ESG Blogs

When digital initiatives evolve in the data center, so too should your ability to choose how you consume IT resources. The desire to move to the cloud has some IT leaders intrigued, yet they continue to look into ways to maximize their existing IT investment and bridge the gap to get to the cloud. This has many IT leaders not moving to the cloud just yet but preferring to buy infrastructure via a consumption-based model such as a monthly subscription based on resource utilization for their on-premises data center.

Organizations are being told to digitally transform, to become more agile, and to respond to the business faster in order to survive in a highly competitive market. And one way organizations are digitally transforming is by modernizing their infrastructures, which means shifting from a traditional 3-tier architecture to a solution that integrates compute, storage, networking, and virtualization. Such a solution must deliver a more cloud-like experience on-premises, making the eventual transition to the cloud easier or better yet, enabling organizations to confidently move cloud-native applications from the public cloud back to an on-premises private cloud. Both converged infrastructure (CI) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) fit the bill, but what is driving organizations to pick one over the other?

It’s time for Juniper NXTWORK in San Francisco next week. At this time of the year between Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year, it’s the tail end of the conference season and announcements.

What may be in store?

What presents may be in store from Juniper? It’s hard to say, but some earlier announcements on bots provide a hint on how their vision of Self-Driving Networks may start to get realized.

Their trio of new bot-apps: The AppFormix HealthBot for telemetry, Contrail TestBot for auditing, and PeerBot for peering monitoring were recently announced for beta, for availability in the first half of 2018. This may be a hint of things to come.

People asked me to follow up on my experience at Best Buy. Spoiler: The particular store where I had my bad experience has closed. I'll give you some details

Everyone talks of digital transformation (DX) but it is especially hard to make a direct connection between IT infrastructure and how it supports digital transformation. Let’s look at a first-hand experience where it fails.

Best Buy is one of the retail companies that’s lauded for being a survivor in the retail industry (see Fortune magazine, June 15^th, 2017 issue, p. 34, in print and online) by embracing the merging of offline and online shopping, but they still fail in many respects. Here’s how.

We came into Dell EMC World Partner Summit expecting a healthy dose of enthusiasm and energy, as personified by Scotsman and President, Global Channels John Byrne and his goal of becoming the #1 Channel company in IT. Well, that was delivered in spades, or should I say kilts, on the opening day of Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, when Partner Summit kicked off with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and the most rock-and-rolling bagpipers this side of the Atlantic.

90 Days Later – the New Dell EMC Partner Program is firmly in place

After getting the crowd of about 1,000 top Dell EMC Partners from around the world up on their feet and ready, John first recapped the highlights of the first 90 days of the new, combined Dell EMC Partner Program, brought together under the binding premise of “Simple. Predictable. Profitable” in order to drive growth, profitability, and deeper ongoing customer relationships through the Channel.

While Dell EMC was busy in Vegas last week talking about Digital Transformation (of organizations) and the IT Transformation (of, duh, IT) that underpins it, many of us were equally interested to see what had, and is, transformed within Dell EMC itself…..the portfolio, the approach, and people’s attitudes (both employees and customers).

I’ll keep this brief because the video we made at the event is a full 7 minutes – but, knowing that in advance, hopefully you’ll find it a valuable 7 minutes as you’ll get succinct insights from not just me but also four of my colleagues - Jason Buffington (on DP), Scott Sinclair (on storage platforms), Terri McClure (on converged platforms), and Kevin Rhone (for the channel perspective).  

Today’s market opportunity for IT vendors is razor-focused on cloud consumption and economics. As a result, it can be easy to lose track of what’s actually powering on-premises data centers, various cloud platforms, and massive numbers of ever-proliferating endpoints.

In a prior role, when I was running an IT organization, it was difficult to acquire new servers at the rapid pace at which innovation was happening in the x86 server market—even though each server upgrade would provide an instant increase in application performance. While the performance bump still exists, the benefits extend beyond core performance—so it’s also important to understand the scale and security benefits. And speaking of scale and security, with Citrix Synergy right around the corner, it seems only fitting to take a look at Intel and Citrix.

In my previous role as a mobile and digital strategist working with large enterprise customers, I often had the opportunity to speak with business leaders about a set of emerging technology forces that I called the “4th wave of mobile disruption.” Without going into too much detail here, the essential premise was that technologies such as IoT, wearables, augmented/virtual reality, and mobile transactions were following on previous waves (e.g. big data, cloud, social media) that would impact businesses across all industries.

I had the opportunity to attend PTC’s ThingEvent in Boston last week, touted as the event that would allow us to “See Things in a New Way”. The event, held on January 28th at the Revere Hotel, was an intimate but well-produced extravaganza of live-streaming and live-demos.