Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 1)

In 1994, Marc Ewing created his own distribution for Linus Torvald’s Linux, called it Red Hat Linux and released it in October of that year. After merging with  Bob Young’s ACC Corporation in 1995, the company was renamed Red Hat Software. Today, Red Hat is a global company that provides enterprises with technology and services via the open source model.

Sramana Mitra: Hi Lee. Let’s start with some context about Red Hat and about you to give our readers an idea about the cloud computing environment we’re dealing with, from what perspective we’re going to look at it and the scale of the problem for you. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 8)

SM: Yes. We use a lot video conferencing in our business also, and we are a little tiny company compared to your clients. There’s something interesting going on in video conferencing. One of the great places where cloud adoption is happening in leaps and bounds, actually in collaboration, it’s especially in video conferencing. I think it’s in every organization, every size, every scale. There’s a tremendous amount of video conferencing going on right now. It’s a somewhat strange landscape. For instance, we’ve been using a technology for almost a year now, but they just got acquired by Polycom. It’s a company called Vivu. They have really excellent, multi-skinned desktop video conferencing technology. It works off of Skype. They just got acquired by Polycom, and I started looking at other options. I cannot find equivalently advanced technology in other vendors, whether it’s Webex or Citrix or any of the other vendors that you would normally look to. None of them have that multi-skinned video conferencing capability and the ability to support large events. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let me give you another example, and let’s have a bit discussion about another trend within the social CRM space. We have another company called Crowd Engineering that is actually getting traction with large companies. Both of the companies I mentioned are getting traction with very large accounts. What Crowd Engineering is saying is, you have a customer support organization. For consumer electronics, telecom, and similar companies, the call volume in a customer support organization is very high. The margin pressure is very high, so each call that you have to take costs you in margins.

You have level one, level two, and level three customer support. Crowd Engineering is saying, why don’t we introduce a level zero customer support in your organization? We are going to set up such that customers will be able to talk to other expert customers. People who know the system inside out can solve their problems and are willing to engage. We have most of these, especially in companies that have strong brand value and passionate customers who are happy to show off their expertise and knowledge. Crowd Engineering is tapping into that class of customers, engaging them. The thesis is you can divert a large chunk of calls that will never have to touch a customer service rep. It will be tackled by expert customers. This translates into very high ROI. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory, Ernst & Young (Part 5)

SM: What you’re talking about is the consumerization of technology and the fact there are so many devices coming into the enterprise [world]. Will the enterprise support the applications on these devices? How does that plug into the enterprise Internet, Intranet, whatever, enterprise IT system? There’re two slightly different questions. The question I was asking you was somewhat different from the question that you are now going towards.

MP: Okay. Let me give you an example in health care. A doctor and nurse go to a patient’s bedside in the hospital. Each has a different device. The doctor, she has a certain device, maybe an iPad, whatever. As she walks to the bed, automatically the information for this patient comes provisioning on her device. She has technology on her device, so she works on it. Equally, on the other side of the bed, the nurse, he has a different device. He has different information that’s also pertinent to the person in the bed. They work at the bedside, and then they walk away. Automatically, as they walk away, all this information is reprovisioned back to the database. That is new, what I call, location-based provisioning type services. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 4)

SM: Yes. I think the complexity arises because in some cases, there are these alliances, existing alliances or evolving, emerging alliances, but then there are also competitive dynamics emerging. If you look at Salesforce.com’s platform as a service strategy, Force.com, technically, you would want the IT environment that is operating in this CRM with Salesforce.com, collaboration and email with Google scenario. Who then is the platform as a service provider? Whose engine are you building your Intranet applications on then? Is it Force.com or is it Google App Engine? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Help me to understand. We have several camps going on in this movement, the email to collaboration to Intranet movement. There’s, as you said, the Microsoft camp. There is the IBM camp, which is struggling right now because of Lotus Notes. But there are some other camps, like Salesforce.com. Where do you see them fitting into this landscape? Where do you see Google fitting into this landscape? Google has actually won because of their collaboration features. What happens when it goes to the Internet? What happens when there are more applications to be developed on their app engine? That’s already four different camps. Are there other camps that we need to be aware of? Could you give a high-level directional view on this? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 2)

SM: Given that vantage point, tell me about the organization’s cloud computing philosophy. Where are you coming from? What is the overall guiding principal that you are bringing to your clients?

MP: That’s a great question again. I think from an Ernst & Young point of view – again we have to realize we are not an IBM or Accenture. We are different. For us, it’s around the cloud risk and assurance. Cloud is a new paradigm shift. We had main frame. We went to client server. We went to Internet. Now, we’ve gone to cloud. Everybody knows that kind of stuff. But fundamentally, going forward, we’re saying, well, there’re certain things around cloud risk and assurance, whether it’s the compliance, the security, business continuity, the overall risk. We are, as a brand, really good at understanding risk and assurance. And to be honest, the cloud part of this assurance is one extra part. It’s not a new part. It’s an evolutionary part of what we’re doing. The second part is around the whole technology and operations. There’re different architectures. There’re different standards. There’re different ways you look at doing systems development. Systems development, I think, is a real key area. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 1)

Arthur Young and Alwin C. Ernst never met in life, and their companies didn’t merge to form Ernst & Young until 41 years after they died within days of each other in 1948. But both men were innovators who believed in globalization. Today, the company provides professional services for its customers but on a much broader and, thanks to the advent of the cloud, more complex scale than anything that Ernst or Young could have imagined.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Mal. Let’s start with some context about the scope of your work, the scope of the cloud computing footprint that you are dealing with, then we’ll go to your philosophy around it and so forth. >>>