You Won’t Be Replaced by AI — You’ll Be Replaced by the Person Using It | Techstrong Gang

All right. Hey everyone, welcome to Techstrong Gang special edition SUSECON. Hey, this is our third SUSECON Techstrong Gang.

I figured by now you got tired of listening to Mike Vizard and I, so we invited some friends in. Let me introduce you to our gang today. First of all, making his return to the gang after a three-year hiatus, two-year hiatus, Steven Dickens, Hyperframe Research, right?

That's the one. Steven, welcome back. Once a gang, always a gang.

Always part of the gang. Absolutely. The tattoo one is...

Well, you don't want to show them that. No, not on the camera. Okay.

I've got a future of tattoos somewhere. I'm not going to say. But, and then joining to my immediate right is Christine Puccio, who's with SUSE, and she handles the big deals here, big relationships and stuff like that.

She'll tell you about it. And of course, we've got Mike Vizard, our Chief Content Officer. So Mike, it's day two, really day three, because we had the zero day.

What are you seeing? Well, the CTO for SUSE, Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo- Easy for you to say ...

easy for me to say, started us off today with some rousing, cheery words and basically told everybody that IT people are living in a semi-state of fear, and that every time they wake up in the morning, they're worried about somebody's going to change the licensing terms or there's going to be a political situation. There was a press conference later where he said, basically, you're one executive order away from becoming a hostage. And, it just spoke to the whole atmosphere here of what IT folks are dealing with on a regular basis.

The pace of change is a lot faster, and he was making a call for flexibility in the form of resiliency and basically saying that folks needed to have a new psychological attitude. He didn't quote Nietzsche directly, but basically he was saying that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, so be stronger. I don't know.

Steven, you were there? Well, yeah, I think he was maybe a little bit more positive than that. But all joking aside, I think we're seeing both two dynamics.

It's the infrastructure for AI and AI for infrastructure. The infrastructure for AI, that's just exploding. The partnership these guys had this week with NVIDIA around the AI factory, we're just throwing the tech stack up in the air and reimagining that, whether that's at the network, whether that's at security, whether that's at compute, networking, all the way up through the stack.

So I think IT teams are having to get their head around that. It's going to be containers largely, but we're also seeing bare metal, we're seeing virtual... Just everywhere up that stack is there new decisions that people are being tasked with.

So that's on the infrastructure side. Then all these teams are being asked to use AI in their day jobs. It's no longer click ops, it's agentic ops.

So the role of an SRE or a platform engineer is changing, and we've not had those terms for very long. Those are three or four-year-old job titles, and even those are changing. So I think it's teams are looking at a completely different stack, and they're also looking at their job fundamentally changing.

And that's a big cognitive load for these teams. Do you think that there will be two stacks or maybe two or more, depending on if you want to count mainframes, but there's a stack that we built for humans, and now there's a stack of AI that we're building for agents, and will these live side by side, or will that all converge? I think it'll converge.

You mentioned the mainframe, you baited me there, so I'll go there. You know me, you can't mention the M word without a reaction. But no, all joking aside, those guys have made collaborations with ARM and announced pieces there.

AI is running on the mainframe with the Spire accelerator. So I think just all of the terms are blurring. If you're managing and running infrastructure today, you've got to be AI savvy, both in what that means as the constraints and demands on your infrastructure, but also how you're going to manage it.

I don't disagree. Christina, you have? Well, I was saying, I think that using it, being a user of agentic and agents inside of a company, I think people are dabbling with the technology, but when you start to reorg, and you start to look at your organization as a whole and how it's actually infused, we're not quite there yet.

And I think that we're at the tip. It seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, which you frequently do- That'll be a first. But I feel like the first wave of AI was, tiger teams built something that was a one-off.

Mm-hmm. And now we're trying to figure out how's that going to get operationalized in a real IT way, and the pros from Dover are showing up and going, "Guys, that's not going to scale. " Well, I think we've got a couple of different tensions.

I think we've got the path you were on. We've seen AI Factory, SUSE have announced a collaboration today. We've seen that from HP, we've seen it from Dell, we've seen it from Lenovo, we've seen it from Cisco.

Everybody's got that kind of opinionated reference architecture. So we were starting to get towards a deployment model, then we throw in clause, and then all the challenges that that brings. So I think we were on a path to it being okay, and now we've thrown something else in on top that's blowing up security, governance, access to data, agentic tokenomics, all of those things.

Mm-hmm. So I think we were on the right glide path. I think we've taken a blip back into a bit more chaos, but I think we're on a good long-term trajectory.

But this is the nature of the beast. When has anyone ever stopped because of security? It's the pace, though.

It's the pace. Right. Yeah.

Well, the pace is- The pace is different ... much and faster. But the train's left the station.

Look, we're a small... We've been on a bit of an agentic journey the last month, month and a half. We've got some people on OpenCore run Mac Minis and doing their thing.

We have other people on Perplexity Computer using that. I've let people experiment and report back. That's the only thing I ask, is report back what we're doing so we can try to normalize that.

I do think it's a chaotic time for people, especially people in larger organizations, because they're seeing this company laid off 30,000 people, this company laid off 16,000 people. We're going to replace our junior engineers, we're going to replace our marketing team. We're going to replace, replace, replace.

But I think longer term, yes, some people are going to be replaced. Let's not kid ourselves, right? Yes.

Some people's jobs will be eliminated. But the people who embrace this are going to be more valuable than ever. And that's the important thing to remember.

The other thing about the hardware infrastructure for AI, is this a momentary supply chain issue, or does it go to the sovereignty issue, which is here loud and clear? Because it's interesting. Sovereignty is important in the US too.

It's just a different kind of sovereignty. Data sovereignty. Well, and it's Chinese.

Right. Yeah. Keep the Chinese out sovereignty, right?

Yeah. Sure. That's what it's about.

Where here, they want someone else kept out of it. Nobody in New York wants their gear in Texas, because you know how... Well, there is that.

But- The interstate issues. Yeah. Well, there is.

But clearly, I think that's why there's more juice at this conference than there has been in years past, because people are recognizing this. It is data sovereignty, it's AI sovereignty, it's infrastructure sovereignty. It's personal freedom and choice, and that's why the whole open thing appeals to them, especially in times of uncertainty.

No one wants to be locked in. Though you're an ex-IBM, you know this, no one gets fired from buying IBM either, theoretically. Theoretically.

I think the fear factor in all of this is nobody wants to be the IT leader who goes to the board and says, "All right. We're going to write a check for $5 million for this platform, we're going to build out and all of that," and then have the world change out from underneath them six months later and have to go back to the board and say, "I was just kidding. " Yeah.

You need another tech. I believe it is chaotic, though. Just even looking at the demos that we had and the partners that we had that had created agents, so to what Rick was talking about, what Abhinav was talking about at the keynote.

You have to let people and customers look at it. It's like the what, how? Because I think it's still kind of like, how do I do this?

What does a 24 by 7 SRE look like? And so that's why we had varying degrees of tools that we were able to showcase so we could at least start the conversation. That's really what that was.

" Whether it was with Rancher Prime, whether it was with MLM, Multi Linux Manager, we had nobody say no. " And they're interested in getting more customers and other partners understanding the what. Well, let's shift gears and talk about the partners now.

Because one of the things that has impressed me about this, and I've been following this company since when Novell bought it. Right. So I've been around.

I watched all the pieces and the parts come and go over the years. And one of the things I've noticed, and I also spent a lot of time in the channel at one point, and those people like stability, and they don't partner unless they have a perception that something is stable. And for a lot of years, SUSE didn't have a lot of partners because there was a lot of movement and a lot of shifting.

But as I walk around here, I notice there's a boatload of partners and people who are working with the company. So is that whole vibe changing now, and is there an ecosystem starting to emerge here? You wrote in your blog about the 80%/20%, the baseball analogy.

Right. Luck. Luck.

Well, he knows this probably, I'm sure. So Branch Rickey said that luck is 80% perspiration and 20% inspiration. And so one may say that SUSE is very lucky in that we see this convergence of geopolitical uncertainty, AI coming to the forefront, open source, open infrastructure becoming a standard, including cloud native.

But it's not luck. It's 34 years of hard work. It's 80% of perspiration.

You get lucky. So I have a different... So I say luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

Yep. I like that. And you know what?

We've been prepared for a long time. And because you're seeing all the partners here, we've been working on this for the past couple of years. It's just every year you inch forward.

And then I think that we've seen SAP be so dominant, still a very strategic partner for us. And now you have the announcements that we did with AWS. Now you have what we've done with Nvidia.

We just brought on Oracle. All of that is just making the luck and the preparation meets opportunity, and you're also starting to see now smaller startups where we haven't really played. We're working with Ravinium and they're a startup and they're in their seed.

This year's different, though. It is very different. I've been coming to SUSE CON for years.

This year that you are at right, guys, there is something different about the company this year. I'm with you. I think that it's had a buffeted past over the years.

Mm-hmm. Various different owners I think the continuity the DP is bringing, what is he, three years now into the role? I think that's starting to reflect.

As you said, Mike, partners look for stability and for opportunity. I think SUSE has got both of those at the moment. The cliche I would use is luck is the residue of good design.

There we go. Luck is something more my role. All right.

What the heck? It's something. I like food.

It's your turn to bring me with. Nothing. I got nowhere to go.

Luck is lucky. But let me say something else though. It's execution.

I think you're looking at it bass ackwards. I think, again, the situation calls for no one company is going to be able to offer the whole enchilada here. Yeah, for sure.

Agreed. Well, Nvidia would think they are. Well, when you got a $5 trillion market cap, you can too, my friend.

So when Nvidia, they're what? $5 trillion market cap, maybe they can go it alone more than others, though they partner with everyone as I think we've seen. No, I think everybody partners with them.

With them. Exactly. That's the distinct difference.

They're the pretty girl at the prom, for sure. Yeah. But here's the thing, I think these partners are sensing that SUSE is a stable, a ship, a safe port in the storm.

As this unfolds, SUSE has a vision. SUSE has multiple parts of this puzzle that they can incorporate and fit into. So, it always takes two to tango.

I agree, and I think that the other piece to this, one of the startup partners that we're working with had a blueprint and had solicited that blueprint to another partner, which that partner wanted to put in some non-open source items to make the solution. And, we're the only true open source partner out there now, really, in this particular space. You guys have been talking about choice for years.

Yeah. Yeah. I think now we're bolstering it.

I think you're seeing a lot more meaning behind it and partners, we've been staying with that message for the past three years. So where you look at it now or the buzz that you're feeling, that has been the preparation to get there and partners like its stability. I also think the barrier to partnership is coming down with things like MCP now.

Yeah. The integration is a lot easier, and I'm not going to be fighting over GUIs and all this other stuff, that it becomes a chat interface, and if everything's a back end service, I can mix and match a lot more easily. But there's another element to the SUSE ecosystem.

There are the, let's call them technology partners. That's what you're talking about, I'm integrating software and stuff. There are the channel partners.

I just interviewed a gentleman from, I think it was FIS in Germany. They're an MSP. Well, they're a customer, but they're a partner, because they're reselling that.

There are the Nvidia technology partners, certainly. There's the Lenovos and HPEs. But you've been in the channel business for years.

SUSE, in a very quiet, unassuming, I guess, European way, has assembled a partner program, an ecosystem from soup to nuts, from A to Z. Yeah. Each way, resellers, the whole thing.

And those guys don't swap out vendor partners unless there's a really super compelling reason. And they won't do it just for one customer. There has to be enough of a recurring business in it for them.

Yeah. They're hard sells. Well, market shifts, right?

There's been market shifts with things like with Broadcom and things with IBM and so we've been able to be stable in that area because we haven't really changed much, except for acquisitions to bring on more to the portfolio. Right. And we've had a lot of the channel partners, we've had a lot of the MSPs.

We're starting to become more nimble as a part of that. We're engaging in our programs to be a little bit more flexible. So you're seeing us take care of the partners in a way where it's easier to onboard them to be able to develop to the technology and MCP is one of the right access.

And to make them successful, though, too. And successful. I had a good interview with Werner, the CRO.

I saw him. And I asked him about his team, and he really emphasized that a big part of his team was partner success. Yeah.

Yeah. Right? The channel, what I would call channel because I'm old school, but he had a different name for it, but their go to market with these partners is really a big part of his go to market plan overall.

And then you layer over that, I think, particularly SUSE being European, some of those European partners are looking to ally with non-US-based tech companies. That's pretty slim pickings for companies that have got the breadth of stack that SUSE's got. I think it's one.

Yeah. So I think what people are seeing, specifically those European partners, whether that's ISVs, go to market partners, GSIs, and MSPs who are looking to build sovereign cloud solutions, you bring that ecosystem together of opportunity for SUSE. They're pretty much the only game in town in this region.

I spoke to the CTO at Fujitsu FS, I forget the name, but it's Fujitsu. It used to be Fujitsu Services, Global Services or something like that, but it's Fujitsu. And that's back basically what his point was.

He was CTO for EMEA. And they're probably the biggest European partner of SUSE right now. And exactly what you said there.

I want to shift the gear because we've talked now about ... issues that the CIO is dealing with. We talked about the partners, but there's also the rank and file, many of which are here.

And many of them, they're lovely people, but some of them are walking around with that look like the deer in the headlights kind of thing. Because what they're seeing is a movement away from what we call ClickOps to this more GitOps kind of mindset, and a lot of them are like, "What's GitOps? " And there's not a whole lot of DevOps and platform engineering people here just yet, and there's- Just not yet ...

and there's a transition that's occurring. But from your perspective, how are you going to take the base of those folks and kind of bring them along? Because that seems to be the really biggest challenge in this set, is figuring out how to get these people skilled up for this next adventure.

That's going to be the next wave. And I think that's one of the reasons why we are connecting to different people in the industry, like the partners. Look at StackLock, another startup.

Craig was here. You interviewed Craig yesterday. Craig is speaking at DevOps Experience.

He submitted right after we spoke. Right. Yeah.

So, we just were speaking about how we're going to start creating a community to grab in customers and partners and us, and to start educating. So it starts with getting yet another community and looking at that. In fact, we talked to Craig about how we could possibly do that, and even proving out the model.

So there's a handful of customers that we're looking at talking to, instead of just creating something and going on site and proving it out, and that's really how it's going to start. And SUSE has been leaning into that with services. I spent some time walking around and chatting to the services team on their booth.

You can get an accreditation free at this training course. Really? Yeah.

Get a training course, get an accreditation free at the conference. There's meeting rooms where people are taking certification courses. So I think SUSE is realizing this and leaning into services.

Services isn't just premium support now, it's consulting. It's also that training piece. Yeah.

They're seeing a lot of people move from VMware, and those guys have maybe got 20, 25 years of experience- Yeah ... in that platform, and they built a career. They need to move, they need to learn what it means to run a virtual machine on Rancher Prime, what it means to move into cloud native.

So I think SUSE is jumping into that space and providing a guide rail. That's a good point. And what makes those people move on that particular dime?

" They identified with a particular platform. Same thing with mainframers, right? They were tied to the platform.

This conversation is you're not really identifying your career with a particular platform anymore. " Yeah. " No, we're redealing the cards.

So I think everybody gets a new hand. Absolutely. Yeah.

Absolutely. People are looking at their careers. Let me tell you something else.

I heard something here today and it made me realize it. We've been talking about, I'm just going to call it what it is, we've been talking about Broadcom's taking over of VMware and how certain VMware customers reacted. And it's created a tremendous opportunity, not only to look at the pricing, but to look at, "Where do I want to be?

Do I want to be in the cloud? Do I want to be cloud native? Do I want to just stay on a hypervisor?

" It wasn't until today, I spoke to the gentleman from FIS ASP, a big partner here, a big German... I think they run four big data centers. Mostly SAP, 1,500 SAP customers.

His reaction to how they were treated by VMware/Broadcom was visceral. He would rather die than stay on VMware, because he feels so put off that they tried to shove it down his throat. " And it left such a bad taste in their mouth that they didn't even care about the price.

It was the way they were treated was insulting to them, and it was a visceral reaction of, "I'm not going to use them anymore. " So the analogy I've been using is a sampling bias. If you're a trauma surgeon and somebody asks you your opinion of motorbikes, you're going to have one opinion.

If you're a Hells Angel, you're going to have a different opinion of motorbikes. I think we've over-sampled those Broadcom customers who've had that experience, and then we've extrapolated that to be the long tail of everybody else. Right.

So I don't disagree that there is a bunch of people out there that are annoyed. There are some people, yeah. There's some people out there annoyed, but that's trauma surgeons having opinions about motorbikes.

I think there's a longer tail who are maybe just not jumping on LinkedIn, they're not jumping on podcasts, and they're going to be on a march to go, "Hey, there'll be a VCF 9, there'll be a VCF 10, there'll be a VCF 11. We've spent 25 years on this stuff. It's been pretty good.

" Not everybody had a price increase. No. So I think, but we've over-sampled that base.

I'm not saying that there isn't a base of people. I'd be crazy to say that. But it's certainly created a opportunity in the market.

We'll get signal in a couple of months' time when we go to VMware Explore. They told us 10,000 people had adopted VCF 9 when we were at that event last year. Yeah.

We'll get a view of this in a couple of weeks' time when we get to that event. You can write this date down. Steven, you're right.

VCF numbers were up this quarter and- There you go ... there you go. But I like what you said, though.

We're reshuffling the deck. Yeah. And when you look at thatAnd I use this very basic example.

So my daughter is going to school and is going to be an illustrator. They did not even have an AI degree. This is a year ago when she started.

Google and Meta and Deloitte have put in money into the school to help create what an AI major would be for creatives. Now they're using about five or six tools with illustration, with animation. And so that is reshuffling the deck.

You have to lean into the technology in order to understand it. So if I'm an engineer, a platform engineer, or I'm an SRE, if I'm not leaning in to understand what the models are, how do I use what agent to create something that's more 24 by seven that can take some time off? That's the irrelevancy.

That's going to make you irrelevant. And come full circle. Regardless of how many licenses are sold, the number of people required to manage all of that, AKA what we call VMware administrators, is declining, and their ability to get a raise is declining with that.

The people who have AI platform engineering skills, demand is rising, and they make this much more than those guys. Yeah. So.

The key piece for me is you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by the person who understands AI better than you. That's it.

Who uses it better. So if the audience wants to take one thing away, whether we've got any practitioners, SRE, platform engineers, single best thing, spend a couple of hours every day learning how AI can unlock a cheat code for you. Because if you want to stay employed, you've got to be using AI.

Absolutely. That's a good place to end this because we're about out of time. Steven, it's good to have you back- Always a pleasure ...

on, man. Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Christina, thank you. Thank you. I know we kind of drafted you in here.

I know. I love it. But we appreciate it.

Yes. Enjoyed the chat. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you. Mike and I will be back tomorrow, wrapping up our Techstrong gang from SUSE CON.

Who knows who will be our guest tomorrow? We'll see. But until then, hey, that's it for our Wednesday coverage.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow. But for now, this is Alan Shimel for the Techstrong TV and Techstrong gang. We're out.