Pat Gelsinger busts prevalent digital transformation myths

Gelsinger busts myths about digital transformation.

Bi-modal IT does not work, period. Speaking at the CIO Leadership Forum 2017 in Singapore, which was themed Leading your Digital Transformation Journey, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware said that it is impractical to divide an IT team into two, with one working on the "old and predictable" and the other working on the "cool and new", in order to work towards digital transformation.

Gelsinger.

"We need to innovate everywhere," he said. 

Another myth is about moving everything to the cloud as quickly as possible. "It is about delivering business outcomes and delivering services," he stressed, introducing the acronym CP², or CP-squared to explain.

CP² is all about two Cs and two Ps - cost, performance, compliance and privacy, which cannot be ignored in any move to make major changes. "If you don't care, go ahead," Gelsinger said. "That's why we need a hybrid cloud infrastructure."

VMware supports hybrid cloud computing, he added, not only providing a highly-automated cloud environment but also the tools to manage clouds which are not built on VMware tech.

"We're bringing the best of both worlds together. That's what cross-cloud is all about," he said.

Gelsinger also acknowledged that cloud computing is challenging, and it is unlikely that companies will be moving their entire operations onto private clouds just yet. He quoted estimates that it will be 2030 before half of companies are on public clouds, and the other half on private cloud platforms. "Private cloud is hard - we have to make it easier," he said. "It will be a hybrid world for a long time to come. Let's embrace it."

Gelsinger said that hybrid cloud would exist for a long time to come with a rough 50:50 split between public and private cloud estimated to occur only in the year 2030.

Automation is one of the ways that VMware is working on to make cloud computing easier. The company is also working with sister company Dell EMC to offer hyper converged solutions, which change the way hardware is bought, deployed and managed. These standalone solution stacks integrate and pre-test compute, networking and storage resources to make sure everything works much better than assembling the resources separately. "Get it as a unit and we are responsible for (managing it)," Gelsinger said.

Another myth has to do with cyber security, with everyone thinking that they must run faster just to stay in place. "That's how the security task feels," he said. "You're running faster and falling more behind."

The problem, Gelsinger said, is that there are too many point solutions available to businesses today. Instead of throwing money at the problem, he believes that going back to the basics to simplify protection will be a better solution, to "disappear (protection) into what we deliver, build them into the software-defined data centre", so that it is truly secure infrastructure.

"We partner deeply with key industry platforms. We put it together for you so you don't have to. We drive simplicity and security of those platforms," he explained.

Cyber hygiene - the need for companies to educate their employees on common ways that sensitive data can be stolen - has to be addressed however as security breaches often begin with a simple phish.
"I've had three false tax returns filed on my behalf," Gelsinger shared, all through his personal data being stolen from third party organisations. "These breaches were not that the attackers did hard things, they were simple phishing attacks."

What will work better than the current security situation is to have well-integrated, well-deployed foundational products, consistent cyber hygiene, and encryption of all data, he said.

VMware is committed to securing infrastructure not just from including it in hardware but also through creating more awareness about cyber hygiene.

The fourth myth has to do with enterprise mobility, which is thought to be fragmented, insecure, with a bad user experience.  Gelsinger explained that as employees experience the ease of use from consumer mobility, where "it just works", they expect to see the same for enterprise mobility, but the experience has not delivered as yet.

The industry, including VMware, has to bring applications old and new, the infrastructure, the providers, and the many point solutions together to create "consumer-simple, enterprise-secure" digital workspaces, Gelsinger said. "Deliver the consumer experience with the enterprise security and management that we require."

Containers were the last myth that Gelsinger addressed. Containers are supposed to be the next big thing, making VMware irrelevant to the future, but that is only if VMware is not container-friendly.

"VMware thinks containers are really really important," Gelsinger said, calling them a "very powerful way to accelerate applications". "We are going to embrace them and make them a core capability...enabling new ways to adopt and deploy applications," he said.

The challenge will not be introducing containers, but managing their proliferation as many containers are needed to deliver the same functionality available without containers. Gelsinger noted that containers will need connections, security, and lifecycle management. "We view it as a huge opportunity to deliver new infrastructure capabilities," he said.
 
Another question mark is that there are currently many container technologies competing with Docker, the first container platform to see success. "Who is going to win? If you pick one today who is going to replace it tomorrow? What are the next abstractions that are going to evolve?" Gelsinger asked.

While the risk of choosing a losing technology standard is real and perennial, VMware will ensure that companies can work with optimised container technology that is as future-proof as possible, Gelsinger said.

VMware's corporate strategy in one slide.

In summary, Gelsinger said that VMware is partnering more strategically and in significant ways with customers. "It's more about the business outcome that we're partnering (with) and enabling you to accomplish (more)," he said.

The company will focus on helping customers modernise their data centres and move to automated cloud environments, integrate public clouds in a way that allows customers to optimise CP², and enable them to empower digital workspaces. Software and software-as-a-service will work with containers and be manageable on any device, whether physical, virtual, or in the Internet of Things. Intrinsic security will be enabled for infrastructure, Gelsinger added.

Interested?

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about Gelsinger's advice to IT leaders, and about VMware's research into digital workspaces

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