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Transform, Digitise, Agile, Cost Reduction and more with less...

I was speaking with a consultant friend of mine about transformation and he was asking about the determinants of success, this was following on from a conversation that I had in which you might deliver a project but fail to meet your key performance indicators – your determinants for success. It stems from the following transformation means many things to many people, key performance metrics can mean many things to different stakeholders and indeed success can be internalised within a business line but not the wider group.  Transformation could be me migrating an application from a legacy data warehouse platform on an unsupported version of Solaris to a new Big Data solution, but often in such scenarios the financial savings are not direct in nature, we take out a suite of legacy costs (which should not be discounted) and introduce a different range of services or cost resulting from the replacement Big Data solution. Therefore defining what your key performance metrics are and what those mean is crucial. In the example above to HR, I might have reduced their spend on Solaris by $40,000 a year in IT charges, to the Solaris team, I might have enabled a physical server and some associated costs to be cancelled, but to group IT, the costs might be neutral. The level of cost transparency you have not only in the re-charge but the direct PnL charges need to be in place so that at the right level you can align projects, and goals with outcomes, a financial SQL query if you like, to achieve this target what do I need to transform or take out.  At the same time we need to recognise that decommissioning a platform, application or service should create opportunities for savings as we scale up those changes. If we transform enough legacy platforms, for example we got rid of AIX or Solaris entirely from the estate does that enable the move to Cloud more transparently with the associated opportunities to reduce costs across the stack. Transformation, the move to Digital adoption of DevOps and Agile are all admirable activities where the legacy IT consumers should be headed often the drive is to maximise change for lower direct initial costs but that can have unintended costs either from outages, unplanned behaviour or simply things like the teams not being...

Red Hat Summit is coming soon!

Red Hat Summit is June 23rd to 26th and is set to be a great event, you can register for the event here: I will be watching the coverage online, what I’ll be looking out for is announcements on the journey towards innovation in OpenStack, DevOps and empowering both business and IT to bring together the right combination of technology and technology services to deliver an end to end solution for transformation and enhancement. Do check out the agenda here and the available training or certifications that are on offer and consider that attending these events is not only an investment in technical aspect of your career, it’s the people you meet, the connections you make and the ability I always find to ask questions which I might not feel comfortable asking directly of my colleagues/service provider.  The ability to grab someone and say, I’m having this problem have you seen it before? The official coverage lives here: Red Hat Summit blog: http://summitblog.redhat.com/ Red Hat Blog: http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog I’ll be watching both online and re-tweeting content so follow me on twitter:...

HP Discover Las Vegas summary

HP Discover was last week and judging by the coverage it went very well and I’ve heard some great feedback through colleagues. I’ve just started a new role as a Software Architect for a large enterprise and was therefore unable to attend.  The official blog lives here and covered it end to end, I did watch when I could (I’ve been between client sites last week). The high level bullet points for you: HP Helps Customers Accelerate the Move to All-Flash Data Centers – further enhancements of their HP 3PAR StoreServ offering, which brings new levels of scale and performanace at a lower operational cost. HP Unveils Developer Focused Testing Solution to Help Businesses Accelerate Application Delivery – this is about creating testing solutions to meet customer requirements end to end, very cool. DreamWorks Animation Selects HP to Automate Its IT Infrastructure – leveraging HP experience and best practice to further automate and enhance DreamWorks IT infrastructure for a more agile and scalable, this will be transformational in terms of the ability to adjust the IT landscape around not only your business but projects and programmes. Updates to HP Helion Portfolio Help Customers Unlock Value of a Hybrid Infrastructure – illustrating their further commitment to bringing and enhancing Cloud and Hybrid business solutions to their customers. There were also further announcements to enhancements to HP OneView 2.0 which will be a welcome to their customers, I’ve heard great things from colleagues about it, so it will be interesting to speak to them about these enhancements. HP Discover is in London this year in December – www.hp.com/go/discover to keep updated and...

A HP MicroServer as a cloud caching device...

I continue to think about the HP MicroServer Gen8 as an excellent opportunity to bridge the gap between the physical and cloud/virtual world, as my cloud offline local cache. The vehicle for Cloud services to be hosted and streamed through whether its for email, analytics or collaboration. I tell you what I mean.  This is what I want as a reseller, a fix IT guy, a nonsense removal device for all those SMB’s where they have their own Exchange server, their own file server, their own everything in a box when they have five employees on site and a few people working remotely on their own pc. They’re not sure quite why they have that, but that’s what the nice independent server sales man said they needed. I want a Cloud in a box like the WEDG but with the backing of enterprise grade applications and possibilities to hook into market standard Cloud applications and service providers. I want to switch on a HP MicroServer or similar device. Then a wizard appear. Click next (to define any network specific values) then it say right you want to setup a cloud caching device it then talks me through: Using an existing account and downloading all the settings and caching any pre-subscribed services, establishing the backup and maintenance jobs etc. This enables me to move to another server seamlessly. Or just set me up a new existence a new domain name, a new online platform and identity A new existence means, I choose the domain name, I choose the services I want with a tick box and then enter my credit card and purchase information then it creates everything for me: My email My internal SharePoint/collaborative calendars and working environments My web presence a page with company name that I can then mess around with will do – a wordpress as a service would be ideal Create two local shares Apps – for streaming or installing apps which are cloud based Data – with cloud and offline, cloud stores cloud replicated data, offline is local storage only Then it needs to: Set up the backups and then offers – cloud backup services if I want them Set up the maintenance schedule – the maintnenace, the security patching and firewall/virus scan settings Register with the cloud for management – power off, rebuild...

Win a ticket to VMworld Europe 2014!

http://vmwareemeablog.com/uk/competition-time-for-our-fast-lane-racer/ Hopefully you will have been practicing, because things are getting serious! Today we’re launching our Fast Lane Racer competition, which means you could win some great prizes. All you need to do is complete tracks 1, 2 and 3 in under 45 seconds each, and you’ll be in with a chance to win an Audi R8 remote control car! On top of this, this is the first in a series of competitions we’ll be running up until the 30th of September. Anybody entering any of these will be in with a chance to win a ticket to VMworld Europe 2014, worth over £1000! See terms and conditions here. Do check this out, they’re offering a free ticket to VMworld Europe which is well worth entry and is by all accounts a great event. Check out the post for more information or click...

RiverMeadow Launches vCloud(R) Powered Service Provider Incentive Program...

http://rivermeadow.mwnewsroom.com/press-releases/rivermeadow-launches-vcloudr-powered-service-provider-incentive-program-1088327 SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwired – Feb 10, 2014) – RiverMeadow Software™ Inc., developer of the world’s only automated cloud onboarding and workload mobility platform developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds, and a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner program, today introduced a new incentive program for VMware vCloud® Powered service providers aimed at minimizing technical and economic risks associated with shifting IT applications to the cloud. The program will provide participating service providers with 50 free migrations from RiverMeadow to jumpstart customer onboarding, driving enterprises and SMBs to migrate IT resources to their vCloud Powered service providers. “While cloud computing offers significant advantages, the risk of shifting mission critical applications to the cloud, along with the outlay of economic resources, can lead to slowed progress in end-user cloud adoption,” said Mark Shirman, President and CEO, RiverMeadow. “Our goal with this program is simple, to add value and remove the friction. RiverMeadow’s Cloud Migration SaaS allows vCloud Powered service providers to offer clients a means to test and verify application integrity and performance before cutting over. Add in free migrations to ease the economic investment and a fair amount of the associated risk is removed from the process of shifting to cloud.” I was on the RiverMeadow site checking out what they were working on in the cloud space and noticed this announcement.  They’ve been working on empowering service providers to migrate their customers to the cloud which is very cool. I’m off to read more about their value proposition, it’s great to see more service providers, vendors and innovators helping customers leverage cloud technology to meet their business...

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