Shaping a World Where Tech Empowers and Responsibility Leads with Mark & Isabella Boost
[Music] Hi everyone, and welcome to Civo Navigate Local. As they mentioned, this is our second event here. We came here last February for our first ever Civo Navigate. It was a two-day conference. What we want to do is make sure that as we move these conferences around the US, we still come back to the places that we went to the previous year and keep that going because Civo is very much about community. That's really part of our DNA and giving back. Today's really about learning and offering you all the opportunities to attend great talks, great sessions. We've got workshops and things as well, so hopefully you all have a really great time. Certainly, I totally agree about the Tampa facts; it's a great city. I love coming here. The weather's great. Obviously, being from London, England,
it's not always great, so it's really nice to be here. I think there's such a buzzing community in Tampa, which is fantastic. There are so many amazing people. Before we get started, a little bit about myself. It was mentioned 46 years, 45 years; I'm 25 years so far in tech, so not quite there yet but maybe becoming a little bit of a veteran. The first company I founded was back in 1999, and that was a domain name and web hosting company. It actually grew to become the fifth largest hosting company in the UK. That eventually got into data centers, built a couple of data centers, launched some networks
around the UK, and started a cybersecurity company which trades in the US as well, Defense.com. There's a stand outside if anyone wants to check them out. Fast forward to 2017, when we started Civo. It was really set up to challenge the hyperscalers, and you'll learn a bit more about that as we go. One common theme for all the companies that I founded is really about value for money—offering a great service and a great product but at a good price as well. I'm going to start with a quote, and this is a pretty big statement: "The cloud is broken." The cloud is broken. Personally, I believe in the context of cloud computing, in terms of how we consume cloud infrastructure, that the cloud is currently broken. Can I maybe see a raise of hands from anyone that
agrees with that statement? Probably about 40% of people. Okay, thought it might be less than that but certainly more than I thought, and I want to convince the rest of you hopefully. I'm going to take you back to 2012. This was Andy Jassy, who's the current CEO of Amazon but was the CEO of AWS. Back in 2012 at AWS re:Invent, Andy Jassy said customers love the fact that in the cloud, they get to pay a lower variable expense than they can do on their own. He then went on to say AWS is able to take
its very large scale and pass on savings to customers in the form of lower prices. What's super ironic is that in the same speech, he talked about the gross margins of old-school tech companies that were working to 60-80% margins at the time. I guess he was talking about the Oracles and the Microsofts from years before. He then said, "This high-margin business model has been around forever and in lots of industries. It's just not ours." He said, "It's just not ours."
Fast forward to today, and it's actually hard to tell what Amazon's margins are because they mix their retail business with AWS and other stuff. Microsoft, who do publish their cloud results separately, have a 72% gross margin. So certainly not the low-margin business that Andy Jassy was promising. In the last quarter, they made a $6.9 billion profit. A crazy profit. So, as I said, it doesn't sound like that low-margin business. Price rises are coming. There have been lots of price rises over the last year or so. AWS
announced they are going to be charging for IP addresses now, which they didn't previously, and that's going to get them an extra $1 billion in profit annually. Just by one lever they pull, suddenly it's $1 billion. There have been loads of press around price increases—I'll just throw a few on the screen—but huge amounts of price increases over the last year or so. Amazon stock is starting to suffer because their organic growth is slowing. The only way they can grow is by charging people more money. This is a recent Guardian newspaper article from November 23. It shows price rises between 11% and 50% compared to a year ago. The general hyperscalers have been increasing their prices.
This is another study from Flexera that surveyed 750 companies. Last year, cloud spend wasn't the highest challenge that people were facing, but this year it has jumped to the top of the list. 82% of respondents found managing cloud spend to be their biggest challenge. We conducted our own survey, and here are the results. 64% of businesses have seen an increase in costs over the last 12 months. 42% said they cannot easily predict their cloud bills. 57% of businesses have been forced to take action to reduce their cloud spend. Only 33% of respondents surveyed felt the hyperscalers were good value for money.
52% believe the cloud has failed to live up to the promise of cost-effectiveness. 47% of businesses are considering moving away from the cloud. Our survey said 47%, and it's worth mentioning that cloud repatriation is the term used when people come off the cloud. This was a quote by IDC that showed 71% of companies are looking to move all or some of their workloads off the cloud back into private environments, which I think is an incredible number. Luckily, Civo has an on-prem solution as well, so I'll throw that in there. Why is this happening? Because the cloud has failed to live up to its original promise—the same promise that Andy Jassy said back in 2012, that the cloud was going to be cheaper for us and have a lower variable cost. Fast forward to today, and we're seeing price rise after price rise and nickel-and-diming, like the IP addresses being charged for and other things as well. But it shouldn't have to be that way. I think it's ludicrous that we've got to this
point where the cloud is getting a bad name because the benefits of cloud are there for everyone to see—the flexibility and bursting when you need to, for example. For startups as well, you don't have to have all that expensive IT infrastructure that you have to put in, buy the servers, rack them up—all that aggravation. The benefits are there, but it seems to me that it's gone too far the other way, and it's about reassessing that balance. Now people are coming off cloud when maybe they should stay on cloud, but as I mentioned, it's broken currently. So what's Civo doing about it? We believe in a cloud that is fair, equitable, and open, which stays true to the original promise of the cloud by supporting business growth and not hindering companies through escalating costs, vendor lock-in, and other things taken from your control.
How is Civo different? Our prices are up to 60% cheaper than hyperscalers, and our GPUs are about a quarter of the price of hyperscalers. We believe in fair and equitable pricing, with no hidden charges or additional egress fees. We're reducing the complexity by abstracting a lot of the unnecessary configuration options that you have with hyperscalers away from you. We're championing open standards and open-source software, and we even use open compute hardware.
We believe in interoperability and having no vendor lock-in. We believe in a world where people should have the freedom to move between providers and not feel trapped into an ecosystem. I also believe in a much bigger purpose that is way more important than profit. Now here's a term that was coined by Cory Doctorow in November 2022 and actually became the word of the year that year: "enshittification." My kids are here, so close their ears when I say that. It's when an online platform becomes more and more monetized and less user-oriented the longer it lasts. He describes how platforms die. He says first, they're good to their users,
then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers, and finally, they abuse the business customers to claw back all the value for the business themselves, and then they die. He talks about how this has happened time and time again in history, where giant companies push their users too far and they eventually leave. I think we're at the start of that in big tech. Where does that leave big tech? Change is needed, otherwise, these companies will die. Big tech
needs to work for a wider societal impact, not just for profit. The world is changing, and it's changing really fast. I've got my two kids in the audience, Isabella and Jack, who are nine and six. They're actually here in the audience today. They are much better educated on the societal issues that we have. We're already seeing this with the Gen Z generation. I've got
some stats for you. 27% of Generation Z will be in the workforce by next year, which is a big number. They're completely prioritizing different things. As it mentions here, 77% prioritize work-life balance, and 37% have actually sought out treatment for mental health issues. 40% say they plan on leaving their job within the next two years. 57% said that those looking to switch are not satisfied with their employers' efforts to make a positive societal impact. 72% said they're extremely interested in environmental issues, and 44% said climate change is their greatest fear.
This image on the screen was drawn by my daughter Isabella. Even at nine years old, she's very passionate and educated on environmental issues. When I mentioned to her about doing this talk a few months back, she really wanted to join me on stage and present her own section on climate change and what we can do as the tech industry to promote that change. So can everyone please welcome on stage Isabella Boost. [Applause] Hello everybody, my name is Isabella Boost. I'm 9 years old and today I'm going to teach you about climate change. Unfortunately, the reality is very different from the cute polar bear image. Many are suffering from loss of habitat and are left starving for food.
Forest fires are becoming a regular occurrence across the world, especially in Australia, the US, and many other countries. Droughts are becoming increasingly common across the globe. This image demonstrates how huge ice caps have melted away over the years. Now I've got a short video to play, which shows you how things have changed over the last 35 years. There's a place in our universe, a marble spinning in a vacuum. It contains life. It
contains us. It may look solid and enduring, but now we can see it differently across time, living and breathing across time. We can see that we, all of us, are changing this place faster than ever before. We can see the impact of the way we live, of the choices we make, and see their consequences. There's a place in our universe. How we decide to treat it today will determine our future. What will you think? What will you do when you see our world changing before your own eyes? I hope that video illustrates the need for urgent change. Moving on to how we as an industry can
support change: data centers are vast users of power. They consume up to 2% of energy globally. A 2024 report from the International Energy Agency says data centers consumed 460 terawatt hours in 2022, a figure that could rise to more than 1,000 terawatt hours in 2026 in a worst-case scenario. 1,000 terawatt hours is equivalent to powering 100 million households. Elon Musk predicted the world will face shortages in electricity and transformers in 2025. Is the tech industry doing enough? Power-hungry AI technology is being rolled out at a record pace, often with no real care for the planet. Are you asking these important questions of your
data center or cloud provider? What commitment are they making to reach net zero? Is the power being used coming from renewable sources? Are they reusing the waste heat elsewhere? Thank you for listening. Goodbye. Well done, Isabella, thank you. Okay, so you might ask what Civo is doing. Well, we believe in a sustainable future.
We've partnered with Deep Green, and with Deep Green, they actually use the excess heat from GPUs to heat swimming pools. We have a region that we've launched in the UK, and we plan to launch more regions where we're doing this, trying to make good use of that waste heat. We've also invested in a company called Heata, and what they're doing is attaching servers to the side of hot water tanks and then providing hot water to homes. While sustainability is at the top of our list, we also believe in a wider purpose. As I mentioned, we're backing the best of open-source technologies. We're supporting open standards,
trying to reduce vendor lock-in by having more interoperability, and we believe in fair and predictable pricing with no surprise bills. We believe in community and paying it forward. We put on events like this, we have a Slack community with 30,000 people in it, we sponsor local meetups and non-for-profits, and we've just launched an event space in London which is a community event space, and we plan to launch more around the US. We believe in reducing the pay gap between the lowest and highest earners. At Civo, we want people to grow together, and work-life balance is really important, so we provide flexible working. We've actually been a four-day week company now for over two years.
We've just launched the Civo Foundation, and the foundation has three main purposes. The first one is the advancement of skills through education. This is about providing opportunities to disadvantaged individuals to acquire technical skills. We're championing sustainable technologies by advocating and investing in sustainable tech to look after our planet. And we're driving social change by using the immense power of technology and supporting initiatives that transcend traditional boundaries and create profound social impact. I believe we have a responsibility to leave the world in a better place for future generations. Like I said at the start, I think the cloud is broken right now,
or perhaps more specifically, big tech is broken. I hope you found this talk interesting and that it inspires you to support the need for change. Thank you very much.
2024-06-26 03:36
