Positive Reinvention

It’s a truism that IT essentially reinvents itself every decade or so.

In some ways this can be rightly seen as a cynical way to repackage the same old tosh and sell it again to confused.com IT departments afraid of having an unsupported IT implementation. But it does also spawn benefits, not least because the vendors themselves are often forced to reappraise their offering and actually improve it.

Vendors reinventing themselves or morphing into their next “Dr Who” regeneration makes a lot of sense, not least because technology sometimes comes first and then there’s the question of what to do with it. And that’s the hard bit. And it’s not because they’ve created a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, it’s simply finding the right way to market (it). I’ve seen many vendor clients with top notch tech take time to get their offering right – Voipex with Aritari, Fedr8 with Green Rain are two that immediately spring to mind (seasonal reference). Another is Densify, with whom I had a catch-up this week and whose offering is based on the technology from their twin, the artist formerly known as Cirba.

When I reviewed the Cirba technology, it was extremely impressive, but equally a tech monster, as in, “bloody hell, this does an awful lot of stuff”. How many times have you seen what was fundamentally being offered as a product and thought: “that should actually be a service offering, based on that underlying technology”?

Never has there been a better scenario for this than in this cloud-adoption era. Companies, xSPs, carriers even, are all second-guessing as to how to optimise storage, application deployment and delivery across what can be a global delivery mechanism – storage with multiple tiers of virtualisation (and real tears, not virtual ones) and layers of networks to manage and optimise. So Densify takes the guesswork out of it. That’s my summation of its proposal; it’s a far more obvious and appealing offering than trying to explain how the underlying tech works and EVERYTHING that it can do. I’m speaking from experience here. I still get the headaches…

Put simply, Densify’s girlfriend Cloe (Cloud-Learning Optimisation Engine) uses machine-learning to work out what to do (sounds a bit like a Chloe I used to know) and, er, does it, without the user having to work it out for themselves. Bingo! Densify reckons it provides results in the first 48 hours of deployment, with Cloe recommending the best cloud technologies for any given application. The solution also offers multi-cloud support, whereby applications are provided the right resources even when simultaneously using multiple cloud vendors.

Sounds like the perfect test revisit scenario…