Kenneth is Speaking at BriForum Denver

I sat down with one of Lewan’s Solution Architects, Kenneth Fingerlos, to discuss his upcoming speaking engagement at the BriForum conference on July 20th.  Our brief conversation covered the details of his session, “vSGA, vDGA, vGPU, and Software – When and Why“, his background in the industry, and what gets him excited in the technology space right now.

Me: Kenneth, can you tell me a little bit about your industry experience?

Kenneth: So, after college I took a left turn in my career path and went into corporate IT for ten years.  Various positions: desktop management, server management, data center.  Various kinds of things.  After ten years of that I decided I didn’t care for IT management and tried to correct the course change and landed in consulting.  I’ve been doing IT consulting for about the last ten years around storage, data management, virtualization of various types, and building up my skill sets trying to help customers solve problems.

Me: Great, great.  So have you been to BriForum before?

Kenneth: I have not been to BriForum.  This will be my first year.

Me: What attracted you to BriForum?

Kenneth: I’m excited.  The whole idea of a conference that has some size to it and is established that is not tied to a specific vendor is just exciting, right?  You go to a Cisco conference and it is all about what is the latest widget from Cisco.  Cisco can do no wrong.  You find the same thing if you go to, you know, Dell World.  Dell is perfect.  Whatever Dell has got going is awesome and whatever everyone else has is garbage.  BriForum excites me because it is everybody. It is a marketing company–a media company that puts on the conference as opposed to a product manufacturer.

Me: So what will you be discussing at BriForum?

Kenneth: I’m discussing a topic that is near and dear to my heart which is the idea of virtualized graphics.  Taking things we do everyday in the physical world with physical PCs and trying to bring this into this virtualized environment.  Things like disaster recovery, security, flexibility.  You know, the physical world is pretty restricted.  Graphics have always been one of these things that is hard and is difficult.  Technology is evolving and has advanced dramatically over the last couple of years in terms of what we can do.  But there is also a lot of complexity and a lot of information and I find my customers have a lot of confusion about what they can and can’t do.  What works, what doesn’t work.  My session is all about trying to bring some clarity to that area.

Me: Ok, so I am going to open this up a little bit and say maybe don’t limit this to just the enterprise world but what is the technology you are most excited about right now?

Kenneth: The technology I am most excited about right now….I think the stuff that is most exciting is really this idea of graphics virtualization.  I mean, so many things go into a user experience, right?  And all of the traditional things that you think about: servers, storage, memory, CPUs–graphics is part of that.  Remoting protocols, right?  What’s going on with actually getting that content delivered to a user.  Networking, right? 3G, 4G networks and starting to think about what’s next, what’s beyond 4G.  These are huge enablers to let people consume and develop content in ways that have never been envisioned before.  Letting you take that stuff to the cloud, to the remote data center, and access it from anywhere.  I’ve been sitting on top of a mountain in my 4×4 holding a virtual desktop, just because I’m a geek and into this stuff, but yes–I can access that app, whatever it is, from a mountain top in the middle of nowhere.  That’s cool stuff. And it’s all about enabling people to work and function in ways they’ve never been able to before.  That excites me.

Me: Very cool.  Well, looking forward to seeing your session at BriForum!  Until next time.

As I wrote about earlier, BriForum Comes to Denver, and I am excited to have such a great event in my backyard.  If you are going to be at BriForum or just have general questions about Denver, reach out to either @kfingerlos or myself (@sagelikebrian) and let’s catch up.

Brian @sagelikebrian

Thanks to all who attended the IT Risk Event today…presentation can be seen here

What a great audience and thanks to the panel for keeping the content interesting and engaging.  The client engagement was excellent and hearing all the stories and ideas was awesome for all involved.

Thanks to Woodruff-Sawyer & Co, FORTRUST and Agility Recovery for helping Lewan Technology put on such a great event.

Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation:

Join Us – Upcoming Lewan Events

You’re invited to join us for our upcoming live breakfast event in Denver on 9/18 or webinar on 9/23:

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Next Generation Risk Mitigation: What’s your plan if your business goes down?

When: Thursday, September 18, 2014, 7:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Where: FORTRUST, 4300 Brighton Blvd, Denver, CO 80216

Please join us for breakfast and discussion of how to ensure your disaster recovery plan really has your business protected.

Our panel of experts from the IT and cyber insurance industries will provide insight and key considerations you should be making about your people, processes and technology to best protect data and ensure liability coverage and up-time. You’ll discover common vulnerabilities that can create unnecessary costs, confusion and conflict when deploying and managing technologies in a disaster scenario.

Learn more and RSVP

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Killer Technologies That Slay SLAs: The latest innovations behind the world’s top data centers.

When: Tuesday, September 23, 2014, 11:00 AM
Where: Webinar

Interested in the latest innovations for meeting or beating SLAs? If so, please join this thought leadership webinar brought to you by Zerto and you’ll discover real-world examples of how data centers like yours leverage the:

• Key innovations from Flash storage
• High-performance, high-speed DR
• Leading-edge WAN accelerators
• Latest in automated managed DNS

Learn more and RSVP

Q&A with Lewan’s Citrix Synergy Guest Speaker

Congratulations to Lewan Technology Solutions Architect, Kenneth Fingerlos, who has been chosen for another very notable speaking engagement – Citrix Synergy 2014. It’s a highly competitive selection process and speaks to the credentials Kenneth has in this industry. If you are attending the conference in LA next month, be sure to check out his presentation on XenMobile best practices.

I took a couple minutes to sit down with Kenneth and learn a little more:

What is your industry experience?
“Something like 16 years ago I took my first IT job managing desktops for University of Idaho. In that instance we had some 800 physical PCs and some 300 unique applications we were delivering to a student body of more than 15,000. I moved to the systems admin team and went on to hold other positions around servers, storage, data center infrastructure, and IT management. It was 6 years ago I took a position as an IT consultant with Lewan Technology. My job is to find ways to help customers improve business productivity and agility through the use of technology. Citrix’s products have played a large role in those solutions.”

What makes Citrix solutions such a great choice for our customers?
“In a word flexibility. There are a lot of products on the market which seek to solve a given problem in a single way. It’s like the analogy when you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Citrix provides a suite of options allowing customers to choose the best solution for the problem at hand and to evolve the solution over time. Extending the analogy – it’s like adding a screwdriver, pliers, saw, wrench and glue to your toolbox in addition to the hammer.”

What will you be talking about at Citrix Synergy this year?
“This year my session is SYN237 – Best Practices for Deploying and Integrating XenMobile. I’ll be talking about real-world impacts and choices on existing Citrix deployments when you add the XenMobile product suite. Essentially trying to answer the questions of ‘how do I add this to my environment?’ and ‘what do I need to know in order to do this successfully?’”

What do you enjoy most about attending and participating in Citrix Synergy?
“It’s hard to pick just one thing. I love product announcements and hearing the Citrix solution story. I love networking and meeting with my peers to learn about the solutions they’ve deployed and how it’s changed the business landscape for their customers. And I love learning about new technology. I suppose if it had to be just one thing its probably spending a week (or nearly one) immersed in what is possible for our customers.”

What can customers look forward to on the horizon at Lewan Technology, as a Citrix platinum solutions provider?
Lewan strives to be the best source of IT related business consulting services for our customers. We want to be a strategic partner, helping to grow and optimize their business. We aren’t just a technology reseller, there’s a lot more to the core value we bring. Looking forward, Lewan will continue driving strategic conversations with customers about how we can jointly enable and optimize business value from their IT assets and adapt to the ever changing business and technology landscape.

Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project

So proud of Lewan’s own Kenneth Fingerlos who will be speaking next week at Citrix Synergy. A link to his session overview is available on the Citrix Blog: Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project | Citrix Blogs. Well done, Kenneth! Read his post to the Citrix Blog below:

Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project
By Kenneth Fingerlos

With the IT press being dominated with articles on the pitfalls of BYO, MDM, MAM, mobile data and cloud-based services it’s clear that enterprise IT and end-users are thinking about different things. When we look at the OS on our compute devices it’s clear that more and more end-user concerns are driving the decisions which go into the design of the devices.

When IT takes on desktop virtualization we focus on costs, security and efficiency. We assess our users to help us determine what is needed for them to do their jobs. With that knowledge we optimize our designs to minimize costs and provide just what every user needs. We focus on single image management and questions of if MCS or PVS might be a better way to deliver our unified images. Do we need a 3rd party personalization manager or can we make due to with roaming profiles or perhaps we can drop personalization all together.

Meanwhile our users are purchasing iPads and Androids at an alarming rate.

It’s common for IT to focus on securing our borders, centralizing our data and developing the most efficient infrastructures we can. It is after all what good IT people are trained to. We read the design guides and perform our Assess Design Deploy process faithfully. We know who our user groups are and what applications they need. We’ve created pristine template images, with all of our corporate graphics and the approved list of applications pre-installed. In short, our design is textbook perfect we’ve addressed all of IT’s project goals and we’re ready to begin roll-out.

Why then do our users balk at adopting virtualized desktops? Often stalling or delaying projects indefinitely?

Often when projects reach the user testing phase we find that users are reluctant and frequently actively resistant to adopting new virtualized desktops. When presented with the new “IT Optimized” desktop paradigm our users blatantly refuse to use it. And the project stalls.

Let’s explore why users are resistant, and what we (IT) can do to help ease them into a new model. We’ll talk about easy use cases and end user wins. We’ll talk about marketing desktop virtualization to our users. We’ll talk about some not-so-easy scenarios that we may want to put off and tackle after the project has some steam and victories on the record. We’ll talk about gold images, RemotePC, personal vDisk, personalization and dedicated desktops. But most importantly we’re going to talk about what users are looking for and how we bring them on-board with the project.

Come join me Friday, May 24th in SYN216: Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project at Synergy Los Angeles to talk about these issues and learn how to not only drive user adoption but to convert your users into your project’s largest promoters.

Kenneth Fingerlos has been working in IT since 1996 in various roles including systems admin, IT manager and IT consultant with a focus on all aspects of datacenter and end-user computing. Kenneth currently holds certifications from VMware and Citrix and works as a systems architect with Citrix Platinum partner Lewan & Associates. Twitter: @Kfingerlos

Two Lewan Experts Chosen as Citrix Synergy Presenters

Citrix just announced the list of guest presenters for this year’s Citrix Synergy LA and two of our Lewan experts were chosen after going through a rigorous judging process. Only 22 topics were chosen so we are extremely proud and excited to be presenting two of those:

Dynamic user experience, presented by Dan Brinkman
User acceptance of virtual desktops, presented by Kenneth Fingerlos

Here are more details from the Citrix announcement:

“Citrix Synergy in Los Angeles, May 22-24, stands out as an open, inclusive conference where many different opinions are expressed – not just those of Citrix. In that spirit, we are proud to announce an awesome lineup of guest presenters for Synergy breakout sessions. These speakers – and their subjects – were selected through our Call for Topics program. Each made the cut after a rigorous independent judging process.

The chosen presenters include Citrix customers and partners, Citrix Technology Professionals (CTPs) and industry thought leaders such as analysts and consultants. They will share their unique viewpoints on the latest trends related to mobile workstyles, including enterprise mobility, mobile healthcare access and large-scale workplace transformation. They will focus on important technologies such as provisioning services, virtual desktop storage and cloud operations management.

A number of presenters will share their successes with mobility, cloud, virtualization and networking solutions that are delivering important benefits to their organizations. These real-world case studies are always among the most popular content at Synergy.”

See the full list of presenters

Join us in Boulder next week for our 40th celebration

Lewan has grown from calculator sales into a comprehensive lineup of IT and printing solutions, but our commitment to local service and support has never wavered since 1972. Stop by for an afternoon of celebration at the Dairy Center for the Arts. Our vendor sponsors will have booths setup and we’ll have music, refreshments, giveaways, prizes and more.

Lewan & Associates 40th Anniversary Celebration – Boulder
Wednesday October 3  |  3:30-6 pm  |  Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder

RSVP at www.lewan40th.com

Join us for our next lunch event on Sept 19th

High Performance Storage for Mixed Virtualization Workloads

Frustrated by storage performance challenges caused by increasingly demanding applications, continued data center virtualization and VDI deployments?

These workloads are not only creating more demand for IO performance and data protection, but when some workloads are at odds with each other, designing a storage solution can be difficult.

Please join us for lunch and an in-depth discussion of these challenges and solutions:

• Various application workloads and IO profiles.
• Traditional storage architectures and the impact that SSD has.
• New storage architecture designed specifically for the varying IO workloads.
• Leveraging an optimized file system to solve IO performance and data protection while using
• technologies such as SSD, inline compression, snapshots and more

Where:  Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 10:15 AM – 12:30 PM

Where:  Fogo de Chao, 1513 Wynkoop St, Denver CO 80202

Agenda:
10:15-10:30 Registration
10:30-11:30 Presentation
11:30-12:30 Q&A, Lunch

RSVP:
Register early, seats are limited!