Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: James Dunlap, President of Cycle30 (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: The scenarios that you have described where the workflow has changed significantly, do you see those as opportunities for other small vendors to come in and solve some of these problems with technology? Are there any vendors that are offering you ways to manage these kinds of transitions to the cloud? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: James Dunlap, President of Cycle30 (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: In terms of business models, what changes are there with the introduction of the cloud in your environments? The contracts and licensing deals that you had with these software vendors, did they all lend themselves naturally to your move to a cloud environment?

JD: I wish they did! We had to go in ourselves, take the lead, and renegotiate a number of the agreements in to order to move them to cloud environment. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: James Dunlap, President of Cycle30 (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Can you talk a bit more about what these GCI order to cash components are, what vendors do they come from, and what the organizing principle of this environment is? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: James Dunlap, President of Cycle30 (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: You needed to go outside to find a data center which deals with IT support for your subscriber base of 450,000, is that correct?

JD: Well, even as we had a subscription count in the 300,000 range and up, that was really the point when we realized that we could not provide for that number as an IT organization. It could be a bottleneck and affect the quality of service, from a data center perspective, as we continued our rapid growth plans. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: James Dunlap, President Of Cycle30 (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

Today, the telecom industry charges its subscribers based on fixed price business models for data services. But to keep up with the rate at which bandwidth consumption is scaling, telecom vendors will almost certainly need to adopt a variable pricing model, such that they can charge based on consumption just as they charge for voice services. The utility industry charges based on how much energy or water is consumed, but the telecom industry assumes unlimited data usage for a fixed fee. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 9)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

SM: Right, which is where startups play very well. Startups start with the lead users and begin developing the market, and once they gain momentum and have validated the space, you pick them up and deploy them to a broader population.

DF: So, I think going from automation to optimization is one area where we are going to push hard. Another one is probably around something in knowledge management. A lot of what happens with IT management software happens because there is a big gap between the people who use the IT systems and the people who deliver them, so there is a big gulf between the data center and the people who are using it.  >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 8)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

DF: The other area I think of as white space is, if you think about the cloud, if everything plugs into the cloud, it’s like an economy. You need people to be able to make that market, and there are lots of impediments to doing so. People describe their services differently, people request them differently. I think there needs to be something that’s almost like Froogle, the Google Froogle, but for cloud services. A tool that has gone out and looked at these services, indexed them, and tagged them using the business service vocabulary and aliases – basically something like knowledge management or search, like we are searching for APIs about pages. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

SM: I have two other major questions. One is from an entrepreneur’s point of view: What do you see in the realm of cloud computing in general, security included? Where do you see are open spaces or blue-sky opportunities, unsolved problems, and open problems for entrepreneurs? That is one question, and the second question is related: What is your acquisition strategy? What is the portfolio of solutions you are trying to put together through acquisitions in terms of functionality? >>>