Tariffs, AI Adoption & The Unstructured Data Problem | TSG Ep. 944

Hey, everyone. We've got trouble with Tribbles. I mean, tariffs.

Again, you're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel and welcome to our Tuesday of edition of the Textron Gang. Got a crackerjack gang line up here for you to talk about as usual, three interesting topics.

Um, let me introduce you to our gang. We've got the one and only Steven Fst, Sanjeev Sharma, and still licking his wounds over his Yankees. Mike Ard.

Gentlemen, welcome to Textron Gang Giants. Beat the Eagles. That's all I gotta say.

I'm good for the year. Yes, the Giants did beat the Eagles. The Giants did beat the Eagles.

All right, guys. It, it, it's the weak is off to as usual to another exciting week. Um, today we're gonna kick off talking about, it looks like we're back to, what is it, a hundred percent tariffs or 145% tariffs or something.

A Thousand percent tariffs. I don't know. It's taco tariffs anyway, but Mike, what's going on?

Yeah, it's kind of, uh, back to square one is your, is a good way to describe it. I mean, I think originally this whole conversation got started again because the Chinese decided that they were gonna restrict access to some of the rare earth metals. And then we responded by saying, well, we're gonna start ta tariffs up on everything again and add it to that.

We're gonna restrict access to AI software. Now, some of this just seems to be, to me at least, that the Chinese are trying to remind us that no matter how much we make semiconductors in the US they're, they still got us because they got all those metals that we need. And of course, you can find those metals almost anywhere these days, but you still gotta set up the process for, uh, mining them.

And that might take a few years. And I think they understand that maybe a little bit better than some of our folks in Washington. At the same time, I'm not entirely clear how this whole AI software threat works.

'cause if the most of that software is open source, I'm pretty sure they can just get access it to from anywhere they want. But Alan, what's your take on what's going on here? You don't really want to know, do you?

Um, You know, it, it's interesting. I I just feel like, uh, bill Murray and Groundhog Day, you know, we keep waking up every, you know, every couple weeks, month or two to the same thing here, Mike, I think you hit it on, right. I don't know if they're metals, but let's call 'em rare earths, right?

These rare earths right now China seems to have a stranglehold on supply. We have, to your point, Mike Othered, uh, potential supplies have been located some right here within the USA, but we're probably a few years out from mining that commercially China's using this as a, as a a, a club, right? To, to force what they feel are unfair trade practices being hoisted upon them.

And when they do that, we respond by, you know, what seems to be the only thing we know how to do, which is ratcheting up tariffs, which then is just like saying, okay, we're gonna close our markets to that. And here's the important thing, Mike, I think you didn't, what you said, maybe confuse people. Tariffs are on incoming export taxes on outgoing.

And so I think, if I'm not mistaken, this is about incoming tariffs, not export license fees. And if I'm wrong, I apologize. So then you gotta ask yourself, what, what exactly are we taring free deep seek with?

Which as you said, is open source, a hundred percent of zero, still zero. Mm-hmm. So, you know, as usual, makes a lot of noise spins up us and, and at the end of the day, it's Taco Tuesday.

It seemed that Taco Tuesday riled up the markets considerably over the last few days. So Yeah, because they just see it's a hundred percent tariffs and, you know, and it's about the rare Earths and all of these things. But I, I just don't know how much teeth this has and if it'll even if, if history is any guide here, it, it's just, you know, strutting and showing just your feathers because you're a big c**k.

I, I, I think it's, uh, it, it goes back to that con it was a very interesting conversation. If you go back to when President Zelinsky was at the White House, right? The question being asked as we have all the cards, right?

And he, I think the question being asked here is, who really has all the cards in this scenario has the higher cards in this scenario, United States versus China versus the rest of the world. And as we saw, at some point, the tariffs as it is, incoming tax doesn't really impact the exporter. They just go find another market.

These are fungible markets, right? And, you know, look what happened with Nvidia, again, if I understood it correctly, we were putting a 15% export tax on Nvidia chips and China then just said, instead of have contributing to that tax, we will just ban Nvidia chips altogether Who got hurt? An American company called Nvidia.

Right? They're now suddenly not viable in the chi in the, in the second largest or economy in the world. So, uh, it's, it's a interesting situation, right?

Also, as you said earlier on, uh, Mike, what is AI software? Are we talking about agent force in Salesforce? Is that now restricted, or is it deep seek coming the other way, which is open source anyway?

Well, you know, I, I think the tariffs extend on goods beyond these tech products, right? And, and so I mean, the, the, the problem you have is, you know, it's the Boyle cry wolf. And you can only do this for so long.

I, I think what we've seen is the rest of the world, not just the Chinese, the rest of the world saying, look, if you're gonna play these games, you're, we, we need reliable business partners and markets. And they start just leaving you out of the conversation, right? And, and then you become irrelevant to a good chunk of the market.

And, you know, and, and there are people here who say, well, that's okay because we're the biggest economy in the world. They all have to come through us. Well, no, they don't.

Not for certain things, right? Talk to our soybean farmers, talk to our meat producers. If I can jump in on the soybean, uh, thing, that's an Ohio thing as well.

I mean, we got a lot of soybean farmers here. Um, they're certainly feeling a pinch. Um, I think there's a little bit of, uh, uh, even some, uh, Trump remorse happening among the deep red rural parts of Ohio where they're realizing that they won't be able to, um, export and, and, and for them, you know, it's funny, they say the same thing that, you know, wall Street traders and investment bankers say, essentially, it doesn't really matter what the rules are, as long as the rules are consistent and predictable, and they can work around them.

The the problem is that if you're a farmer and you're trying to decide what to plant, that's a year ahead or multi-year ahead planning process, and there's a lot of money riding on that. They take on loans, they plant, they tell, they pick, you know, they harvest and, and then they have to, you know, go to market with these things. You can't upset the board game during that process, or a lot of people are gonna be hurt.

And, and in many ways, as you say, Alan, it's, it's the same with, with many of these other things. I mean, the New York Times this morning was reporting that, uh, Trump is already backing down on his China tariff plans. And, um, and it, and it just was Friday that he announced these things.

So how is someone supposed to plan around that? How is someone supposed to deal with this? I guess the only plan that you can make is uncertainty, which is why the price of gold and Bitcoin just keeps going up.

Because I guess people are trying to think about other hedges. And as you say too, there are other markets for these things. Um, there are other suppliers for soybeans, and there are other markets for Chinese electric cars and rare earths.

And, and, and you know, if you, we will look at what happened with the ai, uh, hardware market. If you completely slammed the door, then um, other suppliers are gonna emerge. And that's what's happening in China right now.

As we're seeing the emergence of domestic Chinese manufacturers of, um, GPUs and also really incredible promising, uh, chip fab capabilities in China that would not have emerged probably if it hadn't been for these, um, tariffs and embargoes. And that, that may be the ultimate backfire is I feel like there's, there is a playbook somewhere. Because, you know, this whole thing went down with the, uh, announcement from China and then within like, what, half a day to a day, Trump starts pulling AI software out of thin air.

I doubt that. I think somebody has, there's no way He's never even heard of that. You know?

So somewhere somebody's written some sort of tit for tat response playbook somewhere. I think they call it Project 25. Yeah.

You think it's a, you think it's in project 2025? I Missed that. Yeah.

I think part of that whole thing is to, you know, go ultra isolationist, close up the walls, rebuild the wall of China, except in reverse. And, uh, so yeah, So, so is this It not American? G*******t.

It's no good. All right. So this is USA 1920s economic policy.

Is that where we're going? Yeah. You remember what happened in 29?

Yeah. Remember that scene in Ferris Bueller where the teacher is boring all the students? Do you know what he was talking about when he was bo boring all the students?

Wasn't it the tariff Hartley? It Was the crude hawley tariff act. Har, right?

The tariff. Yeah. That's the thing.

If only Ferris Bueller had paid more attention instead of cutting class, maybe we would all be in better shape. That's an interesting, that's an interesting proposition right there, Steven. Is that, is that, I thought it was Biff that we were blaming, but it's really Ferris Bueller.

It's really Ferris. I, I blame Ferris Bueller for everything, and it was a crime, what he did to that car. Alright, we'll, We'll we'll see, you know, today's Tuesday.

Check back with me on Friday and we'll see where this is. Mm-hmm. Um, I, I, I've given this one enough of my oxygen in time.

My life's too valuable. Let's move on. We'll take a break, come back and let's talk about some, this is interesting.

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Hey folks, we're back in, in another segment that also has a certain amount of tit for tat kinda, um, mojo. So now Salesforce says that they are in the ITSM business and they finally launched their agentic ITSM platform. And of course, this comes shortly after ServiceNow, which owns about half of the market share.

In ITSM said that they were moving into the CRM space. There are other companies in this space that includes B-M-C-I-B-M, Atlassian, but it does feel like there's a good old fashioned war going on in the ITSM space. So, Sanjeev, what's your take on what's going on here?

You know, this is, uh, very interesting to see, you know, back when DevOps started, maybe a decade or so ago, people said, oh, will we need ITSM? Right? Will we need, or will it be developers ruling the world?

And you'll be able to push the big green button and things will deploy and they'll run autonomously everywhere. But in the past decade, all we've seen is that while the speed of, uh, writing software and developing code and deploying code has improved, managing what's running in production, the ops side of DevOps has pretty much remained the same. Right?

In my, in, you know, I wrote the original demos for Dummies back in like 2013 or 2014, right? The original one, it was like this, this thin, because we didn't have much matter to talk about. You could download it for free from IBM's website.

And one of the things I talked about there was there's a impetus mismatch about how software is developed and how operations is run. And that's what devs was supposed to solve. It's unsolved problems.

Still most IC MDBs have garbage in them because of the lack of automation. People are tried solutions like, oh, we'll put everything on the blockchain. Sure, that just makes change immutable.

But if you are, if you don't have any idea what's actually running in production, right? Uh, you still will put garbage on the blockchain. So that doesn't solve the problem.

It is very interesting to see all these companies still fighting it out, but does any one of them truly have a solution which has solved these problems, these challenges which companies face? I don't know. Every large company I talk to, every large company I work for has a major problem of, they don't really know what's running in production.

When something breaks, you're relying on human knowledge to say, oh, this breaks at this time under these circumstances, we know what the problem is. Let's go bounce that server. Let's go, you know, uh, roll back these changes.

Will, will, I hope. I mean, Salesforce has, you know, massive, uh, you know, credibility in the market. They have a massive presence.

Well, so does service. No, I think those are the two big dogs in this fight. So it's fun to see how they will duke it out.

And I think in the end, the good news about having fierce competition is, uh, the customer benefits from it because we will, they will try to out outplay each other. The new variable, of course, this time around is, is ai, the AI agents, can we truly make infrastructure autonomous? Can we make it self-healing?

Something we've been promising in the industry for, for decades now. Uh, but I think with AI agents, we have finally headed in that direction. But let's see, it's gonna be fun.

It is, it is. Well, depends where you're sitting. If you're in the middle of it, it may not be fun, but sitting where we are, it, it's fun.

So a couple things. Number one, does this mean Salesforce is really just not a CRM anymore? Um, you know, they've been saying that for a long time.

But, but here's the other thing. Every gener this, every generation or so, there's an opportunity where it seems we throw all the cards up in the air and let's see where it lands this time, right? And, and AI is this generation's, let's throw the cards in the air and see where it lands this time.

Because basically it, it allows us to change the rules and, and do these things. So you have a CRM company that wants to do ITSM, you have an ITSM company that wants to do CRM. You have ERP companies that want to be agent platforms, right?

Because that's always what they would design for anyway, they'll tell you. And, and, and so the, the battle lines are are in flux, right? And it's not just service, uh, ServiceNow and, and Salesforce though, they're, they're two of, let's call them today's darlings, right?

They're two powerhouse companies of the existing power infrastructure. But I'm telling you, look, for companies like SAP to be getting in here, and of course IBM and you know, your traditional Oracle, and, and these guys, you know, you love the smell of fresh meat in the morning, and there's fresh, there's the smell of fresh meat out here. And the, and these guys are not these guys.

They're not guys. These, these players, old, new, established, they're all very established. Because make no mistake, this is not a little guy's game.

There's not a startups game. It is a big boy game and right, but they're going to war. I don't look at this, just look at this a little bit differently, and maybe Steven, I'd love to get your opinion on this, but, you know, the people who buy CRM in an organization are not the same people buying the ITSM platform in that organization.

So just because Salesforce showed up and said, I've got an ITSM platform does not follow that. Everybody who buys ITSM cares. So, you know, how do they actually do something here that the people who buy ITSM are gonna care about?

Well, and I, I think that that's, that's exactly right. In fact, I would go even further and say that, um, you know, if you are a very strong, if you're very well known in one area of it, that can actually hamper the acceptance of your, of you in another area of it. I mean, look at IBM in DevOps, for example.

I mean, IBM is undoubtedly one of the leaders in the DevOps software and open source software especially. Thanks now that they've got HashiCorp and Red Hat, and yet I think if you ask the average, you know IT person about IBM, they wouldn't go to Linux and open source and DevOps. They would start talking about mainframe or something, which is like completely ridiculous.

It's the same with Salesforce. You know what I mean? Salesforce frankly has egg on its face.

It has a reputation of being a difficult product to implement, a difficult product to get value from. And if you go to an IT crowd and say, Hey, um, you know, Salesforce has got a product in this ITSM space, I, I think a lot of the IT managers might immediately, um, discount it because of their history with Salesforce. On the flip side, if you go to a business person and you start talking about Oracle or something, I mean, they're, it's the same thing.

They're gonna say, Oracle, we've been trying to mess with their stuff for years. You know, it hasn't given us the, you know, it's, it's all nuts and bolts and whatever over here. You know, we need a, a partner, we need a service Now that kind, you know, I mean, we need a Salesforce.

So these things, it's, it's a Mars and Venus problem. And we've been seeing this for a long time in it where you've got companies that, uh, they know how to talk to one market, and then they think that they're gonna be taken credibly in another market. I mean, you know, go to go to Security Boulevard and see what they think of, you know, data protection companies in the security space.

It's the same thing. They're, they're using some of the right words, but it's like they're speaking a different language. It's like Portuguese and Spanish or something, right?

I mean, they, like, they, they're just, it's a real hard bridge to cross. But one thing I do wanna say is, what a relief to be talking about. Not ai, But we aren't talking about ai.

Oh, You had to ruin it. In fact, Sanjeev, I wanted to ask you this question since you wrote the original book. Um, some people are saying that this is, you know, with the rise of ai, this is a bullwinkle moment in the DevOps landscape.

And this time for sure, we're gonna unify all this dev and ops stuff, and this is our moment in the sun. What do you say? Yeah, I, I, well, first of all, I, as somebody who's been advocating this for over a year, I hope that is true, right?

But I've seen this movie too many times before and being disappointed every time to say, is this really the answer? I hope it is. But at the end of the day, you know, the, the proof will be in the pudding at the right.

I think there are some very interesting solutions coming up in the market, right? Where truly with agents, we can do things, and with ai we can do things which humans could not do, given the scale and the complexity, just being able to analyze what's there. You know, think of how many companies that have startups have come in the last decade who said, we will go spread out these agents or crawlers in your infrastructure, and they'll discover everything that is there, and we will able to repair things before they break or predict you when, when an outage will happen.

None of them really served, you know, delivered what they promised. I'm just hoping that this is true this time so that people can, like, like me can say we were right 10 years ago, but, uh, I'm not going to be holding my breath. I'm going to be hoping it's true.

No, I, I do wanna go back to this cross setting, you know, conversation we were talking about. And sorry if I'm mis messing you with your flow, Mike, and not moving on to ai, but I think some, one of these, one of the challenges I've seen as being a buyer in, you know, I've worked for two fortune hundred companies in the last few years and was on the buying side. We seem to discount when it comes working with purchasing organizations of a large company.

We seem to discount the, the, the power. A large company like a ServiceNow or a Salesforce or a m or and IBM bring to the table through their enterprise license agreements and the ability to bundle software and literally squeeze everybody else outta the market. That's the play, that's the power, kind of the, the, the nuclear weapon.

Something like Salesforce brings to the table. That's what they did with Slack, right? They're like, Hey, it's in the package, right?

It's in the bundle. That's what Microsoft does all the time. Why do we all have teams despite us not liking teams and preferring Slack?

Every company has teams because it's a part of the bundle. That's the selling, the b the conversation when it comes to the CFO and the buyers at the budget holders, they go, if I can buy ITSM from Salesforce and we're to save me X dollars, maybe I should force my engineering teams to look at it. I think that's the part we are missing, and that's the nuclear weapons, so to speak.

Uh, these, these these companies have. That's why to me, it's very interesting when somebody who's already getting millions of dollars, right? Dreamforce, you can go and see who all comes to Dreamforce, right?

These are people carrying hundreds of millions, if not billion dollar budgets. If they're going to say, I can now remove another vendor, I can save this many million dollars by buying ITSM from Salesforce. It's going to change the conversation.

Agreed. Mike, what, what Bullwinkle moment other than the three of us here, the four of us, how many people raise your hand if you know what a Bullwinkle moment is out there. Us.

That's what I thought. The rest of you not. So I'm doing my romper room thing and I see little George in that.

It's, it's, it's, it's one of the great classic cartoons of all time, man. And, and more relevant today than ever. Alright.

Should we say a Lucy and football moment? Would that be more relevant to the youngins? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To the youngins. Anyway, You have to give the young ones office, you know, uh, analogies from the office or from, yeah, yeah. Something, something a little more, we gotta get more relevant.

Oh, well look, that's your homework for today. Go ask your AI what a bow winkle moment Is. Hey, next week everybody's gonna be using that phrase promise.

Absolutely. And you heard it here first, but, but Sanjeev, you're right. That, that, that is the power of the big stick, right?

You bundle it in. Microsoft did it, right? IBM does it.

Uh, they all did. This is what big companies do. And, and it'll be interesting and, you know, um, I, I do think you're, now, it's one thing to say, well, I'm throwing out Joe Little company because it's coming with my big company.

But when you start getting turf wars between ServiceNow and, and Salesforce and Salesforce and SAP and SAP and IBM and IBM and Oracle, you know, that makes those procurement shops spin. It's mutually assured destruction, right? Yeah.

A little bit. 'cause they all have big giant enterprise license Grid. Well, until, until the battle lines will be redrawn, right?

Mm-hmm. I, I think this a agen AI thing, as I said, is throwing the cards up in the air and giving everybody a chance to, to claim new turf. So I'll say like the sharks and the jets, you know, what we referring to?

Un un un un until the, that's a Relevant one Guy gets fed up and goes and gets some other tools and just slides them in the back door, right? Absolutely. Well, you know what?

Here's the other thing I've learned, seeing these kind of turf wars erupt over the years, there's always one or two new guys who slip in and this is their chance, right? com bubble burst and I thought out Vista search was the way to go, this company come called Google snuck in among excited home in Alura Vista and all that, uh, the there is, right? It's an, there is an opportunity, not widespread, but for a new, a new, uh, Mm-hmm.

You know, giant to emerge. You mean Alta Vista originally created by, I believe Digital Equipment Corp. You thought that was gonna be the answer?

No. I loved Alta Vista search. I, I'll be very honest with you, I liked it a lot.

Next, he is going to say his Facebook profile is still open. Yeah, it is. All right, let's take a break.

We'll find out what happens. You know, it. Hey, it s m's relevant again.

That's great. I four is here. Um, let's come back and talk a little bit about unstructured data.

Is it in crisis? You're watching Textron? Okay.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Techstrong Group. Hey folks, we're back in. There's an interesting article over on Techstrong it talking about, um, whether or not we have a silent crisis around the amount of unstructured data we've been collecting all this time.

And some folks estimate it's 30% of the IT budget, and a lot of that data is well useless and pointless, and we should get rid of it. But Steven, you've been around this whole data management issue forever and storage. And so let me ask you, you know, A, is this a crisis?

And B, how do we get rid of all this crappy data? Not only is this a crisis, this is a perennial crisis. This is, this is a crisis longer running than one piece.

Sorry, I had to put in a, a modern reference here. I mean, um, this crisis has been going on so long, uh, and we've been talking about it so long. I could, I could probably find an old PowerPoint Microsoft 98 document from a presentation at Storage Decisions in 2001 that says exactly the same things as our article says today with even the same customers.

Here's what's going on. Um, just to be very, very clear to the listeners, so unstructured data, I, I'm sorry, I get passionate. This is my area.

I'm MR. Storage. Unstructured data is basically data that's not in a database, but it's also, and this is important, it's data that is not well described.

So there can be, in my opinion, data outside of a database that is structured. In fact, I, I have seen, uh, incredible file systems, uh, that are incredibly structured and well described with metadata. Um, I have seen, and, and, you know, searchable, categorized all that.

I would consider those structured data, not even semi-structured, but structured. But if you look at data companies, essentially, um, you know, it's in their nature. You know, if your background is in SQL or now, uh, no SQL databases, anything that's not in a database is unstructured.

Lemme tell you, a lot of things in databases are pretty unstructured too. But, uh, point is most businesses have huge amounts of unstructured data. The, the article that we, uh, just recently published, um, about this topic over at, um, at Textron, uh, it talks about many examples in many industries.

And, and they're actually really good examples because I think people often jump to, oh, it's the nas, it's the, the, it's, it's Mike's and Alan's files on the file server. That's the problem. No, no, no, no.

It's the, like millions of medical images. It's the thousands of pages of scanned documents for every patient, or it is all the geophysical data that's been constructed, you know, built up over these years. And it's not always in a na it can be on all sorts of things.

Now, the opportunity here is to structure that data or to mine that data for value. And that's what a lot of companies are doing right now. You know, we, I was at click connect earlier this year, and they've got a lot of capabilities to structure unstructured data.

Um, our article, we mentioned cloudent as a company that's really leaning into this. Um, you know, I've certainly heard a similar story from Microsoft, uh, talking about pulling data into the cloud from Amazon, uh, web services about pulling data up from Google. Uh, for me, uh, I hate to do this, but I'm gonna do it.

One of the most exciting things that's happening in the world of unstructured data, yes, it's ai because AI is actually really good at quote, looking at files and extracting structure from those files. In fact, I get more use of chat GPT as a data structuring assistant than I do as chat GPT as a write my homework assistant. Essentially, I will routinely throw articles or data sets or spreadsheets or, you know, CSV files or, or just plain images at chat GPT and say, describe this in JSON.

I need to know, you know, a list of of faces, a list of animals, a list of, um, you know, background objects. Uh, you know, I need to know which companies are mentioned in this article about unstructured data. I need to know, um, you know, which, uh, you know, I need a summary of all of the, um, different vendors that are mentioned in this spreadsheet.

AI is really good at that. And the best, uh, answer to unstructured data that I've ever seen is essentially building data structuring systems that leverage LLMs to pull information metadata out of these and, and surface that and make it more useful in the future. Whether that means moving it off the file system into cloud storage, or building metadata systems and searchable indexes around them or whatever it means, this is really an opportunity that I've never seen before, and it's something that I could get really excited about.

And, and frankly, it won't burn down the rainforest with, uh, chatbots that are telling us to kill ourselves. It'll, in fact, help us to use more useful, uh, get more use outta the data we already have. Sanjeev, after three plus decades has Steven's moment finally come.

Yeah, I say yes, please Say yes. First of all, first of all, I hope so, right? I, as a former executive from Dell, I don't, I don't want anybody deleting any storage sitting on Dell hardware, right?

So, uh, uh, any files they're sitting on Dell storage, please keep them there. In fact, keep them growing, right? Uh, but I, I think Stephen, your stuff, spot on, right?

The challenge has been, I mean, I'm, I was at IBM during the big data. I know, remember big data where everybody was buying these, creating these data lakes and data warehouses, and it turned into data swamps and data, you know, backyards, right? And that the problem was exactly that.

You dump data, which you don't know anything about, it's got some label on it and obscure label with somebody put by, you know, a human put on it. Uh, or it was put on by a machine which was not intelligent, couldn't look and analyze the way today you can. Uh, I think we finally have the opportunity to say all this data in our data lakes, or data warehouses or data, whatever, it's storage or secondary storage, is it even useful?

Because the first, that's the first thing you wanna find out, right? Most people do not delete the data because they think one day they'll be able to get value of it, right? I remember working, uh, with a company which was at that point, 104 years old, and they had every transaction they had ever made stored, and was that needed?

It was not regulatory required, it was not a part of their history, but they felt one day we can mine, and I'm scratching my head going, you want to mine the buying practices of a teenager 104 years ago? Even that teenager isn't alive anymore. What are you going to get out of it?

But, you know, that was the hope. But I think that hope can result because AI agents, right? Stephen rightfully said, are really good at looking at unstructured data, large amounts of data, and extracting, you know, some labels out of it, right?

It could be as simply as just properly tagging all of it, and it can finally be useful. Alan, do we Have a data hoarding problem? Is That, I was just gonna say that really what this really comes down to is hoarding.

Hoarding, right? I'm keeping, and, and look, I'm guilty. I'm as guilty as the next person, right?

You know, because maybe someone will need to look at my tax returns from 2003. Um, you know, I, I go through this on my own, like personal drives and stuff. I, I, now, on the other hand, you know, my, my Google photos probably I'm ashamed to tell you how many photos are in there, um, but I know I'm going to need that one.

I wanna see when my, you know, I remember when my kid was four and I want to see what he looked like that, right? Or what did I do during this? At, on this day through the years, it's a giant hoarding issue, and we definitely have it and work in, in, you know, in business because you never know what you think you're going to need.

Or actually, you know what you think you're going to need, you just never need it, Or you don't know where it is. It's buried, right? Yeah.

And the reverse is also true. Alan, I'd like, I love to ask you the question. How many photos in your Google Drive are actually duplicates or duplicates?

Oh, there's ti so I do dedupe, but what I found is Google Photos, this is another discussion. Google Photos will take three photos that are similar, but not exact and, and make them dupes. And so I get upset with that.

But we, we have that problem in the business also, that there is large te petabyte scale, te definitely hundreds of terabyte scale data, which is duplicate. Mm-hmm. Because they duplicate it for some reason.

Yeah. To work on it and never deleted the duplicate either, even though that reason to keep that copy isn't there anymore, Right? How many times do you see a file name with the one, number one after it, or two or three?

Yeah, those are the ones you should be getting rid of. But Maybe, maybe, but who's to say that it's actually a duplicate? And I'll tell you if another thing I, um, in, in an interim in my career, I advised, uh, general counsel at public companies on data retention policies.

And it was funny because when I first walked into their office, they would inevitably say, delete, delete, delete. Get rid of this old data. It's a risk to the company.

It's costing us money, delete it. But once I explained to them the fungibility of data and the fact that, uh, this email that you are going to delete is actually stored on the email server of your client as well, and they will produce that in court, even if you can't, suddenly the tune changed. And the answer was, save, save, save.

So I have, um, a bunch of self-proclaimed storage laws that I've named after myself, because that's the kind of narcissist I am. Uh, one of them is that essentially, uh, the capacity of storage, uh, your next storage purchase is going to be, uh, twice the size of all the storage purchases you've made before. And another one is that, uh, your use of storage will expand to, uh, take up all the storage available.

Um, don't delete things, never delete things. Just keep hacking it away. My blog is called Pack Rat, by the way.

I should point that out. Uh, just keep it, just keep it all. So you hear, you hear it from a hoarder here, okay.

And try to categorize it and try to Structure it. You know what, hi, my name is Steven. I'm a hoarder.

I'm a Listen to me ho. Anyway, hey, that's a great way to end this show. We're about out time you brings the joy.

Look, if it brings you joy, do it. Storage is cheaper enough. Uh, that's what I keep hearing.

Steven Sanjeev, Mike, thanks so much for joining. Thanks. You out here for watching and participating in this, uh, mental Health Day here as we explored various topics.

As usual, we have a full text drunk TV lineup immediately following. Steven, you've got a field day this week, don't you? That's right.

Um, I'm gonna be in Vegas. Uh, we are meeting with, uh, NetApp, speaking of storage. Uh, I'll be meeting with NetApp, uh, at NetApp Insight in Vegas.

And we are gonna be live, uh, streaming on, uh, tech Strong as well as Tech Field Day on Thursday. Uh, it's actually not live, live. We're recording it on Wednesday and we're gonna stream it on Thursday.

Uh, but, uh, with all the news coming outta there, so in terms of this data, uh, processing the metadata, the ai, uh, use of data, all that, that's what NetApp's gonna be talking about. So that'll be Thursday. Fantastic.

And I would just like to note that no data was harmed during the making of this particular That we know of. And Stephen, please, please ask Jack GP to tell you who Marie Kondo is. I, I'm not going to, it, it doesn't bring me join.

All right. I, I will mention that we are gonna to be live at what was known formerly The artist is formerly known as, or the conference formerly known as Quais Security Conference. It's now Qualys Rock On Risk Operation Conference, and, uh, risk Operation Co.

So Rock on. We will be streaming live from Rock on on Wednesday and Thursday as well. So busy, busy stuff on Techstrong TV and Tech Field Day.

Stay tuned for it. Stay tuned for Tech TV right now. Text on TV right now.

Until then, I'm Alan Shimmel. I'm out.