How AI is expanding the possibility for partners

NetApp APAC Cloud CTO discusses the current cloud and AI trends.

Before the AI boom, organisations were held back by a lack in capability in processing power and technology, now that the infrastructure aligns with the technology, the world is at their fingertips. But this creates a new problem: a lack of creativity.

Matt Swinbourne, CTO cloud APAC NetApp spoke to CRN Australia at the AWS Summit about how we are at an inflection point with AI.

Previously, he said organisations and partners didn't have the MIPS and the processing power.

“We didn't have the data, the capability to do it, so we were always prevented by the infrastructure,” he explained.

“Now we've got the opposite problem, where we can do anything and we want to do AI. Our boards are pressuring us. We need to adopt artificial intelligence. What do we need to adopt it for? What are we what's the outcome that we're looking for?”

Swinbourne said the problem has reversed for organisations.

“We have the capability to literally do whatever we want. It's our own human concept that's the challenge, trying to whittle down and target that outcome,” he said.

“It’s the snowball effect. You get a little win, you learn from that, you get a bigger win.”

He explained that generative AI and agentic AI is the beginning of something new for leaders.

“We'll look back on this in 10 years and go, ‘Wow, this was the small snowball’. It was just the beginning of what we can do,” he said.

Hybrid in it for the long haul

Looking back at the past five years through Covid and the transition to hybrid working, Swinbourne said hybrid cloud is here to stay.

“COVID was big accelerator. We had customers knocking down our door during COVID, saying, I need more space, I need to use another cloud. I need to use more data centres, more service providers, other partners, to augment my data centre-based services,” he said.

From that first wave of growth came another of understanding what cloud capabilities organisations have.

“We also saw a second wave after that, of we've responded, we've survived now we need to wrangle what we've got, and we need to account for it,” he explained.

Swinbourne said now more than ever, with more organisations deploying AI projects, cloud is being used.

"If you look at AI, the projects, the testing, the proofs of concept, it is default we are using cloud,” he said.

“It just doesn't make sense for something that's transient, to spin up an entire data centre to go and build a new model when everything's available on demand in Amazon, for example.”