Network Transformation Insights
Presented by: Matt Harrell, Gretchen Tinnerman, Rob DeWeese, Trey Guinn
Originally aired on June 19, 2023 @ 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM EDT
Cloudflare and Kyndryl present Network Transformation Insights. Cloudflare and Kyndryl leaders tackle the current and future state of the global modernization market: Navigate complex, multi-cloud networking, augment staff capabilities, improve agility, reduce costs, and enhance security.
Guests:
- Moderator: Matt Harrell, Global Head of Channel +Alliance, Cloudflare
- Panelist: Gretchen Tinnerman, SVP US Network + Edge Practice Leader, Kyndryl
- Panelist: Rob DeWeese, Tech Solutions Leader - Cloud Networking, Kyndryl
- Panelist: Trey Guinn, Field CTO, Cloudflare
For more information visit:
- Cloudflare: www.cloudflare.com
- Kyndryl: https://www.kyndryl.com/us/en/services/network/cloud-networking
Follow:
@Cloudflare and @Kyndryl
- Matt Harrell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewpharrell/
- Gretchen Tinnerman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gretchentinnerman/
- Rob DeWeese: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-deweese-a9676916/
- Trey Guinn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/treyguinn/
English
Transcript (Beta)
Thank you everyone for tuning in. I'm Michelle Zatlin. I'm the president and co -founder of Cloudflare and I'm just so honored to be here with all of you and for everyone who's tuning in live, streaming online.
So it is with great pleasure that I get to introduce this amazing panel.
We're going to have so many great insights and conversation ahead of us.
And really, it's to kick off this great partnership between Cloudflare and Kindrel.
And it's interesting. Partnerships are only as good as both partners in.
And I say this so genuinely that I've just been so impressed with the partnership, the technical expertise, the go-to-market hungriness with everyone from the Kindrel team.
They've just been absolutely terrific. And then everyone on the Cloudflare side.
So thank you so much for your hard work on this.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Matt to introduce our panelists and kick it off.
Thank you, Michelle. Welcome, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Very excited to bring the leaders together today to talk about the Kindrel-Cloudflare partnership.
Let me start at the beginning by examining network transformation. That's the subject for the panelists today.
According to a Gartner report, by 2026, 75% of organizations will adopt a digital modernization model predicated on cloud as a fundamental underlying system.
So we think about transformation. We talk a lot about transforming applications, storage, and a compute layer.
Here, we're going to talk about the network as the next layer of transformation.
So with that, I'd like to start off with Trey.
Just a high-level question. Trey, how did we get here?
Well, it's a great question. You have to kind of put on your thinking caps and remember way back in the day.
Maybe if you wanted to watch a movie, you'd go rent a DVD from somewhere.
This is the sort of history I'm talking about. But back in that time period, if you were doing work, you're doing work at work, and you're using a computer to do that, what did that look like?
Applications lived in a data center, and most enterprises owned a handful of data centers.
If I was Jim in accounting, the only way I could do my job was to go to the office and log on, open an application, and talk to a server basically down the hall.
The world today looks completely different.
I was chatting with Gretchen, and she said she flew here and was able to do her entire job on the plane.
I mean, it's amazing that we're in this world.
Users are everywhere, and enterprises have gone from having a handful of data centers to adopting tons of cloud infrastructure, hyperscalers, but also tons and tons of SaaS.
We see this massive growth of SaaS. As an enterprise, my applications and my data have gone from three or four places to hundreds of places.
It's this really interesting thing. It's driven incredible productivity, but it's created a nightmare for connectivity and visibility and control.
Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Trey. Trey just discussed how enterprise and architectures are evolving.
Question for you, Rob. How does the network function in this new world?
You have to take a look back. It used to be that things ran out of the data center, and then we've had the explosion of cloud growth.
And how they function now is essentially it's a multi -cloud, multi-SaaS world where people expect their applications to work on their phone, on their tablet, on the plane, and to service their clients, their end users, anywhere, anytime, for any reason.
And that expectation of performance has really shifted how the networks need to perform from a security perspective, from a quality of service, and to just give the performance and control that is needed to an enterprise.
Yeah, so true, so true. And then, Gretchen, we were talking backstage a little bit about the people aspect of it, right?
And so we talked about the business challenges that have been contributing to those things.
What about the people and the skills? Have they been a contributing factor from a legacy to next-gen cloud services?
How do they play a role?
Absolutely. If you think about where we started, talking about legacy infrastructures requires skills of people to run legacy infrastructures, and those skills are legacy skills.
And so the challenge our clients face are when they desire to build a roadmap to next -generation services, that challenge of how do I have a labor force?
I have a labor force that is so focused on legacy infrastructure, and I need them to be because my network is important in the foundation to everything else.
But I also have that challenge of upskilling those same people, right?
So in addition to that, we think about the new technologies available and the skillset required for those new technologies.
It's a labor force that's not readily available.
These are highly skilled individuals when we talk about the cloud and we talk about next-gen network services.
They're highly skilled people and not readily available in the market to our enterprise clients.
And so that's one of the core values of Kindle is we bring to our clients those people and those skills to not only build that journey for them, but to also the people and the skills and the introduction of them into that environment so that the client can continue to maintain that legacy infrastructure and also support their digital transformation with new skills and people.
Yeah, awesome. Good reminder, too.
I just think there's so much opportunity for people to continue to evolve their skills, network engineers, for example, to evolve their skills and help modernize the network.
So thank you for that. That's a great perspective on the importance of transforming the network.
I'm now going to transition a little bit to get each of the panels to talk a little bit about the actual example of customer examples.
Like what are some of the challenges where all of you are involved in a daily basis engaging with enterprise customers?
What are some of the challenges you're hearing from enterprise customers?
And Gretchen, maybe we'll start with you.
Well, again, we talk about people, right? That's a big challenge. And if we think about where, you know, I've been in network for my entire career.
I think about where we started in network, and network has always been a necessity to run our clients' environments.
But it's also been an afterthought. And so what's exciting, I guess, for me today and to have conversations with our clients is they have quickly adopted more cloud services into the environment.
But the challenge now becomes optimization of those services against a very legacy network.
And so that challenge, though, creates opportunity for them, for us, for Cloudflare.
Because for the client, it creates an opportunity where new services such as Cloudflare that can truly optimize a client's network, not only does it optimize the network and improve performance on the network, it also improves performance on the current services that they have now moved over to the cloud.
They never question on moving an application to the cloud. Right. But there's never been a discussion on moving the network to the cloud.
So it's sort of been what you're saying, a little bit of an afterthought.
And now we're trying to make that forefront as part of the modernization journeys, including the network layer, right?
Right. And we think about other technologies that have been introduced with the intention to optimize the network, like software-defined networking.
Right. The challenge with that is that when software-defined networking was first introduced into the market, it was still a commodity play where it was very underutilized, right?
It truly wasn't optimizing our client's network. It was decreasing some cost on those traditional commodity services, but that wasn't optimizing the services that they had moved and intended to move to the cloud.
So where we are today, again, it's a great marriage of both the services in the cloud and more services moving to the cloud, and now we have a network that's only going to continue to support and improve those services.
It's an interesting point. We have to remember what we're doing this for.
It's to drive business and to have impacts, right?
SD-WAN struggled to deliver on some of those promises, and you talked about this idea that people are moving to cloud, and I have a silly example of this.
I was like, is the cloud really delivering what you want? I was talking to a large bank, and this large bank said, okay, well, we're now using cloud infrastructure for our developers.
Our developers can easily spin up an environment to go database server, et cetera, and that's where they can work and build their development experience.
But that same customer said, okay, I can spin that infrastructure up in 30 seconds, but to get that developer access to the cloud takes 12 tickets and X number of approvals, and four weeks go by.
So here's this thing where the cloud can get you infrastructure in 30 seconds, but you can't connect your user to get value out of it for four weeks.
And this is that afterthought problem of going, okay, we have to think about this problem end to end.
Otherwise, we're not going to deliver the business value that the business needs.
We need agility. We need ability to innovate. What I see is really three things.
It's cost, complexity, and speed to execution. I'll take that in reverse. With speed to execution, you know, you turn up a new service.
Yes, it could take three minutes, five minutes, whatever to spin up a new application.
Hey, that's great.
Except for in reality, to get it all really functioning, it's, you know, five tickets.
Like we said, you've got to talk to a database team. You've got to talk to a firewall or security team.
You could talk to a networking team and a machine admin team just to get it all working correctly.
So, yes, you can spin it up, but then you've got to integrate it.
That speed to execution is crippling to enterprise clients, banks, whoever.
And then you look at the optimization side of that.
And to optimize around that, to make it easier for administration, for billing, for support.
This is where, like, the magic wand, magic transit, magic firewall, your portfolio really comes into play is it can really simplify the integration pieces if we're connecting a SaaS application to an Oracle financial and then it's being authenticated from an Azure Active Directory online.
Okay, that's the beauty of your product.
And then that brings back to the first point, cost.
If you reduce the complexity and speed to execution, it reduces cost as well and simplifies things.
Kind of hit all three. Okay, so we've talked a little bit about the challenges.
Now I want to talk a little bit about the partnership, right?
So Cloudflare obviously is best in class in delivering innovative technology to the market.
Kindrol is best in class in delivering solutions and services and managed outcomes for customers.
So Gretchen, I'll start with you. Why would an enterprise customer come to Kindrol to solve this challenge around network?
Enterprises do come to Kindrol because we offer an end-to-end solution for our client, but it starts with consulting and advising and being that thought leadership, you know, to our clients to really look at their digital transformation across their entire environment.
When we spun off from IBM, we publicly and distinctly established some core practices and these are areas that we said we are absolutely going to invest in our people, the skills of our people, tools, and we've done so through partnerships like with Cloudflare as well as the other practices.
So the real value I think though for our clients, we aren't just having a discussion about the network.
The network is the foundation and we talked about different, you know, ways on why a client, you know, needs to migrate to a next generational as a service network, but applications, right?
We have an entire, you know, deep technical skill and people and applications, cloud services, right?
Data. And so we bring all of that collectively together for our clients and it's really important for us to have best-in-class partners like Cloudflare that are on this journey with us for our clients.
This is a journey.
This is not something that a client engages with Kendrell to deploy tomorrow.
This is a journey. It's a roadmap and our real superpower is our people and our people that have the skills to develop that roadmap for the client.
So they really know what are my priorities on this digital transformation and how do I optimize the services for it?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Transformation is something that occurs over time and having a service provider like Kendrell be able to break that up into meaningful blocks that delivers outcomes and value is super important.
How about you, Trey? You're a road warrior. We were talking before about how you're constantly on the road meeting with customers.
What's your perspective from a Cloudflare angle and where we see Kendrell playing a significant role?
It's a good point. I'm a geek. I'm a technologist. I love to play with technology and talk about it.
I think what we have built at Cloudflare is incredibly compelling.
We represent the modern architecture of computing and I've not met a CIO or a CISO that disagrees with me.
They go, yeah, that architecture makes a ton of sense and we can provide this amazing technology.
But how do you put it to use?
That's where they go, oh, well, that technology makes sense. That's a great idea.
But now I need to transform my 30,000-person organization, multinational operating in 100 countries.
And how do I drive change? I've got this huge investment of legacy.
As Gretchen was mentioning, legacy equipment that I'm having to maintain.
I'm a CIO. Maybe I'm trying to make the business case for doing this transformation.
How do I prove value right away? I can't just add cost to that. Where do I get started?
Those are really hard and challenging questions. And I think this is just like the perfect marriage.
We have a great technologist and then we have folks that know how to work and work with a customer to help them adopt and transform and get the benefits of that technology.
That's awesome. It's how you apply the technology, right?
Our clients can and may be desired to procure great technology that's available to them today.
But how do they design that into the existing infrastructure?
How do they deploy that? And then how do they manage it, right?
And again, transformation is a journey. We know firsthand as Kindral, as a spinoff of IBM, that transformation is a journey.
We ourselves have been going through a transformation ourselves as a company for the last 18 months.
And so we did so with our people and the skills of our people.
Those same people and skills of our people are also working with our clients on similar transformation journeys.
Yeah, I saw a recent stat that indicated that a third of all projects get stuck because they want to make the move, but they don't have the skills or resources to do it, right?
So I think you're hitting on a really good point there around the need for this partnership between technology vendor and ourselves and a service provider.
I think that's where we are a differentiator, is that we do hard problems.
We come from IBM, so we deal with really hard, complex problems. We have established processes around it.
But where this partnership between two companies really works is you guys are at the leading edge of technology that we service, that we implement.
And it's one thing to be a small business and say, hey, I can just turn up this service.
I can read a doc. But in reality, these are enterprise companies.
They have to integrate with legacy technology. They have to integrate with Cisco firewalls or Fortinet firewalls and has to integrate to AWS and other SaaS.
And that's where we come in together, is you have the solution to simplify and make that perform better and more securely.
And we have the people that are product experts in all those areas that can tie it all together.
And that's the real differentiator.
And we have these customers that are digital natives, right?
They've only been around for five or ten years, and they never had the corporate wham.
They didn't have to worry about that. Their entire set of employees worked from a Starbucks.
It was easy and perimeterless and modern, and everything's on SaaS.
It's all singing and all dancing and glorious. And then I go talk to a manufacturer who's been around for 150 years, and they go, oh, that looks really nice over there, but I'm over here.
And there's a big river between me and that.
How do I get there? You look at mainframe still runs a huge portion of the world from banking, airlines, et cetera.
It's crazy. How do you get that to work with a SaaS application, work with AWS and Oracle Financial, bringing in from Azure?
It's complicated.
It's working with legacy technology, and that's where we excel, the expertise of the bleeding edge and the legacy, and tying it all together beautifully.
So, Rob, I've gotten to know Rob over the last year, and it's been a pleasure.
A very smart individual with very good experience from multiple cloud providers and now with Kindle.
So I'm going to ask you, tell us about the future.
I feel like you have a very good vision for where things are headed. So what's your perspective on where the future's headed?
Internet-facing, going more and more perimeter-less, where it can apply.
So at our company, and for you guys, too, we work at Outlook Online.
We use Concur to book our travel. We can do all these things without a classic data center, and we're seeing a huge growth in SaaS applications.
But with that comes in, we are relying more on the Internet, which means the security footprint really needs to change on how we do things like remote browser isolation, how we do ZTNA.
The future is simplified user experience as possible while the complexity of things grow.
So it's really making it simple for the end user, for the company, from a billing and support perspective, and simple from an integration perspective for a partner like us.
Awesome. Great response.
Good stuff. We're going to open it up just a few minutes to some questions from the audience, but I guess we'll close with some final thoughts.
Any final thoughts from the panelists before we open it up to questions?
I think this is exciting.
I think it's super exciting. Again, someone who's had a long career in network, right?
It's always been a necessity, but it hasn't always been very exciting, right?
We are now in the forefront of being not just the foundation, but the fundamental foundation to our client's digital transformation across all of the markets and all of the industries, whether that be healthcare, financial services, automotive, right?
All have the similar desires to digitally transform their business, but all of them also have their own unique set of challenges based on the industry and the challenges they face in that particular industry.
It's funny, when I talk to others in Kindrel that maybe aren't in Network and Edge, but maybe SMEs and cloud or data and AI and security, and through conversations, almost every conversation, I say, network can be a part of that conversation.
Network has to be a part of that conversation, right? It's just exciting when we see the trends, and we see the trends of, I was reading actually some IT trends from Gartner today in a report where it said, SaaS application, SaaS adoption will continue to have double -digit growth through 2027.
But what comes with that growth is also the rising cost of SaaS.
And so this is a prime opportunity for enterprise clients to look at a redesign and a next generation of the network where it's very asset-heavy, where there's high maintenance costs, right?
And so now they get to actually transform the network and reduce costs for it to support and to better improve and better support applications and other optimization of other services.
So it's an exciting place to be in network. It's not the boring service that, again, the necessity, the commodity.
We're no longer a commodity. Everyone wants to talk to us.
So I think that's what's most exciting. Yeah, and one thing, I'll do a little plug.
It was a great response, Gretchen, was around Kindrel's vertical approach, your domain expertise in particular verticals that I think when we engage with customers, it becomes very valuable to those conversations.
So I think that's awesome. I was going to say what I'm also excited. I'm really looking forward to this because, again, I'm a geek.
I'm a technologist.
And I see this bright, shining future. And why are we in this game at all?
And the game is we're here to help people and help them accomplish their goals.
And the worst thing as an engineer is to see you know that there's a better way.
If you could just do it this way, you would get there. And we're on this precipice where we have the ability.
And I think with this partnership to really unlock this value for customers and finally start to deliver on sort of supercharging like what is the cloud?
What are SaaS? What is the ability to have a remote workforce?
I was talking to a really forward-leaning pharmaceutical CISO.
And they said their strategy is any device, anywhere, any application for any user.
This should be this super dynamic future. And they're like, how do you get someone to be able to unlock that?
And I think this is the partnership that helps enterprises actually get to that sort of promised land and start to drive value.
So it would be fun to see that come to fruition.
Awesome. Thank you, Troy. Rob, anything?
Yeah, you know, to add on to what they're saying and maybe go back to the next question, I think the future and what's exciting about this is we're seeing a reduction of hardware spend.
We're seeing the ability to just connect straight to the Internet, get rid of MPLS circuits, get out of the hardware refresh cycle for at least most site locations.
Okay. And what does that mean? Well, you just need a VPN-capable device or device at your office location that can connect to Cloudflare.
And then you can do the security out of Cloudflare. So like your firewall is a service connected to your clouds, your SaaS.
And that's going to turn into a major transformation as clients get on board with that because realizing they have to replace, you know, routers and firewalls at all, say, 300 or 3,000 locations every seven years when they go end-of-life into support.
Exiting out of that is supremely cost-saving.
And doing it, you know, with Cloudflare, with Kindle, it's going to be a game changer.
And it's not just transformative, but it's a reduction of not just security but, you know, cost and everything.
It's doing things the right way without having to spend nearly as much money to keep it the old way and keep the legacy skill sets around.
This is the precipice of something really major. It's crazy.
Like you can increase flexibility and decrease complexity at the same time. And normally those things are sort of more correlated.
And I think we, too, back to the cost savings, I will add, is where, you know, I like to think of ourselves as we are not just providers of technology to our clients.
We are problem solvers. Yeah. We talk to our clients about what their business challenges are, and we apply use cases enabled by technology and our people and our skills to solve those.
That is who we are at Kindle.
But when you think about to Rob's point on optimizing and lowering cost, take it another step further, right?
Take it to an enterprise client who does not have a remote workforce yet simply because they don't have the infrastructure to support a remote workforce.
To have a worker like myself who was on a five-hour flight yesterday and did everything, including listen to a live stream, watch a live stream on my laptop on that airplane, right?
There are many enterprise clients who have not made that investment.
And so when you think about cost, it goes beyond the cost of the network and migrating the cloud.
Think about the buildings and moving the workers to a more remote workforce.
Think about employee productivity and the culture, right, in the company when they can hire and attract new talent because they as an enterprise client can be more flexible to support the needs of their employees based on the infrastructure they have.
It's really a game changer and much bigger discussion for those of us in network than we typically have had before.
Fantastic. Well, thank you to the panelists.
I think we're going to have a few – we'll answer a few questions from the audience.
Any questions from the audience? I think we're getting the mic here to pass around.
Yeah, I can start.
So talking about this last point about optimizing, I do understand as customers we are moving to SaaS applications, but at the same time our technical debt is increasing.
How we as customers can go ahead and optimize the network and at the same time also make sure that we can optimize the cost as we are transitioning towards the new architecture overall?
Well, from a Kindral perspective, engaging Cloudflare is one of our partners to provide solutions to our client, but it starts with consulting.
It starts with Kindral consult with our clients because the client has to have a roadmap, not just their digital transformation across the different departments within the enterprise market, but to your point, looking at that technical debt, looking at the assets and really making thoughtful decisions on when I remove some of that technical debt financially and otherwise from my environment.
And that's really, again, our people and the skills of our people in our consulting organization to make those assessments for our clients and build that roadmap.
It's a journey, right? It's not something in that journey that happens overnight, but it's a journey and it starts with consulting.
Yeah, I would say that sort of echoing what you said, I talked to a lot of customers that want to move down this sort of Zero Trust journey.
They see this as a strategy, but they have all this technical debt.
The big question that always comes out of that and in modernization is like, what's step one and what's step two?
And how do I get success in step one so that I can get the sort of executive backing to move to step two and then to move to step three?
And I think that's where this partnership with Kendrell coming in to be able to help you identify for your specific enterprise what step one is and what step two is.
That's sort of the sort of critical benefit of marrying sort of great tech with great advice.
So when I get asked similar questions from clients, I like to say, OK, what does the future look like, say, five years from now?
Let's reverse engineer. What are the core pieces that make this function?
And what it always comes down to is you need to develop the network as a product, a product that can adopt new features and roadmap and pivot points.
So we can chuck out old technology. We can bolt on new technology without having to create massive amount of workarounds, which is the current state of enterprise infrastructure.
Networking in general is a bunch of hacks to make one service work because they brought on a new product.
They brought on Okta or whatever.
And by bringing on like a magic wand or your services to run at the core of their network, it's kind of like clearing off the table.
You can plug in your old sites with its legacy technology and start out as a piece of your transit and slowly develop it into your major transit section and then bring on new forms of technology and bolt it on immediately and turn up services in minutes.
And the administration is all from one console. So it's really fast moving back to originally speed execution.
I think that's at its core is developing the network as a product to adopt new features.
People outside tend to agree.
We can hear them. I think we have time for about two more questions.
Any other questions? In our organization, the networking and security groups, they kind of operate in silos and don't really talk to each other.
So how do you get us all growing sort of in the same direction?
I'll take that first.
So I think it comes from the behaviors we as a system integrator and as a partner to our clients demonstrate to our clients.
It's behaviors of people, right?
And so, yes, in fact, at Kindrel, again, I talked about those five distinct practices that we have and those competencies.
And we have those because you need the deep skill set in each of those areas.
However, a client shouldn't be having a network discussion without security, right?
And so what we have fostered with our people and with our clients is kind of those cross solution discussions of network and security and bringing them together.
And I think when we show up with those behaviors with our partners, with ourselves internally, we start to break those silos down, not only for ourselves as providers, but also for our clients, because they are 100 percent relatable and should be a conversation that's had together.
And from the technology side, you know, we're facing a convergence, right?
We're seeing network and security come together. So they don't have a choice anymore, right?
It's like you used to be able to sort of play and paddle in your own ponds, but those ponds have been connected.
And so the both sort of the leadership from the advisors at Kindrel plus the technology sort of empowers it, makes it possible for these teams to work together.
So we provide the opportunity and the guidance.
I'd say, you know, security is involved at all seven layers of the OSI stack and networking are, you know, a few layers of those technically.
Although you could say application layer is almost networking. But it's at its core, you know, anything that makes the Internet run every application, it's security groups, ACLs, routing, firewall, you know, DNS, things like that, that all fall under the networking bucket.
It's making sure we're in sync.
It's making sure that our visions align and we have the right representatives in front of our clients and solutioning the right deals that are lockstep.
And, you know, making sure security is solutioning for all seven layers and that you're advising at the network layer.
But network and security are synonymous.
In my opinion, they always have been. There's definitely convergence points.
There's divergent points. But the core layer is staying in sync. Luckily, you know, Cloudflare is very much a security company.
That's how I'd consider it.
And Kindrel, I would say, is very much in the same boat. So we're pretty lockstep in alignment in how we approach our customers and solution and deliver.
Nice. I think one final question.
Oh, here we go. Yes, I'm really excited about the future and where this partnership is going to take us.
But I want to rewind a little bit and ask our panel, why did Kindrel and Cloudflare decide to work together in the first place?
Oh, that's a good question. I mean, I can start with sort of an echo of what I said before, which is, you know, we're sitting here in this world where I'm approaching digital natives and they can help themselves.
And they live in these perimeterless worlds with no legacy infrastructure, et cetera.
And it's so easy for them to read our documentation and just start consuming our APIs.
And they're sort of off to the races.
But if I talk to a legacy manufacturer or a pharmaceutical company or, you know, a financial services company, they said, OK, we're in a highly regulated industry.
This vision that you're painting that, like, it makes a ton of sense.
How, you know, how do we get there? What's step one? What's step two?
So we've always been seeking a way to who can we partner with that can really help drive that.
And I think that's where Kendrell sort of came to the forefront as such leaders here, right?
They're building, they recognize that this is such a transformational part of digital transformation is getting the network right.
And to have all the different practices that Gretchen mentioned, they can bring to bear sort of all this sort of intellectual horsepower to help an enterprise move from here to there.
Yeah, and I would add. So from a Kendrell and Network and Edge practice perspective, when I look at the partnerships that we have formed since we have spun off from IBM, there's three important factors in every single partnership.
The first is the technology. Does the partner offer and is the partner created and supporting best in class products and services?
Of course, that's number one.
Number two is people. Does the partner have the people and the skills to support us and our clients with the products and services they've created?
And then the last is the culture.
So there are great providers and makers of technology in the market.
But at the core of that are our people in the culture of which we are ourselves adopting and have that same expectation from the partners.
That's how you see partnerships flourish to develop better services to our clients.
I can't provide full services to my clients without a partner.
Cloudflare can't provide services of just Cloudflare to their clients without a partner, like a system integrator, right?
And so choosing and having culture to be at the center of that partnership is demonstrated so well to our clients when we show up together, when we're passionate, when we understand our clients' challenges.
And then on top of that, oh, by the way, we're offering best in class solutions and technology, right?
Where this partnership really started to take off was about a year ago, working on a stock exchange deal.
And it involved some heavy components in China and remote access ETNA.
And I was like, wow, I had to learn up on how do we get remote access ETNA working in China with all these restrictions and learn about all these banking regulations and integrate all these partners from traders and firms throughout the world.
And the more I learned about your network, I was like, whoa, no one has what you have.
You are in every geography. You are, you know, you have the smart Argo routing.
You have, you can connect in every major colo. You can connect to every major cloud.
You have a firewall as a service. Wow, there's some real power in this.
And the more I dug into it, the more I realized, like, we have something big here.
We have something that benefits, it's like a partnership of equals.
You have the secret sauce that we need to get our customers to where they need to be in 2023.
And I would say over the last year, the more I've learned, I realized, like, no one has the money, the time, or the ability to catch up to your network.
There are other providers out there that are chasing your services. And I solution them, your competitors as well.
But I have to say, like, unless someone's got billions of dollars to go out and build it right now, it's going to take five years.
You guys have something very unique that I think our customers need. And I'm out there solutioning it because I truly believe in it.
And the support from Cloudflare and Kindrel working together has just been exceptional.
Solutioning large deals, very complex environments, regardless of geography or industry vertical.
It's been amazing to see something. Again, your network is like a product that can adopt new features that our clients can adopt.
And we can integrate it with all the complexities, with the legacy, with the new.
And we can grow and contract almost, not on demand, but click, click, click, write a script here.
And there's extreme power in that. And that's the flexibility I want our clients to adopt.
And that's next generation networking. Wow. Couldn't have said it better from the Cloudflare.
Thank you to the panelists. Wonderful job. Really great getting to know Gretchen and Rob from Kindrel.
And I think, you know, super excited about what the future holds for us.
Thank you to the audience as well for very thoughtful questions and your attendance.
And have a great rest of the day.