Failing or Succeeding at Cloud - Maribel Lopez

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

All right, you're listening to another episode of the CTO Advisor podcast. You know what? We're correcting a horrible misjustice. I don't know how we've done this. You know, we're about 300 podcasts in. I've known Maribel Lopez for at least five years now. We've met each other at SAP Sapphire, which is going on now as we record the podcast. We've been on some of the same independent analyst consoles. We've asked many of the same challenging questions to some of the IT vendors out there.

Maribel, the founder and leader, lead analyst over at Lopez Research, a award winning research firm. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Wow. I need to have you introduce me more often. I'm feeling it. I'm all clumped up now. Well, you do great research and I'm, you know, I was looking, there was a top 25 or top 100 cloud influencers list and you, you know how you go through the list. You're like, yep. I know that person.

I know that person. That person, I don't know. You're not one of those people that I'm like, yeah, this is not like one of those people they snuck in to raise their profile. You have legitimate chops. Every time I'm in a session, I'm like, wow, Maribel, ask that question before I could ask it. It's, it's, it's uncanny. Thank you, Keith. All right. So we're talking about a topic that's near and dear to both of our hearts, which is multi-cloud.

You know, we're in the same briefings a lot and vendors will throw around this idea of, oh yeah, every customer is multi-cloud, just about every customer is multi-cloud. What's your reaction when you hear that claim? You know, it's interesting because we've gone through all the clouds, right? We started with public cloud, then we went to, it was public and private and then everything was hybrid for a while. And then we started like sprinkling the multi-cloud pixie dust on everything because there was a realization that, you know, there are all these different clouds and people were doing multi-cloud.

So first of all, multi-cloud is not easy. So not everybody's doing multi-cloud. And when you say multi-cloud, it might mean that, you know, one person has one style workload in some second cloud, right? So it's not this ubiquitous, like, I think when people, when vendors say multi-cloud, what people that are listening here is, oh, a whole bunch of other companies and my competitors are flat out running, you know, two or three different clouds, like, you know, AWS and Azure and GCP full on.

And I don't think that's the case. And you know, you haven't asked me this, but I'm just going to throw it out there anyway. The other thing that drives me crazy when people say multi-cloud is the vendors just make it sound like it's easy. Like you just woke up and bought yourself some multi-cloud. Yeah, I was going to ask you, I was going to ask you that from a, you talk to a lot more people on the business side of the ask than I do.

And when you're sitting on the business side of the ask, whether it's the owner of applications, the process owner, and they think or hear multi-cloud, what do you think the initial perception is outside of, oh, people are just, you know, this is a procurement thing and we just need to diversify our cloud vendors and these two things are alike. So I'll just choose two of the four top clouds. So I think there's a huge disconnect between what IT leader or technical leaders think and what business unit leaders think.

Business unit leaders seem to think that it's like just buying a software package that you can just roll up and say, okay, this cloud's going to be better for me now. So it's going to be cheaper. It's going to be faster. I'll take this now, but if I don't like it, I'm just going to swap that over to some different cloud tomorrow, you know, like hitting the button, right? And I think industry analysts like myself, we're partially to blame for that because we used to start in the beginning with cloud talking all about how this, oh, and, you know, if you like this cloud better and it's cheaper, then we're just going to switch your workloads over there.

And the reality is that is not at all how this happens. And if people are doing multi cloud, it seems like they pick a application or workload and it's running in X cloud. It's not running in like two or three clouds yet unless they're doing some disaster recovery play. But in general, they don't think of it that way. And I think when you come to the technology leader, the technology leader is like, well, darn, it was hard enough getting something up and running in one cloud.

And now I got to learn how to run something in three different clouds or two different clouds. And that's, you know, a different way of looking at how I how I basically procure the technology, how I scale it up, how I scale it down, how I monitor and manage it. You know, that is not one ubiquitous interface across two, three different clouds. So, you know, business leader just thinks, well, I can just put this anywhere and it'll be fine. And tech leaders like you have no idea how complicated it is for me to get this up and running the way you want it.

You just can't willy nilly start moving stuff around and deciding you're going to do this or do that or work with a cloud that you think is interesting. So I'm really curious about the fallout. Like what happens when the business leader comes to, you know, get smacks with the reality stick in what they thought was as easy as moving from SAP to Oracle for business? And then they discover it's just as hard as moving from SAP to Oracle for business. What happens when they come to that kind of reality check?

So two things have happened. Usually they've spent a lot of money that it didn't work out the way they thought it would. And I know you and I have had this discussion. And so what happens when they spend a lot of money is they typically have to go back to the well and try to explain why this didn't work. And usually it's like, oh, well, you know, we've discovered that maybe this other cloud was better for it. Or worse yet, they just have stranded assets and they got to figure out some other way to do it or they just have to suck it up and have things work poorly.

And there's a lot of manual sneaker net going on in the background that nobody's talking about to make it actually work. And usually that's when they've dumped it on IT to do the sneaker net to try to figure it out. But there's actually a lot of business fallout in terms of cost. But even if you take the money away, the lost opportunity and the disappointment that senior leadership will have with the business unit leaders that selected poorly is quite difficult. And some people lose their jobs over it.

You know, it's one of those things where, you know, we said we were going to have XYZ up and running in May and it's now July and you tell me it's not going to work. And we spent several million dollars. And a lot of times it's money you can't get back, Keith, you know, you've paid for that and you got to figure out how you're going to use it because you got like a three year contract or whatever it is. And so, you know, there's literal jobs that are on the line if you get it wrong.

Yeah, I've seen this hidden in so many different ways. I shared this story with you earlier on about how we talked to. Fortunately, I can share the story because it wasn't a client of mine. It was just a person who a friend that was telling me what happened. And now I'm thinking, oh, I know exactly what happened, which was that there was a big ERP modernization project that was the there was job reductions promised. And at the end, they didn't realize the business value there.

The reductions didn't come, but the implementation was, quote unquote, successful. They had technically moved over, but the processes didn't align to the new system. So they had to hire a bunch of consultants and hide the operational cost in and outsourcing versus actually have solved the problem. They created a tremendous amount of inefficiencies. So there's a bunch of ways we can go about kind of what to do after the fallout. But we're all about helping people before they make the mistake.

Is it wrong to want a multi cloud model? I don't think it's wrong to want a multi cloud model. One of the things so here's what happens, I think, when real people when real people do multi cloud, they start doing multi cloud and they start to realize it's complicated. Right. Then they start to look for solutions to the complication because, you know, it's you're putting up fully different stacks for the most part. Right. And what happens is then they talk to some technology vendors and all of a sudden the technology vendors are saying things like, well, we're going to put an abstraction layer on top of it.

Right. It's like, don't worry, you can pick whatever clouds you want and we're going to give you some magical abstraction layer and it's all going to work. And that's when you're in trouble, Keith. You're in deep weeds when you believe the abstraction layer is going to make that happen for you. So people can't see me because this audio podcast and I'm raising my hands to the roof because I'm yelling amen to this. We had a podcast earlier on with Martez Reed of Green Tech, and we talked about the technical problems around abstractions on top of abstractions.

So to put this in context, the cloud, let's say AWS cloud, the abstracts, the abstract infrastructure, Google Cloud abstracts infrastructure, IBM and Microsoft, all abstract infrastructure, but none of them do it the same. So that's what we mean by abstractions. And then there's vendors promising to take gloom and put it across all those clouds that are constantly changing, constantly rotating. So as business leaders think about the value of multi-cloud, so obviously we hear things that I think are demonstrably true. Google does a really great job at AI, machine learning, analytics with their cloud.

Microsoft, if you're a Microsoft shop, does an exceptional job of hosting Microsoft and Microsoft SQL type workloads. AWS is always innovating. They just have the best in class of cloud for the overall cloud operations. So there's obviously different attributes of each cloud provider that are appealing. How should business leaders consider their approach to engaging multiple cloud vendors? Oh, wow, that's a that's a difficult question. But it's a difficult problem. Yeah, it is a difficult problem. So I think, first of all, you have to ask yourself what you're going to get out of different clouds.

One of the things that you brought up that is really interesting is, so for example, retailers will tell me that they're really interested in the analytics workloads at Google. And so that's what they put on Google. They put a bunch of high volume analytics workloads. So one of the things I think is a best in practice today is basically the partitioning, deciding what workloads you're going to run, where and why. What is the value of that cloud that you're getting? Right.

So that's the first thing. The second thing I think that it's to recognize that it's still too early to think of this as a write once, run anywhere kind of model. And I've heard this happen a lot. You know, OK, you know, we're going to be able to have some tools that let you do it in this cloud and do it in that cloud. And I think it's you know, you and I both discussed that it's too early for that. So you really have to think about.

You need a team that understands how to effectively. Operate each cloud you are going to be working with, and that requires investment, so you're going to have to have some experts in AWS and say if you're doing GCP or Azure, some experts in those. Right. So I don't think you can think of it as a unified cloud platform yet. Maybe that maybe that would be some of my guidance of thinking how to run it, because I hear a lot about it being unified, but I don't think we're there in the tech stack to actually make it unified yet.

Some context to what Maribel just said, and I'm super tempted to call her Laura Bell for some reason. I don't know why. Maybe because you move to the south and Laura Bell is a good southern name. But to give some context to what Maribel just said, we did some research around VMware cloud options and VMware is one of those vendors we're going to pick on them for one. They're good friends and they have this message around cross cloud, basically one of which is you can take VMware vSphere and run it on every cloud.

That's pretty much true. Everywhere, everywhere from AWS to Alibaba, Alibaba has a VMware cloud option. But running VMware in each cloud is a different experience and it has different training requirements operationally on our team. We did three of the big four cloud providers and all three were operationally similar, but not the same, different enough that I would have to send staff for training for each one of the cloud providers. So, Laura Bell, give us an example of some of the research that you and your team have done around kind of the delta between the cloud providers that people should watch out for and where they can find that research.

So a lot of the research that we're doing in the space is direct with the customers right now, so we can't actually share sort of what they're doing. But I'll tell you some of the things that we've been looking at that we think people should also be looking at. I'm hearing a lot from companies about, for example, Kubernetes and could Kubernetes be the next big track of, not that people aren't already using it, but as a unification layer. And when you think of that, it's like there's Kubernetes and there's Kubernetes.

It's back to what you were saying about VMware. So I think that the whenever, you know, we talked to people back on the earlier point, whenever you are going to look at these things, make sure you ask for the specifics of how that cloud implements them and, you know, create actual spreadsheets. And, you know, I know Excel is it's still popular after all these years, my friend. Very. I love my pivot tables. Yeah. But you got to have these kind of down.

And one of the things I wanted to make sure that I told all the business leaders that may be listening to this is this is where when you think of creating budgets, your budgets will probably need to be a little bigger than you thought they were going to be doing multi-cloud because you need to make sure that you invest in the resources like you were just talking about how you had to send people out for training for different cloud providers offerings. Right. And this is something that I think people don't think about.

Are you going to have the same person doing multiple clouds? Are you going to have different people that are responsible for clouds? How often are you going to give them time to do the training in a very dynamic environment? We talk a little bit about the training with these folks. So these are some of the things to think about. But, you know, you can also come to Lopez Research dot com and we typically have podcast links and video links and other things that we put up there that talk about the changes we're seeing in cloud and edge computing.

All right. com. We're publishing some pretty interesting research and where we're taking a monolithic application and modernizing that for the public cloud so you can get some insights into the technical work needed to do any cloud migrations. If you have questions, you can follow me on the web at CTO Advisor. DMs are open. You can ask me anything that has to do with cloud and cloud migrations. Until then, we'll talk to you next CTO Advisor podcast.