Techstrong Gang – December 18, 2024

Hey, everyone. What is that brown stuff on the nose of all these tech executives out there? We're gonna discuss it.

You're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel. Welcome to our Wednesday before Christmas edition of Textron Gang.

We've got a full house in the gang today, some of my favorite people. Let me get right to it and intro, introduce you to them. First of all, joining us.

It looks like he's back home in Austin area. Uh, futur Analyst vi, co-founder, visible Impact co-founder, Guy Currier. Hey guy.

Welcome man. It's good to see you. Thanks.

Good to be back on the game. Absolutely. Always great to have you here.

Staying in Texas, we're gonna hop from Austin to San Angelo, right outside of Abilene, our own editor for Textron AI and digital CXO and so much more. Amanda Razani. Hey, Amanda, how are you?

Good. Good to have you here, Amanda. Thanks for joining.

Um, moving over from Texas. We're going to go up high. It's early in the morning.

I don't think he's high yet, but it's our few and VP for DevOps and security and analyst, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitchell. Welcome.

Always a Rocky Mountain. Hi. Good to be joining y'all.

Absolutely. Team today. Absolutely.

Good to have you. And let's, let's, now we'll circle back over to Hudson, Ohio, right outta Cleveland. He's the man with the sports jacket.

You know, it's good to be back. I, uh, I feel like I just saw you yesterday. Steven Foss.

Hey, Steven. How are you? Not in person though.

Not in person, though. I wouldn't be seen with the likes. No.

Uh, I'm not gonna ask you about your email. I know it's a touchy subject. We'll, we'll touch on it later.

Um, but let's move over from Cleveland downstate to, uh, well, upstate New York, almost our chief content officer, Mike Vizard. Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm well.

It's a balmy 60 degrees this week in New York, so who knew? You know what? It's not a heck of a lot warmer down here in Florida.

We've had the most miserable weather now for going on two, three months. And, uh, it's probably in the low seventies, but it's a windy, nasty gray day. There's no sun, no joy in Mudville, so you're not missing anything.

Um, that being said though, let's jump into today's text. Drunk Gang Guys, we got only seven days before Christmas. I'm not gonna start singing a song or anything, but it, it does seem like the tech industry is lined up on one knee with, with bags of gold in their pockets, ready to pay homage or bribe, or whatever you wanna call it, to get the good graces of the incoming administration.

Makes me a little sick to my stomach, but Mike, I wonder what you want to say about it. Well, it's kind of starting to feel like an episode of Game of Thrones out there. We're seeing all these folks coming in to bend the knee to the new king as it were.

Um, the latest is, uh, the SoftBank, CEO is pledging a hundred billion dollar investment. So that's a bit more than other folks say, like Met or Amazon just said they were gonna fund the inaugural dinner, so that's helpful, but it's a different kind of thing. 1 billion and then wound up selling it less than three years later for I think 460 million.

And at the time he made some, uh, statements about, you know, this was going to be a thousand year investment and it was gonna be this amazing thing. And he also made similar claims when he made some investment, um, claims at the previous Trump administration. And some people are questioning whether he even has a hundred billion dollars to invest in anything.

But what's your sense of, uh, what's going on here in Mar-a-Lago? And are we gonna see more of these CEOs kind of showing up to bend the knee? And how many are bringing them cash?

Oh, more CEOs, CEOs outside of tech, uh, governments from around the world. Um, so look, let's start with Mahi now are our former CEO, like you said. Um, I've thought about that too.

Um, I'm not sure that, you know, a hundred billion dollars, uh, will actually be spent, or maybe that's gonna be spent over a thousand years. Who knows? Uh, I didn't dig into it.

Um, I think it was, it's already a kind of a gift, um, to, uh, to the incoming administration. Actually, let me be clear. It's a gift to Donald Trump personally, um, the, our incoming president.

Um, and that's sort of my, it's a gift in terms of just making an announcement that sounds really good, that, that, you know, whether that money is actually coming in or not. Um, frankly, I didn't bother to investigate that part because I felt like the gift was already given. And, and on the other hand, uh, we know for sure that there are millions of dollars being put into the inaugural committee, um, or into this, and that, you know, indirect place where, um, some of that wealth is going to, uh, go directly to, uh, our incoming president or his cronies or what have you.

Um, and similarly like governments, uh, booked up the Trump Hotel in, uh, in DC uh, during his first term. I, I think you can divide all these groups, whether tech or not in tech, um, into three different types of individuals, people, um, there are those who are super psyched at the election results and super psyched and supportive thinking of the andreessen's or the Teals of the world, or the Musks of the world. But, you know, on a lesser scale, um, all of these folks have, uh, their own reasons and their own political ends, and they are happy to, you know, contribute money, make big announcements, all that other sort of thing.

Um, the second group was, would be what I would call people who are really unhappy about it and have political principles, uh, that they want to promote and not just promote their business or personal wealth interests. Those are the folks we're not hearing about right now who are not bending the knee and not contributing money. And then the third group are people who really kind of don't seem to care one way or another, um, because with their wealth or power, they're above it all.

Um, but what they do seem to care about is going from wealthy to super wealthy, or from super wealthy to extremely super wealthy than their friends, whoever else. And for these folks, and I'm kind of thinking of Mark Zuckerberg, uh, as an example, um, who, uh, I don't know what his political positions are, um, particularly, and I don't think he's entirely doing it for himself, but I do think he's doing it for the future of his enterprise because our incoming president is famously transactional. He's very blunt and open about it.

You give money to him or to his friends or what have you, or, or gifts in kind like big announcements about a hundred billion dollars investments. And he will at least leave you alone, at least for a little while. It's purely transactional.

That's the administration we're coming into. So whether it's so-and-so with his announcement or some of these other billionaires with their million dollar, 10 million, $50 million contributions to Trump associated organizations, it's for a transactional purpose. Two words, shareholder value.

That's exa that's the only reason people do these things, right? Question. Yeah.

At the risk of sounding uninformed, I'm not the most overly political, but isn't this sort of standard anytime an incoming president's coming in for company leaders to meet with them and, um, align and Well, I'm glad you asked that, Amanda. I'm glad you asked that. There was a time in this country, there was a time in this country where people gave a s**t about whether or not their president was on the take.

There was a time in this country when a incoming administration, not only the president, but the key people in the administration would have to put their assets into a blind trust so that they couldn't enrich themselves at the expense of the American people. There was a time in this country where the people in this country gave a crap about that. It seems like that Time question As, you know, prior to 2016, um, there were, there was a lot of conspiracy and rumor mongering about how it was all hidden, but it was, it was happening.

And I would say that some of it was probably happening, but to nothing to the degree that we have had Some. This is, this is oligarchy in in action. This is what this is.

This is, this is how an oligarchy works, substitute Putin for Trump, and there's really no big deal. It's the same thing. Okay?

I have my own experience with SoftBank, right? When I first met my friend Brad Feld, he was a general partner at SoftBank Venture Capital, and I did a lot of work for him in the SoftBank Keiretsu. And those were the days where, where so could buy something for 2 billion and sell it for 400 million and say, oh, well those days are long gone.

He, Yahoo isn't what it was. Right? He owed a lot of Yahoo.

He owed a lot of, you know, a lot of things. Not that we should take up a collection or cry for Mr. Sony.

He had his children and grandchildren or have enough money, but if he's putting a hundred billion in, my question is how much of that's from China? Because the Chinese are the, are the power behind him. Now, it's not, it's not the old SoftBank money, it's China money.

Steven, you, you disagree. How how much of that money actually exists? That's, that's my que you know, Well, the, I I think there's a hundred billion in China.

And if they could use so as a transit to get it passed and, and make nice with Donald Trump, They'll, yeah. And, and, and you know, I, uh, it is normal for business businesses to try to curry favor with the administration. It's not normal for them to do it in ways that directly benefit the administration.

Yeah. With, with bags of gold Individuals Directly benefit individuals. Right?

There was a time, there was a time in this country, 'cause the inauguration ball committee was always a fundraiser, right? It was always privately funded. But you know what, believe it or not, that committee used to have to file a disclosure statement how much money they got from who and where it was spent.

And if there was money left over, it went into some public good. It was donated to charity. Something happened to it under our president administration, that money will be entirely used for knights at Trump hotels, golf junkets or, or other things that have dollars finding their way into our president's pockets.

This is a president who sells watches, gold coins, hats. I don't know, for all I know, you know, he's selling bidets. He'd sell any, it is what the man does for a living.

He's done it his whole life. He puts his name on crap. And So what, why do you think it would stop going into the White House?

I don't think it would stop. You can't blame him for being who he is. I blame the American people for just not caring anymore.

Well, that's clearly we don't care if that's, you know, this is now the trans is now transparent. Right? What a lot of what was already happening, It wasn't to this degree.

Mitchell Come, and maybe not to this degree, but I think for one, tech leaders have learned the lesson of, you know, it's bad to be on the wrong side of Trump in the administration. And what's, what's towering over this, we haven't talked about is tariffs. Everybody is, is concerned about the tariffs dropping on their part of the industry.

Whether it's a supplier to them, to them directly, whether you're, you know, Canada or within or Mexico or you're a tech company in the us. So that threat has caused a lot of behavior of, I'm just going to, we're just gonna hit this head on. I wanna make sure we're not gonna get zapped in this or try to navigate.

I'm gonna buy my, I'm gonna buy good favor. That's what it was like a good oligarch does. And, and, uh, and I would argue that yeah, it's lining the pockets of oligarchs, but that, that doesn't happen directly.

That happens through companies and investments and people that they do business with, right? So there's a lot of people who make out in that process. It is, it, it's, yes, it's swinging contracts to, to Musk's way or reducing regulations that favor his musk, meaning his companies.

Not him directly, but it does impact him directly. I mean, how much is his growth gross, uh, you know, wealth increased in the, you know, since the election. So I think it's all, it's all money motivated.

I mean, it's, that's what it's about. They wouldn't do it if, if it didn't matter to their bottom line to their shareholder value. Well, period.

Well, let's, let's, I think point, point, well, let's let go To question, right? And, and here's the part that doesn't make any sense to me. Let's say I am a basil and I'm gonna come down there and I'm gonna, you know, cough up my billions of dollars, dollars.

Well, my competitor will show up three weeks later with a bigger bag and also declare that they're a basil and either get the same deal I got or a better deal. And to guy's point, this is highly transactional. So I kind of don't see why everybody's playing the game.

'cause there's no, Why I'm not in it. Again, again, substitute Putin or King Henry viii. Mm-hmm.

This is, this has been going on a long time. They divvy it up. They divvy it up.

Mm-hmm. You know, But, so I think, I think there's a, there's a, a, a alternative explanation, maybe a, an additional explanation to Mike's question. I think it's called the prisoner's dilemma.

Um, which is, um, if you are the one who admits guilt or something like that, then, then, you know, then, then you, you, you stay in, in the lockup. But if everybody admits it or something like that, they all go free it. So, I, I don't, you know, I'm getting the, the, the philosophical term wrong.

But, um, the reason people keep doing this, even though it manifestly doesn't work, um, is because they would all have to stop or almost all have to stop in order for it to come to an end. And no one of them can believe that the others are going to stop. What do you get from the announcement of a hundred billion dollars investment from the million dollars you're contributing, you're getting to stave off a potential problem for another day.

Well, you know, longer than a day, but you really don't know. That's part of the whole game, is to keep you off balance and uncertain about what everybody else. Chaos.

Chaos. And that's what we'll have for the next four years. I wanna say one last thing, and then please, let's just shut this down.

'cause my blood pressure's going up. Wasn't this topic your idea, Alan? I'm just kidding.

Yep. But, but let me just say one other thing. Shame on you out there.

If you are giving me the false equivalency of, well, this is the kind of stuff that always went on behind closed doors, and now it's just more transparent b******t. Not, not to this level, not to this arrogance. Not, not anything like this.

This is, yeah, there was insiders, there's always been insiders. There always will be. This is government for hire.

This is oligarchy at work. This makes anything else that came before it pale in comparison. And if you don't recognize that or you don't wanna recognize it, and you're just going to give it, ah, it's the kind of stuff that always went on, then you get what you deserve.

You get what you deserve a government for. Hire a government for sale. God help us.

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And yes, we're talking about outages again. And there's a story over on Techstrong, ITSM you might want to check out where basically everybody who surveyed in there, or at least most of them, seem resigned to the fact that there's gonna be more of these major outages that we saw this year, and it's becoming maybe too much of a standard operating procedure. And so I'm gonna ask Steven straight up, have we somehow or rather become either a overly dependent on a handful of services and B or we just kind of resigned to have we become complacent?

Um, can I pick c uh, no. Yeah, we, we are overly relying on the handful of services. Absolutely.

Uh, the entire, you know, you gotta love that XKCD comic of the entire internet is reliant on this one little thing that's maintained by a part-time guy in the corner. You know, um, it, it's to so true. Uh, and it's the same with these large companies, whether it's PagerDuty or CrowdStrike, we realize just how reliant we are on the success of a big collection of very big, very important services.

I, I don't wanna go to B though, I don't wanna say resign to it. That's not the right word. I think people are being more realistic now.

You know, you look at the survey results, 86% said that they have, they've prioritized security at the expense of resilient. In other words, they're recognizing that it's, you cannot be, ultimately, you cannot be completely secure. You cannot have complete availability.

You need to be resilient. And that's actually a positive result. And in fact, in fact, I think that's a very realistic approach.

If you, if you just go in, um, assuming that everything's gonna work, and then, and then when it doesn't, you just throw your hands up and scream, well, that's not gonna work. You have to have, um, let's just say multiple, um, you know, hosting providers, multiple network connect connections. And not only that, but you know, you have to be ready that sometimes even those things are gonna fail and, and try something different.

You know, we face that all the time with Tech Field Day. Um, you know, we've got multiple backups and we got a backup to the backup and a backup to the backup to the backup. And I got another one in my backpack just in case.

And even so we sometimes have outages and failures and stuff, because that's the, the, the joy of trying to produce an event on the run. Uh, the same thing happens with enterprise tech. The same thing happens with, uh, with all the rest of us.

I mean, um, you know, my, uh, as you, uh, threw it at me here, and as we mentioned yesterday, my email's been out for a couple of days because we're doing a migration. It's not an unexpected, um, outage by any means. In fact, um, we were ready for it, and that's why we did it over the weekend.

What we weren't ready for was, uh, 900,000 email messages. And, uh, that, that we have to wait to, to flow through there. And, and, and, and so my email's been out, but I got another email provider.

Uh, you know, I've got other ways to sign in. Um, most of the accounts that we have have two owners. And so I'm able to, to still sign in.

You know, it's, it's not about being ultimately highly available. It's about being resilient in the face of problems. Yeah.

I think anytime you have technology, there's going to be glitches here and there. It's about being prepared to handle them. I think of, you know, the balance of cost of working with multiple vendors and, and, you know, if you do have buying power by consolidating your, your purchasing, not everybody does.

There's also just business continuity resilience that you referencing Amanda and those decisions. It's a risk that you take and, and it, you, you can't blame it just on the provider. I mean, yes, if a provider has, you know, continual, you know, bad, bad incidents and at some point you're gonna say, this is not working, we've gotta do something else.

But that's part of what you sign up for. I mean, it's, it's part of putting your big person it pants on and saying, this is what we're doing. Here's why we're doing it.

Here's the risks. Here's what we do to mitigate, mitigate it. We have all, uh, options.

This is something that happens. If this affects our business, guess what? It's gonna change quickly.

We're not gonna take very many of those outages before we're making a move. CrowdStrike's experienced that. That's just one, you know, of dozens I out of about Delta Airline customers, right?

From that outage. So I think it's, I think it's just part of the responsibility of, of tech leaders to make those decisions. And you know what, sometimes they're not the best.

You got react and change when you need to. And I remember being on this show, and we were talking about the CrowdStrike incident when it happened. I think Alan predicted in a few months time it was all gonna blow over.

And it has. So, Yeah. So I, I've got a, I was on that show.

You were probably there, and I Do you think it was What was on Incident was the CrowdStrike incident? I, I wanted to ask Amanda and, and, and, um, Mitch, uh, for their perspectives on, on something. Um, so we're talking about these, uh, single points of failure, so to speak, or these, these, these, uh, uh, services on at, on, which so many other things depend.

I mean, the Windows OS is something upon which, you know, so much productivity in the enterprise depends, and that's what was affected by the CrowdStrike instance. That's an example of what I'm talking about. What I wanted to know, MI Mitch or Amanda, uh, and both of you, uh, what, what is your sense of the state of, of the practice and art of application architecture right now?

Because these are all stacks and, uh, there's, there's frequently seems to be this sort of, uh, uh, lack of understanding as you pass through layers of the stack, or lack of recognition of, of how much you, the app is dependent on the layer below, um, and how little influence it may have. And that's where Zero trust comes from as a principle, right? Is this idea that you can't trust any particular network or, or, or service you're connected to in terms of security.

So you develop around that, or you use tools that allow you to sidestep the requirement to trust. Now we're talking about trusting for resiliency. It might be nice to extend the concept.

No, no. Let jump just, I don't get the sense that there's a lot of this sort of thinking about the entire stack and the application Architecture. Well jump in Amanda, and then I'll come in, then you can, Alan.

'cause you directed the Question. I'm sorry. Well, Mitch, you're the more technical one, so you're gonna have a lot better answer than me, probably.

So I'm passing it to you. Oh, oh, Alright. Well, I I think one of the things that's changed substantially is how much we rely on SaaS services and things that other people are operating for us, right?

To your point, guy, when it was our stack and we're assembling all the vendors, the database provider, operating system, whatever, VMware, whatever it is that we're running across that entire stack, you know, it's got our job to make it work. Um, when it's outsourced, that's what it is. When it's in a third party application, whether it's your mail, whether it's, you know, a database service, whatever it might be, AI thing, you name it, you know, you're depending upon there to them to deliver to some level of service.

Now, we all know those, those SLAs are pretty limited in what you can hold people accountable to and what the, uh, paybacks are to it. But it's really voting with your dollars of how you move to, to your point guy, some of the stacks visible though and some of it's not. Right.

I know where our points of entry, what we're dependent upon, and you build at trust, you build a relationship with providers, or you don't, and some people are just not easy to work with and you move on. So I, I think that analysis is, is both a technical one, but also a business relationship one and how that affects your business. That'd be my answer, Amanda.

Amanda was whispering in my ear. I've got my plugin. So thanks for your help on that one.

Okay, Alan, back to you. So, so guy, I am glad you analogized it to security and zero trust in these things, right? You know, one of the core principles of insecurity is CIA, right?

The three, the three things, the A in CIA is availability. And people forget that that's part of security's, But it's core to, I mean, for as long as I've been in security near 30 years, CIA has been core, right? That's the three principles here.

And A is availability. If it's not available, it's not secure. One of the first questions in the CSSP exam, right?

Yeah. It's gotta be pretty early on. So Availability, I would say that CII would just say that CYA Trumps CIA, which is cover Your answer about Trump again, Mike, that I was prepping that Joke.

No, no, I can't. But, but, but A is availability. But let me, let me tell you a quick start.

Back in the late nineties, two thousands, I also helped put together a company that was a, a, a, uh, miso san, uh, SoftBank company, right? Called Interline. Eventually it'd be called Interline.

It had other names. Um, and I learned the valuable lesson. It was basically at this point, we were a hosting company before we became an A SP.

And then we transitioned into an a SP application service provider, and we had to do SLAs. And we made such a big deal when we moved from what we call four nines to five nines, right? We're all familiar in the tech world with that term, five, nine availability.

And we thought, man, that's the catch meow. Who could ask for more? Who could ask for more than five nines of your, you know, at the time Lotus Notes was, was the hot stuff we were hosting.

Lotus Notes five nines availability. Well, you know, even at five nine's availability, do you know how much downtime you have a month with five nines? Mitch, you, you know this, you're a data center, right?

Eight minutes or something Like that. Yeah, it's eight minutes. I I know that too.

From, from, yeah. So Nothing's ever perfect. There's always going to be unforeseen outages.

Well, it's resiliency. The downtime a month for an email, uh, sorry, uh, for Lotus Notes is different than eight minutes of downtime a month for an OLTP or a, or potentially a supply chain. Um, uh, Well, we we didn't just do Lotus Notes.

Lotus Notes was, there were ERPs, there was, it was mission critical. And remember, Lotus Notes wasn't just email then it, it served as the an early application server, if you will, right? Yeah.

That your AppSec ran on. Um, yeah. So, but, you know, five nines, we were charging a fortune for five, nine SLAs.

Really? I mean, compared to a lot of other, And you should, you need to. Yeah, you need to.

That's, that's, uh, Well, we still weren't profitable, but that's another story. Um, but, you know, fortune Wasn't enough. com, they didn't care about profitability.

We went public as a, we didn't make a dime. But anyway, um, this is, this is, as Mitch said, this is, this is the life we've chosen or someone said in a movie once, right? This is the life we've chosen, and in it you're gonna have unforeseen outages and unforeseen stuff happening.

It's, it's, you know, reboot, control, alt, delete, you know, it is classic stuff. And you know, I I, you know, if you don't expect that, I think you are unrealistic and a novice, and I'll leave it at that. Steve, back, I'm sorry, go ahead, Michael.

I think part of the thing though is you gotta kinda let the business folks understand that or find a way to communicate that. 'cause I think as the IT person, you get blamed even when it is to Mitch's point, some SaaS provider out there and it's, they're the one at the at fault or what issue it is. But sometimes I think it people, you know, try to play hero and they're always like, you know, we're gonna make it all work and it's all gonna be great.

And then when, you know, the outage comes, they're like, oh, I didn't think that would happen. I'm surprised. And, you know, I think they should be more realistic in the conversation they have would be, Well, I think there's expectations to be set.

Yeah. Right. So then when Steven's email is down, he is not as p****d off because, well, he kind of knew that that might happen.

Yeah. Whoa. And, and, and I think that unfortunately it, people do tend to have a bit of a, of a, um, you know, a God complex when it comes to, um, you know, the success of, of IT systems.

You know, it should work, therefore it will work. Um, you know, we tend to underestimate things. We tend to not communicate the risks of things.

Uh, you know, it is absolutely on us to, uh, to do a better job of communicating those things. Also, I wanna make sure that, I'm not saying that availability isn't important just because companies need to be prepared for, uh, to, to switch to something else. And, you know, the, the prepared for failure and ready to, uh, to jump to another system or, or, or, you know, recover in some way.

That doesn't mean that you don't try to build highly available systems. It doesn't mean that you don't try to make things that are gonna be reliable and supportable and that are gonna function quite the opposite. You do wanna make sure that you're building those systems, but you also want to build in the, uh, contingency plan that says, what are we gonna do if this thing fails?

And there again, I think that I, it people generally fail. Um, and I'm speaking for myself here. Uh, I was a systems administrator for many years.

I once took out every Texaco gas station. Um, and, uh, And you admit it, I do admit it. I had don't work there anymore.

And I haven't worked there for 30 years. So I think they've forgiven me by now. But, um, mm-hmm.

You know, I took down all the point of sale terminals. Um, that was a hard lesson for a very young IT guy to learn. Uh, but I did learn that lesson and, and what I learned was you have to make things available.

You have to make things redundant. You have to build supportable, uh, systems. And when failures happen, you have to be ready to switch to a different system.

In this case, you know, switch to the manual credit card readers so that people can buy their gas. A knuckle Buster, United States kn. Yep.

And good communication is always key. When, when the event that there is an outage or a mistake, That That is really important, right? And that's something I think people have learned the hard way.

Hey, we gotta take a break though 'cause we're running over. We've got, uh, one more segment coming up. So stay with us.

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All right, folks. As Alan mentioned, we're kind of winding down the coverage for the year, and it's always a time to look back and say, you know, what were some of the cooler things that happened? And in our case, we, uh, started working more closely with the Futurum group and we met the folks at Tech Field Day, which Steven runs, and Steven's been on this show, and we have been on his shows, and it's been a great partnership.

But I wanted to ask Steven, just looking back over the year, what are kind of the most memorable things from the Tech Field Day events that kind of stand out at you and, you know, are kind the test of time? Are they, are they profound as now as they were maybe when you first thought about 'em? Well, that's a big question, man.

Um, so yeah, so I've been, I've been running Tech Field Day now for, um, uh, 15 years. We just passed our 15th anniversary of the First Tech Field Day event in November of 2009. And, um, it's been incredible.

Uh, it's been an incredible experience for me. Um, you know, it's been my full-time job that whole time. And, um, and also it's been incredible for me to see how these things have affected, uh, the, the, the industry and the people in the industry.

And I don't just mean the people who go to these events. 'cause one of the things about Tech Field Day is that it's public. It's very, very highly public.

We live stream on Techstrong tv. We post the videos on YouTube. What I like to say is, most people, probably most of your listeners have watched the Tech Field Day video without knowing it.

And that's intentional. I don't want it to be about Tech Field Day. I want it to be about the technology.

I want it to be about the company. If you google almost any company in the enterprise IT space, especially IT infrastructure, you're gonna find a tech field, field day video. It's gonna be a deep dive presentation, demo discussion.

Uh, there's gonna be a bunch of people there to keep things real and ask questions and, and, and, and really represent the, the audience at that table. That's why we call them delegates right from the very beginning, because they're there to be you, Textron gang listener at the table. And sometimes it's literally people like Guy or Alan or Mitch or, uh, other folks that you've seen here on, uh, a Textron gang, and sometimes it's folks from the community, um, other analysts, other independent, uh, writers and so on.

Anyway, we've done a lot of these events over the years, and so I just kind of wanted to look back. Uh, one of the things I've said previously on Textron Gang and and in other places is that we intentionally don't have a theme to Tech Field Day, but there's always a theme that emerges. And if we look back on 2024, what are the themes that are emerging?

Well, I bet you guys can guess One of the big themes of Tech Field in 2024. Anybody, anybody wanna shout out what one word? Uh, Alan starts With an A and ends with an I?

It does, it does. Um, I was trying to think of another word that I could throw in, but I just can't. Ai, absolutely.

AI is everywhere. Um, we started doing AI Field Day a couple years ago this year. We, we split it into AI and AI infrastructure.

But truly networking field day is ai. Field day edge. Field day is ai, field day mobility, field day, security field day.

They're all AI field day because everything in the industry is going in that direction. And that's what companies want to talk about. And no surprise, our most watched presentation videos were all around ai.

So if we look at what we did this year, uh, we had a presentation, uh, from Intel, uh, in February about deploying AI on Xon CPUs instead of using GPUs or NPS or something like that. That's our most watched video of 2024. Um, it has, uh, just a tremendous, uh, tremendous amount of viewership.

Um, you know, we also, uh, the second one is from Google about running, uh, applications, uh, AI applications in Google Cloud. Um, and, and one of my favorites here is our fourth most watched video is actually a video from a customer talking about using AI technology in greenhouses in Canada to better improve crop yields. Uh, literally picking the ripe tomatoes.

Um, yeah, who would've guessed that one would be the, the, the most, uh, the fourth most watched video of the year? It's a great presentation and it's a great example of using AI in a productive way. And, and for me, that's really what it all comes down to is, is how do we make AI not just be a toy, but how do we make it productive?

And, and that, I think, I'm gonna guess is gonna be the theme of 2025 when it comes to ai. It's not gonna be about who's got the biggest model, or there's a new anthropic or OpenAI. It's gonna be all about inferencing on device, AI based applications, using this technology in a productive way and in a way that isn't burning down the rainforests, but is maybe growing tomatoes in Canada.

Um, that would be great. Now, yeah, in fact, There's a, there's a new reactive movement. I'm sure you're familiar with Steven, uh, the SLM small language model, um, driven, I think in part by the supply of, you know, giant systems with tons of compute and then the lack of supply, I should say.

But nonetheless, I think that's gonna be truly productive and fruitful in, in the next year. So I think those SLMs will be more accurate anyway. So I think they'll lend themselves to the use cases that people really wanna do.

I think a lot of the stuff with the LLMs that we've been playing around with, we will kind of chalk that up to experimentation, but I'm not sure that those are the things that are driving the business value. I've had the privilege to, uh, to um, uh, join a few of these, uh, tech field days, including, uh, an Edge Field Day, uh, recently, uh, uh, uh, for, for, for Steven and, and the tech field day team. And what's really, uh, been, um, I think so helpful and, and why I encourage everyone watching this to, to go check 'em out too, is how practical and sort of hands dirty the whole thing is.

These are folks, they're from the vendors, but what they're presenting generally, they are people who are themselves working with customers, are practical solutions based on their technologies. And so outside of hearing what the vendor has, that's cool, which is cool. You hear about, you know, how, uh, these different techniques are being applied, uh, to your peers, uh, by your peers, sorry.

Um, and, uh, how they are making things happen. And that's been so helpful in AI where there is so much heat and not quite enough light. And that's one reason that I'm so excited to see these, um, client practitioner customer type videos be right up there in terms of viewership, because it shows that that's what people are hungry for.

They wanna know how this stuff is gonna be practical. And to the SLM point, another big trend in AI that we've been talking about, especially in the second half of the year, is ag agentic ai, the idea of of having AI agents generally smaller, um, AI agents doing things on your behalf. And, um, that has been another, uh, key topic.

You know, we've seen a lot of that. I actually gave a presentation myself on AG Agentic ai. Uh, we've also, as, as guy mentioned, talked about using AI at the edge on lower powered devices.

Um, our most viewed, um, uh, ignite talk, which is our, our, the, where we turn the cameras around, let the delegates talk, is actually by me talking about what is an I pc. Um, which again, I think that talks, you know, that's, that's a question on people's minds, you know, is this thing real? Is it, what does it really mean?

And it's really about, you know, making these things productive. Now, I have An AI agent for you that would be really awesome. It reroutes your email when it goes down.

Let's do that one. Um, uh, piling on, piling on. Now, there was another interesting aspect, uh, of the year though.

So we, we also talked quite a lot about, um, the effect of technology on people's jobs. And if we look on the Gestalt IT side, um, in terms of our podcasts, the Tech Field Day podcast specifically, um, there's a far and away leader in terms of the most listened to podcast of the year. And I think that it talks to the, the, the tenor of the time.

The title is no one wants to be a Network Engineer anymore. And then the second most viewed one is network engineering is a dying career. Now these, I think, talk to the fact that people are very, very concerned about what's happening to us and our jobs and our careers in the face of ai.

I do have to say that we pick the titles to be provocative. Um, in fact, we pick the titles before we record the sessions because we want to make sure that the people are on topic and also that it's something that, that they can feel passionate about. Those were two very passionate topics.

We got a lot of pushback from the audience that, yeah, I wanna be a network engineer. But the truth is, it's, it's challenging for companies to fill these roles. It's difficult for people to step up and say like, that's where I wanna focus.

I had the same experience, you know, as a storage, uh, engineer for many years. Uh, nobody wants to be a storage engineer anymore. Um, and, and so I think that that's an interesting sort of flip side to this whole discussion of AI applications and agent AI and language models and all this.

What does that mean for me? What does that mean for my career? And a lot of us are asking, you know, what does this mean for my career?

How am I trans transitioning from, you know, being an engineer to being whatever this new thing is? I'm curious what, what's your reaction knowing that that one podcast was not just the most viewed, it was eight times as many views as every other thing that we recorded. Hey, have you heard of this thing called a platform engineer?

It's really hot. And you know, I don't know, Alan, you might Have, but, but seriously, look guys, Steven, Mike, guy Amanda, you're a little younger, but we're all of an age. When we probably first got into it, probably the, one of the hottest, hottest things you could have was a Novell network engineer.

You were Novell certified, right? Remember that? Sure.

That was gold. I did that. Actually.

We, okay, there you go. Right? Yeah.

You were a Novell certified engineer. 'cause Novell owned the network. Internet, TCP, everything comes out.

Cisco certified engineer became the new Novell, if you will. And, but again, it was about network engineering. As a matter of fact, when I first got into security, 70%, 80% of the folks that were security people were really network people.

And they became network security people. 'cause network security is where the action was at the time. And so it, it was still the network.

It was still the network people running the show. You know, it started with wifi and this transition from like, you know, network engineers to wifi network engineers, if you will. But, you know, I don't think it's AI that killed the network engineer.

It wasn't radio either. Um, well maybe it was wireless radio, but the, the fact of the matter is who, who runs networks anymore? I mean, it's few or far, but I'm, don't get me wrong, they're big offices that still are wired places.

I think there's a lot of your audience members that are saying, wait A second, Alan, I think a lot of my audience members are on wifi. And yes, there is a small place where that whole nexus comes together, but it's nothing like it was when we were younger, right? When, when, when it was Novell or Cisco or stuff like, I mean, think about some of the names, the great network, uh, product, uh, you know, devices, Juniper Networks, Cisco, threecom, Threecom.

I just think going forward, the what I am is gonna be less tied to a vendor, right? I'm not gonna have this business where I'm gonna be a, a Novell person, a Cisco person, a VMware person, Oracle person. I think all those things wind up being career limiting.

And I think that people should think of themselves as, you know, I am in charge, or I have a set of skills around a particular horizontal function, whatever that may be. But, uh, it seems to me every time you hit your wagon to a vendor, you know, you, you get a great ride for the short term, but in the long term, you wind up getting run over. It really comes down to adaptability and your drive to upskill and continuously learn.

And Amanda, you know, that's something you, I, you know, looking back at 2024, I we're LinkedIn connected obviously, and I always see you taking new, new courses, new skillset, just dabbling out in what's available out there. Mm-hmm. And I, you know, it goes back at the DevOps Institute.

We used to do our upskill report and, you know, we would talk about ts shape for people versus Broom shape people. And, you know, in terms of skillset, it's not what they look like. And, um, you know, it, it's an important, it's an important I think for anyone out here, uh, even, you know, Stephen Corey sent out a thing on, on all of the podcasts that we're gonna be in 2025, right?

We're combining, yep. We're all throwing it Our Tech Field Day and Gestalt IT podcasts and our Techstrong podcast and some of the FU podcasts that we handle here at Techstrong. And, and Corey said, well, you know, what's your kind of area of expertise so we know where to where to put you?

And I said, well, I, I definitely am in DevOps, I'm definitely in security. I'm, I'm definitely in cloud native too, but hey, I could talk about AI transformation. And I started thinking, you know, Mike Vizard could talk about all those things too.

And, and Guy can talk about most of those things too. And Steven, you can too though. You know, you fancy yourself an infrastructure person, but you are comfortable talking AI and everything else.

In some respect. We're all sort of broune shaped people, not t-shaped. Um, that's my advice to people out there is try to be a broom, not a t.

Mm-hmm. And I'll point out too that, um, in contrast to all this, um, some of our other most viewed videos were videos that were deep dives on networking and storage and infrastructure to support ai. So Arista talking about, you know, building networking, you know, deep, you know, heavy duty networking to support AI workloads.

Um, you know, our most watched video organically was a presentation by Oxide computer talking about their incredible, uh, big hardware. I mean, you know, you, you, you'd think that that's outta time. Well, apparently there's a lot of people interested in that too.

And then another, there go another flip side I wanna point out too, we do our weekly news show on Wednesdays. And just a quick shout out next, tomorrow's or today's episode is gonna be a retrospective of the IT news of the year from Gestalt it. So watch for that on Textron.

Um, the most watched episodes of that are all industry naval gazing, intel announces, layoffs, um, you know, uh, the HPE acquiring Juniper, uh, Broadcom's changes to VMware. So there's a huge amount of interest in those kind of really table stakes, you know, upset kind of stories as well. And I think that that also says a lot about the audience and the interests of the audience too.

Absolutely. Guys, we're about outta time. It's been a great text on gang.

I hope you have all enjoyed it out there. As Steven mentioned, we've got some great tech Field day, uh, uh, uh, some great tech Field day content immediately following as part of our tech strong TV schedule. As always, we'll be back tomorrow with more fresh text, Textron Gang takes on all kinds of great stuff.

But until then, on behalf of Guy and Steven and Amanda and Mike and Mitch and myself, have a great day, everyone you've just watched. Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Sunny And Cher.

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