Interview - Chris Akerberg from Vizioncore
Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009
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The President and Chief Operating Officer of Vizioncore, Chris Akerberg is currently in Sydney Australia so I look the opportunity to ask him some questions about the company and their products.
Chris has been with the company for a number of years, before the acquisition by Quest. Since becoming President and CCO he has been focusing on building out the company in order to sustain a much larger customer base, moving beyond the 20,000 customers they now have to the future 100,000 range.
The questions and a summary of the answers:
- What does it mean for Vizioncore to be owned by Quest?
It allows the backing of a large company which brings deeper pockets for investment. There is also the wider breadth of the Quest sales force. Lastly there is the sharing or blending of IP where Quest can bring their application and database management expertise.
- What is the reason behind having free and paid tools within the companies portfolio?
We are in a marathon of virtualisation adoption and we want to give back to the community free tools that will assist in that virtualisation adoption. These tools include a P2V product, V EcoShell and an Optimizer product for storage. The paid tools will evolve with the customer as their need for virtualisation increases.
- How do Vizioncore tools work within an organisation as they move along the maturity model to reach 80% virtual or above?
We have an analyze to automate story which matches the virtualisation adoption life cycle. Analyze your existing environment (vFogLight), take action on the results by converting the workloads (vConverter), then protect the workloads (vRangerPro and vReplicator), now monitor those workloads (vFogLight), then optimize the environment (vOptimizerPro and vFogLight) and lastly extend your ROI by doing automation (vControl). So analyze to convert to protect to monitor to optimize to automate. We can help customers out anywhere along the curve.
- What can you share about product updates next year? What's coming?
Not a wider portfolio, we have already moved from being a backup product to having a comprehensive portfolio. What you will see from Vizioncore is going deeper within those products. So vRangerPro being able to have visibility and control of the applications as well. vFogLight being able to look at applications. Bringing application awareness to the product line. Lastly having all our products being Cloud ready as we are supportive of customers moving into the managed services or Software as a Service industry.
- VMware are increasingly releasing products which overlap with functionality of 3rd party providers like yourself? What's your position on this?
We get this question quite a bit and are creating literature for our channel partners and customers about the differences between what VMware are offering and what Vizioncore do. What we do is communicate with VMware and understand where their roadmap is going and as they turn we will turn with them. Yet if they are going to put a significant investment in an area of platform, Vizioncore can choose to not spend money there and maybe go off in a different direction. Likewise where VMware might not be investing, Vizioncore can capitalize and add more value. Also we want people to think of investing in Vizioncore is investing in virtualisation management. We are going to to not only do this analyze to automate story for VMware but also for HyperV and Citrix. As customers decide what to use within their strategy they can still look to Vizioncore for supporting products.
Of course what you really should do is watch the short video below and listen to Chris in his own words. He is much more articulate than my summary.
Rodos
