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How should climbers prepare financially for the significant costs of climbing Everest? Steven Pivnik, an ambitious mountaineer currently on an expedition with Alpenglow Expeditions, is striving to summit Mount Everest, aiming to join the elite "8000 meter club." Having conquered Kilimanjaro and faced the challenges of Denali, Pivnik brings a wealth of experience to his Everest endeavor, underscoring the importance of meticulous preparation and acclimatization, facilitated by tools like hypoxico tents. His perspective on the ascent highlights the dual priorities of safety and summit success, favoring the north side of Everest for its relative safety from avalanches and rockfall. With a focus on returning alive and reaching at least 8,000 meters, Pivnik's journey is a testament to the lessons learned from past expeditions, where physical readiness and the role of failure contribute to eventual success. Key Takeaways Proper acclimatization to high altitudes is crucial for climbers to prevent oxygen deprivation. Hypoxico tents are innovative tools that mimic high-altitude conditions to help climbers build red blood cells. The south route through Nepal to climb Mount Everest is risky due to obstacles like the Kumbu Icefall and Hillary Step. Monitoring pulse ox, fitness levels, and health indicators is crucial for safety and predicting summit success. Planning and timing the summit attempt on Everest involves starting the ascent in the dark to avoid bad weather. Physical preparation, including legwork, core strength, and endurance, is essential for climbing high mountains like Denali. More from Steven Pivnik Steven Pivnik is a tenacious and dynamic entrepreneur, bestselling author, and in-demand keynote speaker whose journey from Eastern European immigrant to successful tech founder and endurance athlete has inspired countless others. As the former CEO and co-founder of Binary Tree, he scaled the IT company to over 200 employees across twelve countries, landing multimillion-dollar licensing deals with IBM and Microsoft before orchestrating a successful acquisition by Quest Software. Under his leadership, Binary Tree was named to the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 lists of fastest-growing companies for seven consecutive years—thanks in part to its thriving culture of low turnover and high client satisfaction. Away from the boardroom, Steven is equally relentless. He has competed in over a dozen full-distance IRONMAN® triathlons—including the prestigious World Championship in Kona—along with ultra-marathons and high-altitude mountaineering adventures, summiting peaks like Kilimanjaro and Aconcagua. His book Built to Finish weaves together lessons from endurance sports and entrepreneurship, revealing how grit, stamina, and vision fuel long-term success. Whether advising founders, motivating audiences, or tackling unfinished business on Denali, Steven brings an unmatched blend of energy, insight, and lived experience to every challenge he takes on. Website: https://stevenpivnik.com/book/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenpivnik/ If you are an experienced CEO looking to grow your company, visit https://www.TheCEOProject.com You can also reach Jim by email: Jim@TheCEOProject.com LinkedIn: @theceoproject Instagram: @the_ceoproject Twitter/X: @the_CEO_Project Facebook: @IncCEOproject
Climb Channel Solutions Ireland, the specialist technology distributor formerly known as DataSolutions, has announced a new partnership with Quest Software, a global leader in systems management, data protection, and security software. Quest is a software solutions provider which is trusted by more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies. With an office in Cork and more than a quarter of a century of pedigree in Ireland, its offering spans platform migrations, cloud deployments, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), security, governance, data intelligence, database management, and solutions to ensure data is AI-ready. Through this partnership, Climb Channel Solutions Ireland will offer Quest's suite of security, data empowerment, and AI solutions to resellers. Quest's ever-expanding portfolio is designed to help organisations manage, format, and cleanse data, enabling the seamless adoption of AI. Climb Channel Solutions Ireland - which was recently recognised as Quest Distributor of the Year - and Quest will also focus on threat detection, backup and disaster recovery solutions and platforms. This includes Quest Security Guardian, an Active Directory (AD) security solution that significantly reduces the attack surface for enterprises and improves identity threat detection and response (ITDR). As one of only two vendors in Ireland providing Active Directory Recovery, Quest is uniquely positioned to help organisations quickly and securely restore critical identity services, reinforcing its leadership in identity resilience. Brian Davis, VP of Sales for the UK & Ireland, Climb Channel Solutions Ireland, said: "Given its 24/7 support services, technical certifications and expanding portfolio, Quest has the ability to transform, secure and drive impact for both resellers and end users. Ireland offers huge potential, and we look forward not only to solidifying our partnership but addressing challenges and powering success for enterprises." To support its partner network in Ireland, Quest will be rolling out several initiatives to help them identify and close new business opportunities. These include technical bootcamps, roundtables and an online training library. Alongside this, Quest also offers financial incentives to partners, such as rebates and referral fees. Olivia Donnell, Global Distribution, Quest Software, added: "With an office in Cork and more than 25 years of experience in Ireland, our partnership with Climb Channel Solutions Ireland will allow us to further strengthen cybersecurity for Irish enterprises. By combining well-established products with new solutions, we can make enterprises ready now for the future - ensuring resilience, reliability, and readiness across data management, Microsoft migrations, and security." See more stories here.
Let's discuss business endurance and its impact on your company. Business endurance refers to the ability to weather storms, adapt to changing environments, and maintain consistent growth. According to a report by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), 76% of small business owners plan to exit their businesses within the next decade. The primary reasons for their departure are: - **Retirement:** 75% of business owners cite retirement as their reason for leaving. - **Burnout:** 22% of business owners feel burned out. - **Stepping back:** 21% of business owners want to reduce their responsibilities as owners. However, only 9% of business owners have a formal succession plan in place. Steven Pivnik is a sought-after keynote speaker, best-selling author, and business advisor, known for his expertise in the Information Technology sector. He grew his last company, Binary Tree, to over 200 employees across twelve countries before successfully selling it to a $4 billion competitor, Quest Software. When he's not delivering keynote speeches or climbing one of the seven summits, Steven advises founders and entrepreneurs looking to navigate similar growth and exit strategies. With a diverse background in business and endurance sports, Steven offers a unique and engaging perspective on overcoming challenges and achieving remarkable success. His journey from Eastern European immigrant to successful entrepreneur and endurance athlete gives him invaluable insights. Steven's combination of practical business advice and inspirational storytelling leaves audiences energized and motivated to pursue excellence in both business and life. For more information: https://stevenpivnik.com/ LinkedIn: @StevenPivnik
DataSolutions has announced that it is officially rebranding to Climb Channel Solutions Ireland as the distributor eyes up expansion in key markets across Europe. Following the acquisition of Dublin-based DataSolutions in October 2023, Climb Channel Solutions is now focusing on its growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The group expects to generate 12% growth in this region during its 2024 financial year (FY 2024). It also anticipates 12-15% global growth in FY 2024, following a successful 2023 which saw it surpass $1.2 billion (approximately €1 billion) in revenues globally. This ongoing expansion will also be driven by mergers and acquisitions (M&A), with Climb Channel Solutions recently acquiringDouglas Stewart Software & Services, LLC ("DSS") in the US. Going forward, it will be focusing on Western Europe and the rest of EMEA as part of its M&A strategy. Climb Channel Solutions Ireland will be pivotal to the company's growth plans due to its success driven by longstanding relationships with high-performing Tier 1 technology vendors in Ireland - including HP Aruba, Check Point and Citrix. Furthermore, it introduced a number of new vendors to the Irish market earlier this year including SolarWinds, Quest Software and SmartBear. Together, these have enhanced the distributor's capabilities across the areas of cyber security, IT management, networking, and compliance. The company has also invested in a new ERP system and cutting-edge technologies, including Artificial Intelligence and data analytics, to streamline its operations and enhance its services for resellers and partners. As part of the rebrand, David Keating was made Country Manager of Ireland for Climb Channel Solutions. Roberta McCrossan also stepped into a new role as EMEA Marketing Director, with Brian Davis now serving as VP of Sales for the UK and Ireland, Kamel Kerbib taking up the role of Country Manager for France, and Patrick Van Arendonk assuming the position of Sales Director for Benelux. More recently, Martin Bichler was appointed Country Manager for the DACH region. David Keating, Country Manager for Climb Channel Solutions Ireland, said: "The merging of DataSolutions and Climb Channel Solutions has been a gradual process over the past year and the official rebrand now marks a new and exciting chapter for the business as we look to continue on our growth trajectory and expand further in Europe. "While there have been some new additions to our service offering, our success as a company has always been driven by our people and our resellers - who have been a great support over the last 30 years. As Climb Channel Solutions Ireland, that will remain the case as our experienced team looks to continue delivering outstanding service, innovating for partners, and driving business success." Dale Foster, CEO of Climb Global Solutions, added: "The integration and rebranding of DataSolutions marks a vital step in our growth journey and we are excited about the future. On that, mergers and acquisitions will remain a key part of our global strategy - enabling us to extend our geographic reach, add to the team, and bring in new vendors. We do have targets in mind, ones that fit into our overall plan and will bring value to the business, as well as our reseller partners. "Of course, we remain dedicated to our mission of creating an uncontested marketplace for emerging tech, along with delivering exceptional service. Our aim is not just to stick with what's proven and profitable today but to invest in and support the solutions that will shape tomorrow. By leveraging the expertise of our people, focusing on strategic partnerships, and engaging end-users, we will further solidify our position as a trusted partner in Ireland and further afield, thus propelling the business forward." See more stories here.
MPF Discussion with Steven PivnikFrom Commodore 64 To Ironman: Building an Empire with Steven Pivnik About StevenSteven Pivnik is a sought-after keynote speaker, best-selling author, business advisor, and serial entrepreneur specializing in the Information Technology market. He grew his last company, Binary Tree, to over 200 employees across twelve countries before a successful exit to a 4-billion-dollar competitor, Quest Software. When he's not on the keynote stage or climbing one of the seven summits, Steven advises other founders and entrepreneurs looking for a similar corporate growth and company sale journey. From Commodore 64 to Ironman: Building an EmpireWho says you need a perfect start to finish big? In this episode of My Perfect Failure, we chat with the incredible Steven Pivnik, a man who's mastered both the boardroom and the Ironman course.From humble beginnings with a Commodore 64, Steven's entrepreneurial spirit was ignited. We dive deep into his journey, from overcoming early business setbacks to building a thriving company that achieved 26 consecutive years of growth. But Steven isn't just a business mastermind; he's also a physical powerhouse. We explore his transition from deskbound entrepreneur to Ironman champion. Discover how he harnessed the mental and physical discipline from endurance sports to supercharge his business success.Steven's wisdom extends far beyond his own experiences. He's the author of "Built to Finish," a roadmap for anyone looking to turn their dreams into reality. We unpack the book's key principles and how they can be applied to both personal and professional goals. Get ready to be inspired as Steven shares his secrets to success, the importance of building a strong team, and the unwavering belief in yourself that's essential for achieving greatness. Key Takeaways:The power of perseverance and resilienceThe connection between physical and mental toughnessBuilding a strong company cultureSetting ambitious goals and achieving themThe importance of continuous learning and growth Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or simply looking for motivation, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Social Links to StevenWork with Steven: https://stevenpivnik.com/ Order: Built To Finish: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Built-Finish-Distance-Business-Life/dp/B0CB9HWSGW/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?crid Please Leave A Review Like this show? Please leave us a review here, even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Paul: Contact DetailsWork with me: paul@myperfectfailure.comMPF Website: https://www.myperfectfailure.com/Subscribe to MPF YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@paulpadmore8275
On the Practical 365 podcast this week, Rich Dean and I tackle a hot topic that's got the tech world buzzing - Microsoft's alleged security misstep that may have paved the way for the SolarWinds hack. We also chat with Julian Stephan from Quest Software, who shares some valuable insights on Active Directory modernization. Want to stay up to date on all things Practical 365? Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin to stay up to date on all things Microsoft!
The World's #1 Personal Development Book Podcast! Join the world's largest non-fiction Book community! https://www.instagram.com/bookthinkers/ Today's episode is sponsored by Ken Rusk, if you're ready to get UNSTUCK check out the links below: https://courses.kenrusk.com/ https://www.kenrusk.com/ ————————————————————————— In today's episode we have the pleasure to interview Steven Pivnik, author of “Built to Finish” Steven is a keynote speaker, best-selling author, business advisor, and serial entrepreneur specializing in the Information Technology market. He grew his last company, Binary Tree, to over 200 employees across twelve countries before a successful exit to a 4-billion-dollar competitor, Quest Software. When he's not speaking or climbing one of the seven summits, Steven advises other founders and entrepreneurs looking for a similar corporate growth and company sale journey In this episode you'll learn how Steven discovered triathlons as a way to improve his health and became hooked on the sport. About the importance of passion and perseverance in achieving goals, lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey, including the value of learning from mistakes and the power of visualization, how anyone can be an elite athlete, and why everyone should dream big and go after their goals. We hope enjoy this incredible conversation with Steven Pivnik! ————————————————————————— To learn more about Steven and buy his book “Built to Finish” follow the links below: Website: https://stevenpivnik.com/ Book: https://a.co/d/axs1fVP Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpivnik/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenpivnik/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevenpivnik/ ————————————————————————— Chapters: 00:00 Introduction and Background 01:00 Discovering Triathlons 02:31 From Couch Potato to Triathlete 05:00 Learning from Mistakes 07:35 Overcoming Setbacks 08:38 The Importance of Passion 09:09 Building a Successful Business 10:29 Lessons from Endurance Sports 17:37 The Power of Visualization 22:45 Achieving the Kona Ironman 25:00 Writing a Book and Inspiring Others 27:27 Helping Entrepreneurs Exit Their Businesses 29:14 The Feeling of Accomplishment 30:22 Ideal Customers and Getting in Touch 31:23 Anyone Can Achieve Big Goals 36:16 Leaving the World with Advice The purpose of this podcast is to connect you, the listener, with new books, new mentors, and new resources that will help you achieve more and live better. Each and every episode will feature one of the world's top authors so that you know each and every time you tune-in, there is something valuable to learn. If you have any recommendations for guests, please DM them to us on Instagram. (www.instagram.com/bookthinkers) If you enjoyed this show, please consider leaving a review. It takes less than 60-seconds of your time, and really makes a difference when I am trying to land new guests. For more BookThinkers content, check out our Instagram or our website. Thank you for your time!
People Work Technology stond in het teken van ICT security, identity en back-up. Presentator Richard Bordes ging in gesprek over onder meer deze drie onderwerpen met Erik de Jong van Thales, Joost Aarsen van Quest Software, Chantal 't Gilde van Qualys én Ronald Kingma en Stefan Lambregts van Access42. People Work Technology wordt elke tweede vrijdag van de maand, van 14:00 tot 16:00 uur, live uitgezonden op New Business Radio en is achteraf terug te luisteren via alle bekende podcastkanalen.
People Work Technology stond in het teken van ICT security, identity en back-up. Presentator Richard Bordes ging in gesprek over onder meer deze drie onderwerpen met Erik de Jong van Thales, Joost Aarsen van Quest Software, Chantal 't Gilde van Qualys én Ronald Kingma en Stefan Lambregts van Access42. People Work Technology wordt elke tweede vrijdag van de maand, van 14:00 tot 16:00 uur, live uitgezonden op New Business Radio en is achteraf terug te luisteren via alle bekende podcastkanalen.
Interview With Steven PivnikBuilt To Finish: How To Go The Distance in Business and in Life#Author #BuiltToFinish #StevenPivnikHi, and welcome to the show!On today's show I have the pleasure of welcoming speaker, author and entrepreneur Steven Pivnik to talk about his book Built To Finish and how to go the distance in business and life to achieve your personal and professional goals. Steven is a serial entrepreneur specializing in the information technology market. He grew his last company, Binary Tree, to over 200 employees across twelve countries before realizing a successful exit with a sale to Quest Software. Steven now advises other founders and entrepreneurs looking for a similar corporate growth and company sale journey.While Steven was CEO of Binary Tree, the company was named to the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies multiple times, including a stretch for seven years in a row. Steven was known not only for negotiating and closing multimillion dollar licensing deals with the likes of IBM and Microsoft, but also for creating a corporate culture with significantly below average employee turnover and above average satisfaction ratings and an executive leadership team that sparked creativity and drove a passion for winning and success across the entire organization.Steven is also an endurance sport enthusiast and enjoys triathlons of all distances as well as ultramarathons and mountaineering. He has competed in over twenty triathlons including the IRONMAN® World Championship in Kona Hawaii, eight New York City Marathons, Ultraman Florida, and numerous ultramarathons including distances of 50k, 50 miles, 100k, and 100 miles.Steven enjoys public speaking about his business and sporting adventures with the hopes of motivating others to follow in his footsteps. When not traveling for work or pleasure Steven and his wife split their time between their homes in Manhattan and New Jersey.In Built to Finish, Steven takes you on two journeys: leading his software and services company, Binary Tree, from inception to successful exit and his quest to compete in the IRONMAN® World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. Steven shares how the insights gained from his adventures in triathlon, mountaineering, and ultramarathons apply to anyone's pursuit of long-term personal and professional success.To learn more about the topics discussed, or to contact Steven directly, click the link below.Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored post.” My Future Business is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
In Season 4 Episode 14 of the Practical 365 podcast, Steve Goodman and Rich Dean discuss the upcoming Experts Conference (TEC) European Roadshow, the retirement of EWS Application Impersonation in Exchange Online, and the release of Exchange On-Premises Cumulative Updates. They also welcome guest Becky Cross, a Technical Product Manager at Quest Software, to discuss the various paths organizations can take when moving from hybrid or traditional Active Directory setups to Entra ID.Want to stay up to date on all things Practical 365? Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin to stay up to date on all things Microsoft!
Tribal Impact's Sarah Goodall will be speaking to Sandy Adam, global sales enablement senior manager at Quest Software, about the challenges of scaling a social selling program in the IT industry and how to overcome these. We'll be covering:The role of change management in social selling training. How to roll out a social selling program across a large enterprise organisation.The struggle of demonstrating ROI and how to overcome this.
On the show this week, Rich and I are joined by a guest who is leading AI at a multinational enterprise- Mike Wilson, Distinguished Engineer & AI Security Evangelist at Quest Software to talk first - what's new and relevant to Microsoft 365 customers in the world of AI, especially after Microsoft Ignite a few weeks ago. Don't worry - we're not chatting about boardroom drama from OpenAI - we delve into how technology advances from Microsoft on the hardware side might benefit you; we discuss how Microsoft 365 Copilot works under the hood and dispel a few myths - and we get the real deal on how to run AI hackathons; how to discover problems in the business that AI can solve and how to evaluate which to put your money & time behind.Want to stay up to date on all things Practical 365? Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin to stay up to date on all things Microsoft!
Dmitry Kagansky, State CTO and Deputy Executive Director for the Georgia Technology Authority, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he became the CTO for his home state and the nuances of working in the public sector. Dmitry describes his focus on security and reliability, and why they are both equally important when working with state government agencies. Corey and Dmitry describe AWS's infamous GovCloud, and Dmitry explains why he's employing a multi-cloud strategy but that it doesn't work for all government agencies. Dmitry also talks about how he's focusing on hiring and training for skills, and the collaborative approach he's taking to working with various state agencies.About DmitryMr. Kagansky joined GTA in 2021 from Amazon Web Services where he worked for over four years helping state agencies across the country in their cloud implementations and migrations.Prior to his time with AWS, he served as Executive Vice President of Development for Star2Star Communications, a cloud-based unified communications company. Previously, Mr. Kagansky was in many technical and leadership roles for different software vending companies. Most notably, he was Federal Chief Technology Officer for Quest Software, spending several years in Europe working with commercial and government customers.Mr. Kagansky holds a BBA in finance from Hofstra University and an MBA in management of information systems and operations management from the University of Georgia.Links Referenced: Twitter: https://twitter.com/dimikagi LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimikagi/ GTA Website: https://gta.ga.gov 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. Technical debt is one of those fun things that everyone gets to deal with, on some level. Today's guest apparently gets to deal with 235 years of technical debt. Dmitry Kagansky is the CTO of the state of Georgia. Dmitry, thank you for joining me.Dmitry: Corey, thank you very much for having me.Corey: So, I want to just begin here because this has caused confusion in my life; I can only imagine how much it's caused for you folks. We're talking Georgia the US state, not Georgia, the sovereign country?Dmitry: Yep. Exactly.Corey: Excellent. It's always good to triple-check those things because otherwise, I feel like the shipping costs are going to skyrocket in one way or the other. So, you have been doing a lot of very interesting things in the course of your career. You're former AWS, for example, you come from commercial life working in industry, and now it's yeah, I'm going to go work in state government. How did this happen?Dmitry: Yeah, I've actually been working with governments for quite a long time, both here and abroad. So, way back when, I've been federal CTO for software companies, I've done other work. And then even with AWS, I was working with state and local governments for about four, four-and-a-half years. But came to Georgia when the opportunity presented itself, really to try and make a difference in my own home state. You mentioned technical debt at the beginning and it's one of the things I'm hoping that helped the state pay down and get rid of some of it.Corey: It's fun because governments obviously are not thought of historically as being the early adopters, bleeding edge when it comes to technical innovation. And from where I sit, for good reason. You don't want code that got written late last night and shoved into production to control things like municipal infrastructure, for example. That stuff matters. Unlike a lot of other walks of life, you don't usually get to choose your government, and, “Oh, I don't like this one so I'm going to go for option B.”I mean you get to do at the ballot box, but that takes significant amounts of time. So, people want above all else—I suspect—their state services from an IT perspective to be stable, first and foremost. Does that align with how you think about these things? I mean, security, obviously, is a factor in that as well, but how do you see, I guess, the primary mandate of what you do?Dmitry: Yeah. I mean, security is obviously up there, but just as important is that reliance on reliability, right? People take time off of work to get driver's licenses, right, they go to different government agencies to get work done in the middle of their workday, and we've got to have systems available to them. We can't have them show up and say, “Yeah, come back in an hour because some system is rebooting.” And that's one of the things that we're trying to fix and trying to have fewer of, right?There's always going to be things that happen, but we're trying to really cut down the impact. One of the biggest things that we're doing is obviously a move to the cloud, but also segmenting out all of our agency applications so that agencies manage them separately. Today, my organization, Georgia Technology Authority—you'll hear me say GTA—we run what we call NADC, the North Atlanta Data Center, a pretty large-scale data center, lots of different agencies, app servers all sitting there running. And then a lot of times, you know, an impact to one could have an impact to many. And so, with the cloud, we get some partitioning and some segmentation where even if there is an outage—a term you'll often hear used that we can cut down on the blast radius, right, that we can limit the impact so that we affect the fewest number of constituents.Corey: So, I have to ask this question, and I understand it's loaded and people are going to have opinions with a capital O on it, but since you work for the state of Georgia, are you using GovCloud over in AWS-land?Dmitry: So… [sigh] we do have some footprint in GovCloud, but I actually spent time, even before coming to GTA, trying to talk agencies out of using it. I think there's a big misconception, right? People say, “I'm government. They called it GovCloud. Surely I need to be there.”But back when I was with AWS, you know, I would point-blank tell people that really I know it's called GovCloud, but it's just a poorly named region. There are some federal requirements that it meets; it was built around the ITAR, which is International Traffic of Arms Regulations, but states aren't in that business, right? They are dealing with HIPAA data, with various criminal justice data, and other things, but all of those things can run just fine on the commercial side. And truthfully, it's cheaper and easier to run on the commercial side. And that's one of the concerns I have is that if the commercial regions meet those requirements, is there a reason to go into GovCloud, just because you get some extra certifications? So, I still spend time trying to talk agencies out of going to GovCloud. Ultimately, the agencies with their apps make the choice of where they go, but we have been pretty good about reducing the footprint in GovCloud unless it's absolutely necessary.Corey: Has this always been the case? Because my distant recollection around all of this has been that originally when GovCloud first came out, it was a lot harder to run a whole bunch of workloads in commercial regions. And it feels like the commercial regions have really stepped up as far as what compliance boxes they check. So, is one of those stories where five or ten years ago, whenever it GovCloud first came out, there were a bunch of reasons to use it that no longer apply?Dmitry: I actually can't go past I'll say, seven or eight years, but certainly within the last eight years, there's not been a reason for state and local governments to use it. At the federal level, that's a different discussion, but for most governments that I worked with and work with now, the commercial regions have been just fine. They've met the compliance requirements, controls, and everything that's in place without having to go to the GovCloud region.Corey: Something I noticed that was strange to me about the whole GovCloud approach when I was at the most recent public sector summit that AWS threw is whenever I was talking to folks from AWS about GovCloud and adopting it and launching new workloads and the rest, unlike in almost any other scenario, they seemed that their first response—almost a knee jerk reflex—was to pass that work off to one of their partners. Now, on the commercial side, AWS will do that when it makes sense, and each one becomes a bit of a judgment call, but it just seemed like every time someone's doing something with GovCloud, “Oh, talk to Company X or Company Y.” And it wasn't just one or two companies; there were a bunch of them. Why is that?Dmitry: I think a lot of that is because of the limitations within GovCloud, right? So, when you look at anything that AWS rolls out, it almost always rolls out into either us-east-1 or us-west-2, right, one of those two regions, and it goes out worldwide. And then it comes out in GovCloud months, sometimes even years later. And in fact, sometimes there are features that never show up in GovCloud. So, there's not parity there, and I think what happens is, it's these partners that know what limitations GovCloud has and what things are missing and GovCloud they still have to work around.Like, I remember when I started with AWS back in 2016, right, there had been a new console, you know, the new skin that everyone's now familiar with. But that old console, if you remember that, that was in GovCloud for years afterwards. I mean, it took them at least two more years to get GovCloud to even look like the current commercial console that you see. So, it's things like that where I think AWS themselves want to keep moving forward and having to do anything with kind of that legacy platform that doesn't have all the bells and whistles is why they say, “Go get a partner [unintelligible 00:08:06] those things that aren't there yet.”Corey: That's it makes a fair bit of sense. What I was always wondering how much of this was tied to technical challenges working within those, and building solutions that don't depend upon things. “Oh, wait, that one's not available in GovCloud,” versus a lack of ability to navigate the acquisition process for a lot of governments natively in the same way that a lot of their customers can.Dmitry: Yeah, I don't think that's the case because even to get a GovCloud account, you have to start off with a commercial account, right? So, you actually have to go through the same purchasing steps and then essentially, click an extra button or two.Corey: Oh, I've done that myself already. I have a shitposting account and a—not kidding—Ministry of Shitposting GovCloud account. But that's also me just kicking the tires on it. As I went through the process, it really felt like everything was built around a bunch of unstated assumption—because of course you've worked within GovCloud before and you know where these things are. And I kept tripping into a variety of different aspects of that. I'm wondering how much of that is just due to the fact that partners are almost always the ones guiding customers through that.Dmitry: Yeah. It is almost always that. There's very few people, even in the AWS world, right, if you look at all the employees they have there, it's small subset that work with that environment, and probably an even smaller subset of those that understand what it's really needed for. So, this is where if there's not good understanding, you're better off handing it off to a partner. But I don't think it is the purchasing side of things. It really is the regulatory things and just having someone else sign off on a piece of paper, above and beyond just AWS themselves.Corey: I am curious, since it seems that people love to talk about multi-cloud in a variety of different ways, but I find there's a reality that, ehh, basically, on a long enough timeline, everyone uses everything, versus the idea of, “Oh, we're going to build everything so we can seamlessly flow from one provider to another.” Are you folks all in on AWS? Are you using a bunch of different cloud providers for different workloads? How are you approaching a cloud strategy?Dmitry: So, when you say ‘you guys,' I'll say—as AWS will always say—“It depends.” So, GTA is multi-cloud. We support AWS, we support OCI, we support Azure, and we are working towards getting Google in as well, GCP. However, on the agency side, I am encouraging agencies to pick a cloud. And part of that is because you do have limited staff, they are all different, right?They'll do similar things, but if it's done in a different way and you don't have people that know those little tips and tricks, kind of how to navigate certain cloud vendors, it just makes things more difficult. So, I always look at it as kind of the car analogy, right? Most people are not multi-car, right? You go you buy a car—Toyota, Ford, whatever it is—and you're committed to that thing for the next 4 or 5, 10 years, however long you own it, right? You may not like where the cupholder is or you need to get used to something, you know, being somewhere else, but you do commit to it.And I think it's the same thing with cloud that, you know, do you have to be in one cloud for the rest of your life? No, but know that you're not going to hop from cloud to cloud. No one really does. No one says, “Every six months, I'm going to go move my application from one cloud to another.” It's a pretty big lift and no one really needs to do that. Just find the one that's most comfortable for you.Corey: I assume that you have certain preferences as far as different cloud providers go. But I've found even in corporate life that, “Well, I like this company better than the other,” is generally not the best basis for making sweeping decisions around this. What frameworks do you give various departments to consider where a given workload should live? Like, how do you advise them to think about this?Dmitry: You know, it's funny, we actually had a call with an agency recently that said, “You know, we don't know cloud. What do you guys think we should do?” And it was for a very small, I don't want to call it workload; it was really for some DNS work that they wanted to do. And really came down to, for that size and scale, right, we're looking at a few dollars, maybe a month, they picked it based on the console, right? They liked one console over another.Not going to get into which cloud they picked, but we wound up them giving them a demo of here's what this looks like in these various cloud providers. And they picked that just because they liked the buttons and the layout of one console over another. Now, having said that, for obviously larger workloads, things that are more important, there is criteria. And in many cases, it's also the vendors. Probably about 60 to 70% of the applications we run are all vendor-provided in some way, and the vendors will often dictate platforms that they'll support over others, right?So, that supportability is important to us. Just like you were saying, no one wants code rolled out overnight and surprise all the constituents one day. We take our vendor relations pretty seriously and we take our cue from them. If we're buying software from someone and they say, “Look, this is better in AWS,” or, “This is better in OCI,” for whatever reasons they have, will go in that direction more often than not.Corey: I made a crack at the beginning of the episode where the state was founded 235 years ago, as of this recording. So, how accurate is that? I have to imagine that back in those days, they didn't really have a whole lot of computers, except probably something from IBM. How much technical debt are you folks actually wrestling with?Dmitry: It's pretty heavy. One of the biggest things we have is, we ourselves, in our data center, still have a mainframe. That mainframe is used for a lot of important work. Most notably, a lot of healthcare benefits are really distributed through that system. So, you're talking about federal partnerships, you're talking about, you know, insurance companies, health care providers, all somehow having—Corey: You're talking about things that absolutely, positively cannot break.Dmitry: Yep, exactly. We can't have outages, we can't have blips, and they've got to be accurate. So, even that sort of migration, right, that's not something that we can do overnight. It's something we've been working on for well over a year, and right now we're targeting probably roughly another year or so to get that fully migrated out. And even there, we're doing what would be considered a traditional lift-and-shift. We're going to mainframe emulation, we're not going cloud-native, we're not going to do a whole bunch of refactoring out of the gate. It's just picking up what's working and running and just moving it to a new venue.Corey: Did they finally build an AWS/400 that you can run that out? I didn't realize they had a mainframe emulation offering these days.Dmitry: They do. There's actually several providers that do it. And there's other agencies in the state that have made this sort of move as well, so we're also not even looking to be innovators in that respect, right? We're not going to be first movers to try that out. We'll have another agency make that move first and now we're doing this with our Department of Human Services.But yeah, a lot of technical debt around that platform. When you look at just the cost of operating these platforms, that mainframe costs the state roughly $15 million a year. We think in the cloud, it's going to wind up costing us somewhere between 3 to 4 million. Even if it's 5 million, that's still considerable savings over what we're paying for today. So, it's worth making that move, but it's still very deliberate, very slow, with a lot of testing along the way. But yeah, you're talking about that workload has been in the state, I want to say, for over 20, 25 years.Corey: So, what's the reason to move it? Because not for nothing, but there's an old—the old saw, “Well, don't fix it if it ain't broke.” Well, what's broke about it?Dmitry: Well, there's a couple of things. First off, the real estate that it takes up as an issue. It is a large machine sitting on a floor of a data center that we've got to consolidate to. We actually have some real estate constraints and we've got to cut down our footprint by next year, contractually, right? We've agreed, we're going to move into a smaller space.The other part is the technical talent. While yes, it's not broke, things are working on it, there are fewer and fewer people that can manage it. What we've found was doing a complete refactor while doing a move anywhere, is really too risky, right? Rewriting everything with a bunch of Lambdas is kind of scary, as well as moving it into another venue. So, there are mainframe emulators out there that will run in the cloud. We've gotten one and we're making this move now. So, we're going to do that lift-and-shift in and then look to refactor it piecemeal.Corey: Specifics are always going to determine, but as a general point, I felt like I am the only voice in the room sometimes advocating in favor of lift-and-shift. Because people say, “Oh, it's terrible for reasons X, Y, and Z.” It's, “Yes, all of your options are terrible and for the common case, this is the one that I have the sneaking suspicion, based upon my lived experience, is going to be the least bad have all of those various options.” Was there a thought given to doing a refactor in flight?Dmitry: So… from the time I got here, no. But I could tell you just having worked with the state even before coming in as CTO, there were constant conversations about a refactor. And the problem is, no one actually has an appetite for it. Everyone talks about it, but then when you say, “Look, there's a risk to doing this,”—right, governments are about minimizing risk—when you say, “Look, there's a risk to rewriting and moving code at the same time and it's going to take years longer,” right, that refactoring every time, I've seen an estimate, it would be as small as three years, as large as seven or eight years, depending on who was doing the estimate. Whereas the lift-and-shift, we're hoping we can get it done in two years, but even if it's two-and-a-half, it's still less than any of the estimates we've seen for a refactor and less risky. So, we're going with that model and we'll tinker and optimize later. But we just need to get out of that mainframe so that we can have more modern technology and more modern support.Corey: It seems like the right approach. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to frame that is quite as insulting as it might have come across. Like, “Did anyone consider other options just out of curi—” of course. Whenever you're making big changes, we're going to throw a dart at a whiteboard. It's not what appears to be Twitter's current product strategy we're talking about here. This is stuff that's very much measure twice, cut once.Dmitry: Yeah. Very much so. And you see that with just about everything we do here. I know, when the state, what now, three years ago, moved their tax system over to AWS, not only did they do two or three trial runs of just the data migration, we actually wound up doing six, right? You're talking about adding two months of testing just to make sure every time we did the data move, it was done correctly and all the data got moved over. I mean, government is very, very much about measure three, four times, cut once.Corey: Which is kind of the way you'd want it. One thing that I found curious whenever I've been talking to folks in the public sector space around things that they care about—and in years past, I periodically tried to, “Oh, should we look at doing some cost consulting for folks in this market?” And by and large, there have been a couple of exceptions, but—generally, in our experience with sovereign governments, more so than municipal or state ones—but saving money is not usually one of the top three things that governments care about when it comes to their AWS's state. Is cost something that's on your radar? And how do you conceptualize around this? And I should also disclose, this is not in any way, shape, or form intended to be a sales pitch.Dmitry: Yeah, no, cost actually, for GTA. Is a concern. But I think it's more around the way we're structured. I have worked with other governments where they say, “Look, we've already gotten an allotment of money. It costs whatever it costs and we're good with it.”With the way my organization is set up, though, we're not appropriated funds, meaning we're not given any tax dollars. We actually have to provide services to the agencies and they pay us for it. And so, my salary and everyone else's here, all the work that we do, is basically paid for by agencies and they do have a choice to leave. They could go find other providers. It doesn't have to be GTA always.So, cost is a consideration. But we're also finding that we can get those cost savings pretty easily with this move to the cloud because of the number of available tools that we now have available. We have—that data center I talked about, right? That data center is obviously locked down, secured, very limited access, you can't walk in, but that also prevents agencies from doing a lot of day-to-day work that now in the cloud, they can do on their own. And so, the savings are coming just from this move of not having to have as much locks away from the agency, but having more locks from the outside world as well, right? There's definitely scaling up in the number of tools that they have available to them to work around their applications that they didn't have before.Corey: It's, on some level, a capability story, I think, when it comes to cloud. But something I have heard from a number of folks is that even more so than in enterprises, budgets tend to be much more fixed things in the context of cloud in government. Often in enterprises, what you'll see is sprawl: someone leaves something running and oops, the bill wound up going up higher than we projected for this given period of time. When we start getting into the realm of government, that stops being a you broke budgeting policy and starts to resemble things that are called crimes. How do you wind up providing governance as a government around cloud usage to avoid, you know, someone going to prison over a Managed NAT Gateway?Dmitry: Yeah. So, we do have some pretty stringent monitoring. I know, even before the show, we talked about fact that we do have a separate security group. So, on that side of it, they are keeping an eye on what are people doing in the cloud. So, even though agencies now have more access to more tooling, they can do more, right, GTA hasn't stepped back from it and so, we're able to centrally manage things.We've put in a lot of controls. In fact, we're using Control Tower. We've got a lot of guardrails put in, even basic things like you can't run things outside of the US, right? We don't want you running things in the India region or anywhere in South America. Like, that's not even allowed, so we're able to block that off.And then we've got some pretty tight financial controls where we're watching the spend on a regular basis, agency by agency. Not enforcing any of it, obviously, agencies know what they're doing and it's their apps, but we do warn them of, “Hey, we're seeing this trend or that trend.” We've been at this now for about a year-and-a-half, and so agencies are starting to see that we provide more oversight and a lot less pressure, but at the same time, there's definitely a lot more collaboration assistance with one another.Corey: It really feels like the entire procurement model is shifted massively. As opposed to going out for a bunch of bids and doing all these other things, it's consumption-based. And that has been—I know for enterprises—a difficult pill for a lot of their procurement teams to wind up wrapping their heads around. I can only imagine what that must be like for things that are enshrined in law.Dmitry: Yeah, there's definitely been a shift, although it's not as big as you would think on that side because you do have cloud but then you also have managed services around cloud, right? So, you look at AWS, OCI, Azure, no one's out there putting a credit card down to open an environment anymore, you know, a tenant or an account. It is done through procurement rules. Like, we don't actually buy AWS directly from AWS; we go through a reseller, right, so there's some controls there as well from the procurement side. So, there's still a lot of oversight.But it is scary to some of our procurement people. Like, AWS Marketplace is a very, very scary place for them, right? The fact that you can go and—you can hire people at Marketplace, you could buy things with a single button-click. So, we've gone out of our way, in my agency, to go through and lock that down to make sure that before anyone clicks one of those purchase buttons, that we at least know about it, they've made the request, and we have to go in and unlock that button for that purchase. So, we've got to put in more controls in some cases. But in other cases, it has made things easier.Corey: As you look across the landscape of effectively, what you're doing is uprooting an awful lot of technical systems that have been in place for decades at this point. And we look at cloud and I'm not saying it's not stable—far from it—but it also feels a little strange to be, effectively, making a similar timespan of commitment—because functionally a lot of us are—when we look at these platforms. Was that something that had already been a pre-existing appetite for when you started the role or is that something that you've found that you've had to socialize in the last couple years?Dmitry: It's a little bit of both. It's been lumpy, agency by agency, I'll say. There are some agencies that are raring to go, they want to make some changes, do a lot of good, so to speak, by upgrading their infrastructure. There are others that will sit and say, “Hey, I've been doing this for 20, 30 years. It's been fine.” That whole, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it,” mindset.So, for them, there's definitely been, you know, a lot more friction to get them going in that direction. But what I'm also finding is the people with their hands on the keyboards, right, the ones that are doing the work, are excited by this. This is something new for them. In addition to actually going to cloud, the other thing we've been doing is providing a lot of different training options. And so, that's something that's perked people up and definitely made them much more excited to come into work.I know, down at the, you know, the operator level, the administrators, the managers, all of those folks, are pretty pleased with the moves we're making. You do get some of the folks in upper management in the agencies that do say, “Look, this is a risk.” We're saying, “Look, it's a risk not to do this.” Right? You've also got to think about staffing and what people are willing to work on. Things like the mainframe, you know, you're not going to be able to hire those people much longer. They're going to be fewer and far between. So, you have to retool. I do tell people that, you know, if you don't like change, IT is probably not the industry to be in, even in government. You probably want to go somewhere else, then.Corey: That is sort of the next topic I want to get into, where companies across the board are finding it challenging to locate and source talent to work in their environments. How has the process of recruiting cloud talent gone for you?Dmitry: It's difficult. Not going to sugarcoat that. It's, it's—Corey: [laugh]. I'm not sure anyone would say otherwise, no matter where you are. You can pay absolutely insane, top-of-market money and still have that exact same response. No one says, “Oh, it's super easy.” Everyone finds it hard. But please continue [laugh].Dmitry: Yeah, but it's also not a problem that we can even afford to throw money at, right? So, that's not something that we'd ever do. But what I have found is that there's actually a lot of people, really, that I'll say are tech adjacent, that are interested in making that move. And so, for us, having a mentoring and training program that bring people in and get them comfortable with it is probably more important than finding the talent exactly as it is, right? If you look at our job descriptions that we put out there, we do want things like cloud certs and certain experience, but we'll drop off things like certain college requirements. Say, “Look, do you really need a college degree if you know what you're doing in the cloud or if you know what you're doing with a database and you can prove that?”So, it's re-evaluating who we're bringing in. And in some cases, can we also train someone, right, bring someone in for a lower rate, but willing to learn and then give them the experience, knowing that they may not be here for 15, 20 years and that's okay. But we've got to retool that model to say, we expect some attrition, but they walk away with some valuable skills and while they're here, they learn those skills, right? So, that's the payoff for them.Corey: I think that there's a lot of folks exploring that where there are people who have the interest and the aptitude that are looking to transition in. So, much of the discussion points around filling the talent pipeline have come from a place of, oh, we're just going to talk to all the schools and make sure that they're teaching people the right way. And well, colleges aren't really aimed at being vocational institutions most of the time. And maybe you want people who can bring an understanding of various aspects of business, of workplace dynamics, et cetera, and even the organization themselves, you can transition them in. I've always been a big fan of helping people lateral from one part of an organization to another. It's nice to see that there's actual formal processes around that for you, folks.Dmitry: Yeah, we're trying to do that and we're also working across agencies, right, where we might pull someone in from another agency that's got that aptitude and willingness, especially if it's someone that already has government experience, right, they know how to work within the system that we have here, it certainly makes things easier. It's less of a learning curve for them on that side. We think, you know, in some cases, the technical skills, we can teach you those, but just operating in this environment is just as important to understand the soft side of it.Corey: No, I hear you. One thing that I've picked up from doing this show and talking to people in the different places that you all tend to come from, has been that everyone's working with really hard problems and there's a whole universe of various constraints that everyone's wrestling with. The biggest lie in our industry across the board that I'm coming to realize is any whiteboard architecture diagram. Full stop. The real world is messy.Nothing is ever quite like it looks like in that sterile environment where you're just designing and throwing things up there. The world is built on constraints and trade-offs. I'm glad to see that you're able to bring people into your organization. I think it gives an awful lot of folks hope when they despair about seeing what some of the job prospects are for folks in the tech industry, depending on what direction they want to go in.Dmitry: Yeah. I mean, I think we've got the same challenge as everyone else does, right? It is messy. The one thing that I think is also interesting is that we also have to have transparency but to some degree—and I'll shift; I know this wasn't meant to kind of go off into the security side of things, but I think one of the things that's most interesting is trying to balance a security mindset with that transparency, right?You have private corporations, other organizations that they do whatever they do, they're not going to talk about it, you don't need to know about it. In our case, I think we've got even more of a challenge because on the one hand, we do want to lock things down, make sure they're secure and we protect not just the data, but how we do things, right, some are mechanisms and methods. But same time, we've got a responsibility to be transparent to our constituents. They've got to be able to see what we're doing, what are we spending money on? And so, to me, that's also one of the biggest challenges we have is how do we make sure we balance that out, that we can provide people and even our vendors, right, a lot of times our vendors [will 00:30:40] say, “How are you doing something? We want to know so that we can help you better in some areas.” And it's really become a real challenge for us.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me about what you're doing. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Dmitry: I guess now it's no longer called Twitter, but really just about anywhere. Twitter, Instagram—I'm not a big Instagram user—LinkedIn, Dmitry Kagansky, there's not a whole lot of us out there; pretty easy to do a search. But also you'll see there's my contact info, I believe, on the GTA website, just gta.ga.gov.Corey: Excellent. We will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:31:20]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.Dmitry: Thank you, Corey. I really appreciate it as well.Corey: Dmitry Kagansky, CTO for the state of Georgia. 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, insulting comment telling me that I've got it all wrong and mainframes will in fact rise again.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.
Valerie Singer, GM of Global Education at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the vast array of cloud computing education programs AWS offers to people of all skill levels and backgrounds. Valerie explains how she manages such a large undertaking, and also sheds light on what AWS is doing to ensure their programs are truly valuable both to learners and to the broader market. Corey and Valerie discuss how generative AI is applicable to education, and Valerie explains how AWS's education programs fit into a K-12 curriculum as well as job seekers looking to up-skill. About ValerieAs General Manager for AWS's Global Education team, Valerie is responsible forleading strategy and initiatives for higher education, K-12, EdTechs, and outcome-based education worldwide. Her Skills to Jobs team enables governments, educationsystems, and collaborating organizations to deliver skills-based pathways to meetthe acute needs of employers around the globe, match skilled job seekers to goodpaying jobs, and advance the adoption of cloud-based technology.In her ten-year tenure at AWS, Valerie has held numerous leadership positions,including driving strategic customer engagement within AWS's Worldwide PublicSector and Industries. Valerie established and led the AWS's public sector globalpartner team, AWS's North American commercial partner team, was the leader forteams managing AWS's largest worldwide partnerships, and incubated AWS'sAerospace & Satellite Business Group. Valerie established AWS's national systemsintegrator program and promoted partner competency development and practiceexpansion to migrate enterprise-class, large-scale workloads to AWS.Valerie currently serves on the board of AFCEA DC where, as the Vice President ofEducation, she oversees a yearly grant of $250,000 in annual STEM scholarships tohigh school students with acute financial need.Prior to joining AWS, Valerie held senior positions at Quest Software, AdobeSystems, Oracle Corporation, BEA Systems, and Cisco Systems. She holds a B.S. inMicrobiology from the University of Maryland and a Master in Public Administrationfrom the George Washington University.Links Referenced: AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ GetIT: https://aws.amazon.com/education/aws-getit/ Spark: https://aws.amazon.com/education/aws-spark/ Future Engineers: https://www.amazonfutureengineer.com/ code.org: https://code.org Academy: https://aws.amazon.com/training/awsacademy/ Educate: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/ Skill Builder: https://skillbuilder.aws/ Labs: https://aws.amazon.com/training/digital/aws-builder-labs/ re/Start: https://aws.amazon.com/training/restart/ AWS training and certification programs: https://www.aws.training/ 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A recurring theme of this show in the, what is it, 500 some-odd episodes since we started doing this many years ago, has been around where does the next generation come from. And ‘next generation' doesn't always mean young folks graduating school or whatnot. It's people transitioning in, it's career changers, it's folks whose existing jobs evolve into embracing the cloud industry a lot more readily than they have in previous years. My guest today arguably knows that better than most. Valerie Singer is the GM of Global Education at AWS. Valerie, thank you for agreeing to suffer my slings and arrows. I appreciate it.Valerie: And thank you for having me, Corey. I'm looking forward to the conversation.Corey: So, let's begin. GM, General Manager is generally a term of art which means you are, to my understanding, the buck-stops-here person for a particular division within AWS. And Global Education sounds like one of those, quite frankly, impossibly large-scoped type of organizations. What do you folks do? Where do you start? Where do you stop?Valerie: So, my organization actually focuses on five key areas, and it really does take a look at the global strategy for Amazon Web Services in higher education, research, our K through 12 community, our community of ed-tech providers, which are software providers that are specifically focused on the education sector, and the last plinth of the Global Education Team is around skills to jobs. And we care about that a lot because as we're talking to education providers about how they can innovate in the cloud, we also want to make sure that they're thinking about the outcomes of their students, and as their students become more digitally skilled, that there is placement for them and opportunities for them with employers so that they can continue to grow in their careers.Corey: Early on, when I was starting out my career, I had an absolutely massive chip on my shoulder when it came to formal education. I was never a great student for many of the same reasons I was never a great employee. And I always found that learning for me took the form of doing something and kicking the tires on it, and I had to care. And doing rote assignments in a ritualized way never really worked out. So, I never fit in in academia. On paper, I still have an eighth-grade education. One of these days, I might get the GED.But I really had problems with degree requirements in jobs. And it's humorous because my first tech job that was a breakthrough was as a network administrator at Chapman University. And that honestly didn't necessarily help improve my opinion of academia for a while, when you're basically the final tier escalation for support desk for a bunch of PhDs who are troubled with some of the things that they're working on because they're very smart in one particular area, but have challenges with broad tech. So, all of which is to say that I've had problems with the way that education historically maps to me personally, and it took a little bit of growth for me to realize that I might not be the common, typical case that represents everyone. So, I've really come around on that. What is the current state of how AWS views educating folks? You talk about working with higher ed; you also talk about K through 12. Where does this, I guess, pipeline start for you folks?Valerie: So, Amazon Web Services offers a host of education programs at the K-12 level where we can start to capture learners and capture their imagination for digital skills and cloud-based learning early on, programs like GetIT and Spark make sure that our learners have a trajectory forward and continue to stay engaged.Amazon Future Engineers also provides experiential learning and data center-based experiences for K through 12 learners, too, so that we can start to gravitate these learners towards skills that they can use later in life and that they'll be able to leverage. That said—and going back to what you said—we want to capture learners where they learn and how they learn. And so, that often happens not in a K through 12 environment and not in a higher education environment. It can happen organically, it can happen through online learning, it can happen through mentoring, and through other types of sponsorship.And so, we want to make sure that our learners have the opportunities to micro-badge, to credential, and to experience learning in the cloud particularly, and also develop digital skills wherever and however they learn, not just in a prescriptive environment like a higher education environment.Corey: During the Great Recession, I found that as a systems administrator—which is what we called ourselves in the style of the time—I was relatively weak when it came to networking. So, I took a class at the local community college where they built the entire curriculum around getting some Cisco certifications by the time that the year ended. And half of that class was awesome. It was effectively networking fundamentals in an approachable, constructive way, and that was great. The other half of the class—at least at the time—felt like it was extraordinarily beholden to, effectively—there's no nice way to say this—Cisco marketing.It envisioned a world where all networking equipment was Cisco-driven, using proprietary Cisco protocols, and it left a bad smell for a number of students in the class. Now, I've talked to an awful lot of folks who have gone through the various AWS educational programs in a variety of different ways and I've yet to hear significant volume of complaint around, “Oh, it's all vendor captured and it just feels like we're being indoctrinated into the cult of AWS.” Which honestly is to your credit. How did you avoid that?Valerie: It's a great question, and how we avoid it is by starting with the skills that are needed for jobs. And so, we actually went back to employers and said, “What are your, you know, biggest and most urgent needs to fill in early-career talent?” And we categorized 12 different job categories, the four that were most predominant were cloud support engineer, software development engineer, cyber analyst, and data analyst. And we took that mapping and developed the skills behind those four different job categories that we know are saleable and that our learners can get employed in, and then made modifications as our employers took a look at what the skills maps needed to be. We then took the skills maps—in one case—into City University of New York and into their computer science department, and mapped those skills back to the curriculum that the computer science teams have been providing to students.And so, what you have is, your half-awesome becomes full-awesome because we're providing them the materials through AWS Academy to be able to proffer the right set of curriculum and right set of training that gets provided to the students, and provides them with the opportunity to then become AWS Certified. But we do it in a way that isn't all marketecture; it's really pragmatic. It's how do I automate a sequence? How do I do things that are really saleable and marketable and really point towards the skills that our employers need? And so, when you have this book-end of employers telling the educational teams what they need in terms of skills, and you have the education teams willing to pull in that curriculum that we provide—that is, by the way, current and it maintains its currency—we have a better throughway for early-career talent to find the jobs that they need, and the guarantee that the employers are getting the skills that they've asked for. And so, you're not getting that half of the beholden that you had in your experience; you're getting a full-on awesome experience for a learner who can then go and excite himself and herself or theirself into a new position and career opportunity.Corey: One thing that caught me a little bit by surprise, and I think this is an industry-wide phenomenon is, whenever folks who are working with educational programs—as you are—talk about, effectively, public education and the grade school system, you refer to it as ‘K through 12.' Well, last year, my eldest daughter started kindergarten and it turns out that when you start asking questions about cloud computing curricula to a kindergarten teacher, they look at you like you are deranged and possibly unsafe. And yeah, it turns out that for almost any reasonable measure, exposing—in my case—a now six-year-old to cloud computing concepts feels like it's close cousins to child abuse. So—Valerie: [laugh].Corey: So far, I'm mostly keeping the kids away from that for now. When does that start? You mentioned middle school a few minutes ago. I'm curious as to—is that the real entry point or are there other ways that you find people starting to engage at earlier and earlier ages?Valerie: We are seeing people engage it earlier and earlier ages with programs like Spark, as I mentioned, which is more of a gamified approach to K through 12 learning around digital skills in the cloud. code.org also has a tremendous body of work that they offer K through 12 learners. That's more modularized and building block-based so that you're not asking a six-year-old to master the art of cloud computing, but you're providing young learners with the foundations to understand how the building blocks of technology sit on top of each other to actually do something meaningful.And so, gears and pulleys and all kinds of different artifacts that learners can play with to understand how the inner workings of a computer program come together, for instance, are really experientially important and foundationally important so that they understand the concepts on which that's built later. So, we can introduce these concepts very early, Corey, and kids really enjoy playing with those models because they can make things happen, right? They can make things turn and they can make things—they can actually, you know, modify behaviors of different programming elements and really have a great experience working in those different programs and environments like code.org and Spark.Corey: There are, of course, always exceptions to this. I remember the, I think, it's the 2019 public sector summit that you folks put on, you had a speaker, Karthick Arun, who at the time was ten years old and have the youngest person to pass the certification test to become a cloud practitioner. I mean, power to him. Obviously, that is the sort of thing that happens when a kid has passion and is excited about a particular direction. I have not inflicted that on my kids.I'm not trying to basically raise whatever the cloud computing sad version is of an Olympian by getting them into whatever it is that I want them to focus on before they have any agency in the matter. But I definitely remember when I was a kid, I was always frustrated by the fact that it felt like there were guardrails keeping me from working with any of these things that I found interesting and wanted to get exposure to. It feels like in many ways the barriers are coming down.Valerie: They are. In that particular example, actually, Andy Jassy interceded because we did have age requirements at that time for taking the exam.Corey: You still do, by the way. It's even to attend summits and whatnot. So, you have to be 18, but at some point, I will be looking into what exceptions have to happen for that because I'm not there to basically sign them up for the bar crawl or have them get exposure to, like, all the marketing stuff, but if they're interested in this, it seems like the sort of thing that should be made more accessible.Valerie: We do bring learners on, you know, into re:Invent and into our summits. We definitely invite our learners in. I mean I think you mentioned, there are a lot of other places our learners are not going to go, like bar crawls, but our learners under the age of 18 can definitely take advantage of the programs that we have on offer. AWS Academy is available to 16 and up.And again, you know, GetIT and Spark and Educate is all available to learners as well. We also have programs like Skill Builder, with an enormous free tier of learning modules that teams can take advantage of as well. And then Labs for subscription and fee-based access. But there's over 500 courses in that free tier currently, and so there's plenty of places for our, you know, early learners to play and to experiment and to learn.Corey: This is a great microcosm of some career advice I recently had caused to revisit, which is, make friends in different parts of the organization you work within and get to know people in other companies who do different things because you can't reason with policy; you can have conversations productively with human beings. And I was basing my entire, “You must be 18 or you're not allowed in, full stop,” based solely on a sign that I saw when I was attending a summit at the entrance: “You must be 18 to enter.” Ah. Clearly, there's no wiggle room here, and no—it's across the board, absolute hard-and-fast rule. Very few things are. This is a perfect example of that. So today, I learned. Thank you.Valerie: Yeah. You're very welcome. We want to make sure that we get the information, we get materials, we get experiences out to as many people as possible. One thing I would also note, and I had the opportunity to spend time in our skill centers, and these are really great places, too, for early learners to get experience and exposure to different models. And so earlier, when we were talking, you held up a DeepRacer car, which is a very, very cool, smaller-scale car that learners can use AI tools to help to drive.And learners can go into the skill centers in Seattle and in the DC area, now in Cape Town and in other places where they're going to be opening, and really have that, like, direct-line experience with AWS technology and see the value of it tangibly, and what happens when you for instance, model to move a car faster or in the right direction or not hitting the side of a wall. So, there's lots of ways that early learners can get exposure in just a few ways and those centers are actually a really great way for learners to just walk in and just have an experience.Corey: Switching gears a little bit, one of my personal favorite hobby horses is to go on Twitter—you know, back when that was more of a thing—and mock companies for saying things that I perceived to be patently ridiculous. I was gentle about it because I think it's a noble cause, but one of the more ridiculous things that I've heard from Amazon was in 2020, you folks announced a plan to help 29 million people around the world grow their tech skills by 2025. And the reason that I thought that was ridiculous is because it sounded like it was such an over-the-top, grandiose vision, I didn't see a way that you could possibly get anywhere even close. But again, I was gentle about this because even if you're half-wrong, it means that you're going to be putting significant energy, resourcing, et cetera, into educating people about how this stuff works to help lowering bar to entry, about lowering gates that get kept. I have to ask, though, now that we are, at the time of this recording, coming up in the second half of 2023, how closely are you tracking to that?Valerie: We're tracking. So, as of October, which is the last time I saw the tracking on this data, we had already provided skills-based learning to 13-and-a-half million learners worldwide and are very much on track to exceed the 2025 goal of 29 million. But I got to tell you, like, there's a couple of things in there that I'm sure you're going to ask as a follow-up, so I'll go ahead and talk about it practically, and that is, what are people doing with the learning? And then how are they using that learning and applying it to get jobs? And so, you know, 29 million is a big number, but what does it mean in terms of what they're doing with that information and what they're doing to apply it?So, we do have on my team an employer engagement team that actually goes out and works with local employers around the world, builds virtual job fairs and on-prem job fairs, sponsors things like DeepRacer League and Cloud Quests and Jam days so that early-career learners can come in and get hands-on and employers can look at what the potential employees are doing so that they can make sure that they have the experience that they actually say they have. And so, since the beginning of this year, we have already now recruited 323 what we call talent shapers, which are the employer community who are actually consuming the talent that we are proffering to them and that we're bringing into these job fairs. We have 35,000 learners who have come through our job fairs since the beginning of the year. And then we also rely—as you know, like, we're very security conscious, so we rely on self-reported data, but we have over 3500 employed early-career talent self-reported job hires. And so, for us, the 29 million is important, but how it then portrays itself into AWS-focused employment—that's not just to AWS; these are by the way those 3500 learners who are employed went to other companies outside of AWS—but we want to make sure that the 29 million actually results in something. It's not just, you know, kind of an academic exercise. And so, that's what we're doing on our site to make sure that employers are actually engaged in this process as well.Corey: I want to bring up a topic that has been top-of-mind in relation to this, where there has been an awful lot of hue and cry about generative AI lately, and to the point where I'm a believer in this. I think it is awesome, I think it is fantastic. And even for me, the hype is getting to be a little over the top. When everyone's talking about it transforming every business and that entire industries seem to be pivoting hard to rebrand themselves with the generative AI brush, it is of some concern. But I'm still excited by the magic inherent to aspects of what this is.It is, on some level—at least the way I see it—a way of solving the cloud education problem that I see, which is that, today if I want to start a company and maybe I just got out of business school, maybe I dropped out of high school, doesn't really matter. If it involves software, as most businesses seem to these days, I would have to do a whole lot of groundwork first. I have to go and take a boot camp class somewhere for six months and learn just enough code to build something horrible enough to get funding so that then I can hire actual professional engineers who will make fun of what I've written behind my back and then tear it all out and replace it. On some level, it really feels like the way to teach people cloud skills is to lower the bar for those cloud skills themselves, to help reduce the you must be at least this smart to ride this amusement park ride style of metering stick.And generative AI seems like it has strong potential for doing some of these things. I've used it that way myself, if we can get past some of the hallucination problems where it's very confident and also wrong—just like, you know, many of the white engineers I've worked with who are of course, men, in the course of my career—it will be even better. But I feel like this is the interface to an awful lot of cloud, if it's done right. How are you folks thinking about generative AI in the context of education, given the that field seems to be changing every day?Valerie: It's an interesting question and I see a lot of forward movement and positive movement in education. I'll give you an example. One company in the Bay Area, Khan Academy is using Khanmigo, which is one of their ChatGPT and generative AI-based products to be able to tutor students in a way that's directive without giving them the answers. And so, you know, when you look at the Bloom's sigma problem, which is if you have an intervention with a student who's kind of on the fence, you can move them one standard deviation to the right by giving them, sort of, community support. You can move them two standard deviations to the right if you give them one-to-one mentoring.And so, the idea is that these interventions through generative AI are actually moving that Bloom's sigma model for students to the right, right? So, you're getting students who might fall through the cracks not falling through the cracks anymore. Groups like Houston Community College are using generative AI to make sure that they are tracking their students in a way that they're going into the classes that they need to go into and they're using the prerequisites so that they can then benefit themselves through the community college system and have the most efficient path towards graduation. There's other models that we're using generative AI for to be able to do better data analysis in educational institutions, not just for outcomes, but also for, you know, funding mechanisms and for ways in which educational institutions [even operationalized 00:21:21]. And so, I think there's a huge power in generative AI that is being used at all levels within education.Now, there's a couple of other things, too, that I think that you touched on, and one is how do we train on generative AI, right? It goes so fast. And how are we doing? So, I'll tell you one thing that I think is super interesting, and that's that generative AI does hold the promise of actually offering us greater diversity, equity, and inclusion of the people who are studying generative AI. And what we're seeing early on is that the distribution in the mix of men and women is far better for studying of generative AI and AI-based learning modules for that particular outcome than we have seen in computer science in the past.And so, that's super encouraging, that we're going to have more people from more diverse backgrounds participating with skills for generative AI. And what that will also mean, of course, is that models will likely be less biased, we'll be able to have better fidelity in generative AI models, and more applicability in different areas when we have more diverse learners with that experience. So, the second piece is, what is AWS doing to make sure that these modules are being integrated into curriculum? And that's something that our training and certification team is launching as we speak, both through our AWS Academy modules, but also through Skill Builder so those can be accessed by people today. So, I'm with you. I think there's more promise than hue and cry and this is going to be a super interesting way that our early-career learners are going to be able to interact with new learning models and new ways of just thinking about how to apply it.Corey: My excitement is almost entirely on the user side of this as opposed to the machine-learning side of it. It feels like an implementation detail from the things that I care about. I asked the magic robot in a box how to do a thing and it tells me, or ideally does it for me. One of the moments in which I felt the dumbest in recent memory has been when I first started down the DeepRacer, “Oh, you just got one. Now, here's how to do it. Step one, open up this console. Good. Nice job. Step two”—and it was, basically get a PhD in machine learning concepts from Berkeley and then come back. Which is a slight exaggeration, but not by much.It feels it is, on some level—it's a daunting field, where there's an awful lot of terms of art being bandied around, there's a lot that needs to be explained in particular ways, and it's very different—at least from my perspective—on virtually any other cloud service offering. And that might very well be a result of my own background. But using the magic thing, like, CodeWhisperer that suggests code that I want to complete is great. Build something like CodeWhisperer, I'm tapping out by the end of that sentence.Valerie: Yeah. I mean, the question in there is, you know, how do we make sure that our learners know how to leverage CodeWhisperer, how to leverage Bedrock, how to leverage SageMaker, and how to leverage Greengrass, right, to build models that I think are going to be really experientially sound but also super innovative? And so, us getting that learning into education early and making sure that learners who are being educated, whether they are currently in jobs and are being re-skilled or they're coming up through traditional or non-traditional educational institutions, have access to all of these services that can help them do innovative things is something that we're really committed to doing. And we've been doing it for a long time. I may think you know that, right?So, Greengrass and SageMaker and all of the AI and ML tools have been around for a long period of time. Bedrock, CodeWhisperer, other services that AWS will continue to launch to support generative AI models, of course, are going to be completely available not just to users, but also for learners who want to re-skill, up-skill, and to skill on generative AI models.Corey: One last area I want to get into is a criticism, or at least an observation I've been making for a while about Kubernetes, but it could easily be extended to cloud in general, which is that, at least today, as things stand—this is starting to change, finally—running Kubernetes in production is challenging and fraught and requires a variety of skills and a fair bit of experience having done this previously. Before the last year or so of weird market behavior, if you had Kubernetes in production experience, you could relatively easily command a couple $100,000 a year in terms of salary. Now, as companies are embracing modern technologies and the rest, I'm wondering how they're approaching the problem of up-leveling their existing staff from two sides. The first is that no matter how much training and how much you wind up giving a lot of those folks, some of them either will not be capable or will not have the desire to learn the new thing. And secondly, once you get those people there, how do you keep them from effectively going down the street with that brand new shiny skill set for, effectively, three times what they were making previously, now that they have those skills that are in wild demand across the board?Because that's simply not sustainable for a huge swath of companies out there for whom they're not technology companies, they just use technology to do the thing that their business does. It feels like everything is becoming very expensive in a personnel perspective if you're not careful. You obviously talk to governments who are famously not known for paying absolute top-of-market figures for basically any sort of talent—for obvious reasons—but also companies for whom the bottom line matters incredibly. How do you square that circle?Valerie: There's a lot in that circle, so I'll talk about a specific, and then I'll talk about what we're also doing to help learners get that experience. So, you talked specifically about Kubernetes, but that could be extracted, as you said, to a lot of other different areas, including cyber, right? So, when we talk about somebody with an expertise in cybersecurity, it's very unlikely that a new learner coming out of university is going to be as appealing to an employer than somebody who has two to three years of experience. And so, how do we close that gap of experience—in either of those two examples—to make sure that learners have an on-ramp to new positions and new career opportunities? So, the first answer I'll give you is with some of our largest systems integrators, one of which is Tata Consulting Services, who is actually using AWS education programs to upskill its employees internally and has upskilled 19,000 of its employees using education programs including AWS Educate, to make sure that their group of consultants has absolutely the latest set of skills.And so, we're seeing that across the board; most of our, if not all of our customers, are looking at training to make sure that they can train not only their internal tech teams and their early-career talent coming in, but they can also train back office to understand what the next generation of technology is going to mean. And so, for instance, one of our largest customers, a telco provider, has asked us to provide modules for their HR teams because without understanding what AI and ML is, what it does, and what how to look for it, they might not be able to then, you know, extract the right sets of talent that they need to bring into the organization. So, we're seeing this training requirement across the business and not just in technical requirements. But you know, bridging that gap with early-career learners, I think is really important too. And so, we are experimenting, especially at places like Miami Dade College and City University of New York with virtual internships so that we can provide early-career learners with experiential learning that then they can bring to employers as proof that they have actually done the thing that they've said that they can demonstrate that they can do.And so, companies like Parker Dewey and Riipen and Forage and virtual internships are offering those experiences online so that our learners have the opportunity to then prove what they say that they can do. So, there's lots of ways that we can go about making sure learners have that broad base of learning and that they can apply it. And I'll tell you one more thing, and that's retention. And we find that when learners approach their employer with an internship or an apprenticeship, that their stickiness with that employer because they understand the culture, they understand the project work, they've been mentored, they've been sponsored, that they're stickiness within those employers it's actually far greater than if they came and went. And so, it's important and incumbent on employers, I think, to build that strong connective tissue with their early-skilled learners—and their upskilled learners—to make sure that the skills don't leave the house, right? And that is all about making sure that the culture aligns with the skills aligns, with the project work, and that it continues to be interesting, whether you're a new learner or you're a re-skilled learner, to stay in-house.Corey: My last question for you—and I understand that this might be fairly loaded—but I can't even come up with a partial list that does it any justice to encapsulate the sheer number of educational programs that you have in flight for a variety of different folks. The details and nuances of these are not something that I store in RAM, so I find that it's very easy to talk about one of these things and wind up bleeding into another. How do you folks keep it all straight? And how should people think about it? Not to say that you are not people. How should people who do not work for AWS? There we go. We are all humans here. Please, go [laugh] ahead.Valerie: It's a good question. So, the way that I break it down—and by the way, you know, AWS is also part of Amazon, so you know, I understand the question. And we have a lot of offerings across Amazon and AWS. AWS education programs specifically, are five. And those five programs, I've mentioned a few today: AWS Academy, AWS Educate, AWS re/Start, GetIT, and Spark are free, no-fee programs that we offer both the community and our education providers to build curriculum to offer digitally, and cloud-based skills curriculum to learners.We have another product that I'm a huge fan of called Skill Builder. And Skill Builder is, as I mentioned before, an online educational platform that anybody can take advantage of the over 500 classes in the free tier. There's learning plans for a lot of different things, and some I think you'd be interested in, like cost optimization and, you know, financial modeling for cloud, and all kinds of other more technically-oriented free courses. And then if learners want to get more experience in a lab environment, or more detailed learning that would lead to, for instance a, you know, certification in solutions architecture, they can use the subscription model, which is very affordable and provides learners an opportunity to work within that platform. So, if I'm breaking it down, it really is, am I being educated and in a way that is more formalized or am I going to go and take these courses when I want them and when I need them, both in the free tier and the subscription tier.So, that's basically the differences between education programs and Skill Builder. But I would say that if people are working with AWS teams, they can also ask teams where is the best place to be able to avail themselves of education curriculum. And we're all passionate about this topic and all of us can point users in the right direction as well.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to go through all the things that you folks are up to these days. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Valerie: So, the first destination, if they want cloud-based learning, is really to take a look at AWS training and certification programs, and so, easily to find on aws.com. I would also point our teams—if they're interested in the tech alliances and how we're formulating the tech alliances—towards a recent announcement between City University of New York, the New York Jobs CEO Council, and the New York Mayor's Office for more details about how we can help teams in the US and outside the US—we also have tech alliances underway in Egypt and Spain and other countries coming on board as well—to really, you know, earmark how government and educational institutions and employers can work together.And then lastly, if employers are listening to this, the one output to all of this is that you pointed out, and that's that our learners need hands-on learning and they need the on-ramp to internships, to apprenticeships, and jobs that really are promotional for, like, career talent. And so, it's incumbent, I think, on all of us to start looking at the next generation of learners, whether they come out of traditional or non-traditional means, and recognize that talent can live in a lot of different places. And we're very happy to help and happy to do that matchup. But I encourage employers to dig deeper there too.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with me about all this. I really appreciate it.Valerie: Thank you, Corey. It's always fun to talk to you.Corey: [laugh]. Valerie Singer, GM of Global Education at AWS. 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 exactly which AWS service I should make my six-year-old learn about as my next step in punishing her.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.
North Korea's APT37 deploys FadeStealer to steal information from its targets. Apple patches vulnerabilities under active exploitation. Access to a US satellite is being hawked in a Russophone cybercrime forum. Russian hacktivist auxiliaries say they've disrupted IFC.org. Unmasking pig-butchering scams. Social engineering as a method of account takeover. Fraudsters seen abusing generative AI. Sergey Medved from Quest Software describes the “Great Cloud Repatriation”. Mark Ryland of AWS speaks with Rick Howard about software defined perimeters. And embedded URLs in malware. For links to all of today's stories check out our CyberWire daily news briefing: https://thecyberwire.com/newsletters/daily-briefing/12/119 Selected reading. RedEyes Group Wiretapping Individuals (APT37) (Ahn Lab) Apple fixes iPhone software flaws used in widespread hacks of Russians (The Washington Post) Apple issues emergency patch to address alleged spyware vulnerability (Cyberscoop) Apple patch fixes zero-day kernel hole reported by Kaspersky – update now! (Sophos) Military Satellite Access Sold on Russian Hacker Forum for $15,000 (HackRead) Well done. Russian hackers shut down the IMF (Dzen.ru) Why Malware Crypting Services Deserve More Scrutiny (KrebsOnSecurity) Unmasking Pig-Butchering Scams And Protecting Your Financial Future (Trend Micro) Classic Account Takeover via the Direct Deposit Change (Avanan) Q2 2023 Digital Trust & Safety Index (Sift) Compromised Domains account for over 50% of Embedded URLs in Malware Phishing Campaigns (Cofense)
Live on-location from Infosecurity Europe 2023, Sean Martin connects with Chris Thorpe from Quest Software to discuss operational and AD resilience and how organizations can manage permissions to prevent cybersecurity threats.The conversation covers how AD is a vital system and a single point of failure for the organization and therefore is a prime target for bad actors. Given the continued rise in cybersecurity threats, organizations should assume that accounts have already been compromised and should aim to work towards blocking access at choke points before their tier zero assets can be reached.Sean and Chris also discuss the importance of audit trails to track changes and to find the origin of a compromise, emphasizing that AD, as a specialist product, requires a specialist solution.Note: This story contains promotional content. Learn more: https://www.itspmagazine.com/their-storyGuest: Chris Thorpe, UK&I Technical Channel Manager at Quest Software [@Quest]On Linkedin | https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-thorpe-52488b25/ResourcesLearn more about Quest: https://itspm.ag/quest-adp23Recommended Podcast | Cyber Resilience with Defense in Depth: Maximizing Security in Hybrid Active Directory Environments | A Their Story Conversation from RSA Conference 2023 | A Quest Story with Sergey Medved and Matthew Vinton: https://itsprad.io/redefining-cybersecurity-168Be sure to tune in to all of our Infosecurity Europe 2023 conference coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/infosecurity-europe-2023-infosec-london-cybersecurity-event-coverageCatch the full Infosecurity Europe 2023 YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllTOeLEfCLJlToZIoJtNJB6BAre you interested in telling your story?https://www.itspmagazine.com/telling-your-story____________________________If you are a cybersecurity vendor with a story to share, you can book your pre-event video podcast briefing here (https://itspm.ag/iseu23tsv) and your on-location audio podcast briefing here (https://itspm.ag/iseu23tsp).Explore the full conference coverage sponsorship bundle here: https://itspm.ag/iseu23bndlFor more ITSPmagazine advertising and sponsorship opportunities:
Live on-location from Infosecurity Europe 2023, Sean Martin connects with Chris Thorpe from Quest Software to discuss operational and AD resilience and how organizations can manage permissions to prevent cybersecurity threats.The conversation covers how AD is a vital system and a single point of failure for the organization and therefore is a prime target for bad actors. Given the continued rise in cybersecurity threats, organizations should assume that accounts have already been compromised and should aim to work towards blocking access at choke points before their tier zero assets can be reached.Sean and Chris also discuss the importance of audit trails to track changes and to find the origin of a compromise, emphasizing that AD, as a specialist product, requires a specialist solution.Note: This story contains promotional content. Learn more: https://www.itspmagazine.com/their-storyGuest: Chris Thorpe, UK&I Technical Channel Manager at Quest Software [@Quest]On Linkedin | https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-thorpe-52488b25/ResourcesLearn more about Quest: https://itspm.ag/quest-adp23Recommended Podcast | Cyber Resilience with Defense in Depth: Maximizing Security in Hybrid Active Directory Environments | A Their Story Conversation from RSA Conference 2023 | A Quest Story with Sergey Medved and Matthew Vinton: https://itsprad.io/redefining-cybersecurity-168Be sure to tune in to all of our Infosecurity Europe 2023 conference coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/infosecurity-europe-2023-infosec-london-cybersecurity-event-coverageCatch the full Infosecurity Europe 2023 YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllTOeLEfCLJlToZIoJtNJB6BAre you interested in telling your story?https://www.itspmagazine.com/telling-your-story____________________________If you are a cybersecurity vendor with a story to share, you can book your pre-event video podcast briefing here (https://itspm.ag/iseu23tsv) and your on-location audio podcast briefing here (https://itspm.ag/iseu23tsp).Explore the full conference coverage sponsorship bundle here: https://itspm.ag/iseu23bndlFor more ITSPmagazine advertising and sponsorship opportunities:
In this episode, Dan connects with Wall Street Journal bestselling author Steven Mark Kahan to discuss his latest book, High-Velocity Digital Marketing. An all-around digital marketing legend, during his career as CMO of several Silicon Valley startups, Steve helped engineer seven successful exits that generated an astounding $5 billion in shareholder value. He and Dan talk about how he managed to make it all happen - and it turns out, it's all about having the right plan. Of course, the right plan is very, very thorough. Luckily, Steve (and his book) deliver exactly that. Over the course of their discussion, Dan and Steve take a deep dive into the elements of marketing, the importance of content, and just how critical it is to identify your audience correctly and speak to them in a way that resonates. Listen in and... Discover powerful digital marketing techniques to skyrocket your online presence. Uncover the significance of grasping buyer personas for targeted campaigns. Explore the crucial role of consistent content creation in engaging customers. Learn the importance of data-driven marketing and evaluating success. Gain insights on choosing the best partners and agencies to boost your marketing efforts. Notable Quotes: “I found that the traditional path from school to climbing the corporate ladder at least for me, could not only be high-risk for my career, it could almost feel like a death trap.” – (2:59) - Steve “I asked myself a really important question and that question was, how can I earn a great living doing what I love?” – (4:14) – Steve “I've learned how to spot a startup that has a good chance for success versus one that doesn't.” – (6:47) – Steve ”I'm never concerned when I see that there's big competition in the market. I'm always concerned when I see that there's next to no competition in the market.” – (9:26) – Steve “You want to go to work everyday with a passion for the products the company creates as well as your role in creating it.” – (9:56) – Steve “I wouldn't want to take a job if I didn't align with the values of the company.” – (11:33) – Dan “You don't often lose business to a competitor as much as you lose it to the status quo.” – (25:33) - Steve “Never assume that the benefits a customer expresses, equates to impact.” – (31:28) – Steve “So many organizations don't train their sales or their partners on every single piece of content that they have.” - (42:54) – Steve “You need to turn your website into a lead magnet.” – (54:40) – Steve “If you get that content right and that is a big chunk of the battle.” – (1:11:00) – Steve Key Moments: 00:00:00 - Introduction, 00:05:05 - Choosing a Startup, 00:12:33 - Importance of Stock Options, 00:17:23 - Digital Marketing Strategies, 00:28:50 - Importance of Agility, 00:15:57 - Lessons from a Failed Startup, 00:18:05 - Evaluating Startup Concepts, 00:22:30 - Understanding the Customer, 00:25:43 - Building Strong Value Propositions, 00:29:24 - Understanding Benefits vs. Impacts, 00:33:22 - Cybersecurity and Content Creation, 00:35:55 - Sincerity and Content Value, 00:45:03 - Content Stories and Sales Velocity, 00:48:12 - Managing Multifunctional Disarray, 00:51:37 - Importance of Metrics, 00:52:09 - The Martech Stack and Metrics, 00:54:08 - Practical Tips for Improving Lead Conversion Rates, 00:57:53 - The Importance of SEO and Google, 01:04:24 - Agency Selection and Scoring, 01:08:38 - Building Great Content, 01:10:56 - The Importance of Getting Content Right, 01:11:29 - The Future of Marketing, 01:14:16 - Recommendation for High-Velocity Digital Marketing, About Steve Kahan Bestselling author Steven Mark Kahan has a formidable track record, successfully navigating seven startups to acquisition or IPO, amassing a total value exceeding $5 billion. A powerhouse in the world of startups, Steve is revered for his innovative digital marketing strategies that resulted in rapid revenue growth, market expansion, and robust returns for shareholders. In his most recent stint as CMO and Chief of Staff at Thycotic (now Delinea), he propelled the company to a remarkable $1.4B exit. His impact extends to other ventures like KnowledgeWare, PentaSafe, Postini, Quest Software, and The Planet. A past board member of Target Hunger, Steve channels his passion into philanthropic pursuits. Steven Mark Kahan on LinkedIn Steve Kahan on Instagram Steve Kahan on Facebook Learn all about High-Velocity Digital Marketing - Be a Startup Superstar High-Velocity Digital Marketing: Silicon Valley Secrets to Create Breakthrough Revenue in Record Time on Amazon.com Dan Nestle Links The Dan Nestle Show (libsyn.com) Daniel Nestle | LinkedIn The Dan Nestle Show | Facebook Dan Nestle (@dsnestle) / Twitter Timestamped summary of this episode (Generated by Capsho - and presented here unedited) 00:00:00 - Introduction, Dan Nestle welcomes Steve Kahan, former CMO of cybersecurity firm, Thycotic and author of "High Velocity Digital Marketing" to discuss his journey in the startup world and important factors to consider before choosing a startup. 00:05:05 - Choosing a Startup, Kahan shares four important attributes to look for when choosing a startup: quality people who share your values, a concept that fills a big market need, a great product you can get behind, and the startup being well-funded. 00:12:33 - Importance of Stock Options, Kahan explains how stock options can be a game-changer for those looking to separate themselves financially. Working for a successful startup and seeing the value of those stock options grow can lead to significant financial gain. 00:17:23 - Digital Marketing Strategies, Kahan discusses the importance of digital marketing strategies in building a successful startup, noting that they can be a cost-effective way to reach a large target audience. He breaks down some key strategies outlined in his book, "High Velocity Digital Marketing." 00:28:50 - Importance of Agility, Kahan emphasizes the importance of agility in the startup world, noting that companies need to be able to pivot quickly and adapt to changing circumstances. He cites examples from his own experience helping startups navigate unexpected challenges. 00:15:57 - Lessons from a Failed Startup, Steve shares his experience working for a startup in Japan that lacked differentiation in the market and eventually failed. He discusses the importance of identifying a unique product and positioning it effectively to stand out from competitors. 00:18:05 - Evaluating Startup Concepts, Steve and Dan discuss evaluating startup concepts and identifying a must-solve problem for a specific audience. Steve shares his experience at Psychotic, where understanding the customer and crafting value propositions based on their needs led to significant growth and success. 00:22:30 - Understanding the Customer, Steve emphasizes the importance of understanding the full context of the ideal target buyer's world and paying attention to their specific language. He shares his process of asking questions to customers and crafting value propositions that address the benefits and impacts that buyers want to make on their company. 00:25:43 - Building Strong Value Propositions, Steve discusses the mistake many organizations make in building value propositions that align well with what they do, rather than what the seller cares about. He emphasizes the importance of crafting value propositions based on a full understanding of customers that address their specific needs and challenges. 00:29:24 - Understanding Benefits vs. Impacts, Steve differentiates between benefits and impacts, with impacts being closer to the meaning that customers want to achieve in their lives. He emphasizes the importance of addressing both benefits and impacts in crafting value propositions that resonate with customers. 00:33:22 - Cybersecurity and Content Creation, Steve Kahan discusses how weak or stolen privileged passwords are responsible for 80% of cyberattacks, and how his company created content stories to educate and provide value to their customers. He emphasizes the importance of tailoring content to the buyer's journey and creating incredible content that engages the buyer at every stage of the funnel. 00:35:55 - Sincerity and Content Value, Kahan explains how being sincere and providing real value in content creation is crucial for engaging potential buyers. He shares examples of his company's free tools and risk assessments, which offered real value to the target market and helped to accelerate revenue growth at reasonable costs. 00:45:03 - Content Stories and Sales Velocity, Kahan emphasizes the importance of content stories that tie together and support all stages of the funnel to maintain sales velocity. He highlights the need for ongoing partnerships and collaboration between functions to prevent breakdowns in the buyer's journey. Kahan stresses the importance of metrics and numbers to manage and optimize the sales and marketing process. 00:48:12 - Managing Multifunctional Disarray, Kahan emphasizes the importance of managing metrics and numbers to identify and resolve breakdowns in the buyer's journey. He encourages organizations to instrument their sales and marketing processes in detail and manage them rigorously to maintain sales velocity. Kahan stresses the need for ongoing collaboration between functions to prevent breakdowns and optimize the buyer's journey. 00:51:37 - Importance of Metrics, The importance of metrics and data analytics is discussed, with Steve Kahan emphasizing the need for ongoing refinement of data to improve marketing strategies. 00:52:09 - The Martech Stack and Metrics, The Martech section of the book is discussed, with Steve Kahan providing a blueprint for building a successful marketing stack. He emphasizes the importance of measuring KPIs and setting revenue goals. 00:54:08 - Practical Tips for Improving Lead Conversion Rates, Steve Kahan provides practical tips for improving lead conversion rates, including adding a "get a quote" button, minimizing friction in forms, using calls to action in every blog post, and catering to mobile users. 00:57:53 - The Importance of SEO and Google, Steve Kahan emphasizes the importance of SEO and Google for businesses today, noting that companies should focus on both great content and SEO optimization to increase their visibility in search results. 01:04:24 - Agency Selection and Scoring, Steve Kahan provides a scoring system for selecting digital agencies, emphasizing the need to choose partners who are all about the numbers and can provide expert analysis. He notes that selecting the right agency is crucial to a company's success. 01:08:38 - Building Great Content, Steve shares his approach to building great content by having meetings twice a year with cross-functional teams to generate ideas. He prioritizes the best ideas and relies on his team's expertise to create high-quality content that resonates with the target audience. 01:10:56 - The Importance of Getting Content Right, Steve emphasizes the importance of getting content right and making sure it resonates with the right buyer. He suggests that many companies struggle with the fundamentals of marketing, and focusing on these basics can make a significant difference. 01:11:29 - The Future of Marketing, Dan asks Steve about the trends that marketers should be aware of. Steve responds that the focus should be on mastering the fundamentals of marketing rather than looking for a silver bullet. He also mentions that he is currently writing a murder mystery with James Patterson's co-authors. 01:14:16 - Recommendation for High Velocity Digital Marketing, Dan highly recommends Steve's book, "High Velocity Digital Marketing," which offers practical advice on understanding the target audience, creating compelling content, measuring results, and improving marketing efforts. He also notes that David Meerman Scott wrote the book's foreword. 01:16:55 - Wrapping Up, Dan thanks Steve for sharing his insights and experiences on the show. Steve expresses his pleasure in being a guest and shares his website and LinkedIn profile as the best places to find him.
Carlos Rodríguez asume el cargo de Director de Canales para Latino America con la finalidad de desarrollar y mantener los partners de Quest Software en esta región a su vez incrementar la propuesta de valor para la empresa con el desarrollo de nuevas ofertas de negocios.
Abby interviews Harish Munagala, Director of Marketing Operations & Analytics at Quest Software. Harish tells Abby about his passion for systems and analytics, explaining how those work toward business enhancement. Also, he describes what it means to be a Marketing Director for Operations and Analytics.
Welcome to Season 3, Episode 1 of Don't Break the Bank. In this episode, we speak with Joe Baguley, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, EMEA, at VMware. In his own words, Joe is the connection between R&D and the field, our customers, and our partners. He drives all things around that, in terms of where we're going, what we're doing, what's next, and leading the technical community within VMware in EMEA.Joe shares his insights on what the customers he meets with are telling him, the future of IT, and the role of VMware transformation in the cloud era. He discusses the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation, the importance of security and compliance, and how organizations can leverage technology to stay ahead of the competition. He digs into the use of the cloud and its future adoption and whether it has gone too far. He also talks about how sustainability is becoming an economic requirement, as well as the rise and expanded use of automation in business. 3 Takeaways:Digital transformation is not just about technology, but also about people and processes. Companies need to develop a clear strategy, invest in the right skills, and build a culture of innovation to succeed in this rapidly evolving landscape.Security and compliance are critical components of digital transformation. Organizations must integrate these requirements into their plans from the outset to avoid costly and damaging security breaches in the future.The role of the CTO is evolving from a purely technical role to a more strategic one. As technology becomes more central to business strategy, the CTO is becoming a more strategic partner to the CEO and other business leaders. This requires a different skillset and mindset than traditional IT, including a deep understanding of business strategy and the ability to communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders.Key Quotes: "We're moving from a world where infrastructure was defined by hardware to a world where infrastructure is defined by software. The rise of cloud computing and software-defined infrastructure has enabled us to abstract the underlying hardware and treat it as a pool of resources that can be dynamically allocated to meet the needs of applications and workloads. This has made IT more agile, flexible, and scalable, and has enabled organizations to move faster and innovate more rapidly than ever before.""We need to think about security as an enabler of innovation, not a barrier to it. In today's world, security is not just a technical issue, it's a business issue. Customers and partners are increasingly asking about security and privacy as part of their due diligence process, and they want to work with companies that can demonstrate a strong security posture. By building security into our products and processes from the start, we can differentiate ourselves in the market and create new opportunities for growth.""One of the biggest challenges facing IT leaders today is how to balance the need for innovation with the need for operational excellence. It's not enough to just have a great idea, you also need to be able to execute on it reliably and at scale. This requires a different set of skills and processes than traditional IT, and it requires a culture that values both innovation and operational excellence. By balancing these two priorities, we can create sustainable value for our organizations and our customers."Best Career Advice:Focus on building relationships and collaborating with others. Success is not just about what you know, but who you know and how well you can work with them. This is especially important in the technology industry, where innovation often happens at the intersection of different disciplines and perspectives. You need to be able to communicate effectively, build trust, and work together to achieve common goals.Bio:Joe BaguleyCompany: Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, EMEA, VMwareJoe Baguley is VMware's Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for EMEA, joining VMware in July 2011. He helps develop and communicate VMware's strategy and vision with customers and partners, using his wealth of experience to help organisations reduce costs and better support users and business needs. As part of VMware's Office of the CTO and its representative in EMEA, Joe assists VMware's customers in understanding how to use today's advances in technology to deliver real business impact as well as working with them to inform VMware's R&D processes.Joe is a recognised leader within the European technical community and considered one of the top 50 most influential leaders in UK IT. He won an award for data leadership in ‘Infrastructure & Protection' in the 2016 Data 50 Awards and appeared in the Computer Weekly UKtech50, the Information Age Top 50 Data Leaders and the Cloud World Series' Cloud 100 community board. He has played a key role in CloudCamp and other events, communicating how cloud technology fits into the broader IT landscape. Joe previously spent ten years at Quest Software where he was CTO of EMEA, shaping its direction and strategy.In addition, Joe is also on several advisory boards at the European Commission and ETSI and is a founding committee member of the Data Centre Specialist Group at the British Computer Society which helped shape the European Code of Conduct for Data Centres.Joe is based in the UK but his remit is across Europe, Middle East and Africa.For more information:Follow Joe on Twitter - @JoeBaguleyand on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joebaguleyJoe's most recent blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/be/2023/02/2023-top-it-observations-by-joe-baguley-cto-emea-vmware/------------About the HostsMatthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.
Steve Kahan is a marketing strategist, TEDx speaker, start-up guru, and author of Be a Start-Up Superstar and High-Velocity Digital Marketing. He has used his unique marketing skills to help grow 7 start-ups from the early stages of development to going public or being sold, resulting in a total value of over $5 billion. We caught up with Steve to talk about his book High-Velocity Digital Marketing. In our conversation, Steve explains: Insights into how companies can increase their revenue in brutally competitive markets online by building relevant content and writing with SEO in mind. How buyers today rely nearly 100% on digital marketing and a brand's digital presence for decision-making and so the content must be developed to capture the imagination of the buyer at all stages of the experience. How his passion about economic development coming from the startup community has led him to work with the American University of Kiev to mentor entrepreneurs intent on rebuilding Ukraine. Steve currently provides marketing advisory services to startup businesses including several Insight Partners portfolio companies. In his previous position as Thycotic's CMO and Chief of Staff, he has helped guide the company through incredible growth and a successful exit at $1.4B. It's been a similar story with the other companies where he's brought his talents over the past three decades, including KnowledgeWare, PentaSafe, Postini, Quest Software, and The Planet. A previous board member of Target Hunger in Houston, Steve is passionate about making the world a better place by helping those who need it most. Be sure to check out Steven's links listed below. Enjoy the show! Connect with Steven: Website: www.stevenmarkkahan.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevekahan/ TEDx Talk: https://youtu.be/n0FRyqF7e0w Connect with Allison: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonsummerschicago/ Website: DisruptiveCEONation.com Twitter: @DisruptiveCEO #CEO #startup #startupstory #founder #founderstory #business #tech #AI #businesspodcast #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
who is also Quest, Exec MBA, Alex & Ragnar Show, Viva Explorer, Blogger, Podcaster. He said about he as Microsoft MVP and said about his work experiences and answered some of my questions. Follow me on- www.SmartCherrysThoughts.com www.SmartCherrysTech.com, www.SaiCharanPaloju.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Dan Cooperstock was the founder of Cooperstock Software / Software4NonProfits.com, which writes and sells Windows programs for tracking donors and contributions, and bookkeeping. He previously held senior roles in software and programming companies, including as a Senior Software Developer for Quest Software, a Senior Technical Consultant for HEPCOE Credit Union, and a Senior Systems Developer for CIBC Wood Gundy Securities. Dan is an active member, having held various leadership and positions, for both local national bodies of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Dan received his bachelor's in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Toronto, his master's degree in mathematics from the University of Oxford, and his master's in computer science from the University of Toronto. In this episode… You've spent years building your business, so when it comes time to sell it, how can you ensure it will be in the right hands? What steps can you take to build a transferable company geared toward growth? Dan Cooperstock recommends you focus on what you care about, and your passion will be your guide to building an enduring enterprise. Many buyers are searching to purchase a business that is easily transferable with secure transactions. Dan programmed an open-source software that was transferable upon his exit, but he wanted to be sure his work would be in the right hands. For a smooth transition, building a questionnaire and engaging in conference calls is one way to guarantee stability in the exiting process. So, what other steps can you take for a seamless exit? In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Dan Cooperstock, founder and former owner of Software4NonProfits.com, to discuss designing open-source software and streamlining the exit process. Dan details why buyer conference calls are an important part of selling your business, discusses overseeing due diligence, and how partnering with your buyer cultivates a better experience for your clients.
Today, Laura and Gabi talk to Co-founder and CTO at Resurface Labs, Rob Dickinson. Rob lives and breathes APIs and how we can learn from user actions. Years at Intel, Dell, and Quest Software frame his passion for customer input, and to architect and build a scalable solution to solve for security, faster troubleshooting, and observability using real API data from real users. Rob is a versatile speaker and able to make complex technical topics accessible and compelling to audiences across the board and at all levels. He has unparalleled insights as a Founder and CTO of a growing API observability firm, and is also an expert on databases, Open Source software, development tools, DevOps, DevSecOps and anything involving bits and bytes.
Bate papo com Pablo Lage - Country Manager Brasil da Quest Software, falamos sobre o mercado de Tecnologia da Informação, a importância de se investir ainda mais em segurança e buscar soluções simples que ajude não somente a análise dos dados, mas também com o melhoramento nos processos e governança dos ambientes. Papo Cloud 089 - Desafios das empresas em cibersegurança e cloud computing com Rogério Soares - QUEST Softwarehttps://papo.cloud/089 Papo Cloud 110 - O mercado de Tecnologia no Brasil com Vladimir Brandão - Quest Softwarehttps://papo.cloud/110 Acompanhe a minissérie Conversas Abertas em parceria com a Red Hatpapo.cloud/qt-series/conversas-abertas Entre no grupo Papo Cloud Makers Roteiro do episódio em:papo.cloud/160 --------------------------------------------Instagram / Twitter: @papocloudE-mail: contato@papo.cloud--------------------------------------------Ficha técnicaDireção e Produção: Vinicius PerrottEdição: Senhor A - editorsenhor-a.com.brSupport the show: https://www.picpay.com/convite?@L7R7XH
Bate papo com Alessandro Regente, BU Director da Quest Software, falamos sobre a importância de desenvolver e implementar uma Governança de Identidade que evite roubo de informações corporativa e como a solução One Identity da Quest contribui para uma estratégia avançada de Identidades. Entre no grupo Papo Cloud Makers Roteiro do episódio em:papo.cloud/155 --------------------------------------------Instagram / Twitter: @papocloudE-mail: contato@papo.cloud--------------------------------------------Ficha técnicaDireção e Produção: Vinicius PerrottEdição: Senhor A - editorsenhor-a.com.brSupport the show: https://www.picpay.com/convite?@L7R7XH
Jason Braun has 20+ years of sales leadership experience in the technology and information security industries. Prior to joining Defy, Jason was the VP of Global Sales at CyCognito, CRO of Protectwise (now Verizon), VP of Strategic Accounts at Optiv and held leadership roles at leading technology companies including F5, VCE and Quest Software. His belief in establishing long-term, trusted relationships with clients, business partners and manufacturers has been a core value to his successful career. “Try not to become a man of success. Rather a man of value.” – Albert Einstein Jason highlights the following: Sales is a team sport Let self motivation drive you Support, digital marketing, and branding are factors to be successful Digital transformation drives complex security innovations Transcendence in business value Evolve with time Educate yourself about the customer's fundamental needs Rule of 5—ask 5 questions before making a statement Figure out customer's true pain There is no perfect recipe to be a top performer Live within your means Challenge yourself to be better Maximize your time Jason can be reached at jason@zanpower.us Phone number - (949) 278-2628 LInkedIn - linkedin.com/in/▶-jason-braun-7034991 Download our free eBook on “Passively Investing in Real Estate” by going to www.hightechfreedom.com Subscribe to our newsletter for sales and real estate investing tips by going to www.hightechfreedom.com Host Contact Information - Chris Freeman LinkedIn - http://linkedin.com/in/chrisfreeman Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/chris.freeman.9461
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gqhTfu1Ui_I Save 20% on your first order at the DATAVERSITY Training Center with promo code “AlgminDL” – https://training.dataversity.net/?utm_source=algmindl_res Connect with Anthony J. Algmin on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyjalgmin Data Leadership Lessons Home – https://DataLeadershipLessons.com About Our Guest: Co-founder and CTO at Resurface Labs, Rob Dickinson lives and breathes APIs and how we can learn from user actions. Years at Intel, Dell, and Quest Software frame his passion for customer input, and to architect and build a scalable solution to solve for security, faster troubleshooting, and observability using real API data from real users. Rob is a versatile speaker and able to make complex technical topics accessible and compelling to audiences across the board and at all levels. He has unparalleled insights as a Founder and CTO of a growing API observability firm, and is also an expert on databases, Open Source software, development tools, DevOps, DevSecOps and anything involving bits and bytes. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robfromboulder Home: http://resurface.io/
In der dritten und finalen Folge dieses Themenschwerpunktes diskutieren wir, wieso Backup & Recovery bei Rechenzentren nicht ausreichen um eine hohe Verfügbarkeit zu gewährleisten. Oliver Reitermeier von Quest Software erklärt uns, wie hier die Softwarelösung "SharePlex" ins Spiel kommt und welche Vorteile eine Synchronisierung in Echtzeit bietet. Außerdem werfen wir einen Blick in die Kristallkugel und fragen uns, was sich in Zukunft im Bereich "Datacenter Protection" noch so tun wird!
Warum Distanz immer wichtiger für die Ausfallsicherheit von Datenbanken wird und wieso Architektur und Technologie dabei eine große Rolle spielen, erfahren wir in der zweiten Folge des Themenschwerpunktes „Datacenter Protection“ von Oliver Reitermeier (Quest Software). Außerdem besprechen wir, welche Herausforderungen Redundanz und Latenz dabei mit sich bringen.
Guest Paul Robichaux of Quest Software joins Dave to talk about how government agencies can better protect citizen data, Ben has a story about the European Union considering a mandate for common chargers for all phones, and Dave's got the story an Uber driver in the UK getting locked out of his account because of facial recognition software. While this show covers legal topics, and Ben is a lawyer, the views expressed do not constitute legal advice. For official legal advice on any of the topics we cover, please contact your attorney. Links to stories: In a setback for Apple, the European Union seeks a common charger for all phones. Ex-Uber driver takes legal action over ‘racist' face-recognition software Got a question you'd like us to answer on our show? You can send your audio file to caveat@thecyberwire.com or simply leave us a message at (410) 618-3720. Hope to hear from you.
Entrevista com Vladimir Brandão Country Manager na Quest Software, falamos sobre o mercado de tecnologia no Brasil, as necessidades das empresas em conseguir adotar soluções em nuvem, além dos fatores segurança que hoje são determinantes para o sucesso de qualquer negócio. Entre no grupo Papo Cloud Makers no Telegram Roteiro do episódio em: papo.cloud/110 -------------------------------------------- Instagram / Twitter: @papocloud E-mail: contato@papo.cloud -------------------------------------------- Ficha técnica Produção: Vinicius Perrott Edição: Senhor A - editorsenhor-a.com.br Support the show: https://www.picpay.com/convite?@L7R7XH See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Herzlich Willkommen zu Folge 78 von Alternative Realitäten - dem deutschsprachigen Podcast rund um VR&AR! Heute reden wir über Red Dead Redemption 2 VR und andere aktuelle Themen. Heute als Gast mit dabei: Marco von New VR Tech Line up: Nici, Sebastian, Mo & Marco Sponsor heute: Deutsche Telekom Nreal Light bei der Telekom: https://www.telekom.de/unterwegs/zubehoer-und-mehr/nreal/nreal-light-mixed-reality-brille Viel Spass beim Zuhören! Ihr wollt die Folge SEHEN? Kein Problem: https://youtu.be/5XYfTOObJFY Gamingladynici: www.youtube.com/channel/UCRvAr1b2bDb28PQoygyCgiw Mo Fun VR: www.youtube.com/channel/UCY-OJelLZXssnD3nu828LoQ VR Legion: www.youtube.com/channel/UCcuQPzolcCYFqyWjgDXgtKw MRTV: www.youtube.com/channel/UCiJu5YJd6z3EhWs_iT-6Sfw Jegliches Artwork der 77. Folge ist nur provisorisch und wird in Zukunft höchstwahrscheinlich noch verbessert. :)
Welcome to the 8th epiosde of the brand new Next Dimension Podcast! Every Saturday we will be talking about the most exciting topics in VR & AR! Today we will talk about the Apple VR headset rumors, v25 of the Quest Software and what Oculus App Lab means for Sidequest and lots of other exciting news! Today's Line-Up: Tetiana, Anthony, Sebastian Tetiana's channel (Disco VR): www.youtube.com/channel/UCKoDvV9qSSlhj_EKWTk5CIw Anthony's channel (VR 365): www.youtube.com/channel/UCkiYEz5x14idit_PzBYhJ6A / www.vrgamerankings.com/ Steve's channel (VR Flightsim Guy): www.youtube.com/user/force3d Gary's website: www.garywalkden.com/ Get in touch: contact@nextdimensionpodcast.com You want to WATCH this episode? No problem: https://youtu.be/DXmR0Lq014c
Entrevista com Rogério Soares Diretor de Pré-vendas e serviços na QUEST Software, compartilha sua visão de mundo sobre os desafios e oportunidades em prover soluções de segurança da informação para empresas do Brasil e América Latina. Entre no grupo Papo Cloud Makers no Telegram Assine Papo Cloud Premium e tenha muito mais conteúdo. papo.cloud/assine Transcrição completa do programa papo.cloud/089 -------------------------------------------- Instagram / Twitter: @papocloud E-mail: contato@papo.cloud -------------------------------------------- Ficha técnica Produção: Vinicius Perrott Edição: Senhor A - editorsenhor-a.com.br Support the show: https://www.picpay.com/convite?@L7R7XH See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Vorhang auf für Interview Nummer 24 meiner Serie #NewWorkChat. Zu Gast ist dieses Mal der Digital Workplace-Spezialist Ragnar Heil, den ich 2017 auf dem Collaboration Summit in Hamburg kennengelernt hatte – und seit dem begeistert folge. Ragnar ist Channel Account Manager EMEA Central bei der Quest Software und kümmert sich mit Herzblut um das Thema Office 365. Bei Microsoft hat er zuvor 10 Jahre als Partner Manager gearbeitet. Nebenbei hat der dreifache Vater auch noch die Working out Loud-Community in Deutschland mitbegründet, eigene Blogs und Podcasts produziert sich von Nordhessen aus einen Namen als Social Collaboration Experte gemacht. Viel Spaß mit dem Interview.
Viele Unternehmen halten Daten und Datenbanken heute in der Cloud vor. Um eine Hochverfügbarkeit zu gewährleisten, wird die Datenbank dupliziert und redundant an verschiedenen Standorten zur Verfügung gestellt. Im neuen Themenschwerpunkt 'Datenbanken in der Cloud' und in der ersten Episode widmen wir uns den Fragen, warum Hochverfügbarkeit für Unternehmen lebenswichtig ist, wie und warum wir die verteilten Daten synchron halten und wie wichtig die Nachvollziehbarkeit der Änderungen von Daten werden kann. Die kommenden drei Episoden ist Oliver Reitemeier von Quest Software zu Gast im Interview.
In our third partner episode, we talk with Colin Truran (Principal strategist at Quest Software) and his customer Chris Reynolds (Head of Systems and Applications Development Services at Arden and GEM Commissioning Support Unit in the UK). We discuss moving, managing and securing data in Office 365, and how Quest provides solutions to their customers, spending less time on IT and more time on business innovation, allowing Arden & Gem to focus on population health management within the broader National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom. Social and Info Links: SharePoint Facebook | @SharePoint | SharePoint Community Blog | UserVoice OneDrive Facebook | @OneDrive | OneDrive Community Blog | UserVoice Mark Kashman |@mkashman Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 Colin Truran | LinkedIn Quest | Site | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube Chris Reynolds | LinkedIn Arden & GEM CSU | Site | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube Quest Case Study with Arden GEM CSU - "NHS Arden & GEM Commissioning Support Unit migrates seamlessly and securely with Quest Metalogix solutions" "How one NHS support unit is automating migration to Office 365" To learn more about Quest Metalogix software solutions for SharePoint and Office 365, visit https://www.quest.com/metalogix/. Download a Quest Metalogix E-book that presents seven key lessons learned from customers during their content migrations. Resources: Microsoft 365 Content Services Partner Program Microsoft Partner Network Project Cortex aka.ms/projectcortex - Join the preview and learn more about our vision and experiences in the Project Cortex Resource Center. Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals. Stay on top of Office 365 changes Upcoming Events: SharePoint Saturdays | @SPS_Events Microsoft Ignite | The Tour (various cities worldwide) | @MS_Ignite Microsoft events — the year ahead: 2020 The Experts Conference (TEC) 2020 - November 17-18, 2020, Atlanta, sponsored by Quest Subscribe to The Intrazone: Listen to other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts Show Page: https://aka.ms/TheIntrazone Apple Podcasts Google Play Spotify Stitcher TuneIn Overcast Pandora RadioPublic iHeart RSS
MONEY FM 89.3 - Prime Time with Howie Lim, Bernard Lim & Finance Presenter JP Ong
In Career 360, Bernard Lim speaks to Vivien Li, Director, Human Resources at Quest Software to find out how to tackle the issue of gender bias in the workplace.
Ravi Chopra has built his career inside finance functions designed to serve growth-minded management. Such was the case in the late ’90s when Chopra joined Cisco Systems, which at the time was experiencing 50% growth annually. Jump forward 10 years, and you’ll find him busy leading the FP&A function for growth-driven Juniper Networks. Asked to reflect back on a 25-year finance career, Chopra doesn’t hesitate to cite his former employer. “I learned most of everything that I know today at Juniper,” says Chopra, who quickly names Robyn Denholm, Juniper’s former CFO and current Tesla chairman, as a present and former mentor. Still, when the door to the CFO office swung open for Chopra, the accomplished finance executive no doubt found his operations knowledge being put to the test. In 2017, Chopra would exit Juniper Networks and take on the CFO role at SonicWall, a company that had neither a finance nor an HR organization after it split off from Dell, Inc., in late 2016. Dell had acquired SonicWall in 2012 but divested the business along with Quest Software as part of the larger Dell EMC integration. Despite some missing parts, SonicWall arguably split off with something far more valuable intact: its brand name. Prior to being acquired by Dell, the cyber protection company had long since established itself as a leader in the small and midsize business space. “It was just an amazing challenge, and I think that we have now come out on the other side of it rather well,” explains Chopra, who believes that the speed with which SonicWall built its new infrastructure and achieved operational efficiencies allowed the firm to more quickly determine where to allocate capital. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more
This episode I speak with Andre Piazza who has a long history of working as a product marketer in the tech industry for companies such as Dell and Quest Software. He currently serves as co-organizer of ProductTank Austin as well as the co-founder and host of a Portuguese-language podcast focused on the journey of entrepreneurs building new companies. In our conversation we discuss: Why modern buyers aren't giving your sales reps their attention Product marketing's role in the effort to align Sales and Marketing How product marketing can help sales reps deliver personalized content and messaging to different customer personas throughout the buying experience Additional Resources: ProductTank Austin meetup Octanage podcast (in Portuguese) Engage with Andre on LinkedIn and Twitter Music/Production: Chris "KID" Robinson, Hitmakuzz Productions Subscribe to the podcast: Apple Podcast | Stitcher | RSS | Spotify
Chief Executive Officer, KCOMM – www.kcomm.com Chairman and Founder, the Internet Marketing Association (IMA) – www.imanetwork.org Founder, International Executive Council (IEC) – www.iecnetwork.org Founder, Chapman50 – www.chapman50.org Founding Board Member, Pretend City Children’s Museum – www.pretendcity.org Member of the Board of Governors, Chapman University – www.chapman.edu YMCA National Outreach Chairman, Youth, and Government – www.calymca.org Member of the Board of Directors, Seneca Youth Foster Care – www.senecafoa.org Member of the Board of Directors, Literacy Project – www.literacyprojectfoundation.org Cavaliere “Cav” Member of the Royal House of Savoy – www.regalis.com/savoy.htm Ellis Island Medal of Honor Recipient – www.eihonors.org Sinan Kanatsiz has effectively made his mark as an entrepreneur in the United States. His parents who migrated from Turkey established residency and citizenship in America in the 1960’s where they had and raised Sinan and his Sister Sebnem. In 1998, while studying for a master’s degree at Chapman University, Kanatsiz followed his entrepreneurial spirit and formalized his first company, KCOMM, a Public Relations and Internet marketing agency. The company quickly evolved into a full-service marketing, government affairs and event marketing firm known for its Internet expertise and results-oriented approach. In less than ten years, Kanatsiz grew the firm to several million dollars in revenue, opening business operations and clients in Dallas, New York, Dubai, Istanbul, Montreal, London, Argentina, and Delhi. Currently, KCOMM works with over 100 specialized employees and independent contractors in several countries and has developed campaigns for over 1,000 companies and organizations around the world. These include organizations ranging from innovative start-ups to New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq listed companies such as Oracle, Sony, eBay, T-Mobile, HP, Adobe and the University of Phoenix. KCOMM’s dedication to strategic programs and results-oriented campaigns has earned the firm several PROTOS awards, the highest honor bestowed by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). The effectiveness of KCOMM’s strategies has become so widely recognized that the firm’s clients have now extended beyond the realm of technology to include elected officials, municipalities and multi-national organizations. As a consummate entrepreneur and philanthropist, Kanatsiz takes his community responsibilities seriously. In addition to mentoring high school and college students, he is often asked to speak about entrepreneurship and the Internet. He has held engagements at several universities, including USC, Chapman University, UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, Pepperdine, UC Irvine, and Cal Tech. Additionally, he has been a keynote speaker at the Future Business Leaders of American (FBLA) National Conference and is often called to speak on a variety of topics including Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, Modernizing Government and the future of the Internet. Kanatsiz’s belief in the power of entrepreneurism and politics led him to be the original founder of a group called Generation NeXt in 2004, a network of young business and community leaders committed to making a difference by empowering others for the betterment of the next generation. Additionally, he founded the Internet Marketing Association (www.imanetwork.org) in 2000, which has a large number of professional members worldwide and its own conference series called “IMPACT”. Past events have included the executives and founders of Google, SalesForce, Tesla Motor, SpaceX, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, St. Regis Hotel, Wahoos, Quest Software, Amazon and YouTube to name a few. Kanatsiz is currently expanding the group globally and involving leaders from Europe, the Middle East, China, and India, working to create the largest association dedicated to Internet Marketing in the world. While the IMA is a large, global organization, Kanatsiz recently created a spinoff in (2017), called the International Executive Council (IEC), which he founded to focus on the top 100 leaders in Southern California (www.iecnetwork.org). The organization has been hosting monthly events around topics including Social Emotional Learning, Cryptocurrency, Leadership and The Creative Process to name a few. Kanatsiz holds a B.A. in Communications, with an emphasis in Public Relations, and a Master’s degree in Organizational Leadership with a certificate in Human Resources, all from Chapman University. Kanatsiz was designated Alumnus of the Year by Chapman University in the year 2000. He was also the recipient of the Community College of California Alumnus of the Year Award in 2005. Sinan was named in the Hall of Fame for Santa Ana College in the year 2006. He has also been named as 40 under 40 and a featured Entrepreneur of the Year by OC Metro Magazine. Recognized for his philanthropic involvement, Kanatsiz was appointed a Knighthood and invited to become a member of the Royal House of Savoy by Prince Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy in September 2018. Sinan received the 2019 Ellis Island Medal of Honor for his work in non-profit organizations, public relations, and internet marketing. To this day, he credits his accomplishments to his Four Pillars of Success: personal integrity; coaches and mentors; family; and education. Kanatsiz, his wife, Kai, son Archer, and daughter Arden, reside in San Clemente, California.
Jayson Gehri directs the marketing team for Hybrid Data Management at IBM, following roles as marketing director for Dell and Quest Software. In this special episode, he lets us know what to watch for as IBM kicks off its annual THINK Conference, happening this year in the heart of downtown San Francisco from February 12th to the 15th.---------------------Shownotes00:00 - Check us out on YouTube and SoundCloud! 00:05 - Be sure to check out other MDS episodes here! 00:10 - Connect with Producer Steve Moore on LinkedIn & Twitter 00:15 - Connect with Producer Liam Seston on LinkedIn & Twitter 00:20 - Connect with Producer Rachit Sharma on LinkedIn 00:25 - Connect with Host Al Martin on LinkedIn & Twitter 00:40 – Connect with Jayson Gehri on LinkedIn & Twitter 00:55 – Get more info on THINK 01:30 – Pier 39 02:30 – Rob Thomas 02:35 – Arvind Krishna
Jayson Gehri directs the marketing team for Hybrid Data Management at IBM, following roles as marketing director for Dell and Quest Software. In this special episode, he lets us know what to watch for as IBM kicks off its annual THINK Conference, happening this year in the heart of downtown San Francisco from February 12th to the 15th.---------------------Shownotes00:00 - Check us out on YouTube and SoundCloud! 00:05 - Be sure to check out other MDS episodes here! 00:10 - Connect with Producer Steve Moore on LinkedIn & Twitter 00:15 - Connect with Producer Liam Seston on LinkedIn & Twitter 00:20 - Connect with Producer Rachit Sharma on LinkedIn 00:25 - Connect with Host Al Martin on LinkedIn & Twitter 00:40 – Connect with Jayson Gehri on LinkedIn & Twitter 00:55 – Get more info on THINK 01:30 – Pier 39 02:30 – Rob Thomas 02:35 – Arvind Krishna
Podcast start @ 12:52. Tracy Benelli is a pioneering reputation strategist, leadership coach, and keynote speaker who empowers and inspires you to step fully into your calling as a transformative leader in order to have massive positive impact on business and society. Tracy teaches and speaks about how to achieve great leadership by empowering others to be and do their very best. She will inspire you to be the leader you are capable of, in order to do the work you are most proud of! Tracy has built and led world-class communication organizations and leadership mentoring programs for HP, Dell, Quest Software, and Citrix, guided public policy platforms for Hillary Schieve (first female mayor of Reno, NV in over 40 years), and has taken two companies private, one company public, and guided leadership transition and reputation strategies for over $100B in M&A activities. She has a masters in divinity and is a big believer in the non-scientific healing power of cheetos! Tracy can be reached at: https://www.tracybenelli.com/ Colleen Benelli can be reached at: Colleen@reikilifestyle.com www.reikilifestyle.com www.facebook.com/reikilifestyle Robyn Benelli can be reached: robynbenelli@gmail.com Next Step Reiki™ is here! More information at: https://reikilifestyle.com/nextstepreiki/
Alan Armstrong is founder and CEO of Eigenworks, a boutique strategy and research firm that services B2B software companies ranging from series-B startups through large public companies. Eigenworks currently employs 10 people and has demonstrated 35% CAGR for the past 5 years. Eigenworks clients include industry giants such as Oracle and Cisco, mid-size companies such as Blackbaud and ReturnPath, and rocket-ship startups including Gainsight and VictorOps. Alan is a regular contributor of articles and expertise to industry publications including Pragmatic Marketing, Gainsight's Pulse series, and the popular blog OnProductManagement, of which Alan is a co-founder. Alan speaks regularly at industry events, including Pulse (San Francisco 2015, 2016, 2017), TSIA (Las Vegas 2016), Strategy & Competitive Intelligence Professionals (Atlanta 2017), and Product Marketing Community (Toronto & San Francisco 2016, Boston 2017). Prior to founding Eigenworks, Alan held senior director and vice president roles in three startups and participated in three successful exits including Fortiva (to Proofpoint, 2008), Wily Technology ($400M to CA in 2006), and Canada's largest self-funded exit of Sitraka to Quest Software, where Alan was Director of New Products and Innovation. Alan's experience includes Vice President-level positions covering Product Management, Business Development, and Sales.
Bryan Patton is a Principal Strategic Systems Consultant for Quest Software. Prior to Quest, he worked with International Networking Services performing migrations to Active Directory and Exchange from several source platforms. Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/ES_Episode67 Visit http://securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!
Bryan Patton of Quest Software joins us for an interview. In the news, security horror stories, making cloud native a reality, and updates from Ixia, Lacework, Francisco, and more on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly!Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/ES_Episode67 Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes! →Visit our website: https://www.securityweekly.com →Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly →Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly
Bryan Patton is a Principal Strategic Systems Consultant for Quest Software. Prior to Quest, he worked with International Networking Services performing migrations to Active Directory and Exchange from several source platforms. Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/ES_Episode67 Visit http://securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!
Bryan Patton of Quest Software joins us for an interview. In the news, security horror stories, making cloud native a reality, and updates from Ixia, Lacework, Francisco, and more on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly!Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/ES_Episode67 Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes! →Visit our website: https://www.securityweekly.com →Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly →Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly
Amit Agarwal is the Chief Product Officer @ Datadog, the startup that provides cloud scale monitoring that tracks your dynamic infrastructure and applications. They have raised over $140m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, IA Ventures, OpenView and RRE just to name a few. As for Amit, before Datadog, Amit was the Director of Product Management at Quest Software (now Dell), where he led the team responsible for application performance monitoring. Previously, Amit held product management roles at Datamirror (now IBM) and Embarcadero Technologies. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Amit make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Chief Product Officer @ Datadog? Why did Datadog not have a marketing strategy for the early days? What would Amit advise early stage founders with regards to optimising their marketing in the early days? Obviously a multi-product line is crucial for a SaaS startup to be successful, what is Amit’s take on how, when and why to launch a second product? What have been his big learnings on this from Datadog? Amit has said before that it is tough to sell to large enterprises in the early days, does that mean startups should always start with SME’s? At what price point does it become a challenge? Does Amit agree that if you are between 25K-100K you are in the valley of death price wise? 60 Second SaaStr What does Amit know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning? What is Amit’s favourite SaaS reading material? When is the right time to hire a CPO and why? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Amit Agarwal
The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
Charles Ramsey. He’s the CEO of Sauce Labs and has been in that position since April 2015, and has served as Chief Revenue Officer from February to April 2015. Prior to that, he’s had 25 years of industry experience—he was a venture partner at JMI Equity and held a number of roles at Quest Software, including VP of marketing and sales. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Finding Your North Star What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — No Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I wish I’d become a CEO sooner in my career” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:27 – Nathan introduces Charles to the show 03:03 – Sauce Labs has just raised a significant amount, $70M 03:45 – Sauce Labs has raised a total of $130M 04:04 – Charles shares how they decide to raise capital 04:14 – Sauce Labs checked their ability for an acquisition 04:42 – Sauce Labs had great timing 04:54 – Sauce Labs does automated testing in the cloud for web app and mobile devices 06:38 – Sauce Labs’ market is about continuous integration and delivery 07:17 – Sauce Labs is SaaS based with an annual subscription and self-service 07:58 – Sauce Labs has invested in pre-sell and technical support 08:30 – Average transaction fee is $50K annually 08:56 – The fee varies from the number of parallel testings the customer wants 09:20 – The concurrency of 50 09:45 – Sauce Labs is growing organically 10:11 – Sauce Labs is an 8 year old company 10:33 – “The founders started the company with the notion of automated testing from day 1” 10:54 – 3 years ago, a number of ISVs realized that they wanted to leverage selenium 12:03 – One of the founders is still in Sauce Labs and all of them are still on the cap table 12:41 – Team size 13:20 – Sauce Labs currently has 3500 customers 13:58 – Sauce Labs’ 90-day post-transaction clause window 14:17 – Depending on the complexity of the environment, it can require professional services 14:26 – Charles shares what their technical team does 14:58 – Average ARR 16:00 – Average pay of self-serve customers 16:59 – Valuation 17:46 – Sauce Labs wants to focus on the enterprise companies 19:15 – Gross annual customer churn 19:46 – Sauce Labs is currently at net negative revenue churn 19:54 – CAC 20:00 – Sauce Labs is doing paid marketing 21:20 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Do your research—know what your customer wants and needs. Focus your energy on the strengths of your company. Take courage, take the leap. Resources Mentioned: Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Jamf – Jamf helped Nathan keep his Macbook Air 11” secure even when he left it in the airplane’s back seat pocket Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
While at Tech Ed Atlanta, Richard talks to Dmitry Sotnikov from Quest Software about cloud technologies including virtualization. The debate ranges over Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and whether or not application migration to the cloud really makes sense.
Kirk Munro from Quest Software on automating Visio with PowerShell
Richard and Greg talk to Joel Oleson from Quest Software about Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is Microsoft's cloud based offering for Office, Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync.
Richard talks to Amit Agarwal from Quest Software about Project Lucy. Projecy Lucy is a free Azure-based utility that analyzes SQL Traces to find performance bottlenecks and other problems. Check out Project Lucy at http://www.projectlucy.com/.
Dave Kennedy on ethical hacking using PowerShell News Execute commands and scripts from anywhere including the office and remote locations, as well as from a Web browser or smart phone with PowerGUI Pro from Quest Software. With the MobileShell feature, administrators can quickly run commands to troubleshoot problems or make changes, even when away from your desk! This gives teams more flexibility to work remotely while traveling, and to leverage admins from other offices in case of an emergency. · Execute queries remotely to determine if services or processes are running · Restart services, processes, or entire servers · Check mailbox settings · Unlock user accounts · Reset passwords · Run custom scripts Visit quest.com/powerguipro and see why PowerShell and Quest PowerGUI are the ultimate Windows management tools. Usergroup news: Atlanta PSUG next meeting is Nov 16th with Ed Wilson speaking November Arizona PowerShell User Group meets Nov 3rd. Topic is building GUIs using PrimalForms New PowerShell Usergroup: Minneapolis and Saint Paul PowerGUI Pro and PowerGUI 2.2 are out! Doug Finke will be doing a PowerShell session at the Westchester Code Camp Nov 6th Intel vPro Expert Center Blog: Version 2 of the PowerShell Module for Intel vPro Technology released A reminder that the PowerGUI Challenge 2010 is underway until Nov15th Jonathan Medd posted a discount code for PowerShell in Practice Announcing the New PowerShell Virtual Chapter of PASS! Interview Our interview is brought to you by SAPIEN Technologies, makers of PrimalScript and PrimalForms. Links: Social-Engineer.org podcast Book choice: Pro Windows PowerShell: http://apress.com/book/view/9781590599402 Chatroom Buzz ## favorite linux distros? Backtrack/ubuntu ## Scripting language/Programming language history Python ## how about how SET came to be? ### what did you develope for backtrack? Q: how simular do you see python and psh? ## this sounds like a n00b question probably, but has dave used python 3 or stuck with python 2.x? i've struggled with the ctypes he mentioned with 3.x. Q: do you use psh automation scripts to do system tests? ## would you say most networks are turtle shells? ## thoughts on Certified Ethical Hacker cert? ### great description on what the tool is and some backround on it but did you just say one day "hey i want to be able to do something like this automaticaly" or was it someone who wanted the tool? CISSP = if you didn't know how to secure a machine before the cert.. you still don't after.. ## best ways to sell security to decision makers? Opportunity cost? Disaster scenarios? ## how has dave used powershell in a test? i have not listened to his defcon talk. i can see where powershell can be handy since it's almost on every server. like wmi via powershell? Q: is a recorded session or powerpoint slides available for posting in the notes from his defcon session ## Have you looked at attacking winrm or did you play with remoting at all? ##By a weak SA password are describing a brute force attack on the SA, to the SMO? ## how often do new security tools come out? Or are there more updates to existing tools? Q: How often is he using psh for testing? ## Q what resouces has Dave used to learn more about powershell scripting and how to use it? ## how 'powerful' is PS compared to linux/bash? ## What did you not like in PowerShell when learning it? ## What would you do to secure powershell from people like you? ## He's mentioned execution restriction policy twice... what makes them so weak? but flash can't see through....walls Hero - Superman Resources This segment brought to you by ServerFault.com The Scripting Guy has two great guest posts from listener Tome: Tap into the PowerShell Community for Fun and Education Learn How to Load and Use PowerShell Snap-ins Intel vPro Expert Center Blog: PowerShell Module for Intel vPro Technology: PowerShell Drives Beta - Part 1 Don Jones has released a 4 chapter PowerShell "crash course" Manage WSUS with PowerShell Tips From Rob C. $list = @" "@ $col = $list.split("`n") |% {$_.trim()}
Kirk Munro from Quest Software about PowerGUI Pro and the 2010 PowerPack Challenge!
Matt Royer from Intel! News Execute commands and scripts from anywhere including the office and remote locations, as well as from a Web browser or smart phone with PowerGUI Pro from Quest Software. With the MobileShell feature, administrators can quickly run commands to troubleshoot problems or make changes, even when away from your desk! This gives teams more flexibility to work remotely while traveling, and to leverage admins from other offices in case of an emergency. · Execute queries remotely to determine if services or processes are running · Restart services, processes, or entire servers · Check mailbox settings · Unlock user accounts · Reset passwords · Run custom scripts Visit quest.com/powerguipro and see why PowerShell and Quest PowerGUI are the ultimate Windows management tools. Gregg Britton's tip is "go to SQL Saturday #49 in Orlando October 16th" Doug Finke will be presenting a PowerShell session at the Pittsburgh Code Camp October 16th As Lee Holmes mentioned on the show the PowerShell Cookbook scripts are now on PoshCode.org If you are making it to VMWorld 2010 Copenhagen, be sure to catch TA 6944 vSphere PowerCLI is for Administrators Thomas Lee has some more PowerShell Master Classes coming up Interview Our interview is brought to you by SAPIEN Technologies, makers of PrimalScript and PrimalForms. Links: Intel vPro Expert Center Hero - Batman Resources This segment brought to you by ServerFault.com PowerShell cmdlets for the Microsoft iSCSI Target 3.3 Jonathan Medd's excellent series PowerShell 2.0 One Cmdlet at a Time is now available as a PDF Use PowerShell to trip text from PDFs (from @Toenuff) Emmett Lynch shared a starter resource for getting started with PowerShell and Sharepoint Mapping Cluster.exe Commands to Windows PowerShell Cmdlets for Failover Clusters - Extended Edition Custom PowerShell Objects and Performance Contest If you would like to be entered to win a copy of Lee Holmes' PowerShell Cookbook, 2nd Ed., all you have to do is send in your PowerShell tips! We want to hear what YOU think is cool, or what you have in your profile, or some of your favorite one-liners! Send in your entries to feedback@powerscripting.net, and tell a friend! We have FIVE copies to give away. Contest ends October 7th, so send in your entry today!
Quest Software on Mobileshell and PowerGUI Pro and your tips!
Richard and Greg talk to Brent Ozar from Quest Software about running SQL in the cloud. Part of the conversation focuses on SQL Azure, but Amazon's EC2 running SQL on a virtual machine is also a version of the same concept. The larger topic is really around DBAs providing services to their organizations - because that's what the cloud is offering!
Richard and Greg talk to Kevin Kline from Quest Software about SQL Server 2008 R2, the challenges of Business Intelligence, even a discussion around the No SQL Movement.
PowerShell MVP and software developer Kirk Munro from Quest Software
Bob Bobel on Quest's Active Directory cmdlets
Richard and Greg talk to Kirk Munro about PowerShell and PowerGUI. PowerGUI is a free utility created by Quest Software, you can download it at www.powergui.org.
Kirk Munro stops by to talk about PowerGUI, a free tool from Quest Software for PowerShell, including a beautiful script editor!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Norwood and Daniel Wood (I know) from Quest Software, makers of Toad - data tools for Oracle. Now providing Toad Extention for Visual Studio .NET, bringing all of the Datadude features of Visual Studio to Oracle developers.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Carl and Richard talk to Adam Driscoll of Quest Software. The conversation starts with a discussion around Adam's TFS plugin for Android. Then it moves into PowerGUI and the PowerGUI extensions for Visual Studio. PowerGUI is a UI for writing PowerShell scripts and PowerGUI VSX ties PowerGUI into Studio. Adam talks about applications can be built to be PowerShell driven with UI over top to generate the PowerShell commands.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
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