Lenovo + NetApp Making Moves, The Feds on Security, and Dion’s Predictions – EP67

All right. Welcome to episode 67 of Infrastructure Matters because it does matter. Join me today are the usual cohort, Kimberly Diane, uh, somewhat of a slow Newsweek with, unless you're a big fan of enterprise storage, AI data center, power cooling infrastructure matters.

Folks, welcome back. Hope you are, uh, fully in a swing of things. This is the second full week of work as we're recording this.

Uh, hopefully it's been a productive work week for you. Who wants to start off the conversation? Well, I can get started with the big announcements that happened.

Um, not to complain too badly about it, but they got me up at, like, I'm already up at 5:00 AM but I'm usually working out. But the call was at 5:50 AM my time. Yesterday was two days ago.

On Wednesday, I think it was. Um, Lenovo hosted a call to announce that they have, are going to be intent to acquire Infinidat. And so for those GU guys who don't know who Infinidat is, INFINIDAT is a, the third company.

Is it the second company? Second company? No, third or second company.

Moshe started. So Moshe, it was, uh, the originator of something we all know and love if you're in the data storage business called Symmetrics. Um, he is, he was the lead on that.

He left, um, EMC many years ago, started a company called XIV that got sold to IBM. Um, and after that one, he started this company called Infinidat, that was specializing at the time in hard drives, front end by, um, a big cash SSD, and then eventually whatever, but a super high end system, um, targeted the big enterprise companies. And if Lenovo has done very well with their storage environment over the last, whatever years it's been since we've been tracking them on the storage side, all of their relationships up to this point have been OEM.

So they, OEM people like Nutanix, they, OEM, the low end of, uh, NetApp's Systems, um, there's an agreement with NetApp that they're selling it into China, et cetera. Um, they've done well and they've taken over some number one spots according to the IDC counters, um, in the lower end levels of the storage. Um, we've had lots of conversations with them about, you know, what is it gonna take to claim the, the higher level ones and a, you need the products, um, so here would be the likely suspect for you to purchase.

Not that we, we influenced that or anything. Um, in fact, I didn't even pitch embedded data I should have, um, to them. Um, and so here, the, here we are, you know, how many months later that they're acquiring Infinidat, which is a very high end, um, storage system that is primarily sand block, as well as, um, the system also runs a very large, high end scalable, um, backup target.

So g duplication, et cetera. So they're really super solid product. Um, but as you can imagine, competing against the cor crown jewels and the most profitable of the data storage infrastructure is very difficult to do.

They are a profitable company. They're not, you know, not some fly by night kind of company. Um, Phil Bollinger, who, um, has been in the industry forever, took over the CEO Williams, um, five years ago and got them to that profitable cashflow positive space.

So very, very cool to see some of the movements, some of one of the first movements are coming in for the, for 2025. Expect to see a whole lot more. Hey, so Kimberly, this is very interesting.

Um, you know, that we continue to see consolidation in all these spaces, but I, I don't track storage that closely. I'm wondering what you think about, you know, the, uh, the CIOs I work with, they're really don't like to see this, this, uh, consolidation across the infrastructure sector. 'cause it reduces their choice to be beholden to one big vendor, which they have absolutely no, no leverage over.

Uh, are are, are we worried about consolidation or concentration of, uh, of vendors in that space? No, because Lenovo hasn't really been in that space except for the low end. And what I call the space that they've been playing in is the entry level market, um, what I call the server led storage sale where bar goes in pushes that you attach, you want fries with that, here it goes.

Um, and that happens there. So, Lenova, this is entering a new market. It's one of the challenges of this purchase, because they don't, while they have storage salespeople, the guys that go in and these are multimillion dollar transactions that go down, um, the guys that go in and sell this stuff, they, they're focused very much so on this heavy duty technology.

High super high availability, you know, never go down kind of technology. Um, you know, highly, this is where your secure data is gonna be residing, et cetera. So Lenovo's gotta spin that up and bring that to the, to the United States.

And so what we're gonna see now is you'll see in that space competing pure will compete there. Although there may not be at the level of Infinidat, NetApp will definitely be there. We'll see.

Um, PowerMax from Dell is there, IBM's DS 8,000, 8,000 series, as well as IBM's, um, flash system will be up there. And definitely Hitachi who is back in gear. So that's, that's a lot of companies I just rattled off that are in that space.

And there's big enough, enough there to keep that competition going and, um, the pricing, um, situation, uh, under control. So yeah. And what, what enterprise architects do like about these types of moves is that you get more pods, you get more engineered solutions, and the name of the game is in engineered solutions.

Lenovo will now be able to sell. U CIOs may not like this, uh, that no Lenovo can now sell, you know, Lenovo server for more money. 'cause it's more value when you come with a completely engineered Lenovo deci, uh, the Lenovo engineered system.

From a IT op operations perspective, there is a lot of advantages and engineered solutions. They reduce the overall cost of delivering services because you don't have to spend the engineering time taking the best of breeds engineering them together. This is, uh, a obvious, uh, I thought was a obvious hole in Lenovo's offering, not having truly in-house engineered systems.

I fully expect them to at some point fill their networking gap. Uh, as we're looking at challenges around building pods for ai, Lenovo doesn't have a full stack to offer in-house, and I expect that to change over a period of time. Who's available from a networking perspective for them to go out and acquire 'em.

Yeah. You know, we'll, we'll see. So the other piece to the value proposition of Lenovo and fida is where some of the engineering is going to go into is Infinidat has been doing off the shelf hardware.

Um, they don't have the supply chain negotiation capabilities because they're not that big. So we're gonna see Lenovo be able to, you know, bring that muscle into there as well as bring their capabilities of what they have for engineering and design for the infin, that system. So I think what we'll see is improvement.

Um, the guys in Israel, which is where this came out of, are super good, super good engineering. So you combine that with the smarts of what Lenovo is, and I think this is just, just as an all, all over is a good move and really brings another offering to the high end environment. I know Eric Herzog is gonna get p****d off at me for talking the only high end stuff, because they do kind of go, they go down to the smaller sizes, but, um, that's where they played the best.

All right. So that, that, that, that's one story down. Uh, you have another one, cam, Kimberly, what else, uh, did you notice this week?

Yeah, NetApp spun off something called spot, which is a finops offering for managing your financial, the cost of the cloud. Um, they bought them, I don't know, seven years ago maybe at that time, NetApp was really focusing on this cloud strategy, cloud operational strategy. Um, that's where they were going and thinking that, that what was, what's going to grow their TAM into that space.

And Anthony Lai was the lead on that, and they acquired a whole bunch of companies at that time. Spot being one of the lead, one cloud checker in et cetera. So they've spun off both of these cloud checker and spot to Flexera who specializes in finops and those, uh, um, operational efficiencies.

Um, and what this is basically saying is that NetApp is going back to core, which is data infrastructure and some of the key core issues around data infrastructure, which are ai, cybersecurity, you know, all also all the rest of the stuff, hybrid, hybrid cloud or whatever. But that frees up, it just, it, given what we have with AI and what's gonna happen with AI over the next, you know, 12 to 18 months, um, and the capabilities out there, this has raised up a whole lot of, uh, cer engineering to be able to focus on their core, really the core business. And I think it's be, gets them better aligned for the market space.

Yeah, the, I follow the SPOT cloud checker, that part of the bu, uh, or that part of the business for NetApp for quite some years. 'cause that's my space. And NetApp was never really able to tell a cohesive story around how they can do, uh, workload management.

Ontap everywhere on all the public cloud providers has been a wonderful story for NetApp. The ability to do distributed management of all of your data assets across multiple clouds. I'd argue NetApp has the best story of all the MA major cloud providers.

They have per first party solutions with both, uh, GCP, Azure and well all three, uh mm-hmm. First party solutions. And, and it, it's really important to, to, to note that these are first party solutions.

I can buy NetApp ONTAP directly from a WSI can assign access control, uh, rules directly from, uh, my AWS account into the NetApp services. So there are natural services and no other storage provider can, uh, claim that it's unfortunate that they haven't been able to create a cohesive message. And I guess it's better to just give it up than try to play it a game that they just couldn't figure out.

Yeah, And I'll add to that first party, one of the biggest values on that first party, um, position is that they are in the sync of that role of the security, all the security issues. So they're right in the middle of, it's almost, it's, it's their engineering, if you will, um, when you're a first party. And so that when they do an update or a major update, you know, NetApp is right there, stop, you know, lockstep with them.

All right, Diane, let's, uh, move on to your, uh, news of the week. You're, you, you, you've become our resident, uh, follower of all things that are executive orders. The, we're nearing the end of the Biden administration, and with the end of area administration comes a flurry of executive orders.

Which, which of any stood out to you this week? Well, there is, uh, several, uh, but the one that was, uh, I, I kind of raised eyebrows was a last minute, uh, cybersecurity, uh, executive order. Um, it was, you know, they called it sweeping.

Um, and it did have a lot of things inside of it. Um, now we, we do need to always increase our posture with cybersecurity. And, you know, my, my initial read is none these individually are, are bad.

It's just the, the burden it puts on vendors and to some extent, uh, end users is, is very interesting. So the, the first part of it is, is that really, uh, beefs software, supply chain security, so that, uh, uh, security companies are required to submit machine readable attestations of secure development processes and, and looks like it's not just security providers. It looks like it's all software providers.

This, you say That again, machine readable Access of secure development practices so that they know that they don't, that they're not buying or using technology, uh, from vendors. They haven't thoroughly audited to make sure that, that they're, you know, it's not, they're not from China and putting malware inside, you know, some, some library or framework they're using, uh, you know, or, uh, or a a software development team that's in, in, you know, Eastern Europe that might be corrupted by Russia, uh, and they, they're placing back doors in the software. Uh, you have to, you have to say, here's what I've done to prevent you.

Sure. I don't do that. And the machine readable part is interesting, but, but more and more software is now enterprise software is bought through cloud marketplaces.

Uh, I, you know, I did, uh, a bunch of, uh, uh, videos recently with the heads of AWS marketplace, and they did $40 billion in sales last year. They're gonna do over 50 billion this year, billion. I mean, that's a, a large, that's a significant part of the software market.

And what's nice is now, um, you can go in and you can set your dials on what policy and say, here's here's the level of compliance I want to have for, uh, you know, uh, uh, software by providers and their development practices to make sure they're secure. And then it can filter out all the vendors that don't meet that because it's machine readable attestation. So it's interesting.

Yeah. And if you have in-house developers, this puts a burden upon you because you're, uh, providing software services. It, this is not, I, I, again, I don't, I agree with you that I don't think these are necessarily bad things with, uh, the what happened with SolarWinds a few years ago and, uh, having, you know, the right hygiene around software bill of materials.

This is super critical. If you have open source practices, if you're taking down, uh, stream distributions and then adding value upon them, you need some level of assurity that the software, especially the open source software that you're using, is free of these types of malicious defects. And this codifies it to some extent, whether or not you are, uh, under, or whether or not this executive order falls under your burden or not, probably irrelevant.

These are just good things you should look at and determine on whether or not, you know, uh, your software development practices are following, you know, best practices. Yeah. Oh, no.

And, and if that was, uh, it, it would, it would be, you know, I think really good is just that, that was just the very beginning of the executive order. It also covers, uh, things like, uh, uh, mandates federal agencies to adopt phishing resistant authentication methods to move to post quantum, uh, cryptography standards immediately to, so that they have, uh, the federal government uses quantum resistant cryptography across the board, um, mandates AI and cyber defense, uh, has a whole bot about cybersecurity and space, which is getting critical given, uh, you know, there's launches now every two and a half days on average, putting new satellites, uh, data satellites in space. You have kuer coming online soon.

Um, the, the Chinese government's putting their own, uh, constellation up the EU is putting their own constellation up. So, uh, there's a, a bunch of things that, that say, how do we make all that safe so that, you know, hackers don't, don't, uh, take that over and control it. Um, open source software management.

And then to really round out the whole thing. There's a new requirement for vendors, which I like personally. Uh, it establishes a cyber trust mark for our, our consumer Internet of Things devices, which is one of the worst vectors for, uh, security instance.

Uh, since the most of these are small vendors, they barely get their product together. They haven't done the, the full pass for security. And, you know, I remember, um, I was talking to the, the, uh, CIO of, um, uh, Experian when they had, it was a printer driver, uh, an IOT printer driver that, that took their, caused their whole data breach.

You know, so it it's a real thing. Yeah. I, I, I, uh, used to advise customers, uh, one, don't use IOT in your production network because you're asking for trouble.

These are super small vendors. They're security practices, as you mentioned, are, uh, minimum at best. But you know, this whole ideal of isolation and, um, uh, satellite networks of not being able to reach your production network without, uh, at least some significant, significant effort to get from the IOT networks into your production network Network.

Well, that's what microsegmentation becomes so important is you put, put all those devices in their own little playpen that you can't get out of. Right. You know?

Yeah. If you've ever had to, to battle, uh, the early stages of like cold red on Xerox machines, you'll understand why this is important that, uh, these devices have unli, basically unfettered access to your client, uh, networks and potentially your data center network. So again, good hygiene stuff, but another burden upon vendors and businesses.

Uh, I think, uh, my only piece of news is IBM and Core Weave partnered together and Core we would be providing IBM with a supercomputer, which seems kind of weird, right? Right. IBM going to another vendor for a supercomputer, specifically a AI super computer to train their granite models on you need Nvidia chips.

Nvidia chips do not work with power processors. This is a simple math. IBM can either choose to go out to cloud providers and, uh, rent CPU, they can choose to do it slower on IBM mainframes and power based servers, which is not an option.

Or they can partner with someone, I'm sure it's not going to be HPE Dell or Lenovo, uh, their friends at Lenovo. So they chose Core Weave to build the first supercomputer with GB two hundreds. But does Core, core Weave is not a, They're not their provider.

They're provider. They're Provider. So they're using somebody underneath there.

Right. And who, who we, who They're e either they're building it from bits and pieces, uh, custom or they are using someone, but that's obs, ated, I think is the word. Obscured.

The, uh, we're abstracting the way. So maybe it is Dell, uh, or HPE under the hood, but IBM doesn't have to say. So the, I don't know how much of this is the waving of the hands versus, you know, legit engineering work outside of selecting a vendor to basically be the vendor for, uh, uh, Nvidia.

And I think this highlights one of the things in the industry that we don't always recognize Nvidia, choose the customer chooses which vendor Nvidia is going to sell chips too. Dell, Lenovo, HPE for all their bluster. Don't get to choose how many bits and pieces they get from Nvidia.

The cus large customers say, I want you to sell, I want to buy chips from Dell. And that's how Dell is allocated chips, little inter inside, uh, analyst talk there on how these decisions are made. So I'm sure IBM knows who's, who's actually building the, uh, the underlying infrastructure that core we will provide.

Interesting. All right. So we are going to go with our second round of predictions.

This is the beginning of the year. Diane, you had a massive blog post on your predictions. They, it was a little bit non-traditional.

I enjoyed it. It wasn't like, oh, watch these three technologies. You really took at it from a, uh, you looked at it from a strategic perspective.

Recap for us your predictions for 2025. Yeah, you bet. Uh, you, well, I think it's gonna be an interesting year for some reasons.

Um, uh, and, uh, so I'm, I'm gonna go go over my top predictions because there's not time to go over all of them, uh, and to keep it live. They, you guys keep me honest, poke holes in them, make comments on 'em as they go through each one. Um, the, uh, so I, I predict that AI will continue to drive both the tech stock market, um, uh, and growth, uh, for tech companies, uh, until it doesn't.

So at some point this year, there, there is likely to be an inflection point where people say, look, the $400 billion you guys are spending on AI isn't gonna pay off. You're not gonna get ROI in anytime soon. And we might see a, we might see a bubble burst in the, in the tech stock market.

Uh, so far there has been some hope though, uh, uh, late last year, both Lenovo and Palantir became the poster children for, uh, tech companies that are making money off ai. Uh, and, and they're actually turning a net profit. Uh, so, uh, Lenovo, with their AI infused PCs has got a good sales bump.

Uh, and, uh, Palantir attributed their big sales rise entirely to their, their AI services. And so those are, those are the bright spots. And if we see half dozen more of those this year, showing some signs that some vendors are getting, uh, returns, uh, uh, at the stock market, like, 'cause, you know, the, the risk is we end up with a situation like we did with AWS, remember their stock was depressed for years.

'cause Bezos said, I have one chance to become number one. Uh, I'm going to put all, plow all my profits into growing AWS and until we dominate the industry, and then I'll take my profits. And of course, that's not the 90 day returns that the stock market wants, and their stock price was punished for, for like a half decade.

Uh, and that's the risk with AI stocks 'cause that 400 billion. And that's just, that's just so far, Microsoft's thinking another 80 billion this year. How are they ever gonna get that back?

Is what people are starting to ask. And so I think there, there is a chance that we'll see the AI bubble burst this year, at least deflate a little co comments on that. So I love the perspective that, you know, and I I generally agree that AI bubble, if it is a bubble, is not gonna burst this year.

I think this, this is going to be another year of it, and we'll get into, I, I think I only have one prediction this year that I'll sh uh, go in some detail next week on, which is that this is the year that enterprises try ai and that long tail will hit us. And, uh, we'll continue to see kind of this pumping of the market, uh, from the, uh, perspective of preparing For enterprise adoption, which I think will start in earnest this year. I would agree with that, and I, I think we will see some sort of hiccup here and there.

Um, but I think there's other up and comers that will be the investment part of it. Um, part of that reason is because we have seen, you know, whatever percentage, not a whole lot of these AI initiatives make it out the door. I mean, the number I've seen is anywhere, anywhere from 10% to 30% of the initiatives are actually successful and do some sort of, are making it out.

Um, that will probably increase in success over time. Uh, the second piece of that is what we're seeing is that a, the software companies, let's take an SAP or Salesforce or Marketo or, or some of those folks are developing AI tools themselves. So you're gonna, I think, and you probably know about this because you talked to them, if I was A-C-I-O-I pause on some of my initiatives and say, what are my vendor software vendors coming out with that I can don't have to build from scratch.

I can take what they have, add my data to it and push it out. So that, and then getting some of the smaller language models that will be coming out that are very focused will also change how this trajectory goes. So put all of that and maybe that the enterprise doesn't need all this gear, so that where some people are projecting that they would need, um, but it would be purchased by the big software.

Yeah. Maybe on the vendor side. Yeah.

In the, uh, uh, in the, on the hyperscalers as opposed to, uh, we'll see that. I have a prediction about that. So I, I, I only, I'm pulling only my top three predictions, and one of 'em actually covers that a little bit, which is interesting.

Um, so the, my next prediction is that we're gonna see at the high end of the AI market, we're gonna see this, this really bruising competition, um, around achieving, uh, what's called a GI or artificial general intelligence, or, or other people call super intelligence or so AI models that, that are smarter than humans. So, uh, is right now, right now, no AI model has, they can, they have more access to knowledge, but they don't, they can't outperform humans at the very, very high end until very recently, we're starting to see some models cross that benchmark, but that's talking about general intelligence, many people would argue. And so there's a big debate in the industry what that is.

And there's now, uh, benchmarks being developed to measure a GI. So the, uh, the ARC Prize Institute, um, uh, launched a series of benchmarks to see, to try and validate what, which models are closing in on. The traits that they consider are, are artificial demo intelligence.

And this is important because you wanna hook up with an AI vendor that has the biggest vision that will generate, create the most powerful ais that you can then use for your business. And that's the proposition of open AI and philanthropic. And those are the two big vendors that are, that are, that are talking a GI in a big way.

And there's, and they're saying that's their primary goal is to, is to, to reach that. And they, they wanna do that same reason. Uh, the a uh, that Bezos way back in the day was sinking all that money into now Amazon, they wanna be the best, they wanna have the grandest vision with the most superior sweeping products that will attract the buyers.

As if, if AI is going to, you know, transform my business, I better use the vendor with the, the biggest vision, the most powerful products. Um, and, and, and that's what they're betting on. And of course, there's a, most people are concerned about, we're developing things that we don't know yet know how to fully control, uh, of course is the big risk.

Uh, but, uh, you're gonna see at, uh, those two vendors that are, there's a few others there, but they're, they don't, I don't think they have a likelihood of having great industry impact. They're giving it their all. Uh, Altman says, you know, they're syncing tens of billions of dollars into a GI every year, um, and they expect to, to, to have s you know, significant product announcements around this in the next year or two.

So, um, I figure we're, we're gonna see that the high end of the whole AI conversation increasingly go talk about these, these smarter than human, uh, models and ones that, that, that act very much like, uh, humans do in terms of how they, how they think. So it's gonna be fascinating to watch, um, and we hopefully will all benefit from it. Yeah, I, I, I've spent the past two weeks deep diving with, uh, actual end users and helping them through AI and leverage what's out here today.

And I have to say, I'm, I'm, I'm a big skeptical on this whole idea of a GI, uh, from where the state of the art of the technology is today. I, I, I think I can fairly say with confidence, it's not gonna be here to this year, but I love the idea of coming up with standards that we can all agree upon. I've been, uh, frustrated with the, uh, lack of definitions around technical capabilities that have been overtaken by marketing.

I'm, I'm hopeful that the industry can get in front of a GI so that end users really understand, uh, the different levels, uh, and can quantify the different levels of AI that they're using. So maybe we should get the Department of Education involved with the standards, and so they can issue a standard test like we give to our, our school high. Anyway, go on.

Just ignore me. Well, no, that, that's not, that's exactly what's gonna happen. We see the same thing happening with agents.

We're actually seeing, you know, uh, hiring marketplaces, uh, pop up that, that, uh, list digital labor, uh, you know, Salesforce with agent forces doing that. We're gonna see labor standards around, around digital bots here soon. It's gonna be interesting.

Yeah, it's a brave new future, uh, everyone. So, uh, to round out my last, uh, major prediction, um, uh, we're seeing, uh, I just completed it and I, we even did an episode around my CIO insight, um, my, uh, for the, for 2025. Uh, we did, we surveyed some of the top CIOs in the world, and I asked them what they think is gonna happen this year.

Uh, and one of the signals that came out of that is 71% of CIOs says they are seriously recon, wanna reconsider where they're putting their cloud workloads. That's the, by far, the highest number we've ever seen of, of, of CIOs saying they're really gonna rethink where they're gonna gonna put their workloads. And that could be in another cloud provider or another type of cloud provider that could be going, that could mean going from public cloud traditional to, um, serverless.

But, uh, uh, there's a strong undercurrent where a lot of 'em are saying, we're gonna put certain workloads that, that, that run best that way, we're gonna put them back in our data center. So, um, it, uh, using a private cloud model, so same, same cloud technology is just that if it's always on, uh, for example, if workload's constantly running, uh, or if it's, you know, it uses a lot of capacity. Like you're, you're doing this training that's gonna run for weeks or months, why would you pay that cloud markup?

Uh, because not only do you have to pay for them to, to, to run it, you know, a provided or run your workload, but you have to pay for their cost of sales, their marketing, their r and d, and then their profit margin for every minute you're running a workload, you gotta pay, pay that bill in addition to what it actually costs for that provider to run it. It used to be economies of scale would offset a lot of that, and, and they could, the provider could still, um, extract most of that, of that extra cost inside the economies of scale. But that's not necessarily the case with the AI's contract, everything on its head.

So we're not seeing broad based repeat repatriation, but we're seeing like this real saying, we gotta, uh, now that our cloud bill is getting so big, we really have to think smart about where best to run each one of these workloads. And so far it's only on a work workload by workload basis. So we're not seeing people saying, we're gonna recon we're gonna go back and reevaluate every workload we have.

That's not what we're seeing. But we're seeing more willingness now to think outside the box, to think of cloud as a broader spectrum, that it's, it's private, it's edge, it's hybrid, and it's public cloud, and it's these new models, things like, uh, serverless. Uh, we, we need the, if we're, if as we're doing the finops and discovering how much this really cost, we have to get smarter.

And that was so, uh, my prediction of CIOs will extensively rethink their IT supply chains, uh, with respect to cloud in 2025. You know, I looked at your data, looked at your data, which was really, really good, um, the other day. And the other flip side to that though was this piece that said, are you investing in your cloud?

And the answer was yes. So it's not like it's going away at all. No, not at all.

Not at all reevaluating how, what's, where's the best place and how is the best place to deploy what we're doing? So really, really great data. Yeah, I talked to a customer that's spending a hundred million dollars a year in AWS not just on public cloud, but AWS Wow.

And that's not even the largest of cloud spends out there, but this is, you know, a enterprise Fortune 100 and their priorities are right sizing that AWS bill, they're not looking to exit AWS, but it's like what I like to call, I've created a new acronym, uh, latter part of last year, RTDC, return to the data center and, uh, uh, it is happening. But I absolutely agree with you, Diane. No one is saying they're going to abandon the value that Cloud provides, but there is absolutely this movement that cloud first is over, uh, uh, from a, we must move all of our IT to the cloud to thinking about where they're positioning the cloud.

It also hearkens back to our first story or, or our second story around, uh, NetApp and abandoning their spot. And, uh, that ability, uh, they're doubling down on understanding the relationship between data in the workload and positioning the most important asset, which is data. Folks, this has been a wonderful conversation.

What seemed to be a really slow Newsweek. I, I think it speaks to the two of your deep experience and my ability to put people to sleep with this soothing voice. This is why you need to have your spouse listen to the podcast.

It doesn't matter whether or not they're in it or not. A good friend told me, uh, that his wife likes to listen to my podcast because it puts her to sleep at night. So this is a great sleep aid For those of you not in it.

For the rest of you, please join us again next week where I don't know either. I think I'm gonna get my predictions or my prediction for the next week. You, we'll, stay tuned next week.

Until then, have a great week.