Techstrong TV June 10, 2025

Hey, everyone. Looks like Walmart's playing small ball with small ai. You're watching Techron Gang.

Hi everyone, it's Alan Hummel and I'm back. Happy Tuesday. I've been away for two weeks traveling, traveling the the countryside of Italy and really enjoying myself.

Highly recommended of any of you ever get a chance to go to the mountains of Tuscany and just really enjoy the lifestyle. But I am psyched and happy to be back here on Textron Gang and back with my gang members talking about great things. As I mentioned, we're gonna talk a little bit about Walmart playing small ball or small ai.

We're going talk about that. A few other AI things. We've got an update from Bonnie Schneider at a recent event she was on, and we've got our Steven Foskett to give us an update from a recent cloud field day.

Let me introduce you to our gang members talking about all this today, though. First of all, joining us from the data center down in Florida. It looks like resident expert on many things is a good friend of mine though, too.

JP Morgenthal. Hey, jp, it's good to see you, man. Same here.

Glad to be here as usual. Fantastic. Then jumping from there out to Boulder, Colorado where she, I hear she was on a little biking adventure herself.

Yeah, South Dakota Black Hills and the, and the Badlands. You oughta go The Badlands, the bad girl from the Badlands. She's analyst Kimberly Bay.

Hey Cam, it's great to see you. Good to be here. Oh, and then joining us in, I guess he's home in Hudson, Ohio, the Hudson Flash, uh, tech Field Day founder president Stephen Foskett.

Hey, Stephen, how are you? Uh, good. It's, uh, good to be home for a little while.

Uh, a lot of traveling going on over here too, but, uh, not, not quite the bad Badlands though. It sounds like a, I Guess that's Akron, right? Akron can be the Badlands.

Well, if you're in Hudson it is, I guess, but, you know, I think of the Bruce Springsteen song, but I digress. Speaking of Bruce Springsteen from the other side of the river, that's another Bruce Springsteen reference there for you if you didn't catch it. He's our chief content officer, Mike Ard.

Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm good. I'm gonna be close to New Jersey later today.

I'm going to the Datadog conference over Javit so I can wave at it. Nice. All right.

We're always, always close to Jersey. Can see you from the Jersey side. Anyway, let's jump into our first, oh, You forgot somebody.

Oh, Did I forget? Yeah. Hello.

Um, joining me here in studio, she is our Echo Insight analyst and expert editor Bonnie Schneider. Hey, Bonnie. Hey.

Good to here. Good to see you, Bonnie. I, I apologize.

No problem. Alrighty, let's jump into it. Mike.

Walmart's playing small ball in AI with a kind of different strategy. Tee it up. Yeah, I'm not so sure how different that is.

I was just curious to me that A, they actually bothered to articulate it. And b um, it does seem that this is the route forward for a lot of organizations and maybe there isn't gonna be this kind of handful of magical AI agents, and there's gonna be a small army of them that you have to figure out how to orchestrate. But jp what's your take on what's going on here?

Yeah, I, uh, I think I had the same impression as you, Mike. When I read the story. I was like, okay, what's the news here?

Um, maybe I, I do think the, the author, uh, you know, was trying to differentiate from the fact that these large mo large language models that are answering everything from health questions to, uh, you know, supply chain questions, to travel and transportation, you know, it'll book your trip and also find you're a cure for cancer. You know, it sound, it sounds a little too good to be true. I think people are starting to get lost.

And I think what Walmart is trying to call out is, is a, an an architectural approach that says, you know, right now, um, and let me stop for a second. Let me over the weekend, apple, which has been kind of bashed about for their lack of involvement in this AI community, came out with a, a slam paper from left field that was very interesting. That's getting widely distributed that kind of basically put a kibosh on the reasoning, uh, theory and thinking that's going on.

And, and the reality is that reasoning isn't really reasoning and here's why. And, you know, putting, putting the mathematical proofs behind it to show that, yeah, if you put the right data in, you can basically make it look like it's doing the right stuff. And as soon as you're outside the scope of, you know, what it's been trained on, reasoning falls apart, uh, which is getting apples some kudos for, you know, in certain circles and in others, you know, the, the fanboy hype factor or, you know, coming out like antibodies and trying to destroy the virus that is apple for cuck cooing on their parade.

But in many regards, it does play into what Walmart is doing and saying and recognizing. And they probably, you know, Walmart's always had great researches when, when they've, they amazingly have always had these incredible teams of people on the forefront of technology helping to drive their business. And, um, and they probably do a lot of research that doesn't get documented that is on par with stuff that you would find in Google or, or you know, Amazon.

And so, you know, they recognize, I assume themselves that, hey, this reasoning stuff really isn't, you know, we can't count on this. This isn't ready for prime time. It's not what the, you know, what the, uh, anthropics and the, uh, you know, and the Googles and you know, uh, you know, the other players are, are saying it is open ai.

So let's look at it for what it does well, and let's look at it for what we are. We're a retail company. We, you know, uh, it clearly AI can play a, you know, a big area for us in our main area, which is supply chain, right?

That's what Walmart is known for in, in driving costs out of the supply chain to keep costs low at home, uh, in the store. And so, uh, you know, I think these, when we say small, I think it's really what they're looking at is applying these technologies in a very directed sense to accomplish that mission and not get taken out by the, let's use it for everything under the sun right now. Mm-hmm.

I think your point is spot on in the sense that it seems like they're also trying to limit their risk, right? I mean, if I have an AI agent or whatever it is and it goes haywire, I'm only gonna have x amount of scope of possible damage to worry about, whether if I have some bigger AI thing, you know, the risk level goes up. 'cause the reasoning model that I'm counting on has to be more accurate.

And well, that, to your point, a lot of the claims right now seem a little aspirational, if not downright, fanciful. But Alan, you've been away for a while. What's your take?

So, I got a lot to say on this. Number one, this to me, is Walmart dipping their toe in the water. Look, I mean, if that's what you wanna do, you're never gonna be the leader.

You're never gonna shake things up, dipping your toe in the water. But it's a cautious conservative approach. And if you are, if you are Walmart, you could get away with that, right?

Walmart, even though they actually are a great technology company, and all of us probably knew or know a lot of people who work at Walmart Labs and Walmart technologies, though they've laid off a lot of people recently as well there. But they, they do some great things technology wise. I'm a little, I'll be honest, I'm a little surprised that they're not putting a bigger bet on the table here.

But, you know, they've got, they've got football teams to worry about and super yachts and planes and, you know, they've got other priorities as far as Apple goes. You know, did I ever tell you the story of Dr. Henry Pucci?

My, my, no, my professor Poly Sci Professor St. John's Senior year, his claim to fame, he was, was the conservative party candidate for Senator for New York in 1964. He ran against a guy named Bobby Kennedy.

He didn't do so good, he got killed. As a matter of fact, I don't even think the Republicans ran anyone against Bobby Kennedy that year. Anyway, Dr.

Pucci and I coming home from Italy, I like to say that now, ucci, Dr. Pucci always talked, you know, go all the word Dr. Pe Dr.

Pucci always talked about the haves and the have-nots. And the have-nots always throw stones at the haves because they were really want to be the haves. In today's AI world.

Apple's a have not. And so they're throwing stones. Of course, if they were leading ai, they would say the reasoning was fantastic.

Is the reasoning perfect? No. Will he get better?

Yes. But for Apple, and we'll see what comes out of, you know, they have their worldwide developer conference, I think today or something like that. We'll see what they come up with.

I'm sure there'll be AI mentioned there. But for the laggard here to be throwing stones, it, it's, it's unbecoming. It's a have not trying to become a have, I think, or, or throwing stones at the halves.

So I was thinking, I, I really, I'm sorry, Kimberly. Go ahead, cam. No, but go ahead, jp.

No, No. Kimberly, JP went. We gotta give you a chance.

Go ahead. So, I'm not gonna comment on the Apple stuff 'cause I haven't read it or anything, but looking at the Walmart piece, I think it makes, to me it makes a whole lot of sense. Um, they innovate by taking what, you know, systems and implementing systems out in the world, not necessarily as in being an innovator in new technology and in the processes.

So there's a couple things here that are going on. One of them is, as I read that, I think a couple, first of all, there's prompt engineering. So we talk about how, how good you are at prompting.

Essentially what the AI agents are doing is breaking up those prompts into smaller pieces and putting those together. So if I break up the prompts into smaller pieces, now I'm thinking about Henry Ford and how he put together the factory. So, or microservices developing under like a microservices where I can reuse pieces of the AI agents together to go out there and implement it.

So the first thing they're taking on is maybe this some piece of customer service. And when you think about Walmart customer service is massive. You know, customer service is everything from somebody buying something to somebody returning something, um, to questions about, you know, techno questions about their products, et cetera.

So then you're talking about how do I reuse some of these agents that are consistently being able to operate? So again, I'm looking at that Henry Ford meets microservices meets systems of operational systems that Walmart super excels at. And taking the techno new technologies and applying it to what they know best, which is retail operations.

So I think it's advanced. I I would not think of them as being behind. I think they're gonna let other people create the GPUs, the CPUs or whatever.

They don't need to go out create an LLN, they do new, do need to create their foundational analysis for their customer base, et cetera, but not compete against all some of the other big things that are going on. Fair. Jp, do you wanna, I I Just wanted to, you know, address your point of the haves and haves nots.

It's, it's an interesting philosophical point. I do think that it's so important, uh, especially with a technology like this, that there is a recognized that, uh, uh, established pragmatism. And I think right now the height factors off off the charts.

And it would be good to establish some well-respected leadership that is coming out with a pragmatic voice around this at this time that, you know, I think it's important. I, if ABO wants to establish themselves in that camp, I, I think we should support them and not say they're, they're a wannabe that is, you know, outta the game. What I'd like to see actually is some sort of, for lack of a better word, council of customers who get together and kind of provide a mitigating voice against all that hype factor noise that's being generated.

And somebody who's been playing with this stuff and actually try and Hop bridge. Yeah, you're asking Tigers to lose their stripes. That's not the way this game is played.

There's a hype cycle. Maybe this hype cycle is off the charts compared to any historical It's, and you know what? It's up, hype it up.

It's up to the people who keep their hand over their wallets to decide how much of it is hype and how much of it is real and how early they want to get in. I gotta share something. I'm gonna share something, which just you folks in here.

So I was away on vacation. I had a dream. I had a dream.

This is a real God, God strike me dead. I'm telling you the truth. I had a dream.

It's the entrepreneurial, the entrepreneurial blood was, was pumping, I guess. 'cause I wasn't busy at work. I had an idea to start a company and it was, it was, the name was Ask j Eves.

But we already haven't ask j Eves remember Ask Js. That's an, but this was an Ask j Eves, but it was, it was an AI agent Butler, who you want to use the Walmart AI agents, you want to use the targe ones. You want to use whatever Apple's coming out with.

This was a consumer, this was gonna be, this was a consumer, uh, driven, not a B2B a B2C play for consumers to have their own Butler, AI butler who handles all of their agent tasks for them. And you weren't locked into any other, you weren't locked into Google, you weren't locked into Apple. You weren't locked into meta.

It was generic, not quite open source. And I was going up and down the, the venture capitalist meeting route for any of you guys who have ever raised money, right? You go, you go, like you schedule these meetings and you do your dog and pony show, you put on a suit and tie even sometimes, or at least a sports jacket and a tie and, and you go to raise your money.

Um, and I was pitching, I was pitching hard about don't get locked in AI agents from any one vendor. You need something that's generic. And I didn't know about this Walmart thing at the time, but I'm re I'm, I read this and I said to myself, was I precent with this dream?

Maybe I should go do this. I have to come up with a different name than NA Chiefs, but mark my words. All of us are gonna have a butler that handles our AI agents for us.

And I'm not calling it an orchestrator, you know, isn't that my husband? You've got your husband. Well, you don't dress them up in the English Butler uniform, do you?

I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there. I think, I think we're not only gonna have that butler, but that Butler's gonna do battle with AI agents from various vendors to try to come to some sort of negotiated mill that we all agree on.

Because ultimately, my, my agent's gonna be optimized for a specific outcome. And it may not be their agent's outcome. Well, right, you've gotta have an agent that watches out for you, but he has to deal.

And he is, that's, that's wrong. It will have to negotiate that with all of these agents. But we're all going to need one.

We're all going to need one. And I mean, this dream was, it was, I had my PowerPoints all set up. I was, I was really pitchy.

And you know how it is. You get a lot of sounds good, big enough market. I I, it was like the whole VC thing I was playing out.

Right? It's a big market, big opportunity. What makes you think you can do it?

And because I'm not gonna lock us in it, it, so obviously subconsciously, this has been playing on my brain, I guess, for some time now, and it came out while I was away. But, um, I, I think this plays right into what Walmart and, and the rest of these folks will be doing. Steven hasn't said anything yet, so let's let him have the last word on this one.

Uh, I've been biting my tongue the whole time. Yes. Well, first off, jp, thank you for bringing up that incredible Apple, uh, report, uh, to Alan's cynicism.

I do not think it was a mistake or, or a surprise that that report, that that, uh, academic paper came out right before WDC because of course Apple is probably, certainly, well, let's just put our money down and say they're not gonna announce anything revolutionary regulated to AI at WDC. Uh, they clearly, um, was smartly evaluated their AI and said, this ain't good enough and, uh, pulled it. And I don't think that there's a good chance that they're going to have a, a new story here.

And frankly, I think they're right. Uh, I have read the paper. Um, it's very, very good.

It academically shows that these supposed reasoning models with their chain of thought are actually nothing more than the LLMs that they're composed of. And they're not reasoning, essentially, they do pretty well, uh, up until a point when you ask them to actually do real cognition and reasoning, and then they just fall apart and they can't do anything. And that's really a reflection of what this technology is good for.

I do, like jp, I see a reflection here in what Walmart is doing. Essentially, they're saying, wait a second, rather than having, uh, or wishing that we had actually intelligent artificial intelligence, let's use this technology for what it's good for, which is what I suspect Apple is gonna do. And what I suspect, frankly, a lot of enterprises with, uh, decent, uh, management are gonna be doing.

I I heard another similar story about the, the Campbell Soup Company of all people, uh, who are also using AI the way Walmart is, which is to say they're building small agents to accomplish limited but useful tasks in various areas. They're, um, having the LLMs handle, you know, data processing, ingestion, transformation, translation, that sort of thing. Ai, you know, these LLMs are great for that.

In fact, they're probably better for that than humans. But, um, to ask them to be sort of this all seeing, all knowing God emperor from science fiction, it's just not gonna happen. And I'm really glad to see companies like Apple and Walmart, uh, pulling back on that instead of continually putting more and more and more and more money down on a dream that just isn't real.

So, so you're saying my AI agents are unreasonable. I'm saying your AI agents are limited and useful. Well, well, maybe they won't replace all of us, then.

Time will tell, Or, or have the or Skynet take over the entire world Soon enough. All right, let's take a break. We're gonna come back.

We'll, we'll keep talking about AI though, but we'll talk about testing and ai. You're watching Text on Gang. Hi everyone.

Welcome back to the Techstrong Gang. Recently I was at Code remix a summit in Miami where the fo focus actually was AI and also testing. And I had the opportunity to speak with Andy Piper, who came all the way in from Oxford, England.

Um, and he spoke about his company Diff Flu. He is the vice President of engineering there. And not only about their testing that they're doing, but also how it's, uh, making their processes more efficient and the environmental mental impacts of it.

Hi everyone. We're at Code remix in Miami and joining me now is Andy Piper, who is the Vice President of Engineering at Diff Blue. He came all the way from England for this conference.

So Andy, it's great to speak with you today. Thank you. Very pleased to be here and enjoying some of the Miami Sunshine.

Yeah, Exactly. Exactly. So tell me about Diff Blue and your role there.

So, diff Blue is a spin out from Oxford University. So it was started by a couple of, uh, ex academics and we use AI to write tests, Java tests automatically for Java code. And, uh, we've been going about eight years now, I think.

And, uh, there's 45 of us mostly based in Oxford. And So how has that testing field changed? Well, uh, we used to be the only product in the space until Gen AI came along.

So there used to be no AI products at all. Uh, and originally people were basically generating tests in a very standard way. So just sort of template type tests, not using ai, but we actually, because we're able to run the code, we're able to analyze what the code does.

Developers are a crowd that are hard to please. And so they like things like, does the test look good? Does it, is it understandable?

Is it named? Well? So we are able to do all of those things.

Um, but the other thing that we do is we test what the code actually does. So Gen AI tends to test what it looks like. So if it'll read the comments and base the test based on the comment rather than based on what the code actually does.

But we, because we're able to execute the code, write the test based on the code execution, we can write tests that are a hundred percent accurate. Well, where, where does AI come in? Because there's obviously a lot of controversy with that, with people using it and trusting it too much.

It needs to have a human overseeing it. Yeah. So how do you balance that?

Well, so one of our value adds is that you can trust us. So the tests that you get are always correct. We tend to, one of the things we do is discard tests that don't compile run past all the rest of it.

But also because we're, we're not using Gen AI at all. We're not using lms, we're using reinforcement learning. We're able to take a, uh, very deterministic approach.

So you always get the same test, same test that is, right. So with testing, you want to be able to trust it. You don't want something that you've gotta keep checking, otherwise you're testing the test effectively.

So What have you noticed in recent years that developers are asking for that you've kind of had to maybe shift or, or adjust to keep them happy? Sure. So, um, developers very much want idiomatic tests.

So they want, so for instance, we, we have a lot of support for Spring. They want tests that look like spring tests in the way that a developer would write a spring test. They don't want just kind of a bog standard Java test that, uh, doesn't understand the context, doesn't understand the domain.

So we've had to respond to those sorts of developer needs. Developers always want to, they kind of want to fire and forget when it comes for testing. They wanna focus on actually doing their, their day job, which is writing code.

They want the testing part to be handled for them. And often if they use these sort of gen AI assistance, they have to stay in the loop checking things. Whereas what we do, we, we, you know, we're able to do that a hundred percent correctly.

And that's one of the ways that we sort of responded to developer needs. So What do you see going forward in terms of testing? Where do you see the space going?

Sure. So, um, I mean, one of the trends is that the one we've announced here, so we've announced a, a sort of, uh, hookup with modern where they're using customers can use modern to do automated upgrades, and then they can also use us to validate the outputs of the automated upgrade. And that's a very powerful thing.

A lot of customers are dealing with issues where they've just gotta upgrade all the time. How do they know that that upgrade is gonna be safe? And testing is the way that you can do that.

And if you can automate that part of the process, then that's, that's very powerful. Suddenly you've released a lot of, uh, developer productivity to, to spend on other things. Right.

And also, do you feel that it's also helping with efficiency in their productivity? Uh, it definitely helps with efficiency, but, you know, developers will fill the time available, right? It was also about unleashing their creativity to some degree.

So there's a lot of rules and regulations imposed on developers today and really wanna be doing that stuff. They don't wanna be doing the security checks and balances all that. If that can be taken away by tools and ai, then they're quite happy about that allows them to focus on their creative passion.

Absolutely. And since you're based in Europe, the movement of green software and being more sustainable is bigger there than here. I was just wondering what you've seen in that space, people's interest in that?

Good question. I, I, I mean, I've seen it in conferences. Um, I think, uh, in terms of what we do, uh, one of the values of unit test is they're supposed to be fast and light.

And, you know, that's one way of saving energy For particular, you know, a lot of people, their testing infrastructure is very sort of end to end oriented, and that can be very, very expensive computationally. Whereas if you have a unit test approach, then you can save on some of that output. But often people don't write the number of tests that are required in that space.

'cause it's just too hard, too, too time consuming. That's True. Well, have a great conference.

Thank you so much for Joining me. Thank you. No problem.

Diff Blue also just entered a partnership with Modern who was hosting the Code Remix Summit in Miami. So they were, um, very prominently focused there at this summit. And, um, it was fascinating to see, as I'd mentioned, um, there was a lot of interactive activity between these companies, and Andy was just one of the, the global people that I spoke to that had come in overseas for the conference.

You know, it, it's interesting, the, the, you know, the whole reinforcement as a learning model kind of thing, of course, came out with deep seek, really came to the forefront of, you know, maybe there's a better mouse trap to be had here. Um, but it, it'll be, you know, to to to previous to our previous, uh, segment about how real is this and, and all of that. Look, I don't think it's the answer to every question, but I, I think the AI you're seeing today isn't gonna be the AI you see three years from now, or five years from now.

And I do think we're making a lot of progress on how to better train them, reinforcing and everything else. Now I look, I think there's an argument to be made if you took a human child and didn't stuff it full of learning as, as that per, as that child grew, what would their reasoning be? What would their, you know, cogni cognition of things be?

I, I think this is the way you learn. You, you learn based upon what you've been taught, what your exposure is. And I think as we get better at reinforcement, we will get better at, I don't know if it'll ever reach human reasoning, perhaps, perhaps it'll surpass human reasoning, but I do know that, you know, it's thesis and synthesis, right?

You, that that's how reasoning there's a lot of that working that you need a basis to, to build on. And to me, that's what the reinforcement part of it is. It's the learning aspect of it that allows you to build on from there.

So, very interested to see. Now, modern is a very interesting company, right? They, they do code optimization, but for the huge, huge, huge enterprises where you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lines of code, right?

And, and it does, um, modernizing and, and correcting and finding vulnerabilities and, and remediation. So this is a great, that diff blue mo modern, uh, partnership is sounds like it'll be a really, uh, yeah. And the CEO who I interviewed there as well told me they just received series B funding From modern From modern, yeah.

Yes. I I actually interviewed him mm-hmm. On text Trump tv.

Okay. On that. So, so I am reminded of the woman who said, um, I don't want an AI that does art.

I want an AI that cleans up the kitchen so I can do art. And testing to me is kinda like cleaning up the kitchen. Wait, wait, wait a second.

What woman, what woman said that Maybe there's a quote in an article where she basically said she didn't want the AI to do the art. She wanted to do the art herself. She wanted AI to clean up the kitchen so she had more time to do that herself, to reasonable assumption.

This is another use case of that. Um, testing is maybe the kitchen and something that a lot of people don't wanna do or don't have time to do. So maybe this is one of the better use cases for ai.

It, it, it, it, so I really like, and I think the reason we're seeing so much, uh, positive news driving the hype, uh, curve out of the coding environment is because programming languages are so finite, which gives us a really great link to neuro symbolic ai. You, you basically are, you have a limited number of patterns that the, you know, this transformer technology has to be aware of when it comes to language, when it's dealing around a programming language. And because of that, you get very high quality results, right?

And so it's also very easy to add neuro or attach the neuros symbolic AI into the transformers when you're doing coding. Not so easy when you're doing spoken language, right? Because the vast differences in understanding syntax and semantics of NLP, you know, are, are va you know, massively different, exponentially different with regard to the data sets, right?

And so you will see that. And the reason testing is so great is because, you know, the one thing that people are really awful lot programmers are awful at, is trying to break their own code. It was something that was instilled in me when I was a young developer, because I had a manager who, that was his thing, you know, he, he was like, you need to try to break your own code.

And, um, so many people and developers I met after that don't know how to break their own code, nor will they try. And so, um, you know, qual QA environments are, were, that was their goal was to try to see where vulnerabilities were, where opportunities to break the code existed. And so the good thing that this thing does is it has this limited set of, you know, semantics that it has to worry about, and it will devise for you what we call code coverage.

And it can do a hundred percent code coverage. That's a, that in the past we've discussed, no one in their right mind would've expected a hundred percent code coverage from a human. In fact, the averages were like, you're good if you're 80% code coverage.

And what that means is how much of your code are you checking? How much are you checking the input? How much are you checking the output?

Are you validating that the code does what it's supposed to do? I've used it for building some tests, and I gotta say, it's awesome. It's perhaps one of the best uses of this technology in, in the coding and development world.

And if I can jump in here too, on diff blue one, one of the things that's interesting here is that this company predates the current LLM mania. This is a company that, uh, was founded, um, I I guess almost a decade ago or based on research, almost a decade ago. They were out there, uh, before chat GPT, before the LLMs.

They had, um, you know, they, they, their, their basis is in the core technology that, that, that forms all of these LLMs. But this is not a company that said, Hey, let's just take off the shelf LLM Tech and pretend that it knows something about coding. This is a company that focused on coding and, and as, as jps, uh, pointing out on a specifically limited and useful problem set, which is let's develop unit tests around Java code.

Great idea. And, um, you know, they, they released a freeware version, uh, five years ago. They've gotten a lot of adherence in the DevOps space.

And uh, you know, I really love to see this. Another thing I really love to see, they may not love to see this as much. You mentioned a funding round.

Uh, they haven't raised much funding. This is not a company that's gotten a billion dollars from, you know, the, the AI frenzy. This is a company that is trying to build a product, thank goodness.

You know, we need more companies out there that are trying to build a useful product instead of boiling the ocean with ai. I don't know if the VCs agree with you there, right? They want 10 x on their money.

Well, I, I think Steven has a point though. There's multiple types of AI models and engines out there, and they're not all L-L-L-L-M, sorry. And they're just as equally useful, if not valid.

And we'll be part of the monopoly of things that you're gonna orchestrate. So I wonder, maybe, yeah, we're not paying enough attention to these things. 'cause you know, investors are looking for the words LLM and that's it.

Well, not all investors are VCs. True. This is also true.

Mm-hmm. Alright, let's take a break right here. We're gonna come back and we've got C block an update from a recent cloud Field Day review.

Who's leading that one? Stay tuned. You'll find out.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Welcome back everyone. I'm Steven Foskett.

As, as Alan mentioned at the top of the show. I lead the tech field day business unit, uh, with futurum. And, uh, we actually wrapped up our cloud Field Day event last week in California.

Now, I wasn't the leader of it, uh, Mr. Alistair Cook, uh, was the leader out there on site, but we had a couple of days of great presentations from companies. And, uh, most of those, well, I think all of those were live streamed, uh, right here on Textron tv.

So let, let's talk about some of the key takeaways. So as always happens with Cloud Field Day, it's sort of a reality check. Um, I like to say that we don't ever have really a theme for Field day, but a theme evolves.

And this time, uh, was no exception. There was really a couple of big themes. Um, and number one, um, this is a recognition of the fact that cloud strategies are evolving.

Uh, we're seeing a new generation of, uh, cloud technologies that reflect the, the hybrid nature of cloud that reflect the risks that companies are, are, are, are seeing, uh, whether, uh, it was Commvault, which, uh, focused on cyber resilience or scalability, which talked a lot about data sovereignty or Qumulo and HPE talking about cloud architectures. The industry is really trying to figure out how to do this at scale in the second half of this decade. So first off, uh, among the key points was cybersecurity and data governance.

Um, these have moved from, IT concerns to real business imperatives. Companies aren't just worried about ransomware, they're actively developing systems for operational continuity under attack. And that was a really interesting aspect of the Commvault presentation.

A as we've heard from that company for the last couple of years. At the same time, companies are trying to prepare for the rise of ai, as we discussed in the first two segments here. We're trying to figure out how companies can deploy this technology in a reasonable way and what that means for infrastructure teams.

So we saw companies like MIN io with their AI store, um, and of course we heard from our own Signal six five talking about how AI infrastructure is being built and the fact that these workloads aren't just experimental, they're being actually deployed in production. So let's talk through the three big takeaways from Cloud Field Day. And I'm, I'm gonna invite the folks here on the panel who know quite a lot about this, whether you watch the whole thing or not, to talk about these three big topics.

Number one, the rise of cyber resiliency and sovereignty. Uh, number two, the shift toward hybrid and private cloud as sort of a default mode of operation for enterprises. And number three, how AI is reshaping everything from storage to hardware acceleration.

So, I guess, uh, dive in, uh, cyber resiliency, uh, data sovereignty and, and continuous operation. What, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I, I wanna combine two of your things.

Um, the AI and the, uh, in, in, you know, as part of the, in the hybrid, because, uh, one of the things I've written about recently and, and in compare the evolution is in hybrid, right? I, I do think that, uh, as an example, we're gonna see AI follow the model of cloud hybrid, uh, capability. But a good representation that shows the, the architecture and the need for it is that I'm going to have local models that I train on my business running in my facilities, right?

They're smaller, they take less memory. They don't have that heavy weight overhead from an infrastructure perspective that, you know, OpenAI has to run chat GPT, they can run on a simple server and provide tremendous value because it's trained on my business and it really only knows about me. But that's okay.

I only want to ask you questions about me. But occasionally I need to augment me with data that's outside of me. And at that point, it's going to go to the larger LLMs, the ones that have up-to-date information, the one that have tools that can go out and scan and bring in external information and summarize it and make it part of me when I need to.

What's the weather? You know? Oh, what's happening geopolitically, right?

I, I don't wanna keep that data, right? So I'm gonna go out and it's a great model to look at for why do you need to do hybrid cloud? Exactly the same thing.

I want to train on me, I wanna run efficiently on me, and occasionally I need to go bigger than me. I need to think bigger than me. And when I need that, that's when I want to leverage cloud.

That's when I want to expand out and take advantage. And that mechanism for recognizing that I think is still kind of missing from a maturity perspective. I think it has to be created by an enterprise architecture group right now.

And kind of, it kind of made it into a fixed model where it's like, we're around this, we're doing hybrid, and I'm setting up the AWS connect and I'm setting up the VPNs and I'm setting up the VPCs and, and it's too much fixed. And, you know, architecture to make it happen, we need to get more dynamic. It needs to decide, hey, this is where AI may be a great fit for helping.

I need this side. I need to go hybrid now. And by the way, let me tie up and go quickly, you know, and generate the, uh, the DevOps scripts to go provision that architecture up in the cloud, do what I need to do, and then tear it down.

So, you know, it's terraform run it same way it does with a Python script, right? Or it could do it through the API Amazon or Azure API, I think that's kind of where this is all gonna blend together. Yep.

It, it kind of reminds me a little bit of Alan's dream from earlier here, right? That, that we would have our own, uh, uh, ai, you know, agents, whether they're running, you know, locally or out there somewhere. Uh, and they would take on different tasks and, and we would be able to kind of mix and mend and blend based on, on what we want.

Um, you know, Alan, uh, does this resonate with you? Well, yeah. I've got a few thoughts.

First of all, in terms of my dream ask chiefs, the beauty of it is I only had the one agent, I only had the one agent, but it intersected with everyone else's agents. So when everyone and their mother's making an agent, why do I need to make so many agents? I just need an agent to talk to those agents.

That was part of my pitch to the VCs is I'm not gonna create all of these agents. Everyone else is, I'm gonna harness them, but let me return 'cause I digress. In terms of resiliency, look, cyber resiliency is all the rage in, in, in this cyber space these days.

And it really is something that's been coming on now for a while, which was instead of putting all our eggs into the prevention basket, we're never gonna be able to prevent all these bad things happening. We've gotta be resilient. What happens when, and part of that resiliency is kind of spreading your eggs into multiple baskets, which goes to this hybrid thing.

But it also is having a, a real plan in place for when stuff happens. And, and it's not just cyber incidents that happen. It could be geopolitical incidents.

You're no longer allowed to host your stuff in some country because of some nationalistic kind of programs or tariffs are in place or something else happens. And you've gotta, you've gotta be, you've gotta have not just cyber resiliency, but it resiliency and right. And that's one of the great things about cloud is it gives you that expandability, burstability, mobility, all the, I ities I guess to, to, to handle that kind of stuff.

And that goes hand in hand with this sovereignty issue, which is in an increasing, in a world where increasingly the internet is being balkanized, right? It's no more Yugoslavia. Um, we need the ability to really segregate, and I hate to use that word, but to segregate our data and infrastructure into the jurisdictions that political, socio-economic political dictate where they need to be.

And so that's part of the world we live in today, right? You've gotta have a sovereignty. And it's not just data, it's it's infrastructure.

It's, it's everything. You've gotta have a sovereignty, uh, strategy that plays in, in a balkanized world that, that we're, you know, multipolar world that we're living in. Yeah.

And those were topics. Yeah, those were topics that came up in the discussions at at, at cloud field. And some of the more interesting parts, you know, they're talking to Commvault who's talking about data protection and, and, and business continuity.

And, um, and the delegates are starting to say, wait, could this be used for migrations? Could this be used to move data from? And, and absolutely it could.

The same thing came up with scalability. Uh, you know, certainly that's one of the things that, uh, you know, HPE is really keen on with a lot of the things that they've been trying to work on for customers. It's about where you, where you run is no longer a simply a question of cost.

It's a, it has a lot of different factors. Yeah. Kimberly, Kimberly, I'd love to get your opinion on the third topic, though, that Steven brought up.

'cause we talked about this on yesterday's show. If we have AI agents that are constantly using infrastructure, well, we already know that infrastructure kind of tends to keel over when utilization rates get too high. So do we need a whole different set of infrastructure to accommodate all these AI agents that are gonna be constantly processing data?

I don't think the AI agents are taking that much p processing power to execute. Um, they are, you know, there are iOS and that kind of piece of it, but I, I would, I'm gonna take it at slightly different play. I do wanna remind folks that 70% of the enterprise data is still on-prem, right?

And so while we're looking at hybrid, I mean, the hybrid piece of it is that part of what's going on with the CIOs are making some decisions about where to best place their applications. And so that piece is going on in terms of where that piece, just as JP is saying, if I need to more, if I need more power, if I need more bursting or I need more capabilities, yes, I have the cloud that's up there. Um, so I think all of that piece of it, how it all fits together, and those, some of those decisions are not straightforward.

And that's why I think you're seeing, you know, the vendors that are coming in is, they're not just talking cloud. They're not just talking on prem. They're talking at, how do I look at this in a unified way?

How do I look at data? I, I did look at a little bit of the, um, cumula piece and like, how do I look at data that, so that wherever I'm at, wherever it's being processed, it, the speed and the application in response time is significant. Is is at the level that I expected that goes as well for the cybersecurity cyber resiliency.

How do I manage wherever the data is, wherever the application is to make sure that I am resilient and I can recover? So that complexity has grown as they're examining these pieces of it, but what they're looking at is I've got all these different tools that I can do and I can put those pieces together. So I, Micah, I know I didn't directly address your, the question that you had there on the AI APIs, but I don't see those as taking significantly more transactional effort, um, to process, um, than we have in any other transactional kind of system that we're using.

Jp you wanted to say something? I I wanted to ask Steven a question about, um, the event itself, you know, you have all these great ideas being put forth, uh, oh, uh, cyber resiliency and addressing business continuity. But the issue has been the business itself has not taken care of its business continuity over the years, right?

In fact, there are many organizations that don't practice and test the BC plans on an annual basis. I remember sitting at a conference and having preface with someone from an insurance company who, I don't know how we got on the topic, but he is like, he, he said, yeah, if, if we had an incident, we wouldn't be back up for two months. I mean, that is incredible to think about.

Two months the company would be down if they had a major incident because they don't, they haven't tested the DR plans, the BC plans. They don't know if they work, they don't, they wouldn't necessarily be able to restore in a timely fashion, you know, based upon what they had. And now you're gonna, so is is, did anybody talk about the other piece that goes with this, which is we'd have to rethink the organization.

We have to think about who owns this and who's running this? Yeah. And, and certainly that is a topic that people are aware of.

Um, as somebody who just moved houses, it occurs to me that, um, you know, e every time you move, whether it's moving houses or moving your business in the event of a, of an outage, it's extremely disruptive. And there's always something you need, something you forgot, right? Oh my goodness, I don't have any milk.

Oh my goodness, I don't have any, I don't know, towels, you know, whatever it is. When you're moving, you know, you find these things out. The only way to not have it be disruptive is essentially to live in two places all the time.

Essentially to maintain two residences and to move between them, which I think some folks tend to do, uh, once they get a little bit older, businesses are doing the same thing. Uh, I had a wise, uh, business associate, uh, talk to me about this about 10 years ago where they said, you know, we're, we are ready for any kind of disruption. And I said, oh, you're, you're fooling yourself as a a veteran like me, you and me, jp.

You know, and I, I know that Kimberly, you know, you've seen this too over the years. You know, you talk to these companies, you know about their DR plan and the dirty secret is their DR plan is basically panic and find a new job because there just ain't gonna be no way they're gonna recover. But this guy was completely confident, and the reason he was gonna completely confident is because their company actively ran in two locations all the time and switched their nexus from one to the other on a weekly basis as part of their regular business practices.

That's sort of the Commvault strategy here with their continuous business approach. And frankly, that's the strategy I think of a lot of modern cloud infrastructure. You know, you look at how these things work.

Um, I've been actively switching the location of all of the tech Field day websites on a weekly basis for two years now. And nobody has noticed, I don't think I've even mentioned it, it mo moves from the cloud to on-prem, uh, every week. And, um, and it runs in both places.

And so I'm a hundred percent confident that if the, if there's an outage, it will run smoothly and seamlessly wherever it happens to run, wherever it needs to run. And I think that that's what businesses are looking at too, which is why products, you know, you talked about Qumulo, you talked about S Scale, you talked about Min io, you talk about HPE, all these companies. I think their, their idea now is that it has to be continuous operation in multiple locations, not disaster recovery, which is elf is a disaster.

So, but I, go ahead, cam. So to that end, I think where we've come and migrated as we've gone through the cybersecurity five, six years ago, actually more than that, when we were interviewing people about their cybersecurity, um, capabilities, what they were doing, how they're architecting, we were pretty horrified on those interviews about how people thought, as you were saying, Steven, they thought they were perfectly fine. And we, you know, we weren't, we were interviewing, we weren't advising.

And so we get off the phone and go, they're screwed. Um, you know, all it takes is gonna be hit. So now we've come full, you know, and we've seen more and more companies getting hit, or small companies or whatever.

So whether it's the state and local or, or the educational system or a bank or a credit union as, as a, you know, big credit union that, you know, went down, um, last summer, those pe that, that has a trickle effect into your other peers within that industry. And so then they start looking a little bit deeper. And then once you get hit, then is when unfortunately is when they start hardening things a hardening and then realizing I have to be recoverable and what am I doing to be recoverable?

So I think right to be resilient, so over a period of time. So it makes sense that we've shifted from protect to recoverability, um, that they finally have gotten the notice that it's gonna happen and, um, that it, you know, trickles up and down the executive staff to say, can we really actually do this? So the investment is being made and it still is at the number one investment area for the CIOs is cybersecurity in cyber disease.

Absolutely. Alright. Hey, we gotta wrap things up here.

Uh, Steven mentioned Tech Field Day was streamed live on Techstrong tv, but you could also, if you didn't catch it there, you can go check it out on the Tech Field Day YouTube site, as well as on our Techstrong tv, TV site, our YouTube tech Strong tv, YouTube site, and our tech drunk tv t app on Roku, Amazon, and Apple tv, where we have all the tech field day content up there now as well on an ongoing basis, as well as our tech strong tv, as well as some Signal six five content. So check it out there. Um, but for now we're gonna pull the plug on this episode of Textron Gang.

Can't wait to see what I dream about tonight. We can talk about tomorrow. Um, but Mike, Steven, JP and Kimberly, as well as Bonnie yeah, right here.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you for watching this. As usual, we have a full text on TV lineup following up, so stay tuned for that.

Until next time though, it is Alan Shimel for Text Strong. We're out. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong tv.

I'm really happy to have my friend Bob Van Kirk returning. For those who don't know, Bob is the, uh, president and CEO of SonicWall. And you know, we've got a, we're going to do some, some image enhancement here around SonicWall because I'm, I'm sure that most of you out there don't, you've heard of SonicWall and you think you know SonicWall, but you don't know the new SonicWall first, let me introduce Bob though, Bob, a pleasure to have you back on again.

I hope all is well in your world, Alan, uh, it's a pleasure to be back talking with you, spending time with you today. Thanks so much. Great.

So Bob, let's just before we jump into Sonic SonicWall, the new SonicWall, let's talk a little bit about Bob Van. Bob Van Kern, how long have you been president and CEO over here? And kind of give us kind of your journey a bit.

Yeah, great. So actually coming up on three year zone, um, so as, as president and CEO with SonicWall now over eight years. And then, um, you know, as, as far as my time in, uh, cybersecurity, oh, gosh, uh, coming up on 25 to 30 years.

So, uh, yeah, I'll go ahead and admit it, but, uh, um, well we didn't call It cyber, did We? But, uh, yeah, yeah, love the space and, uh, have been in the, the cybersecurity area for now quite some time. It's an exciting place to be and, and, uh, um, love the opportunity Continues to be, continues to be so, Bob, as I mentioned, a lot of people, you know, they think SonicWall, they think red boxes is firewalls, right?

And, and that's what SonicWall is. But of course, you know, back then we didn't even call it cybersecurity. We called it information security InfoSec, and that's where SonicWalls, red wall, red box firewalls were, you know, initiated information security has become cybersecurity, right?

And SonicWall is no longer just pretty red boxes doing firewalling, right? It, talk to us about the new SonicWall, if you will. Yeah.

Um, great question Alan. And, uh, we've been around now 34 years, um, which is, was, you know, that, that's pretty amazing in and of itself. And I, I like so many of the team members, I, I am very proud of our legacy.

Um, to your point, we, we grew up relative to, you know, some, some, you know, first mover capabilities around firewalls and Deepak and inspection. Um, but, you know, proud of that, but, but really exciting is, is where we have gone and, and honestly gone over the recent, you know, two to three years, Alan, um, coming into this role, you know, and, and talking with our owners, talking with the board, um, it, it was clear that, you know, while firewalls still play a role, um, relative to an organization's, um, cybersecurity posture and, and you know, a, a key layer of, of, you know, multiple layers of, of security, it became clear that we needed to, to transform, and we did just that. In fact, all aspects of of SonicWall have gone through a dramatic transformation.

Everything from, you know, our sales organization, our engineering team, our product management support, how we transact with our, our partners, you know, moving more and more towards monthly versus, you know, one, three or five years upfront. But we flipped the company upside down and for the better. Um, we have moved now, um, towards cloud native capabilities.

So away from traditional S-S-L-V-P-N to zero trust network access, we have moved, um, from just the firewall capability to managed security services. Um, we, we've moved from, you know, thinking that Alan, you have to standardize on SonicWall to us actually meeting our partners and, you know, specifically our MSPs and MSPs where they are on their journey. And instead of saying, Hey, you have to use this specific, whether it be endpoint cloud capability or firewall, we will actually manage an endpoint that is, you know, non, uh, SonicWall.

In fact, we support half a dozen non SonicWall endpoints all around meeting our partners where they are and ensuring that, that we are supporting our partners and their customers relative to adding the, the most value from a security services standpoint. So, um, again, a pretty significant transformation just in a few years. Um, or inorganic.

We did three, three acquisitions in four months, um, after not having done an acquisition in, in 15 years. And then, you know, relative to how we're working with our partners early on, we, we, um, really, you know, decide to go to market a hundred percent through our, our partners. And, um, one thing we, we've really taken this relentless focus on our partners.

So we've redone our partner program, we've redone our support, um, program such that if you're a partner, you can get support, um, within seconds. Um, we, as I said, we've changed how we're transacting with our partners, allowing them to move to monthly billing versus, again, multiple years upfront. So, um, we, we really have, um, changed quite a bit.

Um, our biggest challenge is many people still know us as the old firewall, uh, company, but you know, what's really exciting and credit to the team for this, Alan, um, just based upon those fundamental changes, the new capabilities and positioning, you know, a platform of solutions and taking an agnostic approach, um, we're seeing in incredible, uh, growth stats relative to those new areas, double, triple, quadruple digit growth. And again, um, couldn't be more excited. Fantastic.

And that, that is heartening. And you know, Bob, look, part of it is, part of it is somewhat of a rising tide should, you know, raising all the boats, because this is where the tides are running, right? Towards some of the, the, uh, areas that you, you mentioned.

One is, is, is quite frankly, that I see, 'cause like you we're, we're contemporaries, right? From a experience, age point of view, you know, the shift to what I call resilience from just not just pure prevention, but resilience, right? The ability to say, Hey, something's gonna happen.

Yeah, right? We're gonna have an incident. And it, and it may not, frankly, it may not just be a cybersecurity incident.

It could be, you know, issues around data sovereignty and, and governance risk and compliance, you know, uh, big, big things going on there. Uh, the whole, as you mentioned, we live in a world where, you know, consistently endpoint, now, I don't mean endpoints like endpoint computers, but end user customers, let's call them. They don't want to be locked in.

They don't want to be dictated to what solutions or, you know, they want to use, they want to be able to use what they want, but yet they want solutions that are malleable, if you will, that are able to work with a variety of different products and solutions out there. Right? It's easy for you to say, it's easy for me to say it.

Building a product line that encompasses that and embraces that, that's a different story. Talk to us a little bit about how, how you've accomplished this at SonicWall. Yeah.

It, that, that's really, uh, insightful, Alan. And, and one thing that has underpinned this entire transformation is what I call taking an outside in approach. Um, we have incredibly bright team members, incredibly bright engineers and, and product managers, um, sales, you know, leaders and, and reps across the board.

But there is no, the, the, there's no substitute, Alan, to listening more and talking less. And this whole effort started with get out, spend time with key partners, spend time with key customers, and you have two ears on one mouth, use 'em proportionally, ask key questions, and then shut up and listen. And, and that insight, every single function was tasked with that.

That's not just product. It's not just sales, finance, you name it. Um, and that insight is invaluable.

And, and we've used that insight to shape our roadmap. You know, it's one thing for me to say, Hey, Alan, here's our roadmap. Here's what to expect in the next 3, 6, 9 months.

It's entirely different when Alan is a key MSP, right? And Alan says, Bob, this is what I need. This is what's keeping me up at night.

This is how I envision growing my business, right? And we, we took that approach across the board. That's a journey.

It's not a destination. And that insight has really served us well. Um, that drove the, the acquisitions that we did that drove our roadmap, that drove our new partner program that provides on average, you know, at, at worst, um, the, the, um, wait time is like 32 seconds.

If you are a partner in our service provider program, need help, that drove our monthly pricing it, you know, and, and, you know, so credit where credit's due it, that is so fundamental. Um, and, and when you take that approach, I found now the, the length of my career is getting up there. You can't go wrong.

Um, you know, by, by listening, you gotta, you gotta ask the right questions, and you need to make sure you're not, you know, looking at a n of one versus, you know, what's representative across your base. But, um, that has really served us well, and that has enabled us to make some bold moves to, to add key capabilities, which capabilities lean into certain areas that it's not a bed. It, it, it is based upon key input from our partners, based on key input from our customers.

Agreed. So, Bob, look, this is, as I mentioned, I said, the rising tide. What we are talking about is a lot of these mega trends that we're seeing in, in the market, and you are hearing directly from your customers, and especially from your channel partners.

But you guys recently made a major announcement around this about kinda redefining what it means to be a cybersecurity solutions provider today, next generation kind of, uh, solutions, Right? Can you get, let's get a little concrete, let's talk about that a little bit. The new sonic wall, if we make, we love it.

Yeah. I mean, here, here's the data point for you. Over the last 30 years, any new product announcement would've been all about speeds and feeds and, you know, um, increasing to, to this level and, and doing this type of, of, you know, Deepak and inspection or inspecting encrypted traffic.

Um, and, and how we're, we're taking that to the next level. This last announcement, um, is, is, is very, very, um, key on, because we didn't come out talking, yes, we released a new lineup of firewalls. Um, but that wasn't the headline.

The headline was a, a platform of cybersecurity capabilities. Um, yes, the firewalls do provide, um, you know, increased threat protection and new, you know, key capabilities that our partners have have requested. But with every firewall, you know, we're also offering new managed services.

Now, what's interesting, you know, um, Gardner sites, something like 50 to 60% of all incidents are related to misconfigurations. Um, and, you know, even greater, 90% of, of breaches have some degree of human error. So what we did was, we, we are now folding into this, you know, new lineup of, of firewalls as well as going back to our existing level, is offering a new managed service.

That one ensures that three dozen best practices, capabilities, or settings relative to your firewall are set up correctly and maintained. And then also reviews upwards of over a hundred other settings and, and, uh, configurations all relative to just network security. And then on top of that, Alan, you get a monthly health check that confirms, okay, Alan, you know, you're on the right release.

Everything is configured, you're doing everything right Now, you know, how many MSPs, how many mid-market customers, I'd argue, how many even enterprises have their 24 by seven SOC or 365 SOC or noc that will constantly be looking at configurations, giving you health checks, ensuring that you're on supported releases. Not many. And we've heard that in spades from our, our, uh, MSPs, Hey, how can you give us what our customers need?

You talked about it, you know, you know, the, the attacks are, are, uh, um, crazy, um, these days, just the sophistication, the sheer number. So how do we provide a, a, a soc, how do we provide NOx but make it in a cost effective manner for our MSPs to offer to their customers? So that's exactly what we folded into this launch.

Now, our MSPs can take that and say that it's their, you know, soc it's their knock that provides these, these services. Um, or they can say that SonicWall is supporting them, but we're providing that 24 by seven by 365 insight. And what comes with it, Alan, is pretty interesting.

Um, by using those services with every firewall, you actually get 200, uh, 200 k cyber warranty. Um, now, you know, you could say, Hey, you get a warranty, but if you don't have everything set up, you know, then, then you don't qualify. But with these services, we're ensuring behind our MSPs that the end customer is keeping all their settings correct, and we're giving them, you know, these monthly health checks.

So really, really, you know, important integration there. On top of that, what we also folded into every firewall is our cloud native capability. So every time you buy a firewall, you have a cloud native, you have cloud native licenses to provide you with the latest ZTNA capability, not the, the, you know, um, S-S-L-V-P-N of the past, but, you know, a much more secure, much more efficient, greater throughput solution moving forward.

Um, and then all underpinned by our sonic platform, the ability to manage report, do analytics, ensure that you've got the data, the, the visibility to, to manage. So anyhow, that is, is, you know, how we have changed dramatically point solution in the past integrated platform of all these capabilities moving forward. I Love it.

com, but where would you send them on the website to really, you know, cue in on this new, new, these new capabilities? com. You can hit the, the homepage has means to, to get insight.

We will have someone reach out to you within minutes. Um, if that's your preference, um, we have, you know, easy to follow links relative to the new capabilities. Um, if you need a partner, we have a, a partner finder that will, you know, connect you with a local MSP or an MSP in your, you know, geography.

Um, but you know, the team is, is ready to go. And again, the information's right there, um, uh, readily available to, to help anyone interested. Love it.

Bob, we're about outta time, as always, man, it's a pleasure having you on here. Likewise, Alan. Always.

All right, continued success with SonicWall. Um, look, that's a new SonicWall out there. Go check it out for yourself and see it's an exciting time, exciting time in the cyber world.

Bob, hope to have you back on soon with more information. Maybe we could dive a little deeper on this. Look forward to it.

And thanks again, Alan. All the best. Bob Van Kirk, president, CEO SonicWall here talking about redefining cybersecurity with the new SonicWall.

We're gonna take a break. You're watching Tech Drunk tv. The world of networking seems to be innovating rapidly, well, at least it is if you're in the data center, thanks to things like cloud and ai, the pace of innovation is exceeding our ability to keep up.

And then we go back to the edge where our laptops and tablets are still stuck in a time zone from the mid two thousands. In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, user-centric connectivity has to innovate. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where each episode we bring together a group of IT experts to discuss a single topic in the enterprise IT space.

This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of a Tech Field Day delegate community, and is also recorded in association with some of our tech Field Day events. Tech Field Day is a part of the futureum Group, and this podcast is also being published on our sister companies website at Techstrong tv. In this episode, as we head into Cisco Live, we're gonna be discussing some of the areas that need to be focusing on innovation.

But before we do that, let's introduce today's group of guests so that you can get to know them just a little bit better, starting with Sam. Hi, I'm Sam Clements. I'm a technical solutions architect at WW t.

And my day job focuses on, uh, solutions around wifi centric technology and mobility based solutions. Ed Whedon, uh, network engineer, uh, in the enterprise space, um, currently free ranging at the moment. And of course, I'm Tom Hollingsworth.

I'm the event lead for wireless networking and security here at Tech Field Day. Let's jump into this episode's premise. No doubt you have probably, uh, gotten an email or walked into a store and seen that numbers are getting super fast when it comes to accessing things all over the place, but it kind of feels like that no matter how fast things get, it all feels the same.

Um, uh, in, according to the old Henry Ford quote, uh, people really just want a slightly faster horse that eats a little less hay. And I feel like that's what we are being delivered in the modern, at least edge connectivity centric area. And I think that when you compare that to the way that, uh, data centers and especially AI networking are being forced to innovate at a rapid pace, it, it feels like we're being left behind.

So the premise for this episode is that edge connectivity needs to innovate. Uh, now I, I think it's kind of funny, you know, Sam and I have been at Mobility Field Day, uh, here recently, so we've gotten to see where a lot of the people are trying to push edge connectivity, but I also kind of feel like some of it really felt like table stakes, right? And, and I know that we're coming into Cisco Live, and that's usually like the area of where like companies like Cisco and they love to release new products during that event.

So let's, let's pull out the crystal ball for a second and say, if a company like Cisco really wanted to innovate in these spaces, what could they do? Uh, you know, just put on your, your thinking cap. What would you like to see, Sam?

Well, I, you know, it's funny because I, I look at, obviously Cisco being obviously the number one networking manufacturer in the world. And I look at, you know, this, this chase of speeds and feeds, and, and, and frankly at the edge, it always comes down to how we can push more bits and bytes. But there, there seems to be a lack of innovation in how we do that, even from a, from an energy efficiency and from a noise efficiency perspective.

We're talking about, uh, internet circuits that are, uh, multiple gigabits per second. And, and in order to do these things, you need to have these big honking loud boxes sitting out on the edge. And, and I feel like there, that, that, it sounds silly to say, you know, I want a quiet small box that does all the things that the big loud box does.

But apparently that's really, really hard to do because they don't do it. I'd love to see some innovation on energy efficiency, some innovation on how we get speeds and feeds and services without blowing everybody's ears out all day long. Um, and I realize that's sort of petty, but you know, it, it, it, there's a need.

Well, it's not really, it's not petty, Sam and I, and, and I agree with you a hundred percent. And here's the reason why I think it's not petty. And when you look at one of the, the main themes that comes out of Cisco Live every year, it's sustainability, right?

Like, like we, we've read news stories over the last year of Microsoft literally leasing, uh, nuclear reactor capacity from the site, formerly known as Three Mile Island to run data centers. I saw this ridiculous idea last week about launching, uh, uh, data centers into orbit so that they can be cooled by outer space, which by the way, does not work that way. But the, but the thing is, like, it's, it's one thing to talk about.

We need to be more, uh, energy efficient and more sustainable in this massive, you know, warehouse full of data. But I also need to be a little bit more efficient here at my house, because if I have to drop in one of those huge honking, like, you know, 120 millimeter fan copper heat sink routers, just so I can run two gigabit per second ethernet into my house, like, I, I want some sustainability there too, because I'm the one that has to pay that power bill, No doubt. Well, and look at the power consumption of some of this gear that's coming and not look at like APS and whatnot.

We're talking about 60 watts down to the access layer. In some instances you throw you, you know, that number adds up really, really quickly. You're looking at a hundred aps at 60 watts a piece.

Guess what? That's a, that's a power bill. Yeah.

And I think the other thing with, with the sustainability piece is, you know, having worked in the enterprise space for as long as I have, um, you know, doing a lot of office builds and whatnot, one of the key things that we always have to contend with is getting the right amount of space to host the equipment that we want or that we need for a particular site. Getting in the right amount of cooling into that space, that's always a fun one to deal with. Um, and, uh, power, you know, I mean, cooling power and, and space, I mean, those things are all at a premium, especially now as, as offices function the way that they do function, right?

Um, I mean, it, it, it, you know, one thing I remember, you know, particularly when I was doing deployments day in and day out, it was always a c cha. It's always has been a challenge, and none, none of that has changed. So seeing a vendor come out with new gear, great.

How power efficient is it? How cool, how, you know, quiet is it? Um, I would actually challenge Cisco and say there are other vendors in the market space that are dropping devices that can support 10 gigabit, 10 gigabit plus, right?

Um, you know, at least, at, at least for the routing edge, you know, that are very small and power efficient. And are you saying that not everybody who needs a 10 gigabit circuit has access to a rack with a full air handler system and, and HEPA filters? Probably not.

Probably not. What's funny is you look across other, other technologies like ai, where, where they're just like, damn, the torpedoes, full steam ahead, power bring it on. Like we, you know, kilowatts and generators and diesels and blah and y, right?

Yeah. But Sam, here's the thing that I think that most people don't understand about that I'm, I'm kind of glad you brought that up, is like ai, it is assumed that power is limitless, right? Like, if I can bring another circuit into the data center to run this stuff, I can, we know the limitations of power over ethernet because you and I remember a time when power over ethernet was maxed out at like 15 Watts, 15 watts.

So it's like, if, if, if it needs to, like, we need to like disable one of the CPUs on this access point so that it can mm-hmm. Actually run on power over ethernet. If you want to run at full speed, you've gotta go run a, an a, a Electrical easy drop to it.

Yeah. Right. To it.

Yeah. And then, you know, we, we've gradually gone from 15 to 30 to 60, and you know, we've even seen some of the specs for like the, the big, like 90 watt POE stuff, which I don't know that I wanna touch device that's running 90 watt p oe. Like, I'm afraid it's gonna look like back to the future where doc gets shocked.

But like the, the thing to me is we are working within the budgets of what we can do. So the innovation has to happen where we know that we are never gonna get more than, you know, 60 watts to an edge ap, uh, in the best of circumstances. That's assuming we have the newest equipment.

Whereas the AI people are like, yes, what if we could actually just put a lightning rod at the top of the building and have power Just Shunted directly into the, the servers? So I, I guess maybe my question there is, is one of the reasons why innovation has been falling behind so much in these areas is because we are working within self-imposed constraints, right? Because the other thing too, and I'll go back to this, is we're also constrained with the devices that we're using.

So, like, for example, you know, Sam is, is very familiar with the fact that, you know, it, it took a long time for an iPad and an iPhone to have more than one radio in it. You know, we, we talk about some laptop devices that have three by three, uh, transmit and receive antennas, but even laptops, which are considered heavy devices now still have power budgets. Because I used to own an IBM laptop that had a 210 watt power supply and would run for 57 minutes on battery idling.

Like, if you did anything with it, the battery just went dead. And that was like, oh, well, it's a laptop in name only. So are we, are we seeing problems where even the edge devices don't have full capability?

So, I mean, if I could jam a 400 gigabit per second fiber card in my laptop, you could better believe I would. Well, you, you, I think it's an, it's a, it's an interesting conversation when you start to, when you start looking at it through the lens of things like cloud manageability, when you start looking at, okay, how, what, what is my management orchestrator on top of all of this network? And, and, and, you know, throw a Cisco hat on, right?

Because it's Cisco Live, right? Look at the, look at the, the behemoth that is Catalyst Center, uh, versus adopting a management platform such as the Cisco's cloud or the Meraki dashboard, right? There are legitimate power constraints to each of those, um, trajectories.

And I feel like the, the boxes that are in play certainly impact that power efficiency, depending on sort of which way you're gonna go, right? You build out a rack full of d uh, catalyst center clusters, and guess what? That power bill is gonna be as expensive as your AI bill is.

And, and that's not necessarily a fault of the big ass loud router that you're trying to manage. It's because you've tacked a bunch of other stuff on top that requires something else to do the compute for you. I'm glad that you mentioned Catalyst Center, because some of us are old enough to remember Cisco works and, and the behemoth that that was, it's like, you know, my, my, my compute bill just quadrupled because this is gonna take 18 servers and two copies of MySQL.

But I think that's actually one of the things that Meraki got right from the start was people don't wanna run the infrastructure. They wanna access it, but they don't wanna maintain it. And so, you know, I, Sam you mentioned when we were getting going here, like that Meraki acquisition is 10 years old.

Like, like, we are starting to see the fact that, you know, as we've heard over the last couple years that Cisco live, that that, especially when it comes to the wireless side of things, Meraki and Catalyst are one company now it, it is Cisco Wireless. And, and that integration is super important because it creates consistency for people. Like I, I can remember trying to transition from using Arrow net aps to lightweight access points.

And I, I made it a year of my career out of doing that for customers. And how big of a pain in the neck that was, and now it's consistent. Like, we don't have these arguments of, you know, is it autonomous versus controlled?

Is it this, is it that it's just wireless? Now we're still solving hard problems there, and we're still ensuring that users have maximum connectivity, but we're not arguing about which dashboards being used or what, what functionality is gonna be enabled. It's just kind of all there.

So maybe the question is are, do we need more things like that? Do we need more solutions that concentrate the functionality of management into something so simple to use that we can spend our time more wisely solving other problems? Yeah.

Look, you know, the Cisco's biggest competitor there for a decade has been Meraki. Um, and which is, which is, you know, obviously a, a, a tad on the alarming side. Uh, and when we see Cisco, I, I think start moving, uh, cloud managed architecture back into the campus where they, obviously Cisco has a tremendous amount of core competency in, um, there's some challenges there, right?

There's some challenges with folks that don't wanna spread VLANs all over the place. There's some challenges with tunneling technologies and the like, um, we've seen for many, many years that, that cloud manageability and, and campus, uh, haven't yet been fully fleshed out. And, and, and there's a need there, right?

There's a need for an, an, an edge box or a data playing box or something along those lines. Um, it'd be really great to be able to cloud manage my campus, and that is from top to bottom, including my, you know, my big ass chassis switches, my modular switches, you know, controllers, aps, fabrics, and the like. And today we're just not there yet.

I think that's a big challenge, and that's a, uh, I mean, it's a challenge that we faced where, where I, where I was, um, you know, and I think a lot of organizations do face, um, and I think, Sam, to your point that Cisco's biggest competitor is Meraki. I never thought of it from that perspective before, but that's a, that's a great way of putting it. Um, you know, Meraki did a lot of things very well from the cloud management space, and a lot of other vendors in in, in the world are, you know, starting to copy that or have been, have been doing it their own flavors of that out there.

And it's, it, it still feels like Cisco is kind of competing with itself a little bit. Um, not that Cisco would ever do anything like that. Uh, sorry, that was my outside voice again.

Um, but seriously though, I mean, that's, I think that's where I think I almost feel like cloud management, uh, cloud management solution is almost table stakes now. Um, you know, especially any organization that's just, uh, you know, spinning up right now, they want, you know, cloud management capability, um, you know, for whether it's for their products, you know, within their cloud presence and AWS Azure, whatever, uh, you know, but they want that same, that same capability, that same ease, um, you know, for managing their infrastructure, uh, you know, their on-premises, uh, infrastructure. Uh, and Sam, to your point there, you know, there are pros and cons that come with that.

Let me throw a wrench into this conversation because you know, ed, as a longtime network engineer before I got this job, I completely agree with you. Like, I, I want cloud management, right? I wanna be able to log into a portal and manage things.

But other things that we're hearing in the industry are that people don't even want that. They just want it managed. And so when you look at companies like Nile and Broin and Brahman and Meter, they are going one step beyond what Meraki offered, which is you don't even have to manage it.

We will do that for you. You just Right. You just do things.

And, and I think that now that, you know, to Sam's point, you know, Meraki was the largest competitor of Cisco for the longest time. And, but now that they're one big happy family, most, for the most part, um, now the competition is going to be mostly companies that stepped out a little bit further on that edge and said, well, what if we just did it all for you? And, you know, we have heard from, uh, Nile and we have heard from Meter at various field day events, and I know that there's hesitation from the delegates about how to implement this stuff.

And boy, if you haven't seen those videos, you really should watch them. I, I, I, yeah, I'll definitely need to go back and, and, and watch those. 'cause that's, but I think that that's an interesting space.

But the question that I have is I, is is that because we're getting pressure from the C-suite to remove even more roadblocks in including things that we don't think are roadblocks? I, I would, I would take it a step further and say that it's not just pressure from the C-suite to remove roadblocks, remove roadblocks, move faster, less people, less spend. And whether that's, and whe, and, and, and, and whether that is a, a valid argument, it can easily be debated, but you can't deny the fact that there are pressures coming from top down to really cut costs, uh, across the board.

I, I, I'm speaking from direct experience with that. Um, you know, and that's, that's a big pressure point. Um, you know, and I think one of the big pressure points there is, is you get pressure getting pushed down to say, cut cost, you know, do more with less.

How do you do that? And the traditional ways of management that we have done management in the past don't scale. They just don't.

And so that's where I think you start moving in towards the cloud managed infrastructure and the MSP market, uh, whether it's a true MSP or like what you're talking about with, with Nile, you know, and, and other comp, you know, other companies in that space, what they bring to the table, you know? So it's, it's a very interesting time right now. Um, so yeah.

Um, I, you know, the, as a service thing is, is really comes down to a consumption problem at the end of the day in my book. But, you know, just because Uber came out doesn't mean that General Motors stopped selling cars to the, to end users, right? Um, you know, just because you have an, as a service offering, it doesn't necessarily mean that the world is gonna change overnight.

Uh, look at the, look at, look at what cloud did to data centers and look at the pendulum of swinging back the other way with repatriation of data. And they're like, just because it's cloud and just because it's as a service does not necessarily mean that it's right for you and your company. And it doesn't mean that it may ever be right for you and your company, nor does it mean that it really doesn't mean anything.

It's just another way to consume the technology. And I don't know that I look at it as being a black and white. You either do this or you don't, or, or you do that, right?

Right. Solution for the right consumption model for the right use case. The age old, the old age old answer.

It depends. It depends. I believe Sam has that trademarked at this point.

Wait, you, Sam, not, not Yvonne. No. He got there first.

The, uh, yeah, the, the, the joys of trademark registration. Right? But, but I think that you, you all bring up really good valid points here that anyone who believes that there is a one size fits all solution Yeah.

Is going to be very, very mistaken. And, and we're even seeing that, I, I dare I say it in the AI space, right? Like it used to be that everybody ran InfiniBand and mm-hmm.

And the reason why is because InfiniBand was optimized for HPC, and it also was owned by Nvidia, who was the LAR is still is the largest manufacturer of AI stuff, but it was also a very one size fits all solution. And I know that I really p**s people off when I say this, but it's basically the fiber channel of networking, right? Like, as long as your network looks like this, it's perfectly fine, but if you need to scale past this many nodes, well, you're kind of screwed.

And so, so they were Saying least you're calling the token ring of networking. No, no, no, because I really, I really don't want to get the IBM people on my case. But, but the, the people finally realized that they needed to expand past that idea.

And so that's why we've seen innovation with ultra ethernet and Spectrum X and things like that, which are creating, uh, you know, they're busting through the scaling limitations, of course, they've got their other problems to solve. 'cause we all know that ethernet is probably the worst protocol for deterministic delivery. But, but it's, it's that complacency, right?

Like this is the way that every network is gonna look, and this is the way that things need to be built. I mean, anybody remember Cisco, uh, reference designs? Mm-hmm.

Um, you know, s was it srds like solution reference network designs that, like, I, I still have them like wallpapered in my house. So you like, here's the core, here's the access, here's distribution, here's the internet block, here's the WAN block. I think, I think I have some of those burned into my, burned into my brain at this point.

And Now we don't do that. Now we, we have clove fabrics and now we have, uh, you know, very intelligent edges that do a lot more processing these two, it's almost like the col the, the distribution layer has collapsed into, you know, something very unlike what we've seen. But it took innovation in the market to get us there because, you know, the fact that an access point is effectively like a very small server now, um, look, right, the amount of, uh, processing that it has to do, the amount of policy enforcement that it has to be done at the edge, because our edge clients are getting more and more massive.

I mean, I had a conversation with somebody just the other day about running AI workloads at the edge because we now have the capability to do that. Is this where it, I always laugh because like you, if you look at the, the market for smartphones pre 2007, they all looked vastly different from each other, right? You had the Palm Trail and the Blackberry and all these other things.

And then for some reason, after 2007, they all looked the same, uh, little Donnas script, black rectangles. Um, but it was because the industry was still trying to figure out what they wanted to do. And then when the winning idea came along at everybody immediately wanted to do the winning idea, are we seeing a situation where for the longest time, up until maybe a couple years ago, the winning idea was these traditional network designs.

And then when a disruptive technology, whether it was cloud or AI, came along and blew that whole thing up, now everybody is scrambling to try to come up with a better solution. And that's what we really need, is we need some kind of really disruptive innovation at the user edge to bring that along. Uh, use cases of course, evolve.

And sometimes the technology is looking for a problem to solve. I look at, um, edge, uh, containers on aps, right? Uh, that, that have been a thing you could do for the past, let's call it seven, eight years or so.

And, and really what was the use case for that? Well, hooking to some sort of external module or something, or doing crypto mining or something, right? The, the use cases for when containers came out on aps, uh, are, are essentially obviated today, right?

They're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're just, they're obsolete and they're not even being used yet. That technology still exists. And so what are we now going to do with that?

Well, now the buzzwords are ai. And so now we're seeing, um, uh, p qc capabilities being put into, uh, boxes so that you can run a service that, you know, further protects your data. And everything is about, you know, this inline AI inspection for protection.

Um, the, the, the use cases change and evolve. And, and Lord knows the same thing we were using containers for seven, eight years ago isn't what we're using them for today. And same thing on edge, uh, same thing on switches that have container support and routers and all of the devices, right?

Yeah. I think there's some, uh, I think the innovation piece or, or that, that disruptive piece, I think is something that is starting to come to fruition depending on where you are. Um, and I think that, I think some of that, I think some of that disruption needs to happen in order for that innovation to get pushed along.

Um, the container piece is one that's very interesting, Sam, that, that you mentioned that. 'cause that's something that I was just beginning to explore in a previous role. Um, you know, seeing what we could do with that.

Uh, and you know, one of the big things that I always had in the back of my mind was site survivability. Because one, one of the big problems, one big challenge, uh, and particularly at an enterprise level when you're talking about, you know, uh, decent sized enterprise, um, is site survivability, at least for offices, right? Like, how do you actually make sure that, hey, I lose connectivity to my data center, okay, but now where, you know, all those other core services, how can I get those?

You know? And so there's some interesting, uh, edge to that point of edge cases. So I guess what we probably need to say, you know, 'cause this episode, if you're watching it when it releases, is releasing right before the keynote at Cisco Live, I want you both to pick one thing that you hope that Chuck Robbins and G two Patel are gonna release at the keynote that is going to wow you solve this problem.

Make everybody happy. Um, Sam, I'll start with you. One thing that you really wanna see, Uh, we haven't talked about it at all in this particular recording, but we, but the time is right for an outdoor wifi seven ap Yes.

I I think that, uh, anyone who goes to any kind of sporting event, uh, will agree with you. Yes. Uh, that, that we need something that can, uh, that can work outdoors and, and honestly, with all the craziness around six gigahertz, wifi, seven, all that other stuff, yes, the Time is right.

Regulatory requirements. Yeah, there's all sorts. And, and, and, and, and it's, it, it's, it certainly makes sense why we haven't had one just yet, but it's now we, we need it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, how else am I gonna be able to stream live stream my Beyonce concert experience without the right stuff? Exactly.

Ed, what about you? What's the one thing you wanna see? Oh, I would think I, I actually, I think I would probably lean heavily on probably better, better cloud management without needing to do on-prem services.

Like actually putting that control plane, uh, into cloud services. Kind of like when Meraki, you know, from the Meraki model and have better unification across the entire platform and routing, switching wireless. I Think that's pretty fair.

That's, that, that's kind of where I would, I would say that's table stakes now, right? Is is unified management experience, uh, because they're getting killed, you know, with other companies that are doing that. Alright, well I think we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up there.

So, uh, thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. If you enjoyed this discussion, please leave a comment on our YouTube video, uh, subscribe in your favorite podcast application of choice. Uh, so you don't miss episode giving us a rating and review.

I'd like to take a moment for our guests to kind of, uh, give us some information about where you can follow them, uh, for their thoughts and, and content around these things. Starting with Sam. Uh, you can follow me on Blue Sky at Samuel dot Clement, uh, also on Blue Sky at Avalon Hook, uh, and also on LinkedIn at least gonna start posting a bit more there.

Outstanding. net. You can also read my blog there and do all the other things.

Uh, this TIP podcast is brought to you by Tech Field Day, which is your home for IT experts from across enterprise it, part of the Future Room group. You. Let's check out our upcoming events as well as more great episodes at this podcast.

com/podcast or view us on Tech TV or in the New Techstrong TV app. Thanks for listening very much. We'll be back next week with another great episode.

Until then, take care. Hey, welcome back to Tech on tv. Live from the show floor at RSAC in Moscone West in San Francisco.

I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We have great conversations lined up today, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So stick around.

Lots of great content coming your way. My next guest is Dr. Katie Paxton, principal security research engineer at Traceable by Harness.

Dr. Katie, it's great to have you on text on tv. It's so exciting to be here.

It's so great. I love it. Like the energy the mo, like this is so cool.

It is. Cool. Well we appreciate your time.

So traceable by harness, this merger was only announced in February. Yes. It's been a whirlwind.

I bet it has. So really aiming to create this new leader in secure software delivery. Talk to us about that and how these two powerhouses are going to do just that.

So I think quite a lot of the traditional security model has been really focused on security teams. And while that's great and we'd obviously love talking to security teams actually, you know, it's not just about security teams. There's a whole, you know, other range of people in an organization.

The most important people there are developers, right? And at the end of the day, they're the ones that are developing secure software, right? They're the ones who are whose that is their job.

That is their mission, their purpose, right? And if you have a software solution like a security solution that only speaks to the security engineers, you've kind of missed out a major part of the kind of story there because what about the people who write the code? And I think really what traceable y Harness is doing and kind of pushing for in the industry has been this move to be, you know, it's not just about security, it's about the developer experience.

It's about developers and how do we merge those two worlds together? And often when we speak to our customers, and obviously Harness is a sister company to us and harness and I, and we share a lot of customers, right? Okay.

Um, when we speak to them, they are the same buyer. They are interested, they want to get both solutions. Yeah.

And so as we see this kind of push towards, you know, from two separate ideas, developers and security Yeah. To devs, DevSecOps. Yeah.

But everything's gotta adapt with IT. Security solutions are moving towards, you know, it's not just about security teams, it's about the developer experience as well. Are you seeing this kind of rapid convergence of DevOps and security?

We've been talking about DevSecOps for a while, but it's a cultural shift, right? Yeah, for sure. And I think a lot of the early movements of like DevSecOps were very much the cultural, more than the actual shift.

Okay. And they still had like quite siloed responsibilities. And actually what we're now seeing is way more convergence of that and way more, you know, it's not just about security teams and in organizations where developers outnumber security people by, you know, hundreds in some teams, you can't forget them.

No. And it's not, you can't be in a situation where you are telling the developers what to do. Yeah.

It doesn't work. It doesn't feel good for the developers. They don't wanna engage in security.

You have to work with them instead of trying to work against them. Yeah. And I think bringing those two worlds together and really bringing the kind of, making security something developers want to do Yeah.

Make it something they're excited about, make it products that they really love, will give us so much more secure software. Absolutely. AI coding tools.

I mean, we can't go a day without talking about AI anymore since chat GPT burst under the scene. You're an OG AI expert. I'm a hipster, I'm a ai.

Hipster. Hipster. Hipster.

I'm Cool. And no, it is cool. Yeah.

But AI coding is also introducing some security risks. Oh yeah. A hundred percent.

How come a little bit about some of those doors that's opening up and how your solution helps to close those doors. So obviously we've heard a lot about vibe coding. Yes.

That is the term, you know, no programming, no thinking, just vibing with the ai. Just being like, make me a game that allows me to, you know, buy, buy, uh, like cities and buildings and make me a city builder game. And the AI just does it for you.

Yeah. You don't have to think about it. The problem is you don't have to think about it.

Problem. And a lot of developers are using this code and just copying and pasting it and putting it straight in. And the problem is with ai, you know, security, if you think about the history of computing is such a new kind of idea.

You know, these security events like RSA that we're going to now, they're really have become more popular kind of in the last, you know, 10 years. Right. Programming's been around for years before then.

And think about ai, AI is statistics. It has so many more examples of broken code, of code that is insecure because it wasn't much of a thing at the time that it's not surprising that it doesn't know how to secure it. Yeah.

Because security is something new. It's something in the grand scheme of things that is like a blip. And I think really with like vibe coding, you know, it's all about how do we enable developers to use ai?

Yeah. Because we want them to, because this can take, I actually did a vibe coded application recently. I did it in language.

I didn't know anything about as like a little test. Uh, one as someone who knows about security, I was not thinking about security at the time. I wrote it the second it started generating code.

Even as someone who has a PhD in security, who knows this is a problem. Yeah. I just copy and pasted it.

I was like, this is too easy. I'm just gonna get AI to do it all. Okay.

And it's a double-edged sword it sounds like. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

And it's how do we, you know, enable developers to use things like AI but also to think critically about it and actually have, you know, we hear a lot about human in the loop. Absolutely. Making sure, you know, you're not just coding based on vibes.

Yeah. You are also coding based on security. Absolutely.

Um, and I think really when it comes to what, you know, security solutions, like traceable by harness really do enables that AI revolution gets, you know, that AI develop in the developer's hands, get them using it, get them, you know, experiments with it, having them rely on ai but in a secure way. Right. In a way where, you know, we are a security company, we thought about security, we know security.

Yeah. And really seeing, you know, that perspective when we are developing the AI and enabling those developers Right. It, it needs to be factored in and the security from the beginning cannot be bolt on or an afterthought.

Absolutely. And I think when it comes to, you know, the real risk of ai, the real risk of AI is not necessarily in say, AI performing security attacks or anything like that. The real risk is if you've got developers who are just implementing code uncritically Yeah.

And just copying and pasting, you know, whatever the AI gives them, you are just gonna introduce the same security vulnerabilities we solved five 10, like plus years ago. Okay. And my real worry, and you know, the real problem that I think we are gonna start to see really crop up is those old vulnerabilities we've considered solved Yeah.

That we are not even thinking about anymore. Like Right. Move past Them and then we are just reintroducing them.

Okay. They're gonna get a new lease of life. And that's what we've seen across quite a lot of, uh, security research.

So vibe coding is also a relatively new concept. This is a buzzword, but this is, this was coined in February Yeah. A couple of months ago.

Are you seeing more of your work really revolving around enabling the developers to understand how, not how to rely on it securely versus just blindly relying on it? It's interesting because I don't think there's a lot of discussion about it at the moment. Uh, I think there's a lot of like how we enable developers to use ai, but the securely has kind of been missing a little bit.

It's kind of not really been talked about as much because I think when it comes to vibe coding at the moment, the problem is, I dunno if you've seen the, there's a Twitter post of somebody who's like, I vibe coding an application. I don't know anything about programming in this many hours. Here's the link.

And uh, maybe like 12 hours later he followed up with, please stop hacking my application. Oh no. Um, and then after that he's like, I fixed this problem.

And then there was more security problem. Sure. Because, and at the end of the day, developers aren't security experts.

Right. They're not. And they don't have to be.

And they don't have to be. And you know what? AI should be secure.

That can be a security expert, that can be a security like, um, resource that developers use. It can help them do it. Unfortunately, kind of what we have at the moment in a lot of the kind of vibe coding application space is more of like a prompt that ends with please implement securely.

Ah, and that's it. Like, and if you look at the advice as well, if you look on Twitter and talk, see developers talking about this, uh, they actually list front and center that, um, security is optional. Really?

Yeah. In 2025. Yeah.

They're still thinking like that. Yeah. That Shocks me.

But I tempting though, like I have to say, as somebody who did this, I was able to implement an application that would've taken, you know, me doing it properly like a, like a week, maybe two weeks in six hours. Wow. And that's the problem.

Yeah. That you wanna have that advantage. The Productivity advantage is there.

It's Insane. Yeah. It's such a good advantage and to like discount It is.

It's, it's unthinkable. So we really need to think about, you know, enabling developers, uh, whether or not that looks like, you know, having security in things like the security in the pipeline. Yeah.

The ICD. Yeah. A lot of the work we do at Traceable by Harness is how do we put, uh, API security testing in the CICD pipeline, have it something that's automatic, have it something that developers don't think about.

And that's, that's kind of where we wanna get to. We wanna get to a way where they're using the products and they're not really thinking about it. They don't, don't Have to.

Right. Exactly. But it, it seems like from a vibe coding perspective, a lot more awareness needs to be done consistently.

What's the ideal in, in This AI era that we're all living and working in? What's the ideal developer experience? Honestly, that security should be as invisible as we can get it, but still something developers want to engage with.

Yeah. The problem is, is if you are a developer and security becomes a blocker for you, if it's you are trying to write code and it's like, no, sorry, you can't do that. No.

This has got, you know, this many vulnerabilities, fix them, you're not able to do it. If we have that kind of mentality, we're almost like, not we're short, like we're just getting in the way, we are making it annoying. We're making security be the department of no.

Mm-hmm. We want to be the people on the development team who know about security, who you can come to. Yeah.

We are not gonna add workload to you. Right. We are gonna be enablers for you.

We're gonna make it as easy as possible for you to do your job. Yeah. That is our job as security, uh, folks and having solutions that kind of use that mentality of, you know, the ideal developer experience is the security team does it.

The idea security team experience is that developers do it. There's gotta be a middle ground there. And I think it's how do we invite developers into security spaces, into security tools, get them hands on, get 'em excited about security, and also be a like member of the team who will say, you vibe code an application.

That's so cool. Let's run a security test. And if it passes, like let's, let's see how we can put this into production or put it into, you know, maybe an internal tool.

Right. It's That kind of change from being No, you can't do that. That's bad security to Yeah.

We have tools that can do things like security scanning for this application. You don't have, have worry about it. Yeah.

If it comes back clean, we'll do it. Yeah. Let's do it.

Let's do this. And if it Doesn't, we can fix it. All the vulnerabilities, We can fix it together.

It's not you fail bad, you then f Right. Failed your test. Yeah.

It's, we will work together to get your like goal out there. So are are, do you see yourself as a facilitator of the DevSecOps movement and is that evolving fast Enough? I I think every security professional needs to think of themselves as like an ambassador for developers.

You know, I don't think it's as simple as saying, I'm in the security team, that's not my job. Right. It's moving to a situation where, you know, developers aren't, they don't have to know about security.

They have to know maybe a little bit, but they're not experts in it. Yeah. And they, they don't have to be.

They They shouldn't have to Be. Yeah. And they wanna, you wanna have a relationship with them where they feel like they can come to you and And trust.

And trust. Yeah. And once you lose that trust Yeah.

Once the developer considers you like a blocker in their workflow, it's so hard to get it back. Sure. It's so, so hard.

Yeah. And honestly, it's like how do you make your developers not hate you as a security professional? Yeah.

But the thing is, we've got a great opportunity, I wanna say that we have a great opportunity to use AI as a bridge between the two and to use it to make both of our lives easier. I love that as a bridge enable us. Yeah.

So yeah, I do, I see myself as an ambassador and I wanna be the kind of security person who will be there for developers that is on their side, that is not working against them. Yes. But working with them.

With Them Absolutely. In collaboration. Yeah.

And any security person who doesn't see their role like that, I think has like a very dated mindset of, you know, what security looks like now in 2025. Yeah. Time to modernize.

I love that you kind of wrap things up with looking at AI as that bridge between the developer, between security and a lot of opportunity there. Last question for you, Katie. Favorite customer story that really shines light on the value that you're delivering.

So I work in, I work in like the security research side of things. So I obviously see quite a lot of, uh, security attacks. And I will look at attacks and look at, you know, when we see a new vulnerability being released, I'll look at the data and see whether or not our customers have been affected by it.

It's not just me that we've got an entire team that does it. Um, so I will tell you a story from one of these incidents. So we were looking at a, a customer, they worked in the finance industry, so really sensitive regulated.

Yeah. Very regulated. And they, they was, we were noticing some traffic on their servers were a little bit anomalous.

It wasn't an attack per se. This wasn't like, you know, screaming alerts going off, you know, panic, panic, Panic. It was just a little bit weird.

Mm. So we went and investigated. We looked at the behavior and we noticed a pattern.

We could see that there were these attacks, these campaigns that attackers were running. 80% of traffic on one of their APIs was all attackers. 80%.

80%. Wow. Now here's the best bit.

We looked at this, we gave the results, the customers like, Hey, we blocked it for them. Of course. Like they were fine.

Yeah. Yeah. Again, it wasn't that they had like gained a lot of access.

It was like an ongoing campaign. We actually caught them before they were able to do quite a lot of the Wow. Kinda exfiltration part of it.

Fantastic. So we're like, Hmm, I would, if this is true for other customers, and we found another customer, we found the same campaign. Oh, wow.

So we were able to detect this. It was for, for the technical people watching, it was inboxing. We were able to detect it on not just one customer, but multiple.

Yeah. And I think it was, so for me as a researcher, it was so cool one to do, to catch it ahead time. Sure.

Yes. Like, as someone who's a hacker, I spend quite a lot of time talking about the after effect. Right.

Rather than the pre. Um, but it was just so cool to see, hey, you know, this isn't something that just applied to one person. That's something applied to multiple customers.

Yeah. And it's, they're not the only ones that gonna be affected. No, Of course not.

It's, it's probably just gonna proliferate. Exactly. You can spot it, you can find it, you can remedy it.

Yeah. Exactly. Awesome.

Great stuff. Katie, thank you so much for joining me on Textron. I really enjoyed our conversation, really, how you're an ambassador.

You're, you're an AI hipster. I love that. An ethical hacker.

But thank you for sharing what you're seeing out there and how AI can be that bridge between the developers and the security folks. We appreciate your insights. Thank You so much for having me.

My pleasure. It's a pleasure. Good For Dr.

Katie Paxton. Fear. I'm Lisa Martin.

You're watching Text on TV Live from RSAC at Moscone West in San Francisco. Stick around, we have more great content coming up. I'll be back with my next guest in just a few minutes.

Hybrid multi-cloud networkings, they are so complex and yet so fragmented. It feels like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that don't quite fit or maybe pieces from multiple puzzles. In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, I'm joined by Eric Wright and Glen Sullivan.

Glen is the general manager of a product at Infoblox. And they, the Infoblox has done some awesome presentations most recently at Cloud Field Day 22, but also at previous Network Field Day events. Join us for all of the insights that we have around the complexity of managing hybrid multi-cloud networks.

Welcome To the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of IT technical experts to discuss a single idea about key concepts in the industry. This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, and is often re recorded in association with one of our events. Tech Field Day is part of the future and group, and this podcast is also pub published on our sister company Site Techstrong tv.

On this episode presented by Infoblox, we'll be discussing hybrid multi-cloud fact that it's a jigsaw puzzle full of pieces that don't fit together. Lots of complexity out there. But before we dive into today's conversation, let's start with some introductions.

Uh, first up on our panel today is Mr. Eric Wright, my friend. How are you today?

Very good, Alistair, thank you for letting me join. Uh, happy to be here today. And, uh, for those that are brand new to me, my name is Eric Wright.

I am otherwise known as at Disco Posse. I'm the co-founder of GTM Delta, and, uh, I create content and, uh, noise for a living. And joining us from Infoblox is Glenn Sullivan, the Senior Director of Product Management.

Hi Glenn, how are you doing today? Hello, Alistair. I'm good.

Thank you very much for having me. And of course, I'm Alistair Cook. I'm an event lead here at Tech Field Day.

And I think one of the themes we saw through Cloud Field Day, and particularly through the real world deployment of applications on the cloud, is that gluing together a hybrid multi-cloud environment does feel like you're assembling jigsaw pieces and often building solutions on the cloud is about assembling together jigsaw pieces. The pieces from a single cloud are designed to go together, but assembling pieces across multiple clouds and on-premises environments feels like you're trying to assemble three or four or five different jigsaw pieces into a single picture. Glenn, are you seeing customers really struggling with this?

Is this, am I, am I making stuff up or is this real that it's hard? No, this is absolutely something our customers, uh, are seeing as a challenge on a regular basis. And, um, it's, it's even just in a single cloud environment too, right?

Multi-cloud makes it worse. But even, even if you're sitting there thinking, well, I have everything in, you know, AWS or Azure or GCP, you probably have dozens if not hundreds, maybe even. I think the most I've ever heard is like 3000 accounts in AWS.

Um, so even in those environments, everything seems like a very different, uh, environment because you have different regions and different, you know, AZs and different, you know, different zone types. Um, so what our customers are struggling with, you know, kind of out of the box is getting consistency between all of those different accounts and all of those different cloud environments and rectifying it and reconciling it with what they have on-prem. Um, because it's not the same tools, it's not the same expertise.

And, uh, like I was talking about in the cloud field day presentation, it's, it's not even the same terms. So you have to have a cheat sheet to, to determine like, what is this thing called in, you know, on-prem or Azure AWS or GCP? 'cause even the terms are different, right?

It just the very facts that they keep changing the names of products on us between the clouds. And then on top of that, like I often say that multi-cloud is not a strategic choice, but adopting it safely is. And one of the problems we have is that we acquire clouds.

You often, you don't say, I want to build one app across four clouds. What you have is four apps. Each is in a single cloud and maybe you acquire another company or you run a SaaS product and it is tied to another cloud.

And so now you've got all these things that need to work together, but the way you manage them does not in the outta the box way. And then on top of that, the human aspect, right? I've got team members that, like I said, just is it a Route 53?

There's no Route 53 over here on, on Azure. You're like, oh, okay, what do we call it over there is Azure DNS, it might be today. And then, you know, the, the elements and the artifacts are different.

It's not, not like there's one JSON like bind was happy, bind was a good thing. Everybody had the same format. And we've, we've steered far from that.

The core database is the same, but the way we manage it is not, And and people often ask me like, what is the optimal, um, you organizational structure? 'cause I get to talk, you know, the luxury of my job is I get to talk to, you know, hundreds of customers about how their different cloud environments are set up. And, um, I see everything from like cloud centers of excellence, where you have one team that has, you know, governance, architecture, network, uh, cloud teams, cloud ops, all on one team.

And that works well in some environments. And then in other environments, it's siloed down to we have an AWS, you know, development team that, that has their own governance and, and an Azure, you know, development team that has their own governance and the network team is, is completely separate. And there's no right answer.

It kind of just depends on your, your needs and how you organically or non-organically, you know, developed your cloud infrastructure, right? And like you said, with m and a, right? If I acquire, if I'm an AWS shop and I acquire somebody who's primarily in Azure, you know, I'm, I don't even know what I'm getting half the time, right?

Um, I was talking, you know, with, with cricket, uh, the other day on a webinar about this. And, uh, you know, the m and a teams, the tech team is sometimes the last to find out that the m and a is happening, right? So then it's like, hey, the, the contract's signed, the ink's drying, uh, now you need to go figure out what you're getting.

And, uh, you know, the first thing you figure out is, hey, they're using 10 slash eight for all of their IP addressing. We're using 10 slash eight for all our IP addressing. So re iPing is inevitable.

So then it's just a matter of how do we make the re iPing, you know, uh, uh, less impactful than, uh, you know, than it would be otherwise. It's not, it's not a matter of it, we're just gonna find some copacetic, you know, IP space that in between that works. It's, it's re iPing is inevitable.

And no matter how much we've loaded the idea of, of variable length subnet masks, we've had them for decades at this point. We love 8, 16, 24. You know, like it's, we just love those natural ending points.

A hundred percent, a hundred percent. I mean, even, even getting, um, you know, someone to change the default cluster size from a slash 24 to a slash 27 is a challenge. Um, and this is an, this is like an exact, um, scenario that I've seen time and time again happen between cloud teams and network teams, right?

Is you'll have a, you'll have a cloud team who's using Kubernetes, you know, A-K-S-E-K-S-G ke, doesn't matter what flavor, and maybe the default pod size is slash 24, okay? And get 255 addresses, you know, minus two for network and broadcast. But, um, maybe I only need 30.

And it's like, well, what are you doing with the other 200 plus ips? Well, you're wasting them, and it might not be a big deal because maybe you don't need that many clusters, but if you need more than, you know, a handful of clusters, you're gonna want to reduce that size from a 24 to a 27 so that you can, you know, reclaim all that wasted IP space. And if you think about the complexity of that situation, right?

Um, the, the cloud engineer, the, the, the, the Kubernetes admin, they, you know, they don't really speak IP much because most of that is abstracted underneath the, the coverage for them. So they've gotta get on with a network team, you know, who speaks siters and who really understands, you know, IAM you know, IP address management, and they have to kind of like look at both consoles, right? And say, okay, I'm looking at Kubernetes, it's using this, I'm looking at, you know, IAM this is what the toss 24 versus slash 27 gives me.

It's actually really, really complex to figure that problem out if you don't have a holistic view on both sides. And just one thing that you brought up earlier, uh, that will lead probably into something, I know Alistair has had a lot of experience with the idea of Conway's law in that organizations build communication patterns that mirror the systems they build. And so if you've got an Azure team, an AWS team, a VMware team, a network, you know, team, uh, field network team, they will act and operate as if they work for different companies and they expect their local toolkit to be the toolkit of record for everybody else.

And it's often like, I know it's works fine on my machine. And, and that is an unfortunate pattern. And you know, Al I know you've, you and I have spent a lot of time in a lot of environments.

You know, you, you know this too well. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to reflect on was a couple of elements of how this has been done badly in the past.

And we've all seen environments where the IP address management was a big spreadsheet, and it wasn't even a spreadsheet full of formulae. It was search and replace within each tab for the subnet that you have. Um, I'm looking at a particular network team I worked with in the not terribly distant past who, who had a, a large campus network that was exactly that, and it was so painful.

The other element I wanted to hit on, uh, is Glen, you, you talked about that, you know, even within a single, um, provider, single AWS environment with, with lots of, um, lots of accounts in therefore lots of VPCs probably in there, uh, it's still a complex thing because often we've used scripting and declarative tools, uh, scripting and, and, and aligned declarative tools and just made managing the network part of our fragile scripting or hopefully less fragile declarative script tools. But it's been a, a home baked solution that we understand. And this kind of hits a little on Eric's point of, uh, one team who's building the automation on AWS will build it in a way that makes sense on AWS and, uh, we'll have a whole set of structures around that.

And then the team that's building on premises will have a whole different set of structures. And so there's, there's elements where we've built our own tooling to suit our own requirements, but it tends to be very fragile and not very cohesive. And I think that was really a place where we start seeing pain, right?

We moved from that idea of automated all of the things that I know Eric and I were on, that that, uh, rollercoaster as, um, PowerShell was, was new as the, the thing to automate all the things with. And we very quickly realized that really we're automating things because there isn't a good product to do the things for us. And really that automation that everybody has to build, well, that's, that's actually an opportunity for a really good product that takes away the need to build the automation.

Yeah. That's the way we see it with, you know, what we're doing with universal D because it, it's, it's twofold, right? And sort of the obvious thing is, okay, I've got a bunch of humans causing errors.

Um, I'm gonna automate everything because that's gonna prevent conflicts. That's gonna prevent from exhausting ips, that's gonna prevent from, you know, this bad scenario to that bad scenario. So let me automate everything, but there's, there's two, there's two outcomes that are not super obvious from, from that decision, right?

One is, I am signing up for managing the API structures of all the different, you know, third party systems that I integrate with, right? So I mean, you could have a relatively simple environment blink, and now you're managing APIs in AWS Azure, um, maybe you're not even in GCP yet. Microsoft ad, um, you know, infoblox, maybe some generic bind out there.

You know, this is really, really fast. You've got 5, 6, 7, 8 different APIs that you're managing. Um, that's kind of one bucket of, of, you know, tech debt or tech, I won't call it tech debt, but like, you know, something that needs care and feeding.

The second thing that you have to handle is the person who figures all this out. There's probably one or two people in your organization that have the skillset to do all of this. They could be using Terraform, they could be using Ansible, they could be using a combination of all of that.

Um, but the kind of universal answer that I've received from most people I talk to is there's one, maybe two people at the entire organization who really understand how that 50, 60, 70 lines of Python really work. And as soon as they, and it's a hot market right now, as soon as they get a different offer or as soon as they decide they're, you know, they wanna move on, that knowledge is going out the door. So it's not just the managing four or five different API structures, it's also the institutional knowledge you bake into the automation.

So native automation, you know, is always gonna be better interface with a third party, pull the data in, get next available, you know, make, make, make your single IAM source, do the hard work for you. When what we find too is like, I used to always see, like even we have some IAM platform in place, they're read versions. Like they're generally not really, they're not really management, it's more like it's a nicer version of an Excel spreadsheet with a bit more searching.

Like there's some dynamic updates, but they're, they, if at best they were unidirectional, right? Like it's reading the data, getting you one place to look at, you know, two or three sources, but in the end it was just a, a very slightly, you know, elevated abstraction from just managing right in the final interface. And then the biggest problem is then you have to then go elsewhere to actively manage that.

And that's, that's the problem I think that we used to always bump into, There's two things, right, um, that are critical when we're doing anything within a universal, you know, IAM perspective. One is we can't eliminate a swim lane, right? So if, if the cloud team does VPC provisioning and maybe they use AWS ipam, great, I don't take that away from them because as soon as I tell a cloud team, they're not allowed to use their native tools, I might as well tell 'em they need to deploy an appliance, right?

They have antibodies and, and everything else and heartburn against doing that. So that's critical. I can't eliminate a swim lane.

The second thing is, like you said, it has to be bi-directional, right? So, um, anything I do in one has to show up in the other, and that's part and parcel for that swim lane, right? As as long as I make an update in a WSI pick it up in, in my UDDI console, my UDDI portal, and the same, same as vice versa, I make a change in UDDI, it pops up in aws.

So it has to be, it has to be bi-directional, otherwise. Um, the third thing that it has to do, I know said there's only two, but there's really three, um, is it has to do the get next available. Like if it's just a pre, like you said, if it's just a spreadsheet, right, then it's not doing me a whole lot of good, sure I can visually look and see, hmm, okay, what's the next slash 24 inside of this slash 16, but it needs to have an API structure that says, Hey, given, given everything I know about, you know, the environment, here's the metadata I need to be able to pull out the next available ip, right?

So it could be, Hey, give me a slash 24 in US East region that is PCI compliant. Here you go, API, right? Not looking at a spreadsheet, not looking at the ui, it has to unify the data structure so that when I do get next available, it gives me the real next available.

That's a critical piece of ipam. And I love that you highlighted the idea before of like the, you can have incredibly talented people, uh, for fans of the Phoenix project. We call them Brent, right?

So shout out to Jean Kim and, and the crew there, but that is the one person that they're incredibly valuable, but they're also incredibly dangerous in that the amount of risk you carry by having them be such a critical bottleneck to knowledge. And, you know, it's not that we shouldn't celebrate that automation, that knowledge, but like, I would rather automate a tool that already adapts to changes in outbound APIs. Like, like you said, I've, I'm a huge fan of automation, Alistair and I have spent tons of time buried in PowerShell stuff till, until I couldn't even see.

And what we end up finding is that you build incredible solutions that are bespoke and that's great, but then yeah, new version power show comes out or the endpoint API gets to deprecate some function and all of a sudden I'm seeing new elements come in and now I have to go back relearn the code that I barely knew the first time, and then I've got context switch for that. I mean, deity bless cursor and all these amazing things that can help me get there faster now. But still, I'd rather just say, I know for a fact that this, I can buy a product that I know will continuously keep up with the API changes so that I don't have to create braking changes.

Everything I do is like I've got one API that I need to care about. So if I wanna automate, I'm automating against UDDI, right? I'm automating, I'm automating one place much safer.

And like a anybody who's into compliance, they should know. Like the more things you try and work against, it's, it's a general IT risk. Yeah.

I mean, fundamentally what you don't want to be altering the, the, the automation that interacts with the API, you wanna be authoring policies about what it should achieve for you by interacting with that API, you want to be able to say, here are my standards, just go and implement my standards because that's much closer to business knowledge that is far less likely to be locked into that one bring to then gets hit by a bus and, uh, you find yourself out of business six months later because the network falls apart and you have to redesign from the beginning. That's right. There's also a security element too, right?

Like, um, with, with such a, you know, such a hot market right now, you know, there, I know one of the challenges I hear on a constant basis is onboarding and offboarding. Think about if I've got eight different nine different systems that I have to update the API keys. I mean, we don't even who, who, who updates their quarterly passwords as often as they should, right?

Much less, you know, revokes all the API tokens every time someone leaves their company, right? So It's like SFL, everybody that's says if they got a TLS search, the first thing is like there's only one time that you ever update the cert, and that is about 22 minutes after it expires, because that's when you find out that it expired. We're not good at where it people have a DHD by nature, we are not good at following long-term rules.

That's right. This is why alerts and alarms are your, your coping factor here for not just for A DHD, but also for certificate expiry and all of those kinds of routine maintenance things, uh, um, active notifications. I love.

And, and just actually a question you gave an infoblox is in large environment and small environment, you know, like you've got a good variety of types of industries and like, what does multi-cloud really look like? I know my, I'm sort of biased in how, what my view of it was, but like multi-cloud used to be, occasionally I would bump into people that had a second cloud and they kind of grudgingly took it on. But are we actually seeing in practice that it's just cloud, cloud is just a ubiquitous thing and we just have at least two clouds in, in a lot of environments?

Am I wrong in thinking that that's more common? It's like, it's like 90 plus percent of our organizations have, are in multiple clouds and they end up there one of two reasons. One is 'cause it organically happened.

Um, they had a different dev team who needed something that was really, you know, specific and solid in GCP. So they stood that up. You know, you could call it shadow it, you could call it, you know, swiping your credit card to enable, you know, cloud accounts.

But in reality it's just the way business gets done, right? So you either find yourself that or you find yourself in a mandate. Um, multi-vendor mandate has always been a thing.

It kind of goes in and out a phase for what it means. Does it mean that I have two switch vendors for top of rack or does it mean that I have, you know, some Azure so that I can put AWS in the penalty box when I need to? Um, I don't see that as often.

Like you'd think that would be it. Like, oh, there'd be some, you know, ex executive C-suite level mandate to be multi-cloud. That's not what I'm seeing.

I'm seeing a mandate to be cloud first, a mandate to be SaaS first, but then the multi-cloud part is just, it's just organically happens and, um, the smart organizations don't fight it. The smart organizations realize that this is what we're, this is what we have to deal with, so we have to be adapt to the business need. It's about as realistic as me, you know, getting a second girlfriend to keep the first one in line.

Like, it's just not like that. These are not realities of like, we can't, you can't just say AWS yeah, you buggered something up. And so I'm, we're swinging over to Azure, you know, like I can probably barely even log into Azure in the amount of time that they'll be laughing at me, that it's just, you can't possibly move your whole estate like that.

And G ccp, like look at G CCP with the cross cloud networking, the thing that they just, they just announced at Google next, right? With the Google Cloud wan, right? Which does happen to use our stuff as well for DDI under the covers.

Um, but the thing is, is that, you know, even the cloud teams are recognizing, the cloud providers are recognizing that you're, they're not gonna win a hundred percent of your business, and that's not in their best interest to insist that. Um, so now they're building tools. Um, and then MCN is a thing too, right?

You know, your Acuras and your aviatrix's and things like that, like, it's, it's a real thing. Uh, so it's not going away. We're running ourselves towards the end of time.

And as usual, this would be a great conversation to carry on over a, a full lunch or a full week. In fact, it would be great to just hang out with you all. Uh, but I'd like to, uh, give people the opportunity to follow up with you and continue the conversation with you once moved on maybe from listening to this podcast.

Uh, Eric, where can people find you and carry on to this discussion around multi-cloud and hybrid cloud? Well, uh, yeah, thanks for letting me take a part of the conversation. Always a fantastic, uh, I'm at Disco Posse all over the place.

You can find me on LinkedIn. Uh, you could search for Eric Wright. There's probably a bunch of them, but there's only one Disco Posse.

Uh, and of course on XI may even be on Blue Sky, I can't remember. com. Uh, you know, uh, likely you are a customer.

We have lots of customers, all big and small. So you likely already have an account team. Uh, me specifically, I am, I'm on LinkedIn.

I'm fairly active on LinkedIn. Uh, so reach out via Glen Sullivan on LinkedIn. Um, there's a few of us out there, but probably only one guy that works at Infoblox who used to work at Snap Route and other companies before that.

So, uh, Glenn Sullivan on LinkedIn. Oh, and of course I'm Alistair Cook. You can find me on LinkedIn and as well as across a whole bunch of the, uh, text wrong and, uh, fu and group properties as well.

Uh, I think we will be hearing lots more about the complexity of hybrid cloud networking. It's certainly something that I think is important as we're doing more Cloud Field day events, eye out for those in the future. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast.

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