Podcasts about EMC

For high‑growth B2B tech brands, the next funding round or IPO is no longer just a financial milestone – it is a communications stress test. Investors are bringing AI‑driven tools, sharper scrutiny and higher expectations into every decision. The companies that win are those that can match strong numbers with a compelling, consistent story.In this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Liam McLaughlin, Managing Partner at Clarity Europe, to unpack how CMOs and marketing leaders can actively prepare for their next raise or listing through comms and marketing. They explore where tech investment is flowing today, why AI is fueling a renewed funding boom, and what it really takes to move from “interesting startup” to “serious international player” in the eyes of investors.Liam breaks investor attraction down into three pillars: authenticity, narrative and AI visibility. He shares practical examples from an EV charging infrastructure client on the road to IPO, and a fintech brand using AI visibility programmes to show up consistently across search, executives, media and analysts – and, crucially, inside LLMs.Liam has almost 20 years of integrated communications experience, working with global technology brands including Oracle, NetApp and EMC, as well as consumer names such as Canva, Clearscore and eBay. As Managing Partner of Clarity Europe, he has led communications strategies for brands navigating major funding rounds and public offerings across the UK and Europe.Inside you'll find…How to build an authentic, investor‑ready brand story that goes beyond “AI‑washing”A practical framework for aligning spokespeople, channels and proof points over a multi‑year funding journeyWhy AI visibility is now a core stakeholder in investor relations – and how to measure and optimise it

우주만물상 2026년 6월호! E=MC² 은 틀렸다! 그리고 화성에 가는 가장 빠른 길은 직선이 아니다!? - 뉴스 앤 올디스 공개방송 신청신청링크 : https://forms.gle/HbYBq6f9BpsmQeh86출연: 파토, 전혜정 교수, 송민령 박사일시: 2026년 6월 21일 일요일 오후3시 (2시 45분까지 입장 완료)장소: 캠퍼스디 서울(9호선 선유도역 7번 출구 도보 2분)신청 기간: 2026년 6월 6일(토) ~ 6월 11일(목) 자정까지당첨자 발표: 2026년 6월 12일(금) (당첨자 개별 문자 연락)- 세상에서 제일 다정한 양자 책 - 구매 링크교보문고: https://product.kyobobook.co.kr/detail/S000220036172예스24: https://www.yes24.com/product/goods/189660610알라딘: https://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=393544146- 오프닝미국 정부 UFO 자료 대거 공개 중!화성에서 발견된 등산로 돌탑!?가스행성 뒤에 암석행성이?- 홍승수 박사화성 가는 길은 직선이 아니다! 호만 전이의 세계.- 김현철 교수질량에 대한 심오한 고찰 2E=MC² 은 잘못됐다!정지 질량과 상대론적 질량의 세계전체자료https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/2026-6-pdf/287899975과학과사람들 제공

Message #5 of the 2026 EMC spring revival sermon series. Series: 2026 Revival: Open Our Eyes Speaker: Dr. Steve McGuire Scripture: Galatians 4:18-19; 2 Corinthians 3:12-18

Dan Ciruli is VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix. A computer science graduate of UC Berkeley, Dan spent a decade in engineering before pivoting to product management in 2003, a role that barely had a name when he started. Since then he has held product leadership positions at EMC and Google, where he was part of the team that helped create Kubernetes and open source Google's cloud infrastructure.He was a founding member of the OpenAPI Initiative and a steering committee member for the Istio service mesh project, and has spent the last two decades with one foot in commercial product development and one in the open source community.In this episode, Dan explains why open source is not a charity exercise, how companies actually make money from code they give away for free, and what product managers get wrong when they tell their engineers to avoid it.Key takeaways— Open source is not crowdsourcing from individuals — much of the contribution comes from companies investing on the clock, because broad adoption benefits everyone more than proprietary lock-in.— The CNCF succeeded because it created a neutral space where the largest and smallest organisations felt equally safe contributing and consuming. That structure — not the code itself — is what made cloud native computing universal.— Being a product manager in open source requires the same core instinct as any other PM role: understanding the why. The difference is that your engineers may work for a competitor, and your roadmap is not entirely yours to control.— AI is multiplying the capability of both good actors and bad actors in open source security. The answer is not to slow adoption but to keep a credible human in the loop — someone with accumulated trust, judgement and accountability.— Before open sourcing your own work, be clear on how your company will make money, articulate it concisely for leadership, and then find at least one other organisation — even a competitor — willing to join you. A consortium signals a standard. A solo release signals a gamble.Chapters1:16 — From engineering to product management3:11 — Bridging open source and commercial work5:05 — The origin of Kubernetes at Google6:35 — How Nutanix embraces open source7:16 — The crowdsourcing misconception8:51 — Why the CNCF changed everything11:25 — Building a defensible moat in open source12:13 — The business models behind free code14:18 — Managing roadmaps you don't fully control15:04 — When your competitor writes your code16:04 — The CEO who wore his secrets around his neck18:13 — Developing an open source strategy19:37 — The one question every PM must ask22:44 — What is the CNCF?23:34 — AI, open source and the security arms race29:45 — Chop wood, carry water: the human in the loop31:48 — Advice for PMs running open source products33:15 — Harnessing a community you don't manage34:38 — Should you open source your own work?36:35 — How messy does it really get?39:33 — Linux is an anti-patternOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She's currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She's worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury's. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group's Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He's the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager's Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon's music stores in the US & UK.

Message #4 of the 2026 EMC spring revival sermon series. Series: 2026 Revival: Open Our Eyes Speaker: Dr. Steve McGuire Scripture: Ephesians 1:3-14

Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies For most of the history of managed services, backup has been foundational but frankly unremarkable. You back up the data. Customers sleep better. Everyone moves on. That model needs to evolve. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, makes a compelling case for why MSPs need to reframe their entire backup practice around cyber resilience – and why the opportunity to do so has never been bigger or more urgent. The stat that sets the table: 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. Attackers know that if they can compromise the backup, the game is essentially over. An MSP whose backup practice is not built around isolated, immutable copies is not selling a last line of defense – it’s selling false assurance. Central to the conversation is the idea of the “minimum viable company”: a framework Emsley encourages MSPs to bring to their customers, ideally at the board level. The question is deceptively simple – if everything goes down, what are the absolute minimum systems and data sets required to bring the business back online? Building a resilience strategy around that answer changes how you architect backup, and how you price and position it. Emsley walks through Dell’s PowerProtect portfolio, including the Data Domain platform and its multi-tenant capabilities for MSP environments, the Workspace Protection endpoint play, and the new premium rebate incentives for cyber resilience solutions in Dell’s Modern Partner Platform. His most practical advice for the mid-market? Have an incident response plan – and print it out. Because when ransomware strikes, the runbook sitting on the encrypted server is not going to help anyone. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re still coming to you from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, where AI Factory and agentic AI have understandably grabbed most of the headlines. But while I was on the show floor, I also wanted to bring you a conversation that I think is going to resonate long after the conference fades. The question of how MSPs should be thinking about cyber resilience – not just backup or data recovery, but the full picture of what it actually takes to bring a customer’s business back to life after a ransomware attack – sits at or near the top of virtually every board-level buying agenda right now. And with AI increasingly in the hands of the bad guys as much as the good guys, the calculus around protecting data is changing fast. I sat down with Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, for a conversation about the difference between disaster recovery and cyber recovery, the concept of the minimum viable company, and why MSPs who are still selling backup the old-fashioned way may be leaving both value and their customers seriously exposed. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Rob Emsley. Robert Dutt: Rob, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Rob Emsley: Yeah, great to meet you, Robert. Robert Dutt: Director of cyber resilience marketing. You’re sitting in a pretty fascinating place right now, I have to think. Let’s start by sort of setting the table a little bit for an MSP and solution provider audience. How do you define cyber resilience at Dell today and how is that different from what it looked like even a couple of years back? Rob Emsley: Yeah, I mean, for many years, what the portfolio that I market was really the data protection portfolio. And like many vendors in the industry, one of the things that’s dramatically changed over probably the last decade, I would say, is the increase in cyber attacks and really the concern over things like ransomware, over things like insider threats, basically anything where bad actors are going after your data. And over the last probably 10 years, you’ve seen a lot more interest in cyber recovery as opposed to disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has been around forever. Bad things happen to good people. Do I have a set of infrastructure that I can restart from, whether it’s a natural disaster or human error, et cetera, et cetera. And the interesting thing with cyber recovery is the frustrating reality is that your hardware is probably still in good shape. You’re not under five feet of water or your infrastructure hasn’t been destroyed by a tornado. So everything looks as if it’s recoverable, but you know it isn’t because it’s been impacted, it’s been infected, and your good data is now bad data. So many MSPs that work with vendors in this market have seen an evolution of those vendors changing their messaging to certainly become more security companies. And some of that, you could argue, is based on vendor evaluations, especially private companies that are looking to go public or be acquired, et cetera, et cetera. So Dell Technologies was probably one of the last to really make a hard pivot from the products that we sell, predominantly delivering backup and recovery, but really to position those products and market those products as cyber resilience offerings. And cyber resilience really drives us to have new conversations with different parts of the customer’s team. Certainly it’s the old adage that when you’re selling data protection, you take the elevator to the basement to talk to the infrastructure team. When you’re selling cyber resilience, you take the elevator to the top floor to talk to the board, and it really has become a board-level discussion. So I think for managed service providers, the topic of cyber resilience is a much broader conversation that they can have with prospective customers. I think that customers know that there’s only two things that they’re afraid of losing. One is their employees, and two is their data. Losing either of them is really a bad day. So I think that when you look at buying intentions from many analyst firms that do those types of research projects – Omdia, for instance, is one – cyber resilience tops the top three, if not the top two or even top one, buying intentions for the coming years. And it has done for many, many years. So I think that’s why cyber resilience is an opportunity for managed service providers to expand the conversations and the people that they’re talking to, because it’s a horizontally required discipline. One of the things that customers, unfortunately over the years, have overspent on – maybe not overspent, but maybe not got the balance correct – is they’ve spent a lot of their budgets on cybersecurity products, trying to make their environments more secure. Basically build a wall. Firewalls fall into that category of technology, ransomware detection, those types of things. The area where we’ve tried to get a better balance in IT budgets is on recovery and resilience, based on the premise that there’s no such thing as absolute security. So you need to be prepared to have a good copy of your data to bring back to life, to bring your company back to life. Robert Dutt: Obviously, a lot of talk about AI because it’s the 2020s and we’re at a tech conference. Everyone’s going that way, which is good news in some regards and bad news in other regards in the security sphere, because it turns out the bad guys have access to it. Rob Emsley: Yeah. And that’s true for, as you imagine, a lot of technology. If you think about just life in general, there’s a lot of things that are available in the market that can be used for good and can also be used for bad. It all depends on what hands those technologies are in. And certainly, if you look at the use of AI to manufacture more sophisticated cyber attacks, certainly if you think about the use of AI to provide more sophisticated phishing emails, that’s certainly one thing I think we’ve seen. And certainly the concern around using AI to more quickly identify vulnerabilities – that’s been something that’s been top of mind in the news over the last few weeks, a couple of months. But again, I think both of those just reinforce the importance of having a surety that you have a good known copy of your data that you can take to the bank to bring the company back online. And I think from an MSP perspective, offering an infrastructure that gives their customers that assurance is really beneficial to customers. The old adage of customers want to sleep well at night – and if an MSP can help them do that, then a good night’s sleep is worth a fortune sometimes. Certainly my wife would say so. Robert Dutt: I think after 365, backup has been a fundamental underpinning of managed services for such a long time. I’m curious what you think is most common for MSPs to miss in terms of evolving and doing more than just the old-fashioned backup technology and getting more out of that. Rob Emsley: Yeah, I think if you look at a lot of the backup technologies that are available, certainly backup has always been that last line of defense. And unfortunately, being that last line of defense, the bad actors realize that if you compromise the backup infrastructure, you can pretty much do whatever you want. All bets are off. The customer doesn’t have a last line of defense. So if you think about some of the research that’s in the industry, 97% of cyber attacks involve attacking the backup infrastructure. And that doesn’t matter whether or not it’s managed by the customer or managed by an MSP. So I do think that MSPs need to become much more conversant in explaining what they are doing and how they have implemented a backup infrastructure that really is that last line of defense. And that’s something which you start getting into the concept of offering isolated copies of backups – maybe not for every single data type, but certainly we believe wholeheartedly in the concept of the minimum viable company, which really is a discussion to have with the board about when everything is gone, what needs to come back in order for you to be viable. Because I think that’s the killer – some people have a laissez-faire attitude to, well, everything’s important. But if everything’s important, then nothing’s important. So I do think that the MSPs that are in the backup industry need to realize that the backup value has changed. It used to be very much around being there for operational recovery. Having backups is just good hygiene, but having backups that aren’t secure is a no-no in today’s market. So that becomes a very important shift for MSPs that are in the backup market. Because I do agree with you – backup, God bless it, has been a great value creator for MSPs. Many customers realize that they need to back up their data. Subscribing to a service to do that is certainly an easy way to use your resources for more productive work to drive revenue. But at the end of the day, if you’re not secure, it’s difficult to innovate with confidence. Robert Dutt: All right. How does the portfolio that you guys are offering today help partners position their customers to be able to bounce back based on what really happens when they get attacked, breached, when their backup is part of that? Rob Emsley: Yeah. So within the Dell Technologies portfolio, this occurred probably about seven years ago. When I came back to Dell in 2018, we were simplifying the infrastructure portfolio of the company – storage predominantly, servers, and at the time data protection and cyber resilience. So many of our customers and our partners realized we have a portfolio of Power-branded products: PowerEdge, PowerStore, PowerMax, PowerSwitch. And probably in 2019, we introduced PowerProtect. So PowerProtect is the umbrella portfolio for everything we do in that backup and recovery, data protection, and cyber resilience space. Within there, we sell software to create copies of data and store them on hardware. And the hardware that we sell is something that we’ve been very lucky to have ownership of for literally 20 years. It’s an acquisition that was made by Dell Technologies, actually prior to the acquisition of EMC – it was an EMC acquisition, a company called Data Domain. And Data Domain has been really foundational for delivering cyber resilience. It falls into the category of what IDC calls the purpose-built backup appliance market. So unlike general purpose storage that many backup vendors use, this is a storage tier that was specifically developed for the purpose of storing backups. So it was developed with three attributes in mind. One was performance – how fast can I back up, how fast can I recover? It was built on efficiency – backup is a very repetitive process, so how can I store multiple backups in less physical capacity? So data reduction, deduplication. And then scalability – how can I start small and scale? But then overarching to that is how can you make it rock solid and secure? So the security features of our PowerProtect Data Domain appliances are something that’s very advantageous. And many of our managed service providers have stood that up in their data centers and offered that as the foundation for cyber resilience. The nice thing is that Data Domain, as well as supporting Dell Technologies software – so PowerProtect Data Manager, and other software assets that we’ve had for even longer, products like Networker and Avamar – it also has a very healthy ecosystem. There’s a protocol called Data Domain Boost that we use to allow third parties to integrate with Data Domain directly. Because the reality is that an MSP, when they go and talk to a customer, that customer has more than likely already made choices around the backup software that they’re using. And it’s more than likely not just one. And sometimes when they go to the MSP, they’ll say, well, can you basically choose a backup software application? But even the nice thing is, from an MSP perspective, Data Domain is multi-tenant. So you can slice up Data Domain into an ability to serve many MSP customers using different software if the customer so chooses. So if you look at our expo floor this year, we’ve got companies like Commvault exhibiting, companies like Veeam exhibiting. That’s the way that our portfolio is set up to provide that backup infrastructure for MSPs to leverage. Robert Dutt: Obviously, one of the big occurrences here from a partner point of view is the Modern Partner Platform that’s rolling out. And in part of all of those changes, you got the specific call out for cyber resilience solutions as one of the differentiated product areas for premium rebates. That’s a pretty big carrot. What does it say about the signal to the channel about where you see the biggest growth opportunities across Dell? Rob Emsley: Yeah, we have historically done the majority of our business through the channel, but we also recognize that the channel has a lot of choices. Many of our competitors, in fact most of our competitors in that cyber resilience backup solution space, are all pure-play individual companies, most of which have very little direct sales capabilities. So very channel-focused and therefore have blanketed the channel to sell their wares, sell their products. We wholeheartedly believe that the Dell Technologies portfolio, either standalone from a cyber resilience solutions perspective, but also taken in context of the other key elements – you think about things like private cloud and AI – gives a channel partner the concept of delivering secure infrastructure and the opportunity to take advantage of that broader portfolio. And as we talked about earlier, you can’t deny that cyber resilience is top of mind. It’s as high on the board’s agenda as, hey, how are we going to take advantage of artificial intelligence? Some could argue that cyber resilience is either on par or if not, for many customers, more of a concern, because it’s that ever-present danger of – is the infrastructure that I have now, even before I’ve implemented AI, secure enough to allow us to sleep at night? We certainly see the pivot from data protection to cyber resilience fitting well with the other vendors that our MSPs talk to. We certainly have a portfolio that addresses small customer needs to large customer needs, can absolutely be leveraged by our MSP partners to build a practice behind. And also, with cyber resilience solutions, there’s that upfront services component built in – identifying what is the minimum viable company that needs to be the most secure, the most isolated, to give those customers the peace of mind and actually show the MSPs as valued trusted partners. Robert Dutt: So much of the focus is obviously on enterprise data, on the data center, on the infrastructure side. But you also have the Workspace Protection offering going on. How important is securing the endpoint in the overall resilience strategy, and what’s the play there for partners from a resilience point of view? Rob Emsley: Yeah, certainly if you think about the entry point into most networks, the endpoints are clearly the most numerous, just by the volume of endpoints compared to the volume of elements in the data center. So certainly when we look at cyber resilience, we look holistically – not only at the data center infrastructure, but absolutely the endpoints that we sell. We continually look at the elements of security across the portfolio. And there’s a lot of foundational technology across the Dell product line, whether it be in the client space or in the server or storage space. The concept of trusted boot, secure BIOS, really carries forward through the PC line all the way into our server line and then the leverage of those servers into our storage portfolio. And then from an MSP standpoint, when you engage with Dell from a purchase perspective, you gain the advantage of the secure supply chain that Dell uses to its advantage. Our supply chain forever has been an incredible value, not only to ourselves, but also to anybody that buys from us, including our partners. But the fact that the way that we leverage that supply chain securely gives a lot of peace of mind. Because many of our partners, when they’re working with security companies, those security companies are not manufacturing their devices. Certainly they’re not manufacturing endpoints. Most of the time, they’re not manufacturing data center servers and data center storage solutions. They’re buying from somebody else. So the concept of a secure supply chain becomes harder to rationalize when you have multiple suppliers providing your solution. So at the end of the day, one of the advantages when it comes to Dell is that if you choose to work holistically with Dell, you get this foundational benefit across the portfolio of a lot of commonality when it comes to security and resilience. That’s one take-it-to-the-bank benefit that an MSP can achieve when they work with Dell Technologies across the entire portfolio. We’re fortunate enough to be in a position to have that entire portfolio, and long may that continue. And certainly that’s one of the advantages – when we look at security and resilience, we can look at it from the endpoint all the way to the data center and beyond. And I think that’s something that is a big benefit for MSPs to lean into the whole portfolio, as well as the advantages of aggregation of benefits and different tier levels by having a single-vendor, multi-portfolio opportunity, as opposed to slicing and dicing their vendor engagements across half a dozen different vendors. Robert Dutt: What do you see as the most common gap, especially in the mid-market, in terms of incident response plans today? Rob Emsley: I think it’s one, having one that is documented and printed out. That may seem very basic, but… Robert Dutt: Until your systems are locked down by ransomware. Rob Emsley: Exactly. So the very basic advice of have a plan and print it out may sound very old-fashioned and simplistic, but in the mid-market, that is probably something that people should consider. Certainly, practice does make perfect is not a trite saying. Practice, practice, practice in the mid-market becomes important. You don’t want to be developing a plan or using a plan for the first time when the house is on fire. You want to know where the exits are, where the fire extinguisher is, and you want to know how to use it. You want to make sure that when you use it, they work. Something which we can probably all think about in our own home lives, to be honest. So I think that’s probably something which, no matter what size company you are, it comes back to – you don’t want to lose your employees, you don’t want to lose your data. And when it comes to cyber resilience, you’re never too small or too big to take a fresh look at what you do and what your plan is. Robert Dutt: Once again, I appreciate you taking the time. Great chat. Rob Emsley: Great. Thanks, Robert. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Rob Emsley from Dell. I’d like to thank Rob for carving out some time during what has been a very busy week on the show floor at DTW. A couple of things from the conversation that I think are worth mentioning. First, that 97% figure – 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. If you’re an MSP and your backup practice is still built on the assumption that the backup is the safe harbor, that’s a foundational problem. The attackers know exactly where the life raft is. And second, the idea of the minimum viable company sounds simple, even obvious, but it’s actually a board-level conversation that most MSPs probably aren’t having and probably should be. What are the absolute minimum systems, data sets, and processes that a business needs to restart their operations? Answering that question and then building a resilience stack around that answer is the real difference between selling backup and selling business continuity. And his parting advice – have a plan and print it out – almost laughably basic until you consider how many organizations discover their incident response runbook is sitting on the encrypted server when they need it the most. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always help. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Message #3 of the 2026 EMC spring revival sermon series. Series: 2026 Revival: Open Our Eyes Speaker: Dr. Steve McGuire Scripture: John 12:12-26; 20:24-31

Message #2 of the 2026 EMC spring revival sermon series. Series: 2026 Revival: Open Our Eyes Speaker: Dr. Steve McGuire Scripture: John 1:35-51

Message #1 of the 2026 EMC spring revival sermon series. Series: 2026 Revival: Open Our Eyes Speaker: Dr. Steve McGuire Scripture: Isaiah 6:1-8

Dell's CTO built a 4-category agent framework from real production deployments. Most enterprises are ignoring two of the categories that matter most.Full Show NotesEnterprise leaders are mapping AI agents to org charts — building digital employees, agentic teams, AI workers — and then wondering why the results fall short. Dell's Global CTO John Roese has been running agents in production long enough to know exactly why that framing fails, and what to do instead.In this episode, Roese shares a framework Dell developed from actual production deployments, not pilots. It identifies four categories of AI agents defined by two dimensions: how much autonomy you grant the agent, and how complex the underlying process is. Most enterprises are focused on one category. Two of the four are widely overlooked — and they may represent the fastest path to measurable ROI.This is a practical, grounded conversation about where agents are actually delivering value today, how to think about infrastructure cost in the context of agent economics, and why the sequence in which you deploy agents matters as much as which agents you build. If your organization is trying to move from AI experimentation to production, this episode is required listening.3. Chapter titles:[00:00] — Introduction: Dell's dual role as tech vendor and enterprise AI user[01:38] — Why the org chart model for agents fails[03:12] — Decoupling human capacity from work capacity for the first time[04:23] — The two-by-two framework: autonomy vs. process complexity[06:14] — Productivity agents: what most enterprises already have[07:00] — Hygiene agents: the overlooked category that fixes foundational data problems[08:01] — The CRM data example: why every CRM is inaccurate and how agents fix it[10:05] — Latent infrastructure capacity: running agents in GPU white space to cut costs to cents[13:53] — Facilitation agents: removing entropy from complex cross-functional workflows[17:30] — The sequencing insight: hygiene and facilitation as the path to expert agents[19:24] — Why coordination agents aren't agentic bosses — and where human control actually lives[22:21] — Roese's closing advice: become literate, pick a few, get them into production4. Guest BioJohn Roese is the Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer at Dell Technologies, where he is responsible for technology strategy, AI deployment, and research and development across the company. He has held senior technology leadership roles at Nortel, Enterasys Networks, Broadcom, and EMC. At Dell, he operates at a rare intersection: leading AI strategy for a major technology vendor while also deploying AI internally at enterprise scale — which means his frameworks are tested against real production constraints, not just market positioning.LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnroeseDell Technologies: dell.comAbout This PodcastAI with Maribel Lopez is a podcast for enterprise technology leaders navigating AI adoption, agentic systems, AI infrastructure, and AI governance. Host Maribel Lopez covers enterprise technology and advises CIOs, CDOs, CMOs, and technology vendors on how to move from AI experimentation to measurable business outcomes. New episodes published bi-weekly.Subscribe on your platform of choice: buzzsprout.com/1947446

***"Original Description"*** Hello lovelies. Our Kai DéVote is currently taking a little break from his "Deep Space Night" and the "Mixmission Bargrooves". Today we start the weekend with sounds from Melodic House and Deep House. The Mixmission Extended, Kai DéVote, EMC and yours. There is no better way to start the end of the day and the weekend... We wish you a lot of fun listening and watching

In Episode 103, Brennan is joined by NYC actor, Cambria Klein, as they mourn the soon to be death of the EMC program and try to figure out what the heck they're gonna do now! The decision is a very complex one to make and there are 1 million factors to take into consideration. However at the end of the day, it's a decision only you can make for yourself, so you gotta trust your heart!Support the showHost/ Production/ Editing: Brennan StefanikMusic: Dylan KaufmanGraphic Design: Jordan Vongsithi@batobroadway on Instagram, Threads, and TikTokPatreon.com/batobroadway

This week, we interviewed Rod Mathews. Rod is the CEO of TeamDynamix and a member of the board of directors. Most recently, he was President and CEO at Axcient, a business continuity and disaster recovery software company, where he focused on innovation and market acceleration, leading to its acquisition by ConnectWise late last year. During his tenure, Axcient's growth rate tripled, driven by the expansion of the market-leading x360 platform focused on the MSP market.  As a 34-year tech industry veteran, he has held leadership positions across R&D, marketing, corporate development, and general management with Barracuda Networks, EMC, Data Domain, and NetApp.  Rod is also executive chair of the board at Spin.AI, a SaaS security company with a mission to secure SaaS data against ransomware attacks, insider threats, data loss, data leaks, and non-compliance.

Joining Anthony for this episode of VETchat by The Webinar Vet is Jackie Layng,  ICF-accredited Leadership and Executive Coach and certified EmC practitioner. In this episode, Anthony andJackie share insights on transforming stress and conflict into confidence and connection. The two discuss how emotional intelligence, self-care routines, and practical coaching frameworks can rebuild trust and foster a thriving practiceculture. This episode offers actionable strategies for veterinary professionals to enhance leadership skills and team dynamics, ensuring resilience and growth in challenging environments.Email Jackie at jackie@jackielayng.comVisit her website: https://jackielayng.com/

GB2RS News Sunday, the 26th of April 2026 The news headlines: The RSGB Board holds its first post-AGM meeting RSGB 2026 Convention announcement Celebrate World Morse Day with the RSGB Following the RSGB 2026 AGM on Saturday, the 18th of April, the new Board met and co-opted Dr Stewart Bryant, G3YSX, onto the Board under Article 37. The Board then elected Dr Bryant as Board Chair. The purpose of these decisions is to allow newly elected Directors to learn more about the Society and the Board, with the intention that a new Board Chair will be elected from within the new Board in due course. The RSGB Board would like to record its thanks to Stewart for being willing to extend his role in this way. Board Directors also appointed Will Richardson, 2E0WYA, to the volunteer role of Executive Director of Strategic Oversight to help drive forward work on Board effectiveness. As announced previously, Stephen Purser, GW4SHF and Stephen Ramsden, M0CCA, swapped roles after the AGM, so Stephen Ramsden is now Company Secretary and Stephen Purser is Deputy Company Secretary. The Board congratulated John Moss, G0KTW and Ben Lloyd, GW4BML, on their election as Directors and Patrick Wood, 2E0IFB and Graham Smith, G4NMD, on their endorsement as Nominated Directors. The Board Liaison roles are being discussed and will be announced in due course. If you were unable to join the event live, you can catch up with all the AGM proceedings at rsgb.org/agm  Tickets for the RSGB 2026 Convention go on sale on Friday, the 1st of May, and ahead of this, the Society has made some exciting announcements. Not only has it released the first round of speakers, including one on a highly anticipated DXpedition, but it has also shared details of two new workshops that will be taking place. Will you choose NanoVNA Essentials or AI – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? For those looking to extend the weekend's activities, the RSGB has confirmed that it has partnered with The National Museum of Computing to offer Convention attendees the opportunity to visit on Friday, the 9th of October. The RSGB is delighted that this fantastic annual event is being sponsored by Martin Lynch & Sons and that AMSAT-UK will once again be holding its Colloquium during the Convention this year. The RSGB 2026 Convention is taking place between the 9th and 11th of October at Kents Hill Conference Centre in Milton Keynes. Find out more by going to rsgb.org/convention Tomorrow, Monday the 27th, is World Morse Day. The day honours the birthday of the inventor of Morse code, Samuel Morse, who was born on this day in 1791. The RSGB is continuing its annual celebrations of this day by releasing a video with a question in Morse code for you to answer, which this year is sent by the RSGB CW Champion, Laura Robertson, MM7BFL. Once you have used your Morse skills to decipher the question, get involved by leaving your answer in the comments section under the post. You could even share a video of you sending your answer in Morse! You can view the video tomorrow on the RSGB YouTube channel, or via the RSGB's Facebook, Instagram or X pages.  RSGB members, if you are planning a trip this spring, why not include a visit to one of the Society's partner museums? Whether you're heading to West Wales, Cornwall, Suffolk, Dorset, West Sussex or Milton Keynes, you will be able to save between 20% and 50% on standard admission prices. Visit rsgb.org/partner-museums for your personalised discount voucher. RSGB members also receive free entry to Bletchley Park, which includes the RSGB National Radio Centre. Time is running out to apply and be part of the RSGB team that will be going to Austria for this year's Youngsters on the Air summer camp. This fantastic opportunity is for radio amateurs aged between 16 and 30. The programme will include activities such as experimenting with underground propagation, Summits on the Air, Caves on the Air, as well as having the chance to ascend a 2,000m summit in a cable car and make a long-distance VHF/UHF QSO with your handheld. All in the incredible surroundings of the Austrian Alps. The deadline to apply for this exciting opportunity is Friday, the 1st of May. Get involved by going to rsgb.org/yota-camp and selecting ‘YOTA Austria 2026' from the right-hand menu. UKBOTA's Historic Counties event will be running throughout May for both activators and hunters. Stations will be on the air to celebrate the unique historic structure of the UK. More details can be found at ukbota.net/HC26 Did you know that the weekly RSGB News can be viewed on air and via the web as a television stream? Join Alison, G8ROG, each Sunday at 9 am UK time for a live broadcast of the GB2RS News. Kindly hosted by the British Amateur Television Club, go to batc.org.uk/live/gb2rs to watch the show. Alongside Alison's live presentation, you can view additional text and pictures relating to each news item. The transmission is also relayed via GB3HV in Hampshire using Digital ATV. If you enjoy watching GB2RS as well as listening, there is a live Digital ATV broadcast from Clive, G3GJA, via the Hull 23cm repeater GB3EY at 10 am UK time. If you are not in range of the repeater itself, you can still watch the broadcast, again courtesy of the BATC website, by going to batc.org.uk/live/gb3ey And now for details of rallies and events The EMC & Compliance International Exhibition will be held at the Holiday Inn in Oxford from the 29th of April to the 1st of May 2026. The exhibition is open to all interested parties and is concerned with all aspects of EMC. For more information, including registration details, visit emcandci.com The Broadcast Engineering Museum has an open day on Sunday, the 3rd of May, from 11 am. The museum is located at 41 Capper Avenue, Hemswell Cliff, near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire DN21 5XS. Visitors will be treated to one of the largest collections of historic broadcasting equipment in the world. For more information, visit becg.org.uk/events Thorpe Camp Hamfest is taking place on Sunday, the 3rd of May at Thorpe Camp Visitor Centre, Tattershall Thorpe, LN4 4PL. Traders can arrive from 7 am, and visitors are welcome from 9 am. The entry fee is £5 per person. For more information, visit thorpecamp.org On Monday, the 4th of May, Dartmoor Spring Radio Rally will take place at the Yelverton War Memorial Hall, Meavy Lane, Yelverton, Devon, PL20 6AL. There will be the usual bring and buy, trader stands, refreshments, free parking and available. The doors will be open from 10 am to 1 pm, and admission costs £3. More details are available at dartmoorradioclub.uk Now the Special Event news Special event stations OL900CO, OL900JAR and OL900LT are active until December to celebrate the town of Jaromer in the Czech Republic. For more information, including details of awards that are available for working the stations, visit hamawards.eu On Saturday, the 2nd of May, between 9 am and 5 pm, Dundee Amateur Radio Club will be operating from Broughty Ferry Lifeboat Station using the callsign GB1BFL. The station will be active in support of SOS Radio Week. For updates on frequencies and modes in use, visit the Club's Facebook page. More details are available via dundee-amateur-radio.co.uk Now the DX news Using the callsign GB9IOW, a team of Belgian operators will be active from the Isle of Wight, EU-120, from Tuesday, the 28th of April until Tuesday, the 5th of May. Listen for activity on the HF bands, via the QO-100 satellite and on 23cm EME.  For more information, visit QRZ.com Paul, VP9KF, is active from Bermuda, NA-005, until Thursday, the 30th of April. He is operating using CW only on the HF bands. The station was spotted recently on the 17 and 20m bands. You can find more details at vp9kf.com  Now the contest news Today, Sunday the 26th, the UK Microwave Group EHF Band Contest runs from 0800 to 1700UTC. Using all modes on 76 to 241GHz frequencies, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. The SP DX RTTY Contest started at 1200UTC yesterday, the 25th, and runs until 1200UTC today, Sunday, the 26th of April. Using RTTY on the 80 to 10m bands, where contests are permitted, the exchange is signal report and serial number. Polish stations also send their province code. Also, today, the 26th, the British Amateur Radio Teledata Group Sprint 25 Contest runs from 1700 to 2100UTC. Using 75 baud RTTY on the 80 to 10m bands, where contests are permitted, the exchange is your six-character locator. The UK and Ireland Contest Club DX CW Contest started at 1200UTC yesterday, the 25th, and ends at 1200UTC today, Sunday, the 26th of April. Using CW on the 80 to 10m bands, where contests are permitted, the exchange is signal report and serial number.  Full rules, including UK and EI area codes, are available via tinyurl.com/ukeiccrules Tomorrow, the 27th, the RSGB FT4 Series Contest runs from 1900 to 2100UTC. Using FT4 on the 80 to 10m bands, where contests are permitted, the exchange is your report. On Tuesday the 28th, the RSGB SHF UK Activity Contest runs from 1830 to 2130UTC. Using all modes on 2.3 to 10GHz frequencies, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. On Wednesday the 29th, the UK and Ireland Contest Club 80m Contest runs from 2000 to 2100UTC. Using CW on the 80m band, the exchange is your six-character locator. On Thursday the 30th, the RSGB 80m Club Championship runs from 1900 to 2030UTC. Using PSK63 and RTTY on the 80m band, the exchange is signal report and serial number. On Saturday, the 2nd of May, the RSGB 432MHz Trophy Contest runs from 1400 to 2000UTC. Using all modes on the 70cm band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. The RSGB 432 to 245GHz Contest starts at 1400UTC on Saturday, the 2nd of May and ends at 1400UTC on Sunday, the 3rd of May. Using all modes on 432 to 245GHz frequencies, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. The UK Six Metre Group Summer Marathon starts at 0000UTC on Saturday, the 2nd of May and ends at 2359UTC on Sunday, the 2nd of August. Using all modes on the 6m band, the exchange is your four-character locator. The ARI International DX Contest starts at 1200UTC on Saturday, the 2nd of May and ends at 1159UTC on Sunday, the 3rd of May. Using CW, RTTY and SSB on the 80 to 10m bands, the exchange is signal report and serial number. Italian stations also give their province code. On Sunday, the 3rd of May, the UK Microwave Group Low Band Contest runs from 0900 to 1400UTC. Using all modes on 1.3 to 3.4GHz frequencies, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. Also, on Sunday, the 3rd of May, the Worked All Britain 7MHz Phone Contest runs from 1000 to 1400UTC. Using SSB only on the 40m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and Worked All Britain square. Now the radio propagation report, compiled by G0KYA, G3YLA and G4BAO on Thursday the 23rd of April Last week's HF propagation was dominated by the effects of a high-speed stream from a large coronal hole on the Sun. This pushed the Kp index up to 4 and 5 at times, with the result that maximum usable frequencies, or MUFs, were lowered. The ionosphere struggled, and often the MUF over a 3,000km path was below 21MHz. Yes, there were some openings up to 10m, but they were generally weak. Checks showed that paths opened up to Brazil, Kenya and Chile on the 10m band using FT8, but the signals were well down in the noise and barely workable. Get used to this, as it could be the norm for the next few years! Meanwhile, the solar flux index increased to 116 by Thursday, the 16th of April, no doubt aided by active sunspot group 4420. Next week, NOAA forecasts that the solar flux index could rise to 125. It also predicts that the Kp index may remain low due to a lack of coronal hole activity. Fingers crossed that we don't have any coronal mass ejections over the next week. If this pans out as predicted, we could have some decent HF conditions over the next seven days. Yes, the MUFs may be lower, but 14, 18 and perhaps 21MHz could be usable, with very occasional openings on 24 and 28MHz. DX to be worked this week includes TX9W from the Marquesas Islands; VP9KF in Bermuda; 7P8WR from Lesotho; C5B, C5C and C5D in The Gambia; D60DX in Comoros; and JD1BMH operating from Ogasawara And now the VHF and up propagation news from G3YLA and G4BAO The strong region of high pressure will remain with us for the next two weeks. So tropo should be considered a first-choice mode for a while. The main criteria for the quality of any resulting tropo is moisture. This is because moisture is a component in the calculation of the refractive index of the air. High pressure usually produces dry air above any temperature inversion, but we may not always get the moisture below the inversion. The end of last week was good with reports of beacons in Norway and Sweden into JO02 on 1.3GHz because of moisture present below the inversion. However, if the dry easterly wind returns, it may not go so well. Meteor scatter should continue to be uplifted by the declining Lyrids meteor stream, which peaked last week, and rain scatter is off the menu since the charts are dominated by high-pressure systems. Aurora is showing as occasional weak alerts, but apart from the odd fluttery signals on the LF bands, nothing too interesting at the moment. As usual, watch for the Kp index going up to 5. Keeping the best until last, we are approaching the period when Sporadic-E usually becomes a mode of interest. Work is well underway on a rewrite of the Propquest website, which should be ready soon. This will be the go-to place for the daily updates during the 2026 Sporadic-E season. EME now, and the Moon is moving into a lower noise position. Declination is high, but falling, and path losses will increase as we move away from the Moon's perigee, its closest point to Earth, which occurred on Friday, the 17th of April. Apogee, the Moon's furthest point from Earth and the point of highest path losses, occurs on Sunday, the 17th of May. And that's all from the propagation team this week.

Eric Arcese, vice president of global partner marketing at Dell Technologies Dell Technologies vice president of global partner marketing Eric Arcese joins In The Channel ahead of Dell Technologies World, and his central message for Canadian partners is worth sitting with: the AI Factory is Dell’s story, but the seams around it belong to the channel. Arcese describes looking at the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA topology slide at a recent Dell Tech World and seeing the “gaps, the seams” – the services, the data work, the outcome-level integration – as the real opportunity for partners. As enterprise AI adoption moves beyond hyperscaler buildouts into mid-market and commercial customers, those gaps are where Canadian MSPs and VARs have natural advantages: proximity to the customer, industry intimacy, and the ability to make the technology real. On the VxRail-to-Dell Private Cloud transition, Arcese frames the shift around the economics of AI – disaggregated infrastructure lets customers independently scale GPUs, storage, and networking for specific workloads. Hypervisor choice is preserved across Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and others, and partners building Dell Private Cloud practices can access up to 10% incremental incentives. The AI PC conversation moves past the usual productivity pitch. With over 500 million PCs still running Windows 10 and enterprise fleets averaging three to five years old, the refresh is as much a security imperative as a performance one – a stronger entry point for MSPs already in the endpoint security conversation with their customers. The episode closes with a preview of the Global Partner Summit at Dell Technologies World, May 18-21 in Las Vegas. Demand signals replacing traditional leads, AI-assisted quoting and deal registration, a “modern partner-centric transaction ecosystem” – the “simple, predictable, profitable” mantra is getting operational substance. The details come in May. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Dell Technologies World is coming up in May, and for the Dell partner community, it’s the biggest event on the calendar – the place where the direction for the partner program gets set for the year ahead. As we head toward that, there’s a lot for Canadian resellers and MSPs to be thinking about. The partner program has been evolving. The shift from VxRail to Dell Private Cloud is still very much unfolding. The AI infrastructure opportunity is reshaping what customers expect and what partners are expected to deliver. The question of where a Canadian MSP or VAR actually fits into all of that – that’s a real and pressing one. To help me make sense of it, I sat down with Eric Arcese, Vice President of Global Partner Marketing at Dell Technologies. Eric’s been in the industry for over 25 years, with roots going back to the EMC era, so he’s been watching and shaping how the Dell partner ecosystem operates for a long time. We talked about where partners fit in the AI story, the VxRail transition, the AI PC refresh, and what you can expect from the Global Partner Summit in May. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Eric Arcese. Robert Dutt: Eric, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Eric Arcese: Thanks, Robert, for having me. Robert Dutt: You’re the Vice President of Global Partner Marketing at Dell. Can you give me a sense of what that actually means day-to-day? What are you responsible for, and what does the Dell partner community look like from where you’re sitting? Eric Arcese: Well, the partner community has been a tremendous growth engine and a critical and existential part of our go-to-market in everything that we do. We have partners around the world, we have some of our very best in Canada, and our partners really bring our technology to life with our shared customers around the world. We can’t do what we do in the market without the phenomenal partners that we have. In my role leading global partner marketing, that is to make sure that our story resonates, that we’re bringing that value proposition to life for our partners. They have choices, just like customers do, each and every day – who they’re going to invest in, who they’re going to work with, what they’re going to focus on learning, how they’re going to enable their sellers, their pre-sales folks. And we want to make sure that our partners feel really good about working with us, building businesses with us, developing practices with us, and ultimately growing with us in the markets that they serve for the customers that we collectively support. I love what I do. I’ve been in tech for over 25 years, here at Dell for over 25 years as well, and I could not think of a place I would rather be. Supporting our very best partners in Canada and around the world, and all that we do – that’s a little bit about what I do. I work very closely with my team around the world, and with our regional marketing folks as well, to make sure that that last mile of what we deliver for partners is well-aligned and adds value to partners in the ecosystem. So that’s a little bit about what I do, Robert. Robert Dutt: I feel like 2026 is a bit of an inflection point for the partner community writ large, and the definition of a Dell partner seems broader than it’s ever been. You’ve talked about partners moving beyond reselling into being architects, advisors, ecosystem builders – all that kind of good stuff. What do you see as the state of the Dell partner community right now, and how have you seen that picture change over recent months, and I guess the last year or two? Eric Arcese: Robert, you and I have both been in tech for the last couple of decades, and there have been different chapters, different inflection points. What we’re seeing now is a moment like we’ve never seen before. This is obviously all driven by AI, but it puts infrastructure, solutions, integrations, and outcomes at the forefront of everything that our partners deliver and everything our customers are demanding. So we’re in this moment that’s existential in tech and everything that we do, where we need to accelerate time to value with infrastructure. And when it really dawned on me, Robert – it was a couple of years ago, at a Dell Technologies World; you might have been there too. We had this announcement, and we called it the AI Factory with NVIDIA. And we had a picture on a slide – like so many of you have seen, with a chevron – data coming in on one side, use cases and business outcomes on the other, but layered through all of that, you had services, AI, software, infrastructure. And there were gaps when I saw this slide, and I was thinking to myself: the gaps, the seams, that’s where the opportunity lies for our partners around the world. Dell is the infrastructure provider of choice. We are the leader in everything that we provide – right from commercial PCs, to storage, to servers, AI servers – and stitching it all together through the topology upon which we develop those outcomes creates a huge opportunity for our partners. So that’s what gets me really excited about the moment. We’re meeting the moment. Our technology is meeting the moment, our partners are meeting the moment, and we’re working each and every day with those partners to deliver real AI-driven outcomes around the world. And some customers get it – and those that don’t, won’t be here very long. So there is this urgency, and we see that in our demand across the board. And I won’t go into earnings from last year, but you’ve probably seen that the year that we just posted, we’re seeing that come to life in every market. We’re seeing that in Canada, no doubt about it as well. It’s hard not to get excited about it. This is a very special time indeed. Robert Dutt: So the AI Factory – definitely been a centrepiece of the story for the last couple of years, as you point out. When I look at it from the perspective of my audience – from the MSP or the VAR serving mid-market and SMB customers – the massive GPU cluster buildouts feel like they’re kind of happening somewhere else. Can you help me fill in the story for the regional partner who isn’t doing hyperscale deployments and where they fit into the AI infrastructure story at this point? Eric Arcese: It’s a great question. I think that’s a little bit of the elephant in the room, right? The first couple of years, it’s like – yeah, you’re reading about these multi-billion-dollar deals, but where are they happening? And those deals were happening at the hyperscale level. The next question is: when is there enterprise AI adoption? When does a traditional enterprise customer really start embracing AI at every level? And you know what? We’re seeing that now. The trajectory of that growth is accelerating, and it’s terrific to see. To your point, Robert, those first couple of quarters, first year or two – the question was: what about enterprise adoption? And that’s where our partners are incredibly well positioned to make it real. What are the outcomes? What are the use cases? What are the business processes we’re going to focus on to bring that infrastructure to a place where it’s adding real value? The people in that workflow who make that real – that’s our partners. Dell’s partners. Because our partners in Canada are incredibly intimate with the industry, the customer, the use cases, the business priorities – whether it’s in the public or private sector. We’re providing that infrastructure at Dell Technologies, but our partners are making it real because they have that intimacy. They’re pressing the flesh, they’re working with customers each and every day, they know what those priorities are, and they can reconcile where those investments need to be made to help accelerate time to value. So with all of that comes a massive services and consulting opportunity. It’s not just the infrastructure – it’s the value-added services that our partners are building upon that infrastructure. And we’re seeing some terrific practices getting built with our partners around the world. When we work together, we win together, and we’re seeing that each and every day. Robert Dutt: Can you make that just a little bit more concrete for me? What are the consulting-type services you see partners bringing to bear right now – especially for that partner serving, let’s say, a 500-person financial services firm? Just to set an example of a mid-market-type opportunity where there may be an AI Factory angle, but it’s not the hyperscale wheelhouse. Eric Arcese: You know, if you think about it – four or five years ago, you and I would be having this conversation and it would be about a cloud-first model, and then we’d probably evolve into hybrid cloud, using public or private cloud based on the right workload. Now the way we think about it, it’s not a cloud-first model. It’s more around data. It’s the data model. Making sure we have the right data on the right workload, because if you plug an LLM or any AI-driven workload or a GPU behind suboptimal data, you’re going to get suboptimal outcomes. So when we think about where a partner is going to focus – irrespective of the industry, whether it’s public sector, banking, telco, manufacturing – I think starting with a real inventory of what that data topology looks like, and what the business outcome is that we’re looking to achieve. And no matter what industry the customer is from, one quickly realizes they’re all in the data business. Our partners can, number one, do a great assessment of where that critical data is and where it’s living. And number two, marry that data to the right business outcome in terms of what they’re trying to deploy. So I think it really starts with the data, and building practices that understand the workload, the industry, the vertical, and the data – that is key. And that creates a lot of opportunity. We talk about servers, storage, client, PCs, and networking all the time, but that is where that data is going to live, and we’re going to build that AI practice off of it. That initial assessment – where an AI practice starts – all begins with data, Robert. It’s really having that data-informed conversation. And then a lot of this is a change in mindset, in terms of what you’re doing with that data and what the expectations are. Robert Dutt: All right. From one reference architecture to another – talk about the transition from VxRail to Dell Private Cloud. Michael Dell’s been pretty direct about the direction. And I know you have roots going back to EMC, so it might be a bit personal. But for a partner who’s built a real practice, a real business, around VxRail over the last decade – what does that transition actually look like, and where do you see the services opportunity opening up as customers make that move? Eric Arcese: Robert, it’s such a great question. Because for years we talked about converged infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure – packaging, which made a lot of sense. You package a pre-architected and engineered system and you deliver it, to drive an accelerated business outcome. Time to value of infrastructure. The industry, with our partners, built a multi-billion-dollar business and a new market that was very well received. Then you wake up a couple of years later and now we’re talking about disaggregated infrastructure with Dell Private Cloud. And one may wonder: wait a second – we thought it was all about putting it all together and delivering it with speed. What’s changed? And I had to ask myself the same question, Robert. What’s changed? Well, the economics of AI have changed. The centre of gravity in terms of what is needed for these AI outcomes has been driven by a huge development – and that development is the GPU. The GPU is the accelerator of all the processing. And sometimes you need more GPU investment than you would need in storage, than you would need in client. You still need them across the board. So when you think about that economic backdrop of AI, the economics lend themselves to a more disaggregated infrastructure where you can dial up storage, server, networking, depending on what is needed for that specific workload, LLM, or AI platform that you’re rolling out. Also – customers want choice. They don’t want to be locked into one hypervisor. Maybe they want to work with Red Hat. Maybe they want to work with Microsoft. Maybe they want to work with VMware – they’re a VMware shop. Maybe they want to work with Nutanix. Allowing customers to have that choice empowers them, but it also creates opportunity for our partners, to your point, Robert. Because our partners are ultimately going to help our shared customers navigate those choices and reconcile those priorities from a hypervisor perspective, to optimize whatever application they’re rolling out. So it’s really about customer choice. And for me, the coolest thing to see is how quickly this has evolved. We’re doubling down on customer choice. Partners earn up to 10% incremental incentives. We’ve really built a program to drive profitable practices around Dell Private Cloud and strengthen and deepen those relationships. So we’re seeing this real shift from pre-packaged hyperconverged infrastructure to disaggregated infrastructure that’s truly optimized and tailored to Dell Private Cloud. Very exciting to see, Robert. Robert Dutt: Pivoting to the device side of things – the AI PC refresh is a significant cycle for the channel right now. For the Canadian VAR or even an MSP selling into the commercial market, what’s the marketing story that you’re giving them to make that conversation land? Especially with customers who are already stretched on IT budgets and might be looking at that three-year-old PC and saying, “good enough to get me through another year.” Eric Arcese: It might be. But it probably isn’t. And it’s not just the productivity benefits you’re going to see with an AI PC – it’s the security requirements that we’re all going to need. Because AI is terrific for the good, but it has also empowered the bad actors to get to where we work every day. Last year was all about the tech refresh from Windows 10 to Windows 11. We still have over 500 million PCs running Windows 10, and enterprise fleets averaging three to five years of age. So customers definitely need to act on that – to bring that AI capability to the edge, but also to meet the security requirements we need to protect that edge from reaching into the core. We started naturally in the data centre in our conversation today, Robert, but that edge – where are you working every day? What are you touching every day? It’s your PC. That’s your workforce. That’s what’s in front of you, whether at work or at home. And there’s just a tremendous opportunity there for our partners. We’re the number one commercial PC provider in the world, and it starts with what’s in front of you each and every day. We’re excited about that opportunity. That hasn’t gone away. We had a terrific CES, and there’s just more greenfield opportunity for our partners in Canada to win with Dell’s PC portfolio. Robert Dutt: Bouncing around a little bit from topic to topic here – you guys made some program changes for 2026, as most vendors are wont to do from time to time. The Titanium incentives probably being the most visible of them, but there’s also this broader “simplified, predictable, profitable” philosophy underneath it. From a marketing standpoint, what’s the message you most want partners to internalize about what Dell is committing to this year? Eric Arcese: One of the things I love about partner marketing, Robert, is the work is never over. And you can appreciate that – you’ve been in the channel just as long as I have. The work of creating a simple, predictable, profitable motion for our partners really never ends, because everything we talked about just keeps evolving. We want to make sure we have a simplified motion – taking friction out of the system. We want to make sure it’s predictable: you know what you’re going to get, you know how we’re going to engage with you. And it’s profitable: you want to make sure that you’re making money working with Dell Technologies in Canada. So we’re doing a lot around demand signals – how do we accelerate what used to be a lead, which is now a demand signal, the outcome of many different predictive analytics and data points on the markets that we serve with our partners. We want to make sure we’re simplifying that lead management and fostering seamless collaboration in that motion. We also want to make sure that from a deal reg perspective, we are managing opportunities together and protecting where our Canadian partners have invested. We want to do all of that to accelerate engagement, simplify processes, and empower our Dell sellers with a smarter and streamlined motion. And then quoting and buying – we want to make sure we are priced to win across the board, and we’re building a modern, partner-centric transaction ecosystem that connects product discovery to order management in one end-to-end platform. You’re going to be hearing more and more about that in the months to come. I think you’ll be at Dell Technologies World with us, so I’m excited to share more there. That mantra of simple, predictable, profitable – that work never ends. We’re seeing the fruits of our labour here and the success we’ve had in Canada over the last couple of years. And we’re really proud of the work that we’ve done. We’re very grateful and humbled by so many amazing partners in Canada that have really doubled down on Dell across the board, across the portfolio. Because when you have a great program that rewards the right investment, and you have wonderful people – I love the alliteration of portfolio, program, people – there’s nothing you can’t do. When we work together, we truly are winning together in Canada. Robert Dutt: To your point that it never ends – it just keeps evolving. You rightly pointed out we’re not too far away from Dell Technologies World, and the Global Partner Summit is a big part of that. There’s been some preview of a new integrated partner experience that sounds like it goes beyond a typical program update. Without asking you to scoop your own announcements – although if you want to, please feel free. Eric Arcese: Ha – I’ll be good. I’ll do my best. Robert Dutt: What’s the problem you’re aiming to solve for partners with this platform approach? What’s the philosophy behind what we’re likely to see roll out in the near future? Eric Arcese: What we talked about – meeting the moment – it is a truly special time. And we want to make sure our partners have the speed to deliver what we collectively need to for our shared customers, and the scale to do it across every market, across every part of our portfolio, across every partner type. What you’ll see at Dell Technologies World – as you always do – is the product of investments we’ve made over not just the year, but over years. From a portfolio perspective, programmatically, you’re going to see how when partners invest and build their practices and businesses on Dell, they will be rewarded. And then you get to spend time with our people who support our partners in Canada and around the world. Not to mention, we have a great time in Vegas, as one always does. So it’s the place to be. We’re a couple of weeks out and we’re seeing the excitement and anticipation building. We have a lot to share at our Global Partner Summit at Dell Technologies World. Robert, I believe you’re planning on being there – we’re looking forward to seeing you and spending time with you as well. And we’re going to have a great representation not just of Canadian partners but the Canadian customers we work so hard serving each and every day. It’s going to be a blast, as it always is. Robert Dutt: You touched a while back on some of the day-to-day operational things that partners tell me they feel the most friction on – not specific to Dell, but across the industry. Deal reg, quoting, lead sharing, the need to do all of that faster at higher scale. Is the vision here to make those kinds of operational experiences meaningfully more autonomous and self-serve? Is AI in the partner platform something partners will feel starting in May, or is that still on the horizon? Eric Arcese: Well, I prefer drinking your own champagne to eating your own dog food – so I’ll go with the bubbly analogy there. But we have very much been, for years now, investing in a very big way in our partner business and the platforms that support those partners. We want to make sure that we’re using an AI-first approach across the board in everything that we do – to take friction out of the system, and to have an AI-first mantra in all we do when it comes to empowering our people and our partners. I look at the AI that we’re investing in to support our partners as a real force multiplier. How do you get the power of the portfolio to our customers? How do you enable our partners to know that portfolio? How do you make sure that when you’re quoting and ordering, you’re doing that in the most efficient way – so that customers aren’t waiting, they’re getting the right configuration at the right time, for the right workload, at the price that makes the most sense, and we’re delivering value? We want partners to be able to deliver that value, because when they do, they grow – and when they grow, it’s good for our partners, it’s good for Dell, and ultimately we’re driving more outcomes for the customers we serve. So you’ll see a lot of that AI in what we deliver from a product perspective, but definitely in how AI supports things like syndicated content, quoting and buying, and all of the programmatic platform upon which our partnerships are built. Robert Dutt: My last question – you touched on 25 or more years in this industry, through the EMC years, through the Dell-EMC merger, and now we’re into the AI chapter. For a partner who’s navigating all of this right now – the infrastructure shifts, the AI opportunity, the evolution of the program – what’s your read on the best opportunity over the next 12 months? Where would you be pointing partners in terms of where to focus? Eric Arcese: Well, if you’re a partner thinking about which relationships you’re going to invest in – with Dell, you have a leader in commercial PCs, a leader in storage, a leader in services. You have the industry heavyweight in infrastructure. And not only that – in a world where we’re seeing some very complicated supply chain dynamics globally, you have the world’s best supply chain supporting you. You have a proven leader that’s committed to partnering in all that we do. And you have tremendous people in Canada there to support you each and every day. So I always think of it this way: if you’re building a business, who are those partnerships you want to create? You want one hand to shake that’s accountable to you, that’s invested in you, that’s committed to you – so that you can deliver on what you’ve promised your customer. With Dell, you have that. And we’re really proud of where we are in the market. This AI moment that we’ve all been afforded is going to create tremendous opportunity – and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Not just for the partner businesses we support, but for the outcomes and problem statements that we’re going to be able to address that we haven’t even fathomed yet. Transformative outcomes across every industry we serve, both public and private. So I’m really excited, Robert. And if I’m a partner, those are the types of things I’m thinking about and why working with Dell is a great bet. And hopefully we’ll all be making that bet in Vegas in May at Dell Technologies World – because that’s what you do in Vegas. You make bets. But it’s an easy one to make with Dell Technologies every day. Robert Dutt: Great point to leave it on. I look forward to catching up at Dell Technologies World and hearing more of the story there. Eric, thanks so much. Eric Arcese: Thanks so much, Robert. I really enjoyed our time together. Much appreciated. There you have it – Eric Arcese from Dell Technologies. I’d like to thank Eric for his time, and of course, thank you for listening today. If I had to pull three things out of the conversation for the Canadian partner to sit with, here’s what I’m thinking. First – the AI Factory framing. Eric described looking at the AI Factory topology slide and seeing the gaps, the seams between the components, as the partner opportunity. The hardware is Dell’s story. The services layer, the data work, the integration, the outcomes – that’s where partners play. If you’re trying to figure out what the AI infrastructure wave actually means to your practice, that’s a useful lens. Second – the VxRail transition. If you’ve built a practice around VxRail, Dell’s message is: the path forward is clear. The hypervisor choice you’ve made is preserved. The economics of the new platform make sense, and there are meaningful incentives to help you build out a Dell Private Cloud practice. The transition is underway and getting ahead of it matters. Third – the AI PC refresh is a security story as much as a productivity story. There are still around 500 million PCs running Windows 10, many of them three to five years old, sitting at the edge of the network while AI is making the threat landscape more sophisticated. For MSPs already in the endpoint security conversation with their customers, that’s a more powerful entry point than “it’s a faster laptop.” And of course – Dell Technologies World, May 18th to 21st in Las Vegas. The Global Partner Summit is the anchor event for partners, and based on what Eric was hinting at around the integrated partner experience and changes to quoting and deal registration, it’s worth watching closely whether you’re going or not. If you found this useful, follow or subscribe to the In The Channel podcast wherever you get your podcasts – we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. A rating or review is always appreciated if you’ve got a minute – it genuinely helps. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Preparation does not become less important as sellers gain experience. It becomes more visible as a differentiator. In this replay segment with John Rowell, he breaks down of how disciplined pre-call preparation sharpens positioning, turns cold outreach into meaningful engagement, and allows reps to stay fully present in the moment. The conversation highlights why preparation is not just about information gathering, but about earning credibility, accelerating sales cycles, and creating the conditions for authentic customer conversations. John Rowell is the Co-Founder of Pinned Golf and a former enterprise sales leader with experience at EMC and Lacework. He brings a practitioner's perspective on applying enterprise sales discipline to startup growth. Connect with John: LinkedIn Pinned Golf Website Resources mentioned: Pin Golf's Caddie GPS Tablet Catch the full conversation, here:  Pinned Golf: Making the Shift from Sales to Entrepreneurship Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

***"Original Description"*** Hello lovelies. Today there is a small anniversary of our Kai, so to speak. The "Deep Space Night" has its 10th episode today here on our EMC channel. Sounds as usual on Friday evening from Deep-Dub Techno and Electronica. We wish you a lot of fun listening and watching :-) Your EMC Team

What does it take to become a “rockstar” CFO in the age of AI? Today, Zane Rowe, CFO of Workday, shares lessons from a career spanning global airlines, Apple, EMC, and VMware—to leading finance at one of the world's most influential enterprise software companies. From navigating generative AI in the finance function to building a true CEO–CFO partnership, Rowe breaks down how modern financial leadership is evolving. He reveals why today's CFO must think beyond accounting, how AI is reshaping decision-making, and what the next generation of finance leaders must do to stay ahead. If you want insight into the future of financial strategy, enterprise AI, and what separates good CFOs from great ones, this is a conversation you won't want to miss.

Roger Harrison VK2ZRH, Editor-in-Chief of Amateur Radio magazine . - Alan VK2COD, YOTA news and his reminder of the VKSUMMIT . - New downloadable EMC leaflet available, Jason VK2LAW tells how . - EI 0 WAAAW for Autism Awareness and VK4FUQ Felix gives us the when and where . - ARISS Outlines Opportunities for Space Station Contacts in 2027 during Operational news this week with Bruce VK3FFF.

In this episode of China Manufacturing Decoded (Ep. 322), host Adrian is joined by Renaud to take a high-level, practical look at product compliance. Many hardware teams think about compliance too late. By the time testing starts, the damage is already done: failed certifications, redesigns, delays, and unexpected costs. In this episode, we break down what product compliance really means and why it needs to be considered from the very beginning of product development. You'll learn: What “compliance” actually covers (it's more than just CE or FCC labels) Why designing without compliance in mind leads to expensive rework The key compliance areas: safety, chemicals, EMC, and more How requirements change depending on your target market (EU, US, etc.) Real ways companies get caught out, and how to avoid it   Episode Sections: 00:00:03 – Introduction & why compliance timing matters 00:01:23 – What product compliance actually means 00:02:24 – Why compliance must be built into design & sourcing 00:04:48 – What happens when products fail compliance testing 00:06:06 – The cost of redesign loops after failed tests 00:08:30 – Compliance explained: beyond CE & FCC labels 00:11:10 – How requirements vary by market (EU, US, global) 00:13:30 – Key compliance categories (chemicals, safety, EMC) 00:16:00 – CE marking, EU rules & US differences (UL, FCC) 00:18:52 – Additional requirements: toys, packaging, batteries 00:21:28 – Common compliance mistakes & supplier pitfalls 00:26:00 – Final takeaway: think about compliance early   Related content… CE Compliance for Manufacturing in Asia: A Beginner's Guide 11 Common Electronic Product Certification And Compliance Requirements Why Smart Devices Fail CE RED or FCC Testing & How to Prevent It Common Compliance & Recall Risks for IoT Devices Sold in the EU & UK US Consumer Electronics Compliance Basics Your Product is NOT Compliant in the EU or UK if You Don't Have All of its Technical Files Reliability vs. Compliance: Both Matter Equally for Your New Product Launch   This episode is brought to you by The Sofeast Group and includes links in the show notes to our blog posts and resources, and recommended books. For help with manufacturing in Asia, inspections, auditing, new product development, contract manufacturing, 3PL warehousing and fulfillment, visit sofeast.com.  Get in touch with us Connect with us on LinkedIn Contact us via Sofeast's contact page Subscribe to our YouTube channel Prefer Facebook? Check us out on FB

Pat Hindle talks with Jürgen Meyer, Vice President of the Automotive Market Segment at Rohde & Schwarz, about their new, larger office in Osaki, Japan, with increased capabilities, including some interesting demos covering EMC and automotive applications.

Karen Burnham feels your pain - the pain of EMC, that is. Karen is an EMC engineer, instructor, and founder of EMC United, a consulting company that aims to make EMC less painful for the rest of the PCB design engineering community. Karen joins Andy Shaughnessy to discuss some of the most common EMC challenges facing our industry today, a variety of solutions for these challenges, and design practices that can help you avoid EMC problems the first place. Karen also explains why EMC needs to become part of every high-speed PCB design cycle, and not an afterthought that's only addressed when a board fails FCC. Karen will be speaking at PCB East 2026, and she offers a preview of what attendees can expect to learn in her class, "EMC 101 - Fundamentals," which takes place April 30 at the DCU Convention Center in Worcester, MA. 

In this special episode recorded live on site at SXSW EDU, Dustin chats with Greg Smith from Britebound about their recent rebrand and their expanding work helping young learners explore potential careers and the ways to navigate the postsecondary landscape. He highlights how his team's work impacts higher ed during a time of increased scrutiny about value and relevance. Guest Name: Greg Smith, Vice President of Marketing, Britebound Guest Social: LinkedIn Guest Bio: As Vice President of Marketing at Britebound, Greg Smith is responsible for translating annual business objectives into strategic marketing plans and leading the marketing team to concept, create and execute the digital campaigns that impact millions of students each year. Greg brings over 25 years of corporate strategy, brand development and global marketing experience with a career that has spanned the technology, banking and financial services industries. In prior agency and client roles, Greg partnered with executives at companies such as American Express, EMC and Citizens Commercial Bank to envision how their marketing organizations must evolve to embrace the digital world and to transform their go-to-market strategies as the power shifted from companies to consumers. - - - -Connect With Our Host:Dustin Ramsdellhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/dustinramsdell/About The Enrollify Podcast Network:The Higher Ed Geek is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network. If you like this podcast, chances are you'll like other Enrollify shows too!Enrollify is made possible by Element451 — The AI Workforce Platform for Higher Ed. Learn more at element451.com. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥ The conversation that led to this episode started with a LinkedIn post -- and it quickly surfaced a challenge that security leaders across industries are wrestling with but rarely talk about openly: who is actually responsible for protecting the people inside an organization, not just the systems they use? Roland Cloutier has sat in some of the most demanding security leadership seats in the world -- Global CSO at TikTok/ByteDance, a decade as Global CSO at ADP, and VP and CSO at EMC -- and he now advises CISOs and CSOs through The Business Protection Group. His lens is converged security: the deliberate integration of cyber, physical, privacy, and people-risk under a unified program and leadership model. Roland identifies three patterns that typically bring organizations to him. First, an emergent crisis -- a threat against an executive, a workplace violence incident, a travel security failure -- that suddenly exposes the absence of a coherent protection program. Second, a cost and structure conversation where the CEO is tired of receiving two different risk pictures from two different security leaders and wants a single accountable voice. Third, a board-driven inquiry where general counsel or the CEO is being asked questions about executive resilience and duty of care that nobody inside the organization can confidently answer. What makes this conversation particularly sharp is Roland's framing of convergence not as an org chart exercise, but as a force multiplier. A unified threat intelligence picture -- one that covers cyber, physical, executive, brand, and customer risk simultaneously -- enables cleaner prioritization, better resource allocation, and a fundamentally stronger conversation with the CEO. The alternative, which he has seen firsthand, is four separate threat management platforms reporting independently with no team working across all of them. The episode also pushes into territory that most security programs have not yet mapped: employee protection at scale. Not bodyguards for everyone, but the organizational consciousness to monitor for geographic threats, proactively check in with distributed employees during major events, and build a duty-of-care posture that extends beyond the office walls into people's home lives and total risk environment. For high-risk employees -- those with keys to the kingdom, not just C-suite titles -- that responsibility extends further still. For CISOs and CSOs wondering where to start, Roland offers a practical crawl-walk-run framework: start with shared services rather than full convergence, open the conversation with leadership, surface the gaps the business already knows exist, and build a financial and risk model that makes sense for your specific organization. The goal is a converged security program that treats people -- not just infrastructure -- as an asset worth protecting. ⬥GUEST⬥ Roland Cloutier, Principal at The Business Protection Group | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rolandcloutier/ ⬥HOST⬥ Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine, Studio C60, and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com/ ⬥RESOURCES⬥ The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/ More Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast episodes | https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast on YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllS9aVGdiakVss9u7xgYDKYq ⬥ADDITIONAL INFORMATION⬥ On ITSPmagazine: https://www.itspmagazine.com/ On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@itspmagazine On LinkedIn Newsletter: https://itspm.ag/future-of-cybersecurity Sean Martin's Contact Page: https://www.seanmartin.com/ ⬥KEYWORDS⬥ roland cloutier, the business protection group, sean martin, executive protection, employee protection, converged security, physical security, ciso, cso, duty of care, threat intelligence, workplace violence, security convergence, business resilience, redefining cybersecurity, cybersecurity podcast, redefining cybersecurity podcast Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥ The conversation that led to this episode started with a LinkedIn post -- and it quickly surfaced a challenge that security leaders across industries are wrestling with but rarely talk about openly: who is actually responsible for protecting the people inside an organization, not just the systems they use? Roland Cloutier has sat in some of the most demanding security leadership seats in the world -- Global CSO at TikTok/ByteDance, a decade as Global CSO at ADP, and VP and CSO at EMC -- and he now advises CISOs and CSOs through The Business Protection Group. His lens is converged security: the deliberate integration of cyber, physical, privacy, and people-risk under a unified program and leadership model. Roland identifies three patterns that typically bring organizations to him. First, an emergent crisis -- a threat against an executive, a workplace violence incident, a travel security failure -- that suddenly exposes the absence of a coherent protection program. Second, a cost and structure conversation where the CEO is tired of receiving two different risk pictures from two different security leaders and wants a single accountable voice. Third, a board-driven inquiry where general counsel or the CEO is being asked questions about executive resilience and duty of care that nobody inside the organization can confidently answer. What makes this conversation particularly sharp is Roland's framing of convergence not as an org chart exercise, but as a force multiplier. A unified threat intelligence picture -- one that covers cyber, physical, executive, brand, and customer risk simultaneously -- enables cleaner prioritization, better resource allocation, and a fundamentally stronger conversation with the CEO. The alternative, which he has seen firsthand, is four separate threat management platforms reporting independently with no team working across all of them. The episode also pushes into territory that most security programs have not yet mapped: employee protection at scale. Not bodyguards for everyone, but the organizational consciousness to monitor for geographic threats, proactively check in with distributed employees during major events, and build a duty-of-care posture that extends beyond the office walls into people's home lives and total risk environment. For high-risk employees -- those with keys to the kingdom, not just C-suite titles -- that responsibility extends further still. For CISOs and CSOs wondering where to start, Roland offers a practical crawl-walk-run framework: start with shared services rather than full convergence, open the conversation with leadership, surface the gaps the business already knows exist, and build a financial and risk model that makes sense for your specific organization. The goal is a converged security program that treats people -- not just infrastructure -- as an asset worth protecting. ⬥GUEST⬥ Roland Cloutier, Principal at The Business Protection Group | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rolandcloutier/ ⬥HOST⬥ Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine, Studio C60, and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com/ ⬥RESOURCES⬥ The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/ More Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast episodes | https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast on YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllS9aVGdiakVss9u7xgYDKYq ⬥ADDITIONAL INFORMATION⬥ On ITSPmagazine: https://www.itspmagazine.com/ On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@itspmagazine On LinkedIn Newsletter: https://itspm.ag/future-of-cybersecurity Sean Martin's Contact Page: https://www.seanmartin.com/ ⬥KEYWORDS⬥ roland cloutier, the business protection group, sean martin, executive protection, employee protection, converged security, physical security, ciso, cso, duty of care, threat intelligence, workplace violence, security convergence, business resilience, redefining cybersecurity, cybersecurity podcast, redefining cybersecurity podcast Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  If you run a business with a sales team, this episode will make you uncomfortable. That's the point. Marcus Cauchi and Andy Hough have a no-holds-barred conversation about why sales has become distrusted, what's causing it, and what founders and CEOs can actually do to fix it. Andy has spent decades in the field, from Lloyds and Barclays to 16 years at EMC (now Dell), and has since sat through hundreds of hours of sales meetings as a researcher. He knows where the bodies are buried. What we cover in this episode: Why sales has shifted from a relationship-driven profession to a numbers and technology treadmill, and what that's costing you in customer trust, revenue quality, and staff retention. How shareholder pressure flows down through leadership, management, and sellers, and arrives in front of your buyers as inauthenticity, shallow discovery, and unwanted pressure. Why the best sales interactions are built on understanding how your customer makes money, protects margin, and carries risk, and why most sales teams have lost this entirely. The 90-day productivity myth. Research puts it at 3.2 years for a salesperson to hit full stride. Most organisations churn people before they ever get there. Why activity metrics destroy quality, and what the alternative actually looks like in practice. The player-manager trap and why it almost always ends badly for the team, the manager, and ultimately the customer. What sales coaching actually is, and why the gap between what managers think they're doing and what salespeople are experiencing is wider than most leaders realise. Why seller psychological safety is as important as buyer trust, and how the wrong people keep getting promoted. Why your CRM is aligned to your sales process and not your buyer's journey,  and why that single misalignment is costing you deals you didn't even know you lost. The case for sustainable sales: focusing on the 6-to-36 month pipeline where there's no competition, time to build real relationships, and room to become a trusted adviser rather than another vendor chasing a quarterly number. The question this episode leaves every founder and CEO with: Are the systems you've built designed to create trust with customers, or are they quietly destroying it in order to hit this quarter's number? And critically, does anyone in your organisation feel safe enough to tell you? About Andy Hough Andy Hough is co-founder of the Institute of Sales Professionals, a tireless advocate for sales as a profession, and a doctoral researcher studying the adaptability of salespeople and its impact on performance. He lectures at Cranfield University and is part of the Global Sales Science Institute. He has carried a target, led teams, and spent his career trying to return sales to what it was in its best form. A genuinely human, outcome-focused profession. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn or visit the ISP at www.isp.uk.com About Marcus Cauchi Marcus Cauchi is the host of the Inquisitor Podcast and works with founders, CEOs, and sales leaders on decision safety, go-to-market alignment, and building sales organisations that create long-term customer value. He is currently completing a manuscript on the systemic compromises that accumulate inside sales cultures and the cost they carry. Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn If this episode resonated, share it with your CRO, your Head of Sales, or any founder who's wondering why pipeline feels harder than it used to. The answer is probably in this conversation.

In this month's EM Quick Hits Podcast we introduce not one, but two new series! First, "EMC²" - EM Cases Cases (we know, horrible name ;) where Anton or Katie discuss a knowledge building case with a special guest. And second, "Coaching the EM Mind" with Dr. Sara Gray a professional coach for EM providers, where Katie discusses with her the science and best expert advice on how to perform your best in the ED. Plus, a withdrawal syndrome that is new EDs, life-threatening and requires specific treatment - metetomadine withdrawal, EMS handover done right, why community ED docs should not use the PECARN C-spine Rule and Part 2 of Petro's tips on management of traumatic pneumothorax... Please consider a donation to ensure EM Cases continues to be Free Open Access here: https://emergencymedicinecases.com/donation/

Bryan Cantrill is the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company. We discuss why the biggest cloud providers don't use off the shelf hardware, how scaling data centers at samsung's scale exposed problems with hard drive firmware, how the values of NodeJS are in conflict with robust systems, choosing Rust, and the benefits of Oxide Computer's rack scale approach. This is an extended version of an interview posted on Software Engineering Radio. Related links Oxide Computer Oxide and Friends Illumos Platform as a Reflection of Values RFD 26 bhyve CockroachDB Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. Intro [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I am talking to Bryan Cantrill. He's the co-founder and CTO of Oxide computer company, and he was previously the CTO of Joyent and he also co-authored the DTrace Tracing framework while he was at Sun Microsystems. [00:00:14] Jeremy: Bryan, welcome to Software Engineering radio. [00:00:17] Bryan: Uh, awesome. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. [00:00:20] Jeremy: You're the CTO of a company that makes computers. But I think before we get into that, a lot of people who built software, now that the actual computer is abstracted away, they're using AWS or they're using some kind of cloud service. So I thought we could start by talking about, data centers. [00:00:41] Jeremy: 'cause you were. Previously working at Joyent, and I believe you got bought by Samsung and you've previously talked about how you had to figure out, how do I run things at Samsung's scale. So how, how, how was your experience with that? What, what were the challenges there? Samsung scale and migrating off the cloud [00:01:01] Bryan: Yeah, I mean, so at Joyent, and so Joyent was a cloud computing pioneer. Uh, we competed with the likes of AWS and then later GCP and Azure. Uh, and we, I mean, we were operating at a scale, right? We had a bunch of machines, a bunch of dcs, but ultimately we know we were a VC backed company and, you know, a small company by the standards of, certainly by Samsung standards. [00:01:25] Bryan: And so when, when Samsung bought the company, I mean, the reason by the way that Samsung bought Joyent is Samsung's. Cloud Bill was, uh, let's just say it was extremely large. They were spending an enormous amount of money every year on, on the public cloud. And they realized that in order to secure their fate economically, they had to be running on their own infrastructure. [00:01:51] Bryan: It did not make sense. And there's not, was not really a product that Samsung could go buy that would give them that on-prem cloud. Uh, I mean in that, in that regard, like the state of the market was really no different. And so they went looking for a company, uh, and bought, bought Joyent. And when we were on the inside of Samsung. [00:02:11] Bryan: That we learned about Samsung scale. And Samsung loves to talk about Samsung scale. And I gotta tell you, it is more than just chest thumping. Like Samsung Scale really is, I mean, just the, the sheer, the number of devices, the number of customers, just this absolute size. they really wanted to take us out to, to levels of scale, certainly that we had not seen. [00:02:31] Bryan: The reason for buying Joyent was to be able to stand up on their own infrastructure so that we were gonna go buy, we did go buy a bunch of hardware. Problems with server hardware at scale [00:02:40] Bryan: And I remember just thinking, God, I hope Dell is somehow magically better. I hope the problems that we have seen in the small, we just. You know, I just remember hoping and hope is hope. It was of course, a terrible strategy and it was a terrible strategy here too. Uh, and the we that the problems that we saw at the large were, and when you scale out the problems that you see kind of once or twice, you now see all the time and they become absolutely debilitating. [00:03:12] Bryan: And we saw a whole series of really debilitating problems. I mean, many ways, like comically debilitating, uh, in terms of, of showing just how bad the state-of-the-art. Yes. And we had, I mean, it should be said, we had great software and great software expertise, um, and we were controlling our own system software. [00:03:35] Bryan: But even controlling your own system software, your own host OS, your own control plane, which is what we had at Joyent, ultimately, you're pretty limited. You go, I mean, you got the problems that you can obviously solve, the ones that are in your own software, but the problems that are beneath you, the, the problems that are in the hardware platform, the problems that are in the componentry beneath you become the problems that are in the firmware. IO latency due to hard drive firmware [00:04:00] Bryan: Those problems become unresolvable and they are deeply, deeply frustrating. Um, and we just saw a bunch of 'em again, they were. Comical in retrospect, and I'll give you like a, a couple of concrete examples just to give, give you an idea of what kinda what you're looking at. one of the, our data centers had really pathological IO latency. [00:04:23] Bryan: we had a very, uh, database heavy workload. And this was kind of right at the period where you were still deploying on rotating media on hard drives. So this is like, so. An all flash buy did not make economic sense when we did this in, in 2016. This probably, it'd be interesting to know like when was the, the kind of the last time that that actual hard drives made sense? [00:04:50] Bryan: 'cause I feel this was close to it. So we had a, a bunch of, of a pathological IO problems, but we had one data center in which the outliers were actually quite a bit worse and there was so much going on in that system. It took us a long time to figure out like why. And because when, when you, when you're io when you're seeing worse io I mean you're naturally, you wanna understand like what's the workload doing? [00:05:14] Bryan: You're trying to take a first principles approach. What's the workload doing? So this is a very intensive database workload to support the, the object storage system that we had built called Manta. And that the, the metadata tier was stored and uh, was we were using Postgres for that. And that was just getting absolutely slaughtered. [00:05:34] Bryan: Um, and ultimately very IO bound with these kind of pathological IO latencies. Uh, and as we, you know, trying to like peel away the layers to figure out what was going on. And I finally had this thing. So it's like, okay, we are seeing at the, at the device layer, at the at, at the disc layer, we are seeing pathological outliers in this data center that we're not seeing anywhere else. [00:06:00] Bryan: And that does not make any sense. And the thought occurred to me. I'm like, well, maybe we are. Do we have like different. Different rev of firmware on our HGST drives, HGST. Now part of WD Western Digital were the drives that we had everywhere. And, um, so maybe we had a different, maybe I had a firmware bug. [00:06:20] Bryan: I, this would not be the first time in my life at all that I would have a drive firmware issue. Uh, and I went to go pull the firmware, rev, and I'm like, Toshiba makes hard drives? So we had, I mean. I had no idea that Toshiba even made hard drives, let alone that they were our, they were in our data center. [00:06:38] Bryan: I'm like, what is this? And as it turns out, and this is, you know, part of the, the challenge when you don't have an integrated system, which not to pick on them, but Dell doesn't, and what Dell would routinely put just sub make substitutes, and they make substitutes that they, you know, it's kind of like you're going to like, I don't know, Instacart or whatever, and they're out of the thing that you want. [00:07:03] Bryan: So, you know, you're, someone makes a substitute and like sometimes that's okay, but it's really not okay in a data center. And you really want to develop and validate a, an end-to-end integrated system. And in this case, like Toshiba doesn't, I mean, Toshiba does make hard drives, but they are a, or the data they did, uh, they basically were, uh, not competitive and they were not competitive in part for the reasons that we were discovering. [00:07:29] Bryan: They had really serious firmware issues. So the, these were drives that would just simply stop a, a stop acknowledging any reads from the order of 2,700 milliseconds. Long time, 2.7 seconds. Um. And that was a, it was a drive firmware issue, but it was highlighted like a much deeper issue, which was the simple lack of control that we had over our own destiny. [00:07:53] Bryan: Um, and it's an, it's, it's an example among many where Dell is making a decision. That lowers the cost of what they are providing you marginally, but it is then giving you a system that they shouldn't have any confidence in because it's not one that they've actually designed and they leave it to the customer, the end user, to make these discoveries. [00:08:18] Bryan: And these things happen up and down the stack. And for every, for whether it's, and, and not just to pick on Dell because it's, it's true for HPE, it's true for super micro, uh, it's true for your switch vendors. It's, it's true for storage vendors where the, the, the, the one that is left actually integrating these things and trying to make the the whole thing work is the end user sitting in their data center. AWS / Google are not buying off the shelf hardware but you can't use it [00:08:42] Bryan: There's not a product that they can buy that gives them elastic infrastructure, a cloud in their own DC The, the product that you buy is the public cloud. Like when you go in the public cloud, you don't worry about the stuff because that it's, it's AWS's issue or it's GCP's issue. And they are the ones that get this to ground. [00:09:02] Bryan: And they, and this was kind of, you know, the eye-opening moment. Not a surprise. Uh, they are not Dell customers. They're not HPE customers. They're not super micro customers. They have designed their own machines. And to varying degrees, depending on which one you're looking at. But they've taken the clean sheet of paper and the frustration that we had kind of at Joyent and beginning to wonder and then Samsung and kind of wondering what was next, uh, is that, that what they built was not available for purchase in the data center. [00:09:35] Bryan: You could only rent it in the public cloud. And our big belief is that public cloud computing is a really important revolution in infrastructure. Doesn't feel like a different, a deep thought, but cloud computing is a really important revolution. It shouldn't only be available to rent. You should be able to actually buy it. [00:09:53] Bryan: And there are a bunch of reasons for doing that. Uh, one in the one we we saw at Samsung is economics, which I think is still the dominant reason where it just does not make sense to rent all of your compute in perpetuity. But there are other reasons too. There's security, there's risk management, there's latency. [00:10:07] Bryan: There are a bunch of reasons why one might wanna to own one's own infrastructure. But, uh, that was very much the, the, so the, the genesis for oxide was coming out of this very painful experience and a painful experience that, because, I mean, a long answer to your question about like what was it like to be at Samsung scale? [00:10:27] Bryan: Those are the kinds of things that we, I mean, in our other data centers, we didn't have Toshiba drives. We only had the HDSC drives, but it's only when you get to this larger scale that you begin to see some of these pathologies. But these pathologies then are really debilitating in terms of those who are trying to develop a service on top of them. [00:10:45] Bryan: So it was, it was very educational in, in that regard. And you're very grateful for the experience at Samsung in terms of opening our eyes to the challenge of running at that kind of scale. [00:10:57] Jeremy: Yeah, because I, I think as software engineers, a lot of times we, we treat the hardware as a, as a given where, [00:11:08] Bryan: Yeah. [00:11:08] Bryan: Yeah. There's software in chard drives [00:11:09] Jeremy: It sounds like in, in this case, I mean, maybe the issue is not so much that. Dell or HP as a company doesn't own every single piece that they're providing you, but rather the fact that they're swapping pieces in and out without advertising them, and then when it becomes a problem, they're not necessarily willing to, to deal with the, the consequences of that. [00:11:34] Bryan: They just don't know. I mean, I think they just genuinely don't know. I mean, I think that they, it's not like they're making a deliberate decision to kind of ship garbage. It's just that they are making, I mean, I think it's exactly what you said about like, not thinking about the hardware. It's like, what's a hard drive? [00:11:47] Bryan: Like what's it, I mean, it's a hard drive. It's got the same specs as this other hard drive and Intel. You know, it's a little bit cheaper, so why not? It's like, well, like there's some reasons why not, and one of the reasons why not is like, uh, even a hard drive, whether it's rotating media or, or flash, like that's not just hardware. [00:12:05] Bryan: There's software in there. And that the software's like not the same. I mean, there are components where it's like, there's actually, whether, you know, if, if you're looking at like a resistor or a capacitor or something like this Yeah. If you've got two, two parts that are within the same tolerance. Yeah. [00:12:19] Bryan: Like sure. Maybe, although even the EEs I think would be, would be, uh, objecting that a little bit. But the, the, the more complicated you get, and certainly once you get to the, the, the, the kind of the hardware that we think of like a, a, a microprocessor, a a network interface card, a a, a hard driver, an NVME drive. [00:12:38] Bryan: Those things are super complicated and there's a whole bunch of software inside of those things, the firmware, and that's the stuff that, that you can't, I mean, you say that software engineers don't think about that. It's like you, no one can really think about that because it's proprietary that's kinda welded shut and you've got this abstraction into it. [00:12:55] Bryan: But the, the way that thing operates is very core to how the thing in aggregate will behave. And I think that you, the, the kind of, the, the fundamental difference between Oxide's approach and the approach that you get at a Dell HP Supermicro, wherever, is really thinking holistically in terms of hardware and software together in a system that, that ultimately delivers cloud computing to a user. [00:13:22] Bryan: And there's a lot of software at many, many, many, many different layers. And it's very important to think about, about that software and that hardware holistically as a single system. [00:13:34] Jeremy: And during that time at Joyent, when you experienced some of these issues, was it more of a case of you didn't have enough servers experiencing this? So if it would happen, you might say like, well, this one's not working, so maybe we'll just replace the hardware. What, what was the thought process when you were working at that smaller scale and, and how did these issues affect you? UEFI / Baseboard Management Controller [00:13:58] Bryan: Yeah, at the smaller scale, you, uh, you see fewer of them, right? You just see it's like, okay, we, you know, what you might see is like, that's weird. We kinda saw this in one machine versus seeing it in a hundred or a thousand or 10,000. Um, so you just, you just see them, uh, less frequently as a result, they are less debilitating. [00:14:16] Bryan: Um, I, I think that it's, when you go to that larger scale, those things that become, that were unusual now become routine and they become debilitating. Um, so it, it really is in many regards a function of scale. Uh, and then I think it was also, you know, it was a little bit dispiriting that kind of the substrate we were building on really had not improved. [00:14:39] Bryan: Um, and if you look at, you know, the, if you buy a computer server, buy an x86 server. There is a very low layer of firmware, the BIOS, the basic input output system, the UEFI BIOS, and this is like an abstraction layer that has, has existed since the eighties and hasn't really meaningfully improved. Um, the, the kind of the transition to UEFI happened with, I mean, I, I ironically with Itanium, um, you know, two decades ago. [00:15:08] Bryan: but beyond that, like this low layer, this lowest layer of platform enablement software is really only impeding the operability of the system. Um, you look at the baseboard management controller, which is the kind of the computer within the computer, there is a, uh, there is an element in the machine that needs to handle environmentals, that needs to handle, uh, operate the fans and so on. [00:15:31] Bryan: Uh, and that traditionally has this, the space board management controller, and that architecturally just hasn't improved in the last two decades. And, you know, that's, it's a proprietary piece of silicon. Generally from a company that no one's ever heard of called a Speed, uh, which has to be, is written all on caps, so I guess it needs to be screamed. [00:15:50] Bryan: Um, a speed has a proprietary part that has a, there is a root password infamously there, is there, the root password is encoded effectively in silicon. So, uh, which is just, and for, um, anyone who kind of goes deep into these things, like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Um, when we first started oxide, the wifi password was a fraction of the a speed root password for the bmc. [00:16:16] Bryan: It's kinda like a little, little BMC humor. Um, but those things, it was just dispiriting that, that the, the state-of-the-art was still basically personal computers running in the data center. Um, and that's part of what, what was the motivation for doing something new? [00:16:32] Jeremy: And for the people using these systems, whether it's the baseboard management controller or it's the The BIOS or UF UEFI component, what are the actual problems that people are seeing seen? Security vulnerabilities and poor practices in the BMC [00:16:51] Bryan: Oh man, I, the, you are going to have like some fraction of your listeners, maybe a big fraction where like, yeah, like what are the problems? That's a good question. And then you're gonna have the people that actually deal with these things who are, did like their heads already hit the desk being like, what are the problems? [00:17:06] Bryan: Like what are the non problems? Like what, what works? Actually, that's like a shorter answer. Um, I mean, there are so many problems and a lot of it is just like, I mean, there are problems just architecturally these things are just so, I mean, and you could, they're the problems spread to the horizon, so you can kind of start wherever you want. [00:17:24] Bryan: But I mean, as like, as a really concrete example. Okay, so the, the BMCs that, that the computer within the computer that needs to be on its own network. So you now have like not one network, you got two networks that, and that network, by the way, it, that's the network that you're gonna log into to like reset the machine when it's otherwise unresponsive. [00:17:44] Bryan: So that going into the BMC, you can are, you're able to control the entire machine. Well it's like, alright, so now I've got a second net network that I need to manage. What is running on the BMC? Well, it's running some. Ancient, ancient version of Linux it that you got. It's like, well how do I, how do I patch that? [00:18:02] Bryan: How do I like manage the vulnerabilities with that? Because if someone is able to root your BMC, they control the system. So it's like, this is not you've, and now you've gotta go deal with all of the operational hair around that. How do you upgrade that system updating the BMC? I mean, it's like you've got this like second shadow bad infrastructure that you have to go manage. [00:18:23] Bryan: Generally not open source. There's something called open BMC, um, which, um, you people use to varying degrees, but you're generally stuck with the proprietary BMC, so you're generally stuck with, with iLO from HPE or iDRAC from Dell or, or, uh, the, uh, su super micros, BMC, that H-P-B-M-C, and you are, uh, it is just excruciating pain. [00:18:49] Bryan: Um, and that this is assuming that by the way, that everything is behaving correctly. The, the problem is that these things often don't behave correctly, and then the consequence of them not behaving correctly. It's really dire because it's at that lowest layer of the system. So, I mean, I'll give you a concrete example. [00:19:07] Bryan: a customer of theirs reported to me, so I won't disclose the vendor, but let's just say that a well-known vendor had an issue with their, their temperature sensors were broken. Um, and the thing would always read basically the wrong value. So it was the BMC that had to like, invent its own ki a different kind of thermal control loop. [00:19:28] Bryan: And it would index on the, on the, the, the, the actual inrush current. It would, they would look at that at the current that's going into the CPU to adjust the fan speed. That's a great example of something like that's a, that's an interesting idea. That doesn't work. 'cause that's actually not the temperature. [00:19:45] Bryan: So like that software would crank the fans whenever you had an inrush of current and this customer had a workload that would spike the current and by it, when it would spike the current, the, the, the fans would kick up and then they would slowly degrade over time. Well, this workload was spiking the current faster than the fans would degrade, but not fast enough to actually heat up the part. [00:20:08] Bryan: And ultimately over a very long time, in a very painful investigation, it's customer determined that like my fans are cranked in my data center for no reason. We're blowing cold air. And it's like that, this is on the order of like a hundred watts, a server of, of energy that you shouldn't be spending and like that ultimately what that go comes down to this kind of broken software hardware interface at the lowest layer that has real meaningful consequence, uh, in terms of hundreds of kilowatts, um, across a data center. So this stuff has, has very, very, very real consequence and it's such a shadowy world. Part of the reason that, that your listeners that have dealt with this, that our heads will hit the desk is because it is really aggravating to deal with problems with this layer. [00:21:01] Bryan: You, you feel powerless. You don't control or really see the software that's on them. It's generally proprietary. You are relying on your vendor. Your vendor is telling you that like, boy, I don't know. You're the only customer seeing this. I mean, the number of times I have heard that for, and I, I have pledged that we're, we're not gonna say that at oxide because it's such an unaskable thing to say like, you're the only customer saying this. [00:21:25] Bryan: It's like, it feels like, are you blaming me for my problem? Feels like you're blaming me for my problem? Um, and what you begin to realize is that to a degree, these folks are speaking their own truth because the, the folks that are running at real scale at Hyperscale, those folks aren't Dell, HP super micro customers. [00:21:46] Bryan: They're actually, they've done their own thing. So it's like, yeah, Dell's not seeing that problem, um, because they're not running at the same scale. Um, but when you do run, you only have to run at modest scale before these things just become. Overwhelming in terms of the, the headwind that they present to people that wanna deploy infrastructure. The problem is felt with just a few racks [00:22:05] Jeremy: Yeah, so maybe to help people get some perspective at, at what point do you think that people start noticing or start feeling these problems? Because I imagine that if you're just have a few racks or [00:22:22] Bryan: do you have a couple racks or the, or do you wonder or just wondering because No, no, no. I would think, I think anyone who deploys any number of servers, especially now, especially if your experience is only in the cloud, you're gonna be like, what the hell is this? I mean, just again, just to get this thing working at all. [00:22:39] Bryan: It is so it, it's so hairy and so congealed, right? It's not designed. Um, and it, it, it, it's accreted it and it's so obviously accreted that you are, I mean, nobody who is setting up a rack of servers is gonna think to themselves like, yes, this is the right way to go do it. This all makes sense because it's, it's just not, it, I, it feels like the kit, I mean, kit car's almost too generous because it implies that there's like a set of plans to work to in the end. [00:23:08] Bryan: Uh, I mean, it, it, it's a bag of bolts. It's a bunch of parts that you're putting together. And so even at the smallest scales, that stuff is painful. Just architecturally, it's painful at the small scale then, but at least you can get it working. I think the stuff that then becomes debilitating at larger scale are the things that are, are worse than just like, I can't, like this thing is a mess to get working. [00:23:31] Bryan: It's like the, the, the fan issue that, um, where you are now seeing this over, you know, hundreds of machines or thousands of machines. Um, so I, it is painful at more or less all levels of scale. There's, there is no level at which the, the, the pc, which is really what this is, this is a, the, the personal computer architecture from the 1980s and there is really no level of scale where that's the right unit. Running elastic infrastructure is the hardware but also, hypervisor, distributed database, api, etc [00:23:57] Bryan: I mean, where that's the right thing to go deploy, especially if what you are trying to run. Is elastic infrastructure, a cloud. Because the other thing is like we, we've kinda been talking a lot about that hardware layer. Like hardware is, is just the start. Like you actually gotta go put software on that and actually run that as elastic infrastructure. [00:24:16] Bryan: So you need a hypervisor. Yes. But you need a lot more than that. You, you need to actually, you, you need a distributed database, you need web endpoints. You need, you need a CLI, you need all the stuff that you need to actually go run an actual service of compute or networking or storage. I mean, and for, for compute, even for compute, there's a ton of work to be done. [00:24:39] Bryan: And compute is by far, I would say the simplest of the, of the three. When you look at like networks, network services, storage services, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you need to go build in terms of distributed systems to actually offer that as a cloud. So it, I mean, it is painful at more or less every LE level if you are trying to deploy cloud computing on. What's a control plane? [00:25:00] Jeremy: And for someone who doesn't have experience building or working with this type of infrastructure, when you talk about a control plane, what, what does that do in the context of this system? [00:25:16] Bryan: So control plane is the thing that is, that is everything between your API request and that infrastructure actually being acted upon. So you go say, Hey, I, I want a provision, a vm. Okay, great. We've got a whole bunch of things we're gonna provision with that. We're gonna provision a vm, we're gonna get some storage that's gonna go along with that, that's got a network storage service that's gonna come out of, uh, we've got a virtual network that we're gonna either create or attach to. [00:25:39] Bryan: We've got a, a whole bunch of things we need to go do for that. For all of these things, there are metadata components that need, we need to keep track of this thing that, beyond the actual infrastructure that we create. And then we need to go actually, like act on the actual compute elements, the hostos, what have you, the switches, what have you, and actually go. [00:25:56] Bryan: Create these underlying things and then connect them. And there's of course, the challenge of just getting that working is a big challenge. Um, but getting that working robustly, getting that working is, you know, when you go to provision of vm, um, the, all the, the, the steps that need to happen and what happens if one of those steps fails along the way? [00:26:17] Bryan: What happens if, you know, one thing we're very mindful of is these kind of, you get these long tails of like, why, you know, generally our VM provisioning happened within this time, but we get these long tails where it takes much longer. What's going on? What, where in this process are we, are we actually spending time? [00:26:33] Bryan: Uh, and there's a whole lot of complexity that you need to go deal with that. There's a lot of complexity that you need to go deal with this effectively, this workflow that's gonna go create these things and manage them. Um, we use a, a pattern that we call, that are called sagas, actually is a, is a database pattern from the eighties. [00:26:51] Bryan: Uh, Katie McCaffrey is a, is a database reCrcher who, who, uh, I, I think, uh, reintroduce the idea of, of sagas, um, in the last kind of decade. Um, and this is something that we picked up, um, and I've done a lot of really interesting things with, um, to allow for, to this kind of, these workflows to be, to be managed and done so robustly in a way that you can restart them and so on. [00:27:16] Bryan: Uh, and then you guys, you get this whole distributed system that can do all this. That whole distributed system, that itself needs to be reliable and available. So if you, you know, you need to be able to, what happens if you, if you pull a sled or if a sled fails, how does the system deal with that? [00:27:33] Bryan: How does the system deal with getting an another sled added to the system? Like how do you actually grow this distributed system? And then how do you update it? How do you actually go from one version to the next? And all of that has to happen across an air gap where this is gonna run as part of the computer. [00:27:49] Bryan: So there are, it, it is fractally complicated. There, there is a lot of complexity here in, in software, in the software system and all of that. We kind of, we call the control plane. Um, and it, this is the what exists at AWS at GCP, at Azure. When you are hitting an endpoint that's provisioning an EC2 instance for you. [00:28:10] Bryan: There is an AWS control plane that is, is doing all of this and has, uh, some of these similar aspects and certainly some of these similar challenges. Are vSphere / Proxmox / Hyper-V in the same category? [00:28:20] Jeremy: And for people who have run their own servers with something like say VMware or Hyper V or Proxmox, are those in the same category? [00:28:32] Bryan: Yeah, I mean a little bit. I mean, it kind of like vSphere Yes. Via VMware. No. So it's like you, uh, VMware ESX is, is kind of a key building block upon which you can build something that is a more meaningful distributed system. When it's just like a machine that you're provisioning VMs on, it's like, okay, well that's actually, you as the human might be the control plane. [00:28:52] Bryan: Like, that's, that, that's, that's a much easier problem. Um, but when you've got, you know, tens, hundreds, thousands of machines, you need to do it robustly. You need something to coordinate that activity and you know, you need to pick which sled you land on. You need to be able to move these things. You need to be able to update that whole system. [00:29:06] Bryan: That's when you're getting into a control plane. So, you know, some of these things have kind of edged into a control plane, certainly VMware. Um, now Broadcom, um, has delivered something that's kind of cloudish. Um, I think that for folks that are truly born on the cloud, it, it still feels somewhat, uh, like you're going backwards in time when you, when you look at these kind of on-prem offerings. [00:29:29] Bryan: Um, but, but it, it, it's got these aspects to it for sure. Um, and I think that we're, um, some of these other things when you're just looking at KVM or just looks looking at Proxmox you kind of need to, to connect it to other broader things to turn it into something that really looks like manageable infrastructure. [00:29:47] Bryan: And then many of those projects are really, they're either proprietary projects, uh, proprietary products like vSphere, um, or you are really dealing with open source projects that are. Not necessarily aimed at the same level of scale. Um, you know, you look at a, again, Proxmox or, uh, um, you'll get an OpenStack. [00:30:05] Bryan: Um, and you know, OpenStack is just a lot of things, right? I mean, OpenStack has got so many, the OpenStack was kind of a, a free for all, for every infrastructure vendor. Um, and I, you know, there was a time people were like, don't you, aren't you worried about all these companies together that, you know, are coming together for OpenStack? [00:30:24] Bryan: I'm like, haven't you ever worked for like a company? Like, companies don't get along. By the way, it's like having multiple companies work together on a thing that's bad news, not good news. And I think, you know, one of the things that OpenStack has definitely struggled with, kind of with what, actually the, the, there's so many different kind of vendor elements in there that it's, it's very much not a product, it's a project that you're trying to run. [00:30:47] Bryan: But that's, but that very much is in, I mean, that's, that's similar certainly in spirit. [00:30:53] Jeremy: And so I think this is kind of like you're alluding to earlier, the piece that allows you to allocate, compute, storage, manage networking, gives you that experience of I can go to a web console or I can use an API and I can spin up machines, get them all connected. At the end of the day, the control plane. Is allowing you to do that in hopefully a user-friendly way. [00:31:21] Bryan: That's right. Yep. And in the, I mean, in order to do that in a modern way, it's not just like a user-friendly way. You really need to have a CLI and a web UI and an API. Those all need to be drawn from the same kind of single ground truth. Like you don't wanna have any of those be an afterthought for the other. [00:31:39] Bryan: You wanna have the same way of generating all of those different endpoints and, and entries into the system. Building a control plane now has better tools (Rust, CockroachDB) [00:31:46] Jeremy: And if you take your time at Joyent as an example. What kind of tools existed for that versus how much did you have to build in-house for as far as the hypervisor and managing the compute and all that? [00:32:02] Bryan: Yeah, so we built more or less everything in house. I mean, what you have is, um, and I think, you know, over time we've gotten slightly better tools. Um, I think, and, and maybe it's a little bit easier to talk about the, kind of the tools we started at Oxide because we kind of started with a, with a clean sheet of paper at oxide. [00:32:16] Bryan: We wanted to, knew we wanted to go build a control plane, but we were able to kind of go revisit some of the components. So actually, and maybe I'll, I'll talk about some of those changes. So when we, at, For example, at Joyent, when we were building a cloud at Joyent, there wasn't really a good distributed database. [00:32:34] Bryan: Um, so we were using Postgres as our database for metadata and there were a lot of challenges. And Postgres is not a distributed database. It's running. With a primary secondary architecture, and there's a bunch of issues there, many of which we discovered the hard way. Um, when we were coming to oxide, you have much better options to pick from in terms of distributed databases. [00:32:57] Bryan: You know, we, there was a period that now seems maybe potentially brief in hindsight, but of a really high quality open source distributed databases. So there were really some good ones to, to pick from. Um, we, we built on CockroachDB on CRDB. Um, so that was a really important component. That we had at oxide that we didn't have at Joyent. [00:33:19] Bryan: Um, so we were, I wouldn't say we were rolling our own distributed database, we were just using Postgres and uh, and, and dealing with an enormous amount of pain there in terms of the surround. Um, on top of that, and, and, you know, a, a control plane is much more than a database, obviously. Uh, and you've gotta deal with, uh, there's a whole bunch of software that you need to go, right. [00:33:40] Bryan: Um, to be able to, to transform these kind of API requests into something that is reliable infrastructure, right? And there, there's a lot to that. Uh, especially when networking gets in the mix, when storage gets in the mix, uh, there are a whole bunch of like complicated steps that need to be done, um, at Joyent. [00:33:59] Bryan: Um, we, in part because of the history of the company and like, look. This, this just is not gonna sound good, but it just is what it is and I'm just gonna own it. We did it all in Node, um, at Joyent, which I, I, I know it sounds really right now, just sounds like, well, you, you built it with Tinker Toys. You Okay. [00:34:18] Bryan: Uh, did, did you think it was, you built the skyscraper with Tinker Toys? Uh, it's like, well, okay. We actually, we had greater aspirations for the Tinker Toys once upon a time, and it was better than, you know, than Twisted Python and Event Machine from Ruby, and we weren't gonna do it in Java. All right. [00:34:32] Bryan: So, but let's just say that that experiment, uh, that experiment did ultimately end in a predictable fashion. Um, and, uh, we, we decided that maybe Node was not gonna be the best decision long term. Um, Joyent was the company behind node js. Uh, back in the day, Ryan Dahl worked for Joyent. Uh, and then, uh, then we, we, we. [00:34:53] Bryan: Uh, landed that in a foundation in about, uh, what, 2015, something like that. Um, and began to consider our world beyond, uh, beyond Node. Rust at Oxide [00:35:04] Bryan: A big tool that we had in the arsenal when we started Oxide is Rust. Um, and so indeed the name of the company is, is a tip of the hat to the language that we were pretty sure we were gonna be building a lot of stuff in. [00:35:16] Bryan: Namely Rust. And, uh, rust is, uh, has been huge for us, a very important revolution in programming languages. you know, there, there, there have been different people kind of coming in at different times and I kinda came to Rust in what I, I think is like this big kind of second expansion of rust in 2018 when a lot of technologists were think, uh, sick of Node and also sick of Go. [00:35:43] Bryan: And, uh, also sick of C++. And wondering is there gonna be something that gives me the, the, the performance, of that I get outta C. The, the robustness that I can get out of a C program but is is often difficult to achieve. but can I get that with kind of some, some of the velocity of development, although I hate that term, some of the speed of development that you get out of a more interpreted language. [00:36:08] Bryan: Um, and then by the way, can I actually have types, I think types would be a good idea? Uh, and rust obviously hits the sweet spot of all of that. Um, it has been absolutely huge for us. I mean, we knew when we started the company again, oxide, uh, we were gonna be using rust in, in quite a, quite a. Few places, but we weren't doing it by fiat. [00:36:27] Bryan: Um, we wanted to actually make sure we're making the right decision, um, at, at every different, at every layer. Uh, I think what has been surprising is the sheer number of layers at which we use rust in terms of, we've done our own embedded firmware in rust. We've done, um, in, in the host operating system, which is still largely in C, but very big components are in rust. [00:36:47] Bryan: The hypervisor Propolis is all in rust. Uh, and then of course the control plane, that distributed system on that is all in rust. So that was a very important thing that we very much did not need to build ourselves. We were able to really leverage, uh, a terrific community. Um. We were able to use, uh, and we've done this at Joyent as well, but at Oxide, we've used Illumos as a hostos component, which, uh, our variant is called Helios. [00:37:11] Bryan: Um, we've used, uh, bhyve um, as a, as as that kind of internal hypervisor component. we've made use of a bunch of different open source components to build this thing, um, which has been really, really important for us. Uh, and open source components that didn't exist even like five years prior. [00:37:28] Bryan: That's part of why we felt that 2019 was the right time to start the company. And so we started Oxide. The problems building a control plane in Node [00:37:34] Jeremy: You had mentioned that at Joyent, you had tried to build this in, in Node. What were the, what were the, the issues or the, the challenges that you had doing that? [00:37:46] Bryan: Oh boy. Yeah. again, we, I kind of had higher hopes in 2010, I would say. When we, we set on this, um, the, the, the problem that we had just writ large, um. JavaScript is really designed to allow as many people on earth to write a program as possible, which is good. I mean, I, I, that's a, that's a laudable goal. [00:38:09] Bryan: That is the goal ultimately of such as it is of JavaScript. It's actually hard to know what the goal of JavaScript is, unfortunately, because Brendan Ike never actually wrote a book. so that there is not a canonical, you've got kind of Doug Crockford and other people who've written things on JavaScript, but it's hard to know kind of what the original intent of JavaScript is. [00:38:27] Bryan: The name doesn't even express original intent, right? It was called Live Script, and it was kind of renamed to JavaScript during the Java Frenzy of the late nineties. A name that makes no sense. There is no Java in JavaScript. that is kind of, I think, revealing to kind of the, uh, the unprincipled mess that is JavaScript. [00:38:47] Bryan: It, it, it's very pragmatic at some level, um, and allows anyone to, it makes it very easy to write software. The problem is it's much more difficult to write really rigorous software. So, uh, and this is what I should differentiate JavaScript from TypeScript. This is really what TypeScript is trying to solve. [00:39:07] Bryan: TypeScript is like. How can, I think TypeScript is a, is a great step forward because TypeScript is like, how can we bring some rigor to this? Like, yes, it's great that it's easy to write JavaScript, but that's not, we, we don't wanna do that for Absolutely. I mean that, that's not the only problem we solve. [00:39:23] Bryan: We actually wanna be able to write rigorous software and it's actually okay if it's a little harder to write rigorous software that's actually okay if it gets leads to, to more rigorous artifacts. Um, but in JavaScript, I mean, just a concrete example. You know, there's nothing to prevent you from referencing a property that doesn't actually exist in JavaScript. [00:39:43] Bryan: So if you fat finger a property name, you are relying on something to tell you. By the way, I think you've misspelled this because there is no type definition for this thing. And I don't know that you've got one that's spelled correctly, one that's spelled incorrectly, that's often undefined. And then the, when you actually go, you say you've got this typo that is lurking in your what you want to be rigorous software. [00:40:07] Bryan: And if you don't execute that code, like you won't know that's there. And then you do execute that code. And now you've got a, you've got an undefined object. And now that's either gonna be an exception or it can, again, depends on how that's handled. It can be really difficult to determine the origin of that, of, of that error, of that programming. [00:40:26] Bryan: And that is a programmer error. And one of the big challenges that we had with Node is that programmer errors and operational errors, like, you know, I'm out of disk space as an operational error. Those get conflated and it becomes really hard. And in fact, I think the, the language wanted to make it easier to just kind of, uh, drive on in the event of all errors. [00:40:53] Bryan: And it's like, actually not what you wanna do if you're trying to build a reliable, robust system. So we had. No end of issues. [00:41:01] Bryan: We've got a lot of experience developing rigorous systems, um, again coming out of operating systems development and so on. And we want, we brought some of that rigor, if strangely, to JavaScript. So one of the things that we did is we brought a lot of postmortem, diagnos ability and observability to node. [00:41:18] Bryan: And so if, if one of our node processes. Died in production, we would actually get a core dump from that process, a core dump that we could actually meaningfully process. So we did a bunch of kind of wild stuff. I mean, actually wild stuff where we could actually make sense of the JavaScript objects in a binary core dump. JavaScript values ease of getting started over robustness [00:41:41] Bryan: Um, and things that we thought were really important, and this is the, the rest of the world just looks at this being like, what the hell is this? I mean, it's so out of step with it. The problem is that we were trying to bridge two disconnected cultures of one developing really. Rigorous software and really designing it for production, diagnosability and the other, really designing it to software to run in the browser and for anyone to be able to like, you know, kind of liven up a webpage, right? [00:42:10] Bryan: Is kinda the origin of, of live script and then JavaScript. And we were kind of the only ones sitting at the intersection of that. And you begin when you are the only ones sitting at that kind of intersection. You just are, you're, you're kind of fighting a community all the time. And we just realized that we are, there were so many things that the community wanted to do that we felt are like, no, no, this is gonna make software less diagnosable. It's gonna make it less robust. The NodeJS split and why people left [00:42:36] Bryan: And then you realize like, I'm, we're the only voice in the room because we have got, we have got desires for this language that it doesn't have for itself. And this is when you realize you're in a bad relationship with software. It's time to actually move on. And in fact, actually several years after, we'd already kind of broken up with node. [00:42:55] Bryan: Um, and it was like, it was a bit of an acrimonious breakup. there was a, uh, famous slash infamous fork of node called IoJS Um, and this was viewed because people, the community, thought that Joyent was being what was not being an appropriate steward of node js and was, uh, not allowing more things to come into to, to node. [00:43:19] Bryan: And of course, the reason that we of course, felt that we were being a careful steward and we were actively resisting those things that would cut against its fitness for a production system. But it's some way the community saw it and they, and forked, um, and, and I think the, we knew before the fork that's like, this is not working and we need to get this thing out of our hands. Platform is a reflection of values node summit talk [00:43:43] Bryan: And we're are the wrong hands for this? This needs to be in a foundation. Uh, and so we kind of gone through that breakup, uh, and maybe it was two years after that. That, uh, friend of mine who was um, was running the, uh, the node summit was actually, it's unfortunately now passed away. Charles er, um, but Charles' venture capitalist great guy, and Charles was running Node Summit and came to me in 2017. [00:44:07] Bryan: He is like, I really want you to keynote Node Summit. And I'm like, Charles, I'm not gonna do that. I've got nothing nice to say. Like, this is the, the, you don't want, I'm the last person you wanna keynote. He's like, oh, if you have nothing nice to say, you should definitely keynote. You're like, oh God, okay, here we go. [00:44:22] Bryan: He's like, no, I really want you to talk about, like, you should talk about the Joyent breakup with NodeJS. I'm like, oh man. [00:44:29] Bryan: And that led to a talk that I'm really happy that I gave, 'cause it was a very important talk for me personally. Uh, called Platform is a reflection of values and really looking at the values that we had for Node and the values that Node had for itself. And they didn't line up. [00:44:49] Bryan: And the problem is that the values that Node had for itself and the values that we had for Node are all kind of positives, right? Like there's nobody in the node community who's like, I don't want rigor, I hate rigor. It's just that if they had the choose between rigor and making the language approachable. [00:45:09] Bryan: They would choose approachability every single time. They would never choose rigor. And, you know, that was a, that was a big eye-opener. I do, I would say, if you watch this talk. [00:45:20] Bryan: because I knew that there's, like, the audience was gonna be filled with, with people who, had been a part of the fork in 2014, I think was the, the, the, the fork, the IOJS fork. And I knew that there, there were, there were some, you know, some people that were, um, had been there for the fork and. [00:45:41] Bryan: I said a little bit of a trap for the audience. But the, and the trap, I said, you know what, I, I kind of talked about the values that we had and the aspirations we had for Node, the aspirations that Node had for itself and how they were different. [00:45:53] Bryan: And, you know, and I'm like, look in, in, in hindsight, like a fracture was inevitable. And in 2014 there was finally a fracture. And do people know what happened in 2014? And if you, if you, you could listen to that talk, everyone almost says in unison, like IOJS. I'm like, oh right. IOJS. Right. That's actually not what I was thinking of. [00:46:19] Bryan: And I go to the next slide and is a tweet from a guy named TJ Holloway, Chuck, who was the most prolific contributor to Node. And it was his tweet also in 2014 before the fork, before the IOJS fork explaining that he was leaving Node and that he was going to go. And you, if you turn the volume all the way up, you can hear the audience gasp. [00:46:41] Bryan: And it's just delicious because the community had never really come, had never really confronted why TJ left. Um, there. And I went through a couple folks, Felix, bunch of other folks, early Node folks. That were there in 2010, were leaving in 2014, and they were going to go primarily, and they were going to go because they were sick of the same things that we were sick of. [00:47:09] Bryan: They, they, they had hit the same things that we had hit and they were frustrated. I I really do believe this, that platforms do reflect their own values. And when you are making a software decision, you are selecting value. [00:47:26] Bryan: You should select values that align with the values that you have for that software. That is, those are, that's way more important than other things that people look at. I think people look at, for example, quote unquote community size way too frequently, community size is like. Eh, maybe it can be fine. [00:47:44] Bryan: I've been in very large communities, node. I've been in super small open source communities like AUMs and RAs, a bunch of others. there are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches just as like there's a strength to being in a big city versus a small town. Me personally, I'll take the small community more or less every time because the small community is almost always self-selecting based on values and just for the same reason that I like working at small companies or small teams. [00:48:11] Bryan: There's a lot of value to be had in a small community. It's not to say that large communities are valueless, but again, long answer to your question of kind of where did things go south with Joyent and node. They went south because the, the values that we had and the values the community had didn't line up and that was a very educational experience, as you might imagine. [00:48:33] Jeremy: Yeah. And, and given that you mentioned how, because of those values, some people moved from Node to go, and in the end for much of what oxide is building. You ended up using rust. What, what would you say are the, the values of go and and rust, and how did you end up choosing Rust given that. Go's decisions regarding generics, versioning, compilation speed priority [00:48:56] Bryan: Yeah, I mean, well, so the value for, yeah. And so go, I mean, I understand why people move from Node to Go, go to me was kind of a lateral move. Um, there were a bunch of things that I, uh, go was still garbage collected, um, which I didn't like. Um, go also is very strange in terms of there are these kind of like. [00:49:17] Bryan: These autocratic kind of decisions that are very bizarre. Um, there, I mean, generics is kind of a famous one, right? Where go kind of as a point of principle didn't have generics, even though go itself actually the innards of go did have generics. It's just that you a go user weren't allowed to have them. [00:49:35] Bryan: And you know, it's kind of, there was, there was an old cartoon years and years ago about like when a, when a technologist is telling you that something is technically impossible, that actually means I don't feel like it. Uh, and there was a certain degree of like, generics are technically impossible and go, it's like, Hey, actually there are. [00:49:51] Bryan: And so there was, and I just think that the arguments against generics were kind of disingenuous. Um, and indeed, like they ended up adopting generics and then there's like some super weird stuff around like, they're very anti-assertion, which is like, what, how are you? Why are you, how is someone against assertions, it doesn't even make any sense, but it's like, oh, nope. [00:50:10] Bryan: Okay. There's a whole scree on it. Nope, we're against assertions and the, you know, against versioning. There was another thing like, you know, the Rob Pike has kind of famously been like, you should always just run on the way to commit. And you're like, does that, is that, does that make sense? I mean this, we actually built it. [00:50:26] Bryan: And so there are a bunch of things like that. You're just like, okay, this is just exhausting and. I mean, there's some things about Go that are great and, uh, plenty of other things that I just, I'm not a fan of. Um, I think that the, in the end, like Go cares a lot about like compile time. It's super important for Go Right? [00:50:44] Bryan: Is very quick, compile time. I'm like, okay. But that's like compile time is not like, it's not unimportant, it's doesn't have zero importance. But I've got other things that are like lots more important than that. Um, what I really care about is I want a high performing artifact. I wanted garbage collection outta my life. Don't think garbage collection has good trade offs [00:51:00] Bryan: I, I gotta tell you, I, I like garbage collection to me is an embodiment of this like, larger problem of where do you put cognitive load in the software development process. And what garbage collection is saying to me it is right for plenty of other people and the software that they wanna develop. [00:51:21] Bryan: But for me and the software that I wanna develop, infrastructure software, I don't want garbage collection because I can solve the memory allocation problem. I know when I'm like, done with something or not. I mean, it's like I, whether that's in, in C with, I mean it's actually like, it's really not that hard to not leak memory in, in a C base system. [00:51:44] Bryan: And you can. give yourself a lot of tooling that allows you to diagnose where memory leaks are coming from. So it's like that is a solvable problem. There are other challenges with that, but like, when you are developing a really sophisticated system that has garbage collection is using garbage collection. [00:51:59] Bryan: You spend as much time trying to dork with the garbage collector to convince it to collect the thing that you know is garbage. You are like, I've got this thing. I know it's garbage. Now I need to use these like tips and tricks to get the garbage collector. I mean, it's like, it feels like every Java performance issue goes to like minus xx call and use the other garbage collector, whatever one you're using, use a different one and using a different, a different approach. [00:52:23] Bryan: It's like, so you're, you're in this, to me, it's like you're in the worst of all worlds where. the reason that garbage collection is helpful is because the programmer doesn't have to think at all about this problem. But now you're actually dealing with these long pauses in production. [00:52:38] Bryan: You're dealing with all these other issues where actually you need to think a lot about it. And it's kind of, it, it it's witchcraft. It, it, it's this black box that you can't see into. So it's like, what problem have we solved exactly? And I mean, so the fact that go had garbage collection, it's like, eh, no, I, I do not want, like, and then you get all the other like weird fatwahs and you know, everything else. [00:52:57] Bryan: I'm like, no, thank you. Go is a no thank you for me, I, I get it why people like it or use it, but it's, it's just, that was not gonna be it. Choosing Rust [00:53:04] Bryan: I'm like, I want C. but I, there are things I didn't like about C too. I was looking for something that was gonna give me the deterministic kind of artifact that I got outta C. But I wanted library support and C is tough because there's, it's all convention. you know, there's just a bunch of other things that are just thorny. And I remember thinking vividly in 2018, I'm like, well, it's rust or bust. Ownership model, algebraic types, error handling [00:53:28] Bryan: I'm gonna go into rust. And, uh, I hope I like it because if it's not this, it's gonna like, I'm gonna go back to C I'm like literally trying to figure out what the language is for the back half of my career. Um, and when I, you know, did what a lot of people were doing at that time and people have been doing since of, you know, really getting into rust and really learning it, appreciating the difference in the, the model for sure, the ownership model people talk about. [00:53:54] Bryan: That's also obviously very important. It was the error handling that blew me away. And the idea of like algebraic types, I never really had algebraic types. Um, and the ability to, to have. And for error handling is one of these really, uh, you, you really appreciate these things where it's like, how do you deal with a, with a function that can either succeed and return something or it can fail, and the way c deals with that is bad with these kind of sentinels for errors. [00:54:27] Bryan: And, you know, does negative one mean success? Does negative one mean failure? Does zero mean failure? Some C functions, zero means failure. Traditionally in Unix, zero means success. And like, what if you wanna return a file descriptor, you know, it's like, oh. And then it's like, okay, then it'll be like zero through positive N will be a valid result. [00:54:44] Bryan: Negative numbers will be, and like, was it negative one and I said airo, or is it a negative number that did not, I mean, it's like, and that's all convention, right? People do all, all those different things and it's all convention and it's easy to get wrong, easy to have bugs, can't be statically checked and so on. Um, and then what Go says is like, well, you're gonna have like two return values and then you're gonna have to like, just like constantly check all of these all the time. Um, which is also kind of gross. Um, JavaScript is like, Hey, let's toss an exception. If, if we don't like something, if we see an error, we'll, we'll throw an exception. [00:55:15] Bryan: There are a bunch of reasons I don't like that. Um, and you look, you'll get what Rust does, where it's like, no, no, no. We're gonna have these algebra types, which is to say this thing can be a this thing or that thing, but it, but it has to be one of these. And by the way, you don't get to process this thing until you conditionally match on one of these things. [00:55:35] Bryan: You're gonna have to have a, a pattern match on this thing to determine if it's a this or a that, and if it in, in the result type that you, the result is a generic where it's like, it's gonna be either the thing that you wanna return. It's gonna be an okay that contains the thing you wanna return, or it's gonna be an error that contains your error and it forces your code to deal with that. [00:55:57] Bryan: And what that does is it shifts the cognitive load from the person that is operating this thing in production to the, the actual developer that is in development. And I think that that, that to me is like, I, I love that shift. Um, and that shift to me is really important. Um, and that's what I was missing, that that's what Rust gives you. [00:56:23] Bryan: Rust forces you to think about your code as you write it, but as a result, you have an artifact that is much more supportable, much more sustainable, and much faster. Prefer to frontload cognitive load during development instead of at runtime [00:56:34] Jeremy: Yeah, it sounds like you would rather take the time during the development to think about these issues because whether it's garbage collection or it's error handling at runtime when you're trying to solve a problem, then it's much more difficult than having dealt with it to start with. [00:56:57] Bryan: Yeah, absolutely. I, and I just think that like, why also, like if it's software, if it's, again, if it's infrastructure software, I mean the kinda the question that you, you should have when you're writing software is how long is this software gonna live? How many people are gonna use this software? Uh, and if you are writing an operating system, the answer for this thing that you're gonna write, it's gonna live for a long time. [00:57:18] Bryan: Like, if we just look at plenty of aspects of the system that have been around for a, for decades, it's gonna live for a long time and many, many, many people are gonna use it. Why would we not expect people writing that software to have more cognitive load when they're writing it to give us something that's gonna be a better artifact? [00:57:38] Bryan: Now conversely, you're like, Hey, I kind of don't care about this. And like, I don't know, I'm just like, I wanna see if this whole thing works. I've got, I like, I'm just stringing this together. I don't like, no, the software like will be lucky if it survives until tonight, but then like, who cares? Yeah. Yeah. [00:57:52] Bryan: Gar garbage clock. You know, if you're prototyping something, whatever. And this is why you really do get like, you know, different choices, different technology choices, depending on the way that you wanna solve the problem at hand. And for the software that I wanna write, I do like that cognitive load that is upfront. With LLMs maybe you can get the benefit of the robust artifact with less cognitive load [00:58:10] Bryan: Um, and although I think, I think the thing that is really wild that is the twist that I don't think anyone really saw coming is that in a, in an LLM age. That like the cognitive load upfront almost needs an asterisk on it because so much of that can be assisted by an LLM. And now, I mean, I would like to believe, and maybe this is me being optimistic, that the the, in the LLM age, we will see, I mean, rust is a great fit for the LLMH because the LLM itself can get a lot of feedback about whether the software that's written is correct or not. [00:58:44] Bryan: Much more so than you can for other environments. [00:58:48] Jeremy: Yeah, that is a interesting point in that I think when people first started trying out the LLMs to code, it was really good at these maybe looser languages like Python or JavaScript, and initially wasn't so good at something like Rust. But it sounds like as that improves, if. It can write it then because of the rigor or the memory management or the error handling that the language is forcing you to do, it might actually end up being a better choice for people using LLMs. [00:59:27] Bryan: absolutely. I, it, it gives you more certainty in the artifact that you've delivered. I mean, you know a lot about a Rust program that compiles correctly. I mean, th there are certain classes of errors that you don't have, um, that you actually don't know on a C program or a GO program or a, a JavaScript program. [00:59:46] Bryan: I think that's gonna be really important. I think we are on the cusp. Maybe we've already seen it, this kind of great bifurcation in the software that we writ

IEC 60601 has been central to medical electrical equipment safety for decades. From the prescriptive approach of the 2nd edition to the risk-based philosophy introduced in the 3rd edition, the standard has continuously evolved to address technological and regulatory complexity.Now, the upcoming 4th edition represents more than an amendment — it signals a structural transformation.This article explores:The Evolution of IEC 60601• Key shifts from the 2nd to the 3rd edition• Why risk management became central• What lessons shaped today's safety philosophyWhat the 4th Edition Brings• A major rewrite rather than incremental updates• The introduction of “atomic requirements”• Structural clarity for manufacturers, test labs, and regulators• Emerging technical considerations (digitalization, AI, cybersecurity, home use)Impact on Existing Devices• Will re-testing be required?• How to assess validity of existing test reports• Transition strategies with notified bodiesIntegration into Design & Documentation• Embedding IEC 60601 into risk management from day one• Required updates in risk files, EMC documentation, labeling, and usability engineering• Practical advice for SMEs with limited resourcesThe Future of IEC 60601• Greater harmonization with ISO 14971 and IEC 62304• Alignment with digital and AI regulatory frameworks• The long-term outlook for medical electrical safetyFor manufacturers, the message is clear:IEC 60601 is not just a testing standard — it is a design and risk management framework that must be integrated early and strategically.Who is Monir El Azzouzi? Monir El Azzouzi is the founder and CEO of Easy Medical Device a Consulting firm that is supporting Medical Device manufacturers for any Quality and Regulatory affairs activities all over the world. Monir can help you to create your Quality Management System, Technical Documentation or he can also take care of your Clinical Evaluation, Clinical Investigation through his team or partners. Easy Medical Device can also become your Authorized Representative and Independent Importer Service provider for EU, UK and Switzerland. Monir has around 16 years of experience within the Medical Device industry working for small businesses and also big corporate companies. He has now supported around 100 clients to remain compliant on the market. His passion to the Medical Device filed pushed him to create educative contents like, blog, podcast, YouTube videos, LinkedIn Lives where he invites guests who are sharing educative information to his audience. Visit easymedicaldevice.com to know more.  If you need help implementing QMSR or preparing your teams for FDA inspections, contact: info@easymedicaldevice.com If you are located outside the EU/UK/Switzerland and need an Authorized Representative (and possibly an Importer), we can support you as well.LinkLeo Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoeisnersafetyconsultants/Social Media to followMonir El Azzouzi Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/melazzouziTwitter: https://twitter.com/elazzouzimPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/easymedicaldeviceInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/easymedicaldeviceThis podcast is powered by Podcastics, the easiest platform to create and publish your podcast.

מגיל 13 היא פרצה למחשבים, בגיל 36 היא מנכ"לית חברה בשווי 300 מיליון דולר - טל קולנדר מחברת רמידיו חושפת איך בנתה עסק של 10+ מיליון דולר בהכנסות ללא גיוס כסף חיצוני במשך שנים, עד שאמזון הפכה ללקוחה וקרנות ההשקעות המובילות הציעו לה "הצעה שאי-אפשר לסרב לה".פתיחה וגיוס הכסף - 0:00הרקע האישי של טל ותחילת הדרך בסייבר - 4:03השירות הצבאי ביחידות מיוחדות - 8:43המעבר לעולם האזרחי ועבודה בדל EMC - 11:02הקמת החברה עם השותפים - 13:35המוצר הראשון ולקוחות ראשונים - 15:13הצמיחה ללא משקיעים חיצוניים - 17:17הגדלת הצוות והכנסות מעל 10 מיליון דולר - 18:53המוצר הנוכחי ופתרון בעיות קונפיגורציה - 22:28הרחבה לעולם הקומפליינס - 26:00הפיבוט למוצר חדש ופלטפורמה רחבה יותר - 27:27החיים עם משקיעים לעומת בלעדיהם - 29:13הצמיחה הבינלאומית ולקוחות גדולים - 32:24אסטרטגיית השיווק והאירועים - 35:36הסיבות לגיוס הכסף בשלב זה - 37:38התרבות הארגונית ואיזון חיים ועבודה - 39:20התוכניות לשנה הקרובה - 43:18החזון לטווח הארוך ו-2026-2027 - 45:34

How do strong relationships within underwriting teams and between underwriters and producers shape the surety business? In this episode, we sit down with Bob Bowman of Holmes Murphy, Justin Tomlin of FNIC Group, and Rocky Pofahl and Cory Hamling of EMC to explore the vital collaboration between home office, field underwriters, and producers — and why trust, clarity, and communication drive success. Don't miss this look at the people and relationships inside the business of surety! With special guests: Bob Bowman, Surety Underwriting Manager, Holmes Murphy Justin Tomlin, Senior Vice President – Surety Manager, FNIC Group Rocky Pofahl, Assistant Vice President-Bond Underwriting Superintendent, EMC Cory Hamling, Bond Director, EMC Hosted by: Kat Shamapande, Director, Professional Development, NASBP

In today's episode we speak to the 2026 EMC keynote speaker Dave Weber

This episode covers the next part of chapter 30 from: “The frank realization that physical science is concerned with...” to “...this conception brings us to the law of miracles. " Summary: In this episode we focus on the concept of "mind stuff" and scientific breakthroughs, particularly the development of the electron microscope. Paramahansa Yogananda explains how electrons exhibit both wave and particle properties, and how this dual nature challenges traditional scientific understanding of reality. We also cover Sir James Jeans' concept of the universe as a "great thought" rather than a mechanical structure, and Einstein's famous equation E=MC^2.  0:00 Prior Episode; 10:10 Electron Microscope; 22:30 There is no material universe; 32:05 The Law of Miracles; 40:00 Looking Ahead. Links discussed in this episode:  Tungsten crystals https://www.microscopy.ethz.ch/nbwo.htm https://www.yogananda.com.au/gurus/yoganandaquotes12.html  Homework for next episode— Read, absorb and make notes on the next part of chapter 30 from: “Masters who are able to materialise and dematerialise their bodies...” to “...rise up as master of maya, knowing his dominion over the cosmos." #autobiographyofayogi  #autobiographylinebyline  #paramahansayogananda Autobiography of a Yogi awake.minute Self-Realization Fellowship Yogoda Satsanga Society of India #SRF #YSS

In this episode of the Altium OnTrack podcast, host Zach Peterson sits down with Karen Burnham, chief engineer and founder of EMC United, to explore why electromagnetic compatibility remains one of the most challenging aspects of product development. Karen shares her journey from physics to NASA Johnson Space Center and eventually into EMC consulting, offering invaluable insights into why so many engineers struggle with compliance testing and what they can do about it.   Whether you're a new designer facing your first EMC test or a seasoned engineer looking to refine your approach, this conversation covers critical topics including common misconceptions about ground plane splits, the dangers of blindly following data sheet recommendations, requirements management pitfalls, and cost-effective pre-compliance strategies. Karen also discusses the evolving role of simulation and AI in EMC design review, upcoming changes to CISPR standards, and her practical seminars designed to help engineers avoid costly failures.  

In this episode, Adam Torres ⁠interviews Alex Kangoun, CEO of Athena Solutions, Inc., about why data readiness—not AI models—is the real driver of success in the AI era. Alex shares how companies can overcome data management debt, build trust through incremental wins, and turn data into a competitive advantage. About ⁠Alex Kangoun Alex has over 20 years of data warehousing and business intelligence consulting experience across multiple industries. His experience includes solution delivery for BI and data quality initiatives. His core strengths include managing global projects involving teams across multiple locations. Prior to Athena Solutions Alex was responsible for BI solutions at Pitney Bowes and was Director of Business Intelligence and Data Quality at Monster.com. His other clients included Price Waterhouse Coopers, PTC, Fidelity, Teradyne, EMC, Citizens Bank, and others. Alex has MBA from Boston College and MS from Kiev National University of Construction and Architecture. Alex is certified Project Manager Professional (PMP) from PMI. About Athena Solutions Athena Solutions offers strategic data management and business intelligence consulting that empowers businesses to access and use their data to make better business decisions. The experts at Athena Solutions have over twenty years of business intelligence experience, having worked on over 100 successful projects in various industries such as financial services, healthcare, consumer product goods, retail, telecom and high tech. Watch Full Episode on ⁠Youtube⁠. --- Follow Adam on Instagram at ⁠https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/⁠ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: ⁠https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/⁠ Visit our website: ⁠https://missionmatters.com/⁠ More FREE content from Mission Matters here: ⁠https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, ⁠Adam Torres ⁠⁠interviews ⁠Alex Kangoun⁠, CEO of Athena Solutions, Inc., about why data readiness—not AI models—is the real driver of success in the AI era. Alex shares how companies can overcome data management debt, build trust through incremental wins, and turn data into a competitive advantage. About⁠ ⁠⁠Alex Kangoun Alex has over 20 years of data warehousing and business intelligence consulting experience across multiple industries. His experience includes solution delivery for BI and data quality initiatives. His core strengths include managing global projects involving teams across multiple locations. Prior to Athena Solutions Alex was responsible for BI solutions at Pitney Bowes and was Director of Business Intelligence and Data Quality at Monster.com. His other clients included Price Waterhouse Coopers, PTC, Fidelity, Teradyne, EMC, Citizens Bank, and others. Alex has MBA from Boston College and MS from Kiev National University of Construction and Architecture. Alex is certified Project Manager Professional (PMP) from PMI. About⁠ ⁠⁠Athena Solutions⁠ Athena Solutions offers strategic data management and business intelligence consulting that empowers businesses to access and use their data to make better business decisions. The experts at Athena Solutions have over twenty years of business intelligence experience, having worked on over 100 successful projects in various industries such as financial services, healthcare, consumer product goods, retail, telecom and high tech. Watch Full Episode on⁠ ⁠Youtube⁠⁠. --- Follow Adam on Instagram at⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/⁠⁠ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: ⁠⁠https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/⁠⁠ Visit our website: ⁠⁠https://missionmatters.com/⁠⁠ More FREE content from Mission Matters here:⁠ ⁠https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The return-to-office debate has been hijacked by the wrong conversation. In this episode, Josh and Bob cut through the noise to reveal what's really driving RTO mandates—and it's not what most leaders will admit.There are two clouds hovering over every in-office decision: the Control Cloud and the Innovation Cloud. The Control Cloud is about distrust, micromanagement, and leaders who feel uneasy when they can't physically see butts in seats. The Innovation Cloud is about something entirely different—creating the conditions where teams can do their absolute best work together.Drawing from decades of experience building high-performing teams at companies like iContact, Teradata, and EMC, Josh and Bob make the case that co-located teams aren't just a preference—they're an innovation multiplier. They share stories of conference rooms turned into collaboration bootcamps, cube walls torn down with power drills, and the simple magic of a room erupting in applause when someone moves a sticky note to "Done."But this isn't about forcing people back to the office for control. It's about understanding what gets lost when we optimize purely for individual convenience over team collaboration. The watercooler conversations. The yelps from a frustrated tester that bring immediate help. The face-to-face tension that drives real innovation.Josh, who has debated this question with himself for fifteen years, finally lands on an answer: if he were building a team from scratch today, he'd build a co-located team of collaborative problem solvers. Not because remote can't work, but because the magic of true team collaboration is worth the commute.The question isn't whether you should return to office. The question is: which cloud is driving your decision? Stay Connected and Informed with Our NewslettersJosh Anderson's "Leadership Lighthouse"Dive deeper into the world of Agile leadership and management with Josh Anderson's "Leadership Lighthouse." This bi-weekly newsletter offers insights, tips, and personal stories to help you navigate the complexities of leadership in today's fast-paced tech environment. Whether you're a new manager or a seasoned leader, you'll find valuable guidance and practical advice to enhance your leadership skills. Subscribe to "Leadership Lighthouse" for the latest articles and exclusive content right to your inbox.Subscribe hereBob Galen's "Agile Moose"Bob Galen's "Agile Moose" is a must-read for anyone interested in Agile practices, team dynamics, and personal growth within the tech industry. The newsletter features in-depth analysis, case studies, and actionable tips to help you excel in your Agile journey. Bob brings his extensive experience and thoughtful perspectives directly to you, covering everything from foundational Agile concepts to advanced techniques. Join a community of Agile enthusiasts and practitioners by subscribing to "Agile Moose."Subscribe hereDo More Than Listen:We publish video versions of every episode and post them on our YouTube page.Help Us Spread The Word: Love our content? Help us out by sharing on social media, rating our podcast/episodes on iTunes, or by giving to our Patreon campaign. Every time you give,...

In this episode, we sit down with Adam Zimman, author and VC advisor, to explore the world of progressive delivery and why shipping software is only the beginning. Adam shares his fascinating journey through tech—from his early days as a fire juggler to leadership roles at EMC, VMware, GitHub, and LaunchDarkly – and how those... Read more »

Earth's Mightiest Critics ring in the New Year with the escapism of economic uncertainty!Park Chan-wook's latest film, No Other Choice centers on Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) who has been out of work for several years. In a desperate attempt to eliminate job market competition, he concocts a darkly brilliant plan. It's no secret that Ian is not the biggest Park fan (who else on planet Earth thinks the remake of Oldboy is better than the original?!).The question, then, is can this critically acclaimed new slice of dramatic social commentary--and the rest of the EMC's very best arguments--turn things around?Join us as we seek truth, gainful employment, and airtight alibis. We'll also take your questions, comments, and SuperChats!Support Kicking the Seat on Patreon, subscribe to us on YouTube, and follow us at:XLetterboxdInstagramFacebookShow LinksWatch the No Other Choice (2025) trailer.Support all of Earth's Mightiest Critics at their various outlets:Keep up with Jeff York's criticism and caricatures at The Establishing Shot and Pipeline Artists.Check out Mark "The Movie Man" Krawczyk's The Spoiler Room Podcast.Get seated with The Blonde in Front!Follow David Fowlie's film criticism at Keeping It Reel.Get educated with Don Shanahan at Every Movie Has a Lesson…...And Film Obsessive...and the Cinephile Hissy Fit Podcast.Keep up with Annie Banks at The Mary Sue....and We Got This Covered.Make Nice with Mike Crowley of You'll Probably Agree.And save your celluloid soul with Dave Canfield's Substack, "Creature Feature Preacher".

Selling a business is one of the biggest financial decisions an owner will ever make, and the right preparation can shape both the outcome and the next chapter of life. In this episode, Larry Heller, CFP®, CDFA®, speaks with Gregg Schor, CEO of Protegrity Advisors, about what business owners need to understand before entering the mergers and acquisitions process. Gregg shares practical, experience-based insights into how different buyer types approach transactions and how sellers can position themselves well ahead of a sale to improve both financial and non-financial outcomes. Together, they walk through the typical Mergers & Acquisitions timeline and key decision points business owners should be prepared to navigate from early planning through closing. Gregg discusses: The different types of buyers in today's market, including strategic buyers, private equity firms, and family offices How seller goals influence deal structure, timing, and buyer fit The role of cash at closing, earnouts, and rollover equity in a transaction Why the best time to consider selling is often when the business is performing well What preparation really looks like, from financials and contracts to reducing owner dependency How the M&A process typically unfolds, from early planning through closing And more Connect with Gregg Schor: Protegrity Advisors LinkedIn: Gregg Schor gschor@protegrityadvisors.om (631) 285-3172 Connect with Larry Heller:  (631) 248-3600 Schedule a 20-Minute Call Heller Wealth Management LinkedIn: Larry Heller, CFP®, CDFA®, CPA YouTube: Retirement Unlocked with Larry Heller, CFP® About Our Guest: Gregg Schor is the CEO of Protegrity Advisors and has over 25 years of experience managing mergers and acquisitions, corporate development, legal, and human resources for companies of all sizes in a wide range of industries. He has previously held senior management positions at companies that have been acquired by IBM, Microsoft, and EMC, including Deputy and General Counsel, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, and Director of European Operations. As a result, he brings a very unique perspective to Protegrity clients, having been on all sides of M&A transactions and in a variety of roles. Over the years, he has developed an extensive network of national and international relationships with public and private companies, private equity firms, family offices, search funds, and serial entrepreneurs, looking for businesses to acquire. He is on the boards of the Exit Planning Institute and the Alliance of Merger & Acquisition Advisors, and is a member of the Exit Planning Exchange (Long Island Chapters). Gregg received a J.D. from St. John's University School of Law and a Diploma on International and Comparative Law for study in Russia and Poland from the University of San Diego School of Law. He also completed the Mergers and Acquisitions Executive Education Program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Certificate Program in Family Business Leadership and Governance from Cornell University.

Is your company's "AI disruption" happening with you—or quietly without you… and putting your business worth at risk? If you're leading a mid-to-large company right now, you're probably feeling two pressures at the same time: move faster with AI and don't blow up the business while you do it. Because AI isn't a future trend anymore—it's already being built, tested, and used across departments, geographies, and teams (often without a single unified view). And that creates a real leadership headache: how do you scale AI for competitive advantage while still keeping guardrails in place? In this episode, Jim Schleckser talks with Pete Foley (CEO of ModelOp) about what happens when AI spreads "like wildfire" inside an organization—and how to regain control without killing momentum. You'll walk away with: A practical way to get visibility into AI across your organization so you know what models exist, what they're doing, and where the biggest risks are hiding. A framework for putting governance and guardrails in place without slowing innovation—so you can move faster than competitors and sleep at night. A clearer path to scaling AI investments into real business outcomes (revenue, cost reduction, risk control) instead of letting models sit stuck in limbo for 9–12 months. Hit play now to learn how to build AI guardrails that protect your brand and accelerate results—so you can boost business worth before the market decides who survives the disruption. Check out: [02:10] "In five years, there'll be two kinds of companies…" — Jim frames the stakes of AI disruption and why ignoring it threatens long-term survival and business worth. [10:45] The real AI bottleneck: why models take 9–12 months to reach production — Pete explains what's slowing companies down and why that pace won't survive the next wave. [23:30] The "air traffic controller" approach to AI governance — visibility, risk assignment, guardrails, and real-time monitoring so AI can scale without chaos. About Pete Foley With more than 25 years of executive and entrepreneurial experience in enterprise software and a track record of successful business exits, Pete Foley's leadership gives ModelOp customers, partners and employees a high level of trust and confidence in the company and its future. Prior to co-founding ModelOp, Pete held several chief executive roles, including CEO of RingCube Technologies, a desktop virtualization software solution provider acquired by Citrix in 2011; CEO of PortAuthority Technologies, a provider of data leak protection systems, from 2005 through its acquisition by Websense in 2007; and CEO of Infoblox (BLOX) from 2002 through 2005. In addition, Pete was the Executive Chairman of Graphite Systems, a low latency, flash-based big data appliance that was acquired by EMC, from 2012 to 2015.

Lights! Camera! Diggler!Earth's Mightiest Critics close out 2025 with a look at Paul Thomas Anderson's classic 1997 drama, Boogie Nights! Mark Wahlberg stars as Eddie Adams, a young California dishwasher who gets lured into the glamorous, sinister world of 1970s adult entertainment. His found family includes legendary mogul Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), Jack's matronly muse, Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), and fellow performer Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly).Together, they build a new hard-core franchise while struggling against the unrelenting winds of drugs, video tape, and societal backlash.It's also a (really messed up) New Year's movie! AND a reminder of PTA's roots, as we prepare for the likely Awards sweep of his latest film, One Battle After Another.Join us for a free-wheeling Pre-NYE party, where we'll also take your questions, comments, and SuperChats!Support Kicking the Seat on Patreon, subscribe to us on YouTube, and follow us at:XLetterboxdInstagramFacebookShow LinksWatch the Boogie Nights (1997) trailer.As mentioned in the show, Ian had a couple of run-ins with Boogie Nights star Thomas Jane at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con. Presented here is the two-part "The Thomas Jane Affair":Part OnePart TwoPick up Warner Bros' recently released 4K UHD of Boogie Nights.In case you missed it: check out EMC's roundtable review of One Battle After Another from earlier this year.Support all of Earth's Mightiest Critics at their various outlets:Keep up with Jeff York's criticism and caricatures at The Establishing Shot and Pipeline Artists.Check out Mark "The Movie Man" Krawczyk's The Spoiler Room Podcast.Get seated with The Blonde in Front!Follow David Fowlie's film criticism at Keeping It Reel.Get educated with Don Shanahan at Every Movie Has a Lesson…...And Film Obsessive...and the Cinephile Hissy Fit Podcast.Keep up with Annie Banks at The Mary Sue....and We Got This Covered.Make Nice with Mike Crowley of You'll Probably Agree.And save your celluloid soul with Dave Canfield's Substack, "Creature Feature Preacher".

The Cognitive Crucible is a forum that presents different perspectives and emerging thought leadership related to the information environment. The opinions expressed by guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of or endorsement by the Information Professionals Association. During this episode, Bill Wall discusses Accrete AI's comprehensive AI platform. The conversation explores the necessity for the U.S. to balance military focus with information strategies, diplomacy, and a deeper understanding of the populace to achieve success in modern conflicts. Recording Date: 9 Dec 2025 Resources: Cognitive Crucible Podcast Episodes Mentioned #56 Bob Jones on Governance Accrete AI Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph by T.E. Lawrence The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger Link to full show notes and resources Guest Bio:  Bill Wall is the CEO and Co-Founder of Accrete AI Government, an enterprise AI company helping government entities rapidly capture and analyze massive amounts of siloed data, providing analysts with deep insights that enable faster decision-making. Bill has a unique background, combining elite military service and deep experience in the sales and implementation of innovative solutions that drive business transformation. In the private sector, Bill has built technology teams across various industries. His professional experience includes leadership roles at companies like EMC, Praescient Analytics, Boundless Geospatial, and Flywheel Data, where he focused on IT solutions, big data analytics, and geospatial software. Before entering the corporate world, Bill retired from the Army as a Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel after twenty-two years in service. During his military career, he founded a computer network operations organization within the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and deployed multiple times to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen where he worked closely with the national intelligence community to transform the way intelligence was developed and shared. Academically trained in international relations, Bill holds a Bachelor of Science from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a Master of Arts in International Relations and Latin American Studies from the University of Miami. Beyond his professional achievements, he has been married to Francesca for 30 years and is a father to two sons, sharing his home with two dogs and a cat. About: The Information Professionals Association (IPA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the role of information activities, such as influence and cognitive security, within the national security sector and helping to bridge the divide between operations and research. Its goal is to increase interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars and practitioners and policymakers with an interest in this domain. For more information, please contact us at communications@information-professionals.org. Or, connect directly with The Cognitive Crucible podcast host, John Bicknell, on LinkedIn. Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, 1) IPA earns from qualifying purchases, 2) IPA gets commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Friends, this episode is a vulnerable one.For the first time since launching Lead with Heart, I'm pressing pause on the podcast for Q1 of 2026. Not because I'm quitting. Not because the mission has dimmed. But because clarity asked me to make a courageous decision — one that aligns with the emotional sustainability I teach every dayIn this episode, I'm sharing the real story behind this pause: what 2025 revealed, what I'm witnessing across the nonprofit sector, the hard truth about capacity, the emotional health crisis facing nonprofit leaders, and why building the Lead with Heart Summit requires my full presence. It's about choosing purpose over productivity, depth over doing, and alignment over proving.In this episode:00:00:00 Embracing Leadership Clarity00:03:48 Prioritizing Emotional Sustainability00:08:08 The Lead with Heart SummitRESOURCESThe Lead with Heart Summit is not just another conference. It's a powerful, purpose-driven experience created specifically for nonprofit fundraisers who are feeling burned out, stretched thin, and in need of real, meaningful support. April, 2026.NOTEWORTHY QUOTES“ When you become crystal clear on your one thing, the hard decisions stop looking like sacrifices and start looking like alignments.” - Haley Cooper“ Clarity does not make decisions painless. It makes them purposeful.” - Haley Cooper“Just because we are capable of doing something does not mean we have the capacity to do it all at the same time.” - Haley CooperSend Haley a suggestion or request via text HERE!My book, Sow, Grow, Lead is live on Amazon! It shares my journey of starting a nonprofit in Malawi and offers practical strategies for nonprofit leaders to create real impact.CONNECT WITH HALEYHaley is a CFRE, Stress Management Coach, and EmC trainer. Founder of The Savvy Fundraiser, she brings experience in human services, homelessness, and youth nonprofits. She specializes in EmC, leadership, board development, and fundraising, empowering nonprofit leaders to build thriving organizations.Instagram: @thesavvyfundraiser LinkedIn: Haley Cooper, CFREWebsite: thesavvyfundraiser.comYouTube: thesavvyfundraiserProduced by Ideablossoms

Earth's Mightiest Critics re-ignite the age-old debate: Do people actually care about Avatar?Following the death of their eldest son, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) find themselves caring for Spider (Jake Champion), the human son of evil-military-leader-turned-evil-Na'vi-warrior Myles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Meanwhile, Quaritch discovers the volcano-dwelling Ash tribe, headed by Varang (Oona Chaplin), whose obsession with war and the dark arts gives a chilling edge to the invading military's deadly artillery.And there's a bunch of other semi-interesting stuff that's hastily abandoned for the hour-plus Act Three death-and-destruction montage...In this spoilerific roundtable review of the third film in James Cameron's bafflingly successful trilogy, Fire and Ash, the gang digs into why the (arguably) best and (arguably) final entry may be the strongest, and why that may not be enough to save it from a legacy of, "Hey, remember those big blue alien movies?"Also, the EMC talks about Cameron's bizarre Anti-AI public service announcement they saw ahead of the early-December press screening.Support Kicking the Seat on Patreon, subscribe to us on YouTube, and follow us at:XLetterboxInstagramFacebookShow LinksWatch the Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) trailer.And catch up with our previous review of 2022's Avatar: The Way of Water.Support all of Earth's Mightiest Critics at their various outlets:Keep up with Jeff York's criticism and caricatures at The Establishing Shot and Pipeline Artists.Check out Mark "The Movie Man" Krawczyk's The Spoiler Room Podcast.Get seated with The Blonde in Front!Follow David Fowlie's film criticism at Keeping It Reel.Get educated with Don Shanahan at Every Movie Has a Lesson…...And Film Obsessive...and the Cinephile Hissy Fit Podcast.Keep up with Annie Banks at The Mary Sue....and We Got This Covered.Make Nice with Mike Crowley of You'll Probably Agree.And save your celluloid soul with Dave Canfield's Substack, "Creature Feature Preacher".

I am so honored to share today's conversation with Laura Bode, the newly appointed Chief Philanthropy Officer at A New Leaf. A survivor of childhood trauma, Laura rebuilt her confidence as an adult with the support of key mentors who saw her potential before she could see it herself. Today, she leads a powerhouse nonprofit serving more than 30,000 people each year and has helped grow philanthropy revenue from $300,000 to over $10 million.In this episode, we dig into her remarkable journey, the emotional realities nonprofit leaders face, the burnout she's experienced firsthand, and how she rebuilt a healthier, more grounded approach to leadership. In this episode:00:00:00 Value of Mentorship After Trauma00:05:59 Strategic Shifts for Nonprofit Growth00:09:55 Optimizing Your Board00:14:02 Navigating Burnout00:23:39 Expanding Community EngagementRESOURCESThe Lead with Heart Summit is not just another conference. It's a powerful, purpose-driven experience created specifically for nonprofit fundraisers who are feeling burned out, stretched thin, and in need of real, meaningful support. April, 2026.CONNECT WITH LAURALinkedIn: Laura BodeWebsite: https://turnanewleaf.org/ Send Haley a suggestion or request via text HERE!My book, Sow, Grow, Lead is live on Amazon! It shares my journey of starting a nonprofit in Malawi and offers practical strategies for nonprofit leaders to create real impact.CONNECT WITH HALEYHaley is a CFRE, Stress Management Coach, and EmC trainer. Founder of The Savvy Fundraiser, she brings experience in human services, homelessness, and youth nonprofits. She specializes in EmC, leadership, board development, and fundraising, empowering nonprofit leaders to build thriving organizations.Instagram: @thesavvyfundraiser LinkedIn: Haley Cooper, CFREWebsite: thesavvyfundraiser.comYouTube: thesavvyfundraiserProduced by Ideablossoms

At first, we wondered why Zane Rowe was once again leading us back to Continental Airlines. With notable CFO tenures at VMware and EMC—chapters rich with transformation—surely there were fresh stories to surface.But as Rowe began tracing the logic behind flight profitability, route modeling, and data-rich decision making, the relevance snapped into focus. His Continental experience isn't just a recurring anecdote; it's the lens through which he still interprets complex systems today. That early foundation made this discussion every bit as insightful as our last—especially as he connected those lessons to Workday's AI trajectory and the accelerating pace of strategic decision making.“I spent a lot of time in the airlines in what we called flight profitability,” Rowe tells us. At Continental, he helped build systems to understand which routes truly created value when full planes were still losing money, he tells us. That work, grounded in heavy telemetry and EMC technology, showed him how finance could move from reporting results to reshaping the route portfolio, he tells us.In his first conversation with CFO Thought Leader, Rowe walked through those early chapters—from revenue management at a post-bankruptcy airline to a bold sales pivot at Apple and multiple CFO roles in technology, he tells us. In this second interview, he returns to the same storyline but takes it one step further, drawing a direct line from that profitability model to today's AI-driven world, he tells us.Now, as Workday's CFO, he describes AI as an equalizer that lets small teams run multiple forecasting models and ingest far more variables in cash projections than before, he tells us. He points to “Everyday AI,” a company-wide initiative, and a cross-functional AI leadership group that pushes common tools, responsible use, and regular check-ins on what is changing in the work itself, he tells us.Rowe's finance strategic moment this year is “recognizing the importance of investing more into AI”—organically and inorganically—because peers are not standing still and customers want those capabilities, he tells us. With a total addressable market “in the hundreds of billions of dollars” and revenue “much less than that,” he frames leadership now as deciding where to lean in hardest, he tells us.

This Week's Callers Caller 1: Backdoor Clint says everyone likes SnailMail Caller 2: Jeff from OR talks about the budget 9" Caller 3: Nathan from Pittsburgh says he is excited for Trail Hero Caller 4: Beer Craig has a podcast suggestion for caring for your winch. Factor55 Winch Line Video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQCXD62DQYP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== Caller 5: Trevor talks about 1-15 Trail Ratings Caller 6: Chris Rea clarifies what EMC stands for Caller 7/8 Alex from Botches Off-road says congrats on getting married CALL US AND LEAVE US A VOICEMAIL!!!! We want to hear from you even more!!! You can call and say whatever you like! Ask a question, leave feedback, correct some information about welding, say how much you hate your Jeep, and wish you had a Toyota! We will air them all, live, on the podcast! +01-916-345-4744. An alternative method would be sending us an email at Jimmy@snailtrail4x4.com or at Tyler@snailtrail4x4.com. You can also find us on Instagram at SnailTrail4x4 or 4x4ToyotaTyler Listener Discount Codes: SnailTrail4x4 -SnailTrail15 for 15% off SnailTrail4x4 MerchMORRFlate - snailtraill4x4 to get 10% off MORRFlate Multi Tire Inflation Deflation™ Kits4WheelUnderground - snailtrail for 10% offIronman 4x4 - snailtrail20 to get 20% off all Ironman 4x4 branded equipment!Sidetracked Offroad - snailtrail4x4 (lowercase) to get 15% off lights and recovery gearSpartan Rope - snailtrail4x4 to get 10% off sitewideShock Surplus - SNAILTRAIL4x4 to get $25 off any order!Mob Armor - SNAILTRAIL4X4 for 15% offSummerShine Supply - ST4x4 for 10% offBackpacker's Pantry - Affiliate