Guest: Brian Seguin (LinkedIn)
Company: Stark and Wayne (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

Brain Seguin, Chief Operating Officer at Stark and Wayne, believes that the future of work is going to be hybrid, which will lead to companies trying to leverage technology to embrace a hybrid work culture. He also predicts that mobile, virtual reality, augmented reality and 5G are going to play a very big role in 2022 (emergence of metaverse is timely) where companies will leverage these technologies to interact with their customers. Check out his predictions above.

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya, and welcome to our series on predictions for 2022. And today we have with us once again, Brian Seguin, Chief Operating Officer at Stark & Wayne. Brian, it’s good to have you on the show.

Brian Seguin: Thanks Swapnil, great to be here.

Swapnil Bhartiya: This is a prediction show, so I will of course ask you to grab your crystal ball and share your predictions. But, before we do that, please quickly tell us what Stark & Wayne is all about, because you folks have been going through a lot of transition.

Brian Seguin: Yeah. So Stark & Wayne is a member of the Care Group. We are a cloud-native transformation consulting firm and we are focusing on helping enterprises transform their technology as well as doing some of the cultural and the business side changes that help support good cloud-native practices.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing about the company. Now it’s time for you to grab the crystal ball and tell me what prediction you have for the next year?

Brian Seguin: Last year, we predicted that there was going to be a lot of mobility when came to jobs, a lot of technical people changing positions in the pass year, especially with the move to hybrid or fully remote work. And building off of that, we definitely did see that happen this year, everybody saw that happen this year. And building off of that, what we’re going to see in 2022 is a lot of demand for organizational and technical changes and management changes that these companies are trying to figure out how to deal with all this new hybrid and remote work. I also think that there’s going to be a higher demand for figuring out how to manage hybrid work, because every single company out there has figured out that there is so much value to the face-to-face interactions and there’s a lot of things lost in just doing fully remote.

So I think that in the future there’s going to be more of a hybrid approach where maybe once a month or however it works for the organization to have those in-person meetings. And that ties into kind of the second prediction here, which with all this organizational change we also have going on alongside is the 5G revolution, which is going to create this new demand for transforming applications to utilize 5G. And that’s also going to be combining with this new hybrid work approach, because now you’re actually going to be able to have some automated systems, some automated troubleshooting in the fields. And if you think about it, if you want to think about sort of the 4G revolution and new applications that kind of were created from that and new companies for that matter, you have Uber and Lyft, which allowed that kind of on-the-go navigation, that connectivity, we’re going to see the same type of thing but also leveraging a better management structure.

So I’m talking about, there’s going to be more applications doing mobile virtual reality when it comes to storefronts or augmented reality, or stores that are having some people who are experts in the back office being able to have people go around the store and make sure all the displays are correct or remote auditing or things like that in the store standpoint. But we can also harness that in the medical field, we’re going to see more things, more apps being created in the medical field for onsite diagnostics and things of that nature. And the same thing for even technical or for physical mechanical fields as well. So there’s going to be this huge demand for a lot of these more connected leveraging to 5G applications that helps people to do their jobs better.

And that also kind of coincides with a lot of the expertise out of the industry. I don’t know if anybody’s followed that a lot of the people who are experts in the industry over the last two years have started retiring. And so a lot of the people who are really good experts in the fields have gone on to retirement and there’s this new wave of labor coming in, and all this new technology is going to be used to augment their skills and things. So yeah, so that’s my second prediction, there’s going to be a 5G application revolution and a higher demand. More companies are going to be ditching their, either bespoke or deployed cloud platforms to deploy directly to the different infrastructure providers, Kubernetes engines. So that’s like AKS, GKE, LKE, all those different automated Kubernetes services.

And we actually have seen those services increase significantly in their functionalities over time. And it’s really a demand for customers to reduce complexity in their own operational overhead, and also refocus their operators to enabling the application develop developers to do their jobs better instead of focusing on some of the hard and more complex applications. We also are going to see that they’re going to be choosing those cloud Kubernetes engines over other things such as EC2 instead of ECS or those other kind of native league cloud containers services.

And that’s because there’s this perceived value of having your applications run in Kubernetes so you can move it from cloud to cloud. But one of the things that we’ve seen over time is there’s so much competition in between these cloud providers that the costs are maintaining a very competitive nature, which is also causing companies to go more one cloud specific instead of multi-cloud. And there’s also a lot of deals and incentives there as well. So a lot of companies are seeing that vendor lock-in from a cloud provider, risk being reduced into the next year.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. And as we did it last year also, so thanks for checking back on that. And we are maintaining your score card here, which means that we will have you again next year to check how many of your predictions turn out to be true and also get your set of predictions for 2023, but you’ll have to wait for one year for that. Before we do that, I also want to learn what is going to be the focus of the company in 2022? What are the things that you guys are going to be working on?

Brian Seguin: The main focus of Stark & Wayne in 2022 is going to be enabling those customers to either reduce their licensing fees from some vendor locked in platform and helping them migrate to an open source version or some type of unlicensed version, some type of free version of the platform, or directly to an IS provider. We’re already engaging on multiple of these projects today and we just expect that to expand. So if any customers out there are looking for an assessment to see what it is going to take for me to kind of do this transformation effort, we’re going to be doing a lot of those in 2022.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Brian, thank you so much for taking time out today and share of course the focus of the company and especially the predictions that you have. And I think you hit the nail on the head in some cases, but we’ll see next year how it’ll actually… I mean, I fully agree with you, with your predictions there, so I don’t think we are going to compare that, but thanks for those insights and I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

Brian Seguin: Thank you for having me, Swap.

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