Candy corn teeth, or, SpringOne Platform re-cap

Episode 152 · 55:47 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, Richard, I came back from, I was going to say Australia, but that's not at all. I came back from Austin on yesterday, and I think I gained five pounds. That's the American measurement. It's great. And now I'm back here. I'm biking around. I'm going to see if that's all with salt weight. You know, when you eat out, you eat a lot of salt, and your body retains water, and then you just like two days later, you're like, oh, I lost 20 pounds. That was a lot of salt. But I think it was all the tacos and steak that I did. I went to one friend's house who was there, and I didn't measure it, but I feel like they gave me at least a 10-ounce steak, which was delicious. And it was nice. And I think I realized, you know, I like to complain about how the meat in Europe is not compatible with flavor. And I think the reason is because American steaks are full of fat, and you got the fat there, whereas if you just eat meat without fat, it turns out it's healthy. But I guess healthier. I guess the debate's out on meat. I don't know. Right. What was the thing that you ate when you first got to Austin? You're like, oh, I missed that. Like, what was the first thing? I had some barbecue. This is right next to the hotel. So I got, what did I get? I got some ribs. And no, no, I got some brisket and a beef rib, and of course, a little thing of beans and some coleslaw and jalapenos. You got to get a lot of jalapenos. You just get that with every meal. And I brought some of those back in a can. You get your San Marcos, 16-ounce, 32-ounce can of jalapenos. That'll probably last me a while, maybe a couple weeks or so. You're just putting them on all your herring now or whatever you eat in another one. Exactly. That's right. Just put them on the herring. That's what every day, you know what they say, a herring a day keeps you eating herring. I'm not really sure. You know, herring's not so bad. It's basically like really greasy sushi.

As always, I'm really good at describing food, making it advertising. But it's not so bad. It's good. It's a good food. Well, we have two guests on who were at SpringOne Platform last week. Do you want to introduce yourself? And let's say alphabetical order by first name. This is Brian Friedman. I'm a director of product marketing on the tech marketing team at Pivotal. Hi, I'm Danielle Burrow. I work on the product marketing team and I focus on customer storytelling at Pivotal. So Richard had a good idea. We should have you two on. We can talk about, you know, our memories of SpringOne Platform. And they shouldn't be, I can't do math, but was that 72 hours, four days? Not so long ago. How many hours are in a week? I should calculate that. That is a lot. I would told there'd be no math. I mean, this is early. That's right. It is early. But before that, as always, we have just a sprinkling of news to go over. Now, what with having our big conference last week. Also, if you were looking forward for a discount code for SpringOne Platform, it's too late. Sorry. Hopefully, you used the ones we were advertising about. Maybe we'll spin some up for next year. We can probably make a guess of what the format will be. But I think there was, we had a roundup of Pivotal Application Service stuff that we can go over. It was always a very detailed blog post because there was so much of it. I was overwhelmed. It's sort of like, I'm sure as y'all experience, when you go get breakfast tacos, you're like, I thought this was a simple thing. And then basically, someone took all the funny words in a dictionary, and that's the type of taco you can get. And various famous singers. So it's very overwhelming what to get. But there's a lot of features we can go over. But one thing slightly related is that there's the Azure Spring Cloud service, which over there in, as the name would imply, Azure, Microsoft's cloud, you may be familiar with. They have essentially running, I don't know, how would you describe it? Fully integrated, natively?

What do the cloud kids say when they want to say it's sort of like integrated into it? Yeah, I mean, those are some of the words that some people use. I think first-party managed service is a popular way to say this isn't some weird add-on. It's like literally part of portals and command line interfaces. So it's like a legit first-party piece of the application. I'm writing that down. First-party service. Managed service. Managed service. That's, you know, you go to the first party, you hang out there for a little while, you go to the second party, then you go home. I think is the way it goes, as long as you're not too partied out. But it essentially takes Spring Cloud and deploys it on top of the Azure Kubernetes service for you. And using K-Packs, which always makes me think of that old movie, the guy who claims he's an alien, but I don't think it's related at all. And it allows you essentially to use a lot of the kind of microservice and service management-oriented things that are in Spring Cloud. And it also has Spring Boot in there. So you get the, I'm referring to my notes, a first-party managed service of using Spring on AKS and Azure Spring Cloud. Along with all of this, as you would expect, monitoring and integrate things like that, which I think, you know, people love using Spring Boot. Do we have some latest figures on that that we like to quote? Millions of downloads a month? Yeah, all the tens of millions of downloads. I mean, that's a weird vanity number that we don't try to use too much because it's hard to indicate that's not an outcome versus, you know, the million and a half projects you create at start.spring.io every month. That's a real outcome. That's a project. That's right. And I think once you get into those numbers, you can say lots of people seem to like using it. I think that's the qualitative metric. Yeah, and outside of what Pivotal makes, I mean, this Azure Spring Cloud thing is the first, I think, kind of opinionated language-specific platform. Like most of these pads out there are just like, hey, whatever you want, bring it to us, any language.

And this one is just targeting Spring Boot, really cloud-native microservices sort of stuff. Like that's its sweet spot. It's not trying to be everything to all people, which is actually somewhat unusual in the public cloud, which seems to be very much just, hey, bring anything. But this is much more specific, which is kind of refreshing. Yeah, so you have, of course, all the Microsoft.NET stuff in there. Now you've got pretty thorough Java support, all sorts of other things. They're really being just a general purpose cloud. And definitely, it's fun to see. You know, and then did we talk, no, that was one of my other podcasts about how, you know, also there's Android being used in Microsoft land. They've got all the great things now up there in Seattle, lots of logos to run across through in the city. Do they have a little Android guy somewhere? Remember, there used to always be a picture of that when a new version of Android would come out, holding like a chocolate bar or a cupcake? Yeah, the old robot. Yeah. No, I don't think they're always dessert-related. Yeah, all the dessert-related. I'll have to look up what the latest release is. I wonder if they're going to have a candy corn. That would be fun. And I brought a bunch of those back and boy, you got to watch out. If you, I think maybe once you achieve five candy corns eaten, it's time to go take like a digestive break. They are intense. I think it's time to brush your teeth. It is. That's right. They're the marshmallow peeps of Halloween. Like you can eat one of those and then you feel disgusting. Oh, yeah. And then when you get those, you get those big pumpkin ones that are like three times the size of the candy corn. Those will really, those will really do you. Yeah. Talk about market expansion. That's a, that's a Harvard Business Review case study right there. When, when the people decided to get into Halloween, how, how was that achieved? I wonder if they engaged with one of the big management consulting firms for like a summer strategy project and then had some sort of like, you know, 60 minute meeting that had been pre-wired with all the executive vice presidents. And they, they probably even had a code name for it. Like, you know, project jack-o'-lantern.

I would, I mean, literally last week at SpringOne, I was talking to someone that I love the idea of like marketing and strategy for like just weird, like, you know, just weird swag things or things in the dollar store or peeps. Like there's a real marketing team around candy corn who comes up with cool slogans and brand strategy that I love that. Like that just makes me really happy. Yeah. I wonder if they use a lot of post-it notes and things. A lot of design thinking. Yeah. Just invite people in to discuss stuff like that. Well, you know, the last thing on that point, I was thinking, if you don't brush your teeth after the candy corns, they're in the right kind of shape that you could slot them in as a temporary tooth. May not. But you might be able to use them. Probably not an unlabeled use. If I remember, that's what it's called. Yeah. I was going to say, it could also be kind of your Halloween costume. Like it's a dual purpose. We'll bring this all together. That might also, that almost be like an adventure time thing to have like a candy zombie. We've got a candy corn, you know, my mouth and maybe a head made of, you know, a marshmallow peep or Halloween peep. Try that out. I won't be sleeping tonight. Yeah. The thing of nightmare. That's right. Well, so also we should probably just in the, as always, we have a comprehensive blog post. About what's in past 2.7. All sorts of exciting things in there. We should probably pick one or two things to highlight in there. How about, how about yourself, Richard? What, what do you think is a fun thing in the most recent release? Yeah. I mean, all, you know, rolling deployments are always fun. But I think, you know, one thing I heard a ton last week at SpringOne was all this talk about Spring Cloud Gateway, which is interesting. And so the beta release of the pivotal kind of managed version of that. So if you want all these little micro gateways out there for your, your APIs and web apps and things like that, that's a, now a managed experience in, in kind of Spring Cloud services. So people could try that out. You stole my thunder, Richard, with the Spring Cloud Gateway.

There was a lot of talk about that at SpringOne. So I was, I was pretty interested to see what, what's going to come out of that with, with PAS 2.7. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, you know, I, I was, I was, I was looking through things. I mean, there's two things that, that, that stood out to me. One, that the compliance scanner thing, I think is, is GA, which, you know, sounds thrilling, compliance scanners. But I think that's a topic that comes up all the time as, as a barrier. And then more importantly, well, I don't know if it's more importantly, but you know, you can, you, you automate your compliance and security checking that often addresses and makes the lives of security and clients, compliance people better. Who, uh, usually, you know, they can, they can slow down your, uh, use of putting, uh, pivotal platform and things like that in place. So that's nice for them. And then I also noticed we've got, uh, in a couple of areas, there's, uh, Helm chart support, uh, which, which is fun. I think in the, uh, if I remember in the, uh, cloud build pack somewhere or no, it's, it's one of the Kubernetes things that ingests it and, uh, uses them to, uh, deploy things for you. And then also in, uh, oh, I didn't write the other one down, so I've forgotten it. But there's another area where those are, those are supported, which there you go. That's right. So put into the, uh, the build pipeline so you can describe how you want things laid out and, uh, which, which seems to be a, uh, more and more accepted way to describe the, uh, topology. Is that what you would call it of, uh, of what you want your, your cluster to look like? Uh, so then also, uh, announced last week was, uh, and, and I don't know, it's, it's been around sort of informally. Or at least as far as we've been, uh, observing it for a while. There's the Pivotal Vanguard group, which is essentially, uh, you, you would know better, Richard, than me. But it's like an MVP group, uh, to use the Microsoft terminology of some of the, uh, the top, like users and contributors and kind of people in the, uh, Pivotal Platform community. And I haven't gotten around to, uh, watching the recording of the panel where they were discussing, uh, things there. But I think even some of our past guests are in there and, uh, people that you would know from the Pivotal Platform area and they kind of get together.

I think it's, uh, every couple of weeks and, uh, do what you would expect a, uh, sort of a, a top user community to do with each other. Did any of y'all have a chance to, to meet with any of them? Yeah, there was a mixer, uh, our own Rita Menaci put on, uh, Sunday night with a bunch of the vanguards as well as some of the industry analysts. So we've got to spend some time together there catching up. Yeah, it's a great group. Brian at Pivotal has done a wonderful job setting that up, making sure that team is regularly kind of fed interesting information, but also that they, they're feeding information back to engineering teams as well. That they are power users, so they actually know this stuff and they're able to help our teams make better products. Which is, if you're not doing the bi-directional thing, I don't find these programs as effective. So it's nice that, that Brian and team here at Pivotal are doing a good job with that. And then, uh, you know, it's, oh, it's great with you, Richard. We get all the great .NET news always comes up. Really, you're going to, you're going to qualify, I think, for your MVP thing. How long is that term? Is that a, is that a five-year term, six-year term? Are we senatorial or more House of Representatives? I wish it was senatorial, but it is annual, where I'm stuck justifying my system. Wow, they're really putting the screws on there. I mean, I think if you have value one year, you should get at least two years of, of, you know, appreciation, right? But, you know, you know, I don't know if you know this, but, uh, business has become fast moving. And, uh, you know, the rate of change is rapid. So you've got to make sure that, uh, your, your valuable status is still applicable because you might shift yourself or choose to downshift. And then you're just sort of like, you'll be in the SVP, the sort of valuable, uh, what's the P stand for? Player? Professional here, but sure. The quasi-valuable professional, whatever the acronym is going to be. Ah, so if you're an amateur, maybe you don't apply there. So you have to be paid for your awesomeness. Is that the definition of an amateur, that you're, uh, not paid? Ah, that's right. Okay, good. I've got a lot of things that I'm learning in this episode, so that's good.

No, we're solving a lot of things here. That's right. Uh, well, so, uh, what, what is the, uh, you know, essentially, I think, I think it's that, uh, on their, uh, their, what is it? Is it Elastic Container Service? Is that what EKS stands for? I don't know if they were as quirky as us, but I mean, it's Elastic Kubernetes Service, I think. But it's, uh, yeah, I pointed out this one that, uh, I think this was the, this was the last of the big three clouds to add Windows support to their Kubernetes environment. So Microsoft did, of course, first, but Google was immediately after. Pivotal did this with PKS, again, at the same time. And then, uh, also now Amazon adds it. So if you're, you know, doing Windows containers, you're looking for a hosted Kubernetes service, all three public clouds now support you. Obviously, you can do it anywhere with companies like Pivotal, but I think for those trying to do more Windows.net, migration of legacy stuff, or even some net new development, it's nice to have these options, finally. And you're right. It's the Amazon Kubernetes service. They're not, uh, for, for a company that's all about, like, two pizza teams, maybe that's one of their only quirky things, the two pizza teams. All business, all seriousness, no, uh, no silliness going on there. That's fine. Well, yeah, there was also, uh, some great sessions, actually, at Screaming Platform, talking about Windows containers running on Kubernetes. So, I mean, definitely some good info about that. Yeah, more mainstream now. That's not as, uh, bleeding edge as it was. Well, that's a good transition, which, uh, which is fantastic of you to do. We, we, uh, we, we thought, you know, we would, we would talk about our, uh, our, our favorites of last week. And, uh, you know what, how about, how about we'll start with, uh, with you, Richard, since you, uh, you're the co-host, you can get some prerogative. What, what, uh, and then, and then you can choose, we'll do, we'll do like a kindergarten style game. I'll go last. And then, Richard, you can choose who to go next. And then next, you see, uh, we'll kind of hold hands to the conversation as it were. But what, uh, what, what was, tell me, tell me two of your favorite sessions slash sort of like things, you know, sort of official agenda things that, uh, that you came across.

Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be interested in, uh, our, our guest take on, on main stage as well. I did a handful of breakouts because I also got suckered into lots of customer chats and analyst chats. But, you know, it was a good, I had a good breakout with, uh, the team at Wells Fargo talking about how they build product teams, which was, or platform teams, which was really educational to me hearing. And what was interesting is he took half the time to talk. It was Lance and Travis at Wells Fargo. And then he spent half an hour for questions, which always seems super risky because what if there's no questions? Uh, they blew through like just question after question. So you just had this room of people, even in a software dev oriented conference, just asking questions about hiring and kind of how big your team is. And of course that team doesn't pull any punches. They were clear about, Hey, we, you know, we're getting updates every week or so. Here's how we roll them out. This is what we do and how we deliver services. And every Sunday we actually roll the whole environment, kind of do a repave every Sunday. And, you know, it was really educational for that team. So it was fun for me to hear that as well. I didn't know their story, that detail. So Wells Fargo one was good. And then I heard, uh, again, it was good watching, I was TD Ameritrade talk about their, their gateway usage, but more importantly, how they decided to do more. Kind of microservices stuff and their decision process that we considered a and B and C, and this is why we chose this and reminded me of my days doing the same thing in enterprise IT. And it was good to see the teams doing that with even obviously pretty advanced tech and ideas and finding a good answer. So those were good talks, but, you know, I want to hear, uh, Danielle, you were everywhere at the conference or at least on Twitter, you seem to be. So, yeah, what were your, uh, let's go with breakouts and we'll go back to main stage at some point. But yeah, yeah, I think my, I mean, there were so many good breakouts. There's so many good stories, but I really enjoyed Raytheon's breakout. And I think, um, maybe because it was just so dramatic and such a good, uh, such a good illustration of how powerful Kubernetes and our platform are. I mean, I know it sounds very markety to say that, but, um, basically they have this huge, um, distributed real-time system with, I think they said 6 million lines of code.

So just this massive, massive system. They couldn't talk about what it actually is because it's very sensitive. Like some of it's classified, some it's unclassified. Um, they're running, um, they're running like everything you can imagine. They're running Windows on Linux. They're running, um, Java, C++, ADA, Fortran, Python, some commercial off the shelf stuff. And it's all running on bare metal. And so what, what the session was about is this experiment they did to try and move some of this stuff off of bare metal onto public clouds. They were going to move it onto AWS Gov. Um, and it was just really, it's just this really hard, really complicated system that they have a really hard time building and deploying. And they were actually able to move it, um, onto PKS and pillow application service. And they had to do some like funky stuff with some of their, um, cots. They had to use wine on top of PKS, on top of Kubernetes, on top of AWS Gov for a few things. Um, but in general, their, their experiment was a success and they're really excited about it. Um, they're really happy with it. And one of the things they were talking about was just even to be able to do the experiment, if they had tried to build, um, you know, their own Kubernetes platform, they'd still be working on that piece of it, on building that part of it. And, you know, because Raytheon could just provision, uh, you know, an environment for them so quickly, like they already completed the experiment and they're able to like move forward with this crazy huge thing. So anyway, it was, it was, um, it was exciting. It was an exciting breakout. So they run like Ada. Yeah. They're running everything like, and, and they can't, they can't change a lot of it. They can't rewrite it because most of it's classified. I mean, it's super duper sensitive stuff.

Yeah. And they probably also, uh, you know, employ 20% of the Ada programmers left in the world. I think that's where a lot of them are in defense stuff. So, you know, maybe they're actually set. Everything's cool. It's another, uh, older language. Yeah, that does sound fun. Yeah. Check those out. Yeah. Brian. How about you? Yeah. So I had a, I mean, I can never only pick one, right. But I got two, two sessions. The one, um, I always like, you know, Daniel, like you said, I always liked the customer sessions. I think the best. And, and the one that I attended that was, was pretty interesting was from Fidelity. Uh, they were talking about, I mean, they were talking about scale and how they have 15,000 technologists working across thousands of teams and they wanted to basically be able to prove that they could deploy up to 10,000 times a day, which is like completely crazy for an enterprise besides Fidelity. Um, but they were talking about their road to get there and, and how they've gone through various stages of automation, starting with sort of scripts and finding them not scaling so easily and how they're now being more API first and API driven, um, with, with pipelines and, and sort of opinionated automation. So, uh, that was quite a, quite a talk to see from a company like Fidelity doing that, that level of technology. So that was, that was impressive. And then from a non-customer talk perspective, I really enjoyed, uh, James Zerkhart's talk, uh, from Pivotal. He, he, he gives a talk about the path to production as a service. And, uh, it's, it's really compelling because to me, that's the secret sauce, right? Like the path, like how do we get our code into production? There's a lot of, a lot of customers who I think maybe use the platform and have improved their development cycles and maybe, you know, automating deployment to dev or test, but how do you get into production quickly? How do you roll in compliance and testing and security and all that stuff so that you can automate the entire path all the way to your production?

And it's a pretty cool talk too, because he talks about sort of, he goes into the history of, you know, um, not technology, but like, you know, buildings and, and trains and it's a neat talk. So those are the two that I like the most. Well, so I, I, you know, I didn't actually get to see that many talks. I of course saw mine cause I was giving it, so to speak, but, uh, I, you know, there's, there's some, there's some recordings that, that we have available pretty quickly. So I was able to, uh, watch some of them today. So there's one that I was looking forward to seeing, you know, I w I was doing some talk selecting for some of them and there's, uh, there's a talk with, uh, on, on orange and product management there are orange, as we would say. And, uh, you know, it was, it was a good overview of essentially what a, uh, I mean, it didn't really talk so much about like exactly the textbook definition of product management, but more of what the, the tactical things they do, they do are. And just, you know, one thing that, that stood out to me is, uh, uh, you know, I've been spending some time trying to figure out to explain, uh, what vision is as it relates to strategy. And more importantly, what, what good vision is. And I don't know, it's one of these terms that it seems like we should probably not call it vision anymore because it's kind of like, you know, all those motivational posters sort of like, uh, in, in so much as it has been, there's been lots of bad vision statements out there. It's kind of not handy to call something, uh, vision sort of like, you know, if you're not careful, the word casserole, like someone might think casserole is going to result in a bad meal, but in fact, you can make it a fantastic meal if, uh, cooked well. So maybe call it a hot dish or something. But anyways, uh, one of the things I think they were going over well is this concept of, uh, that I hadn't thought of as the concept of, uh, sort of a product manager as the arbiter of what aligns with vision. So as, as they're, you know, walking down the hallway in the morning and the CEO is like, oh, there's this new, uh, you know, blockchain technology we should use. You should, you should think about making, putting that into a feature because I'm like

cool tech CEO person and I want to be, uh, you know, uh, using, taking advantage of all the new stuff or, you know, this never happens, uh, at a, at, at, you know, any company I've ever worked at, but you walk by a salesperson and they're like, you know, if you had this one feature, we can close a $2 million deal tomorrow. Uh, and you know, that, that, um, usually spoiler alert is not true. Uh, other things always come up. So it's not really worth your time spending time on that. And then, and then you go by the customer support person and they're like, oh, we have like 50 people calling in today. Cause there's a bug. You can fix that. And so, you know, the product manager is, is in a good position. I, you know, you can pick the three out of those that probably are valuable to fix, but the, the, the product manager is always sort of able to think about, and then in good, good conditions, what, what features you might add, but what aligns with the ultimate vision that you have because there was someone from orange there, she had, uh, you know, firsthand experience of actually doing it on some orange related things. Uh, and then also there was, uh, you know, picking us another small part out of a talk. There was a, um, there was a talk, uh, from discover, uh, that also, I believe she was a product manager, but you know, it was towards the end of it. There's also, this is another session where there was a lot of good, uh, questions at the end. And I guess in addition, there being good questions, there were good answers, which is always good for a Q and a session. Uh, but she, she kind of put together without explicitly saying it, an interesting example of using kind of low level metrics to basically judge how, uh, the transition to, uh, the transition of your culture to whatever, a more DevOps cloud, native agile, whatever you want to call it way of doing things. And I forget the exactly the four or five metrics that, uh, that she was using. I mean, they were like specific metrics, not just like the kind of pivotal style five S's, uh, thing. Um, but it was a good way of indicating like, as, as we get better at these metrics, you can kind of get a sense of how the, uh, the process and the organization is changing and

improving, uh, which I often get asked about, how do you measure cultural change? And so far all people come up with, she didn't mention this is like using ENPS to measure, uh, culture change. I haven't heard that many other things. I guess you could measure like churn and, uh, I don't know, other HR sort of things like that, but those, those seem, uh, kind of complicated. So those were some, uh, I think, I think if these links are available, I have to put links to all of them, but they were good sessions. How about up there on the, uh, the, uh, the main stage, the keynote, what, what, what did you, what did you think was interesting up there, Brian? Oh, so many good main stage talks. Uh, I think, I mean, I was trying to figure out, I was going through this. Uh, I really liked watch how I strategically mentioned three or four before getting to my favorite one. Um, I, I really liked the, the home Depot, uh, talk that they, they, they flashed some stats about 91% of their software developed in-house and how they're doing that. So that was really impressive. I like, I liked, uh, you know, Joe Bita's talk. Anytime you can get Tron and Legos into the same conversation. I think that's pretty good. That's a pretty good win. Um, but I think Dick's Sporting Goods probably, uh, takes the win on this one. They took their production cloud, like offline on stage and didn't really freak out too much about it, or at least didn't seem to, uh, and nothing, nothing went down. Right. So they were encouraging the audience to hit their Dick's Sporting Goods website and do searches. And then they took that entire piece down and it just failed over to their other cloud. It was super impressive. I've never seen anything like that on the main stage. So I think they take, I think they, they take the cake on that one. Yeah. That was going to be my favorite, Brian. Sorry. I mean, it was, it's hard not to have that as your favorite. It was so dramatic and my heart was racing. My palms were sweating watching it. I knew it was going to work because of course it's going to work, but it's just, it was such

a, it was such a high risk moment. Um, I also really enjoyed. Yeah, yeah, there were, but that was like the most intense of the demos by far. I thought they were cheating at first when they said they were going to take production. I didn't even believe that it was. And then they were like, no, we're totally serious about this. We're just going to take production. It was really cool. Yeah. And it worked. It worked. The other great main stage talk was Leah McGowan-Hare from Salesforce. She had, she just had a really positive message and talking about, um, enablement and empowerment and bringing people, you know, lifting people up with you, like bringing people up with you. I think she was talking, she gave us great example of, you know, asking the audience, you know, who has taught themselves a programming language. And of course, you know, everyone's raising their hand except me. Um, and then she asked, you know, so who, who documented that? Did you record yourself doing it? Did you document anywhere how you taught yourself that language? And of course, far fewer people raised their hand. And she just used that as this great example of, you know, you all could have documented how you did that and shared that with someone else to help them learn, you know, how to, how to learn that language as well. I just, I thought, um, she had a lot of just positive messages around, um, empowerment and also gratitude and, um, being thankful for the privilege that we all have being, you know, in seats at SpringOne. It was nice. And then she also, I think she was, she was the only one at the conference who mentioned being a PeopleSoft programmer. So, so that, I remember that. Yeah, that badge. How about yourself? Yeah, you had my, uh, yeah, I mean, I didn't, I didn't name you. I didn't tag you specifically, Danielle, when you said it, but I mean, you're my favorite quote of the whole conference was when that big thing was about to happen. I look over at you and I'm about to throw up and it was just, I couldn't stop chuckling about that the entire day. And just like, yeah, because that was the moment, like, this is all going to make us all look awful or this is going to look brilliant.

And they, of course, just were so nonchalant about the whole thing. Like, oh, we're now in Azure. Like, what, what just happened? So, I mean, that was wonderful. But, you know, I was, uh, since you all took the next one, I would think about the one that touched on scale. So I'll steal Brian's mechanism here and call out a couple of things. But there was something about that challenge of operating at scale, right? Like JPMC talking about 53,000 people in technology and yet needing to figure out continuous delivery to make that happen. I love those stories. They're at Netflix scale, right? I mean, I thought Taylor's dog was awesome about the problems they were solving in-house that now they're solving through frameworks. And, you know, as I said, the way we now use our own technology is through Spring Cloud because it's easier, right? The projects they initiated turned into Spring Cloud, which now they just use in their projects instead of what they did before. So, again, these kind of how do you operate at scale things. But then the fact that, Daniel, your point on Leah's talk, it was about even scaling by bringing more people into tech. And Home Depot did the same thing with their program of, like, hey, how are we training people in-store through, what was it, a 15-week boot camp for coding? Like, that's so beautiful. Like, that's wonderful stuff. Leah's point the same way. How are we bringing more people in so we can actually scale all this crazy stuff? It's not just automation. It's people. So, there's a lot of just stories on MainStage, I think, of, yes, you know, we're going to scale through automation. Thank you, Spinnaker, and things like that. But we're also going to scale by having tons of smart, interesting people come into tech, and we can do that a lot of different ways. So, I don't know. I just kind of caught that thread through a number of parts of MainStage, and I just like that a lot. Well, I always like the Home Depot talk. You know, we've had Tony on here several times to go over things like that. So, well, one, they talk a lot about themselves in a good way. Most companies aren't that detailed about what they're up to and doing. So, they have a lot of information there. And then, two, just since I've talked with them so much over the years, it's good to get more information on what they're up to. And, you know, I was realizing as they were talking, I think she said they had been doing things for about four years.

But, as always, having worked in strategy, I always remember the year of financial planning and strategy you do before something. So, I was thinking, you know, they must have spent some time planning it out. So, it's maybe more around five years or so that they've been kind of, as we would say, on this journey. And it occurred to me that, like, yeah, that's a lot of people that I talk with get frustrated about people and change or things are taking a while. And, you know, they have great outcomes, like other people who are on the main stage and elsewhere. But, I think that one of the other takeaways that isn't always explicitly made is it just takes a long time, longer than you might think. And so, you should just be patient and, you know, keep working at it for quite some time, unfortunately, depending on your patience. But, it's a good reminder that if you're patient, things will pan out. And, there was also a little session from General Motors, which equally, they, I don't know if you could say that they've been involved for five years or so on the same sort of journey. But, they've also been doing it for quite some time and are starting to see some results as well. And, I mean, that also reminds me, back to that Discover session, she doesn't, I'll have to talk with her to kind of, it'd be fun to get some more history. But, she goes over, you know, we really did Agile in 2006 and kind of did that. And, then, even in 2016 and 2017, we were working with, you know, a cloud-native way of doing things. And, things kind of stalled out at some point. So, we had to change and we had this moment where we had to change the way we were doing things to make sure that we, I guess it's not growth, but that we still had, we were still improving each year. Which is a nice sort of impetus to look at that we've been slowing down improving. So, therefore, we want to make sure we're always improving. So, we should do something about it as well. Yeah. You may be thinking of a couple things when you said that. I'm interested in a follow-up question for Danielle and Brian. But, two things that struck me when I was watching the main stage was, first, I can't think of too many tech conferences where the vendor leaves the customer by themself on the stage.

Right? Most tech conferences you do with, like, some weird, awkward little back-and-forth banter. Here's a really specific question. How did you deploy our stuff? Why are we all so good-looking? Like, whatever. It's a really quick back-and-forth. But, like, we just leave them and say, like, tell your story, which is often super risky, I guess, because they could say anything. Granted, we see some slides ahead of time, but we don't tell them what to say. So, I think that's always interesting that we like to put them up there for an extended period of time. But then, secondarily, I was sitting next to someone else in customer marketing at the main stage when the TD Ameritrade talk was going. And it was so much fun for them to call out, like, their specific apps that they're doing. Like, this is what we've built. Hey, you might recognize this as a customer. Like, it really grounded it versus here's some generic transformation we're doing on back-office stuff that no one recognizes. Like, no, no, if you're doing trades, by the way, this is something that we built in this method and whatever. I think that humanized it a lot. But, I don't know, Danielle, when you were there and you write up so many of these customer stories, I mean, what is your vibe when it's just, like, hey, spotlights on a customer and when they're trying to tell a specific? That feels unique, but I'm assuming that makes your job easier. Yeah, it makes it a lot easier. But it is unique. And I think, you know, to your point, to kind of what Coté was saying before, I think our customers are really, you know, genuine and honest and authentic in telling their transformation story. And what I was hearing over and over again is one of the challenges is changing behaviors, changing culture, that people piece, because you can, yeah, you can buy the technology, but figuring out how to organize your business and, you know, implement processes and new ways of working is really hard. And it involves a lot of people, you know, people need to believe in this vision, going back to the motivational poster. And so I think, you know, I think that's a challenge that a lot of the customers who are speaking at SpringOne were kind of highlighting. And a lot of folks were really proud of the progress that they've made.

You know, you know, I think it was the Manulife breakout. I went to the speaker. I forget who it was. I think Neil was his name. He said something like, this type of transformation is a no-brainer, but it's really hard. And he said, you know, the cost, I think his phrasing was the biggest cost is culture, meaning I think that's what you're going to have to invest in at a really high level that a lot of people might not realize. Yeah. Brian, when you were watching main stage, any of that, I don't know, do those customer talks feel different? You attend a good number of conferences as well. Is it any different here? Is it, you know, just a different flavor on the same thing everyone does? Yeah, I think the word that comes to my mind is sort of passion. It feels like the customers on main stage at SpringOne and the breakouts, frankly, not even just main stage, have like a real passion for not just the technology, but the process and the whole partnership that they get with Pivotal. So I feel like there's sort of a different, you know, they sort of activate a different level of engagement when they're that passionate about something. It's not just like, hey, let us show you what we did with the technology. It's like, hey, we totally buy into this. We love this. We're transforming our whole business with this. And so I think that really, really comes out in spades at an event like this. Nice. So we can, I have a question for you, Coté, in a minute, but I wanted to ask first, now that the conference is over and we can be politically incorrect, did you like swagless? Like, do you miss your conference t-shirt, Danielle, or were you happy to have saved the earth a little bit to not get a women's small or medium? So I feel a little sheepish about it. I am really happy that we went swagless because I think overall it was the right thing to do. But I actually got myself a pivotal shirt from my marketing connections. I totally, I totally, yeah, I did that.

But you also, you also donated, right? But I also donated, I put my token into Black Girls Code and I felt really happy about that. And I, that $120,000 number that we donated to these awesome causes made me feel really good. So it's the right thing to do, but I also got myself a new shirt because, well, and the thing is, my pivotal t-shirt has like a hole in it. So I really needed a new one. But not everyone at the conference needed a new one. So I think it was, I think it all worked out. Well, I don't think, I don't think it's, I don't think it's swag if it's your professional uniform that you need. I mean, swag, the definition of swag is basically at the end of the year, you have a box full of stuff that you take to, you donate to somewhere. And then, and then you get like you, that you write down, you know, $50 worth of stuff and you give that to your tax accountant. And they're like, this, this is nothing. This doesn't do anything. So, you know, or, or, or as I was joking with several people, it's those bouncy rubber balls that light up. And, and then I go give those to my kids and those also go into a box. Yeah. However, maybe if there are people who are giving away Legos, I've only been to one conference where they actually gave away a set of Legos, but that company is not doing so well at the moment. So maybe that would be a bad idea. It should just be either really useful or completely irrelevant. Like, yeah, Legos are like Chinese throwing stars. Like I can't even take that on the plane, you know, or just like make it a ferret, like just something really awkward. Yeah. Just pick something really awkward or something super useful. Not just in between like USB charger stuff. All right. So no Chinese throwing stars, possibly a ferret. Now we did, we did announce the, the SpringOne platform dates for, for next year. So the clock's ticking on checking on ferrets. Yeah. I'm not, you, you think, you know, usually you can't give things to government employees, but do you think you can give a ferret to a government employee? That might be outside of the rules. Yeah. Can you imagine asking for clearance for that?

Like, Hey, I was just handed a ferret. Can I take this home with me? Is this considered a bribe or more work for me? Yes. It's more work. Oh gosh. Brian, do you like Swagless? That's really swinging the pendulum the other way. I'm going to win Swagless this year, next year ferret. That's a complete. Like a life response. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I like the Swagless. I have way too many pivotal t-shirts as it turns out already. Some with holes, some without holes. But I did not need anything else. And I also have a problem of giving Swag to my children and having them, you know, throw things about the house. So I was happy to donate. I sort of spread the wealth. I shared with all the four charities. So I thought that was a really cool idea. It was actually when I first heard about it, I felt like, oh man. But then it really grew on me because I think it's a really, I think every conference should do it, honestly. Yeah. And what we didn't have, you know, what we laughed in Swag, we made up for in really delicious snacks. Like there was a soft pretzel and the trail mix bar and the popsicles. Oh yeah, just the snacks in the hallways. I was thinking of all the food, but you're right. I think I still have a little bag of the trail mix that I'll have. It's from the Austin Nuts Company. They've been around forever. That was good. So Coté, you and I on Monday did the executive experience. This was like, I don't know, 80 or so senior folks at different enterprises who came for a half day of schmoozing and knowledge. Well, you're actually a really good guest speaker. And you did a good panel interview with Jason from Dick's Sporting Goods. I just wanted to know, because Daniel, you said something that just made me think when we were talking about the culture change. I thought when Lauren, our colleague, interviewed Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger, there was some interesting stuff that came out of that. For me, actually, I learned a couple of things as they think about purposely or advising this audience to be purposely injecting more change into their work, to actually make them more comfortable with it.

Because it's too easy. I really love the visual that I think Pat mentioned of like, hey, you almost want to always be in the yellow. If you almost think of this as a, I don't know, I'm blanking on the metaphor. But, you know, I don't want to go to red, right? The dial. Because the red means I'm burning people out. But I want to kind of be sitting in orange, yellow. I mean, there's a little healthy tension. I'm always a little bit on edge because it's going to pull out my best. When I'm in green, I'm actually becoming complacent and losing. And so many companies can purposely try to pull themselves into green, just like, hey, let's make sure everybody's happy, everybody's low stress. And that's how you fall behind. And I thought, to your point even on culture, Danielle, this idea of, you know, leaders maybe changing that culture means adding a little healthy tension where you can see the outcome and you don't feel like I'm burning people out. But, like, yeah, let's change things. Switching up the org every 18 months, people joke about it. But maybe that's a good thing because then change doesn't freak me out so much. So, I don't know, I learned something about that because, hey, did you pick up anything from the exec experience around culture? Yeah, well, like you're saying, I think the, there's other good comments about, like, you know, both of them being CEOs who are transforming or who are and have transformed organizations. It's interesting to hear what they said about maintaining that. But to your point, I think it was Pat who said, you know, it's always good to have a crisis. And even if, if there's, if it's kind of a minor crisis, it's sort of okay to make it into a big crisis, just to, like, motivate people to actually do things. And there's probably, you know, that's a very, I don't know, American business way of saying it, to use the word crisis. But it's more of just, like, motivation. Like, having, I think, I think they used to call this in the 90s, a sense of urgency. You want to have, like, a sense of urgency for doing things. And, I mean, crisis is fewer characters. And, therefore, by some sort of mid-1900s standard of English could be considered a better word to use. But I think, I think I agree. I mean, that's, that's, that's a lot of what, maybe, maybe that's a more precise word than vision.

I mean, vision, or part of it is, like, what is, what is the reason we're doing something? And having a crisis is a bit of a reason to do it as well. Maybe that's also the reason why I find vision kind of fraught, is you've got your vision of, like, you know, I aspire to be a healthy person who raises educated children, which aspiration is a hard motivator versus, like, you know, my secret aspiration is to watch those cool shows on Netflix and eat delicious food. But you need some sort of, some sort of crisis to motivate you to achieve what you're aspiring to. Like, you could have the crisis of, like, you know, the teacher says you need to read to them more at home. That's a good motivation to do things. That analogy wasn't quite as good as the candy corn teeth, which itself was not an analogy. But I think, I think it was, it was, it was nice having those, those two CEOs up there essentially saying, like, you know, you need to make sure as, as a high level executive, there's only so many things that you can use to do to motivate people and kind of putting that, that urgency into people and maintaining that. As you say, Richard, not letting your organization fall into the green and complacency, I think it's definitely a key thing that an executive has to do. Which I think is worth pointing out because I remember at some, one of the, one of the receptions, they're not called cocktail hours anymore, right? We have a little reception in the afternoon. And I was talking with someone at length. It was actually one of the reasons why my voice was forced for quite some time because it was some good, good honky-tonky music, but we were having some business conversations. So we had to yell at each other just to be heard, not yell, speak in an elevated voice. And the main conversation we had was the one I come across too frequently, which is like, oh, we do all this. We have all these change that we're doing in these improvements. And then we kind of expand out into the rest of the organization and they just don't care. They have no sense of urgency for things. And, you know, usually I think unless it kind of comes from the top, it's hard to, I don't know, light a fire from below, as it were. I guess physically it's hard to light a fire from the top, but whatever, you know, you got to have the urgency of what's going on there.

You'd have to have some sort of maybe a lit ball of wax that you drop from the top and then you can do that. But you can just blow fire downward. I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty sure fire goes up. No, I think it was, no science, no math. I think it was, I can't remember if it was Andrew Clay Schaefer or Leah on main stage who talked about change happening through need. Right. As opposed to, yeah, I think it was Schaefer. Yeah. So they both talked so well about change, but, you know, I think that plays right into what you're saying. That's that sense of urgency, right? It's only going to happen if you need it. Otherwise you can just rename it and say that you changed it. Yeah. And all those talks, I mean, Daniel, again, you sparked this by mentioning culture earlier. So it's your fault that I went down this tangent, but, you know, how did you hear anything else that felt like a specific trigger for like, yes, we need to work on culture. What's that mean? Like what's the thing people are doing to actually impact culture? There's a sense of urgency, adding change, anything else that you picked up this week around, you know, specifically impacting culture. Well, upskilling was a big topic in a lot of different sessions. So, you know, you mentioned, Coté, you mentioned Home Depot, talked about their orange method. I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, going back to Manulife, I think they said they have upskilled all of their engineers, they didn't hire anyone new. And so I think just making sure that the people who are, you know, working on the software and the platform are feeling empowered and feeling like they're doing something meaningful. And so I think that, you know, that enablement piece is a big part of culture and really important. You know, that reminds me of something that I think I came up a couple of times and it comes up every year is the idea of, I guess, not to beat around the bush of like insourcing and going, you know, taking staff. And I'm hesitating to word it because that's kind of the point that I'm eventually getting to here.

It's like making sure your staff are capable of doing things on their own rather than having outsourced them. And it's, you know, I'll see if I remember this, but next year, it'd be nice to have at least one talk that's basically like, you know, if I was naming it, it would be like outsourcing. What's the deal? And it would be a fun, like a panel conversation to have like, and some outsourcing people on there and a customer as it were, but to kind of like go over like, so what is the nature of outsourcing and augmentation and other things like that? Because obviously, you know, at Pivotal, we do what you could technically call some outsourcing and services that we have. And we have partners who do that. And then all of our large customers are involved in outsourcing. And I don't know, I've talked with like, some outsourcing people, like I was visiting with some Capgemini people here in Amsterdam, and you walk into their office, and it's basically, it's very similar to walking into a Pivotal Labs office, what they have set up. And they do all sorts of interesting projects, and they help people out. But I don't know if people think about that as like outsourcing. So it would be fun to hear how that changes or what's going on with that beyond the usual things that people don't seem too happy about. Because that, especially here in Europe, that's a huge change in like, I don't know, how a CEO, if not the CEO, thinks about how they do IT that seems to be going on. But it's not really spoken about very much. Yeah, good. I like that. Well, I think as the final thing, you know me, I really only care about food, speaking about vision. What would you do? So for lunches, there were food trucks, and also lots of beverages. Maybe that doesn't really matter so much if you don't live abroad, and there's not something called Dr. Pepper freely available. But between all the food trucks, what was the highlight of a meal that y'all had at the event? What would you pick? What's the meal we should have next year for sure?

Even though it's in Seattle, but let's ignore that. But what would be a good thing to have again? What do you think, Danielle? Hello, Brian. Danielle, go ahead. Yeah, I really enjoyed the catfish cowboy sandwich. That was really good. It had some jalapenos in there, which I think you'd appreciate, Coté. And then, of course, all the hallway snacks. I mean, those were just kind of a meal in and of themselves. So I really was pounding those snacks. Now, Richard, you're up in Seattle. Are we going to be able to have a catfish po' boy from somewhere? I mean, it's going to be a lot of salmon. I've got to be honest. It's going to be a lot of salmon. Salmon po' boy. Maybe we could arrange some of that sweet and spicy salmon jerky. I like that. Or, you know, our friend Dennis, the sales rep who covers Southeast Asia, he brought me two bags of the latest craze in Singapore, which is egg chips, which you eat these, and they taste like a boiled egg. It's amazing. Like they're a chip. They taste like the egg yolk in a boiled egg. And then made by the same company, I think it's Irwin, is egg chips fish skin edition, which I don't know what your position on fish skin is, but they are delicious. In fact, I'm going to go eat some after this. My mouth is watering. So you have to pardon any noises I make here. Your breath profile must have really changed since you've moved to Netherlands. You're just eggs and fish. But basically, I mean, Singapore is like what? From Seattle, a four-hour flight, if I remember. So you can fly some over, right? Yeah, I think it's like 14. That's close. That's right. That's my, you know, I always like to joke with the Australians and the New Zealanders and the people in Singapore about it's just, you know, it's just pretty close. Not that far, right? Yeah. But really, yeah. Quite far. All right. How about yourself, Brian? What was your food highlight, meal-wise? Yeah. Well, as far as the food trucks that were at the conference, those were all really good.

I had some, like, Korean-flavored tacos one day, which was super good. It was like a kind of spicy. It had some kimchi or something. It was really, really good. And then one of the days, we ventured off out of the conference center, and we went to Gus's Fried Chicken, which was… Oh, yeah. What's the story with that? Really. It was super good. It was, like, it's a little spicy, but super crispy. It's probably top three best fried chicken I've ever had. That's delicious. How about yourself, Richard? I'm really hungry now. Yeah, no, the food trucks were good. I had that Korean taco thing, whatever. That was really good. My worst food was I took the team out for pizza and drinks and some really aggressive playing of the game of cornhole, which was a lot of fun. But I was practicing a little bit of, you know, leaders eat last sort of thing. So everyone else ate the good pizza, and I just saw this, like, kind of lonely pizza, so I took a slice of it, which turned out to be some really gross, gluten-free thing that left me hungrier when I was finished eating it. So I felt good that the rest of the team ate the good pizza while I ate this horrible, sad, lonely pizza. But that really did leave a mark on me. You really are a good leader, Richard. Yeah. So I hope you know how much I care about you, that you ate the nice, fluffy pizza, and I ate this cardboard with sauce on it. Well, you know, I think, you know, I'm going to give you a stretch goal for next year. You can start fiscal year, Richard, and that is you should write a little book that is Leaders Eat Leftovers. The Richard's Reader of Leadership. Yeah. Yeah. Leaders Leave Hungrier would be the title of that book, right? Leaders Eat Later. Anyways, well, I think just to round it out, I had some little meatballs that had some sort of peanut sauce on them. Those were pretty delicious. And here's a pro tip. I go to a lot of conferences. Sometimes they give out small portions. You can always get two.

So I got two bowls of the meatballs, and I dumped one in the other, and it was like, you know, I was living high life right there. And we went back and had some more. But it was delicious stuff. Well, as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. If you want to get the episodes that we've done in the past, we actually have a lot from Springwind platform people who are kind of going over their talk. But you can go to soundboard.com slash Pivotal Conversations without an underscore or anything, just all one word. You can probably mix the case. I haven't tested that out. And you can see those things. And we post the show notes usually every Thursday at pivotal.io slash podcast. And thanks to the two guests for being on. That was fun. We'll have to have you all back on sometime. And with that, we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.

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