Savings Through Standardization – Mark Appleton, ALSO Cloud UK

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Mark Appleton as Chief Customer Officer for Alto Cloud uk, and we're talking about the desire to standardize on a single platform versus maybe what the reality is and what the trade-offs and benefits are.

Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks, Michael. Nice to meet you.

In theory, we hear a lot of folks are trying to standardize on a single cloud platform. They sign these large enterprise agreements and, you know, and everybody nods their head, but in practice it seems like we're having a hard time maintaining control of that. Everywhere I go, somebody's got one to two, maybe three or four clouds sometimes.

What is your sense of, um, a, what's the motivation for getting on a single cloud, and B, how do I kind of get everybody to stay there once we decide we're going there In the end, you know, that single provider has to have, uh, all the benefits that the, uh, reseller or the tenants are, uh, looking for now, whether that's based on vendor mix, whether that's based on, uh, security or other topics that are key to them. Yeah, it's having everything complete on one platform makes it easier to have one single provider. Uh, I think one of the challenges in the market at the moment is that there's a lot of marketplaces that do not cover everything that the, uh, resellers and end users are looking for.

As we kind of think that through each time you add a new platform, it increases the total cost of it. So do you think in the current economic climate where there's a lot more headwinds, there's more people trying to stay on a single cloud? Well, the more platforms we're using, yeah, the more talent you need to hire, which is obviously a huge impact on opex.

So, you know, for, you know, the business side of things, if you're using 3, 4, 5 different platforms, you know, is the talent out there, what are the costs of employing that talent to manage three or four different platforms? Um, and that's something that, you know, really the CFOs need to look into rather than the, the CTOs. So who is driving this conversation then?

Do you think it's the finance organization that's saying let's centralize or is it the IT leadership? Um, well, I think it should be a conversation between both. Um, but I'm sure that A C F O would have more influence and understanding on what the, the costs and benefits are of not having to use multiple platforms, having a higher head count, an F T E count, uh, and skilling, keeping those, uh, employees skilled.

Yeah, and if one leaves, you know, how it easy is to replace. Um, so it's a combination of course. Who's making the decision about what cloud platform to use?

At least in my experience, a lot of the times it's the developer who's making that decision and then we're, you know, trying to deal with, uh, the consequences thereof. So do we just need a little more adult supervision at the end of the day? Yeah, possibly agree.

Uh, it needs to be developers, but also at the same time, the, uh, C T O needs to be a part of that conversation to make sure the the right platform is covering everything that you know he need, they need or the, uh, end users potentially need. Do you think it's gonna get any easier to manage multiple clouds anytime soon? I mean, we have seen a bunch of these centralized consoles that people put out there, but it's not clear to me that they're gaining that much traction.

So what do you think is the state of the art at the moment? No, I think, uh, everyone is using in general more than one platform. Um, I think, you know, the offering needs to be in line with, as I said, what everyone desires and needs and, uh, you know, who makes that final decision, uh, is very difficult.

Um, but you know, there's so many different things now with cybersecurity and risks, and you could have one potential tenant that's being used across three different platforms. Is that tenant aware of where their data's lying? Uh, and these are the sort of, uh, discussions they should be having.

Do you think most organizations are even aware where all their applications are running? It seems like a lot of times I talk to people having a hard time discovering where any given workload is. No, I don't, I don't think the, uh, tenants and end users understand which platforms they're sitting on in the interim because everything is being billed through the, uh, M S P.

Do you think perhaps this may get worse before it gets better? Because in addition to the multiple platforms, it looks like we're now trying to support multiple styles of applications. We have monoliths and now we have these new cloud native microservices based applications and serverless computing frameworks.

So as the environment becomes more complex, will it get more expensive to manage? Uh, yes, of course. Um, that's, uh, a natural thing.

You know, we know that more and more is being migrated to the cloud, uh, and managing that, uh, becomes a lot more expensive to do. So what's your best advice to folks as we kind of look at all of this? I mean, is there some way to go after this in a methodical way or we just hoping for the best?

No, I think they need to understand the, uh, the, uh, cloud providers, uh, offering, uh, what best suits them, uh, whether that's, uh, vendor mix, whether that's, uh, fraud protection, whether that's upskilling of their staff, whether it's, uh, potential marketing as a service. You know, they need to understand the full benefits of each cloud provider, what suits them best, understand what the internal costs are to manage where they have their licenses, whether that's sort a single platform or multi-platform, uh, and make the right decision for their business. Do you think more of this will get automated in the future?

I mean, we hear a lot about artificial intelligence every day. How smart can smart get, and uh, will that help us manage multiple clouds or is that kind of a pipe dream still? Uh, I guess we're still in the really early stages of how quickly AI is going to, uh, develop, but uh, for sure it can take some of the burden.

But, uh, no, in the end, automation will be there, but I'm not sure how much we driven by the AI discussion. Hmm. And we also are talking about, well, multiple clouds here, but what defines a cloud these days?

Some people argue that an on-premise environment is another type of cloud, and then we have edge computing. It seems like though workloads are getting more distributed than never. Is the term cloud maybe something we need to move away from at this point?

Because we're kind of moving to some new paradigm. We just haven't put a name on it yet. Good question.

Uh, Michael, I'm not sure how I can, uh, answer that to be on this till the moment. All right, well, we'll all wait to see what happens. Thanks for being on the show.

Thanks Michael. All right, guys. Back to you in the studio.