Why-Leaders-Need-to-Live-Their-Words-to-Drive-Big-Change-HERO- VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

Home

Walking the Talk: Why Leaders Need to Live Their Words to Drive Big Change

Why-Leaders-Need-to-Live-Their-Words-to-Drive-Big-Change-HERO-

Sumit and Roshan HERO - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

Becoming Cloud Smart: Learn from CVS Health

Sumit and Roshan HERO

Raghu byline HERO - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

From Cloud Chaos to Cloud Smart

Raghu byline HERO

Operations-Led-Growth hero - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

The New Frontier: Operations‑Led Growth

Operations-Led-Growth hero

Charting a Path to Tomorrow’s Success HERO

Charting a Path to Tomorrow’s Success HERO - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

From Vision to Reality: Charting a Path to Tomorrow’s Success

New Chief Open Source Officer FB - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

Chip Childers Joins VMware as Chief Open Source Officer

New Chief Open Source Officer FB

Transformational-Change hero - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

The Terror — and Thrill — of Transformational Change

Transformational-Change hero

Businesswoman shaking hands with client

Businesswoman shaking hands with client - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

Podcast Raghu Raghuram CEO with IDC President - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

Podcast: VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram with IDC President Crawford Del Prete

Podcast Raghu Raghuram CEO with IDC President

Cybersecurity-Predictions-2022-TWIT_800x418 - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

VMware: A Look Ahead at 2022

Cybersecurity-Predictions-2022-TWIT_800x418

Professional Development programmer working in programming website a software and coding technology, writing codes and data code, Programming with HTML, PHP and javascript

Professional Development programmer working in programming website a software and coding technology, writing codes and data code, Programming with HTML, PHP and javascript - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

More Secure Open Source Software: A Shared Responsibility

raghu-raghuram-ceo-letter - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

raghu-raghuram-ceo-letter

Mike-Hayes_Headshot_2021_ - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

Mike-Hayes_Headshot_2021_

Change always starts the same way: with an intention. But between that intention and the outcome you’re after are countless tiny actions that will ultimately determine success or failure.

core/paragraph

Bridging the gap between intention and action is hard enough when you’re an individual. The job gets exponentially harder when you want to change an organisation that needs to get many individuals marching in the same direction.

For leaders to succeed in creating this kind of change, they need to do more than transform processes — they need to transform people. But nothing can derail that potential transformation faster than a disconnect between a leader’s words and actions.

We’ve all seen this play out in our careers at one time or another. A change initiative gets rolled out to much fanfare, with a leader rallying everyone to get on board with a new mindset or approach. But a few months in, you see that same leader not living the principles they asked of you.

It’s hard to understate the risks to an organisation when leaders don’t walk the talk. It creates a legitimacy gap, one where employees don’t believe what they’re being told or don’t take it seriously. That legitimacy gap can lead to low morale, disengagement, and ultimately subpar performance.

Put simply: When you’re a leader, your team isn’t going to follow your words — they’re going to follow your actions. This is something I remind myself of almost daily in my role at VMware. One of my most important jobs is to hold myself accountable to my words and to what I’m asking of my team. I can’t ask them to do something that I’m not willing to do myself.

core/pullquote

What does accountability look like to me? First, I try not to make hollow commitments. If I’m going to bring something to my team, I’m going to be personally bought in 100 percent. Second, I strive to be clear about what good looks like. I think about the tiny behaviours that are going to indicate we’re heading in the right direction, and I make sure to do them myself and recognise others who are doing the same. Third, I try to be as transparent as possible about what we’re doing and the progress we’re making against our goals.

Let me give you an example I’m working through right now. For the past several years, VMware has been undergoing its own transformation from licensing software to providing SaaS — Software as a Service. It’s a big change, one that goes far beyond how our products get accessed, and it’s especially important for our work in Worldwide Cloud Sales. We’re actively building a customer-obsessed culture, one that’s more about our customer’s successes than our own.

As a leader who is fully bought into this vision and wants my team to be as well, I know how important it is that I be an active participant in creating change. So I’m intentional about asking questions that I know my team cares about and that are instrumental to fully walking the talk: Are we measuring performance around customer-oriented outcomes? Are we prioritising the right work streams? Are we aligning incentives correctly?

I can’t always fully answer these questions myself. But I’m constantly asking them of myself and of my leadership peers — and I try to be as transparent as possible with my team about where we’re making progress and where we’re falling short.

This is how I think about walking the talk as a leader myself. But what if you’re someone who is working under a leader who isn’t walking the talk? I see two things that can happen. One: you can recognise the disconnect and allow it to make you cynical. Or two: you can recognise the disconnect and get busy walking the talk yourself.

Here’s the thing: Leadership isn’t something that gets bestowed upon you through a job title or a promotion. It’s something you can seize for yourself from any position inside an organisation. That’s empowering — and it’s something every one of us can do to help create the change we want to see in our own lives, in our organisations, and in the world.

Change always starts the same way: with an intention. But between that intention and the outcome you’re after are countless tiny actions that will ultimately determine success or failure. Bridging the gap between intention and action is hard enough when you’re an individual. The job gets exponentially harder when you want to change an organisation […]

Walking the Talk: Why Leaders Need to Live Their Words to Drive Big Change - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

https://news-editor.vmware.com/anz/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/09/Why-Leaders-Need-to-Live-Their-Words-to-Drive-Big-Change-HERO-.jpg

Posts

Over the past decade, challenger brands have shaken up the status quo in the business world by pioneering a digital-smart strategy, centred on accelerating innovation via software in the cloud. There are unique qualities that distinguish a digital-smart business: an ability to harness machine learning to turbocharge business insights; a focus on taking automation to the next level; and an obsession with driving the next leap forward in employee engagement and productivity. 

While challenger brands pioneered this digital-smart approach, established incumbents are investing heavily in every industry sector, from education and banking to healthcare, retail, and public sector. That explains the 400-percent growth in cloud-native apps over the past three years: from a total of 72 million in 2019 to an estimated 310 million cloud-native apps in the world today, according to IDC.1

The Great Re-Platforming

core/heading

But while we’ve made progress on the path to digital, almost every business leader I talk to says the same thing: “We’re not moving fast enough.” Many CIOs describe this current era as ‘The Great Re-Platforming’ of the enterprise – an opportunity to rethink and reshape the core operations that propel every business. In their view, this re-platforming has slowed, and they call out three roadblocks that are holding us back. First, we’re confronting a global-scale gap in critical skills, from software-development to cloud operations. Second, there’s the sheer ‘weight’ of existing enterprise apps, which have proven difficult to modernise and migrate to the cloud. The third roadblock is the fragmented nature of running and securing apps across multiple clouds.

Against that backdrop, organisations have discovered that successfully re-platforming the enterprise requires you to build a “cloud-smart” architecture – one that allows your teams to navigate the inherent complexity of today’s multi-cloud world. At the core of a cloud-smart approach is the ability to drive a consistent, secure, and cost-efficient operating model across the various clouds you rely on.

A survey we conducted this Summer with more than 5,000 organisations across the globe revealed that only 20 percent have reached the tipping point where the strategic benefits of multi-cloud outweigh the challenges, including spiralling costs and cyber-security vulnerabilities.2 In other words, only one in five businesses identify themselves as cloud smart today. What is the right path forward for the remaining 80 percent of organisations that want to implement a cloud-smart approach?

A Typical Journey to Cloud

In my conversations with customers, they consistently describe a journey to the cloud that breaks down into three distinct phases:

Phase 1: Cloud First – This was the initial embrace of public cloud that began a dozen or so years ago, with a big focus on building customer-facing mobile apps in a single cloud. This first wave of cloud innovation drove huge advances in how businesses operate and how they engage their end customers.

Over time, we saw a broad shift from a single-cloud mindset to a multi-cloud model, with 75% of organisations now relying on 2 or more public clouds.3 This makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons. First, CIOs want to tap into the tremendous amount of innovation being driven by the leading public-cloud players. Developers want access to best-of-breed services in different clouds to differentiate the apps they’re building. And every organisation wants greater choice and flexibility, which helps them avoid lock-in with a single service provider.

Phase 2: Cloud Chaos – This describes the current state that 80 percent of organisations are living and breathing each day, a world where greater cloud choice has led to a massive spike in complexity. Most report that building new apps is slow and cumbersome, and managing their entire app portfolio across disparate clouds is difficult and expensive. No wonder: each cloud requires their teams to use proprietary tools that are siloed and incompatible with one another. Meanwhile, for the average employee, getting fast, secure access to critical apps from anywhere is imperative, yet it’s often a challenge. All this complexity has broad repercussions on the business, from managing costs to attracting and retaining top talent.

Phase 3: Cloud Smart – This is the desired destination of every multi-cloud journey: a more sophisticated, mature approach where you have the freedom to select the right cloud for the right app, based on the needs of the individual app. Customers I talk to who have successfully achieved a cloud-smart approach tend to describe three big shifts they drove as part of their move from Cloud Chaos to Cloud Smart:

core/image

Cloud Smart in Action: S&P Global

One of my favourite examples of a company accelerating innovation via a cloud-smart approach is S&P Global, a well-respected brand and a leader in business-intelligence services. Like many organisations, S&P Global was struggling with complexity and the “need for speed” in how they build and deploy apps. <a href="https://youtu.be/ctYLjUZ2X6I%C2%A0">Watch the video</a> to see how they tackled challenges to serve customers better.

Business Outcomes from a Cloud-Smart Approach

When we asked cloud-smart organisations to describe the benefits they’ve gained from their multi-cloud operation, they spoke of advantages that shape both their competitiveness and their top-line results. For example, 97 percent of cloud-smart organisations say their approach to multi-cloud has improved their revenue growth4, and 96 percent say it has improved their profitability.5 At the same time, 96 percent of cloud-smart organisations say they are better able to recruit and retain top talent6, and 92 percent report that it’s easier to manage their data wherever they reside.7

The Ultimate Destination

Moving from a state of cloud chaos to a position of strength as a cloud-smart organisation is neither simple nor easy. There’s a lot we can learn from the small subset of businesses that have successfully navigated this transition. Whether you’re a challenger born in the cloud or an established player, the ultimate destination is a multi-cloud environment that empowers your teams to move faster and spend less – powered by a consistent operating model that extends across any cloud. This is the foundation of a digital-smart business.

Watch Raghu Raghuram’s keynote from VMware Explore where he outlines the vision for cloud smart as the destination of every multi-cloud journey.

core/embed

core/separator

12019: IDC, 500 Million New Logical Applications: More Background, IDC #lcUS45622019, November 2019; 2022: IDC, 750 Million New Logical Applications: More Background,  Doc # US48441921, December 2021

2-7VMware survey of 5,000 organizations globally, July 2022

The ultimate destination is a multi-cloud environment that empowers your teams to move faster and spend less.

From Cloud Chaos to Cloud Smart - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

https://news-editor.vmware.com/anz/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/08/Raghu-byline-HERO.jpg

A key theme at this year’s <a href="https://www.vmware.com/explore/us.html?src=ps_62842e3f6213d&cid=7012H000001Kc4GQAS&gclid=Cj0KCQjw0oyYBhDGARIsAMZEuMsQL4ByQrq95bAvH0wOkgNWohwKGYtHprr3NQJkWslYoMERZh90FVgaAnf8EALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds">VMware Explore 2022</a> focused on how organisations navigate the challenges of moving from “cloud chaos” to “cloud smart.” With a cloud smart approach to building multi-cloud architectures, enterprises have the freedom to select the right cloud for the right app<a>. </a>(VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram shared additional perspective on <a href="https://news.vmware.com/vmware-explore/from-cloud-chaos-to-cloud-smart">cloud smart</a><a>.)</a>

During this year’s General Session, we discussed this journey in detail with one leading organisation and VMware customer – <a href="https://www.cvshealth.com/news-and-insights/articles/health-care-from-the-heart">CVS Health, one of America’s most innovative health solutions companies</a> with more than 9,600 pharmacy locations nationwide and over 300,000 employees. 85% of Americans live within 10 miles of a CVS pharmacy location, with 4.8 million consumers visiting a location daily, and 45 million unique digital consumers further expanding its online reach.

I was honoured to be joined on stage at VMware Explore by Roshan Navagamuwa, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of CVS Health, to learn more about how CVS Health leverages a “technology forward” cloud-smart strategy.

During one of the most uncertain periods in recently history, <a href="https://www.cvshealth.com/news-and-insights/articles/our-covid-19-response#:~:text=As%20a%20leading%20health%20solutions,administration%20to%20millions%20of%20people.">CVS Health played an instrumental role in responding to the challenges of COVID-19.</a> Since the pandemic began, it has administered more than 50 million vaccines and more than 32 million COVID-19 tests. The company continues to embrace innovation in order to meet the health needs of customers, including increasing mental and virtual health services.

Begin with a focus on organisational goals.

As Roshan put it, “We started with our imperatives as a health care business, which are to drive improved outcomes, lower costs, higher levels of engagement, and broader access to high quality care. Our initial focus was making the consumer experience easier and more convenient, leveraging smarter and more efficient technology.” He stressed the importance of enabling colleagues across CVS Health with the tools and capabilities they need to keep customer promises in a dynamic and fast-paced environment. Underpinning these consumer and colleague capabilities are cloud-based platforms and automated processes.

The journey to cloud smart requires taming complexity.

CVS Health’s cloud journey initially began with its digital and analytics team, expanding over time to include its broader community of application developers. Use cases grew quickly from scale-scale opportunities to products and experiences that are now core to the business.

In early stages of the cloud journey, teams worked with speed and loose coordination in a federated governance model. A few years ago, however, Roshan described reaching an inflection point with large independent implementations within each cloud provider that led to increased cost and complexity.

Roshan’s team took a step back and reset to a more enterprise-optimised approach by consolidating into one team managing an integrated hybrid multi-cloud service and centralised controls and governance. Today, CVS Health leverages a more cohesive hybrid multi-cloud operating model focused on its priorities of ensuring reliable, secure operation with financial control and accountability; an increasingly better developer experience; and reusable products that are easier to integrate.

All of these capabilities ultimately enable business value with the agility needed to deliver on CVS Health’s mission; an example can be seen in their ability to quickly build and integrate health equity analytics into its COVID-19 response, distributing millions of vaccines to underserved populations.

Break down silos as technology teams continue to converge in function.

Roshan and I also discussed the trend of convergence among technology teams. I know from my own conversation with many customers and CIOs that a common challenge has been organisations keeping cloud teams in their own silos. Many “cloud first” enterprises have set up a variety of siloed teams – public cloud operations, platform engineering, and private cloud teams. While the formation of these teams has helped organisations cultivate specialised skill sets, it has also often created complexity, confusion, and chaos.

Roshan shared how CVS Health tackled this challenge, converging multiple teams into a more cohesive cloud services team. This helped streamline a number of burdensome processes, optimise workloads, and drive more automation – ultimately shortening the journey from idea to working software. This was also true of the team’s approach to strengthening the colleague experience. “We converged disparate teams that delivered and supported colleague technology into one team, focused on colleague experience,” Roshan said. “We were intentional about the technology choices best suited to support a mobile workforce and our retail team members – especially our front-line health care workers like pharmacists and nurse practitioners.” As he shared with us, streamlining the colleague experience has allowed their focus to be centred on patients rather than burdensome manual processes.

VMware’s portfolio of cross-cloud services enables organisations to navigate their own journeys to cloud smart and ensure accelerated app dev, consistent enterprise infrastructure, and frictionless app-access experience.<a id="_msocom_1"></a><a id="_msocom_1"></a>

The promise of multi-cloud is enabling organisations to focus their time, energy, and resources on innovations that improve customer experience and accelerate growth. I was inspired to hear from Roshan how embracing the potential of cloud smart has helped to enable CVS Health’s impact in delivering consumer-centric health care.

Learn more about our <a href="https://news.vmware.com/vmware-explore-2022-media-kit" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">latest innovations announced at VMware Explore.</a>

With a cloud smart approach to building multi-cloud architectures, enterprises have the freedom to select the right cloud for the right app.

Becoming Cloud Smart: Learn from CVS Health - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

https://news-editor.vmware.com/anz/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/09/Sumit-and-Roshan-HERO.jpg

I originally signed up for a half marathon. The 13.1-mile distance felt manageable, unlike the massive effort I imagined a full marathon would require. There was just one problem: I’ve never been good at doing things halfway.

With the idea of the big race nagging at me, I decided to push my training — week by week, my runs getting longer and more frequent. Before I knew it, I felt confident enough to take on the full 26.2 miles—something that only a few months before felt impossible.

What does running a marathon have to do with business? More than you think — especially when you’re in the <a href="https://news.vmware.com/tech-innovation/terror-thrill-transformational-change" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">business of transformation</a>.

I spend a lot of time talking with VMware’s customers. Just about all of them tell me the same thing: Their company’s future success depends on having a resilient, nimble digital foundation. They’re looking for platforms and tools that can thrive amid uncertainty and flex to meet evolving demands.

Now, my team and I know most of these needs can be met by embracing multi-cloud solutions, which have customer choice and flexibility baked into their architecture. But we also know the process of implementing multi-cloud comes with its own complexity. It’s a major commitment, one that requires time, skills, and resources over the long-term. In the face of that marathon, the lure of half-measures can be strong.

In this environment, my team’s job becomes two-fold: creating a vision for the future that is compelling enough to inspire action, while also charting a realistic path to get there that feels manageable. How do we do it? The same way I eventually ran my marathon.

Learn to Love the Process

As soon as I signed up for my race, I knew I needed to make a plan. Training isn’t something you can procrastinate on. It requires consistent effort over the long-term. So, I started mapping out what the next few months would look like: the weekly mileage I would need to hit, the time it would take, the days I would run.

Broken up into smaller pieces, the impossible starts to become possible. That’s why creating a process is so important to the success of any digital transformation. When my team starts working with a customer, we spend a lot of time upfront thinking about the business outcomes they’re trying to achieve and the most efficient way of getting there. We’re also constantly looking for ways to improve our own processes so that it’s easy for our clients to onboard, find information and best practices, and get value from our services as soon as possible.

Focus on Short-term Wins

Training for a marathon is a marathon in itself — one that can feel overwhelming when you’re just starting out. That’s why I didn’t think about running 26.2 miles at first. Instead, I focused on hitting better times in my hill and speed work. I pushed to run one mile faster than the week before.

Small wins have a way of boosting your confidence and keeping you motivated over the long-term. That’s why my team and I often work with our customers to identify what workloads make the most sense to move to the cloud and in what order. By executing on specific use cases that create big value early on, we can build momentum for the larger-scale transformation we’re working towards. These customer wins also have the added benefit of keeping our own team motivated because we can see just how much our work moves the needle.

When I think back to my marathon training, one factor above all others contributed to my success: I wasn’t doing it alone. I was part of a running club that helped me keep showing up, even on the bad days. I once took a bad fall during one of my long runs, and I probably would have packed it in for the day if I’d been on my own. But my team was with me, and they inspired me to keep going. I ended up running another 10 miles.

When you’re surrounded by people you trust, just about anything is possible. I remind my team about this all the time. We’re there to be partners to our customers in their digital transformation journeys, as well as partners for each other as we do it. This is especially important when the unexpected occurs. Setbacks are inevitable when you’re trying to do big things. But they don’t have to derail progress toward bigger goals — a fact that’s a lot easier to focus on when you’re surrounded by a team that’s as invested in your success as you are.

When the day finally came and I completed my marathon, it was exhilarating. I couldn’t believe what I had achieved and how far I’d come. That’s the feeling I wish for every one of VMware’s customers when they work with us to. And my team and I are committed to delivering it.

Setbacks don’t have to derail progress — a fact that’s easier to focus on when you’re surrounded by a team that’s as invested in your success as you are.

From Vision to Reality: Charting a Path to Tomorrow’s Success - VMware

VMware today announced that Chip Childers has joined the company as vice president and Chief Open Source Officer.

“We’re delighted that Chip has joined VMware,” said Chris Wolf, VMware’s Chief Research and Innovation Officer. “The upstream and community work, as well as the outstanding compliance efforts from our Open Source Program Office, are critical to the success of our customers, the communities we work with and VMware.”

“I am extraordinarily happy to be joining VMware because of its strategic and high profile embrace of open source and its clear grasp of the importance of building inclusive cultures,” Childers said. “Both are positive-sum approaches to growing a great business. When an organisation such as VMware embraces positive-sum thinking, it improves outcomes for customers, partners, employees, the broader industry and the company itself.”

Childers brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing. Most recently, he was at Puppet Labs, where he served as Chief Architect and led their innovation program, incubated multiple new products, and aligned their open source strategy to evolving business needs.

Previously, Childers co-founded the Cloud Foundry Foundation and served as its Chief Technology Officer and Executive Director. While at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, he transformed the organisation from an independent nonprofit to a directed fund within the Linux Foundation. VMware is a platinum member of both the Cloud Foundry Foundation and the Linux Foundation.

VMware announced that Chip Childers has joined the company as vice president and Chief Open Source Officer.

VMware announces that Chip Childers has joined the company as vice president and Chief Open Source Officer.

Chip Childers joins VMware as Chief Open Source Officer. - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

When you’re thinking about how to best grow your business, it’s easy to debate modern Product-Led Growth approaches - relying on the products themselves to draw customers - versus traditional Sales-Led Growth strategies - hinging success on the power of an effective sales force.<a href="https://news.vmware.com/author/mike-hayes"></a>

In leading VMware’s worldwide operations, I’ve come to believe the product-versus-sales conversation misses a critical point. High performing organisations are only high performing if they recognise the power of Operations-Led Growth.

Operations has been traditionally (and mistakenly!) dismissed as merely a lever for cost savings. Too many organisations think of operations in terms of efficiency or eliminating redundancies. Expert organisations see operations as a true growth driver. This is especially the case in today’s world, where expectations for the ease of doing business are higher than ever before, and where data is making things possible that would have felt like miracles just a few years ago.

The world doesn’t (yet) talk about Operations-Led Growth, but it is the next frontier in customer value, profit maximisation and shareholder return. 

Here are four ideas to help realise the power of Operations-Led Growth.

Operations is a Goldmine for Non-Linear Growth

We all understand the big-picture goal: a business that grows exponentially. And yet, so much of our thinking on the operations side is linear in nature — needlessly capping our growth potential.

I was in a conversation recently with a CEO of a business that just hit a $1B valuation, and he was trying to figure out how many more salespeople to hire to best accelerate performance. That sounds like a simple question for sales or HR leadership, but it’s actually not. Sure, we can take the straightforward approach, evaluating revenue quota per salesperson against the amount of investment we want to make, but the smarter way to look at this question turns it into a strategic operations issue: how can we make each salesperson far more effective because of the way the rest of the business operates? 

In the end, I advised my friend that he should certainly evaluate risk and return relative to the sales force, but the focus should be on how to maximise profit regardless of the size of the sales force. Maybe what’s needed isn’t more salespeople, but better policies, processes, and technologies to leverage those salespeople exponentially, and be able to raise their quotas ever higher. 

core/list

At scale, you inevitably need to systematise — to become 2x larger, or 10x larger, you can’t grow costs (like salespeople) by 2x or 10x along the way. Instead, you need to find solutions that aren’t just good for one but good for many, and that lifts the entire organisation up.

The kinds of questions my friend had to ask were ones that would affect the entire business, from end to end — and siloing them in the sales department meant missing out on tremendous opportunities. Where do those opportunities emerge from? The next three ideas provide some places to look: data, process, and the entire operations system underpinning an organisation.

Operations is How You Benefit from the Data Revolution Happening Around Us

I don’t need to re-tell the consumer-first story about the power of data that pretty much everyone understands by now. Whether it’s Amazon surfacing product recommendations, Spotify knowing the music you’ll like before you’ve ever heard it, or DoorDash making it easy to add those dumplings onto your dinner order, we get it: data about the consumer leads to more consumption.

The problem is that we don’t always carry that story through to the B2B arena. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the old ways are still the best ways when it comes to selling to enterprises — but data has just as much to teach us here as it does in the B2C space. Good, rich, unified data across your enterprise drives insights, and speeds and future-proofs any organisation’s agility. 

Most of us understand how to use data to see where time and money are slipping through the cracks — and how to recapture those losses. But that’s just the cost-cutting side of things.

And that’s just a start. The right insights can turn IT and engineering into growth partners and not just cost centres. They can feed off the information coming back into the system and respond directly to customer needs — as long as the data is robust, accurate, and actionable. That’s what’s so critical about rich infrastructure, and why it has to be a huge focus for operations.

Operations is the Vehicle for Smart Processes — Leading to Far Stronger Outcomes

It’s popular to dismiss “process” as the gateway toward needless bureaucracy, but that’s thinking about it in exactly the wrong way. Good process doesn’t lead to more checkpoints and bottlenecks. Instead, it enables simplicity and clean workflows that eliminate as many stopping points as possible. (And simplicity scales far more effectively than complex and broken systems.)

Good process is about faster decision-making — and more principle-driven decision-making — so that even those who disagree with an outcome still trust how a choice was made and remain committed to the larger cause. Good process is also about spending less time on corporate minutiae and more time on things that matter — internally but also for customers and business partners externally.

Internally — we can go back to the sales example. Maybe salespeople are failing to optimise their efficiency because they’re spending 40% of their time on administrative work, which is not only wasteful but fails to take advantage of the skill set they were hired for. If you can put processes in place that save each salesperson six hours a week, you not only get those six hours back, but you give them each six extra hours to actually do the things they’re best at. At VMware, we’ve modelled it out - of course it depends on assumptions but a low/high sensitivity analysis shows us every day we give back to the sales force adds $2.5 to $3.2M in top line. In effect, good process frees people’s time from administrative bloat, making them happier and more productive, encouraging them to stay at your organisation longer, grow their skills, and cultivate stronger talent behind them.

Externally it’s exactly the same story. Customers freed from barriers and bottlenecks can spend more time actually engaging with your brand, understanding its value, and ultimately buying more product. Why does Amazon shine? Because it’s so frictionless to buy, sell, return, track your order and so much more. But what looks effortless on the front end requires an incredible amount of coordination on the back end, between vendors, warehouses and more. It requires operations at the elite level. This is even truer — and harder to achieve — in the B2B space. We’ve all been mired in corporate processes that make procurement a nightmare. We’ve all spent hours dealing with legal, with finance, with salespeople who can’t execute what you need. Imagine if all of that went away – at least on one company’s side - and it was less of a bureaucratic nightmare to procure products and services. 

We all naturally gravitate toward pleasant experiences, especially in a world where so much is trying to grab our attention. When you make it easy for people to do business with you — an operations issue for sure — they will buy even if your product isn’t breaking new ground (but even more so if it is!). If it’s seamless and quick, growth and profit will follow.

Operations is the Glue That Fits Together the Entire Organisation — Guiding Everyone in the Same Direction, Paving the Way for Growth

Organisations that don’t think strategically about their growth drivers miss the opportunity to strike the optimal balance between product-led, sales-led and operations-led growth. In essence, good operations is about the entire system working together. The reality is that the whole of an organisation is greater than the sum of its parts. Siloed decision-making, siloed priorities, siloed budgets, siloed data and siloed accountability are major blockers for growth, whereas an effectively connected organisation is unstoppable.

What people fail to recognise is that operational discipline is the engine of innovation. Great ideas — the kind that drive exponential growth — are too often isolated to small groups and individuals. But making ideas a reality requires the right data and the right people. On the data: good, consistent, shared data, allows everyone to see the same information, and chase the same goals — which makes it possible to streamline processes and make business easier for customers and employees alike. On the people: bringing ideas to fruition in a company requires the right people to get behind them and drive them forward — meaning cross-functional buy-in, which is only made possible when: 

Part of what creates this operational discipline is culture. We all want to build strong teams — but that’s just a buzzword. What building strong teams means in reality is an organisation where everyone is focused on the same goals (the right goals!), armed with the tools to reach them, and unleashed to achieve their best. 

Good operations allow you to actually solve problems, because it means that someone is empowered to not just see a part of the picture but understand all of the details. Operations is really about seeing the system as the interconnection of technology, process, and policy, and so when issues arise, there’s someone equipped to address them.

These four ideas are just the start for an Operations-Led Growth mindset. As competition grows across industries, and as customers’ expectations for service increase, businesses who see operations as a growth driver (not just a way to trim costs) will come out on top. Operations may not grab as many headlines as new products or new tech, but in the end, it’s how you excel, and I see it as the next big difference-maker no matter your industry.

When you’re thinking about how to best grow your business, it’s easy to debate modern Product-Led Growth approaches &#8211; relying on the products themselves to draw customers &#8211; versus traditional Sales-Led Growth strategies &#8211; hinging success on the power of an effective sales force. In leading VMware’s worldwide operations, I’ve come to believe the product-versus-sales […]

The New Frontier: Operations‑Led Growth - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

https://news-editor.vmware.com/anz/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/08/Operations-Led-Growth-hero.png

“It’s so hard … can we skip to the good part?”

You’ve probably heard this lyric from <a href="https://youtu.be/hqrWXNMTaKY">AJR</a> on TikTok at some point over the past few months. It’s the soundtrack to countless clips that all follow the same pattern — someone starts out with one thing, then effortlessly segues into another. From pregnancy tests that turn into babies to outdated bathrooms that turn into modern spas, the <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/skiptothegoodpart">#skiptothegoodpart</a> tag has racked up more than 140 million views … and counting.

What’s behind the popularity of this trend? A lot more than just a catchy song. It gets at a fundamental truth about how most people feel about change. We like the idea of transformation and the better, brighter outcomes it can create. But the process and work of actually getting there? Not so much.

It makes sense. The prospect of change is designed to make us feel uncomfortable and on edge. Chalk it up to instinct — the result of ancestors who constantly scanned their surroundings for any sign of movement that might threaten their survival.

But like it or not, doing the work of change is a constant — in life and in business. So, how can we get more comfortable with it?

I spend a lot of time thinking about this as part of my work at VMware — because in many ways, our business is change. We help drive digital transformation for our customers, particularly in their push to the cloud. But this is a major transition that a lot of organisations struggle with.

We’ve heard the same story, time and time again. Cloud migrations take too long and are too complex. They demand not just technical changes, but process and support changes that require significant leadership buy-in over the long-term. And the pressure to get it right — right now — is tremendous. The pandemic not only turned five-year plans into one-year plans, but fundamentally changed expectations about how quickly an organisation should be able to pivot in the digital space. It’s no wonder our customers want to skip to the good part.

While we can’t make the process of change quite as easy as TikTok creators make it look, figuring out how digital transformation can be simpler and faster for our customers is a huge priority for VMware. We know it’s not enough to just create great products — we also have to deliver the business outcomes our customers need, on the timelines they want, with the resources they have.

The only way to succeed at doing this is by getting comfortable with change ourselves. We have to constantly push ourselves to innovate and evolve so that we can stay one step ahead of our customers’ needs.

This dual push for change — transforming ourselves so that we can help our customers transform — is a unique challenge. It’s a bit like trying to change a tire while you’re cruising down the highway. And the desire to solve it is what drew me to VMware a little more than a year ago.

I’ve always been drawn to the change process and the opportunity to create, rather than just sustain. And as a leader, it’s my responsibility to help get my team excited about it too — not only for ourselves, but for our customers. So over the next few months, I’ll be sharing my best tips for navigating the terror — and thrill — of transformational change.

Until then … what change would you love to skip to the good part of?

corpnews-blocks/related-posts-interrupter

We like the idea of transformational change and the better, brighter outcomes it can create. But the process of getting there? Not so much.

The Terror — and Thrill — of Transformational Change - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

VMware recommendations for ensuring more secure open source software through industry collaboration and public-private partnership.

Building open source software and contributing to its many communities is a big part of VMware’s engineering and innovation spirit, and we believe the way forward hinges on continued collaboration.

More Secure Open Source Software is a Shared Responsibility

VMware recommends industry collaboration to ensure source code, build, and distribution integrity in all open source software.

Happy new year, 2022! It’s time to look deep into our enterprise-technology crystal ball to see what we might expect over the coming year. But first, some context: no psychic powers are required to predict that the trend towards a multi-cloud approach will continue. Multi-cloud gives the enterprise freedom to pursue a best-of-breed cloud strategy to accelerate business transformation and innovative app development. So, we’ll look through the lens of a multi-cloud environment as we consider VMware leaders’ 2022 predictions from cloud, security, apps, and anywhere workspace. I’ll share my own prediction near the end of this post, along with one from a customer.  

corpnews-blocks/pull-quote-image

Most companies have already identified solutions for application portability across clouds (although some environments are more conducive to app migration than others). Data portability, however, remains the big challenge — and data is the fuel that propels apps. Traditional storage systems cannot deliver a cloud-like experience. They are defined by fixed hardware boundaries that confine resources. This can result in trapped data, stranded capacity, limited scalability and elasticity, complex placement decisions, and high sunrise and sunset costs. The industry’s march towards the multi-cloud/zettabyte era will only exacerbate these limitations. In the next two years, we predict that we will see the emergence of a cloud-agnostic federated data fabric, which will enable organizations to mitigate data gravity as a key inhibitor to successfully operationalizing a multi-cloud architecture. 

As organizations implement network segmentation to stop the spread of ransomware, attackers have begun to leverage trusted credentials to move freely throughout the network. With a valid set of credentials, attackers can accomplish much of their nefarious activity without raising a single alarm.  

Some of the stealthiest credential attacks use native, authorized tools like PowerShell to gain access by appearing as legitimate activity. Once an attacker can move laterally across an organization’s network, they have the “keys to the kingdom” and can access sensitive customer information and corporate proprietary data.  

Enter the double-extortion ransomware attack, in which an attacker quietly exfiltrates this sensitive information before encrypting a victim’s files and threatening to make sensitive data public. This ensures financial gain for cybercriminals who force organizations to not only pay to decrypt their files, but to prevent harmful data from being sold or publicly disclosed. 

While ransomware attacks like Kaseya and Colonial Pipeline made the nightly news this year, we think that threat actors will take this one step further in 2022 by using a double-extortion ransomware attack as a result of stolen credentials. 

The good news is that we can expect a cadre of tech companies, the open-source community, academia, cybersecurity institutions and government agencies around the world to unite to meet this challenge. We’ve done it before, and we will do it again.

We will see the emergence of tools that bring the Kubernetes (K8s) patterns to new domains —solving new problems and changing the intersection of development, security, and operations practices. K8s has proven to be successful for containerized infrastructure, but its embedded ideas have broader applicability. We will see an increasing number of systems (build systems, infrastructure management, and federated application-control planes) leverage the manifest-based model popularized by K8s. This will mean a transition to a manifest-based approach and will mark a shift from imperative DevSecOps practices to the consumption of intent-driven services that apply a declarative approach to management. This will lead to something of an inversion of IT — moving from systems that try to make sense of what is running and provide APIs to change what is running, to systems that consume manifests that represent intended state and then allow for reconciliation of actual state with intended state. This will allow them to tackle challenges in areas like AI/ML, stream-based processing, app integration and other areas without having to make significant 'full stack' investments in platforms. 

One of the major trends we predict in the end-user computing space is the broad adoption and general acceptance of password-less authentication — something we believe is a “must-have” moving forward. Most attacks can be avoided by using stronger methods of authentication. 

Password-less authentication is a type of multifactor authentication that replaces the user’s password with a different factor (typically a client-side certificate unlocked via biometrics). This would allow users to authenticate to corporate resources from a fingerprint or face scan throughout the course of a day, rather than having to remember a constantly rotating password or using an authenticator app. 

We see 2022 as the year where VPNs start to die off in huge numbers. During the course of the pandemic, companies realized that VPNs were one of their most vulnerable areas. They did not provide sufficient security for remote users who required broad access to the corporate network. Micro-perimeters, real-time security posture checks, and the wide availability of SASE offerings will be VPNs’ successors. 

Today’s multi-party enterprise workflows are fragmented and highly complex to maintain. This causes delays, increased costs and hinders innovation. Workflow data is often siloed within the enterprise — resulting in inefficient and costly steps to share and reconcile data across boundaries. This is where blockchain/digital ledger technology (DLT) enters the picture. While trendy cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) - which are also built on blockchain - capture memes and headlines, blockchain is quietly making waves in the enterprise driving real productivity. Blockchain’s real power lies in how it enables multiple parties to work together on a shared trustworthy source of data, fully and securely digitizing transactions. Maturing technologies, new delivery models, adoption of standards and the energy of an extensive and vibrant ecosystem are accelerating enterprise adoption. In 2022, we suspect that we’ll  see the value of enterprise blockchain becoming increasingly clear, as well as strong acceleration in production deployments across many industries (such as supply-chain use cases, for example), fundamentally changing the nature of doing business across organizational boundaries. In the financial-services industry, it is already meeting customers’ needs for high-frequency, complex business operations. We expect there will be an even broader enterprise blockchain adoption in 2022 and we’ll see major financial institutions more confident to deploy blockchain technology into production.  

A key area of focus for NKI will be applying AI and ML to cancer recognition through imaging and research models. It can support the automatic analysis of medical images for decision support of healthcare providers, as well as the analysis of cells to better understand the origin of cancer. 

To support researchers in conducting their work, we need a capable infrastructure for a wide variety of workloads. It must be a scalable and secure environment that supports data exchange with other institutions. We must work together to amplify our impact. Network virtualization, containerization, and sharing a single platform with workload isolation are all technologies we hope to leverage in the coming years. 

These new technological possibilities will allow researchers to work more flexibly and safely to help make our mission — a cure for every cancer — a reality in the near future.

What do you think of the VMware leaders' predictions for 2022? Let us know and feel free to share your own predictions for the coming year.  

VMware leaders share their technology predictions for 2022 in cloud, security, apps, anywhere workspace, enterprise blockchain and more.

VMware leaders share their 2022 predictions in cloud, security, apps, anywhere workspace and enterprise blockchain.

VMware Leaders' 2022 Predictions - VMware News &amp; Stories - ANZ

Check out VMware's 2022 tech predictions featuring CTO @kitcolbert on #enterpriseblockchain, @marcfleischmann on #cloud, @_tomgillis on #security, @patelajayp on #apps, and @brianmadden on #anywhereworkspace.

Leadership