Roger Strukhoff

So I was sitting under the hot lights at SYS-CON Media’s headquarters in Montvale, NJ recently, trying to mind my own business but expecting to get hit with some sort of surprise question by my SYS-CON.TV colleague Jeremy Geelan. Jeremy, who serves as Publishing Director of SYS-CON, brings a wealth of journalistic and technological experience to the game, backed by the sort of elocution one would expect from a former BBC producer. And as a European, he often speaks from a viewpoint that, simply, can seemingly be designed to rub a solid U.S. citizen the wrong way. He also likes to spring things on me. He and I were taping a SYS-CON.TV segment and talked of several recent developments in the IT business that particular week. Several minutes into the discussion, I could see by our clock that our time was almost up. Then it came. “As an American, Rog,” he says, and the re... (more)

CCT CEO Jonathan Rosenberg Drives Revenue Through CRM in the Philippines

Cyber City Teleservices (www.cctll.com) is the most venerable of the CRM call-center firms in the Philippines. Dating back to 1999, it was co-founded by longtime industry executive Jonathan Rosenberg, who spent two decades in the US in the direct response industry. "The first thing I want to be clear about is that we don't view ourselves as a solution for companies to reduce costs," he told me in a recent interview at CCT's headquarters in the Clark Special Economic Zone, a couple hours north of Manila in the state of Pampanga. "The most important issue for business executives i... (more)

"Avoid Big Consulting" for Cloud Computing Initiatives

Virtualization Track at Cloud Expo My appreciation of David Linthicum's writing increased yet again when I found a piece on the Intertubes that he wrote about some Big Rules for cloud computing. One of his basic premises is to avoid the big consultant shops. To wit, he writes: "Most big consulting firms lead with well-polished presentations and, perhaps, some pretty smart people. However, when it comes time to do the real work, you're staring across the table at very inexperienced individuals whose knowledge of cloud computing is limited by the number of article printouts they ... (more)

Eucalyptus Clouds Up With Appcara

Eucalyptus continues its aggressive march through the cloud computing skyscape, with an agreement with upstart Appcara to integrate Eucalyptus private IaaS with public Amazon Web Services. Appcara has said its model-basaed approach competes directly with cloud management leader Rightscale, a company with which Eucalyptus also cooperates. Appcara's product, AppStack, "captures and assembles the entire application environment regardless of languages and development platforms and provides 100 percent automation throughout the application lifeycle," according to CEO John Yung. "User... (more)

Privacy, Cloud, Kafka & 2013

No, I don't see black helicopters in the sky. And I don't believe in global conspiracies - I think we humans are far too inept at operating anything complex over the long haul - and at keeping secrets - to somehow build vast, global ruling structures. But I remain highly concerned about privacy, it's alleged absence in the U.S. Constitution (RIP, Robert Bork, you scoundrel), and how it's been steadily taken away from us in the era of the web and social media. I laughed along with the rest of the connected world at the poor young Facebook-family lass who felt her human dignity was... (more)