Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: Even so, does it really make sense for all enterprises to design and architect the entire solution on their own? You are probably much more technology oriented than many other IT shops. I have to believe that there are many other IT shops outside the technology vertical that don’t want to do a lot of development and don’t want to do as much designing as we think. It should be at least somewhat ready, right?

Diane Bryant: I completely agree with you. What you are hitting on, though, is why it isn’t happening. I do believe that we will evolve to a state where there are standards that define how these cloud environments are secured and managed. When you have those standards, that is when you get all kinds of innovation and solutions, full-time solutions, that aren’t proprietary. That is why I say we are a relatively new era. We all want to go to a cloud because it provides great TCO on utilization and agility inside of IT. It provides great business value because when the business group says I want an app, I want a new solution, it takes us now minutes instead of months, which is a huge value to the business. We all want to go there, but you are right, if you are a private cloud and you are a large enterprise and you want to go there, you say, I will just do it myself. It is a big investment. It is a big industry. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: To summarize, you would say that if you were using Google apps, they would offer you a native implementation of that with the same functionality.

Diane Bryant: Google started a consumer solution, and we are hardcore enterprise. I think maybe that is where we are having a disconnect.  We need an enterprise solution. It has to be secure; it has to be robust; it has to have offline capability; it has to have e-discovery solutions. Just think about everything that an enterprise has to have that a consumer wouldn’t care about. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: And what kind of environments are these cloud applications working on from a user interface point of view? On the server side, I understand all these virtualization and scalability issues. What about on the client side? Is it all operating on a thin client browser based environment or are you deploying clients?

Diane Bryant: We are not doing server hosted desktop virtualization on the server side, no. We are not doing that. It’s strictly the application running in the data center in a shared infrastructure cloud environment being accessed by a thick client. All our Intel employees have notebooks, full capacity notebooks, about the drives. We refresh them every two to three years. We have many of our apps run local to your machine. Our office applications are local to a machine, so we still have a thick client as the primary device. The applications are just being hosted in the data center in the cloud environment. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

About Intel

Intel Corporation is an American global technology company and the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue.

Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, as Integrated Electronics Corporation and is based in Santa Clara, California. Outside of California, the company has facilities in 63 countries and regions internationally, including China, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Israel, Ireland, India, Russia, and Vietnam.

Intel also makes motherboard chip sets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphic chips, embedded processors, and other devices related to communications and computing. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mandy Edwards, CIO Of Sitel (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: That is true on the marketing side. You are talking about the pre-sale situation, market research situation where customers are trying to make a decision. But what about the actual customer support piece where you are a customer and you have bought a product. I had this experience recently, and it is really irritating me. I was calling Comcast for customer support with something, and I was kept on the phone. There is this relationship between Comcast and Netgear, and I had a problem with my Netgear equipment, but it was on the Comcast line. So, Comcast and Netgear kept pushing me back and forth this way and that way and I was being kept on the phone for hours! >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mandy Edwards, CIO Of Sitel (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: So, are there nuggets of information that you can share about strategies you are using as far as cloud computing is concerned?

Mandy Edwards: Well, in terms of strategy, everything we do has to be secure. We also have to understand risks and vulnerabilities, and our job, when we are going through a client implementation, is to work with our customers to ensure that those companies are satisfied with the security that is inherent in that integrated solution. It can be both technology related and operationally related, and I will give you an example. Some clients require that we have a complete clean desk policy; that is, the agents who service that client would be allowed to have nothing on the workstations. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mandy Edwards, CIO Of Sitel (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: In your industry, what is available today as infrastructure as a service? Obviously, storage was one of the first value propositions to be adopted as an infrastructure as a service, but is there something beyond that that is specific to your industry that you are able to leverage? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mandy Edwards, CIO Of Sitel (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: Right. What is the procedure of updating the knowledge base? Let’s say your agents come up with a scenario that is not addressed in the knowledge base, and somehow or the other you have to figure out how to answer that question. How does that path, the integration path, between you and the customer’s knowledge base happen in that updating process or enhancement process? >>>