John Ottman Of Solix Technologies On The Most Important IT Management Trends of 2024
An Interview With Rachel Kline
Data Governance: With data volumes piling up across the enterprise, IT organizations are under immense pressure to manage, govern, and then monetize mountains of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Maintaining security and compliance over such a vast amount of data is a major challenge, and as we all know, the impact of a data breach or compliance failure can be severe, even threatening the entire business.
Information Technology, the backbone of modern business, is ever-evolving. Each year brings forth new paradigms, methodologies, and innovations, shaping the landscape of IT management. As we navigate through 2024, it’s crucial to grasp the trends that are steering the industry, from emergent technologies to shifts in managerial perspectives. These trends not only shape the way IT departments function but also determine the competitive edge for businesses across sectors. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing John Ottman.
John Ottman is Executive Chairman of Solix Technologies, Inc., a leading data fabric provider for Cloud Data Management and Enterprise Intelligence solutions. With an enterprise software career spanning over three decades, John’s experience includes senior executive roles with Oracle and IBM as well as Chairman/CEO/President/EVP and founder roles at high growth startups including Corio, Inc, (acquired by IBM), Princeton Softech (acquired by IBM), Application Security (acquired by Trustwave), and Minds, Inc. a leading, decentralized social network.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?
John lives in Connecticut with his wife Peggy and their two dogs. John and Peggy have three children, Bill, Elizabeth and Jack, who are married and now raising families of their own. John is an avid golfer, outdoorsman, and a guitar player who loves nothing more than hikes in the woods, weekend barbecues and jamming with friends.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My father was an intellectual, and chief among his goals for me was to gain a strong education. He made sure I attended great schools, and he drove me to make the most of it. Today, I would credit that education for providing me not just with reading, writing and arithmetic, but also the ability to comprehend, and critically think through difficult problems. I have hardly ever met a successful top executive who lacks these skills.
Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?
The first and most important strength to achieve success is resolve. Success requires firm determination to achieve goals, and everyone has the capacity to summon this super power from within. Resolve is hard, and requires self-discipline, very hard work, and sacrifices not everyone is always willing to make. The second key strength is working well with others. No one achieves success purely on their own. Success requires building consensus, and the ability to inspire others and motivate co-workers toward the goal. Finally, success requires skills. Be the critical expert in the room, become indispensable, and opportunity will follow you like a magnet. When others realize that their own path to success requires your involvement, opportunities to succeed will abound.
Which skills are you still trying to grow now?
All of them! There is no end-point when it comes to self improvement, and with technology continually evolving it is best to always be learning as much as possible about ‘the next big thing.’ In the last 10 years we have witnessed the emergence of big data, the cloud and now AI. These evolutions have brought a sea change of opportunity, and the truly wonderful aspect of a career in technology is that there is always another new innovation just around the next corner.
Let’s talk about IT management trends. What are the key IT management trends that have emerged or gained prominence in 2024, and why are they significant for businesses and organizations?
Digital transformation is, or should be, priority number one for any company seeking competitive advantage. But getting there is not easy, mostly because a new information architecture is required. Digital transformation impacts every aspect of IT management including storage, compute, networks and software. And new skills and processes are required as well. To become data-driven, organizations must learn how to leverage the mountains of data piling up so it can be monetized with data science, machine learning, advanced analytics and AI.
How has the ongoing evolution of cloud computing impacted IT management strategies in 2024, and what best practices should IT leaders adopt to harness its potential?
Today, the question isn’t about if an organization should go to the cloud, the larger concern is about how. The hyperscaler clouds have delivered spectacular innovation. Cloud native, management planes and control planes handle enormously complex, virtualized infrastructures with relative ease, and data planes now execute complex orchestrations that previously were just not possible. Successful adoption of these cloud architectures delivers best practice to an organization by default.
With the increasing importance of cybersecurity, what innovative approaches or technologies are being employed in IT management to enhance data protection and mitigate cyber threats in 2024?
For nearly all organizations, data governance has emerged as a top priority to ensure data security and compliance. But the problem of applying controls to all data in an organization is not easy. Unstructured, semi-structured and structured data is everywhere and growing exponentially in silos across the enterprise. Real-time feeds, social media, IOT, enterprise and workgroup apps pump out data all day long, and where it goes, sometimes no one knows. By collecting all this data into a central warehouse or repository, IT management gains a central point of control for security and data governance. Federated data governance provides end users with control over their own data, and IT Management maintains assurance the data is properly protected throughout its lifecycle.
As remote and hybrid work arrangements continue to be prevalent, how are IT management practices adapting to support a distributed workforce in 2024, and what challenges do they face in this context?
From backlog reviews to daily stand ups, most IT teams have adapted well to remote work arrangements. When managed with proper disciplines, project management systems and GitOps provide operational frameworks that rarely require face to face, in-person presence. Water cooler conversations and personal relationships may certainly suffer, but by trusting your team as responsible individuals, and by relying on well tuned operational processes, many organizations have learned that productivity increases and employee satisfaction grows in the right remote or hybrid environments.
Sustainability and environmental concerns have been gaining traction across industries. How is IT management addressing sustainability in 2024, and what steps can organizations take to integrate eco-friendly practices into their IT operations?
IT is a great place to focus on sustainability and environmental concerns. Computers are enormous consumers of energy and for some companies data center operations rank number one in terms of power consumption. Alternative energy strategies are interesting, but nothing reduces carbon footprint like a portfolio rationalization project. Gartner has stated that up to 20% of the application portfolio of a typical large enterprise is a candidate for retirement or modernization, and by reducing the data center footprint, huge energy savings are possible.
What are the 5 Most Important IT Management Trends of 2024?
1. Implement AI: Since ChatGPT took the world by storm, AI has emerged as the most important IT Management trend of our lifetime. No other IT innovation comes close to matching the potential of generative AI to increase productivity, improve efficiency and gain competitive advantage. But ChatGPT, and other “black box” AI solutions like it, also introduce substantial IT Management risks which are so severe that many leading organizations have banned their use by employees. The concern is over data governance and data security. The broad adoption of generative AI solutions in the enterprise must wait until organizations sort out their concerns over how to safely train AI apps with their sensitive enterprise data.
2. Data Governance: With data volumes piling up across the enterprise, IT organizations are under immense pressure to manage, govern, and then monetize mountains of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Maintaining security and compliance over such a vast amount of data is a major challenge, and as we all know, the impact of a data breach or compliance failure can be severe, even threatening the entire business.
3. Third generation data platforms: To achieve digital transformation and become a data-driven organization, a new information architecture is required. First generation data systems featured canonical, schema-on-write architectures that worked great for high volume, production data processing and data warehouse, but they were not flexible, and could only process structured data. Second
generation systems, called data lakes such as Hadoop, could handle all data in the enterprise including unstructured and sem-structured data, and they offered schema-on-read architecture which reduced ETL overhead on ingestion. But while data lakes stored the data at low cost, and made the data accessible, these systems lacked usefulness and proper data governance. Third generation data platforms take data lake architecture to the next level by adding a metadata layer to support machine learning, data science, and ACID transactions, all while providing robust data governance.
4. Data fabric: In the march toward digital transformation and the promise of becoming truly data-driven, companies require end-to-end data fabrics that seamlessly pipeline data from data collection at the source all the way through to their end-point use case such as AI or advanced analytics. Throughout this journey, the data must be stored safely at the lowest possible cost, be available for transaction processing, and also properly governed throughout its lifecycle.
5 . Open source platforms: Today more than ever, the pace of software innovation is driven by free and open source projects. Open source is built on industry standards such as W3C that have made systems more interoperable, programmable and reliable. And not only is open source free and accessible to everyone, open source software is truly portable, solving the problem of vendor lock-in.
Are there any underrated skills or qualities that you encourage others not to overlook?
Three super easy skills everyone can and should do: 1) Respond to all calls promptly and always in less than 24 hours, 2) be on time, and 3) be concise, to the point, and over-communicate when it’s important… like when a customer needs something.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Always encourage your organization to contribute to open source software in any way possible.
Remember that every software developer today is ‘standing on the shoulders of giants.’
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
