 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon here at the Cloud Technology Partners office on Subra Street in Boston, Massachusetts. Excited to have a first-time guest, but somebody we've known for many years, David Lindthicombe, who's SVP with the CTP. David, thanks for joining us. I'm happy to be here. Thank you for coming in today. Alright, so David, you and I have known each other for many years through the Twitters and, you know, discussions online talking about this whole cloud computing wave. I think back to the early definition wars, what was a cloud? This whole public cloud is going to be the only way to go. Look at where we are in 2015. We're just about going to see Amazon reinvent. My understanding is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 people coming to Las Vegas to talk about how they're using Amazon web services and everything there. So first for audience, can you just give us, you know, what are you doing these days and what's your role here at Cloud Technology Partners? Sure, we're cloud enabling enterprises in the government and so we're working as technologists and consultants and doing the heavy lifting in terms of how it's going to be and we're moving workloads and data into the cloud security issues, governance, provisioning, how you manage multiple cloud environments, hybrid cloud environments, how you design things, even moving ISVs into the cloud, working out tendency models, cost accounting models and we're just having a great deal of fun right now. Awesome. A lot of things in that statement that you just made that I want to help unpack for our audience. So let's start with kind of just the general mindset. So you gave kind of the government and the enterprise mindset, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about what's happened in the government. It's, you know, is it cloud first? Is it cloud only? You know, what is, you know, what's kind of the baseline when you're talking to most people and, you know, maybe you can give us kind of where's the government mindset, where's the traditional enterprise today as to how do they think about this whole cloud computing concept? Well, when Rebekah Cooner was running the government IT, when it's really just a kind of a political pointe, everything was supposed to be in the cloud and so his vision was that the government would be in the cloud very closely and by 2012 they either had to have a cloud strategy or tell somebody why they couldn't have a cloud strategy and here we are in 2015, very few workloads and very few data sets from the government have been moved into the cloud. They've gotten somewhat progress but quite frankly they haven't gotten the procurement vehicles in place and they don't have the skill sets in place to make the move efficiently and it's not the government's fault. If you talk to the government CIO they're going to say well we're not funded yet to make the move into the cloud and we do have specialized business needs and processes that we'd have to take care of and we really need additional money to make the move. So until they get funded, chances are they're not going to make the move. Enterprises see the business case of cloud rather quickly because they do have traditional workloads, traditional data sets, things like that. They're facing a data center bill, they're facing an affine creation, they're facing expanding capital costs and so looking to the cloud as basic as an option that will make much more cost effective sense as they move into the cloud. The other benefit that they're finding that they don't realize so after they deploy to the cloud is agility, time to market, the ability to change their processes, change their data as the speed of need, as business requirements dictate, really provides them the largest advantage and they're realizing that today. Alright, well a lot of pieces there. Let's talk a little bit more about the government maybe. So my familiarity with the government is once you've got something in place with the GSA contracts, it's pretty easy that there's low friction for divisions to just buy that, they get their budgets, they go through that is changing the procurement model. Is that what I heard one of the limiting factors as to why government hasn't adopted more public cloud? Yeah, it's changing the procurement model. It's not that difficult in consuming cloud services. They just have to go through the Fed ramp process, which is a gauntlet into itself. But ultimately, you have to get the right skills in place from the integrators who understand how to move into cloud. And the traditional integrators that are in there right now understand big traditional systems, but don't necessarily understand the ins and outs of cloud, they're getting better at it. But until those skill sets are there and available for the government, either inside the government or outside the government in mass quantities, it's going to be very difficult for them to move. Okay, and what's CTP's role in helping both government and enterprise in determining what they do with cloud? Sure, it's about advising people which steps to take into the cloud and provide a strategy together in terms of what your needs are, what the benefits of cloud computing can bring and stepwise how you get there. And also, when you write the strategy, and you write the plan, and you write the resources that are needed, it's about implementing that. So actually going off and doing the heavy lifting, moving the workloads into clouds onto Amazon, moving workloads into SAS systems, rebuilding application development efforts around DevOps. And as it moves into the cloud, ultimately providing the doing versus the planning, and you got to really do both pieces. And we do both pieces. All right. I'd love to understand from an application standpoint, how many people are, you know, building new applications. So, you know, Amazon Web Services last couple years, when I've gone to reinvent, you know, they've got some awesome things like, you know, they're streaming and how they handle mobile. And you see a lot of, you know, gamers and, you know, cloud mobile type applications are there. But, you know, most of the enterprises that I talked to, I mean, have lots of applications. And it's more of saying, Okay, how do I take my existing applications and maybe replatform them and migrations are a very difficult thing to do. So, you know, how many are you seeing kind of new apps versus, you know, some kind of retrenching or rebuilding of traditional apps? We're seeing two paths. Number one, new application development where people are building new applications in the cloud and making them cloud native from the ground up. So they're architecting them specifically for a cloud provider. And using cloud native features, they can do auto provisioning, auto scaling, security, governance, all those things versus with the cloud features. And the other is mass migration of applications. We're seeing customers who want to basically do lift and shift of 8000 applications over the next two years, moving them onto the platform, the cloud to avoid a data center built to avoid a basically hiring additional administrators or in changing their model. And one versus the other, obviously app migration without refactoring can be limiting somewhat. But that's what people want to do. And that's where everybody's moving right now. New application development is great. It's a greenfield opportunity to reinvent the application for the cloud from the cloud, put cloud native features in there, make it a better application than you can build on premise. And that's really where I see the focus being over the next few years. Okay. Who are you typically working with inside the customer environment? Who's kind of driving the push to the cloud? You know, how much the application owners involve? Can you give us a little bit about what a typical environment looks like there from the kind of the organization standpoint? Yeah, usually we're working with the application managers. So someone who is working within a business unit who's managing a group of applications. In some cases working with the CTOs and CIOs and they're talking about holistically where the applications are going. But working with the tactical leaders allows us to be more effective because they have access directly to the applications. We can work on a smaller problem domain and maybe instead of moving 8000 applications move 800. And once they're successful, then basically move 800 more, 1000 more in other business divisions and build up on that success versus trying to take a big bang approach where we put together a large plan. It takes two years to get it implemented before people start moving code. And it's very difficult to keep that momentum up without success being shown. So we've spent many times over the last five plus years talking about stealth IT. And I'm curious, has in your experience is IT mostly getting those deployments under their wing? Are groups and business owners still going off and doing themselves on the side? Where are we into kind of having a holistic strategy for how to manage my application portfolio? Yeah, that's a great question because what happened was over the last five years we did have stealth IT where business units were going off and solving the problems. Either hiring consultants or building the stuff themselves on Amazon or Salesforce or something else. And then now that it's become unwieldy and difficult to manage, they're asking for forgiveness and turning it back into IT. And so IT is finding that all of these applications and data sets are on their doorsteps that they have to maintain now. So even if they went off to a single cloud strategy, suddenly they find they're a multi cloud strategy because they have five other clouds are taken care of and two two different flavors of private cloud. So IT has to step up and take those applications in their portfolio typically because they're driving the business and there's no there's no option. So they're between the rock and the hard place. They basically were subverted earlier on and now they said well here's what we built. It doesn't matter how bad it is or how difficult it is to maintain or how complex it makes your world or how insecure it is. Go figure out how to make this stuff work. Yeah, you bring up a great point. It's interesting. Last year at Reinvent, Amazon saying our customers are all in on AWS. Every customer I talked to I'd ask a couple of questions. Are you using Salesforce? Absolutely. Are you using Office 365? Of course we are. It's a multi cloud world. VMworld this year, VMware said it's you know any app anywhere one cloud and of course once again you talk to those customers. You know they said there's two classes of customers. Those are using AWS and those that haven't figured out that somebody that doesn't report to them is using AWS. That's right. And they're using some kind of Microsoft apps typically on there. So you know it's a multi cloud world. You know that's as you said there's so many challenges there to how do I manage it? How do I deal with security? You know how do you help customers kind of get their arms around you know what they have to lay a land and how do they you know help you know manage that. Do an honest assessment as to what's there. So in other words the clouds that are known and the clouds that are unknown and what they're being used for. There's always Dropbox there. There's always S3 there. The known knowns and the unknown knowns. And then figure out where you are as a starting point. And then then look at the vision for where you want to be. So we have a cloud maturity model where the top most is basically you're allowed you can orchestrate your services and containerization all that kind of stuff. And moving in that direction you know what does it look like for the next five years in terms of successes. And in terms of normalizing and putting control and governance around the existing cloud infrastructures that are there. Perhaps kicking a few out. Adding a few in but never leaving the users behind. Providing reliable and consistent services. Bringing the agility and time to market aspect down into the business units so they understand the value of that stuff. And it's that's the most difficult thing to do. The first two years of it are going to be the most hard because people are going to make mistakes. We're going to go over budget. They're not going to understand the impact and the value that this stuff has until it actually shows up. But once they're able to get through the smaller problem domains and it's a matter of building that up in the larger and larger efforts and provide larger and larger amounts of value. Very much like when we moved to the web. Very much like we moved to client server. Very much like we moved distributed computing. So there have been a lot of companies that have said we're going to make a software product that can help orchestrate that multi cloud world or you know I'm going to build a tool set. You know look at what you know Mezos is going to give us the data center operating system. You know Kubernetes is going to help pull these things together. Can the technology help us pull this together or is it going to be some kind of combination of you know really the services. You know things that like you talked about understand the maturity model and pulling all together. How should we look at this. You know getting this under control. Yeah well technology won't save you but it will certainly enable you to get further on down the road. So what we're doing right now is trying to figure out the management of abstraction layer that's going to exist between the cloud servers services that we're managing and there's many thousands that are occurring now within the enterprise and how we're going to control those and secure those and govern those and how we're going to abstract them into solutions over and over again and orchestrate them into business processes and re-orchestrate them that gives us the agility value of the thing. So there's tools out there that are being formed but they're all different as you know and they all solve a little subset of the problems and so if people are going to dive in with technology today they're going to find they have two or three tools around to solve the issues brokering tools CMP manager tools service manager tools service governance tools and ultimately no one's risen to the top. So a lot of the larger companies out there like IBM and VMware are claiming dominance in the space but no one has a killer proper killer technology in that space. So use your head and strategize first and for God sakes prototype make sure the stuff works make sure it operates to to form work it out on smaller problem domains for a few months don't just implement it take the word of the provider because they're trying to sell something they're not necessarily looking your requirements and you have to be very skeptical. All right so one of the reasons that we came out here was to talk about reinvent and Amazon specifically. So what's your take on Amazon today? How are they doing in the marketplace? What are your customers think when they when they think of AWS can kind of give us your your great on their 800 pound grow and every time we think they're going to stumble they don't stumble. So they are making a mad dash for the enterprise right now and trying to trying to impact outside of their small business space which was relatively what they owned over the last several years. So they're systemic to everybody who's doing cloud. I mean I just came from a conference and speaking on hybrid cloud almost everybody in the room used Amazon and very few people use Google and very few people use Azure and IBM and some of the other clouds out there just because it seems like it's table stakes to get into the cloud and the other thing is Amazon is very technically oriented and they basically drive feature function and they're not afraid to experiment and put stuff out there. They think the users want and ultimately doesn't cost them a lot to implement that stuff and people will either take off like a rocket with it or diminish and suddenly fall by the wayside as a service and so we need companies like that. They're able to fund lots of experimentation lots of innovation very quickly. They're still relying on innovation. They're not necessarily acting like a big company. It's almost like billions of dollars startups they're running. So as long as they keep that up it's going to be very difficult for the smaller cloud providers if any to catch up with them and and and grab more market share but they're certainly trying. Yeah it's a great point Wikibon's chief analyst Dave Vellante says Amazon you know not only is the 800 pound gorilla they're the cheetah in the marketplace. Nobody's moving as fast or as agile they keep adding new features. Every year they have a couple of really big announcements. Last year they launched a new database service. They announced Lambda. Talked about how containers are going in. The year before they had workspaces. Think it's one of those items that you said maybe hasn't picked up as well. Right. You know are your customers going to Amazon and buying some of those higher level solutions are they still using it as a toolbox to kind of build their own custom piece. How do they how do they leverage Amazon and the various services that they have. Mostly they're staying with with the EC2 and S3. So they're staying with the platform services and they're staying with the with the storage services. So they're buying the very basic primitive stuff and getting things up and running. They're looking at Lambda looking at the other service components not necessarily buying yet because they just started with the cart cloud a couple of years ago. So are they not buying it because the services are mature. They're not buying it because they're not ready for it. Are they not buying it because they're concerned that they'll be locked in to what Amazon's doing. I think it's all the above. I think you hit on everything. So they're not buying it because they don't necessarily need it. In some instances it's it's a problem that doesn't need solving. Number two they don't want to be locked into a particular provider. And so they're afraid that if they go deeper with the native services they're going to be locked in with that. Now they see containers coming along. They're interested in doing that. Will that provide them portability. So they're just kind of holding off to see how the market's going to mature. And they're concerned about data portability. If we're moving a petabyte database into Amazon well that's a lot of USB drives. You have to ship via FedEx. And so how is that going to work. And so they're getting to the tough areas and the tough questions and how they're moving to cloud. So they're using the more primitive services, the platform services. They're using them very effectively. And that's how Amazon's making their money right now. All right. So you mentioned you spoke at a hybrid cloud event recently. And Amazon two years ago, you didn't even hear the term hybrid. Last year they kind of said well we'll give you all the benefits of hybrid. You want your own. You want to own it. You want to control it. You want to configure it. We can do all of that for you inside Amazon. But that doesn't fit what most of us kind of call a hybrid type environment. How does Amazon fit into the hybrid? Do they fit into a hybrid environment? How do customers reconcile that I want hybrid but Amazon really wants everything going to the AWS cloud? Well, Amazon doesn't get everything that it wants. So they can be a public cloud. And we're going to build a private cloud. And we're going to connect up via the Amazon APIs. And we're just going to go ahead and build it despite of themselves. So I understand why they have their religion around public cloud. It's what they sell. And they want to use everything with a cloud model. Public cloud models are very efficient. There's just some people like banks and government where they're not comfortable yet with putting data in those environments. But they do want to use the public cloud for some aspects of their processing. And they want links tight links in between them. So hybrid cloud computing, Amazon's going to participate in that whether they know it or not. And they know they're seeing it right now. And I think a lot of people are demanding hybrid cloud because they want the option of using public and private cloud. Amazon's just going to have to plan that. Whether they recognize it or not, ultimately, they're going to have to realize they need the links, the management talent, the management connectivity, the tools to make those things work. Other people are going to build it and get the money. OK, so you mentioned one of the reasons customers don't put everything there is there. They may be not comfortable for it. They might have some governance issues they want to work out. What today in your view and when you advise customers what doesn't go in the public cloud? I think there's very little that can't go in the public cloud. I mean, I wouldn't put state secrets in there just because of it's going to make people uncomfortable. And that's not a lot of data as it is. The reality is you can be just as secure if not more secure in the public cloud. So if you put systemic security around it and you're using identity management, you're using encryption correctly. Everything we do with security, it's going to be perfectly fine in there. It's not going to get ripped off or even it does get ripped off. They can't see it because it's heavily encrypted. The problems that we had with data breaches that occurred at Home Depot and Target and Sony, clouds weren't anywhere near that. That was older security systems. They won't proactively monitor it and ultimately they were hacked. And those are more vulnerable today than anything we're building in the cloud. So present that to people who are skeptical about the cloud and they still don't feel comfort levels just because they can't control it. But that's really not the reality. They're actually avoiding themselves of a good security approach by not leveraging the cloud. OK. What about from a cost standpoint? We've seen a number of customers that say, I love the agility. It's great. But if I've got an application that's going to run steady state for three, four, five years, I can buy it and manage it myself cheaper than what it will cost me going in the cloud. What do you find from a financial standpoint? Does that hold water? Sometimes it's true. We do some cost models where some applications are going to be cheaper to manage and aren't portable or old mainframe systems running ISAM and VSAM. And it doesn't make sense to move them into the cloud. And so that case, it should remain where it is. In fact, we have on our life cycle and our checklist, leave it where it is as a point if it doesn't make good, viable sense to move it. It doesn't happen often, but there's lots of cases where it doesn't make sense to move applications in the cloud. Companies may not gain as much value from agility or time to market advantages. They may have just invested in $10 million of infrastructure, which will take them for another five or six years without moving the stuff into the cloud. If that's the case, then it doesn't make economic sense just to move into the cloud unless you want to put it in your resume. All right. So last question I have for you, for companies that are still kind of grappling with this whole issue of, you know, what the cloud, why the cloud, how the cloud, what do you recommend as first steps that they take? I think first steps are basically look at your own requirements. So look at what your processes are, your workloads, your data profile, those things. And look at where your growth is going to come from the next five years. What about capital expenditures investments and data centers? Power usage, things like that. And then look at the alternative of using cloud with those platforms. What's the low hanging fruit? What systems can we migrate easier over to the cloud? And what's the cost benefits of doing that? And just this simple business case to see if it makes sense and exploring. And then do a prototype, build the system up, migrate an application, see if it works, start experimenting with the capabilities of the cloud. They're going to be very pleased once they move to Amazon or move to Google or move to Azure. And then see if it makes sense to move it and then stepwise make the migration, just like we did with, like I said, client server and web and all the other things over time. If it makes sense to move their platforms viable and it's going to provide us with a longer, longer life and more resiliency, make the move. All right. You've mentioned a couple of times the cloud maturity model is or the basics of that available online or is that only for your clients? Yeah, we'll put it on the web or send me an email and I'll send it to you. OK, so great. Last thing, I guess, is how do people find out more if they want to get in touch with you and NCTP? Sure. Cloud Technology Partners is cloudtp.com and go check us out. You can email me directly at david.lynthecum L-I-N-T-H-I-C-U-M at cloudtp.com. All right. Well, David, really appreciate it. Thank you for having us in the office. Beautiful location right down the block from the B-C-E-C Convention Center here in the heart of Boston. Lots of innovation happening here. Lots of discussion on cloud. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Find all the research on wikibon.com and, of course, the video on siliconangle.tv. We're excited to have a large part of our team at Amazon Reinvent here at the beginning of October. So thanks so much for joining us, David, and thank you for watching. Thank you.