Monday, January 06, 2020

Why Flexible Work and the Right Technology May Just Close the Talent Gap

https://www.citrix.com/news/announcements/dec-2019/citrix-makes-work-personal.html

Transcript of a discussion on how businesses must adapt to the new talent landscape and find the innovative new means to bring future work and workers together.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner
Companies always struggle to find qualified workers in the mature phase of a business cycle. Yet as we enter a new decade in 2020, there is more than a hyper-low unemployment rate to grapple with.

There is a gaping qualitative chasm growing between the jobs businesses need to fill and the interest of workers to fill them. As a result, employees have more leverage than ever to insist that jobs cater more to their lives, locations, and their demand to be creatively challenged in their occupations.

Accordingly, IDC predicts that by 2021, 60 percent of Global 2000 companies will have adopted a future workspace model -- flexible, intelligent, collaborative, virtual, and physical work environments.

Stay with us now as we explore how businesses must adapt to the new talent landscape and find innovative means to bring future work and workers together. I’m pleased to be joined by two leaders in this area who will share their thoughts on flexible work solutions.


We are here with Stephane Kasriel, the former Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board at Upwork. Welcome, Stephane.

Stephane Kasriel: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We are also here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Welcome back, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Hey, Dana. It’s great to be here.

Gardner: Tim, it sounds like flexible work is the next big thing, but that must mean that we have been working for the past decade or two in an inflexible manner. What’s wrong with the cubicle-laced office building and the big parking lot next to the freeway model?

Skilled staff succeeds on- and off-site 

Minahan
Minahan: Dana, the problem dates back a little further. We fundamentally haven’t changed the world of work since Henry Ford. That was the model where we built big work hubs, big office buildings, call centers, manufacturing facilities -- and then did our best to hire as much talent around that.

This model just isn’t working anymore against the backdrop of a global talent shortage, which is fast approaching more than 85 million medium- to high-skilled workers. We are in dire need of more modern skill sets that aren’t always located near the work hubs. And to your earlier point, employees are now in the driver’s seat. They want to work in an environment that gives them flexible work and allows them to do their very best work wherever and whenever they want to get it done.

Gardner: Stephane, when it comes to flexible work, are remote work and freelance work the same? How wide is this spectrum of options when it comes to flexible work?

Kasriel: Almost by definition, most freelance work is done remotely. At this stage, freelancing is growing faster than traditional work, about three times faster, in fact. About 35 percent of US workers are doing some amount of freelancing. And the vast majority of it is skilled work, which is typically done remotely.

Kasriel
Increasingly what we see is that freelancers become full-time freelancers; meaning it’s their primary source of income. Usually, as a result of that, they tend to move. And when they move it is out of big cities like San Francisco and New York. They tend to move to smaller cities where the cost of living is more affordable. And so that’s true for the freelance workforce, if you will, and that’s pulling the rest of the workforce with it.

What we see increasingly is that companies are struggling to find talent in the top cities where the jobs have been created. Because they already use freelancers anyway, they are also allowing their full-time employees to relocate to other parts of the country, as well as to hire people away from their headquarters, people who essentially work from home as full-time employees, remotely.

Gardner: Tim, it sounds like Upwork and its focus on freelance might be a harbinger of what’s required to be a full-fledged, flexible work support organization. How do you view freelancing? Is this the tip of the arrow for where we are headed?

Minahan: Against the backdrop of a global talent shortage and outdated model of hub-and-spoke-based work models, the more innovative companies -- the ones securing the best talent -- go to where the talent is, whether using contingent or full-time workers.

They are also shifting from the idea of having a full-time employee staff to having pools of talent. These are groups that have the skills and capabilities to address a specific business challenge. They will staff up on a given project.
Read the Report: The Potential Economic
Impacts of a Flexible Working Culture
So, work is becoming much more dynamic. The leading organizations are tapping into that expertise and talent on an as-needed basis, providing them an environment to collaborate around that project, and then dissolving those teams or moving that talent on to other projects once the mission is accomplished.

Gardner: So, it’s about agility and innovation, being able to adapt to whatever happens. That sounds a lot like what digital business transformation is about. Do you see flexible work as supporting the whole digital transformation drive, too?

Minahan: Yes, I certainly do. In fact, what’s interesting is the first move to digital transformation was a shift to transforming customer experience, of creating new ways and new digital channels to engage with customers. It meant looking at existing product lines and digitizing them.

And along the way, companies realized two things. Number one, they needed different skills than they had internally. So the idea of the contingent worker or freelance worker who has that specific expertise becomes increasingly vital.

They also realized they had been asking employees to drive this digital transformation while anchoring them to archaic or legacy technology and a lot of bureaucracy that often comes with traditional work models.

And so there is now an increased focus at the executive C-suite level on driving employee experience and giving employees the right tools, the right work environment, and the flexible work models they need to ensure that they not only secure the best talent, but they can arm them to do their very best work.
There is now an increased focus at the C-suite level on driving employee experience and giving employees the right tools, work environment, and flexible work models they need to ensure they can do their very best work.

Gardner: Stephane, for the freelance workforce, how have they been at adapting to the technologies required to do what corporations need for digital transformation? How does the technology factor into how a freelancer works and how a company can best take advantage of them?

Kasriel: Fundamentally, a talent strategy is a critical part of digital transformation. If you think about digital transformation, it is the what, and the talent strategy is the how. And increasingly, as Tim was saying, as businesses need to move faster, they realize that they don’t have all the skills internally that they need to do digital transformation.

They have to tap into a pool of workers outside of the corporation. And doing this in the traditional way, using staffing firms or trying to find local people that can come in part-time, is extremely inefficient, incredibly slow, and incompatible with the level of agility that companies need to have.

So just as there was a digital transformation of the business firm, there is now also a digital transformation of the talent strategy for the firm. Essentially work is moving from an offline model to an online model. The technology helps with security, collaboration, and matching supply and demand for labor online in real-time, particularly for niche skills in short-duration projects.

https://www.citrix.com/
Increasingly companies are reassembling themselves away from the traditional Taylorism model of silos, org charts, and people doing the same work every single day. They are changing to much more self-assembled, cross-functional, agile, and team-based work. In that environment, the teams are empowered to figure out what it is that they need to do and what type of talent they need in order to achieve it. That’s when they pull in freelancers through platforms such as Upwork to add skills they don’t have internally -- because nobody has those internally.

And on the freelancer side, freelancers are entrepreneurs. They are usually very good at understanding what skills are in demand and acquiring those skills. They tend to train themselves much more frequently than traditional full-time employees because there is a very logical return on investment (ROI) for them to do so.

If I learned the latest Java framework in a few weeks, for example, I can then bill at a much higher rate than I would otherwise could if I didn’t have those skills.

Gardner: Stephane, how does Upwork help solve this problem? What is your value-add?

Upwork secures hiring, builds trust 

Kasriel: We essentially provide three pieces of value-add. One is a very large database of freelancers on one side and a very large database of clients and jobs on the other side. With that scale comes the ability to have high liquidity. The median time to fill a job on Upwork right now is less than 24 hours, compared to multiple weeks in the offline world. That’s one big piece of it.

The second is around an end-to-end workflow and processes to make it easy for large companies to engage with independent contractors, freelancers, and consultants. Companies want to make sure that these workers don’t get misclassified, that they only have access to IT systems they are supposed to, that they have signed the right level of agreements with the company, and that they have been background checked or whatever other processes that the company needs.
Read the Report: The Potential Economic
Impacts of a Flexible Working Culture
The third big piece is around trust and safety. Fundamentally, freelancers want to know that they are going to be working with reputable clients and that they are going to get paid. Conversely, companies are engaging with freelancers for things that might be highly strategic, have intellectual property associated with them, and so they want to make sure that the work is going to be done properly and that the freelancer is not going to be selling information from the company, as an example.

So, the three pieces around matching, collaboration and security software, and trust and safety are the things that large companies are using Upwork for to meet the needs of their hiring managers.  

Fundamentally, we want to be invisible. We want the platform to look simple so that people can get things done by having freelancers -- and not have to think about all of the complexities of being compliant with the various roles that large companies have as it relates to engaging with people in general, but with independent contractors in particular.

Mind the gap in talent, skills 

Gardner: Tim, a new study has been conducted by the Center for Business and Economic Research on these subjects. What are some of the findings?

Minahan: At Citrix, we are committed to helping companies drive higher levels of employee experience using technology to create environments that allow much more flexible work models and empower employees to get their very best work done. So we are always examining the direction of overall work models in the market. So we partnered to better understand how to solve this massive talent crisis.


Consider that there is a gap of close to 90 million medium- to high-skilled workers around the globe, all of these unfilled jobs. There are a couple of ways to solve this. The best way is to expand the talent pool. So, as Stephane said, that can be through tapping into freelance marketplaces, such as Upwork, to find a curated path to the top talent, those who have the finest skills to help drive digital transformation.

But we can couple that with digital workspaces that allow flexible work models by giving the talent access to the tools and information they need to be productive and to collaborate. They can do that in a secure environment that leaves the company confident their information and systems remain secure.
The key findings of the study are that we have an untapped market. Some 69 percent of people who currently are unemployed or economically inactive indicate that they would start working if given more flexible work models and the technology to enable them to work remotely.

The key findings of the Center for Business and Economic Research study are that we have an untapped market. Some 69 percent of people who currently are unemployed or economically inactive indicate that they would start working if given more flexible work models and the technology to enable them to work remotely.

Think about the massive shifts in the demographics of the workplace. We talk about millennials coming into the workforce, and new work models, and all of that’s interesting and important. But we have a massive other group of workers at the other end of the spectrum -- the baby boomers -- who have massive amounts of talent and knowledge and who are beginning to retire.

What if we could re-employ them on their own terms? Maybe a few days a week or a few hours a day, to contribute some of their expertise that is much needed to fill some of the skills gaps that companies have?

We are in a unique position right now and have an incredible opportunity to embrace these new work models, these new freelance marketplaces, and the technology to solve the talent gap.

Kasriel: We run a study every year called Freelancing in America; we have been running it for six years now. One of the highlights of the study is that 46 percent, so almost half of freelancers, say that they cannot take a traditional full-time job. And that’s usually primarily driven by health issues, by care duties, or by the fact that they live in a part of the US where there are no jobs for their skills. They tend to be more skilled and educated on average than non-freelancers, and they tend to be completely undercounted in the Bureau of Labor Statistic data every month.

So when we talk about no unemployment in the country, and when we talk about the skills gap, there is this other pool of talent that tends to be very resilient, really hardworking, and highly skilled -- but who cannot commit to a traditional full-time job that requires them to be on-site.
Read the Report: The Potential Economic
Impacts of a Flexible Working Culture
So, yes, there is a skills gap overall. If you look at the micro numbers, that is true. But at the macro level, at the business firm level, it’s much more of a gap of flexibility -- and a gap of imagination -- than anything else. Firms are competing for the same talent in the same way and then wondering why they are struggling to attract new fresh talent and improve their diversity.

I tell them to go online and look at the talent available there. You will find a world of work, of people that are extremely eager to work for you. In fact, they are probably going to be much more loyal to your company than anybody else because you are by far the best employer that they could work with.

Gardner: To be clear, this is not North America or the US only. I have seen similar studies and statistics coming out of Europe and Japan. They differ from market to market, but it’s all about trying to solve the mismatch between employers and available potential talent.

Tim, people have been working remotely for quite a while now. Why is this not an option, but a necessity, when it comes to flexible and remote work?

https://www.citrix.com/glossary/what-is-digital-transformation.html

Minahan: It’s the market dynamics we have been talking about. Companies struggle to find the talent they need at scale in the locations where they traditionally have major office hubs. Out of necessity, to advance their business and access the skills they need, they must embrace more flexible work models. They need to be looking for talent in nontraditional ways, such as making freelance workers part of their regular talent strategies, and not an adjunct for when someone is out on sick leave.

And it’s really accelerating quite dramatically. We talk a lot about that talent crunch, but in addition, it’s also a skills gap. As Stephane was saying, so many of these freelance workers have the much-in-demand skills that people need.

When you think about the innovators in the industry, folks like Amazon who recently said, “Hey, we can’t find all of the talent we need with the skills that we need so we are going to retrain and spend close to $1 billion to retain a third of our workforce.”

They are expanding their talent pool. That’s what innovative companies are beginning to do. They are saying: “Okay, we have these constraints. What can we do, how can we work differently, how can we embrace technology differently, and how can we look at the workforce differently in order to expand our talent pool?”

Gardner: If you seek out the best technology to make that flexible workforce innovative, collaborative, and secure, are there other economic paybacks? If you do it right, can out also put money to the bottom line? What is the economic impact?

More remote workers, more revenue growth 

Minahan: From the study that we did around remote workers and tapping into the untapped talent pool, the research found that this could equate to more than $2 trillion in added value per year -- or a 10 percent boost to the US GDP. It’s because otherwise businesses are not able to deliver services because they don’t have the talent.

On a micro level, at an individual business level, when workers are engaged in these more flexible work models they are more stress-free. They are far more productive. They have more time for doing meaningful work. As a result, companies that embrace these work models are seeing far higher revenue growth, sometimes upward of 2.5 times. There are revenue growths, far higher profitability, and far greater worker retention than their peers.

Kasriel: It’s also important to remember that the average American worker spends more time commuting to work than on vacation in a given year. Imagine if all of that time could be reused to be productive at work, spend another couple of hours every day doing work for the company, or doing other things in their lives so they could consume more goods and services, which would drive economic growth.
Right now the amount of waste coming from companies requiring that their workers commute to work is probably the biggest amount of waste that companies are creating in the economy. It also causes income inequality, congestion, and pollution.

Right now the amount of waste coming from companies requiring that their workers commute to work is probably the biggest amount of waste that companies are creating in the economy. By the way, it also causes income inequality, congestion, and pollution. So there are countless negative externalities that nobody is even taking into account. Yet the waste of time by forcing workers to commute to work is increasing every year when it doesn’t need to be.

Some 20 years ago, when people were talking about remote work, it felt challenging from a cultural standpoint. We were all used to working face-to-face. It was challenging from a technological standpoint. We didn’t have broadband, secure application environments such as Citrix, and video conferencing. The tools were not in the cloud. A lot of things made it challenging to work remotely -- but now that cultural barrier is not nearly as big.

We are all more or less digital natives; we all use these tools. Frankly, even when you are two floors away in the same building, how many times you take the elevator to go down to meet somebody face-to-face versus chat with them or do a video conference with them?

At this stage, whether you are two floors away or 200 miles away makes almost no difference whatsoever. Where it does make a difference is forcing people to have to come to work every single day when it adds a huge amount of constraint in their lives and it’s fundamentally not productive for the economy.

Minahan: Building on what Stephane said, the study we did found that in addition to unlocking that untapped pool of talent, those folks who do currently have full-time jobs, 95 percent of them said they would work from home at least twice a week if given the opportunity. To Stephane’s point, you just look at that group alone and the time they would save from commuting multiplies to 105 hours of newly free time per year, time they didn’t have to spend commuting and doing unproductive things. Most of them said that they would put more hours into work because they didn’t have to deal with all the hassle of getting there.

Flexible work provides productive creativity 

Gardner: What about the quality of the work? It seems to me that creative work happens in its own ways, even in a state of leisure. I have to tell you some of the best creative thoughts I have occur when I’m in the shower. I don’t know why. So maybe creativity isn’t locked into a 9-to-5 definition.

Is there something in what we’re talking about that caters to the way the human brain works? As we get into the age of robotic process automation (RPA) should we look more to the way that people are intrinsically creative and free that?

Kasriel: Yes, the World Economic Forum has called attention to such changes in our evolution, the idea that progressively machines are going to be taking over the parts of our jobs that they can do better than we can. This frees us to be the best of ourselves, to be humans. The repetitive, non-cognitive work being done in a lot of offices is progressively going to be automated through RPA and artificial intelligence (AI). That allows us to spend more time on the creative work. The nature of creative work is such that you can’t order it on-demand, you can’t say, “Be creative in the next five minutes.”

It comes when it comes. It’s the inspiration that comes. So putting in artificial boundaries of saying, “You will be creative from 9-to-5, and you will only do this in the office environment,” is unlikely to be successful. Frankly, if you look at workplace management, you see companies increasingly trying to design work environments that are mix between areas of the office where you can be very productive -- by just doing the things that you need to do -- and places where you can be creative and thinking.

And that’s just a band-aid solution. The real solution is to let people work from anywhere and let them figure out the time at which they are the most creative and productive. Hold people accountable for an outcome, as opposed to holding them accountable for the number of fixed-time hours they are giving to the firm. It is, after all, very weakly correlated to the amount of output, of what they actually generate for the company.

Minahan: I fully agree. If you look at the overall productivity and the GDP, productivity advanced consistently with each new massive innovation right up until recently. The advent of mobile devices, mobile apps, and all of the distractions from communications and chat channels that we have at work have reached a crescendo.
Read the Report: The Potential Economic
Impacts of a Flexible Working Culture
On any given day, a typical employee spends nearly 65 percent of their time on such busy work. That means responding to Slack messages, being distracted by the application alerts about some tasks that may not be pertinent for your job and spending another 20 percent of time just searching for information. These all leave employees with less than two hours a day, by some estimates, on the meaningful and rewarding work that they were hired to do.

If we can free them up from those distractions and give them an environment to work where and how they want, one of the chief benefits is the capability to drive greater innovation and creativity than they can in an interruptive office environment.

Gardner: We have been talking in general terms. Do we have any concrete examples, use cases perhaps, that illustrate what we have been driving at? Why is it good for business and also for workers?

Blended workforce wins 

Kasriel: If you look at tech companies created in the last 15 to 20 years, increasingly you see them as what people call remote first, where they try to hire people outside of their main headquarters first and only put people in the office if they happen to live nearby. And that leads to a blended workforce, a mix between full-time employees and free-lancers.

The companies most visible started in open-source software development. So if you look at Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox, or if you look at the Wikipedia foundation, the non-profit building Wikipedia, if you look at Automattic, the for-profit open source company that builds WordPress, or if you look at GitLab. I mean, if you look at Upwork, we ourselves are mostly distributed, 2,000 people working in 800 different cities. InVision would be another example.

So, very well-known tech companies that build products used by hundreds of millions of people. WordPress alone empowers a subset of the Internet. These companies tend to have well over 100,000 workers between full-time employees and freelancers. They either have no office or most of their people are not working in an office.
Microsoft started using Upwork a few years ago. At this stage, they have thousands of different freelancers working on thousands of different projects. They are doing it becuase it's the right thing to do.

The companies that are a little bit more challenging are the ones that have grown in a world where everybody was a full-time employee. Everybody was on-site. But progressively they have made a shift to more flexible work models.

Probably the company that I’ve seen to be the most publicly vocal about this is Microsoft. Microsoft started using Upwork a few years ago. At this stage, they have thousands of different freelancers working on thousands of different projects. Partly they do it because they struggle to find great talent in Redmond, Wash., just like everybody else. There is a finite talent pool. But partly they are doing it because it’s the right thing to do.

Increasingly we hear companies say, “We can do well, and we can do a good at the same time.” That means helping people who may be disabled, people that may have care duties, young parents with children at home, people that are retiring but are not fully willing to completely step out of the workforce, or people that just happened to live in smaller cities in the U.S. where increasingly, even if you have the skills, they are not local jobs.

And they have spoken about this in both terms, which is: It’s the right thing for their shareholders, the right thing for their business, but it’s also helping society be more fair and distributed in a way that benefits workers outside of the big tech hubs of San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York, and Austin.

Gardner: Tim, any examples that demonstrate why a future workspace model helps encourage this flexible work and why it’s good for both the employees and employers?

May the workforce be with you, everywhere

Minahan: Stephane did a great job covering the more modern companies built from the ground up on flexible work models. He brought up an interesting point. It’s much more challenging for traditional or established companies to transition to these models. One that stands out and is relevant is eBay.

eBay, as we all know, is one of the largest digital marketplaces in the world. Like many others, they built call centers in major cities and hired a whole bunch of folks to answer and provide support calls to buyers and sellers as they were conducting commerce in the marketplace. However, their competition was setting up call centers right down the street, so they were in constant churning -- hiring, training, losing them, and needing to rehire. Finally they said, “This can’t go on. We have to figure out a different model.”

https://www.upwork.com/
They embraced technology and consequently a more flexible work model. They went where the talent is: The stay-at-home parent in Montana, the retiree in Florida, the gig worker in New York or Boston. They armed them with a digital workspace that gave them the information, tools, and knowledge base they needed to answer questions from customers but in far more flexible work models. They could work three hours a day or maybe one day a week. eBay was able to Uberfy the workforce.

They started a year-and-a-half ago and are now they are close to having 4,000 of these call center workers as a remote workforce, and it’s all transparent to the rest of us. They are delivering a higher-level service to the customers by going to where the talent is and it’s completely transparent. We are unaware that they are not sitting in a call center somewhere. They are actually sitting in a remote office in all corners of the country.

Gardner: I’m afraid we are out of time. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how businesses must adapt to the new talent landscape and find innovative means to bring future work and workers together.

And we have learned how flexible work solutions require a future workspace model, one that’s flexible, intelligent, collaborative, virtual, and physical. So a big thank you to our guests, Stephane Kasriel, former Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board at Upwork. Thank you so much, Stephane.

Kasriel: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And we have also been joined by Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Thank you, Tim.

Minahan: Thanks, Dana. Always a pleasure.


Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect flexible work innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Thanks again for listening, please pass this along to your business associates, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

Transcript of a discussion on how businesses must adapt to the new talent landscape and find the innovative new means to bring future work and workers together. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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Friday, January 03, 2020

As Hybrid IT Complexity Ramps Up, Operators Look to Data-Driven Automation Tools

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/home.html

A discussion on the advancing role and impact from IT automation and how complex IT deployments are forcing managers to seek new productivity tools.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into IT management strategies.

Gardner
Growing complexity from the many moving parts in today’s IT deployments are forcing managers to seek new productivity tools. Moving away from manual processes to bring higher levels of automation to data center infrastructure has long been a priority for IT operators, but now new tools and methods are making composability and automation better options than ever.

Here to help us learn more about the advancing role and impact from IT automation is Frances Guida, Manager of HPE OneView Automation and Ecosystem Product Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Welcome, Frances.

Frances Guida: It’s great to be here, Dana.


Gardner: What are the top drivers, Frances, for businesses seeking higher levels of automation and simplicity in their IT infrastructure?

Guida: It relates to what’s happening at a business level. It’s a truism that business today is moving faster than it ever has before. That puts pressure on all parts of a business environment -- and that includes IT. And so IT needs to deliver things more quickly than they used to. They can’t just use the old techniques; they need to move to much more automated approaches. And that means they need to take work out of their operational environments.

Gardner: What’s driving the complexity that makes such automation beneficial?

IT means business 

Guida: It again starts from the business. IT used to be a support function, to support business processes. So, it could go along on its own time scale. There wasn’t much that the business could or would do about it.

Guida
In 2020, technology is now part of the fabric of most of the products, services, and experiences that businesses offer. So when technology is part of an offering, all of a sudden technology is how a business is differentiated. As part of how a business is differentiated, business leaders are not going to take, “Oh, we will get to it in 18 months,” as an answer. If that’s the answer they get from the IT department, they are going to go look for other ways of getting things done.

And with the advances of public cloud technology, there are other ways of getting things done that don’t come from an internal IT department. So IT organizations need to be able to keep up with the pace of business change, because businesses aren’t going to accept their historical time scale.

Gardner: Does accelerating IT via automation require an ecosystem of partners, or is there one tool that rules them all?

Guida: This is not a one-size-fits-all world. I talk to customers in our HPE Executive Briefing Centers regularly. The first thing I ask them is, “Tell me about the toolsets you have in your environment.” I often ask them about what kinds of automation toolsets they have. Do you have Terraform or Ansible or Chef or Puppet or vRealize Orchestrator or something else? It’s not uncommon for the answer to be, “Yes.” They have all of them.

So even within a customer’s environment, they don’t have a single tool. We need to work with all the toolsets that the customers have in their IT environments.

Gardner: It almost sounds like you are trying to automate the automation. Is that fair?

Guida: We definitely are trying to take some of the hard work that has historically gone into automation and make it much simpler.
Complexity is Growing in the Data Center
What's the Solution?
Gardner: IT operations complexity is probably only going to increase, because we are now talking about pushing compute operations -- and even micro data centers -- out to the edge in places like factories, vehicles, and medical environments, for example. Should we brace ourselves now for a continuing ramp-up of complexity and diversity when it comes to IT operations?

Guida: Oh, absolutely. You can’t have a single technology that’s going to answer everything. Is the end user going to interface through a short message service (SMS) or are they going to use a smartphone? Are they going to be on a browser? Is it an endpoint that interacts with a system that’s completely independent of any user base technology? All of this means that IT has to be multifaceted.

Even if we look at data center technologies, for the last 15 years virtualization has been pretty much the standard way that IT deploys new systems. Now, increasingly, organizations are looking at a set of applications that don’t run in virtual machines (VMs), but rather are container-based. That brings a whole other set of complexity they have to think about in their environments.
Complexity is like entropy; it just keeps growing. When we started thinking about bringing a lot more flexibility to on-premises data center environments, we looked holistically at the problem ... at a deeper level.

Complexity is like entropy; it just keeps growing. When we started thinking about bringing a lot more flexibility to on-premises data center environments, we looked holistically at the problem. I don’t think the problem can only be addressed through better automation; in fact, it has to be addressed at a deeper level.

And so with our composable infrastructure strategies, we thought architecturally about how we could bring the same kind of flexibility you have in a public cloud environment to on-premises data centers. We realized we needed a way to liberate IT beyond the boundaries of physical infrastructure by being able to group that physical infrastructure into pools of resources that could be much more fluid and where the physical aspects could be changed.

Now, there is some hardware infrastructure technology in that, but a lot of that magic is done through software, using software to configure things that used to be done in a physical manner.

https://community.hpe.com/t5/Shifting-to-Software-Defined/How-to-leverage-the-greatest-minds-in-the-world-in-your-own-data/ba-p/7031252#.XdgAk9VKiM8
So we defined a layer of software-defined intelligence that captures all of the things you need to know about configuring physical hardware -- whether it’s firmware levels or biased headings or connections. We define and calculate all of that in software.

And automation is the icing on that cake. Once you have your infrastructure that can be defined in software, you can program it. That’s where the automation comes in, being able to use everyday automation tools that organizations are already using to automate other parts of their IT environment and apply that to the physical infrastructure without a whole bunch of unnatural acts that were previously required if you wanted to automate physical infrastructure.

Gardner: Are we talking about a fundamental shift in how infrastructure should be conceived or thought of here?

Consolidate complexity via automation 

Guida: There has been a saying in the IT industry for a while about moving from pets to cattle. Now we even talk about thinking about herds. You can brute-force that transition by trying to automate to all of the low-level application programing interfaces (APIs) in physical infrastructure today. Most infrastructure today is programmable, with rare exceptions.

But then you as the organization are doing the automation, and you must internalize that and make your automation account for all of the logic. For example, if you then make a change in the storage configuration, what does that mean for the way the network needs to be configured? What does that mean for firmware settings? You would have to maintain all of that in your own automation logic.
How to Simplify and Automate
Your Data Center
There are some organizations in the world that have the scale of automation engineering to be able to do that. But the vast majority of enterprises don’t have that capability. And so what we do with composable infrastructure, HPE OneView, and our partner ecosystem is we actually encapsulate all of that in our software to find intelligence. So all you have to do is take that configuration file and apply it to a set of physical hardware. It brings things that used to be extremely complex down to what a standard IT organization has the capabilities of doing today.

Gardner: And not only is that automation going to appeal to the enterprise IT organizations, it’s also going to appeal to the ecosystem of partners. They now have the means to use the composable infrastructure to create new value-added services.

How does HPE’s composability benefit both the end-user organizations and the development of the partner ecosystem?

Guida: When I began the composable ecosystem program, we actually had two or three partners. This was about four years ago. We have now grown to more than 30 different integrations in place today, with many more partners that we are talking to. And those range from the big, everyday names like VMware and Microsoft to smaller companies that may be present in only a particular geography.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/home.html
But what gets them excited is that, all of a sudden, they are able to bring better value to their customers. They are able to deliver, for example, an integrated monitoring system. Or maybe they are already doing application monitoring, and all of a sudden they can add infrastructure monitoring. Or they may already be doing facilities management, managing the power and cooling, and all of a sudden they get a whole bunch of data that used to be hard to put in one place. Now they can get a whole bunch of data on the thermals, of what’s really going on at the infrastructure level. It’s definitely very exciting for them.


Gardner: What jumps out at you as a good example of taking advantage of what composable infrastructure can do?

Guida: The most frequent conversations I have with customers today begin with basic automation. They have many tools in their environment; I mentioned many of them earlier: Ansible, Terraform, Chef, Puppet, or even just PowerShell or Python; or in the VMware environment, vRealize Orchestrator.

They have these tools and really appreciate what we have been able to do with publishing these integrations on GitHub, for example, of having a community, and having direct support back to our engineers who are doing this work. They are able to pretty straightforwardly add that into their tools environment.
How a Software-Defined Data Center
Lets the Smartest People Work for You
And we at HPE have also done some of the work ourselves in the open source tools projects. Pretty much every automation tool that’s out there in mainstream use by IT -- we can handle it. That’s where a lot of the conversations we have with customers begin.

If they don’t begin there, they start back in basic IT operations. One of the ways people take advantage of the automation in HPE OneView -- but they don’t realize they are taking advantage of automation -- is in how OneView helps them integrate their physical infrastructure into a VMware vCenter or a Microsoft System Center environment.

Visualize everything, automatically 

For example, in a VMware vCenter environment, an administrator can use our plug-in and it automatically sucks in all of the data from their physical infrastructure that’s relevant to their VMware environment. They can see things in their vCenter environment that they otherwise couldn’t see.

They can see everything from a VM that’s sitting on the VM host that’s connected through the host bus adapters (HBAs) out to the storage array. There is the logical volume. And they can very easily visualize the entire logical as well as physical environment. That’s automation, but you are not necessarily perceiving it as automation. You are perceiving it as simply making an IT operations environment a lot easier to use.
The automation benefits -- instead of just going down into the IT operations -- can also go up to allow more cloud management. It affects infrastructure and applications.

For that level of IT operations integration, VMware and Microsoft environments are the poster children. But for other tools, like Micro Focus and some of the capacity planning tools, and event management tools like ServiceNow – those are another big use case category.

The automation benefits – instead of just going down into the IT operations – can also go up to allow more cloud management. Another way IT organizations take advantage of the HPE automation ecosystem means, “Okay, it’s great that you can automate a piece of physical infrastructure, but what I really need to do -- and what I really care about -- is automating a service. I want to be able to provision my SQL database server that’s in the cloud.”

That not only affects infrastructure pieces, it touches a bunch of application pieces, too. Organizations want it all done through a self-service portal. So we have a number of partners who enable that.

Morpheus comes to mind. We have quite a lot of engagements today with customers who are looking at Morpheus as a cloud management platform and taking advantage of how they can not only provision the logical aspects of their cloud, but also the physical ones through all of the integrations that we have done.
How to Simplify, Automate, and
Develop Faster
Gardner: How does HPE and the partner ecosystem automate the automation, given the complexity that comes with the newer hybrid deployment models? Is that what HPE OneView is designed to help do these days?

Automatic, systematic, cost-saving habit 

Guida: I want to talk about a customer who is an online retailer. If you think about the retail world -- obviously a highly dynamic world and technology is at the very forefront of the product that they deliver; technology is the product that they deliver.

They have a very creative marketing department that is always looking for new ways to connect to their customers. That marketing department has access to a set of application developers who are developing new widgets, new ways of connecting with customers. Some of those developers like to develop in VMs, which is more old school; some of the developers are more new school and they prefer container-based environments.

The challenge the IT department has is that from one week to the next they don’t fully know how much of their capacity needs to be dedicated to a VM versus a container environment. It all depends on which promotions or programs the business decides it wants to run at any time.

So the IT organization needed a way to quickly switch an individual VM host server to be reconfigured as a bare-metal container host. They didn’t want to pay a VM tax on their container host. They identified that if they were going to do that manually, there were dozens and dozens -- I think they had 36 or 37 -- steps that they needed to do. And they could not figure out a way to automate individually each one of those 37 steps.
When we brought them an HPE Synergy infrastructure -- managed by OneView, automated by Ansible -- they instantly saw how that was going to help solve their problems. They were able to change their environemnt from one personality to another in a completely automated fashion.

When we brought them an HPE Synergy infrastructure -- managed by OneView, automated with Ansible -- they instantly saw how that was going to help solve their problems. They were going to be able to change their environment from one personality to another personality in a completely automated fashion. And now they are able to do that changeover in just 30 minutes, and instead of needing dozens of manual steps. They have zero manual steps; everything is fully automated.

And that enables them to respond to the business requirements. The business needs to be able to run whatever programs and promotions it is that they want to run -- and they can’t be constrained by IT. Maybe that gives a picture of how valuable this is to our customers.

Gardner: Yes, it speaks to the business outcomes, which are agility and speed, and at the same time the IT economics are impacted there as well.

Speaking of IT economics and IT automation, we have been talking in terms of process and technology. But businesses are also seeking to simplify and automate the economics of how they acquire and spend on IT, perhaps more on a pay-per-use basis.

Is there alignment between what you are doing in automation and what HPE is doing with HPE GreenLake? Do the economics and automation reinforce one another?
How to Drive Innovation and
Automation in Your Data Center
Guida: Oh, absolutely. We bring physical infrastructure flexibility, and HPE GreenLake brings financial flexibility. Those go hand in hand. In fact, the example that I was just speaking about, the online retailer, they are very, very busy during the Christmas shopping season. They are also busy for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and back-to-school shopping. But they also have times where they are much less busy.

They have HPE GreenLake integrated into their environment so in addition to having the physical flexibility in their environment, they are financially aligning through a flexible capacity program and paying for technology -- in the way that their business model works. So, these things go hand-in-hand.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/flexible-capacity.html?chatsrc=ot-en&jumpid=ps_muqbvc5xh2_aid-510455007&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIgbTwgZr-5QIViLzACh0c8AkNEAAYASAAEgLi_fD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

As I said earlier, I talk to a lot of HPE customers because I am based in the San Francisco Bay Area where we have our corporate headquarters. I am frequently in our Executive Briefing Center two to three times a week. There are almost no conversations I am part of that don’t lead eventually to the financial aspects, as well as the technical aspect, of how all the technology works.

Gardner: Because we have opened IT automation up to the programmatic level, a new breed of innovation can be further brought to bear. Once people get their hands on these tools and start to automate, what have you seen on the innovation side? What have people started doing with this that you maybe didn’t even think they would do when you designed the products?

Single infrastructure signals innovation 

Guida: Well, I don’t know that we didn’t think about this, but one of the things we have been able to do is make something that the IT industry has been talking about for a while in an on-premises IT environment.

There are lots of organizations that have IT capacity that is only used some of the time. A classic example is an engineering organization that provides a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) capability for engineers. These engineers need a bunch of analytics applications -- maybe it’s genomic engineering, seismic engineering, or fluid dynamics in the automotive industry. They have multiple needs. Typically they have been running those on different sets of physical infrastructures.

With our automation, we can enable them to collapse that all into one set of infrastructure, which means they can be much more financially efficient. Because they are more financially efficient on the IT side, they are able to then devote more of their dollars to driving innovation -- finding new ways of discovering oil and gas under the ground, new ways of making automobiles much more efficient, or uncovering new secrets within our DNA. By spending less on their IT infrastructure, they are able to spend more on what their core business innovation should be.

Gardner: Frances, I have seen other vendors approach automation with a tradeoff. They say, “Well, if you only use our cloud, it’s automated. If you only use our hypervisor, it’s automated. If you only use our database, it’s automated.”

But HPE has taken a different tack. You have looked at heterogeneity as the norm and the complexity as a result of heterogeneity as what automation needs to focus on. How far ahead is HPE on composability and automation? How differentiated are you from others who have put a tradeoff in place when it comes to solving automation?
We have had composable infrastructure on the market for three-plus years. Our HPE Synergy platform now has a $1 billion run rate. We have 3,600 customers around the world. It's been a tremendously successful business for us.

Guida: We have had composable infrastructure on the market for three-plus years now. Our HPE Synergy platform, for example, now has a more than $1 billion run rate for HPE. We have 3,600 customers and counting around the world. It’s been a tremendously successful business for us.

I find it interesting that we don’t see a lot of activity out there, of people trying to mimic or imitate what we have done. So I expect composability and automation will remain fundamentally differentiating for us from many of our traditional on-premises infrastructure competitors.

It positions us very well to provide an alternative for organizations who like the flexibility of cloud services but prefer to have them in their on-premises environments. It’s been tremendously differentiating for us. I am not seeing anyone else who has anything coming on hot in any way.

Gardner: Let’s take a look to the future. Increasingly, not only are companies looking to become data-driven, but IT organizations are also seeking to become data-driven. As we gather more data and inference, we start to be predictive in optimizing IT operations.

I am, of course, speaking of AIOps. What does that bring to the equation around automation and composability? How will AIOps change this in the coming couple of years?

Automation innovation in sight with AIOps 

Guida: That’s a real opportunity for further innovation in the industry. We are at the very early stages about how we take advantage in a symptomatic way of all of the insights that we can derive from knowing what is actually happening within our IT environments and mining those insights. Once we have mined those insights, it creates the possibility for us to take automation to another level.

We have been throwing around terms like self-healing for a couple of decades, but a lot of organizations are not yet ready for something like self-healing infrastructure. There is a lot of complexity within our environments. And when you put that into a broader heterogeneous data center environment, there is even more complexity. So there is some trepidation.
How to Accelerate to
A Self-Driving Data Center
Over time, for sure, the industry will get there. We will be forced to get there because we are going to be able to do that in other execution venues like the public cloud. So the industry will get there. The whole notion of what we have done with automation of composable infrastructure is absolutely a great foundation for us as we take our customers toward these next journeys around automation.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how growing complexity from the many moving parts in IT deployments have forced managers to seek new levels of productivity. And we have also learned about the advancing role and impact of IT composability and automation to better manage today’s dynamic and extensive data center deployments.

So please join me in thanking our guest, Frances Guida, Manager of HPE OneView Automation and Ecosystem Product Management at HPE. Thank you so much, Frances.

Guida: I enjoyed our conversation.


Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this sponsored BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator IT management strategies interview. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this on to your community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

A discussion on the advancing role and impact from IT automation and how complex IT deployments are forcing managers to seek new productivity tools. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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