Enterprise Infrastructure | Bharat Bedi | TGV Episode #55

Sure, thanks a lot for having me.

Well, before we get started, I want to congratulate both of you for all the work that you're doing with the Guiding Voice. It's exciting for me to be here. But you know, there isn't much guidance available out there that helps people give practical knowledge on how to get started, where to start, and what to look out for. So it's a lot of effort from both of you. Great work and thank you for doing what you're doing. Like I said, I'm really happy and excited to be here. Now about my career, it's been colorful. There are tons of things that I can talk about and I can go for the whole day, but to summarize it, outside of working in call centers and NGOs, which is how I actually started before I really got into corporates, my main 15 years focused part of the career has been working in the IT industry. And when I say IT industry, a majority of that has been with big giants like Dell, IBM, HP, and so on, who opened the whole IT infrastructure world for me. With these companies, I've been really fortunate to work in various capacities like sales, marketing, technology consulting, as I kept growing and building with the companies. Now, there's one thing which has been fundamental all throughout these 15 years which I enjoyed the most: I've always had a chance to meet and speak with IT leaders across different corporates in different industry verticals, from manufacturing to banks to oil and gas, and have been able to understand their requirements, marry these requirements with the technology available, and create solutions that help them resolve some of their business challenges. In addition to this, what I do right now is I've dabbled a lot with IT infrastructure. So I wanted to step aside and get into a different form of learning. What I do right now is I work for a company called SolarWinds, which by the way has nothing to do with solar panels—I get asked that a lot. This is a software company. They have really interesting software that monitors all the IT infrastructure and basically alerts you if something goes wrong. So yeah, that's how my career has been.

There's tons that's happening. If I may, because I know that your listeners are young professionals as well as students, I just want to give everybody a benefit of doubt and bring everyone on the same platform. I just want to simplify it. Infrastructure for everyone listening to this: it's basically, do you know how you use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Chrome on your laptop? Now let's say I told you that you need to run application software, not like the basic ones, not the Word, Excel, PowerPoints of the world, but if I ask you to be a little more professional or specific applications, let's say I ask you to do photo editing through Adobe Photoshop, or ask you to do video editing through Premiere Pro, or ask you to use another heavy application to edit this podcast for example, you would think of buying a more expensive laptop. This more expensive laptop means that you have a laptop with more CPU power, more RAM, more storage, and probably better networking capabilities, just like how it is in our cell phones these days. So that's just your personal usage. Now think of some really heavy applications needed to run an entire company, right from sales to HR to planning to resources to finance applications to accounting applications to running websites with multiple people accessing them at the same time. In that case, you can't really work with expensive laptops; you need bigger, stronger, and more powerful computers. Now these bigger, stronger, and more powerful computers are called servers. And these servers have the same components—it's a CPU, it's the RAM, it's the hard drive, it's the network cards—but it's got so many of those that I like to call them computers on steroids. And the reason I'm making this connection is that when you talk about the innovations and what's happening in the industry, you've got to look at the fundamentals of any IT infrastructure. That fundamental is sitting inside your cell phone today, it is sitting inside the laptop that you're using. It's the same CPU, RAM, hard drive, and network cards. And when you run these inside a server, they get loud and they get hot. So if you have 20 of these servers, you will put them inside an IT room. For the young professionals listening to this, you always have that IT room on the floor that your IT administrator does not want you to enter, and it's always running that really cool air conditioning thing. That's about 20 of those servers. But if you have 2,000 of these, then you have a dedicated space that companies like to call data centers. So what we'll be talking about and the innovation that we're making is the stuff that's happening inside these data centers. And when you look inside a data center, there are racks and racks and rows of these devices which have again those same fundamental things: CPU, which in our space we also like to call compute power, so CPU, RAM, storage, and network devices. Now with that being said, and I just wanted to lay that foundation over here, let's go back to your question: what are some of the things that are happening in this space? I think there's tons of innovations that are happening, and I also think that these innovations are happening for a couple of reasons. The first is, why do you need hardware IT infrastructure? The basic reason for that is that you have to run these applications. You don't buy a desktop or a laptop because you want to buy it; you buy a desktop or laptop because you want to run Word, Excel, PowerPoint on that, you want to be online with a Zoom call, you want to record a podcast, you want to go watch Netflix online. So it is these software applications that force you to buy the hardware. It's exactly the same case in the IT infrastructure space, in the enterprise IT infrastructure space I should call it. The applications that are needed to run a company, these applications are getting heavier, and as they get heavier, they want more muscle power to run. There's a company called Salesforce.com; they make a CRM application. Basically, it allows a sales guy in a company to record all the conversations that they have with their end customer, and the salesperson can forecast when will the business come, when would it not. When they started it, all that they gave to the salesperson was a basic form that he just fills in and everybody gets access to understanding what conversations the salesperson is having with that customer. Today, the sales guy says that I want to connect to my end customer's LinkedIn profile in an AI fashion so it automatically populates and tells me when was the last time you took calls. So listen, we're getting selfish, we need more and more features, and these more features mean more lines of code. All these lines of code have to run on some hardware. So that's my point: as these applications get more and more advanced and heavier, they need more muscle power to run. So the innovation in hardware technology, I think it's getting pushed because companies want to make applications heavier, and these applications have to run on heavier infrastructure. Let me explain that by a gaming example as well. For the ones who love gaming, it's not that they could not make a game with really high definition graphics with 4K capabilities years back; they could. But you did not have a graphics card or a TV or a monitor that could handle so many details. So it's that software game that pushed the hardware industry, or the Nvidias of the world or the other companies on the graphics card, it got them to push to make graphics cards that can make that. And now they work hand in hand. So my view on this is that it's the applications and hardware that are working hand in hand. So as the applications are getting heavier, you need heavier hardware, but more efficient hardware as well. So that's one way of bringing innovation. The other reason why innovations are happening in the IT infrastructure space is because there are challenges that come with running infrastructure. It's not easy to run it. Like I said, these machines get hot and they get loud, and they take a lot of power to run. So you've got electricity bills going on, and when you have hundreds of thousands of them, then you've got huge data centers where you're running these machines. So there are challenges which are involved in running enterprise infrastructure. These challenges are like cost, administration—how many people do I have to hire to run all these servers—security around this. If I have all the data of my company sitting inside one server or one storage machine, what if somebody uninvited comes to the party and gets access to this? Their security features. So every challenge that these machines bring becomes a reason for innovation in this industry. So from a technology perspective, I'm really excited to see all the innovations that are happening to make IT infrastructure faster, cheaper, better, and to be delivered in a way that's more cost effective. And from the business side of things, I think it's only going to grow further.

Yeah, you know, that's one question that comes all the time. I was speaking at a college a couple of years back in Malaysia, and someone in the audience came and told me—and I used to work with an IT hardware company at that time—someone in the audience came and told me, 'Why are you in a space that is going to go out of business?' And I thought, wait, what? Am I in the wrong company? And he said, 'Yeah, everything's going on cloud. I mean, have you not read why in this space?' And the thing is, he was not misinformed, but let me try to break this myth first. I don't think that there is cloud versus on-prem. And let me take a second to explain what is on-prem for the listeners. On-premise is nothing but buying your own hardware and running it inside your own data center, which obviously involves a lot of cost. Corporates like to call it capital expenditure, which means that you put a lump sum amount of money and you give it to another company and say, 'Give me hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware that I can run.' That's what we call on-prem or on-premise. So I don't think there is a cloud versus an on-premise. It definitely was the case initially when the cloud technologies came, and all these hardware companies were like, 'What are we going to do? Our customer is not going to buy our stuff and will they all move to cloud?' I think there is cloud along with on-prem, rather than cloud versus on-prem. We happen to call it a hybrid IT space. Let me tell you something interesting. I was actually selling enterprise infrastructure products when public cloud technology started becoming really popular, and I was in Mumbai those days. So in sales, I got all these enterprise accounts, and the majority of my customers were from the banking space, being in Mumbai. While it was really frustrating to find out that they wouldn't buy the servers that I wanted to sell to them, and they were giving all the business to the public cloud companies. Here's what I learned: the decision of moving to public cloud did not come from the IT head as much as it came from the finance head of the company. So public cloud is a great answer to managing the finances and managing the capital expenditure versus the operating expenditure fight. You see, here's the thing: if three of us were to start a company today, right, and we go to a VC or venture capitalist or we go to a bank and we get a loan of $100,000 as seed capital, and let's say we are making an amazing application on the Apple Store, would we put it into buying all the servers that are needed for us to host this application and get administrators to maintain those servers, or we hire people who can actually create our application and grow the business? So I will use cloud at that time and pay these cloud companies as and when I get to use them. So basically, what I'm trying to say is cloud is actually a great technology, I'm not debating that, but it's actually exactly like using an Uber versus buying your own car. But wait, this is where it gets further more interesting. If your job asks you to go to office twice a week and you don't stay that far, it doesn't make sense for you to buy a car, but Uber it, pay as you go just when you need it, just like cloud. But if you have to drive 100 kilometers up and down every day and always have to be out in the field, you will think that my Uber bills are so high that I'd rather buy a car. So then what's the right decision? Now, in the practical world, as technologies and these models have gotten matured, there is no one versus the other. And the fact is, nobody puts all their eggs in the same basket. They use a bit of both. They use a combination of public cloud technologies with on-premise data center technologies and connect them both in a way that they can talk to each other, and hence cost-wise you get the best of both worlds. So basically, what I'm trying to say is that if you have a family of five or seven people, you don't buy five or seven cars. What you do is you get your kids to use the public transport to go to school and come back, you probably ask your wife to use Uber, and you use a car, and you just have one car. Although I would suggest you give the car to the wife and use Uber yourself just to be safe, but you know. And then if you have parents, then maybe they want to go and visit their relatives only once in two weeks, so then you figure out what's the best model there. If the car is available, you use the car, and if the Uber is, then you know, maybe you can get them over. So in fact, enterprise infrastructure giants have started to think about schemes to make their technologies available in a way that makes more sense, that makes as much sense to the CFO as it makes to the CIO. So they are trying to think of flexible ways of billing to the companies so it's just easier. So I will go back to what I said a few minutes back: this whole public cloud technology decision is a cost decision as much as it's a technology decision as well. I think companies still need more and more infrastructure. If you have a 64 GB phone today, your next one is going to be 128 GB. Find me somebody who had a 64 GB phone and some compute power and who's picked a new phone which is 32 GB. Nobody goes back. They always buy more, better hardware. So I think business-wise, IT infrastructure is going to continue to sell more and more because you always need faster, better, stronger IT hardware. I just think what's happening is the buyer has changed. So let me tell you something further more interesting. I've come with all these stories for you guys today. You know what I said? This bank did not buy the servers and they said we are going on the cloud. My colleague happened to have accounts or customers who were these cloud companies at the time in Mumbai, and there was a local company. So this bank actually had given the contract to this cloud company to run their infrastructure. So while I did not get the business, my colleague got all the business because this public cloud hosting company came to our company and said, 'Hey, here's the bank who's just asked me to host all the IT infrastructure, so I got to buy about 70 servers and a few terabytes of storage and some networking equipment because I don't have much and I need to buy much.' At the end of the day, the company that I was working for ended up making the sale. I did not get it, somebody else got it, but the hardware got sold. So it's the same thing for compute, same thing for storage, same thing for network. It is going to be required more and more. Sometimes the end customers buy it, sometimes these public cloud companies buy it, and sometimes there's a balance in between both.

I think what has worked for me is you go back to fundamentals. The fundamental three things: pick these three things—compute, network, and storage. Start reading about these three things separately and think about the innovations that have happened around it. When I started my career, I used to sell laptops and desktops, but we had to consult different people who had to buy high-performance desktops and laptops. And as I grew in my career, my companies asked me to talk to corporates in their IT departments that need servers and storage machines. So then I was like, how do I get started? And I used to work with a tech specialist at that time, and I asked him how do I get started, and he said, 'You know why don't you come to the lab with me? I'll open the server and I'll start with key components for you.' And when you open it, he said, 'Hey, this is the basic motherboard, but this is the compute which is the processor, this is network, this is storage.' And today, this entire IT infrastructure industry is revolving around these three key areas. Like I said before, you're making it better, faster, stronger, or you're working around the challenges. So here's how to get started: focus on the three fundamentals—compute, network, and storage. And the majority of IT hardware technologies have been created to make these things stronger or better. So I'll give you a couple of examples. Right, everybody talks about network security in the space. There are a lot of companies like Juniper, F5, Palo Alto. These guys deal in hardware infrastructure on network security. Network security in this space was created to make sure that all the data that flows between compute, network, and storage does not get accessed or hacked by uninvited people. So just that network security part is a billions of dollars industry in itself. Now how did it come? You go back to compute, network, storage. So if I'm in college and if I don't know how to start and how to read about it, if I start reading about network, the challenges around network, you start exploring more around what's available out there, the challenges and the solutions, and the challenges of their solutions. I'll give you another example. There's a company called Nutanix, N-U-T-A-N-I-X, and they do something called hyper-converged technology. So what is hyper-converged technology, which is also by the way billions of dollars worth of technology? It was created to run all these three—compute, network, storage—more efficiently. So customers said that I've got 10 data centers globally, can I reduce these 10 data centers to 3 because I don't want to pay all these bills around electricity and real estate and the cost of running these data centers? Hyper-converged technology came about and said, 'Yeah sure, we'll help you run it.' What this tech is basically is just shrinking everything down and making it in a more efficient way. So how do you get started and get deep into it? I think the best way to start is compute, network, storage. I think towards the end of this podcast, everybody will be singing 'compute, network, storage'. Start with these three and start thinking about the innovation that has or is happening on each of these three places individually and the connected use cases, and you know, you will get good examples.

I think career-wise, there is something for everyone. From my experience, I have seen that there are three ways to go about career opportunities, and honestly, it depends on what your strengths are as a student or as a young professional, or which area you are more passionate about. But if I were to bucket it, I would call it three buckets. First, you can get on the engineering and innovation side and get involved in the creation of these products. This is where you've got job offers like product engineers, product managers, system engineers, and all that. These are the guys who sit in their labs and think about what should be the next combination of compute, network, storage. Some of these guys got together and said, 'Hey, you know, hyper-converged is the way of the game.' So one side of this is, do you want to align yourself in the creation of these technologies? And if that's the case, and if you're at a stage—and now I'm thinking from a listener's perspective—if you're at a stage where you're thinking of which course do I choose or what do I do to get to that side, so it's the product engineering and the computer engineering side of things, and that'll help you to get into the innovation and engineering and creation of these technologies. That's one. The second bucket, I think, is you can get into the go-to-market side of things, which is where I've built my career. The go-to-market is that I'm not the guy—I'm not a computer engineer, I'm not the guy who creates these technologies—but I'm the guy who gets involved in the customer-facing roles and the business of this enterprise infrastructure. That involves selling, marketing, consulting, evangelizing, and creating solutions around these products. And this is where, if you do a LinkedIn search today, you'll see a whole lot of roles like sales, pre-sales, technology consultants, installation, implementation experts, and that kind of stuff. So what we started: the first bucket was people who are creating these technologies, and the second bucket then is, once the technology is created, companies need experts who can take these technologies and evangelize, sell, and consult them to the end customer and create a business of that. And then the third side, I think, is you can get involved in the consumption side of these technologies, where you can get hired by companies who buy such technologies and products and give it to experts to use them. This is where the roles like server and storage administrators come into the picture, or the network administrator comes into the picture. These are the guys who are doing those CCNAs and CCNPs and Cisco certified courses, or using Aruba certified courses, or whatever new company is there doing their own certifications. So when you consume these technologies, I'm a bank and I just bought a lot of IT infrastructure, I need to give it to people who can maintain and run this IT infrastructure so that we can do the work that we're supposed to do with this investment. So think about what you want to do: are you going to get involved in the creation piece, or the go-to-market piece which is where I've built my career, or do you want to be on the side where you consume the technologies and run the servers and the storage side? Now this is just about working for corporate. These three buckets, there are a lot of other things that one can do as well. These days we have a lot of IT system integrators or IT partners who are working with various companies, and they get different technologies, they put them together, and they sell it as a service as well. So go back to those three buckets I talk about, and then think about where you want to build and what you are most passionate about and what gives you the kick, and go with that.

Wow, that's subjective, right? I mean honestly, I'm not sure if I'm the right one to even answer this, as I don't personally think that I've made it big yet, you know. But I can tell you that I'm somewhere on that journey for sure, and I'd say a journey it has been, because I grew up in Delhi, I started working in Delhi with Dell, and then I'm in Bangalore and Mumbai, and then Malaysia, and I've been outside of India for more than five years now. So I will tell you, while I've hopped around quite a bit with different companies and worked with different people, I'll tell you what has worked for me and what I've observed from what has worked for a few successful people around me. And I'm going to say this at the cost of sounding preachy, by the way, but here it goes. Making it big for me is finding the right roles and then continuing to grow from there, and then trust the process. You know, if you just get and say 'I'm going to be the next you' and 'I am becoming the next year', there's a lot that goes into that process. So first, get into the right role and then continue to grow from there. So then this question comes: how do you get the right roles? And my answer to that is it's preparation plus opportunities that equals finding new roles. Let me explain this a little bit. Let's say if you said that you want to be the next business leader for an IT infrastructure company, and I say, 'Hey, you know what, I actually know somebody who's hiring for that role. Are you available for an interview tomorrow morning?' The answer is, 'Oh wait a second, I need to, I'm not sure, because I need to go back, I think I need to...' So I just gave you an opportunity, but were you prepared for that? Maybe not. So do you think you're going to land that role? Maybe not. So I think the two things that have to work is preparation. You need to prepare, and then you need to find the right opportunities. So you go back to those three buckets that I talked about and think about which way do you want to build that career, and start preparing yourself. That preparation is important. The interesting part about this is that between preparation and opportunity, the only thing in your hand is preparation. Opportunities are not, but the good news is that the opportunities always come. I've seen this in the last 15 years. You know, you may get a little frustrated, 'Man, there's nothing that I need today, there's some role all the other that some company or the other are hiring for.' So there are opportunities. The question is how much are you prepared for that? So find out which bucket do you want to align yourself with and get into that preparation. This preparation may be you reading and researching, enrolling yourself for a specific role. I know so many people who have gone and done their AWS and Azure certifications in the hope of getting jobs in these companies. Have they all landed in AWS or Azure? Not all, some have. But if they haven't landed, they've always landed in some roles which have got something or the other to do about these cloud technologies. So preparation plus opportunities has been my formula. Opportunities are not in my control, they always come, but I have prepared and have landed myself the roles that I wanted to do. So that's one. And then the other question that I said so far: if you land yourself a right role, what do you do from there? And this is from my personal experience: once you get the roles, you have to continue to read and upskill yourself and keep learning. I mean, if you thought that you can finish a course and prepare yourself and enter an industry, or you got your right role and you're good for the rest of your career, this industry will take you for a ride. It will surprise you. So you have to continue to learn and read and upskill yourself all the time, unless you want to be stagnant in your career. So push yourself and do it. And the last thing is make mentors who can guide you. And please note, I don't say make a mentor, I say make mentors, make multiple of those. There are so many people who know so much. It's not just networking, but they can guide you in so many different directions that will work for you in some way or the other. And when you make it big, then pass it on, be a mentor to someone. So yeah, these are three or four things that I think have worked for me and have helped me reach where I am, and hopefully continue me on this journey.

Thanks a lot for having me, guys. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.