Pied Piper, intelligent cloud, and why I joined Frame
I am delighted to announce that I recently joined the Frame team on August 1st as field Chief Technology Officer. Writing a new chapter in my adventure book is also a great opportunity to step-back, pause, and evaluate both personal and industry developments. Let me share with you why I joined Frame, the lessons I learned, and what the future holds.
Silicon Valley, Pied Piper and work
“Every good thing happens outside of your comfort zone.”
Stepping out of my comfort zone is challenging, but a good thing for me. It gives me new energy to discover and learn new things from a personal and business perspective. I was fortunate to be able to step out of my comfort zone when I joined Atlantis in early 2015 as field CTO. I met new and awesome people (many of which I would call friends) and understood new technologies such as Software Defined Storage, Hyper convergence, and Cloud. I also learned how to apply these technologies both in datacenter and workspace environments. Who doesn’t like the HBO series “Silicon Valley?” I enjoy the TV series and can associate many situations in the TV series with the ups, downs, and pivots of the Atlantis organization in the past years. It truly was an exciting, challenging adventure, for sure. I’ve always advocated “If you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life.” Early 2017, for me, was the right time to write a new chapter in my adventure book.
Direction cloud
“There are no old roads to new directions.”
What is your direction? Intelligent cloud is powering the world of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mobile, and security. Clouds have their pros and cons, especially when looking at cost, performance, use-cases, security, procurement, etc. Many IT partners and organizations are in an IT midlife crisis with regards to intelligent cloud. People need to step up and make a well-informed and active decision about what to do with cloud. Someone needs to lead the change in order to drive the change.
“If you do not have a cloud adoption strategy, then you’re shooting behind the curve. Don’t worry, be ready.”
I am leading and involved in various EUC (end user computing) community projects such as www.vdilikeapro.com. The survey results of this project give a clear view of what is happening in workspace and cloud. For instance, out of the 586 people who completed the survey, 55.6% are actively investigating the use of Remote Applications and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) while 12% are already using public clouds. Windows applications are here to stay, are strategic for many organizations, and are relevant for you and me to GSD (Get Stuff Done). The modern workspace is contextual, identity-driven, and encloses mobile, SaaS/web, and windows applications.
“The future is cloud, that future is now.”
For many organizations, the use of Remote Applications and Desktop as a Service is a strategic stepping-stone to enter public clouds (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Google) or a strategic way to use these public cloud platforms even more. It is all about the applications, not the infrastructure. Ultimately, we want to hide all the complexity for our customers.
First contact
My friends Benny Tritsch, Shawn Bass, and myself presented our unbiased workspace findings about Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware at NVIDIA GTC, the largest GPU industry event, back in 2014. I met Nikola Bozinovic (Frame’s CEO) and was one of the first to see a demonstration of their technology. Frame was able to deliver high-end Windows applications running on Amazon AWS (leveraging NVIDIA GPUs) through a browser. I truly was impressed by their technology. Better technology never wins against better user experience, and the user experience Frame provided was stellar. Between 2014 and 2015, Nikola and I met a few times in Silicon Valley and I took the opportunity to get to know the people behind Frame better; an energized group of geeks. To be frank, during that time, I also had some concerns with regards to the company’s start-up mode, use-cases, and feature richness.
Why I joined Frame
Nikola and I connected again in the beginning of 2017 — it was clear for me that Frame was picking up steam in many different ways. Frame had expanded support for Microsoft Azure and AWS GovCloud and were getting ready to launch an enterprise version of Frame. A $16M series-A funding round from very credible investors (Microsoft Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and In-Q-Tel) was closed recently. Frame is also in a very healthy financial position with significant recurring revenue that’s rapidly growing. Finally, the technology and feature-richness of the Frame’s cloud platform has grown over the years which increases the capability of handling more use-cases. Intelligent cloud including Remote Applications, VDI, Desktop and Workstation as a Service is in hyper growth. Talking to various enterprises, cloud first seems to be on everyone’s roadmap. In the end, I’ve found that Frame is the only end-user computing partner born in the cloud. They designed solutions for multi-clouds, multi-tenancy, they’re elastic and able to deliver a great user experience. Verified with my simple equation:
Cloud + EUC = Frame. PASSED.
Joining Frame as field Chief Technology Officer, for me, is stepping with both feet into public clouds and learning a ton of new information while using my workspace and datacenter domain expertise, my network connections in the industry, and field experience in enterprise IT. I personally like a diverse set of activities, leading, and Getting Stuff Done. I plan to share the company vision and product roadmap with customers and partners, and build new communities. While in the field as an executive, I will provide customer feedback to our product teams, represent Frame at industry events worldwide, and finally understand customer challenges. When possible, I’ll convert these challenges into offerable solutions.
Community
People have asked me: “What about your community presence and leadership?” Communities are important to me, I have already spent 10+ years in various Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware virtualization communities and have no intention of stopping now. I will maintain an already strong leadership in existing communities (e.g AppVirtGURU, TeamRGE, VDILikeAPro, WhatMatrix) and continue to set up new communities. In the past 15+ years I have learned that sharing your knowledge with colleagues and community doesn’t put your job at risk, it empowers you to perform at a higher level — “Iron sharpens iron.”
In this post I have shared a couple of lessons already, I hope this helps you in your personal and business life. Some final lessons I’ve learned:
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking ..don’t settle.”
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you’ll be criticized anyway.”
and “something to remember today… JustDoIT!”
Connect? ruben@fra.me and @rspruijt
