For IT Executives

Posts aimed at C-level, upper D-level or BDM audiences.

Rishi’s better than you at just about everything. Here’s his advice for CIOs.

By |2018-04-17T19:00:32+00:00August 12th, 2015|Blog|

Rishi is too humble to be the CIO of a Fortune 100 bank, too busy to be the father of four, too accomplished to blog about ice cream, and too educated to love John Gray. Mostly, he's too unpredictable to fit stereotypes and too passionate about everything he does to do anything at less than full throttle.

I met Rishi this week at the Pacific Crest Global Technology Leadership Forum in Vail where he was presenting and I was lucky to be in the audience. We spent an hour together before his talk that inspired me to rescue Nepalese orphans... and eat more ice cream.

Rishi's been an IT leader since before we called it that. He has helped organizations grow and shrink and grow again. He's more scared about the state of IT today than he has ever been.

Here are excerpts from the discussion...

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Hey Silicon Valley, you’re wrong about “Data Science” and “Machine Learning”

By |2018-04-17T18:59:14+00:00August 31st, 2015|Blog|

Tsunami detection. Crop dusting. Biohazard monitoring. What may sound like innuendos in the next EL James novel are also fields being revolutionized by quant jocks and smart algorithms. And yet, despite all the innovation, we technorati continue to bastardize the terms “data science”, “machine learning,” and “big data”. They’ve become lazy speak for “we’re not sure what we’re doing so we’ll hand wave cliches until we have real technology and a business model."

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How to Use the 80/20 Rule to Turn Noisy Alerts into Actionable Intelligence

By |2018-04-17T18:23:40+00:00October 26th, 2015|Blog|

If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle, or, as it’s more commonly called, the 80/20 rule. According to the 80/20 rule, for many events, 80 percent of the results are generated by 20 percent of the inputs.

A little background: back in the late 1800s the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. Not long after, Pareto also observed that 20 percent of the peapods in his garden generated 80 of the crop’s yield – and thus the 80/20 principle was born. 

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Five things you need to know about FutureStack15

By |2018-04-17T18:23:01+00:00November 20th, 2015|Blog|

It was a whirlwind couple of days, but FutureStack15 is in the books! I’m sure I speak for most of the BigPanda team when I say that a weekend of rest was welcomed after the long (but exciting!) days at the show. Between demos, conversations with clients and prospects, and even a surprise visit from Weird Al – there was hardly a moment of downtime. But in our world, who likes downtime? (Excuse the terrible pun).

In case you missed it, here’s a recap of some of the key themes discussed at the show:

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What is DevOps? And why you’re not there yet.

By |2018-04-17T18:21:01+00:00December 21st, 2015|Blog|

As a TechOps community, we’re awash in buzz words. Most are initially used to establish geek credibility yet quickly become cliches. Take, for example, the term “DevOps”. From its inception as a Twitter hashtag used to promote a meetup in bucolic Ghent, Belgium in 2009, it began to be co-opted months later by ops teams around the world aspiring to manage infrastructure with code.

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Make Icinga work better with automated noise suppression

By |2018-04-17T18:42:38+00:00May 19th, 2016|Blog|

Given that the very development of Icinga arose from the need for additional functionalities in open source monitoring, it’s little surprise that the tool has become indispensable for so many IT professionals. Its configurability and flexibility allow for a sophisticated approach to monitoring, which is both scalable and extensible to large, complex environments.

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