Techstrong TV January 15, 2026

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. I'm really happy to introduce you to our next guest.

He's the CEO and co-founder of a company called sata. Um, we're gonna find out about what that name means and where it came from. But first, let's find out more about him.

Say hello to Shahar. Taal. Shahar, welcome to Tech Drunk tv.

It's great to have you on here. Thank You. It's great to be here.

So, Shahar, I always like, you know, our audience are tech people like me and you. Yeah. And, um, yeah, they always wanna know who's this talking to them, should we believe 'em?

What does he have to say? Give people a sense, kind of, of your background. Shahar, if you don't mind.

Um, so Sha uh, quick 20 years, uh, in the cybersecurity fronts. So starting out in the Air Force, then unit 8,200, I've, uh, done the rounds. That was the first decade.

Um, then I joined Checkpoint. I led the malware and vulnerability research over there. So I used to be the guy speaking at Black Hat Defcon, R-S-A-C-C-C, or pretty much every other conference.

And I used to go and speak at CISO conferences, like speaking about yesterday's big breach and the vulnerabilities, explaining all that. So that was really my thing kind of 10 years ago. Um, and then I got the opportunity to join Cellebrite.

Uh, so doing digital forensics for the next eight years or so, uh, joining to lead the company's research. And then six years in, I crossed over to the dark side and joined the corporate business development team. It happens, it happens, It happens to the best of us.

Um, yes, I was, uh, maybe, you know, preparing me for my next role, which is the CEO and co-founder, uh, of, uh, sata. So first of all, it's a great journey, right? And I, you know, I, I just, I think it was today, the annual report from YL Ventures came out, 40%, 40% of all, uh, VC money invested in cyber, went to Israeli cyber companies.

I would venture, no, you know, I'd venture to say no, no pun intended, that 80% of those companies have co-founders with a somewhat similar path to yours, right? They come out of the IDF, whether it's 8,200 or what have you, they go to work for a big security company, a checkpoint, maybe a Google or a Microsoft or someone. They then go to a startup and get the bug right?

They catch that virus, no pun intended. And, and they start thinking, well, you know what? I, I could, I would like to start my own company.

I I see a problem that I think needs a good solution. And lo and behold, they got a few friends, maybe people they were in IDF with maybe people they worked with and, and such as The, the, the, the community, the founder community is really, uh, astounding. And I think, I think like I've been experiencing it just for the, the last few years, but it's the way that people put themselves kind of out there and very leaning into kind of being helpful.

Uh, yes. I think that has been really something that stood out for me, you know, going in quite later than most founders, you know, kind, you know, you have, you have those, those people who come out of the army and then, right. You Know?

Yeah. 23, 24. Um, and, and, and, and some, you know, maybe like myself, uh, you know, a a bit gray haired, uh, uh, not, not At least you have hair.

It's okay. Yeah. Um, but, and then, you know, it's, it's a bit of a different context.

So we've been, we've done, you know, a few done the rounds, understand how, you know, commercial cybersecurity gets done, and then you have something to say about that, right? So that's, that's a part of our journey as well. Uh, and, and, and, you know, I was blessed and, you know, for so fortunate to have a, a great team of co-founders, you know, Alta alumni.

Um, the other are the, you know, 8,200 graduates who have been also very deep and security research realms, vulnerability research, very deep understanding of what makes technology kind of work, observing these transformational shifts, one generation at a time, right? We've seen cloud, we've seen mobile, and now we're, we're seeing Gentech, um, which is, which is really making us rethink what is this kind of, you know, software concept? What is happening in the world?

What is knowledge work going to look like? Uh, so for us, that was really kind of a, a moment where we took, you know, we took pause and said, listen, something is, something is about to change big time, and people don't really understand it yet. Agreed.

Agreed. So, I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but let's dig a little deeper. No one wakes up and says, I'm starting a company today.

There's a lot, especially, you know, with co-founders, and there, there's a lot that goes into it, right? Financially, uh, just resource and everything. I mean, you, you put your guts into it, right?

And what, you can't do that unless you're passionate, because you can't fake it. You can't fake it, right? And, and you need this, and you need an internal belief, right?

So that internal passion for, uh, uh, you know, for making something happen. And, and I think that that really, when, when we were kind of in this journey early on, we had these conversations about why we wanna do, you know, wanna do something like this and andro, you know, great jobs and, you know, give up, you know, other Yeah, no, absolutely. Really interesting alternatives to make this happen.

But I was, you know, me personally, I've sitting across the table from like two people that I admire with technical talent. Like, hold on, this is, you know, we are the team that you get in the newspaper, you know, that and, and all the stories there. Yes, I, I know we are, we're that material.

So that gave me kind of the confidence, said, listen, we have to do this right now. This is the opportunity. Um, and, you know, all of us leaned in very hard and, uh, we started, uh, sata.

So let, let's, first of all, what's the website for sata? Let's get that outta the way so we don't Yeah, Sure. Forget that's, that's SATA ai.

Um, it's SATA is C-Y-A-T-A. Uh, we have been, uh, there are quite a few stories recently because we released a lot of interesting research, um, about kind of vulnerabilities and agent frameworks. Uh, we really picked them apart.

And when you start looking at them over and over, you realize those patterns of where things kind of fall, you know, fall apart, and where, where subtle vulnerabilities are. Again, coming from the res from the research background, that kind of, our team comes from, um, uh, we released a lot of research. So we had, uh, you know, a few stories about us.

Uh, there's gonna be, uh, quite, quite some, uh, some more stories coming up. Um, but yes, sata, ai. Excellent.

And just while we're here, we might as well mention it. Talk to us about where the name comes from. Well, uh, uh, the, the, there's a few stories, the origin story for sata, uh, but, uh, I guess in Hebrew or ame, uh, you would say, uh, SATA ish may, right?

With help from above, uh, or with help from the skies. Uh, and, and, and that resonated, uh, for us. And, you know, we started out with, uh, you know, with, which is BSD, and then we say, well, in Hebrew, that's ba which is the, the common acronym for SI May.

And then we just went with it. Very cool. I always like the, I've been through exercises like this myself, so I I know what you mean.

Uh, it's better doing that sometimes than going to spend $150,000 with a hotshot agency another time. I'll tell you how we came to be known as tech Strong. Okay.

$140,000 later was my idea to begin with. But anyway, um, okay, Fair Enough. Let's move into what Sayad does though.

What, what, Okay. If I had say, all right, Shar, tell us, what's the problem you solve? How are you making the world better?

We, we help organizations discover, explain, and control their new AI workforce. Okay? So we are seeing, uh, ai, uh, transition from being the kind of a, a, a nice chat bot or assistant to being a full on digital employee, right?

They are in your, your new workforce. This is where your employees now have their own kind of helper employees that do tasks for them, sometimes on behalf of their identities, sometimes on behalf of certain functions. But things are happening today, or we are letting things happen today that we would've never let happen with any other of our employees out there.

We've built decades of security or identity security controls around human employees, around how we onboard them, around how we grant permissions, how we audit their access, et cetera. But we are absolutely at a loss of these controls, the exact controls that allow us to govern and control, you know, our human workforce are, uh, uh, you know, incapable of doing that with a dynamically reasoning entity that is stochastic, that has access to arbitrary tools, sometimes that gets, you know, ultra connected and hyper connected to all sorts of, uh, uh, you know, databases and, and, and resources that your company has. Um, and that's exactly what we're trying to help with.

Um, so the first thing, typically we help people understand all of the agents that are already working for them. Uh, one of the key problems here is shadow agents, right? These are sprawling out of control.

People are onboarding these agents, uh, as, as their own experiments, as you know. And sometimes just for lack of a better term, it was shoved down their throat, um, by kind of a vendor where, you know, they introduced a new agent for something, and now there is another agent working for your company. Um, and, and, and this is super interesting.

It, it's, it belongs to, we see this in coding agents, we see this in in agentic browsers. We see it on the SaaS platform like agent builder platforms. Each and every platform now has is releasing those new digital employees that run off and kind of do tasks in the background, um, which is w which it just out of control right now.

Agreed. Agreed. And, and Edward, just at the beginning.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Listen, it's, uh, for ev every engagement where we come in and we do the scan, we see that, that jaw drop moment where they realize what they did, or they had a suspicion maybe, but they realize everything that's right, that's happening right now within their, their networks and on their endpoints and in their kind of SaaS environments. So, and, and that's exactly, we try to bring all of this into a singular control plane, right?

So make sure that there's one place where we can govern when we can set policy, um, set your posture guardrails, right? This is, um, uh, and the, the agentic, SPM, so to speak, right? We have the security posture management for so many of these other areas, but they miss the focus on this abstract entity that we wanna solve for, which is the AI agent.

Agreed. Very cool. Um, so here we are in January.

Yes. You know, we, uh, in many ways, all of us, were touting 2025 is the year for agent AI really going mainstream. But as we look back, you know, to last year, I think the consensus is a lot of these agents didn't work as well as we thought they would, right?

A lot of these agents sucked, quite frankly, right? But they'll get better in 2026. But what we're also seeing is that constant jockeying, right?

With security versus new technology, right? First you security seems to dig their heels in and say, no, no, no, no, you gotta make sure it's secure. And people say, well, no, we're going without you, then, okay, okay, we'll, we'll, we'll go do it.

And they try to, you know, keep pace and, and then they try to leverage the technology to make better security. Mm-hmm. I abs I'm gonna assume this is very much part of your journey right now.

Yes. So, and, and lemme tell you, there's a couple things that, that I wanna say. One, I think the narrative is changing.

We've seen the 20, 25 pieces with, uh, the, I'd say the kind of disappointment everyone says, you know, and the analysts were like, oh, you know, so many of these projects are going to fail. We're not seeing any production re and yet, right? So that was, that was, you know, the, the notion, the sentiment that wa that that came about in the second half, 20, 25.

But it's starting to change. And I think the reason for the change is how much, uh, better, and how quickly reasoning models, uh, improved in the, in the way they're able to deliver consistent kind of, you know, longer term tasks or longer term goals translated into tool calls, into, into action. And the, and this, uh, uh, and it came with, with a few models.

I don't want to, you know, pick and choose kind of the vendors, but it really seems like the whole, the entire industry is moving into a place of higher productivity, more reliability, um, you know, it's gaining trust that, you know, you can let this thing run off and, and, and do, uh, kind of a longer term goal. So, you know, that's on, on, on the framing of the narrative. Um, and, and I think that, that in terms of, um, uh, uh, uh, adoption, again, adoption comes from everywhere.

We are seeing the, you know, all the early adopters and everyone's doing their own experiments, right? So they're experimenting with AI and they're trying this agent, they're trying this, they're giving permissions over here. They're giving permissions over there from the top, you see boards and kind of CEOs mandating, uh, how fast are we gonna, you know, accelerate AI adoption?

And so, and, and then everyone has like, tasks to do this. So in the middle, you get this nice, you know, risk sandwich, uh, of, of, you know, stuffing all of the ai, uh, into the organization. I think 2026 is where we're gonna see a lot more, uh, long-term agents starting to work.

Um, again, for companies, we're already seeing this with a few platforms that are now, and I mean, the trend is very clear. You see platforms releasing background agents, right? I don't know if you've, if you've seen some of them, and background agents is exactly what we mean when we say longer term.

Like, you know, long-term goal oriented, uh, uh, agent technology. Um, so this is, I, I think this is where we are going as, as an industry and knowledge work, uh, uh, altogether. Now, there's a lot of people speaking about kind of multi-agent systems, right?

And a to a and this, and this really complicates some of the, uh, uh, you know, controls that, that you want to have over, uh, uh, you know, over, uh, in, in this area. Um, I think this is a little further along. This might be the end of 2026, or even 2027, but longer term, uh, digital employees are happening right now.

I love it. ai, that's C-Y-A-T-A, um, I didn't ask. So agen, spm, all of this, it's, it's publicly available right now.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

We, you know, we have, we have a product out, uh, lots of paying customers in the us, uh, primarily financial services, uh, you know, uh, uh, and financial, uh, tech heavy institutions in the United States. This is where we're seeing a lot of adoption right now. But it's not limited.

It's everywhere. Everyone realizes that this is a gap. Uh, if you look at budgets for 2026, they have aligned for, let's say, AI security, and then they try to figure out what's the right approach, what, you know, how, you know, where, where do we wanna, uh, you know, put our chips on?

Um, and, and for us, it's, it's really clear the, the right approach to tackle this problem is from the identity security prism, right? You cannot treat this as an AppSec problem. It's, there's not code you could statically analyze and figure out whether that, um, whether that agent is going to behave nicely or not.

Uh, it, it, it's just a black box that will make decisions on its own. And so identity security is really the only viable, practical control that you can place around such a, a construct if you want, you know, uh, uh, again, to, to make sure that things are happening in a way that's controlled, that's measurable, that's audited, uh, et cetera. Excellent.

Shah, we're about outta time. First of all, best of luck with Sciat continuous success. Thank you so much.

Don't be a stranger. Keep, keep us, uh, keep, you know, keep us posted on what's doing. Will you guys be at RSA this year?

Yes, absolutely. We're gonna be at, at the early stage Expo. Um, oh, Very cool.

The sandbox or just the early, Yeah, no, at, at, at the hall. Just early stage in the hall there, that song. We'll have a, and have A session there as well.

Very cool. We, we of course, will be there broadcasting live. We put on, you know, we put on the DevSecOps thing every Monday there.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This year it's really about, uh, AI native dev Right.

And securing AI native dev. So we'll be absolutely that. Or maybe stop by, by, uh, broadcast alley.

We'll catch up with you. Absolutely. Uh, we'll meet up then.

Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. All right, you too.

Shatal, CEO co-founder SATA here on Tech Drug tv. We're gonna be back with more. Stay tuned.

Hello, I'm Scott Roam with Al, and I'm here today with Ahmed Abbu of Nokia Enterprise IT to talk about some of the very interesting network migration issues that they've been through over the last, uh, year or so. I'm not gonna steal any of Ahmed's Thunder, and we'll let him speak to at all. Ahmed, please introduce yourself to the audience.

Hi. Um, my name is Ahmed Abbu alb. I'm the lead architect for the on-prem, uh, data centers inside Nokia it.

And, um, I had the privilege of course, of, uh, doing this exciting transformation where we moved a lot of data centers from legacy to modern, modern techniques, modern data centers, migrating from different types of vendors to, to Nokia equipment migrating from Nokia to Nokia. So, um, those two or two and a half years have been very exciting for me. I've been working in data centers for a long time, but this is like something I've never seen before, so.

Awesome. I'm excited to share this with you. Yeah, no, happy to dive into this.

And let's just set the context for, for people who aren't aware, you know, Nokia is just this tiny little company with just a few hundred users on the network, right? Yeah, sure, sure. We've got like 88,000 people.

Yes. Yeah. And a wide diversity of different departments and functions you support, you have manufacturing operations that you have to support, of course, finance, accounting, yes.

Hr, all sorts of, you know, software developers, people in sales, people in marketing. Probably one of the most complex enterprise network environments that I've run into in my time in networking. How about you?

I, I, I think it, it's, it's different types. There is a variety of applications, applications that are very sensitive to disruptions. Sure.

Applications that are, you know, factories, uh, you know, that that could, you know, a brief disruption could, could throw off the software of the factory. It has to be restarted, things like that. So it's very critical.

Very interesting. And the different variety. Different variety.

Some are very sensitive to, to delays. Some are very sensitive to outages. It's very interesting.

So you've given a little hint at kind of the first, um, category of things that we want to talk about. You know, some of the pain points and the issues that you, you had to think about and had to say, what does my next gen network architecture need to fix? So what were some of those original pain points?

If you think back, you know, two, two and a half years now, um, to when you actually started down this path, what were some of the motivators that, um, got you thinking about we need to go to new network infrastructure and new tooling? Well, you, when I started really with Nokia, it, uh, I saw it diff all sorts of problems. You know, I wasn't, I wasn't in the, in the IT world, I was in the product world, right?

And everything, there was like more rosy, you know, you're dealing with labs, concepts, architectures, blue playbooks, sure. Blueprints. Uh, but when you move to it, it really hits, you know, the real world part.

And there I was exposed to all sorts of problems. You know, we have operate our operational model, you know, where we have to do a lot of intensive work, uh, very resource intensive. We really don't know what is deployed, uh, if it's, if what we intended to deploy is actually on the network or not.

We don't have a feedback loop from the actual, from the actual deployment to the intent. Um, we had operational problems where, where the operations team were dealing with different types of toolings that don't cooperate with each other, that don't tell you really what, what, you know, what is wrong with your network at any time. You have to do a lot of brain power and cor, you know, manual correlation.

Hmm. Um, also our designs, our designs, it was a lot, oh, well, let's go to the lab. Let's try and simulate as much as possible production.

Let's bring in, you know, expensive equipment, expensive, uh, uh, low balances, fire, et cetera, into the lab just to, to test something small because we are worried that when if we go in production, it'll have a, a very negative effect. So lots of variety like that. And also, and also human aspect, uh, of the thing.

It's like, like I, I think of it as a journey. This is not only a technical part, you know, sure. People are, you know, see excited about automation, AI, and stuff like that, and they, they wanna be part of it.

They, they wanna get exposed to it, but not, not just for the sake of AI and automation, but where it makes sense for us. And so all that, um, made, made us think of completely rearchitecting the way we do everything. Sure.

From design to, to implementation to operations, everything was completely different. Did you see any, like, not to be overly reductionistic, but any, like, specific pain points? Was there overload due to alarms or tickets generated?

Um, were there communication issues on some of these complex troubleshooting issues? Does anything specific come to mind there? Of course, I'm, I'm not an operations team.

I'm a, I'm a design team, so, sure. Uh, I wanna comment on the design part because, uh, that affected me the most. Sure.

Uh, is, is when, when, for example, when I got exposed and we had a network audit, and we found also of problems. You know, the thing is, we really don't know if, if what we're dealing with is, is a design intent, or it's intended to be like this or, or a drifted through time to be like this. Sure.

So, uh, the common thing, the common thing is I always was told, go back. Let's see that the designer that did it two years ago, let's talk to him. Let's talk to him.

Is it really this or not? Hmm. So it wasn't like very consistent and, and, and drifting.

And we don't know if, if reality is good or bad. So, uh, all sorts of problems there in the design and also in the implementation. Lots of people doing CLI, where, where one node has a completely different configuration than another.

Sure. Not completely, but drifted away from another and they should be identical. And we never understood why.

So I, I, I really need, uh, I really thought, thought about this when, when starting the architecture that we consistency has to be there. Yeah. Automate, you know, something at a higher level should be the, the engineer shouldn't be going to that low of a level to deal with things.

See, they should, they should be dealing with a high level and let some tooling, some automation, some templating, do the, the real hard work, you know, the con you know, consistency check work. Sure, Sure. Hey guys, thanks for the throw.

We're here with Scott Manchester, newly appointed chief product and technology officer for nerdio. And well, we're having a little chat about how it is gonna be managed going forward in the age of the cloud, and maybe with virtual desktops and all kinds of fun stuff. Scott, welcome Michelle.

Thanks. Good to meet you, Mike. Historically, we've always seemed to have managed desktops in the cloud separately, even when the same team is managing 'em, they think about them separately.

And I guess I'm wondering, after all this time, are we on the cusp from what you see as to maybe some actual convergence here and what might drive that? Yeah, certainly. I think, you know, as you've seen the evolution of VDI, uh, moving to the cloud, um, we call that cloud VDI, where it kind of holds to those previous constructs of traditional management of VDI, sort of a separate environment from your physical estate to the innovation that came forward with the cloud pc, where it was a very intentionally named in a, named a cloud personal computer.

And the concept is that it carries forward all those same constructs and how you manage, uh, how you set security baselines, do Windows updates, app deployments, and doing it in a way that's consistent between the physical world and your new cloud-based computing environment. And I think that, uh, thinking of those as a single concept certainly gives back a lot of time and energy to it. So they're not managing two different workflows, but also has a great value of reducing their security footprint and just giving, you know, more structure to how they manage an environment that has less risk of human error as well.

We've been talking about virtual desktops for as long as I can remember. What will kind of finally push people towards them in greater numbers than we've seen thus far. It seems like, you know, at least it, it looks like the right way to go from a computer science perspective, and yet we still see a lot of traditional desktops out there.

So what's gonna move the needle? Yeah, that was a question I asked myself about a decade ago. Um, you know, leading the business at Microsoft for so long and really starting to see what that growth looked like and trying to understand why it hadn't had higher penetration for those customers that had deployed it, you could see the incredible value that it gave to them.

You know, that simplicity is spinning up and spinning down resources when they needed the extra layer of security. But the devil's in the details with this type of technology, right? And there are certain, you know, I'll call 'em quirky behaviors of traditional VDI, uh, that often lead to complex management, uh, and the overhead, you know, when it's not managed in a consistent way, and you add that complexity, that overhead sometimes outweighs the value of virtualization.

And then there's just the general understanding of it. You know, we've had like com, you know, pc, physical PC based computing environments for, you know, five decades now and four decades of windows. And it's just what people are familiar with and accustomed to.

So trying to, you know, bridge the gap between everything on physical and everything cloud and finding tools, processes and value in between there and helping people start to understand that value. So it's closing the gap on the complexities, but also helping customers understand the value. And I think we saw a major inflection point just a few years ago, obviously, uh, with COVID and then many organizations being forced to quickly adapt to an environment that allowed people to be productive outside of the office.

It was a great awakening of the value of virtualization, and I think we saw some explosive growth that hasn't subsided, right? You saw this huge pickup of people really looking into virtualization. But then organizations have gone through these migrations from all on-prem, all in the cloud, uh, everybody at home, everybody in the office, hybrid work.

All these inflection points are a reminder that things are not stagnant. And having environments that allow flexibility, flexibility in where your workforce is, the needs of your workforce, global demands, all of these things. Um, so I think we're definitely an era where that growth of desktop virtualization that we saw for three decades is now at a much higher pace than ever before.

Um, you mentioned you were at Microsoft, so what brought you to nerdio? What was the attraction there? And kinda, there's a lot of players in the space, so what differentiates Nerdio in your mind?

Yeah, I think, you know, when we first started down this adventure of Microsoft having first party solutions in this space, both our cloud VDI product, Azure Virtual Desktop, and our cloud PC product, I came into that, um, mindset of building those products with a partner strategy in mind. Meaning there's certainly core value you wanna have in the solution that customers don't feel like they need third party tools to have a viable product. But having partners and an ecosystem of partners out there who can enhance fill gaps, build specific needs for different verticals was something that was gonna be clear.

NIO just happened to be a second partner that we signed up as a value added partner, uh, in the early days of Azure Virtual Desktop at that time, they were a pretty small organization with just a handful of people, uh, but clearly had a very good understanding of the needs of organization and the vision to understand that that Azure Virtual desktop, our cloud VDI product was gonna be transformational. Uh, it was a product that kind of fit right in between the needs of organizations and that price point that customers were looking for to make those economics work. They asked about earlier and immediately was impressed, uh, with Nerdio, both Joseph and Vadim, uh, and their understanding the needs of customers.

Joseph had just come off, you know, a long tenure at Microsoft as well, and Vadim had great expertise in building managed services for organizations and right off the bat, uh, seeing the, their willingness to take on a very complex, uh, feature ad for Azure Virtual Desktop, which was building the entire GUI to wrap around the management framework. And they did that so quickly, and the reception to it was just phenomenal. So the last I'd been a little over seven years now, I think, uh, working side by side with them continuing, you know, as we now brought a GUI forward, uh, for a VD nerdy has continued to evolve and continue to build value out in front of what we've done.

Um, but getting that chance to work side by side with them for so long, I think the choice for me is pretty obvious, uh, where to go next. Um, why, uh, now, uh, this little timer here in front of me is counting down to two more days until my 25 year anniversary at Microsoft. So, as with many people that come into a large company like Microsoft, you're not quite sure how long you're gonna stay in an organization like that.

Um, and you know, my plan originally was maybe two to five years, and here I am 25 years later, you know, it's just an amazing experience. Uh, I felt nerdy was the right, uh, company, and 25 years was the right time, uh, to go out and, and continue to innovate and build value for customers in this end user compute space. All right.

Sometimes you gotta find your joy, right? Um, so what is your sense of how much of it is gonna be managed by these kind of third party managed service providers versus an internal IT team? As we go forward, I feel like there's more collaboration, but when I look at the numbers, it's still about maybe a quarter of IT is consumed as a managed a service, and the rest of it is still managed directly by some internal IT team.

Generally speaking. Is that the way it's always gonna be, or is there gonna be a change? You know, it's interesting.

I see customers moving in both directions where maybe they've managed all their internal IT before in, are now looking to, you know, outsource that a bit. Um, as they go through these inflection points of on-prem cloud, and then maybe even full cloud pc. I think each of those are times for them to evaluate, you know, is this best suited for us to manage ourselves?

Uh, should we work with one of our current, uh, SI partners? Do we work with a full MSP? Um, I think many organizations are just shifting around as it meets their specific needs.

I think at the end of the day, IT departments wanna spend more of their time looking out into the horizon and less down at their feet. What I mean by that is when you're looking down at your feet, you're implementing the technologies that you've already purchased, you know, the things you've, you've bought, you've made a decision, this is the tech. But when you're spending all your time working on implementing the tech you have now, and you're not looking out at the horizon, you're missing major inflection points, like this new generation of AI tools that could completely streamline your organizations.

So what I see organizations doing is saying, I want to get my IT department more focused on new horizons, new opportunities to make us more productive, lower cost, increased productivity, and less time spending implementing technologies we've already bought. So nerdio kinda is that sweet spot of saying, well, we can provide more, you know, um, management tools to reduce the overhead of your IT team, or can give you even the opportunity to have nerdio be the tool that an MSP uses to manage that customer. So I think they're just situated really well to capture whether you're moving towards managing your own environment or you're moving away from it.

The nerdio, uh, suite of tools I think is just well positioned for all of those movements. Mm-hmm. You mentioned ai, will AI kind of drive some of this convergence we were talking about before in terms of how it is managed?

Because it seems like the workflows will become more automated and there'll be less maybe unnatural delineation between various platforms. So is is that part of that inflection point you were talking about? A little bit, yeah.

But you look at even ai, how fast it's evolved, right? Imagine if you said, okay, ai, I've got this a new AI tool, we're gonna implement it, and then we're done with ai, right? So my IT department can all just go home and, uh, take a vacation, when in reality, even these IT tools are evolving so quickly.

You need to constantly be evaluating these new tools, uh, these new capabilities. So AI will certainly, uh, simplify every aspect of the enterprise workforce. You know, whether that is, you know, um, general content creation, um, whether it's improving workflows or whether it's providing additional tools to help you manage your compute infrastructure.

Um, it's gonna have an impact on all of those things, but it's not a one and done. It's a constant evaluation of these new tools, constant determining what's the right AI services and tools for my organization. So I think it's gonna just keep moving the needle, uh, in terms of what the role of the human is in all of this equation.

And then what are the right tools that help organizations take these AI tools and manage them. Uh, Microsoft made a big announcement at Ignite that really moves the needle forward and then creates a great ecosystem of partners around this, which is giving AI tools and identity, um, that was Agent 365 that was announced at at Microsoft Ignite just a few weeks ago. And then be able to take those tools and those agents and put them to purpose, right?

So you've got new tools that are both applicable to the virtual estate, and there was a couple other announcements. Uh, AI enabled cloud PCs, AI tools, uh, that can be consumed inside of a cloud pc. So AI is having major opportunities to streamline organizations, but then creating new opportunities for IT departments to put these AI tools to bear inside of their virtual estate.

One of the things that I have heard from IT people over the years is, you know, they left to their own druthers, would love to use virtual desktops, it makes their life easier, but they have a hard time convincing the organization that that's the way to go. And it has to do with cultural issues more than technical issues. And in some ways, sometimes desktop virtualization, at least historically, has had something of a bad rap among some end users.

What's your best advice to those folks about how to kind of get the rest of the organization on board for this? Yeah, certainly, you know, with 30 years of evolutionary innovation, it's like, you know, boiling a frog. It's hard to really know how much virtualization has changed since that last time you looked at it.

So if you're A-A-C-I-O or CTO within an organization, and perhaps you looked at virtualization a decade ago and yeah, it had some value, but the overhead and the value equation just didn't make it worthwhile for us. And then with slow innovation, there's nothing major enough for them to go back and look at it again, with the introduction of both Cloud VDI, uh, lowering the cost threshold for organizations where most enterprises already have the entitlements to supporting Azure Virtual Desktop, for instance, without having to go buy some expensive license from another third party, that opened up the door. And many organizations now said, okay, let's take another look at virtualization because this cost has reduced significantly.

I already have the entitlements through my Microsoft licenses. And then cloud pc very disruptive, uh, a revolutionary innovation in the virtualization space. That kind of leans into some of the things you were identifying, Mike, is that experience, that end user experience.

Can you grab a random person off the street, put 'em in front of this environment and have them be productive? I'll use another example from Ignite since it was such a, um, recent moment, um, where a lot of this, these type of topics were discussed. I brought up one customer on stage, um, that had been, uh, working with us since the early days of A VD and now to Cloud pc.

They cycle through 3000 contractors a month. So 3000 offboard and 3000 onboarded. And with traditional virtualization, you can imagine where you'd take specialized training to, to get that new contractor familiar with the differences of computing on a physical device and computing outta a virtual estate.

The overhead of that 3000 times every month wouldn't be worthwhile with Cloud PC and the innovation we've been driving at Microsoft and the value add nerdio wraps around it, it is really designed to be your personal computer in the cloud and it looks, feels and operates like a physical PC and all of the things that humans do when they interact with a physical PC to self remediate problems, right? We all know how to hit the restart button on our pc. Imagine this Mike, 30 years of evolutionary innovation in the virtualization space.

Nobody gave the user the reset button. So every time you put somebody in a virtualized environment and they got into a bad state, someone had to get on the phone, someone had to go in the backend and restart that machine. That alone, it just seems like such a simple thing.

But that alone was one of the major deployment blockers just doing a simple phase in restarting your machine. Humans couldn't do on their own. They had to engage with an IT support person.

It's just one of many little quirky behaviors that we've closed that gap on now. And given that user the ability, ability to restart their machine and do even more actions that they've become familiar with in the physical world, uh, and when you can lower the IT overhead in that same stage, uh, we shared, uh, a couple other customers shared some statistic moving from traditional virtualization to cloud PC reduced their support tickets by 86%. But those are data points that many organizations haven't felt yet, right?

That they're not aware just how fast things have changed and how far they've come since the last time they looked at it. So get to your original question. I think it's just a matter now of getting out and letting organizations know, you know, things have evolved significantly since the last time you looked at it.

And getting some of these large customers in different verticals tell their stories of how it's transformed their, uh, operations made things more secure and lower the costs, uh, starting to resonate. So we're seeing, you know, customers maybe that have been resistant to this now really embracing virtualization and doing it at scale. Mm-hmm.

You mentioned security, so are those folks also starting to weigh in on this conversation? 'cause you know, we're all familiar with Patch Tuesday and nobody's having a great experience per se, but um, yeah. Are the security people starting to show up and say, folks, we need a better way to manage all this stuff.

'cause that endpoint is really, you know, among the weakest links we have because well after the people that comes next. Yeah, and I think virtualization has always been, you know, a tool that security would, would implement to sort of separate, you know, the corporate environment data, uh, from the physical device. So with the traditional virtualization, I log in from, uh, a thin client device or a Windows device or an Android iOS device into the corporate environment through a virtualization application.

And when I'm done, nothing is left behind. That's one of the value props is creating that security boundary, getting it implemented in a way where you can guarantee nothing is left behind and guarantee that that thin client device or that thick client device that's connecting to the service also hasn't been compromised. That's where the real next wave of innovation is really closing the gap on security and creating brand new security opportunities that, um, we're not able to be realized in the virtualization environment of the past.

Things like mobile application management where you can do attestation or posture checking of a physical device and ensure that it meets all the corporate requirements even without being managed. That means it can be A-B-Y-O-E device, my personal device that I'm connecting to the service from. And I think these types of technologies now are opening the door where even the highest level of security government agencies, healthcare, financial services, are now embracing virtualization because it provides that extra layer of security and can be done in a way that's more economical than traditional fiscal computing.

So what is that one thing? I mean, you know, you've been doing this for a while, but is there something you see people doing today that just makes you shake your head a little bit, go, Hey, you know, folks, maybe we could be just a little bit smarter than that and if we have focused on the following? Yeah, I'd say certainly it is, um, understanding when your workload would be better served from the cloud as sort of a general concept.

Um, going into this 2026, I kind of view this as a year of the great migration, uh, that migration from on-prem to the cloud, from legacy virtualization solutions to modern virtualizations solutions, from services that you're paying for in addition to license that you already have through Microsoft. Uh, all of these are new opportunities for migration. Nerdio has been building an amazing platform to support these migrations, whether it is understanding the needs, uh, of individual users and what's the best service to support them.

This is one of the things they announced at Nerdio Con in May. Uh, the ability to migrate users from, uh, Azure Virtual Desktop to Windows 365, but even more importantly, to identify the economics and value of that move. And you actually giving us real word metrics of moving that.

So I think going into this year, being helping organizations see the light you had mentioned earlier that, you know, how do you, you know, drive this innovation of virtualization when maybe it has a bad taste for some organizations, right? I think understanding that things have changed and giving them the tools to see those insights and then the tools to just click a button and migrate from whatever their, their current environment is. Whether it's a third party virtualization solution, whether it's physical PC computing, or whether it's in their own data centers to the cloud, but not just tools that just say, look, I'll move it when you're ready, but to even tell you when it's the right time to make those moves from an economic security and value prop, uh, point of view.

All right, folks, you heard it here. We all know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So maybe it's time to consider your options.

Scott, thanks for being on the show. Thanks Mike. All right.

And back to you guys in the studio. AI assistant crossover Veeam gets objective billion dollar data centers vibe coding shields up cursor calls code crypto. It's time for quantum license renewal and we're going to predict the future in this week's closer look on the tech field day rundown.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown. It is the 14th of January.

We are glad that you made it two weeks into the new year with us. We hope that you've been spending a little bit of time organizing your home because it is national organizer home today. Uh, but what is important is that the stories that we have are all organized as well as my organizer in chief, Mr.

Alistair Cook. Alex, good to see you. It is A delight to be here and I would like to remind everybody that it's 2026 if you start writing.

The data is 2025. You get time traveling backwards. Uh, it is also international Fly your kit day, which seems like a much more sensible thing to do here in the southern hemisphere where it's summertime than up in the Northern Hemisphere where it's not, Depends on where you live 'cause it's still spring around here.

Uh, but something else that springs to mind is a great lineup of stories that we have for you today. And we're gonna start off with one that really had people kind of a Twitter so to speak, because our good friends at the Cupertino Fruit and Mobile device company, otherwise known as Apple, are partnering with Google to use their Gemini models and cloud technology to upgrade. I won't say the word, but you know, the lady that lives in your phone with advanced AI capabilities later this year, this multi-year deal will rely on Google's AI while continuing to run Apple devices and private cloud infrastructure.

Apple reportedly plans to pay around $1 billion annually for this technology reflecting growing trust in Google's AI process as it competes with open ai. The move marks a major shift for Apple, which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the AI boom thus far, and aims to deliver a more capable and sophisticated lady that lives in your phone after delays pushed the rollout to early 2026. Al the biggest thing that I have to wonder is, is Gemini gonna be up to the task?

And has anybody heard Elon Musk whining about this yet? Well, I've used Gemini fairly extensively. Um, it is my first line of defense of looking at a, uh, large language model, and I'm pretty impressed with what Jim and I can can do provided you give it the right guidance as always for a large language model.

Uh, one of the things that struck me in this is the briefness of the joint statement issued by Google and Apple. It's just two very short paragraphs, uh, basically saying this is a multi-year collaboration and the next generation of Apple's Foundation models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technologies. Uh, it's a bit of a shift because historically Apple has been much more connected to, to OpenAI and chat GPT, and the statement is that hasn't changed.

It's just that there're also basing lots of things on Google's Gemini models that may actually reflect what's happening for a lot of us as consumers of the chat components of these tools where we might switch between them and use different tools for different places. I know within the future of intelligence platform, the default in there as chat GPT. Uh, so we we're kind of multilingual within Futur and, and our use.

And I think that's also what we're seeing from Apple. You'll recall that we covered a little while ago that maybe Apple is not doing the best job of you utilizing modern large language model ai. And uh, I sort of drew some lines from Johnny i's departure setting up a, a new AI company and them getting very close to open ai.

Uh, also that the, uh, apple intelligence hasn't quite been what we hoped it would be. And maybe this is where the new Google models, Gemini models will be really helpful at delivering what was promised for, uh, the Apple intelligence and, uh, that, uh, lady who sounds like she's sorry, uh, in your phone actually giving you some good guidance, although of course we're very familiar with large language models having to say sorry because they've got things wrong. So, uh, yeah, I think this is a good thing to see.

It is good to see that Apple is trying something different, but it continues to me to be a sign that they still haven't quite got it right and they've kind of oversold the promise and under delivered. Our good friends at Veeam have acquired Object First, a specialist in Preintegrated immutable backup appliances designed for Veeam environments. Uh, this makes a strategic and expansion for Veeam into Purpose-built hardware from, uh, being very much a software-based organization first and having a storage centric software approach object first.

Orbe appliances provide native S3 object storage with immutable enforcement by default. That's awesome. Field backup storage, particularly keeping it safe from ransomware.

Uh, the acquisition allows Veeam to offer on-premises solutions, uh, alongside cloud-based Veeam Data Cloud, giving customers flexibility in how they secure their backups while Object First will continue operating independently. And partner progra programs remain separate for the time being. At least this move reflects a growing industry demand for immutable secure storage and easily deployable backup solutions that simplify cyber resilience without necessarily limiting customer choice and locking you to a single solution.

Uh, I think, Tom, this is very much in your wheelhouse of keeping your data secure and keeping it well protected. Exactly. And there's nothing better for keeping your data secure than not being able to modify it at all.

It's one of the things that we've seen from the data protection industry over the last, oh, year and a half or so ever since they really started pivoting here, is this idea that you need to have some kind of a system in place that prevents people from attacking your reliability, so to speak. Uh, I saw a quote from our good friend Curtis Preston, Mr. Backup the other day, uh, something like 70 some odd percent of ransomware attacks.

Their very first target is backup data sets. They're looking to prevent your ability to restore. And and we've talked about that late last year, early this year.

I mean, when you think about the number of people that have paid ransomware, not because you know, it, it was a a cost conscious decision, but because they had no good backups that they could rely on in order to, to get back there to a running state like this just makes sense from Veeam's perspective because they already have their online cloud vault. That's great as long as you can get online. And that's one of the things we've seen outta the European Union in order to halt the spread of some of these massive ransomware attacks, is they have created the capability to basically isolate your network from the rest of the global internet.

That means you gotta have something on premises, and that's where Object First comes in and they already partner very tightly together. It's kind of one of those things where if you talk to Veeam and you need an immutable solution, their first go-to is Object first. It's just now that's an in-house solution as opposed to a a partner solution.

And I think that this is gonna give people a lot of flexibility because in addition to what I had already said about, you know, you gotta be able to get online to utilize that online cloud vault, there are a lot of regulated industries that will not let certain data escape the local network, so to speak. And, and that's just here in the US overseas you've got a lot of data, data sovereignty issues when it comes to cloud. So I think that this is great for Veeam customers that want to, uh, take advantage of these solutions and basically just write one check to Veeam.

Uh, we, we found out about this ironically enough through a lot of our great people in the Tech Field Day delegate community. They, they kind of gave us a heads up that there were some emails going back and forth, so we want to, you know, say a special shout out to all of the, the delegates who let us know about this. But I also wanna remind everybody that both Veeam and Object First are gonna be presenting at Tech Field Day Extra at RSAC this year.

I'll have more details about that when we close out the show. OpenAI and SoftBank Group are jointly investing $1 billion in SB Energy to accelerate construction of AI optimized data centers across the UAS as part of the Stargate project. The investment addresses a critical industry bottleneck that would be securing power in real estate to support increasingly demanding AI workloads.

Funny enough, they didn't say anything about building it in space. 2 gigawatt data center in Texas, will develop additional multi gigawatt campuses while integrating open AI's design specifications with its expertise in energy and construction. This partnership reflects a strategic shift in AI competition where controlling physical infrastructure is just as crucial as developing algorithms or having semiconductor access.

The initiative is part of broader efforts, including collaborations with Oracle and MGX to ensure that the US can scale AI computing capacity rapidly and reliably. Al is a billion dollars a great build out for a data center, or is this just a drop in the bucket? It's absolutely a drop in the bucket, Tom.

Absolutely. It's a sign of a commitment to a partnership. It's not actually the $500 billion commitment that the White House announced in January last year for, um, the Stargate Project.

So in the context of the US wants to build out half a trillion dollars worth of AI data center. Yeah, a billion dollar spend is not actually that big. Uh, on the other hand, if, uh, you're a contractor working Forb energy, uh, you're pretty happy that there's another trillion dollars available for this build out.

Uh, the build in Texas and Mulan County is, uh, underway and due to actually start delivering some AI sometime later this year. And this commitment really is just a, a partnership to get started. Uh, if SB Energy sounds like SoftBank, yeah, they're not directly a subsidiary, but a lot of money flows into SP energy from SoftBank to make sure that these build outs can occur.

And of course, OpenAI will be the big customer for putting workloads inside these data centers. So the partnership is good. Uh, it is a non-exclusive, uh, prefer, uh, preferential agreement so that open AI and SoftBank will prefer to use SB energy as they're building out.

There's more and more of these huge data centers over time. Uh, and of course, as you say, control of the power generation, the space, uh, and, and I mean physical space on the ground, not up and up and orbit with those sling satellites. Um, control of locations to build these data centers with high connectivity and good power generation is gonna be vital.

The vast amounts of data center space that are being committed to being built and operated over the next five years to continue this large language model, ai, uh, wave is huge. Absolutely massive scale. So there are gonna be challenges around access to power, securing long-term contracts for that.

Access to power is gonna be found foundational on this, and it's gonna follow then with whatcha gonna put in these big data centers, how are you gonna get chips? And particularly at the moment, RAM for those servers. We all know that consumer RAM has gone up vastly in price over the last few months, and that's driven by the demand for all of these, uh, GPUs and the high bandwidth memory that's gonna be in these GPUs and these massive data centers that are being built out.

So yeah, it's part of an ongoing trend in itself. It's not the biggest element in that ongoing trend. And we'll see more of these partnership announcements as we've seen plenty of them over the past few months as well.

Palo Alto Networks has introduced the SHIELD framework to help organizations secure applications building, uh, built using AI enabled vibe, coding tools, uh, increasingly common, but kind of dangerous. There's a significant cybersecurity risk in vibe coding. The use of an AI tool to build an application without knowing how to build an application.

Uh, SHIELD outlines six of the best practices as you are building any kind of application. Things like segregation of duties, having a human in the loop as you're going from this vibe, coding description to actually running things in production. Uh, other security fundamentals io uh, input output validation, uh, enforcement of security focus, health home models, as well as having the least agency least privileged methodologies and defense technical controls.

The framework emphasizes restricting AI agents from production environments and requiring humans to be involved, involved in code review, as well as making sure that inputs and outputs and security focus controls all of these standard kind of behaviors are being applied. And these coded applications, limiting permissions, applying defensive controls, we know AI coding tools are prone to flaws and could well, um, make it much easier for supply chain attacks to, uh, threaten these applications. Uh, SHIELD provides a roadmap to reducing the risks, but is shield easy to actually start using for a development team?

Is it gonna get in the way? I dunno that it's gonna get in the way provided you were already doing this stuff ahead of time. Because when you look at it, which by the way, I do have to say here, uh, I, I want a quote from a, a great TV show, you know, what does that name mean to you?

It means that we really wanted our name to spell out Shield. Uh, that to me is, you know, whether you're vibe coding or real coding, you've gotta have some kind of a, I don't know, like, process in place. And when you look at that, just think separation of duty is least privilege.

Okay? That's just like security 1 0 1. Don't let people have the run of the system and make sure they only have enough to do their jobs.

Input output validation. Yeah, welcome back to the early two thousands when cross site scripting was a thing. Uh, you know, defensive technical controls, helper models like this to me just screams, formalizing things we were already doing.

I will tell you that we've got a great episode of Security Boulevard's podcast coming up soon where we talk about this stuff. Uh, Mitch Ashley brought up some really good points about why we should be doing these things already. Why these are systems that we need to put in place.

Now granted, I don't think that SHIELD is really going to apply to people who are already doing a lot of coding, right? Like, like we've even seen this this week where Linus Tour Vaults used vibe coating effectively to pretty up the user interface on a tool that he was using. But Linus was very quick to point out that it mostly did a good job quickly, but it had some other problems, I think with like a rectangle selector.

And he had to go in and specifically say, I need you to work on this part and I need you to clean this up so he sees the potential. But that's Linus. He's written a line or two of code in his life and he's managed coding projects where people less skilled than him have written code.

So he immediately knows what to look at in order to make sure that people aren't, oh, I don't know, trying to recode the Lennox kernel and c plus plus again, this decade. The problem where SHIELD is really going to apply is for those people who have no idea how coding works. You know, executives, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Did I, should I have said junior admins? No, those people can be taught, they can learn how to do proper coding technology. They can learn all of these things.

No, no, no. I'm talking about the people who are like, oh, coding is really easy. Watch this.

Hey, chat, GPT build me an application. And it's riddled with bugs and open file handlers and exception errors and stuff like that. That's where you wanna apply shield quietly in the background.

No, no, no. We're gonna scrub all this stuff out and we're gonna make sure that you didn't accidentally expose all of the board's salaries to the internet so that people can scrape them and do whatever. So I, I see the value in what SHIELD is offering, but it's at the extreme ends of the, of the spectrum, so to speak.

You've got the juniors over here who don't know these things and can be taught so that it'll eventually they'll use this as a tool. And then on the other side, you've got the, how hard can it be people who make more money than they should, telling you how easy things are. And it's not until later when it all blows up in their face, they realize it's a lot harder than they think.

I at least give props to Palo Alto for coming up with this. So we'll see how it pans out. But don't forget to check out the episode of Security Boulevard.

We go into a lot more depth of that. Cursor has teamed up with one password to secure sensitive credentials in AI assisted software development, ensuring secrets are never hardcoded or exposed to AI agents. This partnership introduces a hook script for just in time secrets access with plans to add granular task specific permissions, model context protocol integrations, automated secret rotation and enhanced audit visibility.

One password is also building a trust graph track and manage AI agent access similarly to the wood for human users. The initiative aims to make AI coding safer while maintaining developer productivity and addressing the growing risk of software supply chain attacks in these AI driven workflows. Al this sounds a lot like the last story, but very focused on making sure that those pesky little secrets stay secret.

It absolutely follows on. This is, again, AI is a great tool for developers as a great enabler for building applications more rapidly or at least building features within applications more rapidly. And we'll see increasing use of AI tools.

Um, cursor is one of the top ones that we see, uh, being used particularly for the integration into VS code. Uh, and one of the challenges of course, we highlighted in the previous article was that security vulnerability that these AI applications are being used as a supply chain attack against, uh, whichever company is running the generated code. Um, one of the elements, again, it's a fundamental element in application building, is that you don't hard code any kind of persistent credentials or any kind of credentials until your application.

You have them delivered at runtime. And that's what one password has, has targeted is that as the, uh, in this case AI agent runs, it retrieves a password outta one password, it uses that password to access a resource and then, then it flushes that password even better is the capability in here of having one password go and change that long-term password. If it can't generate a short-term token, it can change that long-term password immediately after it's been exercised and therefore mean that even if that password's exposed, the amount of time that it's usable amount is very limited.

So I like, like seeing this in here. Uh, in terms of the technologies behind it, it's fairly fundamental. Uh, the use of hook scripts, uh, is a fairly fundamental part of building this into any kind of, uh, build automation CI i CD kind of pipelines.

And, uh, it's, it is a really useful tool, uh, just in-time delivery of, of credentials is absolutely vital. Um, the, the Hooks capability, that's, uh, something that Kerr has within itself and very simply allows that delivery of credentials without developer having to take too much more action. Always as you're building security and application development, you wanna make it easy for developers to adopt.

You wanna make it as seamless as possible and to take away any kind of place where they think they would've to do additional work that isn't building the feature they wanna build. This is the fundamental challenge for all of us and the security and infrastructure side, is we need to make it easy for developers to build the features they're working on to improve the business that pays us all without actually exposing that business to any greater risk. The US Congress is set to revive the National Quantum Initiative that expired in 2023 and hopefully the, uh, renewed one will bring $85 million a year for five years to support quantum research across a variety of different US agencies like nist, the National Science Foundation, NASA and ostp as well.

The bill aims to boost US leadership in quantum computing and strengthen the supply chain around that quantum computing to support workforce development. People train some of them maybe, uh, and encourage international collaboration directs the, uh, global accounting office to review barriers that slow private and academic participation. And then the industry leaders see the initiative as a key to turning quantum research into real world benefits for the economy and for national security.

Tom, we've been talking about Quantum as the wave that is gonna follow the current large language model. Uh, hopefully this is gonna bring that wave closer to us. It'll, and one of the reasons why we have to have that happen is because Quantum right now has no real payoff.

That's why there's not a whole lot of investment in it. It's, it's real cool science project. Don't get me wrong.

All you gotta do is go watch any of the videos that Tech Field Day has done about anything related to Quantum and you're like, cool. Like if you watched the three body problem and you couldn't understand how they were using those d quantum com, uh, communications devices, we have a video that actually kind of explains how theoretically that would work. The problem is that you've got to get money into the hands of those people in order to be able to develop this technology.

And this is not something that people understand how to do natively. I'll tell you why, because there's no profit motive right now. So I'm going to fix all of these problems.

So, uh, if you are watching this episode of the Rundown and you apply to one of these three areas, I need you to make a little recording of this because I'm gonna fix all of your funding problems. This one's for the US government. Did you hear that China's building a quantum computer, it's bigger than ours and it's gonna be faster and they're gonna be the leader.

Here's the private enterprise one, maybe you can run ads against it. Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah, academics.

Do you want 'em to name the building? This thing is housed in after you for free. You should be involved.

Trust me on this. Do you see how each of those has a profit motive? And that's the problem.

I am a quantum purist. I want them to develop a quantum computer for the sake of having a really fast computer. I also understand that quantum computers don't work like regular computers and they are gonna still be working in tandem to solve harder problems like, you know, cryptography issues or, you know, very chaotic systems like the weather.

Are we gonna be able to perfectly model weather? No, but I promise you, you know, we already have 10 day forecasts. I bet you we can get a little bit better than that, but we also have to be able to figure out how to make this a profitable thing.

And we've seen some of that over the years, right? Like last year we covered something about a quantum GPS, which I thought was kind of neat, but, you know, that's, that's not something that's gonna make, you know, gangbuster business. It's not gonna be like, you know, an LLM that well actually wait, that's, that's not true.

'cause LLMs don't make money either. Uh, but they have better marketing. So I wanna see the US federal government back this, which means they're probably not going to do it because they can't find a way to sell it or give it away to a business to make money off of.

I would hope that we do this for the sake of just doing it, because honestly, the way things have been going, $400 million is a drop in the bucket. I have an idea. Let's build one less aircraft carrier next year and then we can fund quantum and a few other things.

Alright, it's time for a closer look. So everyone get on your, um, uh, oh, the, uh, the hat that Johnny Carson used to wear. Get out your crystal ball because I'm gonna tell you a little secret.

It's 2026 and AI really isn't a trend anymore because it's now foundational infrastructure. It transforms how software is built and how cloud and data centers are gonna operate and how security is enforced. And honestly, it's all about business.

Competition at this point predict 2026, which is hosted by Futurum explores these shifts with sessions on ag agentic, ai, accelerated development, trust and security data infrastructure. And honestly, the physical limits of AI leaders are gonna be giving you insights into how AI will reshape SaaS pricing, DevOps cycles, cybersecurity strategies and operational models, which is gonna help them prepare for rapid, unavoidable changes the event emphasizes actionable understanding of our hype, making it essential for organizations that wanna lead rather than react in the AI era. We hope that you're all gonna be able to tune in and watch Predict 2026, but I wanna throw this over to al real quick hearing all of that, what are your predictions around these areas in 2026?

Because I, I'm kind of curious, are we, are we just tapping the beginning of what AI can bring us or does the sound of this something inflating inevitably lead to a pop? Alright, well, before I address the, uh, the balloon, I wanna give you listening a call to action. If you're listening to this on the 14th of January, you still have time, go to predict 2026 com and register for the event because it'll be live streaming all day tomorrow the 15th.

Uh, if you're too late for that, there should be some replays there on product 2026 as well. So Tom's balloon of AI and it's, uh, balloon or bubble, however you want to call it, there has absolutely been this huge expansion of spending on building ai. We've covered this repeatedly on the rundown.

And as you know, uh, Tom and I are fairly cynical about this and it's, it's again, show me the income. It's not just show me the outgoing, it's the show me the income, how you're gonna make money off this. Well, you know, AI is actually earning money in places and it's earning money in the places where it disappears.

Where AI is just the feature of the thing. AI is not the thing. And so you as a customer, you as a, uh, reader of the news may be very familiar with chat GPT and the chat interfaces to Gemini, uh, or any of your other favorite AI engines.

But it's the agents, it's the tools that talk to the intelligence that's behind it that aren't just a human asking questions. It's where that AI is built into an application that's built into how the application works and it gives you better answers. It continues that trend of moving from customers.

Pick up a phone and talk to a human or walk into a store and talk to a human towards customers. Interact with a, an application, maybe a, a smart application on their phone or a website that becomes more useful. You'll know AI is working when you get better answers out of these systems.

You won't see it, it won't be that there is the chat interface in the bottom right hand corner where Clippy says, it looks like you want to do something stupid. Lemme help you do something stupid. It'll be where the application actually does something useful for you seamlessly and invisibly in the background.

And that's very much what I think, uh, you'll hear from our analyst at the Futureum Group tomorrow. Uh, our good friend Mitch Ashley will be talking about AI and, and agents as well, looking at how that fits within the software development lifecycle. I'll cover that a little bit on this, this, um, episode as well.

And of course, Daniel Newman, the CEO at future, uh, ultimately our boss, uh, he has been all in on AI as a tool to enable us to be more productive, not to replace us, not to replace the technical experts, the, uh, analysts that we have on team within fu but to take away the bits that are really hard and unsatisfying to do so that we can do the things that where we bring the most value. And that's fundamentally what I'm expecting AI to end up doing for us. Um, our friend Nick Patience is gonna talk about another topic that we've, we've covered repeatedly on the rundown, including today, which is the build out of space to run these AI engines and power to, to actually drive them.

I imagine he has some good insights and, uh, the challenges around building these things out. And, uh, sitting on Tom's favorite area of ai, the cybersecurity challenges and the risks that come along. Fernando Montenegro, he'll be, uh, saying some of the same things that Tom says, but he will say them in a completely different way with a very different accent.

Probably not quite as good a snark though. Yeah, we'll, we'll hear lots of, uh, insights around where AI is making a real difference and where AI is gonna continue to make a real difference. Interestingly, we're not talking about much else in predict.

We continue to be predicting that the big changes will come from ai, not from some left field place where suddenly something turns up. You remember, before chatt arrived, our predictions didn't involve a large language model. Predictions about the future are always a challenge.

We may get some really interesting surprises, Tom, I think, we'll, and I I think you're onto something here. The value of AI is not in changing the paradigm, it's in enhancing what we can do. And I think that to me is where a lot of people go off the rails.

They want this to be groundbreaking and revolutionary and upsetting everyone's Apple carts, because then that means that they can get some of that apple cart money for themselves. But right now what we're seeing is a lot of that money being poured into building carts for the Apple carts. And it's not until we settle out of that, like, remember when everything was Uber?

Remember when we needed Uber for all of this stuff and, and it was exciting. And what, what about Uber for food? And what about Uber for that?

And Uber for this. I mean, there was a joke for a while that if you wanted to describe your startup to somebody you just said, oh well it's like Uber, but for X, where are we now? Well, we still have Uber and it still changed the way that we do things, but it's not a revolution.

So now instead of me flagging a cab down in New York City, I might take an Uber, but I might also still take a cab if it makes more sense for that particular application. Here's a hint. If you need to go to JFK, take a cab, they're cheaper.

But ultimately what I think people need to understand about AI is that it's just one more arrow in the quiver, so to speak. And that's what I am excited about to hear at Predict, is that people are going to be grounding AI in the realities of the way that organizations are gonna be using it. I've gotten a sneak peek at some of the stuff that Rums Research Division is using AI for and it kind of is mind blowing when you think about it.

When you look at the, the totality of what can be generated in a signal report. It's something that used to take a few people a long time or a lot of people, slightly less time. It's going out and doing all of these things, but there's still somebody there looking at it going, yes, that makes sense.

No, that doesn't make sense. And I think that that's the thing. AI is not going to replace everybody's job.

It will replace some of the jobs that were easily replaceable, but then that means that those people can move on to do other things. To me, AI is like a batch file instead of just sitting there and typing commands into the console over and over again when your computer starts. You can automate that, you can have it happen automatically.

And then what happens? Well now I'm not worried about making sure I've typed in all the right dos commands to get my computer to boot up. I am now working on my computer.

I'm using it for different tools and different processes. And so I think that to me that's where the real value is. And, and I can't wait to hear what everybody at futurum has to say about it.

So make sure that you're tuned in on the 15th. It's over at Techstrong tv. You can't miss it.

Just, uh, Google Predict 2026 futurum or Predict 2026 Techstrong. And I promise you you'll find it, but you know what else you're gonna find If you look hard enough, all of the great events that Al and I are gonna be doing over the next few months, and Al you've got one coming up in just a couple of weeks. Yeah, I'm deeply embedded in the preparations for AI infrastructure field Day four.

Uh, right now we're having lots of calls making sure that the stories that are being told, the, um, insights that you'll get at, uh, AI infrastructure field day four are gonna be really strong. And that the content from our various sponsors, hammer Space Site Lads, forward Networks, fabrics, ai, and two different parts of Cisco, uh, they're all gonna have some really good stories around how you build out that infrastructure for ai. Whether it's maybe in a massive, uh, data center or maybe it's in your own on-premises environment.

Really looking forward to welcoming my delegates in person to San Jose. Uh, we'll be streaming January 28th to 30th for AI infrastructure fields. I'm also a little earlier in the preparations for another of my events.

I'll be back in Silicon Valley and, uh, early March, March 11th and 12th we'll have Cloud Field Day as well. So stay tuned as we build out our, uh, portfolio of presenting sponsors and get some nice new delegates. I've got at least one brand new delegate for Tech Field Day coming to that event.

Of course March is where things really kick off for us because Tom, you're gonna have an exciting week as well. You're right, I am. We are going to RSAC for the very first time as part of Tech Field Day Extra.

And remember that story that I told you about with Veeam and Object First? We already had both of them booked before this big exciting news came out. So we are gonna be hearing from Veeam and Object First and Commvault and more.

We are gonna have at least two days of presentations there. I've already got a great group of people that are excited to be a part of it and you're gonna see some familiar faces and you're gonna be hearing some from, from some of the leading voices in the security community. And I can't wait to bring it to you.

com and you'll get a list of all the companies, all the delegates. And pretty soon when we get all the schedules sorted out, we'll have a list of the presentation times be ready for this one. 'cause it's gonna be a load of fun and I'm hoping that we'll be able to bring it to you all encrypted over the wire in transit and, you know, using all the right pass phrases so that nothing gets infected.

Um, but we also want to thank you all very much for watching the Tech Fuel Day rundown. Remember that we publish new episodes every Wednesday. Uh, they'll go up on YouTube and you can check out your favorite podcast application if you'd rather listen to us while you're doing that, uh, January exercise.

And if you're not doing January exercise, listen to the rundown and do it anyway. The Rundown is also streamed on Textron TV and as well as the Techstrong TV app. You can check out all of our cool stuff there.

Don't forget that Al and I also spend time on other tech strong and future and group programs. I've already mentioned the other podcast that I do, security Boulevard al's, also a special guest on a lot of things that come up. We'll be back next Wednesday to talk about all the IT news of the week.

That was until then for myself, Tom Hollingsworth, for Alistair Cook and the rest of the people here at Tech Field Day. Go fly a kite and have some fun with it. We'll see you next week.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Ingram Micro One. And I'm talking with my friend Hans here who is a solution provider with a specialty in healthcare. How you doing buddy?

Noel been a really, really great conference. There's just been an awesome amount of innovation in healthcare lately and I know just walk people through a little bit what's going on in that sector and your role in it and what are the opportunities? Yeah, we're finding, um, there's a lot going on with an interest in ai.

You know, trying to find ways to, you know, automate manual processes and we've delved into a very, very niche aspect of that industry with, uh, organ uh, procurement organizations and tissue banks, tissue processors. And uh, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity both for AI and just automation across everything they do within their supply chain. Hmm.

There's also a lot of regulations in healthcare. I don't think that's, uh, much of a surprise to anybody, but we're trying to apply AI to that. How do we walk that nuances of that?

Where is concerns about privacy maybe and the data, but we also need to come up with some automation. That seems like a challenge. Yeah, it is.

And uh, you know, some of the things we're finding out, I mean obviously we've got certain compliance and accreditations and we have to get organizationally SOC two and hipaa, and then you've got the, uh, PII information that they ho hold and that ties into their own processes. So we have to be respectful of the confidentiality of not only the information that they have on the patient records, but also the confidentiality of their own internal processes and how they use it. 'cause in some cases it's, it's a competitive advantage in some cases.

It's, uh, very, very, um, intrinsic to how they operate that they actually don't want it to release. And they're all very sensitive to the aspects of the, the regulations, you know, for that confidential information processes. And, uh, I mean right now it's just respect and, and, and, you know, with the, the technology to be able to, to do what they need to do, but at the same time, not allow it to limit us.

When I talk to people, there are two challenges, but the first one, everybody seems to know. It's like AI will occasionally hallucinate. So how do I kind of work around that or, or account for that factor when I'm building out something in a healthcare scenario?

Yeah, that is, uh, it's really interesting because the way that we are actually applying AI for our clients in this industry is that, uh, that does exist. And the challenge is that, uh, the data, um, as much as you need it, and as much as it feeds into the AI engine, uh, it's basically the lifeblood of the AI engine as well because the AI model has to be trained off of that data. And we've got all the regulations that you just mentioned that prohibits some of, you know, that data in, in terms of how we use it to aggregate it with other clients at a very aggregated le a aggregated level.

And we don't have that opportunity. So the, the, the model has to be trained and the more data that we can get from the organization we're working with, you know, we can work around that. That's number one.

Second part is, is that no single AI model will provide the outcome that we need for our clients. So we're having to stack the technology with other types of ML oriented tech, um, code, other types of AI oriented models that do very specific functions to work in tandem to provide an outcome. So I've kind of got a layered approach where some of the AI models are validating the output of the other AI models to get, make sure that whatever is being generated actually is supposed to be what it is.

Correct, Yeah. At a very simplistic level. Yes.

The Other side of the coin too is that a lot of the healthcare processes are what we would call deterministic. They're supposed to be done the same way every time. Mm-hmm.

Uh, AI models are probabilistic and hardly ever do anything the same way twice. So how do I connect something that is probabilistic into a deterministic workflow and kind of meld that together? Yeah.

And that, and I, I go back to what I just said earlier, right? There's, um, um, there's the prompt engineering, there's the AI models, there's the AI model stacked and layered on the other AI models. We got a vector database that's built into there as well.

The understanding of their business process and what the outcome is. Um, so the model in order to to, to train it, to have a predetermined outcome every single time, the more data that we can feed into it, the more scenarios that we actually get from it that we can hone in and refine on, we'll start providing that very, very precise answer. And it's one of those where it's a process of refinement and processes are an iterative process.

So the first time you build it out, it's not gonna be perfect. And so the more data that we can actually feed into it, the more input we can get from the end users. Uh, we actually start honing in on that, that precise answer.

Now, everybody watching this is probably having the same question. Where did you find the people with the skills to go do that? Because most of the folks are saying, I love this AI stuff, but you know, they all wanna work for Nvidia or something.

So how do you get those guys to come work for you? Yeah. Um, trying to answer this the software way.

So there is a constraint in the marketplace for skilled AI software engineers. And I have to compete with, you know, the Facebooks and the, you know, all the, the big, you know, hyperscalers for that talent. Uh, in my particular case, I got very, very lucky because the AI engineer that we hired, married my, my youngest daughter and I provided an opportunity and there was an opportunity probably wouldn't get at the other places because he, uh, has an opportunity here to actually kind of define our direction and to be able to be very creative with the ai, uh, in a, in a, an applied sense.

Um, but going beyond, you know, my small team of him and, and a couple of others, um, it, yeah, yeah, it, it naturally is is very difficult. So one of the way things that we're trying to do to augment that is that there are AI tools that allow us to, uh, do some code development on the front end. It's not perfect, still has a ways, ways to go, but it does save us time.

So we're trying to use automation and code development to be able to close the gap on some of that. And then, like anybody else, you've gotta go out and hire the talent as well. So we gotta ensure we get the right talent.

Of course, we're at an Ingram event. How did you get connected to Ingram and what does Ingram do for you and as part of the building of this solution? So the story that, um, you know, most resonates is that we got into this about two years ago.

So that's when I hired our, our, uh, senior AI engineer, uh, November 6th of, uh, 2023. And he came on board, and Ingram actually had, and we started out with, uh, IBM's Watson X. They were actually sponsoring a level three workshop with IBM in Chicago.

So his first day on the job was on an airplane heading to Chicago to get his credentials on, on Watson X. So he spent a week there going through the workshop. And that was really brokered by Ingram.

You know, having the foresight to actually, you know, go out and say, how do we actually get our partners enabled? How do we get them engaged? How do we get them them to a point where they can actually start talking ai?

And it was a really good foundation because it allowed us a better understanding of how, uh, the technology was being positioned, you know, in, in terms of the go to market. But we had to learn after that, how do you actually go in and start selling this? So we relied on, on the Ingram team, uh, to, to understand what types of proof of concepts, how do we actually go through a sales cycle, how do we actually engage with prospects who have a need?

And then we had to hone our skills from there. You of course, you also work with a lot of the vendor partners that Ingram represents. Um, I don't know if you can tell me in a lot of detail, but which of those vendor partners are kinda at the core of that solution for you guys right now?

And what is it that you would wish that maybe more of those vendors would remember when dealing with solution providers such as yourself? Yeah. It's right now with, you know, just the, the terminology of ai.

Um, I think the large vendors, you know, the ones that are well known that make the news every day, they're sewing a lot of confusion. Everybody's talking about the art of the possible as a reseller partner, as somebody who actually engages with the client, by the time we engage, they don't want to hear about the art of the possible. They wanna see a solution that actually works.

So there's a big gap between, you know, what, what the, uh, the vendors are providing and what the solution providers actually have to deliver. So we rely on Ingram heavily, not necessarily with the technology partners that we've worked with IBM and Microsoft, and there'll be others in the future, but it's the relationships that we don't have with the other technology partners that Ingram does have. So for instance, if there is a reason for us to change some of the backend coding with a different LLM or a different AI type model that is, uh, specific to a certain vendor and we don't have the re relationship, Ingram will probably have that relationship and we have to leverage Ingram to help build our credentials and reputation to be able to open the door and get the right resources we need so we can continue our development to provide that solution to the client.

One of the things that I hear a lot about is every CEO has a bad case of fear of missing out and thinks that this AI stuff is all magically happening tomorrow. And then there's their staff and people who are a little more circumspect 'cause they understand what's required to actually implement. How do you as the solution provider kind of navigate that relationship and those conversations?

'cause essentially you're a diplomat between these Groups. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And it's, um, that was, I would say situationally, that was probably the case two years ago when we started, um, AI was this concept. And pretty much every executive team says, okay, we've gotta get AI in here. And our first probably, you know, handful of phone calls or, or overshoots from our, our, our client base, not necessarily our, our prospect base was, Hey, can you help us with ai?

And my response was, yeah, absolutely. What would you like us to do? Says, well, that's why we're calling you.

And it was this, this panacea that all of a sudden you, you basically, you install something, you implement it, and everything is gonna work to perfection. It's just like this magic button you press. In reality, that's not the case on the staff level folks, the operating level folks, they're seeing AI as a threat.

So it's basically our executive team wants to bring in AI and it's, it will basically replace my job. And so you have this, uh, uh, diversity of thoughts and understanding of what AI is supposed to do. So we have to obviously educate the C level folks that it is not that be all end all solution where you push a button, everything magically works, um, and it's trained on your data.

And then we also simultaneously have to work with the operations folks and let them know that we're not here trying to put a system in to replace your job. What we are trying to do is that, uh, you know, right now the focus and the benefit of AI is really, you know, time savings and productivity improvement. So we want the system to be able to do the heavy lifting for them and the process and use everything that AI can do based on the data that's being fed to it, to free up their time to work on the very true value add, you know, needle moving types of, of aspects of their job that's gonna really enhance the company's productivity.

One of the funny things about healthcare, at least in from my perspective, is it was always perceived as a sluggish kind of business because they were collecting a lot of data, tagging it and organizing it. And yet that may be their secret sauce for AI because they did a lot of that heavy lifting of the data and worked already then a lot of other vertical industries have not. They, uh, I would agree that to a certain extent, uh, but there are, um, I would say upstream functions that take place that are still very manual and a lot of that tagging categorization of data, which actually makes our job easier, right?

Because it's all, all well-defined. Um, a lot of that has been done, but there's a lot of unstructured data that shows up in forms, in handwritten notes. Um, it shows up in jpeg images, OCR images that we have to translate in.

And not only that, you can have forms that have the same information, but the forms are different and, and the context is missing from that. So when we actually build out these AI solutions, we have to ingest those documents, we have to understand what is in those documents, we have to understand what the context of those documents are so that we can turn the information on those documents into relevant, very well-defined, categorized information to then let the AI model be able to provide the output that it wants. So to your point, a lot of what they do operationally, you know, for production, for, um, you know, um, patient outcome, yes, that is, but upstream from that, a lot of the information is very unstructured and increase the challenge for them.

And there's a huge amount of opportunity as far as productivity gains from that as well. It almost sounds like, you know, you have a solution and you've kinda landed and now you're looking to expand. So what are you thinking about as the next opportunity?

Yeah, so we, we are, we're actually, uh, we, we've got a great client that we're working a, um, informing a strategic relationship with, and it's a tissue processor, so basically an organ donation, and then they actually take, um, uh, tissue, uh, donor tissue and then look at, uh, eligibility requirements. So they, they be able to look at lifestyle, they be able to look at disease, they look at things of that nature and, uh, qualification criteria for the tissue. They have their own manufacturing process.

And you know, as we spoke earlier, that's very well defined. The information is very well defined. How they capture the information and move the information through there is very well defined.

But on the front end of that, how they actually analyze the, the donor and how the tissue, the suitability for the tissue that they have to process for their, in, you know, inpatients, the hospitals, the doctors, the clinicians. Um, so we, you know, we've developed an AI application to be able to do that manual process on the front end, and then the automation that follows that, the donor traceability. So now that we've got the components being processed and tracking that all the way through to the final production of that tissue, so that it's either a skin graft or a bone graft or whatever that final product is, so they can inventory that and then push that out to the hospitals.

And then there's the entire supply chain and ecosystem where the supply demand match is very inefficient. So we're looking at the hospitals, the doctors, the clinicians, when they actually need something, how can we actually compress that cycle time so that they can get it from the tissue processors in a shorter period of time? And, and there there's additional opportunities beyond that as well.

So there's a plethora of, of things that we can do. Technology can help, but you've gotta have a good partnership with folks in the industry to do it. Yeah, I almost think like anywhere there's friction, it becomes an opportunity.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So last question.

As you look into the coming year, what are you excited about? What are you thinking about and maybe what's keeping you up at night? Well, the geopolitical stuff's keeping me up at night, so not, not a whole lot I can do about that, but there are opportunities and I think, you know, we've had, uh, two years of maturation, uh, not only within my organization, but I think within, uh, just industry in general and understanding, you know, ai, AI has gone from this concept of AI is, you know, it's just this broad, uh, term that everything's kinda lumped into it.

Now we've got, you know, the, uh, uh, generative ai, we've got agentic ai, uh, we're still focused on use cases, but I think a lot of the use cases will be addressed by agent AI to a certain extent. And then you have the possibility of that automation where you get the AI agents talking to each other and looking for those opportunities. But at the end of the day, when you look at it, right, we are still collecting data as part of that process.

We're trying to take the friction out of the, the supply chain. So the question I asked the CEO of our client is that if you were to look at your processes and you were to take all the friction out, what is the shortest, shortest amount of time that it would take to act, you know, to actually process the tissue that, that you work with? And he thought about this is, I said, that should be our goal, and that's what I'm excited about.

'cause I think the technology can get us closer to that goal because we can automate a lot of the processes in a very smart, intelligent fashion. Not necessarily to replace jobs, but again, take the folks that are very good at what they do and allow them more time to be able to do it better. Especially the stuff I don't enjoy doing in the first place.

Yeah. Hey guys, it takes a village to do AI and it kind of starts with the solution providers and includes the distributors and the vendors, and that's how it all comes together. Buddy, thanks for coming by.

Yeah, thanks for having me. And we'll be back in a minute. We're really happy to be back here with our, uh, coverage from a w the AWS reinvent.

You know, we did a bunch of them live streamed and, and some we saved for later. This is one of the save for laters. Hope you enjoy it.

And, uh, cap it captures the spirit of and the excitement. That was this year's AWS reinvent. I want to introduce you to John Yanke.

io. Yep. That's not Ben.

I remembered it for more than a minute. I love it. That's my cognitive test.

But, um, anyway, John, first of all, welcome to Textron tv. Thank You. Congratulations.

You guys had a little bit of an announcement here. Yeah. Here, I mean, uh, AWS reinvents the Super Bowl for tackle.

We help ISVs sell list, sell and scale through the cloud marketplaces. And, uh, we were acquired on Monday. So mixing our biggest event of the year with an acquisition was, uh, doesn't Get any better than that.

Quite The way to start the week. Enjoy that moment. Yeah.

Enjoy it. You know what, I just want to, for sake of legal clarity, let me be clear. They announced an acquisition or the intent to acquire the deal is not closed yet.

That Is correct, yes. Right. So that, that's the way we should frame it and, and, uh, the acquiring company.

Yeah. So we were acquired by a company called App Direct. And App Direct is a company that powers marketplaces, right?

So they run 400 marketplaces all over the world, many for, you know, large scale telcos, large scale ISVs, channel partners, distributors, even some manufacturers. And, you know, we work really closely with the hyperscalers, AWS Azure and GCP, but we spend a lot of time talking to people who run marketplaces to understand what's next. We exist to help software companies sell more, sell faster.

So we're always trying to figure out how to help 'em do that. And absolutely that's how we discovered App Direct and started a partnership and that turned into this. So we're really excited.

Good for you guys. You know, I think most of, so our audience is a techie audience, John, and they're, they're familiar with marketplaces obviously, but you know, marketplaces, they're kind of the new mall, right? Malls are zombie.

No one goes to physical malls anymore. Yeah. Most of us don't, right?

We don't go shopping as much as we used to, but when it comes to buying stuff online, marketplaces are where it's at. Right. And us in the tech world, look, we got the Amazon, you mentioned the Google marketplace, the Microsoft Azure marketplace, the AWS marketplace.

But if you look at any good software vendor worth their chops, who has a decent channel of, of, or an ecosystem Yeah. Plugins or whatever, they all have marketplaces. Yeah.

And, you know, I remember, I still remember what the heck, why would Apple want to do a phone? Right? I remember those days, and I remember my friend said, it's not the phone dummy, it's the apps.

Yeah. And it's the marketplace for the, the app store. And really an app store is sort of like a marketplace as well.

Yeah. When you think about it. Absolutely.

And so it, it really makes all this go around. Um, give us an idea. 'cause I'm sure there, I've got folks ISVs out here Yeah.

Who are saying, how's he gonna help me with my marketplace listings? Yeah. You know, without giving away family secrets.

Sure. Yeah. No, uh, my co-founder and CTO, he was the visionary behind tackle.

He was in the beta program for AWS marketplace. And, you know, as he was working through that process, he was like, this is hard. No one really wants to build software to sell software.

There we, there's something here. Uh, so he started to experiment with that, and one of our really early customers was New Relic, and they were like, Hey, we think this cloud marketplace thing's really gonna be a way people buy our software. And, uh, we were able to help them list and start selling.

And back then, this is 2017, like, uh, that wasn't really commonplace. And so we had to work with them really to integrate that into their business process and finance team and rev ops team and revenue team. And that became our product backlog to start.

And, you know, since then the early days, like people were doing large enterprise private offers, which is like passing custom pricing in terms through the marketplace. But now people buy all kinds of software. It's not just cloud forward software, it's business applications, it's vertical applications, it's AI technology.

And we just continue to see like the proliferation of people wanting to list and sell, but more importantly, people buy in this new way. I love it, man. That's a great, it's great.

You know, so there's the onboarding mm-hmm. Of your listing on Old Marketplace. And I unfortunately had to do that a few times in my life.

And it is, it's a giant PIA so I gotta imagine you guys gotta be a, a godsend for, for companies who need to onboard, but then once you're onboarded, tackle doesn't end right at the onboarding. Yeah. You know, in some ways, and I don't mean to say in a derogatory way, but it's almost like SEO for marketplace too, right?

It helps you get more than your share. I mean, there's really three pillars of what we do. The first is, I mean, we process a billion dollars a month through these hyperscaler marketplaces.

And over the years, that's allowed us to build a data model to analyze all of your target customers to determine which would be likely to buy through which of these channels. And once you know that you can engage in something called co-sell where you engage the cloud provider seller to say, Hey, what's our better together story? How can we help each other?

Yeah. Help this customer get the outcome they need. And then marketplace operations are the last piece.

And you know, we do all that inside of tackle as well as inside of Salesforce, because this starts traditionally as a motion that's led by partners, partner teams who try to figure this out. But it really scales with revenue teams and some of the largest sellers in the world. Companies like CrowdStrike have all of their reps understand how to take advantage of this cloud marketplace movement.

And, you know, AWS especially has been pioneering a ton of capabilities and continuing to release new features. So it's a continuous delivery problem for us. We stay really tight with their roadmap and deliver that on behalf of the ISV community, so they don't have to figure it out as we go.

Absolutely. You know, I think back to when AWS started and the AWS marketplace started, and back then, you know, part of AWS's shtick, if you will, was we don't play favorites. If you're approved as a partner, you get a listing in the marketplace and we'll let the market decide.

Right? Yeah. And you, you, you know, this was before, you know, other marketplaces were letting you buy, like, uh, advertised banners within the marketplace, or you could buy premium positioning, or you were in bold letters and everyone else wasn't, you know, AWS back then was very, you know, proletariat, if you will.

Mm-hmm. Everybody gets the same listing. Yeah.

And we'll see what's changed as you look back to those days, John, to now. Yeah. What's it like to compete in the marketplace?

I mean, there's, there's a lot of listings in the marketplace and there are a lot of there listing types. There's SaaS products, there's container products, there's machine images, there's professional services. So you really have to understand what are you trying to put in the marketplace and what motion are you gonna drive?

I think AI is causing even a further explosion in software types. Like existing companies have more products than ever before. New AI companies are growing at a rapid pace.

So there's a lot in there. And I do think you have to think about your marketing system to drive traffic and programs with these marketplaces. Buyer behavior's changing.

But a lot of people still don't go to AWS marketplace to look for something. So it's like, how do you connect the dots between all of the marketing and selling that you do, and then make it make marketplace a part of that process? So I, I think that's a, like quantity of things.

There's a lot more, you know, how you integrate it into both your marketing and sales process is a different thing. And then just making sure that what you put there is what people wanna buy, and it's pricing is aligned and business model aligned to the way people would purchase. I, I agree with you.

Have you ever had a company reach out to you and say, Hey, we need help. We'd want to get on the AWS marketplace or any of the other marketplace you service, and you look at it and say, you know, I'd rather be your friend than you'd be mad at me. Yeah.

Because you just don't get the right, yeah. You don't have the right product for the Marketplace. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of times, like, uh, you have to have product market fit. That's probably the biggest thing. If you don't have product market fit, putting your product in marketplace to figure out product market fits, maybe not the best idea.

Once you have product market fit, then it's really that data analysis to understand who is your ideal customer? Are they buying in this way? Do some analysis upfront.

So we tend to start there with people to be like, okay, are your buyers there? Do they wanna show up this way? And once you have a good understanding of that, then you launch with some confidence.

And, you know, a lot of times we just work backwards from what are your goals? Like, what are your revenue goals? If you're just trying to throw a shingle up and like, Hey, I'll, you know, do a throw it out there and see what happens.

That's not usually the kind of company we work with. We tend to work with people who are like, no, this is strategic to me. I have executive alignment.

I want to go drive tens, hundreds of millions through these channel and I wanna make this the next big channel for our company. So that's where we tend to really focus. Excellent.

So Product market fit primary. Yeah. Secondary, you have to have a better together story with the cloud.

Yeah. Wherever you wanna list. If you don't have that, it's not really gonna work.

And then third, make sure you have a plan to do it strategically. So curiosity killed the ca cat, but I'm curious, as an entrepreneur, how do you, how do you get compensated for this? Yeah, We have really two parts.

We have a services business, which is, we do strategy advisory services for ISVs who are trying to figure this out. Uh, and then we have a platform business. It's a SaaS subscription platform.

People can subscribe to and use, and we try to align to the usage that they're gonna put through. That's a volume of data, co-sell activity, transactions they're gonna put through. But really just try to meet them where they are and allow them to grow with us.

You could start really small, or enterprises do, you know, larger agreements with us in a multi-year basis if they see this as a big strategic component. Got it. Excellent.

Um, you probably don't know the answer to this, but when's the anticipated close on, on this acquisition soon? We said seven to 10 days on Monday. Two We're very, you got two, you've got two private companies and you got board approvals, I'm assuming.

Yeah. Yep. So yeah, it happens quick.

Yeah, Some, So, and again, you may or may not want to tell us, but what, what's the plan for you, John? Yeah. Post acquisition, Uh, I mean, app Act is a pre IPO company.

Then I think the alignment of the products is really interesting. You know, how we can connect the dots with our customers and help them syndicate to more places and connect the dots with the clouds in that same motion. So we're really excited to continue to pioneer.

I think it's super early, like selling software's the most expensive part of every software company. Uh, and that's changing. Uh, and people wanna do it better, wanna do it more efficiently, and we wanna continue to pioneer that.

Our, my founders and I are really excited about that. You mentioned the AI word. Yeah.

Or I shouldn't have, Is it a word? Is it true initials, but what kind of impact is that having on your business? Yeah.

Um, we obviously the AI companies are changing a lot. Like, uh, they're challenging the clouds in ways. They're challenging buyers, changing buyer behaviors.

I think more kind of line of business buyers initiate AI products than ever before. So that's, there's change there. It's changing a lot of business models for our customers.

So existing enterprise companies who now have these AI components, they're like, how do I price these things? How do I meter these things? So we're seeing a lot of change there.

We're seeing people try to apply unique agent based solutions to the problem. Can I give agents to my reps or my partner people in order for them to operate more efficiently? So we launched an a co-sell agent with Salesforce, a Dreamforce earlier this year that runs an agent force to make this whole partner selling motion more convenient so that we think the agent movement will continue.

And, you know, how do you just get your reps to be as efficient as possible with these new AI solutions? Excellent. I love it.

io, but its, it's not spelled like tackle, like football tackle hat. It Is T-A-C-K-L-E. Oh, there is, it's actually a, we have a Caly is our logo, which, uh, really?

Yeah. So my co-founders are from Boise, Idaho. So the, the, the fly really connected with them.

Yeah. That it's big out there. Yeah.

Beautiful out there too. I thought you were gonna tell me, being a Buffalo living in Orchid Park, it was a Buffalo Bills Thing. It could be.

I mean, there's many uses for the tackle word we tackle, tackle the marketplaces, Right? It's a versatile word there. Versatile word, Right.

Go bills. Absolutely. Well, I'm a Steelers fan.

I had a bad week last week. That was, that Was a Yes. That was a good second half.

It was a good second Half. You guys had a great second half. Yeah.

You now you're playing Cincy by, well, by the time people see this, you might have played Cincy. Yeah, but he's, they got Joe Burrow's back, so who know what, yeah, That was, you know. Anyway, John, that's all small potatoes.

Awesome. Congratulations. You know, thank you so much.

I've done four or five startups and venture backed startups, and I sold some and some I didn't. But, uh, a mentor of mine once told, he always told me, actually, anytime you could get someone to reach into their pocket and write a check that you think fairly values the hard work and what you've built, it's the, like, best days of your life. Yeah.

So it's a, It has been a tremendous journey and we look forward to it continuing. Absolutely. All right.

Hey, we're at AWS reinvent. We have probably some more coming your way. Stay tuned.

Is Alan Shimel for Textron tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. I'm really happy to introduce you to our next guest.

He's the CEO and co-founder of a company called sata. Um, we're gonna find out about what that name means and where it came from. But first, let's find out more about him.

Say hello to Shahar. Ta Shahar. Welcome to Tech Drunk tv.

It's great to have you on here. Thank you. It's great to be here.

So, Shahar, I always like, you know, our audience are tech people like me and you, and, um, yeah, they always wanna know who's this talking to them, should we believe 'em? What does he have to say? Give people a sense, kind of, of your background, Shahar, if you don't mind.

Sure. Um, so al uh, quick 20 years, uh, in the cybersecurity front. So starting out in the Air Force, then unit 8,200, I've, uh, done the rounds.

That was the first decade. Um, then I joined Checkpoint. I led the malware and vulnerability research over there.

So I used to be the guy speaking at Black Hat Defcon, R-S-A-C-C-C, or pretty much every other conference. And I used to go and speak at CISO conferences, like speaking about yesterday's big breach and the vulnerabilities and explaining all that. So that was really my thing kind of 10 years ago.

Um, and then I got the opportunity to join Cellebrite. Uh, so doing digital forensics for the next eight years or so, uh, joining to lead the company's research. And then six years in, I crossed over to the dark side and joined the corporate business development team.

It Happens, it happens, Happens to the best of us. Um, yes, I was, uh, maybe, you know, preparing me for my next role, which is the CEO and co-founder, uh, of, uh, sata. So first of all, it's a great journey, right?

And I, you know, I, I just, I think it was today, the annual report from YL Ventures came out, 40%, 40% of all, uh, VC money invested in cyber, went to Israeli cyber companies. I would venture, no, you know, I'd venture to say, no, no pun intended, that 80% of those companies have co-founders with a somewhat similar path to yours, right? They come out of the IDF, whether it's 8,200 or what have you, they go to work for a big security company, a checkpoint, maybe a Google or a Microsoft or someone.

They then go to a startup and get the bug right? They catch that virus, no pun intended. And, and they start thinking, well, you know what?

I, I could, I would like to start my own company. I I see a problem that I think needs a good solution. And lo and behold, they got a few friends, maybe people they were in IDF with maybe people they worked with and, and such As, so the, the, the community, the founder community is really, uh, astounding.

And I think, I think like I've been experiencing it just for the, the last few years, but it's the way that people put themselves kind of out there and very leaning into kind of being helpful. Uh, yes. I think that has been really something that stood out for me, you know, going in quite later than most founders, you know, carry, you know, you have, you have those, those people who come out of the army and then, right.

You know, 23, yeah. 24. Um, and, and, and, and some, you know, maybe like myself, uh, you know, a bit, a bit gray haired, uh, uh, not, not At least you have hair.

It's okay. Yeah. Um, but, and then, you know, it's, it's a bit of a different context.

So we've been, we've done, you know, a few done, done the rounds, understand how, you know, commercial cybersecurity gets done, and then you have something to say about that, right? So that's, that's a part of our journey as well. Uh, and, and, and, you know, I was blessed and, you know, for so fortunate to have a, a great team of co-founders, you know, Al Pieta alumni, um, yeah.

Other are the, you know, 8,200 graduates who have been also very deep in security research realms, vulnerability research, very deep understanding of what makes technology kind of work, observing these transformational shifts, one generation at a time, right? We've seen cloud, we've seen mobile, and now we're, we're seeing agentic, um, which is, which is really making us rethink what is this kind of, you know, software concept? What is happening in the world?

What is knowledge work going to look like? Uh, so for us, that was really kind of a, a moment where we took, you know, we took pause and said, listen, something is, something is about to change big time, and people don't really understand it yet. Agreed.

Agreed. So, I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but let's dig a little deeper. No one wakes up and says, I'm starting a company today.

There's a lot, especially, you know, with co-founders and everything, there's a lot that goes into it, right? Financially, uh, just resource and everything. I mean, you, you put your guts into it, right?

And what, you can't do that unless you're passionate, because you can't fake it. You can't fake it, right? And, And you need this, and you need an internal belief.

Yeah. Right? So that internal passion for, uh, uh, you know, for making something happen.

And, and I think that that really, when, when we were kind of in this journey early on, we had these conversations about why we wanna do, you know, wanna do something like this and andro, you know, great jobs and, you know, give up, you know, other Yeah, no, Absolutely. Really interesting alternatives to make this happen. But I was, you know, me personally sitting across the table from like two people that I admire with technical talent, like, hold on, this is, you know, we are the team that you get in the newspaper, you know, that and, and all of the stories there.

Yes, I, I know we're where that material said that gave me kind of the confidence, said, listen, we have to do this right now. This is the opportunity. Um, and, you know, all of us leaned in very hard and, uh, we started, uh, sata.

So let, let's, first of all, what's the website for sata? Let's get that outta the way so we don't Yeah, Sure. ai.

Um, it's SATA is C-Y-A-T-A. Uh, we have been, uh, there are quite a few stories recently because we released a lot of interesting research, um, about kind of vulnerabilities and agent frameworks. Uh, we really pick them apart.

And when you start looking at them over and over, you realize those patterns of where things kind of fall, you know, fall apart, and where, where subtle vulnerabilities are. Again, coming from the res from the research background, that kind of, our team comes from, um, uh, we released a lot of research. So we had, uh, you know, a few stories about us.

Uh, there's gonna be, uh, quite, quite some, uh, some more stories coming up. Um, but yes, sata, ai. Excellent.

And just while we're here, we might as well mention it. Talk to us about where the name comes from. Well, uh, uh, that there, there's a few stories for the original story for sata, uh, but, uh, I guess in Hebrew or ame, uh, you would say, uh, Beata ish may, right?

With help from above, uh, or help from the skies. Uh, and, and, and that resonated, uh, for us. And, you know, we started out with, uh, you know, with, which is BSD, and then we said, well, in Hebrew, that's bas, which is the, the common acronym for ish May.

And then we just went with it. Very cool. I always like the, I've been through exercises like this myself, so I I know what you mean.

Right? Uh, it's better doing that sometimes than going to spend $150,000 with a hotshot agency another time. I'll tell you how we came to be known as tech Strong.

Okay. $140,000 later was my idea to begin with. But anyway, um, okay, Fair Enough.

Let's move into what say does, though? What, what, Okay. I had say, all right, Shar, tell us, what's the problem you solve?

How are you making the world better? We, we help organizations discover, explain, and control their new AI workforce. Okay?

So we are seeing, uh, ai, uh, transition from being the kind of a, a, a nice chat bot or assistant to being a full on digital employee, right? They are a new, your new workforce. This is where your employees now have their own kind of helper employees that do tasks for them, sometimes on behalf of their identities, sometimes on behalf of certain functions.

But things are happening today, or we are letting things happen today that we would've never let happen with any other of our employees out there. We've built decades of security or identity security controls around human employees, around how we onboard them, around how we grant permissions, how we audit their access, et cetera. But we are absolutely at a loss of these controls, the exact controls that allow us to govern and control, you know, our human workforce are, uh, uh, you know, incapable of doing that with a dynamically reasoning entity that is stochastic, that has access to arbitrary tools, sometimes that gets, you know, ultra connected and hyper connected to all sorts of, uh, uh, you know, databases and, and, and resources that your company has.

Um, and that's exactly what we're trying to help with. Um, so the first thing, typically we help people understand all of the agents that are already working for them. Uh, one of the key problems here is shadow agents, right?

These are sprawling out of control. People are onboarding these agents, uh, as, as their own experiments, as you know, and sometimes just for lack of a better term, it was shoved down their throat, um, by kind of a vendor where, you know, they introduced the new agent for something, and now there is another agent working for your company. Um, and, and, and this is super interesting.

It, it's, it belongs to, we see this in coding agents, we see this in in agentic browsers, we see it on the SaaS platform like agent builder platforms. Each and every platform now has is releasing those new digital employees that run off and kind of do tasks in the background, um, which is, which, it's just out of control right now. Agreed.

Agreed. And, and Edward, just at the beginning. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Listen, it's a, for ev every engagement where we come in and we do the scan, we see that, that jaw drop moment where they realize what they did, or they had a suspicion maybe, but they realize everything that's right, that's happening right now within their, their networks and on their end points and in their kind of SaaS environments. So, and, and that's exactly, we try to bring all of this into a singular control plane, right? So make sure that there's one place where we can govern when we can set policy, um, set your posture guardrails, right?

This is, um, uh, and the, the agent, SPM, so to speak, right? We have the security posture management for so many of these other areas, but they miss the focus on this abstract entity that we wanna solve for, which is the AI agent. Agreed.

Very cool. Um, so here we are in January. Yes.

You know, we, uh, in many ways, all of us, were touting 2025 is the year for agent AI really going mainstream. But as we look back, you know, to last year, I think the consensus is a lot of these agents didn't work as well as we thought they would, right? A lot of these agents sucked, quite frankly, right?

But they'll get better in 2026. But what we're also seeing is that constant jockeying, right? With security versus new technology, right?

First you security seems to dig their heels in and say, no, no, no, no, you gotta make sure it's secure. And people say, well, no, we're going without you. That, okay, okay, we'll, we'll, we'll go do it.

And they try to, you know, keep pace and, and then they try to leverage the technology to make better security. Mm-hmm. I am, I'm gonna assume this is very much part of your journey right now.

Yes. So, and, and lemme tell you, there's a couple things that, that I wanna say. One, I think the narrative is changing.

We've seen the 20, 25 pieces with, uh, the, I'd say the kind of disappointment everyone says, you know, and the analysts were like, oh, you know, so many of these projects are going to fail. We're not seeing any production re yet, right? So that was, that was, you know, the, the notion, the sentiment that wa that that came about in the second half, 20, 25.

But it's starting to change. And I think the reason for the change is how much, uh, better, and how quickly reasoning models, uh, improved in the, in the way they're able to deliver consistent of, you know, longer term tasks or longer term goals translated into tool calls, into, into action, and do, and this, uh, uh, and it came with, with a few models. I don't want to, you know, pick and choose kind of the vendors, but it, it really seems like the whole, the entire industry is moving into a place of higher productivity, more reliability.

Um, you know, this, it's gaining trust that, you know, you can let this thing run off and, and, and do, uh, kind of a longer term goal. So, you know, that's on, on, on the framing of the narrative. Um, and, and I think that, that in terms of, um, uh, uh, uh, adoption, again, adoption comes from everywhere.

We are seeing the, you know, all the early adopters and everyone's doing their own experiments, right? So they're experimenting with AI and they're trying this agent, they're trying this, they're giving permissions over here. They're giving permissions over there from the top, you see boards and kind of CEOs mandating how fast are we gonna, you know, accelerate AI adoption.

And so, and, and then everyone has like, tasks to do this. So in the middle, you get this nice, you know, risk sandwich, uh, of, of, you know, stuffing all of the ai, uh, into the organization. I think 2026 is where we're gonna see a lot more, uh, long-term agents starting to work.

Um, again, for companies, we're already seeing this with a few platforms that are now, and I mean, the trend is very clear. You see platforms releasing background engines, right? I don't know if you've, if you've seen some of them, and background engines is exactly what we mean when we say longer term.

Like, you know, long-term goal oriented, uh, uh, agent technology. Um, so this is, I, I think this is where we are going as, as an industry and knowledge work, uh, uh, altogether. Now, there's a lot of people speaking about kinda multi-agent systems, right?

And a to a and this, and this really complicates some of the, uh, uh, you know, controls that, that you want to have over, uh, uh, you know, over in, in this area. Um, I think this is a little further along. This might be the end of 2026, or even 2027, but longer term, uh, digital employees are happening right now.

I love it. ai, that's C-Y-A-T-A, um, I didn't ask. So Agen, SPM, all of this, it, it, it's, it's publicly available right now.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

We, you know, we have, we have a product out, uh, lots of paying customers in the us, uh, primarily financial services, uh, you know, uh, uh, and financial, uh, tech heavy institutions in the United States. This is where we're seeing a lot of adoption right now. But it's not limited.

It's everywhere. Everyone realizes that this is the gap. Uh, if you look at budgets for 2026, they have aligned for, let's say, AI security, and then they try to figure out what's the right approach, what, you know, how, you know, where, where do we wanna, uh, you know, put our chips on?

Um, and, and for us, it's, it's really clear the, the right approach to tackle this problem is from the identity security prism, right? You cannot treat this as an AppSec problem. It's, there's not code you could statically analyze and figure out whether that, um, whether that agent is going to behave nicely or not.

Uh, it, it, it's just a black box that will make decisions on its own. And so identity security is really the only viable, practical control that you can place around such a AA construct if you want, you know, uh, uh, again, to, to make sure that things are happening in a way that's controlled, that's measurable, that's audited, uh, et cetera. Excellent.

Shah, we're about outta time. First of all, best of luck with Sciat continuous success. Thank you so much.

Don't be a stranger. Keep, keep us, uh, keep, you know, keep us posted on what's doing. Will you guys be at RSA this year?

Yes, absolutely. We're gonna be at, at the early stage Expo. Um, oh, Very cool.

The sandbox. So just the early Yeah, no, at, at, at the hall. Just early stage in the hall there, that song.

We'll have a, and have a session There as well. Very cool. We, we of course, will be there broadcasting live.

We put on, you know, we put on the DevSecOps thing every Monday there. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

This year it's really about, uh, AI native dev. Right. And securing AI native dev.

Absolute. So we'll be talking that ly No problem. But maybe stop by, by, uh, broadcast alley.

We'll catch up with you. Absolutely. Uh, we'll meet up then.

Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. All right, you too.

Shatal, CEO Co-Founder SATA here, Anex Drug tv. We're gonna be back with more. Stay tuned.

Hello, I'm Scott Roam with Al, and I'm here today with Ahmed Abbu of Nokia Enterprise IT to talk about some of the very interesting network migration issues that they've been through over the last, uh, year or so. I'm not gonna steal any of Ahmed's Thunder, and we'll let him speak to at all. Ahmed, please introduce yourself to the audience.

Hi. Um, my name is Ahmed Abbu. I'm the lead architect for the on-prem, uh, data centers inside Nokia it.

And, um, I had the privilege of course, of, uh, doing this exciting transformation where we moved a lot of data centers from legacy to modern, modern techniques, modern data centers, migrating from different types of vendors to, to Nokia equipment migrating from Nokia to Nokia. So, um, those two or two and a half years have been very exciting for me. I've been working in data centers for a long time, but this is like something I've never seen before, so.

Awesome. I'm excited to share this with you. Yeah, no, happy to dive into this.

And let's just set the context for, for people who aren't aware, you know, Nokia is just this tiny little company with just a few hundred users on the network, right? Yeah, sure, sure. We've got like 88,000 people.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

And a wide diversity of different departments and functions do you support, you have manufacturing operations that you have to support, of course, finance, accounting, hr, all sorts of, you know, software developers, people in sales, people in marketing. Probably one of the most complex enterprise network environments that I've run into in my time in networking. How about you?

I, I, I think it's, it's different types. There is a variety of applications, applications that are very sensitive to disruptions. Sure.

Applications that are, you know, factories, uh, you know, that that could, you know, a brief disruption could, could throw off, uh, the software of the factory. It has to be restarted, things like that. So it's very critical.

Very interesting. And the different variety. Different variety.

Some are very sensitive to, to delays. Some are very sensitive to outages. It's very interesting.

So you've given a little hint at kind of the first, um, category of things that we want to talk about. You know, some of the pain points and the issues that you, you had to think about and had to say, what does my next gen network architecture need to fix? So what were some of those original pain points?

If you think back, you know, two, two and a half years now, um, to when you actually started down this path, what were some of the motivators that, um, got you thinking about we need to go to new network infrastructure and new tooling? Well, when I started really with Nokia, it, uh, I saw it diff all sorts of problems. You know, I wasn't, I wasn't in the, in the IT world, I was in the product world, right?

And everything, there was like more rosy, you know, you're dealing with labs, concepts, architectures, blue playbooks, sure. Blueprints. But when you move to it, it really hits, you know, the real world part.

And there I was exposed to all sorts of problems. You know, we have operate our operational model, you know, where we have to do a lot of intensive work, uh, very resource intensive. We really don't know what is deployed, uh, if it's, if what we intended to deploy is actually on the network or not.

We don't have a feedback loop from the actual, from the actual deployment to the intent. Um, we had operational problems where, where the operations team were dealing with different types of toolings that don't cooperate with each other, that don't tell you really what, what, you know, what is wrong with your network at any time. You have to do a lot of brain power and correl, you know, manual correlation.

Hmm. Um, also our designs, our designs, it was a lot, oh, well, let's go to the lab. Let's try and simulate as much as possible production.

Let's bring in, you know, expensive equipment, expensive, uh, uh, low balances fire, et cetera, into the lab just to, to test something small because we are worried that when if we go in production, it'll have a, a very negative effect. So lots of variety like that. And also, and also human aspect, uh, of the thing.

It's like, like I, I think of it as a journey. This is not only a technical part, you know, sure. People are, you know, see excited about automation, AI, and stuff like that, and they, they wanna be part of it.

They, they wanna get exposed to it, but not, not just for the sake of AI and automation, but where it makes sense for us. And so all that, um, made, made us think of completely rearchitecting the way we do everything. Sure.

From design to, to implementation to operations, everything was completely different. Did you see any, like, not to be overly reductionistic, but any, like, specific pain points? Was there overload due to alarms or tickets generated?

Um, were there communication issues on some of these complex troubleshooting issues? Does anything specific come to mind there? Of course, I'm, I'm not an operations team.

I'm a, I'm a design team, so, sure. Uh, I wanna comment on the design part because Okay. Uh, that affected me the most.

Sure. Is, is when, when, for example, when I got exposed and we had a network audit, and we found sorts of problems, you know, the thing is, we really don't know if, if what we're dealing with is, is a design intent, or it is intended to be like this or, or a drifted through type to be like this. Sure.

So the common thing, the common thing is I always was told, go back, let's see the designer that did it two years ago, let's talk to him. Let, let's talk to him. Is it really this or not?

Hmm. So it wasn't like very consistent and, and, and drifting. And we don't know if, if reality is good or bad.

So, uh, all sorts of problems there in the design and also in the implementation. Lots of people doing CLI, where, where one node has a completely different configuration than another. Not completely sure, but drifted away from another and they should be identical.

And we never understood why. So I, I, I really need, uh, I really thought, thought about this when, when starting the architecture that we consistency has to be there. Yeah.

Automate, you know, something at a higher level should be the, the engineer shouldn't be going to that low of a level to deal with things. See, they should, they should be dealing with a high level and let some tooling, some automation, some templating, do the, the real hardware, you know, the con you know, consistency check work. Sure, sure.

Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Scott Manchester, newly appointed chief product and technology officer for nio. And well, we're having a little chat about how it is gonna be managed going forward in the agent of the cloud, and maybe with virtual desktops and all kinds of fun stuff.

Scott, welcome Michelle. Thanks. Good to meet you, Mike.

Historically, we've always seemed to have managed desktops in the cloud separately, even when the same team is managing 'em, they think about them separately. And I guess I'm wondering, after all this time, are we on the cusp from what you see as to maybe some actual convergence here and what might drive that? Yeah, certainly.

I think, you know, as you've seen the evolution of VDI, uh, moving to the cloud, um, we call that cloud VDI, where it kind of holds to those previous constructs of traditional management of VDI, sort of a separate environment from your physical estate to the innovation that came forward with the cloud pc, where it a very intentionally name and it named a cloud personal computer. And the concept is that it carries forward all those same constructs and how you manage, uh, how you set security baselines, do Windows updates, app deployments, and doing it in a way that's consistent between the physical world and your new cloud-based computing environment. And I think that, uh, thinking of those as a single concept certainly gives back a lot of time and energy to it.

So they're not managing two different workflows, but also has a great value of reducing their security footprint and just giving, you know, more structure to how they manage an environment that has less risk of human error as well. We've been talking about virtual desktops for as long as I can remember. What will kind of finally push people towards them in greater numbers than we've seen thus far.

It seems like, you know, at least it, it looks like the right way to go from a computer science perspective, and yet we still see a lot of traditional desktops out there. So what's gonna move the needle? Yeah, that was a question I asked myself about a decade ago.

Um, you know, leading the business at Microsoft for so long and really starting to see what that growth looked like and trying to understand why it hadn't had higher penetration for those customers that had deployed it, you could see the incredible value that it gave to them. You know, that simplicity of spinning up and spinning down resources when they needed the extra layer of security. But the devil's in the details with this type of technology, right?

And there are certain, you know, I'll call 'em quirky behaviors of traditional VDI, uh, that often lead to complex management, uh, and the overhead, you know, when it's not managed in a consistent way, and you add that complexity, that overhead sometimes outweighs the value of virtualization. And then there's just the general understanding of it. You know, we've had big com, you know, pc, physical PC based computing environments for, you know, five decades now and four decades of windows.

And it's just what people are familiar with and accustomed to. So trying to, you know, bridge the gap between everything on physical and everything cloud and finding tools, processes and value in between there and helping people start to understand that value. So it's closing the gap on the complexities, but also helping customers understand the value.

And I think we saw a major inflection point just a few years ago, obviously, uh, with COVID and then many organizations being forced to quickly adapt to an environment that allowed people to be productive outside of the office. It was a great awakening of the value of virtualization, and I think we saw some explosive growth that hasn't subsided, right? You saw this huge pickup of people really looking into virtualization.

But then organizations have gone through these migrations from all on-prem, all in the cloud, uh, everybody at home, everybody in the office, hybrid work. All these inflection points are a reminder that things are not stagnant. And having environments that allow flexibility, flexibility in where your workforce is, the needs of your workforce, global demands, all of these things.

Um, so I think we're definitely in an era where that growth of desktop virtualization that we saw for three decades is now at a much higher pace than ever before. Um, you mentioned you were at Microsoft, so what brought you to nerdio? What was the attraction there?

And kinda, there's a lot of players in the space, so what differentiates Nerdio in your mind? Yeah, I think, you know, we first started down this adventure of Microsoft having first party solutions in this space, both our cloud VDI product, Azure Virtual Desktop, and our cloud PC product. I came into that, um, mindset of building those products with a partner strategy in mind.

Meaning there's certainly core value you wanna have in the solution that customers don't feel like they need third party tools to have a viable product. But having partners and an ecosystem of partners out there who can enhance fill gaps, build specific needs for different verticals was something that was gonna be clear. NIO just happened to be our second partner that we signed up as a value added partner, uh, in the early days of Azure Virtual Desktop at that time, they were a pretty small organization with just a handful of people, uh, but clearly had a very good understanding of the needs of organization and the vision to understand that that Azure Virtual desktop, our cloud VDI product was gonna be transformational.

Uh, it was a product that kind of fit right in between the needs of organizations and that price point that customers were looking for to make those economics work to ask about earlier. And I immediately was impressed, uh, with Nerdio, both Joseph and Vadim, uh, and their understanding like the needs of customers. Joseph had just come off, you know, a long tenure at Microsoft as well, and Vadim had great expertise in building managed services for organizations and right off the bat, uh, seeing the, their willingness to take on a very complex, uh, feature ad for Azure Virtual Desktop, which was building an entire GUI to wrap around the management framework.

And they did that so quickly and the reception to it was just phenomenal. So over the last, I, it's been a little over seven years now, I think, uh, working side by side with them continuing, you know, as we now brought a GUI forward, uh, for a VD nerdy has continued to evolve and continue to build value out in front of what we've done. Um, but getting that chance to work side by side with them for so long, I think the choice for me is pretty obvious, uh, where to go next.

Um, why, uh, now, uh, this little timer here in front of me is counting down to two more days until my 25 year anniversary at Microsoft. So, as with many people that come into a large company like Microsoft, you're not quite sure how long you're gonna stay in an organization like that. Um, and you know, my plan originally was maybe two to five years, and here I am 25 years later, you know, it's just an amazing experience.

Uh, I felt nerdy was the right, uh, company and 25 years was the right time, uh, to go out and, and continue to innovate and build value for customers in this end user compute space. Alright. Sometimes you gotta find your joy, right?

Um, so what is your sense of how much of it is gonna be managed by these kind of third party managed service providers versus an internal IT team? As we go forward, I feel like there's more collaboration, but when I look at the numbers, it's still about maybe a quarter of IT is consumed as a managed a service and the rest of it is still managed directly by some internal IT team. Generally speaking.

Is that the way it's always gonna be, or is there gonna be a change? You know, it's interesting. I see customers moving in both directions where maybe they've managed all their internal IT before and are now looking to, you know, outsource that a bit.

Um, as they go through these inflection points of on-prem cloud and then maybe even full cloud pc, I think each of those are times for them to evaluate, you know, is this best suited for us to manage ourselves? Uh, should we work with one of our current, uh, SI partners? Do we work with a full MSP?

Um, I think many organizations are just shifting around as it meets their specific needs. I think at the end of the day, IT departments wanna spend more of their time looking out into the horizon and less down at their feet. What I mean by that is when you're looking down at your feet, you're implementing the technologies that you've already purchased, you know, the things you've, you've bought, you've made a decision, this is the tech.

But when you're spending all your time working on implementing the tech you have now, and you're not looking out at the horizon, you're missing major inflection points, like this new generation of AI tools that could completely streamline your organizations. So what I see organizations doing is saying, I want to get my IT department more focused on new horizons, new opportunities to make us more productive, lower cost, increase productivity, and less time spending implementing technologies we've already bought. So nerdio kinda is that sweet spot of saying, well, we can provide more, you know, um, management tools to reduce the overhead of your IT team or can give you even the opportunity to have nerdio be the tool that an MSP uses to manage that customer.

So I think they're just situated really well to capture whether you're moving towards managing your own environment or you're moving away from it. The nerdio, uh, suite of tools I think is just well positioned for all of those movements. Mm-hmm.

You mentioned ai, will AI kind of drive some of this convergence we were talking about before in terms of how it is managed? Because it seems like the workflows will become more automated and there'll be less maybe unnatural delineation between various platforms. So is is that part of that inflection point you were talking about?

A little bit, yeah. But you'd look at even ai, how fast it's evolved, right? Imagine if you said, okay, ai, I've got this say new AI tool, we're gonna implement it and then we're done with ai, right?

So my IT department can all just go home and, uh, take a vacation when in reality even these IT tools are evolving so quickly. You need to constantly be evaluating these new tools, uh, these new capabilities. So AI will certainly, uh, simplify every aspect of the enterprise workforce.

You know, whether that is, you know, um, general content creation, um, whether it's improving workflows or whether it's providing additional tools to help you manage your compute infrastructure. Um, it's gonna have an impact on all of those things, but it's not a one and done. It's a constant evaluation of these new tools, constant determining what's the right AI services and tools for my organization.

So I think it's gonna just keep moving the needle, uh, in terms of what the role of the human is in all of this equation. And then what are the right tools that help organizations take these AI tools and manage them. Uh, Microsoft made a big announcement at Ignite that really moves the needle forward and then creates a great ecosystem of partners around this, which is giving AI tools and identity, um, that was Agent 365 that was announced at at Microsoft Ignite just a few weeks ago.

And then be able to take those tools and those agents and put them to purpose, right? So you've got new tools that are both applicable to the virtual estate and there was a couple of other announcements. Uh, AI enabled cloud PCs, AI tools, uh, that can be consumed inside of a cloud pc.

So AI is having major opportunities to streamline organizations, but then creating new opportunities for IT departments to put these AI tools to bear inside of their virtual estate. One of the things that I have heard from IT people over the years is, you know, they left to their own druthers, would love to use virtual desktops, it makes their life easier, but they have a hard time convincing the organization that that's the way to go. And it has to do with cultural issues more than technical issues.

And in some ways, sometimes desktop virtualization, at least historically, has had something of a bad rap among some end users. What's your best advice to those folks about how to kind of get the rest of the organization on board for this? Yeah, certainly, you know, with 30 years of evolutionary innovation, it's like, you know, boiling a frog, it's hard to really know how much virtualization has changed since that last time you looked at it.

So if you're A-A-C-I-O or CTO within an organization, and perhaps you looked at virtualization a decade ago and yeah, it had some value, but the overhead and the value equation just didn't make it worthwhile for us. And then with slow innovation, there's nothing major enough for them to go back and look at it again, with the introduction of both Cloud VDI, uh, lowering the cost threshold for organizations where most enterprises already have the entitlements to supporting Azure Virtual Desktop, for instance, without having to go buy some expensive license from another third party, that opened up the door and many organizations now said, okay, let's take another look at virtualization because this cost has reduced significantly. I already have the entitlements through my Microsoft licenses.

And then cloud pc very disruptive, uh, a revolutionary innovation in the virtualization space. That kind of leans into some of the things you were identifying, Mike, is that experience, that end user experience. Can you grab a random person off the street, put 'em in front of this environment and have them be productive?

I'll use another example from Ignite since it was such a um, recent moment, um, where a lot of this, these type of topics were discussed. I brought up one customer on stage, um, that had been, uh, working with us since the early days of A VD and now to cloud pc. They cycle through 3000 contractors a month.

So 3000 offboard and 3000 onboarded. And with traditional virtualization you can imagine where you take specialized training to, to get that new contractor familiar with the differences of computing on a physical device and computing outta a virtual estate, the overhead of that 3000 times every month wouldn't be worthwhile with Cloud PC. In the innovation we've been driving at Microsoft and the value add nerdio wraps around it, it is really designed to be your personal computer in the cloud and it looks, feels and operates like a physical PC and all of the things that humans do when they interact with a physical PC to self remediate problems, right?

We all know how to hit the restart button on our pc. Imagine this Mike, 30 years of evolutionary innovation in the virtualization space. Nobody gave the user the reset button.

So every time you put somebody in a virtualized environment and they got into a bad state, someone had to get on the phone, someone had to go in the back end and restart that machine. That alone, it just seems like such a simple thing. But that alone was one of the major deployment blockers just doing a simple phase of restarting your machine.

Humans couldn't do on their own. They had to engage with an IT support person. It's just one of many little quirky behaviors that we've closed that gap on now.

And given that user the ability to restart their machine and do even more actions that they've become familiar with in the physical world, uh, and when you can lower the IT overhead in that same stage, uh, we shared, uh, a couple other customers shared some statistic moving from traditional virtualization to cloud PC reduce their support tickets by 86%, but those are data points that many organizations haven't felt yet, right? That they're not aware just how fast things have changed and how far they've come since the last time they looked at it. So get to your original question.

I think it's just a matter now of getting out and letting organizations know, you know, things have evolved significantly since the last time you looked at it and getting some of these large customers in different verticals tell their stories of how it's transformed their, uh, operations made things more secure and lower the costs, uh, starting to resonate. So we're seeing, you know, customers maybe that have been resistant to this now really embracing virtualization and doing it at scale. Mm-hmm.

You mentioned security, so are those folks also starting to weigh in on this conversation? 'cause you know, we're all familiar with Patch Tuesday and nobody's having a great experience per se, but um, yeah. Are the security people starting to show up and say, folks, we need a better way to manage all this stuff.

'cause that endpoint is really, you know, among the weakest links we have because well after the people that comes next. Yeah, and I think virtualization has always been, you know, a tool that security would, would implement to sort of separate, you know, the corporate environment data, uh, from the physical device. So with the traditional virtualization, I log in from uh, a thin client device or a Windows device or an Android iOS device into the corporate environment through a virtualization application.

And when I'm done, nothing is left behind. That's one of the value props is creating that security boundary, getting it implemented in a way where you can guarantee nothing's left behind and guarantee that that thin client device or that thick client device that's connecting to the service also hasn't been compromised. That's where the real next wave of innovation is really closing the gap on security and creating brand new security opportunities that, um, were not able to be realized in the virtualization environment of the past.

Things like mobile application management where you can do attestation or posture checking of a physical device and ensure that it meets all the corporate requirements even without being managed. That means it can be A-B-Y-O-E device, my personal device that I'm connecting to the service from. And I think these types of technologies now are opening the door where even the highest level of security government agencies, healthcare, financial services, are now embracing virtualization because it provides that extra layer of security and can be done in a way that's more economical than traditional fiscal computing.

So what is that one thing? I mean, you know, you've been doing this for a while, but is there something you see people doing today that just makes you shake your head a little bit, go, Hey, you know, folks, maybe we could be just a little bit smarter than that and if we focused on the following. Yeah, I'd say certainly it is, um, understanding when your workload would be better served from the cloud as sort of a general concept.

Um, going into this 2026, I kind of view this as a year of the great migration, uh, that migration from on-prem to the cloud, from legacy virtualization solutions to modern virtualization solutions from services that you're paying for in addition to license that you already have through Microsoft. Uh, all of these are new opportunities for migration. Nerdio has been building an amazing platform to support these migrations, whether it is understanding the needs, uh, of individual users and what's the best service to support them.

This is one of the things they announced at Nerdio Con in May. Uh, the ability to migrate users from, uh, Azure Virtual Desktop to Windows 365, but even more importantly, to identify the economics and value of that move. And you're actually giving us a real word, metrics of moving that.

So I think going into this year, being helping organizations see the light you had mentioned earlier that, you know, how do you, you know, drive this innovation of virtualization when maybe it has a bad taste for some organizations, right? I think understanding that things have changed and giving them the tools to see those insights and then the tools to just click a button and migrate from whatever their, their current environment is. Whether it's a third party virtualization solution, whether it's physical PC computing, or whether it's in their own data centers to the cloud, but not just tools that just say, look, I'll move it when you're ready, but to even tell you when it's the right time to make those moves from an economic security and value prop, uh, point of view.

All right, folks, you heard it here. We all know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So maybe it's time to consider your options.

Scott, thanks for being on the show. Thanks Mike. All right.

And back to you guys in the studio. AI assistant crossover Veeam gets objective billion dollar data centers vibe coding shields up cursor calls code crypto. It's time for quantum license renewal and we're going to predict the future in this week's closer look on the tech field day rundown.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown. It is the 14th of January.

We are glad that you made it two weeks into the new year with us. We hope that you've been spending a little bit of time organizing your home because it is national organizer home today. Uh, but what is important is that the stories that we have are all organized as well as my organizer in chief, Mr.

Alistair Cook Als. Good to see you. It's a delight to be here.

And I would like to remind everybody that it's 2026 if you start writing. The date is 2025. You get time traveling backwards.

Uh, it is also international Fly your cut day, which seems like a much more sensible thing to do here in the southern hemisphere where at a summertime than up in the Northern Hemisphere where it's not, Depends on where you live 'cause it's still spring around here. Uh, but something else that springs to mind is a great lineup of stories that we have for you today. And we're gonna start off with one that really had people kind of a Twitter so to speak, because our good friends at the Cupertino Fruit and Mobile device company, otherwise known as Apple, are partnering with Google to use their Gemini models and cloud technology to upgrade.

I won't say the word, but you know, the lady that lives in your phone with advanced AI capabilities later this year, this multi-year deal will rely on Google's AI while continuing to run Apple devices and private cloud infrastructure. Apple reportedly plans to pay around $1 billion annually for this technology reflecting growing trust in Google's AI process as it competes with open ai. The move marks a major shift for Apple, which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the AI boom thus far, and aims to deliver a more capable and sophisticated lady that lives in your phone after delays pushed the rollout to early 2026.

Al the biggest thing that I have to wonder is, is Gemini gonna be up to the task? And has anybody heard Elon Musk whining about this yet? Well, I've used Gemini fairly extensively.

Um, it is my first line of defense of looking at a, uh, large language model and I'm pretty impressed with what Gemini can can do, provided you give it the right guidance as always for a large language model. Uh, one of the things that struck me in this is the briefness of the joint statement issued by Google and Apple. It is just two very short paragraphs, uh, basically saying this is a multi-year collaboration and the next generation of Apple's foundation models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technologies.

Uh, it's a bit of a shift because historically Apple has been much more connected to, to OpenAI and chat GPT and the statement is that hasn't changed. It's just that they're also basing lots of things on Google's Gemini models that may actually reflect what's happening for a lot of us as consumers of the chat components of these tools where we might switch between them and use different tools for different places. I know within the RUM intelligence platform, the default in there is chat GPT.

Uh, so we we're kind of multilingual within RUM and, and our use, and I think that's also what we're seeing from Apple. You'll recall that we covered a little while ago that maybe Apple is not doing the best job of utilizing modern large language model ai. And uh, I sort of drew some lines from Johnny i's departure setting up a, a new AI company and them getting very close to open ai.

Uh, also that the, uh, apple intelligence hasn't quite been what we hoped it would be. And maybe this is where the new Google models, Gemini models will be really helpful at delivering what was promised for, uh, the Apple intelligence and, uh, that, uh, lady who sounds like she's sorry, uh, in your phone actually giving you some good guidance, although of course we're very familiar with large language models having to say sorry because got things wrong. So, uh, yeah, I think this is a good thing to see.

It is good to see that Apple is trying something different, but it continues to me to be a sign that still haven't quite got it right and they've oversold the promise. And under our good friends at Veeam have acquired Object First, a specialist in pre-integrated immutable backup appliances designed for Veeam environments. Uh, this makes a strategic and expansion for Veeam into purpose-built hardware from, uh, being very much a software based organization first and having a storage centric software approach object first.

Orbe appliances provide native S3 object storage with immutable enforcement by default. That's awesome. Field backup storage, particularly keeping it safe from ransomware.

Uh, the acquisition allows Veeam to offer on-premises solutions, uh, alongside cloud-based Veeam Data Cloud, giving customers flexibility in how they secure their backups while object first will continue operating independently. And partner progra programs remain separate for the time being. At least this move reflects a growing industry demand for immutable secure storage and easily deployable backup solutions that simplify cyber resilience without necessarily limiting customer choice and locking you to a single solution.

Uh, I think, Tom, this is very much in your wheelhouse of keeping your data secure and keeping it well protected. Exactly. And there's nothing better for keeping your data secured than not being able to modify it at all.

It's one of the things that we've seen from the data protection industry over the last, oh, year and a half or so ever since they really started pivoting here, is this idea that you need to have some kind of a system in place that prevents people from attacking your reliability, so to speak. Uh, I saw a quote from our good friend Curtis Preston, Mr. Backup the other day, uh, something like 70 some odd percent of ransomware attacks.

Their very first target is backup data sets. They're looking to prevent your ability to restore. And, and we've talked about that late last year, early this year.

I mean, when you think about the number of people that have paid ransomware, not because you know, it, it was a, a cost conscious decision, but because they had no good backups that they could rely on in order to, to get back there to a running state like this just makes sense from Veeam's perspective because they already have their online cloud vault. That's great as long as you can get online. And that's one of the things we've seen outta the European Union in order to halt the spread of some of these massive ransomware attacks, is they have created the capability to basically isolate your network from the rest of the global internet.

That means you gotta have something on premises, and that's where Object first comes in and they already talk partner very tightly together. It's kind of one of those things where if you talk to Veeam and you need an immutable solution, their first go-to is Object first. It's just now that's an in-house solution as opposed to a, a partner solution.

And I think that this is gonna give people a lot of flexibility because in addition to what I had already said about, you know, you gotta be able to get online to utilize that online cloud vault, there are a lot of regulated industries that will not let certain data escape the local network, so to speak. And that's just here in the US overseas, you've got a lot of data, data sovereignty issues when it comes to cloud. So I think that this is great for Veeam customers that want to, uh, take advantage of these solutions and basically just write one check to Veeam.

Uh, we, we found out about this ironically enough through a lot of our great people in the tech field at Delegate community. They, they kind of gave us a heads up that there were some emails going back and forth, so we want to, you know, say a special shout out to all of the, the delegates who let us know about this. But I also wanna remind everybody that both Veeam and Object First are gonna be presenting at Tech Field a extra at RSAC this year.

I'll have more details about that when we close out the show. Open AI and SoftBank Group are jointly investing $1 billion in SB Energy to accelerate construction of AI optimized data centers across the UA as part of the Stargate project. The investment addresses a critical industry bottleneck that would be securing power and real estate to support increasingly demanding AI workloads.

Funny enough, they didn't say anything about building it in space. 2 gigawatt data center in Texas, will develop additional multi gigawatt campuses while integrating open AI's design specifications with its expertise in energy and construction. This partnership reflects a strategic shift in AI competition where controlling physical infrastructure is just as crucial as developing algorithms or having semiconductor access.

The initiative is part of broader efforts, including collaborations with Oracle and MGX to ensure that the US can scale AI computing capacity rapidly and reliably. Al is a billion dollars a great build out for a data center, or is this just a drop in the bucket? It's absolutely a drop in the bucket, Tom.

Absolutely. It's a sign of a, a commitment to a partnership. It's not actually the 500 billion commitment that the White House announced in January last year for, um, the Stargate Project.

So in the context of the US wants to build out half a trillion dollars worth of AI data center. Yeah, a a billion dollar spend is not actually that big. Uh, on the other hand, if, uh, you're a contractor working for SB Energy, uh, you're pretty happy that there's another trillion dollars available for this build.

Uh, the build in Texas and Milan County is, uh, underway and due to actually start delivering some AI sometime later this year. And this commitment really is just a, a partnership to get started. Uh, if SB Energy sounds like SoftBank, yeah, they're not directly a subsidiary, but a lot of money flows into SB Energy from SoftBank to make sure that these build outs can occur.

And of course, OpenAI will be the big customer for putting workloads inside these data centers. So the partnership is good. Uh, it is a non-exclusive, uh, prefer, uh, preferential agreement so that OpenAI and SoftBank will prefer to use SB energy as they're building out.

There's more and more, there's huge data centers over time. Uh, and of course, as you say, control of the power generation, the space, uh, and, and I mean physical space on the ground, not up and up and orbit with those ling satellites. Um, control of locations to build these data centers with high connectivity and good power generation is gonna be vital.

The vast amounts of data center space that are being committed to being built and operated over the next five years to continue this large language model, ai uh, wave is huge. Absolutely massive scale. So there are gonna be challenges around access to power, securing long-term contracts for that.

Access to power is gonna be foundational on this and it's gonna follow then with whatcha gonna put in these big data centers, how are you gonna get chips? And particularly at the moment, RAM for those servers. We all know that consumer RAM has gone up vastly in price over the last few months, and that's driven by the demand for all of these, uh, GPUs and the high bandwidth memory that's gonna be in these GPUs and these massive data centers that built out.

So yeah, it's part of an ongoing trend in itself. It's not the biggest element in that ongoing trend. And we'll see more of these partnership announcements as we've seen plenty of them over the past few months as well.

Palo Alto Networks has introduced the SHIELD framework to help organizations secure applications building, uh, built using AI enabled vibe coding tools, uh, increasingly common but kind of dangerous. There's a significant cybersecurity risk in vibe coding. The use of an AI tool to build an application without knowing how to.