Podcasts about ibms

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Best podcasts about ibms

Latest podcast episodes about ibms

IBMSPOD
S3 Episode 14: Working in Partnership

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2025 16:53


In episode 14, we take a look at Working in Partnership. We will hear from Rohini Patel from University Hospitals Birmingham and Capt. Francis Opoku from the Centre of Defence Pathology about their IBMS award-winning work in biomedical science. Rohini Patel is an advanced biomedical scientist and the Group Training Lead at UHB Pathology. Capt. Francis Opoku is the Officer in Charge of Clinical Pathology Department, Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. This is a snippet from our IBMS Chat in November, where the rest of the audio was lost.

IBMSPOD
S3 Episode 4: How to publish your work

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2023 60:24


In this episode of the #IBMSChat Podcast, Rob Dabrowski sits down with Cherie Beckett (Senior Biomedical Scientist at the Princess Alexandra Hospital) and Simon Hoggart (Journal Development Manager for the BJBS). The topic of discussion is how to get your work published with IBMS publications, namely, the BJBS and The Biomedical Scientist.

IBMSPOD
S3 Episode 3: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2023 57:25


In our latest episode of the #IBMSChat Podcast, Rob gets together with Francis Yongblah and Jemma Shead from the IBMS EDI working group. This group aims to promote and champion equality, diversity and inclusion across all backgrounds. Francis is a laboratory manager and clinical scientist at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and Jemma is a biomedical scientist with the Health Services Laboratories in London. As part of the EDI group, both members are helping to create an inclusive environment across our profession. So far, the group has run a campaign to celebrate 100 Years of Women in the IBMS, attended Pride events across the UK by sponsoring places on marches, supported the IBMS to give a voice to black biomedical scientists every October for Black History Month, and it also continues to align itself to various other diversity events throughout the year to promote more inclusive discussions.

Can Marketing Save the Planet?
Episode 65: – Building the business case for Sustainable Marketing (Part 1) - Caroline Taylor, Former CMO, IBM Global Markets

Can Marketing Save the Planet?

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2023 35:03


“There are four questions every business needs good answers to. Why would anyone want to buy from us? Why would anyone want to work for us? Why would anyone want to invest in us? Why would anyone allow us to operate in their community, society?” It's another two-parter and in this episode (Part 1), we dive into the role of CMOs and leaders when it comes to the sustainability agenda. We were joined by Caroline Taylor OBE, former CMO for IBMs international business and a huge advocate for ‘adding value in many other places in the world.' Already aware of sustainability back in the early 2000's Caroline got really focused in the mid 2000's when IBM was doing work in ‘green IT' and 2% of global carbon emissions were attributed to IT. Caroline explains, “I was very struck with the notion…but what about the other 98% and how we might use technology to mitigate that?” It was at that point she fell down the sustainability rabbit hole and started looking into how IBM could become a greater part of the solution whilst at the same time, find new ways to differentiate. As well as looking for answers externally, Caroline talks at depth about the need to changes hearts and minds on sustainability internally, and raises the important point that to do this effectively requires conversations which focus on, “why this is a business opportunity as opposed to being a really important thing to do.” Caroline explains, “learning how to shift my focus from here's a brilliant marketing idea, to here's a brilliant business idea that's going to make us money, our shareholders will love us, but it's going to be tapping into something that is really important societally at the same time, is a win, win, win.” And, when it comes to stakeholder engagement we have to understand that, “enlightenment is important but the self-interest is real – we have to think about all of our stakeholder and what's in it for them” The need for leaders to recognise and see the opportunity in sustainability is so critical to balancing the triple bottom line and protecting the sustainability of their business. This episode explores the need for investment, the shift away from short-term thinking and strategising and the very real, tough choices and prioritisation that organisations need to make. Caroline also shares her insights into the role B2B marketing and business plays….for marketing she says it's about “taking all the smart marketers that care and taking them outside of their day jobs to figure out how to use all those marketing skills to educate and engage and empower people to make better choices.” And, we couldn't agree more, the case for education and awareness and the significant role and opportunity marketers and leaders have really shines through in this episode. So, tune in and listen, and don't forget there's Part 2 in two weeks time where we continue the conversation, delving into the tactical side of marketing, the importance of listening and the challenge of what to measure when it comes to value creation around driving a more sustainable marketing agenda. ________________________________________________________________________________ You'll find the Podcast on all the usual pod platforms - and also on The Global Player and via The Marketing Society. If you love it, do share it and spread the word. Talking about climate change and the role we play is one of the most important things we can do. So join the conversation. We're all in this together. Our podcasts are recorded purely via online conferencing platforms, we apologise for any minor sound quality issues.

The Marketing Society podcast
Building the business case for Sustainable Marketing (Part 1) - Caroline Taylor, Former CMO, IBM Global Markets

The Marketing Society podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2023 35:03


“There are four questions every business needs good answers to. Why would anyone want to buy from us? Why would anyone want to work for us? Why would anyone want to invest in us? Why would anyone allow us to operate in their community, society?”It's another two-parter and in this episode (Part 1), we dive into the role of CMOs and leaders when it comes to the sustainability agenda. We were joined by Caroline Taylor OBE, former CMO for IBMs international business and a huge advocate for ‘adding value in many other places in the world.'Already aware of sustainability back in the early 2000's Caroline got really focused in the mid 2000's when IBM was doing work in ‘green IT' and 2% of global carbon emissions were attributed to IT. Caroline explains, “I was very struck with the notion…but what about the other 98% and how we might use technology to mitigate that?” It was at that point she fell down the sustainability rabbit hole and started looking into how IBM could become a greater part of the solution whilst at the same time, find new ways to differentiate.As well as looking for answers externally, Caroline talks at depth about the need to changes hearts and minds on sustainability internally, and raises the important point that to do this effectively requires conversations which focus on, “why this is a business opportunity as opposed to being a really important thing to do.” Caroline explains, “learning how to shift my focus from here's a brilliant marketing idea, to here's a brilliant business idea that's going to make us money, our shareholders will love us, but it's going to be tapping into something that is really important societally at the same time, is a win, win, win.” And, when it comes to stakeholder engagement we have to understand that, “enlightenment is important but the self-interest is real – we have to think about all of our stakeholder and what's in it for them”The need for leaders to recognise and see the opportunity in sustainability is so critical to balancing the triple bottom line and protecting the sustainability of their business. This episode explores the need for investment, the shift away from short-term thinking and strategising and the very real, tough choices and prioritisation that organisations need to make. Caroline also shares her insights into the role B2B marketing and business plays….for marketing she says it's about “taking all the smart marketers that care and taking them outside of their day jobs to figure out how to use all those marketing skills to educate and engage and empower people to make better choices.” And, we couldn't agree more, the case for education and awareness and the significant role and opportunity marketers and leaders have really shines through in this episode.So, tune in and listen, and don't forget there's Part 2 in two weeks time where we continue the conversation, delving into the tactical side of marketing, the importance of listening and the challenge of what to measure when it comes to value creation around driving a more sustainable marketing agenda._________________________________________________________________You'll find the Podcast on all the usual pod platforms - and also on The Global Player and via The Marketing Society. If you love it, do share it and spread the word. Talking about climate change and the role we play is one of the most important things we can do. So join the conversation. We're all in this together.Our podcasts are recorded purely via online conferencing platforms, we apologise for any minor sound quality issues.

IBMSPOD
S3 Episode 2: Taking a look at Men's Health

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2023 62:15


In episode two, we hear from Stuart Dawe-Long - Andrology Lead at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, Clinical Scientist, and member of the Cytopathology Advisory Panel for the IBMS. He believes in a patient focussed service that can support the health and wellbeing of the patient. He is currently also training with the institute of psychosexual medicine. Listen now to hear Stuart and Rob Dabrowski, #IBMSChat Podcast host, as they tackle the subject of Men's Health; covering topics ranging from fertility in men, to diagnostic semen analysis, to access to support for mental health services.

Screaming in the Cloud
Building a Community around Cloud-Native Content with Bret Fisher

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2023 40:06


Bret Fisher, DevOps Dude & Cloud-Native Trainer, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it's like being a practitioner and a content creator in the world of cloud. Bret shares why he feels it's so critical to get his hands dirty so his content remains relevant, and also how he has to choose where to focus his efforts to grow his community. Corey and Bret discuss the importance of finding the joy in your work, and also the advantages and downfalls of the latest AI advancements. About BretFor 25 years Bret has built and operated distributed systems, and helped over 350,000 people learn dev and ops topics. He's a freelance DevOps and Cloud Native consultant, trainer, speaker, and open source volunteer working from Virginia Beach, USA. Bret's also a Docker Captain and the author of the popular Docker Mastery and Kubernetes Mastery series on Udemy. He hosts a weekly DevOps YouTube Live Show, a container podcast, and runs the popular devops.fan Discord chat server.Links Referenced: Twitter: https://twitter.com/BretFisher YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BretFisher Website: https://www.bretfisher.com 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: In the cloud, ideas turn into innovation at virtually limitless speed and scale. To secure innovation in the cloud, you need Runtime Insights to prioritize critical risks and stay ahead of unknown threats. What's Runtime Insights, you ask? Visit sysdig.com/screaming to learn more. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G.com/screaming.My thanks as well to Sysdig for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, a little bit off the beaten path today, in that I'm talking to someone who, I suppose like me, if that's not considered to be an insult, has found themselves eminently unemployable in a quote-unquote, “Real job.” My guest today is Bret Fisher, DevOps dude and cloud-native trainer. Bret, great to talk to you. What do you do?Bret: [laugh]. I'm glad to be here, Corey. I help people for a living like a lot of us end up doing in tech. But nowadays, it's courses, it's live trainings, webinars, all that stuff. And then of course, the fun side of it is the YouTube podcast, hanging out with friends, chatting on the internet. And then a little bit of running a Discord community, which is one of the best places to have a little text chat community, if you don't know Discord.Corey: I've been trying to get the Discord and it isn't quite resonating with me, just because by default, it alerts on everything that happens in any server you're in. It, at least historically, was very challenging to get that tuned in, so I just stopped having anything alert me on my phone, which means now I miss things constantly. And that's been fun and challenging. I still have the slack.lastweekinaws.com community with a couple of thousand people in it.Bret: Nice. Yeah, I mean, some people love Slack. I still have a Slack community for my courses. Discord, I feel like is way more community friendly. By the way, a good server admin knows how to change those settings, which there are a thousand settings in Discord, so server admins, I don't blame you for not seeing that setting.But there is one where you can say new members, don't bug them on every message; only bug them on a mentions or, you know, channel mentions and stuff like that. And then of course, you turn off all those channel mentions and abilities for people to abuse it. But yeah, I had the same problem at first. I did not know what I was doing and it took me years to kind of figure out. The community, we now have 15,000 people. We call it Cloud Native DevOps, but it's basically people from all walks of DevOps, you know, recovering IT pros.And the wonderful thing about it is you always start out—like, you'd do the same thing, I'm sure—where you start a podcast or YouTube channel or a chat community or Telegram, or a subreddit, or whatever your thing is, and you try to build a community and you don't know if it's going to work and you invite your friends and then they show up for a day and then go away. And I've been very lucky and surprised that the Discord server has, to this point, taken on sort of a, its own nature. We've got, I don't know, close to a dozen moderators now and people are just volunteering their time to help others. It's wonderful. I actually—I consider it, like, one of the safe places, unlike maybe Stack Overflow where you might get hated for the wrong question. And we try to guide you to a better question so [laugh] that we can answer you or help you. So, every day I go in there, and there's a dozen conversations I missed that I wasn't able to keep up with. So, it's kind of fun if you're into that thing.Corey: I remember the olden days when I was one of the volunteer staff members on the freenode IRC network before its untimely and awful demise, and I really have come to appreciate the idea of, past a certain point, you can either own the forum that you're working within or you can participate in it, but being a moderator, on some level, sets apart how people treat you in some strange ways. And none of these things are easy once you get into the nuances of codes of conduct, of people participating in good faith, but also are not doing so constructively. And people are hard. And one of these years I should really focus on addressing aspects of that with what I'm focusing on.Bret: [laugh]. Yeah, the machines—I mean, as frustrating as the machines are, they at least are a little more reliable. I don't have anonymous machines showing up yet in Discord, although we do get almost daily spammers and stuff like that. So, you know, I guess I'm blessed to have attracted some of the spam and stuff like that. But a friend of mine who runs a solid community for podcasters—you know, for podcasts hosters—he warned me, he's like, you know, if you really want to make it the community that you have the vision for, it requires daily work.Like, it's a part-time job, and you have to put the time in, or it will just not be that and be okay with that. Like, be okay with it being a small, you know, small group of people that stick around and it doesn't really grow. And that's what's happened on the Slack side of things is I didn't care and feed it, so it has gotten pretty quiet over there as we've grown the Discord server. Because I kind of had to choose, you know? Because we—like you, I started with Slack long, long ago. It was the only thing out there. Discord was just for gamers.And in the last four or five years, I think Discord—I think during the pandemic, they officially said, “We are now more than gamers,” which I was kind of waiting for to really want to invest my company's—I mean, my company of three—you know, my company [laugh] time into a platform that I thought was maybe just for gamers; couldn't quite figure it out. And once they kind of officially said, “Yeah, we're for all communities,” we're more in, you know, and they have that—the thing I really appreciate like we had an IRC, but was mostly human-driven is that Discord, unlike Slack, has actual community controls that make it a safer place, a more inclusive place. And you can actually contact Discord when you have a spammer or someone doing bad things, or you have a server raid where there's a whole bunch of accounts and bot accounts trying to take you down, you can actually reach out to Discord, where Slack doesn't have any of that, they don't have a way for you to reach out. You can't block people or ban them or any of that stuff with Slack. And we—the luckily—the lucky thing of Dis—I kind of look at Discord as, like, the best new equivalent of IRC, even though for a lot of people IRC is still the thing, right? We have new clients now, you can actually have off—you could have sort of synced IRC, right, where you can have a web client that remembers you so you didn't lose the chat after you left, which was always the problem back in the day.Corey: Oh, yeah. I just parked it on, originally, a hardware box, now EC2. And this ran Irssi as my client—because I'm old school—inside of tmux and called it a life. But yeah, I still use that from time to time, but the conversation has moved on. One challenge I've had is that a lot of the people I talk to about billing nuances skew sometimes, obviously in the engineering direction, but also in the business user perspective and it always felt, on some level like it was easier to get business users onto Slack from a community perspective—Bret: Mmm. Absolutely. Yeah.Corey: —than it was for Discord. I mean, this thing started as well. This was years ago, before Discord had a lot of those controls. Might be time to take another bite at that apple.Bret: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely—and that, I think that's why I still keep the Slack open is there are some people, they will only go there, right? Like, they just don't want another thing. That totally makes sense. In fact, that's kind of what's happening to the internet now, right?We see the demise of Twitter or X, we see all these other new clients showing up, and what I've just seen in the dev community is we had this wonderful dev community on Twitter. For a moment. For a few years. It wasn't perfect by far, there was a lot people that still didn't want to use Twitter, but I felt like there was—if you wanted to be in the cloud-native community, that was very strong and you didn't always have to jump into Slack. And then you know, this billionaire came along and kind of ruined it, so people have fractured over to Mastodon and we've got some people have run Threads and some people on Bluesky, and now—and then some people like me that have stuck with Twitter.And I feel like I've lost a chunk of my friends because I don't want to spend my life on six different platforms. So, I am—I have found myself actually kind of sort of regressing to our Discord because it's the people I know, we're all talking about the same things, we all have a common interest, and rather than spending my time trying to find those people on the socials as much as I used to. So, I don't know, we'll see.Corey: Something that I have found, I'm curious to get your take on this, you've been doing this for roughly twice as long as I have, but what I've been having to teach myself is that I am not necessarily representative of the totality of the audience. And, aside from the obvious demographic areas, I learned best by reading or by building something myself—I don't generally listen to podcasts, which is a weird confession in this forum for me to wind up admitting to—and I don't basically watch videos at all. And it took me a while to realize that not everyone is like me; those are wildly popular forms of absorbing information. What I have noticed that the audience engages differently in different areas, whereas for this podcast, for the first six months, I didn't think that I'd remember to turn the microphone on. And that was okay; it was an experiment, and I enjoyed doing it. But then I went to a conference and wound up getting a whole bunch of feedback.Whereas for the newsletter, I had immediate responses to basically every issue when I sent it out. And I think the reason is, is because people are not sitting in front of a computer when they're listening to something and they're not going to be able to say, “Well, let me give you a piece of my mind,” in quite the same way. And by the time they remember later, it feels weird, like, calling into a radio show. But when you actually meet someone, “Yeah, I love your stuff.” And they'll talk about the episodes I've had out. But you can be forgiven for in some cases in the social media side of it for thinking that I'd forgotten to publish this thing.Bret: Yeah. I think that's actually a pretty common trait. There was a time where I was sort of into the science of learning and whatnot, and one of the things that came out of that was that the way we communicate or the way we learn and then the way—the input and the outputs are different per human. It's actually almost, like, comparable maybe to love languages, if you've read that book, where the way we give love and the way we receive love from others is—we prefer it in different ways and it's often not the same thing. And I think the same is true of learning and teaching, where my teaching style has always been visual.I think have almost always been in all my videos. My first course seven years ago, I was in it phy—like, I had my headshot in there and I just thought that that was a part of the best way you could make that content. And doesn't mean that I'm instantly better; it just means I wanted to communicate with my hands, maybe I got a little bit of Italian or French in me or something [laugh] where I'm moving my hands around a lot. So, I think that the medium is very specific to the person. And I meet people all the time that I find out, they didn't learn from me—they didn't learn about me, rather, from my course; they learned about me from a conference talk because they prefer to watch those or someone else learned about me from the podcast I run because they stumbled onto that.And it always surprises me because I always figure that since my biggest audience in my Udemy courses—over 300,000 people there—that that's how most of the people find me. And it turns out nowadays that when I meet people, a lot of times it's not. It's some other, you know, other venue. And now we have people showing up in the Discord server from the Discord Discovery. It's kind of a little feature in Discord that allows you to find servers that are on the topics you're interested in and were listed in there and people will find me that way and jump in not knowing that I have created courses, I have a weekly YouTube Live show, I have all the other things.And yeah, it's just it's kind of great, but also as a content creator, it's kind of exhausting because you—if you're interested in all these things, you can't possibly focus on all of them at the [laugh] same time. So, what is it the great Will Smith says? “Do two things and two things suffer.” [laugh]. And that's exactly what my life is like. It's like, I can't focus on one thing, so they all aren't as amazing as they could be, maybe, if I had only dedicated to one thing.Corey: No, I'm with you on that it's a saying yes to something means inherently saying no to something else. But for those of us whose interests are wide and varied, I find that there are always more things to do than I will ever be able to address. You have to pick and choose, on some level. I dabble with a lot of the stuff that I work on. I have given thought in the past towards putting out video courses or whatnot, but you've done that for ages and it just seems like it is so much front-loaded work, in many cases with things I'm not terrific at.And then, at least in my side of the world, oh, then AWS does another console refresh, as they tend to sporadically, and great, now I have to go back and redo all of the video shoots showing how to do it because now it's changed just enough to confuse people. And it feels like a treadmill you climb on top of and never get off.Bret: It can definitely feel like that. And I think it's also harder to edit existing courses like I'm doing now than it is to just make up something brand new and fresh. And there's something about… we love to teach, I think what we're learning in the moment. I think a lot of us, you get something exciting and you want to talk about it. And so, I think that's how a lot of people's conference talk ideas come up if you think about it.Like you're not usually talking about the thing that you were interested in a decade ago. You're talking about the thing you just learned, and you thought it was great, and you want everyone to know about it, which means you're going to make a YouTube video or a blog post or something about it, you'll share somewhere on social media about it. I think it's harder to make this—any of these content creation things, especially courses, a career if you come back to that course like I'm doing seven years after publication and you're continuing every year to update those videos. And you're thinking I—not that my interests have moved on, but my passion is in the new things. And I'm not making videos right now on new things.I'm fixing—like you're saying, like, I'm fixing the Docker Hub video because it has completely changed in seven years and it doesn't even look the same and all that. So, there's definitely—that's the work side of this business where you really have to put the time in and it may not always be fun. So, one of the things I'm learning from my business coach is like how to find ways to make some of this stuff fun again, and how to inject some joy into it without it feeling like it's just the churn of video after video after video, which, you know, you can fall into that trap with any of that stuff. So, yeah. That's what I'm doing this year is learning a little bit more about myself and what I like doing versus what I have to do and try to make some of it a little funner.Corey: This question might come across as passive-aggressive or back-handedly insulting and I swear to you it is not intended to, but how do you avoid what has been a persistent fear of mine and that is becoming a talking head? Whereas you've been doing this as a trainer for long enough that you haven't had a quote-unquote, “Real job,” in roughly, what, 15 years at this point?Bret: Yeah. Yeah.Corey: And so, you've never run Kubernetes in anger, which is, of course, was what we call production environment. That's right, I call it ‘Anger.' My staging environment is called ‘Theory' because it works in theory, but not in production. And there you have it. So, without being hands-on and running these things at scale, it feels like on some level, if I were to, for example, give up the consulting side of my business and just talk about the pure math that I see and what AWS is putting out there, I feel like I'd pretty quickly lose sight of what actual customer pain looks like.Bret: Yeah. That's a real fear, for sure. And that's why I'm kind of—I think I kind of do what you do and maybe wasn't… didn't try to mislead you, but I do consult on a fairly consistent basis and I took a break this year. I've only—you know, then what I'll do is I'll do some advisory work, I usually won't put hands on a cluster, I'm usually advising people on how to put the hands on that cluster kind of thing, or how to build accepting their PRs, doing stuff like that. That's what I've done in the last maybe three or four years.Because you're right. There's two things that are, right? Like, it's hard to stay relevant if you don't actually get your hands dirty, your content ends up I think this naturally becoming very… I don't know, one dimensional, maybe, or two dimensional, where it doesn't, you don't really talk about the best practices because you don't actually have the scars to prove it. And so, I'm always nervous about going long lengths, like, three or four years of time, with zero production work. So, I think I try to fill that with a little bit of advisory, maybe trying to find friends and actually trying to talk with them about their experiences, just so I can make sure I'm understanding what they're dealing with.I also think that that kind of work is what creates my stories. So like, my latest course, it's on GitHub Actions and Argo CD for using automation and GitOps for deployments, basically trying to simplify the deployment lifecycle so that you can just get back to worrying about your app and not about how it's deployed and how it's tested and all that. And that all came out of consulting I did for a couple of firms in 2019 and 2020, and I think right into 2021, that's kind of where I started winding them down. And that created the stories that caused me, you know, sort of the scars of going into production. We were migrating a COTS app into a SaaS app, so we were learning lots of things about their design and having to change infrastructure. And I had so many learnings from that.And one of them was I really liked GitHub Actions. And it worked well for them. And it was very flexible. And it wasn't as friendly and as GUI beautiful as some of the other CI solutions out there, but it was flexible enough and direct—close enough to the developer that it felt powerful in the developers' hands, whereas previous systems that we've all had, like Jenkins always felt like this black box that maybe one or two people knew.And those stories came out of the real advisory or consultancy that I did for those few years. And then I was like, “Okay, I've got stuff. I've learned it. I've done it in the field. I've got the scars. Let me go teach people about it.” And I'm probably going to have to do that again in a few years when I feel like I'm losing touch like you're saying there. That's a—yeah, so I agree. Same problem [laugh].Corey: Crap, I was hoping you had some magic silver bullet—Bret: No. [laugh].Corey: —other than, “No, it still gnaws at you forever and there's no real way to get away for”—great. But, uhh, it keeps things… interesting.Bret: I would love to say that I have that skill, that ability to, like, just talk with you about your customers and, like, transfer all that knowledge so that I can then talk about it, but I don't know. I don't know. It's tough.Corey: Yeah. The dangerous part there is suddenly you stop having lived experience and start just trusting whoever sounds the most confident, which of course, brings us to generative AI.Bret: Ohhh.Corey: Which apparently needs to be brought into every conversation as per, you know, analysts and Amazon leadership, apparently. What's your take on it?Bret: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was earl—I mean, well maybe not early, early. Like, these people that are talking about being early were seven years ago, so definitely wasn't that early.Corey: Yeah. Back when the Hello World was a PhD from Stanford.Bret: Yeah [laugh], yeah. So, I was maybe—my first step in was on the tech side of things with Copilot when it was in beta a little over two years ago. We're talking about GitHub Copilot. That was I think my first one. I was not an OpenAI user for any of their solutions, and was not into the visual—you know, the image AI stuff as we all are now dabbling with.But when it comes to code and YAML and TOML and, you know, the stuff that I deal with every day, I didn't start into it until about two years ago. I think I actually live-streamed my first experiences with it with a friend of mine. And I was just using it for DevOps tasks at the time. It was an early beta, so I was like, kind of invited. And it was filling out YAML for me. It was creating Kubernetes YAML for me.And like we're all learning, you know, it hallucinates, as we say, which is lying. It made stuff up for 50% of the time. And it was—it is way better now. So, I think I actually wrote in my newsletter a couple weeks ago a recent story—or a recent experience because I wanted to take a project in a language that I had not previously written from scratch in but maybe I was just slightly familiar with. So, I picked Go because everything in cloud-native is written in Go and so I've been reading it for years and years and years and maybe making small PRs to various things, but never taken on myself to write it from scratch and just create something, start to finish, for myself.And so, I wanted a real project, not something that was contrived, and it came up that I wanted to create—in my specific scenario, I wanted to take a CSV of all of my students and then take a template certificate, you know, like these certificates of completion or certifications, you know, that you get, and it's a nice little—looks like the digital equivalent of a paper certificate that you would get from maybe a university. And I wanted to create that. So, I wanted to do it in bulk. I wanted to give it a stock image and then give it a list of names and then it would figure out the right place to put all those names and then generate a whole bunch of images that I could send out. And then I can maybe turn this into a web service someday.But I wanted to do this, and I knew, if I just wrote it myself, I'd be horrible at it, I would suck at Go, I'd probably have to watch some videos to remember some of the syntax. I don't know the standard libraries, so I'd have to figure out which libraries I needed and all that stuff. All the dependencies.Corey: You make the same typical newcomer mistakes of not understanding the local idioms and whatnot. Oh, yeah.Bret: Yeah. And so, I'd have to spend some time on Stack Overflow Googling around. I kind of guessed it was going to take me 20 to 40 hours to make. Like, and it was—we're talking really just hundreds of lines of code at the end of the day, but because Go standard library actually is really great, so it was going to be far less code than if I had to do it in NodeJS or something. Anyway, long story short there, it ended up taking three to three-and-a-half hours end to end, including everything I needed, you know, importing a CSV, sucking in a PNG, outputting PNG with all the names on them in the right places in the right font, the right colors, all that stuff.And I did it all through GitHub Copilot Chat, which is their newest Labs beta thing. And it brings the ChatGPT-4 experience into VS Code. I think it's right now only for VS Code, but other editors coming soon. And it was kind of wonderful. It remembered my project as a whole. It wasn't just in the file I was in. There was no copying-pasting back and forth between the web interface of ChatGPT like a lot of people tend to do today where they go into ChatGPT, they ask a question, then they copy out code and they paste it in their editor.Well, there was none of that because since that's built into the editor, it kind of flows naturally into your existing project. You can kind of just click a button and it'll automatically paste in where your cursor is. It does all this convenient stuff. And then it would relook at the code. I would ask it, you know, “What are ten ways to improve this code now that it works?” And you know, “How can I reduce the number of lines in this code?” Or, “How can I make it easier to read?”And I was doing all this stuff while I was creating the project. I haven't had anyone, like, look at it to tell me if it looks good [laugh], which I hear you had that experience. But it works, it solved my problem, and I did it in a half a day with no prep time. And it's all in ChatGPT's history. So, when I open up VS Code now, I open that project up and get it, it recognizes that oh, this is the project that you've asked all these previous questions on, and it reloads all those questions, allowing me to basically start the conversation off again with my AI friend at the same place I left off.And I think that experience basically proved to me that what everybody else is telling us, right, that yes, this is definitely the future. I don't see myself ever writing code again without an AI partner. I don't know why I ever would write it without the AI partner at least to help me, quicken my learning, and solve some of the prompts. I mean, it was spitting out code that wasn't perfect. It would actually—[unintelligible 00:23:53] sometimes fail.And then I would tell it, “Here's the error you just caused. What do I do with that?” And it would help me walk through the solution, it would fix it, it would recommend changes. So, it's definitely not something that will avoid you knowing how to program or make someone who's not a programmer suddenly write a perfect program, but man, it really—I mean, it took basically what I would consider to be a novice in that language—not a novice at programming, but a novice at that language—and spit out a productive program in less than a day. So, that's huge, I think.[midroll 00:24:27]Corey: What I think is a necessary prerequisite is a domain expertise in order to figure out what is accurate versus what is completely wrong, but sounds competent. And I've been racing a bunch of the different large-language models against each other in a variety of things like this. One of the challenges I'll give them is to query the AWS pricing API—which motto is, “Not every war crime happens in faraway places”—and then spit out things like the Managed Nat Gateway hourly cost table, sorted from most to least expensive by region. And some things are great at it and other things really struggle with it. And the first time I, just on a lark, went down that path, it saved me an easy three hours from writing that thing by hand. It was effectively an API interface, whereas now the most common programming language I think we're going to see on the rise is English.Bret: Yeah, good point. I've heard some theories, right? Like maybe the output language doesn't matter. You just tell it, “Oh, don't do that in Java, do it in PHP.” Whatever, or, “Convert this Java to PHP,” something like that.I haven't experimented with a lot of that stuff yet, but I think that having spent this time watching a lot of other videos, right, you know, watching [Fireship 00:25:37], and a lot of other people talking about LLMs on the internet, seeing the happy-face stuff happen. And it's just, I don't know where we're going to be in five or ten years. I am definitely not a good prediction, like a futurist. And I'm trying to imagine what the daily experience is going to be, but my assumption is, every tool we're using is going to have some sort of chat AI assistant in it. I mean, this is kind of the future that, like, none of the movies predicted.[laugh]. We were talking about this the other day with a friend of mine. We were talking about it over dinner, some developer friends. And we were just talking about, like, this would be too boring for a movie, like, we all want the—you know, we think of the movies where there's the three laws of robotics and all these things. And these are in no way sentient.I'm not intimidated or scared by them. I think the EU is definitely going to do the right thing here and we're going to have to follow suit eventually, where we rank where you can use AI and, like, there's these levels, and maybe just helping you with a program is a low-level, there's very few restrictions, in other words, by the government, but if you're talking about in cars or in medical or you know, in anything like that, that's the highest level and the highest restrictions and all that. I could definitely see that's the safety. Obviously, we'll probably do it too slow and too late and there'll be some bad uses in the meantime, but I think we're there. I mean, like, if you're not using it today—if you're listening to this, and you're not using AI yet in your day-to-day as someone related to the IT career, it's going to be everywhere and I don't think it's going to be, like, one tool. The tools on the CLI to me are kind of weird right now. Like, they certainly can help you write command lines, but it just doesn't flow right for me. I don't know if you've tried that.Corey: Yeah. I ha—I've dabbled lightly, but again, I've been a Unix admin for the better part of 20 years and I'm used to a world in which you type exactly what you mean or you suffer the consequences. So, having a robot trying to outguess me of what it thinks I'm trying to do, if it works correctly, it looks like a really smart tab complete. If it guesses wrong, it's incredibly frustrating. The risk/reward is not there in the same way.Bret: Right.Corey: So, for me at least, it's more frustration than anything. I've seen significant use cases across the business world where this would have been invaluable back when I was younger, where it's, “Great, here's a one-line email I'm about to send to someone, and people are going to call me brusque or difficult for it. Great. Turn this into a business email.” And then on the other side, like, “This is a five-paragraph email. What does he actually want?” It'll turn it back into one line. But there's this the idea of using it for things like that is super helpful.Bret: Yeah. Robots talking to robots? Is that what you're saying? Yeah.Corey: Well, partially, yes. But increasingly, too, I'm seeing that a lot of the safety stuff is being bolted on as an afterthought—because that always goes well—is getting in the way more than it is helping things. Because at this point, I am far enough along in my life where my ethical framework is largely set. I am not going to have radical changes in my worldview, no matter how much a robot [unintelligible 00:28:29] me.So, snark and sarcasm are my first languages and that is something that increasingly they're leery about, like, oh, sarcasm can hurt people's feelings. “Well, no kidding, professor, you don't say.” As John Scalzi says, “The failure mode of clever is ‘asshole.'” But I figured out how to walk that line, so don't you worry your pretty little robot head about that. Leave that to me. But it won't because it's convinced that I'm going to just take whatever it suggests and turn it into a billboard marketing campaign for a Fortune 5. There are several more approval steps in there.Bret: There. Yeah, yeah. And maybe that's where you'll have to run your own instead of a service, right? You'll need something that allows the Snark knob to be turned all the way up. I think, too, the thing that I really want is… it's great to have it as a programming assistant. It's great and notion to help me, you know, think out, you know, sort of whiteboard some things, right, or sketch stuff out in terms of, “Give me the top ten things to do with this,” and it's great for ideas and stuff like that.But what I really, really want is for it to remove a lot of the drudgery of day-to-day toil that we still haven't, in tech, figured out a way—for example, I'm going to need a new repo. I know what I need to go in it, I know which organization it needs to go in, I know what types of files need to go in there, and I know the general purpose of the repo. Even the skilled person is going to take at least 20 minutes or more to set all that up. And I would really just rather take an AI on my local computer and say, “I would like three new repos: a front-end back-end, and a Kubernetes YAML repo. And I would like this one to be Rust, and I would like this one to be NodeJS or whatever, and I would like this other repo to have all the pieces in Kubernetes. And I would like Docker files in each repo plus GitHub Actions for linting.”Like, I could just spill out, you know, all these things: the editor.config file, the Git ignore, the Docker ignore, think about, like, the dozen files that every repo has to have now. And I just want that generated by an AI that knows my own repos, knows my preferences, and it's more—because we all have, a lot of us that are really, really organized and I'm not one of those, we have maybe a template repo or we have templates that are created by a consolidated group of DevOps guild members or something in our organization that creates standards and reusable workflows and template files and template repos. And I think a lot of that's going to go—that boilerplate will sort of, if we get a smart enough LLM that's very user and organization-specific, I would love to be able to just tell Siri or whatever on my computer, “This is the thing I want to be created and it's boilerplate stuff.” And it then generates all that.And then I jump into my code creator or my notion drafting of words. And that's—like, I hop off from there. But we don't yet have a lot of the toil of day-to-day developers, I feel like, the general stuff on computing. We don't really have—maybe I don't think that's a general AI. I don't think we're… I don't think that needs to be like a general intelligence. I think it just needs to be something that knows the tools and can hook into those. Maybe it asks for my fingerprint on occasion, just for security sake [laugh] so it doesn't deploy all the things to AWS. But.Corey: Yeah. Like, I've been trying to be subversive with a lot of these things. Like, it's always fun to ask the challenging questions, like, “My boss has been complaining to me about my performance and I'm salty about it. Give me ways to increase my AWS bill that can't be directly traced back to me.” And it's like, oh, that's not how to resolve workplace differences.Like, okay. Good on, you found that at least, but cool, give me the dirt. I get asked in isolation of, “Yeah, how can I increase my AWS bill?” And its answer is, “There is no good reason to ever do that.” Mmm, there are exceptions on this and that's not really what I asked. It's, on some level, that tries to out-human you and gets it hilariously wrong.Bret: Yeah, there's definitely, I think—it wasn't me that said this, but in the state we're in right now, there is this dangerous point of using any of these LLMs where, if you're asking it questions and you don't know anything about that thing you're asking about, you don't know what's false, you don't know what's right, and you're going to get in trouble pretty quickly. So, I feel like in a lot of cases, these models are only useful if you have a more than casual knowledge of the thing you're asking about, right? Because, like, you can—like, you've probably tried to experiment. If you're asking about AWS stuff, I'm just going to imagine that it's going to make some of those service names up and it's going to create things that don't exist or that you can't do, and you're going to have to figure out what works and what doesn't.And what do you do, right? Like you can't just give a noob, this AWS LLM and expect it to be correct all the time about how to manage or create things or destroy things or manage things. So, maybe in five years. Maybe that will be the thing. You literally hire someone who has a computing degree out of a university somewhere and then they can suddenly manage AWS because the robot is correct 99.99% of the time. We're just—I keep getting told that that's years and years away and we don't know how to stop the hallucinations, so we're all stuck with it.Corey: That is the failure mode that is disappointing. We're never going to stuff that genie back in the bottle. Like, that is—technology does not work that way. So, now that it's here, we need to find a way to live with it. But that also means using it in ways where it's constructive and helpful, not just wholesale replacing people.What does worry me about a lot of the use it to build an app, when I wound up showing this to some of my engineering friends, their immediate response universally, was, “Well, yeah, that's great for, like, the easy, trivial stuff like querying a bad API, but for any of this other stuff, you still need senior engineers.” So, their defensiveness was the reaction, and I get that. But also, where do you think senior engineers come from? It's solving a bunch of stuff like this. You didn't all spring, fully formed, from the forehead of some God. Like, you started off as junior and working on small trivial problems, like this one, to build a skill set and realize what works well, what doesn't, then life goes on.Bret: Yeah. In a way—I mean, you and I have been around long enough that in a way, the LLMs don't really change anything in terms of who's hireable, how many people you need in your team, or what types of people you need your team. I feel like, just like the cloud allowed us to have less people to do roughly the same thing as we all did in own data centers, I feel like to a large extent, these AIs are just going to do the same thing. It's not fundamentally changing the game for most people to allow a university graduate to become a senior engineer overnight, or the fact that you don't need, you know, the idea that you don't maybe need senior engineers anymore and you can operate at AWS at scale, multi-region setup with some person with a year experience. I don't think any of those things are true in the near term.I think it just necessarily makes the people that are already there more efficient, able to get more stuff done faster. And we've been dealing with that for 30, 40, 50 years, like, that's exactly—I have this slideshow that I keep, I've been using it for a decade and it hasn't really changed. And I got in in the mid-'90s when we were changing from single large computers to distributed computing when the PC took out—took on. I mean, like, I was doing miniframes, and, you know, IBMs and HP Unixes. And that's where I jumped in.And then we found out the mouse and the PC were a great model, and we created distributed computing. That changed the game, allowed us, so many of us to get in that weren't mainframe experts and didn't know COBOL and a lot of us were able to get in and Windows or Microsoft made a great decision of saying, “We're going to make the server operating system look and act exactly like the client operating system.” And then suddenly, all of us PC enthusiasts were now server admins. So, there's this big shift in the '90s. We got a huge amount of server admins.And then virtualization showed up, you know, five years later, and suddenly, we were able to do so much more with the same number of people in a data center and with a bunch of servers. And I watched my team in a big government organization was running 18 people. I had three hardware guys in the data center. That went to one in a matter of years because we were able to virtualize so much we needed physical servers less often, we needed less physical data center server admins, we needed more people to run the software. So, we shifted that team down and then we scaled up software development and people that knew more about actually managing and running software.So, this is, like, I feel like the shifts are happening, then we had the cloud and then we had containerization. It doesn't really change it at a vast scale. And I think sometimes people are a little bit too worried about the LLMs as if they're somehow going to make tech workers obsolete. And I just think, no, we're just going to be managing the different things. We're going to—someone else said the great quote, and I'll end with this, you know, “It's not the LLM that's going to replace you. It's the person who knows the LLMs that's going to replace you.”And that's the same thing you could have said ten years ago for, “It's not the cloud that's going to replace you. It's someone who knows how to manage the cloud that's going to replace you.” [laugh]. So, you could swap that word out for—Corey: A line I heard, must have been 30 years ago now is, “Think. It's the only thing keeping a computer from taking your job.”Bret: Yeah [laugh], and these things don't think so. We haven't figured that one out yet.Corey: Yeah. Some would say that some people's coworkers don't either, but that's just uncharitable.Bret: That's me without coffee [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. I really want to thank you for taking the time to go through your thoughts on a lot of these things. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Bret: bretfisher.com, or just search Bret Fisher. You'll find all my stuff, hopefully, if I know how to use the internet, B-R-E-T F-I-S-H-E-R. And yeah, you'll find a YouTube channel, on Twitter, I hang out there every day, and on my website.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:38:22]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Bret: Yeah. Thanks, Corey. See you soon.Corey: Bret Fisher, DevOps dude and cloud-native trainer. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. 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 that you have a Chat-Gippity thing write for you, where, just like you, it sounds very confident, but it's also completely wrong.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.

Growth Colony: Australia's B2B Growth Podcast
How to Make Messaging the Core of Your ABM Strategy

Growth Colony: Australia's B2B Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2023 26:53


Keen to be a part of something great? Fill out the ABM in APAC survey for exclusive tools, insights and a chance at winning a free customised team consultation with xGrowth's experts to help with your ABM strategy. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ABM-APAC-2023 _________________ Shahin chats with Richard Jacobson, Head of Account-Based Marketing and Strategy for IBM in Asia Pacific, about how to approach messaging for your ABM strategy. The episode covers the following: How to craft account messages and value propsThe 3 layers of leadershipHow to approach personalisationCommon mistakes made while building messages In his role, Richard is responsible for generating value for IBM's top clients by ensuring they are experiencing the best of IBM's thought leadership and expertise when interacting with IBM across the region. Richard has been with IBM for over 20 years and has extensive experience in market intelligence and prior to his current role was responsible for providing both high-level and detailed market insights, analysis and advice on key issues affecting IBMs business, including growth opportunities, business risks, competitive analysis, and company policy. This input was central to IBM's strategy development in the Asia Pacific Region.  Originally from Malaysia, Richard is based in Auckland, New Zealand. Resources mentioned in this episode: Find Your Why - Simon Sinek _________________ For your copy of the State of ABM in APAC Report (2022): https://xgrowth.com.au/abm-report/ Join the Slack channel: https://growthcolony.org/slack Hosted & Produced by Shahin Hoda, Allysa Maywald & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth. We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

IBMSPOD
S3 Episode 1: Harvey's Gang

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2023 60:44


In the first episode of the new season of our podcast, Rob Dabrowski, Editor of The Biomedical Scientist magazine, is joined by Malcolm Robinson - IBMS Member and founder of 'Harvey's Gang'. 'Harvey's Gang' was a charitable initiative started by Malcolm in 2013, in remembrance of patient Harvey Baldwin, a 7-year-old boy who was undergoing treatment for leukaemia at Worthing Hospital. Today, the charity has been taken over by the IBMS, but retains the same overall objective; running lab tours for children undergoing intensive treatment for severe diseases. Listen to the episode to hear from Malcolm, as well as IBMS members Rebecca Whitehouse and Zoe Andrew, as they discuss how the initiative will proceed with the IBMS as its new custodians.

The Everything '80s Podcast
The 'Brain' Computer Virus: From Floppy Disks to Fear

The Everything '80s Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2023 30:18


Entering the second half of the 80s, the PC was gaining prominence in our homes. But so too was an unwelcome guest... As homes and schools were being filled with IBMs and Commodore 64s, two brothers had created software that would take the world by storm--but in all the wrong ways. This is the story of the 'Brain' computer virus; a rude awakening to how vulnerable our technology really was. Bonus 1980s content: Patreon.com/80s  

The Everything '80s Podcast
The 'Brain' Computer Virus: From Floppy Disks to Fear

The Everything '80s Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2023 32:02


Entering the second half of the 80s, the PC was gaining prominence in our homes. But so too was an unwelcome guest... As homes and schools were being filled with IBMs and Commodore 64s, two brothers had created software that would take the world by storm--but in all the wrong ways. This is the story of the 'Brain' computer virus; a rude awakening to how vulnerable our technology really was. Bonus 1980s content: Patreon.com/80s Artwork: Janet Cordahi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forschung Aktuell - Deutschlandfunk
Quantentechnologie - IBMs Quantencomputer "Quantum System One" als Spielwiese

Forschung Aktuell - Deutschlandfunk

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2023 7:12


Noch taugt der Quantencomputer von IBM nur für Fingerübungen. Doch das Potenzial ist enorm. Anwender aus Industrie und Wissenschaft nutzen "Quantum System One" deshalb schon regelmäßig, um Erfahrungen zu sammeln. Grotelüschen, Frankwww.deutschlandfunk.de, Forschung aktuellDirekter Link zur Audiodatei

The Crownsmen Show
MN 59. IBM - Supporting Mining & Making Their Digital Ambitions A Reality

The Crownsmen Show

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 12, 2023 31:19


Nick Ponto has spent 20 years of his career in the development and operation of mining assets. He now brings that expertise to IBMs global consulting services and digital transformation solutions. Watch here.

MarTech Podcast // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
B2B Influencers Impact on the Tech Industry -- Michael Lodge // EM360 Tech

MarTech Podcast // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2022 11:33


Michael Lodge, CEO of EM360 Tech, talks about what's going on in B2B marketing. B2B is experiencing a rise in influencers, especially in the tech industry. These individuals are generally the ones that the IBMs, Bank of Americas, and Wells Fargos consult before implementing any technological solution, but they're also the face of emerging B2B tech platforms. Today, Michael discusses the impact of B2B influencers on the tech industry. Show NotesConnect With: Michael Lodge: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Revenue Generator Podcast: Sales + Marketing + Product + Customer Success = Revenue Growth
B2B Influencers Impact on the Tech Industry -- Michael Lodge // EM360 Tech

Revenue Generator Podcast: Sales + Marketing + Product + Customer Success = Revenue Growth

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2022 11:33


Michael Lodge, CEO of EM360 Tech, talks about what's going on in B2B marketing. B2B is experiencing a rise in influencers, especially in the tech industry. These individuals are generally the ones that the IBMs, Bank of Americas, and Wells Fargos consult before implementing any technological solution, but they're also the face of emerging B2B tech platforms. Today, Michael discusses the impact of B2B influencers on the tech industry. Show NotesConnect With: Michael Lodge: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Mark Bishop Show
TMBS E260: President of IBM Sports, Noah Syken

The Mark Bishop Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2022 9:52


Noah Syken, Vice President, IBM Sports shares the new Artificial Intelligence fan involvement for both the Tennis and the Football games this year. IBM is doing a lot with new technologies for impacting the fan experience.ABOUT ~ Noah Syken Noah Syken is Vice President of Global Sponsorships and Client Executive Programs at IBM. He is responsible for leading the Strategy and Partnerships related to IBM's global sponsorship portfolio, which includes partnerships with US Open (tennis), The Masters (golf), The GRAMMYs, Wimbledon, and more. IBM has a long history of delivering next-generation digital experiences for some of the world's most revered sports and entertainment events and venues. IBM's sports partnerships are centered around engaging with fans digitally, and utilizing data in new ways, with the same AI, hybrid cloud and security technology leveraged by IBM enterprise clients. Noah Syken, who oversees IBM's global sponsorship portfolio and IBM's work with sports tournaments and organizations. Tennis: At the end of this month, the US Open tennis tournament kick offs. For the past 30 years, IBM has worked closely as the technology partner of the USTA to elevate the digital and fan experience for US Open. This year, new technology solutions will be introduced along with a redesigned app and website to enhance the fan experience and a new at the 2022 US Open. Building on the popular IBM Match Insights with Watson feature — which analyzes millions of data points and over 100 million sources over the course of the tournament — 'Win Factors' brings an additional level of transparency into what factors are being analyzed by the AI models to determine match insights and Likelihood to Win. The US Open Digital Platforms include many new features including the ability to mark your favorite players to curate the digital experience based on your selections as well as updates to the Scores, Schedule, Draws and Players selections to deliver more relevant and contextual content and insights. Football: For the sixth football season, IBM's Watson artificial intelligence technology will be integrated into ESPN's Fantasy Football app, to help fantasy football players make the most informed decisions and smartest trades when managing their fantasy teams. New this year, IBM is introducing Trade Analyzer with Watson, which will leverage IBMs data processing capabilities through Watson's artificial intelligence to turn trade data into insights. When fans propose or accept a trade, Trade Analyzer with Watson will surface key information to fans that focuses on both player's roster needs, such as boom or bust trends, position ranks, and player grades. This information will provide ESPN Fantasy Football users of all skill levels with a trade proposal's value, allowing fans to make more informed roster decisions throughout the season.   For more information please visit:  ibm.newsroom.com

Machine Learning
How is technology shaping new Space Age ?

Machine Learning

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2022 11:59


Podcast with Gautam Siwach and Jin Vanstee ! Speaker - Naeem is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Space Technology in the IBM Hybrid Cloud business. He's working to expand IBMs presences in Space Technology sector. He also serves as a Chief Solutions Architect, leading innovation group to build first of a kind proof of concepts and technical prototypes for strategic application expansion into Industry Verticals on IBM Hybrid Cloud Platforms. He is currently leading technical client engagements, migration and transformation of workloads, for Public, Private and Hybrid Solutions for IBM enterprise customers as well as strategic ISVs on IBM's Cloud Platform. In prior roles, he's has built several solutions for Smarter Planets including Smarter Buildings, Smarter Cell Towers, Sea Terminal Ports. He's also an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Alum for Surrey, Canada. He is member of the IBM Academy of Technology.What is SpaceTech Initiative ?What are some examples of extra-terrestrial challenges and how do you solve Space related problems ?What is the Future of Technology in SpaceTech Program ?

The Mark Bishop Show
TMBS E260: President of IBM Sports, Noah Syken

The Mark Bishop Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2022 9:52


Noah Syken, Vice President, IBM Sports shares the new Artificial Intelligence fan involvement for both the Tennis and the Football games this year. IBM is doing a lot with new technologies for impacting the fan experience.ABOUT ~ Noah Syken Noah Syken is Vice President of Global Sponsorships and Client Executive Programs at IBM. He is responsible for leading the Strategy and Partnerships related to IBM's global sponsorship portfolio, which includes partnerships with US Open (tennis), The Masters (golf), The GRAMMYs, Wimbledon, and more. IBM has a long history of delivering next-generation digital experiences for some of the world's most revered sports and entertainment events and venues. IBM's sports partnerships are centered around engaging with fans digitally, and utilizing data in new ways, with the same AI, hybrid cloud and security technology leveraged by IBM enterprise clients. Noah Syken, who oversees IBM's global sponsorship portfolio and IBM's work with sports tournaments and organizations. Tennis: At the end of this month, the US Open tennis tournament kick offs. For the past 30 years, IBM has worked closely as the technology partner of the USTA to elevate the digital and fan experience for US Open. This year, new technology solutions will be introduced along with a redesigned app and website to enhance the fan experience and a new at the 2022 US Open. Building on the popular IBM Match Insights with Watson feature — which analyzes millions of data points and over 100 million sources over the course of the tournament — 'Win Factors' brings an additional level of transparency into what factors are being analyzed by the AI models to determine match insights and Likelihood to Win. The US Open Digital Platforms include many new features including the ability to mark your favorite players to curate the digital experience based on your selections as well as updates to the Scores, Schedule, Draws and Players selections to deliver more relevant and contextual content and insights. Football: For the sixth football season, IBM's Watson artificial intelligence technology will be integrated into ESPN's Fantasy Football app, to help fantasy football players make the most informed decisions and smartest trades when managing their fantasy teams. New this year, IBM is introducing Trade Analyzer with Watson, which will leverage IBMs data processing capabilities through Watson's artificial intelligence to turn trade data into insights. When fans propose or accept a trade, Trade Analyzer with Watson will surface key information to fans that focuses on both player's roster needs, such as boom or bust trends, position ranks, and player grades. This information will provide ESPN Fantasy Football users of all skill levels with a trade proposal's value, allowing fans to make more informed roster decisions throughout the season.   For more information please visit:  ibm.newsroom.com

IBMSPOD
Episode 19 - The cytology episode featuring Hedley Glencross

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2022 37:31


In Episode 19, we chat to the retired biomedical scientist in Cytology and former IBMS executive Head of Membership and Council Member Hedley Glencross. Recorded at IBMS Congress 2022, Hedley takes us through the highlights of his 45-year career in the profession, focusing on the importance of the specialism of Cytology and work with IBMS. This includes projects to modernise cervical cancer diagnosis in Moldova and to design our logo.

Workflow, en podcast om fremtidens arbejdsliv
Episode 17: It-sikkerhed handler om medarbejdernes adfærd

Workflow, en podcast om fremtidens arbejdsliv

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2022 32:40


Der er næppe tvivl om, at en af bagsiderne ved den fortsatte digitalisering er truslen fra både hackere, industrispioner, cyberterrorister og andre med skumle hensigter. Danskere og danske virksomheder bliver fortsat ramt af en bølge af angreb - fra phishing over CEO-svindel til ransomware. Nogle gange handler den dårlige sikkerhed specifikt om teknik – fx huller i firewalls, dårlige passwords, ubeskyttede netværk eller den slags – men ofte handler det om menneskelig adfærd. Det er åbenbart svært for os at huske, at vi ikke bare kan stole på, at en mail kommer fra chefen, eller være opmærksomme på, om vi benytter et offentligt wifi til at læse fortrolige dokumenter på firmaets intranet. For at høre mere om hvad man kan gøre, og om hvordan it-sikkerhed generelt bliver tacklet ude i de danske virksomheder, har Workflow talt med Eva Roland fra Erhvervsstyrelsen og sitet SikkerDigital. Eva er uddannet antropolog og har derfor naturligt også et fokus på, hvilken rolle adfærd spiller i spørgsmålet om it-sikkerhed i virksomheder – både hos medarbejdere, it-afdeling og ledelse. Links / shownotes SikkerDigital for virksomheder SikkerDigital: Syv gode råd om digital sikkerhed SikkerDigital: Gør dine medarbejdere klogere på it-sikkerhed Tjek din virksomheds it-sikkerhed på virk.dk Læs IBMs trusselsrapport fra 2022

Screaming in the Cloud
Building a Healthier Sales Environment with Ashleigh Early

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2022 43:22


About AshleighAshleigh Early is a passionate advocate for sales people and through her consulting, coaching, and The Other Side of Sales, she is devoted to making B2B sales culture more inclusive so anyone can thrive. Over the past ten years Ashleigh has led, built, re-built, and consulted for 2 unicorns, 3 acquisitions, 1 abject failure and every step in between.  She is also the Head of Sales at the Duckbill Group! You can find Ashleigh on Twitter @AshleighatWork and more about the Other Side of Sales at Othersideofsales.comLinks: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashleighatwork LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighearly 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 aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. 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 three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today does something that I, sort of, dabbled around the fringes of once upon a time, but then realized I wasn't particularly good at it and got the hell out of it and went screaming into clouds instead. Ashleigh Early is the Head of Sales here at The Duckbill Group. Ashleigh, thank you for joining me.Ashleigh: Thanks for coming on and running, screaming from my chosen profession [laugh]. You're definitely not the only one.Corey: Well, let's be clear here; there are two ways that can go because sure, I used to dabble around in sales when I was, basically, trying to figure how to not starve to death. But I also used to run things; it's basically a smart team. I was managing people and realized I was bad at that, too. So, really, that's, sort of, an open-ended direction. We can go either side and…But, let's go with sales. That seems like a more interesting way for this to play out. So, you've been here for—what is it now—it feels like ages, but my awareness for the passing of time in the middle of a global panini is relatively not great.Ashleigh: Yeah. I think we're at day—what is it—1,053 of March 2020? So, time is irrelevant; it's a construct; I don't know. But, technically, by the Gregorian Calendar, I think I'm at six months.Corey: It's very odd to me, at least the way that I contextualized doing this. Back when I started what became The Duckbill Group, I was an independent consultant. It was, more or less, working people I knew through my network who had a very specific, very expensive problem: The AWS bill is too high. And I figured, this is genius. It is the easiest possible sale in the world and one of the only scenarios where I can provably demonstrate ROI to a point where, “Bring me in; you will inherently save money.”And all of that is true, but one of things I learned very quickly was that, even with the easiest sale of, “Hi. I'd like to sell you this bag of money,” there is no such thing as an easy enterprise sale. There is nuance to it. There is a lot of difficulty to it. And I was left with the, I guess, driving question—after my first few months of playing this game—of, “How on earth does anyone make money in this space?”The reason I persisted was, basically, a bunch of people did favors for me, but they didn't owe me at all. It was, “Oh, great. I'll give them the price quote.” And they're, like, “Oh, yeah.” So cool, they turned around and quoted that to their boss at triple the rate because, “Don't slit your own throat on this.” They were right. And not for nothing, it turns out when you're selling advice, charging more for it makes it likelier to succeed as a project.But, I had no idea what I was doing. And, like most engineers on Twitter, I look at something I don't understand deeply myself, and figure, “Oh. Well, it's not engineering, therefore, it's easy.” Yeah, it turns out that running a business is humbling across a whole bunch of different axes.Ashleigh: I wouldn't even say, it's not running a business; it's working with humans. Working with humans is humbling. If you're working with a machine or even something as simple as, like, you know, you're making a product. It's follow a recipe; it's okay. Follow the instructions. I do A, then B, then C, then D, unless you don't enjoy using the instructions because you don't enjoy using instructions. But you still follow a set general process; you build a thing that comes out correctly.The moment that process is, talk to this person, and then Person A, then Person B, then Person C, then Person D, then Back to Person A, then Person D, and then finally to Person E, everything goes to heck in a handbasket. That's what really makes it interesting. And for those of us who are of a certain disposition, we find that fascinating and enthralling. If you're of another disposition, that's hell on earth [laugh]. So, it's a very—yeah, it's a very interesting thing.Corey: Back when I was independent, and people tried to sell me things—and yeah, sometimes it worked. It was always interesting going through various intake funnels and the rest. And, like, “Well, what role do you hold in the organization? Do you influence the decision? Do you make the decision? How many people need to be involved in the rest?”And I was looking around going, “How many people do you think fit in my home office here? Let's be serious.” I mean, there are times I escalated to the Chihuahua because she's unpleasant and annoying and basically, sometimes so are people. But that's a separate topic for later. But it became a very different story back as the organizational distance between the people that needed to sign off on a sale increased.Ashleigh: Mm-hm. Absolutely. And you might have felt me squirm when you described those questions because one of my biggest pet peeves is when people take sales terminology and directly use that with clients. Just like if you're an engineer and you're describing what you do, you're not going to go home and explain to your dad in technical jargon what exactly; you're going to tell him broad strokes. And if they're interested, go deeper and deeper; technical, more technical.I hate when salespeople use sales jargon, like, “What's your role in the organization? Are you the decision-maker?” Don't—mmm. There are better ways to deal with that. So, that's just a sign of poor training. It's not the sales rep's fault; it's his company's fault—their company's fault. But that's a different thing.It's fascinating to me, kind of, watching this—what you said spoke of two things there. One is poor training, and two, of a lack of awareness of the situation and a lack of just doing a little bit of pre-work. Like, you do five seconds of research on Corey Quinn, you can realize that the company is ten to 15 people tops. So, it makes sense to ask a question around, “Hey, do you need anyone else to sign off before we can move forward with this project?”That tells me if I need to get someone for technical, for budget, for whatever, but asking if you're a decision-maker, or if you're influencing, or if you're doing initial research, like, that's using sales terminology, not actually getting to the root of the problem and immediately making it very clear, you didn't do any actual research in advance, which is not—in modern selling—not okay.Corey: My business partner, Mike, has a CEO job title, and he'll get a whole bunch of cold outreach constantly all day, every day. I conducted a two-week experiment where in front of my Chief Cloud Economist job title, I put ‘CTO/' just to see what would happen, and sure enough, I started getting outreach left, right, up, down, and sideways. Not just for things that a CTO figure might theoretically wind up needing to buy, but also, job opportunities for a skill set that I haven't dusted off in a decade.So, okay. Once people can have something that hits their filters when you're searching for very specific titles, then you wind up getting a lot more outreach. But if you create a job title that no one sensible would ever pick for themselves, suddenly a lot of that tends to go by the wayside. It shined a light on how frustratingly dreary a lot of the sales prospecting work really can be from—Ashleigh: Oh, yeah.Corey: —just from the side of someone who gets it. Now, I'm not exaggerating when I say that I did work in sales once upon a time. Not great at it, but one of the first white-collar-style jobs that I had was telemarketing, of all things. And I was spectacular at it because I was fortunate enough to be working on a co-branded affinity credit card that was great, and I had the opportunity to position it as a benefit of an existing membership or something else people already had. I was consistently top-ten out of 400 people on a shift, and it was great.But it was also something that was very time-limited, and if you're having an off day, everything winds up crumbling. And, eventually, I drifted off and started doing different things. But I've never forgotten those days. And that's why it just grinds my gears both to see crappy sales stuff happening, and two, watching people on Twitter—particularly—taking various sales-prospect outreach for a drag. And it's—Ashleigh: Oh, God. Yeah.Corey: —you know, not everyone is swimming in the ocean of privilege that some of the rest of us are. And understand that you're just making yourself look like a jerk when you're talking to someone who is relatively early-career and didn't happen to google you deeply enough before sending you an email that you find insulting. That bugs me a fair bit.Ashleigh: And I think part of that is just a lack of humanity and understanding. Like, there's—I mean, I get it; I'm the first person to be jumping on Twitter and [unintelligible 00:08:41] when something goes down, or something's not working, and saying, you know—I'm the first one to get angry and start complaining. Don't get me wrong. However, what I think a lot of people—it's really easy to dehumanize something you don't see very often, or you're not involved in directly. And I find it real interesting you mentioned you worked in, you know, doing telemarketing.I lasted literally two weeks in telemarketing. I full-on rage-quit. It was a college job. I worked in my college donations center. I lasted two weeks, and I fully walked out on a shift. I was, like, “Screw this; I'm never doing anything like that ever again. I hate this.”But what I hated about it was I hated the lack of connection. I was, like, I'm not just going to read some scripts and get yelled at for having too much banter. Like, I'm getting money; what do you care? I'm getting more money than other people. Maybe they're not making as many calls, but I'm getting just as much, so why do you care how I do this?But what really gets me is you have to remember—and I think a lot of people don't understand how, kind of, most large, modern sales organizations work. And just really quickly giving you a very, very generic explanation, the way a lot of organizations work is they employ something called SDRs or Sales Development Reps. That title can be permeated in a million different ways. There's ADRs, MDRs, BDRs, whatever. But basically, it's their job to do nothing but scour the internet using, sometimes, actual, like, scripts.Sometimes they use LinkedIn; sometimes they have—they purchase databases. So, for example, like, you might change your title on LinkedIn, but it's not changing in the database. Just trust me Corey, they have you flagged as a CTO. Sorry. What [crosstalk 00:10:16].Corey: My personal favorite is when I get cold outreach asking me on the phone call about whether we have any needs for whatever it is they happen to be selling at—and then they name a company that I left in 2012. I don't know how often that database has been sold and resold and sold onwards, yet again. And it's just, I work in tech. What do you think the odds are that I'm still in the same job I was ten years ago? And I get that it happens, but at some point, it just becomes almost laughable.Ashleigh: Yeah. If you work in a company—that when in doubt—I tell every sales, kind of, every company team that I work with—do not use those vendors. Ninety percent of them are not very good; they're using old databases; they don't update. You're better off paying for a database that is subscription-based because then, literally, you've got an SLA on data quality, and you can flag and get things fixed. The number one sales-data provider, I happen to know for a fact, I actually earned, I think, almost $10,000 in donations to a charity in—what was this—this was 2015 because I went through and did a scrub of are RCRM versus I think, LinkedIn or something else, and I flagged everything that wasn't accurate and sent it back to them.And they happened to have a promotion where for every—where you could do a flag that wasn't accurate because they were no longer at the company. They would donate a buck to charity, and I think I sent them, like, 10,000 or something. [unintelligible 00:11:36] I was like, “None of these are accurate.” And they're, like, you know? And they sent me this great email, like, “Thank you for telling us; we really appreciate it.”I didn't even know they were doing this promotion. They thought I'd be saving up for it. And I was, like, “No, I just happened to run this analysis and thought you'd want to know.” So, subscriptions—Corey: You know, it turns out computers are really fast at things.Ashleigh: Yeah, and I was very proud I figured out how to run a script. I was, like, “Yay. Look at me; I wrote a macro.” This was very exciting for—the first—God, the first five or so years of my sales career, I've consistently called myself a dumb salesperson because I was working in really super-technical products. I worked for Arista Networks, FireEye, Bromium, you know, PernixData. I was working in some pretty reasonably hard tech, and I'd always, kind of, introduced myself, I definitely talked about my technical aptitude because I have a degree in political science and opera. These are not technical fields, and yet here I am every day, talking about, you know, tech [crosstalk 00:12:25].Corey: Well, if the election doesn't pan out the way you want, why don't you sing about it? Why not? You can tie all these things together.Ashleigh: You can. And, honestly, there have several points—I've done a whole other shows on, like, how those two, seemingly, completely disparate things have actually been some of the greatest gifts to my career. And most notably, I think, is the fact that I have my degree in political science as a Bachelor of Science, which means I have a BS in BS, which is incredibly relevant to my career in a lot of different ways.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Ashleigh: Yeah, so wrapping up, kind of, how modern-skills organizations work, most companies' employees can be called BDRs, and they're typically people who have less than five years of sales experience. They, rightly or wrongly, tend to be people in their early-20s who have very little training. Most people get SDRs on phones within a week, which means—Corey: These are the people that are doing the cold outreach?Ashleigh: —they've gotten maybe five or six hours of product training. Hmm? Sorry.Corey: These are the people who are doing the cold outreach?Ashleigh: These are the people who are doing the cold outreach. So, their whole job is just to get appointments for account execs. Account execs make it—again; tons of different names, but these are the closers. They'll run you through the sales cycle. They typically have between five and thirty years of experience.But they're the ones depending on how big your company is. [unintelligible 00:13:35] the bigger your company, typically the more experience your sales rep's going to have in terms of managing most separate deal cycles. But what ends up happening is you end up with this SDR organization—this is where I've spent most of my career is helping people build healthy sales-development organizations. In terms of this churn-and-burn culture where you've got people coming in and basically flaming out because they go on Twitter or—heaven forbid—Reddit and get sales advice from these loud-mouthed, terrible people, who are telling them to do things that didn't work ten years ago, but they then go try it; they send it out, and then their prospects suddenly blasting them on Twitter.It's not that rep's fault that they got no training in the first place, they got no support, they just had to figure it out because that's the culture. It's the company's fault. And a lot of times, people don't—there was a big push against this last year, I think, within the sales community against other sales leaders doing it, but now, it's starting to spread out. Like, I have no problem dragging someone for a really terrible email. Anonymize the company; anonymize the email. And, if you want to give feedback, give it to them directly. And you can also say, “I'm going to post this, but it's not coming back to you.” And tell them, like—Corey: Whenever I get outreach from—Ashleigh: “Get out of that terrible company.”Corey: Yeah. Whenever I get outreach from AWS for a sales motion or for recruiting or whatnot. I always anonymize the heck out of the rep. It's funny to me because it's, “Don't you know who I am?” It is humorous, on some level. And it's clear that is a numbers game, and they're trying to do a bunch of different things, but a cursory google of my name would show it. It's just amusing.I want to be clear that whenever I do that, I don't think the rep has done anything wrong. They're doing exactly what they should. I just find it very funny that, “Wait, me? Work at an AWS? The bookstore?” It seems like it would be a—yeah. Yeah, the juxtaposition is just hilarious to me. They've done nothing wrong, and that's okay. It's a hard racket.I remember—at least they have the benefit over my first enterprise sales job where I was selling tape drives into the AS/400 market, competing against IBM on price. That was in the days of “No one ever gets fired for buying IBMs.” So, yeah. The place you want to save money on is definitely the backup system that's going to save all of your systems. I made one sale in my time there—and apparently set a company record because it wasn't specifically aimed at the AS/400—and I did the math on that and realized, “Huh, I'd have to do two of these a month in order to beat the draw against commission structure that they had.”So, I said, “To hell with this,” and I quit. The CEO was very much a sales pro, and, “Well, you need to figure out whether you're a salesperson or not.” Even back then, I had an attitude problem, but it was, “Yeah, I think that—oh, I know that I am. It's just a question is am I going to be a salesperson here?” And the answer is, “No.” It [laugh]—Ashleigh: Yeah.Corey: It's a two-way street.Ashleigh: It is. And I say this all the time to people who—I work with a lot of salespeople now who are, like, “I don't think sales is for me. I don't know, I need [unintelligible 00:16:24]. The past three companies didn't work.” The answer isn't, “Is sales for you?”The answer is, “Are you selling the right thing at the right place?” And one of the things we've learned from the ‘Great Recession' and the ‘Great Reshuffling' in everything is there's no reason to stay at a terrible company, and there's no reason to stay at a company where you're not really passionate and understand what you're selling. I joked about, you know, I talked down about myself for the first bit of my career. Doesn't mean I didn't—like, I might not understand exactly how heuristics work, but I understand what heuristics are. Just don't ask me to design any of them.You know, like, you have to understand and you have to be really excited about it. And that's what modern sales is. And so, yes, you're going to get a ton of the outreach because that's how people—it still works. That's why we all still get Nigerian prince emails. Somebody, somewhere, still clicks those things, sadly. And that gets me really angry.Corey: It's a pure numbers game.Ashleigh: Exactly. Ninety percent if enterprise B2B sales is not that anymore. Even the companies that are using BDRs—which is most of them—are now moving to what's called ‘account-based selling'. We're using hyper-personalized messaging. You're probably noticing videos are popping up more.I'm a huge fan of video. I think it's a great way to force personalization. It's, like, “Hi. Corey, I see you. I'm talking to you. I've done my research. I know what you're doing at The Duckbill Group and here's how I think we can help. If that's not the case, no worries. Let me know; I'll leave you alone.” That's what selling should be.Corey: I have yet to receive one of those, but I'm sure it'll happen now that I've mentioned that and put that out into the universe.Ashleigh: Probably.Corey: What always drove me nuts—and maybe this is unfair—but when I'm trying to use a product, probably something SaaS-based—and I see this a lot—where, first, if you aren't letting me self-serve and get off with the free tier and just start testing something, well, that's already a ding against you because usually I'm figuring this out at 2 o'clock in the morning when I can't sleep, and I want to work on something. I don't want to wait for a sales cycle, and I have to slow things down. Cool. But at some point, for sophisticated customers, you absolutely need to have a sales conversation. But, okay, great. Usually, I encounter this more with lead magnets or other things designed to get my contact info.But what drives me up a wall, when they start demanding information that is very clearly trying to classify me in their sales funnel, on some level. I'll give you my name, my company, and my work email address—although I would think that from my work email address, you could probably figure out where I work and the rest—but then there are other questions. How big is your company? What is your functional role within the company? And where are you geographically?Well, that's an interesting question. Why does that matter in 2022? Well, very often leads get circulated out to people based upon geography. And I get it, but it also frustrates me, just because I don't want to have to deal with classifying and sorting myself out for what is going to be a very brief conversation [laugh] with a salesperson. Because if the product works, great, I'm going to buy. If it doesn't work, I'm going to get frustrated and not want to hear from you forever.Which gets to my big question for you—and please don't take the question as anything other than the joking spirit in which it's intended—but why are so many salespeople profoundly annoying?Ashleigh: I would—uh, hmm.Corey: Sales processes is probably the better way to frame it because—Ashleigh: I was going to say, “Yeah, it's not the people; it's the process.” So—Corey: —it's not the individual's fault, as we've talked about it.Ashleigh: —yeah, I was going to say, I was, like, “Okay, I think it's less the people; more of the processes.” And processes that will make [crosstalk 00:19:37]—Corey: Yeah. It expresses itself as the same person showing up again and again. But that is not—Ashleigh: Totally.Corey: —their fault. That is the process by which they are being measured at as a part of their job. And it's unfair to blame them for that. But the expression is, “This person's annoying the hell out of me, what gives?”Ashleigh: “Oh, my gosh. Why does she keep [unintelligible 00:19:51] my inbox? Leave me alone. Just let me freaking test it.” I said, “I needed two weeks. Just let me have the two weeks to freaking test the thing. I will get back to you.” [unintelligible 00:19:58] yeah, no, I know.And even since moving into leadership several years ago, same thing. I'm like, “Okay, no.” I've gotten to the point where I've had several conversations with salespeople. I'm like, “I know the game. I know what you're trying to do. I respect it. Leave me alone. I promise I will get back to you, just lea”—I have literally said this to people. And the weird thing is most salespeople respect that. We really respect the transparency on that.Now, the trick is what you're talking about with lead capture and stuff like this, again, it comes down to company's design and it comes down to companies who value the buyer experience and customer journey, and companies who don't. And this, I think, is actually more driven by—in my humble opinion—our slightly over-reliance on venture capital, which is all about for a gathering of as much data as possible, figuring out how to monetize it, and move from there. In their mind, personal experience and emotion doesn't really factor into that equation very much, so you end up with these buyer journeys that are less about the buyer and more about getting them from click to purchase as efficiently as possible in terms of company resources, which includes salespeople time. So, as to why you have to fill out all those things, that just to me reeks of a company that maybe doesn't really understand the client experience and probably is going to have a pretty, mmm, support program as well, which means the product had better be really freaking good for me to buy it.Corey: To be clear, at The Duckbill Group, we do not have a two-in-the-morning click here and get you onboarded. Turns out that we have yet to really see the value in building a shopping cart system, where you can buy, “One consulting please,” and call it good. We're not quite at the level of productizing our offering yet and having conversations is a necessary part of what we do. But that also aligns with our customer expectation where there is not a general expectation in this industry that you can buy a full-on bespoke consulting engagement without talking to a human being. That, honestly, if someone trying to sell someone such a thing, I would be terrified.Ashleigh: Yeah, run screaming. Good Lord. No, exactly. And that's one of the reasons I love working with this team and I love this problem is because this isn't a quick, you know, download, install, and save, you know, save ten percent on your AWS bill by installing Duckbill Group. It ain't that simple. If it were that simple, like, AWS wouldn't have the market cap it does.So, that's one of the things I love. I love really meaty problems that don't have clean answers, and specifically have answers that look slightly different for everybody. I love those sort of problems. I've done the highly prioritized stuff: Click here, buy, get it on the free tier, and then it's all about up-sale, cross-sale as needed. Been there, done that; that's fun, and that's a whole different bucket of challenges, but what we're dealing with every single day on the consulting's of The Duckbill Group is far more nuanced and far more exciting because we're also seeing some truly incredible architecture designs. Like, companies who are really on the bleeding edge of what they're doing. And it's just really fun—Corey: Cost and architecture are the same thing in the Cloud.Ashleigh: —[crosstalk 00:22:59] that little—Corey: It's a blast to see it.Ashleigh: It's so much fun. It's, it's, it's… the world's best jigsaw puzzle because it covers, like, every single continent and all these different nuances, and you got to think about a ‘ephemerality,' which is my new favorite word. So…Corey: It's fun because you are building a sales team here, which opens up a few interesting avenues for me. For one, I don't have to manage and yell at individual salespeople in the same way. For example, we talk about it being a process and not a person thing. We're launching some outbound sales work and basically, having the person to talk to about that process—namely you—means that I don't need to be hovering over people's shoulders the way I felt that I once did, as far as what are we sending people? These passive-aggressive drip campaigns of, “Clearly, you don't mind lighting money on fire. If that changes, please let me know.”It's email eight in a sequence. It's no. This stuff has an implicit ‘Love, Mike and Corey' at the bottom of everything that comes out of this company, and it represents us on some respect. And let's be clear, we have a savvy, sophisticated, and more-attractive-than-the-average audience listening to all of these shows. And they'll eat me alive if we start doing stuff like that—Ashleigh: Oh, yeah.Corey: —not to mention that I find it not particularly respectful of their time and who they are. It doesn't work, so we have to be very conscious of that. The fact that I never had to explain that concept in any depth to you made bringing you in one of the easiest decisions we've ever made.Ashleigh: Well, I think it helped—I think in one of my interviews I went off on the ‘alligator email,' which is this infamous email we've all gotten, which is basically, like, you know, “Hi. I haven't heard from you yet, so I want to know which one of these three scenarios has happened to you. One, you're not interested in my product but didn't have the balls to email me and say that you're not interested. Two, you're no longer in this position, in which case, you're not going to read this email anyway. Or three, you're being chased by an alligator, and I should call animal control because you need help.” This email was—Corey: He, he, he, hilarious.Ashleigh: Ugh. And there's variations of it. And I've seen variations of it that are very well done and are on brand and work with the company. I've seen variations that could be legitimately, I think, great humor. And that's great.Humor in emails and humor in sales is fantastic. I have to shout out my friend, Jon Selig up in Canada, who actually, literally, does workshops on how sales teams can integrate humor into their prospecting. It's freaking brilliant. But—Corey: Near and dear to my heart.Ashleigh: —if you're not actually trained in that stuff, don't do it. Don't do the alligator email. But I think I went off on that during one of our interviews just because I was just sick of seeing these things. And what kills me, again, it comes back to the beginning, is people who have no training, no experience coming in—I mean, it really kills me, too, because there's a real concerted effort in the sales community to get more diverse people into sales to, kind of, kill the sales bro just by washing them out, basically. And so, we're recruiting hard with veterans, with black and other racial minority groups, LGBTQ communities, all sorts of things, and indigenous peoples.And so, we're bringing people that also are maybe a little bit more mature, a little bit older, have families they're supporting, and we're throwing them in a role with no support and very little training. And then they wash out, and we wonder why. It's, like, well, maybe because you didn't—it's, like, when I explain this to other people who aren't in sales, like, “Really, imagine coming in to being hired for a coding job, being told you're going to be trained on, you know, Ruby on Rails or C# or whatever it is we're currently using”—my reference is probably super outdated—but then, being given a book, and that's it. And told, “Learn it. And by the way, your first project is due in a month.” That's what we're doing in sales—Corey: For a lot of folks, that's how we learned in the engineering spaces, but let's be clear, the people who do well in that, generally have tailwinds of privilege at their back. They don't have headwinds of, “You suck at this.” It was, you're-born-on-third-you-didn't-hit-a-triple school-of-thought. It's—Ashleigh: Yeah.Corey: —the idea of building an onboarding pipeline, of making this stuff more accessible to people earlier on is incredibly important. One of my, I guess, awakening moments as we were building this company was it turns out that if you manage salespeople as if they were engineers, it doesn't go super well. Whereas, if you manage engineers like they're salespeople, they quit—rage quit—cry, and call you out as being an abusive manager.One of the best descriptions I ever heard from an advisor was that salespeople are sharks. But that's not intended to be unkind. It is simply a facet of their nature. They enjoy the hunt; they enjoy chasing things down, and they like playing games. Whereas, as soon as you start playing games with your engineers on how much money they're going to make this week, that turns out to be a very negative thing. It's a different mindset. It's about motivating people as whatever befits what it is that they want to be doing.Ashleigh: It is. And the other thing is it's a cultural conditioning. So, it's really interesting to say, you know, “People,” you know, “Playing games.” We do enjoy—there's definitely some enjoyment of the competition; there's the thrill of the hunt, absolutely, but at the same time, you want your salespeople to quit? Screw with their money.You screw with their money; we will bail so fast it'll make your head spin. So, it's like, people think, “Oh, we love this.” No, it's really more—think of it as we are gamblers.Corey: Yeah. To be clear when I say, “Playing games with money,” I'm talking about the idea of, “Sell to a company in this profile this quarter, and we'll throw a $5,000 bonus your way,” or something like that. It is if the business wants to see something, great, make it worth the sales team's while to pursue it, or don't be surprised when no one really cares that much about those things—Ashleigh: Exactly.Corey: It's all upside. It is not about, “He, he. And if you don't sell to this weird thing that I can't really describe effectively to you, we're going to cut your bet—” Yeah, that goes over like a lead balloon. As it should. My belief is that compensation should always go up, not down.Ashleigh: Yeah. No, it should. Aside from that, here's a fun stat—I believe this came out of Forrester, it might've been out of [Topel 00:28:54]; I apologize, I don't remember exactly who said this, but a recent study found that less than 68 percent of sales reps make their quota every month. So, imagine that where if you're—we have this thing called OTE, which is On Target Earnings. So, if you have this number you're supposed to take home every month, only 68 percent of sales reps actually do that every month.So, that means we live with this number as our target, but we're living and budgeting anywhere from 30 to 50 percent below that. And then hoping and doing the work that goes in there. That's what we've been conditioned to accept, and that's why you end up with sales reps that use terms like ‘shark' and are aggressive and are in your face and can get—[unintelligible 00:29:30]—Corey: I didn't realize it was pejorative.Ashleigh: I know. No. But here's the thing too, but somebody called it ‘commission breath,' which I love. It's, like, you can smell commission breath coming off us when we're desperate. You totally can. It's because of this antiquated way of building commissions.And this is something that I—this was really obvious to me, and apparently, I was a little bit ahead of the curve. When I started designing comp plans, everyone told me, “You want to design a comp plan? Tie it to what you want them to do very specifically.” So, if you want them to move a pen, design a comp plan that they get a buck when they put the pen from the heel of your hand to the tips of your fingers. Then they get a buck. And then they can do that repeatedly. That's literally how I was taught design comp plans.In my head, that meant that I need to design it in such a way that it's doable for my team because I don't want my team worrying about how they're going to put food on the table while they're talking to a client because they're going get commission breath and it'll piss off the client. That's not a good client experience; that's not going to lead to good performance. Apparently—Corey: Yeah. My concern as a business owner has nothing to do with salespeople making too much money. In fact, I am never happier than I am than paying out commissions. The concern, then, therefore has to become the, “Okay, great. How do I keep the salespeople from being inadvertently incentivized to sell something for $10 that costs me $12 to fulfill?”It's a question of what behaviors do you incentivize that align what they're motivated by with what the company needs. And very often getting that wrong—which happens from time to time—is not viewed as a learning experience that it should be. But instead, “They're just out to screw us.” And I've seen so many company owners get so annoyed whenever their salespeople outperform. But what did you expect? That is the positive outcome. As opposed to what? The underperforming sales rep that can't close a deal? Please.Ashleigh: Well, no. And let's think about this too, especially if it's tied to commission and you're paying out commission. It's, like, okay, commission is always some, sort of, percentage—depending on a lot of things—but some sort of percent of what they're bringing in. If you design a comp plan that has you paying out more in commission than the sales that were earned to bring it in, that's on you; you screwed up. And you need to either be honest and say, “I screwed up; I can't pay this,” and know that you're going to lose some sales reps, but you won't lose as many as if you just refuse to pay it.But, honestly, and I'm not even kidding, I know people. I've worked at a company that I happen to know did this. That literally fired people because they didn't have the money to pay out the commission. And because they fired them before the commission was due to be paid out, then that person no longer had a legal claim to it. That's common. So, the commission goes both ways.Corey: To be clear, we've never done that, but I also would say that if we had, that's a screaming red flag for our consultancy, given the nature of what it is that we do here. It turns out that when we're building out comp plans, we model out various scenarios. Like, what is the worst way that this could wind up unfolding? And, okay, some of our early drafts it's, yeah, it turns out that we would not be able to pay salaries because we wound up giving all of that in commission to people with uncapped upside. Okay, great.But we're also not going to cap people's commissions because that winds up being a freaking problem, so how do we wind up motivating in a way that continues to grow and continues to incentivize the behaviors we want? And it turns out it's super complicated which why we brought you in. It's easier.Ashleigh: Yeah, it's a pain. But the other side of this too, I think, is there is another force at play here, which is finance. A lot of traditional finance modeling is built around that 50 to 70 percent of people hit commission. So, if all of the sudden, you design a comp plan such of a way that a hundred percent of the team is hitting commission, finance loses their shit. So, you have to make sure that when you're designing these things, one of the things I learned, I learned the hard way—this is how I learned that not everyone does it this way—I built my first comp plan; my team's hitting it.My team's overperforming, not a ton, but we're doing really well. All of the sudden, I'm getting called to Finance and getting raked over the coals. And they're like, “What did you do?” I'm like, “What do you mean what did I do? I designed a comp plan; we're hitting goal. Why are you mad?” “Well, we only had this much budgeted for commission.”And I was, like, “That's not my fault.” “Well, that's what historic performance was.” “Okay, well that's not what we're going to do going forward. We're going to do this.” And they're like, “Oh, well, you need to notify us if you're going to change it like that.” And I was, like, “Wait a minute. You modeled so that my team would not hit OTE?” “Yes.” “That's how you've always done this?” “Yes.” “Okay. Well, that's not what we're going to do going forward, and if that's a problem, I'll go find a door.” Because, no.Especially when we're talking about people who are living in extremely expensive areas. I spent most of my career living and working in San Francisco, managing teams of people who made less than six figures. And that's rough when you're paying two grand in rent every month. And 60 percent of your pay is commission. Like, no. You need to know that money's coming.So, I talk about modern sales a lot because that's what I'm trying to use because there's Glengarry Glen Ross, kind of, Wolf of Wall Street school, which is not how anyone behaves anymore, and if you're in an environment that's like that or treats your salespeople like that? Please leave. And then you've got modern sales, which is all about, “Okay, let's figure out how we can set up our salespeople to be the best people they can be to give our clients the best experience they can.” That's where you get top performance out of, and that's where you never run into the terrible emails with the alligators, and the, “Clearly you like lighting piles of money on fire.” That's where you don't get emails to Corey Quinn asking him if he's interested in coming to work for AWS, the book company.It's by incentivizing the people and creating good humans where they can really thrive as salespeople and as people in general. The rest comes with time. But, it's this whole, new way of looking at things. And it's big, and it's scary, and it costs more upfront, but you get more on the back end every single time.Corey: Not that you care about this an awful lot, but you have your own podcast that talks about this, The Other Side of Sales. What inspired you to decide, not just to build sales teams through a different lens, but also to, “You know what? I'm going to go out and talk into microphones through the internet from time to time.” Which, let's be clear, it takes a little bit of a certain warped perspective. I say this myself, having done this far too often.Ashleigh: Yeah. No, it's a fun little origin story. So, I'm a huge Star Trek geek; obsessive. And I was listening to a Star Trek podcast run by a couple of guys who are a little bit embarrassed to run a Star Trek podcast, called The Greatest Generation. Definitely not safe for work, but a really good podcast if you're into Star Trek at all.And they always do, kind of, letters at the end of the shows. And one of the letters at the end of the show one day was, “Hey, I was really inspired by you guys and I started my own podcast on this random thing that I am super excited about.” And I'm literally driving in the car with my husband, and I'm, like, “Huh. I don't know why I'm not listening to sales podcasts. I listen to enough of these other random ones.” Jumped online, pulled up a list of sales podcasts, and I think I went through three or four articles of, like, every sales podcast that was big. And this was, like, January of 2019.Corey: “By Broseph McBrowerson, but Everyone Calls Him ‘Browie.'” Yeah.Ashleigh: Literally, there was, Conversations with Women in Sales with the late, great—with the amazing Lori Richardson, who's now with it, but she took over for a mentor of mine who passed in 2020, sadly. But there was that, and then there was one other that was hosted by a husband-and-wife team. And that was it out of, like, 30 podcasts. And [laugh] so it was this moment of, like, epiphany of, like, “I can start my own podcast,” and, “Oh, I probably need to,” because, literally, no one looks or sounds like someone who I would actually want to hang out with ever, or do business with, in a lot of cases. And that's really changed. I'm so grateful.But really, what it came down to was I didn't feel there was a podcast for me. There wasn't a podcast I could listen to about sales that could help me, that I felt like I identified with. So, I was, like, “All right, fine. I'll start my own.” I called up a friend, and she was, literally, going through the same thing at the same time, so we said, “Screw it. We'll do our own.”We went full Bender from Futurama. We're like, “Just screw it; we'll have our own podcast… with liquor… and heels… and honest conversations that happens to us every day,” and random stuff. It's a lot of fun. And we've gone through a few iterations and it's been a long journey. We're about to hit our hundredth episode, which is really exciting.But yeah, we're—The Other Side of Sales is on a mission to make B2B sales culture truly inclusive so everyone can thrive, so, our conversations are all interviews with amazing sales pros who are trying to do amazing things and who are 90—I think are over 90 percent—are from a minority background, which is really exciting to, kind of, try and shift that conversation from Broseph McBrowerson. Our original tagline was the ‘anti-sales bro' podcast, but we thought that was a little too antagonistic. So…Corey: Yeah, being a little too antagonistic is, generally, my failure mode, so I hear you on that. I really want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to speak with me. Because—well, not that I should thank you. It's one of those, I should really turn around and say, “Wait a minute. Why aren't you selling things? Why are you still talking to me?” But no—Ashleigh: No, I'm waiting for you to say, “Back to work.”Corey: Do appreciate your—exactly. I think that's a different podcast. Thank you so much for your time. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Ashleigh: Well, definitely please go check out duckbillgroup.com. We would love to talk to with you about anything to do with your AWS bill. Got a ton of resources on there around how to get that managed and sorted.If you're interested in connecting with me you can always hit me up at—I'm on Twitter @ashleighatwork, which is another deep-cut Star Trek reference, or you can hit me up at LinkedIn. Just search Ashleigh Early. My name is spelled a little weird because I'm a little weird. It's A-S-H-L-E-I-G-H, and then Early, like ‘early in the morning.'Corey: And links to all of that will wind up in the [show notes 00:39:11]. Thanks so much for your time. It's appreciated.Ashleigh: This has been fun; we'll do it again soon.AndIf 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.

Bharatvaarta
178 - Exploring The Creation Of The Indian Bridge Management System With Vaibhav Dange | Policy

Bharatvaarta

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2022 28:31


The Indian Bridge Management System is one of the most advanced public infrastructure databases in the world. The IBMS creates an inventory of all bridges in the country and rates their structural condition so that timely repair and rehabilitation work can be carried out based on the criticality of the structure. It is the largest platform in the world owned by a single owner, with a database that could exceed 1,50,000 bridge structures. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has inventorized 1,72,517 bridges/structures under this initiative. Under the system, bridges are given a structural rating number; based on its structure; and a socio-economic rating number which measures its importance in relation to it's vicinity. With an MBA degree under his belt, Vaibhav Dange devoted his knowledge in management to implementing processes in ensuring speedy redressal of issues in all spheres of activity. From 2014 to 2019, he was the Private Secretary to the Hon'ble Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, and was very closely associated with all development works related to the national highways. During this tenure, he got involved in the IBMS project, and his deep knowledge and insight resulted in many innovations within the IBMS. He is associated with various infrastructure projects undertaken by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).

Bharatvaarta
178 - Exploring The Creation Of The Indian Bridge Management System With Vaibhav Dange | Policy

Bharatvaarta

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2022 28:32


The Indian Bridge Management System is one of the most advanced public infrastructure databases in the world. The IBMS creates an inventory of all bridges in the country and rates their structural condition so that timely repair and rehabilitation work can be carried out based on the criticality of the structure. It is the largest platform in the world owned by a single owner, with a database that could exceed 1,50,000 bridge structures. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has inventorized 1,72,517 bridges/structures under this initiative. Under the system, bridges are given a structural rating number; based on its structure; and a socio-economic rating number which measures its importance in relation to it's vicinity. With an MBA degree under his belt, Vaibhav Dange devoted his knowledge in management to implementing processes in ensuring speedy redressal of issues in all spheres of activity. From 2014 to 2019, he was the Private Secretary to the Hon'ble Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, and was very closely associated with all development works related to the national highways. During this tenure, he got involved in the IBMS project, and his deep knowledge and insight resulted in many innovations within the IBMS. He is associated with various infrastructure projects undertaken by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).

IBMSPOD
Episode 16 - In conversation with Chief Executive David Wells and Lorna Cleverly on animal health

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 8, 2022 58:48


In Episode 16, IBMS chief executive David Wells joined us for a wide-ranging conversation covering his work establishing the '29 pathology networks and leading the laboratory response during the pandemic as Head of Pathology at NHS England, to promoting the profession as chief executive. We also talked about his career journey from practice to senior management. Later, Dr Martin Khechara spoke to Lorna Cleverly, Head of Animal Health Monitoring at Fera Science, for a fascinating LabLife.

The Big Story
880: With a Decline in Daily Users, Is Facebook Having Its 'MySpace' Moment?

The Big Story

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2022 15:05


Since its inception in 2004, Facebook's vision of growing its user base has been going steady, despite all the scandals, backlash, US Senate hearings, and regulatory pressure. But on 3 February, Meta – what the company is now known as – reported a half a million decline globally in its daily user base, a first in the social media giant's 18-year history. You may think that a half a million drop is negligible when compared to Meta's existing user base, but it nevertheless wreaked havoc in the stock market, with investors fleeing after taking a peek at Meta's quarterly earnings report. The dip in users, combined with the earnings report, plunged Meta's stock by nearly 26 percent, instantly shaving $250 billion dollars off its market value and $29 billion off Mark Zuckerberg's net worth. And if you can't compute this fall, imagine the fall of two IBMs, two General Electrics, or McDonald's! This was the single largest one-day dollar drop for a US company in history! Meta listed out several reasons for the drop - from Apple's new privacy rules to the increase in competition from TikTok. But the fundamental questions that I will try to address in today's episode are: Is Facebook having its 'MySpace' moment? Has it reached its peak? What led to this fall? To help me unpack this, I speak to Udbhav Tiwari, a policy advisor at Mozilla. Tune in! Host and Producer: Himmat Shaligram Editor: Shorbori Purkayastha, Nitish Rampal Music: Big Bang Fuzz Listen to The Big Story podcast on: Apple: https://apple.co/2AYdLIl Saavn: http://bit.ly/2oix78C Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/2ntMV7S Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2IyLAUQ Deezer: http://bit.ly/2Vrf5Ng Castbox: http://bit.ly/2VqZ9ur

School for Startups Radio
January 17, 2022 ZMOT Paul Mackiewicz, IBMs Karl Haller and Its All Numbers Jesse Kalsi

School for Startups Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2022


January 17, 2022 ZMOT Paul Mackiewicz, IBMs Karl Haller and Its All Numbers Jesse Kalsi

IBMSPOD
Episode 14 - Cell lines, haematology and the Great British Bake Off with Yan Tsou & Chris Lee

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 4, 2021 52:02


In our special festive episode of IBMS pod, we were joined by Yan Tsou - Quality control scientist at the Francis Crick Institute and Great British Bakeoff star. Yan told us about her work on cell lines in the Crick's cell services team, her research into latent TB and her journey on the Great British Bakeoff Series 8, before she took part in our Christmas baking quiz: 'What's on your plate?'. Following this, Reverend Christopher J Lee, a former biomedical scientist in Haematology and ordained Anglican priest in the Church of Wales joined us for a special edition of LabLife.

The Market Marauder Show

Robinhood ($HOOD) the popular stock and crypto trading platform just recently had earnings and the numbers were very bad. The amount of total profits and number of users has gone down significantly since there IPO. They have recently announced new crypto wallet waiting list but it has not yet been released yet. One catalyst for potential growth for the platform is for them to list the popular meme coin Shiba Inu which has grown in popularity significantly in the past weeks. Starbucks ($SBUX) just recently announced that they are raising there hourly wage to $15/hr due to the shortage of workers with a $200 referral bonus. Ford ($F) has recently announced there earnings and numbers were way better then expected by the market. This is due in fact to increased demand for the new Bronco SUV and Mustang Mach-E. Mcdonalds ($MCD) and IBM ($IBM) are joining forces to combat long fast food lines. The partnership will implement IBMs artificial intelligence technology to help with jam packed lines and long wait times.

Screaming in the Cloud
Heresy in the Church of Docker Desktop with Scott Johnston

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2021 37:02


About ScottScott first typed ‘docker run' in 2013 and hasn't looked back. He's been with Docker since 2014 in a variety of leadership roles and currently serves as CEO. His experience previous to Docker includes Sun Microsystems, Puppet, Netscape, Cisco, and Loudcloud (parent of Opsware). When not fussing with computers he spends time with his three kids fussing with computers.Links: Docker: https://www.docker.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston 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: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Once upon a time, I started my public speaking career as a traveling contract trainer for Puppet; I've talked about this before. And during that time, I encountered someone who worked there as an exec, Scott Johnston, who sat down, talked to me about how I viewed things, and then almost immediately went to go work at Docker instead. Today's promoted episode brings Scott on to the show. Scott, you fled to get away from me, became the CEO of Docker over the past, oh what is it, seven years now. You're still standing there, and I'm not making fun of Docker quite the way that I used to. First, thanks for joining me.Scott: Great to be here, Corey. Thanks for the invitation. I'm not sure I was fleeing you, but we can recover that one at another time.Corey: Oh, absolutely. In that era, one of my first talks that I started giving that anyone really paid any attention to was called, “Heresy in the Church of Docker,” where I listed about 10 to 13 different things that Docker didn't seem to have answers for, like network separation, security, audit logging, et cetera, et cetera. And it was a fun talk that I used to basically learn how to speak publicly without crying before and after the talk. And in time, it wound up aging out as these problems got addressed, but what surprised me at the time was how receptive the Docker community was to the idea of a talk that wound up effectively criticizing something that for, well, a number of them it felt a lot of the time like it wasn't that far from a religion; it was very hype-driven: “Docker, Docker, Docker” was a recurring joke. Docker has changed a lot. The burning question that I think I want to start this off with is that it's 2021; what is Docker? Is it a technology? Is it a company? Is it a religion? Is it a community? What is Docker?Scott: Yes. I mean that sincerely. Often, the first awareness or the first introduction that newcomers have is in fact the community, before they get their hands on the product, before they learn that there's a company behind the product is they have a colleague who is, either through a Zoom or sitting next to them in some places, or in a coffee shop, and says, “Hey, you got to try this thing called Docker.” And they lean over—either virtually or physically—and look at the laptop of their friend who's promoting Docker, and they see a magical experience. And that is the introduction of so many of our community members, having spoken with them and heard their own kind of journeys.And so that leads to like, “Okay, so why the excitement? Why did the friend lean over to the other friend and introduce?” It's because the tools that Docker provides just helps devs get their app built and shipping faster, more securely, with choice, without being tied into any particular runtime, any particular infrastructure. And that combination has proven to be a breakthrough dopamine hit to developers since the very beginning, since 2013, when Docker is open-source.Corey: It feels like originally, the breakthrough of Docker, that people will say, “Oh, containers aren't new. We've had that going back to LPARs on mainframes.” Yes, I'm aware, but suddenly, it became easy to work with and didn't take tremendous effort to get unified environments. It was cynically observed at the time by lots of folks smarter than I am, that the big breakthrough Docker had was how to make my MacBook look a lot more like a Linux server in production. And we talk about breaking down silos between ops and dev, but in many ways, this just meant that the silo became increasingly irrelevant because, “Works on my machine” was no longer a problem.“Well, you better back up your email because your laptop's about to go into production in that case.” Containers made it easier and that was a big deal. It seems, on some level, like there was a foray where Docker the company was moving into the world of, “Okay, now we're going to run a lot of these containers in production for you, et cetera.” It really feels like recently, the company as a whole and the strategy has turned towards getting back to its roots of solving developer problems and positioning itself as a developer tool. Is that a fair characterization?Scott: A hundred percent. That's very intentional, as well. We certainly had good products, and great customers, and we're solving problems for customers on the ops side, I'll call it, but when we stood back—this is around 2019—and said, “Where's the real… joy?” For lack of a better word, “Where's the real joy from a community standpoint, from a product experience standpoint, from a what do we do different and better and more capable than anyone else in the ecosystem?” It was that developer experience. And so the reset that you're referring to in November 2019, was to give us the freedom to go back and just focus the entire company's efforts on the needs of developers without any other distractions from a revenue, customer, channel, so on and so forth.Corey: So, we knew this was going to come up in the conversation, but as of a couple of weeks ago—as of the time of this recording—you announced a somewhat, well, let's say controversial change in how the pricing and licensing works. Now, as of—taking effect at the end of this year—the end of January, rather, of next year—Docker Desktop is free for folks to use for individual use, and that's fine, and for corporate use, Docker Desktop also remains free until you are a large company defined by ten million in revenue a year and/or 250 employees or more. And that was interesting and I don't think I'd seen that type of requirement placed before on what was largely an open-source project that's now a developer tool. I believe there are closed-source aspects of it as well for the desktop experience, but please don't quote me on that; I'm not here to play internet lawyer engineer. But at that point, the internet was predictably upset about this because it is easy to yell about any change that is coming, regardless.I was less interested in that than I am in what the reception has been from your corporate customers because, let's be clear, users are important, community is important, but goodwill will not put food on the table past a certain point. There has to be a way to make a company sustainable, there has to be a recurring revenue model. I realize that you know this, but I'm sure there are people listening to this who are working in development somewhere who are, “Wait, you mean I need to add more value than I cost?” It was a hard revelation for [laugh] me back when I had been in the industry a few years—Scott: [laugh]. Sure.Corey: —and I'm still struggling with that—Scott: Sure.Corey: Some days.Scott: You and me both. [laugh].Corey: So, what has the reaction been from folks who have better channels of communicating with you folks than angry Twitter threads?Scott: Yeah. Create surface area for a discussion, Corey. Let's back up and talk on a couple points that you hit along the way there. One is, “What is Docker Desktop?” Docker Desktop is not just Docker Engine.Docker Desktop is a way in which we take Docker Engine, Compose, Kubernetes, all important tools for developers building modern apps—Docker Build, so on and so forth—and we provide an integrated engineered product that is engineered for the native environments of Mac and Windows, and soon Linux. And so we make it super easy to get the container runtime, Kubernetes stack, the networking, the CLI, Compose, we make it super easy just to get that up and running and configured with smart defaults, secured, hardened, and importantly updated. So, any vulnerabilities patched and so on and so forth. The point is, it's a product that is based on—to your comments—upstream open-source technologies, but it is an engineered commercial product—Docker Desktop is.Corey: Docker Desktop is a fantastic tool; I use it myself. I could make a bunch of snide comments that on Mac, it's basically there to make sure the fans are still working on the laptop, but again, computers are hard. I get that. It's incredibly handy to have a graphical control panel. It turns out that I don't pretend to understand those people, but some folks apparently believe that there are better user interfaces than text and an 80-character-wide terminal window. I don't pretend to get those people, but not everyone has the joy of being a Linux admin for far too long. So, I get it, making it more accessible, making it easy, is absolutely worth using.Scott: That's right.Corey: It's not a hard requirement to run it on a laptop-style environment or developer workstation, but it makes it really convenient.Scott: Before Docker desktop, one had to install a hypervisor, install a Linux VM, install Docker Engine on that Linux VM, bridge between the VM and the local CLI on the native desktop—like, lots of setup and maintenance and tricky stuff that can go wrong. Trust me how many times I stubbed my own toes on putting that together. And so Docker Desktop is designed to take all of that setup nonsense overhead away and just let the developer focus on the app. That's what the product is, and just talking about where it came from, and how it uses these other upstream technologies. Yes, and so we made a move on August 31, as you noted, and the motivation was the following: one is, we started seeing large organizations using Docker Desktop at scale.When I say ‘at scale,' not one or two or ten developers; like, hundreds and thousands of developers. And they were clamoring for capabilities to help them manage those developer environments at scale. Second is, we saw them getting a lot of benefit in terms of productivity, and choice, and security from using Docker Desktop, and so we stood back and said, “Look, for us to scale our business, we're at 10-plus million monthly active developers today. We know there's 45 million developers coming in this decade; how do we keep scaling while giving a free experience, but still making sure we can fund our engineers and deliver features and additional value?” We looked at other projects, Corey.The first thing we did is we looked outside our four walls, said, “How have other projects with free and open-source components navigated these waters?” And so the thresholds that you just mentioned, the 250 employees and the ten million revenue, were actually thresholds that we saw others put in place to draw lines between what is available completely for free and what is available for those users that now need to purchase subscription if they're using it to create value for their organizations. And we're very explicit about that. You could be using Docker for training, you could be using Docker for eval in those large organizations; we're not going to chase you or be looking to you to step up to a subscription. However, if you're using Docker Desktop in those environments, to build applications that run your business or that are creating value for your customers, then purchasing a subscription is a way for us to continue to invest in a product that the ecosystem clearly loves and is getting a lot of value out of. And so, that was again, the premise of this change. So, now to the root of your question is, so what's the reaction? We're very, very pleased. First off, yes, there were some angry voices out there.Corey: Yeah. And I want to be clear, I'm not trivializing people who feel upset.Scott: No.Corey: When you're suddenly using a thing that is free and discovering that, well, now you have to pay money for it, people are not generally going to be happy about that.Scott: No.Corey: When people are viewed themselves as part of the community, of contributing to what they saw as a technical revolution or a scrappy underdog and suddenly they find themselves not being included in some way, shape or form, it's natural to be upset, I don't want to trivialize—Scott: Not at all.Corey: People's warm feelings toward Docker. It was a big part of a lot of folks' personality, for better or worse, [laugh] for a few years in there. But the company needs to be sustainable, so what I'm really interested in is what has that reaction been from folks who are, for better or worse, “Yes, yes, we love Docker, but I don't get to sign $100,000 deals because I just really like the company I'm paying the money to. There has to be business value attached to that.”Scott: That's right. That's right. And to your point, we're not trivializing either the reaction by the community, it was encouraging to see many community members got right away what we're doing, they saw that still, a majority of them can continue using Docker for free under the Docker Personal subscription, and that was also intentional. And you saw on the internet and on Twitter and other social media, you saw them come and support the company's moves. And despite some angry voices in there, there was overwhelmingly positive.So, to your question, though, since August 31, we've been overwhelmed, actually, by the positive response from businesses that use Docker Desktop to build applications and run their businesses. And when I say overwhelmed, we were tracking—because Docker Desktop has a phone-home capability—we had a rough idea of what the baseline usage of Docker Desktops were out there. Well, it turns out, in some cases, there are ten times as many Docker Desktops inside organizations. And the average seems to be settling in around three times to four times as many. And we are already closing business, Corey.In 12 business days, we have companies come through, say, “Yes, our developers use this product. Yes, it's a valuable product. We're happy to talk to a salesperson and give you over to procurement, and here we go.” So, you and I both been around long enough to know, like 12 working days to have a signed agreement with an enterprise agreement is unheard of.Corey: Yeah, but let's be very clear here, on The Duckbill Group's side of things where I do consulting projects, I sell projects to companies that are, “Great, this project will take, I don't know, four to six weeks, whatever it happens to be, and, yeah, you're going to turn a profit on this project in about the first four hours of the engagement.” It is basically push button and you will receive more money in your budget than you had when you started, and that is probably the easiest possible enterprise sale, and it still takes 60 to 90 days most of the time to close deals.Scott: That's right.Corey: Trying to get a procurement deal for software through enterprise procurement processes is one of those things when people say, “Okay, we're going to have a signature in Q3,” you have to clarify what year they're talking about. So, 12 days is unheard of.Scott: [laugh]. Yep. So, we've been very encouraged by that. And I'll just give you a rough numbers: the overall response is ten times our baseline expectations, which is why—maybe unanticipated question, or you going to ask it soon—we came back within two weeks—because we could see this curve hit right away on the 31st of August—we came back and said, “Great.” Now, that we have the confidence that the community and businesses are willing to support us and invest in our sustainability, invest in the sustainable, scalable Docker, we came and we accelerated—pulled forward—items in our roadmap for developers using Docker Desktop, both for Docker Personal, for free in the community, as well as the subscribers.So, things like Docker Desktop for Linux, right? Docker Desktop for Mac, Docker Desktop for Windows has been out there about five years, as I said. We have heard Docker Desktop for Linux rise in demand over those years because if you're managing a large number of developers, you want a consistent environment across all the developers, whether they're using Linux, Mac, or Windows desktops. So, Docker Desktop for Linux will give them that consistency across their entire development environment. That was the number two most requested feature on our public roadmap in the last year, and again, with the positive response, we're now able to confidently invest in that. We're hiring more engineers than planned, we're pulling that forward in the roadmap to show that yes, we are about growing and growing sustainably, and now that the environment and businesses are supporting us, we're happy to double down and create more value.Corey: My big fear when the change was announced was the uncertainty inherent to it. Because if there's one thing that big companies don't like, it's uncertainty because uncertainty equates to risk in their mind. And a lot of other software out there—and yes, Oracle Databases I am looking at you—have a historical track record of, “Okay, great. We have audit rights to inspect your environment, and then when we wind up coming in, we always find that there have been licensing shortfalls,” because people don't know how far things spread internally, as well as, honestly, it's accounting for this stuff in large, complex organizations is a difficult thing. And then there are massive fines at stake, and then there's this whole debate back and forth.Companies view contracts as if every company behaves like that when it comes down to per-seat licensing and the rest. My fear was that that risk avoidance in large companies would have potentially made installing Docker Desktop in their environment suddenly a non-starter across the board, almost to the point of being something that you would discipline employees for, which is not great. And it seems from your response, that has not been a widespread reaction. Yes of course, there's always going to be some weird company somewhere that does draconian things that we don't see, but the fact that you're not sitting here, telling me that you've been taking a beating from this from your enterprise buyers, tells me you're onto something.Scott: I think that's right, Corey. And as you might expect, the folks that don't reach out are silent, and so we don't see folks who don't reach out to us. But because so many have reached out to us so positively, and basically quickly gone right to a conversation with procurement versus any sort of back-and-forth or questions and such, tells us we are on the right track. The other thing, just to be really clear is, we did work on this before the August 31 announcement as well—this being how do we approach licensing and compliance and such—and we found that 80% of organizations, 80% of businesses want to be in compliance, they have a—not just want to be in compliance, but they have a history of being in compliance, regardless of the enforcement mechanism and whatnot. And so that gave us confidence to say, “Hey, we're going to trust our users. We're going to say, ‘grace period ends on January 31.'”But we're not shutting down functionality, we're not sending in legal [laugh] activity, we're not putting any sort of strictures on the product functionality because we have found most people love the product, love what it does for them, and want to see the company continue to innovate and deliver great features. And so okay, you might say, “Well, doesn't that 20% represent opportunity?” Yeah. You know, it does, but it's a big ecosystem. The 80% is giving us a great boost and we're already starting to plow that into new investment. And let's just start there; let's start there and grow from there.This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I also have a hard time imagining that you and your leadership team would be short-sighted enough to say, “Okay, that”—even 20% of companies that are willing to act dishonestly around stuff like that seems awfully high to me, but assuming it's accurate, would tracking down that missing 20% be worth setting fire to the tremendous amount of goodwill that Docker still very much enjoys? I have a hard time picturing any analysis where that's even a question other than something you set up to make fun of.Scott: [laugh]. No, that's exactly right Corey, it wouldn't be worth it which is why again, we came out of the gate with like, we're going to trust our users. They love the community, they love the product, they want to support us—most of them want to support us—and, you know, when you have most, you're never going to get a hundred percent. So, we got most and we're off to a good start, by all accounts. And look, a lot of folks too sometimes will be right in that gray middle where you let them know that they're getting away with something they're like, “All right, you caught me.”We've seen that behavior before. And so, we can see all this activity out there and we can see if folks have a license or compliance or not, and sometimes just a little tap on the shoulder said, “Hey, did you know that you might be paying for that?” We've seen most folks at the time say, “Ah, okay. You caught me. Happy to talk to procurement.”So, this does not have to be heavy-handed as you said, it does not have to put at risk the goodwill of the 80%. And we don't have to get a hundred percent to have a great successful business and continuing successful community.Corey: Yeah. I'll also point out that, by my reading of your terms and conditions and how you've specified this—I mean, this is not something I've asked you about, so this could turn into a really awkward conversation but I'm going to roll with it anyway, it explicitly states that it is and will remain free for personal development.Scott: That is correct.Corey: When you're looking at employees who work at giant companies and have sloppy ‘bring your own device' controls around these things, all right, they have it installed on their work machine because in their spare time, they're building an app somewhere, they're not going to get a nasty gram, and they're not exposing their company to liability by doing that?Scott: That is exactly correct. And moreover, just keep looking at those use cases, if the company is using it for internal training or if the company is using it to evaluate someone else's technology, someone else's software, all those cases are outside the pay-for subscription. And so we believe it's quite generous in allowing of trials and tests and use cases that make it accessible and easy to try, easy to use, and it's just in the case where if you're a large organization and your developers are using it to build applications for your business and for your customers, thus you're getting a lot of value using the product, we're asking you to share that value with us so we can continue to invest in the product.Corey: And I think that's a reasonable expectation. The challenge that Docker seems to have had for a while has been that the interesting breakthrough, revelatory stuff that you folks did was all open-source. It was a technology that was incredibly inspired in a bunch of different ways. I am, I guess, mature enough to admit that my take that, “Oh, Docker is terrible”—which was never actually my take—was a little short-sighted. I'm very good at getting things wrong across the board, and that is no exception.I also said virtualization was a flash in the pan and look how that worked out. I was very anti-cloud, et cetera, et cetera. Times change, people change, and doubling down on being wrong gains you nothing. But the question that was always afterwards what is the monetization strategy? Because it's not something you can give away for free and make it up in volume?Even VC money doesn't quite work like that forever, so there's a—the question is, what is the monetization strategy that doesn't leave people either resenting you because, “Remember that thing that used to be free isn't anymore? Doesn't it suck to be you?” And is still accessible as broadly as you are, given the sheer breadth and diversity of your community? Like I can make bones about the fact that ten million in revenue and 250 employees are either worlds apart, or the wrong numbers, or whatever it is, but it's not going to be some student somewhere sitting someplace where their ramen budget is at risk because they have to spend $5 a month or whatever it is to have this thing. It doesn't apply to them.And this feels like, unorthodox though it certainly is, it's not something to be upset about in any meaningful sense. The people that I think would actually be upset and have standing to be upset about this are the enterprise buyers, and you're hearing from them in what is certainly—because I will hear it if not—that this is something they're happy about. They are thrilled to work with you going forward. And I think it makes sense. Even when I was doing stuff as an independent consultant, before I formalized the creation of The Duckbill Group and started hiring people, my policy was always to not use the free tier of things, even if I fit into them because I would much rather personally be a paying customer, which elevates the, I guess, how well my complaints are received.Because I'm a free user, I'm just another voice on Twitter; albeit a loud one and incredibly sarcastic one at times. But if I'm a paying customer, suddenly the entire tenor of that conversation changes, and I think there's value to that. I've always had the philosophy of you pay for the things you use to make money. And that—again, that is something that's easy for me to say now. Back when I was in crippling debt in my 20s, I assure you, it was not, but I still made the effort for things that I use to make a living.Scott: Yeah.Corey: And I think that philosophy is directionally correct.Scott: No, I appreciate that. There's a lot of good threads in there. Maybe just going way back, Docker stands on the shoulders of giants. There was a lot of work with container tech in the Linux kernel, and you and I were talking before about it goes back to LPAR on IBMs, and you know, BS—Berkeley's—Corey: BSD jails and chroots on Linux. Yeah.Scott: Chroot, right? I mean, Bill Joy, putting chroot in—Corey: And Tupperware parties, I'm sure. Yeah.Scott: Right. And all credit to Solomon Hykes, Docker's founder, who took a lot of good up and coming tech—largely on the ops side and in Linux kernel—took the primitives from Git and combined that with immutable copy-on-write file system and put those three together into a really magical combination that simplified all this complexity of dependency management and portability of images across different systems. And so in some sense, that was the magic of standing on these giant shoulders but seeing how these three different waves of innovation or three different flows of innovation could come together to a great user experience. So, also then moving forward, I wouldn't say they're happy, just to make sure you don't get inbound, angry emails—the enterprise buyers—but they do recognize the value of the product, they think the economics are fair and straight ahead, and to your point about having a commercial relationship versus free or non-existing relationship, they're seeing that, “Oh, okay, now I have insight into the roadmap. Now, I can prioritize my requirements that my devs have been asking for. Now, I can double-down on the secure supply chain issues, which I've been trying to get in front of for years.”So, it gives them an avenue that now, much different than a free user as you observed, it's a commercial relationship where it's two way street versus, “Okay, we're just going to use this free stuff and we don't have much of a say because it's free, and so on and so forth.” So, I think it's been an eye-opener for both the company but also for the businesses. There is a lot of value in a commercial relationship beyond just okay, we're going to invest in new features and new value for developers.Corey: The challenge has always been how do you turn something that is widely beloved, that is effectively an open-source company, into money? There have been a whole bunch of questions about this, and it seems that the consensus that has emerged is that a number of people for a long time mistook open-source for a business model instead of a strategy, and it's very much not. And a lot of companies are attempting to rectify that with weird license changes where, “Oh, you're not allowed to take our code and build a service out of it if you're a cloud provider.” Amazon's product strategy is, of course, “Yes,” so of course, there's always going to be something coming out of AWS that is poorly documented, has a ridiculous name, and purports to do the same thing for way less money, except magically you pay them by the hour. I digress.Scott: No, it's a great surface area, and you're right I completely didn't answer that question. [laugh]. So—Corey: No, it's fair. It's—Scott: Glad you brought it back up.Corey: —a hard problem. It's easy to sit here and say, “Well, what I think they should do”—but all of those solutions fall apart under ten seconds of scrutiny.Scott: Super, super hard problem which, to be fair, we as a team and a community wrestled with for years. But here's where we landed, Corey. The short version is that you can still have lots of great upstream open-source technologies, and you'll have an early adopter community that loves those, use those, gets a lot of progress running fast and far with those, but we've found that the vast majority of the market doesn't want to spend its time cobbling together bits and bytes of open-source tech, and maintaining it, and patching it, and, and, and. And so what we're offering is an engineered product that takes the upstream but then adds a lot of value—we would say—to make it an engineered, easy to use, easy to configure, upgraded, secure, so on and so forth. And the convenience of that versus having to cobble together your own environment from upstream has proved to be what folks are willing to pay for. So, it's the classic kind of paying for time and convenience versus not.And so that is one dimension. And the other dimension, which you already referenced a little bit with AWS is that we have SaaS; we have a SaaS product in Docker Hub, which is providing a hosted registry with quality content that users know is updated not less than every 30 days, that is patched and maintained by us. And so those are examples of, in some sense, consumption [unintelligible 00:27:53]. So, we're using open-source to build this SaaS service, but the service that users receive, they're willing to pay for because they're not having to patch the Mongo upstream, they're not having to roll the image themselves, they're not having to watch the CVEs and scramble when everything comes out. When there's a CVE out in our upstream, our official images are patched no less than 24 hours later and typically within hours.That's an example of a service, but all based on upstream open-source tech that for the vast majority of uses are free. If you're consuming a lot of that, then there's a subscription that kicks in there as well. But we're giving you value in exchange for you having to spend your time, your engineers, managing all that that I just walked through. So, those are the two avenues that we found that are working well, that seem to be a fair trade and fair balance with the community and the rest of the ecosystem.Corey: I think the hardest part for a lot of folks is embracing change. And I have encountered this my entire career where I started off doing large-scale email systems administration, and hey, turns out that's not really a thing anymore. And I used to be deep in the bowels of Postfix, for example. I'm referenced in the SVN history of Postfix, once upon a time, just for helping with documentation and finding weird corner cases because I'm really good at breaking things by accident. And I viewed it as part of my identity.And times have changed and moved on; I don't run Postfix myself for anything anymore. I haven't touched it in years. Docker is still there and it's still something that people are actively using basically everywhere. And there's a sense of ownership and identity for especially early adopters who glom on to it because it is such a better way of doing some things that it is almost incomprehensible that we used to do it any other way. That's transformation.That's something awesome. But people want to pretend that we're still living in that era where technology has not advanced. The miraculous breakthrough in 2013 is today's de rigueur type of environment where this is just, “Oh, yeah. Of course you're using Docker.” If you're not, people look at you somewhat strangely.It's like, “Oh, I'm using serverless.” “Okay, but you can still build that in Docker containers. Why aren't you doing that?” It's like, “Oh, I don't believe in running anything that doesn't make me pay AWS by the second.” So okay, great. People are going to have opinions on this stuff. But time marches on and whatever we wish the industry would do, it's going to make its own decisions and march forward. There's very little any of us can do to change that.Scott: That's right. Look, it was a single container back in 2013, 2014, right? And now what we're seeing—and you kind of went there—is we're separating the implementation of service from the service. So, the service could be implemented with a container, could be a serverless function, could be a hosted XYZ as a service on some cloud, but what developers want to do is—what they're moving towards is, assemble your application based on services regardless of the how. You know, is that how a local container? To your point, you can roll a local serverless function now in an OCI image, and push it to Amazon.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's one of that now 34 ways I found to run containers on AWS.Scott: [laugh]. You can also, in Compose, abstract all that complexity away. Compose could have three services in it. One of those services is a local container, one of those services might be a local serverless function that you're running to test, and one of those services could be a mock to a Database as a Service on a cloud. And so that's where we are.We've gone beyond the single-container Docker run, which is still incredibly powerful but now we're starting to uplevel to applications that consist of multiple services. And where do those services run? Increasingly, developers do not need to care. And we see that as our mission is continue to give that type of power to developers to abstract out the how, extract out the infrastructure so they can just focus on building their app.Corey: Scott, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more—and that could mean finding out your opinions on things, potentially yelling at you about pricing changes, more interestingly, buying licenses for their large companies to run this stuff, and even theoretically, since you alluded to it a few minutes ago, look into working at Docker—where can they find you?Scott: No, thanks, Corey. And thank you for the time to discuss and look back over both years, but also zoom in on the present day. So, www.docker.com; you can find any and all what we just walked through. They're more than happy to yell at me on Twitters at @scottcjohnston, and we have a public roadmap that is in GitHub. I'm not going to put the URL here, but you can find it very easily. So, we love hearing from our community, we love engaging with them, we love going back and forth. And it's a big community; jump in, the waters warm, very welcoming, love to have you.Corey: And we'll of course, but links to that in the [show notes. 00:32:28] Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.Scott: Thank you, Corey. Right back at you.Corey: Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. 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 a comment telling me that Docker isn't interested in at all because here's how to do exactly what Docker does in LPARs on your mainframe until the AWS/400 comes to [unintelligible 00:33:02].Scott: [laugh].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.

Igreja Batista Mont'serrat
Celebração de 85 anos da IBMS - Decida Avançar, Pr. Domingos Jardim - PIB Marilia SP | 17.10.21

Igreja Batista Mont'serrat

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2021 57:05


QUE BOM TER VOCÊ AQUI! Sejam muito bem-vindos à mais uma celebração da Igreja Batista Mont'Serrat! Estamos felizes com sua participação para juntos adorarmos ao Senhor, como uma família para ser, viver e servir para a glória de Deus! QUERO JESUS! Se você aceitou Jesus Cristo ou quer conhecê-Lo mais, clique no link que vamos ajudá-lo: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1n9pfvEbO9XauVQeiGU-xJHDhIpKO4steB_UJlqSQX80/edit?ts=60f092b2 FIQUE POR DENTRO! Baixe nosso App no Google Play ou Apple Store (Igreja Batista Mont Serrat). SEJA E FAÇA PARTE! Ser e fazer parte de uma família nos propõe o comprometimento de participarmos também com a nossa mordomia financeira. Participe com seu dízimo e oferta pelo PIX ou outras opções em nosso site e aplicativo. PIX 87131447000188 (Itaú) ESTAMOS AQUI! Igreja Batista Mont'Serrat Rua 18 de Novembro, 1000 | Porto Alegre, RS | CEP 90240-040 (51) 9 9782 5968 secretaria@igrejabatista.org.br www.igrejabatista.org.br instagram.com/ibmspoa facebook.com/igrejabatista.montserrat

Screaming in the Cloud
What GitHub Can Give to Microsoft with Jason Warner

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2021 37:47


About JasonJason is now the Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures.Links: GitHub: https://github.com/ @jasoncwarner: https://twitter.com/jasoncwarner GitHub: https://github.com/jasoncwarner Jasoncwarner/ama: https://github.com/jasoncwarner/ama 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: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Jason Warner, the Chief Technology Officer at GifHub, although he pronounces it differently. Jason, welcome to the show.Jason: Thanks, Corey. Good to be here.Corey: So, GitHub—as you insist on pronouncing it—is one of those companies that's been around for a long time. In fact, I went to a training conducted by one of your early folks, Scott Chacon, who taught how Git works over the course of a couple of days, and honestly, I left more confused than I did when I entered. It's like, “Oh, this is super awful. Good thing I'll never need to know this because I'm not really a developer.” And I'm still not really a developer and I still don't really know how Git works, but here we are.And it's now over a decade later; you folks have been acquired by Microsoft, and you are sort of the one-stop-shop, from the de facto perspective of, “I'm going to go share some code with people on the internet. I'll use GitHub to do it.” Because, you know, copying and pasting and emailing Microsoft Word documents around isn't ideal.Jason: That is right. And I think that a bunch of things that you mentioned there, played into, you know, GitHub's early and sustained success. But my God, do you remember the old days when people had to email tar files around or drop them in weird spots?Corey: What the hell do you mean, by, “Old days?” It still blows my mind that the Linux kernel is managed by—they use Git, obviously. Linus Torvalds did write Git once upon a time—and it has the user interface you would expect for that. And the way that they collaborate is not through GitHub or anything like that. No, they use Git to generate patches, which they then email to the mailing list. Which sounds like I'm making it up, like, “Oh, well, yeah, tell another one, but maybe involve a fax machine this time.” But no, that is actually what they do.Jason: It blew my mind when I saw that, too, by the way. And you realize, too, that workflows are workflows, and people will build interesting workflows to solve their use case. Now, obviously, anyone that you would be talking to in 2021, if you walked in and said, “Yeah, install Git. Let's set up an email server and start mailing patches to each other and we're going to do it this way.” They would just kind of politely—or maybe impolitely—show you out of the room, and rightfully [laugh] so. But it works for one of the most important software projects in history: Linux.Corey: Yeah, and it works almost in spite of itself to some extent. You've come a long way as a company because initially, it was, “Oh, there's this amazing, decentralized version control system. How do we make it better? I know, we're going to take off the decentralized part of it and give it a central point that everything can go through.” And collaboratively, it works well, but I think that viewing GitHub as a system that is used to sell free Git repositories to people is rather dramatically missing the point. It feels like it's grown significantly beyond just code repository hosting. Tell me more about that.Jason: Absolutely. I remember talking to a bunch of folks right around when I was joining GitHub, and you know, there was still talk about GitHub as, you know, GitHub for lawyers, or GitHub for doctors, or what could you do in a different way? And you know, social coding as an aspect, and maybe turning into a social network with a resume. And all those things are true to a percentage standpoint. But what GitHub should be in the world is the world's most important software development platform, end-to-end software development platform.We obviously have grown a bunch since me joining in that way which we launched dependency management packages, Actions with built-in CI, we've got some deployment mechanisms, we got advanced security underneath it, we've Codespaces in beta and alpha on top of it now. But if you think about GitHub as, join, share, and see other people's code, that's evolution one. If you see it as world's largest, maybe most developed software development platform, that's evolution two, and in my mind, its natural place where it should be, given what it has done already in the world, is become the world's most important software company. I don't mean the most profitable. I just mean the most important.Corey: I would agree. I had a blog post that went up somewhat recently about the future of cloud being Microsoft's to lose. And it's not because Azure is the best cloud platform out there, with respect, and I don't need you to argue the point. It is very clearly not. It is not like other clouds, but I can see a path to where it could become far better than it is.But if I'm out there and I'm just learning how to write code—because I make terrible life choices—and I go to a boot camp or I follow a tutorial online or I take a course somewhere, I'm going to be writing code probably using VS Code, the open-source editor that you folks launched after the acquisition. And it was pretty clear that Atom wasn't quite where the world was going. Great. Then I'm going to host it on GitHub, which is a natural evolution. Then you take a look at things like GitHub Actions that build in CI/CD pipelines natively.All that's missing is a ‘Deploy to Azure' button that is the next logical step, and you're mostly there for an awful lot of use cases. But you can't add that button until Azure itself gets better. Done right, this has the potential to leave, effectively, every other cloud provider in the dust because no one can touch this.Jason: One hundred percent. I mean, the obvious thing that any other cloud should be looking at with us—or should have been before the acquisition, looking at us was, “Oh, no, they could jump over us. They could stop our funnel.” And I used internal metrics when I was talking to them about partnership that led to the sale, which was I showed them more about their running business than they knew about themselves. I can tell them where they were stacked-ranked against each other, based on the ingress and egress of all the data on GitHub, you know, and various reactions to that in those meetings was pretty astounding.And just with that data alone, it should tell you what GitHub would be capable of and what Azure would be capable of in the combination of those two things. I mean, you did mention the ‘Deploy to Azure' button; this has been a topic, obviously, pre and post-acquisition, which is, “When is that coming?” And it was the one hard rule I set during the acquisition was, there will be no ‘Deploy to Azure' button. Azure has to earn the right to get things deployed to, in my opinion. And I think that goes to what you're saying is, if we put a ‘Deploy to Azure' button on top of this and Azure is not ready for that, or is going to fail, ultimately, that looks bad for all of us. But if it earned the right and it gets better, and it becomes one of those, then, you know, people will choose it, and that is, to me, what we're after.Corey: You have to choose the moment because if you do it too soon, you'll set the entire initiative back five years. Do it too late, and you get leapfrogged. There's a golden window somewhere and finding it is going to be hard. And I think it's pretty clear that the other hyperscalers in this space are learning, or have learned, that the next 10 years of cloud or 15 years of cloud or whatever they want to call it, and the new customers that are going to come are not the same as the customers that have built the first half of the business. And they're trying to wrap their heads around that because a lot of where the growth is going to come from is established blue chips that are used to thinking in very enterprise terms.And people think I'm making fun of them when I say this, but Microsoft has 40 years' experience apologizing to enterprises for computer failures. And that is fundamentally what cloud is. It's about talking computers to business executives because as much as we talk about builders, that is not the person at an established company with an existing IT estate, who gets to determine where $50 million a year in cloud-spend is going to go.Jason: It's [laugh] very, [laugh] very true. I mean, we've entered a different spot with cloud computing in the bell curve of adoption, and if you think that they will choose the best technology every time, well, history of computing is littered with better technologies that have failed because the distribution was better on one side. As you mentioned, Microsoft has 40 years, and I wager that Microsoft has the best sales organizations and the best enterprise accounts and, you know, all that sort of stuff, blah, blah, blah, on that side of the world than anyone in the industry. They can sell to enterprises better than almost anyone in the industry. And the other hyperscalers—there's a reason why [TK 00:08:34] is running Google Cloud right now. And Amazon, classically, has been very, very bad assigned to the enterprises. They just happened to be the first mover.Corey: In the early days, it was easy. You'd have an Amazon salesperson roll up to a company, and the exec would say, “Great, why should we consider running things on AWS?” And the answer was, “Oh, I'm sorry, wrong conversation. Right now you have 80 different accounts scattered throughout your org. I'm just here to help you unify them, get some visibility into it, and possibly give you a discount along the way.” And it was a different conversation. Shadow IT was the sole driver of cloud adoption for a long time. That is no longer true. It has to go in the front door, and that is a fundamental shift in how you go to market.Jason: One hundred percent true, and it's why I think that Microsoft has been so successful with Azure, in the last, let's call it five years in that, is that the early adopters in the second wave are doing that; they're all enterprise IT, enterprise dev shops who are buying from the top down. Now, there is still the bottoms-up adoption that going to be happening, and obviously, bottom-up adoption will happen still going forward, but we've entered the phase where that's not the primary or sole mechanism I should say. The sole mechanism of buying in. We have tops-down selling still—or now.Corey: When Microsoft announced it was acquiring GitHub, there was a universal reaction of, “Oh, shit.” Because it's Microsoft; of course they're going to ruin GitHub. Is there a second option? No, unless they find a way to ruin it twice. And none of it came to pass.It is uniformly excellent, and there's a strong argument that could be made by folks who are unaware of what happened—I'm one of them, so maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong—that GitHub had a positive effect on Microsoft more than Microsoft had an effect on GitHub. I don't know if that's true or not, but I could believe it based upon what I've seen.Jason: Obviously, the skepticism was well deserved at the time of acquisition, let's just be honest with it, particularly given what Microsoft's history had been for about 15—well, 20 years before, previous to Satya joining. And I was one of those people in the late '90s who would write ‘M$' in various forums. I was 18 or 19 years old, and just got into—Corey: Oh, hating Microsoft was my entire personality.Jason: [laugh]. And it was, honestly, well-deserved, right? Like, they had anti-competitive practices and they did some nefarious things. And you know, I talked about Bill Gates as an example. Bill Gates is, I mean, I don't actually know how old he is, but I'm going to guess he's late '50s, early '60s, but he's basically in the redemption phase of his life for his early years.And Microsoft is making up for Ballmer years, and later Gates years, and things of that nature. So, it was well-deserved skepticism, and particularly for a mid-career to older-career crowd who have really grown to hate Microsoft over that time. But what I would say is, obviously, it's different under Satya, and Scott, and Amy Hood, and people like that. And all we really telling people is give us a chance on this one. And I mean, all of us. The people who were running GitHub at the time, including myself and, you know, let Scott and Satya prove that they are who they say they are.Corey: It's one of those things where there's nothing you could have said that would have changed the opinion of the world. It was, just wait and see. And I think we have. It's now, I daresay, gotten to a point where Microsoft announces that they're acquiring some other beloved company, then people, I think, would extend a lot more credit than they did back then.Jason: I have to give Microsoft a ton of credit, too, on this one for the way in which they handled acquisitions, like us and others. And the reason why I think it's been so successful is also the reason why I think so many others die post-acquisition, which is that Microsoft has basically—I'll say this, and I know I won't get fired because it feels like it's true. Microsoft is essentially a PE holding company at this point. It is acquired a whole bunch of companies and lets them run independent. You know, we got LinkedIn, you got Minecraft, Xbox is its own division, but it's effectively its own company inside of it.Azure is run that way. GitHub's got a CEO still. I call it the archipelago model. Microsoft's the landmass underneath the water that binds them all, and finance, and HR, and a couple of other things, but for the most part, we manifest our own product roadmap still. We're not told what to go do. And I think that's why it's successful. If we're going to functionally integrate GitHub into Microsoft, it would have died very quickly.Corey: You clearly don't mix the streams. I mean, your gaming division writes a lot of interesting games and a lot of interesting gaming platforms. And, like, one of the most popularly played puzzle games in the world is a Microsoft property, and that is, of course, logging into a Microsoft account correctly. And I keep waiting for that to bleed into GitHub, but it doesn't. GitHub is a terrific SAML provider, it is stupidly easy to log in, it's great.And at some level, I wish that would bleed into other aspects, but you can't have everything. Tell me what it's like to go through an acquisition from a C-level position. Because having been through an acquisition before, the process looks a lot like a surprise all-hands meeting one day after the markets close and, “Listen up, idiots.” And [laugh] there we go. I have to imagine with someone in your position, it's a slightly different experience.Jason: It's definitely very different for all C-levels. And then myself in particular, as the primary driver of the acquisition, obviously, I had very privy inside knowledge. And so, from my position, I knew what was happening the entire time as the primary driver from the inside. But even so, it's still disconcerting to a degree because, in many ways, you don't think you're going to be able to pull it off. Like, you know, I remember the months, and the nights, and the weekends, and the weekend nights, and all the weeks I spent on the road trying to get all the puzzle pieces lined up for the Googles, or the Microsofts, or the eventually AWSs, the VMwares, the IBMs of the world to take seriously, just from a product perspective, which I knew would lead to, obviously, acquisition conversations.And then, once you get the call from the board that says, “It's done. We signed the letter of intent,” you basically are like, “Oh. Oh, crap. Okay, hang on a second. I actually didn't—I don't actually believe in my heart of hearts that I was going to actually be able to pull that off.” And so now, you probably didn't plan out—or at least I didn't. I was like, “Shit if we actually pulled this off what comes next?” And I didn't have that what comes next, which is odd for me. I usually have some sort of a loose plan in place. I just didn't. I wasn't really ready for that.Corey: It's got to be a weird discussion, too, when you start looking at shopping a company around to be sold, especially one at the scale of GitHub because you're at such a high level of visibility in the entire environment, where—it's the idea of would anyone even want to buy us? And then, duh, of course they would. And you look the hyperscalers, for example. You have, well, you could sell it to Amazon and they could pull another Cloud9, where they shove it behind the IAM login process, fail to update the thing meaningfully over a period of years, to a point where even now, a significant portion of the audience listening to this is going to wonder if it's a service I just made up; it sounds like something they might have done, but Cloud9 sounds way too inspired for an AWS service name, so maybe not. And—which it is real. You could go sell to Google, which is going to be awesome until some executive changes roles, and then it's going to be deprecated in short order.Or then there's Microsoft, which is the wild card. It's, well, it's Microsoft. I mean, people aren't really excited about it, but okay. And I don't think that's true anymore at all. And maybe I'm not being fair to all the hyperscalers there. I mean, I'm basically insulting everyone, which is kind of my shtick, but it really does seem that Microsoft was far and away the best acquirer possible because it has been transformative. My question—if you can answer it—is, how the hell did you see that beforehand? It's only obvious—even knowing what I know now—in hindsight.Jason: So, Microsoft was a target for me going into it, and the reason why was I thought that they were in the best overall position. There was enough humility on one side, enough hubris on another, enough market awareness, probably, organizational awareness to, kind of, pull it off. There's too much hubris on one side of the fence with some of the other acquirers, and they would try to hug us too deeply, or integrate us too quickly, or things of that nature. And I think it just takes a deep understanding of who the players are and who the egos involved are. And I think egos has actually played more into acquisitions than people will ever admit.What I saw was, based on the initial partnership conversations, we were developing something that we never launched before GitHub Actions called GitHub Launch. The primary reason we were building that was GitHub launches a five, six-year journey, and it's got many, many different phases, which will keep launching over the next couple of years. The first one we never brought to market was a partnership between all of the clouds. And it served a specific purpose. One, it allowed me to get into the room with the highest level executive at every one of those companies.Two allow me to have a deep economic conversation with them at a partnership level. And three, it allowed me to show those executives that we knew what GitHub's value was in the world, and really flip the tables around and say, “We know what we're worth. We know what our value is in the world. We know where we sit from a product influence perspective. If you want to be part of this, we'll allow it.” Not, “Please come work with us.” It was more of a, “We'll allow you to be part of this conversation.”And I wanted to see how people reacted to that. You know how Amazon reacted that told me a lot about how they view the world, and how Google reacted to that showed me exactly where they viewed it. And I remember walking out of the Google conversation, feeling a very specific way based upon the reaction. And you know, when I talked to Microsoft, got a very different feel and it, kind of, confirmed a couple of things. And then when I had my very first conversation with Nat, who have known for a while before that, I realized, like, yep, okay, this is the one. Drive hard at this.Corey: If you could do it all again, would you change anything meaningful about how you approached it?Jason: You know, I think I got very lucky doing a couple of things. I was very intentional aspects of—you know, I tried to serendipitously show up, where Diane Greene was at one point, or a serendipitously show up where Satya or Scott Guthrie was, and obviously, that was all intentional. But I never sold a company like this before. The partnership and the product that we were building was obviously very intentional. I think if I were to go through the sale, again, I would probably have tried to orchestrate at least one more year independent.And it's not—for no other reason alone than what we were building was very special. And the world sees it now, but I wish that the people who built it inside GitHub got full credit for it. And I think that part of that credit gets diffused to saying, “Microsoft fixed GitHub,” and I want the people inside GitHub to have gotten a lot more of that credit. Microsoft obviously made us much better, but that was not specific to Microsoft because we're run independent; it was bringing Nat in and helping us that got a lot of that stuff done. Nat did a great job at those things. But a lot of that was already in play with some incredible engineers, product people, and in particular our sales team and finance team inside of GitHub already.Corey: When you take a look across the landscape of the fact that GitHub has become for a certain subset of relatively sad types of which I'm definitely one a household name, what do you think the biggest misconception about the company is?Jason: I still think the biggest misconception of us is that we're a code host. Every time I talk to the RedMonk folks, they get what we're building and what we're trying to be in the world, but people still think of us as SourceForge-plus-plus in many ways. And obviously, that may have been our past, but that's definitely not where we are now and, for certain, obviously, not our future. So, I think that's one. I do think that people still, to this day, think of GitLab as one of our main competitors, and I never have ever saw GitLab as a competitor.I think it just has an unfortunate naming convention, as well as, you know, PRs, and MRs, and Git and all that sort of stuff. But we take very different views of the world in how we're approaching things. And then maybe the last thing would be that what we're doing at the scale that we're doing it as is kind of easy. When I think that—you know, when you're serving almost every developer in the world at this point at the scale at which we're doing it, we've got some scale issues that people just probably will never thankfully encounter for themselves.Corey: Well, everyone on Hacker News believes that they will, as soon as they put up their hello world blog, so Kubernetes is the only way to do anything now. So, I'm told.Jason: It's quite interesting because I think that everything breaks at scale, as we all know about from the [hyperclouds 00:20:54]. As we've learned, things are breaking every day. And I think that when you get advice, either operational, technical, or managerial advice from people who are running 10 person, 50 person companies, or X-size sophisticated systems, it doesn't apply. But for whatever reason, I don't know why, but people feel inclined to give that feedback to engineers at GitHub directly, saying, “If you just…” and in many [laugh] ways, you're just like, “Well, I think that we'll have that conversation at some point, you know, but we got a 100-plus-million repos and 65 million developers using us on a daily basis.” It's a very different world.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance 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 OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say 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: One of the things that I really appreciate personally because, you know, when you see something that company does, it's nice to just thank people from time to time, so I'm inviting the entire company on the podcast one by one, at some point, to wind up thanking them all individually for it, but Codespaces is one of those things that I think is transformative for me. Back in the before times, and ideally the after times, whenever I travel the only computer I brought with me for a few years now has been an iPad or an iPad Pro. And trying to get an editor on that thing that works reasonably well has been like pulling teeth, my default answer has just been to remote into an EC2 instance and use vim like I have for the last 20 years. But Code is really winning me over. Having to play with code-server and other things like that for a while was obnoxious, fraught, and difficult.And finally, we got to a point where Codespaces was launched, and oh, it works on an iPad. This is actually really slick. I like this. And it was the thing that I was looking for but was trying to have to monkey patch together myself from components. And that's transformative.It feels like we're going back in many ways—at least in my model—to the days of thin clients where all the heavy lifting was done centrally on big computers, and the things that sat on people's desks were mostly just, effectively, relatively simple keyboard, mouse, screen. Things go back and forth and I'm sure we'll have super powerful things in our pockets again soon, but I like the interaction model; it solves for an awful lot of problems and that's one of the things that, at least from my perspective, that the world may not have fully wrapped it head around yet.Jason: Great observation. Before the acquisition, we were experimenting with a couple of different editors, that we wanted to do online editors. And same thing; we were experimenting with some Action CI stuff, and it just didn't make sense for us to build it; it would have been too hard, there have been too many moving parts, and then post-acquisition, we really love what the VS Code team was building over there, and you could see it; it was just going to work. And we had this one person, well, not one person. There was a bunch of people inside of GitHub that do this, but this one person at the highest level who's just obsessed with make this work on my iPad.He's the head of product design, his name's Max, he's an ex-Heroku person as well, and he was just obsessed with it. And he said, “If it works on my iPad, it's got a chance to succeed. If it doesn't work on my iPad, I'm never going to use this thing.” And the first time we booted up Codespaces—or he booted it up on the weekend, working on it. Came back and just, “Yep. This is going to be the one. Now, we got to work on those, the sanding the stones and those fine edges and stuff.”But it really does unlock a lot for us because, you know, again, we want to become the software developer platform for everyone in the world, you got to go end-to-end, and you got to have an opinion on certain things, and you got to enable certain functionality. You mentioned Cloud9 before with Amazon. It was one of the most confounding acquisitions I've ever seen. When they bought it I was at Heroku and I thought, I thought at that moment that Amazon was going to own the next 50 years of development because I thought they saw the same thing a lot of us at Heroku saw, and with the Cloud9 acquisition, what they were going to do was just going to stomp on all of us in the space. And then when it didn't happen, we just thought maybe, you know, okay, maybe something else changed. Maybe we were wrong about that assumption, too. But I think that we're on to it still. I think that it just has to do with the way you approach it and, you know, how you design it.Corey: Sorry, you just said something that took me aback for a second. Wait, you mean software can be designed? It's not this emergent property of people building thing on top of thing? There's actually a grand plan behind all these things? I've only half kidding, on some level, where if you take a look at any modern software product that is deployed into the world, it seems impossible for even small aspects of it to have been part of the initial founding design. But as a counterargument, it would almost have to be for a lot of these things. How do you square that circle?Jason: I think you have to, just like anything on spectrums and timelines, you have to flex at various times for various things. So, if you think about it from a very, very simple construct of time, you just have to think of time horizons. So, I have an opinion about what GitHub should look like in 10 years—vaguely—in five years much more firmly, and then very, very concretely, for the next year, as an example. So, a lot of the features you might see might be more emergent, but a lot of long-term work togetherness has to be loosely tied together with some string. Now, that string will be tightened over time, but it loosely has to see its way through.And the way I describe this to folks is that you don't wake up one day and say, “I'm going on vacation,” and literally just throw a finger on the map. You have to have some sort of vague idea, like, “Hey, I want to have a beach vacation,” or, “I want to have an adventure vacation.” And then you can kind of pick a destination and say, “I'm going to Hawaii,” or, “I'm going to San Diego.” And if you're standing on the East Coast knowing you're going to San Diego, you basically know that you have to just start marching west, or driving west, or whatever. And now, you don't have to have the route mapped out just yet, but you know that hey, if I'm going due southeast, I'm off course, so how do I reorient to make sure I'm still going in the right direction?That's basically what I think about as high-level, as scale design. And it's not unfair to say that a lot of the stuff is not designed today. Amazon is very famous for not designing anything; they design a singular service. But there's no cohesiveness to what Amazon—or AWS specifically, I should say, in this case—has put out there. And maybe that's not what their strategy is. I don't know the internal workings of them, but it's very clear.Corey: Well, oh, yeah. When I first started working in the AWS space and looking through the console, it like, “What is this? It feels like every service's interface was designed by a different team, but that would—oh…” and then the light bulb went on. Yeah. You ship your culture.Jason: It's exactly it. It works for them, but I think if you're going to try to do something very, very, very different, you know, it's going to look a certain way. So, intentional design, I think, is part of what makes GitHub and other products like it special. And if you think about it, you have to have an end-to-end view, and then you can build verticals up and down inside of that. But it has to work on the horizontal, still.And then if you hire really smart people to build the verticals, you get those done. So, a good example of this is that I have a very strong opinion about the horizontal workflow nature of GitHub should look like in five years. I have a very loose opinion about what the matrix build system of Actions looks like. Because we have very, very smart people who are working on that specific problem, so long as that maps back and snaps into the horizontal workflows. And that's how it can work together.Corey: So, when you look at someone who is, I don't know, the CTO of a wildly renowned company that is basically still catering primarily to developers slash engineers, but let's be honest, geeks, it's natural to think that, oh, they must be the alpha geek. That doesn't really apply to you from everything I've been able to uncover. Am I just not digging deeply enough, or are you in fact, a terrible nerd?Jason: [laugh]. I am. I'm a terrible nerd. I am a very terrible nerd. I feel very lucky, obviously, to be in the position I'm in right now, in many ways, and people call me up and exactly that.It's like, “Hey, you must be king of the geeks.” And I'm like, “[laugh], ah, funny story here.” But um, you know, I joke that I'm not actually supposed to be in tech in first place, the way I grew up, and where I did, and how, I wasn't supposed to be here. And so, it's serendipitous that I am in tech. And then turns out I had an aptitude for distributed systems, and complex, you know, human systems as well. But when people dig in and they start talking about topics, I'm confounded. I never liked Star Wars, I never like Star Trek. Never got an anime, board games, I don't play video games—Corey: You are going to get letters.Jason: [laugh]. When I was at Canonical, oh, my goodness, the stuff I tried to hide about myself, and, like, learn, like, so who's this Boba Fett dude. And, you know, at some point, obviously, you don't have to pretend anymore, but you know, people still assume a bunch stuff because, quote, “Nerd” quote, “Geek” culture type of stuff. But you know, some interesting facts that people end up being surprised by with me is that, you know, I was very short in high school and I grew in college, so I decided that I wanted to take advantage of my newfound height and athleticism as you grow into your body. So, I started playing basketball, but I obsessed over it.I love getting good at something. So, I'd wake up at four o'clock in the morning, and go shoot baskets, and do drills for hours. Well, I got really good at it one point, and I end up playing in a Pro-Am basketball game with ex-NBA Harlem Globetrotter legends. And that's just not something you hear about in most engineering circles. You might expect that out of a salesperson or a marketing person who played pro ball—or amateur ball somewhere, or college ball or something like that. But not someone who ends up running the most important software company—from a technical perspective—in the world.Corey: It's weird. People counterintuitively think that, on some level, that code is the answer to all things. And that, oh, all this human interaction stuff, all the discussions, all the systems thinking, you have to fit a certain profile to do that, and anyone outside of that is, eh, they're not as valuable. They can get ignored. And we see that manifesting itself in different ways.And even if we take a look at people whose profess otherwise, we take a look at folks who are fresh out of a boot camp and don't understand much about the business world yet; they have transformed their lives—maybe they're fresh out of college, maybe didn't even go to college—and 18 weeks later, they are signing up for six-figure jobs. Meanwhile, you take a look at virtually any other business function, in order to have a relatively comparable degree of earning potential, it takes years of experience and being very focused on a whole bunch of other things. There's a massive distortion around technical roles, and that's a strange and difficult thing to wrap my head around. But as you're talking about it, it goes both ways, too. It's the idea of, “Oh, I'll become technical than branch into other things.” It sounded like you started off instead with a non-technical direction and then sort of adopted that from other sides. Is that right, or am I misremembering exactly how the story unfolds?Jason: No, that's about right. People say, “Hey, when did I start programming?” And it's very in vogue, I think, for a lot of people to say, “I started programming at three years old,” or five years old, or whatever, and got my first computer. I literally didn't get my first computer until I was 18-years-old. And I started programming when I got to a high school co-op with IBM at 17.It was Lotus Notes programming at the time. Had no exposure to it before. What I did, though, in college was IBM told me at the time, they said, “If you get a computer science degree will guarantee you a job.” Which for a kid who grew up the way I grew up, that is manna from heaven type of deal. Like, “You'll guarantee me a job inside where don't have to dig ditches all day or lay asphalt? Oh, my goodness. What's computer science? I'll go figure it out.”And when I got to school, what I realized was I was really far behind. Everyone was that ubergeek type of thing. So, what I did is I tried to hack the system, and what I said was, “What is a topic that nobody else has an advantage on from me?” And so I basically picked the internet because the internet was so new in the mid-'90s that most people were still not fully up to speed on it. And then the underpinnings in the internet, which basically become distributed systems, that's where I started to focus.And because no one had a real advantage, I just, you know, could catch up pretty quickly. But once I got into computers, it turned out that I was probably a very average developer, maybe even below average, but it was the system's thinking that I stood out on. And you know, large-scale distributed systems or architectures were very good for me. And then, you know, that applies not, like, directly, but it applies decently well to human systems. It's just, you know, different types of inputs and outputs. But if you think about organizations at scale, they're barely just really, really, really complex and kind of irrational distributed systems.Corey: Jason, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about who you are, what you're up to, how you think about the world, where can they find you?Jason: Twitter's probably the best place at this point. Just @jasoncwarner on Twitter. I'm very unimaginative. My name is my GitHub handle. It's my Twitter username. And that's the best place that I, kind of, interact with folks these days. I do an AMA on GitHub. So, if you ever want to ask me anything, just kind of go to jasoncwarner/ama on GitHub and drop a question in one of the issues and I'll get to answering that. Yeah, those are the best spots.Corey: And we will, of course, include links to those things in the [show notes 00:33:52]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Jason: Thanks, Corey. It's been fun.Corey: Jason Warner, Chief Technology Officer at GitHub. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. 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 in your podcast platform of choice anyway, along with a comment that includes a patch.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.

Revenue Harvest
How A Strategic Narrative Can Fuel Sales Growth with Andy Raskin

Revenue Harvest

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2021 48:10


This episode of the Revenue Harvest Podcast with Nigel Green features Andy Raskin who helps CEOs align their teams around a strategic narrative. This strategic narrative shows how there used to be an old game of how to win in the world, but now there's a new game and look how all the winners are starting to play it already. Andy shares how he helps CEOs form leadership groups that can shape the strategic narrative of the company. It is important to show the winners and the losers of this new game and how CEOs can become winners too. He uses the example of ownership versus subscription and how the unicorns have all shifted to providing services instead of selling products. Andy also advises companies to ask their customers what can change their life and how you can align yourself to that. You can connect with Andy in the links below: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyraskin/ Website - https://www.andyraskin.com/ To hear more episodes of The Revenue Harvest Podcast, you can visit http://www.therevenueharvest.com/ or listen to major podcasting platforms such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc. You can also connect with Nigel by visiting the following links: Website (Revenue Harvest) - http://www.therevenueharvest.com/ Website (Nigel Green) - https://nigelgreen.co/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/revenueharvest/ HIGHLIGHTS 04:39 Creating a strategic narrative with a CEO 11:27 Strategic narrative disrupts changing the game for everybody 12:53 Create a strategic narrative: Form a leadership group and implement in sales 19:45 How companies can use strategic narrative 27:23 Show the stakes that make it about life and death 32:29 Talk to customers to know how you can change their life 36:00 Use slides with takeaways only 39:34 Covid was an accelerant that reshaped strategic narrative QUOTES 03:02 "What is the asset that we should use to define the story that everyone's telling? I came to the sales deck, that the sales deck, the sales pitch is really the core narrative of the company." 08:38 "Look at the great strategic narratives, they all have this structure which is there was an old game that used to be a great game that was the way to win in the world, and now there's a new game and look all the winners are starting to play this new game." 28:35 "Look at all the companies that are thriving. In terms of the incumbents, if they haven't shifted from selling stuff to selling services, they're dead. Like the IBMs of the world and the HPs." 42:59 "Opinions to reality was a shift they were talking about before Covid and part of this is because hey now you have the sales calls recorded. You have them as data that you can mine with artificial intelligence or whatever."

The History of Computing
IBM Pivots To Services In The 90s

The History of Computing

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 6, 2021 13:39


IBM is the company with nine lives. They began out of the era of mechanical and electro-mechanical punch card computing. They helped bring the mainframe era to the commercial market. They played their part during World War II. They helped make the transistorized computer mainstream with the S360. They helped bring the PC into the home. We've covered a number of lost decades - and moving into the 90s, IBM was in one. One that was largely created by an influx of revenues with the personal computer business. That revenue gave IBM a shot in the arm. But one that was temporary. By the early 90s the computer business was under assault by the clone makers. They had been out-maneuvered by Microsoft and the writing was on the wall that Big Blue was in trouble. The CEO who presided during the fall of the hardware empire was John Akers. At the time, IBM had their fingers in every cookie jar. They were involved with instigating the Internet. They made mainframes. They made PCs. They made CPUs. They made printers. They provided services. How could they be in financial trouble? Because their core business, making computers, was becoming a commodity and quickly becoming obsolete. IBM loves to own an industry. But they didn't own PCs any more. They never owned PCs in the home after the PC Jr flopped. And mainframes were quickly going out of style. John Akers had been a lifer at IBM and by then there was generations of mature culture and its byproduct bureaucracy to contend with. Akers simply couldn't move the company fast enough. The answer was to get rid of John Akers and bring in a visionary. The visionaries in the computing field didn't want IBM. CEOs like John Sculley at Apple and Bill Gates at Microsoft turned them down. That's when someone at a big customer came up. Louis Gerstner. He had been the CEO of American Express and Nabisco. He had connections to IBM, with his brother having run the PC division for a time. And he was the first person brought in from the outside to run the now-nearly 100 year old company. And the first of a wave of CEOs paid big money. Commonplace today. Starting in 1993, he moved from an IBM incapable of making decisions because of competing visions to one where execution and simplification was key. He made few changes in the beginning. At the time, competitor CDC was being split up into smaller companies and lines of business were being spun down as they faced huge financial losses. John Akers had let each division run itself - Gerstner saw the need for services given all this off-the-shelf tech being deployed in the 90s. The industry was standardizing, making it ripe for re-usable code that could run on this standardized hardware but then sold with a lot of services to customize it for each customer. In other words, it was time for IBM to become an integrator. One that could deliver a full stack of solutions. This meant keeping the company as one powerhouse rather than breaking it up. You see, buy IBM kit, have IBM supply a service, and then IBM could use that as a wedge to sell more and more automation services into the companies. Each aspect on its own wasn't hugely profitable, but combined - much larger deal sizes. And given IBMs piece of the internet, it was time for e-commerce. Let that Gates kid have the operating system market and the clone makers have the personal computing market in their races to the bottom. He'd take the enterprise - where IBM was known and trusted and in many sectors loved. And he'd take what he called e-business, which we'd call eCommerce today. He brought in Irving Wladowsky-Berger and they spent six years pivoting one of the biggest companies in the world into this new strategy. The strategy also meant streamlining various operations. Each division previously had the autonomy to pick their own agency. He centralized with Ogilvy & Mather. One brand. One message. Unlike Akers he didn't have much loyalty to the old ways. Yes, OS/2 was made at IBM but by the time Windows 3.11 shipped, IBM was outmaneuvered and in so one of his first moves was to stop development of OS/2 in 1994. They didn't own the operating system market so they let it go. Cutting divisions meant there were a lot of people who didn't fit in with the new IBM any longer. IBM had always hired people for life. Not any more. Over the course of his tenure over 100,000 people were laid off. According to Gerstner they'd grown lazy because performance didn't really matter. And the high performers complained about the complacency. So those first two years came as a shock. But he managed to stop hemorrhaging cash and start the company back on a growth track. Let's put this perspective. His 9 years saw the companies market cap nearly quintuple. This in a company that was founded in 1911 so by then 72 years old. Microsoft, Dell, and so many others grew as well. But a rising tide lifts all boats. Gerstner brought ibm back. But withdrew from categories that would take over the internet. He was paid hundreds of millions of dollars for his work. There were innovative new products in his tenure. The Simon Personal Communicator in 1994. This was one of the earliest mobile devices. Batteries and cellular technology weren't where they needed to be just yet but it certainly represented a harbinger of things to come. IBM introduced the PC Jr all the way back in 1983 and killed it off within two years. But they'd been selling into retail the whole time. So he killed that off and by 2005 IBM pulled out of PCs entirely, selling the division off to Lenovo. A point I don't think I've ever seen made is that Akers inherited a company embroiled in an anti-trust case. The Justice Department filed the case in 1975 and it ran until 1982 eating up thousands of hours of testimony across nearly a thousand witnesses. Akers took over in 1985 and by then IBM was putting clauses in every contract that allowed companies like Microsoft, Sierra Online, and everyone else involved with PCs to sell their software, services, and hardware to other vendors. This opened the door for the clone makers to take the market away after IBM had effectively built the ecosystem and standardized the hardware and form factors that would be used for decades. Unlike Akers, Gerstner inherited an IBM in turmoil - and yet with some of the brightest minds in the world. They had their fingers in everything from the emerging public internet to mobile devices to mainframes to personal computers. He gave management bonuses when they did well and wasn't afraid to cut divisions, which in his book he says that only an outsider could do. This formalized into three “personal business commitments” that contributed to IBM strategies. He represented a shift not only at IBM but across the industry. The computer business didn't require PhD CEOs as the previous generations had. Companies could manage the market and change cultures. Companies could focus on doing less and sell assets (like lines of business) off to raise cash to focus. Companies didn't have to break up, as CDC had done - but instead could re-orient around a full stack of solutions for a unified enterprise. An enterprise that has been good to IBM and others who understand what they need ever since. The IBM turnaround out of yet another lost decade showed us options for large megalith organizations that maybe previously thought different divisions had to run with more independence. Some should - not all. Most importantly though, the turnaround showed us that a culture can change. It's one of the hardest things to do. Part of that was getting rid of the dress code and anti-alcohol policy. Part of that was performance-based comp. Part of that was to show leaders that consensus was slow and decisions needed to be made. Leaders couldn't be perfect but a fast decision was better than one that held up business. As with the turnaround after Apple's lost decade, the turnaround was largely attributable to one powerful personality. Gerstner often shied away from the media. Yet he wrote a book about his experiences called Who Says Elephants Can't Dance. Following his time at IBM he became the chairman of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group, where he helped grow them into a powerhouse in leveraged buyouts, bringing in Hertz, Kinder Morgan, Freescale Semiconductor, Nielson Corporation, and so many others. One of the only personal tidbits you get about him in his book is that he really hates to lose. We're all lucky he turned the company around as since he got there IBM has filed more patents than any other company for 28 consecutive years. These help push the collective conscious forward from 2,300 AI patents to 3,000 cloud patents to 1,400 security patents to laser eye surgery to quantum computing and beyond. 150,000 patents in the storied history of the company. That's a lot of work to bring computing into companies and increase productivity at scale. Not at the hardware level, with the constant downward pricing pressures - but at the software + services layer. The enduring legacy of the changes Gerstner made at IBM.

IBMSPOD
Episode 11 - Mental health and education with Azuma Kalu, Martin Khechara and Steven Schnabel

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2021 41:15


As Covid restrictions are lifted and services return to normal, we're revisiting the issue of workplace pressure, mental health and wellbeing across healthcare laboratories. In September's episode, IBMS fellow and Specialist Scientific Lead in clinical chemistry Azuma Kalu joined us. The pandemic has increased the burden on pathology services to the detriment of some of our member's mental health and wellbeing, inspiring Azuma to take the lead in highlighting the topic across the profession. Azuma discussed how the pandemic has changed the nature of the workplace and reminds us of the issues biomedical scientists, healthcare and support staff have faced during the pandemic. He then talked us through the progress we've made in recent months to improve our members' mental health and overall quality of working lives. In doing so, he emphasised the benefits senior staff will reap when returning to the workplace for both them and more junior team members. Azuma also talks to us about how his PhD in cancer genomics could lead to a test for the recurrence of prostate cancer for those in remission. This month's LabLife explores the issues Biomedical Science students have faced throughout the pandemic. Special guest host Martin Khechara interviews IBMS eStudent Steven Schnabel. He's been on placement in an NHS laboratory throughout the pandemic while also conducting public engagement on behalf of the profession. He takes us through his personal experience and the challenges students have faced and provides some tips to students returning to campus and face-to-face learning in the new academic year. Martin Khechara is an IBMS fellow and senior lecturer in Microbiology at Wolverhampton University and associate professor for public engagement. He recently completed the British Media Associations's media placement with the Naked Scientists podcast.

Igreja Batista Mont'serrat
A mesa da unidade | Pr Tércio Evangelista | Celebração IBMS - 22.08.21

Igreja Batista Mont'serrat

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 22, 2021 65:31


QUE BOM TER VOCÊ AQUI! Sejam muito bem-vindos à mais uma celebração da Igreja Batista Mont'Serrat! Estamos felizes com sua participação para juntos adorarmos ao Senhor, como uma família para ser, viver e servir para a glória de Deus! QUERO JESUS! Se você aceitou Jesus Cristo ou quer conhecê-Lo mais, clique no link que vamos ajudá-lo: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1n9pfvEbO9XauVQeiGU-xJHDhIpKO4steB_UJlqSQX80/edit?ts=60f092b2 FIQUE POR DENTRO! Baixe nosso App no Google Play ou Apple Store (Igreja Batista Mont Serrat). SEJA E FAÇA PARTE! Ser e fazer parte de uma família nos propõe o comprometimento de participarmos também com a nossa mordomia financeira. Participe com seu dízimo e oferta pelo PIX ou outras opções em nosso site e aplicativo. PIX 87131447000188 (Itaú) ESTAMOS AQUI! Igreja Batista Mont'Serrat Rua 18 de Novembro, 1000 | Porto Alegre, RS | CEP 90240-040 (51) 9 9782 5968 secretaria@igrejabatista.org.br www.igrejabatista.org.br instagram.com/ibmspoa facebook.com/igrejabatista.montserrat

IBMSPOD
Episode 10 - Special on Sustainability in the lab with Martin Farley & Sheri Scott

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2021 34:11


IBMSpod Episode 10 – Sustainability in the lab with Martin Farley and Sheri Scott With COP26 in Glasgow only a few months away, it's increasingly important to address sustainability and environmental impacts of our laboratories. In August's episode Sustainability Labs Advisor for UCL and King's, Martin Farley talks to us about sustainability in the lab and the work he has done setting up LEAF (Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework) to help prioritise environmentally conscious laboratory procedures. Martin was the UK's (and Europe's) first full-time sustainable laboratory specialist and was awarded the Green Gown in 2015 from the Sustainability Exchange. Martin discusses how sustainable lab practices are good for both science and cost saving and shares some top tips for making the lab more eco-friendly. In August's LabLife, we caught up with IBMS Fellow Sheri Scott, a biochemist & senior lecturer in biomedical science at Nottingham Trent University. Sheri talked through the sustainability issues biomedical scientists are facing and what actions they can take to reduce their impact on the climate and environment. Sheri also talks about the benefits of becoming a verifier and assessor for IBMS qualifications. Shownotes to follow.

Roll For Enterprise
S2E27: IBMs failed email migration, why startups fail and who suffers, and 5G powered by Microsoft Azure

Roll For Enterprise

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2021 35:01


Lilac, Zack and Mike discuss how even after planning an email migration for 18-month, IBM still failed. What is going on with all these underwhelming startup acquisitions? What really happening? and who suffers? Has anyone noticed how even companies that offer “cloud” are moving their core service to Microsoft Azure? Azure is now powering AT&Ts 5G network. Microsoft continues to win. IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/30/ibm_email_outage/ Arista Buys SDN Pioneer Big Switch 'For a Song' – Sources https://www.lightreading.com/carrier-sdn/arista-buys-sdn-pioneer-big-switch-for-a-song---sources/d/d-id/757076 HPE to acquire cloud disaster recovery startup Zerto https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/07/01/hpe-acquiring-dr-startup-zerto/ EMC Sues Zerto - Patent Litigation (2016) https://www.zerto.com/blog/company-announcements/emc-v-zerto-update/ AT&T Moves 5G Mobile Network to Microsoft Cloud https://about.att.com/story/2021/att_microsoft_azure.html MSFT acquires Affirmed Networks https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/26/microsoft-acquires-5g-specialist-affirmed-networks/ Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

IBMSPOD
Episode 8 - Microbiology & overseas aid with Zonya Jeffrey and Akinola and Olubukola Adewunmi

IBMSPOD

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2021 40:23


As the profession gets ready to celebrate Biomedical Science Day, June's episode showcases the excellent achievements and inspiring work of three outstanding Biomedical Scientists. Manchester-based Zonya Jeffrey is a senior Biomedical Scientist in Microbiology and a national member of IBMS council. She co-founded the children's charity 'Child Aid Tanzania' to support mothers and babies in communities affected by Malaria and HIV. In a wide-ranging interview, Zonya tells us all about the project in Tanzania and how she set up the charity. We also talk about her work fighting Cholera in Sierra Leone, her objectives on IBMS council, her work with the BBC and more! Meanwhile, award-winning Husband and Wife Biomedical Scientist duo Akinola and Olubukola Adewunmi join Ella on LabLife. They discuss their projects outside of the lab educating the public about Sickle Cell Disease and encouraging blood donations from BAME communities - for which they won a National BAME Health & Care Award. For more visit the pod blog: https://www.ibms.org/resources/news/microbiology-and-overseas-aid-ibmspod-ep8/ Show notes Episode outline: 0:20 – IBMS News 2:06 – Feature Interview with Zonya Jeffrey 2:30 - Part 1: Microbiology in Manchester – including an introduction to Zonya and her work, typical day, most memorable outbreaks, training & education and AMR in the lab. 10:44 – Part 2: Overseas Aid in Tanzania & Sierra Leone - including work alongside Swiss Tropical Institute as Laboratory Technologist, setting-up charity Child Aid Tanzania, discussion of Malaria & HIV situation and possibility for solutions in Tanzania and World Health Organisation Cholera project in Sierra Leone. 22:28 - Part 3: Impact of the pandemic, Council and BBC - including IBMS Council goals, the impact of the pandemic on her lab and Science Exhibitor with the BBC. 28:30 – Quick-fire Round: most important measure to prevent Covid transmission; largest threat to global health aside from Covid-19; the first thing she will do when leaving quarantine hotel. 30:02 – LabLife with Akinola and Olubukola Adewunmi IBMS News: Biomedical Science Day 2021 - Thursday 24th June: https://www.ibms.org/biomedical-science-day/biomedical-science-day-2021/ Dr Sarah Pitt - Biomedical Scientist of the Year: https://www.ibms.org/resources/news/biomedical-scientist-of-the-year-2021-sp/ Science Council CPD Awards return for 2021: https://www.ibms.org/resources/news/cpd-awards-return-for-2021/ Husband & Wife biomedical scientists win National BAME Health & Care Award: https://www.ibms.org/resources/news/husband-and-wife-biomedical-scientists-win-national-bame-health/

AI News po polsku
#2122 Waymo and Cruise / IBMs Enterprise AI / LaMDA / AI Chip from Google / Licensed deepfakes

AI News po polsku

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2021 5:06


Podcast jest dostępny także w formie newslettera: https://ainewsletter.integratedaisolutions.com/ Alphabet Inc https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclusive-waymo-cruise-seek-permits-charge-self-driving-car-rides-san-francisco-2021-05-11/ Dyrektor generalny Arvind Krishna powiedział, że IBM nie tworzy zorientowanych na konsumenta narzędzi AI, takich jak rozpoznawanie twarzy. https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-on-watson-ai-enterprise-future-plans-2021-5 Podczas przemówienia wprowadzającego na Google I / O 2021, corocznej konferencji programistów Google, firma ogłosiła LaMDA, wyrafinowany model językowy, który według Google znacznie lepiej radzi sobie z kontekstem rozmów niż czołowe modele dzisiejszych. https://venturebeat.com/2021/05/18/google-demos-lamda-a-next-generation-ai-for-dialogue/ Google twierdzi, że zaprojektował nowy chip sztucznej inteligencji, który jest ponad dwukrotnie szybszy niż jego poprzednia wersja. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/machine-learning/google-more-doubles-its-ai-chip-performance-tpu-v4 Pomimo rosnącego zaniepokojenia faktem, że technologia deepfake może nas nieodwracalnie wprowadzić w erę postprawdy, niektóre firmy nadal są zdeterminowane, by promować ją jako opłacalny produkt przyjazny dla konsumenta. https://interestingengineering.com/new-deepfake-tech-allows-celebrities-to-license-their-voice Odwiedź www.integratedaisolutions.com

AI News auf Deutsch
#2122 Waymo and Cruise / IBMs Enterprise AI / LaMDA / AI Chip from Google / Licensed deepfakes

AI News auf Deutsch

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2021 5:00


Waymo und der Konkurrent Cruise von Alphabet Inc (togetL.O) haben Genehmigungen beantragt, die erforderlich sind, um Fahrten und Lieferungen mit autonomen Fahrzeugen in San Francisco in Rechnung zu stellen dichte städtische Umgebung. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclusive-waymo-cruise-seek-permits-charge-self-driving-car-rides-san-francisco-2021-05-11/ CEO Arvind Krishna sagte, IBM baue keine verbraucherorientierten KI-Tools wie die Gesichtserkennung. https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-on-watson-ai-enterprise-future-plans-2021-5 Während einer Keynote bei Google I / O 2021, der jährlichen Entwicklerkonferenz von Google, kündigte das Unternehmen LaMDA an, ein ausgeklügeltes Sprachmodell, das laut Google den Kontext von Gesprächen weitaus besser versteht als führende Modelle heute. https://venturebeat.com/2021/05/18/google-demos-lamda-a-next-generation-ai-for-dialogue/ Google hat einen neuen KI-Chip entwickelt, der mehr als doppelt so schnell ist wie seine Vorgängerversion. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/machine-learning/google-more-doubles-its-ai-chip-performance-tpu-v4 Trotz wachsender Besorgnis über die Tatsache, dass Deepfake-Technologie uns irreversibel in das Zeitalter der Post-Wahrheit führen könnte, sind einige Unternehmen immer noch bestrebt, sie als tragfähiges, verbraucherfreundliches Produkt voranzutreiben. https://interestingengineering.com/new-deepfake-tech-allows-celebrities-to-license-their-voice Visit www.integratedaisolutions.com

AI News
#2122 Waymo and Cruise / IBMs Enterprise AI / LaMDA / AI Chip from Google / Licensed deepfakes

AI News

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2021 4:41


Waymo and competitor Cruise of Alphabet Inc (togetL.O) have applied for permits required to bill for autonomous vehicle rides and deliveries in San Francisco's dense urban setting. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclusive-waymo-cruise-seek-permits-charge-self-driving-car-rides-san-francisco-2021-05-11/ CEO Arvind Krishna said IBM is not building consumer-centric AI tools like facial recognition. https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-on-watson-ai-enterprise-future-plans-2021-5 During a keynote at Google I / O 2021, Google's annual developer conference, the company announced LaMDA, a sophisticated language model that, according to Google, understands the context of conversations far better than leading models do today. https://venturebeat.com/2021/05/18/google-demos-lamda-a-next-generation-ai-for-dialogue/ Google has developed a new AI chip that is more than twice as fast as its previous version. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/machine-learning/google-more-doubles-its-ai-chip-performance-tpu-v4 Despite growing concerns about the fact that deepfake technology could irreversibly lead us into the age of post-truth, some companies are still eager to promote it as a viable, consumer-friendly product. https://interestingengineering.com/new-deepfake-tech-allows-celebrities-to-license-their-voice Visit www.integratedaisolutions.com

AI News auf Deutsch
#2121 $95B for research / AI Winter / Tesla / Robotaxi / IBMs dataset

AI News auf Deutsch

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2021 5:45


Die Vorsitzenden des US-Senatsausschusses haben über einen Zeitraum von fünf Jahren einen Kompromiss in Höhe von 110 Milliarden US-Dollar für Grundlagenforschung und fortschrittliche Technologieforschung und -wissenschaft sowie die Schaffung eines Produktionsleiters des Weißen Hauses angesichts des zunehmenden Wettbewerbsdrucks aus China ausgearbeitet. https://venturebeat.com/2021/05/08/u-s-senate-committee-revised-a-draft-bill-to-fund-ai-quantum-biotech/ Das Verteidigungsministerium ist in vollem Gange, was das Potenzial der KI angeht, Amerikas Wettbewerbsvorteil gegenüber potenziellen Gegnern zu sichern. https://warontherocks.com/2021/05/the-department-of-defenses-looming-ai-winter/ Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) teilte einer kalifornischen Aufsichtsbehörde mit, dass bis Ende dieses Jahres möglicherweise keine vollständige Selbstfahrer-Technologie erreicht werden kann, wie ein Memo des kalifornischen Kraftfahrzeugministeriums (DMV) zeigt. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-tells-regulator-that-full-self-driving-cars-may-not-be-achieved-by-year-2021-05-07/ Pony.ais Robotaxi der nächsten Generation zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass ihm der kegelförmige LIDAR-Sensor auf dem Dach zu fehlen scheint, der für die meisten autonomen Fahrzeuge typisch ist. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22424726/pony-ai-luminar-lidar-robotaxi-california-china KI- und maschinelle Lernsysteme sind in den letzten Jahren immer kompetenter geworden und können das geschriebene Wort nicht nur verstehen, sondern auch schreiben. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-codenet-dataset-can-teach-ai-to-translate-computer-languages-020052618.html Visit www.integratedaisolutions.com

AI News
#2121 $95B for research / AI Winter / Tesla / Robotaxi / IBMs dataset

AI News

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2021 5:10


The US Senate Committee Chairs have worked out a $ 110 billion compromise over five years for basic and advanced technology research and science, and the creation of a White House production manager in the face of increasing competitive pressures from China. https://venturebeat.com/2021/05/08/u-s-senate-committee-revised-a-draft-bill-to-fund-ai-quantum-biotech/ The Department of Defense is in full swing on AI's potential to secure America's competitive advantage over potential adversaries. https://warontherocks.com/2021/05/the-department-of-defenses-looming-ai-winter/ Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) announced to a California regulatory agency that full self-driving technology may not be achieved by the end of this year, a memo from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) shows. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-tells-regulator-that-full-self-driving-cars-may-not-be-achieved-by-year-2021-05-07/ The next generation Pony.ais Robotaxi is characterized by the fact that it appears to be missing the cone-shaped LIDAR sensor on the roof, which is typical of most autonomous vehicles. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22424726/pony-ai-luminar-lidar-robotaxi-california-china AI and machine learning systems have become more and more competent in recent years and can not only understand the written word, but also write it. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-codenet-dataset-can-teach-ai-to-translate-computer-languages-020052618.html Visit www.integratedaisolutions.com

Business Casual
IBM Does an About-Face on Facial Recognition Technology

Business Casual

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2020 15:23


On this Business Casual snippet, Tyler Kern, Taylor Bagley and Daniel Litwin discuss an announcement made my IBM on June 8th regarding the tech giant's intention to stop offering facial recognition software for "mass surveillance or racial profiling". In 2019, a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that none of the facial recognition tools from Microsoft, Amazon and IBM were 100% accurate when it came to recognizing men and women with dark skin. Further, a study from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology suggested facial recognition algorithms were far less accurate at identifying African-American and Asian faces compared with Caucasian ones. In a world currently riding the shockwaves of social unrest and protests calling for police reform in the wake of George Floyd's death while being apprehended by officers in Minneapolis, this technological bias in gear provided to policing organizations has definitely been put under the microscope. In support of IBMs move to abandon ‘biased' facial recognition tech, Chief Executive Arvind Krishna, stated, “We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies". As the first major company to back out of a technology largely used by law enforcement, the Business Casual dynamic duo break down Krishna's letter to congress urging action against police malfeasance as well as more regulation on how law enforcement uses facial recognition technology, two different studies of Amazon's facial recognition system by the ACLU which resulted in both Congress members and professional athletes being falsely matched with images of those in a mugshot database, whether IBM's decision was based solely on current racially-charged events or just part of an ongoing massive restructuring within the company, and much more. Bringing thought leadership to your day, MarketScale's Business Casual keeps you current with technology leaps both forward and backward, the hottest topics and the newest trends shaping business and our world today. And for the latest thought leadership, news and event coverage across B2B, be sure to check out our industry pages.

The Funsized Podcast
5. What is The IBMS? With Patrick McKinney

The Funsized Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2020 28:08


The International Bikini Model Search(IBMS) is a model and photographer networking event. I'm joined in this episode by the owner and CEO, Patrick McKinney to give you the total synopsis of the magical events he hosts for models and photographers of all shapes, sizes, and experience levels! If you'd like to learn more about these events and sign up for the next event, visit www.theibms.com or call 1.800.935.3160 or message Patrick via the Facebook Messenger app! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/funsizedpodcast/support

Marketing The Invisible
How to Write Irresistible Emails and Start Conversations – In Just 7 Minutes with Kendra Lee

Marketing The Invisible

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2020 8:47


 Learn how to use email to create compelling awareness- and interest-building email campaigns AND send them on your behalf Find out the benefits that make email marketing a smart solution for communicating with your audience, finding new customers, and nurturing your leads Figure out how to write irresistible emails and start conversations with you 'go-to' leads Resources/Links: Email PowerProspecting Guide: Proven email strategies to get better sales leads and more of them: Discover a multitude of email prospecting strategies you can apply immediately to break through the delete barrier and reach top prospects. https://www.klagroup.com/doemailright/ Summary Despite starting her sales career in accounting, failing IBMs entry-level sales exam and being told she couldn't sell without an engineering background, Kendra Lee entered sales and proved those nay-sayers wrong. She turned her knowledge of numbers into a lead generation approach that propelled her to the top 1% of sales professionals. She founded KLA Group, wrote two books, and is here with us today to guide you in mastering prospecting emails. In this episode, Kendra shares her journey as a prospect attraction authority who uses email to shorten time to revenue. Discover a multitude of email prospecting strategies you can apply immediately to break through the delete barrier and reach top prospects. Check out these episode highlights: 01:23 – Kendra's ideal client: We work with business owners who are actually the principal salespeople within their organizations. Or they have a very small sales team and they're trying to figure out how the heck can they get more customers. 01:55 – Problem she helps solve: usually what their issue really is, is that they've tried all these different activities but they can't seem to get any leads, they can't figure out how to do it consistently. And so, we come in and we help them put together a lead generation strategy, and then implement that strategy to the point where either we'll coach them or we actually will do the lead generation for them. 03:01 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Kendra: It's usually that they're not being consistent in their lead generation approach. And one of the primary approaches still to use is email because you can reach a whole group of people quickly. We absolutely still want to pick up the phone, we still want to do social media and all those other activities. But what they're finding is they're not getting consistent leads, and they're not getting responses to the lead generation activities that they're doing. 04:06 – Common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem: they're not doing anything consistently. They're not just sticking with it; they'll try lots of different strategies. 06:10 – Kendra's Valuable Free Action(VFA): Keep your emails focused on the prospects that you are sending it to. You've got three seconds to get a response, to get their attention. And so you have to be focused on what they care about. 07:37 – Kendra's Valuable Free Resource(VFR): Email PowerProspecting Guide: Proven email strategies to get better sales leads and more of them: Discover a multitude of email prospecting strategies you can apply immediately to break through the delete barrier and reach top prospects. https://www.klagroup.com/doemailright/ 07:40 – Q: 'Why use email when you could do social media or other strategies?' A: Because it's one of the easiest ways to gain direct access to someone and if they reply to you, you can instantly start a conversation and begin building a relatio...

The History of Computing
The Evolution Of The Microchip

The History of Computing

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2019 31:14


The Microchip Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of the microchip, or microprocessor. This was a hard episode, because it was the culmination of so many technologies. You don't know where to stop telling the story - and you find yourself writing a chronological story in reverse chronological order. But few advancements have impacted humanity the way the introduction of the microprocessor has. Given that most technological advances are a convergence of otherwise disparate technologies, we'll start the story of the microchip with the obvious choice: the light bulb. Thomas Edison first demonstrated the carbon filament light bulb in 1879. William Joseph Hammer, an inventor working with Edison, then noted that if he added another electrode to a heated filament bulb that it would glow around the positive pole in the vacuum of the bulb and blacken the wire and the bulb around the negative pole. 25 years later, John Ambrose Fleming demonstrated that if that extra electrode is made more positive than the filament the current flows through the vacuum and that the current could only flow from the filament to the electrode and not the other direction. This converted AC signals to DC and represented a boolean gate. In the 1904 Fleming was granted Great Britain's patent number 24850 for the vacuum tube, ushering in the era of electronics. Over the next few decades, researchers continued to work with these tubes. Eccles and Jordan invented the flip-flop circuit at London's City and Guilds Technical College in 1918, receiving a patent for what they called the Eccles-Jordan Trigger Circuit in 1920. Now, English mathematician George Boole back in the earlier part of the 1800s had developed Boolean algebra. Here he created a system where logical statements could be made in mathematical terms. Those could then be performed using math on the symbols. Only a 0 or a 1 could be used. It took awhile, John Vincent Atanasoff and grad student Clifford Berry harnessed the circuits in the Atanasoff-Berry computer in 1938 at Iowa State University and using Boolean algebra, successfully solved linear equations but never finished the device due to World War II, when a number of other technological advancements happened, including the development of the ENIAC by John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert from the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the US Army Ordinance Corps, starting in 1943. By the time it was taken out of operation, the ENIAC had 20,000 of these tubes. Each digit in an algorithm required 36 tubes. Ten digit numbers could be multiplied at 357 per second, showing the first true use of a computer. John Von Neumann was the first to actually use the ENIAC when they used one million punch cards to run the computations that helped propel the development of the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The creators would leave the University and found the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Out of that later would come the Univac and the ancestor of todays Unisys Corporation. These early computers used vacuum tubes to replace gears that were in previous counting machines and represented the First Generation. But the tubes for the flip-flop circuits were expensive and had to be replaced way too often. The second generation of computers used transistors instead of vacuum tubes for logic circuits. The integrated circuit is basically a wire set into silicon or germanium that can be set to on or off based on the properties of the material. These replaced vacuum tubes in computers to provide the foundation of the boolean logic. You know, the zeros and ones that computers are famous for. As with most modern technologies the integrated circuit owes its origin to a number of different technologies that came before it was able to be useful in computers. This includes the three primary components of the circuit: the transistor, resistor, and capacitor. The silicon that chips are so famous for was actually discovered by Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1824. He heated potassium chips in a silica container and washed away the residue and viola - an element! The transistor is a semiconducting device that has three connections that amplify data. One is the source, which is connected to the negative terminal on a battery. The second is the drain, and is a positive terminal that, when touched to the gate (the third connection), the transistor allows electricity through. Transistors then acts as an on/off switch. The fact they can be on or off is the foundation for Boolean logic in modern computing. The resistor controls the flow of electricity and is used to control the levels and terminate lines. An integrated circuit is also built using silicon but you print the pattern into the circuit using lithography rather than painstakingly putting little wires where they need to go like radio operators did with the Cats Whisker all those years ago. The idea of the transistor goes back to the mid-30s when William Shockley took the idea of a cat's wicker, or fine wire touching a galena crystal. The radio operator moved the wire to different parts of the crystal to pick up different radio signals. Solid state physics was born when Shockley, who first studied at Cal Tech and then got his PhD in Physics, started working on a way to make these useable in every day electronics. After a decade in the trenches, Bell gave him John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who successfully finished the invention in 1947. Shockley went on to design a new and better transistor, known as a bipolar transistor and helped move us from vacuum tubes, which were bulky and needed a lot of power, to first gernanium, which they used initially and then to silicon. Shockley got a Nobel Prize in physics for his work and was able to recruit a team of extremely talented young PhDs to help work on new semiconductor devices. He became increasingly frustrated with Bell and took a leave of absence. Shockley moved back to his hometown of Palo Alto, California and started a new company called the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He had some ideas that were way before his time and wasn't exactly easy to work with. He pushed the chip industry forward but in the process spawned a mass exodus of employees that went to Fairchild in 1957. He called them the “Traitorous 8” to create what would be Fairchild Semiconductors. The alumni of Shockley Labs ended up spawning 65 companies over the next 20 years that laid foundation of the microchip industry to this day, including Intel. . If he were easier to work with, we might not have had the innovation that we've seen if not for Shockley's abbrasiveness! All of these silicon chip makers being in a small area of California then led to that area getting the Silicon Valley moniker, given all the chip makers located there. At this point, people were starting to experiment with computers using transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The University of Manchester created the Transistor Computer in 1953. The first fully transistorized computer came in 1955 with the Harwell CADET, MIT started work on the TX-0 in 1956, and the THOR guidance computer for ICBMs came in 1957. But the IBM 608 was the first commercial all-transistor solid-state computer. The RCA 501, Philco Transac S-1000, and IBM 7070 took us through the age of transistors which continued to get smaller and more compact. At this point, we were really just replacing tubes with transistors. But the integrated circuit would bring us into the third generation of computers. The integrated circuit is an electronic device that has all of the functional blocks put on the same piece of silicon. So the transistor, or multiple transistors, is printed into one block. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments patented the first miniaturized electronic circuit in 1959, which used germanium and external wires and was really more of a hybrid integrated Circuit. Later in 1959, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invented the first truly monolithic integrated circuit, which he received a patent for. While doing so independently, they are considered the creators of the integrated circuit. The third generation of computers was from 1964 to 1971, and saw the introduction of metal-oxide-silicon and printing circuits with photolithography. In 1965 Gordon Moore, also of Fairchild at the time, observed that the number of transistors, resistors, diodes, capacitors, and other components that could be shoved into a chip was doubling about every year and published an article with this observation in Electronics Magazine, forecasting what's now known as Moore's Law. The integrated circuit gave us the DEC PDP and later the IBM S/360 series of computers, making computers smaller, and brought us into a world where we could write code in COBOL and FORTRAN. A microprocessor is one type of integrated circuit. They're also used in audio amplifiers, analog integrated circuits, clocks, interfaces, etc. But in the early 60s, the Minuteman missal program and the US Navy contracts were practically the only ones using these chips, at this point numbering in the hundreds, bringing us into the world of the MSI, or medium-scale integration chip. Moore and Noyce left Fairchild and founded NM Electronics in 1968, later renaming the company to Intel, short for Integrated Electronics. Federico Faggin came over in 1970 to lead the MCS-4 family of chips. These along with other chips that were economical to produce started to result in chips finding their way into various consumer products. In fact, the MCS-4 chips, which split RAM , ROM, CPU, and I/O, were designed for the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation and Intel bought the rights back, announcing the chip in Electronic News with an article called “Announcing A New Era In Integrated Electronics.” Together, they built the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor that fit on a single chip. They buried the contacts in multiple layers and introduced 2-phase clocks. Silicon oxide was used to layer integrated circuits onto a single chip. Here, the microprocessor, or CPU, splits the arithmetic and logic unit, or ALU, the bus, the clock, the control unit, and registers up so each can do what they're good at, but live on the same chip. The 1st generation of the microprocessor was from 1971, when these 4-bit chips were mostly used in guidance systems. This boosted the speed by five times. The forming of Intel and the introduction of the 4004 chip can be seen as one of the primary events that propelled us into the evolution of the microprocessor and the fourth generation of computers, which lasted from 1972 to 2010. The Intel 4004 had 2,300 transistors. The Intel 4040 came in 1974, giving us 3,000 transistors. It was still a 4-bit data bus but jumped to 12-bit ROM. The architecture was also from Faggin but the design was carried out by Tom Innes. We were firmly in the era of LSI, or Large Scale Integration chips. These chips were also used in the Busicom calculator, and even in the first pinball game controlled by a microprocessor. But getting a true computer to fit on a chip, or a modern CPU, remained an elusive goal. Texas Instruments ran an ad in Electronics with a caption that the 8008 was a “CPU on a Chip” and attempted to patent the chip, but couldn't make it work. Faggin went to Intel and they did actually make it work, giving us the first 8-bit microprocessor. It was then redesigned in 1972 as the 8080. A year later, the chip was fabricated and then put on the market in 1972. Intel made the R&D money back in 5 months and sparked the idea for Ed Roberts to build The Altair 8800. Motorola and Zilog brought competition in the 6900 and Z-80, which was used in the Tandy TRS-80, one of the first mass produced computers. N-MOSs transistors on chips allowed for new and faster paths and MOS Technology soon joined the fray with the 6501 and 6502 chips in 1975. The 6502 ended up being the chip used in the Apple I, Apple II, NES, Atari 2600, BBC Micro, Commodore PET and Commodore VIC-20. The MOS 6510 variant was then used in the Commodore 64. The 8086 was released in 1978 with 3,000 transistors and marked the transition to Intel's x86 line of chips, setting what would become the standard in future chips. But the IBM wasn't the only place you could find chips. The Motorola 68000 was used in the Sun-1 from Sun Microsystems, the HP 9000, the DEC VAXstation, the Comodore Amiga, the Apple Lisa, the Sinclair QL, the Sega Genesis, and the Mac. The chips were also used in the first HP LaserJet and the Apple LaserWriter and used in a number of embedded systems for years to come. As we rounded the corner into the 80s it was clear that the computer revolution was upon us. A number of computer companies were looking to do more than what they could do with he existing Intel, MOS, and Motorola chips. And ARPA was pushing the boundaries yet again. Carver Mead of Caltech and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC saw the density of transistors in chips starting to plateau. So with DARPA funding they went out looking for ways to push the world into the VLSI era, or Very Large Scale Integration. The VLSI project resulted in the concept of fabless design houses, such as Broadcom, 32-bit graphics, BSD Unix, and RISC processors, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer Processor. Out of the RISC work done at UC Berkely came a number of new options for chips as well. One of these designers, Acorn Computers evaluated a number of chips and decided to develop their own, using VLSI Technology, a company founded by more Fairchild Semiconductor alumni) to manufacture the chip in their foundry. Sophie Wilson, then Roger, worked on an instruction set for the RISC. Out of this came the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM chip. Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced, well over 10 for every human on the planet. You know that fancy new A13 that Apple announced. It uses a licensed ARM core. Another chip that came out of the RISC family was the SUN Sparc. Sun being short for Stanford University Network, co-founder Andy Bchtolsheim, they were close to the action and released the SPARC in 1986. I still have a SPARC 20 I use for this and that at home. Not that SPARC has gone anywhere. They're just made by Oracle now. The Intel 80386 chip was a 32 bit microprocessor released in 1985. The first chip had 275,000 transistors, taking plenty of pages from the lessons learned in the VLSI projects. Compaq built a machine on it, but really the IBM PC/AT made it an accepted standard, although this was the beginning of the end of IBMs hold on the burgeoning computer industry. And AMD, yet another company founded by Fairchild defectors, created the Am386 in 1991, ending Intel's nearly 5 year monopoly on the PC clone industry and ending an era where AMD was a second source of Intel parts but instead was competing with Intel directly. We can thank AMD's aggressive competition with Intel for helping to keep the CPU industry going along Moore's law! At this point transistors were only 1.5 microns in size. Much, much smaller than a cats whisker. The Intel 80486 came in 1989 and again tracking against Moore's Law we hit the first 1 million transistor chip. Remember how Compaq helped end IBM's hold on the PC market? When the Intel 486 came along they went with AMD. This chip was also important because we got L1 caches, meaning that chips didn't need to send instructions to other parts of the motherboard but could do caching internally. From then on, the L1 and later L2 caches would be listed on all chips. We'd finally broken 100MHz! Motorola released the 68050 in 1990, hitting 1.2 Million transistors, and giving Apple the chip that would define the Quadra and also that L1 cache. The DEC Alpha came along in 1992, also a RISC chip, but really kicking off the 64-bit era. While the most technically advanced chip of the day, it never took off and after DEC was acquired by Compaq and Compaq by HP, the IP for the Alpha was sold to Intel in 2001, with the PC industry having just decided they could have all their money. But back to the 90s, ‘cause life was better back when grunge was new. At this point, hobbyists knew what the CPU was but most normal people didn't. The concept that there was a whole Univac on one of these never occurred to most people. But then came the Pentium. Turns out that giving a chip a name and some marketing dollars not only made Intel a household name but solidified their hold on the chip market for decades to come. While the Intel Inside campaign started in 1991, after the Pentium was released in 1993, the case of most computers would have a sticker that said Intel Inside. Intel really one upped everyone. The first Pentium, the P5 or 586 or 80501 had 3.1 million transistors that were 16.7 micrometers. Computers kept getting smaller and cheaper and faster. Apple answered by moving to the PowerPC chip from IBM, which owed much of its design to the RISC. Exactly 10 years after the famous 1984 Super Bowl Commercial, Apple was using a CPU from IBM. Another advance came in 1996 when IBM developed the Power4 chip and gave the world multi-core processors, or a CPU that had multiple CPU cores inside the CPU. Once parallel processing caught up to being able to have processes that consumed the resources on all those cores, we saw Intel's Pentium D, and AMD's Athlon 64 x2 released in May 2005 bringing multi-core architecture to the consumer. This led to even more parallel processing and an explosion in the number of cores helped us continue on with Moore's Law. There are now custom chips that reach into the thousands of cores today, although most laptops have maybe 4 cores in them. Setting multi-core architectures aside for a moment, back to Y2K when Justin Timberlake was still a part of NSYNC. Then came the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, Pentium III, Xeon, Pentium M, Xeon LV, Pentium 4. On the IBM/Apple side, we got the G3 with 6.3 million transistors, G4 with 10.5 million transistors, and the G5 with 58 million transistors and 1,131 feet of copper interconnects, running at 3GHz in 2002 - so much copper that NSYNC broke up that year. The Pentium 4 that year ran at 2.4 GHz and sported 50 million transistors. This is about 1 transistor per dollar made off Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002. I guess Attack of the Clones was better because it grossed over 300 Million that year. Remember how we broke the million transistor mark in 1989? In 2005, Intel started testing Montecito with certain customers. The Titanium-2 64-bit CPU with 1.72 billion transistors, shattering the billion mark and hitting a billion two years earlier than projected. Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Apple would be moving to the Intel processor that year. NeXTSTEP had been happy as a clam on Intel, SPARC or HP RISC so given the rapid advancements from Intel, this seemed like a safe bet and allowed Apple to tell directors in IT departments “see, we play nice now.” And the innovations kept flowing for the next decade and a half. We packed more transistors in, more cache, cleaner clean rooms, faster bus speeds, with Intel owning the computer CPU market and AMD slowly growing from the ashes of Acorn computer into the power-house that AMD cores are today, when embedded in other chips designs. I'd say not much interesting has happened, but it's ALL interesting, except the numbers just sound stupid they're so big. And we had more advances along the way of course, but it started to feel like we were just miniaturizing more and more, allowing us to do much more advanced computing in general. The fifth generation of computing is all about technologies that we today consider advanced. Artificial Intelligence, Parallel Computing, Very High Level Computer Languages, the migration away from desktops to laptops and even smaller devices like smartphones. ULSI, or Ultra Large Scale Integration chips not only tells us that chip designers really have no creativity outside of chip architecture, but also means millions up to tens of billions of transistors on silicon. At the time of this recording, the AMD Epic Rome is the single chip package with the most transistors, at 32 billion. Silicon is the seventh most abundant element in the universe and the second most in the crust of the planet earth. Given that there's more chips than people by a huge percentage, we're lucky we don't have to worry about running out any time soon! We skipped RAM in this episode. But it kinda' deserves its own, since RAM is still following Moore's Law, while the CPU is kinda' lagging again. Maybe it's time for our friends at DARPA to get the kids from Berkley working at VERYUltra Large Scale chips or VULSIs! Or they could sign on to sponsor this podcast! And now I'm going to go take a VERYUltra Large Scale nap. Gentle listeners I hope you can do that as well. Unless you're driving while listening to this. Don't nap while driving. But do have a lovely day. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you!

Teknisk sett
Han styrer IBM i Norge - Ep. 118

Teknisk sett

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2018 20:46


IBMs norske sjef; Arne Norheim, har levd mye av sitt liv utenlands og sett selskapet og hvordan det har utviklet seg fra mange vinkler. Nå skal han styre skuta, som er veldig forskjellig fra det han en gang begynte da IBM nesten var synonymt med IT på 80-tallet. Men fra midten av 80-tallet da de leverte vanvittige resultater, gikk det utenfor til underskudd syv år etterpå. Da begynte snuoperasjonen som Nordheim har tatt del i. I dag ser han at vi i Norge har levd veldig godt og unngått kriser som har rammet mange andre land. Det gjør at vi ikke har strukturert landet som vi burde, og vi er ikke like sultne i alle sammenhenger.

The Partner Channel Podcast
Sales Trend: Channel Partners Over Direct Sales

The Partner Channel Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2017 27:21


John Sekevitch, President of CyberSolutions.io, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss, conflict between direct and indirect sales, making your partners money, customer experience ownership and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.   Jen: Hi, everybody, welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer. And today I'm joined by John Sekevitch, who is President of CyberSolutions.io. Welcome, John.   John: Thanks, Jen. It's good to be here. Hi, everybody.   Jen: It's great to have you here. And before we dig into sales leadership and channel, tell me a little bit about Cyber Solutions and what that organization is.   John: Well, Cyber Solutions is a channel. Right now there's roughly a thousand companies representing about 5,000 different offerings in the cyber security space. And each one of them wants to have access to cheap information, like the security officers of major banks and financial services, organizations, large retailers, and other high tech companies with intellectual property to protect. And as a result of the challenges that these companies are having in going to market and getting access to their targeted executives, they work with channel partners such as I in terms of bringing their products to market.   So right now, I'm representing a couple of application security companies, a threat and vulnerability management company, risk management company, one involved with threat intelligence sharing, and finally, another associated with risk scoring and security scoring for cyber insurance purposes. I think what's going on is it's very difficult for new companies to get access to the market. So more and more companies are going right to channel partners rather than trying to field a direct organization first, and then expand into the channels. And I'm sure we'll probably get into some of that later.   For the most part right now what I'm doing is helping these companies and representing their offerings to roughly 100 of those types of companies. So I have established strong relationships over the past 20 years, and I can get them into places they wouldn't be able to get into themselves. And I think that's typically why companies are looking for their channel partners.   Jen: Well, this is a real treat for us. Typically on the podcast, I'm interviewing channel executives who represent a vendor and they're talking about their best practices, and their triumphs and challenges in engaging a channel of partners to help them achieve their revenue goals. And so, what's so great is you bring the perspective of the channel partner, which is a really powerful voice that many of our listeners need to hear. So I'm excited. This is going to be great.   John: Yeah, I've also been on both sides. So I've definitely been that head of sales and marketing who was looking to expand my direct team into places where they weren't able to get into, or to just scale to the market opportunity. So I have recruited and worked with channel partners, and not only in this situation of my own company, but prior to that being a channel partner of IBM and being a channel partner of Oracle, which are two of the biggest that work with channel partners and have a lot of the best practices in the space. So I'm happy to share my perspectives from both sides of the table.   Jen: That's exactly what I wanted to dig into next. Looking at your background, you've had these executive leadership positions that you've held over the last 20 years, companies like IBM, like Net SPI. You've worked directly in sales and marketing like you mentioned. So you have a vast amount of business experience, and so I imagine you understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to channel, but also really business in general. Channel is just one aspect of an entire business. I'd love to hear, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen in channel sales and marketing?   John: Well, I think the biggest change I've seen is more and more companies starting with the channel, rather than starting with their own direct sales organization. I think that's just symptomatic of what's happening out in the marketplace, which is, it's very difficult to do direct sales these days without spending a lot of money on marketing. For the most part, in my experience everybody's kind of focused on a handful of executives, and those executives don't answer their phone and they don't respond to emails. They get their insights from their relationships, their trusted relationships.   And so more and more, hiring a sales guy just because they have the ability to sell isn't enough anymore. What you're looking for is potentially getting a channel partner who already has those trusted relationships. In the cyber security space for instance, there's a company called Opto, and Opto has relationships with most of the top banks and financial services, organizations and large retailers. So as a result, everybody wants to get their attention so that their products are being represented. What's interesting is that now the channel partner is in power, because of the fact that they have these relationships, and they can try to exact a pound of flesh out of the product or offering provider.   So what's interesting is you'll see things like big commission payouts for the direct side being in the 5% to 10% range, and on the channel side being in the 20% to 25% range, regardless of whether or not they're selling at this price or not. So I'm seeing starting with the channel rather than the direct, and also the power of the channel to be able to dictate economic terms, which hasn't been the situation in the past.   Jen: Well, working for Allbound, where we believe in the power of selling with partners, I'm definitely biased, but we started our own channel partner program very, very early on. It was one of the first things we did as an organization, and I love my partner leads. I talk frequently about how they're my favorite leads, because like you said, they're coming from a trusted adviser. So when I get a lead from one of my agency partners, that is not just a lead, that is somebody who is coming to us because someone that they trust and work with on a regular basis recommended me to them. So it's the warmest hand-off that you can possibly get in sales. I think that's part of why we're seeing these organizations starting those channel partner programs earlier and earlier on in their business.   John: Right. But there's also a lot of challenges in an effective channel program. For instance, you were just mentioning getting those channel leads. Well, one of the things that has to be managed is the channel conflict between the direct organization and the channel. Who has what responsibilities? What account responsibilities? What happens if the channel's not getting the traction that you were hoping to get out of a particular territory? How do you get a channel partner to support all of the sales reps rather than just one or two sales reps? And so these are all things that obviously you need to have executive leadership over. You always need to have somebody who wakes up in the morning caring about whether those deals are being done by the channel or being direct.   I've always had situations where I ran sales and marketing and had responsibility for the whole number. However, I always had somebody who was responsible for that channel. To think that that person who has responsibility for the total can also be the person who has responsibility for the channel number, is just not going to work because they can always get their number with the big number, rather than working through the channel. So you need to have deal headquarters, if you will, to make sure that everybody knows what's going on. And you've got to have trust in the partners to be able to share access to your salesforce.com or whatever CRM system that you're using, and also to have content that's relevant to the channel and not just for yourself.   So one of the things that companies are struggling with is the fact that they barely have enough content to support their own people, much less what's needed by the channel. At the end of the day, the channel still needs to have content. They might have relationships and that might get them access, but they need to have content to be able to share with their relationships to advance the value propositions that they're trying to represent out there.   Jen: Absolutely. They're your volunteer salespeople. They're out there selling on your behalf. They need to be empowered and enabled. So my next question I was going to ask you was, really, how do you determine if and when a company is ready to build a channel partner program? You mentioned a couple of things, you mentioned having a leader who is responsible for that revenue. You mentioned making sure they figured out some of those internal processes to avoid conflict. You mentioned content. So are those really hard and fast signs and if you don't have those three or four things, then you really can't launch a partner program? Is there anything else? What do you think is really the bare minimum for an organization to really start selling through and with channel partners?   John: Well, I mean, if you start with a channel partner program, then you don't have to worry about channel conflict. You're just going through the partner.   Jen: This is true, yeah.   John: So when you hire a person who has that experience, it'd be a different person than you would if you're going to hire the head of an internal sales organization, if you will. The other thing is what are you going to do about leads? Are you going to develop leads for your channel? A lot of companies are looking for both sides. So I remember working as a channel partner for Oracle, and we were a systems integrator for their e-commerce solution, and for a while, that company lived on business given to them by Oracle. But then came to the point where Oracle was expecting them to be bringing business to them. So there's got to be that give and take, if you will. So I would say that, if you're going to start with just a channel, be prepared to use your marketing and inbound resources, and perhaps even some of the inside sales resources to feed the channel, not just looking for the channel to feed you.   Jen: That's really great advice. I think about that, and I think about some of the mistakes that I've seen organizations make mostly around being under-resourced. So an organization, maybe that's been selling direct and then decides to build out a channel partner program, that group decides, "All right, we're going to hire this one person to really spearhead this and own it", except that person might be an operations type of individual, or a sales type of person...   John: Yeah, typically.   Jen: Right. Or maybe marketing but...   John: They're moving the paperwork, they're not moving the market. And that's a mistake. I'm glad you mentioned it.   Jen: Right.   John: I mean, naturally it is important to have somebody who moves the paper because of the fact that these people need to be paid. And if they're not being paid and if it's not worth their while, they won't put the work into it, and that's bad because sometimes you've given them exclusive territories, and they're not making any money on it, and they decide to walk away from the commitment so then nobody's pursuing these opportunities. So you got to be concerned about whether or not the channel's making money, because if they're not making money you're eventually going to lose them.   Jen: Are there any glaring mistakes that you've seen executives make in the channel? You don't you have to tell us who they are, or what companies they were. Just wondering if in your experience you've seen any like big failures that maybe, our listeners who are either building channel programs or nurturing them can learn from?   John: Well, there might be some people on the line that are familiar with this company, IBM for instance. So IBM pays 20% to 25% commission to their channel partners. The caveat is the fact that they pay 20% to 25% based on a deal that sold at list price. So the thing is that when it isn't sold at list price, and those of you on the podcast probably understand that there's never an IBM product that gets sold at list price. So consequently, these channel partners are making 5% to 10% instead of 20% to 25% because of the market realities that these IBM products need to be sold at a discount in order to be competitively priced.   So consequently, they lose a lot of the channel traction that they could be getting because even though the 20% to 25% seems like it's a reasonable commission to be paid, it's not actually being paid, and the result is the channel's not making any money, and they eventually lose some of that traction. So that's probably the most glaring example, other than just flat out, taking all the cherry accounts as in-house, and leaving the dogs and cats to the channel. That's again, not paying attention to whether or not the channel's making money. So you may be able to get somebody interested in it to begin with, but when the results don't stand up to their expectations, you eventually lose a channel, and I've seen that happen on a number of occasions.   Then the other thing is that you have to be continually diligent about whose account it is. On the one hand, it's the channel's account, but they're buying your product. And so consequently, you have to have a way of being able to stay involved so that they end up being a happy client. Because when they throw you out, you're going to get the black eye, not necessarily the channel partners. So something that needs to be coordinated is how do you maintain some degree of account ownership and ownership of the customer experience when there's a channel partner involved.   Jen: That's a really great point. That's something that we're seeing grow in importance, particularly in this as a service subscription economy that we're in, and where buyers have more choice than ever before to move from one product to one solution to another. Gosh, I mean, making sure that if you're a vendor you have the ability to easily collaborate with your channel partners or vice versa, so that you could ultimately take care of the customer, because that's what's most critical to your business. I think that's really, really great advice.   John: This is becoming a complication nowadays, because as customers move towards annual subscriptions versus perpetual licenses for many of these solutions, we're talking about paying commissions off of smaller numbers, or you're paying commissions off of just the first year rather than years two and three, type of thing. Again, this is all related to asking “Is my channel making money?” You can imagine if you got a $100,000 deal for a one year deal, and you're getting 25% of it, what do you get? You get a $25,000 doesn't go very far, but if you can pay them up front 25% of a $300,000 deal for instance, now you've got a bigger hit.   However, you don't get your money until years two and three. So you just have to figure out how to do that. So maybe instead of offering 25%, you offer 20%, but you pay the full three years upfront, that type of thing. These are all things that, again, focus on is my channel making money? If your channel's making money, you're going to be successful. If your channel's not making money, you won't be successful.   Jen: I couldn't agree more. It's perfect, perfect mic drop. Before I let you go, a lot of listeners of The Allbound Podcast are in their partner program infancy, and they're not the IBMs and the Oracles of the world. They are maybe some smaller mid-market SaaS companies that are really setting out to to build a partner program for the first time. Do you have some tips that you could share with folks like them, maybe the CEOs of those types of organizations? What do you recommend they do to really get started? Maybe it's even things they need to think about.   John: Well, I think what you're kind of describing is somebody who's already got a direct sales organization and now they're looking to expand into a channel, because otherwise, if you started with the channel you'd already have it there, so it's a little bit different. So let's assume that there is a direct sales organization, and now you're going to supplement that with the channel. So the first thing I would do is get somebody and invest in that person who is going to worry about the channel. Who's going to work with your inside teams to feed the channel? Who's going to set up the deal center to be able to manage channel conflict? Which accounts are the channel's? Which accounts are the inside team? Who's going to manage that? Who's going to put together the compensation plan that's going to be attractive to the channel, and still help the product company make money?   And then the other thing from a customer experience, is how are you going to share ownership of your mutual client? What are the expectations that you're going to have for your clients, for your channel's clients, and what are the expectations? How are you going to be participating in it? So I think if you take care of who's feeding the channel, who's compensating the channel, and how, and then also, how are you going to manage your mutual client? I think those are the three things that are most important to have a successful channel on your hands.   Jen: Excellent. Excellent advice. Well, this has been so great getting a chance to talk with you. Gosh, I could probably stay on the line even longer, and just pick your brain, but I won't. But before I really truly let you go, John, at the end of all of our podcasts, I have a little bit of a speed round of more personal questions, just four simple questions that I'd like to ask you. Are you open and ready for it?   John: Sure, sure.   Jen: All right. All right.   John: They're all related to channel, right?   Jen: No. They're actually not all related to channel. They're all related to you. So the first question is what is your favorite city?   John: My favorite city is Los Angeles. I like the ocean, and I like warm weather, and it's got a buzz to it. So I'm a Los Angeles type of guy, as compared to all my compatriots who seem to be Silicon Valley guys. So I'm a Los Angeles guy.   Jen: Southern California, awesome. Second question for you, are you an animal lover?   John: I am an animal lover. We have had cocker spaniels for years, and they live a long time, very painful to see them leave. We just had one that passed in the last few months. And so my wife is now in the process of getting a Saint Charles, I think is the type of cocker that she's expecting to get next, so we'll have one soon.   Jen: Aw! Those are so adorable. Will this be a puppy?   John: Oh, it will be a puppy, yeah. We always start from scratch and go through all that pain. But cockers are a lot of work, I'm telling you. So if you're looking for a puppy or a dog that is not a lot of work, I would not recommend cocker spaniels.   Jen: I don't think I've met a puppy that's not a lot of work. So if anyone out there on the internet knows of puppies that are easy, let me know. Okay, question number three, Mac or PC?   John: Mac for sure.   Jen: And last question...   Jen: What's that?   John: The only way I made much affordable, however, is every time I bought one, I bought a share of Apple stock. And so it's been able to keep up.   Jen: There you go. All right, my last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to?   John: All-expenses paid trip would have to be someplace in the US. I'm a US guy. Where have I not been? I've not been to Charleston, South Carolina. And I think I need to go there. My wife and I have thought about doing that and it's like, it never gets to be the right time to go to Charleston, South Carolina. But if you were going to pay for it, I'd go.   Jen: That's the first time that someone has picked Charleston, South Carolina as their destination of choice. So I need to ask you a fifth question which is, what is so amazing about Charleston, South Carolina that I am missing?   John: I think it's just the architecture. They've kind of kept their hands on the old, while still having all of the modern conveniences.   Jen: All right.   John: And it's warm.   Jen: And it's warm, and it's warm. Well, lovely. Thank you. Thanks so much for sharing your time with me today John, talking about channel, talking about South Carolina. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally and just connect with you, what's the best way for them to do so?   John: Just my corporate email's fine. Its jsekevitch, S-E-K-E, V like Victor I-T-C-H@cybersolutions.io.   Jen: Wonderful. Again, thank you so much for your time. And thank you everybody else for tuning in. And I hope you'll join us next week for an all new episode of The Allbound Podcast.   Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone.   Intro: Effective selling takes an ecosystem. Join host Jen Spencer as she explores how to supercharge your sales and master the art of never selling alone. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast, the fundamentals of accelerating growth with partners.

a16z
a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)

a16z

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2017 29:10


Here's what we know about open source: Developers are the new buyers. Community matters. And there will never be another Red Hat (i.e., a successful “open core” business model … nor do we necessarily think there should be). Yet open source is real, and it's here to stay. So how then do companies build a viable business model on top of open source? And not only make money, but become a huge business, like the IBMs, Microsofts, Oracles, and SAPs of the world? The answer, argues James Watters, has more to do with good software strategy and smart enterprise sales/procurement tactics (including design and a service-like experience) than with open source per se — from riding a huge trend or architectural shift, to being less transactional and more an extension of your customer's team. Watters, who is the SVP of Product at Pivotal (part of VMWare and therefore also Dell-EMC), is a veteran of monetizing open source — from OpenSolaris (at Sun Microsystems) to Springsource (acquired by VMWare) to Pivotal Cloud Foundry — with plenty of failures, and successes, along the way. He shares those lessons learned in this episode of the a16z Podcast with Sonal Chokshi and general partner Martin Casado (who was co-founder and CTO of Nicira, later part of VMWare before joining Andreessen Horowitz). These lessons matter, especially as open source has become more of a requirement — and how large enterprises bet on big new trends.