Cloud Computing 2021: Key Trends

hi i'm james mcguire and today we're talking about cloud computing in the year 2021 we're making big bold predictions and forecasts about what's going to be happening cloud in the year ahead to discuss that i'm joined by three people who know a lot about the topic with me is michael lebeau senior advisor to the c-suite and overall cloud guru michael thank you for joining us today great to be here james i love it you know i mean i want to see how much we can get wrong for 20 exactly we've got to meet a year from now and go oh we were really wrong about that um also with me is jim ryan ceo at flexera hello to your gym james thanks for having me looking forward to it good good and rounding out our panel is sam ramji chief strategy officer at datastax hello to you sam james it's great to see you and uh good to chat with you both jim and michael and and sam you are not you're not even the assistant strategy officer you're actually the chief strategy officer yeah it's an unusual unusual title for a uh for a startup but we have about 500 people in the company and a lot of what we've had to do is look at how is the world changing and how do we fit our model to that what is data like so that's uh there's there's a lot a lot of strategy uh to be done excellent so you know there's a lot of you know possible predictions we could talk about i want to want to get to them but i'd like to get this the single most highest conviction prediction that the three of you have for cloud in in the year ahead you know what what do you think is going to happen that's really important you think is definitely going to happen and really going to have an effect on people um michael what would you say what what do you think one thing that is definitely going to happen in the world of cloud in the year 2021 so um i want to i want to hit the non-technical aspect because i really do think that given what we've experienced in 2020 that in 2021 we're going to see an acceleration on the business side of the house in terms of driving the the level of expectation from the technology and from the business you know to take advantage so we've seen significant acceleration in 2020 uh due to covet i think the taste of what that means to the business uh particularly given you know whatever uncertainty around economics social issues whatever i mean we've got a large number of trends all impacting things at the same time the business side is going to take a very active role in driving the next level of transformation you know you don't mean cost cutting you mean you mean the business side is going to lobby for greater technology or or what will the business side be driving i think we've seen acceleration in digital transformation and i think that the business the ceo in particular needs to step up and articulate the moonshot whatever that moonshot is for that organization whatever ambition i think they need to step up to it um i think they need to for you be the forcing function uh because you know we're seeing too much turn or a lot of turn and like the fortune 500 um and i think if if you don't it's do or die so uh step up to the plate you know set that ambitious agenda the and the reason i'm saying this is because the more ambitious the agenda the fact of the matter remains the only path is cloud so if you're if you know if you need to do things with speed and scale there's lots of i mean the the number of the case evidence of the organization successfully leveraging cloud for their business has grown to a critical mass so that every industry every region you know you can point to something that somebody did with speed and with scale and that's the essence of cloud jim you mentioned the ceo stepping up and what what is your prediction and will you be stepping up in the year 2021 maybe you've already stepped up but what what is your prediction for the coming year hey man i'm stepping up all the time that's a full-time job of the ceo right all right good good you so uh i i i think it's direct i i think michael's bang on here and you know at the risk of being somewhat controversial it's you know maybe the hype around cloud just abates and and ceases it's not magic here right the only reason you go to cloud is to achieve a business outcome and and and get something of benefit for the business and i think too many ceos have been uh you know delegating some of those decisions to the technologists within the company and i understand why but uh just because it's cloud doesn't make it uh the land of milk and honey and all your dreams will come true this is just your stuff running on somebody else's kit and uh let's not make it something larger than it is it's a means to an end it is not the end in and of itself um you know and i think uh i i would hope that that now that you know approximately 50 of the workloads or they're about are now running in the cloud people have have digested what it is and what it entails and uh you know aren't treating it as something so special they're treating it like the rest of their its state so i agree with that that that cloud is going to cease to be special in the year ahead or what do you see if you're going to look ahead i agree with that and that is why my high my high confidence prediction is that 2021 will be the year of multi-cloud mm-hmm right i mean specifically is happening right it is right andy jassy came out and started talking about multi-cloud i mean which is a switch from aws because they like to be the sole dog right that's kind of the whole aws world view right what do you mean there are other clouds we don't understand but when they start acknowledging that what's that reflecting it's reflecting the reality of of cios who are trying to figure out what do i do right there's been this covet acceleration there's been a lot of m a we're actually seeing the fortune 500 are sitting on the largest dry powder war chest in human history the to the top companies in the first six months of koba took out 800 billion dollars in debt which they mostly haven't spent in order to restructure their corporations and fix their assets right so they can figure out how you make payroll what do you do with your facilities so that is going to unleash we're already starting to see an acquisitive wave of buying other companies whether they're companies in their industry whether their tech peer plays to try to figure out how to accelerate so multi-cloud has gotten here mostly by accident people haven't been doing a lot of intentional multi-cloud it's multinationals this company was built on aws got acquired by a company that was built on azure right now you got two clouds that's the simplest simplest stance right but now right i mean look at look at what jim jim's company does right they help you figure out how do you spend less to get more right look at what michael's advising folks on you start to realize wow the best way to get a discount from my cloud vendor is to tell them i'm also on another cloud right if you don't have a reasonable way to escape they will not give you a good price and i learned this myself firsthand a year ago when i was cio cto for cloud platform for autodesk before i came to data stacks so multi-cloud on purpose once you see that line item of your aws bill cross 50 million dollars and your cfo is like hey so i see your compound annual growth rate on the aws bill is like 30 so like when does this become material and should we be talking to the board about this like how do we prepare that that's when you get told you know consider other options you need a multi-cloud strategy and building on that kubernetes is taking over the world like i had the privilege to be working on and with the kubernetes team when i was vp of product management at google we had no idea how fast it would grow but kubernetes is just breaking out everywhere and what that really is is a signal of a technical capability to have a common operational stance on multiple clouds because now google and amazon and microsoft all have their own native kubernetes services which are really good so you can be multi-cloud on purpose you can have a good way of managing the costs and you can have a good way of managing the artifacts and the assets right so i think that's going to become mainstream in 2021 it seems like one of the challenges with multi-cloud is that mythical pane of glass that enables some some poor company to really manage all those clouds there's going to be different cost structures and different technologies that each cloud can offer within reason i mean is is will we ever get to that mythical pane of glass that enables someone to really manage multiple clouds from one platform or does it somehow exist i mean jim you've heard anything about that be able to manage multiple clouds from from one one pane of glass what is your take on multi-cloud in 2021 well i i i think multi-cloud will continue to to increase and increase for all the reasons that that sam just mentioned thanks for the shout out on flex sarah sam but um hey i i mean it's you know nothing good lasts forever and when you talk to any cio or ceo one of the single fastest growing lion items on his or her own budget year on year out for the last couple years has been aws it's outpacing all other growth on on the p l that is not sustainable uh and so people are looking for options and that that will continue to drive people towards multi-cloud and i think that even even the large providers themselves are coming to grips with the fact that it's going to be a multi-cloud environment and one of the key advantages they'll have is you know how can i break down some of these barriers to to working with one another here so we we think it's uh it's absolutely moving in that direction we think that the technology will will be an enabler to making that happen i don't think there's going to be a cure-all but uh you know we absolutely see that as being a reality what about if i think about my own prediction for for cloud in 2021 companies are going to suddenly start asking every every cloud provider what can you do for me in terms of you know ml and artificial intelligence because all the three leaders have those products you know you know they offer them and so and companies are feeling really desperate we need to get on board with artificial intelligence we need to do more uh michael do you hear that at all or am i am i just making that up uh no i don't think you're making it up um i think uh i do make stuff up sometimes but just just more clear on that but it's it's it's natural for the i.t industry to make you know make stuff up so listen i i think that there's a you know a number of levers in terms of generating value from cloud some of them you know involve modernization or rejuvenating what you do have today what you're running today but the big value really i think that's generated is off of innovation and when you think about you know not the newest technologies but the new technologies around anal advanced analytics machine learning um ai iot edge um you know these are the things that um i think you know organizations are have experimented with some organizations have been able to leverage these cloud provider tools um and and really accelerated product development and delivered value quickly i mean we're talking in the matter of weeks um perhaps months um and so these new offerings and it's not just one thing it's not just um you know ai it's the combination of these things together um that create the value and so the better you're able to leverage a club you know platform um these resident tools the innovation that's coming from you know these different providers and apply that into your own you know kind of business challenge and do it in record time that that's the point and so um there are many many uh examples of organizations uh being able to do that and i would say that you know the bulk of the use cases that are out there you know leverage you know these new technologies in some new fashion and underpinning that is is that there's tremendous latent demand from the business side of the house for things that they want to do but have been told no you know there's no budget whatever because when you think about how it runs today the majority of the budget is against you know things you know legacy tech debt whatever paying you know trying you know just paying the interest on that um and not on new and so we we need to have that reckoning um yeah we need to drive you know more funding towards you know these these new capabilities um and uh that's the exciting part of where i think we're going in 2021 cool all right so i i you know if you look around at what the various cloud pundits are saying they're saying a collection of things and i'd like to get the three of yours take on just a number of of possible things that people have said about what's going to be happening in cloud in 2021 i'll very quickly read through them sam i'll ask you for a comment on on one of them any of these could be true or false or some variation thereof i hear people say that 2021 will be the year of cloud native i hear that uh edge computing will be the new cloud as edge gains adoption and cloud becomes merely business as usual foundation uh foundational i've certainly heard that multi-cloud will dissolve the barrier between cloud providers we've talked about that a little bit hybrid and on-premise growing popularity you never know that's you know and then uh winners and losers in the cloud world in 2021 so any of those like stand out to you like oh my god yes that is going to happen or oh goodness please don't pay no attention to that you know they all sound like pretty good bets except for this multi-cloud will dissolve the barrier between cloud providers right so going mainstream doesn't mean the barriers go away and i think this is a kind of a good segue from uh from michael lebeau's comment on artificial intelligence i had the opportunity to attend jpmorgan chase's technology innovation conference about six weeks ago jamie dimon held the keynote and he told us all that the direction he was giving his business people was focus on ai so because if you get something right in the business with ai you won't get a 10 improvement you'll get a 10x improvement great so go figure out what your ai workloads need to be right and kind of drive in there cool so how do you do that well one of the first products that shipped when i was at google uh was the tpu the tensor processing unit right so this is super high end very fast good price performance way to run tensorflow which is a very popular ai framework but that said it's a little bit of a vertical integration strategy because you're going to be doing this high-end processing on data that's got to be in your cloud so you're uploading you know terabytes of data so that you can let your ml people and the processes go crazy on it and find some new correlation some feature in the data that lets you convert your customers at a higher rate lets you predict churn lets you do right supply chain optimization that you couldn't imagine before but then that's all kind of very cloud specific you may end up going well you know the reason i use google for my ai workloads the reason i use amazon is for my line of business apps and i use microsoft for all of my sort of most secure workloads because i've got all of my active directory right you know policy everything's locked up and maybe stuff that i want to see analyzed in in office 365. right so you're going to use them differently on purpose with some crossover so the control plane is unlikely to be common between cloud providers you'll have multiple cloud stances so you what i would say people you should look at what happens to new relic what happens to splunk uh you know what happens to the main management companies as the opportunity to fight for that pane of glass shows up you'll get a lot of telemetry based on their performance and you'll look at a technology called prometheus which is the monitoring and logging engine that is native to kubernetes which is cloud native so i think 2021 being the year cloud native super super safe bet um the idea that multi-cloud means that you can turn all the clouds into one giant computer it's not going to happen because the competition between the cloud providers is going to make them create breaking changes that won't let you kind of have those those common environments like mac and windows so so that mythical pane of glass may never exist or at least for the foreseeable future that would enable you to really manage the three or four or five of them as as one that that's not in the in the near my midterm future it's not it's not in the next 12 months for enterprises that have complex systems right but three years from now five years from now almost certainly something like that's gonna exist what about uh what about that one hybrid and on-premise grow in popularity wait a second on-premise grows in popularity i spit out my coffee on that one i mean jim does that does that is that working for you is on premise like the the rise of the data center that's what i want to see that headline the rise of the data center in 2021 are you buying that it's uh it's counterintuitive absolutely positively now popularity doesn't mean there's going to be an influx of spend right you know what we see our people are finally waking up uh you're not appointed the cio of cloud right if you're managing an enterprise and uh your job as the chief information officer you don't get the luxury to just care about and manage your cloud so again if we've established that half of your app stack is still on prem and or some combination of on-prem and sas guess what you can't ignore the on-prem just because it's not sexy and hyped up here right and now when you look at the totality of your budget and if you want to be treated like a business person you know helping helping contribute to the p l and the bottom line here you're gonna have to become much more attuned as to the interplay between applications and services in an on-prem assassin a cloud where i'll give you an overly simplistic example right when uh for for a relatively complicated organization they're gonna have one contract with oracle one contract with ibm and one contract with microsoft typically those contracts in in the aggregate are going to be in excess of tens of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars per annum now when they audit you or you're having an ela discussion they don't come and say let me you know what are you doing just spending on your cloud they're going to audit you one time and they're going to want you to report out on everything that you're doing across all those disparate hybrid platforms and you're not going to be able to get away with one tool for cloud one for your sas one for on-prem you're gonna have to go and look at it because like it or not it's still fifty percent of your legacy and that's probably the hardest more expensive lift and shift process to move over so you know again i'm not suggesting that people are going to go off of cloud to on-prem but i think people are finally waking up it's not a separate distinct thing it's uh it's part of your overall portfolio portfolio and as a c-level exec you're gonna have to manage that whole thing you can actually see you can see some some hints that everybody else believes that too so look at google cloud platform and anthos it's an on-premises software product from a cloud provider and look what happened aws copied them right now you've got now you've got uh you know ec2 everywhere right or you know so you've got a bunch of these bunch of these capabilities that are um showing you where the market's going and then vmware's tan zoo business is growing really well so there's this there's this rise of on-prem it also kind of brings in the question of who owns your edge are you renting an edge is an edge count against the cloud provider mostly what i'm seeing is edge is on-premises now it might be uh you know it might be the middle of the country right it might not be your your typical location but you're trying to do factory automation you're trying to put an edge close to your big box store so that you can do a lot more uh local processing curbside delivery turns out takes a lot of ai so it'd be nice to be able to have some of that be you know edge computing based that's probably going to show up as on-premises spending as well michael you you're big on the on-prem thing it's pretty cool actually going towards 2025 on-prem is cool yeah i'm not going to be quoted as saying that um i think there are various use cases across the enterprise i think that it's a generalized outflow not an inflow um but i do think that um you know the cloud providers and customers do have various challenges um they can't exit all at once these are struggles you know where it makes sense um in terms of uh that balance um you know it's not all in one or all in the other maybe um i think for a lot of use cases it is going to skew that way i think the you know with the the local zones that amazon announced and whatnot the the type of you know scale and build out that we're seeing yeah we're going to see a different definition emerge um and so our definition of what i'm just unclear uh well i mean you know hybrid on-prem um you know what you're seeing you know with um you know outposts is more like a public cloud in approach um then uh tanzu publi uh data center out um and i think you know there's gonna be kind of a an interesting i wouldn't say war but it's gonna be an interesting um um you know situation where you know different parties are arguing for different perspectives um within the vendor community as well as within clients um in terms of how to approach it and some of it will be uh relating to skill sets tooling uh you know processes other will relate to the business outcome that you're trying to generate and the speed that you're trying to do it at um and so you know where it makes sense um you know depending on the level of innovation that's being applied you know what the orientation who wins um and i think so we're gonna see a lot of friction um and discussion around this in the coming year um the products you know that sam mentioned you know are just starting to ramp up you know they were only introduced a little over a year ago um and so you know those use cases i think are still getting explored um and the economics tied around them you know will be uh more and more fleshed out over time um and so 2021 might see some real real production in in terms of that i want to just hark back on you know this this you know i wrote a paper on multi-cloud a couple years ago um you know it's never going to be a single pane of glass in my view just given the level of churn but what sam mentioned is is the right way to think about in my in my view control plane you need a control plane and what that means is that you need an operations architecture and an operating model that support the fact that you know across your enterprise you're using you know multiple providers legacy and and cloud you're using a multitude of tools um and you have you know data particularly operations data all over the place and not one single version of the truth and i think that's going to be a big challenge for organizations in order to understand what's actually going on and then that could lead possibly to cost problems without that ability to understand what's going on i agree with michael i i think the underlying data architecture and data model fueling all of this is a big challenge and problem for people to get their head around especially their cost model it's uh you know unless you can normalize and get a consistent view of what actually exists out there it's really hard to take action to improve things and and get your cost in in control and it's really hard to do like when in my last job i had a dedicated finance team of five people who would work with the operators to figure out what we were spending where and because any reasonably sized uh enterprise has a platform team that's almost like a mini internal aws even if it's still you know sending workloads out to aws that's multiplexed across you know a dozen two dozen lines of business do you know which line of business is spending is is generating what spend that's flowing through the platform team often you don't so that's that's kind of a tricky component of all of this i spend a lot of time focusing on data and i think there's a huge change in how we use data going back to jamie dimon's quote and the focus on ai giving you 10x improvements in different different areas of business we are going from an era of app-driven data right to data-driven apps app-driven data privileges the app it focuses on app velocity and it kind of isolates data in a silo at the bottom of a microservice this is my postgres this is my mysql whatever your microservice team is kind of the you know the sole owners of how to access that now what happens when the business team is like hey i've got these new data scientists i got a consultant from mckinsey this is going to be amazing and they're like yeah it's going to take us like three months we've got to delay the other application team and then they'll like poke holes and it's a mess right so going to data driven apps which is what ai is requires a rethinking of your data architecture and so that's what i've seen firsthand in the last uh in the last nine months a big shift that's inspired by covid to say we got to move faster what's the blocker to velocity well one is michael's point from the beginning just expect it can go faster and get your executives out of the way let the team get their work done but then the next blocker they come into is how do i get the data to make this new experience amazing and and what what is is there an answer to that a nutshell answer to that how do i get the data this is the underlying transformation that i t is going through now is to figure out how do you become a data driven enterprise and so it is a scale of transformation that we've seen in the last decade around around compute or application orientation and focusing on making data a first-class citizen so you have to say what's my data architecture what are the different groups involved how is my data platform team operating or do i not have one so it's it's going to be a tremendous amount of work over the next three or five years as companies adopt data as an architecture but one year ago there's an amazing podcast that mark andreessen did on the a16z podcast where he offered his point of view right the a16z thesis which is ai is not an app ai is not a feature ai is an architecture and what that pulls on is the data architecture has to be right there's some amazing work being done by um a technology director at thoughtworks named jamaat and she's laid out a point of view of a data mesh i strongly encourage anybody who's paying attention to this thinking about transformational data to go take a look at uh at her work um on data meshes bringing together the operational plane in the analytical plane in a way that lets you be a lot smarter uh getting back to that our little pundits uh possibilities i think that bottom one there winners and losers in the cloud world in 2021 um is is there some is there is there a faction a group or an organization or a thought that it might be a loser let's just say that might fade away a little bit more in 2021 not be as as big jim you have a sense of that who might be either a fader away or or a quarter quarter loser in 2021 a loser well we're not that word is not diplomatic we don't we don't somebody that's not winning as much or ever there you go yeah there you go not winning this month not a loser but not winning as much in the year 2021 in the world of cloud yeah i i go i'll stick a i'll shy away from organizations or things like just focus on the type of people you know names who's that michael that's because the name i want to put uh name names sure yeah companies yeah let's get ourselves sued here yeah sure let's just talk about our peers right we're all professionals we're all knowledge workers uh you know by and large we're part of the rarefied air that that are the jobs of the future and are eating the world right um as mark hydrates and said right yeah well if software is eating the world cloud is eating software and i don't know what's getting any cloud but uh i i think the losers are people that continue to just make this about the flux capacitators and the bits and bytes and feeds and speeds and only the tech stack i think if if that's if that's your chosen world view as it relates to all thing cloud you'll be resigned to to being the you know the staff engineer which may be maybe fine but for those uh those professionals that are aspiring to get up into the c-suite and actually run companies and you know do great things uh lead lead organizations you've got to get past the the feeds and speeds here um you know in 1964 i i believe it was 64 ibm had the 360 architecture that was centralized computing then we had client server then we had desktops and everything else and this is just the same old story kind of repeating itself every five to ten years now and at the end of the day you've got a business to run a problem to solve and the losers are the people that continue to make this just about the technology the winners are the ones that can be the rosetta stone and understand the technology and and you know be able to articulate how you get to your chosen business outcome by leveraging said technology definitely yeah i i heard about this ai specialist recently this individual is making actually a million dollars a year as an ai specialist but i ask about what he's doing and it is a he in this case and he turns out he's got all sorts of like people expertise and business expertise in addition to the ai engineering expertise so that that really made him worth the cool million a year um i'm not just here i'm not trying to expend anybody that's just into the feeds and speeds or devour that you know there's a need there but uh you know at the end of the day a lot of people want to you know i i talk to a lot of people they want my job they want they want to be a c-level well you've got to make that that transition that mental transition michael you're you're winners or or a loser in uh in cloud in 2021 so you know i started off by saying um there's a lot of value at stake tremendous amount of value at stake whether you're you know cloud or not and so when you think about like you know lists like fortune 500 you know there are 500 companies and um i look back at this and then two you know the the difference between the the companies that were listed in 2000 the companies that are listed in 2020 only 38 remain right and so we were to fast forward to you know 10 years from now you know my bet is you know um of the companies that are on the list today only 50 or less you know will still be there and um so there's so it's not like the overall market is gonna swell by that much but what that means is that there's a ton of value that's up for grabs um and so if you're not in cloud if you're not leveraging ai and and advanced analytics and machine learning and um you know iot or whatever other term you like you know if you're not really leveraging these capabilities then you're going to lose um you know it's not it's not just about revenue and and cost efficiency it's really about whether or not your company's viable and i think that you know if that doesn't scare the you know the the crap out of you i don't know what you know what would right and so you know uh so so then the question becomes how so i'm not yes it's not worth naming names because they're in high tech and they're they're in banking they're in retail you know i mean they're they're in every industry and so you know that that that value's gonna change hands um it's gonna gravitate one way or the other um and are you getting your fair share of growth you know are you taking are you winning you know in in that in that regard and i think that's what we're talking about um and so those will be the winners the ones who really leverage this stuff for full advantage for unfair advantage there you go uh all right well let's let's forget what what the opponent said let's look ahead to the future you know cloud in the year 2025 or in in the years ahead let's put it this way um sam what do you see when you think about the future of cloud not just next year but but a few years down the road and and maybe most importantly how can companies prepare for that future what is your sense of that i see a clearly ai driven enterprise becoming the thing that we talk about like today we're still trying to get to data-driven enterprise right an ai driven enterprise will be pretty clear even today some of the winners like lowe's they have a chief ai officer think about that right so that you'll see a lot more of those standard titles right the shape of the c suite will shift in 2025 i think second you'll see containerization of data we've got containerization of compute right we can flow compute cycles wherever we want them to be even in the process of production producing an app you have containers as part of your lean manufacturing sort of inspired flow but the data hasn't come along in 2025 you'll have a completely fluid environment where you can imagine containerization of data so that you'll be able to differentiate between the data you're using in development and test and production and then finally you'll have this really strong ai driven cycle between either your on-premises workloads uh and your cloud workloads you'll understand am i using the cloud to train a model how is my my data science team and my application development team will be working well together and they'll be trading these assets through the cloud so when you think about differences in phases of building ai capabilities by far the most intensive is the training phase and so if you could grab 20 000 machines just for the training phase you might be able to get your model built in five hours instead of five days so that's a really important moment where you want to be able to burst and then once you've got your trained model you want to be able to send it back to the application teams and have those move so it's all about cons basically consolidation of the artifacts if we can have a container concept for each of the things that we care about whether it's a model or data or or our app then we'll be we'll see a lot more fluidity of which clouds we're providing we're using to provide support and how we're scaling to support the business because the business will always have to drive and their demands will will vary based on day based on month based on season how does the idea of needing a container for data and in the future job with the idea of us moving into streaming analytics where analytics is going to go faster it's real time now but it'll become streaming even faster than what it's now called real time where data flow is so fluid it hardly you know sits in a container at any point am i missing something you know we've talked with simon crosby he's early to stream in analytics how does simon's world jive with the world of containers full of data it's about uh sort of consistency addressability fluidity where where can i where can i know that this thing is going to work so being able to do your your test workloads be able to replay be able to pass audits right one of the things that will become shockingly clear is your ability to pass audit deal with regulatory compliance in an ai driven enterprise will be based on your ability to prove why the ai made the decision it did to do that you're going to have to replay this information so yes you're going to have real time and streaming capabilities but you're going to want to be able to play that back you're going to want to address the data that you were using at the time what's that unit right there's no standard container for data today but to be able to index and address that data in a way that makes it more like what you're deploying on kubernetes will make the entire system more more tractable jim what do you say when you when you look at the future of cloud not just next year but a few years down the road what's going to be big and how could companies get ready for it you know i think the biggest uh thing that that we look at and i see a lot of other uh tuxedos looking at is is really um if you fast forward five years ironically it's 2026 and you know resources are already scarce finding people that can actually help solve these problems is already very expensive and difficult to find that talent in 2026 there's a cliff of population we had a recession back in 08 009 and the number of 18 year olds that are going to be available to enter university plummets dramatically and what that means is in five years you know every time a washing machine manufacturer wakes up and decides to hire some cloud cloud people to come in and solve their problems there's fewer and fewer people to actually do this so i actually think work workforce planning is absolutely key as you project out and you want to try and and do this on an organic basis i think the resources will continue to get more scarce now i think one benefit to covid with people working anywhere uh will will make it easier to employ them and manage them remotely but you know at the end of the day it takes talented super smart people to go and help us accomplish whatever we set out to do and there's just fewer and fewer than at least in the united states and we're gonna have to get comfortable on where we're gonna source them or how how we train them internally so that they're with us in five years interesting so so get get ready for the the skills sure it feels like it's there's still footage now it's going to get worse even in the future well that's right well this is this is an interesting thing to kind of just a second jim's point you look at the big tech companies who struggle with the same thing and they're all moving to skills-based hiring so there's this there's this sort of unbundling of education right unbundling of the four-year degree right where you can start to take the time that you have and the money you have to learn enough of the skills that you need to get hired into the job and that's gonna that's been a trend that's been kind of coming for about a decade right you look at udemy and udacity and a range of these different ways of learning things but for the demand side right for microsoft to say we're going to focus on skills-based hiring and we're making a big commitment there that's probably the clarion call for a lot of enterprises to find a different way to solve the problem that jim just articulated particularly given the the class struggles that we're seeing in the united states right going going offshore to find more labor versus focusing on underrepresented communities and places that are struggling and saying hey we're gonna come and give you the skills you need to get tech jobs probably the latter is going to be much more politically palatable particularly under the biden harris administration is they need to figure out how to fix the uh the national economy so i think skills-based hiring is something that should be on every ceos buying services too yeah because you know so i mean i i definitely think you know we saw the wave of you know moving um to low-cost regions as a path for vendors to hit certain price points and that can be across many different industries um but i think where we're going um with cloud and one of my favorite definitions of cloud is this notion of self-service is automation is standardization and one of the things we might have lost did we lose michael we we might have you frozen he might he might come back to us at some point yeah it seemed like he was jim in the meantime were you going to make a comment i i i was i think what we'll see is uh you know i'm quite involved with my alma mater and um you know again it's uh even pre what i what i talked about with that that cliff there you know to be able to to spend a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand or 250 000 over four years to get a degree is is cost prohibitive for many parts of our society here and you know if you look at a microsoft and amazon or google and everything you could go out and you know target high school seniors and actually pay them uh you know not all that much pay them have them earn money to pick up the skill to put themselves in a position to go out and bank six figures in a very short period of time whereas you roll the die and uh you know you're out two hundred thousand to get a degree and whatever it is that's a very different much more expensive proposition and uh some would suggest that that's uh you know that's that's no longer the natural glide path for many in our society here right michael you froze there in the middle of your every year point what were you saying so that moved to self-service automation and standardization of services that the industry spent too much time making things way too complex and that this move towards low code no code type approaches i think that a lot of these things are going to converge um so instead of shipping work you know overseas to lower cost regions i think um you know we can focus you know on reshoring home shoring a lot of these capabilities but moving up the stack um you know one of my applications you know um kind of you know using a legacy model um in cloud you know it take took 80 people to operate um a serverless version of the same thing took two people um and so i really do think that you know we could be much smarter about the types of work and the types of skills and you know we can upskill um you know the the focus and create a more seamless you know experience and a much more efficient environment i want to make sure michael did you give that's a good look at the future give an additional point there if not we're we're all good but i want to make sure you have your special view to the future i don't want to miss that my special view of the future um you know you may have already said but i'm plumbing the depths here for you just to make sure because the talent question and talent management is going to be um you know and i think that you know most people can you know if we teach you know teach the world to fish versus you know delivering fish dinners i think that's the the biggest shift um in terms of the way of work um and so we really do have to be focused on enabling that um and that's going to disrupt the current kind of operating models um across the ecosystem and and we have to reflect on that it's not about you know having armies of people um and so that that's big um you know the other thing is um do we have the right set of uh you know leaders around the table um i think if i'm a ceo and i'm trying to you know get to the moon you know i i need to make sure i've got the the right set of vendors uh partners ecosystem the right set of you know um you know my own directs on on being able to drive that degree of change and focus and that's not always the case and so you know there's no tomorrow in that regard um you know you have to field the team and you have to count on that team in order to deliver the results so when i think about the future you know that's how i get positioned in order to take more than my fair share i deliver a very compelling product at a very you know uh reasonable cost and um and i drive that into the market how is that different in 2025 than it's been for like the last whatever 80 years of business michael what would you say differently about actual actual technology and maybe cloud there right well i mean listen i think uh as i started the cloud drives the speed and scale and allows me to do things that i really couldn't do eight years ago or or 20 years ago you know we've been on this forced march you know for for you know a long time um you know it it is so we're at a point where the democratization of compute um is so vast that if you're not doing it some upstart in you know some garage is doing it for you and when you see kind of you know isolate the use cases and where the value comes from by combining these technologies um it that's the game changer and so if if you didn't have a sense of urgency five ten years ago right you better have it now uh because you know what you you know what you wake up to each morning um it could be disrupted overnight well i think that we definitely said it i mean we're basically out of time but i feel like we could probably talk for another three hours we may have only scratched the surface but but i have a feeling some chief executive could sit down and listen to this and go huh i feel like i learned something uh so jim sam michael i thank you very much for your expertise i'll send you the link when it's done and i totally appreciate you being on thanks thanks for having us happy holidays have a good one yeah have a great holiday for sure bye-bye and sam what's the name of your dog please jessie very nice she's a miniature golden doodle she's incredibly zen i didn't see her until about halfway through and then oh my goodness then the dogs just passed out sleeping yeah that dog is chill she's very chill does she have an opinion about cloud or she just like bark a lot when it comes to private cloud she's pretty copacetic with private cloud oh good good all right well see you guys later thank you matter of thanks a fact folks see you

Channel: Datamation.com

Views: 952

Keywords: Datamation

Id: esoaDYqlE3w

Length: 47min 11sec (2831 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020