Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pete Manca, CEO of Egenera (Part 1)

While Amazon dominates the public cloud platform market with AWS, and Microsoft is a distant second, emerging trends show that resellers and application developers are seeing alternatives. Read on for more…

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Egenera.

Pete Manca: I’m the CEO at Egenera. Egenera is a 15-year-old software company and I have been with the company since the very beginning. We started off mainly in the infrastructure software space selling both the hardware and software solutions that were targeted towards the enterprise market. We did that for the first 10 years of the company’s existence.

About three years ago, we saw the trend of the cloud. We acquired a company in Ireland that specializes in cloud management. We transitioned the company from a traditional enterprise perpetual license software company to a cloud management company that is more of a subscription-based cloud-based company. Today, that’s our main focus—selling, what we call, wholesale cloud. We’re mainly selling for the reseller channel at a wholesale level and providing an easy way to introduce cloud to their customers.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? What specifically are you selling? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Pat Donnellan, CEO of Lumeta (Part 3)

Pat Donnellan: In the UK, there is a directive issued by the Bank of England which stipulates that on an annual basis, each licensed financial service organization operating in the UK is subject to a cyber analytics audit where a live malware is injected into the network of the financial services organization. The audit was determined on how that organization responds to that particular live threat. We operationalize how the financial services organization deals with that. There are pending legislations that stipulate an extension of what the UK is planning where enormous buying is being proposed for financial services organization who do not have, in essence, control over their network and are unable to effectively respond to malware threats.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the industry in general. You’ve already started talking to some extent about the industry in general. Talk to me about what are the open problems. Where do you encourage entrepreneurs to look for problems to solve in the cyber security space? More specifically, in the areas you monitor more closely than others. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Pat Donnellan, CEO of Lumeta (Part 2)

Pat Donnellan: The third part, which is a subset of the real-time product, is that we have built a Hadoop engine that enables the storage of what we’re gathering so that if there is an event – an incident response required – around a particular time, a particular network, a particular region, and a particular set of IP addresses, we can enable you to forensically zone back prior policy of storage to that particular set of circumstances. Again, looking at the real-time movements over a specific period of time.

More recently, we’ve added the capability of taking the threat intelligence libraries of known bad actors and being able to test in conjunction with our product in real-time whether or not your enterprise is now exposed to a particular bad actor. Whether you have within your organization a functioning device that has been zombied, that is the third strand of what we do. We crawl the network akin to how Google crawls across a multitude of databases to gather information. We crawl recursively, right out to the edge of the network and beyond, if required, to enable you to continuously understand your network. We make sense of that. We enable you to prioritize with our Hadoop engine the five things that are priority policy. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Pat Donnellan, CEO of Lumeta (Part 1)

A different snapshot into the Cyber Security world… can the vulnerability management providers actually see the entire network?

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Lumeta.

Pat Donnellan: First of all, let me introduce Lumeta. Lumeta is a New Jersey-based company in the cyber security space. The software was originally conceived within the environment of Bell Labs to facilitate the US government DOD to understand, at that point, the Internet. It was originally conceived as a scanning and mapping tool to identify devices and IP addresses on a worldwide basis. That was the original concept. It evolved when a number of investors that put a lot of money into it to build it out. I, along with a number of other individual investors, bought the business just over two years ago. In essence, we bought it on the premise that the future of cyber security centered on real-time as opposed to continuous.

There’s a big distinction there. Real-time network situational awareness – meaning in enterprises and government agencies, the basic premise of Lumeta is without our product, you do not understand your network. You have a 15% to 20% visibility gap in devices, networks, IP addresses, and >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You gave an overview. If you were to go out and start a company today, have you heard any customer point out a specific problem that needs to be solved but there is no vendor out there that’s addressing this problem?

Jerry Melnick: We are going to rely on cloud services just like the way we rely on our computer systems today. They are at a level of maturity and accessibility that is not exactly at a level that data centers are today. The opportunity, at least in the space that we live in, is how do I build on or harden that cloud? How do I make that cloud capable of supporting the kinds of service and service levels required for the applications that are most important? Clearly, if cloud can do that, I get the advantage of not just the cloud flexibility and utility and the cost savings, but I also get high value out of its foundational security and availability. What kinds of technologies do we need to provide those high-value services? How do I make my cloud do more? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the industry in your space and the adjacent spaces, where do you see open problems that new entrepreneurs could be working on?

Jerry Melnick: The real movement today is clearly around service-based versus product-based offerings. When I say that, I’m referring specifically to cloud service. Utility computing is finally being realized in the cloud space. Probably the applications that we make highly available are the laggards in the industry in terms of moving into the cloud in providing services, mainly because of the conservative nature. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Kevin O’Malley and Patrick Shea, Co-founders of AdDaptive Intelligence (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the workflow of this? Where is the data collection happening? Where is the data integration with the algorithm happening? Is this happening in real-time, batch, or pre-setting of some sort? How is this setup? If I’m a publisher who wants to plug in your system into my site, how does this work?

Kevin O’Malley:  Everything is real-time, so is our data management platform, especially the technology that helps segment the data. That is done through real-time transactions. We’ll essentially place our technology on the publisher’s website. From there, we’re collecting, segmenting, and analyzing all that data in real-time. When the publisher has an advertising campaign to run, they’ll select certain segments of users and certain characteristics that they would like to target. We then would run the campaign on our platform.

The algorithm is obviously built into our media buying engine. Essentially, we’re using their data but we’re also using the data that we receive back from all of the impressions that we’re running. As Patrick mentioned earlier, there’s dozens, if not thousands, of different parameters – time >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you help me with an ecosystem map of the space that you’re in? Who are the other players, whether it’s competitors or complementary players? What does the ecosystem map look like?

Jerry Melnick: You can cut the space in a number of directions. Let’s start at the top in terms of what service level a technology provides, starting with photonics. It’s a small market. You can work all the way down to back up and recovery when you talk about high availability. In the middle of that, the most prevalent is high availability and high availability achieved through clustering. That’s basically less than seven or eight minutes of downtime a year and no data loss. That’s the space that we sit in. >>>