Wasabi is the hot cloud storage company delivering low-cost, fast, and reliable cloud storage. Wasabi is 80% cheaper and 6x faster than Amazon S3, with 100% data immutability protection and no data egress fees. Created by Carbonite co-founders and cloud storage pioneers David Friend and Jeff Flowers, Wasabi is on a mission to commoditize the storage industry. Wasabi is a privately held company based in Boston, MA. Follow and connect with Wasabi on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the Wasabi blog.

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Addteq is a leader in providing business solutions to Enterprise clients. Addteq has been in the business for more than 10 years. Through the use of DevOps automation, Addteq strives on creating innovative solutions to solve business processes. Clients depend on Addteq to modernize the software delivery process by providing Atlassian solutions, create custom add-ons, conduct training, offer hosting, perform DevOps services, and provide overall support services.

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The current environment of Continuous Disruption requires companies to transform how they work and how they engineer their products. Transformations are notoriously hard to execute, yet many companies have succeeded. What can we learn from them? Can we produce a blueprint for a transformation? This presentation will cover several distinct approaches that companies take to achieve transformation. Each approach utilizes different levers and comes with its own advantages, tradeoffs, costs, risks, and outcomes.

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Steadfast specializes in flexible cloud environments, infrastructure hosting, and a full suite of reliable managed services and security. Complemented by expert consultation at all stages of design and deployment to maintenance and expansion planning, Steadfast delivers high-quality, cost-effective IT infrastructure solutions, personalized to customer needs.

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David Friend is the co-founder and CEO of Wasabi, the hot cloud storage company that delivers fast, low-cost, and reliable cloud storage. Prior to Wasabi, David co-founded Carbonite, one of the world’s leading cloud backup companies. A successful tech entrepreneur for more than 30 years, David got his start at ARP Instruments, a manufacturer of synthesizers for rock bands, where he worked with leading musicians of the day like Stevie Wonder, Pete Townsend of The Who, and Led Zeppelin. David has also co-founded five other companies including Computer Pictures Corporation – an early player in computer graphics, Pilot Software – a company that pioneered multidimensional databases for crunching large amounts of customer data for major retail companies, Faxnet – which became the world’s largest provider of fax-to-email services, as well as Sonexis – a VoIP conferencing company.

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Contino is a global technical consultancy that helps highly-regulated enterprises transform faster, modernizing their way of working through DevOps and cloud computing. They focus on building capability and assisting our clients to in-source strategic technology capability so they get to market quickly and build their own innovation engine.

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The importance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to both the biggest cloud providers and their customers continues to rise – and Google Cloud aims to get a step up on its rivals by offering pre-packaged AI services.

At Google Next back in July, Google Cloud AI chief scientist Fei-Fei Li noted that AI was ‘no longer a niche for the tech world’ but ‘the differentiator for businesses in every industry.’ It’s not difficult to see why. Take the various companies who cite AI and machine learning capability as key when they make the switch regardless of who they shop with – from Bloomberg with Google, to Formula 1 with AWS.

Google’s pre-packaged AI offerings are based around improving the enterprise contact centre and talent acquisition respectively. The roster of partners the company is working with on the contact centre is almost a who’s who of the cloud networking space, from Cisco, to RingCentral, to Twilio, with Deloitte and KPMG among the integration partners.

A blog post from Apoorv Saxena, cloud AI product manager, and Geordy Kitchen, cloud group product manager, explains the benefits of the contact centre technology. “Instead of a phone tree, [Contact Center AI] greets callers in a natural and conversational manner,” the two write., “Whenever possible, it aims to resolve simple requests and tasks, such as billing enquiries or driving directions – and when it determines that a caller’s needs exceed its abilities to help, it seamlessly transitions the call to a live agent and switches to a supporting role.

“During the conversation, it surfaces information that can help the live agent, in real time, so agents have little need to put a caller on hold,” Saxena and Kitchen add. “It also captures important analytics, such as historical trends or whether a certain kind of contact is happening more frequently.”

Many will remember that, back in May, Google conducted a demo where its Assistant software called a real hair salon to book an appointment, with the employee at the other line purportedly unaware that it was an AI calling them. Some had suspicions around the veracity of that demo – so it may be worth exploring these further.

On an earnings call last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted the company’s continued momentum, with larger and more strategic cloud deals, was ‘a natural extension of our long time strength in computing, data centres and machine learning.’ “We have developed these over many years and they power our own services in the cloud and are now helping others,” he told analysts.

In its Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation survey, 451 Research analysts found that 90 percent of organizations surveyed are using some type of cloud service. Last year, the cloud market was worth $28.1 billion; by 2021, it will almost double in value at $53.3 billion. And by next year, 69 percent of respondents intend to have some type of multi-cloud environment.

This is just one of the many analyst reports that document the fact that cloud use is on the rise. All kinds of software companies have jumped on the cloud bandwagon – huge numbers of organizations already have a cloud presence or are quickly moving in that direction. You hear the terms “born in the cloud,” “cloud-enabled” and “cloud-native” all the time, but often the differences between them are fuzzy, causing confusion among potential buyers. So, for the sake of clarity, let’s take a closer look.

Defining our cloud terms

One of the latest buzzwords is “born in the cloud,” but what does it mean and why does it matter? Techopedia defines it as “a specific type of cloud service that does not involve legacy systems but was designed for cloud delivery.” Techopedia also notes that “born in the cloud” products deliver certain benefits, such as “rapid elasticity” and “on-demand availability.”

Those cloud attributes support important features and benefits, such as desktop provisioning in minutes, instant scalability and better-than-physical-PC performance. Sounds pretty compelling, right? Then there’s simplicity. If your virtual desktop solution doesn’t simplify your world, it’s time to re-evaluate. 

Cloud-native or cloud-enabled?

A solution that was “born in the cloud” was meant to be delivered exclusively via the cloud. How is this concept related to the notions of “cloud-enabled” and “cloud-native”? These terms are sometimes used interchangeably and can be easily confused, yet the difference between them is significant.

Here is the heart of the matter: A cloud-enabled VDI solution is a legacy product that was originally designed for a traditional data center and was then plunked into the cloud. A cloud-native virtual desktop solution is built from the ground up using micro-services; it’s multi-tenant, and it features fast and easy scalability.

Cloud-enabled VDI drags along all the same baggage it had in its data center incarnation. It’s complex, single-tenant and hard to scale. The cloud-native solutions deliver all the simplicity, elasticity and scalability benefits mentioned above. So, “born in the cloud” and “cloud-native” are the same thing. It’s the “cloud-enabled” solutions you need to worry about.

Of all the VDI solutions available, only two are actually cloud-native. All the other vendors have cloud-enabled VDI solutions that cannot deliver the simplicity, scalability and performance benefits that made moving to the cloud so attractive in the first place. It’s ironic that a solution described as “cloud-enabled” is actually missing so many capabilities that the cloud makes possible. That’s why it can be confusing and why it’s so important to drill-down on whether the solution can meet your requirements.

Going native 

With so much business moving to the cloud, many vendors are scrambling to offer cloud-enabled versions of their products. That might work for some needs, but when it comes to virtual desktops, clunky legacy systems that just get moved to the cloud will never make users happy. With a cloud-native solution, IT doesn’t have to worry about infrastructure or continually put out fires started by legacy solutions, so IT staff can focus on more strategic projects for the business. Getting those resources back to focus on advancing business goals is just one of the many reasons to choose cloud-native virtual desktops.

Cloud adoption is a core component of digital transformation. Scaling the IT environment, making it resilient, and reducing costs are what organizations want. Hear from the author of the best selling Packtbook “Architecting Cloud Computing Solutions” as he presents and explains critical Cloud solution design considerations and technology decisions required to choose and deploy the right Cloud service and deployment models, that are aligned to your business and technology service requirements. This session will help you master the design considerations and operational trades required to adopt Cloud services, no matter which Cloud service provider you choose.

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