Over the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of working closely
with someone I regard as a true visionary when it comes to IT management and
unlocking the power of private cloud computing. I am referring to Rick Parker
who, until recently, has been the IT Director at Fetch Technologies, a longtime
customer of Platform Computing, which leverages Platform ISF for their private
cloud management. Now I am proud to now call Rick by a new name: Protostar!
From a pool of more than 70 applicants, Rick was recognized
in Constellation Research’s SuperNova Awards among an elite group of
semifinalists that have overcome the odds in successfully applying cloud
computing technologies within their organizations.
Most award programs recognize technology suppliers for
advancements in the market. Few programs recognize individuals for their
courage in battling the odds to affect change in their organizations. The
Constellation SuperNova Awards celebrate the explorers and pioneers who
successfully put new technologies to work and the leaders that have created
disruptions in their market. Rick fits the bill perfectly, and an all-star cast
of judges (including Larry Dignan at ZDNET
and Frank Scavo at Constellation - to name a couple) have
agreed. The award recognized applicants who embody the human spirit to
innovate, overcome adversity, and successfully deliver market changing
approaches.
Here is an excerpt from the award nomination to give you a peek
into Rick’s story of implementing cloud computing at Fetch (with a little help
from Platform Computing solutions!).
Since joining Fetch,
Rick has successfully implemented a dynamic, nearly completely virtualized data
center leveraging private clouds and Platform Computing’s ISF cloud management solution.
Rick’s journey originally began with a simple idea: to build the perfect data
center that moved IT away from the business of server management and toward
true data center management. As part of this vision, Rick founded Bedouin
Networks to create one of the first, if not the first, public cloud services in
2006 and deliver radically improved cost effectiveness and reliability in data
center design.
In 2007, Rick carried
his passion for disruptive data centers with him when he joined Fetch
Technologies. Fetch Technologies is a Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) provider that enables organizations to extract, aggregate and use
real-time information from websites and, as such, depends on its ability to
maximize data center resources, efficiently and effectively. At any given
moment, Rick and his IT team can get a call to provision more compute resources
for Fetch’s fast-growing customer base. Before using Platform ISF, Fetch
provisioned resources manually to increase SaaS capacity, which usually took
several hours of personnel time per server. The cost effectiveness of Rick’s
innovative design not only made Fetch’s products and services more profitable,
it made them possible. The expenditure that would have been required for the
hundreds of physical servers, networking, and data center costs to enable the
additional capacity required could have exceeded the potential revenue.
 |
| A Protostar |
Rick has been a vital asset to the Fetch team and an
incredible partner to the Platform Computing
team over the years. We congratulate him on this latest recognition and wish
him the best of luck in his newest adventure – in search of more disruption –
in his new position as Cloud Architect at Activision. We look forward to
working with Rick on his next private cloud adventure. Congratulations,
Protostar!
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