Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #39: Shared Airspace (Exploring Industry Cloud Platforms)

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Reality Bytes #39: Shared Airspace (Exploring Industry Cloud Platforms) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGrath.
• 0:07
  Let's get into it. Hello, change Makers, Welcome to the Deck
• 0:11
  Shows show within a show, which is of course Reality Bites. And it
• 0:15
  feels like it feels like it's been a minute since we were able to bring
• 0:19
  the whole Reality Bites team together. But here we are excluding Dina presently.
• 0:26
  Who oh no, Dina is here as well. Dina welcome. I'm sorry
• 0:29
  I didn't see you second. How could I miss you? Ill great to
• 0:33
  have you all of us together. It's so rare, but I just assumed
• 0:36
  that somebody was unable to make it. But that's but that's not the case.
• 0:40
  So it's before Reality Bites crew that is Tim of course, Oriana,
• 0:45
  Dina, lest we forget Sean and Meghan. So wonderful to have you all
• 0:50
  here. And before we crack onto the topic of conversation today, I just
• 0:55
  thought we should have a word about one of our party who has launched an
• 0:59
  exciting new venture online and that is my main man, Tim Flower and his
• 1:03
  amazing new YouTube channel. Tim very impressive, I've been catching up on the
• 1:07
  content. Is very cool. Why don't you tell us all a bit about
• 1:11
  it and where people can find it. Yeah, let's save the amazing for
• 1:15
  down the road. It's kind of an early venture right now, but call
• 1:18
  it the Proactive It Guy. You know, I post a lot of things
• 1:22
  on LinkedIn, and we do a lot of great work here, but I
• 1:25
  felt like I needed a little bit of an outlet to do a little bit
• 1:29
  something a little different, maybe a little bit lengthier and different format. So
• 1:34
  YouTube the Proactive It Guy. It just gives a place to explore some stories,
• 1:38
  share some technical detail, hope to grow it into a community. That's
• 1:42
  not specifically about next Think per se. It's more about Proactive It a chance
• 1:48
  to bring in other technologies and explore some concepts that maybe we don't have all
• 1:53
  that much time to do here on the podcast. So come join once in
• 1:57
  a while, post some links up on LinkedIn, and we'll see where it
• 2:01
  goes. Fantastic. Yeah, you're doing a great job so far. And
• 2:06
  I just want to say, you know, just because the Beatles broke up
• 2:08
  straight after Paul McCartney's first solo album, I don't want to I don't want
• 2:12
  that to be any kind of a precedent for this. You know, it's
• 2:15
  not it's not an indication of a fracture, you know, a little bit
• 2:20
  more creative space. It's fine, it's fine. Don't don't think of me
• 2:24
  as Beyonce just yet. I'm not breaking out on my own. Ah yeah,
• 2:28
  Beyonce. That's much closer. That's much closer analogy, I'm sure brilliant.
• 2:32
  No, people should definitely check it out and we'll put a link to
• 2:36
  the to the channel in the show notes of course. So we are going
• 2:39
  to be discussing today industry cloud platforms. Very interesting topic brought to us by
• 2:46
  Sean once again. Thanks for that, Sean. And before we before we
• 2:49
  get into industry cloud platforms specifically, I wonder Tim if it might be a
• 2:55
  nice way to kick things off to give us a kind of overview of the
• 2:59
  developments of the cloud that you've seen through your career and have that kind of
• 3:02
  dovetails into next thing specific development over the last couple of years with Infinity,
• 3:08
  etc. Yeah, we all know I've got that one hundred year it career.
• 3:13
  So first came the Abacus. Get ready, it's gonna take a while.
• 3:19
  I'm going to go back to first the dinosaurs. No, I was
• 3:23
  doing I did a little research to see when the term cloud computing was first
• 3:29
  used in public. Google claims ownership of the birthday of cloud computing as a
• 3:34
  term, and they've got a very specific date August ninth, two thousand and
• 3:38
  six, at a conference where their CEO used the term. But it didn't
• 3:42
  feel like that was old enough. It felt like it went back further.
• 3:46
  So I did a little more research. And there are people that reference it
• 3:49
  back in the early nineties at the birth of the Internet, and some even
• 3:53
  say back into the sixties with mainframe computing. But really, cloud just means
• 3:58
  someone else's computer. It's not mine. It's out in the cloud. And
• 4:01
  we used to use it in network drawings and diagrams to depict those other Internet
• 4:09
  based computers on our diagram that we didn't need to worry about. It's out
• 4:13
  in the cloud. Don't worry about it. It's not in our data center.
• 4:15
  You know, it's obscured, you can't see into it, but you
• 4:17
  don't need to worry about it's that's someone else's problem. All we need is
• 4:21
  the service that comes from it. So the cloud really started as a drawing
• 4:28
  to depict the fact that something was happening somewhere else, and then it evolved
• 4:30
  into what we see today, including things like private cloud. You know,
• 4:36
  we rent the data center, we rent the servers that are in the data
• 4:40
  center, we just own what runs there. We want control of the software,
• 4:44
  so we put it in a private cloud and that kind of gets us
• 4:46
  to where we are today with all the different types of cloud computing platforms.
• 4:50
  Industry. Cloud is real interesting because for commercial enterprises, I think it offers
• 4:56
  an opportunity to further commoditize those corporate functions that really don't require me to be
• 5:02
  different from my competitor. Right, my procurement process doesn't differentiate me from anybody
• 5:08
  else. It's it's table stakes, same thing with like accounts, payable,
• 5:13
  or even the platform that we use to create our innovation. Our application development
• 5:17
  platforms don't matter. It's the innovation that we create on top of them that
• 5:21
  matters. So this is going to be interesting as we start to verticalize the
• 5:27
  cloud and incorporate different components. Think. I think it's got benefit and it'll
• 5:32
  be interesting to see where it goes. But I also think it's going to
• 5:35
  get complicated because the stakeholders required to be at the table are gonna get big,
• 5:43
  and when you involve more people. It's the people that are hard.
• 5:45
  The technology is the easy part. The people are tough. So I'm really
• 5:48
  interested to see what the rest of the group thinks about it. Amazing.
• 5:51
  Yeah, but we'll dive into that momentarity. But first of all, showing
• 5:55
  because you brought this to us, and I wonder if you could help help
• 5:58
  me to wrap my brain around this a little bit more beyond Tim's excellent kind
• 6:01
  of potted history there. So put it this way for someone with half a
• 6:05
  brain like myself. But the difference is between software as a service, platform
• 6:10
  as a service, infrastructure as a service, and now industry cloud platforms can
• 6:15
  be a little confused if I'm honest. What stood out to you about this
• 6:18
  topic in terms of its pertinence for the show? And then can you help
• 6:21
  me disentangle these kind of competing constructs in my head a little bit? Please?
• 6:29
  Sure, no problem, and I'll use all of the half a brain
• 6:31
  I can for this topic too together together, but I do I think probably
• 6:38
  the easiest way to work through it, or at least the thing that's most
• 6:41
  pertinent for me that I picked up was for a specific industry, for a
• 6:45
  specific vertical like healthcare, I think this is huge because for example, like
• 6:50
  medical imaging, it will generate a lot of data like MRIs and X rays
• 6:56
  and analyzing that is obviously very important, and you're doing things that you probably
• 7:00
  wouldn't in other industries, trying to work through image resolution and segmentation and things
• 7:04
  like that. Plus in the US they can bake into the vertical cloud platform
• 7:11
  hip hop compliance, which is important in some of these other kind of documentation
• 7:15
  systems and electronic filing systems. So I can understand beyond that. I can't
• 7:23
  break down all different software as a service, infrastructure as a service, those
• 7:28
  differences, but for a specific industry like that manufacturing finance with all the multifat
• 7:31
  factor authentication that goes into it in security, I can understand it. I
• 7:38
  think it's when you get towards next think we work with a lot of different
• 7:41
  verticals. I'm not quite sure what would be the metric or the rubric that
• 7:46
  somebody would use to determine is this for me or not? And maybe we
• 7:49
  can discuss that today, and I think maybe Dina might be the pusson to
• 7:55
  go through and giving us a sense of the dos and don'ts, the possibilities
• 7:59
  and imput pussibilities around like leveraging the industry cloud platform around dex. Do you
• 8:05
  know what should we be very aware of and that's what are the opportunities that
• 8:09
  stand out to you here. So, like Tim mentioned earlier, the cloud
• 8:16
  term is very old since the I think the invention of telephones. Even we
• 8:20
  just used a reference to any complicated infrastructure as the cloud. Right, this
• 8:26
  is where the connectivity is going to be. We're just going to make magic
• 8:28
  happen in the background and boom gets you connected from point A to point B.
• 8:33
  Similarly, if you're talking about next Thing Infinity and how we are hosting
• 8:41
  our platform in the cloud, we're just trying to make it easier for our
• 8:43
  customers to not really worry about the infrastructure in the background, and we're going
• 8:48
  to get you connected. We're going to get your data in there, We're
• 8:52
  going to protect it, make sure it's secured, governed, update up to
• 8:54
  date, patched, et cetera. So we look after that bit, which
• 8:58
  takes a lot of head from every customer to maintain their own platform, but
• 9:03
  still get the services out there done in a seamlessly amount of time and even
• 9:09
  have very good slas. So they are almost always connected ninety nine percent point
• 9:15
  nine of the time and all of that. So this is where the beauty
• 9:18
  of the term cloud comes in place where it's easier. However, with some
• 9:22
  industries, like Shano was mentioning, with healthcare, banks, et cetera,
• 9:28
  there's a little bit of lack of participation at the beginning because of all of
• 9:33
  the security and whereas my data, who's taking care of it? And GDPR
• 9:37
  stuff, et cetera. But as we evolved and as technology has evolved,
• 9:41
  and like Tim was mentioning earlier, technology is easier to maintain. It's the
• 9:46
  people behind it. We are able to make sure that the data is secured,
• 9:50
  it's governed, it's completely monitored and taking care of. So this is
• 9:56
  where we can help let people adopt more digital transformation in place. And I
• 10:01
  think COVID has helped a lot with that. Post COVID, people are more
• 10:07
  applying to actually or less resistant to putting their data up in the cloud if
• 10:13
  the term applies. Mhmm, we've kind of been circling. I feel like
• 10:18
  a whole question of governance and compliance. And in the chat prior to the
• 10:22
  show Oriana, you used an emoji with the not just a smiling face,
• 10:30
  but with hearts for eye. It's one of the most positive emojis I can
• 10:33
  imagine pertaining to the issue around governance, which I have to say, the
• 10:37
  passionate enthusiasm for that specific area caught me a little bit by surprise. You
• 10:41
  don't often see it, but there is something around around governance and the and
• 10:46
  the sort of industry cloud platform, but it gets you excited, and I
• 10:50
  am fascinated to hit where this takes as Governoriana, where does it go?
• 10:54
  Why so? Why so enthusiastic? Yeah, I mean, I think the
• 10:58
  answer is that I'm deeply nerdy and not the fun kind of learn where I
• 11:03
  can explain to you like how the Marvel Cinematic universe works. I'm the kind
• 11:07
  of nerd who's like, yes, let's talk about governance, because I think
• 11:11
  that is the thing that stands out to me immediately as a huge opportunity because
• 11:18
  it's such a huge challenge to every industry, but it looks different in every
• 11:24
  context. Right. And also I really like that we're talking about history because
• 11:28
  that's the other thing that I'm super nerdy about. And something that I've heard
• 11:33
  is this idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution was data. Right. Data is
• 11:39
  central to everything, and when it comes to digital platforms, we have everything
• 11:46
  revolving around how do you manage the flow of data. So there's the sort
• 11:50
  of three main elements right to a B to B digital platform. There's the
• 11:52
  architecture, there's the services, and there's the governance. And the governance really
• 11:58
  controls how everything else works, at least in theory. In practice it's really
• 12:03
  really tough, and it's incredibly specific. And the more massive your data gets
• 12:09
  and the more highly varied, right, because that's the other big factors.
• 12:15
  Companies have a lot of different types of data. Even if you're thinking about
• 12:18
  healthcare, right, you have regulations like hippa, but you also have other
• 12:24
  things besides patient data. You have all the finances, So you have a
• 12:28
  lot of different types of things that need to be managed, that need to
• 12:31
  be controlled, and depending on the industry, it's not just regulations but also
• 12:37
  different needs, so you need to have flex in different places. Right.
• 12:41
  Retail is the classic example. You have very very different data flow at different
• 12:46
  times of years, and so you need a cloud infrastructure and rules around how
• 12:52
  that is managed to adjust to those different needs and also keep it under control.
• 13:01
  So that you're not just hammering money into the cloud, which is something
• 13:03
  that almost every tech company struggles with at some point or other because it is
• 13:09
  so expensive. So governance is also about efficiency and security and all of these
• 13:15
  things that are just critical to every element of it, but also deeply un
• 13:22
  sexy, right, Like, this is the kind of thing that is very
• 13:24
  scary for people to deal with. So I think the great opportunity with industry
• 13:28
  cloud is that when it's vertical and when it's customized to your particular needs,
• 13:35
  it allows that to be much more tailored and much more efficient. Megan,
• 13:41
  I'm interested in the sort of psychology of what are for us customer organizations who,
• 13:48
  of course you work with a great deal here at next thing, but
• 13:52
  who are the people who have to you know, who will be confronted with
• 13:56
  the advantages of industry cloud platforms but also hyper aware of some of the complications
• 14:01
  and even risks that they present. What is your view of a general reaction
• 14:05
  to them on the ground. So, in trying to research for this webinar
• 14:13
  or not webinar this podcast episode, I was like trying to wrap my head
• 14:16
  around this concept, and some things kind of jumped out to me. And
• 14:20
  I think Oreana touched on some of these. One is just going to be
• 14:22
  cost, right, what I hear when I hear customers talking about cloud and
• 14:28
  cloud storage and cloud computing, is that just the cost, Especially when you're
• 14:33
  talking about like large enterprises with so much data, the cost of trying to
• 14:37
  analyze that data, of trying to work with that data, It just goes
• 14:41
  up and up and up really quickly. So I think if an industry vertical
• 14:46
  specifics cloud solution can help keep those costs down or control those costs in some
• 14:50
  way, then I think this sort of thing would be attractive. But if
• 14:56
  it isn't able to control costs, if it's just lipstick on a pig,
• 14:58
  then I think I don't know that that would be that appealing. And then
• 15:01
  the other element that seems interesting is the security aspect of it. So like
• 15:09
  when you're looking at like government public sector, right, they're completely resistant to
• 15:13
  cloud solutions. They don't want to go into the cloud because you can't keep
• 15:15
  it secure. So if there could be some sort of public sector specific cloud
• 15:18
  solution beyond the one that maybe they develop for themselves, then I think that
• 15:22
  they could have that kind of appeal. But that's another element to it that
• 15:26
  I see being being important to navigate because otherwise, yeah, what is the
• 15:33
  difference between just like your general public cloud or one that's industry specific, Like
• 15:37
  what value does it being industry specific bring? And maybe I just don't fully
• 15:43
  understand it yet, but those seem to be the things that jump out to
• 15:46
  me. And then the ability to handle proprietary applications. So, like a
• 15:50
  couple of the articles that I was reading mentioned the financial industry a lot.
• 15:54
  I know a lot of our customers in the financial space have a lot of
• 15:56
  their own kind of homegrown applications that are essential to the running of their digital
• 16:00
  work list, and a cloud solution needs to be able to manage those or
• 16:03
  to balance them in a hybrid environment. So that's what jumped out to me.
• 16:07
  Yeah, you know, the government side of it, cloud dot gov
• 16:11
  is out there. I agree the government entities need not just functionality and usability,
• 16:18
  but they've got different security concerns. So definitely not only a vertical,
• 16:23
  but a huge vertical. There are so many endpoints and people in that that
• 16:29
  fall into that category. I think that one's the one that's going to grow
• 16:33
  with the most value. And then to your other point, Megan, about
• 16:37
  value, I think consolidating into an industry vertical allows you to bring multiple functions
• 16:42
  like I was talking about procurement, accounts, pailable, app dev that all
• 16:47
  maybe have their own small piece of value, but when looked at holistically,
• 16:52
  it brings more people to the table to bring more value to the whole versus
• 16:56
  doing it individually. So I think that there's more opportunity there to pull more
• 17:00
  value out of cloud services when you combine them. Tim interested to know what
• 17:06
  the sort of experience of the rollout of next Think Infinity over the last couple
• 17:11
  of years maybe tells us about the cloud space in general, and about and
• 17:17
  about kind of cross industry functionalities and special services and such like that that enables
• 17:22
  and I suppose in terms of optake and enthusiasm too. Yeah. So from
• 17:27
  an internal IT perspective, migrating from your own data center to a cloud data
• 17:33
  center is tremendously complicated, can cause outages, data loss, downtime, and
• 17:40
  I experienced a lot of that. I think our own migration as a company
• 17:45
  from an on prem solution to a cloud solution, our board members who are
• 17:51
  CEOs at some of the largest security firms and other SaaS providers around have told
• 17:57
  us that our migration from on prem to cloud is one of the smoothest they've
• 18:02
  seen in the industry, and not just the decks industry, the SaaS industry.
• 18:07
  So I think what that tells me is cloud, not only cloud services
• 18:11
  and cloud implementations, but the ability to move from one place to another is
• 18:18
  getting more mature. We've done it as an industry more and more frequently,
• 18:22
  and we understand from a nuts and bolts perspective as well as as a company
• 18:29
  impact perspective, how to do it and how to do it smoothly. So
• 18:32
  I just I think the whole industry is maturing and looking for the next place
• 18:36
  to get value, to get benefit, to get smooth operations, and to
• 18:40
  be more competitive than your competitors. I think I just think it's maturing.
• 18:44
  And then we talk about AI all the time and jen ai and all that
• 18:48
  other automation stuff. It's going to be really interesting to see how cloud and
• 18:52
  JENI really come together and kill it in the next couple of years. Possibly
• 18:59
  another simple way to look at it, as somebody's going through the decision process,
• 19:02
  it's just you have your in house capabilities, your coding and stuff that
• 19:07
  you've invested in, and I think those are the things that differentiate you from
• 19:10
  the market, and it's kind of just comes down to what do you want
• 19:14
  to keep and maintain your competitive edge. Everything else is pretty much a commodity
• 19:18
  that you can determine to replace with something some other service. It's a simple
• 19:23
  way to look at it. I know there's a lot more that goes into
• 19:26
  it, but I think it's that's that's another angle. Yes, I think
• 19:30
  it's going to be very interesting to see how AI plays a role into that.
• 19:33
  So it's going to be in my thoughts are it's going to be more
• 19:38
  towards simplifying the governance, simplifying the security aspect of it, and maintaining it
• 19:45
  and an its administration. So the edge would be more into how we can
• 19:48
  utilize the services to its full capabilities, just like we used to be having
• 19:53
  a smaller use B drives and now we have terabytes of data into a very
• 19:59
  very little USB or chip where we can save all our data. So it's
• 20:03
  going to grow into that perspective, and I think having all of the customized
• 20:08
  content that we have in place, it's just going to get better at the
• 20:11
  time that we can take into modifying, it's going to be much less so
• 20:17
  we will be advancing much further I think in the future with the collab of
• 20:21
  both Cloud and AI aspect into it. An excellent final for Dina, Thank
• 20:26
  you so much and thanks everybody. It's lovely to see you on the same
• 20:30
  show once again. I see you well again hopefully next month. And just
• 20:34
  a final reminder to listeners to check out Team's new YouTube channel. You find
• 20:41
  find a link to that in the show notes, and just remains for me
• 20:44
  to say goodbye good bye. To make sure that you never miss an episode,
• 20:51
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• 20:55
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• 20:59
  the show tap the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If you'd
• 21:03
  like to learn more about how next think can help me improve your digital employee
• 21:06
  experience, head over to nextthink dot com. Thank you so much for listening.
• 21:11
  Until next time,