CA World 2011: Q&A: Bilhar Mann, SVP Cloud

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Can you tell us a bit about your main role and responsibilities at CA?

My background is in security. You can probably tell from my accent I’m actually from England. In my current role at CA, I’m responsible for our cloud strategy and the cloud solutions that we’re building and taking to market.

How long have you been with the company?

I’ve been at CA since 2003, [and was] responsible for our security strategy and our M&A activity in that space. I moved into cloud because security is one of the biggest challenges for customers when they’re moving to the cloud.

Would you have been involved in the Cloud launches during CA World 2010, such as Cloud Commons and the Connected Management Suite?

I got involved with those products as of this year. But what I am responsible now for is taking our strategy forward. All of those things we announced [at the last CA World] are being continued on in some way or form.

Fast forward five-plus years and the large enterprise that has a datacentre may not have a datacentre. It will be sitting within a service provider.

Cloud is a recurring theme at CA World 2011. What are the biggest concerns businesses still have about this new way of providing and consuming technology?

There are a lot of things customers are concerned about. You have to be able to segment the customers because different sizes of organisation will have different concerns. Large customers have come to realise the cloud doesn’t just mean public cloud and moving to Amazon. It also means building private clouds so they can get efficiency out of their own datacentres. That’s what cloud means to them. The challenge for them is how do they build a private cloud using the technology they’ve already got? They are also challenged around trusting production workloads in the cloud. They want to be able to consume SaaS-based applications but with with the same business processes and chargebacks and approvals for all the products they had before the cloud. That’s where we fit in as well because we can help them do that.

The next set of customers, mid-market or SMB, much more readily want to move to the cloud because they haven’t made the [same levels of] investment internally. They’re very eager to move forward. It’s not that they’re less concerned about the challenges, they’re just much more aggressively minded because they have nothing to maintain internally anyway, and they don’t have the IT skills and so forth.

Service providers are going to be the next generation companies that will be managing and running datacentres. Fast forward five-plus years and the large enterprise that has a datacentre may not have a datacentre. It will be sitting within a service provider. We are targeting those guys as well. Their challenge is how do they move applications from the enterprise over to their [estate] as that’s the business they’re in. How do they make it easy for the enterprise to move and how can they get the enterprise to trust them?

Does the cloud flip things around as it’s normally the large business that have an advantage over small players who have less budget and resources?

Absolutely. They’re not ingrained in anything because they don’t have the skills and so forth so they’re much more eager to move forward. I use the analogy of the landline telephone system. You have all these countries who didn’t adopt the landline but they have wireless rolled out already because it was just simpler. When you’ve got something already there’s a tendency to stick with it or move forward more slowly with it.

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