1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,120 Why don't you introduce our guest? 2 00:00:01,380 --> 00:00:02,540 Wait, which one of us is a guest? 3 00:00:02,800 --> 00:00:07,360 We're all guests of this short life, but you're the guest. 4 00:00:07,660 --> 00:00:09,400 That's right, so Josh McKenty, who are you? 5 00:00:09,660 --> 00:00:10,580 Fantastic, thanks. 6 00:00:11,100 --> 00:00:13,260 Very happy to be here, wherever here is. 7 00:00:14,280 --> 00:00:19,180 I am the head of the Global Ecosystem Engineering Team at Pivotal, 8 00:00:19,780 --> 00:00:26,800 which basically means I'm really good at begging favors from the rest of the company. 9 00:00:27,660 --> 00:00:31,900 Who are you begging favors on behalf of? 10 00:00:32,640 --> 00:00:34,980 Well, it's been an interesting six months. 11 00:00:35,120 --> 00:00:37,760 Last year, Pivotal had, I think, a dozen partners. 12 00:00:38,400 --> 00:00:44,580 Right now, we have about 125, and if this keeps up, I think we'll have about 1,000 by the end of next year. 13 00:00:44,780 --> 00:00:45,340 Oh, right, right. 14 00:00:45,420 --> 00:00:52,460 So it's almost too many to count, but some obvious ones just highlighted in the last week, 15 00:00:52,460 --> 00:00:59,180 top of my head, Apogee, Dynatrace, New Relic, CloudBees, Artifactory, GitLab. 16 00:01:00,720 --> 00:01:07,000 You know, we're really excited to announce some work with Mongo today, a ton of different Postgres vendors. 17 00:01:07,180 --> 00:01:09,300 Like, you name it, we have a partnership there. 18 00:01:09,580 --> 00:01:09,780 Right. 19 00:01:10,120 --> 00:01:17,800 And then, so what is, I mean, there's so many questions, but what does a partnership entail with someone like us? 20 00:01:17,880 --> 00:01:22,100 Like, is it like sales or technology or like, I don't know, marshmallows? 21 00:01:22,100 --> 00:01:25,720 It's like Lawrence and Arabia in a little town called Aqaba. 22 00:01:26,100 --> 00:01:26,420 Uh-huh. 23 00:01:26,920 --> 00:01:28,500 I like the desert because it's clean. 24 00:01:28,740 --> 00:01:30,660 See, I told you I know 40-plus of your references. 25 00:01:30,920 --> 00:01:31,500 There you go. 26 00:01:31,700 --> 00:01:33,420 But beyond Sanford and Son, I'm out. 27 00:01:33,960 --> 00:01:42,260 Yeah, so Global Ecosystem team, we actually rolled up our sort of three different partnership groups earlier this year. 28 00:01:42,700 --> 00:01:51,120 So we have ISV partners, really, technology partners where we've done some deep engineering work to produce an integrated solution. 29 00:01:51,120 --> 00:02:01,620 So you can think of, you know, anything from a data service running on top of Pivotal Cloud Foundry to APM tooling that can run inside the containers along with your Spring Boot. 30 00:02:01,640 --> 00:02:01,820 Right. 31 00:02:02,520 --> 00:02:08,040 So then we have Global SIs, your typical Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant. 32 00:02:08,720 --> 00:02:15,880 And then we have Regional SIs, and probably our most famous in that one will be ECS team out of Colorado. 33 00:02:15,900 --> 00:02:16,280 Oh, right. 34 00:02:16,400 --> 00:02:19,980 Who's worked on more Pivotal Cloud Foundry accounts than I think anyone else. 35 00:02:19,980 --> 00:02:22,300 Yeah, that dude tweets almost as much as James Watters. 36 00:02:22,480 --> 00:02:22,860 Right. 37 00:02:23,360 --> 00:02:25,240 And James Watters tweets back. 38 00:02:25,600 --> 00:02:26,100 Yeah, yeah. 39 00:02:26,740 --> 00:02:26,960 Yeah. 40 00:02:27,080 --> 00:02:36,480 So is it a pretty fair, at least on the technology front, to assume that if there's a partnership, that means there's a pretty tight, close integration into PCF and vice versa? 41 00:02:36,980 --> 00:02:42,260 Like with things like, you know, Apogee and other people like that? 42 00:02:42,260 --> 00:02:42,420 Yeah. 43 00:02:42,540 --> 00:02:46,440 So we don't do partnership for PR's sake. 44 00:02:46,440 --> 00:02:49,120 In fact, the partner team is not part of marketing. 45 00:02:49,280 --> 00:02:49,960 It's part of product. 46 00:02:50,140 --> 00:02:50,300 Right. 47 00:02:50,300 --> 00:03:01,320 So I guess if you think of it from an org chart standpoint, generally by the time a press release comes out, we're talking about what customers have done with, you know, three to six months' worth of engineering work at least. 48 00:03:01,740 --> 00:03:01,900 Okay. 49 00:03:01,900 --> 00:03:04,080 What kind of engineering work takes place? 50 00:03:04,200 --> 00:03:05,840 I mean, you described the different models. 51 00:03:05,960 --> 00:03:07,420 I might sit outside of the solution. 52 00:03:07,600 --> 00:03:09,740 I might, you know, be a service that shows up. 53 00:03:09,840 --> 00:03:15,060 So when we have to integrate, what kind of engineering work typically, typical may never be typical. 54 00:03:15,160 --> 00:03:26,180 What kind of engineering work do we commonly see, at least for some of these, when it comes to trying to make them feel to a customer like, I'm just consuming another piece of your platform, because I've got this weird side thing I've got to engage with. 55 00:03:26,180 --> 00:03:30,600 Yeah, so I was partly joking when I said Lawrence of Arabia in a little town called Acqua, but I wasn't. 56 00:03:30,700 --> 00:03:39,320 I really think of this as being like Microsoft circa 1992 and the rise of the .exe, right? 57 00:03:39,400 --> 00:03:50,320 So you've got a standard packaging format for your applications and you know anything that's wrapped up as an .exe is going to run on Microsoft Windows, roughly speaking, as long as the versions line up. 58 00:03:50,900 --> 00:04:01,300 So we have a package format for Pivotal Cloud Foundry that we call Tiles, and we've worked really hard to standardize some SDKs for tile developers. 59 00:04:02,060 --> 00:04:04,200 This is generally joint engineering work. 60 00:04:04,200 --> 00:04:20,340 So there's engineers on my team that pair up with engineers in our partners' companies, and we sort of sprint to a first version, to an MVP, so that we can get it as a classic Pivotal Labs, fast feedback loop, lean startup kind of approach. 61 00:04:20,900 --> 00:04:25,740 Use a few Lighthouse accounts to tell us if we're building the right thing. 62 00:04:26,260 --> 00:04:28,420 The tile can come up in multiple ways, right? 63 00:04:28,480 --> 00:04:32,000 I can envision a relationship to an already existing SaaS service, I think. 64 00:04:32,060 --> 00:04:36,180 It could be something that we actually use Bosch and build out VMs and infrastructure. 65 00:04:36,180 --> 00:04:41,300 And then I think you've described, too, that you also try to make sure the hooks are there back into platform stuff like logging. 66 00:04:42,060 --> 00:04:44,580 I want it to feel like a first-class citizen in the platform. 67 00:04:44,720 --> 00:04:48,020 So what are some of those things that you might write in that assessment? 68 00:04:48,260 --> 00:04:49,460 What does the tile make? 69 00:04:49,460 --> 00:04:50,280 Yeah, absolutely. 70 00:04:50,380 --> 00:04:57,680 So a service broker that connects to a SaaS data service or an on-premise database in the basement. 71 00:04:57,680 --> 00:05:05,600 So most companies in the world still have either Oracle or DB2 or something locked down there with cockroaches. 72 00:05:06,440 --> 00:05:11,540 And so we often have a service broker provisioned in the platform that connects to those. 73 00:05:12,000 --> 00:05:16,140 Or we're deploying, as you say, into VMs, distributed data stores. 74 00:05:17,460 --> 00:05:19,400 We even package up applications now. 75 00:05:19,500 --> 00:05:30,420 So we're starting to see more and more integration level, maybe not COTS apps, but certainly business-focused. 76 00:05:30,820 --> 00:05:36,740 So things like Mendix, MBAS solutions, analytics and visualization tool sets, and so on. 77 00:05:37,280 --> 00:05:37,620 Interesting. 78 00:05:38,340 --> 00:05:45,400 And so what, I mean, in the realm of strategy on both sides of that table, why do we need partners? 79 00:05:46,120 --> 00:05:47,220 What's our goal? 80 00:05:47,700 --> 00:05:51,020 I mean, the SI stuff is sort of like, well, people implement stuff. 81 00:05:51,080 --> 00:05:52,380 I mean, at a very basic level. 82 00:05:52,480 --> 00:05:53,440 So that kind of makes sense. 83 00:05:53,560 --> 00:05:59,140 But walk us through what we try to get as a company out of having a bunch of partners. 84 00:05:59,580 --> 00:06:00,720 Build versus buying these two. 85 00:06:00,720 --> 00:06:01,880 Why don't we just build the whole thing? 86 00:06:01,980 --> 00:06:08,420 Well, and bear in mind, creating a real partner ecosystem is about the hardest thing that you can possibly imagine. 87 00:06:09,700 --> 00:06:15,560 It's not just a double-ended marketplace, you know, but it's almost a three-cornered marketplace. 88 00:06:16,200 --> 00:06:17,220 So why would we do that? 89 00:06:19,040 --> 00:06:27,120 I think there's a reason it's good for our customers, and we always start with that, which is they don't want to buy everything from Pivotal. 90 00:06:27,300 --> 00:06:29,980 They want to buy the things that we're good at, right? 91 00:06:30,040 --> 00:06:32,400 We're really, really good at cloud-native infrastructure. 92 00:06:32,620 --> 00:06:35,020 We're great at Java frameworks. 93 00:06:36,300 --> 00:06:39,020 But they also want to buy APM tools from APM vendors. 94 00:06:39,020 --> 00:06:43,700 They want to buy – and increasingly, hard software is hard, yo. 95 00:06:44,520 --> 00:06:51,020 So we're really good at the hard software we're good at, and other vendors are good at the hard software they're good at. 96 00:06:51,220 --> 00:06:54,340 So our buyers are really sophisticated. 97 00:06:55,700 --> 00:06:57,580 So that's why the customer wants it. 98 00:06:57,640 --> 00:06:59,320 Why we want it is simply leverage. 99 00:06:59,520 --> 00:07:03,620 We can't pick the winner in every spot in the marketplace. 100 00:07:04,500 --> 00:07:06,640 Do you know the Donnie Berkholdt accordion thesis? 101 00:07:07,260 --> 00:07:08,380 I think we talked about this before. 102 00:07:08,500 --> 00:07:12,040 I don't remember, but it sounds like it might involve, like, carnies and gypsies and stuff. 103 00:07:12,200 --> 00:07:12,480 Yeah, exactly. 104 00:07:14,060 --> 00:07:15,440 Short people and tall people. 105 00:07:15,820 --> 00:07:16,060 Sure. 106 00:07:17,000 --> 00:07:22,340 So at any moment in IT, there's parts of the accordion that are contracting and standardizing. 107 00:07:22,580 --> 00:07:25,280 There's other parts of the accordion that are expanding and innovating. 108 00:07:25,500 --> 00:07:25,780 Sure. 109 00:07:26,120 --> 00:07:31,240 And when you've contracted to a perfect standard, you have a standard of one choice, right? 110 00:07:31,300 --> 00:07:34,100 So there's only 19-inch racks in data storage. 111 00:07:34,100 --> 00:07:34,320 Right, right, right. 112 00:07:34,320 --> 00:07:37,220 We don't do weird alternate rack formats. 113 00:07:37,760 --> 00:07:42,280 There's really only IP as a Layer 3 protocol. 114 00:07:42,420 --> 00:07:45,600 I mean, there are others, but, like, if you do IP, you're going to be fine. 115 00:07:45,700 --> 00:07:45,860 Right. 116 00:07:46,720 --> 00:07:51,900 There's more or less only JavaScript and its many variants for doing that kind of thing. 117 00:07:51,900 --> 00:07:54,800 On the client side, yes, in the browser, there is JavaScript. 118 00:07:54,940 --> 00:07:55,240 Right, right, right. 119 00:07:55,240 --> 00:07:59,380 But there are other places in the stack where we've never achieved a monopoly of one. 120 00:08:00,240 --> 00:08:03,820 What is your favorite database, for instance? 121 00:08:03,920 --> 00:08:06,200 There isn't just a single choice for database. 122 00:08:06,340 --> 00:08:11,380 There's no single choice for queue services, even though we happen to love RabbitMQ. 123 00:08:11,380 --> 00:08:13,140 It's not the only one that people like. 124 00:08:13,480 --> 00:08:13,580 Right. 125 00:08:14,240 --> 00:08:17,560 And in areas of innovation, there are more and more options. 126 00:08:18,200 --> 00:08:22,240 And so we can't be in the business of picking winners or of telling our customers, 127 00:08:22,460 --> 00:08:25,320 oh, you've got to use this one, you've got to use that one, because that's the only one we support, 128 00:08:25,840 --> 00:08:26,840 even if it's the one we built. 129 00:08:26,940 --> 00:08:30,780 So there's, like, a big stack of accordions and various parts of ingress and egress. 130 00:08:31,240 --> 00:08:35,780 Yeah, think of it almost as an Oompa Loompa band. 131 00:08:36,060 --> 00:08:36,240 Yeah. 132 00:08:36,520 --> 00:08:36,840 Yes. 133 00:08:37,280 --> 00:08:37,960 That makes sense. 134 00:08:38,960 --> 00:08:39,220 Yeah. 135 00:08:39,220 --> 00:08:42,880 Yeah, but then there's also that choice of, again, what do we decide to build ourselves? 136 00:08:43,040 --> 00:08:44,820 Because we can say, hey, look, we don't want to pick a winner. 137 00:08:45,400 --> 00:08:48,840 And in some cases, we do think this should be native, built-in stuff. 138 00:08:48,900 --> 00:08:50,600 I mean, there's always that tension you brought at Microsoft. 139 00:08:50,980 --> 00:08:51,100 Yeah. 140 00:08:51,360 --> 00:08:52,120 Circa 1992. 141 00:08:52,660 --> 00:08:52,840 Yeah. 142 00:08:52,960 --> 00:08:54,940 Microsoft eats their ecosystem from time to time. 143 00:08:55,040 --> 00:08:55,900 Amazon does others. 144 00:08:55,960 --> 00:09:00,280 So there's always that maybe healthy tension between your ecosystem and your core engineering. 145 00:09:00,280 --> 00:09:07,220 And I guess a lot of your job is to continue to be transparent and help our partners find value. 146 00:09:07,340 --> 00:09:08,660 But how do you balance that tension? 147 00:09:08,800 --> 00:09:11,820 And how do you see Pivotal deciding between a build versus a buy? 148 00:09:12,080 --> 00:09:13,860 Oh, that's a great question. 149 00:09:14,740 --> 00:09:17,340 I think there are specific approaches. 150 00:09:17,600 --> 00:09:21,120 And then there's the general approach, which you highlighted, which is trust and transparency. 151 00:09:21,600 --> 00:09:21,680 Right. 152 00:09:21,760 --> 00:09:26,820 So I don't think Microsoft was the best example, but they're certainly not the worst. 153 00:09:26,960 --> 00:09:30,700 I've worked in other ecosystems that were 100% cannibalistic. 154 00:09:31,100 --> 00:09:46,220 And as a vendor, you know, and particularly I've been a startup founder, so as a startup vendor, you either want to become a monopoly or you want to become acquired at a price that indicates you were going to become a monopoly. 155 00:09:47,100 --> 00:09:58,880 And so if you're going to be part of an ecosystem, there needs, you know, the best thing that Microsoft did, honestly, was when they saw a market that they planned on massacring, they bought up the vendors in it. 156 00:09:59,340 --> 00:10:01,560 They said, look, we want to own that space. 157 00:10:01,800 --> 00:10:02,760 We're going to buy you. 158 00:10:02,760 --> 00:10:10,960 As opposed to we are going to obliterate you by undercutting and disintermediating. 159 00:10:11,840 --> 00:10:13,640 It's a warm, wet embrace of Redmond. 160 00:10:13,880 --> 00:10:14,120 Right. 161 00:10:14,420 --> 00:10:16,380 And there's a bunch of safeties in here. 162 00:10:16,560 --> 00:10:27,700 And I think the Redmond embrace, if you compare it to, let's say, the Apple marketplace today and the iOS, if you were packaging executables and you were a member of the Microsoft Partner Program, 163 00:10:27,700 --> 00:10:29,620 they were still your customers. 164 00:10:30,080 --> 00:10:31,240 You sold to them directly. 165 00:10:31,420 --> 00:10:32,200 You priced it. 166 00:10:32,460 --> 00:10:33,720 You wrote your own SLA. 167 00:10:34,060 --> 00:10:39,180 You went through a certification effort, but Microsoft didn't try and get between you and your customer. 168 00:10:39,820 --> 00:10:47,760 And there are other marketplaces where the platform has decided to interject themselves in a way that's frankly kind of dangerous. 169 00:10:48,420 --> 00:10:56,740 So I think we're trying to maintain that position of saying what is best for the customer is always in the long-term best for Pivotal. 170 00:10:57,660 --> 00:11:03,320 And if that means they prefer our partners' products to ours, I think that's actually great. 171 00:11:03,720 --> 00:11:06,180 I think the rising tide lifts all boats. 172 00:11:06,880 --> 00:11:09,520 So I had one more question, but now I have two. 173 00:11:11,500 --> 00:11:22,400 I've noticed the way we do product management around here is very hyper-agile, which is to say, and I'm doing this in a dismissive, funny way to make a point, 174 00:11:22,480 --> 00:11:23,920 and it's just like, there's no roadmaps. 175 00:11:26,240 --> 00:11:31,160 And instead of roadmaps, you're more adaptive in what you're doing based on the stakeholders and customers and users. 176 00:11:31,540 --> 00:11:39,320 So the risk of a roadmap is, as this guy Ben Thompson always jokes, is like, you might be successful after a year and have done exactly what you wanted, 177 00:11:39,440 --> 00:11:40,500 and that's the wrong thing. 178 00:11:41,200 --> 00:11:43,040 So it can be better to be adaptive. 179 00:11:43,200 --> 00:11:50,040 And so I'm curious how you see that mentality being different in an ISV partner world, right? 180 00:11:50,080 --> 00:11:52,580 Like, you were talking about how, you know, you have more of a team. 181 00:11:52,680 --> 00:11:53,900 I'm putting words in your mouth. 182 00:11:54,080 --> 00:11:55,200 That's a little more adaptive. 183 00:11:55,320 --> 00:12:01,600 But I would imagine in traditional partner work, you sort of like, you know, anytime there's two parties, there's a lot of word docs involved. 184 00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:07,400 And so I imagine, like, you spec things out traditionally with partners, and it's like, it's all protective. 185 00:12:07,400 --> 00:12:11,460 Like, in case something goes bad, we go back and refer to what we promised to do and all this nonsense. 186 00:12:11,680 --> 00:12:16,460 But if you have more of a Pivotal way of doing things, like, does that change that at all? 187 00:12:16,520 --> 00:12:18,460 Or are there still a lot of word docs involved? 188 00:12:18,640 --> 00:12:19,900 Or how do you fit that in? 189 00:12:20,060 --> 00:12:29,180 Yeah, I often joke, but I'm usually serious, that I have the only engineering team inside Pivotal that doesn't do Pivotal things, right? 190 00:12:29,220 --> 00:12:31,260 We're not all pair programming all the time. 191 00:12:31,360 --> 00:12:32,560 We're not all test-driven development. 192 00:12:32,880 --> 00:12:34,820 We're not all agile backlog. 193 00:12:35,020 --> 00:12:38,780 And the reason is our mandate is to match the style of our partner. 194 00:12:39,220 --> 00:12:39,680 Oh, right, right. 195 00:12:39,700 --> 00:12:47,600 And so if they're an SDLC shop and our customers are really excited about their products, we will figure out how to work with them. 196 00:12:47,700 --> 00:12:52,800 So we do have a lot of partners where we have taught them to pair program because they were excited to do that. 197 00:12:52,800 --> 00:12:58,060 Or they were already doing it and we've gone to their offices and paired up with their developers. 198 00:12:58,700 --> 00:13:05,080 We also have a small number of partners where we've put a Gantt chart together and a 20-page Word doc with a bunch of diagrams. 199 00:13:05,080 --> 00:13:09,580 And we've argued about the diagrams instead of writing code and arguing about the code. 200 00:13:11,520 --> 00:13:14,500 And frankly, both approaches have worked. 201 00:13:15,180 --> 00:13:23,200 What's interesting is, I mean, I get back to this accordion thesis just because I like the sort of mental picture of a bunch of people playing accordion. 202 00:13:23,240 --> 00:13:24,180 And I used to play accordion. 203 00:13:25,000 --> 00:13:26,340 Oh, the shit comes out. 204 00:13:26,820 --> 00:13:27,280 There you go. 205 00:13:29,380 --> 00:13:36,040 So, you know, not all areas of IT are innovating all the time at the same speed. 206 00:13:36,160 --> 00:13:43,400 And there are places in the stack where there are very necessary capabilities that are not exciting, right? 207 00:13:43,440 --> 00:13:45,140 And they don't need to be exciting. 208 00:13:45,420 --> 00:13:54,320 And so in a certain sense, when the requirements are really well identified and this is a must-have but boring, I'm thinking of antivirus, right? 209 00:13:54,760 --> 00:13:58,420 I'm sure someone out there would say that there is innovation going on in antivirus. 210 00:13:58,520 --> 00:14:00,700 For us, it is generally a checkbox. 211 00:14:00,800 --> 00:14:04,420 We're doing very innovative things in security, but not on the antivirus side. 212 00:14:04,680 --> 00:14:12,800 And so working with AV partners has really been a matter of saying, here's the very basic checklist that covers regulatory compliance. 213 00:14:13,200 --> 00:14:13,280 Right. 214 00:14:13,400 --> 00:14:17,360 Let's get that done in this time frame for these accounts. 215 00:14:17,540 --> 00:14:17,720 Yeah. 216 00:14:17,820 --> 00:14:18,860 It looks like a Gantt chart. 217 00:14:18,880 --> 00:14:20,100 Yeah, I guess that makes sense. 218 00:14:20,140 --> 00:14:26,360 I mean, Gantt charts and Waterfall and all that upfront stuff are a lot less dangerous if you basically know exactly what you want. 219 00:14:26,460 --> 00:14:27,320 I mean, back to the joke. 220 00:14:27,580 --> 00:14:27,700 Right. 221 00:14:27,700 --> 00:14:32,960 But there are, and it would also make sense that in the building out the partner ecosystem, 222 00:14:33,200 --> 00:14:40,840 which is to say, not all of it, but a fair chunk of it is expected behavior that doesn't already come in the platform that you get through partners. 223 00:14:40,840 --> 00:14:44,820 Like, the fact that it's expected behavior is like, well, we know exactly what it should do. 224 00:14:44,900 --> 00:14:46,440 So we don't have to invent all of it. 225 00:14:46,640 --> 00:14:46,740 Right. 226 00:14:46,900 --> 00:14:47,100 Yeah. 227 00:14:47,460 --> 00:14:47,600 Right. 228 00:14:47,680 --> 00:14:52,220 And it's actually not high value for us to do it because just because it's expected doesn't mean it's easy. 229 00:14:52,500 --> 00:14:52,840 Right, right. 230 00:14:52,840 --> 00:14:53,600 It can be hard. 231 00:14:53,720 --> 00:14:54,600 It's just well understood. 232 00:14:54,920 --> 00:14:55,120 Yeah. 233 00:14:55,680 --> 00:14:59,840 So you've name dropped a couple of things along the way, some of our favorite partners. 234 00:15:00,220 --> 00:15:09,140 As a co-estor on set of categories that when our customers come to us and say, look, I need to be able to do X, Y, Z, do you feel like that's a pretty discreet set of things? 235 00:15:09,320 --> 00:15:10,420 There's always going to be outliers. 236 00:15:10,580 --> 00:15:14,380 But what are those core categories of things that people want to plug into a platform? 237 00:15:14,860 --> 00:15:21,000 You know what's fun is that we use the partner ecosystem to identify the maturity of our accounts. 238 00:15:22,140 --> 00:15:29,100 And usually our customers start asking for table stakes. 239 00:15:29,240 --> 00:15:31,120 The table stakes are, hey, we need source control. 240 00:15:31,520 --> 00:15:32,580 We need CI tooling. 241 00:15:33,200 --> 00:15:37,060 We need some kind of artifact repository. 242 00:15:37,660 --> 00:15:40,020 We've got to at least be able to do some dev work. 243 00:15:40,160 --> 00:15:41,300 So they start with dev tools. 244 00:15:41,720 --> 00:15:44,540 And then they start going out into prod and they say, oh, we need APM. 245 00:15:44,860 --> 00:15:48,540 Because now that we've built a bunch of software, we need to understand what's going on. 246 00:15:48,620 --> 00:15:49,920 So then we get into APM tools. 247 00:15:50,760 --> 00:16:00,940 And then they say, oh, okay, so now that we're done connecting to systems of record in our initial, like, in the basement Oracle database, we want to start using next generation data stores. 248 00:16:01,040 --> 00:16:01,740 We want some NoSQL. 249 00:16:02,400 --> 00:16:07,640 So then we see, you know, Cassandra, Mongo, Couch, and so on. 250 00:16:09,660 --> 00:16:32,580 As the big data side of the data to apps equation is finally coming together, and I've been really excited about Spring Cloud data flow, especially this week, we're now seeing more and more pull to say, hey, give us Spark and Kafka and Hadoop and like 20 other things in that space. 251 00:16:32,580 --> 00:16:35,280 They're like, now we really want to just connect everything together. 252 00:16:35,760 --> 00:16:37,900 Oh, and by the way, now we need integration platforms. 253 00:16:38,180 --> 00:16:44,420 So we see this spread into more and more systems of engagement on the one side and more and more systems of record on the other side. 254 00:16:46,020 --> 00:16:47,900 It's an interesting pull. 255 00:16:48,120 --> 00:16:56,400 I mean, I guess to answer your question long-windedly, there's no simple category, which is why we have so many partners and why it looks like it's going to expand. 256 00:16:56,580 --> 00:16:58,980 I mean, think about Windows circa 1992. 257 00:16:59,400 --> 00:17:01,320 People are like, what do you want to do with an operating system? 258 00:17:01,880 --> 00:17:01,920 Right? 259 00:17:02,220 --> 00:17:07,080 You've called out things like data services, messaging, mobile back into the surface, AP and things like that. 260 00:17:07,220 --> 00:17:07,300 Yeah. 261 00:17:08,200 --> 00:17:12,120 I think we'll go all the way up the stack, which is, I guess, exciting. 262 00:17:12,120 --> 00:17:19,900 You point out an interesting journey there of, you know, potentially the company doesn't just look at a platform and say, all right, give me all your new hotness and that's where I deploy my stuff. 263 00:17:19,980 --> 00:17:24,420 I know, I'd love you to maybe rant for a second, but you hate the term migration. 264 00:17:24,580 --> 00:17:24,740 Yeah. 265 00:17:25,080 --> 00:17:25,780 And things like that. 266 00:17:25,820 --> 00:17:34,580 But, you know, as a shop's looking at a platform like PCF or what have you and saying, I want to start using this and getting real value out of that, that probably doesn't mean just net new stuff. 267 00:17:34,880 --> 00:17:35,080 Right. 268 00:17:35,080 --> 00:17:40,080 It says, okay, I've got this whole stable of stuff that, you know, maybe is fine where it is. 269 00:17:40,140 --> 00:17:40,980 Maybe I do want to move it. 270 00:17:41,200 --> 00:17:47,040 But, you know, as you look at that, what role does a marketplace play when it comes into pick the right word, refactoring, refugging? 271 00:17:47,580 --> 00:17:49,260 So, first of all, why do you hate the word migration? 272 00:17:49,460 --> 00:17:54,380 And then secondarily, how does an ecosystem help whatever we want to call this thing of moving things? 273 00:17:54,880 --> 00:17:58,040 I hate the word because lift and shift has no value. 274 00:17:58,380 --> 00:17:58,560 Right. 275 00:17:58,560 --> 00:18:03,360 So, the idea of a migration is just, hey, let's take it from A and put it in B and somehow that will be better. 276 00:18:05,240 --> 00:18:06,220 It's never better. 277 00:18:06,520 --> 00:18:08,700 And it costs a lot of money to move it, so why would you bother? 278 00:18:09,660 --> 00:18:19,720 But there's tremendous value in getting apps onto the platform if you tweak them enough that they can get value out of being in a cloud-native environment. 279 00:18:19,720 --> 00:18:28,440 And so, I love the term re-platforming if what you're focused on is the minimum amount of refactor required to take advantage of the platform. 280 00:18:28,840 --> 00:18:32,820 And I love the term refactoring because it's well understood from an engineering standpoint. 281 00:18:33,580 --> 00:18:40,560 Now, the line, people say, look, we start with Greenfield apps not because that's the only place where we can use a platform, 282 00:18:40,560 --> 00:18:50,520 but because typically what's hard about adopting cloud-native is not tech, it's people and organizational process and the rules and checklists 283 00:18:50,520 --> 00:18:54,680 and the thousand people in every organization who are allowed to say no and not allowed to say yes. 284 00:18:55,900 --> 00:19:03,660 And so, it's easier to go and figure those things out with Greenfield projects, say, hey, let's go build some systems of engagement first. 285 00:19:04,720 --> 00:19:09,840 But over time, your systems of engagement always have to connect to the systems of record. 286 00:19:09,840 --> 00:19:14,080 And I think about mobile apps and everyone says, oh, mobile apps initially were just for marketing, right? 287 00:19:14,140 --> 00:19:16,840 Or then they were new databases and they were just cute loyalty stuff. 288 00:19:17,560 --> 00:19:21,180 And then sooner or later, you're like, oh, well, we want to do search, product search. 289 00:19:21,920 --> 00:19:27,740 Okay, we've got to tie into the product database, which usually is actually buried in the POS system. 290 00:19:28,320 --> 00:19:35,620 Oh, well, now we want to do all of our customer service experience and new user sign-up and we need to tie into the... 291 00:19:35,620 --> 00:19:40,320 At some point, you realize every system of record is also part of your systems of engagement. 292 00:19:40,420 --> 00:19:53,160 So, those integration points, for a really savvy organization, not only are they looking at the tile format and our partner ecosystem as the way to manage connective tissue, 293 00:19:53,420 --> 00:19:54,420 they're writing their own tiles. 294 00:19:54,420 --> 00:20:06,180 They're building their own internal marketplace and they're using Pivotal Cloud Foundry as the platform to deliver their internal services as well as external partner services. 295 00:20:08,080 --> 00:20:15,120 You know, it reminds me of Jeff Bezos' famous email saying, look, everything at Amazon is going to be a web service or you're fired. 296 00:20:15,380 --> 00:20:16,580 Thank you very much and have a nice day. 297 00:20:17,660 --> 00:20:22,260 But that is what's happening with these large-scale re-platforming. 298 00:20:22,260 --> 00:20:31,780 They're saying, look, everything inside the organization is going to be a service on Cloud Foundry and it's going to use this set of binding ideas. 299 00:20:33,460 --> 00:20:40,960 So, then I wanted to ask you about the open control stuff you worked on to wrap up with because that's always fascinating. 300 00:20:41,820 --> 00:20:46,540 You know, more YAML in the world can't help but help. 301 00:20:47,080 --> 00:20:47,600 I don't know. 302 00:20:48,160 --> 00:20:52,700 But before that, so we talked a lot about, I would say, the sort of tech partnerships. 303 00:20:52,880 --> 00:20:59,680 So, what do we do with SIs and, I don't know, warm bodies and meatware people and some of the software? 304 00:20:59,900 --> 00:21:03,380 So, what's an overview of how that functions around here? 305 00:21:03,520 --> 00:21:03,680 Yeah. 306 00:21:04,460 --> 00:21:07,820 There are basically two kinds of things a partner can do. 307 00:21:08,020 --> 00:21:13,180 They can deliver PCF, which typically means, you know, install and configure it. 308 00:21:13,520 --> 00:21:26,100 And we can install and configure PCF in a couple of hours, but a real enterprise-grade deployment is tying back into those key systems, authentication, authorization, logging, SIEM, and so on. 309 00:21:26,820 --> 00:21:30,540 And so, there's some well-understood but boring work there, right? 310 00:21:30,940 --> 00:21:40,220 And SIs do it not because they love it, because it's not great margins and it is usually fixed duration, but because it maintains a trusted relationship with the account. 311 00:21:40,360 --> 00:21:40,500 Yeah. 312 00:21:40,940 --> 00:21:46,540 The second and more interesting side is typically scale-out of this refactoring and replatforming work. 313 00:21:48,220 --> 00:21:59,900 And look, Pivotal Labs is an amazing, probably the world's premier development shop in terms of agile and lean, but there are a fixed number of us, right? 314 00:22:00,140 --> 00:22:02,400 The whole company is only a couple thousand people. 315 00:22:02,940 --> 00:22:11,800 So, when we have customers who say, look, we've got 30,000 of our own developers, we'd like you to give a staff aug of another 10,000, we're just not in that business. 316 00:22:11,880 --> 00:22:12,080 Right. 317 00:22:13,320 --> 00:22:15,140 But it's a huge business. 318 00:22:15,380 --> 00:22:26,080 And so, a lot of our largest scale-out accounts have now been saying, you know, train up partners, bring them to the table, tell us they're certified, embed some of your own people in that relationship. 319 00:22:27,080 --> 00:22:36,300 And so, we've been driving all of those programs, certification programs, and sales enablement, as well as practitioner enablement, and then a lot of joint go-to-market. 320 00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:49,760 So, when you, in your position, when you look at, like, staff augmentation, how it is nowadays, do you think it's changed a lot for this kind of cloud-native development, or is it still basically like, oh, we need people to write the code? 321 00:22:49,760 --> 00:22:58,960 I mean, like, we spend a lot of time in Pivotal marketing, I guess, to be crass about it, like, telling people how they need to do things differently. 322 00:22:59,200 --> 00:22:59,380 Right. 323 00:22:59,560 --> 00:23:05,880 And so, I wonder if in the staff augmentation world, when you're working on a platform like this, does that add up, or is it more traditional? 324 00:23:06,280 --> 00:23:08,440 It is different. 325 00:23:08,960 --> 00:23:13,640 I think the reality is the difference is sort of split. 326 00:23:13,640 --> 00:23:26,780 But, you know, Pivotal takes the extreme opinionated view of, you know, all pairs, all the time, all test-driven, all the time, never more than eight people on a team, and maybe 12 in a pinch. 327 00:23:27,420 --> 00:23:35,080 And we see, and the old world is 40 people in a very hot room in India for three years. 328 00:23:37,220 --> 00:23:43,160 And so, you know, in a re-platforming, re-factoring era, we see, we've definitely seen team sizes come down. 329 00:23:43,280 --> 00:23:46,240 We do see a standard team size closer to two pizzas. 330 00:23:46,840 --> 00:23:49,720 They have bigger pizzas in other parts of the world, I think. 331 00:23:49,880 --> 00:23:51,220 So those teams are closer to 20. 332 00:23:52,260 --> 00:23:53,480 Or smaller appetites. 333 00:23:54,180 --> 00:23:56,160 Or one slice apiece, something. 334 00:23:57,320 --> 00:24:01,080 They, you know, they are shorter-duration projects. 335 00:24:01,240 --> 00:24:06,300 They're six-week or 12-week or 24-week engagements as opposed to three years. 336 00:24:06,300 --> 00:24:07,700 Early shorter to the first delivery. 337 00:24:08,060 --> 00:24:08,920 Yeah, yeah. 338 00:24:09,200 --> 00:24:19,140 They're not, they're still not doing, you know, CD in terms of day one we push code, during the interview we push code, we push code, you know, before we go home and when we get up in the morning. 339 00:24:19,500 --> 00:24:27,520 But we do see, you know, even in an outsourced staff org model, we see deployed production once a week. 340 00:24:27,720 --> 00:24:27,960 Right. 341 00:24:28,260 --> 00:24:30,000 Which is amazingly different. 342 00:24:30,200 --> 00:24:31,100 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 343 00:24:31,240 --> 00:24:33,360 So, I know you've got to go. 344 00:24:33,420 --> 00:24:34,640 We keep having people come in here. 345 00:24:34,820 --> 00:24:34,920 Yeah. 346 00:24:34,920 --> 00:24:40,340 But, so the last thing, like, on the changing topics, on the open control front, right? 347 00:24:40,480 --> 00:24:40,580 Yeah. 348 00:24:40,680 --> 00:24:44,420 So, first of all, I'll ask two questions and then let you just burn the rest of our time. 349 00:24:45,720 --> 00:24:48,480 So, one, can you just give us a brief overview of what it is? 350 00:24:48,580 --> 00:24:56,780 And two, like, when I look at it, it seems like the insight that you have, not you, but one has with open control is like, oh, we just need to document everything. 351 00:24:57,040 --> 00:24:59,420 Like, we actually have to do what we said we did. 352 00:24:59,480 --> 00:25:00,780 That's sort of important. 353 00:25:01,180 --> 00:25:06,380 But the key bottleneck with a lot of compliance stuff is documenting it. 354 00:25:06,380 --> 00:25:10,940 And so, I wonder if that's like, is that true or is that just something I made up? 355 00:25:10,980 --> 00:25:13,060 So, first of all, what is open control? 356 00:25:13,160 --> 00:25:20,660 So, open control is a open source project and community with a bunch of participants. 357 00:25:21,780 --> 00:25:28,220 I'd say the largest number today work for the GSA, although there are a lot of other agencies and private companies involved now. 358 00:25:28,320 --> 00:25:29,060 And GSA is? 359 00:25:29,200 --> 00:25:30,340 That's the General Services Administration. 360 00:25:30,340 --> 00:25:32,220 The General Services Administration of the United States government. 361 00:25:32,740 --> 00:25:37,800 We're going to have the first open control symposium probably end of September, early October. 362 00:25:37,960 --> 00:25:42,480 There's a survey up on open-control.org right now if you want to go. 363 00:25:42,600 --> 00:25:43,660 Oh, no more XYZ? 364 00:25:43,820 --> 00:25:44,300 What happened? 365 00:25:44,420 --> 00:25:45,460 XYZ also works. 366 00:25:45,920 --> 00:25:46,240 All right. 367 00:25:46,240 --> 00:25:49,140 But government agencies have a real problem with strange domain names. 368 00:25:50,600 --> 00:25:52,300 So, yeah, we've retired that. 369 00:25:52,920 --> 00:26:02,300 So, what it is is the idea that we treat infrastructure as code, we treat code as code, and then we treat compliance as paperwork. 370 00:26:02,880 --> 00:26:03,160 Right. 371 00:26:03,160 --> 00:26:05,120 And so, why not compliance as code? 372 00:26:06,280 --> 00:26:06,980 Put simply. 373 00:26:07,960 --> 00:26:16,880 It's something we tried to do years ago at NASA before kind of the tools were ready or the community was ready, and it's getting a lot of traction now. 374 00:26:16,880 --> 00:26:29,220 So, cloud.gov, which is Cloud Foundry run by the GSA, is using open control for their initial authorization to operate, their initial compliance effort, as are some other agencies. 375 00:26:30,980 --> 00:26:41,280 And so, it's YAML schemas and Go and Python tools for pipelining YAML into compliance. 376 00:26:42,280 --> 00:26:55,080 And we're working kind of backwards from the fact that today's auditors need a Word document in a specific format, but rather than us treating that as the artifact, we're treating that like a binary deployed in production. 377 00:26:55,200 --> 00:27:02,500 It should be immutable, and when it needs to change, we should change the pipeline behind it and change the source artifacts. 378 00:27:03,000 --> 00:27:14,400 So, we're treating compliance source code as being YAML, which can be in the same repositories along with the applications and along with the infrastructure configuration and so on. 379 00:27:14,680 --> 00:27:23,100 So, you can think of every aspect of your platform as being versioned and living in source control. 380 00:27:23,100 --> 00:27:27,500 And then you can also push that down further to where work is happening. 381 00:27:27,600 --> 00:27:35,080 The developers can start modifying that so you don't have the, what's the, the sort of like, it's not an analog loophole, although I guess it kind of is. 382 00:27:35,300 --> 00:27:40,780 There's a bad analog loophole between developers writing code, email, then going to a Word doc. 383 00:27:40,960 --> 00:27:42,720 And so, you can kind of close that loop out. 384 00:27:42,840 --> 00:27:42,980 Yeah. 385 00:27:43,780 --> 00:27:50,840 And you're also circumventing the fact that auditors have to come back in and interview the developers later on to be like, how does this work? 386 00:27:50,960 --> 00:27:53,220 Does this, should I test it this way or that way? 387 00:27:53,520 --> 00:27:56,380 Which, you know, is this nine-month process after the code's done. 388 00:27:56,380 --> 00:28:00,960 When you get to CD in government, you want to actually push code once a week or once a day. 389 00:28:01,420 --> 00:28:06,240 You have to update that documentation and have it signed off every time you want to push code. 390 00:28:06,860 --> 00:28:10,480 And so, if that documentation cycle is typically nine months, CD is impossible. 391 00:28:10,900 --> 00:28:23,600 So, OpenControl is really, I mean, fingers crossed, as a community effort, it's the only thing I've seen enabling continuous delivery for government agencies. 392 00:28:23,740 --> 00:28:23,940 Yeah. 393 00:28:24,120 --> 00:28:24,360 All right. 394 00:28:24,400 --> 00:28:24,760 Well, great. 395 00:28:25,100 --> 00:28:28,620 Well, tell people, I don't know, where your Twitter or other nonsense is online. 396 00:28:28,860 --> 00:28:29,160 Yeah. 397 00:28:29,280 --> 00:28:32,160 Jay McKenty, M-C-K-E-N-T-Y. 398 00:28:32,760 --> 00:28:36,040 And you have a blog that, like, you published the last five years ago or something. 399 00:28:36,040 --> 00:28:36,360 Yeah. 400 00:28:36,840 --> 00:28:41,760 I'm not, I spend a lot of time supporting my team blogging, you know. 401 00:28:42,180 --> 00:28:44,980 I think, like most people, Twitter is where people publish now. 402 00:28:45,360 --> 00:28:45,460 Yeah. 403 00:28:45,460 --> 00:28:47,540 Blogs are just a weird affectation. 404 00:28:47,820 --> 00:28:50,440 How do people send in ideas for things they'd love to see in our marketplace? 405 00:28:50,840 --> 00:28:51,940 Ah, that's a great question. 406 00:28:52,900 --> 00:28:59,260 You know, if you're already a Pivotal customer, just grab your sales rep or your platform architect. 407 00:28:59,580 --> 00:29:00,800 They know how to get a hold of us. 408 00:29:00,880 --> 00:29:05,560 If you're outside the ecosystem, just send an email to isv at pivotal.io. 409 00:29:06,120 --> 00:29:06,400 Awesome. 410 00:29:06,720 --> 00:29:07,000 Great. 411 00:29:07,180 --> 00:29:08,340 Well, we'll see everyone next time. 412 00:29:08,660 --> 00:29:09,000 Thanks. 413 00:29:09,240 --> 00:29:09,740 Thanks so much. 414 00:29:11,700 --> 00:29:13,240 Try not to pound the table. 415 00:29:13,820 --> 00:29:16,060 Don't go all, uh, what was that, guys? 416 00:29:16,280 --> 00:29:16,640 Russian? 417 00:29:17,360 --> 00:29:18,500 Don't take your shoe off. 418 00:29:19,280 --> 00:29:21,460 All my references are, like, 40 years old or so. 419 00:29:21,460 --> 00:29:23,720 No, but Stanford's not going to take off. 420 00:29:24,020 --> 00:29:24,700 That's right. 421 00:29:24,720 --> 00:29:25,960 Did you guys catch what it was gone? 422 00:29:26,400 --> 00:29:26,740 Yeah. 423 00:29:26,800 --> 00:29:27,800 It was rock at last.