Russell, what is your background in the industry
and when did you get started? What has your
career path been?
A
fter I left university I started an environmental
consultancy with some friends, but it was feast
or famine and I needed a regular income. So
I did what many others did in the 90’s - I got a
sales job within an industry that was growing so
fast there was space for people with no experience!
That was 1995 and I knew nothing about sales or IT, but
having a spent some time in the science world, I enjoyed
the technology and took the opportunity to learn the new
skills that a sales career presented. An old sales dog then
encouraged me to take a position with a networking and
enterprise software distributor called LAN Design, which I
did, and found that the mix of sales, marketing and product
focus was a great fit for my personal strengths.
From there I did a short stint
trying to develop mobile
solutions way before the
market was ready (remember Palm Pilots?), followed
by about four years with Acer
in sales and then territory
management, whilst the last
10 years or so have seen me
managing the KZN office of a
major IT industry distributor.
Over the past 20 years I’ve
worked in every tier and
have experienced everything
from the roller-coaster ride
of a start-up, to managing
a structured business and
have been privileged to learn
from some brilliant people
along the way.
How have you seen
Cloud develop within
the industry in this
time, and where do you ultimately see it
ending up?
When I took up this position, I spent a lot of time researching what is available on AWS expecting the product offerings to be limited and the companies using them to be on
the bleeding edge of tech. It’s just the opposite. In fact, I’m
more astonished with the lag in the adoption of public cloud
services locally and just how far up the IT stack AWS have
grown their offering.
Perhaps the rapid rate at which the technology has expanded has been difficult to keep pace if your core focus is
elsewhere. This, combined with questions about connectivity and privacy, has left many people still viewing public
cloud as a place for test and development, a bit of storage,
running the occasional non-core workload and for boffins to
run analytics. The reality though is that cloud is not new, it’s
the new normal.
Based on what I’ve seen local companies already achieve
and the fact that connectivity improvement is a given, the
local footprint of cloud providers will grow and this conversation will sound very different in a few years’ time.
Businesses will eventually view IT as a service (IaaS, PaaS
and SaaS), and as the primary building blocks to meet their
needs and on-premise infrastructure as the means to access and manage the pathways into those services. Glenn
Gore from AWS put it appropriately when he said that not
using Cloud is like fighting gravity!
Why are you enthusiastic about Cloud?
I believe that with some creative thinking and a tenacious
attitude you can solve the unsolvable or take an approach
no-one else thought about. People in various vocations
have accomplished great things by refusing to accept the
status quo. Cloud computing is one of the biggest technology levers that is enabling this kind of change because it
helps businesses to focus
on what they want from their
IT rather than how they are
going to get it.
And whilst we all know about
how cloud has facilitated
new styles of business (think
Uber, AirBnB and Netflix),
and have heard the buzzwords like Big Data and IoT,
there are game-changing
outcomes for our traditional
channel that are equally exciting. Think about the types
of services an MSP could
deliver if their clients were in
a pure-cloud environment,
or how a traditional systems
integrator can move away
from price wars on projects
by becoming the nexus
for the adoption of Cloud
services. It’s ‘connect the
dots’ for your solution, and I
love how transformative that
will be.
What are the advantages of Amazon AWS over
its competitors?
The easy answer to this, is to point to Gartner’s magic
quadrant where AWS is the stand-out leader, or to quote the
statistics indicating that AWS had 10 times the utilised capacity than their next 14 competitors combined in 2015 (up
from 5x in 2014) and is highly profitable. They’ve built a gap
that assists them to work their massive economies of scale
in a cycle faster than anyone else and they proactively pass
these savings back to customers.
We can also go through products and feature comparisons
for hours! However, I think that it’s their extraordinary ability
to execute as fast and as well as they innovate and their
ability to focus on what customers want with an agility that
belies their size that truly sets them apart. Microsoft are
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