30 January 2012, Cambridge, UK: The IT industry is being transformed by cloud computing and 2012 is predicted as the year this technology becomes main stream as the market for public cloud computing is set to reach US$5.8 billion by 2015. But the key challenge according to Peter Job, CEO at Intergence, an independent IT infrastructure technology company, is how to optimise and fine tune an organisation’s infrastructure to best take advantage of the new technology.

Peter explains, “Before jumping into the cloud, organisations must take a look at its current assets and review how they can be optimised.  Taking a new approach and carrying out a full health check prior to taking the leap to the cloud will save time and money by starting to plan a cloud migration strategy.”

Intergence has embraced the cloud for all of its internal IT systems and used  this to fast track the development and spin-out of Real Status, the world’s first true cloud visualisation and analytics engine. Real Status’s product Hyperglance enables businesses to take advantage of revolutionary “clear view” technology that enables “fly-by-wire” views into the cloud. This enables infrastructure managers to make informed business decisions and measure cloud efficiency and integrity.

IT Optimisation Consultancy is one of Intergence’s key strengths and the company works with many of the UK’s leading blue chip and FTSE 100 businesses. Peter continues, “Once a cloud migration strategy has been implemented and the business requirements have been quantified, technology decisions can be made on the benefits to the business.”

“If intelligent decisions are made on the basis of “what you can’t see you can’t measure”, a cloud manager will need help with automation and visibility. Cloud hygiene based on good business and technology practice will ensure that all businesses considering cloud implementation will realise the true business benefits.”

Peter concludes, “If the Red Flag Act had not been repealed in 1896, the internal combustion engine and the car would never have survived. The Red Flag protagonists lost the argument in the same way that the Cloud sceptics are currently moving. The old arguments about security and business ROI’s being unproven are becoming rather tired.”

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About Intergence
Intergence (www.intergence.com) is a leading independent IT Optimisation Consultancy, headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with a regional office in the Middle East (Dubai, UAE) and was founded in 2003 to address the growing requirements of clients demanding high-level impartial expertise in networks and IT.  Our close relationship within the Cambridge academic community enables us to innovate in partnership, rapidly incorporating the latest technology advances into our products and services.
Intergence operates over two distinct lines of business; people and performance. Our expertise and knowledge within the field allows us to resource the right people in the right place, getting your IT projects completed quickly and hassle free. Utilising world first products and professional optimisation services, Intergence has a clear and common purpose- to improve performance and extract more value from your IT infrastructure.
Follow Intergence on Twitter

For further information on Intergence, please contact:

Laura Brown/Justine Smith
KISS Public Relations
T: + 44 (0)208 12345 75
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
www.kisspr.co.uk

30 January 2012, Cambridge, UK: The IT industry is being transformed by cloud computing and 2012 is predicted as the year this technology becomes main stream as the market for public cloud computing is set to reach US$5.8 billion by 2015. But the key challenge according to Peter Job, CEO at Intergence, an independent IT infrastructure technology company, is how to optimise and fine tune an organisation’s infrastructure to best take advantage of the new technology.

Peter explains, “Before jumping into the cloud, organisations must take a look at its current assets and review how they can be optimised.  Taking a new approach and carrying out a full health check prior to taking the leap to the cloud will save time and money by starting to plan a cloud migration strategy.”

Intergence has embraced the cloud for all of its internal IT systems and used  this to fast track the development and spin-out of Real Status, the world’s first true cloud visualisation and analytics engine. Real Status’s product Hyperglance enables businesses to take advantage of revolutionary “clear view” technology that enables “fly-by-wire” views into the cloud. This enables infrastructure managers to make informed business decisions and measure cloud efficiency and integrity.

IT Optimisation Consultancy is one of Intergence’s key strengths and the company works with many of the UK’s leading blue chip and FTSE 100 businesses. Peter continues, “Once a cloud migration strategy has been implemented and the business requirements have been quantified, technology decisions can be made on the benefits to the business.”

“If intelligent decisions are made on the basis of “what you can’t see you can’t measure”, a cloud manager will need help with automation and visibility. Cloud hygiene based on good business and technology practice will ensure that all businesses considering cloud implementation will realise the true business benefits.”

Peter concludes, “If the Red Flag Act had not been repealed in 1896, the internal combustion engine and the car would never have survived. The Red Flag protagonists lost the argument in the same way that the Cloud sceptics are currently moving. The old arguments about security and business ROI’s being unproven are becoming rather tired.”

---end---


About Intergence
Intergence (www.intergence.com) is a leading independent IT Optimisation Consultancy, headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with a regional office in the Middle East (Dubai, UAE) and was founded in 2003 to address the growing requirements of clients demanding high-level impartial expertise in networks and IT.  Our close relationship within the Cambridge academic community enables us to innovate in partnership, rapidly incorporating the latest technology advances into our products and services.
Intergence operates over two distinct lines of business; people and performance. Our expertise and knowledge within the field allows us to resource the right people in the right place, getting your IT projects completed quickly and hassle free. Utilising world first products and professional optimisation services, Intergence has a clear and common purpose- to improve performance and extract more value from your IT infrastructure.
Follow Intergence on Twitter

For further information on Intergence, please contact:

Laura Brown/Justine Smith
KISS Public Relations
T: + 44 (0)208 12345 75
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
www.kisspr.co.uk

by Dr. Steve Turner, @theoptimiser:

BBC News announced last week (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16486796, 11 January 2012) that Spanish Bank BBVA is to move to using Google for its cloud computing services. For a bank which is subject to strict regulation this is a significant event. Other business sectors have already embraced public and private cloud-based solutions but the financial sector has been more wary for good reason, a key concern being loss of control over their data.

Digging deeper into the story it becomes apparent that they are using cloud for their internal communications such as Email, Calendar, chat and Video conferencing. Customer data should remain in situ in their private data centres to ensure regulatory requirements are met.

As noted in the article, this presents new challenges for the Bank including handling much more network traffic across the WAN, as locally serviced applications are now running remotely with Video being the greatest potential impact. There are a number of techniques available to monitor and control the effects of this additional traffic on the way with some of the most popular being Application Performance Management and WAN Optimisation to control, prioritise and accelerate business critical services where necessary.

An additional challenge is one of compliance. With remotely hosted services how do you keep track on where your data and services are within the cloud? Do you know what country your data resides in or how secure the systems are which are hosting your services? Visibility into the cloud is critical and that is where products such as Hyperglance can help by hooking into published APIs (Application Programming Interface) to extract and visualise data about where your remote services are and how well they are performing.

Cloud computing has already proven the benefits for many organisations with significant savings in cost, administration and great improvements in flexibility for all businesses from SMEs to huge multinational organisations. This is a significant growth area and has been for several years now. I anticipate as more organisations migrate to cloud-based environments it will provide a more level footing for smaller companies to compete with the large enterprises whilst benefiting employees through more flexible working options to provide an improved work / life balance. 

How does an office on a beach sound?

The Issue

Over the past 15 years I have worked in many different roles for both Managed Service Providers (MSP) and End Customers alike. The single biggest issue I have faced in both roles is the accuracy of measurement of technical Service Level Agreement (SLA) data and how that translates to the human experience.

As a Customer Services Manager for a Global MSP, I relied heavily on the technical SLA information collected by machines (and the interpretation of said data) to be an accurate portrayal of what my customers end users were telling them. All too often I would stand in front of a customer with an ‘all green’ dashboard only to have him bemoan the fact that his users were complaining of poor application performance!

My response was to explain (ever so politely) that our data was accurate and that it had to be an issue out of our visibility and control.

A number of years later, I joined a global financial services organisation where I was in charge of vendor management. One of my job functions was to meet with Customer Services Managers (CSM) from various vendors and discuss service management reports (…can you see where this is going!!).

Each month I would have any number of vendor CSM’s tell me that the dashboard was ‘all green’ and (ever so politely) explain to me that their data was accurate and that it had to be an issue out of their visibility and control!

For the first time I experienced the issue that plagues the vast majority of Service Level Agreements in operation today. That is to provide the customer and the vendor with an accurate measurement of the Technical Metric AND the Human Experience for any given service!!

The Solution

So off I went and scoured the 4 corners of the earth (…well just the Internet mostly) to find a means to fix the SLA conundrum and am happy to report that my search led me to one such piece of software that does just that…Actual Experience.

The product that they have spent the last 10 years developing not only allows me to accurately quantify the End User experience of any application, it also gives me visibility as to which pieces of infrastructure, in the end-to-end service chain, are contributing to their dissatisfaction.

I now have this clever piece of software deployed across our IT estate. It not only highlights to our own engineering teams where the problems are, it also gives me the collateral I need to explain (ever so politely) to the vendor CSM’s that although their dashboard is ‘all green’, there is a definite problem within their infrastructure and this is the device causing it.

I am happy to report that they liked our chats so much, they are now actively looking at Actual Experience as a means to capture and deliver a better quality of service to all of their end customers.

So End Customers and Service Providers alike, if improving internal and external customer satisfaction is of critical importance to you and your business (according to Aberdeen Group, at least 55% of you agree), then take a serious look at Actual Experience.

I did and it is solving my problem!

In conversation with one of our customers today, I was reminded of the value of Perceptual Quality (our language for subjective human-experience) as a non-technical language for IT. It is easily understood by all, and that enables many stakeholders in a business to communicate and make decisions about IT products and services that will have genuine economic impact.

A highly respected figure in one of our Managed Service Provider customers said, “I’ve never before seen a product or service that can be utilised at all levels throughout any business… to communicate effectively with all people in all areas within a business thanks to the uniform language that it has inspired.”

More specifically, “The scope of your product and service is so wide – anything from assisting an engineer in identifying a particularly troublesome network component… presenting tangible evidence of recent ROI to

a CFO,.. contributing to business cases… to company 5/10 year investment and growth plans… it’s a value-add service to complement any other IT service… a solution that can assist with capacity planning… it can contribute towards demonstrating leading market edge capabilities, or identify what would need to be improved to achieve them… it can create justifications for the necessary investments for all of these things… all from the same data and all due to it being presented back in the same way.”

One of our goals when we started Actual Experience, was for the language of Perceptual Quality to enable business leaders to engage more meaningfully with IT decision-making. Our customer went on, “CEOs, CIOs, CFOs – they’ll all love it. But the key differentiator here is that they’ll all love it not only because of what it can do and what it achieves for them in a tangible way, but because they can and will all understand it without the need for techno-speak translators… this gives what you do total and universal market appeal.”

As we meet more and more customers and prospects, the company-wide appeal of Perceptual Quality is gaining momentum. The graphic summarises this.

The Issue

Over the past 15 years I have worked in many different roles for both Managed Service Providers (MSP) and End Customers alike. The single biggest issue I have faced in both roles is the accuracy of measurement of technical Service Level Agreement (SLA) data and how that translates to the human experience.

As a Customer Services Manager for a Global MSP, I relied heavily on the technical SLA information collected by machines (and the interpretation of said data) to be an accurate portrayal of what my customers end users were telling them. All too often I would stand in front of a customer with an ‘all green’ dashboard only to have him bemoan the fact that his users were complaining of poor application performance!

My response was to explain (ever so politely) that our data was accurate and that it had to be an issue out of our visibility and control.

A number of years later, I joined a global financial services organisation where I was in charge of vendor management. One of my job functions was to meet with Customer Services Managers (CSM) from various vendors and discuss service management reports (…can you see where this is going!!).

Each month I would have any number of vendor CSM’s tell me that the dashboard was ‘all green’ and (ever so politely) explain to me that their data was accurate and that it had to be an issue out of their visibility and control!

For the first time I experienced the issue that plagues the vast majority of Service Level Agreements in operation today. That is to provide the customer and the vendor with an accurate measurement of the Technical Metric AND the Human Experience for any given service!!

The Solution

So off I went and scoured the 4 corners of the earth (…well just the Internet mostly) to find a means to fix the SLA conundrum and am happy to report that my search led me to one such piece of software that does just that…Actual Experience.

The product that they have spent the last 10 years developing not only allows me to accurately quantify the End User experience of any application, it also gives me visibility as to which pieces of infrastructure, in the end-to-end service chain, are contributing to their dissatisfaction.

I now have this clever piece of software deployed across our IT estate. It not only highlights to our own engineering teams where the problems are, it also gives me the collateral I need to explain (ever so politely) to the vendor CSM’s that although their dashboard is ‘all green’, there is a definite problem within their infrastructure and this is the device causing it.

I am happy to report that they liked our chats so much, they are now actively looking at Actual Experience as a means to capture and deliver a better quality of service to all of their end customers.

So End Customers and Service Providers alike, if improving internal and external customer satisfaction is of critical importance to you and your business (according to Aberdeen Group, at least 55% of you agree), then take a serious look at Actual Experience.

I did and it is solving my problem!

In conversation with one of our customers today, I was reminded of the value of Perceptual Quality (our language for subjective human-experience) as a non-technical language for IT. It is easily understood by all, and that enables many stakeholders in a business to communicate and make decisions about IT products and services that will have genuine economic impact.

A highly respected figure in one of our Managed Service Provider customers said, “I’ve never before seen a product or service that can be utilised at all levels throughout any business… to communicate effectively with all people in all areas within a business thanks to the uniform language that it has inspired.”

More specifically, “The scope of your product and service is so wide – anything from assisting an engineer in identifying a particularly troublesome network component… presenting tangible evidence of recent ROI to

a CFO,.. contributing to business cases… to company 5/10 year investment and growth plans… it’s a value-add service to complement any other IT service… a solution that can assist with capacity planning… it can contribute towards demonstrating leading market edge capabilities, or identify what would need to be improved to achieve them… it can create justifications for the necessary investments for all of these things… all from the same data and all due to it being presented back in the same way.”

One of our goals when we started Actual Experience, was for the language of Perceptual Quality to enable business leaders to engage more meaningfully with IT decision-making. Our customer went on, “CEOs, CIOs, CFOs – they’ll all love it. But the key differentiator here is that they’ll all love it not only because of what it can do and what it achieves for them in a tangible way, but because they can and will all understand it without the need for techno-speak translators… this gives what you do total and universal market appeal.”

As we meet more and more customers and prospects, the company-wide appeal of Perceptual Quality is gaining momentum. The graphic summarises this.