Techstrong Gang – August 20, 2024

Happy Tuesday, everyone. It's a crazy Tuesday Here. We've got some mainframe mania going on.

HPE is acquiring again. They're not the only ones. And there's rumors of a, a new Apple Mac Super Mini.

We'll find out you are watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone, it's Alan Shimmel, Techstrong gang. Welcome to our show on this beautiful Tuesday.

We've got a lot to go over with you and, uh, some great people to go over with with you. Uh, let me introduce you to our gang members for this morning. First of all, joining us remotely are the Stevens.

One is Steven with a V and I think we've done this before. I'm getting a little deja vu. And what is Steven with a pH, not a PhD, mind you, but a pH.

Let me first introduce you to Steven with a D. He is a CTA at FU group and he's also our resident mainframe and infrastructure expert is among, among other things, Steven Dickens. Steven, how are you?

It's good to see you. Hey, I, and I think I'll go by Mr. Dickens, just to not confuse the listeners today.

Whenever Steve, whenever Steven and I do calls, it gets complicated, Steven with a v. We may call you V and then, but I appreciate it. Maybe we'll do Mr.

Dickens. No mistake. I like Charles, The sound of that.

I Like sound of that. Um, and then joining us, Steven with the pH, he's also the founder of, uh, tech Field Day, and he still runs the Tech Field Day events, the great events. He's actually, we talk about what he did recently, um, is our friend Steven Foskett.

Hey Steven, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me on. Uh, always happy to be part of the gang, uh, always to, uh, happy to talk tech with my good friend Mr.

Dickens as well. Uh, yeah, for now, I think you're gonna have to ba basically confuse us both by making us think you're talking about our dads. So you can call me Mr.

FoST and him, Mr. Dickens. Okay, well, we'll see how that goes over.

Lemme introduce you to the rest of our gang, though, adding a little sustainability to our show Today is our sustainability editor and analyst, Bonnie Schneider. Hey, Bonnie, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Thanks, Alan. And then joining us. He's, he was back from the Keys.

I think he left his shirt on. He must have just arrived. Our chief content officer, Michael Vard.

Hey Mike, you didn't hear the brake Squealer. Yeah. Well, easy man.

Right? All's good in the keys. Don't worry.

Be happy. Anyway, guys, thank you all for, for joining us. Thank you out here for watching us today on the gang.

We're gonna kick things off, uh, with a block we're calling Mainframe Mania. Steven Foskett. Mr.

Foskett, you were recently out at the v Vulnerable Share Conference and I forget if, I don't remember how many years shares going on, but it's like 25, 30 years maybe more, right? Think it's longer than that. It's the platform is 16 years old, so figure.

Yeah. But anyway, Steven, you were there. I you did a tech field day around it, did you not?

Yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun. Um, man, I gotta say, so Mr. Dickens invited me to share back in March.

Um, really loved the experience. I've gotta say the mainframe folks. Um, they're a lot of fun.

They're just cool people. Um, and, and it's not the same people you might think when you think mainframe. First off, I do have to admit I am not a mainframe guy.

Uh, I arrived on the scene, uh, in the open system space. I was a Unix SIS admin. I got involved in virtualization, storage, et cetera.

But I like to pat myself on the back and say that I'm smart enough to understand that the mainframe still has a place in business. And boy does it ever. I think that the, you know, it, it's very obvious talking to the folks at Share, uh, some of the incredible people that we had on our delegate panel.

Um, you know, uh, Mark Wilson and I were, uh, were talking about this Derek Brit. Um, it is incredible the value and the importance that the mainframe remains in the enterprise. And it's also incredible, um, the number of companies, the number of products and, and frankly the modern, the modernity of the products that are involved.

So, for example, uh, at Share this year, both of the share conferences this year, most of the talk was on ai. A lot of the talk was on DevOps. We're talking containerization, we're talking, uh, building out, uh, webscale and modern microservices applications.

We're talking about basically the same things. What I said to, um, to Derek, uh, at the show was it's like all the nouns are different, but the verbs are the same because everybody's talking about doing the same things. But all of the technologies just have a completely different name.

And, and frankly, that's one of the things that came up in our discussions, that it's a little difficult. It's a little forbidding to get involved in the mainframe space, simply because there are different names for everything. But that being said, uh, you know, we heard from, for example, Broadcom, and they're talking about, um, basically telemetry and, uh, modernizing op operations.

Everything Broadcom said about mainframe could have been said by them about open systems. And in fact, one of the things that struck me about the Broadcom presentations specifically was that all of their discussion about, uh, basically focusing on, you know, their, the needs of their key companies innovating, yes, innovating in mainframe on new ways to accelerate, uh, DevOps and transformation, uh, digital transformation. All of these things are exactly what Broadcom's gonna be doing with VMware in the open system space as well.

Uh, and, and this, and the products also kind of reminded me a little bit of what they're gonna be doing and what they are announcing. On the other side of the, of the coin, the same thing was true with BMC. Um, you know, Broadcom's probably the biggest independent software vendor.

Steven certainly knows the, uh, the market better than I, but, uh, BMC may be number two. And boy do they have a lot of great, uh, products as well. They were showing ca showcasing ai, uh, a really great use of generative AI to, uh, basically examine COBOL code and describe how it works and what it's doing to help, uh, modernize code, um, examining, um, systems and describing how they work with generative AI to figure out, uh, how we can, uh, make sure that these things are sustainable, uh, that we can bring on a new generation of operators in the future.

And then the third one, uh, this one I absolutely love Pop-up mainframe. One of the challenges, one of the reasons that, that, that mainframe is so forbidding is because it's not like you can just get a mainframe at home and start tinkering with it. It's not like you can get one, you know, spin one up in the cloud for dev and test, but you can now with popup.

And that was the cool thing. So, uh, you know, the fact that they were able to basically bring an entire full featured mainframe environment online on demand for dev test is really transformative. It's a small company with a big idea.

Um, Steven, uh, I hope I haven't, uh, stepped in it here. What, what do you think about the mainframe world? Well, I think you, I mean, go in reverse order of what you mentioned there.

I mean, people don't think of startups, they don't think of new companies. They don't think of people getting seed rounds looking to raise capital and kind of that whole VC ecosystem for the mainframe. Gary Thornhill, the CEO of popup is doing exactly that.

So when people think the mainframe, they're not thinking that kind of VC driven innovation ecosystem. They're absolutely wrong. I'm talking to numerous small sort of new innovative startups that are entering this space.

So I think what Gary's doing is fantastic. It fixes a known problem, democratizes access to the develop to developer driven tools and pla and the ability to get on the platform. So Gary's doing great work there, as you mentioned with BMC, involved with them in that launch.

AI ops bringing generative AI to development, that's the same story we are getting on the cloud and the open system side. So to go back to your point, all the things that are going on in the mainframe echo the things that are going on in the wider industry. You know, I think bringing generative AI to code description and code analysis, great initial use case, we're seeing that with copilot.

We're seeing that with Q we're seeing that with all the other things, ads on the cloud, BMC, doing exactly the same. And then from a Broadcom point of view, open telemetry working with the open source community to be able to make the mainframe observable and discoverable by hotel driven tools like Splunk. That's exactly the same conversation I'm having with Splunk about all the rest of the things that they're doing.

So I think if people are going into this thinking mainframe, oh, this is legacy tech that hasn't changed since the nineties, absolutely reset your expectations, do some discovery, and, and you'll find out that that is absolutely not the case. Well, and in terms of the attendees too, I wanna point out, uh, sorry Alan to jump on you. Uh, I was expecting it to be just a bunch of old guys, and it's not just a bunch of old guys.

So I wanna put that bug in your bonnet too, if you go to share Yeah, there's some old guys, but there's some old guys at all the conferences. There's some young people. It is not what you think.

So look, we've been covering the mainframe here at Techstrong for many, many years. And, and Steven FoST, I say, welcome to the party, the pool, the water's just fine. Jump in right still today.

Dollar for dollar. Penny for Penny. The most reliable, stable, secure platform in the world remains the mainframe.

And what I find fascinating is the two of you just spent damn near 10 minutes talking, and you didn't mention IBM IBM's not sitting on their hands here either. I've got, It's just maybe a factor of timing. I know what they're doing.

You may want to look at Hot Chips in a couple of weeks time. I just under embargo Alan, and can't say any more than what I've just said. I gotcha.

But you know what, IBM still does a great job there. And we do, you know, we work, and Steven, I know you, you helped Steven Dickens, excuse me, you helped found the Open Mainframe Group over part of the Linux Foundation and some of the great work. They've got about 20 something projects under their umbrella.

Mm-Hmm. The largest of which is Z Zoe, which Steve Foskett, I don't know if you had a chance to see anything atcher on Zoe, but, you know, that is bringing unbelievable kinds of modernization. I I mean, it's, it's allowing us to do everything you do in the cloud and on systems at the mainframe.

So it it is, it's a vibrant community. The education systems, you know, in India where they have more kids taking computer science than we have kids here in the us it's, it's, it's not a secret there that if you want a job, go learn cobol, go learn mainframe programming, because there are, there are, there's no shortage of jobs available in, in these areas. com forever as well.

It is vibrant. All of the companies. One other company that we didn't mention that we work a lot with there is Rocket Mm-Hmm.

Rocket Software, another, you know, maybe not as big as BMC and, uh, Broadcom, but since, Since the acquisition of the assets from OpenText. Yeah, they, they're certainly Middle Ann is, I mean, that, that's the other thing. 2 billion acquisition of assets from OpenText.

So we're seeing m and a activity, we're seeing startups, we're seeing a lot of innovation in this space for sure. So Metal and Shetty over there at Rocket's doing great work to, yeah, they inate that company. They've got a new CMOA new VP of product marketing there.

There's a lot going on over with those guys to really energize the space. So I don't know where they are now revenue wise. 'cause BMC and Rocket are both private.

So I, I've kind of got a rough idea, but I'd probably put that as a almost a tie at their mainframe revenue. Really? That big.

Steven? Yeah. Yeah, With that acquisition, that was about a 700 million revenue annually.

Oh, okay. So, I mean it's, I, I'd have to go and sort of dig and try Angulate, but it's close. The Open Text mainframe business was in itself purchased from Micro Focus.

Yeahs was from the micro focus deal. That's, yeah, that's the flow Which, um, I think HPE had from which, Right. Which before that was HHPE.

So all things go back to hp. We'll talk more about HPE in a bit, but Mr. Dickens, I'd love to get your opinion on this.

So one of the things you see all the time these days is people showing up, talking about how they're gonna use Gen AI to, uh, transform code. And they typically point the co ball and then they say, we're gonna convert that into Java. It's not clear to me they're moving off the mainframe or if they just wanna run Java because it's easier to find Java developers.

But what is your sense of, um, what languages are driving applications on the mainframe these days? Well, I mean, you've obviously got the greatest t**s. You've got the Cobalt, you've got the P one.

There's a lot of Java that runs on the mainframe. It's been running on the mainframe for a long time, arguably runs two X faster than it runs on other systems because of the garbage collection and some of the other sort of performance characteristics of the underlying hardware. So I don't think it's a Java run somewhere else.

COBOL runs on the mainframe type discussion. But bringing, um, we're seeing this from IBM with Watson Code Assistant. We're seeing that with, from, um, BMC.

We're seeing it from, there's a whole ecosystem. We work a lot with a company called Avera Source. We are working with a stadia.

There's a number of different people in this ecosystem that are, are using generative AI tools to do code, discovery code, um, sort of rewrite ultimately, to get that to something like Java. There's a challenge with that whole space of what's the Java that you actually could create. There's this fantastic word called Jobal, which is kind of Java, that's not really Java that's kind of structured like cobol, but written in Java, which doesn't really help the equation any at all.

So you've gotta, it's not just a straight trans, you know, transcription over into Java. You've actually gotta use the benefits of Java. So it's a bit more complicated than that when you dig into it.

But I think the point is, if all you're doing is just moving one language to another language, the way I'd describe that is, is French better than German? Or is German better than Spanish? Kind of, what did you get?

If you are spending five years of your life to move a COBOL application to Java and you did nothing else, then you're just trying To, it just for, for what sake? I, I agree. Yeah.

What were you achieving? There's gotta be a payoff on that. Yeah.

So Mr. Mr. Foskey, what was the mood of the conference?

Because, um, the mainframe community has gone from, you know, we are it royalty pump and circumstance to, to quote BB King, you know, nobody loves me but my mother. And she's jiving too. So where are they now, emotionally?

What did you kind of feel from the conference? Well, I, I certainly do feel a little frustration from some of the folks at the conference. There's definitely a little rodder, Roddy Dangerfield in there as well.

Uh, you know, no respect, no respect. Look at all the stuff we do. Look at everything, how important we are.

But at the same time, I also caught a sense of humility from them. Uh, I think that the biggest sense that I got was a little bit of, of kind of gnashing of teeth and hair pulling over what's gonna happen with all this space in the future. How are we gonna attract the next generation of folks in here?

Uh, two of the folks around the delegate table are actually working at universities. Um, and, and as well as, uh, Mr. Wilson over in the UK working with, um, mainframe bootcamps to help bring young people in and help them get them trained up, not just on cobal, but on the entire mainframe environment.

Um, I definitely think that they have the understanding and the message and the right focus, uh, in terms of attracting young people and new talent. And man, to echo what, uh, Alan said earlier about, uh, in India, if, if you're coming out of, um, out of, uh, university and you really want to get a job that pays well and is stable and is with a big name company, let me tell you, don't study, you know, I don't know, whatever, you know, the modern stuff. Get in there and study COBOL and get used to the mainframe environment because you will have a fantastic job that will be stable and will pay a lot of money for a long time.

And I think that's kind of the frustration, uh, that there's not more young people coming into the space, even though it's such an enticing job opportunity. You know? And, and on that front, the Open Mainframe project, the Linux Foundation people, they have an amazing education program going on both here in the US as well as internationally and a mentorship and everything else.

But you know what, we we're almost outta time for this, but Steven, I just wanna see when FS can, excuse me, Steve, uh, for people maybe who want to catch the Tech Field Day from Share that's available on the Tech Field Day YouTube channel, I believe, correct? Yeah, just go to YouTube slash tech field day. There's a playlist right there for of all the share videos.

Um, there's also a, um, we have two, uh, delegate round table discussions where basically no presentations, just delegates talking about this as well as, um, some podcasts. So, uh, do check that out. Lot of great stuff over there.

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to present it to the audience here. Not a problem. Thank you for bringing it up.

And I know it made, made me happy. I like talking Mainframe. I know Stephen Dickens gets positively positive about talking about mainframes.

Hey, we're gonna take a break here on Textron, uh, Textron Gang. We're gonna come back. HPE made some news about an acquisition recently company I'm familiar with.

We're gonna talk about that. You are watching Textron Gang. All right, folks, we're back and we're talking about HP's move to acquire Morphous data.

They've been a player in the hybrid cloud space for a while now. And of course, HP is in the middle of trying to acquire Juniper Networks. And it seems like Mr.

Foskett will start with you that HP's kind of quietly being reinventing itself for the last year or two through some acquisitions. What's your assessment of what's going on with these folks? 'cause, um, it seems like they're making a lot of progress.

They have that GreenLake service, and it's not your father's HPE for sure. Yeah, that's true. And, um, I've gotta say that quietly is the right way to put it.

Um, I, you know, I'm, I'm not hearing a lot of chest pounding and announcements and so on from HPE, though of course, they are keeping analysts up to date with what they're doing. Um, and they're definitely making progress. But it's not like they're out there, you know, shouting this from the mountaintops still.

Boy, GreenLake, everything I'm hearing is, uh, GreenLake is seeing incredible traction. It's seen as the Class act in the enterprise opex, uh, infrastructure space. Um, and HPE has made some incredible acquisitions.

I mean, let's, you know, we, we talked about Juniper, uh, which of course is not completed, but, uh, is coming. And, um, and Morpheus, boy, I am very familiar with Morpheus. They, uh, launched the company at Tech Field Day.

Uh, they've come back to Tech Field Day repeatedly over time, and they have an incredible, incredible product. So I'm really excited to talk about it. Mr.

Dickens, I know you've been following this whole cloud space for a long time now. Um, Morpheus data, it seems like it was early on on this whole hybrid cloud pitch, but hybrid cloud seems to be just multi-cloud. And so we don't have this centralized control play in the way Morpheus data originally kind of envisioned that the way the world would broke.

But is that gonna change? Or are we gonna be multi-cloud forever? Well, I, I think the way I describe it is multi hybrid cloud.

So you're gonna be on multiple public clouds. You're gonna be on-Prem, you're gonna be in a colo, you're gonna be consuming services from an MSP. So I think there's a kind of broader overall trend.

Some of the stuff that's going on in the market, um, the sort of Broadcom VCF type discussion is a kind of big mega trend. A lot of people are looking up and down that stack. We're starting to see Kubernetes get mainstream adoption.

Now I go to CubeCon and I track what are the, my sort of maturity tracking is the sport coat to hoodie ratio, as I call it for CubeCon. I'm starting to see more sports coats and less hoodies at CubeCon. And that's my kind of barometer for other grownups entering the room.

So I think you've got some mega trends kind of kicking in. Then you go to what HBS doing, and it's looking at that stack. It's making progress with ops ramp.

It's looking at that overall stack and going, where are we? What do we need to do? What's, what the sort of standard model I think is you're gonna be on multiple cloud services.

You know, three or fours are probably a minimum for a big enterprise. You can have some stuff on premise. We just talked about the mainframe.

You know, we're just talking about other on-premise locations. On-premise isn't what on-premise was 15 years ago on-premise could be an e in an Equinix data center. So the whole, and specifically GreenLake plays into that, you know, a bunch of private cloud servers isn't what it was even five years ago with what HP were doing with GreenLake.

So you kind of throw all that against the wall. This makes a lot of sense for me as an acquisition. I, um, I, I think part of the equation, Steven Dickens, that we're leaving, I, I agree in this cloud everywhere, right?

Mm-Hmm. And that it's all different flavors. I think a big part of it that we haven't mentioned is the SaaS, SaaS, cloud, SaaS, SAS ification, if you will, right?

How much of our data is actually being stored in third party SaaS? Mm-Hmm. Products, whether you're an enterprise or even a small company like ourselves.

I mean, everything's in a, in, in someone else's. We don't Have a data center for the Futurum group. We're all Gmail.

We're All sure it's all sas. Google Clare. Yeah.

We, I don't wanna say sassy. 'cause that means something else today, right? We're that too?

Yeah. Well that's S-A-S-S-Y. That's you.

But S-A-S-S-E. Uh, but anyway, I, I digress. We're, we've got a lot of data in, in sas and now I we're familiar with Morpheus, Steven, like you, Morpheus has been a long time partner, sponsor of Techstrong.

So first of all, big congratulations to the Morpheus team, right? It's, uh, Len Fassler once told, you know, it's kind of like boats the best two days of owning a company the day you buy it and the day you sell it. What's your boat?

It's a similar thing with your startup. Um, so congratulations to them on this. I, I think there's something to be said.

So I'm not an industry analyst as Steve Dickens is. I watch what HP e's doing. I, you know, we all grew up with an HP in our tech stack somewhere, right?

Um, but I'm still not a hundred percent sure of what h you know, Juniper. Juniper, the, the Juniper they bought is not the Juniper I grew up with either. Mm-Hmm.

Um, well, I'm not quite sure what HP e's up to. Well, well, let me put a vision together for 'em. 'cause I think one of the things you hear from them, and I'm not quite clear how many organizations are down this path, but what they consistently say is, organizations wanna spend more of their time on software building and deploying the software and less time managing the infrastructure.

So, Mr. Dickens, are we seeing a move here where organizations are kind of saying, you know what, let's let the infrastructure guys manage the infrastructure and we'll spend our time on the software. Yeah, there's definitely a, a trend there.

I mean, we're trying to abstract the way we've got the whole serverless, you know, trying to minimize that infrastructure piece. To go back to what you were saying, Alan, I, I spent 10 years at, what was HP at the time? Between, um, 2000 and 2010.

I think if you look at them now, back then it was enterprise service, storage and networking. Mm-Hmm. When Juniper closes, the networking piece is gonna jump to a larger part of that organization.

You know, have we finally got a credible competitor to Cisco? Have, we've been talking about a competitor for Cisco For forever mm-Hmm. And they've kind of dominated that space.

So I think Juniper's put in Cisco on notice, you know, what will be the combined HPE assets with Juniper kind of gives us a, a really sort of end to end. Juniper was more core, HP was more edge. Now you throw those two together, you end up with a bigger scale.

One thing we don't always talk about is HP's probably got the best reseller channel in the market. So being able to put that combined portfolio through that channel still Proliance, that's a $10 billion a year business. You know, so there's huge in service.

And then when you put the sort of green and storage, obviously you put that GreenLake wrapper and some of the operational tools. Is that a one stop shop for an infrastructure executive? Maybe.

But it's certainly the HP can have a lot of that conversation with A-C-C-T-O or a infrastructure exec and say, we've got service, we've got storage, we've got the operations. We can connect it to a network. All that coming together.

That's a pretty compelling story for me. I mean, obviously there's competition and other people who can do that, but HP's got a pretty comprehensive portfolio. And, and forgive me, 'cause I get confused because there were so many mergers, reverse mergers and all of that.

Do they still have the services piece to it? Yeah, they did. There's a really good friend of mine, actually I worked with 20 years ago, a lady called Sue Preston based out, oh, I, I interviewed Sue Preston, uh, for sustainability For hp.

What? Wonderful. Yes.

So we worked together in 1999. She's from the same part of the UK as me. Sue's an absolute legend.

Yeah. So I think investing from a services point of view as the thin end of the, the wedge to be able to implement that entire portfolio. Absolutely.

Got a strong services. Is it a full IBM consulting style kind of consulting organization? Probably more what I'd describe it as is a SWAT team to get you going and then you'd work with A GSI.

There are two other pieces to hp. I mean, um, Steven FoST mentioned Ops ramp, but that gave him an AI ops platform to kind of automate mentioned that flow. And we forgot Aruba is floating around in the HPE system.

Well, I would imagine that becomes part of your, of your network stuff, right? Yeah. But yes.

Is it still called Aruba? It is called Aruba. They run it as a separate company, the Aruba Juniper piece.

They haven't obviously told us how they're gonna pull those two pieces together, but Phil Rum runs that Aruba business. So that's gonna be interesting to understand the plan. I mean, for me, Aruba's more your private 5G, your wifi six, your kind of edge, you bring that with the Juniper core stuff that's gonna give them a really comprehensive portfolio.

And remember Aruba includes Silver Peak as well. So, you know, there's a lot more capability there. Also, I just have to say the word Threecom.

I worked at Threecom in the nineties and they went to h HP as well. But, uh, yeah, let me get it back to Morpheus though, because I think that this is one of the interesting angles here. You know, Morpheus was a smaller company.

They were a startup, uh, you know, venture funded, scrappy, uh, kind of fun and cool. Um, but the crazy thing about Morpheus is that their product was most attractive to the biggest enterprise customers. And in fact, Morpheus was really defying the odds for a small startup because they were attracting these big logos, big names, to, uh, basically standardize on their platform.

And why? Well, I think this tells the, the strategic tale of why HPE acquired them. Morpheus was founded to basically like you, like you guys mentioned, to bridge the gap between, uh, various different places that you can run applications, whether it's on-prem, whether it's hybrid Cloud, whether it's the various hyperscalers.

And they've actually remained true to that, right? To this day, the whole point of Morpheus is to kind of overcome the problem that sort of, uh, Uber cloud, super cloud metacloud problem of the fact that everywhere you run your application, you've got different services, you've got different capabilities, and yet developers just want sort of a consistent environment to run their applications. That's what Morpheus does.

And if you think about that, and then you think about these GreenLake customers and the, the customers that HPE has, like Mr. Dickens was mentioning, the incredible, um, you know, distributor network that, that they have the incredible client network that they have. Morpheus fits right in there.

This tool punches way above its weight. And I think it with in the hands of HPE, this tool is really gonna punch above its weight. Excellent, excellent.

Steven, I had to laugh. I almost heard those modems beeping when you mentioned Threecom. Wait, I actually came to Threecom by way of US robotics.

I actually Really, you're a real modem. I skied for US Robotics in the 56 k modem world at three com bought us. And then, uh, you know, everything, everything changed.

So yes, I hear those in my sleep. Uhhuh. I, I'm still waiting on, uh, that prediction that Bob Metcalf made about the internet crashing any day now.

Yeah, Well, you could get an a OL disc with that too, man. That brought back memories. com.

We were buying web hosting companies and, you know, not every web hosting company was the, they weren't all High Hat. And we'd go into some of these quote unquote data centers and they'd have Baker's racks, we called them filled of threecom or, or US robotics even before that modems, you know, and that's how they connected. It was, uh, yeah.

Anyway, I'm glad we're not there anymore though, thank God. Um, but congratulations again to the Morpheus folks. I, I think, you know, anytime you get an acquisition by a big company with a startup, there's a cultural fit or misfit and, and you've gotta give it time to gel and see how it goes.

But like Steve Bosque, Steven Foskett says it, this could be a great thing for Morpheus and la Last question, Mr. Dickens, are you making any predictions about the next acquisition for HPE? It seems like they're starting to be on a roll.

Well, they, they seem to be on two vectors. It's building out the Greenlight platform and it's networking. Those seem to be where they're going.

The only other one that would maybe be on the prediction from me would be something in the storage space. So I think, you know, but I, I would expect them to continue to do what I describe as a tuck in. I think Morpheus is a tuck in into this kind of overall management stack.

So I, I think more work there. So if I was, if I got to pick bets, it would be Tuck-in acquisitions for GreenLake. Once they've ingested Juniper, then it'd be looking for Tuck-ins around the networking space.

But the Find My Wild Card would be storage. Are they gonna look to make an acquisition there in the storage space? So those, you heard it here first, Mike.

Absolutely. I would, I would add one thing to that. HP was hanging around black hat and they're talking about converging networking and security.

So, mm-Hmm. They let's up a couple of security There, there are security companies for sale. No lack of that.

Anyway, okay, we're gonna take a break here on the gang. We're gonna come back and we're gonna, Bonnie's gonna address some rumors floating around, uh, of a refresh on the Apple Mac Mini That and more you're watching Textron Gang Cloud Native now is the web's leading resource for the growing cloud native ecosystem. com is your destination for news, thought leadership, features and webinars on cloud native architecture, Kubernetes serverless, cloud native application development, microservices, service mesh, cloud native security, and more.

Stay on the cutting edge of modern application development at Cloud native. Now Welcome back to the Textron gang. Well, rumors are always around, I dunno if they're true or not, but they're fun to talk about when it comes to Apple.

The Mac Mini, according to Bloomberg is set for a redesign. And this redesign is a rumor to be even more mini. But is it going to be more sustainable?

I decided to take a closer look. Hi, I'm Bonnie Schneider with your Ecotech Analyst Insights. The Apple MAC Mini is reportedly going to see a major redesign that's according to Bloomberg Apple's.

Current MAC Mini already boasts impressive eco credentials. It consumes 55% less power than energy star requirements and incorporates 100% recycled aluminum. But the rumored redesign implies less material use, potentially lowering its overall carbon footprint.

The integration of the AI forward M four chip could enable better power management. For example, if the Mac Mini handles more local processing tasks, it could reduce its reliance on cloud computing for certain applications. The redesign also offers the opportunity to rethink packaging and shipping a more minute.

Mini means less units per shipment, potentially reducing transportation related emissions. However, the new minis reduced size could impact its repairability. If it becomes harder for users to perform upgrades that limits the ability to extend their devices lifespan.

There may also be issues managing its thermal environment. Apple has already implemented effective heat management in the current Mac Mini. The challenge for the redesigned one will be maintaining or even improving upon its temperature regulation within a tighter enclosure.

Ultimately, anticipation for a redesigned MAC mini will only build in the coming months. Apple's latest innovation has the potential to demonstrate how cutting edge technology and sustainability can coexist in a compact high performance device. So one of the challenges I mentioned in the video, but it's interesting to think about if it's smaller, is that going to make it diff more difficult to repair?

Is that going to change the, uh, end of life process keeping it, um, more sustainable? So these are some unknowns, just as the rumor is, but, um, it's gonna to keep an eye on. And earlier in our last segment, we were talking about hp, which is, um, a big a company that's very big on having a, a circular process and, and prolonging the life of, of hardware.

So for the New Mac Mini, we'll be looking to see if that's gonna be the case too. But I mentioned that they're smaller in size, just logically they're gonna be take up less space as as they'd be shipped to customers. So it's something to watch, um, out of curiosity and also outta sustainability.

Sustainability. So I I I think it's interesting is, you know, look, running the Apple CI car, you know, which is an arm architecture at the end of the day, is it, you know, does that simplify the internal circuits and so forth that allow them to miniaturize like this? But the other thing is ai, right?

I think that's gonna be assuming the rumors are true, there is a new Mac, many coming out. I think, you know, the ability to do AI on, on silicon there, on local, not on the cloud, is going to be a a, a thing. And I, you know, we have, we've heard about Apple intelligence on the iOS and all of that, but is there going to be some sort of super duper AI capability built into Apple silicon that'll show itself in the mini, that's what they Were talking about.

At least with the rumors. I, you know, I hear all this stuff about AI and the edge and all that. That's fine.

But you know, Mr. Dickens, I'll go to you with this, but when I looked at the Apple announcements, it was like, yeah, we're running all this stuff locally, but the minute you have an issue, you're gonna make a call out to the cloud. And it looked to me like Apple is starting to become a cloud service provider and they're using AI as kind of their first step into that space.

Starting, Starting. Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing, Alan. I mean, I think for me, the mini, it's a great little device.

What's the use case? You know, is it a computer with where you get, you don't need a screen? Is that really the use case?

I'd like to see Apple really doing something in the home. You know, they've missed the smart devices market. You know, they've had a, um, a sort of speaker with a, with Siri, it was way too expensive.

Amazon and Google have kind of clean their clock on that market. I'd, I'd love to see Apple in the home. What is it in the us?

50% plus market share with the phones. I'm an app. I'm com I'm recording this on a Mac.

I'd just love them to finally compete. Are they doing something with tv? We've heard about that for years.

What am I gonna connect this Apple Mini to? Probably a tv. Amazon's cleaning their clock with fire tv.

You know, I'm really getting frustrated with Apple. I've been a long time Apple user. I've got an Apple.

I was third generation iPhone and I've got a 15 Pro Max. So I'm a fanboy on the technology. Just want them to spend some of that huge cash pile and actually innovate.

Get into edge devices, get into the home, get into uh, Hi-Fi, get into tv, actually do something rather than shaving, you know, one millimeter off the phone and making the next phone thinner. You've got fantastic Silicon and you've got Siri, you've got Apple Intelligence coming. Just innovate.

Apple, Tim Cook. The last thing you did for innovation was AirPods. So Steven, I I'm also an Apple fanboy.

Mm-Hmm. Steven Dickens. I I'm a fan.

I've got my watch. I've got the same, well, I don't have the Pro Max, I have the pro, I don't like the max form factor. But look at home.

I'm an Apple TV house where you, I probably have four or five of them. I think Apple TV is the best streaming device compared to Roku Fire or, or any of the others. But I do agree with you.

They, they missed. I thought they would. I think Sonos is a great acquisition for them.

It's that same culture. I think that would be A great, the last acquisition they did was beats. Yeah.

And that agree years ago now they came out with the goggles and we haven't heard much from there. A $3,500 goggle is a pretty expensive, but what's interesting, there's almost a, a dumb, I call it the dumbbell, uh, missing piece of it here. 'cause they're missing that home piece that you say, Steven, but they're also miss, they're still missing the server market.

They're still missing the data center and they don't wanna be in it. They say, I get that. But when you talk about having powerful computers that don't have monitors with them, that says data center to me.

Now, I'll tell you, we have some of our AV team here uses Apple Minis because you know what? It is a really powerful little footprint with a powerful combination of RAM and, and CPU. And you could hook, you wanna hook an Apple monitor up if you feel like backing the Brinks truck up and buying one, or you wanna hook another monitor up.

It, it, it makes for a great workstation to do video editing. Um, which look, if you go back to traditional Mac right? Graphics work, you know, doing graphics work and that, that's kinda what it does.

But that's a very niche market. Talking Mark. I mean, you mentioned Sonos.

I'd love Tim Cook to get the checkbook out. Go buy Sonos, go Buy. I think it's for sale.

Yeah, go buy Sonos. Go buy, uh, whoever the best smart home hub go buy that. You know, go buy the business of Phillips off Siemens, off h like just go and drop 30 billion of your cash fund that is sitting there and go and do something in this market.

Oh my gosh, you're cracking me up, Steven. You are cracking me up. There is no home server, home hub.

I'm not talking server. I'm talking devices. Nobody, There has never been a home automation market.

I am a home automation enthusiast. I'm a contributor to home assistant. Home assistant is far and away the number one home automation platform.

And it is a open source. It's a wonderful open source community. It is very small dollars.

Uh, I think Apple is a master at seeing when there is a market and when there isn't a market. People like to say Apple is behind on ai. They say that they're behind on home, behind on audio, behind on servers, behind all these other things.

But are those actually markets? Are those, I mean servers sure, but not Apple's market. Um, the, the problem is why would they buy Sonos?

Why would they want yesterday's technology when everything is moving to matter as a new protocol now in, in the home, why would they want, you know, to, to buy, I don't know, whatever Phillips or something like that, when it's never really made a dime for any of those companies? They wouldn't. The truth is Apple is waiting for there to be a real market, and they're trying to seed that market.

Um, if you, if you don't, and I'm not saying this to you 'cause I know you know about it, but if, if people listening don't know about Matter and thread and where that's going, it's very exciting. But it's also very nascent. It's not really a market yet.

And maybe it'll get there, But Apple, but Apple's got the, my point here, Mr. fka, is Apple's got the ecosystem. Why that stuff's not taken off into the mainstream is 'cause it's not simple, it's not beautifully designed and it's not elegant.

What is Apple really good at? It's not Apple. That's what Apple's good at.

If I had a smart thermostat system, if I had a smart speaker system in my home, and if I could connect it all to a Mac Mini and it all looked beautiful, would I buy it? Would everybody else buy it? I think they would.

The the one that gets me is flip phones. If Apple could develop a flip phone, you are telling me that people wouldn't buy it. No.

Just innovate on form factor. Just do something. Johnny Ives is rolling in his Gray.

Oh, he's not quite dead yet. He's not Dead, but he's, he is. There's just no innovation.

He invented them. Oh no, there is, there is no, I look, they, the goggles was the, the big thing. They came out with three and half Thousand dollars.

Really? They're, they're replacing the goggles. So they have goggles coming.

Really? They have new goggle Goggle too. Not, not announced, but come, I mean, Steve Fosters like you, I, you know, in my house I have Google Nest and, uh, thermostats and smoke and car, you know, CO2, uh, carbon monoxide, uh, detectors.

I have Ring for the security, you know, visual security around the house and doorbells. I have, uh, I have Alexa as maybe I just bought the new Alexa 15 inch. Oh wow.

Which is a really cool, that's my kind of home hub and I, I, it's really nice. But I use that. I, I probably have 20 plus Sonos devices in my house, and as I said, four or five Apple TVs.

Wow. I haven't seen one company that's going to convince me to consolidate. And the trouble is that, you know, Alexa looks attractive.

They've sold a lot of them. They're inexpensive, but by all accounts, including Amazon's public information, they have lost billions of dollars. Oh, No Doubt.

On the Alexa home, uh, home audio, because they, they basically, they're selling these things below cost. They're trying to subsidize them. They're trying to do anything.

And, and frankly, now that Gen AI is here, all that work that they put into Alexa is just down the toilet. It's a terrible, horrible market. And it's, and, and I'm glad that Apple didn't pour billions of dollars into a loser, like, uh, pre, you know, Prema home assistant and or home automation and so on.

That's why I, I would love to see them do this. I would love to see them. To Dickens point, I would love to see them make a beautiful works with everything.

Incredible system. Right now, the technology just isn't there. The, the, the community just isn't there.

The, the, and and they're trying to build that. And it's the same. I mean, if we can get back to, to Bonnie's story here with the, with the Mac Mini too.

Um, I really think that Apple has put together an incredible platform with the M four. I've got the M four iPad Pro, uh, geek Bench just released their AI benchmarks, and it shows just how much faster the M four is than the M1, M two in terms of, um, inferencing on ai. Um, yeah, spoiler alert, it's like eight times faster than the previous, uh, platforms with inferencing.

So yeah, get me that Mac Mini. I would love to use it on my desktop. I'd love to have Apple Intelligence.

I think app. I think Apple and AI is showing us how Apple does new markets. They wait, they wait, they make it something useful.

They integrate it, they make it profitable, and then they get into the market instead of jumping in with both feet and throwing billions of dollars at nothing. There you have it. Well said.

Well said. Hey, we're about outta time. I, I want to give it a special, uh, heads up.

I don't know if it'll be amended to this Textron gang show or it'll be on the Textron TV broadcast following gang today. But we have Daniel, uh, Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum group, who's going to give his take on the a MD deal announced yesterday. Um, and then I think tomorrow on the gang, Mike, we're gonna dive in deeper on that right here.

And I think Steve Dickens, you're coming on to join us with that as well. Two days running. What have I done to be turn left?

Absolutely, Kevin, we're Gonna talk about that on, uh, tomorrow as well. On the gestalt. It rundown.

So it's, it's big news. Good stuff. Alright.

But for now, that's gonna end Today's gang, Steven and Steven. Makes no difference. Which one goes first here?

Thank you for joining us. A pleasure as always, to have you on the gang. Bonnie.

Mike, great to have you. Most of all, great to have you out there watching. We hope you've enjoyed this gang.

We'll be back tomorrow with more stay tuned for Techstrong tv. We've got a lot of great content today. But for now, this is Alan Sch Mullen.

We're out. I'm Bonnie Schneider, sustainability contributor to the Techstrong Group. I'm excited to introduce you to a groundbreaking new initiative from Techstrong Research, the sustainability pulse meter.

The pulse meter offers valuable insights into how environmental responsibility factors into tech purchasing decisions for key players in the industry. Position your company as a leader in the industry and differentiate from your competitors with a sustainability pulse meter offered exclusively from Techstrong research.