Replay-New Job Who This? – Keith is leaving his role at CTOA.

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let's do it. All right you're listening to and if you're catching this clip on the Twitters or LinkedIn watching not CNBC because Dan Newman we have Dan Newman from Futrum Group who's in his CNBC background studio I've seen this studio several times Dan welcome back to the show. The room Raider says it's pretty good the wife actually keeps telling me I need to reorganize the stuff behind me and I'm like I don't know I think it looks pretty good I you know I'm not for me it's symmetry matters it's pretty symmetrical and I dig that so you know the title of the podcast is a little bit deceptive you know the you know Keith Townsend is leaving the CTO advisor the part of it is true it's more of a rebirth then do you want to break the news to the audience what what are we doing here I would say Keith is about to triple the size of the CTO advisor and that's just what we're gonna do in the next year would be a better title so I think the question is first off for those who don't know what is the Futrum Group well so I haven't like broken anything yet I kind of broke something but you know the Futrum Group is the new home of the CTO advisor is is how I see it Keith but it's so much more than that so thanks for asking so the Futrum Group is the fastest growing independent research analysis firm on the planet and with the CTO advisor now part of the Futrum Group that growth is only going to accelerate and get faster so we are a firm made up of an incredible team of analysts thought leaders pundits thinkers we serve over 250 of the world's most prolific tech companies as advisors researchers building intelligence doing testing validations lab work TCO studies teardowns talking to CEOs advising hundreds of the world's most innovative companies and their CEOs and we are on a growth we are having a major growing spree and Keith I couldn't be more proud to have spent a year talking to you about how coming together we could grow faster and while I only gave a snippet of what we do there as I explained to us because you know I can't do it in less than like six minutes I've done it in a lot of sales calls Keith I'm so excited to have you and to have the team the CTO advisor team now as part of the Futrum Group so we're extremely excited to as you said it's been a year of me and you talking and one of the challenges when figuring out this type of relationship you ran through Futrum Group's services etc and they seem to overlap with what the CTO advisor does so isn't this more just a aqua higher than anything else well I mean I think labels are good for trying to maybe tweet something but I think when you're really trying to explain to the market into a customer it's about it's about scale synergy and an expansion I mean Futrum has an incredible capability to speak to markets among the most cited analysts in the world in terms of the press the quotes most actively cited and contributing to major television networks business networks so Fox Business, CNBC, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance but we also have a real scope that goes from the CEO all the way to the practitioner and one of the things that I saw in our time spent together Keith is you have this knack this tenacity about trying to get into the head of that that practitioner those technical resources inside of companies those that are making decisions and helping to decide which technology are we going to invest in which are we going to deploy and by the way how do we improve that entire experience and I think that we do that a little bit at the Futrum Group we have some some great people here but you are going to help us take that whole part of our business to another level and I think that's why the CTO advisor isn't leaving the CTO advisor is not only alive and well but the CTO advisor is really just at the beginning of a journey to go from this very exciting brand that you've spent the last several years building Keith to a brand that's going to help jettison what we were doing at the Futrum Group and how we're connecting not only executives and industries and ecosystems but practitioners and users to help them guide their journey of digital transformation cloud infrastructure investment and of course next level AI services so as me and Dan have talked about this joining of capabilities over the past year he's gotten to know kind of me and what drives me and what drives me is helping the folks who listen to this podcast do their jobs better help people to make decisions around what services or products they should buy or investigate buying what abilities should they add to their staffing levels what's personal skills should they do and then you know the occasional just went chin wag about the industry at all so that you stay informed about what's happening me and Dan did this a few weeks ago we're doing VMware Explorer well we talked about the Broadcom deal of them buying VMware which Broadcom promises will be closed in the next few days then we'll well you know a few weeks the I'm sure we'll talk about that in the future so the Futrum Group helps me accelerate telling that story helps give me additional resources to tell this story that to drive this mission home so the CTO advisor mission isn't changing I think one of the things that when these acquisitions happen one of the things that the stakeholders the people who consume our content and and rely on us for data is kind of saying you know what but how would this impact me how would this impact them individually how do you think this will impact my audiences and customers I advise well first of all Keith I think our comp a conversation that we had a VMware Explorer this is so indicative of what the next generation capabilities of a CTO advisor featuring group tie-up looks like historically speaking you had this particular part of that practitioner audience that you'd so engaged but the ability to now go 360 degrees and look through the lens from a company perspective executive perspective from the partners in ecosystems from from the technologist provides a very holistic view that's reflective of how companies need to make technology decisions things if you want to be the fastest moving company in technology you cannot make decisions in a vacuum it cannot be only technology led and it cannot be only business led we really need to create this intersection and it's a dynamic point inside of a business think of us as the eyepass of analysts and advisory firms now you have the technology and you have the infrastructure but really if you want to make those services go faster you need that eyepass layer so you need to be thinking about things really across a continuum from business to technology and you need to be able to understand all of the implications of a decision whether that's going on-prem moving to the cloud whether that's a hybrid infrastructure whether that's going open source using a closed architecture whether that's implementing new applications running gen AI these are all things that we think about and if your technologies you go oh it's a technology decision and if you're a business person you're going how do we eliminate all the technology as much as possible and make it as simple and straightforward and actually take all the complexity out and the truth is you can't do either you can't make all your decisions based purely on the tech especially with all the the exponential technology debt that lives inside of organizations and you can't make entire decisions based upon some nouveau CNBC clip that you caught about some raving cool technology that's going to secure your entire enterprise with one click it just it doesn't happen right it's like this you'll say set up this whole thing with three clicks and you're like no it's 24 clicks that's you know there's market texture and then there's reality and what I'm really hoping that we can do together is we continue to have conversations that are grounded in reality that that help unpack market texture and become really you know ground source of truth to the world about which technology companies are you know creating and innovating which ones bring the most value and which ones are pragmatically most important to helping companies shift and meet their digital transformation goals yeah and if I was to summarize the conversation we had around the VMware deal it was you know what VMware has great technology it has great community it has great solutions a great history and it's been a great technology partner that would summarize that as my section of it and your perspective is you know they they earned the right to be acquired the you know they they were extremely I don't think it's anywhere the any other way to put it they just weren't successful in driving home their cross cloud message and their cross cap cloud capability and Broadcom saw opportunity and if customers are going to benefit it's going to be a benefit of Broadcom being able to focus VMware and get that value for customers because from a business perspective they they're in a great perspective and market perspective they're in a great perspective their drive that value and that's I think that's that's what the summary of that conversation well if you actually look at a company and a business and it's and it's purpose Keith I still remember when I did my MBA my first ever professor said to me you know that the number one job of a manager is to create shareholder value now I think we can argue in modern times it's more than just shareholders it's stakeholders it's communities it's it's it's purpose and values and and creating a brand promise but the the root of his message and again you know you age how messages change over decades you know I'm getting old now but the root of his message is you have to actually appease both sides you do have to appease the shareholder and you have to appease the customer and you have to kind of continuously do these things in this virtuous cycle that creates a fly wheel that businesses grow upon and so VMware had a had a virtuous cycle and it's you know in its core products in the original era of virtualization where it was the thing and it had that momentum and many companies kind of do live their entire life from the inception to their biggest point to when they tend to fade off and we've seen fortune 500 companies fade off for decades now because of digital transformation and disruption but where often it's only one or two products that a company has ever really been built on and so VMware you know can can can really be recognized for a company that built solutions that changed industries the challenge is when you hit this inflection and this big inflection of multi cloud and open source we don't know yet but the the way the trend line was was was going it was becoming indicative with you know high single-digit low double-digit growth of the company that the historic successful product was no longer going to enable a future of growth and it's been where it needed to grow and I'll get to my point it takes me a while sometimes Keith so just bear with me VM VMware was trying to kind of continue to grow through trying a lot of things it got into a lot of areas into security into multi cloud into its core business it was networking it was it was doing a little bit everything and what was the thing that was really working what was still really the core business that was driving its growth Broadcom is uniquely capable of extracting shareholder values meaning that's their skill set so it is kind of VMware has always been an incredibly customer centric purpose-led company that was all about delivering greatness to its customer so what I'm really hoping you know because I've been more positive on this move than others but I'm hoping that that deep desire for shareholder value combined with the core VMware root of wanting to be customer obsessed becomes kind of this meeting spot in the middle that says we can continue to extract value out of core we will innovate where there's an opportunity I mean we won't be so broadly focused we're gonna pick multi cloud on prem mostly private cloud is where I see it going and we're going to double down triple down and lean into the fact that a lot of data is on prem still a lot of workloads still in private data a private cloud is still going to be a thing for a very long time and in Broadcom can put its capabilities of really extracting shareholder value and mirror it to what VMware does in terms of its customer focus to deliver growth it won't be perfect there will be hiccups but I don't think it's I don't I think there's that's you know it took me a while right I'm almost there but I'll pause there because I said a lot so I think what you just laid out is a great example of why I should probably become a Manchester United fan there's your arsenal fan and we need to figure out ways to still work together I'm not a soccer fan I'm not a football player so I'm you don't have to worry about me becoming a manager I just wanted to dig in that your arsenal you know it's a Champions League day today I mean you're you're you're teetering on you know getting hung up on right now but I but I think you previewed the the dynamic of the the relationship that Futurum Group the larger brand and the CTO advisor the brand that I'll be the well not be the brand that I'm as of this recording I'm the president of the CTO advisor a Futurum Group company I still think Futurum Group Futurum dot CTO advisor is a much more geekier cooler name but we'll we'll work for getting there that's uh you know months not days but we've got a plan Keith and it's gonna be cool I mean the thing is is Futurum Group really is just in its infancy up to the change that you're about to see so we may be bigger but we're not even close to where we see this thing going I mean we've doubled the company year after year after year and in a few years we should be the we should be among the three largest research companies in the world so it'll take some work to be done we're not there yet but you got to sometimes stake your ambition you know how you said you're gonna run so much every day I remember watching you do that you know what I'm saying is you know when you want to lose weight you know it's sometimes good to tell the world I'm gonna lose 10 pounds because then you feel like you're holding yourself accountable because sometimes when you just tell yourself that and then you run into the kitchen and you see that pile of nachos there and you're like I can start my diet tomorrow but when you declare your intent to change the world or to change yourself or to change your business I always think that's a great way to hold accountability to yourself so we want to keep growing Keith and I couldn't be more proud to have you as part of that part of that.

So I love that transition to kind of our last point which is tangibly what will people see different in the CTO advisor in the Futurum Group as folks are seeing us out at shows seeing our content customer relationships what are some of the the you know we've talked at kind of the 30 and 50,000 foot layer what what's the on the ground what how are people gonna see things in a different way I'm like am I gonna be on a six five at some point you might you very well might so we've got a lot of different things brewing and we want to make sure that we're talking across that continuum that I mentioned you know I think you've built an incredibly purposeful brand and you've built an audience that respects you and your opinions and your format that little that little dazzling board you write on mm-hmm the light board the light board but not just the light or just the way you interact and engage your community Keith it's it's special and I want to make sure we maintain the integrity of that but obviously we want to pivot bigger audiences bigger distribution more promotion more visibility maybe I'll see Keith on maybe Keith on Bloomberg maybe Keith on CNBC maybe you know maybe Keith's airstream at an event doing not just CTO advisor but doing all kinds of Futurum and six five content together I think it's all about scale it's about momentum velocity and you know I also think there's always a purpose and I can tell you this having done seven acquisitions in a year there's always a purpose of learning and growing together you always have findings you'll never get it all you know we talked about Broadcom VMware I don't care if it's a massive company or a small business every acquisition comes with its own excitement and complexity and we will learn more and more over the next several months about the ways that we can truly engage to maximize this opportunity what I do know is the Futurum group clients the 250 plus that I mentioned and the Futurum groups audience which is millions every month of eyeballs that see our content are interested in hearing what you have to say Keith and what the CTO advisor has to say so I'm excited to just see how this materializes but I'm also you know constantly disrupting myself so I'm also kind of interested in seeing what opportunities are going to expose themselves that we have not yet identified and so that's the most exciting part.

This has been day two and I've already reached out to some of the extended Futurum group team the labs teams where there's overlap because plain and simple as we look at what we're trying to do and what we want to accomplish we need the CTO advisor brand to be just that a brand not just Keith Townsend but many of the folks that you've seen on the CTO advisor platform in years past we are going to hopefully deepen those relationships put those folks out in front more and because the you know as you mentioned 250 customers I can't interview all 250 customers the need help to look at this from that practitioners lens.

com all of my content is still going to be there's going you're going to see some syndication across the Futurum groups platform. Speaking of the Futurum group platform Dan how can people find the Futurum group? com of course you can find us on the Twitter's you can is it X you can find us on the it is officially X I miss Twitter said somebody I know I know mrs. Twitter or on LinkedIn you can find my commentary Daniel Newman's commentary regularly on Forbes you search it you can also check out all of our pods we're all over the YouTube's at the Futurum group on the YouTube's and we will be hopefully on your favorites list soon to check out not just all the CTO advisor shows that you're of course watching right now but all of Futurum's content which should take you on a diverse journey across 14 technology adjacencies from chips to SAS from deep technology to global technology policy we do it all and now with the CTO advisor we're gonna do it just a little bit or a lot better all right and obviously the CTO advisor podcast isn't going anywhere we'll talk to you next week with some more exciting content from industry leaders thanks Dan