What is your title and practice area within Deloitte Digital?
David Linthicum: As the chief cloud strategy officer, I am responsible for leading Deloitte Digital’s cloud strategy.
Tell us a little bit about your background and where you were before Deloitte Digital.
DL: Before joining Deloitte, I was the senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners where I grew the practice into a major force in the cloud consulting market. In this role, I primarily worked on IP creation, thought leadership and project management. This venture continued to grow and the firm was eventually sold to HPE in November 2017. Prior to that I had my own firm, Blue Mountain Labs, that I started in 2006 and ended up selling in 2010, where I was focused on the cloud enablement piece of the business, leading the company until 2013.
In addition to my work at Cloud Technology Partners and Blue Mountain Labs, I have been the chief technology officer, for four public and private companies, and have written 13 books on computing – my most recent book is on cloud computing. In my time away from work, I have been a cloud computing blogger for InfoWorld for the past 8 years and have published over 5,000 articles. I’m also a frequent guest on NPR as a cloud computing expert and enjoy a great working relationship with the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Fortune Magazine and the Economist.
What attracted you to Deloitte Digital?
DL: The potential! Deloitte Digital has deep expertise not only in technology, but in every other area that is important to business, including human capital and sector knowledge. In order to be successful, all of these areas have to work within a technology strategy. This is a core differentiator in the consulting services market and as cloud technology becomes not only effective, but strategic to the nature of business, Deloitte Digital is positioned to drive the market forward.
What do you believe sets us apart from the competition?
DL: We’re not only building technology to save our clients’ money and operate more efficiently, but we’re also allowing companies to disrupt their markets using technology to their strategic advantage. Deloitte was the only consulting firm seeing this vision and willing to invest towards dominating this emerging services market. I knew I wanted to be a part of a team that is like no other on the planet and I’ve found it.
What surprised you the most since starting at Deloitte Digital?
DL: The tools and resources available allow me to do my job better and faster. As someone who has worked within smaller companies before, I learned quickly that my job was mostly DIY. Everyone at Deloitte is so helpful and the automation of things that I’ve traditionally done manually is a welcomed change.
What do you see as the biggest area of growth for your discipline?
DL: The need to manage and optimized very complex systems that span both public cloud, and traditional data centers. It’s easy to push a bunch of workloads from the data center to the public cloud, but it’s a much more difficult matter to manage those resources successfully as a single entity that serves the needs of the business. They need governance, compliance, security, and other aspects of this technology that are defined with both best practices, as well as best of breed tech. This will be the majority of the cloud computing consulting services market by 2020 and beyond.
What do you think the future looks like for creative agencies?
DL: Guess what? You can’t create demand by leveraging the usual approaches. You need to be innovative and agile when approaching a new or exciting market. Agencies that can innovate and adapt are the ones that are going to lead the way.
What inspires you?
DL: Success stories where men and women have overcome significant challenges. You got to love the human spirit and how we’re programmed to overcome adversity
What's on your current playlist?
DL: Mostly tech podcasts, but when I do listen to music I turn to John Hyatt and some blues from Buddy Guy. The blues are timeless.