Ex- Deutsche Bank Cloud Expert appointed by Intergence

Intergence an IT optimisation consultancy based in Cambridge, UK, has appointed Alistair McLaurin as a principal consultant, responsible for developing on site relationships with Intergence’s rapidly growing customer base and developing new customer relationships. The role was especially created for him and he will report to Chief Operating Officer, Robert Smith.

Robert Smith says: “Intergence has a strong commitment to understanding the value of the cloud, as well as some brilliant new ideas around understanding the value of data management and visualisation. I am delighted to welcome Alistair to the Intergence team and am confident that his skills and expertise will prove invaluable.”

“As part of this commitment, the role that Alistair has been recruited to perform will enable Intergence to continue to lead in the domain of “big data” visualisation, helping large enterprises to extract commercial advantage.”

Alistair has a background in designing and implementing innovative new IT architectures and solutions and he specialises in innovation, cloud architecture and identity management.

Alistair comments: “I am passionate about cloud computing and believe that, used imaginatively, cloud computing offers organisations almost limitless new ways to analyse and manage their data without having to align their organisational development to the way their legacy IT system worked.

“Over the next five years I will work with a wide range of customers to help them leverage cloud services to develop innovative new solutions to drive their business.”

Alistair’s most recent role was Head of Cloud Architecture for Deutsche Bank which included defining the strategic architecture for the bank’s cloud programmes, as well as running proof of concept implementation programmes. He led a major research project to investigate how elastic computing and application delivery network controllers could deliver greater efficiencies to the data centre and more responsive environments for IT customers. He has also worked on data centres in non traditional environment, including detailed investigation of using container based modular data centres to provide rapid compute power on demand at far lower cost than traditional data centre provision.

In this role Alistair won the Open Data Center Alliance's ‘Conquering the Cloud Challenge’ award for his work and white paper on ‘Identity Management in the New Hybrid Cloud World’.

Prior to working as a cloud architect, he spent ten years leading and developing Deutsche Bank's Identity Management service. This was a team of over 100 people worldwide responsible for Directory Services, Single Sign On, PKI and Cryptography and account and entitlement management and recertification. Alistair developed many of the architectures for these services and continues to specialise in identity data modelling and data lifecycle management.

Prior to working in Financial Services Alistair worked at the Science Museum London where he managed projects as diverse as introducing the Museum's first Internet email server to making a movie of the inside of the Apollo 10 command module.

Leading IT optimisation consultancy Intergence, announced as specialist cloud services supplier of G-Cloud

Leading IT optimisation consultancy Intergence, a business that is focused on people and performance in IT infrastructure, has been announced as one of the suppliers of the UK Government’s cloud computing procurement initiative, G-Cloud.

The framework will feature services divided into four segments, with Intergence as part of the specialist cloud services. Other supplier segments include infrastructure as a service, software as a service and platform as a service.

As part of the £60m framework, Intergence will be a listed supplier on the Government’s ‘CloudStore’, an online marketplace where supplier services will be detailed and rated, allowing public sector departments and buyers to make comparisons for future procurement.

The CloudStore is expected to be announced shortly following a posting on the site stating:

“We’re currently testing that what we’ve done makes sense and works and then we’ll be opening the store up for everyone to see, use and feedback on but before we can do that we need to get on with working through and assuring the 1700 services for the catalogue.”

Commenting on being selected as a G-Cloud supplier Peter Job, CEO at Intergence said: “We were selected as part of the framework for our strong cloud management, infrastructure and ability to create and manage cloud strategies and deployment.” Peter continued “One of our major strengths lies in our flagship product Hyperglance, which will enable G-Cloud buyers to prioritise their IT decision-making with a visual perspective, allowing the allocation of resources based on real priorities, not guesswork.”

FACTFILE:
Intergence (www.intergence.com) is a leading independent IT Optimisation Consultancy, headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with a regional office in the Middle East (Dubai, UAE) and was founded in 2003 to address the growing requirements of clients demanding high-level impartial expertise in networks and IT. Our close relationship within the Cambridge academic community enables us to innovate in partnership, rapidly incorporating the latest technology advances into our products and services.

Intergence operates over two distinct lines of business; people and performance. Our expertise and knowledge within the field allows us to resource the right people in the right place, getting your IT projects completed quickly and hassle free. Utilising world first products and professional optimisation services, Intergence has a clear and common purpose- to improve performance and extract more value from your IT infrastructure.

You can follow Intergence on Twitter

Will your business cope with network traffic load during the Olympics? Intergence offers five tips for protecting mission critical applications

With London 2012 just over six months away the preparation and excitement for these Olympic Games continues to grow.

With an anticipated one million people descending on London to enjoy 26 different sports, the increase in network traffic will put a huge strain on business critical applications according to Dr Steven Turner (PICTURED), VP of IT Optimisation at Intergence,a leading independent IT optimisation consultancy.

Dr Turner explains, “The pressure on the UK’s telecoms infrastructure and company’s network traffic load during London 2012 will be unprecedented. Although the Games are still six months away, it’s important that businesses start to plan ahead to avoid unexpected service outages.

“There will be employees who wish to watch certain events or indeed the entire sports event. Depending on how these employees’ wishes fit in with corporate policy and IT security configuration, for example which websites are accessible, will dictate how much extra load can be placed on the network. There are a number of ways employees may keep track of the events, most likely in streaming video through sites such as iPlayer but there is also streaming audio, text-based updates and social media.”

He continued, “If a significant event occurs, employees may visit video sharing sites such as YouTube to replay the event and share amongst their colleagues. Unless your business concerns following sporting events (e.g. online betting, news etc), you will no doubt wish to limit the impact this additional traffic has on the network.”

In order to help companies protect their business critical applications whilst also giving employees the freedom to enjoy the 2012 Olympic Games, Intergence has compiled five top tips for protecting and prioritising traffic whilst still giving users the freedom to watch the games if there is capacity.

Intergence’s top tips:

1. Identify your network traffic load and the causes of poor performance
Through application performance monitoring devices including Visual Networks, SolarWinds and Ipanema, business can not only identify network load but also the causes of the load and if a particular user or application is congesting the network. IT staff can use this equipment to identify how its company’s business critical traffic is performing with a view to knowing how then to protect and prioritise it from non-critical traffic.

2. Protect your business critical traffic from non-critical traffic
Achieving this requires intelligent traffic shaping devices such as those from Ipanema. These can monitor the quality of your applications and via a set of criticality rules and quality of service goals, business can ensure that critical sensitive traffic such as Voice, Citrix and internal web-based applications are given the service quality they require. Non critical traffic such as streaming video can be allowed should there be sufficient network capacity.

3. Use WAN Acceleration devices capable of stream splitting
It is highly likely that more than one user at an office location will be streaming the same live video. This is where WAN acceleration devices such as those from Riverbed and Bluecoat can be used to proxy the video streaming so that only a single stream is requested across the WAN link and relayed to the local requesting hosts. This is in contrast to a non-optimised environment where each host receives the same video stream via the WAN, adding much more traffic to the network.

4. Take advantage of multiple WAN links
If there are multiple links including a private MPLS link and Internet link, consider directing your business critical traffic via the MPLS circuit whilst using the cheaper but less reliable Internet link for browsing and video streaming traffic. That way, business applications do not compete with users attempting to stream HD video content or browse websites.

5. Provide a common room with a large TV screen for employees to gather
This will make the whole event more sociable and by using a freeview box to receive the TV over the air you are eliminating any load on the network. Please note productivity may suffer if this is accessible all day!

FACTFILE:
Intergence (www.intergence.com) is a leading independent IT Optimisation Consultancy, headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with a regional office in the Middle East (Dubai, UAE) and was founded in 2003 to address the growing requirements of clients demanding high-level impartial expertise in networks and IT. Our close relationship within the Cambridge academic community enables us to innovate in partnership, rapidly incorporating the latest technology advances into our products and services.

Intergence operates over two distinct lines of business; people and performance. Our expertise and knowledge within the field allows us to resource the right people in the right place, getting your IT projects completed quickly and hassle free. Utilising world first products and professional optimisation services, Intergence has a clear and common purpose- to improve performance and extract more value from your IT infrastructure.

Follow Intergence on Twitter