Meet the Team: Bill Lutton
We thought it would be interesting to run some blogs about the super people at Cloudhouse. We’re speaking to people across all our teams to find out a bit more about them, what their role is and what makes them tick. We also ask them to spill the beans on their worst IT fail… because it happens to the best of us!
Meet… Bill Lutton, Engineering
When did you join Cloudhouse?
December 2020. Although I’m relatively new to Cloudhouse and I haven’t had many opportunities to be with the team in person, I did manage to travel over to London for the Christmas 2021 get-together. I spent a few days doing the tourist things too – a little tour bus around the landmarks, a trip on the London Eye, buying a cap with the Tube logo!
Tell us a little about your career up to this point:
The grey beard represents 40 years of work in the field. Back then we wrote on clay tablets… I had a long career with Hewlett Packard, about 19 years, and worked primarily in firmware. I worked on instruments like spectrum analysers, building the software that went into them. Then I got working with a series of start-ups as a contractor. I ran a small business with my business partner and one of our clients was an early Webex company, developing computer-based conferencing. Following that we developed our own start-up on an antivirus program. The program looked for anything that tried to execute and, if it wasn’t preapproved, would block it. Out of that we developed a driver that notified us of any file accesses or execution requests made on a system. That went on to become what is now the real-time file change notification feature of Cloudhouse Guardian. So that’s the thread from 15 years ago that links my past working life with Cloudhouse!
What do you do at Cloudhouse?
I work on the Cloudhouse Guardian service. My job is primarily to work on the code for the data acquirers, what I like to call the data acquisition minions, that collect data from the target nodes and send it back to the server.
What’s the best thing about working at Cloudhouse?
One of the things I really like is that they have great commitment to a ‘high touch’ kind of approach to their customers. A key part of the business is building a peer relationship with customers and engaging them on the leading end of ideas and product direction, and maintaining that, taking it back into the product cycle. Cloudhouse looks to build relationships over a longer time scale, more than just the next quarter. I really appreciate working in that kind of environment.
Most embarrassing IT moment (e.g., hitting reply all when you really shouldn’t have, deleting something VERY important, leaving your laptop on the train…)
I fancy myself an electronics geek as well as a software geek. My personal laptop screen failed, so I thought “I’m an electrical engineer, I can fix this. I’ve seen a Dell technician do it in 15 minutes.” Over the course of six months, I ended up with a laptop that was completely non-functional and in a dozen pieces. I could not get the screen replaced. To this day is stands as testament to overconfidence…
Favourite sandwich filling?
I don’t know if it counts as a sandwich, but I’d choose a Monte Cristo. It’s a little like a club sandwich, with layers of ham and turkey and something else – and the kicker is it’s dipped in batter and then deep fried. You eat it with a knife and fork with raspberry jelly and mayonnaise.
How do you take your tea?
I start my day with English breakfast tea, one spoon of sugar and no milk. I prefer it stronger, so I always put two tea bags in and leave them for four or five minutes or so.
Cats or dogs?
Me: dog, wife: cat. We have had both for 30-odd years we’ve been married.
Dream holiday destination:
On my bucket list is someplace in the islands of Greece, a little mountainous village with white-washed buildings and a sparkling beach down below. That’s where I want to go next.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Commercials
Cloudhouse costs are split into two elements – the licensing required to deploy application compatibility packages, and the professional services needed to create the application compatibility packages.
Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.
Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.
Contact us here with your requirements and we will provide you with a quote.
Packaging and Maintaining Applications
Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.
Cloudhouse recommend packaged applications are tested in the standard UAT environments used for natively installed applications, or applications packaged in App-V. The more representative the test environment is of the live environment, the greater the chance of finding any issues prior to go-live.
Service packs and updates can be applied to the applications in a package using the Editor, refer to Updating, Editing and Maintaining Containers which describes how a new snapshot is created for the update, and how it is then applied to the package.
Operations
Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.
Applications running in Application Compatibility Packages can be deployed, and managed with same tools, or scripts used to deploy natively installed applications e.g. SCCM, InTune, LAN Desk. Please refer to Supported 3rd Party Products and Versions for details.
Support
The Cloudhouse Package does not include OS components, it only contains the packaged application plus Cloudhouse components. Cloudhouse recommend the same team that is responsible for supporting applications packaged with App-V, or delivered as natively installed applications, support Cloudhouse Application Compatibility Containers.
Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.
Training
Cloudhouse offers a full packaging service that can scale to meet any requirement. In the event, however, that a partner wishes to offer application compatibility packaging as part of a wider solution, Cloudhouse will work with that partner. Please contact us here for details.
