Optimise to Innovate - What's coming up.

Not every tech investment leads to innovation, but it should...

Join your hosts, Alex Galbraith and Jason Gray for the launch episode of the new Optimise to Innovate podcast from SoftwareOne.

SoftwareOne helps organisations maximise the value from their investments in technology.  In this launch episode, Alex and Jason share detail on what you can expect to experience during this series.  A series that will focus on how technology investments, that are designed to solve business problems and drive innovation, can often transform from enablers to obstacles, and what you can do to navigate this challenge.

Want to suggest a topic for discussion on a future episode?  Simply email Alex and Jason on o2i@softwareone.com. 

Don't forget to hit the subscribe button on your favourite platform to get the latest episodes first.

Transcript

Alex 0:03

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you very much for joining us on the Optimize to Innovate podcast. Just by way of introduction, I'm Alex Galbraith. I'm the CTO of Cloud Services here at Software One. And I have my fantastic co-host Jason with me.

Jason 0:18

Jason, why don't you do a wee intro on yourself? Thanks, Alex. Well, I've been working on IT for a couple of decades. I won't tell you how long, but when I first started working with BP, they were just putting desktop computers onto people's desks and clearing away paper a long time ago. Now, a lot has changed since then, but one of the things that's constant and actually has kept me in this industry with a passion is trying to help businesses unlock value from technology, make the best choices in terms of what they're using, how they're implementing, and really looking for the value they can create through whatever they're doing with technology. That's that's my interest. It's what I want to draw out for you on the podcast today. And Alex, what what should the audience know about you?

Alex 1:02

Uh well, I'm uh similarly, let's say grey-haired, would be fair to say. I've been working in IT for just a wee bit over 20 years. I'm the, as I say, CTO of cloud services at Software One, and my background has all been around really helping customers to kind of connect the whole technology to business requirements, is the simplest way I'd put it. Working as an architect for many years, really helping to, I guess you could call it almost a translator between the business and the IT side of things. What I'm particularly looking forward to is, you know, sharing some of the conversations that you and I have had over the several years that we've worked together with our listeners, and more importantly, some of the expert guests that we're planning on bringing in. But I guess why don't we start with, Jason, why did we start this in the first place?

Jason 1:46

Well, the podcast is optimized to innovate. And if you think about technology, it's a it's a bit like a conveyor belt in the sense that nothing stays the same forever. We, you know, you and I, we've seen so many technology changes during our careers, and businesses are having to navigate these. So when we talk about any technology, people always think about it in in isolation. But the reality is that it's joining an existing environment, a landscape. So the question is how do we move forward from where we were and embrace the new, the best, the better, but also do it in the best way, given all the previous investments that we've made, uh, which need to sometimes be sweated. So that question of how do we make the change, how do we make the transition to adopt newer technologies, uh, how do we do it securely, safely, and most importantly, how do we do it cost-effectively, which is where the optimized comes in. So uh optimizing what you have to enable you to move forward to innovate, it's a very strongly connected theme, and it plays very well into the reality that businesses have, which is they want to embrace the new, but they can't just step away from the old.

Alex 2:53

So we I'd like to think the optimized innovate. It's not just a cheesy phrase, it's uh it's really about those realities. Organizations are under massive pressure these days to do more with less, as they say. In fact, uh a former colleague of mine, another organization, once said, uh, we're being asked to do more with less until we have to do everything with nothing, uh, which is gonna be a pretty impressive feat. Um but I guess we we want to kind of help organizations stop wasting money on things that aren't adding value to their business and then help them to understand, you know, those technologies that will help them and and how best to spend that investment wisely.

Jason 3:27

Absolutely. And and even this area of change, of transformation, it's possible to save money while you change to actually cost-optimize the process of transformation. We don't want people to miss these opportunities because every opportunity they miss for optimization is kind of stealing away a little bit of the future possibility, the future potential that they have. So it's a great mission for us to be on together.

Alex 3:50

Love it. And uh just in terms of some people may be wondering, you know, all these modern podcasts from all the cool folk uh generally have video involved, but because we're really old, we decided we were just gonna stick with a voice format for now. Maybe maybe in the future, you might get to see us on the on a camera or two. But uh, I think for now we're gonna stick with the voice format. So it doesn't matter if people are driving to work or doing the dishes or mowing the lawn. Hopefully they're not gonna they're not gonna miss anything. And the other thing I think we're gonna do is we talked about optimize to innovate. So the idea is we're gonna kind of tick tock back and forward between those two key key topics, right? So some of the episodes we're gonna talk about optimization, so things like FinOps or how to reduce your licensing costs or how to improve your architecture so as to save money. And then on the flip side, help our listeners to understand some of these latest technologies and techniques and how you can adopt them, you know, whether it's AI, application modernization, security, all sorts of other really interesting areas on that on that forefront of IT leaders' minds, if you will.

Jason 4:51

Yeah, absolutely. Because this is such a strongly connected set of themes. We you know, we will be bouncing backwards and forwards. I I I didn't ref deliberately say TikTok because I didn't sign up to be part of TikTok as part of this. Hope that's okay. So, in terms of you as an audience, what can you expect from this podcast? Well, we're going to be bringing some domain experts, some of the best people we know in topical fields that we believe will be of value, will be really interesting for you. They're going to be people who work for Software One, they'll be partners, they'll be customers, and we're going to ask them to come and bring their experiences, their real-world stories, the scar tissue, the learnings they've had, the understanding of what works well, what doesn't. The things that really help us to go from the kind of conceptual understanding of the technology and what it can do for a business and how it can really add value to understanding the kind of nuts and bolts connections. That doesn't mean we're going to drown you in detail. Okay. We're not trying to come up with some really heavy technical uh information one-stop shop here. Our goal is to help you to be able to think about some of these technologies, to give you the information and yes, some learning. And absolutely, we're going to make sure that you walk away with something you can practically use. But one of the challenges that we have as technologists actually is making sense of all of these different building blocks which are appearing so far, so rapidly, and understanding how do they connect together, how do they work together, where would you use that? Why would you use that? All of these questions will be taking one layer away at a time, making sure that everyone stays with us on this journey. That's our goal. So, Alex, if I understand this right, you've given me permission, us permission, to challenge people's beliefs.

Alex 6:36

I I would like to think so. I think there's uh maybe quite a few misconceptions out there. I I have a funny feeling, knowing you and my background, that some of those beliefs may also be challenging each other, uh, which will be quite interesting. Uh, you know, we don't always agree on everything, um, but hopefully we'll have uh have a few laughs along the way. After all, we know uh you can't work in IT without a sense of humor these days.

Jason 6:57

Absolutely. And you know me, I love to play devil's advocate when we have somebody on the mic and actually challenge some of their thinking and some of their ideas. So we'll see how that goes.

Alex 7:07

So I'll let people into a wee secret actually, Jason. We've cheated a wee bit and we've already recorded episode one and two. So we've already caught up with in episode one with Tommy, an expert in workplace AI. His role is to help organizations really make the most of their AI investments, but also really work on the cutting edge of innovation there. And then we also, episode two, we dive into the topic of FinOps, which is cloud financial management, if you haven't heard of it before. FinOps is all about optimizing cloud costs. So that doesn't mean you know reducing cloud costs necessarily. It's also all about adding value. And so we have a couple of FinOps experts joining us, so Parker and Anthony, and we dig in about how we find the balance between these two. Beyond that, with some of the other episodes we're planning for the future, we really want to address many of the challenges that you're facing today, whether it be legacy virtual estates, tackling recent licensing changes, which may or may not have uh hit industry headlines. We're planning on a session which is really about how organizations can put the right data foundations in place so they can actually be successful in their AI initiatives, contrary to some of the scuttle butt in the news. And the last thing that I'll just highlight, there's a million ways that we can do things in IT. There's a million ways we can modernize our estates, there's a million ways we can migrate to the cloud to do different things. But question is, where do you start? How do you get there? And so that's what we want to do. We want to bring in some fantastic experts to help to dig into that. So if all of this sounds interesting to you, why not give us a try? Super easy. All you need to do is subscribe on your platform of choice, Apple, Spotify, whatever. And you can also follow Software One on all the usual socials at Software One. We would absolutely love it if you want to send us a message, leave us a comment, especially if it's about topics that you'd like to hear in the future, so we can make sure that we're bringing in all the all the best guests that we can to help you navigate the challenges that you're facing day to day. So if you'd like to reach out to us direct, you can do that via email. So it's O2i. So that's Othenumber2i at software1.com, and we would love to hear your comments and suggestions. So with that, we can't wait to get started on these next episodes. And uh, Jason, anything you want to add before we wrap up?

Jason 9:28

Just to say, Alex, for the audience, if you're an IT leader, an architect, or just someone who wants to cut through the noise and height and hear how transformation actually happens, then you should know by now that this show is going to be for you. We are going to be catering to your needs, and we're very, very keen to serve up the insights that you want to hear. Thanks for listening. This has been the Optimize to Innovate podcast.

Alex 9:50

Till next time.