The real power of Pivotal is in the end-to-end suite of products that enable customers to do things

In the interview, Elisha explains how his career has transitioned from mainframe, to client-server, to web-based dollar rent a car coupon architectures, and to cloud computing at Cisco, Amazon, and eventually Pivotal.  He covers why he is excited about Pivotal, his area of focus, and Pivotal Products. His perspective on the power of Cloud Foundry gives great insight, dollar rent a car coupon given his former position advising customers dollar rent a car coupon and educating developers about Amazon Web Services.
Well, I grew up in beautiful Melbourne, Australia. Despite the fine weather and surrounds, I took to computers as a hobby early on. Fondly remembering the day I got my hands on my first Apple II clone, I started to write a high resolution drawing program. dollar rent a car coupon At that time, high resolution involved a mighty 280 192 pixels. So, you really had to be there!
Sure, I started off working on mainframe computers, and coding dollar rent a car coupon batch programs using COBOL. Then, I moved on to transactional programming using CICS and DB2. I hope that none of that means anything to you, as those skills are my retirement plan! I really loved building big complex systems and soon moved on to a Lead Architect role using a newfangled technology called client/server. At first, I lead the development of the border control system for Australia. The system still runs to this day despite massive increases in transactions over the many years of its lifetime, which always makes me smile when I travel! dollar rent a car coupon As the transition to web-based technologies commenced, I decided to get bleeding edge and developed some of early mortgage application websites for a bank. Afterwards, I led the infrastructure design for a reverse marketplace . This seemed like a good idea prior to the dot-com bubble popping.
During this period, I moved from a traditional dollar rent a car coupon software developer role to a business consulting role, and this gave me the opportunity to learn more about the business side of business, dollar rent a car coupon rather dollar rent a car coupon than simply seeing it through the technology lens. This experience taught me about go-to-market plans, balance sheets, business cases, and the demands of customers as well as all the other things that actually create the need for IT projects. This totally changed my perspective on IT and the role it plays within businesses.
Afterwards, I moved into the storage software and hardware industry dollar rent a car coupon to help solve some big, intractable problems of data at massive scale including how best to protect that data. At the same time, I took a keen interest in highly-available systems in terms of clustering technology and how we actually can engineer failure out of systems (or attempt to do so).
Always with a keen eye to the developer community, I noticed that infrastructure was not keeping pace with what developers needed. It was too slow and too hard. This prompted a move to Cisco where I was involved in Datacentre dollar rent a car coupon Enterprise Architecture using converged platforms. But, I wanted something even more transformational, and this prompted a move to Amazon Web Services back in 2011 as their first technical employee in Australia. This gave me a great opportunity to help customers learn how to take advantage of cloud computing and take advantage of what it can do to make development more agile and effective. The end result was better support for business groups. During this time, I created a number of relevant patents. However, I cannot talk about any of them, but some of them are very cool ;).
All along, dollar rent a car coupon I have been a strong proponent of agile software development and have seen its success when used correctly. Lastly, I have worked as an advisor to a number of startups, watching the disruption of existing business models up-close.
All of this lead me to Pivotal because I was looking for what the next transition would be—what makes sense to businesses and developers? It is clear that cloud (in various forms of Public, Private and Hybrid) will be the dominant deployment model. It is also clear that current approaches to developing dollar rent a car coupon for the cloud are very Generation 1 in that you get a bunch of useful building blocks, but not much guidance or help in assembling them. I believe firmly that PaaS could help developers maximise dollar rent a car coupon their efficiency and get useful apps to market faster. But, such a PaaS needed to develop as fast, or faster, than the underlying services it was abstracting. A great recipe for this is open source software (OSS) and a vibrant developer community. Naturally, Cloud Foundry caught my eye. But, the bigger picture is what the application being built on the PaaS actually does for businesses, how fast they can be built, how scalable dollar rent a car coupon they can be, how interesting they are, how they can leverage real time data, and how they change the customer experience. From my perspective, this is where the unique dollar rent a car coupon combination of PaaS , Big Data , Agile (via Pivotal Labs ), and Data Science (via Pivotal Data Labs) was the secret sauce . Having the opportunity to lead this kind of work in Australia was too good to pass up!
Being responsive to changes in customer needs and demands is just so important today, and, by being part of a smaller dollar rent a car coupon organisation, it is much easier to find the people you need to get things done. People here at Pivotal work closely together, help one another, and share a common goal. There is also the opportunity to work with really smart people dollar rent a car coupon who really care about what they are doing. This is always invigorating. I also enjoy working in a space where not all the answers are known—where new ideas can form and be executed to see if they make sense and make things better. This vibrance and energy is a big part of what I look for in an organisation.
Well, I wear two hats. The first is as CTO for Australia dollar rent a car coupon and New Zealand where I work with customers on understanding industry trends and technology trends so that we can translate those in to useful actions. While I am a big fan of technology, I am not a fan if it for its own sake. So, translating technology into business value is a big part of what I do. My other hat is that of Senior Manager of Field Engineering for Australia and New Zealand, which is just a fancy way to say I get to look after an amazing team of engineers who work day-to-day with our customers on making their vision a reality. My job is to ensure they have all they need, and at the same time grow the team.
The real power of Pivotal is in the end-to-end suite of products that enable customers dollar rent a car coupon to do things they just can t do today. So many customers I speak to want the real time customer dollar rent a car coupon interaction experience. For example, one customer wants to let consumers walk through a grocery store with an app in your pocket to know where you are, what you normally dollar rent a car coupon buy, and to make special offers for you in real time that you can choose to take action. This will create a better customer experience and interaction. But, making this happen requires a raft of components including a modern and scalable development platform ( Pivotal Cloud Foundry ), huge amounts dollar rent a car coupon of efficient and accessible data storage ( Pivotal Big Data Suite ), the ability to develop applications fast and with high quality ( Pivotal Labs ) as well as the capability to gain real customer insights both in hindsight and in real time using advanced Data Science techniques ( Pivotal Data Labs ).
The main challenge customers face today is how to be more relevant and useful to THEIR customers by using all the new digital channels that people are comfortable with. As consumers, we want to use these channels more and more. Pivotal products help our customers serve their customers better.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is closest to my heart given my developer dollar rent a car coupon and cloud background. The ability to deploy software simply and easily, at massive dollar rent a car coupon scale, wherever it needs to go is like a form of nirvana for developers. dollar rent a car coupon But, there is so much more we can do. So, I will be working closely with the Pivotal Cloud Foundry team to drive more capabilities and innovation. We are enabling a truly useful, robust, and scalable software to be built quickly and deployed anywhere. A lot of my time in previous dollar rent a car coupon roles was spent advising customers on how to architect their systems and build their development and deployment tool chains. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, we can help accelerate this process by removing a lot of that complexity and replacing it with total choice dollar rent a car coupon as to where software dollar rent a car coupon is deployed for any given purpose. There is another side to Pivotal Cloud Foundry as well—I am excited about reducing dollar rent a car coupon the operational burden of running systems long-term. dollar rent a car coupon These types of systems are hugely complex and expensive for organisations.  Traditionally operations has been very inefficient. This is why IT shops around the world are moving towards concepts like DevOps . Pivotal Cloud Foundry can help companies in this area in a big way.
Although that time is scarce at the moment, I enjoy spending quality time with my wife and two daughters, aged 8 5. A growing business and family keeps me super busy, but in a good way! As a total change of pace from the day-to-day technology stuff I am immersed in, I am a competitive practical pistol shooter . This allows me to focus on things like discipline, dollar rent a car coupon balance, and effectiveness—as dollar rent a car coupon well as getting me outside and being a whole lot of fun!
Without a doubt, it is my family. Sometimes, I will just stop for a moment, look at my daughters and what they are doing, and realise that I will never create anything better or more important than them. They will do way cooler things than I will ever be able to do! That said, one of the recent things I am most proud of from a career perspective dollar rent a car coupon was creating the Amazon Web Services Podcast back in 2011. This was a weekly podcast that combined product updates and architecture deep dives for an audience of tens of thousands of people each month across the world. It was really humbling to look at the listener dollar rent a car coupon statistics and see the list of download countries. It was exciting and gratifying to contribute to people s understanding of the cloud on such a broad scale.
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