Lenovo + NetApp Making Moves, The Feds on Security, and Dion’s Predictions – Six Five Webcast – Infrastructure Matters

Lenovo + NetApp Making Moves, The Feds on Security, and Dion's Predictions - Six Five Webcast - Infrastructure Matters

On this episode of the Six Five Webcast – Infrastructure Matters, hosts Camberley Bates, Keith Townsend, and Dion Hinchcliffe discuss the latest industry moves, the federal government’s stance on cybersecurity, Lenovo and NetApps initiatives, and more.

Their discussion covers:

  • Lenovo and NetApp’s strategic initiatives and what these mean for the tech industry
  • The federal government’s latest directives on cybersecurity and how they impact businesses
  • Dion Hinchcliffe’s predictions for the tech industry, focusing on emerging trends and challenges
  • The importance of collaboration between tech giants in shaping the future of technology
  • How these developments affect enterprise technology decisions and the broader market landscape

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Disclaimer: The Six Five Webcast – Infrastructure Matters is for information and entertainment purposes only. During this webcast, we may discuss companies that are publicly traded and reference their share price, but please do not consider anything we say as investment advice. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

Transcript:

Keith Townsend: All right. Welcome to episode 67 of Infrastructure Matters because, it does matter. Joining me today are the usual cohort, Camberley, Dion. Somewhat of a slow news week, unless you’re a big fan of enterprise storage, AI data, center, power cooling. Infrastructure Matters. Folks, welcome back. Hope you are fully in the swing of things. This is the second full week of work as we’re recording this. Hopefully it’s been a productive work week for you. Who wants to start off the conversation?

Camberley Bates: Well, I can get started with the big announcements that happened. Not to complain too badly about it, but they got me up at like, I’m already up at 5:00 AM, but I’m usually working out. But the call was at 5:50 AM my time two days ago, on Wednesday I think it was. Lenovo hosted a call to announce that they are going to be intent to acquire Infinidat. And so for those guys who don’t know who Infinidat is, Infinidat is the third or second company Moshe started. So Moshe, he was the originator of something we all know and love if you’re in the data storage business called Symmetrix. He was the lead on that. He left EMC many years ago, started a company called XIV that got sold to IBM. And after that one, he started this company called Infinidat that was specializing at the time in hard drives, front-ended by big cash, SSD and then eventually whatever.

But a super high-end system, targeted the big enterprise companies.And Lenovo has done very well with their storage environment over the last whatever years it’s been since we’ve been tracking them on the storage side. All of their relationships up to this point have been OEM, so they OEM people like Nutanix. They OEM the low end of NetApp’s systems. There’s an agreement with NetApp that they’re selling it into China, et cetera. They’ve done well, and they’ve taken over some number one spots, according to the IDC counters, in the lower end levels of the storage.

We’ve had lots of conversations with them about what is it going to take to claim the higher level ones, and A, you need the products. So here would be the likely suspects for you to purchase, not that we influenced that or anything. In fact, I didn’t even pitch Infinidat, I should have, to them. And so here we are, how many months later, that they’re acquiring Infinidat, which is a very high-end storage system that is primarily SAN block, and as well as the system also runs a very large high-end scalable backup target, so deduplication, et cetera. So they’re a really super solid product, but as you can imagine, competing against the crown jewels and the most profitable of the data storage infrastructure is very difficult to do. They are a profitable company. They’re not some fly-by-night kind of company. Phil Bullinger, who has been in the industry forever, took over the CEO reins five years ago and got them to that profitable cash flow positive space. So very, very cool to see some of the movements. One of the first movements are coming in for 2025. Expect to see a whole lot more.

Dion Hinchcliffe: Camberley, this is very interesting. We continue to see consolidation in all these spaces, but I don’t track storage that closely. I’m wondering what you think about, the CIOs I work with, they really don’t like to see this consolidation across the infrastructure sector because it reduces their choice to be beholden to one big vendor, which they have absolutely no leverage over. Are we worried about consolidation or concentration of vendors in that space?

Camberley Bates: No, because Lenovo hasn’t really been in that space except for the low end. What I call the space that they’ve been playing in is the entry level market, what I call the server led storage sale, where bar goes in, pushes that, you attach, do you want fries with that, here it goes. And that happens there. So Lenovo, this is entering a new market. It’s one of the challenges of this purchase because while they have storage salespeople, and these are multimillion dollar transactions that go down, the guys that go in and sell this stuff, they’re focused very much so on this heavy duty technology. Super high availability, never go down kind of technology, this is where your secure data is going to be residing, et cetera. So Lenovo has got to spin that up and bring that to the United States. And so what we’re going to see now is you’ll see in that space competing. Pure will compete there, although they may not be at the level of Infinidat. NetApp will definitely be there. We’ll see PowerMax from Dell is there. IBM’s DS8000 series as well as IBM’s FlashSystem will be up there, and definitely Hitachi who is back in gear. So that’s a lot of companies I just rattled off that are in that space, and there’s big enough there to keep that competition going and the pricing situation under control.

Keith Townsend: And what enterprise architects do like about these types of moves is that you get more pods. You get more engineered solutions, and the name of the game is in engineered solutions. Lenovo will now be able to sell. CIOs may not like this, that Lenovo can now sell a Lenovo server for more money because it’s more value when you come with the completely Lenovo-engineered system. From a IT operations perspective, there is a lot of advantages in engineered solutions. They reduce the overall cost of delivering services because you don’t have to spend the engineering time taking the best of breeds, engineering them together. This, I thought, was a obvious hole in Lenovo’s offering, not having truly in-house engineered systems. I fully expect them to at some point fill their networking gap. As we’re looking at challenges around building pods for AI, Lenovo doesn’t have a full stack to offer in-house, and I expect that to change over a period of time. Who’s available from a networking perspective for them to go out and apply? We’ll see.

Camberley Bates: So the other piece to the value proposition of Lenovo Infinidat is where some of the engineering is going to go into is Infinidat has been doing off-the-shelf hardware. They don’t have the supply chain negotiation capabilities because they’re not that big, so we’re going to see Lenovo be able to bring that muscle into there as well as bring their capabilities of what they have for engineering and design for the Infinidat system. So I think what we’ll see is improvement. The guys in Israel, which is where this came out of, are super good, super good engineering. So you combine that with the smarts of what Lenovo is, and I think this just all over is a good move and really brings another offering to the high-end environment. I know Eric Herzog is going to get pissed off at me for talking the only high-end stuff because they do kind of go down to the smaller sizes, but that’s where they played the best.

Keith Townsend: All right, so that’s one story down. Do you have another one, Camberley? What else did you notice this week?

Camberley Bates: Yeah, NetApp spun off something called Spot, which is a FinOps offering for managing your financial cost of the cloud. They bought them, I don’t know, seven years ago maybe. At that time, NetApp was really focusing on this cloud operational strategy. That’s where they were going and thinking that was what’s going to grow their TAM into that space. And Anthony Lye was the lead on that, and they acquired a whole bunch of companies at that time, Spot being one of the lead ones, CloudCheckr, et cetera. So they’ve spun off both of these, CloudCheckr and Spot, to Flexera, who specializes in FinOps and those operational efficiencies. And what this is basically saying is that NetApp is going back to core, which is data infrastructure, and some of the key core issues around data infrastructure, which are AI, cybersecurity, also all the rest of the stuff, hybrid cloud or whatever. But just given what we have with AI and what’s got to happen with AI over the next 12 to 18 months and the capabilities out there, this frees up a whole lot of engineering to be able to focus on really the core business, and I think it gets them better aligned for the market space.

Keith Townsend: Yeah, I follow the Spot, CloudCheckr, that part of the business for NetApp for quite some years because that’s my space, and NetApp was never really able to tell a cohesive story around how they can do workload management. ONTAP everywhere on all the public cloud providers has been a wonderful story for NetApp. The ability to do distributed management of all of your data assets across multiple clouds, I’d argue NetApp has the best story of all the major cloud providers. They have first-party solutions with both GCP, Azure, and well, all three first-party solutions. And it’s really important to note that these are first-party solutions. I can buy NetApp ONTAP directly from AWS. I can assign access control rules directly from my AWS account into the NetApp services. So they are natural services, and no other storage provider can claim that. It’s unfortunate that they haven’t been able to create a cohesive message, and I guess it’s better to just give it up than try to play at a game that they just couldn’t figure out.

Camberley Bates: And I’ll add to that first-party, one of the biggest failures on that first-party position is that they are in the sink of that role of all the security issues. So they’re right in the middle of… It’s their engineering if you will, when you’re a first-party. And so that when they do an update or a major update, NetApp is right there lockstep with them.

Keith Townsend: All right. Dion, let’s move on to your news of the week. You’ve become our resident follower of all things that are executive orders. We’re nearing the end of the Biden administration, and with the end of every administration comes a flurry of executive orders. Which of any stood out to you this week?

Dion Hinchcliffe: Well, there is several, but the one that kind of raised eyebrows was a last-minute cybersecurity executive order. They called it sweeping, and it did have a lot of things inside of it. Now, we do need to always increase our posture with cybersecurity, and my initial read is none of these individually are bad. It’s just the burden it puts on vendors and to some extent end users is very interesting. So the first part of it is that really beefs up software supply chain security so that security companies are required to submit machine-readable attestations of secure development processes. And it looks like it’s not just security providers, it looks like it’s all software providers.

Camberley Bates: Could you say that again? Machine-readable attestations…

Dion Hinchcliffe: Of secure development practices so that they know that they’re not buying or using technology from vendors they haven’t thoroughly audited to make sure that they’re not from China and putting malware inside some library or framework they’re using, or a software development team that’s in Eastern Europe that might be corrupted by Russia, and they’re placing backdoors in the software. You have to say, “Here’s what I’ve done to make sure I don’t do that.” And the machine-readable part is interesting, but more and more software now, enterprise software is bought through cloud marketplaces. I did a bunch of videos recently with the heads of AWS Marketplace, and they did $40 billion in sales last year. They’re going to do over $50 billion this year, billion. I mean, that’s a significant part of the software market. And what’s nice is now you can go in, and you can set your dials on what policy and say, “Here’s the level of compliance I want to have for software providers and their development practices to make sure they’re secure.” And then it can filter out all of the vendors that don’t meet that because it’s machine-readable attestation. So it’s interesting.

Keith Townsend: Yeah, and if you have in-house developers, this puts a burden upon you because you’re providing software services. Again, I agree with you that I don’t think these are necessarily bad things with what happened with SolarWinds a few years ago and having the right hygiene around software bill of materials. This is super critical if you have open-source practices. If you’re taking downstream distributions and then adding value upon them, you need some level of surety that the software, especially the open-source software that you’re using, is free of these types of malicious defects. And this codifies it to some extent. Whether or not this executive order falls under your burden or not, is probably irrelevant. These are just good things you should look at and determine on whether or not your software development practices are following best practices.

Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah. Oh, no. And if that was it, it would be, I think, really good. It’s just that that was just the very beginning of the executive order. It also covers things like, it mandates federal agencies to adopt phishing-resistant authentication methods, to move to post-quantum cryptography standards immediately so that the federal government uses quantum resistant cryptography across the board, mandates AI and cyber defense, has a whole lot to say about cybersecurity and space, which is getting critical given there’s launches now every two and a half days on average, putting new data satellites in space. You have Kuiper coming online soon. The Chinese government’s putting their own constellation up. The EU is putting their own constellation up. So there’s a bunch of things that say how do we make all that safe so that hackers don’t take that over and control it?

Open-source software management, and then to really round out the whole thing, there’s a new requirement for vendors, which I like personally. It establishes a cyber trust mark for our consumer internet of things devices, which is one of the worst vectors for security incidents. Since most of these are small vendors, they barely get their product together. They haven’t done the full pass for security. And I remember I was talking to the CIO of Experian when they had, it was a printer driver, an IoT printer driver that caused their whole data reach. So it’s a real thing.

Keith Townsend: Yeah, I used to advise customers, one, don’t use IoT in your production network because you’re asking for trouble. These are super small vendors. Their security practices, as you mentioned, are minimum at best. But this whole ideal of isolation and satellite networks of not being able to reach your production network without at least some significant effort to get from the IoT networks into your production.

Dion Hinchcliffe: Micro-segmentation becomes so important as you put all those devices in their own little playpen that you can’t get out of. Right?

Keith Townsend: If you’ve ever had to battle the early stages of code red on Xerox machines, you’ll understand why this is important that these devices have basically unfettered access to your client networks and potentially your center network. So again, good hygiene stuff, but another burden upon vendors and businesses. I think my only piece of news is IBM and CoreWeave partnered together, and CoreWeave will be providing IBM with a supercomputer, which seems kind of weird, right? IBM going to another vendor for a supercomputer, specifically an AI supercomputer to train their granite models on. You need NVIDIA chips. NVIDIA chips do not work with power processors. This is simple math. IBM can either choose to go out to cloud providers and rent CPU, they can choose to do it slower on IBM mainframes and power-based servers, which is not an option, or they can partner with someone. I’m sure it’s not going to be HPE, Dell, or Lenovo, their friends at Lenovo. So they chose CoreWeave to build the first supercomputer with GB200s.

Camberley Bates: But CoreWeave is not a…

Keith Townsend: They’re a provider.

Camberley Bates: They’re providers, so they’re using somebody underneath there, right?

Keith Townsend: Either they’re building it from bits and pieces, custom, or they are using someone, but that’s obfuscated I think is the word, obscured. We’re abstracting it away, so maybe it is Dell or HPE under the hood, but IBM doesn’t have to say. So I don’t know how much of this is the waving of the hands versus legit engineering work outside of selecting a vendor to basically be the vendor for NVIDIA. And I think this highlights one of the things in the industry that we don’t always recognize. The customer chooses which vendor NVIDIA is going to sell chips to. Dell, Lenovo, HPE for all their bluster don’t get to choose how many bits and pieces they get from NVIDIA. The large customers say, “I want you to sell, I want to buy chips from Dell,” and that’s how Dell is allocated chips. Little inside analyst talk there on how these decisions are made. So I’m sure IBM knows who’s actually building the underlying infrastructure that CoreWeave will provide.

Dion Hinchcliffe: Interesting.

Keith Townsend: All right, so we are going to go with our second round of predictions. This is the beginning of the year. Dion, you had a massive blog post on your predictions. It was a little bit non-traditional. I enjoyed it. It wasn’t like, “Oh, watch these three technologies.” You really looked at it from a strategic perspective. Recap for us your predictions for 2025.

Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah, you bet. Well, I think it’s going to be an interesting year for so many reasons, so I’m going to go over my top predictions because there’s no time to go over all of them. And to keep it lively, you guys keep me honest. Poke holes in them, make comments on them as I go through each one. So I predict that AI will continue to drive both the tech stock market and growth for tech companies until it doesn’t. So at some point this year, there is likely to be an inflection point where people say, “Look, the $400 billion you guys are spending on AI isn’t going to pay off. You’re not going to get ROI in anytime soon.” And we might see a bubble burst in the tech stock market. So far, there has been some hope though. Late last year, both Lenovo and Palantir became the poster children for tech companies that are making money off AI. They’re actually turning a net profit. So Lenovo with their AI-infused PCs has got a good sales bump, and Palantir attributed their big sales rise entirely to their AI services.

And so those are the bright spots. If we see a half dozen more of those this year showing some signs that some vendors are getting returns at the stock market likes because the risk is we end up with a situation like we did with AWS. Remember, their stock was depressed for years because Bezos said, “I have one chance to become number one. I’m going to plow all my profits into growing AWS until we dominate the industry, and then I’ll take my profits.” And of course that’s not the 90-day returns that the stock market wants, and their stock price was punished for a half decade. And that’s the risk with AI stocks because that $400 billion, and that’s just so far, Microsoft’s thinking another $80 billion this year. How are they ever going to get that back is what people are starting to ask. And so I think there is a chance that we’ll see the AI bubble burst this year, at least deflate a little. Comments on that?

Keith Townsend: So I love the perspective that, and I generally agree that AI bubble, if it is a bubble, is not going to burst this year. I think this is going to be another year of it. And we’ll get into, I think I only have one prediction this year that I’ll go into some detail next week on, which is that this is the year that enterprises try AI. And that long tail will hit us, and we’ll continue to see this pumping of the market from the perspective of preparing for enterprise adoption, which I think will start in earnest this year.

Camberley Bates: I would agree with that, and I think we will see some sort of hiccup here and there. But I think there’s other up and comers that will be the investment part of it. Part of that reason is because we have seen whatever percentage, not a whole lot of these AI initiatives make it out the door. I mean, the number I’ve seen is anywhere from 10% to 30% of the initiatives are actually successful and are making it out. That will probably increase in success over time. The second piece of that is what we’re seeing is that the software companies, let’s take an SAP or Salesforce or Marketo or some of those folks, are developing AI tools themselves. So I think, and you probably know about this because you talked to them, if I was a CIO, I’d pause on some of my initiatives and say, “What are my software vendors coming out with that I don’t have to build from scratch? I can take what they have, add my data to it, and push it out.” So that, and then getting some of the smaller language models that will be coming out that are very focused will also change how this trajectory goes. So put all of that and maybe that the enterprise doesn’t need all this gear where some people are projecting that they would need, but it would be purchased by the big software-

Dion Hinchcliffe: Go on the vendor side on the hyperscalers as opposed to… We’ll see that. I have a prediction about that. So I’m pulling only in my top three predictions, and one of them actually covers that a little bit, which is interesting. So my next prediction is that, at the high end of the AI market, we’re going to see this really bruising competition around achieving what’s called AGI, or artificial general intelligence, or other people call super intelligence. So AI models that are smarter than humans. Right now, no AI model has, they can have more access to knowledge, but they can’t outperform humans at the very, very high end until very recently. We’re starting to see some models cross that benchmark, but that’s still not general intelligence, many people would argue. And so there’s a big debate in the industry what that is. And there’s now benchmarks being developed to measure AGI. The Art Prize Institute launched a series of benchmarks to try and validate which models are closing in on the traits that they consider artificial general intelligence.

And this is important because you want to hook up with an AI vendor that has the biggest vision, that will create the most powerful AIs that you can then use for your business. And that’s the proposition of OpenAI and Anthropic, and those are the two big vendors that are talking AGI in a big way, and they’re saying that’s their primary goal is to reach that. And they want to do that for the same reason that Bezos way back in the day was sinking all that money into now Amazon. They want to be the best. They want to have the grandest vision with the most superior sweeping products that will attract the buyers. If AI is going to transform my business, I better use the vendor with the biggest vision, the most powerful products, and that’s what they’re betting on. And of course, a bunch of people are concerned about, we’re developing things that we don’t yet know how to fully control, of course is the big risk.

But you’re going to see those two vendors. There’s a few others there, but I don’t think they have a likelihood of having great industry impact. They’re giving it their all. Altman says they’re sinking tens of billions of dollars into AGI every year, and they expect to have significant product announcements around this in the next year or two. So I think we’re going to see that the high end of the whole AI conversation increasingly go talk about these smarter than human models and ones that act very much like humans do in terms of how they think. So it’s going to be fascinating to watch, and we hopefully will all benefit from it.

Keith Townsend: Yeah, I’ve spent the past two weeks deep diving with actual end users and helping them through AI and leverage what’s out here today. And I have to say, I’m a bit skeptical on this whole idea of AGI from where the state of the art of the technology is today. I think I can fairly say with confidence it’s not going to be here this year, but I love the idea of coming up with standards that we can all agree upon. I’ve been frustrated with the lack of definitions around technical capabilities that have been overtaken by marketing. I’m hopeful that the industry can get in front of AGI so that end users really understand the different levels and can quantify the different levels of AI that they’re using.

Camberley Bates: So maybe we should get the Department of Education involved with the standards and so they can issue a standard test like we give to our. Anyway, go on. Just ignore me.

Dion Hinchcliffe: Well, no, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. We see the same thing happening with agents. We’re actually seeing hiring marketplaces pop up that list digital labor. Salesforce with Agentforce is doing that. We’re going to see labor standards around digital bots here soon. It’s going to be interesting to see. Yeah, it’s a brave new future, everyone. So to round out my last major prediction, I just completed it, and we even did an episode around my CIO insight for 2025. We surveyed some of the top CIOs in the world, and I asked them what they think is going to happen this year. And one of the signals that came out of that is 71% of CIOs say they want to reconsider where they’re putting their cloud workloads. That’s by far the highest number we’ve ever seen of CIOs saying they’re really going to rethink where they’re going to put their workloads.

And that could be in another cloud provider or another type of cloud provider. That could mean going from public cloud traditional to serverless. But there’s a strong undercurrent where a lot of them are saying, “We’re going to put certain workloads that run best that way. We’re going to put them back in our data center using a private cloud model.” So same cloud technology, it’s just that if it’s always on, for example, if the workload’s constantly running or if it uses a lot of capacity, like you’re doing this training that’s going to run for weeks or months, why would you pay that cloud markup? Because not only do you have to pay for them to run it, a provider or run your workload, but you have to pay for their cost of sales, their marketing, their R&D, and then their profit margin. For every minute you’re running a workload, you got to pay that bill in addition to what it actually costs for that provider to run it. It used to be economies of scale would offset a lot of that, and the provider could still extract most of that extra cost inside the economies of scale. But that’s not necessarily the case with the AI has turned everything on its head.

So we’re not seeing broad based repatriation, but we’re seeing this real saying, “Now that our cloud bill is getting so big, we really have to think smart about where best to run each one of these workloads.” And so far, it’s only on a workload by workload basis. And we’re not seeing people saying, “We’re going to go back and reevaluate every workload we have.” That’s not what we’re seeing, but we’re seeing more willingness now to think outside the box, to think of cloud as a broader spectrum, that it’s private, it’s edge, it’s hybrid, and it’s public cloud, and it’s these new models, things like serverless. As we’re doing the FinOps and discovering how much this really costs, we have to get smarter. So my prediction is CIOs will extensively rethink their IT supply chains with respect to cloud in 2025.

Camberley Bates: I looked at your data, which was really, really good, the other day. And the other flip side to that though was this piece that said, “Are you investing in your cloud?” And the answer was yes. So it’s not like it’s going away at all.

Dion Hinchcliffe: No, not at all.

Camberley Bates: It’s just re-evaluating where’s the best place and how’s the best place to deploy what we’re doing? So really, really great data.

Keith Townsend: Yeah, I talked to a customer that’s spending $100 million dollars a year in AWS, not just on public cloud, but AWS, and that’s not even the largest of cloud spends out there. But this is a enterprise Fortune 100, and their priorities are rightsizing that AWS build. They’re not looking to exit AWS, but it’s like what I like to call, I’ve created a new acronym a lot of part of last year, RTDC: return to the data center. And it is happening. But I absolutely agree with you, Dion. No one is saying they’re going to abandon the value that cloud provides, but there is absolutely this movement that cloud-first is over from a, “We must move all of our IT to the cloud,” to thinking about where they’re positioning the cloud. It also hearkens back to our second story around NetApp and abandoning their Spot and that ability. They’re doubling down on understanding the relationship between data in the workload and positioning the most important asset, which is data.

Folks, this has been a wonderful conversation. What seemed to be a really slow news week, I think it speaks to the two of your deep experience and my ability to put people to sleep with this soothing voice. This is why you need to have your spouse listen to the podcast. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re in IT or not. A good friend told me that his wife likes to listen to my podcast because it puts her to sleep at night. So this is a great sleep aid for those of you not in IT. For the rest of you, please join us again next week where I don’t know either. I think I’m going to give my predictions or my prediction for next week.

Camberley Bates: You’re up next.

Keith Townsend: Stay tuned next week. Until then, have a great week.

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.

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.

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.

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