Techstrong Gang – October 30, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Wednesday. There's no joy in Mudville tonight.

Mighty Casey is struck out, but it is football season. So let's, let's focus on football. Um, our first story, actually, today's on football.

You're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel. Happy Wednesday, as I said at the opening, no joy in Mudville.

Congratulations to the Dodgers. They certainly seem to be the better team in this route series. Um, but life goes on.

It's the middle of football season, and as they used to say in Brooklyn about them, bums just wait till next year. Uh, we're gonna switch, as I said though, over to football. Our first story today is armed football.

But first, let me introduce you to our gang today. Uh, we've got hardcore gag, you know, we're down to our court here. Let me bring them on.

First of all, you immediately switched from baseball to football, spouting his, his University of Georgia Bulldog shirt. He's the czar of Silicon Valley, John Schwartz. Hey, John, how are you?

Hey, Alan. You know what? I, I'm holding you a desperate, desperate times call for desperate measures.

So, I dunno if you can see, There it is. There it is. They got a chance.

They're still breathing. Hopefully they, they win. But I I, I will hold that hope against all odds, especially against the Dodgers.

I would root for a wrong before I root for the Dodgers, by the way. Anyway, True meaning of a fan, never give up. Speaking of True Fan from ground near ground zero there, well, we're a little north of Ground Zero in the Bronx.

Our chief Content Officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike. Hey, we're, we're, we're still holding out out here, man.

Yankees, we're gonna four straight, it's been done. We can make it, man. Okay.

None of you, you believe AWS stats like they have on all those sports things, right? I never believe those. Uh, I think Google, Google Cloud is actually official stats.

Oh, it's analysis World Series Ws. I think it's NFL, Google Cloud might be the MLB. You're right.

Let's move on to Denver, right? The King of Guitars, our CTO, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitch, how are you?

Hey, I'm doing really well. You know, if it's any solace, you know, you could be a Rockies fan, just be thankful. Absolutely.

You're in the series, boys. Yeah. That, I guess there is that.

Yeah. Looking for a Silver Bull fans and, you know. Yeah, no, see about the Buffalos kicking some butt.

They're doing well. Buffalo's doing well. Yeah.

Yeah. Buffalo's doing well, enjoying that. Anyway, that's a good transition into football.

Mitchell. Our first story today, our first article in our first, uh, what we're gonna cover is about the Dallas Cowboys calling an AI audible. Is, is AI calling the plays now, John?

Is, is Google Cloud calling plays? What's going on here? Well, eventually that might happen.

They might actually do, uh, game planning based on AI and tendencies of other teams and their own tendencies. So, yes, I, uh, ran into the Dallas Cowboys. CIO is a guy named by the name of Matt Messick.

And I'm gonna make the argument this guy is probably in as much pressure field job as, as the head coach of the team, who's probably gonna be gone by the end of the year. Um, Matt Messick has been the CIO for a couple of years. And just to give a little, a little history about the Cowboys, I actually make the argument that they're successful as a tech and marketing company as they are as a sports team.

I mean, they haven't been to an NFC Championship in decades, but they are the most valued team according to Forbes, I believe it's about $9 billion. And they're also a pioneer in the use of technology. Um, dating back to, you can say arguably the sixties, late sixties, early seventies, when they were the first team really to use computers.

It was Gil Brand who was called the godfather of modern drafting. He would use computers to find and evaluate players that were nowhere near the radar of other teams. Now since then, the Cowboys have been working with people like at and t so they've helped develop this 5G network several years ago within their stadium, which is at T Stadium.

They've done a lot, a lot of research. They've sent, they sell a lot of merchandise, and they do that basically through technology. And they look at ai, interestingly enough, Jerry Jones, who's a who, who's a marketing genius, I will say that he is a marketing genius.

Sayable gm. Yes. A market marketing genius.

I it, I was gonna say one of the worst GMs in history, but he understands the one technology where he's gone to Matt and said, I wanna learn about this. The only technology is ai. And this sounds, does this sound familiar?

Everybody in the Jones family with Jones, the team is pressuring Matt Messick to find out what they can do with AI moving forward. They want to be the trendsetters because in terms of technology use, they really are among all the teams. The other teams send their CIOs to Frisco, Texas, where the Cowboys are headquartered to find out how they use technology.

And what they want to do with AI is they want to use it not only to sell even more merchandise, but they're looking at game planning. And yes, they are looking at in-game gambling. That is the killer app that they are really interested in.

And I think the, obviously the league is interested in gambling, that's their bread and butter. But the Cowboys see that as an incredible incentive. So anyway, I talked with him and he kind of laid out some of the plans that they're working on.

They're a big Cisco user. They use all the collaborative stuff from Cisco. Cisco just came out with some, a Jet agentic AI offering across their collaboration tools.

The Cowboys are embracing it, and it's, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out, because these guys really are the premier team in terms of use technology. I, I, dating back to my days at Barron's, I would go down there and visit them, and they were showing me the testing of 5G and a lot of this stuff they're working on. So, you know, pro sports, it's very competitive.

It's, it's just competitive on the tech side, as it is on the sports side. So are you saying That we should jump here before I go? Yeah.

Mike, Are you saying that we gamblers, I guess, are gonna have to join some sort of AI network to counter this so that we can use AI to win? Yeah. I mean, how's this playing out in your head?

So one of the things that Matt, really, the re the reason why they're obsessed with the 5G network to begin with, and I remember going down there and they were testing it in downtown Dallas. So at and t is headquartered not too far from at and t Stadium, and they were obsessed with speed in inside the stadium. So one of the things they do now is they do a lot of, was That was Davis Just speed baby?

Yeah. So da Yeah. With d yeah, with Dallas, they're obsessed with speed and throughputs and uploading and downloading.

So what they want to do is they wanna make it as fast as possible for a myriad of reasons. But I think the one thing that they are the most obsessed with is creating this opportunity to bet on games inside The stadium on individual plays. Not just games.

Yes, yes. They play, play The guy in the stadium to say, third down in five, are they gonna make it? What are the odds that he passes?

What are the odds that he runs? What are the odds he got the first down? Who is he passing to?

Who's he handing off to? And they want people to bet play by play by play. You need real low latency, high speed to be able to do.

Yes. And they want to be replacing the diamond vision with your handheld, right? You're betting, you're watching the plays, you know, you're, maybe you're watching the football game like this, right?

As much as you are the field. Yes. And I think actually, oh, sorry, go ahead Mike.

I think the coaches are gonna love this because instead of people screaming for their heads, they'll just say, fire the AI agent. Well, but you need that AI because to create the, as much as you need speed for the person to be able to make their bet and get it in in time, right? It's 25 second play clock.

You need that AI to make the odds in real time as well, right? For someone to sit and calculate what are the odds of a, a throw versus a run. What are the odds I give it to this guy, not that guy.

And also in that same 25 second span, right? Given all the variables, it's third nine in four, and we're at there 40 and we're trailing by six. This screams for ai when you think about it, right?

You're going to need AI to make those odds. You all, it all makes perfect sense to me because the Cowboys have always been kind of the outlier in the NFL. Remember there was that whole ke Coke sponsorship throughout the NFL.

And Jerry Jones wanted to do a deal with Pepsi. So he was the one renegade who got his way, which led to this, this kind of like more of an open Jerry lit. He was more than a renegade.

He sued, Yes. Yeah, He sued the NFL to be able to do his own thing. Now look, he is a master marketer, he's a terrible gm.

He, they haven't been in the, you know, at Super Bowl and forever, but terrible gm, but a great marketer. And, and that's why they're the, the, they have the valuation. They do, right?

They're, they fancy themselves. America's team now. So I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you a little, just like a quick context and I'll then I'll head back to you.

So I mentioned this company, my full disclosure, my daughter worked for a startup called Venue Next. They had an affiliation with the Vikings, the 49 ERs, and I think they worked briefly with the Cowboys and this, this, this startup, which basically burned through its cash and, and crashed and burns. They had this kind of, let's see, about 10 years ago.

Yeah, up about six. It's 10 years ago. They had a, an app that was within the stadium.

And the whole idea is everything goes through your phone, your ticket, your parking, you order from your seats. And I tried it out, it does work. It did work fairly well, but it was a very limited menu that, that was kind of the beginning of this.

You buy merchandise and have it delivered to your seats. And, and so the Cowboys could of picked up on that and they see where all the money's going, right? com media ops is the C-T-O-C-P-O for Caesars Entertainment.

He built their online gambling and runs that, that team, um, not online gambling. They call it online gaming. But you know, John, I'm a Caesar taking here to the Dolphins.

I don't go to a lot of games, but the Dolphins app has that ability in it. Now I can order right to my seat. I can order merchandise, my parkings in, in there and everything.

Um, but let's talk about the Cowboys. How about them cowboys? All right, so I'm a Steelers fan.

I'll full disclosure, I'll say it upfront. And you're right, even before Jerry Jones, Gil Brandt was the father of bringing computers to the NFL, he computerized, digitized all of the college films so that when you looked up a player in the cowboy system, they had all the college film that you can to go scout that player and see what he's like. There's an old story.

You know, the best draft ever in the NFL best draft ever was, I believe the 1972 draft of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Yes. Four Hall of Famers in one draft.

Lynn Swan, Jack Lambert, John Stalworth, and Mike Webster, all in one draft, all Hall of Famers. The Steelers drafted John Stalworth in, I think it was the fourth round. He was a great receiver.

No one knew who he was. He went to a, a historically black college. I, You know what, you just spread my mind.

I was gonna say that. That's what the cowboy, I think it was Ed too Tall Jones. I want to say it was him, but maybe it was some, some other player.

But no, Ed too tall Jones was a well-known guy. He was the first round pick Ed too tall Jones. Okay.

But the Cowboys never knew about John Stalworth because the steer and Scout, and then he's a Hall of Famer now. He's passed away. He knew the Cowboys were digitizing all of the Yes.

Filming, going through their scouting. There were only two reels of John Stalworth playing football in college. That Steeler Scout took 'em both and never gave him back.

And no one in the NFL knew John Stalworth or had seen film Warn him. And so the Steelers just tucked it away and waited to the fourth guy and said, you were gonna take this guy, John. Everyone said, who?

John Smore. Now they got film on Pop Warner kids. So, you know, there's no, That's never gonna happen again.

I coached Pop Warner. We had film, there's an app called Huddle. Yes.

Yes. That's very used To Duke film. You Know, I had nine year roads, very still.

Max is another one Review at mine. And by the way, by the way, Alan Lynn one went to high school, maybe, maybe three miles from where I lived. He went to Sarah High School.

Um, really? Yes. Uh, very.

Anyway, but I was gonna mention, well, She went to USC and he was a very known quantity. Right. He is well known.

He was their first round pick that year. Right. But, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting though, the Cowboys in a sense are as well known and respected within the league.

And here's the funny thing. So this guy, Matt was saying, oh yeah, they all come and visit me. They all come to visit our, our facility to, to learn from us.

And I said, oh, it's kind of like when you're successful as a coach, and I think of like the west coast offense or where Bill Walsh was in his prime teams had come, Yes, they would come to Concepts. I don't take umbridge with your use of the term. Well-known and respected.

Okay. I've reminded of the Godfather, part two. Frank Panang says, your father did business with Hyman Roth.

Your father made money with Hyman Roth. Your father never liked Hyman Roth. It's the same thing.

Yeah. With the Cowboys. Yeah.

No, they're, they're, they're, they're a hated franchise. They're like the University of Texas. I said it.

Yeah. I, I take issue with the whole, you know, America's team thing. I think think they invented that themselves.

Of Course, themselves. America's team. Oh, more People getting jealous.

What's all on job marketing? I hope my friend Michael Farham is watching this back home in Houston, by the way, because Farham, this is for you. I know Andy Alice and the rest of my cybersecurity football friends and George Hume out there fly, eagles fly.

Let's all jump on that bandwagon about those cowboys. Anyway, I think, you know, as A New York giant fan, I follow my ABCs. Anybody but cowboys, cowboys, I'm not there.

Oh my gosh. Um, anyway, Josh, thanks for bringing this one. It actually is a great, it's a great story.

We got off the track here, off the rails, right? You know, I have, I have all this anger and aggression because of the Yankees. I apologize.

So I'm taking it out on the Cowboys. Um, anyway, let's move on. We'll take a break here.

It's extra gang. Let me compose myself. We're going to come back and talk about overcoming observability obstacles.

All right, folks, we're gonna, well maybe be a little more serious for a minute here, but we'll see how it turns out. But, um, if you've been following the show, you know, that we've been kind of taking apart this DevOps next report that Mitch and the folks at Techstar Research put together. And one of the things we looked at in this report was observability and This Whole category, Mitch always leaves me scratching my head a little bit because theoretically, at least observability has always been a core tenant of DevOps.

And yet here it is decade later, and we're still trying to figure this thing out. So what is your assessment of where we are with observability? The research says there's more investment in the area, but what the heck are we, is it, Well, one thing we should have studied is, uh, and just anecdotally, there's a lot less therapy involved in observability than there in technology and sports as we've proved in the last.

I think we can just send in a recording, Alan, you can skip your next session. That'll, that'll do. Anyway, Anyway, I had to put that in there.

So, you know, observability has been around for a while. You know, it started with the open telemetry and open tracing coming together and, and, and combining forces. Um, and people talked about it as, you know, logs and alerts and traces, right?

Well, much more than that. It's kind of grown up in parallel with, as DevOps has, you know, matured and expanded cloud native and microservices and containers. And, you know, observability has also progressed in several ways.

One of it is being used in multiple areas, not just in operations for it, but also in security. And another is, as the complexity's gone up, well, we need more than just the logs and alerts and traces. We need really di visibility across all of our systems to be able to trace down a, or walk down a, a security incident or this bug that's happening in a, in an application that may be involving external services, our own apps, our own databases, maybe in the cloud, maybe on-prem, all these different locations.

So it's, it's grown and is really well established, Mike. But even in our own DevOps research, I think it was about 47% so that they were using observability. Okay, so not even half yet.

Quite. So there's, there's certainly more room to grow. I think the biggest thing about observability that we we're finding is it's not only moved and, and used in in security as well as IT ops, but we're starting to see it in test.

We're starting to see it in software development. We're even seeing applications design for telemetry that is gonna go into an observability kind of solution. Now, the real question is, are we creating more stove pipes, more, uh, silos of data and not being able to see across all that data?

Or are we sharing that data on a common platform, some kind of a, a data fabric and identifying where we share data across the dimensions or the domains of the different areas using, that's probably the next frontier. I won't, I won't claim AI is gonna solve that problem for us. I think we gotta organize the data ourselves better.

I feel like people don't distinguish enough between observability and moderating where I'm just looking at a bunch of predetermined metrics and then they call that observability. So I'm not sure that 47% number is as high as we think it is. And a lot of times a lot of the applications still aren't even instrumented yet.

'cause nobody figured out how to go back to all those legacy apps. And when we had application performance management tools, they were so expensive, we only used them for a handful applications. And to your point, we now have all these cloud native applications and things are more complex than ever.

But I feel like we're not quite catching up to that complexity. And there's still a lot of work to be done here. Someone's using, you know, Prometheus and Open Telemetry.

Yeah, open Telemetry is the second biggest open source project in the CNCF. It Is, I do not, I not doubt that people are instrumenting their apps today, but I don't think that those apps will represent even 10% of the total install base of apps that are out there. Let me see if I can help you here, Mike.

How about those cowboys? I, about them cowboys trend around trigger em. Lemme see if I can help you.

I think when you look at the observability conundrum, you're gotta look at it around the event horizon of deployment, right? Is that for little Carl Ganish, uh, post, yeah. Post-deployment, post-deployment observability for all intents and purposes has replaced performance management.

It has replaced a PM, what we used to call a PM and a LM and, and and management is now called observability. I don't care whether you're New Relic or Cisco's AppDynamics or, or Datadog or any of those things. They're, or Grafana, they're all about observability all the time, right?

So post-deployment, horizon observability has, is the new nomenclature, the new name for what we used to call what you refer to. But I think when we look at this 47% number of DevOps teams of DevOps people who are using observability, it goes exactly to what Mitchell said. It's pre-deployment event horizon.

So it's sort of the left of the, of the deployment horizon. And it's the testing teams, it's the classic DevOps feedback loops of taking observability data from post-deployment going through the wormhole, if you will, of the event horizon back to pre-deployment. And using that data to make my testing better, to improve my code and, and act, you know, faster, get my next releases done better faster.

So I think that's where the action in observability is pre-deployment. I hope that helped you. When, When, when do I call the temporal police to prevent me from going back in time?

Is there any thoughts about that? We, we could like cite Tom Cruise up for this one, but, you know, I like the work through the wearable thing. That was, that was kind of, we need a little Owen Wilson, Owen listen to help this stuff.

Obviously it, the spacing, guilt. Mitch, I, I think, I think part of the problem here has been the tools themselves up until most recently have been too complex to use. And I remember talking to somebody and explaining to 'em, and they were like, well, that sounds awesome, but I have no idea what queries to ask in the first place.

And I think with the help of ai, maybe we won't have to launch the queries Soon because the machine learning that's true too. Also, what queries To run, I mean, you have to think of this also as a data problem. Because when I grew up writing software, right, it was like stuff goes in the logs and then when you couldn't figure out what happened, you added more log messages and you hope that that was gonna lead you to some clue of what a what might have happened or to trace down or walk down where, where an issue was.

Now, now it's more about, okay, we have better tools to do aggregation of much more content, much more log and telemetry data coming from everything from security devices, networks, host servers, cloud services, our applications, the infrastructure software that we're running it on, Kubernetes, containers, everything else. That's a massive amount of data. So in many ways that makes the problem much, much worse, Mike, to your point of like, okay, great, we've got all the data now how do I do anything with it?

And just as opposed to get overwhelmed and never find anything. And that's what, where observability is, tries to step in and do much better job of correlating tying events together and being able to walk across different systems and different, uh, devices that are emitting content. And then they actually have an app platform for building apps on top of that data.

Um, I believe it was like in Splunk, I think it's Splunk development language, if I remember right. SDL, um, to actually build apps. And it's a very, you know, popular marketplace and a lot of free apps and things like that.

So people now have at least the data to operate with. It's, to your point, what's the questions we need to ask? And then how do we build kind of better monitoring, better alerting, better whatever.

I, I think observability is a poster child for ai and the full spectrum of ai, quite frankly, what we call observability today would be impossible without machine learning. Mm-Hmm. Right.

A lot of what we do with observability to this point is based upon our ability to sift through large and larger data sets, find patterns, tendencies, and, and bring those to the forefront, if you will. Now, as you get more data and you find more patterns, you tend to bring more to the forefront and it overwhelms the ability of humans. No matter how good that UI is in your observability plot platform, whether it's Splunk or one of the others, there's so much observability being observed that it overwhelms the human.

So phase two of this observability revolution is bringing generative AI or agen AI into play to, to parse and make decisions based upon the pattern recognitions and, and observability of, of the machine ai, machine learning ai. Well, that's What I'm going with the a you know, to your point about ai, about building apps in a, you know, Splunk development language or whatever it is, is much more use of natural language query interface, right? So I'm not writing queries, I'm not writing apps.

Yes, I might have those things, but No, but I'm talking about AI taking, you know, actions based upon what the machine learning shows without a human involved. That's your agents, right? That's where you start to turn those loose, hopefully the agent one.

Well, and hopefully they work. I mean, but that's, if, if you don't think they're gonna work, let's not waste our time and effort in doing it. Right.

Idea, I mean, building, that's the idea. The agent is all, yeah. So, So are you saying that there'll be no software engineer to review that process?

Because there's a saying in that? Well, they'll always be a software engineer because they're gonna be able to do more valuable things with their time. Right?

But, but there's a saying that says it's one thing to be wrong, it's another thing to be wrong at scale. And if I let the agent go do something on its own, bad things are gonna happen. Sarcasm meter.

Sarcasm meter. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, but oh boy, where'd we go wrong today? It's a day. It's a day We go wrong, miss it.

This is why we try not to go just hardcore all the time because Yeah, so there's a problem with running in the red line, red line Anyway, gasket. Anyway, there is one other issue here that I would like to point out too. And some of the engineers I've talked to are getting yelled at by their CFO for storing too much data.

It's too expensive, and they're getting these bills and the CFO's like, what the hell is all this log data? Crap doing? You mean this?

Wow. Yeah. Well that's, look, we've heard this with Splunk, that's been Forever the issue, right?

I'm vendors. Yeah. Splunk being So, you know, that's the classic case of just course I can, doesn't mean I should.

Um, and there's been, there's been a lot of takes on this. I've seen some companies that do their analysis in real time and then purge data that they don't think they're going to need. But, you know, there's hoarders wherever we go.

And, and there are some hoarders who just say, you know, I need everything. I wanna store everything. You know, my wife's like that with our children's pre-K art projects.

But, um, you know, that being said, this is why we have different tiers of storage, right? And right. Cheaper storage versus premium storage.

Um, but that is, you know, that's a constant kind of fault line that moves depending on, uh, your tolerance. So, so we, so we can have a Halloween movie that's called, you know, the observability purge, right? We'll go from There one day a year, Right?

One day a year we're allowed to purge. I mean, it's still a big area of investment. I think about two thirds of our folks that participated in our survey said that they were doing modest or, or significant increases in their, their observability spend.

So it's, and it may be just that incremental data, you know, storage, you're talking about Alan. Uh, it may be those other uses in other areas in the SDLC too as well. Look, storage is a good business.

You're gonna always gonna need it. Just got one word for you. Young me storage.

Um, not all, no. With that, I'm just full of movie references today. Let's take a break here on our observability obstacles.

We're gonna come back about a, something that's gotta actually no kidding near and dear to me, managing the shift or making the shift to manage security services. MSSP iss. A lot going on in there.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, folks, we're back in. Yes, we're talking about managed security services and they've been around forever, but there's an argument that's starting to emerge that says, well, the bad guys are getting too smart.

The attacks are too vulner, too much volume and the attacks, and we're on the cusp of ai. And no cybersecurity team on its own can train all the models that are required. So maybe the whole thing is just gonna become a service that we consume rather than a set of products and platforms that some SecOps teams deploy.

Alan, I know you've been around this space a long time. As they manage security services, time has, has a count. Yeah.

So let me start off, first of all by saying, you know, this, this segment right here references two articles over on Security Boulevard. One is that NTT one of the largest MSPs in the world, uh, has tapped Palo Alto for their MXDR service. So they're basically being powered by Palo, uh, within their socks knocks and all of that.

Secondly, the good folks over in Sophos outta the uk, they bought SecureWorks, which was one of the big, one of the first big footprint MSS PS that Dell bought years ago. They bought it for a little under a billion dollars, which, you know, for, for whatever reason, MSPs never got the multiple that your true software or even some of the SaaS companies got. But that being said, Mike, let Uncle Al tell you a little story here about mss ps um, Mitchell and I started a company back in Denver, in Boulder, Colorado 2001, still secure 2001.

And we banged our head on the wall for about five, six years selling, uh, vulnerability management, IPS and, uh, network access control. And I came to the conclusion that we sucked, not just, we still secure, but the whole paradigm of how we do security sucked that there wasn't, but a handful of companies in the world that were capable. And this is back in 2006, 2007 maybe, that there were maybe 50 companies in the world that could do security by themselves that had the resources, the will, the wherewithal to do security and do it well.

And keep in mind, Alan, that was in the day of, oh, you know, you passed the, the mirror nose test. Oh, you could be a security engineer. Come here.

Come here. Yeah, Network. No, Didn't you used to work on the Cisco Switch here?

You're a security guy, guy come in In here, you're security engineer. It was, I mean, literally the, that was that big of the bold behind people. Absolutely.

And, and so we went to the board, it's still secure and said, Hey, we need to pivot. MSSP is the future. The people need someone to do their security, if not entirely, at least augment their security.

And I bought a security company, right, identified and we acquired a security company right down here in South Florida. I had just moved down here a few years before and uh, I be damned if I remember the name of that company now, but Steve Harris was the CEO of a very capable guy. And the idea was we were gonna do a rollup because the MSSP business was so fragmented.

There was no NTT at that point doing MSSP. SecureWorks was the only one who had, and they were based, I think they were based in Atlanta or Georgia area, but they had kind of a national footprint. Every other M-S-P-M-S-S-P was very regional.

Very regional. There were like a thousand SSPs in the US when I did my research. And we were gonna do a kind of roll up in MSPs.

Of course by then we had already burned through a lot of money and still secure and we're losing money. And the board really didn't have the appetite for another business development adventure led by me. And, um, I left still secure shortly thereafter.

Uh, But if they would've followed that strategy, this is just, I wouldn't be here now. I'd be, yes, I'd point watch the Cowboys or Something, isn't it Protect Point? Is that who we bought?

Yes. Protect Point. That was the name of the company, Mitch, you remembered.

Yes. Protect Point. And so I have been a believer in a long time that the fact of the matter is most organizations are incapable of doing a soup to nuts security ball game.

They just can't, they don't have the resources. They don't have the, they don't have the will to do it. They don't have the oomph, they don't have the software, they don't have the tools, they don't have the talent.

And so I say this is, this is a trend that's been a, a long time coming, right? This has been a long time coming and good for Sophos. 'cause Sophos made some great, uh, MSSP tools, right?

They had what we used to call back in the day, A UTM. Now Mitchell tried to build a better UTM with a router called Coia. Amen.

And he can tell you about that tomorrow's bedtime story. But, um, Tonight Kids, yeah. But, but Sophos has a long history of servicing the MSSP market.

Mm-Hmm. So my question is, by buying Secure Works though, do they alienate their MSSP audience? Right?

A lot of, a lot of the MSS PS I talked to are sick of buying the gear themselves, and they're just as happy to resell somebody else's service under their own Label as well. So, so Protect Point was what we call a roll your own IT before stuff was legal in Colorado. Um, But, but, but let me ask you this.

I mean, I don't disagree with your analysis, but for decades now, organizations continue to try to hire cybersecurity people, build their own platforms and manage all this stuff, and it's like beating your head against the wall and expecting a different outcome. And yet that's what they keep doing. Well, I think there's a tipping point.

There's a, there's a point where you reach where what you're trying to secure and, and operate and then manage Monitor is beyond the complexity of what a service provider can respond to. They have to get you involved again. And you reach this point of saying, well, maybe I should just do that part of it ourselves.

It made a lot of sense to outsource it when it was just resource intensive and who they could do it as well as we could. Maybe better. Maybe they have the skills that we have.

You get into bigger organizations maybe using MSP for some of that, but you'll also probably consider doing more of it internally. So there's this tug and pull about what part of the market is best suited for MSPs. And it does depend on the tools the MSSP is using.

I I think the NTT Palo Alto story is a great example of it. N NTTS coming and saying, we have best of breed software here. We have Palo Alto, a name, bridge and trust.

I think, you know, leaning back on, you know, Mr. Allen, good news, um, AI is gonna force the issue. I don't think your average organization can collect and update to train an AI model much less build and maintain it.

So if I'm gonna fight fire with fire and everything is now a real time fight and I need ai, I don't see how you're gonna get there without a service provider to, to deliver it for you. No, but, but let's take Sophos or not. But you know, Sophos could build a tool that utilizes the SecureWorks data set as an LL M mm-Hmm.

And sell you that tool or sell it to you as a service. That's, Yeah. I think that vendors, they're becoming service providers.

If you look at Sophos and where it's going, and Palo Alto Networks and all of these guys, you know, they start out with this. We have a SaaS platform. It's an as a service security platform.

And then, you know, for a few dollars extra, we'll sell you some managed services and, and if you need a partner to implement it, we'll send that to you. So let Uncle Ally tell you another story. This is not new in security.

I remember walking uphill to school and uphill back from school. Um, company called ISS, that was the first big security buy. IBM bought ISSI forget if it was 400 or $600 million.

And that was crazy back then for security. Who the hell would pay that much for a security company? Well, when you looked at their revenue, I think they had, I don't know, 75 or $85 million in revenue.

So it wasn't that crazy. com bubble burst. Um, but when you looked under the covers, that is S'S revenue, 40% of it, four 0% of it was services, not software.

And I would venture that every security company that's been sold ever since has a, a like amount of services tucked in underneath, whether it was pro services back then or managed services over the last 10 years. That's been the dirty little secret in the security business. That's why I don't sell just product so much was sold through the channel for that reason.

Exactly. Yes. Yeah.

And, And, and, and who is still one of the largest managed security service providers out there today? IBM and then Cisco? Uh, yeah.

IBM. Absolutely. And it is the old ISS business at the core of it.

Uh, though Cisco manages make the deal with Palo. I was gonna mention, uh, Cisco, speaking of Cisco, they're managing the security for our, their dreaded Dallas Cowboys. So, you know, there you Go.

Tech, you, they, you had to bring us back there, had John Yeah. Had to do it. And they got thing at the SSEs kicked by the 49 ERs.

Sorry. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Yeah, I, I served this past weekend. They absolutely did. And it's not the first time shades of Joe Montana to John Taylor.

I know. I'll hold onto that. I'll hold onto that.

Thank you. Absolutely. But Roger Staubach, that's all I got to say.

Wow. Backy Roger the guy Greenback Roger. You Know what, Brad sitting, Sorry.

Got Roger the dodger though. I'll tell you, even as a Steelers fan, he scared the hell out of me. He was dead.

No, look, the land Tom Landry poor Jerry Jus Tom Landry classy guy. Well go. I don't know.

I bet I'm betting that the road to the Super Bowl this year is going through Detroit. That's what I gotta say, really? Isn't it?

That's a good bet right now. Looks, but you know, we'll see what happens. But let, let's get away from football back to Security brought up just starting that.

I'm sorry. Yeah, no, but you know, but that's the truth. IBM security, huge.

Cisco, secure Cisco for many, many, many, many years was the largest security vendor in the world. They may still be, but um, especially if you consider Splunk a security company and you add their revenue to it. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. But that being said, a lot of services wrapped in there and a lot of services in their channel wrapped in there so that, you know, this is, this is Palo Alto net. Yeah.

Look at Palo Alto Networks. It's an outweigh you then it's probably 40 to 50% serviced. I, I, I didn't, IBM do the deal with Palo Alto and I pa doing services now.

So yeah, I I believe they have some sort of alliance. But, uh, you know, and I think it's more than just your typical, uh, uh, Barney announcement. But I, IBM m also has relationships with everybody.

No, I, it was, there was something, I, I don't remember it now, but I remember covering it when it came out. It was, it was, it was my AI and your AI are gonna meet in the cloud and we're gonna work together kind of thing. Yeah.

But there was a t but then there was a quid pro quo underneath that with a RY one pers one of them got technology, one of them got the contracts. And I, I, Yeah, I think, I think IBM gave up Tech and Palo Alto got contracts. There you go.

There you go guys. What a, what a great core text and gag today. How we had a lot of fart.

Well, Thanks for joining us on ESPN here on The text on TV's. Good. So this is, you're just trying to like harken back to the core four of the Yankees?

Is that where you're going with that? Oh wow. 96.

96. So that's what I thought when we lost the first two games, it was gonna be like the Atlanta Braves. And we all remember Jim Laitz, Jim Laitz, pinch it running, hitting That whole run that turned that series around.

But as I said, the mighty Casey has struck out, but that's okay. Right. There's always next year in baseball.

It's always next year, and there's always tomorrow on the Textron gag. It's true. So, and you, I don't, are you gonna be on the show tomorrow?

I don't think so. 'cause you know, you might have to eat some of those words. Yes.

I'll tell you what, if there's, if there is a game five, I will come on and eat my words and apologize to you. Right. I, I, but as I, as I said, when Mush made that bet, I just tore up my tickets.

I, it, I, I I'm looking forward to accepting your apology gracious. I think the Yankees Are gonna, they're gonna salvage at least one game, at least One a safe face. Yes, they are.

Uh, you think Aaron Judge hits a home run? No. You'll strike out twice more.

Two more times. Sorry. Okay.

I'm gonna end this with, how about them cowboys? That was one of my favorite things. Michael Farham.

I hope you're watching this wherever you are. Um, but guys, hey, we've got a full text, strong tv Following this, we've also got a great, uh, uh, virtual event we did yesterday. com and whether they're going on live or on demand, some great sessions on there.

And eventually they do make their way onto Textron tv. But for now, this is Alan Shimmel Mitchell, Michael, John, thanks for joining us. You've just watched Textron Gang.