Podcasts about enterprise cloud

In this Cloud Wars conversation, Bob Evans sits down with Shub Bhowmick, CEO and Founder of Tredence, alongside Yasmeen Ahmad from Google Cloud to explore how enterprises are moving from AI applications to AI agents. Their discussion focuses on what it takes to turn intelligence into action — covering data foundations, semantic layers, agentic architectures, and the operational shifts required for businesses to scale AI successfully. Turning AI Into Action The Big Themes: AI Agents Redefine Applications: Traditional AI apps assist by querying data, generating recommendations, and supporting limited workflows. AI agents, however, represent a much deeper operational shift. As Ahmad explains, agents are multi-step reasoning engines that can access multiple systems, coordinate actions, and execute entire business processes autonomously. Instead of simply helping humans decide, they can perform work across ERP systems, supply chains, and customer interactions. This changes the role of the database itself — from a storage and query engine into a reasoning engine with vector search, graph RAG, and semantic understanding. Examples like Home Depot and Danfoss show how this creates massive efficiency gains Why Questions Require Agentic Intelligence: Shub Bhowmick draws a critical distinction between “what” questions and “why” questions. A conversational BI system can answer what happened — such as how much sales dropped — but a “why” question demands deeper reasoning. Why did sales decline? Was it pricing pressure, competitor behavior, inventory constraints, or macroeconomic events? These problems require hypothesis-driven exploration. Tredence addresses this through business semantic layers, knowledge graphs, and hypothesis banks that support open-ended reasoning. Closed Systems Create Long-Term Risk: Bhowmick warns against enterprises rushing toward closed, inflexible platforms simply because they promise faster short-term value. While packaged solutions may accelerate deployment, they often restrict ownership, adaptability, and future innovation. In contrast, open architectures built with hyperscalers like Google Cloud allow customers to own the IP, customize solutions, and evolve as the market changes. The Big Quote: “Gone are the days when these migrations used to take 12 to 18 months. Nowadays, you have to complete these migrations in less than three to four months.” More from Tredence and Google Cloud: Learn about the partnership between Tredence and Google Cloud and AI agents on Gemini Enterprise. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

Over the past decade, hyperscalers have grown at extraordinary speed. But behind that growth sits a quieter transformation: the evolution of the partner ecosystems that enable it. Building an ecosystem is not a one-time strategy. It is a continuous process of adaptation as technology shifts, customer expectations evolve, and entirely new categories of partners emerge.  In this episode of the Zinnov Podcast, Pallab Deb, Managing Director, SI & Industry GTM Partnerships, Google Cloud, joins Rajat Kohli, Partner, Zinnov, to unpack what it takes to build and scale a partner-led platform business.  Pallab brings experience from both sides of the ecosystem. After nearly two decades in the system integrator world, he joined Google Cloud and witnessed how partner models evolve as platforms reach enterprise scale. At Google Cloud, that journey has been shaped by a deliberate partner-first approach.  The conversation explores how hyperscalers think about ecosystem strategy, the friction points that emerge as partner networks scale, and the new types of partners beginning to shape the next phase of enterprise transformation. Tune in now. 

Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix Nutanix has published the 8th annual Enterprise Cloud Index, its flagship survey tracking how organizations are building and managing infrastructure. This year’s findings hit three themes that matter for the channel: the rapid spread of unmanaged AI tools, the growing weight of data sovereignty, and the accelerating shift toward containers. Lee Caswell, Nutanix’s senior vice president of product and solutions marketing, joins us to dig into the data. Lee spent years at VMware before joining Nutanix, giving him an unusual perspective on how the infrastructure market is reshaping itself – particularly as organizations navigate Broadcom’s changes to VMware alongside the push to build AI-ready environments. The numbers are striking: 79 per cent of respondents encounter AI tools deployed outside IT’s oversight, 80 per cent consider data sovereignty a top infrastructure priority, and 87 per cent expect containerization to increase. But Lee’s read goes beyond the headlines. On shadow AI, he argues most of this is rational behaviour by teams testing in the cloud before committing on-prem – the real challenge is providing a structured path, not clamping down. On sovereignty, he draws a memorable distinction between a “noisy neighbor” and a “nosy neighbor” in multi-tenant environments – a framing that matters for how MSPs position managed services around compliance. Lee, who recently wrote about what he calls the “sovereign edge”, goes deep on what sovereignty means in practice when AI workloads need to stay local. The conversation also explores the MSP opportunity. While 65 per cent of respondents say their AI runs via managed service providers, Lee candidly notes that figure includes SaaS-delivered AI. The bigger play, he argues, is MSPs becoming the “governed alternative” to shadow AI – a sanctioned service layer offering sovereignty compliance, optimal application placement, and predictable costs. His closing advice: be “AI smart,” not just “AI fast.” Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to Canadian IT solution providers for 16 years now. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always your host for the show. If you’re an MSP, there’s a good chance your customers are already using AI tools that your team doesn’t know about. Nutanix recently released the 8th annual Enterprise Cloud Index, their big annual survey of how organizations are building and managing infrastructure. And this year, the data paints a picture that would be uncomfortable for anyone who thinks they’ve got a handle on where AI is running in their environment. Nearly 80% of respondents say they’ve encountered AI tools or agents deployed outside IT’s control. Data sovereignty has become a top priority, and containers are quietly becoming the default for new applications. My guest today is Lee Caswell, Nutanix’s senior vice president of product and solutions marketing. Lee came to Nutanix from VMware, so he’s been watching the infrastructure market reshape itself from a vantage point that very few people have. We dig into what the survey data actually says, where the contradictions are, and what it means for MSPs and solution providers. Here’s our conversation. Robert Dutt: Lee, thanks for taking the time. Lee Caswell: Well, Robert, thank you. Robert Dutt: You come to Nutanix from VMware, and your CEO now, Rajiv Ramaswami, he was the COO over there. Now you’re running this survey while the virtualization market is being reshaped by Broadcom’s changes. How does sitting where you sit now, having been kind of on both sides of that fence, shape how you look at this year’s data? Lee Caswell: Well, I think it’s fascinating that for years, maybe 20 years, people just assumed that the underlying virtualization layer was fixed. That vSphere was well established, super product, exciting. A lot of people built their careers, frankly, on learning the ins and outs of vSphere. And to a lesser extent, some of the later add-on products. But the idea that the underlying virtualization layer has changed has, for the first time in years, had people reconsidering how they will build out their IT infrastructure for the next 10 years. Robert Dutt: And we’ll circle back to that theme and that infrastructure theme a little later. But I wanted to dive in off the top into shadow AI, because it’s something that we’ve been talking about a fair bit on the podcast, and it’s something that a lot of partners are thinking about and trying to get their heads around how to deal with it. According to the survey, 79% of your respondents say they’re encountering AI tools or agents that are deployed outside the purview of IT. That’s a striking number. I’m curious, though, about the quality of the problem. Is this mostly folks who are using ChatGPT carelessly or without permission, or are we talking about the worst-case scenario of actual AI agents making business decisions willy-nilly without oversight? Lee Caswell: Well, we’ve certainly seen some of those later examples, but I think the majority of this is rational decision-making on IT and developer teams. Thinking about the fact that AI infrastructure itself can be relatively expensive. GPUs, new servers, new hardware. You’re generally bringing new hardware into the mix to start with. And what customers have been doing is before they go and make their investment strategy, and particularly in on-prem environments, they’ve been trying things out in the cloud where you can rent infrastructure, you can basically start something up, spin it down. That’s kind of a classic test-dev model, by the way, not different from what we’ve experienced in the past. And yet, when you look at how you’re going to deploy AI long-term with considerations around sovereignty and privacy, and particularly around predictable and lower costs, you start thinking about how you can take your on-prem infrastructure skills, which could include a data center but might also include the edge, and start thinking about how do you bring your already-strapped IT teams into this? And from a channel perspective, it’s how do you leverage some of the skills where people have been trained, particularly on virtualization. We’ll come back to this in just a minute. And basically apply this now into the new world of AI LLMs, AI hardware, and containerized infrastructure running on VMs. Robert Dutt: So if I’m an MSP supporting that kind of mid-market client, the 200 to 1,000 seat kind of space, what does a practical response to shadow AI look like at this moment in time? Because, you know, “implement an AI governance framework,” that’s great in concept, but that’s the kind of consulting engagement that’s a little hard for a lot of MSPs to deliver. Lee Caswell: Well, first off, you want to start thinking about what are the risks you’re trying to address. One is you want to look carefully at what LLMs your user base is actually using. One of the things that we’ve been able to do, for example, is have an audit trail, so you can look at who’s using DeepSeek, for example. Who’s using OpenAI? Who’s using some of the Llama 2, Llama 3 models, for example, or NVIDIA models? So the ability to go and look into the user base and get an assessment of that. Secondly, you’re looking at how do you make sure you don’t have a runaway cost model? This was one of the risks in the early cloud days, you remember. You had users getting shocked with the amount of unplanned, unmanaged cloud costs. And so you’ve got this opportunity now to look at how do you manage a brand new metric of consumption, by the way, called a token. I defy you to find somebody who knows exactly how tokens are created and the like. That’s a very difficult challenge. If you can provide a predictable way to manage, monitor, and control the usage of tokens, we do that as a way to basically protect against runaway costs. And then finally, the idea of sovereignty. So where is your data? Specifically, as you look at geopolitical considerations, we have, I think, a stunning finding that showed that 57% of our respondents said that they wanted their AI workloads to be within a sovereign country. Now, that doesn’t mean a single location necessarily, but it does show the concerns around where’s my data? Who can subpoena my data? Who’s got access to my data? And it may be, Robert, that the data model is more sensitive than the data itself, because the data model shows how you’re interpreting the data. And that’s actually a really interesting finding, I think, for a lot of folks, as AI takes hold so quickly. Robert Dutt: And data sovereignty is an area that we want to drill down on. It’s an area that’s of key interest to our audience, obviously. You touch on the 57% number in terms of how customers want infrastructure in a single country. 80% say it’s a high priority. You wrote recently about what you called the “sovereign edge,” the idea that AI is forcing compute closer to data within sovereign boundaries. For a Canadian audience that’s been navigating this between different regulation at different levels, the US hyperscalers and the CLOUD Act, for years, what’s new here? Is this kind of validation that what they’re seeing is real, or is the ground really shifting here? Lee Caswell: I think the sensitivity is a continuation of the trends that we’ve seen in the past. What’s changed is the understanding that in an AI world, data will be more distributed than it is today. And so imagine if you’re a hydro company, let’s say. And you’ve got different dams and facilities and hydro control points. These are distributed. They need to be able to run in a disconnected manner. You want to have AI applied locally. If you’re doing things around video processing, you don’t want to send all that data back to a central location. And so the ability to have a distributed model where your data and apps are more distributed and yet be connected so that you can do patching, for example, day-two operations, security updates, and push those out to a distributed environment. Now the realization is sovereignty has grown in importance, and at the same time, my data and applications will be more distributed. That’s a double stressor for IT teams looking at how to maintain that control and let the agility of distributed operations continue on. Robert Dutt: So are you seeing organizations redefine sovereignty in terms of operational control rather than just “the data lives here”? Because I think that distinction can matter pretty significantly for how MSPs ultimately architect their solutions and try to address this challenge. Lee Caswell: Yeah, I think for MSPs, there’s a few important areas to think through. One is that customers who were looking for, let’s say, an infrastructure link are now looking for an AI dial tone. They’re expecting to have AI available, always on, no matter where they are, accessing it for their users. Because AI is quickly, as you can see from the data here, becoming a top corporate priority. So that’s one thing. The second one is that the sovereignty means you need to make sure you’re controlling where is your data replicated to? Where does DR happen? How do you fail back within sovereign boundaries? Being able to establish that, something where the data services, something that you can establish or set as a differentiated capability, has been extremely important. And then lastly, you start thinking about what about within the MSP? There’s a noisy neighbor issue, but there’s a nosy neighbor issue, which is how do I make sure that someone inside can’t cross boundaries internally in an MSP and look at your data being hosted in a common location? This is an area that you’re going to want to look carefully at multi-tenancy and how the infrastructure protects your data even when some of the infrastructure is shared across users. Robert Dutt: So let’s shift and talk about containers, because I think that’s one of the areas that’s impactful but kind of hard for the audience to act on immediately. You have 87% increasing their containerization, 83% building new apps in containers. For MSPs who are still living in a virtual machine-centered world, which is probably a lot of them at this point in time, what’s the practical on-ramp? And honestly, how urgent is this? Do they have years to kind of figure this out and re-strategize, or is this a situation where if you’re not there, you’re already behind? Lee Caswell: I think for many customers who are running traditional applications and let’s say they move from an owned data center into a service provider model, the idea is that the applications may not be changing as fast as the container world might have them think. However, what you’re seeing is that new applications are built with containers because developers benefit from running in containers. What we’re finding though is most customers, the far majority of containers, are running in VMs. And they run in VMs because you’re able to now get the benefits of software agility – develop apps faster, eliminate testing dependencies, be able to run in distributed environments more quickly. Those benefits are married or matched with the resiliency of the underlying infrastructure so that individual components can fail. You can have day-two operations intact, and you’ve got integrated privacy and security and sovereignty. The idea that you’re going to run these both – it turns out we allow customers to run containers depending on their use case. If they were going to run on a bare metal instance, they can. If they want to run in the public cloud on EKS, for example, they can run our container Kubernetes stack, take advantage of our orchestration capabilities, but they don’t have to. For many customers, the fastest path to adopting containers will be to run containers in VMs, very familiar to our users and to the service provider base. What we’re encouraging them to get ready for is that even if they weren’t considering containers for traditional workloads, the fast adoption of AI workloads will bring a requirement for supporting containers. Think carefully around how do you leverage the training you already have, resilient infrastructure, all the things that our teams have been able to protect their downside, and still get access to the upside of new AI applications. We think running containers in VMs actually makes that the fastest path to container adoption. Robert Dutt: On AI agents, the survey shows a great deal of optimism around them. The productivity gains, the new revenue streams, all of that. But you also note that, as we talked about before, 79% of organizations can’t quite figure out how to manage the tools their employees are already using. Can you walk me through that disconnect? How do you go from “we can’t govern what we have” to “let’s deploy autonomous agents”? Lee Caswell: Yeah. Well, as you start thinking about what people have realized about AI, first, most customers have figured out that AI training will happen in the public cloud and that training requires huge investments, large power outlays that can only be taken on by the development of the models by the largest hyperscalers and some sovereign nations themselves. And so customers have been looking at, “I’m going to take models,” but then they quickly realize that the ability to have these models be useful in a particular company environment is dependent on having access to proprietary data. Think of support. If you want to support a product, it’s not interesting to have support in a general sense. You want to have support for your products, things that you may not want to expose, internal documents that are proprietary and private to your specific company. So now what you’re doing is basically taking these models, giving them access to your private data. And now the idea is, “I’m going to be able to take that inferencing model,” which is what this is called. Taking inferencing means you can take advantage of a software platform that abstracts the new hardware that’s required, GPUs, and abstracts the different types of models that you may choose over time. And so this is where you have these different LLMs. The ability to access those – we certify and validate the leading models so that they will run on the GPUs that are certified by our OEM partners. And so what we’re doing is taking out the risks. Effectively, what you do is leverage all the expertise you have for building an enterprise-level application today, and now be able to assimilate GPUs at the hardware layer and new LLMs at the software layer. And we’ll make it operate exactly the same as what you have today. Robert Dutt: 65% say that their AI applications are running today via managed service providers. That’s a pretty validating number for our audience, except for maybe the few who are going to say, “Well, what about the other 35%?” But, you know, can’t please everyone every time. I want to push though on what running AI via MSP actually means in practice. Are we talking about infrastructure hosting, model development and management, governance and compliance? What’s the service that MSPs are actually delivering today versus what they should be thinking about building towards for the future as this evolves? Lee Caswell: Yeah, I think the numbers overstate a little bit about how much training and skill building has actually happened already, because this would include things like SaaS-delivered services. And as you think of SaaS-delivered services like Copilot or ServiceNow or Salesforce, you’ll have AI-enhanced SaaS services that can be delivered by a service provider. What we’re anticipating and preparing service providers for is the idea that customers will, as they have private data to run their private models, be requiring dedicated equipment or provided services that give access to GPUs and LLMs that are beyond a SaaS-level model and now are actually specific applications for specific customer use case models. Robert Dutt: We talked about shadow AI a little earlier. I’m curious, speaking of future states for MSPs, is there a world where the MSP becomes kind of the governed alternative to shadow AI? Essentially the sanctioned AI service layer? Because that seems like a bigger play and a little bit harder to get your head around, but a bigger opportunity than just, “Hey, we host applications on GPUs now as well as CPUs.” Lee Caswell: I think so. And I think there’s a terrific both revenue and profit opportunity for service providers around this. First, there’s a services aspect of thinking about where do these applications run? Do they run in one location? Do they run across the hybrid cloud? So for anyone who’s working with cloud providers, how do I bridge this world out to this sovereign edge as we talked about? So that idea of how do I optimally locate applications, AI applications, and their associated data – that’s a very interesting workflow model to start with. And then next up, I think, is the idea of, well, where and how do I maintain sovereignty within this model? Service providers have a terrific opportunity to say, “Here are the limits within which your data and applications can move. And I’m going to provide that and give you some audit capabilities to manage any compliance risks that you have.” So terrific opportunity, I think, for service providers to become, as you mentioned, that governed alternative. And then finally, the idea that you would have a predictable cost model with tokens that allow you to share GPU resources means not just predictable, but lower cost than having an unpredictable model from the hyperscalers. We think this is actually a really compelling opportunity for service providers going forward. Robert Dutt: Can’t let you go without asking this one directly. A lot of our audience is in the middle of evaluating their virtualization platforms because of what’s happened with Broadcom and VMware. Within the survey data, is there anything about how those infrastructure decisions intersect with AI and sovereignty, the things we’ve been talking about, that you’d like to share? Are organizations treating this transition and the AI buildout as separate projects, or do things start to connect in an overall infrastructure refresh rethink? Lee Caswell: Well, I think some of the excitement from a service provider standpoint should be based on modeling or following what’s happening with the largest hyperscalers. I mean, you’re watching hyperscalers build out tens of billions of dollars of capital per month. We’ve never seen anything like this happen. And so that model, at a hyperscaler level, now what you’re thinking about is 82% from the survey of our respondents felt that their infrastructure was not fully ready for AI. And so building this out – I called this an AI dial tone earlier. The idea that similar to how you remember, Robert, how when you went to hotels, when Wi-Fi came along, all of a sudden Wi-Fi became de rigueur. You had to have it. If it wasn’t fast enough, people knew right away and responded very quickly. My view is we’re going to have exactly the same response to having fast, secure, and managed AI dial tones, if you will, for AI workloads, where you can apply your custom data or your private data and do that quickly using skills that you already have. For me, that means using a platform based on servers, based on certified GPUs, getting access to a changing set and world of LLMs. And being able to abstract both the hardware elements and the software elements means that you’re going to have customers be able to take all of the fast-changing AI world and bring it to their business problems more quickly. Robert Dutt: Before we wrap, a couple of lightning round questions, if you will. If a Canadian MSP is listening to this and thinking, “Okay, I need to do something differently,” what’s kind of the one thing based on what this data is showing that you’d tell them to prioritize in the next 12 months in terms of transforming their business? Lee Caswell: Yeah, I’d say number one is AI is coming. So prepare yourself. If you think you can get started nicely with small clusters, for example – one of the nice things about the Nutanix model is you can start small and grow from there. So start small, get a usable cluster ready for customers so they can try out how they can assimilate new GPU hardware, new AI LLMs. I think that’s essential. Also, in the process, what will happen is they’ll get experience with this new world of containers without giving up their virtualization expertise. That’s an extremely important step. If you try and do everything at once, it can be a lot. There are competitive solutions that force you to go to a Kubernetes-oriented management model. That’s a step too far for most service providers. If you think now what you could do instead is leverage your familiar virtualization skills, bring in the containerization, and allow customers to get started on shared infrastructure with a predictable cost. That’s a winning strategy for providing an on-ramp to AI with the lowest risk and a fast uptake. Robert Dutt: All right. And finally, so that the MSP audience can kind of keep an eye on what they need to keep in mind on the customer side, what’s the most dangerous assumption that you see IT leaders making right now about AI infrastructure? Lee Caswell: I think the most concerning thing I see is customers who are racing to be AI fast without being AI smart. And we saw some of this in the early days of the cloud. We remember “cloud first” versus “cloud smart.” And what happened was you had blown-up costs, you had programs that weren’t successful. But I’d say the most important thing actually has nothing to do with the infrastructure itself. It has to do with corporate management making sure that the application of AI is tied to a specific business problem. That’s the most important element. This is the thing I look for first. If you’re trying to solve an important business problem where you can ideally show that you can save money, generate more revenue, or do things more efficiently, those are the areas where you say AI is going to help here. Don’t just apply AI because it’s cool. Apply it because it’s going to solve a business problem, and you’ll find that you can actually move any infrastructure. We’ll bring that and make that work for you. Robert Dutt: Once again, it all kind of flows back to business outcomes. That’s great advice. I love that. Lee, thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Lee Caswell: Robert, I really appreciate it. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Lee Caswell from Nutanix on their 8th annual Enterprise Cloud Index. A couple of things I’d like to flag from that conversation. Lee’s distinction between a noisy neighbor and a nosy neighbor when it comes to multi-tenant environments and data sovereignty – that’s a framing worth sitting with if you’re thinking about how to position managed services around compliance. And his point about organizations racing to be AI fast without being AI smart – that’s one you can take directly to client conversations. We’ll have a link to the full Enterprise Cloud Index report in the show notes, as well as a full transcript of the conversation. Tomorrow on the show, AWS Canada celebrates 20 years of the cloud. I sat down with Eric Gales to talk about what that milestone looks like from a Canadian perspective, and we’ll be back next Monday to catch you up on the headlines with In Case You Missed It. Between now and then, we’d invite you to subscribe to or follow the podcast in your podcast app of choice. And if it lets you, please do leave a review. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

In this episode, we break down the Enterprise Cloud Services Sources Sought from the Department of the Navy supporting the Naval Network Warfare Command. This MA-IDIQ opportunity under NAICS 518210 focuses on secure Azure-based cloud operations, IL5/IL6 environments, Zero Trust architecture, and 24x7 enterprise support. Get key insights on scope, clearance requirements, and what contractors must prepare.Listen to podcast to understand the opportunity and stay ahead of the competition!Contact ProposalHelper at sales@proposalhelper.com to find similar opportunities and help you build a realistic and winning pipeline.

From Tesla to Tekion: How Jay Vijayan Is Transforming the Automotive Experience In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Jay Vijayan, Founder & CEO of Tekion and former CIO of Tesla, about revolutionizing the dealer-to-consumer automotive experience through a cloud-first, AI-powered SaaS platform. Jay shares how his time at Oracle, VMware, and Tesla inspired the vision for Tekion, now valued at over $4 billion and serving major OEMs and dealer groups across the U.S. Jay explains Tekion's three-cloud architecture—Retail Cloud, Enterprise Cloud, and Partner Cloud—and how it's streamlining operations, enabling e-commerce, and connecting a vast automotive ecosystem. He also unpacks Tekion's innovative use of AI agents to enhance after-sales service, deliver transparency, and empower both dealers and consumers. Key topics include: How Tekion modernizes the fragmented automotive retail experience The impact of AI co-pilots on vehicle service and customer trust Lessons from Tesla and Elon Musk that shape Tekion's product philosophy Jay's advice for CIOs aspiring to become CEOs

In this episode, guest host Andrew Connell, a Microsoft MVP of 21 years, joins Allen to unravel the complexities of Microsoft's AI strategy, particularly within the enterprise. They explore the world of Microsoft 365 Copilot, distinguishing it from the broader AI landscape and consumer tools like ChatGPT. Andrew provides an insider's look at how Copilot functions within a secure, private "enclave," leveraging a "Semantic Index" of your organization's data to provide relevant, contextual answers.The conversation then shifts to the developer experience. Discover the different ways developers can extend and customize Copilot, from low-code solutions in Copilot Studio to creating powerful "declarative agents" with JSON and even building "custom engine agents" where you can bring your own models and infrastructure. If you've ever wondered what Microsoft's AI story is for businesses and internal developers, this episode provides a comprehensive and honest overview.Timestamps:[00:00:01] - Introducing guest host Andrew Connell[00:00:54] - What is a Microsoft 365 developer?[00:01:40] - Andrew's journey into the Microsoft ecosystem[00:05:00] - 21 years as a Microsoft MVP[00:06:15] - Enterprise Cloud vs. Developer Cloud[00:08:06] - Microsoft's AI focus for the enterprise[00:10:57] - What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?[00:13:07] - How Copilot ensures data privacy with a "secure enclave"[00:14:58] - Understanding the Semantic Index[00:16:31] - Is Copilot a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system?[00:17:23] - Responsible AI in the Copilot stack[00:19:19] - The developer story for extending Copilot[00:22:43] - Building declarative agents with JSON and YAML[00:25:05] - Using actions and tools with agents[00:27:00] - How agents are deployed via Microsoft Teams[00:32:48] - Where does Copilot actually run?[00:36:20] - Key takeaways from Microsoft Build[00:41:20] - The spectrum of development: low-code to full-code[00:43:00] - Full control with Custom Engine Agents[00:49:30] - Where to find Andrew Connell onlineHashtags:#Microsoft #AI #Copilot #Microsoft365 #Azure #SharePoint #MicrosoftTeams #MVP #Developer #Podcast #Tech #EnterpriseSoftware #CloudComputing #ArtificialIntelligence #Agents #LowCode #NoCode #RAG

New global tariffs are making it more expensive and complicated for enterprises to manage their cloud services across regions. These changes are causing unpredictable costs and creating challenges for global cloud strategies. To stay ahead, companies need to improve visibility, automate processes, and tailor governance to each region.Time Stamps:0:00 - Welcome to the Tech Field Day News Rundown1:12 - AI Application Delivery: Same Old, Slightly Smarter4:29 - Is the Site Down? It's a Secret to Everyone7:43 - Is AI Inferencing the Edge's Long-Awaited Killer App?10:21 - VMware Unregisters Lowest Partner Tier13:21 - Walmart's Smart AI Agent Strategy Could Lead Enterprise Automation15:38 - RSA Encryption Closer to Quantum Breakthrough19:25 - Tariffs hit Enterprise Cloud26:34 - The Weeks Ahead28:10 - Thanks for Watching the Tech Field Day News RundownGuest Host: Brad Gregory, Principal and Cloud Networking Strategist, MCN StrategiesFollow our hosts ⁠⁠⁠⁠Tom Hollingsworth⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠Alastair Cooke⁠⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠Stephen Foskett⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow Tech Field Day ⁠⁠⁠⁠on LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠, on ⁠⁠⁠⁠X/Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠, on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠, and on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Mastodon⁠⁠⁠⁠.

"If AI has proven anything, it will change pretty rapidly. Understanding its limitations and not asking too much of it is significant. What's successful is prototyping tools," said Rob Whiteley, CEO of Coder. "Such tools where AI can create an application, while not the world's most graceful code but will get you to working prototype pretty quickly. That would probably take me days or weeks of research as a developer, but now I have a working prototype so I can socialise it."In this episode of the Tech Transformed podcast, Dana Gardner, a thought leader, speaks with Rob Whiteley, CEO of Coder, about the transformative impact of agentic AI on software development. They discuss how AI is changing the roles of developers, the cultural shifts required in development teams, and the integration of AI agents in cloud development environments.Agentic AI is seemingly set up for favourable outcomes. Or is it? Agentic AI is believed to shake-up enterprise IT, offering a productivity boost similar to the iPhone's impact. This isn't about replacing developers but amplifying their output tenfold. It aims to allow the implementation of rapidly created solutions and iteration that has been unimaginable in the past. This shift requires valuing "soft skills" like communication and collaboration over pure coding proficiency, as developers guide AI "pair programmers."The synergy of AI agents, human intellect, and Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) is key. CDEs provide secure, governed, and scalable platforms for this collaboration, allowing developers to focus on business logic and innovation while AI handles the coding groundwork. This requires a move from rigid "gates" in development processes to flexible "guardrails" within CDEs. Such a move fosters innovation with built-in control and security.Flexibility and choice are vital in this constantly advancing AI space. CDEs enable organisations to select the best AI agents for specific tasks, avoiding vendor lock-in by expressing the development environment as code. This leads to practical applications like faster prototyping, enhanced code development, and automated testing, significantly boosting code output. Furthermore, agentic AI democratises development, empowering non-engineers to build solutions.Preparing for this future requires proactive experimentation through AI labs, engaging early adopters, and viewing AI as an augmentation of human skills. Watch the podcast for more insights on CDEs and the impact of AI agents on enterprise cloud development. TakeawaysAgentic AI is a transformative technology for software development.The role of developers is shifting from hard skills to soft skills.AI agents can significantly increase productivity in coding tasks.Organizations need to rethink their development strategies to integrate AI.Cloud development environments are essential for safely using AI agents.Choosing the right AI agent is crucial for effective development.Security and governance are critical when integrating AI into development.AI can empower non-developers to create applications.Guardrails are more effective than gates in managing AI development.Organisations should experiment with AI to find the best fit for their needs.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Agentic AI and Developer Roles03:20 Transformative Impact of AI on Development06:50 Cultural Shifts in Development Teams10:30 Integrating AI Agents in Cloud Development Environments12:49 Choosing the Right AI Agents15:21 Security and Governance in AI...

On Wednesday, Google rolled out updates to several of its first-party media-generating AI models available through its Vertex AI cloud platform. Lyria, Google's text-to-music model, is now available in preview for select customers, and the company's Veo 2 video creation model has been enhanced with new editing and visual effects customization options. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this Tech Barometer podcast, go behind the 2025 Enterprise Cloud Index findings numbers with Nutanix AI and cloud native...[…]

Back from some recent travel, we look at why it's important to listen to people from around the world to understand the differences between how global regions adopt technology. SHOW: 856SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #856 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO:  https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:  http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST:  "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSOR:Access Gartner cloud research come to life with the “The Future of Cloud in 2028: From Technology to Business Necessity,” webinar.Secure your seat for Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 with our early bird savings of $400 off standard rates now.  SHOW NOTES:LARGER FACTORS PLAY A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN TECHNOLOGY OUTSIDE THE USDiffusion of informationCurrency exchangeGovernment laws, embargoes, tariffsLanguage and timezone differencesLocal culture, norms, expectationsFEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @cloudcastpodInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod

Amazon Web Services recently held their re:Inforce conference, as the company attempts to partner with customers to deliver a securre environment. Following the shared responsibility model concept that was the focus last year, it seems that the company is emphasizing that security is a job for everyone in the modern cloud. We also saw product announcements from AWS, including enhancements to Nitro that control access to the underlying infrastructure. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Cold Open 0:54 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:47 - Veeam Looks to Cyber-Resiliency 6:21 - Enthusiasm for AI in the Enterprise is Waning 10:44 - Microsoft to Improve Security after Recall Delay 14:16 - Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI Join Forces 17:33 - Pure Storage Confirms Unauthorized Access 19:53 - Google Shares the Scope of Enterprise Cloud at Cloud Field Day 25:16 - Announcements from AWS re:Inforce 37:33 - The Weeks Ahead 39:56 - Thanks for Watching Hosts: Stephen Foskett: https://www.twitter.com/SFoskett Krista Macomber, Research Director of Cybersecurity at The Futurum Group: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krista-macomber/ Follow Gestalt IT Website: https://www.GestaltIT.com/ Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/GestaltIT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/Gestalt-IT Tags: #Rundown, @Veeam, @Microsoft, @OpenAI, @Oracle, @PureStorage, @SnowflakeDB, @Google, @GoogleCloud, @AWSCloud, @TheFuturumGroup, @GestaltIT, @SFoskett, @Krista_Lee, @TechFieldDay,

Many Cisco enterprise customers have decades of Catalyst routing and security capabilities functioning at branch locations. As distributed sites grow in complexity, networking teams must rethink how to manage and secure these locations more efficiently with automation and policy management. Listen in as we discuss how Cisco SD-Routing is the ideal solution to gain full lifecycle management and simplified security deployments of your routing environments. Resources www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/c…ng-faq-cte-en.html Cisco Guests: Deepak Kothari, Leader,Product Manager, Enterprise Cloud & SD-WAN, Cisco Madhu Manusanipalli, Technical Marekting Engineer, Cisco Cisco Champion Hosts: Alan Gardner(www.linkedin.com/in/alangard/) CEO, Current Technologies Computer Learning Center Liam Keegan (www.linkedin.com/in/liamjkeegan/) Advisor Kenny Paula, Information Security Professional - College Instructor. East Penn Mfg and Reading Area Community College Moderator Danielle, Customer Voices and Cisco Champion Program

What will be the adoption patterns for AI within the Enterprise? Will it follow the early days of Cloud Computing, or will new and different patterns emerge? SHOW: 810SHOW TRANSCRIPT: Cloudcast #810 SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW NOTES:WHAT WERE THE PATTERNS FOR ENTERPRISE IT AND CLOUD?Shadow ITHigh-scalability or Short-term Projects (and experimentation)Migration via “Cloud First” initiativesDifficult stuff came lastWHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT AI vs. CLOUD?CPU to CPU was easier to calculate vs. CPU + GPUHave we learned any lessons about how to value people's productivity?Does Enterprise AI need a Crawl, Walk, Run scenario? Do they need to be sequential and linked? Are Enterprise AI use-cases well defined? How long is the Enterprise willing to fail at experiments? What's the Enterprise tolerance for GenAI “flaws” (e.g. hallucinations, lack of citations, etc.)Will GenAI rejuvenate Predictive AI projects in the Enterprise? FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @cloudcastpodInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod

The cloud revolutionised how businesses operate, but managing dynamic, complex environments presents new and unique challenges.While digital transformation has brought significant benefits, the reality is that organisations now require innovative solutions to effectively navigate intricate, hybrid, multi-cloud environments.Evolven Software, driven by a mission to simplify complexity and mitigate risk, empowers large organisations to overcome the challenges of governing extensive hybrid ecosystems. By harnessing the power of AI/ML, Evolven enables a more secure, streamlined, and efficient cloud journey with fewer outages or compliance gaps.In this episode of the EM360 Podcast, industry veteran Tom Croll, advisor at Lionfish Tech Advisors, speaks to Sasha Gilenson, Founder and CEO of Evolven Software, to discuss: The current state of enterprise cloud architectures and the challenges in managing hybrid multi-cloud environments.Why managing risk in hybrid multi-cloud environments demands a new paradigm.The unique challenges large organizations face in maintaining visibility, control, and governance across their landscapes.How Evolven's AI/ML-driven solution empowers enterprises to overcome this complexity, enhance security, and optimize performance.

אורן יונגר, שותף בקרן הון סיכון גלובלית GGV Capital שהשקיעה בין היתר בחברות Zendesk  Airbnb, HashiCorp, Slack, Square ובסטארטאפים הישראלים Torq, Wing Security, Orca Security, Pecan, Monte Carlo Data, Snappy, Descope . הקרן מנהלת 9.2 מיליארד דולר ומאז הקמתה הונפקו 56 חברות בהן השקיעה.  GGV מתמקדת בהשקעות בשלבים מוקדמים – Seed, Series A, Series B וממשיכה להשקיע עד שלבי Pre-IPO . תחומי ההתמקדות העיקריים של הקרן הם Enterprise/Cloud ,Social/Internet ו Smart Tech-.בתחום האנטרפרייז, משקיעי GGV מתמקדים באבטחת סייבר, כלים למפתחים, דאטה, SaaS עבור עסקים קטנים ובינוניים וחברות API-First . לפני הצטרפותו לקרן GGV בשנת 2018 שימש אורן מנהל אבטחת מידע ב-Clicktale ובבית ההשקעות IBI וכן יועץ אבטחה ופרטיות בדלויט. בשרותו הצבאי אורן ניהל את תחום אבטחת מידע ביחידת מודיעין בפיקוד העורף. במקביל לניהול בקרן, אורן שותף בהקמת InvestInData, המאגדת עשרות מנהלים בכירים בתפקידי דאטה בנושאי השקעות ושל SVCI, סינדיקט של כ-60 מנהלי אבטחת מידע מובילים בעמק הסיליקון שמבצעים יחד השקעות בסטרטאפים מבטיחים. אורן הוא בעל תואר שני במינהל עסקים מאוניברסיטת שיקגו ובוגר תואר ראשון במדעי המחשב ממכללת תל אביב יפו.  חברת הסטארטאפ Monte Carlo פיתחה ומנהלת פלטפורמת ״data observability" לניטור נתונים ושמירה על מהימנותם. החברה הוקמה ב-2019 על ידי בר מוזס וליאור גביש וגייסה 236 מיליון דולר בארבעה סבבים בשווי שהגיע ל-1.6 מיליארד דולר. בשנים האחרונות רשמה החברה צמיחה של מאות אחוזים במכירות ומספר לקוחותיה. בשנים האחרונות רשמה החברה צמיחה של מאות אחוזים במכירות ומספר לקוחותיה וכיום משרתת חברות כגון Fox, JetBlue, Affirm, SoFi, GitLab OpenTable, PepsiCo ומאות חברות פרטיות וציבוריות נוספות. בר מוזס משמשת מנכ"לית מונטה קרלו מאז הקמת החברה. לפני כן היא שימשה סמנכ"לית בסטארטאפ Gainsight ויועצת בהנהלת Bain & Co. בר היא בעלת תואר ראשון במתמטיקה ומדעי החישוב מאוניברסיטת סטנפורד. היא שרתה בחיל האויר וקיבלה אות הצטיינות.   (*) ללינקדאין שלי: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guykatsovich/ (*) לאינסטגרם שלי: https://www.instagram.com/guykatsovich/ (*) עקבו אחרינו ב"עוד פודקאסט לסטארטאפים" וקבלו פרק מדי שבוע: ספוטיפיי:https://open.spotify.com/show/0dTqS27ynvNmMnA5x4ObKQ אפל פודקאסט:https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1252035397 גוגל פודקאסט:https://bit.ly/3rTldwq עוד פודקאסט - האתר שלנו:https://omny.fm/shows/odpodcast ה-RSS פיד שלנו:https://www.omnycontent.com/.../f059ccb3-e0c5.../podcast.rssSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Console Connect's CTO, Paul Gampe, explains why Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is poised to play a major role in the future of enterprise networking. What will it take to deliver secure, reliable, and scalable connectivity to the cloud? In this Executives at the Edge episode, host Pascal Menezes explores these topics and more with Paul Gampe of... Read More The post Network-as-a-Service: The Enterprise Cloud Revolution appeared first on MEF.

A cloud-native security platform that provides comprehensive protection for cloud-based applications, including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Slack, Avanan differs from traditional security solutions that require cumbersome installations and configurations, instead offering a seamless integration with existing cloud environments and advanced threat detection and response capabilities that don't disrupt workflows. Visit https://avanan.com for more.

Companies are shifting to cloud as part of a broader IT modernization journey. Yet, the complexity of designing, deploying and managing enterprise cloud can be daunting. How can companies navigate these challenges and maximize value creation? Vincent Leung from Kyndryl shared how enterprises can fast track cloud transformation to realize their growth aspirations.  Background music by fiftysounds

Hello and welcome to the new episode of the Risk Management Show brought to you by Global Risk Community. We spoke with Fausto Lendeborg, a Co-Founder & CCO at Secberus and CSA Advisory member. We discussed the following topics. Importance of risk-based approach; Federating risk to the right owner; Reducing time for fraud investigations and more... If you want to be our guest, or you know some one who would be a great guest on our show, just send your email to info@globalriskconsult.com with a subject line “Global Risk Community Show” and give a brief explanation of what topic you would like to to talk about and we will be in touch with you asap.

Paul Puckett, Director of the Army's Enterprise Cloud Management Agency joins Tech Transforms to shed some light on one of government technology's most used buzzwords: Zero Trust. Listen in as Carolyn and Tracy learn what it really means to remove implicit trust and how agencies are prioritizing user experience and data protection. Episode Table of Contents[01:03] The Enterprise Cloud Management Agency [10:41] The Context of Zero Trust [19:55] A Zero Trust Reference Architecture [29:28] Protecting the Data that Falls to the Zero Trust Architecture [39:00] The Traditional Dogma [50:07] Data Sharing on Zero Trust Episode Links and Resources Episode Links and Resourceshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/paulbp3/ (Paul Puckett) https://www.army.mil/ecma (ECMA) https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/M-22-09.pdf (White House Memo on Zero Trust) https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-207/final (Zero Trust Architecture)

Our anchors begin today's show with CNBC's Mike Santoli looking ahead to the impact of tomorrow's inflation numbers on high-growth tech trading, and Morgan Stanley Head of Global Auto Research Adam Jonas offers his thoughts on a potential car from Apple. Then, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman and Code.org Co-Founder and CEO Hadi Partovi join after signing a new letter alongside 500 other corporate leaders calling on governors to expand access to computer science classes in schools across the country. Later, data management company NetApp CEO George Kurian offers his outlook for macro and foreign exchange crosswinds affecting the enterprise cloud space.

C'était donc ça le monde d'après ! L'histoire d'un monde que l'on espérait meilleur après la pandémie, après les premiers mois de confinement en 2020 : un monde prospère d'un point de vue économique, quand les restrictions seraient levées, mais aussi un monde plus respectueux de l'environnement, plus solidaire entre riches et pauvres, entre pays développés et pays moins développés.  Au lieu de cela, qu'avons-nous ? Une guerre impliquant l'une des grandes puissances de la planète, une inflation généralisée et qui crève les plafonds en Europe et aux États-Unis, des crises alimentaire et énergétique, des pénuries de biens et de main d'œuvre.  Sans faire de catastrophisme, que prévoir pour les prochaines semaines et les prochains mois ? La Chine panse ses plaies du zéro-Covid, la récession guette les États-Unis, les Occidentaux bataillent contre l'inflation. De nombreux pays confrontés aux problèmes énergétiques réactivent leurs centrales à charbon et activent des sanctions toujours plus fortes contre la Russie, engagée dans un combat militaire sans merci en Ukraine. Ont-ils raison d'aller si loin ? Qui va gagner la partie ?     NOTRE PREMIÈRE INVITÉE  Agathe Demarais, directrice des prévisions mondiales de l'Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), le Centre de recherche indépendant du magazine The Economist. Membre du réseau d'expert·es du World Economic Forum. Son livre, Backfire, qui porte sur les effets secondaires des sanctions américaines, paraîtra fin 2022 aux Presses Universitaires de Columbia.    NOTRE ENTRETIEN EXCLUSIF  Dans la seconde partie de l'émission, vous pourrez entendre un long entretien exclusif accordé par les dirigeants de Huawei en Afrique. Philippe Wang, vice-président exécutif de Huawei Northern Africa, et Colin Hu, président Enterprise & Cloud de Huawei Northern Africa, dévoilent leur stratégie pour les années à venir. Le cloud, la protection des données, la cybersécurité, les villes intelligentes, la couverture réseau. Ils répondent aussi aux critiques qui visent le groupe et aux accusations d'espionnage.  NOS REPORTAGES Ça repart en Chine ! Pour la première fois en 4 mois, l'activité manufacturière et les services sont en augmentation. Une reprise liée à la baisse des contaminations et à la levée des restrictions sanitaires. Le « sommet des multinationales » s'est tenu à Qingdao sur la côte est du pays. Pour cette troisième édition, il a beaucoup été question de robots. Reportage de notre correspondant Stéphane Lagarde.  C'est la pépite du numérique en Tunisie. « Go My Code » s'est spécialisée dans les cours de codage informatique et connaît un succès qui dépasse désormais les frontières tunisiennes. Casablanca, Abidjan, Dakar, Lagos, Le Caire, et bientôt Kigali, Accra ou encore Nairobi. La société du secteur de la EdTech souhaite accélérer sa conquête du continent africain. C'est à Tunis que tout a commencé. Notre correspondante Amira Souilem s'est glissée sur les bancs de cette école un peu particulière pour tenter de déceler les raisons de ce succès.  NOTRE DERNIER ENTRETIEN Inetum est l'une des plus importantes sociétés de service du numérique français. Avec 27.000 employés dans le monde et un chiffre d'affaires de 2,2 milliards d'euros en 2020, elle vient de changer d'actionnaire de référence. Bain Capital a succédé au qatari Mannaï. C'est une nouvelle étape dans le développement de cette entreprise qui compte renforcer sa présence en Afrique. Son PDG Vincent Rouaix est interrogé par Olivier Rogez.  Retrouvez-nous sur Facebook et Twitter.

C'était donc ça le monde d'après ! L'histoire d'un monde que l'on espérait meilleur après la pandémie, après les premiers mois de confinement en 2020 : un monde prospère d'un point de vue économique, quand les restrictions seraient levées, mais aussi un monde plus respectueux de l'environnement, plus solidaire entre riches et pauvres, entre pays développés et pays moins développés.  Au lieu de cela, qu'avons-nous ? Une guerre impliquant l'une des grandes puissances de la planète, une inflation généralisée et qui crève les plafonds en Europe et aux États-Unis, des crises alimentaire et énergétique, des pénuries de biens et de main d'œuvre.  Sans faire de catastrophisme, que prévoir pour les prochaines semaines et les prochains mois ? La Chine panse ses plaies du zéro-Covid, la récession guette les États-Unis, les Occidentaux bataillent contre l'inflation. De nombreux pays confrontés aux problèmes énergétiques réactivent leurs centrales à charbon et activent des sanctions toujours plus fortes contre la Russie, engagée dans un combat militaire sans merci en Ukraine. Ont-ils raison d'aller si loin ? Qui va gagner la partie ?     NOTRE PREMIÈRE INVITÉE  Agathe Demarais, directrice des prévisions mondiales de l'Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), le Centre de recherche indépendant du magazine The Economist. Membre du réseau d'expert·es du World Economic Forum. Son livre, Backfire, qui porte sur les effets secondaires des sanctions américaines, paraîtra fin 2022 aux Presses Universitaires de Columbia.    NOTRE ENTRETIEN EXCLUSIF  Dans la seconde partie de l'émission, vous pourrez entendre un long entretien exclusif accordé par les dirigeants de Huawei en Afrique. Philippe Wang, vice-président exécutif de Huawei Northern Africa, et Colin Hu, président Enterprise & Cloud de Huawei Northern Africa, dévoilent leur stratégie pour les années à venir. Le cloud, la protection des données, la cybersécurité, les villes intelligentes, la couverture réseau. Ils répondent aussi aux critiques qui visent le groupe et aux accusations d'espionnage.  NOS REPORTAGES Ça repart en Chine ! Pour la première fois en 4 mois, l'activité manufacturière et les services sont en augmentation. Une reprise liée à la baisse des contaminations et à la levée des restrictions sanitaires. Le « sommet des multinationales » s'est tenu à Qingdao sur la côte est du pays. Pour cette troisième édition, il a beaucoup été question de robots. Reportage de notre correspondant Stéphane Lagarde.  C'est la pépite du numérique en Tunisie. « Go My Code » s'est spécialisée dans les cours de codage informatique et connaît un succès qui dépasse désormais les frontières tunisiennes. Casablanca, Abidjan, Dakar, Lagos, Le Caire, et bientôt Kigali, Accra ou encore Nairobi. La société du secteur de la EdTech souhaite accélérer sa conquête du continent africain. C'est à Tunis que tout a commencé. Notre correspondante Amira Souilem s'est glissée sur les bancs de cette école un peu particulière pour tenter de déceler les raisons de ce succès.  NOTRE DERNIER ENTRETIEN Inetum est l'une des plus importantes sociétés de service du numérique français. Avec 27.000 employés dans le monde et un chiffre d'affaires de 2,2 milliards d'euros en 2020, elle vient de changer d'actionnaire de référence. Bain Capital a succédé au qatari Mannaï. C'est une nouvelle étape dans le développement de cette entreprise qui compte renforcer sa présence en Afrique. Son PDG Vincent Rouaix est interrogé par Olivier Rogez.  Retrouvez-nous sur Facebook et Twitter.

About TylerLifelong learner, passionate coach, obsessed with continuous improvement, avid solver of people puzzles.Links: United Airlines: https://www.united.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerslove/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Couchbase Capella database as a service is flexible, full-featured, and fully managed with built-in access via Key-Value SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents align to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling, while reducing costs. Capella has the best price-performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/ScreamingintheCloud to try Capella today for free, and be up and running in 3 minutes. No credit card required. Couchbase Capella make your data sing.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance query accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service, although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLAP and OLTP—don't ask me to pronounce those acronyms again—workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time-consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Calling this show Screaming in the Cloud has been pretty… easy most of the time because that's mostly what I do: I shake my fist and I yell at clouds. And most companies are okay with that. Today's guest is likely a little bit on the other side of that because when I'm screaming at clouds, it's often out the window, when I'm in a plane.Today, I'm joined by Tyler Slove, who's a Senior Manager in the Enterprise Cloud and DevOps Group at United Airlines, a company I spend way too much time dealing with when we're not in the midst of a global pandemic. Tyler, thank you for joining me.Tyler: Yeah. Thanks for the invite, Corey. Really excited to be here.Corey: So, I want to talk a little bit about, first, how glad I am to finally talk to you because airlines are kind of like computers—and particularly cloud—where when you first see it, it is magic; it is transformative, it's endless possibilities, the power of flight slash instant provisioning of computer resources. Okay, so not everyone is going to find those quite the same way. What's novel today is commonplace tomorrow, and then you get annoyed because your plane is 20 minutes late as it hurls you through the sky to the other side of the planet with the miracle of flight while you're on the internet the whole way. And it's one of those problems where it is sort of definitionally, a thankless job. It is either in the background that just empowers things, or everyone's yelling at you on Twitter. So, given that you work with both sides of that, how do you find that commonality to play out in your world?Tyler: Yeah, it's an interesting thought, and I hadn't necessarily connected the dots before. Because I, like you, are just as frustrated when that flight is, like, 20 minutes delayed. It's like, “Oh, I wanted to be—[laugh]—where I wanted to be at that time.” And, you know, when you think about it, it's actually an ongoing joke I have with one of my mentors. Like, airlines should not work; when you think about the maintenance, the aircraft, the crews, the weather, legal stuff, like, it's amazing how complex they are, and it's something that's kept me interested for, you know, the first three years that I've been here.But it is similar, actually, to being in an operational role, right? You do everything right, everything's resilient, you roll through an Amazon, like, region-specific issue without any blips, and no one reaches out to you. But you know, you have one issue, and then it's you're getting out of bed at three in the morning, and everyone's got a big retrospective about why you didn't do something that could have resulted in that not happening. And I can see the parallel.Corey: We all tend to have blind spots, and I more or less had my idea of big enterprise technology fixed a while back. And it occurred to me a few years ago that this is probably no longer accurate because I'm sitting here thinking of, well, United Airlines—with whom I do extortionately large amount of travel, let's be very clear here; we're talking I think I did 140,000 miles domestically flown in 2019, the last year that was even close to normal. Protip: Don't fly that much. It really winds up doing a number on your internal clock and having any semblance of life. But I'm sitting there thinking that it's old-school technology; there's a mainframe that powers all of this, and all of the staff checking me in are using these ancient Unix green screens has always been my assumption.And that thought occurred to me as I'm staring at my iPhone, checking in automatically in the mobile app—that was very modern and working at the same time—and the penny finally dropped for me of this is probably not accurate, how I'm envisioning the technology on the back end working. And there have been announcements that United is moving an awful lot of its systems to AWS specifically. What is that—I don't want to call it modernization because that sends the wrong undertone or subtext to it, but what has that cloud transformation been like?Tyler: So, it's the marrying together of those two things without the time that you would potentially want to just rewrite the functionality that the mainframes that have gotten us to do the amount of you know flights and revenue that we do, and that are rock solid, like, we don't get the chance to shut that thing down for three months and rebuild it—or what would be, realistically, more like three years. So, it's how do we build a—Corey: Yeah, it's a heck of a delay notice to put on the airport flight thing: “Flight delayed?” “Oh, when is it rescheduled to?” “2025.” Yeah, turns out that doesn't usually happen.Tyler: Yeah, and so we've got to do it at the same time. And there's, you know, analogies of, like, changing the tire while you're driving or changing the engine on the jet while it's flying. And we've actually—it's felt like that, but it's been in an exciting way. So, we really are able to decouple the front end from the back end or some of the core systems and then, piece-by-piece, modernize them, and do them in a way that is safe and responsible, given you know, the amount of folks that are relying on us to get to where they want to go every day.So yeah, it's been challenging for sure, but it's also the right thing to do. It's the direction we need to go where we can focus more of our engineering talent, which is scarce or limited, you know, we would rather have folks invested in improving the user experience instead of—what we have is a world-class data center, but you know, the number of people that are focused on making that what it is, I would much rather see that happen—or that investment be put into a higher up the value chain.Corey: It's also, on some level, on a baseline trying to understand how it all fits together. You look at the challenges that an airline has, you have challenges with labor, with press, with you know, the big problem of the logistics of not just the scheduling and the rest of making sure that everything flows throughout an enormous what is effectively logistics network, but also the, you know, the minor detail of keeping the planes in the sky when they're supposed to be in the sky. And it feels like on some other you flip through the list of concerns a company has, and technology in the computer sense feels like it's going to be, like, chapter 47 of that giant book. Obviously, that's not true because technology is an empowering story. It is not just the booking system; it controls, more or less, everything.At some level, I'd like to make fun of big companies saying, “Oh, we're not a”—insert whatever the company really does here—“We're a tech company.” But without technology, I don't think you, at this point, have much of an airline. How do you see yourselves in the broader sense? Are you increasingly a tech company?Tyler: We are increasingly a tech company. I think we're… we're seen as partners with the VPs of the different functional areas, right? It's not a separation of the business and IT the way that maybe we would have thought about it five or ten years ago. It's, both of us can't be successful without each other, and the functions have come to trust that we will spend the time we need to understand the problems that they're solving, and we'll bring different perspectives, we're going to bring technical solutions, but we're also going to bring, you know, potentially system or flow changes and business process improvements. And that takes some getting—that right a few times and building up that trust and spending the time you need to, like, go past, “Oh, here's a set of user stories. Just do them.” Of, like, “What are we trying to solve here? Could we just remove this process? Do we even need to do this thing anymore?” And once you prove yourself, I've never felt like we've been put in a backroom or seen as a lower priority. We're working on the same stuff together, and we win or lose together.Corey: I know a lot about the airline industry because I go to tech conferences, and when I'm at tech conferences, invariably the speaker—who's usually J. Paul Reed, but not always—decides to talk about computers, and incident response, and the rest through the lens of the airline industry, which for some reason has always been one of those neck and neck things that are just completely inseparable for those types of talks. And they talk about airline incidents, and very often it's not even, like, the horrifying headline-making stuff, but things like two aircraft passed closer to one another than they should have, and the NTSB does a full investigation. And they talk about how, “Oh, this is exactly the sort of thing you should do whenever there's a computer-related issue.” And I am curious, given that you do in fact have those investigations with the plane-facing stuff, how much of that culture carries over into the, “Hmm. We took a systems outage on the computer side.” And how much of that is similar versus how much of this is just conference-ware.Tyler: It's actually quite similar; that part of our culture permeates through. And we're actually looking at what's the right level of time to spend to get to the root cause when sometimes it's hard to explain in computers. Or there's so many variables that it's going to take us, you know, weeks or dozens of hours to really get there. But yeah, after any significant incident, we're religious about having a follow-up problem review where we get all the information that we need, and we, kind of, are expected to figure out exactly—like, replay what happened, step-by-step, and what were the controls that were in place to avoid such a thing, and were those complied with or not, et cetera. And earlier at my time in United, definitely was frustrated with how—I'm like, “I just need to get back to delivery. We've got this—this sprint is ending, and I can't spend four hours doing this.”Like, that was a… what was seen as, like, a one-time event. And I don't think that all the things that culminated in that are going to happen again, and I've done a few things that I feel are going to mitigate the risk moving forward, but actually, I've changed my perspective on this now. So, we are forcing—or not even forcing; we're simulating major incidents and then doing that type of a problem review so that we can learn ahead of time and we can make it a heck of a lot more fun [laugh] and open and transparent conversation. So hey, me or someone from my team gets behind the curtain and, like, creates some simulation of a major issue in one of our pre-production environments, and then the team that's responsible for the operations and whatnot of that response.And we look at what alerts went off? What alerts do we expect to go off that didn't? What was maybe a leading indicator that we aren't yet looking at? And kind of so we're calling that a game day, and we took that, you know, from—AWS has influenced our thinking on that, or they contributed to it. And it's a really good way to build those relationships, when there's not a lot on the line, you're not coming around what could be a customer-impacting negative experience, which is, you know, really what drives us to do good work is to make sure that never happens.And it does happen, but you know, we're getting more and more resilient. And this is a way to turn that on its head and be able to take the positive of that, and get the spirit, and get people to collaborate better because they—like, “Hey, I did that fun thing together. Now, when we're in the heat of it, we're going to collaborate better, we're going to be, kind of, more open with the information we're sharing because we understand each other's people and their intentions, and you know, where someone's coming from.” So, yeah, we were pretty excited about that.Corey: I have to admit I'm a little on the envious side about how your timing has worked out. Because back in 2008, when the cloud was still a new thing and some of the early adopters were diving in, the experience really sucked. I mean, this was before CloudFormation and other ways of managing systems. And by migrating over the last few years, so many of those sharp edges have been smoothed, and established patterns and processes, and understanding of how cloud interplays with enterprise IT has evolved dramatically. What has been your experience migrating to AWS? What's worked well and what hasn't?Tyler: Yeah, so the migration itself has been very deliberate. So, we were focused on AWS from the beginning, and it was—we believe that they're a leader, that they're going to give us what we need, but also we didn't want to fragment our engineers across multiple platforms and have them have to pick a team. Like, “Am I going to choose to learn how to build stuff in AWS, or GCP?” So, from just a transformation, and to get everybody on the same page, and upskill the organization, we're focused on AWS. And there's definitely, like, some learning curve, or moving into an environment where there used to be a centralized team that handled a lot of stuff for you and made it magic—like, as an engineer; I just have to make sure that my app builds, and then I can send it to someone, and they're going to deploy it, and it's going to work and then you know, we… shifting the responsibility to, okay, we actually believe that if—we could do that; we could just have the same function that did that in the on-prem world, do that for you in the cloud world, but our belief is that we come up with better software when the engineer understands and can control the entire workload and that it's like, “Hey, I can configure my app to take advantage of this particular portion of the underlying infrastructure.”And that became very clear with, like, Lambda or things like that, where it's… you know, there's only so many configurations, and it doesn't make sense to try to get someone else to do that for you. So, there's mindset changes that had to happen. There's also just, like, proving it out. Like, is this going to be more reliable than our data center, which is extremely reliable? And there have been issues in the cloud, like, where we have something running parallel, and we have a cloud issue and it didn't impact on-prem.So, how do we learn from that? And then how do we kind of continue on and figure out, how do we build resilient workloads in the cloud? How do we make sure that we cover our bases on not just getting it running, but like, getting it running the right way, and then doing the testing that we need to do—like I mentioned earlier on the game days—to really be confident in it so that we can ultimately move away from needing to have any sort of backup in the data center.Corey: I was poking around in an AWS account recently, and it looked like there were seven different ways of managing the systems that have been brought to bear in that account, and different design philosophies, competing approaches. And the sad part is that this was my personal AWS account. No one else has ever built anything in that account except for me. And if I have that problem as one person—admittedly a strange person—I can't imagine what the governance story around something like AWS looks like for an organization that has thousands of people working in your IT org. How do you wind up managing the way to build things appropriately?I can't fathom—even though I am a fan of ClickOps—just letting everyone loose with admin rights in the AWS console. There has to be some form of gating approach. Is that done through patterns? Is that done through some sort of internal platform that abstracts away for folks? How are you managing this?Tyler: Yeah, so this is one of the things that led to a learning curve at the beginning, but I think it's worthwhile. And I can't take credit for this because it was a decision that happened before I came, but we're all-in on infrastructure as code. So, we're not extremely prescriptive about what that means across the entire enterprise, but you cannot deploy anything into an environment, like, higher than a development area without it being defined as CloudFormation and promoted through. And that allows us consistency, auditability, [laugh] and a lot of other things.So, that was kind of phase one, and that's been—I believe—in place since we started in the cloud. Like, maybe there were some pocket accounts and some things that existed before, but once we were all-in, and it was, kind of, official that's been in place. And I'm glad we held to that because there's been a lot of, like, “Oh, just remove that. Let people build stuff through the console because they need to move fast.” And we're like, “Yes, that would move them fast right now, but the level of inconsistency would be extremely risky to be able to handle that, and handle production incidents if you don't have a pre-prod environment to test the patch that you're trying to put in on the fly, that manages hundreds of orders a second.”So, we started with CloudFormation. We were kind of all-in on CloudFormation, and then over the last year or so—maybe a little bit longer—it's become apparent that CloudFormation has some limitations. And it can be also intimidating to have to, in excruciating detail, like, define every single parameter of every resource you're trying to create. And—Corey: It's wordy. It's YAML or JSON, whichever one you hate the most, invariably, is the one you're dealing with today. And yeah, it has its limitations.Tyler: Yeah. And then they're sharing that happens, right? So, it's like, I've got someone that I go to lunch with, that's like, “Oh, I just built this solution. It's all in CloudFormation.” They send it over, and then I'm looking at, it's like, “Can I reuse this? Which parameters here are things that I should change for my app, and which ones are there because security mandated it, or it's part of, like, a corporate compliance thing, or other reasons why?”So, what we are really excited about in the last few months, we've really invested in CDK constructs and being able to define. You know, as my small team, we have visibility and strong, like, partnerships with our cloud engineering group, with our security groups, and whatnot, and we can say, “Hey, if you want to build an ECS cluster, like, this is a good, known way to start.” And you can just provide, like, X number of parameters that are meaningful to you, and you can inherit all the rest. And you're going to get our logging standards, you're going to get our security standards, all that, like, more or less built-in. And we also can version that.So, we can know, hey, this person built off the CDK App 1.1, and then we have some sort of security change, right? So say, now we want to install some other agent on all these things. And it's like, “Okay, all the ones that were deployed on 1.1, we need to move it from 1.1 to 1.2.”And we can test what that upgrade path looks like in a lab environment, and then we can, you know, release it and have, you know, 30 different app teams all consume that update in a relatively self-service manner that means we don't have to do it one by one. And then, yeah, it just gives us the ability to respond to stuff as quickly as we need to in the current environment.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: It's a constant challenge and it's really neat seeing the adoption of things like the CDK, which I've always sort of mentally put on the same stack as, “Oh, yeah, this is something that scrappy tiny startups use.” But you're the exact opposite of that. The fact that you're using it and finding success with it says a lot. I think you're also right there with the most nimble, advanced, tiniest of startups in the world, and you're still trying to figure out how to contextualize this into the broader lifecycle and understand the long-term architectural implications of how this stuff works. If it helps anything, I can assure you, you are very far from alone.If anyone else is feeling that way, exactly the same position. And if you're out there saying, “Oh, yeah. We've solved this. This is how we do it.” Find a second person to agree with you. But then come talk to me. Because everyone solves it locally; no one solves that globally. It's a hard problem.Tyler: Yeah. We've had this vision of, like, a vending machine for stuff. And then we've tried that in different ways and templates, and we think that this is the right pattern.Corey: Yeah, every time AWS builds a vending machine for accounts and whatnot, it's like the worst kind of vending machine; the kind that eats all your money.Tyler: Service catalog. Yeah.Corey: Yeah. It becomes a disaster. So, I want to talk about a couple of other things as well. When we started talking a year or so ago, you were a team lead. Today, you are a senior manager, and it turns out that, unlike when you start your own company and can invent your own made-up title, like, Cloud Economist, those words mean things. So first, congratulations on the promotion, how'd it come about?Tyler: Thank you. Yeah, it came about—I guess, I really have always been passionate about people leadership, but I know that in order to properly lead and, like, have the context, and you need to know what it's like to do these hard things that my team is solving, and be responsible for those, kind of, as an individual. So, you know, I've been spending the last, like, five or so years as an individual contributor, kind of learning how all this stuff works, and then learning from a lot of different managers. You know, I've been really lucky to have some people that, kind of, took me under their wing, coached me, and is just, like, the person that puts the wind in your sails, but like, not in a… not in a fake way, but like actually sees you and puts you into situations that are going to force you to grow and have your back if something goes wrong. And I kind of saw that and I wanted to be that for someone else.So, you know, it's… yeah, it was something that I kind of put my hat in the ring, and a position came and I was tapped to step up and do it. But it was initially for a very small team, right, so a three-person team. But it's since expanded to be six or seven over the next month or so.Corey: One of the things that I found always interesting slash admirable about you is we travel in somewhat similar circles. We both have pitched in from time to time as mentors in Forrest Brazeal's cloud resume challenge, and it's nice to see people who are working at established companies who are very busy with their day jobs, also taking the time out of the day to help, effectively, what is the next generation of cloud engineer find their way within this industry. How did you get onto that track?Tyler: Yeah, so I guess it's, you got to send the elevator back down. I have the experience of, kind of, being on the edge of, like—I was on the waitlist for my university, I had to—also was on the waitlist for my first job as a rotational program, and there was always kind of this, like, I had to claw for it, I had to prove myself, and also had to—I was the first in my family to pursue opportunities like this. And I got the itch for it, then I also see there's so much potential in folks. And like, even looking at my parents as examples, right? My father's an auto mechanic, and he's probably one of the smartest people I know, but didn't really… have the opportunity to get into technology. [unintelligible 00:22:44] kind of in a blue-collar job.But I just feel like there's so much untapped potential, and I am passionate about helping people at least, like, understand what opportunities are available to them. And not just assume that if you don't have an example of someone who's a software engineer in your life, or a sibling, or a parent, like, that's outside of your reach.Corey: I love the phrase, ‘send the elevator back down' because it's true. I feel like the only reason that anyone that you have ever heard of in tech, who you have any modicum of respect for—and I include both of us on that list as well, but basically everyone else in the industry, too—the only reason all of us are here in the roles that we're in is that at some point, someone did a favor for us that they didn't have to, but they did. And it's almost impossible to pay that back, so instead, I've stopped trying. I instead try to do those favors in a forward-looking way for other people whenever I can. And there's a lot to be said for expressing that through a way of helping people find their way and see what happens.Because let's face it, the industry that you and I came up in doesn't really exist in the same way. There is no fleet of help desk positions out there the way there was when I first started getting exposed to technology, that would get me into this direction, so people have to come through alternate paths. And some people try and express that through advice that no longer applies for a world long gone. I try and at least keep up with what's going on in this space.Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. It's a dynamic environment for sure, and when I look at just how challenging it is to try to, like, find a senior cloud engineer, and then looking at, okay, is what we're doing here, like, really rocket science? Does it require ten years of experience? And I think the answer is no, like, we've got a small enough group here, we know what we're doing, and everyone's passionate about bringing other people up and, like, finding their strengths, giving them a problem, not giving them the answer to the problem, and kind of strategically building to bigger, bigger things until the next day, you know—or before you know it, they're able to solve problems that you would have previously thought, like, “Oh, that's something that I have to get my hands on.” And it's just so powerful to see that and to be part of that. So, that's kind of the approach we're taking.Corey: It refreshing to see. So, many companies are requiring that they hire senior talent, and they can't take junior talent because, “Oh, that person would take six months to come up to speed in this environment. We want to hit the ground running.” And the job req has been open for nine months. At some point, building talent becomes the best slash only way forward.I'm still at a scale now where I'm not in a position be able to do that, just because we are dropping principal consultants into dynamic strange situations, and that is a terrible environment for a junior, but as you scale past a certain point—I don't really know what that point is, but yes, United Airlines has scaled past that point—bringing folks up, taking interns, making interns job offers, and continuing to expand what is happening, I think, on some level, one of the big hiring challenges for United and other similarly situated companies has been that, oh, the technology must be ancient caribou-era of trekking across the tundra level of development. But we just talked about using the CDK, and pattern design for things. The public perception and the reality are incredibly divergent.Tyler: Yeah. Maybe I'm strange in this regard. But since college, I've worked only in very, very large organizations. And seeing the satisfaction that you have, or you can get from working with those systems, and being able to churn out a modern customer experience, or modernizing the system for operational efficiency, just it's very satisfying to me to be in that environment. I know that it probably scares other people away.But it's just the scale; it's hard to get that scale somewhere more—I don't know, I guess, like, younger, newer because you don't have years of legacy. But I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. Like, years of success and technology that's supported that success that you need to figure out how to handle.Corey: One last question that I have for you harkens back to something that I said earlier, where I congratulated you on your promotion to management. It's not really a promotion, at least not the way that I think it should be thought about. Because it's very much an orthogonal skill. You were a great engineer and architect building things yourself. And now you manage a team where if you're diving into fix things by hand, you are misunderstanding the role in many respects, suddenly, your toolkit is no longer doing the thing yourself, but rather delegating the thing to be done and making sure that it gets done and your primary slash only toolkit to do all of that is hiring and developing talent. How have you negotiated that transition? Do you still find yourself itching to dive in and fix the work yourself? Are you better at letting go than I was for a long time? Where do you find yourself on that?Tyler: Yeah, so that the inclination is still there, but I've learned to, like, recognize it and let it go. But I also have told my team members, like, 90% of the time, I'm going to give you all the latitude in the world, and I'm going to spend all my time helping you understand the problem that we're facing as I understand it, and the potential roadblocks, and then there may be some times where I'm going to be like, “I really want it done this way.” And I ask them to give me that… give me that ability. I have yet to really break that one out. But that's the only way that you can scale, and you get so much satisfaction about over… empowering someone to solve a hard challenge, and then seeing that they did it in a way different than you did it, and they did it better. [laugh].And that's a little bit of an ego hit, but you're like, that's what it's about. And then they can build that confidence and then take on larger challenges. And that's what gets me out of bed in the morning; that's what gets me excited is working with people who just really want to do good work. And I can help put the right challenges in front of them, help shield them from stuff that's not adding value, but like, asking for their time, connecting them with others that is going to kind of get that wind in their sails, and just get out of their way.And then once the success is there, do everything I can to get that out and make sure that people know the good work that we're doing. Because as much as you can say your work speaks for itself, in a huge organization, it's not so much the case. Like, good work often goes unacknowledged if there's not someone if you're—like, promoting that. And most individuals aren't comfortable—myself included—promoting my own work. Like, I wouldn't do that, but I'm more than happy to promote the work of someone on my team.Corey: On some level, as managers, you get recognized and evaluated based upon the performance of your team, not the things that you personally achieve. And that has always been a difficult transition. I got to level with you; I never handled it super well. It sounds like you are way better suited for the role than I ever was.Tyler: Well, it's early on, but yeah, I'm very excited.Corey: If I really want to evaluate a manager, all I have to do is really talk to their team, more often than not, and you start to see things when you probe properly. I really want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and how you see things, where can they find you?Tyler: I'm probably most active on LinkedIn. So, just tylerslove at LinkedIn.Corey: We'll be sure to add that to both the [show notes 00:29:58], as well as I will add you to my professional network on LinkedIn, which I believe is the catchphrase that they're using. Thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.Tyler: All right. Thanks, Corey.Corey: Tyler Slove, Senior Manager for Enterprise Cloud and DevOps at United Airlines. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud, of the usual kind. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment disavowing all of this newfangled technology we've been talking about and that's why you only travel via steamship.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

OpenStack: scalable, automated cloud infrastructureWe introduced OpenStack, powerful open source software that automates the management of hardware and infrastructure, in our 50th episode. Organizations like Sardina Systems use OpenStack to offer their clients scalable, pay-as-you-grow cloud infrastructure. Today we have two guests from Sardina Systems, Kenneth Tan and Mihaela Constantinescu, who manage OpenStack installations for their customers. Our other guest, Dr. Jens Krüger, uses Sardina to deploy OpenStack for the University of Tübingen, Germany.Sardina Systems deploys OpenStack to private cloud customersSardina Systems knew they needed an open source cloud infrastructure base to build on. They researched the market and ended up picking OpenStack due to its “tremendous velocity of development,” as Kenneth puts it.Sardina Systems' flexibility, ability to scale, and attention to privacy and security are desirable to organizations in industries with particular needs regarding security and privacy. Sardina Systems' enterprise cloud platform, Fish OS, is specifically geared toward creating private clouds for finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and government clients. Sardina Systems is also highly cost-effective compared to many big-name competitors — a private cloud is a fraction of the cost compared to others like Azure or Google Compute Cloud. The University of Tübingen chose Sardina Systems because, according to Dr. Kruger, “Sardina provides a supportive environment for rolling updates with, theoretically, zero downtime, and practically, something very close to that. It saves the university a lot of headaches.” Open Source creating natural alliances where the competition can'tPlatform.sh also uses OpenStack, enabling us to offer public and private cloud services to various customers. Since OpenStack is open source, it can bring together ecosystems of cloud infrastructure service providers like Sardina Systems and Platform.sh in a way that public (often proprietary) cloud can't. There are alternatives to OpenStack, such as NFS, which work well for storage. But they tend to be slower, and they lack the self-healing and re-balancing that OpenStack offers.Try powerful open source software OpenStack to help manage your cloud infrastructure.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Enterprise cloud-driven document remediation is now available to consumers. Michael Babcock has the details. Find Kelly & Company on YouTube! About AMI AMI is a media company that entertains, informs and empowers Canadians with disabilities through three broadcast services — AMI-tv and AMI-audio in English and AMI-télé in French — and streaming platform AMI+. Our vision is to establish AMI as a leader in the offering of accessible content, providing a voice for Canadians with disabilities through authentic storytelling, representation and positive portrayal. To learn more visit AMI.ca and AMItele.ca. Find more great AMI Original Content on AMI+ Learn more at AMI.ca Connect with Accessible Media Inc. online: - X /Twitter @AccessibleMedia - Instagram @AccessibleMediaInc / @AMI-audio - Facebook at @AccessibleMediaInc - TikTok @AccessibleMediaInc - Email feedback@ami.ca

As a Senior Product Manager at Atlassian, Matt Tse uses his experience in product discovery and design thinking to help customers find success with products, such as Jira and Confluence Cloud. A native of Canada, Matt found a welcome change of pace when he moved to Australia and joined the Atlassian team.At the time, Atlassian was in the midst of rolling out its second version of the Jira Cloud. During his onboarding, Matt began digging into customer feedback — a lot of it. That experience led to some interesting insights and ultimately an uncomfortable suggestion: the team needed to redo Jira version 2. Needless to say, the thought didn't make Matt the most popular guy in the room. Though there was initial pushback to the idea of a do-over, it was hard to argue with the customer critiques Matt identified. “It's literally the customer that's saying, We need to fix this part,” Matt says. “The pieces of feedback, complemented with real stories recorded from customers really made heads turn.”And that's indicative of much of Matt's work with Atlassian (so far): breaking down barriers in order to hear and respond to customers.In this episode of People Driven Products, Matt breaks down his exhaustive methods towards customer feedback, how he communicates consumer insights to a team and the key to success as a product manager. 

Let's look into the crystal ball. Industry cloud solutions will be gamechangers for innovation, allowing organizations to quickly deploy apps that address very focused business needs and deliver specific business outcomes. A clean core and cloud platform technology will be key elements of that vision. And enterprise leaders will have to embrace a new mindset when it comes to ERP and the potential of cloud. Some examples: Thinking in terms of “old ERP vs. new ERP” is out. “ERP plus” is in. “Cloud as just an infrastructure play” is also out. Instead, leaders will have to use cloud more strategically—as an enabler of business integration, innovation, and analytic insights. We'll ask Deloitte cloud transformation specialists and industry leaders Smitha Chowdavarapu, Chip Kleinheksel and Hernan Krymkiewiz to share their insights as we explore what the enterprise cloud landscape will look like in the years ahead—and how you can navigate the future of cloud and discover new value for your organization.

Let's look into the crystal ball. Industry cloud solutions will be gamechangers for innovation, allowing organizations to quickly deploy apps that address very focused business needs and deliver specific business outcomes. A clean core and cloud platform technology will be key elements of that vision. And enterprise leaders will have to embrace a new mindset when it comes to ERP and the potential of cloud. Some examples: Thinking in terms of “old ERP vs. new ERP” is out. “ERP plus” is in. “Cloud as just an infrastructure play” is also out. Instead, leaders will have to use cloud more strategically—as an enabler of business integration, innovation, and analytic insights. We'll ask Deloitte cloud transformation specialists and industry leaders Smitha Chowdavarapu, Chip Kleinheksel and Hernan Krymkiewiz to share their insights as we explore what the enterprise cloud landscape will look like in the years ahead—and how you can navigate the future of cloud and discover new value for your organization.

We spoke with David Trice, Honeywell Forge Chief Product Officer and General Manager Connected Buildings, in a Cloud Wars Live Perspectives. Here is our conversation.The Big Themes:Honeywell Forge: Enterprise performance management is bringing a new solution to the table – eliminating the barriers of complexity.Transforming into a software company: Honeywell is going to be a software company – and an industrial company.Mobile first software company: How you engage with the customer, how a building operates, how the supply chain operates, and what we do in the next step of our transformation.Reinventing everything: Honeywell's business is to reinvent everything – from on-premise hardware driven-control systems to virtualized capability to digital transformation.The Big Quotes:“We understand, there's a lot of complexity. That's why we purpose-built Honeywell Forge to rethink the problem.”

The Cloud... It is quickly becoming the standard for modern business. In this episode of The Hacks, Chunga asks Tom the question: "How much does CX (customer experience) matter when it comes to enterprise cloud technology?" After all, it's being used by everyone and yet, for some reason, customer experience doesn't really seem to exist on any widely used or universal level. Why is that? Tom has some theories on why CX has somehow managed to fall through the cracks. Will CX ever become a "thing" for enterprise cloud technology? Listen now to find out! For more about his episode: Forrester report on Enterprise Cloud CX Follow SaltStack on Twitter! @saltstack Send us an email! thehacks@saltstack.com 

On this episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast - Interview Series, host Daniel Newman welcomes Alexey Gerasimov, Vice President of Global Cloud Delivery for HPE to discuss cloud consumption, the benefits of the cloud, and how to find the right mix of cloud for your business.   The Value of the Cloud in the Face of COVID-19   We have built a culture of face to face collaboration, but how we approach business and collaboration has changed in the last few months. Cloud has enabled us to be able to work from home. It has powered companies to keep going. We are coming to a point now where the real, true value of cloud can be realized especially those companies still looking to transform to be able to conduct business as effectively as possible.   Public Cloud Works… Most of the Time   Public cloud usage is through the roof right now. Originally, the whole concept of public cloud was centered on speed, agility, cost effectiveness and faster time to market — all of which was not available in on-prem environments. But that has started to change in recent years as on-prem, private cloud, and hybrid options have started to flood the market. Many companies now employ some sort of cloud mix to handle all of their needs. But the question remains, how do companies figure out the right mix of cloud options? Where should workloads go? This is what HPE strives to help companies figure out.   Enterprise Cloud Adoption Needs Strategy   Like any technology, just because you can migrate to the cloud doesn't mean you should. Your enterprise cloud adoption needs a strategy. Shadow IT won't work for the cloud.   HPE works with companies to figure out what exactly their needs are in order to recommend the right mix. It's a multi-phase journey that allows companies to build in increments similar to a devops approach. Alexey broke down the basic steps of the process into strategic workshop, assessment, minimum viable cloud, final cloud solution.   The strategic workshop is the most important step. It lays the groundwork for the entire cloud strategy. Companies first need to answer a few basic questions to get to the strategy behind a cloud migration. Questions include why are we doing this? What problems are we trying to solve? And where can we gain the most business value?    Objective Recommendations   Once the strategic workshop and assessment are complete, HPE can pitch recommendations that are part of the Right Mix Advisor. The best thing about HPE is they don't pitch one cloud over another for their own gain.   HPE partners with several cloud providers and pick the best cloud for whatever their customers requirements are. HPE determines what applications and workloads can go to the right cloud infrastructure based on decisions from tech components like security, governance, and finances among other things. They help customers find what they need and then can help the strategy shift as needed as well.   Process of Ongoing Engagement   What works today for a cloud strategy might not work next year or even in six months. Companies can spend unnecessarily more if they don't pay attention when adding on or dealing with scale. Cloud is a living, breathing entity that HPE can help manage in a few different ways like cost control and managed compliance. Having the right structure in place from a cost approach is critical especially in situations like this where everyone is tightening their belts so to speak. Alexey noted that HPE understands this and helps companies get it right from the start.   COVID-19 and Cloud Transformations   With the outbreak of COVID-19 every company had to step up their game. If they had already started to transform, the process went faster. If they were already in the cloud, they likely needed more bandwidth or compute power. If companies hadn't transformed at all, it became even more clear that they needed to. The spending must go on to keep business moving forward no matter what the situation is.   HPE stepped in to help even more. First, companies can defer payments for 90 days to get the technology and IT infrastructure set up to continue working efficiently. Second, if companies need cash upfront, HPE is offering a buy back program where they will buy back old outdated technology assets to help with the new IT infrastructure investment.   Furthermore, once IT leaders and companies realize what their cloud strategy looks like, HPE can work with them to figure out how that adoption happens. Whether it's buying the technology back and managing it for them or moving technology to consumption models, HPE has a lot of different options available to help companies in whatever stage they are in.   If you'd like to learn more about how HPE can help you with your cloud strategy, please visit their website and be sure to listen to the full episode to hear more insights. While you're at it make sure to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

In this episode, GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Rita Yang interviewed Renee Wang (王小雨), the founder and CEO of CastBox, a global podcast platform often referred to as the "Netflix for podcasting". It uses natural language processing and machine learning to power unique features like personalized recommendations and in-audio search. According to a report from Sensor tower in April 2019, Castbox is now the biggest 3rd-party pure-play podcast app.   Before launching CastBox in 2016, Renee worked for Google in China, Japan, and Ireland. She holds a bachelor's degree in Peking University in psychology and mathematical statistics. While in college, she taught herself coding and became one of the earliest Android developers in China.    On the show, Renee discussed user acquisition in international markets with a cross-cultural team, integrating Chinese social app features into its global podcasting platform, the landscape of consumer-facing audio apps in China and her strategic decision for not entering the Chinese market. She also shared her journey of landing a job at Google without speaking a word of English, selling her apartment in Beijing to fund her startup and leading a diverse team spread across the US and China.   Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community.  The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

Harsh Jawharkar is currently Head of Enterprise Cloud, Platform, & Ecosystem Marketing at Atlassian. He also has experience in product and marketing at PayPal, Zendesk, and Slack, among other leading technology firms. For full notes and show notes, click here: http://bit.ly/2XzHPHv Harsh's Twitter: twitter.com/hjawharkar Harsh's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/harsh/ Atlassian: atlassian.com Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

On this episode, we interviewed Brian Gu (顾宏地), the vice chairman and president of XPENG Motors, also known as Xiaopeng Motors, a Chinese electric vehicle company and a GGV portfolio company. The company designs and manufactures what it calls "Internet cars" which has AI technology integrated into the vehicles. Prior to joining XPENG Motors in March 2018, Brian was the Chairman of Asia Pacific Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan. He holds an MBA from Yale University, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Washington Medical School and a bachelor's degree in Chemistry from the University of Oregon. At XPENG, Brian leads the company's global strategy, finance, fundraising, investments and international partnerships. Brian discussed his journey from an investment banker to a tech company executive, why China's EV market excites him, and how XPENG differentiates itself from its competitors. This episode also features a bonus interview with GGV Managing Partner, Jixun Foo, on why we invested in XPENG Motors. Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at http://ggvc.com/, or "GGVCapital" on WeChat.

On a special "AMA" (Ask Me Anything) episode, GGV Managing Partner Hans Tung answers questions posed by our listeners on a wide range of topics. How did Hans break into the VC world? What made he move to China and then come back to Silicon Valley afterwards? How does he deal with failures as an investor? What does it take for non-Chinese entrepreneurs to succeed in China? What motivates him to wake up and work hard every day? Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or "GGVCapital" on WeChat.

We interviewed Hao Wu, a Chinese American film director, producer and writer to discuss his recent work "People's Republic of Desire", a documentary about the live streaming industry in China. Originally trained as a molecular biologist, Hao worked in tech before becoming a full-time filmmaker. He held various management positions at technology companies including Excite@Home, Yahoo China and Alibaba. From 2008-2011, he was the China Country Manager for TripAdvisor. As his career progressed, so did his passion in more artistic and creative endeavors. In 2012 he decided to pursue documentary filmmaking full time. His latest work, which is the subject of this episode, is a documentary called "People's Republic of Desire", a journey into the live streaming industry in China, where Hao follows a few top streamers on YY to document their lives behind the screen. The film has won the Grand Jury Award at the 2018 South By South West, among many other awards, and has screened at over 40 film festivals worldwide. The New York Times calls the film "hypercharged," while The Los Angeles Times says it's "invariably surprising and never less than compelling." If you haven't watched the film, we highly recommend doing so. It is available on Vimeo, iTunes, Amazon and Google Play; just visit desire.film for the links. Hao has produced two other documentaries, The Road to Fame, and Nowhere to Call Home. Hao holds a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Science and Technology of China, a master's degree in molecular and cell biology from Brandeis University, and an MBA from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or "GGVCapital" on WeChat.

GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Tao Peng (彭韬), the president of Airbnb China. Prior to joining Airbnb in Sept 2018, Tao has founded a number of companies in the travel space including Breadtrip, a social app for recording and sharing trips, and more recently, CityHome, a management platform for short-terms rentals across China. Before founding Breadtrip, Tao has worked at the network security provider IntelliGuard and has also worked for McKinsey for two years as a management consultant. Tao graduated from the University of Melbourne with Ph.D degree in computer networks and the Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a bachelor's degree in communication engineering. He is also an avid traveler and has been to over 50 countries across seven continents. Earlier on the 996 Podcast, we have interviewed Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb's co-founder and chief strategy officer as well as the chairman of Airbnb China. If you haven't listened to that episode, we highly recommend checking it out; it was released around exactly a year ago on April 11th, 2018. Airbnb is a GGV portfolio company and our managing partners Hans Tung and Glenn Solomon actively works with the company especially with regards to its China strategy. Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Jane Sun (孙洁), the CEO of Ctrip, the largest online travel platform in China which is listed on the NASDAQ. It's current market cap (at time of recording) is around $23 billion. Jane has been at Ctrip for 13 years. Prior to becoming CEO in Nov 2016, Jane served as COO of Ctrip for four years and CFO for seven years. Before joining Ctrip, Jane worked at Applied Materials in the US as the head of SEC and External Reporting Division. Prior to that, she worked with KPMG as an audit manager in Silicon Valley for five years. Jane received her bachelor's degree from the business school of the University of Florida, and LLM degree from the Peking University Law School. Jane discussed her journey from studying abroad in the US to one of the one of the top female leaders in Chinese tech, her daily routine as the CEO of a New York-listed Chinese tech company, and her advice for young people with cross-cultural backgrounds. This episode also features a bonus interview with GGV managing partner Jixun Foo, who led the firm's investment in the online travel search company Qunar, which merged with Ctrip in 2015. Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview two “GGV Fellows,” David Sun (a data scientist on Apple's Siri team) and Bo Ning Han (a recent Harvard grad working on a startup in Beijing), on their life stories and their takeaways from the GGV Fellows program. What is the GGV Fellows program? Read this blog post to find out more: https://hans.vc/why-we-organized-ggv-fellows/ If you are interested in applying to future batches of GGV Fellows or our other events, please join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community, where all related announcements will be posted. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Zara Zhang discuss the opportunities and challenges faced by Chinese overseas returnees (“sea turtles”, or 海归) who are interested in working in China's tech industry. These are people who were born and raised in China, completed their high education outside of China or have worked overseas, and then have returned to China for opportunities. There has been a growing number of sea turtles in recent year as China's tech economy boomed and the US immigration policies became less friendly to foreign talent. We addressed questions including: What are the common pitfalls that sea turtle entrepreneurs run into? In an age where the premium of an overseas education is arguably declining in China, how can sea turtles make the most of their global experience? For aspiring sea turtle entrepreneurs, which verticals should they spend time on? If you're an aspiring or current Chinese overseas returnee, we have a special resource for you: we recently compiled a list of 10 Chinese books on tech & entrepreneurship in China that we recommend all sea turtles read before going back to China. These include books on China's tech giants Tencent, Alibaba, JD, and Meituan, books on practical aspects of running a startup in China such as growth and marketing, as well as books on general Chinese business history. To read the book list, please follow GGV's WeChat official account by searching "GGVCapital" in WeChat, and then message the word "sea turtle" to that account. We also have a lucky draw for you: If you comment on that article with your story of coming back to China as a sea turtle before April 10th, you can enter a lottery to win a bundle of these 10 books, which will be mailed to you. We look forward to hearing your story. And, here's a list of news outlets and resources that can help you stay in touch with what's going on in tech in China: https://zarazhang.com/2018/03/25/how-to-keep-up-with-whats-happening-china/ Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Wang Yu (王宇), the co-founder and CEO of Tantan (探探), China's leading dating app. Tantan is social app that help young people in China connect with one another. It has a slide-left slide-right interface. Only when two users both slide right on each other can they start a conversation. The company was founded in 2014 and has helped users make over 10 billion matches to date. In 2018, Tantan was acquired by Momo (陌陌) for $735 million. Momo is a top location-based social networking platform in China that help people meet strangers around them. It is also one of the leading live streaming platforms in China. It is a public company on the NASDAQ and its current market cap is around $6.8 billion. Wang Yu was born in Beijing and grew up in Sweden. He holds two master's degrees, one on computer science and one in industrial economics. In 2007, he moved back to China and started his first business P1, a fashion community, before founding Tantan in 2014. During this episode, Yu discussed how the failure of his first startup P1 proved crucial to the success of Tantan, why flawless execution is more important than flawless product in China, whether any social apps in China will be able to challenge WeChat, and the advantages and disadvantages of being an overseas Chinese returnee entrepreneur. Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

Join GGV 996's anniversary party in San Francisco on Friday, March 8! The event will take the form of a Trivia Night on Chinese tech. Come test your knowledge of China's tech industry, compete to win prizes, and enjoy a great night with friends. RSVP at 996.ggvc.com/sf. Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community.   GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Simon Zhang, (张溪梦), the founder and CEO of GrowingIO, a data analytics startup in China that helps product managers and marketers analyze mobile apps and websites without adding manual tracking codes. GrowingIO now counts over 6000 companies as its customers, including the likes of Didi, Momo, Tujia, and others. Previously, Simon was senior director of business analytics at LinkedIn in its Silicon Valley headquarters, and before that, worked as a senior manager of site analytics at eBay. In 2015, he left a decade-long career in Silicon Valley to return to China and started his current startup, GrowingIO. But prior to all of this, Simon worked as a brain surgeon in China, and attended medical school in Tianjin. He also obtained an MBA from Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio. Simon is also the author of the Chinese book 《首席增长官》 (“Chief Growth Officer”) and is a thought leader in the field of data-driven growth in China. Simon discussed how Chinese engineers in Silicon Valley can crack the “bamboo ceiling”, how Chinese-style growth differs from Silicon Valley-style growth, and why “raising too much money” could create challenges for a startup. The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

Department of Veterans Affairs officials said they've placed two big bets on technology modernization over the past couple years. Now they say those bets are starting to pay dividends. One is VA's approach to digital services and DevOps best practices. The other comes from VA's approach to the cloud. As Federal News Network's Nicole Ogrysko reported, VA's success on both fronts all started with one big project in particular. Hear more on Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

In this episode, Michael Greene, who is the Principal Program Manager of the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Group, is interviewed giving light on some of the projects Microsoft is working on. This was recorded live at the first meeting of the Chicago PowerShell User Group.    For iTunes users, you can find the podcast at the link below or just search for The PowerShell News Podcast.  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-powershell-news-podcast/id1292825514?mt=2

GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Grant Horsfield (高天成), a South African serial entrepreneur who came to China in 2005 and founded naked Group, which includes the coworking space naked Hub (裸心社) and the luxury resort brand naked Retreat (裸心谷). In 2007, Grant and his wife, Delphine Yip-Horsfield, opened the first naked resort – naked Home – in Moganshan (莫干山), a beautiful mountain 30-minute drive from Hangzhou. Following its success, Grant continued to expand the naked resort business into other high-end, eco-friendly resorts which prioritize sustainability development In 2016, Grant and Delphine launched the coworking space naked Hub, which seeks to combine hospitality, design, technology, and community. Naked Hub offers several services, include open office, private office, and hot desks. It now has 10,000 members across 24 office locations both in Shanghai and Beijing. It has expanded into Australia, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. In April 2018, Naked Hub and WeWork announced that they would join forces to support business in China and throughout Asia. In this episode, Grant explained why he moved to China from rural South Africa, how he earned the trust of local Chinese farmers in Moganshan, and what differentiates naked Hub from other coworking spaces. The full transcript of this episode is available at 996.ggvc.com. Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called “996,” which has a roundup of the week's most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com. We are excited to announce a new program, "GGV Fellows", designed to help "sea turtles" or (海归) and Chinese students studying overseas to get to know the Chinese entrepreneurial landscape better. If you're a Chinese student/professional who is studying/working overseas (or have done so in the past), this is a program designed for you! It's a weeklong program in Jan 2019 in Beijing (during most US college's winter break). You will be able to learn from executives at some of China's most valuable tech companies, and visit some of their offices. You will also participate in mixers with students at top Chinese universities like Tsinghua and Beida to build a local network. Please visit fellows.ggvc.com for the application link and for more information. GGV Capital is a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the last 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in Consumer/New Retail, Social/Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech. GGV has invested in over 290 companies with more than 45 companies valued at more than $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Ctrip, Didi, Grab, Hellobike, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, Opendoor, Peloton, Slack, Square, ByteDance (Toutiao), Wish, Xiaomi, Xiaohongshu, and YY. Find out more at ggvc.com. 

A recent IDC survey found 30% of an application portfolio is managed by an external provider. Operating your next enterprise resource environment requires a different approach and strategy. An enterprise digital core — based on SAP HANA — will enable you to improve customer interactions, provide a foundation for your next IT skills revolution, coalesce all your data across every line of business (LoB) and finally implement real-time business insights. And the cloud is accelerating that movement. It empowers all of us to become pioneers of how new innovations are adopted. This transformation will also have a positive impact on IT productivity; the outcome being more focus on technology projects that center on business growth and new revenue streams. Join us on a discussion with Henry Morris of IDC and learn how the cloud drives innovation by providing a single platform to support ambitious growth plans, simplify processes, and deepen insights to enable faster decision making. This podcast explores: Managing the transition to SAP HANA; a multi-layer challenge New IT architectures require multi-cloud accelerators and managing big skills gaps with Private cloud managed services SLA scope and capabilities that will dictate managed service relationship with client Automating operations for IT to deliver a strategic business engagement; programs that deliver new business value Speakers: Henry Morris, IDC Fellow, Big Data, Analytics, and Cognitive Software Research, IDC Dr. Arndt-Alexander Böhnert, Global Head SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Enhanced Managed Services at SAP Ted Basile, Senior Director, Global Marketing for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC).

Join Bonnie D. Graham Live from Sap Sapphire Now 2017. Day 2 will bring new level of thought leadership to Gain new and Valuable insight into ways that digital transformation will help you reimagine your business.Take a look at all the reasons why you cannot miss this Broadcast and Discover new industry-tailored products and customer successes that will enable your digital business strategy.Find new ways to reduce complexity and increase responsiveness across your organization.

Join Bonnie D. Graham Live from Sap Sapphire Now 2017. Day 2 will bring new level of thought leadership to Gain new and Valuable insight into ways that digital transformation will help you reimagine your business.Take a look at all the reasons why you cannot miss this Broadcast and Discover new industry-tailored products and customer successes that will enable your digital business strategy.Find new ways to reduce complexity and increase responsiveness across your organization.