TECHNOLOGY

On cloud modernisation and women in leadership

Published

1 year ago

September 29, 2022

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?

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.

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’?

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?

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.

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

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

2 hours ago

November 28, 2023

Max

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.

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.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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TECHNOLOGY

AWS and SoftwareOne collaborate on RISE with SAP

Published

6 days ago

November 22, 2023

Max

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SoftwareOne Holding AG, a global provider of end-to-end software and cloud technology solutions, have partnered to help customers transition to RISE with SAP on an AWS cloud environment.

Called the Ready for RISE on AWS bundle, it combines SoftwareOne’s deep SAP advisory and implementation knowledge with AWS technologies to expedite a client’s SAP transformation journey.

The collaboration comes at a time when there is growing pressure on organisations to decide how to modernise their SAP environments driven in part by the end of mainstream support for SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) in 2027. Despite the imminent deadline, many organisations are still confused as to which path to take, including when to adopt RISE with SAP, SAP’s bundled offering of cloud solutions, infrastructure, and services that helps migrate SAP ERP to the cloud.

Ireneusz Hołowacz, Director of Application Development Center at GAVDI Polska, said: “A stable, efficient, and cost-effective environment for consultants and programmers is one of the most important priorities of our daily work. Thanks to the migration of our SAP systems to the AWS cloud with the help of SoftwareOne, GAVDI Polska has achieved all the goals set for this process.

In a survey recently conducted by SoftwareOne with Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) – the full details of which will be revealed in January 2024 – showed that while 42% of respondents were familiar with RISE with SAP, 40% had heard of it but weren’t familiar with the details and 18% had never heard of it. Over half (52%) said they were still unsure how RISE with SAP would impact their existing relationship with cloud service providers.

“SAP customers have implemented some of the most comprehensive and complex enterprise systems in the industry and moving them to cloud services like AWS requires many important decisions to be made to optimise these investments,” says Joshua Greenbaum, Principal at EAC. “SoftwareOne’s extensive experience in the SAP ecosystem, combined with its unique capabilities around system rationalisation, cost containment, contracts and licenses, and cloud service management, among others, will provide customers deploying on AWS with the ability to make the most of RISE on SAP and other SAP offerings. Ready for RISE on AWS is an important offering for SAP customers at this critical moment in their business transformations.”

The Ready for RISE on AWS bundle will help clients understand their SAP transformation options and offer a comprehensive solution to organisations who consider RISE with SAP. It includes advisory data preparation, conversion services, data and AI, cloud innovation platform, supporting the entire journey to RISE on AWS. Clients will benefit from accelerated Return on Investment (ROI), optimal data management, and cost-saving strategies while laying the foundation for ongoing innovation and long-term business success.

Matt Schwartz, worldwide director, SAP Alliance & Partner Network at AWS, said: “As a valued AWS Premier Consulting Partner, AWS is working closely with SoftwareOne to offer SAP customers comprehensive assistance through each step of their journey to RISE with SAP on AWS. SoftwareOne’s ability to bundle Advisory, Data & AI, Cloud Platform, and Operations considerations can be of high interest to customers who are seeking to understand RISE with SAP as well as the cloud native and operation considerations that surround and support the RISE with SAP construct.”

PF Grillet, SAP Business Lead at SoftwareOne, said: “There are many choices available to SAP clients who know they need to modernise but aren’t sure of the best option, particularly given the business-critical nature of the applications.

“All of our services are centered around our customers and what is right for them. This includes supporting and optimising RISE with SAP in scenarios when it’s the right decision based on their requirements. Our extensive knowledge of and relationship with AWS means we can help them better prepare and achieve a seamless transition to S/4HANA using RISE with SAP on AWS with reduced costs and risks. This collaboration goes beyond preparing businesses for change; it’s making transformation and becoming innovation-ready a reality using AWS technologies.”

The offering includes SNP tooling to reduce a customer’s data footprint and accelerate migration. SoftwareOne will migrate selected data to an AWS data lake, accelerate innovation readiness and ensure SAP data is suitable for broader data analytics and AI use cases. Clients gain access to innovative tools like AWS’ Sagemaker for Machine Learning, continuous data management and optimisation within the AWS environment. The AWS innovation platform also includes Amazon Bedrock that helps organisations accelerate adapting Large Language Models and deploying GenAI use cases that leverage the extended data set.

“While the future innovation opportunities are exciting, clients need to balance these with a pragmatic approach to costs,” explained Marilyn Moodley, Country Leader for South Africa and WECA at SoftwareOne, “We integrate ‘Cost-Out’ recommendations into the core of our services, providing a more cost-effective solution for customers, like reducing the data footprint size and optimising storage and archiving.

“Our expertise in the complexities of SAP licensing further drives cost savings while our FinOps capabilities enable customers to optimise their AWS cloud spend and effectively manage their AWS cloud environment, ensuring full transparency in their budgets. The overall result is a significantly reduced time for RISE migration, which translates into a quicker time to value.”

Tags: AWS, partnership, SAP, SoftwareOne, transition

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TECHNOLOGY

Appian unveils winners of its International Partner Awards

Published

7 days ago

November 22, 2023

Max

Software firm Appian has announced the winners of its 2023 International Partner Awards at the Appian Europe conference in London.

The awards recognise partners who have demonstrated exceptional dedication, innovation and excellence in leveraging the Appian Platform to deliver transformational business value to clients through end-to-end process automation.

Christopher O’Connell, VP of Partners & Alliances, said: “These exceptional partners have successfully delivered excellent business outcomes with our European customers by implementing process automation with the Appian Platform.

“This year’s winners have showcased unwavering commitment, innovation, and transformative power by partnering with Appian. We’re proud to recognize their achievements at the 2023 Appian International Partner Awards. Their dedication and passion for excellence exemplify the values we hold dear at Appian, and we look forward to further collaboration in the journey of innovation and transformation.”

The winners are as follows:

Delivery Award – EY

EY Italy is the proud recipient of the Delivery Award, which acknowledges their unwavering commitment to excellence and project delivery for an Italian energy customer. EY Italy’s innovative project management, attention to detail, and seamless integration of the customer’s unique needs into the solution led to transformative outcomes. Their deep understanding of Appian’s capabilities and passion for delivering exceptional value has accelerated project timelines and enhanced the overall quality of deliverables.

Innovation Award – KPMG UK

KPMG’s end-to-end Customer Due Diligence (CDD) service reduces the average case handling time and improves the first-time resolution of cases, allowing global banking institutions to focus back on the core parts of their business. KPMG leverages the Appian Platform to implement continuous improvements and customer data insights throughout the lifetime of the engagement. KPMG ensures a customised and rapid implementation of the CDD service, tailored to each client’s specific business needs. KPMG has built over 5,000 reusable Appian objects and with their onshore/offshore Appian delivery capability has reduced end-to-end platform build time by 40%.

Growth Award – Minsait, an Indra Company

Minsait receives the Growth Award for their remarkable expansion of the Appian practice. In the past year, they increased the number of globally certified practitioners by over 25%. Minsait’s commitment to education is evident through its internal training practice, which has successfully educated more than 200 students, and its collaboration with local universities to certify 100 additional consultants in 2024. To support their growth, Minsait has established a Centre of Excellence, extending their expertise across Europe, LATAM, and the Philippines.

Transformation Award – PwC Spain

PwC is the recipient of the Transformation Award for their remarkable project at one of the top 10 insurance companies in Europe. PwC’s comprehensive transformation involved decommissioning the customer’s legacy platform and migrating all applications (which serve over 25,000 users) to the Appian Platform. This transformation enables the customer to handle complex workflows, develop new applications, and adapt to future business needs with agility.

Partner of the Year for EMEA Channel Sales – VASS

VASS is recognised as the Partner of the Year for EMEA Channel Sales in acknowledgement of their outstanding contributions to Appian’s growth and success in the region. As a leading provider of transformative digital solutions and consulting in 22 countries on four continents, VASS has achieved the highest annual contract value (ACV) in the region through close partnership and collaboration as an Appian reseller.

Tags: Appian, awards

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