Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jared Wray, Founder and CTO of Tier 3 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I have to say I’m having a little bit of trouble [accepting that]. Infrastructure as a service in a commodity, in one sense. Where is the thought leadership in that? It’s a matter of scale. It’s a matter of execution.

Jared Wray: We see ourselves as a platform as a service, not really an infrastructure as a service. Infrastructure, I agree with you, is commoditized. The market has overly built out the infrastructure. It’s hosting providers who are going to be taking on that. You’re going to have the AWSes of the world doing very commoditized types of things. What we see ourselves doing is pushing the envelope in automation and automation for operations. If you think of normal IT people and what they’re doing on a daily basis, about 60% of their workload is doing what should be automated. Our platform enables that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jared Wray, Founder and CTO of Tier 3 (Part 1)

Businesses continue to move their operations to the cloud. So, the need for companies like Bellevue, Washington–based Tier 3 will continue to increase, as will the need for such companies to provide faster, more efficient cloud solutions. Tier 3 has provided large and small enterprises with an enterprise cloud platform that allows them to keep their business operations flowing smoothly since 2006. The company’s technology partners are VMWare and NetApp, among others.   >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In my research so far, I have not seen a lot of great offerings in the social media analytics space that do a good job of taking a lot of data. I agree with you that yes, the relationships can easily be struck with the firms that are producing data – the Twitters and Facebooks and so on – and there’re lots of APIs and so forth. But I think the analytics side of that equation is inadequate.

Lee Congdon: I agree. In fact, I’m sure we’ve identified one provider. I know there are multiple ones out there. We will be learning, based on the capabilities of this new engagement, what’s available. It’s an area of interest to us. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that topic for a second. You’re absolutely right. That is a platform that is going to be very difficult for a startup company to bring to market. What’s happening is that there are several camps that are trying to do that and don’t have a full solution yet. Salesforce.com has a stake in the ground on that front. Google has a stake in the ground. Microsoft has a stake in the ground. IBM and Lotus have a stake in the ground.

Lee Congdon: Zoho, perhaps, as well I would add to your list. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to share a trend that I’m seeing right now, particularly in companies where the number of customers is very large. [Red Hat] has a large number of customers. The number of support calls can be very large. You know how customer support organizations are set up as level one, level two, level three customer support? There is a company that is part of our One Million by One Million program called Crowd Engineering. These guys have introduced a level zero customer support where it’s a full enterprise system that engages and integrates the community into the support system so that some of the support calls can be tackled by the expert customer community when they’re available to deal with support needs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have in total? How many customers do you service from your entire IT infrastructure?

Lee Congdon: Internally or externally?

SM: Externally.

LC: Certainly, [we have] hundreds of thousands [of customers] around the globe. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Definitely. Let’s talk about collaboration. What is your current collaboration configuration, let’s say, or infrastructure? What are you using? What trends are you seeing? Collaboration is one of the areas where we are seeing the most adoption of cloud computing.

Lee Congdon: We attempt to use open-source products. Our email infrastructure is Zimbra. We use that for email contacts and calendaring. We use IRC as our chat mechanism. We use Jive SBS for documents and sharing and blogging. We use Word Press for blogging. We use Drupal for our Intranet. We’re working on a new external website. We’ll be using a combination of our J Bus technology and technology from a firm called XO. Our strategy has been to pick best-of-breed products and make them available internally and selectively externally. We’ve done some pilots with, for example, Salesforce Chatter. That’s working very well for us. We did a pilot with Google Docs. That worked well for us as well. Microsoft products aren’t an option for us. So, we haven’t identified the right enterprise solution for collaboration in the cloud. It’s not something that we are scared of or are reluctant to do. Our associates, on a daily basis, are visibly representing us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. At this point, we’re continuing with our best-of-breed approach on premises until we can identify the right cloud-based platform, but it’s something we’re very interested in. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The 33% that you have moved to the cloud already, what is the organizing principle of that? What have you chosen to move as the early steps? What have you chosen not to move yet?

Lee Congdon: A strong partnership with Salesforce.com; we’ve been using their technology for more than five years for sales automation. Based on that partnership and that success, we added a successful support portal for our partners, the channels we use to deliver our products outside of the direct salesforce. We also added customer ticketing. When customers come to us with a problem, we use the Salesforce solution to capture that data and analyze it and respond internally. We also have a great partnership with Akamai. We use Akamai as a service provider for delivering our bits, for accelerating our websites – our Web properties. When our customers send us dumps and other information that we use to solve their problems, we use Akamai to queue that on the inbound side. Those are our primary investments today, in terms of key applications. We also have recruiting applications, performance management applications, questionnaires and other applications that we use on an ad-hoc basis throughout the organization. The ones I mentioned are the primary drivers of that 33% figure. >>>