Listen to the entire 10:29 podcast Download file

Hi! I'm ebizQ producer Krissi Danielsson. The virtualization sector is hotter than ever as companies rush to adopt and then seek to provide virtual infrastructures that will provide improved business efficiency and automation. Switzerland’s Dunes is one of the latest entrants to the field. And while that mountainous land doesn't usually conjure up visions of flowing sand dunes, the company does believe the metaphor does apply to the shifting flow inherent in effective virtualization. Here to discuss how Dunes hopes to shape the market is company co-founder and CTO, Stefan Hochuli. Welcome, Stefan, and thanks for joining us today!

SH: Hello, Krissi -- thanks for inviting me.

KD: All right! Our first question today is about your company's unusual name. What was the inspiration behind choosing "Dunes" as a name?

SH: Right. That's a funny question. The -- where there are several factors. I mean, some of which are less technical than others. I think one of the ideas that we didn't want to be called one of the three letter names or something like that. We wanted something easy to remember and something that somehow described the philosophy behind the product we wanted to create. 

As you mention in your introduction, I think sand dunes were the inspiration for many different reasons. The dunes are something visually visible, a construct, but they are actually built by millions of grains of sand that need to be assembled to create the dune and I think this sort of applies to services or virtual services which we try to build tools for. To provide a service, you need to assemble a lot of different components in different orders and ways to create the final service. So that's one aspect of it. 

And then the second aspect of it is that these services keep changing. So when this shaping sand dunes from one day to another, they have a different shape so the picture looks different and in the same way, business agility is required in today's world. Services change from one day or one week to another. And although they provide the same basic service, their constituent components or the way it operates may change from one period of time to the other. So, that's sort of the idea behind the name.

KD: Well, that makes a lot of sense. Could you tell us a little more about why companies are choosing virtualization and what Dunes brings to the field?

SH: Right. I think virtualization has changed the way we look at IT infrastructure. You probably know that virtualization as a concept is not new. It was existing in mainframe computers, a lot of years ago. But the virtualization in the X86 space changed the possibilities, the way data center operated, the rapidity, flexibility in which you can create or change services. And I think what we are trying to do is to create business process information tool that will also change the way people look at business automation today. And that is being able to adapt to rapid changes, conditions, while still providing the benefits of a business process automation tool which is usually reducing time, costs and complexity of using the service.

KD: All right. Do you have some specific examples for how that might benefit companies in the data center and in each particular industry?

SH: Yeah, there is one example I like to give because it's understandable to anyone. You have someone new starting a new company. You need to provide the necessary infrastructure for him, or her, sorry. So you need to create an account, introductory service, you have to sign him or her into the right group, you have to create an email box. You have to create some storage space for his data and in a modern virtual environment, you would probably also create a hosted virtual desktop for him. 

So in a classical way, you would send work orders to the different departments that would complete the different requests and then the infrastructure would be available for this new person. The ideal situation though is that the HR person, or the secretary at the front desk, could do that. So enter the name of the person, the starting date in some web front end page, hit the submit button and everything is done automatically. So this simplifies the process. It reduces the complexity so it allows people who are not technical to start those processes and it allows IT staff to concentrate on more added-values activity than the day-to-day routine of IT administration.

KD: All right. So how hard it is for a company to deploy that kind of a virtual infrastructure for business process automation?

SH: Well, actually, that's a very good question because of one of the new features that we will provide in the upcoming 3.1 release is targeted as the 25th of June, is actually not a feature. It's a way of distribution. So we now provide the virtual service orchestration platform as a virtual appliance which means it's pre-packaged virtual machine that contains an operating system, some additional tools that are required for further platform to operate like database or a directory service, the platform itself and all ready to be downloaded and started. So the efforts to put this kind of system in place is reduced to downloading an appliance. Starting it and doing maybe five to ten minutes configuration for the environment-specific configuration and then you're done.

KD: All right! That sounds pretty easy. Okay. So how do you see virtualization developing over the next six months as a whole?

SH: Over the next six months? I think the next six months will just confirm the trend that started some years ago. So we are actually in the market since 2001. We've been waiting for two, three years for the market to really pick up to become mainstream. I think this is the case in the last six to twelve months. So we are now really moving from early adopters to mainstream in using virtualization. Introduction environments are no longer just testing developments but really production grade application like mail servers or data bases, and critical operation as well. 

My vision on the evolution is well, that this trend will continue. Hypervisor and virtualization vendors keep adding features and increase the limits of what can run within a virtual machine that there will soon be no real locking factor for running service in a virtual machine. I think this is, there are less and less bad candidates for virtualization. And I think in the long term, to the contrary of some, some, what some analysts think, that the conversion percentage of virtual infrastructure is going to be much higher than what it was predicted. So prediction goes in numbers between 50 and 70 percent and I personally think that this is going to be much higher than that.

KD: All right. Well, it will be interesting to see what the future holds. I'd like to thank you again for joining us today, Stefan. And where can interested listeners go to learn about Dunes' offerings?

SH: Well, you can visit our website at www.dunes.ch. Usually on the main page, there are different links in our current activities, things the latest news will report, the upcoming release of our 3.1, version of our platform, and the participation to different events and other product and solution information.

KD: All right! Thanks again. This is ebizQ producer Krissi Danielsson and we have been talking to Stefan Hochuli from Switzerland's Dunes. Remember to read here and react to a lot of other great podcasts, blogs, Webinars and Web white papers, be sure to visit www.ebizQ.net. Thanks for listening, and have a great day!