In this episode of Infrastructure Matters, hosts Camberley Bates, Krista Macomber, and Steven Dickens discuss recent developments in IT infrastructure, with a focus on security, cloud computing, and data protection. They highlight the enduring impact of strategic partnerships and investments among major companies, underscoring the importance of cybersecurity and cloud solutions in today’s IT landscape. They also discuss updates from the NAB Show in Las Vegas, discussions on the significance of sovereign clouds, and the potential ramifications of recent acquisitions in the tech space.
Key Points:
- Cohesity recently completed its Series F funding round, supported by major companies like IBM and NVIDIA, emphasizing the critical role of data protection in cybersecurity.
- Commvault announced its acquisition of Appranix, enhancing its capabilities in recovering entire application stacks, especially for cloud-hosted applications.
- Cisco introduced Hypershield, integrating AI with network management to improve security and vulnerability management.
- Recent investments in sovereign clouds by Oracle, IBM, and AWS illustrate a growing trend towards localizing cloud services to meet regulatory and latency issues.
- Future expectations for the industry, such as the potential IPO of Rubrik and the ongoing strategic developments in cloud and cybersecurity.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this webcast. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this webcast.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Camberley Bates: Well, good morning everyone. We are back on a Friday doing our recording from all of our trips and travels and conversations this week. This is Infrastructure Matters, and thank you for joining us again. I’m Camberley Bates. I’m going to be hosting today with, of course, my bestie friendzies, Krista Macomber, who you know from New Hampshire; and Steven Dickens, who you know from New York. And myself, I’m in Boulder, Colorado, which right now is snowing.
Steven Dickens: Oh, you still got snow?
Camberley Bates: A little bit of snow on the beautiful pink blossoms to the blossoming trees. Confusion abounds with all the plants.
Steven Dickens: Does that mean there’s skiing still going on? Have you still got skiing? These people still getting out?
Camberley Bates: Arapahoe Basin will be open until probably July.
Steven Dickens: Oh.
Camberley Bates: I don’t know. I don’t know how late they’re going to stay open. The snow is not that thick this year, but yes, most of them are either this is the last weekend where you have the big huge puddle jump thing. You ski jump, jump over the puddle or land in the puddle, which is pretty damn freaking cold.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, my daughters went skiing last weekend. They didn’t do that, but watched people make a fool of themselves doing that.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. There’s a few that will stay open really late. But Arapahoe Basin is up at 9,000 feet is the base, so it’s pretty cold. We have got a really good round up here and lots of announcements, especially coming out of the security crew and the data protection crew. And we’re going to talk a little bit about sovereign cloud, what is happening there. I’m reporting out from the NAB Show, which is National Association of Broadcast, a big show that’s in Vegas which has got lots of cool toys.
And also, some of the gathering that we had here in Boulder with our RTN user class that we host. So stay tuned and buckle up, here we go guys. Okay, so let’s go with Krista. Do you want to cover a couple of those big announcements that happened like Cohesity and Commvault and Cisco?
Krista Macomber: The list-
Steven Dickens: You’ve had a busy week this week. It’s the Krista Macomber Show this week.
Krista Macomber: It really has been, to be honest with you. Just to start working down the list. Cohesity announced the completion of its Series F funding round, and it had two little companies that backed it by the tune of IBM and NVIDIA.
Steven Dickens: Just some small little names that nobody’s heard of, right?
Krista Macomber: Certainly, these little no names. Obviously, very far from it. I think from my perspective, I did see some coverage that the funding round was approximately $150 million. I did not see anything confirmed by Cohesity. But again, I think from my perspective, the fact that it has been backed in this round by IBM and NVIDIA, it really shows I think a couple things. The first being really the criticality of data when we start to think about cyber security and cyber resiliency, which of course, as we’ve talked about on many episodes here, really are strategic board level priorities.
Just to double-click down into each company here. For IBM, IBM and Cohesity announced last year the creation of what they call IBM Storage Defender. And what Storage Defender is, is it’s effectively a collection of IBM technologies, and also Cohesity technologies, including DataProtect, which is Cohesity’s, its core, its flagship data protection platform, into a solution for cyber resiliency that is designed to address the ability to protect not only your range of sources, whether it be on-prem virtualized environments, cloud-based SaaS applications, things of that nature, but also to have capabilities like threat detection, the ability to accelerate recovery, and things of that nature. I would say from my perspective, it really shows the continued investment in that partnership from both ends. Camberley, I know you and I put our heads together on a research note for that, and you had a few comments as well, especially the IBM point of view.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. There is also some comments coming from the class and I’ll bring that up now. One of the first things we do in the class… And who’s attending there are all Fortune 100 size companies by the way, so. And Steven would love it to say, yeah, they were mainframe folks as well as the open systems people, but all big companies. One of the first things we do is we ask the students about what is top of mind in IT data centers. Three-quarters of them said, which you would love, security. Security is top of mind so it plays right into this. That is the number one issue in the IT infrastructure people that we’re talking to. To that, we did also talk about this purchase or there’s actually this investment that’s been made and the significance of it.
One of the things is IBM has got a very old data protection system called, used to be called Tivoli, it’s called TSM, it’s now called Protect. They need an update. They need an update. So there is a migration here, which is why they’ve got the scale out capability of Cohesity for some of those people over time, but it’s very, very long haul to get there. Probably one of the bigger things that they’re interested in is the Helios capability, which is that cloud management as you know very well, unless you comment on that about what that means and possibly bringing the investment in there. But for Cohesity, it gives them this incredible channel and this incredible geo-support services that’s worldwide in IBM. For IBM, it gives them new products that’s really needed, especially since security is top of mind and data protection is part of that suite that they need to come to the market with.
Steven Dickens: One thing for me looking at this from the outside, is this IBM placing a bet for an acquisition three years, four years down the track and go in, this is a technology that we’re going to go from strategic partnership to acquiring these guys at some point. Or am I reading between the lines and adding two plus two and getting 38?
Camberley Bates: Don’t know, and this is, and I’ll let her comment on as well, but they’ve done almost no acquisitions from the data storage people, none in years and years and years. The last thing that was done was Cleversafe for cause, but that was done by the cloud people. That was not done by the storage people. We’ve seen the storage, there’s investment in the storage, there’s engineering in the storage, we have not seen them do any of that. The answer to that is a big huge maybe, and that may be because they are heavily troubling down on cybersecurity and that’s what’s needed.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, don’t see IBM Ventures that prominently so this one got my spider sense going. IBM Ventures doubling down at Series F in a big name. Okay, why is IBM Ventures doing that? That was just what, I mean I don’t track the base anywhere as nearly as closely as both of you do, but I was looking at it purely from a, is this a precursor to, they’ve got a technology alliance, they’re now going to be on the cap sheet, the cap table. Is this something I can predict going forward? I mean, what’s your view, Kristen? What do you think you’ve watched this space more than anybody?
Krista Macomber: I would agree with Camberley’s assessment. Possibly, I think the other factor at play here is the pending acquisition that Cohesity itself is making of the data protection arm of Veritas, which would include net backup and it would include the Alta SaaS data protection business. So obviously to Camberley’s point regarding the additional traction within the enterprise, for example, that Cohesity is attaining through the IBM partnership, it’s going to get a big boost, assuming that acquisition does go through possibly later this year. We’re still obviously waiting for all the regulatory approvals and things of that nature. That would certainly change some of the dynamics in terms of the evaluation of the combined company and things of that nature. That would be, I would say the big question mark for me.
Camberley Bates: Let’s move on. We’ll just quickly touch on Commvault’s little acquisition that they had, which was honestly a little acquisition as opposed to.
Krista Macomber: This one was interesting. Commvault had its sales kickoff this week, and at that event, it announced that it is acquiring a company called Appranix. And what Appranix does is it essentially does fill application stack recovery for cloud-based applications. The way we can break this down and think about it is that Commvault has those capabilities around recovery of data, whether that be our traditional backup and operational recovery or whether it be from a DR perspective. But what Appranix brings to the table is the ability to recover that entire application stack, and in particular the fact that Appranix focuses on cloud-hosted applications. I also saw on its website some support for Kubernetes containerized applications as well.
Camberley Bates: It’s bundling all the secrets and everything else into that recovery. Okay.
Krista Macomber: Yeah, exactly. To that point, Camberley, what’s really notable and interesting here is that that is a very complex process. Whether it be on-prem, in the cloud, whether it be virtualized or containers, it’s always a complicated complex process to recover the entire application stack, but it becomes even more so in the cloud and in a Kubernetes environment for some of the reasons that you’re referencing. For example, in the Kubernetes world, all of the secrets. From a cloud perspective, we have the additional abstraction that occurs, which further limits the visibility into the underlying infrastructure resources for example.
I really think it’s a great move from Commvault, and it really supports what we’ve heard from them. I attended their shift event last fall and similar to what we were discussing with Cohesity, Commvault is also driving towards a cyber resiliency strategy with its messaging and also its portfolio. When we think about resiliency really being minimizing not only data loss but also downtime, from my perspective, that’s where Appranix really can come into play for Commvault.
Camberley Bates: Great, cool. And then the last one, and we’ll come back to the rubric one in a bit, but the Cisco piece that the Hypershield AI.
Steven Dickens: It’s the Krista Show today. Just going on in your space.
Krista Macomber: Exactly.
Steven Dickens: I’m like the listeners and viewers, I’m sitting here listening, it’s going, what’s going on?
Krista Macomber: Yeah, there has been quite a bit this week, and I’m catching up a bit on this Cisco announcement, but it announced what it calls Hypershield. What Hypershield is Cisco is describing it as an architecture, and if I had to break it down, basically what it is it’s integrating artificial intelligence capabilities and observability into the network to be able to uncover vulnerabilities and then take actions automatically applying a patch, or even applying some micro segmentation within the network in order to be able to contain that threat.
A couple things jumped out for me. Number one, and I know Steven, you followed the Splunk acquisition pretty closely, so I think this is a really great example of how Cisco is going to use the Splunk technology and capabilities, especially from that observability and vulnerability assessment perspective. But also I find it really interesting-
Steven Dickens: Just on that, just to jump in-
Krista Macomber: Sure.
Steven Dickens: Do you see that as one of the first product integrations? I’ve not tracked Hypershield, I saw it come across, I’m thinking Krista’s got that one.
Krista Macomber: Sure, yeah.
Steven Dickens: It’s interesting. You’ve just made my spider sense go off. Is this a connection between Hypershield and what Splunk’s doing from an observability point of do you think it’s going to be at a product integration perspective?
Krista Macomber: That’s my understanding based on what I’ve seen. Again, we’re still getting some of the more technical details, but that’s my understanding and it certainly plays into the general themes of when we think about the network, obtaining that visibility and really using the network as the glue between applications and data and systems, and not only having that observability layer, but also in the case of Hypershield, having AI and automation to be able to automatically apply actions. And it’s-
Steven Dickens: Makes sense perfectly.
Krista Macomber: Yeah, it’s almost a little sneaky because from my perspective, Cisco, I mean they’re still the switch company. I mean, that’s still the heart of their business, so they are taking these adjacent steps outside of that. But I do think this is going to be another play to really make the core Cisco networking technology very even more sticky in customer’s environments than it already is, and maybe even find some new sales opportunities from that perspective. Obviously, that’s been a theme as far as I’ve been tracking Cisco.
Camberley Bates: We’ll come back to the last one a little bit later, but Steven, you had a topic that you wanted to cover, which is on the sovereign cloud based upon some actions that have been going on in the recent months.
Steven Dickens: This week Oracle announced its investment in Japan and what they’re building there all around sovereign cloud. I wrote a research note that should go live about IBM investing in its Canadian operations. I don’t know what you guys are like, but I write so many research notes that I’m like, “I’m sure I’ve covered this about AWS as well,” and I did, I covered it back in January, AWS also investing in Japan. I went back and read all three research notes to write the Oracle one. There’s a trend here. Three of the big five cloud providers were all investing in sovereign clouds. That’s a trend for me. Two of them in Japan, one of them in Canada. You go back, you read all the press releases, it’s consistency around as the geopolitical climate becomes what it is, and we sit on the edge of whatever’s going to kick off in the Middle East and all of this type of stuff.
I think regulators and governments are turning around to cloud providers and go, “I’d just like my data in our country, if that’s okay.” Just as a hedge against what’s going on from a geopolitical perspective. I think this is good for cloud providers. I think it gives them the ability to be closer to their clients from a latency. That’s a good thing just from a not having to take it from a Japan point of view across an ocean to get to another cloud provider or data sensor. There’s some technical latency benefits, but I think for me, sovereign clouds, we’re going to continue to see just a number of cloud instances at a country level just increase because if you’re a midsize western country, you’re going to want to have a cloud instance. I think the cloud providers going to be looking to invest more and more.
I think as I say, three research notes makes a trend is maybe the takeaway, but three announcements from three different cloud providers in three months stood out for me and that’s why I wanted to flag it today.
Camberley Bates: Interesting, okay. I mean, it makes a world of sense with what’s going on with the security side of house, the regulations that are coming down. The need to manage your, if you’re going to be doing anything with AI and how that AI data is stored and where it’s stored and what you’re doing with the data.
Steven Dickens: I think the regulators are starting to realize that where the data sits and where it resides as they try and regulate is important. They can then work with that cloud provider to go, if you’re going to put a big cloud instance in my geography and then my sovereign territory, I’m going to help you think about how we regulate the data. I mean, that’s not explicit, that level of government oversight on what the cloud providers are doing, but that must be happening as part of the investment.
I mean, these are multi-billion dollar investments. These aren’t small, oh, we’re just throwing up a little data center. These are big data center build outs, multi-year commitments. You’ve got to be doing that with federal grants, you’ve got to be doing that with the regulators. So maybe they don’t want to put that item be front and center about it, but it’s going to be part of the equation for sure.
Camberley Bates: I’m going to cover a couple of things. This week was the National Association of Broadcasting’s big show that they host in Las Vegas. About 65,000 people were there from around the world. It’s everything from cameras to satellite gear to big huge screens that you see wherever, and all the underlying technology.
Steven Dickens: I feel like I’m getting a fake case of FOMO here. I wish I’d known about this and gone, this sounds like proper-
Camberley Bates: It’s great fun. I mean, even on the upper deck of the convention center, they’re going to roll in the trucks that you see for broadcast, the news trucks and other stuff so that’s another. It’s spread out all over the convention center. It’s lined up by certain segments and areas together so you can troll the entire one area that’s your specific area that you cover. And specifically, I’ve been there many times on the storage side and it is a big storage show. Everything from your cloud to your tape. And it’s actually, I think it’s the last show for the tape providers other than probably the Supercomputing Show. And all the tape providers are there with their fun toys that they have. It is a big, big data storage show. When we go to conferences like in Dell or HPE or NetApp, Pure, all of them are highlighting one or another of the big film developers that they have some storage over there.
A couple things about them. When I talk about the capabilities you have, so you have the one piece of it, which is all the rendering and the design and the animation that you’re having to deliver on. Another piece is the data management for the data source. Think of yourself as being an ESPN and you need to recall immediately, or you need to snip it to have a comment. How do you do that? That’s the retrieval piece of it, but you also have to have all the data management to be able to find that information so that’s a big huge deal on there.
And then the last is preservation. Think about preservation of Gone with the Wind preservation of all those films from the 1920s, 1930s, where is that? In some cases, they still have the fabric of the film that was done and it’s stored in special places, but we also have all this information so they can retrieve it and use it. Think about the latest Terminator film. I know I go to Terminators. Latest Terminator films is going to have little snippets of young Arnold Schwarzenegger from the original film, so they’re going to have to retrieve that. Think of how all that, there’s all different platforms and environments for retrieving. It’s a constant change and update and especially when we go to more high density filming, and that takes it in a logarithmic scale in terms of expanding how much we have to source. There’s-
Steven Dickens: That’s interesting, Camberley. I wrote about the Masters was last weekend. I’m a huge Masters fan. I wrote about IBM and their Masters app and what they’re doing. And it’s interesting, I think that fan experience. I watched some of the Masters coverage on their website. You could watch multiple different holes, you could watch multiple different groups. I remember watching the Masters years ago and it was like you got what the TV producer said you were going to get, and you didn’t have the ability to choose.
Now, it’s the ability to curate an experience as the end user and say, “Hey, I want to watch this group play.” I don’t really want to watch the TV broadcast coverage, or I want to watch aim in corner, I want to watch all the groups come through these three or four holes because that’s what I’m interested in. That’s capturing all this footage. But your point is it’s a retrieval perspective because I’m curating my experience, not the producer of the live stream. I’m doing that on a mobile app or I’m doing it on a website. Broadcasts changed I suppose is my point. Thinking about it from the, you know IBM does a great job of that Master’s app and that website has done for years. They do the same for Wimbledon, they do the same for the US Open. They do those as their three big events. It’s interesting to see how that fan experience has changed across all three of those. Just a microcosm.
Camberley Bates: It’s amazing industry and the challenges that they have with data they’ve had and how big it’s gotten. A couple, they do have a big best of show awards from the NAB Awards, and there were categories. There’s not a storage, well, there is a storage category. There’s an infrastructure category that includes the storage. There’s a network security category. There’s cameras, and there’s all the other stuff that they’re using there as well. But some of the award winners there were Hammerspace for their Hyper NAS. Best of show award, Quantum for their ActiveScale, which is an object storage system that’s been around for a long time.
LucidLink and Resilio are in the same space, but not quite in terms of the design, but that is being able to do global file management and use. Collaboration is really super important because I may have somebody in Tanzania and somebody in Montana working on, maybe or maybe not, the same system and in editing and doing design work and how do you do that and allow people to live wherever they want to live. And the last one that came up that I’ll call out was Seagate rolled out their new drive will be heavily used. The Hammerdrive will be heavily used in this market, which is a 30 terabyte drive. It’s got a lot of room to grow there. Congratulations to the guys-
Steven Dickens: Two terabytes on one drive. Jesus. I mean, I was with storage, what was it? 10, 15 years ago, and we’re 30 terabytes on one drive. I mean that just, maybe I’m showing my age, but.
Camberley Bates: You are, but that’s okay.
Steven Dickens: That’s a genuine reaction to that.
Camberley Bates: Because we’re talking about 64 terabytes on a solid state drive, QLC drive.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, it’s crazy, isn’t it? The volume.
Krista Macomber: It’s really-
Camberley Bates: And we’re just eating it all up, so. I always think about how are we possibly going to use all this, but we always seem to take it on. Some congratulations to them. I want to wrap it up with this last piece of it, and I think we might’ve touched on this last week, but I want to bring it in, Rubrik IPO. I think for me, it’s important because we’re just now starting to see the IPOs happening again. It’s been a while and having something come from what I would call a real infrastructure company, that’s pretty darn interesting as well that we have that’s coming of age and probably expecting several others to come feed through. But Krista, I know this is your space because it’s cybersecurity, but I think we’re all watching it to see how this one’s going to play out based upon the rest of the year is going to look like.
Krista Macomber: We are waiting patiently. We are certainly waiting patiently. And I did write a research note on this so we can make sure to link to that in the show notes. Like you say, Camberley, it’s interesting because Rubrik, they have their roots in hardware. I mean, they were a hyperconverged data protection system at their start. Of course, they’ve been really moving towards cloud and a SaaS delivered model, and really leaning into security and cyber resiliency with their messaging and their capabilities. I did take a look at least portions of the S-1 filing, and so we can certainly see there are some signs of success when it comes to shifting that revenue model. I have that their subscription annual recurring revenue grew 47% year to year, which is pretty healthy. Just over 784 million for their fiscal year, which ended January 31st of this year, 2024.
Of course they do have growing net losses year to year as well. I think when we talk about the IPO climate, I think it’s interesting because we do continue to see companies that are reporting these net losses that are not substantial going IPO, but I think it really just does show the investment that is needed for a company like Rubrik to make this transition. For example, they made an acquisition last year of a company called Laminar that plays in the data security posture management space and will help with that vulnerability identification and security story. It’s certainly not unusual to see a company post some losses. I think there certainly is pressure to raise quite a bit with the IPO so once it is announced and proceeds, it’ll be interesting to see. But certainly just some hot takes there.
Camberley Bates: We had discussion in the class on this. We were talking about Rubrik’s pending IPO with the crew, and the questions came up, but well, when is Cohesity doing this? And we said probably not, they’ve got to absorb the stuff that’s going on right now and it’s going to happen. We also started talking about what else might be coming out. One of them that has talked about it, but they need to release some of the products soon, which is vast, which we would expect sometime in the next 12 months to happen in that. Then we went into talking about how long Pure Storage, Pure has been delivering positive results now. I mean, it’s been five years or whatever before they take their profit.
The same thing we saw with Nutanix, but one of the things that’s going on there, especially Pure Storage, the pressure was get the footprints in. If I get the footprint in, I can grow it, get it bigger. But if I don’t get the footprint in, I’m not going to get in there. There is that timeframe that companies that are new, that are new, that IPO that will continue as long as they’ve got cash in the bank continue to show a negative net income. But that drive is really in order to establish themselves with the accounts and spread and then turn their sites into managing the P&L.
Krista Macomber: Absolutely.
Camberley Bates: Well, that’s what we got I think. Do we got anything else here? That’s 30 minutes, folks.
Steven Dickens: Krista, is there nothing else that went on in your space this week? I mean, seriously?
Camberley Bates: Just boring.
Krista Macomber: Unfortunately, I cannot take any more meetings at RSA.
Camberley Bates: Oh, that’s next week, right?
Krista Macomber: It’s in two weeks. Been getting all the press emails and stuff like that, which is fantastic. We’ll have plenty to report from the show. I am hoping to have a minute here and there to grab a coffee and all that stuff. But yeah, it’s going to be.
Steven Dickens: Can we distribute you a care package in advance?
Krista Macomber: Literally. In fact-
Camberley Bates: Anything else?
Krista Macomber: Make a device that distributes caffeine into the IV, that might be ideal.
Steven Dickens: Comfortable shoes to walk around.
Krista Macomber: Yes.
Steven Dickens: A little infusion caffeine machine.
Krista Macomber: Exactly.
Steven Dickens: You’re going to be busy.
Krista Macomber: Exactly.
Steven Dickens: I think we can almost do an entire show on RSA in a couple of weeks.
Camberley Bates: I want to wrap the show with one last question. For all of our listeners, what is your number one strategy for managing it through a big show like this? Mine is have multiple different shoes, lots of different shoes, a different one for every day.
Steven Dickens: Well, I’ve noticed actually that the ladies are leaning into their sneaker game. I’m going to say trainers because I’m from the UK, but I really like how the ladies have just completely foregone the high heels, lent in.
Camberley Bates: What’s your number one strategy though? Your strategy?
Steven Dickens: Comfortable shoes.
Camberley Bates: No, for managing through the show.
Steven Dickens: You just got to muscle through it I think, it’s just.
Krista Macomber: I’m going to have to write down everywhere I need to be because.
Steven Dickens: Oh, I love it when a vendor curates where I’m supposed to be and is super up in my face about it. I really don’t want to have to think while I’m there.
Krista Macomber: Yeah, exactly.
Camberley Bates: Maybe that’s what we’ll do is we’ll do our top 10 lists of what we love vendors to do when we’re at a show.
Steven Dickens: Oh, yeah.
Camberley Bates: That sounds like a good one.
Krista Macomber: Got to give us a round up.
Camberley Bates: How to keep your analysts happy. All right guys, thank you very much. Appreciate you listening in. It’s been a great week, and we’ll see you next one.
Steven Dickens: See you soon.
Camberley Bates: Don’t forget to like, wherever the button is.
Steven Dickens: Like, subscribe, click.
Camberley Bates: Subscribe, do all those things. Thank you.
Steven Dickens: Do all the things, great.
Author Information
With a focus on data security, protection, and management, Krista has a particular focus on how these strategies play out in multi-cloud environments. She brings approximately a decade of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content, with a focus on IT infrastructure and data management and protection. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Krista led the data center practice for Evaluator Group and the data center practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research. She also created articles, product analyses, and blogs on all things storage and data protection and management for analyst firm Storage Switzerland and led market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
Krista holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Journalism with a minor in Business Administration from the University of New Hampshire.
Camberley brings over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career has spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley has provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
