How can IT contribute to the business if they are kept busy and trapped by taking care of infrastructure? That's one of the questions we tackle in this conversation I recently had with two IT admins from smaller businesses.

Both of these admins, one from a tire manufacturer, and on from a public health department, talk about their roles and how they add to the operations of their respective businesses.

We were gathered for the launch of Nutanix Xpress, their new offering for small- and medium-sized businesses. We all appeared in an online video program (hopefully it will appear online soon and I'll link to it) that was launching the product. Afterwards we gathered for this podcast. Both guests are long-time Nutanix customers, and jumped in early and with both feet with Nutanix. The platform is performing well for them and this "invisible infrastructure" is giving them more time to contribute in value-added ways by using technology in the service of the business. 

Tom, who works at a public health department, was able to roll out new Electronic Medical Records software.  Charlie, who works at a tire manufacturer, was able to bring analytics and electronic records to a far-flung wholesale and retail operation that was still operating on paper. And it goes without saying (although we say it in the podcast), that they don't think they'd be able to do that if they were busy managing separate servers and storage like some caveman.

Other questions we discussed:

• Should you be a IT generalist or specialist?
• The trap of IT becoming enamored with just technology
• Advice to young sysadmins
• Spending time on security: luxury?

My guests in this conversation were

• Charlie Kavaloski - LinkedIn
• Tom Lockhart - LinkedIn

Enjoy the whole conversation. We did!

The latest TechReckoning Podcast live from  ZertoCON 2016. I interview Zerto co-founder and CTO Oded Kedem and Robert Stretchay, VP of Product.

We talk about the nature of clouds and the nature of various apps and how they map to different types of infrastructure and cloud environments. Companies not only have different strategic approaches to cloud, but they have multiple simultaneous strategies, depending on workload and application and roadmap.

AWS is a great platform for certain workloads. It's not only about the pipe, power, and ping of a data center, it's about having the expertise to manage failover and business continuity between your various estates.

IT is required to be more dynamic and responsive than in the past. IT professionals need a different set of skills as well.

Oded and Rob look forward to areas like DevOps, as well as new stacks like Cloud Foundry and OpenStack, and how IT infrastructure needs to support these new areas.  "I don't think it gets simpler." -Rob

"The mission of Zerto is to let IT sleep at night." -Oded. He talks about how the founding team took 6 months of customer discovery before writing a line of code.

Also:

• RSS feed
• iTunes page

Photo credit: Zerto

The TechReckoning Podcast returns with a conversation with Shannon Snowden, Senior Technical Architect at Zerto.
 

We talk about data protection, the realities of the cloud, and how backup isn’t what it used to be. We also talk about the necessity of upping IT’s game when the lower levels of the stack (storage, hardware, etc) become more of a commodity.

We also talk about ZertoCON May 23-25 in Boston. Use code TECHRECKONING15 for a 15% discount.

TechReckoning at ZertoCON will bring two different sessions with a TechReckoning flavor to the event. A DevOps panel will include both an interview with a practitioner as well as some concrete technical examples of approaching your infrastructure with greater automation and instrumentation. A second session on skills-building and career navigation will hopefully both scare and inspire you a bit. Please come join me in Boston for ZertoCON!

Also:

• RSS feed
• iTunes page

This week Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett) joined us as co-host.

The topic of the year seems to be Dell
Doodling on the Value of EMC, VMware, and Dell’s Offer

TechFieldDay.com

Check out their next two events:

Curation feeds for enterprise tech

More on Grantland

We mention Actual Tech Media

Check out the Tech Field Day channel on Youtube

This week Justin Warren (@jpwarren) joins us our co-host.

We started off by getting back into the Dell-EMC deal. Justin was recently at DellWorld, and talked about his thoughts on the Dell acquisition of EMC and predictions for the future. I tried to get Justin to bet on an outcome, but I don't think we got him to put down any chips on either red or black.

Dell Reportedly to Sell Software Assets to Ease Debt from EMC Deal - Jeffrey Burt at eWeek

We also discussed the TR Topic The End of the Enterprise Public Cloud.

"You can't be more AWS than AWS." -Justin

We make fun of public clouderati.

I still think Microsoft is the secret spice in Dell's future that nobody's talking about.

Microsoft Links Open-Source With Linux Frenemy Red Hat - Klint Finley at Wired

We mentioned the TR Topic Advice from engineers that's good for all of us.

We talked about Justin's enormously amusing Disclaimer: DellWorld 2015 post.

Star Wars or Star Trek? Justin is Star Wars.

For this very special first (zeroth) episode, my co-host is Stu Miniman, senior analyst at Wikibon, co-host of #theCUBE, and owner of the shortest Twitter account (@stu) of anybody that I know personally. We talk about the Dell-EMC deal, AWS re-colon-Invent, and why analysts all live on the East Coast. Our conversation was recorded on October 15, 2015.

Some of the links we talked about:

And Wikibon is collaborating with North Bridge on their 5th Annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. Survey closes soon – please participate!