How the Journey to Modern Data Management is Paved with an Inclusive Edge-to-Cloud Data Fabric

Transcript of a discussion on the best ways widely inclusive data can be managed for today’s data-rich but too often insights-poor organizations. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

 

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next BriefingsDirect Voice of Analytics Innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into end-to-end data management strategies.

Gardner

As businesses seek to gain insights for more elements of their physical edge -- from factory sensors, myriad machinery, and across field operations -- data remains fragmented. But a Data Fabric approach allows information and analytics to reside locally at the edge yet contribute to the global improvement in optimizing large-scale operations.

Stay with us now as we explore how edge-to-core-to-cloud dispersed data can be harmonized with a common fabric to make it accessible for use by more apps and across more analytics.

To learn more about the ways all data can be managed for today’s data-rich but too often insights-poor organizations, we’re joined by Chad Smykay, Field Chief Technology Officer for Data Fabric at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Welcome, Chad.

 

Chad Smykay: Thank you.

 

Gardner: Chad, why are companies still flooded with data? It seems like they have the data, but they’re still thirsty for actionable insights. If you have the data, why shouldn’t you also have the insights readily available?

 

Smykay

Smykay: There are a couple reasons for that. We still see today challenges for our customers. One is just having a common data governance methodology. That’s not just to govern the security and audits, and the techniques around that -- but determining just what your data is.

 

I’ve gone into so many projects where they don’t even know where their data lives; just a simple matrix of where the data is, where it lives, and how it’s important to the business. This is really the first step that most companies just don’t do.

 

Gardner: What’s happening with managing data access when they do decide they want to find it? What’s been happening with managing the explosive growth of unstructured data from all corners of the enterprise?

 

Tame your data

 

Smykay: Five years ago, it was still the Wild West of data access. But we’re finally seeing some great standards being deployed and application programming interfaces (APIs) for that data access. Companies are now realizing there’s power in having one API to rule them all. In this case, we see mostly Amazon S3.

 

There are some other great APIs for data access out there, but just having more standardized API access into multiple datatypes has been great for our customers. It allows for APIs to gain access across many different use cases. For example, business intelligence (BI) tools can come in via an API. Or an application developer can access the same API. So that approach really cuts down on my access methodologies, my security domains, and just how I manage that data for API access.

 

Gardner: And when we look to get buy-in from the very top levels of businesses, why are leaders now rethinking data management and exploitation of analytics? What are the business drivers that are helping technologists get the resources they need to improve data access and management?

 

Smykay: The business drivers gain when data access methods are as reusable as possible across the different use cases. It used to be that you’d have different point solutions, or different open source tools, needed to solve a business use-case. That was great for the short-term, maybe with some quarterly project or something for the year you did it in.

Gaining a common, secure access layer that can access different types of data is the biggest driver of our HPE Data Fabric. And the business drivers gain when the data access methods are as reusable as possible.

 

But then, down the road, say three years out, they would say, “My gosh, we have 10 different tools across the many different use cases we’re using.” It makes it really hard to standardize for the next set of use cases.

 

So that’s been a big business driver, gaining a common, secure access layer that can access different types of data. That’s been the biggest driver for our HPE Data Fabric. That and having common API access definitely reduces the management layer cost, as well as the security cost.

 

Gardner: It seems to me that such data access commonality, when you attain it, becomes a gift that keeps giving. The many different types of data often need to go from the edge to dispersed data centers and sometimes dispersed in the cloud. Doesn’t data access commonality also help solve issues about managing access across disparate architectures and deployment models?

 

Smykay: You just hit the nail on the head. Having commonality for that API layer really gives you the ability to deploy anywhere. When I have the same API set, it makes it very easy to go from one cloud provider, or one solution, to another. But that can also create issues in terms of where my data lives. You still have data gravity issues, for example. And if you don’t have portability of the APIs and the data, you start to see some lock-in with the either the point solution you went with or the cloud provider that’s providing that data access for you.

 

Gardner: Following through on the gift that keeps giving idea, what is it about the Data Fabric approach that also makes analytics easier? Does it help attain a common method for applying analytics?

 

Data Fabric deployment options

 

Smykay: There are a couple of things there. One, it allows you to keep the data where it may need to stay. That could be for regulatory reasons or just depend on where you build and deploy the analytics models. A Data Fabric helps you to start separating out your computing and storage capabilities, but also keeps them coupled for wherever the deployment location is.

 

For example, a lot of our customers today have the flexibility to deploy IT resources out in the edge. That could be a small cluster or system that pre-processes data. They may typically slowly trickle all the data back to one location, a core data center or a cloud location. Having these systems at the edge gives them the benefit of both pushing information out, as well as continuing to process at the edge. They can choose to deploy as they want, and to make the data analytics solutions deployed at the core even better for reporting or modeling.

 

Gardner: It gets to the idea of act locally and learn globally. How is that important, and why are organizations interested in doing that?

 

Smykay: It’s just-in-time, right? We want everything to be faster, and that’s what this Data Fabric approach gets for you.

 

In the past, we’ve seen edge solutions deployed, but you weren’t processing a whole lot at the edge. You were pushing along all the data back to a central, core location -- and then doing something with that data. But we don’t have the time to do that anymore.

 

Unless you can change the laws of physics -- last time I checked, they haven’t done that yet -- we’re bound by the speed of light for these networks. And so we need to keep as much data and systems as we can out locally at the edge. Yet we need to still take some of that information back to one central location so we can understand what’s happening across all the different locations. We still want to make the rearview reporting better globally for our business, as well as allow for more global model management.

 

Gardner: Let’s look at some of the hurdles organizations have to overcome to make use of such a Data Fabric. What is it about the way that data and information exist today that makes it hard to get the most out of it? Why is it hard to put advanced data access and management in place quickly and easily?

 

Track the data journey

 

Smykay: It’s tough for most organizations because they can’t take the wings off the airplane while flying. We get that. You have to begin by creating some new standards within your organization, whether that’s standardizing on an API set for different datatypes, multiple datatypes, a single datatype.

 

Then you need to standardize the deployment mechanisms within your organization for that data. With the HPE Data Fabric, we give the ability to just say, “Hey, it doesn’t matter where you deploy. We just need some x86 servers and we can help you standardize either on one API or multiple APIs.”

 

We now support more than 10 APIs, as well as the many different data types that these organizations may have.

We see a lot of data silos out there today with customers -- and they're getting worse. They're now all over the place between multiple cloud providers. And there's all the networking in the middle. I call it silo sprawl.

 

Typically, we see a lot of data silos still out there today with customers – and they’re getting worse. By worse, I mean they’re now all over the place between multiple cloud providers. I may use some of these cloud storage bucket systems from cloud vendor A, but I may use somebody else’s SQL databases from cloud vendor B, and those may end up having their own access methodologies and their own software development kits (SDKs).

 

Next you have to consider all the networking in the middle. And let’s not even bring up security and authorization to all of them. So we find that the silos still exist, but they’ve just gotten worse and they’ve just sprawled out more. I call it the silo sprawl.

 

Gardner: Wow. So, if we have that silo sprawl now, and that complexity is becoming a hurdle, the estimates are that we’re going to just keep getting more and more data from more and more devices. So, if you don’t get a handle on this now, you’re never going to be able to scale, right?

 

Smykay: Yes, absolutely. If you’re going to have diversity of your data, the right way to manage it is to make it use-case-driven. Don’t boil the ocean. That’s where we’ve seen all of our successes. Focus on a couple of different use cases to start, especially if you’re getting into newer predictive model management and using machine learning (ML) techniques.

But, you also have to look a little further out to say, “Okay, what’s next?” Right? “What’s coming?” When you go down that data engineering and data science journey, you must understand that, “Oh, I’m going to complete use case A, that’s going to lead to use case B, which means I’m going to have to go grab from other data sources to either enrich the model or create a whole other project or application for the business.”

You should create a data journey and understand where you’re going so you don’t just end up with silo sprawl.

Gardner: Another challenge for organizations is their legacy installations. When we talk about zettabytes of data coming, what is it about the legacy solutions -- and even the cloud storage legacy -- that organizations need to rethink to be able to scale?

Zettabytes of data coming

Smykay: It’s a very important point. Can we just have a moment of silence? Because now we’re talking about zettabytes of data. Okay, I’m in.

Some 20 years ago, we were talking about petabytes of data. We thought that was a lot of data, but if you look out to the future, we’re talking about some studies showing connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices generating this zettabytes amount of data.

If you don’t get a handle on where your data points are going to be generated, how they’re going to be stored, and how they’re going to be accessed now, this problem is just going to get worse and worse for organizations.

Look, Data Fabric is a great solution. We have it, and it can solve a ton of these problems. But as a consultant, if you don’t get ahead of these issues right now, you’re going to be under the umbrella of probably 20 different cloud solutions for the next 10 years. So, really, we need to look at the datatypes that you’re going to have to support, the access methodologies, and where those need to be located and supported for your organization.

Gardner: Chad, it wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about how to manage big data, and Hadoop was a big part of that. NoSQL and other open source databases in particular became popular. What is it about the legacy of the big data approach that also needs to be rethought?

Smykay: One common issue we often see is the tendency to go either/or. By that I mean saying, “Okay, we can do real-time analytics, but that’s a separate data deployment. Or we can do batch, rearview reporting analytics, and that’s a separate data deployment.” But one thing that our HPE Data Fabric has always been able to support is both -- at the same time -- and that’s still true.

So if you’re going down a big data or data lake journey -- I think now the term now is a data lakehouse, that’s a new one. For these, basically I need to be able to do my real-time analytics, as well as my traditional BI reporting or rearview mirror reporting -- and that’s what we’ve been doing for over 10 years. That’s probably one of the biggest limitations we have seen.

But it’s a heavy lift to get that data from one location to another, just because of the metadata layer of Hadoop. And then you had dependencies with some of these NoSQL databases out there on Hadoop, it caused some performance issues. You can only get so much performance out of those databases, which is why we have NoSQL databases just out of the box of our Data Fabric -- and we’ve never run into any of those issues.

Gardner: Of course, we can’t talk about end-to-end data without thinking about end-to-end security. So, how do we think about the HPE Data Fabric approach helping when it comes to security from the edge to the core?

Secure data from edge to core

 

Smykay: This is near-and-dear to my heart because everyone always talks about these great solutions out there to do edge computing. But I always ask, “Well, how do you secure it? How do you authorize it? How does my application authorization happen all the way back from the edge application to the data store in the core or in the cloud somewhere?”

That’s what I call off-sprawl, where those issues just add up. If we don’t have one way to secure and manage all of our different data types, then what happens is, “Okay, well, I have this object-based system out there, and it has its own authorization techniques.” It has its own authentication techniques. By the way, it has its own way of enforcing security in terms of who has access to what, unless … I haven’t talked about monitoring, right? How do we monitor this solution?

So, now imagine doing that for each type of data that you have in your organization -- whether it’s a SQL database, because that application is just a driving requirement for that, or a file-based workload, or a block-based workload. You can see where this starts to steamroll and build up to be a huge problem within an organization, and we see that all the time.

We're seeing a ton of issues today in the security space. We're seeing people getting hacked. It happens all the way down to the application layer, as you often have security sprawl that makes it very hard to manage all of the different systems.

 

And, by the way, when it comes to your application developers, that becomes the biggest annoyance for them. Why? Because when they want to go and create an application, they have to go and say, “Okay, wait. How do I access this data? Oh, it’s different. Okay. I’ll use a different key.” And then, “Oh, that’s a different authorization system. It’s a completely different way to authenticate with my app.”

I honestly think that’s why we’re seeing a ton of issues today in the security space. It’s why we’re seeing people get hacked. It happens all the way down to the application layer, as you often have this security sprawl that makes it very hard to manage all of these different systems.

Gardner: We’ve come up in this word sprawl several times now. We’re sprawling with this, we’re sprawling with that; there’s complexity and then there’s going to be even more scale demanded.

The bad news is there is quite a bit to consider when you want end-to-end data management that takes the edge into consideration and has all these other anti-sprawl requirements. The good news is a platform and standards approach with a Data Fabric forms the best, single way to satisfy these many requirements.

So let’s talk about the solutions. How does HPE Ezmeral generally -- and the Ezmeral Data Fabric specifically -- provide a common means to solve many of these thorny problems?

Smykay: We were just talking about security. We provide the same security domain across all deployments. That means having one web-based user interface (UI), or one REST API call, to manage all of those different datatypes.

We can be deployed across any x86 system. And having that multi-API access -- we have more than 10 – allows for multi-data access. It includes everything from storing data into files and storing data in blocks. We’re soon going to be able to support blocks in our solution. And then we’ll be storing data into bit streams such as Kafka, and then into a NoSQL database as well.

Gardner: It’s important for people to understand that HPE Ezmeral is a larger family and that the Data Fabric is a subset. But the whole seems to be greater than the sum of the parts. Why is that the case? How has what HPE is doing in architecting Ezmeral been a lot more than data management?

Smykay: Whenever you have this “whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” you start reducing so many things across the chain. When we talk about deploying a solution, that includes, “How do I manage it? How do I update it? How do I monitor it?” And then back to securing it.

Honestly, there is a great report from IDC that says it best. We show a 567-percent, five-year return on investment (ROI). That’s not from us, that’s IDC talking to our customers. I don’t know of a better business value from a solution than that. The report speaks for itself, but it comes down to these paper cuts of managing a solution. When you start to have multiple paper cuts, across multiple arms, it starts to add up in an organization.

Gardner: Chad, what is it about the HPE Ezmeral portfolio and the way the Data Fabric fits in that provides a catalyst to more improvement?

 

All data put to future use

 

Smykay: One, the HPE Data Fabric can be deployed anywhere. It can be deployed independently. We have hundreds and hundreds of customers. We have to continue supporting them on their journey of compute and storage, but today we are already shipping a solution where we can containerize the Data Fabric as a part of our HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and also provide persistent storage for your containers.

 

The HPE Ezmeral Container Platform comes with the Data Fabric, it’s a part of the persistent storage. That gives you full end-to-end management of the containers, not only the application APIs. That means the management and the data portability.

 

So, now imagine being able to ship the data by containers from your location, as it makes sense for your use case. That’s the powerful message. We have already been on the compute and storage journey; been down that road. That road is not going away. We have many customers for that, and it makes sense for many use cases. We’ve already been on the journey of separating out compute and storage. And we’re in general availability today. There are some other solutions out there that are still on a road map as far as we know, but at HPE we’re there today. Customers have this deployed. They’re going down their compute and storage separation journey with us.

 

Gardner: One of the things that gets me excited about the potential for Ezmeral is when you do this right, it puts you in a position to be able to do advanced analytics in ways that hadn’t been done before. Where do you see the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric helping when it comes to broader use of analytics across global operations?

 

Smykay: One of our CMOs used to say it best, and which Jack Morris has said: “If it’s going to be about the data, it better be all about the data.”

 

When you improve automating data management across multiple deployments -- managing it, monitoring it, keeping it secure -- you can then focus on those actual use cases. You can focus on the data itself, right? That’s living in the HPE Data Fabric. That is the higher-level takeaway. Our users are not spending all their time and money worrying about the data lifecycle. Instead, they can now go use that data for their organizations and for future use cases.

 

HPE Ezmeral sets your organization up to use your data instead of worrying about your data. We are set up to start using the Data Fabric for newer use cases and separating out compute and storage, and having it run in containers. We’ve been doing that for years. The high-level takeaway is you can go focus on using your data and not worrying about your data.

 

Gardner: How about some of the technical ways that you’re doing this? Things like global namespaces, analytics-ready fabrics, and native multi-temperature management. Why are they important specifically for getting to where we can capitalize on those new use cases?

 

Smykay: Global namespaces is probably the top feature we hear back from our customers on. It allows them to gain one view of the data with the same common security model. Imagine you’re a lawyer sitting at your computer and you double-click on a Data Fabric drive, you can literally then see all of your deployments globally. That helps with discovery. That helps with bringing onboard your data engineers and data scientists. Over the years that’s been one of the biggest challenges, they spend a lot of time building up their data science and data engineering groups and on just discovering the data.

 

Global namespace means I’m reducing my discovery time to figure out where the data is. A lot of this analytics-ready value we’ve been supporting in the open source community for more than 10 years. There’s a ton of Apache open source projects out there, like Presto, Hive, and Drill. Of course there’s also Spark-ready, and we have been supporting Spark for many years. That’s pretty much the de facto standard we’re seeing when it comes to doing any kind of real-time processing or analytics on data.

 

As for multi-temperature, that feature allows you to decrease your cost of your deployment, but still allows managing all your data in one location. There are a lot of different ways we do that. We use erasure coding. We can tear off to Amazon S3-compliant devices to reduce the overall cost of deployment.

 

These features contribute to making it still easier. You gain a common Data Fabric, common security layer, and common API layer.

 

Gardner: Chad, we talked about much more data at the edge, how that’s created a number of requirements, and the benefits of a comprehensive approach to data management. We talked about the HPE Data Fabric solution, what it brings, and how it works. But we’ve been talking in the abstract.

 

What about on the ground? Do you have any examples of organizations that have bitten off and made Data Fabric core for them? As an adopter, what do they get? What are the business outcomes?

 

Central view benefits businesses

 

Smykay: We’ve been talking a lot about edge-to-core-to-cloud, and the one example that’s just top-of-mind is a big, tier-1 telecoms provider. This provider makes the equipment for your AT&Ts and your Vodafones. That equipment sits out on the cell towers. And they have many Data Fabric use cases, more than 30 with us.

 

But the one I love most is real-time antenna tuning. They’re able to improve customer satisfaction in real time and reduce the need to physically return to hotspots on an antenna. They do it via real-time data collection on the antennas and then aggregating that across all of the different layers that they have in their deployments.

One example is real-time antennae tuning. They're able to improve customer satisfaction in real time and reduce the need to physically return to hotspots on an antennae. They do it instead via real-time data collection and aggregating that across all of their deployments.

 

They gain a central view of all of the data using a modern API for the DevOps needs. They still centrally process data, but they also process it at the edge today. We replicate all of that data for them. We manage that for them and take a lot of the traditional data management tasks off the table for them, so they can focus on the use case of the best way to tune antennas.

 

Gardner: They have the local benefit of tuning the antenna. But what’s the global payback? Do we have a business quantitative or qualitative returns for them in doing that?

 

Smykay: Yes, but they’re pretty secretive. We’ve heard that they’ve gotten a payback in the millions of dollars, but an immediate, direct payback for them is in reducing the application development spend everywhere across the layer. That reduction is because they can use the same type of API to publish that data as a stream, and then use the same API semantics to secure and manage it all. They can then take that same application, which is deployed in a container today, and easily deploy it to any remote location around the world.

 

Gardner: There’s that key aspect of the application portability that we’ve danced around a bit. Any other examples that demonstrate the adoption of the HPE Data Fabric and the business pay-offs?

 

Smykay: Another one off the top of my head is a midstream oil and gas customer in the Houston area. This one’s not so much about edge-to-core-to-cloud. This is more about consolidation of use cases.

 

We discussed earlier that we can support both rearview reporting analytics as well as real-time reporting use cases. And in this case, they actually have multiple use cases, up to about five or six right now. Among them, they are able to do predictive failure reports for heat exchangers. These heat exchangers are deployed regionally and they are really temperamental. You have to monitor them all the time.

 

But now they have a proactive model where they can do a predictive failure monitor on those heat exchangers just by checking the temperatures on the floor cameras. They bring in all real-time camera data and they can predict, “Oh, we think we’re having an issue with this heat exchanger on this time and this day.” So that decreases management cost for them.

 

They also gain a dynamic parts management capability for all of their inventory in their warehouses. They can deliver faster, not only on parts, but reduce their capital expenditure (CapEx) costs, too. They have gained material measurement balances. When you push oil across a pipeline, they can detect where that balance is off across the pipeline and detect where they’re losing money, because if they are not pushing oil across the pipe at x amount of psi, they’re losing money.

 

So they’re able to dynamically detect that and fix it along the pipe. They also have a pipeline leak detection that they have been working on, which is modeled to detect corrosion and decay.

 

The point is there are multiple use cases. But because they’re able to start putting those data types together and continue to build off of it, every use case gets stronger and stronger.

 

Gardner: It becomes a virtuous adoption cycle; the more you can use the data generally, then the more value, then the more you invest in getting a standard fabric approach, and then the more use cases pop up. It can become very powerful.

 

This last example also shows the intersection of operational technology (OT) and IT. Together they can start to discover high-level, end-to-end business operational efficiencies. Is that what you’re seeing?

 

Data science teams work together

 

Smykay: Yes, absolutely. A Data Fabric is kind of the Kumbaya set among these different groups. If they’re able to standardize on the IT and developer side, it makes it easier for them to talk the same language. I’ve seen this with the oil and gas customer. Now those data science and data engineering teams work hand in hand, which is where you want to get in your organization. You want those IT teams working with the teams managing your solutions today. That’s what I’m seeing. As you get a better, more common data model or fabric, you get faster and you get better management savings by having your people working better together.

 

Gardner: And, of course, when you’re able to do data-driven operations, procurement, logistics, and transportation you get to what we’re referring generally as digital business transformation.

 

Chad, how does a Data Fabric approach then contribute to the larger goal of business transformation?

 

Smykay: It allows organizations to work together through a common data framework. That’s been one of the biggest issues I’ve seen, when I come in and say, “Okay, we’re going to start on this use case. Where is the data?”

 

Depending on size of the organization, you’re talking to three to five different groups, and sometimes 10 different people, just to put a use case together. But as you create a common data access method, you see an organization where it’s easier and easier for not only your use cases, but your businesses to work together on the goal of whatever you’re trying to do and use your data for.

 

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how a Data Fabric approach allows information and analytics to reside locally at the edge, yet contribute to a global improvement in optimizing large-scale operations.

 

And we’ve learned how HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric makes modern data management more attainable so businesses can dramatically improve their operational efficiency and innovate from edge to core to clouds.

 

So please join me in thanking our guest, Chad Smykay, Field Chief Technology Officer for Data Fabric at HPE. Thanks so much, Chad.

 

Smykay: Thank you, I appreciate it.

 

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this sponsored BriefingsDirect Voice of Analytics Innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-supported discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on the best ways widely inclusive data can be managed for today’s data-rich but too often insights-poor organizations. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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COVID-19 Teaches Higher Education Institutes to Embrace Latest IT to Advance Remote Learning

Transcript of a discussion on how colleges and universities must rapidly redefine and implement a new and dynamic and blended balance between in-person and remote learning interactions.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

 

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

Like many businesses, innovators in higher education have been transforming themselves for the digital age for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic nearly overnight accelerated the need for flexible new learning models.

 

As a result, colleges and universities must rapidly redefine and implement a new and dynamic balance between in-person and remote interactions. This new normal amounts to more than a repaving of centuries-old, in-class traditions of higher education with a digital wrapper. It requires re-invention -- and perhaps new ways of redefining – of the very act of learning itself.

 

Stay with us now as we explore how such innovation today in remote learning may also hold lessons for how businesses and governments interact with and enlighten their workers, customers, and ultimately citizens.

 

Here to share recent experiences in finding new ways to learn and work during a global pandemic are Chris Foward, Head of Services for IT Services at The University of Northampton in the UK. Welcome, Chris.

 

Chris Foward: Hi, Thanks. Nice to meet you, Dana.

 

Dana Gardner: We are also here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Welcome, Tim.

 

Tim Minahan: Hey, Dana, I’m excited to be here.

 

Gardner: And we’re here with Dr. Scott Ralls, President of Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome, Dr. Ralls.

 

Dr. Scott Ralls: Thank you, Dana. I’m glad to be with you.

 

Education sprints online

 

Gardner: Scott, tell us about Wake Tech Community College and why you’ve been able to accelerate your path to broader remote learning?

 

Ralls: Wake Tech is the largest college in North Carolina, one of the largest community colleges in the United States. We have 75,000 total students across all of our different program areas spread over six different campuses.

 

Ralls

In mid-March, we took an early step in moving completely online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But if we had just started our planning at that point, I think we would have been in trouble; it would have been a big challenge for us, as it has been for much of higher education.

 

The journey really began six years earlier with a plan to move to a more online-supported, virtual-blended world. For us, the last six months have been about sprinting. We are on a journey that hasn’t been so much about changing our direction or changing our efficacy, but really sprinting the last one-fourth of the race. And that’s been difficult and challenging.

 

But it’s not been as challenging as if you were trying to figure out the directions from the very beginning. I’ve been very proud of our team, and I think things are going remarkably well here despite a very challenging situation.

 

Gardner: Chris, please tell us about The University of Northampton and how the pandemic has accelerated change for you.

 

Foward

Foward: The University of Northampton has invested very heavily in its campus. A number of years ago and we built a new one called Waterside campus. The Waterside campus was designed to work with active blended learning (ABL) as an approach to delivering all course works, and -- similar to Wake Tech -- we’ve faced challenges around how we deliver online teaching.

 

We were in a fortunate position because during the building of our new campus we implemented all-new technology from the ground up -- from our plant-based systems right through to our backend infrastructure. We aimed at taking on new technologies that were either cloud-based or that allowed us to deliver teaching in a remote manner. That was done predominantly to support our ABL approach to delivery of education. But certainly the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the uptake of those services.

 

Gardner: Chris, what was the impetus to the pre-pandemic blended learning? Why were you doing it? How did technology help support it?

 

Foward: The University of Northampton since 2014 has been moving toward its current institutional approach to learning and teaching. We never perceived of this as a large-scale online learning or a distance learning solution. But ABL does rely on fluent and thoughtful use of technologies for learning.

Our teachers found that the work they've done since 2014 really did stand us in good stead as we were able to very quickly change from an on-campus-taught environment to a digital experience for our students.

 

And this has stood the university in good stead in terms of how we actually deliver to our students. What our lecturers and teachers found is that the work they’ve done since 2014 really did stand us in a good stead as we were able to very quickly change from an on-campus-taught environment to a digital experience for our students.

 

Gardner: Scott, has technology enabled you to seek remote learning, or was remote learning the goal and then you had to go find the technology? What’s the relationship between remote learning and technology?

 

Ralls: For us, particularly in community colleges, it was more the second in that remote learning is an important priority for us because a majority of our students work. So the issues of just having the convenience of remote learning started community colleges in the United States down the path of remote learning much more quickly than for other forms of higher education. And so that helped us years ago to start thinking about what technologies are required.

 

Our college has been very thoughtful about the equity issues in remote learning. Some students succeed in more remote learning platforms, while others struggle with what those solutions may be. It was much more about the need for remote learning to allow working students with the capacities and conveniences, and then looking at what the technologies are and the best practices to achieve those goals.

 

Businesses learn from schools’ success

 

Gardner: Tim, when you hear Chris and Scott describing what they are doing in higher education, does it strike you that they are leaders and innovators compared generally to businesses? Should businesses pay attention to what’s going on in higher education these days, particularly around remote, balanced, and blended interactions?

 

Minahan

Minahan: Yes, I certainly think they are leading, Dana. That leadership comes from having been prepared for this in advance. If there’s any silver lining to this global crisis we are all living through, it’s that it’s caused organizations and participants in all industries to rethink how they work, school, and live.

 

Employers, having seen that work can now actually happen outside of an office, are catching up similarly. They’re rethinking their long-term workforce strategies and work models. They’re embracing more flexible and hybrid work approaches for the long-term.

 

And lower costs and improved productivity and engagement are giving them access to new pools of talent that were previously inaccessible to them in the traditional work-hub model, where you build a big office or call center and then you hire folks to fill them. Now, they can remotely reach talent in any location, including retirees or stay-at-home parents, and caretakers. They can be reactivated into the workforce.

As Kids Do More Remote School,

Managers Have Extra Homework, Too

Similarly to the diversity of the student body you’re seeing at Wake Tech, to do this they need a foundation, a digital workspace platform, that allows them to deliver consistent and secure access to the resources that employees or staff -- or in this case, students -- need to do their very best work across any channel or location. That can be in the classroom, on the road, or as we’ve seen recently in the home.

 

I think going forward, you’re going to see not just higher education, which we are hearing about here, but all industries begin to embrace this blended model for some very real benefits, both to their employees and their constituents, but to their own organizations as well.

 

Gardner: Chris, because Northampton put an emphasis on technology to accomplish blended learning, was the technology typical a few years back – traditional, stack-based enterprise IT -- a hindrance? Did you need to rethink technology as you were trying to accomplish your education goals?

 

Tech learning advances agility

 

Foward: Yes, we did. When we built our new campus, we looked at what new technologies were coming onto the market. We then moved toward a couple of key suppliers to ensure that we received best-in-class services as well as easy-to-use products. We chose partners like Microsoft for our software programs, like Office, and those sorts of productivity products.

 

We chose Cisco for networking and servers, and we also pulled in Citrix for delivery of our virtual applications and desktops from any location, anywhere, anytime. It allows flexibility for our students to access the systems from a smartphone and see a specific CAB-type models if we join those through solutions we have. It allows our factor of business and law to be able to present some of this bespoke software that they use. We can tailor the solutions that they see within these environments to meet the educational needs and courses that they are attending.

 

Gardner: Scott, at Wake Tech, as president of the university, you’re probably not necessarily a technologist. But how do you not be a technologist nowadays when you’re delivering everything as remote learning? How has your relationship with technology evolved? Have you had to learn a lot more tech?

 

Ralls: Oh, absolutely, yes. And even my own use of technology has evolved quite a bit. I was always aware and had broad goals. But, as I mentioned, we started sprinting very quickly, and when you are sprinting you want to know what’s happening.

 

We are very fortunate to have a great IT team that is both thoughtful in its direction and very urgent in their movement. So those two things gave me a lot of confidence. It’s also allowed us to sprint to places that we wouldn’t have been able to had these circumstances not come along.

We are very fortunate to have a great IT team that is both thoughtful in its direction and very urgent in their movement. Those two things gave me a lot of confidence. It also allowed us to sprint to places that we wouldn't have been able to.

 

I will use an example. We have six campuses. I would do face-to-face forums with faculty, staff, and students, so three meetings on every campus but once a semester. Now, I do those kinds of forums most days with students, faculty, or staff using the technology. Many of us have found that with the directions we were going that there are greater efficiencies to be achieved in many ways that we would not have tried had it not been for the [pandemic] circumstances.

 

And I think after we get past the issues we are facing with the pandemic; our world will be completely changed because this has accelerated our movement in this direction and accelerated our utility of the usage as well.

 

Gardner: Tim, we have seen over the years that the intersection between business and technology is not always the easiest relationship. Is what we’re seeing now as a result of the pandemic helping organizations attain the agility that they perhaps struggled to find before? 

 

Minahan: Yes, indeed, Dana. As you just heard, another thing the pandemic has taught us is that agility is key. Fixed infrastructure -- whether it’s real estate, the work-hub-centric models, data centers with loads of servers, and on-premise applications -- has proven to be an anchor during the pandemic. Organizations that rely heavily on such fixed infrastructure have had a much more difficult time shifting to a remote work or remote learning model to keep their employees and students safe and productive.

 

In fact, by an anecdote, we had one financial services customer, a CIO, recently say, “Hey, we can’t add servers and capacity fast enough.” And so, similar to Scott and Chris, we’re seeing an increasing number of our customers moving to adopt more variable operating models in everything they do. They are rethinking the real estate, staffing, and their IT infrastructure. As a result, we’re seeing customers take their measured plans for a one- to three-year transition to the cloud and accelerated that to three months, or even a few weeks.

 

They’re also increasing adoption of digital workspaces so that they can provide a consistent and secure work or learning experience for employees or students across any channel or location. It really boils down to organizations building agility into their operations so they can scale up quickly in the face of the next inevitable, unplanned crisis -- or opportunity.

 

Gardner: We’ve been talking about this through the lens of the higher education institute and the technology provider. But what’s been the experience over the past several months for the user? How are your students at Northampton adjusting to this, Chris? Is this rapid shift a burden or is there a silver lining to more blended and remote learning?

 

Easy-to-use options for student adoption

 

Foward: I’ll be honest, I think our students have yet to adopt it fully.

 

There are always challenges with new technology when it comes in. The uptake will be mainly driven in October when we see our mainstream student cohorts come onboard. I do think the types of technologies we have chosen are key, because making technology simple to use and easy to access will drive further adoption of those products.

 

What we have seen is that our staff’s uptake on our Citrix environment was phenomenal. And if there’s one positive to take from the COVID-19 situation it is the adoption of technology. Our staff has taken to it like ducks to water. Our IT team has delivered something exceptional, and I think our students will also see a massive benefit from these products, and especially the ease of use of these products.

 

So, yes, the key thing is making the products easily accessible and easy to use. If we overcomplicate it, you won’t get adoption and you won’t get an experience that customers need when they come to our education institutions.

 

Gardner: Dr. Ralls, have the students adjusted to these changes in a way that gives them agility as they absorb education?

 

Ralls: They have. All of us -- whether we work, teach, or are students at Wake Tech – have gained more confidence in these environments than we had before. I have regular conversations with these students. There was a lot of uncertainty, just like for many of us working remotely. How would that all work?

 

And we’ve now seen that we can do it. Things will still change around the notions of making the adjustments we need to. And for many of our students, it isn’t just how things will it change in the class, but in all of the things that they need around that class. For example, we have tutoring centers in our libraries. How do we make those work remotely and by appointment? We all wondered how that would work. And now we’ve seen that it can work, and it does work; and there’s an ease of doing that.

Reimagining Education

In a Remote World

Because we are a community college, we’re an open-admissions college. Many of our students haven’t had the level of academic preparation or opportunity that others have had. And so for some of our students who have a sense of uncertainty or anxiety, we have found that there is a challenge for them to move to remote learning and to have confidence initially.

 

Sometimes we can see that in withdrawals, but we’ve also found that we can rally around our students using different tools. We have found the value of different types of remote learning that are effective. For example, we’re doing a lot of the HyFlex model now, which is a combination of hybrid and remote, online-based education.

 

Over time we have seen in many of our classes that where classes started as hybrid, students then shifted to more fully remote and online. So you see the confidence grow over time.

 

Gardner: Scott, another benefit of doing more online is that you gain a data trail. When it comes to retention, and seeing how your programs are working, you have a better sense of participation -- and many other metrics. Does the data that comes along with remote learning help you identify students at risk, and are there other benefits?

 

Remote learning delivers data

 

Ralls: We’re a very data-focused college. For instance, even before we moved to more remote learning, every one of our courses had an online shell. We had already moved to where every course was available online. So we knew when our students were interacting.

 

One of the shifts we’ve seen at Wake Tech with more remote services is the expansion of those hours, as well as the ability to access counseling -- and all of our services remotely -- and through answer centers and other things.

 

But that means we had to change our way of thinking. Before, we knew when students took our courses, because they took them when you scheduled the courses. Now, as they are working remotely, we can also tell when they are working. And we know from many of our students that they are more likely to be online and engaged in our coursework between the hours of 5 pm and 10 pm, as opposed to 8 am and noon. Most of when we had been operating, from just having physical sites, was 8 am to 5 pm. Consequently, we have had to move the hours, and I think that’s something that will always be different about us and so that does give us that indication.

We had to change our way of thinking. Before, we knew when students took our courses because they took them when you scheduled the courses. Now, remotely we can also tell when they are working. We have had to move the hours to when they are actually operating.

 

One other thing about us that has been unique is because of who we are, because we do so much technical education -- that’s why we are called Wake Tech – and much of that is hands-on. You can’t do it fully remotely. But every one of our programs has found out the value of remote-based access through the support.

 

For example, we have a remarkable baking and pastry program. They have figured out how help the students get all of their hands-on resources at home in their own kitchens. They no longer have to come into the labs for what they do. Every program has found that value, the best aspects of their program being remote, even if their full program cannot be remote because of the hands-on matrix.

 

Gardner: Chris, is the capability to use the data that you get along the way at Northampton a benefit to you, and how?

 

Foward: Data is key for us in IT Services. We like to try and understand how people are using our systems and which applications they are using. It allows us to then fix the delivery of our applications more effectively. Our courses are also very data-driven. In our games art courses, for example, data allows us to design the materials more effectively for our students.

 

Gardner: Tim, when you are providing more value back through your technology, the data seems to be key as well. It’s about optimization and even reducing costs with better business and education outcomes. How does the data equation benefit Citrix’s customers, and how do you expect to improve on that?

 

Data enhances experiences

 

Minahan: Dana, data plays a major role in every aspect of what we do. When you think about the need to deliver digital workspaces by providing consistent and secure access to the resources -- whether it’s employees or students – they need to be able to perform at their best wherever that work needs to get done. The data that we are gathering is applied in a number of different ways.

 

Number one is around the security model. I use the analogy of not just having security access in -- the bouncer at the front door to make sure you have authenticated and are on the list to be access the resources you need -- but also having the bodyguard that follows you around the club, if you will, to constantly monitor your behavior and apply additional security policies.

 

The data is valuable for that because we understand the behavior of the individual user, whether they are typically accessing from a particular device or location or via the types of information or applications they access.

 

The second area is around performance. If we move to a much more distributed model, or a flexible or a blended model, vital to that is ensuring that those employees or students have reliable access to the applications and information they need to perform at their best. Being able to constantly monitor that environment allows for increasing bandwidth, or moving to a different channel as needed, so they get the best experience.

 

And then the last one gets very exciting. It is literally about productivity. Being able to push the right information or the right tasks, or even automate a particular task or remove it from their work stream in real time is vital to ensuring that we are not drowning in this cacophony of different apps and alerts -- and all the noise that gets in the way of us actually doing our best work or learning. And so data is actually vital to our overall digital workspace strategy at Citrix.

 

Gardner: Chris, to attain an improved posture around ABL, that can mean helping students pick up wherever they left off -- whether in a classroom, their workplace, at a bakery or in a kitchen at home. It requires a seamless transition regardless of their network and end device. How important is it to allow students to not have to start from scratch or find themselves lost in this collaboration environment? How is Citrix an important part of that?

 

Foward: With our ABL approach, we have small collaborative groups that work together to deliver or gain their learning.

 

We also ensure that the students have face-to-face contact with tutors, other distance learning, or while on campus. And with the technology, we store all of the academic materials in one location, called our mail site, which allows students to be able to access and learn as and when they need to. 

 

Citrix plays a key part in that because we can deliver applications into that state quickly and seamlessly. It allows students to always be able to understand and see the applications they need for their specific courses. It allows them to experiment, discuss ideas, and get more feedback from our lecturers because they understand what materials are being stored and how to access them.

 

Gardner: Dr. Ralls, how do you at Wake Tech prevent learning gaps from occurring? How does the technology help students move seamlessly throughout their education process, regardless of the location or device?

 

Seamless tracking lets students thrive

 

Ralls: There are different types of gaps. In terms of courses, one of the things we found recently is our students are looking for different types of access. Many of our students are looking for additional types of access -- perhaps replicating our seated courses to gain the value of synchronous experiences. We have had to make sure that all of our courses have that capacity, and that it works well. 

 

Then, because many of our students are also in a work environment, they want an asynchronous capability. And so we are now working on making sure students know the difference and how to match those expectations.

 

Also, because we are an open access college -- and as I like to say, we take the top 100 percent of our applicant students -- for many of our students, gaps come not just within a course, but between courses or toward their goals. For many of our students who are first-generation students, higher education is new. They may have also been away from education for a period of time.

We have to be much more intrusive and to help students and monitor to make sure our students are making it from one place to the next. We need to make sure that learning makes sense to them.

 

So we have to be much more intrusive and to help students and monitor to make sure our students are making it from one place to the next. We need to make sure that learning makes sense to them and that they are making it to whatever their ultimate goals are.

 

We use technology to track that and to know when our students are getting close to leaving. We call that being like rumble strips on the side of the road. There are gaps that we are looking at, not just within courses, but between courses, on the way to our students’ academic goals.

 

Gardner: Tim, when I hear Chris and Scott describe these challenges in education, I think how impactful this can be for other businesses in general as they increasingly have blended workforces. They are going to face similar gaps too. What, from Citrix’s point of view, should businesses be learning from the experiences at University of Northampton and Wake Tech?

 

Minahan: I think Winston Churchill summed it up best: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Smart organizations are using the current crisis -- not just to survive, but to thrive. They are using the opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation and rethink long-held work and operating models in ways they probably hadn’t before.

 

So as demonstrated both at Wake Tech and Northampton, and as Scott and Chris both said, for both school and work the future is definitely going to be blended.

 

We have, for example, another higher education customer, the University of Sydney that was able to get 20,000 students and faculty transition to an online learning environment last March, literally within a week. But that’s not the real story, it’s where they are going next with this.

 

As they entered the new school year in Sydney, they now have 100 core and software as a service (SaaS) applications that students can access through the digital workspace regardless of the type of device or their location. And they can ensure they have that consistent and secure and reliable experience with those apps. They say the student experience is as good, and sometimes even better, than what a student would have when using a locally installed app on a physical computer.

 

And now the university, most importantly, has used this remote learning model as an opportunity to reach new students -- and even new faculty -- in locations that they couldn’t have supported before due to geographic limitations of largely classroom-based models.

 

These are the types of things that businesses also have to think through. And as we hear from Wake Tech and Northampton, businesses can take a page from the courseware from many forward-thinking higher education organizations that are already in a blended learning model and see how that applies to their own business.

 

Gardner: Dr. Ralls, when you look to the future, what comes next? What would you like to see happen around remote learning, and what can the technologists like Citrix do to help?

 

Blended learning without walls

 

Ralls: Right now, there is so much greater efficiency than we had before. I think there is a way to bring that greater efficiency even more into our classrooms. For years we have talked about a flipped classroom, which really means those things that are better accomplished outside in a lab or in a shop, to do those outside of the classroom.

 

We have to all get to a place where the learning process just doesn’t happen within the walls of the classrooms. So the ability for students to go back and review work, to pick up on work, to use multiple different tools to add and supplement what they are getting through a classroom-based experience, a shop-based experience -- I think that’s what we are moving to.

See How Leading Institutes Use

Technology to Transform Education Delivery

For Wake Tech, this really hit us about March 15, 2020 when we went fully remote. We don’t want to go back to the way we were in April. We don’t want to be a fully remote, online college. But we also don’t want to be where we were in February.

 

This pandemic crisis has presented to us a greater acceleration of where we want to be, of where we can be. It’s what we aspire to be in terms of better education -- not just more convenient access of education -- but better educational opportunities through the multiple different opportunities that are brought to us by technology to supplement the core work that we have always done through our seat-based environment.

 

Gardner: Chris, at Northampton, what’s the next step for the technology enabling these higher goals that Dr. Ralls just described? Where would you like to see the technology take Northampton students next?

 

Foward: The technology is definitely key to what we are trying to do as education providers, to provide the right skill sets wherein students move from higher education into business. Certainly, with the likes of Citrix, with what was originally a commercial-focused application, and bringing it into our institution, we have allowed our students to gain access and understand how the system works -- and understand how to use it.

 

And that’s similar with most of our technologies that we have brought in. It gives students more of a commercial feel for how operations should be running, how systems should be accessed, and the ways to use those systems.

 

Gardner: Tim, graduates from Wake Tech and from University of Northampton a year or two from now, they are going to be well-versed in these technologies, and this level of collaboration and seamless transitions between blended approaches. How are the companies they go to going to anticipate these new mindsets? What should businesses be doing to take full advantage of what these students have already been doing in these universities?

 

Students become empowered employees

 

Minahan: That’s a great point, and it is certainly something that business is grappling with now as we move beyond hiring Millennials to the next generation of highly educated, grown-up-on-the-Internet students with high expectations who are coming out of universities today.

 

For the next few years, it all boils down to the need to deliver a superior employee experience, to empower employees to perform at their best, and to do the jobs they were hired to do. We should not burden them, as we have in a lot of corporate America, with a host of different distractions, apps, and rules and regulations that keep them away from doing their core jobs.

We need to deliver a superior employee experience. We should not burden them with a host of different distractions, apps, and rules that keep them from doing their core jobs.

 

And key to that, not surprisingly, is going to require a digital workspace environment that empowers and provides unified access to all of the resources and information that the employee needs to perform at their best across any work channel or location. They need a behind-the-scenes security model that ensures the security of the corporate assets, applications, and information -- as well as the privacy of individuals -- without getting in the way of work. 

 

And then, at a higher level, as we talked about earlier, we need an intelligence model with more analytics built into that environment. It will then not just offer up a launch pad to access the resources you need, but will actually guide you through your day, presenting the right tasks and insights as you need them, and allowing you to get the noise out of your day so you can really create, innovate, and do your best work. And that will be whether work is in an office, on the road, or work as we have seen recently, in the home.

 

Gardner: I wouldn’t be surprised if the students coming out of these innovative institutes of higher learning are going to be the instigators of change and innovation in their employment environments. So a point on the arrow from education into the business realm.

 

I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how innovators in higher education have been transforming themselves to meet the needs for flexible, new ways of learning.

 

And we have heard how innovation today in remote learning may hold valuable lessons for how businesses and governments will newly interact and enlighten their workers, customers, and even citizens.

 

So a big thank you to our guests, Chris Foward, Head of Services for IT Services at the University of Northampton in the UK. Thank you so much, Chris.

 

Foward: Thank you.

 

Gardner: We have also been here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Thank you, Tim.

 

Minahan: Thanks, Dana. I appreciate the opportunity.

 

Gardner: And we have been joined by Dr. Scott Ralls, President of Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thank you so much, Dr. Ralls.

 

Ralls: Thank you, Dana. I have enjoyed being with you.

 

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect remote work and learning innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

 

Thanks again for listening, please pass this along to your business associates, and do come back next time.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

 

Transcript of a discussion on how colleges and universities must rapidly redefine and implement a new and dynamic and blended balance between in-person and remote learning interactions. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

 

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