Stories by John Gallant

In the battle for the next generation of enterprise IT, John Stratton carries a lot of weapons. Stratton is president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the nearly $30 billion unit formed just over a year ago to deliver networking, cloud, mobility, managed security, telematics and a host of other services in a more coordinated fashion for Verizon's top enterprise buyers. Building on a traditionally strong base of wired and wireless network services, Verizon Enterprise also blends in acquired assets like cloud hosting company Terremark, security company Cybertrust and Hughes Telematics. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Stratton spoke with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about Verizon Enterprise's progress since its inception, including a dramatic streamlining of internal systems and processes designed to make life much easier for the company's customers. Stratton also discussed the company's suite of services aimed at simplifying life for IT teams struggling with mobility and the influx of consumer devices, and he talked candidly about the prospects for a third mobile platform to rival Apple's iOS and Google's Android. He also talked about how cloud is reshaping the IT landscape and hinted at a series of major upcoming cloud announcements from Verizon Enterprise. Also, he explained how the "Internet of Things" is creating powerful new business opportunities for Verizon and its enterprise customers.

n this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal spoke with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about the reality and hype around SDN, and why the data center requires a different network than your father's general-purpose Cisco net. She also explored how her work at Cisco shaped Arista's strategy, and shared insights on how Arista's partnerships with VMware and Cloudera are making it easier to move to cloud and embrace big data, respectively.

Citrix is many different things to many people. It's a cloud company, it's a virtualization player, it's a mobile technologies vendor and it's a collaboration products provider. But according to Mark Templeton, Citrix CEO since 2001, all of that blends together and fits with where enterprise IT shops are headed. Here, speaking with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant, Templeton dishes on Citrix's overall strategy, its relationships with Cisco, Microsoft and Apple, its rivalry with VMware, and its controversial take on open source cloud computing.

In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, CDW CEO Thomas Richards spoke with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how CDW is expanding its strategic services offering, and how mobility and consumerization are expanding growth opportunities for the company. He also talked about the rollout of Windows 8 and the Surface tablet, and why CDW is in an ideal position to capitalize on the big changes reshaping IT.

Jim Whitehurst says it's not just Red Hat's products, but its philosophy that place it at the forefront of cloud computing

To hear Oracle President Mark Hurd tell it, the $37.1 billion hardware and software company is well ahead of competitors on any number of fronts, from transitioning customers to SaaS and the cloud, to incorporating social technology into its products.

Egenera CEO Pete Manca says the company was 10 years ahead of its time in targeting the converged data center infrastructure, but its smooth transition from a hardware-focused company to a software-oriented one in recent years has enabled it to stay in the thick of what's now a booming market pursued aggressively by Cisco, HP and others. As part of our ongoing IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant spoke recently with Manca about Egenera's strategic shift, its partners and competitors, and a big new product announcement.

The customer always comes first. Except when it comes to HCL, the $6 billion Indian outsourcing -- make that co-sourcing -- giant led by CEO Vineet Nayar, who literally wrote the book on a philosophy known as 'employees first, customer second.' In this latest installment of our CEO Interview Series, Nayar spoke with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how that philosophy is fueling HCL's rapid growth and why more CIOs ought to consider adopting it. Nayar also discussed how HCL has set its sights beyond competing with other Indian outsourcers like Infosys and Wipro and is squarely targeting what he believes are the many unhappy customers of services giants like IBM, Accenture and CSC. The outspoken Nayar took shots at the 'fear psychosis' created by services firms in trying to peddle their offerings and used a barnyard epithet to describe public cloud computing, which he claims isn't ready for prime time. He also outlined HCL's aggressive plans for hiring locally in the U.S. and Europe, and defended the company's use of the controversial H-1B visa program. In addition, Nayar talked about the new goals for IT departments in 2012 and beyond, and explained why treating mobile as a technology 'misses the point.'

Those of us with a bit of institutional memory recall a brash upstart named Network Appliance that burst onto the storage scene to challenge EMC -- itself once a brash newcomer -- and other storage royalty like IBM. But that was 20 years ago, as difficult as that seems to believe, and the company, now named NetApp, is $5 billion-plus storage leader in its own right.

When you think about Polycom, the first image that might pop into your mind is the company's 'iconic, triangular speakerphone.' But CEO Andrew Miller wants you to know that Polycom is much, much more than that. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Miller spoke via Polycom's high-definition telepresence system with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about why Polycom should really be known as a software company and about Polycom's move to the cloud. Miller also discussed the impact of mobility on the visual communications market and why -- despite all the talk about video from Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers -- Polycom is in a better position to help companies drive the next era of collaboration. He also talked about the powerful partnerships Polycom has built with top-tier service providers and enterprise stalwarts like Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, IBM, and others.

William McCracken took over as chief executive officer of CA Technologies close to two years ago and in that time has engineered a series of organizational changes and acquisitions aimed at improving the company's perception among buyers and broadening its reach into new areas of technology and new customer segments.

Corporate functions from human resources to customer relationship management (CRM) have already been migrated to the cloud. But are you ready for systems monitoring and management in the cloud? More important, is management-as-a-service (MaaS) ready for your company?

It used to be easy journalistic shorthand to write 'database-giant Oracle Corp.', but that labeling no longer fits a company that's now a key player in applications, appliances, servers, development tools, operating systems and, yes, even cloud computing. How do all these components gel into a coherent plan for IT customers? What makes Oracle better than the other big integrated systems players like HP and IBM? In this latest installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Oracle President Mark Hurd spoke with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about Oracle's strategy and why the company is uniquely positioned to help IT leaders deal with the difficult challenges they're facing today. Hurd also clarified Oracle's stance on cloud -- a position clouded -- sorry -- by some earlier comments from CEO Larry Ellison -- and what makes Oracle's approach better than 'very old' cloud solutions like salesforce.com. He explained more about customer migrations to Oracle's new Fusion applications and discussed how Oracle plans to win in the evolving server market.

Since April, Nils Brauckmann has had the future of enterprise Linux in his hands. That's when the Attachmate Group completed its acquisition of Novell and split the company into two operating units: Novell and SUSE. As president and GM of SUSE, long-time Attachmate executive Brauckmann is responsible for bringing Suse Linux Enterprise Server and other open source products to market. In this latest installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Brauckmann shared with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant his views on the future of open source, his strategy for competing against Red Hat, and SUSE's plans for helping customers build private and hybrid clouds. He also outlined his philosophy for working successfully with the open source community, talked about the role desktop Linux will and won't play in the enterprise, and explained where SUSE's partnership will Microsoft is headed.

How's this for a challenge? The CEO dies suddenly and you're tabbed to take his place -- on the heels of your network infrastructure company entering into a major new strategic partnership and in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Oh, did I mention your competition includes some companies named Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks, among others? That's life for Chris Crowell, CEO of Enterasys Networks, who took over in 2009 shortly after predecessor Mike Fabiaschi's untimely death. Since then, Crowell has refreshed Enterasys' product line, pushed for the development of innovative new social media-based network management capabilities that promise to make life easier for network admins, and achieved record sales in the last financial quarter. In this latest installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Crowell spoke with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how Enterasys is competing against networking's big dogs, explored an upcoming fabric launch expected in October and talked about the company's partnership with Siemens Enterprise Communications. He also explained why "Isaac" is so important and where Enterasys plans to take the technology.