We are very excited to introduce this week’s Friday Feature— @Tony Redmond! After a career in enterprise IT, most recently as VP of Technology Research at HP, Tony started his own consulting firm, Redmond & Associates. Read his interview here to learn about his career, his transition to consulting, and how he keeps up with a fast-paced industry.
Tony Redmond
Job Title: Principal
Company Name: Redmond & Associates
MVP Profile: https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/PublicProfile/9501?fullName=tony%20redmond
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonyredmond/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/12Knocksinna
Blog: https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/
- After a career in various tech roles, including most recently VP of Technology Research at HP, you started your own consulting firm. Could you share a little bit about what that transition was like?
My last ten years in corporate life were in various VP positions. Some of the work I enjoyed, but I hated the corporate bureaucracy, which is what led me to retire (gracefully) when the opportunity arose. My consulting business allows me to keep active with technology through engagements with customers, both large and small, mostly in the area of corporate strategy. Most of my work is in the area of corporate strategy, mainly around the challenges of maximizing benefits from moving to cloud services.
Corporate strategy was an area I was familiar with from my time at HP, so the transition was pretty painless. And when I get bored, I have the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to look after too – keeping up to date with developments in the service is an “interesting” challenge. The amount of change within Office 365 and the growth in knowledge about how to use Office 365 most effectively is such that we must publish a completely updated new book every Friday. Each week, we probably update five or six chapters of the 25 in total. While a small number of the updates are to correct typos and mistakes, the vast majority of what we change is to insert new knowledge that we have learned or to describe a new feature that Microsoft has shipped. After writing 14 books using traditional publishing methods, I think I understand how to create and ship books. The old model just cannot deal with the relentless pace of change within Office 365, which is why we end up publishing every Friday!
- How has IT changed since you first started your career?
The only guarantee you have in IT is that technology will change. I have worked on mainframes, minicomputers, PC LANs, client-server systems, and now the cloud. Some technology comes back (how many times have we reinvented threaded discussions?) but the biggest change is network connectivity. I don’t think anyone could have predicted quite how powerful and pervasive networking has become, especially in the era of mobile cloud connectivity.
- Over the course of your career, you’ve undoubtedly seen a lot of organizational challenges. Now in a consulting role, you’re in a position to help multiple clients. What are some common challenges across organizations, specifically regarding the transition to the cloud?
Changing the habits of a lifetime of on-premises work. ISVs struggle to change and upgrade their products for the cloud; organizations struggle to understand how best to leverage the cloud; and consultants struggle to help their clients deal with these issues, especially to figure out what to do next once the migration is over. Moving data is actually pretty easy and straightforward. It’s what happens afterward that makes the difference. Given that a lot of mundane system administration disappears in the cloud, anyone who works in IT now must focus on how to use the services now available to companies to solve real business problems instead of simply figuring out how to run applications like Exchange or SharePoint. Those who cope with reality and change their mindset to become a problem-solver instead of remaining a cost center will prosper. Those who stay with their heads in the sand probably have a short career span ahead of them.
- Where do you go to stay in front of new trends? What trends are you paying the most attention to these days?
Reading, talking to smart people, wondering, the same as I have always done to keep abreast of developments in technology. As to new trends, it is interesting to see AI revive and become important again. There was a time at the end of the 1980s when we thought that AI would be the next frontier. I have fond memories of playing Monopoly against a VAX mini-computer at the time and indeed, received a patent for what became the basis of email rules around then that was based on an AI program written in LISP. Unhappily, we neither had the computer power or the data to make AI really take off then. 30 years later, evidence of how technologies like the Office Graph is used within Office 365 makes me believe that we will see some pretty exciting developments in this space over the next few years.