Techstrong Gang – June 3, 2024

Hey everyone, it's a DevOps kind of Monday today here, we've got a lot of DevOps news to go over to you and, uh, to go over with you. And then Mitchell and I are gonna tell you about what we did on our field trip, all that, and more on Textron Gang. Hi, everyone.

As I said, it's a DevOps kind of Monday here on Textron Gang. And when we're talking DevOps, we've got some great DevOps people to talk to you about it. Let me introduce you to who we have on the gang today.

Um, back from our, our field trip out to, uh, Silicon Valley. Mitchell. Ashley's joining us from home.

Hi, atop the Rocky Mountains in, uh, Denver. Mitchell. Good to have you back.

Good to be here. Good to be back in Colorado. Absolutely.

And then from Colorado hopping nearby over to New Mexico, though it looks like a little different. Are you home in New Mexico or not? I'm not sure.

Tracy? I'm Home. It's, I'm home in New Mexico today.

Good for you. Just, Just moving around the Rooms looks like. Yeah.

Or, or it's a, who knows? In today's world of birthday Background today. Yeah.

I don't, I don't have my Silicon Valley background. I got, I have my, My Santa Fe look on today. Okay, well go first.

Go Santa Fe. Go Santa Fe. Uh, Tracy, thanks for joining us with us.

I feel like I haven't seen ya on here in a while. We were missing You. I know.

I was visiting you guys too. I was glad to see the invite come, Joe. I'm ha so happy to be here.

It's always fun. Always good stuff. And then joining Mitchell and Tracy and I, he's been holding the fort down here all week, I guess.

In, in our Boca headquarters. It's our Chief Content Officer in Yankee Stadium, Bronx Native Mike Ard. Hey, Mike.

Hello. Good To see you. Yankees are on a hell of a tear.

They Are welcome back. But, but the Rangers are a cause for concern. Well, it's three, two.

Yeah, let's talk, get into hockey right now. That'll take me on a tangent and we'll go a long way. I know.

I still not About the Rangers right now. Yeah, it's been, look, the rangers are the rangers. I Don't know.

I, I I think Tracy can write the DevOps hockey manifesto. Is that where you go? I probably could.

I watch a lot of hockey. I'm sure I'm going for Edmonton this year though. I wanna see a Canadian team go to the Stanley Club.

Yeah, I think it'd be awesome. Edmonton hasn't been relevant since Mark Messier and Wing Gretzky were on. It would be amazing to see them back in the Stanley Cup.

Yep. But let, let's talk Mike, we've got some DevOps news to go over today. So there was a, at least I found it a bit surprising move, but maybe it's the natural order of things.

But JF Rog align with GitHub on this broad alliance and covers everything from how you're gonna connect and provide linkage across your DevOps workflows from the source code sitting over in GitHub all the way over to the Jfr platform where we deal with the binaries. And on that level, it makes a lot of sense. And also they're gonna share some of their AI technologies and folks will wind up using the, uh, GitHub co-pilots in the Jfr environments and kind of use that to help manage back and forth.

I'm sure J Rog will have its own agents as well. Then there'll be handoffs between these things. But what's your take on this?

You've been looking at these companies for a long time. You wanna know my real take on it? Nothing would and, and j Rogs a public company and, and doing fairly well in in the markets.

They've made their numbers. They, you know, Shlomi and the team there run a, a profitable business that's doing well. Would they like to be part of Microsoft?

GitHub, Azure? You betcha. Uh, and I don't have any inside knowledge of this or anything, but to me, this clearly your lines, I I think we're seeing battle lines being drawn up, right?

Where you have ecosystems and, and AI is yet one other place where they will, will come together. But, um, you know, they all wanna play nice. I mean, JFR still has to play nice with AWS and, and GCP and all of that, but clearly, you know, the, it's, it's appealing to deal with GitHub who has a rich uncle.

And, uh, you know, and everybody wants the rich uncle. Now, on the other hand, GitHub, GitHub, you know, has been on a mission for years and years now to be much more than a repo. They wanna be, you know, GitHub pipelines.

They want to be A-C-I-C-D player and, and their GitHub and, you know, their C-I-C-D-C CD offering is probably not as good as, let's say, a GitLab. And so they could use and benefit from, um, some of the jfr maturity, especially around security, right? J Frog's made a big bet in security.

So I, I see, you know, both of these folks have a scratch to itch or an itch to scratch, excuse me. And, and, and they mutually scratch each other. Tracy, do you see the same thing?

Is this the beginning of some sort of elaborate courtship? I would suspect so. Um, I, you know, we we're in a kind of a, one of those flexes Alan is talking about, and we see a lot of disruption in the market right now.

A lot of changes. Um, DevOps in particular, as I keep saying, is lot of its shiny edge. I'm hoping that we can bring it back 'cause there's so much more to do in the space.

But on this particular, uh, offering, there is something that I found interesting, um, which is the ability to connect. And I, you would think that this already exists, but it doesn't, the ability to connect a repo to an artifact. So if you have an artifact in Jfr, you don't know what repo it came from.

Now my preference would be that the Linux Foundation and SPDX would start capturing the GitHub repo and put it in the SBO m that would be really, really awesome. But from a technical point of view, if there could be a connection between the repo and the J Oog re uh, uh, between the source code repo and artifact repo, um, that would be super helpful. At least it would be, uh, to deploy Hub.

We've been looking for something like this for some time. So just from that perspective, they're solving an interesting problem in the market. However, I do think that, as Alan put it, um, it's nice to have a rich uncle, and there's a lot more to be done in this space.

GitHub could go a lot farther than their, they've currently gone in the DevOps, uh, space just in actions. So I think it'll be interesting, and it's something to watch. And I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub, uh, purchased Jfr down the road.

It wouldn't surprise me a bit. Mitchell, for sake of argument, I will say that this is really an alliance between two companies that have incomplete offerings and just kind of highlights what the other guys are doing better, right? So GitLab, to your point, and even the folks over at CloudBees with their new platform, you know, they have a more complete solution.

So is this just kind, you know, two companies coming together in a, in, in an alliance that is maybe signals some weaknesses? What are your thoughts? You said the magic word platform, right?

This is, this is part of that March that moved to platforms and expanding out on an interconnection. And, and Tracy hit it right on the head with what's unique about these two companies. Yes, it's Microsoft with, uh, with GitHub, but it's not Microsoft directly, it's GitHub, the, the subsidiary or whatever.

Um, but with Code Repository and Artifactory, right? That isn't something you have in, in many other, or organizations that are gonna partner together. So that interconnection makes a lot of sense.

I think it makes a lot of sense for J Rog because they get advantage of, they can tie into the pipelines and the a GitHub actions that are being developed there and help round out what's happening there. So is is it incomplete? I, it, I think it's more kind of how do they fit together and there's a nice linkage between the two and Natural Fit.

They don't overlap and compete much, um, in that way. So it makes a lot. And, and it also, they aren't partnering, you know, get, JFR isn't partnering with Azure, they're partnering with GitHub.

So it keeps at least one level of distance between themselves and competing with, you know, other, other, uh, cloud environments. Uh, with, uh, AWS and GCP. I've always thought that GitHub needed a binary repository.

I didn't understand why. You know, we can certainly use Git in any way you want, but there is additional features around binary repositories that Git never offered. So I think that it is a timely, this is the time for them to do it because things are shifting so much.

But I do have to say that it would be nice to see new innovation, not just integrations. Um, there is, there are many problems to be solved right now in DevOps and security and connecting these dots and connecting a vulnerability all the way out to your production environments. And I feel like we should be innovating more.

And I'm hoping that Jfr and GitHub, if they do come together as a complete solution, will innovate around the space and not just integrate. So that's my, my wish. So I, I don't think you underestimate Jfr a, a DevSecOps provider, a security play.

They have been, um, you know, other than this news, look at their news over the last year, two years, 80% of it is security related. I, I think that is a huge, uh, thing that GitHub wants in on, is, is that, you know, security within your CICD pipeline, um, look, I, I, you know, just 'cause they're hanging out together doesn't mean they're getting married necessarily right now. I think the other thing to look at is, okay, now with these two sort of, you know, working together, what does that mean for Cloud b's, GitLab Harness some of the other big CICD platforms, right?

We, I was sighting that kind of segues into our second story where we're gonna talk about Harness recently made an acquisition. Um, what does it mean for Google Cloud GCP? Well, let me ask you this.

Do you think as we move into this AI era that we are gonna see all these different companies and mergers and acquisitions in a wave driven by, to Mitch's point, the desire to create a platform that is AI infused and, you know, all bets are off. 'cause we're gonna reinvent it the platform as we know it. I think there is part of that.

I think another part of it is with ai, a AI AI is gonna render a lot of companies in the ecosystem. It's gonna take away the entry to barrier barriers to entry through a lot of these companies. And not just in CICD, but in observability.

Uh, you know, a a a lot of the different areas that we play in here, it's gonna be a lot easier, let's say for a Google, uh, you know, using some AI technology to quickly beef up their platform a around these things. They may not need to do a, a partnership or a huge acquisition of a public company like this. Um, you know, a lesson I learned, Brad Feld always said is, you want to be in the top three.

If you're not in the top three, get out. And, and when markets consolidate like this, it's the top three people who make out, right? They get great red multiples, they have great financial outcomes for their shareholders.

If you're not in those top three, you don't get as great a, a return. And what we could be seeing here is the beginning of, of, you know, as, as Humphrey Bogart would say, a beautiful friendship. Louis Tracy, to Alan's point, does AI help the startup more or does it help the incumbent more?

Well, if you're a startup and you're not talking ai, you're probably not gonna be a startup. Let's just put it that way. Um, but I don't, you know, first of all, uh, as a small company, it is hard right now to recruit and find, uh, people who are really solid in really understanding large language models, uh, and being able to put the stuff to work.

So there's gonna be yet some time before startups that are not heavily funded that can bring on somebody at, you know, 250,000 for a developer that's in this space, uh, before they can really start leveraging the technology. Um, and as I always say in the, in our space, in the DevOps space, uh, we don't have a good large language model to pull from. Uh, you know, copilot has data, but not about a lot of data about source code that have very little data about what's coming through the supply chain, you know, how, how production environments are being impacted.

Um, so it, it, from my perspective, when I'm looking at AI in the, in the DevOps space, I think we have a long way to go. Now, another another industries. I think that AI will push startups because it, it will, it, it is created a brand new economy, right?

We have a whole AI economy, but eventually, I think we had this discussion most before, it's not gonna be, um, it's not gonna be a product, it's gonna become a feature. So I think we're gonna get to that pretty quick. I think we, yeah, I was gonna say, if we, I think if we get to the point with AI generated code where we can really give it some hefty challenges, problems, it, it can be a, it can, it can eliminate barriers to entry into market, right?

If, let's say I want to go after the same market that this company that just came out with a product, um, maybe it's a startup. So it's a early, early addition to that. How quickly can I do it in my own capability, either into my existing code or adding, creating a new product.

I can create code really fast, um, and I can close the gap in a much shorter period of time. I think that's what we're all wondering about. When is AI gonna be able to help us do that?

And what's the impact when it does? We're close, we're close now there's a lot you can do right now with what you have. We code a lot faster now than we used to, but that doesn't mean we, you still have to have somebody who understands the space and understands the problem set and can use the tools.

It just helps you generate them. I, I think the, the key thing that a lot of people are overlooking with AI is not so much whether I'm gonna write code faster, but I can reduce the time it takes to switch from one platform to the other. So the cost of switching is gonna drop considerably as I re-engineer a, a language that's in some proprietary thing into something more common or whatever it is.

But, Mitch, last question on this. I want put your um, CTO hat on for a minute. You know, are, are you waking up in the morning with a sense of agita because you're kind of worried that, you know, the people and the companies you bet on to provide the platforms that you based all your decisions on might suddenly, you know, be part of something else the next morning and you don't know exactly where you feel or if there's any stability in the market right now.

Welcome to my world for the past 30 years, yes. It's, that's just a fact of life. And especially when you find something really interesting.

You know, you, you, when I discovered Slack, like, oh, this is a great thing. Did I know it was gonna get bought by Salesforce? And would I have been happy about that?

Would I've selected it? I, you know, I don't know, but it, it's just, it's just part of it, you know, you could pick any number of tools that, that we use today, and they're gonna be swooped up or replaced by something else down the road. And you may be, you know, kinda strange bedfellows with a vendor you didn't really plan to be working with.

And now you're, it's just, it's just a fact of life we deal with. Absolutely. Hey, we gotta take a break.

We're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about more deals going on. I, I kinda let the cat outta the back harness made an acquisition. We're gonna talk about that, but first we gotta, we're gonna pay some bills here and do a quick break here on Textron Gang.

We'll be back with Mitchell, Tracy and Mike in just a minute. 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. Hello and welcome back in. As previously indicating, we are talking about an acquisition harness made of a company called Split Software.

They provide, um, feature management tools is one way of thinking about it. Of course, you know, the idea of features has been around forever. We've been using it for AB testing and those kinds of things within DevOps.

But now people are using this stuff in production environments to provide different classes of user experiences because now I can direct different capabilities to different users and charge 'em different price points. It seems like this whole space got a, a jump with the rise of digital transformation. But let's start with Tracy.

What's your sense of, uh, this deal in particular, and, uh, where are we with the maturity of feature management? Well, first of all, I think that harness, um, we used the, we used the term platform in the, in our previous, uh, session. And I think that harness is building a platform.

Feature management was a whole in their, in their offering and they needed to, to fill it. And I'm super happy for the company, for split software for getting acquired by them. It's a really great fit.

Um, you know, I have not, to be honest, I have not played a lot with feature management. I, some companies, uh, really embrace it, but I don't believe it's really gotten as much attention as it's worth, particularly in a SaaS environment. There is a, there in the SaaS environment, there's a struggle with monetizing features and feature management tools in a SaaS environment, um, could be super, super useful.

I don't necessarily, uh, know if in a traditional, you know, where you're downloading software, how useful feature management is, but it does have a important place. Uh, I, you know, I find it interesting that's in it is in the DevOps space as opposed to being in the kind of the ops and management of feature space where you're charging and you're tracking who's using what. And I think that's really where, where it's most useful.

I know we've looked at it for Deploy Hub to say, you know, we could turn off turn features on and off depending on who's, who's logged in, which would be super useful. Uh, it's kind of sify, um, as an option for using features. It was started just for testing, right?

We were using it to test features in production, but I think that it has a bigger story to it. And I think Harness made a good decision and, and I guess increasing its, its features around, its, It seems to me there's a lot of companies providing this kind of capability, but for a lack of a better term. I mean, is features management a feature of a platform or is it a standalone kind of company?

I Look everything eventually becomes a feature, right? No, no pun intended. With feature management.

That's just the way of, of, of the world that I've lived in for the, you know, 25, 30 years I think. Excuse me. You know, you, you looked at this move by harness.

Remember Harness is a Jody Bonsai company, right? Jody's the founder of App Dev, or not app Dev. AppDynamics sold it to Cisco founded Harness.

He's founded Traceable ai. Um, he knows what he's doing. And what you got here is, I think, as Tracy mentioned, harness is building a next gen platform for CICD and software pipelines.

They saw features management as a feature of that platform and, and they made a build versus buy decision. And in today's market where, you know, valuations are a little bit more reasonable and, and Har remember, harness isn't public, but they just raised some money and you know, they, they have their, so they don't, so they, you know, Jody has all this equity there based upon their last raise, but it's not a real market. You know, it's not like a public company where I could say their stock's worth $40 a share.

They could say their stock's worth whatever they want, say it's worth. The question is whether you believe them or not. Billion dollars.

I think they're probably raised it a couple billion. But, um, but then he could use that stock as as currency. And I wouldn't be surprised if this was a deal that used a lot of stock as currency and, and it was a build versus buy.

They made a buy that had equity to burn and good for them. This is what smart CEOs and entrepreneurs do. Tracy, to our last conversation, you know, we didn't really talk about the role of venture capitalists play in this dynamic, but seems like a lot of the times the currency that Alan's talking about is, you know, quote unquote funny money between the VCs being exchanged for shares and stocks, and how much does that impact these mergers and acquisitions?

I, I don't really understand the ven venture capital space as well as I should. And it has changed. VCs have changed so much over the last, uh, four or five years.

It's not the same VCs that we do, you know, before Covid, let's just say. Um, but in the case of what Al was pointing out, uh, you know, if I was split software, if I, if if Deploy hub, if if Harness came to deploy Hub right now and said, we wanna, you know, we wanna invest in you, we're gonna give you a stock ex a pure stock exchange. Just you we'll trade stocks, we're gonna take over yours, we're gonna give you a bunch.

I would think it would be an amazing deal. 'cause I believe in harness, right, as Alan said, Jody really does know what he, he's doing. This was a smart buy for him.

But in the VC world right now, um, I'm not really, I haven't seen anybody really interested in the DevOps space 'cause everybody's talking about AI and stocks have nothing to do with it. It is pure who's gonna, who's gonna win in these particular spaces. And everybody's running kind of crazy trying to come up with the next AI tool.

And there's a ton of the startups out there. You look at what they're doing and sometimes I have no clue what they're up to. So I can't really answer that question.

But I can tell you that talking to some VCs as of late, it's like, if you don't have AI on your, your slide deck, they don't wanna talk to you. 'cause that's all they're interested in. And some of the investments I've seen are a little odd.

It's definitely not the same market as it was in let's say 20 17, 20 18. It's changed a lot. All right, in harness dollars we trust.

Yes, I would think so from our, from our perspective, I, that would be a good deal to be become part of the harness family and own some of their stocks Features management. Mitch has been around since I think the seventies. Um, I think you've had some experience with it or at least, you know, been able to play with it from here to there.

What is the current state of this stuff? Because I kind of do scratch my head. I go, wow, this is pretty cool.

But then to Tracy's point, it's undervalued and people don't seem to know what to do with it. Is it hard? I mean, what is the, why isn't we this more pervasive?

Well, if you've done feature management to any extent, you find out very quickly. You get past about third or fourth or fifth feature you're flagging and turning on off, off and on, you get into 20, 30, 50 features. It gets very complex, very fast of what each one of those does.

What coded effects, what functionality it delivers. So, so having a management capability, I think is, is a valuable thing to have. If you really bought into to feature management, I think feature is a mis misnomer.

Um, it was feature, it's, we used it back in still secure days to enable features, functionality. Um, but I think it's really functions in some way because now, because you can deliver software very quickly, you deliver code into production, you're not really using and so you turn it off. Um, and you can do that with, uh, feature management kind of platform.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a flyer here, I think I'm guessing and don't have any inside information. If I'm building a platform, one of the features or capabilities I think I want from my own platform feature management, I think they bought 'em for as much as use in their own product as well, is to fill in a capability of what they offer their customers. So I think if that's case, that's the case, they got double their money worth of what they paid for it.

That's a smart deal there. You're right. Last question.

Do you think that AI is the missing component in features management? 'cause to Mitch's point, it's complex to manage all these things. So if I can reduce the complexity of managing it, maybe more people will use it.

It's not missing no more. You know, ai, is AI part of that AI's a part of everything? Is it?

You know, I feel like if I went on Jeopardy and, and just answered every question with what is ai? Um, but, but clearly it'll help. Can you do it without ai?

Yeah. Will AI make it easier perhaps? Yeah.

Anyway, good luck. Congratulations to the people it split. Congratulations to all of our friends at harness this, this again should be a beautiful friendship, Louis, right?

For taking a, a line from Casablanca. We're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about what the heck is a tech field day.

Anyway, so as I intimated earlier in the show, Mitchell and I were off on a trip to Santa Clara this week where we were delegates at the inaugural app dev tech field day. We had a blast. We're both back in our respective, uh, home ERs now, but you know, what the heck is a tech field day?

Mitch, why don't you go first? It, it's an interesting concept. I think you and I both kind of went, Hmm, why don't we think of that?

Um, it, it's, uh, something that Steven Bosket set up this part of the app dev, or excuse me, part of that Tech Field Day, uh, team, which is part of Future M Group. Essentially what it is, is let's bring a group of diverse kind of experts in their respective areas and have a technology company present to them for about an hour and a half going, walking through what they do, what the product is, the problems that they solve. But it's all live streamed.

So it's kind of like a giant briefing with, you know, hopefully people that will ask some pretty smart questions. Sometimes. I'm not sure, sure, the questions I always ask are that smart.

But, you know, we all try and it's, and it's really about eliciting of what, what does this product do and how are we using it? And what are you seeing in market? And then there's some kind of alone time downtime where we're not on camera, where we can talk about some things more openly that, you know, they might share with us that they're not gonna say on a streaming video.

So it, it's, it's a chance for us to get a deeper look at some of this and hear from kind of our others in our peer groups, et cetera. But it's also a time to kind of really dialogue with the, uh, technology company. And we, we did three companies while we're out there.

I'll let you talk about it, you know, who they were. And we can get into a little bit of that. But I think, is that a pretty fair description, Alan?

Uh, absolutely. Let me, let me add a little color commentary there. Um, so Steve, Steven FoST is the founder of the Tech Field Day program.

He's been doing it about 15 years. So he's been doing this a while. A lot of them are done out in Santa Clara, Silicon Valley, but he does them also around existing, you know, piggybacking like an existing show and stuff.

And he does 'em on a variety of different subjects within tech, right? This was the first AppDev one, but he's done them on many. The premise is, is that each company, as Mitch said, gets this 90 minute window, what they do with it.

I mean, they could perform circus trick tricks. It's up to them. And then the delegates sit around and they, they listen, they question, they comment and, you know, anything is fair game.

And there is an off camera element where you get to, to speak, you know, sort of off camera, off the record, if you will, with the vendor. I think what makes it really nice though is number one, most of the vendors are the three that we saw. Well, Google Cloud was one of them and they didn't have their CEO there, but the other two vendors were me, SMO, and, uh, Catchpoint.

And they both were represented by their CEO. So you had a chance to really talk to their CEO and hear him talk about his vision. In this case, they were both hims talk about their vision for, for the company.

Um, you know, I, I asked Steven, and, and full disclosure, right? Tech Field Day was acquired by fu I think it closed in April. So, and, and we've signed an LLI with fu and so, you know, we're almost hopefully going to be sister companies or sister units within FU and we're gonna work a lot more with Steven and the Tech Field Day team.

We actually, uh, streamed it on the Techstrong TV platform. Mm-Hmm. And we will be streaming all future tech field days on Techstrong TV platform.

We'll also be doing the Tech Field Day podcast, uh, on our tech strong tv TV platform as well as a lot of the content stuff that they did over there. 'cause the, the parent company for tech field there was Gestalt it and you'll be seeing a lot, you know, we'll be, we'll be working closely with them in more, more details to come on that. So, so far I got reality TV show for it and King, can I get voted off this island or how does that work?

You can get voted off the island, but you, you know, and to be fair, look, those vendors are paying money. Mm-Hmm. So I don't know if you wanna vote 'em off if they're writing checks, but anyway, um, but, but you could certainly tell them I think your messaging is off.

I think your product's not good. I mean, you can tell 'em whatever you want. The way Steven explains it is he figured out almost like how to do a, an event a a a a vir, not a virtual a, a conference event without having a conference expo floor without a lot of the nonsense.

But, you know, and, and, uh, you get these companies presenting at a, from high level folks to an intel, what what you hope is an intelligent delegate representation, asking the questions that the people out in the world wanna know. It's streamed live and then it's available on YouTube or text on TV in this case. And he's been doing it 15 years.

People like it. Yeah. And the Important thing is, anybody can watch this.

I mean, the delegates are there, but Everybody can Right. See what's on. Anybody can watch it.

Mm-Hmm. Anybody could watch it. You don't, you don't even have to register.

They don't know your name. You, you could be, you know, you could be a dog on the internet and watch it. Tracy sounds attractive.

What Do you think? I really have been waiting for a disruption in the trade show space. I am really tired of, you know, expo floors and breakout sessions.

I, maybe it's just the time I've been in the industry, I've, it's, this format sounds far more interesting, to be quite honest. It seems more honest and more productive. I would, I would be very interested in doing something like that.

Alright. I I'll tell you Mitchie, when you say something, go ahead. I Was gonna say, I think the two-way part of this is, is something that is underestimated is it's one thing to go to the trade floor and have the people speak at you.

You know, when you're watching the demo sitting down and where you try to go get a one-on-one, you get, you know, maybe five minutes if you're lucky, the, the two-way part of this dialogue. You know, you learn as much from the questions that people ask, uh, you know, kind of, oh, I would've asked that question too. So I think that's a real positive.

It it's an evolution. You talk about de disruption of the trade show. It's got some other benefits.

I think I tell you one of the things I really liked too is besides the, the on time with the, in this case, three different vendors over the two days, the downtime with the other delegates. You know, we went out to dinner, we had lunch together, we hung out a bunch, met some really interesting people. Um, they a good mix of analysts and practitioners and authors and trainers and influencers.

And they had people from a sales background and marketing background and, you know, engineering background. And it, there was a real comradery there that you develop over the time. Um, I, I, I, I enjoyed it.

I'm looking forward to doing, I think the ne they're gonna do another app dev one mm-Hmm. Uh, during CubeCon Tracy at Salt Lake City. We're gonna try to do it.

And uh, you know, and if you get a chance, as I said, it's on YouTube, it's on Text trunk tv. Go check it out. It, it's, it was a lot of fun.

I should mention too, that of the three companies that, um, presented, I wrote an article, it's on cloud native now with a lot of help from our editors, um, on, on Google Cloud presented about, was it Google Cloud Run, right, Mitch? Yeah, Google Run. Google Run versus Google.

GKE. com today, or maybe it went up yesterday already yesterday on, um, it was Last week by the time you See this, right? Last week was Catchpoint.

Mm-Hmm. And that was good. I I really, you know, I, we've known the Catchpoint people.

I've interviewed Matt, their CEO before, but I really, truly, truly understand where they are and where they're going. And then Mitch, you, you had the, the one on me, SMO, right? Yes.

I, yeah, it's gonna be up I think on Monday. So it'll go up. So as I, it is probably up there as people watch this, I'm, I'm not sure to Tracy's point that this is gonna replace the trade show though, because, well, there's no attractive person scanning your badge and handing you, you know, Swag.

Right? That's why we go to all. No, no.

There was swag. Swag. There was swag.

The vendors left swag at our table for the delegates and stuff. I brought my wife home with Nice, you know, a little cup that she could fill with, uh, a beverage of choice on the boat. Um, so it was all good.

And uh, actually the delegates do they do like a, a grab bag? What do they call it? A Yankee gift.

Yankee gift exchange, yeah. Yeah. That was pretty cool.

Um, but I Too, if there are any companies that are interested in participating in this, we'll have the videos up first part of next week so you can get an idea of the format. But if there are any folks that are interested, would like to be one of the, you know, companies featured on this, just reach out to Alan or myself. We'll be glad to get you in touch with the Right.

Absolutely. And I'll tell you two of, you know, mes o and, uh, Catchpoint CEOs reached out to me privately on LinkedIn. I I saw it on my way home last night on the plane to say they had a great time.

They'd like to do it again. And they wanted to talk to me about some other things. Anyway, but it was, it, look, it's, it's an intimate great environment to learn about what these companies are really doing and, and also helping them kinda sharpen it too.

To sharpen their, to sharpen their thing. And I, you know, just quickly self-serving as we continue down the road with this Futurum group, you know, merger. I, I see a very tight integration between Steven and the Tech Field Day stuff and, and what we do here.

'cause they need the distribution, I think that Techstrong brings to it. And we could help each other a lot. There's a lot of pieces.

I mean, Paul Nati, who's the, uh, FU group, uh, uh, uh, analyst on DevOps was there doing, what's it called? DevOps Dialogue, which is kind of his podcast thing on YouTube. Um, so we had a chance to spend some quality time with Paul.

There's a, there's a lot of goodness all around there. We, we, I had a great time. I mean, I highly, highly recommend it.

Check out the videos, tech Field Day. It's good stuff. All right, sounds good.

And, and can we vote for delegates in the future? I mean, How? Yeah.

Well, you know what? Maybe that's, maybe that's something we could do. We could vote now.

You can be a convicted felon and be a, a delegate. Well, we're not going there. Sorry.

Sorry. No Fake delegate delegates either. Yeah, no, I'm not going.

I'm sorry. We're not going there. Actually, I do, I do have an announcement though.

Uh, starting, I think it's June 20th, which is a Monday big news here at Textron. We're moving Textron TV and the Textron Gang to five days a week. Now.

We've always been on five days a week. Not Saturday and Sunday, obviously, but usually two of those days on Friday. And, uh, Wednesday we would do best of repeat shows where, you know, there's so much going on in the tech world and a lot of it's driven by ai certainly.

And we have so much more content with our friends from Futurum Group, like Tech Field Day and Paul Nati. And we've had Lisa Martin on and, and, and Steve Dickens and the infrastructure, I forget what they call that. Infrastructure Matters podcast Infrastructure Matters podcast than Six five Media.

We, we have a lot more content. So our aim is to go five days a week, four hours a day, and it's ambitious. Our AV people are breaking under the strain, but, you know, they'll, they'll get up to speed and they get used to it.

They're long distance runners. Um, so stay tuned for that later this month. And, and really we hope you enjoy this.

We'd love to hear from you about what we're doing. Something. We might even have a live studio audience.

You know what, I would be great. Like, I would like to do the David Letterman Theater in New York City would be a personal thing for me, but I don't know. Or we could all go to Albuquerque.

I Think you should do a wait, wait, don't tell me style. There you go. Sig, future Cities.

Go to Chicago. Do Wait, don't tell me. I love that show all the time.

Denver, Colorado. We could be like the NFL draft City to city. Anyway, I think that's gonna end our text.

We got a little loopy there today, probably one in the morning last night, guys. Um, I hope you've enjoyed this text Junk gang. We will be back tomorrow with all new fresh content and more gang members aren't here.

But until then, on behalf of Tracy Reagan, Mitch Ashley, Mike Baard, and myself, Alan Shimmel, have a great day. Stay tuned for the rest of Text Drunk TV today. Bye.