On this episode of the Six Five Webcast – Infrastructure Matters, hosts Camberley Bates, Keith Townsend, and Dion Hinchcliffe share a comprehensive discussion on the shifting dynamics of enterprise technology, touching on critical themes such as cloud repatriation, the challenges AI poses to chip depreciation, and the evolving role of platform engineering.
Their discussion covers:
- The surge in SAP’s European sales: highlighting the increasing demand for local providers and performance concerns with US-based cloud services amidst geopolitical uncertainties.
- Insights into 37signals’ cloud repatriation effort: revealing significant cost savings from moving 18 petabytes of data back on-premise and the challenges of sourcing talent with data center experience.
- How the definition of “cloud” is evolving: expanding beyond the public cloud to include private cloud and edge computing, influencing CIOs’ workload placement strategies.
- The dilemma of AI chip depreciation: faced by providers like CoreWeave, considering the rapid pace of technological advancement and its impact on plant obsolescence and depreciation schedules.
- The rising importance of platform engineering: its intersection with IT operations and DevOps, and the ongoing debate about the optimal approach and responsibilities within this domain.
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Disclaimer: Six Five Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Keith Townsend: All right, double sevens. This is the lucky episode of Infrastructure Matters. I’m joined as usual with my co-hosts, Dion and Camberley. A lot of interesting debate I think this week. Not a whole lot of news, but interesting debates. And we’re going to start out, I think with the more spicy old one, the SAP, Dion?
Camberley Bates: First though, we have an international traveler going on here. I mean, we are jealous about Dion’s life here. Maybe we’ll all do this.
Keith Townsend: Yeah, we’ll-
Dion Hinchcliffe: I highly recommend it. Go see the world while it’s still here, because everything’s getting turned into, unfortunately a Walmart and a Circle K. Yeah, for the last about 12 years, I’ve been alternating between the United States and overseas. And I’ve been living in Indonesia, France, Malta, all sorts of places. So yeah.
Camberley Bates: In Bali too.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah. Oh, Bali. That’s near-
Camberley Bates: Yeah. You need to change your social handle to the Nomad Analyst or something. I don’t know. The Nomad-
Dion Hinchcliffe: Well, but aren’t we already nomads? Because we’re constantly at these events, right? So I just now I vary the back end as well as the front end.
Keith Townsend: There you go. So speaking of international, SAP, which I think, I don’t know, Dion, I don’t know if most people realize SAP is not an American company. It is so much ingrained of our culture.
Dion Hinchcliffe: They’ve done a really good job of having a US presence but they’re not a US company. Yes, exactly.
Keith Townsend: And they’ve seemed to benefit from all of the geopolitical turmoil and the economic uncertainty that’s hit the world in the past few months. At least that’s what the numbers suggest.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Correct, yeah. So the data says that SAP sales are up 40% in Europe, and this actually is not just a trend in the last two months. I’ve seen for a couple of years a real desire to buy local for pricing if no other reason, but also for performance. To have, even though a lot of the cloud providers have regions that are locally local, there’s still a concern about a lot of the SAS applications not necessarily having enough local regions to have performance. And there has always been concern about the ability for the US government to seize data. That’s been one of the overarching concerns. So the Patriot Act has a back door for most cloud services. They could technically, if the data is resident in the United States, seize the data.
I’ve seen concerns about we don’t want to use Slack. We’d rather use Rocket Chat. Even though no one in the US has heard of Rocket Chat, it’s very popular overseas because it’s an alternative to Slack that is not resident in the United States. But SAP is now seeing, due to the tariffs and due to the geopolitical uncertainty and the concerns about if the US actually does make moves against Greenland, and the things we’re saying about Canada, is causing a lot of concerns and alarm bells and people are trying to buy down. IT people are not about risk. They want to buy down their risk. They want to say, “Let’s go with something that we’re absolutely sure we’re not going to have problems with.” And SAP has been a stalwart IT provider for a couple decades now. And for a lot of overseas buyers, they’re the safe choice now. It’s very interesting.
Camberley Bates: So the uptick is primarily a European uptick. It’s not a migration of-
Dion Hinchcliffe: IT is also in APAC, but it’s most pronounced in Europe. It’s what the data says. It just came out this week. So that’s why it makes our news.
Camberley Bates: It makes huge sense. Makes huge sense.
Keith Townsend: So is this an overall expansion of the market? Or is SAP taking share away from folks like Oracle as a result?
Dion Hinchcliffe: It looks like it’s taking share overseas away from… Oracle provides a lot of what SAP provides in terms of their ERP suite, all their fusion applications. And so yeah, this is a real loss for Oracle, whether we haven’t seen that data yet, it’d be very interesting to watch their numbers. These are gains, in terms of net new wins, for SAP.
Camberley Bates: For our data privacy though, Oracle, and I don’t know the Patriot Act, so obviously you sound like you know a little bit more about it than I do. If Oracle has a site in Germany or France or whatever that’s housing their ERP system and the data resides in those countries, does the Patriot Act have oversight on that?
Dion Hinchcliffe: Technically, yes. That’s the big objection now. It’s never been tested. I mean, they’ve tried to test it, but unfortunately the US companies have just given up. I mean, they’ve not taken it to court. They’ve given up the data.
Camberley Bates: Yeah, because I thought we had that, and I may be wrong, done through the Microsoft in Ireland and emails that were but that’s foggy right now.
Dion Hinchcliffe: No, there has been cases. That one was a good example of a company standing up for their customer’s rights. But in the end, the Patriot Act allows even technically, even if the data is overseas, it still applies. The company has to hand over the data.
Camberley Bates: Not good.
Keith Townsend: This is why there’s debate in, not debate, but movement and the reality that at the engineering level, you need to maintain your own security key, infrastructure, encryption. You can’t rely on the providers to protect your data, whether we’re talking about from state actors, regulatory issues, or even from bad actors themselves. Cloud providers in the case of AWS, Azure, and Google all make it really easy for them to manage your key management and your encryption. But if they’re managing that, that’s subject to regulations, whether you’re talking about EU, Asia, or the US. So you do need, this is a great example, that you do need to protect your own data regardless of where it sits.
Dion Hinchcliffe: This emphasizes why the trend right now is for holding your own keys, in which case it doesn’t matter. If the data is always encrypted at rest and in motion, then you still own your data. Even if that’s in a cloud provider. All they can do is hand over encrypted data.
Camberley Bates: And unfortunately encrypting data, you can’t take advantage of the data reduction technologies and those kinds of things. Because it doesn’t reduce and therefore your costs are more. But you’re supposed to be encrypting everything anyway.
Keith Townsend: There is no perfect solution and you have to be aware of the trade-offs. Speaking of perfect solutions and being aware of your trade-offs, 37signals. If you’re not familiar with 37signals, they’ve been pretty disruptive, Camberley, in this whole market around cloud repatriation and this idea that where everyone is moving to the cloud.
Camberley Bates: So not for the faint of heart, because about three years ago they started repatriating their core technology capabilities and bringing it on-prem. And they have cited that they’ve been saving millions and millions and millions of dollars in doing this. 37signals are the people behind Basecamp and a couple of other technology areas. And their CTO, David Heinemeier is very, very vocal with this post about what they’ve been doing. Now, when I say it’s not for the faint of heart, it’s because they’re running on open source. And so when they repatriated the server piece of the business, it’s all open source technology that they’re doing. So they got their own people running this. Not every company is ready to go and do that and the difficulties that are around that.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Well, but they used to. This is the funny thing. Everyone used to run their own data center. So that also has gotten really underdeveloped. But Dropbox has done exactly the same thing, saying, “If we know what our workload is, then why would we pay for the cost of sales, marketing? The profit margin? And all the fixed overhead when we could benefit that ourselves?” It’s kind of flipping the whole original cloud argument on its head. It’s very interesting.
Camberley Bates: So the second piece to this has been their data. And their data was on a four-year contract, so they could not move it out of AWS. It’s a big S3. It’s about 18 petabytes that they are in the process of moving. I guess there is a get out of jail kind of no charge for egress going on with AWS right now. So they’re trying to take advantage of that. And I think it’s the end of May is when they have to be out or they start at $5,000 a day. That would be the charge for taking this out. So the rush is saying, “Can you bring all this data back on-prem?” Also, which is pretty cool, is they’re using, they did a bid out with the different disk vendors or drive vendors looking at combinations between hard drives and solid state drives in order to deliver whatever they’re going to do.
And they ended up with PureSystems. So I don’t know if they’re running completely a PureSystem disaggregated kind of environment or what it is. I haven’t gotten the information yet from Pure, but what I do know is they’re running with Pure’s direct flash drives, which are 150 terabyte solid state drives. And the economics they say are better than the hard drives.
Which goes contrary to what we are seeing in some of the cloud providers, which are still using hard drives and saying the economics are there. So there’s a bit of a battle going on, but this is kind of like we’re going to see if they can get all that data off within timeframe to avoid the $5,000 bill a day that’s going on there.
Keith Townsend: So this has been a really interesting story because I’ve followed it since the original volley using AMD servers and from Dell. We’ll get into that discussion later on.
But their CTO talked about the shock and awe of when he first started to explore moving his workloads from AWS on premises. And the sheer amount of cost around the fluff, whether you’re talking about VMware vSphere, support for open source, finding the engineers. Because they did, Dion, they did lose that muscle of being able to run data centers. He was surprised to see how difficult it was to find and retain talent around.
Dion Hinchcliffe: It’s a completely different proposition. Everything’s all totally virtualized and hyper-visored and all that. That’s a very different world now.
Keith Townsend: Yeah, I run into very few net new engineers who want to learn virtualization. It’s like finding a net new application developer that wants to learn Fortran or Cobalt. I jest a little bit, but it’s a similar thing. Why would I learn how to deploy a commodity when the value is in the higher end abstraction? But they’re moving forward and they’ve saved a ton of money and they’re turning a familiar knob, Camberley, of sweating assets.
Camberley Bates: Yes. So the other item as I was reading through, there was another blog that they put opposite. Talking about how they are now into the year 10 of sweating the Dell servers they originally bought when they started the company 15, 10 years ago, whatever it was. I think believe it was 10 years ago for half a million.
Dion Hinchcliffe: All that says is they’re not doing AI. I’ll talk about that. I’m following this cloud repatriation at the CIO level for three years now because it’s interesting.
Camberley Bates: And I agree with that. Classically what we do is we take servers and do something else with. But where that economics goes in is that when they did the economic analysis of coming out of the cloud, they looked at five years of sweating the servers. So if you go back and say, “Okay, so I’m going to do 10 years of servers. I’m going to tier them down to doing low life kind of stuff.” Or low level, not low life, low level kind of activities.
Dion Hinchcliffe: We don’t know what they’re doing.
Keith Townsend: No. Have you talked to your latest Linux guy? Man, they are kind of low life.
Camberley Bates: I’m sorry, data protection people, Linux people. Sorry about that. I’m moving it down to lower priority availability kind of areas. But still if you’re in the cloud, you’re paying. I mean I’m sure that there’s cheaper costs and everything else if you analyze what you would do over 10 years of that with lower cost servers that are in the cloud. But that has an implication in terms of your depreciation schedules, your costs, et cetera.
Dion Hinchcliffe: It does. Well, and you also have to look at, they must have a pretty steady state workload because they can’t have all those. If they just had, let’s say a North American audience, then they would have their servers quiet 16 hours a day. And that can’t be the case because then you’re paying for all those facilities and all that overhead for 24 hours a day, only using eight hours a day for only in a narrow set of time zones. But when I’m arguing now, when people say cloud, you can’t assume public cloud anymore. Cloud is now very much a private abstraction as well. It is an equally valid destination. And certainly IT looks at it this way. Say when we look at workloads, we’re now much more agnostic is what I’m hearing.
And my latest research on private cloud, which is coming out should be this week, tracks the very rapid growth in how willing over the last four years, CIOs are willing to reconsider where their workloads run. Is it public cloud or private cloud? When we say cloud now, we don’t know which one means. It means the same set of cloud technologies, but it could be used on-premise, it could be used in colo, it could be used out there in the hyperscaler world. It doesn’t mean anything. And it could be edge as well. It could be running workloads very, very close to where it needs to run if it needs to be performant. So I think cloud now just means a set of technologies. Doesn’t necessarily mean public cloud anymore, is the argument that I’m making. And certainly 71% of CIOs agree with me. They say they’re willing to consider, 71% willing to consider where they put their workloads, are reconsidering where they’re going to put their workloads this year. So it’s very interesting.
Camberley Bates: I think it was, I don’t know, six, seven years ago when we did survey on cloud. And we asked the question about cloud. And then we’d ask about what they meant by their cloud environment? And the majority of the time back then, that was a VMware virtualized environment was their cloud.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Oh, very interesting. I didn’t know that.
Camberley Bates: Yes, it was. It was like this. If it’s cloud first, what do you mean by that? And you get down into what it-
Dion Hinchcliffe: Was there, Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Camberley Bates: And I think-
Keith Townsend: Yeah, so-
Camberley Bates: That was checking the box to say we’re in the cloud back to the executives.
Keith Townsend: And there was an awful lot of that. I actually just got a little… I hope he doesn’t watch this because he’ll identify, he’ll quickly identify what I’m talking about.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Who he is, yeah.
Keith Townsend: But I talked to a executive, I got a note from an executive who basically said, circa that era, Camberley, that he has learned so much more about cloud since the last time I did a project with him and he’s doing other more advanced cloud transformations. But back then that was the checkbox. You could go to your CEO, CFO and say, “We’ve migrated to the cloud,” by simply virtualizing your environment was the standard for moving to the cloud. Which gets us into kind of the enterprise thinking versus the provider thinking. The enterprise thinking is AI, IT, technology capability is a tool, it is a hammer and we’re going to sweat that asset until we can’t. Until it just needs to be replaced. That’s the majority of this thing you’re talking about.
Dion Hinchcliffe: You can do pay as you go with Amazon now on premise. You can do pay as you go with HPE. So the pricing models have gotten so you can sweat other people’s assets now. I mean it’s an all new world. The options that enterprises have are unprecedented today on where you want to put those workloads.
Keith Townsend: And because of that abstraction, enterprises can stay on legacy architectures longer. So I don’t need to re-platform my storage system because Amazon has provided me S3 for 14 years and I don’t need to look at a different protocol for accessing data. There is a argument amongst technologists that you should always modernize, you should always stay current, but we’ve abstracted at least the underlying technologies that we don’t need to. We can build a cloud app 12 years from now, use load balancers, blah, blah, blah. If there’s a new modern architecture, we don’t worry about that because we’ve established the baseline for the value. So yes, there’s a new nail gun that will provide me faster, the ability to frame faster, but I don’t need to frame faster. The nail gun is working fine for me.
Dion Hinchcliffe: And this is where the hyperscalers have shot themselves in the foot as well. So again, if you look at the management level, the CFO is asking the CIO what is their budget projections for the next three years. That is very standard. CFO wants that reliability, especially for public companies. They want to report this out. Government is also the same way. They have to have these budgets. And when you’re using an external provider and you don’t have a three-year contract, you can guarantee they’re going to jack up the rates. And the cost of cloud has gone up faster than inflation for years. And SAS as well, same thing. Cost increases have gone up faster than inflation. The CIO can’t tell a CFO accurately what their future IT cost is going to be. Now if you have your own assets, you know exactly what costs you’re going to be and that has really changed the equation. The recent price increases for SAS and cloud have dramatically changed the acquisition template for many organizations. They’re now much more amenable to saying, “We want predictability. We want financial predictability and cloud is killing us the last few years.” So that’s also another factor.
Camberley Bates: And that gets us back to paid licenses as well.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Yes.
Keith Townsend: Which gets us to an amazing real life use case that we get to watch unfold in real time. The IPO of CoreWeave. For those who don’t know, CoreWeave is an NVIDIA backed startup that basically provides AI cloud services. They’re laser focused on providing services, high level abstractions, cloud abstractions for people wanting to run AI. But, Dion and Camberley, I can’t help but realize after coming out of GTC the week before we’re recording this, that plant obsolescence is a real thing when you’re a hyper-scale provider like CoreWeave. And now the economics of the millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars that you spent on H100s Hopper chips, I can now get much better efficiencies, operating efficiencies. There’s like a five to six month ROI for my OpEx budget to move to the next generation of GPU. How do you? I guess beyond the news, we’ll get into the ticktock of the stock price, but we’re infrastructure folks. How does CoreWeave operate at that level? Cloud providers are sweating assets. Amazon just announced that they’re extending some of their depreciation schedules to what, from five to seven years, so that increases their profit margins. I can’t imagine that CoreWeave can do this. Not with AI chips.
Camberley Bates: You mean sweat their?
Keith Townsend: You can’t sweat a H100, not from a provider perspective.
Dion Hinchcliffe: You’re lucky to get a year. And they want two years out of AI chips these days, but you’re lucky to get a year.
Camberley Bates: Maybe that changes who the target markets are. One of the things we’re finding is that we know that CPUs can address some of the work that has to be going on with inferencing and for the enterprise and for the other companies. So the race right now seems to be after these AI centric companies that are building a business that may be around AI.
And I’m not privy to the data that we’ve got coming out from probably Brad Schuman and Nick Patience on the use cases. But what I hear from the teams that are testing things, you still have the ability to use chips that are probably slower to be able to get things done.
Now the flip side of that is the energy consumption because we’re seeing some efficiencies and such coming out of the new technologies. So the economics will be interesting as they look at that, both from a use case, where can the older ones being used? Is there a different market for them as you upgrade to the other stuff? It’s classic what we’re doing in the data center, right? Those old servers that’s 37signals are doing, is not doing core applications or running transactional operations, I’m sure. It’s going down and doing some low level, not low life, low level file serving.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah, well, those productivity applications and not transaction applications. And not it.
Keith Townsend: Yeah. And then the enterprise, just the culture and the math and enterprise is different. When you’re not providing your technology as a service, the cog of your technology does not directly impact the end output. So for example, if I bought an H100 today based on a justification around some capability over the next five years, it really doesn’t matter if a B300 comes out or a B… Or I’m sorry, a BG300. The naming, their naming is crazy. And you can get 40X the performance and have a ROI that’s five months.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Well, if you need to have competitive… If you have competitive pricing, it might matter, right? I mean, that’s the thing.
Keith Townsend: So if I didn’t outsource that risk to the provider, if I bought the H100. I’ve been in the enterprise on the operations side much too long. I’m way too bitter around this. So correct me if I’m wrong. But I don’t pay my power bill. If I run infrastructure, I don’t pay the power bill. So if operationally I can, there’s a ROI that’s five, six months that does not impact my budget. I paid $1.5 million for these H100 things. When I have to answer to the CFO, he or she wants to know, am I on course to continue to use this depreciable assets through its useful life? The operations, if I was to buy a B300, the new chip, and it saved power from an OpEx perspective, as the operations guy from the IT side, I get no benefit from that. I get no professional benefit from saving the facilities folks cost. Even if, and the simple fact of the matter is, I didn’t save them cost. They’re going to use the same amount of power, et cetera, et cetera. So that culture completely changes with providers.
Dion Hinchcliffe: It’s why you see them buying nuclear power plants now. It’s all been focused down at the facilities level now.
Camberley Bates: It would be interesting to pull their SEC filing and see what depreciation schedule they’re using on their AI GPUs.
Keith Townsend: Yeah, I think that’s a lot of the debate.
Camberley Bates: Change the policy. Because if I was a financial investor looking at them and saying, “What’s their balance sheet look like? What’s their capitalization look like?” That would be one of the areas that you’d have to dig into.
Keith Townsend: And our CEO, who’s pretty astute around some of these things, Dan Newman, posted to that effect. The depreciation is a really big question around CoreWeave. And there IPO results I think hint towards that he’s probably correct. They were targeting IPO, in there at around 47 to $55 for initial offering. But they ended up much softer at about $40. They didn’t put as many shares out for the offer. They only raised $1.5 billion as opposed to the $2 billion they wanted to raise.
Camberley Bates: Well, they haven’t gone out yet, have they?
Keith Townsend: I think their IPO is today was, yeah, they opened at $40. So it is a interesting-
Dion Hinchcliffe: I just looked it up. It looks like, so the hyperscalers have gone from about a three-year GPU depreciation schedule recently to five years, which is very surprising to me. I would’ve figured that they’d be going the opposite direction. So that’s Google, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have all gone from about three years to five to six years now.
Camberley Bates: Okay, maybe on the new-
Keith Townsend: I think all of this is a really big proxy on not just NVIDIA and whether or not they’ll be able to continue their billions of dollars of growth every year, but whether or not AI is actually being adopted at the pace and speed as advertised. And it would be, I think, hard to believe or at least hard to reconcile. I really would want to dig into the math of why that depreciation schedule is expanding versus to your point, Dion, shrinking.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Well, I think it must be being used on other workloads as well. But what’s really interesting is what companies are going to do going forward in terms of how they’re going to source compute. I see we’re very much going towards the spot market where for a lot of the cloud primitives, cloud storage networking, you’re going to see much more of a spot market evolving. We are seeing it now.
Keith Townsend: All right. So again, this has been an engaging conversation. We’re starting going the meaty part of the spring from conference season. GCN, Google Cloud Next, is just a couple of weeks away, albeit that. Early summer, late spring, Dell Technology World is coming up. We’re in the more traditional part of the infrastructure shows. Dion, Camberley, anything that you’re keeping your eye open for?
Camberley Bates: So QCon is next week and, the big and, the first day of QCon, which is not the official day, but they have all these sessions that are going on, is a full day. And it’s the highest attended full day session is on platform engineering.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Ah, yes.
Camberley Bates: Put that in your bonnet.
Dion Hinchcliffe: It is the hot topic for sure.
Keith Townsend: We need to have an extended conversation on platform engineering. It’s one of my favorite topics and it’s kind of like that cloud conversation we just had. How companies are checking the box when they have VMware and say that they have a cloud. Well, you don’t necessarily have one and you probably don’t have a platform engineering team if you think you do.
Camberley Bates: Well, we had a lively debate on Textron Gang with Mitch Ashley and a couple of others about platform engineering, DevOps, secure ops, all that kind of thing. About whether or not platform engineering was really IT operations. Where that fits? How that’s operating? So let’s see what happens coming out it.
Dion Hinchcliffe: I don’t think the ops people can do platform engineering. But anyway, that’s mine.
Keith Townsend: I think that is a fascinating insight, Dion, and I think it will stick a pin in it for post-QCon, I think. Make sure the tone in next week, not just to find out about this whole platform engineering conversation, but where in the world is Dion Hinchcliffe?
Dion Hinchcliffe: I didn’t even get it myself.
Keith Townsend: He doesn’t even know. The world wants to know. Talk to you soon. Thanks a lot for staying with us.
Author Information
Camberley brings over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career has spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley has provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
Dion Hinchcliffe is a distinguished thought leader, IT expert, and enterprise architect, celebrated for his strategic advisory with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. With over 25 years of experience, Dion works with the leadership teams of top enterprises, as well as leading tech companies, in bridging the gap between business and technology, focusing on enterprise AI, IT management, cloud computing, and digital business. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, industry analyst, and author, known for his insightful and in-depth contributions to digital strategy, IT topics, and digital transformation. Dion’s influence is particularly notable in the CIO community, where he engages actively with CIO roundtables and has been ranked numerous times as one of the top global influencers of Chief Information Officers. He also serves as an executive fellow at the SDA Bocconi Center for Digital Strategies.
Keith Townsend is a technology management consultant with more than 20 years of related experience in designing, implementing, and managing data center technologies. His areas of expertise include virtualization, networking, and storage solutions for Fortune 500 organizations. He holds a BA in computing and an MS in information technology from DePaul University. He is the President of the CTO Advisor, part of The Futurum Group.
