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In the Boardroom™ | |
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SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Pete. Please give us an overview of your background.
Pete Malcolm: I joined Abiquo in 2009 to boost the company's
international expansion, in part due to my experience with startup technology
companies. Prior to joining Abiquo, I founded and served as Chief Technology
Officer of Orchestria Corporation, which was acquired by CA Inc., in January
2009Additionally, I was Benchmark Capital Europe's first "Entrepreneur
In Residence", and prior to that Senior Vice President of Business Management
with CA Inc. I founded the IQ International company in 1989 (acquired
by Cheyenne Software in 1996) where I invented the data storage technique
known as Open File Backup. I'm also an inventor and have more than 150
granted and pending software patents around technology including Data
Loss Prevention and Open File Backup.
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: One will read on www.Abiquo.com that, "Abiquo represents the next generation of cloud management solutions. Designed to meet strategic objectives, rather than as a temporary tactical fix, it is built to realize our vision of virtualized infrastructure management. Based on open standards, Abiquo allows organizations of all sizes to dramatically improve business agility, mitigate risk, and reduce costs." Please give us an overview of Abiquo's solutions.
Pete Malcolm: The Abiquo Enterprise
Cloud Management is the only software to support compute (supporting
6 different hypervisors, including the most popular), storage and network
management , across multiple global datacenters, all from a single
pane of glass. While this capability alone will simplify datacenter management,
control virtual sprawl, and increase the visibility needed to efficiently
manage multiple hypervisors and datacenters, it's only the beginning.
In addition to this highly scalable infrastructure management, Abiquo
delivers a multi-tenant,
self
service portal to allow end users to consume the infrastructure they
need, according to predetermined business policies set by IT. Only Abiquo
combines infrastructure management and self service access with business
policies to help enterprises set SLAs, compliance, security and access
guidelines for users. Abiquo affords business units the access they want,
while allowing IT the control they need.
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com : What are your key target markets and what is your perspective on the market drivers for Abiquo solutions at this challenging economic time?
Pete Malcolm: Our key target markets are really not
vertical specific but rather initiative specific. We see that many enterprises
have taken the last 2-3 years to virtualize much of their datacenter,
offering them huge cost savings on power, space and hardware. Yet with
this wonderful invention comes a new challenge. Because it's so easy now
to spin up a virtual machine (VM), many enterprises are dealing with the
problem of VM sprawl and not being able to effectively manage all these
random builds. Mainly this problem persists where there are very large
deployments and they interact with teams or organizations that need new
environments set up for test and development, engineering, marketing programs,
etc. The problem occurs when someone asks for a new environment, but then
never de-provisions it for fear that they may need it again, and if they
do, it will take too long for IT to get it set up. So IT is stuck with
all these virtual machines that have no policies or rules wrapped around
them to know which should be backed up, need high availability, have secure
data, and so on. This is complicated when you add in all the other aspects
like virtual storage and network access, not to mention on and off premise
data centers. Given the highly complex nature of managing all this, and
most importantly being responsive to serving the needs of the business,
enterprises are turning to solutions like Abiquo to help manage it all
and provide a self service portal to allow users to access the resources
they want, spin them up or down, all within the security and business
governance needed for that particular user. IT has seen the alternative,
they have groups running to Amazon
EC2 or AWS with a credit card to create an environment and that means
loss of visibility, control and security over that data and environment.
Additionally, CFOs are starting to see the costs of departments using
public clouds with the convenience of a credit card, and is concerned
about the controls around managing this.
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: We understand that you are participating in Cloud Computing Expo June 6-9 2011 at the Javits Conventional Center in New York City. As you plan for this event, what trends are you seeing in the cloud computing market? Any new Abiquo solutions on the horizon?
Pete Malcolm: We are certainly going to be discussing the evolving role of IT. Given the success of Amazon in capturing business groups frustrated with dealing with internal IT, where does that leave the traditional enterprise IT group? Will the group ever regain control of this situation or will groups continue to outsource to SaaS, IaaS and other as a service vendors? How does IT start to bring value to the business and turn that ship around? Has the applications team found a way to create production ready applications outside of IT and will the apps team become the IT of tomorrow? Will they build in smart code with the application that tells the IT environment how to engage with that software, making IT staff redundant or purely administrative? We think IT, especially in the enterprise, will still hold the reigns, but the business has raised the bar on what it expects. The world of instant gratification is here, and the "consumerization of business" has everyone thinking that all services should be available right now at the click of a button. IT needs a way to deliver on this expectation, while also maintaining the security and governance needed for the business.
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Are there any Abiquo "wins" or success stories you'd like to mention?
Pete Malcolm: Since March 1, 2011 Abiquo has garnered
many accolades and industry analyst recognition. For example, Abiquo was
recently named Gartner "Cool
Vendors in Cloud Management, 2011," and were highlighted as
the top "pure-play" cloud management solution in the May 2011
Forrester Research report, "Market
Overview, Private Cloud Solutions Q2, 2011". Most recently, Citrix
awarded Abiquo with the 2011, Best of Show Solution for Virtual Data Centers.
Additionally, Abiquo was awarded the Network Products Guide Best of 2011
as both the "Entrepreneur of the Year" and as a "2011 Hot
Company." Other recent awards include CRN Top 100 Cloud Vendors,
On Demand Top 100 Winner for Cloud Computing, eWeek 16 hot startup companies
flying under the radar in 2011, and Datamation 15 cloud computing firms
to watch.
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: What resources are available for end-users and the trade at Abiquo.com?
Pete Malcolm: Users can find information about how to
plan and build a cloud service either as a service provider or as an enterprise
through our content rich series called "The
Hitchhikers Guide to the Cloud". Additionally, every Third
Thursday of the month we offer a free live technical demo that shows
how easy a cloud service can be. We also offer access to an enterprise
trial or a download of our free community edition . Lastly, in addition
to the basic information about how Abiquo is different and what it offers
customers, the reports from Gartner
and Forrester
are available to download in their entirety.
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thanks again for joining us
today, Pete. Are there any other subjects you would like to discuss?
Pete Malcolm: I'll leave with some parting notes. The world of cloud is hard to understand. There are the day to day challenges IT faces in managing chaos, then there are the business demands to deliver quickly, the CIO initiatives to "deliver cloud services" and of course the company concern for security, governance, process, and policies. When this amount of activity is overlaid onto the distortion of cloud offerings and vendors, it can be mind-numbing. You have the traditional system management players that have in many cases rebranded existing applications as cloud applications, you have the virtualization management vendors that really want to only manage a cloud as long as it's based on their hypervisor, then you have lots of new cloud players you may not have heard of, and lastly the public cloud vendors telling IT to outsource it all. Of course all of this matters only after you figure out what a cloud is and how you plan to approach it. I would highly recommend the "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Cloud" series to your readers. It was written by an independent analyst, and will help IT teams chart the path to getting to cloud. Then when you get to the cloud management piece, take a look at the latest Forrester report that outlines most common customer cloud requirements, and figure out how to choose the best cloud management solution, because not all cloud are the same and not all management is created equally. Best of luck on your journey to the cloud.