Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

The Big Themes:
• Setting clear project goals and timelines: This will help you measure your progress. Without clear goals and success metrics, it will be difficult to understand if you are on right track.
• Make sure you have leadership buy-in: It’s important to get these individuals on board. Leadership support can also ensure you have the right resources.
• Select the right consulting partner: They wish they did more research on their consulting partner instead of simply using the first partner that their software vendor recommended.
• How to recover: Identify what is happening in real-time and isolate the specific points of failure. Assess the impact on your project and organization.

The Big Quotes:
“So who knows where the next wave of technology will take us.”

“Well, like the age old question, how do you eat an elephant? It's like one bite at a time.”

“You want a partner who's not going to bait and switch you and give you wrong the team during the selection process.”

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The Big Themes:
• They're looking to modernize everything they do: And whether that's the infrastructure, whether that's how they operate the infrastructure, but it's such a key priority.
• I look at this as two layers of that cake: If we go back to the pillars of a modernization, infrastructure, operations, and applications.
• And I think there's really three pillars to that: One is certainly modernizing their infrastructure. Two is their operations and how they're interacting with their data. And then three is empowering their modern applications.
• If you look at our core storage products: They're designed from day one to be very elastically scalable, non-disruptively so that they can easily be expanded in terms of performance, in terms of capacity.

The Big Quotes:
“All of a sudden your entire workforce is working from home and there's IT demands that come out of that.”

“Maybe there's a hurricane, a data center goes offline. How do I bridge that gap? How do I survive that couple of weeks before I can get back to normal?"

“And so I think that's going to continue to increase. And again, that's something that we've invested heavily here at Pure. Because it just fits so well with the core principles of our technology.”

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The Big Themes:
• You may be hearing about it: The Buy American Act, The Infrastructure Bill, The United States Innovation, and Competition Act.
• Based on our Thomas data: We have a few predictions of supply chain disruptions that will impact the consumer economy over the next 12 months.
• The woman that created a billion dollar brand called Spanx: She was pretty savvy about design and had at least a functional understanding of some of the engineering requirements.
• These key pieces of legislation: Are accelerating the US manufacturing economy and will play significant roles in driving the overall US economy and global security.

The Big Quotes:
“And all these things arrived for the first time in history, that generation is being hit with product shortages and problems of supply chain, disruption, and ships backed up in harbors.”

“If you can, I would wait at least six to 12 months to buy your next car.”

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The Big Themes:
• Every industry: Think about how each one of them accelerated or propelled what they would have taken years to get to in a very, very short period of time.
• Some businesses have opened, some have closed: But one thing it's really taught us is we're able to touch billions of people in meaningful ways, across a broad spectrum.
• Constantly engaging with your customers: And the more you own your customer’s success, the more rewards you will see for your engagement.
• That's what you purchased: Today, you purchase a car that's convenient and that meets your sustainability, and is the next generation and it's driven through software.

The Big Quotes:
“But it's incredible how human beings have been able to cope with this and continue to cope with the scenarios around it in every place around the world.”

“And so we have to work every day, really hard to make our customers successful.”

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The Big Themes:
• IBM support is a differentiator: Upstart cloud vendors are in an IaaS arms race. Legacy enterprise IT clients have been with IBM clients for 50+ years.
• Board of duty of care: The board’s overarching mandate is to protect shareholders over the long term. Boards have two main fiduciary duties: Loyalty and care.
• Cybersecurity and obsolescence risk: What is the age of IT components vs. current – years matter less than generations.
• The right CIO: The CEO gets the CIO they settle for. And CEOs should lobby for QTE—qualified technology expert—on the board.

The Big Quotes:
“We can't get people. We can't get stuff. We can't get network capabilities added because everybody's out of everything.”

“We are now 20 months into a pandemic where we sent the office workers home. Microsoft just the other day said, ‘We're not coming back for a while.’ “

“So you can be a higher margin, higher stickiness, higher customer satisfaction in a company and survive for the long run.”

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The Big Themes:
• This thing called fog of war: And the fog of war is you don't know everything. And then as soon as the bullets start flying, you actually know less because it's like this aperture shrinks.
• Half the Fortune 500 will be replaced by other companies: We have the highest churn rate in the history of the list.
• Most of our corporations are run by terrible leaders: They have the technical background, but just look at our firms, look at how tone deaf they are.
• It's a fantastic world: It's the standards that you have to live up to. And in the exploration of this conversation, we can get to the heart of why leadership is so difficult.

The Big Quotes:
“I think we've lost the societal grit to do good leadership to the extent that we need to, because it's so freaking hard.”

“When you learn leadership, there's fundamental principles that are at play here, and sometimes they're in conflict.”

“Not the placards that the typical HR department puts on the walls, which are meaningless and senseless. A waste of print dollars.”

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The Big Themes:
• The Ambassador: Excited about the project and are telling everyone about it. They’ll be the first ones that post their go-live badge on LinkedIn. They’re also rolling-up their sleeves to contribute.
• The up-and-comer: Might not have previous experience but see the project as an opportunity to grow in their career and add a successful digital transformation to their resume. Great attitude.
• Debbie Downer/Don Downer: “We’ve always done it this way” is their MO. They have a problem for every solution.
• I’m only here for the snacks: Quiet and non-participatory in meetings and email. Demotivate the team and get credit where credit is not due.

The Big Quotes:
“The success of a project is going to boil down to good people management.”

“You want to make sure that you're hand picking the team.”

“A lot of these problems can be solved through good documentation and a good project blueprint where people have known exactly what they're needing to contribute and buy one.”

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The Big Themes:
• It just doesn’t magically happen: It’s not the data you already have, this is one of the hard lessons that lot of folks think.
• DataStax fits into that equation: And this is one of the things that I think goes back to what you talked about in terms of agility.
• Everybody has S3 compatible APIs: You've got your storage now that is just scale out via very simple APIs. You've got your compute now that's been standardized on top of Kubernetes.
• You may have some rock stars: But majority of code written even at these internet companies is written by good developers. And I guarantee you, you've got good developers.

The Big Quotes:
“And so Cassandra was what enabled a number of retailers, many of the major retailers in operation today built critical parts of their e-commerce stack on top of Cassandra.”

“The starting point for most folks is you start talking about saying, ‘Okay, you need to collect and log and interpret all of these streams of data.’”

“And so the open data stack is about trying to make data catch up to where Kubernetes is in terms of giving you that agility.”

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The Big Themes:
• You've got great leaders at the top of the house: In both those companies you really understand innovation.
• One of our venture companies: We sold a company to a publicly traded company that when that transaction happened, I got a lot of congratulations.
• That ship has sailed: I also think though that speaks to another thing that we expected to happen when you plug into an organization – like in this case of Salesforce or Oracle.
• Very fast moving dynamic: So we need to keep in mind not to get locked into an idea that will surely be obsolete in a matter of weeks or months.

The Big Quotes:
“But that doesn't mean that the $27 billion was a fair price. I think it probably was not unfortunately for the shareholders.”

“The game was how many times could you say synergy in a windowless conference room for 30 minutes?”

“I think in enterprise tech you're really seeing something of this happening now in Slack.”

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The Big Themes:
• A fascinating cultural shift: The millennial generation’s increasing dissatisfaction with “knowledge work” and the increasing interest in wanting to make things.
• The cultural legacies of the US manufacturing industry: This is why so many industries are disrupted by outsiders.
• Technology continues to advance dramatically: It’s time to transform and upgrade how technology is positioned, explained, and sold.
• Many scheduled office re-openings have been pushed back: We’re seeing some companies announce full remote plans in perpetuity. What will this push-back do to the tentative office re-opening plans?

The Big Quotes:
“I think I shared with you in New York City that there's over 8,000 small manufacturers that are generating over $7 billion a year in revenue in New York City.”

“We hit a really interesting inflection point where the number of millennial managers were in the workforce and at the same size as the Baby Boom managers.”

“The US manufacturing industry is close to a $3 trillion industry—there are not of industries of that size walking around.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

Visit Cloud Wars for more.