Cloudbusting Podcast

We've got some sad news to share this week, Dave is leaving the pod! So to see him off in style, we've put together two very special final episodes - bringing back a few beloved guests, welcoming Dan Dan Producer Man back behind the mic, and having a look back at some industry trends and pod highlights throughout our time together.

In Dave's penultimate episode, the team are initially joined by Nelson Wootton, CEO of SaaScada, to discuss his experience in the industry and SaaScada's cloud journey over the last few years - namely, how the conversation around cloud adoption has shifted from "what if we?" to "how can we?".

We then welcome back two longstanding friends of the show for a second deep dive, Duena Blomstrom, CEO of People Not Tech, and Alastair Kidd, a Systemic Leadership Coach. Together the group reflect on how leadership styles and ways of working have evolved and shifted over the last few years, leaning in on psychological safety and the importance of focus on people throughout a transformation.

Why scissors?  Find out why this week’s guest, Maggie Fox, took up interest in the scissor industry and is creating awareness around the history of the product. She describes the end to end manufacturing process and its intersection to cloud technology - “ancient process meets new technology.”  Learn about how she became an entrepreneur by starting this very new business and how the cloud enabled her ramp up time to be so quick. 

Listen in to see if you will be convinced your scissors should be as good as your knives?  

Mark Ross, Lead Cloud Architect at Atos, joins the podcast to discuss the “Coaching Hub” at Atos and the importance of continuous education in retaining current employees. Find out why the coaching hub started and how employees transition through it during their tenure. He goes on to stress the importance of building a community and a cloud native culture to bridge the gap between online learning and real life.  When employees engage with other like-minded individuals and apply their work to customer engagements, they gain the experience and confidence to go further in their continuous Cloud Education. 

Interested in getting into the Cloud Industry?  Mark remarks that anyone can do it, it just takes a good education program and the support of business leaders to upskill their teams. 

This week, Jez and Dave are joined by Adam Carmel, Founder and CEO of Polly, a cloud native disruptor to the mortgage industry. In this episode, we discuss how cloud is enabling greater flexibility, faster and continuous deployments of new features, and faster time to market for Polly. Adam gives insight into how building a backend from scratch, maximizing customization for users, automating workflows, and leveraging cloud based analytics, machine learning and AI are all helping drive better ROI and benefits for customers.

During today’s episode, we discuss FinOps with our very own Head of FinOps at Cloudreach, Stephen Old.  Stephen made an interesting segway into the tech and FinOps industry, which he covers in the first portion of the podcast.

Since his entry into the growing industry he’s learned quite a bit about the real definition of financial management of the cloud.  He explains it’s more than just financial optimization.  A true FinOps consultant should know what ‘good’ looks like and really help customers make decisions about their spending and the business value that can be extracted from metrics.

Dive into this episode to learn why FinOps is far from traditional IT Finance. 

Maggie Fox joins us to further explore what we really mean by Digital Quotient - one of our 2022 Cloud Trends.  Maggie is very experienced in the digital marketing space with credit for starting the first social media consultancy, Social Media Group, business advisor to many high-growth companies and a frequent speaker on digital transformation. 

During this discussion with Dave and Jez, Maggie dives into the massive digital changes organizations experienced in 2020 and how company cultures were able to adapt and change quicker than ever before, setting the standard going forward that many projects that used to take months or even years to plan now have the expectation of being completed in a matter of weeks! 

While we might still be coming up with the exact definition of digital quotient - we’re all experiencing it in our daily lives.  Listen to this episode to hear why.

Jed Yueh joins us on the Cloudbusting podcast this week to discuss his journey towards engineering disruption through his previous and current companies.  He goes into describing a wide variety of scenarios to our listeners on what it takes to disrupt the digital space in a big way and how he’s seen success using data.  Using examples like TikTok, Snapchat and the like, he describes why these companies are so successful in their niche. 

Find out what it means for a company to be carbon negative and not just talk about sustainability but take action.  It’s no longer a trend to talk about the environment but time to take real action.

Of course, we wrap up the episode with some really interesting and personable ten-second recommendations this week.  Any guesses on the latest sport to take over America? 

What is the real difference between Automated Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)? This week, Dave and Jez are joined by returning guest, Phil Le-Brun, Enterprise Strategist at AWS, as they unpack data strategies, machine learning use cases, and some practical advice to get enterprises started on their data journey. Drawing on experience working with LexusNexus, Moderna, Formula 1 and more, Phil talks us through how these organizations have delivered better customer experiences through AI and ML.

If you’re looking to get started in the AI and ML space, listen in for Phil’s guidance on your next steps.

Is your enterprise just getting started on its cloud security monitoring journey?  Hear from our guest and CEO of Panther Labs, Jack Naglieri, on some of the biggest challenges he sees in the data security space and even an example of a recent public data breach.  Panther labs provides a cloud native threat detection platform that uses services to scale up workloads as needed by customer demands. He shares with us how he got his start at some of the leading silicon valley tech companies and where the idea and need for Panther Labs came from.   Finally, he provides his view on how to implement a threat detection platform on a cloud environment and the benefits of this compared to traditional, off-the-shelf software.  

Not sure where to get started?  Jack provides advice on where to get started and precautions you can take today with your employees to ensure phishing, the easiest way to hack an environment, is prevented. 

As the demand for software continues to outpace supply of people capable of delivering it, are DevOps and Agile methodologies making the situation worse?

Dave and Jez are joined by Tyler Jewell, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital and DevOps enthusiast, for a fascinating discussion on whether or not we're getting too good at Agile and consequently making developers lives less efficient and more complex.