David Linthicum is an SVP at Cloud Technology Partners, and was just named the #1 cloud influencer via a recent major report by Apollo Research. David is a cloud computing thought leader, executive, consultant, author, and speaker. He has been a CTO five times for both public and private companies, and a CEO three times in the last 25 years. Few individuals are true giants of cloud computing, but David’s achievements, reputation, and stellar leadership has earned him a lofty position within the industry. It’s not just that he is a top thought leader in the cloud computing universe, but he is often the visionary that the wider media invites to offer its readers, listeners, and viewers a peek inside the technology that is reshaping businesses every day. With more than 13 books on computing, more than 5,000 published articles, more than 500 conference presentations, and numerous appearances on radio and TV programs, David has spent the last 20 years leading, showing, and teaching businesses how to use resources more productively and innovate constantly. He has expanded the vision of both startups and established corporations as to what is possible and achievable.

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Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

David’s lifelong passion is to help drive the ability for us to effectively and efficiently use software and hardware by getting the government and companies to utilize these resources in better ways. His perspective was shaped by his experiences of being brought up all over the world and spending most of it in Hawaii. He lived his life in military bases and had seen firsthand how they do things very efficiently and this impacted his perspective on how he uses resources.

David is a programmer by trade and as he got into organizations, he was tapped and pushed to lead the technologists. He took these roles early on in his career and got the chance to manage people and learn from his mistakes – including those with many zeros in the end. The biggest pivot of his career was the time when he became CTO of SAGA Software as this was his real, official CTO role. He was now responsible for a lot of things and it was a lot of burden and stress for a 30+ person but this was how he grew his career.

Cloud Technology Partners is a consulting organization with the ability to do specialized projects to work with companies to enable them to leverage technology better. He works in the digital enabling team where they help people get over the impediments of moving to the cloud. They are growing in leaps and bounds – he started in the company with 10 people and now, they have grown to over 200.

David shares how they help clients leverage technology better by coming in and working with them in their journey in moving to the cloud. This includes triaging their existing applications, setting up the migration factory, and rewriting applications to work with the platform that they are moving into.

How do you prioritize? You do it to align with the business. You ask what has to occur, the money you can spend, what are the objectives and the impact to moving to the cloud and how you measure success. From here, you decide which to prioritize in terms of what applications to move, databases which need to be migrated and transformed, additional technology that needs to be layered in and all that.

Security is the obstacle that comes up most often that cloud computing has the greatest impact on because for clients, their data is sacred that it needs to stay within company premises. But the biggest opportunity that cloud computing can actually offer is also security. You move to the cloud where advance security encryption are in place so your information is typically more secure than where it came from. Agility is also one of the advantages as you can build and process things more quickly without going through cycles and cycles of software and hardware buys.

Mobile needs to be ubiquitous in terms of the ability to develop applications that are customer facing and has to be systemic with most of the clouds out there. All of the major cloud providers have mobile-based platforms and thousands of technologies and companies out there have mobile-based computing. The cloud is usually where the action occurs and everything else we carry just becomes terminals. So when David develops something, he ensures that it has a mobile component and that it can communicate to different platforms…all these things have to be built in.

Rapid Fire Questions

• What is your definition of innovation?

Innovation is the ability to create something that didn’t exist currently to solve a core problem.

• Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why?

I put more emphasis on the execution. It’s easy to have ideas but the ability to execute on those ideas and make them happen – that where the rubber meets the road. 90% execution and idea is 50%

• What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far?

Don’t hack anybody off as it is a very small world and you are going to see them again.

• What is your favorite business book?

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

• What is your favorite digital resource?

YouTube

InfoWorld

• What is your favorite app and why?

MyFitnessPal