The future of the VMware vSphere Admin
Transcript
Wow you are his Thor for a great week of coverage from Dale technology's world Satya Nadella Pat Gayle singer Michael Dale all on the same stage today and no better guest the Steve tennis president of the board be my president president interchangeable you know what there's a lot to unpack here yeah first off let's talk about the announcements from a customer perspective you're you're a deal I'm imagining you're at the minimum of the VMware customer and you will get it to whether or not you're a
larger Dale Technologies customer but as a Dale Technologies customer perspective what do you think about today's announcements I'm really excited right for a couple reasons I think first and foremost anytime a company is gonna give me choice I'm on board with that right and so the announcement about having you know multi-cloud right and I still haven't gotten all the product names right in my head yeah a little too new they're not buried in there the old technologies cloud right but then there's also isn't there also
a VMware cloud on Delhi MCE does right and so there's all these different piece in there but being able to have a subscription-based model on-premise have a subscription-based model in Azure have an AWS and being able to choose where the right place to have that workload is for my business that's really exciting for me right right and so again anytime someone's gonna give me choice I'm gonna take that choice and I think that was a big statement today that it's you know and I think we
saw it in the in the keynote a lot was innovation is done by people innovation is done by the teams right so by enabling that and reducing the friction around it I think that's huge so Michael started out the keynote with talking about not solving big problems but solving big problems he was talking about world-changing problems I've gone to healthcare facilities education facilities all over the place and I see Dale branded stuff all the time I did this really cool tour of a research facility in
Oregon the pathologist had these huge Microsoft mean youth microscopes and they were connected to Dale technologies hardware which was pretty cool when it comes to this announcement with Microsoft and this announcement with VMware what do you how do you think that's gonna change your business so you asked a question earlier and I'll get to that in just one second but so we are at a reasonably large Dell Technologies customer rate so we you know we've maintained Dell hardware you know back in the day we had
EMC storage right and it's all converging now in today all right so we're a pretty big Dell shop that's our primary strategic vendor so how is it gonna change our business I think you know you talked about solving big problems right and so to solve big problems you have to be focused and you have to be intentional about solving them right right so what I always tell my team is the less time that are you know Chancellor president for university right Chancellor president is spending thinking
about technology thinking about IT the less time that their thing the more time of thinking about research teaching how we're changing pedagogy in the in the industry right that's where we want them to be spending our time right walk through spending time thinking about IT so we want to take that off their plate and a lot of this stuff is all focused on giving IT the tools to do that does he you know don't worry about you know how we're gonna figure out the capital spend
for our servers let's just pay the run rate that we need to do to get the job done to focus on our core mission and anytime IT is taking you know what sometimes we get glib and call you know table steak stuff but removing that sort of base layer of effort that we have to spend and allowing our teams to focus on assisting with solving those problems and you know building the software and the platforms and the architecture to get the real work of our organizations
done that's all net positive so I really love the ideal of shrieking the just the the mind share of IT IT person I don't like to hear that I mean I like the fact that I is this mystery thing and I get paid really well to figure it out but those I think those days are disrupted by AWS as your Google compute and Salesforce and more sass like solutions yeah I don't know that it's I don't know this being totally disrupted I think it's changing right
so like when I got into the industry no granted I started in desktop support right like a lot of folks did but we spent a lot of time thinking about geez how do we set the dip switches to get the IURC you setting right right you know that's gone now nobody does that but there is still a huge there's still a need for that tech skill so I think what happens is we keep moving further up the stack and we keep doing I could we apply
that engineering mindset to different challenges and so it's changing but I don't think it's going away I think IT people they're still gonna be a strong need for IT talent and I think to kind of echo your point was at a RPA conference last week I really read what is it robotic processing automation where you take you you know if you have a person who takes something from one screen and copies it to another screen that's kind of a robotic process there is not a reason
a real reason that human beings should be doing that work and you have a whole cottage industry that has you kind of built up around that to automate doing that and people can now people who are doing the process can get involved in creating the bots to do the process but more importantly you free up that person who's doing what there was copying text one screen and putting it into another one to do more interesting stuff and be more creative and more creative yeah when I
was in college I had a friend of mine who was working in staff staff augmentation and they had a position they would always have four other called at the chip flip position and that print is true what they would do is they take away for a wonderful with silicon or what but it would come out of the machine a and they'd flip it over and then they put it into machine B and I thought how dehumanizing is that labor right like wouldn't that person rather be
doing something that lets them use their mind or creativity or express their passions instead of do this four thousand times a day think we're seeing that NIT right I think we know although people I've had roles I've had periods of time in my career where it was copying the text and putting it over here or you know wash rinse repeat let's update server a-ok good updates are good let's move to server B and do the exact same process okay that's done now let's move to server
see and that's not exciting that doesn't get you at least it doesn't get me energized to get out of bed in the morning but solving problems in in education that can transform you know our environment and better our society that does get me out of bed at all so going back to the announcements from this morning show one of the things that if I were a IT individual contributor and I heard the announcements from the stage I heard Gale VMware would now managed my on-premise solution
Wow if I'm a bi admin what am I going to do next like what what's the what's the future you know usually you help lead one of the biggest user groups in the world and their bread and butter is V spirit I mean I go to a help put on the content track track for many of the very events yep and people still love configuring and troubleshooting V spear set set sure that's not the future of it's not the future of the VI admin is obviously
not gonna be the future of yeah and I agree entirely right and so I think it you know if I'm if I'm in that role right and which I have been for a good portion of my career for me it's about you know eight what's next right and I think a lot of that comes to look you've got the infrastructure piece that your apps are laying on right and so spending time down here every hour you spend down here is an hour you can't spend up
here making sure your apps are well connected right making sure that the data is moving from a app to a DAT PT you're making informed decisions and so that's where I would focus my effort and energy right is and that's different for every organization it's different for a manufacturing organization than it is for education than it is for healthcare right but moving up that and saying this is stuff that just it's done right no different than no nobody's messing with dip switches anymore right on our
servers right nobody's worried about oh you know where do I put the cable in the server we've left that so this is just the next progression of that at least in my mind which is let's take our highly-skilled frankly often well compensated IT talent and move them to places where they can they can keep the business moving forward in some cases that's going to for some people that's you know kubernetes right or cloud native applications in some cases it's going to be moving into the apps
themselves right and there's too many to bother listing off and in some place it's gonna be I think almost becoming more of an economist rate which is okay this workload looks like this and feels like this and usage pattern is this which cloud does it belong in right because Dell I think is doing a doing a lot for us in terms of not needing to get me to worry about how to get it to run on a certain platform but at the end of the day
I'm still paying for my consumption right and that's costed differently in Azure than it is an AWS than it is on premise so if the goal is to reduce the amount we're spending to get an application to run I think that's I think there's a role for that being almost an IT economist tree and then VI out economy and via admins are already accustomed to doing this ability they understand how much a workload it's going to cost around on the EMC array warrants versus a Taichi
RA versus you know an ass they understand the trade-offs of doing that from a technology perspective so it's just milk really making a mind shift from you know going to dip switches to doing till you know what someone else is controlling the dip switches I can focus on the financial pieces so some practical like right it must be clear when's the last time a you know assists admin or VI a man came up to you and said you know I had the most fun yesterday we
had a board blow and I got to have somebody come in and replace my motherboard while I was worried about moving you know nobody has fun doing this stuff anyway no one has fun about doing that you know Michael made the comment that workloads are going to have to move from one cloud to another it is the reality I'm not a fan of moving workloads from work from one cloud to another but the reality is is that as you give users the the raw capability if
I give a user Salesforce at access and if I give him AWS XS he's gonna build something I never thought about correct and I need to be in a position where I can handle that I need to learn about the security between the two domains how I'm gonna maintain the security how I'm gonna see how data is gonna be where it needs to be egress charges leaving AWS the Salesforce I have to be prepared for kind of the unknowns we didn't know what was gonna happen
we when we gave users the ability to just plug random USB devices into a computer and they came up with uses and use cases that we didn't think of and this is gonna be very much the same yeah we have an electron microscope that has a unit that's a USB evany you know multi hundred thousand dollar device is a USB peripheral to a debt when USB was invented it was like the scanner was the really cool thing they were on USB right and now we have
all these standard interfaces it and the great in the I guess the fun thing Michael said that you should be if you work in technology you should be the most excited you've ever been in your career witness it's a great point one of the things is there's a lot of change yeah but in the midst of the change like nothing's really settled you look at cloud and people say the cloud is the future you know using GCP is very different than using AWS which is very
different than doing it as your which is still very different than the spirit 6.7 update - right so which is probably obvious I haven't had hands on that which is probably different than using VMware cloud on Dell EMC right so it's there's another one yeah so a lot of stuff to learn so people will they need outlets for this tell us where can people find debug and how can debug help with this career in management yeah that's it it's a great question and thanks for asking
it Sofia mug the easiest way to find V mug if you don't already if you're already plugged into V mugs V mug comm right you can go there you can join V mug we have a look we have something like I want to say 230 over 230 local groups around the world we're on every continent except Antarctica if anybody is in Antarctica that's watching and is a vSphere admin please please sign up for V mug so we can say we have all of incontinence right but
we're on six continents right we do 30 over 30 user cons again around the run in fact you and I were just in Australia we were just Noah you were pretty busy too yeah yeah I was running around a little bit was like I don't think you were that I was white yeah but but you know so we're in your backyard wherever you are we're in your backyard and so how can that help your career I'm the poster child for it right so when I I'm
not much of a child anymore I'm a middle-aged but I'm the poster middle-aged guy for a UH you know when I joined vie mug as a member I was effectively an entry-level sysadmin right and then I got more interested in a female and I started building more relationships I started learning more and I became an engineer and then I became a leader and then I became a vie mug leader volunteer female leader and then I became a team leader at work right and then I you
know sort of progressed ended up on the board of directors and became a director at work and so there's you can almost chart my career progression with my V mug involvement because it gave me a safe place to express myself and practice things that I couldn't practice at work right so I got my first taste of public speaking at a vie mug right and I was probably terrible at it right but that's a lot better being terrible there along people who will support you and encourage
you then is being terrible in front of your executive team trying to pitch a new idea is that right so I was able to practice that before I had to do it for real same thing with you know project management I did that at a vemma before I did it in the office so I think the amok has a lot of ways that you can you know expand your career through volunteering the vemma but even if you don't want to do that if you look look
I already volunteer with six things I got enough on my plate right now right we offer a ton of educational content a ton of professional development initiative we're doing a professional development webcast series that isn't focused on technology almost focused on strategy and having difficult conversations and all those skills that set you apart in in a team of engineers right so I think those are ways that vemma can help build and obviously you know we're doing the same thing that the rest of the industry is
doing we're building in cloud native content we're building in network and security content and so we're moving along like everybody else's and so you know one of the things I hear when I go to an event is hey thanks for having content on you know NSX or IOT because I don't get to mess with that in the office nobody's ever saying hey can you mess with this NSX right but I can when I go to a V mug and I can do a hands-on lab or
take the cloud Network Academy piece I think that's really important that we expose people to other things besides their sort of daily admin job yeah and we not you mentioned cloud native the V bug team is getting kubernetes content being where law hefty o has PKS so there's there'll be plenty of content on cloud native specifically kubernetes the world of changing and Dell technologies world 20:19 is a great example of how technology has changed how companies as big as dale have had to navigate change and
as a result how supporting organizations like the mo has changed along with it i truly encourage you to take a look at comm to get more information on you can visit the CTO of Iser comm on more information on its seat CTO advisor you can follow me on the Twitter's at CTO advisor Steve your Twitter handle at Steve Athena's ste ve a tha na s talk to you next CTO dos Thanks
