1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,060 So I've rediscovered lentils. 2 00:00:03,420 --> 00:00:08,240 Now, when I was in the 80s, and by when, I guess I mean alive as a child. 3 00:00:08,240 --> 00:00:09,560 I don't mean like I was time traveling. 4 00:00:10,400 --> 00:00:18,660 My mother somehow got mixed up with this person who was big into, I don't know, Indian mysticism stuff. 5 00:00:18,920 --> 00:00:19,180 I don't know. 6 00:00:19,300 --> 00:00:25,440 And we spent some time and a lot of time in some, I don't know the right word for it, some ashram up in Rochester or something. 7 00:00:25,660 --> 00:00:27,840 And, man, I remember the food was terrible. 8 00:00:28,200 --> 00:00:30,940 And I think this got me in dim view of lentils. 9 00:00:31,020 --> 00:00:32,100 But recently, I figured it out. 10 00:00:32,100 --> 00:00:36,100 So we have a guest on who will ask to introduce himself shortly. 11 00:00:36,780 --> 00:00:44,060 I wanted to get y'all's input on like proper lentil preparation because all I have so far is like salt, garlic, and a bay leaf. 12 00:00:44,480 --> 00:00:47,640 And I experimented a little bit with some tomatoes today. 13 00:00:47,760 --> 00:00:48,320 Turned out well. 14 00:00:48,380 --> 00:00:52,900 But surely, surely that you guys have some sort of like lentil thing you would pro-offer. 15 00:00:54,780 --> 00:00:58,340 You have high expectations of this size. 16 00:00:58,760 --> 00:01:00,520 I'll do a mean lentil soup. 17 00:01:00,760 --> 00:01:02,100 That's my extent of lentils. 18 00:01:02,300 --> 00:01:02,560 Okay. 19 00:01:02,780 --> 00:01:03,640 So lentil soup. 20 00:01:04,560 --> 00:01:11,000 I feel like if you put some bacon in that preparation, you might come out with a tastier thing. 21 00:01:11,060 --> 00:01:13,920 But I know your wife, she's on the vegetarian box, right? 22 00:01:13,920 --> 00:01:14,700 Well, she used to be. 23 00:01:14,780 --> 00:01:15,420 She used to be. 24 00:01:15,520 --> 00:01:15,740 Oh. 25 00:01:15,820 --> 00:01:16,080 No longer. 26 00:01:16,080 --> 00:01:16,760 She's coming back. 27 00:01:17,140 --> 00:01:17,420 Yeah. 28 00:01:17,660 --> 00:01:18,520 Back to the light. 29 00:01:18,780 --> 00:01:19,040 Yeah. 30 00:01:19,100 --> 00:01:19,520 That's right. 31 00:01:19,740 --> 00:01:19,960 That's right. 32 00:01:20,020 --> 00:01:21,940 She's returned from the vegetarian. 33 00:01:22,400 --> 00:01:22,620 Yeah. 34 00:01:22,940 --> 00:01:24,900 It was a long journey. 35 00:01:25,180 --> 00:01:27,600 Kind of like Cain walking the deserts, I guess. 36 00:01:27,940 --> 00:01:28,560 Through the darkness. 37 00:01:28,920 --> 00:01:29,440 That's right. 38 00:01:30,040 --> 00:01:32,340 Well, why don't you introduce yourself briefly, guest? 39 00:01:33,540 --> 00:01:33,900 Sure. 40 00:01:34,080 --> 00:01:35,820 This is Ian Andrews. 41 00:01:36,760 --> 00:01:50,760 I'm VP of products at Pivotal, which means that I get to hang out with Richard and yourself quite a bit, as well as the rest of the corporate marketing and product folks at Pivotal. 42 00:01:51,200 --> 00:01:55,900 I get to have a little bit of a say in product strategy every now and then when they let me in that meeting. 43 00:01:57,360 --> 00:02:10,960 And I've been around since a little bit before the beginning of Pivotal, so I'm always game for trivia or history challenges about where Pivotal came from and where we're going, if we happen to veer into those topics today. 44 00:02:11,240 --> 00:02:11,840 Yeah, yeah. 45 00:02:12,360 --> 00:02:16,760 One day we should write down a chronology of all the various brand names we've used for things. 46 00:02:16,760 --> 00:02:22,100 I think that would be fun when we have spare time for Cain humanity. 47 00:02:24,180 --> 00:02:25,240 I'm game for that. 48 00:02:25,540 --> 00:02:32,280 It would have to go back to the depths of my memory for sure, but it could turn out to be a fun little game. 49 00:02:32,520 --> 00:02:33,160 That's right. 50 00:02:33,500 --> 00:02:40,180 Well, I wanted to get Ian on to talk about some systems of record and bimodal stuff, which we'll get to. 51 00:02:40,240 --> 00:02:42,920 We don't really have a lot of news to go over since last time. 52 00:02:43,020 --> 00:02:44,760 I'll just mention a few things. 53 00:02:44,840 --> 00:02:45,980 I don't know if you all two have anything. 54 00:02:45,980 --> 00:02:52,160 One, I write a book review over at the News Stack, and I try to do it every couple of months. 55 00:02:52,240 --> 00:02:56,220 And by do, I mean this is the second one that I've done, so bully for me. 56 00:02:56,660 --> 00:03:02,440 But I wrote one recently that I think, given the stuff that we all work on and listeners do, I think might be interesting. 57 00:03:02,560 --> 00:03:05,740 It's all about automation and digital transformation. 58 00:03:05,980 --> 00:03:11,960 I look at these two books called The Wealth of Humans and then one that's called Silicon or Silicon Collar. 59 00:03:12,520 --> 00:03:19,100 And they're kind of like, you know, the frowny face and the happy face of the effects of digital transformation. 60 00:03:19,400 --> 00:03:21,480 And I think it's kind of worth looking at them. 61 00:03:21,620 --> 00:03:34,720 The second one in particular, if you're just all like about the marketing and use cases, it's just like a compendium of positive use cases about digital transformation, which is fun. 62 00:03:34,720 --> 00:03:41,720 And there's some commentary from John Alspaugh on my Facebook posting that points to some good follow-up things to look at. 63 00:03:42,240 --> 00:03:46,960 And then also, you know, I try to keep politics out of this as much as possible. 64 00:03:46,960 --> 00:03:58,380 But if you're interested in my take and by some internal conversation that we've had at Pivotal is kind of reflective of several Pivotal people about kind of what's going on in American politics. 65 00:03:58,380 --> 00:04:02,780 I'll put a link to it in the show notes on my own blog that I think summarizes. 66 00:04:03,440 --> 00:04:09,740 I would say like what's going – how all of this stuff affects the tech world and how I would recommend thinking about it. 67 00:04:10,440 --> 00:04:16,140 And then finally, I'll be next week in Charlotte at DevOps Days Charlotte. 68 00:04:16,360 --> 00:04:22,840 I think I hesitate to aggrandize it, if that's a word, and saying I have the day two keynote. 69 00:04:23,100 --> 00:04:24,400 But I have the day two keynote. 70 00:04:24,820 --> 00:04:32,320 I think my charity majors, Mipsy Tipsy, she's doing the first one, which I'm looking forward to. 71 00:04:32,420 --> 00:04:37,380 I think – I don't know if I've ever seen her give a talk in person, but she's delightful. 72 00:04:38,160 --> 00:04:45,740 So if you're in the Charlotte area or you want to just like, you know, be like Nelly and drop some money to fly over there all of a sudden, you should come see us. 73 00:04:45,820 --> 00:04:51,420 We'll have a Pivotal booth there and give away some books, and we might even have some like pens or something. 74 00:04:51,880 --> 00:04:53,400 But that's all I got for this week. 75 00:04:53,740 --> 00:04:56,420 I think we also have some spare passes for DevOps Days Charlotte. 76 00:04:56,420 --> 00:05:04,820 But if you email me at Coté at Pivotal.io, I'll – send me a good lentil recipe if you want, and I'll see about giving you a pass. 77 00:05:05,520 --> 00:05:07,820 Do you guys have any newsy stuff you wanted to go over? 78 00:05:08,940 --> 00:05:09,220 No. 79 00:05:09,320 --> 00:05:11,220 I mean, congrats on making it, though, keynoting. 80 00:05:11,320 --> 00:05:12,440 It's a long journey. 81 00:05:12,640 --> 00:05:12,960 That's right. 82 00:05:13,160 --> 00:05:15,300 You know, things are finally happening for me, Richard. 83 00:05:16,320 --> 00:05:18,020 It's about damn time. 84 00:05:18,200 --> 00:05:18,480 That's right. 85 00:05:21,620 --> 00:05:33,320 Hey, one news item of note, maybe a little premature, I don't know, since it's not until June, but Cloud Foundry Summit is happening in the beginning of June in Santa Clara. 86 00:05:33,960 --> 00:05:37,260 The call for papers is still open for a couple weeks. 87 00:05:37,560 --> 00:05:42,240 So I think we have until February 19th, which is like maybe three weeks from now, something like that. 88 00:05:43,080 --> 00:05:52,720 So anybody that wants to talk at that event, they're still accepting submissions, and I think they'd love to have folks to listen to this podcast, at least, would be a good fit. 89 00:05:53,040 --> 00:05:53,500 Yeah, yeah. 90 00:05:53,500 --> 00:05:54,060 Yeah, great call. 91 00:05:54,520 --> 00:05:54,780 Yeah. 92 00:05:55,160 --> 00:06:02,300 Pivotal has a track, so obviously that doesn't impact how people submit, but I think we'll be doing one on Java microservices. 93 00:06:02,500 --> 00:06:06,940 So if you have things on that topic as well, you know that's going to be a focus that we're looking out for. 94 00:06:07,120 --> 00:06:15,180 I think it's extremely similar to our own SpringOne platform, which I believe is in December in San Francisco. 95 00:06:16,220 --> 00:06:16,600 That's right. 96 00:06:16,860 --> 00:06:22,080 But I think it has a good mixture of, I don't know, the suits and the nerds, if you will. 97 00:06:22,200 --> 00:06:29,980 So there's a lot of talks about how people are doing cloud-native stuff and using all the great Cloud Foundry distros. 98 00:06:30,580 --> 00:06:33,020 And then there's also a lot of highly technical talks. 99 00:06:33,380 --> 00:06:34,740 So it's great. 100 00:06:34,740 --> 00:06:38,880 And I think the booth floor there is one of the better ones as well. 101 00:06:39,100 --> 00:06:40,660 So that's a good recommendation, Ian. 102 00:06:41,920 --> 00:06:45,980 And on the topic of giveaways, actually, before you jump ahead. 103 00:06:46,300 --> 00:06:52,700 So the team has come up with a new giveaway for all these trade shows and events and conferences that we sponsor. 104 00:06:53,520 --> 00:06:58,980 I don't know if you'll have them in Charlotte, but maybe we could figure out how to FedEx some to you. 105 00:06:59,580 --> 00:07:08,360 In the world of Big Brother that we now live in, where everybody's got a camera on all the time, it's a camera cover for the one that's built into your laptop. 106 00:07:08,500 --> 00:07:09,080 Oh, nice. 107 00:07:09,340 --> 00:07:09,620 It's a pivotal brand. 108 00:07:09,760 --> 00:07:15,040 It sticks on the frame of your monitor, and it has a little slide that you can slide open and close. 109 00:07:15,300 --> 00:07:23,220 So your mechanical process to actually put yourself on video intentionally versus accidentally the camera turning on. 110 00:07:23,720 --> 00:07:28,160 Yeah, that'll be much better than the folded up piece of paper that I've built over. 111 00:07:29,140 --> 00:07:30,740 That's what we're trying to solve for. 112 00:07:30,880 --> 00:07:37,600 We're replacing the Post-it note camera cover with something that's a little more stylish. 113 00:07:37,980 --> 00:07:38,460 That's right. 114 00:07:38,600 --> 00:07:40,740 It's like pivotal data, compassionate. 115 00:07:41,520 --> 00:07:42,160 That's right. 116 00:07:42,440 --> 00:07:47,780 That would be way too long of a phrase to put on a tiny thing like that, but whatever. 117 00:07:48,380 --> 00:07:48,720 Anyhow. 118 00:07:49,080 --> 00:08:08,460 Well, so as I mentioned, it's actually the three of us were on, we were having a conversation with some folks recently, and we were kind of explaining what we think about DevOps and cloud native and just kind of how Pivotal thinks through that stuff. 119 00:08:08,460 --> 00:08:24,720 And someone mentioned the idea of, so how does this, you know, I forget how they phrase it, but basically they brought up the topic of systems of engagement and systems of record, which just to add some context, I'd be interested to hear how y'all would define that. 120 00:08:24,840 --> 00:08:29,220 But it's sort of like the, I mean, I guess it actually came from Jeffrey Moore. 121 00:08:29,220 --> 00:08:50,020 I remember hearing about it first at, of all places, an Adobe briefing with, what's the guy's name, Tarkov, who works for, I forget where he's the CEO of now, but they brought in Jeffrey Moore to kind of go over of Crossing the Cosm fame and bowling alleys and such, to go over like how things were shifting to basically systems of engagement. 122 00:08:50,020 --> 00:08:53,880 And this was in, and this was in, must've been 2009 at the latest. 123 00:08:55,140 --> 00:09:01,100 And they were, he was essentially explaining how there's these ways of dealing with customers and, and new things. 124 00:09:01,100 --> 00:09:03,000 And this is when social was really popular. 125 00:09:03,680 --> 00:09:06,240 And so I think it was conflated a little bit into that. 126 00:09:06,380 --> 00:09:08,800 I would just call it external facing things. 127 00:09:09,120 --> 00:09:18,060 And then the system of record was basically just a really fancy name for ERP systems and, and sort of existing back office stuff you have. 128 00:09:18,060 --> 00:09:24,980 And I think that's, this notion has kind of been subsumed into a Gartnerian bimodal IT stuff. 129 00:09:25,400 --> 00:09:47,320 And, you know, not to steal Ian's thunder too much, but like, I think a lot of the, the suggesting of, would you call this a dichotomy or a pairing or whatever it is, is that you need to divide your IT into the ERP stuff, the system of record and the systems of engagement, which is sort of like the ways that you interact with people, I would guess internally or externally. 130 00:09:47,560 --> 00:09:57,740 And the way you think about and manage those things is different, which leads to a different type of process and a different type of strategy and different types of technologies that you use. 131 00:09:58,320 --> 00:10:06,420 So I thought when that topic came up, like Ian had a, a very interesting reaction to it, which, which I agreed with. 132 00:10:06,420 --> 00:10:17,460 And I wanted to have him on to kind of like explain that you're not to replay it word for word, but like what, what's your sort of like gut and or well reason reaction to this kind of like splitting things up? 133 00:10:17,560 --> 00:10:36,160 Just off the cuff, I think it's, your view on this tends to depend on whether or not you're pessimistic or optimistic about the world of tech inside of large enterprises and the ability for organizations to change or improve over time. 134 00:10:36,680 --> 00:10:52,460 Because ultimately when you set up this, you know, the bimodal IT scenario, which I think feeds into the systems of record versus systems of engagement, having different policies and process models around them. 135 00:10:52,620 --> 00:10:58,160 You're basically saying, hey, there's a big chunk of your workforce that's unfit to do technology well. 136 00:10:58,540 --> 00:11:00,080 We're going to do it fast, at least. 137 00:11:00,920 --> 00:11:13,680 And I, I just personally fall on the optimistic side, which is, you know, given the opportunity, most people will step up to the challenge and can learn new things and are incredible, you know, incredibly capable. 138 00:11:15,400 --> 00:11:19,340 Just in a, in a very broad kind of sentiment on the human race. 139 00:11:21,040 --> 00:11:30,020 And so I find the, the, hey, you know, we've got to run two distinct teams because these group of individuals and these systems are just hopelessly irretrievable. 140 00:11:30,160 --> 00:11:33,860 Too depressing to really believe that that's a broad based truth. 141 00:11:34,240 --> 00:11:43,880 So I'll, I'll kind of get that out of the way and, you know, more from a tech perspective, my view on this is, uh, uh, they're all apps, right? 142 00:11:44,100 --> 00:11:46,000 It's, it's all application infrastructure. 143 00:11:46,180 --> 00:11:47,060 It's all technology. 144 00:11:47,340 --> 00:11:47,440 Sure. 145 00:11:47,460 --> 00:12:02,260 There's, there's unique or, you know, certain dependencies within each category, but I think the people who espouse the systems of record versus systems of engagement as a tool to divide up how you manage and operate these systems. 146 00:12:02,740 --> 00:12:05,340 Is setting up a false choice, right? 147 00:12:05,360 --> 00:12:20,120 I think, um, I think the, the, the actual measure of, uh, of most IT organizations really comes down to one of operational efficiency, right? 148 00:12:20,140 --> 00:12:22,000 How many people do you have to throw at the problem? 149 00:12:22,580 --> 00:12:32,440 And so if the core system in your environment happens to be something that, uh, you know, an analyst firm might term a system of record, uh, and you spend 90% of your IT. 150 00:12:32,440 --> 00:12:37,180 Uh, budget in terms of people in dollars maintaining that system. 151 00:12:37,380 --> 00:12:47,540 Well, I would actually argue that that would probably be the first place we should go look if we were attempting to optimize the way you do technology, right? 152 00:12:47,540 --> 00:12:58,560 That's going to have the greatest impact to the, to the business versus say, looking for a system like, um, you know, a website that we're launching or a new, you know, mobile app. 153 00:12:58,640 --> 00:13:15,100 Uh, so, so I think, I think going after these things and saying, oh, well, exclusively we should only apply new techniques like continuous integration and delivery or agile software development and planning process to these systems of engagement is a little bit upside down. 154 00:13:15,100 --> 00:13:32,780 If your ultimate goal is actually to try and, uh, uh, improve efficiency around, around operations, which I think most of the things that, that we talk about at Pivotal that is, you know, uh, folks at the forefront of, of, uh, thinking about how technology can be done well or really espousing. 155 00:13:33,840 --> 00:13:34,980 Yeah, that makes sense. 156 00:13:34,980 --> 00:13:50,900 I think that, yeah, I mean, do you think that separation comes in because the perception is systems of record have a slower change rate and you can incubate ideas on these systems of engagement, even if that, again, that's a real separation and then fold them back eventually into these systems of records. 157 00:13:50,900 --> 00:13:59,060 I think even bimodal IT is meant to be pitched as a journey of sorts, not a fixed end state that you will always have slow systems and fast systems. 158 00:13:59,220 --> 00:14:05,540 It's a, like, hey, over time you might have to start somewhere and you just think there's a different place to start that you're slicing it at the wrong level. 159 00:14:06,840 --> 00:14:18,020 Uh, yeah, to, to be fair to the people that, that, uh, like the bimodal concept, I actually am totally fine with it in the context of, hey, we, we've got to pick someplace to start. 160 00:14:18,960 --> 00:14:24,640 And so we're going to carve off a small team of people that are, uh, of the willing, right? 161 00:14:24,640 --> 00:14:25,800 They want to do things differently. 162 00:14:25,800 --> 00:14:29,960 They have a strong, uh, appreciation for what we're trying to do differently. 163 00:14:30,620 --> 00:14:38,260 And, and they're, you know, they're willing to suffer some of the pain of, of actually being the first through the tunnel, if you will. 164 00:14:38,920 --> 00:14:40,780 Um, that makes a ton of sense to me. 165 00:14:40,840 --> 00:14:49,200 And I think, you know, picking an application, um, that may be, uh, where the immediate return is greater. 166 00:14:49,740 --> 00:14:56,520 And you can, you know, I, I like to try and judge, um, fit for one of these type, type of things. 167 00:14:56,520 --> 00:15:00,600 I, I don't like the systems of engagement versus systems of record framework. 168 00:15:00,600 --> 00:15:07,180 The way I look at this, you know, I think first and foremost, people often will just gravitate towards technical fit. 169 00:15:07,340 --> 00:15:20,100 Like how close is this app that today I'm running on premise on bare metal, or maybe on some VMs, uh, how, how technically suitable is it for me to take this onto, you know, a cloud infrastructure. 170 00:15:20,600 --> 00:15:25,120 And that tends to be the, the driving factor for which ones they go after first. 171 00:15:25,880 --> 00:15:34,060 Not to say that I would exclude technical fit, but I would add to that, that there's a, um, a measure of value to the business, right? 172 00:15:34,080 --> 00:15:43,780 Is the application something that one analyst in an office looks at once a month, or is it something that's driving decision-making across all your lines of business, right? 173 00:15:43,780 --> 00:15:48,340 So there's a spectrum of value to the business that I think you can measure on an, on an application basis. 174 00:15:48,580 --> 00:15:51,740 And then there's this other question about quantity of plan change. 175 00:15:52,260 --> 00:16:02,520 So if we've got a backlog that's, you know, 24 months worth of work to be done to a particular application versus something that, you know, it, it works fairly well for what it's used for. 176 00:16:02,520 --> 00:16:07,700 And there's nobody aching to change it with, with a lot of, uh, a lot of anger in their voice. 177 00:16:08,520 --> 00:16:17,820 Uh, you know, again, that spectrum, I think you can then combine that with the value to business and technical fit and, and come up with some sort of a stack rank. 178 00:16:18,300 --> 00:16:23,460 That allows you to determine where you can have most immediate impact. 179 00:16:23,840 --> 00:16:30,380 If you're looking to take an app from kind of legacy way of doing things to this, this, uh, new world order, if you will. 180 00:16:30,940 --> 00:16:33,400 Uh, I think that's a more useful framing. 181 00:16:33,660 --> 00:16:45,340 Now, if, if, if going after and attacking that work comes from, you know, this small team, the, the Marine expeditionary force, highly trained, highly skilled, highly motivated, that's great. 182 00:16:45,560 --> 00:16:53,640 Uh, I think where a lot of people get stuck though, is they don't have a plan for bringing the rest of the organization along with them. 183 00:16:54,540 --> 00:17:05,580 Uh, and so it becomes the case where you have, uh, the small, highly skilled team that's doing one thing and the rest of the organization doesn't see a path to ever get there. 184 00:17:06,100 --> 00:17:09,660 And that actually tends to increase the organizational resistance. 185 00:17:10,700 --> 00:17:16,820 Um, you know, they, they start to fight against, uh, fight against the new thing in the organism. 186 00:17:17,380 --> 00:17:28,900 Um, and so I, I think that, that last piece is where people really tend to get stuck when they, they start on the bimodal path is they don't plan out well enough how, how they're going to bring the rest of the organization up to speed. 187 00:17:29,280 --> 00:17:29,680 Yeah. 188 00:17:29,740 --> 00:17:34,220 You know, I, I, I like all that framing cause, cause it, uh, well, one, cause it matches my own thinking. 189 00:17:34,220 --> 00:17:36,920 So it validates how, what a wise person I am. 190 00:17:36,920 --> 00:17:45,820 Uh, but, um, it, I, I, I think it touches on, on something that's oft overlooked with, with things like this, 191 00:17:45,820 --> 00:17:52,800 which is the unintended consequences that, that what is otherwise more or less a good idea might have. 192 00:17:52,800 --> 00:17:53,060 Right. 193 00:17:53,080 --> 00:17:59,520 So like, even if, even if we concede that like, well, sure, the state of the universe you described is correct. 194 00:17:59,980 --> 00:18:11,680 Um, the, I think the follow on effect is that not only is there, as, as, as our friend Bridget would say, the sort of sad IT and happy IT, uh, you know, as a way of making fun of it. 195 00:18:11,680 --> 00:18:17,240 So you have this demoralizing effect of people, um, that they're working on the, uh, the boring stuff. 196 00:18:18,240 --> 00:18:28,760 Um, but I, I think, I think it also like, as, as you're the, what you're pointing to is the more correct approach is like, no, there's just, there's basically just the, you're prioritized IT. 197 00:18:28,760 --> 00:18:31,900 Like it's all IT, I mean, to, to describe it as all apps. 198 00:18:31,900 --> 00:18:42,020 And so you should prioritize like the, the IT that you have, whether it's apps or whatever, and figure out the, or the value it has to your organization and proceed correctly. 199 00:18:42,280 --> 00:18:48,600 And, and if it does turn out that your ERP system is your most valuable thing, then great, right? 200 00:18:48,600 --> 00:19:01,220 Like you should focus on that, but, um, which is often not the, the, the case with, uh, pivotal customers at least, but it's more important to not separate things out by a category, um, before you separate them out by business value. 201 00:19:01,220 --> 00:19:23,420 Um, and I think, again, I think even though the framing of bimodal and everything might be helpful, I think it, it's, it's somewhat, I don't know if it's irresponsible, but whether it's irresponsible from the authors or just as a concept on its own, like it, it tends to have these, uh, these negative, uh, knock on effects that could be avoided with a, with a different framing of things. 202 00:19:25,500 --> 00:19:36,940 And so I'm, I'm, I'm also curious, like, uh, I mean, uh, you, you, you go out and talk with a lot of people, like when this comes up with, with various like teams that you have and things like that, like what's, what's the conversation? 203 00:19:36,940 --> 00:19:39,100 Like what's some notes from the field on this topic? 204 00:19:40,660 --> 00:19:45,160 You know, I, I visited a old insurance company last year. 205 00:19:45,540 --> 00:19:55,380 Um, I w I won't put their specific name out there to protect the innocent, but, uh, the, the exact leadership had gone very much down this. 206 00:19:55,500 --> 00:20:12,180 And it was an interesting conversation because, uh, they had done kind of an age measurement across the tech technology organization and something like 60% or slightly higher of the staff was in their, uh, late mid to late fifties. 207 00:20:13,200 --> 00:20:16,620 And so, you know, rapidly approaching retirement age. 208 00:20:17,160 --> 00:20:26,840 And so the, the leadership was, was legitimately concerned, I think about appetite for the organization to do anything different than they had ever done before. 209 00:20:27,500 --> 00:20:42,640 Uh, and you know, whether they would, even if they were able to retrain the staff to do things differently or better, could they, you know, they wouldn't likely be able to retrain, retain them long beyond the, 210 00:20:42,640 --> 00:20:44,000 the retraining period. 211 00:20:44,300 --> 00:20:54,100 So was it even worth trying was, was sort of the challenge they were faced with, which, um, they, they never came up with a really good answer to this. 212 00:20:54,540 --> 00:20:57,820 Uh, they set up, no, it really is. 213 00:20:57,820 --> 00:21:11,120 You know, they set up a, uh, uh, you know, a small go fast team, um, who, who they, they allowed to break a lot of rules, uh, you know, took an app, deployed it direct to Amazon over the course of six weeks or so. 214 00:21:11,120 --> 00:21:23,800 So their first foray of anything serious into public cloud, uh, and, and prove that it was possible and kind of documented all the things that they would need to chain were they to make this, this a wholesale strategy shift. 215 00:21:24,520 --> 00:21:29,440 Um, but they weren't really sure to what to do with the rest of the workforce, right? 216 00:21:29,440 --> 00:21:37,180 Should they just let them age off or should they, uh, should they invest in, in kind of technology to bridge the gap between these two teams? 217 00:21:37,260 --> 00:21:48,880 This is ultimately why I was in the room was they were trying to figure out if, if they brought in the right tools, uh, you know, could they augment some of the maybe process changes that they were going to have to make? 218 00:21:49,740 --> 00:22:06,300 Um, so that would be one example where they'd gone down the bimodal path, had some early success in that it helped them understand what would theoretically need to change in the organization in order to do a wholesale shift from their historical IT process to a new one. 219 00:22:06,540 --> 00:22:12,080 But they, they stalled out on this moment of, well, how do we actually do this at scale, right? 220 00:22:12,120 --> 00:22:16,500 The first app they got through it, but they didn't know how to do the next 20 or the next 30. 221 00:22:17,240 --> 00:22:29,460 Uh, and, and I, this, this is actually part of the reason why I'm fairly critical of bimodal is, is, you know, and, and suspect that a lot of people land a spot of, uh, hey, great. 222 00:22:29,460 --> 00:22:32,180 It sounds like a good way to get started, but what do we do next? 223 00:22:33,600 --> 00:22:36,140 Yeah, no, that makes, I, I, I think that makes sense. 224 00:22:36,140 --> 00:22:46,680 And, and, and again, to emphasize the point, like it's almost, uh, I don't know, the, the, the, the word ironic is, is almost useless at this point in, in Western culture and language. 225 00:22:46,680 --> 00:22:57,940 But, uh, like, cause it's so overloaded, but it's, it's sort of like one of the great ironies of like, uh, this kind of bimodal thinking that the reason you get into this mess is you are separating. 226 00:22:57,940 --> 00:23:08,360 You, you weren't paying attention to the, what's next, as you were saying and evolving things and setting up a system that, uh, where things are evilly, not evilly, maybe easily evolved. 227 00:23:08,520 --> 00:23:16,100 I mean, it's sort of like my, my ongoing joking about the definition of legacy software is legacy software is software you have to change, 228 00:23:16,120 --> 00:23:17,640 but you're deathly afraid to change. 229 00:23:18,180 --> 00:23:31,660 Uh, you know, otherwise you just call it your software and it seems like, um, yeah, there's not a lot of great answers about what to do with the old stuff that is starting to, whether it's because of, uh, staff attrition or whatever, but you're sort of like fear it. 230 00:23:32,060 --> 00:23:38,380 And, uh, unfortunately until we invented time machine, you can't do the ultimate fix, which is to go back in time and not screw it up. 231 00:23:38,800 --> 00:23:45,780 But, um, you know, to appropriate another phrase, it's sort of like the best time to plant a tree is yesterday, but, you know, barring that today's a good idea. 232 00:23:46,220 --> 00:23:59,380 So it's, it seems like, uh, it's, it seems like further enforcing this bifurcation of different classes of it and trying to, instead of trying to make all of them the best possible is, is a, is a bad idea. 233 00:23:59,380 --> 00:24:09,280 And I guess like a, uh, sort of like a footnote to that is like, this also sort of assumes that you try to minimize working on it. 234 00:24:09,280 --> 00:24:23,160 That's not actually valuable to your business, which I think, I think, I think this is a part that's often, uh, overlooked by people is like, probably the first thing you should do is make sure you use, you're using as much software as a service as possible. 235 00:24:23,300 --> 00:24:34,920 And, and there's, you're sort of taking off the load of all this stuff that you used to have to manage on your own and spend a lot of stuff on, but make sure that you're only doing the absolute minimum of it management. 236 00:24:34,920 --> 00:24:39,120 And then you can have all this highfalutin think about like a happy it versus sad it. 237 00:24:40,020 --> 00:24:43,540 Are you trying to say that I shouldn't be running my own email server? 238 00:24:43,700 --> 00:24:45,300 Cause that's going to make me really sad. 239 00:24:46,580 --> 00:24:49,720 I mean, there's multiple reasons why that's proven to be a bad idea. 240 00:24:51,380 --> 00:24:53,980 I have no idea what that reference is. 241 00:24:54,020 --> 00:24:58,300 I can't imagine somebody got into trouble for running their own email to me. 242 00:24:58,420 --> 00:24:59,120 I wonder who that was. 243 00:24:59,620 --> 00:25:03,820 Do you think on that point, I mean, to some extent it's sometimes I'm a fan of. 244 00:25:04,840 --> 00:25:19,240 You know, you mentioned kind of don't do that, the dumb undifferentiated heavy lifting stuff, but I mean, to your earlier point where you talk about stalling out, sometimes you advocate, I mean, you see with our customers, you almost have to shock the system and say, let's not do these things tiny over time. 245 00:25:19,240 --> 00:25:29,280 But instead let's try to do a bigger top down endorse change so that you don't stall out after that first team shipped and then the antibodies swarm on it and kind of kill the process. 246 00:25:29,560 --> 00:25:30,140 I don't know. 247 00:25:30,200 --> 00:25:32,820 Do you see people try to do bigger changes versus the incremental stuff? 248 00:25:33,460 --> 00:25:34,360 No, for sure. 249 00:25:34,500 --> 00:25:38,040 I mean, that's my admonition in a lot of these meetings, right? 250 00:25:38,100 --> 00:25:40,840 Cause people's initial reaction is, Hey, let's do something small. 251 00:25:40,960 --> 00:25:42,100 I can kind of prove it out. 252 00:25:42,460 --> 00:25:46,120 At least get a PowerPoint level ROI that I can share with the organization. 253 00:25:46,300 --> 00:25:47,840 We'll use that to mass support. 254 00:25:49,240 --> 00:26:00,140 And, and I'm all for a short project, but my guidance is, look, you've got to do something that has enough visibility and importance to the organization that people care to look at your PowerPoint ROI. 255 00:26:00,860 --> 00:26:05,960 And, and if you're picking too small, often you pick something that no one cares about. 256 00:26:06,060 --> 00:26:09,160 So the, the evidence becomes irrelevant very quickly. 257 00:26:09,160 --> 00:26:17,140 This is, this is why I think, you know, of my three things that you need to measure value to the business is, is right there. 258 00:26:17,140 --> 00:26:17,440 Right. 259 00:26:18,500 --> 00:26:19,460 It's a big deal. 260 00:26:19,460 --> 00:26:30,440 I mean, I think a good example of this is actually, uh, you know, big telecommunications, uh, uh, cable TV provider that that's a customer of ours. 261 00:26:31,400 --> 00:26:49,440 The, the system that they've put onto, onto cloud foundry, um, is responsible for core service provisioning, uh, billing, customer management drives, all their call center help desk interactions for their, you know, 40 plus. 262 00:26:49,440 --> 00:26:59,440 So, you know, you couldn't pick a more important, uh, piece of software in the business, right. 263 00:26:59,440 --> 00:27:18,600 In terms of its impact, when this is down, it costs the organization and ungodly amount of money because it, it impacts nearly everything in, in the organization on the flip side of that, uh, even, uh, you know, a 10th or a hundredth of a percentage point increase in service availability has an equal positive return. 264 00:27:19,420 --> 00:27:27,920 And so one of the biggest challenges they had was service availability across the collection of, of services that make up this platform. 265 00:27:28,340 --> 00:27:32,660 And, and that was really the problem that they were seeking to solve when they first started working with us. 266 00:27:32,940 --> 00:27:39,040 So they were able to demonstrate really significant impact on a really large application. 267 00:27:39,040 --> 00:27:43,320 And it wasn't purely just, you know, Hey, let's, let's move this app onto cloud foundry. 268 00:27:43,440 --> 00:27:46,040 They adopted a lot of unique and new processes. 269 00:27:46,040 --> 00:27:54,120 They went from, you know, a waterfall driven, you know, quarterly release train to continuous delivery into production. 270 00:27:54,620 --> 00:27:55,140 Right. 271 00:27:55,180 --> 00:28:03,800 So radically different, uh, uh, radically different shift in terms of, um, approach and concept. 272 00:28:04,380 --> 00:28:14,220 So I, I think that shock to the system, that massive improvement that becomes widely visible, it has the effect across the rest of the organization of people saying, wow, that's amazing. 273 00:28:14,220 --> 00:28:15,260 I want to be part of that. 274 00:28:15,340 --> 00:28:20,340 How can I learn, get on the boss and, and start working on that team. 275 00:28:20,640 --> 00:28:25,500 And, and so I, I think that value to the business is a huge metric in terms of where you choose to start. 276 00:28:25,900 --> 00:28:26,300 Yeah. 277 00:28:26,440 --> 00:28:33,160 Especially when it's not rogue and, uh, you know, some person in a fancy office somewhere says, this is what we want to do. 278 00:28:33,220 --> 00:28:35,400 You don't feel like you're, you're being bad about that. 279 00:28:35,460 --> 00:28:50,980 Let me, uh, so speaking of that, as we think about what are some of those things that help the rapid transformation and, you know, you've been here since the beginning, you've seen kind of spring go from, Hey, something kind of an interesting part of the portfolio to now a super critical one. 280 00:28:50,980 --> 00:29:11,460 Um, as companies are betting on spring boot at kind of crazy levels, but, you know, so I wanted to give your quick take on the spring boot phenomenon and then kind of tangentially, since you got roped into the, uh, Java EE madness at the end of the last year, when, uh, they shipped their market guide, it really riled up some, some folks and, and got them all hot and bothered. 281 00:29:11,460 --> 00:29:14,160 You commented on an info queue story. 282 00:29:14,280 --> 00:29:21,140 You had a quote in there as well, just focusing on cloud native, but I just wanted your take on kind of what, what happened with spring boot? 283 00:29:21,220 --> 00:29:22,600 Why did this take off so much? 284 00:29:22,720 --> 00:29:25,720 And what do you think about some of that? 285 00:29:26,200 --> 00:29:30,980 I don't know, brouhaha about Java EE where, you know, what's your reaction to the reaction? 286 00:29:32,540 --> 00:29:35,220 Ooh, lot, lot, lots of meaty topics in there. 287 00:29:36,020 --> 00:29:37,360 I'll start with spring. 288 00:29:37,580 --> 00:29:47,820 I mean, I, I, uh, I'm completely blown away by the, the rise of, of spring boot as, as kind of the de facto framework for doing Java microservices. 289 00:29:48,340 --> 00:29:59,460 Um, I mean, I think we're now seeing somewhere over 10 million downloads a month from the, the Maven repos, which, you know, the, the absolute number is actually less important. 290 00:29:59,460 --> 00:30:06,080 I think then, then an appreciation of the fact that, uh, you know, three years ago it was around 200,000. 291 00:30:06,580 --> 00:30:11,240 So you're seeing this kind of exponential move to that as, as a default framework. 292 00:30:11,240 --> 00:30:20,780 And it's important because in the, the enterprise space and the enterprise software space, the de facto language is, is Java, right? 293 00:30:20,800 --> 00:30:27,860 I think it's greater than half of all the software written, uh, in the last, you know, 15 years is, is Java. 294 00:30:27,860 --> 00:30:30,500 A lot of accounts also have a significant amount of .NET. 295 00:30:31,000 --> 00:30:46,520 But when you look across that landscape, the skillset that enterprises employ or their, their consulting partner outsourcer of choice, you know, either the, the big American ones or the big Indian ones have an incredible number of Java developers. 296 00:30:46,980 --> 00:31:00,980 Um, and so I think this collision of, you know, companies suddenly emphasizing, Hey, I want to go fast, uh, being able to, to change applications quickly, add new feature sets, ship new apps. 297 00:31:00,980 --> 00:31:17,340 Uh, with as little overhead as possible, highest possible developer productivity, um, has contributed to, uh, to looking for any, uh, opportunity to, to, to optimize development process. 298 00:31:17,340 --> 00:31:24,480 And so, you know, spring boot was unleashed into that, that climate and has, has stuck, right? 299 00:31:24,480 --> 00:31:34,460 Uh, the, the, the, the historical thinking about Java as being kind of heavyweight and difficult to change and update and, you know, confusing to configure and set up and build environments. 300 00:31:35,260 --> 00:31:41,260 Almost all of that concern goes away when you move to, to spring boot as a framework. 301 00:31:41,260 --> 00:31:49,540 And so it just made, uh, it, it made a lot of the hard things easy, uh, as our friends on the spring R and D team like to say. 302 00:31:50,200 --> 00:32:00,220 Um, and, and, and it is timed perfectly to this kind of world condition that just makes, uh, has, has made it so necessary, right? 303 00:32:00,220 --> 00:32:07,140 It, it, uh, it, uh, it, uh, it drives such an increase in, in developer productivity that, uh, it's almost become a no brainer. 304 00:32:07,500 --> 00:32:17,020 I, I subscribe to, uh, a bunch of job posting boards and I like to look for, you know, who's hiring for our key, key technologies that come out of the pivotal portfolio. 305 00:32:17,020 --> 00:32:24,980 And, uh, my inbox is just slammed with people that are hiring spring boot, uh, expertise. 306 00:32:25,220 --> 00:32:31,320 And now we're starting to see the rise of spring cloud, which I'd like to talk about as a scaffolding around, uh, spring boot. 307 00:32:31,320 --> 00:32:43,180 As you build out these microservices applications, you're starting to see that be complimented with rabbit as everyone's going down this event driven kind of async message passing, uh, application architecture. 308 00:32:44,180 --> 00:32:50,080 Um, it's a really interesting shift in application architecture that's happened really, really quickly. 309 00:32:50,080 --> 00:32:54,200 Basically in the last two, two years, uh, we've seen an explosion there. 310 00:32:55,640 --> 00:33:05,260 And so how do you contrast that to, uh, potentially some of the existing, you know, legacy tech that served its function, but maybe, uh, struggling to maintain the same relevance? 311 00:33:05,540 --> 00:33:13,980 Well, I think, I think the, uh, the piece that InfoQ published, you know, mentioning, uh, in Thomas's, 312 00:33:13,980 --> 00:33:30,880 the market guide for application platforms, it was really interesting because the, um, obviously the people who, who are likely to, to suffer the most, or at least benefit the least from a shift away from JEE or, or IBM and Oracle, right? 313 00:33:30,880 --> 00:33:39,000 They've built, you know, uh, uh, over, uh, over the last couple of decades around JEE middleware. 314 00:33:39,460 --> 00:33:49,080 And then you add on top of that, you know, things like consulting services and architecture support, uh, really large and profitable business. 315 00:33:49,780 --> 00:34:07,540 And you now, all of a sudden have a huge number of customers in the, the core buyers of that technology, by the way, who were saying, Hey, uh, the, the tech stack you've supplied us with and the app architecture you've told us to build with no longer fits with the speed at which. 316 00:34:07,780 --> 00:34:10,400 We want to, we want to deliver capabilities to the business. 317 00:34:10,700 --> 00:34:21,160 It also no longer really fits the infrastructure we plan to run on because, you know, everything's going to cloud, whether it's public or private or some combination of, of both. 318 00:34:21,620 --> 00:34:27,400 You know, our, our world has changed radically from the day when we made the decision to implement web logic or web sphere. 319 00:34:28,060 --> 00:34:41,060 And so the, the shift that Ann talked about in the market guide away from JEE to, to spring, specifically spring boot, I think is really, um, she actually called this out in the paper. 320 00:34:41,280 --> 00:34:48,460 You know, this year for the first time in history, both IBM and Oracle's middleware business is going to decline sequentially. 321 00:34:49,500 --> 00:34:52,400 Uh, you know, that's, that's never happened before. 322 00:34:52,400 --> 00:34:57,260 So they've seen kind of consistent growth for years on years and, and all of a sudden it's turning the other way. 323 00:34:58,080 --> 00:35:00,780 So the, the reaction you could kind of predict, right? 324 00:35:00,780 --> 00:35:11,120 All the, all the folks who are, uh, you know, extracting those premium dollars from, uh, from, from big companies are coming out of the woodwork to deny the obvious, right? 325 00:35:11,140 --> 00:35:12,080 It's not happening. 326 00:35:12,620 --> 00:35:13,960 Everybody loves JEE. 327 00:35:14,360 --> 00:35:16,820 Oracle's continuing to invest deeply in it. 328 00:35:17,280 --> 00:35:18,040 Don't worry. 329 00:35:18,260 --> 00:35:21,240 This is still the right tech stack for you, right? 330 00:35:21,260 --> 00:35:24,700 Kind of perpetuating this myth that everything's okay and you don't need to change. 331 00:35:25,420 --> 00:35:28,020 Uh, you know, frankly, that's just goofy, right? 332 00:35:28,020 --> 00:35:34,320 I, I think the, uh, the smart money is already woken up to the fact that this changes has happened. 333 00:35:35,000 --> 00:35:39,880 And the, uh, you know, the, even the, the laggards of tech will come along here pretty quickly. 334 00:35:40,680 --> 00:35:49,120 Um, I, I think it's, you know, call, calling the end of, uh, JEE is, is, uh, you know, it's not premature. 335 00:35:49,120 --> 00:35:52,160 I think it may even be a little bit late to make that call, right? 336 00:35:52,180 --> 00:35:53,660 It's sort of an obvious thing at this point. 337 00:35:55,560 --> 00:35:56,240 There you go. 338 00:35:56,700 --> 00:35:56,920 Yeah. 339 00:35:56,920 --> 00:36:11,040 And I, and I mean, just to add my, uh, my, my extra seasoning as I like to do, like, I think, uh, I, I think, I think, I think whenever you're sort of, uh, and, and to be clear, I don't think anyone used this phrase, but it's this genre of tech analysis. 340 00:36:11,040 --> 00:36:23,300 Whenever you declare something dead, I think, I think what's, it causes such a kickup that I think the thing that's, that's, uh, to, to reprise something you, a phrase you used earlier, it's sort of like ruins the conversation of what's next. 341 00:36:23,300 --> 00:36:32,940 And I think, I think what I've seen over the years, and I used to see this at the height of JEE is that it's not so much that this, uh, this way of life programming is over. 342 00:36:32,940 --> 00:36:34,020 It's just that it's evolving. 343 00:36:34,360 --> 00:36:41,020 And so there are, there is functionality and just as much interesting stuff that does things in a, uh, a JEE way. 344 00:36:41,020 --> 00:36:46,940 It's just a different like set of, of APIs and specs and technologies and all this stuff going on. 345 00:36:47,160 --> 00:36:53,240 Uh, so it's not sort of like the, uh, the bottom is being sort of like pulled out from under you while you're cooking your lentils. 346 00:36:53,240 --> 00:36:54,960 It's just like someone's retiling it. 347 00:36:58,520 --> 00:37:00,800 I, I, I will totally agree with that. 348 00:37:00,800 --> 00:37:07,820 I don't think this is a, uh, uh, all the change happening here is very much for the good. 349 00:37:07,920 --> 00:37:09,280 So I'm, I'm with you there. 350 00:37:09,780 --> 00:37:09,920 Yeah. 351 00:37:09,980 --> 00:37:12,660 Well, well, on that note, I, uh, I appreciate you being on. 352 00:37:12,660 --> 00:37:17,980 We, we, we, I think we did this at extremely short notice over the weekend was, which is, uh, which is nice. 353 00:37:18,360 --> 00:37:30,580 And, uh, I think, I think, I think, I think as you demonstrated, like, like so many people, uh, at Pivotal, it's, it's always fun to see the, uh, the sort of hat rack approach you have to things, you know, having, having, having many different, uh, many different hats and things. 354 00:37:30,580 --> 00:37:31,200 To speak to. 355 00:37:31,660 --> 00:37:33,400 So, uh, so thanks for being on. 356 00:37:34,480 --> 00:37:35,160 You're welcome. 357 00:37:35,340 --> 00:37:37,080 Anytime you want me back, just let me know. 358 00:37:37,380 --> 00:37:37,700 Indeed. 359 00:37:37,840 --> 00:37:40,580 Well, as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. 360 00:37:40,780 --> 00:37:44,580 You can go find us at soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations. 361 00:37:44,900 --> 00:37:48,000 I'll put the show notes for this on the official Pivotal blog. 362 00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:50,220 Once I do the training of how to put it on there. 363 00:37:50,220 --> 00:38:03,100 And also on my website at Coté.io slash conversations 49, because this is episode 49 as, as a bonus exercise, figure out the, the standardized URL scheme I use for show notes. 364 00:38:03,440 --> 00:38:09,580 It's, it's always great if, if you enjoyed this podcast to go into iTunes and leave a star rating or write us a nice review. 365 00:38:09,580 --> 00:38:15,900 It's even better if you, uh, recommend it in Twitter or whatever systems of engagement you like operating in. 366 00:38:16,180 --> 00:38:20,900 Um, and if you're in something like Overcast, if you just hit that recommend thing, I think that does something positive. 367 00:38:21,100 --> 00:38:22,880 I have no idea, but it looks cool. 368 00:38:23,020 --> 00:38:26,460 And if you want to contact us, uh, you know, I'm Coté in Twitter. 369 00:38:26,600 --> 00:38:27,900 Where, where are you, Richard? 370 00:38:28,980 --> 00:38:32,120 You can find me at rsaroter on the Twitters as well. 371 00:38:32,300 --> 00:38:33,240 How about yourself, Ian? 372 00:38:34,080 --> 00:38:36,520 I am at Ian Andrews, DC. 373 00:38:37,100 --> 00:38:37,820 Oh, exciting. 374 00:38:38,160 --> 00:38:40,620 So, uh, with that, we'll see everyone next time. 375 00:38:40,860 --> 00:38:41,380 Bye-bye.