As competition for the attention of the billions of technology users around the world escalates, companies strive to create the best possible experience for consumers. A lot of these strategies revolve around creating authentic customer/user engagement campaigns from a marketing perspective to build sound relationships. TK Kader (pictured), group vice president of strategy at Marketo Inc., shared ...

As underlying infrastructure technology matures, companies are turning their attention to user experience improvements to differentiate and add value for their partners. Taulia Inc., a company facilitating early payments on purchase orders, first focused its marketing effort on acquiring buyers as paying customers. After successfully building out its two-sided marketplace, the company next turned to improving ...

The transition to cloud computing requires a lot of different pieces, including networking security and virtualization, all moving toward a common goal. Alan Cohen (pictured), chief commercial officer of Illumio Inc., shared his view on what it means to be fully cloud native, including an analogy to hybrid vs. all-electric vehicles. “This cloud movement is about ...

Simply developing accurate data science models presents such a big effort that many companies overlook the challenges associated with bringing these models to production. To help facilitate this process, DataTorrent Inc. is using its open-source engine Apache Apex to help businesses better utilize real-time big data analytics. And the company’s co-founder and co-founder and chief strategy officer, Phu Hoang (pictured), is leveraging his ...

The financial services sector has historically been viewed as a legacy industry with behemoth organizations slow to adopt change. In the face of increasing cybersecurity threats, however, banks are empowering their information technology departments to re-tool their infrastructure to ensure the latest security and compliance measures, including through the use of virtualization, according to Josh Holst (pictured, left), ...

As computing trends like virtualization, containers or edge continue to create churn in the industry, companies are hard-pressed to maintain a competitive edge. Rob Young (pictured, right), manager of virtualization product and strategy at Red Hat Inc., says his company’s position as an operating system agnostic to the computing infrastructure, virtual or otherwise, enables it to ...

As the industry consolidates around a few cloud service providers, smaller companies are finding innovative ways to carve out market share by targeting niche, high-value use cases. Zadara Storage Inc., an enterprise storage as a service company, created an opex business model for providing storage hardware with some additional software hooks built in. Nelson Nahum (pictured), ...

While some question the role of developers in the operations and infrastructure-focused VMware Inc. community, others view the collaboration between developers and classical DevOps people as an indication of a healthy organization. As Rebecca Fitzhugh (pictured, left), technical marketing engineer at Rubrik Inc., pointed out, companies can innovate much faster when developers start becoming operations minded. ...

The diversity of use cases and application requirements make it impossible for a single infrastructure architecture to dominate the market. While many see this as a challenge, Steve Herrod (pictured), managing director at General Catalyst Partners, shared why he thinks this trend toward heterogeneous computing environments presents a great opportunity for innovation. “The heterogeneity is now, ‘I ...

As infrastructure providers grow larger and expand beyond their core offerings, segments where companies used to collaborate are starting to become arenas for competition. As a result, companies like VMware Inc. are spinning off business units where they are not competitive enough, such as the sale of vCloud Air to OVH, a global, hyper-scale cloud ...