Leadership, Skills & AI: Cisco’s Push Into the Future | TSG Ep. 921

Lead, follow, or get out of the way might be the best leadership advice ever you're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Talent Shimo. Happy Thursday to you.

It's great to have you on here for another Tech Drunk Gang. Well, I, I am still out in John Schwartz's Edge, west Coast side of the world at Jfr Swamp Up. Um, but though, by the time you see this, hopefully I'll be on my way home.

But lots going on out here at Swamp Up. Lots going on in Boston at at the Splunk comp. Lots going around, going on all over the place.

And we've got it all for you here on Textron Gang. We have also got a great group of folks to talk about it with you. Let me introduce you to them.

First of all, it's good to see his face here on, on the show with me. He is my friend, Rob Reeves, R two. Hello.

Hello, hello. Thank you for having me. Absolutely.

John Swartz, Reem of Al who are regular and, and a new regular here from our Tech Field Day Brethren, our friend Tom Hollingsworth. Hey Tom. And of course, joining us it looks like, uh, are you home or still up in Boston?

Mike? I'm still in Boston, so you gotta say that, right? Yep.

Yeah, you still in Boston? Mike Ard. All right.

Um, guys, let's, let's jump into things. Mike, talk a little bit about leadership. Go ahead.

Yeah, There's a story written by Alen over on digital CXO that we think we should all check out, but it's based on a survey that finds that only one in 10 companies thinks that it's workers are ready and have the skills to drive the next generation of innovations. And Alan points out, well, it's not the worker's fault, it's an actual, uh, leadership issue because the leaders of these companies are not stepping up to kind of drive this point home with their workers or making those investments. Tom, I know that leadership training is a bit of a hobby of yours, but what's your take on what's going on here?

'cause it's, it suggests at least that a certain amount of malaise has been allowed to set in. Yeah, I think it absolutely has. And I love that Alan brought this up to the people out there, because workers are gonna work, right?

Like you, you give them a task and they do it, and then they do the next thing, and then they do the next thing. But if they don't know what the next thing is supposed to be because they didn't get clear communications, because they don't understand the value of what they're doing, then they get apathetic about it, right? Like, we see this all the time.

And I want people to understand that this is not a tech problem. This is not because of ai. This is a problem everywhere.

I promise you, you have worked for a bad manager sometime in your life. Not Alan, not Steven Foskett, not Daniel Newman. They're, they're all wonderful managers.

But I mean, in general, in your career, you've worked for a bad person, and you can probably figure out that it's probably not because they don't understand how to, uh, configure, rag to, um, reduce hallucinations in the thing. You're probably going, the guy probably thinks that a rag is something he uses to polish his BMW The what Alan calls in this article, soft skills, which I, I think are a little less soft, are the important things, right? Um, adaptability, uh, say it with me folks.

Change happens. We need to get used to this idea that what we know now is not gonna be what we're doing later. Communication.

Clear, effective communication, and not just putting things on blast. Right? How many times have we gotten that email?

The all hands email, and, and I don't even know who's seen it, right? Well, did you see the email last week that we were supposed to do this thing? Well, you never sent it to me.

It must have showed up in my spam folder. Communication is a two way street. There's a message, a sender, and a receiver.

And all of that gets wrapped up in this idea that you have to understand how your team works. If you've ever seen, remember the Titans? You've seen how they build that team together.

All three of those things that I just told you are part of a program that I volunteered to be a part of called Wood Badge, which is a part of the Boy Scouts of America. I've spent the last seven years deeply immersed in this program, watching the curriculum change, uh, over the course of that time to incorporate all of these things, to train our adult volunteers, to be the leaders for the youth that will be the bosses of youth when you are about to retire. And I can tell you that I have a deep passion for this because I've seen it transform people from average leaders into effective great people.

But it focuses on the soft skills. It doesn't matter where you're trying to, uh, configure. I ai, it doesn't matter whether you're trying to, uh, lead a corporate takeover.

It's the values, it's the communications, it's the agility and the flexibility and the team leadership skills that matter, most of all, because most people that I've taught have told me over the years, I use wood badge every day. Yep. So, so, Tom, I, I don't disagree with anything you're saying.

I think there are absolutely, you wanna call 'em soft hard. 'cause if you have soft, obviously you must have hard, but there are, you know, there are soft and hard leadership skills, and I think many of us on this panel have led teams that led companies and, and have had a chance to develop some of these leadership skills. One of the other things that I've learned, and I, you know, I co-founded several more than several companies, is, and I learned this lesson as a, as a young boy, I'll tell you the truth.

My dad owned a, a, uh, a deli in New Jersey, and I went to work for him one summer, and I was probably 14 or 15. I was a cocky teenager, and he told me to go clean the bathroom, and I said, clean the bathroom. I'm the owner's son.

I'm not supposed to clean the bathroom. He said, no. When you, when you have a company, when you, it's your business, you've gotta be able to do every single job there, right?

If, if something's too good for you, it's too good for your worker to Right? Don't, don't ever hear anyone. Don't let anyone ever hear you say that, right?

That it's too good for you. And, and, you know, I'm not equating learning AI to cleaning the bathroom, but if we're gonna ask our folks to embrace AI and go all in on ai, we owe it to them and ourselves and our organizations to have a little bit of, of knowledge here to, to have a little bit of dirt under our fingernails too, when it comes to ai so that we, we know what the challenge is. We understand what their issues are, and we, we empathize, right?

Empathy is so important. It's one of the founding principles of DevOps, as you know, garima, right? Empathy.

Empathy. Yeah. And that is why we say that ignorance is bliss, right?

Mm-hmm. So I, I would add, uh, to what you have said, um, Alan, because, you know, um, the first aspect is of course, knowledge, right? You need to kind of know that throwing money on this problem will not solve this problem.

So build your OKRs in a way that it makes sense for people. So invest 20% of your r and d time in experimental projects. For example, this should be a, could be an okay r to build that skill, that build that momentum and cultural mindset shift, which needs to take place, right?

And then there are three parts of this problem. The first part is, what is my new skill radar as an individual in an AI era, right? So how do we, uh, I, as an individual, I onboard to that, be it the leader, be it a engineering manager or a practitioner.

Everybody has to do that, right? And the change is coming. The second part, or the aspect of the problem is how do we work in a team where AI is a team player?

So when you bring AI agents, when you bring AI components, uh, you know, co-pilots into the teamy equation, how the team should react, what kind of assets, what kind of support you need for the teams, you know, do that due diligence now. And the third aspect is, you know, enterprise level, all these enterprises who are used to big bank transformation programs, I'm sorry to say that this needs to stop because most of these, uh, transformations will be AI led micro changes in the future. So you need to get used to it, you need to experiment with it, and also curate the culture as you go along.

You know, there was, there was, um, it was interesting when I saw this story, I, I wanted to ask a couple of the executives out here in swamp up about it, and I talked to this, uh, guy, uh, Fred Simon, who's the chief data scientist and co-founder of Jfr. And we were laughing about it. And Mike, I, I think this appealed to you too, is this whole idea of, of the edict from the top down to change and to change fast.

And we were thinking about back in Silicon Valley days, where we would have these movements among the employees from the bottom up to adopt things like the Macintosh or what have you, or whatever, new technology. And there was a resistance among management. So there would be the, these small kind of, these, these small teams of people trying to advocate.

And now we have like the opposites, you know? And I, maybe it's, it's a consequence of AI in a certain sense in this, in this example because of productivity and efficiency demands. But now we, it, it's things are, are, are, now we have the executives who are the big change, A agents versus the employees who used to have to pull, push them as much as possible now.

And, and, and it's, it's very interesting. And yet there's no upskilling and they're very, very, very, uh, skilling that's going on to make this happen now as fast as the executives want it to happen. Well, John, I think it's funny that you mention that because there's, there's this breakdown between a manager and a leader, right?

Managers make sure that you're doing things right. Leaders do the right thing. And I think that a lot of times, if that's the same person, then great, you have a, a really effective management leadership chain.

But like you said, in a lot of cases, the, the leadership comes from groups of people that are kind of below the management level saying, Hey, if we could only do it this way, things would be better. And, and I think that's where a lot of, you know what, call it what you will, right? Like, uh, adopting Macintosh's shadow it in the cloud, uh, AI revolution, a lot of it came from below first because you have to prove it to people, right?

Who are very traditional in the way that they approach things. Oh, this isn't on my list, so we shouldn't be doing it. But as soon as it becomes something that has impactful, uh, opportunity for the company, now it becomes directive.

Now we have to do this. Meanwhile, all the, the leaders, if you wanna call 'em that are sitting around going, we already knew this. What took you so long?

Yeah. And it's really vetting for the, for the employees especially. Think about the people at the entry level trying to get into some of these companies.

They're having a hard time in, in some cases. And they might be the people who are, who are the best at early adopters or, or users of ai. And the irony is, the people who are entrenched may be slower at doing it.

They will do it. So we have this, these, these conflicting emotions in, in kind of, uh, edicts going on within companies. So this, this creates all sorts of paralysis.

But let me hold on before we Wait. Let's, let's get Robert in here for a second. Um, you know, as I listen to everybody, it reminds me of the fact that companies get into ruts, and everybody's so busy trying to do the thing that they normally do every day.

IAKA putting out fires that they don't have time to think about fire prevention. So how do you kinda make it acceptable to take a minute to step back and rethink and re-engineer something to make it more efficient and innovate? Well, you know, like Tom was saying, there's, you know, a sender receiver and a message.

Uh, what is that message that resonates with that receiver for management? It's gonna be saving money for, uh, people that are individual contributors, gonna be about, you know, being more valuable to the company. You gotta speak in terms that the receiver is going to respond to positively, and you have to put it into their mental schema, not yours.

Uh, so empathy, like Alan was talking about. Um, but, you know, look, it, it, it is, uh, you know, this whole conversation reminds me of that line from The Simpsons with Ned ER's parents, where they said, we've tried nothing, and it's, we're all at ideas. And, and, and so, you know, the, uh, there's a lot of, you know, do as I say, not as I do.

We have managers that are not seeking to automate and eliminate their jobs. Look, as a DevOps engineer, I always believed that my job was to put myself, automate myself out of a job. Never happened.

Um, and, but I took that upon myself to make certain that my developers and my SREs were very happy. Uh, those, you know, both pitching and catching, uh, software code. And I just don't see that.

I see a lot of people, the individual contributors are being told to adopt ai. Yes, they're not being given the resources to be successful, but there's not a clear exit or exit criteria. Uh, and managers are being managers.

They're not being leaders. And instead of saying, this is where we're going to, um, you know, this is where we wanna see productivity improvement, they're saying, oh, I'll know it when I see it. Which is really, really difficult for people to operate under.

So it's will fail. It absolutely will fail. And the people that adopted AI bottoms up, they will be successful.

I, I, I don't disagree, Robert, you know, so look, we could have a conversation up here about leadership, and, and that's an important conversation to have. And it is important leadership traits that can be trained can be learned. And then there are people who are born leaders.

But I wanna bring the conversation, or, or close out the conversation on this where we started, which was around the AI piece of it. You know, one of the things that came out, John and I are out here at Swamp Up was there was a Gartner study, evidently that 40%, 40% of CIOs, um, are increasing, or at least asking to increase their budgets because they're being pressured from their board to adopt ai. So now, you know, who's the leader here, right?

The guy you think, or the person you think is the leader, is really just taking marching orders from the board. And, you know, it reminds me of this meme that's become very popular that we've seen on LinkedIn and other places, right? It's about six panels.

There's the, there's the, uh, there's the leader saying, I want my AI and someone, and the group says, when I want it now, why? And the guy says, I don't know. Right?

And, and then there's some of that going on here where, hey, the board's saying we gotta adopt ai. I need budget to do ai, and I'm gonna go do ai. At the same time, the message from Jfr on the keynote stage from their CEO Shlomi Bank was very clear.

Hey, he asked people who's using AI right now in your SDLC, who's planning on using AI right now in your SDLC? Okay. Whoever hasn't raised their hand, you, you should probably leave the room.

Ah, yeah, that's Exactly what he said. If you don't, you can leave the room now. Right?

Yeah. It was laughter, but it was nervous. Laughter.

Yeah. Because that, again, is what our leaders are being told they need to, how they need to lead or what they have to do to lead Tommy. It goes back to what you said.

Someone sends out a letter, that's a terrible way sending out an email saying, we're going to do ai, you know, no matter how well that AI wrote that letter for them or whatever, right? Um, it, that's not leadership. That's not leadership.

You gotta get, tell, you gotta get dirt under your fingernails. You gotta be shoulder to shoulder with your troops, with your players. Well, but Alan, we've never seen the board tell us to adopt, you know, technology before.

Yeah. I mean, you know, do that thing because they read it in a, uh, in-Flight magazine. Mm-hmm.

Like, we never saw this with Cloud or DevOps or No, Them up. Wait, wait to be, to be fair, we have never seen CIOs turn around and say, oh, I need more money to do that, and let me attach everything in the world to my quote unquote AI initiative, including that laptop Yeah. Firewalls, yeah.

And everything else. Yeah. Yeah.

We've never done this with digital transformation or anything. Never. Never.

Well, look, we, we, we just changed the names to protect the innocence. Exactly. But, um, anyway, hey, we've given this one, it's 15 minutes of fame.

Let's take a break here on the gang and come back and, and we're gonna, I think John, and I'll maybe give an update from all the other things we've learned at Swamp Up. You're watching Textron Gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT, leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey, folks, we're back, and as Alan said, we're gonna talk a little bit about Swamp Up, but both John and Alan were there, but we're gonna start with John because, well, Alan's been to this show, I don't know every time it's existed since, I don't know the beginning of time, John, I think this was your first trip, and I don't think you spend a whole lot of time with those folks.

So, you know, give us your general impressions. Yeah, that's interesting you said that because I, I'm coming to this show, and this is a DevOps show, and I'm, and I'm wondering, okay, they're gonna talk about ai, they're gonna, is it gonna be a Me Too announcements, or what are they gonna do? They're gonna have an AI agent announcement.

They did, of course. But, um, one of my big takeaway from Shlomi keynote, and I think it really resonated with me, and I think it resonates with their partners, which include Nvidia and ServiceNow, is there's this new persona in this, in software development, AI agents, rather than human developers. And it's making it imperative that foundational platforms incorporate a genetic practices alongside security, traceability, and viability to succeed in this era.

And I think, um, Alan mentioned this Gartner survey, which was the AI FOMO survey. And they, that was one of the, that was the first statistic that he cited before he went into kind of a long list of, uh, of announcements. I'll mention just a couple of 'em, because I thought they were interesting, and I actually think they're very relevant given all, given what's going on with, um, agent AI and just this tidal wave of announcements.

And I, I, some of the executives at J Rog refer to it as liquid software where there's no set version, and you're constantly adapting, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. So, uh, JFR, just to reiterate, and Mike wrote the story, actually, in all fairness. Um, they announced a couple things.

They announced, uh, fly, which is a DevOps platform that simplifies AI agent integration for app developers working at scale. Um, they also, uh, announced, uh, APT Trusts platform, um, which serves as like a unified hub for governance, risk management and compliance. And to me, and I got the same impression from Atlassian's show months ago, this is like a practical solution that almost kind of applies to a number of companies, and especially enterprises that are grappling with this.

Um, again, I will say a tidal wave of AI agent announcements coming at them, which can be confusing, overwhelming, and at the same time, they're being, they're being pressured. The CIOs particularly being pressured from the top down, from the board level down to move as fast as possible, not break anything. So, um, that was kind of my takeaway.

I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll pass it on to Alan, because I'm, I know he's got a ton of stories from this show. Yeah. So, so John, let me riff off that a little bit.

And you're, and Mike, and you're right, I've, I, I've been coming the swamp up for many years, both here and Israel and, and all over, and I, you know, full disclosures to all, me and Fred and yo the three co-founders of personal friends of mine that I talk to pretty often. Um, couple of things. Jfr fly this.

So this is Jfr made its bones in this business, if you will, right? With Artifactory, Artifactory was the, the repo, and still is the repo for artifacts, right? If you and artifacts are a valuable tool in the developer's tool chats toolbox, and if you're using artifacts, chances are you're using Artifactory to House catalog access your artifacts, right?

Like, there's J JavaScript art, uh, repos, there's Java repos, there's DACA repos, there's artifact repo Artifactory. They took that little kernel of a business and, and more power to them, and they built the whole Jfr platform around it, right? Rob, you, you were here with me in the beginning in this stuff on DevOps.

Robert, you, this is old hat to you. They built an entire business around Artifactory. First they started checking the artifacts for security with X-ray.

Then they started building more repos for different things. Fly is the latest repo, it's a repo for AI agents. So think about it.

Now, I can store my agents up there, and I need an agent for a particular task. I just bring it down from my repo, right? So I could reuse these agents over and over again, Much like reusing artifacts that another team has built, you know, using a web service from another team.

It's almost almost like turning AI into software components. Amazing. That, That exact Robert, that's, that's exactly, they, they just played the same script, number one.

Number two, the big thing that Jfr has been on for the last four years, maybe more, is security. They bought a lot of security expertise, a lot of a couple, like three different security companies to build security into the software supply chain. And you know what, lo and behold, the gen AI needs security too, right?

So they, so they build this whole security piece around agentic ai and be clear, they, they, they definitely distinguish between agentic AI and, and, and generative ai. But for agentic ai, they, they're calling it dev gov ops because there's this whole use of shadow ai. Like there was Shadow Cloud, there was shadow IT people whipping our credit cards and buying instances.

com about do we need another dev, XXX ops, right? My, my friends in the dev, the purest of the DevOps people, right? Patrick Vo, John Willis, Damon Edwards, they hated when I used DevSecOps.

The DevOps people revolted. We don't need no stinking syllable in the middle of Devon Ops. It's there is just, well, Alan, they were, they're really upset that they didn't come up with it.

Yeah, who was my, who was That? But you know what? Over time they look, DevSecOps became a thing.

And then we saw, so then we saw all the takes on this dev, BizOps dev, sales ops dev, this ops dev, everybody wanted to be in the middle of the dev and the ops. So the latest one is dev gov ops. And when I heard it, I said, oh, God, here we go again.

But here's the thing we need. We do need governance on ai. Back to our leadership discussion, Tom.

Our leaders are telling us go forth in ai, and it's okay to make some mistakes. It's okay to experiment because we're in this deep learning phase go forth in ai. Well, that's great.

Until, until the, the alarms go off and the stuff hits the fan. So we need some sort of governance around our use of all of this AI and jfr tag, the line dev gov ops. Is it a great name?

Will it have legs and stick? I don't know. But the idea is good, right?

The I, the thought is, is I think a good thought. We need to have governance around this. Um, the other thing they came out with is that, you know, on our tables, John, right?

They had a little magazine. I said, how quaint? Yes.

Actually printed on paper. Printed on paper. And it was the AI catalog.

I felt like I was going into Sears again or something. And, uh, so I opened up this ca, this paper, this catalog, and they have all the different, you know, I know six or seven top LLMs, they had top AI and, and you know, all the different, but what they're really doing is they're cataloging or allowing you to catalog all the AI in use in your organization. Mm-hmm.

What AI you're using, what models it's based on who's using it, what prompts have been put in. And again, back to dev gov ops, it's all part of that. So I, I, I think that's a brilliant piece of it, to tell you the truth.

'cause you know, sooner or later the thought police are coming, you know, Sorry, sorry to interrupt. So here it is. No, I'm done.

There it is. The, I Saw it on the table and my first discussion was, So, so, so some marketing person, yeah, some marketing person right now is having a good laugh going in. And that made you look, There were no in there, but what the heck, Why not?

I wanna get green's thoughts in here though, on this particular issue, because I can't quite figure out where I stand on this one. Do we need a new DevOps platform for inserting AI agents into these workflows? Or can we just start bolting AI agents onto our existing platforms and it'll all work out just fine?

I think, uh, we need to step back a little bit on understand why do we need this kind of platform, right? And of course, the platform will not solve all the problems because before standardization, the platform can do only a little, right? But there, there are two main problems when I see, uh, you know, integration of AI into like DevOps or developer workflow or even operation workflow.

The first part is, you know, can I bring my data? You know, and when I train my model, who has the IPR on that model, right? So I need to have a fragmented approach to these platforms so that I can train my model in-house, but I can also infer the models online or real time.

So that's the first, uh, issue. And I, I have to read a bit on, you know, how this platform caters to that problem. Because, you know, again, who owns the data, how this data is kind of, you know, curated and, uh, used even if you are, uh, you know, deploying it in ize, the model itself gets like the, the training of the model.

Who owns the IPR for that? So the, the first problem, I think I have to look into that. The second thing is that a, a lot of these things, which we are talking about, a, from an AI agent perspective, this will be democratized, which means that you will have to have a marketplace of AI agents, which can be hosted somewhere.

So if Jfr is bringing this dev gov ops, I would like to understand a little bit more on, you know, if I can bring my AI agent into that platform, will there support? Like does this support a marketplace place of AI agents, uh, just like, you know, uh, cloud providers, uh, Understanding is yes, Sima. Yeah.

So that is great because that solves one problem, right? The first problem still is, uh, something which needs to be discussed. Because if jfr is using their cloud services, for example, it brings some kind of vendor lock in.

But I, I think I have not read enough about this, uh, platform. So they might have roadmap, uh, on items, which can in may make this platform interoperable as well. You know, Garima said something though here that I want to come back to, Mike, to your point, which is this isn't a new platform.

And that, that's the genius of what Jfr G's done here. They took Artifactory and they built a platform around it. And all they've been doing since then, and I, I don't mean it belittling, that's all they've been doing, is they've continued to build out this platform.

You know, the Acorn of Artifactory grew into this mighty oak tree and this latest thing with Fly and, and, and dev gov ops and, and ag agent cattle, AI cataloging and stuff. It's just more on that same platform. It's not a new platform.

It's the j fraud platform. And they're not alone. GitLab has done the same thing.

When you look at the, the players in the, you know, DevOps, DevSecOps space, there's Jfr, there's GitLab, there's Harness, there's CloudBees, some others, CircleCI, maybe if there, you know, there, there were others. It's changed over the years. But they've all in their, in their quest to become platforms keep adding on functionality as it comes to market.

AI is the latest and greatest of it, but it's that same platform. It's the GitLab platform, it's the Jfr platform. Everybody wants to be a platform.

My take, Robert, Do we have too many platforms already? Well, I mean, no. Yes.

Maybe. I mean, you know, what's too many, you know, I look this whole conversation, so, you know, well, look, my job on the Textron Gang is to remind people of, you know, that we've solved these problems in the nineties. Um, and so, uh, here we go again.

Um, so this, this whole conversation reminds me of Zinski's Law, JW Z, y'all remember Jamie Zelinsky? Alright, for our, you know, people keeping score at home, um, you know, longtime Netscape engineer and came up with Zinski's Law, which is every program attempts to expand until it can read email those programs, which cannot so expand or replaced by ones, which can, well, we've just replaced email with, well, first it was cloud, now it's ai. Um, and, and so we're gonna continue to see this.

And, uh, there are certainly, um, you know, uh, applications here that, that, that don't need email. Like, like, why do I need to read email from my refrigerator? Why, why, why does that make sense?

You know? But, uh, there certainly is going to be applications here, uh, for ai, and the ones that do it right, will succeed. And those that do it wrong, looking at those leaders that just tell their people to do it, go do that AI thing.

I'll note when I see it are gonna fail. Um, I am betting on jfr, oog figuring this out, uh, that there are companies that are struggling with their AI catalog, uh, with how do they keep track? How do they maintain governance, uh, regulatory compliance, all the GRC stuff, um, how are they doing that with ai?

Um, and you know, the trick with Jfr is that, well, customer, you already have Artifactory, let's help you out with this other thing. And I like how they are sticking to their core, um, things that they do well. So, um, is there too much, too many platforms probably, but, uh, there's a lot of long tail there.

Uh, and I, I see Jfr is definitely a leader in this space. And, and I, I think they're gonna be successful with this, even if it's just keeping track of tokens and who's using it. Absolutely.

And, and just one other thing John touched on, and I wanna reemphasize it, is though they wanna own the platform. They're not going it alone. They, they are, they've had over a year now of their relationship with Nvidia, and you wanna talk about a platform.

Nvidia has the AI platform, right? They, they're, yes, they make the GPUs, and that's a pretty sweet business. But the real key to their power is the ecosystem that they've built around AI and Cuda and all these things.

So Jfr is very closely aligned and in, you know, partnership with Nvidia, with ServiceNow, and, you know, ServiceNow is a, just a powerhouse of a company and everything they get involved in and, and sonar. The, I I interviewed the CEO of Sonar there yesterday. Uh, Tariq, um, just, you know, they, they're building a real ecosystem around this platform and around DevOps in the age of AI is the best way I could say it.

So, um, I'm gonna make that the last word on this one. I'll take my founder's prerogative and say, okay, we're closing this one out. We're gonna come back and we're gonna hear from Mike about his trip up to Boston.

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Home of security bloggers Network. Hey folks, we're back. And as Alan alluded to, yes, I'm a Yankee fan in enemy territory, but they're being kind and gentle, so it's all good.

And plus, uh, I lived here for 10 years and went to bu so I think they allow me to come back and visit from time to time. However, it's been an interesting couple of days here because, um, ly this is a Splunk show, right? And it's supposed to be mainly about what goes on with that IT analytics platform from back in the day.

But they've expanded that out into the realm of security, and they're also driving into observability in the DevOps world. And there's also a big AI push around agents and agents everywhere in the Cisco portfolio. So they have now agents for observability, and there'll be agents to drive security and they'll use agents everywhere they can.

But underneath all that is a backstory that's getting kind of interesting. 'cause I think Cisco's playing for nothing short of world IT domination here. And what they're really talking about is the unification of things like IT ops, security ops, networking ops, um, any kinda ops, ai ops for that matter.

And they all want it to be managed in some shape, manner, form with a Cisco tool or platform. Now, Tom, Cisco's not the cheapest player in the, in the marketplace, but you could make a case if you have a single vendor that it winds up being a little less expensive than cobbling together 10 different vendors to accomplish some particular goal. So, I don't know, in the age of ai, is there an opportunity to unify all this stuff?

And does Cisco have a shot at it? There is an opportunity, and I do think that Cisco stands one of the better chances just because they are so pervasive in the industry, right? Like it, uh, we joke all the time that if you're watching the Textron gang, you probably, the packet passed over a Cisco device somewhere along the way, right?

They were still kind of are the 800 pound gorilla of the networking space. You know how we always used to say that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM? Well, in the networking world, it's Cisco.

And part of that reason is, is because they have made themselves so indispensable to what goes on. However, when Chambers left and Chuck Robbins took over, Robbins saw the handwriting on the wall and realized that pushing boxes wasn't gonna be the solution to their problems. They needed to become a software company.

And that's what he's been doing slowly over the course of the last several years. It's not the easiest going 'cause that aircraft carrier doesn't turn on a dime. However, I think that this is kind of the, the, the setup for the end game, right?

AI gives them an opportunity to be transformational and being able to purchase these platforms like Splunk that give them visibility into the rest of the network to be able to put these agents in place to make operations a lot easier for those teams. And you're probably sitting there about typing out a comment. You're gonna leave on this video about how I'm wrong.

Then why did HPE by Juniper, because I promise you it wasn't for wireless access points. They wanted access to Mar Vistas, they wanted access to the, the AI stuff that Bob Friday's been doing over there to integrate with Aruba Central to do the same thing at HPE. This is the, this is the setup, right?

Everybody wants to make operations easier because operations is like the person who answers phone calls at the front desk. They're the executive assistant that tells the people where to go. If you can make operations life easier, you have won the game.

I mean, look at Meraki, that was Meraki's entire business model, right? Who cares about the hardware? Let's make operations simple and easy to do.

And Meraki has taken over Cisco networking. I think that this is their opportunity to essentially AI agents and to put them out there and to make them run everywhere. To collect that data, to analyze that data, to give it back to people and say, isn't it so much easier to run your network?

Why would you ever want to go with anybody else? Because we're the one stop shop. We're all you need.

I, I have some thoughts there. So, Tom, I I don't disagree with you. This ain't your grandpa Cisco.

It's not about that router or the Switch or even the, the firewall was, you know, for a long time Cisco was very quietly the biggest security vendor in the world, right? People didn't realize it, but Checkpoint and Palo and all those people, great. Cisco sold more security than any of 'em.

However, this is a different game. And what I said before about NVIDIA's real strength is not the GP just the GPUs, but the ecosystem. And they've opened source itself and the partnerships and the, that groundwork they're laying, that's the game.

That's the game. And Cisco knows it too. And they're trying to play the same game.

And let me tell you who else is playing this game? Small companies like Salesforce is playing this game, right? What do you think agent force is all about, right?

Microsoft, Google, the only one of the, of the hyperscalers that maybe isn't is, is, uh, apple at this point, but I expect them to shortly. So make no mistake what's going on here is a fight for the soul of it. What's the platform that's going to control all these agents that's going to control the way we operate and do business and work?

And it's not, it's not the Johnny C*m lately's who maybe raised a couple of hundred million on a, a couple of billion dollar or tens of billions of dollars of, of, of, of market cap. It's the guys who have the tees next to their names, right? Who have trillion dollar market caps.

'cause that's the, the ante, that's the table stakes to play in this game, right? Has anybody noticed that? Whenever somebody says, I don't mean to disagree with you, they go ahead and disagree with you anyway, Well polite, right?

No, No. Never noticed it. Never first Time.

I, I, I agree with what Tom's saying. I'm just saying, yeah, you are gonna have HPE, you are gonna have Cisco, but it's not the traditional network guys even that we've gotta, that, that 'cause this game, this, this prize isn't about who controls the network per se. It's about who controls the whole ecosystem.

Right? Go Ahead. Yeah, I mean, I will lean towards Tom first and then I'll come to Alan because Alan, you have changed the conversation a little bit here.

But for the immediate part, I think, uh, what Tom was mentioning, it's uh, spot on what we see in NetOps or SecOps is that it's very human intensified jobs because it's very complex in nature, right? And that the sweet spot, what Cisco is, uh, you know, piggy banking upon, is that they have the data fabric, right? They have the, they, they have the telemetry part of the network and the SecOps, right?

And then they have, uh, with Splunk, they have this observability lens. So combining these three things, the data fabric, the telemetry plus the observability, they would release a lot of pressure, operational pressure, which is basically, I mean all these, uh, network operation people ask them like 80% of the cost is intensifying in labor intensive jobs, right? So that is where immediate gains would be.

And again, I do not disagree with what Alan you have said, because this is a long short, uh, probably it's an ecosystem play and all that. But I, I think, uh, just to echo what Tom has said, I think the immediate sweet spot is that, Robert, do you think that this can happen to Garima's point? 'cause, and I'll just bring up, there's an old joke that says, you know, what's the one thing an application developer and an IT admin can agree on?

Well, it's the network guy's fault, and there's all these silos in it, and, and it has been since time began, and people buy stuff and they make individual decisions. And unless there's some CIO sitting at the top of this thing who's, you know, declaring edict saying thou shout. I don't know if you can actually bring it together though the silos are too solidified and too hard, or you think it can be done.

Um, no, it can't. If it could be done, it would've been done. Uh, you know, it, it's, look, there, there is, um, there is, this goes back to soft skills.

This really does. How do we get people to change when at first value, you know, first look prima facie, it might not be in their best interests. So how do you convince people to do that?

Um, and, and look, it, it, it is, you know, it's great that, um, all these people with, you know, trillion dollar market caps are investing money. But you know, the real winners here are like folks like core weave, people selling shovels and dungarees during the gold rush. Uh, not the people actually getting gold outta the ground.

Um, and, and so look, I, I think it's a little premature to say who the winners and losers are going to be, uh, but right now it's our friends that are selling shovels in dungarees, GPUs, and, you know, cloud GPUs, they're doing very well. Everybody else, we do not know how this is gonna play out. We have no idea.

John, you're out in the valley. What's the culture in Cisco like these days? You know, it's, I think of Cisco as two different companies, right?

The era that when, when we were out, when you were probably out here, when you lived out here, we had the John Chambers of the JC movement, uh, and it was almost like a cult movement. I remember he embedded me once with him to, to go to Comdex to, to talk about their big consumer play. I remember how that went.

And then we got the prac, pragmatic, practical, very kind of low key Robbins who's, who's kind of reinvigorated or kind of given them more of a purpose. Um, Cisco has always been kind of referred to as kind of one of the boring kind of, uh, pioneers to like, they're kind of lumped in with HP and Oracle in a certain sense, but I think there's a more relevance to them now as, as, as Tom and you all have pointed out. Um, so they have kind of a rejuvenated image.

And you know, the one other thing that always stuck with them for years, and which really hurt them, was every time they announced their earnings, they would announce layoffs. So this was a company synonymous with layoffs and retrenching year after year, after year after they bought companies. So they buy companies, they shed workers, they bought companies, was almost like this snake with a never, never ending losing its skin.

Um, I think it's a different company now. I think it's a more, um, vibrant, vital kind of respected company than it was a few years ago. Yeah, I, I know Cisco gets beat up by people.

'cause every time they acquire something, there's a price hike for that product right behind it. So, funny thing, you know, everybody gives Broadcom grief about that, but Cisco actually invented that playbook. So we'll see, we'll see how that all comes together.

But Alan, final thoughts for today? Um, look, I, I think Cisco has done a good job of assimilating Splunk, right? You know, not to sound all borish, but, um, they, they've done a good job of assimilating Splunk.

And I think Splunk is an engine to Tom's point about Cisco's move to software, right? To really be a dominant software player. Um, but make no mistake, their competition's not just HPE, their competition is Nvidia.

Their competition is, it's a big boys game. And there, and there's something to be, you know, look, I don't wanna burst anyone's bubble, but as much as we talk about startups and, and some of us have made good money on founding startups and having exits and liquidity events and all of that liquid based kind of stuff, no, not talking about you Rob, don't worry. Um, but that being said, it's still a big boys game because most of those startups, most of those liquidity events happen because the Ciscos and the IBMs and the Microsofts of the world put the money in and buy those startups.

Most liquidity events are not IPOs. That's a very small percentage. Most of them are m and a.

And the way our industry works is medium fish by small fish and big fish buy me medium fish. Cisco's a big fish, but they're gonna be swimming with a lot of sharks in this, in this one. And it's gonna be interesting to see who comes out on top.

That's it for me, Mike. All right, folks. Hey everybody, thanks for being on the show and sharing your insights, and Alan, sign us off.

All right. Hey, we, as usual, we've got a full tech, strong, uh, TV lineup following Tom, if I'm not mistaken. We have Tech Field Day today, don't we?

We do. AI Infrastructure Field Day is going on, uh, right now. Actually, Alistair Cook is, is really cooking out there with, uh, some great companies.

com for the lineup. It'll be, it'll be on Techstrong tv. If you don't catch it live on there, of course you could catch it on the U Tech Field Day YouTube channel, and they're available on the Techstrong TV OTT app.

So if you want to sit at home and watch it on your tv, it's cool there too. Um, hey guys, I'm not gonna be on tomorrow's show. I'll be traveling.

Um, but Mike, you'll, you'll steer the ship. It's just a three hour tour, what could go wrong? Um, but until then, everyone enjoy Text Drunk tv.

Enjoy the rest of your day. On behalf of the Text Drunk Gang, we're out.