We asked a few of our team members what they were grateful for when it came to working at Virtana, and here’s what they shared with us: 

Olivia Palomares – Digital Marketing Manager

“I’m thankful to work for a company that lets me relax and recharge.”

Ryan Clagett – Technical Support Manager

“I’m grateful to work for a company that encourages teamwork and collaboration.”

Karlia Kue – Growth Product Manager

“I’m grateful to work for a company that promotes employee growth.”

Eva Karnaukh – VP of Business Operations

“I’m grateful to be involved with cutting-edge technology on a daily basis.”

From all of us at Team Virtana, we hope this season brings to mind all of the many things you have to be grateful for – both at work and beyond. 

The post ‘Tis The Season To Be Grateful appeared first on Virtana.

But how do we continuously foster a work environment where every aspect of diversity, equity, and inclusion truly thrives? DEI can’t become the new word art we emptily plaster across websites and social channels; it’s crucial that businesses actually invest, implement, and measure it. 

At Virtana, it’s one of our Core Behaviors – behaviors that define what we expect and encourage every person in the company to do. To ensure diversity, we educate leadership teams on the importance of diverse hiring. And diversity isn’t bound to race and gender. It includes experiences as well. Where you grew up, went to school, who you love, how you think, or where you’ve worked all play a part in bringing cutting edge innovation and valuable opinions to the table. 

We post job openings to groups created for minorities and females, such as Women in Technology, to attract diverse candidates. During the interview process, we ensure that there are multiple qualified candidates who also represent a wide range of diversity. By increasing the diversity of our candidate finalists, we have been able to successfully create a highly qualified and diverse workforce. 

We benchmark, set incremental goals, and measure our success in attracting, hiring and retaining diverse talent company wide and across individual departments. We create collaborative environments where the opinions and experiences of our workforce are shared.

1/3 of our leadership team is made up of women, and 38% of the women in our company come from a diverse background, with more than 30% of diverse women in leadership positions at Virtana. 38% of employees, and 32% of our executive leadership team, are racially diverse. In the last 18 months alone, our percentage of female employees has grown from 16% to 26% of total employees. And since April, 62% of employees we hired were diverse.

One of the main reasons we moved to a completely remote workforce was to allow us to hire people across all parts of the world. Without geographical limitations, we can continuously take strides to achieve our goals in creating and maintaining cultural diversity across all departments and levels.

Increasing DEI in STEM careers is a multifaceted effort. It takes the education system, companies, leaders, recruiters, ALL pulling together to foster its growth. And it requires businesses to prioritize it and track the progress to ensure goals are met, not just talked about. Creating an inclusive environment where people feel a sense of belonging can ignite creativity, boost productivity, and even lead to better mental health. 

We can all be a part of the solution to make workforces diverse in all ways. And again I must stress that diversity is much more than gender or race. I truly believe in diversity for disability, sexual orientation, race, gender and of course neurodiversity. 

Let’s work towards diverse, equitable, inclusive hiring. DEI is powerful and I’m proud that we at Virtana are fully invested in making it a reality.  

The post Making DEI a Reality in STEM Careers appeared first on Virtana.

As a part of our business transformation in the last one year, Virtana has embraced both the sharing economy and as-as-service subscription. We adopted a WeWork-like model for our physical office space and colocation for our data center, from the traditional office space and data center we owned and managed. We are also creating and delivering a Software-as-as-a-service model for our customers.

Most of these transformational shifts in the way we live and work were made possible by the cloud. It powers the digital economy because it can flex up and down according to demand, making it indispensable for any type of business to effectively compete and thrive. And yet, managing this environment encompasses a level of choice and complexity that presents a formidable challenge for organizations, as Andreesen Horowitz lays out in “The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox.”

As I see it, we have leveraged the cloud to transform our businesses, and that will continue. But we also need to apply that same level of innovation and agility to transform the way we manage our cloud environments. We are seeing signals that this is starting to happen, which is why, when it comes to hybrid cloud, I see the coming 12 months as the year of flexibility. 

Here are my top 10 hybrid cloud predictions for 2022:

Prediction 1: Public cloud at scale is cost-prohibitive.

They say you are crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you are crazy if you stay in it. Public cloud delivers on its promise early on in the lifecycle of a company; however, as a company scales, it becomes cost prohibitive. 

Cloud waste is nothing new. In fact, last year I predicted that “Cloud waste and cost will continue to hinder cloud adoption. Operational inefficiencies will decrease; however, customers will not see cost curves being bent down without proper instrumentation.” This has borne out, and as companies scale, the amount of waste in their cloud spend also scales. Enterprises need cost optimization to get the cloud right, remain cloud smart, and manage scaling and hidden costs.

Prediction 2: Colocation enables choice and on-demand cloud service consumption.

Colocation for private clouds is important because it provides the best of both worlds: your own space, more control, and technology features. Virtana had its own data center with 80 racks, but now we are moving half of our data center assets to a colo in San Jose and will transfer the other half later next year. Embracing an on-demand service for our data center simply makes better sense—and we see customers coming to that same conclusion.

Prediction 3: Cloud arbitrage comes of age.

Cloud arbitrage is the ability to choose cloud providers for specific services based on which one offers the best functionality or support at the lowest price at that time. 

There is ample reason to believe that the coming year will be a transition year as the public cloud becomes more flexible and cost-effective at scale. It will be driven by two trends: more cloud providers and more co-location options resulting in healthy competition – meaning more options for the customers to leverage cloud arbitrage to drive down the cost.

This next year will feature any-cloud to any-cloud workload placement to push the limits of achievable cost optimization and provide organizations more leverage. The emergence of industry-specific clouds, and the fact that cloud flex does not necessarily require public clouds, means companies are no longer limited to just the big three providers but will have more choices. Be prepared to see smaller options emerge as reality. 

Prediction 4: Hybrid cloud complexity continues apace.

Based on a May 2020 Equinix Hybrid Cloud Trends and Strategies E-Book, the number of companies “committed to or interested in a hybrid cloud strategy has increased from 81% to 93% since 2017.” How well organizations successfully manage a complex computing, storage, and services environment composed of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and public clouds will drive their ability to ultimately achieve business results.

Prediction 5: Containerization accelerates application delivery.

Containers offer businesses a dedicated, cloud-based space where they can build, test, and deploy new applications. The technology offers faster delivery, agility, portability and modernization. By 2022, Gartner estimates that more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today.

Prediction 6: The rise of serverless design streamlines management.

In this model, users do not need to lease servers or pay for fixed amounts of storage or compute, so infrastructure scales invisibly as an application requires it. Is it really serverless? Not really—the servers are there; however, it adds a layer of abstraction between the user and the platform, so the user does not have to worry about technical details of servers—it is easy operational management that requires no system administration.

Prediction 7: Cloud computing drives increased artificial intelligence (AI) adoption.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai described AI as “more profound than electricity or fire” in terms of the effect it will have on society. Because AI platforms require tremendous processing power and data bandwidth for training and processing data, the cloud plays a key role in enabling AI services, and cloud data centers make these capabilities available to anyone.

Prediction 8: Cloud security is increasingly everyone’s problem.

Protecting data in the cloud and on premises is a responsibility that is shared between organizations and cloud service providers. As the cloud sector continues its vigorous growth—bringing in more stakeholders with more IP at stake—security will only continue to rise in importance with all constituents doing their part.

Prediction 9: Edge computing keeps data processing local.

Rather than relying on a centralized cloud, edge computing brings data collection, storage, and analysis closer to the sources generating the data. Gartner predicts 75% of business-generated data will be created and processed outside of a centralized cloud by 2025. This reduces latency and powers the use of edge devices. For example, for autonomous cars to transmit massive data volumes from thousands of devices to on-premises data centers and clouds for processing without unacceptable levels of latency, you need to build data storage and processing capabilities at the edge. Technologies such as IoT, analytics, and 5G can build edge computing capabilities so that processing and analysis happens at the location where data is generated and the insight is required.

Prediction 10: Open source will accelerate cost-effective flexibility.

A 2020 Tidelift survey revealed that 68% of enterprises evaluated open source during the COVID-19 economic downturn to help them save money. Open-source software offers a great way to build and manage cloud environments that are flexible and cost-effective, and avoid what could be expensive vendor lock-in. Faster time-to-market along with increased security are also important considerations. Open-source projects are usually inspected by many different contributors, leading to increased code quality and no secret backdoors or vulnerabilities.

Powering cloud arbitrage at every level

We have only just begun to scratch the surface on the innovations that are possible thanks to the cloud. But as more and more organizations of all stripes are jumping in, success relies as much on the way we manage our multi-cloud environments and choose cloud providers for specific services based on which one offers the best functionality or support at the lowest price at that time. I am excited to see where these trends—and the increased hybrid cloud flexibility they deliver—will take us. And I am proud that Virtana is helping our customers successfully navigate that journey.

The post Hybrid Cloud Predictions: 2022 Will Be the Year of Cloud Arbitrage appeared first on Virtana.

According to the results of our recent State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps study, only 18% of cloud decision makers surveyed said that they have been able to avoid unnecessary cloud costs. This does not bode well for IT teams responsible for managing hybrid cloud infrastructure within a budget that we CFOs care so much about (i.e., everyone). Where are those excessive costs coming from?

• 41% experienced workloads bursting above agreed capacity
• 35% overprovisioned their compute or storage resources
• 34% over-bought or had unused reserved instances
• 34% stated they had storage blocks no longer attached to a compute instance
• 22% were vexed with poor job scheduling

Half of the respondents reported experiencing two or more of these problems, and 26% were plagued by three or more. Furthermore, given the relative lack of visibility organizations have into their hybrid cloud infrastructures, these numbers are likely understated. Let’s examine each of these budget-busters in turn.

1. Workloads bursting above agreed capacity

Cloud bursting, which is when a workload running on premises or in a private cloud moves or “bursts” into the public cloud when demand spikes, can prevent overload. If you don’t have a good handle on what’s happening with your workloads and how they’re evolving, bursting and the associated costs can escalate well beyond what you’ve budgeted for.

2. Overprovisioning of compute or storage resources

Overprovisioning to support future growth is an age-old approach IT infrastructure teams use on premises. Any costs for capacity you may not be currently using aren’t wasted; these are capex investments that don’t change the amount you pay over the life of those assets. In the cloud, however, because you don’t need to invest in hardware, overprovisioning isn’t necessary, assuming you have an elastic environment. Sometimes it is used to mitigate risk—to ensure that workloads don’t end up under-resourced. The difference is that these “extra” costs are opex that could be eliminated or at least minimized.

3. Over-buying and/or under-utilizing reserved instances

You can save money on your cloud deployment by committing to a particular plan—called a reservation, reserved instance, or programmatic discount—that delivers discounts on the resources you use. While you might have some flexibility to modify or exchange a reserved instance, you typically can’t cancel it, so if you over-commit, the savings might not materialize.

4. Unattached storage blocks

There are a couple of reasons you might have storage blocks that aren’t attached to an active instance. You may need to keep it for audit and compliance purposes, for example. Too often, however, instances get terminated but the attached storage does not—and you continue to pay for that orphaned volume. You need a way to track, report, and eliminate these wasteful, unused resources.

5. Poor job scheduling

If you don’t schedule batch processes or big jobs well, you could end up degrading the performance of other applications. It’s not just a matter of adding capacity. More capacity will always solve the problem, but it might also cost you more than necessary. Instead, you could do things like co-locate a workload that needs to be run at night with another workload that only runs during business hours.

Keeping your cloud costs in check with Virtana Optimize

So, how do we CFOs help our IT/DevOps/Cloud teams keep these cloud costs from spiraling out of control? With Virtana Optimize, you can optimize your cloud capacity and costs on an ongoing basis, so you can stay on budget, even as conditions and options change, and avoid an end-of-month billing surprise. With Optimize you can:

1. Improve forecasting and planning. Use real-time data collection and analytics for ongoing cost management and resource optimization recommendations to meet SLAs and stay on budget.
2. Understand cost-impacting changes in real time. Automatically optimize Amazon EC2 and Azure VM instances with rightsizing recommendations. Quickly adjust to changes in cloud service provider offerings to optimize cost structures.
3. Manage risk more cost-effectively. Tune sizing based on your organization’s risk tolerance with “what if” analysis that includes CPU, memory, I/O, and ingress and egress charges. Safely adjust over-allocated resources to save on your bill without risking production.
4. Optimize reservation planning. Avoid long-term programmatic discount commitment mistakes by finding the ideal resource settings before purchase. Track the amortized value of programmatic discount usage at the instance level.
5. Identify orphaned or unused resources. Automatically identify unused compute instances, storage on stopped instances, and unattached storage blocks. Quickly spot wasted spend with proactively emailed reports.

We need all the help we can get managing our costs in this increasingly complex IT landscape. Fortunately, there are amazing resources available, including our own Virtana Optimize. We have seen our customers truly surprised at the savings they see. The cloud is an amazing resource; now you can keep the costs in check, mitigate surprises, and lower that hosting bill. Amazon may not thank you, but your shareholders will. Request a free trial today!

Get the survey report: State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps survey

Request a trial: Virtana Optimize

The post 5 Ways Cloud Costs Can Spiral Out of Control appeared first on Virtana.

Virtana was just awarded Best of San Jose in the Software/SaaS category for 2021! 

I was fortunate to step into a role at Virtana in June and in that short time have witnessed numerous awards won, milestones hit, and new hires coming on board. When a company has all A+ reviews on HR sites like Comparably and Glassdoor from their own employees, you know you made the right choice in joining the team. 

This company and its leadership continue to inspire me, and it seems like I’m not the only one. One recent employee review stated that “New leadership is driving a true servant-leader environment and cultural shift. Very positive.” Another said, “We are all rowing in the same direction, and it’s amazing!”

And that is just a glimpse into our culture. 

In terms of our technology, our platform is winning awards like Top 10 Cloud Management Platform, Digital Innovator, World Technology Leader, Top 10 Companies Revolutionizing Healthcare, Top Player Reducing Cloud Costs, and CRN even named us Coolest Cloud Company for 2021. 

I look forward to seeing where Virtana goes from here and what the rest of this year has in store. From cultural growth to professional development, technological advancements to global recognition — I’m looking forward to witnessing and being a part of it all!

To learn how you could join the team at this exciting time, view our current openings. 

The post We’re Honored! 2021 Best of San Jose: Software / SaaS Company appeared first on Virtana.

Companies built to last navigate trends and economic challenges such as COVID-19 and take advantage of the window to re-invent themselves, while keeping sights on the long-term – and ultimately come out stronger. That is exactly what we did last year. We accelerated the company’s transformation by expanding more aggressively into the hybrid cloud market.

COVID-19 fast-tracked the future of advanced digital technologies, making companies more human, and organizations will change forever and for the better. Vaccines will bring an end to lockdowns, consumer savings have risen, debt has lowered, and more stimulus is on the way. If you connect these dots, I am optimistic that America is best positioned for much stronger economic growth in the second half of 2021 than we have experienced in decades.

Virtana is well-positioned to help companies accelerate their digital transformation and drive human progress. We are on track for three quarters in a row growth – with new executive leadership, an active strategy to expand in the cloud market, and our new SaaS Platform having earned a flurry of recent industry recognitions. However, we are just getting started; the best days of the company are still ahead of us.

To prepare us for the future, I have spent a lot of time in the last several months listening, asking a lot of questions, and learning—and then working with the executive leadership team to crystallize the vision, purpose, and core behaviors for our company.

The Virtana vision and purpose

Our vision is to provide a simple software platform that leverages high-definition precision data insights to manage, monitor, and secure any workload on any cloud for hybrid IT customers.

Why do we do it?

Our purpose or mission is to simplify enterprise cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation to drive human progress. It sounds lofty, but it is true. In fact, it is something the company has been doing for years. For instance, one vertical we are particularly strong in is healthcare. We are proud that we were able to help our customer AstraZeneca manage their hybrid cloud complexity last year to enable agility and cost savings so they could focus on developing a critical vaccine during the pandemic—and that is just one example. So, while Virtana may not directly save lives or otherwise drive human progress, we enable those who do.

But it is not enough to define just the what and the why. If we don’t also clearly articulate how we are going to accomplish the vision and purpose, those statements will never be more than motivational posters on a wall. How you make them real is through actions which, as they say, speak louder than words.

This is where core culture behaviors come in.

Why should anyone outside of Virtana care about our culture?

I believe that it is equally important for companies to address talent and culture as much as they address customer churn or competitive advantage. As Peter Drucker so eloquently put it, culture eats strategy for breakfast. In other words, Virtana’s culture directly influences our ability to fulfill our vision with our platform, so our customers can accelerate digital transformation of their own vision and purpose to drive human progress.

Our core culture behaviors are our promise to you and your company’s mission

We undertook a robust, months-long process that resulted in five core culture behaviors. I use the word “behaviors” not “values” as they relate to culture, and this is deliberate. Values are passive—they are simply qualities. They signal how you should be, but do not help you achieve that state. Behaviors, on the other hand, are concrete. They are expressed as actions, which provide a roadmap for how to get from here to there.

Core culture behaviors define what we expect and encourage every person in the company to do. It is how we work, treat customers, and treat each other. It also provides a way for everyone to know what to prioritize and how to make decisions, even in the absence of specific instructions. When practiced effectively, core culture behaviors create an exciting workplace and, more importantly, a sustained competitive advantage.

By promoting and rewarding these behaviors in our own company, we are enabling everyone here at Virtana to do the work you need us to do so you can fulfill your own company’s mission.

1. Embody people-first servant leadership
2. Foster customer obsession and innovation
3. Promote diversity and inclusion
4. Measure what matters (OKRs)
5. Help each other

We embody people-first servant leadership

I am very passionate about servant leadership and talk about if frequently (see here and here) but more importantly, I encourage everyone, no matter their level of seniority, to practice servant leadership. We expect our leaders to treat leadership as a service, to the team members and to our customers.  Servant leadership means that leaders exist to support their employees, not the other way around.

Servant leaders focus on the needs of others before considering their own.  At the core of this belief is that a leader exists to serve their people; the leader acts as a guide and mentor to encourage team members to fulfill their highest potential by providing coaching, opportunities to shine, and motivation. Those served should ideally become freer, wiser, more autonomous, and more capable of becoming servant leaders themselves or reaching what they aspire to do and arrive wherever they want to go. Leaders at Virtana exist to serve our customers. The job to be done by the leader is to help our teams realize their full potential and to help our customers achieve their objectives. At Virtana, humility, approachability, and being grounded in hands-on reality are defining characteristics of a successful leader. ​

“People-first” reflects the fact that we are in the business of hiring and developing talent. It is our most important asset and one that deserves continuous learning and development at all levels. We are serious about developing people in their current roles and for future roles at all levels. Business is dynamic and technology is constantly changing.  Developing new knowledge and skills keeps us all enjoying our work, while keeping the company relevant. Talent is one of the areas where we would like to create competitive advantage. 

​

We foster customer obsession and innovation

Virtana has always been customer-focused, as evidenced by our incredible customer base, some of whom have been with us for many years. Additional recognition of our customer-first approach can be seen through our all five-star customer ratings on Gartner’s Peer Insights and an award from Gartner recognizing Virtana as a ‘Customer-First’ company.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Professor developed the theory of “disruptive innovation” and “jobs to be done,” and the book The Innovator’s Dilemma said, “People don’t just buy products or just want to use a certain service. They ‘hire’ them to do a job.”

At Virtana, we are obsessed with empathetically understanding the ‘job’ customers want to hire a product or service to do. What is the outcome they want to achieve?  

With a focus on outcomes, we jump-start innovation to create products. This outcome-driven innovation (ODI) fulfills our customer needs for the jobs to be done (JTBD).  

True innovation requires risk, and we will take risks in the service of our customers to solve their problems, not just for the sake of innovation. When we experiment with a focused goal in mind, failing fast and learning fast, we build success for our customers, our teams, and our company.

We promote diversity and inclusion

Part of what helps us innovate and better solve customer problems is having more ideas. Diversity creates a competitive advantage. It is not about whose idea it is, but about getting better ideas to address the challenge at hand. When we listen to be inclusive and incorporate diverse points of view, the best idea can win.

We accept each team member for who they are and encourage them to bring their whole self to the company. By respecting both similarities and differences in others, you open the door to opportunity. 

We believe diversity and inclusion generate a better strategy, better debates, and better outcomes. 

We measure what matters

Metrics drive behaviors so if we want the correct behaviors we need to manage the right expectations and priorities and measure accordingly. This means focusing not on activities but on outcomes that deliver results. By aligning on objectives and key results (OKRs), we can focus on what matters and hold ourselves accountable to do what we say we will do.

Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel and author of the book “High Output Management” said, “Create an environment that values and emphasizes output.” Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management, created the term “activity trap.”  We love what Andy Grove said and we avoid focusing on activity traps.

We help each other

This is another area where the team excels across the board—and we will continue to help each other, to collaborate, and to solve difficult issues together.

We are one team with one dream, which is to work on the Virtana vision and fulfill our purpose.

This is how we run the company and how we engage

This is an exciting time for Virtana and for our customers. We are growing and are expanding our product portfolio with the Virtana Platform to help customers solve their most pressing hybrid cloud migration, cost control, performance optimization, and monitoring challenges.

Formalizing these core cultural behaviors is a vital part of being the organization our customers need us to be.

The post Open Letter to Every Company Undertaking Digital Transformation to Drive Human Progress appeared first on Virtana.

This myGrapevine+ inteview with a leading Silicon Valley CEO explores how HR can wield Emotional Intelligence for better business outcomes. Includes:

• Insight on Google’s culture
• Explores why Sundar Pichai is a ‘servant leader’
• Analyses the limits of emotional intelligence and what tools are needed alongside it

As the UK enters its second year living with Covid, many HR Leaders have a stronger idea on how to assist the workforce through this crisis. Part of this assistance may be born of knowing employees more and responding to their needs. This is certainly something that Kash Shaikh CEO of Virtana, a Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence (AI) software solutions provider for hybrid cloud complexities, former Vice President (VP) at Dell and member of the Forbes Business Council believes. He exclusively told myGrapevine+ that Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the most pivotal skill needed this year and can underpin a HR practice that is offered more as a service to employees with EI interwoven in to it.

What is EI?

The subject of EI has received plenty of attention from a research point of view. Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman released his book in 1995 named ‘Emotional
Intelligence’ and has since applied the notion of EI to the business world. In this book, Goleman explains that HR rely on EI to lead and collaborate with employees in a better way and it seems to be a concept that top leaders practice, too. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has received acclaim for the EI he has displayed during his time as CEO of the tech giant. Pichai’s ethos is that professionals are not managers but rather a coach: “Trying to get the best out of others. It is about empowering other people to succeed … to lead effectively, you must understand the person you are working with, not just the role they play.” The Google CEO believes it is about asking the right questions, getting to know the employee’s family situation and creating a deeper bond, which in turn helps to cultivate a strong preforming company.

“Trying to get the best out of others. It is about empowering other people to succeed … To lead effectively, you must understand the person you’re working with, not just the role they play”

Leadership as a service

So, how does EI then impact HR practice? Well, Shaikh believes that HR leadership should be a service with EI playing a large part. Shaikh feels HR leader positions should be viewed as “servants of the people”. The CEO states if HR leaders hold this mentality, employees will be more successful in their jobs. This point is supported by a Levo Institute survey, an intelligence hub for the Millennial economy, which found 80% of employees consider emotional intelligence crucial for developing their careers.

According to the Silicon Valley leader, bosses in HR should practice “listening with empathy and ask probing questions such as ‘how you are feeling?’ and ‘what can I do to help?’” An important part of this is about obtaining a clearer picture for HR leaders. This helps them understand if an employee is feeling overwhelmed or dealing with problems outside of work. In fact, this awareness in leaders can be used to encourage staff to take breaks as well as help to prioritise parts of their workload. Goleman states that emotional awareness and noticing them when they occur is an important factor for a HR leader.

Shaikh said: “Servant leaders (HR leaders who follow the will of employees’ needs) with high EI know there is a subtle difference between challenging team members to reach their potential or pushing them too much to breaking point.”

EI makes leaders stronger

Goleman has also found that truly effective leaders are distinguished by a high degree of EI. The author believes even when a manager possesses all the right traits such as a good supply of ideas, an incisive mind and access to training but without EI, the leader will not be remembered as ‘great’. The Psychologist and author details how by HR leaders showing this characteristic can inspire colleagues to allow the regulation of emotions become a guiding light for the work community. Goleman and Shaikh hold EI in similar ways of importance as an essential attribute any HR leader should have.

Google’s EI

Back in 2017, Google research found that EI is what makes a leader highly effective. Therefore it is clear why Google CEO Pichai displayed strong EI whilst leading the tech giant. Furthermore, after their research, Google released some advice on how to become a leader who displays greater EI. The tech giant believes a leader should show genuine curiosity in the individuals that make up their team.

Google’s research found that employees are adept at realising when a leader is not being genuine and just trying to complete a box ticking exercise. Therefore, to be effective a manager must show sincere care and interest in worker’s lives. Additionally, Google found that kindness is contagious, and that when a leader displays more humanity to a staff member, this feeling of good will can then be passed on to others in the organisation.

Google research additionally found that when treated in a positive way, workers will then deal with other professionals during their job in a similar way. Moreover, a leader who shows strong EI traits, encourages cooperation rather than competition in a team. Google states that compassionate leaders understand how vital it is to create bonds between workers to increase morale. This way, staff will welcome the team’s dynamic as it guarantees everyone has a chance to contribute.

By analysing Google’s statistics, professionals can see the bene ts of EI the company is reaping. Google has been recognised as the number one company in the US for building a happy culture and a positive workforce by CareerBliss, placing it higher than Deloitte, Microsoft and Apple. Inc. magazine has also reported that Pichai is the opposite of what people may perceive a high-powered CEO to be. The Google boss leads with compassion and empowers his staff by being as personable as possible. When holding virtual meetings during the pandemic, Pichai goes around the team meeting, asking everyone to introduce themselves as “this helps everyone not only to feel heard, but also to feel that they have a stake in the outcome.” If EI is helping to run one of the world’s most successful companies in the world, then clearly it is a managerial method that could be universally used.

“Not all cultures are driven the same way”

Must understand business culture

Another aspect, beside emotional intelligence, that HR leaders need to show is a stronger understanding of business culture. Shaikh states: “Understanding the culture,
the state of the business, and then coming up with the strategy is one of the most important things that I have learned.” He adds that cultures vary from company to
company as “not all cultures are driven the same way”. The leader of HR, having acquired this understanding can then apply the right strategy. Shaikh states that when staff “live and breathes the culture, it is the most effective way to measure everyone’s contribution to company culture.” The CEO explains it simply: if colleagues notice an employee does not understand the culture of the company “they will be rejected as a foreign object”. In fact, the CEO feels that without this understand of culture, EI will be weakened and bonds between staff broken.

It is clear from the pandemic why cultural understanding is important. Maintaining and understanding a strong company culture has recently received even more importance than usual. A Cisco study recently found that to successfully implement hybrid working,a business must exhibit solid company culture. And as it has been widely anticipated that following Covid hybrid working will become the new de facto way to work, it is no surprise that culture is once again in the spotlight. With numerous large names stating that hybrid working is what they will be adopting moving forward – Microsoft, PwC, and the Civil Service, amongst them – it is no surprise that Shaikh believes that a better understanding of culture can turn staff into a more effective workforce and as a byproduct can pave the way for hybrid working.

EI breeds and attracts success

With past clients such as AstraZeneca, Dell, Apple, Costco, Nasdaq and Boeing, the Silicon Valley CEO of Virtana has used an EI-rst ethos and it appears to be driving a successful company. The CEO being more aligned to the emotions of Virtana’s team appears to have helped feed in to its achievements. Listening and being empathetic can go a long way when leading a team, with the mentality that leaders are the servants of the employees instead of professionals who just give out orders.

By HR leaders utilising EI in step with an understanding of culture, they can see employee’s happiness increase which can spread to the rest of the team and increase the wellbeing of the company. By displaying EI traits, a leader can tell the workforce that they are there to act as a servant of the staff and actively help them throughout their duties. Therefore, it makes sense that a leader can become more effective by adopting EI.

Original interview and article published via HR Grapevine

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An application is a set of functions that serve a business purpose. A workload is the stress placed on the infrastructure by that application. For example, when a customer calls a company’s support line, their account information is on the screen when they’re connected to a support representative. To make this happen, the customer support application runs in the background to look up the incoming phone number, collect and present the associated account details, and display that information on the representative’s screen. The whole process touches code that runs on operating system(s), which sit on virtual machines (or bare-metal servers), which rely on storage subsystems and networking subsystems to communicate. The effort needed to support this application—CPU, memory, network, and disk consumption—is what I consider a workload.

Each application has a workload fingerprint. When the application was initially built, the developers generally knew how much horsepower was needed to make it work. For instance, they knew the application in our example had to support 500 customer service reps who average one phone call every 2 ½ minutes. They can determine how many queries will be executed on the database, how many rows will be returned, how much disk will be accessed, how much CPU is consumed to crunch the numbers, etc., and spec out the infrastructure needed to support the application. Pre-production testing can aid in obtaining a more accurate workload fingerprint; rather than guessing at consumption values, a developer can run tests that will simulate production. 

Workload placement considerations

When most people think about workload placement, they are looking for the optimal place to run that workload.  Some companies are only mature enough to find space available while others are looking for the most efficient place to run the workload, efficiency being a code word for “cost effective.” (If your thoughts jumped to “run slow apps on slow disk,” you get my point.) However, you need to consider more than just cost.

For example, cost will be less of an issue for a mission-critical workload that absolutely has to be lightning fast. In that case, you should optimize on performance. Some workloads don’t have to be fast but they do have to be always up, so those should be optimized on availability or redundancy. You need to understand the critical dimensions and then stack rank your workloads accordingly. There are three dimensions you could optimize toward: cost, performance, and availability. Each has its own implications when it comes to placement decisions.

Evaluating placement opportunities

Once you’ve characterized what an optimized application means (and each app is different!), you need to look at what’s available in your infrastructure. The key word here is available. It’s not enough to just look at what’s currently free—that’s a myopic way of viewing your infrastructure. Workloads are granted rights to resources that they may or may not be consuming at the present moment. 

Imagine a scenario where a hyper-critical application’s workload is busy from 6 am to 6 pm, Monday through Friday. You have placed it on expensive hardware. But for 12 hours each weekday, and 24 hours over the weekend, that expensive gear sits relatively idle. If a critical batch-processing workload appears, you must consider co-locating those two workloads together. What this means is that at any given moment, all of your options are on the table, and you need to consider the broadest set of permutations to truly optimize your infrastructure.

This is not a one-time exercise

Conditions change over time. You need to understand your workload needs on an ongoing basis and see how you’re trending. When that customer support team grows to 750 reps, and process improvements drive down the call average to one every 2 minutes, there’s an impact to your infrastructure. The application hasn’t changed, but the workload has. This so-called workload drift could require you to adjust your infrastructure to keep performance at expected levels, and to avoid surprise costs if you’re running in a cloud environment. And yes, this means your infrastructure architect’s job is never truly finished, and they need a way to constantly probe for better ways to run the workloads they have.

Keeping workloads optimized

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is—which is why you need tools to automate the process. And that’s exactly what the Virtana Platform helps you do. Our Optimize module helps you characterize your workloads, evaluate your placement options, and recommend improvements based on your priorities—on premises and in your public clouds.

If you’re ready to #KnowBeforeYouGo, contact us to request a Virtana Platform demo.

Cloud Optimization and Rightsizing

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The Virtana team is thrilled to have been awarded ‘Customer First’ status by Gartner and we are proud to state that in the past 12 months we have received all 5 out of 5 Star reviews by customers across all products and services.

To our customers who submitted reviews, thank you! These honest reviews mold our products and our customer journey, and we always welcome both positive and critical feedback. Read our Global 2000 Customer Reviews.

Virtana have pledged to be a Customer First vendor in the ITOM (IT Operations Management) market for our product(s): VirtualWisdom, CloudWisdom, Virtana Platform, Virtana Migrate (Cloud Migration Readiness). Our team takes great pride in this program commitment, as customer feedback continues to be a critical priority, and shapes our products and services. 

Everyone at Virtana is deeply proud to be part of the Customer First program. To learn more about the program, or to read the reviews written about our products by the IT professionals who use them, please see our reviews on Gartner Peer Insights.  

If you have a Virtana story to share, we encourage you to join the Gartner Peer Insights crowd and weigh in here.  

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The global pandemic has proven the importance of businesses to be agile to flex to scale up or down with changes in demand. The pandemic also validated the cloud’s value proposition. A public cloud platform provides enterprises with an agile, on-demand, flexible scale up or down to align with the business’s changing needs. However, the public cloud is not appropriate for all types of workloads. Some workloads are better to be on-premises – using an in-house data center or on private clouds. This approach, for example, delivers better performance and greater compliance with regulations.

Also, businesses are not sufficiently prepared to implement cloud roadmaps due to migration and skills-related challenges. According to IDC 2020 research, less than 20% of applications have migrated to a public cloud to date. Just under 30% of medium-to-large organizations responding to IDC’s META CIO Survey 2020 highlighted migration as a key challenge. 39% cited a lack of skills as an obstacle hindering their rollout of cloud strategies.

A survey of IT decision-makers in the United States and the UK, commissioned by Virtana and fielded by Arlington Research in November 2020, confirmed that of enterprises that moved workloads from on-site data centers to one or more public clouds, 72% subsequently moved some of them back. The top reasons cited were the applications should not have been moved to a public cloud in the first place (41%), technical issues associated with public cloud provisioning (36%), degradation of performance (29%), and unexpected cloud costs (20%).

To achieve success in their multi-cloud journeys, we advise enterprises to use a data-driven, phased approach for moving application workloads, to enable them to make appropriate cloud decisions for hybrid/multi-cloud environments.

In the past year, public cloud adoption was accelerated by the pandemic which led to faster growth. According to IDC, enterprise cloud spending, both public and private, increased 34.4 percent from a year previous, while non-cloud IT spending declined by eight percent.

By the end of 2021, the digital transformation pace will accelerate by 2x, as companies face the need to adapt to a post-COVID-19, digital-driven world. Global cloud spending will grow several times faster than overall IT spending throughout this period.

Here are my cloud predictions for this year and beyond:

• Prediction 1: By 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.
• Prediction 2: By the end of 2021, more enterprises will deploy a hybrid cloud management platform for on-going cost control, observability, and real-time analytics for all IT operations initiatives.
• Prediction 3: Cloud waste and cost will continue to hinder cloud adoption. Operational inefficiencies will decrease; however, customers will not see cost curves being bent down without proper instrumentation.
• Prediction 4: In 2021, we will see joint provider cloud offerings as providers realize they can partner to accelerate public cloud adoption since most enterprises use a multi-cloud approach.
• Prediction 5: We will see increased containers and serverless adoption, creating a spike in global demand for both multi-cloud container development platforms and public cloud.
• Prediction 6: Greater skills gap for cloud and AI technologies.
• Prediction 7:  All cloud companies will grow with the rise of the public cloud; Google’s growth may outpace the market as they become a stronger defacto #3 after AWS and Azure.
• Prediction 8:  Look for on-premises companies such as Cisco and Dell to offer cloud-like as-a-service consumption options for their infrastructure.
• Prediction 9: Channel partners will become more important as enterprises want more guidance to know before they go.
• Prediction 10: Machine learning and AIOPs will accelerate in the management of cloud migration and monitoring. Data from these AIOPs/ML initiatives will require a hi-fidelity approach to de-risk cloud mgmt.

The cloud will continue to be a crucial aspect of companies’ digital transformations, but what will make or break their success is how prepared they are before they take the leap. We strongly believe in a ‘know before you go’ approach, and would be happy to share various use cases that prove the success (see AUCloud’s 30% capacity savings) of this method. Get in touch with us to learn more.

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