Listen to episode five of the ‘Don’t Break The Bank’ podcast and subscribe here:
Matthew O’Neill, Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group, VMware Office of the CTO.
I doubt many of us get through the week nowadays without having calls and catch-ups with friends, colleagues, customers and peers that include at least a short exchange on how life is for them. They’ve become a fact of lock-down life, as much a part of this new reality as Zoom has become shorthand for communication, social-distancing, joining-up with people from their homes and even admiring some of their very creative virtual backgrounds. It’s all a way of getting a bit more colour, a bit more insight into what people are seeing, how they’re feeling and being able to feed that into our perspective. It’s data collection to fuel our analysis of what continues to be uncertain and confusing, but still, there is something business-as-usual going on in the background.
It is inspiring me, that within VMware, we are actively looking to the future, to the end of this situation, and questioning “where do we want to be?” and “what steps can we take now to get there?”. At the same time, our executives are taking extraordinary actions to ensure we are safe, secure, enabled and actively engaged.
During the recording of the latest episode of ‘Don’t Break the Bank’, our podcast for curious minds in financial services, my co-host, Brian Hayes and I connected with our colleague Martin Eves, Director for Cloud Foundation in EMEA at VMware. The first thing we asked him was how the pandemic was shaping his projects; in his role, Martin works with a variety of customers to deliver the infrastructure they need to enable their digital transformation. He’s very much in the change part of the Run versus Change dynamic we often talk about all the time.
The nature of these projects is very much one of evolution – they’re a commitment by the enterprises running them to change their operations for the better. It takes investment, courage, and a degree of fortitude to drive them through, even at the best of times. As such, I had wondered whether many of Martin’s projects would have stopped. While that did seem to be the case to a degree, what was heartening to hear was that in some instances, projects were actually being brought forward and accelerated. Many had focused on the Run aspect, keeping the lights on, but there were still some enterprises that wanted to keep going on the path they’d started on to a brighter tomorrow.
Why it’s important is because it shows that whatever happens, whatever chaos the world faces, after a period of disruption, things start to reset. They may not return to the old definition of normal. Still, organisations realise that they need to press on, that they need to continue their migration of legacy applications and services from an on-premises only environment to a modern digital foundation for their future. What that looks like depends very much on the organisation, but for many, that’s a hybrid cloud platform. Martin gave a great example of a business that had started that shift, and how they realised not only the technological benefits (which they were expecting) but also significant cultural ones too.
As he explains, when we talk about legacy, most people think technology, or software, or infrastructure. While it encompasses that, what legacy really means is people and processes – legacy thinking, an outdated operating model and culture. So when there are projects, like the one detailed in the podcast, that not only transform operations but drive real behavioural change too, it demonstrates just how dramatic the impact can be.
It’s well worth a listen if only to show that you don’t need to all be in the same room to have an interesting, and sometimes funny, conversation. I’d also like, as before, to welcome your thoughts and feedback, not just on the topics covered today or in previous episodes, but what you’d like to hear about in future. It’s likely to have at least a nod to the current situation for a little while longer, but hopefully, as we did in this episode, it won’t be the only thing we talk about.
Finally, let us know how you’re managing and any concerns you have. Stay safe and take care.
Listen to episode five of ‘Don’t Break the Bank – Run IT, Change IT’ with Martin Eves and subscribe for future episodes:
