How have you approached implementing cloud architectures when working with private equity-backed companies?

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CEO in Services (non-Government), Self-employed

In automotive, they're definitely big cloud users, but they're also leaning a lot more towards edge, because they see long-term payoff in that investment simply because of latency. 5G only gets me to the pole—from the pole in, edge computing is my way around that. So they're creating these very complicated, multi-cloud hybrid environments and the decision at the board levels, or at the senior management levels, is not around the details of the cloud, or the model. It's, "Can you get us money back in? Yes or no?"

That's why the discussion from the perspective of the PE and the split that they're doing makes no sense to me. It's like, "I'll take a quarter of this, half of that and another quarter of this and call it a company." I think that puts CIOs in a very bad way.

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CIO, 5,001 - 10,000 employees

I was in a private equity (PE) company before coming to Juniper. If you mentioned cloud, they'd call it “OPEX” (operating expenditures) and say no. You think, "Oh my God, my CFO is running my technology strategy." I don't know if that was due to the PE firm, because the PE firm's advisor advocated for cloud to me and I said, "Get it by my CFO."

But when I was at Reinvent we had conversations about how to build the business case and the PE issue came up, so I was talking a lot about it until I moved to a public company. It’s not like the balance sheet doesn't impact how you make decisions at a public company. It does, regardless of what company you're in. But we weren’t reduced to simple rules like, "No OPEX because it's going to hit Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA), so you can't do the right thing."

Advisor | Investor | Former CIO in Services (non-Government), Self-employed

The PE business is fascinating, because they have an investment thesis. Usually, it's a certain return on investment after a 5 year period. Some call it financial engineering to maximize return on investment. Then you've got these poor CTOs and CIOs that are actually trying to do the right thing, but are hindered from realizing their full potential as they are held captive to a certain investment number.

CIO, 5,001 - 10,000 employees

There are ways to get past it. It's just that most CIOs aren't financially well-equipped enough to do it.

vp information technology in Consumer Goods, 51 - 200 employees

focus on TCO analysis showing the benefits on including cloud as an outlet for lower cost storage and operations.

CTO in Software, 11 - 50 employees

PE firms typically form a VCP -- Value Creation Plan during their technical and commercial due diligence of target companies. A savvy CxO will work with the firm performing the diligence to understand the opportunities and develop a comprehensive technical and financial plan that will have the support of the C-Suite and Board.