Andy: 0:00

my job, the way I see it, is to communicate the unique, like the USP, the unique selling proposition, the unique value, the unique things that our solutions do that the other 346 automation solutions don't do. And really for me, as a network operator, what pain are you in that this solution solves? And if we can tie that to a narrative or a story? Because if you just throw stuff at people, hey, here's a thing and it does this and it's built on this and isn't this cool and like. Okay, like 7% of the nerds are going to get excited about Kubernetes and Linux and Hi out there, I'm William.

William: 0:50

I'm your friendly neighborhood tech host. I'm ready to try to solve your problems, but with me with me is my co-host, yvonne Sharp, who has been trained on approximately 500 trillion packets of network data. Her response latency is impressively low, I must say. But unlike your favorite AI that you might use out there, we actually know when we're making things up. At least we try to think we do. But how are you doing today, yvonne? How's Kentucky?

Eyvonne: 1:21

I'm good, I'm good, things are good in my world. Are you doing today, yvonne? How's Kentucky? I'm good, I'm good, things are. Things are good in my world. Always busy, always stuff going on. Summer's creeping in, and so we're already filling up the summer schedule with kids activities, but we've already lost an entire month this summer so, and it's the beginning of May, so yeah, so does that mean the rain's gonna stop like anytime soon?

William: 1:43

because I'm over it.

Eyvonne: 1:45

We have had a lot of rain. But I will say, a few days ago I was like you know, we just sowed some grass, we could use some rain. But now we've gotten some rain and of course it rained all Derby weekend, so the track was sloppy. If you don't follow horse racing, when it rains and there's a lot of mud, the track is sloppy and so now, yeah, but it's green, so I'm not complaining like there's grass and there are leaves in the trees and I drive around and I go yeah it's like a new shade of green.

William: 2:16

I've never seen it's like a very deep I've been rained on for like forever. Green goodbye.

Eyvonne: 2:22

Goodbye seasonal depression. Hello green trees, that's yeah.

William: 2:27

So on the show we talk about a ton of different technology-related things. You know we get into the bits and the bytes sometimes. Sometimes it's the infrastructure, sometimes it's the AIs. But what about the bridge between the technology and the people who buy it and champion it or use it? So joining us today is our good friend and product marketer extraordinaire and host of the Art of Network Engineering podcast, which anybody tuning in has probably heard or listened to it in the past. And hello Andy, how's life going for you?

Andy: 3:07

Hi William, Hi Yvonne, Thanks for having having me. It's my first time on the cloud gamut podcast.

Eyvonne: 3:10

Yay, really that doesn't seem so, and yvonne is here. Yes, I try to always be here I know and and just for the record, if I'm not, it has nothing to do with the guest.

Andy: 3:28

Well, my imposter syndrome has been quelled because Yvonne is here for me and I might have been worried that is Yvonne going to be here.

Eyvonne: 3:36

My 15 year old frequently says that's a you problem mom. So that's the voice in my head that's a you problem mom.

William: 3:46

Okay got it. It's always a classic I love it.

Andy: 3:50

It's it's raining here, but the pool's open and I'm really looking forward to uh, to the summer for sure I, so I briefly saw one of your posts.

William: 3:58

It was like, uh, you're talking about a backyard project and it was like a picture of your fence or something I think, oh my god. Or like the pool and the fence or something, I think oh my God. Or like the pool and the fence. My other school wasn't right from pressure washer.

Andy: 4:08

I spent seven hours pressure washing on Saturday. I bought a pressure washer. I bought a huge surface cleaner. I put the pressure washer together. There's no oil in it. One trip to the store I get home. I get that running. I try to connect big surface washer. They're like those circle things that spin. I don't know if you've ever seen them. I needed an adapter. I didn't have back to the store. So it was one of those typical home projects of you know. I planned it all out, Everything was going to be great, Deployment was going to be seamless. And then I was running around all day and my wife was like, why aren't you done yet?

William: 4:38

So pressure washing is a pain. It really is. I have gas-powered most things, especially leaf blower and stuff like that, but the pressure washer I got is an electric washer and it's really awesome. I had an electric leaf blower a few years ago and it was just like okay, I'm going to divide my yard into chunks of 30 minutes here and 30 minutes there, because that thing would just run out of juice. I bought extra batteries like have a stack of batteries and I still can't get through our property, which isn't very big. Um, so the the electric, um pressure washer has definitely been a different experience, but we we didn't actually come to the, the podcast, to talk about yard work as much as, as much as it excites me I was just wondering if your listeners have fallen asleep yet hey, on a nice summer day there's nothing like mowing the grass, it's beautiful, you know, get a good sweat in.

William: 5:36

But so I guess, kind of just um going back to like in this episode, kind of what I wanted to dig into and something we haven't dug into before really, is what is product marketing? What does it mean? What are the impacts? How does it compare to other technical marketing or developer advocacy or tech evangelism, stuff like that? So kind of going through it, just kind of getting your you know, as a freshly minted nokia product marketing genius, you know we want to hear it straight from, straight from you. What do you think. So I guess we could start out like what, what does product marketing mean? Like, how do you define it?

Andy: 6:21

I'll issue the caveat that I've been in this role four months and it's my first formal product marketing role, so take my answers with that context in mind. My job, the way I see it, is to communicate the unique like the USP, the unique selling proposition, the unique value, the unique things that our solutions do that the other 346 automation solutions don't do. And really, for me, as a network operator, what pain are you in that this solution solves? And if we can tie that to a narrative or a story? Because if you just throw stuff at people, hey, here's a thing and it does this and it's built on this and isn't this cool and like. Ok, like 7% of the nerds are going to get excited about Kubernetes and Linux and containers. Bless their hearts.

Eyvonne: 7:10

Well, and, by the way, they're the nerds who don't have access to budget.

William: 7:16

Fair.

Eyvonne: 7:16

Right, like that it's what you know like you've got to get people excited, but you also have to get people excited enough to be willing to spend an organization's money. Right, and that's a big part of the equation. Not to turn all corporate here, no, that's a perfect segue.

Andy: 7:36

So there are multiple audiences too. I'm glad you said that because I didn't want to forget that, and this happens to me in my role now I most identify with the network engineer persona. So in most of the content I create and just to circle back to what would that content be? Blogs, videos, white papers, data sheets, faqs, sales, trainings, demos, you name it If there's any content that needs to be created that can help communicate what we're doing and the value that needs to be created that can help communicate what we're doing and the value that it would fall under that bucket. But there are also multiple what they would call personas to talk to. So there's the network engineers, like me. So that's why I'm like, well, let me lab and let me get this thing installed and let me show you the cool things. And here's the UI and ooh, it tells you when something's about to break and you click it to auto-remediate it like, isn't this great?

Andy: 8:23

Because, again, the narrative that I think good product marketers are and this is such an overused term, especially in tech. But, like storytellers, I have been actively studying storytelling for a year. I bought this book by Matthew Dix called Storyworthy and there's an entire Almost like you would learn cloud or Network Plus or whatever Like this is a certification of sorts for storytelling, with a process that you can follow and a bunch of work to do to try to become better at telling a story. And I think if we can tie what we're doing in Vendorland and product solutions to a narrative because this guy, matthew Dix, that wrote the book he says you know, think of the last presentation you went to, the last PowerPoint someone presented, or the last speaker you saw. Like when you get home an hour and a half later and pull in the driveway, what do you remember? If they weren't telling stories, typically you don't remember a thing. But if somebody talked about, you know the lunchbox they got as a kid and how you know their parents were broke but they always made sure they had shoes and a lunch, and like you can pull at heartstrings of people's experience, tie those real stories from your life to what's happening now and create that connection with your audience. So I think that that's what makes a really good product marketer. That's my gold, that's what I'm aiming for Now you have to let a company allow you to do that right, because most corporations want to be plain white bread and stay in the middle and not get picked off by a predator.

Andy: 9:50

The downside to that is you sound like everybody else and nobody's going to listen to you. So if you could tell a story, be unique and make someone feel something, I think that that's critical. I know I'm going on and on, but I didn't want to miss Yvonne's point about the different personas. So I talk to network engineer personas primarily. I have to be reminded by people like Yvonne and the folks I work with. Well, there are other people in organizations we have to communicate with CTOs and people who sign purchase orders and all those people that aren't network engineers that have access to budget to a bonds point.

Andy: 10:26

So my technical content recently I am being pulled back and my leaders and my team saying like listen, you're not a technical marketing engineer, william, you mentioned it earlier. Like what's the difference? So we have TMEs who go deeper into the technologies, who are in the weeds, who can create compelling demos right, I feel they're less story-driven, like here's the tech, here's the nerdery man, let's do it, let's hurt your brains and they're very good at that where, as a product marketer, they keep reeling me in saying listen, this is much more about the story, the narrative, and if I don't go as deep on the tech, I can get much more broad and have much more impact at a higher story level and a narrative level. Then I spent six weeks in the lab fighting it. Oh, isn't this great. We found some gaps and we're updating documentation and I made some videos. But that may or may not be what the company is looking for from me Not so deep, technical, because we have brilliant technical people who do that stuff.

Andy: 11:26

So, yvonne, I'm trying to figure out how to talk to the purchase order people in the C-suite, because what they care about is different than what I care about. Right, as a network engineer again, personas, product marketing I don't want to be called every time I'm on call. I don't want to be working five maintenance windows a week, like when I think back to my production experience, like I got hammered in a meat grinder for a decade, and that's not what I want. So if your solution can give me more nights of uninterrupted sleep, can give me more holidays with my family, can give me soccer games I'm not being pulled away because something's broken again If you can deliver to me maybe a reliable solution, I'm listening, but a CTO, it's a different message, right. What do they care about?

William: 12:10

Yeah, you said so many things there that I want to like just reply to you. Want to go first of on well, there's a lot um sorry first no, the no the whole

Eyvonne: 12:21

like what's the, what's the cto interested in? Right, um, the the cto should be not all of are but should be interested in how does our technology organization deliver value to the business? And some of that, and I think in technology we get caught up in like cost savings, cost optimization. You know, there's the FinOps discipline and, yeah, we need to mind our P's and Q's and be sure that we are not spending frivolously and that what we're spending on our infrastructure is we're getting value for that. But then the other thing that your CTO or CTO, any C-level leader should be asking is really about value to the business. And so if you can show up and say, hey, not only is this technology going to streamline our operations, but it's going to allow us to spend X and then deliver Y, which is a multiple of that, that's really when you've got a winning argument and and and and you're a winning story.

Eyvonne: 13:34

Um, but the other thing that that I kind of want to comment comment on as it result, as it relates to marketing, there's this great tension that happens especially when we're talking about technical products, because your, your technical builders, your product managers, your SWEs, your, all those folks they are emotionally attached to all of the amazing, deeply cool technical things the product does and you want them to be right, because if they're going to build great things, they need to be emotionally attached to that. The thing is, most customers aren't emotionally attached to those things, and so your technical product people and you'll end up in fights because they'll be like but there are 3,000 gigawatts per teraflop, right, you got to tell them. There are 3, 3000 gigawatts per teraflop, right, you got to tell them there are 3000 gigawatts per teraflop. And that's not how you connect with customers and and the. The best analogy of this I've seen is you know that when, when they went to market with the, the iPod, the, the I, not yet the iPod, like the, the very first um, you know, media player from Apple, they didn't talk about how much storage the device had. They said a thousand songs in your pocket. Right, they translated into and, and.

Eyvonne: 15:04

So marketing is either how do I solve a problem for you or how do I help you reach this aspirational future that doesn't yet exist. Those are the two of the different approaches that you can take, but you have to do one of those or you're just spewing statistics that only a very niche group of folks are going to care about. Now. I've monologued a bit. It's your turn, william.

William: 15:38

Let me respond to something you said. First, apple is like any marketing team out there. I mean, I've heard it many times actually over the past five to eight years. Apple did this. You look at how simple all of. Look at Mike. I think his name was Mike Murray.

William: 15:57

I just talked about him, actually in a talk I gave back at our home base last week. He was one of Apple's quasi-marketing people in the 80s. He reported directly to Steve Jobs sort of marketing, quasi-marketing people in the 80s that did the. He reported directly to Steve Jobs and he really was like the first effort in Apple to really humanize the technology and take like very technical things and just make them, you know, bring them down to earth. And that was at a time where technology wasn't everywhere. We're looking and reading and thinking all the time. It, you know, monopolizes our life. You know that was back at a different time where it was much harder to do that and, uh, you know, apple just does a fantastic job with it.

William: 16:42

But one, one thing I wanted to say like you've sort of uh went back and forth on this line, andy, of technical and non-technical, and just one observation I've made is, in a very early stage, startup, you might not have these defined roles. It's kind of like you're going to wear many different hats. So your product marketing person or even if they're called that, is probably going to be technical. They're going to be logging into the product, they're going to be taking screenshots, they're going to be doing mock-ups, they're going to be building demos, they're going to be doing all the things. But as you grow and as you scale and you become a bigger company that's like you were saying that's kind of like what I guess technical marketing is supposed to be doing. They're from like the product outwards. They're like the first stab at like making really good collateral. You know that's going to be customer facing perhaps, or maybe even managing the whole products documentation. You know something like that maybe. And that's one thing I realized um, the last startup I worked for is earlier on. I was helping with like product marketing stuff and it was very technical because our product people were off building amazing things and building good collateral.

William: 18:02

Let's face it, it takes time. You know writing takes time Well, not as much time lately with ChatGPT, but it's all time consuming. If you want beautiful things for customers and prospects to consume, it takes time. So you can either buy, lease out an agency or you can build that collateral yourself. But as a company gets bigger, you're going to have product marketing. I guess and I want to get your take on this Is there a role really to find that product marketing fit to take these beautiful things that these product folks have built, that they're emotionally attached to, and provide that buffer, or be in that middle area and say, hey, this is great, but this is how it can be received out to the market. And then I don't know if you've ever done like, if you have to do like analyst calls or any of that type of marketing, or if you're just collateral specific, but a lot of times product marketers on that side of the fence will do like marketing. You know positioning categories and talk to analysts to get feedback as well. But, yeah, any, any thoughts.

Andy: 19:08

Yeah, my colleague, Anthony, just spent six months working with Gartner and we got, you know, on the in one of the quadrants, I think, the visionary or whatever. So we got a guy for that, fortunately and it's not me, but it was. It was a ton of work. I wanted to.

Andy: 19:23

I love that Yvonne brought up Apple. I I think of Apple almost every day in my job. I think they're the gold standard what they've done around storytelling and they tap into emotions and beliefs, not features. So Simon Sinek he's one of my favorites, right, and I'm actually going to read it because I'll screw it up if I don't. But it was Start With, was start with why. It was his whole like Ted talk on on start with why and the reason Apple was so successful in his view. So so here's because Apple starts with why they really tap into your, to your emotions and your beliefs and you're like, oh yeah, and then you see yourself in that narrative. So he says Apple says everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in thinking differently. That's the why, Right, they start with why not what? Like hey, we built a thing, you should buy it. Like Yvonne said, why we're not talking about the storage on the device.

Andy: 20:24

You can have a thousand songs in your pocket. Which of those two sentences make you feel something? Now it's hard because all these years later, all the music is at our fingertips. But back then I had a stack of vinyl yes, I'm that old and then I had a bunch of CDs that I used to have to put in right, and when I would move I would have to move all of that crap with me and it takes up space and you need cabinets and things to. I'm a music person, so I had a lot of music. And then when they come out with a thing like a thousand songs in your pocket, I felt something. It hit me in the chest. I'm like whoa, they didn't say we built this thing with this processor and this, you know, RAM and this battery life and a thousand gigs of memory. That means nothing to me. A thousand songs in my pocket, holy crap.

Andy: 21:07

So to finish the Simon Sinek thing, everything we do, we believe in thinking differently. The how is? The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. And then they hit you with the what, which most people start with. We just happen to make great computers, you want to buy one. So, because they flip, they start with why not what?

Andy: 21:51

So for me, in my role, if I said we have a network automation platform and we think we're going to make your life easier because of blah, blah, blah, so totally, and none of them have solved our problem, we're still waiting for the one solution to come along that's simple enough and doesn't burn the whole world down quickly. Again, this is network automation for our model. There's a lot of conversation around this that we're not having now, but there are a lot of. Again, this is network automation for a model. There's a lot of conversation around this that we're not having now, but there are a lot of tools and people are still waiting, waiting for one. But in my mind, where I am, we've done something different and compelling, and what I want to do is almost follow the apple playbook. Now, I don't know if they're going to let me, but we really need to hit people.

Andy: 22:28

Michael say win the hearts and minds of people. We got to hit them in the heart. We got to hit them with a thousand songs in your pocket, because if we're coming out with a 350 second network automation tool, nobody's going to listen, Nobody's going to care, but if we can give you again, I don't want to do a product pitch here, but I think the story and the narrative is very important. I don't think I answered your question, William, that you asked, but I got really excited when Yvonne brought up Apple, because I think they're the gold standard and I think it's what we should all be aiming for in product marketing and most technical brands I don't think do it well or even do it average.

Andy: 23:04

Nike doesn't sell sneakers. They're not, you know, just do it right or like. Again, this gets into like advertising and things like that. But if you can make people feel something like, oh wow, if I get Jordans, I can fly like Jordan no, you're not going to, but they're not selling the feature. We use this advanced rubber which gives you another inch of lift and it's really good for your ankles. Like nobody cares. It's advanced rubber which gives you another inch of lift and it's really good for your ankles.

Eyvonne: 23:27

Like nobody cares it's a sneaker, but if you can make them feel something they don't do, all that right.

Andy: 23:30

It's not that they don't do all that but they're not selling features right.

Eyvonne: 23:33

There's something else in how they show up in the world and and it's that.

Eyvonne: 23:38

It's that aspirational thing I was talking about earlier. Um, there's somebody that uh comes across, my social, roy Sutherland, and I don't know if any of you out there are familiar with him, but he talks a lot about the psychology of product and of sales and of marketing and he he uses an example about it's. Really he talks a lot about customer satisfaction, things like that. He talks about folks waiting for the train. He says if you wait for a train, folks may be willing to wait seven minutes for a train. If there's a timer they're counting down, show them when the next train is coming. But if they wait four minutes for a train with no countdown timer, there's a psychological difference to that experience. Another example that he's used is the speed of elevators.

Eyvonne: 24:29

There was this entire engineering effort that went into how do we make elevators faster? People don't like waiting, but what they discovered is when you put mirrors in elevators and you play music in them, the ride is more enjoyable, and so it reduces the need for the engineering effort. Right, and so as technical people, we're often quick to discount the psychological side of what it is to use an experience or a product, and I find those things fascinating have moved me in toward management because ultimately, work is done by people and people are unique and weird and complex and they're and it's not always a straight line to human behavior. And I think often we just completely ignore and discount that stuff and we go at it like well, rationally, this is better and that would be great if you were selling to a robot, but you're selling to a person who doesn't make decisions rationally and we have to take that into account as we're frankly moving through the world, not just trying to pitch technology.

William: 25:40

Yeah, totally agree with that. There's so much. I kind of want to keep the conversation moving, though, so actually one of the questions.

William: 25:51

I actually wrote down that. I wanted to remember that. I just think would be interesting to hear your take on, andy, is what are the actual? Because in technology there's different roles that are fitting to different types of people Like I know many good many very amazing engineers that don't ever want to talk to a person the rest of their life. Nor should they If they're, like, locked in their house. They're good as long as they have their computer and they can write code. But then you have some folks that can't sit down and work on a powerpoint for longer than 20 minutes without talking to a person. Like these are things I mean. This is just how we you know humans have different qualities and what. What do you think like as far as, like quality wise, would make a good product marketer? Are there any underrated soft skills that matter maybe more than people realize? What does a day in the life also look like for Andy? How does that look?

Andy: 27:00

I think what makes a great product marketer and again, this is why one of the reasons I love Yvonne so much is she hit on the psychology. You need a laser focus on your audience and you have to have so much empathy that you're having their experience and then determining how to speak to them in a way that resonates, that's compelling, that will get their attention, that will bring them in the funnel. Marketing supports sales. So what makes a great product marketer? I think was in there somewhere. I think I know a lot of engineers and I've had them on my different shows. They shouldn't talk to customers, right, they can't. I have, and I used to listen to Howard Stern and he always he said he always had this you know, whatever you think of this guy, right, Like he's a much better interviewer today than 40 years ago when he was doing ridiculous stuff. But he said he's always had this kind of meter in his head of when his audience is tuning out and he knows when it gets uninteresting. And I feel like I have a little bit of that and sometimes I'll have an engineer on a show and I'm like, oh my God, like this person has no idea that nobody cares, and they're going on and on, and so you kind of need to constantly be tuned in to the people receiving your message on the other side and like, is this compelling, Is this engaging? Do they care? Because, again, throwing a feature list at them or a data sheet, it's good for some people, not all. I think.

Andy: 28:33

You asked me what a day in the life looks like. So it's kind of like networking and tech. Every day is kind of different, which I think is why I love tech. You never know what's going to come day to day. Uh, you know, I I started out, I wrote a blog. I wrote a blog that got me this job. It was kind of like a tryout. I covered I've covered them at NFD and I wrote a blog about it through the NFD agreement thing and I was told like this is your audition, so you know, and, and they liked it, which was great and it helped kind of get me this position. A few months later, I wrote another blog Again not tooting my own horn, but I think it's one of the best performing blog pieces they've had, at least in the data center vertical.

Andy: 29:17

So what was my day like? It started out writing good blogs. Then I kind of came up with like a six-month plan. Like what can I do? So I'm like I want to do a short form video series, because I love short form video. We're all doom scrolling looking at the 30 or 60 second videos. You and I do it with the podcast. We break it up into short form and people can, but again it brings people in the quote unquote funnel. If you can get 15 seconds of attention from someone oh who is this? William and Yvonne huh and then maybe they'll follow you and maybe watch the show longer. So I have been working on short.

Andy: 29:53

I started out with blogs, I'm working on short form video. Now I have a stealth podcast that I'm not supposed to or allowed to talk about, but kind of a data center thought leadership. Where I work, there's a ton of smart people, much like you guys. The places we work, there's really smart people and I would like to highlight all the cool stuff Not product, Never, ever, ever going to mention hey, you should buy this thing because we're making it. Holy crap, Look what these people are doing. Bell Labs created fricking transistors. Let's talk to one of them. This is amazing, Whoa. So that's kind of a thing. But blogs, video I write a lot. There's conferences William, I'm hoping to see you at Aldicon in Denver, so there'll be a little bit of evangelizing.

Andy: 30:43

But, just like when I was in production, every day is kind of different. There's a plan, there's a strategy. There's a plan. Nobody knows Nokia is in data center Full stop, Unless you're in service provider or you're running mission critical networks. So I think the plan is like how can we communicate out to the world that we're not the phone company, which is what everybody thinks, and what are we doing? That's so compelling. What have we been doing for 20 years of mission critical that can now line? You know, do you think that reliability would be well applied in your data center? Maybe right?

Andy: 31:30

So the plan is to get the word out, and there are a hundred different ways to do that and there's limited time. So I haven't done my podcast because there's only so much time. Like, right now I'm doing release marketing, I have to get a data sheet out and a new FAQ, and we got to get sales trainings Some of it's internal too. We have to help our salespeople understand the value so that they can talk to customers when they go out. So it's a terrible answer to your question. Every day is different and, again, I'm new to the role, so I'm kind of learning as I go and they're plugging me in where they think I can bring value. I don't know if that's a great answer.

William: 32:02

No, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, that's been kind of my I'd say my experience as well. Every day is very different.

Andy: 32:08

I mean, you were an evangelist in your last role, right Like there's a. I don't want to say that's a's. It's not a product marketing job, but you're out in the public telling people why they should care right, creating awareness it's pretty.

William: 32:23

There's a little bit of overlap between I mean, honestly, I think there's a little overlap between tech evangelism, product marketing and tech technical marketing. Yep, especially the smaller company that you, you work at. But yeah, technical evangelism is more like starting at the community and starting at the technology and not so much the vendor, and just kind of reverse engineering your way back to the product. I wouldn't be able to sell something a day in my life, I'd be a terrible salesperson. But if you can come in with some, just good, you know, meet the individual where they're at and, you know, become some sort of trusted something and then if it, you know, ends up working its way back to your product and you make a sale, then awesome, which that happened for me many times. I didn't go in, I don't get paid on commission, but I went in and just had conversations, good conversations, and built relationships. And you know, as it were, when you build relationships with people and you have good conversations, you're gonna, you're trending in the right direction, you're not going backwards. So yeah, what, what do you? So one thing I wanted to get into, I just wanted to get your take on is like nokia um is a company, is incubated. I guess incubated I don't know what the right word is for this but so roman and folks have built container lab and it's.

William: 33:53

I'd have to go back, I actually don't remember. I think it's a bsSD license or maybe it's Apache, I can't remember but it's a pretty permissive license. It's essentially open source. Paying for its employees to do things has to be tied to like some sort of revenue generating exercise or like leads coming in or pipeline specific stuff. But every once in a while you have a gym kind of like container lab, which I use, like it's an incredible, incredible tool and it's got so much traction right now. Um, but how, what you view those types of exercises where maybe it's kind of a risk? Because, again, when you have a conversation at Nokia with your teams, or I have a conversation at Itential or Yvonne has a conversation at Google, you're paying for everybody to be on that call to Google. You're paying for everybody to be on that call. You have salaries to pay. You have employees that could be doing other things. How do you view that sort of marketing style exercise?

Andy: 35:07

if you would even call it that. I think it's a brilliant strategy. I don't know how well thought out it was that that happened well before I ever came on. It's completely open source. Every time I turn around, somebody else I know is using it, loves it. I've came on. It's completely open source. Every time I turn around, somebody else I know is using it, loves it. I've used it.

Andy: 35:22

I think like networking vendors. Well, here's, I guess, my perception, my bias, whatever I feel like my experience with networking vendors is they're trying to walk us in, squeeze money. It's never really felt like a great relationship. So when I see vendors and Nokia is not the only one but when I see vendors doing things that contribute to the networking community at large, doing open source projects like Container Lab as your example, it just says a lot to me about the culture, about how the company sees the world, and because, you're right, resources were spent and time, and I mean Roman's brilliant and he's still working on it. Right, he's also responsible for other products, but he's working on an open source, and I don't have the list in front of me, but they've worked on a lot of different open source products, Like when I wanted to learn their operating system.

Andy: 36:21

Sr Linux Container Lab made that so easy. That was my introduction to Container Lab. I had never run a container. I didn't know what Container Lab did, and it did some virtual wiring for me and then it gave me a Yang. What the hell was it Like? It gave me a, a file with six lines, and I loaded it up and I hit a command in Linux and poof, it was all running and I'm in the CLI. And then I'm like, well, what the hell is this? But I can grab an open AI key, put it in and then talk to it in plain language and it talked me through how to configure it. For me, this is a different experience than I've had at other unnamed vendors when I'm trying to learn their operating system or their syntax or lab their things. It was just so easy, so well thought out and it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling when a company who exists to extract, generate profit and make shareholders happy in a never ending game of, you know, endless returns that's how it's our economy works right. For them to spend time, money and resources on something open source, I think says a lot about about how they see the world.

Andy: 37:29

William, you and I have had this conversation. Like I don't really understand the open source world. I don't understand why people would spend their time doing something for free when they could charge for it, and that's probably a whole separate conversation. But I agree with everything you're saying and I think it's really cool. I don't. At another place I worked. I don't recall us doing stuff like that, so it's just one more feather in the cap of like huh, this place is like really like they're doing smart things and it's not all about dollars. Like here's a product we made, you should go buy it. Like no, here's this cool free thing, Isn't this cool? You can spin up a containerized NAS. You can use container lab. It'll do the virtual wiring for you. It'll give you the interface you're in in a second. A second like how are you using container lab? Are you using it for a ton?

William: 38:20

yeah, yeah. So one of the free products that we build I basically built like I dockerized it. It's on docker hub and I inject it into container lab topologies for testing and versioning. So I do a lot of um testing. I put it all on github too, just for the heck of it, because free stuff and hey, I mean if you can provide some sort of ability for someone to get their hook in with automation and just have value out of it, even if you can change their mind, that automation is important and anybody can do it, as it were, don't be scared, jump in and try it.

William: 38:55

You know the thousands and thousands of dollars of lab gear you know isn't holding you back anymore, like it did for me when I jumped into this space way, way back. Like I guess I'd kind of turn this dark a little bit and say, look, there's no excuses, get out of your chair and go do it because it doesn't cost you anything. It just costs you time. The technology's there and anybody can learn it. We have to be good stewards of that technology by when it makes sense. I'm not saying go and post your company's IP on the internet or something stupid, but if you have a free product and you have a free tooling ecosystem. Go and build cool things and share it with people you know it's. That's the way forward, that's how we all get better. But yeah, that's just my take look at linux.

Andy: 39:47

You taught me about linux, torbold and linux and how linux changed the world, and that was all open source. Again, I don't. As a capitalist who wants a bigger house, a bigger pool pool and a faster car, I have a hard time personally being like let's do all this stuff for free. I wanted to ask you, before we wrap up, what's the biggest feature? So I'm still learning these things and I'm not a Container Lab expert. Why are you using Container Lab? Is it because it allows you to do lab as code? It does the virtual wiring between containers. Is that the big value there?

William: 40:19

Yeah, and I think some of the other solution. I think the. I like the idea. So the stuff that I've built with container lab, with our product, it's all ephemeral so you basically, as long as you have container lab or docker installed, you can run all of it. It actually pulls the code down from a github repo through an import thing that we do. It tees everything up. The lab files are already in the Git repo, everything's there. All you have to do is type in a command to run them and you will back up configuration from network devices or configure BGP. It makes it easy.

William: 40:50

I think the way that this evolved is after physical hardware, we all set up ES, esxi and just used ovas for different network images maybe, or you know, qcal2s, whatever, ran them directly on the hypervisor and then connected to things and that isn't the most resource friendly thing. But the vendors that I think vendors like nokia, vendors like Arista is another really good one where they've actually built purpose-based containerized images. So you don't have to go through some wild conversion process and do like all these special things. It's not walled by licensing Like there's. You know, there's a good, diligent, free tier with these things Like unless you want scale and capacity, obviously, that you're going to have to pay for. But you can do and test a lot of things out of the box and it's just ephemeral, so I can have this thing in code and then rerun it when I need it, and there's no going back and just trying to remember what in the world I was doing. So it's just very ephemeral, it's resource friendly and everything's you know can be treated as code.

William: 42:01

I think that's the huge bit. And they just released a REST API, which is awesome. I've imported the schema and I'm playing around with it a little bit, but it's that's. That was the one feature that I was hoping. I mean, I think everybody was hoping that they would do that on the container lab side was you, was you know, get an API out there? And they've hit it. I mean I really can't think of many more things they could actually do with Container Lab to make it easier or better at this point, because they even have the topology editor, which is like really cool, you can import your own logos and stuff. It's pretty wild. But yeah, I think we were coming up at the top of the hour.

Andy: 42:39

but yeah, I want to say one more thing before we end, and cause I realized that it's the same advice I give people trying to get into networking. Um, if you like to communicate. So I tell people, like how can I get into networking? It's so hard, right? Uh, do some con like do the technical study, get the certs, go to lab or free lab, whatever and try to communicate what you're learning. Right, show people your communication skills, start a blog, do videos, whatever. Now there's TikTok, do whatever that is. But it's very similar to this type of role too.

Andy: 43:09

When I interviewed, I had a body of work that they could see. I like to communicate. I mean, I used to poo-poo my degree. I have a bachelor in communication and I've joked with all you technical people because you know, oh, it was, you know it was the easiest major I could find at the time. Well, as it turns out, I love to communicate.

Andy: 43:26

I was writing poetry at six, right, like I really like communicating. It's one of my strengths. I love people, I love you know all of it. And and if you like to communicate with people and you're technical, this is the kind of role that could really again, this is the most satisfied. It's the wrong word, but the most fulfilling role I've had in tech in the 20 years I've been in tech, and it's because it's aligning with my strengths. It's as technical as I want it to be. I get to communicate, I get to create all this cool content and if you're a technical person who likes to communicate and create content, this could be the type of role you could look at.

Andy: 44:05

At a vendor, and it doesn't hurt that it pays, usually more than production, getting your head pounded into the change window, change management world right, I mean, you have to pay your dues. But if you're out there doing the job and you like to communicate and you're thinking about vendor roles or maybe you're not, maybe this is an introduction. It's a really cool. I get to come on and talk to cool people like you. All the time I've been on packet pushers, like, come on, it got me on packet pushers. Hello, that's awesome.

William: 44:30

That's a dream, right? Yeah, it's good advice, great advice. Yeah, I know your strengths, know what the job role entails, find the right match and, yeah, get out of. I mean, some people like that production craziness. I I never. I liked it at first, I liked it for a few years and then it started getting old pretty quick. But, yeah, thank you, I mean, we're at the top of the hour. I think both of you have hard stops. I think I do too, um, the trifecta of hard stops. But, yeah, thank you so much for coming on like. This has been a great conversation and this is an area that we haven't really dived into before. I think this will be really, really valuable. Oh yeah, where can people find you? I forgot to um ask if somebody doesn't know, for some reason, um, where they can find you thank you for having me on.

Andy: 45:16

I enjoyed the conversation. Hopefully your audience didn't fall asleep because it's marketing, right? Where can you find me? Go to my website, permitipandyandycom. It has all the things there. It's kind of like my link tree that I pay $300 a year for to host, which doesn't make sense but it has all my links to all my things there. I should probably just shut that down into a link tree and save money, but permitipandyandycom. You can find all the things I do everywhere. And if you're a network engineer, check out the Art of Network Engineering podcast. It's a show I love to do and I think it's helping people.