Techstrong Gang – March 21, 2025

Hey, happy Friday. The outlook for DevOps today is cloudy with a chance of AI in some heavy CICD. You are watching Textron Gang.

Hi everyone. Alan Shimmel, tech Strong here for Techstrong Gang. Wow, it's Friday.

It just seems like yesterday was Monday and today's Friday. And it's not because we record these a week at a time. It's just that kind of crazy week.

We've got a lot to go over, including some new DevOps reports and research by one of my favorite DevOps analysts in the world. Um, some new Java is, can Java be 25, 24? I don't know.

It seems like it's been around that long. And, uh, we've got a little Star Wars. May the droids be with you?

All kinds of good stuff, good people to talk about it with. Let me introduce you to our gang members today. We're going out west again to, uh, start things off with our Silicon Valley contingent, the the king and queen of the valley.

Uh, we've got Lisa Martin. Hi Lisa. How are you?

And great Alan. Great to be Here. Okay.

And the King John Schwartz, our Silicon Valley editor. Hey, John. How you doing?

Hi. It's good to be here. Happy to be here.

Busy week again. Yep. So what's the sweatshirt today?

Oh, we can't really see it. California Golden Seals. Do you know much about the history of that team?

Say NHL? Sure. California Golden Seals.

You remember who owned them? They're goalie. Yes.

Well, I'm a Yeah, no, I used to play hockey. I didn't play hockey. I watched Hockey.

Hockey. They were, they were an expansion team in 1967, I believe, along with the flyers and penguins, et cetera. And they were owned by Charlie Finley, Who Yes, they were, they had the same as colors, gold and green.

You just stole my thunder. Exactly. They were terrible.

They were the opposite of the A's. But, uh, they were an interesting team. I got to see 'em play when I was a kid.

Didn't, didn't it? They moved to Vancouver and they became the Vancouver. They grew up Cleveland.

They moved to, became the Cleveland Barons, I believe. And then, ah, Yeah, the Cleveland Barretts, the Nor that, that was merged with the Minnesota North Stars, if you remember them. Sure.

Anyway, it's a long painted history and, um, you know, it, it, it was, it was, they played in the Oakland Coliseum when the A's and the Raiders and the Warriors were, I remember, I remember though, we're all old enough to remember, you know, I play, I did play hockey, I played roller hockey. I was a goalie. And what I did is I, you know, we used to have those ball bearing kinda wheels and I smashed them square so they didn't roll, and I could just walk.

And as a goalie, I didn't have to walk too far. So I very rarely fell. And I, I, I was a good goalie like that.

Nice. Anyway, moving on. Moving on to Colorado.

We've got our, uh, future VP research, DevOps, Mitch Ashley. Hey Mitchell. We've got full on guitars today.

You changed the angle there. Yeah, we're getting, we're getting a little up the upshot on the guitars, by the way. The only seals we have in Colorado are the seals on mason jars.

We're used for canning vegetables and fruits. Yeah. So That's as close as I would imagine.

That's what a seal means to you. Okay. I guess that's why it's so regional.

Speaking of regional, let's go to a different region north representing the northeast batting left-handed, throwing. Right. Getting ready for baseball season.

Chief Content Officer Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm good.

One week opening day three o'clock Thursday next. Yes. Yes, it is actually.

So the game's going on in Japan now. They're still preseason. Yeah, no, tho No, those are regular season.

The the dogs are two and Oh Yeah. You might take a week off or or so to recover from Japan, but yeah, everybody else starts on the 27th. Right.

Oh, okay. Very cool. Very cool, huh?

Well, I could talk baseball more, but we've already gotta get going here, Mike. We've got some new, uh, research coming out of our, uh, friends from futurum. What's going on?

Yeah, the research is on what's happening with DevOps in general. And, um, there's actually two reports. One is kind of a survey.

The other one is a market analysis where we're seeing, I think the number was a 9% compound annual growth rate for the next few years on DevOps tools and platforms. Mitch, I'm gonna let you dive into it, but, um, you know, we've heard all this noise over the years about DevOps, especially in the last two or so. And yet looking at the data, things look pretty vibrant.

It's interesting, you know, it is kind of, once things have been around for a while, you say, well, is that sort of passe? Or, you know, what's really happening with it? And uh, as you mentioned, we did both.

We have our own market analysis, the growth of the market, you know, nine plus percent cagr, uh, over the next several years. Uh, but we also correlate that to buyer decision maker data. So we have a very comprehensive, not just looking at DevOps, but really across the entire software development life cycle, considering DevOps and Agile, but also software development, uh, platform engineering, uh, testing, um, application security, uh, ai, AI ops, things like that.

IT ops, let's kind of think about the whole life cycle. And, uh, we had 855 responses to this. com and I'll be having some more stuff come out.

But the themes of it are, when it comes to DevOps is, is we have very high levels of people who see themselves in the kind of three quarters of the game. If you wanna think of a football game or in the fourth quarter of kind of very mastering DevOps or in the, you know, standardizing it across the organization, over half of, of the respondents and, and very few, it was like 14% said they were in the beginning stages. So we're in a pretty far down the maturity stages.

The interesting thing is, we, we kind of divided the, the analysis up into people who were doing dev DevOps, who were doing development, people who were doing platform engineering. When we asked the platform engineering folks, they weren't quite that far along, but not too far behind. They, they saw themselves as pretty mature in their platform engineering efforts probably 'cause they were doing some of that stuff before.

Maybe they're getting more attention and, and funding to that. Uh, a couple of other interesting things is, uh, we had both 41, 40 3% range of people both in platform engineering and in DevOps and in development saying that they're using AI as part of their n aid to their tools. Now, that can mean a lot of different things.

Could mean we're using cursor. It could mean they're just using chat to, to do, you know, code, code lookup or whatever, or get ideas for code. There's a wide range of things, but the fact that, you know, almost half, close to half are saying that they are using AI today.

And the two, the last thing I'll kind of add to that is the two biggest, well, I have my budget for 2025, but I'm planning to spend even more this year and even more in 2026 software security and ai. So those are the, those are the key themes coming out of this. And nowhere really did we see, well, I'm cutting back in these areas.

Almost, almost all of it was kind of full steam ahead and this was late 2024, early 20, 25 data. So we're not, you know, we're talking, not talking sometime last year. This is pretty recent stuff.

Hmm. Interesting stuff. So I, I'm not surprised at the maturity findings, Mitch.

com now for a couple of years is that, you know, DevOps certainly crossed the chasm, certainly penetrated that, you know, 35% of the main of the, uh, the early 35% of the mainstream right. And is clearly going after the, the other 35%, you know, the, the second half of the mainstream, if you will. Um, what I, what I am pleasantly surprised 41% plan to use AI with it, right.

That, that shows you, I think, you know, almost half half of folks are trying, are gonna be, you know, trying to use AI in, in their software development pipelines. Um, I think the other thing is though, that as part of this DevOps maturation, we've seen DevOps, you know, you know, general Douglas MacArthur said, old software never dies. It just fades into the woodwork.

I remember that. Oh no, he didn't really say that, did he? But he said something like that.

But, um, He was up to his ankles and water on a beach, right? Yeah, Yeah. Trying to figure out the little Pipe, right?

Or something. And I don't know what was in that pipe. But anyway, um, DevOps has kind of gone into the woodwork itself, so to speak, along with things like ITSM along with things like Agile, which is kind of the precursor, right?

Agile is 25 years old. And so, and then you have new things like platform engineering, which is really, you know, still very closely aligned. It doesn't replace DevOps works alongside it.

And so, and you have things and other new things like s re maybe and, and stuff like this. So we cloud native I should mention as well. So you have this whole echo system of which a frameworks and, and ways of doing things and so forth and, and DevOps is, has taken its place.

Kind of like when you look up at the stars, right? And you see all the, the past rulers of Pride rock and, um, DevOps is up there. So It is, you know, and interesting too, Alan, um, couple other thoughts.

One is when we asked, so what do you see is, is the most important technology or investment areas to invest in to, um, getting software into production, uh, faster, more consistently? Top of the list. The, the top things we're gen ai, uh, A IML for dev, uh, DevOps and test.

Um, and also software security was up there at the very top. So e even looking at just kind of, what are you using? What are you spending, what do you see as critical, you know, kinda look, you, oftentimes you look at different ways of analyzing those questions.

So you are, you kind of triangulate, are we saying the same thing? It it's very consistent. And these are decision makers, these are buyers, and these aren't, um, you know, just folks reading about it on, on, uh, you know, Udemy or something, taking a course on it.

Mitch, I'd love to get your opinion on this. 'cause when I talk to people, I get two divergent points of view. One is says that with the rise of AI coding tools, the pipelines we have are too brittle and we're gonna need to replace all our DevOps platforms to accommodate for that volume of code.

The other says that AI agents will just pull the data from all the existing platforms and AI agents will manage in those workflows without having to replace any of the, the DevOps platforms. So I don't know what your sense of how that's gonna play out, but right now I can line up 20 people and they'll split evenly on that conversation. Well, I think there's multiple trajectories.

One is moving to platform solutions, that kind of, a lot of the pre-integration done for you, instead of development teams being, being in the tools integration business. That's one path of helping to reduce that problem. Uh, another, and, and it is an issue especially around CICD.

'cause CICD sounds like one thing, but if you really understand what's going inside of it, it could be 50 or a hundred different types of CID for CSED pipelines going on for different apps, different versions of apps, all kinds of things. So the complexity in that is very high. And oftentimes there's a few folks that will touch it to go resolve it.

'cause it is, it does take some real skill to do that. There, there's a belief that we can put AI on to that task, at least to analyze it and give us more people accessible to be able to resolve issues with CICD with AG Agentic. Then maybe starting to address it, the, the kind of wild card factor is now we have a whole different path of doing development, you know, whether it's through cursor or, you know, Gemini code or whatever your latest, uh, flavor of the day of generating code through, uh, natural language as opposed to writing it.

And how does that flow through into, you know, a DevOps. So in a way we're making it more complex as we always do, kind of things that get more complex over time. But AI is one of the, one of the potential solutions for it.

But I think there's others platforms are definitely a part of that. com. We, we have an article on there with links, and if you go to futurum group, uh, dot com did research, it's there and there's, and there's also been a huge refresh in the, uh, futurum intelligence portal that incorporates a lot of this and some other DevOps, uh, research Mitchell that you have spearheaded.

And, and, uh, if you're not familiar with the futurum intelligence portal, go check it out. It's, it's actually a really, really nifty tool. If you wanna stay on top, depending what you wanna stay on top of, I like data.

That's the place to go. We do all kinds of analysis. Good stuff.

Alright, let's take a break. We're gonna come back here, we're gonna talk Java. What could nothing new in Java is there.

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Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back and we're talking about Java that got a new edition, I think's.

Number 24. And this one is being driven largely by Oracle, but it has everything in it from, I don't know, post quantum cryptography support to AI capabilities. And it looks like, you know, Java, the venerable language we're using that word again, is, uh, getting a significant update.

And Oracle seems to be driving this despite the fact that Java was supposed to be this whole open source community thing. So Lisa, I know you're out on the west coast, but is Java cool yet? I think it is, it's hard to believe it's almost 30, but I was doing research on this, I thought really?

30 and, and the scary, I think it's what's scarier is, I can remember 30 years ago and it was was, it doesn't seem like it was that long ago, but yeah, at the event Java 1 20 25 up up the, the shore here in Redwood Shores, they announced the availability of Java 24. The latest version reportedly some of the things they talked about in the press release, thousands of improvements they said to help developers really maximize their productivity drive innovation. We just talked about the DevOps, um, momentum going on that future machine, that's what organizations of every industry want is to accelerate that business growth.

The pedal is to the metal and it really, I think what we're seeing from Java is it's continuing to really expand its tool set to meet developers where they are their evolving needs. And I think considering we just talked about the DevOps momentum when the pedal is to the metal, I think this is a good thing. Absolutely.

You know, I I re who remembers the little Java logo caricature? The little black and white guy looked like a Star Trek kind of a kind of thing, you know, uh, energy wave or whatever that really is in Star Trek world. Um, and of course, look, if you're gonna call out Java being 30, you gotta pay homage to sun, right?

I mean, for those of us of a certain age, what a golden era of, of computing Sun ushered in with Solaris and Java and Spark servers and all of the great innovations that that came out of there. Um, it's interesting, you know, Oracle or Java is the language Oracle loves to hate or hates to love. I, I don't know.

But, you know, they keep improving it. And, and excuse me, this one really does seem to be a major upgrade, right? You've got AI integration in here, you've got post quantum cri cryptography a little early.

Certainly though, look, we're hearing so much quantum stuff. I'm, I'm looking for Quantum in 2026. Um, and, and of course developer experience tools, which has always been at the heart of Java.

The, the other interesting thing is, you know, we are, we go on here and we, we, we argue whether, you know, is, is line is correct in letting us in, in, in pushing rust over c for Colonel and, and what's the latest, greatest languages we're using and do we really care about languages? But you know what, 30 years later, Java still rocks and rules the roost, right? I mean, is there any language that is used more today?

I mean, it, it's a lot more of a fragmented world in terms of languages than it was, let's say 30 years ago. But it's still a dominant, a dominant force. You can't kill this beast.

That's Yeah, that's what, that's just what's so remarkable about it. 30 years later it's still relevant. And then they did really did do a push.

I mean, I talked to an executive at Oracle about this and the only, the only unfortunate thing is that they made the announcement at the same time as Nvidia and the, the monster conference that they had. But, um, you know, kudos to them for, for keeping this alive and making it relevant and adapting, which is something that Oracle has to do as well as companies like Salesforce and C3. They, they've just gotta continue to foster and, and move along.

Mitch, it seems like the appetite for learning new programming languages is not all that high, despite the fact that there's more of 'em than ever. But if you go into your average enterprise, it's Java, Java, Java. Well, really good point.

There's such an embedded base of Java, right? That's part of one of the, kinda like DevOps, right? It's part, it's embedded within the organizations, right?

Once you start developing applications in Java, you're gonna be using Java for, for a long time. And you know, I have to remember, remember when Java's introduced, it was very revolutionary because that was the days of the languages were things like c and C sharp and c plus plus and really, you know, more complicated languages to learn. And Java was seen as much easier, though it has its own complexities too.

But I think the support from Oracle, you know, you called out a couple things, uh, Alan and Elisa about what they announced. I think one of the big things too is the backward compatibility, two versions of Java itself that are included in this new version because that's always the hassle. As things mature and mature and mature, you get bigger and bigger embedded base of code of different versions of things.

Some things get sunset or grandfathered, whatever, and it's hard to upgrade. It's, it's a, that's that technical debt. And so I think them by investing and trying to give as much backward compatibility as they could, you know, something's embedded in our, in our software stack when the people we're talking about app modernization are talking about how do we migrate from Java to something else?

And that's, that's part of that conversation too. So it's not going anywhere. It's, it's gonna be with us for a long time.

I think from a marketing perspective, John, you nailed it. It's relevance. It's 30 years later, it's still relevant.

And one of the things that they did here, I I think again from that marketing lens is they really nailed what is important to their target audience, which is developers. They're really working on improving the onboarding experience, making this mm-hmm. Kind of pav this on ramp up, they said.

And so I think they're really getting to maintaining a community that's healthier and healthier. The ecosystem is there, but getting these, uh, developers onboarding much more easily, more easily is a, is an a plus Job was gonna be dead when Oracle took it. We thought, uh, oh, that's the end job everybody.

Yeah, exactly. I would just like to point out that everybody on this call has been doing this for longer than 30 years and is hopefully still relevant. So, Well that's my Case, but, uh, I'm not so sure well Are, yeah, I'm not so sure.

I try to stay relevant, but you know, I'm out here quoting Douglas MacArthur, who the heck knows who he is out there, who's, uh, so anyway, all good, happy birthday to Java and, uh, good to see it out there and thriving and staying current. Uh, you know, and I'm glad to see post quantum cri cryptography being used, right? We're gonna need it.

All right. We're gonna come back and do our C block in, in right after this break. And I'm not sure if those are the droids we're looking for.

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Hey folks, it's, John alluded to earlier, yes, there's been this massive conference involving Nvidia all week long, and one of the things that came out was Disney and Google DeepMind and and video are gonna go build some actual droids, you know, the ones from Star Wars, and you go to the, uh, amusement park there and you'll be able to interact with these actual droids, whether it's R 2D two or not. I don't know, probably. We'll see.

But John, I'm telling you, this is a conspiracy right now. And here's how I'm viewing this thing, right? I could dragged into the amusement park, the kids drag me into the gift shop, and the next thing you know, I'm taking home joys and that's how they get into my house.

Go, yes. It's like, it's you, you are channeling George Lucas. You're channeling Steven Spielberg.

It was always about the merchandising and the marketing in addition to great movies and great created creative contents. It was also about that's where the real money comes. And I think, um, I think beginning next year we're gonna see these Star Wars inspired BDX droids at, uh, theme parks for Disney.

That's the plan. At least. There's a, uh, guy named Kyle Laughlin, who's the senior VP of, it's called Walt Disney Engineering Research and Development.

And he basically said the BD steroids are just the beginning. They're committed to bringing more characters to life in ways the world hasn't seen before. And that's the plan.

And, and, and in fact, I think at South by Southwest, there was a demo of one of these prototypes that was shown. I saw a video of it, it was actually pretty interesting. Um, but again, these are entertainment robots and I think we're gonna see various iterations of different types of not just droids, but animals.

And the same story I mentioned, um, this new dog that's being developed in Europe called Luna, that, uh, can be trained. It is very strange. There's also, at uc, Berkeley, there's this, a robotic squirrel that's being developed that can leap and, and land on ledges.

So this is the world We're in. He's not rocky, is he? He's, no, you know, there might be a Bullwinkle in the future, but Well, he Has a moose friend.

Yes, he does. I wonder if the dog will chase the squirrel. That's what happens in our neck.

You know what they should have developed that they should have developed the, the Rocky robot at what's the matter? You right? Not Berkeley.

Yeah, that would've worked. But in any event, um, it's a, it's a very Strange one. Oh, John, that was, that was, That was I, I got that from my Brother.

I'll give you, I'll give you a, I'll give you a few bonus points. All right. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you. This is like an ESPN show, right?

Pardon the interruption. But, um, but anyway, that's where the, that's where, uh, Disney's going. And Jensen, it's really weird.

He, he made this presentation in the midst of a 90 minute fire hose of news. So it didn't really get a lot of, they got coverage. I mean, obviously Reid wrote about it and others wrote about it, but he kind of like tucked it into this larger presentation.

And I wish he kind of spend more, a little bit more time with it. There was also maybe the reason why he didn't spend more time was there's a bit of a glitch during the demo, so that could have explained it. But Brave New World.

So Alan, will Paramount respond with the commander data as a droid. Is that where this Well, come on. They, they we're scratching the surface.

First of all, let me say this, and I'm speaking on behalf of Mitchell and myself, I can't wait to go buy one. All right? I guarantee you I am buying it as soon as they're out.

I'd like a C3, uh, CP three more than R two at first, but I'll take anything they got. And then, you know, you know, it's Disney. Who wants, who doesn't wanna buy a princess, right?

For your little girl, her own, her own Snow White or Cinderella or, or any of the princesses. But let's go. And why stop at Disney?

Why can't we get data? And why do we have to get dried, you know, make 'em, make 'em animals, make 'em anything. This is, it's a little secret.

I I, I've got my agentic AI agents already on the task, and they are already cornering the market on all the supply coming out of China. Yeah. Or more.

These are being, well, No, there's gonna be a har a huge tariff on this. Huge tires. Oh, oh, Geez, tire.

Oh, no. Do you think that Bob, I, But seriously, I mean, Bob, Bob Ider must, his eyes must be lighting up at the prospect of this, or whoever, whoever becomes a CEO of Disney eventually. I mean, because they've been struggling with the theme parks.

They're overpriced, they've had issues with weather, et cetera. But this is an opportunity to kind of build a new product line, a new Monet monetize something. And maybe they do it ironically, through robotics.

I don't know. One of the things that stuck out to me is, I was just on iHeartRadio an hour or so ago talking about giving them kind of an update of what, you know, this big AI conference in Silicon Valley is all about with the, with GTC and I talked about the humanoid robots. And there in the consumer space, there's a lot of fear of, of what a humanoid robot actually is.

So I wonder, when I saw this partnership with Walt Disney and Google and Nvidia, is this gonna help start to get the general population more comfortable with robots and show mm-hmm. How they're able to be used from an entertainment perspective? I think some of the fears out there might be dialed down by something like this.

Yes. Like a kind of cute and cuddly approach versus they're not gonna steal your job. They're, they're gonna entertain you.

They're gonna be your friend. Like I went to, when I went to Carnegie Mellon, we, we had the, the humanoid ro robot there. It was a crude implementation, but nonetheless it had a personality and almost felt as if it was a, another person in the room.

And it, it had a bit of a, a little bit of weird, I hate to say this, but charisma and it reacted to you. And I think that is Lisa, you're right. That is part of probably the mindset.

I got one. You got one dude, we're all getting at, Okay. Mitch.

Pre tariff. Pre tariff right here. Um, but come on, this is a no brainer.

Will this be the killer app for ai? It could be, or Robots or recreational robots. And, and, and you know it, and it'll grow from there, right?

Because today the robot will do stupid tricks. But tomorrow the robot will, will, will continue to get smarter and start doing your homework with you and Everything. I'd do your laundry for.

You do the dishes. Yeah, they'll set up the table. Yeah, there you Go.

Might be a little Backroom bedding on two Robots having a battle. You never know. Whoo.

Spoken like a real Bronx guy right there, man. I, that never crossed my mind. What, what was that?

What was that movie? Not Rock and Suck Robots will be coming up. No, no.

Yeah. Well that would, that would be pretty cool. Crazy.

Anyway, hey, what a great time to be around. We'll, we'll put, what's his name again? That's not R 2D.

D-B-A-D-B-A, right? We'll, we'll put it to the side for now. Where was, I've had him sitting here all this time.

He was just, he wasn't smart enough. Now I just, I could put a chip in there. Um, anyway, what a great, what a great story, what a great way to end our Friday on Textron Gang.

We wish you guys having a great weekend. There's a lot going on in, in, in the world this weekend. You know, a lot of us are starting to get a little better weather right now.

You know, April is coming. Um, so good stuff all around. We have a full text, drunk TV lineup of course, following our gang show today.

So do check that out. Mitch, congratulations on this DevOps research, by the way. That was a nice piece of work there.

Thank you very much. A lot of folks contributed and made help make that happen. So thanks to the team, everybody.

Yeah. Excellent stuff. But for now, on behalf of our gang and all of us here at Tech Storm, have a great weekend everyone.

We'll see you Monday. We're out.