Sunday, February 27, 2011

Episode 3 - "President of the Private Cloud" - show notes

The Cloudcast (.net) - Episode 3 - “President of the Private Cloud”
Date: February 28, 2011
Guest: Christian Reilly (@reillyusa) - The Loose Couple Blog (http://blog.theloosecouple.com/)


Overview: Aaron and I sat down and spoke with Christian to discuss his hands-on experience transforming IT within his company, the challenges and how they measure success today and going forward.

If you don't know Christian, here's a quick video of him discussing the evolution of Private Cloud and the challenges of legacy applications:



During the podcast he gave us great insight into:
  • The "we need to make a major change" moment with their CIO.
  • The challenges at the people and operational level of making a major change and the importance of IT/Business alignment.
  • What problems virtualization solves and the areas where much improvement is still needed around orchestration and automation.
  • Selling the concept internally and some tricks to getting past the naysayers
  • How much "consumerization" has played a role in their transformation
  • "Cloud" terminology and whether it has been valuable or a hinderance in their business
[Our rough notes from before the show]

- A little background on the “President of the Private Cloud” moniker

Company that begin their Private Cloud transformation back in 2007 - large multi-national
- chicken & egg question: what came first - IT problems or business needs?
- who drove the change?
- how to get through the major bottlenecks?

- The OpenStack project. What is interesting? How do you see the vendor involvement and how could that hurt (or help) the project?

- “Cloud opportunity” in your latest blog post and describe how the spend percentage to “re-platform for public cloud” is actually very low and could be a huge problem.