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. >>>

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. >>>

SAP To Intensify Cloud Strategy

SAP, one of the largest companies in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market, recently reported strong results – its seventh straight quarter of double-digit growth. It even reported a double-digit gain in market share against Oracle, which recently announced its plans to acquire customer service SaaS vendor RightNow for $1.5 billion. Let’s take a closer look.

>>>

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? >>>