 Hi, this is your host Abdul Bhartia and welcome to the 2023 prediction series. And today we have with us once again, Pablo Despot, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Cloud at Akamai Technologies. Pablo Despot, it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Before I ask you to grab a crystal ball and share with us what predictions you have for us, please tell us a bit about the company. Akamai has especially recently evolved into quite something new and different. But for those that might be familiar, about 20 years ago, we started the concept of a content distribution network. About 10 years after that, we found that that same globally distributed platform was really a superior approach to application, security and DDoS and a whole other slew of security features. And today, most recently, we entered last year, more specifically, the cloud computing market with the acquisition of Linode. So from Edge to Cloud and the security in between was where we're really focusing on. Excellent. Thanks for telling about the company. Now it's time for you to grab your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you have for us. We'll start with, I think, maybe it's an easy slam dunk one, but I think maybe some of the nuances we haven't all thought of. And that's, I think we're going to see increasing diversification in terms of our cloud providers, right? I think if you look at COVID, that certainly accelerated a lot of adoption to new X as a service, be they infrastructure or software. And I don't really see any of that changing, especially given the inertia of a lot of technology decisions. Right? If it's working, why would we go back? And I think it's even telling the fact that people didn't run to deploy collaboration apps in their data centers, right, for those that had them. So I think you're going to see that. And we see that also backed up in our data. When we look at where our customers endpoints are, if you think about all the applications that are on Akamai, when we kind of do a study of where those endpoints are, we see over time that they're in an increasing number of cloud providers, an increasing number of regions. They're split up in an increasing number of different endpoints, obviously microservice types of patterns. And then you factor in growth of kind of edge, then it's really not a surprise that we're going to see more providers kind of come into the mix. Number two, and I think maybe that edge is kind of a follow-up prediction, is that edge is becoming increasingly important and an increasingly legitimate destination for a variety of workloads. So you see it in a combination of with the microservices pattern that we talked about. A lot of, as we modernize our applications, and most of those we know aren't going to be lift and ship-type modernizations, they'll be refactoring into microservices. Now, all of a sudden, the edge becomes another legitimate destination for a particular workload. We ourselves rolled out a whole new crypto library to help with authentication. You see that across the whole market. So that's just going to be another factor in increasing the number of quote-unquote clouds that we'll have to deal with as developers, as ops folks, right? And then I think the third thing, which might be a little bit of an easy one, but I think we're going to see a lot more challenge, or a lot more challenges in finding folks with the particular set of skills. Because now, as we kind of fragment all these different technologies, now I don't just need to know Linux and networking, right? To harken back to the old days, right? Spanning Tree Protocol is Spanning Tree Protocol, regardless of if it was Cisco or Juniper. Now I need to know how to configure these SaaS and these code-free applications and so forth. So I think that is ultimately going to be a bigger challenge. And we'll talk about it a little bit later, but it's something we see ourselves. What are the challenges that you see are going to be there in 2023? And what role you see Akamai is going to play, as you also talked about with the Linux acquisition, you have entered a new market there, which is the main market in this cloud-centric world, that Akamai will be a better position to help customers, users navigate through some of these challenges. It's interesting, if you look at one of the biggest challenges you alluded to, I think a little bit earlier, is finding some of the background specific to building out infrastructure. And I'll differentiate a little bit in terms of, you know, maybe a front-end developer, right? We won't touch the full stack myth, but it's more of the kind of folks and again, if anyone wants to look at the job posting, please do refer people, the kind of skills in particular that we're looking for and that we need as we build this out, a really low-layer networking OS virtualization, right? A lot of those kinds of skills that people used to also need in the data center, right? And I think that the takeaway for all this is, yes, we hear about the developer, the lack of developer skills and some of the front-end stuff, maybe a little bit more in the headlines and in, you know, your tech crunches and wherever, wherever. But increasingly, the skills, right, the configuring, you know, the top-of-the-rack switches and the routing in between and the VLANs, that kind of stuff is whether you're building a cloud, which most people aren't, or whether you're maintaining your own data center, it becomes very stark, the number and different type of skills you need to build this. So it is kind of going back to the broader market. It's not really a surprise why people go, why am I doing this, right? Why am I maintaining network engineers? Why am I maintaining CCNAs plus, right, when I am an insurance company, for example, right? Or I am a XYZ. So I think kind of one of the challenges for us, like I said, is getting those type of skills where luckily we have a huge network team that we can draw. And everybody's obviously excited to work on things, but if you look at it, we hear it from our customers and now we're experiencing it firsthand. So it kind of drives home the point of, yeah, we're moving a lot of stuff out of the data center because this is all stuff you have to manage. Even if you don't have to worry about paint, power and pipe, you still have to deal with networking, you have to still have to deal with that kind of stuff. So it's really not a surprise that a lot of the workloads are going over to cloud. And the last one I'd say is just capacity, right? Everybody needs more capacity, more power, more floor space, more bandwidth, more locations. So that is I think a perennial challenge that anyone would raise their hand and point out. Pavel, thank you so much for taking time out today. Of course, share this predictions, challenges ahead, how I can help customers and users. And of course, the opportunities that are there. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.