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Krista Gets Married and Outages, Outages and more Outages – Infrastructure Matters, Episode 49

Krista Gets Married and Outages, Outages and more Outages - Infrastructure Matters, Episode 49

In this episode of Infrastructure Matters, hosts Camberley Bates, Steven Dickens, and Krista Case discuss various topics including Krista’s recent wedding, the CrowdStrike outage, and its implications on cybersecurity, Microsoft’s East Coast Azure outage, and the recent earnings reports of IBM and Google Cloud. Krista emphasizes the importance of cyber resiliency and the need for a robust recovery plan. Steven and Camberley highlight the significance of multi-vendor strategies to mitigate risks and the role of regulation in addressing systemic issues in cloud services. They conclude with insights into the financial performances of IBM and Google Cloud, noting the increasing investments in AI and infrastructure.

The key talking points include:

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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:

Camberley Bates: Good morning, everybody, and we’ve got to come and focus on you because we’ve been playing in the background. I’m Camberly Bates. I am your host here for Infrastructure Matters, and of course, joined by my cohorts, Steven Dickens and Krista Case.

Steven Dickens: This is the new Krista Case. Krista 2.0, new and improved.

Camberley Bates: So the question is, if you had a last name like Macomber, would you change to Case?

Krista Case: So the deal is that I am legally hyphenating, but Krista Case has a nice ring to it and it is also much easier to remember. So it has the double whammy there, we’re going to.

Camberley Bates: You’re going to have to spell it over and over for people. There you go.

Krista Case: Exactly. Exactly.

Camberley Bates: All right.

Steven Dickens: Well, Krista, first off, we’ve going to say congratulations. People may not know what we’re talking about. Krista got married, fantastic news. Long time coming, really great photos. Congratulations.

Krista Case: Thank you so much, Steven. Thank you so much. We’re still waiting for the official sneak peeks from the photographers very anxiously. But we got some lovely shots from some of our guests, including Camberley, so very much appreciate that and we’ve gotten so much support even through my professional network as well. So we really appreciate it, and it was a beautiful day that was over in about 30 seconds and-

Camberley Bates: That’s how it goes.

Krista Case: Right. Yeah.

Camberley Bates: Okay, guys, we’ve had quite a bit going on and Krista, as she was out for getting married, missed the CrowdStrike disaster and here she is in the security business, but she’s back on. So we’re going to put her front and central to say, okay, so now that you’re back from the wedding stuff now, where are we with CrowdStrike and what should we know about this right now after we’ve been… it’s been a week?

Krista Case: It has been. Yeah, and it was ironic that 48 hours after our wedding, apparently the entire tech and security world decided to have a party of storm sorts, but absolutely. So I think probably everybody knows the largest outage, I would say from my perspective really in history resulting from the flawed update to CrowdStrike, their Falcon solution that was pushed to Windows machines. I don’t think we need to spend a ton of time recapping exactly what happened because I think to Camberley your point, it’s been a week at this point. I think it’s been well covered. But taking a little bit of a step back from my perspective, one thing that’s very important to recognize is that this was not a security incident. Want to make sure that that point is front and center here. It was an issue of a flawed software code update getting pushed out. So it’s on one hand a really great reminder because we have spent so much time over the last couple of years and for a good reason covering cyber resiliency, what to do in the event of a cyber attack that I think we’ve almost lost sight that there still are other incidents and disaster events that we have to be prepared for and be able to recover from.

What I will say is that the CrowdStrike solution, part of why unfortunately this bug reached so much havoc is due to the fact that the CrowdStrike solution requires that very low level access to the Windows machines at that kernel lever, at that kernel perspective I should say. So again, that’s something that is one reason why it caused so much havoc, but it really is just a reminder of the need for a very solid plan for resiliency and recovery. And so I think the data protection companies near and dear to my heart, but they’re going to, I think, have a really great opportunity here to talk about what they can do to help in the event that, hopefully it won’t, but in the event that something like this were to happen again in the future.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, there’s some interesting things that I’ve seen come out that this affected 1% of all Windows machines. So I don’t know, I haven’t got that validated. I haven’t been able to check, so that’s the first thing. The second piece with some of the communities, I’m in the Linux and mainframe communities, there’s been a lot of smug responses, a lot of victory laps, a lot of people… I saw Susan doing this, making a victory lap, and I’m like, “Guys, read the room. All of the people who are buyers of your software are also probably Windows server admins as well at the same time, so maybe don’t take a victory lap.” I think just the scale of these outages, people don’t realize the interconnected world they live in, and if this stuff that we rely on every day catches a cold for even a day, the world can stop. How many people stranded at airports? The National Health Service in the UK couldn’t issue prescriptions, surgeries canceled, people being able to…

Shera told me a story about she had to explain what was going on to a line of people at a local bank because they were trying to rip apart the teller. And she’s like, “No, let me tell you what’s happened and why it’s not this lady’s fault,” so I think just the blast radius of this type of stuff, if we can validate that it is 1% of Windows machines that were affected. The other piece I’ve heard, which is why I’m bringing up this 1%, people are saying, “Oh, well, the security market’s too concentrated. Look at the impact that CrowdStrike were to have.” If they’ve got 1% market share of updating Windows service, there’s no FTC case here against… This isn’t a big tech broke the world story. CrowdStrike’s not that massive a company. They haven’t got 100% market share. There’s hundreds of players who do what they do, so I think there’s just some perspective. It gets lost in the noise, but it’s fascinating for me.

Camberley Bates: I had the opportunity to speak to CIOs, CISOs this last week and get a little bit here. A couple of things that was brought up the last time something like this happened was 2010 when McAfee hit, any update like this. Similar, situation was a long time ago. So that’s 14 years that some of these people, some of the guys running the operations were still the elementary school still. So please don’t remind me-

Steven Dickens: So at least they’re trying, let’s put it that way.

Camberley Bates: … for my old age. But one of the things to talk about is that where’s the discipline of rolling out updates within the IT organization and discipline is usually N-2. So you stay behind. Now, somehow or another for some of these people, this slipped through, that practice or maybe they don’t have that practice because of the zero-day problem and saying, “Okay, so was this something that was that important that needed to roll because there was a cyber problem or however that came out?” So those are the questions they’re asking themselves now as they go back and look at their procedures within their systems about, are we sticking to the N-2 and in what cases do we do exceptions to allow this to roll out because what is going to happen?

Steven Dickens: That’s the Hobson’s choice for me, if you are a CISO. You’ve got a patch coming out that fixes a critical issue that could bring down all your systems so you want to roll it out as fast as possible. But if you roll it out as fast as possible without testing, you can bring down all your systems. Which box do you open?

Camberley Bates: And some of the folks that I talked to is that it didn’t take all of the Windows boxes down. They were unique. They talked about we have all of these Windows systems out there. What it took down was just the email servers or what it took down was just something, these order processing servers, it wasn’t ubiquitous of what it hit. So even if I have, I’ve got my set aside boxes that I download the patches on. I run it and clear it, and I clear the patch and then I roll it out. In that situation, I still may have corner cases. So it’s an odd-

Steven Dickens: Did you hear from the people you spoke to? And maybe this is my big enterprise background, if I was running a big bank or a big telco or a big retailer and there was roll CrowdStrike out to every one of my end user machines or go, “I don’t know this market well enough, say vendor A and vendor B that both do the same thing,” would it be an idea to just go with a dual vendor approach and have half of my servers updated by CrowdStrike and half of them updated by another vendor? Because then if this happens again, only half of my servers go down and I’ve got something to back up and recover and-

Camberley Bates: And that is what they did bring up. That was one of the strategies is some of them said, “Okay, I have split vendor strategy here.” However, if you’re a large, large company that’s probably not going to work very well. The smaller the company is, the more likely you are to use just a single one because then you don’t have the skill base for it, so that was another idea. And Krista to your point where you were talking about that focus from cyber and that’s what they raised, it’s like, yeah, we’ve been focused on cyber but there’s two parts to this. There is the disaster recovery piece of it and you have to have your playbooks and everything for that, and there’s a cyber recovery and you have to have your playbooks and everything for that. So it was really an interesting conversation.

Steven Dickens: The really interesting thing for me is going to be automation. This is an automation problem. As you said, it wasn’t-

Krista Case: Well, that’s exactly-

Steven Dickens: … this whole automated patch push…

Camberley Bates: I wonder if ChatGPT could figure this out.

Krista Case: Well, I think it’s going to introduce some… if IT operations and security teams have already been a bit skeptical regarding some of these automated and AI-driven capabilities, if they were already a bit skeptical, they’re going to be even more so now, right?

Steven Dickens: Exactly.

Krista Case: And so I do think we’re going to see a ripple effect there. And just regarding the dual vendor approach, we heard a ton at RSA just around, “Okay, we’re moving towards platforms in the security market, and we’re trying to help you consolidate down your vendors and tools.” Again, I think this is another great example where security teams are perhaps not going to only want to work with multiple vendors to have best of breed but also to reduce their risk, right?

Steven Dickens: Yeah.

Krista Case: Definitely, I think it’s going to shift some of these pendulums that we’ve been seeing swinging in certain directions here.

Camberley Bates: So let’s go on to a related topic, which is the U.S. East Coast outage with Azure, and go ahead, Steve.

Steven Dickens: Well, so Microsoft had a double whammy last Friday. Obviously, they got dragged along for the ride by CrowdStrike. You could say they were lucky to pick the best day to have one of their major U.S. and probably one of the largest cloud regions in the world go down at the same time as CrowdStrike. So if you’re going to pick a day to avoid front-page news for having a major outage, it was last Friday ’cause this would’ve been… I’ve seen-

Camberley Bates: Is that making lemonade out of lemons?

Krista Case: Yes.

Steven Dickens: I think Microsoft would put that way. So Microsoft’s got a couple of big regions in the U.S. U.S. Central’s probably the biggest, and it’s got three availability zones and all three of them are down for 14 plus hours from Thursday night through Friday. I spoke to numerous clients who have got 365 services, i.e., email that weren’t back on email until mid-afternoon Friday afternoon. I’ll give you the list of the services: App Service, Azure Active Directory, Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft Sentinel, Azure Data Factory, EventHub, Service Bus, Log Analytics, SQL database, SQL Managed Instance.

There’s probably 20 plus things here that I could list. It doesn’t make for a great podcast if I go and list off a bunch of services. But they had a multi-availability zone, single-region outage for 14 hours plus at the same time as CrowdStrike, fortunately for them that pulled down. And once you go digging through this and I did, I went through and looked through it and spoke to some people who have got some knowledge, they made a storage update that really just pulled down this entire region.

Camberley Bates: A storage update, because I didn’t hear exactly what happened, a storage update.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, so-

Camberley Bates: What do you mean on the storage guys again?

Steven Dickens: It’s always you storage people. So it was-

Krista Case: I can’t catch a break.

Steven Dickens: It was storage and persistent discs around virtual machines. I’ve got a research note. It ended up being almost 1000 words ’cause you needed the detail. I can share that. If you follow me on X or on LinkedIn, I posted earlier this week. I think some of the learnings for this, and the interesting thing for me is availability zones within regions won’t save you if the region goes down. So let’s just debunk that as a DR strategy for a start off.

If you are in one region and in two availability zones and the region goes down, you’re down. Public clouds are architected for 3 9s availability. If you need more than 3 9s, don’t put your workload on the public cloud. In fact, I have to say that 18 years into the public cloud being deployed is still weird for me. You need to think about this thing. You need to be thinking about multi-cloud. You need to be thinking about multi-region. You need to be thinking whether your workload should be on a public cloud in the first place or whether you should be architecting it with a private cloud or hybrid cloud solution.

I’m not knocking Microsoft, Microsoft do a great job of running a cloud service, multiple billions of revenue come in, lots of happy customers, continuing to grow. I said to somebody earlier this week talking about this, you can hold two truths to be true at the same time. The public cloud can be amazing and it can be growing, and on-premise infrastructure can be great and can be growing and be the right thing for certain workloads. These two truths can be true at the same time.

Krista Case: Well, and it’s interesting, Steven. So one of the first projects I worked on when I joined Camberley’s team five years ago now was on multi-cloud data management and data protection. And probably the most consistent piece of feedback coming out of that, it was a research study, was as a practitioner I simply don’t trust putting all of my eggs in one basket of one cloud provider. And I really would love to have the ability to either fail over or migrate my data between, as you mentioned, ideally two cloud providers or at minimum as you’re mentioning here, a couple of regions, a couple of availability zones. So to your point, cloud market’s been around for 18 years. We’ve certainly been seeing this feedback for years now and I think it’s like you say, just a great reminder of why that dual-pronged approach there is probably going to be the most appropriate.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, it’s no question-

Camberley Bates: And that opens the door-

Steven Dickens: Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Camberley.

Camberley Bates: What you’re talking about opens the doors for the traditional software vendors that have the replication and high availability capability that can operate in multiple clouds. So instead of relying on Azure’s or AWS’s or Google’s software that does that within their own cloud and their regions, and now I’m looking at say, well, one of the people that we’ve worked with recently was SIOS, but there’s also Veritas and those kind of folks that have software that will help you create reliability capabilities, high availability across clouds seamlessly. Whatever seamlessly means with any technology, you got to read through the capabilities. So Steve-

Steven Dickens: The interesting thing for me, and maybe this is the space I live in, is Europe is starting to regulate for stuff like this. They’ve seen concentration risk. They’ve seen how concentrated public cloud providers are into particular data center locations, so Paris, Dublin, London, Frankfurt, the amount of concentration of multiple cloud providers into single data centers. So the DORA regulations in Europe, great place to start, great place to get educated. DORA applies to U.S. organizations that operate in Europe. But if you’re looking for a great place to go and say you’re a mid-size bank in Wisconsin with no operations in Europe and you don’t know where to start, Europe’s doing a great job of this. Go read DORA. Apply DORA to your organization in Wisconsin that’s got no European operations, it’s not a bad place to get going.

Camberley Bates: Absolutely.

Steven Dickens: So there is some good work being done to mitigate some of these issues. I’m not a fan of regulation normally, but when there’s such systemic concentrated risk from some of these cloud providers and infrastructure providers, you’re leading the charge here with DORA, and I think it’s a good place to go looking.

Camberley Bates: I had cocktail hour with somebody in the industry and she lives here in Colorado. She was in San Jose for work, but she also had brought her kids and they got up to fly out Friday morning. Her husband calls her, says, “Oh, my gosh.” They got up at 4:00 to get to a 6:00 flight and calls her and she goes, “Well, what the heck could be happening at this point?” And he tells her what’s happening, so they decide they’re not going to turn the car in. They’re going to drive from San Jose, California to Colorado with teenage kids. But listening to her talk through it and I had this terminator kind of feeling of telling her to go to the bank, pull some cash out. She went to three different banks in order to pull to cash out. And then saying, okay, so now you’re going to get on the road and drive in which you need to refill your car. Are you going to have problems getting gas or whatever, which she didn’t have. But I started playing the scenario out with this kind of stuff and it’s like, “Do I have cash at home? Do I have what I am going to need…..

Steven Dickens: Do I have a bag that I can grab-

Camberley Bates: Right.

Steven Dickens: … in the event of an emergency?

Camberley Bates: Maybe those people aren’t that crazy, so…

Steven Dickens: Do I have some chickens I can trade from fuel? It’s like Mad Max type of apocalyptic fuel-

Krista Case: Right?

Camberley Bates: No, but you totally-

Krista Case: Are we going to start bartering?

Camberley Bates: Forget it ’cause we bartered for this.

Krista Case: Three chickens for a liter of gas.

Camberley Bates: I can’t imagine having to go hit three banks and having that your anxiety level going up to saying, “Oops, this is not looking really good.”

Steven Dickens: You can see how a run on the bank happens, can’t you? She probably went in to get $100 thinking, “I’m probably-

Camberley Bates: The first two banks didn’t have their systems up.

Steven Dickens: No, no, but my point is you go into the first bank to get $100, then you go into the second bank and think, “Maybe I’ll get $300 out just in case.” Then you go to the third bank and you’re like, “Can I have 1000 bucks, please?” And this one now runs on the bank cap and people just are wired to want their money.

Krista Case: Almost like the pandemic all over again.

Camberley Bates: Yeah, a little bit in the toilet paper problem. Okay, so let me get on to the next one, which is on earnings. We’ve had a couple of big earnings this week. IBM came out, I know we did a big writeup on it. But I went through and looked at all of these, AI and the consulting stuff, raising their level. Full disclosure, as an IBM stockholder, ’cause I go way back to IBM and it’s back in the 1990s-

Steven Dickens: Great infrastructure numbers. We are on the infrastructure map-

Camberley Bates: 9% growth on the mainframe?

Steven Dickens: 8, only 8.

Camberley Bates: I’m sorry, okay, only 8% growth on the mainframe.

Steven Dickens: Only 8.

Camberley Bates: I’m going, what the heck? This is out of cycle. Why?

Steven Dickens: I wrote about this, I’m speaking to Ross Mauri, who runs that business next week ’cause I literally just pinged our AR contact at IBM then. I need a call to understand it, how he’s pulling this off basically. That was almost word for word, like, “How on earth this late in the cycle…” I’ve listened to IBM earnings call for years and normally list late in the cycle that roll out the script the mainframe’s a cyclical business. “We’re late in the cycle. We fully expect this. The business is down 40%. This happens every time. We’re a couple of quarters away from the new box coming out. Things will recover.” Not this time, not this script. I think it’s 10 quarters into what is normally an 8 to 10 quarter cycle and they’re still posting growth.

Camberley Bates: And it’s not just the Z, it’s also-

Steven Dickens: It’s power.

Camberley Bates: Well, power is up but not as big as that. The power is definitely up, and it’s Linux. And nowadays, it’s going to even be better because of, thank you very much, CrowdStrike. And the other one that’s up is the data storage side of the house, which was driven by the Z. So they’re adding more storage capacity to the Z, which means basically transactions got to be up or something. So anyway, I’d love to hear the feedback and we’ll get a full report..

Steven Dickens: Yeah, maybe I’ll report back next week, but Tom McPherson’s doing a great job. They’re late in the power cycle as well. Power 10’s been out for I think three years and they’re still posting growth. That’s a great performance. They launched med servers earlier on this year, whether that’s where it’s coming from. Tom and Ross are doing a great job to grow businesses late in the cycle where they’re very desperate for product updates.

Camberley Bates: So the second one, big announcement this week was Google Cloud earnings.

Steven Dickens: Yes.

Camberley Bates: Despite the fact that they didn’t buy Wiz.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, was that a trial balloon? TheyThe way I looked at that one was the Wiz one, just briefly while we go there, ’cause we’re struggling with time today. I took that it was a trial balloon to basically see whether big tech would be allowed to buy a smaller tech company. I think they put up a trial balloon and said ” We’re Google, we’re a $3 trillion company,” or whatever they are this week. “The Lina Khan doesn’t like big tech companies, are we going to get away with it? Yes or no?” And I think the fact that it died so quickly was that the trial balloon got shot there.

Camberley Bates: Krista, you had a perspective on that too.

Krista Case: Yeah, so from my perspective, possibly, but from my perspective, if you also look at what Wiz might be anticipating that they’re going to be able to raise in an IPO round, staggering, right?

Camberley Bates: Mm-hmm.

Krista Case: And I think it just points to the growth in the cybersecurity market and especially given with their platform, based on what I’ve seen, very comprehensive, very aligned towards protecting cloud infrastructure, cloud applications, really digging into some of the potential vulnerabilities in code like we just saw through CrowdStrike. So I think it perhaps was a little bit more than just a test because I do think that Google would have loved to be able to add all those capabilities to its portfolio. Think about what a heavy hitter it would’ve made Google from a security specific perspective. Not that they don’t already have-

Steven Dickens: With flex Mandiant, is that what you’re thinking?

Krista Case: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Right? So I think for Wiz, assuming that they did decide to walk away because they believe that they have a very, very strong feature through an IPO, again, I think points to the need in the market for those capabilities. You should have seen at RSA just all the buzz around them a few months ago when they raised a billion dollars and just their funding, not even an IPO. So that was my takeaway as well.

Steven Dickens: The interesting one for me, though, is if you just play the math out of this, and the CEO said this week that they hope to get to a billion of revenue. That puts the valuation at 23x revenue. You look at what Red Hat sold to IBM for was 11 times revenue. So the CEO of Wiz is making a bet that they’re roughly two times more interesting and sexy than Red Hat were in 2019 to IBM, that’s bold.

Krista Case: That is a bold…

Steven Dickens: In a whole IBM climate, that’s bold to me.

Camberley Bates: It’s a very bold place.

Krista Case: It is bold.

Steven Dickens: If you do the map on the valuation numbers, and if I was a Wiz employee and I had stock options, how happy would I be right now?

Krista Case: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Steven Dickens: I think I said to somebody the other day, and maybe this is a British saying, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

Camberley Bates: And I’ve been there before with another company, so…

Steven Dickens: Interesting.

Camberley Bates: Not at the size, but a little bit different. Okay, we have got a minute and a half. Take us out, Steve, with Google’s numbers.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, I don’t cover all of the alphabet, so I just drill down into the Google piece. Revenue hitting 10.35 billion. They surpassed expectations on that. It’s up from last year’s figures of 8 billion. I’ve got a research note specifically on the Google Cloud piece that’s just in the queue to publish, maybe get out today. A lot of CapEx spend I think is probably the only piece. I’m trying to pull the numbers here, huge CapEx investment. It’s going to be interesting to see. Here we go. Yeah, increasing capital expend is projecting at least 12 billion per quarter through 2024. The last year was 6.9. So what’s driving that CapEx? AI. And that they’re expanding…

Krista Case: Does this make sense?

Camberley Bates: No, it’s also expanding the geos as well, isn’t it?

Steven Dickens: Well, yeah, great Camberley, great catch. You obviously read my research, so I feel a warm glow.

Camberley Bates: Just keep on thinking that, dude.

Steven Dickens: I feel a warm glow now coming through the screen. But no, it’s a couple of things. It’s building out more regions, sovereign cloud, needing to deploy infrastructure into… I’ve been banging the drum for that all year, and then it’s deploying AI infrastructure with their Trillium TPU. So I think the top line revenue growth for Google Cloud, over 10 billion, impressive, certainly cemented deposition as the third-largest type of scanner. Got to watch out for OCI and the Oracle guys.

They’re coming for them, but I think still solid growth. I haven’t seen the market share breakdowns, but I think it’s good directionally for them to be growing that business by 2 billion, need to do more in the enterprise space. Google’s got to start punching its weight. If they employed some new sales leaders that we got to meet at Google Cloud next, I want to see that those guys are starting to roll out a new enterprise sales muscle for Google. If they do, good times ahead, I predict.

Camberley Bates: Yep. Well, thank you very much Steven and Krista Case.

Steven Dickens: Krista Case.

Camberley Bates: And thanks everyone for joining us on this episode number 49, if you will, on Infrastructure Matters. Please remember to like, share, all those things because it’s all about popularity, isn’t it? No. It’s about how much information we’re providing you on Infrastructure Matters. We will see you next week. Thank you very much.

Author Information

With a focus on data security, protection, and management, Krista has a particular focus on how these strategies play out in multi-cloud environments. She brings approximately 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.

Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Krista led the data protection practice for Evaluator Group and the data center practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research. She also created articles, product analyses, and blogs on all things storage and data protection and management for analyst firm Storage Switzerland and led market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.

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.

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