3.7 billion pounds, or nearly 5 billion US dollars. That's what UK businesses spend every single year to store data that's never used again after it's been created. And that doesn't take into account the anticipated rate of growth that we're expecting to see because of AI. There's an old adage in business, which is that we're here to make money, save money, and avoid going to jail. We're gonna focus on the second of those three things. IT spending is growing at 8.9% a year. This year, we'll spend 5.3 trillion on IT, and a huge amount of that is waste. So how much waste is there in IT environments today? Well, if we think about VMware in particular, maybe up to 25% of the virtual machines that have been provisioned are over provisioned and underutilized. But if you remember back to the early days of virtualization, it was all about driving up utilization. It was about removing waste. But then over time, the value that companies really got from virtualization was automation. It was that freedom that it gave people for different groups to be able to spin up virtual machines to create resources as and when they needed them. And it's led to a lot of over provisioning, a lot of under utilization, and frankly, a lot of virtual machines that people simply aren't using. The very problem that VMware solved for us in the beginning, is actually now manifested itself as being part of the problem, when we think about waste in IT. And the licensing costs around VMware right now have really put that under the spotlight. Then if we look across the infrastructure more broadly, there's a lot of things connected together that have just been left connected and probably not used anymore. People have cabled servers and storage devices together, and through that process of commissioning and decommissioning, we end up with a lot of wastage in the infrastructure as well. When we think about the cloud, 30% of what we spend on cloud is simply wasted for many different reasons, and that equates to about $150 billion, which is why companies are now investing in FinOps practices to try and get some control over that. And then finally; data. 68% of the data that we store is never used again after it's created, but every few years we buy the nice shiny new storage array and we copy that 68% from the old one across onto the new one. But it's sat on devices that we pay for that are consuming power. And this is where an intelligent data infrastructure can really help. It gives you that single pane of glass, that ability to look across your heterogeneous hybrid, multi-cloud environment to find where those opportunities are to remove waste. It gives you the ability to make sure that the workloads you're running in the cloud are running on the most highly available, but also highly efficient, cost optimized resources. It scans your data to make sure that the data analytics that it gives back to you are helping you to find that 68% of data that isn't used, so that you can make better decisions about what you do with it. And finally, it gives you a single unified storage architecture that allows you to consolidate storage from multiple different devices down to one single highly available, highly cost- optimized architecture. What are the most common inefficiencies you see in IT departments and how do companies go about solving them? Probably the biggest thing I'd say is over-engineering. And that is often linked back to the pressure from the business to deliver services, which are always available, always on and always performing. It's generally overprovisioned from the start. And the problem you do have is people often don't even use the tools they have access to. If you look at even in areas like storage where you've got compression, deduplication, storage, tiering... been around forever. These are not new, not enough people use them. And they end up having storage on the wrong tier. So they'll have everything on a high performance tier when it's not actually required. And data retention is my biggest one. 'cause businesses have got into this culture of keeping everything forever just out of fear. And even when you look at things like backup, you find some organizations, if you look at every one copy of data, they'll often have 15 or 20 copies of it lurking around the business somewhere. What's the most exciting innovation you're seeing around IT efficiency today? You get into application modernization and transformation in the cloud. You could be using serverless computing, you could be using all these technologies to massively transform how your applications consume resources. And so it's actually about how IT departments use these technologies and actually convince their line of business people to listen and let them change how services are delivered. So taking into account what could be done to make sure that services are always well designed, well optimized, and well run through their entire life cycle. We've established there's a huge amount of waste in IT. And maybe you didn't realize just how significant it was. Maybe you did, but maybe you just didn't know what you could do about it. But if you could reduce your licensing costs, if you could reduce the amount you're spending on the cloud, if you could find that 68% of data that you're storing that's never used again after it's created, think of the opportunities thatwould give you.could be the budget hero and building your intelligent data infrastructure with NetApp will be a crucial part of that. So my only question for you is... what's stopping you?