Bearing Witness to Success

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Audio transcript:

Episode 6 – Bearing Witness to Success

Published July 21, 2017

Announcer: You're listening to Technomics. Connecting you to insights on digital transformation and the marketplace. The hosts' opinions are their own. Enjoy the show!

Robyn Itule: We are back with a brand spanking new episode of Technomics. I’m so excited to be sitting in front of the microphone with a great crowd around the table today. I’ve got Curt Cornum with me.

Curt Cornum: Hey Robyn.

Robyn Itule: How are you?

Curt Cornum: I’m doing great, how about you?

Robyn Itule: I’m really good. And our guest today is Mr. Mike Gaumond. How are you sir?

Mike Gaumond: I’m doing well, how are you Robyn?

Robyn Itule: I’m doing very well. I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation which is kind of our case-study wrap up of the Infrastructure Optimization Season because it’s a while. And you almost get a chance to reflect a little bit on some of the conversations we have had since we last got to sit down. And we actually did some interesting surveys between the last time we recorded and today. And so the Insight Intelligent Technology Index was actually recently released and the focus of some conversation today, which is going to take us to hybrid cloud, real-time business, and intelligent networking, those topics are covered in some of what we checked out in the survey. So I’ll give you a couple data points to respond to. I respond to emotion, other people respond to numbers. But so we want to speak to all of our audiences. Something we saw was that legacy infrastructure is still a huge, huge barrier for some organizations. They are worried about the kind of disruption that they can bring to the business in terms of failure. But they’re also worried about the kind of disruption that can come to business in terms of implementing cloud. And about a third of the respondents said that their implementing services would be too disruptive to their organization. And another 59% of the personnel that we interviewed said that they believe that their data environment is safer after investing in cloud services. So you really have a two sides of the coin conversation filling up the pros and cons list for getting into an on-premise/off-premise hybrid model.

Curt Cornum: Absolutely, I think Mike might have been the one that told me a lot of technologies that were hyped in the short-term, and then they’re hyped in the long-term. And I think we’ve certainly seen that with cloud. And I think some of the concerns on security kind of flipped on their head and folks are kind of looking at some of the security features that are actually inherent in some of the public cloud offering. So its interesting but I think as we had the conversation today, we’re going to realize its not an either/or type of situation, that we live in a hybrid world in more ways than one. I think that includes the compute environments that we’re going to have in most organizations as we move forward as well. Definitely interesting times and I think infrastructure optimization is an important part of it because it really drives the things we talk about a lot about with our clients. Which is how do they help enhance the engagement they’re having with their customers? And then how do they really enable their future and current workforce as well. Those are important aspects but you’ve got to have the infrastructure in place to make that happen. So its an important part of it and interesting times for sure.

Robyn Itule: I mean we’re all nodes on the network right?

Curt Cornum: We are, yes in one, in probably multiple nodes these days as it turns out.

Mike Gaumond: Hopefully my meaning in life is slightly deeper than a network.

Curt Cornum: Than a node, than being known as a node.

Robyn Itule: So oversimplified. So with all of that in mind, I’d love to start talking about some of the real deal conversations and actual projects that we’ve been able to help clients though in terms of getting their hybrid cloud into place. Really benefiting their organization without too much disruption. Leveraging real time business in order to better engage and enable the workforce. And also, use intelligent networking to help optimize large organizations and handle workload. Mike pick your poison. Do you want hybrid cloud, real-time business, or intelligent networking?

Mike Gaumond: You kind of lead off with the hybrid cloud so maybe we should start there.

Robyn Itule: Sounds like a plan.

Curt Cornum: So Mike I have a question if I could jump in around not a solution, because I know you go visit clients and some things that are actually driving then. What are the market drivers, what are the challenges that they’re saying, “We think that there’s a better solution than having us build it all on prem.” What are some of the realities that you’re seeing out there?

Mike Gaumond: I guess I’d point to a few things. First, back to your prior comment. There was definitely an irrational exuberance phase for public cloud when the whole world started thinking everybody’s going to move to public cloud, nothing is going to be left in private cloud. And the pendulum started swinging back the other way when people were getting these huge bills for public cloud and saying, “Wait, wait, wait. This is pretty expensive.” And the reality is setting in now that almost every client we talk to is going to have some amount of private cloud that they keep on premise whether that’s their own data center or a colo [assumed]. And some amount of workloads up in the public cloud. But from a business driver perspective, what I really see clients struggling with is that their legacy infrastructure isn’t enabling them the kind of business agility that a hybrid public cloud solution could enable. And specifically, I’m talking about creating the capability for their business to be able to do things like launch a new product faster than they’ve done in the past or enter a new market more quickly or integrate an acquisition more seamlessly then they have in the past. So that’s what’s driving companies to make that investment, that business pressure to compete more effectively than they ever have in the past.

Robyn Itule: Another notable stat we got from the survey was that nearly half of respondents have migrated more than 50% of corporate application workloads to private cloud. Yet, that leaves the other half sitting somewhere on site.

Mike Gaumond: Yeah and even if you believe the more aggressive projections for public cloud growth, there will be a significant portion of infrastructure that remained a private cloud environment for at least another five or ten years would be my bet, and what most of the analysts are saying. So where that leads, a lot of our clients are wrestling with which of my workloads and applications should I keep in public cloud and which ones should I keep in private cloud? And how do I think about that in some sort of objective fashion?

Robyn Itule: And how do we think about it.

Curt Cornum: I’m sorry Robyn, it seemed like before, initially folks were looking at as a cost savings measure. They thought, “Hey it’s a way I can scale how my organization, I don’t have to buy hardware that I don’t use.” But it seems like its really changed now and its much more rounded. How does it help me transform my own business? How does it help me be more agile? Like you spoke to before, not that cost isn’t a criteria. The whole Cap-ex to Op-ex which seemed to be the original driver; I think is maybe anecdotal, maybe there’s data behind it. But its taken a back seat to just the fact that people want that kind of agility. They want that kind of flexibility, be able to move quicker to the market which seems to be changing, like you mentioned Robyn, its changed since last time we had a conversation.

Mike Gaumond: Cost still matters, so our clients still care about that; they’re balancing the cost of public to private. But yet its really about what’s the right infrastructure for me to deliver the agility that my business client is requiring or demanding?

Robyn Itule: Alright, we’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’re going to hear about a solution that we actually got to deploy around hybrid cloud and how that’s changing some of the outlook for our Insight client.

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Robyn Itule: Alright and we are already back to hear about how we actually put hybrid cloud to work in a pretty interesting example. So Mike share with us how we were able to help a business transform with some hybrid cloud approaches.

Mike Gaumond: Happy to. The client here is an independent Coca Cola bottler. And they faced a couple of business challenges. I framed this all as business agility. So their business challenges were first, they were trying to drive significant inorganic growth in the business. And second, Coca Cola Inc., the company that makes all the products we know and love, has decided that bottling is not their core competency and they’re exiting that part of the business and they’re selling those assets to independent bottlers like our client. Now the challenge our client had was that their legacy IT infrastructure wouldn’t allow them to add in that new capacity from the parent company and drive that kind of organic growth that they were trying to achieve in the business. So the IT structure was becoming the long pole in the tent for growing the business. So we helped them and we started by taking an assessment driven approach. So we look at their infrastructure, the active directory environment, their network, and then even their applications and workloads, to help understand what their starting point is in order to develop a roadmap for them. And as part of that, we asses their applications and workloads from a strategic, a functional, and a technical perspective. And we do that though some proprietary digital discovery tools we have coupled with running client workshops at the location. And one of the interesting outputs we create for that is a roadmap for our clients for where those workloads should land in a new hybrid world. And we put them into one of four buckets. So the first bucket is, this is an application and workload that we believe makes sense to keep on premise in a private cloud environment. The second category are applications that should be rearchitected for infrastructure as a service or platform as a service environment. The third category are applications we believe they should replace with a standard SaaS (Software as a Service) offering. In other words, there’s a better off the shelf tool out there you can use. And the fourth important category are ones they should retire or end of life. And by starting with the applications at workload, we can then develop a roadmap for their infrastructure on both the pubic and the private side and help them put that in place. And for this particular client, we’re in the midst of implementing that infrastructure, and its going to allow them to triple the capacity of their business from about a 500 million dollar to a 1.5 billion dollar company in 18 months.

Robyn Itule: Yowzah

Mike Gaumond: So that’s pretty transformational.

Robyn Itule: That’s really impressive.

Curt Cornum: I think that’s the kind of agility that we talked about earlier. Its about that ability to move your business that quickly which would be almost impossible to do if you had to try and do that all on premise.

Mike Gaumond: Not only all on premise but even with a tradition premise, fragmented reality environment. If you have a true private cloud with converged or hyperconverged stacks and automation and orchestration, it is so much more rapid for you to support the change in the business side.

Curt Cornum: Yeah that’s a good point, it isn’t necessarily location dependent. Its what kind of automation, orchestration tools you’re bringing to bare just to make you much more agile from an operational standpoint as well.

Robyn Itule: And I mean, when you talk about business outcomes, at the ned of the day the ability to move fast is becoming a part of the DNA. Its thrive or die. Which seems a little bit harsh, but I think you look a little bit at some of the examples that are out there of people who were running organizations that didn’t believe they were technology companies versus some of their competition who felt that at their core, they were a technology company or were becoming a technology company and the results are pretty radical.

Mike Gaumond: I get the opportunity to spend a lot of time with our clients and in the last five years, I can’t think of a single client who didn’t say that their competitive environment was more intense than it was in the past. The pace of change is faster than its been in the past. The ability to track and retain the right kind of talent in their organization is more difficult than its ever been in the past. So the market’s getting tougher, not easier.

Robyn Itule: Dare I say business has become real-time.

Curt Cornum: Which, in a sense is code for the Internet of things. Real time business I think folks can kind of wrap their head around what that means. The Internet of things means a lot of things to other folks. But its interesting the connection between what we just talked about and from a hybrid cloud environment because a lot of the real time business solutions that we see today run on platforms. So folks may not get that unless they’ve kind of started to go down that path on how they use these sensor-enabled products and the analytics driven data that’s coming from that, that really lends itself from a platform based solution and by definition means you’re going to be in a hybrid environment. So exactly what Mike had just talked about, really plays into the real-time business piece. But there’s a whole other set of technologies that are being brought to bare. And its really around getting data off of things that we wouldn’t have necessarily gotten them off of. And I think a lot of times around real-time business, folks saying around IoT, folks are saying the hype. Some folks say its still at the top of the hype cycle. A lot of folks said this is nothing new, we’ve been pulling analytics and temerity off things for quite some time. But there is a difference now in the way that its being done and at the scale that’s its being done today. So pretty interesting and Mike I know you’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of clients around some of the reasons that they’re driving to try and make their business more real time. And I know its around a couple things that we’ve talked about. Can you maybe elaborate on not the specific solutions, but some of the business benefits? What’s really driving these folks to try and get the information that they just didn’t have before?