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More UK executives have admitted their deeper knowledge of cloud computing is spotty at best, according to survey results from software provider Sage UK.

The survey conducted by YouGov, which polled 749 SME decision makers in the UK, found that more than half (57%) of respondents confessed to having only a partial understanding of cloud computing technology.

“While companies are becoming smarter about their use of the cloud and it continues to become a more viable option, the reality is that there’s still a pervasive knowledge gap amongst SMBs that threatens to hold back cloud adoption”, commented Rob Davis, Sage 200 Online head of technology.

Happily, 41% of execs polled said they fully understood what was going on under the bonnet. Yet there were more security concerns over migrating business data to the cloud. Data security (38%) was the most frequent fear, followed by the risk of downtime (25%), and challenges caused by a slow internet connection (19%).

Over a quarter of respondents said they were looking at a gradual implementation of cloud resources, a mixture of cloud and on-premise. “Cloud doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision; far from it,” Davis added.

This may all seem a little basic on the surface but it’s good, solid advice. Ivan Harris, cloud services manager at Eduserv, recently told CloudTech that hybrid clouds were “essential to the cloud migration journey”, focusing particularly on smaller businesses.

“Very few organisations are in a position to do a one-stop-shop, lift and shift their entire IT estates from physical on-premise to virtual public multi-tenancy clouds,” he said. “So you need flexibility in your infrastructure architecture to be able to deploy a changing hybrid cloud model.”

There are plenty of reasons why a business is reluctant to get rid of a private cloud for now; it’s still on the balance sheet, it’s connected to other hardware, or there might still be security concerns. Yet Harris doubts that hybrid clouds will still be around in five years’ time.  

“I think most people will be in public clouds and they will choose clouds with appropriate controls in place to manage their information estate,” he said.

Previous surveys gauging knowledge of cloud computing have often met with amusing results. The most memorable was a Citrix poll of American consumers in 2012 which found, among other responses, that an advantage of the cloud was being able to access work information in your birthday suit.

Things have improved since then – but there’s still a bit of work to do.

Postscript: The Citrix poll had one remarkable survey result. As CloudTech wrote on August 29 2012, “a quarter of those surveyed said the cloud was great for keeping embarrassing videos off the hard drive.”

Given the iCloud-related celebrity hacks of the past couple of months, this is a remarkable statement.

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Google has announced the latest price drop on its Compute Engine cloud infrastructure, keeping in line with its Moore’s Law theory of cloud pricing.

“As predicted by Moore’s Law, we can now lower prices again”, wrote Urs Hölzle, Google SVP technical infrastructure in a company blog post. “Effective immediately, we are cutting prices of Google Compute Engine by approximately 10% for all instance types in every region.

“These cuts are a result of increased efficiency in our data centres as well as failing hardware costs, allowing us to pass on lower prices to our customers,” he added.

The latest price drops are likely to set off similar attacks from the competition, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Back in March Google set things off by slashing costs on Compute Engine, dropped by a third, and a two thirds drop for Cloud Storage, with Hölzle saying at the time you needed a PhD to work out the best option.

Amazon and Microsoft swiftly followed suit. At AWS Summits in San Francisco, SVP Andy Jassy noted that lowering prices was not new for Amazon, although admitting previous price drops came largely in the absence of competitive pressure.

Low prices don’t mean anything unless you’ve got customer support, mind you, and Google also took the time to focus on a couple of case studies. The Snapchat case study got wheeled out again – the search giant is fond of telling anyone who would listen about that – while two more interesting customers got mentions. Google Compute Engine powers Workiva, which processes financial reports for 60% of the Fortune 500 saving nearly $1m annually, and Coca Cola, running the Happiness Flag campaign for the World Cup.

Last month Google announced a scheme for $100,000 (£61,500) in Cloud Platform credits to eligible startups, again seemingly taking a shot across the bows of AWS and its Portfolio Package initiative.

 You can find out more about the latest cuts here. How will this influence your usage?

Picture credit: Egnyte

Feature Enterprise file sharing provider Egnyte has hired Ian McEwan to head up its nascent EMEA operation – and after a “hectic” first five weeks, the former Gigamon sales VP and founder member of the Cloud Industry Forum is rolling up his sleeves and getting on with the challenge.

Egnyte’s proposition is straightforward. The company tailors itself as being ‘built from the cloud down’. In other words, you need a hybrid mix of cloud and on-premise for enterprise to store and share files securely. Chief exec and co-founder Vineet Jain is such a firm believer in this his Twitter handle is @CloudNotEnough.

McEwan certainly fits the bill in terms of buying into the company ethos. In a previous role at FrontRange Solutions, competing against the likes of ServiceNow and BMC in service management, the European strategy revolved around a hybrid approach. “We made some very big inroads to some customers,” he notes.

Not needing to learn the ropes this time around, the strategy for Egnyte is to continue where FrontRange left off.

“From my perspective, the marketplace and the number of vendors in that space will start to consolidate, and it’ll be interesting to see what the customer is driving from their demands,” McEwan tells CloudTech. “You look at some of the vendors, they’ve got very large market penetration, but a lot of that is on a zero cost to the consumer, which is very hard to sustain when you have to keep continually investing in R&D.”

As McEwan notes, it’s a pretty crowded marketplace. With 19 vendors on the latest Gartner enterprise file synchronisation and share (EFSS) Magic Quadrant, it represents an industry sector with many fingers in many pies. You’ve got your cloud storage players in Box and Dropbox, your hyper vendors in Google, Microsoft and IBM, and enterprise mobility companies in AirWatch.

A lot of companies forgot about the most important words in front of reseller – the value add

Egynte is positioned at the very high end of the niche players category at bottom left. At the time Gartner noted Egynte’s strengths in being 100% enterprise-focused and openness to partnership, but cited two key weaknesses; unproven on-premises model and – you guessed it – a lack of investment in Europe.

McEwan explains that the whole of EMEA is fair game, although the most interest for Egnyte’s solutions for now is in the Middle East, Nordics and Benelux. In other words, Egnyte “probably” won’t be following the standard roadmap of American software companies wanting to get a foothold across the Atlantic, targeting the UK, then Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and so on.

“In a way I’m saying we’re going to go after the market from an EMEA perspective, but if I drill down on that a little bit, I’m probably going to focus on some of our key verticals, where we’re finding our hybrid approach resonates very well with the business and IT,” McEwan says.

“That’s construction, retail, manufacturing, and to be honest it’s anywhere people are sending large amounts of data, and they want to do it in a controlled environment.

“We’re not going to be bound by country, but we’re going to focus on what we do well and execute against that,” he adds.

McEwan is under no illusions of the board’s expectations; “certainly high double digit…if not three digit” year on year growth, he says. There’s plenty of slack from the board, but not too much; he adds that he’s in regular contact with the board and CEO Jain, but has autonomy to “put his footprint and signature to the growth of the company.”

For now, the company appears in no big hurry to do anything as drastic as going public. When Jain spoke to CloudTech back in April to announce European expansion, he described a “little slow and deliberate” style of leadership, in stark contrast to some of Egnyte’s competitors.

Nowhere was this more exemplified than when Jain refused the board’s request to open up a European branch last year. “You need to strengthen into a specific territory before you go and fight another war,” he said.

For McEwan, who went through an IPO with Gigamon, it’s a similar route.

“I would rather focus on where we’re going to really grow and develop, and put the investment there, and go to the board with investment requests based on business models, rather than getting bodies and heads into an organisation and then finding we don’t have a strategy to support that,” he explains.

“You just have to look at some of the S-1 filings that are out there, or companies about to go IPO. It’s got to be a balanced scorecard, it’s got to show the growth, it’s got to show international growth, but it’s also got to balance up the cost versus the revenues – and there are some companies out there burning multi-million dollar payments that came in from the VCs on a monthly basis.”

One of the keys McEwan frequently pointed out is to beef up both the direct sales strategy and indirect sales through the channel. As he puts it, it’s about getting the balance right.

“Ultimately it’s going to be a customer’s decision in which way he wants to go, and nine times out of 10 it’s not just a commercial decision”, says McEwan. “It’s not a sales guy from the vendor saying ‘come with us directly and we’ll give you an extra 10% off.’

McEwan is under no illusions of the board’s expectations; “certainly high double digit, if not three digit” year on year growth

“I think for a long period of time a lot of companies forgot about the most important words in front of reseller…the value add,” he adds. “From a European perspective we know what our target markets are going to be, and we know that complementing some current technology vendors will help us grow, and will help their partner community to stave off some competitive threats from other vendors.”

This includes storage partners and cloud-based security partners, McEwan confirmed. It all goes back to Gartner’s strengths for Egnyte in EFSS: “open to partnering where it does not have to skills in-house.” It’s certainly something some vendors could learn from.

The immediate future for Egnyte in Europe involves several key hires, building up the new European headquarters in Stockley Park, in Heathrow, and then planning for next year.

As the oft-repeated, rarely-learned story of oligarch sports teams goes, a glut of great players at gratuitous expense in one go rarely gels. It’s very similar in business. To that end, McEwan will be overseeing an onboarding process, getting two key US employees across the pond to oversee things for up to two years.

“It’s going to be a controlled and steady growth, but I’m also very conscious that this window is getting smaller and smaller from an opportunity perspective,” he adds. “Every day that’s gone by that we haven’t been able to promote our position is an opportunity that’s gone by the wayside for at least the limited term of the contract with the competitors.

“But we are finding we’re having lots of conversations with customers who would have traditionally or initially gone with one of the other vendors, but started to realise some of the business or technology limitations. We’re finding a bit of interest coming from what I would call second generation clients, who have already put the foot into a file sync and share company.

“I think it’s going to be a steady growth, but steady growth is something that can be measured in doing a couple of things right, and that’s focusing on the customer, getting the right channel strategy, and fulfilling those requirements.”

It’s long been mooted that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) just isn’t ready for mainstream deployment, even though Gartner predicted there would be 49 million VDI users by the end of 2013.

Whether it’s down to incompatibility or price is a matter of executive opinion. Yet a new survey for CloudTech by IP EXPO Europe has revealed a small amount of growth in the space.

According to the survey, of 300 UK IT directors and managers on IT infrastructure, over a quarter (27%) of those surveyed had implemented local virtual desktops, while around one in five (18%) had implemented desktop as a service (DaaS).

Even though it’s certainly not a majority, these numbers represent a chunk of the sector exploring virtualised desktops for their organisation. However, only 21% of respondents said they would consider VDI or DaaS in the future.

This may be the more illuminating stat – and other research shows these figures might be a little higher than expected. The DataCore State of Virtualisation survey, from March last year, showed that more than half of organisations hadn’t implemented virtual desktops at all. Gartner expects a maximum of 15% VDI penetration by 2015.

As 2X Software’s Giorgio Bonuccelli wrote for CloudTech earlier this month, VDI penetration is still less than 2% of all desktops worldwide.

“VDI has been touted as the short cut to cloud computing, so what has put a sea of traffic cones in the way?” he asked.

Incompatibility is a big issue. As Brian Madden wrote earlier this month, user experience of VDI on a tablet is not good – because VDI is about delivering Windows apps from devices with precision mice and keyboards to, usually, a mobile device. The form factor change just doesn’t work.

So what other options are available? Software defined networking (SDN) is an opportunity, but the landscape is mixed for this self aware network. Four out of 10 polled said they were adopting SDN in their data centre, with one in six (16%) on premise. Yet one in eight (12%) said they were unfamiliar with the concept.

What do you make of current VDI penetration? Would you use it at your company?

Picture credit: Ericsson

Earlier this week, it was confirmed that Swedish telecoms provider Ericsson had bought a majority stake in platform as a service (PaaS) provider Apcera.

The deal, to close in Q4, sees Ericsson strengthen its position in the cloud market. Apcera will continue as a standalone company, with Ericsson shoving funds into Apcera’s technology and sales operations.

The telco cloud is an expansive opportunity and market place. One only needs to look at the initiatives Verizon is introducing with Verizon Cloud, for instance, or how CenturyLink is beefing up its portfolio.

Ericsson’s route, on the surface, looks similar. The Swedish telco’s offering, Ericsson Cloud System, adds cloud capabilities to an existing operator network. Yet Ericsson sees PaaS as key to success in cloud – hence the buying of Apcera. But Apcera’s USP is one of policy and governance – a vital cornerstone to larger enterprises using the cloud.

“Cloud technology is disrupting the global ICT infrastructure market, and service providers must modernise to provide more value to their customers,” an Ericsson press release trumpeted. And this realignment is becoming prevalent elsewhere in the business, too. Only a week ago, Ericsson announced discontinuation of its modem business, “redirecting investment from modems to radio networks”, according to the press bumf.

This all leads in to how Ericsson is going to change its strategy through 2015. Ericsson’s portfolio will comprise three arms: operator telecom cloud, with network functions; operator IT cloud, with OSS/BSS, media and IT functions; and operator commercial cloud, with commercial anything-as-a-service (XaaS) offerings.

Offering cloud services appears, on first glance, to be a straightforward value-add for telcos, who already leverage a huge network. Take CenturyLink, for example. The communications firm slashed their prices on cloud storage, in line with competitors, back in May. More recently they launched a private cloud, but with the aim of private cloud security and public cloud agility.

Richard Seroter, director of CenturyLink Cloud, told CloudTech at the time the company was “bullish” in the public cloud market. It’s an indication of how seriously telcos are taking this – and for more evidence, look no further than Verizon.

Verizon Cloud has got some serious weight behind it, including integration with AWS and partnerships with Oracle. It’s clear that stakeholders from both sides see the benefit, and it helps keep mobile operators and telcos agile – a key point made by Ericsson earlier this week.

The CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, has spoken of the “huge opportunity” to become the leader in enterprise cloud in a newsletter, describing the shift from client-server to cloud-mobile as a “once in every 20 years” change.

Whitehurst put pen to paper summing up Red Hat’s summer on a positive note with a glut of acquisitions and partner news over the past few months. The most recent of these was the buyout of Irish mobile backend as a service provider FeedHenry, as reported extensively on sister site Enterprise AppsTech last week.

The acquisition of FeedHenry made Red Hat’s third of the fiscal year, after open source storage system firm Inktank in April, and cloud services provider eNovance in June. Each acquisition, naturally, plays right into Red Hat’s strategic shift of an open hybrid cloud – and it’s also the case with strategic partnerships, including Cisco, Nokia and Google.

“When I talk to customers and partners, they are excited about the moves Red Hat is making, and they are thrilled by the leadership and enterprise open source know-how Red Hat is bringing to a promising and fast-growing project like OpenStack,” Whitehurst wrote, adding: “We want to show customers that open is better. We are bringing customers the tools they need to build their infrastructure from the ground up with open source, enabling amazing flexibility and choice.”

It’s safe to say Whitehurst’s claims to be the ‘undisputed leader in enterprise cloud’ might see raised eyebrows at IBM and SAP towers, just to name two examples. But the Red Hat chief’s vision about the state of the cloud market can be resonated by all its competitors.

“We’re staring at a huge opportunity,” he added, “the chance to become the leader in enterprise cloud, much like we are the leader in enterprise open source.

“The competition is fierce, and companies will have several choices for their cloud needs. But the prize is the chance to establish open source as the default choice of this next era, and to position Red Hat as the provider of choice for enterprises’ entire cloud infrastructure.”

Red Hat isn’t the only tech firm to ditch its hand recently. The legacy software vendors, such as IBM, SAP and Oracle – whose long-serving CEO Larry Ellison stepped down last week to move into a more technical role – are moving in the same direction.

But Red Hat is aiming to change from being the leaders of Linux to platform as a service kings. And given Amazon’s cloud services run on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company will hope to become the power behind the throne.

The latest survey from cloud provider Databarracks has found that small businesses are lagging behind when it comes to disaster recovery planning and cloud exit strategies.

Only 30% of smaller businesses had a business continuity plan in place, compared to 54% of medium organisations and 73% of large businesses. The findings, which appear in Databarracks’ annual Data Health Check report (registration link here), showed a poor uptake in smaller businesses for now, but added that disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) was either the most or second most likely service to be adopted – across all business sizes.

The report firstly examined the state of cloud computing across businesses. The majority of companies (25%) still use only one cloud computing service, yet a solid amount use two (23%). The numbers trail off afterwards (three cloud services 7%, five cloud services plus 4%), yet as the report notes: “More cloud services are being used, but adoption is gradual and often discrete.”

The most popular cloud service was backup as a service (BaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) with 21% of the vote, followed by IaaS, PaaS (18%) and DRaaS (16%).

Smaller organisations aren’t putting disaster recovery plans in place, or testing their plans if they do have them, but all organisations are at risk of losing data. Hardware failure (21%), software failure (19%) and good old fashioned human error (18%) were the key reasons for data loss. Not surprisingly, lack of time (35%) is cited as the biggest reason for firms not testing their plans.

For larger organisations, 22% listed human error as the main cause of data loss over the past 12 months, compared to just 6% of smaller firms. 23% of small organisations have no data retention policy, compared to 3% of large organisations.

The overall verdict is clear: disaster recovery needs to be part of the process at any level.

“Disasters don’t discriminate when it comes to the size of your organisation,” said Peter Groucutt, Databarracks MD, adding: “And it’s not just the media-worthy incidents such as cyber-attacks or natural disasters that are a risk.

“There needs to be an attitude change. Disaster recovery is not only available and affordable to organisations of all sizes, it’s absolutely essential.”

After cloud provider Nirvanix shut down in September last year, Gartner analyst Kyle Hilgendorf noted how the research firm’s advice on cloud exit strategies were falling on deaf ears.

“I suspect it is because cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as cloud deployments – they are an afterthought,” wrote Hilgendorf. “These functions rarely receive the attention they deserve in IT, except for immediately following major events.”

The Databarracks study shows that companies are starting to pay attention to this – but it will take a little while to see through first.

Read more: Disaster Recovery as a Service: Can small businesses now benefit?

Picture credit: William Warby/Flickr

Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison has stepped down from the chief exec role, with co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd appointed to steer the ship.

Ellison isn’t leaving Oracle full stop however, assuming the role of CTO and executive chairman at the software giant. In an earnings call, Ellison admitted that not much would change under the bonnet.

“I’m going to continue doing what I have been doing over the last several years, [Catz and Hurd are] going to continue what they’ve been doing over the last several years,” he said, according to Seeking Alpha.

It would seem this is a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, then.

The news came alongside Oracle’s first quarter results, which were again on the spotty side. New software license revenues were down 2%, net income stood still at $2.184bn – noting a very slight decrease in constant currency – while total revenues were up only 3%, considerably lower than Wall Street predicted.

In the call, new CEO Catz immediately got the excuses in early. “Those of you who have followed us for a while know that Q1 is a seasonally smaller quarter which can mean more volatility in our results, and that’s what we saw this quarter,” she said.

Not surprisingly, the new chief execs focused significantly on cloud as the way forward. “As the movement to the cloud grows, we expect this transition will affect our revenue to the positive,” said Catz. “These customers will essentially replace their software support payments with a cloud subscription which will mean substantially more revenues to Oracle.”

Yes, this may sound a bit like ‘welcome to cloud’. SAP and IBM, other legacy hardware and software businesses, got there a little earlier with their aggressive transformations. IBM shoots out new iterations at a rate of knots, and remember SAP’s bigging-it-up quote that they were going to become ‘THE cloud company’ (their emphasis, not ours)?

When Ellison grabbed the reins for the earnings call, he discussed Oracle’s new multi-tenant database as a service offering, to be unveiled next week at Oracle Open World. “With the push of a button, your data is automatically compressed 10 to one and encrypted for secure and efficient transfer to the cloud,” he said. “With the push of a button, your existing application automatically becomes a multi-tenant application and it’s moved to the Oracle Cloud.”

To be fair, this does seem like an improvement, especially with the NoSQL brigade of MongoDB, Couchbase et al breathing down Oracle’s collective necks. Yet the analysts, naturally, were more interested in the boardroom shuffle.

On the promotion of Catz and Hurd, Ellison said: “They deserve the recognition. They deserve the CEO title and I’m happy that our management team continues forward as a team.”

When one analyst enquired about whether there would be a change on the sales leadership side, Hurd curtly replied: “No.”

There was a little back and forth between the analysts over whether Ellison was staying on these executive calls. “You’re going to have to wait a little while longer before you get me off the call,” he joked. “I apologise to everyone for that.”

This may reveal more than is let on. Even though Catz and Hurd are the new faces at the top of Oracle, Ellison will still be doing his fair share of backseat driving.

This isn’t to say there aren’t good precedents for this change, however. Catz joins HP’s Meg Whitman, IBM’s Ginny Rometty and Good Technology’s Christy Wyatt in the influential female tech CEO camp, while the concept of two co-CEOs is not new: SAP has been doing it for years.

Ellison, if you recall, was initially dismissive about cloud computing. Oracle has since then been playing one long game of catch up – and if the latest results are anything to go by, then they could be playing this game for a while longer yet.

Picture credit: Oracle

Cloud storage provider Box has announced compatibility with iOS 8 on day one, including support for iOS App Extensions, which allows apps to “lend” functionality with each other.

This means users can access Box content from any other app on their iDevice, provided it supports the Extensions framework. Users can select a document on Box and open it in an editor, or work on Box content from a mobile project management tool, for instance.

“This gives you unprecedented freedom and control when it comes to your information, while maintaining the security you expect with Box and iOS,” wrote Aaron Levie, Box CEO, in a blog post.

“This is a huge milestone for interoperability, and we’re thrilled to support iOS 8 on day one to transform productivity and collaboration for individuals, businesses and industries,” he added.

With the release of iOS 8 yesterday, plenty of companies have announced their support. Enterprise mobility management (EMM) provider MobileIron noted in a blog that iOS 8 was “the first sign of Phase III of mobile enterprise computing.”

In other words, we’ve moved on from only being able to do wireless email, and we’ve moved on from the more recent trend of using standalone apps for working on mobile. Now it’s about workflow. It was a point Levie referenced to close his blog.

“We’re just at the beginning of the post-PC technology shift, with many more years of innovation to come,” he wrote. “What Apple introduced [yesterday] is crucial to the health and success of this transition.”

Box is evidently ramping up its collaboration tools. Box Notes, a tool which allows users to compare notes across mobile, has recently been made available for both iOS and Android-powered devices.

You can find out more about Box’s iOS 8 integration here.

Open source cloud provider Rackspace has dismissed all merger and acquisition discussion to continue with its current independent trajectory – and has named Taylor Rhodes as new chief executive.

Rhodes joined Rackspace in 2007 and was appointed president of the company back in January. He takes over from Graham Weston, CEO from 1999 to 2006, who had temporarily held the fort since the shock retirement of Lanham Napier in February.

“Our board conducted a thorough search of highly qualified internal and external candidates, and we are confident that Taylor is the right person to lead Rackspace through its next phase of growth,” said Sam Gilliland, lead independent director of the Rackspace board in a statement.

“Throughout his tenure, Taylor has proven himself to be an inspiring leader, a strategic thinker and a committed Racker,” he added.

There had been talk of potential merger or acquisition activity at Rackspace, with the company disclosing that multiple parties were interested.

Former CEO Weston explained the updates. “We talked to a diverse group of interested parties and entertained different proposals,” he said in a statement, adding: “None of these proposals were deemed to have as much value as the expected value of our standalone plan.

“We concluded that the company is best positioned to drive value for shareholders, customers and Rackers through the continued execution of its strategic plan to capitalise on the growing opportunity for managed cloud services,” he added.

The wording of the press material indicates that Rackspace has taken this decision on its own merits – but not all are convinced. Rackspace shares have plummeted in the aftermath of the announcements, according to Business Insider.

Ben Kepes, writing for Forbes, noted pessimistically: “I was worried about Rackspace’s future before this potential sellout was announced, and nothing I’ve seen since has changed my perspective.”

The company’s ethos, stated at the start of the year, was to continue its push towards OpenStack and hybrid cloud models. This time around, with analysts inevitably about to ask questions over why M&A never materialised, Rackspace is pointing towards gaining increased share in the managed cloud market, as CloudTech reported earlier this year, as well as an upturn in figures.

Rackspace added more than $20m of new revenue in a single quarter in Q214, the first time this has happened in the firm’s history. Sequential revenue growth of 4.3% in the same quarter was the highest since 2012. But is this all short term gain masking long term pain?

The company also fiercely cultivates its relationship with customers – the term Rackers for instance, and claims of ‘fanatical support’. With this strength in branding, Rackspace remains on a sure enough footing for now. But as Rhodes steps into the hot seat, it may be a baptism of fire for the seven year veteran.