In episode 55 of the Six Five Webcast Infrastructure Matters, hosts Steven Dickens and Camberley Bates from The Futurum Group dive into recent reports on changes in cloud deployments. including looking into more reports on repatriation and public cloud trending, and what that means for new technologies being introduced to the markets, including announcements from Oracle and Lenovo. They also discuss VMware and what that means with the cloud. Finally, our program extends our hearts to Brian Gong’s family and friends due to his passing.
Their discussion covers:
- Honoring Brian Gong
- Cloud Adoption Trends and how the focus has shifted from cloud first to application placement, influenced by the AI boom and cost concerns. How companies are evaluating the best platform for each workload rather than making blanket decisions about cloud migration
- VMware trending, for migration and TCO analysis of the options
- The strategic importance of partnerships in delivering vertical applications, including data effective AI training
- New announcement from Lenovo, plus the impact of the advanced liquid cooling technology of Neptune
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Listen to the audio here:
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this webcast. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this webcast.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome to episode 55 of Infrastructure Matters. I’m joined today by my wonderful co-host, Camberley Bates. I’m Steven Dickens. We’re glad to be here. Hey Camberley, welcome.
Camberley Bates: Good morning.
Steven Dickens: I know. Just the two of us again today. Nice intimate little setting.
Camberley Bates: Oh, wonderful. I don’t know if everybody realizes that you’re my technical brother, that we have this odd relationship going on here that we pick on each other like brother and sister now.
Steven Dickens: Sister from another mister is my thing-
Camberley Bates: There you go. We just have to watch out for when we do it in front of one of the vendor calls or something like that, they don’t know how to take us when we pick on each other.
Steven Dickens: We had that dynamic on a call the other… They were like, “You two are arguing with each other in front of us.” And we’re like, “But that’s what we do.”
Camberley Bates: Well, I love a good argument. You’re easy to argue with, that’s the good news.
Steven Dickens: I try. Genuinely though, I think the briefings that we get, the information we try and digest, you need a sparring partner to be able to contextualize it. A lot of my thinking is done with colleagues like you, we’re working on some stuff we’re going to talk about, “Well, I heard that this way.” “Well, how does that relate to this?” “Well, I see it this way.” And I think it’s a phrase I’d like to use is, we’ve got strong opinions lightly held. I love to come into a discussion and go, “I saw it this way.” Then you are one of the best at this, you’ll go, “Oh, well I saw it a completely different way.” And I’m like, “Oh, well, okay. Camberley is smarter than me. I’ll change my opinion.” That’s typically a mindset I go through. I don’t win many battles with you, but you seem to win a lot with me.
Camberley Bates: Wow, okay.
Steven Dickens: I say that out loud for posterity.
Camberley Bates: There we go. We’ll record that. Before we really get started, I wanted to do a call-out. We lost a one of our analyst friends this last couple few weeks here, Brian Gong of Pure Storage. For those of you who are listening in that may not know how the analyst works, Brian Gong has been working as an analyst relations person with the vendors for a long time and he’s well-loved, well-liked. Young man, died in his sleep. Which I hope I would do as well, but not at that young age. Brilliant, bright smiles always and lots of selfies. We want to say our heart goes out to his family and he’s very involved with the community there in California as well as all of his friends there. Thank you very much for being part of our lives.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, it’s a really sad story. I met Brian literally the week before this happened at VMware Explore. High energy meeting with Paul and I, just super fun, fantastically professional guy, just really sad. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends at this difficult time. I don’t know where I go from here as the host, but-
Camberley Bates: We take a sigh and we say that thank you. Then we’re going to move on to some of our other things-
Steven Dickens: I think Brian would want us to carry on and keep covering the industry and keep bringing our insights. As I say, tough conversation to kick us off, but we wanted to mention that. A couple of big topics. I don’t know what order we want to do this in Camberley, we should have maybe got a bit more organized this morning, but I’ll do them in the order we’ve got written down. There’s some stuff going on with AWS, repatriation data, big investments, what we’re seeing in sovereign cloud. I just came from Oracle, there’s some good stuff that they’re doing. Maybe throw it to you and then come back to me. We’ve been talking about Sovereign Cloud, we’ve been talking about investments. I think it’s just one of the big timelines that I’m seeing in the industry. Almost every week there’s somebody investing a billion dollars in a cloud build out in a far from part of the world. What are you seeing and how are you contextualizing this?
Camberley Bates: Well, there’s been several reports and we haven’t done any research studies on this, but there’s definitely this trending that has been going on for quite some time. Whereas five years ago, everything was cloud first. Then we shifted to which cloud, and then we shifted to, “Okay, what’s the best place for this application. Where do you want to put it?” Is it a Google, AWS, Azure or on-prem? Now we’re into… I think part of it might be driven. Part of it’s driven by two things, one is the AI craze and the data sovereignty issue that’s going on that is uplifted with the AI craze about how I’m going to train my data, the privacy of data, LLMs versus on-prem, that kind of thing. I think the second thing, is that we’ve gotten to a place where the applications, whenever you get to an application status point, the next thing you do once you get to a status point and a stable point, you look at how you start taking cost out. We’ve had this pressure on costs for quite some time. We’re still in that mode. We’re staying away from recession, but we’re still in that. Nobody’s quite sure about what that next quarter’s going to look like, so you have the tightening down of it. When you have a tightening down, you’ve got to look at your costs and then you start opening up. A lot of people think that people moved to the cloud for cost purposes and they did not. They moved to the cloud because-
Steven Dickens: We’re so past that narrative now. We’re so past it.
Camberley Bates: Right. They moved it, but even in the beginning when we did the research on it and asked them why, they were saying, “It’s because I can move so fast.”
Steven Dickens: It’s flexibility.
Camberley Bates: The flexibility.
Steven Dickens: It’s flexibility.
Camberley Bates: Now I have to look, “Okay, so I’ve got it stable.” Then I look, where’s the best place for this? That activity is going on in terms of rationalizing, where do I place my applications? We’ve said before on this podcast, that only about 70% probably of the enterprise applications have actually moved… Or no, I’m sorry, 30% have moved, 70% are still on-prem. It makes sense that they will take a look about what’s going over there. At the same time they’re looking at what do they do with VMware, all those rationalizations that are going on. There is definitely some repatriation going on, but it’s not like, what, 57 signals? Is that the right number, 57 signals?
Steven Dickens: 37 signals. I think-
Camberley Bates: 37 signals. It’s not like 37-
Steven Dickens: DHH and his wonderful LinkedIn and X posts.
Camberley Bates: It’s not necessarily somebody saying, “Okay, I’m going to take the entire thing and plop it back down.” It’s looking at it from a case by case, and a use case by use case, what makes the most sense. We are in a world of multi-hybrid cloud and that’s where we’re going to be.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, I think the way I’m looking-
Camberley Bates: What I’d love to hear, especially since you just got back from Oracle’s conference, CloudWorld, that’s what it’s called nowadays?
Steven Dickens: Yep.
Camberley Bates: It’s not just Oracle, it’s now CloudWorld for Oracle, what they were saying. Because they have built one of the best clouds in the world, I think, that have to do with the enterprise.
Steven Dickens: I’ve been a long advocate for this. I think where Oracle is largely where my mind is, so there’s some sort of meeting of minds. I think Oracle’s got a balanced perspective. They’ve obviously got OCI and that’s growing at 45% based on the last earnings, but they’ve also got Exadata Cloud@Customer and there’s the connectivity between the two. What they announced was that they completed the set with AWS, that there’s now OCI in each one of those cloud providers. This isn’t, “Oh, I can get Oracle licenses through the marketplace and deploy it on AWS infrastructure.” This is OCI infrastructure in an AWS data center.
I think the interesting thing for me in all of that is, you mentioned it and you said it quickly, but I think it’s worth going back to, we live in a hybrid multi-cloud world. You’re going to have relationships with all of the cloud providers. I was chatting to Google this week. They’re seeing people start to get more balanced between the big three. Then you see Oracle growing at 45% when the big three are growing in high twenties, so are they getting market share? Then you also see that Dell with Apex, Lenovo with TruScale and HPE with GreenLake, are growing massively. So I think you’ve got to hold multiple truths to be true at the same time. Public cloud is growing, private cloud is also the right answer. I think we talked about VMware and VCF- 9 and the Broadcom pivot more towards private cloud. I come back and I’ve been saying this for the last 15 years, you’ve got to look at workload placement. You’ve got to look at it as an enterprise architect through this rubric.
Each workload is different. I look at it like journeys that you take. You take a journey, you choose whether you go on your push-bike like you and I ride bikes. You decide, because that’s something you do for sport and for health. You commuting to work. How far away is that? Is it down to the city like I do on the Amtrak? If I’m going to Vegas, I’m going to fly. You look at each journey and you go, “What is the right platform for this workload?” There is not one definitive answer. I think as an enterprise architect, if you carry a rubric round in your mind of, give each one of these scales a mark of one to 10, availability, security, scalability, ESG controls and security. Put those on a list and go, “Is it a system of record where my CIO will get fired if I have five minutes of downtime?” If you start there, you’re going to make some very different decisions to, “Oh, is this a system of engagement where our customer can just come back an hour later and access the application?”
Camberley Bates: I’m not sure if that’s a decision point about where to put it. Because I think that that’s the design criteria-
Steven Dickens: Yeah, okay-
Camberley Bates: … wherever you put it. The reason why we might poke at the cloud, is because the cloud is three nines, unless you do the right job. Those people that know how to do that, you have an architect that goes in there, you just don’t drop something in the cloud. You architect it with multiple regions, you architect it with… Now we’re learning even more about how the crowd strike thing also opened a bunch of doors at how things can go wrong again, so you have to go back and look at availability. Poor Delta. Well, sorry, I won’t go there. It does not obviate your need for high availability, requirements design, DR design, data protection design and security design, all of those have to go into whatever place that you’re in, and that’s your responsibility.
Steven Dickens: It’s on you. I think we got to a point where people just went, and I’m not a fan of serverless because I always ask the question, “What server does it run on?” And that freaks people. I see the appeal of serverless, because it gets you out of having to think about these things, but I think you should think about these things. Start with some of those non-functional requirements. Start with RPO, RTO. Keith Townsend on our team and I got tweaked this week, because return to office is different to recovery time objective people. Those mean two different things. From an enterprise architecture point of view, I think RTO means recovery time objective. We will use this as a jumping off point into VCF- 9… Because our team’s been doing some thinking about this, been doing some analysis. We’ve got a research paper which hopefully we put into the queue to get published today, I’m pushing the team to get that done. But it’s been fascinating to look through that whole space through the context of the broader conversation we’ve just been having. Camberley, do you want to summarize some of the work we’ve been doing as a team to look at VCF- 9 and we’ll jump off there?
Camberley Bates: Well, why don’t you start with the top one because you led that off and then I only added some of the pieces.
Steven Dickens: Happy to have it pushed back. Our team, some of us went out to VMware Explore a few weeks ago. It was the first event to kick it off after this fall season. Big announcements that Paul Nashawaty and I covered in a research note about VCF- 9, Paul and I just went, “That’s probably not enough.” 900… What was it? A thousand words, just covering the announcement. There’s a lot to unpack. There’s a lot going on in the industry. We’ve had briefings from Nutanix, we’ve had briefings from Red Hat. We’ve had briefings from all the OEM partners as they look at-
Camberley Bates: Dell, HPE, NetApp, Pure.
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Camberley Bates: Sure. It’s ongoing.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, so it’s been a hot topic. As a team, we’ve decided to collaborate on a more detailed, what you should be thinking about, how you should contextualize what’s going on with VCF-9. Without stealing the report’s thunder, I think it’s be balanced, be measured. There’s a lot of heat and noise, and what we’re trying to do is find the signal in the noise. It’s really interesting where a lot of enterprises are, depending on their size and their deployment of VMware, they’ve got some real choices to make. I think everybody will be telling you to get off. Everybody will be telling you the wonderful benefits of their particular solution or how their consulting organization will deliver a project on time and save you millions. I think there’s some pragmatism that’s required. I think you’ve got to look beyond why is that vendor and why is that system integrator telling you that? What is the success rate of IT Projects to do big, what I describe as, brain damage migrations? They’re not that successful typically. You’ve got to make a balanced decision. Biggest driver for me is scale of your VMware deployment. If you’ve got a massive VMware deployment like some of the big Fortune 50, Fortune 100 organizations, you’re probably signing yourself up to a 03:00 to 5:00 PM migration project and is Nirvana going to be Nirvana at that point. There’s a lot to unpack there and this document keeps growing. I think it’s nine pages at the moment, but I’ve got a whole bunch more I need to add today.
Camberley Bates: To that, the report that we’re doing is more focused on VCF, where it’s at, and then what are some of the other options that are along with it versus a, here’s a migration tool. We’re not doing that. Because one of the things that we’ve seen, when I say all the different announcements, there’s two elements to the announcements that are coming out. One is, VMware renegotiated all those contracts basically, that if you will, the OEM contracts or whatever. For that purpose, the main thing was the licensing and how they’re licensing. They wanted to make sure that whoever was… It wasn’t just reselling the VMware license, they were adding value to it. What we saw roll out and whether it was HPE, Dell, I saw some from NetApp, we saw some from Pure, Lenovo. I’m probably missing somebody, so sorry if I am missing, I can’t keep them all in my head. What they showed in various sundry ways is, “Here is what we’re doing to build a stack to make it very easy to roll in.”
The second piece that we saw was that most of them were announcing some sort of service to say, “If you want to get off, move to something else. Here is what we are doing to provide assistance for that.” We’ve recently also seen tools that are basically saying from them just saying what kind of cost, “Here’s the estimate. What is the cost benefit for moving off?” Because you’re looking at, what is my core count, all those kinds of things. One of the things we were looking at, the lab team was looking at, is core count in terms of how VMware gets priced and what I can get out of it. So I look at how many transactions can I pull out of a certain processor that’s this size versus another processor that’s this size, and does that give me a benefit? We didn’t see a significant benefit when it came to a VMware licensing unlike what we’ve seen with other things like SQL or Oracle on the core count. So I don’t know if the new server is going to provide that benefit or not.
Steven Dickens: That’s one I want to double click on in the paper. Literally, I was thinking about that overnight. I think if you’ve got old servers, maybe not-
Camberley Bates: Older than the last two. I’m looking at, the lab has got a regular cadence of doing some server testing that we do for certain clients. If we went back and looked at a version, two versions back, clearly there is a value proposition to-
Steven Dickens: That’s an area I’m literally thinking about overnight. It was one of the recommendations. I think we’re going to see a lot of VMware estates that stay VMware estates do a consolidation. This is an opportunity for those OEMs. If you are… All we talk about is the new latest, greatest server. Lots of enterprises have got servers that are 4, 5, 6, 7 years old. I think this will put some tension into the system. If you’ve got a seven-year-old X-86 server running VMware, and there’ll be a lot of those out there in the industry, do you want to take 10 of those and consolidate it to two and two brand new ones? That’s probably the consolidation ratio, and you can get a lot of value from your discussion with Broadcom around your VCF licensing from that. That’s an area where I see people being pragmatic, “Hey, I could throw this all away and go to Nutanix. I could go to Red Hat. I could go somewhere else. Or could I just do some work to consolidate the estate I’ve got? Maybe the price goes up by 20 30%, but it doesn’t go up by 4X.”
Camberley Bates: At that end, this last year we saw enterprise servers slow down in terms of sales. If you looked at the numbers coming out of. Both Dell and HPE and Lenovo were all reporting kind of on that, some of them were more distinctive than the others. The one that I recall the most, and you listened to Lenovo very intently, so you may be able to pop in on that, but HPE. They did specifically call out, not only did they have the double-digit of course on the AI servers, they had the double-digit on the enterprise servers. What they said is, “We’re starting to see that free up.” Even sweating those assets, if you will… I love that term term, sweating those assets.
Steven Dickens: I’ve always struggled with that. We’ve got water cooled servers and their sweating. But yeah, whatever.
Camberley Bates: My fourth minute into my plank, that’s definitely sweating my asset there. We won’t even go what that means. Anyway, so they are taking longer to take those servers. Now what possibly we’re seeing, is that they’re going to start returning them this next year. Then that’s going to be an interesting year because then we’re going to see the battle between Intel and AMD on what server to go in, because they are definitely neck and neck on enterprise to a certain extent.
Steven Dickens: We won’t get into Intel, because that would be another-
Camberley Bates: No, no, no. Anyway, so that’s my thoughts on it. I know there are some TCOs out there that are looking at this, but you have to look at them and say, “Okay, which one are you going to use?” Everybody’s will vary on how they look at this analysis going forward. Have we killed that one yet?
Steven Dickens: It’s going to be a big document, let’s put it that way. If I bring it home under 15 pages, I think I’ll be impressed. And that’s 15 pages of text without graphics and images and stuff, so it’s going to be a weighty one. Final topic on the docket today is Lenovo’s AI announcements. We’re working closely with the Lenovo team and Flynn over there and those guys. Lots coming through from this vendor. I think the way I’m looking at it, there’s a couple of things I like about what Lenovo’s doing. This AI accelerator program, they’ve got, I think it’s 165 plus ISV solutions that they’ve tested and packaged and built out and have got reference designs. You can go to Lenovo now and go, “Hey, I want to do a generative AI project around retail oil store shelf management.” Your requirements pretty specific and it’s like, “There’s 20 vendors that do that. I buy Lenovo infrastructure. Have you got any opinions, Lenovo?” And Lenovo will go, “Yeah, we do actually. We’ve got five different vendors, we’ve tested and certified all these. All of these we can pull you into our facility and research Triangle Park and show you a demo of it working and you need to buy this, this, and this and then it’ll work.” They’re not underwriting the solution, they’re not giving you a complete deployment template.
But they’ve done the first part of the work to go, does vendor A work on infrastructure B and can I get there and get the types of things I’m looking for? That’s huge for me. Everybody is being told by their CIOs, and Flynn’s phrase that sticks with me is, “I need three AIs. Just get me three AIs.” And the IT teams going, “Well, I don’t know what that actually means, C-suite executive, but thank you for the direction.” There’s a cycle of people reading stuff in the in-flight magazines, C-suite execs watching a podcast like the ones that we push out and going, “I need some of that. I need that competitive advantage.” Turning around to the CIO that’s going to make that happen, make it happen this quarter. That comes down and then it’s like, “What are we going to do and how are we going to do it and get there fast?” The thing I like is, Lenovo’s thinking through that.
Camberley Bates: That’s… Okay. Again and again I’ve shown my age when I talk about this kind of stuff, but that strategy goes back to the mini computer days. You had a vertical application for every vertical that was out there. That’s what drove… You went in there with your technology, but on top of that, what you needed to do was have that partnership with the application that would go in. Brilliant strategy, love to see what they’re doing. I hadn’t seen anybody else do that at that level. Seen them do it with maybe Dell and the Starburst kind of thing, or Dell definitely published some very super stuff that went up on GitHub, if you want to see applications for transportation, manufacturing, retail. They demonstrated the capability. I believe HPE has done some of the same things in terms of their AI offerings, but not from a use case kind of discussion. AI think that gets really brilliant, because then what I’m not only doing is that I’m saying, “Okay, so this vendor that’s providing this software for this use case.”
More than likely they have companies they can point to that have some level of success deploying. That’s where right now we’re running up against, is that deployment process, that data… That would go back to, I think there’d be interesting to look at this, go back to, are they helping them with that understanding of the data management side of the house? What data do I need to have prepped and ready to go into that use case to be able to train it appropriately versus having hallucinations come out or really bad answers and then get it out the door. I think that what they’re doing, I’m going to have to listen to that announcement.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. Well, the other two key takeaways from the announcement for me, where GPU is a service and what they’re doing with the sixth generation of Neptune. The GPU as a service, I got to get more detail on this. What I think I heard from the briefings, we get briefed before this stuff comes out, but it was a lot to cover in the hour, they’ve put some technology in collaboration with NVIDIA to do GPU virtualization.
Camberley Bates: Is that with TruScale?
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Camberley Bates: So they’re using a TruScale, which for people that are listening, that is your consumption model that they have and how you can consume as buy a drink.
Steven Dickens: These GPUs are expensive beasts, 40, $50,000, and you don’t want to point that at one application, you want to point it at multiple applications. It’s almost going back to the mainframe days of doing a bureau service for your GPU. It’s kind of, how do you time slice this GPU out so you can get multiple applications to be able to leverage this infrastructure? So that was one, I got to get more detail, I got to get a briefing on that, but what I heard was directionally really interesting and made it make sense to me at least.
Camberley Bates: Are they hosting that and then you’re using it as a cloud and-
Steven Dickens: It’s a sort of private cloud, TruScale based consumption service-
Camberley Bates: On your premise or someplace else like-
Steven Dickens: You can put that in an Equinix data center, you can put it wherever you want. It’s kind of that almost private cloud like, but then taking that into GPU time slicing was what I-
Camberley Bates: You need to find out more.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, absolutely. The other one is Neptune, the sixth generation of this stuff. As part of the server acquisition from IBM, Lenovo acquired probably the market leading water cooling business. Because IBM had been in water cooling with the mainframe for eons.
Camberley Bates: But Neptune is more than water cooling, but Neptune is liquid cooling, right?
Steven Dickens: It’s liquid cooling.
Camberley Bates: It’s liquid cooling.
Steven Dickens: Glycol, I think it is. Liquid glycol.
Camberley Bates: For those people that are watching, if you haven’t seen these things, for a technologist, it makes you itch. Because you look at it and it literally is, they’ll take the cover at the top of the cover and you can see all the liquid flowing around on top of all of the processor stuff and you’re kind of going, “But you can’t do that.”
Steven Dickens: I got the chance to go out to Lenovo and spend some time in their liquid cooling lab.
Camberley Bates: That was in Europe, right?
Steven Dickens: Well, I’ve been out to Europe with Lenovo, but this was in RTP in North Carolina. If you love copper and intricate copper wiring, this is a nerd fest. All joking aside, the level of engineering excellence to get that much copper close to silicon and close to high-end components, these are genuinely beautiful looking devices.
Camberley Bates: It’s gorgeous.
Steven Dickens: It’s very rare that you open… We’re cynical analysts who’ve seen all this stuff before. I walked around, they had us in small groups walking around the facility. One of the guys, deep nerd, opens up the server and literally all of us grabbed our cameras on our phones and are taking pictures. Because copper wiring in a server is just a beautiful… I mean I mentioned it because Lenovo’s probably leading with that copper piece. Other people have tried braided hoses and stuff like that, ultimately it doesn’t work. Copper wiring is a thing, you’ve got to be good at it. There’s some really cool stuff going on with Neptune V6. I could nerd out some copper wiring for the next half an hour, but we’ve got to pull this to a close.
You’ve been watching episode 55 of Infrastructure Matters with my wonderful cohost Camberley Bates. Please click and subscribe and do all those things and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thank you very much for watching.
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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.
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
