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In the pilot episode of "Expedient: The Podcast," Jim Gehring hosts an insightful conversation with cloud authority David Linthicum and Expedient's VP of Innovation, Anthony Jackman. They delve into the complexities, challenges, and often underestimated costs associated with cloud adoption. Highlighting the tangible impacts of strategic cloud decisions on businesses, the discussion also explores the evolving landscape of IT infrastructure and the crucial role of automation and strategic planning in navigating cloud transformation effectively. This episode sheds light on the need for a holistic approach to cloud adoption, emphasizing cost management, the importance of choosing the right technology for specific applications, and the strategic integration of legacy systems for optimized operational performance. Tune in to uncover expert perspectives on making cloud adoption a true catalyst for innovation and business growth, rather than a cost burden.
Creators & Guests
What is Expedient: The Podcast?
"Expedient: The Podcast" is your gateway to the inner workings of technology and innovation, presented with unparalleled clarity and expertise. Each episode is an invitation to join the luminaries of Expedient along with special guests from the forefront of the tech industry. We delve into the latest advancements in cloud computing, the evolution of data centers, cybersecurity trends, and groundbreaking developments in AI and machine learning. This podcast strips away the complexity of the technology landscape, offering listeners an exclusive look at the real stories of challenge and triumph, innovation and leadership, that are driving our digital future.
But we don't just stop at presenting groundbreaking ideas; "Expedient: The Podcast" is about building a community. It's for the IT professionals charting their course through the ever-changing cloud environment, and for the tech aficionados keen on decoding the future of digital infrastructure. Our episodes provide the essential insights and perspectives to keep you at the forefront of a world in constant transformation.
Tune in to "Expedient: The Podcast" for a deep dive into the technologies and ideas propelling us towards tomorrow. Experience the journey through the eyes and voices of those shaping our technological landscape, all presented with the authenticity, insight, and forward-thinking Expedient is celebrated for. This is not just a podcast; it's your insider's look into the technologies transforming our lives.
00:05:10:29 - 00:05:46:14
Jim Gehring
Hi, my name is Jim Gehring with Expedient and had the honor of sitting down with David Linthicum, subject matter expert and cloud, and Anthony Jackman, VP of Innovation at Expedient. We had a great conversation about cloud adoption and the complexity and challenges and costs that people are experiencing today. So without further ado, here's the recording in a Wall Street Journal article, which I thought was fascinating, that the technology is under new scrutiny This these days, writing cloud class is just huge.
00:05:46:14 - 00:06:14:00
Jim Gehring
And I actually recently have been talking with some of our top salespeople and they're like the biggest discussion that they're having is budget and for a number of reasons, right? It's not just what we've all had a sense is coming, which is clouds complex and it's costing more than people thought. But budgets are becoming a big thing. So I know you've seen this again and again, too.
00:06:14:02 - 00:06:15:18
David Linthicum
I saw it coming a long time ago.
00:06:15:18 - 00:06:17:00
Jim Gehring
Yeah.
00:06:17:02 - 00:06:24:22
David Linthicum
I just run around the country and tell people I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. Here it is. Yeah. I like being wrong.
00:06:24:25 - 00:06:25:20
Jim Gehring
Right?
00:06:25:23 - 00:06:29:10
Anthony Jackman
There's just a there exceeding their budget or that they can't predict their budget.
00:06:29:12 - 00:06:50:21
David Linthicum
I think they, they exceeding it's not living up to cost saving expectations and everybody was running around the early days of cloud computing or even just transformational stuff to get to new new platforms and talking about how cost effective is going to be and half the cost of running things on premise. And I knew that was going to be the case if you just did the math for it.
00:06:50:21 - 00:07:10:22
David Linthicum
And the other thing they did is, is house them self-inflicted wounds. They ran it in their own chaotic way and weren't able to have any kind of cost efficiencies out of the system. They have instances up and running, they overprovision lots of stuff. And there was no really kind of feedback and accountability that came from usage of cloud.
00:07:10:22 - 00:07:33:09
David Linthicum
This whole thin ops movement is a reaction to that. People are really trying to get that discipline and that accountability under control. So and at the end of the day, it's not as cut and dry as people think. Your ability to leverage public cloud versus on premise systems or MSPs and other solutions that should be viable options as you're picking platforms for this technology to run.
00:07:33:11 - 00:07:54:26
Jim Gehring
To, I often say that that's where they just neglected the infrastructure side of things. In other words, nobody walks down the hallway to the infrastructure team and says, Hey, we're going to cloud the development, the software application side of the house, just like Jenny Go, the infrastructure people, we're not asked, they're not talked to. They didn't have extra money to plan.
00:07:54:26 - 00:08:18:24
Jim Gehring
It's not even thought of as a project that had seen as this silver bullet and all of the important things that need to be taken care of having an architectural approach, operational disciplines, tools, data skills and management. It's almost like people wound up building another city next to the one that they had with new roads and pipes, and there's not a connector.
00:08:19:00 - 00:08:46:04
David Linthicum
I love that analogy. That's very apt. Yeah, absolutely. The infrastructure people weren't asked because normally these decisions are made by the solution. Developers that are developing stuff independently with in particular pods and they're picking whatever technology they want to pick. And that's how we got into multi-cloud as well. We got into multi-cloud organically because different development teams decided to go after these best of breed technologies and others they couldn't use as a system on this cloud provider.
00:08:46:06 - 00:09:06:19
David Linthicum
They had to use this one. You know, suddenly we start onboarding different databases, AI systems, app DEP, test, all these sorts of things on clouds and even sometimes on the enterprises. And we just end up with a huge mess where we didn't instruct. There was no planning behind it, people just onboarded what they need. And that's not a best practice as I'm find it now.
00:09:06:19 - 00:09:32:23
Jim Gehring
I worked with a company that was a 50 plus billion and they actually tried to rein that in with procurement. In other words, so many people buying clouds in so many places that I couldn't get their hands around it. And procurement was having conversations of how can we train people about where to put it in the right place, and so on and so forth, like it was just out of control.
00:09:32:25 - 00:09:52:28
David Linthicum
Yeah, Cloud business offices were another reaction to that. You know, people decided to send a group that really kind of had no operational clout, and so people didn't listen to them for the most part. And so now they're standing up announce programs because what we're doing is making the job of automation to basically control and govern the costs and make things happen.
00:09:52:28 - 00:10:01:01
David Linthicum
It's a bit more pragmatic planning behind it. Then then kind of the chaos that I think we've gotten to that's gotten us into this much trouble.
00:10:01:04 - 00:10:01:25
Jim Gehring
Right.
00:10:01:27 - 00:10:25:14
Anthony Jackman
Kind of started with the viewing of cloud as a destination versus operating model and it was this is a destination we're going to go to. And early on it was dictated which destination it was to. Right? There was a in an internal initiative. We are going to use our and it was kind of guided by that rather than being guided by proper choice of technology for whatever the application actually was.
00:10:25:16 - 00:10:50:12
David Linthicum
Yeah, that's, that's key to it. It's people don't understand this is about optimization of whatever platforms we're moving to and not picking destinations before we understand what that optimization optimization can be. And I think I saw that so many times in walking organizations where they say, Well, this is our to boost project innovation transformation project. Well, where your guys are step ten, and we're not even in step one yet.
00:10:50:12 - 00:11:06:22
David Linthicum
Why do we know we want to move there? What are the security models? And by the way, is our culture going to be able to change around adaptation and leveraging cloud computing? Do the have the operational planning and resources in place and how are you going to keep it secure? All those things really just kind of thrown out the window and just kind of making a mass move.
00:11:06:29 - 00:11:22:03
David Linthicum
We saw another iteration of that with a pandemic. Everybody just suddenly decided that that was their safe harbor in terms of where their applications in data can run. And they moved as quickly to the cloud as possible, just basically accelerating the same mistakes. And now we're paying for that bit of a hangover.
00:11:22:06 - 00:11:50:05
Anthony Jackman
I think there's actually even a really good example of that recently that where Amazon themselves got it wrong on their own cloud that you see the report from the prime video team now. So they built the the monitoring infrastructure for prime video around Amazon's best practices, distributed microservices, etc. etc. They just wrote an article about how they reduced their costs by 90% by going back to a monolithic app, because when they did it, they just said, Well, this is how we do it at Amazon.
00:11:50:08 - 00:12:03:24
Anthony Jackman
They didn't consider that exact app turned out to be a big mistake, and now they've pivoted back to a monolithic app and reduce their costs by 90%. So if Amazon can get it wrong on their own cloud, it's probably pretty easy for a lot of other people to get it wrong.
00:12:03:26 - 00:12:32:08
David Linthicum
Yeah, and not to pick on them. I mean, that's just just common mistakes that I think people are making out there. And now there's a repatriation movement right now which is basically around the same thing, which is moving to managed service providers and even back on premise, you know, from cloud providers, because the simplistic things that application workloads and data sets do that may exist on a public cloud provider, they can do much cheaper on on on premise and on a managed service provider and other other alternate platforms.
00:12:32:08 - 00:12:56:01
David Linthicum
And so there's a mass movement there. So in other words, if I'm paying for a petabyte of storage on a public cloud provider and I'm paying for a petabyte, a storage on premise, that's going to be significantly cheaper. Now, you haven't looked for the last ten years. You guys probably know this better. Anybody else? The cost of hard drive, you know, HDD is as drops like a rock and so therefore that makes it much more viable cost effective platform even to a factor of ten in many instances.
00:12:56:01 - 00:13:11:12
David Linthicum
And so we're asking ourselves the pragmatic question. You just kind of hit on it. In other words, where were you going to run this stuff, where it's going to return the most value back to the business? I know that's a bummer question to ask, but the reality is that's that's really as it people you know, that's our mandate.
00:13:11:12 - 00:13:18:23
David Linthicum
That's what we have to do. We have to basically bring more value back to the business in whatever best way, whatever weapons we need to take to make that happen.
00:13:18:25 - 00:13:49:15
Jim Gehring
When I'm talking to people, one of the things I say that I'm just it's amazes me I'm on the marketing team here, and if you think about it, Cloud, the big companies have gotten us to refer to our traditional systems in two distinct ways legacy systems and technology that everybody talks about their traditional systems. That way the marketing is absolutely brilliant.
00:13:49:18 - 00:14:17:22
Jim Gehring
And since I think we've kind of agreed that that the push is coming down from about because the people who own the companies are in full agreement because it's real, there are ways to take cloud technologies and services and enhance business operations and drive new business growth. Period, end of story. So it's coming down on high and everybody accepting this, you know, hey, this is the old stuff.
00:14:17:22 - 00:14:36:21
Jim Gehring
We shouldn't be on it. And so the idea of looking at it in ways that you can optimize it, modernize it, which is, you know what we've been about for a while, it's hard to get people to listen to because, well, that's the technology dead. You want me to do something with that.
00:14:36:24 - 00:15:08:17
David Linthicum
Is in the zeitgeist. And we have a tendency in this industry to manage my magazine and we chase side. And you got to remember there's $20 Billion of marketing budgets behind cloud computing and the ability to kind of change the narrative in terms of how people are moving in that direction. And so it's going to be having these conversations where it's it's assumed that we're making this movement to modernize our systems and moving them into cloud when it should be assumed that we're going to optimize the platform and use whatever platforms we need to do to make that happen as an imperative.
00:15:08:17 - 00:15:23:22
David Linthicum
And I think those questions are important. Ask by the way, we're asking those questions now because of what we talked about at the beginning of the conversation. We hit a complexity wall and it costs wall and we can't spending more money. And, you know, all these sorts of things are saying, okay, where are the optimized best place for these to run?
00:15:23:22 - 00:15:37:10
David Linthicum
The cloud is certainly going to be a great optional tool, but there's other tools and other platforms that we need to consider to really get the most out of the stuff. And I think those questions being asked right now are exactly the right thing to do.
00:15:37:12 - 00:15:59:21
Anthony Jackman
And I think whether you're, you know, Modder versus what would be called legacy, it's all about just viewing it as an operating model. Because if you wrap the same level of observability and automation around legacy infrastructure as you do around the modern, you could actually get the same benefit. And by the way, a significant portion of applications are still a fit for that for the legacy infrastructure.
00:15:59:23 - 00:16:07:11
Anthony Jackman
But it's much more important than it was in the past to wrap automation around it, to do policy based security control, etc..
00:16:07:13 - 00:16:29:26
Jim Gehring
Yeah, I think that what it does is it fills in that gap because like I said before, when I build two cities, I'm going to be in a tough place, especially when I can't find the skills that I need to do things. If I use tools that help me optimize and modernize my traditional systems, whereas I'm using a different word and those same tools will help me on my new platform.
00:16:29:26 - 00:16:59:16
Jim Gehring
So my hyperscale platforms, right? I've I've started to do something I need to do because to me, cloud is been about a new platform. Things are different and it's not just refactoring the application. I have to refactor my D.R., my backups and my security and my tools and it's all new. And unless I bring my traditional system in my environment, which for most organizations who aren't born in the cloud is a very real factor and a costly one when it gets overlooked.
00:16:59:19 - 00:17:18:00
David Linthicum
Yeah, absolutely. You kind of hit the nail on the head. And the thing is, also, we have this perception that legacy systems, traditional systems are these big blue boxes that haven't been touched for 20 years. That's that's not what they are. They're course that operate in very modern data centers that have the ability to scale and have manageability.
00:17:18:00 - 00:17:33:06
David Linthicum
And they're typically software defined and they have all these capabilities that we don't we don't really kind of understand. Those are there. And the reality is it's not freedom of the cloud. And we can't just do lift and we find that out. That lift and shift doesn't necessarily work for the majority of the time. You have to do.
00:17:33:07 - 00:17:58:28
David Linthicum
To your point, significant refactoring is different security model, different governance model, different operations model to make it work effectively. That doesn't mean it's not a viable platform. But the thing is, this is about considering all the options. And if we're a good architect out there and we're a good solutions provider, we're looking at everything in the viability of those platforms, how they're going to provide growth in the future, and also what the cost efficiencies are now, what they are going to be in the future and things like that.
00:17:58:28 - 00:18:27:11
David Linthicum
It's not always going to be an automatic default platform, even moving to the cloud from now, moving to distributed environments, edge based systems, micro clouds that actually exist in data centers. You know, all these very complex deployments which are not having centralized, you know, as a service components aspects of it set on premise. So we're moving into this complicated architectural, you know, domain where it's not set in stone as to where we need to run these things.
00:18:27:11 - 00:18:48:20
David Linthicum
And I think even moving forward, we're going to have automatic relocation of different data sets, the ability to have autonomous, you know, relocate able application workloads in data and the ability to have resources that are going to be cost optimized exists on premise versus in the cloud providers and the ability to move in between them, you know, as you need it is really with the destinations moving too.
00:18:48:21 - 00:18:55:23
David Linthicum
So if you're doing there, why are you trying to eliminate your best cost option in many instances and why are you eliminating your options? That's a big.
00:18:55:23 - 00:19:16:13
Anthony Jackman
Initiative from a lot of the major software players now in that kind of enterprise data center, software mobility of data solving for data gravity appropriately, and this is in data platforms and compute platforms as well. They're seeing the value of giving clients flexibility and really solving for that without the need to go to a hyperscalers and consumer native as a service.
00:19:16:16 - 00:19:35:20
David Linthicum
Yeah, the cloud is has extend ability now to these edge based systems and the ability to have, you know, run aspects in the data center. And they're doing that for a reason because people are demanding to have this flexibility of running different workloads all over the place. And also co-locating these cloud based workloads that's closer to the applications that need access to the data.
00:19:35:20 - 00:19:54:10
David Linthicum
In this case, on premise. And so we're assuming that there's there's a big cloud someplace and asked to, you know, move in that direction, and that's not going to be the case. So we're going to get an iris watch or on that thermostat that's on the wall, any number of places where it makes sense to host platform. And it's getting easier and easier to do that as we move forward.
00:19:54:18 - 00:20:12:17
David Linthicum
But there's you have to look at where the optimization is. You have to look at the cost effectiveness. And that's kind of what people are missing out there. And I think one of the good things in how we're going to grow this moving forward is that people will have a realization this this kind of stuff is coming down for the board of directors and the C-level folks there.
00:20:12:18 - 00:20:27:04
David Linthicum
You know, it's not coming from it that says you need to figure out a cost advantage. There, saying we're paying, you know, ten times what you said we're going to pay, you know, for these different new architectures, these new scalable systems that you work in the cloud. We're not going to do that anymore. How are you going to be able to get us out of that?
00:20:27:04 - 00:20:51:29
David Linthicum
How are you going to return more value back to the business? And the reality is it's going to take some businesses down because not only is it the way in which they build and deploy applications that automate things internally, it becomes the business itself. In other words, their ability to automate IP, provide enhanced customer experiences. All these sorts of things become the differentiator of the business really is going to take them to the next level and affect them not to be disrupted, which I think many of them are.
00:20:51:29 - 00:21:04:03
David Linthicum
So we're making mistakes that are not only just going to cause annoying it bills that are going to be very difficult to find board of directors, but things are going to take some businesses out because that becomes the core business unto itself.
00:21:04:05 - 00:21:33:12
Jim Gehring
So to me it's like if the business is a ship and I have the anchor of my traditional systems and I add a whole new platform, I'm kind of second anchor until I make those things cohesive and tie do something to pull the, you know, operational disciplines or core principles that need to be executed. And to me, having been in infrastructure a very long time, the interesting thing is there are ways to do this.
00:21:33:15 - 00:21:53:24
Jim Gehring
I mean, it's not like they moving your applications into the cloud is like a complete rebuild because you're going to a cloud native platform and microservices in this that the other moving your infrastructure over. Yes it's new similar but there are a lot more things that are out there as a service make it easier I've got a skill shortage.
00:21:54:01 - 00:22:19:04
Jim Gehring
Well let's not worry about the commodity stuff in my infrastructure, but let's put the right things in place so that things are running better. I could talk about it to the point where it just makes me feel like it's hopeless. But the truth of the matter is there's a lot of things out there that are ready to help people, whether they're just starting a few people are already most people are already in it, but we like to call it Order Matters.
00:22:19:09 - 00:22:38:09
Jim Gehring
We compare it to the fact that if it's a math problem, you're putting your operators in the wrong place. And if you started that and you're three years into it, your results are obviously going to be way off. But you can still correct those operations. And and for us and correct me if I'm wrong, Anthony, these things are been doing it for a long time.
00:22:38:09 - 00:22:49:08
Jim Gehring
I think one more thing. One of the things we throw out, we decide it's legacy and technology that is the maturity around running the systems. Agreed.
00:22:49:10 - 00:23:17:17
Anthony Jackman
Yeah. I mean, this is the key to our story. For a long time. And we have a number of customer customer testimonials about how us solving for their existing problems, things that they understand and giving them automated tool sets and observability about over what they had today, freed up the cycles that their team needed to upskill to go to the next generation of clouds For the applications where it makes the most sense versus an edict across the board that we're going to go do everything.
00:23:17:24 - 00:23:33:19
Anthony Jackman
Let's let's solve all the problems that we have right now. Let's get some management over our technical debt and free up cycles from our people. And by doing that, just like you said, reversing the order of operations, they saw a massive acceleration for how fast they could transform their business.
00:23:33:22 - 00:23:54:28
David Linthicum
Yeah, absolutely. If again, we're putting a different objective, you know, it's not moving to a platform which you just stated, which I think was objective in the past. It's moving to an optimal state and something that's going to be a little bit more difficult to figure out in terms of the value that's coming back to the business. But we're evaluating each workload and each data set on its own terms.
00:23:54:28 - 00:24:13:24
David Linthicum
In other words, not on the terms of the market, are not in the terms are ready to go. We're looking at it strategically as to where it needs to exist and making the right decision. It really kind of comes down to that. And it's but it's it kind of blows my mind how many people are just don't see that really kind of as the way in which you're going to look at it.
00:24:13:24 - 00:24:34:24
David Linthicum
And I think and the reality is we're getting to a state and this thing kind of scares me. What it always ends up working, you know what I mean? Well, okay, maybe we shouldn't move with the climate works. You know, It's like, okay, well, it works, but it's crushing. I think, you know, let me just in back of the napkin, I guess $2 million a month more you're paying for that thing than doing it on premise or even some other alternative platform.
00:24:34:26 - 00:24:59:12
David Linthicum
So just fact it works. We got to start use it. Stop using that as a core metric. We can make everything right. It can be on a completely inefficient platform and work great. You've got to figure out in terms of its optimization of the system and start asking the question. So someone has to take leadership and then these organizations and say, Are we fully optimized on that particular platform and leveraging this technology, or is this something we move to properly for the wrong reasons?
00:24:59:12 - 00:25:00:23
David Linthicum
And those questions aren't being asked?
00:25:00:26 - 00:25:23:05
Jim Gehring
I know. And to me, because the edict came down from above, what they were really looking for was that enhanced operation and or new business growth, if you ask them that question, working an enhanced or new business growth are different things. So if you told them to really take an audit check on it now, unfortunately they're the guys at the top.
00:25:23:05 - 00:25:42:23
Jim Gehring
They made the decision, are they going to come back and say, Oh, you know, I made a mistake? No, it's it's working. Got it. But if you want to switch gears a little bit, you can get back to unleashing the potential that was there by doing what you said is, well, what we've all been saying, which is you got to focus on the right modernization and optimization.
00:25:42:23 - 00:25:47:04
Jim Gehring
It's it's it's what we call it. What a journey. Not a destination.
00:25:47:06 - 00:26:06:22
David Linthicum
Journey. Not a destination. I think we have to have educate people in organizations to ask the tough questions you just mentioned. It really kind of comes down to leadership and also the ability to kind of admitting mistakes and backing some things up. I can't imagine someone has to go in someone's office. I mean, I remember the cloud was turned out to be more expensive than we thought it was going to be.
00:26:06:25 - 00:26:29:16
David Linthicum
Remove it back on premise and agree repatriating the system. But those conversations, I think it's okay to have. I think that it's a win. I would high fives somebody if they came up and had the courage to make those decisions. And in the organizations we need to make it acceptable that this is going to be an agile and constantly changing operations.
00:26:29:16 - 00:26:46:12
David Linthicum
We're going to make mistakes. And the only way to find complete optimization and complete agility is the ability to kind of move things back and forth as we need to. And it and put them on the right platforms and then even have to relocate them. If we made a mistake in moving to the platforms, sometimes leaving stuff on premise, that's a mistake.
00:26:46:13 - 00:27:01:11
David Linthicum
Sometimes leaving stuff on an MSB, that's a mistake. Sometimes leaving stuff on the cloud is a mistake. So let's ask the tough questions, Alice. Let's start. Let's start calling into task as to why we made these moves. You know what value is coming back into the business and what we should do going forward.
00:27:01:14 - 00:27:29:13
Jim Gehring
Yeah, we're getting the perfect storm right now because you look at Dropbox, for example, went to the cloud, came back out there saying their margins are up 34%. We ourselves saved University of Phenix $50 million over the life of the contract by just pulling that they were on the out of Boustany they're still on the IWC tourney but we pulled them into our platform and nine months and streamlined things for them.
00:27:29:13 - 00:27:53:23
Jim Gehring
But now the perfect storm is because you can tell it's there because one of the few people who are reporting the difference in repatriating and what's happened right now, there's a flex era poll that they did recently and for the first time ever, cost has become an higher concern for the coming year than security. Right. So a lot.
00:27:53:26 - 00:28:14:13
Jim Gehring
Yes. And to me, the question is, you know, what what kinds of things have you seen as direct impact on business as we've seen it? We can talk about it. You know, what what have you seen where, you know, besides cost are bad decisions? And if somebody says it's working, as we just said, that, is that really working?
00:28:14:16 - 00:28:18:01
Jim Gehring
You could tell by the two millions over. But sure, there are some other stories.
00:28:18:01 - 00:28:39:26
David Linthicum
Yeah, I think we're seeing businesses that are dying and don't know it. I think I'm we're seeing a rash of those right now. So in other words, they've made many mistakes. Everything seems to be working fine, but they're paying way more for their I.T. infrastructure. They're hindering development, creativity. They're not enabling the producers and the organization to create.
00:28:39:26 - 00:29:10:20
David Linthicum
And that new innovations are going to take the companies to the next level. They haven't done the digital transformation, and they may believe in their own minds that they're doing just fine. But the reality is a company is going to die the death of a thousand cuts over the next ten years. And I wrote an article years ago called The Brand Pocalypse I Never write about Business if I was right about tech stuff, but I kind of seeing the fact that many of these organizations are going to go through these kind of invisible downfalls that occur within because they're making the wrong decisions.
00:29:10:20 - 00:29:27:23
David Linthicum
And mostly about the technological aspect of it. And so they're going to end up getting smaller and smaller, smarter part of the market share where someone buys them and they're going to go out of business, you're going to get bots or going to brands that around for 100 years. We've seen this happen in the last five years, you know, 150 years that that just kind of go away.
00:29:27:23 - 00:29:46:09
David Linthicum
But they went away for no good reason and they went away because many bad decisions were made. And that didn't come to the realization that their investment in I.T. wasn't working strategically for the business. They got enamored with the fact that things were just operating and working. Here we go again. But it was taking too many resources out of the business.
00:29:46:09 - 00:30:08:15
David Linthicum
They weren't enable creativity and innovation. They weren't leveraging culture and operating model today to get the most of the cloud based systems, and they just end up dying and going away. And I'm not even sure people who say, well, that was why they did that. Maybe the market went away. No, that market didn't go away. Well, maybe they just couldn't, you know, spend as much as the other companies.
00:30:08:15 - 00:30:13:20
David Linthicum
Now they're spending twice as much as other companies. So you get the pattern here.
00:30:13:24 - 00:30:33:12
Jim Gehring
And some people can get through it. But as an example, I talked to another large company. Hey, do you distributors a distributorship And I talked about their old system. They had a large system. They were moving into a U.S. state. They had a good pace. They were moving things properly, but they had a lot of stuff left. That's why are you leaving that there?
00:30:33:12 - 00:30:51:14
Jim Gehring
And they said, well, our plan is to just let it die on the vine. And well, is that three years, five years, ten years? Because what a lot of people think would be, here's how much it's going to take. I talked to a CIO in a large financial firm, and I was asking basic questions about how's the cloud journey going?
00:30:51:17 - 00:31:16:21
Jim Gehring
Like, tell me about it. And I would ask simple questions, Tell me what's working. I always ask them that question before you ask them to tell you what's bad because you can't get back to the good. And he said, Now let me tell you what's not work. And he wouldn't even answer the question. He goes, All right. He said, The board came to me almost four years ago and said, We got to move to cloud one of those cloud for first programs.
00:31:16:21 - 00:31:37:29
Jim Gehring
He goes, I told him I could do 90% in two years, Jim. I just stopped the program where 28% of the way I've spent way more money than I thought I could. I can't get the people to adapt to the change. I can't find the skills that I need, etc. And to me, that's what happens when you don't look at where are you getting the value for the move?
00:31:37:29 - 00:32:08:09
Jim Gehring
Like, why do I need to move an application into that? There's good reasons. There's really good reasons to look at putting it in NWC or Google or Azure, very good ones, especially if you're optimizing, using the services and so on and so forth. You're focused on the application and what it's going to give the business. But if you decide the cloud is that magic thing, something here not laser focused on where that's going to come from, it's like years ago when I was in the database business, I got on a talk after informing.
00:32:08:09 - 00:32:28:10
Jim Gehring
I was on stage before me. And you know what they said? Now I'm showing my age here, information, build it and they will come. And I was in database deep at that time. I got up on stage and I knew the guy personally and I said, Hey, Rob, I'm really sorry. Don't build it. And they will come like Goldfinger out or you're going to get your value.
00:32:28:13 - 00:33:02:20
Jim Gehring
And that hasn't changed. Sequel coding hasn't changed in all this time. That hasn't changed. So to me, what we've put together and why we put it together is to help businesses out with that. But getting them to listen to that, especially when you look at you look at the difference between how decisions are made in the software side, from how decisions are made and the infrastructure side, the people who take that job, a lot of times, not all the time, are meant to keep the lights on and for good reasons, and that's what they focus on.
00:33:02:20 - 00:33:25:02
Jim Gehring
So you tell them, Hey, you got a rework your entire platform. It's not necessarily how they think. And if the business at the top who doesn't understand that infrastructure anyways is having a hard time figuring out how to handle that, how do you bridge that gap from a business perspective and that massive shift in how they do things that they need to go?
00:33:25:07 - 00:33:58:09
David Linthicum
That's a great question. In some cases you don't, you know, in some cases, unless they they hit rock bottom, they're not going to change. I kind of realize that after, you know, being in this business for 40 some odd years and that and seeing people change and not change and the reality has to be some sort of a urgency that set up either by the board of directors or by some key leadership that comes in there that starts that she is truly an agent of change and not just an agent of operating where they start moving in a different direction and that only happens when people touch the oven, you know, so touch the stove.
00:33:58:11 - 00:34:15:22
David Linthicum
And it's it's a shame that that works that way. But the reality is you just kind of hit the nail on the head. People are typically hired to maintain the status quo, to keep the lights on, to keep things running, to make sure the invoices get out on time, to make sure the products are built, to make sure the systems are supporting some the basic, you know, business processes.
00:34:15:28 - 00:34:38:09
David Linthicum
There doesn't seem to be an incentive there to do innovation, and that doesn't be an incentive there to do optimization. And your friend who is a CIO, I see it all the time. There were 90% in the cloud. I think probably going to, you know, even at their even our best, even our best that decade or two decades, we will saturated at 70% and moving and maybe because it is not cost effective for all these workloads to move in that direction.
00:34:38:11 - 00:34:55:07
David Linthicum
But the reality is people weren't looking at the cloud for what it needed to be looked at. Something is going to have an opportunity or optimization opportunity to build net new systems. And by the way, that's where all the developments occurring in the cloud you're trying to do the best is systems are going to be in the cloud typically not on premise.
00:34:55:07 - 00:35:18:05
David Linthicum
So it's going to have a it's going to have a core use, but just as a platform alternative that can lift and shift out of a particular data center with no remediation or refactoring that occurs. I make that happen. That's typically not going to it. Sometimes it will it will work happens in many instances not viable. You have to link it into the cloud native features in the security systems and you can make a very efficient application.
00:35:18:05 - 00:35:39:18
David Linthicum
But guess what? That's going to cost you three times the amount of money it took to rebuilt to build the application in the first place, because refactoring actually means rewriting from scratch, right? Or mostly rewriting scratch. So if we're going to make that move, we're just going to have to figure what realistically that's going to be, how many resources we're going to take out of the organization, and also ask ourselves, should we make the move?
00:35:39:18 - 00:35:56:06
David Linthicum
And I think that's what that's a question that's not getting bantered about. And I think we're we're up against, like I said, a huge marketing push that's been going on for a long time. Back in 2010 to that was when people were cloud washing everything. It doesn't matter if you're, you know, you're making this cup, it's cloud aware.
00:35:56:08 - 00:36:14:25
David Linthicum
And now we're doing the same thing with API. And so we just saw a massive adoption of this kind of religious belief that this the system is going to, you know, bring us to the next level. Not looking at for what it is, is another tool in our arsenal that's going to make us better at doing it. Now we're coming to that realization.
00:36:14:25 - 00:36:21:14
David Linthicum
Hopefully enough people will come to a realization before they take their business down. Are their careers now I think we're going to see about.
00:36:21:16 - 00:36:46:05
Anthony Jackman
A part of it too, he said. You have to consider how many resources you're going to take out of your organization, but you also have to consider can the resources in my organization even handle this change? When you talk about the team that's been asked to keep the lights on? Right. Over the years, those systems have grown and grown and grown and those people manage tens of systems and so the business assumes, while they've learned all these, that, you know, the next jump, they can easily learn this next system.
00:36:46:08 - 00:37:06:15
Anthony Jackman
It's not typically the same type of skill set right. Right. The person that's great at running the on prem infrastructure and the backup platform, etc. might not have that great of a grasp of how to consume the service. It's a different skill set or a significant upskilling, which while they're keeping the lights on, how are they supposed to do that?
00:37:06:17 - 00:37:16:16
Anthony Jackman
So it's often not just resources put out of the organization it's also resources that need to be poured into the organization, which is a cost that's not always considered. And, you know, after you're trying to make the move.
00:37:16:17 - 00:37:35:04
David Linthicum
Absolutely. Great point. In many instances to their additive. In other words, they don't replace anything. So know they've gone from, say, running 100 systems on premise and they're going to move 20 of them into the cloud. They may have 110 systems. The end of the day, many of them just don't go away and they become kind of redundant.
00:37:35:04 - 00:37:58:08
David Linthicum
Systems are running in parallel at the same time with the idea we're going to sunset. That's a better word for saying retire or turn off, but it just kind of never happens. And that's how we're getting into this complexity problem or just getting overhead unity because we're building systems of different platforms and we're asking the operational people to by the way, we know you're running this hundred systems needed around these hundred 20 now, 20 in the cloud.
00:37:58:15 - 00:38:18:22
David Linthicum
Yeah, I know you. I have the skill sets to do that. But here's some on the way on training. Go ahead. Make that happen. That's too much. Too much. Draw on those resources. And that's where companies are running into this this complexity while this this cost wall that's hitting into because they built these additional systems without regard to how the people in operations are going to scale up and make them happen.
00:38:18:22 - 00:38:25:05
David Linthicum
So we can't operationalize these complex environments because we didn't think through what it takes to do that correctly.
00:38:25:07 - 00:38:46:12
Jim Gehring
It's just dawning on me now as I think about this, because I was in managed services for a long time. In fact, I was selling it before people would really let somebody in to do the managed services. Right. Had to wear tap dance shoes and all kinds of things to get people to listen to it. And when I finally got to doing is the same kind of thing with the University of Phenix and other clients.
00:38:46:12 - 00:39:12:07
Jim Gehring
We have. We saved them money and we did things better than they were doing it To your point about needing a new set of set of skills to to do the optimization and modernization of that environment, but there's a gap between that and where they need to be next step after that. So the advantage of this is really very similar to how it was back in my day.
00:39:12:07 - 00:39:29:28
Jim Gehring
But I think what they need to look at is no different than when I sold to Oracle managed services to Pioneer Standard years ago. I said to the CIO, Listen, you've got three DBA here. I keep coming back to fix problems. The core of the system. Just give me a contract and let those guys keep doing the work they're doing for the company.
00:39:30:00 - 00:39:54:11
Jim Gehring
And and they did that and they were very successful with it. So it's no different. It's look, if and and the message is no longer just I.T. the messages to the business. Look, if you really want to get business enhancement and and have the opportunity to do innovation and drive new growth, you need to make a shift. This isn't I can put my stuff over there and I'm done.
00:39:54:11 - 00:40:01:03
Jim Gehring
And now I don't have to think about my data center costs. It's way more than that. And it's a big opportunity.
00:40:01:05 - 00:40:21:11
David Linthicum
It is a big opportunity. And so, you know, what do we do? I mean, what are we saying here? What's the we get into this kicking the same ball around and and getting into a disinfected drum circle, you know, so to speak, about that stuff is about what you know, what are we recommending as far as getting of organizations moving in the correct direction?
00:40:21:13 - 00:40:24:00
Jim Gehring
Yeah. So for us, it's an and conversation.
00:40:24:00 - 00:40:39:12
Anthony Jackman
We've been talking about it and conversation. It's a plan upfront. It's what's the low hanging fruit where I can offload some things off my team. Right. I think something that everyone's bought into at this point is that certain things are a great fit for SAS because you really don't have to worry about it. Right? And those are things systems you have to manage.
00:40:39:12 - 00:41:01:17
Anthony Jackman
Today. Almost everyone's on 365 at this point, which sounds small, but that actually offloaded a good amount of work from internal I.T. That's a great first step. And then look at the rest of your workload and decide what's the order in which I need to modernize. This were not modernize this what systems I need to put in place to get better control over my systems that are going to stay on premise and then execute on the plan.
00:41:01:17 - 00:41:18:15
Anthony Jackman
And I think partners are typically a big part of that because like we said, that the skill set that exists within a business is not necessarily always correct. And you can bring in a partner for a short period of time to help you along that plan and make sure that you optimize versus.
00:41:18:17 - 00:41:38:29
David Linthicum
Yeah, this is solving a problem systemically. I mean, it's it's not throwing technology at this. It's getting into the culture and the people and the skill sets you're going to have in the organization to take things forward and where they're going to come from and what they're going to do. I think those we're not asking ourselves those questions in many instances and also factoring those things in the selection of the technology.
00:41:38:29 - 00:42:01:07
David Linthicum
As I mentioned, SAS, you know, I agree with you, if you can put it in a SAS based system, normally it's a better system and you don't have to maintain it. It sits outside the organization. Someone doesn't know your behalf. But you know, what about the infrastructure stuff you have to deal with the databases, all these sort of things where you're looking them over to what kind of skill sets you have around, what kind of culture of adoption do you have to have?
00:42:01:07 - 00:42:25:03
David Linthicum
You know, what about, you know, putting putting things in a product management versus just an application management journey? So we're having interactions with with the customer, both the customers and the users internally organization to make those things better. And it really needs to be something that has to be owned by an organization that has kind of the political will to make the changes they need to take things to the next level.
00:42:25:03 - 00:42:41:21
David Linthicum
And by the way, I've seen it happen a few times. I've seen heroes within organizations. I know exactly what they need to do, and they're on this multi-year journey, which is difficult to do because if you're working for a publicly traded company, I was officer of a few of those. It's quarter on quarter growth is everything. You're trying to get everybody into the mind.
00:42:41:21 - 00:43:03:11
David Linthicum
It's not quarter on quarter growth, less investment into the long term value and where the organization looking to go, having those conversations, having your leadership and having your investors agree upon it and then back those into those sort of conversations which are more productive, you know, productive moving forward. And we've been not necessarily thinking about this in a value play, thinking about this in a cost by EPS play.
00:43:03:14 - 00:43:20:04
David Linthicum
And I'm not sure that's the right way to go. And I think the investors in the markets in general are rewarding companies that able to make these innovation leaps to move to these states that are going to be closer to fully optimized where they're leading their business. So you're at the point where you're losing the resources as efficiently as we can.
00:43:20:11 - 00:43:46:02
David Linthicum
That's going to be core to what we're doing. And so we're minimizing the cost for minimizing the amount of software spending on humans and I.T. resources, things like that, without undermining the existing strategy as to where we're going to go. Now, that's possible to do, again, spending things wise or not, you know, you know, wiser, not more in more cost effective way and not being penny, you know, penny wise and pound foolish when you make these sorts of things.
00:43:46:04 - 00:44:06:10
David Linthicum
So this seems to be an obvious trend that needs to come in there. And we're we're going to see I think this happened anyway because the ones who really don't effect this sort of cultural change and this sort of change in infrastructure and our leveraging and optimized resources are going to go away. You know, the market's going to do the natural selection and they're going to be, you know, off into the wind.
00:44:06:10 - 00:44:25:26
David Linthicum
They're going to get bought by other organizations that figured out how to make this happen. But I think there's so many organizations now that have a viable chance to make the changes that either make to think differently and how they're dealing with technology and think a bit out of the box and how they're dealing with this stuff. And look at this stuff with different metrics and different measurements in that currently doing.
00:44:25:28 - 00:44:58:20
Jim Gehring
So I agree 100%. And I want to just emphasize that unless they're really looking at how the applications that sit on the infrastructure are being optimized and modernized to meet business initiatives, they've got challenges. But that drum circle that we had before that talks about the infrastructure, one of the things I would say that I think is really important in solving the problem has to do with the planning that Anthony mentioned.
00:44:58:23 - 00:45:28:12
Jim Gehring
And I think a piece of that is if I was going to give it a name, it has everything to do with the silos that we work in because people by default have accidentally been building two settings. And so I've been working with a company recently and they're buying D.R. And they're looking at that D.R. project like a silo, and they're not even on a full cloud journey yet.
00:45:28:12 - 00:45:53:23
Jim Gehring
But the problem is, is that in today's world, using cloud tools, you need to not buy D.R. without thinking about how production is really working, how your security is really working, really important. Yes. Yes. And because people are so accustomed to thinking in silos and working, especially in it, these are the guys that are keeping the lights on.
00:45:53:26 - 00:46:27:05
Jim Gehring
Hey, I need D.R.. No, no, don't talk to me about Those are the things that's crippling them because what's really of value is when they can look at that product and start to think about that landscape as we've been talking about. If you look at our portfolio we call it the laggards, you know, in other words, we have a very large portfolio that covers a lot of arenas from Edge to VDI to D.R. to backups with a micro segmentation and firewalls, all these things that go into, but they're all built to go together.
00:46:27:05 - 00:46:43:10
Jim Gehring
In other words, we publish the stack that we run and are not saying you need to buy all that, but you know that when you're buying those pieces, two things can happen. One, you can use those. And two, don't buy it without talking to us about how it's going to fit into what you have, because it's meant to do that as well.
00:46:43:17 - 00:47:20:15
Jim Gehring
We don't. We say it's an add conversation because we know Multicloud is a reality, but we've been building our products for a number of years now to be able to work on prem, to work in our cloud, to work in hyperscale clouds, etc., and a wide variety of areas. And I think that one little piece of advice, if you could find the hero or somebody who's listening enough to say, Yeah, I want to try and make that shift, that's a smaller shift, but it'll have big consequences on the underlying infrastructure that is right now the the second boat anchor that's holding the company back, yeah.
00:47:20:17 - 00:47:40:20
David Linthicum
I think is going to be a push to doing things using common services and common mechanisms moving forward because I mean, when we started the conversation, I'm saying the same thing, little pods within organizations as we're all agile now, and so we just make it up as we go along and, you know, get in a digital drum circle, so to speak, but smaller drum circles with a two piece team, whatever.
00:47:40:21 - 00:48:06:04
David Linthicum
But the reality is we can still do that but still have commonality and how we're going to deal with core services. If you think about it, we got into the complexity problem because there was no commonality. Everybody used whatever BCD r system and security system and governance system and even thin ops systems and things that really should always be deployed as common sense of services to solve a particular type of problem that was related to a particular solution pattern.
00:48:06:04 - 00:48:26:27
David Linthicum
And so that's how we're getting in trouble. You know, so to speak. And I'm glad to say, well, that's the way, you know, the creative innovation wants to occur within these pods. And we just do it that way. And when they externalize something, we'll figure out how to operate it that won't scale and ultimately, you know, I wish we live in a world where I could, you know, you make stuff up and it would be 100% optimized and work and stuff like that.
00:48:26:27 - 00:48:36:05
David Linthicum
They have to link in to a common set of security, common operational framework. They have to deal with abstraction, automation, or else we're going to spend too many resources in operationalizing this stuff.
00:48:36:07 - 00:48:54:02
Jim Gehring
But they have to think about those things across the landscape. So as long as they're thinking holistically, they're going to do great. And I'd be curious your thoughts, because another aspect of this, you know, a little hint as to how you might be able to get the infrastructure, pull the anchor up on the infrastructure to get the ship moving.
00:48:54:04 - 00:49:06:05
Jim Gehring
Automation seems to be really huge. I mean, and if you focus on automation as a means of doing things across the landscape, don't get down into a pocket. It can be of great.
00:49:06:05 - 00:49:31:06
Anthony Jackman
Malformation isn't lost, it's not even question, not even a question. And it's it's not just automation. It's a automation approach appropriately, where you abstract as much as possible under the under the scenes and you control the interaction point to make it look the same. Whether you're deploying data user Azure on prem, if you can make it look the same and it's just a choice of where it's going because of some other service that that needs to consume.
00:49:31:08 - 00:49:34:28
Anthony Jackman
That's how you can really get the acceleration, abstract complexity away.
00:49:35:03 - 00:49:51:20
David Linthicum
Yeah, it's putting, it's putting volatility. And so there may as an all architectural challenge and by the way, that's been around for a long period of time before there was volatile land domain. That's genius. Now we were talking about that in the eighties and nineties as it's moving forward because we're dealing with the move in distributed systems and it seem to work there.
00:49:51:20 - 00:50:15:25
David Linthicum
But the thing is we have these to your point, we have these entirely complex, heterogeneous systems all using their an interfaces and different security systems and, you know, different ways of provisioning and provisioning systems. And the thing is, if we're going to deal with these systems on their terms, knock the scale, going to work, we need to deal with these systems on our terms, which means we use automation and abstraction as a way to place volatility into a domain that allows this stuff to scale.
00:50:15:27 - 00:50:40:14
David Linthicum
When you get to it, it's the only answer. I think that work works because we've proven this to work, but it's not a eureka concept. It's an old architectural standards. Been around for a long time. And and so it just seems to me people, when they touch the oven, they're going to be start moving in this direction. My my hope is that they're not too far gone in terms of the complexity they created where they're not able to roll it back.
00:50:40:14 - 00:50:43:06
David Linthicum
And that's something that's going to be viable to operationalize.
00:50:43:09 - 00:51:05:13
Anthony Jackman
And the problem, I think, becomes and systems were chosen that were chosen without automation in mind to start. Those are the ones that are difficult because there are some things that are very difficult to automate against a especially some legacy type systems. Somebody needs to be a main consideration point. When you're choosing any new platform is not only can I automate it, but can I automated in the way I've automated other.
00:51:05:15 - 00:51:19:16
David Linthicum
It's it's got to have an API and that that's been a core rule of mine as an architect for a long period of time. It has to have a service level interface into the system or else it's not going to have value to me. You have to be able to run in different ways.
00:51:19:16 - 00:51:21:23
Anthony Jackman
I think all the software managers understand that at this point.
00:51:21:23 - 00:51:38:10
David Linthicum
Finally, I think they do, but I still see some APIs. They're not function function matches or, you know, what they provide with the user interface is just a little bit disappointing. So in other words, I can only do things on the user interface that I have to go down I can't do using the API. There's not as much interest on doing that.
00:51:38:10 - 00:52:00:26
Anthony Jackman
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's a kind of a core tenet expedient. We're evaluating new products. One of the things we evaluate upfront is the richness of the API was done correctly. Is it at feature parity or greater than the UI? And how does it plug into our automation framework? Because we're running it for thousands of customers. We can't do that if we can't automate it completely.
00:52:01:00 - 00:52:17:22
David Linthicum
That yeah, and it's absolutely imperative for the enterprises to leverage the technology. You should have should be dealing with these systems on your terms, which means dealing with these systems that are at their interface level, not whatever user interface which causes a human to stare at the system and make it behave in a certain way that won't scale.
00:52:17:27 - 00:52:21:19
David Linthicum
We don't have enough human beings around to stare at your user interface.
00:52:21:21 - 00:52:45:04
Jim Gehring
So we talked about, you know, holistic planning, looking at the things that I'm putting into place as the stepping stone. So if I'm getting our new backups, which are getting refresh because there's better tools out there, making sure that I'm linking that into everything. We've talked about automation as part of that. One of the challenges I don't know that we can tackle here is that cultural mindset.
00:52:45:04 - 00:53:08:15
Jim Gehring
You know, how do you and to me that's where if you know, we can have these simple conversations around you're buying this tool, how is that going to fit into other things? And, you know, we're saying literally, we'll sit down and have that conversation. A lot of times we get stopped before we can even get to that, and there's no charge down that conversation with us.
00:53:08:18 - 00:53:34:27
Jim Gehring
But people want to operate in that old model. We can't get them to that next step. I guess the message I'm saying is that it's worth just looking at because they're such advantages to Anthony's point, to making sure you understand what you're buying, how it's going to relate to the future systems that are coming, and make sure that it's connected to an architecture that you're growing for the future instead of continuing to build traditional systems.
00:53:34:27 - 00:53:44:07
Jim Gehring
I might even call them if you're not thinking ahead legacy systems at this point, no reason to put something in new right now that is going to pull you backwards.
00:53:44:09 - 00:53:50:00
David Linthicum
Yeah, I agree. And so they're saying no, because I have a culture that that just does not want to hear it. Or is that.
00:53:50:02 - 00:54:09:00
Jim Gehring
Yeah, a lot of times it's the it's you know, you've got a guy in charge. He's made his way up through the ranks for a long time. He's the one who's really, really influencing the decision. You can't get to the CIO, ask the question about what are the next things the business is going to be doing, which is, as we talked about before, a really key part.
00:54:09:03 - 00:54:29:06
Jim Gehring
Yes. I mean, if you're going to trust a partner or talk to somebody about what they can do for you, you want to have that conversation with them and hear them addressing and asking the right questions without and every other sentence saying, well, RDR project product will solve that for you. You know, it's really looking at that in a more deeply.
00:54:29:06 - 00:54:58:14
Jim Gehring
But I think the idea of just automation and looking at things properly and asking a few questions about where it would go is really helpful. I'm not saying you need to hire the most expensive consultant to come in and look at things and understand where your data is and your application. That's if you're making infrastructure decisions. There are, as I said earlier, simple things you can do right now that will lighten that anchor more, more and each step.
00:54:58:16 - 00:55:18:01
Anthony Jackman
It's interesting that you bring up. D.R. One of the things that we offer is a D.R. assessment, right? Where we go into a customer and we help them evaluate what they need to do. For D.R., the interesting part about it is that one of the most common outcomes is they figure out things they need to do in production from the after course.
00:55:18:03 - 00:55:38:00
David Linthicum
Yeah, it was the same thing with security. You do a security assessment, they go, Yeah, that and they end up making augmentation to the same thing with governance. And even then ops people have a if they looking at their system in different ways, they can see an assessment CNN a different way, and then find vulnerabilities and find different operational things that they can change.
00:55:38:00 - 00:55:40:07
David Linthicum
Sorry to interrupt, you know.
00:55:40:10 - 00:55:41:26
Anthony Jackman
Yeah.
00:55:41:28 - 00:56:01:00
Jim Gehring
But I don't know if there's anything else, anything you want to focus on relative to getting better. We've kind of hit on things at a high level. Are there any specific things that you wanted to just point out, and especially in the and story, the kinds of things that we've done with Azure and folks like that?
00:56:01:03 - 00:56:22:03
Anthony Jackman
Yeah, I mean, I could talk about the clients that I think have gotten it right. The best and what they did right, they started with plan upfront versus duo right then probably step number one was getting control and probably observability actually before control observability over their existing systems, right? Probably security upfront because if you get security wrong, there's even one mistake.
00:56:22:03 - 00:56:44:07
Anthony Jackman
It will blow up the rest of your plans, right? Not even question observability over costs and actually understanding the cost of everything. And also what is providing value to me and what's not, how many clients do we have that we are on board and we help them discover that 20 to 30% of their workload was idle machines running dollars flying out the window all day, not providing any value at all.
00:56:44:11 - 00:56:45:14
Anthony Jackman
Providing some.
00:56:45:14 - 00:56:46:29
David Linthicum
Money. Yeah.
00:56:47:01 - 00:57:13:02
Anthony Jackman
Right. That that is a first step. Right then. Okay, let's strategically look at where are the hyperscalers the Fed. Great. I already mentioned three five. That's kind of a no brainer across the board. We've had a lot of customers that find that workload is a great fit for Azure. These three applications are dot net. We have a team of dot net developers that have done it for years and Azure has given them the easy button, the port, that code and optimally run it in Azure while consuming some other services.
00:57:13:02 - 00:57:40:27
Anthony Jackman
So Another common theme we've had challenges database performance database is update push data, Azure Consume Database as a service that makes the absolute perfect sense. And now that you have a little bit of control over your environment, you've optimized a couple of things. You can redirect your resources to figure out how do I take the next step and solve some difficult problems, or how do I build that application that's going to enable my business to go where we plan to be in five years?
00:57:40:29 - 00:58:11:10
David Linthicum
That's you just stated what everybody should understand. I mean, and I like the first thing you talked about. You talk about a plan that leads to observability before you do execution in deploying this platform that people are missing right now. Because, you know, that's not a fun thing to do when you do the analysis of the existing requirements as you were looking to go and also observe what the systems are doing now so we can figure out the existing state before we figure out a future state and how to make it run, and also find common services and dealing with security, at least from a logical layer.
00:58:11:12 - 00:58:34:23
David Linthicum
Before you started deploying it as a physical layer. And I think what's missing out there is that kind of thinking which really should be implemented in every organization, at least that I deal with, because they're not that people like think tactical around tooling, things like that. If you want to go and have a conversation there, then I want to talk to you about a plan or talking about a backup system in a redundancy system and how it's going to come back and things like that.
00:58:34:23 - 00:59:04:04
David Linthicum
So they're focused on the technology, not necessarily having, you know, the resource and requirements conversation, which is which is everything. And the reality is that everything, you know, it's kind of taking me back because everything we're talking about here is not overly complex. You know, it's extremely simple and it kind of comes back to, you know, old style, old school software development and how we build systems because systems are so expensive that we by the time we got to the implementation stage, we did lots of planning and watch the design on paper before the stuff was implemented.
00:59:04:04 - 00:59:21:13
David Linthicum
Not trying to get back to the fact that we have to, you know, paralysis through analysis and all that kind of stuff that I think was was get back that and not getting away from Agile, but just having a vision as to where you're looking to take it and what the thing needs to do. And everybody in the organization is able to explain the vision.
00:59:21:13 - 00:59:55:23
David Linthicum
You know, that's the core thing. So everybody understands based on their actions during the day, they're making a decision and understand requirements, utilization of technology. It gets down to a common vision that everybody that exists in the organization, from the CIO, you know, down to the I.T. Staffer who is managing the data center and and not hard it really isn't hard to implement just became very hard because those sorts of ideas are up against a marketing machine that likes to talk about using technology as the way in which you're going to get to the end state.
00:59:55:23 - 01:00:11:07
David Linthicum
And that's almost never going to be the case. We got in trouble now, am I doing that? So let's let's kind of, you know, back up a bit, realize that that's not the way to go. Figure out some sort of a hybrid way to get to this. So we're normalizing complexity. We're dealing cost efficiencies, we're dealing with different metrics.
01:00:11:14 - 01:00:27:18
David Linthicum
More importantly, we're maximizing return of the stuff to the value to the business, which is, you know, and we can prove it. You know, there's metrics and we can prove that we're making it happen, things like that, versus while we help, we got there, it works. Now that's you're killing yourself and you're doing that.
01:00:27:20 - 01:00:32:26
Anthony Jackman
It's really all about the approach, but making sure that the approach is actually going towards mission.
01:00:32:29 - 01:00:34:29
David Linthicum
Absolutely. All set.
01:00:35:01 - 01:01:01:22
Jim Gehring
Yeah. And I think that and the idea of it being agile, our analysis paralysis, it goes back to that term that IBM created on bimodal I.T. And it's not that and you know quick review application team go fast and furious infrastructure team take your time get it right. In this day and age we have to move faster. And as I said before, a lot of tools to do that.
01:01:01:22 - 01:01:23:02
Jim Gehring
But you got to think differently and you still have to do a little more planning. So if I look at what Iot and Cloud services are doing for cities with, you know, pollution and control of traffic and all these things that go into place, those are the great things outside on cloud. But the infrastructure are the roads and the pipes that are underneath.
01:01:23:05 - 01:01:40:17
Jim Gehring
So I can't just as much as I want to make that infrastructure just shift and become agile and I could move my road over here and over there, build another bridge. It can't do that when that bridge is old and it's time for me to replace it. We see all the time I'm changing the way interchange is function to make them better.
01:01:40:17 - 01:02:04:00
Jim Gehring
Great, that's the time to do it. And there's no reason to try and do it all at once. But if if that exchange is still working, use it. When it's time to redo it, decide then not optimize it. And I don't know, I just think that people need to place a little more emphasis on what it means to move an infrastructure.
01:02:04:04 - 01:02:09:19
Jim Gehring
I think we've actually literally neglected what's happening inside of the infrastructure.
01:02:09:22 - 01:02:21:20
David Linthicum
Yeah, that sums it up. That's how we got in trouble. In other words, neglecting in terms of having vision, visibility. And so what the as data is on the TV state needs to be, I don't think many organizations have an idea at a cloud still don't.
01:02:21:20 - 01:02:37:11
Jim Gehring
I really appreciate having this conversation with you. I love listening to Anthony and I work with him. I don't see him often when he's on stage. I really enjoy it and I follow you. So it's a real pleasure to sit and talk with you. If we were going to summarize a kind of our conversation.