By Matthew O’Neill, Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group, VMware Office of the CTO
If this is the first time you have found us, or, if you are a regular listener, thank you for dipping in today and spending your time with us.
Brian and I both worked in Banking and Banking IT for the past 30 years. We have both seen and driven a lot of change in that time, back from when it was called Change through to Transformation as it is today. The pace of technological change continues to speed up, making keeping up with technology and its application, an ever-increasing challenge. If you are a regular to our, Don’t Break The Bank, Run IT and Change IT podcast you will know we try to ask the questions we didn’t even know were questions when we worked on the other side, and to be fair, some of the topics and concepts may not have been conceived when we were still on the other side.
In our first year, we talked with 15 guests across our 12 episodes. This included talking with one customer, five VMware VPs, one member of VMware’s EStaff (Greg Lavender our CTO) along with six very interesting colleagues. We had a frightening deep dive into cybersecurity threats, a more hopeful look at sustainability, actionable career insights, and lots of discussion about how banks have and are still responding to the challenges of the pandemic.
It has been quite the ride, so we thought for our thirteenth episode we’d look back over our first year, highlighting some of our favourite moments. From VMware Carbon Black’s Tom Kellermann giving us all nightmares (and causing Brian to completely overhaul his home network), to AXA’s Violetta Ciurel providing the customer perspective on responding to the pandemic. The chat with Joe Baguley our EMEA CTO covering the push and pull of running versus changing the bank, and VMware’s Vice President of Sustainability Strategy, Nicola Acutt, talking about how sustainability is innovation’s next frontier. Brian and I go back over what really struck us in the conversations we had in 2020.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a review of the year without considering the devastating impact the Covid has had on everyone. What’s struck us in these conversations is how people are looking at the current situation, acknowledging the crisis, and looking at how we can all move forward. And that’s what gives us hope, as we enter 2021 and try to plot a way forward in the knowledge that the technology, we’ve all been talking about for years has proved to be as vital as we said it was, and that everyone, whether consumer or business, individual or global enterprise, is looking at how they can further adapt and move on.
With our first year done, we have big ambitions for the coming twelve months and having more external guests joining us. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback. What are the topics you want to hear about? Do you want to learn more from one of our past guests, or have us focus on something completely new? We’ve got some exciting speakers lined up, but we’re always keen to hear from our listeners, so please do leave a comment or send us a message. In the meantime, take care, and if there’s anything we can do to help, get in touch.
