Transcript
Welcome to Nutanix CXO Pulse. Okay. Let's look at our first question, shall we? How should CIOs build IT resilience and adopt future-proof solutions? I think it's a really interesting question. Personally, I think there's a technology side and there's a people side to the answer to this question. On the technology side, really the first step, I think, is removing the silos from your infrastructure. So that includes your cloud infrastructure, that includes your VMs, your applications, all of your cloud native apps. They can all literally run on the same infrastructure and the same platform. Now, every time a technology refresh happens, that's actually an opportunity that allows you to start to think about, should I use the existing platforms or infrastructure we have in our company, or should I look at implementing a platform that can scale across all of the future things we're going to need to do in our organization? Now, finally, then, just thinking about the people component as well. The number one reason that projects fail is actually lack of communication. And let's face it, doing a job in IT is hard. There's so many things that people have to consider. We're all creatures of habit. So we keep doing things the same way that we've always done them. And I think really the challenge for all of us is to think about, well, what is the best way we're going to get the outcome that we need, not necessarily what's the way we've been doing it for the past 5, 10, or 15 years. All right, let's go to question two. How do I align IT transformation with business goals? Now, I think this is a really interesting question. We've just had our customer conferences throughout Asia. And at one of those conferences, one of the customers said that digital transformation is not technology transformation. I think quite often you get the two confused or combined. I really think that AI is going to have a profound impact on how digital transformation projects occur in organizations. But even with AI, it's not going to be enough. Our teams need to have a mindset of agility. We really need to have a culture of agility in our IT organizations. And also, it all needs to be built on a foundation of automation. Without that, we're really not going to be able to have the impact we want on the digital transformation projects. How can CIOs manage and reduce IT risks from vendor lock-ins? Now, this is actually a really timely question that's happening at the moment. I think the first thing that people need to think about when they're looking at avoiding lock-in is, do you have freedom to choose or the freedom of choice, as we would sort of say at Nutanix? The first thing I'd be thinking about is you need to have the ability to choose the hardware vendor that you want to deal with. You need to be able to choose the hypervisor that you want to run in your organization. You need to be able to choose the Kubernetes distribution platform. And obviously, you need to be able to choose the cloud that you have as well. And then finally, most organizations now are thinking about a dual vendor strategy. Again, I heard a large bank say recently that they're looking at 75% of their workloads going to the champion in their organization and 25% going to the challenger. And that's how they're mitigating the risk and driving a dual vendor strategy. Question number four. What is the key in maintaining IT agility in an era of disruption? It's a great question. I think disruption really is everywhere and it can't be ignored. You can't just leave it sitting on the back burner. But to disrupt yourself, really organizations need to be able to innovate. And innovating today isn't just implementing AI or different workloads. It really is how do we build this agility mindset in our organization? How do we create this culture of agility so we're always looking to be able to change and do things differently? And then secondly, I think that to be able to disrupt, you need efficiency. You need to have flexibility and simplicity. And being able to run one platform across your organization that allows you to manage all of your infrastructure, all of your Kubernetes workloads, all of your AI workloads, and all of your VMs in one place gives you that level of flexibility. Why do some organizations struggle to scale IT effectively? Now when I think of this, really it's a question of how do we scale effectively? It's not organizations struggling, etc. So I think really that organizations have decisions to make about their infrastructure. How do they actually deploy the whole of their data center infrastructure? They have the opportunities to think about, well, how do we remove silos from our organization as well? And then finally, how do we actually plan to help our organization reskill? Which is one of the biggest challenges. It's not just about implementing or doing something differently. It's actually about the reskilling of the organization to make it happen. What should CIOs prioritize for IT infrastructure decision? So last week I heard an analyst say that AI is really needing or driving the need to redesign our cloud capacity. But also it's driving big decisions around our Kubernetes distribution. And also many companies with the transition that's going on are looking at their hypervisor of choice as well. Now all of those things really are part of the same AI infrastructure decision. So my thought would be don't get stuck in the way that we've done things in the past. Look at the way that we could do things in the future and think about how do we build an infrastructure that supports all the different components that we need to run our business going forward. CIOs next steps for navigating IT transformation strategy. So I think this is really interesting because at the moment everyone is talking about AI. It's really where a huge amount of investment is going for pretty much every single organization and every vendor that's out there. But it's not just about the investment in AI. To be able to take advantage of AI, the way we build applications need to change. We talk about being able to actually build and deploy these AI applications really is built on Kubernetes infrastructure. So we need a platform that supports those modern applications. But also you need to think about how do I move my workloads between clouds as well because the cloud that I'm using today might need to be different in the future. And then finally, I think another area that people need to think about is how do they modernize the legacy infrastructure that they have in the data center. And my thought is that all of these things are actually connected. They're not separate conversations that you should be having. That concludes today's episode of Nutanix CXO Pulse. I hope you gained some actionable insights that can help you bring your digital transformation strategy to the next level for your business. Also stay tuned for more episodes and make sure to check out the previous ones if you haven't seen them already with Paul and Darius and explore more expert IT insights at Nutanix.com slash CXO.
