Designing a Digital-Native Strategy – The Last Great Cloud Transformation EP9

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel for Techstrong, and welcome to another episode of the Last Great Cloud Transformation. You know, if you've been following along at home, you know, the last great cloud transformation is a show we've been doing now for about, I think, almost six months. And we've had a number of episodes.

And, uh, what is it about? Well, you know, we, we've passed the point of making decisions. Should we move to the cloud?

Stay OnPrem, private cloud, public cloud. Now, the edge, right? We're all moving and have talk about moving to the edge.

We have endpoints anytime, you know, working from everywhere. And all of this is a, a, a fabric, as my friend Mitch Ashley calls it, uh, that we need to kinda weave together into a user experience, into a de delivering applications, delivering data, delivering business. And that's the age we live in right now.

This is the last great cloud transformation. You know, uh, our show is, is co-sponsored and co-produced with, uh, good friends at CloudFlare, and they have something called the connectivity cloud that helps, it's kind of the glue that holds this fabric of this lake, of this last great cloud transformation together. And we've been exploring various topics within this area, as I said, for the last six months.

Um, today's topic is designing a digital native strategy, right? What do we, when we're gonna be digital natives and we're dealing with digital natives, and some of you out here watching are truly digital natives. What is that?

What, what's your requirements? What's your expectations? What do we have to, meaning a CloudFlare or any provider in this space?

What do they have to do to deliver the delight from a digital native perspective? I've got some great people to discuss it with me here today. Let me introduce you to them.

First of all, I, I mentioned him earlier, he's my co-host of the last great cloud transformation as well as DevOps Chads and, and Textron Gang, and a bunch of other good stuff. We've been partners in business for 20 plus years, my friend, uh, Mitch Ashley, future VP for DevOps. Hey, Mitchell, how are you?

Very good, very good. Good to be talking about fabric and digital natives and user experience and all kinds of great stuff. So excited to be here and co-hosting and with our panel today.

Absolutely. Great to have you. We mentioned Text on Gang.

This next guest is one of our regular gang members on Tech Drunk Gang, but she's also, well, if you live out in the Silicon Valley area, she's on a lot of radio stations out there and her own marketing company and, and podcast around it. She, she kind of knows, she has her finger on the pulse of what people, like people's expectations are, are around digital Native and, and, and, and digital in general. Lisa Martin.

Hey, Lisa, how are you? Hey, Ellen. Great to be here.

I wish I could say I was a digital native, but I'm here representing Gen X, but the topic around digital nativity is so interesting because it's the direction that so many are going in and I can't wait to hear what the, the, um, panel uncovers today. Fantastic. Thanks for joining us.

Um, then last, but certainly not least is our friend David Liu. David is senior product marketing manager for ai. That's a lot in today's world for CloudFlare.

Hey, David, welcome back. How are you? I'm good, thanks, Alan.

Um, great to be here and, uh, I'm, I'm super excited to talk about, um, the digital native direction that we're all headed. I think at the start of my career, I was in a legacy manufacturing company and now I'm in a digital native company. So, uh, excited to talk more, uh, about those type of experiences.

Why can't a legacy manufacturing company be a digital native company, though? That's my question, but we, we'll, we'll discuss it. You know, in my mind though, we can't really discuss, you know, what are the benefits or how do we satisfy or design a digital native strategy without first kind of defining what do we mean by a digital native?

You know, some people may make a connection, digital native, cloud native, right? And I had a lot of friends who had a, a bit of a time distinguishing cloud native from just cloud digital, native from just digital when we use the term digital native. David, if you don't mind, I'm going to open with you and I'll ask the rest of the panel to jump in.

When we use the term digital native, David, what do you, what kind of, what does that conjure up for you? Yeah, so for me it's a, a company that delivers products or experiences in a digital way, or they generate value, uh, using digital technology. So it could be a social media company, it could be ride share, home sharing.

Um, that's a digital native. Uh, from my perspective Panel, I think from a consumer perspective, a, a user perspective, digital natives, as I said, I, I'm not one I wish I was, are are people who were born into that space where they, they only know the Airbnbs, the ride shares, as David was talking about, those types of organizations, they can actually do transactions, communications digitally with, with businesses, with other people. And that's really kind of the fabric of, of their lives.

That's how I think of it. A digital native, uh, in terms of a, of an end user. I, Yeah, I'll just add to that and also say that, um, I think there's an expectation around digital not just being an adjunct to business, but digital being the way we engage, the way we conduct business, whether you're the consumer or a business, and there's a always on aspect to it.

There's a, uh, kind of patience level with, uh, technology and that it should work or an inpatients level when it doesn't work. And of course, um, whether it's business relationships or the social fabric that we all, uh, work with people that we know, family, friends, uh, colleagues, et cetera, uh, all accessible into one digital environment. So whether it is it's apps or Zoom calls or, um, services that we're getting over the, over a, an app or a device or the internet or whatever it is, it's being able to do kind of a most, if not all of our lives over at some kind of digital medium in some way or another, or enhanced by it.

Yeah. So Mitch, I, that's like digital first, if you will, right? Mm-hmm.

The primary path is digital for me. You know, literally a, a switch went on here during Covid, right? I think prior to Covid, David, yes, there were definitely some businesses and models that lent themselves to a digital first or a digital native type of business model.

And then bang, one day, I think it was the end of February, right, of 2020 was it, and the whole world, you were either digital or dead, right? Because you could no longer afford to not be digital. And so that manufacturing company that you worked for before, you know, moving into the digital native space, they had to go digital like this.

You know, they may have had some dusty old plans in the backyard or in the back room about, well, how they might go digital one day. Well, they had to bring those out and, and give them a shot, give 'em a whirl. So all of a sudden, you know what, what people may have been planning to do five, 10 years from now had to be done, had to be done.

I remember that's when we started text Drunk tv. I remember standing on here and, and talking about these companies that really didn't have a, let's face it, they didn't have a fully baked plan, were forced to be digital or die, right? Because that was the only way.

So everyone had to figure out a way to deliver their goods, take take orders in digitally, communicate with customers, digitally, communicate with other employees digitally. You weren't in the same office anymore, right? So everything had to go digital.

And I remember Mitch having these conversations with you saying, once that genie's out of the bottle, you, you can never put it back. You can never put it back, right? Because people are just going to, that's the way it is.

And, and let's face it for a lot of things, it made it a lot easier, right? It made it a lot easier to do things. It made it a lot better.

So now, one could say, and I think Mitch, you alluded to Lisa, you definitely alluded to it, is that as a result of that, a lot of us, if we weren't born digital natives sort of became adopted digital natives. And, and with that became our digital expectations. And that's what I think, you know, the, you guys are hitting on it, but is digital expectations where, hey, it's digital, it works, it works fast, it works reliable, it's always on, and you know, I want my five nines, right?

And, and, and that's what people expect. Now, David, that goes to the heart of the connectivity cloud, right? This is what CloudFlare is trying to en ensure, uh, that that digital native experience is a, you know, a, a satisfactory experience, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. Um, I think the, the aim to become digital native is, is especially driven by customer expectations now. And so that's why I think a lot of of companies are looking to infrastructure that's built on the edge.

So like, we're talking like per city level versus per region level. Mm-hmm. And, um, you know, CloudFlare is like playing within that space, right?

We got like 330 cities that we support and we're adding more. Um, and that is, I think that's the heart of it. It's like the customer experience that we're so used to.

Now, I completely agree with that. I think that we've had, you know, in our consumer lives, and we talk about this a lot on, on different programs, we are so conditioned that we can get whatever we want where we are, and we're going to have an experience that is relevant, it's contextual in a non-creepy way. But those expectations are just ingrained, I think, in so many different generations that are alive today that maybe not be, that may not be digital natives, but Alan, to your point, adopted digital nativity, if you will, because those expectations have to be met and they have to be secure as well, right?

We, we just have this exploitation, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be secure, somebody else's problem. And I think too, it's also, we think about digital native as the kind of the end, end result, right?

Of how we, how something is delivered to someone, or what form or factor. If you kinda said, uh, you know, let's take a baseball mentality to designing a football experience, you'd say, that's not really a football experience. That's how, that's how baseball works, right?

Same thing is true. When we think about building products for a certain kind of customer, a certain, um, you know, a community of customers, they pretty quickly figure out where, well, this is just the old way to do it, but kind of a dressed up fancy and a nice mobile app, but it's not really like what I expect to use, right? So when you think about digital, digital native economy, digital native experiences, you're talking about, uh, both how the, how you design and create products, right?

You need to be able to be nimble, be agile to react to market quickly. It's not just performance of the app or performance of the network or the data, but also, hey, these folks over here, I can switch apps quick. 'cause now they've got something more interested than what you have.

So you have to be, you know, different competitive mindset and how quickly you can react to it. It's also working in an environment where I expect more personalization, not the creepy personalization, but enough personalization that, you know, I feel like I get more value working with this technology, and especially in a mobile world where it's whatever device I'm using, but probably a mobile device, a phone, uh, at some point. So there, there's, how data is used to deliver that experience is different now that, you know, to David's point, that data can be anywhere.

It can be at the edge, right? It could be information about what's happening in your home, your office, or your car, your moped, or whatever it is that your, your scooter that you're, you're driving. Uh, it could be a lot of different areas where that data is relevant.

And now that affects how we might think about what services or information we deliver to you. So it's, it's a, it's a mindset and an approach, not just a form factor of how we deliver a service. Yep.

You know, I, I'll, I'll make another statement. I don't think any of us would argue that we're in a post COVID era now, right? So the first wave of this huge digital native transformation that kicked off with CO, you know, it's like the, the snake that swallows the rat, right?

You could follow the, the lump through. So they, we, the, the snake swallowed the rat, right? We, a lot of companies that were not even close to being digital went digital, 20 20, 21, 22.

And for many company, and it's funny, it depends where on that transformation continuum you are on. If you were already on the cloud, you started thinking about the edge and about the end point and how to connect all that. If you were still in that private data center, moving to the cloud was a big transformation for you, right?

Oh my God, all of a sudden we're on the cloud and doesn't make a difference. I don't need people at the data center anymore. I could, you know, remote knock socks, all that good stuff.

Well, that initial wave is now over. And so many of those people, and I'm gonna tell you that I think the bulk of the people were like first generation digital natives, right? They, they were immigrants to the digital native world and they, their first stop was like at Ellis Island in New York, or, but in this case it was the public cloud.

They were at an AWS or Azure or, or, or Google, right? And now they're realizing, wait a second, that may not be digital native enough. I need to take my next transition, my next transformation on this digital native journey, which means I can't just be at that hyperscaler, I gotta get to the edge, I gotta get to the end point.

I need to be on multiple clouds. Right? How that, that, you know, that may be a bigger job than the initial transformation even, you know, how how can companies like CloudFlare and others help people make that that leap that that's a question, David, I'm gonna ask you the hard question.

Yeah. Um, so what I'd like about the, the CloudFlare infrastructure is that it's easy to build on top of, um, and it's with a click of a button you're deploying globally at the edge, right? Um, so you don't need to be choosing a specific server type.

Um, managing that infrastructure, uh, is just all there for you with a click of a button on the edge. And just to go back to your point of the people who move to the cloud, they're now thinking about the edge, uh, comes down to some real life customer pain points. And so one example, I was actually talking with a company and they, they said that, um, they actually see a drop off in paid users when things take too long to load, um, on their website, especially for AI generated content.

So if you're trying to generate an image, they see this fall off. Um, and where CloudFlare comes in is usually the, the wait time is both the compute time, right? To generate that image, but then also the network latency to display that image to the user or to the eyeball.

Um, and so because we have this edge network companies are, are moving to CloudFlare to be able to like really, um, optimize this, this latency to prevent, um, customer drop off, um, on, on their websites. I think that's table stakes for any business. Sorry.

Yeah. No, The consumer was gonna ask you to comment. 'cause I know this is in your, they're your name, you right after the woods.

Yep. The expectations being what they are. Um, it's table stakes for any business, regardless of industry, whether it's healthcare or manufacturing or retail.

The consumers that are consuming the content have the expectation that it's gonna be delivered. It's gonna be delivered as soon as I want it beautifully. But every business now needs to have that baked into how they're delivering products and services to end users because it's no longer a nice to have Agreed.

Agreed. I think there's also an aspect of, you know, we talk about mobile, it isn't the device being mobile that counts. It's the users, it's the consumers, the people that are accessing this information.

You remember when, uh, the, I think it was in an IBM commercial where the, the counter on the website goes up on how many orders, all of a sudden it takes off, right? It's, it's, it's not that just that kind of growth. It's, you know, it might be, well, we've got plenty of infrastructure in, uh, Singapore, but all of a sudden, you know, Sydney takes off.

Well, well, I need, I need that infrastructure there. Whether it's network, compute, security, ai, all the things at the edge. And that, and that's the kind of digital economy that we're in, is we need to go where the business is, not bring the business to us.

And so to do that, you've kind of flipped the model to say, well, we need to be able to deliver anywhere that the customer's gonna be. Now, that might be tough in the middle of some cornfield in the middle of Nebraska, well, maybe not, but, uh, but we can pretty much go where, wherever the customer is and, and adapt the resources required to deliver that and still meet the experience expectations. Like you're talking about David, of, you know, I, two and a half seconds, I'm gone.

Right? I'm onto the next thing that's too long to generate an image for, for me. So it's, it's really kind of flipping that mindset of not having a fixed mindset about the infrastructure and the software stack and where things are, but think about the, that moves to where the users and the customers are where the need is.

And that could be 'cause we've introduced a new service. Could be because hey, something's, something's happened in Sydney, what's going on? All of a sudden there's this big pickup in traffic.

Let me, uh, let me geek out here for a second. So I, I think, you know, we're we, we, we we're understanding what it means to be on the edge, the endpoint and, and local, right? And, and distributed.

Mitchell and I started a company called, or co help co-found a company called Still Secure back in the early two thousands. The original name of the company was the Lattice Networks. And the idea was, is that the world was going to, applications would be in a lattice, right?

They would be distributed all over the place, and you would need something that would be allow you to manage those distributed companies. We were so far ahead of our time that we burned through all this money and had to pivot to become a security company. But that's a story for another day.

The, the, the, the point I wanted to make though was that in order to take advantage of this architecture, in order to use the connectivity cloud, in order to live on the edge simultaneously as being in the hyper center, hyperscaler center, and even on the private cloud in the data center and on the endpoint, you need an architecture for your applications and data that makes sense. If you are developing in a monolith, which is what a lot of people were doing covid time when covid hit, right? It doesn't lend itself well, that's not a digital native architecture to take advantage of this.

So a lot of these companies that made that first immigration wave up from the private to the cloud, really just, you know, they, they, they shift and lifted, right? They took their monolith and they put it in the cloud and they say, okay, we're digital now. We don't need anyone manning the data center on the cloud.

This next wave though is saying, you can't have a monolith and be distributed. You've gotta go to a microservices based architecture, cloud native as some call it, right? Digital native.

And I think we're seeing that really take hold right now where it's not that monolithic applications are inherently bad. They're not, they're, you know, to always use the right tool for the job, but to really take advantage of this digital native opportunities out there to really deliver delight, I think you have to go microservices, you have to go distributed it, it has to work that way. Panel.

What do you think? Yeah. Um, I, I totally agree on that.

I feel like, um, with the monolith architecture, if you want to add ai, like everybody is trying to do mm-hmm. Uh, super difficult, right? And then to also make that distributed and accessible to, let's say all your global, uh, internal employees, they need AI chatbot.

Um, building a monolith application for that is a, gonna take a really long time, right? So time to market, um, is, is really difficult with a monolith type architecture versus microservices. Um, and then number two, just like the, uh, how complicated it is, right?

Um, versus working on small pieces of it, small components, updating those small components. Um, so yeah, I think like, like you said, use the right tool for the right situation. But I think right now the situation is you, you have to be, uh, using like micro, uh, microservices approach.

It, it's interesting you, you bring that up, David, because, you know, we're in this, this adoption phase of AI and, uh, you know, really today's AI products or tomorrow's AI features, in other words, we're building more AI into what we're doing, not just selling new products that are an AI product. So it, it's really best suited to be part of something else, not just an AI bot, or not just an ai, uh, kind of query tool and enter language, et cetera, which means that's part of the fabric of what we're building into infrastructure, applications, services, analysis of data. And that really also, that also emphasizes this, uh, this point of, I need to be able to distribute that capability to my partners.

I need to be able to distribute to my end customers, uh, who are using my products and services. Um, maybe I'm getting information from other folks, right? Via AI type services that I'm using within my applications or my infrastructure.

So it's very much an interconnected AI that's embedded across what we're doing, whether it's software development or service delivery, et cetera, um, rather than a, a bolt-on feature. 'cause today it kind of feels pretty bolt-on at the moment, but I think that's going to change for us. Fair.

So guys, we, we, I, you know, we've got maybe 10 minutes here left. I wanna try to start tying a bow on some of this stuff. Um, designing a digital native strategy.

We've talked about pieces, ai, microservices, edge endpoint, right? How holistically, and I'll start with Mitch or David, whichever one of you wanna jump in here. How, how would, what would you recommend to people to design this digital native strategy?

How do they outsource it? You know, I mean, it, you know, how do you, you want it, you know, made for your company and your unique vision? How do you, how do you go about designing this?

I'll jump in David, if you wanna, if you don't mind. And then, yeah, appreciate everybody what your thoughts are. Yeah, I, I would kind of outline it this way.

First of all, you don't design for something you don't understand, right? You have to take as a design centric approach. And if that's the community, that's the persona, that's the whatever term you want to use, it's really understanding, um, that kind of a end user customer, that kind of experience that they expect.

And how do you design it in a way that is gonna be, um, kind of faithful and ha have high fidelity to what their expectations and experience that they desire from whatever you're creating. So I think starting with the end in mind is the first thing. The second is, I, digital natives expect technology innovation.

That's just part of what the, they live in a, we all live in a world, but especially live in a world where new innovations from technologies, new capabilities, things that are being added are part of it. And if you aren't innovating, you're dead, right? You need to be keeping, keeping pace with, with what customers are looking for and maybe surprising or delighting them with things they didn't expect 'cause of technology innovations.

Uh, I think the third thing I mentioned earlier is about being agile, being understanding that you have to move quickly 'cause the market moves quickly. And the thing that moves even faster is your end customers, right? 'cause they can switch in a digital world much more easily.

And the, the last would be much more data-driven kind of a business. Data isn't an after effect or a side effect of operating an infrastructure, applications, et cetera. That's really the heartbeat that's telling you what's happening, uh, in the interactions that you have with customers, the kinds of servers, not just what they're buying, but the experience of how they're buying it or using or consuming that capabilities.

So think about each one of those things and how you, how you would apply it in a digital native, uh, metaphor rather than a business centric metaphor. And I think that'll help you put together your strategy for how you serve and be part of a digital native economy. I also think, uh, you hit the nail on the head, Mitch, with a lot of things that you said when you mentioned innovation, kind of the first thing that popped into my mind was like, fostering a culture of innovation.

That's a lot of challenges that legacy organizations have or, or some resistance to change. Change is hard. People get used to doing things the way that they do.

But the, to be able to react, like you said, me, as fast as the market is reacting, that culture has to be there. I think from a top down to really deploy the right technologies and services to deliver what the ex end user wants so that, that customer engagement ultimately is high and it's telling you we're doing the right things. But that culture, I think that company culture is really important.

Lisa, I Think that's also how you said, I'm sorry, David, go ahead. Yeah, I was gonna, I, I really like that, uh, getting the employee buy-in, right? Especially in the, uh, legacy companies while we've been doing it one way, we've been receiving purchase orders via fax, uh, this whole time.

Why should I get a PDF version of it? Um, and, uh, yeah, that cultural shift is also super important. Um, one, a few other kind of pieces advice that I think like builds on top of what Lisa and Mitch ha has said is also like, leaders should be focusing on critical digital experiences.

Uh, focus on the ones that count. And I think for me, and maybe everyone has already experienced this, is I found that, um, airline mobile apps have significantly improved, especially post covid with the rise of so many travelers, right? Like I remember back in the day you had to call, um, to change a flight and there would be a change fee.

You can do all of that within the app. And then the part that really delighted me about some of these airline apps is they tell me when my baggage has been scanned, right? Once I get on, once I get off, they tell me which baggage claim I should go to before the flight attendant even announces which baggage claim I should go to, right?

So I feel like these are type of the critical digital experiences, um, that delight customers, right? And again, it's focusing on customers, um, that people should be thinking about. Um, and then, um, the one last thing I wanted to mention is like, to become digital native or move towards that space, you want to think about integrating security in, into everything because things are moving so fast.

There's also a lot of security vulnera vulnerabilities, right? So you wanna make sure that you're architecting things with security in mind, and ideally it's out of the box, right? You get protection, um, out of the box.

Agreed. You know, I I I think you guys have highlighted, you know, what the, what does winning look like in going digital native? David, I got a hard question for you.

Why partner with cloud? Why, why partner with CloudFlare for my digital native strategy is, you know, what, what does CloudFlare give me that's gonna help me to succeed? Yeah.

So I would say the, the top thing is CloudFlare has done something that I think is unique, uh, within this whole space, which is our infrastructure is built out, uh, on a per city level, right? Um, and it's really distributed. Uh, we got people who are working in the Arctic and you know, we're serving those clients because we have a server that's like super close to the Arctic, right?

Um, and I think that type of infrastructure is super hard to build out, and we're probably one of the only ones that have that. Um, and so if, if you are trying to serve these awesome digital experiences to the user, you want to be closest to them. Um, and that's where CloudFlare shines.

And then lastly, I think what I believe that people choose CloudFlare because it's also, uh, a one-stop shop, right? Um, instead of buying all these different point solutions to be best of breed, I think they're coming towards CloudFlare because we have everything. It works really well, there's security built in, and, um, you're also consolidating your tools and your spend as well.

Powerful. Excellent. Did a good job on that one.

Guys, we, we've got just two or three minutes left here. I wanna, uh, kind of tie a bow on the whole thing, which is, I, I think we, we live in this post digital world where every company has to be digital, every company. And it's not just because we're all locked in our houses afraid to catch some disease.

The, as I said in the beginning of the show, the genie out of the bottle, everybody's expectation is, is that I could do just about everything digitally. Um, and companies that don't have a strategy, if you want to call that being digital native, so be it. If you don't have a strategy to get there, unless you're really in some like corner case type of business, someone else is gonna be eat your lunch.

I mean, it, it's, it's really that simple. It, that to me is when we talk about this digital native journey and, and, you know, digital native strategy, this isn't a, like, this isn't a, a maybe have or a like to have. There's a must have for 95% plus businesses, right?

I, I can think of very few businesses that can exist today without having some digital strategy. It it's just that simple. Um, I Think it's a big competitive advantage as well for organizations.

It, it has to be, well, you, you, yeah, you hope it is. Anyway, I think the, the issue though is we're moving from competitive advantage to table stakes, Right? It's table stakes, otherwise you can't even play in the game, right?

And that's where we are. Anyway, I think we're about done with this, uh, episode of, of the last great, great cloud transformation. I think our next one may be a live round table one, I'm not sure, but if so, if you'll find it up on our website.

David is always thank you for coming on and, and you know, look, it's not easy being the CloudFlare guy on here, right? We, we, we, we pull a lot out if you, so I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on, Lisa, as always, it's a pleasure to have you on anything we do here at Textron, bring, you know, a touch of class to the whole thing.

Thank you so much, Mitch. What can I say? Take it home.

Well, it, uh, digital native isn't, uh, isn't going away. I think that is our next wave of, of kind of how we experience technology, whether it's AI related or you know, the next B, b and B reservation that we make. So think digital, think na, think native, and I think we're on the right track.

Alrighty, for CloudFlare and text Sean, you've just watched another episode of the last great Track Cloud transformation. Thanks everyone. We'll see you all soon.

Bye-bye.