May, 2008
by Denise P. Kalm, CA, Inc.
Denise Kalm has 30 years experience in IT including application programming, enterprise systems management and performance management/capacity planning at Pacific Telephone and Bank of America. She moved to vendor land in 2000, spending 5 ½ years with BMC on the EPA product line, then recently became the senior product marketing manager for enterprise job scheduling products at CA, Inc., formerly Cybermation. She is a regional officer of CMG, has held many volunteer positions within that organization and is a frequent contributing author. Prior to entering the IT profession, she was a biochemical geneticist. Her hobbies include flying, Jazzercise, writing and scuba diving. Her book, Lifestorm, on the Oakland Hills fire, is available on Amazon. She is an executive and personal coach as well, offering phone and in-person coaching.
About the Author
Denise P. Kalm, CA, Inc. formerly Cybermation
Michael Salsburg won the 2007 Mullen award for his paper, "Beyond the Hypervisor Hype." This paper received positive reviews from attendees and clearly represented the best of CMG. Michael has a long track record of writing quality papers for CMG and presenting at CMG-T and Sunday workshops, and this award recognizes his contribution.
MS: I have been writing and publishing papers with CMG since 1984. Back then, participating in CMG gave me focus for my career. I owe a lot to CMG for this. So, when Bernie Domanski asked me to help with programming, I became the "Windows Program Architect". I went from there to volunteering to be a Subject Area Chair (SAC), then Program Chair and now I head up the Marketing Committee. I am also on the CMG board of directors.
MS: I am the Chief Architect for Real Time Infrastructure solutions for Unisys.
MS: In my previous position at Unisys, I was the Chief Architect for all products and development. In that position, I had the opportunity to work with some great architects and subject matter experts. Unisys is very involved in server virtualization. As part of that effort, I wrote a paper the previous year based on some benchmarking we had done ("It May be Virtual ... but the Overhead is Not"). I quickly realized that server virtualization would have a transformational effect on computing, but that performance issues were not well understood. After that, I started combing the literature for other papers on server virtualization benchmarking. Throughout 2007, I published a series of articles in MeasureIT, starting with one that discussed the benchmark results from VMware and XenSource. When the call for papers went out, I decided to take the information from those articles and re-work them into a paper.
MS: The biggest challenge was finding the time to do a meticulous job.
MS: My greatest satisfaction is getting the recognition of my peers. It is quite an honor.
MS: This year has been consumed traveling to regional CMG meetings and presenting the paper.
MS: My suggestion is to write about something that you are passionate about. Pick a topic that people need to understand so that they can do a better job at work.
MS: CMG helped me define my career. If I had never published that first paper, I suspect that I would never have had the career that I have. I owe a lot to CMG.
MS: I would like to see CMG be recognized in the industry as the "go to" community for all matters concerning IT Service Management, computer performance and capacity management. There are a lot of new folks entering the industry every day, trying to manage Linux, Windows and other platforms. They think they have to re-discover the various performance and capacity issues needed to properly manage an infrastructure to deliver quality service. I would like the computing industry in general to know that we already have a huge body of work and people with expertise in this area.
MS: I have been married for 35 years, with two daughters and a new puppy called "Chester".
MS: I am a semi-professional musician. You can find some of my work on myspace: www.myspace.com/msalsburg
MS: Regarding CMG, I guess my greatest inspiration was seeing Bernie Domanski in 1984 present SMF statistics. I have never managed an IBM system - I started with Burroughs systems. But I was totally engaged with Bernie's presentation even though I had no experience in that area of management. Our job is to take complex ideas and illuminate them so that others can easily see the important issues.