All Posts Tagged With: "Leadership"
A while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]
Continue ReadingMy old CIO at BT, Al-noor Ramji had a most delightful and endearing way of describing just how unimportant and disconnected IT Infrastructure is from reality by describing us as “The toilet cleaner’s toilet cleaners”. Like other successful CIOs Al-noor had the ability to cut through the noise and explain things as they are.
In every [...]
Continue ReadingMy good friend and ESG colleague Terri McClure @esganalysttmac recently blogged about a thought leadership piece I had presented at an analyst call last week. She made a very good job of explaining it and so I thought that I would write a little more about it here:
I call the concept the “Golden Triangle” and it [...]
Here is a video from my friend Professor Masood Amin @Massoud_Amin who is the world authority on Smart Grid. If we want to save the planet from global warming, prevent terrorists shutting down our economy and prevent catastrophic failure of our power distribution systems. This is the template of what we need to do and [...]
Continue ReadingThere is cloud and then there is cloud. Cloud with take it or leave it service levels or cloud with service availability that supports the UK’s emergency services (911, 999, 112). I know about this life or death service level because a few years back I actually ran the BT IT operational department that supported the [...]
Continue ReadingApplication Developer: My new application needs to store some objects. Can I have a bit of storage please?
Storage Administrator: So do you want NAS or Block storage?
Application Developer: Is there a Java object library for that stuff, what did you call it nasty blocks?
Storage Administrator: (mumbles) stupid code monkey… Who knows – thats your job [...]
I have been contributing to Kiva ever since I noticed a tweet from Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree) Cisco’s CTO mentioning the micro-finance site. Getting a business loan in the western world is tough enough, it’s pretty impossible in the third world. So that’s where micro-finance can help. Kiva collects lots of $25.00 “investments” from lenders (don’t [...]
Continue ReadingA recent Hot Aisle poll about the use of hypervisor technology in enterprises offers some interesting insights.
96% of respondents use at least one hypervisor
44% of respondents use two or more hypervisors
16% of respondents use three or more hypervisors
98% of Hot Aisle readers know what a Hypervisor is (we are a smart bunch)
* The poll was [...]
Continue ReadingMy old firm, First Data, have teamed up with RSA, the security division of EMC (NYSE: EMC) to provide a new service called First Data Secure Transaction Management which is engineered to enable merchants to secure payment card data and remove it from their environment while allowing access when needed.
Regular readers of the hot aisle will know [...]
I met up with my old friend Martin Williams yesterday; he is CEO of a startup company called ATOV. Apparently AtoV means Anarchy to Visualisation, which is exactly what they do.
Some firms have limited instrumentation to monitor their IT systems, some firms even have a Command Centre or Bridge Operations to react to outages in [...]
Telephone has Shortcomings – It was printed in a memo at Western Union in 1878 that
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us”
Electric Light will Close as well – Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson predicted that
“When the Paris Exhibition [of [...]
At ESG we’ve teamed up with Dell, Microsoft, Symantec, VMware, and Intel on the Virtualization Tour show that’s all over North America (for now)! From September 29th pretty much every day through the end of October, we’ll be in a US city!
The content is excellent – based on some killer ESG research and [...]
It’s a pretty good question given the perilous state of the US power distribution network, the ever increasing load and the ever increasing dependance (around the world) for US based IT and network systems.
My friend Professor Massoud Amin (the global authority on what is wrong and how to fix it) is running a free webinar [...]
The storage wars are hotting up with EMC the clear leader in block oriented product and with a huge portfolio of software that places them as the seventh biggest software company on the planet. NetApp hold onto the leadership position in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market with a technically advanced set of products. Why [...]
Continue ReadingI was delighted to hear today that my friends, David Wright (CEO) and David Driggers (CTO) at Verari Systems have been recognized for their great work on driving Data Center energy efficiency. For some time it has been apparent that the modular, containerized data center holds huge promise:
Ability to deploy new capacity extremely rapidly
Ability to deploy [...]
Fusion-io announced today at SNW that it closed $47.5 million in Series B funding from a group of investors led by global venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The company also announced that David Bradford, a Novell Inc industry veteran, has been named CEO of Fusion-io, in Bradford’s last three years at Novell, he reported directly to [...]
My good friend Jon Davis picked up an article by Rosabeth Moss Cantor on The Harvard Business Review that is so good that I wanted to write about it here.
“Managers of the last century, gave speeches, then had their assistants send snail mail letters with the text, and maybe followed up by a phone call to see if [...]
Recent cases of lost data have damaged public perception of government competence
Over 80% of the population in Scotland has lost confidence in the UK government’s ability to look after personal data; this is the stark finding of the first comprehensive survey of its kind into the psychological impact of recent public sector information losses.
The [...]
Next Generation Data, data centre specialists and designers and creators of NGD 1, one of Europe’s largest and most technically advanced data centres, has today announced the appointment of Dr Simon Orebi Gann as a Non-Executive Director. Dr Orebi Gann will work closely with Next Generation Data’s management team to aid growth and ensure technological [...]
Continue ReadingThe Hot Aisle is delighted to serve up another exclusive interview with a senior industry figure, 3PAR’s Senior Director of Strategy Geoff Hough. In this interview, Geoff answers some searching questions about 3PAR’s product capability and environmentalism and its intersection with self-interest – reduced running costs.
The Hot Aisle: Can you explain 3PAR’s strategy around environmental [...]
I recently met with Mark Shirman, CEO and Founder of Glasshouse Technologies and had the opportunity to get another exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mark is uniquely placed to comment on the recent changes in the Data Center and Storage markets with particular emphasis on Green issues.
For many years Glasshouse has been the leading independent Storage [...]
I got a note from Ivan who used the Contact form on The Hot Aisle to get in touch with me, headed up - Best of breed:
“Steve, great to see your article about Mike and Brocade on TheHotAisle and hope that this will continue the positive rise and acceptance we have in the SAN space. On the basis [...]
When I read the headline for this press release from The IT Job Board, I just about fell off my chair laughing. After reading through some of the finding though some things started to hit home.
Research conducted by online recruitment specialist www.theitjobboard.co.uk revealed that of 500 IT workers surveyed for a report on working hours, nearly half [...]
We buy too much software from software vendors because we don’t have processes and tools in place to ensure we only buy what we need.
What we need is what we use not what we install.
A fair software licensing agreement would allow us to pay for software that our employees need to do their jobs. Software companies have defined this [...]
When I saw the most inspirational leader of modern times on the cover page of Time Magazine (July 2008) sharing his Secrets of Leadership, even though Nelson Mandela is 90 years old and retired last century in 1999, I had to pick it up and spend the €4.20.
I bought Time, not because I expected a great insight [...]
