Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 1)

For the past 15 months, Joe Langner has been the executive vice president of mid-market solutions for Sage North America. He comes with an extensive management background which includes strategic planning, operational excellence, and profitable growth. In this interview he discusses mobile and social applications and Sage’s current position on the market regarding those applications.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Joe, and welcome to the series. It would be helpful to give our readers some context about Sage. Then we will dive in to specific topics. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Could you summarize BMC’s philosophy in terms of your product roadmap in the area of the cloud?

Mark Settle: We have a SaaS offering for one of our principal offers, our remedy service staff solution. Now customers can implement that on campus, as they have done in the past. They basically have access to two versions. One is a hosted solution we call “Remedy on demand,” and the second is a version of remedy that has been written on a Force.com platform called “Remedy Force.” As you mentioned before, there are a lot of IT people or shops who want to come out of the IT business and who don’t want to worry about the hardware or the DR capability. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There have been attempts to solve certain problems. But right now there is a larger focus on big data which is driving toward the mid-market. That is one of the trends I see. Certain corporations have tackled the big data problem for a long time by investing in big systems and custom-built solutions. From a private point of view, we are seeing more activity in building big data solutions, which are becoming more affordable for the mid-market. That mid-market could never afford [to spend] that money on warehouses and custom solutions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 4)

MS: There is an interesting site for travel agents. You, as the buyer of the vacation, enter a description of the type of vacation you want: if you want it to be a romantic experience, an athletic experience, a trip with your wife, etc. So, you provide a broad outline of the experience you are looking for, and then agents from around the world bid on supplying your needs. Then you can pick the top three and get prices. After that you pick the one you want. Basically, instead of you doing all the work and interrogating 10 different agents, you just make a one-time statement of what you are looking for, and they bid on that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What do you consider being open problems right now? This is one of the areas in which our audience is always very interested. If an entrepreneur is looking for open problems to solve right now, where do you see opportunities?

Mark Settle: That is a good question. Most of the large enterprises are dipping their toe in the water. They are exploring cases like DBi in the cloud, where a virtual desktop is offered. Maybe they have contractors or training facilities in different parts of the globe. I believe that storage in the cloud is a real area of opportunity, and I know investments have happened there in the past. But storage continues to be a large cost factor for most organizations. I think there are lots of ways to make the cost of storage more transparent by getting a monthly bill for it, and then dividing that bill and charging departments back. This is opposed to the classical way IT usually makes business, which is to creep more and more storage over time and then charge it back on a block basis. You can make this much more transactional with the use of a cloud provider. I think this offers a lot of opportunities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: My understanding of the large-enterprise cloud adoption dynamics would probably synthesize with what I have seen. Is that also what you see?

Mark Settle: Yes. You have part of the big hardware vendors – the BCE consortium, VMware, Cisco, or EMC – in order to engineer and sell a pre-integrated stack of server storage and network capability that you can think of as a unit of compute. Then you can just scale that by buying additional blocks of hardware capacity. That type of offering would come from companies like Dell, IBM, or others. To get to your point: Some of the large enterprises aren’t trying to go back to reverse engineering or existing hardware environments. When they go forward, they say: “Let me start building my private cloud as new challenges or new development opportunities come along. I’ll try to leverage that private cloud hardware capability that I brought in. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 1)

Mark Settle is the chief information officer of BMC, a Houston-based company that provides software solutions to any size business. Mark has been in this position for four years. Before BMC, he worked as CIO of Corporate Express and Arrow Electronics, and he was executive vice president of the Systems & Processing division of Visa. In this interview he explains new trends in cloud computing, big data management, and how these affect medium-sized and large businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Welcome back to the Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series, Mark.  We have talked before, so our audience knows you. I think the last time we spoke was some time ago, and we were still trying to figure out how America or the world was looking at cloud computing as a trend. At this point, the trend is sweeping over the IT-infrastructures around the world.  There is no ambiguity – the trend is here to stay and cloud adaption is quite significant. In today’s conversation, I would like to address some specific issues which you have a lot of insight to. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Omer Artun, CEO of AgilOne (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of competition are you seeing on the market? I know there is a lot of activity in the data space right now, and everybody wants to be categorized on their big data these days. It sounds as though you have relatively mature capabilities since you have been in business for seven years working with real customers. What do you consider as real competition? >>>