IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview: Become a Cloud Catalyst, Not a Cloud Road Block

Cloud computing, as an operating model that now changes daily, is disrupting the way businesses purchase and manage technology. Brian Kelly, as CEO and founder of CloudGenera, understands the importance for organizations to select the cloud option that’s best for their company – and how to keep pace with changing cloud solutions when they evolve in a rapid fashion – almost on a daily basis. He provides his insight to IT Briefcase on the current challenges in selecting the right cloud solution to satisfy businesses specific individual needs, and how CloudGenera is helping companies, like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), overcome them.

• Q. How are most organizations choosing a cloud solution for their business today?

A. Current methods of cloud evaluation and decisioning involve costly consultants or time-consuming, error-prone spreadsheets. In most organizations, a person has to manually run cloud scenarios on an ongoing basis, putting information into spreadsheets and running that information for every supplier that they consider for the business. There’s nearly 20K cloud pricing changes a month. That’s awfully hard to track manually and overall not efficient.

• Q. What are the obstacles that organizations face in cloud selection?

A. When it comes to enterprise cloud selection, IT professionals and organizations have either faced the high costs of consultants or have used manual decision making processes to select the right cloud for their business needs. As I said, many organizations have someone manually going through cloud scenarios and detailing information into spreadsheets, running all of it for every supplier that they are contemplating. This method is extremely time consuming and fraught with error.

At the same time, new technology can be viewed as a threat to those positions within the organization who had been charged with evaluating technology solutions themselves. Enterprises can also be concerned about bringing a new tool set to their business that requires someone to learn and maintain the tool. IT must be an enabler of the business that accelerates time to value – it can’t be a barrier that slows critical initiatives.

• Q. How can organizations quickly and cost-effectively evaluate and select the right private, hybrid or public cloud solution for their “right mix” for hybrid IT business needs?

A. As the cloud computing market matures, a greater number of organizations are developing multi-cloud strategies and must determine multiple cloud service vendors that best meet specific business needs – making sure that the right vendor is selected for each workload or scenario. A streamlined process that clearly lays out all cloud options, in matter of minutes, is needed to help organizations get to the cloud faster, with the right solution for their needs. The cloud decisioning process must become automated to eliminate the challenges of manual cloud evaluation methods, and speed enterprise time to digital transformation.

• Q. How does CloudGenera make the process of cloud selection more efficient?

A. We offer IT professionals and organizations a convenient simplified experience to speed time to digital transformation. Our CloudAssist, and CloudAssist Mobile, eliminate the time consuming and costly error-prone manual cloud evaluation methods that are currently being used by most organizations in selecting cloud solutions.

As the industry’s only independent cloud decision engine, we provide vendor agnostic IT analysis that allows organizations to select the cloud solution that truly fits their workload placement and hybrid cloud strategy needs.

• Q. How does CloudAssist actually compare cloud solutions?

A. Our patented CloudRank algorithm is utilized to power an unrivaled search engine for cloud decisioning, matching the range of private, hybrid and public cloud solutions to individual customer needs. It’s supported by our team of MIT graduates, Intel Fellows and pioneers of innovative private cloud solutions, bringing decades of data science expertise and real world cloud experience into the ongoing design and maintenance of CloudGenera’s solutions.

Brian Kelly, CEO & Founder of CloudGenera, is responsible for the company’s day-to-day operations and business strategy, as well as leading product vision. He is a prior technology start-up founder, inventor and US patent holder. Brian has spent the entirety of his technology career helping companies discover, validate and adopt disruptive technologies and technology operating models. He is a 15-year software and hardware industry veteran, most recently at VMware where he ran business strategy for VMware’s Eastern United States region. Prior to VMware, Brian held a variety of sales, strategy and principal technologist roles at BEA Systems. He started his career in business consulting at Compuware Corporation and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.