Q&A with Sangram Vajre, Co-founder & Chief Evangelist at Terminus

MEDIA 7 | November 28, 2019

Ed Breault, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo is a marketer with over 18 years of industry experience. At Aprimo, Ed is responsible for the global brand and growth which includes all Paid/Owned/Earned media, Brand Experience, Product Marketing, Industry Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Strategic Communications, Content Marketing, Analyst Relations, Alliance Marketing, Public Relations, Events, Demand Generation and Account-Based Marketing. MEDIA 7: What’s your superpower? ED BREAULT: I would say it’s applying the full spectrum of art and science that is required in marketing today. Not just left or right brained, but whole-brained strategy. Being human yet data-driven and really understanding numbers and (the right) metrics to make connections to business drivers. Add storytelling to that, so I can effectively communicate to my team, the CEO and CFO as well as my Board of Directors on those metrics, and connecting all that we are doing in marketing to the mission of the business. Then quickly shifting gears to the art and creative aspects of marketing that are required to engage an audience and tell great commercial stories that take complex concepts and craft them in a way that is interesting for people to pay attention to. I have to be the ultimate point of truth for the brand. M7: At Aprimo, how have marketing leadership roles and responsibilities evolved over the past few years? EB: There are so many dimensions needed by marketing leaders today. There are several elements driving this evolution, it’s the new experience battlefront that is emerging and also marketers themselves driving changes. From a market perspective, there is a clear appetite for disruption and consumers are wanting more experiential elements to their buying experience and interactions with brands. Take a few direct to consumer disruptions like trialing products in-home, purchasing directly from a brand or even wanting to ensure that the producer’s trade practices are in line with the buyer’s or even a regulator’s for that matter. Then we want to try before we buy, and we emotionally care about the supply chain of products. Do we TRUST this brand to do business with them? Behind all of this is a story that needs to be told, and it is those marketers who know their audience well and make connections that will win the commercial game. Back to the marketer, there are so many diverse backgrounds that marketers bring now and I’m really intrigued by those who have unconventional backgrounds because they contribute something uniquely new to the field. I love hearing about the marketer’s journey.

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MEDIA 7 | November 21, 2019

Amy Barzdukas, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Poly is a marketing and communications leader with extensive experience in setting strategy, shifting perceptions, advising customers, digital marketing, revenue marketing, integrated marketing communications, and public relations in highly competitive product arenas. Amy is known for her ability to create and execute winning turnarounds on a global scale. MEDIA 7: What inspired you to get into marketing? AMY BARZDUKAS: I was always destined for marketing, even if I didn’t know it. As a child, I collected promotional brochures. I was fascinated by how the words and pictures were used to drive action. My first job was as an advertising copywriter, and I’ve never looked back. M7: How is Poly redefining the video conferencing experience for modern businesses? AB: We’re in an unprecedented time of change in our industry. Voice and video services are moving to the cloud, and companies are changing how they approach their communications needs. Poly is the largest provider of the devices – video conferencing, audio conferencing, headphones and desk phones – you use to connect to these services so you can collaborate with your colleagues. That uniquely positions us to shape the video conferencing experience, and we’re doing so in four ways. First, Poly has made both the Zoom Rooms and the Microsoft Teams video conferencing experience better than ever with our radically simple Poly Studio X video bars that deliver these experiences with no PC or Mac required. We’ve got decades of experience in understanding what makes meetings more human – for everyone in the room and those dialing in from other locations – and we’ve packed all of that into easy-to-install, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-use all-in-one powerhouses. Second, we are bringing the world of AV and video conferencing into the modern app economy. Our Studio X series and Poly G7500 video conferencing devices run a common platform that can be updated and enhanced through a series of regular software updates. This Poly platform, built on Android, can run applications like a smartphone does today. Third, Poly has introduced innovation that makes any video conference better. Our new Poly MeetingAI features use AI and machine learning to address the distractions that hit your senses in a meeting. We make it easier to hear what’s being said by blocking out the annoying noises that people make while talking, and we make it easier to see what’s going on in the room with the most advanced speaker tracking and framing, and our built-in production rules. Finally, we are pricing our solutions in a way that completely resets the calculations on what it costs to outfit a room. The Studio X30, for huddle room and smaller spaces, costs just about $2,100, including the Poly TC8 touch controller. All you add is the cloud service and a monitor, and you have a room up and running for under $2,500. That’s easily under the cost of other solutions and with better audio and video quality.

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MEDIA 7 | December 5, 2019

Andrea Lechner-Becker, Chief Marketing Officer at LeadMD is an experienced Marketing and Sales Executive with a demonstrated history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Skilled in Business Process, Marketo, Sales, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and IT Service Management, Andrea is also a strong business development professional and a storyteller. MEDIA 7: What inspired you to get into marketing? ANDREA LECHNER: Frankly, not having better options. I originally attended the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse thinking I’d major in Archaeology. I wanted to be Indiana Jones! But, after visiting the archaeology building – i.e. the cold, dark basement of the science building – where a girl sat to piece together pieces of an old Native American vase, I knew archaeology was not going to be the right path for me. And so, without being good at science and a major in art or art history was unlikely to pay my bills, I decided to go into “business”. I originally registered as a management major, but took my first marketing class and thought it was more interesting and switched my sophomore year. That was pretty much it. I’d never been involved in business classes or DECA in high school – I didn’t really know what to do or what jobs in marketing were even possible. I dumb lucked myself into it really. M7: As a storyteller, do you relate the brand to a story or story to the brand? AL: Both? Neither? I think there are stories in every brand, because there are people working on the brand and people engaging with the brand and people using what the brand creates. People, most often a single person, are at the heart of great stories. You can start with the “point” of the story you’re trying to tell. Say you have a software that help accountants better create reports for board meetings. It’s likely you’ll want to tell a success story about an accountant getting promoted to CFO in part because your software helped better communicate their work product to the board. You could have the idea for that and go looking for that story in your customers. OR, you could hear that story, and say, “That’s amazing!” and share it with customers, partners and internal people. Stories are all around us – the most important thing is to keep your ears and eyes open for finding them.

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Venafi | January 12, 2023

Vanafi, a leading provider of machine identity management, said that VMware has added its machine identity control plane to its Tanzu service mesh. With this integration, virtual machines, containers, and Kubernetes clusters can talk to each other in a secure way right out of the box. Customers will be able to set up and keep secure connections between applications, services, and other workloads with this integration. Enhanced multi-cloud and multi-cluster security helps to gain better observability, consistency, and freedom of choice when it comes to machine identity management, ensuring regulations are adhered to. Vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, Kevin Bocek, said, "It's exciting to see VMware simplifying customers' cloud-native journeys while still ensuring enterprise-grade security." Moreover, he added, "Other service mesh – such as Istio, only support self-signed machine identities out-of-the-box, which fall outside of companies’ already existing machine identity management infrastructure and trust chains." Further, he said, "It's great to see VMWare is addressing this security gap by tapping into the control plane for machine identity management in a way that’s frictionless and security-team approved." (Source: Businesswire) This enables Tanzu users integrate their service mesh with a trusted certificate authority (CA) of they select to support mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) between Kubernetes clusters. This integration will help customers automate the issuance and renewal of machine identities, generate identities from over 40 trusted certificate authorities, and gain unparalleled observability and freedom of choice over machine identity management. It will also help with compliance with regulations. About Venafi Venafi is a cybersecurity company that specializes in machine identity management. It offers solutions that manage and protect identities for various types of machines, including physical and IoT devices, software applications, APIs and containers. The company has a global visibility of all machine identity types and the risks associated with them. Jetstack is a Venafi company that specializes in working with enterprises using Kubernetes and OpenShift. It is an open source pioneer and the creator of cert-manager, an industry standard for cloud native machine identity management. Jetstack's products and solutions protect the application environments and platform infrastructure for global organizations. Venafi has over 30 patents and serves security-conscious organizations and government agencies, including top U.S. health insurers, airlines, credit card issuers, and banks from the U.S., U.K, Australia and South Africa.

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Mirantis | January 13, 2023

Mirantis has announced that its Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK) has seen virtual machines deployed on its infrastructure increase more than 10 times the previous year. The latest release of MOSK 22.5 includes full support for OpenStack Yoga, shared file system-as-a-service using OpenStack Manila to support legacy workloads, and easy integration with monitoring systems to provide data on the state of cloud resources. MOSK makes it possible for cloud-native and traditional applications to use digital infrastructure. This makes sure that applications are reliable and gives users full control over application data. MOSK offers centralized logging, monitoring, and alerting, as well as tools to automate management of the infrastructure underneath, from setting up hardware to configuring software. Artem Andreev, product manager, Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes commented, “The significant growth we’ve seen of VM deployment on MOSK in 2022 serves, yet again, as proof that OpenStack is still a relevant and important infrastructure for virtualized workloads at enterprises and service providers.” He further said, “MOSK hardens the open source OpenStack as the basis for mission-critical operations, removing the typical challenges of OpenStack cluster deployment and operations with an easy-to-use virtualization platform – containerized and optimally-configured for Kubernetes. (Source: Businesswire) About Mirantis Mirantis helps companies ship code faster on both public and private clouds. This makes developers more productive because they don't have to worry about managing infrastructure. The company takes a ZeroOps approach to managing and running Kubernetes and cloud environments by using intelligent automation and cloud-native skills. Mirantis provides a public cloud experience on any infrastructure, from the data center to the edge, with a single cloud experience for complete app and DevOps portability, a single pane of glass, and automated full-stack lifecycle management, all based on open source. Mirantis works with some of the biggest companies in the world, like Adobe, DocuSign, Inmarsat, Nationwide Insurance, PayPal, Reliance Jio, Societe Generale, Splunk, and S&P Global.

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Gcore | January 19, 2023

Gcore, a European company that makes high-performance, low-latency, international cloud and edge solutions, has released Gcore Basic, a low-cost solution made for webmasters, developers, and people who do things for fun. Webmasters, developers, and hobbyists can use Gcore Basic to access a wide range of services and features that are designed to make their applications run as well as possible. Gcore Basic, which starts at €5 per month, provides a compute instance on a shared virtual machine for running light web servers and microservices. It includes free DDoS protection and can be deployed in just a few minutes. Gcore Basic includes several add-ons, such as managed databases, object storage, and security services. Director of Edge Cloud Stream at Gcore, Seva Vayner, commented, "Gcore Basic brings low-latency, high-performance computing within reach of everyone." They added, "From €5 per month, Gcore Basic is a place where aspiring programmers can learn their craft, where developers can run pet projects, proof of concepts, and test environments; and where aspiring entrepreneurs can build out online services." Seva Vayner said, "With Gcore Basic running on our cloud infrastructure, customers can scale up and deploy additional services as and when required—for instance, adding extra resources to handle significant leaps in traffic." (Source: PRNewswire) It will first launch Gcore Basic at its Amsterdam location. The service will soon be available in the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt, giving Gcore a second location in Europe. By making Gcore Basic available in more than one place, customers can put their services closer to their customers, which will speed things up and cut down on latency. About Gcore Gcore is a company that helps provide powerful edge and cloud solutions for the media and entertainment industries. They are headquartered in Luxembourg and have offices in several other countries, including Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Cyprus, and Georgia. It works for clients such as government agencies, TEDx, Wargaming, and Avast. They have a large global IT infrastructure spread across six continents and is made up of over 150 points of presence in reliable data centers.

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