CONNECTIONS VS COLLECTIONS:
WHY TELCOS KEEP LOSING -
JEFF APCAR

CRA: Jeff Apcar, welcome to the TechBurst Talks podcast. Jeff: Thank you very much. CRA: I'm looking forward to this discussion because we've known each other for quite a while, and I love picking your brains on technology because I feel like I can learn a lot from you. But I know a bit about you, but the audience doesn't. So why don't you tell us a bit about your background and where you are today? Jeff: Okay. I was in tech for 46 years, I did a degree in computing science back in 1977. I graduated In those days there were roughly nine or 10 people in the class. These days it's obviously a bit different, but my entire career has been technical and I finished up at Cisco a couple of years back. As a distinguished engineer. And I was there for just over 24 years at Cisco. And I, I worked on quite a bit of varying technologies, I've had a very diverse career from writing code to designing large [00:01:00] networks to cellular networks. And towards the end of my career or before I retired looking at low earth orbit satellites and tech like that. CRA: , I want to come back to this distinguished engineer position you had at Cisco. 'cause you had that for about 20 years, Jeff: Yeah, CRA: how I initially heard about you through one of our mutual friends, Brett. And you were a distinguished engineer in the customer experience, CTO. Chief technology office. So what does that actually mean? Jeff: Well there, there are different types of DES in Cisco. There are ones from engineering, there are ones from sales, and there are ones from the services organization. The services organization being those that go out and install or design or do the after sales implementations . With me in particular was I like to use the term I, I left a trail of evidence through all my workings at Cisco. I used to leave a lot of documentation around of implementations, what went wrong, what went [00:02:00] right, and that used to feed back to engineering and also to the sales teams. And that started to become noticed. And that's what got me to that position a long time ago. It's because a DE it's someone who can move the needle not only internally in the company to make new products or a change of direction, but also externally influence standards and ideas. And obviously most these have patents in certain technologies. It's a nebulous term really, but it's a pretty cool thing to have. It's also treated as an executive role, although it's quite technical. You don't have any reports, but you are treated as a senior executive. And and that's handy for those who are technically savvy. I'm not very good when managing people. having said that, you really do need to have very good communication skills if you get chosen to be one. And you can't apply for it. It's something [00:03:00] that's, it's like a knighthood, I guess, without sounding like an idiot, but it's what it is. CRA: So when I look at the industry, a lot of these companies are pushing the forefront of tech, but what you were doing with Cisco, with this role, it's really looking at what's next for them. Even so you're, you are at the bleeding edge of the Jeff: Yeah, yeah. The last several years of my career, last five or eight years, certainly that was the case. Yeah, absolutely. CRA: I remember we had a meeting in Sydney once, it must've been almost a decade ago, talking about the future of Low power wan. And we were looking Jeff: I, CRA: Laura, Jeff: yeah. CRA: versus N-B-I-O-T, which, and, and Sig Fox, which was a thing back then. I'm not sure if they're still around. You always get to look at these Jeff: Yeah. CRA: before they're even really ready to go so you're actually creating a market that doesn't Jeff: Totally, totally. I was very fortunate in that respect. I worked with some of the brightest minds, not only in Cisco, but in the industry in particular, JP Vasser, who was a Cisco fellow and he's now at Nvidia as a fellow, I'm sure. [00:04:00] And he was right at the forefront. And I, I used to be on the service side, he was on the engineering side. And I used to look at it from my lens of, how would it work for a customer, I try and push things back through to the engineering teams, including JP about, things that they had to consider instead of just being locked away as engineers, not speaking to customers. So I was very fortunate and I worked on some really, really interesting tech CRA: You've looked at pretty much everything over the years. I think basically anything, all the GS NP Ls, Jeff: Yeah, all the Gs and MPLS was where it all started way back when I started at Cisco back in 1999. All the technology. And when it comes to networking, it's basically encapsulation of some sort. And you've got a header and, and you've got the data and you've got , a trailer at the end and it just is sent. And those headers change over the years. And NPLS at the time was the label, and that was the thing that was all [00:05:00] the rage. You look at any technology today, it's still the same concept, but it's just implemented architecturally different. But MPLS certainly was one of those up and coming technologies all that time ago, and that's where I left the Trail of evidence. You know, it was new and not many people understood it. And so there was a lot of documentation and, and standards and stuff came outta that. Yeah, totally. CRA: And MPLS really changed the Jeff: yeah. Yes CRA: enterprises and Jeff: it did. It did. It did actually. What we started to see was that the really big enterprises, turned into what I call enter providers, where they started to look like a service provider, but with an enterprise jacket, or the other way around actually. They were slicing and dicing their organization into different VPNs. Keeping things separate, having it all come to the middle providing connectivity services. But that's all what MPLS used to do and could do. That was this whole idea. the large enterprises grabbed hold of it and all of a [00:06:00] sudden rather than being a service provider tech, it was starting to be something that large enterprises, you know, we're talking the Boeings of this world and, visa and stuff like that. They were interested in using it. So I coined that phrase the end provider, because that's what they became. And the tech sort of moved from the world of service providers into this enterprise area, which was really interesting. It did change the way things operated in a enterprise network as a, and a service provider network as well. Yeah, yeah, CRA: can give you a great stat on the service provider side. When I was at BT about 15 years ago in Asia Pacific, I think MPLS was close to 80% of our revenues. But it's moved on quite a bit since then. Now we've got 5G, so I know you got to work on 5G quite a bit over the years. What do you think about the current state of 5G? Jeff: For most people that are users of 5G, it is just another [00:07:00] connectivity that there's no clear value add for, you know, the regular Joe Blow who's just using their mobile. They see faster speeds, but the monetization of of the tech, it becomes very difficult to try and quantify and try and sell to a, a normal user there was all this idea of that 5G would replace wifi in high rises and office blocks where you would have the backhaul over 5G and you wouldn't use wifi. But that never came to be. And then we had small cells where we have a millimeter wave came along. And the thing with that is you still need a huge amount of infrastructure to have millimeter wave receivers everywhere. You still gotta have backhaul it somewhere, so it becomes this. Problem of, operating cost versus the value that you're giving to the customer. It's always been a hard sell. And from 4G to 5G it was always [00:08:00] a question for the service providers of, you know, how do we sell it? My opinion is the biggest problem with SP'S is that they'll all fall by the wayside because they're into connections. And to make money, you've gotta do collections. What I mean by that is that data is king and it's one thing to connect. Because what will happen if you provide a beautiful pipe as a service provider, and Google comes along and says, thank you very much, I'll use that pipe and I shall add value over the top with all my. Technologies and all my software and all my services, and for that $1 I pay you Mr. Sp I'll make $10. Right. And the over the top services just kill the service providers they still do today. Yeah. So it, it's that thing about connections versus collections and collecting data and doing something with it. And that's probably more on the iot side, but the idea is still the same. How do you add value on [00:09:00] top? And you know, the over the top players are just winning. And now the over the tops have got so big, they have their own fiber and their own networks, so they don't need to use anyone else's. And now we have starlink and Copa and all the other Leos up there. It becomes a real problem for companies like Telstra here in Australia CRA: But they've gotten themselves into this because, you know, we've both been in the industry for a long time and I, I remember 3G, how we overhyped it and under-delivered. Then we did the same thing with 4G and you just brought up Telstra. So I remember this must have been also up to a decade ago, probably, we were in a meeting with Telstra, with Andy Penn, the former CEO, and he was explaining the 5G vision that that Telstra had. And it was the first time I heard this phrase, which I grew to hate more than probably any other phrase in history, which is, 5G'S gonna be great, you can download a video in seconds. And I was thinking, who downloads videos? We stream everything right now. Every single network equipment manufacturer [00:10:00] plugged that into all the service providers. 'cause every operator, every equipment manufacturer, all used the exact same tagline. And if you thought about it, it never made sense. So they really never had a plan on how to do it. And then, yeah, you mentioned millimeter wave, which is brilliant because. Ultra low latency, super high bandwidth, but it's too expensive to deploy I think the US has it. And I know ad knock Abu Dhabi national oil company just launched a millimeter wave private 5G network. But that's because they're an oil company and they've got a lot of cash and they wanna put everything with high definition video and all their rigs everywhere. it makes sense, but it's not like it's financially viable for anybody else 'cause they don't even know how to make money on this stuff. Jeff: I don't know where it'll end up. And as for six GI don't know anything about it, so I can't comment on that. We have enough. Problems trying to monetize 5G let alone going to the next one. CRA: This is a perfect lead in because the latest buzzword that a lot of people are talking about is network API's Idea that operators do have valuable information [00:11:00] where you know they have got location information. They have identity information that could be valuable if you open it up and allowed companies to start building services on it. the operators are getting really excited thinking this is how we're gonna make money. But like you said, the hyperscalers, the Googles of this world will say, yes, thank you for those APIs Jeff: Yeah. CRA: the whole infrastructure to build it out and monetize it. they can't even explain the value of it to somebody who's not technical. So how are they ever gonna make money out of it? Jeff: Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. And the SP's Service Providers are really the dinosaurs of today. I, I hate to say that word because they've done great things over the years, but the hyperscalers are all taking over. When the high hyperscalers were growing, they really didn't need to know much about networking. They really didn't need to know much about compute. But all of a sudden, as they grew, they suddenly saw what was stopping them was the connectivity between their data centres What was stopping them was the lack of choice of network hardware, [00:12:00] let's say. And then we had this white boxing going on where companies like Facebook were designing their own network devices that could run any sort of operating system. You know, we would have a, this network disaggregation would happen, so you would disaggregate the software from the hardware. And if you look at a Cisco box, it's pretty well connected, but on the later boxes it is a disaggregation play where you could run. Cisco software on a dis aggregated piece of hardware. My point is that it was the hyperscalers that were looking at doing this, they're the ones that are pushing the change. And whereas the network guys and the service providers are trying to protect their patch, so they're not gonna share anything. So the hyperscaler said, oh, we'll just do it ourselves. So they got so big, they just reinvented everything, not only from what you see as a customer, but everything that's going on below, they just said, oh, stuff it We'll just go do it ourselves. We'll do it better. And that's what we're seeing. CRA: I do feel bad [00:13:00] for the service providers and the telcos because they have done good things. They've given us connectivity, but they haven't adapted and changed quick enough network APIs is a great concept and I want them to open up their network APIs, but I don't think they have the teams internally to actually be able to deploy this yet, Jeff: Yeah, CRA: be even able to explain it to somebody who's not technical. And if you wanna build out an API business. You need to literally build a business line. How are you gonna go and get sign off on many, many millions of dollars if you can't even explain the value of it or how you're gonna make money out of it? Jeff: It's a cultural and a mindset change for service providers to try and figure out what business they're in. And this comes back to network APIs and the business of collections and the business of information. So don't worry about the connections. They're always there, but we've got this other thing that we can give to you, which is information that will make you wiser to run your business. That's where the money is and that's where you come back to this network, API. The SPS generally they're the [00:14:00] first, if not the router manufacturers are the first to see the data. Put aside the fact that it's all encrypted and you can't really look at it. But if it touches you first you could do something with it if you could look at it and I think large service providers suffer from really an old school mentality. CRA: What's frustrating about this is I've been in Telco for a long time, so I worked for three of the world's biggest puns, which is O2 Telefonica. And then I worked with Vodafone and then bt. And then in my analyst and consulting days, I've probably worked with another 20 or 30 more. You come across some brilliant minds in this space. People who really get it and are driving so much change, they tend to get burnt out because the organizations make it so difficult for you to drive this change. So you end up getting people who were great for the telco and they tend not to last as long as they should. Jeff: Well, I think you can apply that to any large corporate. It doesn't have to be a telco. You know, when you try and push large [00:15:00] change and you have a vision and others around you don't see that vision, it becomes almost impossible. CRA: Okay, so next let's move on to something else that the telcos have overhyped and under-delivered, which is IOT. Jeff: Mm, We had a conversation, about a decade ago, about the future of low power WANs yeah. CRA: we could do things like N-B-I-O-T and Laura and these low powered networks would allow us to connect up all these things. So Jeff: what do you think about that market right now? You know, to me LORAWan is still the best tech for connecting things. It's an extraordinary technology, there's so many others. You know, the NB-IoT which is the, standardised tech for service providers and Sigfox and all that. But the biggest problem. Is the monetisation I come back to that again. How do you make money out of connecting things, right? You can connect things quite relatively easily, but to make any money, you've gotta [00:16:00] connect a lot of them. And it's not just the connection, it comes back to the collection. And this is where you provide value by providing an insight. Let's not necessarily talk about the IOT tech. To me LORAWan is probably the superior one still, but it's more about, okay, we can connect the thing, but how does that add value? I always mention this cycle of DIKW data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom, At the edge, you've got a thing that's doing something. Let's say you're measuring temperature. Now if that temperature is always the same, that's still data and it's not particularly interesting. But if the temperature changes in some way that is not good or expected, then the edge should be able to look at that and say, well, that's, information. It's gone from data to information. And then we send that along up to the cloud, which then correlates and does all sorts of things to it, and it becomes knowledge. And that knowledge [00:17:00] then makes the end user who's interested in buying that information. Wiser and I give a, just a good example of a service provider in Europe. It's a long, long time ago. they actually noticed that they could make money out of a rat trap in a factory and putting a little transmitter on it. And whenever there were rats in the trap, they would send an SMS message to the end customer. And that end customer were the pest control people. So they came up with this closed system where it went from data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom, to make the pest control people wiser about what traps they had to empty. That was really clever because it, monetized the information for the customer. And what I then saw over the years, once Laura came out and N-B-I-O-T, et cetera, were that, some service providers, particularly in Europe, were actually [00:18:00] hiring people that weren't networking people. They were people that knew about aged care, about Alzheimer's individuals that knew about logistics and also transportation and looking at solutions that would provide wisdom to these end customers. Like people who ran fleets of trucks nursing homes, if you've got someone with severe Alzheimer's and they escape, it can be quite a challenge to try and find them. They looked at it from the top down, looking at the, at the problem and solving it with the tech. Now as a nursing home owner, I don't care. It's narrow band iot or SMS or whatever it is, it's just knowledge for me to make me wise and run my business. And the same comes back to your original question about, what do you think about these techs? That the techs are great, but it's just a means to an end. It's the value and the [00:19:00] monetisation that you get from it. CRA: I think one of the issues I have with the industry is for years we battled back and forth saying my low power WAN is better than yours. So it's N-B-I-O-T vs LoRa versus, and the I thing is, each of them could be correct, depending on the use case. There's certain things that you would want to use each of them for. And I remember I was doing Telstra's sales kickoff, I think it's like five years ago, and they said, gimme one recommendation you would have for Telstra. And I said, you should start deploying LoRa. 'cause right now you're gonna miss out on certain tenders because certain utilities want to do their solution at LoRa and you don't have it. At the time they had Telstra Purple, which was the biggest SI Australia. Deploying LoRa is pretty simple. It's not that hard to add that to your portfolio. All you can do is say, we'll do it and you can suddenly compete. But they were just so driven around we must push everybody to NB-IoT do what the customer wants, build the use case and go from there. you did mention satellite. So where are we now with satellite and leo sat. So how do you think this is developing? Jeff: it was one of the last things I worked on [00:20:00] at Cisco was looking at the tech and seeing where Cisco could play in the market there. And part of the brief was to come up with some intellectual property around satellites. We got quite a few patents in the, in the area of Leo SATs, particularly looking at the way starlink actually operated because the way starlink operates, which is brilliant, totally brilliant. Elon Musk for what you might think of him. He really was a visionary when it came to that. You've got a little bit of a change the way a, Leo works and a terrestrial network works because as we know, a terrestrial network stays still and the people move around, or the end points move around. Now we have a point where we have the network moving around. And the receivers staying still. So it's completely turned over on its head. I wouldn't say it's the future of networking Leo SATs. It's certainly an addition, [00:21:00] an addendum to networking because the advantage of Leos is in the round trip times and the response times very, very fast because you're going through free space. You're not going through optical cable, which runs around 68%, the speed of light. Whereas you're talking to a, a, LEOSat, you're at the speed of light all the way until you get the ground station. it's just a sensational thing that they've done. The fact that you can get connectivity anywhere on the face of the planet except the poles, that has such value when it comes to emergency services and people out on oil rigs So even being able to track a particular container on a ship, if we put some sort of iot tech on that container, knowing exactly where that container is, irrespective of what the boat's doing. It's a pretty impressive tech and certainly Starlink are The leaders and everyone else comes second. CRA: [00:22:00] This is a fascinating one, and we experienced it a lot during our sabbatical. So we went hiking for a few months in South America were staying in places that were the middle of nowhere, yet they had starlink and we had fast internet. And you're thinking like, if this was five years ago or 10 years ago, you have nothing. We were thinking, oh, we're gonna go on the sabbatical and be disconnected the whole time. Well, if you get high speed connectivity, you tend to use it. Jeff: yeah. And, and so the birth of the digital nomad, you can be anywhere and no more a gray nomad, you know, tech people like me. Always gonna stick to tech. And regardless of where we are, even we're on holiday, . We went to a very remote ski area here in Australia and I didn't want to ski, so I brought one of my IMAX along with me and I sat there the whole week with a connection via Star Link as well. And did some CAD drawings for my 3D printing. There's a digital nomad example. You know, it doesn't matter where you are, CRA: I've been working remotely since You're [00:23:00] gonna love this one. I was testing A-G-P-R-S-P-C-M-C-I-A card from Cent when I was at O2, and this must have been 2002. And at that time, that allowed me to get my emails at home, so I started working remotely. From that time, I don't think I really ever went back to a normal office style life again, and that was on A-G-P-R-S card, and I thought that was the best technology ever but now I want to talk about something not from your technical expertise, but just about what you think about what's going on. And we're gonna look at artificial intelligence and there's a lot of issues around this. Like, you know, is it good, is it bad? Is it cheating? Is it dumbing us down? What do you think about AI right Jeff: I've found it a godsend. I use copilot all the time. I'm always reading technical books and sometimes I don't understand the point they're getting at in the book and I'll ask copilot and so far, the, the answers have been really, really useful to me. From my personal experience, I think it's just been brilliant. And I guess it's [00:24:00] because I know what question to ask. So if we look at someone who is just coming into work, some a 19, 20-year-old. Someone who's been brought up with nothing but ai, would they, when they get to my age, know what question to ask? Or even when they're a few years older, is it dumbing them down, as you say? And it's a really interesting problem, and I wouldn't know if we can get the answer because we'll have to wait and see, I guess. But there's always that argument you put rubbish into the system and it'll tell you rubbish back. And there are so many models out there. I was thinking actually this morning, like in science, they're trying to unify the theory between relativity and quantum mechanics because the two theories, are really opposite to each other. And there must be a way to unify those two theories. And I [00:25:00] thought this unification it's a long stretch, but you could actually apply it to all the different models that are out there. They're all looking at the same thing in a different way. And so I thought, for starters, what we need is a unified GUI Where you don't talk to copilot, you don't talk to Gemini, but you have one interface that goes and asks all of them the same question and then comes back with a common answer. And maybe that's the way to do it. It's a bit like the streaming platforms we have now. How many streaming platforms can you have before you decide, you know, I can't handle this anymore, I can't look at them all. And the AI models are the same in a way that there's so many of them. Should I ask this question to this model or that model? And they're all vying for your business. AI itself is really, really great for those who know how to use it well. [00:26:00] It's certainly going to put a lot of people out of business. But so did radio and television and everything else. The steam engine people will get over it and find other work, but you know, if you're an artist, a commercial artist, or someone who's in the advertising business, I think your days are numbered. But that doesn't mean that you can't retool, right? CRA: I can relate to that. When I was at university, I studied finance and economics and I spent final year memorizing net present value IRR calculations. And then suddenly we had Excel and I spent all this time memorizing Jeff: yeah. CRA: So I was able to retool. And then, let's face it, I left banking right around the.com. And I've been doing tech ever since. You can always evolve into something else, Jeff: You can absolutely and it's what we should do. yeah. CRA: up some Good points there about the fact that they're capturing everything. And I have this theory that basically that means everything is average because you're taking the best stuff that's out there and mixing it in with the worst stuff. Jeff: Yeah. CRA: And people had asked me before, do you think this [00:27:00] is gonna spell the end of your role as an analyst or an advisor? Well, no, because what it does is it gets rid of those mid-tier average people. Those people are at risk. Then there's gonna be the people who are really good but really lazy and that'll dumb down their work. If you know how to leverage the tool, ask the right questions for human machine collaboration. It makes sense. I thought it was the best 24 by seven intern ever I've run two models. So I use Chet, GPT, and Claude, and I mirror them. So I, I'm asking both, the same question, see which one I prefer. ' em for the very important things in my life. Like, how do I learn to use my new oven? Because there's so many switches, I have no idea what to do. I rely on it for that. I ask it for recipes, I trust it for that. When it comes to work related stuff, I would fire both interns. I think the responses I'm getting are so inconsistent, so variable, and just not up to scratch because it's dumbing down what's out there. And this is what worries me, is like, yes, we're gonna dumb down people because we're taking the average of everything Jeff: Yeah. CRA: there, and we're [00:28:00] filling the internet with more crap Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. CRA: which means there's more dumb stuff out there. I was so impressed with these models when they first came out. Now I don't trust them at all anymore. Jeff: I see a glass of cordial with water and it tastes good the first time round, and then we drink a bit of it and we add more water and more water and more water until the cordials completely diluted. And what you have is not what we started with. I did ask copilot the other day. If I ask you a question, you give me an answer, and then I get you to summarise that answer well, what happens if you keep on summarising and summarising and summarising which is your point? And copilot answered the question, said, well, first of all, I will look at, the main points. That's the first time I said, what happens if I summarise that? Oh, well, then I will look at keywords. And then eventually it gets to the point where it's just so basic. You lose the complete intent of what you're looking at. My point [00:29:00] here is that you get this thing where you wanna send an email and the AI mechanism will say, do you want me to draft you an email? Just give me points of what you want to talk about. And it writes it right? And it writes it in one paragraph and off it goes to the other end. And the other end. The ai feature says you probably don't wanna read this. Shall I summarise it for you? Right. So it summarises it. At Cisco we used to have April Fool's patent competition, which I'm proud to say I probably won it more than most people. And I came up with an AI bot that was kept on summarizing and summarizing until there was absolutely no point to it. It actually converted the summarized text into icons and R-O-T-F-L and, and WFS so that the millennials and the younger ones could understand the other problem is not only are we dumbing down, but the actual language [00:30:00] is changing. Language always changes. That's life. But. I think it's accelerating now to the point where people only actually understand what they're looking at. But it's the summarisation of knowledge that becomes problematic and knowing how to ask the right questions. CRA: So I think I've just come up with a new theory on this these gen AI models they're taking everything that's out there and you're basically getting an average. So they're useful when you're below average. When I built my website last week, I built a brand new website and I used these two models to help me build it. And for me it's good because I'm not a designer and I don't know how to build a website. If I was a designer they'd probably look at my site and think, God, that shit. But in reality for me it was great. So when you're below average in a topic area. it's an amazingly powerful tool, but when you're an expert or have expertise in certain areas, it's not as useful. Jeff: Yeah. You can see through it, so to speak. Yeah, [00:31:00] yeah. CRA: Okay. So let's move on to some closing questions here. When you look at all these technologies out there, what gets you excited? What do you think is the Jeff: Yeah. CRA: new tech that's coming Jeff: quantum networking and computing were the last things I was involved in. I, I spent a lot of time educating lots of people in the company, but quantum computing once it becomes commercialized enough to be useful, it's just gonna be phenomenal. I think that will be a game changer. The fact that you can take exponential problems and that's what quantum's all about. Quantum doesn't do things fast. They say, oh, quantum computer's very fast. It's not fast. The way it works is, on probability. It can compute a probabilistic outcome for a very complex problem very quickly. Just imagine being able to find the best route from A to B and take into account absolutely every parameter and metric that can be possibly taken, this is the future, every [00:32:00] vehicle, where it's going, what it's doing, and looking at it from your point of view. And that's the sort of exponential, every time you add an extra car, that's a, an exponential increase in the problem. And, and obviously, you know, Y2Q will be a, problem the day quantum. Breaks encryption. So there's obviously work being done on that to make sure it doesn't happen, but that's a really exciting area. Truly. CRA: Okay. So that's what excites you the most. Is there anything that scares you about technology in the future? Jeff: Yeah. Probably quantum as well. CRA: I think it's, 'cause you just mentioned the encryption bit there at the Jeff: yeah, the encryption. Yeah. The, you know, there are nefarious actors that are collecting data as we speak from various countries knowing it's all encrypted and they can't actually do anything with it, but one day they will. I think nearly every country is worth the salt in, in in protecting their interests would be doing the same thing. That's what's scary as well. The fact that encryption might break one day and then we'll all [00:33:00] be going to hell in a hand basket. CRA: Well, luckily, as we know, organisations are very careful with our data and there's never any data breaches, so. Jeff: Yeah, the, that's the other problem that scares me. True. I, that you mentioned it. The C-Suite executives are slowly coming to realise that tech is actually far more important to them than they've realised Now, I've had, I wouldn't say arguments, but strong discussions with people who sort of poop. For me, when I tell them about, you know, C-Suite really need to understand a little bit of the tech, and the argument is, well, C-Suite are all about strategy and implementing strategy, et cetera. But these days, if you look at a bank, a bank is not a bank anymore. It's a tech house. It's full of technology that's just moving digital bits. Around the place that happened to be, have some value allocated to them. But it's purely tech, without the tech, there is no bank. The problem is the C-suite don't pay enough attention to [00:34:00] that area, it's the CIO's responsibility. The Chief Technology Officer, the chief security officer. But if you are in that level, half the time, you don't know what the hell you're hiring, how do you know that they're the right person? So far the evidence has suggested that we have had nothing but knuckleheads in most of these roles, the same company that Qantas uses for their outsourcing in the US and other company used the same outsourcer. When you're outsourcing, you have to realize that you have no control over the outsourcer. So the data you give them is outta your hands now, and they don't pay enough attention to that. So this particular outsourcer has been breached twice, but it's Qantas that is, is bearing the brunt, but really it's the outsource of, if I was Qantas, I would be certainly moving away from them, but. Even this fact of outsourcing your data, it's a real problem. And [00:35:00] so that probably scares me, but it's all because of the executives. They don't pay enough attention to it. CRA: They think get though it's just a tech thing. They don't understand that that tech thing, not only does it run your business, but a data breach can do immense damage Jeff: yeah, CRA: and evaluation of your company. Qantas is learning that because we both got the same emails from Qantas about their latest breach. , I've lost track on how many of those emails I've gotten over the years. So I just assume that everything I have is pretty much out there now. Okay, one other question on tech. You've been around the industry a long time. You've heard every buzzword over the years. What's your most hated buzzword? Jeff: The buzzword that I hate the most was actually a phrase that they used to use in Cisco, the best of we. Full stop. I know it's not a buzzword. I was always incredibly annoyed with the way English is abused. when it comes to tech, you know, and the best of we was the example, that I always bring. It's the one that used to [00:36:00] get my backup at Cisco. And people used to say, for heaven's sake, let it go. And I said, well, if I let it go, it'll happen more and more and , it'll dilute the meaning of the. the English language and, okay, maybe I'm, I'm being pedantic, but that was, that used to get my goat up. It just annoyed the crap out of me. The buzzwords and the technology you know, I get past that, but abusing the English language is just annoys me. CRA: now let's look back at your career for some closing questions. Jeff: You've worked on so much cool shit over the years. yeah, CRA: the proudest moment of your career? What Jeff: what's the thing you worked on? You're like, oh, this is amazing. The one that comes to for, is probably not what you'd expect me to say, but it was early in my career. I would've been 24, 25, and. I had written a transmission program. Net send was called, and it's opposite, was called Net Get. There was no way of transmitting files between places. And in those days we [00:37:00] had digital VAX seven eighties and seven thirties and seven fifties. And there was quite a lot of them. And they were all connected in a 9,600 B per second debt net network. But there was no real easy way to send files. And so I wrote this thing, it took me quite a while, and I remember distinctly and it was about 2:00 AM in the morning. There was no working from home. So I used to stay in the office and code, and I remember distinctly trying to get the net send and net, get to try and talk to this other piece of code I'd written and it would never work one evening at 2:00 AM it started working and the two of them got the messages through this 3rd party. And that was the most exciting thing ever in my career, believe it or not. CRA: so now let's finish on a high, gimme the best case scenario. How do you think tech is going to improve our lives going forward? Jeff: [00:38:00] Ooh, yeah. It's probably quantum in combination with ai, being able to use quantum to model new medicines and modeling medicines at the molecular level is incredibly complicated. And it's exponential in its problem format. And so being able to model new medicines to solve. Very complex illnesses. Being able to address all sorts of cancers along with ai being able to easily detect, illnesses, that would be amazing. so there's hope there. But then the other part is, being able to help those who are less fortunate than you and I, who, who live in parts of the world they're malnourished, strange, you know, you can get fantastic internet coverage, but you can't get fantastic water, clear water. That's a big area of trying to bring equality to the rest of us and stop killing each [00:39:00] other. CRA: The one thing I would say is if we can start curing all of these diseases and we start to live a lot longer, I hope we leverage tech to somehow figure out how we take care of people when they move beyond their retirement age. Because Jeff: yeah. CRA: not set up to do it as is. Could you imagine if we all live to be a hundred. Jeff: Oh my goodness. Yeah. That would be problematic. CRA: All right, Jeff. Well thank you so much for taking time in your afternoon there in Jeff: Thank you, Kyle. CRA: to join me today to talk about this. It's it's always fascinating to talk to you because I always learn so much Jeff: I appreciate it. Thank you. I've been out for a little while, but I do still keep up with it. Well, I try to keep up with the tech. Unfortunately. That's the other thing that probably scares me, the fact that. One day I won't know more than my kids about tech. . CRA: Based on your past experience. I think that's gonna take quite some time Jeff: Thank you. CRA: for joining us. I look forward to getting down to Sydney and having Jeff: Yeah, CRA: dinner with Jeff: absolutely. CRA: and we'll keep talking about tech and thanks again. Thank you. [00:40:00]