Podcasts about cisco

Omar Tawakol is the CEO and founder of Rembrand, an AI-powered virtual product placement company. He founded BlueKai, a data management platform acquired by Oracle for $400M+ in 2014, and Voicera, an AI meeting assistant acquired by Cisco in 2019. He currently serves on the board of The Trade Desk and as a General Partner at super{set}.In this episode of World of DaaS, Omar and Auren discuss:Why virtual billboards work better than 3D product placementHow AI eliminates two-year product placement negotiationsWhy virtual placement grew 10x faster internationally than in the USThe mistakes repeat founders make at scaleLooking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @worldofdaas.You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Omar Tawakol on X at @otawakol.Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

MRKT Matrix - Tuesday, January 6th S&P 500 hits fresh all-time high, Dow heads for first close over 49,000 (CNBC) Fund managers prepare for ‘reckoning' in US tech sector (FT) Jensen Huang CES keynote ignites analyst optimism on Nvidia's future (CNBC) Sandisk's 1,000% Rally Is Turbocharged by Nvidia CEO's Remarks (Bloomberg) Data-Center Cooling Stocks Sink After Nvidia CEO's CES Talk (Bloomberg) The Fight Over Making Data Centers Power Down to Avoid Blackouts (WSJ) AMD's Lisa Su says AI isn't replacing people, but is changing who gets hired (CNBC) Hiring in the Age of AI Means Proving You Need a Human (Bloomberg) Elon Musk's xAI raises $20 billion from investors including Nvidia, Cisco, Fidelity (CNBC) Supreme Court Sets Friday for Opinions Amid Tariffs Watch (Bloomberg) --- Subscribe to our newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://riskreversalmedia.beehiiv.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ MRKT Matrix by RiskReversal Media is a daily AI powered podcast bringing you the top stories moving financial markets Story curation by RiskReversal, scripts by Perplexity Pro, voice by ElevenLabs

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USRing Doorbells as Warrantless Surveillance Networks•  Amazon admitted to sharing Ring footage with police without user consent or warrants in 2022: Politico article •  Update on Ring requiring warrants for police access starting in 2024: The Guardian article Smart TVs (Samsung, LG) as Observation Posts with Audio Recording•  Texas lawsuit against LG, Samsung, and others for turning TVs into surveillance systems: TechRadar article •  How to turn off smart TV tracking features (Consumer Reports guide): Consumer Reports article •  NYT investigation into smart TVs spying and sharing data: New York Times article Alexa/Google Home and CIA Partnerships (AWS Contract)•  Details on Amazon's $600 million AWS cloud deal with the CIA: The Atlantic article •  Recent discussion on the AWS-Intelligence Community partnership: Nextgov article Fitness Trackers (Strava Heat Map Exposing Military Bases)•  Strava's 2018 heat map revealing secret military base locations: The Guardian article •  Wired analysis on Strava's privacy implications for military security: Wired article •  NYT report on how Strava data exposed sensitive sites: New York Times article Flock Safety License Plate Readers with Facial Recognition•  Flock's response to reports on their ALPR networks and data practices: Flock Safety blog •  EFF on Washington court ruling that Flock data is public record: EFF article •  ACLU on Flock sharing data even without police requests: ACLU article Cisco's Smart+Connected Communities Platform•  Official Cisco overview of Smart+Connected Communities infrastructure: Cisco page •  Cisco network designs for smart cities including surveillance elements: Cisco design guide Social Media Surveillance (Facebook as Largest Operation)•  Amnesty International on Facebook's surveillance posing threats to human rights: Amnesty article •  NYT op-ed on Facebook as a surveillance capitalism entity: New York Times article Workplace Monitoring (Gartner Study ~78%)•  Gartner insights on employee monitoring for insight vs. oversight: Gartner document •  Report on 78% of employers using digital surveillance on remote workers: NBC Montana article •  Computerworld on electronic monitoring reaching all-time highs (~80%): Computerworld article Vehicle Surveillance (Black Boxes Post-2020)•  Explanation of car black boxes recording data for accidents, insurance, and police: Michigan Auto Law blog •  How black box data is used in car accident cases: Kameb article Financial Surveillance (IRS $600 Reporting)•  IRS FAQs on the Form 1099-K threshold and reporting: IRS page •  IRS announcement delaying the $600 threshold for 2023: IRS newsroom Medical Surveillance (23andMe Data Sharing)•  23andMe's policy on responding to law enforcement requests: 23andMe support page •  23andMe privacy and data protection overview: 23andMe privacy page Palantir's Gotham Platform for Predictive Policing•  Official Palantir Gotham platform description:

Technology Leadership and Strategic Advisor Elizabeth Bieniek shares how devaluing the unique talents that come naturally to you is the biggest self-sabotage to building a healthy culture where innovation thrives. Having successfully scaled the operations of multi-billion dollar businesses at Cisco, she knows that creating a space as a leader where your teams are excited to work in is the foundation. "Show up to work the way you wish everybody else showed up. If you are creating the environment that you want to work in, then that' creating an environment that other people want to work in." If like her you are more of a natural introvert, have the courage to raise your voice to be heard. "Nobody can hear the thoughts in your head." You can perfect an idea internally forever, but if you never voice it, you are robbing your teams of the collaboration and innovations that could spark from it.

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this exclusive interview, Vince Menzione sits down with Darryl Peek, Vice President for Partner Sales (Public Sector) at Elastic, to decode how Elastic achieved the rare “triple crown”—winning Partner of the Year across Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Cloud simultaneously. Darryl breaks down the engineering-first approach that makes Elastic sticky with hyperscalers, reveals the rigorous metrics behind their partner health scorecard, and shares his personal “one-page strategy” for aligning mission, vision, and execution. From leveraging generative AI for cleaner sales hygiene to the timeless lesson of the “Acre of Diamonds,” this conversation offers a masterclass in building high-performance partner ecosystems in the public sector and beyond. https://youtu.be/__GE0r2fPuk Key Takeaways Elastic achieved “Pinnacle” status by aligning engineering roadmaps directly with hyperscaler innovations to become essential infrastructure. Successful public sector sales require a dual approach: leveraging resellers for contract access while driving domain-specific co-sell motions. Partner relationships outperform contracts; consistency in communication is more valuable than only showing up for renewals. Effective partner organizations track “influence” revenue just as rigorously as direct bookings to capture the full value of SI relationships. Generative AI can automate sales hygiene, turning scattered meeting notes into actionable CRM data and reducing friction for sales teams. The “Acre of Diamonds” philosophy reminds leaders that the greatest opportunities often lie within their current ecosystem, not in distant new markets. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Keywords: Elastic, Darryl Peek, public sector sales, hyperscaler partnership, Microsoft Partner of the Year, AWS Partner of the Year, Google Cloud Partner, partner ecosystem strategy, co-sell motion, partner metrics, channel sales, government contracting, Carahsoft, generative AI in sales, sales hygiene, Russell Conwell, Acre of Diamonds, open source search, observability, security SIM, vector search, retrieval augmented generation, LLM agnostic, partner enablement, influence revenue, channel booking, SI relationships, strategic alliances. Transcript: Darryl Peek Audio Episode [00:00:00] Darryl Peek: I say, I tell my team from time to time, the difference between contacts and contracts is the R and that’s the relationship. So if you’re not building the relationship, then how do you expect that partner to want to lean in? Don’t just show up when you have a contract. Don’t just show up when you have a renewal. [00:00:13] Darryl Peek: Make sure that you are reaching out and letting them know what is happening. Don’t just talk to me when you need a renewal, right? When you’re at end of quarter and you want me to bring a deal forward, [00:00:23] Vince Menzione: welcome to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzi. Own your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. [00:00:34] Vince Menzione: We just came off Ultimate Partner live at Caresoft Training Center in Reston, Virginia. Over two days, we gathered top leaders to tackle the real shifts shaping our industry. If you weren’t in the room, this episode brings you right to the edge of what’s next. Let’s dive in. So we have another privilege, an incredible partner, another like we call these, if you’ve heard our term, pinnacle. [00:01:00] Vince Menzione: I think it’s a term that’s not widely used, but we refer to Pinnacle as the partners that have achieved the top rung. They’ve become partners of the year. And our next presenter, our next interview is going to be with an organization. And a person that represents an organization that has been a pinnacle partner actually for all three Hyperscalers, which is really unusual. [00:01:24] Vince Menzione: Elastic has been partner of the Year award winner across Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Cloud, so very interesting. And Darrell Peak, who is the leader for the public sector organization, he’s here in the Washington DC area, was kind enough. Elastic is a sponsor event, and Darryl’s been kind enough to join me for a discussion about what it takes to be a Pinnacle partner. [00:01:47] Vince Menzione: So incredibly well. Excited to welcome you, Darryl. Thank you, sir. Good to have you. I love you. I love your smile, man. You got an incredible smile. Thank you. Thank you, Vince. Thank you. So Darryl, I probably didn’t do it any justice, but I was hoping you could take us through your role and responsibilities at Elastic, which is an incredible organization. [00:02:08] Vince Menzione: Alright. Yeah, [00:02:09] Darryl Peek: absolutely. So Darrell Peak vice President for partner sales for the US public sector at Elastic. I’ve been there about two and a half years. Responsible for our partner relationships across all partner types, whether that’s the system integrators, resellers, MSPs, OEMs, distribution Hyperscalers, and our Technology Alliance partners. [00:02:26] Darryl Peek: And those are partners that aren’t built on the Elastic platform. In regards to how my partner team interacts with our team. Our ecosystem. We are essentially looking to further and lean in with our partners in order for them to, one, understand what Elastic does since we’re such a diverse tool, but also work with our field to understand what are their priorities and how do they identify the right partners for the right requirements. [00:02:50] Darryl Peek: In regards to what Elastic is and what it does elastic is a solution that is actually founded on search and we’re an open source company. And one of the things that I actually did when I left the government, so I worked for the government for a number of years. I left, went and worked for Salesforce, then worked for Google ran their federal partner team and then came over to Elastic because I wanted to. [00:03:11] Darryl Peek: Understand what it meant to be at an open source company. Being at an open source company is quite interesting ’cause you’re competing against yourself. [00:03:17] Vince Menzione: Yeah, that’s true. [00:03:18] Darryl Peek: So it’s pretty interesting. But elastic was founded in 2012 as a search company. So when you talk about search, we are the second most used platform behind Google. [00:03:28] Darryl Peek: So many of you have already used Elastic. Maybe on your way here, if you use Uber and Lyft, that is elastic. That is helping you get here. Oh, that is interesting. If you use Netflix, if you use wikipedia.com, booking.com, eBay, home Depot, all of those are search capabilities. That Elastic is happening to power in regards to what else we do. [00:03:47] Darryl Peek: We also do observability, which is really around application monitoring, logging, tracing, and metrics. So we are helping your operations team. Pepsi is a customer as well as Cisco. Wow. And then the last thing that we do is security when we’re a SIM solution. So when we talk about sim, we are really looking to protect networks. [00:04:03] Darryl Peek: So we all, we think that it’s a data problem. So with that data problem, what we’re trying to do is not only understand what is happening in the network, but also we are helping with threat intelligence, endpoint and cloud security. So all those elements together is what Elastic does. And we only do it two ways. [00:04:18] Darryl Peek: We’re one platform and we can be deployed OnPrem and in the cloud. So that’s a little bit about me and the company. Hopefully it was clear, [00:04:24] Vince Menzione: I’ve had elastic people on stage. You’ve done, that’s the best answer I’ve had. What does Elastic do? I used to hear all this hyperbole and what? [00:04:32] Vince Menzione: What? Now I really understand what you do is an organiz. And the name of the company was Elasticsearch. [00:04:36] Darryl Peek: It was [00:04:37] Vince Menzione: elastic at one time when I first. Worked with you. It was Elasticsearch. [00:04:40] Darryl Peek: Absolutely. Yeah. So many moons ago used to be called the Elk Stack and it stood for three things. E was the Elasticsearch which is a search capability. [00:04:48] Darryl Peek: L is Logstash, which is our logging capability. And Cabana is essentially our visualization capability. So it was called Elk. But since we’ve acquired so many companies and built so much capability into the platform, we can now call it the elastic. Platform. [00:05:00] Vince Menzione: So talk to me about your engagement with the hyperscalers. [00:05:02] Vince Menzione: You’ve been partner of the Year award winner with all three, right? I mentioned that, and you were, you worked for Google for a period of time. Yes. So tell us about, like, how does that work? What does that engagement look like? And why do you get chosen as partner of the year? What are the things that stand out when you’re working with these hyperscalers [00:05:19] Darryl Peek: and with that we are very fortunate to be recognized. [00:05:23] Darryl Peek: So many of the organizations that are out there are doing some of the same capabilities that we do, but they can’t claim that they won a part of the year for all three hyperscalers in the same year. We are able to do that because we believe in the power of partnership, not only from a technology perspective, but also from a sales perspective. [00:05:39] Darryl Peek: So we definitely lean in with our partnerships, so having our engineers talk, having our product teams talk, and making sure that we’re building capabilities that actually integrate within the cloud service providers. And also consistently building a roadmap that aligns with the innovation that the cloud service providers are also building towards. [00:05:56] Darryl Peek: And then making sure that we’re a topic of discussion. So elastic. From a search capability, we do semantic search, vector search, but also retrieval augmented generation, which actually is LLM Agnostic. So when you say LLM Agnostic, whether you want to use Gemini, Claude or even Chad, GBT, those things are something that Elastic can integrate in, but it actually helps reduce the likelihood of hallucination. [00:06:18] Darryl Peek: So when we’re building that kind of solution, the cloud service provider’s you’re making it easy for us, and when you make it easy, you become very attractive and therefore you’re. Likely gonna come. So it becomes [00:06:28] Vince Menzione: sticky in that regard. Very sticky. So it sounds like very much an engineer, a lot of emphasis on the engineering aspects of the business. [00:06:35] Vince Menzione: I know you’re an engineer by background too, right? So the engineering aspects of the business means that you’re having alignment with the engineering organizations of those companies at a very deep level. [00:06:44] Darryl Peek: Absolutely. So I’m [00:06:45] Vince Menzione: here. [00:06:45] Darryl Peek: Yeah. And being at Elastic has been pretty amazing. So coming from Google, we had so many different solutions, so many different SKUs, but Elastic releases every eight weeks. [00:06:54] Darryl Peek: So right before you start to understand the last release, the next release is coming out and we’re already at 9.2 and we just released 9.0 in May. So it’s really blazing fast on the capability that we’re really pushing the market, but it’s really hard to make sure that we get it in front of our partners. [00:07:10] Darryl Peek: So when we talk about our partner enablement strategy, we’re just trying to make sure that we get the right information in front of the right partners at the right time, so this way they can best service their customers. [00:07:19] Vince Menzione: So let’s talk about partner strategy. Alyssa Fitzpatrick was on stage with me at our last event, and she Alyssa’s fantastic. [00:07:25] Vince Menzione: She is incredible. Yes, she is. She was a former colleague at Microsoft Days. Yes. And then she, we had a really interesting conversation. About what it takes, like being in, in a company and then working with the partners in general. And you have, I’m sure you have a lot of the similarities in how you have to engage with these organizations. [00:07:42] Vince Menzione: You’re working across the hyperscalers, you’re also working with the ecosystem too. Yes. ’cause the delivery, you have delivery partners as well. Absolutely. So tell us more about that. [00:07:50] Darryl Peek: So we kinda look at it from a two, two ways from the pre-sales motion and then the post-sales. From the pre-sales side. [00:07:56] Darryl Peek: What we’re trying to do is really maximize our, not only working with partners, because within public sector, you need to get access to customers through contract vehicles. So if you want to get access to some, for instance, the VA or through GSA or others, you have to make sure you’re aligned with the right partners who have access to. [00:08:12] Darryl Peek: That particular agency, but also you want domain expertise. So as you’re working with those system integrators, you wanna make sure that they have capability that aligns. So whether it is a security requirement, you wanna work with someone who specializes in security, observability and search. So that’s the way that we really look at our partner ecosystem, but those who are interested in working with us. [00:08:30] Darryl Peek: Because everybody doesn’t necessarily have a emphasis on working with a new technology partner, [00:08:36] Vince Menzione: right? [00:08:36] Darryl Peek: So what we’re trying to do is saying how do we build programs, incentives and sales plays that really does align and strike the interest of that particular partner? So when we talk about it I tell my team, you have to, my grandfather to say, plan your work and work your plan. And if you fail a plan, you plan to fail. So being able to not only have a strong plan in place, but then execute against that plan, check against that plan as you go through the fiscal year, and then see how you come out at the end of the fiscal year to see are we making that progress? [00:09:01] Darryl Peek: But on the other side of it, and what I get stressed about with my sales team and saying what does partners bring to us? So where are those partner deal registrations? What is the partner source numbers? How are we creating more pipeline? And that is where we’re now saying, okay, how can we navigate and how can we make it easier? [00:09:17] Darryl Peek: And how can we reduce friction in order for the partner to say, okay, elastic’s easy to work with. I can see value in, oh, by the way, I can make some money with. [00:09:25] Vince Menzione: So take us through, have there been examples of areas where you’ve had to like, break through to this other side in terms of growing the partner ecosystem? [00:09:33] Vince Menzione: What’s worked, what hasn’t worked? Yes, I’d love to learn more about that. [00:09:36] Darryl Peek: I’ll say that and I tell my team one, you partner program is essential, right? If you don’t have an attractive partner program in regards to how they come on board, how they’re incentivized the right amount of margin, they won’t even look at you. [00:09:49] Darryl Peek: The second thing is really how do you engage? So a lot of things start with relationships. I think partnerships are really about relationships. I say I tell my team from time to time, the difference between contacts and contracts is the R and that’s the relationship. So if you’re not building the relationship, then how do you expect that partner to want to lean in? [00:10:07] Darryl Peek: Don’t just show up when you have a contract. Don’t just show up when you have a renewal. Make sure that you are reaching out and letting them know what is happening. I like the what Matt brought up in saying, okay, talk to me when you have a win. Talk to me when you have something to talk about. [00:10:22] Darryl Peek: Don’t just talk to me when you need a renewal. When you’re at end the quarter and you want me to bring a deal forward, that doesn’t help ab absolutely. [00:10:28] Vince Menzione: So engineering organizations, sales organizations, what are, what does a healthy partnership look like for you? [00:10:35] Darryl Peek: So I look at metrics a lot and we use a number of tools and I know folks are using tools out there. [00:10:41] Darryl Peek: I won’t name any tools for branding purposes, but in regards to how we look at tools. So some things that we measure closely. Of course it’s our partner source numbers, so partner source, bookings, and pipeline. We look at our partner attached numbers and pipeline as well as the amount or percentage of partner attached business that we have in regards to our overall a CV number. [00:11:00] Darryl Peek: We also look at co-sell numbers, so therefore we are looking at not only how. A partner is coming to us, but how is a partner helping us in closing the deal even though they didn’t bring us the deal? We’re also looking at our cloud numbers and saying what amount of deals and how much business are we doing with our cloud service providers? [00:11:15] Darryl Peek: Because of course we wanna see that number go up year over year. We wanna actually help with that consumption number because not only are we looking at it from a SaaS perspective, but also if the customer has to commit we can help burn that down as well. We also look at influence numbers. [00:11:27] Darryl Peek: Now, one of the harder things to do within a technology business is. Capturing all that si goodness. And saying how do I reflect the SI if they’re not bringing me the deal? And I can’t attribute that amount of deal to that particular partner, right? And the way that we do that is we just tag them to the influence. [00:11:44] Darryl Peek: So we’re able to now track influence. And also the M-S-P-O-E-M work that we are also tracking and also we’re tracking the royalties. And lastly is the professional service work that we do with those partners. So we’re looking to go up into the right where we start them out at our select level, we go to our premier level and then our elite level. [00:12:00] Darryl Peek: But left and to the right, I say you gotta go from zero to one, one to five, five to 10, and then 10 to 25. So if we can actually see that progression. That is where we’re really starting to see health in the partnership, but also the executive alignment is really important. So when our CEO is able to meet with the fellow CEO of the co partner company that is really showing how we are progressing, but also our VPs and others that are engaged. [00:12:20] Darryl Peek: So those are things that we really do measure. We do have a health score card and also, we track accreditations, we track certifications as well as training outcomes based on our sales place. [00:12:30] Vince Menzione: Wow. There’s a lot of metrics there. Yeah. So you didn’t bring, you didn’t bring any slides with that out? [00:12:35] Darryl Peek: Oh, no. I’m not looking at slides, by the way. [00:12:40] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about marketplace. [00:12:42] Darryl Peek: All right? [00:12:42] Vince Menzione: Because we’ve had a lot of conversations about marketplace. We’ve got both vendors up here talking about marketplace and the importance of marketplace, right? You’ve been a Marketplace Award winner. We haven’t really talked about that, like that motion per se. [00:12:55] Vince Menzione: I’d love to s I’d love to hear from you like how you, a, what you had to overcome to get to marketplace, what the marketplace motion looks like for your organization, what a marketplace first motion looks like. ’cause a lot of your cut a. Are all your customers requiring a lot of direct selling effort or is it some of it through Marketplace? [00:13:14] Vince Menzione: Like how does it, how does that work for you? [00:13:15] Darryl Peek: So Elastic is a global organization. Yeah. So we’re, 40 different countries. So it depends on where we’re talking. So if we talk about our international business, which is our A PJ and EMEA business we are seeing a lot more marketplace and we’re seeing that those direct deals with customers. [00:13:28] Darryl Peek: Okay. And we’re talking about our mirror business. A significant amount goes through marketplace and where our customers are transacting with the marketplace and are listing. On the marketplace within public sector, it’s more of a resell motion. Okay. So we are working with our resellers. [00:13:39] Darryl Peek: So we work our primary distribution partner is Carahsoft. So you heard from Craig earlier. Yes. We have a strong relationship with Carahsoft and definitely a big fan of this organization. But in regards to how we do that and how we track it we are looking at better ways to, track that orchestration and consumption numbers in order to see not only what customers we’re working with, but how can we really accelerate that motion and really get those leads and transactions going. [00:14:03] Vince Menzione: Very cool. Very cool. And I think part of the reason why in, in the government or public sector space it has a lot to do with the commitments are different. Absolutely. So it’s not government agencies aren’t able to make the same level of commitments that, private sector organizations were able to make, so they were able to the Mac or Microsoft parlance and also a AWS’s parlance. [00:14:23] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:14:24] Darryl Peek: definitely a different dynamic. Yeah. And especially within the public sector. ’cause we have Gov Cloud to work with, right? That’s right. So we’re working with Microsoft or we’re working with AWS, they have their Gov cloud and then we Google, they don’t have a Gov cloud, but we still have to work with them differently. [00:14:35] Darryl Peek: Yeah. Within that space. That’s [00:14:36] Vince Menzione: right. That’s right. So it makes the motion a little bit differently there. So I think we talked through some of this. I just wanna make sure we cover our points [00:14:43] Darryl Peek: here. One thing I’ll do an aside, you talked about the acre of diamonds. I’m a big fan of that story. [00:14:47] Vince Menzione: Yeah, let’s talk about Russ Con. Yeah, [00:14:49] Darryl Peek: let’s talk about it. Do you all know about the Acre Diamonds? Have you all heard that story before? No. You have some those in the audience. [00:14:55] Vince Menzione: I, you know what, let’s talk about it. All [00:14:56] Darryl Peek: See, I’m from Philadelphia. [00:14:57] Vince Menzione: I didn’t know you were a family. My daughter went to Temple University. [00:14:59] Vince Menzione: Ah, [00:15:00] Darryl Peek: okay. That’s all I know. So Russell Conwell. So he was, a gentleman out of the Philadelphia area and he went around town to raise money and he wanted to raise money because he believed that there was a promise within a specific area. And as he continued to raise this money, he would tell a story. [00:15:14] Darryl Peek: And basically it was a story about a farmer in Africa. And the farmer in Africa, to make it really short was essentially looking to be become very wealthy. And because he wanted to become very wealthy, he believed that selling his farm and going off to a long distant land was the primary way for him to find diamonds. [00:15:28] Darryl Peek: And this farmer didn’t sold us. Sold his place, then went off to to this foreign land, and he ended up dying. And people thought that was the end of the story, but there was another farmer who bought that land and one time this big, and they called him the ot, came to the door and said you mind if I have some tea with you? [00:15:43] Darryl Peek: He said, all right, come on in. Have a drink. And as he had the drink, he looked upon the mantle and his mouth dropped. And then the farmer said what’s wrong? What do you say? He says, do you know what that is? No. He said no. Do you know what that is? He says, no. He said, that’s the biggest diamond I’ve ever seen, and the farmer goes. [00:16:01] Darryl Peek: That’s weird because there’s a bunch right in the back where I go grab my fruits and crops every day. So the idea of the acre diamonds and sometimes that you don’t need to go off to a far off land. It is actually sometimes right under your feet, and that is a story that helped fund the starting of Temple University. [00:16:16] Vince Menzione: I’m gonna need to take you at every single event so you can tell this story again. That’s an awesome job. Oh, I love it. And yeah, they founded a Temple University. Yeah. Which has become an incredible university. My daughter, like I said, my daughter’s a graduate, so we’re Temple fan. That’s great story. [00:16:31] Vince Menzione: That is a very cool, I didn’t realize you were a Philadelphia guy too, so that is awesome. Go birds. Go birds. All right, good. So let’s talk, I think we talked a little bit about your ecosystem approach, but maybe just a little bit more on this, like you said, like a lot of data, a lot of metrics but also a lot of these organizations also have to under understand the engineering side of things. [00:16:53] Vince Menzione: Oh, yeah. There’s a tremendous amount to become. Not everybody could just show up one day and become an elastic partner [00:16:58] Darryl Peek: absolutely. Absolutely. So take us [00:16:59] Vince Menzione: through that process. [00:17:00] Darryl Peek: Yeah. So one of the things that we are trying to mature and we have matured is our partner go to market. [00:17:06] Darryl Peek: So in order to join our partner ecosystem, you have to sign ’em through our partner portal. You have to sign our indirect reseller agreement. ’cause we do sell primarily within the public sector through distribution. And we only go direct if it is by exception. So you have to get justification through myself as well as our VP for public sector. [00:17:21] Darryl Peek: But we really do try to make sure that we can aggregate this because one thing that we have to monitor is terms and conditions. ’cause of course, working with the government, there’s a lot of terms and conditions. So we try to alleviate that by having it go through caresoft, they’re able to absorb some, so this way we can actually transact with the government. [00:17:36] Darryl Peek: In regards to the team though we try to really work closely with our solution architecture team. So this way we can develop clear enablement strategies with our partners so this way they know what it is we do, but also how to properly bring us up in a conversation. Also handle objections and also what are we doing to implement our solutions within other markets. [00:17:55] Darryl Peek: So those are things that we are doing as well as partner marketing. Top of funnel activity is really important, so we’re trying to differentiate what we’re doing with the field and field marketing. So you’re doing the leads and m qls and things of that nature also with partner marketing. So our partner marketing actually is driven by leads, but also we’re trying to transact. [00:18:10] Darryl Peek: And get Ps of which our partner deal registration. So that is how we align our partner go to market. And that is actually translating into our partner source outcomes. [00:18:18] Vince Menzione: And I think we have a slide that talks a little bit about your public sector partner strategy. [00:18:23] Darryl Peek: Oh yeah. Oh, I share that. So I thought maybe we could spin it. [00:18:25] Darryl Peek: Absolutely. [00:18:25] Vince Menzione: I know you we can’t see it, but they can. Oh, they can. Okay. Great. [00:18:29] Darryl Peek: There it’s there. [00:18:30] Vince Menzione: It’s career. [00:18:31] Darryl Peek: One thing, I think this was Einstein has said, if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. So that was the one thing. So I always was a big fan of creating a one page strategy. [00:18:39] Darryl Peek: And based on this one page strategy one of the things when I worked at Salesforce it was really about a couple things and the saying, okay, what are your bookings? And if you don’t have bookings, what does your pipeline look like? If you don’t have pipeline, what does your prospecting look like? [00:18:51] Darryl Peek: Yeah. If you don’t have prospecting what does your account plan look like? And if you don’t have an account plan, why are you here? Why are you here? Exactly. So those are the things that I really talk to my team about is just really a, it’s about bookings. It’s about pipeline. It’s about planning, enablement and execution. [00:19:05] Darryl Peek: It’s about marketing, branding and evangelism, and also about operational excellence and how to execute. Very cool. So being able to do that and also I, since I came from Salesforce, I talk to my team a lot about Salesforce hygiene. So we really talk about that a lot. So make, making sure we’re making proper use of chatter, but also as we talk about utilizing ai, we just try to. [00:19:21] Darryl Peek: How do we simplify that, right? So if we’re using Zoom or we’re using Google, how do we make sure that we’re capturing those meeting minutes, translating that, putting that into the system, so therefore we have a record of that engagement with that partner. So this is a continuous threat. So this way I don’t have to call my partner manager the entire time. [00:19:36] Darryl Peek: I can look back, see what actions, see what was discussed, and say, okay, how can we keep this conversation going? Because we shouldn’t have to have those conversations every time. I shouldn’t have to text you to say, give me the download on every partner. Every time. How do we automate that? And that’s really where you’re creating this context window with your Genive ai. [00:19:53] Darryl Peek: I think they said what 75% of organizations are using one AI tool. And I think 1% are mature in that. But also a number of organizations, it’s 90% of organizations are using generative AI tools to some degree. So we are using gen to bi. We do use a number of them. We have elastic GPT. Nice little brand there. [00:20:11] Darryl Peek: But yeah, we use that for not only understanding what’s in our our repositories and data lakes and data warehouses, but also what are some answers that we can have in regards to proposal responses, RP responses, RFI, responses and the like. [00:20:23] Vince Menzione: And you’re reaching out to the other LLMs through your tool? [00:20:26] Darryl Peek: We can actually interact with any LLM. So we are a LLM Agnostic. [00:20:29] Vince Menzione: Got it. Yep. That’s fantastic. And this slide is we’ll make this available if you don’t have a, yeah, have a chance. We’ll share it. I [00:20:36] Darryl Peek: am happy to share, yeah. And obviously happy to talk, reach out about it. Of, of course. I simplified it in order to account for you, but one of the things that I talk about is mission, vision of values. [00:20:45] Darryl Peek: And as we start with that is what is your mission now? How is anybody from Pittsburgh, anybody steal a fan? Oh wow. No, there’s a steel fan over [00:20:54] Vince Menzione: here. There’s one here. There’s a couple of ’em are out here. So I feel bad. [00:20:57] Darryl Peek: The reason why I put immaculate in there is for the immaculate reception, actually. [00:21:00] Darryl Peek: Yes. And basically saying that if you ever seen that play, it was not pretty at all. It was a very discombobulated play. Yeah. And I usually say that’s the way that you work with partners too, because when that deal doesn’t come in, when you gotta make a call, when you’re texting somebody at 11 o’clock at night, when you’re trying to get that at, right before quarter end. [00:21:17] Darryl Peek: Yeah. Before the end of it. It really is difficult, but it’s really creating that immaculate experience. You want that partner to come back. I know it’s challenging, but I appreciate how you leaned in with us. Yes, absolutely. I appreciate how you work with us. I appreciate how you held our hand through the process, and that’s what I tell my team, that we have to create that partner experience. [00:21:32] Darryl Peek: And maybe that’s a carryover from Salesforce, Dave. I don’t know. But also when we talk about enhancing or accelerating our partner. Our public sector outcomes that is really working with the customer, right? So customer experience has to be part of it. Like all of us have to be focused on that North star, and that is really how do we service the customer, and that’s what we choose to do. [00:21:48] Darryl Peek: But also the internal part. So I used to survey my team many moves ago, and I said, if we don’t get 80% satisfaction rate from our employees how do we get 60% satisfaction rate from our customers? Yeah. So really focus on that employee success and employee satisfaction. It’s so important, is very important. [00:22:03] Darryl Peek: So being able to understand what are the needs of your employees? Are you really addressing their concerns and are you really driving them forward? Are you challenging them? Are you creating pathways for progression? So those are things that I definitely try to do with my team. As well as just really encouraging, inspiring, yeah. [00:22:19] Darryl Peek: And just making sure that they’re having fun at the same time. [00:22:21] Vince Menzione: It shows up in such, I, there’s an airline I don’t fly any longer, and it was a million mile member of and I know it’s because of the way they treat their employees. [00:22:29] Vince Menzione: Because it cascades Right? [00:22:30] Darryl Peek: It does. Culture is important. [00:22:32] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Absolutely. [00:22:32] Darryl Peek: What is it? What Anderson Howard they say what col. Mark Andresen culture eat strategy for [00:22:37] Vince Menzione: breakfast. He strategy for breakfast? Yes. Very much this has been insightful. I really enjoyed having you here today. Really a great, you’re a lot of fun. You’re a lot of fun. [00:22:43] Vince Menzione: Darry, isn’t you? Amazing. So thank you for joining us. Thank you all. Thank And you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be sticking around for a little while today. I’m sticking around for a little while. I’ll be back in little later. I think people are gonna just en enjoy having a conversation with you, a little sidebar. [00:22:55] Darryl Peek: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it. Thank you all for having me. Glad to be here. And thank you for giving the time today. [00:23:01] Vince Menzione: Thank you Darryl, so much. So appreciate it. And you’re gonna have to come join me on this Story Diamond tool. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. [00:23:12] Vince Menzione: We’re bringing these episodes to you to help you level up your strategy. If you haven’t yet, now’s the time to take action and think about joining our community. We created a unique place, UPX or Ultimate partner experience. It’s more than a community. It’s your competitive edge with insider insights, real-time education, and direct access to people who are driving the ecosystem forward. [00:23:38] Vince Menzione: UPX helps you get results, and we’re just getting started as we’re taking this studio. And we’ll be hosting live stream and digital events here, including our January live stream, the Boca Winter Retreat, and more to come. So visit our website, the ultimate partner.com to learn more and join us. Now’s the time to take your partnerships to the next level.

Kick off the New Year with a brand new episode of Strange New Pod as Julian and Giraffe sit down with writer and game designer Carlos Cisco for a wide-ranging conversation spanning Star Trek and tabletop RPGs.Carlos dives into his work as a writer on Star Trek: Discovery, his contributions to Star Trek Adventures, and his role in helping develop the brand new TTRPG Daggerheart. They also take a deep look at his latest release, Pistolheart, a Western-inspired supplement for Daggerheart that brings six-shooters, frontier justice, and genre-bending storytelling to the system.From Starfleet to the final frontier of the Old West, this episode explores storytelling across mediums, adapting tone and genre, and what it takes to build compelling worlds, whether on screen or at the table. As Data once said, "Saddle up, lock and load." (and roll some dice).Send us a textSupport the show

Send us a textThe year felt like it stretched on forever, and in that extra space the networking world reshaped itself. We traded weekly cadence for deeper focus, shipped an AWS Advanced Networking book that the community embraced, and then watched the landscape pivot as vendors consolidated, clouds connected to each other, and AI hype met the hard edges of security and reliability.We dig into the acquisition wave with clear eyes: Arista picking up VeloCloud from Broadcom and what that means for SD‑WAN customers; HPE's Juniper deal clearing regulatory review and the open questions around Mist and portfolio strategy; and why Broadcom–VMware didn't trigger instant mass migrations, even as budgets and CSP support shifted. Then we chart the most surprising turn—AWS and Google offering a cross‑cloud link that's not a one‑off database play, but a general connective fabric. If pricing trends toward pipe capacity rather than per‑GB egress, multi‑cloud networking stops being a niche product pitch and becomes an operator reality. We even explore the idea of a Cloud Exchange Point, where automation snaps providers together at scale.AI was everywhere and still uneven. We call out real wins—friendlier automation workflows and eBPF‑powered visibility via Cisco's Isovalent acquisition—while laying out the unsolved work: agentic AI with least privilege, auditable actions, and enforceable data boundaries. Until those controls are standard, enterprises will limit autonomy and keep AI close to expert hands. Against the constant layoff drumbeat, we offer direct advice: build skills across cloud interconnects, Kubernetes networking, and eBPF telemetry; document outcomes in the language of cost and risk; and lean into community for opportunities and perspective.If you want a no‑nonsense guide to what changed, what actually matters, and how to prepare for a faster 2026, this one's for you. Subscribe, share with a teammate who needs signal over noise, and drop your take: which shift will shape your architecture next year?Purchase Chris and Tim's book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/ Check out the Monthly Cloud Networking Newshttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/Visit our website and subscribe: https://www.cables2clouds.com/Follow us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/cables2clouds.comFollow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@cables2clouds/Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cables2cloudsMerch Store: https://store.cables2clouds.com/Join the Discord Study group: https://artofneteng.com/iaatj

Donatas Urbonas, Karolis Tiškevičius ir Tomas Purlys paskutiniame metų „Basketnews.lt podkaste“ apdainavo kosminę „Žalgirio“ pergalę ir jos herojus. Taip pat – išsami metų apžvalga, kuriai reikalinga ir jūsų pagalba. Susitinkam komentaruose. Tinklalaidės partneriai: – Nord VPN. Apsilankykite https://nordvpn.com/basketnews ir dvejų metų planui gaukite keturis papildomus mėnesius. Jei nepatiks - per 30 dienų galite atgauti pinigus. – Sportuok didžiausiame sporto klubų tinkle Gym+! Rinkis iš 10 miestų ir net 34 lokacijų, įsigyk narystę jau šiandien: https://gymplius.lt/kainos/ – Nealkoholinis alus „Gubernija“, daugiau informacijos – https://gubernija.lt/ Temos: Darbas per „naujaką“, „Žalgirio” pergalė ir keisti „Hapoelio“ fanai (0:00);  Itoudžio techninė, vaidyba ir „Žalgirio“ pergalės prieš lyderius (5:08);  Pradinius gaisrus gesinęs Brazdeikis ir pasijungę kiti (8:55); Tikra Masiulio techninė: ar kainuos Tiškevičiui? (17:08);  Elitinė „Žalgirio“ gynyba, kosmosas Gossas ir Cisco prisitaikymas (19:27); Neapdainuotas herojus Sleva ir Moses Wrighto emocijos (27:09); Koks tas pirmas „Žalgirio“ ratas? (36:16); Ar šita turnyro lentelė dabar kažką reiškia? (40:30);  Kiek balų rašom šitiems krepšinio metams? (50:18);  2025-ųjų TOP frazė (57:17);  2025-ųjų TOP rungtynės (1:01:34);  2025-ųjų TOP nesąmonė (1:05:55);  2025-ųjų TOP džiaugsmas (1:10:07); 2025-ųjų TOP skausmas (1:16:24);  2025-ųjų TOP šokeris (1:18:51);  2025-ųjų TOP perėjimas/išėjimas/kontraktas (1:24:33);  Visiškai kitokia informacija dėl „Ryto“ naujoko (1:32:57); Palinkėjimai „Žalgiriui“, „Rytui“, „Neptūnui“, „Lietkabeliui“ ir kitiems (1:34:43).

Re-Release: On this Live Greatly podcast episode, Kristel Bauer sits down with the Founder and CEO of Change Enthusiasm Global, Cassandra Worthy to discuss how to thrive amid change.  Tune in now!  Key Takeaways From This Episode: How to thrive amid change  How emotions can help us navigate change  A mindset shift around change How leaders can help their team's navigate change  A look into Cassandra's journey around change About Cassandra Worthy: Cassandra Worthy is the world's leading expert on Change Enthusiasm®.  Recently named one of the world's Top 50 keynote speakers, she is lighting the world on fire with her refreshingly unique take on not just 'managing' but growing through change.  Through her Leadership Development and consulting company, Change Enthusiasm Global, she is sharing this revolutionary approach for not only embracing change but using it to propel you to heights you never imagined with thousands all over the world.  She is trusted by clients around the globe including Johnson & Johnson, Bank of America, UnitedHealthcare, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco. After spending nearly 15 years working as an executive within both Procter & Gamble and Berkshire Hathaway thriving through some of the biggest acquisitions ever recorded in the consumer packaged goods industry, Cassandra decided to cultivate the mindset and tools she practiced to grow through these disruptions in a way that inspires, invigorates, and motivates others to grow through their change challenges. She's the author of the bestselling  book 'Change Enthusiasm: How to Harness the Power of Emotion for Leadership and Success' a Next Big Idea Club nominee. Connect with Cassandra Worthy: Website: https://cassandraworthy.com/  Become a Certified Change Enthusiast™ Practitioner:  go.changeenthusiasmglobal.com/growth-accelerator LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassandra-worthy-802ab623/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cassandra_worthy_speaker/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wearechangeenthusiasts/  Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRSgcTNQnQPCTF_0ydJdZvw  About the Host of the Live Greatly podcast, Kristel Bauer: Kristel Bauer is a corporate wellness and performance expert, keynote speaker and TEDx speaker supporting organizations and individuals on their journeys for more happiness and success. She is the author of Work-Life Tango: Finding Happiness, Harmony, and Peak Performance Wherever You Work (John Murray Business November 19, 2024). With Kristel's healthcare background, she provides data driven actionable strategies to leverage happiness and high-power habits to drive growth mindsets, peak performance, profitability, well-being and a culture of excellence. Kristel's keynotes provide insights to "Live Greatly" while promoting leadership development and team building.   Kristel is the creator and host of her global top self-improvement podcast, Live Greatly. She is a contributing writer for Entrepreneur, and she is an influencer in the business and wellness space having been recognized as a Top 10 Social Media Influencer of 2021 in Forbes. As an Integrative Medicine Fellow & Physician Assistant having practiced clinically in Integrative Psychiatry, Kristel has a unique perspective into attaining a mindset for more happiness and success. Kristel has presented to groups from the American Gas Association, Bank of America, bp, Commercial Metals Company, General Mills, Northwestern University, Santander Bank and many more. Kristel has been featured in Forbes, Forest & Bluff Magazine, Authority Magazine & Podcast Magazine and she has appeared on ABC 7 Chicago, WGN Daytime Chicago, Fox 4's WDAF-TV's Great Day KC, and Ticker News. Kristel lives in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area and she can be booked for speaking engagements worldwide. To Book Kristel as a speaker for your next event, click here. Website: www.livegreatly.co  Follow Kristel Bauer on: Instagram: @livegreatly_co  LinkedIn: Kristel Bauer Twitter: @livegreatly_co Facebook: @livegreatly.co Youtube: Live Greatly, Kristel Bauer To Watch Kristel Bauer's TEDx talk of Redefining Work/Life Balance in a COVID-19 World click here. Click HERE to check out Kristel's corporate wellness and leadership blog Click HERE to check out Kristel's Travel and Wellness Blog Disclaimer: The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician for any recommendations specific to you or for any questions regarding your specific health, your sleep patterns changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.  Always consult your physician before starting any supplements or new lifestyle programs. All information, views and statements shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors, and are not medical advice or treatment recommendations.  They have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration.  Opinions of guests are their own and Kristel Bauer & this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests.  Neither Kristel Bauer nor this podcast takes responsibility for possible health consequences of a person or persons following the information in this educational content.  Always consult your physician for recommendations specific to you.

Kelly Jones is Chief People Officer at Cisco, where she leads the people strategy for more than 84,000 employees worldwide. Over nearly two decades, she has helped make Cisco a global benchmark for workplace culture. In this episode, Kelly explains why trust is the foundation of every AI strategy, how Cisco is equipping managers for an era of augmented work, and what it takes to lead responsibly when the pace of change is this fast.In this conversation, we discuss:Why trust is Cisco's most valuable workplace currency and how it shapes decisions about AI, culture, and leadership.How AI becomes a co-pilot when employees are given the safety, training, and time to explore new tools at their own pace.What “super leadership” looks like and the four traits Cisco's CPO believes will define successful managers in an AI-augmented workplace.How Cisco evaluates AI use cases based on disruption, scale, and their potential to enhance the employee experience.Why the real opportunity of AI lies in automating administrative work to give humans more time for purpose, creativity, and connection.The systems Cisco is building to ensure responsible AI use through governance, upskilling, and clear ethical boundaries.Resources:Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Kelly Jones on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How to Use Generative AI to Get Ahead In Your CareerOther episode mentioned in the show: AI as a Liberating Technology: Josh Bersin on Turning Routine Tasks into Superworkers Driving Trust, Creativity, and Growth

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/vEdq8rpBM3I In this data-rich keynote, Jay McBain deconstructs the tectonic shifts reshaping the $5.3 trillion global technology industry, arguing that we are entering a new 20-year cycle where traditional direct sales models are obsolete. McBain explains why 96% of the industry is now surrounded by partners and how successful companies must pivot from “flywheels and theory” to a granular strategy focused on the seven specific partners present in every deal. From the explosion of agentic AI and the $163 billion marketplace revolution to the specific mechanics of multiplier economics, this discussion provides a roadmap for navigating the “decade of the ecosystem” where influence, trust, and integration—not just product—determine winners and losers. Key Takeaways Half of today's Fortune 500 companies will likely vanish in the next 20 years due to the shift toward AI and ecosystem-led models. Every B2B deal now involves an average of seven trusted partners who influence the decision before a vendor even knows a deal exists. Microsoft has outpaced AWS growth for 26 consecutive quarters largely because of a superior partner-led geographic strategy. Marketplaces are projected to grow to $163 billion by 2030, with nearly 60% of deals involving partner funding or private offers. The “Multiplier Effect” is the new ROI, where partners can make up to $8.45 for every dollar of vendor product sold. Future dominance relies on five key pillars: Platform, Service Partnerships, Channel Partnerships, Alliances, and Go-to-Market orchestration. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Keywords: Jay McBain, Canalys, partner ecosystem, channel chief, agentic AI, marketplace growth, multiplier economics, B2B sales trends, tech industry forecast, service partnerships, strategic alliances, Microsoft vs AWS, distribution transformation, managed services growth, SaaS platforms, customer journey mapping, 28 moments of truth, future of reselling, technology spending 2025, ecosystem orchestration, partner multipliers. T Transcript: Jay McBain WORKFILE FOR TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: Just up from, did you Puerto Rico last night? Puerto Rico, yes. Puerto Rico. He dodged the hurricane. Um, you all know him. Uh, let him introduce himself for those of you who don’t, but just thrilled to have on the stage, again, somebody who knows more about what’s going on in, in the, and has the pulse on this industry probably than just about anybody I know personally. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: J Jay McBain. Jay, great to see you my friend. Alright, thank you. We have to come all the way. We live, we live uh, about 20 minutes from each other. We have to come all the way to Reston, Virginia to see each other, right? That’s right. Very good. Well, uh, that’s all over to you, sir. Thank you. [00:00:35] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you so much. [00:00:36] Jay McBain: I went from 85 degrees yesterday to 45 today, but I was able to dodge that, uh, that hurricane, uh, that we kind of had to fly through the northern edge of, uh, wanna talk today about our industry, about the ultimate partner. I’m gonna try to frame up the ultimate partner as I walk through the data and the latest research that, uh, that we’ve been doing in the market. [00:00:56] Jay McBain: But I wanted to start here ’cause our industry moves in 20 year cycles, and if you look at the Fortune 500 and dial back 20 years from today, 52% of them no longer exist. As we step into the next 20 year AI era, half of the companies that we know and love today are not gonna exist. So we look at this, and by the way, if you’re not in the Fortune 500 and you don’t have deep pockets to buy your way outta problems, 71% of tech companies fail over the course of 10 years. [00:01:30] Jay McBain: Those are statistics from the US government. So I start to look at our industry and you know, you may look at the, you know, mainframe era from the sixties and seventies, mini computers, August the 12th, 1981, that first IBM, PC with Microsoft dos, version one, you know, triggered. A new 20 year era of client server. [00:01:51] Jay McBain: It was the time and I worked at IBM for 17 years, but there was a time where Bill Gates flew into Boca Raton, Florida and met with the IBM team and did that, you know, fancy licensing agreement. But after, you know, 20 years of being the most valuable company in the world and 13 years of antitrust and getting broken up, almost like at and TIBM almost didn’t make payroll. [00:02:14] Jay McBain: 13 years after meeting Bill Gates. Yeah, that’s how quickly things change in these eras. In 1999, a small company outta San Francisco called salesforce.com got its start. About 10 years later, Jeff Bezos asked a question in a boardroom, could we rent out our excess capacity and would other companies buy it? [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Which, you know, most people in the room laughed at ’em at the time. But it created a 20 year cloud era when our friends, our neighbors, our family. Saw Chachi PT for the first time in March of 2023. They saw the deep fakes, they saw the poetry, they saw the music. They came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:02:58] Jay McBain: And that consumer trend has triggered this next 20 years. I could walk through the richest people in the world through those trends. I could walk through the most valuable companies. It all aligns. ’cause by the way, Apple’s no longer at the top. Nvidia is at the top, Microsoft. Second, things change really quickly. [00:03:17] Jay McBain: So in that course of time, you start to look at our industry and as people are talking about a six and a half or $7 trillion build out of ai, that’s open AI and Microsoft numbers, that is bigger than our industry that’s taken over 50 years to build. This year, we’re gonna finish the year at $5.3 trillion. [00:03:36] Jay McBain: That’s from the smallest flower shop to the biggest bank. Biggest governments that Caresoft would, uh, serve biggest customer in the world is actually the federal government of the us. But you look at this pie chart and you look at the changes that we’re gonna go through over the next 20 years, there’s about a trillion dollars in hardware. [00:03:54] Jay McBain: There’s about a trillion dollars in software. If you look forward through all of the merging trends, quantum computing, humanoid robots, all the things that are coming that dollar to dollar software to hardware will continue to exist all the way through. We see services making up almost two thirds of this pie. [00:04:13] Jay McBain: Yesterday I was in a telco conference with at and t and Verizon and T-Mobile and some of the biggest wireless players and IT services, which happen to be growing faster than products. At the moment, there is more work to be done wrapping around the deal than the actual products that the customer is buying. [00:04:32] Jay McBain: So in an industry that’s growing at 7%. On top of the world economy that’s grown at 2.2. This is the fastest growing industry, and it will be at least for the next 10 years, if not 2070 0.1% of this entire $5 trillion gets transacted through partners. While what we’re talking to today about the ultimate partner, 96% of this industry is surrounded by partners in one way or another. [00:05:01] Jay McBain: They’re there before the deal. They’re there at the deal. They’re there after the deal. Two thirds of our industry is now subscription consumption based. So every 30 days forever, and a customer for life becomes everything. So if every deal in medium, mid-market, and higher has seven partners, according to McKinsey, who are those seven people trying to get into the deal? [00:05:25] Jay McBain: While there’s millions of companies that have come into tech over the last 10 to 20 years. Digital agencies, accountants, legal firms, everybody’s come in. The 250,000 SaaS companies, a million emerging tech companies, there’s a big fight to be one of those seven trusted people at the table. So millions of companies and tens of millions of people our competing for these slots. [00:05:49] Jay McBain: So one of the pieces of research I’m most proud of, uh, in my analyst career is this. And this took over two years to build. It’s a lot of logos. Not this PowerPoint slide, but the actual data. Thousands of people hours. Because guess what? When you look at partners from the top down, the top 1000 partners, by capability and capacity, not by resale. [00:06:15] Jay McBain: It’s not a ranking of CDW and insight and resale numbers. It is the surrounding. Consulting, design, architecture, implementations, integrations, managed services, all the pieces that’s gonna make the next 20 years run. So when you start to look at this, 98% of these companies are private, so very difficult to get to those numbers and, uh, a ton of research and help from AI and other things to get this. [00:06:41] Jay McBain: But this is it. And if you look at this list, there’s a thousand logos out of the million companies. There’s a thousand logos that drive two thirds of all tech services in the world. $1.07 trillion gets delivered by a thousand companies, but here’s where it gets fun. Those companies in the middle, in blue, the 30 of them deliver more tech services than the next 970. [00:07:08] Jay McBain: Combined the 970 combined in white deliver more tech services. Then the next million combined. So if you think we live in an 80 20 rule or maybe a 99, a 95 5 rule, or a 99 1 rule, we actually live in a 99.9 0.1 parallel principle. These companies spread around the world evenly split across the uh, different regions. [00:07:35] Jay McBain: South Africa, Latin America, they’re all over. They split. They split among types. All of the Venn diagram I just showed from GSIs to VARs to MSPs, to agencies and other types of companies. But this is a really rich list and it’s public. So every company in the world now, if you’re looking at Transactable data, if you’re looking at quantifiable data that you can go put your revenue numbers against, it represents 70 to 80% of every company in this room’s Tam. [00:08:08] Jay McBain: In one piece of research. So what do you do below that? How do you cover a million companies that you can’t afford to put a channel account manager? You can’t afford to write programs directly for well after the top down analysis and all the wallet share and you know exactly where the lowest hanging fruit is for most of your tam. [00:08:28] Jay McBain: The available markets. The obtainable markets. You gotta start from the community level grassroots up. So you need to ask the question for the million companies and the maybe a hundred thousand companies out there, partner companies that are surrounding your customer. These are the seven partners that surround your customer. [00:08:48] Jay McBain: What do they read, where do they go, and who do they follow? Interestingly enough, our industry globally equates to only a thousand watering holes, a thousand companies at the top, a thousand places at the bottom. 35% of this audience we’re talking. Millions of people here love events and there’s 352 of them like this one that they love to go to. [00:09:13] Jay McBain: They love the hallway chats, they love the hotel lobby bar, you know, in a time reminded by the pandemic. They love to be in person. It’s the number one way they’re influenced. So if you don’t have a solid event strategy and you don’t have a community team out giving out socks every week, your competitors might beat you. [00:09:31] Jay McBain: 12% of this audience loves podcasts. It’s the Joe Rogan effect of our industry. And while you know, you may not think the 121 podcasts out there are important, well, you’re missing 12% of your audience. It’s over a million people. If you’re not on a weekly podcast in one of these podcasts in the world, there’s still people that read one of the 106 magazines in the world. [00:09:55] Jay McBain: There are people that love peer groups, associations, they wanna be part of this. There’s 15 different ways people are influenced. And a solid grassroots strategy is how you make this happen. In the last 10 years, we’ve created a number of billionaires. Bottom up. They never had to go talk to la large enterprise. [00:10:15] Jay McBain: They never had to go build out a mid-market strategy. They just went and give away socks and new community marketing. And this has created, I could rip through a bunch of names that became unicorns just in the last couple of years, bottoms up. You go back to your board walking into next year, top down, bottom up. [00:10:34] Jay McBain: You’ve covered a hundred percent of your tam, and now you’ve covered it with names, faces, and places. You haven’t covered it with a flywheel or a theory. And for 44 years, we have gone to our board every fourth quarter with flywheels and theory. Trust me, partners are important. The channel is key to us. [00:10:57] Jay McBain: Well, let’s talk at the point of this granularity, and now we’re getting supported by technology 261 entrepreneurs. Many of them in the room actually here that are driving this ability to succeed with seven partners in every deal to exchange data to be able to exchange telemetry of these prospects to be able to see twice or three times in terms of pipeline of your target addressable market. [00:11:26] Jay McBain: All these ai, um, technologies, agentic technologies are coming into this. It’s all about data. It’s all about quantifiable names, faces, and places. Now none of us should be walking around with flywheels, so let’s flip the flywheels. No. Uh, so we also look at, and I sold PCs for 17 years and that was in the high times of 40% margins for partners. [00:11:55] Jay McBain: But one interesting thing when you study the p and l for broad base of partners around the world, it’s changed pretty significantly in this last 20 year era. What the cloud era did is dropped hardware from what used to be 84% plus the break fix and things that wrap around it of the p and l to now 16% of every partner in the world. [00:12:16] Jay McBain: 84% of their p and l is now software and services. And if you look at profitability, it’s worse. It’s actually 87% is profitability wise. They’ve completely shifted in terms of where they go. Now we look at other parts of our market. I could go through every part of the pie of the slide, but we’re watching each of the companies, and if you can see here, this is what we want to talk about in terms of ultimate partner. [00:12:43] Jay McBain: Microsoft has outgrown AWS for 26 straight quarters. They don’t have a better product. They don’t have a better price, they don’t have better promotion. It’s all place. And I’ll explain why you guess here in the light green line. Exactly. The day that Google went a hundred percent all in partner, every deal, even if a deal didn’t have a partner, one of the 4% of deals that didn’t have a partner, they injected a partner. [00:13:09] Jay McBain: You can see on the left side exactly where they did it. They got to the point of a hundred percent partner driven. Rebuilt their programs, rebuilt their marketplace. Their marketplace is actually larger than Microsoft’s, and they grew faster than Microsoft. A couple of those quarters. It is a partner driven future, and now I have Oracle, which I just walked by as I walked from the hotel. [00:13:31] Jay McBain: Oracle with their RPOs will start to join. Maybe the list of three hyperscalers becomes the list of four in future slides, but that’s a growth slide. Market share is different. AWS early and commanding lead. And it plays out, uh, plays out this way. But we’re at an interesting moment and I stood up six years ago talking about the decade of the ecosystem after we went through a decade of sales starting in 1999 when we all thought we were born to be salespeople. [00:14:02] Jay McBain: We managed territories with our gut. The sales tech stack would have it different, that sales was a science, and we ended the decade 2009, looking at sales very differently in 2009. I remember being at cocktail parties where CMOs would be joking around that 50% of their marketing dollars were wasted. They just didn’t know which 50%. [00:14:23] Jay McBain: And I’ll tell you, that was really funny. In 2009 till every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker who walked in with 15,348 SaaS companies in their MarTech and ad tech stack to solve the problem, every nickel of marketing by 2019 was tracked. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, driving this industry. [00:14:50] Jay McBain: Now, we stood up and said the 28 moments that come before a sale are pretty much all partner driven. In the best case scenario, a vendor might see four of the moments. They might come to your website, maybe they read an ebook, maybe they have a salesperson or a demo that comes in. That’s four outta 28 moments. [00:15:10] Jay McBain: The other 24 are done by partners. Yeah, in the worst case scenario and the majority scenario, you don’t see any of the moments. All 28 happen and you lose a deal without knowing there ever was a deal. So this is it. We need to partner in these moments and we need to inject partners into sales and marketing, like no time before, and this was the time to do it. [00:15:33] Jay McBain: And we got some feedback in the Salesforce state of sales report, which doesn’t involve any partnerships or, or. Channel Chiefs or anything else. This is 5,500 of the biggest CROs in the world that obviously use Salesforce. 89% of salespeople today use partners every day. For the 11% who don’t, 58% plan two within a year. [00:15:57] Jay McBain: If you add those two numbers together, that’s magically the 96% number. They recognize that every deal has partners in it. In 2024, last year, half of the salespeople in the world, every industry, every country. Miss their numbers. For the minority who made their numbers, 84 point percent pointed to partners as the reason why they made their numbers. [00:16:21] Jay McBain: It was the cheat code for sales, so that modern salesperson that knows how to orchestrate a deal, orchestrate the 28 moments with the seven partners and get to that final spot is the winning formula. HubSpot’s number in separate research was 84% in marketing. So we’re starting to see partners in here. We don’t have to shout from the mountaintops. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: These communities like ultimate Partner are working and we’re getting this to the highest levels in the board. And I’ll say that, you know, when 20 years from now half of the companies we know and love fail after we’re done writing the book and blaming the CEO for inventing the thing that ended up killing them, blaming the board for fiduciary responsibility and letting it happen. [00:17:06] Jay McBain: What are the other chapters of the book? And I think it’s all in one slide. We are in this platform economy and the. [00:17:31] Jay McBain: So your battery’s fine. Check, check, check, check. Alright, I’ll, I’ll just hold this in case, but the companies that execute on all five of these areas, well. Not only today become the trillion dollar valued companies, but they become the companies of tomorrow. These will be the fastest growing companies at every level. [00:17:50] Jay McBain: Not only running a platform business, but participating in other platforms. So this is how it breaks out, and there are people at very senior levels, at very big companies that have this now posted in the office of the CEO winning on integrations is everything. We just went through a demographic shift this year where 51% of our buyers are born after 1982. [00:18:15] Jay McBain: Millennials are the number one buyer of the $5 trillion. Their number one buying criteria is not service. Support your price, your brand reputation, it’s integrations. The buy a product, 80% is good as the next one if it works better in their environment. 79% of us won’t buy a car unless it has CarPlay or Android Auto. [00:18:34] Jay McBain: This is an integration world. The company with the most integrations win. Second, there are seven partners that surround the customer. Highly trusted partners. We’re talking, coaching the customer’s, kids soccer team, having a cottage together up at the lake. You know, best men, bate of honors at weddings type of relationships. [00:18:57] Jay McBain: You can’t maybe have all seven, but how does Microsoft beat AWS? They might have had two, three, or four of them saying nice things about them instead of the competition. Winning in service partnerships and channel partnerships changes by category. If you’re selling MarTech, only 10% of it today is resold, so you build more on service partnerships. [00:19:18] Jay McBain: If you’re in cybersecurity today, 91.6% of it is resold. Transacted through partners. So you build a lot of channel partnerships, plus the service partnerships, whatever the mix is in your category, you have to have two or three of those seven people. Saying nice things about you at every stage of the customer journey. [00:19:38] Jay McBain: Now move over to alliances. We have already built the platforms at the hyperscale level. We’ve built the platforms within SaaS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot. Every buyer has a set of platforms that they buy. We’ve now built them in cybersecurity this year out of 6,500 as high as cyber companies, the top five are starting to separate. [00:20:02] Jay McBain: We built it in distribution, which I’ll show in a minute. We’re building it in Telco. This is a platform economy and alliances win and you have alliances with your competitors ’cause you compete in the morning, but you’re best friends by the afternoon. Winning in other platforms is just as important as driving your own. [00:20:20] Jay McBain: And probably the most important part of this is go to market. That sales, that marketing, the 28 moments, the every 30 days forever become all a partner strategy. So there’s still CEOs out there that believe platform is a UI or UX on a bunch of disparate products and things you’ve acquired. There’s still CFOs out there that Think platform is a pricing model, a bundle model of just getting everything under one, you know, subscription price or consumption price. [00:20:51] Jay McBain: And it’s not, platforms are synonymous with partnerships. This is the way forward and there’s no conversation around ai. That doesn’t involve Nvidia over there, an open AI over here and a hyperscaler over there and a SaaS company over here. The seven layer stack wins every single time, and the companies that get this will be the ones that survive this cycle. [00:21:16] Jay McBain: Now, flipping over to marketplaces. So we had written research that, um, about five years ago that marketplaces were going to grow at 82% compounded. Yeah, probably one of the most accurate predictions we ever made, because it happened, we, we predicted that, uh, we were gonna get up to about $85 billion. Well, now we’ve extended that to 2030, so we’re gonna get up to $163 billion, and the thing that we’re watching is in green. [00:21:46] Jay McBain: If 96% of these deals are partner assisted in some way, how is the economics of partnering going to work? We predicted that 50% of deals by 2027. Would be partner funded in some way. Private offers multi-partner offers distributor sellers of record, and now that extends to 59% by 2030, the most senior leader of the biggest marketplace AWS, just said to us they’re gonna probably make these numbers on their own. [00:22:14] Jay McBain: And he asked what their two competitors are doing. So he’s telling us that we under called this. Now when you look at each of the press releases, and this is the AWS Billion Dollar Club. Every one of the companies on the left have issued a press release that they’re in the billion dollar club. Some of them are in the multi-billions, but I want you to double click on this press release. [00:22:35] Jay McBain: I’m quoted in here somewhere, but as CrowdStrike is building the marketplace at 91% compounded, they’re almost doubling their revenue every single year. They’re growing the partner funding, in this case, distributor funding by 3548%. Almost triple digit growth in marketplace is translating into almost quadruple digit growth in funding. [00:23:01] Jay McBain: And you see that over and over again as, as Splunk hit three, uh, billion dollars. The same. Salesforce hit $2 billion on AWS in Ulti, 18 months. They joined in October 20, 23, and 18 months later, they’re already at $2 billion. But now you’re seeing at Salesforce, which by the way. Grew up to $40 billion in revenue direct, almost not a nickel in resell. [00:23:28] Jay McBain: Made it really difficult for VARs and managed service providers to work with Salesforce because they couldn’t understand how to add services to something they didn’t book the revenue for. While $40 billion companies now seeing 70% of their deals come through partners. So this is just the world that we’re in. [00:23:44] Jay McBain: It doesn’t matter who you are and what industry you’re in, this takes place. But now we’re starting to see for the first time. Partners join the billion dollar club. So you wonder about partnering and all this funding and everything that’s working through Now you’re seeing press releases and companies that are redoing their LinkedIn branding about joining this illustrious club without a product to sell and all the services that wrap around it. [00:24:10] Jay McBain: So the opening session on Microsoft was interesting because there’s been a number of changes that Microsoft has done just in the last 30 days. One is they cut distribution by two thirds going from 180 distributors to 62. They cut out any small partner lower than a thousand dollars, and that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s over a hundred thousand partners that get deed tightening the long tail. [00:24:38] Jay McBain: They we’re the first to really put a global point system in place three years ago. They went to the new commerce experience. If you remember, all kinds of changes being led by. The biggest company for the channel. And so when we’re studying marketplaces, we’re not just studying the three hyperscalers, we’re studying what TD Cynic is doing with Stream One Ingram’s doing with Advant Advantage Aerosphere. [00:25:01] Jay McBain: Also, we’re watching what PAX eight, who by the way, is the 365 bestseller for Microsoft in the world. They are the cybersecurity leader for Microsoft in the world and the copilot. Leader in the world for Microsoft and Partner of the Year for Microsoft. So we’re watching what the cloud platforms are doing, watching what the Telco are doing, which is 25 cents out of every dollar, if you remember that pie chart, watching what the biggest resellers are converting themselves into. [00:25:30] Jay McBain: Vince just mentioned, you know, SHI in the changes there watching the managed services market and the leaders there, what they’re doing in terms of how this industry’s moving forward. By the way, managed services at $608 billion this year. Is one and a half times larger than the SaaS industry overall. [00:25:48] Jay McBain: It’s also one and a half times larger than all the hyperscalers combined. Oracle, Alibaba, IBM, all the way down. This is a massive market and it makes up 15 to 20 cents of every dollar the customer spend. We’re watching that industry hit a trillion dollars by the end of the decade, and we’re watching 150 different marketplace development platforms, the distribution of our industry, which today is 70.1% indirect. [00:26:13] Jay McBain: We’re starting to see that number, uh, solidify in terms of marketplaces as well. Watching distributors go from that linear warehouse in a bank to this orchestration model, watching some of the biggest players as the world comes around, platforms, it tightens around the place. So Caresoft, uh, from from here is the sixth biggest distributor in the world. [00:26:40] Jay McBain: Just shows you how big the. You know, biggest client in the world is that they serve. But understand that we’re publishing the distributor 500 list, but it’ll be the same thing. That little group in blue in the middle today, you know, drives almost two thirds of the market. So what happens in all this next stage in terms of where the dollars change hands. [00:27:07] Jay McBain: And the economics of partnering themselves are going through the most radical shift that we’ve seen ever. So back to the nineties, and, and for those of you that have been channel chiefs and running programs, we went to work every day. You know, everything’s on fire. We’re trying to check hundred boxes, trying to make our program 10% better than our competitors. [00:27:30] Jay McBain: Hey, we gotta fix our deal registration program today, and our incentives are outta whack or training programs or. You know, not where they need to be. Our certification, you know, this was the life of, uh, of a channel chief. Everybody thought we were just out drinking in the Caribbean with our best partners, but we were under the weight of this. [00:27:49] Jay McBain: But something interesting has happened is that we turned around and put the customer at the middle of our programs to say that those 28 moments in green before the sale are really, really important. And the seven partners who participate are really important. Understanding. The customer’s gonna buy a seven layer stack. [00:28:09] Jay McBain: They’re gonna buy it With these seven partners, the procurement stage is much different. The growth of marketplaces, the growth of direct in some of these areas, and then long term every 30 days forever in a managed service, implementations, integrations, how you upsell, cross-sell, enrich a deal changes. So how would you build a program that’s wrapped around the customer instead of the vendor? [00:28:35] Jay McBain: And we’re starting to hear our partners shout back to us. These are global surveys, big numbers, but over half of our partners, regardless of type, are selling consulting to their customer. Over half are designing architecting deals. A third of them are trying to be system integrators showing up at those implementation integration moments. [00:28:55] Jay McBain: Two thirds of them are doing managed services, but the shocking one here is 44% of our partners, regardless of type, are coding. They’re building agents and they’re out helping their customer at that level. So this is the modern partner that says, don’t typecast me. You may have thought of me in your program. [00:29:14] Jay McBain: You might have me slotted as a var. Well, I do 3.2 things, and if I don’t get access to those resources, if you don’t walk me to that room, I’m not gonna do them with you. You may have me as a managed service provider that’s only in the morning. By the afternoon I’m coding, and by the next morning I’m implementing and consulting. [00:29:33] Jay McBain: So again, a partner’s not a partner. That Venn diagram is a very loose one now, as every partner on there is doing 3.2 different business models. And again, they’re telling us for 43 years, they said, I want more leads this year it changed. For the first time, I want to be recognized and incentivized as more than just a cash register for you. [00:29:57] Jay McBain: I want you to recognize when I’m consulting, when I’m designing, when you’re winning deals, because of my wonderful services, by the way, we asked the follow up question, well, where should we spend our money with you? And they overwhelmingly say, in the consulting stage, you win and lose deals. Not at moment 28. [00:30:18] Jay McBain: We’re not buying a pack of gum at the gas station. This is a considered purchase. You win deals from moment 12 through 16 and I’m gonna show you a picture of that later, and they say, you better be spending your money there, or you’re not gonna win your fair share or more than your fair share of deals. [00:30:36] Jay McBain: The shocking thing about this is that Microsoft, when they went to the point system, lifted two thirds of all the money, tens of billions of dollars, and put it post-sale, and we were all scratching our heads going. Well, if the partners are asking for it there, and it seems like to beat your biggest competitors, you want to win there. [00:30:54] Jay McBain: Why would you spend the money on renewal? Well, they went to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and the people who lift trillions of dollars of pension funds and said, if we renew deals at 108%, we become a cash machine for you. And we think that’s more valuable than a company coming out with a new cell phone in September and selling a lot of them by Christmas every year. [00:31:18] Jay McBain: The industry. And by the way, wall Street responded, Microsoft has been more valuable than Apple since. So we talk in this now multiplier language, and these are reports that we write, uh, at AMIA at canals. But talking about the partner opportunity in that customer cycle, the $6 and 40 cents you can make for every dollar of consumption, or the $7 and 5 cents you can make the $8 and 45 cents you can make. [00:31:46] Jay McBain: There’s over 24 companies speaking at this level now, and guess what? It’s not just cloud or software companies. Hardware companies are starting to speak in this language, and on January 25th, Cisco, you know, probably second to Microsoft in terms of trust built with the channel globally is moving to a full point system. [00:32:09] Jay McBain: So these are the changes that happen fast. But your QBR with your partners now less about drinking beers at the hotel lobby bar and talking dollar by dollar where these opportunities are. So if you’re doing 3.2 of these things, let’s build out a, uh, a play where you can make $3 for every dollar that we make. [00:32:28] Jay McBain: And you make that profitably. You make it in sticky, highly retained business, and that’s the model. ’cause if you make $3 for every dollar. We make, you’re gonna win Partner of the year, and if you win partner of the year, that piece of glass that you win on stage, by the time you get back to your table, you’re gonna have three offers to buy your business. [00:32:51] Jay McBain: CDW just bought a w. S’s Partner of the Year. Insight bought Google’s eight time partner of the year. Presidio bought ServiceNow’s, partner of the year over and over and over again. So I’m at Octane, I’m at CrowdStrike, I’m at all these events in Vegas every week. I’m watching these partners of the year. [00:33:05] Jay McBain: And I’m watching as the big resellers. I’m watching as the GSIs and the m and a folks are surrounding their table after, and they’re selling their businesses for SaaS level valuations. Not the one-to-one service valuation. They’re getting multiples because this is the new future of our industry. This is platform economics. [00:33:25] Jay McBain: This is winning and platforms for partners. Now, like Vince, I spent 20 minutes without talking about ai, but we have to talk about ai. So the next 20 years as it plays out is gonna play out in phases. And the first thing you know to get it out of the way. The first two years since that March of 23, has been underwhelming, to say the least. [00:33:47] Jay McBain: It’s been disappointing. All the companies that should have won the biggest in AI have been the most disappointing. It’s underperformed the s and p by a considerable amount in terms of where we are. And it goes back to this. We always overestimate the first two years, but we underestimate the first 10. [00:34:07] Jay McBain: If you wanna be the point in time person and go look at that 1983 PC or the 1995 internet or that 2007 iPhone or that whatever point in time you wanna look at, or if you want to talk about hallucinations or where chat chip ET version five is version, as opposed to where it’s going to be as it improves every six months here on in. [00:34:30] Jay McBain: But the fact of the matter is, it’s been a consumer trend. Nvidia got to be the most valuable company in the world. OpenAI was the first company to 2 billion users, uh, in that amount of speed. It’s the fastest growing product ever in history, and it’s been a consumer win this trillions of dollars to get it thrown around in the press releases. [00:34:49] Jay McBain: They’re going out every day, you know, open ai, signing up somebody new or Nvidia, investing in somebody new almost every single day in hundreds of billions of dollars. It is all happening really on the consumer side. So we got a little bit worried and said, is that 96% of surround gonna work in ag agentic ai? [00:35:10] Jay McBain: So we went and asked, and the good news is 88% of end customers are using partners to work through their ag agentic strategy. Even though they’re moving slow, they’re actually using partners. But what’s interesting from a partner perspective, and this is new research that out till 2030. This is the number one services opportunity in the entire tech or telco industry. [00:35:34] Jay McBain: 35.3% compounded growth ending at $267 billion in services. Companies are rebuilding themselves, building out practices, and getting on this train and figuring out which vendors they should hook their caboose to as those trains leave the station. But it kind of plays out like this. So in the next three to five years, we’re in this generative, moving into agentic phase. [00:36:01] Jay McBain: Every partner thinks internally first, the sales and marketing. They’re thinking about their invoicing and billing. They’re thinking about their service tickets. They’re thinking about creating a business that’s 10% better than their competitors, taking that knowledge into their customers and drive in business. [00:36:17] Jay McBain: But we understand that ag agentic AI, as it’s going to play out is not a product. A couple of years ago, we thought maybe a copilot or an agent force or something was going to be the product that everybody needed to buy, and it’s not a product, it’s gonna show up as a feature. So you go back in the history of feature ads and it’s gonna show up in software. [00:36:38] Jay McBain: So if you’re calling in SMB, maybe you’re calling on a restaurant. The restaurant isn’t gonna call OpenAI or call Microsoft or call Nvidia directly. They’re running their restaurant. And they may have chosen a platform like Toast Square, Clover, whatever iPads people are running around with, runs on a platform that does everything in their business, does staffing, does food ordering, works with Uber Eats, does everything end to end? [00:37:08] Jay McBain: They’re gonna wait to one of those platforms, dries out agent AI for them, and can run the restaurant more effectively, less human capital and more consistently, but they wait for the SaaS platform as you get larger. A hundred, 150 people. You have vice presidents. Each of those vice presidents already have a SaaS stack. [00:37:28] Jay McBain: I talked about Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, et cetera. They’ve already built that seven layer model and in some cases it’s 70 layers. But the fact is, is they’re gonna wait for those SaaS layers to deliver ag agentic to them. So this is how it’s gonna play out for the next three and a half, three to five years. [00:37:45] Jay McBain: And partners are realizing that many of them were slow to pick up SaaS ’cause they didn’t resell it. Well now to win in this next three to half, three to five years, you’re gonna have to play in this environment. When you start looking out from here, the next generation, you know, kind of five through 15 years gets interesting in more of a physical sense. [00:38:06] Jay McBain: Where I was yesterday talking about every IOT device that now is internet access, starts to get access to large language models. Every little sensor, every camera, everything that’s out there starts to get smart. But there’s a point. The first trillionaire, I believe, will be created here. Elon’s already halfway there. [00:38:24] Jay McBain: Um, but when Bill Gates thought there was gonna be a PC in every home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 to hobbyists, that created the richest person in the world for 20 years, there will be a humanoid in every home. There’s gonna be a point in time that you’re out having drinks with your friends, and somebody’s gonna say, the early adopter of your friends is gonna say. [00:38:46] Jay McBain: I haven’t done the dishes in six weeks. I haven’t done the laundry. I haven’t made my bed. I haven’t mowed the lawn. When they say that, you’re gonna say, well, how? And they’re gonna say, well, this year I didn’t buy a new car, but I went to the car dealership and I bought this. So we’re very close to the dexterity needed. [00:39:05] Jay McBain: We’ve got the large language models. Now. The chat, GPT version 10 by then is going to make an insane, and every house is gonna have one of the. [00:39:17] Jay McBain: This is the promise of ai. It’s not humanoid robots, it’s not agents. It’s this. 99% of the world’s business data has not been trained or tuned into models yet. Again, this is the slow moving business. If you want to think about the 99% of business data, every flight we’ve all taken in this room sits on a saber system that was put in place in 1964. [00:39:43] Jay McBain: Every banking transaction, we’ve all made, every withdrawal, every deposit sits on an IBM mainframe put in place in the sixties or seventies. 83% of this data sits in cold storage at the edge. It’s not ready to be moved. It’s not cleansed, it’s not, um, indexed. It’s not in any format or sitting on any infrastructure that a large language model will be able to gobble up the data. [00:40:10] Jay McBain: None of the workflows, none of the programming on top of that data is yet ready. So this is your 10 to 20 year arc of this era that chat bot today when they cancel your flight is cute. It’s empathetic, it feels bad for you, or at least it seems to, but it can’t do anything. It can’t book you the Marriott and get you an Uber and then a 5:00 AM flight the next morning. [00:40:34] Jay McBain: It can’t do any of that. But more importantly, it doesn’t know who you are. I’ve got 53 years of flights under my belt and they, I’m the person that get me within six hours of my kids and get me a one-way Hertz rental. You know, if there’s bad weather in Miami, get me to Tampa, get me a Hertz, I’m driving home, I’m gonna make it home. [00:40:56] Jay McBain: I’m not the 5:00 AM get me a hotel person. They would know that if they picked up the flights that I’ve taken in the past. Each of us are different. When you get access to the business data and you become ag agentic, everything changes. Every industry changes because of this around the customers. When you ask about this 35% growth, working on that data, working in traditional consulting and design and implementation, working in the $7 trillion of infrastructure, storage, compute, networking, that’s gonna be around, this is a massive opportunity. [00:41:30] Jay McBain: Services are gonna continue to outgrow products. Probably for the next five to 10 years because of this, and I’m gonna finish here. So we talked a lot about quantifying names, faces, places, and I think where we failed the most as ultimate partners is underneath the tam, which every one of our CEOs knows to the decimal point underneath the TAM that our board thinks they’re chasing. [00:41:59] Jay McBain: We’ve done a very poor job. Of talking about the available markets and obtainable markets underneath it, we, we’ve shown them theory. We’ve shown them a bunch of, you know, really smart stuff, and PowerPoint slides up the wazoo, but we’ve never quantified it for them. If they wanna win, if they want to get access, if they want to double their pipeline, triple their pipeline, if they wanna start winning more deals, if they wanna win deals that are three times larger, they close two times faster. [00:42:31] Jay McBain: And they renew 15% larger. They have to get into the available and obtainable markets. So just in the last couple weeks I spoke at Cribble, I spoke at Octane, I spoke at CrowdStrike Falcon. All three of those companies at the CEO level, main stage use those exact three numbers, three x, two x, 15%. That’s the language of platforms, and they’re investing millions and millions and millions of dollars on teams. [00:42:59] Jay McBain: To go build out the Sam Andal in name spaces and places. So you’ve heard me talk about these 28 moments a lot. They’re the ones that you spend when you buy a car. Some people spend one moment and they drive to the Cadillac dealership. ’cause Larry’s been, you know, taking care of the family for 50 years. [00:43:18] Jay McBain: Some people spend 50 moments like I do, watching every YouTube video and every, you know, thing on the internet. I clear the internet cover to cover. But the fact is, is every deal averages around these 28 moments. Your customer, there’s 13 members of the buying committee today. There’s seven partners and they’re buying seven things. [00:43:37] Jay McBain: There’s 27 things orchestrating inside these 28 moments. And where and how they all take place is a story of partnering. So a couple of years ago, canals. Latin for channel was acquired by amia, which is a part of Informa Tech Target, which is majority owned by Informa. All that being said, there’s hundreds of magazines that we have. [00:44:00] Jay McBain: There’s hundreds of events that we run. If somebody’s buying cybersecurity, they probably went to Black Hat or they probably went to GI Tech. One of these events we run, or one of the magazines. So we pick up these signals, these buyer intent signals as a company. Why did they wanna, um, buy a, uh, a Canals, which was a, you know, a small analyst firm around channels? [00:44:22] Jay McBain: They understood this as well. The 28 moments look a lot like this when marketers and salespeople are busy filling in the spots of every deal. And by the way, this is a real deal. AstraZeneca came in to spend millions of dollars on ASAP transformation, and you can start to see as the customer got smart. [00:44:45] Jay McBain: The eBooks, they read the podcasts, they listened to the events they went to. You start to see how this played out over the long term. But the thing we’ve never had in our industry is the light blue boxes. This deal was won and lost in December. In this particular case, NTT software won and Yash came in and sold the customer five projects. [00:45:07] Jay McBain: The millions of dollars that were going to be spent were solved here. The design and architecture work was all done here. A couple of ISVs You see in light blue came in right at the end, deal was closed in April. You see the six month cycle. But what if you could fill in every one of the 28 boxes in every single customer prospect that your sales and marketing team have? [00:45:30] Jay McBain: But here’s the brilliance of this. Those light blue boxes didn’t win the deals there. They won the deals months before that. So when NTT and Software one walked into this deal. They probably won the deal back in October and they had to go through the redlining. They had to go through the contracting, they had to go through all the stuff and the Gantt chart to get started. [00:45:54] Jay McBain: But while your CMO is getting all excited about somebody reading an ebook and triggering an MQL that the sales team doesn’t want, ’cause it’s not qualified, it’s not sales qualified, you walk in and say, no, no. This is a multimillion deal, dollar deal. It’s AstraZeneca. I know the five partners that are coming in in December to solidify the seven layers, and you’re walking in at the same time as the CMOs bragging about an ebook. [00:46:21] Jay McBain: This changes everything. If we could get to this level of data about every dollar of our tam, we not only outgrow our competitors, we become the platforms of the next generation. Partnering and ultimate partnering is all here. And this is what we’re doing in this room. This is what we’re doing over these couple of days, and this is what, uh, the mission that Vince is leading. [00:46:43] Jay McBain: Thank you so much. [00:46:47] Vince Menzione: Woo. Day in the house. Good to see you my friend. Good to see you. Oh, we’re gonna spend a couple minutes. Um, I’m put you in the second seat. We’re gonna put, we’re gonna make it sit fireside for a minute. Uh, that was intense. It was pretty incredible actually, Jay. And so I’m, I think I wanna open it up ’cause we only have a few minutes just to, any questions? [00:47:06] Vince Menzione: I’m sure people are just digesting. We already have one up here. See, [00:47:09] Question: Jay knows I’m [00:47:10] Vince Menzione: a question. I love it. We, I don’t think we have any I can grab a mic, a roving mic. I could be a roving mic person. Hold on. We can do this. This is not on. [00:47:25] Vince Menzione: Test, test. Yes it is. Yeah. [00:47:26] Question: Theresa Carriol dared me to ask a question and I say, you don’t have to dare me. You know, I’m going to Anyway. Um, so Jay, of the point of view that with all of the new AI players that strategic alliances is again having a moment, and I was curious your point of view on what you’re seeing around this emergence and trend of strategic alliances and strategic alliance management. [00:47:52] Question: As compared to channel management. And what are you seeing in terms of large vendors like AWS investing in that strategic alliance role versus that channel role training, enablement, measurement, all that good stuff? [00:48:06] Jay McBain: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. So when I told the story about toast at the restaurant or Square or Clover, they’re not call, they’re not gonna call open AI or Nvidia themselves either. [00:48:17] Jay McBain: When you look out at the 250,000 ISVs. That make up this AI stack, there is the layers that happen there. So the Alliance with AWS, the alliance they have with Microsoft or Google is going to be how they generate agent AI in their platforms. So when I talk about a seven layer stack, the average deal being seven layers, AI is gonna drive this to nine, and then 11, then probably 13. [00:48:44] Jay McBain: So in terms of how alliances work, I had it up there as one of the five core strategies, and I think it’s pretty even. You can have the best alliances in the world, but if the seven partners trusted by the customer don’t know what that alliance is and the benefits to the customer and never mention it, it’s all for Naugh. [00:49:00] Jay McBain: If you’re go-to market, you’re co-selling, your co-marketing strategies are not built around that alliance. It’s all for naught. If the integration and the co-innovation, the co-development, the all the co-creation work that’s done inside these alliances isn’t translated to customer outcomes, it’s all for naugh. [00:49:17] Jay McBain: These are all five parallel swim lanes. All five are absolutely critically needed. And I think they’re all five pretty equally weighted in terms of needing each other. Yes. To be successful in the era of platforms. Yeah. [00:49:32] Vince Menzione: And the problem is they’re all stove pipe today. If, if at all. Yeah. Maintained, right. [00:49:36] Vince Menzione: Alliances is an example. Channels and other example. They don’t talk to one another. Judge any, we’ve got a mic up here if anybody else has. Yep. We have some questions here, Jacqueline. [00:49:51] Question: So when we’re developing our channel programs, any advice on, you know, what’s the shift that we should make six months from now, a year from now? The historical has been bronze, silver, gold, right? And you’ve got your deal registration, but what’s the future look like? [00:50:05] Jay McBain: Yeah, so I mean, the programs are, are changing to, to the point where the customer should be in the middle and realizing the seven partners you need to win the deal. [00:50:15] Jay McBain: And depending on what category of product you’re in, security, how much you rely on resell, 91.6%. You know, the channel partners are gonna be critical where the customer spends the money. And if you’re adding friction to that process, you’re adding friction in terms of your growth. So you know, if you’re in cybersecurity, you have to have a pretty wide open reseller model. [00:50:39] Jay McBain: You have to have a wide open distribution model, and you have to make sure you’re there at that point of sale. While at the same time, considering the other six partners at moment 12 who are in either saying nice things about you or not, the customer might even be starting with you. ’cause there is actually one thing that I didn’t mention when I showed the 28 moments filled in. [00:51:00] Jay McBain: You’ll notice that the customer went to AWS twice direct. AWS lost the deal. Microsoft won the deal software. One is Microsoft’s biggest reseller in the world. They just acquired crayon. NTT who, who loves both had their Microsoft team go in. [00:51:18] Question: Mm. [00:51:19] Jay McBain: So I think that they went to AWS thinking it was A-W-S-S-A-P, you know, kind of starting this seven layer stack. [00:51:25] Jay McBain: I think they finished those, you know, critical moments in the middle looking at it. And then they went back to AWS kind of going probably WWTF. Yeah. What we thought was happening isn’t actually the outcome that was painted by our most trusted people. So, you know, to answer your question, listen to your partners. [00:51:43] Jay McBain: They want to be recognized for the other things they’re doing. You can’t be spending a hundred percent of the dollars at the point of sale. You gotta have a point of system that recognizes the point of sale, maybe even gold, silver, bronze, but recognizing that you’re paying for these other moments as well. [00:51:57] Jay McBain: Paying for alliances, paying for integrations and everything else, uh, in the cyber stack. And, um, you know, recognizing also the top 1000. So if I took your tam. And I overlaid those thousand logos. I would be walking into 2026 the best I could of showing my company logo by logo, where 80% of our TAM sits as wallet share, not by revenue. [00:52:25] Jay McBain: Remember, a million dollar partner is not a million dollar partner. One of them sells 1.2 million in our category. We should buy them a baseball cap and have ’em sit in the front row of our event. One of them sells $10 million and only sells our stuff if the customer asks. So my company should be looking at that $9 million opportunity and making sure my programs are writing the checks and my coverage. [00:52:48] Jay McBain: My capacity and capability planning is getting obsessed over that $9 million. My farmers can go over there, my hunters can go over here, and I should be submitting a list of a thousand sorted in descending order of opportunity. Of where my company can write program dollars into. [00:53:07] Vince Menzione: Great answer. All right. I, I do wanna be cognizant of time and the, all the other sessions we have. [00:53:14] Vince Menzione: So we’ll just take one other question if there are any here and if not, we’ll let I know. Jay, you’re gonna be mingling around for a little while before your flight. I’m [00:53:21] Jay McBain: here the whole day. [00:53:22] Vince Menzione: You, you’re the whole day. I see that Jay’s here the whole day. So if you have any other questions and, and, uh, sharing the deck is that. [00:53:29] Vince Menzione: Yep. Alright. We have permission to share the deck with the each of you as well. [00:53:34] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you very much everyone. Jay. Great to have you.

In 2000, internet darling Cisco was the world's most valuable company. Today it's worth half as much. AI juggernauts like Nvidia and Palantir are driving the tech-bloated S&P 500 today. Buyer beware. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As RedHanded takes a festive pause, we've picked two of our favourite Patreon Bonus episodes from 2025. To get a full-length, bonus episode of RedHanded every month (plus weekly video episodes of Under the Duvet and much more besides) head to Patreon.com/redhanded and sign up. Or, head to patreon.com/redhanded/gift to buy a membership for someone else!--When Santa Claus robbed the First National Bank in Cisco, Texas, two days before Christmas 1929 – it was just the beginning of a wilder-than-fiction festive tale.What followed was a calamitous string of bungled carjackings, high-speed chases, oil-field shootouts, a trail of dead and injured townsfolk, and mishaps aplenty – all under a hail of gunfire from the entire town of Cisco, who in true Texas fashion were all armed to the teeth, and desperate to be the one to nail Santa…--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / InstagramSources and more available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Send us a textThis case is so wild, y'all! It takes place in 1927 in Cisco, Texas, and involves a Santa, a robbery, bounties, a whole town full of people shooting at each other, murders, and mayhem. Merry Christmas from Bad Acts!Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/badactspodPodMoth: https://podmoth.network/Ad: Rowan & Pine — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rowan-pine-a-feminist-folklore-mythology-podcast/id1632401774 Episode Source List:https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/santa-claus-bank-robberyhttps://member.texasbankers.com/Magazine/magazine/Vault/22-01-The-Cisco-Santa-Robbery.aspx https://www.fwweekly.com/2007/12/26/santa-got-a-gun-and-a-rope/ https://texashighways.com/culture/history/sinister-santa-a-look-at-the-1927-cisco-bank-robbery/ https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/prisons/inquiry/henry_helms_sep6_1929_1.html https://www.mentalfloss.com/crime/santa-claus-bank-robbery-1927 https://www.newspapers.com/image/62068287/ https://www.behindbadge.org/newsroom/ym10hz2l6rw15fy6jj9zp4vsdqlncb texasescapes.com/MaggieVanOstrand/The-Night-the-Posse-Chased-Santa.htm https://member.texasbankers.com/Magazine/magazine/Vault/23-01-Reward-Dead-bank-robbers.aspx https://mbcpathway.com/2023/12/04/infamous-1927-santa-claus-robbery-provides-go-to-spiritual-lesson-for-texas-pastor/ https://www.nydailynews.com/2018/12/09/bad-santa-robs-bank-gets-lynched/ https://www.wideopencountry.com/the-great-santa-claus-bank-robbery/ https://www.hotcars.com/fastest-cars-1920s/ https://www.americantreasuretour.com/vintage-automobiles-1920-to-1929 https://blog.americansafetycouncil.com/the-history-of-speed-limits-in-america/ 

Before Star Trek: Discovery unmasked the Breen in season 5, they were little more than an enigma in the Trek canon, name-dropped but rarely seen. This week on The Trek Files, Discovery writer and producer Carlos Cisco joins us to talk about tracing those first cryptic mentions of the Breen, buried in The Next Generation scripts for "The Loss" and "Hero Worship," and how they helped inspire the character of L'ak and a new chapter in Star Trek storytelling. Carlos reflects on working with the Discovery team to shape the Breen arc and what it means to tell stories that are simultaneously new and rooted in Trek history. Along the way, we look at how offhand script references from 1990 can fuel major plot threads decades later and how today's writers sometimes find the best inspiration in yesterday's margins. Don't miss this conversation about canon archaeology and how the smallest details can echo across centuries. Documents and additional references:  "The Loss" (TNG Season 4, Episode 10) – Final Script Pages (1990) "Hero Worship" (TNG Season 5, Episode 11) – Script Pages (1991) Character Reference: L'ak - L'ak on Memory Alpha For more on the Breen - Breen on Memory Alpha The Trek Files Season 14 on Memory Alpha All episodes and documents: The Trek Files on Memory Alpha Visit the Trekland site for behind-the-scenes access and exclusive merchandise. The conversation continues on Discord with live chats and the Roddenberry Podcasts community! Join today!

Steve sits down with Nick Hopwood, CFP, founder and president of Peak Wealth Management, for another edition of No Lazy Money,  focused on discipline, planning, and real-world investing. They look back at Cisco finally hitting a new high more than 25 years after 2000, what the lost decade taught investors, and where money actually worked when the S&P 500 went nowhere. Hopwood also lays out what investors should do if the market drops 10% or more in 2026, weighs in on Ray Dalio joining Michael Dell, and delivers a critical reminder: this is the last call for 2025 tax planning, including QCDs, donor-advised funds, tax-loss harvesting, and Roth conversions. Visit PeakWM.com/Gruber for a free Social Security analysis. Stop letting your money get lazy!

Bhavesh Mehta and Mahesh Kumar—senior technology leaders at Uber and co-authors of the practical guide AI-First Leader—discuss the lessons learned from Nova Bridge's collapse, and share best practices for mitigating hidden risks that can derail ambitious AI projects. They also share specific ways that small businesses and Fortune 500 companies can embrace AI from a place of empowerment rather than fear. Key Takeaways:  Ways to align C-suite leaders and engineering teams around a unified AI roadmap The most underestimated human factor that determines whether an AI transformation succeeds How overlooked vulnerabilities, insufficient oversight, and the rush to deploy led to unexpected fallout of the Nova Bridge Chat The unforeseen dangers lurking within AI systems Guest Bio:  Bhavesh Mehta is a technology leader and co-author of AI-First Leader, a practical guide for executives navigating enterprise AI adoption. With over 20 years of experience across Cisco, Uber, and VMware, Bhavesh has architected large-scale conversational and generative AI systems that support millions of users daily. His work bridges deep technical design and executive strategy, helping organizations deploy AI responsibly and at scale. Mahesh Kumar is a seasoned product executive and co-author of AI-First Leader, a practical guide for executives navigating enterprise AI adoption. With over 20 years of experience across Uber, Veritas, and VMware, Mahesh has led the development of multi-billion-dollar product portfolios and enterprise AI strategies. Known for bridging deep technology with strategic vision, he helps organizations move from experimentation to large-scale AI transformation. His work focuses on responsible innovation, combining business storytelling with technical fluency to make AI both accessible and actionable for leaders.   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About this Show: The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all! Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together. The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API. Music by: Ari Dvorin Produced by: Sam Laliberte  

Before Star Trek: Discovery unmasked the Breen in season 5, they were little more than an enigma in the Trek canon, name-dropped but rarely seen. This week on The Trek Files, Discovery writer and producer Carlos Cisco joins us to talk about tracing those first cryptic mentions of the Breen, buried in The Next Generation scripts for "The Loss" and "Hero Worship," and how they helped inspire the character of L'ak and a new chapter in Star Trek storytelling. Carlos reflects on working with the Discovery team to shape the Breen arc and what it means to tell stories that are simultaneously new and rooted in Trek history. Along the way, we look at how offhand script references from 1990 can fuel major plot threads decades later and how today's writers sometimes find the best inspiration in yesterday's margins. Don't miss this conversation about canon archaeology and how the smallest details can echo across centuries. Documents and additional references:  "The Loss" (TNG Season 4, Episode 10) – Final Script Pages (1990) "Hero Worship" (TNG Season 5, Episode 11) – Script Pages (1991) Character Reference: L'ak - L'ak on Memory Alpha For more on the Breen - Breen on Memory Alpha The Trek Files Season 14 on Memory Alpha All episodes and documents: The Trek Files on Memory Alpha Visit the Trekland site for behind-the-scenes access and exclusive merchandise. The conversation continues on Discord with live chats and the Roddenberry Podcasts community! Join today!

What does it take to make Wi-Fi truly predictable? In this episode of Cisco Champion Radio, we explore the world of wireless determinism and how Wi-Fi 7 is setting a new standard for reliability and performance. Our experts break down key advancements like Multi-Link Operation (MLO) and intelligent channel usage—technologies that are transforming interference management and latency control. Tune in for an inside look at the current and upcoming deterministic features in Wi-Fi 7, the impact of evolving regulations, and how these innovations are shaping the future of wireless connectivity. Cisco guest Matthew MacPherson, CTO Wireless, Cisco Jerome Henry,  Lead Researcher, Office of the Wireless CTO, Cisco Cisco guest Jonathan Mahady, Principal Network Engineer, BHP Len Ledford, Arcitect II, Advisory Services, Insight Kjetil Teigen Hansen, Wirless Whisperer, Conscia Norge AS

Why do smart, capable leaders still feel unheard? Why do ideas lose power the moment pressure rises?In this episode, we explore the hidden communication gap that keeps leaders from inspiring action—no matter how experienced or knowledgeable they are. We dive into why presence, clarity, and strategic intent matter more than perfect words.Our guest, Ash Seddeek, is a leadership and executive communication coach who helps leaders speak with confidence and impact. Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, Ash came to the U.S. as a Fulbright Scholar, studied linguistics, and built a corporate career at companies like Oracle and Cisco.Today, Ash coaches executives, develops AI-powered communication tools, and helps leaders influence and connect authentically in high-stakes moments. This conversation will challenge how you think about leadership, confidence, and what it really takes to be heard.Quotes:"Presence is about intentionally listening and giving your audience your full attention, so they feel heard, valued, and connected to your message.""The best ideas don't happen when you're grinding through the day; they emerge when you give yourself space to step back, reflect, and think deeply.""Stories are an amazing vehicle for pulling people in—when you share your challenges and triumphs, you give others permission to do the same."Actionable Takeaways:Audit your presence, not just your wordsBefore your next important conversation or meeting, focus on how you show up. Are you truly listening, or just waiting to speak? Practice paraphrasing what others say to confirm understanding and build trust.Clarify your strategic intent before you communicateAsk yourself: What do I want the listener to think, feel, or do after this conversation? Write this down before emails, presentations, or difficult discussions to ensure your message has purpose.Use story to earn attention, not demand itReplace data-first communication with a short personal story, metaphor, or real example. Stories reduce resistance and help people lean in—especially in high-stakes or emotionally charged moments.Conclusion:Great leadership isn't about having the right title or saying the perfect words—it's about showing up with presence, intention, and authenticity. This conversation with Ash Seddeek reminds us that communication is not a performance, but a service. When leaders learn to listen deeply, clarify their intent, and speak in ways that truly connect, influence follows naturally.Whether you're leading a team, a family, or your own personal growth, the challenge is the same: stop trying to impress and start trying to connect. When you do, your message doesn't just get heard—it moves people to action.

Before Star Trek: Discovery unmasked the Breen in season 5, they were little more than an enigma in the Trek canon, name-dropped but rarely seen. This week on The Trek Files, Discovery writer and producer Carlos Cisco joins us to talk about tracing those first cryptic mentions of the Breen, buried in The Next Generation scripts for "The Loss" and "Hero Worship," and how they helped inspire the character of L'ak and a new chapter in Star Trek storytelling. Carlos reflects on working with the Discovery team to shape the Breen arc and what it means to tell stories that are simultaneously new and rooted in Trek history. Along the way, we look at how offhand script references from 1990 can fuel major plot threads decades later and how today's writers sometimes find the best inspiration in yesterday's margins. Don't miss this conversation about canon archaeology and how the smallest details can echo across centuries. Documents and additional references:  "The Loss" (TNG Season 4, Episode 10) – Final Script Pages (1990) "Hero Worship" (TNG Season 5, Episode 11) – Script Pages (1991) Character Reference: L'ak - L'ak on Memory Alpha For more on the Breen - Breen on Memory Alpha The Trek Files Season 14 on Memory Alpha All episodes and documents: The Trek Files on Memory Alpha Visit the Trekland site for behind-the-scenes access and exclusive merchandise. The conversation continues on Discord with live chats and the Roddenberry Podcasts community! Join today!

El analista independiente revisa los títulos de Novo Nordisk, Acerinox, AENA, Cisco o Unicaja, entre otros

Catch Up Cisco by Talented Slackers

Closing Out 2025: Setting the Stage for 2026 As 2025 comes to a close, the economic landscape offers both reassurance and reason for vigilance as we look ahead to 2026. Inflation has been the defining theme of the year, and recent data suggests meaningful progress. The latest CPI reading for November showed inflation at 2.7% year-over-year, below expectations of 3.1%. While this data should be interpreted cautiously due to missing October inflation and unemployment figures, the broader takeaway is clear: inflation remains below 3% and is not rebounding aggressively, even amid ongoing tariff concerns. This marks a productive year in the fight against inflation. However, history suggests the story may not be over. Inflation has often moved in waves, with pauses followed by renewed surges. Current trends indicate we may be in one of those pause periods. Previous inflationary eras, such as those beginning in 1910, 1939, and 1972, saw inflation reaccelerate after similar lulls. One underappreciated factor bears close watching: money supply growth. Currently expanding at roughly 4.6%, money supply has historically been a leading indicator of renewed inflationary pressure. Should inflation move higher in 2026, it would likely remain a central driver of market behavior and Federal Reserve policy uncertainty. This is a dynamic that will continue to shape economic headlines and investment decision-making in the year ahead. Lower Gas Prices and a Tailwind for Holiday Travel One encouraging contributor to easing inflation is the recent decline in gas prices, welcome news during the busiest travel season of the year. AAA estimates that approximately 122.4 million Americans will drive more than 50 miles from home between now and year-end. On a typical day, the U.S. consumes about 376 million gallons of gasoline, a figure expected to rise significantly during this peak travel period. Even small changes in gas prices have an outsized economic impact. A 10-cent decrease at the pump translates into roughly $40 million in daily savings for the U.S. economy. Over the past year, gas prices have fallen about 10%, while oil has dropped more than 30%. This gap suggests gas prices may have further room to decline as they catch up with oil's sustained downward trend. Lower fuel costs provide a dual benefit: easing inflationary pressure heading into 2026 and giving consumers a financial tailwind during the holiday shopping season. For households and the broader economy alike, this trend is a timely and positive development. Market Rotation and the Santa Claus Rally As the year winds down, attention often turns to the so-called “Santa Claus rally,” a seasonal market pattern that spans the final five trading days of the year and the first two trading days of the next. This rally does not begin until Christmas Eve, meaning expectations should remain measured until that window arrives. Historically, markets have tended to post gains during this short period, though outcomes are never guaranteed. Still, performance during these days is often viewed as an indicator heading into the new year. Beyond seasonal trends, market rotation has been a notable feature of recent months. While headline indexes may appear to have stalled in November and December, the underlying story is more constructive. The top-performing 10% of stocks from January through October, leaders for much of the year, have recently underperformed, while previously lagging segments have begun to outperform. This broadening of leadership is a hallmark of a healthier market. Recent milestones underscore this rotation. Bank of America reached an all-time high for the first time since 2006, and Cisco achieved a new high for the first time since 2000, nearly 25 years. These examples are not about individual stock recommendations and are about illustrating how leadership is spreading across sectors and styles, reinforcing the durability of the broader market environment. Greg Powell, CIMA® President and CEO Wealth Consultant Email Greg Powell here Bobby Norman, CFP®, AIF®, CEPA® Managing Director Wealth Consultant Email Bobby Norman here Trey Booth, CFA®, AIF® Chief Investment Officer Wealth Consultant Email Trey Booth here Ty Miller, AIF® Vice President Wealth Consultant Email Ty Miller here Fi Plan Partners is an independent investment firm in Birmingham, AL, with a team of professionals serving clients across the nation through financial planning, wealth management and business consulting. The team at Fi Plan Partners creates strategies in the best interest of their clients using fee based investing. The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be invested into directly. Economic forecasts set forth in this presentation may not develop as predicted. No strategy can ensure success or protect against a loss. Stock investing involves risk including potential loss of principal. Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC and a registered investment advisor.The post Closing Out 2025 first appeared on Fi Plan Partners.

(Presented by ThreatLocker (https://threatlocker.com/threebuddyproblem): Allow what you need. Block everything else by default, including ransomware and rogue code.) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 77: New React2Shell data from Microsoft, fresh Apple and Cisco zero-days already in the wild, and state-linked campaigns from Russia and China that show a merging of espionage, crime, and infrastructure disruption. Plus, the US government's push to enlist private firms in offensive hacking, letters of marque for cartels, new discovery of spyware used against journalists in Belarus, and Amazon catching North Koreans via keystroke latency. Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (https://twitter.com/juanandres_gs), Ryan Naraine (https://twitter.com/ryanaraine) and Costin Raiu (https://twitter.com/craiu).

Jeetu Patel knows a few AI secrets. As the President of one of the largest companies in the world, he's helped pave the AI adoption roadmap. At Cisco, they provide full-stack, enterprise AI solutions spanning infrastructure, security, observability, and operations to the world's largest companies. So naturally, Jeetu could write a legit playbook on what's slowing enterprises down in the AI fast lane and how they can overcome those bottlenecks. And naturally, Jeetu is gonna share it all with us. The 3 Big Obstacles Holding AI Adoption Back -- An Everyday AI Chat with Cisco President Jeetu PatelNewsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode:Episode PageJoin the discussion on LinkedIn: Thoughts on this? Join the convo on LinkedIn and connect with other AI leaders.Upcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: info@youreverydayai.comConnect with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:Enterprise AI Adoption Rates & ChallengesAI Workflow Automation Phase ExplainedThree Big Obstacles to AI AdoptionInfrastructure Constraints for Enterprise AITrust Deficit in AI SystemsData Gaps Impacting AI SuccessMeasuring ROI on Enterprise AI DeploymentFuture Trends: Agentic AI and Original InsightsTimestamps:00:00 AI Adoption Challenges in Enterprise05:18 AI Adaptation: The Key Strength08:56 AI Infrastructure and Trust Challenges10:23 Building Trust and Harnessing Data13:27 Unsatiated Demand Signals Growth19:12 Proactive AI Model Safeguards22:07 AI Strategy and Business Growth26:09 Key Metrics for AI Success28:10 Guardrails for AI Vulnerabilities31:34 AI Unlocking Revolutionary DiscoveriesKeywords:AI adoption, obstacles to AI adoption, enterprise AI, generative AI, AI strategies, chatbots, autonomous agents, workflow automation, business productivity automation, infrastructure for AI, AI power consumption, data center capacity, compute capacity, GPUs, Nvidia, AMD, network bandwidth, CapEx in AI, AI bubble, national security and AI, economic growth and AI, AI trust deficit, securing AI, AI safety, AI hallucinations, large language models, model unpredictability, AI guardrails, algorithmic jailbreak, AI security stack, AI defense, company data as moat, AI data pipeline, data gap in AI, machine data, human data, synthetic data, time series data, data correlation, AI model training, AI ROI, trust in AI systems, agentic workflows, future of AI, robotics, humanoid AI, physical AI, original insights with AI, economic prosperity with AI, AI-generated knowledge, workflow automation with AI agents, scaling AI in enterprisesSend Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Ready for ROI on GenAI? Go to youreverydayai.com/partner 

This episode is sponsored by Fidelity Investments and the all-new Fidelity Trader+ platform. Try Fidelity's most powerful trading experience yet: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.fidelity.com/trading/trading-platforms?immid=100734&imm_pid=430504639&imm_aid=a&dfid=&buf=99999999⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Views, opinions, products, services, and strategies discussed are not endorsed or promoted by Fidelity Investments. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, Member NYSE, SIPC Dan Nathan hosts Dan Niles, founder and portfolio manager at Niles Investment Management, on the Risk Reversal Podcast. They review market trends from 2025 and look ahead to 2026, discussing the implications of AI, potential market bubbles, and macroeconomic factors. They examine the challenges for companies like OpenAI, which faces funding and competition issues, and explore the broader market impact of AI and tech investments. They also touch on China's tech advancements, U.S.-China trade dynamics, and specific company performances including Nvidia, Oracle, Cisco, and Palantir. The conversation concludes with insights into the economic outlook for 2026 in light of inflation trends, fiscal policies, and potential market volatility. Show Notes OpenAI in Talks to Raise At Least $10 Billion From Amazon and Use Its AI Chips (The Information) —FOLLOW USYouTube: @RiskReversalMediaInstagram: @riskreversalmediaTwitter: @RiskReversalLinkedIn: RiskReversal Media

Cybersecurity Today: Cisco Zero Day Exploited & Maritime Cyber Attack Unfolds In this episode of Cybersecurity Today, host David Shipley discusses a series of critical cybersecurity incidents, including the exploitation of a zero-day flaw in Cisco email security infrastructure by a China-linked group, a Hollywood-style attack on an Italian ferry involving remote access malware, and a new data theft spree by the ClOP ransomware gang targeting file-sharing servers. Shipley also highlights the broader implications of cybersecurity on physical safety and national security. This episode is brought to you by Meter, a complete networking stack provider for enterprises. 00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message 00:20 Massive Patch List and Zero-Day Flaw in Cisco 03:41 Latvian Arrested in Italian Ferry Cyberattack 06:31 ClOP Ransomware Gang's New Target 08:54 Conclusion and Upcoming Episodes

The Cybercrime Magazine Podcast brings you daily cybercrime news on WCYB Digital Radio, the first and only 7x24x365 internet radio station devoted to cybersecurity. Stay updated on the latest cyberattacks, hacks, data breaches, and more with our host. Don't miss an episode, airing every half-hour on WCYB Digital Radio and daily on our podcast. Listen to today's news at https://soundcloud.com/cybercrimemagazine/sets/cybercrime-daily-news. Brought to you by our Partner, Evolution Equity Partners, an international venture capital investor partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs to develop market leading cyber-security and enterprise software companies. Learn more at https://evolutionequity.com

As we ease into the holidays, the security news doesn't stop coming. This week we discuss the research from AWS threat intelligence on Russian adversaries targeting a variety of network edge devices for opportunistic exploitation, then we break down attacks by a Chinese threat actor that target a new zero day in Cisco's AsyncOS, and finally we discuss the continued exploitation of the React2Shell vulnerability. Support the show

Hewlett Packard Enterprise patches a maximum-severity vulnerability in its OneView infrastructure management software. Cisco warns a critical zero-day is under active exploitation. An emergency Chrome update fixes two high-severity vulnerabilities. French authorities make multiple arrests. US authorities dismantle an unlicensed crypto exchange accused of money laundering. SonicWall highlights an exploited zero-day. Researchers earn $320,000 for demonstrating critical remote code execution flaws in cloud infrastructure components. A U.S. Senator urges electronic health record vendors to give patients greater control over who can access their medical data. Our guest is Larry Zorio, CISO from Mark43, discussing first responders and insider cyber risks. A right-to-repair group puts cash on the table.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined by Larry Zorio, CISO from Mark43, to discuss first responders sounding the alarm on insider cyber risks. To see the full report, check it out here. Selected Reading HPE warns of maximum severity RCE flaw in OneView software (Bleeping Computer) China-Linked Hackers Exploiting Zero-Day in Cisco Security Gear (SecurityWeek) Google Chrome patches two high severity vulnerabilities in emergency update (Beyond Machines) France arrests 22-year-old over Interior Ministry hack (The Record) France arrests Latvian for installing malware on Italian ferry  (Bleeping Computer) FBI dismantles alleged $70M crypto laundering operation (The Register) SonicWall Patches Exploited SMA 1000 Zero-Day (SecurityWeek) Zeroday Cloud hacking event awards $320,0000 for 11 zero days (Bleeping Computer) Senator Presses EHR Vendors on Patient Privacy Controls (Govinfosecurity) A nonprofit is paying hackers to unlock devices companies have abandoned (TechSpot) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maybe a Little Bit More Interesting React2Shell Exploit Attackers are branching out to attack applications that initial exploits may have missed. The latest wave of attacks is going after less common endpoints and attempting to exploit applications that do not have Next.js exposed. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Maybe%20a%20Little%20Bit%20More%20Interesting%20React2Shell%20Exploit/32578 UAT-9686 actively targets Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Secure Email and Web Manager Cisco s Security Email Gateway and Secure Email and Web Manager patch an already-exploited vulnerability. https://blog.talosintelligence.com/uat-9686/ https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-sma-attack-N9bf4 SONICWALL SMA1000 APPLIANCE LOCAL PRIVILEGE ESCALATION VULNERABILITY A local privilege escalation vulnerability, which SonicWall patched today, is already being exploited. https://psirt.global.sonicwall.com/vuln-detail/SNWLID-2025-0019 Google releases vulnerability details Google updated last week s advisory by adding a CVE to the mystery vulnerability and adding a statement that it affects WebGPU. No new patch was released. https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2025/12/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_16.html

Cramer says this legacy tech company is a very strong stock at today's levels. Become a CNBC Investing Club member to go behind the scenes with Jim Cramer and Jeff Marks as they talk candidly about the market's biggest headlines. Signup here: cnbc.com/morningtakeCNBC Investing Club Disclaimer Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jason Eubanks on Building Oracel: Raising $30M in 28 Hours to Disrupt the $236B Go-To-Market Tooling Market with AI-Native Sales AutomationJason Eubanks, CEO and Co-founder of Oracel, discusses how the company raised $30 million in just 28 hours—oversubscribed at $40 million—by solving a critical problem in the go-to-market industry. With a $236 billion market opportunity and only a "desert of innovation" since the late 1990s, Aurasell is building an AI-native platform to intelligently automate sales workflows and consolidate the 12-15 fragmented tools that plague modern sales teams. Jason shares how his experience scaling revenue from $1M to $100M+ across five startups—including Twilio (IPO), Meraki (acquired by Cisco for $1.2B), and Harness—directly informed the founding vision of AurasellEpisode Timestamps- 00:00 - Introduction and Jason Eubanks joins the podcast- 00:26 - Why Oracel raised $30M in 28 hours despite initial $40M oversubscription- 01:24 - The "desert of innovation" in go-to-market tooling since the late 90s- 01:42 - History of CRM evolution from mainframe to cloud to niche products- 03:12 - Founding vision: One intelligent GTM sales platform to replace them all- 03:39 - How pain as a CRO across five startups led to Oracel's creation- 05:58 - The X-Ray productivity assessment revealing tool sprawl inefficiencies- 07:59 - Sellers spending 28% of time selling and 70% on manual tasks- 09:03 - First principles AI-native approach with whiteboards in the kitchen- 09:29 - Five key personas: SDR, seller, IC manager, executive, ops team- 12:18 - AI-native architecture: multimodal interface, lakehouse, and 10,000 agents- 14:39 - Unified data model importance for contextualized AI automation- 15:45 - Current hat wearing: product focus and 50% building go-to-market engine- 18:43 - Platform features and customer experience design philosophy- 19:05 - Three wow moments per persona as success metric- 20:39 - Onboarding experience: automatic territory building and customer choice- 21:40 - 10,000 agents discovering ICP, personas, and competitors automatically- 24:07 - Automated account research and value hypothesis creation- 25:34 - Outbound prospecting content generation with propensity scoring- 26:32 - Outbound sequencer integration and email platform plugins- 27:00 - AI voice dialer coming in three weeks with closed-loop automation- 28:47 - What's missing: deep marketing and customer success automation- 30:49 - Ideal customer profiles: startups and enterprises with tool sprawl- 31:30 - Solution for heavily customized legacy systems coming in December- 34:24 - Dynamic change detection layer solving technical debt- 36:23 - Jason's career arc from BMC Software through Harness- 37:09 - Why: helping go-to-market operators solve problems he experienced- 39:55 - Meraki's disruptive cloud-managed network architecture- 41:51 - Three constants: great product builders, important problems, massive markets- 43:22 - Intrinsic motivation as foundation for hiring and culture- 45:31 - Hiring from first job onward to assess character and values- 51:24 - Understanding why someone wanted to work at 14 years old- 53:21 - Importance of formative years for work ethic and intelligence- 55:46 - AI adoption culture: using own product and building agents internally- 56:36 - All employees use AI daily across PMs, engineers, and operations- 59:25 - Ask AI features: analytics dashboards, data enrichment, natural language-

Dar viena „Žalgirio” agonija savo žiūrovų akivaizdoje. Dar vienas Moses Wrighto košmaras. Kas vyksta Kaune? Karolis Tiškevičius, Jonas Miklovas, Lukas Malinauskas ir naujausias „Basketnews.lt podkasto” epizodas. Tinklalaidės partneriai: – Nord VPN. Apsilankykite https://nordvpn.com/basketnews ir dvejų metų planui gaukite keturis papildomus mėnesius. Jei nepatiks - per 30 dienų galite atgauti pinigus. – Drabužiai, kurie kurti ne vienam sezonui – o ilgam dėvėjimui. Tvirti audiniai, klasikinis stilius ir komfortas, kuris kasdien atrodo gerai. Aplankyk mus: V. Pociūno g. 8, PC „Vilnius Outlet“ arba https://www.suitunited.lt/ – Nealkoholinis alus „Gubernija”, daugiau informacijos – https://gubernija.lt/ Temos: Nuotaikas keliantys santechnikai (0:00); Gudri žiūrovų evakuacija arenoje (1:23); Kaltę vėl prisiėmęs Masiulis, nelaimingi žmonės ir ką darom su Moses Wrightu? (3:17); Penketo neradęs Masiulis (18:51); Dingęs Cisco ir liūdni Iggy, Sirvydis, Giedraitis (22:15); Vėl favorito statuso nepateisinęs „Žalgiris” (26:29); Vėl negyvas puolimas ir įdomi Cisco žinutė (30:40); Viskas „ant Tubelio” ir gero lygio „Efes” (33:20); Eurolyga nemyli savo produkto (37:29); Žiūrovo žinutė Sinkevičiui, vieta prie suolo ir liūdna politika (40:04); Geros naujienos ir „Ryto” kito etapo paveikslas (47:39); Kada „Rytas” sulauks papildymo? (52:50); Žibantis Radzevičius ir atsigaunanti „Baskonia” (54:08); Sabonio kalbos Londone ir „Žalgiriui” reikalingi asistentai (57:35); „Neptūno” agonija Kluže (1:03:45); Į Kauną atvažiuoja dar vieni paliegėliai (1:05:07); Pragiedrulys Jocytė ir kivirčai „Kibirškties” rungtynėse (1:09:41).

```html i'm wall-e, welcoming you to today's tech briefing for thursday, december 18th. explore the latest in tech innovations and challenges: amazon's ai initiative: amazon's ceo andy jassy appoints peter desantis to lead a new ai-focused organization. this signifies amazon's increased dedication to ai, covering ai models, silicon development, and quantum computing, alongside a $50 billion investment pledge in the u.s. government's ai infrastructure and a possible $10 billion investment in openai. cisco's cybersecurity challenge: discovery of a zero-day vulnerability in cisco's asyncos software impacting secure email gateway users, currently exploited by chinese hackers. cisco recommends rebuilding software as a temporary measure, while a proper fix is underway. instacart's pricing scrutiny: the ftc investigates instacart's ai-driven pricing tool, eversight, over dynamic pricing tests causing price variations for identical grocery items. this raises concerns over possible targeting involving essential goods like groceries. adobe's ai ethics lawsuit: adobe faces a class-action lawsuit for allegedly using copyrighted materials, including books by oregon author elizabeth lyon, to train ai models. this case accentuates ongoing industry concerns with ai training content, paralleling issues faced by apple and salesforce. amazon's openai interest: rumors of amazon's consideration to invest $10 billion in openai could value the company over $500 billion, reflecting amazon's strategy of infrastructure leverage for ai advancement and its continued expansion in the ai sector, following an $8 billion investment in anthropic. that's all for today. we'll see you back here tomorrow! ```

Join host Melissa Barr for an in-depth conversation with Fletcher Previn, CIO of Cisco, as he reveals how AI is fundamentally reshaping IT and the future of work. Discover Cisco IT's mission to enable 10x employee productivity and learn about our “customer zero” philosophy—acting as the proving ground for products designed to help large enterprises build, deploy, and manage their infrastructure. Get ready for a fascinating, inside look at how Cisco is building, securing, and making AI work every single day for our employees, customers, and partners. Speakers Melissa Barr - Senior Manager, Cisco Proof Points Fletcher Previn, CIO, CIsco

Skippy & Doogles unpack three wild stories from the world of money, markets, and mayhem:Listener mailbag: “You guys called it!” — Oracle's crash, Broadcom's wild ride, and the return of Cisco (25 years later)Affordability all day, every day: A new Brookings study reveals that 1 in 3 U.S. middle-class families can't afford basic living costsCollege Sports Go Corporate: The University of Utah just sold a piece of its future to private equityJoin the premium Skippy and Doogles fan club. You can also get more details about the show at skippydoogles.com, show notes on our Substack, and send comments or questions to skippydoogles@gmail.com.

Len Bosack, co-founder of Cisco Systems and the CEO of XKL, sits down for a discussion with Scott Robohn. Len shares how he went from a mathematician to being responsible for pioneering the widespread commercialization of LAN technology. We also get to hear his firsthand account of building the first multi-protocol routers at Stanford and... Read more »

Len Bosack, co-founder of Cisco Systems and the CEO of XKL, sits down for a discussion with Scott Robohn. Len shares how he went from a mathematician to being responsible for pioneering the widespread commercialization of LAN technology. We also get to hear his firsthand account of building the first multi-protocol routers at Stanford and... Read more »

What does it take to build something genuinely new inside a $60B Enterprise? In this podcast hosted by Sid Shaik, Outshift by Cisco VP & CPO Papi Menon breaks down how product leaders can drive meaningful innovation inside massive enterprises, and why the future depends on incubating bold bets like agentic AI and quantum networking. He shares how to identify ideas worth pursuing, how to navigate internal pressure from sales and the board, and how to create strategic optionality that reshapes a company's trajectory. This is essential listening for product leaders looking to understand what high-stakes innovation actually demands.

The Federal Reserve has announced a 25 basis point rate cut as President Trump inches closer to naming his pick for next Federal Reserve chair. CNBC's Sharon Epperson explains the decision's impact on consumers and personal finance. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) discusses the independence of the Fed and Netflix's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery assets. Famed “big short” investor Steve Eisman shares his perspective on the markets, including the AI thesis that he's “paying attention to every day.” Eisman also gives a personal PSA after his breast cancer diagnosis. Plus, Oracle shares tumbled after reporting its quarterly numbers, the U.S. has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, and Cisco stock eclipsed a record set in 2000. Sharon Epperson - 16:06Steve Eisman - 19:58Senator Elizabeth Warren - 34:55 In this episode:Elizabeth Warren, @SenWarrenSharon Epperson, @sharon_eppersonBecky Quick, @BeckyQuickJoe Kernen, @JoeSquawkAndrew Ross Sorkin, @andrewrsorkinKatie Kramer, @Kramer_Katie Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Faber led off the show with breaking news: Disney announced it will make a $1 billion investment in OpenAI — part of a three-year licensing agreement between the two companies. Hear what David, Jim Cramer and Carl Quintanilla had to say about it. The anchors also discussed Oracle shares tumbling on a revenue miss and raised capex guidance, reviving investor jitters about the level of AI spending. Also in focus: What's next for the Fed after Wednesday's rate cut, Time magazine's 2025 Person of the Year - "The Architects of AI" including Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Coca-Cola picks a new CEO, Cisco shares hit a new record high, "Faber Report" with an update on the Paramount-Netflix battle for Warner Bros. Discovery. Squawk on the Street Disclaimer Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A devastating new React vulnerability earned a "perfect 10" for risk, letting attackers remotely run code on a million-plus servers with a single HTTP request. Find out what happened, how fast attackers moved in, and why this bug changes everything for web security. France's VanityFair face a stiff fine over cookies. GrapheneOS pulls out of France over coercion worries. The EU adds to the pile-on over underage social media. India mandates the tracking of all smartphones. Apple says no. India abandons its smartphone tracking mandate. India requires all encrypted messaging to be SIM-tied. Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters --becomes--> SLH. AI demand has driven RAM pricing sky high. GRC's DNS Benchmark is finished and available. Cisco may talk a good game, but they're still Cisco. Browsers to ask users for local network access permission. React: The worst remote code exploit in a LONG time. Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1055-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: 1password.com/securitynow veeam.com bigid.com/securitynow zscaler.com/security hoxhunt.com/securitynow

A devastating new React vulnerability earned a "perfect 10" for risk, letting attackers remotely run code on a million-plus servers with a single HTTP request. Find out what happened, how fast attackers moved in, and why this bug changes everything for web security. France's VanityFair face a stiff fine over cookies. GrapheneOS pulls out of France over coercion worries. The EU adds to the pile-on over underage social media. India mandates the tracking of all smartphones. Apple says no. India abandons its smartphone tracking mandate. India requires all encrypted messaging to be SIM-tied. Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters --becomes--> SLH. AI demand has driven RAM pricing sky high. GRC's DNS Benchmark is finished and available. Cisco may talk a good game, but they're still Cisco. Browsers to ask users for local network access permission. React: The worst remote code exploit in a LONG time. Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1055-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: 1password.com/securitynow veeam.com bigid.com/securitynow zscaler.com/security hoxhunt.com/securitynow

A devastating new React vulnerability earned a "perfect 10" for risk, letting attackers remotely run code on a million-plus servers with a single HTTP request. Find out what happened, how fast attackers moved in, and why this bug changes everything for web security. France's VanityFair face a stiff fine over cookies. GrapheneOS pulls out of France over coercion worries. The EU adds to the pile-on over underage social media. India mandates the tracking of all smartphones. Apple says no. India abandons its smartphone tracking mandate. India requires all encrypted messaging to be SIM-tied. Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters --becomes--> SLH. AI demand has driven RAM pricing sky high. GRC's DNS Benchmark is finished and available. Cisco may talk a good game, but they're still Cisco. Browsers to ask users for local network access permission. React: The worst remote code exploit in a LONG time. Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1055-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: 1password.com/securitynow veeam.com bigid.com/securitynow zscaler.com/security hoxhunt.com/securitynow

A devastating new React vulnerability earned a "perfect 10" for risk, letting attackers remotely run code on a million-plus servers with a single HTTP request. Find out what happened, how fast attackers moved in, and why this bug changes everything for web security. France's VanityFair face a stiff fine over cookies. GrapheneOS pulls out of France over coercion worries. The EU adds to the pile-on over underage social media. India mandates the tracking of all smartphones. Apple says no. India abandons its smartphone tracking mandate. India requires all encrypted messaging to be SIM-tied. Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters --becomes--> SLH. AI demand has driven RAM pricing sky high. GRC's DNS Benchmark is finished and available. Cisco may talk a good game, but they're still Cisco. Browsers to ask users for local network access permission. React: The worst remote code exploit in a LONG time. Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1055-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: 1password.com/securitynow veeam.com bigid.com/securitynow zscaler.com/security hoxhunt.com/securitynow

A devastating new React vulnerability earned a "perfect 10" for risk, letting attackers remotely run code on a million-plus servers with a single HTTP request. Find out what happened, how fast attackers moved in, and why this bug changes everything for web security. France's VanityFair face a stiff fine over cookies. GrapheneOS pulls out of France over coercion worries. The EU adds to the pile-on over underage social media. India mandates the tracking of all smartphones. Apple says no. India abandons its smartphone tracking mandate. India requires all encrypted messaging to be SIM-tied. Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters --becomes--> SLH. AI demand has driven RAM pricing sky high. GRC's DNS Benchmark is finished and available. Cisco may talk a good game, but they're still Cisco. Browsers to ask users for local network access permission. React: The worst remote code exploit in a LONG time. Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1055-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: 1password.com/securitynow veeam.com bigid.com/securitynow zscaler.com/security hoxhunt.com/securitynow

Cisco has finally admitted it's time for real change and is vowing to build "secure by default" gear after decades of criticism. Steve Gibson reacts to a rare moment when a tech giant actually gets security right—and what it means for everyone running critical infrastructure. • Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters strikes (Salesforce) again. • Cisco actually (no kidding) sees the light. • Next week, Australia bans all underage social media. • The EU Parliament moves to replace US computer tech. • When to use Passwords, Passkeys or Yubikeys. • Do unpowered SSDs lose their data. • How about a "Joy of Coding" podcast. • A Bitwarden Passkeys integration glitch. • XSLT is sneaky. It's where you don't expect it. • We know where last week's picture came from. • The long-awaited return of a new Stargate series. • A simple test to check our networks for any bot infections. Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1054-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: joindeleteme.com/twit promo code TWIT vanta.com/SECURITYNOW bitwarden.com/twit threatlocker.com for Security Now canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT

Is your contact center ready to become a profit center? Agility requires not just adopting new technologies like AI, but also fundamentally rethinking how we structure our teams, measure success, and interact with customers. It demands a willingness to experiment, learn, and adapt quickly in a constantly evolving landscape. Today, we're going to talk about how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the contact center, transforming it from a cost center into a driver of customer loyalty and revenue growth. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Chang Chang, Senior Director, Product, Cloud CX Solutions at Cisco's Webex Customer Experience Solutions. About Chang Chang Chang Chang, Senior Director, Product, Cloud CX Solutions, Cisco's Webex Customer Experience Solutions.  Chang is a senior director of product management in the Webex Customer Experience Solutions business at Cisco. With over 14 years of product leadership experience, Chang has held key roles at Intuit and Mighty Audio (an early-stage startup), as well as a management consultant at PwC. Chang holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson. Chang Chang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/changjonathanj/ Resources Cisco's Webex Customer Experience Solutions: https://www.webex.com/ The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/ Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company