Chris: 0:14

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the fortnightly cables to clouds news podcast, where Tim and I basically go through a couple of the news articles that have come out over the last two weeks and discuss them.

Chris: 0:29

Tim gives all the hot takes he has, you know, those controversial opinions on the planet. But no, before we hop into that, actually I do want to provide a bit of an announcement. So you know, tim and I, over the course of this podcast, have frequently talked about things to do with Aviatrix, because we both work there and you know we were coworkers there for a long time. But I have made a recent change, so I have actually moved companies to Fortinet as of last week, so I'm three days in drinking from the fire hose, doing all that fun stuff, um. But just wanted to provide a quick update to the listeners, in case you had not noticed it anywhere else, that, um, I'm I'm working for a different company, so that's just a a quick, quick side note that I'll add there. Tim is very upset, um, that we're not coworkers anymore, but-workers anymore. But luckily, linkedin, we're still listed as employed at Cables to Clouds on LinkedIn, so we're technically still co-workers right, Exactly.

Tim: 1:33

I mean, we don't draw a salary or anything, but yeah, we're co-workers sure I wonder.

Chris: 1:38

We still haven't figured out who reports to who. The org chart is still a little hairy, but we'll figure it out. Yeah, all right, with that out of the way, let's hop into the news, um. So first up we have an article from channel e2ecom, um, which this is none of this has been confirmed by either of the vendors in play here, but it's a pretty strong rumor at this point that it sounds like VeloCloud, which you may remember from early SD-WAN days, was acquired by VMware several years ago. Sd-wan offering that then was acquired by Broadcom in the acquisition of VMware is now reportedly being sold off to Arista Networks. So Arista, obviously huge, huge player in the data center networking space right now. They've been very successful in taking a lot of that business from Cisco and really kind of creating that groundswell and creating that market there, and now it looks like they're looking to strengthen their SD-WAN offering for an acquisition. This is all rumors, like I said, but it says it could be valued nearly around a billion dollars.

Chris: 2:58

From what I've heard, I was under the impression that VeloCloud had kind of slowed on market adoption as of recent. I don't know if that has to do with the Broadcom acquisition. Obviously, we've made some comments about how Broadcom treats a lot of these things on this podcast, and maybe that it contributes to why some people would be a little bit hesitant to transact or move to VeloCloud et cetera. But I think this is an interesting move. It looks like Broadcom is kind of selling off pieces of the business that it doesn't find. I mean, just based on what Broadcom has done in the past, I'm assuming this is not, uh, you know what they consider their bread and butter, uh, moneymaker type products. Um, and I think there there's mentioned in here that they sold off the end user computing um option to um KKR. Um, I don't even remember that being announced, if I'm being honest with you, but um, that is that is listed in here as well.

Chris: 4:03

Um, from my understanding that Arista already had an SD-WAN product, I think it was called like um, pathfinder, yeah, pathfinder, but I think like it incorporated into the Arista WAN routing system type thing, and it was like this whole kind of portfolio, as far as I know.

Tim: 4:21

Yeah.

Chris: 4:22

Yeah, exactly so it was kind of baked into there. So I don't know if this is going to fit in there or what they're going to do with it, but quite an interesting move. I don't know if this is going to be kind of the next evolution for VeloCloud or maybe the end of days for VeloCloud, but yeah, I don't know. What do you think, tim?

Tim: 4:41

I mean this is typical PE behavior, right, which of course Broadcom pretty much operates as a PE, so private equity firm. So yeah, I can't say I'm surprised in any shape that Broadcom is divesting itself of pretty much everything that doesn't bring in the most money possible and just making what they can by selling it. Yeah, no, I don't have much to add that you haven't already covered. Arista is a good. It's probably a good fit for VeloCloud. There's a difference between selling. When a business sells off its technology to another business.

Tim: 5:13

There's still a huge question mark around what does integration look like? So I think that still remains to be seen. It can't just be as simple as I guess they could simply just take over VeloCloud customers and whatnot. But if they want to integrate it into their portfolio, I'm sure there's some work to be done there. And yeah, I think, just like the whole Juniper, hp Aruba thing, that still hasn't obviously happened in terms of where does the wireless fit in those portfolios? I think we're going to have to answer the same question Are are they just going to have VeloCloud, to just have VeloCloud, or are they going to integrate it? And if they integrate it, what does it look like next to its you know its homegrown, offering this Pathfinder.

Chris: 5:54

Yeah, and from what I recall, I believe there is a VeloCloud SASE product as well, so I'm assuming this is going to go with that. So I mean, I don't know if Gartner is still doing Magic Quad Horns specifically for SD-WAN or if it's kind of evolved into SASE at this point, but that potentially puts Arista in a good spot there with kind of the rest of the market contention that they see there. So, yeah, could be a good move, like you said.

Tim: 6:21

All right. In other news of things happening in the world of tech, it looks like Charter and Cox Communications are merging. So this is an article from CNBC, and the way the article reads it actually reads less like a merger and more like Charter's acquiring Cox Communications, because when it's all done, it looks like Charter's going to be the name that survives. But yeah, so I mean, these are two huge cable companies, so it's not unusual for you know, cable companies to merge. But what I found particularly interesting about this article is how it mentions that cable companies have been struggling, of course, since streaming services came out, which course since streaming services came out, which is, I think, everybody knows that right, and so the big part of their survival technique, if you will, is to roll in wireless. So they've added like wireless services. I'm sure by now everybody, probably in America, has gotten their cable company, a cable company calling them, so they have wireless services. So so the big three for cable has always been television, internet, of course, and then finally wireless services. So in this case it mentions that that's part of, maybe part of what's fueling the merger is that they're both just trying to stay essentially relevant and merge it together.

Tim: 7:45

What I find interesting is that this isn't getting the same scrutiny that some of the other large mergers are, because, like what is it Comcast? Comcast is still the biggest in America, I believe by a lot right. So maybe that's why, maybe that's why it's not getting. But there's so many other acquisitions out there that are like there's a Verizon one out there as well. What were they going to buy Frontier? They're going to buy Frontier, and that still hasn't gone through. So I don't know if this is political.

Chris: 8:13

Because they're being investigated for DEI practices.

Tim: 8:19

Yeah, yeah, it says that. So if they're currently being investigated for DEI, does that mean they had it? Yeah, I don't know, or they didn't have it. So anyway, yeah, Charter also recently acquired a completely different cable company. So I think we're getting into the mega consolidation wars now, where everything's going to get mega consolidated. But anyway, this isn't. I don't know. I don't think there's a lot to say to this other than just to point out the decreasing relevance of cable, but the increasing conglomeration of big companies in the US. I don't know How's it like? What do you think down? Companies in the US? I don't know How's it like. What do you think down there in the underland?

Chris: 8:56

Well, yeah, I mean, things definitely operate a bit different down here. There's only probably a handful of major kind of commercial ISPs that you can choose from, but there's also the NBN network, national Broadband Network. But this one does hit a little close to home for me, because charter was like the first job that I had in the technology sector, so like yeah so I worked at a call center charter. There's a huge charter call center in Louisville, kentucky, where I'm from, and yeah, just like troubleshooting commercial internet service or not, commercial residential internet services.

Tim: 9:34

This is crazy. I worked at Cox as a tier two high-speed internet rep. I was also one of my first tech jobs, nice. I worked at Cox Communications in their what is it? Virginia in their call center as a high-speed internet residential internet rep. How have we never fucking? Talked about this this has never this has never come up.

Chris: 9:55

In our entire friendship over the last like 10 years nice, yeah, it's funny, though, um, beautiful. So, yeah, we that's you're hearing this live on air me and tim are discovering that we both got into this realm of networking probably in the exact same fashion, which, which is which is crazy. But yeah, so I worked for Charter for a few years and then eventually, like that's where I got my CCNA and was like convinced that, like, that's what I needed to do, so I moved to their NOC and things like that. But all that aside, one thing that is weird is like, like you said this, like it's weird even hearing reference them as Charter again, because I thought, when they went through that recent acquisition where they acquired another insanely large telecom provider no, it was Time Warner oh, really, yeah, so they bought Time Warner and then the kind of merge of Charter and Time Warner was supposed to be Spectrum, that was their new name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now it's back to being called Charter and Time Warner was supposed to be Spectrum, that was their new name.

Chris: 10:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but now it's back to being called Charter Spectrum again, so they've adopted the old name. So maybe they're going to have a new name for when Charter and Cox come together. I don't know.

Tim: 11:07

Yeah, good point, I forgot about that. But I mean, this says it's going to be Charter, so here in Raleigh they still just like. I get calls it's from. I get email, I get mail like spam messages and stuff from Spectrum. It just says Spectrum in the location. So I think it's per market maybe, depending on where the market is.

Chris: 11:28

Yeah, I guess. So I mean, maybe I don't know if it's still a parent company or something like that. I mean, I think they probably do more than just this, but yeah. And just to be clear, when we were talking about wireless services, we were talking about, like, mobile services.

Tim: 11:39

Yeah, mobile, yeah, specifically.

Chris: 11:41

Because I say that? Because when I worked in the call center we also provided, like home wireless Internet and I also was responsible for troubleshooting that. So yeah, it's like you said, it's just kind of the super consolidation of all this stuff just to kind of turn a profit again. I think and you know this I mean, let's be honest, internet connectivity has become truly commoditized and is just basically used as an underlay for the applications that we want to run on it, even from a business and a and a kind of a uh, uh, uh, commercial perspective, right, um, so yeah, it's, it's crazy. Eventually there's just going to be one, right? They're all going to merge into one mega corpse yeah exactly.

Chris: 12:26

All right, uh, next up, another article from CNBC. Actually, um, this was reported on by several news outlets, but we found this one was probably the one that had the most info in there. So, as of recent and if you've been on LinkedIn in the last two weeks, you've probably noticed a bit of this but Microsoft actually laid off of about 3% of its global workforce, which I know 3% doesn't sound like that much, but for a company as big as Microsoft, that does turn out to be about 6,000 people. So odds are you know someone that was directly impacted by this. So it's funny because this comes like directly on the heels of their you know kind of Q1 reports coming out saying that you know they, of Q1 reports coming out saying that they you know they were they reported better than expected results, um, with $25.8 billion in uh, quarterly income for the quarterly yeah, quarterly income. So that's nearly $26 billion in one quarter.

Chris: 13:26

Um, yet they needed to lay off 6,000 people, um, so like better than expected. So what were you expecting? To lay off 7,000 people and you were able to cut that. Like it's just like the shit's getting old man, like it's like I know it's kind of like the rules of the game, but like it's, it's, it's so demoralizing, it just keeps happening. So yeah, I don't. I don't know if you have any additional comments here, specifically Tim yeah.

Tim: 13:56

So I mean in the article actually says what their, what their reasoning was. Basically they're they're using layoffs to pay for their AI capital investment. So there's not much more to say beyond that. Right at some point, you know, there's not going to be people to buy the products that you guys are selling anymore. It's a snake eating its own tail, and I've said it so many times.

Tim: 14:24

I mean, capitalism really became cancer when you know, we started favoring shareholders over stakeholders, when we started favoring shareholders over stakeholders, and that's never been more obvious as this freight train gains speed towards the mountain that it's going to crash into at some point. Yeah, best of luck to everyone. Of course, that's been laid off. I mean, god knows, they're in a line with 100,000 other people and 100,000 more to come, because this thing mentioned specifically that. You know or maybe it was either this one or a different one there's another article I was reading that was saying that they're eyeing more like they're thinking every year they're going to have to lay off like 10,000 more people to pay for their expansion into AI.

Chris: 15:06

Yeah.

Tim: 15:06

Which just says volumes really. It's insane, as they post quarterly profits that are record.

Chris: 15:14

The thing is like AI I mean, we've said it a few times before like AI is still this thing where, like, no one is making huge profits on this yet, like, yeah, there's no money being made on it.

Chris: 15:25

They're hedging their bets early enough to say like, oh, we need to keep laying off thousands and thousands of people every year to to pump money into. I have to assume that the executives are doing some kind of Charlie Day type math to figure out all this shit like how it's going to turn a profit, but that just seems so unnecessary at this point when you're making that much money already. It's crazy.

Tim: 15:52

I think they're just jerked around. I think they're getting jerked around by shareholders that are asking them what are you doing to capitalize on AI, and so they feel compelled to do something. I don't know that there's an actual payoff at the end of this that's going to be significant to what?

Tim: 16:05

they're going to expend to get to it 100%. All right, let's close this out. One more article. Honestly, it's a fairly short one anyway. Microsoft has decided to offer rival AI models from inside its own data center, so it's launched, and it's launching an AI coding agent another one, basically. So they're going to be offering models from what XAI, wink, wink, you know Grok or whatever, you know Grok or whatever, and from Meta, so Olamah and European startups, mistral and Black Forest Labs, hosted in its own data centers. So this is obviously different than traditional, maybe traditional marketplace type offers. But yeah, so. And then they're, and they unveiled a new artificial intelligence tool designed to complete software coding tasks on its own.

Tim: 16:58

So agent, basically like software, different than Copilot, where you're coding and Copilot is telling you what you're doing wrong and what an idiot you are. And here's what you should change. This is straight up give it a task and it'll go build the software for you from scratch. It's agentic in some way. It's unclear yet from the article exactly where the line is basically between how agentic it is or is it an actual agent, um, and if it is an agent, like, what tooling is it going to use? Uh, so it doesn't go into that, but basically that's. The difference is that this is something that's going to build software for you, versus you are building software and ai is coaching you or helping you clean it up. So, yeah, yeah. So the article specifically mentions, like GitHub Copilot feature is a coding agent and AI tool designed to help developers with coding tasks.

Tim: 17:46

Now, it's weird because I thought an agent was specifically autonomous, like to some degree, would go out and do things on its own. But this article I don't know if this article I mean this is from CNBC, right, so maybe or Reuters this one's from Reuters, I apologize, this article's from Reuters, so I don't know if that's a interpretation by the people writing the article or if I've got that wrong. So, anyway, and OpenAI released a preview of a similar agent. It's calling Codex. So everybody's stomping on each other now with this stuff as we race towards agents. And yeah, man, I don't know that's about it it mentions that moving forward, agents are probably going to actually end up mixing models, because the more autonomous it gets, the more different tooling you can draw from to build your agent. So yeah, I don't know, man, brave new world.

Chris: 18:33

Yeah, I would say, the announcements in this one are, you know, clear enough to justify that you should lay off 6,000 people? That's for damn sure. Yeah, I mean, think about how much money.

Tim: 18:44

Exactly Billions and billions. Yeah, one last thing in the article that is interesting Microsoft said it was creating a way for AI agents to have the same kind of digital identifier as human employees inside of company systems. This, I don't know how they're going to do it, but this is something I've been railing against for a while, which is this idea of we talk about MCPs and agents and autonomous coding tasks and exchanges of tooling with no security right. So this might be the first step towards some kind of security associated with AI workloads or AI tooling, or something which is desperately needed. We should move into AI security right in time for this whole thing, to desperately need it, as attackers are blowing everything up.

Chris: 19:30

Yeah, that line also jumped out to me. The same kind of digital identifier as a human employee that just immediately sends off so many security red flags. In your mind it's like what does that mean? Are they going to do 2FA? Are you going to sit there and just? Be hitting approve and whatever on your Microsoft Authenticator. No, they're going to give them a captcha and then slide the puzzle piece into place, exactly.

Tim: 20:04

And then the agent will be completely powerless.

Chris: 20:06

Yeah right, exactly so. Yeah, I don't know how you do that, but I mean not to say that innovation can't come along and do something cool, but, like I don't know, it seems like a lot of these constructs are put in place to disallow stuff like this, either be someone else or something digital acting on a behalf in a malicious manner. I just don't see how they can disseminate what's good from what's bad at this point, like you said, with the lack of security controls that are there already. So you know, I think if you have security in mind, you're probably not going to be jumping on this type of thing this early. So just hold you know, keep the horses ready. Eventually this stuff may get worked out or it may kill us all. We'll see.

Tim: 20:59

Yeah, the good news is you only have to wait for another probably another 20, 30, 40,000 layoffs before we get to the point where this will be fine.

Chris: 21:08

At first I thought you were going to say what about 20, 30 years? I was like brother, I probably won't even be here in 20, 30 years. All right, on that note, we will go ahead and wrap up for this week. So thank you so much for joining us. Uh, this has been the Capus clouds. Um. Fortnightly news update. Um, all these articles are put into a word doc that's in the show notes. So if you want to check that out, please give that a click. Uh, what did I say that one week? It was like throw a throw a click on that link or something like that.

Chris: 21:38

I can't remember yeah, I don't know, yeah, but you know um, do that, do that thing, Um subscribe to all this stuff, Um click on all the things, share this with a friend and uh, with that, we will see you next week. Goodbye, See ya. Thanks for watching.