Archive for Derick Townsend

Anyone who has worked in development or central IT for any length of time knows first-hand how the application release cycle has sped up.  The need to achieve faster time-to-market facilitated by Web-based applications has driven new release cycles to a weekly, daily, sometimes even hourly basis. With the need for controlled speed and consistently…

ServiceMesh was very active at EMC World 2013 last week in Las Vegas. If you couldn’t make it, I pulled together some of the highlights and links: ServiceMesh was recognized several time by the press, including video interviews by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE on the expo floor. Here's an interview with our CEO Eric Pulier: One of…

"Leaving aside the proliferating startups in ServiceMesh's sector, Cisco, Dell, VMware and the Big Four enterprise systems management vendors can't lose the battle for cloud management without losing the war – and their lives."  This is what 451 analyst Rachel Chalmers wrote when describing the competition to ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform 9.0, and just one reason…

Many IT organizations are struggling to overcome the complexities of selecting, analyzing, planning and migrating existing applications portfolios to private and/or public clouds. Each application portfolio is unique and each organization has its own business and technical reasons and requirements for choosing to move their enterprise applications to the cloud. The challenge and skill involved…

Transforming Enterprise IT from a Cost Center to an Innovation Center Read the Forrester case study now. One of our ServiceMesh customers, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), has decided to publicly share some of the results of their cloud IT transformation efforts. We’ve been working with CBA for 4 years, and although they have been…

Enterprises require fine-grain cloud governance controls to manage the complexity and regulatory/compliance risk inherent in their organizations. Most everyone agrees cloud governance is necessary, so the challenge becomes how to create and enforce policies and governance in an automated way, while keeping it largely transparent to end users, and allowing those policy control to be…

Many global enterprises have 1,000’s or 10,000’s of applications in their portfolio. When these enterprises begin realizing the benefits of private or hybrid cloud implementations, typically starting with green-field projects, the next inevitable question turns to migrating their existing apps to the cloud. This may seem like a daunting task, so here are some tips…

As described by President Eisenhower, the Military-Industrial Complex comprised major industries and technology supply chains that grew into a huge, self-sustaining bureaucracy that worked hard to protect its expensive, long-term contracts for non-standard offerings. Unfortunately, there are some similarities with today's enterprise IT. Driven in part by vendor alliances, a lack of incentives to evaluate…

Earlier today, I spoke with Mike Vizard about enterprise IT complexity, and whether cloud computing actually makes complexity worse or simplifies it. IT complexity certainly creates a tremendous burden in a large enterprise. It’s not just the time, resources, and chaos it inflicts on IT ops folks charged with running IT smoothly, but also the redundant…

For many folks in IT, it's easy to get wrapped up in technology implementations and forget to step back and ask what the real strategic benefits and broader potential of those technologies are for the larger enterprise. This is certainly true for cloud computing today. So what is cloud computing and how can we best leverage…