Techstrong Gang – February 18, 2025

Hi, everyone, in honor of President's Day. Let's go Imperial in terms of our it, that's where we're headed here on Text Drug Act. Hi everyone.

Happy Tuesday. We hope you enjoyed your President's Day. I'd like to do a survey.

How many of you out there took off for President's Day? Raise your heads. We do my romper room thing.

Oh, yeah, I see Tom and Dick and Harry. Okay. I, you know, it is a federal holiday.

I think if there's any federal employees left, they probably took off, but I don't know how many are left. And that's what we're gonna talk about on this fine Tuesday. Let me tell you who we're talking about it with.

We've got a nice gang assembled, first of all from Hudson, Ohio, where he's officially, uh, in cons before he heads out to this week's Tech Field Day, which I believe is a cloud tech field day. It's the CEO founder of Tech Field, day of FU company. Stephen Foskett.

Good morning, Stephen. How are you? Hey, I'm pretty good.

Um, you know, president's Day, I had to come up, uh, I was trying to tell my team like, uh, you know, what's your favorite president? Um, you know, how about Jimmy Carter didn't have a great presidency, but he seems like a decent guy. Um, but of course, if you, if you broaden the scope, um, how about Bertrand Russell?

He was the president of Pugwash, uh, an all around great guy. Okay, so presidents don't have to be US Presidents, Presidents of anything. Yeah.

Yeah. That's like people who, who, you know, maintain or look at eliminating government waste don't have to be appointed or, or, or approved or anything either. Nobody, Just let that guy fire everyone.

Well, he is. All right. Moving on from Steven.

We'll go right over. I see we're starting early. We're moving over to Harrison, New York, where we have our chief content officer in residence.

Mike Vizard. Good morning, Mike. I hope you enjoyed President's Day.

I enjoyed President's Day and the Valentine's Day before that. So it was kind of a lovely set of bookends in some ways. Yeah, it was.

So he with a good president, come on. A good president. Well, of course, there's always George Washington who started this whole thing, but behind that, um, I kind of miss Abraham Lincoln not having his own day.

You know, that you mentioned when I was younger, we had Washington's birthday. Lincoln's birthday, and then they just combined it in the President's Day. Well, this is offic.

It was, it's officially Washington Dash Lincoln Day in Ohio, if that makes You feel Better. It, well, I, yeah, that does make me feel better, actually, Steven. Good.

I'm glad they did that. Let me introduce, though, well, she's not the president. Well, she is the president of Echo Site, echo Tech Insights, but she's also our analyst for all things sustainable and green.

Bonnie Schneider. Hi, Bonnie. Welcome.

Thanks, Alan. Great to be here. Great to have you here.

Big day for you today. We'll be getting to it a little later. Um, so gentlemen, lady, it is the day after President's Day, and, you know, Washington warned us about this stuff, speaking of Washington, and, uh, I've been talking and writing about it now for a couple weeks.

You know, I'm, no one raises their hand and says, I'm for fraud, or I'm for waste, or I'm for paying more money that doesn't get used well and winds up in people's pockets illegally or, or immorally. But there's a right way and a wrong way. And so, Mike, let me kick it over to you.

Have we reached an age of an imperialism in government? It, I think we're gonna have to sort this all out with some sort of Supreme Court ruling, and the sooner the better. But a lot of folks are walking around to your point, and they're saying, what's the big deal?

I mean, it's, the Department of Government efficiency has been unleashed on these agencies with the approval of the heads of those agencies to go look for this waste. So on a certain level, they're saying that it's all above board. It's just being super aggressive, and the average person is standing there going, well, yeah, most of what we think is spent by the government is wasted anyway.

So why not apply analytics and all this stuff to come to some better outcome? And, uh, maybe the only way to do it is, you know, what a blunt instrument. So that's one thought process.

The other thought process is, of course, you know, this is executive overreach and things that have been approved by Congress to be spent are not being spent. So, Alan, which side of this equation are we on? I stand on the right side of the, the correct side.

The correct side, yeah. Not right or left, you know. Um, so my, I agree.

No one raises their hand and says, I'm all for fraud. I'm all for waste. I'm all for spending more money.

Of course not. But a nation of laws that does not follow their laws is a nation that will not stand. I think Lincoln said something like that.

Right? The house divided, house divided right. A nation of laws.

We are a nation of laws. Now, the right side, i I do mean left versus right rejoiced over the last couple of years is the Supreme Court, on more than one occasion, has said these federal agencies cannot overstep their charter given to them by Congressional acts. Right?

We've seen it on several different agencies. While I'm telling you that the flip side of that is correct as well, these agencies cannot overstep their charter as given to them by acts of Congress. So when an act of Congress establishes an agency with a specific purpose and budget and, and charter, it is, the executive branch is, does not have the ability to go against or overrule that act of the legislature.

Now, you wanna say, well, the heads of these agencies gave them permission. The heads of these agencies are no more than the leftovers of the Saturday Night Massacre that's gone on here. The same way we dropped the, they had to go through seven assistant attorney generals to drop the charges against the mayor of New York, because the first seven said, we don't nce that kind of unlawfulness, and that kind of, that's fraud.

Which more than anything else. So eventually they find someone to sit in these agencies who's a loyal collaborator, who say, go ahead and do it. That doesn't undo the will of the legislature or Congress absent an act of Congress.

That's number one. Number two, though, you know, I had a good discussion with my friend Tony Bradley about this, and there's an excellent article that I think every single person watching this needs to read by two people that I know pretty well in the security space, and that I respect an awful lot. Bruce Schneider, who, if you're in security, needs no introduction.

Bruce has been, you know, probably one of the foremost, uh, personalities, thought leaders in security for as long as I'm in security, 25 plus years or more. And another really smart guy, Dave Heimer, Heimer Davi is, was one of the original security bloggers network members in 2005, has been with us, I think was Security Penguin is his blog. But he, he does a lot more than that now.

But Avi and, and Bruce wrote a really great article. It's in here on government over, excuse me, me, um, it, it's, it's in here on declaring Do unconstitutional. And I will put the, well, the URLs in there, read it.

They lay it out. What we're doing here for the sake of reducing fraud and waste is giving a backdoor to our, I don't wanna call 'em enemies, but our adversaries, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, by putting classified information on machines and systems that have not been certified, that have been hacked already. And, and graffiti put on them that are Swiss cheese.

And, but it's okay. I, I've had conversations with fairly smart people who say, well, you know what? In, in the name of progress, we gotta do that again.

Not in a nation of laws. We have laws about this. People have gone to jail for releasing classified information like this.

This is being done without an act of congress, without due process, without hearings, without following our rules. I'm all for reducing waste. You wanna go do a fact finding thing?

Not to mention that you invited Mr. Fox into the hen house. You invited a man who has 400 million plus dollars worth of government contracts annually, and you are asking him to police government contracts.

Do we, you know what, when I took political science, I had a really great teacher who taught us modern political theory, including communism. He was a former socialist in the thirties. He was blacklisted, didn't work for a long time, became a college professor, and then he became a violent anti-communist.

'cause he said, you know what the problem is with communism? It, it only works if you have a society of atheistic saints. Are we to believe that Elon Musk is an atheistic saint?

That he's doing this out of the kindness of his heart? A man who owned who, who is in bed with the Chinese Communist Party because he needs them for his Tesla business. You know, this, there used to be rules about conflicts of interest.

There are rules, there are laws about conflicts of interest. Just because someone has a lot of money, doesn't mean they don't follow the rules. That's what this country's based on.

But yet we're saying it's okay. 'cause it's Elon and, and what, what, what could he possibly do wrong guys? Have we have we, have we all gotten stupid?

I, we, we have forgotten about the Absolute power maximum corrupts Absolutely. Let's let this, this, I mean, if this stands, I'm telling you, it, it bodes very ill for a nation founded upon the rule of law. Yeah, absolutely.

And, and remember too, that, you know, I mean, the United States has spent, uh, centuries lecturing every other country in the world about how to build a nation and how to be a nation of laws and how to have a proper democracy, a proper functioning democracy. Um, you know, the, the stuff that's going on with Elon Musk and the Doge is just unconscionable because, you know, allegedly, we are a nation bound by the Constitution. Allegedly, we are strict construction.

I mean, remember, remember when people were all talking about, you know, people, Republicans we're all talking about how, uh, you know, we're, we're getting beyond the, uh, the, the, the, the Constitution. And we have to return to the strict, you know, what it says in the Constitution, strict. And, you know, all these, you know, Supreme Court justices as well, um, have said that they are strict constitutionalists.

But, uh, where's that, where that, where's that now? Um, you know, is it, doesn't the Constitution enumerate which powers or belonging to which, uh, branches of government? Doesn't the Constitution talk about the, uh, powers of the, uh, executive branch?

And, and I'm sure that they have, uh, people who are willing to twist themselves into a pretzel, uh, deciding that somehow this is constitutional, but it's clearly not. It's also, uh, asinine, uh, to have someone go in. Um, I heard one of the things at the education department.

They, uh, canceled a grant, um, that was central, a central data collection system, if we can get back to it here for a moment. They canceled a grant that was, uh, central to handling, um, data collection on the demographics of American school, uh, children, because that was, uh, fundamental to the mission of the education department and all other aspects of government, because, you know, you have to know who these kids are if you're supposed to be supporting them in any way. Um, the reason they canceled it was because the title of the grant was Common Core of Data.

And Common Core is a popular, I mean, you, you've heard, you know, that there's all this DEI, anti DEI stuff. Well, common Core is a, is a popular, um, phrase for a certain type of teaching that is, uh, frowned upon on the right. Um, the fact that they named this grant, common Core of Data, made it canceled.

And it's like, that is just, you didn't even know what it was. And, and it's true of most of these, uh, grants from the national, from the education department that have been, uh, canceled last week. A lot of the people who've lost their jobs, um, you know, it, it's, it's basically a global search and replace.

I can just see somebody sitting there. I don't wanna give 'em any credit, but I can see there with vi, you know, search for this, uh, search for that. And, um, and then D-D-D-D-D, we don't need any of that stuff, you know, it's just, it's just ludicrous.

Um, Mean when do you ever declare fraud and everything else before the investigation is done? And Steven, I think they got rid of that list. So, because we're afraid we might track what kids have vaccines, I don't think that's what was included in that particular one that I, well, I just wanna throw That out there.

Um, I gotcha. You know, the other thing that's bothering me here is I don't wanna be all, both sides. It's true that there's waste and there's fraud in the government.

And it's true that that should be rooted out. But it should be rooted out competently. You know, it should be rooted out by somebody who goes in and looks at things and considers what it is and considers whether it's waste or fraud.

I'm sorry. SLS should have been shut down a decade ago in favor of SpaceX and Blue Origin. I, you know, you can say what you want about Elon, Elon Musk, but SpaceX freaking works and SLS is just a giant cash cow.

That being said, having Elon Musk be the one to cancel SpaceX that Stinks. S-L-S-S-L-S Sl. But yeah.

Space Launch system, right? Our big stupid rocket. I Mean, it, it's just inherently a conflict of interest.

Yeah. Yeah. So, Alan, in effect though, constitutionally, I mean, if the President is now exercising what amounts to a pocket veto by not spending money in effect, we have turned the executive branch into some sort of equivalent of a king.

Well, it's an imperial presidency. That's, and, and that's, let's face it, that's what, that's what our current president thinks. And, and, and you know, he's also appointed three of the eight Supreme Court justices, and two of the others are slightly to the right of, of Hitler.

So you've got a majority of the Supreme Court that is far, far right or beholden to this man, and they're our last best hope Obi one. Right? If things don't work the next, the next thing is the rebellion.

Well, the, the funny thing is, the prosecutors who quit in New York, were all clerks for most of the hard right justices. So go figure. Well, you hope that you, you gotta hope that the decency and the law abiding nature of our judiciary from an impartiality, you know, there's outliers like that crazy woman down in Florida who we appointed that somehow every case got assigned to her.

I don't know how that happened, but for the most part, our judiciary, our US attorneys are, I think, law abiding decent people, right? Before nominating people for the judiciary became a political sport. Over the last eight or 10 years, we had, we had, you know, to get, to become a federal judge, generally I'd have an a BA American Bar Association recommendation.

You had to have some experience. You there, there's good people on the bench, Let's call it competence. That's a good word, that we seem to have forgotten.

Competence. Um, I just wanted to add something. Go ahead.

You know, it's something that Steven said, but they're looking through, you know, the waste or whatever. They're, they're looking, they're using an algorithm to detect certain words. And what Steven was pointing out, something with education could be triggered by the word common core.

What, what I'm hearing from my colleagues in weather and climate is a concern for the word climate. Yes. Of the trigger word.

And then losing funding for that. And I just got an email, I haven't looked at it, but my dad dad's side this morning that Bloomberg, um, as Michael Bloomberg was gonna step in and fund a lot of the climate projects that, um, that, that, that are probably gonna be canceled. So, um, that is a big concern.

Number one, with just the funding already that's been designated for climate. And number two is a meteorologist. Another huge concern within the community that I'm in is the data, uh, for, oh no, weather data has always been free to use.

And it's something that private weather leverages as well. And public weather, if that becomes completely privatized, that's gonna be a real problem, I think. So we'll see what happens.

But I just wanted to give you that perspective also. Absolutely. I mean, I mean, quite frankly, if they're eliminating everything, 'cause climate change doesn't really exist, and we nothing monolith fossil fuels.

What does that do for Tesla? Mm-hmm. Well, gee, uh, it didn't quite get 400, uh, million dollars worth of Tesla vehicles get sold to the State Department, though it almost did.

Um, it, it, though, it should be pointed out that that program was, uh, came up up in the Biden administration. Um, but still, uh, that was another new story from last week. Um, but talk about self-dealing.

Um, you know, I mean, ultimately, you know, I I I'm reminded of the Onion article, uh, the Facetious article supposedly written by Jimmy Carter. It was not saying, you know, they made me sell my effing peanut farm. Um, I'm, I'm thinking of that, you know, I mean, it's like, you know, he had to sell his effing peanut farm.

And, um, and yet this, Because I, I think, and this is the biggest thing, I I've had this conversation with numerous people on social media. They're willing to overlook obvious craziness like this for the sake of, we won an election and we could do whatever we want. And that, that's a problem.

And I wanna leave you with one more thing. I think, think the reason that Elon is doing all this, I don't think he's political at all. I think the reason he is doing all this is so that he can get to Mars.

He will cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party. He will, he will support, uh, right wing, uh, nationalists in Europe. He'll, you know, fund Trump's rise to presidency because he knows that that is the only way that he gets to Mars.

And he, that's all he cares about. I think he cares about making more money. Nope.

He wants to get to Mars. That's my thought. Okay.

I would just say, I would just say to all our IT friends out there who might be anywhere near this, be careful. There will be lawsuits. You will be called to testify and you will have to explain what you did and didn't do.

So think twice. Mm-hmm. Agreed.

All right. Let's take a break before they come and censor us. Thank God we don't rely on any federal, uh, on any federal subsidies or anything, but we're gonna come back and let's talk about something Easy.

Tech Field Day was live at Cisco Live last week in, over in Europe. There's still a Europe, isn't there? Yes, yes.

All right. We are watching Textron Gang. You'll be right back.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Welcome back to Textron Gang. Uh, so we were, uh, in Amsterdam for Cisco Live last week.

And, um, I brought a few tidbits to share with the Textron community from that show. Now, I wasn't there, but Tom Hollingsworth, who runs our networking mobility security events, was with a great group of tech Field Day delegates along with some of our staff. We did, uh, livestream a bunch of presentations on a channel you might watch called Techstrong tv.

We also are uploading those to YouTube if you're interested. com. But, you know, here's sort of the, the takeaway, the TLDR of, of Cisco Live.

Now, as you can imagine, it's 2025. So Cisco spent a lot of time talking about ai. In fact, uh, according to the folks that have talked to the insiders and management at Cisco, all the way up to the top, Cisco is all in with ai.

Now, you could probably substitute almost any enterprise tech company and say exactly the same thing, but what is Cisco actually doing? Well, as you can imagine, they're a server vendor. Uh, or did you forget that?

Yes, Cisco's UCS is one of the leading and, and probably the, the most, uh, advanced, uh, integrated blade type system out there. The UCS is actually, uh, adding more capabilities for GPUs. You can add now have, uh, up to eight Nvidia H 100 GPUs on those, um, UCS, uh, servers according to, uh, Tom's, uh, reporting.

Um, and they're really trying to go after the market for not just AI training, of course, but, uh, the, the emerging market for, uh, inferencing AppSec, uh, basically using AI to do productive stuff. One of the more interesting aspects to me, um, was that Cisco announced something called AI Defense a few weeks back, which is essentially a, um, a system, let's call it an agent that looks for AI applications running in your environment and allowing you to, uh, uh, you and IT manager to control some of that. It also, uh, helps service providers and others to try to figure out, uh, how AI is being used.

This is an interesting angle for Cisco and one that I think is pretty smart. Now, Cisco also did some really cool stuff with, uh, DPU and a new, uh, their own homegrown silicon. But let's, let's put a pin in that for a second because I wanna hear what, uh, the other folks here have to say about Cisco's place in the AI centric data center.

Uh, what do y'all think? I think this is a battle for the control plane that's coming around and, um, you know, Cisco and HP and Dell like to talk about the data center and on premises if, uh, AWS and Google and Microsoft have no ambitions in that space, when in reality they seriously do. And then the question's gonna come down to, do I go with a control plane that enables me to manage a unified cloud from Microsoft AWS Google, or do I go with something from Cisco HPE or Dell and I manage that hybrid cloud infrastructure that way?

Um, and the, you know, honestly, the cloud guys have a lot more experience with that kind of control plan than the H hps and Dells and Ciscos do. So, um, the question is, does the customer view those people as the center of their IT universe or now just kind of hanging around the edge of some other IT universe managed by somebody else? That's, to me where the battle's gonna be.

To me, Cisco has always been a company that sells picks and shovels to gold miners, right? They, they sell the hardware that made these data centers run. And even early on in the cloud, you know, the, the, not the server per se, but the connectivity hardware and security hardware or Cisco, they've lost a lot of that business, right?

Um, but the hardware business or the, the hardware networking infrastructure business is not what it was. Yeah, there's a lot going on with servers and how many Nvidia can you stuff into a rack and, and all of these things. But the traditional Cisco business is not enough for Cisco anymore.

And so the question they face is, do they wanna just continue selling picks and shovels, though there may be different picks and shovels. Maybe they're more servers, they're more, you know, not just the traditional networking gear or do they enviously eye what Google and, and AWS and these others have, which is the service layers on top of that hardware. So it's not enough just to do the hardware, right?

We're gonna layer on services there with, and, and they've, look, they've tried this with WebEx and, and their security and Splunk now, right? The Cisco's remade itself or trying in the process of remaking itself to be more than just that pick and shovel seller. So we could talk about their latest, greatest hardware, but to me, the real action at Cisco is what are they doing service wise on top of the hardware?

And that will determine whether they go the way of Intel or Microsoft. Well, it's interesting that, um, you mentioned that because the other half of what was announced, the nerdy half is really hardware. And, um, let's, let's dive into that for a second.

So Cisco is actually ripping a page out of Apple's playbook here. Uh, they've introduced their own, uh, Silicon One is, uh, what they're calling it their own, uh, switching platform. And this effectively is, uh, um, you know, a, just like Apple was able to push Intel out of the max, this is a way to push, uh, Broadcom and cloud scale and companies like that out of the Cisco switches.

Those were a pretty big cost line item for Cisco, I'm sure. Also, um, you know, it's a kind of a generic platform. You know, if you, if you're using an enterprise switch, asic, it's uh, pretty much, uh, you know, Broadcom's been good at differentiating them, but ultimately, um, Broadcom is happy to sell them to your competitors as well.

So Cisco has done some pretty cool stuff on the switching side here. The new, uh, nexus 9,300 line, uh, includes their, uh, their new switch, uh, asic, which again, like Apple incorporates things that the generic hardware wasn't incorporating. In this case, it's dpu.

Now, we've talked in the past, I'm sure, on, uh, Textron Gang, certainly on, uh, tech Field day events and so on about dpu. Um, you remember, um, the Pendo group, which was, uh, made up of the, that group of, uh, Cisco execs called MPLS that typically develops things and then Cisco buys them back and all that. Well, when it came to Penson, it's interesting, A MD was the one that bought it instead of Cisco.

And so a MD has basically these client offload card, you know, networking cards with offload engines. Incredibly powerful. And we've seen a lot of use cases for those things to, uh, as you know, in the AI space, but also in conventional networking.

And, um, as you mentioned in the security space in, um, you know, new networking technologies. Well, Cisco is now integrating that same type of technology into the Switch ASIC for themselves. And so basically you've got a DPU on both sides, which accelerates everything.

Again, very Apple-like to do this, but also it enables Cisco to be a little bit more of a master of their own destiny when it comes to where they're going with their, uh, Cisco, with their, with their underlying hardware. Now, there still needs to be a bit of a rationalization here because, you know, now Cisco has multiple different, uh, fabrics, multiple different operating systems. You know, the Nexus portfolio now supports N-X-O-S-A-C-I and Sonic, uh, which is a, a, a new up and coming, uh, platform for networking.

So it, it's really gonna be interesting to see, uh, how Cisco rationalizes those things. I expect there will be more announcements at Cisco live us, which will also be covering. But, um, overall, uh, you know, again, I feel like what we're seeing here as a company, again, like Apple, that's trying to focus on user experience, trying to focus on the, on the value or the, the, the high margin part of the market, trying to make sure that those customers are the happiest customers, bring more to services, more to software and control the platform all the way down to the chips, which is something you don't see as much of in the enterprise tech space as you do in the consumer tech space.

What do you guys think of this? I think that it'll take Broadcom in short order to kind of converge DPU into their own networking processors. And Well, they certainly have that capability, don't They?

And they, and then they will turn around and commoditize the pricing to the point where it's very difficult, as we've seen in the historically, right? Cisco's done a good job for creating their own networking chips for a long time, but the map, you know, from a manufacturing point of view seems to be against them. And the speed at which the other guys can copy that is getting faster and faster.

So I'm kind of not seeing the cycle of how they're gonna like, get enough scale on their processors and that architecture to kind of make it worth competing head to head against the Broadcom and whoever else decides to come out that. And remember, the cloud guys are also all making their own networking chips now. And so there a lot of that business that Cisco, Cisco might have had over the years.

There's just a lot more options. And the cloud guys are right there with DPU as well. I think you should point that out, that, you know, a lot of them are really making hay with this same technology.

So in a way, Cisco is almost following them. Cisco will not achieve its corporate goals on hardware. They, they have got to put a bigger bet on services and software.

That's the bottom line here. The hardware business, if it was a commodity before, it's even more of a commodity now, because you, you no longer have certain, I don't wanna use the monopoly word, but powerhouses that you did before, there were the, the barriers to entry to, to burning your own silicon, designing your own silicon, fabbing your own silicon, or, or, you know, subbing out the fabrication piece of it are much, much lower than they ever were. So if you are going to stake your claim on purely, uh, custom silicon without corresponding software, you know, what makes the Apple chips great, is because they're optimized for something called the Macs and iOS right There.

Yep. Right? Without Mac, OS or iOS, who the hell needs a an M four?

Mm-hmm. Exactly. And, and well, that's obvious everybody who bought an M four iPad, um, it, it, it's, it's also exactly what I'm seeing too, Alan, that, that the goal of this platform is to enable Cisco's software and services.

And if they can do that, then they have a sustainable differentiation in the networking market. I mean, they're still the 800 pound gorilla. They still sell more than anybody else in pretty much every, uh, market they play in.

And, um, and they can maybe use that to, you know, claw back market share and, and, and, and so on. But if, if they can't, if this is just a way to extract a little bit more margin from those switches, it, it ain't gonna work. It needs to be a truly integrated product or platform all Apple.

And we're gonna be keeping a close eye on that. So rightly, and don't Forget that there's this little Chinese outfit call Yahweh that's trying to close off half the market. No, Yahweh, Yahweh, it's wwe.

Yahweh's a different guy. Ywe people pray to. All righty on that.

No, let's take a break here. Mike's mixing metaphors with Gods and, and, uh, service providers. We need a break.

We're gonna be back. Get some big news for Bonnie, from Bonnie coming at you. You are watching Textron gag.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Techron Gang. Well, this week I have an exciting announcement that's coming my report. I've been working on this for quite a while now, and it's called Executive Strategies that, uh, I'm sorry, I'm already getting my report's name wrong.

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I've been, uh, showing some previews of it on LinkedIn starting on Monday. And one of them is this preview video I'd like to share with everyone right now. Sustainability is now a business priority, Bonnie Schneider latest report decisions that define Executive Strategies and Innovations Driving corporate sustainability based on exclusive interviews with 100 industry leaders reveals how companies use technology to cut emissions and improve efficiency.

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Driving corporate sustainability demonstrates that sustainability is no longer optional, but a catalyst for resilience and growth. com to read the executive summary. The full report releases on Wednesday, February 19th.

You can also go to Ecotech Insights on the blog. I have a brand new blog up there now, which also talks about some of the findings in the report decisions that define, I'm very excited to share this with everyone, and like I said, I've been working on it for months and it's, it's kind of long, it's 31 pages, but it has less pictures. So it's, uh, it's easy to digest and a lot of companies that are in it, you've heard of, maybe some you haven't, that that was the exciting part to talk a little bit about some of the more cutting edge AI startups that are looking to do climate mitigation, climate risk mitigation.

And one of the companies featured, actually two focused on wildfire mitigation. And I wrote this before the wildfires in California, so it's very timely indeeds, and I'm looking forward to everyone's, uh, you know, feedback on it. And, and I also wanna thank everybody on Textron Gang because our conversations also we're always in my head when I was putting it together.

Thank you, Bonnie. Well, you know, it's interesting, right? This is what makes the world go round.

The government could try to take out anything with the word climate in it or sustainability or any of these things, but yet we're at a point in the, in the world right now where this is staring us in the face and, and the time for us to do something meaningful that will mitigate this somehow, or I don't even know if we, I mean, we can't solve it. I don't know how much of an effect mitigation we can have, but the time for us to do something is now, and what what's nice about this is you do, you have over a hundred interviews, over a hundred executives you've spoken to, and they, they run the gamut right around sustainability, you know, very heavily weighted in the IT and technology space. But it, at least it's clear at that level that sustainability, you know, mitigation of, of, of, uh, global climate change and so forth, and trying to be more renewable.

And all of this is important. And we, you know, all kidding aside, we, we argue when we yell about what's going on in our federal government right now, sustainability is important. The work you're doing is important.

And it's not just important for me or Mike or Steven. It's important for our children and their children and for this world because doing the same old, same old is not gonna end well, and it's gonna end quick if we don't jump ahead of this. So I would highly recommend not just leaders out there, but tomorrow's leaders and wanna be leaders.

Go take a look at the report, see what leaders are saying, see what, you know, the actual facts on the ground are. You know, an interesting thing that goes on in our society today, and I think it's one of the reasons we're in the mess we're red, is everyone says, well, I wanna listen to all sides and then I'm gonna form my opinion. And that's my opinion.

You know, opinions are like buts, my grandmother used to use a different word than buts, right? But opinions are like that. We all have one, but truth is eternal.

There's true and there's false. Everyone could have an opinion, but what's true is true. I don't really care what your opinion is or my opinion.

It's, it's truth. And when we're talking about stuff like this, I, I think that's the key to what Bonnie is. There's this truth here, and we need to do something about it.

So, great work. Thanks. I'm really excited to see how it comes out, you know, people's reactions.

I am coming to an, arguably an opinion, but, um, have we reached a point where the mitigation side of this thing is just, we're not gonna get there. So we need to focus more of our energy on things that take carbon out of the atmosphere and kind of the more the effort has to be on the fixing. I think it's a combination of both, because on medication for the impacts of more extreme weather events, um, we're talking about wildfires, dry conditions and things like that definitely add more fuel to it.

But the, the mitigation in the technology of detection, early detection with drones and, um, detecting any spark that's on infrastructure to prevent power outages, that's all I think very valuable. And then on the climate tech side, there are incredible innovations happening to remove carbon, to capture, um, solar energy and, and, and things like that, that are, that are all happening at the same time. That's why this part, it's funny, when I was writing it, it turned out to be much longer than I expected because there were so many different sides to this story.

So Mike, I, I think you make a good point that there's, there's that, that side of it and, and, and then the others. Well, Yep. Wait, Wait, wait.

Let's ask Steven Windmill fst what he thinks. Is that my little Land mail? I thought it was Solar Panel.

I thought so I, Steven Solar. Yeah. Now I, I, um, I was just gonna jump in on that too.

I, I, I, I have to say that, um, you know, one of the things that is evident in this report is that it's not all driven by, uh, I mean, and you guys can throw stuff at me. It's not all driven by feel good, liberal hippie dippy do better for the children kind. This is also driven by solid business reasons.

Sure. You know, you look at some of these things, you know, I wanna call out one of the companies that, uh, that Bonnie focuses on the report and that's pure storage with their Evergreen architecture. I, I know those guys, they're not bad people.

Um, but I guarantee that they didn't come up with Evergreen for hippy dippy feel good reasons. They came up with Evergreen because it was a solid differentiator. Um, and their customers love it.

And I've been to the Pure Conference, I have talked to their customers. They absolutely do love it. Mm-hmm.

The idea that your storage array can be migrated forward to such an extent that you can have the, literally the latest and greatest product from Pure and parts of it, components of it are still the original product they came out with over a decade ago is powerful. And, you know, I think that that's a, a, a business reason. Mm-hmm.

To look at the circular client. That's great. It's the same with HPE, which is another company you focus on in here.

Mm-hmm. HPE is a huge corporation. They're not driven by do-gooder.

They're driven by business reasons, and they are doing a lot in the circular economy and sustainability. And like I've said many times, you can call me windmill FoST or solar panel FoST if you want, um, those technologies, you cannot stuff them back down because they make good business sense. They're not just good for the environment, they're good for, they're good for business, they produce power cheaper.

They, you know, and it's the same with a lot of these other things. You know, you look at, um, in many ways, I think that we can look at problems and find ways that are ecologically sound right. And we will find that they're also good business and no new, uh, political administration, no smears and, and, and assaults on that is gonna change that.

And I am optimistic that ultimately, you know, the cat's outta the bag on some of these eco-friendly technologies, you can't stuff 'em back down. That's a great point. I I, I definitely, I'm glad you said that because that, that's one of the thesises of what I put together, that it's, um, not just about, um, you know, the do-gooder mentality that there, there are solid ROI that I stated I have, you know, data to back it up.

And, um, I think that's gonna be something that's more looked at. We always talk about on the show that, you know, it depends in the end is it cost effective? People don't wanna spend the money.

And what I found was there were multiple examples just in the report, and there's more that, that weren't, didn't even make it in there, that they were getting that return on investment. Um, another one is delphix with their virtualization, um, and, and, and storage and how that is much more efficient and it's been successful. And Perforce, um, acquired Delphix.

So for, for that technology, that was one of the reasons they acquired them. So, um, as you, as you look through the examples, um, there are many. So I think that is changing, right?

But you ruined the View from the golf course out onto the ocean. I mean, what are we gonna do about that? And won't somebody think of the imaginary whales that are killed by imaginary wind turbine?

Well, no. That I thought they just cause cancer. That was my opinion.

Anyway, what's the website? com. Go check it out.

Until then, this is your hippie dippy weather, dude saying stay away from the brown as you've got my reference. Yeah. We'll, uh, we'll, we'll talk to you all tomorrow.

Enjoy the rest of Techstrong tv. Where Stephen, you are a tech field day cloud. Tech field day.

Yes, we're gonna be live Thursday Live streaming Cloud Field Day on Textron TV and LinkedIn, Wednesday and Thursday this week. Uh, we've got a great group of people, um, really looking forward to it. Tune in.

Fantastic. Mike, I'll see you in New York this week, right? Absolutely.

Looking forward to it. Until then, everyone enjoy the rest of the day. This is Alan Shimel for Textron Gang.

We're out.