Introducing a New CTO Advisor – Alastair Cooke

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All right, you're watching a special episode of the CTO advisor Podcast I'd say special a lot of times One I don't know if I've ever had Alistair on the actual podcast Alistair. We've done content together But have you ever been on the podcast? No, I don't think I've ever been on the podcast I think we've done projects and produced video together, but I don't think it's ever been for this podcast Yeah, so this is it's special in that sense then it's special in a sense like you've been doing stealth work for the past Like month or so a little over a month What do you been up to?

Well, I kind of teased it at the end of last year that I was switching out of doing things domestically in New Zealand and switching back to Working in the wider IT community and more analyst type work and I've been joining you Keith here at the CTO advisor and the wider future room group And it's a pretty exciting big change for me to be Part of a larger collective rather than just being me here in my shared quarters in New Zealand Yeah, and speaking of shared quarters in New Zealand.

I'm literally on the polar opposite side of the world literally The only way I can get any opposite if I went a little south to Spain I'm in Amsterdam attending Cisco live and more of my future group Head and people have wondered what has happened to the CTO advisor. This podcast is an example of the investment that future group and we're making in a CTO advisor as I expand my role to Global advisor at future room group our ability to talk to CTOs talk to IT DMS IT decision makers that mission has not changed We still very much want to help people along with their career paths.

We want to help them make decisions This is part of that journey. So you are the first full-time or kind of full-time Other CTO advisor, so welcome to the welcome to the team Alistair. Thank you very much It is such a pleasure to be here as you can see I've been working on the beard and the lack of hair on the top to make sure that I properly represent as the advisor brand and Of course been studying with you what goes on in this world as advising these decision makers Getting beyond just the technical hands-on towards more of the business value of the technology that we deliver it's part of the conversation that you and I have been having over the years is how you move up that stack how you move from being a hands-on practitioner more towards being the engineering decision maker up towards the business decision maker clearly you made that transition quite a while ago and I've been following along as we go so Let's kind of give a lay of the land of their future group as it's related to the CTO advisor You know the CTO advisor used to do these really cool Lab projects where you know, we got a bunch of juniper six 10k switches we get a bunch of Oracle cloud infrastructure AWS infrastructure we tell these CTO journeys Give me an update on a lab.

Are we still doing the lab thing? Well, yes, we still want to do Hands-on lab work with the wider Futurum group as a support to it But the thing is different about CTO advisors. We've very much come from the point of view of what's the business decision make? What's the person inside the actual customer? thinking about what are their criteria for making decisions and This is where I think CTO advisor brings a huge value into the wider Futurum group as being very much the customer focused inwards towards the technology a lot of the Analysts and labs tends to come from the other direction and be vendor focused and We just bring that difference in perspective and I think there's a huge value of having those two different types of perspective brought together Yeah, we've seen this practically happen me and Steve Dickens come at the Broadcom acquisition of VMware from two different perspectives Steve looks at it from The angle of Wow Broadcom has Bought this super valuable asset in VMware Shareholders should be extremely pleased the business of Broadcom will be greatly improved And you know what?

I'm going to take a step back as the audience has heard my opinion plenty of times How do you think the Broadcom? acquisition of VMware has impacted our community of decision makers and practitioners So I Separated in the same way that Broadcom does Broadcom cares about those very largest of customers They care very deeply and want to retain those customers customers for whom An increase in the actual purchase price is not really that significant compared to the cost of retooling to use something else Whereas the customers that are Negatively affected here are the smaller customers where that capital cost that switch to an op-ex Monthly acquisition that is going to be higher than that We're expecting and those are very impactful and their cost of switching to a different technology will be a potentially lower Those are the customers who are going to be significantly impacted that the large enterprise that Broadcom from the beginning said they care about They're not going to be so concerned.

I think there is a huge opportunity for This reassessment. One of the things that VMware did is that it allowed you to not have to reassess your Underlying platform every time there was new hardware versions because it was all abstract to the wide well this change in cost model is a point at which the customers are going to reassess whether they have that right platform and That's going to be an interesting set of decisions that we'll see You know, I think as you go to the smaller end of the market It's going to be much easier for people to transition away from VMware, but as their processes as their integrations Are much more reliant on the VMware stack.

It's much harder to move away and I saw this hands-on at the Educational Institute I spent the last six months working at They were very quickly They got hit by an increased cost and they were very cash-strapped at the moment and decided that we're going to move away from VMware I could see that being very painful for them because of the degree of integration into the VMware platform. I had So this is an example of how both you and I look at especially the VMware community In acquisition of By Broadcom and its impact to that VMware community we're both still relatively close to that, but I think where our paths diverged a bit in Technical capability you've spent the past few years teaching AWS developer courses.

Well, I thought taught across the sort of core of all of the AWS courses the architecting and DevOps and development and I've definitely seen a difference in an approach to how you build IT solutions and get the most of value and I could see this being an another opportunity for a shift away from on-premises Virtualization towards more cloud-native applications the interesting thing I've been seeing is a lot of rise of discussion to how DevOps methodologies aren't necessarily the solution to all of our ills and They bring their own sets of problems and it kind of echoes what I've Talked about in some of the courses where if you're redeveloping your on-premises monolithic application to being this fully serverless application that runs in the cloud You're never actually going to get to the end of that because there'll be another change that comes along and another architecture and we get This wonderful joy of a really long tail of IT we need another mass extinction event like the my2k event to cut that tail off and allow us to start again and this is the kind of challenges that enterprise organizations always get as there's this really long tail of investment of business process that's encoded in pieces of technology that Potentially have been superseded but still run production and that production is incredibly valuable So as an expert in training because you've trained, you know, you've trained as long as I've known you I was I'm like the one if I think about like my first Interaction with you was not even me knowing you as me using your autolabs Community project which enabled us to automatically and Systematically the redeploy our VMware vSphere lab environments way back in my virtualized geek days as you're looking at the shift of as you're looking at the shift and focus at that SMB mid-market customer and needing to adjust to the reality of VMware and Broadcom What do you see CTOs CIOs needing to invest in skills for their teams to make that leap Consulting about learning paths for customers is very much learning what the customers current skill set that current teams are about But the places we are seeing a lot of innovation Is still in software as a service delivery Consuming the things that run your business as a service rather than having to run your own infrastructure.

So getting Increasing skills around how you integrate the collections of software as a service this definitely move up the stack this continuous move up the stack of Moving away from caring about the interrupts on the boards from back when I had here and my children were still preschool Through the time when I've been a trainer and I've been started teaching VMware training courses in 2006 And Through that time we progressively got more and more abstracted more and more Of the low-level undifferentiated heavy lifting being automated and obviously the clouds the end of that So getting some that focus lifted outwards lifted upwards away from the the minutiae of implementing things and as a hands-on technologist I love that minutiae, but it doesn't deliver the most value So you're definitely trying to assist your teams and working towards more automated more declarative things It's some of the same stories.

We've been talking about for last 10 years so we've talked about this at detail for network as a network as not network as a service, but network is cold and disability for Network engineers to make a leap from people who perform perform Changes that the CLI to consuming these data center platforms whether we're talking about you know companies like aviatrix these SAS like companies there's a mix between Or this thin line between SAS and I as that looks a lot like size I argue that VMC on AWS VMware cloud on AWS is actually a SAS you're not turning any VMware vSphere knobs that you know, we're used to as These smart people we're allocating to being more process driven more business driving making the same leap That you're making what are some of the practicals like other than going to go work for the Futurum group?

Okay, they develop some of these skills So I have a talk track for this. My talk track is either cross training with With other internal groups or finding a job that is closer to the business such as sales engineer at C or going back to school or Having it like a any ISV or service provider such as a PwC, etc. So Countdown and then just answer it as you as you go All right Well, I think there are a whole lot of different ways of acquiring new skills one of the first things to do is in your existing role think about how does what I do impact the business because Most of us work in companies where the delivery of IT is not the purpose of the business and So starting to get your focus out to what's the purpose of the business?

How is it being furthered now if you're early in your career going in and you really want to make a big change? For the study if you did a computer science degree then heading towards doing something That's more like an MBA getting more of that business language Because there's a whole other language as you start moving out of the technology But it may be that it's simply mentorship within your organization go and find somebody who is a level up But across on it and another reporting line.

It may be Go and find some Training on YouTube. It may be that you go look for a new role that is adjacent to your current role That is maybe more aligned that may be within your organization. If it's a nice progressive organization that allows you to move Sometimes these IT organizations the infrastructure people get held in one place because it's so hard to find good ones But you don't get them go So sometimes that does involve moving to a new organization in order to get that new horizon It really does depend on your position and your starting point But getting that that idea that the future focus is more.

How do we make the business successful? What is it that this business does that is successful? and then the education is really good for getting a systematic thinking around how you look at a business and how you look at a different business because You might be in a manufacturing business and have a particular way that things you have to work to achieve business success It's very different from a service business And having some of that formalized framework for education can be really useful for actually understanding your own skills your own gaps So I'm really interested also kind of going back to I wanted to kind of do a victory lap and Brag to my audience about your diverse skill your experience from a technical perspective Your help with our projects where we you know Compare all the various VMware cloud solutions and help customers with that decision matrix a lot of good work on The past technical side, what are you most looking forward to in this new world?

I'm looking forward to digging both technically into AI. How do you implement? How do you build an AI solution? but also How does I get integrated into another solution because I isn't going to be that the product? AI is going to be a feature of things in the future And I'm really interested to see how AI is going to be integrated into products and to see the very beginnings of it I've already been in briefings around How you might automate building AI tools into something rather than just building an AI tool So this is going to be a big area of focus for Me as well as I think for the wider CTO advisor and future and group for the next 6 7 12 to 36 months And just generally learning more at that higher level of how businesses are making decisions how businesses are being impacted by Both good and bad decisions So I'm excited about getting you in the mix We've introduced you to some of our biggest clients as a new CTO advisor analyst We're looking forward to you getting briefed by AWS AWS For to you getting briefed by AWS HPE I even introduced you to SAP which is as far as far out of your area of your domain expertise We're actually looking to get you come to get you to come up here all the way from New Zealand We're not up here because I'm in Europe and we don't want you to have to fly That way or that way if you're not watching the videos on the other side of the world We're in getting you integrated with the rest of the team Alistair what can't find people find you until you have your first post on either the CTO advisor comm or the future group website well, my Primary historic point of publication and hopefully I can start publishing there again is at Demi test dot co dot NZ That's been my blog since 2006 when I became an independent Contractor and started writing about VMware you can Occasionally find things from me on on X Twitter, and I really need to ramp up publication on LinkedIn as well because that seems to be replacing X as the location to actually engage around these issues, so A General identity for me Alistair cook as well as Demi test NZ as they are as the IDs everywhere of course Demi test Is my small but powerful company and NZ for New Zealand where I live I definitely need to get up to the US more because it's it's all very well talking online like this But it's when you share a meal with somebody that you actually build those relationships those understandings from much less formal Interactions, and I really do need to be up and around the people in the US for those I'm absolutely not averse to travel to the to Europe.

I've been to Barcelona so many times. I haven't got enough fingers to count them All right, if you want to find More about the CTO advisor or future group you can visit future group on the web the active future group calm Caught myself you can find the CTO advisor at the CTO advisor calm I'm at Cisco live the week of this recording the week that you're listening to this so there will be Content Freshly posted to the CTO Advisor calm as I visit tech field day X a tech field day brand another future group company Talk to you on the Twitters or X comm at CTO advisor.

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