Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jim Stikeleather, Chief Innovation Officer, Dell (Part 1)

Sramana Mitra:  Hi, Jim. Welcome to the Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series. To better understand the scope of the IT infrastructure you are running for Dell, would you talk a bit about this before we get into cloud computing in more depth?

Jim Stikeleather:  Hi, thank you. To introduce myself, I am the chief innovation officer for Dell. What I’m focused on, as opposed to the chief information officer, are future products and services for Dell. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Social CRM and Crowd Sourcing

There are many trends hitting large enterprises at the moment right in their bellies. Within the broad sphere of cloud computing, with the adoption of the social Web, one of these trends is crowd sourcing. The business function that is most acutely impacted by this trend is CRM. All the way from marketing to sales to customer support, the social CRM trend is becoming an avalanche, and for some industries the implications bear particularly serious consequences.

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Willie Tejada, Senior VP And GM Of The Enterprise Cloud Division, Akamai (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: All these trends, the video collaboration trend, the online video trend, all of these are massive scalability problems. I think if five billion Internet users start doing video collaboration and video on-demand on a continuous basis, it will choke the network. So, network scalability is a significant problem that needs to be looked at from multiple angels. I would ask you, what are some concrete places entrepreneurs could sink their teeth into? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Willie Tejada, Senior VP And GM Of The Enterprise Cloud Division, Akamai (Part 7)

SM: By 2020 we are going to have five billion people on the Internet, and there are going to be diverse types of connection, bandwidth, clients and so on. What do you think are some of the areas that entrepreneurs should look into when it comes to opportunities that pertain to the scaling of global networks or the global Internet?

WT: Yes, that is a good question. There is still a tremendous challenge. On global Internet, what are most interesting in that area are the types of services still that we’ll utilize. Those five billion users, what services will they use? On the consumer side, I think that there is still a tremendous amount of opportunity for folks who are trying to enable what we often refer to as TV everywhere, whether you are talking about the bandwidth and the video quality component of the problem, reaching every type of device possible. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Willie Tejada, Senior VP And GM Of The Enterprise Cloud Division, Akamai (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Even on the private network, I am not sure that is working so well. One of the popular collaboration tools these days is Google Docs. You open up a spreadsheet in Google Docs, and 10 people around the world are able to see it. It is a smooth, real-time, convenient function. In the CAD world or a video editing world, it is just a completely different animal. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Willie Tejada, Senior VP And GM Of The Enterprise Cloud Division, Akamai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is an interesting company we track called ON24. It is more than $50 million company out of San Francisco, and they do large events. Are you familiar with them? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Willie Tejada, Senior VP And GM Of The Enterprise Cloud Division, Akamai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You opened up this channel of thought in the context of my question that where are the open problems? So, this sounds like, on your radar, this area of collaboration is an open problem. The question is, where do you solve this problem? What layer do you solve this problem [on]? Is it something that you know who solves the problems? Is it something that Polycom needs to solve? Is it the problem that the combination of Polycom and Akamai needs to solve or is it something that you know somebody new can solve, on what level can you solve this problem? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Willie Tejada, Senior VP And GM Of The Enterprise Cloud Division, Akamai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a question about that. You gave the example of Adobe or Autodesk, right? These are media or CAD tool vendors, and typically CAD files or video files that are being edited are extremely heavy files. So, people tend to not edit these files in the cloud; they tend to edit them in their desktops. Is that changing? >>>