Eric Courville, COO and co-founder of VM6 Software

Can you briefly tell us a little bit about what VM6 Software has been up to in the past year? 

VM6  Software (VM6) originally began as a consulting business, with its focus on server virtualization. The company was founded in 2004 and the first two years of the company were focused on developing the first generation software, which was originally based on VMware. VM6 was self- funded, with all the proceeds that came from the consulting firm being reinvested into developing the software. When we first took our first generation software to market, the feedback we got was that the solution was too complex because it needed a SAN and the customers we were targeting didn’t have VMware expertise.  They found the product too complex to implement.
 
With this feedback, we took our product back into development for another two years and the first version of our new product was released in September 2009, which worked off the Microsoft platform and required no shared storage. With this release, we also sold the professional services side of VM6, changed our company from a consulting company to an ISV and renamed ourselves VM6 Software. 

This past year has been focused on securing financing (which we received $4M in Series A financing from RBC Venture Partners and Ignition Partners), growing our sales and marketing teams and fine tuning our go to market strategy. 

VM6 Software recently announced VM6 VMex 2.1, what can you tell us about this new release? 

VM6 VMex 2.1 featured some enhancements to our product that had been requested by our partners and customers. Key new features include: 

• High availability and storage recovery enhancement:  Includes a multi-array hub-witness that improves protection against unexpected crashes caused by power outages of entire sites. This also eliminates the need for manual intervention, which is required by competitive products to respond to certain crash scenarios.
• Simplified event monitoring:  Sends VM6 VMex 2.1 administrators event monitoring via e-mail. The configuration and management of alerts is now more integrated than in any other product on the market.
• Storage-integrated dashboard:  Fully integrated dashboard inside the storage virtualization manager section provides all the information administrators need to understand the state of any storage virtualization object.
• Virtual desktop session manager:  Management interface enables the monitoring of VDI sessions and includes a fully integrated dashboard, allowing users to view session state or reset sessions.

Would you consider VM6 VMex 2.1 to be the only all-in-one solution of its kind? 

Definitely. While we do compete in the virtualization space, our solution offers a virtual SAN, high availability, a VDI broker and a management/monitoring console all in one product. No other solution combines the four solutions that we feature into one product. 

What does the pricing structure look like? 

VM6 VMex starts as low as $1,000 for a single server (for test and development) to $4,000 per server for enterprises with multiple sites. 

What channels are being used to sell VM6 VMEX 2.1? 

We are channel focused. All our sales are worked with and through partners. We just recently announced the launch of our global partner program, looking for value added resellers (VARS) and systems integrators (Sis) who focus on virtualization solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. 

For the technologist who is reading this, who enjoys “the deep dive”, what is it that you can tell us that he/she would really appreciate about your product? 

The technologist will appreciate the ease of installing and operating VM6 VMex. The fact that the management portion is built on the Microsoft Management Console makes it highly portable. It is very simple but everything in the application can be tweaked using our proprietary user interface. The command line lets you script any operation accessible from the console. VM6 VMex comes with its own communication protocol based on TCP, its own cluster technology that was designed especially for virtualization. The array coordinator and hub witness services remove the need to have a quorum disk and allows GEO clustering. VM6 VMex can self recover from any type out outage.  The edge services that act as a cash proxy on our communication layer is built in the product and allows our customers to centrally manage a highly distributed IT infrastructure from anywhere.  Our virtual SAN solution consolidates and automates all the complex operations of setting up a clustered shared storage in a single and easy operation that takes only 10 seconds.  Our central monitoring and alerting is also built into the product and uses an easy to configure wizard that is based on subscription. Our customers also have access to a centralized event log within the VM6 VMex console. Our VDI solution is quite simple; it complements the rest of the functions that are built into the solution and it is compatible with any type of terminal using RDP protocol. One of the very important features of VM6 VMex is that it has full integration with active directory without creating any dependency on the DC or DNS service. Other virtualization solutions would automatically initiate a total failure if DNS or DC is not accessible. VM6 VMex can operate in both domain and workgroup infrastructures and will never initiate a failure if it lost DC or DNS connectivity. 

Where can our readers go to learn more? 

Readers can visit http://www.vm6software.com/ for more information. 

So where does VM6 Software go from here? 

This is just the beginning for us. In the upcoming months, you will hear more about who we are as a company and how we are penetrating the SMB space in virtualization. We will continue to listen to the needs of our customers and partners in the development of our product. Our short term roadmap includes new additions to the features set: 

• Application virtualization
• Provisioning services
• Real-time operational dashboard
• Microsoft System Center integration
• Microsoft Azure Integration

Can you briefly tell us a little bit yourself about how Correlsense got started?

I founded Correlsense along with Lanir Shacham, who is now the Correlsense CTO. We first started working together by offering services to solve IT performance problems. Often, we were called in when organizations were in panic mode, having already assembled a war room of network and database experts, systems administrators, developers and architects. Through our time spent dissecting complex IT problems, we quickly realized that the data did not exist to be able to identify the source of problems. A lot of the data was taken from random sampling, but nothing was available that gave us an end-to-end look at each transaction as it made its way through the data center. More importantly, there was no way to correlate data into meaningful context. We moved from analyzing problems to figuring out how to collect 100 percent of the data in real time, tying it back to what was occurring during the transaction process, and then analyzing the results. This process of discovery took three years and ultimately resulted in founding Correlsense and our flagship software product, SharePath.

Where did the company get its name?

Correlsense is all about transactions. We track and detect transaction paths in physical and virtual environments and correlate the data to isolate performance bottlenecks and to ensure IT reliability.

What about your experience and history before Correlsense?

Before founding Correlsense, I founded Internative Solutions, a provider of knowledge management solutions designed to support contact centers through multiple contact channels. Lanir and I met while studying at the Israel Defense Force’s Mamram computing center.

Why does Business Transaction Management (BTM) matter?

The common denominator among all IT systems is transactions — an end-to-end account of what happens when the user of an online service or application clicks “send” and receives a response.  With this granular information, enterprises can ensure IT reliability by using this data to optimize the end-user experience, minimize the risks associated with new service roll-outs, issue chargebacks for IT resources consumed, and improve the capacity planning process.

To monitor the end-user experience, Correlsense offers a subset of SharePath free for one year at www.real-user-monitoring.com. This is an enterprise-class offering that tracks every individual user interaction. Users of the tool can see the response times and service levels with online systems to better understand the quality of the online experience they are providing.

How is your company or technology positioned relative to the competition?

Other solutions conduct random sampling and monitor each hop in a transaction path separately. While this was not a significant disadvantage in the past when application architectures were simple, today’s architectures are much more complex and dynamic, causing the path of transactions to execute across 20 to 30 different components with hundreds of invocations. This makes performance management nearly impossible due to the lack of business context through all services, as well as the lack of visibility into how transactions execute throughout the infrastructure. We take a different approach. Our data collectors are installed in every application logical node. The metrics the collectors take are sent to the backend servers, which then stitch together the entire transaction path, providing significantly more reliable results in less time.

What market segments are you targeting?

Correlsense targets the financial services/banking, insurance, online retail and telecommunications markets.

What channels are being used to sell your SharePath software?

Correlsense sells directly to enterprise IT organizations, as well as through regional channel partners worldwide.

For the technologist who is reading this, who appreciated “the deep dive”, what is it that you can tell us that he/she would really appreciate about your product?

We’re seeing what’s driving complexity is not only the fact that the infrastructure is changing and applications seem more complex, but also these frequent change cycles are driving a lot of complexity into production environments. Much of what people deal with performance-wise relates to other things that were not done upstream. When we’re implementing change, such as rolling out a new service, we need to try to do other activities upstream around tuning, planning and understanding the impact of change so that we can roll that back as a continuous chain of improvement. The kind of data that Correlsense captures means IT organizations can get a better understanding of their test and production environments in order to truly leverage agile development.

So where does Correlsense go from here?

The data we collect has more uses than fine-tuning application performance. Recently, we’ve begun to analyze how to use the data to examine, for example, the impact of new service roll-outs or to accurately rate and charge business units for the amount of IT resources they consume. To that end, we are developing an IT reliability ecosystem which brings together specialists in the areas of chargebacks, application optimization, capacity planning, security and more. We’re doing all the legwork of finding knowledgeable partners so our customers have access to experts that can help add value with the information they already have, moving IT from a cost center to a profit center.

Oren Elias is CEO of CorrelSense. Contact him at Oren.elias@correlsense.com

Can you briefly tell us how the company started and share a little about your current executive team?

Founded in 2007 by Alex Bakman, VKernel has quickly established itself as the leading provider of Capacity Management products for VMware and Microsoft virtualized infrastructures. Backed by top tier venture capitalists, we are lead by an experienced management team with significant experience in systems management, storage, networking, and virtualization domains.

VKernel just announced StorageVIEW 1.0. What can you tell us about this new tool?

StorageVIEW is the latest desktop assessment tool from VKernel that quickly and easily identifies the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest storage I/O latency in a VMware environment. StorageVIEW 1.0 supports SAN, iSCSI and NFS shared storage environments. StorageVIEW 1.0 joins other free assessment tools CapacityVIEW and AppVIEW to create a family of easy to download, easy to install, desktop tools that VM administrators can use for quick diagnostic views into their virtualized infrastructure.

What are the benefits?

StorageVIEW helps VM admins quickly and easily determine if high latency data paths are causing problems in their virtualized environments. StorageVIEW is a free to use, simple to download, 6 MB desktop tool that provides near instant visibility into the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest latency including:

• Listing of the associated VMs for these high latency paths
• Throughput information for each VM in the high latency path
• Aggregated results for the remaining datastore/host pairs
• Support for NFS, ISCSI, Fibre Channel

Why create a new tool?

Customer demand for simple to use, easy to download assessment tool that targets the problems vm admins have with storage.

Where can our readers go to download?

http://www.vkernel.com/products/storage-view

Looking at VKernel as a whole, how would you say the company and technologies are positioned relative to the competition?

There are a lot of good companies making products to help VM administrators with their virtual environments. We are exclusively focused on solving the problems associated with capacity management. Our focus provides a significant competitive advantage.

What market segments are you targeting?

We have customers with several thousand VMs down to customers with just 40. What we have found is that once you go above 50 or so VMs, it becomes very, very challenging to do capacity management on spreadsheets, whiteboards, or using real time monitoring tools.

So where does VKernel go from here?

The problems of capacity management are only growing, as more and more applications are virtualized. From discussions with our customers, there is a significant amount of innovation to be done to solve this problem and keep up with emerging areas such as cloud and VDI. From the business side, we will continue to expand our sales distribution, partner network, and size of the development organization. We are very excited about our prospects and our ability to meet customer demand for scalable capacity management solutions.

Bryan Semple is Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel

Virtela is the largest independent managed services company. We provide managed network and security services to more than 1,000 customers around the world, leveraging an innovative multi-carrier network architecture that enables us to deliver services in more than 190 countries.

The company was started 10 years ago by some of the leading architects of the world’s major IP backbones. They had the foresight to develop an intelligent routing/switching overlay architecture that integrates the world’s best-of-breed carrier networks for our underlying multi-carrier infrastructure while delivering consistent high quality of service throughout. This architecture gives Virtela’s customers the freedom to use any mix of underlying transport networks or network carriers to address their unique needs around the world, even on a location-by-location basis. This disruptive model has proven highly successful – and we’ve now extended this implementation to the cloud.

What market segments are you targeting?

Virtela serves companies that have a distributed workforce. Virtela serves some of the world’s most competitive, midsize- to-Fortune 100 multinational companies.

Virtela just announced Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC). Can you tell us a little about this new program?

Virtela ESC is a new cloud-based architecture. It was built from the ground up to deliver enterprise networking, security and mobility services to enable communications supporting delay-sensitive applications:

• Between private and public clouds
• Between enterprise users anywhere in the world using any device and private/public clouds or private data centers that host enterprise applications
• Among enterprise users in remote locations, branch office or in mobile environments

To deliver these services, we had to create a wholly different cloud architecture:

• Open Architecture. We deliver any service to any location or device using any network. Virtela ESC seamlessly integrates with any public or private cloud such as storage, computing and SaaS. Virtela ESC enables any-to-any enterprise communications regardless of the underlying transport network while ensuring end-to-end service performance.
• Locally Distributed. We have deployed Local Cloud Centers (LCCs) worldwide, close to the end users. Our locally distributed model makes applications run faster immediately at the content source and we mitigate security threats close to the source of attack, as examples.
• Optimized for virtual devices. Hosting models that use rack-and-stack deployments are expensive, complex and not scalable to support many services or many customers. In our case, we’re using virtualization technologies to deliver services from the cloud by decoupling hardware from the services and service delivery.

What are the benefits?

Virtela ESC eliminates the need for multi-device implementations at corporate locations. It’s not uncommon for companies to have to buy a single device per service per location. So if a company has security and networking needs such as URL filtering, firewall, IP telephony, LAN switching, application acceleration, etc., the traditional device-based solution requires many devices per location. It’s complex, expensive, slow to deploy and hard to manage.

With Virtela ESC, we’re offering all these services from the cloud:

• We offer a breakthrough low monthly cost per location. A typical 20-site configuration can achieve 80% cost savings.
• We can turn up services instantly, within minutes instead of months.
• We deliver service guarantees based on customer experience.

How is Virtela using virtualization to create this new architecture?

We have optimized Virtela ESC for virtual devices. This means that we have decoupled services and service delivery from hardware. In addition to that, we ensured that our virtualization approach is deployed close to the end users and works on top of any underlying network or combination of service provider networks around the world.

What types of services are being offered based on ESC?

Virtela ESC supports a wide range of enterprise networking, security and mobility services. All services can be activated instantly, offer low per-site monthly charge and are backed by unprecedented service guarantees. Some examples of these cloud-based services are as follows:

• Application Acceleration Service – This flagship service under Virtela ESC makes applications run 5-25X faster for only $5 a day per branch office, backed by a 250% guarantee. Some of the applications we accelerate include email, ERP/CRM applications, file sharing, web-based collaboration and backup/storage. We are so confident that we can deliver faster application response time that if end users do not experience faster response time, they don’t pay. In fact, we pay them 250% of the service charge.
• Real-time Distributed Security Services - Real-time distributed security services allow enterprises to mitigate security threats at the point of origin and contain the potential damage from within the cloud.
• Managed Smartphone Services - Managed smartphone services offer a range of capabilities available from the cloud, all aimed at improving an enterprise’s control and monitoring of its smartphone devices and wireless usage.

How is ESC positioned in relation to other cloud uses?

Virtela ESC is the only cloud optimized for enterprise networking, security and mobility. It enables communications between end users, end-users with clouds (e.g., storage, computing, Software as a Service, process platforms, application development platforms, etc.), and clouds with other clouds.

In your opinion, what things are holding cloud computing back from wider adoption? What issue is top-most in your mind and why?

From an enterprise communications cloud perspective, we believe that enterprises want a cloud that does not tie them to a specific carrier’s services; can effectively support two-way, delay-sensitive applications, and truly decouples services from hardware to offer consumable services with low monthly charges and meaningful service guarantees. Based on our discussions with many enterprises, we anticipate wider adoption of cloud-based enterprise networking, security and mobility services with Virtela ESC.

For the technologist who is reading this, who appreciated “the deep dive”, what is it that you can tell us that he/she would really appreciate about ESC?

First, Virtela ESC’s position as the cloud that enables seamless communications between end users, end users with clouds, and clouds with other clouds; and second, Virtela’s inherent network-, technology- and carrier-agnostic business model, which allows the company to truly deliver benefits to all users rather than just a select few. Virtela has cracked the code, from the company’s inception, for how to ensure consistent performance over an underlying multi-carrier transport network.

So where does Virtela go from here?

Virtela will continue to develop and launch cloud-based services that offer breakthrough low monthly charges, instant service activation, and service guarantees based on measurements most important and most relevant to end users.

Liza Adams – Vice President of Marketing at Virtela

As Vice President of Marketing at Virtela, Liza is responsible for all aspects of Virtela’s global marketing organization. Prior to Virtela, Liza was the Vice President of Marketing for Level 3 Communications’ Business Markets Group, responsible for marketing data, voice and converged enterprise services. She also held various strategy, marketing and product management lead positions at WilTel, the service provider that launched the world’s first Layer 2 networking services for enterprises. Early in her career at WilTel, as an Applications Engineer, Liza designed some of the largest and most complex enterprise data networks in the world.

She was also Vice President at TeleChoice, Inc., an industry analyst and marketing and strategy consulting firm. She worked with technology vendors and service providers to market enabling technology products and networking services, respectively. Liza is a co-author of Frame Relay Internetworking and a contributor to ATM for Dummies.

Liza has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri – Rolla.

I’ve seen your name quite a bit over the years and am familiar with your book “VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide”; it was great to meet you at the recent New England VMUG. Tell us about Vmguru.com and how did this get started?

VMGuru.com is a personal blog that I started several years ago when I was starting to push the envelope on what VMware said I was allowed to do with their software while consulting. I had done some creative things around using VMware ESX 1.5 which, at the time, were quite cutting edge. I was looking for an outlet to share my information and settled upon the name VMGuru, as the “Guru” moniker is something that had actually carried over from a previous life while in corporate IT. Sadly, I do not have near as much time as I’d like to continue to share some of the cool things I do through my personal blog.

Your current position as Lead Architect – Virtualization Business at Quest Software, sounds like the dream job – “Generate new product ideas and enhancements into growing line of virtualization products “? Can you tell us a little more about what you do, and what the drawbacks are?

My daily responsibilities are quite fluid depending on where we are in a release cycle around a new idea or set of features. I normally find myself rotating around 3 distinct tasks. One of the biggest challenges I come across is when I have 3 concurrent projects, each of which are in a different phase. This tends to keep me quite busy, to say the least.

1. First, often at the beginning of the year, I find myself traveling around and getting in front of as many customers as I possibly can simply to talk shop. I still maintain a sizable test lab so can keep very up-to-date on the latest technologies. This enables me to work closely with current and potential customers on identifying key challenges they are experiencing as their datacenters shift towards a more virtual existence.
2. Secondly, I take the various discussions that I, and the product management teams collect from customers and identify any specific trends or common themes, and also investigate upcoming market trends that relate to the identified challenges. We then make decisions around strategies to fulfill those challenges and determine the business value of filling the gaps. Fortunately, with the financial support of Quest Software, we have several options open to us, whether we decide to build the new technology or we investigate an acquisition strategy to lower our time to market.
3. Finally, once the solution is spec’d out and submitted to R&D, I help determine the best way to market the new features or products as solutions that can be offered to our customers. This often involves enabling our sales teams as well as our partner channel with proper training and sales tools. Fortunately, the unique perspective acquired when doing initial customer interviews helps us focus on the key pain points and challenges, which really help us make sure we are doing the right things for our customers.

I can’t say there are significant drawbacks to what I do outside of the fact that my family life takes a hit every once in a while. Quest is actually an awesome company when it comes to understanding a mix of personal and professional life, or at least I don’t give them the choice. The overall attitude is “If our employees extend work hours while they are at home, they should also be able to enjoy a bit of personal life while at work”. This has enabled me to bring my wife with me on my travels on multiple occasions, which helps make up for the time I spend away.

What about your earlier experiences at Invirtus & Vizioncore?

My earlier experiences at Vizioncore and Invirtus (Both Quest subsidiary companies through acquisition) gave me a taste of what it was like in a startup company. Overall, roles within the organizations at the time I was there were quite loosely defined and I found myself doing complete 180’s as a direct reaction to a new feature request or customer comment. I can honestly say it was a great experience to go through the start-up thing not once, but twice, but having a definitive role and an opportunity to learn from some of the best in the business for a while will make me a much better individual.

What market segments are you targeting ?

The segments that we target actually vary by product or solution. This is all a part of properly analyzing the market and how our solutions best fit. There are several areas in which vendor solutions are actually good enough out of the box in the SMB segments, so instead of fighting an often difficult battle, we focus our development and sales efforts on mid-market and enterprise. There are also some areas in which competing at the enterprise level is difficult due to legacy software or technology methods, and the best opportunity is where vendor tools lack in the SMB and Mid-Market space. Our ability to accurately assess the market and attack the key segmentation instead of trying to sell everything to everyone is what actually helps drive our success within Quest.

What is the EcoShell Inititaive?

When I was “growing up” in Corporate IT and continued driving virtualization as a consultant, I found that I was simply amazed when I couldn’t do things that, to me, were extremely simple with the tools that were available. To my astonishment, 6 years later, many of these annoyances still existed, and were still causing all kinds of headaches for my customers. By utilizing some internal Quest Intellectual Property with our PowerGUI product, I was able to create a virtualization-specific version of the software that I branded as Virtualization EcoShell and distributed as free software to our virtualization customers.

Alongside the freeware product, I also launched a website called the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) for short, which helps people get the most out of the software as well as share PowerShell scripting tips and tricks around virtual environments. In 11 months of existence, we’ve had over 25,000 downloads of Virtualization EcoShell and a steady increase in traffic to our community site, which to me shows the strength of our understanding of the needs of virtualization users, and our ability to provide them with powerful tooling.

Is there a person or company in the virtualization space that you admire or are keeping an eye on?

I’ll always have nothing but the utmost respect for one of my key mentors while in consulting with Ron Oglesby. He’s surprisingly patient (Even if you reboot his production servers mid-day) and was never afraid to share any knowledge. He really set me up for success. I also have tons of respect for the many virtualization authors out there. I know first-hand what it is like to take the time out of our already busy schedules, often on the personal side, to share the knowledge we’ve collected over many years to help people avoid making the same mistakes we have. There are simply too many to name.

Probably the question that you are asked the most – Quest and the Cloud; what can you tell us? When is the right time to move to the cloud?

From Quest’s standpoint, we are constantly looking at ways to better service our customers and simplify the use of our products through the adoption of the latest technologies. This can be seen by our recent announcement of our Quest OnDemand SaaS Services which are currently in Beta.

Personally, not being one that succumbs to the marketing of “The Cloud”, I’m of the opinion that organizations and consumers are, and have been there for some time. To me, “Cloud” is an overly generalized term to describe one, or a combination of, several key technologies. People who build virtual environments to provide capacity-on-demand are utilizing “Private Clouds” for infrastructure. I did this for the first time about 6 years ago I believe. Even going back prior to that, some would argue that using a service such as Akamai to increase bandwidth and availability of static web content is considered a cloud service by today’s standards. The key shift here is the introduction of off-premise clouds, and even hybrid clouds which enable workloads to seamlessly transition between the private and public clouds

New technologies such as Microsoft Azure, and even slightly older technologies like Google APIs provide a platform to quickly publish new applications using a defined development framework. We also see companies who were traditionally considered “Software as a Service” or SaaS vendors (also considered cloud technologies BTW) enabling platforms for writing applications, such as Facebook for social applications or Salesforce for business and CRM applications.

When it comes to adoption of these technologies it comes down to the simple question of “Is there an application or service being provided that can benefit my business without violating the IT Governance policies in place that must be adhered to at a price point that makes sense?” We have seen the SMB and Mid-Market segments adopting these technologies steadily now. As trust grows and security and compliance concerns are accommodated, we will see enterprise interest in these newer technologies increase.

What things are holding desktop virtualization back from wider adoption? What issue is top-most in your mind and why?

There are several inhibitors standing in the way of what I’d consider “Wide-scale” adoption of VDI. First is simply concern over end user experience. The target recipients of VDI instances are more often than not non-technical users who are prone to get frustrated with technology. Every time there is a change to the way in which they need to access their applications, or they perceive the “Network to be slow”, they get vocal…VERY vocal. If running a fat client application within a remote desktop instance appears to be slower or less responsive to the end user, it is difficult to have success in VDI implementation. That is why there is such a large investment from VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix to tackle this very issue. As more applications move towards using web 2.0 technologies and become online applications, the question of “Why use VDI at all” can also arise, as data is not persistent on the client and all processing is performed on the back-end servers.

In addition, many organizations expect to see cost-savings out of the box as the primary benefit of VDI. In 2009, where IT Spending was limited, this meant that projects that didn’t have quick ROI or were costly to get off the ground simply didn’t happen. When looking at JUST virtual desktops, the ROI doesn’t quite add up, mostly due to software licensing costs and increased storage demand. Organizations need to really stop and understand the processes around how VDI can change user management as well as the provisioning of operating environments and application workloads to see how desktop virtualization as a whole solution fundamentally changes how their users can work, and the cost savings associated with the larger picture.

How would you compare your firm with BMC, or CA?

When you historically look at any of the “Big 4” management companies (BMC, CA, HP, IBM) you get offered solutions that go as wide as anything you can conceive of sticking in your datacenter. What is traditionally lacking is adequate depth into many of the key technology areas. Where Quest traditionally excels is in identifying the top technologies seen in the infrastructure in the Application, Database, Windows and Virtualization management spaces and instead of going 7 miles wide and 2 inches deep, we focus on the depth of giving the internal subject matter experts the level of detail they truly need to most effectively manage their infrastructure. We aren’t focusing on owning all management within the datacenter, which I think is actually one of our strongest traits.

For the technologist reading this or the “virtualization champion” who appreciates “the deep dive”, can you tell this person something that he would really appreciate about a current product that you are involved with?

I’d actually recommend aspects of two different products. For those that are concerned with more than just pulling out VMware metrics and displaying them in a different format, which too many products do today, definitely take a look at the depth of what vFoglight can do. The ability to customize any dashboard, script business rules based on trends, and even chain portions of physical and virtual applications together to report on key SLAs make vFoglight a truly amazing and capable application.

For the guys responsible for administering a rapidly expanding virtual environment, definitely spend the time to check out what Virtualization EcoShell can do. While we provide 250 or so scripts out of the box, we actually mask the fact that PowerShell is really on the back-end of the application. For those wanting to learn this whole “PowerShell Thing”, we don’t hide anything about this application. All of our scripts can be viewed or modified, and the entire UI and set of actions is fully customizable using PowerShell. I have already seen some users and community members do some AMAZING stuff with EcoShell. The best part is that it is free of charge, so there is minimal risk in getting started, and it provides immediate benefit “out of the box”.

Where does Scott Herold go from here?

Right now I wouldn’t trade my job for anything (well, except the chance to retire early to a Tuscan Villa). I have the ability to create and generate new product ideas and continue to blaze new trails not just in virtualization, but as a technologist, and I have the opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the software business. I’m learning everything I can as fast as I can, and we’ll see where that takes me when the next big thing comes around.

Scott M. Herold, Lead Architect – Virtualization Business, Quest Software

Scott Herold leads product design and architecture for Quest Software. With more than a decade of industry experience in operating system, network, security and storage design, Scott has been a pioneer in architecting advanced virtualization solutions. Scott is also the co-author of two best-selling books, VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide. Focused on helping organizations achieve the benefits of virtualization while minimizing the challenges, Scott is a frequent presenter at industry events and contributes to whitepapers and articles focused on virtualization best practices.

Check out Scott’s blog VMGuru.com

Tell us about how the company started and your executive team?

Founded in 2000, FalconStor Software is the premier provider of TOTALLY Open™ data protection solutions, delivering solutions that facilitate the continuous availability of business-critical data with speed, integrity and simplicity. Our executive team is lead by ReiJane Huai, whose vision has grown FalconStor into a leadership position within the data protection industry. With FalconStor, it is all about data protection that enables instant restore of data with 100 percent transactional data integrity, so businesses get back to work quickly following any data center failure.

Where did the company get its name?

FalconStor Software is named after the Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon.

What about your experience and history before FalconStor Software?

I began my software career as a real-time assembly programmer for LucasFilm Ltd. Our group, the Droidworks, delivered the industries first non-linear editing system know as the EditDroid; this technology resurfaced later as the core technology in the Avid editing system. After leaving Lucas and the entertainment industry, I moved toward the product management side of the business and ultimately became director of advanced products for AST Research, a Fortune 1000 computer manufacturer. In the 1990s I focused on networking and business development and joined Cheyenne Software. My responsibilities grew to include OEM Sales, Product Management, Marketing and M&A, and I rose to the position of EVP corporate development. After a successful $1.2 billion sale of Cheyenne to CA, I joined Perquot Ventures as a Venture Capital Partner focused on the software industry. I have served on more than 20 technology boards both public and private and consider myself to be very fortunate in that I love what I do.

Have you experienced anything like this before in regards to the market today and where your company or technology is positioned relative to the competition?

Yes. Cheyenne rose to prominence during the rapid growth and adoption of Local Area Networking and client/server computing. Today I see a much larger and exciting trend in the move of physical computing to virtual computing and the early adoption of cloud or on-demand service architectures. We are serving a much larger and far more complex and exciting market.

What market segments are you targeting?

FalconStor works with enterprises of all sizes, from small and medium-size businesses to Fortune 100 companies to provide comprehensive data protection and storage management solutions for their data centers. It’s important to note that our solutions are horizontal in that all companies must have a data protection strategy no matter how large or small.

Is there something that comes to mind when you think about last year that you now know that you want to do this much differently this year?

One thing I have learned in business is that although you have to look back to move forward, you shouldn’t dwell on the past. Even though I was not officially with FalconStor last year, I have evaluated our business model and look forward to building upon these insights in the coming year. Falconstor is maturing as a solutions provider. I look forward to doing a better job of communicating the true value inherent in sound data protection strategies.

Is there a person or company involved with emerging technologies that you admire or are keeping an eye on?

There are far too many to mention. We are focused on technology and ideas that accelerate network performance, increase storage density, increase data integrity, simplify management, scale both up and out and ultimately reduce customer operating costs while increasing return on investment.

What do you think is holding cloud computing back from wider adoption? What issue is top-most in your mind and why?

I believe it is a matter of trust and familiarity. The IT industry routinely cycles from centralized to decentralized models. Cloud is a centralized model. The main difference is that the user may not own and control the cloud. This raises a lot of technical and legal hurdles as well as simple concerns about data security and protection. The rapid adoption of server and desktop virtualization provides a logical path to cloud computing, and the first stop will be private clouds. In time, as companies learn that they can save significant money and retain peace of mind, I think we will see a very healthy public cloud business. In the meantime, IT managers should think carefully about how their data moves into and, more importantly, out of a cloud – this is something we do extraordinarily well. Lastly, I think we all recognize the benefits of cloud computing; after all, how many of us generate our own power and drill for our own water?

For the technologist reading this, who appreciates “the deep dive”, what is it that you can you tell this person that he would really appreciate about your product?

FalconStor is lauded by analysts, partners and customers for its totally open software platform, because we work with any storage hardware, operating system, or backup software from any vendor to provide effective storage solutions. The storage management market is at a crossroads; IT managers are looking for a comprehensive data protection solution that is easy to use and covers all aspects of data protection while providing virtual solutions and rapid recovery capabilities. Rather than piecing together their disaster recovery and data backup plans with numerous options, IT managers need one comprehensive solution to take the place of these disparate systems. Also, protecting data is all about moving bits. When moving bits, you want to do it as fast and efficiently as possible and you want to make sure you don’t drop any. Our patent portfolio includes a number of key inventions that make us the best at performing this critical task.

What channels are being used to sell FalconStor Software?

FalconStor’s storage management and storage virtualization solutions are available through channel partners, OEM partners and our direct sales teams in North America, Europe and Asia.

Do you have any OEM deals now or is this being looked at?

FalconStor’s original sales models focused on OEM partnerships, from which we continue to profit to this day. FalconStor collaborates with a number of IT industry leaders to bring new solutions to market that address data protection issues and growing storage demands. In 2009, we decided to grow aggressively our non-OEM, FalconStor-branded channel sales operations, primarily via a growing channel sales network. Despite the economic downturn that started in 2008, FalconStor grew its non-OEM channel sales revenue by 15 percent in 2009.

So where does FalconStor Software go from here?

In today’s business world, data is the lifeblood of the enterprise. It must be fully protected and easily accessible at all points in time. Storage virtualization and storage management solutions will assist data centers and enterprises in capturing and managing this proliferation of data. FalconStor is committed to helping businesses by providing comprehensive data protection solutions that are simple to use while offering an elegant solution for virtualizing storage, reducing data proliferation, protecting data and rapidly recovering both physical and virtual services from failures of any kind. We are moving to deliver a holistic approach to data protection and lifecycle management. FalconStor intends to be Your Data Protection Partner.

James P. McNiel, vice president and chief strategy officer -James McNiel comes to FalconStor Software as an accomplished senior executive, bringing all of his technical and business acumen to bear on the role of chief strategy officer. Prior to joining FalconStor, McNiel was co-founder and CEO of Fifth Generation Systems, a social networking startup. Prior to that, he was a general partner at Pequot Ventures (now FirstMark Capital) for nine years, where he managed successful investments in Netegrity, NetGear, OutlookSoft and other technology companies. In addition, McNiel was a key member of the Cheyenne Software executive team that led the company to market leadership in backup software, culminating in a high-value sale to Computer Associates in 1996. McNiel started his career as a software developer and software team leader for LucasFilm Ltd. McNiel studied business and advanced management at The Wharton School and finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

How would you compare the success of the Philadelphia area VMUG’s with other User Groups?

PAVMUG was established in 2004 when VMware first initiated the user group (VMUG) program and so we have had time to develop relationships with a large number of national and regional vendors who sponsor our meetings and deliver the majority of our presentations. We have also established a local presence and a routine that seems to work for the professionals and students who attend the PAVMUG meetings. 

Our meetings are held at a branch campus of Penn State University that is a graduate center for business and technical masters’ degrees. Our central location makes it possible for attendees from PA, NJ, MD and DE to attend our meetings. As far as membership and event attendance, PAVMUG is probably in the top 10% of VMUGs. Last year’s annual PAVMUG conference attracted approximately 600 attendees and 30 vendors with 40 presentation sessions. Some of our user attendees are starting to deliver presentations and looking forward, I think we will have more users sharing their success stories. 

What do you currently do full time and how does it tie into your User Group priorities? 

I work as an IT Infrastructure Project Manager and a technical educator. Many of the projects I manage involve deploying virtualization technology and so there is a direct relationship between what I learn in the VMUG setting and the rest of my professional life. The VMUG allows me to interact with vendors supplying information about their latest technology offerings and so I am aware and in a position to recommend relevant products for evaluation. We strive to bring high value, practical content to the PAVMUG meetings and that brings benefits in two ways. Attendees can put to use what they learn and vendors can highlight the costs and benefits of their technology offerings so that businesses can evaluate their applicability 

What are your thoughts about Microsoft Hyper V? Are users talking about it & how much interest is there in management of a multi-hypervisor environment? 

The success of your solution will, in part, depend on your ability to effectively manage it. Obviously, I’m a bit of a partisan when it comes to hypervisors. However, with that said, requirements differ based on the environment that is in place or planned. There is definitely a place for Hyper V and Zen. An organization that is Microsoft centric should seriously consider the cost benefit of deploying Hyper V. In a large, multi-platform environment, multi-hypervisor management would seem to be a critical requirement. 

What is the most common complaint that you hear from end users? From vendors? 

The concerns from end users center around cost and complexity of the solution, vendors are more concerned about projected spend for infrastructure and the overall impact of IT budgets. Even if a solution could result in cost avoidance, the funding for the investment may not be there. 

What are the advantages vs. the disadvantages of being associated with VMware and running a user’s group? 

We’ve been very fortunate to have a VMware team that fully supports our VMUG. VMware System Engineers and Sales reps attend our meetings and events and they provide great presentations and support. We have an ASK VMware session at every meeting so that members can ask questions directly to the VMware representatives in an open forum. We have found this to be a very useful part of our meetings. 

Any thoughts on a live video feed of the User Group presentations? 

We’ve thought about podcasts, webinars/webcasts and video conferencing and while it could increase access it may also bring issues such as (1) incremental cost since we would continue to pay for the brick and mortar access (2) availability of equipment and technical support expertise (3) affect on the on-site attendance especially if it resulted in a decrease in member interaction. 

Having access to the meeting content would provide a great resource for a wider audience (including other VMUGs). However, what would the impact be to the VMUG and its emphasis on face-to-face networking and interaction? Would fewer people attend the meetings? What affect would that have on Q&A sessions? Isn’t part of the benefit of the VMUG to meet new people and to share information? 

When, if at all do you think it would be appropriate to start charging users? 

The VMUG is set up as a not-for-profit organization and is supported via vendor sponsorship (or sponsorship via member organizations). My understanding is that VMware VMUG policy prohibits charging VMUG members for attending meetings, hence, our need as VMUG leaders, to solicit sponsorship support. 

What were the 3 top technologies or topics that users were interested about this year? 

Cloud computing (vSphere), Desktop Virtualization, Performance Monitoring, and VM Management 

During the downtime between User Groups, where can people go to get updated information on the next event? 

PAVMUG posts meeting announcements on the PAVMUG Forum (part of the VMware website). As soon as the agenda is fixed, meeting announcements and all presentations from PAVMUG meetings are also posted there. Members who could not attend the meeting can view the presentations on the PAVMUG Forum. There is also a LinkedIn PAVMUG group for discussion forums and announcements.

Tell us about how the company started and your executive team?

John and Ellen quickly raised a $7.4M Series A financing and recruited George Moberly (VP Product Management, formerly of Bladelogic) and Fred Olivera (Chief Architect, formerly of EMC). Shawn Henry (VP Engineering, formerly RSA) and John McEleney (CEO, formerly of SolidWorks) joined shortly thereafter. Outside investors were interested in the company and the management team received a pre-emptive $8M Series B financing a short 6 months after the A round.

What about your experience and history before CloudSwitch?
I have worked in the application software industry for over 20 years. I joined SolidWorks when it was approximately 20 employees and $0 in revenue. I was the CEO from 2001 to 2007, and during this period we tripled the business from approximately $100M to over $350M. I have a technical background, moved to sales and marketing and have been in senior management for approximately 15 years.

What market segments are you targeting?
CloudSwitch’s software can be used by enterprises in a wide range of industries. We are focusing on companies and industries that are likely to be the earlier adopters of public clouds. These tend to be medium to large enterprises that have existing data centers, with virtualization of at least a part of their servers and a desire to take advantage of the cost and agility benefits of the cloud.

Where did the company get its name?
As the name suggests, CloudSwitch is focused on helping companies who want to switch to the cloud, and to have the flexibility of switching between multiple clouds and their data centers.

Is there a person or company involved with Cloud storage that you admire or are keeping an eye on?
While CloudSwitch is not specifically in the cloud storage space, we think there are several great companies in this area, including Carbonite, Nasuni and Actifio.

Why create a new company? Aren’t there already many suppliers involved with leveraging the cloud?
As you would expect, with a computing platform shift like cloud computing, we’veseen a plethora of new companies with innovative offerings to help people take advantage of this new platform. Many companies are focused on providing public cloud services, or helping enterprises build their own internal clouds. At CloudSwitch we’ve taken the unique approach of extending the corporate data center out to the cloud through our CloudSwitch software appliance, enabling enterprises to take advantage of cloud computing securely, easily and affordable without changing their applications or management tools.

How is portability a concern on where you want to host your applications?
Without CloudSwitch, portability is a big challenge for enterprises, since they’d have to re-architect their applications for a specific cloud, and would then be locked into that cloud if they decided to move between clouds or back to the data center. With CloudSwitch, portability is not a concern, since our software automatically takes care of all of the logistics in moving a customer’s applications to the cloud.

When is the right time to move to the cloud?
Enterprise IT departments are struggling with costly, over-provisioned and un-responsive data centers. They are eager to find ways to move to the cloud to take advantage of its on-demand pricing and rapid, self-service provisioning. The cloud provides the ability to offload specific applications and avoid expensive build-outs, as well as to scale our capacity as needed for applications with short-term or cyclical demand, especially web and test/development apps. For most enterprises, the time to move to the cloud is now.

What things are holding cloud computing back from wider adoption. What issue is top-most in your mind and why?
It is very clear that the cloud as a compute platform is real and it is happening today. Like any major platform shift, people are going through a process to understand the benefits for their organization, the risks and the challenges. The single greatest perceived issue is security. Organizations are concerned, and rightfully so, about how secure their applications and data can be in the cloud. At CloudSwitch we designed our solution from the ground up to provide provable end-to-end security, including encryption of all data and communications, in transit and at rest, enterprise control over key management, and roles-based access controls for authorization and permissions.

How would you compare your firm with Enomaly, TwinStrata?
Enomaly and TwinStrata are in different segments of the cloud market. Both of these solutions are targeting the data storage segment. While CloudSwitch does deal with storage-related issues, we are focused on moving applications (with NO changes) to the cloud. As a result of moving these applications we can take the full stack (including data) or people can “stretch” the application from the cloud back to the data center.

For the technologist reading this or the “Cloud Champion” who appreciates “the deep dive”, can you tell this person something that he would really appreciate about your product/service?
Our patent-pending Cloud Isolation Technology enables seamless migration of applications to the cloud, and full isolation of the customer’s cloud resources, so they remain under enterprise control. In addition, we automatically create a layer 2 network to bridge between the data center and the cloud, so that the cloud-based applications retain their original data center IP addresses, identity, etc. and still look exactly as they did in the data center.

What channels are being used to sell CloudSwitch?
We are reaching out to customers directly via the internet as well as inside sales.

Do you have any OEM deals now or is this being looked at?
We are engaged in many discussions with many players.

As chief executive officer at CloudSwitch, John McEleney brings over two decades of experience in scaling software businesses to market leadership. Prior to joining CloudSwitch, John was the CEO of SolidWorks Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dassault Systems S.A. (NASDAQ: DASTY). John’s rise to CEO was built on his strong record of results over a 20-year career in the CAD industry. During his tenure as CEO, annual revenues grew from US $100 million in 2001 to over $350 million in 2007.

Before joining SolidWorks, John held management positions at Computervision, where he was involved in a wide array of functions including marketing and product development. John has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Rochester, a master’s degree in manufacturing systems from Boston University, and a master’s degree in business administration and marketing from Northeastern University.

Describe for us what is your company involved with?

Your background?
A corporate level strategist and change agent with over fifteen years in information technology including the past 5 years in a Vice President role, six years managing technical professionals in advanced technology, telecommunications, systems programming and 4 years as an IT technical professional. My specific experience includes retail, manufacturing/production, consumer products and health care.

How large is your IT staff?
(31) FTE’s split into three segments; Applications, Telecommunications, Infrastructure/Help Desk & Security

Most significant business challenge that you face today?
An increased level of competitive threats to our business lines means that our technology solutions need to remain solid, easily scalable and be delivered in a timely manner.

Do you have key initiatives planned for this year? What are they?
Our most major initiative will be the replacement of our phone switch servicing our headquarters in Providence. With over 600 handsets deployed to our back office employees and nine call centers we easily receive 250,000 in-bound calls per month. In the case of Road Service there cannot be downtime at all. Once this replacement has been completed we will then focus on incorporating our remote Branch offices via SIP IP Trunking to reduce costs and increase productivity.

Are you using Microsoft Hyper-V? If no, any plans to do so?
We have tested Hyper-V but have not deployed it anywhere in production. It may have a fit down the road as we take a deeper dive into VDI for our various call centers.

Your thoughts on “The Cloud”?
There isn’t a day that goes by that my e-mail inbox doesn’t receive some sort of message regarding Cloud Computing and how it is the next-generation to the Information Technology industry. The reality, consumers who use Hotmail, Facebook and/or iTunes are already using an application form of Cloud Computing and don’t even know it. Meanwhile the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering has been a dream for web developers who need the ability to test and then scale their solutions in minutes instead of days. In my opinion Cloud Computing will gain its largest adoption in the mobile space for applications and services in the next three years. The main contributing factors; consumers love their mobile applications and continue to adopt feature phones that have smarter built-in web browsers.

The IT project that you are most proud of?
The successful launch of our Membership Relationship Management “MRM” custom software solution about 18 months ago. Our “MRM” solution enables our organization to provide specific and relevant offers individually tailored to each member. The 360 view component provides a snapshot of the products and services a Member utilizes, recent contacts and recent campaigns the member has received. The centralized Member profile allows a Member to obtain a quote in one branch and complete the purchase in another branch. This has really been a business enabler offering Club associates a complete picture when assisting a Member which allows them to present the right product at the right time in our goal to create a ‘Member For Life.’

If you had a magic wand that could do 3 IT tasks for you instantly what would they be?

1. Reduce costs of high-speed data network connections (speeds greater than 100MB). Consumers are now able to receive extremely high speed bandwidth connections at home, oftentimes for $60.00 or less per month, to download high-definition movies, songs, gaming, etc. As a result service providers are requiring larger and faster pipes just to keep up with the amount of requests.
2. Make a strong network security posture and set of policies a ‘hit’ with end-users. IT has always the bad guys when enabling a good security program -the more secure systems are the less user-friendly applications and passwords become to navigate and utilize.
3. Require all telecommunication vendors to present their monthly recurring billing in a clear and concise manner making it easier for those processing bills to understand the line items they are being billed for versus the agreed upon rates in the contract (oftentimes signed more than 2 years prior).

Dean Patterson is Vice President of IT – AAA of Southern New England and a member of the VIB Advisory board.

Describe for us what your company is involved with?

What is your background?
Spent 5 years in the Royal Australian navy deploying networks around the country. Left the service after they civilianized the IT support and returned as a contractor. Finally was able to step foot on a ship, something I had not had the chance to do during my enlistment. Spent the next three years installing networks on all major fleet units. Migrated to Canada and worked as a Network Field Technician for 7 years before migrating to the USA. Most of my work now with CRA is supporting their server infrastructure and ongoing development of our virtual environment.

How large is your IT staff?
In North America we have approximately 20 people.

What are the most significant business challenge that you face today?
Cost containment. Any new project must be evaluated to determine what is the most cost effective way to implement it. This includes looking at both in-house and hosted solutions.

Do you have key initiatives planned for this year and what are they?
Migration to vSphere 4.1 and implementing VDI.

Are you using Microsoft Hyper-V today?Any plans to do?
No. We are only running VMware. I feel it is the most mature virtual solution in the market and provides an excellent feature set and support.

Your thoughts on “The Cloud”?
It’s currently a technology undergoing a lot of development. Concerns are speed of access, security and cost effectiveness. There is definitely an advantage for Disaster Recovery, but the other issues must be addressed and access must be seamless before we could move our larger business processes to ‘the cloud’.

The IT project that you are most proud of?
Of my recent projects, the migration of most of our services to our virtual environment. This has resulted in significant cost savings for our company which has helped during the current economic climate.

If you had a magic wand that could do 3 IT tasks for you instantly what would they be?

1. High bandwidth, low cost data connectivity to give users LAN like access to all points of our network.
2. A completely replicated virtual environment providing seamless business continuity.
3. A printer that could pump out perfect $100 bills to pay for all the cool IT toys our upper management craves.

With 15 years in IT, Andrew is currently working with Charles River Associates supporting their North America offices. He has been heavily involved with the virtualization of the environment, with over 50% of systems now virtualized. This has proved to be very interesting work due to the rapidly evolving nature of virtualization tools and technologies.