Here’s a glimpse into my life, achievements and hobbies…
Father of 3
Collegiate athlete (Football & Rugby, two-time NAIA II National Champion)
I started Mountain Biking in 2020
I found the fountain of youth in Yoga
Enjoy gardening
Love the beach
Fun fact: You will never find me jumping out of a plane.
About my professional life/career:
I started in IT back in 1995, in the days of frame relay and token ring, and I enjoyed the early successes of VoIP and the onset of virtualization. Fast forward now to present day technologies of software defined, containers and Artificial Intelligence, and mixed in those 25 years of success were some challenges, cycles and shifts in technologies, like Microsoft's turn of the century, the dotcom bubble and the financial crash of 2008-09. All of these were significant in their own time, and without comparing the pandemic and the Digital Transformation Journey to the challenges of the past, I believe that “forward is the only direction we can go.”
I argue that corporate IT was already at an inflection point before the Pandemic. Many of the trusted manufacturers have struggled over the past 5-6 years to provide and/or fulfill their vision of the modern IT platform, and in many cases this required forklift upgrades and a host of PHD's settling on default parameters to get things running. I began to ask myself, “When did IT infrastructure become a 3-year refresh cycle, and why is everything costing more?” I find that many of the elevated solutions are addressing problems that are not defined by the business, but rather by the manufacturer. The architectures of the future are software defined and hardware agnostic.
Networking, compute and storage all provide commodity-based resources and components that are vital to the business, but often come at a premium, stealing budget dollars from key business priorities and stalling progress with misplaced complexity.
For the most part, I came to PivIT Global in January, 2020 to do my part in enabling the next technology revolution. Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence begin with two nonnegotiable requirements:
1) strong leadership to drive and enforce cultural change at every level of the business
2) the collection of clean data with a purpose of solving a defined problem
Sadly, most companies are failing at both, and look to traditional technology vendors to solve problems that have yet to be defined. Simply collecting the data is not the answer, and not only one technology vendor can address the fundamental needs of the next technology revolution. Today's progress is not limited by the infrastructure but by the ability to define the problem and provide the data needed to answer the problem. The next handful of years will benefit only those companies who embrace the fundamental understanding of a digital native including where, when, and why a premium should be afforded.
Infrastructure relevance is only realized when asking for budget, or when something breaks. If you want to retain your leverage and performance over budget, becoming more competitive in sourcing and extending architectures until fully depreciated is key. Industry experts say we have hit a lull in technology advancements, with coding and known physical limitations being hit. Power, performance and speed are not the issue - and will not become the issue - until the problem is defined and the appropriate data is collected.
Before joining PivIT Global as an employee, I had the pleasure of being a customer and a partner to the founders of PivIT for some 20 years. The same dedication of saving customers’ money on IT hardware and services holds true today as it did 20 years ago. PiviT Global will help you afford your digital transformation journey!
Tim Sauer is a member of our Sales team here at PivIT Global.
