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TECHNOLOGY

On cloud modernisation and women in leadership

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On cloud modernisation and women in leadership

As far as tech is concerned, the workplace continues to be male-dominated. According to 2015 data from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), women make up 47% of all employed adults in the US, but hold only a quarter of computing roles.

Yet the benefits of greater diversity are manifold. McKinsey noted in a 2020 report, ‘Diversity Wins’, that more diverse companies have better performance, more engaged workers, and better rates of retention.

Female CEOs generally, but in tech specifically, remain thin on the ground, but not at Growth Acceleration Partners (GAP), an Americas-based strategic technology solutions provider focused on both digital transformation advisory services and software and data engineering services. Joyce Durst, CEO, began her career in an engineering role at IBM, before co-founding GAP in 2007 and focuses a lot of spare time on empowering women leaders, from Hipower, to the Women Presidents’ Organization.

CloudTech spoke with Durst about leadership, human-centric software engineering, and cloud and data modernisation:

CloudTech: Hi, Joyce. You started off as an engineer before progressing to sales roles and then eventually to forming your own company. Tell us about the potential dichotomy there – between the need to progress up the corporate ladder and the entrepreneurial mindset while maintaining that technical interest?

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Joyce Durst: For me, I love the problem-solving aspect of being an engineer. More than I love just sitting in coding every day, I really love the idea of ‘Hey, we built this thing together as a team, and we got this to work.’ I get that same energy from working with the executive team to solve either people-related problems, or deciding what services we’re going to provide. So it still feels a lot like engineering.

It’s funny – people ask me all the time whether I had a lemonade stand, or always wanted to run something growing up. No, I never had any idea I actually would be a CEO of anything. I minored in management for the engineering degree. For me, the people side, of how people work together, and how you as a team can figure out how to motivate and inspire and energise others to accomplish something bigger than themselves – that was the part that really drew me to management. Because as an engineer, it can be a big problem, but I can only fix one kind of problem. In management, I can help a whole bunch of people realise their dreams, and advance themselves.

CT: Your leadership style has been described as a ‘natural servant-leader.’ Can you tell us a bit more about your leadership ethos?

JD: I think as human beings, it really is true that we get wiser as we age, and we collect all of these experiences and relationships – and you look across that and really reflect, and say, ‘How can I be the best that I can be?’ I think as a leader over the years, I certainly still have a true engineering kind of mindset and approach, but my empathetic skills, and my focus on values really takes the lead.

I think that’s what really makes the difference with GAP. We don’t have any outside investors, we don’t have a board of directors, other than me, so I can say, ‘I’m okay about putting people before profits.’ Through the whole Covid pandemic, we promised people on day one we would never lay anyone off – and if that meant we were going to take a financial hit, we were prepared to take that.

Fortunately we didn’t – the business actually grew by leaps and bounds. But when you look at it, we’re responsible for 550+ people working at Growth Acceleration Partners. Every day, I wake up and say I’m responsible for creating a great place for them to come to work, for them to share their best selves, and for them to do great things for our clients. 

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When I first became a CEO, I was much more concerned about ‘the numbers have to be exactly this’, or the strategy. Now I’m much more concerned about ‘are we really delighting customers every day? And are we doing the same for our employees?’ If we do those two things, everything else magically seems to work out.

CT: This is a good place to move onto GAP itself. What does GAP do, in terms of services the company provides?

JD: Growth Acceleration Partners is in the business of partnering with companies on their digital transformation journey. We do that in two different service areas. One is pure technology consulting and advisory services. Some of our clients come to us and say, ‘We don’t have any idea how to take all of our old legacy applications and get them to the cloud.’ So they’ll ask us to build that strategy and a modernisation plan, tell them how they take advantage of data, and data insights, and begin to monetise the value that they know they have in data.

The other side of our business, which is long-standing and the majority of what we do really, is on engineering services. We are experts in both software and data engineering. So people will come to us and say, ‘OK, you’ve helped us and we built this great strategy on how to modernise our applications, but we don’t have the resources of the expertise to do that. Help us build a team and work in a hybrid fashion with our existing technology organisation.’ We have teams of one to 70 or 80 people working for large U.S. companies.

Our clients primarily tend to be in one of three areas: financial services, healthcare-related technology companies, and large enterprise data analytics, technology services companies. For those companies, we really become a key part of their innovation engine, with development and testing and operations. We help companies figure out how to leverage technology to improve their business outcomes, which means better customer experiences, faster revenue, better margins and better profits.

CT: Tell us how the company is run, in terms of its core values, and the concept of ‘human-centric engineering’?

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JD: If you dig into the name Growth Acceleration Partners, every word was intentionally chosen 15 years ago. We really are focused on growth: the growth of human beings, the growth of companies, and the growth of our communities. 

And our values spell out ‘gap’. The first value is ‘G’ for greatness: striving for greatness in everything you do, and everywhere you do it. The ‘A’ stands for agile; be agile in your mindset, not just in terms of software development. Be open and collaborative, and be willing to have retrospectives, and change and share leadership. And then finally, the ‘P’ is because GAP invests in people. If we’re not doing all three of those things, we’re failing. I think that culture is really evident, not only to the people who work inside of GAP, but the people that work with GAP and our clients. 

CT: What sort of roadblocks do your customers face, and how is GAP able to resolve them?

JD: For the customers, there’s such a limited supply of technologists around the world. And even if you can find really talented engineers, keeping really talented engineers is very, very difficult. The ‘great resignation’ has highly impacted technologists. An engineer can, in the U.S., have three or four job offers a week if they so desire. 

Then, just keeping up with the skills needed to be in this fast-paced world is very difficult too. If you’re a financial services company, you may not have the budget required to retrain all of your engineers with expertise in the latest tools for cloud, or the latest frameworks and libraries. So that’s where GAP can really step in, because we have the benefit of not just working with one company, but working across 50 or 60 large companies – so we get to have our eyes on all kinds of different best practices that we can employ on every single individual customer we’re working with.

CT: You mentioned the U.S. there specifically – and this ties into another core value, that of focusing on the Americas. Can you elaborate on the rationale in that?

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JD: We’re now in 18 different countries. When we started the company, someone I knew that I had worked with in a previous big company said, ‘You just have to come to Costa Rica.’ I was very busy starting a new company, but this gentleman called me literally every week for two months. And I finally said, ‘OK, I’m going to come down there and then you’ve got to stop calling me.’ And I immediately went down there, and I interviewed four people. As soon as I met these technologists, some women and some men, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is where we’re supposed to be.’ Literally that day, we hired four people and started the company in Costa Rica.

GAP was way ahead of the curve on nearshoring to Latin America. They have great English skills, amazing talent, in the same time zone. All of the reports say that over the next five to 10 years, there is a significant wave of companies coming to Latin America, and that U.S. companies will want to have their development teams there. We’ll continue to expand there as quickly as we can, with our number one goal of only hiring people that match our values; hiring people that are experts in their technology field and want to grow.

CT: Going back to leadership, you are very active in supporting and mentoring women both in technology and business. Tell us about some of the things you do, and how the space has evolved in your career?

JD: We have a lot of work to do still as an industry, sadly. The number of women running tech companies has not changed dramatically. I think that’s on the industry — that’s on us, to make sure we’re doing everything to make the environment safer and more comfortable and more appealing for women. At GAP, 60% of our executive team is female, 60% of my engineering leadership team is female, and no-one questions whether or not a woman should be leading engineering.

So that’s part of what more companies need to do. On the mentoring side, we are also very passionate and involved. We have a number of charitable initiatives that are focused on getting girls in junior high and high school involved in STEM activities. We sponsor boot camps and have hackathons. You’ve got to start early. 

Also, in my role as CEO, I mentor a number of women CEOs, in tech companies and non-tech companies. I’m also on the board of directors for the Austin Chamber of Commerce, and I’m the chair of the global tech and innovation committee. All of these initiatives are aligned with the idea of ‘hey, we’ve got to get more women into leadership positions in all kinds of companies’, because every company is a technology company. They just may not know it yet.

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CT: If you were to give one piece of advice to a young woman reading this article who wants to get into STEM, what would it be?

JD: I would say really open your mind to the possibilities of how you can use these skills to change the world. The fashion industry, for example, is now run by technology. The food industry is now run by technology… the travel industry. Any industry you’re interested in, behind the scenes, it is run by technology. 

And if you have a technology background, I promise that you will have a very rewarding career for your entire life. You will never have to worry about there not being a job for you – there always will be an opportunity for you to work and make an impact.

For more information about Joyce and Growth Acceleration Partners, please visit www.wearegap.com.


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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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