Technology Reseller - v28

INTERVIEW 01732 759725 32 Graham Lewis A different approach which, according to CloudStratex co-founder and CEO Adrian Overall, is impairing their decision-making and the confidence they have in their choices. “We felt that there was a gap in the market to go in and address the challenge of integrating cloud computing at an enterprise scale within organisations that run thousands of people in IT who are all operating on a very legacy-driven agenda and aren’t necessarily adapting fast enough to take on the benefits of what this next generation technology can bring,” he said. “We are into financial services and insurance and these types of organisation are labouring under significant legacy that has been built up through acquiring other businesses or through the technology waves we have seen. They haven’t been able to modernise the applications running on these legacy environments or migrate them to the cloud and have been stuck with significant cost concentrations as a result.” Lack of knowledge Overall adds that the difficulty of modernising IT infrastructure is compounded by business leaders’ nervousness about making choices in areas where they feel unsure of themselves. “You’ve got this dilemma between legacy vendors like IBM and DXC and HP, which are all trying to sell their version of the cloud – a private cloud-type story – leveraging their technology and infrastructure platforms and software, and the big public cloud players like Amazon, Microsoft and Google that are espousing a different agenda, which is that you don’t need any of that old stuff and can do it all on their shiny new public cloud. Clients are looking at these different options and saying where should we play and how should we play and there’s quite a complex set of situations there that make those decisions a lot harder,” he said. “In the past, it was a question of are you an HP shop, are you an IBM shop, are you a Dell shop, do you run on Windows, do you run on Unix? Now, it has become am I private or public cloud? Secondly, which private cloud do I need to be on? Do I need to be hybrid? And, by the way, how is someone managing all the cost of this and how are my people supposed to be operating through these different lenses?” At the same time, businesses face greater competition from new entrants unencumbered with legacy infrastructure – a problem, claims Overall, that is clearly evident in CloudStratex’s core market of financial services businesses. “Start-up retail banks that have been able to engineer their platforms from Day One to be highly agile, highly dynamic are coming into the market with relative ease as the barriers to entry are now so low. An HSBC or a Lloyds or an RBS carrying tens of years of legacy that others don’t have faces real questions about how to cope with that. Some are saying let’s leave the legacy, ‘drain and contain’ it, essentially graveyard it, and build a 2.0 bank; others are saying we need to transition, transform and modernise and that requires money; others could potentially be amalgamated into bigger enterprises. People are genuinely beginning to assess where technology sits in their strategy; it’s become a board-level conversation now.” A disruptive force Overall questions the quality of the advice and guidance such organisations are receiving and suggests that, as a new entrant itself, CloudStratex has the potential to be a disruptive force by encouraging clients to become more self-sufficient and to develop their own in-house capabilities rather than relying so much on SIs and other third parties. “A lot of big system integrators (SIs) that we, perhaps a little ambitiously, consider to be our competitors are carrying business models that have a significant requirement for people to be kept busy in offshore areas. The Big Five, for instance, have huge resources and huge capabilities, but they also have a business model that requires significant chargeability of their staff in large offshore arenas. We don’t have that. “One of the things I want to draw people’s attention to is that if you are going to a third party, certainly one of the CloudStratex aims to give clients the knowledge and skills they need to address the challenges of cloud computing. James Goulding finds out more from CEO and co-founder Adrian Overall CloudStratex is a self-styled ‘disruptive’ London-based start-up that aims to make clients thoroughly self-sufficient in cloud computing and its usage, rather than leaving them reliant on external providers to manage their IT operations. It was founded in March 2019 by Adrian Overall, Brad Day, Tony Irving and Adam O’Hare with the intention of transforming how businesses leverage next generation technologies through an incubator model that focuses on helping clients understand ‘how’ to adopt them. The company’s co-founders are seasoned entrepreneurs, having previously set up an IT consultancy, CloudTalent, that was acquired by Avanade Accenture in 2015. It was partly to recapture the excitement of a start-up – and to avoid the friction of working for a large multinational corporate – that the four embarked on their new venture. CloudStratex focuses on two challenges associated with cloud computing: the difficulty of integrating a cloud IT environment with the legacy IT that FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies have built up over the years; and the lack of knowledge and skills within organisations, Adrian Overall