The Fabric CXO Council: Reimagining Infrastructure

The Fabric recently hosted the CXO Council meeting. The Council consists of CXOs of industry leading companies to discuss and gain private access to the latest breakthrough innovations in next-generation enterprise cloud infrastructure technologies.

The theme for the meeting was “Reimagining infrastructure in a distributed era.”

Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP, Analyst from Gartner, set the stage by presenting Gartner’s view of how the future of infrastructure is everywhere. He opined that it is not just a journey to the cloud but a journey to a mix.

Gartner predicts that by 2021, 40% of large enterprises will be integrating edge computing principles into their IT projects, up from less than 3% in 2018.

Throughout the discussion, CXO Council members shared their perspectives. Performance, Security, and Compliance were clearly on top of their minds. The fast pace of technology, moving towards microservices and serverless, is creating challenges for organizations that are over a century old. Their challenge is supporting internal operations through legacy mainframe infrastructure while delivering modern user experience using microservices to millennium customers. They opined that they go with an approach of different horses for different courses.

Security is a broad area, and the advice from CXOs was that not all problems have a solution, so take an approach to reduce the risk area. The key takeaway is to focus on three things:

1. Who did what when
2. Who is doing what when
3. Who could do what when

We asked the leaders the key issues on top of their minds as they go through their digital transformation journey. Not surprisingly the top 5 were:

1.  Optimization their deployments for hyper growth and hyper scale
2. Hiring talent
3. Transforming department culture from IT support to a SW organization
4. Cost reduction through modernization of platforms while maintaining legacy systems
5. Safety and security of people and assets

In the end, there was advice for startups: If you want to sell into an enterprise, you should provide discrete value. Your offering should save around 30% of the current spend to make the effort of transitioning out worthwhile.

It is always hard to get into the schedule of CXO’s and I am grateful to all for making their valuable time available for an engaging afternoon.