Industry specialist gives lecture to students
Roger Harry, Managing Director of CircleIT Limited
The Managing Director of the largest IT support provider and consultancy in Wales recently visited the School of Computer Science & Informatics to hold a lecture for students.
Roger Harry, Managing Director of CircleIT Limited, visited the School for the session with second year students undertaking the Communications Networks and Pervasive Computing module.
During the lecture, Roger – who's Cardiff-based company employs 40 people and reported a 28% growth year-on-year for the last five years - highlighted the emerging role of managed services and remote administration.
He identified the emerging role of supporting virtualised infrastructure (using VMWare and Microsoft HyperV using SMB) and server consolidation that could be achieved by using this technology – citing a number of case studies at Hugh James (a major solicitors firm in Cardiff) and Milton Keynes College.
Students also heard his thoughts on the emerging energy agenda and the need to both conserve energy footprint and reduce associated costs. Roger suggested that an older server with high energy consumption was likely to be more costly (when considering overall cost of operation) than purchasing a new server.
Roger also highlighted the emerging need to monitor and better understand energy use within an institution and map this into overall cost of operating computational and IT infrastructure. CircleIT currently make use of the Kaseya software for supporting remote administration of systems.
He commented: "These students will be the IT managers of tomorrow and it is important that they get a grasp of the sort of challenges that face the IT sector. One of the major things we are seeing at the moment is the mandate to be greener, with the need to monitor and better understand energy use within the organisation, ultimately mapping this into the overall cost of operating an IT infrastructure. Hopefully this lecture has given them some food for thought."
Professor Omer Rana, module leader who invited Roger along to speak, said: "We were very pleased that Roger was able to come along and speak to the students taking this particular module. It is invaluable for them to hear the thoughts and experiences of such a successful person in the industry, as it brings to life what they are being taught in the classroom. The feedback I had from the students about Roger's lecture was overwhelmingly positive."