Analysts relations, kubernetes for konservative konsumers, and pig brains

Episode 141 · 49:57 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

We were just talking before the show. We got a compressed schedule here. So I'm going to be brief in my opening inanity. But Rita, now I know Richard doesn't know. Tell me about eating a pig head. Have you done that before? I have not. I have tasted pig brain. I had a friend who roasted a whole pig and kind of stuck my finger in through the eye hole and got a little scoop there. Wow. Just brutal. That is the worst sentence I've ever heard said. That is literally. Oh, gosh. I know. I did it. I know. I don't know. It was crazy. It was pudding like in texture and smoky because it was on a fire. It was great. I mean, brain is a very delicate delicacy for a reason. It's delicious. I only know two things about eating brain. One, it goes with fava beans. That's what I learned. And two, I think we probably talked about this, Richard. You have to remind me. I think when I was in Beijing a year or so ago, I had Paul Kubernetes or Tasty Meats. Paul and I had pig brain. And here's my review. Not good. Don't eat it. No. Well, how was it? Maybe if I think if it was smoky and sucked out through an eye socket, it might be good. But it was basically deep fried. And it was just, you know, I used to tell people that I'll eat anything, which is pretty much true. But I've decided what I'm going to tell them is I'll eat anything, but I don't like organs. Like I'll eat organs if I have to, but I really am not into it. I don't want organs. I don't know. I think our new band name is Hot Eyehole. So, gosh. I've had cav brain before as well. Yeah. I think, and this is just a theory. I have no idea if there's anything that backed me up. When I think about the smarter the animal, the more, I guess, luscious or, as I said, pudding-like.

Like fatty. The brain is, maybe. I don't know. Because I remember hearing an episode about people who, in Appalachia, they still eat squirrel and raccoon. Yeah. And I think someone mentioned that there was a difference in the texture of the brains. The smarter the brain, the smoother. I mean, smarter the animal, the smoother the texture of the brain. But, you know, I'm making that up. Well, listen. This is a testable theory. So, maybe next time. Maybe. Maybe. What week is SpringOne Platform? October 7th to 9th? Did I get that right? Yeah. Well, I'll eat some octopus or whatever else are really smart animals. I don't know. Octopus. I've given up octopus. I only will do it if I'm in Spain. Because they're sort of, I know this is not politically correct to say, but that's, it's my spirit animal. I thought you were going to say they're super. I know they are super smart, but if we're supposed to eat smart things, it obviously can't be people. Like, I'm just trying to pick smart animals. And you can't, you know, I have a, yeah, pigs are really smart too, apparently. Smarter than dogs. Well, listen. Apologies to all the listeners who didn't like the previous discussion. Now we're going to get on to computers. My understanding of computers are dumb as a post. However, they are an exception to the rule. Good. So don't, don't eat computers, even though, well, maybe this confirms they're really dumb. So they're not tasty. I'm not going to be very tasty. Definitely not very tender, unless heated up really hot, in which case it would melt your mouth. So don't, don't go eating the, the Terminator. What was it? The T2000? That, that one. Well, well, you know, I was just on vacation. All sorts of big news here in Pivotal land while I was gone. You want to give us the summary, Richard? Yeah. What things can I summarize? So there was some, as I call the end of summer shopping for our friends at VMware who announced Intent to Inquire Pivotal, Carbon Black, which I actually thought was a Marvel superhero, but also a pretty cool name. And I think they did like four acquisitions the last two weeks.

So they've just been doing a lot of things to build their portfolio up. So, you know, stay tuned for when things may, may keep going. But I think it's a nice complimentary story. VMware put out a good blog post. We linked to Pivotal from Rob, me, put out a good blog post and, and Forrester had a really nice take on kind of how this all fits together. So worth taking a look at all of those and seeing what happens. And then VMware, all this actually happening this week that we're recording, they just put out a post announcing some of their stuff, including some pretty cool stuff, Project Pacific, which bakes Kubernetes into vSphere, which is pretty neat. So you have the most ubiquitous infrastructure in the enterprise now with kind of Kubernetes native capabilities. So that'll be coming out shortly. Some other things around management of Kubernetes, wherever it sits with the mission control work, continue to do more and more. So it really does seem like kind of Kubernetes is starting to coalesce in VMware as being a place where not only are they committing a lot to the open source, but making it commercially available in a serious way. So pretty neat stuff. It's, uh, it's cool to see VMware playing to win. Yeah. You know, this is reminding me, I think all the way back in December of 2014, I went to like the, uh, the Docker con in Amsterdam. And I remember I met with, uh, what's his name? I think his name was his name chip, the guy who was heading up cloud native stuff at, uh, at VMware. And, uh, we were just kind of discussing it and trying to figure out, well, I was trying to figure out what he was talking about. He seemed to know what he was talking about. But, uh, now, now, uh, this time later, it seems like they, they got full cloud native stuff going on over there as, as it's evolved. So that's, uh, that's fun stuff. Also on the Forrester blog, I, you know what I heard Rita, I heard that Forrester hired some new, um, CMO person, which I think shows cause they've got like big bright pictures of analysts on their blogs. Yeah. Very clear. Always nice to see them. They got that new podcast they started, but anyways, I was just remembering that picture on their blog. Yeah. So also, uh, oh, and then we have Rita on as a guest who does analyst relations.

We'll come back and talk in more detail about that. Uh, she, she of eating pig brains through eyeballs, but anyhow, uh, so also, uh, the, the new DevOps report came out, which I think we, we supported or sponsored a little bit or a lot bit, I don't know. Uh, and, uh, I, I only, you know, it has the usual stuff you would expect in, in a good way in the DevOps report that like, you know, doing DevOps practices, still good. You should do those. Uh, and, and I, and I think, you know, being less flippant, I think there was a, uh, increase in, in hiring higher performing organizations, uh, since last time. So, uh, things are getting better, at least in the survey base. And I'll just, uh, I'll just say my highlight and maybe, maybe you have one, uh, you have one Richard, uh, which was, there was a new section on, um, tactics organizations use to transform. I think there was a better name for it, but basically they had six sort of ways that organizations change all the way up from, uh, just bottoms up change to, uh, have a center of excellence to, um, there's a couple that are basically kind of the model that I see a lot of people who are pivotal customers use, which is start with a few teams and then figure out some way to clone them or spread them out through the organization. Uh, and then of course the big bang change where you just do everything at once, uh, that one done by the least amount of people to the least success. And then my favorite, they call it mashup, which is, I don't know, everything, uh, which was also, uh, widely practiced. But I think, I think what, um, the conclusion they had that it was interesting from there, there's a couple of things. One that are mostly confirming of what I tend to see out there. One is like, uh, your center of excellence thing doesn't tend to work very well because you isolate all these people off into their own organization and they might even train people and training is kind of in this bucket is too as well. But the problem is there's two problems. One, people kind of just go to get trained and then they kind of go back and it, uh, they

might have new skills, but it's not like a kind of a hands-on transformational thing. I'm in, I'm interpolating, I think a lot into this because it's really only three pages in an 84 page document. Uh, but the other thing, which I think, which I think was very gently pointed out was that, uh, if you are someone who's training and, and center of excellencing and, uh, not working on product, you start to, as, as I just said, not actually be working on the product and, uh, you lose a little bit of touch with stuff, which becomes a little weird after a while. But, you know, as with all studies, as they say, your mileage may vary. I think there's even some internet acronym for that or initialization, but, uh, it's a good, it's a good little overview of, uh, it's a study of something I haven't seen really surveyed before, which was fun to look at. But how about yourself, Richard? You see anything cool in there? Yeah. Like you said, there was a lot of good guidance stuff. I thought one thing that stood out and I have to read this three or four more times and, and quick plug, Nicole or Dr. Forrest and I are doing the webinar on this September 12th. So she and I will be doing a webinar about this report on the pivotal site, which will be great. Uh, but the one thing that I was looking at was the disaster recovery stuff's fascinating that even the elite performers are less than half are doing even application failover, just, you know, disaster recovery. So like, we're still really bad at that or else we just are deprioritizing it, I guess might say is that in no case, we're even half of the people in any sort of test actually doing it. So whether that's failover or chaos monkey stuff or simulations or, you know, network failures, like any sort of real DR tests, even the best performers weren't even at half, which is fascinating to me. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. I remember that one. It's also interesting. If I was reading it right, there's, there's like only seven to 9% of people actually do like production chaos monkey testing, which, which, uh, matches like your first blessed intuition to this idea that you'll purposely bring down production, that intuition being that sounds crazy, uh, I guess, but, but it is like a little, um, I don't know for it, for as popular

and as much as that's talked about, it either shows that there's a lot of opportunity or some weird as, as they would say product market mismatch. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Well, I wonder, cause I, I mean, I went back and looked to, and it, uh, mentioned, I think 29% of respondents said they actually meet all the five, uh, NIST cloud criteria stuff. So if you were thinking about kind of, Hey cloud, unless you're mistakenly thinking that cloud stuff's more reliable or it fails less, I don't need to do as much DR as I used to versus a lot of people who use public cloud say, Hey, it's actually sometimes more ephemeral things can disappear. Things, weird things happen. We should do more DR testing. Like, I don't know. Just fascinating to see, like if we're doing, we're trying to be better at cloud, but we're getting worse at DR. Are we just assuming the clouds do more? I don't know how to reconcile all that. Yeah. Did you have a look at this report, Rita? I did not. Well now, now, now to have a second question, let's in, in, in the general area of like analyst world, like, uh, what, what's, what's their sense for how DevOps is doing? Would they say that it's increased or like, is there an analog of this kind of report that you find in, in, in, uh, analyst land? That's funny. They say that I actually, um, they're talking a lot about scaling DevOps. So, you know, as we know, the, the analyst firms talk with large, you know, uh, conservative quote unquote organizations. And they, they, they see that there's DevOps happening here and there are smaller groups, but they're having a hard time scaling it. Um, so that's, that's come up a lot. Um, and I know at least Gartner is really kind of, um, pushing this concept of platform ops and platform teams, right. Which is, uh, supposedly, you know, will, will help scale DevOps by instilling a product mindset and building balanced teams, which, you know, ties in nicely to a lot of the stuff that we've been doing and that we see our customers doing our more successful customers have figured that out and are, are, are, are doing it that way. So, yeah, I love that you guys started talking about this because that is definitely a trend

I'm seeing is, so how do we scale this now? How do we take DevOps and make it real? That does seem to be a lot. I mean, the, the, the, the PD reports I see, they do tend to cover, uh, doing DevOps in the large a lot more, which, which, uh, which is interesting. DevOps in the large. I love it. Large jobs. Anyways, uh, so there's a lot of, uh, in pivotal land, there's a lot of open source, uh, updates going on there. Uh, first of all, where there's a, there's a steel toe update just for people who, uh, haven't listened to every single episode we've ever done, Rick. What, what is steel toe? Yeah. It's a set of libraries for .NET developers, whether you're using .NET framework on windows, .NET core on Linux or windows kind of help them do microservices, these sort of stuff. So whether you're doing, you know, configuration stores and circuit breakers and service discovery, all these sort of concepts that make sense in the microservices world, making it easier. So you're not hard coding all this boilerplate infrastructure stuff. So there's a new release to three, uh, 2.3 has some new stuff, has some new, uh, connectors to backing systems like gem fire, Oracle database connector, SQL server stuff, support, uh, some other health check things. So some nice little updates. There's a big update coming for 3.0, but this team keeps humming along. And then, uh, let, we'll do a little game here. Usually you are much better informed about, uh, items than I am. I, I actually did spend some time to prepare because I got that. I still got that vacation relaxedness where my mind running slow enough to actually think. And, uh, I tried to educate myself on the other two things and tell me, tell me how I did here. This is so also there's a K pack update or is it a release? I, I, I, I think it's like, uh, I've never really seen it before. So yeah, no, it's a first time. K pack is not a rapper. It's actually a, uh, nothing. No. Okay. So K pack is a part of the build pack service. I see. I see. That's good. That's good. It's kind of like a Tetra pack. Are those Tetra packs recyclable, but all the drinks come in. I didn't mean, I didn't mean to wrap for like a soda wrapper.

Or I meant like somebody who does rap music. Come on. Oh, gosh sakes. This isn't, yeah, this isn't a beer koozie. Are you saying that Tetra pack is not a new hip hop person from like, I mean, that is pretty also bad-ass, but yeah, I don't think K pack and Tetra pack are going on tour. K pack. That was that movie with, uh, Kevin Spacey in it. If I, if I remember, well, there's a really lot going on in K pack. Yeah. So my understanding from reading and tell me if I was wrong is like, so if I'm wrong, so you got, you got kube CTL, kube cuddle speaking of, uh, what do you call the octopus, the, uh, the cephalopods. And, uh, now, now that's a, that's a procedural way to command the Kubernetes cluster to do things like a wizard. Uh, but however, well, as we all know, there's a cycle in the world. You'll do, you'll do procedural script-based things. The industry thinks that's great for a while. Then it's terrible. You got to do things declarative. You can't directly tell people how to do things. So you got to do it in YAML or, uh, or some sort of DSL or something. So then, then you got your K pack thing. There's a more of a declarative way to use some YAML to talk about how you want to, uh, orchestrate the way Kubernetes stuff is basically set up. That stuff being, as I recall, like the, uh, the sort of like images, the container images that you have and kind of making sure that they, uh, they stay good and how they're set up in the registry. And then you can also access the logs of things going on there. Uh, that's what I got. How did I do? Yeah. I mean, K pack for some of this is just the hard part of building containers. So yeah, I mean, you're right. There's that whole set of things that people have to do in a Kubernetes cluster for, for build packs. That's always been something that was originally Heroku cloud foundry kind of took it on as part of that to build containers, source code K pack kind of does that natively running in Kubernetes to generate these containers. We'll wrap all that up as the pivotal build service so that you can not just build them though, but also update them. That's the cool part with build packs is let's say about every seven to 10 days, we update build packs instead of a developer having to now recompile, reassemble, deploy their new

stuff. We can be automatically updating images with the new container layers that come in through a build pack. So K packs is doing some really smart work on building and then managing the containers it builds, which, you know, at scale, we're talking about DevOps in the large and talk about automation in the large managing thousands, tens of thousands of containers, assuming you're just going to get upstream pushes from dev teams might be optimistic. So let's maybe have different ways that we can update containers as they sit in the registry. So there's even more. There's also the, uh, the sort of backend janitorial service that makes sure everything stays clean and tidy running around. That's right. Good, good. Okay. So then there's also an update to riff the open source, like a functional serverless, whatever the kids call it now programming thing for world. And, uh, so here, I think if I remember it's, uh, it's, it's added an abstraction layer so that it's not dependent on like, uh, like K native stuff or other things anymore, but then it also has like different, different deployment models, different ways of packaging thing. You can put like raw containers in there. I don't know if that's a, uh, uh, industry term rock container, but that's what I'm going to call it, or you can deploy it K native style, or you can do kind of more of like a, a streaming sort of use of containers. And then also it'll use build packs in the cloud native build packs. And, uh, I don't know that that's how do I do on that one? That was good. Yeah. So, all right. Still, still a bigger update to riff. Yeah. As they kind of decouple the runtime from some of the builds and things like that. So you can go ahead and build functions or apps or containers and then deploy them to different runtimes, like just a basic kind of core runtime that just runs Kubernetes, creates Kubernetes deployments and services. And that's it. Or you can plug in the K native runtime. If you want to do scale to zero sort of computing and routing with Istio as well. And then they're working on a streaming runtime to do real time kind of stateful stream processing. So kind of interesting. This is becoming more than just a function platform. It's really becoming kind of a Kubernetes native app platform or app runtime. Very good. Well, good news run through there.

Rita, why don't you introduce yourself formally? Sure. Rita Minacci and I am the head of analyst relations at Pivotal. And you've been on a couple of times before. I have. It was fun. Less nervous this time than I was a couple of times. Well, that's good. It only takes a few times and then you're a pro with it. No ducking to jingly or soft meditative music. So we'll be fine. So you went over a little bit about the, you know, what's going on in the analyst world about DevOps and things like that. And, you know, another thing in the DevOps report was sort of a survey. I mean, I guess the whole thing is a survey, but an analysis of what people are doing as far as using cloud, whether it's public or private or on-prem. I think one of the answers was like, I don't know, or prefer not to say, which I think was kind of a funny answer for you or whatever. But what, you know, in general, when you look at what analysts are talking about, like what's their status on cloud adoption right now? You know, it's growing, right? The interesting shift that I've seen over the past couple of years actually is that they no longer just talk about it in quote unquote public cloud sense. They're seeing some growth in on-prem, right? Or private. There's a really good, I mean, 451 did a two-part report that I really liked that talks about the growth of hybrid and also managed services. So they're, the way 451 broke it up in their report or reports is they look at cloud as a whole. So it includes not just infrastructure services, but things like managed cloud and managed or managed services are hosted on-prem. So they talk a lot about that and that, that growth. There's a lot of talk about data workloads, right?

Moving to the cloud. So I think Gartner wrote a report that everybody really loved that talk about that growth and, you know, the dominance of Microsoft and Amazon on that. And then there's also a lot of talk about modern, like the next big, I think, push in cloud is going to be modernizing core apps. So that's something that I think Forrester called a few years ago and refreshed that report, which I think we have on our website for download and you can add them to the show notes. But that's the next big push is modernizing the, the old, if you will. And then, you know, they break it up, you know, there's, there's going to be more growth. So, so core, core infrastructure services, sure, growing, but not as much as things like database, PaaS, the, the term that everyone hates, but the PaaS services, as well as things like data services and modernizing, modern, modernizing new ones, which is kind of what I've been noticing. So this reminds me of, I was walking the dog before this, just to add irrelevant information to the podcast again. But I, you know, like you were kind of mentioning, I think, or referring to like the, the I as magic quadrant. And if I remember there's like five or seven, there's six, there you go. I got a, what's the opposite of, of an average where you get the outlier, the anyways, like and basically the, you know, Microsoft and Google and AWS were like way up and to the right compared to the other ones. And so I was thinking kind of, kind of, uh, you know, what do you, what do you do with a magic quadrant when there's only six things on it? Like, it's sort of like, it's sort of like asking people like, do you like Pepsi or Coke? And it's like, uh, uh, I only get two options. Right. So it's funny that you should, you should ask that because what Gartner has done in the past when a market does not shift very much for several, several years in a row is they,

they downgrade it and they turn it into a market guide. All right. That's what happened, for example, with app servers, right? Because it was just web sphere, web logic, and to some degree, JBoss, right? Like nothing changed for several years. And so they downgraded that to a market, market guide. I see. And is that more like a selection criteria than sort of like, okay. Like, here's the overview of the market. Here's what's happening. And here are some vendors and, uh, you know, their shtick, if you will. Here's like the capabilities they have and you can match it to your, what you're, I see. That makes sense. Okay. Once it stabilizes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so use market guides for like brand new or, or, or things that are kind of on the down, right. Or things that are stabilized, as you said. Nice. So you, uh, you've already name dropped a couple analyst firms that we work with. Like you said, we've talked about Forrester. We've talked about Gartner 451. So it's easy to, uh, not for you because you're always nice to the analysts, but you know, it's easy for people to kind of dog analysts and, and what they're, so tell me something nice about each of them. Like, what do you like about Gartner? What do you like about Forrester? What do you like about Redmonk? Give me, give me one thing that, uh, you're a fan of. You know, I've got to be honest. It's all about the individual analysts. Like we can talk, if you want me to talk about the business models, I definitely have issues for their sales place. I have issues. Um, but it really, it's about the individual, um, um, analysts, but I will say Redmonk, what I love about them is they tend to see trends a little ahead of everybody else, right? They, they pick up on things, particularly in the developer, uh, developer space. I think Forrester is pretty good in that regard as well, actually, because there's been a couple of times when, um, Forrester's called some things, you know, two or three years before, uh, the rest of the firms pick up on it. So, um, uh, I really, uh, it has to do with their business models. Um, you know, Gartner is a very buttoned up organized organization. They have a lot of automated systems, right. That you have to deal with when you're trying to engage with an analyst and you kind of have

to go through the process. And, um, so that, that can be a bit frustrating at times because there isn't room for flexibility, right. Um, whereas Forrester, I feel is much more flexible. So, uh, but sorry, I'm talking not about things that I like. That's not what you asked. Well, but yeah, they're topics like when we're planning something, like what are the topics you would say, like, I'm going to go ask Gartner, the folks we like at Gartner, the folks that give us good advice. Like, what are there certain topic areas that you typically skew towards one or the other? So yeah, look at Gartner's depth. I mean, they cover topics, uh, multiple times, um, from different angles. So I actually really like that. It can be overwhelming. You and I have talked about that. We could spend our, our week just reading Gartner research. I kind of like that, you know, um, they're also consistent. They use these strategic planning assumptions and they build off of, those, which I think is, is good. Um, so that's what it is. Forrester, um, I, they've, in the past couple of years, they've really up-leveled their, the conversation, particularly around app dev and software delivery, right? So, um, you know, they have a report and I think this one's on our site as well about why CEOs need to care about, um, app software delivery and development. They don't need to learn how to code. They just need to know what's up because their, their, their thesis is that, that is your CEO's job depend on being good at delivering software. So then RedMonk, you know, again, I think, you know, I, I love the way they frame things. I like the language they use and they're just, you know, in general, their persona, but I do see that they kind of take a more holistic picture of what's going on. Um, and they cover the smaller, the smaller vendors, uh, much more deeply, I think, than some of the bigger firms. So, yeah. Yeah. And sometimes you do the, uh, events for different firms. We go to Forrester events and RedMonk events and you just went to the Gartner Catalyst event, I think down in San Diego. Any, any takeaways from that? What kind of audience goes to an analyst event like that?

People who write checks. I'm still in that for one of our colleagues, really a lot of decision makers. Uh, the Catalyst event is special because it covers all the topics, right? It's, it's run by the group within Gartner that's called Gartner for technology professionals. Catalyst was actually an event that was put on by Burton group. So they kept that name. Uh, so they cover all the things, whereas, you know, the Gartner summits are specific to a topic, like you'll have a security one, you have an app dev one, an infrastructure one. Um, so that was really cool because there was all sorts of topics covered. Uh, this year, um, they, there was a lot of talk about edge computing, right? Like cloud and edge, right? Like what's, that's the next thing. Um, so that was really great. Um, there were, I mean, in terms of like just being self-serving, there was a session on when to use, uh, virtual machines, containers, or serverless, which was standing room only. So there's a lot of, uh, still a lot of interest in that and containers and things like that. And the, the, the other topic there, uh, Catalyst, I talked to a couple, I met to a couple of attendees, um, who a lot of office 365 content and people like, that was another one. I think the office 365 sessions were, you couldn't get in. Wow. But yeah, that, that, that brings together, uh, two things. Like one, as I was reading to the, uh, the DevOps report, I was thinking like, um, and you know, I mean, this, it's a good joke opportunity for my favorite part of the IT world. It's like, this doesn't seem to be speaking to, uh, you know, desktop management at all. Uh, it's, it's obviously all about application development and, and to the point of like, you know, office 365, like, I don't think the DevOps report has much to say about like, uh, you know, if you should have SAS email or not, I think that's probably assumed, but like, uh, I, I get, I get by selective bias on my own exposed to mostly the application development world of, of analyst stuff.

But like, how, how would you chunk out like all the parts of IT that they pay attention to? Like, for example, if, if I were to think about all the Forrester stuff that I read, like they have a very heavy, what do they call it? CX. They're, they're nicely, there's a whole sort of like, it's, there's probably internally sort of like three to five pillars of strategic focus or something. And it seems like one of the pillars is, uh, customer experience, which sort of, I'm reverse engineering this, like, you know, subdivides into like, uh, marketing stuff through Instagram and then like also like, uh, actual application development stuff. Um, but there must be somewhere that someone's doing desktop management, right? If people still do that in analyst land, you know, honestly that they, they, they probably do, uh, I would say Gartner, but I don't, that research doesn't pop up on my, on my radar cause it's not on my radar, but I would say, uh, Gartner covers all the things. Um, and, and to your point about Forrester, they're very heavily focused on, on customer experience, right? I mean, even like they have, their research theme is really all about, um, I think attracting, retaining and delighting customers, whether you're writing about app dev, like if you read a report about application development and delivery or software development delivery, there will be, uh, at least one point in there about how that's important for attracting, retaining and delighting customers. So they're really big on that. And, uh, and they're known for, for being pretty deep on that topic. Yeah. You know, I, I, I, I don't know. Sometimes I find myself being an apologist for the old, uh, the old bimodal thing. And I, and I think it's usually what I say is it's about this topic where it's like, well, if you're, if you're like a CIO or someone, right? Like, and I'll use for the third or fourth time, my favorite thing, there's this fork in the road where you're like desktop management versus custom application development. And I feel like a lot of the bimodal stuff is basically like about that fork. And it's sort of like all this, like, if you're going to be talking about like continuous

integration and delivery, uh, like, you know, there's a, some point of it that you got to divide up the portfolio and there's just different ways about knowing about things. But, but it seems like the, uh, the tragedy, uh, well, and also like over the, you know, the three or four years that was happening, uh, Gardner's explanation of that evolved a lot, which gets to the other point is like all their stuff would cost thousands of dollars to read. So I'm pretty sure not that many people who didn't like it read it, which, which is always, always unfortunate, uh, as, as a way of self-defending yourself against things. Yeah. I don't really have a question there. I would, uh, you make me think we do, uh, switching gears on briefings and talking to analysts. You've, uh, you've been in this game for a while. You're a veteran of the analyst game. What's the, uh, without naming names, cause it's probably involved me. What was the worst briefing you've been part of and like, why, like what makes a bad briefing? You know, a bad briefing is when there's no, when someone's reading, when you can tell someone's reading, it drives me nuts, not just in briefings, but even when I see people presenting, when they read slides, those are, that's the worst. Or when they start off like, Hey, let me tell you about the market or let me tell you the trends. You know, I always tell people, this is their job. They're analysts. Don't tell them about the industry. So that always makes me cringe a little bit. Um, so I try and make sure upfront people don't do that. Um, I, I will say it's, it's, but actually the, the, the worst experience I've ever had on an analyst call, this was years ago, back when I was at Sun Microsystems and I'm not going to name any names, but I'll just say that by the end of the call, I said to myself, Hmm, perhaps putting a lawyer and an analyst on a call together was not the best idea. Right. Um, these are two groups of professionals who kind of like to argue. So, um, you know, and it might've been, you know, a productive argument, but, uh, as my

personality is, I don't like to, I like to see people smiling and nodding at each other. Right. Just the nature of what I do. So that was really, uh, it was anxiety inducing, uh, to 11 really. So that's kind of something I remember. But yeah, I think, I think back to your, back to your question, what makes it bad, makes it bad is, is not being able to read where the people want to get going, um, where the analysts want to dig in and being standoffish. I know I always say there's always an opportunity to talk more. So if an analyst wants to go deep on something you said and you weren't planning on it, just do it. And we can follow up and finish up the rest later. There isn't a rush here, you know, and that ties to, you've heard me say this about my philosophy on, um, what we do in analyst relations, which is to me, it continues. You know, I like to say that I've been having a four-year conversation with our analysts. And one thing we do during, I mean, for people who aren't, haven't been part of an analyst briefing before, typically it's, you know, potentially us presenting to the analyst about some sort of announcement or initiative or whatever. What's, since most analysts, you correct me if I'm wrong, aren't always interested in breaking news. Like they're not breaking news on the Gartner site or Forrester site. So it's not about just giving them the press release. You're, what's the point in reality of that briefing? Is it to give them different context or actually have a two-way conversation? What's, what's the point of a vendor briefing an analyst firm? So in general, it's for them to, to at least to get a sense of where you're going or where you're headed. Right. So I like to like, I don't, by the time your announcement is made, the analyst should know that it was coming because you've been talking to them about it. That's how I like to think about it. Um, if you do a post announcement briefing, it's to add more specifics and details because they're going to get called by end users to get asked about this. What does this announcement mean? Uh, what, what is, um, can you break it down for me? And so I want to arm them with the, with the answers, right? With, with the knowledge. So that's, that's what we do with the post, post announcement briefings. But like I said, they should know what's coming down, uh, before it goes, goes down.

Yep. So, so what, what, uh, you know, I always, I always wondered this way back when, when I was an analyst, uh, but like, what, what are the questions analysts are supposed to ask? Hmm. Supposed to ask it. Well, they, they, they need to be looking at it from the lens of their end user clients. So what does it mean for the customer? Is this going to, if they upgrade to this, what's going to break? What's still going to work? How much is it like the previous version like that? What, what are the dependencies they need to consider? Uh, those are the, the, the, the, I think that's number one, they need to have that perspective. And then the second will be more of the industry perspective. Like looking at it from what is this, is this, is this on par with what they're seeing other vendors are doing or adoption trends or, or such is this, are, are you, are you kind of, you know, not only towing the line, but are you, are you heading in the right direction? Does this make sense from what they're seeing, uh, where are they seeing the market going or are people doing so? Yeah. I remember, I remember, uh, when I was at four or five, one research, they had a, um, they had a very, uh, trying to be prescriptive list of questions that I think, um, I forget there was someone who, who, who wrote, who originated it. But anyways, the, the, the one takeaway that I had from there that was always good that I guess I had learned when I was doing MNA at Dell was like, you always want to have, uh, sort of like momentum figures, like, you know, depending on who you talk to, there's all sorts of numbers, uh, that they tell you are not like revenue or number of customers or percent increase or downloads or whatever. But it's always good to get, uh, a running thing of like year over year numbers, at least one year to another. And like, it, that does, that does seem like, uh, to your point, right? Like, especially if you're talking with, uh, among many other things, if you're talking with end users, which is to say people who are using and buying the stuff that vendors, uh, and open source people are providing, uh, like one thing they want to know is like, well, is this working right? Like are other people using it and how's the acceptance of it going?

So, uh, that always seems like something useful to, uh, to go over. That's actually a really good point. Cause then they can also assess out like, does that, how you're doing vis-a-vis, you know, your competitors and again, other, other market factors. So, and then they also have examples, right? So if a, if a client or an investor asks things like, well, how many other customers do they have? Or how many customers like me do they have? They'll have that answer. So, and, and then what, like, like, uh, speaking of end users, like I know what it's like to, uh, work with, engage whatnot with analyst people, but like, what's it look like from an end user perspective? Like, do they have a different business model or is it still like just seats and like rated things or, or do they, I guess it all depends on the size of the organization, but what's it like there? So they do have to do, you know, they ask for inquiries the same way that a vendor would or any client would, but they offer, I think they configure the, the, uh, the accounts differently. Like, I think they, it's more team based, for example, um, as opposed to individual seats. And I think that, like, I mean, this is at least for Gartner, um, and I, they're trying to move in that direction actually across the board with their services. So you can't just buy, like, I just want one seat, you know, um, and have these, have, have work group seats underneath it. But they're really looking at team structures. Like, oh, if you go into this service, you have to buy at least three seats and this is the makeup, which is one of the things that, uh, sort of annoys me. I wish that, uh, especially companies that offer many different services, right. For like that, like, for example, Gartner has like, you know, for tech marketing teams or product managers or GMs, um, if they were, I wish they had a lot more of a bespoke type of, uh, account configuration, if you will. Yeah. I'm pretty strict about the categorization of stuff. Right. That's interesting. Like it's almost, it's almost as if like, uh, you're reading some newspaper and it's like

you had to subscribe to the lifestyle section in the comics, but not the U S political nudes. Like you pick all these different, uh, yeah. Um, but the other thing for, the other thing for end users is they offer additional services where they will connect you with some of your, again, depending on how much you pay them, connect you with your peers. Um, and, and those folks will go and do some research for you and come back and give you more feedback or even give you questions, tell you what questions to ask, uh, the analysts. So they have varying levels of access, but yeah, in terms of, you know, how do you, how do you connect with an analyst? It's, it's similar. Uh, you go through the, at least the inquiry process is similar. You, uh, you ask, you know, so one of the things that, that I think is, is, is important is knowing the analyst you want to talk to, right? Cause if you put in a request and say, I want to talk about paths, PA, you know, paths, they're just going to go through the system and they'll find somebody who covers that or who has, um, who has availability. But if you know that there is an analyst that you trust or an analyst that is, uh, very up to speed on a particular vendor you're interested in, I would ask by name. Um, it's very rare that I just put in a random question. If it is, it's because it's an area that I don't know or a topic I don't know about. And I haven't been able to figure out by looking who covers it, um, who that analyst is. So, um, that's, that's kind of one thing that I think, I'm not sure if it gets, if it gets lost with the end users or not, if they have their go-to analyst that they go to, but if I were an end user, I'd try and figure out who the analyst that's most informed about the question and ask for that analyst by name. Otherwise you're just going to go through the system and you don't know who you're going to get. Next thing you know, you're talking to some, someone about desktop management. Exactly. Office 365. So, so that I have, I have two more questions, just one brief one, but then. Then do, uh, to do a little, a little thinking on, on your feet or, or in your chair as it

were. So if we were to, if we were to look at like, let's say the past three to four years of like Kubernetes, like, what do you, what do you think the role of analyst has been in like covering shaping? And then like, uh, finally, like, uh, to put it in the passive voice, the crowning of Kubernetes, like, how did they, how did they lace into that from the beginning to the present day? Hmm. I think they, well, I think they were hot on containers from the get go because they didn't want to miss on a hot trend. So they started off, you know, and it was all about Docker, as we all know. Um, and Kubernetes, the way, the way they've arrived, where they've arrived today is that it's still difficult, right? Despite the fact that, uh, all the analysts are like, Kubernetes is the way to go. Everyone's hot on Kubernetes. They tend to, you know, they, they fall short from saying like, you should do this. They, they, they try and place it as like, this is where all the momentum is, um, to, to rather than saying, this is what you should do. Because what they're seeing is people are, you know, having some, some problems despite the fact, you know, but they still say Kubernetes one. I think one of the, I can't remember which firm it was. I read a, read a report where they're like, that's it. It's Kubernetes is where it's at, right? That's where you're going. Um, that's what you're using. And that's the, that's the answer. But like, but what are you asking? I think Fint and Ryan, a catalyst had a session that said, okay, if Kubernetes is the answer, what, what questions are you asking? So, um, you know, they, they, you know, I think they sort of hedged their bed, their bets, how they got to Kubernetes. I mean, it's been a whirlwind. I got to be honest. Um, uh, and how they got to Kubernetes, but it's been, been watching the, them cover containers for a while. And it's all driven by, you know, all the questions that they get. So, uh, my perspective is they're getting a lot of questions from end users about the stuff. So they've had to figure it out quickly. Um, and it's, it's complicated.

So, um, they're, yeah, they're using, they're using, you know, information from vendors and information from end users to form their opinions and their perspective. I don't know if I answered your question. No, no, no. I think, I think that matches exactly what I would think. And, and like, similarly, I didn't always have access to all of this stuff, but like back in the, in the, in the rise of DevOps, like, I think it was pretty similar where, uh, you know, in, in both cases there, there's a lot of, uh, footnotes in, in analyst reports that like link to like, uh, you know, um, talks from the usual suspects, lots of Netflix commentary and things like that. But then to your point of like who the huge customer, uh, uh, the, the end user customer base is as people who are making conservative decisions. So that what they want to know a significant amount of people want to know if it's a safe choice. So you kind of like have that, uh, as to use the word again, that conservative tracking of how this technology is doing, but more importantly, how it's going to work out for you. Right. And no, no one, no one really likes to be told that they're, uh, average. Uh, but I think, I think more importantly, it might to, to use a bit of pivotal thinking it might be like, well, is this something you want to specialize in? Like, do you want to use an experimental Scotch tape or just a regular Scotch tape? Right. Uh, so, you know, it all depends on the profile of people, but it does seem to, uh, this, they're pretty good at like tracking that kind of, uh, when, when is it across the chasm of, of safety usedness to excellently formulate a phrase? Yeah. Well, they're, you know, it's like it's container management is, uh, at the peak of inflated, um, uh, I forget the term that they use. Expectations, right? Yeah, exactly. So, so they get it, you know, they know that everyone's asking about it, but they, and they will say in the research, um, whether it's Forrester or Gartner, that this is still complicated stuff. Um, but it's getting easier. Um, but, and they're also pretty, pretty adamant.

That you shouldn't try and do it yourself, right? There, you know, that if you, you need help. Right, right. So, so my last, my last question to, to speaking of, of, to make, to make a, uh, way too inside analyst joke. Let's, I'm going to try to do a Gartner L2 style of, of chart and analysis here. And that is, so if we were to make a, uh, uh, an animated donut chart and donut, cause I don't, you know, I don't never know why I use a donut chart instead of a pie chart, cause it just looks cool to have a hole in the middle. I'm not really sure. I prefer donuts. Yeah. See, yeah. I guess maybe you could put the text on the inside so you could better like, you know, uh, space out the labels, but, so let's say we had an animated donut chart, uh, and, and what we were tracking was the momentum, the change of analysts wearing sports jackets. Like what, what, what would it look like now? Is it, is it, has it been shrinking or we, are we at like a 60% sports jackets or 30%? What do you think the splits looking like? Oh, I think it's 60. Well, at Gartner conferences, I believe they have to wear them. So it's, uh, it's, uh, let's do it outside when they're out in public. It's like 60%, but in, if you're coming and having a meeting with them, at least with the vendors, I think they're probably less formal with the vendors than they are with the end users, but in public. I'd say 60%. Wow. That's higher than I would expect. Maybe I'm, I'm, I'm going to the wrong sample set, but yeah, back, back in my day, as it were, it was, it was quite high. Uh, so, uh, I, I remember that was a formative moment in my little analyst life as I was in an elevator and there was, there was an analyst in a dark Navy blue sports jacket with the gold buttons, you know, the full, the full thing. And, uh, I was talking with them and I asked what they did and they said they were a storage analyst and I bet you are. Yeah. I mean, it's trending downwards for sure. Yeah. Right. It's trending downwards for sure. But it's, uh, you know, like I said, in public, you know, they have to wear slacks. All right.

All right. Well, we'll, uh, next time we run into a Gartner L2 analyst, I'll have to take note of their attire. See, see what's going on there. All right. Well, uh, well, thanks for being honest. Is there, is there any, any, uh, any like last, last analyst things, advice or commentary you'd throw out before we wrap up? That's, that's it. I don't know if you guys have any other questions, but, um, you know, that's, it's been fun. You know, it's, it's a, it's a fun, it's fun. What we do is I enjoy it very much because it's bringing people together. Um, I will say one of the things that I'm really, uh, liking seeing is, there's a lot more, uh, content and reports that's advising C-level folks, not just C-level folks, even I and O folks and CISOs and things like that. And how to talk business speak, if you will, how to communicate what they do in a way that is compelling or that makes sense for their, you know, quote unquote line of business. Partners. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Right. You know, we're talking earlier about what, what, what looking at, like, how do you, how do you, how to, how do you put what you do in perspective of the business goals? Um, and there's a lot more research or reports on that, which I'm really enjoying reading. I have one that's actually about how to talk about information security and in terms of business value. So, yeah, that is good. That's probably a good keyword to search for a phrase business value and finds interesting things. And then, I mean, that's kind of related to the last thing I was going to add is like, uh, there's actually, you know, for, for the, uh, the paywalls and stuff, which, you know, people got to make money. So that's fine. No problem there, but there actually are, as we talked, mentioned, there's actually a lot of analyst blogs that are, uh, of course free to read. And, uh, and also if you, if you're very, if you're interested, there's a lot of press releases, particularly from like an IDC, they actually jam a lot of information in those press releases. So if you've got yourself an RSS reader or something, it's pretty easy to set yourself up with a steady stream of free analyst stuff.

You know, or if you have a vendor like, like Pivotal, you know, look at the analyst, um, analyst report section on our website. There's a, there's a ton of, you know, I like to get distribution rights for reports that are informational. So they don't just talk about us. They talk about trends. So check out our, check out the. It's true. I think, I think, I think because of you, us, uh, we put out a lot of stuff and then I noticed Salesforce puts out a lot of things and, uh, and also, you know, the usual other big vendors, but if you don't have an account, it's easy to get access to stuff if you're interested. Yeah. All right. Well, uh, as mentioned earlier, we have a SpringOne platform coming up in Austin, October 7th and 9th. Uh, I think there's like a $200 code that I obviously don't have memorized. I'll put it in the show notes, uh, if you want to get a discount for it. If you go over to, uh, usually about every Thursday, if I remember to do it on time, I post the show notes at pivotal.io slash podcast. And as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. Uh, you can subscribe to it by just searching for Pivotal Conversations, wherever you get podcast things, or if you're really, uh, excited about the worldwide web and, uh, universal resource locators. Is that what URL stands for? I always forget. Anyhow, you can go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations. And with that, we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye. Well, we are, I'm going to start over.

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