Things. Reasons: The independent show for Australian IT leaders (AI, Tech & IT Leadership)

Between May and July this year, OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Microsoft all put billions of dollars behind the same idea: engineers who sit inside the customer's business and build alongside the people who will use the software. The industry has a name for them, the forward deployed engineer, and a lot of Australian IT leaders are hearing it for the first time. Faith Rees has been running a consultancy on that model for more than a decade. Her view is that the role is not new at all. What has changed is that AI made writing code cheap, so the real constraint is now understanding what should be built. About the guest Faith Rees founded SixPivot in 2015 and runs it today. SixPivot builds software for startups, corporates and government, was ranked second in the AFR Most Innovative Companies 2025 technology list, and is a finalist for AI Initiative of the Year in the CRN Australia Channel Awards. Faith is also co-founder and CEO of Cloud Ctrl, a multi-cloud cost management platform, and she wrote the post that prompted this episode: "The Faster We Build Software, the More the Real Delivery Bottleneck Is Exposed." What this episode covers • What a forward deployed engineer actually is, and how the role differs from the vendor account engineer most IT leaders already know. • Why Faith calls the sudden rush of FDE announcements "rubbish", and why she says any company building software should always have worked this way. • How AI made the coding the easy part, and why teams that move faster without understanding the requirement just create problems faster. • Why the hyperscalers and AI labs are building their own FDE armies, and whether partners really lack the skills or are simply being hired away. • How SixPivot now hires developers, what fails a candidate, and the four camps of developer she sees in AI adoption. • The customer that burnt through a year's AI token budget of a million dollars in a month, and why Faith rates her own AI spend a six out of ten while her developers rate it a nine. • Why Faith would hate to be a developer today, and what developers and their leaders should do about it. • A confession about a pizza franchise ordering system that sent Friday night orders from northern New South Wales to Perth. Who this episode is for • CIOs, CTOs and IT directors being pitched forward deployed engineering by AWS, Microsoft or the AI labs, who want to know what they are actually buying. • Heads of engineering and delivery leaders working out how to structure teams when code is cheap and requirements are the constraint. • Consultancy, MSP and partner leaders whose customers are now being offered the same service direct from the vendor. • Developers and technical leads deciding which skills to build next.    Show notes This episode is supported by NinjaOne. Follow Naran McClung on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/Naranmcclung/  Follow Jono Staff on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanstaff/  And don't forget to subscribe and rate the show! We love hearing your thoughts and answering questions.  For all enquiries, contact [email protected] 

SCX.ai listed a week before this recording, and on the morning of the record the Sydney Morning Herald ran a front page calling AI the most important sovereignty issue for Australians since the Second World War. At the same time Australian communities are pushing back hard on new hyperscale data centres, and Australian businesses are being told to adopt AI without being told where their data is being processed. This conversation sits directly on that fault line.  About the guest  David Keane is the founder and CEO of SCX.ai, which listed on the ASX in August 2026. He has taken a company public in Australia twice, the first being Bigtincan, which he started in Sydney in 2011, listed in 2017 and ran largely out of Boston for fourteen years. SCX runs an AI inferencing node in Sydney built on SambaNova ASIC hardware rather than NVIDIA GPUs, and it is pointed deliberately at inference rather than training.  What this episode covers  Why SCX listed on the ASX rather than taking the offshore capital that was readily available, and what strings that money carries  What inferencing actually is, why it is measured in tokens, and why the industry should be counting tokens per watt instead of GPUs  The mega trend from GPUs for training to purpose-built ASICs for inferencing, and why SCX chose SambaNova over the alternatives  Open weights versus proprietary models, what transparency in the weights really buys you, and the DeepSeek Tiananmen Square example  Emergent capability: why coding was never trained into a large language model, and why the same is now happening with offensive and defensive cyber  Project Magpie, SCX's Australian fine-tune of an open weights model, and why as much as 30 per cent of a prompt can be wasted on localisation  Opir, the guardrails classifier model built in wartime Ukraine to detect 996 types of attack, now being brought to Australia through SCX  Why network latency stopped being Australia's problem, and why thinking latency replaced it  Watermarking in model outputs, and whether human-made work is about to carry a premium  Who this episode is for  CIOs, CTOs and IT directors who need to adopt AI without sending sensitive data offshore  Cybersecurity and risk leaders working out where guardrails, watermarking and emergent model capability leave their controls  Cloud, platform and infrastructure leaders evaluating inference economics, hosting decisions and service levels for agents  Founders, investors and operators watching Australia's position in the global AI build-out  Show notes This episode is supported by NinjaOne. Follow Naran McClung on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/Naranmcclung/  Follow Jono Staff on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanstaff/  And don't forget to subscribe and rate the show! We love hearing your thoughts and answering questions.  For all enquiries, contact [email protected] 

Episode overview AI adoption is the number one priority for Australian IT leaders, and that is exactly why the unglamorous work of replacing what no longer works keeps sliding down the list. Meanwhile the risk is growing, because AI is now finding and exploiting legacy weaknesses faster than any human team can. The Telstra outage on 8 July, traced to a defect the vendor had flagged since 2022, is what happens when technical debt is left at the bottom of the pile. About the hosts Jono Staff is CRO at ASE Group and Executive Director of WinDC, with more than 20 years in cloud infrastructure, managed services and critical infrastructure. Naran McClung leads Australia's leading Azure managed services practice as Executive, Azure at Macquarie Cloud Services, and thinks in cloud economics and AI. In this rant cast they go without a guest and pull apart the question the industry keeps ducking: why are we still so bad at replacing the old things that no longer work? What this episode covers • The Telstra outage on 8 July, traced back to a timekeeping software defect the vendor had warned about since 2022, and why that is a technical debt story rather than a one-off • Why 93% of organisations carry technical debt yet only 24% feel confident they can track it, and what that gap costs • How AI is changing the maths on legacy kit: the largest Patch Tuesday on record at 570 vulnerabilities, and end-of-life systems accruing 218 new vulnerabilities every six months • Whether AI is now the threat, the defence, or both, and why a runaway agent is a tooling failure rather than Skynet • Sovereignty and token economics: what happens when the frontier model you built on gets pulled or triples in price, and why sovereign is being redefined • Data centre scarcity in Australia, with 14 companies bidding on the last three megawatts of air-cooled capacity • The closing argument: make technical debt a board-issued KPI so it can never be quietly deprioritised again Why now Adapt's latest survey of more than 2,400 Australian CIOs and IT leaders puts AI adoption as the number one priority. The risk is that everything else slides down the list while the attack surface grows. AI is now finding and exploiting legacy weaknesses faster than any human team can, which turns years of deferred maintenance into a live liability rather than a someday problem. Who this episode is for • CIOs, IT directors and heads of infrastructure balancing an AI mandate against ageing estate • CISOs and security leaders watching vulnerability counts climb on end-of-life systems • Boards and executives deciding how to fund and measure risk they cannot see • MSP and cloud leaders advising customers on remediation, sovereignty and cost Leave your anonymous confession here: https://thingsreasons.show/confessions/  Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/things-reasons Follow Naran's Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/things-reasons-newsletter-7371660254704701440/ Follow Jono's Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/things-reasons-newsletter-7371662467678023680/ Instagram: @things.reasons

In February 2026, roughly 285 billion US dollars fell off software valuations in 48 hours, on the theory that AI would gut per-seat SaaS. NinjaOne sells per-seat SaaS and is growing about 70 percent a year.  About the guest  Vic Guerrero runs channel and enterprise for NinjaOne across Asia Pacific. He has spent more than two decades in the channel, from Adobe in the late 1990s through to chief revenue officer at Jabra and nearly eight years at Orro Group before joining NinjaOne. He grew NinjaOne's APAC partner-led revenue 166 percent year on year on a deliberately selective model, and he may be the original source of the phrase things, reasons.  What this episode covers  Why NinjaOne runs almost all of its growth through the channel when going direct would be easier  The selective, go-deep partner model, and why 25 to 30 partners can cover most of the ANZ market  The question Vic uses to expose a weak vendor relationship: what do they actually do for you  The SaaS apocalypse, and whether AI is a threat to platforms or a tailwind for consolidation  What Vic learned at Adobe in the late 90s that he is deliberately applying now  Two IT confessions, including the outage that accidentally killed an unprofitable contract  Why now  Every IT leader is building an FY27 plan against the same open question: how much to keep buying from SaaS platforms, and how much to try to build in-house with cheap models and AI agents. NinjaOne is a live test of the case for buying, a per-seat platform embedding AI and still compounding while the market debates whether SaaS is finished. For MSP owners and vendors, the channel thread is just as timely, because the recruit-wide playbook is under pressure.  Who this episode is for  MSP and IT services owners choosing vendors and planning FY27  Channel and partner leaders inside technology vendors  CIOs and IT directors weighing build versus buy on AI  Anyone selling or buying per-seat SaaS as AI reshapes the stack  Show notes  The Quick Fire Three in this episode is supported by NinjaOne. 

The IT industry is shedding jobs to cost-cutting, AI restructuring and the usual business cycles, and the man who chairs the Australian Men's Shed Association thinks the real cost, what it does to people's identity and purpose, is the thing nobody is talking about honestly.  About the guest  Luke Clifton spent nearly 15 years in senior leadership at Macquarie Technology Group, more than a decade of it running Macquarie Telecom, where he drove the SD-WAN transition and built out the cyber security and cloud practice for the mid-market. He stepped back from the operational role in late 2025 and is now Director of Macquarie Technology Operations, focused on governance, risk, partnerships and strategy. He also chairs the Australian Men's Shed Association, which is where his thinking on purpose, identity and men's mental health comes from.  What this episode covers  Why Luke stepped out of a decade-long operational role, and why he frames it as retiring into something rather than retiring from work.  What it actually takes to move into board and NED work: more responsibility, less control, less pay, and a completely different skill set from running a P&L.  The crisis of purpose Luke sees coming as AI restructures the IT workforce, and why men in particular tie too much of their identity to a title.  Inside the Men's Shed movement: the origin story, the scale, and the Spanner in the Works health checks that have caught men mid heart attack.  Practical advice for navigating AI disruption: more than one iron in the fire, broadening beyond a single specialism, and starting while you are still employed.  Confessions of an IT Professional: a listener's story of a change in Washington DC that kept a US President's plane in the air for ten minutes, plus Luke's own confession.  Quick Fire Three: dedicating people to a tech change, why results are the wrong thing to manage by, and the one gut check Luke uses on every partner.  Why now  The IT industry is shedding jobs through a mix of cost pressure, AI restructuring and ordinary business cycles, and the human cost is not being discussed honestly. Releasing during Men's Health Week, with its See Your GP theme, gives the show a reason to put the men's health thread front and centre. The board and NED angle is just as current, with a generation of senior tech leaders weighing up what their next decade looks like.  Who this episode is for  CIOs, CTOs and senior IT leaders thinking about board and NED roles as their next move.  Technology executives navigating AI-driven restructures, in their own teams or their own careers.  Anyone in tech leadership who has tied their identity to a title and is starting to wonder what comes next.  Listeners who care about men's mental health and want a candid take from inside the industry.    Hosts: Naran McClung & Jono Staff. Follow Naran McClung: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naranmcclung/ Follow Jono Staff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanstaff/ Follow Things. Reasons.: https://www.linkedin.com/company/things-reasons/ Instagram / TikTok: @things.reasons Enquiries: [email protected]