Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Gatch, CTO of Cbeyond (Part 4)

SM: What is the impact of Apple in all of this?

CG: They’ve changed the browser landscape pretty considerably. They’ve driven HTML 5 shift in the industry and are forcing customers to have to redevelop sites that are moving away from Flash. We haven’t to have client solutions for tools that we roll out that support Mac. Their penetration within the SMB space is high enough. It’s probably around 10%. You have to pay attention. In the business segment, especially SMB, they haven’t been nearly as big a driver or game changer as they have been in the consumer segment. But they’re there. You have to support those clients. Outside of that, I haven’t seen it as a big landscape changer in the business scene. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Gatch, CTO of Cbeyond (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The best way for us to understand the business and the dynamics of the business environment in which you play is to do use cases and segments. That’s why I’m leading you down this path.

Chris Gatch: Sure. To that end, let me give you an example. We have a customer that’s a property management company. If I look into the systems that the company uses, it has Microsoft Exchange that’s hosted on site. There’s a property management application that’s hosted on site. But when you look at the payroll system, it’s ADP, which is a SaaS-based solution. We’re moving those applications that ran on site into the cloud. When we’re done, the company will have no physical infrastructure on site, and it will have a combination of applications that run on a private environment hosted on our total cloud data center product suite. And then it will have some SaaS services that it consumes as well. That’s what I see when I look out across most SMBs. I see some combination like that.   >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Gatch, CTO of Cbeyond (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: And what does it cost?

Chris Gatch: It’s going to vary. A cloud data center can start at about $350 for a private center, which includes a completely segmented network environment, a logically separate firewall, about half a terabyte of storage, and a modest level of computing resources. It can scale to much larger numbers depending on what kind of cloud infrastructure the client needs. On the hosted telephony side, for a total cloud phone system, like most hosted PBX offers that are in the market, the price probably settles around $25 a user. That’s not counting international usage. If it’s a distributed virtual company with international locations, that figure could change considerably. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Gatch, CTO of Cbeyond (Part 1)

It’s nice to have an IT team on staff, but that’s not affordable for all businesses, especially small and medium businesses. That’s where managed services providers like Cbeyond come in. They offer small and medium businesses the same level of services that they would receive with on-staff IT teams at a fraction of the overall cost.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Chris. Let’s start with some context. What do you do? Where are you going directionally? What is your personal background? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Pavlovsky, Product General Manager, Control and Communications Systems Business, GE Intelligent Platforms (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I heard two broad categories. One is around information security. The other piece that I heard is around analytics of data that these machines are generating. Could we take a use case and look at what kinds of data are being collected in these processes?

Steve Pavlovsky: If we think about our architecture today, if you start at the machine level, you’ve got sensors that are collecting inputs off the machine. They might be position sensors of some sort. They might be vision sensors. They might be thermal sensors or thermocouples. You have a whole set of process variable data coming in, and then you have what the machine state is and the process state and what we in our industry call outputs. What motor speed was a motor turned to, or what other actions were taken? You’ve got an aggregation of data in terms of the current status of the machine, the work elements going on in the machine, and what the control system is telling that machine to do. >>>

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. >>>