LATAM felt the presence of Virtela
Is it worth a one way journey of 24 hours with 2 flight changes to get to a conference for 2 days? The short answer, yes. Especially when it’s the Capacity LATAM 2011 show in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Most of the LATAM carriers were present at the conference and just like us, they had come with goals in mind. While some attendees focused on the panel discussions, others were already in meetings scheduled weeks in advance. The event itself triggered new networking initiatives and we had some good meetings with LATAM carriers and also discovered new partners and vendors.
Virtela takes on the “Windy City” at IT Roadmap
This year’s IT Roadmap Chicago definitely had more emphasis on the cloud than in the past—that’s good news for Virtela.
Our VP of Marketing, Liza Adams, presented at the event and spoke on Using the Cloud for Faster Apps, Robust Security, & Proactive Management. It was reassuring to hear positive feedback from the attendees. One audience member applauded that Liza’s presentation demonstrated how to approach and solve IT issues for multinational companies, instead of sounding like a sales pitch.
Opportunities for Cloud Services
I joined Virtela two weeks ago, and this is my first blog post! I’m very excited to join Virtela as cloud computing is picking up momentum across different sectors and around the world.
Today, Virtela held a webinar presenting results and findings of our recent survey on top IT infrastructure priorities for 2011. Two of the top priorities among the multinational companies surveyed were pursuing cloud solutions and application acceleration. Although multinational companies are increasingly taking advantage of cloud services, opportunities for leveraging cloud computing exist in other sectors as well.
The votes are in! Top 10 IT Priorities for 2011
More than 400 IT professionals at multinational companies responded to Virtela’s recent survey on top IT infrastructure priorities for 2011 and improvement areas for managed service providers (MSPs), and the results provide an exciting glimpse into the year ahead.
Topping the list of priorities are infrastructure management, security, data center consolidation, application acceleration and cloud solutions. Not surprising, really. Having just come back from PTC ’11 where cloud services seemed to be a recurring topic of conversation amongst our global partners, to the customers we speak to on a daily basis, cloud solutions are in high demand given their ability to deliver better, cheaper and faster ways to meet security, application acceleration and other needs. And with today’s IT leaders being tasked with security and compliance initiatives on top of the ongoing management and monitoring of networks, data centers, application speeds and overall business efficiency – it’s no wonder they ranked these as their top priorities for 2011.
Virtela “Cloud” Hits Waikiki Beach
Virtela’s Global Network Operations support for our customers “follows the sun”. So does its Global Strategy Access Strategy team. We follow the sun even to picture perfect Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii. In Aloha shirts and clutching a wad of business cards, we had a mission at the annual Pacific Telecommunications Council’s 2011 conference (PTC 2011).
Led by Andy Funk, our Vice President of Global Access Strategy, the team underpins Virtela’s partnership with global carriers as a platform for supporting cloud services and superior customer experience. We take time to meet with global partners, share industry perspective, discuss on-going and future business, strengthen industry ties and discover new partners. The Hawaii venue of this annual event lends itself to strong participation from Pacific Rim and North American carriers.
Webinar: Developing a profitable cloud services strategy
I’m excited to participate in this Thursday’s FierceTelecom webinar, Developing a profitable cloud services strategy. It’s rare nowadays to sit (virtually) alongside service providers with different business models to engage in a healthy debate and discuss how each can craft profitable cloud strategies.
Level 3 will be represented by my former colleague, Carolyn Reuss, as a data center/co-location company. Qwest will share the views of a traditional telco. And I’ll cover how Virtela, a managed services company, has developed its global cloud strategy from years of serving multinational Fortune 500 and midmarket customers. I love this panel because, although we may compete with each other at some level, we are successful partners in many cases when it comes to cloud.
Welcome from Virtela’s new CEO
Hello Virtela Viewpoint readers. I am truly pleased to be making my first post since joining Virtela in fall 2010.
We saved the announcement of my joining until the start of 2011, because I feel this is going to be a milestone year for IT and its leaders as companies across the world take advantage of the flexibility, savings and agility offered by cloud- and network-based services and their associated providers.
Welcome to Virtela Viewpoint
Welcome to Virtela Viewpoint – our blog about Managed and Cloud IT Services.
As we start a new – and hopefully economically more vibrant – year of 2011, we look forward to sharing what Virtela, our customers, and our partners see in way of IT trends, best practices and things to watch out for. If Gartner has anything to say about 2011, it starts with moderate budget growth of 5.1% to $3.6 trillion (not so moderate, in terms of aggregate spend).
From Virtela’s Viewpoint, CIOs and their IT teams have some clear and consistent goals for 2011 and beyond, including how to:
What will be the top IT priorities in 2011?
Although I hear from customers on a weekly basis about what works, what doesn’t work, what they plan to do next and what services/features we should develop, I always look forward to market survey time. It’s like a big brain dump from customers and prospects. Developing services and marketing them is 100% more fun when you know exactly what the market wants. And more importantly, our customers are happier.
Last year, we polled IT leaders and professionals and asked them in what areas would they like to see improvements from managed network service providers. It wasn’t any new feature, functionality or service that IT leaders wanted. The top 3 areas of improvement were:
- Offer more value for the price
- Timely communication of status and issues
- Better understanding of requirements
Cloud-based IT Services – 2 New Approaches
It’s exciting – and engaging – to finally see cloud computing and storage gaining strong and lasting market adoption. And not to be always looking for the next IT trend, but I’ve felt for the last 12+ months that it’s been time for additional IT services to start making their way to the cloud…or at least delivered via a cloud-based format.
Well it looks like my wait is coming to an end, given announcements by my [new] company, Virtela, as well as other vendors making announcements over recent weeks, and even the recent Riverbed announcement. There appear to be two primary architectural approaches to offering cloud IT services – either integrated as single service offerings (e.g. WAN optimization tied to existing cloud compute or storage resource pools like Amazon EC2 (see #2 on diagram below), or as independent cloud-based service offerings – either single service or more holistic multi-service IT cloud platforms (see #3 on diagram below).