Michael van Rooyen: 0:00
Welcome to part two of my discussion with Kevin Bloch from Bloch Advisory. If you haven’t seen part one, I’d highly recommend viewing that first before we continue discussion today.
Kevin Bloch: 0:17
I’ve always admired what you guys did, with OTC standing for One Touch, Control, Control, right, yeah. So if you think about that product and at the time it was kick ass- and you won some big deals out of that which it really did, and all credit you.
Kevin Bloch: 0:33
The question mark now for you is so. So where do you go from here? Yes, yes, and how do you build on that? And that’s the point I’m trying to make, and, and, and you know, obviously you’re going to start by saying, well, we’ve now got this data, we’ve got this dashboard. Is that dashboard fit for purpose today? Or do we have to now leverage AI? And the answer is probably you’re going to have to leverage AI so that you know, you don’t have to hunt for the problem. You’ve now given the solution. Yes, you know what I mean. Can you please checkbox this so that we can implement this on the network?
Michael van Rooyen: 1:04
Yeah, absolutely, and that’s what we’re saying. Right, we haven’t been thinking a lot of long and hard around and even we look at some of the integrations. Do you know, Meraki, juniper, Cisco doesn’t really matter about what data we’re going to extract that and how do we get that data? You did touch on the Splunk acquisition, which I’m happy did, because it’s obviously very topical at the moment. Probably the best way to renew your licenses to acquire them is when you’re in the role as CTO from ANZ. You know, obviously, visibility reporting. You were in the early days of SOC, siem, prime and all these things that drove the visibility. You know, was this a topic of conversation back then around what do we do around this kind of reporting and logging? And then, off the back of that, you know, do you see Cisco really going to integrate and I know there’s the juries out on it but what do you? If you’re there today, what would you be thinking is the strategy behind that?
Kevin Bloch: 1:58
Well, even when I was there, I mean, there was the strategy. Look, Cisco’s always been pretty strong on network management. And that goes back in time. And then of course they got into APDI application dynamics, which is really looking at the application performance, and then they bought thousand eyes. So the theory was we can now look at the full stack and then, now that the sort of the word of the day is observability.
Kevin Bloch: 2:29
Okay, it’s a big deal, and I’m not trying to dismiss it, I think it’s pretty important. I think the problem Cisco had at the time was you could get up and talk about the fact that we’ve got full stack, but actually whether there were three different, completely different platforms and they didn’t work with one another. So thousand eyes and APDI and any other source of data or telemetry were coming into three different areas, and you know it was complicated. Now with Splunk there’s a fourth or fifth or six, I don’t know. You know you can start counting.
Kevin Bloch: 3:04
So the hard part, I think, is the good part, is they’ve got the components, but that doesn’t actually solve the problem for the customer, because the customer could have bought it from six different places anyway. Of course, if they’re, if Cisco this is what I was talking about earlier if Cisco Splunk is going to really leverage what each other’s done, they’ve got to converge that such that there’s data that can come from multiple sources, and then you’ve got some sort of collector, then you’ve got some sort of AI machine and then you’ve got some inference. Putting that together ain’t easy and I think that got a long way to go on that I agree, and there are.
Kevin Bloch: 3:38
I mean, ibm’s made some amazing announcements in AI I think Juniper has as well which is kind of really taking a lot of the legwork out of running a network, and that’s kind of where they got. That’s where the puck’s going, and, yeah, we’ll see how quickly Cisco can get there. The one thing, though, you know, chuck Robbins, the CEO, made, and that is he bought it because of. You know, we can all get in the technology, but he makes it pretty clear Form billion ARR accredited and profitable.
Kevin Bloch: 4:13
And you know he’s saying that’s pretty attractive for a company like Cisco’s trying to, as you know, swing from transactional selling hardware to an ARR software as a service kind of business. Yes, so you know the financials look great. Question mark on the rest.
Michael van Rooyen: 4:29
Yes, sure, sure, tom will always tell right with all these things. So, Kevin, obviously you spend a lot of time. Not any consensual customers. But for those who don’t follow, you’re a great newsletter. You know your thoughts, what you’re seeing, trend analysis. You know a suggested book to read. I know you’re about to release it, release another one. Can you maybe give some insights on what’s the thought of MindFeed today, or even outside of that? You know you used to be famous top 10, you know maybe generally what’s happening in industry.
Kevin Bloch: 4:57
Yeah, I guess that’s what we’re talking about the basis of the newsletter is just to provoke some thought. I mean, I’ve always spent my career looking at the next three years, not the last three months, if you will, because I got you know the companies I’ve worked with 98% are looking at the next three months. So how do I help that? I help that by by shining a light further down on the part, because most customers want, want to buy your product or service not for three months, but for three years or maybe six years right.
Kevin Bloch: 5:25
So if I can shine a light on what’s going on there and make some sense of it, so that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time. Hence the top 10, when I was at Cisco, trying to make head and tail about why did we acquire this company, what is it fitting our portfolio, how does it compete, all those sort of things. So I just continued that with the newsletter bringing out themes. So a couple of months I sort of featured hardware because I think the world you know, andresen talked about software as eating the world and everybody thinks it’s all about software and a lot of money going to software. And actually my newsletter came out before Nvidia popped.
Michael van Rooyen: 5:59
Yes.
Kevin Bloch: 6:00
Nvidia went up like I don’t know. It was 25, 30% overnight took them over a trillion dollars. That was after my newsletter had nothing to do?
Michael van Rooyen: 6:09
I’d love to take credit, Take it, take it.
Kevin Bloch: 6:10
But the point is that you know, people underestimate how important hardware was. So I featured that because I think look at what’s happened with Nvidia I think a hidden gem is Qualcomm. Yes, that’s true. We’ll talk about 5G in a minute.
Kevin Bloch: 6:23
But you know that company is remarkable. I’m always staggered by the fact their share price isn’t where I think it should, could and should be. But it’s a remarkable company and with really smart technology sort of sitting in phones and all sorts of wireless gear right, and there’s plenty. So I featured a hardware and then this month I swung back to software and the reason is that there’s been a first of all M&A and investment went down quite remarkably in the last sort of beginning of since generally and then the last few months it’s picked up a lot Right, right, and so I started, and Splunk was one of them.
Kevin Bloch: 7:02
That’s 28 billion. That’s Cisco’s largest acquisition, probably four X it’s the largest acquisition ever.
Kevin Bloch: 7:10
And then there were quite a few others that I thought about. You know, when I started looking at the last 12 months, I featured companies like New Relic that’s gone private Coltrics that is now gone private AppTO bought by IBM. But there’s two really interesting ones. One is a company called Hugging Face. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, but Hugging Face is interesting because it was formed basically to be the GitHub hub for open source AI models and it has just kicked ass and everybody’s invested in them, from Google, amazon Everybody’s invested in them.
Kevin Bloch: 7:56
So that’s an interesting one. And then the other one that I mentioned earlier was Anthropic. These two siblings left open AI because they weren’t happy with what was going on, spun up Anthropic, google invested, amazon invested, google reinvested and they’re already valued at, as I said, 20 to 30 million. So I think some really interesting trends going on in software, and I guess the reason I do these is because then at the end of it I say okay, so what can we learn from this?
Michael van Rooyen: 8:26
What are the?
Kevin Bloch: 8:27
insights in terms of these massive trends and billions of dollar deals. What can we in the industry learn from this and what is it telling us about the next three years? And so that’s what I try to do in the newsletter, whether it’s software or hardware or whatever it may be, yes, and people are able to subscribe to you.
Michael van Rooyen: 8:49
I mean, I get it and you just go to the website. Blochadvisory. com.
Kevin Bloch: 8:54
Blochadvisory. com insights sign up.
Michael van Rooyen: 8:57
Nice. It’s always a great read and always like your book suggestion because I know you’re an avid reader and have been for a very long time. To stay ahead, you touched on 5G, so let’s talk a bit about 5G. We know that that is really starting to propagate quite a lot. There’s a lot of investment by the carriers over time and I think you’ve read about 6G coming to the US et cetera probably a bit closer than I am but tell me where you think 5G is compared to NBN and obviously maybe touch on styling, because that’s always a topic for people as well.
Kevin Bloch: 9:30
Sure, I think the two dot well, maybe a third. But definitely two dominant themes in in the area of connectivity.
Michael van Rooyen: 9:39
Number one’s, 5g and the other one is Leo satellite, so we’ll come back to that.
Kevin Bloch: 9:44
But first of all, when 5G came out of the blocks, it was totally overhyped. I remember 2016 saying this is not the year of 5G. That’s right.
Kevin Bloch: 9:52
I think last year was probably maybe 2021-22. And the problem I had with it was there was no business case I couldn’t see. The only business case I could find was fixed wireless access. Yes, right, but because everything else was just the cost and was benefit to the carrier. It wasn’t a benefit to you and I as a consumer, and I think that’s kind of borne out. It is a benefit to the carrier because of its density, because there’s a whole bunch of stuff that is a benefit to the telco in terms of infrastructure cost.
Michael van Rooyen: 10:24
Yes.
Kevin Bloch: 10:27
But for the user, 4g is actually pretty damn good. They say after 50 megabits per second. A human can’t tell the difference. In fact, somebody once said to me, 5g was not built for humans because of you know it was too much low latency and all this sort of stuff. So the beauty of 4G was we were already getting way beyond 50 megs in Australia.
Michael van Rooyen: 10:52
We were.
Kevin Bloch: 10:53
And yeah, even if 5G, 3 or 4X is that no one’s going to make the difference. No, big difference. No, the things that are going to see the difference of cars yes, autonomous vehicles yes, they’ll crash If they don’t get the back in time.
Michael van Rooyen: 11:08
Correct, correct.
Kevin Bloch: 11:10
But for most people it doesn’t make a hell of a difference. So we didn’t race out and say we’re going to get 5G. You just go and buy a phone and you get it Correct and you’re paying extra, and that’s kind of what we always thought, right. Yes, One of the surprises I think has been fixed wireless access Agreed, which now touches on the NBN.
Michael van Rooyen: 11:29
And the reason is.
Kevin Bloch: 11:30
It’s just so straightforward. You can get seriously high speed. All you need is a modem on one side Modem. You don’t have to deal with anybody else, just buy it from the telco and off you go. And the numbers are pretty astounding. Where they’re saying that within a couple years, 55% of connections will be fixed wireless access. Wow, I didn’t believe that. Wow, but it makes sense Absolutely For a number of reasons. Now, I think what people outside of telecommunications forget is that it’s all underpinned by fiber. Yes, correct, so this doesn’t mean that we’re getting away from wired infrastructure.
Kevin Bloch: 12:13
Not in fact, it’s the opposite. We’re going to double down on fiber. If you look at what the NBN is doing with its HFC, all they’re doing is pushing fiber more out. Correct, right. And we’ve always said that that’s going to happen. Now it’s happening with 5G too. Yes, so there’s just going to be a truckload more fiber. Yes, but you’re going to see a lot more fixed wireless access to that fiber, provided by the 6GHz spectrum that 5G provides. So I think that’s the 5G world. It’s a reality check. It’s 85% of Australia covered by Telstra already. It’s only going to get more.
Kevin Bloch: 12:51
I think with some of the new standards from the 3GPP you’re going to see that hitting IoT as well.
Michael van Rooyen: 12:59
Yes.
Kevin Bloch: 12:59
Agreed. So let’s just say the dominant wireless spec in the world for the next three years plus is going to be 5G 100% agreed.
Michael van Rooyen: 13:09
That’s now right 100%.
Kevin Bloch: 13:10
The only time that, and we’re already seeing the big trend in leos, thousands of leos getting shot up and getting really good coverage, getting good speeds into rural and regional countries, and so that’s sort of the hand in the glove 5G Leah. The only other thing I sort of wanted to highlight earlier, and that is the huge investment in fiber. Yes, which sort of underpins all of that.
Michael van Rooyen: 13:42
Yes, yes.
Kevin Bloch: 13:44
So that’s the connectivity piece of the future, and I even question things like Wi-Fi. You know, to people, you know we’re probably still gonna have Wi-Fi for a long time, sure, but if I was a large retailer, bank, whatever, I’d really be seriously thinking about do I really want this Wi-Fi, or? Do I just connect everybody five by five G.
Kevin Bloch: 14:04
I mean we’re getting you know up to gig. Yes, on 5 g. Yes, what do I need Wi-Fi? I get better service on 5g than I get in Wi-Fi. Yeah, good, wi-fi. Yes, yes, now if I’m, I’ve got 400 offices or you know 3,000 branches, mm-hmm. As a CTO, I would seriously think about that for the future and say do I really want to the overhead of this Wi-Fi infrastructure? Wi-fi means you need access points, you need switches unique right.
Michael van Rooyen: 14:31
Correct all that infrastructure correct.
Kevin Bloch: 14:33
I’d consider jumping over that.
Michael van Rooyen: 14:36
What do you think? That’s a a natural progression. We’ve always seen many, many life-cycle belt belt curves in technology. You know. Do we do you see that Wireless first is really big driver today we see customers coming back from work, from home, you know what, wanting better speeds because investment in the office wasn’t there, so, while it has been spent on a little bit but but I think you’re right over time capabilities, mobile devices you know I’ve got an architecture we use internally so you know, securing client to cloud effectively, have your client and that’s just gonna be connected and you’re gonna be talking to the cloud securely with with all sorts of tools. So I’m agreeing with you with your point and I think we’re gonna see the trajectory overlap.
Michael van Rooyen: 15:15
Well, we talked to, you know, manufacturing and Airlines, for example, doing doing maintenance. You know 5g, something they’re really considering, even private, because gives them that coverage and connectivity. So it’s an interesting, interesting point that you make. I definitely agree to your Backhaul. And fixed wireless you know we’ve got a lot of carriers providing fixed devices. Now you plug it home and you get plenty of bad data to run your whole home on it. But, but interesting to see on that point, you think then the. It will remove very much into into that, into that space.
Kevin Bloch: 15:42
I think that’s a good example of why I think 5g so important, because we’ve had with it lots of variations in terms of the connectivity with, you know, wide area networking and those. What’s happened there is, small companies got involved with their set of standards, but they’re relatively small compared to the proliferation of 5g. So what’s then? You know, what then happened was, for example, telstra said you know, we’re covering 98 9% of Australia for IOT and, and you know they, they came out with an ariband IOT and, but it’s all based on 3g pp standards. Yes, and all of that is heading around you know, the 5g standard. So, going forward, I See a lot more investment around that because people are already using 5g, the infrastructure is already there what that does is it lowers the cost of the hardware and the and the, you know, the, the cost of the infrastructure.
Kevin Bloch: 16:50
So in terms of even IOT, I think the the most ubiquitous form of connectivity will be 5 g. Yes, and obviously there’s been reasons for not using. You know, for using LP when, as opposed to 5g in the past, like power. But, this is where the 3g pp have been working and and saying what do we do about lowering the power?
Kevin Bloch: 17:14
You know, and bringing in some of the learnings from other LP when standards yes it’s 5g. So I think over the next few years, you know, 5g is going to have a big play in the IOT world.
Michael van Rooyen: 17:25
We talked to many years ago. You know, you know sassy, zero trust, sd when you know that’s kind of come with the talent is what I’m seeing. More people are wanting zero trust, but that’s just again that client to cloud journey. Being a person has been involved with plumbing for a very long time. As yourself, I see the lifecycle going through. We had routers unsecured on private network all the way through to needing firewalls and routers for internet connectivity SD-WAN because the internet became stable enough to carry as a mechanism. I feel we’re going right back to the beginning again, where we’re just wanting a device to get us to connect to a service and security. So I’m curious to see your thought on that lifecycle. It’s interesting?
Kevin Bloch: 18:02
yeah, because both of us come from the networking world, so what I’m about to say is heresy. But I always thought many years ago, because in the 90s I was involved in network performance tools. Right, this is when we were going from sort of TDM, by-based networks to PAKA to IP. So you’re going from deterministic to non-deterministic and so people need to understand the performance of the network. But I always had in the back of my mind that actually isn’t the problem. The real problem is how do I protect my application and data?
Michael van Rooyen: 18:35
Yes, yes.
Kevin Bloch: 18:36
So if I could break through the network then I could get into anything. So I thought about it. If I was Fort Knox, I want to protect Fort Knox. I don’t want to protect the roads and rivers coming into Fort Knox, I want to protect Fort Knox. And if my application is running the bank. I want to protect that application. I don’t really care how you get to it, so I’ve always had in the back of my mind what’s more important is to protect the application and the data.
Kevin Bloch: 19:04
And sometimes not all applications and not all data are the same. Yes, some applications again I’m going to use the bank are critical for the bank and some aren’t. So, again, as a CTO, whatever it’s, understanding which are the priority ones and putting your money in there and really ensuring that, putting insurance into it to mitigate risk and sort of prioritizing or deprioritizing the other. So, going back to your question, I think the world is shifting now very much towards what data do I need? What AI tools do I need? Or applications, let’s just call it, let them what applications and how do I protect those?
Michael van Rooyen: 19:46
And I think again.
Kevin Bloch: 19:48
This sounds like heresy, but I’ve always said I think Sassy is more important than SD-WAN. I know a lot of people think, oh, they’re both important. But I’ve talked to customers who are actually skipping the SD-WAN phase but they’re not going to be able to skip the Sassy phase. You’re not going to be able to skip the zero trust phase right Because at the end of the day, you want to protect your application and data, that’s right.
Kevin Bloch: 20:10
And if you’ve got a man in the middle of a tackle and ethernet who cares Because I’ll protect the application, that’s right. That’s right. So to me and again, as we move to cloud, cloud 2.0, and things are up in the cloud the cybersecurity world is going to shift and have to shift around. How do I protect stuff in the cloud, the microservices, the containers, the interactions between them?
Michael van Rooyen: 20:36
And that ain’t easy. It’s not easy, very so, just coming to the end of our discussion, I guess if you were to, and you’ve touched on a really, really broad range of topics and we could talk for hours. But if you were to project to 2030, right, we’ve got games in 2032. We’re kind of seven years away from the 2030. What are the three technologies trends that you believe will reshape the business landscape today?
Kevin Bloch: 21:06
OK, so I look at it through the eyes of a CTO, as a customer CTO, and I said if I was running a large shop and I was a CTO in 2030, what do I have to think about? And if you can imagine a triangle at each vortex, there are three things. What are the applications running my business? And those applications are going to be completely proliferated by AI and probably Gen AI in the next version of it. So, first of all, focus on what runs my business. If I’m a bank, transportation, it doesn’t really matter. What are the applications? So that’s the first thing I would own those, I would control those, I would be. That’s my number one. Number two, on the next point of the triangle the data. So data is what powers those applications fears those applications makes those applications either intelligent or not.
Kevin Bloch: 22:08
So if you give it the wrong data, watch out. So there’s a whole world of data now in terms of people like Databricks and Snowflake and Amazon and a whole lot of others who have got these data sets, and I think curating the right data set is going to become incredibly important.
Michael van Rooyen: 22:27
It already is.
Kevin Bloch: 22:29
It’s the oil, if you will. So that’s the second most important point as a CTO. The third one, on the other end of the Vortex, is connectivity and, as I think we’ve alluded to earlier, to me, I think, connectivity is going to be very much as a service. So I don’t, you know, hold out much hope for people buying their own infrastructure. It’s never going to disappear. People will always sure, but there’ll be less of it. Yes, ownership of the infrastructure. Why does a bank with 4,000 branches want to maintain 20,000 access points?
Michael van Rooyen: 23:04
That’s right.
Kevin Bloch: 23:05
It’s a very expensive thing.
Michael van Rooyen: 23:06
Yes.
Kevin Bloch: 23:07
When you know you’ve now got options right. So if I was that bank I’d be looking at 5G, seriously looking at 5G. I’m not so sure about private, just with slicing and what you can do with 5G today both. You know C-band as well as millimeter wave. I mean, millimeter wave hasn’t yet broken, correct?
Michael van Rooyen: 23:27
But it’s going to come, it is.
Kevin Bloch: 23:28
And so you know we’ll be getting really super high speeds on 5G. So that’s one area We’ve talked about, leo for everything else right. And we’ve one thing we didn’t talk about was IoT and connecting into IoT, because that’s going to be a source, one of those data sets, or multiple data sets. So those are the three points of the triangle. Sitting in the middle of the triangle is is how do you mitigate risk? So you know, for every company is really three things that the board wants how do you make money?
Kevin Bloch: 23:58
How do you save money and how do you keep them out of jail?
Michael van Rooyen: 24:01
Correct, correct, and the middle is how do you?
Kevin Bloch: 24:03
keep them out of jail. Yes and I think things only going to get worse from a security perspective. So that sits in the middle of that, that triangle. So you know that covers a lot of the topics. In terms of trends, you know AI is probably the most I think there’s. The two biggest trends right now are really AI and specifically Gen AI.
Kevin Bloch: 24:22
So we move from classification to generation. Yes, we can generate new stuff that we’ve never had before. And the second most important one is cybersecurity. Yes, that’s the risk side. Yes, but that they covered in that triangle, if you will. And it has application, the data and the connectivity, yeah, yeah, Fantastic, Kevin.
Michael van Rooyen: 24:41
And for people who wanted to have a further discussion with yourself obviously we’ve got a number of customers that that integrate and have a discussion with you, but is it just through Bloch Advisory?
Kevin Bloch: 24:52
Yeah, I mean Kevin at blochadvisory. com.
Michael van Rooyen: 24:55
Nice and nice and easy Blochadvisory. com.
Kevin Bloch: 24:57
Blochadvisory. com, that’s correct.
Michael van Rooyen: 24:58
That’s correct, Kevin. I really appreciate you coming in today. Thanks for your insights, always a pleasure having a chat.
Kevin Bloch: 25:02
Thank you, great questions. I really appreciate. It Made it very easy for me as the interviewee.
Michael van Rooyen: 25:07
No worries at all, thank you, thank you.
