'With customers across 60+ countries, organisations of all sizes rely on Device42 as the most trusted, advanced, and complete full-stack agentless discovery and dependency mapping platform for hybrid environments.'
One of the most significant technological advancements in the last two years has been the remarkable acceleration of cloud computing initiatives. The pandemic unequivocally demonstrated that cloud computing indeed offers enhanced speed, agility, and resilience, even in the most demanding circumstances.
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 21st September in central London.
One of the finalists is Device42, on the shortlist for Best Cloud Project.
We talked to Ken Wooten, senior director of product at Device42, about what makes his company stand out from the crowd.
With a technology career spanning over 20 years, Ken has worked in IT, consulting and primarily product management. He oversees Device42's product strategy and implementation of the company's discovery and dependency mapping product. Previously, Ken was the director of product management at Cherwell Software, an ITSM solution for mid-sized enterprises.
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers. What makes you different from other companies?
Ken Wooten: With customers across 60+ countries, organisations of all sizes rely on Device42 as the most trusted, advanced, and complete full-stack agentless discovery and dependency mapping platform for hybrid environments. With access to information that perfectly mirrors the reality of what is on the network, IT teams are able to run their IT operations more efficiently, solve problems faster, migrate and modernise with ease, and achieve compliance with flying colours.
Device42 continuously discovers, maps, and optimises infrastructure and applications across datacentre and cloud, while intelligently grouping workloads by application affinities and other resource formats that provide a clear view of what is connected to the hybrid environment at any given time.
Additionally, over 200 global system integrators use our capabilities as they manage and modernise their client environments, and leverage Device42 as one of the core aspects of their go-to-market strategy.
What is one company achievement in the last 12 months that you are most proud of?
While cloud discovery has been part of the Device42 solution for a while, over the past year we have invested heavily in new cloud discovery and application dependency mapping capabilities that provide our customers complete visibility into their cloud infrastructure. After months of development we're now bringing those capabilities to market, providing our customers with end-to-end visibility of their on-premise and cloud environments.
Device42 has a long history of providing customers with the insights they need to manage their physical infrastructure and plan migrations to the cloud. Now, with these new capabilities, customers can manage not only their migration to the cloud but also keep track of their workloads after they've been moved.
In addition to providing a complete inventory of your cloud resources, Device42 is also very excited to offer true application dependency mapping (ADM) in the cloud. For years our on-premise ADM solution has given customers the ability to understand the makeup of applications and dependencies within those environments. By extending that capability to the cloud, companies can not only visualise the relationships and dependencies of cloud resources, but also see where communication is occurring between the cloud and on-prem data centres.
By understanding how your cloud and on-premise resources are working together, companies have unparalleled insight, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing risk of their operations.
Whether your focus is on improving IT operations, modernising your infrastructure, compliance, security or service management, Device42's unified view of your hybrid IT infrastructure will increase the stability, efficiency and quality of your IT operations.
What are you working on this year?
Device42 will continue to expand on our significant progress over the past year with deeper discovery and insights into cloud infrastructure and better tools to visualise and manage the hybrid environment.
Our other area of focus is Device42's EnrichAI service. Core discovery provides a rich set of data gathered from each device. However there are many cases where customers would benefit from additional data that is not available directly from the device. This is the purpose of the EnrichAI service. By supplementing each device with non-discoverable data from other sources, Device42 customers get more value and better insights into their infrastructure.
Some examples of enriched data for discovered hardware, software and operating systems:
- Name standardisation
- End of life/end of service dates
- Vulnerabilities
- Categorisation
- Carbon emissions
As we add additional enriched data sources to our EnrichAI service throughout the year, this information will be automatically updated on each device discovered by Device42 at no additional cost to our customers.
Why are events like the Cloud Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
Recognising the achievements of vendors and end users is an important aspect of any industry, especially IT. As a platform to share advancement, all members of the industry benefit from shared knowledge. Additionally, innovation is contagious. By highlighting the achievements of a few, other companies will be inspired to take the next leap, ultimately pushing the entire industry forward.
The Cloud Excellence Awards take place on 21st September in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.
