Feature Story

Allowing CIOs to Achieve Operational Efficiency Goals with Tuangru: Jad Jebara, Co-founder and CEO, Tuangru

Jad Jebara, Co-founder and CEO, Tuangru shares how the concept of all workloads residing in a physical data center is shifting fast, and explains how everything is moving towards Hybrid IT environments.

Please tell us about the company Tuangru—the idea behind it, the products, and the vision for the company. Also, how does your approach to cloud management differ from other solutions on the market?

With hybrid IT's promise of increased efficiencies and cost savings, comes greater complexity. Tuangru's hybrid IT infrastructure management software lets you manage and monitor assets across on-prem, cloud, colocation, edge data centers—wherever your application workloads reside—in a single, easy-to-use platform.

"Our vision is to enable economic performance, reduce environmental impact, and enhance social equity of critical infrastructure, and our mission is to make critical infrastructure think."

What is the current state or the important aspects of the hybrid cloud market? What are some of the key pain points your customers have talked about when managing clouds?

Hybrid IT infrastructure (or hybrid cloud) is used when an enterprise has application workloads, both, on-premises in a data center and in the public cloud. This model is growing in adoption, the main drivers being a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and far higher efficiency. In fact, Gartner expects 90 percent of enterprises to adopt hybrid IT infrastructure by 2020. Our software empowers enterprises to manage this complex IT infrastructure model and realize the expected cost savings.

As more and more agencies jump into cloud, age-old fears about vendor lock-in persist. In your view, what's the smartest way to make the migration and side step concerns about vendor lock-in?

Having data-driven management tools to guide decisions is the best way to reside within your IT infrastructure. When looking at cloud, it's important to continually right-size workloads at the right cost to maintain the lowest TCO. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy aligns with this, as well as, avoids vendor lock-in.

What is the current state or the important aspects of the hybrid cloud market? What are some of the key pain points your customers have talked about when managing clouds?

The public cloud is often used for quick projects to see if something works. Is there a danger of enterprises locking themselves into an environment that later becomes difficult to move to in-house IT? Do startups need to worry about locking themselves into public clouds?

In one word, yes.

"Going all into the public cloud can prove to be disastrous. We've come across many companies who have done so, only to regret the decision due to skyrocketing costs, loss of control and/or compliance issues"

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has recently been talking about enterprises that are now running up against a "cloud cliff", an over-reliance on the public cloud leading to performance, cost, or control issues. This is one of the main drivers for adopting a hybrid IT infrastructure strategy.

Is public cloud always the least expensive option, and where might private clouds be more cost effective?

No. As mentioned earlier, for certain workloads, private clouds can prove to be far more economical and provide greater control. That is why it is important to leverage hybrid IT management software to get data-driven recommendations.

Why is software like yours so important to the success of a business today? What are the biggest frustrations your clients come to you for project management? What are the risks of not managing workflow digitally?

Today's CIO is continually being tasked to reduce the total cost of ownership of infrastructure, as well as, be operationally-efficient, and greener for that matter.

"Our software allows CIOs to achieve these cost-saving and operational efficiency goals by removing the complexity associated with managing many workloads across a multi-sourced environment."

Looking at the future of federal IT, it seems fully embracing and implementing a cloud infrastructure is pivotal for any public-sector organization looking to meet mission and keep up with the demands of its many consistencies. What's your take on the current state of cloud in the federal government?

The adoption has been very slow. So slow, the federal government has launched the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) to effectively shut down and/or collapse existing legacy infrastructure into fewer more efficient facilities, and outsource the rest to the cloud. They have missed their targets twice now, however, I do see a big shift over the next 10 years towards more efficient hybrid IT environments.

Looking to the next 10 years of IT, what are the things agencies can do today to "future proof" their infrastructure and ensure they're not simply investing in tomorrow's costly, legacy system?

A hybrid IT strategy provides the maximum flexibility for today's enterprise for the simple fact that you are not locked into a single-sourced infrastructure. Having the freedom to match workloads to the right infrastructure to achieve the lowest overall TCO is an enduring strategy.

Are there any upcoming releases/products that you would like to tell us about? What can customers expect over the next one to two quarters from Tuangru?

Recently, we added the ability to manage our multi-cloud instances in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. We will continue to build on this feature in 2018 with more robust tools to help determine which workloads to keep on-prem and which ones to migrate to the cloud.

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