 Our final panel tonight is one that obviously I'm really excited to have, but more so because we're in Philly. Our last three guests are going to join me on stage from Comcast, and I'm pretty excited to welcome them because not just because this is their hometown and I'm really fond of their story, but I also think that the participants on the panel I'm going to bring up to join me really represent so many different parts of the business that I think it really lends itself to a much more broader view of what the journey looks like from both an executive decision making to the implementation of the technology to the power open source has as part of that continuum. So I'd like to welcome on stage with me Rick Roboli, who's the SVP and CIO, Nithya Ruff, senior director of the open source practice, and Mike Chrisifoli, the SVP of platform and product services. Come on up. Practice your names. I did not practice the SVP. It worked on that. You got really bold though, that was good. I did. Yeah. At least I got one thing right. It's been a long day people, it's been a long day. I'm actually excited to end today with a conversation with the three of you because we often talk as I said about the transformation journey and bits and pieces of open source or platform. I think this is the first opportunity we've had to have the entire continuum in one organization on the stage. So I actually want to start first with a really difficult job which is leading this initiative. And Rick, you've been working to transform Comcast now for several years and this has been quite the undertaking. Maybe if you could walk us through how that journey began and the process you've taken, particularly on the culture side because I think you've got a great story on the culture piece. Yep. I love to. So yeah, I joined Comcast about 14 years ago as of last week was my 14 year anniversary. So when you were like 12? I was like 12 years old, absolutely. And it was funny, when I joined the company we were very much a, we had just become the largest cable company in the country and we were very much a cable company. We were all about set top boxes, cable modems, rolling out hardware, trucks, call centers, operational efficiency, that was what our story was all about. And we were self-proclaimed fast follower in terms of product and technology. And that was sort of our story, that was our strategy coming out of the gate back about 14 years ago. We came to the conclusion though pretty quickly that in order to compete in this industry and looking forward that we were really going to have to become a product and technology company. And we invested a huge amount of money and energy into becoming a product and technology company. Just out of curiosity, how many hands, hands for customers, Comcast customers? I know this front row is going to be customers. And just out of curiosity, how many folks have like the X1, the voice remote? Pretty good. Yeah. So that was the X1, the voice remote, XFI, a lot of the product advancements that you've seen come out over the last couple years are the result of a big investment in technology and just a huge cultural change within Comcast from becoming an operational cable company to a technology and product company. And then interestingly enough, over the last couple years, we came to the conclusion that it really even wasn't enough to become a great technology and product company. We need to be a customer experience company. And what that means is what does it mean to really create a great customer experience from the time you buy our products to the time we support you and ongoing life cycle of a customer? And that was like our next cultural shift as a company, was how do we go from not just building great products and technology, but creating great end end experiences? And so that's the big journey we've been on over the last couple years. It's been super exciting. It has been exciting. As part of this journey, and I actually had the pleasure of speaking at your open source day a few months ago here in Philly, feels like it was just yesterday, Nithya. But one of the most powerful things that I got to hear was a lot of your executives getting up in front of the room and talking about not just the culture change part of it, but how important open source was to that journey, which is not something you often think about when you think about Comcast is, wow, open source, right? And so, Nithya, you've been a part of the Comcast team and you run the open source program office. Can you talk a little bit about the journey for Comcast on the open source side? Absolutely. So it's really fun to be here and welcome Cloud Foundry to Philadelphia. I consider it my second home, even though I live in the Bay Area. So it was around the time that Rick mentioned around 2004, 2005, we made that switch from just procuring proprietary software or, if you will, commercial software and move to starting to consume open source software in our desire to build our own products, build our own technology. And then very soon after that, around the 2010 time frame, we realized that it wasn't enough to just consume. We needed to actually contribute back any changes we made. And frankly, sustain open source and do our part to give back to open source. And then since that time frame, the scale of open source consumption and contribution has been spectacular. So just to give you a statistic, we did about 13 contributions, I think around the 2013 time frame. And then last year, we did about 165 pretty major contributions. That's significant. You can go check out some of the open source projects we have open sourced on comcast.github.io. There are over 150 projects that we have open sourced of all kinds, libraries, front-end, back-end. A big one is the content distribution network that's at Apache Foundation. It's called the Apache Traffic Control. Another big project would be the software stack that runs on your set-top boxes and routers. And it's called the RDK Project. And it's a collaboration across a lot of different companies. So tremendous growth from consumption to contribution to actually creating original projects. That's phenomenal. It's also phenomenal to think about the set-top boxes on top that are actually running open source now, which has come a long way in the last 10 years. Absolutely. And Mike, you're responsible for the platforms that run all of these things from the technology standpoint. How do you kind of sit literally in the middle of these two things, but I think figuratively also between the directives from the executive and the leadership and the culture change that's happening, as well as the work that's happening on the open source side, how are you bridging all of those things together for the product choices you're making? Sure. Great. No, thanks, Abby. Yeah, I mean, Billy and I, Rick, said what we quickly learned in the journey was we say, happy customer, happy business. And for me in going through a four or five-year transformation, leveraging both the great technology around Cloud Foundry and open source, we learned quite a bit about the people, the culture, and happy developer, happy business. We had to really adjust our internal development, buzzword bingo around DevOps and things like that. But it's really about frictionless, happy developers where we're creating very crisp outcomes that translate the strategy, like Rick mentioned, customer experience outcomes around that and really changing the game there. If our developers in our development community don't experience the same transformation, the same focus on acting and behaving on a day-to-day basis in a very frictionless digital way, how would they present that from a platform or a product perspective? So it's been a great cultural transformation from the perspective of learning, not, and I say just, it's an important part. The technology aspects, but the adaptive leadership that came with that, as well as really empowering the development team through the technology, but also through getting out of the way from a top-down, from a leadership perspective and bridging the strategy through creating that same environment for our development community. You don't often hear that getting out of the way part. Yeah, it took a lot. It was my team will tell you we had some very passionate moments when we had a lot of performance, a lot of resiliency problems, a lot of trust with the business. We went through this big cauldron of change and we had big, great tipping points where you said, let's have crisp outcomes, empower the development community, leverage the open source, really create a true community internal, not just as we contribute externally, and it's been a really fun journey. Yeah, that was actually one of my favorite stats that I got from Greg today. Greg is everywhere. You have 1,500 people that are active on Slack and that they're helping and they're building that community. And I think that we talk about a community a lot in open source. And Nithya knows we always have this conversation about community, but it's also interesting that you're actually building a community inside Comcast, too. Yeah, absolutely. And changing the way that we develop platforms. And clearly we're not there yet. The transformation takes more than four or five years, but there's been some really great tipping points. And we really see this organic drive to this frictionless value that the open source technology, Cloud Foundry, the whole environment that we've created. And it's just so refreshing to see. And it's not having that big top down management style. It's really refreshing. And the outcomes are great. It's great. And you can say that with the management here. Yeah, absolutely. No, it's the same. It's like the management's here. So you can actually say that with a straight face. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we talked a lot about open source. And you're at an open source conference. So obviously I'm going to lean heavily on the open source. But how is open source and participating and making it part of your core product offering, how has that changed the way that you work? And maybe this is something any of you want to answer. Because I think I look at it from a culture and a technology standpoint. Yeah, I think what it changes, it definitely changes the way we think about the way we build the technology. So I think I was referencing back when I first started. We were really all about buying products from vendors. And the way it worked was we were a big, obviously a very big company. We would tell the vendors what we're looking for. And they would give us these long product roadmaps. And then we would wait around for a product to show up. And in the meantime, we'd be testing and all that. And it was just a very typical like waterfall process. We'd develop product requirements. We'd give them to the vendors. They'd build out a roadmap, so on and so on. And now with open source and with the software development teams we have, it is much more of a dynamic environment. We can control our future. We can come up with great ideas. We can innovate. And then we can build that into the technology. And we don't have to sit around and wait for everybody else. And then we also get contributions from everybody else. So for us, it's absolutely been a massive shift. And definitely got us out of that sort of total vendor dependence mentality that we had a bunch of years ago. That's awesome. And I mean, from the platform standpoint, I mean, I'm going to plug Cloud Foundry here, obviously. But that's an open source platform, as well as the surrounding technologies. How is that impacting the way you think about product and platforms? Yeah, it's like Billy Knopf, Rick said, the dynamic kind of flexible aspect that's what was, again, really, if I tie it back to the development community, it's refreshing. It's a very innovative, the great team that we have, the desire to contribute, be part of the community. And then clearly, that provides business value back to what Rick was saying, to what we deliver day to day. And just people participating in that ecosystem, seeing our contributions, it actually pushed on the broader Comcast culture a little bit. Just like what Rick mentioned, in terms of where we've been from either a security or a legal profile perspective, and it's just refreshing to see that kind of all that shift together is kind of driven by the technology and then the impact that it had. So it's all really tightly coupled, really hard to separate those things. The only other thing I would add is I think when it comes to one of the big culture shifts we made when we started to become a product company was platforms. We started to really think in terms of investing in platforms. And I think before that, we used to think about projects and implementing individual things. And I think we made a big shift several years ago. And it was really around the time we were building out the X1 platform where we realized, wait a minute, if we're really thoughtful in the way we develop our software and we're really future looking, we can build things once and reuse it over and over again. And it became sort of a very big mantra within our technology organization is we build platforms we don't run projects. And we not only took that mantra on the product and technology side, but we also brought it over to the IT side of the house and started attacking our problems in a similar way. And that was definitely a big culture slash mind shift as well. That's phenomenal. I'm learning so much during this conversation, even though we've talked a couple of times off stage, just processing that. And thinking about the number of products you're now creating, you're not just contributing back to existing projects. You're creating projects in the open source and using that to power both your business, but also drive that community engagement. Have you seen, and at the end, I'm gonna go off script here for a minute, but I was coming back to the number issue just throughout about the projects you're actually putting out there now. Have you seen that drive a bigger interest internally in the communities that you're building inside Comcast? Have you seen those projects really get people excited? Absolutely. In fact, very often some of these projects start out as inner source projects where teams across the company will contribute to the project and will actually, they're users of the project, they start contributing to the project. And you start kind of honing your skills as a community inside the company and then once it goes outside, it becomes much more successful. An example of that would be a project called Winel DNS, which is DNS as a service. It's used by people across the company and many of these users used to wait for the small team to maintain that project. But soon when we opened it up, they realized that they were empowered to make the changes themselves and they didn't have to wait for the maintainers of the project. And then once we open sourced it, we're seeing a tremendous amount of interest from other users and other contributors who are taking it far beyond what we had imagined. So I'm seeing, it's been a huge shift also in how people perceive us. More and more when I go to open source conferences, people actually see us as a technology player as an open source player, which helps us then attract the right developers and the right technologists into the company. And if anyone's interested, we actually have a booth here and we are recruiting and we have a lot of TA folks here and we have a lot of people and a plug for Philly. Philly is a fantastic city to live in and work in and be in and the culture of Comcast is a terrific culture for developers. And it's a great place to have a conference in, turns out to. Yeah, yep. Well, I mean, I just, I have so many questions. I could actually probably run this for like an hour but because I think you both hit on, or all three of you hit on the points that I think a lot of people are really excited about in terms of open source and technology and platform building, but also the culture and the leadership. I think one last question I'd love to hear from all of you is what are some of the obstacles that you've had to overcome in your organization? I realize again, this is gonna be put you on the spot, but I think we love to hear stories about what are some of the challenges you've had to overcome because we all know, and I know everyone in this room knows, this is not an easy journey. This is not something to your point that you're not gonna do it in three or four years, and it requires everyone to be part of that process. So, if maybe if you could list out maybe a few of the obstacles you've had to overcome as part of this. Well, that one first. How much time do we now? We've got all the time in the world. I think the obstacle, I mean, scale is clearly, from an order change management perspective, if you, with what we have to deliver to the business every day and balancing that with the transformation, but you mentioned it earlier, Abby, but kind of self-awareness to really drive that empowerment, that risk-taking, it's the letting go, like the obstacle of, as either a leader or technical leaders as well, it's letting go, taking more risk and trying to overcome that mindset obstacle. The technology is difficult at scale, it's hard, but I'm gonna say it's kind of the easy part relative to that, you know? I say that often, that's the easy part, it's the change that's hard part. Exactly, and so just the self-awareness from a, like don't try to change everything out of the gate, pick and empower and have clear outcomes, and then let go, and then trust and verify, and I think when we rinse and repeated that, we had some really good outcomes for the business, it wasn't just a kind of nerdy technology thing that we did, and coupling that and giving people a sense of purpose and mission in that context was really, it literally took us about a year to figure that out, and that was one of the biggest obstacles. Yeah, I think I would say, so I'm about to insult everybody in the audience here, but I would say the biggest challenge we have is, I've been leading software development teams for a whole bunch of years, and usually it's the smartest software developers when you tell them, you know, go make a left or go use this technology or go use this platform, this is the strategy, they put like every ounce of energy into proving you why that's not the right answer, right? And they all kind of want to go over this way, and so I think one of the biggest challenges we've had over time is we went from almost zero to over 10,000 software developers within Comcast, and as we grew that community, we wanted it to be a very innovative community, and so we let folks kind of do their own thing, and then as we've built up some of these platforms and technologies and said, hey, everybody, we really think it would be great if you did this, you know, a lot of them would kind of say, oh, if that's what management wants me to do, you know, well, that's probably not the right answer, we probably need to go do something over here. So just kind of getting everybody aligned on getting onto a common technology, a common platform, a common way of doing things, the whole change management aspect to it I have found over time has been challenging with some of the developer community, but what I've found works really well, and I think the way we get there is it needs to be a grassroots thing. It works best if there isn't like a top-down mandate, go do it this way, it works best when there's someone like Greg who says, hey, I did this thing, check it out, you try it, you try it, you try it, and you start to get this brown bag lunches and you start to get this ground swell of grassroots around it, and then it's like it takes on a whole new life, and I think that's the way you beat the, or that's the way you kind of, the best way to get really a cultural change management program going on something like this. That's, yeah, it's amazing, I think, I know I often hear the question of like, all right, this is a lot to do, where do I get started? If I have 10,000 developers, how do I start? Because taking off 10,000 at one time is a lot. Right. So starting small, and then, you know, Nithya, I'm gonna put you on the spot also because you've built an open source program office at Comcast, and I know I've heard from a lot of users in the audience, how do you get that, how do you get that started? Because there's so many hurdles internally, you know, legal PR, like how do I get that started? So maybe you could walk through a couple of the obstacles that you've overcome to get where this amazing thing is today. You know, ironically, one thinks of legal as an obstacle, and in our case, legal was the instigator of the open source office. And they're fantastic people, we have a great legal team, and the reason is they were getting inundated with developers who wanted to do more open source, had a lot of license questions, and wanted to contribute to open source, and they would say, you know, help me, help me, help me. And so legal said, we really need a center of excellence in the company around open source who could serve as the first line of questions and support, if you will, for our developers, right, and act as a translator between developers and legal. So the first obstacle wasn't really an obstacle because legal was on board. The second obstacle often tends to be leadership. Sometimes business leaders may not see this as important to the business. But again, we had an ace here because people like Matt Zalesco's, the chief software officer for the company, and Rick saw the value of open source as a means of innovation for the company, as this is, we do need to innovate this way, and we need to empower our developers this way. So we had so much support from the top, from the legal team, that it was easier to start the open source program office that way. That's where most companies struggle with starting an open source program office, right? And if you can get your leadership on your side, and if you can get your legal team on your side, developers are already on your side. They're chomping at the bits to do open source. It's just setting up at scale some of these processes, like open source approvals, license, you know, and we want to respect licenses and we want to contribute back. It's engaging systematically with external communities like Cloud Foundry and the Yachto project, for example, which we rely on, and being members of organizations like the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, so that we can learn from our peers, just as Greg shares how he does things, I learn every single day from my peers at the LF and the Apache Foundation and other things. And that's amazing, and I mean, I know you're also given a talk later this week tomorrow. I gave up my talk to a very good colleague of mine, Chris Powers, who will do the talk. There's a talk on this as well, this is honestly, I get, this is a conversation that I have a lot, and it is powerful, and it's powerful to have, you know, Rick, you here on stage, talking about how important it is for you as well, and it's so exciting to hear a company as big as Comcast is to say from their executive leadership on down that culture change is important, but also that open source is a strategic value to your organization, and I think there's a ton of power in that for the future of Comcast. Well, I wanna thank you all for hanging out with us here in Philly, which is a wonderful city, and thank you all for coming to participate in Summit, and Nithya, I know you're gonna be around all week. Yes. So I'm gonna say, if you have questions about open source program office, Nithya is around. Absolutely. So thank you all for coming. Thanks, I love you. Thanks, Adam. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Nithya.