2016 Melbourne VMUG Keynote
Transcript
career so how did I get to that point where I can take on the title of the CTO advisor early in my it career I cut my teeth in many the same places that some of us cut our teeth when I had hair I got my novel certification for those of us that don't know what novel was it was ad before ad was ad that was my first certification uh I spent you know typical career L went from from server Administration to network Administration can a
general generalist I think this region of the world we're pretty good you guys are pretty good at knowing a lot of topics and being extremely broad so I think you can relate and kind of the death of knowledge across a bunch of different topics that led to an opportunity for me to take a job at Lo Martin as a chief program architect for the US housing department pretty interesting role I get to see all the different Technologies and how they aligned to that organization's Mission uh
took me away from the day-to-day data center uh thing I slowly noticed that my keyboarding skills uh were going away and one day I showed up at in the data center and the engineers looked at me at this with this curious look like what are you doing here and why are you touching that keyboard and they didn't realize I still had an administrative account and that went away really quick so that that marked a change in my it career and I think a change for the
better for the most part it it brought me here uh after Lo Martin I went back into a well no I wouldn't even say back I went forward into even deeper down this business uh hole I went to PWC which is formerly known as price waterhous Coopers I was a Management Consultant looked at problems a lot differently than I had been before even with ly Martin it was someone would set the business agenda uh the goals I would create a solution that would meet those goals
you know a goal would be we want to reduce the amount of travel that our uh business takes so obvious solution to that is High defition video Cisco uh high definition video conferences and solutions around that pretty much a lot of what I did in the past at L Martin I do a I do a trade study on NFS versus Ice scuzzy versus fiber channel at PWC I found that the conversations were much different instead of talking about iy versus NFS versus fiber channel it was
should we Outsource all of this to a m service provider and let them figure out the whole transport issue on the storage perspective it gave me a a a truly different view of it and the value that it adds we'll talk a little bit about my education path I don't normally put my education on the introduction SL uh slide but I think it's relevant I have a ba computer so pseudo computer science degree but typical heavy computer science programming Java uh be tree the typical stuff
you get in a computer science degree then I went back to school and got my Master's of Science in IT project management a mix between the business side and the technology side and I'll talk about how that add value to my career in a little bit so let's talk about the opportunity we can think of it as a challenge but I prefer to think of it as an opportunity I think there's disruption happening in the industry today one of the first things is that convergence we
saw that slide uh Nathan shared about hyperon convergence and the value that you're achieving through hyperon convergence one of the side effects of this value or the things that we don't like to admit to when we talk about value that's driven via convergence and Hyper convergence is the breaking down of silos and the reduction of the need for manual labor Scott will deliver in part of our community session a little bit later he'll talk to through you know the value of uh automation versus but button
pushing when we automate things when we collapse the infrastructure into a single platform that reduces complexity when we reduce complexity we add redundancy and that redundancy can be at the full-time employee level we need the organizations will start to look at how they shift resources from day-to-day storage administrators you know our hyper convergence Trends will always say you know what you no longer need 10 storage administrators to uh to manage your storage well what happens to those jobs what happens to those people there's people Behind
These one of them bitter truths that I discovered when I was at PWC is that some of the decisions we help companies make has in in an impact to real people lives and I think that's one of the things that I developed a passion for is saying you know what these are highly skilled people these are people who figure out multi-million dollar challenges when you think about some of the things that we do the migration from a physical landscape to a virtual landscape making sure applications
have the quality of services they need to deliver the business value these are highly complex problems when you look at NSX and delivering uh micro segmentation and uh virtualized networking and delivering and extending the capability these are great great challenges that require a tremendous amount of skill people with that type of skill do not just dissipate that's that innate ability to solve those problems I think that's a transferable skill set into some other areas and we're going to talk about some of those other areas Outsourcing
Outsourcing is you know we went through in the period of the 80s and 90s this huge move to Outsourcing Outsourcing hasn't gone away businesses not necessarily would save money but to drive business value are looking at Outsourcing as a thing very much so the cloud the cloud is changing the business model for a lot of vendors I don't think we need to look any further than a Delta EMC merger to see the pressure that these companies are on under to uh morph into something that organizations
can get True Value out of and uh the Dell EMC merger is a example or symptom of what's happening to the larger industry I know a lot of us are a little a little bit of pans and needles we all have friends at both Dale EMC VMware and we're wondering what's going to happen to their jobs and their careers it's but in all that challenge is opportunity because if you think about it I think this business problem that I'm trying to allude to is no different
than any other engineering challenge these are massively complex distributed systems when we talk even when we talk about adding hyperon convergence well you bring in hyperon convergence containers cloud and Cloud native applications that are managed across a another manag service providers infrastructure your infrastructure these hybrid infrastructures these are complex that we we're at on service we thought we were reducing complexity but we're actually adding complexity we're adding a layer of abstraction and someone has to figure out how all those systems interact from a way that
we're not accustomed to me and Scott will talk upon that a little bit later in the community session so one of the things that if you follow me on Twitter one of the things that I did that was very abrupt and interesting was that I quit my job without having a new job lined up one of the brutal realities of working as a Management Consultant is that you work or you travel 40 I think in 2013 I traveled 40 weeks out of the 52 week year
Monday through Thursday or Sunday through Thursday every week for two years and you still work a you still Bild 40 hours a week and you still work an additional 12 to 13 hours on top of the trael I got to do some really cool stuff I there was a um a financial services company that had got breached they provided TR credit card transaction Services uh they were going through what they call that their PCI audit because they got breached if they didn't pass the audit they
would not go continue as a going concern this is a Fortune 500 company so a fortunate 500 company had to remediate their environment in 6 months mon so it's literally about 3 years of work math is math you can't squeeze 3 years of work in 6 months how do you solve this business challenge immensely immensely challenging on I like to share this story The I throw a really big Super Bowl party 30 to 40 people you know Super Bowl is big in the US and this
event I was leading the the P management REM mediation program for this customer and it was Sunday we thought we had it all settled the audit was going to be the next week we're good I have 30 35 people in the Next Room I get a call from our partner saying you know what Keith we found 300 servers we weren't we didn't know about they had very very poor service management this is why they got breached this is why they're in trouble so we we found
300 uh ncope servers we didn't know about I need you to jump on the plane come solve the problem I'm like well hold hold up one that's a serious problem that's not going to get solved in one day and two I got 35 people in the Next Room that I'm entertaining the game hasn't even started yet you get the the drift that's the life of a management conso you get to do really cool stuff but it's a high stress job that requires a lot of it
so I you know I came to it I said you know what this is not going to be my long-term deal I'm not going to do this forever what what better way to transition to a new career than to use the community and kind of crowdsourced my job search so I gave a couple of month notice or a month notice and I announced to Twitter I was looking for a job I got a ton of inquiry some lessons learned from that that search that I think
is valuable lessons for this conversation as a result of my management consulting experience vendors loved the fact that that I solved problems at that higher extraction L the thing that they don't generally have they have very good very very good Architects and Engineers pre-sales Engineers but they didn't have a death of people that really understood the boardroom what I also found out to my sh is that they still want a deep technical skill so you know it's one of those things that you know people want
10 years of open stack experience okay that's quite impossible but it's the same deal people wanted the Deep technical they wanted the Deep uh business skill and they also wanted the Deep technical skill if you remember my earlier comment when I went to the data center the engineers kind of looked at me crazy and that was four years that was four years previous so when I got asked the question you know walk me through riding a bad shell script the last script I wrote was a
Windows batch file so I was kind of taking back valuable lesson so the output of that is that there's a balance if you enjoy being a engineer I'm not telling you to go out and become a Management Consultant and abandon your engineering discipline there's opportunities in between if you want to stay technical you can most definitely stay technical but don't let this opportunity that the while the industry is changing don't let that opportunity pass by to add business skill to your repository so what are these
skills and how do you gain them you know from a high level some of these skills are obvious we work with these people every day the change management folks the people in finance that figure out the financing of a project whether it's Opex capex the difference between the two why would we choose one over another we work with the service management people who uh understand you know there's this great story I don't know it's great from Netflix's perspective but it's a great lesson to learned Christmas
2012 Netflix uh experienced the outage that out was a result of elastic load balancers being updated on aws's side no no one's fault you know it was routine maintenance for AWS it had to happen but that interaction with the onsite application Netflix's specific application caused that chain chain reaction that resulted in an outage that's a great distributive system problem it's also a great business problem or change management problem inside of our own organization we may catch that type of uh change or that type of issue
because the knowledge is all internal to our organization how do we figure out how to do those things as our domain main spreads across an extracted data center so these are I think still fun challenges but how do we obtain these skills I think I have four recommendations and by the way I'm going a little fast so if you have questions raise your hand ask a question at any point for it won't mind and take questions all live four different options get involved in projects propose
a new project get formal CH changing or the Nu clear option which is switch jobs which I think is a very good option we'll get into why so get involved in projects to advantages to getting involved in projects it improves your visibility I think and still run into this in my day job my day job I'm a sap infrastructure architect you may say Keith your handle used to be at virtualized geek what are you doing as a sap infrastructure architect simple answer that's where the money
is at follow the money I I support a environment that has hundreds of it HP itanium servers running on hpux that that's the furthest thing from VMware V however it's Mission critical to the organization if you ever have the chance and I see this a lot in organizations where Engineers can be a little fearful of getting involved in Mission critical workloads because of the visibility and what happens when they go down the reason why organizations pour so much money into Mission critical applications is because it's
Mission critical the reason why I chose to be a sap infrastructure architect is because in my organization sap is Mission critical it was a unique opportunity for me to take sap as as is today in itanium and move it to you know look down up Road there you know there's sap Hana uh there's uh the retirement of hpux as a operating system that's supported another eight or nine years give or take depending on who you listen to I'm not a technical resource anymore you know I
couldn't tell you how to even spell hpu is it h pu is it hpu I don't know how to pronounce it um I couldn't tell you how to create a I still don't know how to I know logically how I create a patch file but I couldn't log into HD system and create that file I couldn't tell you how to configure even look at the stats of a uh of a of the storage iio for hpux system however my RO role is to sit in between
the business and the engineers so when the business comes to me and says you know ke we need to buy eight Vmax support I'm exaggerating but not by much we need to buy eight uh Vmax to support [Music] workloads because that's what our vendor told us we need for the solution and then when I go to the engineer and I tell the engineer that they give me that obvious look like you know what if you want to spend the money I'll take the money and spend
the money but I don't want to manage eight Vmax for that's just not only is a a waste it's impractical it I just don't want the the complexity so I take I sit in between those two organizations and I negotiate uh when a engineer when we have a project like sa Han on the landscape and the business says you know what we're going to do this massive trans information with the same infrastructure guys and with the same number of guys I'm the one that goes into
the vp's office and says and say look gu you're crazy this this isn't going to happen I need to give these people more resources so that we can have a successful project so the architect title is changing it's no longer a and this is you know I've had this time this CID conversation with my organization and other organizations the architect title is morphing from a person who is third level fourth level engineering to someone who really understands the business challenges can have the conversation they can
walk into a director of of Finance or direct or VP of finance's office have a business level conversation take those take that conversation and translate it into engineer spee not necessarily creating the solution themselves but being the proxy between those two environments getting involved in projects is a great way to become to get introduced to that world because it can be drawing you know it's it I like to share the story uh me and Justin a few months ago on the V brownb did a developing
a business case mock where I created I was the IT guy created the business case Justin was the business owner the CEO and I had to present the business case to to Justin the business the technology project was a data center network switch refresh from a engineer perspective if we have 10 year-old switches we understand instantly what we need why we need to upd upgrade the data center switch technology they're 10 year-old switches so I I don't want to support an environment they have 10 year
old switches but if I go into a CEO's office and say you know what I want $3 million to upgrade switches he's thinking you're asking me for 3 million the warehouse is asking me for 3 million to upgrade uh the forklifts I understand why I need to upgrade the forklifts I don't understand why I need to I get email um I can still print what exactly is the problem so proposing a new project is a way to help you understand how to deliver the business value
you can work with the folks in your finance department you can work with the folks in your portfolio management uh group to understand what your organization values what are the key drivers of key goals and align that to the network switch upgrade I I highly recommend you guys go take a look at that uh video from the V Brown Bag series we go into a good number of detail around how what what are the criteria and and what's the requirements for proposing and getting the project
approved and how to make sure it aligns to your organizational goals then we'll get into this a little bit more introduces you to the uh project management Concepts so I kind of combine two slides into one so I'll gloss over the other we'll just cover it now so this was you know get involved in the project propose a project more specifically even before you propose a new project getting involved in the project is a great idea if there's an existing project you don't have to jump
into the whole you know what let me get our into our portfolio management system and and tear through justification for a new project and go before a project management board and introduce the concept and defend uh the project as if I'm going in from my vcdx defense you don't have to jump into that to the deep end of the pool you can simply just get involved in the existing project this is something that I see in a lot of organizations or with a lot of Engineers
the fear to get involved in something new you know I I create I I'm a automation engineer and I love automation might be the feedback I hear and I don't care about what's going on now I really like what I do today and I don't want to do anything different that's a sure fired way to get caught up and the changes that's happening within the industry raise your hand don't be scared to raise your hand and say you know what that adjacent part it may not
be automation it could be something related to a automation let's say it's an NSX project because everyone has some type of micr segmentation project going on you can add value as automation engineer to that type of project don't be scared to raise your hand and volunteer to add value to an existing project formal training I said I talk a little bit about my educational path and why I chose what I chose I like you know hinted on it earlier I like structure I was originally certified
in netwar 4.1 the great thing about certifications and add structure to training and as engineers and we look at this more what seems to be a little bit more abstracted the business part seems to be more abstracted if I wanted to learn today if I wanted to learn NSX a great way to do that is to go for a vcp and NSX there's training material it's very technical there's points that I have to learn it's not very complicated to understand what I need to do to
learn NSX the same thing for uh VSP 6.0 or V realize if I wanted to learn these Technologies the path forward is pretty simple but if I say Keith how do I learn contract negotiation what's the certification for contract negotiation oh there's I don't think there's contract for uh a uh certification for contract negotiation that's a little bit more abstracted of a concept so formal training is a great option for learning these techn or not Technologies these topics I'm telling you you need to go out
and get the the options range you can go to a full University go my path and get a degree in IT project management NBA I'm seeing a lot of Architects Now with uh NBAs I think our good good friend at rum Chris Wall I think he has an NBA uh and it adds uh a great deal of depth to your skill that is not necessarily the path for everyone especially if you don't have an undergraduate degree another uh option is a certificate program a master's level
certificant program some people will be surprised to know that you don't need a a lot of universities don't require you have a bachelor's degree to get a master's certificate program which is a and at this point in most of our careers if we're attending vmug user groups we probably if we haven't gotten our degree at this point uh it may the the value of that at this point in our career may be questionable but there's most definitely value and you have the ability I think if
you're in this room you have the ability to grasp the material in a certificate a master certificate level course that might have three or four different courses to teach you a specific topic I talked about contract negotiation you can find Master's level certificate programs that focus on contract negotiation and then you could take bike size courses at something like what we call in the US as a junior college a 2-year University in which you take focused courses on the topic that you want let's say you
don't want to do whole uh contracts negotiation course you can take a negotiating course uh uh and then even tangent courses like psychology and so forth and then the final option you can just get a new job the I think it's some of us will be surprised at the how relevant our skill set is to a job that's tangent to something that we to do today if you work with a service management person today if you work with a auditor if you work with a finance
person you from a high level understander job if you shadowed them for a couple of months you could probably in especially at the depending on the responsibilities you could probably do their job don't be fearful of going out and applying whether it's internally or externally for a job that you don't do directly today and it's not a technology job configuration management you know I count on that is a pat peeve of mine is a is a great example of a job that most of us would
be able to do because we work with configuration management people every day we know what they do it's just a matter of learning the details the in andout details of their job that adds a great business skill to our repository I went out and chose to become a Management Consultant that was like the nuclear option you know you can become a you can go work with a vendor become go get on to the pre-sales team on a vendor team pre-sales Engineers pick up a awful lot
of skill from just the sales process that's a great option you can become a consultant or a management consult you get exposed to so many different problems in such a short time it's all Al a great option so let's catch the conference up and hopefully get back on track let's close out in summary things are changing whether we want them to or not I think this golden age of the silos getting certification having an easy skills inventory to maintain those times are inty silos are getting
broken down the industry is changing we have to change with the industry I think I highlighted from my own personal example business and Tech skills combined together is a killer combination I don't think you need to look any further than the example of Netflix and how that complexity of moving to the cloud requires more than just Tech te capability and most importantly if anything that you take away from this session today I want you to go out and do something different if you've been doing the
same thing in your everyday job for the past five six years change I'm telling you from personal experience and helping companies make these tough decisions that impact everyone in this room that if you're doing the same thing every day for the past 5 years you have a Target on your back that's that's the biggest thing I appreciate it thank you look forward to talking to you guys outside uh the the presentation [Applause]
