Getting higher (or deeper) in The Cloud

Nat Schooler had the privilege to interview IoT Expert and Adjunct Professor Dan Yarmoluk, on this occasion they discussed cloud.

Nathaniel Schooler 0:01
Welcome to influential visions. Here, we interview futuristic leaders who share their deep industry knowledge, business experience with you, ensuring you have your finger on the pulse and your eyes wide open.

My name is Nat Schooler and I am your host today. So today I’m joined by Dan Yarmoluk. And he’s an industrial IoT professional, a full-stack technology solution provider from hardware through to cloud API integration. It’s a work order systems is an adjunct professor in data science and software engineering. And we’ve done a couple of podcasts before. And today, we’re actually going to be talking about cloud and getting higher or in fact, deeper in the cloud. So yeah, it’s quite an amazing place that we are facing now. Dan what’s your sort of take on the situation with the cloud right now?

Dan Yarmoluk 1:07
Well, man, it’s great to be here. I think we’re finding that you know, the world is migrating to the cloud. But you know, there’s still way more runway to go. According to this new study by McKinsey, we start seeing that most companies are only about 2020 to 25% of their way into their cloud journeys. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of more work to be done. And it’s exciting, yet, it’s difficult. So a lot of people are reckoning with all these different changing tools and toolsets. And they have to mind the store, meaning regular business at the same time, they don’t want to miss the future. So we’re kind of reckoning with this transition, you know, to an agile development kind of sandbox.

Nathaniel Schooler 1:57
Right? So when you talk about the Agile development sandbox, you’re talking about, you know, very safely controlled experiments with new solutions, is that fair to say?

Dan Yarmoluk 2:12
Yeah, that is fair to say these can be sandbox systems, which was cordoned off, you know, safely away from existing workloads. And what we’re really trying to get through is, is get to this point of rapid iteration and innovation, and wanting to be able to experiment, like on mass, in a way that is quick, and you can test the use cases, environment, so it allows that otherwise, it was the old world of servers and spinning up things and, and looking at databases in a static environment, as opposed to an online kind of dynamic environment.

Nathaniel Schooler 2:55
Okay, okay. And you know, from this McKinsey study, it says it says, say that there are the only sort of 20% of the people are into Cloud journey. So that that equates to like 80% of workloads still being on-premise is that that’s like, that’s like kind of risky, isn’t it?

Dan Yarmoluk 3:14
Well, I think it is, I mean, if we have to move fast, and you have to be able to look at these charts, the way people are digesting media today or information. And, and the amount of big data being that just keeps growing and growing. And you know, you can’t just kind of being continued to do things on-premise in a rapid format. So and also those servers or server racks just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So if you’re a small and medium-sized company, it kind of becomes a ball and chain on you at a certain point. So

there is a lot more to do.

I don’t think it’s completely off base to go. Okay, there’s a lot more to do, but quite a bit has been done. And so people should not say like they’re behind the eight ball, but there are still many more workloads to do. We just have to find the right architectures to kind of be able to deal with these things and lift and shift these in the right way such that it doesn’t compromise. Continuous business.

Nathaniel Schooler 4:20
Right, right. So when you say device architectures, are you actually talking about the well, security, the scalability, the speed of the processes? What do you actually referring to when you talk about architecture?

Dan Yarmoluk 4:36
Well, the way you know, now, I’m not a, I’m not a senior architect, or, or cloud professional on my day to day, but we’ve had to leverage it in various ways. And it was very interesting for us. And I mean, my day job in an industrial IoT environment and our platform and our solution. You know, there’s some best practice architectural principles, which is kind of building decoupled systems. You know, we want to kind of separate storage from the compute and process stuff, and newer technologies will replace the old ones. And this kind of decoupled or modular approach allows that risk mitigation, you know, because you’ll be able to be agile, and computing, the swords are separate. So if something does change. Now, a lot of my contacts in that our high level in technology says that we’re always going to be on the precipice of bridge technologies, always migrating and changing what can be more efficient, faster, cost-effective. And if you think of it like that, and we’re always changing, we have to kind of have these little unique workloads that we can kind of like appetisers something we can just put it on the plate, the plate may shift, the appetiser, my but this kind of flow and orchestration. We’re just trying to break down that process so that it doesn’t slow us off, slow us up in the future.

Nathaniel Schooler 6:13
Right, right. And being slowed up in the future could be down to the lack of skills within the vendors. Is that is that fair to

Unknown Speaker 6:21
say?

Dan Yarmoluk 6:24
Absolutely, I mean, this is the real, you know, we often hear about the lack of data scientists, you know, people being able to do data-driven kind of analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, visualisation, etc. But, you know, there’s a lot of other skill sets to that are still very high in demand, if the modern-day science of software engineers, for engineers, things like that, that are all in the guts of how to make these connected solutions work. So there is a lack of skills. And this why we’ve seen a lot of the cloud providers, they’re really storage, guys, you know, the cloud providers, they really want storage at the end of the day, but to facilitate that kind of storage, they have to create toolboxes, code list code, API ecosystems, such that the partners are subject matter experts are vertical guys that work with these cloud providers are able to rapidly iterate because they don’t have all those software engineering, kind of that that wasn’t their traditional bailiwick, you know, they were building pumps, they’re building fans, they were building motors, and all of a sudden, you know, they’re there, they’re being forced in a digital environment to kind of work there. But that’s not historically where they’re what they’re good at. And they can’t scale up. And it could be a road to nowhere, just adding more and more software, guys, if you don’t have the right problem to solve. So it’s kind of the industry has created toolsets for people to experiment.

Nathaniel Schooler 7:59
Right, right. And when you’re talking about toolsets, you’re talking about what like AI? And for example, you know, chatbots, and this kind of software. And what else? Let me see, I’m just thinking, and perhaps, and what’s it called? language processing, natural language processing, image recognition, what What things? Is that the sort of stuff that you’re talking about here?

Dan Yarmoluk 8:32
Right, right. I mean, those are some of the things I mean, you know,

from a cloud perspective, you want to kind of containerize these workloads, and there’s this containerization, or Kubernetes is very popular. Think about blockchain, you know, you want to create this kind of secure business transaction network, when you talk about data, is now object storage, you know, because things are changing voice data, image data, I’m in a big data environment. And then AI is all these kind of different machine learning type of tools, which can be chat, arts, it can be, like you said, natural language processing or image recognition. But, you know, I watched a colleague of mine is like, 50, few who was a kind of a coder 2030 years ago, became a line manager and a business guy. So a technical engineer, that

Nathaniel Schooler 9:23
that really that I’m gonna have to ensure that what are we saying about chatbots? I didn’t I didn’t catch that we had a sort of problem with a connection, some reason?

Dan Yarmoluk 9:32
Well, chatbots, you know, are popular today. But there’s a lot of, you know, if we were to do have done that 10 years ago, that would have been very, very manual software, coding and rules-based kind of engine where would have like 10,000 different rules if this then that if this? If not, then communicate with point C. But now, the way the framework set up, you can build a storey bought, seen it an IBM convention, where my colleague is 52, built the in the thing was built a chatbot and 15 minutes, and sure, no, I did, however simplistic, it’s starting to show that you do not have to have this tremendous acumen to do some kind of meaningful development, or at least be on the path to that, you know, yeah.

Nathaniel Schooler 10:23
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So is it so the big data, when you say, when you said to me, big data is like necessitating the new architectural solutions in the cloud, or the unique workload? What do you mean by that, in relation to what you just said?

Dan Yarmoluk 10:44
Well, you’ve heard the statements that, you know,

I’m, like more data has been generated in the last year than in the history of humanity. That’s how much is being generated, mostly by the prolific creation of mobile phones, mobile usage. Yeah. But also, you know, we’re getting into this world whereby 2025, there are things how many 10s of billions of devices will be connected. That means in the industrial sphere, we think of, we think of our mobile phone, but we humans go to sleep, we can shut the phone off. But yeah, good machines, they’re going to continuously talk all the time, and be communicating small bits of data. So when you think of this massive amount of data, whether it be numbers or, you know, simplistic kind of text data, it’s still growing in astronomical rates. So you can’t just keep, you know, adding servers or on-premise stuff to that kind of tsunami of data coming at you. Right? drowning in data and starving it information is a popular, popular term. So we have to find a different mechanism to kind of hold all this stuff. And because we want the data to kind of mine unique insights at the same time. We can’t we can’t just be so worried about security that we do it on-prem, or that was the traditional way of doing it. So we do it on-prem, it just you can’t keep scaling up to keep up with that growth in certain industries. So we have to go to the cloud to be able to take that volume of information.

Nathaniel Schooler 12:20
Yeah, yeah. IBM has made available to the developer community and offer we have $12,000 worth of Cloud Credits. And if you’d like to pick that up, you go to WWW dot influential visions.com, forward slash IBM Cloud Credits, you can grab that there. So let’s get back to the show. So so that that basically comes back to the containerization of the cloud, and actually being able to run something 24, seven, no, that if you know, for example, one of those cloud containers is attacked or has a problem that you can just replicate what that data was and run in the cloud effectively with no downtime, right? That’s correct.

Dan Yarmoluk 13:17
Yeah, you can have redundancy, and save those instances, and not be as harmed as if it was on-prem. And I’ve talked to your kind of internal thing, and in many industries are trying to kind of have a hybrid strategy.

Unknown Speaker 13:33
Because

Dan Yarmoluk 13:35
they have big security concerns, you can think of the utility, you know, we hear about nefarious means trying to get in and control these things, and they’re secure. And command and control has always been like that. At the same time, they’re realising that this volume of information or looking to retrofit and connect their kind of machines in the utility, it necessitates a different approach. So there can be hybrid solutions. But in addition to just hybrid solutions, being multi-cloud, or private cloud and public cloud or multi-vendor, also what is, what is another phenomenon that’s hitting this area is this open-source area, where, you know, the community is kind of driving best in class software kind of environments. And it’s, it’s different than proprietary software, because it’s meant to integrate, it’s meant to work. It’s meant to be malleable and modular. And that is why some of the best software development minds look at open architectures that are open and true, what they mean by open source is that you can see the code, and it’s not a black box. So you hear about things like algorithms, there are biases in them. Also, in software environments, people want to know what’s making this machine go, what makes it drive from this to that, and that kind of transparency builds trust and allows the community to also participate in the code and augmented for their use cases and these open-source models. And that is just the way the world’s going it’s going open source, it’s almost going to the point that it’s free, people participate it make it better, and it becomes a dominant kind of choice. and commercialization models come in services around that, you know, and that’s why Red Hat has been so successful, that it’s been able to, you know, be a billion-dollar company with very little IP, you know, at all, it’s just managing the environment. And that is, I think the world that we’re heading to, in the future, de facto, and proprietary software is kind of becoming a thing of the past.

Nathaniel Schooler 15:55
Okay, that’s, that’s, that’s very, very interesting. So to to navigate this open-source, like multi-tools solution set of the future? What a partner is doing to do that, Dan?

Dan Yarmoluk 16:16
Well, I think they’re trying to find

partners are also looking Yeah when you think of partnership, you know, there’s, there’s, it’s two ways, right? You think of the partner that wants to develop an industry-specific solution, but they’re also tapping that partner for those frameworks, and open-source models, to be able, for to facilitate that vertical solution. So it is definitely a team approach. Right? You know, you can’t be everything to everybody, you can’t be the best at open source software, but it’s the encouragement of allowing people to play in that, in that in that development for their solution. So partners have to get educated on it, it’s rather overwhelming, you know, because there, again, from the mind, the storey look at new things in the future, and develop kind of ROI models or commercialization success on those things. So it’s, you have to have this ever, you know, never-ending curiosity to learn and want to develop yourself as an organisation with these new technologies. That’s the best advice I can have is just always to remain curious. You know?

Nathaniel Schooler 17:35
Yeah, yeah, I agree completely. I think learning anything, is it’s a fundamental part of learning, isn’t it? And especially if you’re, if you’re enjoying yourself, I mean, it’s very interesting now, in terms of how things work, and like, actually, how people don’t really need that many programming skills anymore, they can just go and just bolt on these things to what they’re doing already. And don’t need to use coding skills in many, in many ways. Is that is that fair to say?

Dan Yarmoluk 18:09
Well, they’re trying to get to that world of like code list code and drag and drop the devils in the details, right? Because there’s just always so many nuances and wrinkles and issues and things that are changing. Yeah, so it’s a little bit of both, right? It’s, it’s a mixed bag of, of, yes, there’s some programming. Yes, it’s called list code. And that’s where we that that’s, that’s the promised land, we’re not quite there yet. But, but if you were a small, medium-sized business, you can leverage a lot of these toolsets that are provided by the vendors, such as IBM, etc. will get you pretty darn far to where you want to go. And then whether you tap a red hat or someone else to kind of augment that, as you’re going to version two point O or 3.0, that that organisation can figure it out, but they first want to kind of test it in a, you know, non-gigantic investment way, right? Because typically, a lot of these places want consultative fees and building it. And you can think of teams of Indian engineers that are with gigantic companies that do this. outsourced or IT shops, so to say, and traditionally small, medium-sized business does cannot do that, you know, so this is the industry’s response to that to that market segment, I think,

Unknown Speaker 19:33
hmm. So

Nathaniel Schooler 19:37
what better basically, I don’t like the word disruption, but we’re in a, we’re in a disrupted business world completely these days. And this, like need for digital agility is so necessary, right? And what you’re saying is, is that basically, we need to just keep learning continually use the, for once a better word, the education resources that are provided by the vendors. Is that is that right?

Dan Yarmoluk 20:10
Yeah, that well, yes.

And I think you hit the nail on the head, we’re talking about digital agility here, right? How do we be able to, you know, change to a very rapidly evolving marketplace, doesn’t matter what business you’re in, and be able to pivot on that. And provide new services or new insights for that company. So it just requires people to be aware, not go back to your traditional biases of what you think it was, right? And why it was right because it’s moving quickly. As you can see, you know, Amazon’s one of the most valuable companies in the world, and at the same time, as we’re talking about that, that that size, and that gigantic juggernaut we have, you know, Sears and Roebuck went out of business, right, it was the traditional, you know, a gigantic retailer that I grew up with this as a kid. Yeah, oh, you have to be able to pivot to these different things. And like, you can see Walmart, a traditional retailer has pivoted to more online or e-commerce type solutions for their customers in a variety of ways. So you, in states having the ability to pivot in those areas. And if it’s mostly data-driven, if it’s mostly software-driven, if it’s a mobile commerce environment, whether it be enterprise or whether it be industry, or consumer, we have to have this environment, like you’re saying that facilitates agility, right? You know, it’s like training at the gym, how do we get agile and kind of knowing those things, and being plugged in. So if you don’t have a gigantic software team, and you’re, you’re a partner that has leveraged things like maxima with IBM and, and work order systems and industrial environment, you know, you’ll want to look to IBM subject matter expertise, as it relates to cloud environments for these hybrid solutions that are the market is demanding, you’re going to want to look at maybe vertical expertise and things like machine learning, or neural networks or edge processing, there’s all these different things, but you have to know what tools to choose from. And you have to know that there you have access to them. Right, this is the first thing is that people have to know that these things are available, and can they start playing with them?

Nathaniel Schooler 22:33
But I mean, I don’t think people know, actually that there are so many different options right now, I think, I think we’re almost we are at a point where you have to hire someone to tell you what would be of interest for you, you know, and, like, in terms of like, these developer tools with like, starter kits and stuff like that, like, what, what sort of starter kit, you know, would be the best kind of kit that you’re you sort of mentioned here in your article for like DevOps and stuff like that?

Dan Yarmoluk 23:06
Well, I think the right starter kit is, is a lot of these, if you’re the right partner, and you’re looking to migrate some of these work workloads is to migrate some of these functions in a safe sandbox in a cloud. So there’s a lot of easy ways to get started. And, you know, IBM is offering $12,000 off, you know, free Cloud Credits to get started. For the right partners. Yep. And starting to look around the toolsets around the cloud. And I’ll give you an example. Right, we had, we have an industrial IoT solution. It’s monitoring various kinds of spectrums of data in both ultrasonic and vibration. And to understand when a rotating machine, roller element bearing something pumps, fans, motor suppressors, and it would force out an alert. So we you start getting that kind of hardware connected, and it starts having all these alerts, they start becoming a nuisance, right? It’s kind of like your email nudges. Just imagine hundreds of them a day, would you like do this? Would you like to do that? start finding out that that, okay, we have an alert, we’ve covered up but we told him what the problem is. But that’s not really integrating into the workflow. And what we did is we took a surplus function. And basically what that means is, if this alert, tell it to do this, and then API integrated into their older systems that are spit out a work order, okay? That way, we’re eliminating the judgement call by the human, you know, because I got a million things already taxed, we can’t expect regular field engineers to be looking and pondering over, you know, machine learning data. And visualization, we’re too busy. There’s already tax, they’re already we’ve already in the manufacturing of buyer, we have granted, we ground this now. And it’s solely in that, you know, some of these jobs should be done by two or three people. And we’re trying to give them more data to do their job better. So some of these simplistic tools are very, very meaningful, such as any of these API integrations, and that lets this kind of applicant is API’s and application programming interface, which is shares this data between these two systems. And with that creates interoperability and integration the at the best way right now. So that we’re going to live in this world of API’s and API integration for a long time, and some other standard comes along. And it’s creating an environment where we can integrate these things. And then, you know, thread, you know,

thread the, you know, thread through the eye of the needle, so to say, to bring it all the way down to business. So when I say we integrated our API, in the work order system, something spits out in a piece of paper and says, go fix this machine by doing this. So instead of alerts and alarms, we’re just telling them what to do. And it’s already integrated in the workflow. Now, this is a transition phase, when we get into this world where there’s no more paper and no older systems, everything’s new, that’s fine. But we got another 20 years to kind of transition to this mega digital environment, for lack of a better word. Yep. And that, you know, that that service function that I did with some of these industrial IoT experts, and data scientists, as basis basic as it may sound, it was really, it was really like, cutting edge in a way to, for these industrial guys who’ve been in plants and, and this kind of environments for decades to go, Wow, now we’ve kind of, we’ve kind of closed this, you know, we’re almost closing the entire feedback loop. You know, in the sense, though, it’s going all the way to the corrective action, and hopefully, get that behavioural change. And then, and then when you start seeing the results, you’ll get a 360-degree view of what’s working and what’s not working? And what does that tell you that will tell you like, do you need that many pumps? Do you need that many that much redundancy? Can you do? Can you do more with less? Can you know, can you just going to throw labour at every single problem, you just going to double up the labour as your business case grows, or is there ways to kind of digitally kind of be aware of what’s happening, and dispatch people accordingly to where the needs are the highest, right, and Franco, it requires a lot of data, it requires a lot of information. But we have to funnel that data in, in an appropriate place such that it can be digested, you know, the the promise of the alert, technology is great, but we also have to be able to absorb what it’s, it’s provided to us, right? It’s that’s the other thing, you and I could just tell on our daily basis, just podcast, like there’s so much going on, there’s so much information and new ways to kind of communicate and do things with each other, it’s hard to keep up. So you got to be able to digest it and put it in your daily life, you know, to make it really meaningful. So there is very easy to use tools out there, it just necessitates that the subject matter expert, wherever that is that that that vertical industry leader has to, you know, has to think about the problem and has to, you know, mould these technology solutions into their, into their world.

Nathaniel Schooler 28:38
Right, I get you. So what we’re really talking about then is actually having the right culture of innovation for the first thing, and then we’re actually talking about Sam boxing ideas within departments. Yeah, based upon the requirements within that department. So if it was like a production orientated business, you would have different production managers, wouldn’t you for different parts of that chain? Right of the production line? So is that fair to say?

Dan Yarmoluk 29:12
That is a fair answer. Yeah. No, that is very soon.

Nathaniel Schooler 29:16
Yeah. So so then it really goes back down to the culture of innovation, the inherent culture within the business and actually talking to the people who are on the ground and saying, Well, you know, what could we automate, that’s going to make your job better? That’s going to make your job easier, it’s going to get to help you. I mean, I think, you know, there are so many ways that we can do this, it’s, it’s almost, it’s almost like, Well, actually, you know, do we start? Where do we start within the business?

Dan Yarmoluk 29:48
Yeah, and a lot of people I’m seeing

what I’m starting to witness, I don’t know if I can articulate it properly is more of a focus on the process of process optimization, as opposed to the endpoint. So it’s not just being learning with the killer algorithm that gives you this holy grail of a data point or insight. It’s kind of like, Can I automate chunks of the process that makes much easier, or for humans to do things that they should be working on as opposed to mundane? No data reading, you know, reading things? Yeah. Things if they’re, they’re all routine. If you think of a chatbot, I want to do a return, okay, return Why? Why do you want to return it? You can do this in an industrial environment as well. Right? He can think of the same kind of rules-based decision engine. Yeah, that can help these things, and we’re really trying to say is, can we can is, is there a place, you know, we should be effectively spending our time rather than just, you know, manning the shop, you know, if you go to some of this industrial violence, police pumps and systems and stuff like that, you’re going to see, like, there are just guys sitting around, like, just think something breaks Well, okay, let’s say grows, because we want the business to grow, you’re going to just add more guys just sitting around looking at these things? Or can we, you know, almost be digitally connected, such that you dispatch them again, I’m kind of saying the same thing again, but where they should be focused on as opposed to idleness, right? Because everybody’s trying to keep their costs down. That’s for sure.

Nathaniel Schooler 31:25
Yeah, very much. So. I mean, I think you’re completely right there. I mean, if you can, if you think about just like the wine industry is one example. Yeah. You know you put your filter sheets in the filter, you, you, you, you, you, you wrap it up, so it’s tight. Yeah. You create your airlock. Yeah. And then you pump the wine through the filter. Right. And, and you know, you’ve done all the work you so what do you What’s the winemaker doing? What’s the guy doing? He’s just sitting there waiting for the filter to go through. So what does he do with his time? Yeah, it’s like, most strategic work could be actually done. If you could automate that process. Once you’ve checked it all. And you’ve made sure that it’s a wash though, it’s all clean and then you steam it and then you run the wind through right you can, you can easily automate a lot of that process. So once the wine has actually gone through the filter, and you’ve got some air coming in, you know that you’ve run out of wine from the other end, right? So you can have automation that switches the pump off, right?

Dan Yarmoluk 32:30
Right. That’s exactly right. So I mean, again, my my, my interest has been focused on these little, maybe you can call them single, single-digit percentage gains by automating certain parts of the process. It’s not all going to be automated every single thing of everything, right. But can we automate certain aspects of it, and then you’re getting these percentage gains. And if you think about that, from a time perspective, money perspective, labour utilisation perspective, you start adding up 5% here, 7%, here, 12%, here, it starts to get to be meaningful. So it’s looking at the desired end state. And you’re looking for that machine learning algorithm and all these like AI and all this stuff. But also, there’s just a lot of tools. And that’s what the cloud environment allows us to do is kind of, you know, take those workloads and kind of look at ways in which we can optimise that stack. And it’s very exciting, I would encourage people that are kind of, in traditional industries to look at these things get boned up. Because the solution providers, the vendors are very much interested in hearing what they have to say, to customise their solutions and make it their own. So it’s a win win for everyone. And we’re trying to evangelise what’s going on here. And I would just encourage them to take a look around, not be intimidated by it, and try it in a safe environment. You’ll be surprised by the results.

Nathaniel Schooler 34:04
Yeah, very much. So. I mean, it’s, it’s very exciting to think that actually, you know, what we can use for security purposes, just as one example, if you think about the security threats that, you know, a router, for example, might have extra traffic coming through there. Yeah. You can use a some kind of AI-powered solution to check that out. Right. And like you were saying, with the Internet of Things having sensors on, for example, the motors in aeroplanes, for example, they use sensors on those don’t know, to work out if the aeroplane needs a service, right? Or if there’s something wrong with the motor. So it’s making things a lot safer, isn’t it for everyday people? Right?

Dan Yarmoluk 34:52
I think so I think it’s making it safer, I think it’s making it better. This is means that, you know, the world’s changing and but always, you know, jobs have shifted and changed, you know, we’re not we’re not picking fruits and vegetables with our hands. For the most part, you know, we’re using machines, you know, we’re taking you to know, we don’t use the horse and buggy anymore. We’re using you know, tractors and soon to be automated tractors and automated, you know, system. So I’m just knowing how to change it and better serve your customer and ultimately, you know, make, make the company and your customers very happy with it.

Nathaniel Schooler 35:32
Yeah, very much. So, I mean, I think the capabilities of actually feeding more people for less money are there now. I mean, just as an example, there’s a there’s a, there’s a watch the programme about tomato growing in the United Kingdom, and this gentleman, he’s actually worked out how to grow tomatoes to such an extent that they are the sweetest tasting tomatoes that you could ever possibly get. And he’s done that by working out how to stress them to the point of producing just the right tomatoes, giving them just the right amount of water and nutrients, and no more than that. So it saves so much resource. I think I heard that there’s some kind of like, 15% they’re going to save 15% of costs for food production is what I heard.

Dan Yarmoluk 36:23
Well, that’s tremendous, right? We’re in a resource-constrained world of water, you know, feeding more people on the planet, like you said that that’s amazing. That’s, that’s, that’s groundbreaking. Yeah. You know, I love it.

Nathaniel Schooler 36:36
Yeah. So I think any business can utilise this right? And all they really need to do is just is literally just check out, you know, if they’re into dev ops, or they’ve got a dev-ops or a tech company they work with, they can get these $12,000 of credits, right, just by clicking the link. Yeah,

Dan Yarmoluk 36:52
that’s absolutely right. And, and start exploring these tools and start having brainstorming sessions on what could be done. Yeah. And I, you know, there are definitely areas to put up in the cloud to digitise certain workloads to have access to this information, instead of being on the side. It’ll be very helpful for visibility, transparency, data-driven decision making, and it’s just the way of the future.

Nathaniel Schooler 37:21
But also, they’re going to be saving capital investment costs as well, aren’t they? Because they don’t need to actually reinvest and invest in servers that are in house, right. So they can just scale as the business grows.

Dan Yarmoluk 37:34
Yes, it is. It’s kind of like elastic compute, you know, they, it scales to according to the data storage and kind of computing power you need. You have to keep your eye on it, because it grows. So fast bills are higher than they expected to be in the cloud. So kinda it can be you have to be aware of it. And you have to know how to mutate and augmented, which has all these different solutions that are coming out and toolsets to be able to kind of manage those things. But, again, we’re looking at this new world and how to participate and be agile in the new world. And that’s kind of the cost of doing business. Now. It’s kind of table stakes. Yeah,

Nathaniel Schooler 38:12
yeah. Yeah, I hear that a lot. Actually. I mean, you either jump on board and really go for it, or you’re basically just going to be left behind on you really, and, you know, the chances of being acquired as well lower with businesses that aren’t keeping up, because the technology and the speed at which their competition can be ahead is just too much for them. Some of these people, you know,

Unknown Speaker 38:37
yeah, you’re right. Good point.

Nathaniel Schooler 38:40
Yeah. Well, thank you, Dan. It’s been really, really interesting. And I do really appreciate your time.

Dan Yarmoluk 38:47
Thank you, Nate. It’s always a pleasure. Cheers. Cheers.

Nathaniel Schooler 38:52 At the time of posting this IBM had made available to the developer community, an offer with $12,000 of cloud credits, if you are interested drop us an email via the contact form and we will see what we can do for you.

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