Techstrong Gang – September 24, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Tuesday. We've got a report from the Edge for you today.

Plus, can you believe we're returning to three mile out a three mile island? And what are our best sustainability practices? All this and more, you are watching Textron gag.

Hi everyone. Alan Shimmel here for Techstrong. Happy Tuesday to you.

We've got a great tech strong gang set up for today. As I mentioned in the earlier, uh, segment, we're gonna talk about Edge and a recent tech field Day edge computing event at our friend Steven FoST and the Tech Field Day team conducted. We're also gonna talk about a, a new plan.

Again, everybody wants electricity for, for data centers. Well, let's, let's revive some failed nuclear reactors. That sounds like a plan.

What could go wrong? And we've got best sustainability practices by our own sustainability analyst, Bonnie Schneider and Josh Harbert. Well, so I guess I gave away Bonnie, one of our guests on Techron Gang today.

We're gonna come back to her in a second. But first let me mention, well, I mentioned his name too. He is the founder of Tech Field Day, and he's a regular here on the gang joining us.

I think from home today. It's good to be home. Steven Foskett.

Hey Steven. Welcome. Absolutely.

There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

You're supposed to click your heels when you do that. How do you know you can't see my heels? Maybe I won't.

I can see you don't have red ruby slippers. Well, if you do, maybe as a matter of fact, I give you a hundred bucks right now if you pick up your feet and there were red ruby slippers on there, I think. Um, I I don't want your a hundred bucks, so I'm not gonna, okay.

So you just have to keep guessing. Welcome, Steven. Joining Steven and I today is our, uh, tech drug, CTO and Fu of CTA.

Mitch Ashley. Hey Mitchell, how are you? I'm doing great and I think I have a pair of Crocs on, but they aren't red.

Sorry. We would expect nothing less from a bolder person. Remember the guy in our, uh, in our incubator, the mob use incubator, who's family invite invented the things that go in the Crocs?

Oh yeah. Those little, the little, uh, rich, rich, rich, rich. That's right.

Schneer sch Smeller, right? Yep. I was We knew wind.

Yeah. Yeah. No, rich wasn't successful.

His wife and daughter were. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, congratulations to them, them joining us here in our Boca Ratone headquarters.

We'll tell you the Reza story. One day on my, well, on my immediate left, I've already introduced her. She's our sustainability analyst and, uh, editor.

She's a meteorologist, accomplished author and a bunch of other things. Bonnie Schneider. Hey, Bonnie, how are you?

I'm doing well, Alan. Great to be here. Thanks to have you here.

And then to my far left, he's our chief content officer. He is moving to New York, but he's back here in Boca because you could check out, but you can never leave. Um, oh, no, that's California's California.

Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you? Happy to be here.

And I am on the edge of my seat. You're on the edge. We're all on the edge.

The edge. All right. Speaking of the edge.

So Steven, you guys did a, uh, edge Tech Field Day. I caught some of it. Um, but why don't you, you know, give a report from the field, if you will, on Edge Tech Field Day.

And it, maybe while you're at it, not everyone out here might be familiar with Tech Field Day. Somewhere. We should kind of set that table.

Yeah, thanks a lot. Um, so great to be here. Um, returning to the gang once again.

And, uh, great to bring a little bit of a report of my takeaways from another Tech Field Day event. Uh, we did the same thing with our AI Field Day recently. Um, and, and so Tech Field Day is a great, uh, great little event that I've been running for 15 years now.

Essentially, I pick a panel of people just like the people here on the panel on Textron Gang. In fact, literally just like the people on the Textron Gang 'cause it's included you and, and Mitch and, and, and Guy Coer and Stephen Dickens and some of the others, Kimberly. And, um, along with a bunch of others, we fly into California and then companies present to them over a couple of days.

And we live stream the thing on, uh, tech Strong tv. com, you can see a little bit more about the thing. Um, but yeah, the last week was Edge Field Day.

Uh, edge is a, a topic that's really near to my heart because, well, I'm a hardware nerd, and, uh, ultimately, uh, one of the coolest things about Edge is that there's still a lot of hardware innovation happening. The other cool thing about Edge is that it really encompasses all the different disciplines of it. I mean, you've got container orchestration, you've got virtualization, you've got physical machines, you've got security and networking and storage, and like I said, even nuts and bolts.

And that's pretty cool to hear about, uh, across the spectrum there. And that's really what we saw at our Edge Field Day event. I mean, we had companies, you know, like VMware talking about how they're, uh, this kind of funny.

They, um, they brought in a couple of guys dressed as the men in Black and, and said, we're not the VMware you think we are. And then proceeded to talk about a completely different edge platform that VMware by has, uh, within Broadcom. In fact, they're more within Broadcom than within VMware now, which I think is a, is a really interesting move on the part of Broadcom.

But also it shows a little bit of support for this, uh, sort of alternate VMware product line. Uh, we also talked to our friends from SSA talking about, uh, orchestrating applications at the edge. Uh, they're getting a lot of traction in that space where, you know, allowing companies to, uh, deploy applications anywhere.

And, uh, they, they demonstrated that, uh, with actually hardware for provided by another Edge Field Day partner. Um, we also heard from T second who makes an incredible ruggedized, uh, military grade, uh, storage brick that can store terabytes, petabytes of data transport, uh, you know, terabytes per second of, uh, of throughput. Um, and, and, and survive basically anything.

So if, if you're recording video in the field or collecting data or I don't know, military industrial science, uh, their little brick is, is a pretty cool box for that. And then the next day we, we heard from ZA Data who are doing, um, a basically edge scale. So their thing is that they can, uh, they can deploy across thousands of sites, which is, is pretty awesome.

And then finally on Logic, uh, you know, they're the partner that, uh, everybody partners with. They're a, a, an American company that's manufacturing servers, essentially little, uh, ruggedized edge servers. And, uh, you'll recognize these little orange and silver monsters basically everywhere you go in industry and retail and restaurants and so on.

So it was a pretty cool event. It was pretty neat to, to hear about all this varied stuff at the edge. Absolutely.

Um, you know, I, it's interesting when I first, uh, was introduced to this concept of the Edge, I think it was Simon Crosby, Mitch, uh, you remember Simon from, uh, micro perimeters and stuff and security, right? He was at Citrix for a while and yeah, at Citrix, you know, and, and in his vision, he thought like some of the cellular carriers would, would have sort of a, like a, a a freight container, you know, the big containers that you see on ships that would sit at the bottom of a, of a cell tower, and that that would be the, your edge set to your edge data center. So literally an edge data center, the size of a, a, a free container.

And maybe there's still a place for that, but you know, now we have bricks that have petabytes of, of storage on it, and that that's pretty amazing. And, you know, the, the orange and silver servers, it reminds me of when we were first starting to do worry about dataset density, this company, COBAL Networks came out with those little one u rack mount servers that you could fit, I think it was 40 or 50 into a rack. You can put now an entire system in a box like this, in those cell towers.

So you don't need A big container. Yeah, no, but that, that, you know, back then, I mean, this is going back seven years, eight years, this, this was the concept of the edge. And, um, it, it's amazing to see like everything else, how it's miniaturized.

But I'll tell you something else. Mitchell and I are working on a project with our friends at CloudFlare called the Last Great Cloud Transformation. And it's about something that CloudFlare calls the connectivity clout, which is the amalgamation of all they do.

And the, the, you know, the thing about the edge on it is the edge doesn't live in a vacuum, no pun intended, right? And it, it, it's not replacing the core. You're gonna, you know, we're gonna live in a world where you'll have some things in the core, and AI is a great example of this, right?

There are gonna be some ai, real heavy lifting stuff that you're going to get do at the hyperscaler at the core. There's gonna be a lot of AI that, for latency reasons and everything else you're gonna want at the edge. And then there'll be some AI that takes place, right on the device.

All, uh, you know, Mitchell and I spent the weekend slacking about Apple Intelligence. We've set it up on every device we have, because that's how Mitchell and I rule. Um, not that it does a damn thing, but whatever we did set it up now, connecting these connecting.

And that's where the magic happens when you connect the edge to the device to the core and all of this. So the network piece of this connectivity, and then of course, the security of it at its heart, that's that this connectivity cloud, that cloud Steven CloudFlare should be at this ne the next edge tech field day. We do.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We, You know what, Steven, I'm curious with the, the people that you had at this event, where some great companies, you know, the, the edge, it isn't like there's one definition of what the edge is, right?

It's, it's, you know, one person's edge is ano not another person's edge, mentioning VMware being there. I'm, I'm curious what kind of use cases or experiences like that did you see where maybe the edge is really different in some domains than others? Oh, definitely.

And that's, I, you know, I, on Wednesday, uh, before kicking this thing off, I defined the edge more by what it's not than what it is. Uh, the edge is basically not the data center and not the desktop. It is essentially, you know, it's everything else.

And, and, and, and in terms of by what it's not too, if we look at the IT attributes of the edge, this kind of goes to what, what y'all are seeing as well. Um, you know, the edge is defined by, uh, lack of environmental controls, lack of power controls, lack of connectivity, lack of operational, uh, hands-on operational talent, lack of accessibility. And we saw some absolutely incredible, uh, customer use cases, uh, you know, devices operating across the, you know, Canada and, and, and in, in the Arctic, uh, with, uh, you know, well, well below freezing temperatures, devices in the desert at, you know, boiling temperatures, you know, everywhere.

And, and certainly there's military, there's industrial edge, there's industrial IOT. Uh, we saw a use case that involved mining another use case that was a, a, a steel smelter that, uh, got up to 70 degrees C uh, just incredible, um, what these systems have to have to endure. And, and, and in terms of even, even sort of mundane things like retail and restaurants and so on, a lot of the time, these little servers are sitting underneath the fryers or sitting in the corner, uh, with the trash piled on top of 'em or whatever.

There's nobody there to push the button. So a lot of the technologies that we've pioneered, uh, in other areas, like zero touch provisioning and, um, you know, zero trust access and so on, a lot of that stuff is really getting traction at the edge because, you know, you just can't have a system that, that, that needs a lot of babysitting. Also, the same thing with, with networking, you know, and connectivity.

That's, uh, that's sparse. And one more thing that I'll mention too, uh, to your point about the, the containerized data center, one of the biggest thing that's happening at the edge is the virtualization movement. Just like virtualization affected the data center in the cloud, it's really important to virtualize, uh, all these devices at the edge as well, because you don't want to have a rack of 10 different pieces of hardware to run.

You know, the, the, the, the payment processing, the iot processing, the camera control, the security system, all these different things. You want that all to be consolidated into a few different servers. Um, and I'm also gonna give a quick shout out.

There's a group called Edge Monsters that is basically our delegates that are involved in this space. And every month they put together, uh, an open white paper about various topics of the edge. So if you check out Edge Monsters in your favorite search engine or on LinkedIn, you'll see some really cool stuff coming outta that group.

I think we're missing some of the bigger implications on the software side. If you think about it for a minute, we're in the process of, uh, processing and analyzing the data at the point where it's created and consumed. So we're gonna do a lot more of that at the edge to reduce the amount of stuff that gets sent over the network and back to the cloud.

And in many ways, in my mind, the tail is wagging the dog. All of a sudden, there might be a lot more processing happening out at the edge than there is in the cloud one day, Especially with AI inferencing at the edge too, right? Right.

Inferencing at the edge is gonna be big. It's gonna depend on the economics, right? Why do you wanna move stuff to the edge?

Well, you're gonna reduce latency, but if it's prohibitively expensive, we'll be a little more latent, right? Um, so you're, you're going to need that, you know, the economics of it are gonna have to work, but it goes to something Steven said, the edge, the edge is a many faceted thing. Where is the edge?

You know, are you close to the edge? Um, I just wanted to throw that little reference in there. Like I said, I'm, I'm on the edge, so, Oh, no, I was, I'm a yes head, and that was a big album.

But anyway, um, that being said, I, I, I do think it's that this show that Mitchell and I do called The Last Great Cloud Transformation. I think that it, it, it perfectly encapsulates what, what's happening here. The edge is going to be the, it's, I don't know if it'll be the last 'cause who knows, but it's the next great cloud transformation.

It's gonna change the way we look at cloud, and we, it, everything doesn't have to be in that core data center anymore. Um, let's take a break here on Textron Gang. We're gonna come back and I feel like I, we need a Saturday Night Live skit here or something.

Remember, they used to do the Good three Mile Island? Well, you guys may not remember I'm that old, but they used to do some good Three Mile Island skits on Saturday Night Live. And, uh, we'll hear what's go, what, what the next plan is for SAT for Three Mile Island, not Saturday Night Live.

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And Microsoft is talking about licensing some data center energy capabilities from, uh, what was formerly known as Three Mile Island. That's now the, uh, what did you say, Stephen Crane. Crane, clean Energy emphasis on Clean Crane, clean Energy Center.

I think Steven Foskett knows better, which, Which we'll get Steven to kinda explain, but it's a rehabilitation project at the very least. And of course, Microsoft isn't the only people talking about this. Oracle at their event was talking about how they might have many nuclear reactors attached to data centers.

And Steven, what is your sense of what's going on here? I mean, can, uh, everybody have a, uh, a nuclear data center in their backyard? And are, are you ready to put one in there in Cleveland?

We already got a nuclear center here in Cleveland. Um, yeah, but, uh, what I'll say is, uh, I, again, I'm, I'm not gonna bore you all by saying Solar, solar, solar, like I do every time on Textron Gang. Let's talk Nuclear.

Um, so first off, nuclear is actually a great power source, especially for data centers because it's reliable. It is non-polluting, asterisk, sort of, kind of, I'll let you argue that out. It is, uh, you know, carbon neutral again, in terms of point source.

And, um, of course, it's actually a fairly proven and reliable technology. So they're gonna be restarting, uh, three Mile Island. Just for context, my understanding is that, uh, you know, three Mile Island shut down, uh, I think in only, only, only in 2019, uh, because of the economic situation of the cost of power.

And now they're gonna be restarting, uh, what they had running there until very recently. Um, I, I love the fact that they're calling it the Crane Clean Energy Center because, uh, anyone from Baltimore knows the CP crane plant was this horribly blighted, polluted, uh, waterfront park. Uh, same guy.

It's named after the same guy. Um, it's now a park. That's nice.

Um, so basically, yeah, we're gonna be using nuclear energy for, uh, for our data centers. And the Microsoft angle is really cool too, because those are small modular reactors, which is a, another really cool thing that they're looking into there, where they would actually be deploying small, um, industrially manufactured, uh, nuclear reactors right there at the data center, which That's Oracle, not, not Microsoft. Yeah, Oracle.

Yeah, you're right. Thank you. Yeah, yeah.

Mm-Hmm. You know, that's interesting you mentioned the micro reacts because, um, I would say maybe six, seven months ago I did an interview with a company that has since gone public, um, after that interview, I don't know if that had anything to do with it. Um, it's called, uh, nano Nuclear Energy, and they specialize in those portable micro React units.

And they told me that a lot of it is because of the data centers and the need, um, for that. 7 GI Kilowatts or Whatever, but it's, he mentioned Three Mile Island. And one of the questions I had for them at the time, because I think it's just embedded in us, of how do you get beyond this PR issue of, well, nuclear three Mile Island, we're gonna have an accident.

It's not gonna be safe. And, um, the, the gentleman that I interviewed were saying, um, new energy, the green energy, like getting it rebranded, like you were saying, um, is one way to get around it. But I think it's gonna be all hands on deck in order to power these data centers that will be solar and, and, and wind.

Um, and nuclear is coming into play more and more. It looks like, especially with the success I've seen of this recent company. We actually have a lot of experience with this in space, right?

The, the Mars Rover probes that go into space, most of those have nuclear react, self-contained nuclear react that are designed, you know, to of a certain life. And course there we're expending 'em out in space. But it makes, it makes a lot of sense, especially, um, in a dynamic situation.

A lot of, we were talking about the edge before, um, if you need power for a, a data center that you're setting up in a container, I mean shipping container or something like that, a pod at a remote location that doesn't have power to it, you know, middle of the desert, whatever it might be, that's a great solution for it to have a modular reactor kind of option. So I would expect we're gonna see, I dunno if it's gonna proliferate, we're all gonna have our own, you know, backup power supplies that are modular nuclear reactor in the backyard quite yet. But, um, I think there's a lot of commercial, industrial and military applications of this.

Yeah. That company I just wanna mention, they, they just got a contract with, um, a German, uh, government, um, in that area in, um, which we're talking about with space and everything. So, yeah, I, I think that's gonna be the growth area.

I'm having a hard time picturing the town meeting where I go and the local supervisors are trying to explain to everybody that we're gonna put a nuclear reactor in to help the data center. And I got a feeling everybody in the town is pretty much gonna go, I don't think so. Maybe go fight another town.

Well, Niese, but, so here's, here's where I am. First of all, I don't think we laid it out right fully for folks. What it is is Microsoft is building a new data center near Three Mile Island, and they've contracted to use all of the electricity that this nuclear data center is going to put out for the next 20 years Or Concern or something like that, right?

And I, it's enough to power 800,000 homes. Wow. It's a lot of electricity.

Now, we've made a lot of progress in our nuclear reactor design from the early sixties when three Mile Island was originally early to mid sixties when Three Mile Island was originally designed and, and construction started there. Lot of progress. And I, I read a great article this weekend on Nuclear fusion and, and they're saying we will have some commercial fusion plants in the mid thirties, just in time for quantum computing, if you believe that.

Um, so I am not against nuclear, however, the child of the seventies that I am, who, whose brilliant idea was it to go back to three Mile Island. This is the, this is the ultimate boogeyman of the nuclear industry. I don't give a sh I don't care what name you wanna call this thing, it's still Three Mile Island.

There was a popular movie we had Movie, movie, exactly. Had you forget the movie. Who I wouldn't wanna touch this radioactive beast with a 10 foot pole.

Why would you do this? Go build something fresh and new. Maybe the price was right.

Know, hey, I feel like John Belushi, you know, they're smoking dope in Mexico. I might not get the electricity and time to drive my AI revenue model if I go. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But this is, this is just, look, this is a disaster waiting to happen. I'm telling you, Literally maybe a PR disaster. A pr Right?

It's a pr hurdle. How do, can you imagine the poor marketing shuck this wound up on their desk? And he said, wait a second.

What could I rename it? What could I rename it? And in the ultimate irony he said, let me give it to him.

Good. I'll name it for that guy, Charles Crane, that bastard champion of clean energy. Look what they did for Baltimore.

Everyone who's in that park, God knows what we'll find out in 20 years. It may, it may not be a good look for AI either. 'cause people will start equating AI with nuclear in three mile Island and they're gonna go, you know what?

Maybe we'll slow down. Well, you just hit it. It's okay to equate it with nuclear.

Let's equate it with new nuclear, fresh nuclear, safe nuclear. Not three mile island Like this Oracle. Come on guys.

Like this Oracle story. Exactly. I mean, you've got this Oracle React.

Oracle sounds cool. They've got much, you know, they're, they're a modular design. They're easy to maintain, they're easy to run.

They're, you know, a lot less expensive. I think I, I think Youi should also give a reality check too. The reason three Mile Island was shut down is not because of the accident.

I mean, it's important to understand the accident actually was a, a proof of the success of nuclear safety because it did not meltdown. Totally Meltdown. But, but they did close one of the three reactors.

Yes. Well, Yeah, they closed the one that was damaged. Yeah.

But, um, but the important thing is that to, to to note is that it was, it's the, the, uh, economics of nuclear that didn't work out. Not the safety, it's the economics. This, this station was running.

It says, um, I looked it up here. It says that it was running at $44 per megawatt hour, which is significantly more expensive than natural gas plants. Significantly more.

I, I'm sorry, I have to say it. Way more expensive than solar. And, um, and, and Microsoft just signed a 20 year lease on at a, at a very high price for electricity.

This may actually be more of a disaster in terms of contract and finance than in terms of anything related to nuclear safety, Safety. Unless they know how much those AI prompts are gonna cost in the future as they keep building. No, no, I saw the new, the, um, what's the Nvidia new set Rock, not Rockwell, Mitch, you remember the name?

Whatever the new Nvidia chip set. Blackwell. Blackwell, yeah.

What did they say? It was a hundred, a hundred megawatts or so. It's gonna cost a lot to run one of those puppies.

Yeah. Is the bottom line. And so you're going to need this, but I, as I say, I'm not against nuclear.

I think we've made a ton of progress. I just don't know whose bright idea was to, to Recommission three Mile Island. That, that's just, I don't know.

Let me just ask a a, a question here. So will you trust chat GPT to answer the question how much radiation is safe? Yeah.

That fact chat, GPT or Microsoft copilot. Yeah, you have to have the right prompt, I guess. Yeah.

Um, but you know, in the same vein, Steven, you love this. I, I read another interesting story this weekend that, um, I think it was Columbia University and a university over in China came up with this fantastic idea of installing 51 billion, 51 billion with a b solar panels to over the over highways. Mm-hmm.

Right over our interstate highway system. If you make it high enough for trucks to get in there and you install like a solar power, you know, a lattice that you put solar panels on, they think we can replace 60% of our energy needs with that. That's Interesting.

I mean, Steven, I feel like every company out there is betting on all forms of power sources. They're looking at hydro themic, geo themic, whatever it's called, um, Grease, lightning Grease. So I mean, is it, is, is this like an either or conversation or is it all of the above?

I Think it's all of the above. And I think that there's a lot of nuance to it. Um, you know, one of the nice things about nuclear is that it operates 24 7.

It's a very steady, uh, power source, unlike, frankly, almost every other power source. I mean, one of the, one of the reasons that frankly, natural gas is so attractive is because you can spin up and spin down the natural gas generator. Um, you can adjust the power output literally in seconds, which is something that's very useful.

And I think that we're gonna continue to use natural gas for, um, kind of filling in the gaps in energy for a long time. And you mentioned that there's all these other ones. Absolutely.

Um, you know, geothermal, uh, costs a lot, but is very low. You know, pollution, um, you know, solar is, is very inexpensive now, but of course it only works when the sun's out. And so we have to have batteries and batteries add to the cost.

And so there's, I think we're gonna have a very, uh, distributed and diverse energy system. And I think that it makes sense to have nuclear in there as one of the options as sort of the base, uh, generating load, especially if we can make it, uh, less expensive and, and more reliable. And remember too, one of the reasons nuclear is so expensive is permits and NIMBYs Regulatory.

And you know, I mean, there, there, there's just one nuclear plant that's been built in the last few decades in the US because nobody wants to add a new nuclear plant because of the worries about three mile Island. And that's what drives up the cost of it. Yeah.

I look, my, my personal opinion is, I think, as I said, we've come a long way on fission fusions. Fusion's a game changer that that's what I, we've been chasing fusion for decades, so Yes sir. I know it's always just out of reach.

Mm-Hmm. Anyway, I think this segment's just about out of time. Mm-Hmm.

So we're gonna take a break here on Textron Gang and we're gonna come back and we're gonna stay on this green theme for today. And Bonnie's gonna talk to us a little bit about best sustainability practice practices You are watching Textron Gang Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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org. And if this does, name doesn't sound familiar to you, it's because it hasn't been around too long. They actually started this, uh, organization, uh, nonprofit it right around the time of covid.

So just a few years ago. And the concept came from what can we do to make it more sustainable? And it really blew up from there.

Now they have, uh, chapters and, and people from all over the world that are involved in this organization. So sustainable. It involves best practices to be more sustainable, whether it's green software, open source, ai, of course, I talked with Josh about all of these things and where he sees the future going and how IT practitioners can learn more about being green with their development.

org. I know you're a founder of the organization. It's Almost been three years, not quite.

Uh, we needed to advance sustainability globally and that we needed technology leader to play an active role in it. So almost three years. And the initial mandate was gonna be around telling stories, and it very quickly turned to we needed to establish a standard for technology for their departments, for their business, and really for their industries.

Second was building community. Too many of these organizations were doing things in isolation. They weren't almost afraid to share their stories around sustainability.

Third is around education. And we're just now starting to really evolve that. Uh, we have a really strong community.

We offer all sorts of webinars and other programs to be able to deliver to our membership and beyond. Uh, but we're gonna continue to evolve with education, meaning, uh, leveling skills and everybody we've within their departments and talk about sustainability. And then I think lastly is one that we're still pretty immature on, but we've had made a lot of progress is really in the transparency piece.

And that's establishing the benchmarks, right? We're not gonna be the one set the benchmarks, but we want to make sure that we're, uh, leaders and making sure folks are starting to measure and make improvements. Can You talk more about those standards that you mentioned?

Our audience is filled with IT practitioners and they may be unfamiliar with the standards and, and the practices of being more sustainable, Donna? Well, these are open standards and for, for us, again, this was about it's ability to really describe three core areas. Obviously environmental is what everybody's honing in on now.

And we've got a set of 240 different metrics that we outline. com. You just clicked on standards and you everybody can go through these, but it's environmental, so, and governance.

We also have those that are centered around, you know, social. So what are some of the things that we're doing to help it measure technology accessibility. It could be technology, partner diversity.

A lot of, uh, visibility that's happening today around all of these European directives, whether it's the CSRD or the due diligence directives. Some of these things are about how are you sourcing? And it's not just about the materials, it's about, uh, overall, you know, supply chain that you're driving.

We make these standards real for IT and for IT leaders and practitioners to start to understand how they should categorize and start to look at the structure of these metrics for the organization. That's great. Well, you mentioned the corporate reporting and ESG mandates and things that are happening.

A lot of it's in Europe, but it's certainly coming to the US and in 2025 we'll have new regulations and deadlines to meet. Has that spurred a little bit more urgency in this movement? It has.

And listen, you're right, Europe is certainly has a little bit of a head start, if you will, around their sustainability initiatives. And some of it has been because of the, the regulations and some of it is just simply because of the best practices that they believe in. So it's created urgency around it.

I think secondarily, just forget about ESG or any of the acronyms that people want to use. Comedies are orienting around it, not just because it's the right thing to do, because their employees are really pushing them. Yeah, that's a great point about employees.

I've found that too in the research that I've done. People are pushing it from the outside and from the inside. So how would you say sustainability in IT marries with the overall corporate sustainability package within an organization?

Well, I think, look, there's certainly the, the ability to manage the data in a consistent manner. So, I mean, I think the strategy has to be paid off by technology. We've made some commitments to Comp 29 that participate in the World Economic Forum because there's a lot of strategic discussions that are happening around this problem that they're gonna require technology to go solve.

Big thanks. CIOs and CTOs have to be part of that discussion. Companies are starting to realize that and these technology leaders becoming part of the conversation.

It's really incredible to watch the success and the, and the way this organization has been embraced. I've been following it for a while and in just maybe the past few months, they've been invited by the UN to be part of Climate Week and the organization's involvement there and in policy. So there's gonna be in a conference next month in Austin around this topic as well.

This is a really a growing movement. And it's not just IT workers that you're gonna see that are part of it. There are executives from companies from all over the world that are, um, wanting just to be more sustainable and learn best practices.

So the standards that I mentioned in the video are on their website. They're trying to uniform these metrics for people to practice. And I I know Alan, you knew one of the, you know, one of the co-founders as well.

Yes. Yeah, it was, uh oh, darn it. You put me on the CEO founder of Delphix.

He really was the guy who, yeah, who started this. I think it's great. I gotta tell you the truth, I still can't get over this three mile aisle.

I'm sitting there, this is like an Easter egg that they named it for this guy Craig. org. And, and I'll tell you something, having spoken to the guy from Delphix years ago about this during COV, it's, this is something that it's, time has come, the time is now.

The place is now. We, we need this done. Um, I think for all the reasons that we just spoke about all the, and we've been talking about it for weeks, data centers and ai, energy consumption and everything else, we've got to get serious about green IT and being more, um, mindful of, of, you know, the impact on our environment that all of these great technologies have in the age of nuclear it.

I'm not sure green is the right phrase anymore though. Ah, Would you prefer neon Oring green? Yeah.

Neon. Yeah. Is he the jeed?

Is that who you're thinking? Jeed is the Delphix fellow. You know, what's really also interesting about this from exploring it is that it's not just these leaders that come together, it's coming internally.

All the employees are pushing the, the, uh, leadership to do this. So it's really a uniform movement that's across the board and, and all I was just fascinated by all the different types of companies that are involved with it. It's not just software and it it's consumer companies and things like that.

And Steven, I know you know a lot about this as well. Yeah. I'm very excited about what's going on with sustainable.

It, um, the, the, the, this organization, as you mentioned, um, the thing that gets me about them is that they're not just, you know, about, you know, they're not just chatting and, and blabbering about, oh, we wish there's a lot of muscle behind this thing. I mean, number one, as you pointed out, the variety of companies that are involved in sustainable, it is just kind of mind boggling it. And, and, and across the spectrum of various industries.

I mean, they've got case studies, um, from, you know, Sunbelt Rentals and Rackspace and a DP and all these things on their website. The other thing that's that, that I really like is the fact that they're trying to define standards and metrics so that you can actually compare organization to the organization how you're doing on these things. Now, some of these I think are going to be pretty sad.

I want to, uh, specifically call out S-I-T-E-E two 30, which is the standard for eco-friendly business travel, which let me tell you, is gonna be ugly because there's just no way to have sustainable business travel that doesn't involve horses. And, um, Especially as you go higher up Exactly as you get above the earth, it becomes less and less sustainable. But the thing is, they're measuring this stuff and they're gonna be reporting on this stuff.

And I'm starting to look at these, uh, companies as we're going to these analyst days. I mean, you know, Alan, Mitch, I mean, you know, we, we, I've seen you guys at these analyst days and I've seen you guys asking the question. Uh, you know, tell me about, you know, the, the sustainability.

Tell me about your sustainability goals. Tell me about your sustainability report. And they're becoming more and more, um, nuanced and more and more specific.

So Bonnie, one of the things that you've talked about quite a lot is scope one versus Scope two and three. And the companies are starting to report on that. And I think that that is the result of initiatives like this to open their eyes and, and, and really have a conversation about sustainability instead of just sort of waving a magic wand and saying, yeah, we're green.

Yeah, exactly. Having, having those metrics are, are big deal. And the, those standards, those, that's all new, that's all coming out now.

And just this week I mentioned Climate Week. It's climate week in New York and this week sustainable. It has a whole program.

They're involved with the UN as I mentioned, on global initiatives for, um, IT sustainability. I was telling Josh that it's, it's hard to believe this in three years. Like the, the amount of, um, explosive growth that they've had in membership and interest and everything, and also from government.

So interesting to watch. So Steven, how detailed are those reports? 'cause sometimes I feel like, you know, we'll hear somebody put out a statement about their sustainability initiatives and on page 42 in a footnote, it'll say, you know, and we bought a boatload of carbon credits from Elon Musk and we're good.

Elon. Is the carbon credits? org is that they're trying to make them very detailed and specific.

They've got specific metrics, like I said, numbered metrics with units, with, uh, and, and I think that the goal there is to kind of push the, the industry forward a little bit so that they can't just wave their hands so that they have to, you know, I mean, it's the equivalent of like miles per gallon. You know, you have to have a specific metric, you have to have a specific test that shows that metric. And they've got dozens, maybe hundreds of these metrics on their website that they're pushing people to use.

I think that's a, a smart move and it's a move in the right direction. Um, are companies using this yet? Well, maybe not so much, but I think they will increasingly, right?

I mean, Bonnie, that's, that's what you heard, uh, during your interview. Yeah. And that's what I've seen there, there, I mean, the amount of organizations that I said are, that are joining in their growth, that and the variety of them indicate the answer is yes.

Especially when you have these leaders that are getting it at, uh, from the, from their own employees, from their own shareholders. There's just enough encouragement that they, they wanna have the metrics and then be able to compare them. And I'm sure as time goes on, they'll be rated and, and things and you know, in, in terms of their implementation.

Steven, do you think we will, you know, we go to conferences all the time, physical conferences, and we go to Vegas and you think there'll be some meter somewhere up top that says, you know, and this is how much carbon was consumed to bring 6,000 people to a conference in Vegas? Well, I have seen some 13. I have seen some companies thinking about that now, honestly, right now with technology the way it is, I don't think there's any way to really reduce that too much, except by being smarter about ticketing and travel and so on.

But I mean, ultimately, um, I've been to conferences where the conference organizers bought carbon carbon credits to offset the cost Conference that for CubeCon, I believe. Yeah. Yeah.

Can you get me a soapbox because I, I've gotta step up, right? You said The word Elon. That's trigger.

Lemme deal, lemme explain This. Let me, let me tell everybody in Hyde Park to get off the box here. Yeah, I know.

So, and I've said this before about things, when will we get serious as an industry about sustainability? When our customers demand it, when people are willing to withhold money and they're gonna say, I'm willing to pay to make it sustainable, that's when we'll make this happen. And I don't see that happening when a good portion of our population supports agendas that say there's no such thing as climate change.

That wind power causes cancer. It kills bald eagles and all the other nonsense conspiracy theories that get threshed about in this country. Until that, until people rise up and say, bull crap, this is serious and it's important to us and we need to pay for it because our kids' lives and our grandchildren's lives are dependent on it.

It's often naugh. And I'll step off my soapbox right there. All right.

I gotta go find and you're all behind the shout out. You're good with it. I'm sorry, Mitch.

What? No, other than that, you're, you're all For it, right? Well than that.

Yeah. No, I'm a big, I'm a big, so support of it. I, I think we are, but I think a lot of people talk about it, give you the wink, wink, because at the end of the day, it's drill, baby drill.

And, and by the way, that's not just one party. Go look at the increase in, in oil and gas production Under today than we have Absolutely the highest output. And we don't have, neither candidate for president wants to do anything about fracking or any of this other stuff.

So it is what it is. And until that changes, I don't know if we can really have the, the muscle we need for these. Well, definitely three Mile Island.

Well De yeah, I think it's growing just from looking at this organization and their impact and also the AI and data center demand and that a big part of that. And there are government incentives to have more solar and more wind. So that, that's where you are Today.

There are, they may go away depending. Yeah, I Think we're all betting at this point on, you know, these technologies that are gonna consume carbon and find places to store it and take it outta the atmosphere. 'cause I think we're past the point of making any material difference.

I, I actually read an article on that today. Some, some folks are experimenting with changing the chemistry of the sea that would allow us to be two thou, it would allow it to be like 2000 times more carbon dioxide. It would be able to absorb what could go wrong, What could possibly go Wrong.

I don't like It. I'm now officially terrified. 'cause I read that article too, right?

Yeah. Your own fish tank. Don't start with the C.

Yeah. Well, I don't know, Bonnie, anything else you'd like to add? Uh, Yeah, I will be at this conference that they're having in Austin, Texas, uh, next month.

Um, and speaking of big people that are coming, I'm gonna be hosting a fireside chat with the chief sustainability officer of Dell. Really? Yes.

Very cool. I tell you that happen. Yeah.

So, um, they're just getting the demand and the interest from a variety of companies. It's, uh, global that that's going in. Um, and I'm very honored to be part of it.

And actually speaking of that, today I'm on my way to Miami for the Smart smart Cities conference where we may address some of the things we were talking about earlier with, um, managing traffic and energy and urban infrastructure. So there's just a lot of movement in this space overall with lots of people with great Ideas. And that's why Barney is who she is, right?

We need people like her banging this drum and, and, and leading it. Thank you. Sure.

Thanks for what you do. Alright, I think that's gonna wrap up today's text gang. It was, it was an interesting gang.

Three Mile Island. Who's idea? What's that?

Um, we will be back tomorrow. Hey, Steven. When's the next tech field day?

Uh, today. Oh, okay. So we're actually, uh, doing an exclusive event, uh, with Nokia, uh, literally, uh, right now as people are watching this.

Uh, we're gonna be going live probably right after Textron Gang airs. Um, cool. And then, uh, we've got another event coming up, uh, AI Data Infrastructure Field Day, which is all about, uh, the data storage support for ai.

That's, uh, October 2nd and third. Fantastic. Very cool stuff.

All right, well everyone, we do have a full tech field day after this and, and more tech strong tv. Stephen, one thing we didn't mention, also, if you ever wanna watch any of the old tech field days, these, the Tech Field Day YouTube channel. Yeah, absolutely.

Just go to YouTube slash tech field day. There's tons and tons of great content out there. Um, we're gonna be posting all the Edge Field Day stuff today as well, and so you'll be able to, uh, catch some of the stuff that I talked about earlier in the episode.

So Every day is a tech field. Yeah. Every day could be a tech field day.

I'll take Steven a happy camper. That'd be fun. Can we do it sustainability wise though?

Yeah, they're carbon neutral. All right. Hey, we're outta here.

Have a great day everyone. Happy Tuesday. We'll see you tomorrow for Vortex Strung Gang.