Christian Reilly
Christian currently serves as Manager of Product & Demand Management at Bechtel Corporation, working in a niche position between the business and technology delivery teams to help identify opportunities to drive worldwide innovation in the mobile and cloud computing areas. Prior to this, Christian was Principal Technology Architect at Manager of Global Systems Engineering at Bechtel. Having gained hands-on experience in 15 different countries designing and managing complex IT environments in support of worldwide project execution, Christian brings a wealth of enterprise experience and led a team that architected and deployed one of the world's first true private cloud infrastructures. Christian is one half of The Loose Couple Blog team and his disclaimer can be found here.
The Trouble With Choice…
Choices, as the old British adage goes, are rather like buses – you wait patiently for one to arrive and then, annoyingly, several of them arrive at once. So true is this, that in my continued observation of our beloved tech industry, it appears to be the present day case for enterprises feeling their way […]
2013 – The Year of the User – Again.
I’ve long since given up the perennial quest of predicting “what this year will bring”, skillfully leaving this particular exercise in bland rhetoric to those bold enough to want to suggest whether 2013, 2014, 2015 or 2021 will indeed finally prove be the year of VDI, Linux on the Desktop or herald the arrival of other such […]
The 5V’s of The Data Landscape
While not yet having reached the cringe-factor of “cloud”, the term “big data” is certainly becoming much discussed, and, as I’ve done many times with it’s buzzword stable-mate, I find myself asking, “What exactly is it?” Thankfully, NIST have yet to offer an insipid and face-numbingly trite definition (hooray) but unfortunately, the leading definition of […]
Sensory Overload
It usually starts with some ghoulish headline about “big data” and ends in a look toward the heavens, accompanied by a shake of the head and a deep, woeful sigh. The kind of big data they are talking about is not applicable to me, not yet, maybe not ever. It hasn’t reached the point where […]
Can You Feel The Force?
Last week, I was fortunate enough to have a “customer success story” published by our friends at Apigee. It’s not something our organization tends to do very often, but in cases like this one, where we feel that there is sufficient industry-relevant and generally interesting content to stir other people’s imaginations, then we give these […]
Critical Paths & Functional Clouds
It took me less than 24 hours of being back in my former “home” of the Middle East (Abu Dhabi to be precise) to be starkly reminded that I had been remiss in my goal of penning some thoughts on the potential emergence of what I’ve dreadfully-named Functional Clouds and, more specifically, where I see they could […]
Wig Wam Bam.
So, in perhaps one of the worst kept embargoes of 2012 to date, Citrix finally announces their intent to join the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) and “donate” the Cloudstack code to the open source community. Anyone with the requisite amount of brain cells to challenge algae could have seen this move coming and, despite it […]
Beware the “C” word…
Over the last few days, I’ve read a selection of articles from some so-called “leading” tech journalists who continue to position “cloud” and “cost savings” firmly in the opening sentences of their respective copy, baiting the target audience into joining their supposition that at the end of the unicorn rainbow, lies indeed, the proverbial pot […]
Cloud Complexity ? It’s A Wrench.
A new year, a old topic. Complexity. “CLOUD IS COMPLEX” screamed the headline of two recent blog posts from my Clouderati alumni, James Urquhart and Sam Johnston. Really ? Who would have thought ? There really is nothing that gets past these two guys, is there ? Joking aside, their respective copy brings a sharp […]
There Goes The Neighborhood
Not too long after vmware’s Cloud Foundry made its pomp-and-circumstance debut, I was fortunate enough to be sitting down to (and paying for) an interesting dinner with several of the senior figures in the Cloud Foundry core team, including head honcho Derek Collison and all round good guy Killian Murphy. After a few aperitifs and […]
Big Data ? Big Deal…
I’m convinced that long after the lights have been switched off on the yawningly dull public vs private debate, today’s progressive enterprise who has reasoned with, understood and accepted that there is absolutely and categorically no textbook answer to the dizzying and hard-to-demystify rhetorical questions around cloud and where one should put one’s stuff, will […]
Cloud Spring
Following the November 7 announcement of Rackspace’s tantalizingly named (and OpenStack-powered) Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, I’ve found that I have descended into doing something I don’t normally do – getting all hot under the collar over what amounts to really nothing more than a clever positioning statement. First, let me clear a few things up. I […]
Whisper Sweet Nothings…
If you whisper the word “Infrastructure” to me, I can guarantee that as quick as a flash, I will conjure up two very clear yet very different mental images, each telling an interesting story of the juxtaposition of my professional life. One will be of a sterile data center, you know, the kind that we’ve […]
Trading Places
Almost a year ago, I was deep in conversation with other members of the Clouderati discussing (philosophically, I might add) where the future of cloud computing and the associated services might lead and, more importantly, what that may mean for the next generation of enterprise CIOs. You may be aware of my enterprise background and […]
Off The Charts
Earlier this week, I was asked to present at the Silicon Valley Forum SIG event entitled “OpenStack – How Big Can This Get?”, which brought together some of the leading lights from the OpenStack community and helped deliver a very focused session, providing the packed and attentive audience with an incredibly honest assessment of the […]
