Techstrong TV August 19, 2025

Hi, everyone. Is AI Apple's original sin? You're watching Textron Gang.

Hi everyone. Happy Tuesday. Welcome back here to Textron Gang.

Well, I hope your Monday went well, was the start of yet another week here in the summer. You know, uh, a as we get deeper into August in South Florida, we all, all of us down here start looking more and more towards sort of the Cape Verde Islands off Africa and so forth, watching, you know, storms spin up. And of course, we have a one spinning up.

Aaron is, isn't your wife's name Aaron? Jp? That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. No, good for you.

You got a hurricane named after her? Yeah, she's Been watching that one. She's very proud Of it.

I'm sure well tell It's a healthy one. It's a healthy one anyway, if you're not in Hurricane Ally, it makes no difference to you. But that, that's kinda what we do down here in Florida in August, September, October.

Um, but we've got so much more than hurricanes to talk about and some great people to talk about it with our gang for today. I've already mentioned JP Morgenthal, who's a fellow Floridian with me, one and only Stephen fst and the Dean Mike Ard. What a great panel.

Welcome guys. Happy Tuesday. Let's dive right into things, Mike.

Yeah, everyone's been beating up Apple that they're late to the AI wagon. You know, I have my own views on this, but what's going on? Well, there's a report out of Bloomberg that says that next year Apple will get more serious with the AI capabilities built into Siri.

And then that will be followed up by a robot, also driven by Siri. That will arrive in 2027 sometime. I'm not sure Apple confirmed any of this.

I always get suspicious when I see these stories because, you know, somebody's beating up Apple about not being AI savvy, and their stock price gets beat up and suddenly this gets leaked. So I'm always suspicious about the motivation for these things. But jp, what's your sense of what's going on here with Apple and AI and what's real and what's not?

Well, I Mean, the reports of the hardware coming out are 2027, so we're definitely looking forward, looking here with regard to this information. None of it is actually created or on the blocks or working prototypes as far as we know. I did listen to the Bloomberg report, uh, to hear what they were pulling out, you know, the strategy itself.

I, I think, you know, befits, uh, apple Strengths, which has been hardware, you know, they are, uh, I think that's been their claim to fame is the, you know, creation of devices and, uh, bringing devices to market in a way that interacts with you in a way that's personal and, and makes sense. Uh, I gotta say, some of these reports though, about the utility of the devices that they're working on, uh, I question, like you said, it's not so much a robot as it is a, uh, like an iPad like device on an arm that can track around the house and, you know, be able to, uh, follow and, and advise and provide information. As an assistant.

I, I don't know how much room this market has for more assistance, but, you know, uh, apple always has somewhat of a fanboy base, uh, people who will be beholden to Apple devices and get the latest, uh, apple device there. PR headset, I don't think is doing well, uh, as, or as well as they had hoped or expected is a very expensive piece of equipment. Uh, and it really doesn't answer the question on the AI side.

It doesn't really talk to utilizing ai, uh, and, you know, getting the enhancements and the value out of Apple products, um, but also using Apple products in an, in an AI centered universe. So, uh, you know, as you said, a lot of people will call if it's IN'S head. Uh, they don't, you know, they don't, they think that Apple's behind with regard to ai.

I, I think the expectation though is that, you know, Fang, uh, apple needs to keep up with Meta and Google and Microsoft with regard to, uh, producing and being part of that, you know, gold Rush. And I don't know that Apple does. I really don't.

I mean, uh, they are included in that FANG grouping, but I don't believe that they need to keep up in the same way they're not an infrastructure player. Right. And a lot of the interest areas really around AI infrastructure, so, you know, the expectation that Apple should be right there in the center with everybody producing models and generating, you know, uh, inference engines that everybody, that's not Apple's thing.

And that, and that's not where Apple plays. So to expect them to compete on that level and compete in that space, but those players, I think is a, is a misnomer. Yeah, that's not really Apple's thing, you know, I mean, they, they never have been a leading edge company in terms or bleeding edge company.

They just don't do that. Um, historically I think people forget because Apple has had such incredible, uh, success with things like the iPhone and the AirPods and so on. I think people forget that a lot of these, uh, products are built on existing technologies, and Apple often waits, uh, for the market to mature before diving in.

I think that's what they're doing with ai. I think you're, you're spot on there. JP Apple just isn't like the rest of those companies.

And I think that time will show that they were smart not to pour billions of dollars into developing Frontier AI large language models, that ultimately there was no business justification for, um, to the news here. I think that it's really cool that a, uh, you know, that, that the idea of what they're talking about, um, apple fanboys probably remember the iMac G four from 2002, which was, uh, sometimes, uh, nicknamed the, uh, you know, the lamp iMac, which has kind of a rounded base with an arm and a and a screen. They actually had advertisements where those moved around and danced.

I think that's exactly what, uh, Bloomberg is suggesting that Apple is developing essentially a, uh, like a, like a little home thingy with like a little arm and it kind of moves around and follow, you know, it doesn't literally follow you around the house. It just sort of is there in the room with you reacting to you, um, in a, in sort of a friendly way. I think that'd be a cool product.

I think Apple could probably pull that off. I'm not sure it would be transformative or useful. Uh, you know, I I I think that it would be a lot of work for a product that would have, uh, you know, limited appeal.

But I think that it shows what Apple could do with AI technology once it's a little bit more mature and a little bit less burn down the rainforest with, you know, mega models. You know, I mean, I think that Apple could run all of the AI needed to have a, uh, articulated, uh, friendly Siri bot, um, run it on, on device with, uh, you know, moderate power consumption. And that could be a, a pretty good move for Apple.

And actually it would be a pretty nice differentiator for the company in the market when everybody else seems to be running off with these, you know, Stargate billion, you know, nuclear powered data center projects. Well, I, I don't Know. I don't know, Alan, what's your take here?

'cause I look at this thing, especially this thing that as JP described it, I'm like, you know, I'm married happily, I got four children. I'm blessed. I don't need another thing following me around the house telling me what to do.

Reminds me of an old Star Trek episode with Hard Court Fenton Mud, and, uh, and he had the, uh, Android of his ex-wife Stella, or whatever her name was. But anyway, if You could rename it that they could call it Stella instead of Siri. Yeah, that would work.

Car caught ENT mud. Have you been drinking again? Is that alcohol?

I spell on your breath. But anyway, um, you know, is Apple too late to the AI there? Does anybody remember cell phones before there was an iPhone?

Sure, Sure. There was a decade of them, you know. Yeah.

But yet there was the iPhone sort of start tack, you know, Blackberry. Blackberry, Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But you Worked the, the month before the introduction to the iPhone, and you look the, the month after the introduction of the iPhone and everything changed. I still think there's that a moment like that that might be out there for ai. I don't think it's a monitor with arms that may or may not be on wheels following when you were around.

I think that's pure smoke that their feet, they must have went back from that Bloomberg briefing and rolled on the floor, that these guys ate that up. Because a part of it Was also, they were going after the, uh, home security market. So yes, the home, the home security's a real market, but you wanna know what, so you know who you left out of their competition for these things.

Amazon, Amazon has a great between ring and what's the other one? Bling. Not bling.

Bling something ring and something. They, they've got the, the cameras and the home security stuff nailed down pretty good. Google, of course, is in there.

Look, I in my house, all you have to do is say her name and the little and the woman from, uh, Amazon. I don't want to say it 'cause there's, I ought to be one in here. I call it the dot.

Yeah. It be use, I mean, in my house, it's not just the dots. I've got monitor, I have the 15 inch screen of it.

It's built into all my soundbars. It's built into e like my bath, ev the whole house is done up in it, so it's never You needed to follow me. I know.

Name theory And another friend whose wife is named Alexa. Yeah. Can you imagine those houses?

Oh, it must be terrible. But, you know, so it, it's already there. I would a as I, you know, Steven and I remember you, I know you were on the show that day.

We talked about the first day the os 26 beaters came out. I remember you hated the, the, uh, glass interface still. I don't know if it's been growing on you.

I I like it. But, but here's, here's the thing. They are subtly building intelligence into their product line, and I think that's really where they're gonna make their think.

I I'll tell you something else though. Did Johnny, ive signing the deal with Open ai, steal their, their, their secret plans for world conquest and domination. I think that hurt.

Yeah, I think that definitely hurt. I think it Was almost like, you know, the rats leaving the jump in the Ship. Right?

Right. I mean, I bet you they thought they had that in the bag. Right?

Johnny Ivers was gonna come up with something Apple ish that would just, you know, do it. So Alan self admitted Apple fanboy. Correct.

Open AI starts showing up with gear next year. Are you not first in line? Absolutely.

'cause I'm, I'm just not an Apple fan. Fanboy. I'm a gadget boy.

It makes no difference to me. If there's some new tech gadget, I, you know, I'm there. And does anybody think Samsung's gonna have something to say about all this soon?

Well, you know, it's, it's funny, I'm an Apple fan boy, but we recently bought the Samsung Frame TV and the Samsung, um, uh, speakers, I don't remember what they're called, but they're, they, they, they're like, they look like a, like a picture frame. In fact, they have a picture in them. No, I have a Frame TV in my bedroom.

It's, it's really nice. It's really nice. And the integration with their, um, whatever the heck they call it, symphony something or other sound, it's really good.

And, uh, so we're actually pretty happy. The funny thing is, we don't use any of the intelligence of the frame. It's a dumb TV with an Apple TV behind it, because the Apple TV experience is so much better.

Um, but the, that combination really works well. And, you know, Samsung has some good capabilities. Yeah, No, they absolutely do.

I mean, you know, to me, and I don't take this the wrong way, it was, it used to be the, the, the argument between let's say a European sedan versus a, a Japanese sedan. The Japanese made fine sedans and they had all the bells and whistles. As a matter of fact, they had more bells and whistles than the Europeans.

The Europeans were more expensive. They had that kind of Tony look, right? Do you wanna drive a Mercedes, a Beamer, an Audi, or, you know, a Jaguar versus maybe a Lexus, Infiniti Toyota, Honda.

Right? And, um, I, I think it, you, you get that sort of between Samsung and Apple, right? They, I think Samsung has great bells and whistles.

They make good products. I, I have, well, I had a bad experience with one of their AK TVs, but we could talk about that another time I went to Sony. But, um, anyway, I, I, I'm, I use the, my tablet is a Samsung tablet.

My phone is Flip is the Flip Z, so, oh, you are Samsung. I, I just find that the products are good price, good quality, Their refrigerators, reliables have a bad wrap. Mm-hmm.

I'm sorry, they're refrigerators. Oh, I, I've had same stuff, but the, but the digital equipment. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, the, the common integration, you know, what you use on a daily basis, your tablet, your phone, I think they do a fine job with. And they're re you know, you reasonable, reasonably priced.

And, uh, and they're well integrated. Yes, They Are. They are.

But you know, back to Apple, as I said, I, it's early, early in this game. We're not even at the end of the beginning. So there's, there's time for them.

I, they, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be selling all my Apple stock just yet. Is this a move for, to bolster the stock price? Or is they, are they trying to actually freeze the market Stock?

The stock price is doing well? Uh, I don't think that they needed to make this announcement. They've been rising steadily over the past month, a month and a half.

Um, they were under two, two months ago. They're, I think they're two 30. I last saw 'em.

So, I mean, I, I think they're doing fine. What they need is another good iPhone release. And that's where I think that they, they know Apple is getting, uh, stymied, right?

It's like, what do you got? What do you got that's gonna be worth the I I Apple iPhone 17? You know, On that point though, I mean, what does anybody got?

I mean, the iPhone is one of the most important products of the century. Maybe one of the most important consumer electronics products of all time. Uh, to say that Apple's gonna come out with another iPhone, man.

Oh, man. Uh, that, that's a, that's a challenge for anybody. That's true.

So what year was that when the iPhone first came out? Was that, I forgot, But iPhone first came out around 2004 or five. Okay.

And then that was followed up by maybe what the next cool thing was, the iPad, right? Yeah. The iPhone was released on, uh, June, June 29th, 2007.

Was it seven already? Later than I thought. I'm sorry.

And then, so then the iPad followed a few years later. And since then, what? Steve Jobs died, Right?

Well, Oh, well, let's not get down that route. I know that people like to say that, but, um, the, the Air Pods alone are one of the biggest consumer electronic product. No, but the air, But the Air Pods were Steve Jobs that was under development when jobs was there.

Well, you might as well say everything was under development when jobs. I mean, I'm sure that Jobs knew about the transition to, uh, arm as well. You know what I mean?

I, I, Well, he didn't wanna be beholden Intel. Get him some credit sometimes. No, I Look, Tim Cook has done a heck of a job of steering the ship, but Bold, bold and Tim Cook don't go together, honestly.

And I'm a fanboy. I love their stuff. I have it all.

There's very few other, I didn't buy the glasses, the, the VR things that, that was a bridge too far for Lee. But I mean, the AirPods came out over five years after the death of Steve Jobs. Okay.

Are you really gonna say that? They're Steve Jobs creation? I, I, I think it came out under Yeah, I think so.

I'm sorry, but hey. Alright, Well, I hope you know, well, let me just tell you about this. Back to this story.

So this, uh, magical, uh, Siri robot thing that they're talking about. When Steve Jobs introduced the, uh, iMac G four in 2002, he said that in the future, all consumer devices are gonna look like this device, which would be a base with an articulated arm with a screen on it. So when this product comes out in 2028 or 2029, it was a Steve Jobs.

It's a Steve Jobs give him credit, no credit for Tim Cook. The man was a visionary. Visionary, Okay.

So the, so the next product launch will be, which is really Early, Will be a digital avatar of Steve Jobs doing the whole Present. You, you wanna really get me going? Give me a holographic series that just pops up.

Oh, yeah. You get like the Emperor movies, right? Or something.

You know, you want that. Yeah. That, you know, that would, that I would say Steve Jobs never thought of and go Tim Cook.

But let's take a break and come back to our next subject. You're watching Techron gag, Discover Techron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Techron Group. Hey folks, we're back and we're gonna dive into something that some folks might consider arcane and other folks are screaming about.

But, uh, Microsoft apparently is changing its licensing plans for its SaaS products, for the volume discounts that it provides. And some people are complaining already that this is amounts to a 10% price height. Others are saying Microsoft's trying to take more of those customers direct so they can sell them more professional services.

And there's always been some contention about the way SaaS apps are priced anyway. Everybody kind of starts out with a 50% discount and tries to negotiate downwards from there. And, well, frankly, it's a little crazy to begin with.

But Alan, what is your take on what's going on here with a Microsoft and B is the whole pricing model around Saab's just kind of broken. Yeah, so there, there's a, there's, there's, there's circles within circles here, right? Spirals within spirals, first of all, they're only talking about vo, they're volume discount plan, which is probably one of five different discount plans they have over there.

Um, this one though, and I think why it got attention is it affects the channel. And, you know, the Microsoft channel, like the Cisco channel and some of these other big providers, you got, you got players who will kill themselves over 20 basis points, 10 basis points, because that's the difference there. And so every little discount helps.

But, you know, the bigger issue is, Mike, as you said, the whole SaaS pricing model for some, especially with these bigger companies that have three tier distributions, is full of crap. You never know. You know, I, I always find, just keep going higher up the tree and, and you'll get better discounts, right?

Not good enough. Let me speak to your manager. Let me go direct and, and you keep getting better discounts.

And maybe it's, it's the New York boy in me, but you know that that's the way I always did business with them. And, and it's not just Microsoft. It's all of the bigger players like this.

There's the, you know, there seems to always be another discount plan that you didn't know about if this one, so this one dries up. Let's see what the next one is. I'm all for transparency and pricing, and I think that that's the key.

I I'm not gonna hit on Microsoft, but let me tell you something. I got a bill from Google YouTube last week for my NFL Sunday ticket for $522. I was livid.

Livid because I'm watching and I thought my MLB season passed Was expensive. No, the NFL is a world unto itself. I mean, they're a marketing money machine, but I'm watching Google commercials on the TV four payments of 39 95 or whatever.

It comes out, $280 is what it comes down to it, right? Half the price. I reach out to Google to say, where's my volume discount here?

You know, where's my discount? Of course, I'm still waiting because they don't get a live person at Google. And it could take two weeks for them to get back to you.

But the whole SaaS model's rotten guys, right? And look, we could sit here and talk about, is AI gonna break SaaS? Hey, what's his name from Microsoft?

Satya himself says, SAS has died, right? Couldn't come soon enough for me, the son of a gun charging me $522 to watch football this year. But, you know, in terms of this, I don't think any Microsoft End users are sitting here truly saying, oh, I'm gonna pay 10% more.

'cause they're gonna say, I wanna speak to a manager and they're going to get their, they're gonna get their discount back. The only people who may lose out on this are the channel partners. And, and don't they always, but Microsoft has a way of making good to their channel partners too.

So I'm sure there'll be a yet another discount we don't know about thrown into the program to make them hold too. So crocodile tears for me guys. Well, I don't wanna get excited about pricing and licensing discussions, But 540, there's an is crazy.

But yeah, go ahead. But there's an angle here, according to the article, this was partly driven by the EU requirements for transparent pricing. Could it be that the European Union could help all of us by forcing some of these companies to have less obscure?

Because you are absolutely right. Pricing, especially in major SaaS contracts is entirely fictitious. Yes, there's a price, but essentially if you're a bigger customer or a very big customer, what you pay is going to be what you negotiate rather than what the price is.

And could it be that the EU might end up cracking down on some of those shenanigans? And could that maybe help Us? There's a, there's a whole pattern here, uh, from the big players with regard to adhering to eu.

Remember years ago it was like, all right, I'll ha I'll follow the EU rules, but in the US I'm doing the, my, the, this, whatever my way they, I, I have seen now three or four different occasions where EU rules are just becoming the rules that they play by internationally. Right? One of them actually, uh, had to do with, um, how miners need to be, uh, confirmed their age in order to watch certain content that was initiated by the European Union, and they took it to the us.

So the US now, you know, Google's now implemented this worldwide, and if you're a of a certain age, you need to prove who you are and what age you are, the same way they do in, in the, the, the, in the uk. Um, and so I think there's a whole pattern here that's kind of going on where the, the, the specialty, you know, by region is starting to, they're realizing it's expensive to maintain all these different types of systems with different rules. And, and it's like, you know what, if they want it that way, it's not that big a deal.

We're gonna push it on everybody. It does seem to me that a lot of effort goes into these negotiations, and I'm not sure that they're meaningful. I mean, did I really get a better deal of the next person?

Or did we just all, you know, waste about a month of a year of talking to each other about pricing, when at the end of the day, I might be half a point difference than the next guy, jp? I mean, how silly is this? I look every dollar matters in business, right?

Especially when you're a large corporation, uh, and you know, they, you know, the, your, your enterprise licenses based on the size of your organization or how much revenue you're generating. Uh, it can be substantial, right? Uh, you know, somebody like a j and j or General Motors is, is, is gonna have see substantial upside with based on that discount if, if they're going by revenue in the size of the organization.

So it's not a small change for some of these businesses. Well, others, it's nominal, right? You, you're a $40 million business.

It's, it's gonna be nominal. Well, you know what they say though, if you watch your pennies, the dollars take care of themselves. Thanks, granny.

Just, just some wise words of wisdom, right? I'm going to throw out there. But, but seriously, it's true, right?

You, you gotta watch your these things and a half a point here and a half a point there, and it starts adding up. Um, a as I said, especially, you know, when you're in the channel game, those 50 basis points is a big, big difference in your margin. It, it's the difference between profitability and not sometimes, right?

You got overhead cost of good sold salespeople and stuff, right? You in the Cisco channel, the Microsoft Channel, you know, these traditional channels, especially in the three tier distribution model where you go from manufacturer to distributor to, to jobber, if you will. It's a big difference, man.

They, that's, they live on those margins. I will tell you, the one thing that does drive me crazy about it, it's makes it almost impossible to do any meaningful apples to apples comparison across any of these guys. 'cause no one knows what the actual price is.

But I think they like it that way. The Microsoft, oh, they sure do. Yeah.

Of the world. They want it that way. That's right.

They'll kill this discount, this volume discount deal, but they're not gonna tell you about some other discount programs that they have in their back pocket. If they need to close the deal, it's the business. Well, I'm gonna go get on the phone down cve, get a bigger discount on my Microsoft stuff.

But we're watching Textron gang, we'll be back. Are we in a data center crisis? Oh, this sounds so manufactured.

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Home of security Bloggers Network. Hey folks, we're back. And we're talking about, well, just how much capacity is there available in these data centers?

3%. And we also know that the cloud service providers are complaining or are not complaining, but at least cautioning people and advising people to be more efficient with their infrastructure because they too are running outta space. And then, or at least according to JLL, some folks are booking data center capacity now 12 to 18 months ahead of time because they just can't get to the stuff.

And they're just hoping that they have applications or assuming they're gonna have applications to go there. But it's pretty far in advance. And when the app is actually ready, Steven, is this the new reality that we're in?

Because it looks like it's a lot more complicated, at least here in the us. Yeah. I wonder how much of this booking is speculative in nature.

Um, you know, we certainly, uh, the numbers tell us that we're in something of a data center vacancy crisis. In other words, there's not much vacant data center space available. But we've been building so much data center space, and, and I say we, um, I guess the, the, I don't mean me, but the, the industry has been building so much data center space.

It, it's actually, uh, uh, kind of, I don't want to say the wrong word here, but inconceivable that there isn't enough data center space already that, that, that this vacancy. So I wonder how much of this space is actually standing empty in anticipation of use, you know, anticipation of, uh, you know, I, i, could this be another bubble, another maybe even an AI adjacent bubble where people are leasing data center space preemptively in hopes that they'll be able to fill it with, you know, GPUs and so on. Um, one of the stories, Mike, that you, uh, shot over to me, which was really interesting, was this, uh, Reno, Tahoe Industrial Center where they're building get this, um, this industrial park is larger than the city of Detroit.

They are building that much data center space in the Reno, Tahoe area. And it's basically everyone you've heard of Google Switch, you know, Nuova, all these companies are, you know, Microsoft, Google are there, it's all these companies. And they're building in Reno, Tahoe.

Is this a good place for a data center? Uh, probably not. 'cause the Syrian Nevada mountains are right there and they cast a rain shadow.

So there's really no, no water there. Uh, the, uh, pyramid Lake Ute tribe is saying There will be soon, they will soon have to call themselves. Well, I studied urban planning and there's an urban planning joke that I'm gonna let you all in on.

You always name a new development after what used to be there, but isn't anymore because you built your development. So like, you know, happy Deer Park, uh, you know, uh, you know, uh, Fox Meadows, you know, uh, Indian Trail, you all these things. Fox Meadows are neither Fox nor Meadows, right?

Yep. They're all gone because we, we paved it and we built houses and golf courses there. So the Paiute Indian, uh, pyramid Lake Paiute Indian tribe are gonna have to, uh, be the artist formerly known as the Pyramid Lake, because there ain't gonna be no Pyramid Lake anymore.

It's all gonna get drained for these data centers. It it's wild, um, that we're building that much. And yet we still have a vacancy crisis.

What, what do you guys think? I mean, is this, is this real or is this Speculative? I, I got, I have some, first of all, look, this is all tied into the AI data center two thing too, where we've got a trillion and a half dollars, you know, pledged for whatever that means for new data, AI data center space.

But, you know, this brings me back to the dotcom days, right? In the dotcom days, there was a little town outside of Boulder, Colorado called Interlochen. I don't know if you guys have ever been out to Interlocked.

I was just There. That's right. You were on vacation in Boulder.

So, you know, so, so I'm working, I'm starting a company at the Mobius data center, uh, Mobius Accelerator Incubator, Mobius Venture Capital, and that's in Lewisville between Boulder and Interlochen. And I used have to go into interlock and lock for business meetings. There were a lot of storage companies, storage tech and mixed storage and all that stuff.

But then you had level three there. You had, um, whatever the, the Bell West from Denver was called at that time. Was there, might have been sent, I don't think it was sent yet.

Anyway, there were a whole bunch of, of fiber people there, right? And, and we had the same discussions. There was the same drive in the market.

We have a bandwidth crisis. We have a bandwidth crisis. We're not gonna be able to deliver all these resources and all this great stuff's coming online.

And we don't have, we don't have the bandwidth to deliver it. We're gonna have to deliver it over copper wire and coaxial cable and last mile, and we'll forget the last mile. We don't have the first mile.

And we sunk so much money into building fiber that the, the term dark fiber became, everyone knows what that means, right? We, when the bubble burst, there were a lot of people holding a lot of fiber that we had overbuilt, and there was a data center aspect to that fiber as well. Um, I, I think we're looking at the same thing here.

Speculative. Steven, I'm gonna tell you something for, according to this article, right? Like 75% of all the data center space that's under construction right now is already pre spoken for how many of those people it on speculation and figure they'll arbitrage it when the time comes, if they haven't quite grown where they need it.

Look, data center space is premium. We, we could sell it at a profit, sublease it, whatever. I think there's a lot of that going on.

Uh, I, you know, this is, to me, this is gonna be a musical chairs game. And just pity the poor fool who's standing when the music stops. I think the one, the one piece overlooked about all this is, you know, this is North America.

Last time I checked there was this internet thing that allowed you to put apps anywhere you want it. So not, not with digital sovereignty. I think sovereignty makes a difference here.

People are gonna want to shorten their supply chains and all of that good stuff. I'm, I'm, I'm thinking the data center up in the I'll pick Norway for the EU market is gonna be cheaper 'cause it's cooler than maybe one in, uh, I'll pick on Columbus, Ohio. 'cause I know where fu Well, but, but, but just, well, Steven has a particular fondness for data centers in his backyard, but mm-hmm.

The, the thing is, and I forgot if it was in this one links or not, is clearly the data center industry is, is rallying around nuclear. And if you believe, you know, you could put up a little containerized nuclear plant to run your data center, you could do that anywhere, even under the sea. Yeah.

Equinix is talking about that as they're gonna go build out some nuclear reactors. But is that gonna happen before the end of the decade, Steven? Uh, no.

Um, not at all. Uh, but it could happen at the end of the decade. And, and that would, and that would be interesting.

I mean, one of the things that, that would be interesting about nuclear and solar and other sources of cheap electricity, um, you know, one of the reasons that data centers use so much power is because it's much more efficient to use evaporative cooling than, uh, heat transfer, heat pump cooling. Theoretically, if we had sufficient power, we could use more heat pump cooling and reduce the use of water, um, especially if it was incredibly reliable like nuclear. So I don't wanna sound like a too positive on this overbuilding trend, because I definitely think there's overbuilding and speculation going on here.

But, uh, could we perhaps, uh, solve the water problem at least with more electricity? It is possible. Now, there are some good things happening here.

Some companies are looking all of this and saying, yeah, maybe we'll just go back to building our own data centers. And they are taking over old mills in places like Pittsburgh to kind of refurbish them to become their local data center service. So that could be good for those communities.

I don't know how good Moderately good. Remember we talked last, We did, we had this that doesn't make jobs this Automotive factory. Yep.

No. And not making jobs, but it does provide access to power and that is enough to drive your AI up. So people are starting to get concerned about whether or not they're gonna have enough capacity to run these AI apps in facts.

Some of the AI crowd is screaming about how, you know, we're gonna lose this thing to China because they have more power than they know what to do with, Oh my God, the red menace. The red menace. You know, whenever we need a boogieman, do we got it right there?

There is a peak power issue when it comes to these data centers. We are, we are seeing that it is becoming more expensive to deliver power to these data centers. And at the end of the day, the capacity, uh, for the entire system as a whole, right, is going to be delegated to availability within, you know, uh, uh, to support and infrastructure to support these things.

So it, it is, We, We, I I, I liked one of the stories was that there's a group, uh, that can do small nuclear power based on reuse, reuse of thistle material. Um, which as long as it's safe, great, right? And it's not becoming toxic waste somewhere, uh, and, and it can generate, you know, that additional power.

I, I do think that they, we are looking at, we get, even if there's vacancy, right? Even if it's not filled, um, there's still a capacity issue to the entire industry as a whole. But you know, the des the desire of what the consumption is, level of consumption right now is at an all time high.

And I don't think we can easily satisfy it. I mean, OpenAI has a lot of outages, right? I hear of outages all the time.

Uh, anthropic, I see outages in using their services. They, you know, they are having a tough time keeping up. And that's gonna drive, uh, that a, a consumption of that vacancy space very, very quickly.

And this will become the argument for why we need to loosen the regulations in this whole space. Because we have to keep up with the pace of demand and we're gonna lose the race to, To the Chinese X number Of Countries, right? Oh, Yes.

Gotta keep Up with that cap. Gotta keep the world safe for democracy. Hey, I wanna love Canal.

Who has democracy? Now I, You know, I don't know. I just, I just repeat, you know, the slogans.

Mm-hmm. I'm a good, I'm a good party member. What can I say?

Yeah. Well We Shall see. Love canal coming to Ohio.

So wait, so what, what region? So you talked about Nevada, we've also seen Arizonas Phoenix, that, that water wonderland, Phoenix, Arizona. Great place for data centers.

Texas. Texas, uh, yeah, people Are looking, yeah. Another, Another bird in paradise, I guess Northern Wisconsin is now a spot because they have, they have lakes Nuclear.

Yeah. They also have a nuclear energy mill place up there. And they better not mess with them Cows though.

No, don't mess with the cheese. Not the cheese heads will be after you. Is that the thing?

Yeah, I'll be after you. No. Is it Ohio, Steven?

No. All kidding aside, is it Ohio? Like data center central or something?

Mm-hmm. Uh, yeah. Well Northern Virginia I think is where the most data centers, centers are was Virginia.

Yeah. But there's certainly a lot being built in Ohio, Indiana, you know, Tennessee, sort of the, the middle us because, because there's more water here. Um, but uh, there again, how long will that last?

Um, you know, I mean these things are, are, are just absolute water, waters. And I wonder too if there's gonna be climate or perhaps, uh, weather, uh, microclimate related issues. If you Are evaporating humans don't contribute to that.

Tons Of water. No, No. Yeah.

I don't know the earth. The, it changes the earth. It, our climate's been changing forever is not a human issue.

So The dinosaurs, they went extinct because they built out too much AI data center Space. That's exactly what it was. At, at one point though, do AI companies or hyperscalers or wherever show up in a local community and say, we recognize that these are all issues and a we will start paying your electric bill and we'll offset the cost of all these things.

'cause they're making money hand over fist Determine when pigs fly. Oh, that would be interesting though. I could, I could see that happening.

That's a real good idea, Mike. I could see somebody like a Microsoft come into a, a community and say, you know what? We're gonna build this data center, but in exchange everybody gets half price electricity from now on.

Another Volume discount. Boy, that would change the talk. Alright, there we go.

Oh my God. What a tangled web. Anyway, guys, I think that's gonna call a wrap on this excellent edition of the gang, JP Steven.

Mike, thanks so much for joining. Thank you for watching. As always.

We have tech drunk TV playing. Uh, there's some good black hat video still playing on tech drunk tv, so check those out. Uh, but until tomorrow, enjoy your, uh, Tuesday and we'll see you, uh, Wednesday for another great Textron gang.

We're out. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel. We're back here at our suite of black hat with continuing coverage of this year's Black Hat event.

I'm in really happy to introduce you to our next guy, our next guest, Luigi Ko Luigi. Did I get that right? Yeah, You get that right.

Thank you. Luigi is the CEO founder chairman of a company called Data Crypto. And you know, you, you come to Black Hat and look, there was a time I've becoming a black hat Luigi, 25 years, used to be down the block at Caesar's back then.

And, and Black Hat was all about research then. What, what, you know, I remember Barnaby Jack standing up there and making money spit out of the, the ATM machine if you were here for that and, and some of the great, just great security research today. Black hats become more, it's more like RSA in the desert, to tell you the truth, right?

Yeah. We've got every security company, all different kinds of security and cyber as we call it now. And everybody's vying for attention and there's endpoint security and, and, and you know, uh, uh, cloud security and, and what have you with, of course, AI security is big here this year.

And we tend to, we, we, we like gloss over. We don't pay attention to the obvious stuff, right? Like Bill Clinton, when he ran for president, they said it's about the economy.

Stupid. Right? That's what you gotta focus on.

Focus on the economy. Well, in security, it's the data that's the, that's the crown jewel. The data is what's not the application, not the endpoint.

It's the data. And that the best way we can protect data is still encrypting it. Yes.

Right. And so I'm, I'm happy to talk a little bit about data crypto and encryption, but before we do Luigi, let's talk a little bit about you give us kinda your story. My story is, uh, I've been, uh, a computer enthusia since I was, uh, a baby At least compared with, uh, who I am right now, Uhhuh.

So I start when I was 14 and we are talking in the eighties. So yes, with, uh, very small computers and I start back, then I start to be involved into security on the wrong side. So I was hacking, uh, back then, uh, become an ethical hacker.

Uh, from there I start my first business that was doing consulting in, uh, protecting some softwares and, uh, doing, uh, analysis for security threats. Maybe you remember back then there was a protection against the illegal copies of the software. Sure.

And I was testing the security of the different products that was coming from protecting the software from illegal copies. And it was really fun. So from there, then I went to college and I specialized into making the software more efficient.

Back then resources were extremely limited. So everything need to be more efficient. Uh, if you want to squeeze some more performances out it.

And, uh, I've been a serial entrepreneur since then. I've built, uh, for different companies. This one is my fourth one.

Really? Yeah. And, uh, all of them are being around the data.

I start from data processing. So we were processing large volume of data before big data become something. And then I start to do data analytics.

And my area of expertise was helping and developing application for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to analyze the data to fight, uh, organized crime and terrorism. And during that I realized that, uh, while for a government is a good thing, the data unprotected because they can collect them and analyze them for everybody else. It's not that a good thing.

Yeah. It's not a this And There's a right to privacy. It's the right to privacy, but it's also the right to buy intellectual property.

Sure. That, you know, you invest a lot of time and a lot of effort in creating something and then everybody else can take a look at it. It's not the most valuable way To No.

Protect Your job Or No, not the most efficient either. Yeah. You know, it's funny, you, you mentioned protecting or copying software.

So like you, I, I was also, I think most of us of this age, that's how we got into it. Breaking things. Yes.

It was fun. That's how you got into security. They didn't have security in school or you take cyber, they didn't call it cyber anyway, but you didn't take security in computer security in school.

You, you got into security. You, you broke things and you tried to fix 'em better. But back then, you know, we used to have, you know, black market software, you'd buy Windows or OS two or whatever, visit Calc, whatever program you were using.

It came on the floppy desk and you could make copies of the floppy disk and give it to your friends. Or if you wanna make a little cottage business, you made a lot of copies of the floppy dis and you sold it for a couple dollars, but it was such an innocent time. Now we live in a different world, right?

Yeah. Where it's, you can't have, you can't even pirate software anymore because you gotta worry about software bill of materials. Yes.

What is inside. Yeah. What's inside it.

So it's a crazy thing Now, encryption too though, right? I remember when, uh, like, uh, Netscape first came out, right? And, and the, and the first kind of encryption web er web web certs and, and stuff like that.

And we thought, wow, this is this, this is the be all end all. We don't have to worry about it anymore. Right.

Data's gonna be encrypted. And, and we get that little, remember the little key used to light up or whatever, close the lock again, it was an innocent time. Yeah.

The world we live in today's much more. It's not that Innocent anymore. No.

Talk to us about data crypto. Why, why, why this is your fourth company? Why?

Uh, because, uh, as I said, I realize that, uh, everybody spend a lot of money in protecting the data without protecting the data. Yeah. It's, uh, I usually say it's like a bank.

You have a money inside a bank, you want to protect the money, but the way to protect the money is I build stronger vaults. A big, very strong vaults, right? I put alarms, I put cameras, maybe put armor guards and so on.

But if somebody passed all those and put the money on the money that ends on the money now it's that money. And there is nothing you can do. They took the money and they can do whatever they want.

And that have been true in the real world. So the next step is, but banks have not solved the problem, but reduced the problem, putting a small pouch of explosive ink inside the cash. And they did that in the late seventies.

I remember as A result, the robbery to the armored vehicles decreased 84% in a year because the return of investment was at that point. Mm-hmm. Incredibly low.

Right? So it was not worth it. And so what we were thinking is how we can become, or how we can build the purple explosive ink for the data.

And the only solution is we need to encrypt the data, not as is encrypted today means it's encrypted at rest. So when the data slips inside there drive, they're encrypted. And what is protected from somebody stealing physically they're drive from your computer, which is possible, but not that likely.

Or, but even if you stole it, you just installed it a hash blob of data. Yeah. But what I'm saying is how often people get active because somebody get into their computer and ripoff, they're driving taken away.

Right? It's not that common. No.

Then we have the encryption in motion, people sniffing the traffic and that is significantly more Possible. Likely. Yeah.

And likely. But being an hacker, I was also lazy. Why do I need to spend my time to try to breach as 2 56 or breach RSA or electric curve when I can sit here waiting for you to use the data and they will be decrypted for me and I'll take them in clear and do whatever I want with it.

It's a significantly easier place to be. I'm lazy. Average time between intrusion and detection is nine months.

So I have plenty of time. Right. No rush.

There is no rush. I don't need to do it in 30 seconds. So why do I need to spend time in breaching all the other encryption when the data will be clear where I want to use them?

And, and all the system you have in your infrastructure, because they need to operate on the data, they will also need to have access to the key to encrypt and decrypt the data. Therefore, the key sooner or later will be clear. I can steal that key as well.

So the goal for us was how we can solve the third leg of the table. Unfortunately, this one is four for my example, but you have the leg of the encryption address. You have the leg of the encryption motion, but the encryption use is not there.

And with two legs, the table is not that stable. No. So the table cybersecurity, it's definitely not stable for the reason data are vulnerable when they're processed.

And nowadays we spend a lot of time in processing the data. For instance, AI is, or the data always in process 24 7. So they never rest.

Right. So they're always in clear and hackers can just take them in clear without caring about how safe is your encryption. It doesn't matter if it's quantum proof or not, because they did that in clear.

Right. That that, you know, that's like, uh, we locked all the doors, but we left the window open. Yeah.

Right. And, and you, In our case, I would say the example is we lock all the window and left the door open. We left The door open.

Fair enough. Fair enough. But, but it, but it's true.

Right? And, and so this is the encryption in use. Yes.

Uh, taken. And the thing about encryption in use is usually you gotta be on the machine or on the device that where the data's being used prior to that data being decrypted. Right.

Like you said, you get in, you do a low and slow attack or whatever, but you're, you're in, it's, it's eight, nine months till they even discovery. Yeah. And, and so for the next eight or nine months, you, you literally have a guard eye view.

But there is also a better point is because those did, in order to be decrypted, you need a key right Now, sooner or later I can steal your key sooner than later. And then I do it at my leisure, then I do whatever I want. I don't even need you to ask anymore.

No. You by Myself up where it is and use the key. So how does data crypto help this?

We develop, uh, an encryption technology that allow you to encrypt the data and never decrypt them until humans need to consume. Because human will not be able to read encrypted data. Sure.

But until a human doesn't need to consume those data, the data remain encrypted and the whole chain will be from the moment the data encrypted usually generated by a system or a human to, until the data will not be consumed by another human, the data will never be decrypted and the key will never be accessible because no system need to decrypt the data, therefore they don't need a key. What about if I, I have an API call mm-hmm. I, the, the API call is to grab that data, I don't know, run it through it an a, uh, AI or something.

Mm-hmm. No humans really involved. It's all machine to machine is that you got hung.

You gotta decrypt it for that, right? Absolutely not. If the two machines use our technology, of course, if one of them doesn't, yes you need to this of course.

But if both of them use the same technology, machine B can operate on those data without decrypting it. It can do whatever it need to do and then give it back. Um, recently, I'll give you an example.

We launched our product called Phenom for ai. Uh, you have an AI that is fully encrypted. So the model for the first time we'll operate on encrypted data versus today, every model have every single parameter clear and every ED state and any passage between different layers are unclear.

So you can read everything you ask and everything come back as a reply. Every context in context document, every document for training isn't clear with our solution, everything is encrypted, nothing isn't clear anymore. And the AI will be capable of processing your query without even understanding what your query is.

Your response coming from the AI will be understood only by you. The AI model will not be have a visibility in what did you ask. And if somebody steal the model, the model itself is useless because the key is contained inside what we call a te a trusted execution environment.

And if so, you now need to physically steal that server from the data center in order to physically have access to the key, which is again, feasible but extremely unlikely Or probable. Right. Um, how does what we're doing with AI help hurt this whole or it's non-factor?

Uh, what sense? So AI needs access to the data. Yes.

Whether it's from an LLM or you voluntarily give it 'cause you wanted to do act on that data. It's in use. Yes.

And they can be encrypted. But does the AI need to use data crypto too then The AI need to be encrypted with data crypto. With data crypto.

Yes. I got it. So, um, our customer is the AI model owner who provide, we encrypt his own model.

Think about you are a company and we are talking with several different type of company. So from a pharma to a software company, you have your intellectual property. You are trying to use AI to increase your efficiency or to do better service for your customer or to design new products.

Whatever it is you are trying to use the AI because it will help you in your business at the same time. In order for the AI to do its job, you need to provide to the AI information, which is your corporate intellectual property. Your secrets, your 20 year of researches in a pharma business, and all your compounds and all your medical researches.

Now you put all your crown jewels in one single place, which is designed for the opposite purpose. To keep a secret is designed to divulge information. Got it.

And it become a huge liability because if somebody get illegal access to that AI or is capable of copying that AI and take him home with himself, with him, now he can start query and playing with prompt engineering to have the eye to split, spit out all your company secrets and 20 year of research and all your competitive advantage is sadly lost in heartbeat. Hmm. And is a serious threat for every company who want to use ai because they're going to lose potentially, the value of their business is a serious threat.

I believe it is. On, On the other side, you are providing services with your ai. So, you know, there is a lot of company today are coming to provide the services.

Doesn't matter if they are agent EKI, or if they are services like AI as a service. Those company will collect questions from their customers and the answer back, A lot of customer can provide their own intellectual property as query context, document, read informations, and so on. And if those information are exposed, because again, I provided AI as a service, I'm a company.

Mm-hmm. It doesn't, because I'm doing good, AI doesn't mean I'm un breachable. Right?

If I got breached, because rule number one of security for AI is log everything. Yeah. My log can be lost and exposed.

And now all your query, all your information could be exposed. So you have two simultaneous problems. One is the privacy or the security of your company knowledge inside the model.

If you provide a service, there is the privacy and intellectual property of your customer asking question to your ai. Both of them need to be protected. And the only way to do that is to encrypt the information and create a barrier that doesn't allow the model owner to become aware of the question asks by the customers.

And to everybody else, be unable to read what the model itself is capable of doing. This is the problem we solve without creating any measurable delay. And that's a big, that's a big problem to solve and getting bigger as we get more and more of this ai.

Luigi, we're probably over time, I apologize. I I'm Sorry for That. No, you don't be sorry.

I've asked the questions. Um, I don't know if we mentioned the website. What's the website?

com. com. Hey, thanks for coming up.

Thank you for having me. Enjoyed Black Hat. Thank you.

Dead to Crypto. The latest company here. We're highlighting from our Black Hat coverage on Tech Storm tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a little bit. Good day, everyone.

Welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. My next guest, I'm happy to have him on here, is Tabban mog. Mgu.

I hope I got that right. Right. You got right.

Vice Vice President Community and Outreach for the Eclipse Foundation. Tabba, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. It's great to have you on here.

Thanks for having me, Alan. Happy to be here. Pleasure.

Thank you. Well, it's our pleasure. Tabba, I mentioned your vice president community and outreach for the Eclipse Foundation.

Sounds like a great job. I think we all admire the Eclipse Foundation for what it's done for, for us in the IT and software world. But let's, let's dig in a little bit.

How, how did you get to be the VP for Community and Outreach? Kinda where, what, what, where's your journey come from in going to? Great question.

So, uh, maybe a bit more about my role. Um, it's a bit of a mouthful, uh, community and outreach, but essentially what it entails is, is responsibility for our global working groups and marketing and developer outreach and engagement initiatives that we have. Anything that's community facing, I'm involved in, my team is involved in, and, uh, I'm really happy to work with a, a great group of folks around the world.

Uh, the ACS foundation, as, as you noted, has a, you know, a strong legacy of impact, uh, continuing, uh, impact in, uh, the industry, broadly, the open source ecosystem, uh, as a whole. And what, uh, uh, my team, uh, of, of folks gets to do on a daily basis is to advance those various, uh, projects that, uh, we steward at the Eccles Foundation and promote and drive the participation, uh, across a portfolio, a broad portfolio of technologies, uh, globally. So that's everything from developer tools to, uh, software develop, uh, software defined vehicles, rather, uh, uh, a broad remit of, of technologies and, uh, domains in, in the modern application development, uh, industry.

So, with that said, my personal background, I'm actually from a small country in Africa that no one's ever heard of, uh, Otto. And, uh, I, um, I started my career as a hardware designer and, uh, gradually made my way into open source community development and support. And that's what led me to the, the Eclipse Foundation.

I've HaDin at the Linux Foundation as well. Um, and in my current role, I am able to, to really do what I have described often as the, the best job in the world, which is to promote the efforts and encourage the participation of others in, in what's really a transformative technology, um, for our world. Uh, open source everywhere.

And I'm happy to be a part of, uh, ensuring and enabling its success. Absolutely. You know, just during my career spanning, well, more than 30 years now, I such a big difference.

When I first got involved, if you were talking to a, not even just a large company, even a medium sized company, open source was almost a dirty word, right? They didn't want to use open source because they were unsure of licensing. Of course, they didn't have support and training and, and who's gonna maintain it?

And, you know, there were a million questions. And, you know, as I said over the course of my career, that, that, that's flipped on its head, right? Today, virtually every single company is using open source.

And even those who claim they're not using open source are because the tools they're using are all based on open source components and, you know, snippets and so forth. So, you know, it's been open source triumphant, right? O over the last years, now it's, it's not been without bumps along the way.

Right? I think open source security has become an increasingly, uh, you know, divisive or, or let's call it an interesting area, not necessarily divisive. We've learned that open source, like every other software has vulnerabilities and bugs, and, and we've gotta be vigilant about testing and remediating and patching and updating and, and all of that good stuff.

Um, but nevertheless, it, it is do the dominant, a dominant form of software today. Now, the Eclipse Foundation is closely tied into open source, right? The open source is at the heart in many ways.

But why don't you, how would you describe the Eclipse Foundation and give us sort of a, a 50,000 foot overview of all the different things the Eclipse Foundation's involved in. Certainly. So the Hubs Foundation has been around for over 20 years at this point.

And, and we really see our mission as encompassing three important things to empower software developers to enable collaboration in terms of the development of, of open source, uh, technologies. And thirdly, to ensure user freedoms, right? So the, uh, the freedoms of folks to be able to use and modify and, and consume open source in a way that is, is, uh, permissive and allows for the overall software industry to, to thrive.

I I really want to emphasize the software industry component there, because to your point, open source is everywhere. Open source is like air and water. Uh, we need it to breathe.

And the modern economy is fueled by open source. Uh, according to Harvard Business School, upwards of 96% of all commercial software includes open source components. So it's really the default and predominant way that open source, uh, sorry, that software rather is built today, uh, is, is through these open source components, these libraries, these frameworks and tools that, um, comprise, uh, a full stack of, of, uh, capabilities and technologies.

So at the Crips Foundation specifically, we have, uh, a long back record of enabling the, the, uh, growth and evolution of technologies that are used by commercial stakeholders, so by businesses of all sizes, uh, and as well as, uh, individual developers to advance software development. So, uh, the Eclipse IDE, uh, that were named after, and, and the platform that, uh, the IDE is based on is probably, uh, one of the, the most successful examples, uh, in our industry of a community driven and collaboratively developed, uh, piece of infrastructure that has enabled, uh, hundreds, if not thousands of, of organizations to, to successfully commercialize software. It's used by millions of developers around the world.

And, and that's essentially, uh, the basis of, of our foundation, but we have many other technologies at, at this point. We have, uh, more than 20 working groups and interest groups. And our areas of focus include ai.

Uh, we, um, are also involved in IOT and, and, uh, edge and cloud, uh, native, uh, development. Um, and, uh, increasingly we're known as, uh, the, the real center of gravity of software defined vehicles. Our Eclipse SDV, uh, working group has attracted, uh, strong membership growth and, and, uh, and participation from a variety of stakeholders across the, uh, largest, um, uh, organizations in the world and public sector and, and small and medium sized enterprises.

So really what we see as our mandate, and, and particularly, uh, this is part of my role, is to, to support, uh, and nurture the growth of a healthy and robust and diverse ecosystem of, of stakeholders, be they the largest companies in the world, the hyperscalers down to, uh, small and medium sized enterprises and startups, as well as our engagements with the public sector, with regulators and countries and regions around the world. So, um, yeah, as I, as I said, it's a, it's a great place to be, uh, at the forefront of, uh, the innovation and evolution of our, our, our industry and the global economy. Excellent.

I love it. That was a, that was a great overview, Tobar. I appreciate it.

Let's, if you don't mind, I'd like to kinda shift gears a little bit and focus in on three things. I, I led off with security, right? How important securities become in open source.

And, you know, we, we have the Cybersecurity Resiliency Act, and then over at the Eclipse Foundation, you guys have the ORC Working Group and the Octet Project. Let's, first of all, definitions, what is the ORC working group stand for? What is the Octet Project?

How does this all work with the Cybersecurity Resilience Act, and how does it help people watching this? Or how can it help people watching this navigate open source compliance? Uh, great question.

So, the ORC Working Group stands for the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group, and that is home at the Echos Foundation. But, but you know, beyond us providing a regulatory, uh, or a governance rather, uh, framework for the, the Working Group, it's really a coalition of industry leaders and small, medium sized enterprises, uh, in Europe and beyond, as well as, uh, open source foundations. Uh, we are the largest collaboration in history of open source foundations with 20 and counting, including the Apache Software Foundation, Python Foundation, rust, uh, foundation Software, heritage, and, and V Foundation, of course.

So you really have this, um, coalescence of, of all of the industry stakeholders that are impacted by the European Union's, the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act, so the CRA, and that came into force in December of 2024. And it really places, uh, an un unprecedented, uh, uh, the, the, the CRA rather provides, uh, a regulatory regime that's unprecedented in our industry, where the entire software supply chain needs to build security into, into their development and operations, and ensure that vulnerabilities are managed in a way that, um, ultimately self safeguards the consumers of, of these products. So it impacts all software that is sold into the European Union.

So it, it, it is expansive in nature because, um, you can imagine that, um, all companies are, all major companies, all startups that want to be successful in the European market need to, to take into account, um, the, uh, the regulation and, and, and impacts of the CRA. It's particularly notable the work that's happening at the ORC because you have this diverse ecosystem of folks coming together, this community coming together to respond to, uh, the CRA and take a role in shaping its implementation. Um, and that's something that as well is, is, is new, and, and we are really proud to be playing a supporting role in, in, uh, enabling the community to respond, to build, uh, the specifications, the tools, the best practices that will benefit the entire industry.

And that's happening, uh, through the, uh, the participation and involvement of Hyperscalers, so Microsoft and Google, and some of the largest companies in the world in, in terms of software and beyond. We have Red Hat participating, uh, Huawei, Nokia, uh, Mercedes-Benz. All of these various, uh, industry leaders and titans are working alongside small, medium sized enterprises.

So, uh, you know, literally, uh, uh, companies that have dozens of employees who, uh, these small medium enterprises are going to be the ones who really face some of the challenges around the implementation and response to the CRA. Uh, they are folks that, um, you know, think of the startups that you know of. Uh, the vast majority of them don't have the resources to, to necessarily, um, develop secure by design, uh, software development practices and, and procedures.

They don't have the tools, uh, to effectively, uh, handle these vulnerabilities and, and report them. So that's the work that is, is happening under the aegis of the, uh, of the ORC. So that's the ORC.

The Octe project is, is, um, is a European commission funded initiative that is hosted at the Eclipse Foundation. And we've announced the launch of that. And what that entails is a toolkit, a practical, uh, easily accessible toolkit that is available to small, medium sized enterprises.

So, uh, it'll include a CRA compliance checklist, a conformity assessment specification, uh, a variety of, of, uh, uh, tools and, and capabilities that will allow, uh, the small and medium sized enterprises in Europe to respond to the CRA. So, the ORC provides the strategic, uh, response, let's say, from, from the broad base of ecosystem folks. And then the o the op-ed project is the tools and, and practical guides on how to respond specifically for small, medium sized enterprises.

Some great, that was, that was a lot there. A lot packed in there. Devon.

Thank you for, for laying that all out. Now, of course, everyone on here heard it, and a lot of people said, Hmm, sounds interesting. I'd like to find out more.

How can they find out more? Absolutely. So in terms of ORC, the, the, the way that the ORC works is, uh, it, it, we like to call it is, is built for and by the open source community.

So our engagement model is, is what you'd expect in open source. Everything happens out in the open transparently through get repositories. org, and, uh, find out how to contribute and participate in the development of the, the, the strategic response, the resources, et cetera, that, um, are, um, are being put into place by this, this diverse community of, of folks.

So that's how they can engage with the OC, uh, working group. Uh, yeah. And that includes going to the, uh, GitHub, uh, repository where you can find the inventory of resources that we announced and, uh, and, you know, being able to, to use those resources.

eu, uh, that folks can visit and, um, they can find out about, find out more about the, the work of the, uh, the project and sign up for a mailing list where they can be updated as these resources become available for small, medium, uh, and, uh, uh, similarly sized enterprises. So, uh, those two venues, the, uh, ORC Working Group website and the octe, uh, uh, website are the best places for people to learn more and also to get involved in responding to what is a transformative and ultimately beneficial regulation for this industry. Uh, software, uh, open source software is everywhere.

Security is everyone's job, and it's through regulations such as the CRA, uh, as, as daunting as they seem. They really, uh, are a call to action for everyone, particularly, uh, the folks, uh, in the open source world that, uh, live and breathe, um, uh, these challenges every day. Great.

Tomorrow, we're about outta time. I want to thank you for coming on here and, and telling us all about ORC Working Group OCAD project, how people can help and, and how they get their arms or head around the, uh, cyber STA Cybersecurity Resilience Act. Right?

It's something, it's, it's, it's not needless red tape regulation. Open source security is a, is real. And, and it's a need.

Keep up the great work. Keep doing what you do. Keep the Eclipse Foundation.

Great. We appreciate you all, and, uh, come back and visit us again soon. Thank you very much for having me out.

My pleasure. Tabba Micho Micho Lagu, uh, vice President Community and Outreach, the Eclipse Foundation here on Techstrong tv. We're gonna take a break.

We'll be back in a second with more. Hey, everyone. We're back here at Black Hat on the show floor.

If you can't tell from the lights and the noise, it's live. Uh, people are all over. But we carved out some room here at the Palo Alto, uh, exhibit, if we could call it that booth, if you want.

Let me introduce you to Orion Ca. Caseta Cato. Cato.

Yep. I apologize, Orion. It's all good.

I did get Orion right, though. You got the important part, like the star. But, um, Orion, thanks for joining us here on Techstrong tv.

Say hello to our audience, give him a little bit about you. Yeah. Um, my name's Orion Cato.

I'm Senior Director of Product marketing for the Cortex Cloud Solutions of Palo Alto Networks. Um, I've been kicking around the cybersecurity space for about 20 years. About a third of my career is in application security, a third in security operations, and a third in cloud security.

It's a nice, it's a nice third, third and a third kind of rounded out thing. Um, Orion, look, our audience knows Palo Alto. Yep.

But, you know, this isn't like your grandma's Palo Alto. It's, it's more than just next Gen firewall, obviously. You mentioned Cortex Cloud.

Yep. That's the cloud security offering. There's Unit 42, the, uh, the, uh, security research.

Yep. Division. You guys have done a couple of acquisitions recently.

Some bigger than others. They're not all closed yet, but you can follow along on Security Boulevard to get all the news on that. Uh, what have I left out?

Uh, the thing we're talking about today is Cortex Cloud, which you talked about a minute ago. Um, what Cortex Cloud is, is essentially a re-architecture of our Prisma Cloud solutions, which is our cloud security, uh, portfolio. What we essentially did was we took, uh, you know, our well-known market leading solutions, Prisma Cloud, we re-architected them on top of our security operations platform, which is Cortex.

That's how we got to Cortex Cloud. The benefit though, is essentially we now have, you know, our application security, our cloud posture security, our cloud runtime security solutions, all on the same unified data layer layer as our security operations solutions. So they have, you know, context running all the way from code to cloud, and then a unified policy and AI engine and, uh, automation engine of cortex.

I love it. Um, look, you, you shoved a lot there in a little bit of time. I did.

I hope That can, uh, you know, just do it. Well, we're not gonna play it any slower because that's not gonna help. But let's peel the leg the onion back a couple little, let's dive into each of these days.

Sure. So, the problem in the cloud security market essentially is fragmentation and the natural silos that exist within the platform. So cloud security essentially is, um, three things.

It's your application security, so the app, the applications you build, there's a whole bunch of six or seven tools that everybody has to have to make that work. Then you have your cloud posture security, which is essentially kind of a, a proactive battening down of the hatches and making sure your misconfigurations are dealt with. And then finally, you have your onetime security.

So, you know, finding a attacks in real time reacting to those. And so what Cortex Cloud is, is essentially taking the, you know, 16 or so solutions that an average company would have to build these together, and then putting 'em onto one platform to break down the silos of those tools and the silos of the teams that run those, which is application security, uh, your, uh, cloud security team, and then your security operations team all on one platform. I love it.

I love it. Look, the theme of this year's show is definitely, uh, ai. Yeah.

And I know you guys are doing stuff with AI within Cortex. Talk to us about that a little bit. Yeah, I think it really has, um, two implications on, has two implications on our, uh, portfolio.

The first is, people don't often think about this, but when you're building an AI application, it's actually a cloud native application underneath it. So the more AI you use, the more cloud you use, and our solutions help you to secure that cloud. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is, you know, the proliferation of AI is starting to reach all sorts of areas. And one that's very important is AI generated code. So about 95% of code will be AI generated by 2030 according to Microsoft Report.

Um, what that means though is, you know, we have a lot of code being generated by ai, and a lot of that is vulnerable and being pushed into production to the point that around 74% of cloud breaches are now due to insecure go. So really drives home the need for not only greater cloud security, but also, you know, an integrated approach that brings application security into that. I love it.

Very cool. Um, let's talk black hat. Yeah.

What are you hearing from people? What's been the reception for what's happening with Cortex and Palo Alto on, on a broader stage? Yeah, it's a great show this year.

Um, there's a lot of buzz in the air. So we announced our application Security Posture management, our A SGN features. Yep, yep.

Um, it's been very, very well received. Um, you know, at least for this booth, it's one of the hot topics. I, I think A SPM is pretty hot all around.

What about, I, I know you're not part of, but unit 42 news there. Uh, yeah. We recently released the, uh, I think the 2025 global IR reports.

Um, so, you know, there are lots of good tidbits in that, lots of good research. The unit 42 guys are always cooking up amazing stuff. It's a good, it's a talented team they got over there.

Absolutely. Absolutely. How can people engage with Cortex Orion?

Yeah. Um, the best way to get involved, uh, the best way to get involved is to, uh, check out our website. So both the Cortex Solutions and the Cortex Cloud solutions.

com. Um, we also have live interactive demos that you can, you can do for the products and, uh, you know, kick the tires. Fantastic.

Hey, I, I know we, we took over the, uh, the theater here. Yeah. We gotta give it back.

But I want to thank you for coming on and getting us a little bit educated on Cortex. Of course. It's Palo Alto.

com or palo alto network com. Networks com. Com.

And then they could click through to Cortex from there. Yep. Alright.

Or Ryan, thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of black hat. Keep up the good work.

Thank you. Cortex Cloud from Palo Alto Networks here at Black Hat. We are, well, we're not live, we're edited, but we hope you've enjoyed this.

Stay tuned for more black hat coverage on Tech Trunk tv. Hey guys, thanks to the threat we're here with Nick Durgan is the field CTO for harness, and we're talking about bottlenecks and DevOps and AI coding tools and lion and tigers and bears of mind. Lots of things are going on.

Nick, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Mike, for having me. Always enjoy coming on here.

So, again, thank you. It seems to me that we always had issues with bottlenecks before ai, and now we're adding these AI coding tools and we're generating more code than ever. And it's not clear to me that our existing DevOps workflows are up to the tasks, but what's your take on what's going on here?

Look, I think the last 10, 12, definitely the last eight years, we talked about automate everything. And I think it was something that was important to people, but it hadn't been driven by anything that was actually truly backing it. And now AI has put a massive amount of pressure, and what we're seeing is, if you look at the Dora report from Google and 25% more usage of, of AI coding, but it's not actually getting outta production, it's getting at, it's getting out slower, you know, one, one or 2% slower.

And it's also having more bugs. And so I think to the point is, is now there's a huge pressure, and we're seeing it specifically is about automating all of those pieces, making sure it's easy for people to do the right thing, but it's hard for them to do the wrong thing. So putting policies in place to prevent, whether it's AI generated code or engineer generated code, making sure that it doesn't do the wrong things.

Is this simply a matter of we're gonna have to manage more pipelines simultaneously, or is it also the fact that a lot of the pipelines are gonna have more dependencies on each other and things have to be orchestrated in the right order because otherwise it'll just all pile up at the back end? Yeah, I, I see it, it was done in an interesting way. I'll, I'll, I'll give a very clear example, Mike.

If our job today was to build an airport, would you let me build a runway for every airplane? Well, probably not, right? And the idea here is very simple, is that we used to actually allow all of our engineers to build a pipeline for every application.

And you wouldn't do that in the real world. There's no way we did it to, to, to speed things up to give 'em freedom. But the reality is now when we see with our customers, you know, instead of having, you know, 3000 pipelines or 30,000 pipelines, it's actually only what 19 to 30 templates are being used.

And so the intention is to actually make the reusable, but more importantly, it should be like playing a video game. So my intention here is this, is that, you know, when I hit that critical vulnerability, I don't want to know about it two weeks from now. I wanna know about it now I don't wanna fix it.

And so it should be like, just every time that I fail, constantly doing it and allowing the pipelines to truly allow us to go and move faster. If we've got all of the same rules and all the same policies in place, now we can actually go forward, Hey, I failed because of resiliency problem. Great, let me fix that.

Hey, I failed 'cause this is gonna cost me too much. Great. Let me go fix that.

And so now we're seeing it in the pipelines and it's allowing our engineers to focus on what they're good at. So let's take that analogy a little bit further. If I, um, limited number of pipelines that are being shared by all these different planes, at some point, do I have to wave off some project because the pipeline is being used by some other project, kind of like how I do it in airport?

Great, great question. So I think that's one of the neat things that we have with scalability in the cloud, is that we can actually go ahead and burst those pipelines. So even though there's one pipeline template, it can be leveraged by all the people and we can scale it out infinitely.

And I think those are the benefits is that leveraging the cloud and, and leveraging, you know, whether it be the build and the deploy pipelines for what they are, uh, the intention should be that unless there's an actual blocking reason why they have to, you know, wait for each other, right? Because they, they have a dependency, but then that's not a, that's not a pipeline problem or, or harness problem. That's a science problem, right?

If there's a dependency, but if there's no dependencies on each other, they should just move along and scale it and fill it. Are a lot of organizations gonna have to rethink their CICD platforms as a result of all of this? Because a lot of the stuff that historically we built was for frankly, a different era.

I think that's what we're seeing across the board is everybody thought they could go build it with 17 different tools, right? We've had tons of people up on stage. I'll tell you that's, that's not the case anymore.

Why would we spend an ounce of time building spinnaker or something to the effect of, uh, when that would mean, you know, not not beating their competition. And so now that you've got a pipeline that makes it easy to do the right thing, creates the templates, you've got, um, you've got policy in place to make it hard to do the wrong things. And now we're starting to automate all the parts that people hate.

No one likes waiting for tests to run. No one likes creating those tests. No one likes, um, you know, waiting and babysitting for babysitting deployments.

No one likes turning on and off non-production infrastructure. So now when you're using AI in that pipeline to remove the worst part of people's jobs, now people come to it, they actually clamor towards it. Versus we've seen a lot of AI in a lot of this area where we've started taking the best part of the job, you'll actually find revolt, right?

Your, your engineers kind of, uh, push that aside because they look at it as taking the best part of their job. Mm-hmm. It almost seems to me there's a little bit of a paradox going on here in the sense that you will hear people say they like using these tools to handle specific tasks, but at the same time, they'll also tell you oddly enough that they're going slower.

And maybe that's 'cause I don't know, they're spending more time on the code and less time on scut work and they're fixing more issues earlier. But, um, what's your sense of what's driving that little paradox? I see it in two ways.

'cause we actually see the numbers. So you see the generation of code, but then you also see the quality of it. And I think that's one of the areas where, you know, almost like Paraprogramming was in the day where we would actually go and have two engineers working together, you know, looking at the code and then extrapolating from it.

And I think it's, it's causing a new way to think about things. So yes, it might take a little longer. What we are finding is that the people are leveraging it to, to clear the white space, right?

So I don't have to even just start from nothing. I've got a place to start with or to help me with the challenging tasks that are outside of my boundaries. Maybe a security oriented, uh, function or, or something that's quite a, I can at least have a starting block.

And so to your point, yeah, there might be some troubleshooting and there might be some areas, but what we are finding is qualitatively, uh, we're seeing people actually enjoying it. Uh, the ones that are, that are able to skill up and move forward. Sometimes the ones that have massive knowledge, like in depth, been at the company for 20 years, sometimes their knowledge actually outpaces some of the AI today.

And so it is irritating, but for the most part, we're seeing a qualitatively beneficial Quantitative is still a struggle for a lot of folks. Mm-hmm. As you kinda wonder a little bit, we've been talking about platform engineering and various shows and previously and all kinds of places.

And, um, will the rise of AI coding tools kind of force more DevOps teams down that path? Because I do need to find a way to manage all this at scale. So I think that's it.

If we're gonna actually take on and become supporters, and we're gonna, we're going to support our engineers, we're going to provide them templates that work, we have to work in a more efficient way, right? We can't have 10,000 copies of the same thing. We have to, to be able to do it efficiently.

And so whether that's through, you know, our own, our own work or ai, what we're seeing our customers is removing. I don't want to go and have to create a new template for Java when I've got one for T net. Can we, you know, have AI kinda help me create it based on my policies, my templates that I already have?

I want to, you know, when I have to troubleshoot why a pipeline's down or why it's not working as an engineer or as a developer, I might not know all the 17 different systems that it's being used. So I want help and actually understanding what failed, why it failed, so I can get to it quickly. Those are the areas where we're seeing people focus, because regardless of, of whether they love their DevOps job or they love their developer job, those are the parts that people hate doing.

And we've literally, since the beginning of time, you know, this, have focused entirely on that. We started with making sure people weren't babysitting deployments. We then said, Hey, instead of, you know, if I changed the gas cap on your car, why would I, you know, test your entire electrical system, do the same thing with unit tests.

And now we're adding that even to the point of I don't want to have to go and create tests. Like, let me take and copy straight from Jira and, and let me put it into a test automation that can actually go and figure out what it should be. Let's have the tools that have the context of your pipeline and the context of your application actually recommend tests that you implement for, for full functional tests.

So I think the idea is let's unburden those people so they can do higher level things, not remove their jobs in any way, shape or form. Going back a little bit to your earlier point as it relates to that, we all have deadlines and people rush to do things. And when they're rushed, they tend to short shrift things and skip things.

And if it's simpler to complete a task using ai, is it more likely that we're gonna run that scan or that we're gonna run that extra task that we'll have the time to do it, right? Versus, I think there's a tendency these days where we're doing things that we know are suboptimal, but we're doing it because we're trying to meet some sort of deadline. This is where I see people implementing and specifically harness our policy engine using OPA to write policies that maybe a change advisory board would hold, or maybe a governance team would hold, or security team would hold.

So that those things actually just can't happen. And so the idea here, and I know I've talked about it a thousand times with you, but making it easy to do the right things. That's one part.

Make it hard to do the wrong thing. So even under that deadline, there are certain things that we cannot mis, you know, we can't skip, right? Especially say we're critical infrastructure or regulated industry, those could, could, could delve into fines and, and much larger problems.

So instead have that be known. I think one of the things that's important is that we all have to be playing the same game. I use a horrible analogy and I'll, and I'll use it today, but I think software is like playing football and just hear me out for two seconds, right?

Most people in the world play football with their feet in America. We play with their hands, God knows why we call it football, uh, in Australia, they bump it and they kick it and they jump all over each other. The problem is no one knows how big the pitch is, what the score is worth, where off sides is.

All of these things are different, but that's how every one of our software teams are working. And until we can actually have the same rules of the game till we know how things can go to production, and it's okay to fail as we learn through that process. It's okay if you failed because you didn't do that test, it'll go out next week, right?

It's okay if you failed, but I'm gonna give you that response now, not two weeks later. And so the intention is to actually put that as part of the process. And I guess that brings it back to even playing the video game.

Make sure you have those opportunities and abilities to fail. Um, because we all know the rules of the game. Mm-hmm.

As I listen to you, it occurs to me that historically every time there's been a great innovation, we typically use it to do what we're currently doing slightly faster for a little while. And then one day somebody wakes up and just blows up the whole thing all together and has this epiphany and we do something entirely different. Are we on the cusp of that with software development?

Or are we gonna be rethinking the entire software development life cycle end to end? I think right now we're in that phase where, where I would almost call it like the renaissance phase, where you actually, the reason we were doing paintings and, and we're able to go and create shows and, and spend time in art is 'cause we had an abundance of everything. And I think that's what it's providing for us right now, is AI is actually taking a lot of those tasks that were menial, the things that we hated.

One of the things I actually talk about, Mike, in a lot of my talks is, you know, a lot of people say that AI is gonna mimic human behavior. And I actually think it's a little bit opposite. I think human behavior is going to mimic agentic AI in the sense that we build agents to handle the tasks that we dislike, right?

And then we can focus, our teams can focus on the things that they love and more importantly, the things they're passionate and good at. When you put someone who's phenomenal at a task or, or has a passion towards it, there is no time at the end of the day. Um, yet there are tasks that we all have to do that are minna and we'll do them tomorrow.

But if we can remove those, I think what you get. And so I'm not, you know, I'm not necessarily directly answering your question, but I think right now we have an opportunity to be in that renaissance state where we can actually go do the things we're phenomenal at. I'm also trying to figure out, um, how these AI agents will manifest themselves.

And I ask this from this perspective. Will I as a developer or a software engineer have my own personal small army of AI agents that I am assign tasks to? Or will the team have a, a single AI agent optimized for a specific task that we're all sharing and sending jobs to, and then it is kind of getting trained and better optimized for that particular task as it goes along.

So I, I think you'll see both options, but if we actually go extrapolate where the benefit would come from, you know, you can take it a simple medical practice. Would you rather go to a doctor who's seen one version of, of the thing that you have wrong? Or would you want to go to a specialist who's seen it every single day all the time?

That's one example. Now, we take an AI context, is what's important. What drives value in an AI is its context.

It's the same as humans, right? The more experiences we have, kind of, the more it allows us to deliver. And AI is no different.

So if the AI has context amongst your entire team of, through your entire organization, more importantly through the industry, right? Being able to understand your code, your build, your artifact, your deploy, your infrastructure, your database change all the way through, right? Even your APIs and how they're operating in, in runtime.

Now, when that AI has that context, it's a very different story than my individual one that works for me. And so I think sure, people will create them that work for themselves, but where you'll gain value is where you actually had the most context, which is beneficial to the organization that's using it. And that's, that's our firm belief.

That's why if you look at all of our ai, it includes the context that we have of your organization. And so now it's creating responses. Potentially it's the PR that you can go fix something because we know the line of code, we know who committed it, we know it's part of this deployment.

And I think that's where value drives in any ai, it's the context that it holds. Mm-hmm. Well, let's walk through that for a minute.

Let's use your doctor metaphor. So if I go to the hospital today and I go see all these specialists, each of these specialists tends to think of whatever the cure is gonna be is something that's related to their field. AKA, you see a surgeon and they always want to cut.

So how do we kind of figure out like within that context that the AI agent in particular may have a, a bias towards a particular function or motion because of what it does? I think that's a perfect example of one of the reasons we wanted a platform that doesn't just include the developers, but includes security, it includes finance, it includes governance, it includes DevOps. And I say this because we don't wanna look at through one singular lens.

So I I'm a hundred percent with you. I think we have to look at this through outside lenses, and it shouldn't just be about one focused area. Sure, you can, if that's your area of, of expertise and, and of course it's gonna build stronger notions.

But I think to your point, the value is actually a platform that allows all these teams to work in harmony. So often you get, you know, finance will buy a tool to go beat infrastructure or security will buy a tool to go beat engineers, I think longer are the days that that's actually successful. And now you have to actually operate to that point with a larger mindset and a larger amount of people bringing information into that platform.

And so to your point, the more you can get a diverse understanding of the business problem, of the finance problem, of the infrastructure, uh, the application problem. Now, I think to your point, you're getting, you're getting closer. Is it all of it?

Maybe not yet, but I think your, to your, to your purpose, that's, that's exactly where we believe, right? And then what is the definition of a developer going forward? And that may seem like a trivial question, but it's not because it seems to me we're gonna see all these so-called citizen developers who are gonna be using these vibe coding tools to rapidly prototype stuff and all that code is gonna come cruising through our DevOps pipelines at some point, hopefully.

Um, so do we need to kind of come up with a different way of thinking about developers and their, I guess, tiering them based on their knowledge or experience, and how do we manage all that? Sure. I think I'll start in reverse.

How do we manage all that? One of the things that I believe wholeheartedly and is incentivize the behavior that you want. And so if we're gonna incentivize engineers or developers to write, you know, lines of code, maybe that's the wrong incentive.

And so I think what changes and where the titles change we've had, you know, um, you know, you can go through DevOps SRE platform, like we've had adjustments on that side of the fence. We might see the same type of name change in developers. We may or may not.

I think the functions that will change are gonna be based on how we actually incentivize people. And I think that's the key is that to constantly make sure that what we're asking them to do, we're also incentivizing them in the background. If we don't do that, you know, you will cause to your point, a problem where I'm being incentivized one direction and doing it that way, but what the company and the business actually needs is something else.

And so I think it's actually upon the business, um, and upon, uh, not just say on the tech, but actually really take a look at what that does look like, to your point, whether it's generated by ai, whether it's generated by a human, whether it's vibe coded or it's built by someone who knows our business for years, I think it still all has to follow the same policy regardless, because we can trust, uh, any and all of it as much we all make mistakes and, and putting those guardrails in place is actually make sure we all are confident in what's coming out regardless of where it comes from. And so I think that partially answered your question, but um, hopefully that makes sense. Yeah.

Is this in the final analysis becoming a bigger conversation than just something that occurs among US software engineering minded folks? And we need to be able to go explain this to the business leaders who the organization itself is more dependent upon software than ever, but it's not clear to me that they think in these terms or even understand these issues. So how does that conversation get started?

Well, I will tell you, in the last year we've had a massive change. So this used to be a CIO or CTO level conversation, and now this is a CEO, uh, COO and board level conversation. So to your point, I think the industries that are realizing that either A, they're behind or b, that are pushing forward, um, quickly, are all in an understanding that we have to take this on regardless of what we believe our business is.

You know, we said a long time ago that, you know, almost every business is a software business at this point. And the intent here is this has become a much higher level conversation. Um, I'm now having all of those conversations with the highest level executives because it matters to them as well.

And they realize that to gain their investment, they put in, say, in the code generation space or in the audit, the AI that they've already used, if they don't protect it on its way through a pipeline, it doesn't do 'em any good. All right, folks, you heard it here. I think it still holds truly, even in the age of ai, every time you have an action, there's an opposite reaction, sometimes more powerful than the actual action itself.

And we need to figure out how to plan for that because it's happening right now. Hey, Nick, thanks for being on the show. Thank you so much, Mike.

All right, and back to you guys. And Steve, Welcome to the six five Summit AI Unleashed. I'm Will Townsend.

I lead the security networking practices for more insights and strategy, and I'm joined by Mike Fitz. He's the vice President of Solution Sales and indirect channels for T-Mobile for business. And in this session we're gonna discuss the evolution of the edge in its impact on 5G networking, agility, and intelligent connectivity.

Mike, it's always a pleasure to chat with you. We've done several of these over the years, haven't we? Yeah, we have.

It's been fun. Will. So I appreciate the opportunity.

I appreciate you having me back. Yeah, likewise. I always learn something new when we we talk, but let, let's get started and let's talk about defining the term edge.

There's near edge, there's far edge, there's fat edge, there's thin edge. What does it really mean from your perspective, and why is it important to businesses right now? Yeah, no, great question.

Look, and I think it's, uh, defining this is probably more important than ever as we move into the world of AI and agentic AI specifically. Um, and, uh, and to me really what edge means is, um, it's less of a technical concept to me and more about where does work get done. Yeah.

You know, where are we working? Um, for me, it's right here on my connected laptop. It's my, uh, mobile phone, it's at my house, it's wherever I wanna work.

Uh, for agent ai, it's the same. It's, um, it could be a, a robot, it could be a car, it could be a, a contact center application being used by a care representative sitting at home. It could be any of those things.

And so to me, the edge of the network is, uh, where work gets done. And I think in some ways, the classic definition that many carry around thinking well, edge means the edge of the provider's network or the edge of my corporate network, I think is a little bit ill-defined and a little misleading actually, because it's limiting, frankly. Yeah.

Um, and, uh, and I think we just need to sort of blow up that concept a little bit and just acknowledge, hey, where work is done is where we need compute and where we need network, and that's the end of the story, and we need enough at both of those places. Um, so, so it just, it just works, right? Yeah, I know.

Yeah. And, and, and I think, we'll, even more importantly, um, when I think about, you know, what's needed to make agentic AI work, it's, uh, it's obviously the compute, but of course network, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit today. Yeah.

And it's not so much about, um, faster, better lower latency networks, any of that. It's not necessarily about even faster compute. It's about providing a predictable connectivity experience where computing exists.

To me, that's what it's about. 'cause I was, I read an article the other day, actually, it was pretty fascinating, but it was a, it was a study done by MIT where they were studying the reaction time of humans to, um, driving situations and, and how quickly humans reacted to things like a deer running out in front of them or, um, seeing something on the road or a car cutting them off, whatever it may be, right? Yeah.

And what they found was, this was interesting to me. What they found was the average human reaction time from seeing the obstacle to reacting to the obstacle, either through steering wheel or brake input, was about half a second. Mm-hmm.

So 400 to 600 milliseconds is actually what their study, uh, said. And I was thinking about that and I was like, you know what, uh, if you, if you use that metric and you said, well, could, could the, you know, the cloud providers and a 5G network or even a 4G network provide consistent performance and delivering an application less than, or can it provide an application of less than 400 milliseconds? Yeah, it absolutely can.

There's no doubt it can, we know AWS as an example, performs better that we know 5G is better than that. Yeah. The question really is can it do it in a consistent and predictive way such that, well, when you're driving down the road with your family, you know that you're gonna get some, you know, the right response time to, um, keep you safe.

That's really the question to me is how can networking that underpins AI applications, especially genic ai, provide that predictable experience, right. To deliver this genic AI in a way that we're all comfortable? No, you, you, you're solid.

You're dead on, on that, Mike. And you know, you need that reliability to facilitate, you know, you know, automation at scale. When you look at drone connectivity, I know T-Mobile is involved, you know, with with, you know, something through T-Mobile ventures there.

Yeah. Um, when you look at, um, just, you know, autonomous driving and that sort of thing, right? So you, you need to have that, that reliable, that low latency, that, that predictable throughput to do all of that.

And the edge is becoming redefined, right? I mean, edge AI is a big subject of conversation right now as, uh, you know, generative and agentic move from cloud-hosted larger language models to smaller language models that reside on the network edge. And I, and I also love your definition, it's where stuff gets done.

It's where data gets created. So kind of with that context, and it's, it's obvious the benefits for mobile network operators like T-Mobile in providing consistency with subscriber services and that sort of thing, but what, what, what do you see as some additional sort of opportunities with this whole notion of Edge ai? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I think Edge AI is really pushing us to all perform and deliver that consistent experience. Because as edge AI be becomes, you know, an everyday capability you and I use, um, and devices use, whether it's autonomous vehicles, robotics, you name it, right? Mm-hmm.

The examples I gave earlier, uh, we're gonna need a network that underpins that and makes it work. And, and you know, we've been thinking a lot about that here at T-Mobile. I've talked to a lot of customers and, um, and I really believe will, there's a paradigm sh paradigm shift coming in, networking, something that, uh, look, you and I have been doing this a long time.

Yeah, right? I've been in the networking world now 30 years, just celebrated my 30 year anniversary year at T-Mobile last week. Congratulations.

And, uh, yeah, thank you. And, uh, I've seen a lot of evolution in networks. I've seen, you know, capabilities come and go, and I think we're on the verge of another paradigm shift.

And, and here's what I mean, when you think about the way we have built and managed networks, um, going back to the beginning of time, it really was built on this fundamental idea of we have a WAN model and we have a land model. Yeah. And, uh, and nobody ever said by the way, and a six five summit 30 years ago, um, if it existed, uh, that, hey, having this bifurcated network structure is a good thing.

Yeah. And let's just fundamentally have different technologies that we have to bridge together and make it all work. Right.

You know, being a little facetious here, nobody ever said that it's just the way technology evolved and we still fundamentally use it today. Right? Sure.

For the most part. Um, I mean, we're sitting here, you're probably sitting on a land network right now. Mm-hmm.

Uh, or a land, you know, a wifi network in, uh, wherever you are, hotel room there, wherever it's you are, and I'm in San Diego and on, on a hotel wifi. Yeah, there you go. Exactly.

And, uh, and that's, that paradigm's been around the river. The challenge we have with that model is when we think about important critical use cases of agentic ai or any application for that matter, the model we've used where you, no matter where you work, you could be on a different network. Mm-hmm.

Uh, doesn't help us. I mean, think about all the different networks that you sit on, all of us sit on throughout the course of the day, right? I mean, you might be on your home network in the morning, and then you travel and you're in airport wifi, and then you get to your hotel, you're on hotel wifi, and then you see a customer, you're on their wifi, and then in between all that, you're mobile.

I mean, you could be on five or six different networks all day long. And if you get to the point, you know, if I get to the point I made earlier, which is you need a predictive network. You're getting anything but that.

Yeah. In fact, who knows what I mean? I'm sure you're in a great hotel.

Will I know you, but who knows, who knows what wifi they're running? Who knows what ISP they're using? Does that ISP buy directly from a carrier?

Do they buy transit to a tier one ISP? Um, how is this hosted session we're having right now getting to the, uh, to the cloud? Is it it through a peering point?

Is are they direct connected? We don't know. Yeah.

So what does all this mean when you write applications? Um, it means up until now we've sort of written applications despite the network and we write applications to overcome the network. Mm-hmm.

I mean, this is why the term store and forward applications got invented. Right. Why did you have to store 'em forward Because you couldn't count on the network.

Yeah. And there's a whole host of digital experience monitoring applications to ensure you've got the right level of connectivity because there's all that inconsistency. Right?

Exactly. So for for all of time, I would argue we've generally written applications despite the network. That's it.

I'll just leave it at that. Sure. And, and overcoming the network, whether it's performance or even security.

Right? I mean, look at all the whole world of security and VPN clients and everything else. We've built a ride over those networks.

Yeah. As opposed to trusting the network itself. And that's why to me, this paradigm shift is this will, it's, uh, to, to say it concisely, I think the shift is one where we are gonna pivot to a, a national network.

I almost think of it as like a, the easiest way I describe it sometimes to people as, like, think of it as like if, if wifi went national, imagine if you can have one bubble of coverage. Now, wifi can't do that by definition, but cellular can. Yeah.

And cellular does that today. It provides a national network, but there's some gaps with that. Right.

And so what I wanna talk to you about is what I think are the, how we're closing those gaps and gonna be potentially be able to realize this vision of a single network. We here at T-Mobile are calling this concept the flat network concept. 'cause we're flattening all those network archetypes that I talked about already, right?

Yeah. From access points, wifi access points to switches, to routers, to ISPs and all that flatnet to a single network. Mm-hmm.

And we think that is a cellular network, but supplemented with a couple things. And so, well, I would argue there's, there's four ingredients to this paradigm shift that I think is gonna transform networking, um, and, and potentially be the network of the future. The four ingredients are number one, a nationwide network.

And that is, uh, the only one that can reach endpoints nationwide. And this important distinction, these endpoints right here is a cellular network today. Right.

No other network reaches endpoints. All other networks out there today, uh, wi wan wide networks, you know, get to sites, and then you have last mile connectivity, be it wifi, ethernet, whatever it may be, CBRS, you name it. Mm-hmm.

Cellular's the only nationwide endpoint network now. So that's step one. You need a nationwide endpoint network.

Now you might say your first reaction to that would be, okay, sounds good, but you don't have coverage everywhere. So how could this be nationwide? Yeah.

We don't, you're right. There's small parts of the country where we don't have coverage, but those could be important parts that you need, like an elevator shaft in a hospital, and if a nurse needs a hundred percent coverage, that's not gonna work. Yeah.

So the second ingredient that we carriers have been focusing on, and, and in particular here at T-Mobile, we call it our a and s platform. Yeah. Advanced Network Solutions is building, uh, purpose-built coverage, we call it, to supplement that nationwide network and fill in any of those spots you need for your business operations.

Right. That could be filling in that hospital so that you've got coverage in not only the elevator shaft, but the basement floors, the broom closet everywhere. You need coverage.

Mm-hmm. Uh, an oil field where you need remote operations, uh, you name it. Right.

Just filling in that coverage. That's the, the second piece. And with that, you can get all the places you do business covered.

The third element though, and this is arguably the most important will, is, um, overlaying onto that network, whether it's our 90,000 cell sites that cover the country nationally, or the purpose-built coverage, we've augmented for that business overlaying onto that, all the capabilities that really a 5G SA network brings. Yeah. Which most notably slicing Yeah.

To provide what I set up earlier, which is that predictive experience mm-hmm. That is being this to me, that you can know that, hey, if I'm running this application, and let's say it's the latest genic application, I'm running on my phone and I'm running a local inference engine on my phone, and that thing only works when I get this predictive performance. Yeah.

We can apply a slice to your connection. Mm-hmm. It gives you that predictive performance no matter where you are located.

And that could be you're running on our macro network at any part of this country, or you're running on the purpose build coverage we delivered for you. It doesn't matter where you are. We can provide that, uh, predictive performance.

That to me, will, is an unlock here that it is gonna be the key to this transformation, add to that local breakout and APNs and of course sass e and all the other capabilities that we can add. And, uh, and that slicing combined with purpose-built coverage combined with the macro network. And then the fourth thing, by the way, is wrapping all that with a platform or portal that manages it all for you.

So you can set up your devices and give priority. That combination, I think is gonna be the network of the future that is gonna unlock the way we, uh, deliver applications. Yeah.

No, I, I completely agree. And the deterministic nature of taking cellular connectivity and, and, and slicing, by the way, you can only do that with a standalone network that marries core infrastructure, 5G core infrastructure with 5G ran infrastructure, you know, and, and not to be too gratuitous with the plug, but, you know, T-Mobile has been the first, uh, to standalone with a nationwide network. And, um, that's driving tremendous business value from my perspective.

But you touched on security, and I know that T-Mobile has done some very innovative things with slicing and security and that sort of thing. Co let's spend a little bit of time there because security is very important when you think about this, this, you know, cellular networks in general, the threat surface is tremendous, right? Because you have, you know, you have so many subscribers, you've got so many services that are hanging off that network, your vision of going to that ubiquitous network, that that's gonna, uh, create a massive threat surface.

So speak a little bit about how T-Mobile for business is addressing that. Yeah. 5G new radio brings great encryption improvements over LTE, but more is needed.

So what are your Thoughts? Yeah, no, absolutely. Here, here's what's cool about it.

Yeah, you're right. 5G uh, standalone, 5G new radio does bring a lot more encryption all the way down to the device that, uh, you don't have an LTE networks today or hybrid five GL uh, LTE networks, but 5G standalone brings that. So yeah, no question.

That is a big benefit of it. Um, but really this whole notion of slicing is unlocking a lot of things for us. And security is a big one.

The ability to encapsulate traffic as it goes across the network, create that VPN experience. Uh, will I, I almost liken what's happening in 5G SA with slicing and security to what, uh, again, I'm gonna harken back to our old network days to what MPLS did for the internet almost 20 years ago. Sure.

When you think about the internet, when the internet came about, um, everybody loved the internet, of course, and still does, but I'm talking in a business world, everybody loved the internet coming about because it was, it scaled, it was less expensive, gave me, you know, great access to anywhere I wanted to go. Yeah. But what network operators quickly found out was, Hey, the Internet's wide open, and you know, what I miss about my old frame relay and ATM and X 25 that works, is I miss those, those private connections, the ability to set up a circuit from point A to point B that I knew was secure.

Yeah. And, and, and so MPLS in many ways came about to address that. Yes.

It also addressed performance and gave a little more, you know, quality of service, uh, capability as well. But the ability to do, to encapsulate that data overlaid onto the internet and provide that same VPN experience, li like the VPN like experience that those other technologies provided, is really what unlocked the internet for business and NPLS was born and companies still use it today. Right.

And I liken slicing, slicing is to 5G in its many ways for business. Like NPLS was to internet slicing now allows us to create that business environment, um, and, and make our backbone and all the endpoint devices connected to our backbone run, like, and operate like they're in their own private network. Yeah.

Essentially. Right. Um, and the slicing, you know, can encapsulate that traffic, create that same quality of service and predictable experience.

Just, just like in many ways NPLS did. Now, of course, NPLS was very limited in that it dumped the traffic off in your corporate land. And, and from there who knows where it went.

You had to manage that separately. The beauty of this is it's all the way to the endpoint end to end network capability, endpoint to endpoint with security, uh, um, you know, encryption end to end and creating a, a tunnel that provides that security and that quality of service from endpoint. Yeah.

Endpoint. That's, that's pretty compelling. And of course, in everything in between, which includes our data centers, our cloud services and everything else.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's super compelling because it ensures consistency, right? So you can do that anywhere.

And given how, you know, sort of disaggregated infrastructure is in general and, and how we work today, I mean, we're beyond the pandemic obviously, but we're working from branch locations, campus locations, you're needing to connect, um, operational technology connectivity that's been fraught with, you know, you know, a mishmash of different, different modalities and, you know, really a 5G standalone network with nationwide coverage can address that. But let's talk a little bit about use cases, Mike. Yeah.

So the, this, this whole vision that T-Mobile for business has with this, this this ubiquitous network. Yeah. What, what are some of the use cases that are, that are bubbling up?

Yeah. Uh, well, there's, there's a lot of use cases and we've, um, we're having a lot of success right now. It's growing pretty rapidly.

But let me, let me just share one particular use case that I think really brings, uh, to light this concept that I'm talking about. And, and I've shared it with other customers and it's, they, they sort of have that aha moment of, I get it Now, what you mean by combining macro with local coverage and slicing over the top. Um, and, and it's a use case from a customer of ours, um, a hospital.

And in this particular case, they were using wifi for their nurses, um, running, uh, uh, epic. Um, which then some of you will know it from MyChart, that's the consumer facing side with your doctor, but Epic is the application on the backend. Um, and it just wasn't performing so well on their wifi.

And as a result, there were modules in Epic that they hadn't even deployed yet because they couldn't rely on it. But, and as you can imagine, certain modules like the alerting, um, you know, of a patient alerting and things, you need to make sure they're gonna be received if you're gonna run those modules on your, on your mobile phone. Sure.

So we designed for them a purpose-built 5G coverage experience for their hospital, where we blanketed every square inch of that hospital, including, you know, basement, broom, closet, you name it. Mm-hmm. Um, and then of course it's the same coverage that we provide all across the country.

Um, but we over, you know, we overlay that then with everything I've been talking about in the slicing world. And here's what slicing can do. So imagine this use case.

This is, this is how, how powerful this is and, and how this works. So imagine a nurse is in a hospital, it's 3:00 PM they're working and they're running Epic. And because of the time of day, uh, it is and the location of that nurse's device, we know collectively, we T-Mobile and, and the customer knows that nurse is working as a nurse.

She's in their nurse persona right now. So we can dynamically apply a slice, which is, you know, again, a slice is nothing more than tuning the parameters of our network for that device at that point in time. Right.

Be it speed, latency, priority routing, um, filtering all the parameters of a connection, we can tune it. Right. So for that nurse in the middle of the afternoon, her, her device is tuned into a slice for her business persona as a nurse, which means she gets priority on the network instance in the hospital.

Mm-hmm. And why is that important? 'cause we don't ever want her missing an alert because the kid in the waiting room down the hall is playing Fortnite with his three buddies and Right.

And this is very real, right? Oh, it's a, That's real. I'm laughing because I have two daughters that are into online gaming, so Yeah, exactly.

Right. So, you know, so she will get priority, uh, over anybody else, any other 5G or T-Mobile connected devices. Um, we will also give her, you know, minimum bandwidth, um, to ensure the app works, everything that needs the apps to work.

We will also route her traffic uniquely to their data center, not the internet directly to her data center. Very Important for healthcare and privacy and HIPAA compliance and all of that. Yeah, Absolutely.

Absolutely. Very important. Um, and we can, and we can filter out the traffic that they don't want if they don't want the nurse, you know, watching Netflix during the day, whatever.

We can do whatever we want on that connection. But most importantly, it's quality of service. It's priority, and it's routing of secure traffic while that device is at work.

Now, imagine the nurse gets offered shift at six o'clock, goes out to dinner with her husband, they get to the restaurant. That same phone is now in a restaurant still connected to T-Mobile to the same network, but because we know the nurse is off work, now we can flip that phone back to being a, just a regular old consumer phone. Sure.

Which means no more priority than anybody else in the restaurant. Um, traffic gets routed to the internet and it functions just like a consumer phone. Cool.

Right? Yeah. Now she goes, she goes home, she's at home now, now she's on a different T-Mobile macro cell tower, um, and no priority.

She is watching Netflix at 9:00 PM um, and she's competing with the neighbors in the neighborhood for, for airtime, which hopefully is performing well. I hope our T-Mobile network performs well in her neighborhood, but it's routing to the internet and, and she's just like every other consumer in that neighborhood. Yeah.

Now at 11:00 PM she goes on call and when she goes on call at 11:00 PM once again, she's in her nurse persona. Yeah. And she needs better performance and routing of traffic.

And even though she's on a, not even at the hospital, she's still on the T-Mobile macro network, which we don't differentiate where she's located, we apply that same slice to her, and now she gets priority and not over the kids in the waiting room, but kids down the street watching videos and playing games and whatever else in her neighborhood. Right. And we just the same to their data center.

And it never touches the public internet. This is what the power of slicing and a nationwide network can do when you, when you treat it as such and, and manage devices and applications all the way to the end point. And I think those kinds of use cases, we're finding our killer use cases where, where it goes sort of in and out of local and mobile, you know, locations.

Yeah. Um, this is where this concept thrives. It, it really does.

I mean, it's intelligent routing. It removes all the friction. You don't have to manage like EIM or multiple physical sims in a device and it just works.

Right. And then it really just, it demonstrates the, the true value I think, of what 5G can deliver. And, uh, you know, and you have to have standalone to get there.

And, um, it, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's super compelling from my perspective. But Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'll tell you what, another example, just personal one here.

I'm sitting on my laptop with you right now connected to 5G uh, my 5G connected laptop. And I'll tell you how great is it when I travel, I pop this thing open. Yeah.

And I'm always connected no matter where I am, airport, hotel, home, um, I'm sitting right here in my office at the moment. Doesn't matter where I am, I'm always connected to our network in the exact same way. I don't have to worry about logging into wifi somewhere.

I don't have to worry about connecting the VPN, I don't have to worry about any of that kind of stuff. I'm just always connected to the corporate network no matter where I am, 24 hours a day. It's, it's pretty cool though, a lot of utility in that.

Yeah. It's powerful. Especially for road warriors like you and I, so, yeah.

Yeah. Hey, Mike, it's been a great conversation, but as we sort of wrap things up, I I, I'd love to end with your recommendations to enterprises that are considering sort of taking the leap to what T-Mobile for business is doing with your advanced network solutions and this whole notion of a ubiquitous network. What, what sort of sage advice would you, would you provide CIOs?

Yeah. Look, um, first of all, I know thinking about going to a different, very different kind of technology like this can sometimes be a little, you know, intimidating, you know, is this novel approach come with risk. I would say first of all, customers are, this is not new.

These technologies are not new. Maybe putting them together in the way I outlined that use case That is new. Yeah.

That is new. But customers are doing that now. And I think the risk is, uh, very low.

Uh, uh, and I think I was thinking about this, you know, risk is really about what are we conditioned to accept, I think in many ways, right? I was, I was talking to my wife about, you know, she was worried when we bought an ev like, well, are those batteries can, are they, do we need to be concerned about those batteries? And I thought, well, do we, or are you concerned at all about the fact that when our kids are in the backseat of the car, their back end is sitting 12 inches from 20 gallons of flammable and explosive liquid?

It's relative, right? Yeah. It's All relative.

That, and it's, she just said, I never thought about that. And I was like, that's 'cause we're conditioned to accept that risk. And, uh, but EVs are new and batteries are new.

And I think it's a little bit like this, right? The idea of offloading and moving my traffic off of wifi and into a cellular world in the environment that I talked about is new and different. Um, but it's, um, it arguably, you know, we carriers probably know how to manage networks as well as anybody.

I mean, we have 130 million devices connected to our network. We have tens of thousands of people that run a network. I would say we know how to run networks really well.

And I think in the future, if this approach I outlined is the future, I think we're gonna look back and say, wow, can you believe I was running my corporate network on, um, the same technology I use in my house, which is wifi with 10 guys that I hired, or whatever it is, I mean, larger, but these 10 guys that did this. And I love 'em to death. But now I'm glad that I've been able to move the network to a carrier grade network and put those 10 guys working on new a agent AI applications.

'cause that's making all the difference. Exactly. Exactly.

You know, you know, redeploying those resources to, to add more value to the line of business, right? And, and that's what I've seen T-Mobile for business to you over the years. Mike, I want to thank you and I want to thank our viewers for tuning in.

Um, this has been an Intelligent Edge spotlight with T-Mobile for business. Stay tuned for more insights coming up at the next six five summit session. Thanks again, Mike, for your time.

It's been a great conversation, Michelle. Great talking to you as well. The world of networking and security continue to converge and convergence invites complexity.

And when engineering and operations teams are faced with complexity, they may not know where to turn. In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, brought to you by HP Aruba Networking, we look at the fact that SASS e makes convergence simple. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of technical experts in the IT enterprise space to talk about a single concept about things in enterprise it.

This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, as well as many of our presenters. And we often recorded an association with one of our Tech Field day events. Tech Field Day is a part of the futureum group, and this podcast is also published on a number of our sister sites, including Techstrong tv.

In this episode, which is brought to you by H Puba Networking, we are going to be talking all about SASS e and convergence. But before we get into that, I would like to take a moment for our guests to introduce themselves so you know who you're listening to, starting with Chris. Hi, I'm Chris Grundman.

I'm an executive advisor on network infrastructure topics. I'm excited to dig in today. Hi everyone.

Welcome. My name is Jeff Olson, and I lead our e and security marketing here at HPE Aruba Networking. Hello, uh, Adam Fus, uh, VP of Product Management for Edge Connect SD-WAN Wan here at HPE Networking.

Really excited to be talking to you guys today. Well, thank you all for joining us. Let's jump into the premise for today's episode.

No doubt you have been faced with challenges when it comes to converging your network. There have been many disparate parts over the years that work really well on their own. Their, and as soon as you try to mix them together, it's like oil and water or cats and dogs, or like having teenagers.

What you need is a solution, some kind of an emulsifier to get them to all behave properly. And I think that that solution involves sassy in this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. SASS e makes convergence simple.

Now, I'm sure that a lot of people out there are already thinking about one of, one or more of the reasons why convergence is so hard for them, but I was hoping Jeff, Adam, maybe you could tell us a little bit about some of the challenges that you're seeing in the industry around things like convergence. Why is it so hard to get what I would think of as ostensibly similar protocols and standards to all work together properly? Yeah, so I think I'll start off with this one.

So I, I think it starts with a few different things. Uh, the first is that, you know, today, you know, we're effectively delivering different products and tools to customers. And, you know, they may get those from a single vendor, they may get those from multiple different vendors, but today there's so much work being placed on the end user to actually go out and configure and try to stitch these things together.

And I think that if we look at SSE, this is one of these, these kind of, you know, entry points where we're really seeing security and networking starting to merge into a single thing. And the huge benefit in that is that the products are built together by the vendors themselves. The policy is unified and the ultimate kind of end user experience is much more simple.

And there's this constant kind of concept that we hear, especially in the security industry around like tool sprawl. And I think that this is one of these really kind of great areas to start, um, that you actually have the policy engine and, you know, the actual network itself and the security stack completely intertwined. And so that's effectively where I think SS E is at today.

Uh, I, however, I do think it can go a whole lot further as well. I realized something we, we've thrown out an acronym that people may not understand. Uh, but more importantly, I think that people may not understand that SS e is kind of a super set of an existing technology.

Adam, seeing the area that you're in in HPE, maybe you could tell kind of our audience, what is the difference between SASS E and FD wan? That's a great question, and it's actually funny you you bring that up. I always tell, um, you know, customers and partners when I speak with them, the mathematical equation of how we get Sass E And so, uh, SASS e effectively is SD-WAN plus SSE equals sass e.

Uh, and so it is the combination really of, of those two technologies. Now, if you look at, um, you know, HPE networking, we think that broader the definitions of broader in our actual actual equation, we also include NAC in there as well. We think that's an important core component.

Um, but ultimately, you know, SASS e stands for Secure Access Service Edge, and it's the merging of these technologies really into one thing. I, I think that's as excellent an answer as, as any, in fact, I've been telling people for years that, uh, SSE is sassy without the hardware, and they're like, well, what's that? And so we have to have this longer conversation.

Uh, but I wanted to get a practitioner perspective or perspective on this from, uh, my friend Chris. Um, Chris, you've been advising people for quite a while about some of their networking strategies. Have you seen challenges around implementing SSE or implementing things that maybe SS e could make it easier?

Uh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in, in SASS e itself, uh, as Adam said, it's, it's, uh, a mathematical equation, right? It's, it's a number of different features or services or products depending on how you look at it and how you slice it that are being bundled together.

And we've been talking about SASS e for several years now. Um, but most vendors, SASS e is actually just three or four products with a label strapped on the top. And so actually, you know, converging those into a single offering that actually is kind of an end-to-end service where security and networking are provided through the same interface on the same devices.

Um, I, I is, you know, finally starting to happen here. And so that's, that's, that's really exciting. And then the other piece is, you know, SD WAN is obviously a WAN technology, and so there's another piece where things can fall out of convergence, which is, you know, does my campus network actually understand what's going on in SD-WAN and, and back and forth, right?

So is that home office or, or smaller office or whatever the other end of that SD-WAN connection, you know, is that actually a part of my overall enterprise IT network or not? And in a lot of cases, you know, with the early versions of sd-wan, um, that wasn't really the case. It was, it was two totally separate networks and you really had to do some things to string it together.

And so, you know, there's two layers of conversions here, I think happening, or two dimensions of conversions, which is, you know, connecting the WAN and those edge sites into the corporate network, um, at the campus in a real way, and potentially also to your data centers and to your cloud. And then also bringing those security features actually into the same product in, in a real way, versus just kind of stacking a bunch of of different services on top of each other. And, and I think that people need to understand the value of having a unified architecture from the top to the bottom, because if I remember correctly, the reason why SSE even exists, because a lot of SD-WAN providers started going to other companies to offer, you know, these kinds of things on top of the existing, uh, WAN stack, I can remember.

It's like, oh, yeah, well, we'll offer things like, uh, content filtering and proxy stuff, but that, that's somebody else. Like, we'll, we'll have a portal in our, our platform that allows you to do that. And as we've moved along, we've realized the value of having a, a single vendor providing all of those things because it provides better integration.

Um, I, I, you know, Jeff, is this the, the kind of the strategy behind what HP Aruba networking has been trying to bring to the table is, is having something that is, you know, HPE top to bottom as opposed to, well, it's a little bit of HPE, but it's also a little bit of this CASB and a little bit of this secure web gateway and possibly some other things over here. And boy, we hope they don't go outta business sometime soon. Yeah, Tom, um, and we certainly work with, uh, an entire ecosystem of, you know, networking and security providers.

But here at HPE, we continue to build more and more security solutions into the network. For us, the network is a security solution, right? It is converging.

And when we talk to different, especially security operators, they have many tools they're using. Some of them have 50 different products they're using right to secure on top of their network. So we believe it's important to bring more and more of those capabilities into the network, and it helps them remove certain products that they, they don't necessarily need to maintain because they're now converged in the network.

And it's also indicative of, you know, the network really becoming a strategic part of their cybersecurity, um, you know, solutions and footprint. I, I would say that's very accurate. A lot of people don't see security as an add-on anymore.

They see it as something that needs to be integrated from top to bottom. Uh, how many times have we heard the, the, the maximum of shifting security to the left, meaning it needs to be occurring earlier in the development of design cycles, as opposed to, okay, we made it work. Um, maybe we shouldn't allow everyone in the world to log into this.

And I think that that's one of the values of SASS e is that it's integration into networking has created a fundamental base to allow this to, um, you know, be more secure. But I think maybe one of the challenges that people are facing is this idea that security by its very nature is a limiting factor. It complicates things.

How many times have we heard stories about, um, developers that have, you know, created a, a system to query things and, and it's open to the world by default because, well, I I'll fix it later, I'll add security on later. And, and then that's how you end up in the news with the, an unsecured S3 bucket that just suddenly leaked a whole bunch of PII to everybody across the internet. Um, how are some of the ways that, you know, solutions like yours are offering us a chance to become more secure by default?

Yeah, I think so. I think policy is at the heart of a lot of this, Tom. Uh, you know, and I think that, um, the problem that we see almost everywhere is that you have to go, you know, over here and you have to try to replicate the policy in the next place and the next place and the next place.

And, you know, you want that, that policy to be unified across your entire network. And, you know, I think SASS e is doing a really good job of, of doing that at the network edge and kind of up to the, the cloud. Um, but I think that there's an argument to be made that it should even go further down into the network, down to the switch border or even access point, uh, or down to the client level with the same exact policy, um, so that people's lives do become easier to go out and do security without having this huge burden placed on them.

And this is kind of one of the things we are, we think that this is a problem that needs to be solved around like zero trust. You know, there's a lot of talk around Zero trust today. Um, if you are starting a company, you know, tomorrow, uh, it'd be really easy to go out and implement Zero Trust and say, this is our, our playbook.

This is our process, this is how it all works. But that's not the reality for every company on the face of this earth where they have many years of tech debt and complexity that they have to then go overcome. And we think that policy unification, the unification of security and networking coming together, uh, and the ability to look at data at a much more granular level in multiple different places, is gonna be one of these things that actually helps get to this end result.

That's nirvana that we're looking for. I when you say, uh, companies are saying that Zero Trust is, is something that they need and easy to implement, I think about all those restoration videos I see on YouTube where someone like speeds up the footage like a thousand times. So it only took like 30 seconds to like grind something, as opposed to the fact that it really took like four and a half hours to do it.

And, and it, everyone has this deceptively simple idea of, of how easy it's to deploy zero trust. Uh, you know, Chris is, are you hearing some of the, the customers that you're talking to talk about the need for Zero Trust, but then kind of throwing their hands up in the air because they're like, we don't know what we're doing. Yeah.

I mean, this has gone back and forth in the industry quite a bit. I know when, when I, the idea of Zero Trust was kind of first posited, um, you know, at least in its, in its most recent incarnation, there was a lot of pushback from, from enterprise around this whole idea. And then there's, then there was kind of this, you know, philosophical shift of like, okay, yeah, that's what we need.

Um, and then the reality of of wait a minute, like, how do we actually make any of this happen? Especially as Adam pointed out in a environment that's been growing organically or through acquisition over the last 10, 15, 20 longer years. Um, that's a, you know, IT estate that's gonna be really tough to modernize into Zero Trust.

Uh, there's another complication there, which I think, um, may have been addressed actually by some of the announcements from HPE, uh, at Black Hat this last week. But there's a fundamental issue of, you know, who's now doing these things, right? So that's the one problem with convergence is, okay, now great, you're putting security policies, you know, on my networking devices if I'm a network engineer, that's kind of interesting.

And then of course, you know, from the security side, right? They're looking at, you know, how do we interact with the network? And so you've now got potentially two teams, or two different, at least personas within the IT team working on the same infrastructure in the same, um, you know, know in the same system, which, which could lead to conflicts if not managed properly.

Um, right. There's a lot of times when a network engineer looks in and says, okay, that a C L's gotta go, oh, guess what? Everything works.

Um, and how many times have we seen that happen and then be left that way? Or, or worse yet, we just had have to add one line to this ACL and it won't be hard to fix, it's just permit ip, any, any right. That fixes all my problem.

Just put that at the top and you're good to go. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, of course.

And Chris, I think you, you teed this up perfectly because one of the things that I love about the development on these products is that it is ongoing. There's always something new being added, uh, that, that kind of adds feature sets that people in the real world need. And as we were recording this, it's literally the week of Black Hat, you know, everyone's favorite summer hacker camp.

Um, uh, you know, uh, gentlemen, what were some of the things that came out of Black Hat that HP announced that are kind of solving some of these challenges that, that we're seeing in the industry about around convergence? Yeah, so we were really excited at the show because it was the first time since the close of the Juniper acquisition that we were able to showcase our combined, uh, secure networking portfolio. So that's both HPE Aruba networking and HPE Juniper networking.

So we had demos, we had a lot of activity in the booth. It was a very, very great show. But Tom, in terms of the announcements, um, it was kind of in, in this area of Zero Trust and Sass E right?

So there were four, there were four key announcements, and we'll cover some of 'em I, I think a little later in the podcast. But the first was around open cloud native nac, so cloud-based network access control for third party network devices. That means any other network, it could be a switch, uh, you know, other devices inside of the branch that we can define a global policy across your entire enterprise.

Another area was we've enhanced our, uh, application intelligence engine. Just think of it as a library with characteristics. What are the risk scores for the application?

What are its needs? What are the characteristics? And of course, we feed that in real time as we're and learn as we're going along and, and we get data from other, um, you know, threat intelligent places.

Then the third area was around Zerto and CrowdStrike. We announced a new integration there, which helps with our ransomware use cases. But the last one that we're really most excited about is infusing AI into sass E.

And so we announced a new natural language, uh, sassy copilot. So that's kind of a quick rundown. The guests, our guests, our audience can go and, you know, read more about it.

We have blogs and press release and lots of information, but that's, those were the main things we announced at Black Hat this just this last week. You piqued my interest. And because we were contractually obligated to talk about AI on every podcast from now until the end of time, I need to know what is it about AI copilot that makes it easier to deploy these things?

Uh, is it just me being able to ask it, Hey, what's going on? Or is there deeper integration with AI there? Yeah, so I'll tell you that this is a significant area of investment for us, and, uh, we have a, a lot of people in r and d, um, in our engineering organization working on ai.

Um, and so we think that AI is going to fundamentally transform security and networking. Uh, you know, it's funny, when we started, uh, SD WAN many years ago, uh, our, our CEO of Silver Peak, David Hughes, uh, he used to say, uh, SD stood for self-driving. And I think that in many ways we were missing, um, something to help get us the rest of the way there.

And I do believe AI is it where we are really focused right now is really in, in several different areas. Um, the first is, you know, we wanna make it easy to perform like a security audit of your, your sassy fabric. Um, so, you know, if I have hundreds of sites and cloud endpoints and all this stuff that I need to look at, um, you know, you, we think that you should just be able to ask and it goes out and it looks through a huge data lake, all of your configuration data, and it comes back and provides you a report telling you exactly where your security problems are, and you can go dig deeper from there.

Uh, same thing for getting things like the health of the network, um, how sites are working. All of these things are, are going to be available in the copilot, uh, you know, in our upcoming release. And the other kind of major area that we're really interested in is, is actually in troubleshooting.

Um, and so, you know, if I'm having issues with IPSec, you know, what does that process look like today? I go out and I download, uh, the PCAP files and I analyze them, and I try to figure out what's going on. You maybe a machine should be able to just do all of that for you.

Uh, and so we think that this is gonna be, you know, transformative for the operator and the way that they interface with our product. Uh, and so we're, we're heavily investing in, in those things and many others in the future. So I will admit in my own curmudgeonly state that I feel a little hesitant to deploy some technologies because I don't know what it's doing, right?

Like I, it goes in and tells me it's more secure, it tells me things are better, I can ask it questions, and it's like some of the engineers I've worked with in the past, yeah, yeah, don't worry about it. It's fine, it's fine. I took care of it.

Is there a way for me to kind of verify these solutions when I look into the platform and say, yeah, yeah, it really does do the thing I think it needs to do, and it explains why it did that and why this is a better option? Yeah, so I think that the, the first thing to point out is we're not starting with configuration. Uh, we're starting with really helping improve the operator's experience, getting more data out of your environment, kind of talking to your, your sassy fabric, if you will.

Um, I think configuration will be something that we'll look at down the road, but, you know, here's the thing, you know, I think configuration would be higher value off the, you know, from the start for us if we didn't have so much automation in the product. But the reality is, I, you know, I myself could sit down and, and manage a multi-thousand site network with just a few mouse clicks. And so configuration wasn't really the first thing we wanted to tackle.

We really wanted to tackle, you know, getting, you know, better data out of your data. Um, and so that's really where we're, uh, focused primarily right now. Uh, yeah, it's funny, Tom, I've spent plenty of time vibe, coding.

I dunno if you've played out with any of those tools yet. Um, yeah, they can get you kind of far along and then all of a sudden they don't work at all. And so, um, I'm not kind of, uh, inclined to impose that upon our customers quite yet.

So I think back to the Get smart series with Maxwell Smart, one of his famous catch phrases missed it by that much. Uh, and, and I think that there's a value in that, right? Is that we can use certain tools to get close, but there's still that value in the, I'll call it what it is.

It's the last mile of getting over the line, right over the line is, you know, I can, it's like any writer, right? I can create a rough draft that has a lot of good ideas, but doesn't have a really good structure. It's when I create structure around that.

And I think that that structure is, is one of the things that is helping battle the simplicity, uh, challenge that we have is people tend to think of structure as complex, right? Like, you know, uh, everybody remembers the security thing from war games where you have the two keys that have to be turned at the same time, and that's a horrible idea, except it's really a good idea because it enforces a policy of no one person can make this decision. Uh, Chris, in your experience, does lack of structure create complexity or is it the structure itself that causes people to feel like they're overly burdened with it?

Uh, well, I mean, it can go both ways, Tom, but, but I mean, I, I, I do agree. I mean, proper planning, proper structure can definitely provide, you know, whether it's the guardrails or just, you know, the, the overall process or, or whatever it is, right? Without any structure at all.

You're constantly reinventing the wheel, right? You're trying to figure out how to do something. Um, and, and, and with structure there is, you know, typically a path to follow.

There's some best practices there, there, there, you know, there's a reason for that structure that's guiding you down a path that that provides structure, uh, for your activities. And so well done. I think structure can actually simplify things, and the more complex things are, the more structure you may need.

Um, now that said that, that does become a little bit interesting in, in what we're talking about here, where, um, you know, in some ways a, a structured dashboard that just shows you kind of red, yellow, green and shows you kind of what's going on in your network in, in, you know, in, in, uh, a gooey format is more structured than a chat interface that just sits there and stares at you blankly. And you have to know what questions to ask. And so there are some trade offs here where that natural language interface can be really empowering for the right individuals.

I think, uh, it can also be potentially terrifying, uh, for the wrong ones. Yeah, and I should point out that, you know, we're still, we, you know, we haven't gone to full chat GT mode or anything where it's just a chat interface, right? We have a really robust UI that has graphs in a dashboard.

When you walk in, you know, we have tons of reports, like everything our customers come to expect from our product is all still there. This is an addition right on top of it as well that, you know, it sits alongside you and get me used to produce data. And, you know, graphenes kind of one of these things I'm also really excited about.

We get people asking us to, you know, correlate data or help create customer reports all the time. And, you know, this is something that in the future here, they're just gonna be able to go in and say, you know, help me graph out this stuff and it's gonna pop right up for them from the data that they want, not just from what we think that they need to see. And I think that's gonna be a really powerful thing.

And I would agree that one of the challenges that we face in modern networking that creates complexity is the fact that we're so overwhelmed with this data. Uh, it took us years to get to the point where we could even find all of it, right? And now all of a sudden that we have access to things like APIs and programming, promo grammatic interfaces.

I can get pretty much any data that I want out of the system, but then I don't know what to do with it. This is actually a common complaint that I see, not just in networking, but across a lot of places, is, you know, well think, think about something like exercise, like, here's the number that you generated for the workout that you did yesterday. Well, is that good?

Is that bad? I don't have any context around that. And to Chris's point, if I don't have any context, I don't know what to ask.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What could make this better? What can I do to not make it worse?

Uh, are are these some of the challenges that you guys are seeing, uh, that, that organizations are having? Uh, and and how are you solving them? Yeah, you know, I think a lot of those questions come in today, you know, by way of a support case, right?

Or a call to an se. And, um, I definitely am tasking the team with saying, you know, did this, did the customer really have to call us? Like, shouldn't, this has been something that they could have inferred right out of the product, like, or that it told them what they needed to know before they had to pick up the phone, because they don't wanna make that call either.

They just wanna get what they need to get to. And so, um, we are really trying to look at this from like an improvement of experience, not, I'm not trying to just slap the AI label on the product just so we can say we have it, and you, it's just that black hat and it, every booth said ai. Um, I do believe this is one of these times where this is more than hype.

Like I really believe in this technology, um, and I think that it's gonna make people's lives a whole lot better in interfacing with products, um, in many other ways probably as well. Um, but, you know, yes, we wanna like, you know, present the customer, for example, with the prompts. So, um, you know, when you pull up the chat bot today, it will give you a series of prompts that you can just start off with.

And so you immediately have some way to know how to use it, and then at some point you can start asking questions further and further from there. Um, and we're doing quite a bit of work with prompt engineering and other things in the engineering organization to make sure that we're producing the right outputs for the customer as well, that we're not overwhelming them with data. Um, because these systems, they have access to millions of records and firewall logs, and you name it.

And you guys, we've all used these tools. Sometimes they spit out some pretty weird stuff. Um, and so how do we make sure that we put a good wrapper around it so that we're still producing a good product?

Um, but giving people a new way to actually work with this. And, and Tom, if I can add to that, you know, the topic of convergence, um, you know, you've got different users, right? Some people come from a networking background, they maybe are very knowledgeable in managing networks.

That's what their core, but now these teams are converging as well, right? Or they may have come from the security ops, but now they need to verify some things on the network, right? And vice versa.

So tools like our sass e copilot really help them with productivity, jumping, you know, gaining knowledge right away, getting access to things as they're learning. We know that teams are understaffed. We know that it's hard to hire the talented people that can run these tools.

So there's a lot of value there. Um, as, as people are crossing over between being a networking expert and a security expert. I do think, Jeff, that like the bull sprawl thing is like a really good one to call out because, you know, we're all in it here, and I used many tools over the years, and you get really good at them and you don't look at them for a while and you go back to it and you're like, oh, shoot.

Like how do I do this again? Right? And it's like the copilot is sitting there next to you, and it's always available to help to kind of catch you back up to where you need to be when working with any product.

And I think that's gonna be another big benefit. Uh, if you go back and watch, uh, our round table discussion from our security field day event that we had, uh, earlier this year, you'll notice that the topic was the, the, the idea of a point solution tool versus an entire platform. Uh, and there's challenges around both.

There's, there's value for both. Um, but I think this, the idea of having way too many tools to accomplish all of these things, um, is, you know, I I ha to quote a famous, uh, internet chef, it's a unit tasker problem. Why would I build something that only does one thing when I can build something that does two or three and, and get more out of it?

Uh, I do want to jump back on one of the other announcements that you guys had and talk a little bit about nac, because I know that's definitely something that, uh, people find challenging to implement. Uh, and maybe you could give us just a minute about what is it about your solution being cloud native that makes it easier to deploy and manage for organizations out there that are looking to implement something like that? Well, again, Tom, that goes back to what we talked about earlier in the podcast, where we're building more and more capabilities inside of the network.

So our customers, uh, have been asking for cloud native nac, especially the customers that are fully cloud forward, right? They're building their entire environment, uh, uh, on cloud. NAC has been around for a long time.

There's probably some people in the audience going, wow, you're talking about nac. I mean, let, you know, bring us to today. But NAC is still very relevant in terms of access control.

You know, what, who can join my network, uh, who's allowed to be on the network? And it's a very important part of Zero Trust, uh, IT and, and SASS e and putting this all together. And so we're very excited that we have this modern cloud native nack, which extends the zero trust connectivity to, you know, every device across any vendor.

That's the big thing that we announced at Black Hat. So we've, we've had this nack and we've had the cloud-based nack, which we talked about at RSA as well. But now you can have, you know, Cisco Extreme, Arista, other types of network devices in your branch.

And this is, this is great for customers that, um, maybe they've done an acquisition or they have a brownfield or they've already purchased some devices. They don't have to have everything top to bottom from HPE you, but they can, they can define a net network access control policy across all of them. And then of course, once someone's on the network, we have a global policy manager, which helps determine, you know, Hey, can Adam talk to this particular application?

Tom, can you access a certain LLM or certain data? Right? And, and of course we do that and enforce, you know, as they're on the network as well.

So we were really excited about this cloud nack. We're also excited in that it works really well with Juniper, so this is our better together. And we were showing that this week at Black Hat, basically, uh, Aruba and Juniper together.

Alright, well, as you can see, networks have become a lot more complicated over the years. And the solutions to make them less complicated also run the risk of making them less secure, unless you have a company that has a security first mindset that is willing to embrace new technologies, both on premises and in the cloud, and figure out a way to make it work so that it's not adding needless cycles to engineering and operations roles. And I think that that is something that really speaks to our jobs.

We want to be able to do more without having to actually work harder or think harder. And if it comes down to a choice between two solutions that offer, you know, roughly equivalent performance, but one of them is much easier to implement and maintain. Well, I know which one I'm going to go with.

Speaking of which, for those of you out there that might be interested in learning more about some of the solutions that we talked about today, where can people go to find that information? com and search for sas, E-S-A-S-E. And then from there it also branches out into the individual products such as SD WAN and our cloud-based SSE, so they'll be able to find everything.

So again, HPE com, sass e. Awesome. And we'll make sure to include links to that in the show notes as well.

For those of you who want to just click directly there, thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, which is brought to you by HP Aruba Networking. If you enjoyed this discussion, please make sure that you subscribe on our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast application of choice so you don't miss an episode and consider giving us a rating in a review that really helps people understand what we talk about around here, and hopefully it appeals to them as well. This podcast was brought to you by HPE Aruba Networking and Tech Field Day, the Home for IT experts from across the Enterprise Tech Field Day is a part of the Future Room Group.

com/podcast or check us out on Techstrong TV and in the New Techstrong app. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.