Conference, news, & white papers catsup with Jared Ruckle

Episode 87 · 48:08 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, it's been several weeks since we recorded. I think both yourself and I, which that sounds like some sort of mid-20th century poetry there. Both yourself and I. Maybe it's a collaboration between Sylvia Plath and Shel Silverstein, maybe that unpublished children's book they worked on. Although, you know, I'm reading, what's a Shel Silverstein book? Say I'm reading. Doesn't mean I'm reading it, but you've got the edge of the sidewalk, the end of the sidewalk. I don't know. I think people who cherish their childhood are probably rolling around in their pre-purchased graves. I can't remember that. But I don't know if you've noticed the author picture of him. He does not look like someone that you would want to have around your kids. He's got this scowl on his face and he's holding a guitar and he's got his foot pointed towards you, which I have no problem with the foot's pointed towards me. But it's kind of funny that you've got this kid's book guy and his picture is basically like angry hippie. Yeah. You know, he's a, he's part of our childhood. So where the sidewalk ends and all these great books. There you go. Where the sidewalk ends. Yeah. I've been a few of these great books. Yeah. He seems like a, he was a pretty cool dude. Yeah. And he's got the, he's got the giving tree, which my wife is like, I do not want to read that book because I will sob at the end of it. It's just like the, the, the, the saddest book ever, but it is in an endearing way. I don't know. Must be a name for that. So yeah, I'm going to have to look up that, that Sylvia Plath shell Silverstein combo. That seems like a good partnership. Well, anyways, I was in, I was in Jakarta and Bangkok and I think, I think you are various equally glorious places. Where were you traveling around at? Where was I? Not nearly as glamorous as Bangkok. A couple of trips to Boston, a trip to Austin, Texas, you know, some, some bouncing around coming up these next few weeks. So, but yeah, not the, not the Coté Asian world tour, which seemed pretty awesome. Asian world tour. I like that. Yeah. You know, I have noticed that, that you, you maybe I'm just noticing, but man, you're, you're going out there more and more,

which is exciting. I need, I need to get in a meeting with you one day so I can see the, the full on seroter. It is something to behold. I got to be honest with you, but it's, it makes grown, I don't cry just like a shell silver steam book. Is it like Gallagher and you hand out like a glasses and ponchos if you're in the front row? Oh yeah. There's a splash zone. It's a, it's fun for the kids. That's good. That's good. Yeah. Well, so I was, I was at, I was at a DevOps days in Jakarta, which is really fun. I, I, I never been there. And as, as always, was this true? I mean, if it wasn't true, I don't think I would say otherwise, but as always, when I travel abroad, like there was a, there's a lot of interest in, in DevOps and, and Agile, someone was talking to me and they said that several years ago, which, which is, is less than a lot, I guess they said, they said a couple of years ago that the, the local community there in Jakarta, that they've really gotten interested in Agile development and, and all of that. And I take, I mean, obviously Agile's like, well, maybe not obviously it's a little around 20 years old or so. So there's been plenty of time to be interested in it, but that there's a lot of community events and things going on over there, which, which is fun. It'll be, go back there. Cause you know, here, here's a little traveler tip, right? I've been to Thailand twice now, once for vacation. And then just recently, cause you know, I'm a highfalutin marketing person apparently. But when you go there, it's very different. They don't want to like give foreigners like spicy food. And so you have to like tell them to make your food spicy. And, you know, as I was trying to explain to people, like I grew up not only eating like Tex-Mex, which is spicy, but like you basically nowadays grow up eating Thai food. Like Thai food is just, I think, well, I don't know, at least here in the U S it's just part of our cuisine. And so, you know, it's nice to have spicy food, but then you go over to Indonesia and Jakarta, they don't ask the food, just spicy.

It's great. And they got a, I think they call it and everything. Like they've got all sorts of spicy sauce and they'll give you a, they're one of those, those cuisine cultures that serves the fish whole without the guts in it. Of course. Sure. They just serve the whole fish, which, which I still don't quite know how to serve myself whole fish. I don't have those. I don't have that dexterity. Like, you know, to, to kind of like expertly cut the, the, the, the fillet, the meat off of the bones without getting the bone in there. Like, I feel like there's serving a whole fish lessons. I need, I need to go to. I smell a marketing team building exercise. I'm going to just find a nice cookout. Cook some whole fish. That would, that would be good. That would be sort of like, instead of a, instead of a ropes course, or I don't think anyone does this anymore. Right. Instead of a ropes course or falling backward, you would, you would, you would work with each other to properly debone a fish that was already cooked. That's right. I don't need trust falls. I just need to eat the meat you cut off a fish and not choke on a bone. Like that's trust. I believe that's right. And then of course you need to write a, a white paper about it afterwards. Well, good, good segue into our general theme for the podcast. That's right. Well, we also have a guest. Why don't you introduce yourself? Much returning guest. Yeah. This is Jared Ruckel. I'm on the product marketing team here at pivotal, and I'm already very excited to be here because the segue was really, it's a white papers rather than speaking of grown men crying, which I think you mentioned earlier, Coté. So now, now by saying that, are these two topics that you're equally knowledgeable about and prepared to speak on? I, I do have children. So I have some sort of grasp of children's literature. We spent a lot of time as a team talking about dragons love tacos. Whoa. What's that one? I need to look. Well, you might be able to guess what it's about.

I'm going to put that in the show notes, right? Dragons love tacos. You should. There's a, there's a part one and a part two. And if you ask me and a fellow pivot door main, that is just really begging for a prequel. Like there's a whole story there about what happened beforehand that needs to be told. Yeah. Right. Tried other genres. Like he really didn't like taquitos and then he had some sausages. He just, he had to work his way up to tacos. Yeah. And then there's a plot twist in there about salsa and how spicy they like it. Speaking of, you know, spicy food, which is another great segue. Huh? Well, I mean, I feel like my work this week is done. It's a wrap. Thanks for joining us today. That's right. Well, consequent if that's a word to it being several weeks, there's a, there's a whole slew of, of content to go over. I mean, I think, I think pivotal has put out some things and we've got the, we had the CF summit. Yeah. Last week. Or is that week before last? I forget. A couple weeks. Yeah. And, and then Microsoft build is going on. They're sort of combined together. kind of everything conference, but sort of infrastructure and developer and, and stuff going on there. And then, and then of course there was a KubeCon last week. So we got some Kubernetes stuff and then not, not least of which there was a Dell tech world out there. I think this was last week, right? In Las Vegas. Since you're the guest, Jared, why don't you pick the first bucket of stuff that you want to sort through? Ooh, pressure is on. Yeah. How about the, the KubeCon stuff? First of all, is there a controversy about how the conference name is pronounced? Oh, a topic for some of the tools that are out there. I bet there was. Cause I said KubeCon and you said KubeCon. So that, this sounds like we could really get into some, some pedansplaining on this. Let me, let me make a case. It's Kubernetes, right?

So you would say KubeCon. What's, what's your case? Just we'll do a debate team format where whether you believe it or not, you can take the, the contra position. Well, cause there's a tool that you use that's cube CTL or cube control. And that's kind of a mini debate about how you pronounce something. So I, I guess I'm now more confused than when we started. That's right. Well, some people call that cube cuddle as well. Cause it's cube CTL. So that I can't say that with a straight face, but you know, all of these, these things need better names. Wow. You know, I'll have to find this, but I think there was a, what is it? XCD, XKCD. Yeah. And a cartoon about how to pronounce things that ended in people shouting to each other about GIF. So I think, I think, I think, I think that's a, that's good. We'll put that in there. Well, there was, there was a whole slew of announcements including you know, Google had a, a, a, a yet another layer to put into the container stack to do more securing, which we discussed this last week on my, my own podcast software to find talk. But you know, more security. Why not? It, it seems better. And yeah, I mean, there, there was, there was a, a lot of vibrant Kubernetes related stuff there. I didn't get to go to the conference, but it seemed nice. How, what, what did you two spot from it? Yeah. As you mentioned, there's a lot of, you know, any vendor there had some announcements. We had some announcements around work we're doing with, with Confluent, the company that has primarily contributed Kafka and some of the work there. As we talked about our upcoming collaboration to make Kafka great on PKS, which is good. Then you had digital lotion, announcing their own Kubernetes service. Cause honestly, everyone has to have one at this point. So they had some good stuff there. And you know, it was a, it was a good slew of vendors, large and small talking about different things with Kubernetes. I think at some point we may hit a Kubernetes exhaustion point, but it doesn't seem like we're there yet. I think for what I saw was some of the overlap and intertwining with,

you know, serverless. So kind of talking about the fun Kubernetes container abstraction, and then serverless as the function abstraction and how all those things different play together. And really how Kubernetes is a, you know, interesting way to build, you know, new platforms and new abstractions. So I thought that was a kind of a, kind of a cool confluence, not confluence of a different new ideas that we talk a lot about in tech. And we have obviously one of the co-creators keynoting at SpringOne. Neha is going to be on stage probably on day one. So yeah, I think it's cool that we're getting a little closer together as companies. And there's, there's a lot of most pivotal customers are either looking at or using Kafka and running it on PKS seems like an ideal way to keep it close on a managed platform. So it seems like win-win now. Now what's the SpringOne platform conference that might just be on September 24th to 27th that you mentioned. It is, you know, and now you're past the first price cliffs and I've got to jump up to the incrementally more expensive ticket because you're a procrastinator. So now is the time to book and we're finalizing the content. Now all that we have a crazy amount of submitted talks, which was really impressive. Just as you know, go take kind of company after company and individual after individual. It was just an impressive set of folks coming in. So we'll have 25 or so percent of the catalog posted this month here in May. Main stage is, is settling down almost completed. I'm working on that. So it's going to be bigger and better than last year, Washington, DC buy your ticket now. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, you know, it's sort of in the, the Maryland part of DC to insult all the Marylanders out there. I mean, you're your own independent state. That's true. But I think, I think there's going to be a lot of crabs that, you know, so get a look into crabs. I have my understanding is that it's a blue crabs that are the big deal there. Well, also I mean, just to mention it briefly, we, we, we IPO'd, I think since last time we talked, that was fun. I enjoyed all the pictures from the floor of people enjoying themselves. There's a little bit of hamming it up that, that that's always nice to see you were there,

right? I was. Yeah. I didn't get into the Josh long, you know, photo bombing pictures from on that money or, or those sort of squawk box shows, but yeah, that was a crazy experience. I'm proud of everyone for getting to this point. And now the actual hard work begins. So it's a good milestone. Now, now I, when I was, when I was abroad there, I think, I think when I was waiting to fly out of Bangkok, I happened to watch that as a trading places. So is it, is it like that movie with like, where there are the orange juice commodity thing, or they're just people yelling at each other everywhere? I was hoping for more of that, but it was weird because all the pivotal people were in, in suits and skirts and dressed up and all the traders wearing pivotal hoodies. So it was just such a bizarre swapping of, of roles. And there was not a lot of screaming and yelling and holding paper and throwing things in the air. So it's all stupid computers now. Oh, that's too bad. It wasn't just like people throwing confetti paper into the air all the time. No, I was trying to get a deal on orange juice, but didn't seem to get anywhere. Yeah. The orange juice futures. So, you know, another thing that came out that I thought was interesting, because I'm always looking at this stuff as we have the, as we call it, the built to adapt benchmark, which I think, I think there's sort of two layers to it. I haven't actually seen the sort of the machinery behind it, but there, there's two things that are out there now that are interesting to look at. And there is a, I think it's across like four or five different phase or areas like in operations and the business side development. And there is a, to borrow an old term of ours, an opinionated set of metrics. And so I think just off the top of my head, there's probably like 12 to 15 metrics on there of things to track. Like unplanned downtime versus planned downtime and not downtime, but sort of like getting it right versus not getting things that were scheduled in the backlog versus discovered tasks that you have. And several other benchmarks that I think will start to be a useful thing for people to track with metrics. Because I always think,

I don't know if you've been encountering this in your poncho front row gigs as it were, but one of the, one of the fun things that's sort of like half, I think serious and also half kind of EBC hazing is people ask you what metrics they should be using. And these ones look pretty nice. They look like actual useful metrics for people to track, not only at the team level, but at the management level as well. So those will be fun to stew over and look at some more. Yeah, absolutely. I actually was pretty happy with that. You, you probably get this too, Coté, but I've done a couple of talks the last few weeks on, on how the best companies really measure their success. And so, yeah, what are those metrics that matter? And the benchmark thing seems good. It's based in real data. We're actually putting up a survey in the next couple of days where you can kind of grade yourself against that by answering some questions. So, yeah, I think it's a good exercise that most people don't want to get stuck with vanity metrics. And sometimes even I'm starting to believe that just the raw deploys count can be a vanity metric because it's, you know, if I do 10,000 a month or I do a thousand a week or whoever, does that matter? Maybe the better metric we've been talking about more is how many apps are on pipe wise that, you know, maybe that should be a hundred percent because that means I can deploy whenever I want, even if it's not every day. And so there's just, how do you find the right metrics so you don't accidentally create the wrong incentives or you, you celebrate something that actually didn't matter? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think there's enough metrics there that you can pick the one that's right. The ones that are right for you, or maybe just one. Like, I remember I've been, as I'm fond of saying, I think every six months I've been working on like updating my cloud native journey book. There's a whole bunch of new stuff that I haven't even read yet. But I was, I was thinking about this metrics thing before I was looking over the benchmark thing. And there's, there's, there's, there's one case of a customer of ours, orange France. And they wanted to, as is a common case, they wanted to have their customer service stop being call centers and be an app.

But more importantly, it was for small and medium businesses. And more importantly, they wanted to, they, they had a very humble approach. They wanted to lessen the interactions that their customers had to have with them. And that was like the, not the only one, but that was like the top KPI that they picked to track, which was a interest from the other side of it. Right. The sort of like, as they would say, business impact sort of metric to start tracking is like, figure out what the actual thing you're trying to accomplish is and start tracking that metric as a, as a primary thing. And it's just an interesting notion that you could boil down one metric beyond, you know, the typical one of like, how many books did you sell? Which I think was a popular.com era thing to, to track to speak. But yeah, I mean, finding out what those metrics are and how to track them, based on the, the software work that you do, I think is it's valuable to see that kind of stuff. So the second thing that I think was interesting about this is the, in, in, I forget how many organizations or it was across like five industries in several countries or something like that. But there are also at the moment, maybe it'll be more like baseline metrics from insurance, manufacturing, banking, and other things. And it's interesting to go through there, to use another B word, to find a baseline for what is the baseline in that industry. So like, for example, I don't have the numbers in front of me because I'm a prepared professional. But, you know, there was some interesting commentary on how retail is actually one of the most advanced, sort of digitally transformed, sort of speak things like, so because of the pressures that they have in the retail space and because they're very consumer oriented, they actually are doing better than some other industries when it comes to their online presence and being able to transact online and things like that. And so you can look at some representative metrics across across those industries,

which I think, you know, when I, when I talk with people, I don't know if they always like, if this is like top of mind of what they're asking. But one of the things I try to tell them is like, you know, you're, you're probably normal. Like you may, you may think like you're way behind or it's impossible to do something, but you should get a sense of like your normalcy versus unnormalcy. Not so that you can, you know, slow down and not actually do things, but so that you don't like, you know, feel terrible about yourself. Yeah. How okay you are. Yeah. You should be dissatisfied, but you shouldn't necessarily be stressed out that everyone's lapping you. Like there's a mix, I guess of, yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. So, let's see. So then, so then we, we should go over the, the Dell tech world stuff. I think, I think we had a good, writeup of, of the sessions that we had there and, and several other things. What, what's a, what's your pick for what the fun stuff was at the Dell tech world, Jared? Let's see. You know, there was actually a pretty good case study of Dell drinking their own champagne, I guess is what you say. We don't say the dog food thing anymore, right? There's a pretty cool case study of how Dell itself has started on this getting better at software, this whole digital transformation thing. And I think you, you tweeted out the case study link to that this morning, didn't you, Coté? Mm-hmm. Yes, indeed. So, kind of talks about, you know, the, a number of different things that, you know, both of you just been touching on about looking at, you know, the metrics and, you know, the numbers that, that really matter. and how you kind of, you kind of, you get to that particular point and how fast you can get there. You know, I think the money, the money line that you tweet out, Coté, was something about how it was like flipping a switch where you could get some order of magnitude boost in velocity. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it's been fun to, over the last few weeks, read up about that.

Cause I, you know, as being in Austin and also having worked at Dell, like I've spent some time looking at the, the labs, the pivotal style labs they have set up there. And it is sort of where we have our, our Austin labs office in a sort of, I don't know, casual way, if you will. And yeah, it's, it's cool to go in there. Cause it's quite the contrast from the traditional Dell, everything that I would encounter where they have, it looks, it's set up exactly like a pivotal lab situation where there's people pairing at this, at a, at a table and there's a nice open area to hang out at. And it's a, they even have like some snacks and refreshments, which is nice. So I think they've been doing that for maybe a year or so now. And, and it is like, you know, you don't really sort of think about this unless you've worked internally at Dell, but like, you know, they're working on like, as they say in the article, like Dell.com, which is the thing they're working on is a huge and also extremely mission critical for, for, for revenue. And so it is, and, and it's also a very, it's been around for a long time and it's built of all sorts of systems. So it's a good ongoing case study of, even though it's nominally from ourselves, so to speak it's, it's like, it's the same similar challenges and type of software that most every large organization has. So it's good to hear that they're able to do it and the experience that they've had. And also their internet there is really fast. I always find that if you go there, you should bring your photos to upload. It's handy to have that. Nice. Yeah. So, and then also, you know, I, I've always, I'm always into reference architectures and I see that we can't, that they came out with one, the pivotal ready architecture from Dell EMC, which, which is a nice name, but there is, there's a pretty good, you know, let's say high level reference architecture going over how all the various

pieces fit together, you know, running on top of these fear and VX rail and some other Dell EMC technologies. But I think, I think it is good to have an answer for no. Here's an overview of what it would look like to run your own, your own setup for this. And of course the actual setup of being integrated together, that's also a nice side effect of generating a PDF that describes it. So, so that's always good. Sarcastically, but. Yeah, I think that that's a, I'm sorry. I think that the, the PRA thing is, is really kind of a interesting option. We talk about, you know, multi-cloud and companies having their choice of different infrastructure targets they want to deploy to when people you're doing, you know, private cloud as well as a public cloud. So it's kind of this interesting mix of different things. And PRA is kind of a unique option where if you don't want to kind of bother expanding your existing private cloud, you can buy this integrated appliance, just, you know, plunk it down in your data center, plug it in, and then you're, you're up and running really quickly. So we talk about this DIY value line kind of conversation. If you don't want to muck around with, you know, expanding your private cloud footprint, it's a really cool option to get going really quickly with it. Yeah. It's a, it's a purchasable thing, right, Jared? It's not just a reference architecture. It's actually a skew that you buy that comes converged. Yeah, that's right. So it's got the hyperconverged infrastructure and VX rail and all those kinds of things. And I think it probably hyperconverged infrastructures may be a new thing for the pivotal universe to get familiar with. But as we, you know, get, get closer with Dell and start integrating more things with VMware and NSX, there is a lot of appeal to have this, you know, turnkey to use up our, our buzzword quota or this option that you can just, you know, plug in and go. So yeah, there'll definitely be a lot of interest in something like that, particularly as it includes, you know, the app platform and then all this talk with, you know, PKS and Kubernetes being able to get that stood up, you know, very quickly too. Yeah. Do you think when, when they were in a conference room a while ago,

there was a lot of debate over saying turnkey versus key turn. Like when that phrase was a, that idiom was created. Cause there's sort of like equivalent, right? Like, like why would you choose turnkey over key turn? There's, there's some assignment. You're going to have to give me a minute on this one. I got you on that. Cause I was thinking like, where does that turnkey phrase come from? I mean, you got a car ignition, you've got, you know, launching nuclear warheads. There's all sorts of things that you, you turn a key for, but then also it's a, it's the act is actually a key turn. I don't know. Maybe turnkey describes a key turn, you know, English. What, what a language. So it related to the reference architecture. Mind blown. Related to the reference architecture. There was also a, an update to the, the integration we have with Azure stack. And more specifically, the, that as they say, Dell EMC cloud for Azure stack, but the Dell EMC version of Azure stack and how we fit into that. So there are, there are now many multiple options, depending on what, what you need to actually run a pivotal cloud foundry on premise, or maybe, you know, run it on your own, where whatever premise it may be on, or I'm sorry, premises. But it seems like in the, in the past year or so, there's a, there's been a whole bevy of these actual modes coming out that are pretty well documented amongst the community here. And then also, also not to leave it out. There's also a virtue stream. Right. Packaging of it, which, which seems interesting. Right. And, and you know, as, as that's sort of interesting in the sense that they manage it for you, like they'll manage running everything. And I think, I think also a large part of what virtue stream does is they, you'll run your older ERP systems or from our perspective, older, but they also are good at running your ERP systems. So you've kind of got, for those people who worried about having their new application development,

be able to be for all the good reasons, side by side with their existing systems. That's another good option out there to, for you. And then finally, I always like to point this out. So Dell has this Flickr account and they upload lots of photos, which are always very well taken. So there's, there's three days worth of photos you can look at in the albums. Presumably it'll move over to smug mug one day, but, uh, lots of photos of people doing stuff all the way down to my favorite is the, uh, the buffet and catering that I missed out on. But it looks like there was some tasty snacks out there. Legit FOMO there. Exactly. Food FOMO. So, uh, I think other than a few miscellaneous things and maybe, uh, asking Jared about, uh, the exciting work that he does, there was also just, it was a while ago, but there was also CF summit, uh, that occurred. And, uh, you know, for me, I think there were, uh, there, there were a lot of good as always, uh, sort of case studies and testimonials and things like that that came out, which equally, uh, it's always nice to promote pivotal and, uh, the success and other people in the cloud foundry community that they've had. But it's, it's also interesting to see the, um, the sort of, uh, uh, speeds and feeds that people have had like T-Mobile getting down to like 170 developers to one operator ratio for their pivotal cloud foundry neck of the woods. And then, and then there was even more detail about the, uh, the, the U S air force's, uh, use of pivotal, which, which I think over the past six months has been extremely fleshed out, but it's, uh, it's such an interesting case that it's good to see more, uh, even more documentation of it. How, if I remember they basically got their, uh, their, their develop, well, you were actually in the session, but you know, what's remarkable about that is, uh, they were able to move down putting software into release from years into a matter of months and then iterate over it, which I think,

uh, extremely encouraging. But what, uh, what did you see in that session that you thought was interesting? Yeah. The video is online now as well up on the cloud foundry, uh, foundation YouTube channel. So it's a good watch, but yeah, I think it was this, how this team was, was showing some of the benefit back of this. It wasn't just some rogue team, although, you know, they keep it Kessel run website and you can buy t-shirts and stuff like that. That's right. You know, but there's something to that you learn. And I think you've talked about that with all state and others too, is sometimes you also, you have to build a community around it and becomes infectious. And other people do want to copy those outcomes, not just the cool tech stack, but that again, they're making a real difference with software. So it was, you know, they had some good numbers in there about reducing cycle times and getting stuff to prod. And they're going to, I expect them to also be at SpringOne with some updated stories. So yeah, no, some good stuff from air force as well as, as you mentioned others, T-Mobile on stage, plenty of customers telling good stories. And of course at the conference too, it's not just customers telling cool stories. It's also good deep dives into the engineering and where the projects are going and what all the latest stuff is. Yep. And, and then as they always do, well, I think they always do this. They released the most recent cloud foundry foundation survey. And yeah, I pulled out some items that I liked into the show notes. If you want to, you listeners want to go peruse that, but I think, I think in general, the, the, the couple of, of parts that are interesting at looking at there are one sort of tracking the use of, of Kubernetes in, in the, in cloud foundry deployments. And I think it was, it was up to like 13% of people using cloud foundry, you know, across the distros were using the, the Kubernetes component and 45% were evaluating it. So that there is a, an extreme amount of interest. I mean, it's, it's, I think it was over 600. There were about 380 people who qualified to answer, to be part of the survey. And so it's good. It's good numbers to wrap around the sort of anecdotal interest and momentum

we see there. And then there's also there's also a very detailed analysis broken out by things of the cost savings that people have had. And I think, I think, you know, the summary is that there's, I think there's four tranches of, of cost savings, depending on, I forget how they're qualified, but it's essentially, there's about, let's say about, it says nearly a quarter. So let's call that 24% of people said that they, they're saving about a half a million dollars per application cycle. And then there's a 17%, very precise number there who are saving over a million dollars per release cycle, which, you know, even if you are conservative and discount those numbers down, it's a, it's good to see that people are optimizing on cost in their release cycle. In addition, as, as you are mentioning Richard, and we're talking about with metrics, you know, hopefully the business side is good as well, but people are always very interested in stuff, with monetary signs in front of it. So there's some interesting stuff in the survey around that. Yeah, it's neat stuff. It's good to get those kinds of surveys and they had some good stats in there, as you said, that showed expansion and some other good points. So it's nice to get that out there. So I think that's about all the news that we have. Did we, the only other one I wanted to throw in there, I thrown something in there on security quickly that there was a, a depressing story yesterday that, what was it? Like 11,000 companies have downloaded vulnerable versions of struts since those patches came out. That was the same thing that Equifax got hit by. So we've had some security focused podcast episodes and this is just that reminder, like we're still doing the same things that get us into trouble. And that is using vulnerable versions of software often as dependencies. It's not even your code that has to change all the time, but your dependencies keep going out of date. So if you're one of these companies, many of which are the fortune 500, many of these are the largest financial and insurance firm for you're as vulnerable as Equifax was with some of these things. So maybe it's time to modernize and get off these things.

Well, let me, let me, let me use this opportunity to use my only stretch joke. Are you ready? Are you two prepared? Buckle up. All right. What are we going to do about that? Thank you. Thank you. That's, that's my stretch joke. It's funny now as it was way back in 2004. So that's, that's good. Well, speaking of a gift, you have a gift, my friend. Speaking of things that are as great now as they were in 2004. How about yourself, Jared? What have you been up to since last we talked? Well, see, we've talked more recently than 2004, so that's good. Yeah. Yeah. The, the mix of, of the product marketing gig here at, at pivotal is, you know, the tons of content work, you know, white papers, blogs, you're doing product launches, you know, things of that sort. So all cool things as we help, you know, try and tell a compelling product narrative and highlight a lot of customer success. So a lot of the stuff revolves around, you know, those two, those two work streams, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm always, I'm always telling Richard, we have a, we have a blizzard of information. And I mean, you know, obviously in a good way, but as, as I've been around here like three years now, and I think, I think we've significantly ramped out our ramped up our publishing, which is fun, you know, for sort of like a data hoarder, like me, it's exciting to find all of that stuff. Yeah. I get way too much credit for any of that. So, I mean, for Jared, for specifically, you know, I do look sometimes at our, our not even just competition, but like who are the biggest tech firms and what are they publishing? And for our side, let alone just in general, we seem to publish a ton, you know, blog posts, clearly top notch podcast episodes like this, white paper videos. So, I mean, Jared, have you, how have you kind of thought about how we're more purposeful? Cause it's easy to just blast this stuff out in the aforementioned blizzard of content, but sometimes it is good to organize around some sort of message.

What have we been doing this year? I guess to maybe stay a little bit on point. Yeah. And this is a blast from the past for folks that have worked in advertising or public relations, but there used to be print magazines and they used to have things called editorial calendars. And so editorial calendars are, you know, really handy ways to think about the messages you want to get out there. You know, that aligned with industry events or product releases or things of that nature. And so what we've done is that we've organized an editorial calendar for, for all things, you know, pivotal, really thinking about the top messages we have and then aligning content to those, you know, messages, having a primary theme, you know, one month with a secondary theme. And these are really handy guidelines that you give content contributors ways to think about, you know, timing of their, of their content, sequencing deliverables, you know, things of that nature, aligning to broader industry trends. And it's a really handy way to think of it as a roadmap of sorts for all the content, creation and content syndication that you want to try and do. So what do you think are the, like of all the sort of mediums that, that, that are out there? What are the kind of mediums, you know, across like white papers? And of course podcasts is everyone's favorite as, as rich. Then you got your, your eBooks and blog posts and videos. What, what are you finding that the, the sort of like pivotal community responds best to or is most interested in? I guess, and I left that webinar as well, but where, where, where's some of the more, most excitement engagement that you're seeing? Yeah, it really depends on the, the, the sales process, you know, when an enterprise, you know, software, you have, you know, six, nine, 12 month, you know, sales cycles. So I think if you look at lead generation, the ebook, ebook assets are always, you know, top notch. That's why I was very excited when Matt Stein tweeted that he felt like writing a book again. So that was a great news, great news this morning. And then as you get into really the,

the more mature parts of the sales process, you know, the white papers can be really effective to help explain a concept either right before a meeting or right after a meeting. What we've really tried to do is try and package up as much of that collective insight and wisdom from a lot of pivots so that they can send that stuff out ahead of time or as a follow-up so that they can focus their time in talking with the customer at a whiteboard and really getting down to the nitty gritty specifics of the problems that they're trying to solve. So white papers are great in that regard. And then if things like, you know, the blogs, the webinars and the social and podcasts are all great just for kind of a steady, you know, drumbeat of activity. When something new comes out, it's really handy to have a blogger or a podcast or a webinar to point people towards because things are just, you know, accelerating. They're not slowing down. So I think you probably do need a mix for all this stuff given the space that Pivotal happens to be in. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I find, I mean, I would have answered the same way that I'm, I'm always surprised that all the different mediums still have thriving audiences. And, and I, I guess, I guess I should stop being surprised. That's the only thing that's surprising that I still am. But, uh, people like all the formats. You can't really hone in on just one. Yeah. And what's, what's really cool about, uh, you're working at, at Pivotal is that, um, there's so much, you know, kind of collective wisdom that everybody here has. So I think of this editorial calendar and a lot of what we do in, in product marketing is, you know, harnessing the hive mind of everybody that, that works here. And I'd probably include, you know, our customers and partners in all this as well. So when you're thinking about all the different, you know, mediums and what's going to be really effective, you still need to have that, you know, good story. And there's all kinds of really cool artifacts that folks here have cobbled together from GitHub repos. They did for a project or workshops that they run for a bunch of spring

developers or a dot net, your workshop as we're starting to do a lot more of, um, your customer wins. And there's just this rich, uh, your fertile ground to, to draw from as we create content and syndicate it. And so we want to kind of do a, an open source wisdom of the crowds thing where anybody at pivotal can contribute. You know, they're, they're part of the story to the, to the narrative and you share what works, you know, what doesn't and why. Um, so that helps, uh, you know, capitalize on all these different mediums that remain still pretty relevant, popular for different, different personas. Cool. So, I mean, you mentioned already the, uh, it's, I think it's been rewarding for you when people say, Hey, can you help me with X and say, Hey, we actually have content that answers that question, but you're not, I don't think unless you've, uh, been lying to me, but you're not the one actually writing all of these things and creating all this content. So, I mean, what's the pool, what's the pool of people you've been tapping into to actually help with all this? Yeah. I mean, like, like I mentioned, you know, anybody really has an open invitation to, to, to write and contribute. And I know that that's probably a little bit different than some, you know, bigger, bigger companies that may have a little bit more of a command and control type of structure. So, uh, we've had a lot of interest from the platform architects and these are folks that, um, really are the, the best in the biz to, uh, to quote the pivotal, you know, sales leadership, um, where they'll be with the customer on site for a year or more while they get them up and going with this, you know, digital transformation business. And so they just have a ton of stories from the front lines about, you know, how things have been going and what's really resonated. Um, and then also we've seen a lot of great stuff come from the, uh, R and D organization, your developers, your product managers, you're contributing to the new features that have been built. Um, and every new feature has a story behind it. You know, we, we literally use the artifact at pivotal called a feature narrative to describe what that particular feature is going to do and why it matters in the context of the customer. Um, and all that stuff is really valuable information to buyers and customers out there knowing not just,

you know, what a particular feature is, but you know, why we built it, why it was important than getting into the house and the actual, you know, technical nuts and bolts of all that stuff. So, um, uh, we also do a lot with, you know, partners trying to syndicate, you know, their content on, on pivotal properties. Uh, no digital product lives alone, as we all know. So when people are, so when people are bolting on their tech to the cloud foundry to solve a more expansive problem, that's always stuff we want to try and highlight. There's great things we can learn from there as well. So, um, we talk about the importance of a, of a frictionless path to production for, you know, your code and pipelines. I think it's really important for content authors to have a frictionless path to, uh, you know, the, the website to get that content up and going there. So a lot of analogies, I think with high velocity development for, for high velocity content teams too. Yeah. Was there anything that you, that we've shipped either blog posts or white papers or others recently that kind of stood out to you that if, if somebody was listening to this podcast going, and this all sounds good, but you know, I don't want to sift through everything. What's that couple of one or two must read things. Yeah, there's, there's, uh, a really cool one on cloud native.net the right way. As we start to engage, you know, more with, uh, windows shops and.net teams, you know, Microsoft build happening this week. You know, lots of folks are talking about that and, and.net core. So we've, uh, encapsulated a lot of the collective wisdom of the, uh, pivotal, you know, .net experts in that paper. Um, and then there's just two other things just sort of in the spirit of, you know, business outcomes. Um, there's a paper on value stream mapping and, uh, the author has been on, uh, one of our, our podcasts before, um, you know, the white paper is crossing the value stream, improving development with pivotal and cloud foundry. So kind of this idea of that benchmarking, uh, post that we talked about the idea of what metrics matter, this value stream stuff is just a really handy way to get started with that whole process. So if you're not thrilled with how your software is going today, value stream mapping can be a great way to map out, you know, the specific bottlenecks and start to build some alignment across all the different,

you know, executives in your company about, you know, how to think about, you know, changing. And then, um, and then one other last thing, um, this is a really cool series from, uh, Molly Norris Walker, uh, a UX designer from pivotal labs. Um, she's got a book out and has been, you know, teasing, uh, teasing a few excerpts from it on the build to adapt blog. Um, but she has a really cool post on how to craft a conversion funnel. And it really gets to this idea of how, Oh, AB test saying blue green deployment. It's about how all these newfangled development concepts can, uh, get married up with UX ideas to drive business outcomes. So it's easy to over rotate on, you know, some technical implementation details. Um, but those stories about, you know, UX and how they can help produce a better outcome is, uh, I think what we all need to keep in mind. Yeah. I think the, uh, the value stream mapping one, that's, that's, that's a good, uh, example of, uh, sort of, um, what would you call it? One of the sourcing strategies, uh, it seems like y'all use, which is, you know, so, so, uh, a platform architect who's like a, uh, technical person out in the field visiting with customers and prospects. Other people would call them sales engineers, but they're commiserate to their name. There's kind of different than just someone who does, well, they're much different than someone who just does demos for you, but you can imagine that, uh, there were many, many sort of like meetings where it was suggested that you should look at your, your whole workflow and people would ask like, well, what does that mean? And then there was a lot of whiteboarding doing value stream mapping. And so I, I imagine that process was sort of like, here, here's a repeating thing that comes up. It seems helpful, helpful. So we should, uh, write it down. And then indeed you look through the paper and it is a pretty good sort of, uh, reference architecture, if you will, of how you would do a value stream map to figure out how improving your software would, uh, make you rate high on those benchmark metrics, I guess. But, but it's a, it's a fun, not too long paper. Uh, yeah. Is there anything, Jared,

as you look ahead and as we wrap up, are there kind of things you look at that you look forward to us writing about? Cause you kind of see a bit of a dearth of discussion about it or, you know, things as a whole, you would hope that we come back to. I was actually reading, uh, a story today on the new stack. It was like an intro to get that reminded me of, sometimes we all zoom ahead to like the advanced sort of topics and advanced things. We don't always rewind to people who are new at something. So kind of where do you feel are their gaps? Are we doing a good job helping people understand the basics and then are there advanced topics that we're not talking about enough? Yeah. I mean, you hit on it with the, the Equifax thing and, uh, the, the struts usage where there's still, it's just a lot of basic security hygiene that, you know, folks, you know, aren't doing or, you know, we need to find ways to compel those kinds of folks. You know, modernize their security practices. Uh, and you know, since a lot of these companies, you know, hold our personal information, it is a personal thing for all of us to try and think about how we can all get collectively better at, you know, securing your systems and securing your data. So I think this notion of practical guidance for security and rapid patching and how to measure your security practices, uh, is going to be, you know, paramount for the foreseeable future. And, you know, not just, you know, newfangled things, um, but a lot of the basics of, you know, applying patching with zero downtime, things like that. Um, and then the other thing that never goes out of style is, you know, business outcomes. And we've touched on it a little bit, you know, here in this conversation today. Um, but how do you focus on those business outcomes? And a lot of tech conferences tend to focus on, you know, the, the pump, the plumbing and implementation details and, and that's all well and good. Um, but not to lose sight of those, you know, business outcomes, especially as you have at platforms, you've got all this Kubernetes business and now you've got serverless in there. So this idea of using the right abstraction for the right workload and this idea of matchmaking, I think is a, is another key thing for folks to get their, get their head around. And I think that, you know, Pivotal can play a really important role in helping shape how all that,

all that plays out. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely, uh, that that's, that's the whole point of all this that comes up over and over again. Yeah. So, uh, that does sound like a, a fecund ground of, of content. Well, thanks for, uh, being on this week. I think, uh, I think we asked you maybe about like a 90 minutes before this. So it's always nice when someone's ready to hop to it. And, uh, it was good to get an overview of, uh, what you've been up to and, uh, go over the past couple of weeks. Uh, we should be back next week on our regular schedule cadence. We'll have to see. Uh, but, um, you know, as mentioned, I think, I think if you're interested in all of this, uh, there's SpringOne platform coming up and you know, you can just go to SpringOne platform.io, but we'll put a link in there. And, uh, I think I actually have a call this afternoon to look over talks, but as Richard said, that shaping up to look nice. And, uh, there's plenty of, uh, videos of all the sessions we've had in the past. So you can get a sense of it, but I'd, uh, I'd encourage you to check it out. If you listen this far and, uh, you're interested in what's going on there and we'll put a link to it in the show note, show notes. And as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. If you want to get the most recent episodes and peruse our expansive back catalog, you can go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations. And usually every Thursday, and I think I might hit this this week successfully, but usually every Thursday we put the full show notes up at, uh, pivotal.io slash podcast, where you'll see links to all the news things that we discussed and, uh, some, some other items here and there. So, uh, thanks for listening and we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.

Tanzu Talk · 🍕 Get more pizza.