2024 Year end Podcast
Transcript
all right another episode of the CTO advisor podcast it is just me I'm recording this the Dave dad it publishes on December 18th 2024 it's been a wild couple of months I've attended so many shows from V to AWS reinvent and everything in between IBM think the amount of data that I've consumed over the past few months has been overwhelming is why I haven't consistently gotten the podcast out I've just been traveling so we're going to do a podcast recapping kind of what are the things
that I think you should be considering based on my experience with vendor shows cios CTO focus groups what are the big things going into 2025 the biggest thing obviously is AI but not AI like it was coming out of 2023 in 2023 we're talking about how big should your cluster be to support emping in your generative AI solution on the Enterprise we've gotten a bit more clarity I and I think AWS reinvent is a great proxy for where customers are at and where the industry has
moved to AI by itself is not a application AI by itself is not a business solution the thing driving AI is productivity gains right now so this ability to reduce cost in creating and consuming content this ability to do chat box and summarization this ability basically to reduce costs around labor because this is a massive opportunity it's trillions of dollars versus the 300 billion dollar software industry we're seeing a lot of attention from not just software providers and software and it DMS it decision makers were
seeing a lot of attention from the lines of business they want to reduce their cost they want to increase their productivity they want to better their bottom line and the IT vendors are responding in kind at AWS reinvent we saw AWS integrate AI into all the things and all the things integrated into AI we didn't hear much of any multicloud conversation but that's not to say that multicloud should be de emphasized in 2025 how was AI heavily represented in the AWS stack and not just AWS
but other technology companies such as Veil technology it is much closer to talking about putting the rubber to Road or meat on the bone from what's the value of the AI solutions that are people are building AWS case in point badrock Amazon Q indexing services how do you build AI as part of your application strategy instead of just having the AI strategy was the theme it is I called it seamless integration nothing in it is seamless but there is a wellth thought out plan about how
not just generative AI with Nova and uh whatever other services such as anthropic Etc is integrated in the AWS control plane but how do you build app applications that can make calls to the services seamlessly turning the attention down the stack to a Dale who is now talking data leags and this ability to for storage to be more than just storage we saw this with AWS and S3 tables but AWS S3 tables was not the first one to the market with this idea vast data with
I ber and parade file support this ability to enable AI from a lowlevel infrastructure service all the way up to high level services such as Amazon Q for business and badrock AI part of the process not just part of not just a standalone application we'll talk in the future about how companies are making this real and some of the real implications I've integrated AI into my workflow and I'm just a single person as we start to distribute this within our organization you'll see an acceleration of
content you'll see higher quality content you'll see deeper insights with the same number or less people within our organization to do that that is the driver for the biggest talking point of the Year AI it has matured in 2024 even though for some some people it doesn't feel that way multicloud so let's talk about keeping the lights on AWS rolled out their normal customers including well to my surprise Apple was on stage but not just Apple they rolled out Capital One talking about how they're all
in in AWS and they're taking the cloud first approach to everything they do but on the opposite end of the scale you have someone like Geico Geico has embraced a open stack I me I'm sorry open source slant I went to uh uh a a Tech Conference in Houston in which I engaged with some Geico representatives and they talked about how they're rep platforming every ation within their environment to run either an open source or open source services so they're deploying open stack they're embracing graph
for moning they are rethinking all of their processes in the object objective of being able to use modern abstractions in the in the service of being able to use AI in a highly regulated environment they've made the Strategic decision in order to take advantage of AI in a highly regulated environment they have to rethink how they deliver it when you rethink how your how you deliver it there's a in between Geico Capital One multicloud we're not going to be able to build all of the services
that a Geico is building we're not going to have a top down policy in which we can tell the business no we have to build the application based on AWS Services specifically Capital One is taking a serverless first a Lambda first approach if not Lambda then fargate if not parade then ec2 at the end and it allows them to build operations that are catered around AWS we don't have that luxury some of us have contracts with Microsoft orac uh we're de with our VMware landscape on
premises and then AWS is still very much the Guerilla in the room for most of our organizations we've at pum group started to do these CIO CTO forums in which we bring in cios and CTO from lines of businesses uh who can have one onone or one to many discussions with us and uh the vendor sponsor on their challenges and multicloud continues to be a challenge I put out a provocative blog post the other day in video saying that I don't believe in private Cloud I
don't believe in private cloud in the sense that you can take AWS put it on Prem Azure put it on Prem I'm not talking about Outpost or Azure stack yes you can take those things and put it on Prim we can't build what the cloud providers are building we are not going to build a open AI chat GTP alternative we can do cool stuff with claw and and granted and get close and have some of the capability but these companies are innovating at a pace that
we can't keep up with so our most innovative solutions are probably best built on these platforms and when the Enterprise Solutions the cck solutions catch up we can move those things from our Cloud providers who are Cutting Edge on Prim which we're seeing this repatriation but we have to deal with the resulting hybrid imp infrastructure in the hybrid operating model that we're in where we have VMware hyperv op shift KVM bare metal kubernetes on premises that's interacting with services in the cloud Lambda cloud cloud actions
or whatever the term for the serverless platforms the cloud providers have we're with the security imp implications of that how do we make sure that the Lambda that's engaging with my Oracle DB or MySQL DB or kubernetes on premises have the security context to be able to apply our security policies to these application flows how are we positioning our data in a equinex qts digital realy Etc to be able to take advantage of these Cloud assets how do we catalog and index all of this data
so that we can make it available in some type of vector format so that we can leverage these AI services to get business insights last big theme of the year around AI is a gentic AI this idea that you're going to have a agent that acts on your behalf how is this different from the AI that we saw in 2023 early 2024 before we're using AI to again accelerate the consumption of data summarization of data the Sorting of data the chat box of the world basic
datadriven actions these agent can act on data so the difference is I can get a agent that will book a flight based on my calendar not suggest flight options but actually book a flight based on the count data within my calendar this is a huge opportunity for both Enterprise software companies Cloud providers and infrastructure providers if we think about the nature of Agents they are basically representatives of our organization if we have a agent act on our behalf we're having a agent do the work of
the company that is very different than the foul cabinet release ship that I have with my Erp provider my Erp provider isn't doing work my Erp providers providing me data and insights so that my people can make decisions and do the work what happens when the agent is embedded in my Erp system so Logistics has a request for additional material and a agent goes out and procures that uh material without any human engagement or interaction what happens when you want that process move from your Erp
system to another system or you want to replicate that in another business unit do you then need to go out and deploy that Erp solution to get that agentic AI capability what happen where you need these agents to talk to one another do you go to a snow flake or a sales force or a service now and have them build this capability and that capability is locked in or do you go to a Dale Technologies Lenovo Cisco HP and build your agentic AI with OP Source
tools which again move a little bit slower from our ability to consume this capability but now we own it now we can create this process that monitors are sap Erp environment for these requests and then that AI solution that we control we control the model we can control the logic we control and place the platforms it can do this work on our behalf huge debate and discussion that I've heard this year what's the answer to that the to that problem I do not know speed to
Value having your Enterprise application providers and Cloud providers provide you you this capability or having the ultimate control of business processes inhouse but you need to hire for the skill set not a tough I'm sorry not a a a easy question to answer that's been my 202 for second half we didn't get into the first half but that SP my 2024 in review and looking at 2025 and the things that I'm keeping track of yes AI of huge importance but because is of us importance is
elevating the need for solid cloudbased operations a solid data governance program and strategy and and just fundamental Primitives that's it for me for the year uh I am not going to do another podcast but I will continue to create content through the end of the year if you celebrate it Merry Christmas Happy Holidays happy everything from the CTO adviser and future GRS
