We're here at the OpenStack Summit on the ground. Exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE Wikibon. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host for this segment, David Floyer, senior analyst, co-founder of wikibon.org. And our guest is Bailey Caldwell, VP of BizDev at RightScale. It's been around the block. Had done a few laps around the infrastructures service cloud management track. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. You guys are really the pioneers with Amazon that are known, you guys are known really all about making Amazon usable. And I once quoted saying that Amazon was the junkyard dog of cloud, meaning it was a place where you could get your parts and build your own and have great advantages. And hence the developer community took to that like a big time, just so easy to use. And just that was the cloud. That was infrastructure to service. Now platform as a service is going on full tilt. Amazon is doing extremely well. They're adding more and more stuff every day. Real powerhouse, really putting a lot of people on notice recently going into the enterprise. So tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing now and try to compare and contrast where you were just a few short years ago. Sure. Yeah, so as you mentioned, we started when EC2 launched and our CTO Torsten Van Iken had the foresight to see that this cloud world would require new management tools. Not only that, we also saw a world where there wasn't just one cloud. And it was really about having multiple resource pools you could choose from and running your applications on those resource pools as quickly and as easy as you possibly could. And what are you guys doing here at OpenStack and talk about what you guys are offering now because you guys see the world's expanded, the rising tide is floating boats. One of them is called OpenStack, a competitive platform. But in the same grain, Amazon has got some steam as well. So we really see the hybrid model emerging where enterprises want to build cloud-like services for their IT organization. What Public Cloud has done is allow the business to innovate really rapidly. And there's no reason that IT can't provide those same services using technologies like OpenStack. So we've been part of the project for basically the inception, but formally joined the foundation in September as a corporate sponsor. Dave, what's your take on Rackspace and OpenStack and what they've done vis-a-vis what Amazon has built because Amazon's got a trajectory, right? So, you know, diseconomies of scale exist at some level, but you have a rapid rise in OpenStack with open source. And yet Amazon's on a trajectory. Well, Amazon's a very strong trajectory and it's on a strong trajectory with the types of services that it's offering as well. Rackspace is focusing very much on, in my opinion, on the cloud service providers as the primary consumer of the products. Making cloud services applicable in volume with all of the interconnections, making that the focal point. And then from that it'll go into either cloud services providing stuff for the enterprise or the enterprise taking that over at that particular time. Both of those are models, but the primary starting point is, how can you enable cloud service providers? And is that your experience as well? Are you seeing most of the people that you support in the cloud services area? It's becoming more difficult to differentiate an internal IT organization's role with a cloud provider or service provider's role. So, what we see is that the innovative IT, enterprise IT organizations are really becoming sort of travel agents for these resources, right? They want to govern it. They want to provide access in a controlled manner and get the best price, but it's ultimately about facilitating in a controlled way the choices that businesses need to make with regards to these public resource pools as well as their own private cloud. So, I certainly think the service provider market is being revolutionized. Everyone, there's 30,000 independent data center operators, right? Their businesses are getting threatened by this public cloud thing, so they have to innovate. And I think OpenStack is a great way to do that for their business. Do you see the rise of mega-datas where a whole number of cloud providers and users in a particular vertical are going to be and some data aggregators as well? Yeah, I mean, Rackspace actually this week announced their service provider strategy with regards to federated cloud resource pools. And I think that's a really compelling vision. I think it's probably fairly early. But in general, I think that's certainly a really great use case. So, we do see universities going down that path where they're starting to share resource pools across multiple use cases that share similar requirements. Excellent, so you've joined Rackspace, you've joined OpenStack relatively recently. So, what area are you focusing on? What's your contributions? What are you working on? Sure, so, you know, RightScales Platform is really about what you do after the cloud is built. All right, so it's a lot of people focus on getting the cloud service there. What we focus on is the content, the apps and the data that you really need to run on that infrastructure. So, we're working with Rackspace and their private cloud software, which is their installation reference architecture of OpenStack. We've done a ton of testing, a lot of application provisioning. So, really above the cloud where applications run is where we're really making sure OpenStack can scale. The orchestration layer, the management layer. Yep, management orchestration, automation of those apps, sort of self-healing architectures. We're doing an HADR session, I think, tomorrow about how you can use RightScales Management Platform on top of an OpenStack cloud to build, you know, highly fault-tolerant architectures for your data center. What white spaces do you see out there? Obviously, in the management space, you guys filled a lot of holes on the Amazon side. What white spaces do you see in the management side for OpenStack that developers could come in and fill a hole? You know, it's a really good question. I think that we've seen Amazon evolve their feature set. They have multiple different ways of using their own tools to manage their cloud. Obviously, for RightScale, because we support multiple resource pools, we still think there's a lot of area to innovate, especially when you look at something like OpenStack. So, the whole software-defined networking space, adding things like a database as a service, building more platforms as a service, like features into the OpenStack foundation is really going to be an interesting opportunity for a lot of companies. We've been strong proponents of getting compute storage and network right and making that solid and scalable, which I think with Grizzly especially, the foundation has proven it's capable of doing. What about storage in the high availability market? Because obviously, Cloud, you have a lot of people that have latency. Dave and I were just talking about when he was on earlier, given his overview of what the analysts at Briefings were yesterday. You know, storage, high availability storage, low latency is really a focus. Obviously, Flash is a medium that people are deploying with. But how do you guys look at that storage side of on the management side? What are you guys doing there? Yeah, so for us, you know, we really rely on the API of the cloud software itself. So, I think when you look at something like Swift, or you look at the new block storage in OpenStack, those products are in sender. Those products are evolving to a point where ultimately it's going to be further and further commoditization of that hardware. So yeah, SSDs are great, super fast, I was really good. I think the biggest issue with data is location, right? And data has mass. So how do you take these petabytes of information that live in a corporate IT data center and move it somewhere that you can process it? And I think that's still something that the speed of light is creating challenges for. That's one of the reasons I was asking about these mega data centers, because if you can backhaul it across a mega data center, that's a lot cheaper than, and a lot less elapsed time than trying to crawl it over the network. Equinix and CoreSight, who are partners of ours, are building these sort of cloud campuses, CoreSight calls them, where they're pulling all the fiber there. And then it's much easier to get to a particular facility. So I certainly think that high speed connections are going to solve some of the problem. But the reality is this data is transactional. This data gets created in real time. So the closer you can move the data to the processing source, the better. I agree, I totally agree. Yeah, we agree. It's interesting that the philosophy of people like Supernap, on the West Coast in Las Vegas, they are courting all of the cloud providers for certain industries, they're bringing those certain industries like the media into their data house. And that seems to be a very strong way of growing that infrastructure. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've been to that facility, it's pretty amazing. Amazing, isn't it? Yes. If anyone can get a pass, I highly recommend it. But no, I think that's very true. But I think one thing we forget living in this cloud bubble is the majority of the software and the majority of the processing power in the entire world is not cloud, right? It's still existing apps. Many of these apps are decades old and they're not going away overnight either. Plus, it's really questionable what the value is of moving those to the cloud. So how are you, so what should people do? Should they try and integrate a hybrid cloud from their installation to the cloud? Or should they move their applications to the cloud, run them on their own hardware, but run it as a co-location on the same area? This is the good news, bad news, I think for everyone in the IT industry, which is a mainframe to client server, client server to virtualization. Virtualization to cloud is not a natural, it's not a natural progression because the apps don't benefit from moving to that model. So ultimately, I think we end up with, in a world with too many choices, really the key is having choice and being able to pick and choose where you place your workloads, depending on their value to the organization, how they're architected and what you want to spend. There may be things you just want to let them sunset off and not ever come back to life. So what you really want is you need to have a strategy that lets you maintain what you've got, take advantage of all these new technologies, and certainly build anything new in a cloud model with cloud aware apps. So I think that's what we try to help our customers with and try to convince them that you need to start now because it's not an overnight journey, it's kind of a, it may take you multiple years, but you can get there if you start now. Bayley, you've guys had a good view of the cloud market, obviously from in the trenches and sitting up in the executive ivory tower of RightScale, you've been close to all the action, certainly on the Amazon side. What's the most impressive thing that you've seen with the OpenStack Summit here and in and around the community that you can share in terms of technical, business, users, open source? Pick a few and chime in and share just for the folks who aren't here can't see the crowd. Well, so this is my third summit and other RightScalers have been all the way back to the original ones. And I think it's amazing how it, I think it's doubled every single time. So literally almost to the T. It's twice as many people as it was last time. And I think Jim Curry from Rackspace said it well, this is about the users. And it's really cool to see the conversation shift from the theory of building compute storage and network to actual use cases, actual customers who are really using OpenStack in production to do all sorts of interesting things. Yeah, David was commenting, there's not a lot of vendor hype here, it's pretty much meat and potatoes, put your meat in the table and everyone look at the size of the code or contribution or implementation. And that's what we need in the cloud. Shameless plug, RightScale compute is next week in San Francisco. If anyone- Is there a hashtag? Shouldn't going? Yeah, I think so. But we'll definitely get the hashtag but it's our compute conference and we have a really cool panel with what we call the mega cloud providers all on the same panel. So you can hear- Shameless plugs are okay in the queue as long as they don't go into the sales pitch. You can hear directly from them. You're sharing information. I'm just sharing information. We had a guy in earlier who shared a GitHub link and I'm like, it's not a plug, that's a resource, it's okay. So, but taking OpenStack in particular, obviously you cover a lot of different platforms. So how are you envisaging integrating into Horizon and into that orchestration and other layer? So, you know, I think what we're really focused on is continually improving our own product as a platform because what's happened is we started as a web front end to a command line interface. It was pretty easy to tell somebody, oh, you want to use Amazon? Well, here's a web UI for it. And we become much more of a platform, much more of a horizontal abstraction that normalizes the experience of all these resource pools in a way that makes it much more accessible for anybody, whether that's developers, IT end users, DevOps people, managers who are worried about costs, security people worried about governance across all of these resources. So, each cloud and each cloud technology will build its own pieces of right scale. Our job is to innovate ahead of that and or around it, but also to provide that uniform experience across all the resource pools that people want to consume. Bailey, talk about DevOps. Obviously we've had a site two years ago called DevOps Angle ahead of the curve. And now it's pretty much mainstream. And actually that's a mindset shift. But that really points to a term that we've been hearing in the, that's been amongst the industry alpha geeks for a while, but now it's hitting mainstream enterprise service provides infrastructure as code. In your opinion, what do you, what does that mean? What does infrastructure as code mean?  We see it, we just did a survey and I think 73% of all the enterprises who responded are doing something with DevOps in terms of how they view their IT organizations. And that's pretty amazing. I wouldn't think that would have happened so quickly, but it's clearly points to the fact that software's ability to interact with infrastructure is really the future of software development, right? So why write an app that then runs on a server? Why not write an app that knows how to run itself on a server or a platform? And it's actually an area we've done a lot of work ourselves with a product that's in private beta right now that actually has a fully featured programming language that allows you to control compute storage and networking in line in the code that you're writing. Cause wouldn't that be great, right? Why do I need an ops guide to determine I need more CPU when the app itself can just take advantage of those resources and spin them up and provision it on its own. But what does infrastructure's code mean to you?  So what is it? I mean, people are trying to say- It means turning the cloud into a computer. It means making it as programmable as the hardware in this laptop, right? That's really what it means to me is that when you can synthesize the business functions with the infrastructure as software, then I think you've hit the sort of- And scale's a big part, right? Scale is a big part of it. Absolutely. Sure. So yesterday we were talking to a number of the users and they were looking, they were asked the question, what's the cost of the software that you have to buy? And one of them said, well, I've got to play for an old Microsoft installation and I'll pay $50,000 of that. But the rest of the code put together is $2,000 a month that I'm paying. Your model is obviously a higher touch or higher end model. How do you see, I mean, I asked the question before, how are you integrating into it? Or how are you moving towards that much lower cost type of environment? Yeah, so this is one of my favorite topics. It's also, it's probably a good news, bad news story. I just, I'm sure it's trying to find the good news. But essentially the OSI model, right? The seven layer cake that everything we have consists of network, hardware, physical server software is getting compressed. And I think the companies that fight that compression are going to have a really difficult time in the future. And there's very few businesses that will survive that transition. So a couple of examples, Salesforce.com, I don't think has ever dropped their prices. In fact, they've probably only increased them. And for a software company, that's normal. That's nice, but they're delivering the application itself and that's value to the business by making it more streamlined. And that's a value sale. Stuff on top of IT is not quite the same, is it? Well, I think it can be, but I think the reality is that as people see the commoditization of infrastructure and physical networks and hardware, they're going to expect software to follow that trend. And that's why I say it's a good news band of stories. It's good for the consumers and the challenge for companies who are software development businesses is to figure out an innovative model to take advantage of those price points and pass that value down to the customers while building a strong business. We're here at Bailey Caldwell VP Business Development RightScale, we're getting cut on time here. But I want to let you get to the last word in RightScale, obviously good business decision, great team, been following you guys for a while. Haven't been recently, I just put a plug out for your event next week and we'll keep an eye on that. But I want you to just share your vision around, take your RightScale hat off and just put your kind of industry participant hat on and share with the folks what's going to happen the next one, two years around. OpenStack, multiple clouds, data center transformation, obviously modern era infrastructures upon us. And every, all industries are affected. And how do you look at that and then share your vision of what you see unfolding? So, we see a world where the mega cloud providers, the sort of household names that we know, Amazon leading that front, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, in that market who a sensory characterized by they have enough infrastructure to deliver a cloud servers without building another data center, right? Google has a big enough network and enough servers, they can just do it. We see the public cloud as the innovative force in this new era of IT with private cloud copying it as it goes along and innovating behind public cloud resources. So I think that it's exciting times. And I think that any IT professional who's paying attention will realize that building your own private cloud is an important strategy for whatever business you're in and understanding that following and using public cloud where you can because you're not going to be able to innovate as fast as those guys will is going to be really interesting to watch. Okay, softwares of service, obviously is the preferred business model for all businesses, but before to get softwares of service you need platformers of service, you need infrastructure underneath it. Lot of transformation, exciting times, this is the open stack summit, this exclusive live three day wall-to-wall blanket coverage here on SiliconANGLE.com. Go to SiliconANGLE.com for reference point and emerging tech and the enterprise and go to wikibond.org to check out all the research around big data, big data analytics, Hadoop open source and more recently David Fleurer and team's work around software-led infrastructure. Lot of great free research there and it's been great to have all these great guests. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.


Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier and we are on a rainy San Francisco day, day three of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2019. Here to talk shopping, one of my favorite topics. We have Katie Dunlop, VP of Global United, unified rather commerce and marketing for Blue Wolf, part of IBM. Katie, welcome to theCUBE. And from Salesforce, we have Ben Caesar, Senior Director of Global Industry Retail Solutions. Ben, it's great to have you on the program. How are you? Excellent. Good. Even though we are at the rejuvenated Moscone Center, which is fantastic and I think all of the hybrid multi-clouds have opened upon San Francisco. Right. It's a very soggy day. So Katie, IBM announced a partnership with Salesforce a couple of years ago. Just yesterday, John and I were chatting. We heard Ginny Romani, your CEO, talk about IBM as the number one implementer of Salesforce. Talk to us a little bit about the partnership before we get into some specific examples with that. So I know that part of that partnership, it's really to leverage the best of the technology from Salesforce as well as IBM in ways that we together, married together, create opportunities for the industry. And specifically here today, we're talking about retail. So on the retail side, Salesforce is obviously a great SaaS company. They keep on blowing the records on the numbers, performance-wise, SaaS business has proven it's a cloud business, but retail is a data business. Yes. So how does IBM look at that? What's the relationship with retail? What's the solution? And what are people looking at Salesforce for, for a retail? Yeah, I think it's really important to understand where our strengths are. And I think when you talk about Salesforce, you talk about marketing cloud and commerce cloud and service cloud, we call that the engagement layer. That's how we really interact with our consumers, with our shoppers, but at the same time to really have a great connection with consumers, you need to have great data. You need to have great insights. You need to understand what's happening with all the information that drives choices for retailers. And that's why the relationship with IBM is absolutely so strong. And it is a data-driven relationship. Together, I guess you can see the customers in the middle. So we have our engagement layer and our data layer. Together, we satisfy the customer. Lisa, what's the solution specifically? Because obviously you guys going to market together to explain the tactical relationship. You guys joint sales and integration. Sure, so what we have done, given the disruption that's happening right now in the retail space and with the customer at the center of that conversation, we've been looking at ways that the native functionality for Salesforce is Einstein as an intelligent layer and for IBM, it's Watson. So where do they complement one another? And so looking at retail with commerce and marketing and services, the center of that conversation and the engagement layer, how are we activating and working with the customer from a collection of data information standpoint and activating that data all the way through supply chain. So the experience is not just the front experience that you and I have when we go to a site. It's actually how and when is that delivered to me? If I have an issue, how am I going to return that? So we've looked at the entire customer journey and looked at ways that we can support and engage along the way. So for us, we're looking at, as you see retail and the way it's evolving, is that we're no longer just talking about that one experience where you're actually adding to your cart and you're buying. It goes all the way through servicing that customer, returning and making sure that that information that's specific to me and if I can choose how I'm going to have that inventory sent to me and those products sent to me, that's exactly what we're looking to do. So then the retailer, like a big clothing store is much more empowered than they've ever been. Probably really demanded by us consumers who want to be able to do any transaction anywhere, sort it on my phone, finish on the tablet, et cetera. So I can imagine, maybe Ben, is this like a Watson and Einstein working together to say take external data, maybe it's weather data, for example, and combine those external data sources with what a retailer has within their customer database and sales force to create very personalized experiences for us shoppers, us consumers? Right, and where retailers really can grow in terms of the future is really accessing all that data. I think if you look at some of the statistics, retailers have up to 29 different systems of records and that's why some of our experiences are very good, some of our experiences are not very good. So together if we can collapse that data in a uniform way that really drives personalization, contextual selling so you can actually see what you're buying, why you're buying it, why it's just for me, that's the next level. And I must say with all the changes in the industry, there's some things that will never change and that is consumers want the right product, the right price, the right place and at the right time all enveloped in a great customer experience. That will never change, but today we have data that can inform that strategy and when I was a senior merchant at Macy's years ago, I had no data, I had to do a lot of guessing and when mistakes are made, that's when retailers have a problem. So if retailers are using data to its benefit, it just makes sure that the customer experience is exceptional and that's what we try to do together. And I can build on that if we're thinking specifically how we're engaged from a technology perspective. If I'm a merchandiser and I decide I want to run a promotion for New York and I want to make sure before I run that promotion that I have the right inventory and that I not only am I creating the right message but I have the information that I need in order to make that successful. One of the things that we partner with Salesforce on is the engagement layer being Salesforce but in the back end we have access to something called Watson Embed Business Agent and that business agent actually goes out and talks to all the disparate systems. So it doesn't have to be solutions that are necessarily homegrown by IBM or Salesforce. Watson can actually integrate directly with them and sits on top. So as a merchandiser I can ask the question and receive information back from supply chain. Yes, there's enough product in New York for you to run this promotion. It can go out and check to see if there's any disruption that's expected and check in with weather. So that as, on the back end from an operations standpoint I'm empowered with the right data in order to run those promotions and be successful. It's interesting, one of the things that comes up, we've heard this expression from IBM. There's no AI without IA, information architecture. You talk about systems of record, all these silo databases, there's low latency. You need to be real time in retail. So this is a data problem, right? So this is where AI really could fit in. I see that happening. The question that I have as a consumer is what's in it for me, right? So Ben, tell us about the changes in retail because certainly online buying mobile is happening. So what are some of the new experiences that end users and consumers are seeing that are becoming new expectations? What's the big trend in retail? Well, there's two paths. There are your expectations as a consumer. Then there's the retailer path and how they can meet your expectations. So let's talk about you first. So what you always want is a great customer experience. That's what you want. And what defines that is, are they serving me the products I want when I want them? Are they delivering them on time? Do the products work? If I have a problem, how am I treated? How am I served? And these are all the things that we address with the Salesforce solutions. Now let's talk about the retailer. What's important to the retailer as an ex-retailer myself? It was important that I understood what is my right assortment? And that's hard because you have a broad audience of consumers, you have regional and local requirements. So you want to understand what's the right assortment? And working with IBM with their assortment optimizer, that helps us out in terms of how we promote through our engagement later. That's number one. How about managing markdowns? This year there were over $300 billion in markdowns for retailers. Half of those markdowns, $150 billion were unplanned markdowns and that goes right to your P&L. So we want to make sure that the things we do, satisfy the consumer, but not at the expense of the retailer. The retailer has to succeed. So by using IBM supply chain data and information, we can properly service you. It's interesting, we see the trend in retail, I mean financial services early on, high frequency trading, use of data, that kind of mindset's coming to retail where if you're not a data driven or data architecturally thinking about it, the profit will drop, unplanned markdowns and other things, inventory, a variety of things. This is a critical new way to really reimagine retail.  There's retail banking, there's retail in every part of our life. It's not just the store or online, but it's retail everywhere. Someone's selling their services to you. So I think the holy grail is really understanding you specifically. And it's not just about historical transactions which you bought, but behavioral data. What interests you? What are the trends? And data has become a much broader term. It's just not numbers. Data is, what are your trends? What are you saying on social media? What are you tweeting out? What are you reading? What videos are you viewing? All that together really gives a retailer information to better serve you. So data has really become exponential in its use and in its form. So I'm curious what you guys see this retail, very robust retail use case as driving in the future. We just heard yesterday, one of the announcements, Watson anywhere. I'm curious, leveraging retail as an example and the consumerization of almost any industry because we expect to have things so readily. And as you both point out, data is commerce. Where do you think this will go from here with Watson, Einstein and some of the other technologies? What's the next prime industry that really can benefit from what you're doing in retail? Well, I think that I'll start and you can add that in as well. But I think that it's going to bleed into everything. So health and life sciences, consumer goods, product goods, we've talked about retail being all different kinds of things right now. Well, CPG organizations are actually looking at ways to engage a customer directly. And so having access, utilizing Watson as a way of engaging and activating data to create insights that you've never thought of before.  And it's going to be proliferated into all kinds of different industries. Yeah, every merchant, every buyer wants to be able to predict. I mean, wouldn't that be incredible to be able to see around the corner a bit? And while technologies don't give you the entire answer, it can sure get you along the way to make better decisions. And I think with Watson and Einstein, it does exactly that. It allows you to really predict what the customers want. And that's very powerful. I want to get you guys' perspective on some trends that we're seeing. We hear Ginni Rometti talk about chapter two of the cloud. You almost say there's a chapter two in retail if you look at the certainly progressives who are way out front doing all the new things. People doing the basics, getting an online presence, doing some basic things with mobile, kind of setting the table of foundations, but they stare at the data problem. They almost say, oh, so it's a big problem. Out of all these systems of record, how do I integrate it all in? So take us through a use case of how someone would attack that problem. Talk about an example of customer or a situation or a use case that says, okay, guys, help me. I'm staring at this data problem. I got the foundation set. I want to be efficient and innovative in retail. What do I do?  Do I call Salesforce? How does that work? Take us through an example. So I think the first example that comes to mind is I think about Sally Beauty and how they're trying to approach the market and looking at who they are and many retailers right now because there's such a desire to understand data, make sure that you're kept, everyone has enough data, but what is the right data to activate and use in that experience? So they came to us to kind of look at, are we in the right space? Because right now, everyone's trying to be everything to all people. So how do I pick the right place that I should be and am I in the right place with hair care and hair color? And the answer came back, yes, you are in the right space. You need to just dive deeper into that and make sure that that experience online. So they used a lot of information from their research on users to understand who their customers are, what they're expecting, and since they sell hair care product that is professional grade, how do I make sure that the customers are getting using it in the proper way? So they've actually created an entirely infused way of deciding what exactly hair color you need and for me as a consumer, am I actually buying the right grade level for me and am I using that appropriately? And that data all came from doing their research because they were about to expand out and add in all kinds of things like Altile where you're going into the makeup area but really helping them stay laser focused on what they need to do in order to be successful. So you guys come in and do like an audit and engage with them on a professional services level. Yes, we went end to end. And they're buying a SAS AI and then they plug in Salesforce? Yeah, so they actually already had Salesforce. So they had the commerce solution, marketing and service, they were fairly siloed. So we go back to that old conversation around data being held individually but not leveraging that as a unit in order to activate that experience for the consumer. What they have decided as a result of our work with them so we came in and did a digital strategy. We've been involved as an agency of record to support them in how that entire brand strategy should be from an omnichannel perspective in the store as well as that digital experience. And then they actually just decided to go with IBM OMS and use that as a way of activating from an omnichannel order orchestration standpoint. So all the way through that life cycle we've been engaging them and supporting them on Watson, obviously native to Salesforce's Einstein and they're leveraging that but they will be infusing Watson as part of their experience. So another benefit that Sally Beauty and I imagine other retailers and other companies and other industries will get is optimizing the use of Salesforce. It's a very ubiquitous tool but you mentioned, I think you mentioned Ben in the previous days of many, many, many systems of records. I imagine for Sally Beauty, also not just to be able to deliver that personalized customer experience, talk inventory, but it's also optimizing their internal workforce productivity. And I'm curious, for an organization of that size, what's the time to impact? They come in, you guys do the joint implementation, go to market, the consulting, identify the phases of the project. How quickly did Sally Beauty start to see a positive impact on their business? I think they, well there were some immediate benefits because they were already Salesforce clients and so our team, our IBM team was able to come in and infuse some best practices and their current existing site. So they've been able to leverage that and see that benefit through all the way through Black Friday and last holiday season. And now what they're seeing is they're on the verge of launching and relaunching their site in the next month and then implementing OMS as part of that. So they're still on the path and the journey to that success but they've already seen success based on the support that we've provided them. And what are some of the learnings you guys have seen with this? Obviously you've got existing accounts, they take advantage of this. What are some of the learnings around this new engagement layer and with the data intelligence around AI? What's the learnings have you guys seen? Yeah, I think the leading thing that I've learned is the power of personalization. It's incredibly powerful and a good example is one of my favorite grocers and that's Kroger. And if you really understand what Kroger has done, I'll talk about their business a bit and I'll talk about what they've been able to do. If you look at someone's chopper basket, there's an amazing amount of things you can learn about them. If they're trying to be fit, if they're on a diet, you can learn if their birthday's coming, you can learn if they just had a baby, you can learn so many different things. So with chopper basket analysis, you can understand exactly what coupons you send them. So when I get coupons, digital or in my home, they're all exactly what I buy. But to do that for 25, 30 million top customers is a very difficult thing to do. So the ability to analyze the data, segment it, and personalize it to you is extremely powerful. And I think that's something that retailers and CBG organizations are going to continue to try to do. We're not all the way there. We're probably 30% there, I would say. But personalization is going to drive customer for life. That's what it's going to do. And that's a massive learning process. And the other thing too, Ginny mentioned in her keynote is this concept of reasoning around the data. So it's knowing the interests and around the personas, et cetera. But it's also those surprises. Knowing kind of in advance maybe what someone might like given their situation almost. We were talking about this morning actually. We're talking about behavioral data. And data's taken a different term. Data is, again, what are you doing online and what are you talking about? What did you view? What video did you look at? For organizations that have access to that data, tells me so much more about your interests right now, today. It's not just about a product, but it's about a lifestyle. And if retailers can understand your lifestyle, that opens the door to so many products and services. So I think that's really what retailers are really into. My final question for you guys both, if you can answer be great, is what's the biggest thing that's going to happen in retail that people may not see coming? That's going to be empowering and changing people's lives. What do you guys see as a trend that's knocking on the door or soon to be here and changing lives and empowering people and making them better in life? Yeah, I'll jump in on one real quick. And I think it's already started, but it's really a phenomenon of commerce anywhere. Commerce used to be a very linear thing. You'd see an ad, someone would reach out to you and you would buy something. But commerce now is happening wherever you are. You could be tweeting something or on Instagram or you could be walking in an airport. You could be anywhere and you can actually execute a transaction. So I think the distance between media and commerce has totally collapsed. It's become real time.  But there's distance. So I think it's the immediacy of media and a transaction that is really going to take retailers and CPG customers by surprise. It changes the direct to consumer equation. It changes it. It does. And I think I would just build on that to say that people have relationships with their brands. And the way that you can extend that in commerce anywhere is that people don't necessarily need to know they're in that commerce experience. They're actually having a relationship with that individual brand. They're seen for who they are as an individual, not a segment. I don't fall into a segment that I'm kind of like this, but I'm actually who I am and they're engaging. So the way that we can, I think we're going to see things go is people thinking more and more out of the box about how to make it more convenient for me and to not hide that it's a commerce experience, but to make that more of an engagement conversation that you're buying. People centric, not personate in a database. Exactly. Moving away from marketing, from segmentation and more to individual conversations. Yeah, I think you said it, Ben. It's the power of personalization. Katie, Ben, thanks so much for joining us, talking about what you guys, IBM and Salesforce are doing together and we're excited to see where that continues to go. Great. Thanks so much. Our pleasure, thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE live from IBM Think 19. I'm Lisa Martin for John Foyer. Stick around, our next guest will be joining us shortly.


Recorded Books presents an unabridged recording of The Whaling Wind by Tony Hillerman, narrated by George Gwadel. This work is copyrighted 2002 by Tony Hillerman. This recording is copyrighted 2002 by Recorded Books. When a patrol officer botches a routine murder investigation, Sergeant Jim Chi has to take the heat from the regional FBI office, which brings Joe Leephorn out of retirement to investigate the situation. Lost gold, lost love, and a mysterious whaling all haunt the Kenyans of the Navajo Reservation, where Chi and Leephorn have to go to track down the heart of the mystery. And now, The Whaling Wind. Chapter 1. Officer Bernadette Manuelito had been having a busy day, enjoying most of it and no longer feeling like the greenest rookie of the Navajo Tribal Police. She had served the warrant to Desmond Nakai at the Kudai chapter house, following her policy of getting the most unpleasant jobs out of the way first. Nakai had actually been at the chapter house, obviating the hunt for him she'd expected and, contrary to predictions of Captain Largo, he had been pleasant about it. She had dropped down to the Beclavito Day School to investigate a reported break in there. That was nothing much. A temporary maintenance employee had overdone his weekend drinking, couldn't wait until Monday to get a jacket he'd left behind, broke a window, climbed in and retrieved it. He agreed to pay for the damages. The dispatcher then contacted her and cancelled her long drive to the Sweetwater chapter house. That made Red Valley next on her list of stops. And Bernie, the dispatcher said, When you've done it, Red Valley, here's another one for you. A fellow called in and said there's a vehicle abandoned up a gulch off that dirt road that runs over to the Cove school. Pale blue king cab, pick up truck, check the plates, we'll see if it's stolen. Why didn't you get the license number from the guy reporting it? Because, the dispatcher explained, the report was from an El Paso natural gas pilot who had noticed it while flying yesterday afternoon and again this morning. Too high to read the plates. But not too high to tell it was abandoned. Come on, Bernie, the dispatcher said, who leaves a car parked in an arroy overnight unless he stole it for a joy ride. With that he gave her a little better description of the probable location and said he was sorry to be loading her up. Sure, said Bernie, and I'm sorry I sounded so grouchy. The dispatcher was Rudolph Nez, an old timer who had been the first to accept her a female as a fellow cop, a real friend, and she had a feeling he was parceling her out more work to show her he looked on her as a full fledged officer. Besides, this new assignment gave her a reason to drive up to Roof Butte, about as close as you could drive to ten thousand feet on the Navajo Reservation. The abandoned truck could wait while she took her break there. She sat on a sandstone slab in a mixed growth of aspen and spruce, eating her sack lunch, thinking of Sergeant Jim Chee and facing north to take advantage of the view.  But an infinity of new Mexico's empty corner spread below her and to the left lay the northern half of Arizona. This immensity dappled with cloud shadows and punctuated with the sordid mountain peaks was enough to lift the human spirit. At least it did for Bernie. So did remembering the day when she was a brand new rookie recruit in the Navajo Tribal Police, and Jim Chee had stopped here to show her his favorite view of the Navajo Nation. That day a thunderstorm was building its cloud towers over Chaco Mesa miles to the northeast and another was taking shape near the turquoise mountain of the east, but the rolling grassland below them was bright under the afternoon sun. Chee had pointed to a little gray column of dirt and debris moving erratically over the fields across Highway 66. Dust Devil, she had said, and it was then she had her first glimpse behind Chee's police badge. Dust Devil, he repeated thoughtfully. Yes, we have the same idea. I was taught to see in those nasty little twisters the hard flint boys struggling with the wind children. The good yee bringing us cool breezes and pushing.


Hello everybody welcome back to another Adobe Photoshop CC 2021 tutorial. In this one I'm going to show you how to round your type, create rounded type. What am I talking about? I'm talking about right here on the corners. Here is the original shot or here's the original aerial type and then here is the modified type with the rounded corners. It's a little bit more hand-drawny, playful, a little more fun. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to delete the entire top layer here and we're going to start off with just some type like this. The next step is you want to hold down your command key or the alt or the option key on your PC and click on this thumbnail. When you do that it's going to make a selection and it has selected the type. The next step is you want to go down to the bottom here and you'll see the add layer mask. Click on that. Now for me nothing has happened yet but that's no problem. Double click on the layer mask thumbnail and it's going to open up the properties for the layer mask. Here's how you do it. Now resist the urge to do smoothing because like this it just doesn't look quite right. Here's what you do. You want to jack up the feather. For this demonstration I'm going to go to 10 and when you look really closely you'll see exactly where the rounding is occurring. So you'll see here that these are rounding, this point's rounding and then because it looks soft and fuzzy what you need to do is you've got to also increase the contrast to 100%. When you do that and click on okay, left click on okay, you now have rounded type from the aerial jagged type. Guys that's all there is to it. Thanks for watching. Be back soon.


So against my better judgment, I am making this video I was planning on talking about the psychological aspects of no, not November the benefits of abstaining from masturbation and pornography, but I Benefit greatly from doing these things, you know I'm able to stay focused on my work my day-to-day stuff and not pursue women guys if I don't jerk off in the morning, I will literally ask out like three girls when I go to the supermarket and I mean not to complain about my success with women, but out of the 50 or so girls I've asked out over the past two years. I got 30 to 40 numbers the rest of them I gave him my business card. I didn't get one text back. So is this me complaining if it did I Find that if I'm having such a difficult time even getting a date that I might as well stay focused on my business But why is the media promoting? No, not November, but censoring things like MGTOW Men going their own way. My only guess is they want us to pursue women Spend our resources on them as opposed to focusing on myself on my business Unfortunately, both men and women are unhappy for fairly different reasons As such there are positives and negatives for being either gender and it's pretty obvious in the way each sex Treats their professional versus personal life Most men pursue women in their spare time while focusing on their job on the other hand women treat their Relationships like a job and tend to pursue a career on the side and keep in mind guys Speculating on a lot of this stuff The main point being that I think the majority of men are wasting their time pursuing women at least in America Now I did want to start off with the right path because a lot of the stuff I'm going to talk about today is negative and by no means do I think that fits Everyone although most people have some of those characteristics So in my personal especially observing my family, you know I see these girls were loyal to their partners from a young age like the classic high school sweetheart Relationship getting married several years out of high school after college a woman chooses to commit her prime years Her youth to a man she desires to be with in exchange for that the man usually offers her security Income and support for a family the difference here is that a man is seen as more valuable in his late 20s 30s whereas the woman kind of peaks younger and there is far more value in that female beauty and Sex than a male. Yeah, it's why men go to strip clubs and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to talk to females It's why a female escort is thousands of dollars per hour and male escorts aren't seen that doesn't exist It's not a viable business the male is expected to provide more than just his physical beauty although Some females do certainly value that above all else on the contrary to the high school sweetheart relationship If people decide to be promiscuous throughout college and their 20s sleeping with hundreds of people Things change and it can get kind of ugly. I mean, I guess I should have said that this video is Mainly going to be me complaining about the current dating scene, but I guess you figure that out already So promiscuity is shunned in society as a negative but most men don't realize how promiscuous some females are and it's not really fair for a few reasons one Not every female is promiscuous to males can be promiscuous themselves but it's understandable as an even below average or ugly female can have sex with a male every night or as The male of equivalent attractiveness is going to be a 30 year old version young male virginity on the rise One third of men over 18 have never done the deed in their lives In fact, everyone's getting laid a lot less these days hookup culture total myth go home and tell your parents They were doing it a lot worse or better. I guess it depends your point of view. This is the culprit right here I wrote about it a year ago in my article the tinder effect 40% of couples are meeting online And this is pre-pandemic data. It's probably a lot higher now match group the owner of tinder hinge and a bunch of Other dating sites is the most profitable app in the world. The owners of the company have gotten very rich Video game companies have also done very well over the last decade. I wonder why that could be that brings us to Cell phones in the past if woman wanted to sleep with hundreds of guy I mean it was basically impossible she had to go out meet them in clubs and bars go on dates now Woman can have a roster of a thousand men just from getting messages on their social media I need to do a whole video on this But it's insane to think a female has access to hundreds of males that will basically do anything for her Anytime if she asked it's not just pretty girls even average and ugly girls if they put themselves out there I've seen people say that a lot of young women are being put on unattainable pedestals for many young men when celebrities and athletes are praying on those young girls You know imagine your 16 or 17 year old kid in high school and the girl you're going to class with is talking to NBA players I mean that's an extreme example, but stuff like that It's kind of the gist of it one of the worst things to happen to gender dynamics is this they put a smart phone with the Camera into women's hands that was disastrous for relationships and gender dynamics from there She can worship herself. She can broadcast other people to worship her So much so that if she has a spouse a boyfriend or whoever people pursuing them They cannot match the attention that she can get on her own They cannot match the attention that she can get via Instagram tick-thot Snapper chat all of these vehicles to broadcast herself for women's worship and the beta males are eating it up is 80-20 the truth and if you guys aren't familiar with that, you know, there's kind of a rumor going around that 20% of men get 80% of women And women are far more selective in their partners than men are Most men will have sex or relationship with anyone they're attracted to and I wanted to say that Yeah, yeah, most men are pigs that just want to have sex with you But that doesn't matter when those men aren't actually having sex and the female still is it's kind of hypocritical Like you can talk all the crap you want about how disgusting men are But at the end of the day, they are not getting the sex again physical beauty being the most important part to men Now it's important to understand that the availability of sex and relationships for a higher Value man is more similar to what the average woman can get But for the most part women have far more options across the board I would say height is the biggest bar for men probably deserves its own video Something titled female height obsession because I believe it's the main factor destroying the current power dynamic Between male and female happiness want to come over tonight. I got plans. You will come over.  Like I've seen girls literally say, oh, I've dated all the good men in Chicago Should I move to New York like? It's it's crazy Does it feel I'm just checking if I hit all of these points fairly well, and I think I did So promiscuity is permanent damage means, you know, if I sleep with hundreds of women Yeah, there's gonna be a few of them that I would rather have sex with above the rest of them Which leads to you know access to hundreds of men in flights standards of a lot of women and the majority of men end up Lonely, which leads us to that toxic ex that girls seem to keep going back to aka chatter Tyrone Her favorite out of the dozens to hundreds to thousands of men that she has spoken with or interacted with and generally speaking those physical attributes are 511 6 feet tall handsome successful dominant and most women at least younger to my understanding do have a roster of These people which means you know like a sports roster. They have five ten fifteen guys they will always contact and I would love if some of these women actually told the truth about their behavior because I think it would Blow your mind. I'm sure there's some crazy Examples out there of girls literally having hundreds of guys on speed dial because you know women have better memories than men I think they're they're made for this kind of stuff if women are Unable to obtain a man that meets all of their requirements or they always want more, you know people love excitement people love being happy You know just like a drug addict wants more cocaine or heroin. They can never be happy enough Some women treat men like that and some men treat women like that. So You know one guy they might like to fuck another they go on dates with that gives them money could be a sugar daddy and Then she gets to live her best life hot girl summer whatever you call it About four years ago, I asked five different guys to buy me the same exact Chanel bag All of them bought the bag I sold four of them and kept the fifth one They never suspected a thing I Feel guilty about it now But it was a huge come up Yeah, yeah, so let me just reiterate those points So many people including men but more women will fill the needs with multiple partners So you have the physical needs like a woman wants someone tall handsome rough dominant sex The emotional needs dates cuddling Simpsacks like I guess instead of being like pounded into the ground like a cave woman I guess she wants to cuddle with him and kind of make love to him The financial needs the sugar daddy the car the rent But you know in that high school sweetheart relationship, you know, the woman accepts various degrees of these things and Most women will compromise on some categories for others The best females I think will simply require less and go for the personality someone they're truly in love with however something is always Wanted you will never find a female in a relationship That doesn't fit a couple of these things and I guess the top females when they're messing with the top guys are Factoring in some even more specific things, you know is one guy taller than another is he more handsome? Does he have a shlong deadly done? Key thing to understand is that unless the man meets those initial requirements Particularly height which vary from female to female the other stuff doesn't matter, you know and Skin color facial track than this in tied in with height.  Is this dynamic reality? Is this all Stuff made up for divide and conquer nonsense I think there is an unfortunate amount of truth to this But cell phones and social media have definitely made it more difficult for men to be happy, you know Was it more like 60 40 or 70 30 years ago has 80 20 turned into 90 10 or even 95 5 because of social media our woman being more and more selective, you know have more men given up just to play video games all day and You know men do talk about women hitting the wall when they're 30 or you know Whenever the woman is no longer highly desirable and the wall isn't really true Because as we mentioned even ugly to average woman regardless of age can find sexual partners Two things change for women though.  I I'm like average height.  I don't go out much I don't want this to be about me at all.  I Don't understand how you guys up I'm assuming You guys are refraining from this to get with more females, but to me I Mean, I guess I'm a kumar. All right, you guys can go to Frank dash to power.com to support me through all of my businesses. I Definitely jump a like on the video. Leave me a comment down below I'm sure we'll get plenty Subscribe so that YouTube can unsubscribe you next week and be sure to check that notification bell So they don't notify you of my videos Thanks again for joining me guys, and I'll see you for tomorrow if I don't get crucified


The global research community is focusing on developing sustainable biofuels, biomaterials, and fine chemicals through the use of polyhydroxyalkanotes, a promising biomaterial due to its physical chemical properties, biodegradability, and biocompatibility. Efficient and economic bioprocesses are being designed with social and environmental benefits in mind, highlighting the multidisciplinary nature of this venture. The current review presents challenges and opportunities regarding polyhydroxyalkanote production, covering key steps of their overall process through pure and mixed culture biotechnology, from raw bioprocess development to downstream processing. This article was authored by Konstantina Cormensa, Jerssen Placido, Nikolaos Venetsanias, and others.


Hey guys, Ken Ross here. I'm a business consultant that specializes in reducing costs for businesses by looking at their essential expenses and today I get to do it again. I'm gonna pick on Verizon like I always do and I'm sure you've seen the commercials right? Home internet, 5G, it could be in your home right? I've talked about this before in the past when I continue to talk about this narrative. If you haven't seen the commercial I'll put the link to it in the in the description below but it is. It's very cheeky. It tells you, hey we offer 5G wireless internet in your home. Basically what happens is Verizon has you pay for a device that's in your home that receives the 5G ultra-wideband signal and from that they broadcast the wireless network in your home. That's how this will work going forward. These devices are readily available for people that are eligible to get them. Now here's the thing though. It's very limited in scope. I went and did some research. CNET has a really great article which I'm gonna post in the description below that talks about it and some of the advantages. This is not a new thing. Verizon has FiOS which is fiber over IP that they offer in the Northeast as well as 4G home internet. So if you don't have the ability to get 5G they're gonna try to offer you 4G in your home which is not nearly as compelling as 5G in your home. When looking at it it honestly isn't that competitive in this space and I'm gonna actually tell you why. So when you look at the different plans they want to advertise and they put all over their website. You can get this as low as $25 a month but there are a lot of stipulations implied when it comes to that. And you're also not going to be delivered the same type of speeds you would get if you paid more money because I certainly what wanted to have the ability to try this out. I actually went to the Verizon website. I filled out the form to see if 5G was available in my area and to no one's surprise it's not. It is a very limited scope like I said in the at the beginning here in this article kind of explains it. It's in most major cities but you have to have access to the ultra wide-band spectrum. They have to be able to have a strong enough signal to deliver you the speeds that they're promising and ultimately since there are no caps on the information they have to be able to deliver those kind of speeds over over time for you as a customer for it to be something worth investing in. Well if I were you know actually able to evaluate this more I would I would look at this in comparison to what some of the cable providers are offering at this time and what is being offered by cable providers and other telecommunications vendors are fiber gig speed internet. I'm sure you've seen the commercials about that as well. They offer gig plus speeds upload and download when it comes to what what Verizon is offering and this is where I talk about the convergence and I very much emphasize this in my on my channel. There is a convergence of telecommunications providers out there. People who provide cellular service like Verizon want to offer you this option. They want to give you in-home internet and ISPs like Comcast and Cost Communications and the like they want to offer you wireless. It's because of the converging technologies it's the fact that most customers today they're going to have a cell phone plan that has internet as well as an at-home plan with internet right and they want to do streaming services on all of those things so if we can converge all of these different markets into one market and we can all play nice we can all make money right that's ultimately the game here. It's no misnomer AT&T offers telephone service wireless service and if you've been paying attention to my channel they also at one point offered streaming services but they do that now through Direct TV versus AT&T TV so this isn't a new thing it's been around for a while you need to pay attention to it and you need to understand I would encourage you right to at least go to the website on Verizon's website and see if 5G is available in your area see if that's something worth evaluating compare it against what you currently have because ultimately there are going to be a lot of options and those options can't afford you saving a lot of money on those things so should you invest in Verizon 5G or some type of at-home wireless internet provider I would say no they don't offer the same level of service that your cable providers like cost communications or Comcast or even Xfinity if you have Xfinity and Comcast are pretty much the same thing they don't offer the same level of speeds and reliability that these things that the wireless at-home solutions provide the download speeds can certainly be something that most people can get behind you know they offer up to gig speeds over 5G because of the technology that's that's ultimately available to you but you have to be pretty close to their technology have to be within range of 5G towers and very little interference you're going to be sharing your internet with wireless phone customers and that's something you have to also consider when you get into the solution the download speeds of something that you can you can easily compare but when it comes to upload and that's something that is also not very apparent in these these plans you're talking in the case of 4G single speed uploads 5 less than 10 meg megs up on fiber plans that AT&T offers for example I have an AT&T plan they offer gig down and gig speed ups for a very similar price that you would get for these wireless plans and the only thing that the wireless plans are offering is that you'd be locked in for a certain period of time and you're married to their plans well that's not something that you really want to do you don't want to over invest once again in technology that furthers their narrative for 5G 5G is something that's emerging as a technology it's certainly around in a lot of different areas but when it comes to these higher speeds and when it comes to what Verizon is trying to offer people you have to be on the ultra wideband network in order for this to work and you're going to be competing with cell phone other cell phones in your area in order to get this reliability in order to replace what you already have in your home so that's something you should definitely consider when you go into this is it worth doing it for yourself to save a few dollars I wouldn't I wouldn't do that myself even if I had it available to me and at this time it's just not that's what I have for today I appreciate your time and attention wanted to give you these this insight because ultimately I don't want you to be confused the reason Verizon is pushing for these initiatives is to continue its its lead forward in 5G it is not very mature yet we are not at its peak of hey this is this is a viable solution for a lot of people's problems so please be aware of that don't don't feed into the machine that Verizon is giving you or that AT&T or Sprint or is other communications providers that are out there pitching 5G and how great it is it's going to be great but right now it's just it's just average so but that like I said that's what I have please subscribe to this channel let people know I'm here I put in the comment section below what you really think of all this will you be looking to switch to a wireless provider for internet at your home I'd love to hear your your opinions on that I'd also love to hear your opinions of what I should do research on that telecommunications is something I find very fascinating I studied a lot in college and I continue to be kind of the the purveyor of this space I want to follow certain things that are going on I love technology and this this ties to that so if you have any other thoughts of things that I can bring to the table right when it comes to my expertise please put that in the comment section below as well let your friends know like this video share it with everyone that you know and visit my website I am Ken Ross calm until I see you next time we'll see you around


Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Azure Unblogged. In this series covering AVS or Azure VMware Solutions, we are looking at different areas of AVS. Today, we're going to be discussing automation with Scott Holden. Scott, how are you doing? Going well. Thanks for having me. Yes. Sorry about disturbing your early morning, considering you are in Australia and I'm in Canada. That's the nice thing about the virtual world is there is no distance between us. Definitely. Got to make those time zones work. That's right. AVS and automation. Basically, how does our automation fit into the AVS picture? It's actually a really interesting question. For a lot of customers when they first get hands-on with AVS, they'll run through and they'll manually spin up an AVS private Cloud. They'll manually configure everything and to be perfectly honest, it's a great way to get started, to learn the nuts and bolts, to actually understand how everything fits together. But when you want to begin to look at production environments, cross-regional environments, when you want to be spinning up DevTest prod, or even environments that are temporary or only for a short period of time, all of a sudden manually waiting for a private Cloud to deploy and then spending hours upon hours just to configure a private Cloud becomes really unwieldy. So rather than having to manually drive that first level of configuration, Automation for AVS as part of the Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, really focuses on how can we take the low-hanging fruit, the things that should be repeatable, reliable and stored as configuration rather than in people's heads, and deliver it in such a way that customers can take the best practices and begin to run with them. Now, you may not necessarily want to automate everything inside of AVS day one, but a lot of customers that are especially looking for an infrastructure as code first approach in this Cloud world, and that's what the Enterprise Scale Landing Zone for AVS Automation section is really focused on. How do we do this thing without having to boil the ocean at once? Okay. So what you're talking about really is like setting up like CICD pipeline to deploy the VMware cluster on Azure or is it deploying the guest inside or is it both? Fantastic question, and it was one of the really interesting conversations we had when we were putting together the best practices. How far do we actually go down this rabbit hole of automation? Exactly. Yeah, we can deploy just the private Cloud, or we can go right down to the virtual machine level over in sub workload level. The majority of the guidance and the best practices we have are around the private Cloud so that top level deployment, because a lot of customers actually have existing automation strategies for guest and VMware level deployments today. If they've got those best practices, they have those strategies and approaches, we want to encourage customers to continue to use those pieces where appropriate. Whereas private Cloud automation, the actual spent deploying the Azure resources themselves, that's the new thing. That's the thing customers are not too sure about there. Hey, we've used Azure, we've used VMware, but how do we use the Azure VMware solution? How do we actually get this thing spun up? So it's really about targeting that middle area of how do we deploy private Clouds, take care of networking? Customers if they want to automate VMs can bring all the tech they know and love already. That was one of the major goals. It's also rather interesting. Oh, sorry. No, it's okay. That's deployments. So what are you targeting that? What kind of scenarios you're targeting? Is it for like say a development team that is testing a new app, or what scenarios are you looking to really focus on with the guidance on automation and deployment? Definitely. It was an interesting one because we originally started off by building out what we call the Greenfield scenario, which was a customer that wants to come along and deploy an entire environment net new from scratch, and that could either be as a temporary dev environment, or as a production environment that they have documented as infrastructure as code. We have had customers that have gone through and said, hey, our proof of concept was manual, our production deployment rather than configuring it by hand, let's just roll out the automation and get it done. But we do realize that, hey, it's not just net new customers that want to take advantage of this automation and begin to move towards that infrastructure as code style approach. We also have a series of modules as well or sub scenarios, where you can pick and choose the parts you want to automate. You may have an existing private cloud ready to go that your production team is deployed, but you really want to automate the networking or you want to automate service health alerts and monitoring. The operational side of it is just as important as actually deploying the private cloud itself. So as well as having the massive Greenfield scenario, we do also have a series of sub scenarios, the customers can pick and choose and use for individual components rather than having to deploy the whole thing. Okay. When you're talking about creating that deployment package, if you will, are we looking at, is it like an ARM template? Is it like a YAML file? Yeah. JSON, what format are we looking at? This is one of the highly divisive questions that we had internally is what format do we release this in? I mean, we've got so many options these days from the Azure CLI through to ARM and Bicep templates. What we ended up doing is releasing in a few different formats. So we have both Bicep and ARM templates available and that gives customers the flexibility to deploy using in-house Microsoft infrastructure as code in a declarative manner. We do also have some samples for PowerShell in the Azure CLI for particular sub scenarios where we found customers have really needed an example or something to work upon when they're building out environments. Hot off the press, we are also working on Terraform modules as well, giving customers the ability to use the tools they know and love to deploy these environmental components. This really opens up the slather to any tech a customer wants to work with. The fact that we've got Bicep means that it's really easy to build and extend upon but also having Terraform means that, hey, if you're not built into the Azure infrastructure as code ecosystem, you can still work with the landing zone. I'm a big fan of that mostly because it removes a lot of the friction for adoption. So if you're used to Terraform, then here's the Terraform module. If you're a Bicep or ARM guy, then here it is. I do prefer declarative to imperative mostly because it's a little quicker because things run in parallel versus having to wait for item number one to be done to move to item number two, but to each his own really. So you've mentioned Terraform, is there anything else that we're working towards? This is the interesting thing because AVS is a constantly growing product with the new technologies that are coming out and integration with other services. Today, we do have a ton of sub scenarios, everything from, as we mentioned, private cloud deployment to automating network into connectivity, to setting up connectivity between multiple regions, right down to things like, as we said before, service health alerting and operational monitoring. And that's been one of the big things that customers are looking for. It's, hey, we've got the private cloud deployed. How do we take care of all the ancillary tasks that actually sit around the solution itself? And that really comes down to the architectural decisions that are beyond just, hey, we want to use AVS. So we've been working on a ton of the add-on capabilities. So having the ability to roll out HCX and SRM as part of your AVS deployment rather than having to do it as a secondary step afterwards, having the ability to utilize V-WAN Hub for site-to-site VPNs as well as for egress control via Azure Firewall as part of your deployment. So all of a sudden you can begin to deploy an entire end-to-end environment including your networking stack as a single template rather than necessarily having to jump backwards and forwards between different components just to get an AVS environment stood up. And that's the main thing we're looking at now is that ecosystem of technology is that actually surrounds AVS. So that is actually very, very interesting but what just popped into my head now is we've talked about automating the deployment of the AVS cluster or the VMware cluster running on Azure, dedicated on Azure. Is there a tie-in to Azure automation in terms of the operation of said cluster once it's up? Yep, definitely. And one of the nice things about AVS in particular, so the Azure VMware solution is that we can treat the virtual machines sitting inside the cluster in the same way we treat an on-premise virtual machine.  And we do have customers that are using Azure Automate to run DSC on top of AVS workloads. That gives you the ability to take that modern cloud first approach through Azure Automate rather than necessarily having to build out your own DSC focused infrastructure just to build up those workloads. So yeah, there is that massive tie-in. One big thing that I'm looking forward to down the track is that deeper integration between all of these systems.  You do need to consider the fact that yes, it is a VMware virtual machine rather than an Azure native virtual machine but that does come with benefits by itself. So really looking forward to down the track that deeper integration and automation is key to making that happen meaning that we can do things as ideally single-click or in a perfect world, a zero-click operation where it just happens as part of your deployment rather than something you need to manually orchestrate. That's wonderful. Wonderful. I'm interested in looking at it. I'm sure some of our audiences are also interested in looking at this. Where does one go to get started? Yeah, so we've released the Enterprise Scale Landing Zone for AVS now which contains an Automation and DevOps focus section that runs through some of the best practices, some of the guidance from many, many customer deployments we've had externally today but also has a little bit of a path to adopting automation for AVS.  A lot of customers will find that it's a little bit of a journey. You may manually deploy it first. You may choose to manually deploy templates, still using infrastructure as code but having it as a kicked-off operation rather than something you execute via a pipeline all the way through to that continual deployment of infrastructure which is kind of the golden state that everyone wants to head towards. I know you did mention at the beginning of the conversation that the first time you do something it's often a good idea to do it manually so that you understand how all the pieces work together and then kind of graduate to a automated deployment. So I'm really a big fan of that approach as well. Do we have as part of the Enterprise Landing Zone are there samples for me to look at and basically steal and pillage from? Yes, there is. And this is the other half of the Enterprise Scale Landing Zone if you will as well as the best practice documentation and now our best practice recommendations we've also released a series of artifacts and that's really the core of the Enterprise Scale Landing Zone. So we have these scenarios built out and documented ready to go as an open source GitHub repository. This means you can clone, you can fork, you can take them and modify to your heart's content. We've also tried to make it as easy as possible for customers to test out this technology. So a lot of the scenarios and especially the big Greenfield scenario actually has a single click deploy to Azure button. So rather than even having to clone the repo you can just click deploy to Azure, flip over and actually roll out a full AVS private cloud using infrastructure as code. The whole goal is for customers to be able to get started quickly but then have these templates available to modify to extend to build upon as they see fit. Yes, because it's not unusual in the industry to have like a common ground kind of underpinning of your environment saying, well, if you replied, did this type of application requires AD network storage and database, boom, go out. And if you wanna add or remove some stuff then editing the samples becomes fairly easy. That's exactly it. We've even seen organizations that may not necessarily have a DevOps strategy today take advantage of things like Azure template specs importing the templates and basically giving them a rubber stamp to go around creating environments with AVS. And that's really the whole goal is we don't wanna say, hey, you have to be running Azure DevOps or GitHub actions to deploy this thing. We wanna give you the artifacts to adopt in the way that makes sense for your organization but give you best practices at the same time so you don't fall down those common traps or common pitfalls. Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Scott. This was enlightening. All the links will be in the description below. So hopefully all of our audience will go and try it and possibly automate the deployment of the AVS solution. So thank you very much again for taking the time this morning. And thank you very much. All right. And for you at home, go try it out. Go check it out. All of the samples are there and try for yourself in your own environment. So thank you very much. Have a good day.