Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You gave an overview. If you were to go out and start a company today, have you heard any customer point out a specific problem that needs to be solved but there is no vendor out there that’s addressing this problem?

Jerry Melnick: We are going to rely on cloud services just like the way we rely on our computer systems today. They are at a level of maturity and accessibility that is not exactly at a level that data centers are today. The opportunity, at least in the space that we live in, is how do I build on or harden that cloud? How do I make that cloud capable of supporting the kinds of service and service levels required for the applications that are most important? Clearly, if cloud can do that, I get the advantage of not just the cloud flexibility and utility and the cost savings, but I also get high value out of its foundational security and availability. What kinds of technologies do we need to provide those high-value services? How do I make my cloud do more?

The answer to that is, some of the work that we are doing in terms of our high availability offerings allow you to move these kinds of applications and harden the cloud. Also, some of the other work that we are doing is, how do you understand when things are going wrong or where they are going wrong because now you have got a much more complex system than you have ever had before. It’s not even in your control. You have networks. You have applications. You have databases. You have cloud providers.

Sorting through that has been done using what I call a Computer Science approach. It has been built on age-old technologies. The opportunity that we see is around using Big Data analytics for IT operational problems. How do I acquire data from the infrastructure and mine that data and learn from it to automate and identify issues very quickly or before they happen so I can proactively manage them?  Also, use that data for other use cases like make sure it is reliable or make sure it is efficient, or figure out how to model or how I should change it. What do I do without damaging what I have? Just like you would data mine a marketing research database for customers, you want to data mine your IT operation environment.

Those are complementary problem domains. How do I make it available? How do I make it more efficient? How do I make it performant? How do I change it and grow it? The opportunities that we certainly see and we are capitalizing on is in putting a lot more intelligence using machine learning technologies and advanced data mining to apply the same intelligence we are applying to market and biological databases today to our information databases.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for taking the time. It was good talking to you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS
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