Predict 2026: AI is Shaping Business and Technology | Tech Field Day News Rundown: January 14, 2026

AI assistant crossover. Veeam gets objective billion dollar data centers, vibe coding shields up cursor calls code crypto. It's time for quantum license renewal and we're going to predict the future in this week's closer look on the tech field day rundown.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown. It is the 14th of January.

We are glad that you made it two weeks into the new year with us. We hope that you've been spending a little bit of time organizing your home because it is national organizer home today. Uh, but what is important is that the stories that we have are all organized as well as my organizer in chief, Mr.

Alistair Cook. Alex, good to see you. It is a delight to be here and I would like to remind everybody that it's 2026 if you start writing.

The date is 2025. You get time traveling backwards. Uh, it is also international.

Fly your cut day, which seems like a much more sensible thing to do here in the southern hemisphere where it's summertime than up in the Northern Hemisphere where it's not, Depends on where you live 'cause it's still spring around here. Uh, but something else that springs to mind is a great lineup of stories that we have for you today. And we're gonna start off with one that really had people kind of a Twitter so to speak, because our good friends at the Cupertino Fruit and Mobile device company, otherwise known as Apple, are partnering with Google to use their Gemini models and cloud technology to upgrade.

I won't say the word, but you know, the lady that lives in your phone with advanced AI capabilities later this year, this multi-year deal will rely on Google's AI while continuing to run Apple devices and private cloud infrastructure. Apple reportedly plans to pay around $1 billion annually for this technology reflecting growing trust in Google's AI process as it competes with open ai. The move marks a major shift for Apple, which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the AI boom thus far, and aims to deliver a more capable and sophisticated lady that lives in your phone after delays pushed the rollout to early 2026.

Al the biggest thing that I have to wonder is, is Gemini gonna be up to the task? And has anybody heard Elon Musk whining about this yet? Well, I've used Gemini fairly extensively.

Um, it is my first line of defense of looking at a, uh, large language model, and I'm pretty impressed with what Jim and I can can do provided you give it the right guidance as always, for a large language model. Uh, one of the things that struck me in this is the briefness of the joint statement issued by Google and Apple. It's just two very short paragraphs, uh, basically saying this is a multi-year collaboration and the next generation of Apple's Foundation models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technologies.

Uh, it's a bit of a shift because historically Apple has been much more connected to, to open AI and chat GPT, and the statement is that hasn't changed. It's just that they're also basing lots of things on Google's Gemini models that may actually reflect what's happening for a lot of us as consumers of the chat components of these tools where we might switch between them and use different tools for different places. I know within the RUM intelligence platform, the default in there is chat GPT.

Uh, so we we're kind of multilingual within Futurum and, and our use, and I think that's also what we're seeing from Apple. You'll recall that we covered a little while ago that maybe Apple is not doing the best job of you utilizing modern large language model ai. And uh, I sort of drew some lines from Johnny i's departure setting up a a new AI company and them getting very close to open ai.

Uh, also that the, uh, apple intelligence hasn't quite been what we hoped it would be. And maybe this is where the new Google models, Gemini models will be really helpful at delivering what was promised for, uh, the Apple intelligence and, uh, that, uh, lady who sounds like she's sorry, uh, in your phone actually giving you some good guidance, although of course we're very familiar with large language models having to say sorry because they've got things wrong. So, uh, yeah, I think this is a good thing to see.

It is good to see that Apple is trying something different, but it continues to me to be a sign that they still haven't quite got it right and they've kind of oversold the promise and underdelivered our good friends at Veeam have acquired Object First, a specialist in pre-integrated immutable backup appliances designed for Veeam environments. Uh, this makes a strategic and expansion for Veeam into Purpose-built hardware from, uh, being very much a software-based organization first and having a storage centric software approach. Object first.

Orbe appliances provide native S3 object storage with immutable enforcement by default. That's awesome. Field backup storage, particularly keeping it safe from ransomware.

Uh, the acquisition allows Veeam to offer on-premises solutions, uh, alongside cloud-based Veeam Data Cloud, giving customers flexibility in how they secure their backups while Object first will continue operating independently and program remain separate for the move growing industry demand for immutable secure storage and easily deployable backup solutions that cyber resilience without necessarily limiting customer choice and locking you to a single solution. Uh, I think, Tom, this is very much in your wheelhouse of keeping your data secure and keeping it well protected. Exactly.

And there's nothing better for keeping your data secure than not being able to modify it at all. It's one of the things that we've seen from the data protection industry over the last, oh, year and a half or so ever since they really started pivoting here, is this idea that you need to have some kind of a system in place that prevents people from attacking your reliability, so to speak. Uh, I saw a quote from our good friend Curtis Preston, Mr.

Backup the other day, uh, something like 70 some odd percent of ransomware attacks. Their very first target is backup data sets. They're looking to prevent your ability to restore.

And and we've talked about that late last year, early this year. I mean, when you think about the number of people that have paid ransomware, not because you know, it, it was a a cost conscious decision, but because they had no good backups that they could rely on in order to, to get back there to a running state like this just makes sense from Veeam's perspective because they already have their online cloud vault. That's great as long as you can get online.

And that's one of the things we've seen outta the European Union in order to halt the spread of some of these massive ransomware attacks is they have created the capability to basically isolate your network from the rest of the global internet. That means you gotta have something on premises and that's where Object First comes in and they already talk partner very tightly together. It's kind of one of those things where if you talk to Veeam and you need an immutable solution, their first go-to is Object first.

It's just now that's an in-house solution as opposed to a a partner solution. And I think that this is gonna give people a lot of flexibility because in addition to what I had already said about, you know, you gotta be able to get online to utilize that online cloud vault, there are a lot of regulated industries that will not let certain data escape the local network, so to speak. And, and that's just here in the US overseas, you've got a lot of data, data sovereignty issues when it comes to cloud.

So I think that this is great for Veeam customers that want to, uh, take advantage of these solutions and basically just write one check to Veeam. Uh, we, we found out about this ironically enough through a lot of our great people in the Tech Field Day delegate community. They, they kind of gave us a heads up that there were some emails going back and forth, so we want to, you know, say a special shout out to all of the, the delegates who let us know about this.

But I also wanna remind everybody that both Veeam and Object First are gonna be presenting at Tech Field Day Extra at RSAC this year. I'll have more details about that when we close out the show. OpenAI and SoftBank Group are jointly investing $1 billion in SB Energy to accelerate construction of AI optimized data centers across the UAS as part of the Stargate project.

The investment addresses a critical industry bottleneck that would be securing power in real estate to support increasingly demanding AI workloads. Funny enough, they didn't say anything about building it in space. 2 gigawatt data center in Texas, will develop additional multi gigawatt campuses while integrating open AI's design specifications with its expertise in energy and construction.

This partnership reflects a strategic shift in AI competition where controlling physical infrastructure is just as crucial as developing algorithms or having semiconductor access. The initiative is part of broader efforts, including collaborations with Oracle and MGX to ensure that the US can scale AI computing capacity rapidly and reliably. Al is a billion dollars a great build out for a data center, or is this just a drop in the Bucket?

It's absolutely a drop in the bucket, Tom. Absolutely. It's a sign of a, a commitment to a partnership.

It's not actually the $500 billion commitment that the White House announced in January last year for, um, the Stargate Project. So in the context of the US wants to build out half a trillion dollars worth of AI data center. Yeah, a a billion dollar spend is not actually that big.

Uh, on the other hand, if, uh, you're a contractor working for SB Energy, uh, you're pretty happy that there's another trillion dollars available for this build out. Uh, the building in Texas and Milan County is, uh, underway and due to actually start delivering some AI sometime later this year. And this commitment really is just a, a partnership to get started.

Uh, if SB Energy sounds like SoftBank, yeah, the, not directly a subsidiary, but a lot of money flows into SP energy from SoftBank to make sure that these build outs can occur. And of course, OpenAI will be the big customer for putting workloads inside these data centers. So the partnership is good.

Uh, it is a non-exclusive, uh, prefer, uh, preferential agreement so that AI and SoftBank will prefer to use SB energy as they're building out. There's more and more, there's huge data centers over time, uh, and of course, as you say, control of the power generation, the space, uh, and, and I mean physical space on the ground, not up and up and orbit with those styling satellites. Um, control of locations to build these data centers with high connectivity and good power generation is gonna be vital.

The vast amounts of data center space that are being committed to being built and operated over the next five years to continue this large language model, ai, uh, wave is huge of absolutely massive scale. So there are gonna be challenges around access to power securing long-term contracts for that. Access to power is gonna be found foundational on this and it's gonna follow then with whatcha gonna put in these big data centers, how are you gonna get chips?

And particularly at the moment, RAM for those servers. We all know that consumer RAM has gone up vastly in price over the last few months, and that's driven by the demand for all of these, uh, GPUs and the high bandwidth memory that's gonna be in these GPUs and these massive data centers that are being built out. So yeah, it's part of an ongoing trend in itself.

It's not the biggest element in that ongoing trend. And we'll see more of these partnership announcements as we've seen plenty of them over the past few months as well. Palo Alto Networks has introduced the SHIELD framework to help organizations secure applications building, uh, built using AI enabled vibe coding tools, uh, increasingly common but kind of dangerous.

There's a significant cybersecurity risk in vibe coding. The use of an AI tool to build an application without knowing how to build an application. Uh, SHIELD outlines six of the best practices as you are building any kind of application.

Things like segregation of duties, having a human in the loop as you're going from this vibe coding description to actually running things in production. Uh, other security fundamentals io uh, input output validation, uh, enforcement of security focused health home models, as well as having the least agency least privileged methodologies and defense technical controls. The framework emphasizes restricting AI agents from production environments and require humans to be involved.

What involved in code review as well as making sure that inputs and outputs and security focus controls, all of these standard kind of behaviors are being applied and these vibe coded applications, limiting permissions, applying defensive controls, we know AI coding tools are prone to flaws and could well, um, make it much easier for supply chain attacks to, uh, threaten these applications. Uh, SHIELD provides a roadmap to reducing the risks, but is shield easy to actually start using for a development team? Is it gonna get in the way?

I dunno that it's gonna get in the way provided you were already doing this stuff ahead of time. Because when you look at it, which by the way, I do have to say here, uh, I I want a quote from a, a great TV show, you know, what does that name mean to you? It means that we really wanted our name to spell out Shield.

Uh, that to me is, you know, whether you're vibe, coding or real, you've gotta have some kind of a, I don't know, like process in place. And when you look at that, just think separation of duty is least privilege. Okay?

That's just like security 1 0 1. Don't let people have the run of the system and make sure they only have enough to do their jobs. Input output validation.

Yeah, welcome back to the early two thousands when cross site scripting was a thing. Uh, you know, defensive technical controls, helper models like this to me just screams, formalizing things we were already doing. I will tell you that we've got a great episode of Security Boulevard's podcast coming up soon where we talk about this stuff.

Uh, Mitch Ashley brought up some really good points about why we should be doing these things already, why these are systems that we need to put in place. Now granted, I don't think that SHIELD is really going to apply to people who are already doing a lot of coding, right? Like, like we've even seen this this week where Linus Tour Vaults used vibe coating effectively to pretty up the user interface on a tool that he was using, but Linus was very quick to point out that it mostly did a good job quickly, but it had some other problems, I think with like a rectangle selector.

And he had to go in and specifically say, I need you to work on this part and I need you to clean this up so he sees the potential. But that's Linus. He's written a line or two of code in his life and he's managed coding projects where people less skilled than him have written code, so he immediately knows what to look at in order to make sure that people aren't, oh, I don't know, trying to recode the Lennox kernel and c plus plus again, this decade.

The problem where SHIELD is really going to apply is for those people who have no idea how coding works. You know, executives, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, did I, should I have said junior admins? No, those people can be taught, they can learn how to do proper coding technology.

They can learn all of these things. No, no, no. I'm talking about the people who are like, oh, coding is really easy.

Watch this. Hey chat GPT build me an application and it's riddled with bugs and open file handlers and exception errors and stuff like that. That's where you wanna apply shield quietly in the background.

No, no, no. We're gonna scrub all this stuff out and we're gonna make sure that you didn't accidentally expose all of the board's salaries to the internet so that people can scrape them and do whatever. So I, I see the value in what SHIELD is offering, but it's at the extreme ends of the, of the spectrum, so to speak.

You've got the juniors over here who don't know these things and can be taught so that it'll eventually they'll use this as a tool. And then on the other side, you've got the, how hard can it be people who make more money than they should, telling you how easy things are. And it's not until later when it all blows up on their face, they realize it's a lot harder than they think.

I at least give props to Palo Alto for coming up with this. So we'll see how it pans out. But don't forget to check out the episode of Security Boulevard.

We go into a lot more depth of that. Cursor has teamed up with one password to secure sensitive credentials in AI assisted software development, ensuring secrets are never hard coded or exposed to AI agents. This partnership introduces a hook script for just in, just-in-time secrets access with plans to add granular tasks, specific permissions, model context, protocol integrations, automated secret rotation and enhanced audit visibility.

One password is also building a trust graph track and manage AI agent access similarly to the wood for human users. The initiative aims to make AI coding safer while maintaining developer productivity and addressing the growing risk of software supply chain attacks in these AI driven workflows. Al this sounds a lot like the last story, but very focused on making sure that those pesky little secrets stay secret.

It absolutely follows on. This is, again, AI is a great tool for developers as a great enabler for building applications more rapidly or at least building features within applications more rapidly. And we'll see increasing use of AI tools.

Um, cursor is one of the top ones that we see, uh, being used particularly for the integration into VS code. Uh, and one of the challenges of course, we highlighted in the previous article was that security vulnerability that these AI applications are being used as a supply chain attack against, uh, whichever company is running the generated code. Um, one of the elements, again, it's a fundamental element of application building, is that you don't hard code any kind of persistent credentials, any kind of credentials into your application.

You have them delivered at runtime. And that's what one password has has targeted is that as the, uh, in this case AI agent runs, it retrieves a password outta one password, it uses that password to access a resource and then it flushes that password even better is the capability in here of having one password go and change that long-term password. If it can't generate a short-term token, it can change that long-term password immediately after it's been exercised and therefore mean that even if that password's exposed, the amount of time that it's usable is very limited.

So I like, like seeing this in here. Uh, in terms of the technologies behind it, it's fairly fundamental. Uh, the use of hook scripts, uh, is a fairly fundamental part of building this into any kind of, uh, build automation CI CD kind of pipelines.

And, uh, it's, it is a really useful tool, uh, just in time delivery of, of credentials is absolutely vital. Um, the, the Hooks capability, that's, uh, something that Kerr has within itself and very simply allows that delivery of credentials without your developer having to take too much more action. Always as you're building security and application development, you wanna make it easy for developers to adopt.

You wanna make it as seamless as possible and to take away any kind of place where they think they would've to do additional work that isn't building the feature they wanna build. This is the fundamental challenge for all of us and the security and infrastructure side, is we need to make it easy for developers to build the features they're working on to improve the business that pays us all without actually exposing that business to any greater risk. The US Congress is set to revive the National Quantum Initiative that expired in 2023 and hopefully the, uh, renewed one will bring $85 million a year for five years to support quantum research across a variety of different US agencies like nist, the National Science Foundation, NASA and ostp as well.

The bill aims to boost US leadership in quantum computing and strengthen the supply chain around that quantum computing to support workforce development. People train some of them and encourage international collaboration, the participation, and then industry leaders see the initiative as a key to turning quantum research into real world benefits for the economy and for national security. Tom, we've been talking about Quantum as the wave that is gonna follow the current large language model.

Uh, hopefully this is gonna bring that wave closer to us. It'll, and one of the reasons why we have to have that happen is because Quantum right now has no real payoff. That's why there's not a whole lot of investment in it.

It's, it's real cool science project. Don't get me wrong. All you gotta do is go watch any of the videos that Tech Field Day has done about anything related to Quantum and you're like, cool.

Like if you watched the three body problem and you couldn't understand how they were using those quantum com, uh, communications devices, we have a video that actually kind of explains how theoretically that would work. The problem is that you've got to get money into the hands of those people in order to be able to develop this technology. And this is not something that people understand how to do natively.

I'll tell you why because there's no profit motive right now. So I'm going to fix all of these problems. So, uh, if you are watching this episode of the Rundown and you apply to one of these three areas, I need you to make a little recording of this because I'm gonna fix all of your funding problems.

This one's for the US government. Did you hear that China's building a quantum computer, it's bigger than ours and it's gonna be faster and they're gonna be the leader. Here's the private enterprise one, maybe you can run ads against it.

Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah, academics. Do you want 'em to name the building?

This thing is housed in after you for free. You should be involved. Trust me on this.

Do you see how each of those has a profit motive? And that's the problem. I am a quantum purist.

I want them to develop a quantum computer for the sake of having a really fast computer. I also understand that quantum computers don't work like regular computers and they are gonna still be working in tandem to solve harder problems like, you know, cryptography issues or, you know, very chaotic systems like the weather. Are we gonna be able to perfectly model weather?

No, but I promise you, you know, we already have 10 day forecasts. I bet you we can get a little bit better than that, but we also have to be able to figure out how to make this a profitable thing. And we've seen some of that over the years, right?

Like last year we covered something about a quantum GPS, which I thought was kind of neat, but you know, that's, that's not something that's gonna make, you know, gangbuster business. It's not gonna be like, you know, an LLM that well actually wait, that's, that's not true 'cause LLMs don't make money either. Uh, but they have better marketing.

So I wanna see the US federal government back this, which means they're probably not going to do it because they can't find a way to sell it or give it away to a business to make money off of. I would hope that we do this for the sake of just doing it because honestly, the way things have been going, $400 million is a drop in the bucket. I have an idea.

Let's build one less aircraft carrier next year and then we can fund quantum and a few other things. All right, it's time for a closer look. So everyone get on your, um, uh, oh, the, uh, the hat that Johnny Carson used to wear.

Get out your crystal ball because I'm gonna tell you a little secret. It's 2026 and AI really isn't a trend anymore because it's now foundational infrastructure. It transforms how software is built and how cloud and data centers are gonna operate and how security is enforced.

And honestly, it's all about business Competition at this point predict 2026, which is hosted by Futurum explores these shifts with sessions on ag agentic, ai, accelerated development, trust and security data infrastructure. And honestly, the physical limits of AI leaders are gonna be giving you insights into how AI will reshape SaaS pricing, DevOps cycles, cybersecurity strategies and operational models, which is gonna help them prepare for rapid, unavoidable changes the event emphasizes actionable understanding of our hype, making it essential for organizations that wanna lead rather than react in the AI era. We hope that you're all gonna be able to tune in and watch Predict 2026, but I wanna throw this over to al real quick hearing all of that, what are your predictions around these areas in 2026?

Because I, I'm kind of curious, are we, are we just tapping the beginning of what AI can bring us or does the sound of this something inflating inevitably lead to a pop? Alright, well, before I address the, uh, the balloon, I wanna give you all listening a call to action. If you're listening to this on the 14th of January, you still have time, go to predict 2026 com and register for the event because it'll be live streaming all day tomorrow the 15th.

Uh, if you're too late for that, there should be some replays there on product 2026 as well. So Tom's balloon of AI and it's, uh, balloon or bubble, however you want to call it, there has absolutely been this huge expansion of spending on building ai. We've covered this repeatedly on the rundown.

And as you know, uh, Tom and I are fairly cynical about this and it's, it's again, show me the income. It's not just show me the outgoing, it's the show me the income. How are you gonna make money off this?

Well, you know, AI is actually earning money in places and it's earning money in the places where it disappears. Where AI is just the feature of the thing. AI is not the thing.

And so you as a customer, you as a, uh, reader of the news may be very familiar with chat GPT and the chat interfaces to Gemini, uh, any of your other favorite AI engine, but it's the agents, it's the tools that talk to the intelligence that's behind it that aren't just a human asking questions. It's where that AI is built into an application that's built into how the application works and it gives you better answers. It continues that trend of moving from customers.

Pick up a phone and talk to a human or walk into a store and talk to a human towards customers. Interact with a, an application, maybe a, a smart application on their phone or a website that becomes more useful. You'll know AI is working when you get better answers out of these systems.

You won't see it, it won't be that there is the chat interface in the bottom right hand corner where Clippy says, it looks like you want to do something stupid, lemme help you do something stupid. It will be where the application actually does something useful for you seamlessly and invisibly in the background. And that's very much what I think, uh, you'll hear from our analyst at the Futureum group tomorrow.

Uh, our good friend Mitch Ashley will be talking about AI and, and agents as well, looking at how that fits within the software development lifecycle. I'll cover that a little bit on this, this, um, episode as well. And of course, Daniel Neuman, the CEO at tum.

Uh, ultimately our boss, uh, he has been all in on AI as a tool to enable us to be more productive, not to replace us, not to replace the technical experts, the, uh, analysts that we have on team within Futur, but to take away the bits that are really hard and unsatisfying to do so that we can do the things that where we bring the most value. And that's fundamentally what I'm expecting AI to end up doing for us. Um, our friend Nick Patience is gonna talk about another topic that we've, we've covered repeatedly on the rundown, including today, which is the build out of space to run these AI engines and power to, to actually drive them.

I imagine he has some good insights and, uh, the challenges around building these things out and, uh, sitting on Tom's favorite area of ai, these cybersecurity challenges and the risks that come along. Fernando Montenegro, he'll be, uh, saying some of the same things that Tom says, but he will say them in a completely different way with a very different accent. Probably not quite as good a snark though.

Yeah, we'll, we'll hear lots of, uh, insights around where AI is making a real difference and where AI is going to continue to make a real difference. Interestingly, we're not talking about much else in predict. We continue to be predicting that the big changes will come from ai, not from some left field place where suddenly something turns up.

You, Tom, I think, we'll, and I I think you're onto something here. The value of AI is not in changing the paradigm, it's in enhancing what we can do. And I think that to me is where a lot of people go off the rails.

They want this to be groundbreaking and revolutionary and upsetting everyone's Apple carts because then that means that they can get some of that apple cart money for themselves. But right now what we're seeing is a lot of that money being poured into building carts for the Apple carts. And it's not until we settle out of that, like remember when everything was Uber?

Remember when we needed Uber for all of this stuff and, and it was exciting. And what, what about Uber for food and what about Uber for that? And Uber for this.

I mean, there was a joke for a while that if you wanted to describe your startup to somebody you just said, oh well it's like Uber, but for X, where are we now? Well, we still have Uber and it still changed the way that we do things, but it's not a revolution. So now instead of me flagging a cab down in New York City, I might take an Uber, but I might also still take a cab if it makes more sense for that particular application.

Here's a hint. If you need to go to JFK, take a cab, they're cheaper. But ultimately what I think people need to understand about AI is that there's just one more arrow in the quiver, so to speak.

And that's what I am excited about to hear at Predict is that people are going to be grounding AI in the realities of the way that organizations are gonna be using it. I've gotten a sneak peek at some of the stuff that Rums Research division is using AI for and it kind of is mind blowing when you think about it. When you look at the, the totality of what can be generated in a signal report.

It's something that used to take a few people a long time or a lot of people slightly less time. It's going out and doing all of these things, but there's still somebody there looking at it going, yes, that makes sense. No, that doesn't make sense.

And I think that that's the thing. AI is not going to replace everybody's job. It will replace some of the jobs that were easily replaceable, but then that means that those people can move on to do other things.

To me, AI is like a batch file instead of just sitting there and typing commands into the console over and over again when your computer starts. You can automate that, you can have it happen automatically. And then what happens?

Well now I'm not worried about making sure I've typed in all the right dos commands to get my computer to boot up. I am now working on my computer. I'm using it for different tools and different processes.

And so I think that to me that's where the real value is and and I can't wait to hear what everybody at futurum has to say about it. So make sure that you're tuned in on the 15th. It's over at Techstrong tv.

You can't miss it. Just, uh, Google Predict 2026 futurum or Predict 2026 Techstrong. And I promise you you'll find it, but you know what else you're gonna find if you look hard enough, it's all of the great events that Al and I are gonna be doing over the next few months.

And Al you've got one coming up in just a couple of weeks. Yeah, I'm deeply embedded in the preparations for AI infrastructure field Day four. Uh, right now we're having lots of calls making sure that the stories that are being told, the, um, insights that you'll get at, uh, AI infrastructure field, therefore are gonna be really strong in that the content from our various sponsors, hammer Space Site Lads, forward Networks, fabrics, ai, and two different parts of Cisco, uh, they're all gonna have some really good stories around how you build out that infrastructure for ai.

Whether it's maybe in a massive, uh, data center or maybe it's in your own on-premises environment. Really looking forward to welcoming my delegates in person to San Jose. Uh, we'll be streaming January 28th to 30th for AI infrastructure fields.

I'm also a little earlier in the preparations for another of my events. I'll be back in Silicon Valley and, uh, early March, March 11th and 12th we'll have Cloud Field Day as well. So stay tuned as we build out our, uh, portfolio of presenting sponsors and get some nice new delegates.

I've got at least one brand new delegate for Tech Field Day coming to that event. Of course March is where things really kick off for us because Tom, you're gonna have an exciting week as well. You're right, I am.

We are going to RSAC for the very first time as part of Tech Field Day Extra. And remember that story that I told you about with Veeam and Object First? We already had both of them booked before this big exciting news came out.

So we are gonna be hearing from Veeam and Object First and Commvault and more. We are gonna have at least two days of presentations there. I've already got a great group of people that are excited to be a part of it and you're gonna see some familiar faces and you're gonna be hearing some from, from some of the leading voices in the security community.

And I can't wait to bring it to you. com and you'll get a list of all the companies, all the delegates, and pretty soon when we get all the schedules sorted out, we'll have a list of the presentation times be ready for this one. 'cause it's gonna be a load of fun and I'm hoping that we'll be able to bring it to you all encrypted over the wire in transit and, you know, using all the right pass phrases so that nothing gets infected.

Um, but we also want to thank you all very much for watching the Tech Fuel Day rundown. Remember that we publish new episodes every Wednesday. Uh, they'll go up on YouTube and you can check out your favorite podcast application if you'd rather listen to us while you're doing that, uh, January exercise.

And if you're not doing January exercise, listen to the Rundown and do it anyway. The Rundown is also streamed on Techstrong TV and as well as the Techstrong TV app. You can check out all of our cool stuff there.

Don't forget that Al and I also spend time on other tech Strong and future and group programs. I've already mentioned the other podcasts that I do, security Boulevard, al's, also a special guest on a lot of things that come up. We'll be back next Wednesday to talk about all the IT news of the week.

That was until then for myself, Tom Hollingsworth, for Alistair Cook and the rest of the people here at Tech Field Day. Go fly a kite and have some fun with it. We'll see you next week.