In this episode Matt Trifiro interviews Kit Colbert, SVP and CTO at VMware. Kit started at VMware right out of college as an intern in 2003. He is responsible for ensuring VMware’s long term technology leadership through research and innovation programs, with the primary goal of positively impacting and shaping the future of VMware, its ecosystem, and its customers.
In this episode Matt Trifiro interviews Kit Colbert, SVP and CTO at VMware. Kit started at VMware right out of college as an intern in 2003. He is responsible for ensuring VMware’s long term technology leadership through research and innovation programs, with the primary goal of positively impacting and shaping the future of VMware, its ecosystem, and its customers.
Kit talks about how his role as CTO at VMware isn’t typical compared to his peers, and how he’s both looking out for near term deliverables and ensuring the company has a viable future. He provides insight on what he has learned and how the company has adapted and progressed over the years, discussing everything from the future of connectivity and bandwidth to blockchain and the open grid alliance.
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"We're trying to balance sort of two aspects. Number one, sort of our near term deliverables to help engineering accelerate and deliver these new products in new ways for us. And number two, also chartered with ensuring that we've got a viable future. And so we’re looking at the different sorts of innovation, research, and things that are going to be paying the bills in maybe five to seven years."
"It's basically a question of how do we as an industry build, deliver, and operate software. This is the challenge that we've been struggling with for the last few decades. And there's the sort of traditional model, which has been that you build it, then you test it, and then you ship it out to customers and they stand it up. I think the big shift that we're seeing is that people would prefer to get things as a service."
"People are now looking for everywhere. And, I think the opportunity goes back a lot to the programming model. How can we make this as simple as possible for developers? Because I think the easier that you can make it, that's where you're going to win. People love simplicity, and that's one of the beauty of cloud; there's a tremendous amount of complexity, but that complexity is largely hidden most of the time."
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(02:00) Getting Started in Technology
(05:10) Working at VMware
(07:10) What does the CTO of VMware do?
(07:40) What an Organization Values
(08:40) Empowering Others
(10:20) Ensuring a Viable Future
(11:40) Existential Trends, Staying Ahead, and History of VMware
(13:10) VMware Product Focus and Security Considerations
(14:20) Focus of the office of CTO
(15:30) Blockchain
(17:50) Trends Driving Visualization and Multi-Cloud
(23:21) Edge Opportunities
(25:00) Open Grid Alliance
(28:30) Modern Application Design
(29:50) AI/ML Use Cases
(31:39) VSan and Automation
(35:05) Future of 6G and Networking
(38:50) Architecture Opportunities and Integration
(40:30) IoT and Considerations for Computing and Security
(42:15) Edge and Multi-Cloud
(45:00) Data Centers and Storage Locations
(47:50) Email Signatures
(54:10) Notion of Inclusion
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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What Message Does Your Email Signature Send? - Article by Kit Colbert
[00:00:00] Matt Trifiro: Hi, this is Matt Trifiro host of Over the Edge, the only podcast focused on teaching you about edge computing, the grid and the future of the internet. On this show, I interview experts and practitioners with deep knowledge and expertise in digital infrastructure and the software and technologies that support it. We'll even throw in a little metaverse web three and cryptocurrency to keep it on trend.
[00:00:18] Matt Trifiro: Join us each episode for a mind, expanding romp through the vast technological and business landscape that is quickly defining our new digital world.
[00:00:29] Narrator 1: Hello and welcome to Over the Edge.
Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Kit Colbert, SVP and CTO at VMware. Kit started at VMware right out of college as an intern in 2003. He is responsible for ensuring VMware’s long term technology leadership through research and innovation programs, with the primary goal of positively impacting and shaping the future of VMware, its ecosystem, and its customers.
In this episode Kit talks about how his role as CTO at VMware isn’t typical compared to his peers, and how he’s both looking out for near term deliverables and ensuring the company has a viable future. He provides insight on what he has learned and how the company has adapted and progressed over the years, discussing everything from the future of connectivity and bandwidth to blockchain and the open grid alliance.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsors…
[00:01:25] Narrator 2: Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting Dell.com for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
[00:01:44] Narrator 1: And now, please enjoy this interview between Kit Colbert, SVP and CTO at VMware, and your host, Matt Trifiro.
[00:01:55] Matt Trifiro: Hey, Ken, how's it going today?
[00:01:57] Kit Colbert: I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me. That's terrific. [00:02:00]
[00:02:00] Matt Trifiro: Uh, you know, you, and I've gone back quite a ways, but we've never talked about how you actually got started in technology.
[00:02:06] Matt Trifiro: How did you get started?
[00:02:08] Kit Colbert: Well, it depends on how far you want to go back. I've been in tech professional life for my whole working life and then studied at college. But how I got into it originally was probably through video games, I guess I was playing them. And then we eventually got a family computer and we had games on there and then like any good computer hacker type person.
[00:02:30] Kit Colbert: I started breaking. Learning how those things worked. I worked for a little while at a company that built computers, this. So this is like way back in the day and you're assembling the motherboard and all the, the cards and everything, power supplies. Exactly. Yeah. Well, not that one. I would, yeah. If I chose, like I say, I grew up in Oklahoma, so not too far from Austin, but I think I missed him by a few years.
[00:02:56] Kit Colbert: Unfortunately. Now, are you, are you more of
[00:02:58] Matt Trifiro: a hardware person or [00:03:00] software
[00:03:00] Kit Colbert: person? No. No, no. It started off doing that hardware stuff mostly because you kind of had to at the time, definitely more of a software guy. I loved learning to program and the ability to automate things. It's one of those true program or things where you spend 10 hours automating something that maybe it takes five minutes of actual manual work, but it's still worth it because now you solve the problem and it's done.
[00:03:23] Kit Colbert: Yeah. And so I just love sort of exploring it. I remember at the beginning, learning a bunch of different programming languages, like basic and all these things. Eventually getting up to see, and just this sort of stuff you could do. It was always mind blowing to me. And so it was clear to me as I went off to college that I wanted to study computer science and eventually wanted to work at a software company, but I didn't really know what exactly I wanted to do out of all the realm of options out there, which was the one I really wanted to do.
[00:03:54] Kit Colbert: Well, that's a good question. So it was actually my junior year of [00:04:00] college. I went to brown and they had a great CS program and it's very coding heavy. And so, yeah, there's theory and other stuff, but a lot of it, you're just writing a ton of code. Now they had an operating systems class and you could take you to the normal one, or there's an extended one where you actually write.
[00:04:14] Kit Colbert: The good majority of a core operating system kernel. And it's only that class that excited me because it was like the, the basic constructs that we take for granted, like threading for us since you're actually. Implementing those things. And so it's kind of mind boggling to understand, okay, how does this work and how does that map to the underlying representation in the machine and sort of all of these constructs kind of a type of virtualization, right.
[00:04:39] Kit Colbert: Memory virtualization and managing thread state. So anyway, that sort of was like, okay, I love these low level systems that I knew at that point. I want to do something low-level operating system focused.
[00:04:50] Matt Trifiro: Okay. And so you came out of college and went
[00:04:52] Kit Colbert: straight to. Yeah. So this is a matter of fact. I interned at VMware the summer between my junior and senior [00:05:00] year.
[00:05:00] Kit Colbert: How big was. So I believe we were about 150 people worldwide. Wow. Biggest fan. We're now 37,000, 20, 20 odd years later. What is this? 22. Yeah. So it was the summer of 2002. So I mean in about six months, it'll have been 20 years since I did my intern or
[00:05:21] Matt Trifiro: amazing. So few people actually have a career arc at a single company anymore, especially in the technology world.
[00:05:26] Matt Trifiro: That's you must have had a dozen jobs.
[00:05:29] Kit Colbert: And Silicon valley. Yeah. Especially, I don't know. It's funny. The joke is that I'm a lifer and maybe I am. We'll see, I don't know. It's one of those things where I have been super fortunate to be able to move around within the company. I probably moved five or six or more times over that 20 years.
[00:05:46] Kit Colbert: So each time it's a good amount of probably three or four. Uh, a classic tour of duty as you might do it at, at a company, but here it's really just within the company. And I think as VM-ware has grown, it's just provided opportunities to go into these new [00:06:00] areas. And something that I've always appreciated is that I've been able to continue with learning through all that going from the low-level kernels that I started with, like, I worked on the core kernel for ESX to doing stuff like vMotion and sort of distributed systems type work to going into.
[00:06:18] Kit Colbert: Performance management, operations management with V realize operations and then over to our end user computing group and focus there and then to cognitive applications and it goes on and on, and it was pretty cool cause you're going into all these different disciplines and it's different technologies and different concepts.
[00:06:34] Kit Colbert: And so I think, I just feel really fortunate that I've been able to learn so much throughout that journey. Yeah. I
[00:06:40] Matt Trifiro: mean, going from intern to CTO, that's quite an art and I mean, what does the CTO of.
[00:06:47] Kit Colbert: I asked myself that quite a bit. Well coding anymore, right? No, sadly I took away get access probably for the good, I think I'd be doing anyone any favors right now that happened a few years back.
[00:06:59] Kit Colbert: And [00:07:00] I'll get to the question here in just a sec. What I do think in terms of my career arc, I had a number of realizations and probably one of the most important ones was around sort of. Are my real values to the organization. And I think I'm a decent technologist, but what I saw as I moved through my career was that many other aspects of the, the work environment and sort of what you're doing in that work environment came to the forefront for me as, as bigger strengths.
[00:07:28] Kit Colbert: And so that would be things like being able to work across teams and work across different. With other people. I had this ability to sort of really dig in, understand, or someone's coming from, talk with them, kind of work through the issue and get to an amicable outcome. That's something I consider sort of a super strength.
[00:07:46] Kit Colbert: The ability to tell. Technically complex concepts and distill them down to their essence and communicate them effectively. That's another big piece. And so I was doing public speaking for quite a while, even as an individual contributor engineer. And I [00:08:00] think as a, now a leader, a manager of a large organization, it is about how do you empower others?
[00:08:05] Kit Colbert: And so I think that's been a really big focus for me. So it's interesting because it's hard for me. Point to the exact things that I do or contribute. It's like before you're writing some lines of code and you check it in and you're done with the day of work and you're like, wow, here's what I did. I did that.
[00:08:19] Kit Colbert: You can point to it. And now it's much broader and a bit fuzzier. But the cool thing is that I think that the, the degree of impact I can have on the company is obviously very, very large now. And so that's what excites me. So in terms of the things I actually do in the role as a CTO, So first thing to know is that we recently did a bit of a reorg within VMware engineering.
[00:08:39] Kit Colbert: Now, previously the office of the CTO was focused on traditional CTO, ish type things, things like incubation and innovation and evangelism. All this good stuff, and we're still doing that. But as part of the reorg, what we've done is actually added in a whole bunch of our central common services. And this is stuff as you know, [00:09:00] VMware is going through a journey, much like many of our customers are moving from traditional products that we've sold to cloud services.
[00:09:07] Kit Colbert: And so there's that kind of SAS transformation. And so as part of that, we need a proper foundation for all of our SAS. Common services like identity and like billing and commerce systems. The list goes on and on there. So, no. The Okta is focused very much on that area as well. So it's a, it's a fairly large team.
[00:09:26] Kit Colbert: And so really we're trying to balance these sort of two aspects. Number one, our near term deliverables, helping engineering to accelerate and to deliver these new products and new ways for us. And number two, also chartered with ensuring that we've got a viable future. And so looking at the different sorts of innovation and research and things that are going to be paying the bills and maybe five to seven years, Right.
[00:09:49] Kit Colbert: So it's a really interesting balance that we have. And of course, we also do a lot of stuff externally as well, like that, the face of the company, the technical. A lot of started driving conversations [00:10:00] around. What, what does multicloud mean? How are we taking a lot of the technologies that we developed for the cloud and for modern applications and so forth, bringing them to the edge.
[00:10:09] Kit Colbert: So a lot of these different areas, right? So anyway, one of the things I really love about the role is that it's very multifaceted. So every day is a different adventure. And even during the day that you get hit with 10 different things. And so that keeps it very interesting and continuing to learn through the whole.
[00:10:25] Kit Colbert: Yeah,
[00:10:25] Matt Trifiro: which is a lot of fun. And I can also see the value to the company of having done many jobs within VMware. Having seen it grow up, having seen probably some really tough problems and know that there's always a solution at the end and have those, those people skills that you have, which are sometimes lacking in engineering organizations, uh, really makes for quite a, quite a powerful combination.
[00:10:45] Matt Trifiro: One of the things you mentioned that was interesting, as you said, part of your role is to make sure that VMware can survive. What, what are the sort of. Trends that you're trying to keep up with or get ahead of.
[00:10:58] Kit Colbert: Yeah. So we're really entering into our third [00:11:00] act as a company. If you look over the history, so VMware's been around, what about 24 years now give or take?
[00:11:07] Kit Colbert: And if you look at the history of the company over that time, the first chapter was really the core data center virtualization, right. vSphere and things that everyone knows us for. And we built not just vSphere, but a whole set of products in that ecosystem. So right. The next step, our act two would be the expansion from just compute virtualization to really entire data center virtualization.
[00:11:30] Kit Colbert: The term we use a software defined data center. And so that's providing elements of software-defined networking and storage management on top of all that and so on and so forth. And now we're really entering into the third stage, which is very much focused on cloud services multi-cloud and modern applications.
[00:11:48] Kit Colbert: And so what you've seen over the past five plus years is us dramatically expand our portfolio. And so most folks know us as a virtualization company, which of course we still do, but much like [00:12:00] Microsoft has moved from windows as a center to Azure, really as its center, we're in our own. Moving from previously vSphere at our center to our cloud services at the center of what we call them specifically across cloud services.
[00:12:14] Kit Colbert: So the thesis that we have is that the world is very much going multicloud, that everyone, we talk to every customer out there is going to be using multiple public clouds. Sometimes two, sometimes more, but they'll also have stuff in their data centers and they'll also have stuff out at the edge. And so when you look at that, Architecture, how do you build for that?
[00:12:34] Kit Colbert: And how do you manage and what sort of consistency do you want to cross it? You know, particularly we hear a lot about security issues, especially with things like log for J the software supply chain. How do you ensure that there is that sort of consistency that the apps that you're putting out to all these different locations are actually going through the same level of rigor and controls and governance and so forth.
[00:12:55] Kit Colbert: So that's just one example, but there's many others. There's operational costs. There's infrastructure, [00:13:00] consistency, data management. And so really that's the focus of the company now. And. This is again, a giant shift of the industry and one that I feel that we're pretty well positioned for. And so I think when I look at what we need to do, and particularly within the office of the CTO, that's a few things.
[00:13:18] Kit Colbert: So number one, as I said, it is about getting the message out. A lot of people still see us as the virtualization company from 20 years ago, but really it's like, Hey, we're quite different now. So we need to be people to be aware of. And then secondly, we need to help accelerate that shift that I talked about to our SAS services, to our cloud services, with a lot of these fundamental underlying building blocks.
[00:13:38] Kit Colbert: The idea being that we in the office of the CTO can take care of the story that undifferentiated heavy lifting, let the business units focus on what does differentiate them, and actually really engage with customers and drive great new features. And then finally it's like, what are the next big things coming up?
[00:13:54] Kit Colbert: And we're very focused in the market right now. Let's say with our Tansu offering around modern applications, there's a bunch we're [00:14:00] doing in the telco space, in the edge space, but what comes next? And so I do think when you look at things like what's happening with telco and 5g, and I know I'm sure we'll dive into this one, quite a bit.
[00:14:10] Kit Colbert: Things like the open grid. And really taking some of these principles that we've developed, not we VM-ware, but the industry has developed for the cloud and applying that sort of open framework into these scenarios as well. Uh, another one that I'm particularly bullish on personally is our work around blockchain and enterprise blockchain.
[00:14:29] Kit Colbert: And I think when you say that people tend to think, oh, It's a cryptocurrency crypto, right? Exactly. Yeah. We're not doing the ape NFTs or whatever those, the board apes or whatever they are. Right? No, quite, quite the opposite, actually. So if you look at blockchain as a technology, one of the really interesting things about it.
[00:14:48] Kit Colbert: Is the fact that what they've developed is a way of doing a distributed consensus here and that you can have multiple parties involved in a shared database, and anyone can write to [00:15:00] it any time. And yet you're still able to maintain consistency and you're able to deal with malicious actors. And so this is something like extraordinarily powerful.
[00:15:10] Kit Colbert: And when you think about the next. Enterprise type scenarios where you have a lot of people trying to interact in a shared database, like the there's so many, right? You think about supply chain and having many different people needing to be updating a central database. Right? This is the big challenge. I look at a lot of financial markets and there you got the, the actual stock markets.
[00:15:29] Kit Colbert: You got people wanting to make trades. You've got market makers. You've got. Regulators, you need to be involved. And so everyone needs a complete full view and oftentimes a rideable view of that shared database. So any case, I think that blockchain is something that is still on the horizon, especially in the enterprise use cases, but that we're going to start seeing it become more and more mainstream over the next few years.
[00:15:52] Kit Colbert: And when you start looking at that, you can start thinking about the credit modern apps are kind of cloud native and they're Kubernetes and all this stuff, but they're still kind of run [00:16:00] by a single party and all those. And I think with the advent of blockchain, what we're going to see is the expansion of that concept of a modern app to include nauseous, these current applications that are operated by a single party, but instead are in addition, the support for multiparty applications.
[00:16:17] Kit Colbert: And so that's really what I think the big opportunity there is. And so these are the sorts of things that. No one else in VMware that the business units that they got to focus on their business. Right. And what we're talking about here is a potentially net new business for the company. And so these are the things that we really need to be incubating and keeping our eye on a few years ahead.
[00:16:35] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. Well, as you mentioned, I mean, this show nominally is about the edge and the future of the internet. And this is certainly in the future of the internet, but let's, let's talk about some of the trends that are driving virtualization and multicloud, and a lot of these concepts out to, to the edge, what is causing.
[00:16:52] Kit Colbert: Yeah. Well, I think it's fundamentally about how do we take these principles that we've seen around speed that, that [00:17:00] responsiveness. And so some of the dynamicism there and then automation as well. And so when you look at it, it's basically a question of how do we, as an industry build, deliver, operate software.
[00:17:12] Kit Colbert: And this is the challenge that we've been struggling with for the last few decades. Right? And there's the sort of traditional model has been that you build it and then you test it and then you ship it out to customers and they set it up. And I think the big shift that we're seeing is that people prefer to get things as a service and that when you start doing that, you can fundamentally start increasing the speed at which you move.
[00:17:36] Kit Colbert: That if you can push out to a known location that is fairly controlled either by you or by part. That you can then make those updates much more seamless, much more quickly. Customers don't need to be involved, but moreover, because you've got telemetry coming back from that because you need to operate it.
[00:17:53] Kit Colbert: You can now actually instrument those applications in very, very detailed ways. So you can get feedback on how people are using [00:18:00] it. Are they using the new features? You can do things like AB test. So you can have one side of the population, see a future one set not and compare the B the differences in behavior and outcomes between the two.
[00:18:10] Kit Colbert: You look at needing people to think more holistically about, or developers to think, not more holistically, not just about the code they write, but how that code may fail in production. What sort of signals that you may need in order to take action, to address problems that happen out in the field and so on and so forth.
[00:18:25] Kit Colbert: So the whole dev ops or dev sec ops mindset. So I think there has been this trend towards. A better way of building an operating software and in the end for customers getting value from that software, and that's clearly headed toward cloud services has been doing that for years. Right? Moreover, we then look at the application.
[00:18:44] Kit Colbert: What you find is that as you start building the apps and we've seen all the problems of very large software teams and kind of the coordination between them. So how can you stop? Structuring it such that each team can operate more independently. And this is the whole move toward microservices, or even like [00:19:00] serverless.
[00:19:00] Kit Colbert: We have small teams that do their thing and communicate with those other teams through well-defined API APIs. So these are just some of the small list of the best practices that we've seen. And then underlying that there's a whole architecture of what you expect from cloud. Cloud's gotta be on demand.
[00:19:16] Kit Colbert: It's gotta be API driven. It's gotta be responsive. It's gotta be scaling. And these characteristics play really nicely with some of these modern development models that I just talked about. So you look at that sort of holistic, I'm going to talk about cloud. I'm really talking about that, that sort of model and fundamentally, it's just a better way of doing software.
[00:19:34] Kit Colbert: And, and so what you look at is that this model has been continued to expand and reaching into more and more spaces. And this is the whole sort of digital transformation that we've been hearing about for the past almost 10 years now. And it's because it's like, if you try to take a. That does things, quote unquote, the old way with someone who does things, quote unquote, the new way, the advantage will be you w with the person doing it the new way and that while there may be behind initially.[00:20:00]
[00:20:00] Kit Colbert: Let's say they're, they're a startup or something going against an incumbent over time, they will win because they can move faster because they can be more responsive. It's really interesting. I actually start digging into the data. Many studies have shown that like most of the software changes we make, like, let's say that we're on a, a site that wants to sell merchandise and say, okay, maybe we can make this change.
[00:20:20] Kit Colbert: Then we'll sell 10 more products an hour or something, whatever you can imagine. Some KPI, what we find is that actually about two-thirds of the time. The changes that we believe will positively influence a KPI don't either because they make no difference or actively make it worse. Now, if you imagine that, do you
[00:20:38] Matt Trifiro: mean that in our intuition doesn't serve us properly?
[00:20:41] Matt Trifiro: Or do you mean that even after we've tried to validate it with split testing, it's still wrong?
[00:20:47] Kit Colbert: Oh yeah. Both. I mean, yeah. Like we have an idea and then we try to evaluate it and we find that it's wrong. And what that tells you is that these things are very complex. And it's hard to know Opry, operatory, what the right thing is.
[00:20:59] Kit Colbert: So you [00:21:00] can look at that and say, well, we're only right, a third of the time. We're wrong. Two-thirds of the time. So what do you do? Do you just give up and not do anything? Well, it's like, no, what you do is you make your bets smaller and smaller. That every change you make should be pretty small. You're measuring a very small, incremental movement one way or the other, and that as long as you can do that quickly, And it doesn't cost much when you're wrong, then you can very slowly move forward, right.
[00:21:21] Kit Colbert: That, that you will find the wins very quickly over time and improve. And so it's that sort of rapid iteration model. That means that if someone is an incumbent again, let's say this, not doing that. They will slowly see ground to the startup or something. Who is doing that much more rapid prototyping and advancement.
[00:21:42] Kit Colbert: So I guess to your question about why is this going to come to Nashville? It's going to come everywhere, right? That's the bottom line, every business and Marc Andreessen said it many years ago, software is eating the world, that sort of thing, but this is the reason behind it because it's such a software.
[00:21:55] Kit Colbert: It's a way of thinking about things. And it's a way of like leveraging abstraction
[00:21:59] Matt Trifiro: layers that [00:22:00] operate at real time without a lot of human interaction or.
[00:22:04] Kit Colbert: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's a, it's an approach and mindset, right? I think that's, that's the biggest distinction is it software enables it in a very unique way because we're able to change software so fast.
[00:22:14] Kit Colbert: And to your point, oftentimes in an automated fashion at, at, uh, in a way that we can't do manually. And I think the other part is that the scale that's involved there as well, that there's just massive scaling. And when you have something like that, this kind of digital experience, you can just do things in a much more tailored way.
[00:22:30] Kit Colbert: And, and, you know, you've seen it, right. You look at any. E-commerce thing like Amazon, it's like, it's so simple and easy and you got to love the other side. I sometimes like to support these other folks, but I just make it so hard sometimes because you're like so many clicks and it's confusing and it doesn't work.
[00:22:46] Kit Colbert: Right. So, okay. It's getting back to the edge. I think the opportunity there is absolutely massive. And at the same time, it's been fairly rigid in terms of architecture and sort of the, these very integrated tightly integrated systems. We haven't [00:23:00] had the sort of openness that we've seen with, with like the cloud and the internet.
[00:23:03] Kit Colbert: And so it is very much. For a change. And because of all these reasons and all this pressure is absolutely going to have to go through that. And so the question is, what does that look like and how can we help support that? Well, I think you, when you look at what's been happening thus far, and you look at it with, with the ran, like to it, to the, to the V, ran to the open, ran or similar similarly with network virtualization functions and putting them into a VM and then eventually containerizing them and so on and so forth.
[00:23:35] Kit Colbert: This is all. Moving toward the same direction of driving more openness. And so this is where I think things like the open grid Alliance are so exciting because the idea there is that well, okay. So let me just tell you how I see it. There's a few different pieces to it. There are super exciting for me. So first of all, what is it?
[00:23:53] Kit Colbert: The idea is it's an open container. Of industry participants, they're trying to come together to solve a problem of how do we [00:24:00] really realize the vision of 5g, right? 5g, this notion of like the network is much more intelligent. There's all these devices out there and they're kind of everywhere. You want really high speeds.
[00:24:11] Kit Colbert: Most people associate 5g with speed. I know I did, but as I started learning more, it's like, there's actually much more there is that you are. Today you look at things like content, distribution, networks, CDNs, and people have this whole businesses OCHA Myra built around this thing, but fundamentally it's because the networks just wasn't smart network didn't know what end points were and like Workday needed to be and all this sort of stuff.
[00:24:33] Kit Colbert: And the opportunity is we can actually drive much greater optimization. If the network did have that extra information, that sort of metadata, if you will, and what the advent now of, of things that are out there and needing to put compute, oftentimes near things, let's say you got a video camera out in a city somewhere.
[00:24:51] Kit Colbert: You don't want to shuttle all that data back across the network to some central server. Cause you're paying, you know, there's like a whole bunch of traffic there. You'd rather just take whatever [00:25:00] compute you're doing. Your ML analysis, let's say and move in next to the. And so you don't want to cart out a physical machine yourself and said you about that.
[00:25:08] Kit Colbert: They don't work, do it. That there's compute available, just run this ML inference app next to this thing. I don't know where exactly it is, but network use, go figure it out. And I think that's really what I see as one of the biggest opportunities here is that we can make the network much, much more intelligent around those sorts of placements.
[00:25:25] Kit Colbert: Make it much easier for application developers that they can just say, you know what, here's what I want. Here's my SLA. And yes, certain sort of performance in later. And I want obviously to reduce costs as much as like. So that's not like an optimization problem network, go figure out where to put that.
[00:25:40] Kit Colbert: Well, and what's
[00:25:41] Matt Trifiro: neat about this is the modern developer. The typical developer was introduced to this concept with Kubernetes and the manifest, right. It's declarative. And now we have a whole generation of developers that think in terms of declarative. This is what I want. Can you go make that for me?
[00:25:57] Matt Trifiro: And we have all these underlying systems that [00:26:00] again are operating at machine speed, not like a human saying, well, I want this and us east and this and us west, and this is my data center. It's more like it needs to be this secure in this size carbon footprint and this price and these things, and may even be auction-based, uh, on a
[00:26:15] Kit Colbert: blockchain.
[00:26:18] Kit Colbert: Yeah, and I think so a couple of things. So that's a great example. Like the, the notion of, of the design of Kubernetes. I really appreciate the way they did that, because it does embed a lot of the best practices of modern application design. Things are declarative. As you said, you don't specify how something happens.
[00:26:34] Kit Colbert: You say, here's what I want the result to look like. And then the system figures out how to go make it happen. Right. And it's extraordinarily extensible and it's highly scalable. And in terms of even like the interconnectivity of the components within a Kubernetes cluster. So that model you're right, people are now looking for everywhere.
[00:26:52] Kit Colbert: And I think the opportunity, as I said, goes back a lot to the programming model. How can we make this as simple as possible for developers? Because I think [00:27:00] the easier that you can make it, that's where you're going to win. Right? People love simplicity. And that's one of the beauties of cloud is it's just calls me API.
[00:27:07] Kit Colbert: Some stuff happened. There's a tremendous amount of complexity, but that complexity is largely hidden most of the time. And so I think the challenge, I think for the open grid Alliance is really how do we bring that same? Cloud-like experience to the edge. Yeah. There's
[00:27:23] Matt Trifiro: a lot of complexity. It starts at spinning fans in a physical micro, modular data center all the way up to where should this workload run?
[00:27:33] Matt Trifiro: And again, it's all happening. Yeah. Real-time or near real time in microseconds or milliseconds. And one of the things that you mentioned blockchain, but I'm surprised you didn't mention AIML. And it, it, it seems to me, once you get past the buzzwordy aspect of this, that that's an essential component because you have all this telemetry, as you mentioned, that this layer of metadata.
[00:27:56] Matt Trifiro: Around it in the network available for some software to read [00:28:00] and then make influencing decisions. It's because you may have lots of options about where you could put that workload and you may have 30 workloads that are all asking at the same time. So how has VMware looking at that automation AIML?
[00:28:13] Kit Colbert: Yeah, for sure. And it's funny. Yeah, you're right. I didn't mention it mostly because I think at this point, most people are aware of, of the power behind it and I'm still kind of infatuated with blockchain right now, just in terms of what it can do. So that's why I've been getting my on my pedestal about that one.
[00:28:27] Kit Colbert: Now that being said, we are doing a tremendous amount of stuff around AI and ML, and we really look at it in a few different ways within VMware. So number one, it's like. How do we have products that support customers doing AI and ML workloads? And so there again, it's like we look at our infrastructure and do we support the latest and greatest Nvidia GPU's and some different work we're doing.
[00:28:51] Kit Colbert: I think we announced this at VMworld last year, project radium around remoting and having much more flexibility and the underlying [00:29:00] accelerators that they're used for AI and ML, whether it's a GPU or an SPGA, or even a CPU, in some cases it's still getting good performance. So that's the first category is how do we help customers and deliver products to them that the support that number two is how do we actually embed ML into our products to make them smarter.
[00:29:16] Kit Colbert: Now, this gets a little bit to what you're saying in the sense that. We do have an AI ops offering could be realized AI, I believe I forget the exact name, but the point of it is that what it does is it's a it's part of our management system. And so the first use case is really around storage optimization.
[00:29:34] Kit Colbert: So we got a storage offering called V San and, uh, V San is as the name suggests virtual San. So it basically takes a set of, uh, physical disks across the. Servers and makes it into like one giant logical disk, right? Then you can use it all together and we do all sorts of raid and all this other good stuff.
[00:29:52] Kit Colbert: Now, the thing is that, as you might imagine, this thing is incredibly tuneable. There's like all sorts of nerd knobs in there. And the reality [00:30:00] is we try to set the default such that we think they're the best for the average user. The reality though, is that it is highly dependent on the workload and that.
[00:30:10] Kit Colbert: Dramatic performance improvement. If you actually know how to fine tune those knobs for the right workloads. But of course, most people don't because it's a big manual effort and it's complicated and they needed to hire a bunch of experts. We'll fine. Tune it for me. Exactly. Why not just give this to the software?
[00:30:24] Kit Colbert: So we built an ML model specifically focused around this and what we found was pretty staggering, actually, that it would sit there and train itself on the workloads that you have on, on each V San cluster. And then it would tune V San for those workloads. And I forget the exact performance improvements now, but it was something at least 50% better, 50%.
[00:30:43] Kit Colbert: I mean, it's wild. Yeah. It's wild. Is this something that's fully automated? Yeah. So the storage optimizations that the first use case, there's a bunch of other ones that we want to do, but it does go to your point in terms of we're embedding AI into the system and just making that [00:31:00] experience better. So that's case number two, case number three is then how are we using AI and ML internally at VMware in terms of our own products?
[00:31:08] Kit Colbert: So for instance, we have an offering called VMware cloud and AWS, as the name suggests we are running our core software defined data center products, vSphere and ESX V San on top of AWS and their data centers. And on top of their bare metal hardware now, We're using a lot of their hardware. Obviously, of course we pay them for it, but they're like, Hey, given that you're such a big user, we really love to know how much you're going to need so we can go buy it at a time.
[00:31:33] Kit Colbert: Right. So you go give us some forecasting in other words. And so we've built out AI models to help support us there. And so the idea being that we can look at. We look at a lot of things. We look at our sales data and like, okay, where are customers in the pipeline? How big are these deals? How many hosts we think they're going to want?
[00:31:51] Kit Colbert: What's the probability of us closing those deals and look at current users, how fast are they growing? So take all that data. And that gives us at a quarterly level of [00:32:00] projection of saying. So we call up AWS. Okay, next quarter, we need so many hosts. Right. And obviously we're not committed to it because they're going to use the hosts one way or the other, but we're saying we're going to need this order of magnitude.
[00:32:11] Kit Colbert: Just be ready for it. Right. And so that's an example where we're really optimizing ourselves and ensuring that we can support customers being onboarded to that.
[00:32:20] Matt Trifiro: One of the things you wrote, you wrote a blog post on the open grid and six G. And one of the most triggering statements you wrote was, whereas today services like content delivery networks or concepts such as cloud regions or availability zones are overlayed on top of the internet.
[00:32:36] Matt Trifiro: The opportunity exists to build these capabilities directly into the network, making it more intelligent and reducing the burden on app developers. That's exactly what you're
talking
[00:32:44] Kit Colbert: about. Yeah, yeah, no, a hundred percent. So again, there's kind of this derisive term that's often used against some telcos, like the quote unquote dumb pipe.
[00:32:52] Kit Colbert: Right. And I think the, the, the original internet, the way it was designed was you had some constructs, but there, there [00:33:00] was a lot of sort of layering involved in terms of, of the, the stack. Right. And so you had the hardware knew about Mac addresses and these sorts of things and other, and like, you know, other things too about IP addresses and, but then higher level.
[00:33:12] Kit Colbert: Or construct just weren't there. I think this is just the legacy of how the early internet to CPIP et cetera, was designed and the designs in general, like great stuff, but how can we do better? And so what you've seen is this organic layering that like people came on and layered high level constructs on, but they didn't go back and redesign the underlayer.
[00:33:31] Kit Colbert: Right. Then. And that's fine because everyone was moving independently and so forth. And so I think where we are now though, is that we have seen 15 plus years, whatever of, of cloud and practice and here's how it's done and here's some of the best practices. And so I think we, as an industry now know what we need to do.
[00:33:50] Kit Colbert: And if we were to do it over again, how we do it differently. And I think the point I was getting at there is that a lot. Constructs that we talk about at a core level have been overlayed on top [00:34:00] of the underlying network and the network itself isn't aware of this necessarily, right? I mean, yes, it knows about IP addresses, but it doesn't know about cloud regions per se, that construct isn't there.
[00:34:09] Kit Colbert: That construct of geographic location isn't necessarily there. And so I think the opportunity is then how do we make the networks smarter in the sense of giving it that extra metadata? And as I said, there, there's a tremendous number of applications that start to come up once you do that. And so we talked about the IOT, like the video camera out there and you say, Hey, I want to make things.
[00:34:32] Kit Colbert: I want to get that app, that process, that data right next to it. I've talked to many customers about this in different ways. And so some customers like gambling customers are like, if there is a sports match, I want all my apps running right next to the stadium, the horse races take every bet
[00:34:48] Matt Trifiro: I possibly can and calculate the odds, you know,
[00:34:52] Kit Colbert: millisecond level, like response times here.
[00:34:54] Kit Colbert: And I can't be traversing half the internet to go do. So, how do I ensure that I can do that? And it's not just a [00:35:00] performance thing. It's also an availability thing. If for some reason, God forbid some connection goes down to the stadium. Well, all the apps are still running there and can run autonomous.
[00:35:08] Kit Colbert: Gambling may not be the best example, but you can imagine, uh, many other things,
[00:35:12] Matt Trifiro: right? Like a factory floor for a laser
[00:35:15] Kit Colbert: late. Yeah. And downtime, there has significant costs and you can look at healthcare operations, especially, particularly in the field where they may not be at a hospital or it may, they're coming out to visit.
[00:35:27] Kit Colbert: And sure that we'll have a laptop in front of them, but if you can have all their services at follow them geographically, so that they're close and, and responsive, that's really, really powerful. So I think we're really just scratching the surface of what's possible here, but what's clear to me is that this new architecture in terms of enriching the network with that sort of intelligence will open up a lot of opportunities.
[00:35:50] Kit Colbert: But as I said, I think it's really important that as we go toward that, that we think about it and do it. Yeah. Open way that we have this open architecture that [00:36:00] allows for that sort of innovation, right? When you have things that are very close and tightly integrated, you can't have someone with a new idea, just jump in.
[00:36:06] Kit Colbert: Right. They've got to slowly integrate with the whole thing, but the beauty of the internet is that an in cloud in general is that openness, clean API APIs. Anyone can talk to those APIs and add value there. So I think that's the other aspect of it. And that's the key with the name itself? Open the open grid.
[00:36:22] Kit Colbert: The whole idea is to foster that sort of innovation and help to accelerate that pace at the end. Yeah. On a global level. Yes. And that's the other thing I think, yeah, you're absolutely right. The scale is absolutely massive. Right? Cause we're not talking about one city or state or even country, but really talking about yes.
[00:36:41] Kit Colbert: How do we really drive this across the world? And, and you start looking at. At okay. Well, that's pretty cool. If I was an application developer, it's kind of like the app store for your phone. You can connect all these phones, but now think about the similar thing, but to the network all around the world.
[00:36:55] Kit Colbert: And so I think that's where it starts getting really, really interesting. Yeah. You mentioned
[00:36:59] Matt Trifiro: earlier [00:37:00] that the open grid and 5g are in your mind sort of inextricably linked, and, but you also mentioned that you started out thinking, well, 5g is about more bandwidth, more speed, but when you really think.
[00:37:11] Matt Trifiro: Yeah, the internet of things might be a little bit of a tired phrase. It's sort of crawled down the trough of disillusionment on the, on the Gartner chart, but it really is all things and the things are out there and they don't like to be tethered. And so we need the network and the compute to be out there and we need it untethered so that we can connect all these things and run these amazing applications that take advantage.
[00:37:38] Kit Colbert: Yeah. I mean, the, the distribution that's happening now is broader than it's ever been. And you see this across the board, right? It used to be computing was done mostly at the office, mostly in the data center. The scale was a small number of places where a lot of compute happened. And so now we've really turned that on its head is that we've got a tremendous number of places where a very small amount of computers [00:38:00] happening, your phone, your laptop, whatever it is like a video.
[00:38:03] Kit Colbert: These things are fast, but they're not like a giant data center. And so the challenge now is much more distributed. And so I think that that opens up a whole bunch of interesting issues, clearly security being a huge one. We're talking about the network here and security and apply there, but then you also think about, okay, as an enterprise, how am I going to use this network and how am I going to drive security and consistency across all these different locations?
[00:38:26] Kit Colbert: I'll talked about that a little bit at the, at the beginning or closer to the beginning with multiple. And so when we talk about multi-cloud edge is absolutely part of that. In fact, I think edge is going to be a huge part of that probably over time. The biggest part of that, while we'll see a lot happening in cloud and continue great growth there, there's going to be even stronger growth, I think at the edge.
[00:38:45] Kit Colbert: And just in terms of the number of things that are out there, they need to be managed, but they are core part of these business process.
[00:38:51] Matt Trifiro: So to help me understand the connection between edge and multi-cloud that really intrigued me.
[00:38:56] Kit Colbert: Yeah. So when we talk about multicloud, I'm not just talking about public cloud because a [00:39:00] lot people think that, oh, you just mean running a Azure and AWS and maybe GCP or something.
[00:39:04] Kit Colbert: And sure. That's part of it. But I'm talking about bringing that concept of cloud everywhere. So we've done that in the data center. There's that concept of private cloud and there's a whole bunch of models like AWS and outposts. We have our VMware cloud on Dell. Like you can actually deliver a cloud server.
[00:39:19] Kit Colbert: With hardware onto the premises of a customer. And I want edge to be viewed as that as well. I want to actually be viewed as part of the cloud in the sense that edge is. Yeah, another cloud location and not to take anything away from edge. I think that there's so many powerful aspects of it, but the point is that how you manage it, how you think about it is that it's like, I don't like another cloud.
[00:39:43] Kit Colbert: right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, there's us east one. And now there's San Francisco mission district, you know, whatever, something very specific. I think what's going to happen though, is, is that we will need a slightly different. Model for how to manage that. Because with public cloud, you have only so many regions, right?
[00:39:59] Kit Colbert: It's it's in the [00:40:00] dozens or maybe a hundred now for these are not a hundred and in the dozens of different regions with Aziz, okay. Maybe we get into a hundred or so, but with edge, the number of places is infinite because you're really talking about potentially getting down to like a single building or a single room, or even a part of a room.
[00:40:15] Kit Colbert: And so you can imagine, how do you even address that? Give a name to that in a way that's scalable. And so that's where I think it goes back to what we talked about before, where we have to think of it, maybe as a macro sort of, okay. There's like a Metro area then within that Metro area. Well, it's, I'm really just want the network to figure it out.
[00:40:32] Kit Colbert: And I think this goes back to why it's so important for the network to have that metadata, because again, you as a user and aren't going to know all those details, you're going to. Here's my declarative thing. Here's what I want the properties. And you know what, whether it's in this room or that room or across the street, I don't really care and just make it close enough.
[00:40:49] Kit Colbert: So it meets my SLS, right. Or whatever it is. And so I do see kind of an evolution in how we think about cloud and how we think about some of the cloud architecture pieces. But in the end, I think it would be a [00:41:00] mistake if we don't think about edge as part of cloud. And
[00:41:03] Matt Trifiro: one of the interesting. Uh, impediments, but also an impediment.
[00:41:08] Matt Trifiro: That's going to shift very rapidly as all these digital natives. Like my, my two kids that you might hear in the background are, is that, is that my kids grew up with. They don't even know where it is. It's just out there and the idea that anybody would actually want to own and operate a data center. It's just going to seem so completely nonsensical.
[00:41:26] Matt Trifiro: I believe it's like, why, why would you do that? Why would you drop a million dollars into your parking lot when you get Amazon to do it?
[00:41:34] Kit Colbert: Yep. Well, yeah, so I think it's interesting. Right? And so here's what I would say. I think outside of the U S I do see a lot more interests in this thing, even in the U S for certain customers here, here's the deal.
[00:41:45] Kit Colbert: A lot of regulatory compliance may require these sorts of things. So for instance, in the banking sector, you have to have a plan with, on file with regulators, for how you're going to evacuate a cloud in case, I don't know why you need to, but let's say you did for some reason, [00:42:00] anyway, they require you to be able to do that.
[00:42:02] Kit Colbert: I've talked about. Let's say various customers in the military, around the world from different countries. And they, again from geopolitical. Uh, concerns may want to be running data centers as well as doing some applicable, being able to get out of the public cloud and so forth when they need to. I look at, especially in Europe and in APJ data sovereignty is like a really, really huge thing.
[00:42:24] Kit Colbert: And so their locality is extraordinarily important and you know, some of them they're like, well, uh, the public clouds are like American companies. Can I trust the American company? So there's like some of that as well. So I think. Exactly well, or all cryptography or whatever it is and manage the keys carefully.
[00:42:42] Kit Colbert: But, so look, I think what you're going to see is that there will be some need for it and I'm fine with it. It's like, whatever. I think the view you have to take is one that's fairly agnostic to any of those questions. Like if you want a data center, great, you wanna go to the cloud? Great. You want to go to a colo, like an Equinox grade.
[00:42:58] Kit Colbert: You want to go to the edge? Great. Like [00:43:00] all those things are awesome. You're probably going to be everywhere. And so I think our point of view, the VMware getting back to the VMware point, right? We don't want to fight any of that. We're like, where do you want to go? We'll help take you there. Right. We'll help make it work.
[00:43:11] Kit Colbert: I just see that as so critical because I talked to so many customers and they're just all over the place and everyone's got different requirements and it's so varied. So you're right. I don't think we're going to see a lot of new groundbreaking on data centers. I do think that will actually become more and more common though, the equinoxes of the world.
[00:43:30] Kit Colbert: And so that's a way of offloading some of that data center management, but still getting some of the data center banner.
[00:43:36] Matt Trifiro: Yeah, that's great. So I want to make sure there's one question I realize there's so much more we could cover. I'll have to have you on the show again, but one of the things I really like about you kit is you're so thoughtful about things and I was blown away by this blog post you wrote.
[00:43:49] Matt Trifiro: I think it's relatively soon after you took the job of the CTO and it was about at least on the surface, it was about your email signature line. Would you, would you tell us about that?
[00:43:59] Kit Colbert: [00:44:00] Sure. Yeah, that's a funny blog posts because it got a lot more attraction than I expected it. We were looking at the data recently, so, okay.
[00:44:07] Kit Colbert: What, what's the deal? So, so one of the things I'm very passionate about is diversity and inclusion. And so at VMware, we've got what we call these power of difference groups, pods, and the kind of like employee resource groups, the RGS, I think it's a term use other places, but there's paws for all sorts of different groups.
[00:44:25] Kit Colbert: And so there's the. Asians at VMware pod, the black at VM-ware Paul and the pride at VM-ware pod. There's a disabilities pod. Veterans' pod, the Latinos pod, the list goes on and on. Right. And we met with all these groups and cause I was like, Hey, you know, I'm coming in, I'm in a leadership position here. I always say not new to VMware, but I want to get a, get a perspective of how are we doing and supporting.
[00:44:48] Kit Colbert: Putting you in your communities, right. But them as individuals, as leaders of the pods, as well as the communities that they represented, and it was super, super enlightening, just super insightful. And I really appreciated them taking the time [00:45:00] to educate me and kind of became clear that a lot of these things were kind of basic.
[00:45:05] Kit Colbert: Could I actually make a big difference. So what we do is we categorize the actions that we would take into three buckets. Number one is what I would do personally, things I can just do kit can go do real quick. Number two is things I can do within the office of the CTO. I run the team so we can, we can do that.
[00:45:19] Kit Colbert: And then number three would be what I drive for VMware. Now, obviously I'm not the CEO. I've got to influence the CEO and teams and they're very supportive. So, anyway, those are the three buckets now on the bucket for myself. This is, again, this is good. It goes back to the example of small things that I can do that would be meaningful.
[00:45:35] Kit Colbert: So I heard a bunch of stuff. I heard stuff like on my zoom. I have my pronouns there and I do that in various places. And the pride pod mentioned that that was great. Cause I, I had thought about it as trying to normalize it and just trying to, as a leader, especially it'd be visible with it, but they also said, Hey.
[00:45:52] Kit Colbert: That you're a supporter and an ally. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that angle of it so much. When I talked to the Asians pod, they [00:46:00] mentioned how one of the things that their members find challenging is things like name pronunciation, and they were pushing on people, adding pronunciations for their name.
[00:46:08] Kit Colbert: For an, any native English speaker kit. Colbert's you can somebody . Yeah. So that is okay, but no problem, but for a lot, I got a lot of folks who don't have traditional English names. It's simpler, unfortunately like butchering these things. And so again, can you try to drive more normative behavior around showing your pronunciation and also having a link to the audio version of it?
[00:46:31] Kit Colbert: And so. We heard from folks around feeling pressure, maybe to respond to executives because we get the email from the executive panic and so forth. So I added a part to my signature that said, it's a little note that, Hey, like I send emails when is best for me. And that could be many different times of day or not.
[00:46:47] Kit Colbert: It kind of depends when I'm free and I don't expect, you know, expect to apply only when it works for you. I kind of don't go out of, out of your way, unless something's urgent, then they'll say that. But normally yeah, you know, you do you, and then finally. I [00:47:00] added. So I have obviously my pronouns, I have the pronunciation and then I added as well, a link to a feedback form for myself.
[00:47:06] Kit Colbert: And it's anonymous. I mean, you can add your contact info, but most people just submit anonymous feedback. And so that's been actually a fantastic, I get probably. Between five and six pieces of anonymous feedback a week. And I
[00:47:19] Matt Trifiro: should go out to external as well as internal. Yeah.
[00:47:23] Kit Colbert: Technically the link probably does work.
[00:47:24] Kit Colbert: Um, although I don't go around publicizing it, but anyway. Yeah. So I think, no one's done it externally so far as I know, but, um, until after the show. Yeah, exactly. I know w we get people across the org, give me feedback across all sorts of stuff. I post. Unless people tell me not to, I post every piece of feedback I get publicly in a public slack channel.
[00:47:44] Kit Colbert: I respond to it publicly. We take action on it. And yeah, so it's, it's been a good way of just sort of engaging with the team, but anyway, getting back to the signature. So that's the signature and it was just a really nice thing that I could do to help try to be an ally and support [00:48:00] all these different communities.
[00:48:01] Kit Colbert: Right. And so it's a, and maybe we'll have a link here somewhere there that you can share and encourage people to check it out again. I find a lot of the. It's just around opening your mind a little bit. And I. The pronunciation
[00:48:12] Matt Trifiro: I'm going to go rewrite my signature.
[00:48:14] Kit Colbert: Yeah. I mean, I see it all the mine last name.
[00:48:17] Kit Colbert: I see so many, even people who work for me, I wasn't exactly sure how to pronounce like their last name. And a lot of my staff are doing this as well. I'm like, oh, you pronounce it that way. And so we have a little conversation about it and I'm like, oh man, I'm such a bad person. I never, and so I started realizing, wow, this is just one of those things where you don't think about it, but then you're like, wow, it was kind of everywhere.
[00:48:38] Kit Colbert: I don't know, it's just one of the really great outcomes of that exercise. And so I encourage everyone to try it out. And especially if you're in a position of leadership, but even if you're not, people will notice and ask about it, cause it's not a traditional signature. It's not about, Hey, here's my contact info.
[00:48:53] Kit Colbert: And my street address in my mind, it's about getting to the meat of being inclusive and trying to create a safe space and in a supportive space, [00:49:00]
[00:49:00] Matt Trifiro: uh, w which is really, really forward-thinking for someone whose job. It's tactically leading the tick. Right. It's a very, like I said, it's very thoughtful of you and, uh, it's made
[00:49:14] Kit Colbert: me think that, I mean, look, I mean, it's, it's the thing I've found about my role here.
[00:49:21] Kit Colbert: I mean, it seems overly trite and simple, but it is all about the people and about the team and the data's clear and the more people can feel safe, especially psychologically safe, the better they're going to perform. And you look at women and minorities in particular and particularly in the tech industry.
[00:49:36] Kit Colbert: And there's a lot of environments where they don't feel safe psychologically and sometimes sad, very, you know, even worse like physically. And so. This notion of inclusion is really about creating that space and saying, Hey, we value everyone. We have zero tolerance against any sort of discrimination or harassment or any of that stuff.
[00:49:56] Kit Colbert: And so what's start of those things. Go on set. But I think acts like this [00:50:00] are more proactive and do show that there is a commitment. And so I think I look at it as super important, not just because it's the right thing to do, but also because I think it actually is going to be better for business and that will create a space, will attract great talent and they'll be able to perform at their best.
[00:50:16] Kit Colbert: That is such an
[00:50:16] Matt Trifiro: awesome note to end the interview before we sign off, if people want to find you online, what's the best way to do that?
[00:50:22] Kit Colbert: Twitter just at Colbert. Excellent. Correct. Yes. I mean, some people say Cole bear, which I'm fine with. I mean, there was some French guy somewhere way back in my history, but it's been Colbert for quite a while.
[00:50:34] Kit Colbert: I believe
[00:50:35] Matt Trifiro: kit has been so much fun to have you on the show. Thank you for all your inspiring words and explanations and have a great
[00:50:41] Kit Colbert: day. Thank you. Thanks so much for.
[00:50:44] Narrator 2: That does it for this episode of over the edge. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a rating and a review and tell a friend over the edge is made possible through the generous sponsorship of our partners at Dell technologies.
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