Navigating IT Resiliency & the Future of Work | TSG Ep. 895

Hey everyone. Are we suffering from a lack of confidence in it? Resiliency.

You're watching Textron Gang. Hey, happy Tuesday to you everyone. It's Alan Shimel for Textron Gang.

You know, through the magic of the internet, you're watching this, but I'll be, I should wait the term you're watching this, there's a good chance I'll already be in Las Vegas for summer camp for hackers with a all, a lot of my security friends for this week. But, uh, I've recorded this in studio before we left and we've got a great Tuesday line up here for our text on gang. Let me introduce you to our gang members, uh, joining us, looking very dapper today.

I might add JP Morgan fall. Mitch Ashley, Mike Ard, returning from his hiatus. He thought he was gonna be the next Yankees bull pin pitcher they were picking up, but no, no joy in Mudville.

And then joining us from the Land of Oz, where it's an ungodly hour where we're recording Alastair Cooke. Hey Alistair, welcome and thanks for joining us. Thanks, Alan.

It's always a pleasure to be on the show with you. Beautiful. Alright, so Mike, let me kick things over to you on this beautiful Tuesday.

Uh, we're gonna start off with a, a report that, uh, we're not as confident in our resiliency in the I and it's not just security. Mind you, this is it, operational resiliency. Well, and there is this new report from SolarWinds on that very topic.

And it's interesting, at least from my perspective, we have a consumer confidence index all the time that we survey people with, but there should be something that's the equivalent of that for it. And it looks like SolarWinds went out to try to accomplish that. And on the one hand, most it people I know or confident in their own abilities, they have a certain amount of, uh, pride of ownership and pride of work.

So they are always gonna say that they are somewhat confident. But when you poke at it a little bit deeper, it does seem like, well, there are issues with inefficient workflows, not enough staffing. Maybe I don't have the right tools.

Maybe I don't understand this AI stuff and everything's changing faster than I'd like to admit. Mitch, what's your take on what's going on here? Is it the best of times or the worst of times?

Or is this the way times always are? Well, I don't, I think we might have a new crop of therapists that it, people are talking with, and that's where we get this data because that's kinda what the report basically held out is what are the issues. And I think, yeah, it's, it's staffing and skills and things like that.

But I think, I think underlying all of this is the theme of we have to do more. We're at more is expected of us. We don't necessarily know about the new stuff that's being thrown at us and it's being thrown at us at a much faster rate.

I think it's that pace of change and how much they're dealing with. And meanwhile, you know, some punt is telling you they're not gonna have a job 'cause of ai. So they're kinda like, what am I supposed to do here?

So I think there's, there's a lot of things that can be addressed. And I don't think there was anything new. It wasn't like, oh, that's a big surprise that the workflows are inefficient.

Okay, great. Do you address that now or do you work on AI and maybe use AI to make that better down the road? Do you work on improving security or do you, uh, go work on your security skills?

Maybe you do bo both. So, I I, it wasn't earth shattering. I think it was more an amalgamation of a lot of issues, but underlying it, just trying to deal with it all.

So I I maybe I, it was just the way it was phrased, but early on article, I think it's the first sentence. It talks about it, people referring to themselves as resilient. And the only thing that comes to mind in my mind is does that mean that you recover well from trivia night after the team goes out and plays?

I mean, what does it mean you are resilient? Um, your operations should be resilient. And uh, and the issue is, if that was the case, why do we, you know, have such, uh, an initiative to chase after DevOps?

And the whole fact that none of this addresses DevSecOps is bewildering to me because that's where you get resiliency from. It's where you find your, your, you know, your lean processes. It's where you identify your automation.

And none of that's mentioned here. So I, I don't exactly understand what SolarWinds is trying to say here. It's kinda ironic the survey also said 13%, um, said that they, that they lack the right tools.

Well that's kind of counter counter to what, what SolarWinds might want 'em to say. Anyway, I stepped on you, Alan, jump in or, or a or whoever. No, no, I think that's fair.

Mike, jump in. I'm say something. Well, I'll leave them.

Well, I, I, I was just gonna point out that, you know, most it people I know are kind of like Timex, right? They take a lick at and keep on ticking and that's all they're kind of like trying to answer here at the, at the end of it. But I do believe that, you know, this is a survey of traditional ITSM people who probably don't have a whole lot of DevOps experience and maybe not enough of those folks who are in the survey base because that's not where solo winds normally plays.

But, um, it's clear to me that there is a lot of reliance on manual processes. People are somewhat, you know, still doing the same thing the same way they've always done it. 'cause that's the only way they know.

And I think that continuing to do things the way you know how to do them does lead to the, the feeling that we don't know how to deal with these newer things. And so I think there's a, a definite crossover to jps point that this doesn't address DevOps, DevSecOps types methodologies, but there is a huge s SWAT of enterprise IT that isn't DevSecOps. Uh, but simply because the transition from those years and years of legacy is so hard.

Yet most of those are surrounded by little bits of innovation that bolt around the sort of sea anchor applications that don't change fast. And it's these elements that I think are terrifying for the engineers who've grown up with much slower moving things and take away their competence. They can recover.

You Know, Alan, I held with a lot of compassion for these folks too because operations, IT operations in particular and SecOps too. They're the scotties of engineering. And you know, Kirk's hollering down, I need war drive in 60 seconds.

We're all dead, right? Everything is an emer emergency and it's gotta be addressed this second. That's resiliency.

Well, look, I think these numbers are all made up. This was done just to embarrass me and I wanna fire the person who did the survey. 'cause that's what we do in America.

But that being, that being said, that being said, I'm struggling to Keep my arms down. But That being said, I think the issue here is goes to what you said JP, about people thinking themselves as resilient versus operationally resilient. Well, but I think when you're an IT person like this, your resiliency is your ability to keep operation and going, right?

And so they, they, I forgot the word, but you know, they, they put themselves in that. That's what if operationally they're resilient. They're resilient.

I think what this really comes to though, you know, I read an interesting article, I think it was in the times this morning about the changing work culture in tech, right? People used to want to flock to work to tech, work in tech. Whether it was Silicon Valley startup, chase the dream of stock options or just being an ITSM tech worker who makes, who makes the internet work and, and makes all, you know, is on the cutting edge of technology and all the cool stuff.

The fact of the matter is, even though we have AI and we have all these great things going on around us, being the tech worker these days is isn't a lot of fun. It's not, we're under increasing pressure to do more with less. We're all faced with layoffs, right?

We're being told that job may or may not be around in the next three years because it's going to be replaced. And they want you put on a happy face, smile and say how resilient we are. And that s**t don't fly.

It's not gonna fly for very long. And I think we're starting to see it now in, in surveys like this, where it's not just the security curmudgeons who are always unhappy. It's, it's the it people who used to are the bread and butter, the backbone of what makes the digital world will go starting to really feel the pressure that, you know what, this ain't fun no more.

And it's, I'm sad to say that, but I, I think we have to confront ourselves with that may very well be a new reality. I'll, I'll leave it right there. I'm hopeful it might get better if, you know, these AI agents live up to their promise and the job itself could become a little more interesting and maybe things are a little more automated.

And so maybe, you know, there's hope on the horizon. I mean, I get that AI is also somewhat of a threat, but it seems to me there's still a lot more companies out there that don't have good IT talent. And so we'll just distribute it more widely.

And this AI stuff may at the end of the day be a boom. I can argue, You know, I, I I put an article up on Techstrong ai, I saw an interview Mark Benioff of Salesforce saying he's spoken to a lot of CEOs and he challenges them into show me jobs that were actually replaced by ai. By the same token, he's laid off what, 7% of his workforce and says 50% of what they do.

Seems to me, mark Benioff speaks with fork tongue there. Um, we, what are we, are we replacing people or are we augmenting people? So I've been used doing this, you know, a lot actually working project right now very deeply leveraging ai.

And you know, it it, it's an augmented tool. It really, I, I see it as for, you know, I'm doing a coding problem, right? And, uh, and challenge.

And so my, I see programming changing for me from actually having to write in the language to describe what I want the AI to do and the AI actually doing the coding. So I view it as a form of programming. It, it, it is that level and it is the same thing.

The it people have the opportunity too, right? It's, instead of spending hours combing through logs and files looking for issues, right? With regard to a, you know, a root cause analysis and, and tools like SolarWinds and things like that, you know, they're supposed to do a lot of the pre-processor work and hand you, you know, an answer.

We know they don't. We know that that's the start, not the end, right? So do, if these people learn how to use these tools, they have the opportunity to then, you know, ask questions, right?

Load up this data into the, and then ask the questions in a, in a, an inquisitive way to get to the answer instead of themselves having to chunk through the editors and look at all the, on the individual line items. And it makes the experience a better experience and it gets them to a faster answer. Allows, does it make, Make It more resilient?

Yeah, this makes it more resilient. But I I the opportunity is there for them is what I'm saying. It's a, you know, it's, it's a matter of learning it to incorporate the tools and, and it should be augmentative, it should not be replaced.

I don't, I don't see these agents sitting there going, ah, I got this problem. Don't worry about it. It's all taken care of already.

Agent's gonna say, ah, forget about it. We got, we kinda got it here. Only, Only Mike's agents.

Only Mike's because he's from the Bronx. The Bronx. Well, we talked about this yesterday, Alan, on the show.

Um, you know, 'cause I'd written the article about you still have to have engineering chops, right? And, and AI isn't ready to take on that level of the problem. And we talk about augmenting a ai, augmenting a our work a lot.

And when you dig down, I'm guessing probably what you're experiencing and what you're doing is you're directing jt, you're telling it what you wanna do. You're telling it what it's not doing. You're telling it.

Wanna do differently, do things differently. And prompt is the new code, prompt. All of that input.

And that process is kinda like you're in real time writing a requirement is design document and building it all at the same time. And that's, that's how it's changing the work. Now, I've talked a lot about the landing zone for AI and tech is software, software development.

That's where we see the greatest application of it and the most impact. And it's starting to trickle into just a little bit of DevOps. Some testing, we'll see more in ops.

You know, for example, you know, Kubernetes, we've, we've seen an observability move into Kubernetes. We'll see AI move into Kubernetes increasingly too, to help it. It's not gonna take it over and do it all for us.

But that's gotta take on some of the complexity of those tasks for us. I know I've, I've been, I've been away for a week and I've had a time to think about this a little bit. And you know, we have all, we're big fans of it, right?

And we all love tech, but let's be honest, most of this stuff is overly complex and doesn't live up to the promise. And it's been great in the sense that it's job security for it people. But, you know, working with this stuff on a day-to-day basis kind of sucks.

And maybe AI is gonna put a little pig on the lipstick or, or a little lipstick on the pig, sorry. But at the end of the day, um, a lot of the promises that have been made it people about all these IT platforms just didn't meet the grade. And so stuff is hard to deal with.

Nothing's integrated and it's stressful. You Know, Mike, Mike, the days are long, but the years are short. And, and you know, you, you might be looking among the trees and not seeing the forest.

Let me see what other analogies I could come up with. But I think my flights have been delayed on this trip. He is.

But here's, but here's the deal. When you look across time, look across 25 years, look across 35 years, look across from the advent of the, of the commercial internet till today and how it has changed, not just the it workers life, but how it's changed life on this planet. It's remarkable.

And yes, the, the, the day to day, the inch by inch is tedious, sometimes discouraging. But when you look at the breath of, of, of accomplishment and how it changes how we live, it's, it's revolutionary. Now, I, that being said, I go back to what I said in the beginning of this segment.

Tech workers did tech because they had in their own way and opportunity to change the world. It was a great professional to work in, even if the day to day was somewhat tedious, even if, you know, building resiliency was more smoke and mirrors than, than true re re resiliency. When you stripped that facade off though, and just focus on the day to day and, and take away some of the carrots, good pay, great working conditions, job security, doing exciting things, then yeah, it becomes a real job.

Right? And that's, that's not fun. Anyway, we're over time.

Let, let's, let's take a break on Techstrong gang. We're gonna come back here and talk about, uh, it un it unified. Well, we're gonna talk about a recent Broadcom Tech Field Day Techstrong event.

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0 that Alistair was one of the lead players on. And it relates to our previous topic in my mind because it really is about trying to make the IT experience may be better and some folks are at least making an attempt at it. But I don't know, it seems like there's a lot of parts in this thing too.

So, Alistair, how do, what's the balance here? What's your take on what's going on and and bring us up to speed on the event? Well, Mike, the, the event was the first real deep collaboration that we've had for a live event between Tech Field Day and Techstrong Group.

Our Tech Strongs our, our favorite part outside of Tech Field Day, our favorite part of Futurum Group, and love working with you guys on lots of projects. Uh, this particular one happened last week. We, uh, streamed out a series of presentations from a series of technical experts at the, uh, at Broadcom, uh, VMware by Broadcom, uh, starting of course with, uh, Sabina Anja, who was a guest here on the Techstrong group a couple of weeks ago was, uh, prelude to our live event.

Uh, during the live event or during the, the Stream. We, we also had a bunch of the Tech Field Day delegates. And that's one of the things that makes Tech Field Day absolutely unique.

And as an event is that we invite in a bunch of independent technical experts who have their own opinions and, and things to share. People will be great guests here on the Textron gang as well. Uh, and we have them interact with the presenters.

So throughout the stream, you saw that, um, my, my delegates were asking the presenters questions to get to a little more of the truth of what's happening in the real world and how the, these things are being used. And those same delegates also write about their thoughts, their opinions of, uh, what was being shown. So these are, this was great to do this with, uh, text Strong.

And as we speak, this will be being live streamed on the, uh, tech field day LinkedIn. So if you missed any of the, the live event last week, we've got a a refresh stream now. But don't step away from this, watch the rest of the text on you.

Uh, I did wanna highlight and, and pull Mitch in here because he's been one of my delegates at events and we will be a delegate at future events. And I wanted to pull in his opinion of how that, that sort of feeling of having this group of technical experts in the room with the presenters makes for a different kind of experience to a lot of the, the webinars and the, uh, presentations you see from vendors. Yeah, I, I liken it too.

And I congratulations on a great event. I think the format, uh, that we, we did together was fantastic. I liken it to didn't, don't you wish you were in one of those meetings that, uh, you didn't get invited to, or you'd just like to be a fly on the wall and kind of hear about the questions that were being asked?

'cause some of 'em I would've thought of, and a lot of 'em I wouldn't have thought to ask, but that's a great question. Um, and, and there aren't gotcha questions. It's not like we're, you know, trying to make anybody look bad.

It's like different perspectives. And that's one of the things about the, the delegates is they're not all, you know, copies of one kind of person and what kind of role or kind of whatever. They come from a heavy networking, heavy operations, heavy development, heavy ai, whatever it might be, type of background.

So they've got different perspectives. 0 of VMware. It's the next era of VMware moving it into the self-service model, which I wish I would've had when, when I was running it about a little more than a decade ago.

Um, you know, 'cause I was looking for something like that and, and, uh, we hadn't gotten there yet. So it was a really good time to have that kind of a deep dive in several different areas. And it wasn't just about that, but I think hearing from the experts, both the delegates and the presenters gives you a better rounded perspective as opposed to just going to a conference and hearing one person speak about it.

What is the level of self-service there? 'cause sometimes I feel like, you know, it's self-service in the Henry Ford way, right? As long as the car is black and, you know, cost this much, you can have it.

So what are we actually giving to folks is self-service and how much flexibility is there in that model? Well, what I saw in the new release of, uh, VMware Cloud Foundation nine is that integration into the VCF automation, what used to be called Aria Automation. And that's got a capability to differentiate this persona of the cloud consumer and give them a catalog of things they can deploy.

Now, those things can be pre-built virtual machines. They can be entire Kubernetes cluster. There are pre-configured services that sit on top of those Kubernetes clusters.

And so this feels to me a lot like a tool for building an internal developer platform, uh, where here's the catalog of things that you can deploy and wrapped around that catalog is not just, you can deploy it onto some test environment. It's, there's data operations in here as well. We can make sure your data is protected.

You make sure that maybe you're running A-C-I-C-D pipeline to populate out all of the executables that are in here along with maybe it is a test environment and, and there's a lease time for, you're only allowed this amount of resource for a fixed period of time. So there's definitely maturity coming into that portal. Is it the sort same sort of scale we see in the major public cloud providers?

Absolutely not. There isn't the diversity of services. There isn't the scale that you see, the elasticity that you see in public cloud platforms.

On the other hand, this is inside your own data center. It's on your own hardware and your ability to control all the compliance and all of the, uh, security around this is, is much stronger, uh, at least more ability to directly control what you want. So yes, it is consumed from a catalog.

So it is here, here's the sizes that are available, but hopefully there's more than one engine size and more than one color available. Uh, but it is still on premises resource. So it is a limited scale, But, but this new version of VMware can be run in a public cloud.

It's supported by AWS and Google and Microsoft and, and I, I'll tell you something else, they've, they've borrowed a lot, I guess from Tan Zu, right? To make it much more cloud native Cobe, uh, uh, friendly, usable to me, this release is, is literally a, a Swiss Army knife, right? It, it, it has something in there no matter how you want to use it, whether it be on-prem, whether it be in a data center or the public cloud, and, and, you know, whether it be cloud native, you know, Kubernetes containerized or not.

There's, this is a, a very usable, broadly usable platform now, and, and I kudos to them to, to, for doing it. It's also a transition or hybrid environment to Alan, not just on-prem and in the cloud, but it's meant for workloads that are both on traditional VMware hypervisor type of architecture As well as, and that's where the world's going, multi worlds. So Alistair, is it your sense that the mere mortal IT administrator can now manage Kubernetes?

Or is this more about just provisioning it, but I still need DevOps engineers to make that puppy run for the long haul. I, I've always been at the opinion that Kubernetes is an infrastructure tool that the same people who are looking after virtual machines are just delivering now Kubernetes clusters. And that's to a certain extent, what we see here is that the, what was the tanz, Kubernetes grid, whatever the branding was, is now called the VMware Kubernetes Service Inside Cloud Foundation.

And yeah, you can deploy yourself with Kubernetes cluster and the worker nodes are easy to deploy, and the updates and changes, those have always been the nightmare of that coordinated update of all of the plugins and components before you can do the, the co update itself. These things are all packaged together in a, uh, more controlled way. And like most Kubernetes platforms, it's a n minus two support within the platform.

So there's, uh, you don't have to immediately update, but when the administrator makes it available, you as the owner of the cluster can choose to update. Does this completely abstract understanding Kubernetes and the, the networking complexity and manage store, uh, storage for it and volumes and all of those, those elements? Absolutely not.

Uh, there's, there's still Kubernetes underneath this. You're still hitting Kube CTL commands here and there. Uh, although there's tools in the actual automation to generate those manifests, those YAML manifests to deploy things for you.

So there is some guidance in it, but I think you still need to understand what Kubernetes is as an infrastructure tool to get the best outta that hybrid multi-platform modern applications kind of, uh, milage That we have now. Fair fair guys. It was a great event.

I should mention, it's still available on demand. com. You could grab it there.

Eventually, it will make its way to the, uh, tech Field Day YouTube channel and Techstrong tv. But right now it is available on demand. You go check 'em out, all, all the various sessions and so forth.

So go do that. We're gonna take a break here on the Gang, come back and we're gonna talk about, uh, expanding AI agents framework. Shocking.

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Hey folks, we're back. And we're talking about AI agent frameworks. Once again, it seems like there's a lot of these all of a sudden, and the we're discussing specifically one that was donated by Cisco to the cloud native, or sorry, in the Linux Foundation.

And those folks are gonna add another framework to the ones they already support from Google, which is the a to a protocol, which kind of sits as a compliment to MCP, but, um, I think this one's a little more identity focused, but JP I'd love to get your thoughts here because it's kind of like, on the one hand I'm like, this is great. There's another standard that we can use, and then I'm like, oh, no, there's another standard we can use. And is the Lennox Foundation thing gonna start to look like the CNCF framework all over again?

And what's going on here? Well, I mean, these things do follow consistent patterns as people are, you know, I I, I liken it to, you know, the, you remember the old Maze games on PCs where you didn't know what was in the room until you went into a, like, into a section and it lit up that section, and then you could see what was in that part of the room. Uh, and that's kind of the way the last five major shifts in technology have operated.

And this is a lot of people, you know, things like this happen, happen in X ml, happened in web services happen in cloud. These standards emerge as people try to make sense of the part of the room that they're in that's lit up. Oh, look, we need one of these.

Oh, look, we need one of these. And obviously different, uh, skills and different focus areas are gonna have different perspectives, right? This one's coming outta Cisco.

So lo and behold, it's secure communications is gonna be a core element, um, that they've recognized is lacking, and the ability to have these autonomous agents communicating with one another, right? How do we, how do we ensure that they authorized, you know, that they author, authenticate to each other properly? How do we have a common framework for them to, to exist and not be hacked?

How do we control, uh, the actual communication pathways between them, right? How do we, how do we label them? How do we, uh, you know, name them?

How do we find them when they're existing out the network? And so, uh, you know, at this point in time, right? This is, uh, a group of companies answer that, you know, they've obviously convinced a, uh, good group of core AI leaders that this is a potentially valuable project, right?

You have the likes of Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, ServiceNow jumping, adobe jumping on board, right? With, uh, with this release. And so, uh, the clearly the people in those organizations who are, who are associated with, uh, their individual AI efforts and in in standards efforts, recognize that there's something valuable here.

And so, uh, now the question becomes, well, and this is the more difficult one, is how, as these things start to emerge, how do you incorporate them in, right? Because they, they're leaking out and you're, and you have individuals who are building architecture. They're building agent architectures today.

Okay, great. The last thing you want is, oh, this new toy came out today. Let me add this, which we have seen, and Lord knows that's how you end up with a huge amount of your tech debt coming into a new application, right?

Is that the early part of that, of your tech debt? You know, initiative starts with the fact that it was new when you started and you threw all this stuff as it emerged at the problem domain. Oh, look, here's some observability.

Let's throw that in. Oh, look, here's some communica authentication here. Let's put that in.

And you get to a point where nobody really wants to spend the money to, to say, okay, all the pieces are in place. They, they're pretty solidified. Now we should probably redo this, right?

And so that is my concern as these things start to leak out, is that they find their way into a project, they become, they're, they get used and, and then they're not refactored in later on. Hopefully, now that it's easier to refactor the code using AI agents, uh, companies will take that opportunity to do that more. But you know, this is, this is what where we are as an industry and, you know, agency has as much of a chance of being a home run as it does a foul ball.

Mitch, I mean, I looked at this stuff and I, and, and clearly there's a need for agency, but I also scratched my head and I was like, well, shouldn't this just be part of a two A in the first place and we should just take these capabilities and it should be one project, and I'm not clear we need a whole other project around this thing. Or is this just like the, the next natural evolution of A two A? I don't know, but I'm a simple guy.

Well, one of the benefits of being part of Linux Foundation, or one of its, you know, subs, if foundations, if you will, is we may see something like OpenTelemetry merging with open, um, uh, tracing may, maybe they do come together at some point, but it's early enough along. I don't think you want big, big standard even open standards efforts because they'll get bogged down. They'll, they'll kill it by the weight of itself if it isn't quite this cleanly.

But if you look at who started it, it makes sense why they started it, right? MCP got started by by Anthropic, and it was all about giving their models and other models access to data and, and systems outside of the model. When you look at A two A, that was created, initiated by Google, that's about agents talking to themselves, collaborating, communicating.

So kind of another layer down in the stack, if you want to think of it that way. Guess what? Talk, speaking of stacks, this one's by Cisco.

So guess what it has, it relies on agent communication protocol, which is another new emergent standard. Um, it has identity management. It, it adopts, um, an OSAF framework, uh, open e I'm sorry, o Open Agent schema framework.

Uh, open a OAS. It's, it's too early in the morning. I can't say it anyway, it, it's, it's adopts yet another standard that I can't spit out all at once in one sentence without taking a breath.

So it, it's, it's another layer. It's kind of at, at a deep more deeper layer in the stack. And we're gonna see more of this more thing there.

There's open, there's agent DNS, there are other things that are in the pipeline that I think will, will, might not only see emerge and become adopted, but they'll also start to combine where it makes sense. But for now, I think we need it fragmented. You know what it, you know, if you look at the pattern, especially around distributed computing in the last four major, uh, you know, e evolutions of key technologies in this space, they're just recreating the operating system At some level.

So does this happen like, you know, naturally over time or are there like, you know, a bunch of folks in a smoke bill room making trades or how's this? No, I, so I, you know, that's, that's a jade, you know, this isn't politics, Mike, or how our government runs, right? I, I, I think, I think what we have going on here is more, this is like a ca Cambrian explosion of life forms, right?

This is Darwinism technical. Darwinism, let's, I, I coined that phrase. Give me credit for that.

This is technical Darwinism at work, you're gonna see a lot of these frameworks competing, cooperating, cooperation, vying for air and space in this crowded market. And, you know, for those of us who still, still believe in a market system, the best will rise to the top and, and become dominant. And those that don't fall by the wayside, that's the way it should work.

Now, you know, you could take the Mark Andreesen approach, which says, if I put a hundred million dollars into this one, even though it may not be the best, it'll have enough resources, you know, it'll, it'll windows the OS two, so to speak, right? We'll do better marketing and everything else. And it may not be as good in os as OS two was, but the world will focus on Windows.

We might see that here because, uh, projects that are given to the Linux Foundation, the CNCF might have a leg up on projects that aren't part of a foundation that have a single big brother sponsor. But it's Darwin is its technical technological Darwinism and, and hopefully the best succeed. It's almost like the formation of the universe, the big bang, right?

At this many fractions of a fraction of a fraction, these elements formed, right as it progresses and, and grows. And I think it's just, it's, it's just emblematic of no one do, no one is dominating in this industry, right? There isn't a dominant player yet, whether it's in the LLMs, the nature there will be, right?

But because there isn't everybody's contributing through open standards, instead of saying my proprietary API and my pro tri proprietary framework, we'll see those things come along. But by the way, what not the open part is happening on the, on these kinds of standards. Where it's not happening yet is on the data side as why i's stumbling through through that acronym.

But at, at the same time, we see these open standards, some vendors are starting to lock down their data so that other people's models can't get access to your data in their SaaS service. Whatever it might be that we've gotta stop that we've got, because that's my data. I mean, it's no, no more frustrating.

I won't name the vendor's names of, I can't get my data out of the CRM system to do what I wanna do with it. I've gotta work with it within the confines of that one product. And that that's not just CRMs or some one CRM that's that way, But I think that's gonna be the next battle.

I think you're spot on and that will be an entire topic this week. So stay tuned on that one. But, um, I would just point out one last thing about all of this is that the pace of innovation is a lot faster than it used to be.

So by the time we wake up and three, four months from now, or is, is the a OA crowd gonna figure out that they need most of the things in these things and have done something about it and put it in code? My money says yes. Well, well it Goes along with the technical Darwinism, right?

A technology Darwinism, because you have mutations that are accelerating with, with AI that at a speed that was not plausible when run by humans. Yeah, True. Alright gentlemen, thank you for joining us on this great tech strung gang today.

Thank you for watching. As usual, we have Techstrong tv immediately following, uh, we will be back on tomorrow Wednesday, uh, with another great show. I won't be on that one, but Mike, I guess you'll be driving the bus.

Mm-hmm. Right off the cliff, ma'am. Alright.

Alistair, again, thank you for getting up at the ungodly hour in New Zealand to join us. JP Mitch, talk to you soon. This is Alan Shimel for Techstrong.

Have a great day everyone. We're out.