Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Pavlovsky, Product General Manager, Control and Communications Systems Business, GE Intelligent Platforms (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in terms of what’s happening in your industry? This is an old industry that innovates very slowly.

Steven Pavlovsky: Yes, that is absolutely true in terms of where our industry has been. We’re in the process of launching a new control platform that has both control aspects and traditional computing aspects. Focusing the compute resources at the machine control level, where customers can have both high performance control and the computing resources to run HMI software and historian software and analytics software, enables much better analytics of the performance of the machine. That combination and our ability to deploy computing resources at the machine level will deliver to those customers and OEMs that take advantage of it to differentiate their machines to the customer bases. It will also be good for those end users who value the productivity that comes from doing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) analytics or other process control analytics at the machine.  These observations lead us to think we’re at the cusp of a technology shift where the level of computing resources, combined with the networking resources to move from data that’s collected at the machine level up into plant-wide or enterprise-wide historians are cloud-based analytics that the software company within our business is working on pioneering. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Pavlovsky, Product General Manager, Control and Communications Systems Business, GE Intelligent Platforms (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Fair enough. And the second use case?

Steve Pavlovsky: Multiple people working on the same application.

SM: What’s new about that? What’s new in the work flow? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Pavlovsky, Product General Manager, Control and Communications Systems Business, GE Intelligent Platforms (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If you could, walk us through a couple of use cases where these concepts are playing out in your domain.

Steve Pavlovsky: That sounds fantastic. The core product we make is a control system that enables a user to control a machine. In effect, it’s a special purpose computer. These computers have typically Intel-style CPUs. There’s memory on them. They don’t run a traditional operating system like Linux or Windows. In our case, our systems run VX Works. They run a real-time operating system, and they have a kernel on them that processes a control algorithm to connect to machines and control the modes of a machine and what that machine does at any given time. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Pavlovsky, Product General Manager, Control and Communications Systems Business, GE Intelligent Platforms (Part 1)

There’s more to General Electric (GE) than people might think. Founded in 1890 by Thomas Edison, the company has moved beyond providing electricity and light bulbs. As my conversation with Steve Pavlovsky will reveal, GE continues to move forward and adapt with changing times in ways that Edison would likely approve of.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Steve. Let’s start with your personal background and the organization within GE, GE Intelligent Platforms, that you’re part of. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 4)

Because Elizabeth had some exciting news to share with me during the course of our interview together regarding a recent acquisition that Citrix made, I decided to forgo my usual questions and focus instead on the company that was acquired and why Citrix thought it would be a good fit.

Sramana Mitra: Elizabeth, what have you acquired? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I agree with you. Service Now is an excellent company.

Elizabeth Cholawsky: Yes. We’re coming from the position of remote support as the core competency and building a constellation of IT tools around that. We come at it from two different use cases and two different parts of the tools. Service Now is interesting to us. Our remote support competitor Bomgar is doing interesting things, but it’s pure premise, and one of the trends that’s driving Citrix’s business right now is just all of cloud computing. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The part of the market I was referring to as the broader support market includes products like Assistly, for instance, which is inside of Salesforce.com, Zendesk, and a variety of startups and other companies that have come up with products in that space. Those are not what you compete with? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 1)

We’ve featured Citrix on the blog before. This time, we’re going to discuss the wonderful things that Citrix is doing in the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Elizabeth. Let’s start with a bit of your personal background as well as what Citrix is doing in the area of cloud-based support.

Elizabeth Cholawsky: Right now I am the general manager for the IT support line of business at Citrix, which includes all of the GoToAssist branded products. I took this position a couple of years ago, but when I first joined Citrix, I was the VP of product management and client services. Client services runs through my career for the past 20 plus years. When we decided to focus on IT support, it was a natural segue from running our contact center operations and support operations to managing the business for these products. >>>