INterview with Don Boxley, DH2i CEO
Monday April 2, 2018 0 comments
Don Boxley Jr. is a DH2i co-founder and CEO. Prior to DH2i, Don held senior marketing roles at Hewlett-Packard where he was instrumental in sales and marketing strategies that resulted in significant revenue growth in the scale-out NAS business. Don spent more than 20 years in management positions for leading technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard, CoCreate Software, Iomega, TapeWorks Data Storage Systems and Colorado Memory Systems. Don earned his MBA from the Johnson School of Management, Cornell University.
Q: What is the primary mission of DH2i?
A: Help companies speed their digital business transformation by providing them with Smart Availability software that enables them to create a distributed data management framework that enables their Windows and Linux databases, application services and containers to dynamically find their best execution venue (BEV). That means all their databases, workloads and containers become portable from any host, to any host, anywhere with near-zero downtime. Intelligent automation ensures that those databases, workloads and containers only come online where they can perform at an optimal level, compliant with business requirements and SLAs.
Q: When and why did you found the company?
A: DH2i was founded in 2010 with the goal of helping customers reduce the number OSes (operating systems) they need to manage to speed digital business transformation.
Q: How crucial is it for companies to have this kind of protection and IT management?
A: It's fundamental. The best companies have recognized that the biggest barrier to digital business transformation is legacy IT infrastructure. Hundreds of millions of operating systems have been installed for Windows and Linux, and an operating system doesn’t exist in a vacuum -- every OS is on some kind of server, whether physical, virtual or cloud. Also, every server has a whole host of other components that go with it, from power and cooling, to storage and networking. So it's crucial for companies to target solving the dichotomous issue of having a ton of disparate infrastructure that needs to undergo transformation, but needing to do so in a way that minimizes business impact. Failure to solve this problem will be existential for companies. CB Insights recently published a list of 40 Bankruptcies In The Retail Apocalypse And Why They Failed. One of the key reasons was a “lack of adaptability.”
Q: Why are companies slow to move away from their legacy IT applications?
A: Two reasons: 1. Old thinking; 2. They don’t see a clear path forward. To me, digital transformation is about having solutions that helps companies simplify their existing chaotic environment, allowing them to encapsulate their existing workloads on the fly. It’s about the ability to move workloads from any host, to any host, anywhere in their environment, at any point in time by supporting a mixed operating system environment. This approach optimizes enterprise operations by unlocking the freedom to dynamically move workloads to always run on their best execution venues.
Here’s the bigger reason why this approach is a game-changer: When companies have the ability to encapsulate workloads and move them around, they can start to think differently about how they manage their applications. Instead of thinking: “I’ve got it here, running on this old box, and I’ve got to migrate it to this new box,” migration is no longer the conversation piece. Instead, it becomes about moving each workload where it makes the most sense. Because it may be that the old box does some things pretty well, but for a certain time during the month, it would be nice to be able to take advantage of another capability on more suitable infrastructure.
Q: What are the main advantages of switching from these legacy platforms to DH2i software?
A: The great advantage of DH2i software is that it does not force companies to switch from their legacy platforms. It helps companies to drastically reduce the IT management complexity of their legacy environments, enables nearest-to-zero planned and unplanned downtime, unlocks 30-60% cost savings by reducing the number of OSes under management by 3-10x.
