In this article (you can listen to the Podcast in Italian here), we will talk about some of our solutions and we will try to communicate the work and the innovative effort that is behind each high performance solution we propose in the market. In addition, we will try to understand what is the best time to bring innovation to the market.

The interview is conducted by Radio IT to our Sales & Marketing Director, Simone Zanotti.

At E4, we assume that the customers determine how quickly our solutions impact their infrastructure, organization and processes.

Let’s start with one of our solutions, FLUCTUS: Fluctus is an infrastructure for cloud computing, private or hybrid, based on open source software, composed of various modules and components.
Fluctus applies to the lowest layer of an infrastructure and makes it in step with the times, suitable for the requests for services that arrive at IT department from users, and that IT must try to satisfy in the better way.

Fluctus can be implemented in a few days and exists in a small size and in hyperconverged layout: in this way it can be gradually integrated into the existing infrastructure. Thanks to Fluctus it is possible to reach a level of automation and delegation of some activities, made by IT to end users (the most basic but highly time-consuming activities) leaving the IT free to deal with higher level activities, aimed at improving the infrastructure.

With Fluctus it is possible to work, therefore, only on the lowest layer of the infrastructure: this means that the workloads of virtual machines and applications already present can continue to function exactly as they did before, therefore according to the logic of virtualization, but without affecting the higher layer, resulting in significant improvements and benefits.

Once the lower layer has been fixed, it then becomes essential to re-engineer and revise some applications, but it is an action that the IT Manager or the CIO of a company decide to do based on business priorities, the needs of users and the company’s technological and IT evolution program.

The upper part of the infrastructure, on the other hand, concerns the operations and applications of virtual machines. For this part E4 proposes KAPTAIN, (remember that the E4 solutions are flexible and can all be combined with each other). KAPTAIN is a Kubernetes-based container orchestrator.

But how does the customer know when the time is right to move to a containerized and managed infrastructure model with an orchestrator like Kubernetes? Isn’t it too complex for the client to make this kind of assessment?

It depends a lot on the user’s application landscape, i.e.,whether its applications are still monolithic, or are already organized into microservices and containers.

With Kaptain the transition can be made gradually.

If the customer is a company that works in the IT field, then he knows the technologies and can evaluate them. But, if the customer is a company that works in another sector, then he does not have to worry about knowing the technology, he just must evaluate how it supports him in the business so that correct choices can be made at a strategic level.

How does E4 make a customer understand how complex a technology is and the level of innovation it contains?

It is important and also an ethical responsibility to make the client understand these aspects, so that he can evaluate the quality of a consultancy.

The fact of proposing consultancy and innovations in an agnostic way is another very important element, that is to give the customer the certainty that what is suggested to him is not dictated by reasons of economic convenience, but only by reasons of a technological nature. The credibility of E4 was already very high, but with the expansion to all the opensource and software part it is even more so. E4 does not choose a vendor for commercial agreements, but first of all, for the technology it proposes and whether it is the most suitable for a customer at a given time or for a specific need.

Why should consultancy be at an agnostic level and therefore why leave the speed of innovation in the hands of the customer?

Simply because the client suffers more (like all human beings) the condition in which he is forced and bound by certain conditions. If a solution is proposed with tight deadlines, which are very difficult to adapt to the needs of the customer’s business and its market, the customer would be impatient.

Talking about innovation means talking about the future: after all, innovation is creating new things and developing new solutions that are not there before, in short, giving life to something that will be there, so its gaze is by nature directed forward.

But what happens if a certain innovation project cannot be implemented? Aren’t you afraid?

I answer this question in a personal way: real fear, in the negative sense of the term, no, also because to surf innovation you always need that share of curiosity and unconsciousness, otherwise you risk flattening out. In fact, what I suffer most is the famous “it has always been done like this” (and so let’s go on like this). This scares me much more than innovation.

What are the risks in innovation?

– Making more rash decisions more than rational decisions

– Furthermore, being a sector that is always in constant turmoil and change, sometimes it happens to see waves that look good but then in reality turn out to be little or deflate immediately afterwards.

– Another important element is speed and timing. It is always very important to understand at what stage you are in a wave of innovation, to be able to ride it at the right time.

If you ride it too late it is no longer innovation, if you ride it too soon you risk being taken more for a dreamer than an innovator: if you are too innovative compared to the times you can take serious risks.

Therefore, it must always be carefully evaluated if what is proposed as “innovation” can become a real and widespread benefit to as many companies as possible.

Curiosity and not fear: the future is not scary. And reiterating it in times like these is doubly precious!