Okay, thank you Karen, thanks everyone for coming here, and it's very exciting to talk about this one today Just as an expectation of what what you should come out of this with Static sites are still something that's a little bit unfamiliar to many And so just if you come out of this session just with an understanding of what a static site is How that might help in your WordPress setup then that'd be great All right, so a little bit about me It's my little WordPress dating profile here Yeah, I left us earlier when I was 20 traveled around the world and did a bunch of sort of tech-related work for different places and Here I am okay, so Static websites will start off with what they are. Okay, and then we'll move on to how you can go about getting one How you can go back converting your WordPress site into a static site and Whether or not that's actually going to be suitable for the type of website that you've got Okay, so If you look at a static site and you look at a dynamic site, this is part of the what are they? You shouldn't really notice any difference when you're looking at it as a user visually, there's no difference and Again looking at the code no difference at all So it's still a bit mysterious now. So what is what is what is a static site? What is the difference? All right, here's a little hint if you've ever been to a Project hosted on github and the URL is something dot github dot I o then you're looking at a static site there but the real the real guts of it the real difference between a static site and a dynamic site is a Static site is pre-generated and we look at WordPress as an example here So when you've got your WordPress site and you create a post in your WordPress dashboard a post content is living in the database You've got a database you may not be aware that you've even got a database you just log into your WordPress and you add a post and Your user visits your site and they see that but what's going on behind the scenes is that? they they go to your page and It's making your quest to your server and pulling this this content out of your database and all that takes Not lots of time But enough time that it can be a problem for a heavily viewed site or a site that's got some performance issues because you got lots of plugins and things running Now with a static site, you're getting rid of all that all that time There's there's no time going and fetching different pieces of content from the server and doing other tasks in the background As soon as the user goes to your page, boom, they've got the whole the whole content right in front of them In doing so it uses very minimal resources If you're hosting a static site and you get some media attention or you get linked to on front page or something like that, your site's not going to break a sweat As opposed to if you've got a WordPress site and you haven't Sort of planned for massive traffic and put it through tests, you can find yourself with a site that's offline and happened to a Friend of mine running a charity last week. They got media exposure in the UK got some television coverage and Their sites down and that's the worst time because you've got all these people. You've got the media attention and they're coming to a blank page There's lots of ways you can you can mitigate that just within WordPress itself Most people that have been using WordPress for a while Use some some caching plugins some things that will help with handling handling traffic Another advantage with a static site is you can you can use that offline so if you're a designer and you're building your WordPress site and you want to hand that to a client for approval or preview you can Put on a USB stick CD if you still use CDs hand it to them and and they can test the site out You don't have to worry about You know whether the site's still online and what sort of version they're going to see you take a snapshot We give it to them and they can approve that with With I'm going to talk a bit later about a product that I make that allows you to take your WordPress site and turn it into a static site and One of one of my main customer groups are people that are worried about security security of their WordPress site and Again, there's lots of ways you can mitigate security when you're running a WordPress site but for a lot of people If you're a digital agency you met you might have hundreds of sites, but you still don't have the resources to hire a full-time you know security expert for your company and so when you've got something that's so easily Easily customizable like WordPress any of your clients can if they've got access to their to their site They can go in and they can turn on plugins They can download a plug in they can copy and paste some random code They found on the internet and that's that's the beauty of WordPress. It's so easy to to To add content to to get your site up to modify it But it comes with a lot of security implications You know, no one's checking the code that the plug-in the plug-in author made or the theme author made And for a lot of us, it's not something we can do. I'm not a security expert myself and my solution back in the day To to create my product was I don't want to have to deal with that security issue So if I can take my WordPress content keep it as it is the beauty of rapid development But then get rid of this whole security concern of hosting a WordPress site by taking its static then that's great and that's what I did So the three main points of a static site the security of mention Performance touch on a bit where Especially when you've got lots of load on your site, you've got, you know, 10,000 people all at once You can you can test your current website your work WordPress website you can go to some online Load testing tools that will simulate what it's going to be like when a hundred people or a thousand people or 10,000 people All visit your site at once and you may be interested to find How quickly it it will fail or to start getting slower and slower to respond to each request so the page is going to load slower and we all know that Slow page loads do not make for happy users Once you're once you've got a static site, you can you can throw crazy amounts of traffic at it and again You won't break a sweat The last thing that I really like one of my passions is is open source low resource computing You know so like enabling Enabling people that may not be as fortunate to have the luxuries you have in Australia Or even if you're in Australia not everyone has the money to to spend on hosting to spend on latest computers all these sort of things and static sites are really really great in enabling you to I know I guess You can have your you can have your Really nice looking site that you built with WordPress and you put all your features into it But you don't need to pay for hosting at all. There are lots of really good sites hosting providers out there at the moment where you can put a Static representation of your website and host it for free And with some extra benefits as well. I'll cover some of some of those providers later on It's not the the primary users of my of my software or not You know the ones looking for that for that free hosting, but I think it's a really exciting Aspect, you know, I've paid over the years the last 10 15 years paying for hosting for WordPress It would go up to I know from $40 to $150 a month depending on the site and When you can pay zero for that that means you can focus those costs on more important things and Again, if someone's looking at your site, it looks visually exactly the same whether it's static or dynamic But you don't have to pay for it. That's a big a big bonus Just to reiterate security wise If you're hosting your site statically, you're not worried about your Database credentials. You're not worried about your file permissions And you're not worried about any vulnerabilities in plugins or or anything like that about the only thing you have to worry About is your main username and password for wherever you're hosting your site. Alright, so This one might be a little bit more technical But for anyone who is already using a caching plugin for WordPress like w3 total cache Caching is great and it solves a lot of solves a lot of problems But for in order for for caching to work though, you've usually got to have one person at least visit that page and and You know run through it allow it to do all that that fetching in the back in the back end hitting the database pulling your content out and from that point on subsequent visitors will will receive that that cached version and So while you might have a really big site and it's really busy some really large sites. I've worked on utilize w3 total cache and Eight but being that the site was so heavy if ever the page content changes or something something changes on the side that requires a Non caching request to happen then that could be enough to really slow down the site again and cause you cause you pain So here are some of those that I mentioned before some that offer free hosting for your static site and Some of the ones in the in the top three layer are ones that have a free tier so something like Amazon web services you can host with their S3 it's just like a simple storage solution and Kind of like something like Dropbox put files in it and people can access them Specifically with this one they allow they make it very easy to host your site using that Netlify is a really big Really big thing at the moment They've just got an extra 30 million dollars in funding and they're very happy if you to host your site for free on them provided it's static There their biggest market is not straight static sites at the moment It's more something called the the jam stack which I'll talk about in a bit more, but it's totally fine for a Static version of your WordPress site Very fast if you're a global CDN So you put your static site on Netlify and your users in Australia your users in America will get the best response time available to them Github Github been in the use last week for a big outage affected the whole world it felt like But there's still a good option for hosting your static site GitLab the more open source of them and Bitbucket from the Australian company Atlassian Pretty much all the cloud providers out there. So Google App Engine Azure all support static site hosting within their free tiers in some form You've also got cool things like Firebase and for anyone that remembers geo cities back in the day The new the new New form of that neo cities you can host a static site for free on them too and with almost all of these options You're not limited to using their You know their internal domain name. So if you've already got your site on You know, www.you know my shopping site comm That's fine. You can point your domain at these free free hosts and your users won't know the difference except they might be getting the page faster Some other options that are usually paid tiers are content delivery networks. So Bunny CDN key CDN anything like that All those quite well to static site hosting One more I'll throw in there, which is if you're wanting to be a bit geekier and support a cool organization is Open BSD Amsterdam. They'll give you a server for $60 a year $10 of which they donate to the open source and Super secure super minimal out of the box kind of a nice way to host your static site and Again, you're a bit if you want to be in control All these other options the free options there at the top They're hosted platforms and so you can host your site for free there But you're you can't you can't have access to your own log files You can't really get in there if you're you know, want to want to get geeky with it then a cheap server A cheap but solid server like the open BSD Amsterdam is a good option You can install whatever you want on there host a static site, but still have full control over the server and One last point which is kind of close to my heart. So last year I was doing a charity in the Philippines with my partner and it was all around It's all around plastics cleanup and that sort of thing which if you've been to Southeast Asia is a big problem and it makes me think more about everything that we spend money on and Hosting is just another one of those so $40 a month for hosting It's it's it's not bad for anyone that's working in Australia. You can afford that But in order to pay that it might be an hour. It might be two hours of your of your wage and That's two hours of time per month That you might be dedicating just to pay for your hosting and you don't need to so that money can go somewhere better Or take two two hours off work each week. All right, this one's going to be more It's just a concept to throw out there It's a quite a geeky sort of thing so IPFS is something called the interplanetary file system. It's really cool and it's you think of it kind of like, you know Bitcoin blockchain stuff like that where You can it's a distributed decentralized network and you can also get a static site and put it on here And this is not something that most of us are going to be looking at doing it's not going to be a business case for us, but it's cool to think about in terms of You know when you're in a country, we've seen the YouTube outage last week was Pakistan trying to block sites for their users You know, hopefully so far. We're not getting many sites blocked in Australia that we want to visit but if that case ever happens and you can put a static site on something like IPFS and you're kind of resilient to those kind of governmental controls so when you've got your your WordPress site and you are Publishing it out as a static site now I would just say here that when you're when you're going static site option with your WordPress site You're not giving up on WordPress you keep using WordPress for what it's great for which is the content management the plug-ins themes the community but your your code goes out and it's all static HTML files Just files just files in a folder. You'll have your HTML files your CSS your images your JavaScript and You can use a version control software something like git and you can You can have a nice history of each each time you publish your site out You can put a name against it. You could be you know, this is the time we added the You know the new widgets section and then you've made three more publishers since that day and then you realize oh crap We we made a massive mistake and we lost like you know all these images on a site You can just quickly roll back to those versions prior because you've got a exact Snapshot of what your site was like at that point in time. So that's another benefit you get The use case I see sometimes from digital agencies again with hundreds maybe thousands of client sites going back ten years WordPress presents a challenge in that you've got a You get a site from a client who is a great client You love them and you built their website, but they don't need any work on it You know, there might be a small business and their site serves them fine or they're You know, they're just not They don't have the money to invest in it anymore Now when you're when you've got their WordPress site, usually you're charging a monthly fee for maintenance and security a lot of the times But if they don't want to pay that you don't have to take their site down So what you can do is again take a take a sort of snapshot of it turn into a static HTML site Keep that up there. Don't worry about security. Don't worry about even hosting costs for them and they get to keep their site okay, so there's a lot of probably new words on this screen and this is just the the many many ways that you can take any any website whether it's a WordPress site or another one and and convert it into a static site So the first two W get an HDD track HD are kind of built in Either built in or easily installable tools for a lot of operating systems and these are kind of command line more geekier tools HD track has has a user interface a lot of the time and it's it's really really full-featured and comprehensive in terms of Making an archive of a website site sucker is a tool for Mac OS at least use many years ago, and that's you just put in the address of your site click a button and it'll Pull it all down and create a static copy of that. It won't do as far as I know. I haven't checked recent versions. It won't do Rewriting of your of your URLs or all your links in your site And so it's good for taking offline copy of your site and giving it to someone but not so good for You know having a WordPress development server taking a static copy of that and then publishing it somewhere else that's where WordPress plugins and that's where one of one of those is a plugin that I create and there's at least one more up-to-date Plug-ins specifically for WordPress that you install Put a couple of settings in press a button It'll it'll crawl through your site extract each page Rewrite the links that you want for your new site and give you that static copy and there's also At least three companies that are quite new and quite interesting out there at the moment so shifter static and hardy press and They're kind of like a hybrid approach. They're a press specific hosting company but they serve the content statically so So you log in and you you manage your site through them like you would any WordPress site But behind the scenes there they're making a static copy of it to serve and they address some of the issues automatically that you would otherwise have to manually Work around taking WordPress site to a static site Yeah, it really quite interesting so a Bit more secure in that sense Last on that list there is the Jamstack and WordPress and I mentioned before Jamstack is is something that Netlify's Big user base is is about and the the Jamstack Here we go Jamstack stands for a JavaScript APIs and markup so Kind of like the you know the trend your way to build a website You know these days is to have a Totally sort of offline site. So it's it's a static site in nature, but for things like getting the content for having user user comments for having e-commerce or anything anything that's kind of a bit dynamic in the site you'll Hit API from various services and use those on your static site and In the case of WordPress it plugs into a lot of these Jamstack setups so You know like a modern front-end framework or static site generated like Gatsby.js is a is a common one You can use your WordPress site as a data source So WordPress exposes an API since I don't know how many versions ago Which makes it really easy for you to take your content from WordPress and use on another site in that case you're not gonna be getting the The theme so it's not gonna necessarily look the same as what your WordPress looks like you'd just be purely using it for Adding and managing your content, which is again what WordPress is really good at so to go static from WordPress for For the majority of WordPress sites that are out there. I would say that they're Fairly easy to do with the only consideration needing Is to deal with your contact form most websites will have at least one really dynamic aspect, which is your contact form and when you've no longer got a Server-side language on your server you don't have PHP on there anymore once you go static So there's nothing to sort of handle the submission of your contact form and there's a few good solutions out there If you're hosting with Netlify All you need to do is add an extra Attribute I think it is to your to your form So if you're comfortable to go into the source code you can add a little attribute to your to your form and they'll automatically Intercept anytime a user submits your form and they'll email it off to your email address of choice. It's really nice In other cases there's some Plugins you can get for WordPress that will automatically convert your contact form 7 which is a plugin that almost all WordPress users are using for their contact form And it will convert that to submit to a service like form spree Which is again remote sort of form processing Other sort of dynamic things you might have on your site comments so comments more for a blog business sites, maybe not so much but Even when you're using WordPress in its default state a lot of people have been using third-party comments systems like discuss For some years and that works just the same way on a static site because it's not running on your server. It's running somewhere else It's it's very seamless Search is a bit of a trickier one. So usually your your WordPress site You've got built-in search in your theme. It hits your database and it's you know, it's got a powerful text search So To to get that same functionality With a static site It needs to know the content of your site first and it needs to sort of index that for easier searching And that's where a company at the moment Algolia is doing a really good Really good job and they're really popular and quite easy to create Options or something like Google custom search. I think it's called where you basically Have a mini version of Google running in your site It's you're not limited when you go static with your WordPress site You can use something called sneak card, which is a really nice JavaScript based shopping cart that's it works with their hosted platform does all the payments and everything And last one there user accounts. So if you're running a membership site that might be more of an issue There are Solutions out there again popularized with the the jam stack. So thanks to the jam stack We're getting a lot of solutions to the typical static site as well. All right, so Static site generators I'll skip just give you a bit my my product I'm going to talk about in a moment is called WordPress static generator. We know that this from the talks topic and There's a lot of static site generators out there that you don't you don't use WordPress at all you just start out of the bat with one of these tools and Usually the way they work is you'll manage your content just as a as a bunch of files And these might be marked down files just text files. You can just open them up in text edit make some changes Usually run a command on the command line and it'll it'll produce your They're generally really fast and they're generally Something you got to run from the command line, which can be a bit it can be a bit intimidating if you used to WordPress so there I guess they're more popular with with Those that really want to pursue a you know development path If you want to see there's there are static site generators and pretty much any language out there So if you like PHP if you like Ruby if you like Python There's one out there that'll do the job and they're getting better and better and you can go to static gen.com there and See which ones are the most popular Why we don't use them again? It might be that that that that was fear or just you just don't want to have to deal with the command line Which is a understandable? And that can be a big turn off for using a static generator WordPress is still brilliant at what it does. It's what is it 30 something percent of the web powered by WordPress It's not, you know, it's not just some random chance that people installed it at work. So it works great for content And the plug-in ecosystem this community really good ease of collaboration meaning If you're a distributed team or you're outsourcing some work you got content writers all over the globe It's very easy to just give them a Invite to your WordPress site they can come in they can have their different user levels You can have editors publishers and such and when you've got a static site generator you're dealing with those You know those files on a folder which if you want to start sharing those around Then you're looking at putting those under version control sending like a link to github to your designer to update some text and It's not as easy The study site generators out of the box they're they're quite good. They've got their Their ways, you know, you put your content in this folder your text files you put your theme over here Running command generates it and they're all designed to do that really well out of the box But it gets tricky once you want to start doing Customizations the kind of things that in WordPress you might just install a plug-in You want to show a list of the I don't know the top the top ten posts But you want to filter out a certain category. That's fairly easy to do now in WordPress but with a static site generator that could be fairly easy to it could be like You know a lot of customization to get it working And again back on the command line these days if you're doing WordPress and I meet a lot of people that are Able to build really good sites Without ever leaving the browser, you know, they're not having to edit any any code with an editor They're using something like Divi or Alamor and it works fine. All right So this is artwork done by done by a developer here. So it's a bit rainbowy So I Created this product About seven years ago. It just it solves the problem for me. I was doing a lot of WordPress sites for clients and Performance and security were an issue as though it must be an easy way. So I created this and it got some users it's on the WordPress repository and Then I kind of you know, I got out of WordPress man I you know did other things for many years and then I Notice it still had all these users and I wanted to do something With open source still as looking for a project to contribute to and realized. Oh, okay I'm still one and it's got all these users, but it's in serious need of a refresh So this is my my full-time thing now I developed this and try and make it as useful to the to the users as possible and it takes the The best of both worlds. So you've got your your WordPress still for your content your collaboration But you're getting rid of the security and the performance issues by publishing out to a site and Those icons you see there on the the brightly colored area are some of the deployment targets that you can use So you install this plug-in Choose where you want to host your your new static site and this can be your own server via FTP Bitbucket GitLab bunny seat Bunny CDN all these ones there it can be anywhere that you can put a static site And in general anywhere that you can put a dynamic site you can put a static site so if you're comfortable with your digital ocean set up or You know, whichever whichever hosting it is that you like you can just put your files in there and it'll work I'll just give you a quick quick preview what the what the interface looks like well, it's a bit full on there lots of fields and things but That's That's one of the benefits of it. You get a lot of control over Not just taking your current site and putting it out as a static site But you can modify a few things in between there for example If you've ever looked in the the source code of your WordPress page you might find a lot of stuff that You wouldn't put in there if you were making your site by hand if you're hand coding your your site You wouldn't end up with all these Maybe canonical links have a purpose but you've got a lot of other things if you're not using the WordPress API You don't need links to the API in there You may not be using feeds. So there's certain plugins that may get rid of You know what I dare to call a bit of cruft in your in your WordPress generated code but this plugin also allows you to Strip out things strip out things you don't need and that's an optional step You can also rewrite your paths. So one of the things that I really was interested in doing was Generating using WordPress to generate websites, but kind of not Telling the world that that's what I'm using For various reasons one is if you're if your site is easily identifiable as a WordPress site. It's very easy for bots to scour the net and say okay, this is a WordPress site So I'm going to start attacking the usual points that I think With with the plugin I wrote I allowed to Rewrite all those paths. So you're stripping out the usual WordPress identifiers but you're also doing things like changing all of your all of your links that say, you know WP content slash themes slash Divi slash whatever and Totally making those whatever you want Also with Changing your URL structure so you can completely rewrite the URL and have you know relative links or absolute links Which generally you can easily do with WordPress and on that one one more example there is For that squeezing that extra out of performance out when you've got those really long through your site They they start to add up. It's not a big amount of space but You know these days you really want your site to be as fast as possible And if you want to go crazy and get your source code as small as possible Then this can be an option where you can you know remove half of that Alrighty, so I think we're gonna start doing some questions and answers here if anyone's got anything


Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of Discover and we're super excited to have Jason Newton back in theCUBE. He's part of the HPE Mastermind Alliance behind its messaging and marketing. And he's been instrumental in up-leveling the conversation over the last several years from ports and lones and gigahertz to topics that resonate with business technology executives, which is basically every executive on the planet. Jason, great to see you. Welcome back to the program. Hey, I'm thrilled to be here. Okay, we're going to talk about the future of enterprise tech and the evolution of cloud, hybrid cloud, its expansion to the edge, where we are today, where we're headed and how we're going to get there. And I'm excited to start this off. We're living in an era where value and competition, we talk about this all the time, it's defined by data and the insights that organizations can extract from that data, the products and services that they can build that are data-centric. What do you think this means to HPE and what does it mean for your customers? Well, I think we're at the right moment at the right time. And I think for the customer, it just, what's happening now, what's possible to create value from data is just a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the transformation they were already driving for their business. We're seeing our customers do amazing things with data, not just monetizing data, but like world-changing types of things around in healthcare, in finance, transforming experiences for their customers. And all of this is being driven by data. Well, I'm excited to see how you guys approach that. I mean, you're talking about the cloud-to-edge strategy. And I've been having discussions with various execs at Discover, obviously, remotely, about how far HPE goes and certainly you're going to have compute everywhere. And Aruba seems to me to be a really interesting part of that platform. You're going to go to the deep edge. So you got a lot of assets in the arsenal. How are you thinking about that? Well, it really all needs to come together into one experience. And you mentioned Aruba. I mean, that's where it all starts with secure connectivity. The more that we connect things up in a secure way, the more data that we're going to be able to create, analyze and act upon. So it really plays a critical role. But if you look at HPE, we really have an embarrassment of riches of assets and expertise and partnerships at global scale. And there's not a part of our business that isn't focused on some part of the data challenges that customers have, from edge computing to supercomputing to storage, what we're doing with the Esmeral software, it's all focused on helping customers take in that data and then create insights from it, create new innovations from it. Talk a little bit more about the customer challenges that you're specifically solving at HPE. What do you see there? How are you thinking about that? I think one of the biggest ones where the conversation always starts with is, I have a lot of data, but it's all in silos, even within my organization. Or in some cases, I know there's data out there, but it's in another silo. How do I get access to it? How do I hear that word a lot when we talk to customers? You know, I need to get access for my teams to that data. So first step is just, how do I bring it all together? How do I federate all of that data in one place? That's one area that we're helping customers solve. The second is in order to bring those pieces together, the different data owners have to have a trust, right? To share the data, because often there's not an incentive for them to do that, like I own the data, I don't wanna share it. So we have to establish different parameters or capabilities in order to enable that type of trust and sharing. And there has to be some mutual benefit as part of that. And we see that with inside of companies and we see it with multiple different organizations. Once you can overcome those, those are really hard challenges. Once you overcome those things, everything becomes astronomically more easy to deal with and everything starts to go faster. And that's kind of where we're trying to get people on that modern data maturity curve up to that point where they do have federation, they do have curation, they are able to share, they know what they're going to benefit from it. And then we can get on to the task of enabling the teams to do analytics at speed and scale. Yeah, you talk about federation. And so there's an interesting challenge that you're describing. And you and I have had some good conversations about this because you want to kind of tame that data, if you will, and put it in a place that you can actually get to it, share it, make it discoverable. And of course at the same time, it's all over the place. So you've kind of got these pods that can talk to each other and facilitate that kind of data sharing and then what I call building data products, building data services. And technology is at the point now it's evolving to enable us to do that. Look back at the last 10 years, it's just far too complex. Yeah, we heard Antonio earlier today talk about building not private clouds but private data spaces. It's really that idea of how do I bring an experience to the data, right? That is agile and fast and cloud-like or cloud and in the case of what we're actually doing now, building a cloud platform. If that's exactly where customers are trying to get to, and we look at these data spaces as the advantage by going, bringing that to the data, obviously there's the physics of it, the performance and that kind of thing. But we can pay more attention to data sovereignty laws. You know, we can address things like data ownership within these spaces so that teams can come together and freely collaborate and act on that data together. You know, I've been watching you guys for now several years and you've taken this messaging and marketing thing pretty seriously. But a lot of times, you know, we see it all. A lot of times there's gimmicks and I don't mean that necessarily in a bad way. There are actually some really good gimmicky marketing that gets a lot of attention but your approach is different. It's very thoughtful, it's cultural, I'll say. You're trying to cultivate sort of what you say with what you do. And so I want to ask you, how are you going about, you know, changing the way in which you provide solutions? I sort of alluded to that at the top versus how you've done it in the past and how you're helping customers redefine their business for success. Well, yeah, the way that we're thinking about that is, and I think you heard it very clearly and succinctly from Antonia earlier today, we're transforming into an edge-to-cloud company, okay? We are building an edge-to-cloud platform, that is GreenLake. That platform is the way that will deliver cloud services to our customers, for their workloads, to their data sets, wherever that needs to be. We're committed to a truly hybrid model, right? Edge, on-prem, cloud, together. And so those elements, it starts to crystallize, I think a lot more about who this company is and the type of challenges that we need to solve. Talking about the things is not interesting to customers. They want to know what problems can you help me solve, how fast can you do it, right? What outcome can you help me achieve? And that's the way that we've talked about this a lot, Dave, that we continue to transform and have those more meaningful conversations. And like I said, every time we get to the data challenges, they know the opportunities there. They have a dream and a vision of what they want to go do. They just need a partner like HPE to help them get there. So we talk a lot about GreenLake and as-a-service. You guys, through the gauntlet down first, I got to give you props because you're kind of all in on it. You're not a halfway house. I'll give you that much, but now we've seen, at least I could count, at least four other large competitors follow suit. How should we think about your strategy and specifically your advantage relative to the competitors? Let's talk first in terms of as-a-service and GreenLake and then maybe overall. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you see a lot of people following GreenLake's lead.  We were the first to say the world will be hybrid and it is. We were the first to make the big bet at the edge. We were the first to see that not all the data is gonna go into one unified location. It's gonna continue to be distributed and therefore cloud experience has to travel to that data. We created the GreenLake brand years before anybody else did. And now while they're just now trying to figure out, how do I do hardware as a service or a better way to sell my products? We're moving on. We're focused on the workloads and the workflows and the data sets. GreenLake is much, much more mature. And now that we have everybody on board across the company, we're moving much faster as well, right? And that's more of a statement for the traditional competitors, right? The traditional space is, you know, they're still just stuck on like hardware-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service. We're at the workload level and much higher. And I think what you're seeing from the public cloud players is, wow, data center and on-prem and edge is hard, a lot harder than I think they really anticipated.  So I feel like we're in the place where the world is moving to, right? And we're really writing, you know, the first chapter of the new HPE, not the last. Has it changed the way this as a service mentality? Has it changed the way or how has it changed the way in which your product groups are behaving? Quite a bit. You know, it is a mindset shift and, you know, I think we have the culture that will successfully enable that because we've always been so customer-centric. I think as you move to an as-a-service, it becomes much more about how do I ensure customer success, right? How do I put an environment in place and then use that as an opportunity to solve more problems across our customers' environments? I think that aspect is what, you know, really is driving our thinking now, is, you know, what new services can I land on the GreenLake Edge to Cloud platform to solve different data-centric challenges?  What do you, what was the hardest part about making that change? Was it the leadership? Was it the sales compensation? Was it to get the product guys out of the widgets? What was the hardest thing? Yeah, I think, I think go-to-market is as big a challenge as anything. You know, I think in marketing, it's our job to show the art of the possible in the future, even if it's uncomfortable for the organization. And I think that helps articulate Antonio's vision and give him a true North. And he's a fabulous leader in a culture that they, you know, they believe and trust in him. And so they're following, but, you know, the challenges are not so much, you know, the technology in many cases. It is the people and the skills and, you know, building those new relationships within accounts and those aspects, those intangible things. So, you know, we're doing a lot around enablement, sales enablement and of course with our, and most importantly with our partners who are out there selling for us. It is a new approach, but it's a good approach because it's so customer-centric. It's not product-centric. So, how are the customers and partners reacting? Of course you're gonna say great, but how do you know? Like what kind of metrics do you look at? What kind of things that are important to you to track that give you confidence that you're on the right track? They're buying more stuff. Yeah, okay, that's a good metric. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, like I think there was some skepticism, you know, at first because we had been doing some of that infrastructure as a service type of thing for a while before we ever had a GreenLake brand. And they're like, well, is this just the same thing? Like, no, we're truly cloudifying this platform. We are building a cloud-native platform. You saw it in the announcements today, right? With cloud-native security, just like you get in the public cloud, but you can deploy and run these workloads in your choice of location. And the more that we can show evidence of our messaging in the experience that we actually deliver, that's when customers start to lean in. So we look at a ton of metrics. I mean, it's not one data point. We listen to Gartner, you know, we have our own internal research that we do. We're constantly getting feedback from our field. In fact, last week, two weeks ago, we had a Board of Advisors meeting brought in some of our top-top customers just to hear from them, you know, what are we doing good? What are we not doing good? So it's a lot of different pieces that go into how are we doing with the customer and how are they into this? But this is, we're only doing what they told us they wanted, bring the cloud to me and my data. I can't move at all, but I don't want different operating models. I want a consistent experience. I want to be able to focus and innovate. I don't want to deal with, you know, the underlying pieces of the infrastructure. Right, and so... Yeah, we're doing what they ask, right? So they tip, okay, but that sounds good, but then it's hard to do that. I mean, you got to put real, that's a lot of elbow grease, a lot of investment, a lot of innovation. Like you say, you got to align the organizations. That's not a trivial task. I mean, I tell you, Jason, I've been hearing this, you know, early days, even 10 years ago, I think we're finally at the point now where the industry is responding to what those customers really want. And of course, you know, it's like Steve Jobs with the iPhone, ask them what they want. They're not going to tell you an iPhone, right? They, maybe they didn't know 10 years ago, but I think it really came into focus in the last several years. And investment is the key there. Yeah, I mean, I think the last decade was, the digital transformation was all about, you know, how do I bring speed to code and take advantage of public cloud? And I think that took us further. But now, okay, the next chapter is a very data center. How do I bring speed and agility to data and data analytics? And especially at the edge and where things need to live, how do I make a consistent experience? That's going to be our focus for the next 10 years. And like I said, I feel like we're at the right moment in history as a company with the right assets, expertise, partnerships to go and help customers take advantage of that. Well, it's interesting. The last decade, we all talked about big data. We don't use that term much anymore.  I feel like we actually are now entering the true data era. So you're excited about a lot of things, obviously as a service, but I got a sense there's more that you're not sharing with us. So what are you most excited about for HPE in the future? Well, like I said, you know, becoming that edge to cloud company, watching GreenLake blossom as it is. I mean, tremendous innovations that we announced today. And yes, there's things I can't share that I know are coming later this year. I've seen the roadmaps. It's really compelling, very compelling and impressive. The things that we're doing with Esmeral combined that together with GreenLake and that experience, the types of data and analytic platform environments that we can build to unify those data silos, to accelerate the machine learning and analytics teams. It's really all coming together. And those are the things that I'm excited about. Changing that perception of HPE as infrastructure, as a service and hardware as a service and that kind of thing. It's not about, as a service is the experience, right? The value is in the data and watching us be able to help customers solve those data challenges and seize those data opportunities is what I'm most excited about. Well, the other thing too is the world has some big challenges, population and energy. We can just make the huge list. And I feel like tech companies, not only are in a position to help but I think they have a responsibility. And I got to say, I think most tech companies, big large tech companies are stepping up and have great leadership around that. And what are your thoughts on that? Well, yeah, we talked about value from data. It's all about the insights is where the value comes from. But value is not always about profit and monetization. I mean, data truly does have the opportunity to solve some of the world's biggest challenges. I was just reading this morning about CGAIR and the things that they're doing in agriculture with these. They've got a big data set platform that I think could be literally the thing that ends up helping solve world hunger. The thing that everyone sort of jokes about. I'm like, no, seriously, now with the data that could be possible. Yeah, I think you're right. I think we are going to solve world hunger. World nutrition may be a different story, but we'll tackle that next. Last question, you know, what else should we be focused on at Discover? How can folks learn more? Well, you know, this is a three-day event. So today was really about the news and the excitement and clarifying our position as an edge-to-cloud company and that GreenLake is our edge-to-cloud platform, the way that we deliver the cloud to you. Tomorrow is really about how all of that vision strategy manifests itself into the experience and the products and the solutions that you can consume. There'll also be a lot of sharing of the keynote is what I'm looking forward to with Dr. Inglem Goh. He's our head of AI and he's going to be sharing all the lessons and learnings from hundreds of engagements that he's been driving with customers, showing exactly how to overcome the data silo problem, the trust problem, how to bring agility to analytics. And then Thursday is kind of the geek out day, right? We get to talk to Hewlett Packard Labs. We get to go and touch the technology, meet the technologists, interact with them and understand what are those technologies that are going to be crucial for the next 10 years of data-driven transformation. Some really exciting stuff there, Jason. Thank you so much for spending some time on theCUBE again. Really great to see you. I appreciate the invite. Every time is a pleasure. Thank you. All right, and thanks for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 21. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. We'll be right back.


Hello everyone and welcome to this four o'clock question of OER 22. I'm delighted to be joined by Clint Lalonde and Amanda Coolidge, who are joining us from BC campus very early in the morning for them. So thank you for joining us at this time. And Clint and Amanda are here to talk to us about how it started, how it's going, celebrating 10 years of open textbooks in British Columbia. So I'll hand over to you Clint and please enjoy the rest of the session. Thank you Caroline. Hi everyone and thank you so much for spending some time with us here on what is a beautiful day here in Victoria British Columbia. Nice early morning. Well it's not super early but it's eight o'clock in the morning here. I'm really happy to have you along for this session. My name is Clint Lalonde. I'm a project manager for open education with an organization called BC campus and we'll tell you a little bit about that in just a moment. I'm also an associate faculty member with the School of Education and Technology at Royal Roads University and today we want to have a little bit of a celebration to talk about a project that we have worked on for the last 10 years now which is our open textbook collection here in the province of British Columbia. We want to tell you a little bit about how it started, how it's going and some of the lessons that we have learned over the past 10 years. And I'm being joined today by my colleague Amanda Coolidge. Hi everyone. I have really nice to be here this morning or your afternoon. My name is Amanda Coolidge. I am the director of open education at BC campus. So what you're seeing on the screen here is just a little bit of a visual representation of our journey from the for the past 10 years represented in the the websites that we have had for the collection starting in 2012 and a couple of various iterations as we go along here and a new collection which we have just launched and and we'll be launching formally in June for our open textbook collection. So we wanted to kind of visually represent that in this this opening slide here. Great thanks. So one of the things Clinton I would like to do is start by acknowledging and recognizing that we are currently on the Slewa Tooth Squamish with Sonic and Esquimalt Songhees Nations of the Lagunquan peoples. These peoples have walked gently on the unceded territories where we are grateful to live, work and play and we're committed to building relationships with the first peoples here based in honor and respect and we thank them for their hospitality. So I thought we'd start off with a little bit about BC campus. So BC campus we are innovators, implementers, leaders and learners and our primary focus is to support the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia as they adopt, adapt and evolve their teaching and learning practices to create a better experience for students. We achieve this through a supportive approach to advanced pedagogies, a focus on impactful practice and a collaboration with partners in British Columbia and around the world. Our mandate is to provide teaching and learning educational technology and open education support to the post-secondary institutions and we're funded primarily through our ministry of advanced education skills training. We provide collaborative leadership that brings innovative resources and effective expertise together to create awareness, understanding and adoption of available curricular resources. So ultimately our goal is to improve student learning. Okay so we thought we'd take you on a little bit of a journey here and tell you a little bit about our our collection and and how our project actually started because we've been doing this now for 10 years hosting a fairly large open textbook repository that is focused on for educators in British Columbia and we thought we'd take you a little bit about how it started. So and I want to go back to 2012 here and what the situation was like here in Canada and in North America especially where we were seeing issues where where students were were not purchasing their textbook because of cost and this was some of the research that was done early on by the student public interest research group that showed 65% of students had not purchased a textbook for a course because because of the cost of textbooks. So the costs were becoming a barrier for students and it's not just a you know an economic you know of course that's an economic issue as well but there were also pedagogical implications to high textbook costs in 2012 and this actually still continues today where we're seeing students that do not purchase the textbook because of cost. Students take fewer courses because of the cost. They opt to go without textbooks because of the the high costs of textbooks. So this was the issue that we were trying to deal with in 2012 when we started our open textbook collection and it started with some funding that was announced at the open education conference in 2012 in Vancouver British Columbia when our Minister of Advanced Education at the time John Yapp announced that you would provide some funding to BC campus to create a repository of 40 open textbooks that that aligned with the highest enrolled first and second year subject areas in British Columbia post-secondary institutions. So we got to work on that in 2012 and the first thing that we decided to do we we have a long history in open education so we know that there are tons of great resources that were already out there so we didn't want to just start creating textbooks. We wanted to be sure to go out and find out what was out there. There were other projects at the time like open stacks, the open textbook library at the University of Minnesota, lots of projects out there that were creating open textbooks. So the first thing that we did is we we found out what the top 40 subject areas were based in enrollment here in British Columbia and we went out and we kind of surveyed what was already out there to try to to find resources to put in our repository. So that was sort of the the first step and then what we did is when we found gaps for things that were maybe a little bit more specialized we we decided to fund some some creations so we released some grant funding brought some some subject matter experts on and and created some sorry I can't stop those notifications for some reason. We can't see them Clint. Oh okay good so we we funded some new creations when needed when we needed to create some some textbooks and we ended up with a collection that had 40 textbooks fairly quickly for the first year of the project something we also did we recognize that instructors wanted to we wanted to allay some of the issues around quality of textbooks which was a big issue in 2012-2013 when the project first began and you know are these good quality resources so we instituted a a peer review system for the textbooks in our collection which continues to this day and has become a huge factor in in in educators deciding to adopt these resources and we didn't do sort of crowdsourced reviews we actually we worked with instructors who were local here in British Columbia at the institutions and we have 25 public post-secondary institutions that we work with here in British Columbia and we worked with educators in discipline areas within our local institutions to do the reviews of the textbooks in the collection so that you know it's a fairly small community here in British Columbia when educators came to when educators came to to see the the textbooks they would see reviews from educators that they knew and have probably worked with in the past so that was an important consideration for us so our first year we actually felt like we had some pretty good success you know we spent 2012 and the early part of 2013 getting this up to date and getting it up and running and and you know we saw some adoptions in that first year and we had realized about $60,000 in student savings by the end of that first year. Fast forward to how it's going in 2022 we now have a collection of close to 400 open textbooks and as well as a variety of publishing guides and other content within our our collection we have been tracking savings all along for the 10 years we've just passed the $30 million mark in student savings on textbooks which is a significant number and still kind of blows me away that you know we have managed to do this with open educational resources and open textbooks to make that kind of a massive impact on student savings. We've got close to 6,000 adoptions of the open textbooks in the province which you know in 2012 if somebody would have said you know we would have 6,000 adoptions throughout the province I don't know if I would have you know it's what we'd hope for but I don't know if we actually thought that we could could achieve it so very happy to see these kind of results in in in 10 years and we have funded about 200 different projects some of these are open textbook creation projects but we've also done things like adaptations of existing resources in there and we've funded projects like a recent project that I worked on which is the H5P and open homework systems project which is to build out the textbooks that we have and add some additional functionality in into the textbooks in terms of student self-assessments and and kind of more interactive elements so so certainly you know from that original project of creating the repository of of 40 uh 40 textbooks we now have have done a ton of other projects and the collection has grown and grown and grown well I'll hand this over to Amanda now she can start some of the lessons we have learned awesome thanks Clint um so lessons learned so we're gonna talk a little bit about I think we have five uh different lessons learned that we have um we thought we would highlight for all of you at we are 2022 so the first one is um can you go to the next slide uh community building so one of the things we learned right away is that a community of open education advocates makes a huge difference so we started off by going to libraries um going to teaching and learning centers and really engaging the support uh systems at the institutions we also engaged in a content creation sprint where we brought together faculty for uh the creation of a geography a regionalized geography open textbooks and communities are really at the heart of what we do and Clint wrote a blog post a couple of years ago which I love to reference um because he said ultimately for a project to succeed and be sustainable it has to be about developing a community and so one of the things I'll just be a little bit more specific about in particular is librarians so at the start of the project in 2012 we gathered librarians together to create the very first open education librarians community in British Columbia and the bc open education librarians they're a supportive community um to help learn about open education practices and they build support for librarians and faculty in advocating for the use of oer in their home institutions by sharing knowledge and practices that can impact um higher education and the librarians who uh make up this community have worked together to create lib guides across the institutions shared best practices presented at multiple conferences and um most importantly they've worked together to ensure that access to educational resources is unencumbered by ownership and cost next slide another area that we wanted to focus on as a lesson learned is the importance of research and the importance of efficacy and tracking metrics so in um we've been very focused on building a research community in British Columbia in particular because we noticed that a lot of the open education research was very us centric and in order to really make an impact across uh faculty as well as administration and institutions we wanted to be able to gather our own metrics so in 2014 we started what is called the faculty fellows program and that brings instructors together to engage in research that determines the efficacy of open textbook use in bc institutions this is really a branch out not just for the efficacy of open textbook but really looking at open education pedagogical practice and the fellows also provide mentorship to faculty who are new to open resources they do presentations and consultation and also conduct outreach um outreach work and we've been fortunate to partner also with the oer research hub um out of the uk and we have all of these other partnerships as well that have really helped us with this further research next slide clint i think this one's for you yeah this is a little bit about paying attention to the technology and and you know when we started the the project we wanted to being that we were at open education project we wanted to kind of sort of walk the walk and and and use open source technologies as much as possible uh because we felt it was just a you know part of the ethos of working in open education and so when we started we we did some research and looked around for different publishing platforms because we knew at some point we would have to do some of our own publishing and we we stumbled upon press books and did some early work in going back to 2012-2013 when press books was just a bit of a a startup not quite the the you know the force that they are today which i'm so happy to see that it has become a publishing platform that is being used quite extensively and widely and much credit to huma guire and press books for for starting off open source and realizing that there was a niche there that needed to be filled in open textbook publishing so and so we really wanted to to focus and and have a an emphasis on on using open technologies but one of the lessons we learned about open technologies and anybody who's worked with open source technologies would know is that not only do do you you know benefit from from getting access to open source software but there is a commitment that you you need to make in order to give something back to that open source community and so one of the ways that we gave back to press books even though we weren't financially using them because it was an open source plugin at the time is we gave back developer time so we had a developer named Brad Payne and we continue to do this we submit code back to press books for use cases that that work for both press books and bc campus so if you are going to do an open textbook project in the future and you or any project and you do use open source software consider the ways in which you can give back to the open source software that you are using because you are driving benefit from that software so whether it's a financial contribution back to support them to inform of a donation or a fund or if you can develop provide back some developer resources to that open source project it is important to give back and not just use the open source software so another area that we also would say is a lesson learned is the importance of involving students in the advocacy of open resources one of the things we realized early on is that the advocacy work that was happening was really missing that integral piece of the audience member and the audience being the student and so we started working with student unions across the province to talk to them about the why of open resources and the how one of the things that we articulated to the students is especially those students who were in the leadership team of student unions is that you can have you may not be able to impact tuition rates and you may not be able to impact housing costs which are the two biggest cost costs for students here in British Columbia but you can have an impact on the course materials and so together with the BC Federation of Students which is a larger organization body that works with all of the student unions across the province we started helping them out with campaigns so things like you know this one I just spent censored on textbooks and just sort of being able to help them and and learn more about outreach and how to start having the conversation with faculty so that it's not something where they're being turned away from opening adopting uh or sorry using open uh resources but something that they want to engage in to to really work with their um work alongside the students next slide so finally another area that we wanted to highlight um that we actually didn't think um we would be doing is actually policy so one of the lessons learned is the importance of really working with institutions on policy creation so one of the things uh that we started to do in particular was reaching out to some of the open education advocates at their institutions to find out how one would be able to um put open education policy within a strategic plan in an e-learning plan in some sort of administrative level way of doing that and there's a couple things that we did one of the things that I always recommend to people when they're looking at um possibly putting an open education policy into their institutions is to take a look at your institution's mission or mandate there's often a lot of wording involved in the mission vision or mandate of a university or institution that says words like access or affordability or inclusion or equity um and all of these words really culminate what is open education so that's really important and another thing was also to start looking at ways in which um policy can influence tenure and promotion so one of the number one reasons that uh faculty were not adopting open education resources is because they said it didn't affect their tenure and promotion and so actually alongside with the students at the University of British Columbia um they were able to implement a or put in policy the the acceptance of open educational resources development and creation um as part of the tenure and promotion package which is actually one of the first tenure and promotion policies in North America that uh highlights open resources so the so it's really important I think at the end of the day to really think about what is the holistic view of open education so we've talked about community research open education technology students and policy and so at the end of the day the major lesson learned is you in order to really advance open resources at your institution it's not going to be a one stream um endeavor it's something that's going to take the entire ecosystem of your institution and there we go some lessons learned and uh a little bit of uh a celebration for for making it to this 10-year milestone for the open textbook collection here in British Columbia um open to any questions that you might have and I know there's a bit of a delay in getting the questions back to us from uh from from the YouTube channel but oh hi Caroline any questions rolling in uh not so far just praise uh praise some Catherine saying yay for policy um hi definitely agree with that um it's it's been fantastic to hear about what you've managed to achieve in 10 years um so many big changes and not just you know in the textbooks themselves but changing that policy in the institutions um so thank you for for sharing that um boss got a comment from Martin um he said that was really comprehensive and so thanks for that um if anyone does have any questions pop them in the chat um I follow up from Catherine uh about your wonderful lessons learned so I think lots of praise coming in for for the work that you've done uh so I've got two questions now they're all flooding in first one from Martin you set out a lot of lessons but in order to get started what would you say is the most important first step clean um you know there were a lot of important first steps and you know Mary Burgess who's our executive director at BC campus was there right from the from the very start um who could probably speak to some important first steps but I know one of the first important steps that I was involved in was was was trying to be focused um that really did help us having the constraints um for for putting the collection together of 40 textbooks and 40 subject areas uh and you know that really helped but then also reaching out to tap into people who had already done this one of the first events that we had um probably three or four months after the announcement was made from the ministry here is we had our first open textbooks summit and we brought together in a room in Vancouver uh a bunch of people who who had worked on open education and who are working on open textbook initiatives uh and we just did a big brainstorming and the original intent for that was really about sharing it was kind of like you bring lists of the resources that you have we'll bring lists of the resources that we have let's see how we can share and collaborate and I think that was that was a really early lesson making those connections and those relationships early on with people who are already doing same kind of work and similar work which you know in in 2022 doesn't sound all that radical but you know in 2012 uh you know the open education conferences were we're still quite small and insular didn't have like a thousand people like they do now so we actually had a bunch of people that sat in a table in a room I think there was about 20 or 25 of us representing you know some of the major open education projects that were happening in North America at that time and so we started collaborating early on and connecting with people early on and I think that was a really important piece into the success of the project. We have a question from Catherine. What is in store for the next 10 years? That's a great question. I don't know about the next 10 years but I can tell you that in the next year we will be we are officially launching a new collection. This will be based on open course collections so the opportunity to not just share out open textbooks but also to share out course materials from lesson plans to power points to instructor guides, H5P, all of the resources needed for one to either mirror a course or perhaps take a look at something that we would say is an exemplary. We've really worked hard to include equity diversity and inclusion within the development of these courses, indigenization and decolonization and looking at alternative forms of assessment so we're really looking forward to that. I think on our twitter page you can actually see like a teaser video which is super fun about that. In the future for the next 10 years you know I really think one of the things we've actually seen within the first 10 years that I think well I hope will continue to happen is that open education practice has really been infused throughout our organization to the point where every single department at our institution is implementing open practice and so what I'm hoping is that that will then sort of filter out to as examples for other organizations and or our ministry to also continually improve practice so that we see more open work. Great thank you for that we've got one time for one more question one from Jenny Heyman. Likely you have achieved good support and buy in from early adopters what are strategies for encouraging the majority especially college faculty for 10 years not on the table? Yeah you know one thing that I think has worked for us in that regard is and first I should say that I don't think there's any education strategy that is ever going to be adopted by a majority of educators or you know education is pretty specialized in niche but that being said I think one of the things that we have done has been able to leverage a lot of those early adopters and have them become advocates and being able to sort of seed advocates at the institutions who are early adopters and really having those peer developing those peer to peer connections educator to educator discipline to discipline having people within those departments and within those disciplines speak to why they adopted open educational resources and open textbooks and why they are involved and invested in the open education community and you know slowly it builds and slowly it builds and and I think that has been you know one of the the keys to to kind of breaking through and and you know taking a long-term approach for it too I mean you know the open textbook project has been running for 10 years in British Columbia but you know open education in British Columbia helped happen way before that a whole bunch of of early people who have you know since the open courseware initiative was announced at MIT I think that kind of spurred things on so we've had people involved in open education for for 20 years now and certainly having that long view has helped as well. Okay so I'll just finish with this comment saying Amanda that sounds wonderful your lessons learned show how adaptable you've been responding to the evolving needs of students educators and society. Well Catherine you're just the sweetest ever um yeah Catherine and Martin nice to see your questions and comments and Jenny too it's nice to feel the support from our crew. So I'll just finish by saying thank you so much Clint and Amanda for that really interesting presentation it's been really great to hear about all the good work that you're doing and so thank you for sharing that with us and look forward to seeing you and hear more about it in the future. Thank you we'll see you at oh we are 32. Oh we are 32 next 10 years thank you everyone. Okay bye.


The Jack Benny Program presented by Lucky Strike! Great one! From first puff to last, there's never a rough puff in a Lucky. Yes, from the very first puff you get smooth, mild smoking enjoyment. The rich, mellow taste of fine tobacco. Because LS-MFT, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco, and in a cigarette it's the tobacco that counts. Now fine tobacco costs more. and at the auction's luckies pay more millions of dollars more than official parity prices to get fine light naturally mild tobacco tobacco that smokes cool and smooth with never a rough puff the independent tobacco experts can see the makers of lucky strike consistently selected by ripe mellow leaf and a recent survey shows more of these experts auctioneers buyers and warehouse men smoke lucky strike regularly than the next two leading brands combined that's a tip for you friends for your greater enjoyment of smoking yes for a smoother milder smoke with never a rough puff smoke the smoke tobacco expert smoke lucky strike so round so firm so fully packed so free and easy on the draw the lucky strike program starring Jack Benny with Mary Livingston Phil Harris Rochester Dennis day and yours truly down will ladies and gentlemen let's go back a few hours it's just before our regular Sunday rehearsal and Jack is in his dressing room waiting for his guest star to appear a Rochester has Fred Allen arrived yet no sir say boss mr. Allen has been off the air for a long time has me yes yes he has well you and he never did get along how come you have him on your program well Rochester I'll admit it took me a long time to make up my mind I didn't feel sorry for mr. Allen when he lost his job and I wasn't particularly upset when he was evicted from his house but last week when I saw him standing on the corner of sunset and Ohini selling maps to movie stars home I'll wept he looked awful standing out there selling those maps his suit was so ragged it looked like he bought it one flight up and then fell down the stairs no kidding boss does he really look that bad Rochester you won't believe this but Allen is so weak that he's talking through his mouth now he hasn't the strength to push the words up through his nose oh it's pathetic under the circumstance I suppose you're going to give him a very generous check well a man should never let his sympathies override his good judgment in business I'm going to pay him according to the number of laughs he gets then you'd better watch it boys he's loud and live himself right into the upper bracket listen Allen couldn't add live the word please if it was preceded by give me a package of beeman's peps and chewing gum so I'm not worried about what he's like oh Jack what is it done well everyone's out on stage waiting for you oh good as Fred Allen come in yet I'm not yet oh well I'll be out in a minute oh boss why do you want me to make out the payroll like I always do yes Rochester and on Don Wilson's check deduct 50 cents 50 cents yes and on the stub make a notation deduction for DP DP what does that stand for drear pooson he'll he'll understand well I better get out on the stage see you later Rochester you don't do it on the ground the github Los Angeles open golf tournament sure was exciting my legs are still sore from following Hogan and Snead I was silly to follow such good players they never lose any balls yeah I did a dumb the dumb the dumb the dumb the dada now fellas before we try that number again I want to make a few changes first trumpet in the third major changed the F sharp to an A flat. Phil. Just a minute, Jackson. Now in the second sax, in that first major following the code, it changed the D flat to an E natural. Look, Phil. Now tenor sax planted at the flute right after the on Dante. Give me a little more pianissimo. Phil. Now let's have it. One, two. That's exactly what I want. Phil. Phil, what was that? Some enchanted evening. That was some enchanted evening. Sure. And that's the way you're gonna play it on my program? Certainly. Well, Phil. Phil. Yeah. If some enchanted evening, you should meet a stranger, ask him for a job. That was the worst. Wait a minute, Jackson. I forgot the most important change of all. Oh, I'm sorry. Joe, turn your trombone around. You're blowing in the wrong end. I wondered when you noticed that he's been doing it since 1936. Phil, if I were you, I'd worry less about the music and more. Jack, Jack. Let's get on with the rehearsal. Well, we'll start when Alan gets here. Is Fred Allen gonna be our guest? Certainly, Mary.  I thought you were kidding. Getting Fred Allen is no surprise to me. What? I could see the handwriting on the wall. Dennis, you're in the middle of your season. You got to start getting last, kid. Now look. Some Sundays I'm ashamed to go home. Wait a minute, Dennis. There's nothing for you to be ashamed of about my program. I happen to be one of the country's outstanding comedians. Some comedian. You couldn't ad-lib the word please if it was preceded by give me a package of Beeman's peps and chewing gum. Dennis, where'd you hear that? On Groucho Marx's program, Wednesday night. Oh, yes. It was pretty good, wasn't it? Yeah. I like the part where Groucho said Fred Allen is so weak he has to talk through his mouth.  What a kid. Jack, I just look over the script and from the jokes I've got, you must have stolen them from Death of a Salesman. What? I haven't got one good gag in the whole show. Well, it's your own fault, Mary. I had a very funny routine in there about your sister, Babe, and you made me take it out. Of course I did.  About Babe? Certainly. One week she's a model in a harness shop. Next week she's a hostess on a live bait bar. At the following week she's a sewer inspector at Pismo Beach. Well, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with that? People think she can't hold a job. Well, then we won't tell any more jokes like that about Babe. And you can stop talking about her looks, too. Now, wait a minute, Mary, even as though it is your sister, let's face it. She never was exactly bolded Miss America. No, but you came close. Close? Mr. America. Oh, yes, Gabby Hayes came in second, I remember. Anyway, Mary, if you object so strenuously to what we say about Babe, we'll leave it out of the script. Well, say Jack, it's getting kind of late. Can't we rehearse without Alan? No, we can't, Don. Well, say, Mr. Benny, as long as we have to wait, would you like to hear my song first? Well, yes, Dennis, you might have. Oh, wait a minute, that reminds me of something. Now go ahead, Dennis, sing your song, will you? Jack, what was that? Well, during our murder mystery last week, the quartet was supposed to sing that. And at one point they got it so mixed up that nothing came out. It was just awful. Oh, so you're making them sing it today, huh, Jack? 500 times. They won't bother us. They have to stay in that closet until they finish. But, Jack, the four of them in such a small closet. Well, that's part of the punishment, Mary. They can't stand each other, you know? Well, I don't think they're crazy enough to sing that same thing 500 times. You don't think so? Listen to this. You see? Now, Dennis, go ahead and sing your song. 500 times? No, only one. Do it on the show I'll say that was Dennis Day singing happy times from Danny Kaye's new picture the inspector general starring Danny Kaye. The song was written by Mrs. Danny Kaye and sung in the picture by Mr. Danny Kaye. There I guess that'll take care of the Christmas present I forgot to send them. Now kids, let's try and get this, get this, get this, get this. It's more for fights and battles, yes sir me. Hey! Dennis, get away from that door. Stop this, one of the fellas in the quartet look exhausted. Must be the tenor, they never do hold up. But maybe I ought to take a look. Alice Alice Alice and the peepy snake is more for fights and battles. They're alright Mary. Are you sure? Certainly I'll show you. Yes sir me. Hey! Now look kids, I've made up my mind if Alan doesn't get here for rehearsal in the next ten minutes I'm gonna cancel him. I wonder where he can be, hasn't any friends out here. Maybe. Will it be anything else Mr. Alan? Yes waiter, I'll have another cup of coffee. Before I took this job here at the Brown Derby I was a waiter at Lendase. Really? Now how are things back in New York? Well they're about the same except we have a water shortage you know. Oh yeah I've been reading about that. Did it affect you personally? Well it didn't bother me much at first but after several weeks something told me to take a bath. Jay what did you do? Well every day I'd lunch at the automatic and while the nickel changer wasn't watching I would slyly pilfer half a glass of water which I would take home and pour into my bathtub. Yeah? Then on Tuesday evenings I would visit my friends and while they were listening to my jokes on Milton Burl's program I would siphon a little water out of their goldfish bowl. Oh I used many other ingenious methods of collecting moisture. When pigeons weren't looking I would raise them up slowly and drop my handkerchief into their bird baths. I'd follow window washes through the Empire State Building to catch their dripping and I would purposely irritate little boys so they'd squirt their water pistols at them. Well finally after much waiting and hard labor I had collected four precious inches of aqua pura in my bathtub. And then you took your bath? Oh no I rented it out I'm not working you know. You're not on a radio anymore. Well you may have heard over heard a gossip you know radio is highly competitive and the program that used to be opposite me was a giveaway show. Now I don't know how it happened but on the last Sunday in June they gave me away. No yes I was prize number seven I came between a plastic zither and a year supply of strong heart dog food. Well Jean Mr. Allen if you're through with radio then you must be out to make a picture. No no I am not my inquisitive little straight man. I am here I am this is confidential you know I am here as a personal emissary of Mayor O'Dwyer to ask Jack Benny to come to our trouble city on March 15. Why did they want Frank there on March the 15th. Because when Benny pays his income tax his tears alone will fill every reservoir. Mr. Allen aren't you supposed to be on Jack Benny's program today. Well this is none of my business but how much is Benny going to pay you. Well I don't know yet but my lawyer filed suit against him two weeks ago. Wait a minute you ain't even been on his program yet and you started showing him two weeks ago. My friend when you deal with Benny it's always best to get a running star. He's really that cheap. Why Benny is so tight that last summer when he was out on a dude ranch he kept his money in a wildcat's mouth. And he was snide enough to find a wildcat with tonsillitis so it couldn't swallow. Wait a minute I'd better get going I have to go to that old man's rehearsal over there. Say which network is he lousing up now. Well he's at CBS it's just two blocks from here. Say on second thought you know I think I'll let him stew a little while. Bring me another cup of coffee. I can't understand what's keeping Fred. Oh Jack take it easy he'll be here any minute. Well when we go to court I'm certainly going to bring up about him being late. All right Chester will you run out and see if you can find Mr. Alan maybe he's at Lyman's or at the Derby. Yes sir. Alan is certainly a thoughtless guy. He's been doing things like this to me since the first day I met him. Jack I've been with you for so many years and I never knew how you first met Fred Alan. Oh what happened in Boston a long time ago. Well tell me about it Jack. All right Don it was many many years ago when vaudeville was at its height I was the headliner at the Metropolitan Theater in Boston. One night after the supper show I was sitting in my dressing room resting from my seven encoys. I was removing my makeup. Gosh they were a wonderful audience tonight they made me take seven vows. This makeup is hard to get off. I'll see a gray hair. I should be getting great. This is the first year I'm thirty nine. Well I'll just come in. Mr. Benny. Yes Mr. Benny my name is Fred Alan. I'm appearing here at the Metropolitan. That's funny I don't remember any Fred Alan on this bill. I'm in the opening act. Oh I thought the opening act was thanks mules. I took my makeup off. Oh so you're with things mules. May I sit down. Yes but not too close. Now what what can I do for you young man.   Yes I'm just mule delineating for the time being. I am really a jugger but I want to give up juggling because you can't get any steady booking. Oh I don't know now my brother worked for a bank juggled their books and got 20 years.  Oh it didn't get past me Mr. Benny. I've been around mules so long I didn't notice it. Well Mr. Alan if you're a jugger I hardly think you have the experience to become a great comedian. Oh sir I never hope to be as great as you are sir but I do think with a little perseverance and some polish mark you I might become another Maury Amsterdam.  Thank you sir. Tell me Mr. Benny what do you think of this new entertainment medium that's just starting up this thing called radio. Well I've been giving it a lot of thought in fact I already have an idea for a radio program. You have. Yes on my program each week I'll visit a place called Benny's Boulevard where I'll start knocking on doors and ask topical questions of four people. Four people. Yes a southern senator a Rube who says howdy bub a Bronx housewife and an Irishman. Gosh what a novel idea for radio. You know that might even replace the street singer. You'll have to excuse me now Alan I've got to get dressed for dinner. Well goodbye Mr. Benny and thank you so much sir for your help. I will always treasure the memory of this meeting meeting the greatest comedian in the world sir. Thank you. And that done is how I first met Fred Allen and why I dislike him so much. Jack you mean. Yes he stole my radio idea and called it Alan's alley. Yeah I wonder if Rochester has found him yet. I'll have another cut. Oh there you are Mr. Allen I've been looking all over for you. Oh hello Rochester say I was just getting ready to go over to the studio. Well let's hurry Mr. Benny's awful upset. Come on I'll show you the shortcut to CBS. No Rochester I'm rather surprised to see that you're still Mr. Benny's valid. I thought you'd quit long ago.  Well I know but what about money. Pardon. What what happens on payday. He gives me a whip and a chair and tells me to get it from the wild. These years Rochester you'd think Benny would change but he's just as bad as when I first met him in Boston many years ago. I never did hear about how you two first met. Would you tell me about it Mr. Allen. Well are you really interested how you're. I shall be glad to tell you Rochester. Before you start we'll take this shortcut. We'll go through the parking lot at NBC which leads to the back door of CBS. That way we can. Who was that. Phil Harris. Well Rochester had happened many many years ago. I was headlining at the Metropolitan Theater in Boston and one evening after the supper show I was sitting in my dressing room removing my makeup. Care what a show I'm all tired out from blowing kisses to the audience 11 on course before I finally big door. Come in. Mr. Allen. Yes. My name is Jack Benny. Well I'm glad you got here. It's the cold water faucet that's leaking. No no I'm not the plumber. I'm appearing here on the portable bill with you. Jack Benny Jack say I did I didn't see your name on the program. Oh I'm in the opening act but the show opens with a Japanese flash act Yamaguchi and Takamura gosh they're wonderful the way they lie on their backs and juggle that big barrel with their feet. I know and inside of that barrel me. No. Oh yes Mr. Allen while they're balancing that barrel and kicking it up in the air. I'm curled up inside with my violin playing Ireland must be heaven because my mother came from there. What an inspired touch. I can just hear that music coming out through the bung hole. Well so much for flattery. Now what can I do. What can I do for you Mr. Allen sir you've got to help me.  I want to make a lot of money. A lot of money. But Benny why knock yourself out to make a lot of money. You'll only spend it. No no Mr. Allen I save my money. Here look say that's a peculiar looking wallet you have there. It's a baby wildcat. A strep throat.  Well if you're so anxious to earn big money why don't you turn to radio radio. Yes it's a gold mine. Say I'm working on an idea for a program for myself. Now my idea is this I'll be the star you see and I'll have a valid a very naive young boy singer a girl to insult me a drunken orchestra leader and a fat announcer. That sounds like a wonderful idea Mr. Allen and I hope you have a lot of luck with it. Goodbye. And that's how I first met your boss Rochester. You may yes Rochester. Mr. Benny stole my radio idea crawled out of his barrel said goodbye to Yamaguchi and Takamura crawled out through the bung hole became a big success on the air sold himself to CBS for two million dollars. While today I am a bum. How fickle fate can be. Well here's the studio Mr. Allen let's go in. No no Rochester I can't go in. What. I can't do it Rochester I can't let Benny give me a job. I may be a derelict down and out but I've still got my pride but Mr. Allen. No I'm sorry Rochester I just can't do it but Mr. Allen you haven't got any money how are you going to live don't worry about me I'll get along. Maps get your maps to the movie. There's never a rough puff in the lucky because lucky strike means fine tobacco. So. Yes sold to American that's a familiar cry at the auction when fine tobacco comes up for sale for it market after market the buyers for lucky strike go after fine light naturally mild tobacco tobacco they know will give you a milder smoother smoke with never a rough puff now fine tobacco like this costs more and luckies pay more millions of dollars more than official parity prices to get light ripe tobacco for your cigarette no doubt about it ls mft lucky strike means fine tobacco and it takes fine tobacco to make a fine cigarette so for the real deep down smoking enjoyment that only fine tobacco can give you light up as a lucky puff by puff you'll see there's never a rough puff in a lucky good reason to make your next carton lucky strike that's the worst thing anybody ever did to me I'll never forgive Fred for not showing up jack stop complaining had a good program without him I know but how could he do a thing like that all right don't walk so fast I can't keep up with you okay hey mister would you like to buy a map to the movie stars homes don't you talk to me stupid man come on Mary well you might at least say hello to Portland she's on the other corner hello Portland how are they going but most of all a boy needs a friend the big brother why not you observe National Big Brother week by volunteering your services now contact big brothers at Broad Street Station building Philadelphia 3 Pennsylvania and be sure to hear Dennis Day in a day in the life of Dennis Day stay tuned for the Amos Nandy show which follows immediately this is CBS the Columbia Broadcasting System