Legacy Platforms, IT Expenses, AR Swim Goggles and More – Digital CxO Podcast EP 71

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today is of course Mike Gazar. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Good to see you as always. Well, we have some interesting topics to discuss and we're gonna start off with, uh, digital business transformation initiatives and the fact that they're being held back because leaders are too wedded to their legacy IT platforms.

You recently had an interesting conversation about this in our Leadership Insight series. Can you share with our audience? Yeah, I was talking to Francis Courtney over at uh, HFS and through a research house that tracks this space pretty closely, and he was positing the theory that basically we're holding onto our legacy platforms too much and we have too much value or perceived value in them when in reality they're not nearly as valuable as people think.

And he's making an argument that says, Hey, if we're gonna move forward with digital transformation, instead of like peeling that bandaid off one little thing at a at a time, he's basically saying, let's just rip it off and move forward because the cost of maintaining and integrating all these legacy platforms is too expensive, slows us down, and there's not a lot of real benefits. So I now, whether or not you're gonna modernize that application or replace it with something that might be a SaaS app would be up to each individual organization. But at the end of the day, uh, software that was written, yeah, I dunno, five, 10 years ago, I mean, it just doesn't stand the test of time.

So he, his argument is, is let's get on with it. Yeah, absolutely. And I know we've, we've discussed this issue before and one of the concerns that keeps people stuck in, in their old legacy systems is they're worried about that, that waste and, and what to do with all that, that old technology.

Uh, so moving forward, do you have some ideas how, you know, what companies can do with this old technology so it doesn't make such a carbon footprint, uh, on the environment? Well, the infrastructure can be recycled and software to software, so it just kind of goes away. But, um, I think part of the issue that people have is they're just too attached from their personal standpoint to whatever it is that they're running.

So a lot of folks seeing themselves as an Oracle expert or an SAP expert or whatever it is that happens to be running in an on-premise environment. And so then if those things go away or, or, or there's a major revamp, everybody's kind of doing a little bit of a, you know, what does that mean for me and where did my cheese go? Kind of conversation.

So there's always, um, that issue kind of is a bigger factor than most people kind of wanna admit. There's a lot of folks out there every time you talk about, um, a new this or new that they always talk about, you know, what it means for that company and the ROI, but no one seems to ever really get into that. And you know, there's a people aspect of this thing and a cultural aspect of this thing and people, you know, they like to hug things that, you know, pay their salaries and their wages and everything else that their household runs around.

Yeah. And we tend to get really comfortable with what we're familiar with. And change is hard for some people.

I think a lot of that, um, needs to be addressed by some in-house, uh, training or um, HR initiatives to bring everyone on board. Yeah. And at the very least, we need to get less attached to our vendors, right?

So I can't be running around saying I'm a VMware this or an Oracle that because of that goes away then. So do I. Absolutely.

Well next up we have an interesting study from vanson, born of 500 IT and finance decision makers. And it's about the cost of, um, outsourcing and moving to cloud. A lot of IT business leaders are looking to outsource their expense management.

Uh, and a big problem they seem to have in-house is data analytics. So there's a few different hurdles here, uh, and then you bring in AI for automation and they're just unfamiliar with it. So, um, there's a lot of issues with those cloud costs spiraling and, and how to get that under control.

I think why I like this story, and by the way, I saw over there on uh, Textron ITSM. So for those of you who have not checked that site out by own means, go and take a look, but we're bringing this up in the context of digital transformation because a lot of those cloud costs are driven by digital CXOs that are trying to put something new and awesome together and nine times outta 10 these days it'll run on the clock. But I don't think we're taking a hard look at the real total cost of doing that.

And there's been this tendency to just kinda move forward and spend, and here's what we're gonna do without any kind of sense of cost optimization and a lot of the costs in the cloud are wasted. There's tons of these virtual machines running that are probably haven't been turned off and they haven't been doing anything for months. And um, there's a lot of services that have been spun up that no one's using anymore.

And somewhere along the line in these large companies, we lose sight of this. And I think I was just talking to somebody who, you know, they run the cost pressure and you know, they basically went in and said, you know, where's all this stuff in the cloud that we're running and what does it mean and what does, what does, what do we have? And then they wound up saving, you know, half a million dollars because by the time you added up all the silly things that people have provisioned over the years and forgot about, then they were just left running.

And you can't help but wonder how much of the revenue that the cloud service providers are generating is based on um, stuff that's, you know, semi-retired already. Yeah. I think one of the problems is business leaders are in such a hurry to not get left behind and to move forward ever moving forward and keeping up with the evolving atmosphere that they don't take that time to look and see what all are they using and what's a waste.

And this will play out to your earlier point in speeds around AI because the cost of those AI large language models is, is not insignificant. They are a running on GPUs for training and you can probably save some money on the inference side by using something other than the GPU. But um, the way that those things are priced in terms of the, uh, the inputs and the outputs, you're gonna wind up paying a lot of money or every time somebody uses some AI model that you've developed or created.

So as awesome as you might think it is, it's not cheap. And ultimately it'll be the digital CXO who kind of has to stand around and say, what's the ROI math on that again? Because um, they're the ones that are gonna be held accounting.

Yeah. And I think it probably depends on the business and, and what services they provide, but maybe be beneficial to say every quarter have a a, a real a sit down to look at what can they get rid of and, you know, cut that budget again every quarter or so. And there's this whole movement around finops out there where people are trying to bring the finance team and the IT team together to kind of figure out what these costs really are.

And digital CXO should, uh, probably be at the forefront of that conversation 'cause ultimately they may be the ones that benefit most. Yeah. And, and then just also, you know, we talk about this a lot, the different silos, um, different departments and you know, making sure there's good collaboration and communication between all of them so there's a good understanding of, of what they each need and relate that to the cost as well.

All right. Well I think ultimately, um, the challenge we're gonna see here is I think a lot of times the digital CXO doesn't always have visibility into the IT costs. 'cause a lot of that will be run through say A CIO, but the digital CXO is creating the demand.

So I just think there's a, a conversation that needs to be had between all these digital CXOs and their local CIO and say, Hey, what's real here and what's not, and kind of let's stop wasting money. Absolutely. So moving forward, there was the recent World Tour event by Salesforce in New York, and uh, you shared some news about them launching the zero copy data network to foster integration.

So can you share a little bit more about that? So on a straight up, it's kind of, you know, marketing noise at the, at the extreme, right? Um, basically they already have this capability across six platforms in Salesforce, and now they're adding Microsoft in the future.

And now they're calling it a party in KAA network, which is great. But on the more serious side of this thing, it's about data virtualization. And we have this tendency where we kind of want to roll all this data that we're trying to manage up into some sort of magical data warehouse or data lake.

And I think we need to take a more federated approach to this whole thing because moving that amount of data and then trying to make that centralized data accessible to every application is a heavy lift. And you know, this is why you see so much demand for data engineers and why they're getting expensive and they're hard to find and retain. If we go in the data virtualization route, the data doesn't move.

I can still, uh, apply metadata to it and I can apply analytics to it, but I can get the benefits of the data in an aggregated form without necessarily having to move it all the time and move it everywhere. There might be instances where it might make sense to roll everything up into this massive data lake, but I think as we go along here, uh, data virtualization, which is hardly a new technology, it's been around for, uh, I don't know, two decades at least I think. But um, we don't have to, you know, make it a heavy lift all the time.

And I would argue, or at least uh, when I was younger in this business, people used to say, you know, nothing good can happen when you move data, right? It's either gotta be costly, it's gonna create a security problem, it's just gonna, uh, it's, it's, it's a career limiting move sometimes. So, um, a lot of the old time it folks prefer, you know, an approach that doesn't require moving all that data.

And of course if I move that data, then probably gonna run into some sort of security issue anyway. So sometimes it's, you know, the least cumbersome approach, the one that generates the least amount of friction is the way to go. Yeah.

And I think it would be much more efficient if you're not having to constantly worry about moving the data. You can just always access it more easily like that. I think you said it's been around a while and I think now again with the advent of AI and, and the fast moving technology and what customers come to expect, I think they're just looking at these other technologies more carefully now and realizing their benefit.

This is true. And I think part of what goes on here is, um, there's a tendency to kind of get overly excited about something. So we got the, the, the new shining toy is the Great data lake, and so this becomes this massive strategic initiative when um, sometimes, you know, the better part of valor is to do the least possible because you're trying to get the end result sooner.

Yeah. Well next up, this one is a really fun one. I love, I I get excited about all the geeky new toys in technology.

So this one's cool. Um, a fitness wearables and tech company called Form has unveiled its second generation augmented reality swimming goggles. They run 2 49 each and they have a lot of neat things about them.

For one, they have, um, built in heart rate sensor so they can manage, um, their, their heart rate and their oxygen levels and all that. And then they have kind of like a built-in GPS that tells them if they're swimming straight and on track, um, in races. And I think, um, and there's a few other really neat, um, bits of technology built in, but I think this is really cool.

Um, and it's, it's being harnessed by a lot of athlete elite swimmers. There's just a massive amount of investment going into this whole sports technology sector and it being applied everywhere in every sport. Here's the thing that, you know, my conversations with some folks that they're a little concerned about.

So the athlete is a business in their own right. They are essentially have agents and all these other folks and a lot of the data that's being collected from their perspective is a personal and b is more about their business and they're not overly excited all the time, but sharing that with everybody and who's gonna be then assessing that data to determine what their contracts might be worth. And there's a lot of nuance in all this stuff that I'm not quite clear that we have sorted through just yet.

And I think there'll be some interesting, um, contract negotiations in the future around this data issue because, um, you know, whether or not, uh, you know, my shoulder is a twinge, is that a and I'm a pitcher, is that an issue for the New York Yankees or is that my issue is a pitcher and I'll let you know if it gets any worse and we'll see how it goes. I'm not sure where that right answer on that equation is. 'cause we are talking about millions of dollars, so everybody has a vested interest in the conversation, but I'm not quite a hundred percent certain, you know, where does my interest end and your interest as the sports owner begin?

You raise a good point that I didn't think about. I was just thinking about how, how it helps the athlete, but I didn't think about the fact that when they're looking at critically at, uh, their data and, and how their, you know, any injuries that they might have and how that's slowing them down or hurting them and then that, that could potentially hurt their careers if that's being looked at so carefully. So this is true.

I guess there's gonna be a fine ba balance there. Well, I, I seem to remember there was some movie involving Tom Cruise as a sports agent and had all that show me the money kind of thing and through, so yeah, probably have to remake that movie soon 'cause you know, the tech has changed so much. Yes.

Well I think that actually brings us to their, the end of our list. Do you have any key takeaways for our audience today, Mike? No.

Things are moving forward faster than ever, I would say. And uh, AI is changing just about everything you can think about in terms of, you know, heck, things you did two years ago as a leading edge digital transformation project are now feeling a little antiquated. So, you know, I would just say the thing about being a digital CXO, it's, you're never done, Never done.

In fact, always trying to avoid being behind. Alright, well thank you to our audience for staying tuned to our show. And if you missed last week, go back and and catch it.

It's up. And until next week, have a wonderful week. Take care, Eric.