Data Centers and Clouds are all about applications. The efficacy of a data center or cloud deployment is a function of how quickly applications can be stood up, scaled or de-commissioned as required. As new architectures continue to evolve, data center and cloud architects are constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to further simplify operations, lower costs, increase responsiveness and provide flexibility of consumption models.

In this context, I'd like to take the opportunity to profile Pulsant -a cloud service provider from the United Kingdom. They provide colocation services across 10 data centers with managing hosting and innovative hybrid services that are continually evolving.

A short while ago, I had the pleasure of having Martin Lipka who heads the Pulsant network architecture team participate in a talk with me sharing deployment insights with customers at the F5 conference in Edinburgh. He talked about the simplicity of Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), and the synergy with F5's BigIP and BigIQ offerings down the line. For the benefit of the broader humanity that was not in the room with us, I requested him to sit down again and distill some of his views. Martin was kind enough to oblige and shared his insights on diverse topics including how he expects data center architectures to evolve, candidly confessing why he was wrong about automation trends and how he feels the job roles will morph in the coming years. Interestingly, some of his sentiments were also echoed by Stefaan Hinderyckx, Network and Security Director of Dimension Data Europe. Stefaan is not in this video, but he had joined our session as well and it was good to see everyone excited about the possibilities of network, security and data center transformation.

A fresh case study from Pulsant is also posted here.

Also, at the same conference, I was invited to sit down with F5 EVP Dave Feringa and SVP Calvin Rowland along with my colleague Patrick Schmidt who's the Managing Director overseeing the EMEA region, where we discussed the partnership, momentum with Cisco ACI and scaling our joint marketing activities.

The Cisco-F5 partnership momentum continues as we get together again at F5's US Agility conference at the beautiful National Harbor in Maryland.  I'm teaming up with Matt Smorto who heads Cisco's Data Center Sales Engineering team as we address the audience there and in a separate session with Mark Hall of WWT, a valued Cisco channel partner. Notes from these engagements will follow later.