Best-of-breed strategies have long since fallen out of favor in the enterprise, because the work required to stitch together the components proved to be too difficult. But best of breed is back with cloud. Companies today are hell-bent on buying the ideal SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS cloud services for the job, and while APIs make the integration work easier, the resultant cloud silos create a new challenge: How do you assure service performance in this multi-cloud world?

The short answer: By maintaining global knowledge of what is happening (and where) across IT infrastructure, applications, and services. But we’ll get back to that.

Companies use eight cloud providers on average, according to IHS Markit Ltd., a research firm in London. IHS’ survey of 155 companies in a range of industries shows that number swelling to 11 within two years. When you include any and all SaaS services, the average number of cloud applications that companies use explodes to almost 1,500, by some counts. 

To read this article in full, please click here

Gray Hall, CEO of Alert Logic, cut his teeth delivering enterprise-class services when he started VeriCenter, one of the earliest managed hosting companies.  Hall eventually sold that company to SunGard Data Systems in 2007, and in 2009 joined Alert Logic where he has since driven revenue growth 12x.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Hall to learn more about Alert Logic and the security-as-a-service movement.

Lets start with a brief background on the company.

Alert Logic was founded in 2002 -- the founders are still with us today in very key roles – and the original vision was to bring together SaaS and managed security services, starting with Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Sourcefire had been around for a long time, they were the gorilla in the space (now owned by Cisco), but Sourcefire is a very advanced product and most of our customers would say it’s expensive, complex, and you need a lot of expertise to make it work.  It’s only as good as the content you feed it and once you reconfigure your network, you have to do it all over again … tuning, configuration, etc.

To read this article in full, please click here

Sam Ramji, who joined Google about six months ago as VP of Product Management for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), has deep roots in open source:  He was the founding CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation and he designed and led Microsoft's open source strategy.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix sat down with Ramji at the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston to discuss how Google is trying to differentiate its cloud service.

Google

Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst kicked off the company’s Summit meeting in Boston this week, which attracted more than 6,000 people, up 20% from last year. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Whitehurst at the show for an update on the company’s position and prospects.

One of your keynote speakers said 84% of Red Hat customers have cloud deployment strategies. Is the shift to cloud accelerating your business?

I do think the shift to cloud is helping. We have data that shows our customers who use cloud actually grow faster in total with us than ones who don’t. The promise of cloud accelerates the Unix-to-Linux migration as people modernize applications to be able to move to cloud -- whether they move immediately or not -- because clouds primarily run Linux. In general, anything that makes people move to a new architecture is good for us because we have a high share of new architecture relative to old. I think that’s a big, big driver.

To read this article in full, please click here

F5’s new President and CEO, Francois Locoh-Donou, took over the reins of the application delivery networking company April 3, replacing longtime leader John McAdam who retired in 2015 but stepped back into the position when his replacement resigned in December of that year for “personal conduct matters.”  Locoh-Donou was mostly recently COO of Ciena, a telecom equipment supplier.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked with Locoh-Donou yesterday about his plans and ambitions for F5 after Locoh-Donou hosted his first F5 quarterly earnings call (Q2 revenue up 7% year-over-year to $518 million). 

Given your history in the technology business, are there any experiences in particular that will guide you in this new role?

To read this article in full, please click here

PTC has assembled a robust portfolio of Internet of Things technologies that, when combined with the company’s history in digital 3D design and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools, makes for some interesting new ways to bridge the physical and digital worlds.  To see how it all adds up, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Michael Campbell, Executive Vice President of PTC’s ThingWorx IoT platform. Campbell, who has been with PTC since 1995, has a background in 3D CAD and visualization, and ran the company’s CAD business for years when they started to think about the convergence of IoT and 3D and how it might all come together in augmented and virtual reality. 

To read this article in full, please click here

F5 Networks is said to be lining up to acquire Brocade’s virtual Application Delivery Controller (ADC) business, the latest hunk of Brocade’s IP suite to be sold off to meet the terms of Brocade’s $5.5 billion acquisition by Broadcom, a deal announced last November. Brocade sold its Ruckus Wireless and ICX Switch business to Arris International in February for $800 million.

The latest divestiture -- reported by companies contacted by the private equity firm shopping the ADC asset -- is said to involve Brocade’s Virtual Traffic Manager, formerly known as the SteelApp Traffic Manager.  Brocade had acquired the technology from Riverbed in 2015 for an undisclosed fee, and Riverbed itself had acquired the tech from Zeus Technologies in 2011 for $140 million.

To read this article in full, please click here