Beyond the Cloudscape

Tullio Siragusa (00:11):

Good day everyone, this is Tullio Siragusa with Tech Leaders Unplugged. Let's get unplugged again today. Today I am speaking with Amanda Blevins, the VP and CTO of the Americas for VMware. Welcome, Amanda. I'm looking forward to speaking with you.

Amanda Blevins (00:28):

Oh, thank you very much

Tullio Siragusa (00:29):

About beyond the cloud scape revealing the interconnected tape tapestry of the multi-cloud. It's an interesting topic that I can't wait to dig into because this is top of mind for many organizations, especially multinationals, and it's a big challenge and also a big opportunity as we'll discuss. But before we do that, how'd you get to where you are, Amanda? Tell us a little bit about yourself and what excites you about VMware.

Amanda Blevins (00:58):

Well, I got here by, I guess, a lot of hard work. So I started in the industry many years ago, and my background was server admin, storage, admin, technical architect, and enterprise architect. And I joined VMware over 13 years ago as a sales engineer, a senior systems engineer. And it was pretty neat that the SE that supported me when I was a customer called me up one night and said, hey, I'm taking a different position inside VMware. Would you like mine? And so I was like, yes, I absolutely want to work for that company. I was a little nervous about working in the field and being in sales, but, it worked out. So moved my way up through the ranks at VMware, and now I'm the VP and CTO of the Americas. And it's just an exciting place to be because we've changed how we've done technology over time. You know, everyone knew us as a compute virtualization hypervisor company. And then our second act was around the software-defined data center and user experience on the end user side. And now our strategy is aligned with being the multi-cloud leader in the technology space, so the tech keeps me excited and the people and the culture is, are what make it great to work at VMware.

Tullio Siragusa (02:10):

Great. Well, let's, let's dig right in, Amanda, because when it comes to the multi-cloud, you know, I think a lot of people think of it as we got here, not intentionally, right? You know, a division might have acquired one cloud solution, and another division acquired something else. If you large multinational, you might have some legacy data centers that are not even on the cloud. And then it just becomes, how do we bring it all together? Yeah. With the multi-cloud. But I think there's more to it that could be actually strategic and offer more flexibility and scalability. What are you seeing in terms of why people come to you to solve this problem for them? Is it a reactive thing trying to bring it all together, or do, are some of them going into the, Hey, we want to be more strategic about this? What are you seeing?

Amanda Blevins (02:58):

Well, I think, you used the word that's very important. You said that they weren't intentional. And I say that a lot. And what I mean by they weren't intentional was that maybe some technologists like myself were like, Hey, that's cool new tech. I want to use that service in AWS or that one in GCP or that one in Azure. And all of a sudden, their journey to the cloud became cloud chaos. And cloud chaos essentially means that you know, it's out of control. The spending is too high. They're not seeing the velocity and the innovation that they thought you'd receive. Maybe they thought they were migrating the majority of their workloads to public cloud environments, and they've only done 10%. But regardless, this cloud chaos is a very expensive unsustainable operating model and not providing the benefits that, you know, cloud environments can provide. So, what we do at VMware is help folks get to “cloud smart, as our CEO Praveen Regu says, and cloud smart just means I want to run the workload that's important to my business and the location that is best for my business. And so that could be on-prem, it could be an AWS, Azure, GCP, or hundreds of other cloud providers. It could be on VMware-based platforms, or it could be on native public cloud services, but it's all about that optionality and choice with the right security governance and controls around it.

Tullio Siragusa (04:17):

So let's dig in a little bit more about that because I think it's an important point, especially today with multiple technologies needing different cloud environments. You know, for example, AWS seems to do very well in more advanced AI-type services, or you know, Google Cloud has more powerful analytics, or Azure does a better integration with Microsoft products and multinationals typically have multiple applications on multiple platforms. So what's the shift that companies need to make in terms of moving away from trying to get the chaos under control, but actually moving towards being strategic in how they use multi-cloud? What, what's working in terms of moving in that direction?

Amanda Blevins (05:04):

Yeah, I think that there's an exercise that most organizations haven't done yet, and it's difficult, which is probably why it hasn't occurred. But if you think about business process mapping, if you do that and you identify the IT systems, the applications, databases, servers, services, whatever it might be, that brings in money for your company that is necessary to generate revenue, whether it's to sell something, schedule something, whatever it might be, manufacture something, understand what that business process mapping looks like, and align it to IT technology, you know, systems, etcetera. And once you do that, then you have a really good idea of what systems are most important to your business. So if the majority of my revenue is generated through systems that exist within my data center on-prem, and I haven't built out a private cloud, and I'm not getting those, you know, advancements and capabilities of a private cloud, well, that's where I want to invest my time. If I've done a lot of work in the public cloud and maybe 40% of my revenue comes from systems in a w s, well then that's another place I want to focus my time to make sure it's secure and under control. So, as you said, many cloud providers provide, you know, excellent services, those higher-level services or where the benefits and velocity come in of public cloud providers but it's really hard to rearchitect applications and refactor them to be able to use them. So what I suggest is organizations look at where my revenue comes from, what systems support that, and what do I need to do for those systems to improve their capabilities, improve their resiliency, improve their you know, geo availability, whatever it might be to help my company generate that revenue, and then build my multi-cloud strategy across that and make sure that I am reducing the amount of unnecessary technology that maybe I deployed before, but I'm also focusing on investing in the technology. I need those multi-cloud, cross-cloud services to have better efficiencies. And then I can also focus on what my people do, and what my talent is focusing on to be able to do their jobs better and to be able to support the multi-cloud environment.

Tullio Siragusa (07:16):

All right, so here's what I think I heard most companies approach this as a utility. You know, it's something you got to get on the control and manage and not necessarily a conversation that's taking place at the board level, right? But what you're saying is you can actually be more strategic, tie it to your costs, risk management performance, and, then actually extract maximum value that impacts the business. So the conversation needs to be elevated at the business level. How are companies going to do that? What's the best approach? How do you elevate it to the CEO of the organization or the board to say, Hey, this isn't just a utility, this is strategic to our business? Any use cases where you guys have had to help perhaps a CIO elevated at that level, or are you going directly to the, business side of it in to have those conversations?

Amanda Blevins (08:12):

Yeah, I think it's important to bring everyone that's involved together. A lot of times our relationships originally lie with the traditional IT folks, you know, CIO, CTO, VP of infrastructure, VP of cloud, and all their teams. But for a successful cloud strategy to happen to work, to be implemented and executed upon there needs to be agreement across not only the infrastructure and cloud operations teams, but also the application owners, whether you formed a DevSecOps team, whether it's a platform engineering team, you want to make sure that your, your cloud operations team sits here, your platform engineering team sits here, and then all of your app owners, developers are up above that. And so this is how a technology organization should look. But what's interesting is the app owners and developers most often are not within IT or within the corporate area. They're within the lines of business. And so if you're building out cloud infrastructure, operations, services, etcetera, you need to know what they're going to be doing. You need to know what you know, what services they might need, what resiliency they need, and what capabilities they need for all their applications. And so there needs to be a direct conversation between all those teams because once we've built out the right cloud infrastructure, and cloud operations services, then the platform engineering team comes in and builds out all the tools for CI/CD pipelines and secure software supply chain and, and Golden Path and automating that software development deployment. And once those tools are in place, then developers and app owners just come in and do what they do best, right? Developers get to code, they don't have to worry about infrastructure, they don't have to worry about security, etcetera. And so until you bring all those teams together and understand all the requirements, you might build something thinking that they will come, right, the field of dreams but instead they don't come, they might go around you to somewhere else because you haven't met those requirements. So once we have, the bus lines of business, the application owners, it, security, everyone working together, it's very easy to present, a solid strategy to the CEO to the senior leadership team, to the board to say, not only will we reduce costs, reduce our risk, you know, have better security and governance, but also we'll be able to improve revenue. We'll be able to address new market opportunities, we'll be able to create optimizations and systems that already exist and generate money that way too.

Tullio Siragusa (10:44):

Okay. So clear step into an effective multi-cloud strategy is alignment with the business, getting that alignment with the business, understanding the requirements, where you're going to get the best outcome where you're going to get the best security managed risk. There are also compliance issues today that we have to deal with too, right? When it comes to data, especially multinationals you know, what are some of the key ways that that organization ought to go about doing this? Are there some, you know, five key steps that they ought to be thinking about when planning this? I saw the, stacking on how to look at it, and how to strategize around it. But in terms of planning, like if I'm sitting here watching this today and I'm like, oh yeah, you know, I haven't really thought about strategically using the multi-cloud and in a way that benefits the business. I've just been making sure that all the data's compliant and everything is running smoothly and there's uptime and there's, you know, contingency plans. But you mean I can actually help the business elevate how they do things? How, what are some of the key steps to make that happen?

Amanda Blevins (11:55):

Yeah, I think from a, from a technology perspective, because the, the relationships are required, you know, that collaboration is required, but from a technology perspective I think it's important to understand when do I use native public cloud services individually, and when do I use multi-cloud services or cross-cloud services? So what's happened is because we've gone at it maybe not as an intentional as intentionally as we should, or maybe through acquisitions and m and a, we have different cloud environments or lines of business go out and get, you know, different solutions with their different ISVs. We're at this point where we have maybe one individual or a small team managing on-prem, and we have one individual or a small team managing AWS and one for Azure and one for GCP and so on and so forth, right? And that means that these folks are spread really thin, that they're using different applications, different processes to do the same things. And so, it's important from a technology stack perspective to look at what services am I using across public clouds. And in addition to the input from my application owners and my developers, which ones are necessary across these public clouds? And so say we decide that Kubernetes is critical because we've created modern applications. And so, with Kubernetes, I might be running AKSs and EKS and OpenShift and Tanzim Kubernetes grid, which is VMware's version. I could have Anthos, all these different Kubernetes services, and distros. And so something like VMware's Tanzu mission control, where we can manage Kubernetes clusters across the globe, across these different platforms, whether they're VMware based or not, means that those folks on those teams that were individual, you know, managing AWS you know, EKS or, or AKA or GKE, no longer have to do that because they have a single interface where a small team can manage all of them. And now I've freed up my talent to be able to go work on more innovative things. And so, as technologists and as leaders, we need to see where is the value of these public cloud services. Where should I focus my time and innovation and learning and you know, how my talent can support that and where are the common services that I need to reduce the complexity that I don't need to touch those individual services in every public cloud, and I can look for a cross-cloud or multi-cloud service to do that work.

Tullio Siragusa (14:26):

All right, so one argument I'm sure you're seeing is well, I'm just trying to get it all in control too, and, and having too many cloud environments is costly, then I have to manage it. And there are risk factors involved in terms of security. Yes. But what you're saying is there's some truth to that, but if you do it right, there's some business ROI that you can gain. Yeah. But how do you ultimately manage it all? You know, you got, you got these two competing sort of mindsets, right? One is I'm trying to reduce how many things I need to have in place so I can manage my costs and risks. And you're saying, actually, you should optimize the best scenarios based on your business requirements. But then how do you manage all that? That's the big question, right?

Amanda Blevins (15:13):

Right, right. So, I think to approach it, I just really like data to be able to make decisions, right? So if we have the data around what applications are important, you know, what are our current goals, where does our revenue come from? What are our application teams and what does the business want to do to, you know, do new things in the market to provide new services? If we understand all this, and then we look at our environment and what are we spending? Are we spending 20 million a year on AWS, but only 5% of our revenue comes from that spend? Maybe something to look at, right? Maybe I don't need a lot of AWS services and maybe, I don't know, maybe I could look to consolidate that to another cloud that I'm running in. So I don't think that it's smart to have all, you know, all the different cloud environments if we can't identify the business value or if the business value can come from a similar service on a different public cloud provider. So I don't suggest that you just have all of them to have them. But if you do need them, you know, for example, in financial services, there are compliance requirements where we need to have that flexibility to run in different cloud providers for risk avoidance. And so when you have these different regulatory requirements or business and capability requirements, then you want to decide, do I need every cloud provider? Can I do it all in one? And then once I've made that decision, I've looked at things architecturally from the infrastructure standpoint, cloud services, application, data management, et cetera, then I say, okay, now that I've narrowed down the scope of where my workloads really need to run and what services they need, how can I do this in the most cost-effective, efficient way? Because if we're efficient, we're going to lower costs, but we're also going to speed up how quickly we can do things and how quickly we can help the business. And so, if I can look for multi-cloud services, as I mentioned, VMware and Tanu mission control to be able to manage those Kubernetes clusters. If I look for multi-cloud services and cross-cloud services at the infrastructure layer, at the automation layer, self-service, you know, platforms be able to do network and application mapping, log analytics, all those things. And then if I look at cross-cloud services in the security layer, how can I protect my workloads? How can I microsegment them? How can I identify ransomware and react? Where can I look at cross-cloud services for an app development platform, so my developers have the same experience across multiple clouds regardless of where the app is running? And then, of course, cross-cloud services across end-user services. How do I do my work? You know, how do all my colleagues access their applications and data? How do we securely do that work? When I look at when I really need a single public cloud service, or when can I use and consume a multi-cloud or cross-cloud service, that will reduce the complexity of my environment, the more multi-cloud services I have, the smaller amount of things I need to attach, which will then reduce costs improve efficiency and free up time to help the business.

Tullio Siragusa (18:10):

How is or will AI help in planning, optimizing, and making these choices?

Amanda Blevins (18:19):

Yeah, I think there are many vectors to that, right? I'll start with the technology sector and provide a couple of examples of how we're looking at it. So we have services, all those things that I mentioned before, those, you know, possible multi-cloud services, those are all capabilities within VMware's portfolio. But even then, if you're looking at cost for, for public clouds and on-prem, and you're looking at, I want to migrate a bunch of workloads and how do I do that? And what goes first and how expensive will it be? And then when it is time to migrate it, you know, who will do the work? You know, we've had those capabilities in our portfolio for a long time, but now we're using AIML in our technology to be able to automate all that, to be able to take these 250 million data points across these different solutions that VMware has to do that work and put it together in an intelligent way so your teams don't have to do not have to spend time on building out these migration plans and manually doing it. No, we can do it all in an automated fashion along with all the data analysis, with machine learning also threat protection, advanced threat protection, identifying malicious payloads any type of workload protection. You know, we use AIML in those backend systems to be able to identify those threats and mitigate them before, you know, general and you know older tech version of antivirus, you know, would even be able to find it, if at all. And so we're able to do that within the hypervisor layer, within our, you know, virtual network and security layer within our workload NextGen antivirus layer. But collecting all that data is one thing. Being able to analyze it and determine what's going on, especially across a chain of events takes a lot of work. And so if we can offload some of that to, you know, machine learning algorithms, well, that just means we'll be able to respond faster and have a more secure environment.

Tullio Siragusa (20:10):

You know, it's interesting sometimes when we look back at the trends of technology, so it's a, you know, something that's a great idea. Sometimes it's a little ahead of the time until another piece of tech catches up, right? There's a lot, you know, you couldn't do like encoding for example, without the proper computing power that, that finally caught up. And it sounds to me as though the true benefit of having a multi-cloud environment that's manageable, that can be optimized is actually coming to life because of technologies like AI and machine learning that make it possible. What about in terms of an assessment? Are any tools out there yet to actually go and do, you know, an assessment to help with figuring out where the issues are before putting in place, a multi-cloud management solution? How is that still manual today? How's that done?

Amanda Blevins (21:04):

So, the same tools that you can use to manage your multi-cloud environment, pull all the data that you need to determine how should I have a good multi-cloud strategy. How should I go about my multi-cloud environment? So, we have things like our Tanu app navigator where we can go in and determine which applications are appropriate for modernization and which ones would be a little bit more difficult, so we know where to start to, you know, refactor applications to be cloud-native, run on containers, et cetera. We have tools where we can do entire network and application mapping across on-prem and public cloud environments and services. So you can see your real estate of applications and what talks to what, so you can come up with those you know migration plans. And then also we do a lot of cost analysis because what we've found because the VMware platform is available, not just on-prem, but we also have an available in every public cloud provider. So, it's an AWS, VMware cloud, and AWS. We have Azure VMware solution, we have Google Compute VMware engine, we have you know, VMware's platform in IBM and Oracle and Alibaba and thousands of other cloud providers. And what we found is that when organizations try to use native virtual machines like an Azure native virtual machine, and you compare that cost to what it would, a virtual machine would cost on an Azure VMware solution, the cost of running a VM on an Azure VMware solution is almost half of a native Azure virtual machine. And I say that because we want to make sure that we're not doing a bunch of unnecessary work of saying, taking, you know, on-prem to Azure native virtual machine, which on average takes about eight months of time without any business value and increasing costs. So, understanding your costs of where you're at today and understanding your costs of, if you make choices for a cloud architecture or workload migration, what those increased costs would be is a very important factor. So, all these you know, tools and capabilities come out of our Tanzim portfolio and our Aria portfolio to help with these different data points, that need to be understood.

Tullio Siragusa (23:16):

Very cool. We're coming up on time. We're actually up on time, but I, I'm wondering, as I'm listening to you, this is you know, predominantly multinationals need this, but there are also some mid-market companies that are globally distributed, especially today with post-pandemic. A lot of organizations have learned to be remote now they have globally distributed teams and divisions. And I can't help to think, wouldn't it be cool someday if you actually had something that automatically leveraged whatever cloud was out there and fractionally set up services to support whatever business initiative you have in place? Is that something you think that's coming in the future, or that's good?

Amanda Blevins (23:57):

How do you know our roadmap? How did you see it?

Tullio Siragusa (24:03):

You know because that'd be cool. You just plug in your business stuff and then thing automatically optimizes across whatever PLA platform. It makes sense. So yeah, the future's pretty bright now. All these things are obviously available because of AI, so we'll see how it plays out. Amanda, it's great to have you with us. Thanks for joining me. Just stay with me as we go up there in a second. We've got another show coming tomorrow at the same time with Piyush Malik, who's the Chief Digital and Transformational Officer at Veridic. And on Tuesday we have Lisa Thee who's the managing Director of Data and AI of Launch Group. So those are the next two upcoming guests. We'll keep digging and seeing what we can learn and get unplugged together. And, and who knows, you might learn something new I certainly did today. So thanks for being with me again, Amanda. See you all again soon.