Podcasts about webscale

Cookies are out, context is in. People Inc.'s Jonathan Roberts joins The Big Impression to talk about how America's biggest publisher is using AI to reinvent contextual advertising with real-time intent.From Game of Thrones maps to the open web, Roberts believes content is king in the AI economy. Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler, and welcome to this edition of The Big Impression. Today we're looking at how publishers are using AI to reinvent contextual advertising and why it's becoming an important and powerful alternative to identity-based targeting. My guest is Jonathan Roberts, chief Innovation Officer at People Inc. America's largest publisher, formerly known as Meredith. He's leading the charge with decipher an AI platform that helps advertisers reach audiences based on real time intent across all of People Inc. Site and the Open Web. We're going to break down how it works, what it means for advertisers in a privacy first world and why Jonathan's side hustle. Creating maps for Game of Thrones has something for teachers about building smarter ad tech. So let's get into it. One note, this episode was recorded before the company changed its name. After the Meredith merger, you had some challenges getting the business going again. What made you realize that sort of rethinking targeting with decipher could be the way to go?Jonathan Roberts (01:17):We had a really strong belief and always have had a strong belief in the power of great content and also great content that helps people do things. Notably and Meredith are both in the olden times, you would call them service journalism. They help people do things, they inspire people. It's not news, it's not sports. If you go to Better Homes and Gardens to understand how to refresh your living room for spring, you're going to go into purchase a lot of stuff for your living room. If you're planting seeds for a great garden, you're also going to buy garden furniture. If you're going to health.com, you're there because you're managing a condition. If you're going to all recipes, you're shopping for dinner. These are all places where the publisher and the content is a critical path on the purchase to doing something like an economically valuable something. And so putting these two businesses together to build the largest publisher in the US and one of the largest in the world was a real privilege. All combinations are hard. When we acquired Meredith, it is a big, big business. We became the largest print publisher overnight.(02:23):What we see now, because we've been growing strongly for many, many quarters, and that growth is continuing, we're public. You can see our numbers, the performance is there, the premium is there, and you can always sell anything once. The trick is will people renew when they come back? And now we're in a world where our advertising revenue, which is the majority of our digital revenue, is stable and growing, deeply reliable and just really large. And we underpin that with decipher. Decipher simply is a belief that what you're reading right now tells a lot more about who you are and what you are going to do than a cookie signal, which is two days late and not relevant. What you did yesterday is less relevant to what you need to do than what you're doing right now. And so using content as a real time predictive signal is very, very performant. It's a hundred percent addressable, right? Everyone's reading content when we target to, they're on our content and we guaranteed it would outperform cookies, and we run a huge amount of ad revenue and we've never had to pay it in a guarantee.Damian Fowler (03:34):It's interesting that you're talking about contextual, but you're talking about contextual in real time, which seems to be the difference. I mean, because some people hear contextually, they go, oh, well, that's what you used to do, place an ad next to a piece of content in the garden supplement or the lifestyle supplement, but this is different.Jonathan Roberts (03:53):Yes. Yeah. I mean, ensemble say it's 2001 called and once it's at Targeting strategy back, but all things are new again, and I think they're newly fresh and newly relevant, newly accurate because it can do things now that we were never able to do before. So one of the huge strengths of Meredith as a platform is because we own People magazine, we dominate entertainment, we have better homes and gardens and spruce, we really cover home. We have all recipes. We literally have all the recipes plus cereal, seeds plus food and wine. So we cover food. We also do tech, travel, finance and health, and you could run those as a hazard brands, and they're all great in their own, but there's no network effect. What we discovered was because I know we have a pet site and we also have real simple, and we know that if you are getting a puppy or you have an aging dog, which we know from the pet site, we know you massively over index for interest in cleaning products and cleaning ideas on real simple, right?Damian Fowler (04:55):Yeah.Jonathan Roberts (04:55):This doesn't seem like a shocking conclusion to have, but the fact that we have both tells us both, which also means that if you take a health site where we're helping people with their chronic conditions, we can see all the signals of exactly what help you need with your diet. Huge overlaps. So we have all the recipe content and we know exactly how that cross correlates with chronic conditions. We also know how those health conditions correlate into skincare because we have Brody, which deals with makeup and beauty, but also all the skincare conditions and finance, right? Health is a financial situation as much as it is a health situation, particularly in the us. And so by tying these together, because most of these situations are whole lifestyle questions, we can understand that if you're thinking about planning a cruise in the Mediterranean, you're a good target for Vanguard to market mutual funds to. Whereas if we didn't have both investipedia and travel leisure, we couldn't do that. And so there's nothing on that cruise page, on the page in the words that allows you to do keyword targeting for mutual funds.(05:55):But we're using the fact that we know that cruise is a predictor of a mutual fund purchase so that we can actually market to anyone in market per cruise. We know they've got disposable income, they're likely low risk, long-term buy andhold investors with value investing needs. And we know that because we have these assets now, we have about 1500 different topics that we track across all of DDM across 1.5 million articles, tens of millions of visits a day, billions a year. If you just look at the possible correlations between any of those taxonomies that's over a million, or if we go a level deeper, over a hundred million connected data points, you can score. We've scored all of them with billions of visits, and so we have that full map of all consumers.Damian Fowler (06:42):I wanted to ask you, of course, and you always get this question I'm sure, but you have a pretty unusual background for ad tech theoretical physics as you mentioned, and researcher at CERN and Mapmaker as well for Game of Thrones, but this isn't standard publisher experience, but how did all that scientific background play into the way you approached building this innovation?Jonathan Roberts (07:03):Yeah, I think when I first joined the company, which was a long time ago now, and one of the original bits of this company was about.com, one of the internet oh 0.1 OG sites, and there was daily data on human interest going back to January 1st, 2000 across over a thousand different topics. And in that case, tens of millions of articles. And the team said, is this useful? Is there anything here that's interesting? I was like, oh my god, you don't know what you've got because if you treat as a physicist coming in, I looked at this and was like, this is a, it's like a telescope recording all of human interest. Each piece of content is like a single pixel of your telescope. And so if somebody comes and visit, you're like, oh, I'm recording the interest of this person in this topic, and you've got this incredibly fine grained understanding of the world because you've got all these people coming to us telling us what they want every day.(08:05):If I'm a classic news publisher, I look at my data and I find out what headlines I broke, I look at my data and I learn more about my own editorial strategy than I do about the world. We do not as much tell the world what to think about. The world tells us what they care about. And so that if you treat that as just a pure experimental framework where this incredible lens into an understanding of the world, lots of things are very stable. Many questions that people ask, they always ask, but you understand why do they ask them today? What's causing the to what are the correlations between what they are understanding around our finance business through the financial crash, our health business, I ran directly through COVID. So you see this kind of real time change of the world reacting to big shocks and it allows you to predict what comes next, right? Data's lovely, but unless you can do something with it, it's useless.Damian Fowler (08:59):It's interesting to hear you talk about that consistency, the sort of predictability in some ways of, I guess intense signals or should we just say human behavior, but now we've got AI further, deeper into the mix.Jonathan Roberts (09:13):So we were the first US publisher to do a deal with open ai, and that comes in three parts. They paid for training on our content. They also agreed within the contract to source and cite our content when it was used. And the third part, the particularly interesting part, is co-development of new things. So we've been involved with them as they've been building out their search product. They've been involved with us as we've been evolving decipher, one of the pieces of decipher is saying, can I understand which content is related to which other content? And in old fashioned pre AI days when it was just machine learning and natural language processing, you would just look at words and word occurrence and important words, and you'd correlate them that way. With ai, you go from the word to the concept to the reasoning behind it to a latent understanding of these kind of deeper, deeper connections.(10:09):And so when we changed over literally like, is this content related to that content? Is this article similar in what it's treating to that article? If they didn't use the same words but they were talking about the same topic, the previous system would've missed it. This system gets deeper. It's like, oh, this is the same concept. This is the same user need. These are the same intentions. And so when we overhauled this kind of multimillion point to point connection calculation, we drastically changed about 30% of those connections and significantly improved them, gives a much reacher, much deeper understanding of our content. What we've also done is said, and this is a year thing that we launched it at the beginning of the year, we have decipher, which runs on site. We launched Decipher Plus Inventively named right? I like it. We debated Max or Max Plus, but we went with Plus.(10:59):And what this says is we understand the user intent on our sites. We know when somebody's reading content, we have a very strong predictor model of what that person's going to need to do next. And we said, well, we're not the only people with intent driven content and intent driven audiences. So we know that if you're reading about newborn health topics, you are three and a half times more likely than average to be in market for a stroller. We're not the only people that write about newborn health. So we can find the individual pages on the rest of the web that do talk about newborn health, and we can unlock that very strong prediction that this purchase intent there. And so then we can have a premium service that buy those ads and delivers that value to our clients. Now we do that mapping and we've indexed hundreds of premium domains with opening eyes vector, embedding architecture to build that logic.Damian Fowler (11:56):That's fascinating. So in lots of ways, you're helping other publishers beyond your owned and operated properties.Jonathan Roberts (12:02):We believed that there was a premium in publishing that hadn't been tapped. We proved that to be true. Our numbers support it. We bet 2.7 billion on that bet, and it worked. So we really put our money where our mouth is. We know there's a premium outside of our walls that isn't being unlocked, and we have an information advantage so we can bring more premium to the publishers who have that quality content.Damian Fowler (12:24):I've got lots of questions about that, but one of them is, alright. I guess the first one is why have publishers been so slow out of the starting blocks to get this right when on the media buying side you have all of this ad tech that's going on, DSPs, et cetera.Jonathan Roberts (12:42):I think partly it's because publishers have always been a participant in the ad tech market off to one side. I put this back to the original sin of Ad Tech, which is coming in and saying, don't worry about it, publishers, we know your audience better than you ever will. That wasn't true then, and it's not true today, but Ad Tech pivoted the market to that position and that meant the publishers were dependent upon ad Tech's understanding of their audience. Now, if you've got a cookie-based understanding of an audience, how does a publisher make that cookie-based audience more valuable? Well, they don't because you're valuing the cookie, not the real time signal. And there is no such thing as cookie targeting. It's all retargeting. All the cookie signal is yesterday Signal. It's only what they did before they came to your site, dead star like or something, right? The publisher definitionally isn't influencing the value of that cookie. So an ad tech is valuing the cookie. The only thing the publisher can do to make more money is add scale, which is either generate clickbait because that's the cheapest way to get audience scale or run more ads on the page.(13:57):Cookies as a currency for advertising and targeting is the reason we currently have the internet We deserve, not the internet we want because the incentive is to cheap scale. If instead you can prove that the content is driving the value, the content is driving the decision and the content is driving the outcome, then you invest in more premium content. If you're a publisher, the second world is the one you want. But we had a 20 year distraction from understanding the value of content. And we're only now coming back to, I think one thing I'm very really happy to see is since we launched a cipher two years ago, there are now multiple publishers coming out with similarly inspired targeting architecture or ideas about how to reach quality, which is just a sign that the market has moved, right? Or the market moving and retargeting still works. Cookies are good currency, they do drive performance. If they didn't, it would never worked in the first place. But the ability to understand and classify premium content at web scale, which is what decipher Plus is a map for all intent across the entire open web is the thing that's required for quality content to be competitive with cookies as targeting mechanism and to beat it atDamian Fowler (15:15):Scale. You mentioned how this helps you reach all these third party sites beyond your properties. How do you ensure that there's still quality in the, there's quality content that match the kind of signals that makes decipher work?Jonathan Roberts (15:32):Tell me, not all content on the internet is beautiful, clean and wonderful. Not allDamian Fowler (15:36):Premium is it?Jonathan Roberts (15:36):I know there's a lot of made for arbitrage out there. Look, we, we've been a publisher for a long time. We've acquired a lot of publishers over the years, and every time we have bought a publisher, we have had to clean up the content because cheap content for scale is a siren call of publishing. Like, oh, I can get these eyeballs cheaper. Oh, wonderful. I know I just do that. And everyone gives it on some level to that, right? So we have consistently cleaned up content libraries every time we've acquired publishers. Look at the very beginning about had maybe 10 to 15 million euros. By the time we launched these artists and these individual vertical sites were down to 250,000 pages of content. It was a bigger business and it was a better business. The other side is the actual ad layout has to be good,Damian Fowler (16:29):ButJonathan Roberts (16:29):Every time we've picked up a publisher, we've removed ads from the site. Increase, yeah, experience quality,Damian Fowler (16:33):Right?Jonathan Roberts (16:36):Because we've audited multiple publishers for the cleanup, we have an incredibly detailed understanding of what quality content is. We have lots of, this is our special skill as a publisher. We can go into a publisher, identify the content and see what's good.Damian Fowler (16:54):Is that part of your pitch as it were, to people who advertisers?Jonathan Roberts (16:58):We work lots of advertisers. We're a huge part of the advertising market because we cover all the verticals. We have endemics in every space. If you're trying to do targeting based on identity, we have tens of millions of people a day. It'll work. You will find them with us, we reach the entire country every month. We are a platform scale publisher. So at no point do we saying don't do that, obviously do that, right? But what we're saying is there's a whole bunch of people who you can't identify, either they don't have cookies or IDs or because the useful data doesn't exist yet. It's not attached to those IDs. So incremental, supplementary and additional to reach the people in the moment with a hundred percent addressability, full national reach, complete privacy compliance, just the content, total brand safety. And we will put these two things side by side and we will guarantee that the decipher targeting will outperform the cookie targeting, which isn't say don't do cookie targeting, obviously do it. It works, it's successful. This is incremental and also will outperform. And then it just depends on the client, right? Some people want brand lift and brand consideration. They want big flashy things. We run People Magazine, we host the Grammy after party. We can do all the things you need from a large partner more than just media, but also we can get you right down to, for some partners with big deals, we guarantee incremental roas,Damian Fowler (18:26):ActualJonathan Roberts (18:26):In-store sales, incremental lift.Damian Fowler (18:29):So let's talk about roas. What's driving advertisers to lean in so heavily?Jonathan Roberts (18:34):Well, I think everybody's seen this over the last couple of years. In a high interest or environment, the CMOs getting asked, what's the return on my ad spend? So whereas previously you might've just been able to do a big flashy execution or activation. Now everybody wants some level of that media spend to be attributable to lift to dollars, to return to performance, because every single person who comes through our sites is going to do something after they come. We're never the last stop in that journey, and we don't sell you those garden seeds. We do not sell you the diabetes medication directly. We are going to have to hand you off to a partner who is going to be the place you take the economic action. So we are in the path to purchase for every single purchase on Earth.(19:19):And what we've proven with decipher is not only that we can be in that pathway and put the message in the path of that person who is going to make a decision, has not made one yet. But when we put the messaging in front of it of that person at the time, it changes their decisions, which is why it's not just roas, which could just be handing out coupons in the line to the pizza store. It's incremental to us, if you did not do this, you would have made less money. When you do this, you'll make more money. And having got to a point where we've now got multiple large campaigns, both for online action and brick and mortar stores that prove that when we advertise the person at this moment, they change their decision and they make their brand more money. Turns out that's not the hardest conversation to have with marketers. Truly, truly, if you catch people at the right moment, you will change their mind.Damian Fowler (20:10):They'll happily go back to their CFO and say, look at this. This is workingJonathan Roberts (20:15):No controversially at can. During the festival of advertising that we have as a publisher, we may be the most confident to say, you know what? Advertising works.Damian Fowler (20:27):You recently brought in a dedicated president to leadJonathan Roberts (20:30):Decipher,Damian Fowler (20:30):Right? So how does that help you take what started out as this in-house innovation that you've been working on and turn it into something even bigger?Jonathan Roberts (20:39):Yeah, I think my background is physics. I was a theoretical physicist for a decade. Theoretical physicists have some good and bad traits. A good trait is a belief that everything can be solved. Because my previous job was wake up in the morning and figure out how the universe began and like, well, today I'll figure it out. And nobody else has, right? There's a level of, let's call it intellectual confidence or arrogance in that approach. How hard can it be? The answer is very, but it also means you're a little bit of a diante, right? You're coming like, oh, it's ad tech. How hard can it be? And the just vary, right? So there's a benefit. I mean, I've done a lot of work in ad tech over the last couple of years. Jim Lawson, our president of Decipher, ran a publicly listed DSP, right? He was a public company, CEO, he knows this stuff inside a and back to front, Lindsay Van Kirk on the Cipher team launched the ADN Nexus, DSP, Patrick McCarthy, who runs all of our open web and a lot of our trade desk partnerships and the execution of all of the ways we connect into the entire ecosystem.(21:38):Ran product for AppNexus. Sam Selgin on the data science team wrote that Nexus bitter. I've got a good idea where we're going with this and where we should go with this and the direction we should be pointed in. But we have seasoned multi-decade experience pros doing the work because if you don't, you can have a good idea and bad execution, then you didn't do anything. Unless you can execute to the highest level, it won't actually work. And so we've had to bring in, I'm very glad we have brought in and love having them on the team. These people who can really take the beginnings of what we have and really take this to the scale that needs to be. Decipher. Plus is a framework for understanding user intent at Webscale and getting performance for our clients and unlocking a premium at Webscale. That is a huge project to go after and pull off. We have so many case studies proving that it will work, but we have a long way to go between where we are and where this thing naturally gets to. And that takes a lot of people with a lot of professional skills to go to.Damian Fowler (22:43):What's one thing right now that you're obsessed with figuring outJonathan Roberts (22:46):To take a complete left turn, but it is the topic up and down the Cosette this summer. There isn't currently any viable model for information economy in an AI future. There's lots of ideas of what it would be, but there isn't a subtle marketplace for this. We've got a very big two-sided marketplace for information. It's called Google and search. That's obviously changing. We haven't got to a point to understand what that future is. But if AI is powered by chips, power and content, if you're a chip investor, you're in a good place. If you're investing energy, you're in a good place of the three picks and shovels investments, content is probably the most undervalued at the moment. Lots of people are starting to realize that and building under the hood what that could look like. How that evolves in the next year is going to really determine what kind of information gets created because markets align to their incentives. If you build the marketplace well, you're going to end up with great content, great journalism, great creativity. If you build it wrong, you're going to have a bunch of cheap slop getting flooded the marketplace. And we are not going to fund great journalism. So that's at a moment in time where that future is getting determined and we have a very strong set of opinions on the publishing side, what that should look like. And I am very keen to make sure it gets done. You soundDamian Fowler (24:17):Optimistic.Jonathan Roberts (24:19):A year ago, the VCs and the technologists believed if you just slammed enough information into an AI system, you'd never need content ever again. And that the brain itself was the moat. Then deep seek proved that the brain wasn't a moat. That reasoning is a commodity because we found out that China could do it cheaper and faster, and we were shocked, shocked that China could do it cheaper and faster. And then the open source community rebuilt deep to in 48 hours, which was the real killer. So if reasoning is a commodity, which it is now, then content is king, right? Because reasoning on its own is free, but if you're grounding it in quality content, your answer's better. But the market dynamics have not caught up to that reality. But that is the reality. So I am optimistic that content goes back to our premium position in this. Now we just have to do all the boring stuff of figuring out what a viable marketplace looks like, how people get paid, all of this, all the hard work, but there's now a future model to align to.Damian Fowler (25:23):I love that. Alright, I've got to ask you this question. It's the last one, but I was going to ask it. You spent time building maps, visualizing data, and I've looked at your site, it's brilliant. Is there anything from that side of your creativity that helped you think differently about building say something like decipher?Jonathan Roberts (25:42):Yeah. So I think it won't surprise anyone to find out that I'm a massive nerd, right? I used to play d and d, I still do. We have my old high school group still convenes on Sunday afternoons, and we play d and d over Discord. Fantasy maps have been an obsession of mine for a long time. I did the fantasy maps of Game of Thrones. I'm George r Martin's cartographer. I published the book Lands of Ice and Fire with him. Maps are infographics. A map is a way of taking a complex system that you cannot visualize and bringing it to a world in which you can reason about it. I spent a lot of my life taking complex systems that nobody can visualize and building models and frameworks that help people reason about 'em and make decisions in a shared way. At this moment, as you're walking up and down the cosette, there is no map for the future. Nobody has a map, nobody has a plan. Not Google, not Microsoft, not Amazon, not our friends at OpenAI. Nobody knows what's coming. And so even just getting, but lots of people have ideas and opinions and thoughts and directions. So taking all that input and rationalize again to like, okay, if we lay it out like this, what breaks? Being able to logically reason about those virtual scenario. It is exactly the same process, that mental model as Matt.Damian Fowler (27:12):And that's it for this edition of The Big Impression. This show is produced by Molten Hart. Our theme is by loving caliber, and our associate producer is Sydney Cairns. And remember,Jonathan Roberts (27:22):We do not as much tell the world what to think about. The world tells us what they care about. Data's lovely, but unless you do something with it, it's useless.Damian Fowler (27:31):I'm Damian, and we'll see you next time.

During the earnings call, Cisco Systems acknowledged the competitive landscape in cybersecurity and observability, as evidenced by Palo Alto Networks' acquisition of Exabeam. However, Cisco highlighted its strategic strengths in these areas, emphasizing the value of an integrated, unified platform for end-to-end security and insightful solutions.The company stated its focus on the immediate integration of its XDR (Extended Detection and Response) solution with Splunk Enterprise Security, showcasing its commitment to harnessing the combined strengths of Cisco and Splunk. This integration represents progress in developing seamless product alliances, innovative solutions, and robust go-to-market strategies.Furthermore, Cisco has integrated AI capabilities into its cybersecurity offerings, such as Cisco Hypershield, to differentiate itself from competitors relying on standalone products. The company asserted that embedding security within the network fabric provides a unique and significant market differentiation.Cisco's strategic emphasis on integration, AI capabilities, and unified platforms in cybersecurity and observability positions the company to leverage market opportunities and address evolving industry challenges effectively.Navigating Macroeconomic Challenges and Sector-Specific DynamicsWhile Cisco experienced revenue declines in its core networking business due to inventory implementations, its security and observability segments saw growth driven by innovations and the integration of Splunk. The company acknowledged the ongoing macroeconomic challenges, particularly in the telco and cable segments, although some stabilization was noted in the Webscale sector.Cisco's CEO, Chuck Robbins, stated, "So from a macro perspective, what I would say is that ironically, we saw the quarter actually slow -- showed slight improvement as we move through the quarter." The company's strong cash flow and strategic investments in AI, security, and the Splunk integration position it well for future growth, despite these headwinds.Balancing Growth Opportunities and Competitive PressuresCisco Systems reported mixed financial results, with revenues for Q3 down 13% year-over-year at $12.7 billion, primarily due to reduced product revenue. However, service revenue saw a 6% uptick, and the recent acquisition of Splunk added $413 million post-close, boosting annualized recurring revenue to $29.2 billion. Gross margins remained strong at 68.3%, and operating margins stayed steady.While the company faced declines in its core networking business, key customer sectors like data center and campus switching, security, and collaboration witnessed order increases. Capital returns to shareholders amounted to a robust $2.9 billion in Q3.Moving forward, Cisco Systems must navigate the competitive waters while capitalizing on growth opportunities in cybersecurity and observability. The company's strategic focus on integration, AI capabilities, and unified platforms positions it to address evolving industry challenges and leverage market opportunities effectively. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theearningscall.substack.com

The 91st episode of dToks features Sonal Puri, a Board Director at Magento Asociation and Ex CEO of Webscale.

Webscale is the Cloud Platform for Modern Commerce, offering security, scalability, performance, and automation for global brands. The Webscale SaaS platform leverages automation and DevOps protocols to simplify deploying, managing and maintaining infrastructure in multi-cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Webscale powers Fortune 1000 brands and thousands of other B2C, B2B, and B2E ecommerce storefronts across 12 countries and has offices in Santa Clara, CA, Boulder, CO, San Antonio, TX, Bangalore, India, and London, UK. https://www.webscale.com

Adrian Luna from Webscale and Lindsey Murray and Rick Buczynski from Blue Acorn iCi discuss the why, what, and how of peak traffic preparedness for your website infrastructure, customer experience, and marketing initiatives.

Adrian Luna from Webscale and Lindsey Murray and Rick Buczynski from Blue Acorn iCi discuss the why, what, and how of peak traffic preparedness for your website infrastructure, customer experience, and marketing initiatives.

Skit raised $23M in Series B funding from WestBridge Capital and others to expand in markets like the US and enhance its voice technology. The company provides a suite of speech and language solutions that enable enterprises to automate their call center operations.Constant Contact completed the acquisition of SharpSpring, initially announced in June this year and met yesterday with the shareholders' approval. It provides a SaaS solution for marketing automation to help SMBs.Google Cloud and C3 AI enter partnership to help organizations spanning industries such as financial, healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain and telecommunications, solve real-world challenges.Crownpeak, a digital experience platform, has formed a strategic agreement with Webscale, a multi-cloud SaaS solution. Webscale will become Crownpeak's preferred cloud delivery engine for its global brands due to the partnership.Corelight, an open network detection and response (NDR) platform, has raised $75M in a Series D round from Energy Impact Partners (EIP). With the latest round of funding, Corelight will be able to expand its global market presence and develop new data and cloud services.Humane Inc., a platform that produces and sells consumer hardware, software, and services, has received a $100M investment from Tiger Global Management. Humane will be able to scale its operations while pursuing the next step in human-computer interaction.Stravito, a knowledge management platform, has raised €12.4 million (about $14.6 million) from Endeit Capital in a Series B round. Stravito will use the new funds to speed up product development and grow globally, emphasizing the US market.

In this episode, Frank and Graham are joined by CEO of Webscale, Sonal Puri, to talk about e-commerce security, scalability, performance, headless applications, and the story behind Webscale.

Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the ecosystems, and communities they work and live in. This week we interview Sonal Puri, CEO at Webscale. We discuss the meaning of “Modern Commerce '', how online retailers should be thinking about new technology (the shiny new thing is sometimes the best), and how Core Web Vitals is something that requires every merchant's attention (yesterday). We also discuss Jay Smiths' “Edgy” open letter, as well as how Webscale prides itself on always pushing the market in terms of features and capabilities. Sonal also shares how important she feels it is that we mentor young people today, helping them complete their education and finish college. This episode was recorded on June 21st, 2021

This episode, Frank is joined by Adrian Luna of Webscale to talk about how critical hosting is in modern day e-commerce. From scaling to cope with unexpected traffic spikes, to safeguarding against bad actors, your hosting shouldn't be an afterthought.

This episode, Frank is joined by Adrian Luna of Webscale to talk about how critical hosting is in modern day e-commerce. From scaling to cope with unexpected traffic spikes, to safeguarding against bad actors, your hosting shouldn't be an afterthought.

Sonal Puri is the CEO of Webscale Networks, a software company that hosts and manages a wide range of digital commerce and web applications. Sonal has almost 20 years of experience working with Internet infrastructure in sales, marketing, and corporate and business development.  Before her work at Webscale, Sonal was the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks. She has also served as a valued advisor for a variety of technology companies and held key management roles at Akamai Technologies, Speedera Networks, and more.  In this episode… Are you looking for a top web hosting platform to help you grow your ecommerce business? Do you want enhanced visibility and control over your web applications, as well as key strategies for scaling your company? If so, this episode of the Ecommerce Wizards Podcast is for you! Sonal Puri is an expert when it comes to software. As the CEO of Webscale Networks, Sonal not only has the inside scoop on all things web hosting, but also knows the secrets to building and managing an effective, customer-focused team of tech gurus. Today, Sonal is here to share her experience and advice on ecommerce hosting solutions, successful business tactics, and more! In this episode of the Ecommerce Wizards Podcast, Guillaume Le Tual sits down with Sonal Puri, the CEO of Webscale Networks, to discuss the ins and outs of web hosting. Listen in as Sonal shares her strategies for delivering a better, faster, and cheaper service, the structure behind Webscale's speedy SLA, and how the platform is helping clients manage the transition from Magento 1 to Magento 2. Stay tuned!

I had a chance to moderate a panel discussion this week with some interesting people in the B2B space. Hope you will learn too.Panelists on this session:Ryan Van Hoozer, VP of Operations, Marysville Marine OperationsKenn Glenn, Marketing Director, Marysville Marine OperationsAdrian Luna, Channel Leader, Webscale NetworksDevon Plopper, Sr. Account Executive, ShipperHQGowtham Ram, Account Manager, DCKAPWhat you’ll learnWhat role a hosting environment play in an online store?What does ShipperHQ do?Where does ShipperHQ fit in the eCommerce ecosystem to drive conversions?The experience of migrating from Magento 1 to 2.Launching a website on large scale vs small size corporations.How was the experience in launching a website through a 100% remote team?Approaching the design of B2B vs B2C websites.Shipping best practices.Process of setting up ShipperHQ.Why do you need to consider middleware implementation as a part of your core project?Some common mistakes distributors make during the initial discovery or vendor selection process.Is the holiday season sale going to be different this year?Show Links and ReferencesMarysville Marine DistributorsClorasShipperHQWebscale NetworksVideo version of this episodeShiva Kumaar on LinkedinDriven: Ecommerce at Work Home

Andi Grabner, our man-on-the-street, gets the scoop on:-Going web-scale with cross-environment features, globally distributed high availability and more​ - with Guido Deinhammer-The role of OpenTelemetry in Dynatrace​ with Daniel Khan and Sonja Chevre-Build resiliency into your continuous delivery pipeline​ with Michael Villiger

Andi Grabner, our man-on-the-street, gets the scoop on:-Going web-scale with cross-environment features, globally distributed high availability and more​ - with Guido Deinhammer-The role of OpenTelemetry in Dynatrace​ with Daniel Khan and Sonja Chevre-Build resiliency into your continuous delivery pipeline​ with Michael Villiger

Sonal Puri is the CEO of Webscale – her 4th B2B SaaS startup. Webscale is disrupting the multi billion dollar market for cloud hosting & cloud services. Sonal talks about: Using deep tech to turn the cloud into a utility Replacing her talented, humble & self-aware founding CEO The potential dangers of pursuing a freemium pricing model How she learns each & every day from other startup CEOs & mentors Webscale's impact on $billion clients like Puma, Unilever & Tommy Hilfiger For more insights into Webscale check out https://www.webscale.com & for advice on hiring world class talent for B2B software scale-ups check out http://alpinasearch.com  

CEO Sonal Puri of Webscale shares how her company helps B2C and B2B sellers of all sizes manage their cloud infrastructure globally, helping them take advantage of the cloud’s almost infinite scalability while optimizing costs, security, and performance. In this episode, we discuss: As a startup, how Webscale is disrupting the digital infrastructure space as “the digital cloud company” for more than 1000 online stores globally Webscale’s ability to manage applications in the public cloud on behalf of customers across all the “hyperscale” cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Alibaba Cloud, and others The company’s experience with online commerce is key to helping clients manage their infrastructure for maximum benefit with minimal cost Large hyperscale providers are providing very reliable, scalable cloud infrastructure/hosting on demand, while Webscale runs its own services on top:  security, predictive autoscaling, performance, caching, content optimization, bot management, etc. Webscale provides an easy-to-use interface/portal for customers It also ensures cloud computing consumption is always right-sized so customers don’t pay for more than they use Infrastructure as a commodity or utility, like electricity, allowing retailers/brands to pay only for what they need, when they need it How today’s technology and cloud offerings allow smaller retailers to access the same tools as leading global brands, leveling the playing field Why it makes sense to use a vendor like Webscale to manage your cloud infrastructure Migrating applications to the cloud from traditional hosting models can be confusing and challenging Costs start to add up quickly if you don’t manage your infrastructure actively Security concerns are only escalating and require constant monitoring 24x7 global support includes expertise across multiple clouds Why even the data layer no longer presents scalability issues if the infrastructure is set up correctly, even for retailers who see 20x or 30x traffic spikes during peak seasons Migrating infrastructure to the cloud typically takes anywhere from 1-2 weeks up to 2 months, depending on complexity and the amount of testing required With good business requirements, Webscale quickly figures out the right solution using available providers Why Sonal believes the infrastructure market will undergo further commoditization and look more and more like a utility, with probably three hyperscale providers and perhaps a small group of very targeted cloud providers (e.g. a health cloud or database cloud)

SHOW: 396DESCRIPTION: Aaron and Brian talk with Renaud Boutet (@boutetren, VP Product Management @datadoghq) about logging, monitoring, observability, and the challenges of balancing the collection of the right data with the costs of all the data.SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:Snowflake HomepageGet started with Snowflake at snowflake.com/cloudcastDigital Ocean HomepageGet Started Now and Get a free $100 Credit on Digital OceanGet 20% off VelocityConf passes using discount code CLOUDCLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:A Cloud Guru raises $33M in funding to expand courses and labsMicrosoft Azure adds VMware CloudVMware Cloud on Dell SHOW INTERVIEW LINKS:Datadog Homepage - Modern Monitoring and AnalyticsSHOW NOTES:Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about some of your background prior to joining Datadog, and about your focus areas today. Topic 2 - Let’s start with some conceptual buckets - how do you sort out the differences when people say “monitoring” vs. “logging” vs. “observability”? Topic 3 - Logging has the inherent tradeoff between the desire to “log everything” and the limitation of costs to log (and retain everything). What are some of the trends to potentially make this tradeoff more manageable?Topic 4 - At some point, the tradeoff between sending logs, filtering logs, storing logs all boils down to a financial trade-off of immediate costs vs potential costs associated with failure. How do you see those conversations playing out in real life? Any suggestions on a framework for doing those types of analysis? Topic 5 - What role do you see AI playing in the future of Logging/Observability? It seems like that needs to become the next big step if the industry solves the challenges of logging/storage more and more. FEEDBACK?Email: show at thecloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet and @ServerlessCast

This week on the podcast, we chat about the latest release of NetApp’s object storage solution – StorageGRID Webscale 11.2! Join us as we ask StorageGRID software director Duncan Moore and Global Solutions Architect Luke Mun all about StorageGRID and object storage.

As the importance of our data continues to grow, so does our need to scale its use, be it for performance, resilience or reasons of data locality, the need to architect solutions and find technologies to support this demand for data at scale is increasingly important. If we look at the way cloud giants use their data, it's clear that "traditional" database methods are not going to be suitable and of course it's not just "cloud giants" who need their data at scale, today, enterprises of all types need to be able to present their data with the same scale, flexibility and resilience. One widely adopted way of doing this is using Apache Cassandra as a database technology. But why? and how does Cassandra differ from our traditional on-prem solutions such as SQL and Oracle? That is the topic of this week's Tech Interviews as Patrick Callaghan, Solutions Architect at Datastax joins me to provide an intro to Cassandra as a database technology, how it works and why it's becoming the database of choice in the modern webscale world. In this episode we discuss; *Cassandra's beginning at Facebook * Why you may need a scalable, distributed database * What challenges does it bring * Why automation at your busiest times is perhaps not the answer * Webscale database use cases * Where Datastax can help Patrick is a great guest and provided a fantastic intro to the world of Cassandra and what it can mean for the way we handle data in this distributed, webscale world. Next week we start a brief series talking with Cloud Architects and Migration specialists about making a success of Public Cloud Projects, too make sure you catch that show then please subscribe in all of the usual podcast places and until next time, Thanks for listening. Full show notes are here: https://wp.me/p4IvtA-1DZ

So you may have thought about using NoSQL or a Document Database for taking care of you needs. But do you know why that might be not be a good (or a pretty bad idea?). Or you may have a Database that have been running fine, but it seems that you can't work with it anymore? (Is it time to move to NoSql? Would it help?). We dive into the "Why" would you choose Databases vs NoSQL Data Stores, or when to ditch your MongoDB and actually come back to MySQL. In our current time of "WebScale" and "CloudReady" we get bombarded by choices! (Mongo, Dynamo, MariaDB, ElasticSearch) and while some of the offerings are great, it might not mean that is the Right choice for what we need to store. So take a listen as we explore normalization and the strength and weaknesses of relational data vs unstructured data. We thank DataDogHQ for sponsoring this podcast episode Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to our cool NewsCast! Java Off Heap Database Normalization SQL vs NoSQL (StackOverflow) Sql Vs NoSql (TheGeekStuff) Max # of Rows MySQL Do you like the episodes? Want more? Help us out! Buy us a beer! And Follow us! @javapubhouse and @fguime and @bobpaulin  

MageMojo and Webscale Discuss Magento in the Cloud by Kalen Jordan

DCD Webscale in SAN FRANCISCO June 2018- I talked hyperscale data center growth with Compass Datacenters' Nancy Novak, Turner Construction's Ben Kaplan, ABB's Ciaran Flanagan, and 1547 Managing Director Corey Welp. We dove in to how this type of data center development has and will continue to change the industry.

Peggy and Chuck Byers, principal engineer and platform architect, Cisco, discuss interoperability and he questions how we are going to achieve interoperability if there are 900 different platforms. Interoperability—and security—are big challenges that face the industry. He believes quantum computing is a threat to IoT (Internet of Things) security, but the arms race is going to be won by the good guys. At the same time, having one player in the market is an impossible task, as no one can do everything, he explains. When discussing bringing companies into the OpenFog Consortium, he says the big Web-scale companies have been invited to join, but politely refuse. Byers speculates that it is because the companies believe they have the power to influence the industry all by themselves and they are smart because they know where the share owners want them to go, but it might not be best for the industry.

Peggy and Chuck Byers, principal engineer and platform architect, Cisco, discuss interoperability and he questions how we are going to achieve interoperability if there are 900 different platforms. Interoperability—and security—are big challenges that face the industry. He believes quantum computing is a threat to IoT (Internet of Things) security, but the arms race is going to be won by the good guys. At the same time, having one player in the market is an impossible task, as no one can do everything, he explains. When discussing bringing companies into the OpenFog Consortium, he says the big Web-scale companies have been invited to join, but politely refuse. Byers speculates that it is because the companies believe they have the power to influence the industry all by themselves and they are smart because they know where the share owners want them to go, but it might not be best for the industry.

Die aktuelle Softwarelösung unterstützt IT-Organisationen dabei, auch komplexe Dateninhalte und das rasche Wachstum von unstrukturierten Daten im Unternehmen zu kontrollieren sowie kosteneffizient zu verwalten...

This week on the podcast, we welcome Duncan Moore, Director of StorageGRID at NetApp, in to chat about the latest and greatest StorageGRID WebScale release, which comes out today! As a bonus, we also discuss StorageGRID 10.3, which we somehow overlooked on the podcast. Tune in to find out what’s new in the world of S3!

When Michael Phelps bought a ring for his girlfriend at a small retail shop then shared it online, thousands of his more than one million followers flooded the website of this small jewelry shop. That massive increase in traffic could’ve caused the site to crash. But as a customer of WebScale, the site was ale to adapt. Businesses dream of having their website flooded with orders. But for some, when it happens, it’s a nightmare! Everything comes to a stop in the surge of traffic. Why? Because they don’t have the infrastructure to support the number of people creating transactions on their site. Webscale CEO Sonal Puri talks about how her company is helping businesses of all sizes leverage the cloud to avoid crashes. In our “HealthTech” series, Stroll Co-founder and COO Matt Maurer talks about how he’s helping doctors guide their patients on the best, most cost-effective options for medical tests. If you have to get an MRI or an ultrasound, prices can vary by as much as $10,000 within a few miles. His technology provides that information to your doctor before you even leave their office. Plus, UpRamp Managing Director Scott Brown shares four startups that have the potential for disrupting the Cable industry.

StorageGRID Webscale is NetApp’s object data storage system. Recently version 10.2 was released and added a number of new and interesting features. To enlighten us, we asked none other than Duncan Moore, Director for StorageGRID at NetApp, to visit us and give us a breakdown. As always, Duncan does a great job extolling the benefits of object storage, so if you’re curious about object storage and it’s use cases, give this episode a listen!

Aaron & Brian talk with Manoj Chaudhary (CTO & VP of Engineering @loggly) about building and managing massively scalable SaaS applications. Music credit: Nine Inch Nails (nin.com)

Aaron and Brian talk with Dave Lester (@davelester, Open Source Advocate at Twitter. Friend of @ApacheMesos, @ApacheAurora) about how Twitter manages large-scale infrastructure, an introduction to Apache Mesos and how projects like Kubernetes, Docker, Aurora are helping to define the next-generation of web-scale infrastructure management. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)

Brian talks with Eric Bowman (@ebowman, VP of Architecture at Gilt, @gilttech) about the evolution from monolithic apps to scaleable micro-services. They discuss how to manage scale, how they manage deployments across internal, managed and public clouds. They discuss when to open-source a project and how to engage with open-source communities. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)

Brian talks with JR Rivers (@JRCumulus, CEO - Cumulus Networks) about the launch of the company and Cumulus Linux. They explore hardware-acceleration of Linux, integration with Chef/Puppet/Ansible, and the evolution of network operatiing systems and hardware supply chains.