Howard Boville, Head of IBM Hybrid Cloud (Hosted by Brad Sousa)

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:02) Hello, my friends. Today we have a guest host episode with Brad Sousa, the CTO of AVI Systems, hosting Howard Boville, the head of IBM Hybrid Cloud. And they discuss how to propagate your vision throughout an organization, IBM's recent innovations in the hybrid cloud space, and why it's important to find engineers that not only have the right talent, but also have the right...

(Brad Sousa at 00:00:50) So here's where I think I'd like to start. First of all, let's just get to know each other. I'd like everybody to get a chance to get to know you. Would you mind if I took just 60 seconds and gave everybody the one-minute "what every man, woman, and child should know about Brad" shtick? We can get that out of the way and get that conversation...

(Brad Sousa at 00:01:10) Okay. So I'm CTO at AVI Systems. We're a global solutions provider, a technology integrator specifically focused on media and collaboration. So the space that we're in, if you're a corporate customer, we'd probably be doing conference rooms and UC and streaming and online and all that kind of stuff. If you're a healthcare provider, it would be telehealth.

(Brad Sousa at 00:01:31) If you're federal, it might be a command and control or classified collaboration, that kind of stuff. That's the world I live in. I tell people I have the best job on the planet, and I actually believe it. And it's partially because I get to play with really cool stuff and work with amazing customers and help solve problems for them. And I get to meet all sorts of cool people, you being one of those.

(Brad Sousa at 00:01:55) So tell us a little bit about you. How did you get started in the tech business?

(Howard Boville at 00:02:00) Yeah. Through serendipity and from missing a post, but that's a longer conversation. But I guess there's three kind of chapters in my career, Brad. One is I spent a reasonable stint in telecommunications, so working for Comcast in the UK—obviously a very nice brand in the US—and then British Telecom, primarily originally in product development, but then moving to more commercial roles. Then moved into banking and did a stint at Bank of America as the CTO across there and led a number of the initiatives to drive the digital transformation of that business.

(Howard Boville at 00:02:38) And now into IBM, kind of building upon, I guess, all of the knowledge, experience, and mistakes I've made of those two preceding chapters to actually chart the journey of the strategy that we have here at IBM for hybrid cloud.

(Brad Sousa at 00:03:07) Yeah, hybrid cloud is something I want to talk about. I'm excited. I'm a consumer of hybrid cloud, and so I'm anxious to learn more. But a little bit about you—it doesn't sound like you necessarily planned to get into the tech business. You kind of found your way into it. That's the way it was for me. I did not start out in tech. I started in strategic planning and marketing and then ended up in tech and loving it. Was there somebody that kind of influenced you, or how did you find out that you actually liked it?

(Howard Boville at 00:03:23) I guess it's very often like the scene from The Godfather. Every time you try to get out, it kind of drives you back in again. So I started in advertising as a database programmer doing data analytics, very slowly based upon the speed of the actual computers back then, for direct mail lists, direct marketing.

(Brad Sousa at 00:03:44) Yeah.

(Howard Boville at 00:03:44) Kind of drove the greater response rates, much to the chagrin of the creative people in the advertising agency, that this geeky kid was actually getting better response rates through market segmentation than they were getting from their creative elements. So kind of came out of that and then moved into networks. And networks is a deeply interesting area in terms of the context. You see the technologies there, and kind of came through that through the emergence of .com, moving from analog to private circuits. So you really hit the heart of the digital transformation and the Internet.

(Howard Boville at 00:04:19) And then kind of you've broadened your skills as your curiosity takes you further, and you actually figure out, "Actually, this is a thing for me." So yeah, so then continued to actually no longer be a technology denier, but a technology acceptor. Yeah. But in a business context, Brad, because the thing that always interested me was actually how you can make tech work in an applied way as opposed to a pure science way.

(Brad Sousa at 00:04:43) Well, that's interesting because I didn't know this side to you, but I also started in marketing, more with financial services. I was a partner in an ad agency in Beverly Hills for a number of years and had some customers or clients that were tech clients. And that was kind of my introduction to it. And I discovered when looking back at it now, as a teenager, I guess I was doing design and engineering and just didn't know what that meant. And there was like this knack, I guess, that kind of brought me into the industry, and I've never been able to leave it.

(Brad Sousa at 00:05:17) I'm addicted to it, and I absolutely love it. What keeps you passionate about it?

(Howard Boville at 00:05:22) This is the forever changing nature. You can never rest on your laurels. The environment always changes around you in a business context. Yeah. And therefore, how you kind of change the technology to actually meet those changing needs appears.

(Howard Boville at 00:05:35) And they're very kind of complex system-based problems to solve for. So there's lots of dots that you have to join, and you can't really take the broadest aperture. So I think from a professional basis and a skills basis, you're always developing. But I think it also develops you as a person because unless you've got into humility as a technology professional, you will always get left aside. You've got to always work on the basis that there's a whole bunch of stuff I don't know I don't know.

(Brad Sousa at 00:06:03) Right.

(Howard Boville at 00:06:03) And that appeals to my nature, which is I'm just a natural collaborator. I get my energy working with smart people and asking lots of curious questions sometimes, but don't get to a point of actually being less than. So you've got to balance it on both sides of the left brain, right brain.

(Brad Sousa at 00:06:20) Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting. I find it, you know, as a CTO in a tech company, I say often to people who don't understand what it is that I do, I say that I'm the chief geek in a company full of geeks. And it's interesting because a lot of engineers, they prefer working with things rather than working with people.

(Brad Sousa at 00:06:41) But it sounds to me that you and I are alike in the sense that it's a combination of both. I like what the tech does for people. And that's kind of what keeps me passionate about it.

(Howard Boville at 00:06:52) That's a really interesting thing you say there, Brad. In my own overall, as you get increased responsibilities in my previous company, which I learned a huge amount of things—towards the end, my organization was 23,000 people. So I was spending more time on psychology and sociology than I was on technology.

(Brad Sousa at 00:07:12) Right. Right.

(Howard Boville at 00:07:13) Which I kind of enjoyed to a degree, but I thought it was time to get back into tech and get the tech in front of the ology, as opposed to the socio or the psycho in front of ology.

(Brad Sousa at 00:07:23) Yeah. So the T in CTO for you was the chief therapy officer, not the chief technology officer. Right?

(Howard Boville at 00:07:29) Very good. Yes. Yeah. You learn a lot through that process, and I did.

(Brad Sousa at 00:07:33) Yeah. Yeah. And I enjoy that. What do you—when you're not leading a global organization like you are now, what would people find you doing? You have particular hobbies or places you like to go or...

(Howard Boville at 00:07:44) Just family. So I spend time with my family. The best start to the day is when I have breakfast with them, and the best finish to the day is when I'm having dinner with them in the evening. I've got two young children, a five-year-old and an eight-year-old.

(Brad Sousa at 00:07:57) Oh, nice. Great ages.

(Howard Boville at 00:07:59) Kind of seeing how they develop, it's kind of watching various new releases of software being released in their brain system. They brought their perspectives until they get into an educational system. We send them all their perspectives.

(Brad Sousa at 00:08:12) Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I have four kids, and every one of them are in the industry to some degree or another. So I guess I passed on my addiction to them too.

(Howard Boville at 00:08:24) Yeah. Exactly.

(Brad Sousa at 00:08:27) Let's talk a little bit about IBM and, in particular, about hybrid cloud. Can you give us maybe a high-level view of where IBM is today and how hybrid cloud fits into the overall offer?

(Howard Boville at 00:08:37) Yes. So we're kind of a new entrance into chapter two of cloud. And what I'm saying is qualified in the business of my old role where I ran a very big tech shop, and I kind of dealt with all of the large and small technology companies and, in many ways, helped do co-engineering with some of the big brands that we hear about now to get their offering correct. And I could see that there was a gap in the marketplace that wasn't being well served, which was enterprises. So understanding what it is to operate in enterprise space with heritage environments was number one.

(Howard Boville at 00:09:12) Number two was that when you're a kind of a single-player company where you're a cloud service provider and the answer is cloud, what's the question? You can't blame them for not serving the enterprise space. This is an enterprise. You will have some of your environments on-premise and have other environments in a more distributed cloud basis. And then the third element would be the world was going to be multi-cloud, as I was putting architectures together.

(Howard Boville at 00:09:37) And the cloud service providers—and it's a very legitimate mechanism to grow your business—were becoming more and more proprietary in terms of how they were putting their solutions together. And obviously, you get concerned around things like vendor lock-in and economics. But the thing that concerned me the most was being locked out of innovation from a particular technology vendor. Because that's that point I made earlier on, which is you can't be agile to your changing environment if you're tied to an innovation stack of a company. So the approach that we're taking here at IBM, and it's the strategy that our chief executive, Arvind Krishna, laid out when he took the role in April, is to be a hybrid cloud business where AI is built into everything that we do. And it's funny.

(Howard Boville at 00:10:19) It's kind of a whole bunch of CIO friends could take an exhalation out because they're saying, "I'm really pleased that you said this because we've had our business saying everything's got to be cloud as if cloud was the panacea to everything. And you've kind of created an aperture that it will be on-prem, it will be off-prem, and it'll be multi-cloud." And that the assets that we have here at IBM—and I could just spend a few more minutes on this topic—I could see as an external consumer of IT are entirely differentiated in terms of meeting those business needs.

(Howard Boville at 00:10:52) And those business needs are actually transforming business processes, not simply moving applications or workloads off your computers and your data centers to put on somebody else's computers and data centers, which, I mean, that's colossally uninteresting and non-strategic and doesn't have any business value. But what does add business value is if you kind of build it from a technology stack perspective and a business process in. You'll know this from your own role. Everybody else listening to this will know it as a practitioner—IT exists to support the business process. And the business process will have a system that relates to applications, datasets.

(Howard Boville at 00:11:29) Those applications and datasets, like children, have different needs from a compute or from a memory perspective, and therefore can't just land on x86. And therefore, what IBM brings is the ability to actually land those workloads on a landing zone that could be x86, or it could be Power, or it could be Z. And obviously, having been the leading company in the space of quantum, can also have quantum there as well. But the final element is that the x86 that we have for IBM's cloud is for more mission-critical workloads where you care more about your availability, performance, and capacity and the risk posture. But we recognize that there's other workloads that don't have to have those levels of capability, and we can drop it on another cloud provider.

(Howard Boville at 00:12:14) So we'll meet the customer wherever they are with their bare metal, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, VMware, whatever it is. Right? And we'll give them the right silicon for the children of their applications to be able to support the business processes and transform those processes that get calcified over time.

(Brad Sousa at 00:12:33) Well, so I'd like to—like I said, we provide solutions that are almost always hybrid. Hybrid is kind of a unique space in the market that we fit, and then multi-cloud also. So you know, you're singing to the choir here and I'm loving it. There were a couple of quotes that I heard from you. I'm going to share them with you.

(Brad Sousa at 00:12:54) I'd love you to get deeper into them. One of them, when you said it, I think it was you—I laughed. It was, "God created the earth in seven days. That's because he had no legacy." And you're talking about hybrid cloud.

(Brad Sousa at 00:13:06) Maybe expand on that a little bit.

(Howard Boville at 00:13:08) Yeah. So in all our roles and your role, you've been in environments that you wish you hadn't, and you're anchored to them not just from a technology perspective because they're difficult to unravel. Yeah. You're also sat with a balance sheet of depreciating assets. So even though you would like to transform somehow, you've got assets that have got some life relative to where they are.

(Howard Boville at 00:13:27) And therefore, the bubble costs associated with the economics of transferring out isn't just going to work. It's not going to work, nor will it be. And finally, you as CTO have been to the line of business and said, "I've got this great thing I want to do. I want to modernize your applications to move them out of our data centers and move them to somebody else's data center, and it's going to cost an exponential amount of money over that period." And the LOB will say, "Well, what features do I get that'll help me sell more?" "Well, you're going to move it to containerized offerings and so forth."

(Howard Boville at 00:13:57) You don't typically get the funding for that. Right? You do when you're writing your new applications. And the point I'm trying to make here is that we can meet customers in terms of, "Yes, we'll drive you on a containerized strategy with our assets at Red Hat OpenShift." And you really should be looking at OpenShift. You shouldn't be looking to hire exotic Kubernetes skills and roll it your own. There's far better things for your engineering to be doing. I learned that the hard way when I was in my old role. But we can bring you on the journey, still get business value driven for your LOB leads and for your customers, to drive your business forward on the different environments that you've got. We're not as opinionated as, say, another cloud.

(Howard Boville at 00:14:35) "It's our cloud, and it's only x86."

(Brad Sousa at 00:14:38) Yeah.

(Howard Boville at 00:14:38) So that's what I kind of mean about the legacy piece. The good thing about, obviously, IBM in the cloud context here is that we're a kind of a starter in the other cloud space as we move into chapter two. We'll be able to have a lot of good assets to play with them, and it's fairly well capitalized from the company. But I haven't got the wealth of legacy that a 14-year-old cloud provider has or a seven-year-old, because they'll be into the next cycle of the issues that they're facing.

(Howard Boville at 00:15:05) So that kind of ties back to that much more in terms of what it means to deal with legacy.

(Brad Sousa at 00:15:11) Yeah. So one of the things I find really interesting is in talking with technology leaders, and in my space, it's, you know, just a small little sliver of the space that you're dealing in. Right? And the conversations that we have around cloud is, we like the agility of cloud. We like the fact that I'm offloading some of the management and all of that kind of stuff.

(Brad Sousa at 00:15:32) Right. But we don't like the fact that you can't control the architecture of what's happening in that cloud. Right. And I say to people, there's no such thing as cloud. It's just somebody else's computer that you don't get to control.

(Brad Sousa at 00:15:44) So the question becomes often this: the reason, the motivation for hybrid seems to be more around security and the ability to control and predict the architecture than it is the simplicity of moving to somebody else's architecture in the cloud. What's your thoughts on that?

(Howard Boville at 00:16:03) Yeah. So the whole kind of promise initially of cloud being a cheaper way to run your applications. I mean, I did a huge amount of analysis on this from kind of 2015 onwards, and I just couldn't see where that held true when you operated at a reasonable scale, because you've got different economic issues. First, when you're building out hundreds of data centers in a given year, you've got all these appreciating assets, and you're always building to match supplies and meet the demand that you're anticipating. But there's a value in terms of having a resource pool that's not on your premise.

(Howard Boville at 00:16:35) So your ability to actually get better business continuity in a more elegant architecture way. The ability to actually have things built for you with people with the skill sets that you wouldn't be able to hire. We live in a kind of war for talented animals as technologists, and therefore, it's very difficult to actually compete, particularly against some of the big clouds in the enterprise and IBM. And from a cybersecurity perspective, there is simply not enough human talent around the world for any company, like federal agencies, let alone kind of enterprises, to meet that need. So if you can work with companies that are thinking deeply about this, then you're in a stronger place.

(Howard Boville at 00:17:12) And that's very much kind of what I built into the cloud here at IBM because that was another issue I saw with the cloud service providers, which is they're general-purpose cloud providers. And therefore, they were trying to be vanilla to everybody when some people didn't want vanilla. But what I built for was the regulated industries. So building a cloud architecture, hyperscaler architecture, and putting a service catalog on top of it, everybody can do that. You can do it yourself.

(Howard Boville at 00:17:38) You can build your own private cloud and do those things. There's no differentiation there. There was when Werner Vogels wrote his PhD paper, the CTO for AWS many years ago, which I had on my nightstand for a while because, yes, we are geeks. But there's no longer any competitive advantage in terms of what I do, what AWS does, or what Google does, or what Microsoft does on their IaaS piece. But where there is differentiation is for regulated industries building in the laws, rules, and regulations to the cloud from the outset.

(Howard Boville at 00:18:10) So you cover cybersecurity, data privacy, and that band. And we keep that updated on that non-functional set of requirements every month. And we do that in collaboration with 40-plus financial institutions that feed into those requirements. Because the other mode of operation in any other cloud provider that you work with is you have to build those yourself. And then the CTO at the next bank has to build it or the CTO at the next federal agency or the CTO at the next healthcare company has to build it every time.

(Howard Boville at 00:18:40) And that's like everyone building their own version of electricity. Doesn't make any sense. So we took that away. And then the other really nice thing about this, Brad, was—I don't know how it perhaps applies to your industry, but it certainly applies to all financial companies—is it would take us 18 months to onboard a new tech vendor, large or small, into the bank because there's a whole raft of vendor risk assessment things that we have to do. And if you're a Salesforce or a ServiceNow, you can kind of handle that.

(Howard Boville at 00:19:11) And every bank is different. You have to do it every time in a different bank. But if you're a small fintech that we as a bank wanted to get at that point of innovation and you as a fintech want to supply to us, after 18 months, you'd have had so much brain damage, you just forgotten what your actual innovation was. So the idea of actually building the controls in from the very outset is you as a financial services fintech, you can land on our platform, go through the certification process, which is in 18 months to a lot quicker, and then the whole marketplace opens up to you in terms of you can provide immediately. So it's the quick onboarding.

(Howard Boville at 00:19:46) That's really good news for chief technology officers because they can get that innovation quickly, and it's really good news for the fintechs because they can actually remember what their point of innovation was as well. And that's a really big powerful thing where the value exchange sits there for our customer to find the services from the fintech that we have on our platform, and obviously for us. And then the other final nice thing about IBM is we figured out that it's not a good idea to have partners on your platform, and we figured this out decades ago, and then actually go and steal their business from them at a lead point. We're kind of a lot more mature in terms of how we work with that, but it's a lot more trusted. And I think if you've read the various tech press, you'll understand what I'm talking about.

(Howard Boville at 00:20:30) That what we don't work on that business. We want our partners' businesses to grow up. I provide innovation to our customers, and as a consequence of that, we all grow.

(Brad Sousa at 00:20:40) So I think one of the overriding themes that I'm hearing from you is that you're clearly passionate about the tech, but you're super passionate about people and how the tech aligns with people. So I'd like to talk about that a little bit and put it in the context maybe of leadership, and here's where I'm headed with it. So as a CTO, a lot of people confuse my role with a CIO. And so they think what I'm doing is I'm focusing technology for our company as a business enabler for our organization. And I clearly do some of that, but most of my focus is outward.

(Brad Sousa at 00:21:21) Even when I'm focused on our organization, the change I'm making is really to help us align outward with the customer. So where's your role? Are you more inward-focused? Are you more outward-focused? How do you align with that?

(Howard Boville at 00:21:38) It's I've always been outward-focused, but you've got to give a clear sense of purpose to the teams that you lead as to how they align to the business imperative and the customer experience. And I've worked in places, or I've observed places—I'm not personally worked in places where the IT function very often could be working anywhere. It doesn't really matter what industry they're in.

(Howard Boville at 00:21:59) And that disconnects them from the actual purpose and mission of the company. So my own role here, I always do a town hall the week after the chief executive—here at IBM, or Brian Moynihan at Bank of America—on the quarterly results. And translate those results in a non-numbers-based way and where people have worked to the marketplace. So you get the sense of purpose and an alignment to the actual colors of the company that they're playing for to actually understand how they can drive them forward. And it's essential to do that.

(Howard Boville at 00:22:30) But I learned through a lot of experience, and experience if you distill it is making mistakes. Right? So I've got a lot of experience. And I guess the key thing I learned is that as a technologist, you can get really enamored about technical architectures, the transformation of the technology, the software titles, everything you're doing. But unless you put the same amount of work into understanding the operating model, the functional work that people are doing, and how they actually structure their jobs, and how you continue to give them opportunities, whether it's through experience, assignments, education, to be clear on what their career path is, you're really not doing a very good job at all.

(Howard Boville at 00:23:11) You can have great architectures, but if you haven't got the people that sit around that to make that thing really come alive and to draw upon all the brilliance that everybody has within the brand, you're kind of diminishing the actual full range of assets that you have. And the final point I'm going to make around that is there's a lot of talk about talent. We all, I guess, sit in talent reviews. Who's the top talent and everything else? And I just, from experience, don't believe in that.

(Howard Boville at 00:23:37) Right? And you can see where people can be incredibly talented, but unless they have grit and unless they apply themselves and unless they have the right attitude, that talent is for absolutely nothing. And I would take somebody with grit and a curious mind and a positive attitude and resiliency, and they're all qualities that anybody can build. Right? The other stuff is just kind of genetics that your arms are a bit longer so you can reach the basket or you're faster so you can run to the rugby line for getting other people.

(Howard Boville at 00:24:09) That's a genetic thing. But those are the qualities that I've talked about everybody can have. But they get taken out of people because you'll have a talent conversation, and most people are fairly humble and think, oh, well, you're not talking about me, so I'll switch off. Just imagine if you switch everybody on. Say, all right.

(Howard Boville at 00:24:24) Let's just work on grit. Let's work on attitude. Let's work on being curious, having a growth mindset. You can get your whole population switched on, and then you got a force multiplier in terms of how you move your organization on. And the ones that don't want to demonstrate those qualities typically find that the working environment isn't a good one for them.

(Howard Boville at 00:24:41) So they'll self-select out, and that's not a bad thing. Right? So you've got to work on the basis that everybody has a light within them. It's your responsibility to turn it on as opposed to have a light that you shine upon.

(Brad Sousa at 00:24:53) Yeah. So how do you do that as a leader? How do you develop—to your point, you can train technical skill, but it's tougher to develop a set of attributes and characters and characteristics. How do you do that as a leader? How do you define what it is you want to develop?

(Brad Sousa at 00:25:14) And then how do you produce that across a team?

(Howard Boville at 00:25:19) It's this kind of very difficult thing to capture called culture, and it doesn't come overnight. It takes a long time to land and a lot of consistency, and it's all value-based. So you've got to create cultures where people can feel psychologically safe to turn up to work, to be themselves, to be able to express themselves. You have to create a culture where people can challenge one another with positive intent. But the positive intent is important, so don't use the authority that you've been given to challenge one another to be rude.

(Howard Boville at 00:25:50) Yeah. Bring charm to work in addition to intellect. Right? So think about how you can charm with the actual intellect. And then there's other elements which is it's far better to actually maintain quality of relationships than being right.

(Howard Boville at 00:26:05) And this is the hardest part of the technologist. Right? Because we get religious about our data points, but we only see the world through one degree of aperture if we do that. Whereas if you take it through 360 degrees, there is no right. Right?

(Howard Boville at 00:26:22) There's just optimum. And optimum only counts if everybody is aligned to what that optimum thing is. So that's a key element to get across to people is it's not about being right. It's about being understood. It's about getting shared comprehension, and then it's getting after that course of action and then doing course corrections as you get around it.

(Brad Sousa at 00:26:41) Yeah. That's so good. And one of the things I find myself spending a lot of time with is if we don't define a goal, a vision that we're all moving towards, a playbook or whatever it is, then we end up looking at each other, and that's where we become sometimes a little contentious. But if we're all headed to someplace else, we're looking outward and we as a team tend to get there. How do you develop that sense of vision within your team?

(Brad Sousa at 00:27:13) How do you create that sense of it's not as important to be right as it is to maybe get there together?

(Howard Boville at 00:27:19) Yeah. It's a few points around that, which is that it's the communicator's responsibility to ensure that the person that's hearing them is comprehending it. It's not the person that you communicate into because it's so easy to hear things in a different way because people only hear what they understand. Therefore, you've got to have conversations to ensure that there is a shared comprehension around the message. And the message, it's got to be simplified.

(Howard Boville at 00:27:43) And I think that's part of the beautiful part of our jobs, which is we deal with so much complexity. And if we're forever driving that complexity into the simplest message, it's almost going to create poetry because poetry is the simplest way of expressing a particular thing and distilling it down. And then it is just relentless repetition until the point you're boring. Right? If you've got to be at the point where I get it, you're being boring, well, that's a success point on the journey if you have shared comprehension.

(Brad Sousa at 00:28:11) So teach me this. The whole concept between hybrid cloud, I mean, it's a relatively simple concept to grasp. It's a complex process to put in place. How do you take these leadership skills that you talk about in developing a team and you apply that to leading a customer? Because that's a journey that a lot of customers haven't gone on before and you have to kind of lead them to get there.

(Brad Sousa at 00:28:39) How do you transfer those skills from internal to external?

(Howard Boville at 00:28:43) Yeah. I mean, the key thing to understand is the cloud should never be anybody's strategy. It's like saying that a wrench is somebody's strategy. Right? Or a spanner is somebody's strategy.

(Howard Boville at 00:28:53) Right?

(Brad Sousa at 00:28:53) Super good.

(Howard Boville at 00:28:54) Cloud is not a strategy. It's the mechanism. It's one of the many things actually that gets an outcome. And the other element is tied to the business process. So what is it that you're actually trying to improve?

(Howard Boville at 00:29:04) Now, the good thing about our jobs is we're always being worked. As soon as you lay down a business process, it starts to atrophy, and it starts to calcify. Right? So the underpinnings, it's the actual systems that actually do that. It isn't the people that are causing the problem.

(Howard Boville at 00:29:16) After a while, it's the poor people that are fighting against the systems that aren't working in their way to operate. So you could come in with that element, and then you can say, okay, well, that's too big for you to think about. Let's deconstruct it. So let's look at, say, a process from around my old world. So wealth management.

(Howard Boville at 00:29:30) Break it down to make a trade. So what's the technical architecture that sits beneath making a trade from an online presence? So what do you click? So I think from the web front ends, what's the architecture there? And then and then and then.

(Howard Boville at 00:29:43) And what are you looking to improve? So it could be, right, we're going to be able to deal with big market volatility. So, okay, then how do you instrument all the elements within that system to determine that you can actually have the level of capacity, scale out in areas of volatility? So it's then not a capacity approach just for capacity's sake.

(Howard Boville at 00:30:03) Actually, we do this on a Monday morning where when somebody wants to change their positions and everyone comes in at the same time, they can come in. That's a better customer experience. It's a better customer interaction than what it would be otherwise. And so you're helping people in their lives. That sends people's lives.

(Howard Boville at 00:30:22) All right. Like, you've turned that technical thing into a human thing and into a thing that's actually tied to our mission. Yep.

(Brad Sousa at 00:30:29) That's it. That's it right there. We call it human impact. If the things that we do create an impact for the people that we're serving, our customers, then that's how we win. One of the metrics that we talk about in our leadership circle—it's not a metric that we publish—is we ask ourselves the question, how many times has the key point of contact that we've been working with now for two or three years, how many times have they been promoted?

(Brad Sousa at 00:30:59) And if what we're doing isn't actually aligning to their ability to succeed with their goals, if they're not able to accomplish their outcomes, we have to rethink what we're doing.

(Howard Boville at 00:31:08) I love that, Brad. I mean, I would say that makes money. As a community in collaboration, we'll separate ideas. I love that idea.

(Brad Sousa at 00:31:17) Take it, man, for sure. I'm stealing a lot of what you've been sharing today. Hey, there's an exercise we went through with my team recently, and we were together—just those who report to me directly—and we were doing some planning for the rest of the fiscal year. And I asked them a question: are there certain attributes of the pandemic that you would like to see endure?

(Brad Sousa at 00:31:45) And it came from this realization. I was reading an article, and this is going to sound silly, so don't laugh at me too much. But I was reading this article about World War II and how the hemline of a woman's skirt moved from below the knee to above the knee in an attempt to conserve material for the war effort. It's been there ever since. And so then I started researching what other things out of World War II stay with us today, like commercial flight and radar and all these other things.

(Brad Sousa at 00:32:16) And I began to ask my team, what parts of the pandemic have really impacted our business? And then what parts of those attributes would we like to see continue forward? So I'll ask you, what parts of the pandemic have really impacted your team or the way you lead?

(Howard Boville at 00:32:39) Yeah. A couple of things before I dive into it. The thing that impacted me when I was in my twenties was in World War II, they had the pub shut at 10:30 on Sunday evening to ensure productivity on Monday mornings, and I just thought that was very restrictive. So, my an extra pint.

(Howard Boville at 00:32:55) But putting that to one side, there's a few things that I've observed with COVID, so good and bad. So the good thing is that when you work in a work context, your mindset is set that you're in a corporate office. People actually dress differently in terms of how they come into work, and you never really get a human connection without a lot more effort on that individual. Now we're in situations where we're seeing people in whatever room of the house that they're actually in, their children are coming in, their balconies barking or whatever else. And I think it's just made people a lot more tolerant for people's personal circumstances and connected on a more human basis than ever would have been possible without the situation.

(Howard Boville at 00:33:40) A lot more empathy, I guess, is the summary that I would see, which I would love that we maintain going forward, and that kind of human connection and that sense of you don't truly know what's going on in somebody else's life other than what's going on there. So if they're having a bad day, step back a little bit. Just be respectful of that. I think we've—well, maybe it's just me—has gone too far in terms of always on, always in front of the screen. That isn't what work is, but work is actually about sitting down and thinking at times or drawing architectures or reading books or having one-on-one conversation.

(Howard Boville at 00:34:17) Brad, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? That's been lost a little bit. And the other element—and I've got no scientific factor back where I'm about to say—but even when you're doing it through this, in terms of you get the nonverbal communication and you get the verbal communication, but there's something chemical when you're in a room with a bunch of people that gets the creative juices going more, I believe.

(Howard Boville at 00:34:42) And I've done a few engineering workshops over recent weeks, and we just brought—we've made breakthroughs that we've not been able to make prior. And it's not perceptible as to what it is in the fact that we're all in a room and just picking up different things that you wouldn't pick up that are beyond the nonverbal and verbal.

(Brad Sousa at 00:35:01) Yeah. So I'm going to press down on that, actually, because I find that remarkably true. And as a result of the pandemic, so many of us are eager to travel, to get together with people. So here's something I think I've learned as a result of all of this. Love to hear your thoughts on it.

(Brad Sousa at 00:35:20) I think there's a difference between influence and impact. I think I can influence people through social media or email or whatever. But if I'm going to impact somebody, if I'm actually going to do something that's going to transform them or help them do a course correction, I think impact requires proximity. If I think about it through Newton's law, an object set in motion stays in motion unless impacted by another object. If I really want to create a course correction or a transformative outcome, I think it requires time and proximity.

(Brad Sousa at 00:35:54) Proximity is a requirement for actually impacting somebody or an organization or a customer. What's your thought on that?

(Howard Boville at 00:36:02) I think there is. I guess I think you're completely correct. I hadn't thought about it in that context, but again, I'll steal that from you as well, Brad. But I think it's also an energy piece as well. We get more energy. We're social beings, so we get more energy from it. And I guess from the reflections, what I have found is when I've been doing these things, I'm actually fatigued afterwards. And I guess it's like when you exercise, you get fit. When you're in a social gathering, you have to redevelop those social gathering models. But there's an energy spark that you get when you see it.

(Howard Boville at 00:36:36) Now, what I'm not saying is everyone's going to come back into work again, everyone's going to be sat in their cubicle and everything else. I think this hybrid working model in addition to the thesis that we have in terms of chapter two of cloud computing in a hybrid context—but I think you're completely correct. It's that impact and then the energy that you can get from it as well, bringing atoms together in that respect.

(Howard Boville at 00:37:00) Yeah.

(Brad Sousa at 00:37:01) Yeah. So if you look at it—and so now we're getting probably deeper than we should—but if you look at it from a quantum physics perspective, everything has a frequency, a resonant frequency in it. And I think that I can see you and we can exchange information and create even a connection with each other. But when you're in the same place, breathing the same air in proximity to each other, I think that there's some sort of resonant thing that happens.

(Brad Sousa at 00:37:33) You describe it as chemical. There's something that happens that you just can't synthesize through a virtual connection.

(Howard Boville at 00:37:41) I agree. And may the force be with you, Brad. May the force be with you. Exactly. Yeah.

(Howard Boville at 00:37:48) But now you've thought about quantum. What a cool thing. I mentioned that we got quantum computing in our cloud.

(Brad Sousa at 00:37:54) Yeah.

(Howard Boville at 00:37:54) It is atoms. So that's getting into a real quick commercial on quantum computing.

(Brad Sousa at 00:37:58) Hit it, man.

(Howard Boville at 00:37:59) Quantum computer science. So yeah, you got our entire reason built on ones and zeros. Quantum is not digital. It is actually nature. It's atom manipulation.

(Howard Boville at 00:38:09) And you get a one and a zero and an in-between, and that's why you can do floating point calculations at an input in place. But—and I'm not a quantum physicist, but I'm really interested in this stuff—I've been to our labs over in Yorktown Heights. And two things I'll say about that as well is, if you've never seen Yorktown Heights, which is our research and development function, we have a few. In my old role, I would go to see all technology companies, and I went to Apple's wonderful circular building.

(Howard Boville at 00:38:39) Yorktown Heights was first with that architecture, and it's more beautiful. So if nothing else, go look at Yorktown Heights, and it's absolutely a gorgeous setting and a gorgeous building. But I met with Jay Gambetta, who's the quantum physicist, the lead person on this, and we're in the labs. And he said, oh, yeah, it has to be a thousand degrees cooler than outer space for it to actually operate. So we work with submarine manufacturers to build these hermetically sealed elements to encapsulate the things. So the first thing is quantum computing is cooler than outer space. So there's the first data point for you. Okay.

(Howard Boville at 00:39:14) Got it. But it's a really fun thing as a tech geek, which I'm sure you'd want to do as well, Brad. I'm in the thing, and it's—again, if you've not seen what they look like, they're absolutely gorgeous pieces of art when you see them—all the circuitry.

(Howard Boville at 00:39:29) And I said, oh, Jay, can I take a photograph, a selfie in front of the thing? No. But we've got one outside that you can because we wired that one incorrectly. So if anybody sees the actual—if anybody sees the actual thing, they'll do their own thing. It's like a Willy Wonka kind of—yeah.

(Howard Boville at 00:39:46) You can see that with the wrong formulas, they'll actually make it as horrible as opposed to good. It truly is. I mean, it's just—it'll fail you to continue to do work when you meet with brilliant people like these people that are going to have quantum compute capability.

(Brad Sousa at 00:39:57) Oh, that's so cool.

(Howard Boville at 00:39:58) That's so cool.

(Brad Sousa at 00:40:00) I want to help us land our conversation. I just want to say, man, I've really thoroughly enjoyed this. I hope you have too.

(Brad Sousa at 00:40:10) I want to land the conversation by giving you a chance to—if there's a big thing, one thing in your mind, you said, hey, I'm going to be talking with other CTOs, Modern CTO, and you wanted to get it across. What would that thing be?

(Howard Boville at 00:40:25) I mean, there's a few things. So, so IBM first and foremost, technology is a fashion business, right? We all know this. You have things that become fashionable, and then they become unfashionable. And IBM probably sits in the unfashionable camp at the moment as a company. But we're pivoting the company under Arvind's leadership. Arvind's a technologist. He's out of research.

(Howard Boville at 00:40:45) He understands what technology is about. He lives several steps in the future and then applies that to a business context. And therefore, we're separating all parts of the company. So the strategic outsourcing, the labor-based piece, that separates away from us at the end of this year. And that will be a good vibrant business in and of itself, but it will be unfettered by being tied to what our future aspirations are.

(Howard Boville at 00:41:08) So that's good for both parts of the actual exchange. But we are a technology company going forward. And we, I think, can clearly see the issues that CTOs face in terms of this chapter one of cloud, which is just move your application to somebody else's computers. I mean, ultimately, why would you do that? It adds complexity from a resourceful perspective.

(Howard Boville at 00:41:30) Digital operations become more complex. Cybersecurity is more complex. Your developers become less productive because they're building on the proprietary stack of cloud service provider one, cloud service provider two, and your own environments. So we're solving for those problems in terms of we'll abstract above the actual different environments from a development perspective. So you talked about legacy.

(Howard Boville at 00:41:53) I built a new serverless capability called Code Engine, and it's not a legacy product by the other providers. It puts together all form factors to actually abstract the developers away from the actual infrastructure. We also integrate the other cloud providers so you've got a single pane of glass to operate with them. And we see in a respectful way relative to the other cloud service providers, a role for our resource pools, whether it's x86, Power Z, or quantum relative to the system architecture. And we don't see the other cloud providers as competition.

(Howard Boville at 00:42:23) We actually see them as partners, in that you should be using multiple cloud providers from a system architectural perspective, but also from a resiliency and concentration unit perspective. And then you can also then pick the innovation as a CTO from them as opposed to being tied to—you not only got a cloud strategy, your strategy actually is cloud service provider strategy. Why as a CTO would you want to do that, right? Well, because that's no longer your strategy.

(Howard Boville at 00:42:49) You made that point at the very beginning in terms of—so tie yourself across a number of different areas, and that's what we built our strategy on going forward with the capabilities that we have across Red Hat and the IBM capabilities. So take the conversation with an open mind and listen to this different fresh way that we've got thinking. And the role that we can play in terms of helping you have that level of choice that you wouldn't necessarily get on the more proprietary ways. And the answer from IBM isn't just cloud and x86.

(Howard Boville at 00:43:22) The answer is, let's understand what your problems are that we're solving for, and let's play a part in doing that. And that final part is with the strategic outsourcing business, which is still a really strong business and growing, that approach was, we'll take over everything and run it for you. That isn't the philosophy of technologists. We'll say, okay, how do we work in a piece part relative to your overall architecture in the knowledge and the humility that we can't solve for everything?

(Brad Sousa at 00:43:48) Yeah. That's so good. That's so good. One final question. If there's an engineer, a technologist that's listening in and they aspire someday to be a leader, maybe a CTO, maybe lead a business unit like you're doing, but stay in the tech space, what's one word of advice that you would give them early in their career?

(Howard Boville at 00:44:12) Always be curious as to the next thing. When you first—and I did this, I'm sure you did as well, Brad—the first thing that you get into is the thing that you feel you have to be wedded to from a technology perspective. And never get married to technology.

(Howard Boville at 00:44:27) Because it will always come and go typically in five or seven year cycles. So understand that and go deep. Go very deep in terms of understanding it, but also be looking left to right in terms of what the next trends are that's coming through and make continue to make the actual shift as you go through it. So the breadth of experience that you've got on the article is because I started doing dial tone and private circuits at Comcast right through them to the full range of services that I built out there. And that all builds out a more complete comprehensive understanding of how networks are put together from all the different layers on the OSI stack right through then to how you put security in place and so on and so forth.

(Howard Boville at 00:45:11) So always have an insatiable curiosity that naturally draws you to working into technology. And then to your point, Brad, as opposed to my point, never forget the people. They're 51% of the solution, so they always get the majority of what I can write.

(Brad Sousa at 00:45:26) Yeah. That's so good. Howard, I've really enjoyed our conversation. I am particularly just so encouraged, maybe inspired to continue to look at how technology fits what people are trying to do. I love the way that you're doing that at IBM and the whole story around hybrid cloud.

(Brad Sousa at 00:45:47) It's been great to learn more about it. I want to say thank you for joining us on the Modern CTO podcast, and we're going to connect again sometime soon, I'm sure.

(Howard Boville at 00:45:56) I'm sure we will, Brad, love to do that as well. Picked you up, Brad, as opposed to me. This is my own advice.

(Brad Sousa at 00:46:01) It's been a pleasure.

(Howard Boville at 00:46:03) Thank you, Brad.

Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.