Last year at Dell World we talked about our approach to Digital Transformation. This year however we have put it front and center and the theme is woven throughout the show.
Today at Dell World, supporting this increased focus, Dell Services is unveiling a new dedicated service line called Digital Business Services (DBS). This service line is focused on helping organizations better understand and serve their customers through digital technologies.
To get a better idea of what Digital Transformation is all about and how Dell can help customers with this transformation, check out this short video:
A little more digital detail
The new Dell Digital Business Services line includes both Digital Transformation Consulting as well as Digital Technology Services. DBS leads with consulting to help companies determine their needs and then creates a tailored roadmap that leverages technologies such as analytics, mobile, social media and cloud as well as emerging trends like the Internet of Things.
The DBS team brings together best practices from Dell’s analytics, cloud and mobile solutions, IP from our end-to-end portfolio, partnerships as well as our learnings as an online and social pioneer.
If you’re interested in learning how Dell can help you adapt to a digital-first approach to better understand and serve your customers ping us here.
The weekend before last, the Major League Hacking crew helped put on a hackathon at the University of Texas. The event drew over 700 students organized into close to 100 teams.
Major League Hacking, which Dell helps power, is the official collegiate hackathon league and puts on more than 50 hackathons across the US, UK, and Canada per semester.
In advance of the event I got to have lunch with MLH’s commissioner, Mike Swift along with co-founder Jon Gottfried. After we ate I grabbed some time with the duo to learn what MLH is all about.
Some of the ground Swift and Jon cover:
What is Major League Hacking and what’s a hackathon?
How did Dell get involved and what role did project Sputnik play?
How the U Penn hackathon beat out the triple deterrents of Valentines Day, the release of House of Cards and two feet of snow
MLH’s plans for global domination
The power of learning from fellow students and the community
Last but not least in my series of four videos from the Cloud Standards Customer Council is an interview with Bernard Golden. Bernard, who is the VP of strategy at ActiveState, provided an industry perspective talk entitled: What Should PaaS Standards Look Like. Bernard then sat on the PaaS panel that followed.
I sat down with Bernard and he gave a quick overview of his talk as well as provided his thoughts on OpenStack and its need for focus. Take a listen:
Here is the third of four interviews that I conducted last week at the Cloud Standards Customer Council. The theme of the conference was “preparing for the post-IaaS phase of cloud adoption” and there was quite a bit of talk around the role that PaaS would play in that future.
The last session of the morning, before we broke for lunch, was a panel centered around Current and Future PaaS Trends. After the panel ended I sat down with panelist John Gossman, architect on Microsoft Azure. John, an app developer by origin, focuses on the developer’s experience on the cloud.
Below John talks working with Google on Kubernetes and getting it to work on Azure as well as the potential future of PaaS as a runtime that sits on top of IaaS.
Stay tuned for my next post when I will conclude my mini series from the Cloud Standards Customer Council meeting with an interview with Bernard Golden.
Extra-credit reading
Microsoft Azure Now Supports Google’s Kubernetes For Managing Docker Containers — TechCrunch
At last week’s Cloud Standards Customer Council held in Austin Texas, the first panel of the day dealt with “Current and Future PaaS Trends.” The panel debated whether there should or could be a PaaS standard as well as what its future might look like.
One of the panelists was Diane Mueller, community manager of OpenShift Origin. I grabbed some time with Diane after the panel and got her to share her thoughts on the viability of a PaaS standard and how she saw the technology evolving.
Stay tuned for two more posts from last week’s Cloud Standards Customer Council meeting and more PaaS prognostication.
Today I attended a day-long event put on here in Austin by the Cloud Standards Customer Council. It was a packed agenda focused around the theme “preparing for the post-IaaS phase of cloud adoption.”
Craig Lowery, Sr Distinguished Engineer in Dell Software, chaired the event and gave the opening presentation. I grabbed some time with Craig during the lunch break to get his thoughts on the event and have him hit the highlights of his presentation.
Take a listen.
Stay tuned next week for three more short interviews from the event around Docker, the future of PaaS and more.
In June I got to attend and present at the Harvard University IT Summit. The one-day summit, which brought together the IT departments from the 12 colleges that make up the University, consisted of talks, panels and breakout sessions.
The day kicked off with a keynote from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen of The Innovator’s Dilemma and “disruptive innovation” fame. Christensen talked about disruption in business as well as disruption in Higher Ed and its threat to institutions like Harvard.
After the keynote there was a CIO panel featuring the CIOs of the various colleges where they discussed their strategic plans. When the panel ended the concurrent sessions began.
My talk (see deck above) was near the end of the day and before the final keynote. I took the attendees through the forces affecting IT in higher education and the value of a cloud brokerage model. In the last part of my presentation I went over three case studies that involved Dell and the setting up of OpenStack-based clouds in higher education.
All-in-all a great event and I hope be going back again next year.
Today we come to the final interview from DevOps Days Austin. I began the series with an interview with Andrew Clay Shafer who gave the first-day keynote. Today I close, with perfect symmetry, with Michael Cote of 451 Research, who gave the keynote on the second day.
In his keynote, posted below, Cote presented findings from a study 451 did on DevOps usage. I caught up with Cote to learn more. Take a listen.
Some of the ground Cote covers:
Tracking tool usage as a proxy for DevOps
How they focused their study on companies outside of technology
What they found and given that, what advice would they give to
IT
Vendors in this space
Investors
How Cote would advise a mainstream CIO looking to get into DevOps and set a strategy
Here is my penultimate post from DevOps Days Austin. Today’s interview features Vann Orton, a Dell Sales Engineer for Dell Cloud Manager. I chatted with Vann about the customers hes been visiting out in the field and what he’s seeing.
Some of the ground Vann covers
What’s Dell Cloud manager do and what pains does it address for customers
How Vann used Chef to connect Dell Cloud Manager and Foglight
What customers are facing as they look to implement cloud and how he shares Dell’s learning’s from implementing our own cloud.
How the conversation evolves into the higher order concern regarding business transformation and shifting to a services model.
Still to come: last but not least: Cote’s DevOps Days keynote.
Continuing with my interview series from DevOps Days Austin, today’s interview is with Matt Barlow. Matt established Rackspace’s support offering around DevOps automation late last year. Hear about it and how it all came to be.
Some of the ground Matt covers:
Matt’s background and how he got into DevOps
What led him to developing a practice
What exactly his team does
What types of customers have they been working with
Still to come from DevOps Days Austin: Dell Cloud Manager, Cote’s keynote
Extra-credit reading
Rackspace Announces New DevOps Automation Service to Increase Speed and Agility for Software Developers and IT – Rackspace Blog
Today’s interview from DevOps Days Austin features Sumo Logic’s co-founder and CTO, Christian Beedgen. If you’re not familiar with Sumo Logic it’s a log management and analytics service. I caught up with Christian right after he got off stage on day one.
Some of the ground Christian covers:
What does Sumo Logic do?
How is it different from Splunk and Loggly?
What partners and technology make up the Sumo Logic ecosystem?
What areas will Sumo Logic focus on in the coming year?
Still to come from DevOps Days Austin: Rackspace, Dell Cloud Manager, Cote’s Keynote
Extra-credit reading
Sumo Logic Expands Enterprise Security Analytics Capabilities With New Application for PCI Compliance – Press Release
Im picking back up the series I started last month, DevOps Days Austin. Today’s interview features Arup Chakrabarti of PagerDuty who presented at DevOps days and leads PagerDuty’s Ops engineering team. Take a listen:
Some of the ground Arup covers:
What PagerDuty does (hint: it has to do with Incident management and alerting for IT monitoring)
How they integrate with partners like SumoLogic, DataDog and NewRelic.
How the 3 founders took the experience they gained at Amazon around incident management to found PagerDuty
What to look for in the upcoming months
Stay tuned, there are still three more interviews from DevOpsDays Austin to come: SumoLogic, Dell Cloud Manager, Cote and his keynote.
Digital transformation may seam like the latest in a long line of marketecture-based high tech concepts but it actually is pretty straight forward. In a nutshell, digital transformation is about adopting and often combining the digital technologies of Cloud, Mobility, Social Media and Analytics to better serve customers.
More generally, digital transformation, is about extreme customer-centricity and engaging customers digitally at every point throughout the customer life cycle. And it is key to remaining competitive today.
Big at the Bazaar
A few weeks ago I attended the Bazaarvoice summit here in Austin. The topic of digital transformation was woven through out the two day event. My favorite illustration of this was a very cool keynote on the first day demonstrating what a mobile personalized retail experience might like look in the year 2020.
While at the show I grabbed some time with Scott Anderson, SVP of marketing at Bazaarvoice to get his thoughts on digital transformation. Take a listen:
Some of the ground Scott covers:
The customer is in control
How does Digital Transformation map to Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud?
How would you advise a CEO looking to digitally transform his or her organization?
How does digital transformation work in a B2B, vs. B2C, context?
Where Dell plays
Dell Services has been involved with digital transformation for a while. We consolidated our capabilities and created a dedicated service line to help customers achieve digital transformation. The service line uses a consulting-led approach to help them leverage any/all of these technologies to drive business outcomes and better serve their customers.
As an example, here is one our earlier case studies where we worked with the American Red Cross to help them leverage social media to aid in disaster relief.
Stay tuned in the weeks ahead as I post more about what we are doing in the realm of digital transformation.
Here is the second of two videos on Application Performance Management from DevOps Days Austin. Heiko Leibenath of New Relic, which recently received an additional $100M in funding, gives an overview of this APM vendor who is making the transition to “Software analysis vendor.”
Some of the ground Heiko covers:
Why Heiko moved from Salesforce.com to New Relic
What he does as a technical account manager
What excites customers the most about New Relic
The platforms and application development environments they support and whats coming up in the next year
Today’s entry from DevOps Days Austin concludes the series on configuration management tools. Today’s interview features Jonathan Thorpe of CFEngine, the company that started the whole configuration management thang back in the 90’s.
Some of the ground Jonathan covers
Why Jonathan recently joined CFEngine and its role with mobile and embedded
A quick history of CFEngine
The features of CFEngine 3
The companies focus for the next year
Stay tuned next time when we turn our attention to Application Performance Management and listen to folks from AppDynamics and New Relic.
Great news, yesterday the i2c Linux kernel drivers from Synaptics made it upstream and are in the proposed repository. This is relevant for those Sputnik 3 users who have upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 to either 13.10 or 14.04 LTS.
If you want to start kicking the tires before the drivers hit updates, you can enable the proposed repository and get to the test kernels by following the instructions here:
From 13.10 on there is better i2c support and since there weren’t any drivers, this caused the touchpad to operate in very basic i2c mode, meaning no multi-touch, tap-to-click, scrolling, etc. Users were either left with a minimally-functional touchpad in i2c mode, or they had to end up blacklisting the i2c-hid modules as a workaround so the touchpad would come up in psmouse mode and operate similar to how it did in 12.04.
Going Forward
Canonical, who has been instrumental in this whole process, is also doing their best to try and backport this functionality into 14.04 LTS so that users can take advantage of native i2c touchpad support.
Thanks
I would like to give big shout outs to Synaptics, Canonical and Kent Baxley from Canonical for making this happen!!
Today is the second of three entries focused on configuration management tools. Today’s interview from last week’s DevOps Days is with Matt Ray from Chef.
Matt did a cool a presentation on the first day about how to introduce DevOps to traditional enterprises (see below) and I was able to grab him on the beginning of Day two to hear about his talk and the latest regarding Chef.
Some of the ground Matt covers
His talk about taking DevOps into the traditional enterprise “Helping horses become unicorns” (see presentation below)
Recent announcements from ChefCon e.g. Chef Metal etc
How they will be participating in this week’s OpenStack conference
Some of the traditional enterprises using Chef e.g. Nordstroms, Target, GE
Last week was DevOps Days here in Austin and I conducted a bunch of interviews. On Friday I shared an interview with Andrew Clay Shafer who gave the first-day keynote.
The next three interviews I’ll be posting deal with configuration management tools. Im going to kick off the topic with an interview with Lindsey Smith who recently joined Puppet labs and is the product owner for Puppet Enterprise:
Some of the ground Lindsey covers:
Why Lindsey decided to join Puppet Labs
Lindsey’s open source and enterprise background e.g. invis inspector
How Puppet Open Source and Puppet Enterprise differ e.g. Event inspector
What’s coming up in Puppet Enterprise e.g. manifest ordering, supported modules etc.
Quite a few developers have referenced Jared’s work, taken the plunge and installed Ubuntu on these beefier systems.
M3800 Precision workstation
Here is a video that Rudy Vissers from Belgium created last month. Rudy walks us through his new M3800 Precision including touchscreen and graphics.
XPS 15 laptop
Web developer Matt Woodward, who is a Principal IT Specialist for the US Senate and one of the original Project Sputnik beta cosmonauts, decided on upgrading to the XPS 15. He shared his experience running Ubuntu on the XPS 15 on his blog earlier this month. Here is an excerpt:
…Once Ubuntu is installed everything works out of the box. The screen runs at the full, mind-blowing 3200×1800 resolution, and even the touch screen works. No issues with sound card, WiFi, or anything else. Awesome…
If you need something a bit bigger and beefier than the XPS 13 developer edition, you just may want to check out either the M3800 or XPS 15.
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 