Techstrong Gang – November 19, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Tuesday. We've got a great Tuesday report.

It's good to be back home in Boca. You are watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone.

Happy Tuesday. I'm Alan Shimmel for Textron, and welcome to Textron Gang. We, we have a, uh, just a, a Nitty gritty gang member group here today in Boca Ratone With me is our sustainability analyst and editor, Bonnie Bonnie Schneider.

Hi, Bonnie. Welcome. Great to have you here.

Thanks, Alan. And then joining us. He's back.

He was actually, he was out with me in Salt Lake City. We're gonna hear more about that in a minute. He is the, uh, founder of Tech Field Day and still runs Tech Field Day, part of Futurum Group.

Steven Foskett. Hey, Steven. It's good to see you back home.

Yeah, it was nice to see you in, uh, in Salt Lake City as well. I, I'm wondering, is Bonnie the nitty gritty one? Or is that me?

It's either That. Well, one of you is Nitty and what are you is gritty. Oh man.

I don't wanna be gritty from, uh, the Pennsylvania, the, the Philadelphia, uh, mascot. You know, that's, I can't, can't do That. Well, yeah.

Being from Cleveland, I would imagine you'd have a problem with that, Right? That is the mascot in Philly, right? I, I, I think so.

Yes. It is the creepy one. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. You're pretty creepy.

Yeah. Our camera crew is, is yes. Making all kinds of gestures that you're correct.

I can just imagine what gestures they're making. Yes. No, no, no.

All good. All good. Look, it's all good.

Um, so we, we have a, a great couple of topics to cover today. We're going to kick off as, as I mentioned, Steven and I were out in Salt Lake City last week, and that was for the CubeCon Cloud Native Con. And while there, you know, in conjunction with that, Steven, you guys ran one of your, uh, tech field days.

This was App Dev Tech Field Day. But you, you've got a busy tech Field Day calendar coming up. Yes.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. We're still, we're not done for the year yet.

Uh, so we've got, uh, actually tomorrow, uh, we've got Mobility Field Day streaming on Techron tv. Mm-Hmm. So, uh, tune in for that.

We're gonna have some reports from a couple of companies, Nile and Cisco, and the Wire wifi and Enterprise Mobility space. Very cool. And then we're looking at, uh, you know, I'm not sure, uh, what all we're gonna be doing at Reinvent, but, uh, we're also planning our, our first 25 events, including another AI Field Day, which I'm looking forward to.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, so I, I had the chance to sit in a little bit in the app dev, or at least for one session.

I, I had to go to the show floor and do videos, but it was a, uh, a full couple days there for the, uh, tech Field Day team. Why don't you, if you don't mind, share a little with the audience. Yeah, sure.

It was, uh, it was a lot of fun. First off, it was a lot of fun to have you and Mitch, uh, sit in for, uh, field day presentations, along with, uh, uh, some other great friends of ours and including some new friends. Uh, that was fun too.

We've got some first time delegates joining us around the table. Um, shout out to, uh, Mike Stanley and, uh, Benji Young. I think that maybe they might be here on the, on the gang at some point.

Um, that be great. And, and of course, uh, so many great people. Um, man, the Q Con cloud Native con, it was, uh, a, a, there was a great showing there, a good attendance, um, about about half the people I spoke with.

Uh, this was their first ever event. And I think that reflects the changing nature of the event. Uh, you know, open source software, Kubernetes Cloud native software has become more mainstream, more enterprise, more corporate, and there were certainly a lot of those sorts of end users there, in addition to the usual crowd of developers and project staff.

Um, but yeah, we, we did, uh, tech Field Day there, the CNCF, uh, graciously extended, uh, some space for us and, and, and some ability for us to do those. Um, we heard from a company called South Works that, uh, specializes in, um, hybrid multi-cloud, which is a, a kind of a, a, a near and dear topic to my heart. In fact, I actually, uh, sat in for that one as a delegate.

And I'll be writing an article about that, uh, probably publishing today on LinkedIn. Um, talking about the core question of, of, of cloud mobility. To me, when you look at the, the big, um, well, the, at the cloud platforms, there's kind of two flavors, right?

There's sort of the generic, um, run anything here. It's a virtual machine or a, or a, you know, physical machine. But, uh, you know, run, run anything you want on it, it's all yours, have fun, go to it.

And then there's the more value added clouds, like the big three, uh, Azure, uh, AWS and Google Cloud. They, they specialize in advanced services. And my question, uh, for South Works, and, and my question for the, the industry really is, um, given the fact that some of these big cloud providers offer advanced services and differentiated services, how can you really make multi-cloud applications that are valuable when moving them from, for example, AWS to Azure or Versa, fire to, you know, you're, you're gonna have to switch a lot of the core services, database services, firewall, even, um, some of the, uh, elements of running the application itself.

How do you make use of multi-cloud in that kind of scenario? And South Works is planning on using CNCF tools, a lot of which, a lot of those projects that we saw at CubeCon to make that happen. Uh, but I think a lot of companies are really faced with that core issue.

So, before I get on, um, you know, what's your take on that question, Alan? Yeah, look, I, I, I will tell you, you know, I've been following the cloud space since there was a cloud space, and I always knew there would be hybrid cloud, right? You would have people in public, uh, hyperscale data centers, and then private data centers.

I, I never foresaw the multi-cloud. I thought people would make their bets. I'm an Amazon shop, I'm a Microsoft shop, I'm a Google shop, an Oracle shop, what have you.

However, the way it's worked out is, I do believe that multi-cloud wins the day a lot. And I think what it is, is, yes, each of these hyperscalers have have their own, uh, special sauce that they bring to the, to the table, right? But that's at this higher level underneath that, I think it's sort of bits and bytes, right?

I what database you're running is, it's on a serverless platform, is it Kubernetes? And especially when you start talking about, uh, microservices based architectures, right? It's almost, that lends itself really well to pulling stuff from anywhere and everywhere.

So while each of the cloud providers does have its own special sauce, I, I think underlying application infrastructure, there's just basic stuff that allows multi-cloud to become the dominant format going forward, right? I don't think anyone is gonna put all their eggs in, in any one basket. Yeah.

I, I, I think that there's a, a deep desire, especially among enterprises not to become too reliant on any of these companies, because then, man, you're really enthralled to that, to that company. I mean, if AWS, I mean, look what happened with VMware, right? I mean, VMware became core to the enterprise data center, and then VMware got sold and they, uh, changed the pricing structure to put it gently.

And a lot of enterprises are pretty upset about that, and I think that they're really shy of having that happen to them again. But at the same time, if you, all you're doing is using the lowest come denominator features or using like, you know, EC2 as a, as a virtual machine in the cloud, you might as well use any other cloud provider. I mean, Oracle's gonna be a lot more affordable to you, uh, IBM and the, and the rest of the companies out there, Akamai, uh, why bother using, um, you know, AWS at all?

So, I do wonder how this is gonna work long term. Now, another company that we saw, uh, was Heroku, which is a Salesforce platform, and this is one of the original PA platform as a service companies. Um, they specialize in, uh, a higher level, um, application integration.

Uh, for me, when, when talking to them, um, you know, the big question for me was how is this, how does this serve Salesforce companies? But how does it serve CU customers that are not Salesforce customers? In other words, if, if is this just a Salesforce Salesforce solution?

The answer is absolutely not. Um, they really are trying to emphasize the fact that, uh, you know, it's kind of a, a, a tightrope walk for, for Heroku, because on the one hand, you know, they wanna say, look, we are the best for Salesforce customers and running, you know, applications that are connected to Salesforce, that are powered by Salesforce, that leverage other Salesforce capabilities. But on the other hand, I think that they don't also want to say, and if you're not a big Salesforce user, then we don't want you as a customer, because of course, it's a useful platform as well.

Um, we're also looking at them, um, extending beyond their roots and, uh, embracing, uh, third parties including a WF. Um, that's, uh, I think to me, a real interesting takeaway from that. And also the fact that Heroku has, you know, a decade of experience doing this stuff, um, you know, past seems like a new thing, but it's, it's really not.

And, uh, those of us who have been trying to build applications around Salesforce have faced the, uh, the challenges and, and, and sort of realized the benefits of using a platform as a service technologies that sort of smooth over a lot of those integration details. Great, great. Look, it, it comes down to this.

People will, and, and people are smart about this, organizations are smart about this. I think they'll use the right tool for the job. Mm-Hmm.

And if it lends itself to doing it a multi-cloud, I think that will be the preference not to be locked in, but there'll be things where you don't have a choice, right? And it, it's, and the other thing to remember is, look, the average organization has like, what a thousand appli, you know, large organization, I mean, has a thousand applications or something like that. Some will be multi-cloud, some will be just on a single cloud.

Some will be kept in a data center, some will stay on the mainframe. It's a mishmash out there. It's the way it's gonna be.

What do you think, hang on that one. Um, Not on that one. I was just curious about the, the tech field days that, from the videos I've seen, it seems like the participation is growing, the interest is growing, and there's more, uh, diversity in types of the people that are attending.

Uh, I was wondering, Steven, if you can comment on that. That's just my observation from watching it for the past, uh, six months or so. Yeah.

Well, we, we really are, uh, aggressively reaching out. And to that point, Bonnie, for example, um, at the, uh, media and analyst reception at, uh, CubeCon, I ran into Benji de Young, uh, host of, uh, Kubernetes podcast. Um, really hit it off with the guy.

And, um, I invited him to come sit in on a, on a session to see what he thought of it. Um, we are really understanding that, um, you know, we can't have this be sort of a, a, a quiet, you know, private little club or something of people who attend Tech Field Day. We really wanna embrace more diversity.

We wanna embrace more, uh, people with different perspectives. Um, and, and that's really what we're all about. And, and so I'll just say, if you're listening to this, if, if you've got a, a blog or a podcast or you make videos or your user group member or whatever, uh, you know, hit me up.

'cause I would love to invite you to a future Field Day event. Uh, there are a lot of fun and, um, and it really is an open door. And, you know, the other thing that's interesting for me too is kind of crossing the vendor, um, and, and delegate divide.

So the people around the table, um, you know, we don't invite in people who work for any of the companies and, and in this space, but of course, people switch sides all the time. And so, for the third company that we had presenting at Field Day, we had, um, one of our, our favorite delegates, uh, Mike Lavan was actually at the keyboard running the, uh, demo for Kodiak because he, uh, got a job with a startup. And, uh, and so it's a lot of fun to see that we also had our, uh, our friend Chris Williams who works at HashiCorp, uh, crossing the other way because the companies didn't mind him sitting in as a delegate on some of these presentations.

And so it's really neat to see how that works, because of course, these folks have, um, different, a different, uh, perspective after being in product marketing and product management for a tech company, uh, than coming on the other side of the table and realizing it's awful hard to position a new tech product in an enterprise tech space. So, you know, Kodiak is a great example of that. 'cause this is a small company, a a startup.

They're attacking, um, the complexities of, um, platform engineering and infrastructure as code and trying to figure out how to make all of this stuff easier. They're all practitioners. These are essentially people who were out there doing the work, and now they're trying to figure out a way to leverage that experience, leverage their own skills, and help people, uh, get up to speed faster, which is really, uh, a great idea.

Um, and it also demonstrates the fact that this divide between companies and practitioners isn't as hard as it looks. And in fact, um, we benefit when we can cross those streams a little bit and bring practitioner experience to, uh, the product vendor side. Absolutely.

Steven, as you mentioned, uh, tomorrow Wednesday is, is the next tech field day was, was networking, you guess? Yeah, it's mobility. Uh, mobility is our mobility field day.

Yeah. Which is, yeah. Which is originally wireless Field day.

And this is actually, I gotta tell you, mobility Field Day is my favorite Field day event. I know you're not supposed to have favorites, but I know you have favorite kids, right? I know we all do, right?

We're All special. You know, my kids know which one's my favorite. Well, mobility Field Day is the most fun because it is like being on another planet because they're all wireless nerds.

They come in, they talk about private 5G, they talk about antennas, they talk about propagation. And, and, and the other thing that's crazy too, in the, in the wireless and mobility side, a lot of what we take for granted was invented independently there. And so, again, it is like a science fiction movie, you know, where they go down to the planet and like, there's like six legged reptile horses instead of four-legged furry ones.

Mm-Hmm. You know, 'cause everybody's gotta do the same things. And so like zero touch provisioning that originated in the mobility space.

And a lot of, you know, a lot of the technologies that we're seeing in cloud and in data center are things, you know, software-defined networking, things that mobility invented separately. And so you can learn a lot by kind of opening your eyes to a different area of technology and then kind of bringing that into your space. And that's, that's why I've, I've loved being part of mobility this whole time.

Love it. Alright. com and you can get the whole schedule of the events and find out a lot more on there.

Steven was a lot of fun. Let's take a break here on Techron Gang. We're gonna come back and talk about, do you have what it takes to be a DevOps leader?

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And, uh, our next block talks about what it takes to be a DevOps leader. com. You could see the link to the article in the, in the notes.

The interesting takeaway for the, one of the main takeaways from this analysis and report was that DevOps leaders become, excuse me, DevOps engineers become leaders faster. Usually within two years, a DevOps engineer is becoming a leader. Now, what's the reason for that?

There could be some several reasons, and some of them not so obvious. But, um, one of it may be that, you know, well, I have two takes on it. First of all, when you're a DevOps engineer, almost by definition you have skills in, in multiple areas, right?

So you're that classic. You're not a t-shaped person. You are a bro shaped person in terms of your skillset.

And I think that makes you much more valuable as a leader within an organization because you have expertise that that crosses over. So it's that multi skill. The second thing may very well be though, that frankly, a lack of DevOps engineers and we're, you know, we're, we're dying for 'em out there.

And so when we get one, we wanna hold onto 'em and, and, and give them a, a promotion, you know, and give them a, a career path. Steven, I know you guys run in, you know, you're talking to a lot of people with the field day events. What, what's your take?

Well, it's interesting, Alan. I think those two aspects that you just mentioned are exactly what came up in my mind when I was reading this article in this survey. Um, as you said, uh, just to just kind of summarize, you know, there's a lot of different people in DevOps and some of the people that come in, um, don't have the same background.

And, and that's really great. And I, we've definitely seen that, uh, in the tech field day space. Um, I'm gonna, uh, uh, call out without fear of, uh, of, of concern because this is something that he owns really well.

Um, a recent, uh, field day delegate that we had, Kurt Kempel, um, who is a one of the best, smartest, brightest people talk about having an unusual background though. Um, one of the things, uh, in his background is that he was a con convict and he picked up a lot of skills in prison. Wow.

And now he is a tremendous DevOps leader and an inspiring person in AI. And, you know, basically a platform evangelist and well, literally a pla I mean, he's the Slack, he's the Slack platform evangelist, and he ga gave us, I mean, it's just like such an example of the fact that you don't necessarily have to come from one of the elite colleges and a computer science degree to be successful as a DevOps engineer. And again, you know, if we look deeply in, in the article and in the survey, what we see is, although if you start with a degree, it gets you further along on your career path Initially.

Initially is that, But if you start without a degree, you can catch up. And that's what we see. You know, I mean, I think that that's what we saw at CubeCon.

Incredibly diverse audience. I mean, historically at CubeCon, that's what I've been seeing, you know, a wonderful, uh, group of people, many of whom came from or from just different backgrounds. I don't have a computer science degree.

Um, I don't know about you, but I think it is a welcoming space and I love that about it. I think that was also in this, the survey, what type of school did they go to a top Ivy league or, or, or not. And there was fluctuation in terms of how does that affect their career path?

And a lot of it found, even if, regardless of the school and as you were saying, Steven, regardless of even if they had a degree, uh, that they were great prospects for career growth, right. Wi within eight years that that whole thing goes away with eight years of experience. You know, it was interesting.

There was an article, I, I don't even remember if it was in the Washington Post or the New York Times, about has Ivy Leagues, has the Ivy League ruined America League schools? Yeah. Well, that was the front page league schools, uh, this month on the Atlantic as well.

No, that's what it was. The Atlantic. Excuse me.

And, um, you know, look, I'm not here knocking Ivy League schools. You want to go pay a hundred thousand dollars a year for your education? God bless you.

Um, and they do turn out a high proportion of great, great people. But it takes a village. It takes a whole community.

And there are plenty of, and especially that I love this about the tech field, love it about the tech field more than in almost any other field that I've come across. It truly is a meritocracy. Mm.

It doesn't really, I mean, it's easy for me as a white man to sit here and say this, but it's a lot more open regardless of your sex, regardless of your race, certainly regardless of your, you know, we have trans, I have Steven, I'm sure you were a cute con. You saw transgender people. Uh, what, look, it doesn't really make a difference how you dress, how you look, how you talk, you know what your preference are.

It's that, it's can you code, can you do the technology? Can you help build apps? Can you make them more secure?

Right. And it's that meritocracy that I, I actually really, it's one of the big reasons why I love being part of this community. Um, and, and it, and it's, and it's certainly so in DevOps as well.

Right? That's great. 'cause it's encouraging for people to, that are considering a career to, to go to one that's welcoming, like in that way.

Yeah. And listen, I don't wanna be blowing, you know, I don't want to be some unicorn crapping rainbows here. I'm not saying that there isn't prejudice.

I'm not saying that, you know, again, as a white male in my shoes, it's easy for me to say, oh, everything is kumbaya. Try being a woman or a black woman or a, a a, you know, a chance kind of person. And, and I'm sure they do run into some head currents, but I think when you look at tech versus other industries, we're a lot more, uh, there's a lot more opportunity there based upon not who you are, but what you do in, in terms of work.

And, and that's a great thing. The other thing I'll mention though is that, um, from a pay point of view, from a compensation point of view, it seems, you know, at least initially, and maybe this is what you were getting at Steven, at least initially, the people with college degrees in this stuff are getting a higher pay rate. But again, that goes away too after a few years of experience.

So, you know, what does it take to be a DevOps leader? I think it just takes the will to go do it. Mm-Hmm.

I, I think it takes being a leader. Um, I will push back a little bit on, on what you're talking about, about the acceptance. Um, I think in, um, software developers, I think they're, you know, the people themselves.

I think there's a lot of acceptance and there's a lot of, um, meritocracy and belief that, you know, if you, if you show your skills, if you show your qualities, you can move up. But I do want to caution that we've certainly seen a lot of misogyny, a lot of racism, a lot of, uh, challenges in this industry, um, especially on the business side and on the pay side. But, uh, uh, and, and on the promotion side, I mean, if you look at who is successful in Silicon Valley companies as opposed to in software development, you'll see, well, a lot of male faces, uh, not all white faces, but the non-white faces tend to be, you know, Southeast Asians, you know, Indian folk.

Exactly. But, but even more to the point, uh, as my Indian friends have informed me, they tend to be elites in their, uh, en environment, their background, their schooling as well. Um, so, so to, to us, we may, you know, from from America, you know, white guy from America, I may see, you know, oh, it's an Indian guy, I, but, but, um, in their culture, um, there are different levels and casts as well.

And, and they've said that that is a, a big problem in tech. And of course, you know, we certainly are seeing politically, uh, you know, a, a huge like, kind of white guy movement and so on. So I wouldn't say that it is all rainbows.

One, get Me started, Steven. But that being said, it is a phenomenally welcoming environment. And some fields, that's another thing we've seen with Tech Field Day because we have different verticals.

We've seen that some fields are more accepting than others. So for example, my background in storage, well, storage is a white guy world. Um, sorry, uh, I wish it wasn't.

Um, but you know, you look across the lines at data analytics, um, it's a much more, uh, diverse field. Much, many, many more women in the database field. Um, security tends to attract lots of phenomenal and incredible and wonderful weirdos.

Um, and so I always love we going to security conferences because it's just, wow, I love these people. Um, and the same thing in software development. Um, you know, when you look at the, the DevOps leaders and so on, a lot of these new, uh, areas, AI has been more welcoming, I think, than traditional IT infrastructure.

So I, I think it does, uh, there is sort of nuance within that, and I think that that's a positive. And it shows that if you are who, no matter who you are, if you're skilled, if you are energetic, if you wanna make a contribution and you code, you can move forward in a way that many other parts of society would hold you back. Yeah.

I think that's also in, in recent years, you know, with girls that are, are coding girls who code, and then the, um, organization I just met that does, um, women in ai that's growing a lot too. So if we like pause this now, then look again in five years, we think it's gonna be different conversation. I think a lot more women are coming in just slowly but surely.

But it's, but it's definitely happening. I Look, as I said, is it perfect? No, far from perfect.

But you know, in many ways the one eye jack is the king in the land of the blind. And, and there are, there are many other industries, verticals, communities where they would view our progress here in tech, as you know, well, they may not actually be fans of it. They may think that we are too many weirdos or too many, you know, uh, well, Those people need to meet more weirdos because the weirdos are what makes life Fun.

Absolutely. Sure. They're fun.

Absolutely. Anyway, it's a great article. com.

You could check it out. We're gonna take a break and we're gonna come back. Bonnie recently did an interview with a friend of mine, jet Yu, uh, founder of, um, well, he's founded many things.

Yeah. com. But, uh, within the, uh, DevOps space, Delphix Del was his company.

But we're gonna take a break here on Text and Gang, we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Techstrong Gang. Well, recently I had the opportunity to speak to a serial founder of IT companies and in the tech world.

His name is Jed Yue, and you might know him as the founder of Delphix. org Avamar. com plus he's also a bestselling author.

His book is called Disrupt or Die. And if you're wondering how does that relate to sustainability, I had the chance to speak to Jed and he explained that as well as a topic we were just sort of visiting in our earlier block leadership. So let's take a listen.

I'm pleased to be joined by Jeda, who is a bestselling author of Disrupt or Die. com. Jed, it's so great to have you on today.

Thank you, Bonnie. Great to join you In Disrupt or Die. You talk about the importance of change to stay competitive.

Tell me a little bit more about that philosophy and also how it applies to sustainability in tech. Yeah, it's definitely at odd with sustainability in many ways. If you think about sustainability, you have to think about sustainability of your business and then also what your business and what the people in your organization do to drive sustainability for the planet.

And the challenge with disruption is that it disrupts what is sustainable in any given business. You have to stay ahead of all the innovation potential within your industry and by your competitors. And so in order to be sustainable for your business and then be able to invest in sustainability for the benon, you have to master disruption and innovation.

When people are trying to innovate their companies and lean into ai, what do they need to be thinking about when it comes to sustainability and energy use? Gen AI had an enormous cost to the manage. It is so expensive when it comes to compute and energy resources.

And today we're in a phase where there's vast experimentation with jet AI and different types of ai. All of that has really big implications for the planet. It's completely changed the curve on electricity consumption by technology, by the technology industry.

It's gone from growing over the next decade, a couple percentage points to more than 10% of the total for the planet. And you could really see how staggering the shift has been. Now, on the other side, it has incredible potential.

It can really accelerate innovation and change the nature and the speed of innovation. And so my book Disruptor Dies filled with frameworks that I have put a practice or that I've learned at, put a practice from other entrepreneurs who built much bigger company than the mine. And so those are the frameworks that entrepreneurs use to ensure that the things they work on have high probability and high return.

com and the fact that CRM had already been invented in the data center business mode into the clan, all of the news app platforms that followed those were she bet. Let's talk about leadership for sustainability first, just generally, do you have any overall advice for tech leaders and maybe the ones that aren't a part of sustainable it that, that this is something new to them they know they have to focus on? What's your overall advice for leadership and sustainability?

It's a great question, and I think for too long, sustainability has been somebody else's problem to solve maybe the CEO or chief sustainability officer's problem to go and solve and create a solution. But I think IT leaders are in the perfect place to take charge of their sustainability efforts. So in IT, they can not only look at the IT consumption of environmental resources, they can also look at the broader footprint of their entire company and then perhaps their entire industry.

But I think it's very important for leaders that we call around the world to reprioritize sustainability and to look very carefully and what they're doing with gene ai. The challenge with gene AI is that it has a massive accelerant. It's a massive accelerant on innovation.

So it not only changes the nature of what you can build in applications because you can incorporate gene AI and AI ml and other types of AI into your applications and programs. It also changes the rate of innovation. com, which measures the impact of gen AI tools on developers, uh, we're seeing that the average developer using Gen AI tools like GitHub, co-pilot are shipping new features, 38% faster, 38% more features in terms of time to market than in the baseline.

4 x developer with a $19 a month solution. And so it radically accelerates potential for innovation and a very low cost, low dollar cost. But it does have a very big cost to planning because these LMS are hugely expensive on planetary resources and the range of things it can do keeps growing and then moves into direct management of data against video voice.

All of these things will create more and more demand for cq, not less. So there are areas where it'll become more efficient in areas where it'll become even more voracious than its appetite for energy and planetary resources. Thank you so much.

com. Jed talked also about Gen AI and its immense energy use and where he sees nuclear coming in as an innovative, uh, disruptor as, uh, to to be a, a source for that energy and just the overall view that he has about how important sustainability is. That's why he founded Co-founded Sustainable.

It, it was really a pleasure to speak with him. This is someone he said he's quote, not working now, but I, I doubt that I think he's gonna come back. com, which he said he had picked up the domain years ago for that, which was a smart move.

And now, um, he's working on that. So it's kind of exciting to watch and, and learn more about where things got started and where they're headed now. Excellent.

Um, I, I had met, I think I was in Chicago at a, uh, a, a DevOps event we were doing with, uh, the Jenkins community. And this was, uh, with, uh, Delphix. And he is, he is a, uh, he's a dynamic individual.

He's a, he's a serial entrepreneur in every sense of the word, but also you, you know, he was out here preaching and, and starting up sustainable it before it was cool, right. And before there was, he helped make that community come around it. So, you know, more power to him, more power to him.

Steven, I don't know if you've dealt with him at all or run across his Yeah, it's funny. Um, our backgrounds have kind of paralleled a little bit. I knew him at Avamar Mm-Hmm.

Um, I met him, uh, back then and, and at Delphix as well. Um, you know, this is somebody who certainly has made a lot of contributions and talk about diverse backgrounds too. Started as a high school teacher Yeah.

Isn't an interesting high school English teacher. Isn't That great? Yeah.

Um, but you know, I, I gotta say one of the things that really struck out or struck me from this conversation was his, and I don't know if this is exactly the point he was trying to make or just his worldview, but essentially that sustainability isn't just about green. It's not just about making sure that things use less power. Now, obviously from the conversation he's concerned about, you know, carbon emissions and power consumption and so on.

But he talked a lot, especially in this interview about other aspects of making it, uh, I dunno if sustainable is the right word for it, but essentially mature. Um, you know, that we have to be looking at things in a mature way, in a, in a way that, that allows these applications to continue to run for a long period, to be able to generate a positive benefit to the company that's creating them or society. And, and I think that that's a more expansive view of sustainability then a lot of people have.

And really, uh, you know, kind of a refreshing view as well. Uh, did that stick out to you? Yeah.

And especially when he was talking about where, where does it, the IT team fit into the whole company and he really is very certain on that they should be the leaders in, in sustainability. Um, and that's what you saw with sustainable it. And, and that's what he reflected in the interview.

And when I asked him also about, um, ai, you know, one of the things when I covered Nvidia about AI making, um, the process more efficient, and that might be a way to save energy, he seemed a little reluctant to go with that as, as full force. He, he seemed to pull back and say, um, the demand is gonna be so overwhelming that we have to look more at the, uh, a alternative energy sources. So it was an interesting conversation.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things he mentioned there was indeed that, um, even if, as I have suggested on this show a few times now, even if we, we kind of shift gears into a new realm of, uh, inferencing and AI applications, that doesn't mean that these big training clusters, these big energy sinks are going anywhere.

And, and I think that one of the things he pointed out in this was that those clusters will continue to use a meaningful percentage of the world's energy even if we turn to things that run AI locally on our phones and Exactly. And on low power devices and so on. So, and the other thing that he pointed out, I, this makes a lot of sense to me, is as we kind of turn the corner on chat and generative AI and run it on low powered processors, we're at the same time accelerating the development of applications, as he said, like video that are just gonna consume even more resources.

So Right. Video and voice. Yeah.

You know, Uh, I feel like, you know, maybe the, the, the environmental impact of AI is a little bit overblown because I feel like we kind of have a spike of, um, of, of power consumption. Now, maybe that's not gonna continue. It sounds like he thinks that it's gonna continue.

I think so too. I think that perspective that he has from his years of different starting different companies, maybe he can see things a little further down the line. That's exactly the impression I got as well.

Uh, that the demand is just beginning and with these new things that are coming out with voice and video, um, this will grow even more because the demand for all of that is just gonna keep growing. Could be, but more power to him. Yeah.

We're following it. Alright, I think that's gonna wrap. Yeah.

That's about it. Right? We're, uh, finished here for today's Textron Gang, Tuesday's Textron Gang.

As Steven mentioned, tomorrow we do have, uh, mobility Tech Field Day on, well, today even we have a whole line up of our usual Textron TV material. And also, I don't know if this'll be for today, but this week we should start having our CubeCon videos that we streamed live while we were in, uh, salt Lake City. We'll be playing here on Techstrong TV and they'll all be available on there.

Subdue. Check that out, Steven. Great seeing you.

Good luck on Field Days this week. We'll speak to you soon. Great to be here.

Thanks. And, uh, glad to be able to share those with the Textron audience. Absolutely.

Bonnie. Yeah, great to see you as always. Great.

Most of all, great to see you watching this. We hope you enjoy today's Textron gang. Stay tuned for the rest of Textron TV today, everyone.

But for now, this is Alan Shimmel and we're outta here.