Briefings Direct

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Redefine the potential of your virtualization investments.
View the full Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation.

And while the technology to support and fix virtualized environments is essential, it’s the people, skills, and knowledge to manage these systems that provide the most decisive determinants of ongoing performance success.

In a special BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast, created from a recent HP Expert Chat discussion on best practices for VMware environment support, HP experts explain how they have made the service and support of global virtualization market leader VMware a top priority.

For example, Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution and Quality for VMware Products at HP, provides case studies for how managed escalation and multi-vendor support around the globe can reduce downtime by 70 percent, with large ROI benefits as well.

Other HP experts in the discussion include Pat Lampert, Critical Service Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP Virtualization Engineer. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Register for The Open Group Conference
Jan. 30 - Feb. 3 in San Francisco.

This BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview comes in conjunction with The Open Group Conference this month in San Francisco.

The conference will focus on how IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation. Speakers in conference events will also explore the latest in service oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security.

We’re now joined by of the main speakers, Andy Mulholland, the Global Chief Technology Officer and Corporate Vice President at Capgemini. In 2009, Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world by InfoWorld. And in 2010, his CTO Blog was voted best blog for business managers and CIOs for the third year running by Computer Weekly.

Capgemini is about to publish a white paper on cloud computing. It draws distinctions between what cloud means to IT, and what it means to business -- while examining the complex dual relationship between the two.

As a lead-in to his Open Group conference presentation on the transformed enterprise, Andy further drills down on one of the decade’s hottest technology and business trends, cloud computing, and how it impacts business and IT. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

The latest BriefingsDirect case study podcast discussion centers on how Nottingham Trent University gained strategic operational efficiency and improved IT management.

A combination of professional services and portfolio management technologies allowed the 25,000-student university -- one of the U.K.’s largest -- to improve end-user satisfaction while freeing up IT resources to pursue additional technology innovation.

To learn more, BriefingsDirect brought together Ian Griffiths, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Nottingham Trent University, and Michael Garrett, Vice President of Professional Services for HP EMEA. The discussion was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Register for The Open Group Conference
Jan. 30 - Feb. 3 in San Francisco.

This BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview comes in conjunction with The Open Group Conference this month in San Francisco.

The conference will focus on how IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation. Speakers in conference events will also explore the latest in service oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security.

We’re now joined by of the main speakers, Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Jeanne studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms.

She is also the co-author of three books: IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, and IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain.

As a lead-in to her Open Group presentation on how adoption of enterprise architecture (EA) leads to greater efficiencies and better business agility, Ross explains how enterprise architects have helped lead the way to successful business transformations. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

Better managing virtualized IT workloads and private clouds is a top concern for IT leaders going into 2012. They may want to follow the lead of global travel and tourism giant TUI Group. The IT organization there, TUI InfoTec, has found ways to manage highly virtualized IT operations better, especially in mixed environments like hybrid clouds.

The critical need to better identify performance issues and outages prompted TUI InfoTec to find ways to cut time to troubleshooting, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in the time needed to identify the causes of such problems.

To learn more about better systems management in heterogeneous cloud environments and in virtualized environments, BriefingsDirect interviewed Christian Rudolph, Infrastructure Architect at TUI InfoTec in Hanover, Germany. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Register for The Open Group Conference
Jan. 30 - Feb. 3 in San Francisco.

This special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview comes in conjunction with The Open Group Conference this January in San Francisco.

The conference will focus on how IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation. Speakers in conference events will also explore the latest in service oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security.

We’re here now with one of the main speakers, Joseph Menn, Cyber Security Correspondent for the Financial Times and author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet.

Joe has covered security since 1999 for both the Financial Times and then before that, for the Los Angeles Times. Fatal System Error is his third book, he also wrote All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster.

As a lead-in to his Open Group presentation, entitled "What You're Up Against: Mobsters, Nation-States, and Blurry Lines," Joe here explores the current cyber-crime landscape, the underground cyber-gang movement, and the motive behind governments collaborating with organized crime in cyber space. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Register for The Open Group Conference
Jan. 30 - Feb. 3 in San Francisco.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

This BriefingsDirect podcast discussion centers on how worldwide enterprise applications leader SAP has designed and implemented a private cloud infrastructure models that supports an internal consulting and training program.

By standardizing on a VMware cloud platform, SAP has been able to slash provisioning times for multiple instances of its flagship application suite in the training setting, as well as set the stage for wider adoption of cloud models.

Here to tell us about the technical and productivity benefits of private clouds is Dr. Wolfgang Krips, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure at SAP in Walldorf, Germany. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Stone Bond Technologies.

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion targets the need to make sense of the deluge and complexity of the data and information that is swirling in and around modern enterprises. Most large organizations today are able to identify, classify, and exploit only a small portion of the total data and information within their systems and processes.

Perhaps half of those enterprises actually have a strategy for improving on this dismal fact. But business leaders are now recognizing that managing and exploiting information is a core business competency that will increasingly determine their overall success. That means broader solutions to data distress are being called for.

This discussion then examines how metadata-driven data virtualization and improved orchestration can help provide the inclusivity and scale to accomplish far better data management. Such access then leads to improved integration of all information into an approachable resource for actionable business activities.

With us now to help better understand these issues -- and the market for solutions to these problems -- are our guests, Noel Yuhanna, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and Todd Brinegar, Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing at Stone Bond Technologies. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Stone Bond Technologies.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

Our next VMworld case study interview focuses on how a major game developer in Europe has successfully leveraged the hybrid cloud model.

We’ll learn how SEGA Europe is standardizing its cloud infrastructure across its on-premises operations, as well as with a public cloud provider. The result is a managed and orchestrated hybrid environment to test and develop multimedia games, one that dynamically scales productively to the many performance requirements at hand.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference in Copenhagen. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here to tell us more about how the hybrid approach to multiple, complementary cloud instances is meeting SEGA’s critical development requirements in a new way is Francis Hart, Systems Architect at SEGA Europe, in London. The case study interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on The HUB, HP's video series on data center transformation, go to www.hp.com/go/thehub.

You don’t need to go very far in IT nowadays to find people who are diligently working to do more with less, even as they're working to transform and modernize their environments.

One way to keep the interest high -- and those operating and investment budgets in place -- is to show fast results, and then use that to prime the pump for even more improvement -- and even more funding -- with perhaps even growing budgets.

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion then explores how to build quick data center project wins, by leveraging project tracking and scorecards, as well as by developing a common roadmap for both facilities and IT infrastructure.

We'll hear from a panel of HP experts on some of their most effective methods for fostering consolidation and standardization across critical IT tasks and management. This is the second in a series of podcast on data center transformation (DCT) best practices and is presented in conjunction with a complementary video series.

With us now to explain how these solutions can drive successful data center transformation is our panel, Duncan Campbell, Vice President of Marketing for HP Converged Infrastructure and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs); Randy Lawton, Practice Principal for Americas West Data Center Transformation & Cloud Infrastructure Consulting at HP, and Larry Hinman, Critical Facilities Consulting Director and Worldwide Practice Leader for HP Critical Facility Services and HP Technology Services. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.