Welcome to the first Cloud and Culture episode of 2021. I am Derek Harris from VMware. And I am Danielle Burrow from VMware. If you're new, this podcast focuses on the process of application and IT modernization through the lens of Tanzu Labs, previously called Pivotal Labs. Over the years, Tanzu Labs experts have helped hundreds of companies and organizations, big and small, build better software and adopt modern development practices. This tradition carries on today as Tanzu Labs experts help clients get up to speed with cloud native computing and the flexibility and resiliency it provides. And on that note, our guest for this episode is Felicia Schwartz, who walks us through the process of analyzing application portfolios and building a plan for how to get started with modernization, whether that's a full refactor or simply lifting and shifting onto a modern platform like Kubernetes. As she explains, organizations get hung up on trying to boil the ocean or focusing on applications that don't align with the business objectives, driving their modernization efforts. So having a good, actionable plan is critical. Absolutely. So stick around and listen to Felicia dive deeper into portfolio analysis now. So Felicia, thank you so much for joining us today. Let's just dive right into just a quick introduction of who you are and what you do here at Tanzu Labs. Sure. Thank you, Danielle. My name is Felicia Schwartz. I am a solution lead as part of Tanzu Labs. I have been working on helping enterprises, large and small, modernize their portfolio of applications so they can take advantage of the capabilities, primarily cloud capabilities that are out there today so that they can continue to grow their business. I've been working as an application portfolio director for many years in the Wall Street, most of the time on a major Wall Street firm, leading teams of architects and engineers, building applications, supporting them, updating them.
2:05And now I'm helping multiple clients in that journey. Awesome. And I bet, you know, you've, it sounds like you've worked both, you know, internally at a company and then you've worked as, you know, a consultant as a part of Tanzu Labs, helping other companies do this. And I'm wondering, you know, from your perspective, when an organization is setting out to do like a large app modernization initiative, like what, what makes it so hard to get started? Like, what are some of those stumbling blocks that you and, you know, that, that companies often encounter? Most of the time, customers are very interested in the outcomes that they hear about. We talk about the value benefit of the cloud, but a lot of them don't know how to get started. And they spend a lot of time overanalyzing what to do, how much they should do. And they, they boil the ocean. Some of the skills on their team are not the future set skills because they're supporting production applications. So the technologies that are in place today are not where they want to go. So they do a lot of planning upfront to the point where it's some analysis paralysis. So we help get, we help customers get started to say, do as much as you need to do, plan what you need to plan, and then start executing, learning from what's going well, learning from what might not be going so well, and get started. That that's the hugest stumbling block to get a stumbling block to get started on this journey. All right. And one of the things I understand that that's important is to actually help organizations walk through, like, what are their, like all, like kind of do an analysis of their application portfolio and figure out, you know, what's the most important applications to modernize or, or otherwise, or otherwise, you know, rank or, or, or, or figure out a plan, I guess, for going forward. I mean,
4:06you talk through kind of how, how that works, how to walk through, we used to like, obviously analysis paralysis, right? If you have, you know, a thousand applications, you might want to modernize all of them eventually, like, how does that process get started? Absolutely. And we've really been helping customers with this, because we found that they would spend a year to try to do that analysis. And as we all experience in COVID, things can change in a year. And if you spend all that time upfront, you know, doing planning, that the world changes and all your planning is for not. So we do help them to say, let's understand where your business is today. Let's build, let's help you build a model to be flexible so that as things change, you could see the direction you need to go. So we are helping with, we want to help with create a roadmap that gives you the outcomes you want and a place to get started. So we've been doing a portfolio analysis, which a lot of companies have done something, but we've taken a different angle to it is time is of the essence. A lot of the companies, if you have existing applications, you're competing with startups. If you wait too long, the startups don't have that existing legacy portfolio and tech debt out there, they're going to get ahead of customers. So we need to act fast. So we'll, we'll work with clients to really analyze what's the most important to think to your organization. Every company has like their, their top goals for the year or for a five-year plan. Let's clarify them. And some of them could be, I need to shut down a data center. That's part of their goals. Some of it could be, I need to start a new business. We work with a lot of customers that are trying to attract new clienteles, especially in the finance world. How do I get the millennial generation to want my products? So there's all these different directions that companies want to go to technical, non-technical. We help customers go in there and say, let's pick number one or number one and number two, let's stack rank these. And then we can look at your applications to say, which are tied to these? And we don't have to go
6:07through every single one of them, but let's work with a group of people that are interested in moving to the cloud or improving them, making their applications more resilient. Let's find ones tied to strategic business initiatives. And then we're going to help you assess the difficulty of getting the results you need for these applications. It could go in many directions based upon these goals, but that's how we can help narrow down the focus to say, let's do this thing. Let's get started. And then let's take the learnings to the next most important thing to you. Yeah, that makes sense. And, and it sounds like the process must be somewhat dependent on what the client is trying to do. Like I imagine if, you know, maybe they have a really large portfolio of apps that they want to just move right away because they have to get out of their data center. Like maybe there's a somewhat different approach or, or is it a similar approach regardless? We take a similar approach in terms of how we start gathering information, how we, the solutions of what to do will be changed based upon it. For instance, in the example you gave, we've worked with clients who had both. Let's shut down a data center and a data center is applications. It's also data. There's a lot to that. We've also had customers who had 10,000 applications that they wanted to move to the cloud. The goals, there's a lot of commonality in terms of what we were going to do, but the prioritization is very different. I would target the data center that's shutting down. We have a date, we're restricted by a date. If that date is the top priority for them, I may not get to the final solution for an application, which may mean like we need to re-architect this application because some of the business problems are so complex, you can't just move it to the cloud and get results you want. But if they're date driven, we may say, step one is just let's move it. It may not improve the performance you want from this application, but if your goal is to get out of a data center, that's the solution for you.
8:10One of the things I wanted to ask was what modernization typically means to an organization, if it means refactoring or just switching platforms, or in some cases, it sounds like it's just, initially, it might just be as simple as moving to the cloud. So can you walk through like what, but yeah, so it sounds like modernization takes on a different meaning depending on what your business goal is. Absolutely. Modernization can mean exactly what you're saying. I'm modernizing the platform it runs on. So when you look at the world of Kubernetes and containers, I could be taking an application and I could be containerizing it, moving it through a pipeline, and that's modernization. I'm not changing any of the code in my application. I'm just making it so that I have one code base, and I've got resiliency so that I could scale up as needed. That is part of modernization. Some of it could be the application and the way the logic in the application is flawed, and it's very slow. It may take 10 minutes for my application to start up. So I really need to get into the way I've designed my application so that should it go down, when it comes back up, it comes up faster and it's not 10 minutes. So my end user experience is very positive, where a container may not improve that. So modernization is a generic term that based upon the outcomes you're looking to drive, will dictate what it means to you. And it's usually a combination of things. For any organization, there are some applications you're going to say, I just need to move these to the cloud. Some applications saying, I really do need to re-architect them. And it really is driven ultimately by the business needs for that application because IT is there to support business. So the decisions and the outcomes is part of when we do a portfolio assessment. It really is going to drive is the end of the day, if you're successful, what does success look like for you? So I would imagine that, you know, I mean, prioritizing your applications and what you're going to modernize and how you modernize it, it sounds like, I mean, it's really complicated
10:10because there's so much, you know, related to the business that you need to know and how that directly ties to these applications. I guess, like, is that one of the reasons why it's so hard for organizations to prioritize how they're doing this work? Or what are some of the reasons for, you know, just they're kind of getting stuck with this? So one is people making this a priority. People in organizations are busy. This is an added additional thing for everybody to work on. Making that decision is hard. And if you want to stack rank everything, that's a very hard thing because people will think many things are important. So challenges coming up with that decision. And we do that upfront. Like we want to get aligned. Let's have those conversations. If you're working with multiple business owners that everybody thinks this is most important, let's drive those and let's get aligned. That's where people get stuck off in the time. What's the most important thing to do. And then understanding that the difference between how long is it going to take to get to the final outcome? And do you have that time? And do you have the people with the skill sets to make the changes? So for instance, if you decide this application is very brittle, it's very hard to change. The technology is so dated. We don't have a lot of people who know it. The real goal is to really re-architect this in a way that's simpler to maintain. That may be a great outcome, but that takes a long time. So making sure everybody understands the outcome you need today, maybe step one in a longer journey and accepting that like this is a journey. It's not something that starts and ends. It'll continuously evolve. So getting everybody in the mindset of let's get started. Let's dedicate some people to work on this. We don't have to know every application that's out there before we get started. We have to get started and share the learnings. It's an agile way of doing
12:15the assessment that people have to be bought into and be willing to try. Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like just getting that momentum seems like a critical thing with anything. What's the result we can get to and just build off of? Yes, rather than boil the ocean and try to undertake something that you haven't been undertaking, right? For years or decades, but now today we'll just flip a switch and it's going to start. We oftentimes get clients who will say like, we need to assess those 10,000 applications that we know we have to go to the cloud before we do anything on them. And we try to change that around is why? Why do you have to look at all of them? Let's take some that you know. And I haven't found a customer that doesn't know what some of those critical applications that are very painful to them that go down all the time or whatever their criteria is. They all have something that keeps them up at night, that they get the calls at 3 a.m. They know they've got to think about those first. Let's start with that, right? That's going to give you great results. You'll learn so much about the possibilities and the options out there. And then you could take those and apply it to the 9,995 others. Yeah. So what are, what about the process of actually doing the modernization work after this portfolio assessment? I mean, is there, is there kind of a common approach to this? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so yeah, great question. We like to do a quick analysis to get started, but then we want to execute on it. We usually will come up with applications to say, you know, we follow the five hours, which is like some of applications, you know what, you're ready to retire them. Let's not touch them at all. It's not worth the investment to move on them. Others will say, you know what, this application is pretty stable. It doesn't change that often. We just need to be able to scale up at peak times in the retail industry. Black Friday was always a time where you'd see a lot more volume. So we may containerize that and we'll, we'll start with one. We'll put together a way of doing it. What we like to do is create something that the rest of the organization
14:19can learn from. So we'll work with customers side-by-side to say, here's how we containerize that. Here's the pipeline we're putting into play. And we'll show them using the technology and the tools that are out there, how to do that. We solidify that with what we call a cookbook, which is something that the customer holds onto and they share it within their organization. So that becomes a repeatable pattern, whether it's containerization of an application, or if you have to actually go into the application and change code to make it, to improve the performance of the application of itself, we do the same thing. We'll make the changes. We'll, we'll create a recipe on all of the changes, what we did with their code, and then we'll share it with the rest of the organization. So you expedite those changes because oftentimes what we find is the problems you find in one application tend to be in multiple applications. So if you have to find a way to solve it, you know, in application A, there's probably like hundreds of applications that will have that same solution. And it's much faster to implement the solution over and over again than it is to create the solution the first time. So you mentioned a few components of, of the application, right? Like the code itself, their business logic, and then there's the, the architecture, there's the platform, there's probably the development process. Do you, what, is there a, I mean, is something more common or do you see, is there like, I'm curious what the interplay is between all the different elements of actually running an application that come into play? Cause I'm guessing, yes, it's not just like you're rewriting the business logic every time, excuse me, or you're, or you're deploying it to Kubernetes every time, right? It's like, there must be some sort of a balance. It really depends upon the outcomes you're looking to get. So oftentimes when we're looking at doing a portfolio analysis, we're looking at existing applications. We're going to look at what's the future of that application and what are the challenges in the application? If it's very business critical and it's going to be changing, we'll tend to go down a path to make sure it's easy to change. So that's where we'll tend to go down a path to say, you know what, it makes sense to
16:21modernize this. You use like 12 factor applications to make this cloud native because you need that. And we'll drive those. We do come up with like a guidelines and a decision matrix for customers to say, if this is business critical, if the application is going to change, here's the road to go down. So it's easy for them to continue on this journey on their own and looking at more and more applications. So there is consistency. We work with them. We work with a customer often enough to make sure they are the ones driving what's the solution they need. So there are some basic, like let's, you know, rehost these. These applications make sense to rehost. These are applications that totally need to be re-architected. They're so big, they're so clumsy. And here's ones that need some modernization in terms of like tweaking to the business logic or tweaking to the performance issues in the application, but they don't need to be totally redone. There's just performance issues on there. So there's a couple of main paths we go down, you know, just rehosting them, moving them to a Kubernetes container, making tweaks to the existing application all the way to the more extreme of re-architecting or totally rebuilding if the business logic has changed that drastically. Yeah, that makes sense. And it sounds like, you know, there's probably different levels of like, you know, app development expertise at these different organizations within these different organizations and what they're able to kind of take on or maybe what they want to take on. Yes. So we look at things from three different lenses. When we go down this modernization path with customers is, what are your goals? Where are you trying to go? And I think it's the topics we were talking about a lot so far is, where are you going to? What's your five-year plan? What's their one-year plan? We marry that with, let's look at the technology that's in place in your applications. Are we talking about like a COBOL DB2 application that probably needs to be written? Or are we looking at
18:21something that's a few years old? How complex is it? How many proprietary licenses are in there is a goal to get rid of the proprietary. So we'll look at the goals in the business landscape. We'll look at the technology landscape. And we've created many tools. We've created as well as collated through the open source environment to kind of do an assessment of like, let's dig into these tools. We look at security. Like, so how complicated is it going to do to do any of these things on it? And then the third lens we look at is, let's look at your organization. Do you have the skills in-house? Do you have enough people available to work on these things? So we need to bring that in. And that also helps with the prioritization because you may say this one thing is really important, but you may have nobody available to work on it. So it may take a little longer to get started on something like that. So the organizational capabilities and desire and bandwidth is that third element that we have to look at to get started. And when you say bring people out, I mean, is that a hiring situation? Is that a consulting situation? Is that a, maybe we need to retrain or otherwise educate people internally? I think it's a combination of things. When you, when you get started, the best thing we can have working is people who understand your applications. It's very hard to go in on a modernization if you don't know what's in the application. So yes, having people that know it, having people that have the technology. If we talk about some of like the real old stuff, like the mainframe applications, they may not have anybody who really understands how this code works or, or understand to be able to go through an application to understand it. So that's gonna, that's gonna direct one of the challenges when you get to a scaling model. So we talked about a data center migration or, you know, moving 10,000 applications to the cloud. Oftentimes that's bringing in partners. So you need to bring the partners in and you may need to upskill some of the people on your team at the same time
20:23while you're bringing partners in. So maybe your team will, will be the subject matter experts, but you need more people than you have available or that you have on staff to do these changes. So it's a combination of let's, let's find the picture that works best for you based upon who your employees are, what are the challenges and projects they may be working on, as well as, do you have partners in place that could work with you on this as well? And this might be a little tangential, but like how have the tools or the platforms available today improved on this over, over years past? I just think even just from the infrastructure perspective, as we went from VMs to cloud to, to containers and Kubernetes, like, theoretically, it should be getting easier to make these moves or re-architect, right? I would think, but to some degree, it also adds complexity, right? Because each new thing is, in some ways, more complex. I'm just curious how that, how that plays out. There's always new tools. Every day, new tools come out and the goals of the tools are to make things easier. We've created tools to do deep dive introspection into VMs to see what's on a VM for a data center move. There's tools that look into applications to see what are all the integration points in the applications that it needs to talk to so that we, if we move to the cloud, an application to the cloud, we don't have performance issues that, you know, we're talking to something in a data center. So the tools are continuously improving to give you visibility and to make as many of the changes. Oftentimes, when you start getting into applications, there are tools out there that do it. But what we found is you still need people involved to kind of help make those right decisions. For instance, this tools out there that do code converters from like, you know, from like, even say Cobol to Java, they do a good job at converting it. But then it's really hard to support those Java applications. So the tools are getting better. And I think every day they continue to improve. Yeah, I'd say the goal, maybe it's 80% of the way the tools will be there to help migrate things over. And then you'll need the people understanding it to kind of finish the journey.
22:23Right. I would imagine that, you know, that kind of prioritization based on business outcomes and business goals, that's really a people conversation, I would guess. Yeah. And there are tools, we've created tools that help us, once we have those conversations, to allow the flexibility to say, you know, and I use the example of COVID. When we've worked with clients last January, their priorities changed in March. So the flexibility of reprioritizing your goals and what the impact is going to be in terms of what you do with your applications and what the prioritization of your applications changes. So we've also built tools to capture, you know, what, what are those business goals? How are they prioritized? What's the impact? So ultimately, we want to be able to help our clients to say your business shifts. Here's how that shift should, should impact or could impact the decisions you make about, should you go public cloud? Should you go private cloud? Should you do a massive remodernization of your application? Or should you just, you know, move it to a container or do tweaks to the application? So we have assessment tools as well as tools to actually make the changes once you've made your decision. All right. And you've definitely touched on this, but I wanted to bring it up just expressly, because it's something we've talked about in a previous podcast as well, which is the importance of it sounds like to some degree when you're, when you're talking about educating or upskilling employees. Some of it is technical and some of it, it seems like is on the business side of things. And then we had talked about like, at some point, you know, you, if developers don't understand the actual business goal, right, maybe they, they're spending way too much time over-optimizing on some element of an application where it's good enough and then they can move on and they can move on to the next, the next thing. So I'm curious, you know, just, just to get a sense of when we're talking about the people part of this, whether some of the gaps are more technical or whether they really are just bridge or they're, they're, they're, they're bridging. That's about bridging that gap between technical and business, technical capability and business need.
24:23I definitely believe it's, it's bridging the gap of having, showing people a different model of working and working together. Agree, like it's good enough to get it done as opposed to being into a state of perfection, whatever perfection should mean. So I think the bigger challenge tends to be getting that business and understanding like business people look at the features they want in there. Then they may be upset if it doesn't get performance. So being able to say, Hey, on a technical side, I need to build this for resiliency business people. Like I want my feature. So marrying the two together and having that, that collaboration is so critical to the success. If you, if an IT person will say like, I'm building it this way because in six months from now, when the business grows, I'm building it for that six month future. The business people should understand this taking a little bit longer to do something today because it's being built for the future. But a model of collaboration, like we've worked with customers all the time and we, we have seen big improvements with customers of the collaboration between the business and technology in that iterative cycle, working together on a weekly cadence has gotten so much better. And then everybody gets the right outcomes they need. That sounds very like Pollyanna, but it does happen. That makes sense. As more, as more organizations kind of embrace these different ways of working. No, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. I was wondering kind of where and when you see most of the obstacles during these modernization journeys, either, you know, kind of in these initial assessments or during the actual modernization work, like what are some of the major issues that, that come up? So from a people perspective, the biggest challenge is when people get pulled off for other things. We're trying, you want people to focus the idea of getting something done before you move on to the next thing. If people don't get that chance, that becomes a big obstacle. Some of the challenges we see from a technical side is as we dig into changes in the code, the skill sets on the teams may not be
26:29where they need to. They haven't been enabled enough to really take this on the changes they need to. So, so there's a technical enablement component that needs to be in place so that when, when my team will go with work with customers, the team that we bring has the skill sets. But our goal is to make make sure the customer is able to take the journey on when they're on their own. The right people and making sure they have the right capabilities and the ability to learn is always a challenge. We also look at code and realize like there's a lot of issues within the code itself that need to be addressed. And that will make, that may necessitate this taking longer. Security. Security is the biggest topic, especially when you talk about the cloud. How do you make things secure? And if you go into code and you see that there's security risks within the code itself, how do we fix that? So we've got to fix that. Like you, you don't want to move something to the cloud that's not secure. So that's usually a big stumbling block. So I'd say those are probably at a high level, some of the biggest hurdles we see, security, as well as capabilities within the team that will ultimately be owning these applications to understand the changes that are being made. Right. Out of curiosity, when you're talking about security issues, I mean, what is like, what do those look like? We've been obviously internally and externally, the security is becoming a much more prominent topic lately. It's, I mean, it's been in the new with that SolarWinds hack, right? It's like kind of rock, rock people's worlds. I mean, what is it? I mean, when I think about security, is it, is it in the logic? Is it in, is it in like components, just, you know, unpatched components or questionable tools or like, like what, what are these security issues that you see arising a lot? So, so I would say yes. And yes, we see a lot like secrets within the applications, like things are not protected as well as they should do. Remember, a lot of the applications have been around for a long time. So the latest and greatest things that are in place are not necessarily in place. They weren't around when these applications were written. So when we start
28:29scanning them and they, these applications may not have been changed. So some of the scans, security scans that go through, they haven't necessarily gone through all of these. So when we're trying to make changes, we're seeing these vulnerabilities in place. One of the things that's come out of that is we're helping clients get ahead of it. So how do you detect things in advance that may cause a risk from a security standpoint to your applications? So again, newer things are easier to protect because the technologies have improved. Older applications are, have a little bit more challenges to them because you don't necessarily have the time to rewrite something from scratch, but the security vulnerabilities that exist are, are intense. So, you know, a workaround is how do we get up front to see some things that are going on beforehand so that we could get ahead of it if the application can't support it? Well, we don't know where the application may have the vulnerabilities. I mean, security sounds like a huge, a huge area of focus. I'm wondering, you know, before folks even get started kind of on their, you know, putting together their plan for their app modernization journey, as you're calling it, like, what are some of the pitfalls that need to be avoided just right from the get-go? So I'd say a way of avoiding is every organization has their, their CISO and their security team in place. And historically it's been a gatekeeper. What we like to do is say, let's get security involved from the beginning. Let's identify the things that the organization feels are risks. We don't want to go down a path of making changes to be stopped at the 11th hour to say, no, no, sorry, this is a security risk. We can't do it. So getting everybody in the room at who has a, who will have a say in what happens, especially when you're talking like public clouds, where there's still a lot of fear or especially some on the public cloud,
30:30some on-prem, you've got edge technologies out there. Get the, get the people in there who have always had oversight from a risk compliance, a security perspective involved from the very beginning, listen to their concerns, understand what the challenges they've seen and that they're afraid of are. So as we make the changes, we can implement the right things in place to address them. That makes sense. And Felicia, I wanted to just ask you, you know, you mentioned a few minutes back COVID and how, you know, everyone had a plan last January that suddenly changed. And I'm wondering, you know, looking back on these last 10, 11 months, what trends are you seeing, you know, in the realm of atmarization that relates to how people are needing to respond to the pandemic? So interesting question. The types of applications that are, we're looking at now are dealing with the fact that people can't necessarily go in person to do things. So for instance, we, we work with one retail customer who needed to deal with the fact that people were just ordering online. They weren't coming into the storefronts anymore. So teaching them resilient ways of building their applications to allow quickly to allow for like, wait, nobody wants to come into the store. So we have to either deliver faster, a model that wasn't prevalent in their organization, or we have to have like curbside pickup. So that changed prioritizations. What people were buying dramatically changed. So prioritization for different types of products became important. That was retail. We also found that in the financial services world, bank fronts, people were getting like the FinTech concepts were becoming so much more important because people wanted to do things in a different manner today. So the prioritization changes based upon what the customers were seeing with COVID, you know,
32:32people not people being more online and not necessarily having the ability to go places, wanted them to be able to transact online and the prioritizations of what you wanted to do, scaling of applications, applications that you may not have had a lot to do with, needed to scale a lot faster. We work with some governments that unemployment, that became a real challenge. So things that they were able to handle the volume, and then when COVID hit, and so many people were unfortunately out of work and were applying for unemployment benefits, they were shut out of systems. So the, those were not important applications. Suddenly they became very relevant and there was a need to modernize them. So, yeah, Yeah, this seems like a good place to wrap up. And I just, I mean, I want to wrap up with one final question related to COVID and especially now that vaccines are available and we're starting, people are getting vaccinated, we're starting to come out of this, hopefully, is what, what do you see? Do you see, do you see any of these practices or lessons that companies have been learning during COVID? Like, which ones do you see really carrying over and how, you know, hopefully as a silver lining is that maybe processes are improved and, and the next time it's, it's even easier or, or businesses get better. I'm just curious what you see carrying over from, from this experience. So we've, we've done a lot of work remotely, obviously most people have. We've seen a lot of our customers have seen like, you can do things remotely while, while there's definitely zoom fatigue out there. People do realize hybrid model, I think is what people are looking for. I can get accomplished a lot in this remote world that we've been in with COVID. I think the ability to change quickly is really important that they're going to have to adjust to. The world changed overnight with COVID. So I think that flexibility, you know, personally, I think we're going to go back to a hybrid world where it's going to be in person some of the times, remote some of the times. I think that's something that people don't want to go back to being in their office all the time, but they don't want to be home all the time either. And how do you work successfully in that remote world? I think
34:36people have gotten really good at it at a necessity and technology, like tools like zoom and these collaboration tools that have come up that we use zoom, we use mural boards. There's so many out there. I think those are our habits that and trends that are going to stay for a while because they do have a lot of value and there's productivity there and there's employee satisfaction knowing they have choices. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I imagine, too, it will also just continue to influence what types of applications companies are prioritizing when they're looking at modernization, because the way their customers are interacting with their products or the way their employees are working is really going to influence that, I would imagine. Absolutely. And when the world opens up, I can say, you know, you could sense that there's going to be a desire for people to get out in the world again, which will, again, impact which applications should get prioritized. So building a model that's flexible so that when business needs shift and they shift fast, you could change and know the direction you need to go with. I think that's that's one of the things we've been learning a lot. Like you need something that you could act fast on, but you could quickly, you know, change direction as the business needs deem necessary. It's the holy grail. All right. Yeah. Thanks so much, Felicia. Really, really insightful. Thank you very much.