Brainwave #3: Lori Mac Vittie — From Legacy Cloud to Securing the Edge (and beyond)

Intellyx co-hosts: Jason Bloomberg, Jason English.

Topics covered:

• What happened to the field of technical journalism, and actual product reviews?
• How has the way we expect to buy software and hardware evolved with cloud, and cloud marketplaces?
• Why are all of our applications going to SaaS models, but IaaS is just a little slower on the uptake?
• Why are containerization and Kubernetes orchestration efforts happening so fast in major enterprises?
• What is the future of software-driven network and security on the edge, and does the edge, microservices and even 5G bring our delivery efforts closer to where customer value is generated?

• F5’s “State of Application Services” annual report: https://www.f5.com/state-of-application-services-report
• F5 website: https://f5.com
• Video link: https://youtu.be/SR5zTLhOTkg

Listen/download the Podcast on your favorite player here: https://anchor.fm/intellyx/episodes/Brainwave-3-Lori-Mac-Vittie–F5—–From-Legacy-Cloud-to-Securing-the-Edge-and-beyond-eit9tm

Watch the YouTube version here: https://youtu.be/SR5zTLhOTkg

Transcript of the podcast:

Jason English: Alright, well, welcome to another Intellyx Braincast. glad you could join us here today. Today we have Laurie Mac Vittie. She is the lead technology evangelist for F5. Did I get that correctly?

Lori Mac Vittie: You got that correct? That is absolutely right.

Jason English: Yeah. And, we’ve talked, over the years at many different, many different lives previously.

I think I first got to know you at, I didn’t know if it was at Network Computing or?

Lori Mac Vittie: Yeah, don’t say the other one. I still have, you know, that adversarial view. Right? So you can’t say the other one. It was Network Computing, often confused with Network World, right?

Jason English: Yes. So, yeah, I think you’re one of the first actual, journalists at the time who actually opened up our software and used it (ITKO LISA in 2005), which is like a foreign concept to me now.

I mean, what’s actually happened to the tech journalism world or does it still exist? What do you think?

Lori Mac Vittie: It still exists. What, what happened to that right? I mean, Network Computing built its kind of fame and glory, if you will, on hands on testing. So we did a lot of testing and sure…

Testing software, isn’t as hard as testing massive network equipment and it got so capable, we could no longer stress it out. We could no longer afford to actually do the testing we needed to do in order to provide value. Right. And it just, it just kind of fell apart.

Plus, I mean software, I say ‘it’s easy.’ It was for me because I like to play with software, being a developer. It was kind of a little more intuitive, but generally speaking it expanded and it got so broad. How do you find experts in each technology area that can actually authoritatively incredibly speak to the quality of software, does it do its job? It just became overwhelming, I think in general. So that’s why we don’t see a lot of hands on testing reviews and people are kind of like, ‘yeah, stuff’s fast enough now — we don’t really need to know, but that’s not the big thing we want to see.’

Jason Bloomberg: Yeah. And the business model was an advertising base, so it just didn’t add up. Right? You had the advertising revenues. And then you have these expensive testing efforts. And I know it wasn’t just your magazine, but I’ve heard that across the board. All of the magazines that actually did testing, it just didn’t make economic sense to support.

Lori Mac Vittie: Yeah. Yeah. It just became too capital intense as it were. And even the shift to using like cloud didn’t make sense. In all cases, it didn’t provide consistent test results. How do you adjust for ‘well, the internet was slower for my test than it was for the other guy’s test.’ So competitively, this is useless, right?

It just became a big hassle and the return on investment was not there. So now it’s more about analyzing the markets, the technology where it fits, getting more advice. Being more advisors than it is hands-on testing.

Jason English: Yeah. That’s very interesting. So, so what are you focusing on these days? it’s going to interesting to see how it’s changed. I mean, the whole industry has kind of made this leap from one of covering the technology itself to more of an advocacy model. So, what in particular defines what a technology evangelist is?

Lori Mac Vittie: Today? Wow. I always go back to Guy Kawasaki’s definition, way back when, when we started seeing evangelists, right?

It’s about selling an idea. So at least from my perspective, it’s been more about promoting the technology ideas, how you can leverage it, what it gives you, how you can use it, how it helps, how it doesn’t help. Right. What are the pitfalls? What should you look out for? Underlying all of that of course there’s always a ‘well, here’s how F5 plays in this role,’ right.

Or can help, or what it does for that. Sometimes there is no answer. Sometimes I just pontificate about things that are absolutely not really related. But that’s good because those things might not seem related now, but, you know, in the future they might. I don’t know if you pay attention to gaming.

I’m a gamer.  The big drama in the last month has been Apple and Epic games. Yeah. It’s not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Today is the start of the, of [Fortnite] season four. And all of the iOS players are very upset because they can’t play because of this, but, you can look at it that way and see, okay, kids are upset, but on the backend, what we’re talking about is an attempt.

To break up and disrupt an entire kind of model, right? The payment industry. How do you pay for things? How do platforms work? How do ecosystems get built? Who gets the money? How much do you get? Right. There’s a lot of business model, potentially, being disrupted in the background from this lawsuit in this gaming industry that could spill over into software because we’re all moving to that subscription model, right.

To buy this thing, have the subscription. I have a store. So how does that impact, the future of anyone who wants to be on the Apple ecosystem, I don’t know yet. We’ll have to wait and watch and see it play out. But

Jason Bloomberg: do you think the Apple Epic battle is going to impact the enterprise software space?

It’s a bit, you have to sort of connect the dots for us there, if,

Lori Mac Vittie: you know, it depends on, on what model you’re using. Right. So the, the entire. Argument here is that Apple controls the app store. That’s the only way you can get apps onto your mobile phone. Right? So if I’m an enterprise software vendor and I want to be on the Apple platform, right.

I have to go through them. If I wanted to offer in-app purchases or subscriptions of different things say, feeds to information, threat feeds. Let’s say that that’s something that you wanted to do on a phone. I want my threat feeds my alerts to come through here. I’m going to subscribe to them and I’m going to do that through the Apple store because it’s easy.

I wanna make it easy for people to get this information. So suddenly now I’m paying Apple’s fee, for in-app purchases, because that’s how you get those kinds of feeds. So am I going to, that has to be you count that in your business model, how much overhead is it? Who am I paying? How does that interaction work?

If Epic is successful and apple has to allow other app stores, what does that do for who can be on there? That’s a new model, but also how much, right. It changes all the business models. So I think it depends on what you’re actually selling or how you’re selling through it.

Enterprise software isn’t quite there yet. We like to talk about the app store experience. I think we’ve got years before it comes, but I think it is coming just because of the ease with which you can subscribe to different software and different feeds, different content. that you may want to see, on not just phones, but what about on platforms, cloud platforms?

You’re talking about an ecosystem where you’re forced to go through a specific provider. Does this have ramifications outside of that for a cloud provider that says you have to go through our marketplace? I don’t know. I’m not a legal expert. I don’t even play one on the internet. So I have no idea.

You can see kind of threads there that the same kind of abstraction exists in many different worlds, including enterprise software cloud subscriptions that somehow this may have an impact down the road.

Jason Bloomberg: Now the internal marketplace has been around for a while. You know, an enterprise will have some internal marketplace where people can go and download or even purchase possibly with a chargeback, any number of different internal apps, you know, logins to Salesforce or whatever it is.

But it isn’t necessarily about the device that they have. I would say. It’s not like, an enterprise is going to offer Salesforce and if you want to use your iPhone, you have to pay Apple something. I mean, I don’t think that’s how they’re doing it. Right.

Lori Mac Vittie: No, it’s more about the platform and the ecosystem, right?

The platform that you’re on and how you use that and who you have to pay and what the restrictions are, what is the model around it? Right. Those kinds of things. Right. It’s like developer agreements back in the day. How did that get governed? How did it change with open source and now, with these platforms.

It’s an interesting thing, right? It kind of was like, wow, this could have an impact. So it’s something to kind of watch and see. Not only if you’re a gamer and you’re interested, but also, how does this potentially impact other businesses? So, yeah, it’s all software and subscription.

So I suspect there’s something, somewhere that could get disrupted because of it, depending on how it falls out.

Jason English: As, as we’ve seen everything’s moving to cloud. So as we go to developer marketplaces, like Atlassian has their own kind of marketplace walled garden of vendors. Then obviously the AWS marketplace is full of vendors. People are starting to buy even infrastructure on this kind of pay-per-use or as they go basis.

And so, I think in particular you’ve been a part of a lot of this evolution seeing, F5 going from a very much a stalwart kind of hardware vendor in the space to, where everything is completely software defined. So, how have you seen that kind of market evolution go in, in your experience?

Lori Mac Vittie: How do I see it go? Slow. It does. And that’s the reality of data centers that still exist and they’re still hardware. So there’s still capital outlay and you still have refresh cycles and you know, those kinds of things are still going to exist.

It’s more the value on top of it, the software pieces that start going subscription, very heavy. What do I put on that hardware? Ah, now we’re talking about software and subscription and that’s still a very lengthy process. I know we all like to talk about digital transformation and ‘Hey, you’ve got to change this and you’ve got to change that and you have to get with the game.’

And all the while, internally, software vendors, hardware vendors are all struggling with that same transformation. ‘How do we do this? We built stuff that was this way. And now we have to make it work that way.’ And it’s just as hard for us as it is for an enterprise to suddenly pick up and go, ‘well, I’m just going to do it all this new way.’

How does that work? We make it sound easy. Why don’t you just shift your CapEx to the OpEx and everything’s good. It’s a little more complicated than that. but you know, it is happening. But it’s slow. We see cloud growth. Definitely. And it’s continuing. right now, you know, thanks to the, reaction to the pandemic and everything that’s going on.

We’re seeing a whole lot of shift to SaaS — As fast as people can go. That’s the clear winner right now. SaaS is definitely growing like gangbusters again. IaaS — I hate that word. It’s so hard to say.

Jason Bloomberg: IaaS.

Lori Mac Vittie: IaaS. Now I said a naughty thing. IaaS rate it’s growing, but not quite as fast, and a lot of that is just the shift to focus on getting everything on SaaS first and then we’ll come back and focus on IaaS and what needs to go there. It’s kind of amazing if you think about it, but.

Enterprises are not young anymore. A lot of businesses have been out there for 20, 30, 40 years. a lot of them longer than I’ve been alive. and you know, they’re still running. And so they have a lot of what people would say is baggage, but what they really have is a lot of investment in applications and what’s going on.

So they’re not just picking those up and moving them to the cloud. But they are going through a period of, we need to modernize these because it’s really hard to hook up a COBOL app to your mobile phone directly. I mean, that just doesn’t happen. Right? There’s, there’s always glue in between the kind of get the duct tape, get the bailing wire, let’s make this work.

That is the life of IT. So they’re going through app modernization efforts. And a lot of times that involves the cloud. Because we want to put this new modern interface, we want to have a mobile option. We want to hook up some voice stuff. We’re just going to run that in the cloud, but all the good stuff still sitting in the data center.

So it becomes an architectural problem for them. Right. CEO’s are really like, okay, I have to make this work. How do I do that? Because I’ve got apps all over the place. And I got all my stuff inside. And I have to somehow glue it all together and it becomes a big integration challenge for them is how to make that work seamlessly or at least appear to be seamless.

We know, you know, from being in it, right. Nothing is seamless. There’s a lot of pipes and a lot of turns and Ys, but they make it work eventually.

Jason Bloomberg: That’s interesting. You mentioned, IaaS, because you haven’t heard that term in a little while. I mean, there’s plenty of it out there obviously, but it’s virtual machine centric.

Right. And it has been since, you know, the Dawn of Amazon with their first cloud products, you know, EC2, but today the virtual machines are sort of the older way of doing things, right? Enterprises are moving to, Kubernetes and serverless. Also in the cloud or the Kubernetes you might also do on prem as well, but it’s a different model, right?

Where it’s not, it’s not about virtual machines so much as, you know, they’re still there, but that’s not the point. So, I mean, what are you seeing in terms of the evolution of the cloud is IaaS, going to be going to fade away or, in favor of other technologies or is it going to, is it going to stick around and be the legacy cloud?

Lori Mac Vittie: Legacy cloud?

Jason Bloomberg: Legacy cloud. There you go.

Jason English: Did you just come up with that?

Jason Bloomberg: Well, you can put legacy in front of anything, you know. Just a matter of time.

Lori Mac Vittie: Legacy cloud. I like that. Well we watched how Kubernetes containers has just moved faster than just about any technology we’ve seen in terms of adoption in the mainstream.

It just went like. “Yeah, let’s do it. I, it was wait, what?” I mean, it’s not even mature, right? We’re still in like alpha-beta or whatever phase that is. And it just gotten picked it’s up like wildfire. So we watched as IaaS kind of migrated from my here’s our special version and that didn’t work right. Pretty much.

They’ve all gone. ‘Yeah. We’re going to help you manage Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes is clearly going to win this market.’ And so suddenly. It’s all there. So as they’re making that easier, I think there are a lot of people that are using cloud and Kubernetes together. Right. So IaaS is becoming that platform, but you’re right.

When I looked at industry data, I still see almost half. So like in the mid 40% of companies that are building out apps in Kubernetes or containers are doing it on premises, Right. Not necessarily in their own cloud, but sometimes in their own private cloud, but they are keeping it on premises. So there’s a good mix.

And really, if you look at Kubernetes and you look at just the container model, it just doesn’t matter who provides it. I mean, it is, it, it actually fulfills the promise that we had. Remember when we talked about cloud bursting, like way back with the legacy cloud, right? Oh, you’ll just be able to burst out to the cloud when you need capacity.

Be a beautiful world, right. Never happened because of the size. And the difficulties in actually migrating a live virtual machine from one place to another. Oh, it can’t be done.

Jason Bloomberg: Yeah. But it takes like 40, 45 minutes or whatever. That’s not exactly a burst. It’s more of a trickle. Right.

Lori Mac Vittie: Exactly.

But with containers that actually becomes like more realistic. Like we could do this. Maybe, maybe it takes minutes. But it’s way quicker and we could actually do that. so I mean, that’s kind of a, an exciting change because I think that will actually make cloud as appealing or more appealing because it does become a, not, not just a destination, but a, ‘Hey, this is our extra capacity.’

It is what they promised now, because we can do that. We don’t see a lot of that yet. But right. I expect that that will start to become something. We can do the notion of cloud arbitrage, right. Being able to run where it’s most efficient financially right now also becomes more of a reality. We talked about wouldn’t that be great?

Yeah. That wasn’t happening either.

Jason Bloomberg: Well, now it’s now between Kubernetes flavors, right? Between GKS and openShift or whatever it is. And, so at the move to the cloud and the move to Kubernetes are not the same thing, because as you say, move to Kubernetes is often a reevaluation of on premises, more private cloud, which is sort of now what is private cloud when you pull, when you don’t talk about virtual machines, it’s on premises, Kubernetes in a collocated or managed data center, and isn’t really a private, cloud or do we need new terminology now.

Lori Mac Vittie: That’s true. Should we even call it cloud anymore? Does it matter? Do you need a cloud? If you have, container clusters and you’re basically getting the same elasticity and economy of scale, that cloud promised you when you do it in containers. I don’t know.

Maybe. Yeah.

Jason Bloomberg: And then we add edge computing to the mix.

Now we can put Kubernetes at the edge and we have the edge data centers and that’s part of the 5G rollout. So that’s going to be. Exploding even more in the next few years. And where does that leave the cloud? I mean, is that all the cloud or are we do want to differentiate between the cloud and the edge?

I don’t know if there is an answer, interested in your take.

Jason English: Or serverless, I mean, what about that too, where does it end? I mean, as far as being able to burst these workloads they’re not generic anymore. Right. So how do you. How do you decide what to do from here?

Jason Bloomberg: So what’s your take on edge computing? I know you’d think F5 would have an edge computing story. So I’m interested.

Lori Mac Vittie: Yes. We, we have quite a bit of, of edge going on internally. So I sit in the office of the CTO. So, and just something we generally talk about at least once a week with someone, internally about projects that are going on, what we’re looking at.

We recently released, basically a smartNIC with big IP functionality, right on it. Because at the edge you are resource constrained. You don’t have a lot of hardware. This could be like at the local gas station in a closet. That could be edge for them.

If they’re a part of a franchise, this is your edge. So now you can’t just pick up a big piece of hardware and put it in there. It’s not how things are going to get done, hence Kubernetes appeal. Because it’s small, it’s easy to deploy remotely manageable. this is exciting. And you know, we look at that for software pieces, of course, because we have a lot of software that can, can run in that kind of format, but also at rate, what are different hardware formats that might actually, the amenable or the work.

Right. So a smartNIC basically. I mean, it’s incredible how much power is on a NIC today. When you look at the actual CPU and the server piece that goes on them, that’s coming out. It’s incredible. I mean, it is a server on a NIC. You’re like, it is right there. You know, it’s like looking at an Arduino right there.

Jason Bloomberg: A server on a NIC that sort of boggles the mind because back in the day, a NIC or network interface card was a card you stuck in a server, and now you’re putting the server in the card that goes in the server. So it’s like, well, where does this thing go? If the server’s on the card?

Yeah.

Lori Mac Vittie: Yeah. It’s actually an additional server, right? It’s a server for them. However…

Jason Bloomberg: A server in the card in another server,

Lori Mac Vittie: another server. Yeah. It’s very, very recursive there. But it does. It allows you to do a lot more compute, intense network processing, right on the NIC, before it ever hits the server.

So you’re saving those resources. So same kind of model, same kind of story. When you look at it from the network, but now you’re just kind of shoving it all together because edge requires different form factors and raid, better economy of scale and smaller hardware. so those are things we’re looking into, right?

How, what can you put there? What makes sense? Right. Some things don’t make sense. Some do. and we’re exploring those options. I’m looking at just right. What about the, you know, the container side? How do you do that? When you deploy maybe a piece of an app out to the edge, are you still going to need load balancing?

Or are you going to need some other service if you do, then we should probably figure out how to be there and how to provide that same kind of rate, easy deployment and use and management, which is where you end up going back to SaaS and looking at IaaS.

As you know, maybe the enterprise uses slow down, but I think you’ll see a lot of technology vendors making a lot of use of cloud because it makes sense to put a lot more.

It matters to have management as a service? You don’t go to Salesforce for that. You go to something like Amazon or Google or Azure, and you build your solution on top of that. So great. It’s a, you know, it’s maybe just a shift in who their buyers are and who uses them more. But I think cloud is going to be with us long enough to be called a real legacy legacy, or heritage legacy.

We’ll just keep tacking on terms until it’s indicative of how old it is.

Jason English: Yeah. All this effort seems very progressive too, to how much we’re driving new kind of business models based on what we can do. but then the other side of it, obviously there’s a big cybersecurity risk, an increase in the size of the attack surface.

And you kind of deal with some of that on, on a daily basis as well. I imagine. So, you know, what, what kind of concerns are you seeing out there and, how do enterprises address that side?

Lori Mac Vittie: Oh, one of the things that we’re watching is this move of attackers.

It’s not just the broader surface, but up the stack. Right. So it used to be, we’re just gonna, you know, we’re going to do a Smurf attack right now. We’re gonna do a DNS amplification attack. We’re going to stop your business. Now we’re going to do a DDoS attack. Now we’re going to attack your application.

Now, it’s moving up to the business logic. Like we actually had some, we were fielding a survey. Yeah. And if you give incentives for a survey, you will suddenly find that attackers are like, ‘Oh, really? Here’s a bot.’ Great. And then we’ll just keep hammering it because they want that incentive. That’s a security threat.

I mean, to the business, because now somebody is getting money for just running a script.  It’s an attack on the business. You see different kinds of attacks on business logic. It’s like credential stuffing. Not about overwhelming you. It’s about how could I get access by attacking your systems at a logical layer.

people who go in when Nike has a really big sale, they have botched that, watched this go in, scoop up everything at really good prices. And then resell them on eBay. For more. It’s a business attack. And it’s really fascinating to watch that start to evolve because how do you defend against that?

Cause it’s not just the amount of traffic it’s: ‘Who are you, and what are you doing? And how are you interacting with this flow? That’s happening well above the application and what are you doing? How do you recognize that?’ So those are some of the challenges that we’re looking at. I mean, there’s still the normal challenges that you still have to deal with.

And it’s not that those are new, it’s that we need new ways to address them because Kubernetes and cloud and edge and everything’s changing, but there are also new attacks, new forms of attacks, and that we need to start guarding against in terms of security. And, so we’re really kind of digging into those as well as how do we provide the kind of intelligence you need to stop that or recognize it in the first place.

It’s really hard.

Jason Bloomberg: Yeah. Ad fraud falls in that category. And that’s been going on for years. It’s tricky because you know, the advertising algorithms are complex and real time. so you know, the attackers are also have to be complex in real time. And so it’s just this ongoing battle. I know the airlines have really, had a hard time with the attackers gaming, the price, the airline pricing system, and it’s really tricky to guard against.

Jason English: Yeah.

Lori Mac Vittie: Yeah. It, it really is. you have to have a business visibility into everything, right? So you not only have to be able to see, you know, what the application is doing and you have to be able to see, all the way down into the network, you have to be able to see the client. Then you have to start understanding that relationship and what indicates this is not a real person, because they’re not behaving the way a real person behaves. And it’s not just about mouse clicks. I mean that’s right. Easy enough for bots to adjust to and scripts, to be able to replicate. It’s how they navigate through a flow, how long it takes, you know, to read something, those kinds of things.

Right? It’s all of those combined. So you need the visibility and the context. Then you need to be able to analyze that in real time to be able to say, that’s not right. You need to stop that. Yeah. So it’s a really complex problem. That’s just great. You’ve got a lot of space to cover and a lot of weight, different ways you have to kind of think to get a hold of all of those bits of data to pull it together, to make sense.

Jason English: This been very interesting, Lori. so is there anything else that’s a particular interest right now that you’re kind of following or, or something new you’re looking at these days?

Lori Mac Vittie: What do you mean I’m looking at. Wow. Hmm.

Jason English: Yeah. You’ve already named several.

Jason Bloomberg: So five G what do you think of 5g?

Lori Mac Vittie: Yeah, it’s just faster phones, but for the enterprise, I think it gets one better than four G.

Now you’ve stepped into a space that I rarely go into other than — We have a significant effort that deals with service providers. Of course. We have a lot of technology that’s specifically for service providers. I mean, working with 5g, they’ve got like a whole effort going on and I know that the better bandwidth rate is faster.

Is really critical, because edge is going to require it or force it. It depends on which side of the fence you’re on, but also just work from anywhere. This is the number of kids who are doing online learning right now. You know, we don’t know how long that kind of a model is going to last. I asked how much of this is, is significantly permanent.

You know, everybody likes to say, well, this is the new normal I’m like, what is this. Cause we don’t know yet. Everything keeps changing day to day, but we do know a lot of people are going to continue to work from not just home, but anywhere. I work from multiple places from my office here in the basement to my mother-in-law’s in Cincinnati.

it doesn’t really matter because we have zoom and we have, you know, hopefully 5G. So you get that, you get better connections. Hopefully zoom is a little bit more stable over it. I don’t know if anybody else has those problems, but people are constantly just right. It’s falling off. It’s, it’s having problems.

Cause it’s just so saturated. So I, you know, I hope it’s a good thing. I try not to look at it. My, my new passion right now is, is looking into, More on the analytics and visibility and how that’s evolving. Visibility. Isn’t isn’t enough. Now we’re looking at observability. And how does that flow into operability?

How do we get people there? And what are the strategic moves that it has to make in order to actually progress in their transformation efforts? So, it’s interesting because you start looking at weird things this morning. I was learning how many signals a human body sends per second. And it’s a lot, it’s like 11 million bits per second.

You’re like, wow. That’s like, I need 5 G inside.  I mean, I’m not sure it, can I do that? what’s going on? So, you know, it’s those higher level challenges or, you know, what I’m trying to look at and then how cloud fits into that, how, you know, how containers fit into that? What does app modernization really mean?

Cause a lot of times when people say that they’re like, Oh, you just put it in a container. It turns out that’s not true. That’s not how it works. Right. So just trying to dig into all those different things that fit together eventually to make up an entire data center. Okay. Cause it’s not just one thing or another.

Jason English: Yeah. It’s in a sense. It’s like the world’s most complex product. Right? All these pieces have to come together to build this, but you know, it could take, it’s like something that’s constantly changing over the course of years. So the, the maintenance of the product you build.

Lori Mac Vittie: So yeah, I hadn’t thought about it that way before, too, right?

Yeah. I mean it’s because everyone is unique too. Right. If it wasn’t, we’d all just be on SaaS everywhere. Everything would be fast, but we’re not because it’s such a unique bunch of systems that have been built and put together. Then it is kind of, a product. Wow. I like that angle. Cool.

Jason English: Well this has been really great, Lori, so, thanks so much for being on our show.

Is there, any place I should direct our listeners to go for some more information about, or something interesting to send them to right now?

Jason Bloomberg: You got a free plug, so what do you want to plug?

Lori Mac Vittie: Oh, my, I’m just going to plug F5.com.

Jason Bloomberg: It’s easy to spell, right?

Lori Mac Vittie: Easier to remember F5.com. I and the rest of the octo (Office of CTO) team blog out there. So we kind of give a view of how we see things coming in the future.

What’s new, what you’re going to need to look for, what we see as, you know, everything evolving. And then of course, everybody else is writing about it. I mean, stuff that helps you right now. There’s a good mix of content out there that has some interesting things. Plus I, you know, we’ll see things in our annual researches out there that I helped drive.

So, I always like plugging that F5 State of app services report.

Jason Bloomberg: We’ll put a link to that. Definitely. So, very good.

Lori Mac Vittie: Thank you.

Jason English: Yeah. Thank you very much. It’s been great catching up.

Lori Mac Vittie: Yeah, it’s been great catching up. Thank you.

Jason English: Okay, I’ll stop recording now.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Intellyx podcast. If you have any questions or ideas for future episodes, feel free to drop us an email at PR@Intellyx.com. Until next time, keep on transforming.