Getting more from ‘best of both’ worlds

By Mark Davies 

It feels like it’s always been the same old story for the majority of businesses on their cloud journeys. Or sometimes the lack of journey.

They reach a stage where a certain amount of their data and applications have been successfully migrated to the cloud, while the rest - the ones that feel can’t be moved -remain on-prem.

Once those basic applications are moved to the cloud this should be their chance to take stock and see what else could be done to make their IT more efficient or cost-effective.

Cue head-scratching and deliberations on how they can best utilise both on-prem equipment and cloud based services.

But having applications running in two different places but connecting to each other has become very achievable especially with the advent of open 'apis' (application programming interfaces), which allow applications to communicate with each other.

The reality is that today, more and more businesses believe a blend of cloud and on-prem is a desirable end-position.

Complex Solutions - Simply Sold

By Lee Prior

“I know enough about technology to know that I don’t know enough.” That’s what I often hear myself saying when faced with a technical question that exposes the limit of my knowledge. It’s a flippant comment that most times will buy me the breathing room I need to look up the subject matter and return with a full answer a little while later…That’s fine for me I’m in marketing, but a sales person faced with a call or presentation where they are expected to have all the information to hand in order to secure the deal doesn’t always have that luxury.

Hungry, Hungry HPE

By Lee Prior 

So far 2017 has been a pretty interesting year for HPE. We’re only half way through March and already we’ve seen them extend their portfolio through the acquisition of enterprises like Simplivity, Niara and now most recently Nimble, with each of these additions being met with the slow head nod of general approval by the wider technology sector. That in itself is an achievement some would say, but when you consider the pace of change we are seeing, with Hybrid IT finally releasing the long promised potential of the Cloud and the reality of the Internet of Things cresting the horizon, to be able to navigate the turbulent waters of such rapid progress with a steady course, speaks volumes about the crew at the helm of the good ship HPE.

Once upon a time a story about a large IT company consuming one of their smaller rivals wasn’t really “Big News”, and had more to do with Darwinian natural selection, stock market roulette, Sabre Rattling or just plain good old fashioned billionaire vs billionaire ego than it did with a clear strategic vision or a drive for innovation - but things have changed.

As a lowly Marketing Manager, albeit for the biggest HPE Distributor in the UK, this type of corporate manoeuvring was an interesting side note that held my attention for as long as I was able to read without interruption, but ultimately news of a buyout had very little bearing on my day to day life. That is most decidedly not the case now, and rather than acquisition for acquisition’s sake these additions have the whiff of strategy about them, with each bringing their own particular part of the answer to a far larger question.

Big Data: Answering the questions that don’t yet exist

By Phil Le Blond 

Data is growing fast, real fast! It’s predicted that humanity’s accumulated digital universe will be 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020. That’s a lot of data to crunch considering today only 0.5% of data is ever analysed. Somewhere in that data we will find the cure for all disease, the ability to conserve our planet, to generate unlimited free energy, prevent war, and produce enough food for every person on the planet. Technology will have to help us, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will guide us to the answers we seek, or perhaps decide to kill us all.

The business case for Hybrid IT – Selling Hybrid IT effectively

By Lee Prior

Hybrid IT is all the rage in the IT world right now but what exactly does the term Hybrid IT actually mean?

Hybrid IT is the magic recipe for the perfect 21st century IT solution, and the ingredients are the right mix of private cloud, public cloud and traditional IT.

The recipe however is different for every organisation, and the only way to ensure you end up with the solution you need is to build it using HPE products backed up with the services and support of their largest and longest serving Value Add Distributor in Westcoast…That’s what the blurb from our new Ignite website says about Hybrid IT, and as descriptions go it’s not a bad one. But we thought we needed to give it a little more depth.

HPE Discover 2016 round up

By Jess Tyley

Meg Whitman was clear in her keynote at HPE Discover 2016 about her vision of the future of IT and I was lucky enough to be there to hear it first hand on Tuesday. Digital transformation is at the forefront of the company’s vision along with key partnerships and data led insight.

Our world is experiencing a digital disruption. We are producing data like we never have done before and its more important than ever that we have the capability to process and draw insights from the data we create. Data volumes are increasing outside the edge and companies need to be able to process the data to make decisions in real time.