Paul Strong
Chief Technology Officer, Global Field
Biography
Paul Strong is VMware's Chief Technology Officer, Global Field. His team connects VMware R&D with VMware’s field organization, its partners and its customers, helping to change the way enterprises view and manage their business services and IT assets. Paul is a recognized leader within the IT industry, and is a regular keynote speaker and contributor of articles on the subjects of Grids and Clouds. As a Distinguished Research Scientist at eBay, he was responsible for eBay's research into large distributed systems and how to manage them. Prior to joining eBay Paul architected and/or developed various software systems, including Sun's Solaris Containers, large scale B2B eCommerce systems, and large, distributed command and control systems. He sat on the board of directors of the Open Grid Forum (OGF), and was chairman from 2006-2008. Paul also sits on the technology advisory boards of a number of small startups, mature businesses, and government funded consortia. Paul holds a bachelors degree in Physics from the University of Manchester, in England.
Posts by Paul Strong
When Joe Baguley joined the VMware Office of the CTO in 2011, we knew he would be fantastic at connecting the VMware R&D organization with its customers and partners in EMEA – to share VMware’s vision and strategy, and to relay customer feedback back to R&D in order to continue to innovate and improve our products. Since then, Joe has helped many of our customers advance on their journey to the cloud and act as a key resource for VMware R&D. I’m pleased to announce that Joe was named one of the UK’s top 50 most influential people in IT by Computer Weekly (a leading technology publication in the UK) last week, joining distinguished CEOs, government ministers, heads of design at Apple and...
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Just over a week ago I had the pleasure of speaking at PuppetConf 2012 . PuppetConf is a great conference focused, somewhat unsurprisingly, around Puppet , a declarative, model driven framework for automating systems and IT management. The conference brings together a community of pretty hard core systems admins from the DevOps world and beyond. Automated management is clearly a key ingredient in building software-defined datacenters and Clouds, and something that we, at VMware, have more than a passing interest in. Preparing for it made me think. A lot! I was after a prism of simplicity, if you will. A way of capturing the Cloud and software-defined datacenter concepts in a simple way, that allowed one to understand...
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I am lucky enough to spend a lot of my time meeting customers, talking to them, listening to them and learning from them. On a recent trip to Turkey I had the opportunity to chat with a number of CIOs and other technology leaders about the trends shaping enterprise IT today. Of course you can’t really have such a conversation without mentioning Cloud, but Cloud is only a part of the bigger picture… What has struck me over the last few years is the consumerization of enterprise IT as a whole. We often think about the adoption of consumer technology within the enterprise, especially smart phones, tablets, and even the x86 architecture itself. But what we perhaps tend to think less about is...
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The previous post is intended as a starting point for a discussion about where the real value, not just the cost, is in IT for organizations. Ultimately it is the organization that has to decide, but IT can now think about a roadmap for how and where to source IT services, and how it transforms itself into a value center. The diagram below shows one approach to working out the desired end point for any given application or service. It requires that a small number of critical questions be answered by the enterprise. As a prerequisite the organization must be clear about its core mission(s) and how/if it seeks to differentiate itself? Then for each application or IT service that the...
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My last post was one in a series that looks at Cloud, both in terms of technology evolution and also in terms of a business model that is highly disruptive. However I left questions about the road ahead unanswered. Such questions are almost always addressed in terms of technology adoption roadmaps. This clearly has great value, but risks missing the purpose of going Cloudy, i.e. to enable organizations to be more productive, efficient and agile; to be more competitive; to focus on their core differentiating value and/or executing on their mission. What we tend to overlook is a discussion around how to decide which IT services (and thus which business processes) to source where, when, and why. Defining such a strategic technology roadmap requires...
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Timing is everything. As an industry we have been talking for at least a decade about enabling service driven utilities, and about the organizational and process changes, and automation technologies that will make this real. We are ten years into a long journey. But a journey that continues to yield incremental benefits every step of the way, every year. Now we have reached an inflection point. At VMworld during Paul Maritz’s keynote a graph was displayed showing one aspect of this inflection point, specifically a graph that shows a year-by-year comparison of the number of physical machines versus virtual machines provisioned. 2009 was the first year in which the number of virtual machines provisioned outstripped the number of physical machines. This is but...
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The externally driven change in role is matched by an internal transformation in terms of how IT organizations are structured. The traditional data center is one of silos of control. The very nature of the technology that comprises IT infrastructure, and the lack of management tooling that has been able to treat it systemically or holistically and hide complexity, has forced the creation of expert groups, each with a specific focus on one aspect of the infrastructure, such as networking, storage, compute, operating systems, databases, applications and so forth. This “divide and conquer” approach allowed organizations to deal with the complexity of the technology and it’s deployment, to some degree. But at a high cost! Specifically the creation of organizational silos, that inherently tend...
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So far I have said more about the business, innovation, applications and services, than perhaps about IT and IT Operations (Ops) per se. However the impact on IT within the enterprise is no less profound. Cloud not only changes the cost dynamics for enterprises that consume Cloud services, offering a move away from essentially fixed cost CAPEX dominated IT budgets to variable cost OPEX driven budgets, but will ultimately force IT to fundamentally re-evaluate its role. One of the first drivers for this introspection is the business itself, where the notion of self service, variable cost and convenience have driven many business service owners to either start using external cloud providers or to demand equivalent attributes from their own IT organizations. Now that...
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One of the interesting consequences of the fragmentation of services (see last post) is the opportunity it presents for the providers of new and innovative services. There has always been a discussion about the challenges of truly achieving economies of scale in IT. Almost all large enterprises with significant IT assets achieve some economies through purchasing power and the sharing of physical assets, but I would assert that few, if any, are able to genuinely attain a state where as they scale up, the overall cost per hypothetical unit of delivery of IT service to the business decreases or even stays constant. In some sense Cloud addresses this and changes it, by turning things on their head. Real economies in IT are perhaps not...
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Part 1 – Changing The Business of IT and The Democratization of InnovationBeing a bit of a geek, I have always been tempted to take a particular perspective on new technology and innovations. By the time that Cloud came along I had been doing distributed systems and Grids for quite a while and saw Cloud as a natural evolution of many of the things I had been working on over the course of my career. After all most of the technology ingredients were not exactly new.So what was all the fuss about?Well, for me, this is not just about the technology, fun though I happen to think that side of things is. What Cloud fundamentally changes are business models. In this sense Cloud is...
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