In this episode of Infrastructure Matters, hosts Krista Macomber, Camberley Bates, and Steven Dickens. They discuss key highlights from the VMware Explore event, focusing on announcements related to private infrastructure for AI applications and multi-cloud solutions. Some notable topics include VMware’s partnership with NVIDIA for private AI solutions, updates in multi-cloud networking with NSX+, and advancements in ransomware recovery solutions. The discussion also touches on the growing importance of AI in enterprise workloads and the demand for GPU-powered infrastructure. Overall, the episode provides insights into the evolving landscape of infrastructure technology.
Topics include:
- The key themes from VMware Explore
- More on Broadcom & VMware, and what we see as in the future investments
- Review of VMware announcements including vSAN Max, Edge Cloud Orchestrator, NSX+, VMware Cloud DR and VMware Private AI
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 streaming platform of choice here:
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this webcast. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this webcast.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Krista Macomber: Hello everyone and welcome to this next episode of Infrastructure Matters. My name is Krista Macomber and I am joined this week with both of my wonderful co-hosts here. We have both Camberley Bates and Steven Dickens. So, a great three part episode here. So, this past week we’re coming fresh off the heels of the VMware Explore event out in Las Vegas. Steven and I were both covering the announcements and actually Camberley was there in person. So, during the course of this episode we’re really going to focus on that show and we’re also going to talk a little bit about, in particular, some of the announcements pertaining to private infrastructure for AI applications, as well as some multi-cloud-related announcements that came out of the show.
So, Camberley, you were actually there in Las Vegas this week. Why don’t you kick it off for us with some of your general impressions from the show?
Camberley Bates: Sure. Well, first of all, I have to say that this was during when the Cyclone Hillary was coming all the way through. So, there was all this anticipation. It was like, “Are we going to be able to get in there?” et cetera. So, we all did. We made it there. I didn’t get the official number, but it was somewhere around 10,000, 12,000 people is what we were estimating there. Which is bigger than last year. It’s not as big as it was before pandemic, but definitely a good size crowd and a lot of energy, as we’ve seen in all the shows that we’ve been at. Hosted at the Venetian, what also is known as the Sands Expo or used to be there. So, we kicked it off with an analyst day on Monday and had the privilege to spend time with Raghu and Sumit, the CEO and president, talking about a very, very open conversation about where everything was going, et cetera. And then the big event was the next following days. But two big themes, multi-cloud and AI or generative AI. You can’t get away from those two.
Steven Dickens: They talked about AI? I’m shocked completely.
Camberley Bates: I know.
Steven Dickens: A big tech event where AI came up? Who would’ve known that that would’ve been a topic?
Camberley Bates: I know.
Krista Macomber: Falling out of our chairs.
Camberley Bates: Couple snippets of data kind of thing. Raghu talked about the fact that when they’ve looked at their clients, 75% of them are in two clouds and on-prem. We had a conversation with one of their clients and was really… I can’t say who it was or anything like that because it was all on the A, but one of the things that I heard is that two clouds is enough. Any more than two clouds is going to be too difficult to do because of all the staffing and everything that goes on there. So, it was an interesting snippet that was there. The main session kicked off with Raghu of course saying, “Hey, 25 years, great. We love you guys,” et cetera, and then went straight into the elephant in the room, which is the Broadcom.
So, it was like, “Let’s talk about that, get it all over and we’re going to go to the next thing.” And actually Hock was there. Hock Tan was there. He stood up and waved at everybody and that kind of stuff. And Raghu reemphasized the commitment of the $2 billion that was emphasized in the AR event, but the $2 billion investment and stating 50% of that is going into R&D. The other part is to accelerate the solutions, and we can talk about what that means. And the other big thing is the confidence that this is going to close by the end of their fiscal year, Broadcom’s fiscal year, that is. That’s October 30th, 2023. So, we’re pounding down on the edge of it.
Steven Dickens: So, they got another approval, didn’t they, while the show was on, I think? Was it the UK gave an approval for the acquisition-
Camberley Bates: Yes.
Steven Dickens: … I think I saw?
Camberley Bates: UK gave approval and then the date for the antitrust people to stand up and say, “We’re holding this up,” passed. So, that was a approval without an approval. It was just the date passed, so nothing’s going to happen there. We don’t think anything’s going to happen. So, we’re down to-
Steven Dickens: Obviously they’re regulated by the SEC, both public companies careful about what they could say. Did you pick up any sort of buzz from any of the attendees?
Camberley Bates: Still nervous about this, what’s going to happen with both the investment and the pricing. As we’ve seen over the course of the last year since the announcement is clients have been locking in their licensing. We’ve seen some big uptick with their licensing or their SaaS contracts that have been going on and those have… Looking at two to three year contracts to lock it in so they are assured of what they have, and we’ll see where things are going to go. So, that’s the biggest buzz but there’s just still a lot of nervousness of what’s going to happen.
Steven Dickens: It’s a big acquisition.
Krista Macomber: It is.
Steven Dickens: I think we’ve been pretty well briefed as a team and I think our posture as a company is we’re pretty bullish on the innovation, this 2 billion. I think the perspective that VMware was a fantastic bed of roses and everything was amazing and Broadcom’s going to come in and change that probably is not very factual, if we’re being honest. The company was growing but certainly not at the rate that it needed to be. So, I think this 2 billion investment… And obviously Broadcom’s an innovative company. A very innovative company. We’ve spent some time last week out with Greg Lotko who reports directly into Hock and his story, albeit for a completely different technology, is all about inward investment, all about supercharging growth and really driving forward. So, if that’s from a guy who reports directly into Hock, I think I probably trust that source of information maybe more than I do some of the armchair pundits out there just trying to take a pop at this.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. And I brought that point up to a couple people and their point back to me was that the initial effort with CA was taking out resource, taking out a lot of the extra stuff that was there. But the other piece on the other flip side of it is that Greg has had a lot of investment in the mainframe technology and they have way advanced into that area. So, I think there’s that one thing that says, “If you can rise up and you’ve got good quality stuff, the investment is going to happen.” So, you have to prove your point. What becomes at risk is those folks that are not executing and the one big area that we’re all going to look at is Tanzu. Tanzu has struggled and can Tanzu raise up to that level. But we’ll see. They’ve come a long ways. They’ve got still more ways to go on that and we can talk a little bit about that later on. So, talk about what they’ve done and what they’ve brought out and many of these things should be core and strategic to Hock’s investment.
Steven Dickens: Well, that’s where a lot of that 2 billion’s going to go. They’ve not provided any clarity but that’s my perspective of where that investment’s going. Well, A, going to have to go and B, should go.
Camberley Bates: Right.
Krista Macomber: Absolutely.
Camberley Bates: So, Sumit got up after Raghu talked about the big themes and everything else and he started talking about the five innovations around multi-cloud. And let me rattle those off where I’ll go into a little bit of them. And I’ll go in the order that he listed them, which was an interesting list because I’m not sure I would’ve listed them this order, but this is where his importance was. Number one was vSAN Max. Okay, storage is everything. I know that.
Steven Dickens: He listed them that way for purely your benefit, Camberley,
Camberley Bates: He did. He did. He knew I was there. So, vSAN Max and we’ll have a piece coming out from Dave Raffo on this, but it’s petabyte scale disaggregated storage. What is disaggregated storage? It’s basically network storage. So, what they’ve done is where vSAN has more or less been part of this HCI platform. So, you had to scale compute in storage together. And they did a little bit change when they did the HCI Mesh, which I could scale the storage separately, but this is taking it to another level and really creating almost its own separate storage device. It’s petabyte scale. They’ve done some big enhancements into the data path. Expect to see these guys ship as ready nodes, so their own storage. In a sense I’m thinking they may be competing with some of the mid-level products that are out there. I think this is all goodness in terms of the architecture.
So, Let’s say I’ve got a big vSAN cluster out there or clusters out there and I just want to have the storage device, they are going to start competing directly with guess who? NetApp and Dell and Pure that have got the network attached storage for VMware. So, that’s going to be an interesting play that’s going to happen in that space, but that was one of the big announcements. The second one, I’m looking at my notes down here so pardon me if I’m looking down, guys, is the vSphere+. I think this is the area we’re going to see a lot of investment coming in because what they did is planning and upgrading the fleet centrally. So, they’re claiming a three times faster upgrades with lifecycle management. And that has implications across for the customer and it has implications for Broadcom ultimately or the management of the service.
So, on one hand they’ve got people on old versions and they’re not upgrading and it’s difficult to upgrade. So, if you can make this stuff easier to upgrade, over time people will rattle through it and then your cost and your service support were reduced. So, I think there’s a big cost benefit that’s going in there. So, that was a significant one. That was the second one they announced. What they called true multi-cloud networking with NSX+. And the bottom line on that one is, define the policies once and deploy it across all the clouds. That is slick. Really slick. And Russ who was with me was super excited about it. Five years ago he would talk about NSX+ and had certain four letter words after the product name. He was-
Steven Dickens: And they weren’t words like “good.” Is that what you’re telling me?
Camberley Bates: It was not good. It had a digit before it. It had-
Steven Dickens: Yeah, there was other vowels and consonants in that word. Let’s put it that way.
Camberley Bates: He was quite really super pleased to see that. And just as a note for you guys who don’t know who Russ is, Russ runs our lab here. So, when he’s saying certain words about products It’s because he’s had the opportunity to work with them and set them up and run them and everything else. So, that was very, very exciting.
Steven Dickens: He’s our expert in VMware. From chatting to him, he’s elbow deep in that technology and comes with a practitioner mindset. So, that’s a good perspective.
Camberley Bates: Yeah, yeah. The fourth one was the Edge Cloud Orchestrator, and that is also or it used to be known as Edge SASE Orchestrator or something like that. And what they’re doing, and this is my way of looking at what they’ve done, is this orchestration of the edge devices that are out there. And I need to simplify it for my terminology here, but imagine being able to take all your edge devices out there and have them upgraded and substantiated like an iPhone. In other words, you get on your iPhone, it’s ready for it’s upgrade. So, it goes up, talks to the guy. The guy goes over and says, “Okay, here’s the stuff coming at you. Here’s your upgrade,” and take care of it,
And so it’s a much more efficient way to manage on upgrades and capabilities out in rolling out. So, I’ve got a little code sitting on my edge device that goes out there. It ships out there, comes out there, says, “Hi, I’m here,” and goes through the process of updating and continuously updating. So, when we think about thousands of edge devices out there, this is a super efficient way to orchestrate and manage these devices. And I’m sure we’re going to hear a whole lot more about this coming out. So, it was quite a bit of excitement around there. And the last big one that he mentioned was the ransomware one, and I’ll pass it on to my lovely copilot. That’s not you, Steve.
Steven Dickens: I knew you weren’t talking about me. That was crazy. I knew. Lovely? Yeah, that’s not me.
Camberley Bates: I’ll just pass it over to Krista. She’s been with Russ Fellows and the lab has been up to their eyeballs on this ransomware. So, why don’t you mention what they’re doing?
Krista Macomber: Yeah. And I think, Camberley, actually the two announcements that you covered even before this I think are a great segue. When we think about the NSX+ and the Edge Orchestrator, those both have security implications for sure. When we think about installing updates to these endpoint devices for security, and then also from a networking perspective when we think about, as you were mentioning, not only creating and rolling out these policies centrally and consistently, but also having that visibility into the network. So, from my perspective, being our data protection and data security individual on the team here, certainly excited to see that as well as, as you’re mentioning, updates to what VMware calls its ransomware recovery solution. And as you were mentioning, it was great timing for us because Russ and I actually just completed what we call an audit of the solution.
So, we were very hands-on with VMware in terms of spending a lot of time observing the capabilities of these solutions and vetting it from all the angles we could really think of for cyber resiliency and in particular thinking about some of these ransomware attacks and how they’re evolving. So, this is a solution that has been in the market actually since approximately the fall of last year of 2022. It’s an add-on to what VMware calls VMware Cloud DR, and it has some capabilities that are specific to recovering from ransomware. Because these are not just your normal standard disaster events that we need to recover from.
They require things like the ability to create immutable data copies, which VMware provides with this solution by using the Scale-Out cloud file system for example, and also some forensics capabilities to be able to not only uncover that an attack has occurred but really to assess its damage and to see where has it impacted in the environment and to be able to identify maybe what are some of the best snapshots to recover from that are not going to reintroduce the infection back into the environment but also help you to mitigate your data loss resulting from an attack.
So, we are going to be having a full paper coming out on it and I did write a blog so I won’t get too much more into the nitty-gritty, but I will introduce the fact that there are a couple of additions that VMware added to the solution. So, it now can protect Google Cloud VMware engine workloads. But really for me the big picture takeaway was the ability to support multi VM recovery operations concurrently. So, this is going to help to really reduce that downtime for the business by speeding those recovery operations. So, those were a couple of the headlining announcements really coming out of that service.
Camberley Bates: Right. Great. That’s the big package for the multi-cloud. A lot wrapped in there. As I said there’ll be multiple… We’ve got piece coming out from Krista. We got a piece coming out from Dave Raffo, and then Russ and I are authoring a piece that goes a little bit more in detail into the overall areas that I just talked about.
The second big area, so if that wasn’t enough for the conference, were the big announcements around generative AI. They had two announcements on there. One of them was the private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. Let me say that one more time. Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. It’s an integrated solution with NVIDIA. Looks like it’s going to be available Q1. Not priced yet. Still working on all of those pieces. It’s another one of those systems that;s basically giving a nod to saying, “People are going to want the privacy. They want to protect their IP. They want the governance, et cetera, and they want to do the training on site.” So, this is that solution that’s going to be wrapped up together integrated not only with NVIDIA’s GPUs but also with their software.
A couple big items here. Number one, they’re claiming a 97% performance of bare metal. Now I haven’t seen the performance numbers. They’re supposed to send the blog and the information over to me, but what they’ve done is some technology changes or assistance with VMs with NVLink and also their vSAN directed GPU capability using RDMA integrates with NVIDIA GPUs. Between those two pieces, they’re getting close to bare metal and they said they’re getting better than bare metal in some cases. So, 106% performance in certain use cases, I guess, is what we’re seeing. So, pretty significant. Looking forward to seeing this come out the door. Jensen was on stage. I guess he had to fly. From there he went to do his incredible earnings that he reported.
Steven Dickens: Those earnings, two quarters in a row. Wow. Just wow. We’ll put some in the show notes but Daniel was all over the media. Daniel, our CEO and lead analyst was all over the media talking about that. Just what a spectacular beat and raise and yeah, just the NVIDIA team are on fire right now, I think.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. It’s, what was it? Double, twice? 13 billion or something like that as opposed to six and whatever. It’s mind-blowing that they could actually A, ship that much in that short a period of time. And the fact is that they’re forecasting next quarter similar numbers, so just amazing what’s taking off. The second announcement they had was reference architecture for VMware Private AI with their partnership with Hugging Face. This reference architecture is already coming out with three guys that they talked about: Lenovo, which you keep on holding and giving them free advertising with your coffee cup there.
Steven Dickens: This Yeti cooler, it’s sponsored by Lenovo.
Camberley Bates: You know what mine is? I’m not sure if anybody knows who this is. It’s called Left Hand Networks.
Steven Dickens: I think there’s a sponsorship opportunity.
Camberley Bates: Back to the day.
Steven Dickens: We can give people a shout-out as part of this podcast.
Krista Macomber: I have AWS over here.
Steven Dickens: Come on, Krista.
Krista Macomber: So, yep. AWS here.
Steven Dickens: And look-
Camberley Bates: Watch out. I know Rachel’s going to start sending me Veeam stuff. So, I’m going to see her Veeam coffee cup come in in a heartbeat here.
Krista Macomber: I’ve got so much Veeam swag that she doesn’t even have to.
Steven Dickens: I feel Jonathan’s missing a sponsorship opportunity for this podcast. What do you think?
Krista Macomber: We’ll have to follow up with him, for sure.
Camberley Bates: Absolutely. So, here the reference architecture for VMware Private AI and their partnership with Hugging Face. Lenovo, Dell, HPE were talking about rolling out the solution with them. I had the opportunity to spend some time with Lenovo, Robert Daigle, who is over there with their box. It was a 4u box, two GPUs in there. They were running a large language model. They had trained the model according to the website. They had an avatar up there that we could plug in and ask questions by and she was kicking out information, et cetera, to us.
So, it was a real thing. Very exciting. They are totally all-in and very, very focused on not necessarily… Because I’ve known Robert for a while and I met him at Supercomputing. I said, “Are you going to be at Supercomputing?” And he goes, “No.” And what they’re focused on, yeah, they’re focused on supercomputing because they got an awesome supercomputing practice over there, but his focus is really on the big enterprise stuff, which is where we’ve been talking about this is going, which is so cool. It’s just like this is now part of our life and living and it’s here, guys.
Krista Macomber: So, that might be a great segue, Camberley. I was curious, when you were at the show, did you get a chance to talk with any customers about some of these private AI solutions or maybe even just how are they thinking about integrating AI into their business and what will be some of the ramifications from the standpoint of their technology stack?
Camberley Bates: Yes, and I think overall what you’re seeing them doing is they are cautiously moving forward with this. So, one of the folks that talks who talks about this is all at the CEO board level discussion. This was a curious statement. There is a little bit of FOMO going on, fear of missing out, and there should be. Because as I’ve said this is, to me, this is as big as what we saw when we went to transaction processing in the 1970s and ’80s and everything went online. It was so, so changed in terms of an efficiency operations and the organization. So, they should be jumping into this. But because of potential problems with IP, bad outcomes from training and those kinds of things, they’re moving slowly and they’re looking at first initial.
And you’ve seen this happening when we were at Dell or whatever. First initial implementations is internal. Let’s get the C. Let’s do some ones internal. Let’s see how we can get them going. And I will mention that in terms of what also was announced with VMware is Intelligent Assist. So, they’ve taken their training. They’ve been doing this, training these models to do Intelligent Assist for upgrades and service assistance with clients and that includes, I believe it was Tanzu, NSX and Workspace ONE is the first three that they were talking about. Amanda Blevins was on main stage talking about that. I’ll go to you, Krista. You were about to say something.
Krista Macomber: No, no, no. I was just going to add that I think another application for that is increasingly going to be cyber recovery. So, Rubrik at the show had an announcement on utilizing Microsoft’s AI capabilities on a cyber recovery solution there. So, I think that’s another potentially very impactful application. And also using some of these large language models to train on evolving cyber attack approaches and trying to at least keep pace as much as we can with these bad guys, so to speak, if not try to get a step ahead of them. So, it’s going to be interesting to see how it shakes out, for sure.
Camberley Bates: Yes, absolutely.
Steven Dickens: It’s interesting. I’ve got a research note which should hopefully come out today and we’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Dave Raffo and I wrote about some of the adoption that Oracle cloud infrastructure’s seen. They issued a press release this week around some of the work they’re doing with MosaicML and some of the performance stats that we’re starting to see. We were at HPE Discover. They’ve announced infrastructure for GPU access. I think we’re going to see all of the vendors over the next probably two or three months bring in a real focus on how you get access to these GPUs as a service for enterprise workloads. And then when you factor in, I had a conversation with Kirk Skaugen, the SVP over at Lenovo, the focus that he’s seeing coming through into the pipeline of business they’ve gotten, you’re starting to see that pivot towards AI being the biggest workload.
And Lenovo’s got huge market share in servers. So, that’s a lead indicator for me of whether the rest of the industry’s going to go. I think all of these vendors are going to be building out GPU-powered infrastructure. And then you see NVIDIA talking about their backlog and their pipeline. That gives you a further lead indicator. You don’t build out all this infrastructure on the Field of Dreams model of, “Oh, we’ll just put it all out there and hope that somebody uses it.” The enterprises must be asking for it from these CSPs, managed service providers, and from prem, and that’s what’s driving this whole market around enterprise AI. For me, it’s end user demand, the vendors building out the infrastructure and then NVIDIA just crushing it from a GPU supply chain perspective.
Camberley Bates: The other thing is, and since I do play into the data side of the house here, is that most of the training being done right now has been on information that’s already been generated, their documents, their documentation and language models, et cetera. And so the amount of data that’s actually needed is not as huge as people might think.
Steven Dickens: “Small language models,” is what somebody said to me today, earlier this week-
Camberley Bates: Right, they’re really as compared to when you get video and imagery and that kind of stuff. However, expect that the next wave that’s going to hit to train these models will be bringing in more visual, videos, whatever into the models to be able to do anymore training. And so that would be the next wave that happens and that was where this is going to explode. One of the sessions I sat through had some big visionaries using the term explorers. Literally explorers. They had somebody that was an astronaut there, somebody that was the deep sea guy, and then also somebody that was been talking about and has been in AI for 20 years.
And she looked like she was 30 years old, so I’m not sure how long she’s really been doing this. She said 20 years. I’m going, “You only look 30 to me.” Anyway. But she was talking about the big trends about what she’s expecting to see over the next two years, and that was the one thing I picked up on that she said, “This is coming. This is coming and this is why I believe It’s coming.” So, it was like, “Okay, okay. Let’s watch and see whether it’s going to be as soon as the end of 2024 and the beginning of ’25.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, I think we’re only at the beginning of this. This is how it feels. One of the key takeaways from my conversation with Kirk was 52-week lead times on some of these GPUs and they’re sold out for the next year. If you think about that, it’s kind of crazy that that’s how much the demand is and that’s how early we are.
Camberley Bates: All right, looks like we’ll-
Steven Dickens: We’ll be watching it. On future episodes we’ll be talking about it. I don’t think we’re going to be going anywhere soon. We’re going to be talking about this for months ahead is the impression I get.
Camberley Bates: All right, folks.
Krista Macomber: That we will be.
Camberley Bates: Good stuff. Good stuff.
Krista Macomber: All right. Well, they-
Camberley Bates: I didn’t think we’d have 30 minutes of VMware. There you go.
Krista Macomber: There we go.
Steven Dickens: We need Yeti coolers from VMware for this show.
Krista Macomber: I know it. I know.
Camberley Bates: They gave me a cup to take with and I just didn’t have room in my bag.
Steven Dickens: Come on, Camberley.
Camberley Bates: Sorry, Shirley.
Krista Macomber: Always the struggle, right?
Steven Dickens: Next week, Shirley, we’ll give you some love. How does that sound? Come on.
Krista Macomber: We’ll need to get a rotating lineup of tumblers.
Camberley Bates: Okay. There we go. Wait. Wait a second.
Krista Macomber: We’re accepting submissions.
Camberley Bates: My former company formerly known as the Evaluator Group just for you.
Krista Macomber: I think I have mine kicking around, Camberley, so we’ll have to keep those in rotation too, for sure. All right. Well, Camberley, Steven, this was a lot of fun. Very insightful as always. We want to thank everyone for listening and joining. Please make sure that you like and subscribe and all of that good stuff so you don’t miss a future conversation and you’re kept up to date, and we look forward to the next conversation. Thanks so 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 a decade of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content, with a focus on IT infrastructure and data management and protection. 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 center 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.
Krista holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Journalism with a minor in Business Administration from the University of New Hampshire.
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.
