 Hi, this is your host, Olim Parathia, and we are back with predictions for 2024. And today we have with us Rob Hershfeld, CEO and co-founder of Racken. Rob, it's great to have you back on the show. Swap, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited for our annual journey into the next year. Well, you and I, we talk on a regular basis, so this is not needed, but since this is the format of the show, tell us a bit about Racken. Racken is a infrastructure automation management company, so we help enterprises that are managing their own infrastructure adopt patterns and practices and basically reduce the friction of doing the bare metal and up IT infrastructure automation, really creating dramatic ROIs for companies running their infrastructure in much more predictable ways. X10, now it's time for you to pick up your crystal ball and share your predictions with us. 2023, it was a heck of a year from a change controversy and things moving forward. And I think that in 2024, there's a lot of things that are not settled and will have to go through. Obviously AI and large language models are going to be the most disruptive capability. And the advice I've been giving people is if they're not using and training their teams to use LLMs effectively, then that is, they need to do that. I actually think we're gonna see measurable results even from early LLM use across the board and companies that are using them well, we'll pull ahead in 2024. And we'll be talking about things like vectorization and using vectorized databases and agents quite a bit more. I think along those lines, we're gonna see a lot more movement in this platform infrastructure engineering concept. We've been talking about platform engineering a lot, which really ended up being about dev developers and dev portals, but we're seeing that move down into the actual infrastructure team layers and watching infrastructure teams build standardized operating models and improve consistency and repeatability. The reality is most companies are really struggling with how many divergent operations they have and how little consistency and repeatability and governance they have. We're gonna see that come in quite a bit. I think we'll see software bill of materials or S-bombs part of that conversation a lot. And it'll be an important part of how things are going. Another prediction here is that the Broadcom VMware acquisition finally completing, I think is gonna sell a lot of chaos in the virtualization markets. First that we're gonna see Broadcom pulling back on some of the more developer innovative pieces that VMware had been doing and that'll create some chaos in the market. But I think that a lot of companies are gonna be looking at how they use virtualization and rethinking that. Either by looking for alternatives to VMware or much to rack ends to like, asking can we do this on bare metal and eliminate a virtualization requirement altogether? Maybe doing Kubernetes on bare metal or just running workloads in bare metal. And with what we do, that's a much more attainable goal. You don't need the virtualization layer. And so there's some really interesting opportunities as enterprises look for alternatives to VMware and Broadcom. And I think that's gonna be a dominant story. One of the other things this last year that was very chaotic was changes into open source and open source vendors and vendor relationships. I expect we're gonna continue to see challenges in how open source projects are moved around, right? The Hashi Corpse, the Red Hats. We're seeing, we saw a lot of change there in 2023. The fallout for that's gonna be in 2024. And so that's gonna be a major piece. Happily, of the major open source projects, Kubernetes is almost getting a little boring. And that I think is appropriate. So we're seeing really significant adoption from the Kubernetes front. It's due for a little bit of drama perhaps, but the governance there has been actually very good about allowing a lot of the ecosystems to grow. There's very competitive ecosystem. And so we haven't seen as much challenge there, although the complexity that's been created by that, I think sort of creates some adoption challenges, but it really hasn't been that bad, frankly. And then as a final note, one of the things that we keep seeing and we've been tracking, I think Swap UNI for years now is edge technologies. Edge is in, I think it's due for a bit of a revisit from people, although I'm starting to hear that we're calling it distributed infrastructure, something that Racken's been using to describe edge for years now. And this idea of doing, not site by site, but actually treating edge as a series of distributed sites and having a consistent repeatable pattern across all of those. I do, I get excited by the idea that edge might actually be moving into an IT realm and then having discussions about it being a distributed infrastructure. Some people might say distributed cloud. I think those are starting to happen, but that's more of a late 2024 trend than an early one. What challenges you see in 2024, not only for the large ecosystem, but also for Racken to tackle? I think that this idea of governance and compliance and security is really been a challenge for companies in 2023, especially with budget constrictions. And we're starting to see companies pull back on new projects in favor of landing the projects they have in favor of having the compliance and governance that they wanna have. And also having more reuse, right? So I think one of the biggest challenges companies have is that they're doing a lot of different things. They're having trouble finding and keeping the people to do that work. And that is creating real governance and supply chain challenges. And it's gotten big enough that I think the market is starting to respond to that. We're seeing messaging. We're seeing tools and orchestration that is looking at IT infrastructure from a system perspective. I'm very excited about that. That trend line of infrastructure platform engineering is part of this idea of companies really looking for help with governance. And we're acknowledging that the lack of governance is slowing down projects. It's slowing down growth. And so the larger companies, the cloud providers, the larger consulting companies really do have to help these enterprises address it from a leadership perspective. What is going to be the focus for all of Racken and your focus in 2024? Racken has really been helping enterprise customers build these standard repeatable processes. And what we've seen demonstrably is enormous ROI from having out of the box capabilities that customers can repeat and use over and over again. And so what we're focused on doing is taking done work, patterns, practices, automation that we treat as software, this infrastructure as code methodology, and then helping new customers repeat and extend that work. So from our perspective, what we're really doing is taking all of this great knowledge, lessons learned, these patterns that we've built into the product and then turning that into repeatable success in new environments. So for us, that involves not as much building new things but helping explain the things that we've built, bringing them into new customers and then continuing to refine. The thing that makes me excited about that is not just the new customer opportunities, but as we grow and mature those processes, our existing customers get the benefit of that uplift. And so we actually see this new customer engagements actually accelerate our existing customers. And that gets everybody very excited. So that's a big deal from our perspective and something worth a fair bit of investment from our internal engineering work. Rob, thank you so much for joining me today and share your predictions. Of course, I'll have you again next year to see how many of these predictions came out to be true, but thank you so much for your time. And I look forward to chat with you again soon. Thank you. Thank you, Swap.