Is the recent shake-up with Broadcom and VMware causing you headaches? In this episode, we talk with Talor Holloway, CTO at Advent One, about why many companies are looking for alternatives. Talor explains how Advent One helps businesses update their technology, move away from expensive old systems, and switch to newer, more flexible solutions. This change can lead to better security and save money in the long run. Discover how this move can help your business run better. This is an episode you won't want to miss Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or [email protected] or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au Full Episode Transcript:  (Intro Music with Voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert, unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades slightly and continues in the background) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here and welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. Today in the studio, we have Talor Halloway, the CTO of Advent One. And I'm super excited to be talking to Talor about some of the really cool things they're doing for customers in the tech space. So, over to you, Talor. Who are you? What do you guys do? And why do my customers need to know you? Talor Holloway: Hi Leanne. Yeah, I'm Talor from Advent One. So Advent One's been around for close to 25 years. We're a managed services provider and service provider in general. We've been helping our customers with a variety of different services over that time, but more recently, we tend to be spending a lot of time helping our customers with cloud adoption, Kubernetes adoption, trying to automate their environments and IT processes, as well as build the operating model around some of these new platforms that they're building future applications on, as well as helping sort of modernise and migrate legacy applications to to more modern cloud platforms. So what we find with a lot of customers is that they don't really want someone to come in on on day one and start from scratch. Really, they want someone who's able to come in and accelerate their project and bring a lot of knowledge and existing blueprints and automation patterns and so on into those projects. One of the things that is different about us is that all of the technology that we recommend and service for our customers, we consume internally. So, what we've tended to do is really build out that capability internally, build a lot of automation and things like that that we can come into a project already being part of the way there and really help accelerate that customer's outcome, rather than purely just sending a services person in who's going to have to start from scratch. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. So Talor, one of the really cool things I wanted to chat to you today is about Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. It's created obviously quite a stir in the in the tech marketplace amongst customers. And I'm interested to understand a bit more, you know, what does it mean? And what are the options available for customers and what have you been doing in that space that you've seen a lot of success? Talor Holloway: For those who may have been living under a rock, Broadcom has acquired VMware and there's been, in certain cases or most cases, substantial price rises and a great deal of uncertainty around what the future looks like. So pretty well all of our customers have been evaluating their options. Not an exhaustive list, but there's essentially you could do nothing, and there's a cost associated with doing nothing. You could look at an alternative virtualisation platform, or you could go into the public cloud, or some combination thereof. And some combination thereof is really the path that we've been going down. So we've looked at several alternatives from a virtualisation standpoint, as well as obviously moving workloads that are fit-for-purpose into the public cloud. Leanne Taylor: And what have you guys at Advent One, what's worked for you? Talor Holloway: We've been a long-time Red Hat partner and have adopted Red Hat OpenShift. So OpenShift is a unified platform that gives you the capability to run containers and VMs on the same platform. So OpenShift is based on Kubernetes. We migrated completely over to OpenShift earlier this year and have seen some really great benefits as a result of doing it. We've reduced our VM footprint by around 40% due to containerisation and was able to have a really good and highly automated operating model for everything else that's been moved over. So one of the benefits, for example, that we saw was we have an internal application that provides all our dashboards and stuff like that to customers, and on VMware that was using like 184 GB of memory across a whole bunch of Linux virtual machines. Once we moved everything over to containers, it's using around 10 GB of memory. So it just shows the significant efficiency you can get by just taking the OS out of the picture. So there's obviously the operating system, the security agents, and all of that stuff that has to run on top of it to make it work. When we're purely just focused on the application, we can gain a significant amount of efficiencies. And our customer onboarding, the time taken to do that has dramatically reduced. Leanne Taylor: So tell me, have you got some customer examples of where you've had some success with customers? And what does that journey look like for them? Talor Holloway: One of the things that set us up well for this was that internal adoption and taking a lot of time to build all of the automation and the operating model around providing a mature service to our customers with OpenShift. What that's allowed us to do is to help customers move not only data centre workloads but also edge workloads off VMware and onto OpenShift. So we're working for example with a retailer at the moment where we're putting an OpenShift cluster in all of their retail stores, as well as helping some customers who have got, you know, data centre workloads and move those from VMware to OpenShift. And we're also helping customers with OpenShift in the public cloud where there's modern workloads that they wanted to deploy, and we're able to have a sort of a unified experience between Kubernetes running in the public cloud and on-premises or out at the edge. Leanne Taylor: So from an end-user experience, you know, the users aren't seeing any change to how they do their job. It's the tech underlying that's supporting the network, yeah? And the cost savings for the customer in how they architect their network, is that right? Talor Holloway: Yeah, so there's certainly the underlying platform has some significant improvements, but from an end-user perspective, I wouldn't say it's exactly the same. In most cases, it's going to be better. So, we tend to use infrastructure as code and config as code to manage all of these environments. So Kubernetes inherently is a complex platform, but if you have the right tools and operating model orchestrating it all, it can become really simple. So if a customer wants to add a new network or create a new virtual machine or configure network policies, configure storage, do disaster recovery, all of that is completely automated using the open-source tools that ship with OpenShift. And for us, even internally, we were able to use those where our time to do a disaster recovery used to take around an hour for us to fail over our data centre, and we can do that in five minutes now, just to give you an example. So when things are really heavily automated and the platform that you're using lends itself really well to that, it makes things very, very simple. Leanne Taylor: So it sounds like customers can work with you guys to kind of alleviate some of that cost and uncertainty if they are on a VMware environment at the moment. So with automation and cost reductions, customers can see some huge benefits. But going beyond the cost, talk to me more about the automation and and some of the operational benefits. Talor Holloway: Certainly. So, we'd normally go into a customer and do an assessment to understand what the target state looks like. And in almost every case, there's either homegrown or ISV software that we can, you know, move out of VMs and run natively on OpenShift, which from a developer experience or the team that are looking after those applications, it's going to make their lives a lot simpler, and they're going to be able to deploy and lifecycle their software in a highly automated way that's very easy. From a VM administrator perspective, the lifecycling of VMs and the overall management will be fully automated as well. So we use a combination of OpenShift, GitOps, and Ansible. So OpenShift GitOps has allows us to manage the platform itself and have that fully automated as well as the containerised workloads running within it. And we use Ansible for for VM management, so that could be provisioning, patching, configuration management, all that sort of stuff. Leanne Taylor: So what can customers expect to see, I guess, over the next one to two years? A lot have their investments and licensing coming up for renewal. What's the lead time to have a conversation with you about how Advent One can support them with that next step and what's the timing involved around that? Talor Holloway: Most of our customers have locked in their VMware licensing or subscription for the short to medium term while they figure out what to do. What I would encourage people to do is start assessing what your options are early. We can obviously assist from a services perspective with the assessment and migration and all that sort of stuff. But I'd start planning now because if you've signed on for another 12 months or 24 months, that's going to go really quickly. And if you want to do a large uplift or modernisation as part of that, it's going to take some time. So what we sort of see is two paths for customers where the first path is they'll basically lift and shift onto the target platform and modernise later. The path that we chose, which which we feel is probably the right path, is to start modernising and moving things over on the way through to get to your target state sooner rather than later. But that being said, there's nothing stopping you from modernising things at your own pace. It really depends on the timeline and how complex your environment is. But we're able to help customers with both of those. So to answer your question, I think customers really need to start planning now. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. So Talor, who can benefit from the service that you're offering in this space? You know, what sort of industries are you seeing that you're working with predominantly? Talor Holloway: Yes, I think for us, we don't have a focus really in any particular vertical. Being around for so long, we've got customers in retail, financial services, manufacturing, government, education, higher education. There's no real one industry vertical or industry that's going to benefit from this because what we're really talking about is the underlying platform that supports customers' IT environments. But what we can do is when we go to start looking at how to move from something that could probably be best described as a legacy environment to something more modern, we can address looking at data centre, edge, and cloud use cases and what makes sense to go where. The other thing is a lot of ISV software is now being delivered in containers as opposed to, you know, virtual machine images. And we've got a lot of customers who aren't really being given the choice that at some point, you are going to need to consume this software as containers. And that could be for, you know, software running out at the edge, which could be in retail stores, or it could be running in a data centre or in the public cloud. And a lot of customers need help making that transition, as well as having the maturity and a good operating model around it to make sure things are secure, things are patched, things are kept up to date, where in a more modern container-based environment, it's fundamentally different to how a VM environment would function. So it's really getting a good operating model and getting some maturity across while you make that change. Leanne Taylor: How do customers engage with you? Obviously, I'm happy to set up some introduction meetings and things like that, but from an engagement perspective, do you guys run a proof of concept or how does that work? Talor Holloway: Yeah, so our engagement model is pretty simple where we can do things on a project basis or deliver it as a service. There are instances where customers are going to want to try the technology before they look at further investing in it, and we're more than happy to assist with customers running a proof of technology or a proof of value to see whether or not what we're proposing is going to be fit-for-purpose for them going forward. Leanne Taylor: Thank you, Talor, for your time today. I really enjoy working with you and the team at Advent One and we've got some very happy customers already experiencing the shift away from VMware to your solutions. So if anyone would like to further the conversation, please reach out and let's have a chat. See you next time. (Outro Music with Voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up to date and informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades out) elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades out)  

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