Techstrong TV – January 9, 2025

Hey, everyone. What's that giant sucking sound you're hearing? Well, it's all the dollars flowing into ai.

You're watching Text On Gang. Hey, everyone, happy Thursday. It's Alan Shimmel here in our Boca Ratone Techstrong headquarters, and you'll watching another episode of Textron Gang.

As usual, we've got a great group of people here in the gang and some interesting topics to dive into. Let me start off by introducing our gang members today. I think making his first appearance in the new year.

He took a regal couple weeks off as any royalty member Wood. It's our, you know, resident SAR of Silicon Valley, John Swartz. Hey, John.

How are you, man? Happy New Year. I hap Happy New Year everyone.

Um, uh, yeah, we spent a few days in Scottsdale, Arizona, formar r but I'm, I'm happy to be back. I couldn't help myself during the time I was off. I actually, I'll admit I wrote a couple things.

Did. You just can't help it. Scottsdale was nice.

It was nice. It was, uh, in the seventies. I haven't been to Arizona a few years, um, but it was good.

It was all good and ready to go. Excellent, excellent. Joining us, I, I assume, well, you know what, Anne, I gotta give you kudos, man.

You, your, your backgrounds are always tuned into the upcoming holiday. So is this still a bit of a happy New Year thing behind you there, or, Yes. Yes.

Only because it feels seasonally inappropriate to go to Valentine's right from Christmas. Yeah. It might be a little early for Valentine's.

Yeah. So I just wanted, you know, it's kind of a gloomy time right now of your, so I thought a little sparkle. Look, it's a great time to buy Christmas and New Year decorations.

They're basically 50% off. Um, Oh, yeah, Yeah, yeah. I, I stocked up on my Hanukkah decorations right after the first of the year.

Of course, we'll put them away for next year, but hey, 50% the deal's a deal. Um, anyway, that's pretty funny. Uh, and we're gonna work like heck to get your name right this year.

Thank you. And a whole award. Yes and no.

I know. And, and a whole award. You got it.

Okay. Thanks, Anne. Thanks for joining us.

You know, ed, people, you know, we have you on here once a week. People may not know a lot about what you do when you're not, you know, supporting your gang colors. Why don't you tell us a little bit?

Well, I go into companies and I help them grow through data and, uh, analytics, basically. Um, I am a growth expert. This here is the book I wrote in 2017, O'Reilly book, the, uh, SEO battlefield.

Um, and I love going and helping companies grow, uh, whether it's organic, paid search, search is my game, and I love it. I have an agency with a team of six, uh, that I've been running since 2009 on my own. Wow, that's great.

What's the name of the agency? Circle Click. Very cool.

Mike, you should take note of that. Okay. Jumping from Anne to one of our regular, I think, Mike, I don't know if Mike's frozen or what, jumping from Anne to one of our regular gang members joining us from, uh, frigid, frigid Colorado.

It's our own. Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitch.

How are you? Man, it's In the single digits this morning. So, yes, it's a little cold, a little cold in here in Colorado, but, you know, we have her, we have her sprints in January where we get some cold weather.

It'll warm up, I tell you. It makes me feel better. I'm, I'm more bundled up here in my sweater.

It's 50 degrees. Um, what am what am I I'm soft. I've gone soft.

Um, Florida soft. Florida soft. Anyway, Mitch, thanks for being on, and then joining us today from Harrison, New York with the state-of-the-art DSL connection on his internet.

It's our one and only Chief Content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm doing well.

I think my internet connection may be frozen, though. That seems to be what the issue is, so we'll see how it goes. Okay.

Let's hope it unfreezes or thaws out as they say, and we'll go from there. So, as I mentioned for today's show, Thursdays show, we're gonna start off with that giant sucking sound. You may be hearing, it's actually AI soaking up investment dollars at an unprecedented pace.

Um, Mike, I don't know if you want to kick it off or we're going over to John on that, but why don't we, we, Mike, let's see how it works with your connection. Yeah, let's, let's just go right to John on that and the internet connections and see how it goes. Okay, John, what?

That sounds good. Well, it's free flowing money. It is.

This is a gold rush. This is a land grab. I mean, to me, in a sense, there are a number of things that are happening, and we'll go up, we'll go first with the news and then more for a broader context.

But basically what's happening is philanthropic just said they need to raise more funding to get to a $60 billion valuation. OpenAI, which is moving to a for-profit model, needs more capital than we'd imagine. Now, within context, think about this.

Anthropic alone has raised $8 billion from Amazon. OpenAI has raised at least $13 billion from Microsoft. They're pouring money into operations because in a sense, there is so much at stake in a sense now, not the only ones.

There's this gold rush, as I said, a land grab, money's pouring into these. I, I keep hearing the phrase, trillion dollar industries being bandied about buildings are sprouting. Even out here, I, I was, uh, at a cybersecurity event a couple days ago, and a, a guy there was saying to me, who are all these new buildings that are cropping up along Highway 1 0 1?

There? A lot of them are startups. A lot of 'em are expansion of companies.

Monies being just injected by the billions into these companies like OpenAI, which want to go public. Nvidia just hit a record stock price. Uh, it's, and it's, and basically, to put it really bluntly, if we took a shot at tequila every time someone said trillion in AI in the same sentence, we'd all be extremely happy.

It's, it's crazy. 4 billion into AI next year. 6 billion.

This is a, this is, this is crazy, and I've never seen anything like this, or I haven't seen anything like this in at least 25 years, because this is considered the go-to year for AgTech ai and beyond that physical ai. So, and again, as you, so what put it so well, Alan, this is a money sucking sound, but I think it's necessary, or these companies think it's necessary for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I, I totally agree with you, John, and I think it's interesting.

And philanthropic seems to be a favorite among my data scientists, decision scientist friends, philanthropic is sort of viewed as the underdog, but looking at those numbers, they obviously are not much of an underdog. The company that I've been watching in the space is perplexity, obviously as an SDO I'm interested in them because they're a search engine. But I mean, just a year ago they were valued at a billion.

And now that that investment from SoftBank in the middle of the year last year took them to 3 billion. And then all of a sudden this year, uh, January, they come out strong in a $9 billion valuation in a $500 million round, which sounds like chump change compared to Anthropic. But I mean, think about that.

In about 12 months, 13 months, you go from one to 9 billion. Um, it, it's, it almost seems like play money. You know, it's staggering.

One thing I was gonna, I I, I should have mentioned as well, is that I think there is this incredible rush and this no coincidence that it has something to do with a change in the political climate. Also, the economy is doing fairly well. So these companies see this opportunity to not only go public 'cause we've had a down IPO markets, but they see opportunity of merger and acquisition activity with the new administration, which might allow more of that.

At least that's what I, we, that's the indication we're getting. Um, and I, I mentioned, uh, we mentioned philanthropic. A 60 billion open is about 160 billion.

And, um, it's, this is this, I mean, it's go time. And if you listened, and you guys talked about the CES Nvidia keynote speech by Gen said, but he, he mentioned every industry that they were getting into with AI and the amount of money that was at stake. And he talked about manufacturing with Keon and Accenture.

He talked about, uh, autonomous avs with Toyota. He mentioned perplexity, and, and, and, and it's just, it, it, to me, it's staggering. And when you see every big tech company just chasing this as aggressively as I've ever seen them, it is, it's a game changer.

com or the nineties, or the, you know, the, uh, cloud. And it's interesting, I was talking with, um, one of our analysts who heads up the CIO insights, uh, practice at future. And he mentioned to me, which I, I've kind of forgotten about, in focusing on the, on the, uh, fortune 500 companies for large companies, they're definitely investing in ai.

But because, uh, because, uh, um, agenda of AI came on so quickly, they don't, they don't quickly change their budget cycles and, and suddenly reallocate a whole bunch of money to AI quickly. It takes a couple of years. And in the meantime, they sort of rob Peter to pay Paul to get some AI projects done while they cut back and kind of play the budget games.

Meanwhile, they're putting more and more budget against ai. Um, but if you look at the numbers, it's really small compared to like, security and data and, um, you know, some of, so networking things like that. But it, it'll catch up.

So I feel like we are at the bottom of that hockey stick. I always worry, are we over rotating on building so much infrastructure? But I think about, you know, the large enterprise and what they could potentially spend on AI in the next two to three years really can step up to what the market's building.

So it's, the timing may be right for that. But it's interesting just the pace of how it's happened, sort of outstripped, at least large enterprise ability to really fund the projects they want to fund. You know, the really weird thing was when Jensen was talking about, uh, AI at CES, he kinda lumped it all together in a sense.

He talked about generative ai, but then he, he made a segue into, um, ag agent ai, which he's talked a lot about the digital workforce that we keep hearing about. Then he puts it in even farther and said, now we're, we're, we're about to start robots. Yeah.

Physical ai. Um, and they brought the robots on, on stage. He mentioned all the possibilities.

It was kind of staggering. It was a little overwhelming to me because I think we're, we're, we're like looking at three different movements or waves at the same time. But, um, I guess that's the way these companies are interpreting it.

Um, usually they kind of transition from one thing to another. I remember Microsoft was behind on the internet. They, they rushed into it.

It seems like this, everybody's in this go-to now mo mo movement. And if they don't, they feel they're gonna be left behind. Well, you know, I'm curious, Sean, your thoughts on Apple.

Because Apple, If you can hear me, the one thing We can hear you, Mike. Well, apple keeps saying, Hey, we're in AI too. Ai, ai.

But do you really think, John, that they're the player that they normally are in the space? No. That's a great, that is, that is a tremendous point.

I was thinking the same thing when I was watching Jensen. You know, the one thing that I kept having these eerie comparisons to is watching Jensen and how he's, in a sense, assumed the Steve Jobs role. He has this elaborate, uh, presentation flawlessly executed.

It's like a Broadway show, right? They're, they're bringing the props on. He's mentioning everything they're moving into.

He does it extremely well. Very slick video presentations with him as the narrator. And, and I'm thinking in the back of my head, okay, we have Google's involved, Microsoft, Amazon, they've all hedging their bets.

Apple's playing ketchup in a sense, but they're kind of the forgotten. You're That's so right, though. They're the forgotten name.

They're, it's just, meanwhile, this guy is wearing his black jacket. It's, it's, you gotta know the Apple way though. This is typical of Apple.

Oh, yeah, That's true. So First, I, I, I got some thoughts on here. I wanted y'all to join in before I jumped in.

You know, normally I would tell you that all this money's rushing in. 'cause if you're not in the top three, get the hell out. Right.

Lesson we learned from Brad Feld, Mitch and I, and, and normally that is true. If you're not in the top three, get the hell out. But I think we're looking at this wrong.

We're lumping this all under those two letters. AI as if all AI is the same. That Agentic is just the next phase of generative and physical is the phase that's gonna come after.

No, the, there's, there's, AI is not a monolith of, of, you know, of just ai. There's different aspects of ai. There's different markets, there's different products.

There's different, there's gonna be different winners and losers in each one. You mentioned perplexity specializing AI search, AI search in and of itself. Look, they're gonna fight Duke it out with Google.

'cause Google's not seeding that. Let's be clear. Right?

And reviews are weak at best, and they're only ruled out to 20% of users. Yep. But, so, but there will be three winners in AI powered search.

There will be three winners in CRM empowered ai, there will, you know what I mean? AI itself is gonna spawn so many separate markets and separate product things that there's room for a lot of of winners. However, I do believe that at the end of the day, when we talk about large language models and cutting edge, cutting edge AI breakthroughs, it's gonna be a big boys game.

And that's why these guys are bulking up the same way. You know, you have hyperscalers today, it's very hard for startups to compete with Google and Microsoft and Apple and Meta. I used to say Twitter before Elon cut it to, I'm gonna call it Twitter till the end of time.

I refuse to say it. No, I'm not. Well, but it's not, it doesn't have the infrastructure that Twitter had.

It does. It's, I dont, I don't consider Twitter a, a hyperscaler anymore, right? 'cause they're running on bubble gum and spit.

But in order to really play in the AI game at that level, you are going to need those kinds of resources. Now, philanthropic, we've been talking a lot about philanthropic this week. They're making a lot of noise.

I clearly, I think they are, you know, emerging as a two three at worst to, to open AI and, and, uh, Google. Um, but where would they be without Amazon's money? Right?

That's, that's their ACE card, right? That, Hey, we're the guys, Amazon's betting on you should bet on us too. 'cause they're not stupid over there.

Um, so I, I do think you're gonna see at that level, it's a big man's game. It's a hyperscalers game, and we'll, we'll have, we'll have the hyperscalers. But that's not to say that there aren't huge niches within the AI landscape where there will be winners and losers and fortunes made, fortunes made.

Like Yeah, I think water, the fear, yeah. The fear among a lot of companies out here, at least in Silicon Valley, is that if you're not closely aligned or at least, uh, thought of as a company with some sort of AI present, you're irrelevant. Well, but That's, That's just the mindsets.

That's pro fomo part it carville at Valley. What? I'm the uber of computers.

I'm the uber of guitar makers. I'm the cloud version of this. What's my cloud story?

What's my security story? What's my, you know, that's how Silicon Valley rolls. Well, Yeah, that's what I mean, though.

I mean, it's, habits are hard to break. I mean, Yeah, that's typical secure Culture. Let me, so that's why you're seeing this kind of paranoia mounting as well to, so, To, to your point, Alan, though, I think all of those are applications or uses of products built with, with ai, right?

It's a technology. If, if I look at the macro view, I, I think, you know, we, we like to say Nvidia is what, or a GPU company. They're a consumer gaming company.

They're a, Nvidia wants to own company stack. Nvidia wants to be The Google of ai. That's, they want the whole stack Pilot at the, you know, at the desktop.

They, you know, building foundational models. No Doubt. They want, they want to.

And they also are pulling kind of the Google game of, we want, well really the Microsoft game, we want you to build on Kuda. We want you to build on our mm-hmm. Our drive, uh, the platform, API platforms, right?

That's what they're trying to do, is they're kind of playing the Apple game, if you will. Yes, they are. Let's build this whole ecosystem.

But, But let's talk about Apple a sec, Mitch. com days, I did a big deal with, uh, company. I helped start, uh, we did a big deal with Dell, Dell host, and we were Dell host.

We were in OEM for Dell host at the time. Dell had just gotten into the server market about a year or two before. Dell didn't do servers.

They only did laptops and desktops. Then they got into servers in a big way. Why did, and and a lot of people said, oh, they're so late to this game.

It's so late. They'll never, never be a player in servers too late. But Dell's philosophy was, they didn't get into a market till it was mature enough to be worthwhile jumping in with two feet.

And when they did, they immediately sought to dominate that market. And they did, in the case of servers that became, you know, probably one of the top three server companies. Apple's the same way.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, there may be a lot of money going into AI right now, but Apple's sitting, Apple's got a few shackles in the bank that they're sitting on and they haven't deployed, You know, and also, yeah, I'm sorry, Alan.

You know, the other thing too is a lot of consumers, a lot of people who don't really know what AI is, are wary about it. They're waiting to see what Apple does, like they did with smartphone market and other Markets. Well, apples saying, how big is this market today?

And 'cause I'm gonna make a big bet 'cause I'm Apple. I'm gonna come in here with both feet and try to dominate something. But is this market mature enough for me to put that kind of resources into it?

'cause as soon as it is, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, get lost, be Today, they get lost in the mix between all the announcements by Microsoft, you know, every, everybody, um, you know, Nvidia, Amazon, et cetera. So, I mean, that's, Apple looks at how that's not the time for Apple. How much money is AI generating?

Not how much investment. Right. That's generating And that's, that's what Apple's All, Yeah.

There's something to be for letting the, the Trailblazers spend the money. Apple's the only corporation I've ever worked for. And let me tell you, they, they know how to save a dollar.

They really, like, they're thrifty on a, on a level you would not even imagine. Uh, and I think that they're, you know, I think about all their successes, and then I think about the Newton message pad and the Apple vision mm-hmm. Sitting in my closet.

They, Yes, they learned lessons. They learned lessons on that. The hard apple's sort of like the Old Bull.

And a lot of these other companies are the young bull, if you know that story. And, um, don't, don't count them out on this. Don't count 'em out.

Just Because you don't see it doesn't mean they're not, they don't have teams on. Right. Right.

They, they're very secretive until they know that they're gonna come out Yep. And they're gonna dominate. Yeah.

So that, that's my, my word on that. I think we've, uh, we've made the point here. John, you have an article, a couple of articles on this, up on Techstrong ai, right?

We could send I Do. Yes. Yes.

Um, so, and every time I turn around, there seems to be a study Id showing the amount of money being just being thrown at this. And you're right, Alan, this, until we start seeing the revenue, we're we we're gonna event inevitably go through a couple of years of, of, of this we're early market growing and Yeah, no, Exactly. If you wanna be a first mover, especially if you're a startup and you are aligning yourself with a hyperscaler, this is the time.

If you don't have Apple type of resources, hyperscaler resources, now is the time where you gotta grab, you know, you gotta set your homestead up, right? You gotta claim your homestead and, you know, and grab, grab your picks and shovels. And there's gold in them.

Nar Hills, right? I wanna be the guy selling picks and shovels, but I don't Exactly. That's, that's where the money.

Yes, exactly. That's, that's the, that's the sweet spot, really, for a lot of the startups and a lot of the smaller companies here to, but to sell the picks and shovels. Exactly.

Yep. Mike, I, it's California, right? The Gold Rush.

Yeah. No, the 49 ERs. Mike, I feel like we're, we're missing you on this one.

I I, I'm sorry. Your internet is troublesome. I don't know if you can hear me, but, um, I would say ooey, and there's just a lot of money being poured into this space in a way that, as the old saying goes, a fool on their money or soon parted.

And I think you should keep an eye on what's going on with these various knowledge graphs out there. 'cause I think that you'll be able to use those for about half the things that we're using LLMs for. And I think small LLMs are gonna be the things that drive agentic ai.

So I'm not gonna need these massive foundational LLMs other than to build small LLMs. And I kind of look at all this right now, and I scratch my head and I go, where's the revenue model for all this stuff gonna be? 'cause I can see a future where these things are not gonna be nearly as important as we think.

All right. You heard it there from, uh, the, the, uh, where, where was Rip Van Winkle? Where did he go to sleep?

Sleepy Hollow. Not far from Harris in New York. Alright.

All right. Hey, let's take a break here on Text Strum Gang. We're gonna come back and talk about a recent announcement, one of several announcements that we will say, a controversial with a capital C.

This one's around a, uh, $20 billion data center investment pledge. You're watching Textron Gang Modernize your business to fuel innovation and elevate customer experiences with the builder community. Hub AWS and its partner network provide essential tools for transforming applications and infrastructure to fully leverage the cloud.

Discover free trials, in-depth demos and essential resources to empower DevOps engineers and developers to deliver value faster and more reliably. Visit the builder community hub to learn more. Alright, folks, we're back.

And we're talking about, well, Donald Trump says that there's gonna be $20 billion investments from his friends in the Middle East into data centers that are gonna be in the us. This seems to be part of his quid pro Crow program, where he says that he will, uh, help companies navigate these regulations if they tune up to invest in the country with, uh, his assistance, as it were. And I guess his family's involved in this whole thing.

But Alan, what's your take on this? Do we need more data centers? Is there $20 billion worth of investment to be had here?

And Are Other folks gonna get mad? Well, maybe we should build them in Greenland, our newest estate. Or, or maybe in the Gulf of America offshore.

Oh, better yet, let's keep them in the US canal that runs through Panama. Come on. Wow.

Canada's got good cooling. I think we could go after. Yeah, that's good.

North liquid cooling in Canada. Our newest territory. Come on.

First of all, $20 billion to drop in the bucket. Look at how much money Google, Microsoft, apple, all the usual suspects are spending on data centers. This got publicity.

So just what I need. Some Middle Eastern Sheik from Abu Dhabi owning data centers here in the us What happened to Made in America? Built in America, owned in America, is that what is, are we for sale?

Are we for sale? We have a CHIPS act. We have so many resources that we put in to trying to build out foundries and data centers and everything like that, that we haven't even begun to spend that money.

Let's focus on that before we put up the for sale side to, to the sheex to come in here and, and spend a pit and some money on some data centers somewhere to, to massage this guy's ego. I say pledge, I'll throw it out to you. I Say Pledge smidge.

We've heard this, we've seen this movie before, right? Yeah. Until we're breaking ground on a data center and building stuff.

Yeah. Pledging is Mean. Where's those, where's those chip manufacturer?

In today's, in today's world, $20 billion doesn't buy as many data centers as it's raising 2 billion Alone. I mean, just one company. So to your, I that was my first reaction.

20 billion. Is that all drop in the bucket? Yeah.

Yeah. That's like two That I think, oh, sorry. Go ahead, John.

Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Just quickly.

Yeah, for context, Blackstone estimates that the US is gonna see investments of a trillion dollars in data centers over five years with another trillion Exactly. Committed to other types of facilities internationally. So in, in other words, uh, what properties commitment accounts for just like 2% of the total expected domestic investment in the sector?

I'm sorry, go ahead, Ann. No, no, no. I, I just always think, when I see these announcements, I always think, okay, great.

How are you powering it? That's like, where my head always goes is who, who's paying the bill? Right?

Who, who's gonna be powering this? And I think we're gonna start to see, you know, Amazon companies like that. They're gonna have, and they already do their own nuclear plants that That's, well, no, we, we reported on this, right?

Microsoft, Microsoft made a deal with the old three Mile Island, and they're gonna build a huge data center right out there. Uh, another big utility in the Midwest basically signed, I forget if it was Google or Amazon or whoever it was, um, a deal where they're going to like, basically build plants just to power data centers there. And they're putting damn near a billion dollars into that alone.

So, you know, this makes interesting fodder for press. I personally, I didn't realize we wrote about it on Text Strong, ITSM. Um, I, I, it's not news to me.

It's, it's publicity. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's a publicity stu, you know, and also within context, I looked into this, uh, organization that works with the Trump family. And for every project that they completed, there were several others that never went anywhere.

There's always talk about it going back to 2016. This isn't the first time he's mentioned working with them as, as a, as a member, as the president. Well, We should be clear.

It's one company, one, it's basically one family, One company from UAE in the United Arab Emirates. Right? Right.

Soman the family own, right. Family owned Business. Private development.

Yeah. It, it's also, you know, you mentioned Nuclear Anna. You're right.

I mean, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. There's, I think they're pouring billions of dollars into these nuclear energy facilities. And they're looking into building small modular, uh, reactors.

Just Fusion baby cult fusion. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So, um, yeah, this, this whole thing was like the, uh, sock bank, uh, pledge as well, which was a couple of weeks earlier. Um, we've all seen this before, as Mitch said. And, uh, when the rubber hits the road, when something really actually happens, that's when I pay attention.

And for now, it's just a, it's a nice, uh, press release from the, uh, incoming administration. You know what you gotta give him credit for, though? This is a nothing burger.

Mm-hmm. Right? But everybody and their mom is reporting on it, talking about it.

And it's a nothing burger. There's bigger things for us to talk about. So, I'm, I'm given this.

It's 15 minutes. It's over. We're going on a break here.

Texture and gang. We're gonna come back and talk about a m and a deal between Getty and, uh, Shutterstock. Images.

Images. You're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Sunny And Cher Share.

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2025. Be there. Hey everyone, we're back here.

You know, big news in a usual, very actually quiet, uh, neighborhood in the internet. And that's the, uh, the, uh, image royalties and image licensing business. Uh, and what you want to tell us about this Getty Shutterstock deal.

Absolutely. 7 billion acquisition. And I think that, you know, when I think Getty, a lot of people in my industry, internet marketers, I think of Getty.

I think of the image scam. I think of the letters you get if they find something on your website and they'll threaten you with legal. But this, this, they've grown out of these sort of games and they're recognizing where the industry is.

Essentially. They've gotta unify to fight AI images. People can now generate images on the fly on demand.

They recognize obviously that they're dying breed, or they could be. And so I think that this signals, uh, you know, the combined company will have nearly 2 billion in revenue. I think they have, they see it as a greater chance of survival, obviously, and will save them costs on overhead and other things by merging.

Um, I don't know that this is gonna go through though. I think there's gonna be some antitrust scrutiny, um, because this is, this is making them an even bigger player. Uh, already both are dominating.

But I think this is signals a sort of insecurity of, and it's a sign of the times to some degree. And I think we're gonna see more of these. Um, especially as, you know, AI's run out of easy data, right?

So we're gonna start to see these mergers just for the data. And I think that this is one of assigned to come. So I I, I don't think you're gonna see any antitrust scrutiny from the, uh, incoming administration.

They don't care. This is wild west. But that being said, I think someone earlier said a fooling his money are quickly separated.

To me. This is, this is, uh, Winchester stage coaches buying a bunch of horseless carriages, uh, uh, buying a bunch of, of carriages for, you know, buggy and whip horses right around 1910 while a guy named Henry Ford is figuring out how to mass produce. Uh, I, I, I wouldn't give two dimes for an image library in the age of AI generated images.

I mean, I, I will tell you here at Techstrong, I right before doing this show, um, we were looking for a nice background to use. 'cause I'm gonna be live, uh, next Tuesday for, for, um, our Predict 2025 conference. I'll be doing the live kickoff at 8:45 AM And I'm, I wanted to have a nice background image.

And normally in years past, I would go to Shutterstock or Getty or one of those and, and look for a, you know, a high res image for that. I went in, you know, went into, uh, one of my favorite ais and said, this is the image I'm looking for. I want something immersive.

I want it in 4K. I, I uploaded an image of the hero image from the website and said, make me a stage that looks like this. Two, one or two tweaks.

Yeah. I mean, Go ahead. No, no, you're right.

SI mean, Ann Ann beautifully laid this out and I, I just think it's just almost an exercise in futility, honestly. Um, with this on rushing competition from images generated by ai, it's just, um, it kind of almost reminds me of the old media just trying to compete with the internet. It's Just Exactly.

That's, it's inevitable exactly what it is. And so the Let's get big, let's get bigger. Yeah, exactly.

They're not be packaging themselves up with a bow for open AI or Google who will be buying them for parts later. Right, Right, right, right. For for input.

Yeah. 7 billion for it? Yeah.

Well, No, something tells me someone's gonna take a a hit on that one. Absolutely. Yes.

There, we're gonna see more of these acquisitions though, because the training data needs to be, you know, of a certain quality. The internet is generating so much data every day, but it's kind of garbage data for purposes of training, right? So I think we're gonna see more and more of these acquisitions coming that are purely for the data, because these models are hungry, they're hungry for more, they're consuming, you know, all this money's gonna go to something.

And I think a lot of it is gonna, once we get the GPU power, everything we need to, to actually crunch the data, then they're gonna be hungry for more actual data. And so companies like this are gonna see themselves on the chopping block, is the reality. We need more data centers.

Just kidding, right. Data. Sure.

Right. Um, That's the solution for everything. Just just build them.

Yeah. Build them, especially as you said in our, in our new territories. Yeah.

But let me ask a question though. Seriously, guys, I remember didn't Getty so get, you're right. And Getty was sort of the stuff, shirt of the image licensing crowd for a long time.

Right. But they also were good quality. To be fair.

I always thought Getty had the best quality. Um, but I thought Getty like set free of a good part of their library a few years ago where you could use it as long as you attributed or something. You didn't have to pay for a lot of the images.

Is that, am I wrong about that or am I hallucinating? I think, I think that you're right. Um, I mean, would that be like a, like a copy Lefting?

No, like a Richard Salman style? Yeah. Yeah.

No, But I didn't they didn't they like ease up on, on their licensing a bit? I think they did. I think, I think, I think that they did release a bunch.

I know the Library of Congress has released a bunch. I mean, there have been these large swaths that have come, uh, as an effort to get people to come back, right? Mm-hmm.

Uh, the loss leader. Yeah. You, you get some free, and then, oh, I want this paid one.

Well, I guess I got, you know, it's just a perception of value like a grocery store does with their specials in the week, right? It could be. I mean, it's gonna be interesting.

It Just, it just seems as if we're following the same path that we did with content, you know, the written content. And now in terms of arts, it's just, it's, it's, they're trying to adapt to this, to technology. And it's kind of like a, it's a, it's a slippery slope.

It's a, it's in a sense they're, we're rolling the rock up the hill, and I don't, I'm not sure it's really gonna make much of a difference in the end. Well, I'll give you, this might be something they're thinking about. They own the data instead of selling that data to the AI people, to who, why not create their own AI based on their own LLMs.

And then, and then, you know, it's to meet the new boss, same as the old boss. They're still out there. You know, you, you pay a subscription to use their AI to generate images that are pulled or, you know, that use their data to, to get a superior image, uh, library to use for it.

So This should give them the capital to do that, because you would think, right? But, but then it goes back to our first categories. If you're not in the top three, get out.

So has this become a sub-sector of the larger AI market, the AI image market, and then they could dominate that AI image market? Or do they, because they don't have a hyperscaler partner, an Amazon of Meta or Apple, um, do they not, are they not able to compete at at that hyperscaler? I mean, they're gonna have to do some smart partnering and they're gonna have to do it quickly because Adobe Canva, there are a lot of very easily access Sure.

Are, they're doing this and doing a pretty decent job. Um, but if they do some smart partnering, I'll tell you something, Getty's the kind of marquee, uh, brand name that Apple loves. Yes.

That's that's a great point. Yes. Mm-hmm.

It's a Tiffany name. A Tiffany brand name Yeah. That Apple gravitates towards.

Yeah. So keep that in mind. You heard it here first.

I mean, it is, it does, there's prestige associated with the name for sure. Mm-hmm. So I do think there's something to that.

I think we might see that in the coming months and years. I mean, it's gonna be very interesting. The acquisitions this year, I think are gonna be, Oh, it's gonna, it's, I think it's gonna go through the roof.

I think there's gonna be a rubber stamp at the FTC from now. Yeah. You're not next couple weeks.

I don't think they're, Speaking of land rushes, we can have an m and a land rush. Yeah. No, it's a good time to be doing m and a Fire up the engines.

All right. Mm-hmm. Uh, guys, I, I feel like we've discussed a lot of it, and I feel like we're putting poor mic here.

It's, it's hard to Oh, take the mic outta, I, I feel, I feel Mike's I feel Mike's pain. I've been through this. Yeah.

He's sitting by Stoically. Isn't that a good word to describe him today? Stoic.

Um, Mike is a very stoic guy though. Yeah. Mike, I'm sorry.

We hope your internet's working better for tomorrow. Show rumor has it, it was Mitch who sabotaged your, your internet. Wow.

Wow. Throw him under the bus. Jesus.

Well, he left. Damn. Remember Elon and get his starlink?

Yeah, you could do that, Mike. You could do that. Um, anyway, hey, and happy New Year.

Thanks for joining us on your first show of 2025 on the Gang. We'll have you back on soon, right? Next week.

Yes. John is always good to see you. See you back on the throne, Mike.

Well, oh, sorry. Speaking figuratively, but Mike, yeah, better luck with the internet. Thank you everyone for watching today's Textron Gang.

As usual, we'll have a, we have a full Textron tv, uh, schedule immediately following. So stay right here on your favorite channel, Textron tv. But for now, this Alan Shimel, on behalf of Textron Gang, we're out.

This is Techstrong tv. Hey, everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong tv. My next guest, he actually, he's been on here before, he's Andy Fernandez.

Andy is senior director product marketing at Haiku Haiku Inc. Not the poem people. Um, if you remember those from school, um, let's welcome him.

Andy, welcome to Text Trunk tv. How are you, man? Thank you so much, Alan.

Happy to be here. Um, and happy to hear any haikus. People'd like to volunteer our way.

I'm sure they must throw a lot at you, right? Oh, yeah. Um, Andy, before we go down a, a path that I wasn't contemplating here and trying to think of some good haikus, let's talk a little bit about you.

Um, as I mentioned, you've been on here before, but give people a sense of your journey to becoming senior director product marketing here. Yeah, absolutely, Alan. I'm, I'd like to say, but I'm probably not one of the few people who's been born and raised in the world of data protection.

So, you know, over the last decade, uh, my entire career, both in product marketing and product management, has been focused exclusively on data protection, disaster recovery, business continuity, and helping organizations protect and recover their data in very different ways. I've come from the traditional data center to virtual to SaaS and cloud, and it's been, it's been quite a, quite a run just focused on helping people recover their data. Absolutely.

Um, you know, and 10 years ago we weren't talking about ransomware. Now we are obviously, but, uh, um, you know, there, there's been a, a renewed, uh, emphasis on data and data security, I think over, since Covid, let's say, right? So over, let's say the last four years, five years.

Uh, um, but you know, it's a new year. It's a new year and new new happenings. One of the big things this year is the Dora regulations.

That's GORA. Not to be confused with Dora research from, well, now it's Google it. Originally it was, uh, uh, Jean Kim and Jez Humble, and Dr.

Nicole Forsgren, but that's a different Dora, right? For high performing IT teams. Dora is the, uh, uh, compliance statutes, statutes, and, uh, kind of framework put in place by eu.

But you know what, it applies to US financial institutions. If they're doing any business over in the eu, and that probably includes 99% of US financial institutions, right? Have some interaction with EU business, and therefore our, our, uh, responsible for Dora.

But before we get into Dora, Andy, let's talk Haiku. What's Haiku about? Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, Alan Haiku is the fastest growing data protection company in the world. Our focus and where we come from is protecting critical infrastructure. But as we talked about at the beginning, Alan, just 10 years ago, you know, let's say even before that, when I started my career, it was all about just the data center.

Ransomware wasn't a conversation. Cloud wasn't a conversation. SaaS wasn't a conversation.

The world has changed so drastically, uh, and so much faster than the traditional industry that we needed a data protection vendor that could evolve and adapt to what we actually have today, which is a bit of a mess when you actually think about it from a technology stack perspective. And that's what Haiku is able to do, is protect data. No matter where it is, cloud SaaS on-prem, it's making sure that you have full control.

com, you can read through our story, our vision, and our, our approach to, to data protection. com, HYCU. Absolutely.

At h ha, right? Not H-A-I-K-U, like the poem, or did they get that out there? So Andy, we called them who out, who Haiku is how they get there.

There might be some folks out here who are unfamiliar with Dora, right? Yeah. Or at least this Dora, right?

As it relates, what, what, how would you describe that to them? Yeah, absolutely. So I would say Dora is probably some of the best legislation and directive that is actually applicable to the times that we exist in.

And just for those, as you mentioned, Dora is not the research, it is not Dora the Explorer as the kids watch. It is the Digital Operational Resilience Act. And all it means is we take a look at where we are today.

And the reason I'm focusing so much on change is because Dora is trying to tackle that change. 10 years ago, every organization was running their digital estate, let's call it all of their applications, uh, everything that they're leveraging for communication, for file storage, for IP in a data center. All of a sudden, people not only are still using data centers, but they lifted and shifted to the cloud.

Maybe they modernized a bunch of applications, especially during covid. We're also seeing it today in, in how fluctuating the on-prem world is. But most importantly, the use of SaaS applications completely exploded.

Anyone with a credit card in an organization can start using a critical SaaS application that all of a sudden is logging critical customer data. So the compliance directives, the cybersecurity regulation, posture management, has always been years and years behind where companies actually are today. And this is so important from a cybersecurity perspective.

Why think about the eu? Think about the political implications of disrupting the financial supply chain of organizations and customers in the eu. Just a few SaaS applications, and of course there are thousands of SaaS applications.

If any one of those gets disrupted, if there's a supply chain attack, if somebody makes a mistake, we've seen this with CrowdStrike, we've seen this with public cloud vendors, even in the eu, accidentally configuring something and taking entire regions down. This is always going to happen. People are going to exploit these applications.

People are going to make mistakes, and customers themselves are going to make mistakes. In the past, everything was in a data center, so I could just protect that and I'd be okay. I had my backups.

But in the world of SaaS and the world of cloud, all of a sudden my data is everywhere, all at once. And regulation hasn't really evolved to catch up to that. And that's what Dora is.

Dora is saying, we understand what your supply chain looks like today. We have to make sure that we protect not only you and your customers, but make sure that the vendors that you trust are following these requirements. So when something bad happens, people are resilient, people can recover.

Customers are not effective. So when we look at Dora, all it is is saying, look, you're no longer just requiring on physical and virtual apps. You're using a flurry of applications in cloud, cloud hosted, or SaaS.

You might not even know what they are, but you have to start protecting them. You have to understand what they are. You have to discover those assets.

You have to make sure that you're protecting it, and you have to make sure that you are recovering it as well. So, Alan, when I say Dora is probably the best of all regulation, it's one of the few out there that are actually cutting edge and saying, this is the modern problem. This is how we're going to tackle it.

But at the same time, it creates a massive challenge for organizations to actually become compliant. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I, I mentioned in the beginning, Andy, just because you're a US-based its institution doesn't exempt you or insulate you from having to comply with Dora the same way. It doesn't help you with GD uh, GDPR. Right, Exactly.

Um, you know, I, I think the, the nexus is relatively a low bar for whether or not you come in contact with EU regulation. So I, I'm wondering, do you ever run into any US based financials who say, oh, yo, no, that doesn't apply to us. Yeah, absolutely.

It's a, uh, it's a distribution. It's a bell curve when you think about it at the beginning. No one thinks it applies to them, then all of a sudden everyone figures out it applies to them.

And then you have a couple of stragglers. Um, but the reality is there's two ways in which everyone is going to be affected by this. The first one is, if you have European entities, if you have European customers, even if you're a technology company, Ava, not just a financial institution, but a technology company with financial customers in the eu, that is an important thing for you to be Dora compliant.

The other piece that it impacts all of us is, this is probably one of the best, most accurate evolved pieces of legislations. There are going to be copycat legislations, not only with another industries in the eu, you're already seeing it with infrastructure, with what's called NIST two or NIS two regulation. You're gonna see it in Australia.

You're going to see it in the us. So short term, if you have European entities or lots of European customers, even if you have 50 employees, even if you have a hundred employees, that is going to apply to you as well. And for everybody else, that same approach is coming, whether it's healthcare, whether it's retail, whether it's legal, that same approach is also coming.

Absolutely. So Andy, when, when it comes to, to this though, you know what to do about it, right? How, how so much I've been in security 25 plus years, and my philosophy when it comes to compliance is if I do good security, I get compliance as a byproduct, right?

If I do compliance for compliance alone, I get what I call least common denominator security, right? Relative. That's the low bar true with Dora.

Or is Dora a different animal? I, I'd say Dora is a different animal. I I know exactly what you mean.

We call it, uh, um, checklist security, which is, Hey, did you do this? Yeah. Did you do this?

Cool, cool. Did you actually test it? Not really.

Where, where Dora really evolves is think about where we are today. You know, we, no one knew what ransomware was 15 years ago. Now it's all we can talk about.

This is where we see organizations in the industry spending over, what, $200 billion a year in US American, uh, cybersecurity budgets. Yet every day you continue to see organizations fall, you see real disruption. You see very, very negative impacts on business, on people's lives.

So we're spending more than ever on security, yet things are still happening. Where we see Dora really evolve if saying, look, we understand you have a security posture. You have your incident response.

You have your, your c you have everything on the firewall side. You've always had that, and you're always refreshing that. What you don't have is the plan for when that fails, and that is backup and recovery.

So Alan, not only is it now making sure that organizations have actual backups when something happens and breaches, but they're actually making people test too, right? So an entire pillar and association, Dora, is resilience testing where you have to buy. And it's a mandatory approach, depending on how critical this apps is.

You have to test your response. You have to test your recovery. So what I would say here is, of course, there are going to be things that are not covered in Dora that are best practices from a security perspective.

But just by asking for backups, asking for resilience testing, and a continuous framework, I'd say it's a pretty good approach for most organizations. And Alan, from what we're noticing in conversations in the field, most people are not even close to meeting that type of compliance. Interesting.

Very cool. Andy, people wanna maybe get more information from Haiku on this. com.

Absolutely. com, if you go and you click on solutions, you're gonna find an entire door page. We've built a checklist.

It has nothing to do with Haiku is simply, I am a financial institution. I've got a mix of all types of applications, and I need to know how do I meet these very stringent backup and recovery requirements. You'll find a full checklist there available for you, um, where you can go through.

And it is very extensive. Uh, it's something that I recommend everyone does, uh, even outside of financial institutions. Cool.

Just wanna check my notes real quick here. Um, I, I know you got your checklist is that, is there a name to the solution for Dora that you guys are pushing Yes. Or Offering?

Yes, absolutely. So after finding out what Dora was and how in depth it was around requirements, um, we started to look in the market and started having conversations with our customers. And one of our partners, uh, in the world of Atlassian, uh, tis, they're a global IT services partner, largest in the world of Atlassian.

They saw the requirements that Dora had, they saw the massive gap in backup and recovery. They saw what Haiku is able to do in protecting that with over 80 integrations. And what they realized was, Ellen, for an organization to get started today and actually start becoming Dora compliant, first they need to actually build a framework, and then they need to identify and map out all of their assets.

This actually, uh, means that if I'm a regular organization, I'm hiring people, if not entire department, to actually start this process. It's expensive, it's cumbersome, and it's super difficult. So what we've done with this partner and with other solution partners, like, uh, land Sweeper nafi, is we built an entire GRC solution, a full GRC solution that says from the beginning, we'll help you actually automatically discover everything that falls under door requirements for compliance.

And we will make sure that every single pillar from asset discovery to response and recovery are all included in that as well. And what this does, Alan, is not only saying, look, we're a great technology for backup. They're a great technology for asset discovery.

Those folks do this. It's a single solution that automates it. Um, so it starts with the checklist, but then it starts with, well, I actually have to do this, and you need a real GRC solution to be able to do so.

And that's where we've partnered with Dentis, Lance Sweeper, and organizations like App Fire. Fantastic. Andy, thanks for coming on Tech Trunk tv.

Happy New year to you and all our friends at Haiku. We'll hope to have you back on soon. Especially as we get maybe closer to the RSA season.

Um, but for now, that's it. We're gonna take a break on Tech Trunk tv. We'll be right back.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey everyone, this is Alan Hummel for Techstrong, and you are watching another edition of CD pipelines. Ed Pipeline is a, uh, monthly video series put on by us here at Techstrong in partnership with our friends at the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the CDF.

And, uh, we're gonna tell you a little bit about the CDF in just a moment. So if you're not familiar with it, not to worry, we'll get you familiar with it. But basically, we every month pick another topic of interest to those in the world of continuous delivery, CICD, DevOps, and, um, explore it a bit.

We've looked at the various projects that are under the CD f umbrella that they manage and own. Uh, we've looked at trends in the market and how some of the mega trends are affecting cd, just about anything that that touches on cd. Uh, we unfortunately, I, you know, taping a recording.

No one tapes anything anymore. Who am I getting recording this? Uh, right after, uh, AWS re event last week, we've lost a person or two from our panel, uh, see as we call it, the AWS Reinfect kind of syndrome where people get sick.

So our co-host, Lori Larussa, is, is not available to us today. She is under the weather, as is we think, the DC sonika, who actually happens to also be the chairperson, uh, for the CDF. So we hope both of them are feeling better, and we'll have them on at our next CD pipeline show.

But the show must go on as some famous someone said at one point. So let let us March on. Let me introduce you to our, uh, panel members today.

First of all, uh, well joining us, he's the open source advocate at IBM Andrea. Do Oli Fri Bri, not Fri Ali Fri is that Andrea? Welcome.

And I, I said you were an open source advocate at IBM, but maybe you could add some more color to that for us. Thanks, Alan. It's great to be here.

Yes. So I work at BMA software engineer and developer advocate. I focus on open source and as part of my open source, um, job and work that I do.

Uh, I serve, uh, for the Continuous Delivery Foundation for the CDF as chair of the Technical Oversight Committee. And I'm a, as well, a, a member of the governing board. And, but I'm a software engineer, uh, and I'm involved in maintaining some of the projects within the CDF and I co-founded the city events project that we're talking about today.

Wonderful. And thank you. Thank you for what you do, you volunteering as well.

Next, I want to introduce you to Gerard McMahon. I messed that up, but Gerard, correct me please. Uh, so it's Ger McMahan, as we say, over here in Ireland end, and Yes, Gerard McMahan.

Gerard, why don't you introduce yourself? Thank you, Alan. Um, so my name is Germ McMahan.

I work for Fidelity Investments, and I'm part of the CDF governing board at representing the end user members. Um, my role here in Fidelity is heading up what we call a LM Tools and Platforms. So providing the tools, the platforms, and the services for all of our developers at Fidelity to, to, you know, to build their code, write their code, build their code, test their code, and deploy their code to our customers.

Okay. Thank you and welcome Gerard. Uh, last but certainly not least is Ben Powell.

Hey, Ben, how are you doing? Doing Good. How about you, Alan?

Very well, thank you, Ben. Why don't you introduce yourself? Cool.

Yeah, so I am a software engineer at Apple. Uh, so I work primarily on continuous delivery tools. Uh, prior to that, I was actually at AWS, uh, speaking of reinvent, um, I was on the SDKs and tools, uh, team, and then eventually ECS.

So a lot of experience, uh, in that regard. Um, so I, um, I'm maintainer of the CD events, uh, org and repos as well. So I help kind of facilitate, uh, the spec as well as, um, a sig lead for the implementation sig a part of CD events.

Excellent. All right. Um, so guys, I, I feel it necessary for people who maybe are catching this show CD pipeline for the first time.

We've been doing CD pipeline for more than a year, maybe going on two, but for people who are familiar with the Continuous Delivery Foundation or the CD Foundation as sometimes we refer to it, or CDF, which seems to be the new, the preferred nomenclature these days, right? The CDF is a, I call it a daughter foundation of the Linux Foundation. So it's under the Linux Foundation umbrella, and it is, it was set up specifically to focus in on the continuous delivery market and, and it, uh, community and, uh, you know, perhaps its biggest job is managing, you know, I think is it eight or nine projects that have been donated, given to fostered under the, uh, CDF umbrella among, which is the CD events project that we're gonna gonna talk about today, but also some, some kind of household names in the tech world.

Jenkins for one, um, oh, I'm drawing a blank. My goodness. Netflix, Google Spin sticker, Spinnaker for two.

Um, who you are all board members here? What, what are the other projects under the CDF umbrella? Well, we have project like Screwdriver, uh, for instance, and Jenkins and Spinnaker that you mentioned.

We have tacton, uh mm-hmm. Um, yeah, the city events protest and what else? We have, uh, Jenkin Sachs.

Yeah. Um, which is also GI UPS in the GI UPS area. Uh, yeah.

Excellent. I mean, it's from, you know, and, and our audience is DevOps and cloud native folks and cybersecurity, and so these are kind of very well known projects and tools to, to the audience. Um, again, before we start, I should also mention that the, uh, CDF recently announced the annual conference, which is coming up, actually, Gerard, do you maybe have some of the, uh, particulars on that one?

Yeah, so CD Khan has been running as a kind of pre-con micro conference as part of the Open source summits in, um, north America. So this year beyond in June in Denver on the 23rd to the 25th. So we look forward, do you want to come or participate?

I think there was a call for speakers open at this point, isn't there? Yes. org?

So it's CD Foundation. CD Foundation, excuse me. Yep.

Excellent. Just wanted to get that out there. Alrighty, folks, if it's okay, then let's turn to our topic at hand today, which is to get people aware and familiar with, uh, a project under the CDF umbrella called CD Events Project.

Andrea, you mentioned you were one of the co-founders of this, so if it's okay, I'd like to start it off with you and give us kind of the background. What is CD events, what kind of drove you to wanting to, you know, make this project? And we could go from there, Right?

Um, yeah, thanks, Alan. Um, so, um, I mean, we, we started in the, of course, the, in the continuous delivery landscape, but more generally, uh, what we call the Soft Factory. So looking at, you know, the, the software, how it's built, starting from source all the way to, to production.

Um, and there, we, we have a number of tools that are involved in these. Um, you have your CD tools, your CI tools, your, uh, software management, uh, systems, your deployment system, and so forth. Um, and there are several options for all these tools, and a lot of them are hosted by, by the CDF as we discussed before, but others are also hosted by other foundation.

Um, but, uh, what we notice is that there is a lot of fragmentation and how these tools are set up in the data models they use and how they, they talk to each other. And so, um, the CDF project, we created it basically to try and address this, this fragmentation and bring interoperability in this space, right? So we want to, um, make it possible for these, uh, tools to, to talk to each other, to generate data that can be processed, uh, seamlessly across the different tools and, you know, make it easier for organization that use many of these tools to not have to reinvent wheels and, you know, integrate them these tools with each other or, um, in house all the time.

So, but yeah, mainly we want to bring interoperability in this space, and that's how city events was, was born. And City Event itself as a project is, it's a specification. Um, so it basically defines, um, formats for events that can be produced and consumed by, by tools in this space.

And expand a little bit to kinda give it a little bit more of a, some concreteness like, uh, imagine you have like your whole, let's say you're a company and you have your whole SDLC, which is software development lifecycle, um, architecture, you know, you have all these services and tools running, and let's say you want to actually add or even switch out a tool to do that today, it's very, very difficult. You're gonna spend, you know, months, maybe even years, just trying to get to that place where you are at, to just deploy that software again, at the same, same level, or same criteria. So with the goal CD events, as, as Andrea has had alluded to, is, is interoperability.

So you're, you're, our goal is to be able to just be able to pick up pieces and just put new pieces in very easily and transparently. Absolutely. So, but when we say it's a spec, I don't wanna lessen what CD events project is, right?

It's, it's, it's more than a spec. Is that fair to say? Um, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the project started with a specification, uh, but we went on to implement a number of SDKs or software development kits that can be used by the different tools to make it easy to, you know, consume the events or produce them, validate them, and so forth. And, uh, more recently, the, the project expanded even further, uh, through one of the, um, working groups that May Ben mentioned earlier, that is sharing that, uh, it's the implementation working group, because of course it's nice to, to have a specification, but, you know, we want to actually provide guidance, uh, on how to go about implementing it and, you know, benefiting from, from this, uh, interoperability, um, that we're setting up. Yeah, and Alan, I, I add to that, and I totally agree, it's far more, or allows it, it creates a framework or a way to, to go much further.

So, you know, for a company like Fidelity, you know, using CD events, you know, allows us to express, you know, all of the different events that happen across the L-S-D-L-C into a common form, and then allows us to be able to have conversations across all of those events in a very consistent and common way, um, helping us, you know, join events, you know, from disparate systems and allows us then to say, you know, how do we measure governance? How we, how we might measure compliance, how do we ensure that codes being created, built and tested according to the kind of our standards and the kind of the specifications fidelity might have, or any, any enterprise might have. And re CD events allows us to express those events in a way that it can achieve those outcomes.

Fair. Um, You know, look, I think all of us on here are very familiar with how open source communities work. Not everyone watching this is gonna be as familiar though.

Let's talk a little bit about the relationship between like CDF and how it sponsors this particular project and where kinda rubber meets the road with the broader community. Do, do you know what I'm saying? I mean, it's one thing for the CDF to say, okay, we, we are gonna sponsor CD events and we're gonna, you know, have people like Andre or on our board who are kind of co-founding it.

But in terms of growing the community in terms of, you know, making breathing life into a day, day by day, it's not the CDF per se that's doing that, right? It's the maintainers, it's the, the community as we say. Can you give us a sense of the size of the community, of the involvement of the community here?

Aja, I hate to put it on you, but you are, you know, you are one of the go Under, um, you know, growing, uh, growing community, uh, is a continuous effort. And, but we've been lucky, uh, with a, with a great community, um, in, in the city events project. I mean, we, we've had like, uh, early adopters from the beginning, like, uh, uh, friends, uh, you know, Gerard and, and Ben here that, uh, started at the early days, uh, contributing to the project, uh, components as to the specification and, you know, taking it on and starting adopting it and, you know, bringing the, the invaluable feedback back to the community.

So, um, yeah, and we, we have, uh, a core group of, uh, contributors that, uh, are kind of always within the project, you know, helping, facilitating the working groups and con bringing the discussion on. And then we have other, we have had other companies that maybe joined the project, they're interested in a specific area, contribute some to the project, and then, you know, take that home and, uh, may contribute later in the future. But, yeah, so we, we, we have, uh, several companies that contributed over time.

So we had, um, Ericson contributing, uh, a lot of, um, a lot of the, uh, specifications and SDKs. We have companies like Cube, uh, cube Shop, Bloomberg, and Red Hat, uh, do while, so SAS. So we have many companies involved in each, you know, contributing to different areas and, um, other, the project itself.

Yeah, And one thing I wanna, I want to add to that as well, 'cause it's more on the open source side of that, is, um, so generally with open source, you have this concept called like working groups or SIGs, uh, which are special interest groups. And so these are like, you know, some sort of timeframe meetings that's like every week, every couple weeks, every month, you know, it could be any sort of allocated amount of time for any sort of, um, for any sort of period. Um, so with these groups, the maintainers and anyone that's interested in the project can join these calls.

So these calls are completely public. You can just go to a GitHub repo and, um, you know, we'll, well established ones and find a calendar, which will have these meetings. And then you can just hop in, you can hop in and just start participating.

So we encourage anyone that's interested in open source to go ahead and do that. Just go to any sort of interesting, uh, repo that you find that you wanna contribute to and just attend. You don't even have to speak.

You can just attend. And we're always looking for maintainers. We're always looking for more people to join.

So, you know, feel free to go to CD events, take a look at our calendars, and please, please, uh, show up. We'll, we'll, we'll encourage the discussions. Absolutely, gentlemen, if it's okay.

Okay. I'd like to pivot a little bit. Look, it's December, it's the end of the year.

Everybody's forward thinking, what does 2025 look like? What is 2025 gonna bring in ways in, you know, in ways of technologies and ways of business, in ways of, it's a crazy time in the world. There's wars and there's regime change, and there's elections and just, you know, it's, it's, it's a busy, crazy time in our world now, CD events.

You know, someone once told me, don't do anything if it's not going to be big enough, right? It's gonna have, if it doesn't have the potential to be impactful, don't waste your time. See the events as a project that has tremendous potential to, to be impactful, really help our organization streamline their, their pipelines, their delivery pipelines and collaboration.

As you look at 2025, where do you think kind of the promise or the potential is specifically there with CD events that, that could make this really impactful in this coming year? Andre, I'm not gonna pick on you for a spin, if it's okay, let's pick with you and then Gerard and Andrea, you can fill in from there. Uh, sure.

Yeah. So for me, um, 2025 is gonna be a really good year. 'cause like I said, like, um, we started the implementation sig about, I don't know, maybe a month or two months ago.

And so we're gonna start implementing the things that we're talking about, the, the specifications, the theory, you know, and try to prove that these concepts work, um, and ensure that they are of quality and, and are very efficient as well. So that's gonna be very key for us in 2025, is getting, um, the actual implementations down so companies can actually start using these technologies, or even people, you know, if they're interested in seeing how this stuff works and wanting to see, um, the efficiency and the, the easability of tra uh, just changing tools, you know, we wanna be able to provide that. And then also on top of that, we also want to kind of, we, we talked a lot about interoperability, but there's also another side of the coin that CD events, um, really caters to, which, which I think we want to also cover here is, is metrics and, and telemetry.

So that's another good job that we've done, um, at CD events spec wise is, is when you're looking at CD events from afar, um, there's this concept called links, which allows you to like link the individual events together. So if you're some sort of like, let's say you're very happy, you're some sort of on the very top of the leaderboard, or, you know, in, in terms of like you just said, like CEO or CFO or something, you could actually look at the impact of, let's say, when a ticket was open to how long it took to actually get that feature out into production and all the bugs that were associated with it, just with CD events. So that's, that's gonna be our overarching goal.

Are we gonna get there in 2025? Uh, I could hope, but probably not. But we're gonna try to strive there through the, through the implementation stakes by answering, you know, like what the spec looks like, as well as how do we address the observability portion of it.

So that's gonna be the focus, well, at least my focus for the next year is the implementation of these concepts. Yeah, I think jam to, to kind of, um, lean in on what Ben said and, you know, even potentially go further and broader, is the more enterprises, um, that kind of adopt CD events, I think, you know, from where what we have seen so far in our adoption is it's actually created new questions and new things we can ask of information that we didn't actually think have think of before. 'cause there was no visibility or transparency into the underlying data.

So therefore we didn't realize there was even questions to be asked. So, you know, how do, how could we apply this in, in a governance compliance perspective? Can we apply this in a security perspective?

Can we in product, even if we wanted to try, you know, the, the million dollar question, does Gen AI deliver on its productivity? You know, are we now being able to look inside the data, right? The data's the currency and the data is the evidence.

And are we able to look inside this data, um, to, to gain understanding from it? I think, I think there's a lot of exploration yet that I think CD events has opened up to us. Um, and we're looking actually forward to sit to innovating into that, exploring that, innovating within that space, and see what other opportunities outside of the ones we already know and that, you know, Andre and Ben have articulated that we're, that the community is focusing on building in 25.

But I think I'm look also looking forward to 25 is what does the 26 roadmap look like? What does the 27 roadmap? Because I think there's great potential and opportunity here.

Yeah. I just wanna make note, we got about 22 to 23 minutes in before Gen AI was mentioned today. That's pretty darn good.

Pretty darn good. Um, but I agree with you, Gerard, Andrea, back to you. Yeah.

Um, thanks. And I totally agree with, um, Moger and, and Ben mentioned, and I mean from, I, I look at it from, from a kind of, uh, open source project point of view and what we, we plan and what we, we hope to, to, to achieve in, in 2025. And, um, we, we discussed about the, um, implementation working group and what we really want to focus on in, you know, to, to help enterprises company and open source project adopt CD events and make the most of it, you know, starting from small, uh, and, you know, to grow to, uh, a larger scale, like, you know, covering the entire SDLC like Ben was saying, you know, asking new questions, building new, new metrics.

And so, you know, we, we keep on like working, improving our SDKs, um, increasing more languages, um, uh, you know, drawing kind of reference architecture that companies can use to say, okay, this is how we we go about, uh, adopting city events. We need this component and that component and so forth. And, uh, what, what characteristics do they need and so forth.

And so this is, uh, uh, some of the areas where we are going to focus. And, and of course, I mean, I I was talking about city events at the, the Linux Foundation Member Summit couple of weeks ago, and I think it was a bit further than 20%, but maybe about 50, 60% from my slides. I also had a mention of Gen ai because it must be there.

Uh, and, and that's an area actually though that, um, where we, we might consider expanding the, uh, the specification as well, uh, because, um, we've been talking about building software and the software, uh, uh, lifecycle build and, uh, software factory. Uh, but now something that, uh, a lot of companies are doing is building AI applications. And so we want to make sure that we have all the, uh, events that are relevant for those kind of applications as well as part of the specification.

And I made a call to action during my, uh, my, my talk, and there was quite good response already. Someone in that space said, oh, yeah, but be interested, you know, in contributing events in that space. So we hope to see that's that going, It would be great.

It certainly would be great. Um, How does CD events play with the other CDF projects? Right?

This is something I've bought in the past too, right? Because, you know, if you look at it, you look at the CDF projects, they all kinda live in their own silo, right? And there's not as much integration as one may think, but CD events seems to me to be something that would work with some of the other CD foundation projects, right?

And there can be integrations there, and there can be crossover, cross promotion, cross use, so forth. Um, community building, is there someone from c you know, on the CD events side that is looking at that? Is that something the CDF board is looking at?

You know, where do we get one plus one equals three maybe? That's a great question, Alan. Thanks.

Thanks for that. So, um, indeed, one of the goals of C events is to, you know, be supported by as many communities as possible. And being at the CDF, the CDF project are our first, you know, and the closest project, our dearest project.

And, uh, we discussed this also as part of the technical oversight committee. And, you know, uh, we think as a, as a TOC from a TOC point of view, that's definitely a priority to get CD van support in all the CDF projects. Um, and that's, uh, already the case for many of the projects.

Uh, I mean, thanks to the Fidelity, uh, contributed the, the Jenkins plugin. So you can produce C events, um, from, from Jenkins already, and be there is support, uh, on spinnaker that was contributed by, uh, apple and Ericsson. Uh, so we have experimental support in tacton, and so many of the projects are already coming on board.

And we are also working on a, a mechanism that we call the, the VU adapter to integrate more and more projects as a, as a kind of translation layer that we want to, to, um, we started implementing and with plugins that can decode physically translate messages from, uh, different platforms into, into city events, you know, to speed up the, the adoption. Excellent. Um, guys, we're almost outta time.

You know what I realized? Did we mention a website specifically for the, I know we mentioned the CD Foundation website, but did we mention the website for the CD events project? We did not.

Where can we go get more CD events, project specific info CD events Dev, I think, right? Andrea? Yeah.

CD events, Dev City events, do dev. And then from there we have the documentation, we have the community page. We'll send you, like Ben was saying earlier too, where all the community meetings and details and how to contribute.

Um, and we have the CD events organization on GitHub as well with all our specification as the case and, and more, You know, will there be a specific track for CD events at the CD Foundation Summit in June, or too early to tell yet? And the CD con is kind of like a mini summit, I think it happens the day before. Uh, right, the day, I think it might be day zero, is it, or, um, only of the conference.

So as part of the call for papers, um, you know, we'll have multiple, multiple talks during that mini-conference. And yeah, absolutely hope we have, uh, CD events being one of those talks where we, you know, we can share more with them, with the audience that, that are right, that are around that day. Excellent.

Excellent. Do you know where in Denver the event is? In the Colorado Convention Center?

That's what I was thinking. The Convention Center. It's a nice place, a nice place for this.

So do check that out. You can get to the Open Source Summit as part of the Linux Foundation, uh, website as well. It's Open Source Summit North America.

We're about outta time. Andrea, Andrea, not thank you for being on here today, but also thank you for all you're doing around the CD events project, right? It's not easy, as I said before, kind of breathing life into these things day to day.

So thank you very much, and thanks for being on the show today, Gerard, thank you for joining us as well, and for all you do. You know, it's one thing for, and I don't mean to slide anyone, but when a vendor has people on board, generally the vendor's paying for them, but the vendor has an agenda, right? Uh, yeah.

Here, you know, Gerard, you represent the every man and woman, right? And as part of Fidelity, and Fidelity is a huge supporter of Open source as, as I think most of us know. But, um, thank you for all you do on CD Foundation and, and, uh, volunteering your time.

And then of course, Ben, thank you for what you're doing and staying on top of all this. It really does take a village to, to, you know, maintain these foundations. So it's not just the Linux Foundation, you know, sprinkling some money and dust on these things.

It's, it's the day to day-to-day work that, that keeps it going. So thank all three of you will we, we'll be back next month with another topic for our CD pipeline show, Lori and d, we hope you feel better. We're sorry you missed it, but this is Alan Shimel for Techstrong and CD Pipeline.

Have a great day. This is Textron tv. Hey everybody.

We're here at OpenText World in Las Vegas, and we're talking to my good friend Joel here. And we're talking about the OpenText ecosystem and how big it is. And perhaps you could explain this, but the OpenText platform is brought, it covers a lot of ground.

So where does OpenText kind of begin and end, and where do partners fit into the ecosystem, and how does all this come together? Well, thank You. It's a great question.

We, the OpenText partner network is, is quite big. Um, and so first of all, as a, as an organization, a significant portion of the company's revenues come from or are, are touched by or influenced by by partners. It's, it's quite large in that we have strategic partners, like our great partnership with SAP, we interact with all the big global system integrators, uh, across the board, the Capgemini of the world.

We have thousands of technology partners. Um, and we also have a huge, uh, distributor and reseller network who are sort of classic in that doing classic distribution and reselling of our products. So you ask the question, where does, where does OpenText end and, and the sort of the partners begin?

Partners are there kind of every, every step along the way, you know, they're at the first mile, they're helping us generate the leads or, or doing the co-innovation that might have led to the go, the go to market co-innovation together. And they're there helping us sell, uh, often in, in the middle of the deals. And they're at the, they're at the end oftentimes helping us to, uh, to, uh, implement or, or have customer satisfaction taken to a different level inside of an organization.

So really, uh, across the board, uh, partnerships are, are, uh, that we're dealing with are there for us everywhere. Partners come in multiple forms. Some of them are IS vs.

Some of them are traditional resellers, uh, among the resellers and integrators. Are there attributes that you're looking for that makes for a good partner? That's a great question.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, its course is different by segment, by by partner segment.

But, but mostly when we think about what differentiate us, differentiates us as a company and what we look for in our, our partners, therefore, as well is for companies, whether they're a tech partner or a, a cloud partner, that, that would like a Google or a, an Amazon or a, a Microsoft or a strategic partner like an SAP. We're looking for those companies that have the ability to be transparent with us and wanna work on co innovation at a, and I know this sounds a bit trite, but it is, we're looking for that sort of interaction at a real level. Yeah.

So whether it's, as I said, the first mile or, or even before the first mile where we're, we're doing co-product, co innovation together. Yeah. Like with a tech partner or with a, a strategic partner.

Or it could be all the way at the back end, you know, where as a set, so the partners are delivering on the professional services or the customer satisfaction sort of pieces that are going on. It's, it's that kind of company that can, wants to be a collaborator, that wants to be transparent, that wants to be real. That's what, that's what we're looking for too.

And we are different in that, in that regard. We have very tight relationships as a result of that. What is the opportunity for those partners?

Because a lot of them are also sensitive to issues like profitability. So, um, is demand for this whole space around data and information management increasing and, you know, what kind of return can the partner expect? Well, that's another good question.

They, they're, first of all, we have different kind of partners by product line, uh, um, but they're all fundamentally looking for the same thing, right? Which is what accelerates their business in, in, in some way and in whatever way that's meaningful to them. And that's, that's one thing if you are, if you're Google.

Yeah. And, and what, what, what do you want out of a a com? A company like OpenText?

Well, you want more Google Cloud to be consumed ultimately. I mean, you want other things too, but that's ultimately what you're, what you're looking for or more of your artificial intelligence products or, or your large language models or whatever it might be to be used by a company like OpenText. So if, if you, if you look at all at all of that, or, or a reseller who's, who's trying to ultimately say, is there, is this something the market wants, right?

So that I can go out there and, and sell and sell more of our job, our products really across the board, and I'm not just saying this, but it is absolutely the truth. We have growth opportunities across the board in, in all of our buss with, with the partners. Our job really is to help the partners define both the micro or macro niches that, that we want to help them go after so that they can maximize that growth and profitability for themselves.

Ultimately, it's what's good for the, the customer that that's, that should be driving it. But then it's gotta be good for the partner. It's gotta be good for OpenText too.

And if we can help orchestrate all that, we have really good, a really good winning scenario between the three. It seems to me, having watched the keynote today, that OpenText is kind of emerging as the hub around which the data workflows kind of move in the age of ai. Yeah.

And there are connection points out to, as you pointed to SAP on one side and maybe different LLMs over here. Um, is there an opportunity for the partners, therefore, to kind of use OpenText as kind of the foundation for which they're driving any number of AI solutions? Oh, yes.

A a, absolutely. So let's, let's imagine that you are a, uh, a partner. I mean, this is one example, but let, let's imagine that, that you are a partner and you've, you've derived an extension to some specific, uh, product line that we have.

I won't even, I won't even bother to name what it could be. 'cause it could be, it could be dozens of product lines that, that would fall into this category. And then likely extensions via our APIs of our artificial intelligence products, or alternatively just our, our core products as well, all extensible by, by the partners.

And that's just one go to market motion that, that we have with them. But that's a big deal, and that's an ongoing thing that the, the partner community is engaged with, with us on. And it's cool too because it, it brings innovation.

Yeah. Uh, so it's, you know, more, the more people that, that are involved, the more eyeballs, the more great companies that we have involved in this, the better it is for the customers. Uh, ultimately, uh, So if I'm a partner and I invest to get to know the platform, it then becomes extensible to multiple use cases.

So the ROI on that initial investment is pretty high because I can now work that through any number of opportunities. Yeah, Absolutely. So a lot of the partners have some kind of domain specificity.

Now, I'm gonna, I'm kind of speaking more of the distribution of the reseller, reseller channel right now. 'cause it's a little different for like a strategic, like SAP or for a, for a cloud company or GSI obviously, but, but let's say that they've got domain, you know, uh, specialty and what we're seeing, and we saw it in, uh, the partner advisory board that we had yesterday. We saw it in our partner collaboration day that we had yesterday.

We're seeing a lot of our partners who, because they understand the model now, they understand how we work. They understand the transparency and the, the co innovations that we're trying to derive either with product or we go to market, they're gonna be go to market co innovations too, right? It doesn't have to be, uh, just from a a product standpoint, the, the partners are also starting to think to themselves, okay, I've got expertise now in OpenText.

I've got my master's degree in OpenText. I know I know how to navigate this, right? And I actually could pick up more products now, things that I maybe I wasn't doing before.

So they got their domain expertise. And now, you know, I'll use an example. You might have our, a content provider or a, uh, or a, a reseller that was really good in the content space and data orchestration space.

And then they look at what we're doing from a security standpoint and think, yeah, I could, I could put these things together Yeah. And, and, and I could go sell that niche and I could become the expert on that. And we're starting to see more and more.

That's kind of cool, uh, to see the partners pick up on that, On the technology partner side, you know, the Google's of the world, Amazon's, whatever it's gonna be. Mm-hmm. They don't like to acknowledge each other as competitors.

Mm. Mm-hmm. But in some ways, as OpenText emerging, as kind of a neutral territory where they can come and kinda interact with each other at the customer level without necessarily having to formally acknowledge each other.

Yeah. That's a good, that's good. Uh, in, in Mark's keynote today, he talked about the platform of platform's, multi-cloud, uh, platform.

And that's exactly what we do. And, and not just across one product line, but across many of the product lines, there's, there's, it's not their cloud agnostic that they could be delivered on multiple clouds. That's one thing.

And we, and we are that, uh, today, but also that we can stitch clouds together. So that information, there's not a barrier that between, you know, how we would interface and move data from one system to another, or extract information from one system, maybe on the Amazon cloud, move it to another system, which might be OnPrem or, or then maybe there's, there's, uh, some sort of, uh, data com computational work that goes on, and then maybe that gets dumped out to something on Azure, right? That's what we do every, every single day.

That sort of, uh, complex data orchestration and, and, you know, security and governance. Yeah. Is there something you wish, and I know there's multiple types of partners, so you can work your way through the list a little bit, but is there something you wish that, you know, your traditional reseller managed service provider understood then what a GSI might understood, and then a technology partner would understand about OpenText going in before you have that conversation?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, it, I think I'll answer that question in two different ways. So the first is, if they understood this about us as an organization with just who we are and, and what we're all about culturally, it's that transparency that I talked about at, at the onset.

There sometimes is a built in amount of, uh, uh, you know, I'm not gonna show you everything until you show me more and more. And we as a group from a a, across the company, so it's not, not just the partner team, but across the company, are very, very open to transparent partnering around these co innovations. Again, that could be product oriented or, or go to market oriented.

So if they knew that about us and we didn't, we didn't have to waste, uh, uh, six months or a year, uh, of, of going through that, that time and, and that, that we could accelerate, uh, uh, better together, they'd benefit, the customers would benefit, we'd benefit. Oh, yeah. I'd always like to go faster just by knocking down walls and barriers.

Yeah. There are, on occasion conflicts with partners will happen. Sure.

Uh, there are lots of people selling different things at different times. Is there a process for managing all of that? How does that kinda work itself out?

Yeah, Great. Great question. We have, uh, so we have thousands of partners and, and, uh, thousands of transactions that are happening every year through partners.

So not everything's perfect, right? And, and, and sometimes there is, uh, a conflict between, you know, us and a partner where we're right there, right. Or maybe it's somewhere in the middle.

Yeah. And, um, and I think, again, I talked at the beginning about that, those miles, yeah. You know, maybe they're at mile zero where, where they're helping us drive the co innovation, or maybe they're at the last mile where, where they're helping us get it over the finish line on, on, uh, satisfying the customer's needs.

You know, uh, the, the truth is we have to see them as an extension of ourselves. And, and, and when you deal with them that way, and we do, and, and the truth is, whether it's Google, uh, you know, the biggest companies in the world or whether it's the smallest reseller that, that there might be, we try to have that exact attitude, right. And, and, and deal with them with that sort of, you know, not to be trite, but affection and, and, and transparency.

We, uh, you know, we have a, a incredible relationship with SAP, it's spanned several decades. It, it's a massive business, uh, between the, the two organizations. And we often refer to each other as a family, as a, as opposed to, you know, even talking about the partnership, you know, per se, because we, we genuinely view it that way.

Not just OpenText, but, but SAP, uh, does as well. And, uh, and that's a testament, I think, to that culture that, that I talked about about before, which comes right from the top of the company. It's, uh, it's, you know, it's, uh, a pleasure to work here.

From that standpoint, what's The level of investment required on the part of the partner to come up to speed on the platform? There's a lot of training. There are various certifications that people have to get from time to time.

And when you talk to partners, they're always kinda like, well, how much do I gotta put in on the front end of this thing to get the expertise before I start to see the Return? Sure. Yeah.

Sure. Um, a couple things. It's really dependent on the kind of partner that, that we're talking about, but let's, let's use, you know, an example like in the global system integrator space, they can only spend money and invest personnel if they're going to have a substantive return, you know, on it.

So, uh, our job is to, I talk about that transparency. It's actually to set that out and talk about that, uh, upfront. How big could this really be?

And really do detailed, you know, total addressable market analysis and talk about the kind of commitments that we need to make to each other, to, to achieve the sort of, uh, levels that, you know, that we might be talking more that they may need. And if it's not there to also be honest enough and open enough to say, that's not gonna work in, in this, you know, doing it this way might be beneficial to me, but it's ultimately not gonna be beneficial to you. We have those conversations.

Yeah. And, uh, and that's kind of what partnership's all about. Mm-hmm.

One of the things that has struck me as I walked around here is that every partner's probably trying to figure out, how do I cash in on this AI thing? But if I go back and I use the gold rush metaphor, all the people who made the real money were like handing out shovels and dungarees. And so is that kinda like what data management's gonna be like for ai?

It's gonna be the, the thing that makes all the money isn't necessarily the ai, it's gonna be the data and the platforms to fuel the ai. Yeah, it's, I think a couple things. One, we are sitting on, uh, a AI gold mine here because of all the, think about a data management company, and then imagine all the, the, uh, managed unmanaged data, the metadata layering that, that goes into ai.

It's the heart of ai, right? Yeah. And, and that's the heart of OpenText.

That's, uh, that's, that's what we do. So I think we're extremely well positioned from that standpoint. But the second thing I was gonna tell you, I, I like the idea of like, who ultimately made the money in the gold rush.

Right? That's a good, good, good analogy. Who's gonna make the money in ai?

And no one's figured it out yet. I mean, really, I mean, there, there really isn't, uh, uh, a clear, not only is there not a clear leader, there's not a clear path, uh, really yet either. For many companies, it's the companies that partner together that get more value to the end customer and figure out how to drive that, that value across the chain in AI specifically, not just generally across systems, but in AI specifically, I see this little corner of the world that I sit in, in, in partnerships as just the crucial hub of, uh, of that future unlocking of the AI value for the customer, for the partner, for us.

Yeah. Uh, you know, across the board for the, for the hyperscaler, the, the cloud companies, all of them, right? They like, we're, it's how we get more together to deliver that end value is, is what's gonna, that's who's gonna win the race.

It's a foot race, and that's who's gonna win the race. You talked about the technology partners. Each of them has their own partners.

So where do all the partners kinda meet together in the ecosystem? I mean, 'cause I could be a Google partner Yeah. And how do I kind of cross pollinate into the OpenText channel, as it were?

Yeah, well, right here at OpenText World, uh, the truth is, we have a lot of partners who are b who are multiple, they're an SAP partner, they're an OpenText partner, they're a Google partner, and they're a reseller, uh, you know, of, of ours. Or, uh, they're a solution extender for us. And they're an SAP reseller and they're, uh, an implementation partner that's really common, uh, for us.

So, uh, so part of it is that's kinda the ecosystem that we run around in on a, on a day-to-day basis, but then it's also incumbent on a good partnership team, like the one that we have here at OpenStax to pull in other members of the ecosystem who may be only a Google partner as a, for instance, but who are crucial to delivering the end value that we're trying to do, either in a co innovation or to an end customer. And that's, and that's what my team does. Alright, folks, you're already, if you're a partner and you wanna make some real money in the a JI think data management, It's right here.

Hey, buddy, thanks for Coming. Yeah, great job. All right.

We'll be back in a minute. Welcome back to Textron Unplugged. My name is Cassandra Chin, and today we have Kevin Dubal with us here.

Hi. Can you introduce yourself? Sure.

Yeah. So I'm, uh, Kevin Dubbo. I'm a developer advocate at, uh, at Red Hats.

Um, and I've been doing that for the last two years. Um, and my background is in software engineering. Uh, I've done that most of my work life, my work career.

Uh, yeah. And, And can you tell me a little bit about how you got started into technology? Sure.

Yeah. So, um, of course as a kid, I was, I enjoyed playing video games and stuff like that, but I wasn't necessarily looking for a career in it because, um, I, I didn't really like the idea of spending my whole life behind, uh, a desk. Um, you know, I always like, I, I pictured myself, you know, going places and doing stuff.

Um, yeah. And then I did end up, uh, going to the university and then, uh, we found this, uh, uh, kind of university degree in Italy, which was kind of a combination between linguistics and computer science, because I also am passionate about language and, uh, linguistics. But then, yeah, I like to play that.

Can You tell me a little bit about what linguistics actually is? Yeah, so it's basically the study of language, right? So in, uh, in linguistics you can learn about, uh, the history of, uh, of languages, how they were created, how they evolved, and, um, but also literature is part of linguistics.

Um, and then of course, you know, studying actual languages as well. When you took computer science with linguistics, was it kind of accidental or, Um, in, in a way. So, to be honest, uh, before I went to Italy, I also studied at the university in Belgium.

Um, first I did aeronautical engineering because I was really, uh, I wanted to, I wanted to become a pilot, uh, but I did some tests and my eyes weren't good enough, so I wanted to do something with airplanes. So I studied aeronautical engineering, didn't quite work out. Then I completely changed to, uh, studying, um, linguistics in Belgium for a little bit, but I didn't really like, uh, the university system in Belgium, and I wanted to go somewhere else.

And so, because I had always, you know, been, you know, like playing around with computers and doing, uh, you know, some experimentation there, I was like, well, here's a course that kind of combines those two interesting subjects, and it seems like something to, to try out. So that's how I ended up there. And so in a way it was a little bit accidental how I ended up going into, uh, computer science that way.

You said that before you felt like computers were just like sitting in front of a screen all day. Yeah. How would you feel about it now?

Um, completely different. Uh, so I started, uh, learning about the actual programming at the university, and, um, because before I just like created some websites with HT ML or CSS or whatever, um, and never really actually programmed. And once I started doing that, I was like, this is actually really fun.

I really like this. And, um, when I graduated, um, I moved to the United States. My, my wife's from the United States and, um, uh, got a job, uh, which was, uh, programming with cold fusion, which is, uh, really random.

Uh, but I really enjoyed it. And it was literally, I mean, for the most part, sitting behind a desk. Can You repeat that again?

You said programming with cold Fusion? Cold fusion, yes. So, uh, it's a really weird one.

So it was, uh, using this, uh, IDE called Dreamweaver. And so it basically like embedded HTML and like the same XML kind of structure for the, the programming bits too. So it was a little bit funky, like it made sense, but it like mixed, you know, the front end and the back end kind of very like hard coupled in, in that.

So it did that for a year, and then I started realizing like, I don't know if this is a good direction for my career. So then I got more into, well, I first, uh, uh, into, uh, I, I got another job where we worked mainly with PhD. HP also didn't love that because it was a little too loose.

And, uh, I had studied Java at the university, and that's where I really enjoyed, you know, like the structure and, um, the, the, you know, like the, the, the type safety of it all. So then eventually I got into, uh, a Java J and kind of never looked back from, uh, from Java. Is that your like happy spot Java?

I think so, yeah. Yeah. It, uh, I, I think especially the few years that I worked on PHP gave me really a sense of like, um, working with developers who were not very disciplined and we had to maintain the, those applications and it was, it was a mess.

Because if you don't have the type safety and you don't have like the, the, you know, kind of the, the, the barriers in a way that Java provides it, it can very quickly become a mess. If you're not super, uh, structure in the way that you define you, you create your code. And that's something that always bothered me about, uh, working with PHB.

And I like that about Java. You still have flexibility, but more like, It's more like rail guards scene. I'll just go over it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what are you doing now today? So, uh, I, I now work as a developer advocate, so it's funny, I sit less behind my desk now.

I mean, I still do, and I still, uh, write, uh, Java programs, but quite a bit less. Um, instead I, you know, I do a lot more public speaking about, you know, my experiences that I've learned over all those years working as a software engineer and as a lead software engineer and working with teams and, uh, and especially about, uh, developer experience and, you know, how can we find, you know, a way to make developers happier in the sense that they can focus on being productive, but in, in a fun way, right? Not to necessarily crank out more code or anything, but actually enjoy and, and feel that I'm not spending my time, um, you know, working on boilerplate kind of stuff, you know, that I'm actually like creating something new.

Um, so yeah, it's, these Still come back to coding sometimes. Absolutely. Yeah.

So, uh, I, I get to create, uh, demos, of course, uh, for, to kind of support my talks and to show like, Hey, here's some cool stuff. Um, and so we at Red Hat, uh, we work only with open source, right? So I get to work with, uh, um, open source projects and kind of bring them together.

Uh, I get to experiment a lot because like, we are, you know, like at Red Hat, we're working on a lot of experimental stuff in the open source communities as well, so I can be like the Guinea pig to try out a lot of this stuff and provide feedback. Um, so I create, you know, like, uh, little applications here and there. The kind of, the, the fun thing is that I don't need to support them on production anymore because it's just like, you know, they need to work for my use case and, and my things.

And sometimes a little more than that because we also create content and tutorials and, uh, labs and everything. So there they need to be a little bit more stable and maintainable, but for the most part I get the, that's Really different. 'cause I think when you work for software engineering, sometimes your job is maintaining someone else's code.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Um, that's, uh, the reality, right? Is, uh, you, you go into a project and you see the code, and I mean, and to be honest, even if I look at my own code from a few years ago, I, I get the same kind of reaction. Like, uh, this is, this needs to be done better, or Why didn't they do it this way?

Or, you know, can I even read this code because it's just a tangled mess or something? Um, I, I don't necessarily miss that part. I mean, I, I still, still get to experience some of that, especially working in the, in the open source communities and you know, I also contribute to some projects, you know, we see a little bit of it there, but, uh, yeah.

Are you involved in open source communities? Yeah, so I, I'm not like a core maintainer of any projects, but uh, you know, I contribute to, for example, to cus or, um, to Poman and Poman desktop or uh, to K Native, you know, so, um, bits and pieces here and there whenever I can, uh, well when I have time and when I can, uh, find something useful. What kind Of contributions do you make?

Um, so like for example, in in Corcus, uh, it's usually when I try out something and I find that there's a piece missing or uh, there's a bug or something, I'll, uh, I'll, you know, try to trace through the code and see if I can fix it or if I can add a new feature that, you know, addresses my need and my use case. Um, you know, so for example, in, in cus in terms of, uh, serverless functions, I found that there were, you know, like you can create, um, functions with QCA that you can deploy to, uh, Lambda two Azure functions and two Google Cloud functions and 2K native in kind of the same way. Um, I found that there were like some kind of differences between them, so I, you know, tried to make it a little more universal or, uh, in the CLI, there's a caucus CLI that you can also do a lot of the commands with in a more intuitive way than using Maven or Gradle.

Um, but there were also like bits and pieces missing, so I was like, oh, I'll, uh, I can do that. Do you ever feel like it's intimidating to like submit a change or suggestion to a really big project, which, Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

So especially if you're not like day to day working on those projects, um, it's hard to come into those projects, uh, and feel like I'm doing it the way that they expect it to be and then, but I think you need to be a little bit okay with, you know, the fact that you'll probably get feedback, uh, asking you to maybe change something or write it in a different way or something. And I, I think that's okay, but it is definitely intimidating, especially like I'm now a developer advocate, so I don't like write code on a daily basis. And so there's a little bit of that imposter syndrome, right?

Like, uh, you know, maybe I'm losing my edge or something, and so I don't wanna be judged for maybe riding it not in an optimal way or something. So, but I mean, I tried to get over that and if they see that there's issues and they can just tell me. Aside from just technology, do you have any other hobbies or like what do you do in your free time?

Um, so in my free time I try to not have like, uh, personal projects in terms of like, uh, programming or it, I, I like to go outside. I really like the outdoors, so, um, you know, I like to travel, which I can fortunately combine in my current role, but I also like the outdoors and I like to go, um, snowboarding or pack rafting, which, uh, which is something I picked up over the last few years where you basically just throw a little personal raft into your backpack and you go into the wilderness and I mean, you do your research, you don't just go down random rivers, but, you know, like you can, uh, enjoy nature like that. So yeah, it Sounds like a lot of fun.

Yeah, it definitely is. Yeah. And it's good to have that balance between like not always being in front of the computer.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's important to sometimes disconnect and, uh, you know, have something else in your life.

It's, it's really tempting to, you know, work a lot of hours. And admittedly, I I I, I catch myself doing that too because like, oh, I wanna finish this, and then, oh, there's also that, that I wanna do. And, um, but I, I really, uh, feel regenerated after like just disconnecting for a while and uh, going out in nature.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. Maybe I should take more breaks from my computer. Yeah.

Yeah. I think we've had a really good chat today, so thank you Kevin. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Really enjoyed it. Thanks. This is professor, let me share a interesting fact to start with today.

Do you know that what the power of AI is and the AI's role in global economic impact? 7 trillion is what AI gonna contribute to the global economy by 2030. And you know what?

This is more than the combined GDP of India and China. Together, this impact will span industries from finance to healthcare and transportation. And it shows how AI is not just an individual sector, but entire economic network and to share the machine learning models who have played a vital role in climate change.

Let me tell you, this is the factual data. Machine learning models are greatly capable of analyzing the satellite data, which covers the key 6 million square kilometers of forest in the world, and it can predict the deforestation patterns with 92% accuracy in today's date. As we talk, this models provide the real time insights that will help the agencies and organizations to take immediate action to protect the critical ecosystem.

That's the power of ai, that's the power of ml and that's impacting the world of projects. Hi, this is Professor San again. Today we gonna learn, we gonna witness the next 25 minutes, which we'll talk about the world of air.

We gonna walk through the topics which we'll talk about transforming how we approach project management in a agile specifically, and we'll explore the remote work diversity and resilience, how it's shaping the agile team for tomorrow. My goal in this session is to leave you with practical insights and examples that you can take back to your teams. So let's get started.

Now, when we think of a j we know that how a giant have a evolved significantly when we used to have, uh, the original form for agile. Now if we take a look back, it's no longer just the practice. When we look at agile, agile is a mindset, and this mindset will encourage adaptability in each aspect of work.

In today's environment where thieves are open, spread across globe, they are, uh, in different geographies, different time zones, a giant methods should be used to adopt this changing work ecosystem, work landscapes. Now imagine a traditional agile setup where everyone meets in person, uh, for daily standups for huddles, okay? And different ceremonies.

In today's world, this standard structure have evolved, evolved over time, and now we have Jira bots, now we have different digital bots, we have shared resources despite the teams are available remotely and also in office and hybrid, absolutely when we need, when we know what we need. Different teams are using digital platforms to connect. This shift now have net to the development of hybrid a joy it needs that we blend the traditional practices with flexible solutions, solutions which are more digital solutions, which are more a port apple solutions, which are more available always when we need them and should be easily adoptable with the organizational culture.

This session, we should intend and we will intend to cover how to leverage all the transformational trends related to agile in AI ML projects to make our agile practices more future remote work have fundamentally changed how agile teams operate. One, uh, significant advantage that, uh, I'll say that how we can now tap into the talent from across all over the world. That's a benefit that we see.

For example, at Citrix, we recently hired a UX designer who is from Brazil and a developer who is from Eastern Europe. Now, this geographically drivers have brought fresh perspectives that reshaped our products design. However, when we see that remote work isn't, um, without its own challenge, there are some sweet challenges.

So time zone difference makes scheduling difficult and uh, it can be hard to build a strong team culture when team members have never met in person. And a simple solution is to have, uh, a team overlap hour. So we dedicated, uh, time when everyone is available and we thought that why not connect, why not talk, why not see why not care for each other in that time.

Now this helps bridge the gap and makes collaboration more efficient and that have impacted and a better onboarding time, better productivity, better operational, uh, excellence, and less of involvement of the stakeholder. So out of three time zones, we have 60 minutes, which is overlapping time with three teams. We spend 20 minutes each and once a month some ceremonies.

That's how we have achieved productivity with changing diverse themes are not just, uh, uh, about different nationalities. I'd say they're about bringing together different skill sets, different backgrounds, like someone from ux, someone from ui, someone from polling, someone from designing someone from products, et cetera. And different viewpoints.

Absolutely. Now research shows that diverse teams are more innovative. Why?

Because they bring unique perspectives of problem solving. Each team member carries a different persona of how to approach the problem. What are the best solution according to each team member?

Sometimes leaves me surprised, oh, it can be taught this way as well or it can be achieved this way as well. And that's interesting. Uh, for example, on recent project what happened, we had a team members with different levels of agile experience and the more seasoned agile practitioner were more focused on process efficiency.

While the new team members were more focused, uh, they were leading into unconventional ideas. Now the combination of both of this, it created a solution that was both effective and innovative. We were able to understand that how this diversity have been encouraging and, and uh, it was a key agile I'll say.

And it helped the team approach the challenges from multiple angles. Now, a agile team faces constant changes. I'm not talking about just the team level, we are talking about the market condition.

The client demands various product improvements or even internal. Now resilience is the quality that allows this team to keep moving forward despite various adults, various obstacles. One practical way to build, uh, resilience is through one concept, safe to pay or feel safe.

Now in our recent project, we were trying out new features, which was innovative and it was related to cryptocurrency and it's required a different polling approach. Now, instead of rolling it out to everyone, we just did it with a small set of group. And the favorite most model that is proof of concept.

The experiment failed initially and which we expected may be the possibility, but we learned some valuable lessons without risking the entire project. We were able to test the prototype on the low complex, low priority work, and it was safe to pay approach. Now, this safe to pay approach allowed us to adapt, uh, the change without any business impact, without any product here and making the team more resident, more confident.

And it was more product. The effective tools played a vital role in onboarding any change, understanding any, uh, cultural diversity, project diversity, ecosystem diversity or technological type. Very easy.

Now, effective tools are essential for agile success in all virtual and environ. If we want to take a quick look at some of the tools that have transformed an approach to agile collaboration, if I know of you are, uh, a Microsoft teams slack for real world communication, for real time communication. These tools have created a secure platform which are integrated with any number of project management tools.

May be Jira, uh, who which is used for managing the sprints, tracking the progress, or it can be Trello, which is used for virtual task management or maybe the Citrix, uh, work now solution, which we are using with JIRA's MS projects, SharePoint, so and so forth. Now at Rex, we use this, uh, work now, which is integrated with Microsoft teams and also it talks with Jira. Now every sprint review is recorded in teams, which means we don't have to worry about is project manager or scrum master available, which team members will have a responsibility now because the meetings are AI enabled, the nodes are taken and approvals are seamlessly understood if there are any, uh, improvements, if there are any observations, if there are any rework, those are smartly captured via AI tools.

The simple practice of onboarding the productivity tool with various other collaborative factors app help us to meet the deadlines have helped us to keep track of change app. Help us to keep track of betterment approvals. Remember, tools are only effective when teams know how to use them collaboratively.

The techniques for managing distributed giant teams, it's interesting topic and it have been, uh, I see that this will be lived for a longer period of time. Teams will have a great future. All the companies will see that their teams are working remotely, will have a great good future.

Now for distributed agile teams, it's Christian to adapt some practices like uh, daily standups, retrospectives planning sessions. There are some techniques that have worked well now, uh, uh, if we talk about us and pro standups, not every dean can join at the same time using a platform like Slack for any US and Kroners check-ins, which will allow team members to enter access, communicate, collaborate, despite their from different time zones, they will be able to update their progress whenever they're available. Maybe tools like Jira, updating the board using a product board where the features are requested and users get to know which features have been accepted or which features have been uh, parked on hold or parked off and later, which features are in pipeline.

That gives a great good confidence to all the business and internal users to understand how the product shaping should take place. Marketing team understands which goals have to be designed in a specific way. Now this real-time usage instead or waiting for documents to be rolled out, minutes of meeting to be rolled out.

App created a real time meeting in books instead of person retros. We have virtual retrospective. We use Miro to create interactive retrospective.

Each member had their thoughts on virtual sticky keynotes and most of the time it can be more rules, it can be mirrors. And this approach have improved the engagement and given all team members a voice, even the quiet a one that's most important. I'll give you an example.

One of our, a giant team in India and Europe, they had an issue syncing on sprint codes. Now by moving to this uh, r synchronous check-ins, team members could log and update, which means they were able to update without any restriction. Without any challenge.

Even the quieter ones had their opinion and they used to keep it forward. And because it was the common platform, it was more collaborative, a small change which created a big impact, a big impact that have reduced misunderstanding, that have improved the alignment, improved the team outputs. And this changes have been increasingly promoting our organization culture towards transparency, towards productivity.

When we think of building and inclusive a joy culture, it requires intentional actions, it requires an objective. Inclusivity is not just about policy. It's not just about creating the rules, it's about daily practices.

It's about driving the right set of culture and the culture, the practices that makes the team member feel valued. It should make team member feel that they are heard. I'll take an example again.

Now, during retrospective, we ask each team member to share one success and one area of improve. Now, by giving everyone a chance to speak, we encourage diverse viewpoints and we foster a psychologically safe environment, a safe team culture, which will help individuals feel comfortable, transparent, valued, and they are comfortable to propose new ideas even if they are unconventional, even if they were not tried and tested earlier. Now, this openness is crucial for agile teams so that they can thrive on adaptability and continuous improvement.

How many of you may have faced an issue if you are in a retrospective? If you are in, um, a meeting and you may have taken a second thought, should I really put out my word, talk out, my thoughts loudly and I have an unconventional idea and should I call it out? How many times have we felt that there are so many leaders in the events, retrospectives meetings, daily stand and we have old pack from sharing the best idea that could have saved a lot of time or would have been beneficial to the end customers?

Some of the other ways, a lot mini if yes, this is the answer there. The technique that we are talking about, the strategies that we are talking about, let's try this is more about it, but one of the strategies for fostering adaptability. Adaptability is a core agile value and it's more critical than ever it was in today's dynamic work environment.

Now there are some strategies like when we think of leveraging adaptability, when we embrace spontaneous learning, when we learn from the mistakes, when we learn from the best practices, when we learn from nothing is working the way we expected or everything is working in a better way, what we forecaster, we encourage the team members to regularly upskill and explore new methods of learning. We implement the flexible frameworks, we consider various frameworks like we have been using uh, Kanban boards that will allow frequent adjustment based on the team requirements and need. And a product manager, if was some for people with Kanban, despite it was, uh, an a giant sprint that we were wanting to move and it was more iterative.

But if it was creating a value to the product team and to the business understanding Kanban better and the development team was flexible enough to adapt the sprints in the Kanban. So that allowed a frequent adjustment according to the product managers priorities, which means product manager was able to shuffle the Kanban, go the way he or she wanted, and team were able to understand this priority seamless. One of our team at Citrix recently adopted Kanban two weeks ago for an experimental project and they had shipping requirements way too flexible.

I will say. Instead of sticking to the fixed print cycles, we moved tasks dynamically. So this strategy allowed us to adapt quickly without the constraints of sprint, without the constraints of uh, limitations of various techniques.

We have also been thinking to work on j plus xp, J plus, um, different models that we have. We used MS projects, we use can, and each team came up with their unique way of working where we integrated the entire collaborative team communication on either Slack, on either various different channels. Now, if we happen to sum up what we have discussed so far, what we have been talking about, so there are three takeaways for building an agility that is ready for future one.

Firstly, the remote work. Remote work is gonna stay for long companies, teams, managers, leaders. We should be ready to welcome this work approach.

We need to equip your teams with effective collaboration tools to bridge the geographical gaps, technical gaps, skill sets, diversity where we promote inclusivity and encourage the diverse perspectives as the lead to innovative solution. If something's working well for a team doesn't mean that it should work for entire organization. Looking at the skillsets, the expertise, the way cultures are being driven into silo teams and the geographies where they belong to or different set of team members belonging from different geographies in a set of team, it may work well and lend the customized approach of project management and ceremonies and the tools and techniques be respected for this bits and pieces, which means, uh, organizational value, which is leveraging team members to decide on how they would want to manage their productivity and collaboration using different techniques and tools effectively.

Lastly, I'll talk about the resilience and adaptability. Once again, one should foster a safe to pail environment because in AI ML there are lot many things to be explored. Let the teams safely pale, create the safely peeling environment and create a level of comfort in adaptability.

Adapt the flexible pre-work that will empower the team to adjust swiftly. Now this pillars which are remote work diversity and resilience are foundational for agile teams and global fast pace environment. With this, I would want to thank you everyone for joining in this session.

We have explored the future of agile teams and agile teams who have been accommodating teaching and also improvising themselves with the changing landscape. Uncertain situations have yielded to beneficial approaches. We have explored the future of agile teams touching on remote work, diversity and resilience and agile teams today are increasingly global, building a strong foundation in this areas.

This will prepare you for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow. I would like to hear your questions, insights or any unique experiences that you would like to share about your own agile journey. Let's discuss how we can apply strategies to our unique projects and challenges with this.

I appreciate everyone staying with me for this webinar and tech strong for giving this wonderful opportunity. This was Professor Sada. Have a wonderful day and journey.

Let's stay connected. Thank you so much for your attention once care. Yeah, hey Pete, that's all.

Thank you. Welcome everyone, and Thank you you for joining me today. My name is Iran and today we're going to explore how we can manage projects effectively using digital whiteboard tools.

'cause in the age of hybrid work, collaboration is taken on a new dimension and there are loads of different tools like mural, mural concept board. They can all help us do things a little bit differently. Today I'll be focusing on MI but there are different tools as well.

Um, but I will get to that in a minute. Before we get started, a few words about myself. Um, I'm Iran.

Um, I am freelance agile project manager. I have, uh, over 10 years of experience in project management and one is seven years in agile roles. Most I work as an agile coach or scrum master, occasionally as a product owner as well.

And that's basically what I do. And aside from project management, I also help organizations transition into agile, adopt new practices like OKRs for example, and scaling organizations. So today, uh, I want to draw from my experience and show you how I use digital whiteboards as a tool, uh, maybe a little bit more intensively than other people do.

Let's have a look at what we will cover today. So we will start by looking at the new reality of collaboration and the challenge of tool overload. Next, we'll go through each phase of a project and see how whiteboards can support your work.

And then we will also build a sample board, uh, for your project. Finally, we'll discuss some of the potential downsides of using whiteboard tools and compare them uh, to traditional tools like Jira or MS. Office.

Ready and let's get started. Alright, uh, back in the non-REM remote days, a lot of my project work used to be done physically. So I remember walking, uh, through the office building to my desk and just see what's plastered with gun charts, Kanban boards, discovery work, and a lot more.

Now things have changed for better I think. Um, so we have a lot of digital tools right now. Those, uh, have revolutionized collaboration, given us more flexibility and new ways to work together.

But with so many tools like Jira, slack teams, office outlook and so on, it's hard to keep track of projects that become more complex. Studies even show that a tool switching between those apps, um, can decrease productivity by up to 40%. And on average, one company uses 88 different tools in total.

So that's a lot of overloads, uh, for a lot of people oftentimes spent searching it for information instead of just working with it even creatively. So today we're asking, are we missing the simplicity of traditional whiteboards and can we bring some of that magic back into the digital world? So in my opinion, digital whiteboards have the potential to combine best of both words.

So you have the ability to collaborate visually, which is good for a lot of people, including myself. I like to work visually as well. And they're also flexible.

So teams can use them in any way that suits them best. And uh, it also works well for distributed teams. And lastly, they also have a lot of integration tools nowadays.

So you can integrate your Jira, you can integrate your messaging apps, you can integrate them as office, and that gives us a structure of tra traditional project management tools combined with visual accessibility. So that was a lot of talk. Let's now have a look at how that would look like in the real world.

So I will go through a few project phases, not all of them, um, and just show you examples of, uh, frames that we have used in the past, uh, to just scribble on whiteboards instead of sending files to one another. So every project starts with initiation. We want to define the high level goals and business value.

Traditionally we'd create some kind of documents. So you put on a word file, put, maybe put it on SharePoint, have Google Doc store in Confluence. Um, and then that's kind of easy to get to, but even easier is just having them all on the whiteboard.

Um, so in a whiteboard tool, you can just put all this information and visualize it also. So a single whiteboard can house the project charter, the team roles the objectives, and that's just really great for visibility and alignment. So this is how something like that would look like.

So here's just a regular project framing template. You can use this one, you can also use another one. Um, whatever suits your needs.

So if you have other dimensions that are more relevant in your organization, you can swap them out. And what's really neat is that you can treat this as a living document. So you can take this exact board, share the link and go through different meetings, refining it with stakeholders, with your team, um, and uh, just have a single source of truth.

Once you've done that, you usually take the next step towards project planning. And in the project planning, uh, we try to identify and prioritize tasks. And traditionally this has been done in tools like Microsoft Project, Excel, maybe Jira.

Um, those tools are really good for task detail and structure, but they can become difficult to manage visually. So in a whiteboard tool, you can prioritize your tasks, you can create a roadmap like it has been done here. You can create kan boards, flow charts to map out dependencies, whatever fits your needs.

And this gives, uh, everyone an immediate understanding of what's important and where the teams focus. So you can just keep editing what you have. So now that we've planned our project, obviously we're gonna work on it.

Um, and in agile we do this not all the time, but mostly in sprints. Um, so we plan the work, we build the work, and we then we review the product increment if everything works out well. So normally we'd use something like Jira or similar tools to track each sprint, but with whiteboards we can map out the entire sprint plan, track tasks as they progress and just be more flexible.

So flexibility is the key here. Teams can design the board layout to fit the way they work, and this allows for adaptability over time. For instance, we can have our daily standup section here or even track blockers visually.

So this is an example of how you could do it. Um, you can see uh, some kind of notes on the left hand side and the right hand side, whatever, uh, suit your team needs. Um, a lot of these tools also have integrated, uh, tools that help you during agile ceremonies.

So you have stuff for estimation built in, you can track your dependencies, everything can be done in here. And this example is also pretty neat because this one, if you look very, very closely, um, you can maybe figure out that all those little stickies, the tasks, they are actually Jira tickets. So, um, in the background, the Jira instance linked and you can basically just use them in this ui.

UI is a big point because the developers I've worked with, they hate the Jira ui. Um, it's not uh, their gusto. Uh, so what we do a lot is we put everything in Jira so it's documented, it also fits the rest of the organization, which works a lot with Jira as well.

But we use the myro board to just do our own work, right? So the team can use it as a daily board and uh, everything's very, very easy and very user friendly and a lots of flexibility there as well. And then after sprinting you have the retrospective, which is where these tools just shine.

So, uh, here's just a amalgamation of different layouts, um, and templates. There are plenty of pre-made retrospectives that you can use. Um, and they also have a lot of built-in functionality, again, like anonymous voting time, boxing and so on and so on.

So this is basically the, the core premise, uh, to use this tool. And this is how you can basically do you have video project work, uh, in whiteboarding tools. Apart from that, there are also unlimited options obviously.

So they have these tools are very versatile, so you can use them for other courses within or around your project. They're very good for large and complex workshops. You can do pi plannings with them, you can do strategy sessions.

You can also, uh, incorporate research UX discoveries and you can even do documentation in there. So you can put your process documentation in there. What we do a lot is technical architecture.

We put them in there and all those items can be interconnected, so you can have them all on one board and whatever you want to look at, you just have a single source of truth. So these are a few options. Now let me show you how I would build one of those boards.

So this is an example of a board that I have built, um, similarly, not, it's not the same obviously, but the board is somewhat similar to the boards that I've uh, worked with with my previous teams and projects. And uh, I would just walk you through it. So in the middle you can see kind of a welcome box.

Uh, you can slip your team logo on there and then link to other areas on your port. This helps a lot with navigation because you will start to see that a lot of content comes together, but it's not always easy to navigate those ports. Having a site map makes things easier there.

So then we have the main area, the task board. This is where everyday work happens. So we have a kan board there, for example, and uh, put our tasks on there like you've seen on the previous slides and uh, you can surround it, but whatever you feel like your team needs on the left hand side, uh, we have everything that feeds into that.

So you can have your project charter in there, your long-term strategy. You can even facilitate the project kickoff on this board, which I've done in the past as well. Um, and just have everything that actually led to this group of people coming together and working, uh, on the same board as well.

Then we have what I like to call the preparation area. We have the backlog here. We have a refinement space and sometimes during refinement we learn that some stories are not really ready to be executed, so we need more discovery.

So what we do is we put the discovery right there. So you have a discovery area, uh, where you can discover all the stories you want to work on or the features you would like to implement, and you have everything just right next to each other. Then moving on the right hand side, we have some kind of documentation.

So this is where we can display health metrics of the project or of the sprint. Uh, we cannot document the decisions taken in our meetings, uh, because we have a lot of people that cannot always attend every meeting because maybe they're only in the project for 50%, but then they have the decision log right there. Uh, you can also take meeting notes.

You can write down people you need to contact or your stakeholders who to contact for what and just have it have everything in one place. If you all want to go one step further, you can also put your retrospectives on this board. Uh, you saw with all the templates that I've shown you before, you can just do your retros on the sport and just have everything in one place.

One thing to consider though is who has access to the sport? So what we do is, uh, we keep these boards very transparent so everybody in the organization has the link to the board, has access to the board, at least read access, and uh, can have a look though obviously having retrospectives on there is not the best way to go. So we have a separate board for that.

But aside from that, you can just put anything on there that, uh, works for you when structured thoughtfully. These boards can provide clarity for everyone involved and have everything in one place. So it's very easy, it's very flexible, but it can also be a little bit overwhelming, which leads us to the dangers and pitfalls of these tools.

So they do offer great possibilities, um, but they do come with some risks. So first of all, they lack the rigid structure of tools like Jira or MS project, which can lead to inconsistency. This is the backside of having all the flexibility there.

So, um, you get some flexibility, but then again, if you have the need for more structure, then these type of tools are not element for that as well. Another issue is visual platter. So imagine the board that we had before, um, there's a lot of stuff going on on there, so, um, it is very hard to navigate those things sometimes.

So having a navigation at some point, um, makes sense and helps with that. Also, those white ball tools have usually very limited tracking and reporting capabilities. So let's see, you want to measure your lead times or cycle times and you just work with stickies.

Um, then obviously you would have to do it by hand. So you don't have the burn down charts that you usually have in, in tools like Jira and um, dependencies are not updated automatically. So there's some manual work though you can circumvent that with linking those services.

In backgrounds though, like I said, uh, what we do is we have a jar instance running in the back and uh, then just use myro for the front end and also for all the other stuff that we are doing in the project aside from from tasks. So linking those things can, uh, leverage your productivity as well. I've already talked about confidentiality, so this can be another concern, especially if you have sensitive information on the board.

So make sure you know who has access and uh, what can be edited by anyone. So this um, usually takes some kind of administration efforts. So all in all, it's very important to find what works best for you and your team, balancing the flexibility of the whiteboards and making the tool work for you.

With that, I want to thank you for joining me today to explore the role of digital whiteboards and agile project management. I hope the session has given you some new ideas of how to structure your project visually while avoiding some pit walls fault we discussed. If you'd like to connect or discuss this further, feel free to, uh, reach out.

And other than that, I hope you have a great skill update. Thank you.