POPULARITY
15 episodes with enterprise it
17 episodes with enterprise it
7 episodes with enterprise it
4 episodes with enterprise it
4 episodes with enterprise it
3 episodes with enterprise it
4 episodes with enterprise it
2 episodes with enterprise it
3 episodes with enterprise it
In Episode 97 von „Mainframe – What the Heck?“ diskutieren Heidi Schmidt (PKS Software GmbH) und Tobias Leicher (IBM Deutschland GmbH) mit Marc Beyerle (IBM Deutschland GmbH) über moderne Workloads auf dem Mainframe, Linux on Z und Performance Engineering im Java-Umfeld. Im Mittelpunkt stehen moderne Workloads auf IBM Z, Performance-Optimierung und die Frage, warum der Mainframe technologisch oft unterschätzt wird. Marc erklärt anhand praktischer Beispiele, wie Java-Anwendungen, Datenbanken oder Fraud-Detection-Lösungen effizient auf der Plattform betrieben werden können – und warum gute Architektur und saubere Entwicklung dabei entscheidend sind.Die Folge gibt spannende Einblicke in Linux on Z, hardwarebeschleunigte Funktionen wie Krypto und Komprimierung sowie die Rolle von Performance Engineering in modernen Enterprise-Umgebungen.
In episode 73 of Trade Show Talk, host Danica Tormohlen explores the transformative GDC Festival of Gaming 2026, highlighting innovative event strategies, sponsorship activations, and industry insights with Will Wise, Vice President of Sales/Partnerships for the Gaming Vertical at Informa Festivals. Discover how the rebranding, global community, and creative activations are shaping the future of gaming events. In this month's advocacy segment, Tommy Goodwin, President and CEO of the Exhibitions and Conferences Alliance provides an in-depth update on industry advocacy, government shutdown impacts, and upcoming legislative initiatives affecting trade shows and events. Register for Legislative Action Day for free here. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Trade Show Talk Podcast 02:10 Overview of GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 04:35 Rebranding GDC: A New Era Begins 09:20 Building a Global Community in Gaming 10:16 Media and Digital Platforms Supporting Engagement 12:04 The Importance of a Strong Brand 14:19 Innovative Sponsorships and Activations 19:06 Utilizing Multiple Venues for a Festival Experience 22:44 Sponsored Sessions: A Key Component of GDC 24:50 Creating Memorable Experiences: Concerts and Awards 27:59 Expanding Audience Ecosystem for Success 29:26 Shifting from Exhibitors to Partners 30:49 Evolving Partnerships in the Event Industry 31:43 The Role of Customer Success Teams 32:35 Measuring Sponsorship Success 34:20 International Participation and Feedback 36:40 Innovating for Future Events 38:40 Success Stories from the Event 39:59 Lessons Learned for Future Events 42:17 Year-Round Engagement Strategies 43:49 Personal Insights and Hobbies 46:54 Looking Ahead to Future Events 47:18 Advocacy Update with Tommy Goodwin 50:00 Government Shutdown Impacts on the Industry 52:17 Legislative Action and Industry Advocacy 55:32 Preparing for Legislative Action Day Context This March, the GDC Festival of Gaming took over San Francisco, bringing together attendees from over 85 countries, featuring more than 20,000 attendees, 1100 speakers, 700+ cross-disciplinary sessions, and over 300 brand partners. The event wasn't just a conference—it was a celebration of creativity, technology, and connection. From vibrant activations in the Festival Hall to city-wide celebrations like the Opening Night at Oracle Park and the Developer's Concert, this year's GDC truly redefined what a gaming event could be. One of the standout moments was GDC Diamond Partner AWS' activation at CityView at Metreon, which buzzed with agentic AI demos, game streaming showcases, and the inspiring AWS Women in Games event, where industry leaders shared their perspectives on innovation and inclusion. The Festival also introduced new networking opportunities like GamePlan and GDC Encounters, fostering thousands of meaningful connections between attendees and sponsors. And let's not forget the major announcements that made headlines—Microsoft's Project Helix, Google DeepMind's Genie 3, and Valve's Steam Machine Verified program, all of which positioned GDC as a platform for breaking industry news. Key Takeaways The rebranding of GDC to the GDC Festival of Gaming reflects industry growth and a focus on community. Will Wise's consultative approach has transformed partnerships into collaborative experiences. Innovative sponsorship activations have enriched attendee engagement and showcased the latest in gaming technology. Resources Informa Festivals Division GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 GameDeveloper.com GDC Vault Exhibitions and Conferences Alliance Trade Show News Network Connect with our guests on LinkedIn Will Wise Tommy Goodwin Danica Tormohlen Guest Bio: Will Wise Will Wise is the head of event & media partnerships, business development, growth strategies, sponsorships & activations, content marketing programs, customer success, revenue operations, and delegate relations teams for Informa Festivals' GDC Festival of Gaming, Game Developer (media) and GDC Vault (digital content library). Previously Will was Group VP for the Security, Gaming & Transportation events portfolio at RX Global, Managing Director of the IoT Group at Penton Media, and Senior VP of Sales at UBM Tech for Enterprise IT, Cloud Computing, and Engineering events. Guest Bio: Tommy Goodwin Tommy Goodwin is President & CEO for the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance (ECA), the advocacy association for the business events industry. In this role, he leads ECA's work on behalf of the interconnected ecosystem of exhibitors, event and meeting organizers, suppliers, venues, and destinations that comprise the global business events landscape. Prior to joining ECA, Tommy spent more than 20 years working for several globally recognized associations and corporations, including Oracle, AARP, and the Project Management Institute. Podcast Host: Danica Tormohlen An award-winning journalist who has covered the trade show industry since 1994, Danica Tormohlen is VP of Group Content, Meetings, Sports, Travel for Informa Connect. In her role, she oversees content for Trade Show News Network, BizBash and Connect's portfolio of in-person events. These leading media brands publish websites, newsletters, social media channels, video, podcasts and online and in-person programming for the trade show, corporate event, association meeting, experiential marketing and exhibition industries. Tormohlen currently serves as immediate past president of the Women in Exhibitions Network North America chapter. She has been a speaker and moderator at major industry events, including the TSNN Awards, IMEX, IAEE, SISO, UFI, ESCA, DI and Large Show Roundtable — to name a few.
From 3am war rooms to self-healing infrastructure, LogicMonitor's GM of AI shares a compelling vision for how observability and agentic AI are transforming IT organizations worldwide.Topics Include:LogicMonitor is a 15-year-old AI-powered hybrid observability company.Their AI product, Edwin AI, targets IT alert fatigue and noise.Enterprise IT teams are drowning in signals from dozens of monitoring tools.Generative AI evolved from machine learning — agents are the next frontier.LogicMonitor's first Edwin use case: help teams know what to focus on.Key lesson learned: stop chasing perfection and start experimenting faster.AI adoption requires serious change management, not just technical deployment.Success metrics should be process efficiency, not vanity adoption numbers.LogicMonitor accelerated software releases from monthly to weekly to daily.AWS Bedrock powers Edwin AI; Agent Core reduces infrastructure complexity.Agentic AI will run long, complex workflows without human intervention.The future is self-healing infrastructure — systems that sense, fix, and notify.Participants:Karthik Sj – General Manager of AI, LogicMonitorSee how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/
Wie organisieren Unternehmen heute den Betrieb geschäftskritischer Mainframe-Systeme – und welche Rolle spielen dabei Managed Services, Outsourcing und neue Betriebsmodelle?In Episode 94 sprechen Heidi Schmidt und Tobias Leicher mit Gerald Mehring über aktuelle Entwicklungen im Mainframe-Umfeld.Gerald Mehring bringt über 30 Jahre Erfahrung aus IT-Outsourcing und Mainframe-Betrieb mit und gibt Einblicke, wie sich der Markt verändert – und welche Strategien Unternehmen verfolgen können, um ihre Systeme stabil zu betreiben und gleichzeitig Raum für Innovation zu schaffen.Im Gespräch geht es unter anderem um:▪ Managed Services für Mainframe-Systeme ▪ Outsourcing-Strategien und Betriebsmodelle ▪ Fachkräfte und Wissenstransfer im Mainframe-Umfeld ▪ Nearshore- und Offshore-Modelle im regulierten Umfeld ▪ Die Rolle des Mainframes in hybriden IT-Architekturen ▪ Warum Mainframe-Kompetenz weiterhin strategisch relevant istDie Diskussion zeigt: Der Mainframe bleibt ein zentraler Bestandteil vieler Unternehmensarchitekturen – entscheidend ist, wie Betrieb, Modernisierung und Ressourcen strategisch organisiert werden.Jetzt Episode 94 anhören
This episode of The Tech Leaders Podcast takes a different format from our usual leadership interviews. The recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has sent significant ripples through the enterprise IT landscape. As one of the most widely deployed infrastructure platforms in the world, VMware sits at the heart of many global technology estates. The commercial changes that have followed the acquisition have prompted widespread discussion across the market. The ongoing court case involving Tesco and Broadcom has brought those issues into sharp focus. What may appear to be a contractual dispute raises much broader questions around platform dependency, vendor discretion and how resilient enterprise IT contracts are when ownership changes hands. In this special episode, Gareth Davies is joined by licensing specialist Barry Pilling to unpack the case, explore the latest developments, and discuss what it could mean for enterprise software licensing and commercial governance going forward. For CIOs, technology leaders and procurement teams responsible for major vendor relationships, this conversation looks at the wider implications, and the questions organisations should be asking right now. Timestamps: Introduction and Barry's Background (2:04) VMWare and the Broadcom Acquisition (5:00) The Rise of Virtualisation (8:50) The Tesco Dispute Background (12:38) Organisations Exposure to Licensing Risk (22:45) Other Broadcom Cases (29:22) Death of the Middleman? (37:51) Potential Consequences and Advice for VMWare Customers (41:49) Recent Developments (47:30) https://www.bedigitaluk.com/
China is Already Inside your infrastructure. And the EU is done ignoring it.In this exclusive first discussion of the upcoming EU Cybersecurity Act revision, Bart Groothuis, MEP, joins Lieuwe-Jan Koning, CTO and Co-Founder, to explain why vendor dependency is now a board-level security risk.Groothuis breaks down how the revised EU Cybersecurity Act will shift Europe from soft guidance to hard enforcement - introducing formal “high-risk vendor” treatment inside critical infrastructure.This isn't about secret backdoors.It's about who controls the next update.Who enters your data center.And who can one day - switch off the grid.The revision brings non-technical risk - state influence, intelligence laws, geopolitical leverage - directly into cyber certification decisions. That means supply chain risk is no longer theoretical. It's regulatory.And the impact goes far beyond telecom.Energy. Cloud. Transport. Enterprise IT.If your infrastructure depends on a vendor tied to a high-risk state, this conversation matters.Timestamps 00:00 Opening & guest intro: MEP Bart Roos - rapporteur on EU legislation01:23 What the CSA revision targets - certification, telecoms, cloud09:11 Non-technical risk: intelligence laws, vendor-state ties, 5G implications15:10 What's new in the Security Act Revision, 4G vs 5G - why virtualisation changes the security model17:17 Energy, inverters, and real-world dependency risks - blackouts21:53 What organisations & buyers should do now (roadmaps, phasing out risk)25:53 Final call to action & closingKey Topics Covered • Why the EU Cybersecurity Act revision treats non-technical vendor risk as policy, not just code review. • The difference between technical vulnerabilities and vendor/state dependencies (intelligence laws, personnel access). • 5G's virtualised architecture: “winner takes all” risks and the limits of code audits. • Practical next steps for CISOs: vendor inventory, risk-based roadmaps, procurement levers and phasing strategies.Related ON2IT content & explicitly referenced resources ON2IT website: https://on2it.net/ Threat Talks website: https://threat-talks.com/ European Commission - Cybersecurity Act overview: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cybersecurity-act Proposal for a Regulation for the EU Cybersecurity Act: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/proposal-regulation-eu-cybersecurity-act Subscribe and turn on notifications to stay ahead of emerging cyber policy, supply chain risk, and critical infrastructure security across IT and OT.► YOUTUBE: /@threattalks► Spotify / Apple Podcasts:
Enterprise IT spending is projected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2026, but this growth is concentrated in software, cloud services, and AI infrastructure for large organizations, according to HG Insights and Omdia research cited by Dave Sobel. The system integration market is positioned to approach $950 billion in 2025, with enterprises working with an average of 6.3 technology partners. A substantial surge in AI-optimized server sales, as reflected in Dell Technologies' reported 342% year-over-year increase in revenue for those systems, is reshaping supply chains and vendor dynamics, leading to shortages of DRAM, SSDs, and hard drives. Underlying this development are volatile component costs. DRAM prices have doubled quarter over quarter, and both Micron Technologies and Western Digital have indicated they are sold out for 2026. HP reports that RAM now constitutes 35% of new PC materials costs, up dramatically from 18% the previous quarter. Such cost shifts are creating downstream risks for managed service providers (MSPs) with fixed-price agreements, as the economic assumptions underpinning many contracts—stable hardware prices and predictable cloud costs—no longer hold. The episode also highlights an increase in application sprawl and a widening gap between IT budgets and other operational costs. A Torii report shows large enterprises use over 2,191 applications on average, with more than 61% bypassing formal IT approvals, resulting in unmanaged security and compliance exposure. Additionally, 80% of small businesses report rising energy costs that directly compete with IT budget allocations. Industry analysis from Jefferies and Boston Consulting Group signals that AI and automation are not viewed uniformly as productivity boosters and may compress revenue models in both Indian and domestic IT services sectors. The practical implication for MSPs is the urgent need to audit and reprice contracts related to hardware procurement and refresh cycles, clearly documenting and communicating current cost realities with clients. Dave Sobel stresses reframing device lifecycle extensions as a security risk rather than a cost-saving measure and warns against selling clients on speculative AI market projections. The advice is to focus on specific, scoped use cases and to structure agreements that accurately reflect volatility in component costs and the operational burden of application sprawl, ensuring financial and legal accountability as the IT services landscape evolves. 00:00 $4.96T IT Spend Surge Bypasses SMBs as AI Infrastructure Captures Enterprise Budgets 03:58 Dell's $43B AI Server Backlog Triggers DRAM Shortage, Repricing Downstream Hardware 05:52 AI Shrinks IT Services Revenue Model; MSPs Face Contested Implementation Role This is the Business of Tech. Supported by:
Enterprise IT systems have grown into sprawling, highly distributed environments spanning cloud infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and increasingly AI-driven workloads. Observability tools have made it easier to collect metrics, logs, and traces, but understanding why systems fail and responding quickly remains a persistent challenge. As complexity continues to rise, the industry is looking beyond dashboards The post Engineering AI Systems for Autonomy and Resilience with Krishna Sai appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Enterprise IT systems have grown into sprawling, highly distributed environments spanning cloud infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and increasingly AI-driven workloads. Observability tools have made it easier to collect metrics, logs, and traces, but understanding why systems fail and responding quickly remains a persistent challenge. As complexity continues to rise, the industry is looking beyond dashboards The post Engineering AI Systems for Autonomy and Resilience with Krishna Sai appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Enterprise IT is drowning in repeat incidents, slow triage, and reactive firefighting—burning teams out while costs rise and service quality slips. In this episode, Sandy and Umesh Shiknis of Publicis Sapient explore how Sapient Sustain uses AI-driven automation, predictive insights, and self-healing workflows to break the cycle, turning IT operations from constant crisis mode into a resilient, proactive engine that sustains the business. They also discuss how Publicis Sapient is leveraging AI to address challenges in the healthcare sector. They put an importance on modernizing legacy systems while also emphasizing the concept of agentic AI.Check out more about Sapient Sustain here: https://www.publicissapient.com/sapient-ai/sustainIn this episode, they talk about:Publicis Sapient focuses on human-centered digital transformation in healthcareAI can accelerate product development and modernize legacy systemsIt's easy to confuse automation with simple elements of machine learning, which are progressively more deterministicOrganizations must establish guardrails for AI implementation because of how powerful agentic AI can beSapient Sustain helps healthcare companies manage and stabilize their applicationsThe end-user experience is crucial in technology deploymentAI can significantly reduce technical debt in healthcare organizationsHealthcare leaders should look at the boring stuff and focus on practical AI applicationsEducate your workforce to embrace the future instead of fearing itA Little About Umesh:Umesh Shiknis is Executive Vice President and Global Chief Growth Officer at Publicis Sapient, a human-centered, product-led digital business transformation firm. He leads global growth and go-to-market strategy, scaling new buying centers, accelerating client impact, and driving transformational revenue across industries. Previously, Umesh held senior leadership roles at Capgemini, Infosys, and ISG. His current focus is on taking the Publicis Sapient AI product suite—Sapient Slingshot, Bodhi, and Sapient Sustain—to market, turning AI innovation into measurable, enterprise-wide outcomes.
In dieser „Mainframe - What the Heck“ Live-Folge #92 aus Berlin sprechen Tobias Leicher (IBM), Heidi Schmidt (PKS Software GmbH) mit Patrik Maeyer (GDV – Gesamtverband der Deutschen Versicherungswirtschaft e. V.) über das PKS-Event „Train the Boss“ und die wichtigsten Learnings aus anderthalb Tagen Austausch in der Mainframe-/Enterprise-Community. Im Fokus stehen weniger Technologien, sondern vor allem Kommunikation, Haltung und der Umgang mit Veränderung.Ein Highlight ist ein Vortrag des Zimmermanns, Sebastian Schmäh von Holzbau Schmäh, der zeigt, was Stolz aufs Handwerk, Demut vor dem Bestand und Ausbildung mit Verantwortung bewirken können – und was die IT daraus lernen kann: Bestände respektieren, gezielt modernisieren statt „alles neu“, und Menschen stärker befähigen.Außerdem geht es um digitale Souveränität in der Versicherungsbranche: Warum das Thema durch geopolitische Rahmenbedingungen auf Entscheider-Ebene angekommen ist, wie Unternehmen Risiken sinnvoll verteilen können und welche Rolle die EU-Digital-Wallet / digitale Identität spielt. Als roter Faden zieht sich das Thema Risikokompetenz durch: Risiken lassen sich nicht komplett vermeiden, aber professionell managen. Am Ende steht ein positives Fazit: Mit Zuversicht, Austausch über die eigene Komfortzone hinaus und einem klaren Blick auf den Nutzen für Bürger und Kunden kann Transformation sogar Freude machen.Alle Infos zu unserem Podcast findet ihr hier: https://www.pks.de/pks-live/podcast-pks
Enterprise IT and procurement teams start the year with big priorities; however without disciplined contract management and a clear view of services and spend, those good intentions may be lost as costs and risk can creep in, weakening your leverage. In this 11-minute episode of Staying Connected, Laura McDonald of LB3 joins Tony Mangino to walk through a practical New Year's "housekeeping" checklist to spotlight the steps teams should take to avoid missed credits, address chronic service issues, build leverage, and tighten vendor governance so that the big priorities can be met without unnecessary friction. If you would like to learn more about our experience in this space, please visit our Network Services Transactions, Strategic Sourcing and IT Cost Management webpages.
Rob Hughes — CISO at RSA and Champion of a Passwordless FutureNo Password Required Season 7: Episode 1 - Rob HughesRob Hughes, the CISO at RSA, has more than 25 years of experience leading security and cloud infrastructure teams. In this episode, he reflects on his unconventional career path, from co-founding the original Geek.com and serving as its Chief Technologist during the early days of the internet, to leading security and systems design at Philips Home Monitoring.Jack Clabby of Carlton Fields, P.A. and Kayley Melton welcome Rob for a wide-ranging conversation on identity, leadership, and the realities of modern cybersecurity. Rob currently leads RSA's Security and Risk Office, overseeing cybersecurity, information security governance, and risk across both RSA's products and corporate environment.Rob explains his dream for a passwordless future. He unpacks why passwords remain one of the largest sources of cyber risk, how real-world incidents and password-spraying attacks have accelerated change, and why phishing-resistant technologies like passkeys may finally be reaching a tipping point. The episode wraps with the Lifestyle Polygraph, where Rob lightens the conversation with stories about gaming with his kids, underrated horror films, and classic cars.Follow Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-hughes-816067a4/Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to No Password Required01:43 Meet Rob Hughes, CISO at RSA02:05 The Role of a CISO in a Security Company05:09 Transitioning to the CISO Role08:00 The Early Days of Geek.com12:14 Launching a Startup During the Dot Com Boom14:30 The Push for a Passwordless Future18:21 Tipping Point for Passwordless Adoption20:20 Ongoing Learning in Cybersecurity26:09 Managing Stress in High-Pressure Environments33:46 The Lifestyle Polygraph Begins34:15 Career Insights in Cybersecurity36:08 Dream Cars and Personal Preferences39:58 Underrated Horror Films41:19 Creating a Cybersecurity Monster
Enterprise IT didn't plan for this problem—but now it has to solve it. In this episode of The CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith Townsend sits down with Lynn Comp, Head of Data Center Market Readiness at Intel, for a candid, unsugarcoated conversation about how Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has fundamentally disrupted the enterprise infrastructure status quo. [...]
In this episode of Hands-On IT, Landon Miles explores the history of servers and enterprise IT infrastructure, from early mainframe computers to cloud computing, Linux servers, virtualization, containers, and AI-driven data centers.This episode connects decades of server evolution into a clear, accessible story, focusing on the people, technologies, and ideas that shaped modern computing. From IBM's System/360 and minicomputers, to Unix and Linux, virtualization, cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, and container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes, this episode explains how servers became the foundation of today's digital world.Topics covered include: • Server history and early computing systems • IBM mainframes and enterprise computing • Minicomputers and distributed computing • Unix, Linux, and open-source software • Virtualization and data center efficiency • Cloud computing and hyperscale infrastructure • Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native architecture • AI workloads, GPUs, and modern server hardwareLandon also highlights key figures in computing history, including Grace Hopper, Ken Olsen, Linus Torvalds, Dave Cutler, Diane Greene, and Jeff Bezos, and explains how their work still influences IT operations today.This episode is part of our December Best Of series, featuring some of our favorite moments and episodes from the past year.Originally aired March 20, 2025.
De geheugenprijzen zijn de afgelopen maanden vier- tot vijfvoudigd, en dat heeft alles te maken met OpenAI's gigantische deal met Samsung en SK Hynix. In deze aflevering van Techzine Talks analyseren we waarom OpenAI 40% van de wereldwijde DRAM-productiecapaciteit heeft opgekocht en wat dit betekent voor de rest van de markt.Van laptops tot servers en smartphones: alle apparaten worden duurder door het extreme tekort aan geheugen. Dell overweegt prijsverhogingen van 15%, Micron stopt met Crucial geheugen voor consumenten, en Samsung weigert zelfs zijn eigen Galaxy-divisie vangeheugen te voorzien. We bespreken hoe lang deze crisis gaat duren, wat bedrijven kunnen doen om kosten te beheersen, en of er alternatieven zijn zoals efficiëntere software of nieuwe productiecapaciteit.Ook komen AGI-ambities, de rol van AI-inferencing, en de vraag aan bod waarom OpenAI zoveel geheugen nodig heeft. Gaat het om Stargate datacenters, een geheimzinnige hardware-gadget met Jonathan Ive, of iets heel anders? En wat betekent dit voor Windows 11, ARM-laptops en de toekomst van enterprise IT?• OpenAI's 900.000 geheugenwafers per maand deal• Geheugenprijzen stijgen van €100 naar €400 voor 32GB DDR5• Impact op Dell, HP, Lenovo en smartphone fabrikanten• Productiecapaciteit groeit slechts 8% terwijl vraag explodeert• Samsung weigert eigen Galaxy-divisie te voorzien van geheugen• Alternatieve efficiëntie-oplossingen en DeepSeek OCR-innovaties• Langetermijnvooruitzichten: 2-10 jaar tekorten?0:09 - Geheugenprijzen stijgen explosief1:24 - OpenAI koopt 40% van wereldwijde geheugencapaciteit3:09 - Productiecapaciteit en tekorten3:42 - Gevolgen voor PC- en laptopprijzen6:44 - Marktdynamiek en leveranciers7:46 - AI-infrastructuur en geheugenbehoefte23:30 - Toekomstscenario's en efficiëntiewinstTags: OpenAI, geheugenprijzen, DRAM, DDR5, HBM, Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, AI-infrastructuur, geheugen tekort, laptop prijzen, Dell, enterprise IT, datacenter, GPU, Nvidia, Windows 11, AGI
In deze aflevering van Techzine Talks bespreken we de grote veranderingen bij VMware sinds de overname door Broadcom. We waren in Las Vegas bij VMware Explore, maar we bespreken de ontwikkelingen vanaf het zwembad in Split. De belangrijkste aankondigingen in Vegass gaan over private AI-services, VCF9 en de vereenvoudiging van het productportfolio.Broadcom had al een radicale koers ingezet: alle producten zijn gebundeld in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), licentiemodellen zijn eenvoudiger en prijzen zijn hoger. Sommige klanten kijken naar alternatieven, maar voor degene die VMware lieft heeft, is er nu ook echte innovatie te zien met private AI-capabilities en verbeterde gebruikersinterfaces.We bespreken de impact op Nederlandse partners, de toekomst van public cloud integraties en waarom ARM-ondersteuning binnenkort beschikbaar komt.KEY TAKEAWAYS:• Private AI-services nu onderdeel van VCF9 voor on-premises deployment• Licentiemodel veranderd van per socket naar per core• Veel Nederlandse partners oriënteren zich op alternatieven• ARM-processoren ondersteuning komt volgend jaar• VMware Explore Europe vervangen door lokale events in Londen, Parijs en Frankfurt• Walmart en andere grote klanten tonen VCF9 adoptieCHAPTERS:0:00 Intro vanuit Split, Kroatië1:10 VMware Explore Las Vegas highlights2:20 Broadcom's strategie en VCF9 focus4:40 Productportfolio vereenvoudiging en kritiek8:00 Licentiewijzigingen en prijsimpact12:40 Nederlandse marktreactie en alternatieven16:20 Private AI-services en modelrepositories23:00 Public cloud partnerships en toekomst25:20 Samenvatting en afsluiting#VMware #Broadcom #VCF9 #PrivateAI #EnterpriseIT #TechzineTalks
How do you keep a computer running non-stop? This week Technology Now explores the world of fault tolerant computing. We dive into how fault tolerance works, what industries use it, and why such a useful form of computing isn't as ubiquitous as we might expect. Casey Taylor, Vice President and General Manager HPE Nonstop Compute tells us more. This is Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Every week, hosts Michael Bird and Aubrey Lovell look at a story that's been making headlines, take a look at the technology behind it, and explain why it matters to organizations.About Casey Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/getcaseytaylorOur previous episode with Casey: https://hpe.lnk.to/missioncriticalfaSources:https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/24/tech/crowdstrike-outage-cost-causehttps://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/24/tech/crowdstrike-outage-cost-causehttps://www.kovrr.com/reports/the-uk-cost-of-the-crowdstrike-incidenthttps://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/mission-overview/https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1-and-voyager-2-now/A. Avizienis, G. C. Gilley, F. P. Mathur, D. A. Rennels, J. A. Rohr and D. K. Rubin, "The STAR (Self-Testing And Repairing) Computer: An Investigation of the Theory and Practice of Fault-Tolerant Computer Design," in IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. C-20, no. 11, pp. 1312-1321, Nov. 1971, doi: 10.1109/T-C.1971.223133. https://www.cs.unc.edu/~anderson/teach/comp790/papers/Siewiorek_Fault_Tol.pdf
(Disclaimer: erstellt mit Copilot)Hallo liebe Community! In dieser Episode sprechen Michael & Thorsten über die neuesten Entwicklungen rund um Microsoft Copilot, die Integration von GPT-5, Single Sign-On auf dem Mac und ein paar typische „Moments of Luck“ aus dem Teams-Universum. Dazu gibt's einen Ausblick auf die M365 Summit und neue Community-Events.
In this episode of Heroes of IT, Ashley sit down with Milton Webster to explore how his team transformed their IT operations using Automox. From reducing endpoint risk scores in record time to implementing automated Windows 11 upgrades with Worklets, Milton shares real-world wins and challenges from the frontlines of IT. Learn how a culture of proactive patching helped his organization boost security and sleep easier at night. If you're navigating risk management, remote device updates, or end-user satisfaction, this conversation is packed with practical insight.
Meet Chris Brandt, the new host of IT Visionaries.In this special episode, outgoing host Albert Chou passes the mic to Chris—a seasoned Technology Strategist with a passion for connecting bold ideas to real business outcomes.Chris's career spans startups to global enterprises, from building an EMP-shielded data center deep underground to deploying 200PB HPC environments in Fintech. His expertise includes business strategy, IT operations, security, and network architecture.Outside of work, he enjoys life with his wife Julie, their two kids, Lily and Camden, and their dog, Hobs.Get to know the new voice behind IT Visionaries—and what's coming next. ---Produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.
In this Brand Story episode, Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli sit down with Rob Allen, Chief Product Officer at ThreatLocker, to unpack how the company is reshaping endpoint security through a unique, control-first approach. Rob shares how ThreatLocker is challenging long-held assumptions about trust, visibility, and control in enterprise environments—and why the traditional “trust but verify” model is no longer good enough.From Default Permit to Default DenyThreatLocker's philosophy centers on a fundamental shift: moving from a default permit posture to a default deny stance. This approach, according to Rob, doesn't hinder operations—it creates boundaries that allow organizations to function safely and efficiently. It's not about locking systems down; it's about granting permissions with precision, so users can operate without even noticing security is present.Product Innovation Driven by Real FeedbackThe conversation highlights how customer input—and CEO Danny Jenkins' relentless presence at industry events—drives product development. New solutions like Web Control and Patch Management are designed as logical extensions of existing tools, allowing security teams to reduce risk without creating friction for end users. The addition of a software store, suggested by enterprise customers, gives users clarity on what's approved while reducing IT support tickets.Insights and the Detect DashboardRob also explains how ThreatLocker is unlocking the value of big data. With billions of data points collected every hour, their new Insights platform aggregates and analyzes cross-customer trends to better inform security decisions. Combined with the Detect Dashboard, teams now gain not only visibility but actionable intelligence—supported by polished visuals and streamlined workflows.More Than Just Tech—It's Peace of MindWhile the technology is impressive, Rob says the most rewarding feedback is simple: “ThreatLocker helps me sleep at night.” For many customers, that level of confidence is priceless. And in unexpected situations—like a blue-screen incident caused by third-party software—ThreatLocker has even been used to mitigate impacts in creative ways.Whether you're leading a global IT team or managing a growing MSP, this episode will make you think differently about how security fits into your operational strategy. Tune in to hear how ThreatLocker is turning bold ideas into real-world control.Learn more about ThreatLocker: https://itspm.ag/threatlocker-r974Note: This story contains promotional content. Learn more.Guest: Rob Allen, Chief Product Officer at ThreatLockerOn LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/threatlockerrob/ResourcesLearn more and catch more stories from ThreatLocker: https://www.itspmagazine.com/directory/threatlockerAre you interested in telling your story?https://www.itspmagazine.com/telling-your-story
Jon Harding is the Senior Vice President and Global Chief Information Officer at Conair LLC, a multibillion-dollar consumer products company. In his role, he has driven major initiatives, including implementing a global SAP system and other eCommerce platforms. Before joining Conair, Jon held senior leadership IT roles at Kellogg Company, where he spearheaded enterprise system transformations across Europe and the US. In 2023, he was recognized as the New York CIO of the Year in the enterprise category. In this episode… Enterprise IT leaders are often expected to maintain flawless systems while simultaneously driving innovation. As digital tools evolve, companies must adopt new technologies while avoiding disruption and risk. How can organizations balance innovation with stability and strategic alignment? When managing IT transformation at the enterprise level, veteran technology executive Jon Harding recommends aligning tech initiatives with clear business outcomes rather than chasing the latest trends. This requires initiating early cross-functional collaboration in tech planning, focusing on change management, stakeholder buy-in, and long-term thinking. To integrate AI efficiently, Jon suggests prioritizing high-ROI use cases like customer support automation and content creation while maintaining governance and budget control. In this week's episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant talks with Jon Harding, the Senior Vice President and Global CIO at Conair, about enterprise-level tech stack innovation and digital transformation. Jon shares change management strategies, vendor selection considerations, and the future of enterprise advisory work.
Set up and access your Cloud PCs from anywhere with a full Windows experience on any device using Windows 365. Whether you're working from a browser, the Windows app, or Windows 365 Link, your desktop, apps, and settings are always available—just like a traditional PC. As an admin, you can quickly provision and manage Cloud PCs for multiple users with Microsoft Intune. Scott Manchester, Windows Cloud Vice President, shows how easy it is to set up secure, scalable environments, ensure business continuity with built-in restore, and optimize performance with AI-powered insights. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Windows 365 Cloud PC 00:51 - Benefits to Cloud PCs 02:32 - How to set it up 04:58 - Provisioning process 06:16 - Options to connect to Cloud PC 07:40 - Restore Cloud PC 08:52 - Backups for PC forensics 09:44 - Failover options 11:36 - Change Cloud PC specs 12:51 - Connect from personal devices 14:28 - Wrap up ► Link References Check out https://aka.ms/W365Docs ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics
This episode dives into the fascinating evolution of server technology, from room-sized mainframes to today's AI-powered cloud computing. It explores the innovations, rivalries, and key players—IBM, Microsoft, Unix pioneers, and the rise of Linux—that shaped the industry. The discussion covers the transition from minicomputers to personal computing, the impact of open-source software, and the shift toward containerization, hybrid cloud, and AI-driven infrastructure. With a focus on the forces driving technological progress, this episode unpacks the past, present, and future of server technology and its role in digital transformation.
Generative AI is no longer just a playground for tech enthusiasts. Hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are joined by Amazon Web Services' Vice President, AI/ML Services & Infrastructure, Baskar Sridharan on this episode of Six Five On The Road at AWS re:Invent. They discuss the journey from proof-of-concept to full-scale production in enterprise IT with a focus on generative AI and strategic partnerships. Highlights Include: Great Expectations: The transition of generative AI applications from experimental stages to production and the evolving customer expectations of AI & data infrastructure Unified SageMaker: AWS is streamlining the journey from data to AI with their next-gen SageMaker platform, making it easier for businesses to build and deploy GenAI applications Cost Optimization: Model distillation and other innovations are making GenAI more affordable, with significant reductions in training and inference costs Data as a Differentiator: Your data is what makes your GenAI applications unique & AWS is providing powerful tools like Bedrock Knowledge Bases to help customers leverage data effectively Trust and Security: AWS is leading the way in responsible AI with its ISO 42001 certification, ensuring that your GenAI applications are built on a foundation of trust Real-world examples: How enterprise IT is leveraging AWS services to scale their generative AI applications effectively
As AI continues to take off – a talent gap persists. Host Dion Hinchcliffe is joined by Amazon Web Services' Leo LaBranche, Director, Global Business Innovation on this episode of Six Five On The Road at AWS re:Invent. They look at how AWS and its partners are reshaping the landscape of AI in enterprise IT through strategic cloud migration, modernization efforts and upskilling existing workforces. Get their take on: The change from lift-and-shift to modernization: Enterprises are increasingly re-architecting or building cloud-native applications The talent gap: Upskilling existing workforces is crucial, and AWS is investing heavily in training and career path development IT Outsourcing (ITO) and Application Outsourcing (AO) in today's business environment Rethinking commercial constructs: How AWS is working with partners to develop more flexible models that enable modernization The C-Suite Perspective: CIOs should seek partners who can deliver tangible business outcomes, not just billable hours. AI is the next frontier: AWS's approach to partnerships in enhancing cloud migration and modernization AI is transforming how workloads are migrated, modernized, and managed.
In this episode we are looking at how technology is enabling as close as possible to 100% up-time for the most mission-critical business operations. We'll be looking at how software and hardware are coming together to ensure the absolute pinnacle of reliability, and what it means for our organizations.Joining us to discuss is Casey Taylor, Vice President and General Manager of HPE NonStop.This is Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Every week we look at a story that's been making headlines, take a look at the technology behind it, and explain why it matters to organizations and what we can learn from it. About this week's guest: Casey Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/getcaseytaylor/ Sources cited in this week's episode:TahawulTech report into the cost of IT downtime: https://www.tahawultech.com/insight/why-dns-exploits-continue-to-be-a-top-attack-vector-in-2024/ Siemens report into tech downtime in manufacturing: https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3d606495-dbe0-43e4-80b1-d04e27ada920/dics-b10153-00-7600truecostofdowntime2022-144.pdf Octopus suckers mimicked for better denture grip: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/octopus-suckers-fix-dentures
Tech behind the Trends on The Element Podcast | Hewlett Packard Enterprise
In this episode we are looking at how technology is enabling as close as possible to 100% up-time for the most mission-critical business operations. We'll be looking at how software and hardware are coming together to ensure the absolute pinnacle of reliability, and what it means for our organizations.Joining us to discuss is Casey Taylor, Vice President and General Manager of HPE NonStop.This is Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Every week we look at a story that's been making headlines, take a look at the technology behind it, and explain why it matters to organizations and what we can learn from it. About this week's guest: Casey Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/getcaseytaylor/ Sources cited in this week's episode:TahawulTech report into the cost of IT downtime: https://www.tahawultech.com/insight/why-dns-exploits-continue-to-be-a-top-attack-vector-in-2024/ Siemens report into tech downtime in manufacturing: https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3d606495-dbe0-43e4-80b1-d04e27ada920/dics-b10153-00-7600truecostofdowntime2022-144.pdf Octopus suckers mimicked for better denture grip: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/octopus-suckers-fix-dentures
Generative AI is no longer just a playground for tech enthusiasts. Hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are joined by Amazon Web Services' VP AWS, Database & AI Leadership Baskar Sridharan on this episode of Six Five On The Road at AWS re:Invent. They discuss the journey from proof-of-concept to full-scale production in enterprise IT with a focus on generative AI and strategic partnerships. Highlights Include: Great Expectations: The transition of generative AI applications from experimental stages to production and the evolving customer expectations of AI & data infrastructure Unified SageMaker: AWS is streamlining the journey from data to AI with their next-gen SageMaker platform, making it easier for businesses to build and deploy GenAI applications Cost Optimization: Model distillation and other innovations are making GenAI more affordable, with significant reductions in training and inference costs Data as a Differentiator: Your data is what makes your GenAI applications unique & AWS is providing powerful tools like Bedrock Knowledge Bases to help customers leverage data effectively Trust and Security: AWS is leading the way in responsible AI with its ISO 42001 certification, ensuring that your GenAI applications are built on a foundation of trust Real-world examples: How enterprise IT is leveraging AWS services to scale their generative AI applications effectively
In this episode we are looking at how technology is enabling as close as possible to 100% up-time for the most mission-critical business operations. We'll be looking at how software and hardware are coming together to ensure the absolute pinnacle of reliability, and what it means for our organizations.Joining us to discuss is Casey Taylor, Vice President and General Manager of HPE NonStop.This is Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Every week we look at a story that's been making headlines, take a look at the technology behind it, and explain why it matters to organizations and what we can learn from it. About this week's guest: Casey Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/getcaseytaylor/ Sources cited in this week's episode:TahawulTech report into the cost of IT downtime: https://www.tahawultech.com/insight/why-dns-exploits-continue-to-be-a-top-attack-vector-in-2024/ Siemens report into tech downtime in manufacturing: https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3d606495-dbe0-43e4-80b1-d04e27ada920/dics-b10153-00-7600truecostofdowntime2022-144.pdf Octopus suckers mimicked for better denture grip: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/octopus-suckers-fix-dentures
How can you future-proof your collocation? Start by combining advanced AI hardware with global data center capabilities. On this episode of Six Five On The Road at SC24, hosts Keith Townsend and David Nicholson are joined by Lenovo's CMO Flynn Maloy and Digital Realty's Chief Executive of Alliances - Global Sales, Seamus Matthews for a conversation on how their collaboration addresses the increasing demand for #AIinfrastructure and sustainable data center solutions. Watch the full video for more on
With an observability strategy, businesses can quickly cut through the noise to see key actionable insights. In this episode of The Main Scoop, Greg Lotko and Daniel Newman are joined by Brett Dawson, Principal Mainframe OS Systems Programmer at Fidelity Investments, to discuss observability and how it fits in with AI and hybrid IT strategies.
What is Agentic AI? Steven Dickens of Six Five Media is at BMC Connect to discuss BMC's pioneering introduction with BMC's Ryan Manning, Vice President of Product Management, and Josh Nichols, Sr. Manager Corporate Applications, at CoorsTek, Inc. to discuss Agenic AI and its role in revolutionizing how enterprises manage their IT work. Their discussion covers: The evolution and strategic importance of AI in enterprise IT management Insights into BMC's latest Agentic AI offerings and their unique benefits Case study insights from CoorsTek, Inc. on implementing BMC's Agentic AI solutions Future trends and predictions for AI in the enterprise IT space Best practices for businesses looking to leverage AI for IT management
AI PC Insights and Strategies for CIOs! Join the Six Five On the Road for part three of our four-part series with Intel. Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are joined by Intel's Todd Lewellen, VP & GM of PC Ecosystem, and Insight's Megan Amdahl, COO of North America for an in-depth look at how CIOs should navigate the emergence and integration of AI PCs within their organizations. This insightful discussion reveals the anticipated benefits, preparation strategies, and the balancing act between innovation and security that accompanies the adoption of AI PCs. Their conversation covers: The benefits Insight expects from the adoption of AI PCs Intel's support strategies for enterprises preparing for AI PC integration Insight's plans for merging AI PCs and software into their existing IT ecosystems Addressing AI-specific privacy and security concerns with AI PCs Strategies CIOs are employing to analyze costs and benefits for AI PC implementation
The summer lull has us reflecting on how the evolution of cloud computing has shaped the existing era that's trying to figure out AI. With a special guest introduction. SHOW: 848SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #848 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW NOTES:WE HAVE A SPECIAL GUEST LEADING OFF THE SHOW - AFTER 13 YEARSWHAT PARTS OF THE CLOUD EVOLUTION HAVE LAID THE FOUNDATION FOR TODAY?[BAD] Shadow IT set Enterprise IT back 5-10 years, with the same responsibilities[GOOD] Technology experimentation has become the norm, from technologists to business leaders. [BAD] We still don't really know how to measure the cost or return (ROI) of technology spending.[GOOD] We have a new appreciation for the power of software and software development to change businesses and markets.[BAD] But we still haven't figured how to normalize great software development[GOOD] Open source communities (e.g. CNCF, etc.) provided a blueprint for bringing new innovation to the marketplace[BAD] We saw how long it took for Cloud to be disruptive, but now that valuations are so high, we haven't learned patience for new disruptions.[GOOD] The “cloud” way of doing things has laid the foundation for what might/will come next. FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @cloudcastpodInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod
This insightful episode explains the secrets to expanding your website's success in other demographics. Discover how to unlock the potential of your online presence and achieve your goals.STEPHEN TYLER has over 30 years of experience in product development in a wide range of sectors, from GovTech to Energy to Enterprise IT management. As Chief Product and Technology Officer, Stephen leads vision, strategy, development, and delivery for MotionPoint's product and technology platform. Stephen aims to ensure MotionPoint is an industry-leading innovator in driving forward the state of the art in enterprise translation and localization, harnessing the new wave of AI technologies to drive superior outcomes for our customers. MotionPoint is a managed translation platform that delivers concierge-level, end-to-end translation to meet the needs of brands across desired languages and local markets. MotionPoint's concierge-level managed translation service has led the industry for 22 years.Learn more at Website: https://www.motionpoint.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenjtyler/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/motionpointcorporation "What an innovative conversation. As an IT professional, I did not know such a company existed to support businesses in translating their website to other markets. WOW. Thank you for sharing Stephen." IdaRemember to SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss "Information That You Can Use." Share Just Minding My Business with your family, friends, and colleagues. Engage with us by leaving a review or comment. Your support keeps this podcast going and growing.Visit Just Minding My Business Media™ LLC at https://jmmbmediallc.com/ to learn how we can support you in getting more visibility on your products and services.
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have been aware, forever, of an Australian digital signage software company called Ryarc, but through the years - and maybe a little because of the distances - I've never met or chatted with its founder and CEO Fergal Ó Ceallaigh. It's one of those submarine companies that kind of operates below the waterline and mostly out of sight, but Ryarc has been around for many, many years - and has done well despite its admitted marketing deficiencies, because the software is all about substance rather than sizzle. That has appealed to the IT people who get involved more and more these days in scaled screen projects. I was reminded of Ryarc during InfoComm, when an industry friend mentioned on a panel a technology he'd come across that would and could use broadcasting technology to move around digital signage content, instead of broadband internet or mobile data networks. That sounded interesting, and I wanted to know more - as it sounded like satellite content distribution, but different. When I found out Ryarc was the company that was doing proof of concept trials in the U.S., I reached out to Fergal - now based in Seattle - and we had this chat. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Fergal, thank you for joining me. I've been aware of your company for a long time, but we've never actually spoken. For those people who don't know what you do, what the company does. Could you give me the elevator pitch? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Thanks for inviting me on. RYARC was founded as a digital signage application, with the starting point of their need for a digital signage platform that combined enterprise capabilities with knowledge worker-level skills by the operator. So this was in an era when digital signage was moving from what was a highly specialized and fairly rare thing, to something where at least from our perspective, the requirement was going to be that digital signage was just going to be another tool in the armory of an enterprise and, as such, it would require rather than a specialized team to operate at a knowledge worker level. This goes back 20 years, right? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it does. We divert a little bit into kind of my backstory. I worked for Microsoft in the 90s in Dublin and I had a fantastic time there. It was Microsoft where the Nvidia of the day, Windows 95 was coming out. So it was a fantastic place to work, and I couldn't have asked for a better start in my career, but I had an itch to try and start something of my own, and I happened upon digital signage. I could see the way trajectories were going in terms of connectivity. If you combine connectivity, availability, and cost & display, availability, and cost, two lines on a graph are going down and to the right and human labor is going up, and to the right. So those three factors combined to make it apparent to me that digital signage was going to be a thing. If it was going to be a thing, it needed software to go with it. So I quit Microsoft, and I did my Asian Odyssey backpack and thing, and I was actually writing the code for version one. I got so bored sitting on the beach in Thailand that I took to actually writing code. I'm serious. That is dysfunctional. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I guess. Yeah, it was extraordinary. I'm not a beach guy, which is, another strange story for someone who ended up in Sydney for as long as he did, but, yeah, so it was with that desire to have a go with that. Coming out of Microsoft, I felt I had a decent handle on usability and what's needed for a knowledge worker-level software product, by which I mean a product that it became. It seemed obvious to me that digital signage was going to become a bigger thing and as a result, it needed to be a kind of a productivity-type app rather than some highly specialized thing that you'd need a broadcast engineer. I think the early software that was available did come out of broadcast if I'm not mistaken. I think that was Scala's backstory. So, I managed to get my hands on one of those. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but I was like, oh, okay, I can see how this works, but you're not going to be able to give this to Joe in marketing and ask him to start operating it. So that was the kind of genesis of why I chose that particular route and why I started writing code to get there. But it took a few years, from building the thing in my apartment to actually launching the company. When did the business start, like when you were out there selling licenses and everything? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I think the first license we sold was in 2006 but I had gone full-time about two years before that. So you're pretty happy to start selling. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, I was. But it's funny. I was working for a company that was bought by Match.com in Sydney, and that was an interesting place to work at the age I was at the time. But then, I met some folks there who are independently wealthy folks and the particular gentleman I approached is named Neil Gamble, a very well-known Grandi in the Australian business scene, South African guy, lovely man. But, a serious business guy who is running one of the largest software companies in Australia, such as they were back then. But he was chairman of the company I was working for, which was acquired by Match, and I pitched him my idea. I turned up in the boardroom office of this large software company at seven o'clock in the morning in Sydney. So I think it was 2003 or maybe 2004, it doesn't matter, but I pitched him the idea, and he said, “Fergal, that's brilliant, but fuck off and come back when you've got some customers.” So, I duly fucked off and I think he ruminated on the idea for a while and came back to me a couple of months later. I was still working as a contractor at the time so I was fine. He said, “You know what? I've met some other people who are doing certain things in the retail space, and what you said clicked even more. So I'm going to take a swing on this”, and so he put in just enough money to basically pay for me and some other young guy to take the code from what was something I could, demonstrate to something that we could actually sell and the first customer was Zimmer if you've ever heard of Zimmer Frame? No. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The Zimmer frame is kind of like that. It's a mobility tool for people with generally older people. It's like a walking frame. Unfortunately, maybe I'll learn about that soon enough, but not yet. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Not yet. May it be many more years, but we put the website up and boom, that was the first one, and then, out-of-home started to take off in Australia and had a pretty decent clip, compared to other markets, and Neil was very well connected in the Sydney business scene. He started to open doors into places like I could get meetings now with people, and my experience of that, and again, maybe it's reflected in our website and our kind of general low-key profile, generally, I found it, if I could get in front of a customer and showed them the product, we tended to do well. It was the getting the customers part, which was the trickier part for us, but Neil was instrumental in that, and that's how we started. Back then it was trickier for everybody. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it was. Coming from an engineering background, I found it quite interesting, the whole scene at the time. What you had was advertising guys who were in the billboards business and suddenly there was, foist upon them this need to transform into an IT company, and that created a particular set of issues at the time, I think, where you had companies that whose experience and interaction with IT was about, “fix the printer” and “why is my email not working?” So they weren't tech companies in their DNA, they were marketing companies, and I tend to think of those years as like the cowboy years, by which I mean, there were an awful lot of platforms out there. What I tended to see, although not uniformly, was a thing I noticed is that oftentimes, the decision makers because they didn't have a mature IT section within their company, it wasn't a traditional thing for them. It wasn't integral to their business in the way it is now, you often had people making software decisions who didn't really have the experience and wherewithal to assess software and what that led to properly, and I think this is partly what led to the massive proliferation of solutions out there was that the thing with digital signage is that it's fairly straightforward to get a piece of software that will reliably get a flash file or a JPEG or a video from A to B. And when the software assessments were being done by people who didn't really have experience in enterprise software or edge management or remote device management, stuff like that, it was very easy for the smoke and mirrors guys to do well quickly, because no one was asking the boring questions about the plumbing. So that was something that took some adjustment for me with my background. I think it's maybe part of what led to the proliferation of often these things. I don't want to denigrate or be down on the industry or anything, but there were a lot of solutions out there that were really something that someone had put together in response to a request from someone and then they came up with a logo, and said, we're a digital signage company, and often these solutions, if you ever got to peek behind, to look under the hood, as they say in North America, you'd be shocked at what was there, and I had several experiences in those early times of being Gesamt or someone with a fantastic sales pitch, which is something that no one would ever accuse us of. I was thinking these guys don't know what they're doing anyway. Anyway, I think that's calmed down a good bit because you have to be sustainable and, eventually, if your stuff keeps falling over, that's going to, with the best sales pitch in the world, that's not going to last forever. Yeah. I think there were a lot of companies, for a whole bunch of years, who signed on with a service provider, some sort of software company, and then three years later moved on to another one after they learned what they really needed and learned about things like device management and scalability and all that stuff. But first go around, they were attracted by the pretty pictures and the WYSIWYG UX and all that stuff, and as a consultant, I saw it first hand where I would say this thing is boring and ugly, like a Subaru, sorry, Subaru owners, but they're not the sexiest cars, but they just work, versus a Range Rover that looks sexy as hell, but it's going to be a nightmare. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, that was it. And I guess it was inevitable. If you looked at the factors feeding into that, you had an industry that was being dragged, kicking, and streaming into the world of it and you had a lot of people who saw an opportunity and needed to go quickly, but I couldn't believe some of the stuff that I saw pass muster, and I was because sometimes I get a peek under the hood and it was literally, The wizard of Oz, they're furiously pulling levers to keep the thing up. But we learned, I think, that the company that was the first major out-of-home company we thought was iCorp. Australian company. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: That's right, and they were also based in Sydney, and so we, very quickly, felt their pain when things would go wrong and that was an excellent kind of learning curve for us. But what helped embed in the company was this engineering mantra that we had, which was, if it can be avoided, never have the software operate In a manner where if a truck roll can be avoided, it's not avoided. There's this focus for us on remote manageability so it's different. I know some people in the early days tried to use browsers for digital signage, but that failed for reasons that we don't need to get into, but when there's a huge difference between an application and this even goes all the way up to major, big sticker stuff like Microsoft, an application which leaks memory or does something like that and, yeah, it's annoying when you have to kill the browser and restart it, after a few hours, which used to be the case a while ago, but that kind of level of tolerance for unattended execution, you could see it didn't exist. It's different if the program falls over and you ring Mark in IT, and he says, yeah, just reboot the machine. But if you've got three-quarters of a million-dollar screen in an airport, that's a really expensive proposition and the failure is immediately public and embarrassing. That helps embed for us that learning experience we had with out-of-home, of the importance of just reliability at the edge and going on from reliability to manageability. So we spent a lot of time finding bugs in Microsoft Core DLLs, that's just through the usage scenarios we had, they just weren't common enough even for Microsoft to have identified some of these issues with things that will leak a little bit every time they're used. It's a software term. If the software isn't carefully crafted every time it runs through a certain given set of routines, it can capture a bit of memory and then fail to release it, which isn't a problem if you're closing your laptop at the end of the day but if you're wanting to run 24/7 in twenty feet up in airside and an airport, it's a different proposition. So anyway, that was all a learning curve, but it helps embed for us this fanatical focus on stability and manageability. You talked about the people in the meetings in the early days, the visual merchandisers and people from the marketing department, business communicators, those kinds of people, but that's changed, right? The people across the table now, quite often, are IT people. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, they are, and I think that's just an inevitable consequence of the pain of failure to not do that. It was like Mad Man so the whole focus was on the flashiness of the advertising and the creativity and all that, whether it's on a billboard or TV or whatever. But now they were in a new world where boring stuff like Enterprise IT management was crucial, a factor in their ability to succeed. It was cruel as well because of any failures they had. If you're even running a service and your website goes down, maybe some people would notice, maybe someone won't, but if you've got a big screen downtown, and then your customer is there showing his friends or their customers, say, look, check out our ad down in some public place when it goes wrong, it's really bad because it's so visible, so those two things are combined. So I guess they had to learn quickly and yes, I think it's certainly, it's no longer the situation where you've got someone from Marketing making IT decisions. So describing your product mix or suite now, what would it be, and is there a particular market that you focus on? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. I remember before I started the company I read how to write a business plan, and one of the things was identifying your customer, and I thought, wow, there are so many, anybody who wants to display a message somewhere publicly… Anybody with money. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. That was the prerequisite. Going back to what I was referring to with the learning curve in the early days, it became apparent to me that there's only so much gilding of the lily you can do in terms of the content management side. I sometimes bristle when we get described as a CMS, because really most of the value of what we do is it's fuller than that. Content management is its raison d'etre, but it needs to do an awful lot of other stuff, and I always believed that for us, that was a strength of ours in our kind of relentless focus on manageability and Edge device management. I saw it just again, through the growing pains of helping an out-of-home company get through the early days of it. That's really where we needed to focus on managing the device and just being absolutely bomb-proof when it came to reliability. What that has led to, I would say organically is: so are we a digital signage company? We are, but we're other things too. So what this hundred of man years of effort, of the device management side and the remote manageability side of things, we have customers now, who don't use us for digital signage at all. They're using us as a remote management platform for devices, and that has led us, over more recent years, probably since the time I moved from Sydney to the West Coast here into IoT, into Edge AI, into sensor management, and device management. So I guess what I'm trying to say is what started as an organic reaction to needing remote manageability and not saying to your customer, yeah, you have to fork out an extra 15 bucks a month brand point for some other tool that's going to help you manage the device. That led to that side of the application becoming so developed that it could stand on its own even for folks who didn't need digital signage. So we're on lots and lots of things, where we're not controlling the screen, but rather they're using us as the plumbing, right? For example, for AI and stuff like that. It can identify a Coke can versus a Pepsi can or whatever it might be. But how do you deploy that model to 16,000 different endpoints and how do you collect information at the edge about how you do AB testing? How do you manage the versioning of AI models at the edge? All that kind of stuff. So there's lots of sleep-inducing, boring, but absolutely critical stuff where the product focuses. And yeah, that's on device management, and we're also used to deploying other kiosk-style applications. So the person interacting with the device could be a piece of software running there. It doesn't matter what it is, but it's RYARC that is forming the plumbing that enables all that to work and go together. Back at Infocomm, a few weeks ago, I hosted a little discussion panel where we talked with three people, both attendees, and executives, about what they saw and everything else, and I asked one of the guys who is actually from an LED company. What he saw that he thought was interesting, I thought he would talk about some other LED product or whatever, but he started going on about this idea that you could use datacasting to distribute content, and he bumped into a company that was doing that, and described it, and I thought, that's interesting but I'm not sure who he's talking about. So I asked him after the fact, who was that company? Eventually came around that it was RYARK. I thought, oh, interesting!!! Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Those guys are still around? There was that too because I don't bump into your name very often, but can you explain what he was talking about this whole idea of ATSC and using datacasting to move content around? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, sure. The ATSC thing, so the whole TV industry is they've gotten together and they're pushing the ability of the traditional broadcast channels to be able to carry data. The ability to push data across has been around for quite a while. Yeah, it happened when when TVs went from analog to digital, right? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Right, but the ATSC 3. 0 upgrade, which was the thing that was being marketed and pushed, just greatly expanded the ability and the bandwidth available to push data across. Again, I think this is likely to be limited in some respects globally because of the ubiquity and cheapness of being able to push data across cellular, right? So in other areas, cellular is the cheapest chip, right? If you go to places like Korea or India or Singapore or countries that have recently developed, they tend to get saturated with cellular very quickly. The situation in the United States is that cellular data is significantly expensive compared to the rest of the world. Canada, it's the same story, right? What pertains in North America is a situation where it is so expensive that alternatives are becoming more attractive. Anyway, that's not really a signal to what ATSC three is all about, but essentially, working with some of the hardware and software providers in the broadcast industry. We've been able to plug into the broadcasting software and hardware side of things such that in addition to using our software, you can use our cloud service or install our software on your own infrastructure if you want to do that. But in this case, in addition to publishing it to the cloud, which is what happens when you create campaigns and do that kind of thing, we can also add another pipe to the mix, and that pipe is the broadcasting station. So when someone clicks the publish button, it's seamless from the user's perspective. But if it's set up in such a way, in addition to pushing stuff to the cloud and having it dribble down over cellular that way, we can also have these files broadcast. So that's a kind of one-to-many, very effective way of getting data across that doesn't require large bandwidth bills. We've worked with some companies with large numbers of devices. It was another example of us learning by doing, where their cellular data bills were a huge factor. So, we worked pretty intensely to make the handshake and everything else in our software super parsimonious. I think with 20 megs a month, I think what the chatter that our software has in maintaining connectivity with the server. So we worked relentlessly and got that down. But anyway, that's all to show how much of a factor the data cost is, and that's that was the impetus that led to wanting to see if we can offer customers a much cheaper way of getting data across and it works seamlessly. We had a working example at that show at Infocomm. I wasn't there, but I think it was an EV station or something like that, which would allow them to do all the heavy lifting so that they've got video and stuff like that. You can push that over the air. So what's at the far end of it? Is there a receiver or special hardware? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, TV tuner. It's like a cable box. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: What we've been working on over the past year is ensuring that our software can run on these tuners. So you've got the prospect now of not having to buy an ARM or an X86 chip and put it in a computer running Windows in the back at the back of the TV, but we can squeeze our stuff now onto many of these tuner devices. So you have a small but capable box, that started life as a tuner, but we can have our software running on there. That's a big step in terms of cost-per-unit reduction. For customers, the main difficulty, I think, with the ATSC 3.0 thing is that it's very easy to go to a Verizon or whomever and be able to estimate what your data cost is going to be. If I need to push across three gigs a month to 11,000 devices. I can work out how much that's gonna cost me. The data cost element in the broadcast space isn't quite as commoditized yet. So there's still some ambiguity there and, perhaps, lack of clarity, and I think the cellular companies are awake to this too. It has the potential to eat into or take up a lot of the enterprise pushing off large amounts of data, and there are many industries that can use that, but digital signage is certainly one of them. This is reminiscent of the late 2000s or mid-to-late 2000s with satellite and multicasting through satellite. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, yes, I remember that. Is this the same idea, or is this different? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The similarity I suppose would be in its one-way communications and you need a back channel to be able to do the other stuff. So you still do with this? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: You can deploy with just broadcast, so we could get the software running so that there's zero coming back. The obvious thing with that is that you don't know if a meteor struck the sign, right? But it is similar to satellites in that it's one-way. One of the things that we do actually—I don't know if we know—is we do a lot of in-store music. So we use the CMS side of our product suite to organize what is essentially a radio station template and the thing about audio is you can get away with having six ads running for a week on a sign, right? But if you play three Alton John and five others in a retail environment, the staff in the shop, they'll climb ladders to rip the speakers out of the roof because it'll drive them crazy and that's understandable. So ironically, MP3s are fairly small, but you need thousands and thousands of them. So we often found, for the in-store audio deployments we were doing, we had to work with that. We did Woolworths in Australia, which was the largest retailer, I'm not sure if they are anymore, but they're one of the big two there, and we did all their in-store music for years and that was all via satellite, which was really painful actually. But this seems to be working. It's a lot easier and it's a lot better as you would expect, it's nearly 20 years down the line from that. So is it the same feed, so to speak, the same set of files that you're sending to everybody, or can it be addressable by location, setting different things? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, we've done some work on that. I can't get too deep into the way our product works because most people won't be familiar with it, but essentially, in our software, we've got this concept called a channel and a channel is an abstract entity that represents an endpoint somewhere or multiple endpoints. We have an engine that will categorize those things. Let's say you want a national rollout. Now like a lot of other things in the United States, the broadcast market is really quite fragmented. It's not like the UK or Europe, where you've got a single national broadcast or a few commercials and you can go live everywhere. You've got a real kind of mix right across the country. So obviously you don't want to be pushing, essentially what I'm getting into here is that we know where the data needs to get up. So there's a layer in the software that will go, okay, you need to go to station X, you need to go to station Y and I guess broadcast, but once it just gets pushed out, right? And it's the same kind of files, and again, from the user's perspective, when they're using our software, if it's being set up and configured in the back, in the backend to utilize ATSC 3.0 broadcasts that all happen seamlessly under the hood. So they're just clicking a publish button, and in the case of where they use an ATSC 3.0, instead of it just going to the cloud, it's also going to the broadcast station where we work with the some of the ATSC 3.0 technology companies, goes into their queue and then gets broadcast out and then it goes down to the tuner and then we're sitting on the tuner too, so we can watch the files come in and do whatever assembly and decryption that we need to do, at the edge and playback. So is this something that could be done or are you supporting active networks that are now using this? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: They are all at the POC stage. I alluded earlier to it being early days as well from the people wanting to utilize this, I think the industry is still working out how to package this and sell it. If they're successful at that and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be, it'll be great for North American enterprise because there's finally a competitor out there to cellular. I don't know what the word is, a triopoly? But yeah, the situation, that a reason why data is so expensive in North America. We could talk for a very long time. We'll probably have to do this again at some point, but that was super interesting and great to finally meet you. Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, I'm happy to talk, and I'm happy to do it again if you think there's more interesting stuff we can chat about. I am probably at risk there doing a lot of reminiscing, but, I feel entitled to that now. I've been in the industry for a while. Exactly. All right. Thank you.
On this episode of On The Road at Pure//Accelerate 2024, we are joined by Pure Storage's Prakash Darji and Shawn Hansen, GM Digital Experience Business Unit and GM Core Platforms, respectively, for a conversation on Pure Storage's latest digital experience initiatives, storage solutions, and AI strategies. Their discussion covers: Insights into Pure Storage's latest digital experience initiatives The impact of evolving storage technologies on enterprise IT strategies Pure Storage's approach to sustainability in data management Challenges and solutions in current data storage trends The future of data storage and Pure Storage's roadmap Learn more at Pure Storage.
Guest Bio: Mark Schwartz joined AWS as an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist in July 2017. In this role, Mark works with enterprise technology executives to share experiences and strategies for how the cloud can help them increase speed and agility while devoting more of their resources to their customers. Mark has extensive experience as an IT leader in the government, private sector, and the nonprofit world, and with organizations ranging from startup to large. Prior to joining AWS, he was CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (in the Department of Homeland Security), where he led a large digital transformation effort, moving the agency to the cloud, introducing and refining DevOps and Agile techniques, and adopting user-centric design approaches. From his work at USCIS, he developed a reputation for leading transformation in organizations that are resistant to change, obsessed with security, subject to considerable regulation and oversight, and deeply bureaucratic. Before USCIS, Mark was CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange, a leader in global youth exchange programs, and CEO of a software company. Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value , A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility, War, Peace and IT and The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy. Mark speaks at conferences internationally on such subjects as DevOps, Leading Change, Driving Innovation in IT, and Managing Agility in Bureaucratic Organizations. He has been recognized as a Computerworld Premier IT Leader and received awards for Leadership in Technology Innovation, the Federal 100 IT Leaders, and a CIO Magazine 100 award. Mark has both a BS and MA degree from Yale University, and an MBA from Wharton. Social Media/ Website: Mark's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/innovativecio Mark's AWS Executive Insights page with links to all his blogs posts and books https://aws.amazon.com/ar/executive-insights/enterprise-strategists/mark-schwartz/ Books/ Resources: The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor and the Sumo Wrestler by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Delicate-Art-Bureaucracy-Transformation-Wrestler-ebook/dp/B086XM4WCK/ The Art of Business Value by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Business-Value-Mark-Schwartz/dp/1942788045 A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seat-Table-Leadership-Age-Agility/dp/1942788118/ War, Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Peace-Business-Leadership-Technology/dp/1942788711 Reaching Cloud Velocity: A Leader's Guide to Success in the AWS Cloud by Jonathan Allen et al https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reaching-Cloud-Velocity-Leaders-Success/dp/B086PTDP51 Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT by Stephen Orban https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ahead-Cloud-Practices-Navigating-Enterprise-ebook/dp/B07BYQTGJ7 Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineers-Victory-Problem-Solvers-Turned-ebook/dp/B00ADNPCC0 The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-Devops-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/ The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unicorn-Project-Disruption-Redshirts-Overthrowing/dp/1942788762 Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku: Mark, thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. Mark Schwartz: Thank you, my pleasure. Ula Ojiaku: Great. Now let's start with you know, the question I usually ask my guests: who's Mark? What makes him tick? Mark Schwartz: And they can answer that question. It's not a hard one. where to start? Um, you know, I always enjoy my work. That's a thing about me. I like to think that people have fun working with me because I tend to laugh a lot. And even you know, when the work is boring, I find ways to make it interesting. I just enjoy doing things and accomplishing things. I think if we're going to talk about my books, and some of the things I've done later, an important thing to realize is that, I started out, you know, when I went, when I was in high school, when I went to college, I was pretty sure I wanted to study computer science and get involved with these computer things. But when I was actually studying, I realized there were all these other interesting areas, I'm just, you know, endlessly curious. And so, I wound up studying all kinds of other things, in addition. And the result was that when I finished college, I decided to go to graduate school in philosophy. And I spent a few years getting a master's degree in philosophy. And the fact that I'm curious about so many things and read so many different things, I think it enters into a lot of what I do. I like to pull analogies from non-IT related fields and, and, and I'll call upon all the things I've learned in all sorts of different areas, as I'm writing and speaking and working. Ula Ojiaku: It shines through in your book, definitely. Mark Schwartz: Yes, I think it does. That's partly an explanation for what you see in my books. I think, um, you know, I sometimes say that I have trouble reading business books generally. Because I kind of find them boring. They tend to make the same point over and over again, and to be very just so one directional, you know, just on the same subject, and it's a little bit odd because in every other subject, the books tend to refer to other books in other fields and there's this extra dimension and that helps you understand what the author is getting at. But in business books, they, you know, aside from having a quote now and then from a famous leader or something, they don't tend to do that, they don't, they don't sort of call upon the whole history of literature and writing. And so, I have a little bit of fun in writing my books in trying to see if I can add an extra dimension just by reference and by bringing in other things that are a little bit orthogonal to the subject matter. Ula Ojiaku: And that kind of, you know, brings home the point that life isn't black and white. It's actually a complex or a complex kind of, you know, maze and of different disciplines, different ideologies and different viewpoints that make it what it is really. Mark Schwartz: Yeah well, of course, that was part of the fun of my recent book on Bureaucracy. You know, because I know we all, we want to throw up when we encounter bureaucracy, you know, it disturbs us in so many ways. And one of the things I wanted to say in the book is, well, actually bureaucracy is all around you all the time in unexpected places and it usually doesn't drive you crazy, actually. Yeah... Ula Ojiaku: Well, I have a lot of questions for you on your book, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy, which is a catchy, catchy title on its own, very clever. But before we get to that, what do you do when you're not working? I know, you said you love work and you've also said that you're curious about so many things, which means that you read broadly - that's my interpretation. So, what do you do when you're not ‘working'? Mark Schwartz: Yes, I read broadly, is one thing. In the past, I played the guitar a lot. And I don't quite as much lately. I don't know why, you know, I'll start doing it again. I'm sure at some point. But while I was living in San Francisco, I was actually playing in bars and coffee shops, I have a singer, who I performed with. Ula Ojiaku: Really? Wow! Mark Schwartz: And that was really fun. And then the other thing I do is travel, I've really traveled a lot. And, yeah, there was one period in my life where for about five years, I was bumming around the world with a backpack with you know, occasional returns to the States to work a little bit and make some money and then go traveling again. So, one of the joys of my current job is that, I get to do a lot of traveling to interesting places. Ula Ojiaku: So, where would you say is your ideal getaway destination? Mark Schwartz: Oh, let's see. I'm a big fan of Brazil. That, I have good friends there and it's really nice to see them and the atmosphere is always kind of fun there. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Mark Schwartz: I don't know what I've discovered so many places around the world that I've really loved being. I lived in Japan for a year and that is a place that I love to go to, especially for the food. Yeah, I like good food. But I don't know I've found so many places that made me feel like I'd like to spend more time there. And of course, you can't really spend more time everywhere. Ula Ojiaku: Interesting. So, let's, let's go to your book, “The Art of Delicate Bureaucracy”. What was the inspiration behind that book? Mark Schwartz: Well, for all of my books, before I wrote, before I wrote them, I was thinking, ‘why hasn't anybody else written a book on this topic?' People don't write books on bureaucracy, at least not, you know, popular books, there are academic books on bureaucracy. And the same thing happened to me with my first book, “The Art of Business Value”, where I said to myself, we keep talking about business value in the IT world, like, is it obvious what it means? You know, what, why isn't anybody writing a book about what business value means? So, bureaucracy is one of those things. I have a lot of experience with it first of all, I was a CIO in a government agency. But it turns out, it's not just the government, whenever I tell people about my government experience, when I speak at a conference, people come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Oh, my company's just like that. I work for a financial services company; we have lots of bureaucracy'. And I work with a lot of people who are trying to pull off some sort of digital transformation, which is change on a big scale, that's changing traditional organizations on a big scale. And bureaucracy is always in their way because bureaucracy tends to resist change; it strongly tends to resist change. So, if you're doing a big change, then you're probably going to come up against it. So, I thought maybe with my experience as a bureaucrat, or at least experience in the big bureaucracy, I could give some pointers to people who are trying to cause big change, and yet are facing bureaucratic obstacles. And I can't imagine that there's any organization, at least any large organization that does not have bureaucratic obstacles to digital transformation. So, that got me started on it. And then as I started to think about bureaucracy and research it, I realized this is actually a really interesting topic. Ula Ojiaku: You had an interesting introduction to the book. You said, “we are bureaucrats all.” Why that claim, you actually were saying, everyone is a bureaucrat, and I know you made a statement that's similar to that earlier on in this conversation - why? Mark Schwartz: Well, of course, I have to define in the book, what I mean by bureaucracy and all that. And I follow the generally what's accepted as the academic definition. It mostly comes from the sociologist Max Vabre, who is writing around 1920. And, and he talks a lot about bureaucracy, and it's fairly complicated, but I simplify it in the book. Basically, what it comes down to is a bureaucracy is a way of organizing socially, that has rigid formal roles for people and rigid formal rules. And that's the essence of it. You know, bureaucracy, there are rules and they have to be applied uniformly to everybody. And there's a division of labor and you know, a hierarchy. So, it has rigid roles of people who have to sign off on things and approve things. So, with that is the definition. I think it, it connects with the very human tendency to try to structure things and constantly improve them and optimize them. So, if you find a good way of doing something, you tend to turn it into a rule, you know, this is the way it should be done from now on. Ula Ojiaku: Best practice! Mark Schwartz: It's the best practice. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, we, in, social organization, we'd like people to be accountable or responsible for things. And we know that you can't hold somebody accountable unless they have authority to perform their role. So, when you put those things together, it's very natural for us to set up these organizational systems, where we assign roles to people, and give them authority, and we make rules that encapsulate the best way to do things. And, essentially, that's bureaucracy. So, bureaucracy, I find, is everywhere around us in one form or another. But it doesn't drive us crazy most of the time, so we don't notice it. Ula Ojiaku: Maybe if it's serving us, then we wouldn't notice it. But… Mark Schwartz: It does serve. And if you look at the cases where it does drive us crazy, they have certain things in common. And in the book, I say there are three characteristics that bureaucracies often take on which they don't need to, it's not part of the definition of bureaucracy, but they often take on these characteristics. And it's those three characteristics that are what drive us crazy. And so, the goal, ultimately is to eliminate those three characteristics or turn them into something else. Ula Ojiaku: I know that the listeners would be curious to know what the three characteristics of bureaucracy that drive us crazy are? Is that so or should I just tell them go buy the book? Mark Schwartz: Yeah, go buy the book! Well, let me tell you the three characteristics, and also their opposite, which is what we really want. So, the first characteristic that drives us crazy, I think, is that bureaucracies tend to be bloated instead of lean, that would be the opposite in my view. There's no reason why a bureaucracy has to be bloated and wasteful. It could be lean, but it's one of those things that bureaucracy tends to become. So that's the first one. The second one is that bureaucracies tend to petrify, as opposed to learning. So, when I say petrifies, I mean that the rules and the bureaucracy don't change, or don't change as often as they should, or don't change continuously, which is really what rules should do. Now, that's not necessarily a characteristic of bureaucracy, but the definition, the definition says the rules have to be applied rigorously. You know, once you have a rule, everybody has to follow it. But it doesn't say that the rules have to stay the same forever, they can change. The opposite of a petrified bureaucracy is a learning bureaucracy, where the rules are constantly adjusted, based on what the people in the organization learn. And there are plenty of good examples of learning bureaucracies out there. And your goal is to transform the one into the other, the petrified into the learning. The third is, bureaucracies tend to be coercive, rather than enabling. Coercive, meaning that they're there to control employee behavior, to force employees to behave in ways that otherwise they wouldn't want to. They tend to be ‘no' saying, they say ‘no', a lot. Your bureaucracy for your expense reporting policy in your company probably says, ‘no that expense is no good because X Y and Z.' There are plenty of examples of enabling bureaucracies, where the point is not to stop you from doing things or force you to do something you don't want to. But the bureaucracy provides a support structure, provide best practices, as you said, that help you do your job well. And there's no reason why bureaucracies can't do that. So, the three bad characteristics are bloat, coercion, and petrify. Ula Ojiaku: Okay, nice. So, it sounds like the way you've described bureaucracy, when you look at it from a positive slant, would it be the same thing as guardrails, putting guardrails in place, or giving people the right degree of freedom? Mark Schwartz: Yeah, that's exactly the idea. What I find is that guardrails and automation are ways of implementing bureaucracy, that lead to those three good characteristics rather than the bad ones. Let's say in software development, in DevOps, for example, it's a good idea to put guardrails, security guardrails, for example, around what people can do, and automated security tests and things like that. Because then the developers or the DevOps teams, they can go charging ahead full speed, knowing that they can't do anything wrong, you know, because the guardrails are there. And they get immediate feedback, if they do something that's going to put them outside the guardrails and they can just immediately fix it. So, it's very empowering for them, lets them move fast. And it also gets rid of that coercive element of you know, I write some code and then somebody comes in afterwards and says, ‘no, you can't deploy that'. That's annoying. Instead, I can run the security tests myself, as a developer, see if there's anything that's problematic, fix it right away if I want to, so it's all under my control. But the end result is still the same. The bureaucracy is still there. It's just automated and implemented as guardrails. Ula Ojiaku: It's enabling, like you said before, instead of hindering. Mark Schwartz: And it's lean, because it's very inefficient and wasteful, if you write some code, and then at the very end of the development process, somebody finds a security flaw. And now you have to remember what you were doing. And, you know, go back and relearn your code and make changes then, so that's wasteful, as opposed to lean. It's coercive, as opposed to enabling. And if you're good at doing these things, then you keep updating your guardrails and your security tests based on new security threats you learn about or new policies or whatever. So, you make a learning bureaucracy as well. Ula Ojiaku: Interesting. In the book as well, you said you want us to be calm, chaos monkeys, knights of Ockham, lean sumo wrestlers, very interesting oxymoron there. And you know, black belt experts, could you tell us more about those terms? Why did you use those terms? Mark Schwartz: Because they made me laugh of course. Ula Ojiaku: Well, they made me laugh too. Mark Schwartz: So, I thought about what I learned about coping with bureaucracy, especially in my government job, but also from reading and from talking to other people. And I realized I had about, you know, 30 techniques for coping with bureaucracy, I call them plays. And I just grabbed those 30 techniques, but I thought about it, and I realized they divided into three. And the three, I could sort of associate with a personality, almost. You know, that these 10 plays are associated with this personality, these 10 plays are associated with this one. And I came up with these three personalities that I thought describe those plays. And the three personalities are the monkey, and the razor, and the sumo wrestler. And, you know, I think, I could stop right there, because it's probably obvious why I associate those with these plays, but I will go a little further. Ula Ojiaku: Please… Mark Schwartz: So, I realized that some of the things we did, the ones that I call the plays of the monkey, the way of the monkey, those things had to do with provoking. You know, monkeys are mischievous, provocative, and sometimes annoying. And a bunch of the techniques had to do with trying to be provocative. And the razor and I'll give you some examples in a minute. The razor, to me is all about being lean. It's about trimming away waste. And it also refers to the philosophical principle of Ockham's razor. Ockham was a medieval philosopher, right, William of Ockham. And he's generally credited with an idea that something like if you have a choice between a simple explanation, and a complicated explanation, you should prefer the simple one. That's not really what he said. But that's, that's what most people associated with him. That's the principle of Ockham's razor. And, and so it's called a principle of ontological parsimony, meaning, you shouldn't presuppose the existence of more things than you need to, in order to explain something. So, you know, don't make up nymphs. And you know, I don't know, water dryads and whatever's to explain something that you can equally just explain through simple physical laws. Ula Ojiaku: Just saying, 'keep it simple...' Mark Schwartz: Yeah, keep it simple, in a way, right? So that's called the principle of ontological parsimony. And I said, there's a similar principle of bureaucratic parsimony, which says that if you're trying to implement a control, and you can do it in a simple way, or you could do it in a really complicated way, do it a simple way. And so, it's a principle of leanness because I find that bureaucracies, when they get bloated, they have these really complicated wasteful ways of doing something that they could they could accomplish exactly the same thing, but in a simpler way. So that's the razor. And then a sumo wrestler. Well, Sumo is the sport where, you know, two massive people sort of bang into each other, right? And the goal is you want to push your opponent out of the ring, or you want to make them fall and touch the ground with something other than their feet. And if you can do either of those things, you win. So, if you're a big massive person and you're trying to accomplish those things, you might think that the best thing to do is charge your opponent and push really hard. But if your opponent then just either dodges or just is soft and lets you push, well, you're probably going to go flying out of the ring, right? So, one of the principles in Sumo is you want to use your opponent's strength against them. And if they push hard, now, go ahead, give them a little pull. And, you know, let them push even harder. And I realized that some of these techniques for overcoming bureaucracy have to do with using bureaucracy actually, on your side, you know, the using the strength of bureaucracy against it. So that's why the sumo wrestler. So, I'll give you examples now on each one, now that I've described my three personalities. So, the monkey does what is sometimes referred to as provoking and inspecting or provoking and observing, in parallel with the Agile principle of inspect and adapt. So, provoke and observe, what the monkey does is try something that's probably outside the rules, or at least is, you know, a borderline and watches what happens. So, an example where we use this is that we have these rules in Homeland Security that essentially said, if you were going to do an IT project, you have to produce 87 documents. And each document had a template, and you have to fill in each section of the template. And these documents would run to hundreds of pages. And so, using the persona of the monkey, let's say, we started to turn in these documents. But in each section of the template, we just wrote a one sentence, one sentence answer, you know, we're very short answer instead of writing pages and pages. And we wanted to see what would happen if we did that, because there was no rule that said, it had to be a really long answer. And eventually, we started to provoke even more, we just left out sections that we thought didn't make any sense for what we were doing. And all of this was unprecedented, you know, it caused a lot of fear. It turned out, and this sometimes happens, that the enforcers of this policy, they were happy when they said, “We've never wanted anybody to write these really long answers to these things, we have to read them. And you know, the intention wasn't to slow people down. As long as you're giving us the right information. That's all we need.” So, in this case, provoking just it turned out that we could defeat a bunch of bureaucracy there, we could, we could make things a lot leaner because nobody objected. But sometimes people do object. And if they do, then you learn exactly what the resistance is, who it is, is resisting, and that gives you valuable information, when you're trying to figure out how to overcome it. So that's the monkey. You know, let's try something a little playful and mischievous, and see what happens. The razor, well, that one follows also on my 87 documents, because we then set up an alternative way of doing things that had only 15 documents. And where there had been 13 gate reviews required for each project. We reduced it to two. And so, all we did, you know, we just used our little razor to trim away all the excess stuff that was in the bureaucratic requirements. And then we showed people that those 15 documents and those two gate reviews accomplished exactly the same thing as the 87 documents and the 13 gate reviews. That's the principle of the razor, that's how the razor works. The sumo wrestler, also a favorite of mine. So, we were trying to convince the bureaucracy to let us do DevOps and to be agile, and it was resisting. And people kept pointing to a policy that said, you can't do these things. And so, we wrote our own policy. And it was a very good bureaucratic policy looked exactly like every bureaucratic document out there. But it essentially said you must use DevOps and you must be agile on it, you know, it set up a perfect bureaucracy around that it's set up ways of checking to make sure everybody was using DevOps. And the theory behind it was the auditors when they came to audit us and said we were being naughty because we were doing DevOps. Their argument was we looked at the policy and we looked at what you're doing, and they were different. And that's the way auditing works. That was the, you know, GAO, the Government Accountability Office, and the Inspector General and all that. So, we figured if we had a policy that said you must do DevOps, and they audited us, well, they would actually be enforcing the policy, you know, they'd be criticizing any part of the organization that was not using DevOps and I thought that's great. So, this is how you use the strength of the bureaucracy against the bureaucracy or not really, against even, you know, it's perfectly good, perfect… Ula Ojiaku: To help the bureaucracy yeah, to help them to improve, improve the organization. But thinking about the monkey though, being provocative and mischievous, do you think that there has to be an element of you know, relationship and trust in place first, before… you can't just you know… you're new, and you've just gotten through the door and you start being a monkey… you probably will be taken back to wherever you came from! What do you think? Mark Schwartz: Well, it helps if you're giggling while you do it. But you know, I think the goal here is to figure out the right levers that are going to move things. And sometimes you do have to push a little bit hard, you know, you do need to take people out of their comfort zone. Usually, you want to do these things in a way that takes into account people's feelings, and you know, is likely to move them in the right direction, rather than making them dig in their heels. But I'll give you a couple of examples of Monkey tactics that are less comfortable for people. One is simply, you know, there's a status quo bias. It's a known, well-known cognitive bias; people tend to prefer the status quo or look the other way about it's failings and stuff. So often, when you're trying to make a change, people say, we're fine the way we are, you know, everything's okay. So, one of the things the monkey tries to do is, is to make it clear that the status quo is not acceptable, you know, to show people that it actually if they think about it, it's no good. And so, for example, when we decided to move to the cloud, instead of working in our DHS data center, people said - of course at the time it was a big concern, ‘was the cloud secure enough?' And in the persona of the monkey, the right response is, ‘are we secure enough now?' You know, ‘don't you realize that we're not happy with our security posture today?' ‘It's not like, the cloud has proved itself. I mean, we have to compare our security in the cloud versus our security in the data center. And yes, I'm very sure it'll be better in the cloud and here's why…' But you can't start from the assumption that you are fine right now. In general, when we're talking about the cloud, that's the situation. Companies are using their own data centers. And it's like, you know, we have to teach them that they can do better in the cloud. But the truth is that they're not happy in their own data centers, if they think about it, right? There are security issues, there are performance issues, there are cost issues. And they're aware of those issues, right, they just look the other way. And because they're comfortable with the status quo, so the monkey has to sort of shake people up and say, ‘It's not okay, what you're doing now!' Another example, and this is really harsh, and I wouldn't use it in most cases. But let's say that this was in Homeland Security. Let's say that Homeland Security is enforcing a very bureaucratic process that results in IT projects, taking five years instead of six months. And let's say, you know, the process is there on paper, the rules say, ‘Do this', the people are interpreting the rules in a way that makes things take five years. Sometimes, the monkey has to go to somebody who's in their way and say, ‘We are in the Department of Homeland Security, this IT project is going to make people more secure in the homeland. Are you comfortable with the fact that you are preventing people from being more secure for the next four and a half years, when we could…' You know, it's a matter of personalizing it. And that sometimes is what's necessary to get people to start thinking creatively about how they can change the bureaucracy. You know, ‘I hate to say it, but you're a murderer', you know, essentially is the message. It's a monkey message. And like I said, you know, it's not the preferred way to go about doing things. But if you have to, I mean, the lives of people are at stake, and you've got to find a way to get there. Ula Ojiaku: So how can leaders because your book, The Art of Business Value, in your book, you said that “leaders create the language of the organization, and they set up incentives and define value in a way that elicits desired outcomes.” So, in essence, I understand that statement to mean that leaders set the tone, and you know, kind of create the environment for things to happen. So, how can leaders implement or apply bureaucracy in a way that enables an organization where, before it was seen as a hindrance, how can they do this? Mark Schwartz: My thought process was, if we all agree, we're gonna try to maximize business value? How do we know what we mean by it? And I realized, a lot of Agile people, you know, people in our Agile and DevOps community, were being a little bit lazy. You know, they were thinking, ‘Oh, business value, you know, it's returns on investment, or, you know, it's up to the business (to define) what's business value.' The tech people just, you know, do the work of providing a solution. And to me, that's too lazy. If you're going to be agile, be it you have to be more proactive about making sure you're delivering business value. So, you have to understand what it means. You have to actually do the work of, you know, figuring out what it means. And what it means is not at all obvious. And, you know, you might think it has something to do with return on investment or shareholder value or something like that. But when you really closely examine it, that is not the right way to define it, when it comes to deciding what its efforts to prioritize and all that that's, you know, the case that the book makes, and I explain why that's true. Instead, I say you have to think of business value within the context of the business's strategy and its objectives as a business. There's no like, abstract, this has more business value than this because we calculated an ROI or something like that, that doesn't work reprioritizing. It's always asked within the context of a particular business strategy. And the business strategy is a direction from leadership. There might be input from everybody else, but ultimately, you have leaders in the organization who are deciding what the strategic objectives are. So, for example, if you are a traditional bank, or traditional financial services company, and you look around you and you see there are all these new FinTech companies that are disrupting the industry, and you're worried, well there are a lot of different ways you can respond to those disruptive FinTechs. And how you're going to choose to respond depends on your preferences, it depends on the situation of your company, in the industry, the history of your company, all of those things. But of the many ways you can respond to that disruption, you're going to choose one as the leader of your enterprise. Well, what adds business value is whatever supports that direction you choose to go. You can't think of business value outside of that direction, you know. That's the case that I make. So, leaders don't just set the tone and the culture there, they're actually setting strategic direction that determines what has business value. And then the people who are executing the agile teams have to take it upon themselves to make sure that whatever they're doing is going to add business value in that sense. So, the role of leadership then becomes direction setting and visioning for the future and communicating the vision to the people who are working and providing feedback, you know, on whether things are actually adding business value or not . And that's the key responsibility. Now, in order to do that, in order to motivate people to deliver according to that idea of business value, there are certain techniques as a leader that you have to keep in mind, there are ways that you get people, you get a big organization to sort of follow you. And one of the ones that's become most important to me to think about after talking to a lot of leaders about how they're running their organizations, and what's working, is using middle management as a lever for accomplishing those things. So often, I'll talk to leaders of a business, and they'll say, our problem is the frozen middle, middle management is, you know, they're just not changing the way we want, we want to, we want to cause a big transformation, but middle management is getting in the way. And I tell them, ‘that's pretty much a myth.' You know, ‘that's not actually what's happening, let's look more closely at your organization.' Almost always, middle management is still trying to do the best they can, given the situation that they're in. And the way that you get them to align themselves behind the change is, you change their incentives or their role definition, or how you tell them what you're expecting from them, you don't say “change”, you know, and start doing X and Y, you change what success looks like for their position. And then they adapt to it by becoming engaged and finding ways to get there. So, there's almost always a leadership problem when you have that frozen middle effect. And, and I've seen it work really well that, you know, all of a sudden, you get this big leverage, because you just do a little bit of tweaking of role definitions, and bring everybody into solving the problem. And actually, there's an example, I love to talk about a history book, like I said before, I like to bring in other things, right? It's called the Engineers of Victory. And it's about World War Two, the Allies realized that they had to solve a set of problems, I think there was six or so problems. One of them was how do you land troops on a beach that's heavily defended? They realize they were just not going to be able to win the war until they could do that. But nobody knew how to do it. Because, you know, obviously, the bad guys are there on the beach, they're dug in, they put barbed wire everywhere, and mines, and you know, all this stuff. And it's just going to be a slaughter if you try to land on the beach. So, this book, Engineers of Victory, makes the case that what really won the war, was figuring out those solutions. And who was responsible for figuring out those solutions? It was middle management, basically. It was the, you know, within the structure of the army, it was the people not at the top who had big authority, you know, the generals, and it was not the troops themselves, because they weren't in a position to figure out these things. It was middle management that could see across different parts of the organization that could try things and see whether they worked or not, that, you know, essentially could run their own mini skunkworks projects. And eventually, they came up with the solutions to these problems. So, I think that's very encouraging for the role of middle management, you know, that a lot of problems have to be solved at that layer in order to pull off a transformation. And it really can be done. And this is a beautiful example of it. Ula Ojiaku: It reminds me of, you know, my experience in a few transformation initiatives. So, the middle, the people who are termed to be in the frozen middle, are, like you said, they want to do what's best for the company, and they show up wanting to do their best work, but it's really about finding out, ‘Where do I fit in, (with) all this change that's happening?' You know, ‘if my role is going away, if the teams are going to be more empowered, that means I'm not telling them what to do, but then what do I do now?' So, the clarity of what the ‘New World' means for them, and what's in it for them, would help, you know, make them more effective. Mark Schwartz: And the mistake that's often made is to say to them, ‘start doing DevOps' or, you know, ‘start doing agile or something.' Because if you don't change the definition of success, or you don't change the incentives that, you know, then it's just, make work and they're going to resist it. You know, if you say your incentive is to get really fast feedback or you know, one of the other goals of DevOps, because of the following reasons, it helps the business this way, so let's try to reduce cycle time as much as possible for producing software. Okay, that's a change in the incentive, or the, you know, the definition of success, rather than just telling somebody you have to do DevOps, you know, read a book and figure it out. Ula Ojiaku: So, what other books because you mentioned the Engineers of Victory, are there any other books you would recommend for the listener to go check out if they wanted to learn more about what we've talked about today? Mark Schwartz: Well, I think, you know, obviously, my books referred to War and Peace by Tolstoy, Moby Dick, another great one. You know, you probably need to read my books to figure out why those are the right books to read and Engineers of Victory. As I said, I think that one's a great one. Within the field, there are some DevOps books that that I like a lot, of course, Gene Kim's books, The Phoenix Project, and now The Unicorn Project, the sequel to that. Because those are books that give you a feel for the motivation behind all the things that we do. The Mechanics of Things, there are plenty of books out there that help you learn the mechanics of how to do continuous integration and continuous delivery. And then the cloud is I think it's really transformative. You know, it's the cloud itself is a tremendous enabler. I work at AWS, of course but I'm not saying this because I work at AWS, it's more than I work at AWS because I believe these things. And my teammates have written some good books on the cloud. Reaching Cloud Velocity, for example, by Jonathan Allen and Thomas Blood is a great one for reading up on how the cloud can be transformative. But my other teammates, Gregor Hope, has written a number of books that are really good, Stephen Orban did A Head in the Cloud. So, I think those are all… should be at the top of people's reading lists. And then, of course, I recommend my books, because they make me laugh, and they might make you laugh, too. Ula Ojiaku: Definitely made me laugh, but they've also given me things to think about from a new perspective. So, I totally agree. And so, where can people find you if they want to reach out to you? Mark Schwartz: Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to find me. If you're with a company that is an AWS customer, feel free to talk to your account manager, the sales team from AWS and ask them to put you in touch with me, is another easy way. LinkedIn is kind of where I organize my world from so find me there. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Sounds great. And any final words for the audience or for the listeners. Mark Schwartz: Um, I, I have found that these things that you want to do to take advantage of the digital world, and I think we're all sort of pointing ourselves in that direction, there are these amazing things you can do in the digital world. They're sometimes challenging to get there, but it's very possible to get there. And one thing I've learned a lot at Amazon is the idea of working backwards, you know, you get that picture in your head for where you want to be and then you say to yourself, ‘I can get there. Let me work backwards and figure out what I have to do in order to get there.' And you might be wrong, you know, you should test hypotheses, you start moving in the right direction, and of course, correct as you need to. But you can do it with confidence that others are doing it and you can too no matter what your organization is, no matter how much you think you're a snowflake and you know different from every other organization. You can still do it. And with just some good intention and good thinking you can figure out how to how to get there. Ula Ojiaku: Thank you so much, Mark. That was a great close for this conversation and again, I really appreciate your making the time for this interview. Thank you. Mark Schwartz: Thanks for having me. Ula Ojiaku: You're welcome.
A Web3-based CBDC (central bank digital currency) is a solution that bridges the gap between traditional finance and the innovative world of Web3. This would not only create a secure and efficient way to make payments but would broaden the scope of inclusivity in the financial space. Carmelle Cadet, a beacon of innovation and Founder of EMTECH joins us today to share how her company is working to widen the adoption of blockchain technologies that enable financial inclusion. This week, episode 201 of the Tech Intersect™ Podcast is about unlocking financial access through Web3 CBDC.POWERED BY ADVANTAGE EVANS™ ACADEMY Unlock Crypto Secrets with Digital Money Demystified!
Hyperscale-inspired technology is everywhere in enterprise IT, from Kubernetes to S3 to OCP, but these technologies may not be applicable. This episode of On-Premise IT features Cloud Field Day 18 delegates Allyson Klein, Eric Wright, and Nathan Bennett discussing the cloud gap with Stephen Foskett. Looking at AI, we see a very different deployment model in hyperscale cloud as opposed to enterprise cloud, with this gap in technology, implementation, and talent widening. One impact of the needs of hyperscalers is an increased focus on sustainability, specifically energy consumption. We should also consider how the hyperscale use case distorts the development of technology, which is obvious in CXL, GPUs, and networking technologies. Looking at Cloud Field Day, we see that many of these companies are attempting to bridge this gap, connecting hyperscale cloud technology to the enterprise. This is what makes the event so interesting! © Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Mind the Gap Between Hyperscale and Enterprise IT
Hyperscale-inspired technology is everywhere in enterprise IT, from Kubernetes to S3 to OCP, but these technologies may not be applicable. This episode of On-Premise IT features Cloud Field Day 18 delegates Allyson Klein, Eric Wright, and Nathan Bennett discussing the cloud gap with Stephen Foskett. Looking at AI, we see a very different deployment model in hyperscale cloud as opposed to enterprise cloud, with this gap in technology, implementation, and talent widening. One impact of the needs of hyperscalers is an increased focus on sustainability, specifically energy consumption. We should also consider how the hyperscale use case distorts the development of technology, which is obvious in CXL, GPUs, and networking technologies. Looking at Cloud Field Day, we see that many of these companies are attempting to bridge this gap, connecting hyperscale cloud technology to the enterprise. This is what makes the event so interesting! © Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Mind the Gap Between Hyperscale and Enterprise IT
In this episode of the Business Excelleration® Podcast, how can IT organizations most effectively vet, evaluate, and integrate AI into their enterprise? A discussion with Tammy Pinter (Practice Leader, Global IT Advisory), Ron Exler (Senior Research Director, Enterprise IT) and Todd Musgrove (Associate Principal, Technology Transformation). Part of a series of podcast episodes covering issues related to Generative AI.
In this episode of the Business Excelleration® Podcast, how can IT organizations most effectively vet, evaluate, and integrate AI into their enterprise? A discussion with Tammy Pinter (Practice Leader, Global IT Advisory), Ron Exler (Senior Research Director, Enterprise IT) and Todd Musgrove (Associate Principal, Technology Transformation). Part of a series of podcast episodes covering issues related to Generative AI. A complete list of show notes is available here for download.
Enterprise IT is constantly oscillating between centralized and distributed, and we're currently in a period of repatriation of workloads from the cloud. This episode of the On-Premise IT podcast features three delegates from Cloud Field Day 17, Joey D'Andoni, Eric Wright, and Jason Benecicic, discussing the reality of repatriation of cloud applications with Stephen Foskett of Gestalt IT. Pundits constantly tout the money they save by repatriating from public cloud, but this might not be the best choice especially for smaller organizations. The only way to ensure functionality between on-prem, hybrid, and public cloud is to use them and use each where it is the best solution. Repatriation is especially challenging for today's SaaS-oriented businesses, since most of these solutions can't be run on-prem. But even workloads that can be run outside the cloud will likely require re-architecting to run locally. Yet many companies are developing software to ease the transition to and from the cloud, and these make it much easier to repatriate. © Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Cloud Workload Repatriation is a Real Problem
Enterprise IT is constantly oscillating between centralized and distributed, and we're currently in a period of repatriation of workloads from the cloud. This episode of the On-Premise IT podcast features three delegates from Cloud Field Day 17, Joey D'Andoni, Eric Wright, and Jason Benecicic, discussing the reality of repatriation of cloud applications with Stephen Foskett of Gestalt IT. Pundits constantly tout the money they save by repatriating from public cloud, but this might not be the best choice especially for smaller organizations. The only way to ensure functionality between on-prem, hybrid, and public cloud is to use them and use each where it is the best solution. Repatriation is especially challenging for today's SaaS-oriented businesses, since most of these solutions can't be run on-prem. But even workloads that can be run outside the cloud will likely require re-architecting to run locally. Yet many companies are developing software to ease the transition to and from the cloud, and these make it much easier to repatriate. © Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Cloud Workload Repatriation is a Real Problem
Today's guest is John Cullom, CEO at Northcraft Analytics. Founded in 2008, Northcraft Analytics is the leading provider in the U.S. of Analytical Applications for Enterprise IT departments. They offer a broad suite of HOLAP BI applications for IT Service and Operations Management, including coverage for 10 of the 24 ITIL process areas on more than 12 enterprise applications. Northcraft's vision is to provide Business Intelligence applications for all of the industry-leading solutions for IT automation with platform portability for our customers. Their solutions are unique in that they require no BI development whatsoever, which is backed up by the most comprehensive maintenance and support package in the industry. In the episode, John will discuss: The interesting work they do at Northcraft Analytics, Current trends he is seeing in the market, Why ServiceNow is the platform of choice, How they are using ServiceNow and the benefits it brings to the organization, What he's learned from implementing ServiceNow and What the future holds for the platform
Discussing what might drives team structure in Enterprise IT.
Discussing what might drives team structure in Enterprise IT. The post HS016 Team Structure for Technology Teams appeared first on Packet Pushers.
© 2020-2026 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
