In this episode of Infrastructure Matters, hosts Steven Dickens and Camberley Bates cover the Rubrik IPO, Oracle’s positioning in the cloud market, plus IBM’s Storage announcements.
Key topics covered:
- Rubric IPO: Rubric, a data protection company, went public with a $5.6 billion valuation, emphasizing its scale-out data protection capability and its focus on cybersecurity.
- IBM Earnings and Acquisition: IBM reported solid earnings, with notable growth in software and hybrid cloud, and announced the acquisition of HashiCorp for $35 a share, enhancing its open-source support model.
- IBM Storage Announcements: IBM introduced Storage Assurance Perpetual, a program aimed at keeping customers’ storage infrastructure current over an eight-year period, and unveiled enhancements to its virtualized storage product, SVC, focusing on replication and mirroring capabilities.
- Google Cloud Growth: Google Cloud’s revenue surged 28% year-on-year, nearing $10 billion for the quarter, signaling strong sales execution and growth momentum in the enterprise market.
- Oracle Developments: Oracle showcased its Exadata platform’s cloud connectivity and cost-effectiveness, positioning itself as a competitive player in the IaaS space. Larry Ellison’s involvement highlighted the company’s AI strategy and its integration with the Cerner acquisition for healthcare innovation.
You can watch the video of our conversation below, and be sure to visit our YouTube Channel and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.
Listen to the audio here:
Or grab the audio on your favorite audio platform below:
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 another episode of Infrastructure Matters. It’s just me and Camberley today. I shouldn’t say just me and Camberley.
Camberley Bates: Yes.
Steven Dickens: It’s Camberley and I. Hello, Camberley.
Camberley Bates: Good morning. And Krista, we have to tell everybody where Krista is. She’s off working on wedding plans.
Steven Dickens: I know. The big day looms and she’s got to take some time to organize it.
Camberley Bates: It’s like, wow, she just ditches us for wedding plans.
Steven Dickens: Weddings matter.
Camberley Bates: Priorities, girl.
Steven Dickens: Weddings matter, infrastructure doesn’t obviously. Packed week as always this week. We’ve got IBM earnings. They’re making a big acquisition. Google earnings. I was at Oracle this week at their database analyst Summit. Rubric IPO’d, IBM launched a bunch of storage stuff. We’ve got a lot to cover. Let’s dive straight in. I’ll go to you first, Camberley. I think maybe joint, if not the biggest news of the week, Rubric coming out with an IPO. Small little company with a $5.6 billion valuation. I know Krista’s been tracking this and sort of called that it would come this week. I gave her props on X that she did a good job of calling that. But what’s the story?
Camberley Bates: Well, Rubric is one of the darlings of the data protection industry, which we’ve been talking at Infinitum over for the last year. Just as a note, why in the world would data protection be taking off? Well, it’s because of cybersecurity. What else do you want to talk about, cybersecurity or AI this week? Which one do you want to talk about? Anyway. They point themselves as a security firm, but the core of where they came from is really the data protection side of the house.
And they were one of the guys that came out with this scale out data protection capability, scale out security, kind of the new technology that’s hitting the market and that the other companies have fallen suit in terms of to bringing their offerings out as well. We actually expected one of their competitors come out earlier than they did, but they’re busy acquiring Veritas, or client parts of Veritas. Rubric came out here, big valuation.
Steven Dickens: 5.6 billion’s not small beer.
Camberley Bates: No. Raised around three quarters of a billion dollars of money. They have got a nice cash cow there. Suspect we’re going to see them over the next two years just work to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, get placements, get positions out in the market. Maybe with the 750 million plus that they raised, they’ll be acquiring some security firms.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. That was the one that stood out to me. That’s a decent sized war chest. Now, do you see them kind of doing a bunch of tucking smaller acquisition? Do you see them going big on somebody? What’s your thought?
Camberley Bates: I think they will because they’ve positioned themselves as a security firm, and if Krista was here, I’d be turning it over to her because she’s been watching them in detail, and security firms. And there’s a lot of other pieces to security. I’ve talked about this before where security has traditionally been this nature of the CISO. Data protection has been the nature of the IT operations. They’ve merged together because of the issues with cybersecurity. Last point of defense is whether or not you’ve got your data encrypted, secure, air gapped and you can get it back.
And so there’s a lot of pieces in between how you’re protecting your door to come into your house as opposed to how you protect the stuff that is in your house. And so there’s lots to still be done and as we continue this progress or as the bad guys continue their knowledge expertise using AI in particular and being able to spoof and all the other things they’re doing, the money continues to march into this market and be spent because you can’t afford to lose your data. And you can’t afford to be shut down for a month.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. I mean for me as a CISO, it must be really hard to not green light a project. A vendor comes in, comes and says, hey, I found this hole, this thing that you haven’t fixed. I don’t know how as a CISO you say no to that because-
Camberley Bates: Well, it’s hard.
Steven Dickens: Is that a tailwind just overall for where these guys are? Because you don’t want to be the CISO that says, hey, I didn’t buy that tool and now we’ve got hacked by the thing that tool would’ve protected us against. Is that just a dynamic that it’s really hard to say no in that market?
Camberley Bates: I think so, and I think that’s why you’re seeing the increase of people doing the auditing. You’re seeing the increase of white hats. And actually I was at a dinner party last weekend and spent a good portion of the evening talking to a white hat who was basically telling me stuff. He wasn’t telling me who he was doing this, but the CISO and the CIO are going to walk in Monday morning and have a really bad day is what I figured. Because he’d gotten in pretty easily and it was a very large company, he said. How large, I don’t know. But stupid things like not changing your passwords.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, there’s a guy I know in the main frame.
Camberley Bates: I mean there’s a lot of really, really crazy stuff that’s how things get broken in. And then there’s some really scary stuff of how things are getting broken in using AI and take somebody’s image, have a Zoom call with a sysadmin image, his image or her image that calls into the call center and says, I need to have my password redone. Except for it’s not really that person, it’s their image.
Steven Dickens: Or deep fake a video of her.
Camberley Bates: It’s a deep fake image and it gets taken over. And it’s like, that’s one scary piece of doing. The innovation that has to happen, continually happened as they get smarter, and this is where Rubric is sitting right there in that security space and looking at how we do things differently.
Steven Dickens: Well, and that leads into that valuation. I think people see there’s still room to grow in that space. There’s still growth to capture, the TAM is expanding probably in that space. If we’ve had Krista on, she could tell us that, but that’s what leads into that. I mean, it’s not a great season for IPO right now. For Rubric to come out at that level of valuation, it’s pretty impressive. Keeping a thread going here. Let’s talk about, I’ll do IBM earnings. I know you’ve got some stuff particularly about storage. Solid results from IBM, 1% overall up. They’re starting to get back onto growth on a consistent basis.
I was expecting more, I’ve got to admit, I think as a lot of people on the street were as well. I think some good numbers within the numbers. Software is up 5.5%, hybrid cloud within that, good growth within Red Hat, consulting was up. One thing that stood out for me, and I always look for these numbers, the mainframe numbers, how Ross Maury and Jose Castano are getting that business to grow at 4% and beat their peers within IBM this deep into a product cycle. Kudos to those guys I spoke to. I texted them both to congratulate them. Sorry.
Camberley Bates: Do you have any sales jobs open for that?
Steven Dickens: One thing, sales has got worse over there since I left obviously, but it’s kind of making me look bad that they’re doing so well since I left. But I mean, all joking aside, what are there now? Eight quarters into the Z16 cycle? That’s very deep into that. I mean I think long-term bullish, I think they’re probably at least three or four quarters out from a new box.
Camberley Bates: Yeah.
Steven Dickens: There is still some growth to come. I think 1% in a technology lifecycle services was down. The big news obviously that broke this week that they decided to break as part of earnings, and I’m getting briefed on it later on today is the acquisition of Hashy Corps for $35 a share. This is going to be really interesting for me. I’m digging in with Keith Townsend. IBM’s going to own the open-source support model, the enterprise versions of both Terraform and Ansible. That’s going to be interesting, I think, going forward. The two approaches for how you do enterprise-
Camberley Bates: But IBM is getting that, not Red Hat.
Steven Dickens: That’s the bit that’s going to be interesting for me. I don’t know where Hashy Corps going to fit within IBM structure. The really obvious place for me is for it to sit alongside Red Hat in some type of combined entity just because the go-to-market model’s the same, the support model, the structure, it’s an open-source business that’s gone public and then been bought into IBM. Or do they keep it separate and run it entirely separate? Don’t know. Not a lot of detail yet. We are getting briefed later on today by Rob Thomas. It’s going to be interesting to find out. IBM Think is in a few weeks time, so I’d imagine there’ll be a whole bunch more announcements there.
Rubric will probably be there in some shape or form. I mean obviously it’s IBM announcing their intention to acquire, the assets haven’t transferred yet. There’ll be some clean room stuff, there’ll be some reg. I don’t know whether there’ll be a lot of regulatory focus on this. I don’t know what Hashy Corps exposure to Europe is. Don’t know whether they’re exposed that much to China. I’d imagine this will be US regulator driven approval. Don’t know, don’t know. I mean the only question for me is Terraform and Ansible being in the same, whether the regulators will understand that or not, don’t know.
Camberley Bates: Which may be why they have to keep it separate, but we’ll see.
Steven Dickens: Well then there’s an open source way to do Terraform. That project came from Google. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think IBM’s very buttoned up when it comes to regulatory stuff. I don’t envisage any problems. I don’t think IBM would either. It’s going to be interesting to see that one play out. I’m going to go deep on that next week. I’m going to write a detailed research note, but really interesting.
I think for me it proves that IBM’s further doubling down on its hybrid cloud space. It’s nice to see them be doing the Watson X stuff and the hybrid cloud stuff. They’ve been very Watson X focused. I mean obviously they bought Aptio not so long back. Arvind led the Red Hat acquisition under Ginny. He’s done Aptio, which is another multi-billion dollar acquisition, Mad doing Hashy Corp, really, really trying to get IBM onto a software-driven growth story. But they also made some announcements in the storage space this week. We’ll segue to those.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. A couple of real cool announcements. Audrey Donnell, who is one of their product managers, went through something called Storage Assurance Perpetual, okay. Many years ago, Pure did a disruptive kind of piece in the market with their Evergreen offering, the Evergreen basically saying that if you have the high-end in support, the top premier support, you will get a replacement controller on top of your drives in the future and that you can refresh that and so you can speed up your drives that are below it. And the software and all that kind of stuff. Kind of keeping an Evergreen of your environment, keep your drives in place, you don’t have to migrate them to the next area, which is a pain in the butt anyway. Now, so the issues with IBM is a little bit more trickier because they’ve never used off the shelf.
Steven Dickens: Mm-hmm.
Camberley Bates: They have their Flash core modules. And in their Flash core modules that they’ve developed with Micron, there’s some really unique technology in there.
Steven Dickens: Mm-hmm.
Camberley Bates: And so just changing out a controller isn’t enough to stay current in the market.
Steven Dickens: Controller and dumb drives. There’s actually some value-adding drives.
Camberley Bates: Those Flash core modules have AI-enabled ransomware detection embedded in there using the FPGA as the async that they have in these things. Every IO is getting scanned that’s coming through. They have data reduction offload that they’ve done, they have done… And a couple of other things that are in there. But those are the two big ones that are coming off of where typically those are being done in the controller.
Steven Dickens: Mm-hmm.
Camberley Bates: How do you keep somebody current in migrating forward when you have to play with both of those things? And also for anybody that’s dealt with finance, you have to deal with depreciation and everything else.
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Camberley Bates: What their storage assurance perpetual program is doing is recognizing that I have controllers and high-end drives and how do I keep those current? When you’re under their premium support service there, you will have multiple triggers during the lifespan up to eight years of where you can refresh into the more current drives of whatever they’ve done to soup up the drives or refresh with the software or refresh with the controller over those eight year period. You’re going to stay within that currency within their market. And then you have the ability to pay on a monthly basis, up front, pay it all up front, pay on a monthly basis. The monthly rate won’t change over this course of eight years, which is pretty significant.
Steven Dickens: It’s only just consumption. If you consume more, will it go up? Is it a consumption based-
Camberley Bates: Well, if you’re buying some new items, yeah, that’s going to go up.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, yeah.
Camberley Bates: You’re going to obviously have it what the current rate is whenever you buy another box or whatever drives or whatever is going on. Yes. I think what they’ve put together, and I mean there’s a lot of moving parts in there whenever you put a complex program in there and they’ve done a great job of thinking through all the caveats. We went on the briefing call, we kind of were poking all around where’s the weak spot in this? And we really didn’t. They really thought through it.
Steven Dickens: I can just imagine a bunch of story journalists torturing an IBM product manager on that call.
Camberley Bates: That’s exactly what we were doing.
Steven Dickens: I can just imagine you all looking for the weakness in that. I love those calls when it becomes a team effort with a bunch of other analysts from other firms.
Camberley Bates: Right. Well, it was actually just us, but we’re known for digging into the corner cases. Kudos to the team because I know getting anything, and you know this, getting through being an illegal takes Herculean effort.
Steven Dickens: I’ve got some staff back here somewhere from that back in the day.
Camberley Bates: I know this has been in the works for many years and I heard about they started way back.
Steven Dickens: From a competitive landscape perspective, do you think it gets them where they need to be?
Camberley Bates: Yeah, it does.
Steven Dickens: You think it puts them up? I know I’m sort of vast and pure and some of those guys have been kind of, and it’s easy for those, I say easy. It’s easier to innovate when you’ve not got as much product debt and technical debt. It’s easy to come in with a flash piece, blank piece of paper. Do you think they’re there, IBM?
Camberley Bates: Yeah. Yeah, they are. And the big push for IBM now is new placements. I mean, IBM’s got such an engine. You roll a new box out and all you have to do is go replace everything that’s out there and you’ve got a very, very large market. But that really doesn’t grow you over time. It just is a long-term management of your assets. The big thing for them is that they need to push on a real strong new placement, new opportunity positioning in their systems. Now, they did roll out a new low end box.
They’ve got the 5,300 is replacing the 5,200. That’s their low end box. It’s a one U box. It’s about 400,000 IOPS. Craziness that this thing goes into a 64 gigabit fiber channel. It’s like, okay, so I’ve got a one U box that’s got a fiber channel. Who the heck is going to do this? Well, what’s going on is that you’re going to have larger companies are going to use these one U boxes and scale out with the one U boxes.
Steven Dickens: Just building block them, basically.
Camberley Bates: They’re going to building block these.
Steven Dickens: It’s a nice low entry start point for an SMB customer, but it’s also an enterprise play ’cause you can just rack them and stack them.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. It’s both ethernet and fiber channel, but it’s kind of like, okay, so you still have fiber channel on this and that’s kind of where it’s going is servicing those clients who are using those systems for that. I mean what IBM does is I think it’s similar to what they do with the mainframe is they look for where they could use cores, FPGAs, asics and that kind of stuff to offload and speed up the process.
One of the things they’ve done within the controller, if you will, they are using one of the CPU cores to help speed up data services. You’re offloading the IO and letting the IO go hammer over there. And the things like replication and safeguard copy, which is marrying kind of stuff, is offloaded. And those are things that can bring down a controller and really hurt your performance.
Steven Dickens: Looking for a complete balance system design.
Camberley Bates: Right. Predictable balance. Predictable balance. They’ve got some really great offering here. Again, it’s a question of how they’re going to go out there and selling. The third area that we-
Steven Dickens: That’s always been IBM’s challenge from… IBM’s very well populated in those huge big enterprises, the Fortune 500, the sort of largest enterprises that probably those top 2,000 customers globally. Can they get into the SMB space? Can they get into the fast emerging tech space? That’s always the sort of question. It sounds like this new box and this new form factor gives them a proposition there.
Camberley Bates: Right. Yeah.
Steven Dickens: Can they get there from a go to market model is the question, I suppose.
Camberley Bates: Yeah, and they’re all complete channel pretty much. The last thing I’ll mention is their virtualized product, which is SVC. If you know SVC, which is their storage virtualization product, anything that’s run SVC, which would be Flash systems and some of the other pieces, they’ve done some things to super enhance their replication and their mirroring and their metro capability. I don’t have the chart numbers on terms of performance and the easing of the hit.
Instead of this hockey stick that you tend to see whenever you do a mirror or those kinds of things, it’s this even flow without… Looks like it’s almost close to the same performance you have if you don’t have mirroring or if you don’t have their policy-based replication. Pretty significant. I want to see more on it. I want to see more of the performance about under what conditions are we really seeing that kind of performance?
Steven Dickens: Mm-hmm.
Camberley Bates: How is it hitting? But that’s the reason why people don’t use that technology for high availability or DR is because it brings systems down. If they’ve done some tweaking and code development there to make that whole lot better, it makes it very, very attractive. And if the sellers know how to position this, it’s meaningful because we’re not just talking about replicating to another site. You can be using the cloud because they’ve got SVC running up in the cloud as well.
Steven Dickens: SVC’s long been the crown jewel for me in IBM storage. Tough proposition to position, especially for a channel partner, but really fantastic technology I think. I mean we’re going back, well how long have they had SVC now? Over a couple of decades probably.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. But locally we have a, what used to be IBM site, now it’s a Kyndryl site.
Steven Dickens: Mm-hmm.
Camberley Bates: I’ve known friends that have worked at that Kyndryl site and they’ve always used SVC at the Kyndryl site to manage these very, very large environments that are located there for their VR site. And they come back and they say, it’s just amazing what we can do and how many terabytes or petabytes now that a single person can manage because of this layer. If it gets implemented, it’s a huge value proposition for the IT operations space.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, for sure.
Camberley Bates: We better rush to the other pieces because we’re eating up time.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. Get you started on storage and you can just keep on going. We could do at least half an hour on storage.
Camberley Bates: You need to cut me off.
Steven Dickens: IBM also launched a Power Edge box. I’m going to be writing some stuff about that, bringing power systems closer to the edge. We haven’t got time to go into it in depth. I think this can be interesting for some of those Edge AI workloads, but I’m going to be writing a research note on that. We’ll link to that one. We spent a lot of time on IBM today. Moving forward, Google announced earnings were obviously Alphabet, the parent for Google announced earnings. I think up 15% at the Alphabet level. I think the one that stood out for me was that Google Cloud was up 28% to almost 10 billion for the quarter.
That’s a significant number now. Google’s tracking probably faster growth or at least kind of in the same levels of growth as AWS and Microsoft. We’ve covered Google Cloud next and their conference on why that is. I think the AI proposition makes a lot of sense. It’s a very coherent, well-structured message. I think what we’re seeing is sales execution from Google. That’s the thing that I’m tracking. Are they able to execute in the enterprise? Obviously a fantastic organization with product-led growth. I think 12 services over a billion users, five services over two billion users.
You don’t have to explain sort of what YouTube is to anybody these days. Everybody gets it. Consumer-focused, product-led growth obviously got it nailed, really strong ad business and all the things that go around it, the G Suite and the workplace stuff obviously getting traction. Can they build an enterprise sales go-to market sort of strategy that is as equally good as they’ve got from a product point of view? That’s the bit I’m watching. 28% year-on-year growth of Google Cloud means they’re starting to do something right. Can they continue to execute? That’s kind of my question.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. And that was the interesting thing about Tom Currie and coming over there from Oracle because we all know how well Oracle can execute on the sales side. And so I think it’s probably, and I haven’t watched it like you have, but I’m sure it’s taken a while to change over to a different sales motion and the sales people that you need, which are enterprise, account-based, senior-level people selling into the higher echelons of the company and positioning as well as the technical capabilities that they have.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, I mean we met with a couple of their senior execs who they’ve hired an exec from Microsoft to lead global enterprise sales.
Camberley Bates: Mm-hmm.
Steven Dickens: I think it’s that person. I was chatting to a former colleague about the person who’s running sales for Europe in Google. Very sales-driven, very focused, very enterprise-driven. We need more of that type of person to be at Google just across the entire organization. And we’re going to continue to see numbers like 28% year-on-year growth for Google Cloud. I think the market needs three strong players for hyperscale cloud. The other one I would talk about is Oracle.
I was at Oracle’s Database Analyst Summit this week. They took 30 of us out to San Francisco to wine and dine us and tell us about what they’re doing. Really, really came away from that event with, I’ve always been impressed with Exadata. It’s a great platform on-prem. Perfectly tuned for doing Oracle workloads on prem. I think what is more impressive for me is how they’ve made that a truly cloud customer, cloud connected through into Exascale in Oracle Cloud.
Being able to take that workload and really architect it to be able to go whether you want it on-prem, whether you want it in a sovereign cloud deployment with Alloy, or whether you want it as a full cloud deployment in something like Exascale. Being able to take that one workload and then build around it. The other piece that they were really keen to tell us is obviously they’ve got a strong track record with Oracle database workloads, but infrastructure workloads. They popped up a couple of slides there.
Whether this is entry level pricing to go grab market share or whether I can believe what they’re saying that they’ve got some secret sauce that means they can be cheaper. They were 200% cheaper. Now obviously you can pick a workload and make anything look better than your peers if you try hard enough. And I’m going to be digging down on this, I’m going to be going to the ICE hopefully to their OCI analyst summit in a couple of weeks.
But really interesting that Oracle was positioning that they’re cheaper for pure IaaS. I need to go digging on that. But on first blush, they put up, I think it was Uber have moved a lot of their infrastructure onto Oracle just purely for IaaS, and they moved it because of cost. I don’t think any of us would normally associate Oracle with being cheap for something, but they’re positioning that they are for IaaS.
Camberley Bates: But you know what? They know how to optimize for their environment and that’s a big deal. I mean, they’ve been running these high-end transactional database environments, high availability, high… That’s what they’re focused on. And when you’re focused on something versus other clouds tend to be more generalist. I’ve got S&B I’ve got to take care of.
I have this kind of application. I have this application, this application. You also see in the clouds, they tend to ship beta products. They announce that beta and then they build on top of that beta to build on top of the capabilities to roll out. And that’s by design. And we’ve seen that from most of the clouds doing that. That is not an Oracle way.
Steven Dickens: MM-hmm.
Camberley Bates: Oracle ships, Oracle clients, Oracle…
Steven Dickens: It’s bomb proof.
Camberley Bates: You are expecting it, just like I’m shipping a mainframe. It shouldn’t break. And so there’s a different type of engineering approach from those two organizations, and that may be what is contributing to their value statement that they’re bringing out there is because they’ve tuned and tuned and tuned and tuned and tuned for what they do best as opposed to generalists.
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Camberley Bates: I don’t know if that’s accurate enough, but…
Steven Dickens: That certainly came through. It was fascinating as well. Sort of fanboy moment. Larry Ellison joined us for an hour. I got-
Camberley Bates: I saw that picture.
Steven Dickens: I got to ask Larry a question.
Camberley Bates: He looked like he was on Lanai.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, I think he was.
Camberley Bates: He was in Hawaii.
Steven Dickens: People who’ve seen him before were trying to work out where his background was, but…
Camberley Bates: He definitely had a suntan going on there.
Steven Dickens: 79 years old. Sharp as a button, absolutely on it, was telling us about where they’re coming with their AI strategy, architectural questions, interacting with the room of the 30 brightest and best in the database space. Well, 29 of the best and me. But you know..
Camberley Bates: Wait, wait, wait. You are the best, aren’t you?
Steven Dickens: Oh. I don’t know about that.
Camberley Bates: One step above me, right?
Steven Dickens: There was some database experts in the room, to be fair. There was some database experts there. But no, I mean still hands-on, deep in the tech, really leaning into his CTO role. That was fascinating for me. I think the other key takeaway is with obviously the CERNA acquisition around healthcare, it’s going to be fascinating to see what they do to fully embed that from an AI point of view.
Camberley Bates: That’ll be interesting. Okay. I hadn’t thought about that. They’ve had that for quite some time though now.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. Was Cerner as innovative as Oracle? No, obviously not. They were sort of, I think infusing Oracle innovation and now AI into Cerner. You’re going to start to see a flywheel develop with that business for sure. But we’re running late. We’re 32 minutes.
Camberley Bates: Oh my God.
Steven Dickens: I know. It’s crazy.
Camberley Bates: I can’t believe we’ve been hanging in that long. Thanks guys for hanging in.
Steven Dickens: I’m going to blame it on you with all that storage deep tech talk.
Camberley Bates: Okay. You can do that.
Steven Dickens: But no, fantastic as always. Thanks for joining me on the show today, Camberley. Always good to talk to you. We could wax lyrical about infrastructure for weeks here.
Camberley Bates: I know. We bore them to death, but there we go.
Steven Dickens: You’ve been listening to another episode of Infrastructure Matters. Do all that stuff and click and subscribe and share this with your friends. We’ll see you next week. Thank you very much for watching.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Oracle Announces New AI Capabilities in Oracle Fusion Cloud CX
IBM FlashSystem 5000 & 5300 – Product Review
The Need for Cyber Resilience: A Conversation with Rubrik – Futurum Tech Webcast
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.