Joann Starke

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Digital disruption is resulting in smarter and smarter devices, an explosion of business services, and increased complexity for data center professionals.   The initial response of many organizations was to increase virtualization and headcount only to discover that this was not the way to increase organizational speed and agility.   Meeting the challenges of today’s […]

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The heart of automation is about reducing the intricacies of deploying and managing complex services and applications. Its about translating manual processes into automated workflows that deliver significant value to your business while allowing your staff to focus on more strategic projects. LightEdge is an enterprise-grade service provider and consulting company that is focused on […]

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Shadow IT is not a new topic and the threat it brings can wreak havoc on your business as well as your leaders. For years, we have known that employees and lines of business are bypassing IT departments and utilizing cloud services to get their job done.  Just how much are we using? Research brings […]

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Cloud has become a strategic component to business strategy for a wide range of businesses because it can deliver a comprehensive set of workloads as automated services.   Additionally, it allows organizations to reach new customers, stay ahead of the competition and transform the way they deliver resources to line of business and application teams. But […]

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The Industrial Revolution was a time when the world was transitioning to new manufacturing processes from the 1700’s to approximately 1820.   This transition moved manufacturing from hand to machine production and literally changed just about every aspect of daily life.    This was followed by a second revolution that scaled machine production into large-scale production […]

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Hybrid Cloud.  These two words are individually or collectively on the minds of just about every business today, regardless of size.  Why?   If you’re implementing a private cloud, you will inevitably ask yourself if you should be leveraging public cloud for dev/test or an alternative place to deploy workloads. Traditional people think of hybrid cloud […]

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Digital technology has become pervasive in our lives.   As a result tech savvy employees and customers have new expectations for interacting with your business. The problem is how do you meet these new expectations while at the same time meet your objectives of cost reduction, delivering business innovation and increasing profit? Translate your manual provisioning […]

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The world is experiencing a digital revolution that is rapidly changing your business landscape.  This revolution is not only connecting people with digital technology; but it has made this technology ubiquitous in all of our lives.  The result is tech-savvy employees and customers with new expectations how to interact with your business. Meeting these expectations requires […]

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There is no denying it cloud has moved beyond buzzword and become a key foundation element for over 40% of enterprise organizational strategies.   Making the decision to “go cloud” is the easy part.   Figuring out how to optimize and deliver on your cloud strategy is another discussion. The “first wave to cloud” was focused on operational […]

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Shadow IT is nothing new as employees and lines of business bypass IT departments to get the cloud services they need to complete their jobs.   Rogue IT has resulted in a conversation around the unintended and potentially dangerous consequences of increased security risks, compliance concerns and hidden costs. We all know that private and public […]

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Application architects and developers are the life blood of your business. They are responsible for analyzing, designing and developing commercially viable solutions to drive revenue for your business. These teams keep up-to-date on the latest technology, drive development activities and are responsible for the design and day-to-day functioning of non-production environments. What they are not […]

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Customers frequently comment that IT simply isn’t keeping pace with their needs.  Provisioning new data center resources can take weeks.  To be fair, IT professionals are doing the best they can but manual processes and organizational silos can make the process equivalent to trying to play a symphony without a conductor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc7U3VQIsk Cisco UCS Director’s […]

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Whether you call it digital disruption or the age of the empowered customer, business models are being disrupted; and at the center are our customers.  Customers are driving new consumption models that focus and align the way they want to consume technology:  faster, cheaper and with a higher degree of service.  Accommodating our customers requires […]

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The pace of business is accelerating.  As consumers, the internet has changed our expectations for how to order products, services or information as well as how fast it is delivered.  Think about it.   We access a web page, order what we want and complete the transaction.  In some cases, our orders are delivered within hours. […]

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Advanced technology assists your business on its journey to becoming more efficient and agile so it can keep serving the rising expectations of customers.  But, how can you help these advanced technologies serve your business well? Technology headlines focus on the individual tools to help you support advanced technologies; but the pivotal reality is that […]

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Application teams are the backbone of the revenue generating capabilities of all companies.  These creative people spend their off-hours working with the latest tools to keep their skills sharp.  Increasingly, these teams are going into the public cloud to develop their applications.  Why?  Developers need resources in days.  Procurement and IT quote resource delivery in […]

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Smart devices give us access to information and services at the speed of need. But they have conditioned us to expect anything and everything faster — and that includes IT services. This expectation for speed coupled with modern technology is driving IT innovation.  Yet, in most organizations, delivery of consistent infrastructure to application or business […]

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Companies’ expectations of IT keep increasing as the pace of business intensifies, creating greater demand for new services and faster access to resources and data.  If you have been reading my blogs, you know that THE way for IT to keep pace with the speed of business is automation. But buyers beware. IT automation solutions […]

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Agility is highly sought after in today’s business environment.   It allows your business to rapidly adapt to market changes or competitive pressures.  It enables your business to capture new opportunities and customers without expanding your staff or increasing costs.  To accomplish these objectives you need one thing:  automation.  Automation delivers the key element for business […]

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How quickly can your organization stand-up a new application or deploy new services?  Most customers tell me, “not fast enough!”   I am clearly hearing from them that the new standard expectation across the organization is to receive precise data center resources in “internet time,” easily and definitely on-demand. But customers are not the only […]

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Organizations are realizing that without a formal comprehensive cloud strategy, line of business and application architects will continue to sidestep their internal IT organizations and procure solutions on their own – an industry phenomenon known as “rogue IT” which happens out of necessity.  While it helps solve the immediate problem, it brings with it a […]

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Private cloud – you hear it everywhere.  Industry analysts tell us that private cloud has become a core data center strategy  well on its way to becoming a core element in the formal IT portfolio. Forrester research indicates that CIOs and IT departments are strongly drawn to private cloud as the on-ramp for their cloud […]

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Forrester research indicates that private cloud has entered into the formal IT portfolio by becoming a core part of data center strategy.   I have been writing about the sea change underway in private cloud.  This sea change means that automating the provisioning of virtual machines and their infrastructure is inadequate in a world where your […]

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The connections between your business success and data center efficiency have never been clearer or stronger. Delivering data center resources quickly to capitalize on new business opportunities or projects is a major factor for business success. The only way to expedite resource delivery is by replacing manual processes with repeatable, best-practice-based automated service consumption and […]

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The increasing pace of business is creating high demand for IT efficiency and speed. IT directly affects your ability to respond correctly and quickly to new opportunities.  Slow IT equates to slow business. The latest release of Cisco UCS Director allows IT to automate the deployment of infrastructure delivering the speed and efficiency IT needs […]

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Businesses move quickly until they have to cross rough roads paved with technical challenges. That’s because even though data centers are sophisticated, the components that support most businesses still include far too many 20th century manual processes, silo based resources and administrators pressured to keep up. Although automation can speed up IT, and your business, […]

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Automation was a major theme at VMWorld 2014 in Barcelona this month and it was clear that IT professionals are discovering that they can’t keep pace with business using manual provisioning and de-provisioning processes. The problem is that with the physical boundaries of time and space, there simply isn’t enough staff to meet the need. […]

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Every organization needs more from their data centers, such as faster services and data analysis for real-time decision making.  The unprecedented expansion of data is a major driver of rapid data center transformation.  Consider these statistics: 90% of all data in the world was created in the last three years Data centers handled 214 exabytes […]

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Most of us expect immediate delivery both as consumers and as employees. As employees, we are no longer willing to wait weeks for IT to deliver what we need. IT departments feel the pain that ensues from our urgency in the form of shadow IT.  Shadow IT results in the double trouble of higher risk […]

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Data center strategy is a critical part of business strategy. In fact, the ways and means of IT deployment make all the difference between an efficient, successful organization and an ineffective one. Therefore, to align and adapt quickly to the needs of business, IT is changing the delivery mechanisms of infrastructure resources. Part of the […]

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Organizations are rethinking their data centers and nothing is off limits for discussion – everything from infrastructure to software to processes, and even more fundamentally, the very ways in which a data center serves the business. One element that is empowering this phenomenal shift is IT automation. It is vital. No automation, no effective IT. […]

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In previous blogs I have described how organizations are maturing beyond provisioning of individual servers to provisioning of richer cloud-based application stacks.  Known as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), this capability takes cloud technology beyond infrastructure to automate the application life cycle.  PaaS allows developers and IT operations to collaborate and ensure that application stacks are consistent and […]

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At a recent event I saw a T-shirt that said “Remember when cloud only meant rain?”  In the days before cloud computing, asking someone what they thought about cloud usually invoked a response about an animal-shaped formation or looking at cumulonimbus and predicting precipitation. One thing that today’s IT clouds have in common with their […]

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Imagine that you head the leading telecommunications provider in Italy and you are watching traditional service and revenue streams struggle under intense competitive pressure. Customer retention is a major issue because the types of services required by your residential and business clients are changing. Clearly, you need to retain customers and do so by offering […]

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Every area of your business has a stake in the way IT delivers services. Each one needs speed, agility, efficiency, and a clear definition of its relationship with all of the other areas and the business as a whole. In order to get there and create an agile and efficient organization that flows, you need […]

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Cloud is changing the way businesses deploy and manage IT and business services. Industry analysts estimate that by the end of 2014, four out of 10 companies will have deployed a private cloud. But where do you start? Join Cisco and Forrester on February 18th, for this live webcast entitled: Cloud Management: It’s More than […]