September 4, 2025: In this inaugural episode of Flourish Sound Bytes, Sarah Richardson sits down with Tyler Barhydt, a seasoned technology executive who led a remarkable cloud transformation journey. Tyler shares how his organization, Envision Healthcare, went from 11 data centers to nearly zero, the unexpected benefits of the Broadcom/VMware situation, and why he believes every cloud migration needs a dedicated FinOps team. Through candid discussion about getting board buy-in (spoiler: it took 12-20 rounds), building trust through transparency, and empowering teams, Tyler provides a roadmap for healthcare IT leaders considering their own cloud journey.

Key Points:

1. 00:16 Meet Tyler Barhydt: Cloud Transformation Leader
2. 01:03 Key Considerations for Cloud Strategy
3. 01:49 Board Engagement and Cost Transparency
4. 04:08 FinOps and Operational Readiness
5. 06:41 Navigating Industry Challenges
6. 15:33 Leadership Insights

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Welcome to Flourish Soundbites, and today I am joined by Tyler Barhydt, a seasoned technology executive with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, finops, and enterprise architecture.

Over the past few years, Tyler has led a significant cloud transformation moving away from on-prem systems to embrace a modern, scalable cloud first approach. But this wasn't just the technology shift, it was an organizational evolution involving board education. Cost transparency and aligning it strategy with the business.

Tyler, welcome to the show.

[00:00:49] Sarah Richardson: Glad to have you here. Other things, great for our audience to know. You and I have been friends for probably a decade now. We've worked together in previous organizations, stayed in touch, and that's kind of what it's all about. The HIT [00:01:00] world's a lot smaller than most people realize.

So let's jump in and I wanna talk about cloud strategy and board engagement because you've been leading a major cloud transformation journey. And I'm curious, what were the key considerations that led your organization to commit fully to shutting down on-prem?

We had data center sprawl, there was, you know, cost considerations. We needed some flexibility in what we were doing to either as we grew or, shrank in that, that manner, right? We had to be able to be there for that and kind of adjust, as well as just making sure that we had, you know, kept the care journey in mind.

We were enhancing our operations and kind of looking to limit and deal with either current or future risks and kind of mitigate that as well.

[00:02:01] Tyler Barhydt: Yeah, I mean, we have, you know, like anywhere else, right? You have your typical kind of business case and intake processes and things like that. So you're gonna do your cost benefit analysis, you're gonna go through ROIs, you've got different financial models. , I will say we went through quite a number of iterations around that, um, to get kind of this overall migration and , kind of optimization project kind of in play.

, And just really needed to kind of show, hey, if we keep doing what we're doing, what's that look like, right? And that CapEx model, what do you, what if we shift more of a consumption based model? And it was really about explaining it that way and the ability to kind of. Either, again, shrink or, or grow with the business.

So you've got all this extra infrastructure laying there. That you thought you were gonna use and you just kind of, kind of walk 'em through that model. And really it was all about data. If you can show that model, show 'em the data and say, okay, here's what's gonna happen. This is what it looks like and we're gonna be able to shift, they, they actually bought it pretty well and they were kind of headed a little down that path when I got here.

So it was a, a little bit easier, I would say, for me 'cause they were kind of somewhat bought in and I was able to kind of just get 'em kind of over the, over the line and understanding in a more data driven mindset.

[00:03:45] Tyler Barhydt: We're kind of, we're still in the middle of it. We were, know, 11 data centers I think when I got here.

So in the middle of this, our ServiceNow platform's been evolving. So it's, it's really been around showing the progress of these applications and that we've either rationalized, so we had a ton of d Yeah. A ton of stuff that just didn't need to be there anymore. So we looked at, here's what. We thought it was gonna cost when we migrated.

Here's what it costs after we migrated it, here's how we've optimized it, optimized it with finops. So we really focused in on our provisioning times, our typical IT TSM and ITIL metrics from an operations perspective and stability throughout that. So just typical things like that. Time to stability is a big one.

[00:05:15] Sarah Richardson: Philosophy of yours is the importance of not getting locked into technology. And so how do you evaluate the tools and the platforms for some of that long-term flexibility that you need?

'cause you're gonna run into some things along the way that you might shift a little bit to the right or left, but you wanna make sure you don't do a complete, 180 and turn around. Right. So you've always gotta kind of know where you're going. So we try to do things in a way [00:06:00] that it doesn't. Necessarily matter where it's going to live. You have to be flexible and you work with your partners. You're doing POVs and POCs, and sometimes you, there have been a couple of times where I'm like, you know what?

If you'd asked me, I would've said that's the one. And three, four months later I went, oh, we totally went a different direction. And I was wrong. Right? So my early analysis of something was off and being flexible enough to go, okay, that's. We found the right answer in the end, but you've just gotta kind of remain flexible with it and just not, the beauty of the cloud again, is you're not getting locked into something for, three to five years.

You don't have to get locked into

[00:06:53] Tyler Barhydt: So. I think as, as folks are aware, right, the kind of, Hey, we're gonna redo [00:07:00] SKUs, we're going to give you a whole bunch of extra stuff and we're gonna charge you more for it, kind of regardless of what you have left in your environment.

So I'll, I'll leave it as that, as the Broadcom situation. We went heavy aggressive from a dcom perspective, and a lot of that had to do with where we were just, and. There wasn't a lot of lifecycle management going on, things like that. So it was a, a very target rich environment from that perspective.

So we had to, we minimized as much as we could and then we had to evaluate what are our options, right? So how do we try to eliminate enough of where we're tied into Broadcom that we have the ability to kind of walk away? And what, what we chose was to like, okay, let's go talk to AWS, let's talk to Azure.

They would've not, they would not have noticed. So it went really well for us, but we, we had to kind of convince our own internal folks, get a few of those under our belt, but we moved a significant portion of one of our data centers or all of it basically, and then another significant portion of our other on-prem in.

A very short timeframe even. And we had a little bit of vendor help and stuff like that. They were, they were very surprised with how effective we were at it. But we went with, get off of this stuff as fast as we can, and now it's a pathway for us to get the rest of one of our data centers. We still are working to move some more out of it.

[00:09:16] Sarah Richardson: And the win to your point, is doing all of that where you had to let somebody know, but you actually didn't need to let somebody know. So I love the conversations when you get to say, oh yeah, we moved all this stuff over the weekend and nobody noticed, even though they were on deck to be aware of it. So great way to build that trust and collateral to keep doing the things that you want.

Yep. And you did, you created a dedicated finops capability within your team early on. Tell us why that was so important and how has it shaped your ability to manage costs and transparency, specifically for our listeners? Going to the cloud can be very expensive if you don't know how to manage that expense.

It did immediately build trust with the business and with others in it, and it exposed as kind of his historically hidden costs or the lack thereof, right? So when you. We all joke around that the business thinks that, oh, compute is free. Storage is free 'cause they don't see it, right?

We've historically not done showback very well in an, in an on-prem or heavy CapEx type environment. Sometimes you allocate it out, sometimes you don't. It just depends on how you, how you kind of do it. Once you get there, you're now looking at everything and you can apply. Your wasted infrastructure and understanding what you have on-prem, you're applying that in the, in the cloud environment as well.

The business is, it's, well, I don't know if it's surprising or not. It's, most of 'em don't know. They don't pay attention to it. They just kind of, we run and like you leave it up and running and it's all fine, but it's, it is, this is one of those areas where I'm kind of like, I wouldn't go to the cloud without it.

So if you, this is, this is why most people or some people have returned back to on-prem because they think it's cheaper. If you do this right with finops, you're not gonna have that problem. If you're gonna have winners and losers in that mix, right, some stuff's gonna be a little more expensive, someone's gonna be cheaper.

But you just have, you have to manage it tighter than what I think you're used to from an on-prem

Then that desire to have zero data centers, which truly, there's some legacy stuff every once in a while needs to float around in in on-prem or in a, in a closet somewhere. But that ability to truly be able to leverage that environment is a massive strategic win. And so for CIOs and CTOs who might be considering a similar shift, what are the top two pieces of advice that you would offer?

There's more flexibility in it. So just be prepared for that. Retool yourself, reinvent yourself. You've gotta think about things in different ways, and I think that's one of the, the big ones is just being able to kind of, Hey, this is how we've always managed on-prem. You're going to do [00:13:00] things differently.

You can make some quick decisions and go, oops, that one wasn't quite right. But I can adjust it and I can adjust it Um. I know you said two, but I had throw in just if admit when you don't know something, right. Leverage partners, bring them in. Leverage the vendor programs that are out there.

There's all kinds of, you're gonna end up in the double bubble thing where you're gonna have to pay for stuff on-prem and that's always part of that, getting them convinced it's okay. You're gonna be dealing with that double cost of there and in the cloud while you're moving it in your decom before you can actually, you know.

Shut down your data centers and recoup those costs. So I think it's just be willing to leverage those things. There's a ton of programs out there with all of 'em that get you the discounts and commitments and EDPs and all that kind of

Here's what I love though about going to the cloud is to your point, when you have to do, when you have to make that quick correction or something different, it's a keystroke change. It is [00:14:00] not the physical labor like it once was, and hours of downtime and reconfiguring, et cetera. It is keystroke configurations when you go to that infrastructure as code space.

It is a pretty fascinating and fun place to be, harder to get to in some cases. Mm-hmm. But you've shown time and again, that it is possible, I mean, decades of doing this, and that's one of the reasons I always appreciated working with you is, oh, well if Tyler's involved and his teams are on this, then here's what we can expect.

I'm serious. I mean, think. 12 to 20. That's like a win. We've came from environments together where 50 rounds of conversations and you're like, by the time you get approval, you're like, I don't even wanna do it anymore. But yeah, you have got, you have shrunk that equation significantly. Yeah.

Is it is like, hey, we had, we had an application that we were, you know, we were gonna get rid of and didn't need, someone was willing to kind of take it from us and it was already in the cloud, right? So it was like. I'm gonna exaggerate a little bit, but it was pretty much as easy as like, give 'em, you know, we're gonna turn over the account.

The bill can rise pretty quickly too, so you gotta keep an eye on It's good stuff. I, I, I love the model. It's been, it's been fun to make that shift even in my

Are you ready for speed round? Sure. All right, here we go. What is one tech trend you are most excited about right now? And you can't say the cloud.

I do think there's so much potential with it which is a good thing and a bad thing. We, [00:16:00] I would say there's still a lot of kind of. Fragmentation with even our use cases and what, where we're thinking about using it. And you've got a whole bunch of folks that are just kind of out, so you gotta get some control of it, but you want to kind of let folks experiment.

It's just been, there's again, huge potential. There's a lot that can be done. I think we're, you know, you run some risk of where you get lock in again, like, you know, there's all these little ones out there. Somebody eventually is gonna buy 'em and gobble 'em all up and. So it's a little bit of a gamble on some stuff, but there's so much potential and, and really cool stuff that's going on with it that it's like how do you dive in and get more involved with it.

[00:16:44] Tyler Barhydt: Uh, my easy answer is to get outdoors. You know, whether it's camping, fishing, I'm out in Colorado, so there's a lot of opportunity, those types of things. We're in a kind of a remote first culture.

The other one that's kind of funny is, uh, there's a little local barber shop. And in my, uh, the town that I've been. So I go down there, I get the straight razor shave beard trim up and all that. So the hot, tall shave thing's pretty nice. I'd say that's my one, self-care thing that I do, which is kind of fun.

But that'd be my go-to, I guess.

[00:17:34] Tyler Barhydt: it's a barber shop. Barber

Most underrated leadership trait in infrastructure roles.

So I don't geek out too much on some of that technology or it's really not why we're here. The whole, I've worked at a couple places now that talk about it for it and it drives me nuts 'cause I'm not a fan of that either. But I would say it's having a core that's built on kind of servant leadership.

Creating teams where you empower them, um, you need to enable 'em to make decisions and to make mistakes. And, you know, I'll say, make the right, I didn't say make the right decisions, um, because they have to be able to fail, right? You have to be able to allow your folks to fail, but also be empowered that, and know that they're not gonna, you know, get beat up or whatever if they make the wrong decision kind of thing.

So I think just enabling your teams and growing them and that kind of front is where I, I try to focus, I guess.

And, uh, it's always fun to know that I can make one ping to like five of the guys that, uh, used to be able to hang with every day. Thank you so much for just your vision, your leadership, your time today. It's really a testament to the constant reinvention of the infrastructure space, the things we need to be learning and doing, and you building teams and working for organizations that allow you to do all of those things.

So thank you for being on the show today.

[00:19:26] Sarah Richardson: Or see you a city tour at dinner soon. And for all of you listening, thanks for tuning in. That's all for now.

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