloudSimple was created by Guru Pangal, an entrepreneur who spent four years working for Microsoft on Azure. Microsoft and VMware had been rivals for some time. As a result, Microsoft’s plan was to use the newly created CloudSimple—also a VMware partner—as a conduit to migrate VMware workloads to Azure.

    Michael Dell, CEO of the company bearing his name, stepped in to help smooth things out between the two companies, helping Microsoft secure formal permission to run VMware on Azure. As part of the deal, however, Dell-owned Virtustream became the recommended method of migrating VMware to Azure, leaving CloudSimple out in the cold.

    Google saw an opportunity and formed a partnership with CloudSimple in August with the aim of helping companies migrate onsite VMware workloads to Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple.

    “Through our existing partnership with CloudSimple, our customers can migrate their VMware workloads from on-premises datacenters directly into Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, while also creating new VMware workloads as needed. Their apps can run exactly the same as they have been on-premises, but with all the benefits of the cloud, like performance, elasticity, and integration with key cloud services and technologies. And best of all, customers can do all this without having to re-architect existing VMware-based applications and workloads, which helps them operate more efficiently and reduce costs, while also allowing IT staff to maintain consistency and use their existing VMware tools, workflows and support. To that end, we believe in a multi-cloud world and will continue to provide choice for our customers to use the best technology in their journey to the cloud.”

    Now that Google has acquired CloudSimple, it will be interesting to see if it can makeup lost ground against rivals Microsoft and Amazon.

  • VMware COO: We Have a Bigger Plan For Security

    VMware COO: We Have a Bigger Plan For Security

    “Fundamentally, we have a bigger plan for security,” says VMware COO Sanjay Poonen. “We felt it was the perfect time for us to come up with a disruptive play that was based on big data, was AI, and was cloud-based. There were only two companies doing it, CrowdStrike and Carbon Black. We felt Carbon Black was better integrated to us, had as good a product or better. We have a plan to integrate Carbon Black and make it intrinsic in a way that nobody else will do. We think this will transform the security industry that’s been broken today.”

    Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, elaborates on how they plan to transform security and lead the containers movement currently going on in digital transformation. Poonen was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Containers Are A Movement Going On In Digital Transformation 

    When you look at these types of transformational moments going on in digital transformation, these happen once every 10 to 20 years. VMware is the company that invented the virtual machine and for the last 20 years, we’ve created a million jobs in that part of infrastructure. There is a movement going on in digital transformation right now called containers. We believe it’s our birthright to own that movement. There will be potentially tens of millions of jobs among developers created on top of this virtual machine. 

    Think of the virtual machine sort of like the ship and containers like the things on top of it. In the 1950s containers completely transformed ships and VMware created the ship. These containers are going to allow apps to be fundamentally transformed. We found as we thought about this that this was the right time to do it and it was our birthright to do it better than anybody else. Why not take those three thousand people in Pivotal and $750 million in revenue and turbocharge the next ten years of VMware, not just in virtual machines and virtualization in the path to the cloud, which is the first C, but the other C is containers. We think that’s a big part.

    We’re A Go-To-Market Machine

    Pivotal (is more valuable than the market initially believed) for two reasons. They’ve refactored their product which now sits completely on Kubernetes. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a sort of the big open-source container movement. And their go-to-market engine probably stuttered a little bit. But that’s what VMware does well. We’re a go-to-market machine. We’ll bring them in and accelerate this to our 500,000 customers. We feel good when we get a good product in the hands of our good go-to-market machine. I think we can accelerate it. 

    At VMware, no one person does it, it takes a village but also our partners like Dell and the ecosystem also. VMware has 75,000 partners who love us. We’re going to take this to those ecosystem partners. We have a big tent of system integrators and they’re excited about this. We branded the entire thing, that’s the other thing we’ve done pretty well. Tenzo, which is the Japanese word for containers, we’re doing big ads in New York, San Francisco, and London Airports. This is a play on the word VMware that says ContainerWare. We’re not changing the name of the company but we’re going big in containers and that’s the key message.

    We Have a Bigger Plan For Security

    Fundamentally, we have a bigger plan for security.  Let me just walk you through a quick understanding of the strategy. There are a lot of parallels with security and healthcare. My mom’s a doctor. Imagine you went to a doctor and you asked her how do you get well and she said you have to eat 5,000 tablets. Eating one every 30 seconds would take you a couple of weeks to do. That’s what the security industry is today. It’s 5,000 vendors, broken, with lots of different agents bloated on people’s laptops, lots of alerts showing up, and manual labor.

    We look at this and say there’s a fundamentally new way to do it, which is to make security intrinsic to your diet. You eat your vegetables, your fruit, you drink your water, brush your teeth, and that’s what we’re doing with security. We are making it part of our platform. 

    A Disruptive Play Based On Big Data, AI, and Cloud-Based

    We’ve been doing very well in network security around the NSX product but endpoint security and workload security we didn’t have much there. We had Workspace ONE, our AirWatch related product, and we found that many of these endpoint security players were kind of in a little internal turmoil. Symantec got bought by Broadcom. McAfee got bought by Intel and then was spun out again. We felt it was the perfect time for us to come up with a disruptive play that was based on big data, was AI, and was cloud-based.

    There were only two companies doing it, CrowdStrike and Carbon Black. We felt Carbon Black was better integrated to us, had as good a product or better, and we intend to acquire them. The acquisition hasn’t yet closed. We have a plan to integrate this and make it intrinsic in a way that nobody else will do. We laid that out at VMworld. We think this will transform the security industry that’s been broken today.

    VMware COO Sanjay Poonen: We Have a Bigger Plan For Security
  • 50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO

    “You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten,” says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen. “We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment.”

    John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, discusses the impact of 50 years of datacenter that will shift to the cloud over the next ten years, in an interview on CNBC:

    Software Is Now Eating the World

    Software is now eating the world as a lot of folks know. It’s how we bank, how we shop, how we do just about everything. These applications have gotten much more complex over the last five years as they have moved to cloud platforms. The spend in the traditional datacenter is declining quickly and the move is over to the cloud. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment. 

    For example, Carribean Cruise, one of our customers, is reinventing the travel experience for Millenials. They’re doing it all through software on their ships. They provide a little wrist band that interacts with software on ship and on shore to transform the experience. What we’re seeing is really still a continued focus on growth. New revenue streams, new opportunities, and taking in existing core application environments and rebuilding it to be cloud-native. That’s the shift that we see. Still growth, still attack market, still competitive advantage for most companies that are pushing forward aggressively. 

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud

    We’ve always built the company around a direct sales approach. Our products are used by enterprises. Enterprises want to connect directly with the company that builds these products. We’ve really always gone to market that way and it has served us very well. It makes it a very predictable business and a very strategic platform for these enterprises. We run across all of the cloud platforms and then some. We target the global 15,000 enterprise companies. We expect to talk to the CIO, CTO, and sort of the executive level that are driving this shift within their organizations’ digital transformation projects. That’s our focus. 

    What’s happening now is that the cloud is moving from the early days where people would put applications in the cloud to where they really are taking their entire datacenter and shifting it to the cloud. That’s what’s driving these webscale multi-cloud environments that we do so well in. It’s still early days. There’s a lot of room to go in this marketplace. You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten. We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast.

    Cloud Is So Much More Efficient and Economical For Companies

    This market is very large. We estimate it’s about $18 billion. Others have the estimates in the $20 billions. It’s plenty of room for a company like us to grow and actually probably multiple companies to grow in this space. We feel very secure and happy with our organic innovation. We’ve been able to reinvent the business several times now. It’s a very dynamic space, this application world. Organic innovation is our thrust going forward.

    The cloud is so much more efficient and economical for companies that as there is any kind of disruption anywhere in their markets they’re going to lean toward applications. The things that really drive connective tissue with their customers and their marketplaces that create more automation and more information that they gather when they go through digital channels.

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen
  • VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation, Says CEO

    VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation, Says CEO

    “We believe that our conversations now have gone from targeted to holistic to be this platform for their digital transformation,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. “That core idea of how do they get to that digital future, that’s not an IT discussion anymore, that’s a business strategy conversation. That’s why we are seeing this real uplift in the position in the conversation that we are having with customers globally.”

    Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, discusses how VMware has become a complete digital transformation platform for companies in an interview on CNBC:

    VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation

    We believe that our conversations now as we’ve expanded from selling compute Hypervisor to a complete cloud infrastructure, complete end-user computing, a transformation of their network and security offerings, our conversations have gone from targeted to holistic to be this platform for their digital transformation. That core idea of how do they get to that digital future, that’s not an IT discussion anymore, that’s a business strategy conversation.

    That’s why we are seeing this real uplift in the position in the conversation that we are having with customers globally. As we’ve positioned in the past, as people move to the full VMware offering that is a multiplier. A company or an institution that is using us as a Hypervisor, now the full cloud stack of network, compute, management, and automation, that is a business expansion opportunity for us.

    VMware Seeking Ability To Be a Government Cloud Provider

    As I said on the (earnings) call we are now in the FedRAMP High process. We are seeking that ability to be a cloud provider for the government and many of the government. Many of the government in defense and intelligence are big VMware footprints. We see this as a great opportunity. We are in process to get approval. As the JEDI contract gets resolved we hope to be able to be positioned with Amazon and Azure, given our relationships with both.

    Even as our preferred relationship with Amazon is very strong we do see this ability for us to participate for government business being an essential element of our multi-cloud strategy where Amazon, Azure, IBM, and our other cloud partners all give us a great opportunity to participate for government contracts.

    VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation, Says CEO Pat Gelsinger
  • Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    “The surprise outcome ten years from now is there’ll be something much bigger than the private cloud and the public cloud,” says Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell. “It’s the edge. I actually think there will be way more computed data on the edge in ten years than any of the derivatives of cloud that we want to talk about. That’s the ten-year prediction.”

    Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, discusses how it has become a critical technology platform for its customers in an interview with theCUBE at Dell Technology World 2019 in Las Vegas:

    Data Has Always Been at the Center of How the Technology Industry Works

    We feel great. Our business has really grown tremendously. All the things we’ve been doing have been resonating with customers. We’ve been able to restore the origins of the entrepreneurial dream and success of the company and reintroduce innovation and risk-taking into a now $91 billion company growing at double digits last year. Certainly, the set of capabilities that we’ve been able to build organically and inorganically, with the set of alliances we have, the trust that customers have given us, we are super happy about the position that we’re in and the opportunities going forward. I think all this is really just a pregame show to what’s ahead for our industry and for the role that technology is going to play in the world.

    Data has always been at the center of how the technology industry works. Now we just have a tsunami, an explosion of data. Of course, now we have this new computer science that allows us to reason over the data in real time and create much better results and outcomes. That combined with the computing power all organizations have to reimagine themselves given all these technologies. Certainly, the infrastructure requirements in terms of the network, the storage, that compute, the build-out on the edge, tons of new requirements, we’re super well-positioned to go address all that.

    Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    The surprise outcome ten years from now is there’ll be something much bigger than the private cloud and the public cloud. It’s the edge. I actually think there will be way more computed data on the edge in ten years than any of the derivatives of cloud that we want to talk about. That’s the ten-year prediction. That’s what I see. Maybe nobody’s predicting that just yet, but let’s come back in ten years and see what it looks like.

    Really what we’re doing is we’re bringing to customers all the resources they need to operate in the hybrid multi-cloud world. First, you have to recognize that the workloads want to move around. To say that they’re all going to be here or there is in some sense missing the point because they’re going to move back and forth. You’ve got regulation, cost, security, performance, latency, all sorts of new requirements that are coming at you and they’re not going to just sit in one place.

    This is All Super Important As We Enter This AI Enabled Age

    Now with the VMware cloud foundation, we have the ability to move these workloads seamlessly across now essentially all the public clouds. We have 4,200 partners out there, infrastructure on-premise built and tuned specifically for the VMware platform and empowered also for the edge. All of this together is the Dell Technologies cloud. We have obviously great capabilities from our Dell UMC infrastructure solutions and all the great innovations at VMware coming together.

    Inside the business, the first priority was to get each of the individual pieces working well. But then we saw that the real opportunity was in the seams and how we could more deeply integrate all the aspects of what we’re doing together. You saw that on stage you know in vivid form yesterday with Pat and Jeff and Satya and even more today. Of course, there’s more to do. There’s always more to do. We’re working on how we build a data platform bringing together all of our capabilities with Boomi and Data Protection and VMware. This is all going to be super important as we enter this AI enabled age of the future.

    We’ve Created an Incredible Business

    I think investors are increasingly understanding that we’ve created an incredible business here. Certainly, if we look at the additional coverage that we have as they’re understanding the business, some of the analysts are starting to say hey this doesn’t really feel like a conglomerate. It’s a direct quote. If you think about what we demonstrated today and yesterday and will demonstrate in the future we’re not like Berkshire Hathaway. This is not a railroad that owns a chain of restaurants. This is one integrated business that fits together incredibly well and it’s generating substantial cash flows.

    I think investors over time are figuring out the value that’s intrinsic to the overall Dell Technologies family. We’ve got lots of ways to invest, we got VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, and of course the overall Dell Technologies.

    Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud


  • There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World, Says Rackspace SVP

    There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World, Says Rackspace SVP

    “If you think about where we are on the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars of spend that are ultimately going to move, there’s no doubt that it’s a cloud-first world,” says Prashanth Chandasekar, Senior Vice President & General Manager at Rackspace. “But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. How do we take on that hybrid movement? Amazon is very aggressively investing and we’re investing with them and helping our customers along their journey effectively.”

    Prashanth Chandasekar, SVP & GM at Rackspace, discusses how Rackspace has transformed from primarily a hosting company to a technology service company helping enterprises effectively and efficiently move to the cloud on AWS and other platforms in an interview on theCUBE at AWS Summit London 2019:

    Rackspace Helping Companies Navigate to the AWS Cloud

    Ultimately part of the reason why customers in our install base were reaching out to us and saying, ”Hey Rackspace, you’ve done a phenomenal job helping us in the first evolution of our journey, can you help us now in this new world where it’s actually quite complicated?” Over 1,400 features on average are being launched by Amazon on a yearly basis. Despite what we hear in the headlines where cloud first companies and the startups of today are absolutely leveraging Lambda out of the gate or containers out of the gate.

    There are a whole host of companies that are going through this massive digital disruption trying to compete with these startups. They need a lot of help to reskill their workforce to change the way they think about processes within their organizations between their business development and technology and operations teams. Then ultimately, how do they actually build out a much more agile way of responding to customers? That work requires a company like Rackspace to come and help them navigate through that really large set of features.

    There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World

    That’s what’s so dynamic about the space. Nobody would have predicted this ten years ago. Even today we’re seeing a ton of momentum with concepts that were very nascent just a few years ago. Kubernetes is a concept where almost every one of our AWS customers at Rackspace, what we call fanatical AWS, are absolutely looking for help on Kubernetes. When we think about Docker a few years ago and Dock Enterprise and we think about Kubernetes and there was that battle, today the battle has been won. Kubernetes is pretty much the de-facto orchestration engine. Nobody would have predicted that a couple of years ago.


    Hybrid and multi-cloud are becoming a lot more prevalent. I think even Amazon is very much acknowledging that the big opportunity is in hybrid cloud. If you think about where we are on the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars of spend that are ultimately going to move, there’s no doubt that it’s a cloud-first world or a destination is the cloud. But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. How do we take on that hybrid movement? Outposts is a great acknowledgment of that. Amazon is very aggressively investing and we’re investing with them and helping our customers along their journey effectively.

    There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World, Says Rackspace SVP Prashanth Chandasekar

  • Customers Need an Easy Button for Cloud

    Customers Need an Easy Button for Cloud

    “Customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but almost an easy button for cloud,” says Matt Liebowitz of Dell Technologies Consulting.  “Often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, but it’s really difficult to do that integration work. But this product, Dell Technologies Cloud, is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud that they can start consuming.”

    Matt Liebowitz, Global Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Leader at Dell EMC, discusses how to migrate enterprises to the multi-cloud in an interview with theCUBE at Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas:

    Multi-Cloud is Not Just Using More Than One Cloud

    The most common thing we see from customers when they say I’m doing multi-cloud is they’re actually using more than one cloud. That’s not multi-cloud. You really need to tie it together with a cloud management platform, something that can bring all the pieces together that’s API enabled so that they can programmatically access resources. When customers tell us they’ve got multi-cloud but they’re really consuming something in Azure and something in AWS they’ve just created more IT silos. We’re trying to get away from that. They can use all those clouds but wrap it together in that common control plane so you can understand your estate and actually manage it and consume it.

    I think most customers are responding. The needs of the business are changing and they need to respond more quickly so they just consume cloud resources as they can. That often leads to the sprawl. We try to just wrap it together, do an analysis, figure out what’s out there, and help them not only understand where the applications should live but wrap an operating model around it so they can start consuming it properly. They can then understand what they’re going to advertise in their service catalog.

    Are You a Digital Laggard or a Digital Leader?

    We take what analysts do and we also have our own studies and indexes all the way starting from what we call digital laggards all the way to the digital leaders. What we found is actually most of the customers are either laggards or they’re just starting out. Maybe they’ve made some loose investments but they haven’t walked the path that far. There’s stuff kind of everywhere. Customers don’t often know where to start but I think they’re responding to the needs of the business. I don’t think it’s anything that they’re doing that’s wrong but it’s a little bit of the Wild West for sure.

    It’s all about business value and business outcome. The customers who are the most successful have a business reason for what they’re trying to do. They’re not going to public cloud because Gartner said they should, they’re doing it because they know they’re going to get an outcome. They’re going to be able to go into new markets or operate faster and deploy applications faster. Those are the ones that are further down the line. I would say the ones that are the laggards are the ones that are just sort of peeking under the covers of what they should do. They’re just starting out there. They’ve got some workloads in multiple clouds and they need to get a handle on it but they’re just starting.

    Customers Need an Easy Button for Cloud

    Customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but almost an easy button for cloud. Often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, but it’s really difficult to do that integration work. I’m in consulting so we’re all about the outcome. But this product, Dell Technologies Cloud, is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud that they can start consuming. Then we can help them with the day two to actually drive business value, consumption of the cloud and that sort of thing.

    We have a framework on how we approach things for multi-cloud and for lots of other things. We use a methodology that we call as-is-to-be where we determine their current state, project where they’re going to be in the future and build a roadmap that’s actually actionable. Then I think what differentiates the methodology is we tie it to a business case. We tie it to an outcome and a financial outcome so that executives and IT leaders can see that this is not just another IT project. They’re going to get true value out of it. We build a roadmap pretty quick, within three to six weeks, that’s actually actionable. We build consensus and that’s how we get started.

    Customers Need an Easy Button for Cloud, Says Matt Liebowitz of Dell Technologies


  • SAP CEO: We’re the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    SAP CEO: We’re the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    “We’re the fastest growing cloud company in the enterprise software space,” says SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “We grew total revenue by 16% and grew cloud 48%. Let me just put this on the line. When you grow cloud 48%, that’s 80% faster than Salesforce, that’s 30% faster than Workday. So when you have a franchise that’s growing your core business in double digits, the cloud faster than anybody out there, and you’re progressing the margin one point per year between now and 2023.”

    Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, discusses SAP’s amazing growth over the last quarter, especially in cloud, in an interview on CNBC:

    Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    This is a good start to the year. It’s what the capital markets have been waiting for. They’ve been getting all kinds of revenue growth. We’re the fastest growing cloud company in the enterprise software space. They wanted to see the multiples on the margin. As we raised our full-year guidance we committed to improving the operating margins by one point per year for the next five years. Now after a $75 billion investment in innovation for our customers, our shareholders are saying wow, this is the moment I get the multiples on the margin and therefore the leverage in the share price.

    Our cloud gross margins can improve to 75% between now and 2023. We’re hiring the absolute very best people in the world in artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, all the areas that our customers want us to go. It’s not the number of people, it’s getting the absolute very best people. If you hire right, you manage your cloud gross margins right, and you have a highly inspired customer base where you’re growing with high renewal rates, you get tremendous leverage on the operating margin.

    The Company Really Is On a Roll

    What we’re doing is when we did restructure, and that was announced in Q4 and we executed it in Q1, we basically said we’re going to take about 4,400 people from areas that were not part of the new economy and hire to those tremendous standards. We’re bringing in the best data scientists in the world, best machine learning individuals out there, best enterprise application software coders around the world, and we’re developing in China, Israel, the United States, and in Europe. The company really is on a roll.

    We’re almost done (with the restructuring) in the sense that we accounted for most all of it in Q1. We are finishing it up in the next quarter right now. For example, it’s being executed in Germany, but the majority of it has been handled. The stock today (is way up). We grew total revenue by 16% and grew cloud 48%. Let me just put this on the line. When you grow cloud 48%, that’s 80% faster than Salesforce.com, that’s 30% faster than Workday. So when you have a franchise that’s growing your core business in double digits, the cloud faster than anybody out there, and you’re progressing the margin one point per year between now and 2023, I think that’s why the shareholders have the stock up 8%.

    What’s On My Mind is Where the Customer Needs Us To Go

    All competition is on my mind. But what’s really on my mind is where the customer needs us to go. We weren’t losing to them. What the shareholders wanted, and we surveyed them, we had a capital market stay in New York and we used Qualtrics to survey them, they said we love your revenue growth we know you’re gaining share we just want more operating margin leverage out of the company. That’s what we gave them this quarter. It took us ten years and $75 billion in R&D and M&A to get to the point now where we have everything we need. We don’t need to do any more big M&A, we just need to perform well and spin-off margin and free cash flow for our shareholders and the stock goes on a run.

    They (our customers) know we’ve given them so much innovation. It’s coming at them so fast that now they’re saying help me integrate it, help me fully leverage it across the enterprise and get the value from it. Interestingly, the customers and the shareholders are both in the same place. They’re saying you’ve done unreal things, now let’s dig in and drive real value from all the things that you’ve done. We bought an $8.3 billion dollar company called Qualtrics. We now took over a new category called experience management where we can actually tell the consumer experience inside or outside the company in real time. We have data now.

    So think about this, if you’re running a company and you want to recruit to retire process in your company, how do my people feel when I recruit them? How did I feel when I trained them? Am I coaching them? Am I teaching them? Am I giving them everything they need in their compensation plan? We know this all now in real time with the Hana database built into the human capital management process. We do things that no other company can do.

    SAP CEO: Were the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space


  • SAP CEO: We Out-Innovated Everybody

    SAP CEO: We Out-Innovated Everybody

    SAP announced the completion of its $8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics which brings critical real-time customer experience data to its customers. SAP CEO Bill McDermott explains how the combination of Qualtrics’ Experience Management (XM) Platform with SAP’s enterprise software and cloud services is not only a game changer for companies, but solidifies SAP as the world’s business software leader:

    “Where did we leave them in the dust? We basically out innovated everybody in terms of how you run your business better. Now the idea is how you create an unbelievable human experience so you inspire your people to take care of your customer and create a loyalty effect that’s unlike any other company in the industry. That’s what we do.”

    Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, talks about how the integration of Qualtrics into SAPs enterprise solutions will help businesses know their customers with real-time sentiment analysis, in an interview with Fox Business at Davos 2019:

    With Qualtrics Your Brand Will Become a Religion

    I think it’s really important that you focus on the business of your customer and stay obsessed with that and not get caught up in a lot of tech jargon. That’s why I’m glad we’re the business software market leader.

    There is a huge trust deficit in the economy. Customers aren’t necessarily getting what they paid for which is why there is a $1.6 trillion deficit from customers that defect from companies that are out there in the marketplace today. So how do you keep a loyal customer? Today’s systems create operating data. You know your customers, you know your people, you know your suppliers. But we need to know what are consumers saying in real time, in the moment? We need that sentiment analysis.

    Qualtrics is the number one experience management company in the world. From now on, your customers, if you are CEO, will love your products. In fact, they will be obsessed with them. Your brand will become a religion because every employee is an ambassador that’s connected inextricably to the customer experience. That’s Qualtrics.

    If you are a customer of SAP, now you have all the experience data. I call this X-data. This is data from all the consumers that are experiencing your product and your brand. You combine that with the O-data which is all the operational aspects of how you run your company, from your demand all the way through to your supply. You know everything. You take X plus O and you have the winning formula.

    The Enterprise Has Been Redefined by SAP

    We surveyed, with Qualtrics and SAP, along with the World Economic Forum here, we surveyed 10,000 individuals on a random sample in 29 different countries. Once of the questions was, “What are you really worried about out there?” Most humans said we are worried about being replaced by robots. We said, “Is tech for good or is tech for bad?” What’s happening in your world with the perception of technology? They said, “A little bit better than negative, but somewhat ambivalent.” That’s a concern.

    They said that they are basically trusting the people that run their companies, even more than the people that run government. There is a trust deficit out there. It’s really important that we close that trust deficit at the leadership level. It’s also important that companies get the human experience going with their own employees and their customers. That’s why I think that this experience management positioning for SAP is fundamentally going to be a moment in time where the enterprise has been redefined by SAP.

    Over 77 percent of the world’s transactions run through an SAP system. We manage everything from the customer relationship to how you manage your people to how you build great products and how you ship on time and deliver. Now we have experience management which is the ultimate touchpoint for customers, and we put it all in the cloud. So you can be nimble, you can be agile, and you can upgrade quickly. You don’t need a whole lot of resources to maintain these systems. We are moving faster than anyone in 25 industries and in 193 countries around the world.

    About the S/4HANA Upgrade

    S/4HANA is now the system from the demand signal of your consumer in any channel including ecommerce. We know your consumer. We align the product in the proper configuration, at the proper price based on the customers history and all the loyalty that they should earn in their business with you. We ship. We take care of the whole supply chain. You get what you want at the price you procured for anyplace in real-time in the world. That whole value chain is SAP.

    4HANA is now in a cloud. So you can run your entire company from end-to-end on top of SAP’s 4HANA platform in the cloud. Game change. Again, I go back to, that’s all the operational data and all the operational processes. Now, if you can add experiences to this with Qualtrics you’ve got an unbeatable competitive advantage.

    I’m signing up customers left and right on this idea in Davos because this has been the number one thing that businesses have forgotten. You have to have the experience under control with your consumer and it has to be real-time sentiment analysis. Just think, it’s five times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep the one you have. Don’t you want to know how they’re doing?

    No Signs That There is This Global Slowdown

    We have a very strong business. There are no signs in our business that there is this global slowdown. Because we serve the best run businesses in the world we are usually an early indicator of what’s going on out there. We see a very optimistic future. Our pipelines and our business model have not changed one iota. I think there is this disjoint between the consumer companies and the consumer world and the enterprise.

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott: “We out innovated everybody.”
    SAP Bill McDermott: “No signs that there is this global slowdown.”


  • When It’s Game Time for Retail New Relic is There, Says CEO

    When It’s Game Time for Retail New Relic is There, Says CEO

    New Relic provides deep performance analytics for every part of a business software environment. It enables companies to easily view and analyze massive amounts of data, and gain actionable insights in real-time. Whether it’s for a popular mobile app, an online video game with millions of users, or a huge ecommerce platform, they all rely on critical New Relic insights to keep revenue flowing.

    Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic, talks about how critical real-time insights from New Relic are to a companies revenue stream in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    When It’s Game Time for Retail New Relic is There

    For retail obviously, so much of their business, particularly their web business depends on a very small number of days; Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. That’s game time. That’s the moment of truth. That’s when we’re working our hardest to make sure our software is there to make sure our customers can see what’s going on in real-time. Our customers were thrilled with the performance and availability that they delivered which turns into business results.

    If your site is slower or down on Cyber Monday, forget it, you’re going to miss your quarter. You may never recover from that because you also have a brand hit. So it’s so vital. This is not nice to have software. Anybody who is competing on their software needs New Relic’s platform in order to succeed.

    We’re a Massive Cloud Operation

    We’re a massive cloud operation. We’re collecting millions of data points every second from mobile applications and from cloud infrastructure every time somebody’s pressing a button to buy something and every time someone’s watching this video on the CNBC app. We’re measuring the health of that and we do that on a massive scale. That’s one of the things our customers love.

    When Fortnite said, “Hey we’ve got this huge app. It’s the biggest in the world and we want to monitor on New Relic.” We’re like great. Your biggest day is just another day for us. We collect so much data and we can do it for you.

    New Relic Monitors Fortnite to Keep it Running for Millions of People

    Epic Games is the company that created Fortnite and if you have kids or you’re into games this game has taken the world by storm. It’s the most popular game in the world. If that game is not working millions of people know about it and the company is affected.

    So they rely on the New Relic platform to see everything in real-time on how that game is performing. It’s a very complex piece of software that has to work flawlessly in real-time. We measure everything going on in that game so that the builders of Fortnite can keep it running for millions of people 24/7.

    There are different companies that do different things around observing what’s going on in this space but were the applications-centric company. What does that mean? It means that when you’re playing Fortnite what you’re doing is you’re using software.

    We’re measuring the software in real-time. We do it in a cloud platform that integrates what’s going on in the software with the infrastructure and with the end-user experience, like the mobile app. We see all that together and do it in one unified platform and our customers love us for that.

    New Relic Helps CNBC Scale Mobile App in Real-Time

    At CNBC, you just launched an incredible new revenue app in the fall and it’s amazing. I use it a lot and I love it and again this is an app that’s getting a lot of uptake. I was talking to the team and they said customers love what the app is doing for them and they want to use it more and more. That means they have to scale.

    When more and more people are using that app how are you able to handle the scale when people want to see the news in real time and want to see the stock quotes in real time? We provide them the visibility that gives them the confidence to move faster and scale to this amazing demand that the CNBC app is generating.

    New Relic Helps Companies Move Fast in a Multi-Cloud World

    This is so important to our customers. It’s clear that we’re entering a multi-cloud world. Obviously, Microsoft’s doing well and Amazon doing very well. We had a great show at re:INVENT. And there’s some hybrid cloud as well. What our customers are saying no matter where my software is running I want to see it all in one place. I’m sick of moving from one tool to another to see a complete picture. They turn to the New Relic platform to see it all in one place. That enables them to move fast with confidence.

    Anywhere there are systems that need to perform well and scale well, those are systems that need New Relic. What we say to our customers is building great software is not easy, but it is the foundation upon which companies can build great competitive advantage. We want to partner with our customers to deliver amazing software that delights our customers and grows their business.


  • IBM CEO: We Will Be Number One in Hybrid Cloud

    IBM CEO: We Will Be Number One in Hybrid Cloud

    IBM is in the midst of being reinvented and the acquisition of Red Hat is a big part of that. A primary business for IBM is helping companies integrate their mission-critical work into a multi-cloud world in a secure way. “All of us know the big job is how to manage it, access controls, security, know what data is where, and how much data you want flowing,” says IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.  “We will be number one in what the world calls hybrid cloud.”

    Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, recently discussed on Fox Business at Davos 2019 how the acquisition of Red Hat is part of the reinvention of IBM and how this is part of their strategy to be number one in hybrid cloud:

    We Have Been Reinventing IBM

    We have been reinventing IBM. We just had our earnings and 50 percent of the company has moved into these new products and services which are always redoing the portfolio. One of the things with the Red Hat acquisition is really what I see in front of us, which I call chapter two of the cloud. For most enterprises, chapter one was the easy things that they moved. Pretty low hanging fruit. If you sized it, 20 percent is what’s moved to the cloud. The other 80 percent is not just more complex, it’s got a different complexion.

    Most companies weren’t born yesterday. It’s like if you have a house already. You’ve got your house. You say these rooms I’m not going to touch, I’m going to leave them as they are. These rooms are going to get remodeled, moved to the public cloud. These are so sensitive, I’m going to keep them right here and put them in a private cloud.

    Greatest Proponent of Open and Open Source

    That’s really what Red Hat and us together says to all of our clients out there. With this journey now, you are going to have multiple clouds. They are difficult to manage with security and moving of data. Don’t get locked into any single cloud. We now become the greatest proponent of open and open source.

    Part of Red Hat is how you build things so they can move from private to multiple clouds. This allows clients to move to a multi-cloud era, open so they are not locked in, in a very secure way, so they make their cloud journey from where they start. It really allows us to own the starting point and the ending point of a cloud journey. That’s part of the portfolio.

    Number One in Hybrid Cloud

    When you think of IBM, think of your mission-critical work. We believe it will be a multi-cloud world, but we believe we will have the most secure public cloud for mission-critical work. We will also help you manage and integrate all of these other clouds together. We are the cloud for business. That’s how I would differentiate us. For big business as well as small. You will see a different mix between what percentage runs on a public cloud versus a private cloud.

    Most clients may have their CRM system with Salesforce, their HR system with SAP or Workday, etc. They already have all of this different real estate. All of us know the big job is how to manage it, access controls, security, know what data is where, and how much data you want flowing. We will be number one in what the world calls hybrid cloud.

    IBM is the Greatest Supporter of Open Source

    Our familiarity and investment in Linux goes back 20 years. Linux is the open operating system and what people mostly think about when they think of open. We are one of the top contributors to all the projects out there. So I think counter to what may be the perception out there, IBM is the greatest supporter of open source. Take blockchain, for instance, that’s all open source. We open sourced that on purpose to make it fly.

    Red Hat Linux is the number one operating system in on-premise as well as number one in the cloud. This year it took over number one over the others. We view this a part of our DNA to be open. I don’t see it cultural. It’s really important for what they do that it not just run on IBM. It’s going to run on all of our competitors. This is friendly competition as well since these are our clients that use all these. It will be on all the other clouds.

    We want to preserve that and make sure that they have equal opportunity with what they do. Then what we do is we take the same products from Red Hat and we add to it and then we also compete in that world. We have a strategic imperative around cloud, around analytics, and around mobility. That’s the part of the business that is now close 50 percent of the company.


  • SAP Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World, Says CTO

    SAP Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World, Says CTO

    “We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world,” says Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President of the SAP Cloud Platform. “We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.”

    Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President SAP Cloud Platform, recently discussed the future of the SAP Cloud Platform in an interview with Ray Wang, the Founder & Chairman of Constellation Research:

    Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World

    We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world. We strongly believe that hybrid clouds will play a major role in the coming years. If you also follow what the hyper scalars are doing, Amazon was the last one to announce an on-premises hybrid support model. We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.

    We announced partnerships with IBM and ANSYS already and there will be more coming. We’re totally committed to the multi-cloud strategy driving the kind of choice for customers that they demand. But then what we’re more and more focusing on is business services and business capabilities. It’s about micro services as well. It’s really about business functionality that customers expect from SAP. We are an enterprise solutions company.

    It’s Really About No Code and Low Code Environments

    With our broad spectrum of 25 industries we support all the lines of business within a corporation from core finance to HR to procurement, you name it. We are focused on a high level of functionality that we can expose via APIs and micro services on a cloud platform to allow customers to quickly reassemble and orchestrate customer specific differentiating solutions.

    There is no other company out there in the market that has the opportunity to really deliver that on a broad scale worldwide to our corporate customers.

    That’s where we’re heading and that’s where we’re investing. We’re working on simplifying the consumption of all of this. It’s really about no code and low code environments. You need to be able to plug and play and not always force people to really go down into the trenches and start heavy coding.

    SAP Embedding Machine Learning Into Applications

    Beyond that machine learning is all over and on everybody’s mind. What we’re doing is making sure that we can embed machine learning capabilities deep into the application solutions. It can’t be that every customer needs to hire dozens and even hundreds of data scientists to figure these things out.

    The very unique opportunity that SAP has is to take our knowledge in business processes, take the large data sets we have with our customers, and bring machine learning right into the application for customers to consume out of the box.

    RPA is a big topic as well of course. We believe that 50 percent of ERP processes you can potentially automate to the largest part within the next few years. We are heavily investing in those areas as well.

    Focused on Security, Data Protection, and Privacy

    Especially if you think about the level of connectivity and companies opening up their corporate environments more and more, clouds being on everybody’s mind, and the whole idea to make access to information processes available to everybody in the company and in the larger ecosystem at any point in time from anywhere, of course, that raises the bar that security has to deliver. So it’s a top of mind topic for everybody.

    There are a lot of new challenges also from an architectural perspective with how these things are built and how you communicate, We have a long-standing history as an enterprise solution provider to know exactly what’s going on there. There’s security, there are data protection and privacy that companies have to comply with these days. I think we’re well positioned to serve our customers needs there.

    https://youtu.be/JwXU89MrdaA


  • Box CEO Sees the Underlying Value of Box Increasing Because of IBM-Red Hat Deal

    Box CEO Sees the Underlying Value of Box Increasing Because of IBM-Red Hat Deal

    Box CEO Aaron Levie says that the IBM-Red Hat Deal showed what the underlying value of incumbent technology companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and “hopefully Box” is potentially worth.

    Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, was interviewed on CNBC about the impact of the IBM-Red Hat deal on Box:

    Red Hat Deal Puts IBM in a Great Position

    Red Hat is a leader in commercial open source technology which is really the future of computing in any real IT environment or software development and IBM now has one of the world’s best companies in the open source space and the multi-cloud space.

    I think it puts them in an incredible position to help enterprises that are moving to a multi-cloud environment be able to run their data centers and run their operations, whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises and a hybrid model for the future. It puts IBM in a great position.

    IBM-Red Hat Deal Shows Increased Underlying Value

    This is obviously an incredibly bold move on the part of Ginni (Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM) and the rest of the team but one that I think we will look back in five or ten years and say that was a very defining decision. IBM is a great partner and we obviously want to root for their success but we partner with probably the majority of software and technology companies in the industry, so our job is to be interoperable and integrate with all the major technologies our customers use.

    What the (IBM-Red Hat) deal showed was that the underlying value of some of these significant players is in many cases worth a lot – especially big incumbents. I think in general, companies like Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and hopefully Box, we’re trying to build industry defining companies that will last quite some time.

    Becoming a Core Part of the Technology Stack

    I think, in general, when you think about enterprise IT, enterprise IT buyers are making long-term investments in the future of their technology architecture. It’s very sticky and there are massive modes in the technology that are being built out and if we do our job and continue to innovate we will become a core part of the technology stack of how the future of all enterprises operate.

    That’s why these deals end up actually looking pretty good in hindsight when you can see how powerful these platforms are.

  • IBM CEO: Red Hat Purchase is About Resetting the Cloud Landscape

    IBM CEO: Red Hat Purchase is About Resetting the Cloud Landscape

    IBM’s $33 billion all-cash deal for Red Hat is expected to literally reset the cloud landscape says IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. “This now changes the cloud battle to open, which is what we both are together, to proprietary. This allows them to move mission-critical work safely and securely,” said Rometty.

    It’s All About Resetting the Cloud Landscape

    For us, it’s all about resetting the cloud landscape. This is to create the number one company that will be the number one hybrid cloud provider. If you look at this with our clients, right now, it’s everyone moving to the cloud, but it’s really only 20 percent though. I call that chapter one. Chapter two is to move the next 80 percent and that’s what this is about. But to move that 80 percent they are going to need what this combination brings them.

    Based on the hundreds of notes I know Jim (Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat) and I both got, clients see this very clearly. Chapter two is about hybrid cloud. This is how they move the remaining 80 percent of their work to the cloud… you have to be hybrid, you have to be able to handle multiple clouds, you have to be open technologies, you have to do multi-cloud management, and that’s what we can do.

    It’s $1 Trillion and Clients Don’t Want Lock-Ins

    We’ve been investing in cloud a long time, a $19 billion cloud right now and this is what makes us number one for this next chapter of the cloud. This is a $1 trillion emerging market and that’s what we’re going after. It’s $1 trillion and clients don’t want lock-ins.

    This gives them a portable answer here. They want to be able to run on-prem, in a private cloud, in a public cloud, multiple public clouds, and that’s what we do together. I think the world doesn’t realize that Linux is now the number one platform, not just on-prem, it’s the destination in the cloud. Now we own the number one starting point and the destination.

    This is About Lifting All of IBM

    This is a very fair price if anyone understood the prized asset we’re buying and Jim’s built a great company. Unlike others, Red Hat has high growth, high profit, and cash. This is why I think really the most important thing for our investors is that this is about lifting all of IBM. It is accretive to our high-value model.

    This is about being accretive in year one for free cash flow and gross margin. Most important, we are still going to go ahead with a very strong growing dividend and that is really key to our shareholders.

    This Changes the Cloud Battle

    This makes perfect sense. This is what these clients tell me day in and day out they need for chapter two, that 80 percent of their work can’t move without what we bring them and they don’t want lock-in. This now changes the cloud battle to open, which is what we both are together, to proprietary. This allows them to move mission-critical work safely and securely. We can secure this from the firmware up. This is about making open source safe end-to-end mission-critical work moving accretive to IBM’s high-value model, strong continued growing dividend, all around everyone wins.

  • Cloudera CEO: How We Become the Next Oracle of the Future

    Cloudera CEO: How We Become the Next Oracle of the Future

    Last week, Cloudera and Hortonworks announced that the companies were merging to “create the world’s leading next-generation data platform provider, spanning multi-cloud, on-premises, and the Edge.” Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly says that providing technology to help manage the huge volume of data generated from the Internet of Things is where “Cloudera is going to compete and that’s how we become the next Oracle of the future. “

    Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, discussed the Hortonworks merger and how they plan to become the next Oracle type company in an interview with Jim Cramer on Mad Money:

    This is a Wonderful Merger

    This is a wonderful merger. Basically, by bringing these two companies together we are creating immense shareholder value. Our plans are that by 2020, just around the corner, our combined company Cloudera plus Hortonworks will be greater than a billion dollars in annual revenues, will be greater than 20 percent year-over-year growth, and will have greater than 15% operating cash flow margins. The amount of shareholder value we will create by bringing us together is immense.

    Profitability of the combined company is our goal. This has been a rivalry that’s going on for nearly 10 years. We have been going at it really hard against each other and that has made us both better. Competition is wonderful, but now there’s a new set of competitors that we can combine ourselves to be a much stronger company at greater scale and we can take on a new set of competitors, and a lot of it are these cloud guys, where we are extremely well positioned to win in a different market.

    What Does Cloudera Do?

    Samsung Electronics, like all other manufacturers, are instrumenting and connecting the devices they create to the Internet. It’s called the Internet of Things. Every car, every cell phone, everything through a supply chain is being instrumented including autonomous vehicles. We sell technology for our customers to collect all that data and use machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand better how products are being used and to make them more efficient or to build autonomous vehicles. This is what we do. Cloudera and Hortonworks allow us to deliver an enterprise data cloud from the Edge where data comes from all the way to AI, getting insight out of that data.

    Merger is a Win-Win for Everyone

    This merger is a win-win for everyone. All of our customers are happy, all of our partners are happy, and yes our partner systems is going to get larger because Cloudera has some unique partnerships and relationships as does Hortonworks. Regarding our IBM partnership, Hortonworks and IBM have had a wonderful strategic partnership.

    The new Cloudera is going to embrace that partnership much like we Cloudera have had a wonderful relationship with Intel. Now we’re going to bring in the Hortonworks customer base and they’re going to get the benefits of our relationship with Intel. We intend this to be a win-win not only for our shareholders, our partners, our customers, and all of our employees.

    How We Become the Next Oracle

    A  lot of the excitement about this merger is people expect us to be the next Oracle. That doesn’t mean we’re replacing Oracle legacy business or their traditional business. No, the world is changing with this Internet of Things. Data is of much more volume and people want to do artificial intelligence machine learning against that data. That’s where we’re going to compete and that’s how we become the next Oracle of the future.

    The fact of the matter is Oracle is a good partner of ours. Oracle has resold Qatar our software for a long time and we’re excited about what Oracle is doing in the cloud and we intend to work with them there. Cloudera plus Hortonworks working together will be the only provider delivering our software across all the major cloud guys. We work on Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the IBM cloud and that’s our value proposition, enterprises they can work across all the cloud providers.

  • Study: 86% Of Enterprises To Connect To Multiple Cloud Providers Within 2 Years

    Study: 86% Of Enterprises To Connect To Multiple Cloud Providers Within 2 Years

    XO Communications recently commissioned a study from IDC, which found that most enterprises are planning to implement a “multicloud” strategy despite historically being “long-held concerns” about security and performance.

    More specifically, the number of enterprises that will connect their corporate networks to two or more cloud service providers will triple within the next two years, it finds.

    According to the study, hybrid cloud architectures in which businesses are utilizing both public and private cloud resources are helping IT managers more efficiently support demand for enterprise cloud apps.

    “As a market leader in IP and Ethernet networking and cloud connectivity, XO believes in the importance of helping customers stay at the forefront of emerging trends,” said Jake Heinz, senior vice president, marketing and product at XO. “An expected increase in the percentage of enterprises planning to expand the use of a multicloud strategy from 29 to 86 percent over the next two years is a significant trend our customers need to understand.”

    “Enterprises that connect to cloud service providers through the public Internet face security and performance concerns inherent with that access option,” continued Heinz. “The secure and reliable XO network-enabled cloud offers companies the ability to connect cost-effectively to a wide variety of cloud services in an environment where they have end-to-end control and visibility.”

    When asked to rate importance the cloud attributes, enterprises rated network reliability and availability at 4.41 and secure data transport at 4.31 out of 5. The importance of performance management capabilities is also rated highly when assessing cloud services.

    86% of those polled expect to connect to multiple cloud service providers within two years.

    The full study can be found in a paper called “Why Are Enterprises Connecting to Multicloud Services?”

    Image via Thinkstock

  • Get Ready For Lots Of Microsoft Enterprise Releases This Fall

    Microsoft has announced a bunch of new enterprise cloud solutions coming this fall.

    On October 18th, the company will release Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 for businesses to create data centers, as well as Visual Studio 2013 and the new .NET 4.5.1 for app creation.

    On November 1st, the company will start offering Enterprise Agreement customers access to discounted Windows Azure prices.

    The company announced a strategic partnership with Equinix to provide customers with more cloud connection options. This follows similar previously announced partnerships with AT&T and others. Customers will be able to connect their networks with Windows Azure at Equinix exchange locations.

    Microsoft introduced Windows Azure US Government Cloud for government customers, and Windows Azure has been granted “FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board Provisional Authority to Operate,” which the company says makes it the first public cloud of its kind to achieve this level of government authorization.

    Next week, the company will release a second preview of SQL Server 2014 with increased performance improvements. Later this month, Microsoft will release Windows Azure HDInsight Service, an Apache Hadoop-based service that works with SQL Server for big data analytics.

    On October 18th, Microsoft will release Windows Intune aimed at helping IT departments give mobile employees secure access to apps and data.Later this month, they’re also launching a Microsoft Remote Desktop app for Windows Server 2012 R2.

    Also coming later this month is Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Fall ’13. Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 is now available.

    “As enterprises move to the cloud they are going to bet on vendors that have best-in-class software as a service applications, operate a global public cloud that supports a broad ecosystem of third party services, and deliver multi-cloud mobility through true hybrid solutions,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise executive vice president. “If you look across the vendor landscape, you can see that only Microsoft is truly delivering in all of those areas.”

    More details about all these releases here.

    Image: Microsoft

  • VMware to Acquire DynamicOps, Inc.

    VMware to Acquire DynamicOps, Inc.

    VMware out of PaloAlto, California just announced a definitive agreement to acquire DynamicOps, Inc., a provider of cloud automation solutions and management of IT services across diverse environments.

    While the terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, the acquisition is expected to be complete by the end of the third quarter in 2012.

    Here’s what VMware had to say about the acquisition in the news release on their website:

    VMware believes that customers will benefit most by a standardized architecture, but will build solutions that make it easy for customers to choose the model that best works for their needs, including heterogeneous environments/management. Customers that have standardized their private and public clouds on VMware vSphere can continue to rely on VMware vCloud Director to enable aggregation and management of virtual and cloud resources.

    For customers whose requirements for managing and provisioning resources extend beyond VMware-only environments, DynamicOps builds on the capabilities of vCloud Director by enabling customers to consume multi-cloud resources (e.g., physical environments, Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2). DynamicOps’ policy-based service governor capabilities automate and control how applications and users are provisioned across physical and heterogeneous cloud infrastructure resources.

    Ramin Sayar, vice president and general manager of Virtualization and Cloud Management at VMware comments on the acquisition of DynamicOps:

    “As IT organizations evolve from builders to brokers of services many seek to provide access to diverse cloud resources in a controlled, managed fashion,”

    “DynamicOps’ multi-cloud and multi-platform capabilities help to strengthen VMware’s position as the infrastructure and management vendor of choice for cloud computing.”

    Rich Krueger, CEO of DynamicOps comments on joining the VMware team:

    “VMware and DynamicOps share a common vision for dramatically simplifying the management and provisioning of IT resources in the Cloud era,”

    “I’m excited about DynamicOps joining VMware, and expect our customers to benefit from increased investment and support in the solutions they rely on to optimize their delivery of IT-as-a-service.”

    DynamicOps is privately held company based in Burlington, Massachusetts. It is expected that VMware will integrate DynamicOps’ technologies into their current products and solutions to offer even greater benefits to existing and prospective clients.