Tech Interviews

There is no doubt that the way businesses operate has changed significantly throughout 2020 and while many of us had plans for and technology in place to deal with a distributed workforce, not many of us have the plans, technology or processes in place to deal with all of our workforce been distributed. Now then, is the time for us to take a step back and rethink our distributed workforce, how we approach it? To help me to explore this is this week’s podcast guest Doug Miller, CEO of Brightworks Group, a company specialising in helping enterprises of all sizes to modernise their approach to IT and help to service a distributed workforce. Join us as we discuss. • Doug’s props! • The demands of our changing world • The opportunity of distributed workforces • The power user problem! • Big issues are not necessarily technical • The digital transformation “lag” • The data portability problem • When the leadership does not embrace technology • The importance of working with specialists who can help you • Tips on

The public cloud is playing an ever more important part in the modern enterprise’s infrastructure, whether they are SaaS services such as Microsoft 365 or native cloud services from compute to storage. The challenge when we look to adopt the cloud is how do we avoid developing a technology silo in our business, how do we make sure we don’t put the cloud on an island all of its own, one that has no integration into our enterprise datacentre. Because that is not the point is it? We want the cloud to be a valuable extension of what we do, something we can use “tactically” to solve problems and enable us to do things that are hard on-premises. How then do we build appropriate bridges between what we do in the datacentre and those resources and services the public cloud has to offer? That is the subject of this week’s show as I am joined by Principal Architect and Cloud Evangelist at NetApp, Phoebe Goh. We discuss. • Why we need a Cloud data strategy. • We need an Enterprise-ready cloud. • It is not just about “

The fact that the importance of data to every business continues to grow is not a surprise. Our data estates been more complex, more geographically spread and housed in more data repositories than ever before, again should not be a surprise and neither is it that our demands on our data are also increasing, we want it to be more useful to us, be used as part of new data strategies, but we also need it to be more highly available than ever, more portable and more flexible. However, it is these challenges that are also leading to us needing to consider another part of our data infrastructure and that is our data protection. The state of our data protection strategy should also be under constant review, does what we are doing today meet the demands of our business? A few months ago, I attended VeeamON, Veeam’s annual technical conference, one of the sessions I found extremely useful dealt with the exact topic I’ve just described, the state of the data protection industry in 2020. With that in mind, I asked the

The need to modernise the way we deliver technology continues to be high on the agenda of both IT and broader enterprise leadership, whether it's how we manage and store data, build security or work with partners and customers we are looking at ways to do this more effectively and efficiently. This is also true of the applications that we use across the enterprise. The public cloud has changed the perception of how we want to see our technology, including our applications, behave. This has led to new app development methodologies and tools, one of these is serverless. But what is serverless? Can I use it? I have got lots of big enterprise applications is it all relevant? All of which are good questions and are the subject of this week's podcast as I'm joined by Ezhilarasi Chezhiyan of KOVAI.co to talk about serverless architecture. Join us as we discuss. Serverless is not without servers! The LEGO approach to applications Abstracting the infrastructure Flexibility Serverless use cases Serverless limitation

As September rolls around it seems that the technology industry has decided this should be digital conference season, as we publish this week’s podcast in the week of the 28th September we see VMworld 2020 happening online and throughout October companies like Veeam, NetApp, ONUG and others will be holding their own digital events. Ahead of all of those we have had Microsoft Ignite, their major conference for the technical community. What did we hear at Ignite? What Microsoft announcements should we go and check out? In the first of what is going to become a series of event wrap up shows over the coming weeks, I’m joined by Microsoft’s Sarah Lean and NetApp’s Kirk Ryan to give their views of Ignite, what surprised them and excited them. So technical issues (with the video version of the show) aside, settle back and join our chat as we talk about. • Microsoft’s aims for ignite • Azure in Space and in the sea • Automating your Azure estate • Windows is not dead • Putting the power in the hands of those who ne

There are two camps when it comes to the world of technology, there are those who use it and those who make it. The challenge is, how do we make sure that those who are developing and selling technology are supplying things that are useful to and solving the challenges of those who are buying and using it? How do you bring those two disparate groups together in a way that allows for constructive dialogue which in turn leads to delivering products that solve business problems while still allowing tech vendors to innovate and of course make money? On this week's show, we look at an organisation who although new to me, has since 2012 been looking to address this problem and have done so with a fair degree of success, ONUG, as I'm joined by Co-founder and Co-chair Nick Lippis joins me to share the ideas behind ONUG and how you can get involved. We discuss. Where do execs go to talk to their peers? Getting beyond price only influence with vendors. It's not about users v sellers – it's about healthy debate! ONUG

2020 has of course been a very different year for most of us and for those of us in the technology industry one major impact has been on the tech community. For many of us the community is one of our core career tenants for us as we develop, it is where we learn and where we build relationships and friendships. As VMworld 2020 approaches, like most of the major conferences this year, it will only happen online and while this is a great opportunity for many to attend for the first time, it also means that we will lose that chance for the tech community to be brought together. On this week's show, I'm joined by VMware content strategist and founder of the excellent community initiative The Tech Level Up Project, Yadin Porter De León as we discuss what VMworld 2020 has to offer. Join us as we discuss. Inclusion in numbers Community side channels The no-risk chance to try out VMworld A chance to pick and mix "the future forward" them A chance to "really deliver for the widest audience" The Tech Level Up Proje

It's pretty much the norm for us now that when we visit a website we are increasingly used to seeing the arrival on-screen of a helpful chat assistant, normally popping up in the bottom corner of the page and offering to help us out and to try to triage our requirements. The issue though is these types of services are limited and are not smart enough to understand our requirements or add context to the conversation, but what if they were smarter? That is the question we ask on this week's Tech interviews with my guest CEO and founder of aigo.ai, Peter Voss. Join us as we discuss; the current state of "assistants" where is the value in deploying them? the limitations of assistants without a brain! how is the technology and the market changing? the power of cognitive intelligence how a good assistant can help retain customers how aigo.ai are helping where to start with a cognitive assistant project Peter provides a fascinating insight into a part of the technology market that is going to become increasingly

There is no doubt the world has changed in many ways in the last 3 months, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the global response to it has been something we have not witnessed before. From a technology point of view, it has presented many challenges. However as things start to change we are starting to turn our attention to returning to some kind of "normal", but this also presents an opportunity to us, the chance to take what we have learned over this period and take that knowledge and experience to help plan what we do next, so that next time we need to react quickly to change we can do it better. To help with that I have put together a short series of shows looking at where do we go next for some of our technology decision making. In this episode, we take a look at an area that has been pushed more than most during the COVID response and that is the area of connectivity and especially how the reliance on connectivity. To discuss that I'm joined by Rob Shore, Rob is a Senior Vice President of Marketing for Infin

In this episode, we look at a topic that is not normal Tech Interviews territory, but one that is going to be a huge focus for businesses of all shapes and sizes as we come to grips with the COVID realities that will be with us for some time to come and that is how do we use technology to better market our organisations and sell our services? My guest is Vlad Edelman, CEO and founder of Targetable a digital marketing platform and service that helps businesses to use technology to better market and sell to their customers base. Vlad has vast experience in the areas of both digital platforms and online marketing services with a very impressive CV developing solutions for some of the best-known brands in the world, in this episode Vlad shares some of that experience as we discuss some of the pitfalls with today’s marketing approaches and how marketing may not be quite as easy as everyone likes to think! We discuss. • I’m in IT why should I care about marketing? • Why everyone thinks they can do a marketeer’s

One of the few COVID-19 benefits has been the shift of many major technology vendors to taking their key events online, we've already seen Microsoft, NetApp, HPE, Cisco and many more move their big in-person conferences to an online version and while they may not replace all elements of those in-person events, what it has done is opened up the opportunity to attend events that you may not normally be able with the bonus of much of the content been left available for many weeks after the event so you can consume what you need at your own pace. June saw Veeam's popular VeeamON event move online for 2020 with nearly 30,000 registrations it seems to have proved a huge success, so on this week's show, we look at how was it running such a big event online? What were the key messages and announcements from the conference that would be relevant for Veeam partners, customers and the wider data management industry? With a focus on "Elevating your cloud data-strategy" we also ask what that means and how Veeam is hoping

There is no doubt the world has changed in many ways in the last 3 months, the COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it has been something we have not witnessed before. From a technology point of view, it has presented many challenges, delivering remote IT at scale, stretched VPN's, flexibility, support, security, the list is long. However as things start to change we are starting to turn our attention to returning to some kind of "normal", but this also presents an opportunity to us, the chance to take what we have learned over this period and take that knowledge and experience to help plan what we do next, so that next time we need to react quickly to change we can do it better. To help with that I've put together a short series of shows and in this third part we pick up on something we discussed in the initial episode the "journey to cloud" and how do we make that easier? On this week's episode, I'm joined by Microsoft Cloud Advocate Sarah Lean to discuss Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework, a hu

The move to the cloud is hardly a new topic, for many the value of services like Microsoft 365 have proved their worth over the opening months of 2020, having key services running in the public cloud has delivered the flexibility, scale and accessibility that it promised. Beyond that we are also starting to see ever increasing tactical use of public cloud, integration into backup and archive tools, storage, cloud-based security appliances, the list continues to grow. But what about those big enterprise core applications like SAP, the systems that are running every element of a business, are we starting to move them as well? I ask that question because of an announcement that caught my attention this week (w/c June 15th 2020) from NetApp proudly declaring they are the first to offer SAP HANA certified storage via their Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) inside of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). What I wanted to know was why? NetApp has no doubt put a lot of time, effort and money into gaining this certification, but is

There is no doubt the world has changed in many ways in the last 3 months, the COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it has been something we have witnessed before. From a technology point of view, it has presented many challenges, delivering remote IT at scale, stretched VPN’s, scale, flexibility, support, security, the list is long. However as things start to change we are starting to turn our attention to returning to some kind of “normal”, but this also presents an opportunity to us, the chance to take what we have learned over this period and take that knowledge and experience to help plan what we do next, so that next time we need to react quickly to change we can do it better. To help with the “what next” planning is a short series of shows looking at that topic, in this second part we look at the world from a user point of view and explore how we need to rethink our end-user experience. Joining me to discuss this is Tony Main of Italian end-user device company Praim as we explore how the worl

There is no doubt the world has changed in many ways in the last 3 months, the COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it has been something we have not witnessed before. From a technology point of view, it has presented many challenges, delivering remote IT at scale, stretched VPN's, scale, flexibility, support, security, the list is long. However as things start to change we are starting to turn our attention to returning to some kind of "normal", but this also presents an opportunity to us, the chance to take what we have learned over this period and use it to better plan what we do next, so that next time we need to react quickly to change we can do it better. To help with the what next conversation is a short series of shows looking at what next, we start with the public cloud, which is first on the list of most "what next" discussions. To help me to explore this first topic is first time guest to the show, but long time industry friend, Grant Caley, he is Chief Technologist for NetApp in the UK

Over the last few weeks the use of collaboration tools has grown exponentially as they have become critical to enterprises of all types to enable their staff to continue to work together and to keep business moving in these most challenging of times. Many of them have moved from business tools to household names, now everyone knows what a Zoom meeting is and of course, we are all familiar with the phrase "living in Microsoft Teams". While Teams itself is an excellent collaboration tool, easy for users to work with and to work together on, its backend complexity can be a challenge, especially as much of that complexity is hidden from not only users but administrators too which leads to increased risks that can impact your sensitive data assets. That problem has inspired this week's show, my guest is Stephen Nesbitt of Varonis, Steve has been with them for about a year, but before that had worked for Microsoft with a particular focus on SharePoint. Recently I recorded a video with Steve highlighting some of t

Data is essential in modern business, how we store, protect, ensure it's available and portable and of course that it is compliant and meets our business and regulatory needs. To provide the kind of insight and control we need of our data in the modern enterprise requires us to think beyond how we store it, we need to be more platform focussed, ensuring that in whichever repositories we place our data they give us greater insight and control of its usage. However, to deliver things like compliance traditionally has needed multiple products, a storage location, a separate compliance tool and professional services to integrate it all together. But what if your storage could do this natively as new data was written to it? With that in mind, I was intrigued to see NetApp announce their Cloud Compliance tool an integrated compliance solution that would offer immediate native reporting to data written into their cloud storage repositories (Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes Service)What do

In our increasingly data focussed world the desire to gain more insight from our data to help us to make better decisions continues to grow. This has lead to a real upsurge in the need to not only find better ways to analyse data, but also approaches that make the ability to analyse it more widespread and get tools into the hands of those inside of an enterprise who need it to help them make better decisions for their companies and customers alike. How do we go about building this kind of data analytics strategy? That's the question for this week's podcast, the second in our series looking at how we use data. This week I'm joined by Catherine Wilks, Data and Analytics Practice Lead at data specialist Slalom. Join us as we cover. *What do we mean by visualisation? *How to avoid making stepping into work seem like stepping back in time? *Are we adopting Analytics and why we should be? *How starting small can still bring big benefits. *Why it's OK to not always find something new. *How data analytics can attra

Data, data everywhere, that seems to be the standard refrain in most businesses, we are collecting more data from more sources than ever, yet in many cases we don’t have a clear and bespoke strategy for dealing with it, how we use, store and secure data tends to be embedded in other strategies and policies. Many enterprises talk about the importance of their data and how they see it as a crucial asset, so is now the time to have a bespoke and specific data strategy? If it is, why is it? What should it include? How do we go about building one? that is the focus of this weeks show as I’m joined by returning guest Matt Watts, CTO EMEA at NetApp. Matt has been at NetApp for 15 years and during that time he has always had a great enthusiasm for understanding technology trends and that is exactly the same here as we discuss the importance of a data strategy and why now is the time for enterprises to develop theirs. In this episode we discuss. • Are we still too fixated on “boxes”? • Before we talk tech, what is t

One of the questions that I always find interesting in the technology industry is whether the technology that industry watchers and analysts talk about and fill column inches with are the things that enterprises are deploying on a wide scale. I often feel that analysts and large tech vendors have a vision of the world that is shaped by the companies on the West coast of the USA and the very largest enterprises, there is nothing wrong at all with listening to the needs and challenges those companies face, but not all enterprises are those types of organisations and does that view of the world translate to everybody else? On this weeks show we explore exactly that question but a bit differently as this time I’m the guest! as I share with you a podcast I recorded recently with two industry friends and fellow podcasters Chris Evans and Martin Glassborow on their excellent Storage Unpacked podcast. Between us we have a wide and varied debate about what kind and how technology is used, evaluated, and bought by en