Neil Miller, Director, Solutions Engineering at Cisco ThousandEyes
"ThousandEyes provides customers with unparalleled visibility and insights into digital experiences from every cloud to every employee and customer."
The cloud enables speed and scale undreamt of for most firms at the turn of the century. Used properly, it can lend users the flexibility to respond to changing market conditions, and the freedom to experiment with new ideas, products and tools.
Computing's Cloud Excellence Awards recognise the very best of the UK's cloud industry, from the most innovative and compelling products and vendors, through to the top use cases from end-user firms.
This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Thursday 22nd September at One Whitehall Place, London.
One of those finalists is Cisco ThousandEyes, in the running for the Cloud Management Solution of the Year.
We talked to Neil Miller, director of solutions engineering, to find out why his company deserves to win.
Neil joined Thousandeyes back in 2014 as its first employee in EMEA, and was responsible for establishing the company in the EMEA market. Since then, he has moved into a leadership role running the Solutions Architect team: a role in which he identified and hired the incredible talent within the technical teams across EMEA. Neil says, most of all, he is passionate about delivering value to their customers and partners.
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers.
Neil Miller: Cloud adoption, migration to SaaS, SD-WAN, and hybrid work are some of the major drivers in digital transformation that effectively make cloud, the new data centre, and the Internet the new corporate backbone. Delivering a great digital experience across environments outside the IT perimeter is a huge challenge that businesses face.
ThousandEyes lets customers overcome the blind spots to see and troubleshoot the cloud and Internet as if it was their own network. Acquired by Cisco in 2020, the combination of Cisco's expertise in network and application performance with ThousandEyes' visibility into the cloud and Internet provides customers with unmatched, end-to-end visibility from campus networks to the Internet, SaaS, and cloud-based services that are so critical to business, but lie outside of enterprises' direct control.
CTG: What makes you different from other technology companies?
NM: Powered by billions of ongoing measurements across thousands of global vantage points, ThousandEyes provides customers with unparalleled visibility and insights into digital experiences, from every cloud to every employee and customer. ThousandEyes' unmatched distribution of vantage points throughout the Internet delivers the only collectively powered view of the Internet, helping enterprises and service providers work together to improve the quality of every digital experience. It is the eyes and ears of the new hybrid digital ecosystem - across cloud, SaaS and the Internet - by combining Internet and WAN visibility, browser synthetics, end-user monitoring and Internet Insights.
CTG: What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
NM: At ThousandEyes we all share a commitment to help our customers to thrive in an Internet-centric world and I'm excited about our continued growth and innovation to do that at an ever-increasing scale. In fact, we're continuing to build out our engineering team across Europe, with top talent who are passionate about innovation. We've had a London office for a number of years but we're now moving well beyond our London roots, hiring some fantastic people across the UK, France, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal and Lithuania this year alone.
CTG: What are you working on this year?
NM: For businesses operating in today's new Internet-centric reality, change is the only constant and that's where our focus is. We'll continue to deliver the visibility and insight our customers need to quickly troubleshoot issues and optimise performance along the entire digital supply chain that impacts the delivery of digital experiences across the Internet, cloud and business-critical SaaS apps.
CTG: Why are events like the Cloud Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
NM: The world changed two years ago and with it, the accelerated digital transformation projects have redefined the role that IT plays inside organisations. Awards and events like these help showcase and celebrate the innovation and technology by and for these critical teams to successfully navigate and thrive under the new realities of today.
The Cloud Excellence Awards will take place on 22nd September in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.
