The CTO Advisor

It seems like I’m writing or talk more about Gartner than at any point in time in my career. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant (MQ) comes under more scrutiny than any other piece of content than in the infrastructure market. It doesn’t matter the results; there are constant questions surrounding Gartner’s research criteria and their integrity. The most recent MQ was a mapping of converged infrastructure solutions. It seems the biggest surprise is the inclusion of Oracle as a leader in the space. There was a good deal of push-back from engineers who don’t view Oracle as innovative. In this podcast, I talk MQ and why Oracle should be in the latest report.

Gartner recently released their Magic Quadrant (MQ)for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure. Both The Register and ZDnet have questioned the logic in the research. Many of the subject matter experts I follow on Twitter have questioned if the MQ is little more than marketing for those vendors that spend money with Gartner. I tackle the question and make some suggestions for Gartner which includes following the lead of Big 4 consulting practices that have to deal with similar issues.

I believe there are to cultures of DevOps. One culture is driven by developers looking to consume infrastructure resources and the other driven by infrastructure professionals looking to automate provisioning and management of the infrastructure. In this CTO chat, I approach the high-level differences and provide an example use case in which CTO's have to consider the training they give to their technologist.

My wife's legacy PDA may be the perfect metaphor for the advantages and disadvantages of hyperconverged infrastructure. I discuss why convergence may benefit the majority of data centers while not being a universal solution for every enterprise.

SDN has been a hard sell within the enterprise. However SD-WAN may just be the killer app for reducing both security risks and costs.