Chris Krebs Resigns from SentinelOne || Tech Field Day News Rundown: April 23, 2025

Zoom isn't zooming. Is it free? ESXI day?

AI code issues still abound. Hammer Space gets some big investments. Google buys Boardwalk to complete their monopoly.

HPE gets the PE treatment. And we're gonna take a closer look at Chris Krebs departure from Sentinel One in this episode of the Tech Field Day rundown. Hello everyone and welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown for April 23rd.

My name is Tom Hollingsworth and I hope you're having an enjoyable spring day. Perhaps you're having lunch outside on a blanket with a lot of ants because it is national picnic day. Uh, but one thing that I hope that you are excited for is our episode of this great news rundown.

And joining me is a new co-host, Mr. Romeo Gardner, Romeo. Say hi to all of those people out there in our audience.

Hey everyone, happy to be here today at the News Run special guest just popping in for a second. Well, we are very glad to have you on this National Cherry Cheesecake Day because it is gonna be a dessert extra extravaganza of all of the wonderful stories that we have coming up. And, uh, we've got some, you know, exciting things like investment news.

We've got some less than exciting things like, you know, well, we'll get there in a minute, but I actually wanted to start off with, uh, well it's an outage because you may have noticed that Zoom was down last week. That wasn't just you. It, it was literally everybody.

'cause it lasted about 90 minutes and, uh, was widely reported because, well, people weren't on Zoom calls, so they had free time to talk about stuff. Now what do you think was the problem if you guess DNS you win GoDaddy, who is the maintainer of the US top level domain created an administrative block that caused the outage. Um, even the status pages for Zoom, which were hosted on US domains, well, they were, uh, they were affected.

So, you know, go figure. Um, Cisco thousand Eyes was finally able to figure out that it was some sort of DNS issue before the real root cause was found. Now, Romeo, I, the question that I have for you is, should we really be doing a better job of trying to take care of all these DNS issues before they inevitably, uh, shoot us in the foot?

You know what, Tom, I'm gonna say absolutely. So DNS is, from what I've seen, DNS has kind of been a put it on autopilot as long as it's working, no need to worry, okay, resolve it, and that's all I need you for. Unfortunately, that can cause much more of an issue if we don't pay attention to DNS, how it's working, how it's secured, and a bunch of other issues that it could cause.

And this was just one of the things that just happened to pop up that caused some concern and really begs the question, should we pay more attention to it? Yes, we should absolutely VMware. Now, VMware has quietly reinstated its free ESX hypervisor.

This was a long time ago that I used to to use this, but the free is back after discontinuing it in 2024. 0, the update that happens now with the download available through Broadcom, this move seems aimed at supporting some hobbyists and maybe some small scale users. And I'm curious what you think about this, Tom.

So I actually gave a comment for an article that's gonna be published on Techstrong it here shortly. And, uh, I agree that, you know, there's, there's probably some, some hobbyists out there that are wanting to run a DNS server or something like that on a free hypervisor, but I think you're actually, those people are not VMware slash Broadcom's core market. We know that, right?

Like we've seen the shift from Broadcom. They, they basically only wanna sell to VMware Cloud Foundation users. And if I am someone who is looking to investigate options to install a virtual setup, well, I know I can download Kubernetes for free, right?

Um, but of course, downloading Kubernetes for free without some kind of a management system is nightmarish at best. Uh, what I really want is I wanna be able to kick the tires and make sure that my workloads are able to work in some kind of system. And then now that I know how hard it is to manage it, onesie twosie, I'm gonna go figure out how much it's gonna cost to manage it.

Right? Now, how would I do that for VMware? Oh, wait, I know you can't because they're gonna make you sign a contract and get access to the system and then you're gonna find out it doesn't work.

Then you're gonna have to fight with your sales rep and refund all those 72 core licenses that you were forced to buy unless there's a free version out there. So, as was noted, you basically have to go in, you have to create a Broadcom support account, and then you can download it for free and it has to be registered to you. Uh, believe in the industry, we call that a freemium trial because that's essentially what it's, you can use ESXI for free for whatever ESXI scales to, which is realistically about four or five virtual machines if they're lightweight and you can make sure your stuff's gonna work.

And then when you try to install it the second time, it's probably gonna pop up and bark at you saying, Hey, you know, you've installed this twice, uh, and then you're gonna figure out that it's a nightmare. Um, yeah, the people, the things that people use ESXI for are not things that are included in the free version, like, you know, DRS and HA and all of those other things. And so they're gonna quickly go find a sales rep and be like, I want to use this.

I want to use all of the features that everybody tells me. You're so important. And that's when Mr.

Sales rep is like, Woohoohoo, I get to make a boat payment this month. So I am thinking that this is very much a, a marketing and sales enablement tool because otherwise, I mean, most of the people who are gonna be using this are either, like, if they were gonna be using it for like one or two servers that they were trying to virtualize, they'd either be using Fusion or Parallels. Um, this is for kicking the tires before we actually get people to go out there and work on things.

So I mean, Bravo to Broadcom, but understand that this is, this is a sales facing function. We've heard a lot about AI coding assistance and what they're capable of doing, but application development involves more than just writing new code. A Microsoft research team has been working on building a new AI agent that can debug code and find and resolve root causes of application errors.

The question that I have for you, Romeo, is can we trust AI to actually go out and do all this debugging for us? And if we can, is there any reason why we should still be employing coders? That's a good question.

If we should really be employing coders continue to, well, I'll say this, it's a matter of time, right? This is gonna be a matter of time. I think it's gonna take some time to develop that.

Now, Microsoft has, through this research, has developed this, this, uh, debug gym and majority of a coders or programmer's, time is generally debugging, right? It's not just creating that program, it is debugging that particular program now with the, the news of, hey, these AI agents cannot do this right now or not able to do that. It is just a matter of time before they are able to do that.

You asked an important question, Tom, should we trust them to do it? Now, that's a gift and a curse in my opinion. Well, it depends.

How quickly do you want to get that particular program out? How securely do you want to get that program out? And where, where are you putting that information into?

Um, is that contained? Is that out on the internet? Those are things we gotta think about when you look at debugging a specific program that you're writing for someone else or for your company or things like that.

So I'd say it's a matter of time, but I wouldn't put my information in a specific AI agent right now, still got coders, I trust them. Hammer Space secured additional backing from strategic investors, including ARC Invest and TER Capital to expand its AI focused data platform recognized for eliminating data bottlenecks and delivering high speed access, hybrid multi-cloud and edge environments. Hammer Space's technology is now deployed by organizations such as meta, the Department of Defense, national Science Foundation, and that platform's, standards architecture and rapid deployment capabilities position it as a foundational infrastructure for AI workloads.

I'm curious, where do you see this going in how Hammer Space is gaining investors and starting to put more money behind this big congratulations to our friends over at Hammer space for this series BI think it's important that we see that this is kind of a growth, uh, strategy for them. And, you know, they've presented at Tech Field Day on a number of occasions, and we've gotten a good look underneath the hood at how all of this works. And I think back to a quote that I've heard a couple of times, uh, related to kind of this boom in the AI industry.

Um, thinking back to the, the Gold Rush of 1849 in California. Do you wanna go look for gold or do you wanna be the person that sells pick axis to the miners? And I think that that's where Hammer Space is right now.

They're definitely in the pickax business. When you look through the press release that's on there, I mean, names like Hitachi Ventura and Super Micro are using this technology to build for companies like DOD, national Science Foundation and Meta. So the, the latter companies all have one thing in common.

They have massive data sets that they need to be able to index quickly to search through to Mung for any kind of an AI related program. The former companies obviously see value in partnering with Hammer Space to be able to bring this technology to the forefront because it's become an arms race, right? We've seen this with companies like Nvidia.

It's not a question of who has the most complete solution. It's a question of how quickly can you jam the data into the algorithms to feed the monster? And it's, you know, it, it's people who go out and buy a kenig egg, right?

I don't need the flashiest car with cup holders and uh, you know, full leather trim. I need a car that will go as fast as possible as quickly as I can get it because I need to have the best machine out there. Uh, if you, if you need cup holders, you need something else.

And, and Hammer Space really is kind of like that exotic hybrid sports car because they are building for a hybrid multi-cloud world. They're building for these edge deployments where we need to get to the data where it lives because the gravity of that data is just too big to be able to put it back into a, you know, a, a cloud environment. So I think that Hammer space is gonna continue to get the wins.

And honestly, you know, with a series B that's still very early, I was explaining this to somebody just today, it's like, uh, you don't wanna be the company that gets to an a d or an E without no, without a clear exit plan, but an A or a B round. You can still be figuring this out. And honestly, the sky's the limit for Hammer space at this point because they're gonna get more investors, they're gonna get more companies that are ready to kind of take on that load as they're scaling up.

Because if you're not already doing research into the kinds of things that hammer space is, is building, then you're far enough behind the curve that you probably should just buy it from them anyway. A US federal judge has ruled that Google willingly violated antitrust laws in a ruling last week. Uh, judge Brima said in her ruling that Google acquired and maintained Monopoly power in their advertising business.

Now, you may have thought, wait a minute, didn't a judge already ruled about a Monopoly thing? Well, yeah, that was last year when they ruled that they illegally monopolized the search market too. And the potential remedies for this are kind of fun, actually.

Uh, the, the, the most polite one, I guess you could put it, is that they could basically be restricted, uh, and have to be, provide fair competition to any one of the companies that uses them as kind of a, a neutral platform. Uh, that's the best thing that Google can hope for. The worst thing it's breakup city baby.

Uh, they could be completely reaving off the ad business and everything like that. But the thing that I thought was the most interesting in the ruling when you read through it, 'cause it's something like 85 pages, is that the judge actually found that the plaintiffs in the case did not do a very good job in their argument of calling open web display ad networks, kind of like their own relevant market, but even though they did not find for the plaintiffs, they turned right around to the defense table and been like, and you guys were doing a whole lot of things that you shouldn't. Uh, so we, we've got Google basically monopolizing web search, monopolizing ads, which is the one, the two things that Google is most known for.

I mean, Romeo, is Google gonna get off light here or is the, is the the hammer of justice basically gonna come down on them? I personally think that they're gonna get off a little light here. There may be some shakeup, but I think they're gonna get off light here and then I think they're going to begin to go after other things.

And case in point, they're looking at buying Wiz a huge cybersecurity company there, one of the biggest, right? That price tag is enormous. So they're looking to acquire even more.

That's why even if the hammer does come down on them, they're still going to look to acquire more things so that that can be underneath their umbrella. So in my opinion, I think they're gonna get off a little light, but that effort is still going to march forward in terms of mass dominate. Now Tom, HPE is a, is about to emphasize the PE even more.

5 billion with a B billion stake in the company. Elliot is known as a company that attempts to help a company unlock value by encouraging them to sell off valuable business units and unseat unsuccessful CEOs. Elliot has most recently taken a stake in Southwest Airlines, which has introduced controversial changes to their business model, especially the seats, uh, which we've been talking about recently.

Um, Elliot is looking to engage with management per unconfirmed reports, but other reports state they're exploring other options here to remove CEO and Antonio Neri. Tom, should HPE be worried about this? Do you want my honest opinion?

Yes, absolutely. Yes, they should. Um, I always tell people that the two worst things that you can can hear as a CEO are one, uh, Brian Krebs is on line one asking for a comment, and two, Elliot investment management just took a stake in our company because no matter what happens after those statements, it's not gonna be good for you.

Um, so, uh, how do I put this delicately? Um, Elliot is gonna wreck this company that, that's about as delicately as I can put it. Um, they are going to find, uh, things that they can sell.

Um, my guess is that with the pending Juniper acquisition, there's a very good chance that they could just say, why don't you get rid of the networking business? 'cause it's not core to what you do. Uh, GreenLake is what you do, and if it doesn't immediately serve GreenLake, get rid of it, uh, then I think that they're gonna can Antonio Neri because according to them, Antonio Neri has not been doing a very good job, which is weird that they live in a strange fantasy land where, uh, they did not see all of the people that came before Antonio Neri, who did a worse job and said, oh, well we need to replace the guy who actually kept this ship from sinking.

And then they are going to basically look for, I don't know, about an 11% return and then exit the company as fast as possible with the I gotten gains. Um, you know, it's, it's kind of like those movies where the guy walks in and he goes, man, this is a wonderful company you have here. It would be a shame if somebody came in and sold off all the assets and got everybody fired, right?

I mean, not that I'm saying that that happens, but there is a repeated pattern here, um, and, and it, it involves basically the, the same thing that we see a lot in the industry of, you know, your company should make money, but what if we did all of these things to make you a whole lot of money and like the next six months so that you can essentially buy us off so that we leave and it's not good overall for the long-term health of the company. Yes, there's gonna be somebody that's gonna leave a comment on this video and say, but yeah, it is because look what happened when they took a stake in Juniper. They forced Juniper to do this and this, and they're a healthy company now.

You're right, they are. That was six or seven years ago. And was Juniper a healthy company up until they bought Mist and kind of transformed the company around Mist?

I'd say that NIST is the reason why they're still in business and didn't get bought by anybody else. And that wasn't something that our friends over at Elliot invested them to do. As a matter of fact, the people at Elliot said that they should have sold off their enterprise networking business a long time ago and focused on the core network business of selling service provider routers, which is their most profitable business.

Um, you know, it'd be like going into IBM right now and saying, Hey, you need to sell off this Red hat crap because nobody cares about it. You need to focus on making mainframes 'cause that's where all your business is. Would anybody agree with that business outlook?

Because it turns out that maybe a bunch of financial people telling a technology company how to run their core business isn't very smart. That'd be like me walking into the Elliot Investment Management Board and being like, you guys gotta stop breaking up companies. What you should do is invest in Lemonade stands because their profit margins are out of this world and you love bullying people so much.

You should definitely do it to little kids because that'll make you the most popular kids on Wall Street. Anyway, I'm gonna drop off my soapbox for approximately 30 seconds because we're gonna take a closer look at a story that hit the news and in the, to quote my, uh, my co-host Steven FoST. Oh, this isn't good.

Chris Krebs is a well-known figure in the cybersecurity space, and as the former head of the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, also known as CSA Krebs was responsible for directing security in the US federal government starting back in 2018. But you may recall that our friend, Mr. Krebs, was fired from CSA in 2020 by President Donald Trump for his stance on the 2020 election.

Put a pin in that because last week, some four years later, later newly elected President Donald Trump, stripped Chris Krebs of his security clearances for this said four-year-old issue. Krebs then announced that he would be stepping down from his role at Sentinel One to prevent the company from being harmed by what appears to be a personal issue between the president of the United States of America and a private citizen who dared to disagree with him. As you can tell by my read on this, I have opinions, but I'm Romeo I'm gonna let you start off with this one.

Did Chris Krebs do the right thing by stepping away from Sentinel One when all of this went down? It's, uh, it's a tough one, it's a tough one, Tom, I'll I'll say this. A selfless act in my opinion, by stepping down and resigning and recognizing that the problem is with me.

This issue is directed towards me, not the rest of the company. So I'm going to remove myself out of this to try to prevent any action that will be taken against the company. Smart move, in my opinion.

However, worst thing that could happen come directly after Sentinel One. So either way, like either way it could have resigned and something can still happen with the company as a, a lingering effect even though he's not there. But I do applaud him for stepping down because he recognized, Hey, this is directed towards me.

We have other people that have families that have pets that are doing great work, and I don't wanna disturb that particular piece or issue that's going on there. Tom, I wanna hear your, your thoughts around it. 'cause I know you got something there.

Yeah, I do. I I want to echo your statement there. Krebs is, Krebs is a smart man and he knows exactly what this was.

That, uh, that 4-year-old issue was one sentence. The 2020 election was the most secure in history. That's all he said.

He didn't get political, he didn't take a position on who won or lost. He spoke with the authority of his office. This was the most secure election we've had in history.

And four years later, somebody comes in and says, you know what? I disagree with you. I'm gonna strip you of your security clearances.

Hey, I get it. That's his, his right as the leader of the free world. But it feels a little petty.

It feels like you're punching down on somebody who quite honestly hasn't bothered you for four years. But, uh, we are on the roaring rampage of Revenge tour, um, AK 47th president of the United States, and, uh, I've made my feelings on this subject abundantly clear over several episodes of the rundown. Um, but I, I do wanna call out the people at SentinelOne.

Um, you guys are going to be fine because this was never about you. I, I get it. You're, you're gonna have to deal with some, some dodgy seas for a little bit while you figure out where this is gonna go and what's gonna happen.

But you have a great product, you have great people that are ready to lead you into you wherever happens next. Um, unfortunately Chris Krebs is not gonna be one of those people right now, but I think this is for the best because Chris Krebs has a more important job right now proving to the world that a petty little tyrant isn't going to be able to bully every company in the industry and any industry into believing what he believes. Um, we've talked a lot in history about the reality distortion field that Steve Jobs used to, uh, project around himself and that, you know, if, if Steve believed it, then everybody else around him had to believe it.

Um, we need to stop the reality distortion field here because there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the 2020 election was the most secure one that we have had. And yes, I am counting the 2024 election in that statement. I, I personally have some questions, but the fact of the matter is, is that a man that was being paid to essentially ensure that things were secure did so you disagree with his statement of the outcome and you are bringing the full weight of the US federal government against him for what I, I'm just curious, what is the end game here?

Is it to embarrass a man publicly for making a statement that you disagree with? Is it to get him to publicly admit that something happened and that he agrees that things were irregular? And then what are you gonna restore his security clearances?

Are you going to publicly apologize for treating him the way that you did? We all know the answer to that is no. Um, basically it's, it's kind of like when a private equity firm comes in and wrecks your company.

Um, the ultimate goal was not to get you to admit something, it was to take your win and run away like a scald dog. And that's what's gonna happen here, assuming that Chris Krebs does give in and say, yeah, you're right. It was a bad election.

Um, that's a propaganda piece that will be put out and everybody will say, oh yeah, Krebs, the, the CSA head at the time even says it was bad. And then it'll be forgotten and Chris Krebs will still be out of a job. He still won't have a security clearance and nothing will happen.

The best thing, Chris, if you're watching this, uh, big fan, um, you can do, is to fight this to your very core. And I know you are the kind of person that will, you wouldn't have stepped away from Sentinel One if you were just going to give in. This is about you versus him, and you are gonna win.

You know why? Because you have the attention span and the intelligence to fight this, and you are right. And that is always the best defense.

Romeo couldn't, couldn't say it, couldn't say it more. I mean that, uh, they have a wonderful team there. They just have a great team there that will continue to thrive and survive despite Crips not being there.

It's just sad that he's, he's he's resigned to step down. Yeah, it is. And honestly, whatever it takes for us to support a great human being like Chris Krebs, we should be doing it because like I said, he's in the right here, but you know, what else is in the right?

And that's all of the Field day things that we have coming up because one of them is actually happening right now. AI Infrastructure Field Day is the biggest event that we've had in a number of years. Uh, we were doing it, uh, you know, Tuesday, today, Thursday, Friday, if there's so much content that you're gonna have a hard time digesting it all.

com or check us out on Techstrong TV because we're gonna be simulcasting in both places. And then first, actually second week of May, May 7th, eighth and ninth, I'm gonna be back with Mobility Field Day, which is a pretty big event. We have several presenters that we are excited to be bringing you folks like Juni and Cisco and Nile and and Cel.

com for the schedule for that. And then speaking of security, we are gonna be back with Security Field day 13 at the end of the month. I know it's Memorial Day, that Monday it's hot dogs and grilling out.

But the grilling is really gonna start on Wednesday when we get some of the great security companies in the space into the room with our great Tech Field Day delegates who will be asking questions, making comments, and doing all of the things that they do. And if you wanna follow that, make sure you are following us on LinkedIn. We are Tech Field Day over there because we'll be broadcasting the video there as well.

We wanna thank you for watching this episode of the Tech Field Day rundown. We are here every Wednesday with great content, with wonderful guest hosts like my friend Romeo Romeo. Thank you very much for stepping in.

If people wanna check out some of the stuff that you talk about, where can they go to learn more? Absolutely. Thanks Tom.

You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. Romeo G, that is just Romeo G.

You'll see me there. No Juliet, just Romeo G, you'll find me there. Yeah, you absolutely should love Romeo as much as I do because he has got some great perspectives on things.

And if you wanna hear our perspective on things, no matter whether we're doing the the Tech Field Day rundown, our Tech Field Day videos or pretty much anything else, uh, make sure you set your bookmarks to Tech on tv. We're streaming over there all the time. Uh, make sure you follow our Tech Field Day plus YouTube channel.

Uh, make sure you follow the Tech Field Day YouTube channel and make sure you check out future group com because we have a lot of great people that, to create great content over there. We'll be back next Wednesday with more great stories. Uh, hopefully the news is fun between now and then.

Uh, until then for Tom Hollingsworth, for Romeo Gardner, and for all of the people who participate here on the Tech Field Day Rundown, thank you very much. Go get yourself a nice thick slab of cheesecake and enjoy the rest of your day.