In today's episode, Will and Jillian dive deep into the evolving landscape of Salesforce DevOps, joined by the experienced Vernon Keenan. This episode covers a range of critical topics including recent changes in Salesforce's AI product offerings and the complexities surrounding their pricing. Vernon takes us on his personal journey from telecom to pioneering a tax engine on Salesforce, leading to his current focus on Go and Kubernetes-driven DevOps solutions.

They unpack the challenges developers face with Salesforce's SFDX and metadata API, explore how companies like Capado, Flowsome, and Gearset are tackling these issues, and discuss innovative approaches from firms like Elements Cloud. The conversation also ventures into the realm of cognitive DevOps, AI-driven virtual employees, and the economic and societal impacts of these technologies. Additionally, they touch upon the shifting responsibilities in Salesforce management and the rising importance of CIOs in this space.

Whether you're grappling with Salesforce’s limitations or seeking insights on how AI is transforming the DevOps field, this episode is packed with expert advice, industry insights, and forward-looking perspectives. Stay tuned, as they also address public policy concerns, the potential for job displacement, and the future of SaaS DevOps. Listen in and join as they navigate the future of technology and workforce transformation!

Will Button [00:00:01]:
Here we go. Another episode of Adventures in DevOps. Jillian, thank you for joining me as cohost today.

Jillian [00:00:07]:
Hello.

Will Button [00:00:09]:
Warren is off on vacation, getting some much needed rest and relaxation. And also joining us today, Vernon Keenan from Salesforce DevOps. Welcome, Vernon.

Vernon Keenan [00:00:22]:
Thank you. Thank you. It's great being here. Hope I can, share some insights.

Will Button [00:00:27]:
Dude, I'm pretty sure you can because I'm particularly excited about this because it's not very often that I get to hang out and talk with people who have been doing this longer than I have. So not trying to like throw out your age or anything, but I feel like, you know, I take it as a badge of honor that I've been doing it this long. So when I meet someone who's been doing it similarly, I'm excited.

Vernon Keenan [00:00:54]:
Well, thank you. Yeah. I've been doing it for 45 years now. That's quite a while. Started my career at Northwestern University, working in the medical school and then, had the great chance to, work at Genentech in the early days. And that was

Jillian [00:01:13]:
What were you doing there?

Vernon Keenan [00:01:15]:
I was doing clinical research. So I was actually one of the first people to see the results of the clinical trials, because I was doing data analysis, and we used a product called SAS. And, of course, because we were genetic and we thought we could do anything, we, decided to, write our own clinical research product.

Will Button [00:01:39]:
Right? How hard

Jillian [00:01:40]:
could it be? That one too.

Vernon Keenan [00:01:43]:
Yeah. That was that was a a lesson in humility. Right? Because because we we we learned that Oracle did a much, much better job at that particular, product than we ever strike down

Jillian [00:01:56]:
some hubris, so I'm sure it was all fine.

Vernon Keenan [00:02:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it still happens all the time. You know, I talk to enterprises all the time, and people still waste their time doing custom projects they could buy out there.

Will Button [00:02:09]:
I think it's one of those it's it's one of those lessons that you can't teach anyone. They just have to learn it themselves.

Vernon Keenan [00:02:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because you you're so conceived. You know, you you know that you think your requirements are so unique. You think your requirements are are are special. You think that your talents and your abilities are special. Well, turns out they're not, generally. Because, usually, what happens is a software company is gonna find somebody who is much better at those qualities than you are because they're gonna produce it for 10 times as many people.

Vernon Keenan [00:02:44]:
They're gonna make 10 times as as much profit. So they have as much, you know, 10 times as much motivation to find to find the right people. So, but, that's yeah. I got started there, and then I I had a fascinating early career. I was at, I I was at Oracle, and, actually, Marc Benioff himself hired me there. And I was working for him. And, I had the unique experience of going into the corporate visit center all the time, and I I was basically just lying my my butt off all the time, drawing boxes on the board, putting putting arrows, talking to the CEO of various global companies saying, yeah. We can do this.

Vernon Keenan [00:03:26]:
We can do that. We look at this application server. It puts everything together, and it was all it it it wasn't true. It wasn't true. That that was what I

Will Button [00:03:35]:
I won't say it isn't so.

Vernon Keenan [00:03:37]:
That that's that's what I call the first act of enterprise software, was we we basically said everything was gonna was gonna work, and then and then it didn't.

Will Button [00:03:48]:
Right. Like, first act like a Shakespearean tragedy where you know what acts 2 and 3 are gonna be like?

Vernon Keenan [00:03:55]:
Well, yeah. I mean, act 2, I I think, was, the data lake, data warehouse era where we tried to put everything into, like, a secondary, storage area, and we still didn't get transformation. We still didn't get, you know, new capabilities out of that. And, hopefully, we're in the 3rd act now where maybe things will come up.

Jillian [00:04:15]:
Is just gonna do it for us. That's what I think.

Vernon Keenan [00:04:18]:
Well, that's my thing

Jillian [00:04:20]:
as well. Structure my data anymore. Who who needs even MongoDB when I've got AI?

Vernon Keenan [00:04:27]:
No. We could delve into that a little later, I guess. But

Will Button [00:04:33]:
Okay.

Vernon Keenan [00:04:33]:
But yes. So my friendship, with Marc Benioff is kinda interesting, because I recently renewed it. It was fascinating. Because I wrote a a blog post that got his attention that said why Salesforce Trailblazers don't care about AI. And, I my phone started blowing up, and I and I was been have renewed my friendship with Mark. So so that is that that's interesting as well.

Will Button [00:05:03]:
So what's your take on that? Why don't they care?

Vernon Keenan [00:05:07]:
Well, the real the reason was because they didn't actually put it make it available in the product. So the thing about Salesforce that I liked as a, you know, like, I got my first Salesforce account actually way back in 1999. And I've been using it, you know, on and off, and I actually built my own business on it, about starting in 2012. Created a whole enterprise product, for telecom that I used in my business. And the reason why I thought that the trailblazer community was so active and so forthcoming with tips and tricks and, like, techniques and sharing and things like that was because the SaaS pricing model, basically gave you all you could eat for a fixed price. Mhmm. So any trailblazer would be able to, like, go to the setup menu and search for a new feature, for example. And then they could just, like, start trying it out.

Vernon Keenan [00:06:08]:
So those those capabilities were always in there. But because AI seems to be different, mainly in terms of the cost that the companies have to burden to provide it, they didn't do that. They made you order a product. So while they were all carping and and, you know, saying AI this and AI that, like, 95% of the trailblazers out there couldn't get access to it. So that would that was my point. And the thing that was a fascinating story actually is that what happened was Mark read that. They sent me the keynote, and I actually was able to, like, edit the keynote and tell them what they should fix.

Will Button [00:06:49]:
And Wow.

Vernon Keenan [00:06:51]:
And this is, like, 3 days before Dreamforce. And and they, I sent it back to them. They put all the changes in. They changed product timelines, accelerated timelines, and just, you know, made a bunch of people, you know, you know what happens when the CEO says do things to a bunch of people they weren't expecting to do things, like, over the weekend and

Jillian [00:07:14]:
My long holiday weekend like that at all.

Vernon Keenan [00:07:18]:
That's right. It's gone. You know? It's like plus you got all the stress of, you know, Dreamforce coming up, all the prep, and now they gotta change all the products. So so they changed it. They actually included a free version of their new Agent Force thing, in a a new, go to market version of their product they call foundations, which is kinda like, you can just buy it with a credit card as opposed to dealing with, one of their account executives.

Will Button [00:07:48]:
Oh,

Vernon Keenan [00:07:48]:
nice. So they so they actually changed the product. Not sure how effective that was, but kinda just like in any situation, what it did, it just peeled the onion a little bit and revealed another problem underneath. Which is which is how are they gonna charge for it? So they haven't really figured it out yet is the answer. So there's a lot of confusion out there in the Salesforce world as to how they're gonna pay for it, the all this magical AI stuff.

Jillian [00:08:18]:
For sure.

Vernon Keenan [00:08:18]:
That's what it keeps talking about. For sure. But but I so we get back to the SaaS DevOps thing. I'll just tell my story a little bit, more. So like I said, I was in telecom. I had this, I had built an actual tax engine on the Salesforce platform for telecom, which is, you can imagine, is pretty complex. And I had an opportunity to kinda, like, leverage that tax engine outside of telecom. And so I realized that Salesforce was kind of a bad platform for that because of its performance characteristics.

Vernon Keenan [00:08:55]:
You know, like, if you're gonna have an API service, you don't wanna run it off of Salesforce, basically. There's just too much overhead, too many constraints. So I personally got into more of, I think, your world of DevOps, kinda like the Go Kubernetes world. And I implemented all of my stuff, you know, my my new API, my new database, everything with Go, Kubernetes. It was beautiful, scalable, it's, you know, like, a 100 times faster than Salesforce. And so I had that, but, you know, business wise, that project didn't go anywhere. So I had all this wonderful new DevOps knowledge plus being the Salesforce expert, so I turned my attention back to Salesforce. And then I realized that they were in deep, deep, deep trouble when it came to release management.

Vernon Keenan [00:09:50]:
Basically, what happened was Salesforce had an initiative in the late 20 tens. It was called the SFDX initiatives, where they essentially created a command line interface to their metadata API. And this enabled developers to pull configurations out of a Salesforce org and put them into a git repository. So now this is starting to sound a little bit more like a regular DevOps workflow. Right? Right. Where you have repository, you have a somewhat kind of a source of truth, and then you're able to, deploy it. Again, in some fashion, maybe to another org, or you're changing the deployment and you're redeploying it to add a capability, fix an error, or something like that. So it turns out that the the SFDX effort was noble and was good and actually was kind of sufficient to begin the DevOps movement within Salesforce.

Vernon Keenan [00:11:00]:
And so what happened was all these end users basically started to to try to figure out how to use this SFDX tool to manipulate Salesforce.

Will Button [00:11:13]:
Mhmm. And

Vernon Keenan [00:11:14]:
then at the same time, a group of companies, and I'll name a few of them. The leaders are Capado, and back then, Flowsome. And another one that's come out is Gearset. And all of these companies, what they did is they kind of operationalized that API or that that, CLI interface that Salesforce had provided end users And put a low code clicky interface on top of that capability. So that Salesforce admins and other folks who were accustomed to a low code interface could start to do release management in a more rigorous way using tools like Git or Versus Code or things like that to, you know, have a more kind of rigorous development effort. But at the same time, it was still constrained a lot by the way that Salesforce works. So, like, here's here's a crazy thing. I mentioned this metadata API.

Vernon Keenan [00:12:25]:
Right? And you think that this metadata API would love let you to actually pull all the information out of a Salesforce org so that you could reproduce it. Like, maybe copy it to another org or something like that. Turns out that there is neglect within Salesforce, the company, to implementing the metadata API. So they they have a they have a definitely a priority to get the the low code interfaces out there first. So they actually recognize that they've gone to the point now where it's it's a real problem. And some of these DevOps companies, another one I I'll mention is Elements Cloud. And they're interesting because they have all kinds of proprietary ways to go into the Salesforce org and get out that metadata that's not available through the API. So this kind of gets into a a central theme that I have all the time when I'm talking about SaaS DevOps and Salesforce DevOps, which is that the way these things work is that you kinda have to treat the subject system, you know, like the the Salesforce org that you're, updating or the org that you're reading or or copying.

Vernon Keenan [00:13:57]:
You have to kind of treat that thing like a living system Where there's there's no source of truth, really, other than the state of the thing that it's running in now. And that's really quite problematic because you have to, like, in order to understand if you can produce a a deployment that's gonna work, you know, it's not it's gonna go through and not have any errors, you essentially have to, like the only way to do that is to is to submit it to the org and see if any errors come out. So you can imagine how slow that would be on an iterative basis and how frustrating. And, this actually gets back to a complaint that Salesforce developers in the community have about working with Salesforce, which is that it's very slow. It can and it like, somebody who went from goo to Apex, you know, Apex is the is the development lang is this Java like language they have for Salesforce. So, like, with Go, I could just, you know, compile things, you know, hit you know, recompile or whatever. Go. And I'd have, like, 10 seconds between a coding change and being able to see if it worked.

Vernon Keenan [00:15:15]:
With Salesforce, that can go out to maybe 2 or 3 minutes sometimes.

Will Button [00:15:20]:
Right.

Vernon Keenan [00:15:20]:
So so when when you submit, a a package to either your scratch org or or even, you know, a sandbox org for testing, it's still gonna take, you know, like, 90 seconds, 2 minutes for that for that submission to go in. So I think Salesforce developers are are always complaining about this this flow of work thing. And the way that you can, fix that as a vendor is to do kind of what Elements is doing, which is to create what I call a very complete digital twin of your subject SaaS system within the, DevOps product that you're working with. So so Elements has a separate, like, AWS thing running where they essentially ingest all of the metadata from an org and convert it into, like, a graph database or some other kind of representation that they can then manipulate. And then they can use that to do something which is very essential in Salesforce, which is called impact analysis. So, like, if if if if the boss says, oh, we gotta have another, you know, shipping type in the shipping module or whatever, then that thing needs to be, defined in what they call a pick list in Salesforce.

Will Button [00:16:57]:
Mhmm.

Vernon Keenan [00:16:58]:
And when you change the pick list though, you could actually impact a whole bunch of different things. You know, different screens all over the place, Apex code, user interface mechanisms, and other things like that. So by having a digital twin, you're able to easily pick do what I call impact analysis or change intelligence is another word they use for that. My favorite term is blast radius.

Will Button [00:17:29]:
For sure.

Vernon Keenan [00:17:30]:
You know, like like like, when you when you make a change, what's the blast radius potential of that particular change? And so that that's a that's a critical and that's just one thing one example that you can't get out of Salesforce and that you you need a DevOps service provider to help you delve into that and to help you organize that stuff.

Will Button [00:17:57]:
So Let me pause you real quick right there and, like, recap the problem here for our listeners. So Yes. With, with these large enterprise style SaaSes, I think you're describing 2 problems here. 1 is, you never know what the true state is. So someone with the appropriate permissions could go in, make a change to the environment, and you don't have any way of tracking that change to see what was actually impacted aside from asking that person, hey. What'd you do? And getting their typical response, nothing. And then the other one the other aspect of this is if you want to introduce new features or capabilities to your system, you don't have any way to create, like, a staging area and test your changes before you apply to production.

Vernon Keenan [00:18:49]:
Correct. Correct. So those are those are both, capabilities that DevOps products, Salesforce and SaaS DevOps products, let you do. And the most popular Salesforce DevOps product is from a company called Gearset. They're in England. And the simulated deployment is the most popular feature of that product. So that's and it's also affordable. So, like, for $250 a year or whatever to get a seat for that thing.

Vernon Keenan [00:19:24]:
Oh, wow. Yeah. It's pretty cheap, and, it'll save you a ton of time, basically. It's a it's a it's a iteration.

Will Button [00:19:35]:
Yeah. At that price, it doesn't even need to save you more than a few minutes per year.

Vernon Keenan [00:19:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. No. And and Gear Sets easy to buy too. That's another reason why they're popular. They kinda have a, you know, a PLG product like growth concept where they just try to make it easy to use, easy to buy. You don't have to talk to a sales rep. Where with most of the other products, it's more like an enterprise sales

Will Button [00:20:02]:
Yeah.

Vernon Keenan [00:20:03]:
Sales loop where you gotta kinda, delve into, dealing with somebody and then coming up with a a license agreement.

Will Button [00:20:12]:
Jillian, you were about to say something.

Jillian [00:20:14]:
Yeah. I was just wondering who is kind of the target audience for this? Because on the one hand, we have Salesforce, which is, you know, like a a sales tool. Right? And then on the other hand, we're talking about DevOps. And, from the, you know, places that I've been at, the sales and marketing team is not necessarily gonna know or wanna have anything to do with any type of DevOps project. Right? If they could, they could be running things, off of their laptop and Excel or whatever, they probably would and would have nothing to do with somebody like me. So I'm just wondering what are kind of the target audiences of these different tools?

Vernon Keenan [00:20:50]:
Well, that's changed over the years. So I think that that's important to realize. So the Salesforce has evolved over the last, let's say, 8 or 9 years into an enterprise, platform. So it's it's more like an application delivery platform than a pure CRM than than it was in the past. And, also, if there are several customers out there, Salesforce customers out there who are spending in excess of a $100,000,000 a year pre on Salesforce. And kind of the minimum for a Fortune 500 type company, the minimum expenditure is in the tens of millions. So because of that, a lot of the responsibility for maintaining Salesforce has moved off of the departments and into the office of the CIO. So I think that that's part of the explanation for for why people care about DevOps is is, in Salesforce now.

Vernon Keenan [00:21:54]:
And it's been it may have been taken out of the hands of some of the departmental leaders because that they want to, increase efficiency. But I think, Jillian, you're you're right that every you know, there are lots of people out there who could care less about DevOps and really want to use Salesforce kind of like what, they've been telling you how they've been telling you to use it.

Will Button [00:22:24]:
Yeah. I thought

Jillian [00:22:25]:
it was a marketing tool. I thought it was, like, a a more robust, like, HubSpot or something.

Vernon Keenan [00:22:30]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And

Jillian [00:22:31]:
contractor thing, and I have, like, Harvest and HubSpot for emails. I thought that it was a fancier version of that, and now I'm finding out that I was so wrong as

Will Button [00:22:40]:
I am a Well,

Vernon Keenan [00:22:40]:
you're not of course, you're not wrong. But I mean, there's just a they it's more like they want it to be bigger. And the other thing to appreciate about Salesforce is is that when they're in a big company selling, their number one goal is to have multiple clouds, as they call it. So they have their sales cloud, their marketing cloud, their commerce cloud. Now they have data cloud. Now they have, you know, all these other things that are kind of all designed to work. Well, actually, they're not well designed to work together. Dirty little secret out there.

Vernon Keenan [00:23:15]:
But and they're trying to make them all work together. They're actually rewriting some of the

Jillian [00:23:19]:
Doing their best. Yeah.

Vernon Keenan [00:23:21]:
They are. You know? I I I'm a critic of them, and I I always like to, you know, have a little empathy in my criticism. But, they're, yeah, they're they're trying. They're trying to to do that. But I think they definitely, want the attention on their product to be at the CIO level. And a lot of vendors now are in the Salesforce ecosystem are kind of, like, turning their sales pitches in that direction. Where before the sales pitches need to be you just need to be more in a land and expand kind of philosophy so that they would be pitching to the trailblazers, would be pitching to the sales managers, would be pitching to, you know, the people who who are actually, using these products more. But the pitch has definitely turned more to the CEO, CIO level pitch.

Vernon Keenan [00:24:19]:
And, like, and also let's look for a minute at where DevOps is most prominent in Salesforce, and it's it's almost always in a critical application. So there's a, a Salesforce partner out there called Encino, n capital c I n o. And they are a multibillion dollar valuation public company, that that runs on top of Salesforce, and what they do is banking. So they're, will do financial transactions and banking service. So you can imagine that the people who are running Encino installations definitely want DevOps. Right? Because they they definitely wanna be able to have a a record of all the changes they made to their system. They want have validation protocols. They have QA protocols, and they and they have to, sustain them.

Vernon Keenan [00:25:19]:
And, there's actually a DevOps company that's pretty much devoted to that one sector, and it's called Auto Rabbit. It's a cute name.

Will Button [00:25:29]:
Yeah.

Vernon Keenan [00:25:29]:
I like it. Their their annual, conference is called DevOps.

Will Button [00:25:37]:
I like it. On them. Yeah. Good job.

Vernon Keenan [00:25:40]:
Yeah. I I like AutoRabbit. They have some great great people there, and and they, they're very rigorous in terms of, the security aspects that often gets folded into Salesforce DevOps too, like static, security analysis and and other things like that. So, yeah, I think the the reason why there's been a transition from Salesforce being kind of this this SaaS platform that you just use to being something that has to have, like, a change management process associated with it is mainly the introduction of of, critical applications into it. There was another product, used to be on Salesforce called Veeva. You may have heard of them. They're a big, another giant software company who services pharmaceutical industry. So, you know, like in my I used to work at Genentech, and and it it totally reminds me of, what we're doing is kinda like the software QA and validation that we had to do for the FDA.

Vernon Keenan [00:26:48]:
You know, like at Genentech, we had to, like, have a protocol for for how we, like, did all the rat lab, weighing. You know? So so that we could produce that protocol to the FDA and say, this is how we weighed all the rats. And and and a similar thing happens with software too. Right? So they they that that's where this kind of, culture came from, I think. And it's it's now been extended more into Salesforce.

Will Button [00:27:18]:
So what are the, like, in in my experience, very few people who really need DevOps know that DevOps is the thing they need. So what does a conversation look like for you when you're talking to people that clues you in to say, oh, here's what you're missing. Here's here's what this problem is describing to me.

Vernon Keenan [00:27:40]:
I think it's release management problems. Yeah. That's that's the other essentially equivalent description for what the the field is in Salesforce. Because like I mentioned before, the there is so many speed bumps and roadblocks to developers to to get this going. So, if you're what a lot of these products do is they offer you CICD pipeline automation

Will Button [00:28:09]:
Mhmm.

Vernon Keenan [00:28:09]:
As well. So they kinda give you a clicky interface to let you do pipelines. And again, it's it's it's more compatible with the Salesforce trailblazer kind of profile to to have that. So I think it's it's a common pain point in almost every Salesforce shop that does customization is is this. And they also know that that the vendor ecosystem is out there to service them. Because if if you're part of the whole Salesforce, you know, Dreamforce, World Tour thing, you know, all all of their outbound communication and their partnership programs and everything. There are companies like Capado and Gearset and Flowsome and all these companies are are upfront, you know, in terms of of their partnership. And Salesforce actually has investment relationships with some of these, like Capado.

Vernon Keenan [00:29:16]:
And they does the Salesforce frequently, recommends them to solve problems for for for big people. So I think people realize that that release management in Salesforce is still broken. Still a lot of problems with it, and you probably need some vendor help to help you get through it.

Will Button [00:29:41]:
Yeah. I'm sure just thinking about it from a Salesforce perspective, you know, how they started and where they got to now, you're dealing with 30 years of legacy code, and now you're like, oh, hey. Let's do this new thing. I would imagine that that's not an easy implementation.

Vernon Keenan [00:29:59]:
No. It's not. It's, I think you get a lot of, some of these tools are bought, not used. Yeah. That shelfware is a big problem in Salesforce ecosystem. The I think they, people are are always looking for solutions to this kind of thing. And especially if you have that external pressure of, like, you know, a a QA officer or somebody like that in your organization who's going to, you know, be looking down your shoulder or if you have external regulatory concerns or things like that. I think that that that that really is the dividing line.

Vernon Keenan [00:30:45]:
I think I think it of all these companies, like, I would say there's about something like about a $1,000,000,000 market, I think, for all the software and services for Salesforce DevOps. So that might be a little bigger than

Will Button [00:31:03]:
Wow.

Vernon Keenan [00:31:04]:
Than than people have thought. I think about a quarter of that is software and about 3 quarters of that would be services from people like, you know, Accenture or whoever, you know, global system integrators who or consultant houses that frequently come in and and and do this kind of thing. So I think the other thing that I think we wanna talk about today, and we can kinda switch subjects a little bit here, is is, like, 3 years ago, I wrote this blog post where I said predicted that SaaS DevOps was gonna be a thing. And I recently was talking to one of my old customers, Opsera, and and they have, they're out there really trying to make this SaaS DevOps thing work. And here's the thing that they've noticed talking to customers now is that at the CIO level or maybe at the center of excellence level, you do have a a a lot of people now thinking about how to manage every business platform in their company. So you have what is I I've heard some crazy numbers. Like, if you're a Fortune 500, you have maybe up to a 1000 different applications running in your in your organization. And maybe if you're a department, you might have 50 different online apps or SaaS apps that you could be using for this kind of thing.

Vernon Keenan [00:32:39]:
So I think the same kind of momentum that we saw in Salesforce where they become it becomes more critical. It becomes more widespread. It becomes harder to manage. So it kinda rolls up to the CIO level for for concern. This is happening with other products as well. Obvious ones like SAP 4 HANA or or, you know, like Oracle ERP or something like that is is one of them. But even things like Jira. Mhmm.

Vernon Keenan [00:33:12]:
Or or things like, HubSpot. Or things like, Zendesk is a is a big one. So so people, there's an express there's a thing out there now that I think kinda goes hand in hand with the platform engineering movement, actually. That CIOs want some sort of universal business platform, system that they can use to do that. And I've seen various, Salesforce DevOps companies. Just a handful of them have been successful. 2 of them. 1 is Salto, another one is Opsera, to kinda do this, to to have, like, a low code user interface, to do SaaS DevOps on different application products.

Vernon Keenan [00:34:07]:
But I kinda have a feeling that IT managers are looking for the solution right now. That they they want to have a universal application to be a digital twin manager for all of their different SaaS products.

Will Button [00:34:25]:
Yeah. For sure. The there's a big risk factor there as well because we pretty rapidly ran to the SaaS world. And now in hindsight, you can look back and say, oh, wait. All of our business critical data is not ours. It's sitting in a SaaS somewhere. And so how do number 1, how do I manage the control and permissions in that? And, also, what's the blast radius when that SaaS provider gets hacked?

Vernon Keenan [00:34:58]:
Oh, right. Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of security and safety considerations and data governance and and retention, problems there. I think I think the a lot of people are kinda over the idea of of the SaaS data being stored in somebody else's computer, being not your data. You know, I think that most people have an export capability, and I think that the success of SaaS is kinda like an indicator that people are are are getting over that. But, I think, the the they they definitely want to have some way to consolidate DevOps sprawl in their organizations. Because this is, I think, something you're seeing that goes along with these separate business systems. So if you're gonna have a Salesforce DevOps team, you're gonna have an SAP DevOps team, you're gonna have maybe a a Jira DevOps team.

Vernon Keenan [00:35:59]:
So I think that if you're a CIO and you're trying to consolidate tool usage and trying to, get people to work together better, I think that that the looking at how you now have release management processes and critical infrastructure processes associated with these SaaS products, that that there's a a SaaS DevOps discipline that could be developed around this that would that would consolidate and systematize your ability to manage all these things.

Will Button [00:36:36]:
Yeah. It almost strikes me as very similar to back in the nineties when you were doing desktop configuring, like, when you were building like, if you had a Salesforce of 200 people, you know, you only made it through the first 2 or 3 computers before you were looking for some way to automate it, and then that took you into the world of, like, modifying the Windows Registry and and all of that kind of stuff. It feels very similar to that.

Vernon Keenan [00:37:05]:
Oh, yeah. Like, in other words, taking a bunch of crazy configurations and trying to manage them under one roof.

Will Button [00:37:12]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Vernon Keenan [00:37:14]:
Yeah. That's that that

Jillian [00:37:15]:
Bio Linux. That's for you there. It's Bio Linux.

Will Button [00:37:21]:
Well, I think that's where we all ended up, but now here we are facing the same problem again.

Jillian [00:37:28]:
No. I just I just remember, like, you know, a certain team trying so hard to get all the bioinformatics applications bundled with 1 distro of Linux, and I don't know. They really tried. Okay, you guys. They tried.

Will Button [00:37:40]:
They gave me a pass.

Jillian [00:37:42]:
And that was just Bioinics, and that was that was my job to manage that for, like, a year.

Vernon Keenan [00:37:47]:
Bioinics?

Jillian [00:37:48]:
Bioinics. Yeah. It was it was, like, I think a distribution of Ubuntu that just had a lot of bioinformatics software pre installed. So it had, like, r and blast and all, like, the genomics soft all the top genomics software at the time. You could,

Will Button [00:38:04]:
I don't know.

Vernon Keenan [00:38:06]:
Sounds like a project.

Jillian [00:38:07]:
Very small genome, I guess. I don't know.

Vernon Keenan [00:38:11]:
That that was that was a while ago, I think.

Jillian [00:38:13]:
That was that was a while ago. Yeah.

Vernon Keenan [00:38:16]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jillian [00:38:17]:
We're talking about desktop management, and, that that was my job for a little bit was to install Bio Linux on all the new scientist computers.

Will Button [00:38:26]:
So do you think companies like Salesforce have a a road map of taking this problem in house and bundling it as part of Salesforce, or you think they're gonna rely on the, external vendors and support them in solving it?

Vernon Keenan [00:38:43]:
I think the solid answer is the external vendors Yeah. Are the ones to to to rely on. I think, because of generative AI, I think that there will be disruption though in DevOps right now. And I think maybe a year ago, there was a rumor going around or it might have been just a hope from the Capado people that Salesforce might, buy Capado. And after they bought OWN backup, recently, that for over $1,000,000,000, that so that possibility came up again. But if I was, you know, look, if I was a adviser for Salesforce on this, I would say maybe try to hold off on that because the just DevOps is gonna be highly disrupted by AI, I I think. Like like like, for example, I was telling you the story about the digital twin, for example. So so that's so if what that required to create was to, ingest all of the metadata from a Salesforce org and then create a structure around it so that you could then use it, sort of traverse it in some way, like a graph database, for example.

Vernon Keenan [00:40:04]:
And you can actually achieve that same functionality now by simply ingesting all of the XML metadata and just putting it in a giant blob or ragbur into into an organized semantic database is the better way to do it. And then you can use an LOM to get the same results. So you can use an LOM to find a blast radius for a chain proposed change without creating a graph database. So that means a new entrant in Salesforce DevOps can possibly have the same kind of capability that that, you know, Elements Cloud and Panaya and and few of these others have, to find the blast radius with almost no coding.

Will Button [00:40:58]:
Alright on. Okay.

Vernon Keenan [00:41:00]:
So so this is, just one example of the revolutionary capabilities of of AI when it when it comes to to DevOps. So I have a like, there was a company in Y Combinator's current batch called sre.ai. There's an intriguing URL. And they're doing Salesforce DevOps with natural language. So you would be able to, give it a command, like take a a deployment from sandbox a and deploy it to user testing sandbox b just with a command like that, just with natural language. And I think that this crowd, this the listeners here kind of understand how potent that would be. Because that that that would invoke a whole pipeline process. And, also, what this company claims they can do is do repair errors that occur in the pipeline.

Vernon Keenan [00:42:11]:
So, you know, self healing kind of capabilities with that, which is the thing that AI seems to be really great at in terms of root cause analysis for for, errors. So I think to answer your question, I think that they may have been thinking about acquiring Capado or one of the other ones maybe a year ago because it is an obvious thing, and they're kinda moving out of this new acquisitions phase that they were in. Mhmm. But, I think right now, the field is up for grabs.

Will Button [00:42:45]:
Yeah. For sure. No. I see that because in in the modeling you just described, like, the the capabilities of using an LLM to do that would just dwarf the capabilities of any team trying to do it by forcing people to follow procedures and policies.

Vernon Keenan [00:43:07]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, also, it's just the the cogeneration aspect of of AI as well that, I think that's considered to be part of Salesforce DevOps now. Salesforce has an agent, that lets you or I should call it a copilot. Works kinda like GitHub. Copilot, even though Mark hates copilots, they still got some. They, you know, they they they still have the the capability to generate code and and that kind of thing. But and that's part of DevOps.

Vernon Keenan [00:43:47]:
But I don't think that that they're gonna be supporting it very much, honestly. And I I try to get into that. Because like this, the publisher of Salesforce DevOps dot net is kinda like my job to figure out for the community, you know, where the solutions are gonna come from. And, you know, like, they have a product called Salesforce DevOps Center. And it's kinda terrible. It just it it it hasn't been updated. There's the they they have a very sluggish pipeline of of features that they're that they're putting in. If you're aware of how Salesforce operates internally, politically, you kinda realize that this is a a, kinda like a group that's that's sitting in a nonrevenue position within Salesforce.

Vernon Keenan [00:44:35]:
So they have no product that you could put a revenue number on. So if if you don't have that in Salesforce, you're at a disadvantage.

Will Button [00:44:44]:
Yeah. Right.

Jillian [00:44:45]:
Gotta be making money. It's in the name.

Vernon Keenan [00:44:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that this like, one thing I I like to compare Salesforce and Microsoft, in the in this respect. I think Microsoft, for me as a developer, as as somebody who who uses tools and was looking for things to put together all the time, Microsoft does it right. You know, what they basically they're gonna create an API, create an interface, and they're gonna service the developers first. They're They're gonna make sure the developers have all the tools in order to create these applications.

Vernon Keenan [00:45:18]:
And Salesforce does it kind of backwards. They're gonna make sure that the trailblazers have all the tools to do the clicky thing first. But then, then the the DevOps capabilities or the the, Apex coders or even a flow coder, capability is added later. You know, like, they they gotta get this this functionality out the door that people can buy. And and it's it's that mentality that, you know, it's just kinda like a gigantic difference in the founders between Bill Gates and and Marc Benioff. You know? That you have, you know, somebody who's who wants to create a tool tools that developers can use, and that's not the mentality at Salesforce. So the DevOps industry is basically compensating for that.

Will Button [00:46:11]:
Yeah. For sure. And that's been the pattern I've seen a lot in my career in start ups. You, you know, you have 2 types of start ups from that perspective. You have the ones who are just, like, ship it or the ones who think about the long term you know, how do we support this, how do we configure it, how do we maintain it, and and are a little more deliberate in their the delivery. But, I tend to lean towards the fir former with just ship it because odds are from a startup perspective, odds are your product's gonna fail, so you wanna fail as quickly as possible. And in the off chance that it doesn't fail, well, now you've got money. And with money, you can pretty much solve all the bad decisions you made early on.

Vernon Keenan [00:47:01]:
Well, yeah. That's I I I I tend to agree. I mean, I I think my inclination as a developer is to kinda go down the wrong road here, which is to make it make it perfect.

Will Button [00:47:12]:
Right. Yeah.

Vernon Keenan [00:47:13]:
You know, I think I kinda have that OCD, ADD, thing that a lot of developers have, which is, you know, oh, but if I just do the get this one thing, get the speed going, you know, cut out this one thing, it'll it'll be perfect, and everybody will buy it. And then the problem is you always find some other thing to fix.

Will Button [00:47:33]:
For sure. Yeah.

Vernon Keenan [00:47:34]:
After that, you get into an app. Problems? Yeah. Always new problems. And I think you're right is you gotta ship the thing. You gotta you gotta get customers. You gotta have your MVP out there. You gotta, you know, talk to people. And, yeah, you can fix bad design decisions later.

Will Button [00:47:57]:
For sure. So what is the, what is the this changing landscape look for you where if we use the Wayne Gretzky analogy of, go where the puck's gonna be, where are you lining up for this?

Vernon Keenan [00:48:12]:
Oh, well, I'm, I'm interested in cognitive DevOps now. That's kind of the thing. And

Will Button [00:48:19]:
I hadn't heard that term before, but we were kinda out of there. Whatever.

Vernon Keenan [00:48:22]:
Yeah. That's my term, cognitive DevOps.

Will Button [00:48:25]:
I like it.

Jillian [00:48:26]:
Glad to have

Will Button [00:48:27]:
a point here.

Vernon Keenan [00:48:28]:
I like to I call it, that's what sre.ai is doing, is cognitive DevOps. I think, that we're gonna the other thing that's happening for sure, and I talked to all these companies, I talked to Salesforce, is this agent concept is I think it's a little more real than any other, part of the generative AI revolution that we're now in the 3rd year of, I guess. The reason why is because there's some serious programming and development behind these things. It's not just the LLMs. It's you you've got, multistage LLMs. You've got a, you know, an LLM that does the planning, then you've got other LLMs that do the actions, for example. And and then you've got other, ways to kinda conceive of this. And I think the most interesting way to conceive of this is what I call the virtual employee, paradigm.

Vernon Keenan [00:49:39]:
And the I think that this is where it's gonna go. I think that you're gonna have the agents, and this is gonna happen in DevOps too. So so you're gonna have be able to hire a virtual employee that functions like your Salesforce admin. That you're going to be able to communicate with the, DE like a business person. You know, like, you are able to express your business needs to this, your Salesforce admin, VA. And then that Salesforce admin, VA, will actually use RPA or whatever it needs to do to actually operate the software to implement those changes and to manage manage it for you. So I believe that most of the DevOps companies have a project working on this right now.

Will Button [00:50:39]:
Yeah. I can see that being very realistic. Because when you think about the common hands on tasks that happen in in DevOps, it's, you know, create a Kubernetes pod with these images and configure a database and add that database connection stream to this parameter, which are all things that are very much within the capabilities of, an agent like that.

Vernon Keenan [00:51:06]:
Right. Yeah. It's it's exact it's essentially I think with the the way these VEs are gonna go is they're gonna replace entry level employees first.

Will Button [00:51:17]:
Yeah.

Vernon Keenan [00:51:18]:
So that's just the kind of thing you would give to your DevOps trainee. Right?

Will Button [00:51:22]:
Right.

Vernon Keenan [00:51:23]:
And that, so so they're going to be a joy and a boon to senior people like us. You know? That that that know how to use all these, know what needs to be done, and can just give out the instructions like you're like you're talking to a junior person on your team. And, that, by the way, gets into the public policy aspect of of this AI businesses. You know, what's gonna happen to all the entry level jobs? And

Will Button [00:51:54]:
For sure.

Vernon Keenan [00:51:54]:
What what what's gonna happen to all all that kind of stuff. So, you know, I don't wanna be just blithely talking about virtual employees without mentioning that, you know, there's obviously a public policy and human impact to this. And I think it's, if you're a young DevOps person right now, it's it's, you know, I have no other I have nothing to say other than I'm kinda worried Yeah. About that, because I think that you look at this v e thing, and, something that you can associate with that is what I call v e economics. And, essentially, if you can hire let's say you needed 20 of these DevOps junior people in your giant company. Well, you're gonna start experiencing some economies of scale that you won't experience with people. Right? So on 20th one of this, you're gonna get a big discount from whatever service provider that that you're you're getting this from. So there's kinda like new economic laws that are that are, that are happening here.

Vernon Keenan [00:53:01]:
And one of them is, you know, the law of infinite scale. The the basically, you know, you take away the profit margin. You know, you get you have a service provider like Salesforce, and they'll be happy to provide you all of these, agents or or virtual employees at a at a discount. So now you've got the prospect of being able to grow your headcount without a linear increase in in expenses. So this basic property of v e economics, I think, is what's gonna drive this forward is that this is something that CEOs get immediately.

Will Button [00:53:44]:
Right.

Vernon Keenan [00:53:44]:
And and did you like, they're they're what is what does the CEO do? They manage their workforce. They manage resources. They they they take inputs and outputs. They they think in terms of profit and loss. The they, are extremely interested in this. Like, I've talked to the agent force rollout from Salesforce in September was, definitely changed the landscape in terms of their sales right now. That I've been talking to system integrators and consultants, and they're getting calls from their CIOs, basically, because their CEOs are saying, hey. You know, I saw what Mark's talking about.

Vernon Keenan [00:54:28]:
I get this v e economics thing. Get me some of these virtual employees as quick as possible. And and so it it's we're seeing a different shape of demand right now. Mhmm. And I was talking to another one of these cognitive DevOps companies, and they're actually going in there making the sale based on what their customer is paying a Salesforce admin. So this to me is kind of revolutionary because it it implements what people are calling the service as a software model. And what that means for the software industry is that not only are you able to to, let's say, get budget out of an existing IT budget, but now you're able to get budget out of an existing human resources budget.

Will Button [00:55:33]:
Yeah. For sure. That's crazy. And that just yeah. That gives you you know, you refer to it in in sales a lot. It it, you know, it gives you stickiness because now you can bring multiple decision makers in and create compelling arguments for each of those.

Vernon Keenan [00:55:56]:
That's wild. Yeah. It's it is wild. I I think so. You know, where am I looking for things to go? I think, I'm sticking with the DevOps thing. Cognitive DevOps, I think, is gonna be a huge disruptor. I I think that, that they're going to slowly get into this area. And I think that we're gonna have pretty soon, you're gonna have virtual employees, let's say, within 2 years, I'd say, who would be able to manage or at least management process all completely on their own.

Vernon Keenan [00:56:36]:
So that that would be tremendous in terms of automation and time savings for the the Salesforce, admins that are left, to to do that.

Jillian [00:56:50]:
Oh, that is crazy disruptive when you think about kinda all the industries that could be applied for. Like, it wasn't too long ago that we had, you know, secretaries and things to help with scheduling, and now we have virtual calendars that can do all that. And I think AI is on just a a completely different scale than even these kind of revolutionary technologies that we've already seen, like virtual calendars and a word processor. You know, like, being a word processor used to be people's jobs as well.

Vernon Keenan [00:57:19]:
For sure.

Jillian [00:57:20]:
I don't know. It's gotta be scary to be a young person and, like, who's coming into the industry now or, you know, or or is thinking about coming in. Sure. It's scary for everybody else too, but I would be especially scared to see young people. Mhmm. Because of what you said about the entry level jobs, like, just being obliterated by, by AI.

Vernon Keenan [00:57:40]:
Yeah. I'm really concerned about that. You know, as a policy prognosticator, I I I definitely see a problem there. I also like, I see this v e economics is like a a a giant sucking sound,

Will Button [00:57:53]:
you

Vernon Keenan [00:57:53]:
know, out there, that CEOs are locked in. I think it it only took them a few months to get locked in on this on this thing. And, like, here in Silicon Valley, I I couldn't think of a single young entrepreneur who isn't thinking about who isn't dreaming about building their company this way as well. So and I think that they're getting tremendous encouragement from the venture capitalists. Also, this, VE Economics story, if you bring it to the table as a a start up entrepreneur and you're and you are able to latch on to that, I think that that is a story that just instantly sells with investors as well. So I I think we're about basically, another thing I like to say is we have not reached the peak of expectations of generative AI yet. You know? So there was a talk that maybe we had hit the trough of disillusionment. Of course, I'm referring to the Gartner hype cycle graph here.

Vernon Keenan [00:59:01]:
And people thought we'd hit the trough of disillusionment with the enterprise AI, this past summer. And I would I never felt that way because of the conviction that I have on the subject, which like, here's a simple reason why I have conviction. And I'm sure you've heard this example before, but let's say you've got a pile of 10 legal briefs, and you need a lawyer to kind of examine those in the context of a case you're working on. That would have taken, you know, the cheapest lawyer you could have hired in the Philippines or whatever for, like, you know, $75 an hour to do something like that. That would have cost you, you know, 3 or $400. And now that costs you 3 or 4¢ to do the same thing. And that's actually a reliable application that I'm referring to here. And, where the hallucinations are not that that much of a problem, and you can do things to manage it.

Vernon Keenan [00:59:57]:
So when you've got anything that's like a 3 or 4 order of magnitude change in economics, to me, that's that's like an inevitable force. It's similar to, like, the distribution of paper catalogs. What happened to that in the nineties? Because it was literally a 1000 times cheaper to send that stuff around the world as a PDF than, you know, over the Internet than you than to actually print and distribute it. So I think this is why I have conviction on AI is is is that kind of basic cognitive change, and that's actually one of the second economic laws I've kind of, been working on, which is, you know, this the the ability to have cognitive scale that that you can do things with AI that was previously not possible, or was so expensive you couldn't do it all the time. That you can now do it with with AI. So that's those that's where I think it's going. And I it's I think it's it's generally good because I mean, like, the abundance side of this equation of this of this idea is that if we make it easier to make to build software, more software will get built.

Will Button [01:01:17]:
Right.

Vernon Keenan [01:01:18]:
Too. So that that's another thing. I mean, there's there's, the Marc Andreessen quote where he says software will eat the world. Well, according to Gartner, they're only about 30 or 40% done, really. So, like, if you look at the cloud, migration, they still got more than half of corporate data still on prem. So I I think it's, you know, there's a a long way to go with this stuff. And I'm pretty sure that, cognitive DevOps is probably gonna be one of those things that kinda, like, seeps into the background and we take for granted 3 or 4 years from now.

Will Button [01:02:02]:
For sure. And I and I do want to, like, for all the the young listeners listening to the show who are still early in their career, I wanna give them some hope and not send them away from the episode going, well, damn. That was a buzzkill. So, you know, we've seen this in the past, not exactly like this, but we have seen you know, like Jillian was mentioned, there used to be a career called word processor. Like, you were mentioning, Vernon. You know, you used to have people who ran the printing presses for printing paper catalogs, and we saw the outsourcing movement.

Jillian [01:02:35]:
When I was a kid. Like, I Right. Like, that was a job.

Will Button [01:02:39]:
Yeah. And we had the outsourcing movement of the nineties and early 2000 of outsourcing the tech jobs in the US to other countries. So there's there's patterns there's historical patterns you can look at if you're still early in your career and see what happened. Where did those people who were displaced, where did they go? And then see if there's some parallels here in this type of movement. And, you know, back to the Wayne Gretzky quote quote, start steering your career in that direction.

Vernon Keenan [01:03:12]:
Yeah. I think you gotta look at the you gotta move up the application stack, essentially. You have to I think the thing that folks like us are gifted at is to be able to understand capabilities and marry them to problems.

Will Button [01:03:31]:
Right.

Vernon Keenan [01:03:33]:
So it the you you need to be I think we're gonna have fewer people in IT is is definitely a thing, but I think that we're gonna be doing more good work. And we're gonna be doing more work that's actually tied to whatever the enterprise that you're working for does. Because it's a I mean, we're all familiar with the the Phoenix project. Right? It's it's amazing how many dysfunctional IT organizations there are out there, you know, where where you have people who have no idea why they're doing something.

Will Button [01:04:11]:
Right. You

Vernon Keenan [01:04:11]:
know, like, they they have no idea that, you know, like, working on this weird Salesforce problem is somehow gonna help the company. Like, they they they can't translate that in into that. And I think what's gotta happen in our profession is we have to become more aligned with, business. For sure. I I it was and so I think that if we're able to use tools like AI and cognitive dev DevOps to remove us from some of the daily grind of this and some of the drudgery that goes along with IT, then I think we're making progress. And we and we have the ability to to expand our talent so that talent young talent can can use their imagination and their new ways of thinking and other gifts of youth to, you know, participate in the economy more in terms of constructing solutions and working more where the rubber meets the road in a particular organization. I think we're just like, you know, don't have elevator operators, don't have buggy whip makers. You know, we might not have more, DevOps engineers in the future.

Vernon Keenan [01:05:26]:
We might have fewer of those because of automation. But I think the the people, if you're looking to marry your your love of technology, your ability to see solutions, your imagination to to pull things together. I think that there's a a lot of business people who would love to hear from you.

Will Button [01:05:47]:
For sure. There's always gonna be problems that don't have solutions. And and one way to look at this is you can shift your daily grind from solving the problem of why doesn't this Docker container build to a higher level problem of something that the customers of the company you're working for are gonna value.

Jillian [01:06:12]:
Absolutely. Try to give that advice to, you know, whenever I'm working with students or talking to young people, be very wary of putting yourself in a position where you you don't know why you're doing what you're doing. Always try to, you know, kinda move up the ladder to the decision makers, talk to the people who are actually using the product, that you're creating if that's what you're doing or that kind of, you know, the equivalent and sort of whatever job it is that you have. Because if you can if you can keep identifying problems, you can keep having a job for the most part. It's it's at least what I've found. And obviously, you know, that's not always a perfect strategy, but I think it's much better than kinda sitting in your corner and saying I'm gonna be the best Python or Go developer of all time. Right? Like, that's that's maybe not the best goal. It should be instead, I wanna solve this problem.

Jillian [01:07:01]:
And then there are always new problems, you guys. Always. All the time. They never end. Like, they just they never they never stop. So

Vernon Keenan [01:07:10]:
No. I and

Jillian [01:07:11]:
that uplifting advice. There's always new problems. Always.

Vernon Keenan [01:07:16]:
Right. And I think also, it took a lot of resources and a lot of capabilities to solve some of these problems with IT, in the in the past. And now you could do it with less. So I I agree. I think that there are more problems to be solved always, and I think that we're gonna have a different kind of flatter world when it comes to doing this. I think there's gonna be fewer middle managers, fewer, people trying to function as gatekeepers because we're gonna have, you know, assistance to help us with some of this stuff. For sure. So that's where I think it's going.

Vernon Keenan [01:07:56]:
If you wanna aim your puck in the right direction, I think it's, it's for that.

Will Button [01:08:03]:
Awesome. What do you think? Should we move on to picks? Jillian, what'd you bring for us?

Jillian [01:08:10]:
So I'm gonna go with the, shameless self promotion this week. I am opening up, I don't know, maybe 5 to 10 spots for and, actually, an AI product that I have now that we've, you know, had this nice, end of the show on how AI is gonna take all the jobs and things, let me take some jobs away from your company. No. I'm just kidding. It's it's cool stuff. It's cool stuff to empower your scientists to, do different tasks. The most frequent one frequent one that I see is to be able to do literature text mining and throw, you know, thousands of papers at it and then to be able to get some type of information. I work in drug discovery, so it's it's mainly drug discovery.

Jillian [01:08:48]:
I do have an article on that. It's called, using LLMs to query PubMed knowledge bases for biomedical research and kind of, like, what it says. You you can query PubMed. You can throw all of your papers, FBAI, and then you can tell the AI, you know, please summarize this for me. So it's a product that I have that gives you a chat GPT, like, interface that your scientists can use, but it's all self hosted on AWS so none of your data gets out if you have, proprietary data, if you have, you know, preclinical data, all that kind of stuff, or other data science companies that I don't know what you all are doing, but it might be useful for you too. I don't know. So anyways, it's got the chat GPT, like, interface, and then it's also got a programmatic interface that you can use wherever you have a terminal, SageMaker, HPC, wherever all the things are. That'll be on my website, dabbleofdevops.com/ai, if anybody is interested in that and would like to try it out.

Will Button [01:09:52]:
Right on. Awesome. Vernon, what'd you bring for a pick?

Vernon Keenan [01:09:57]:
Well, I got my website, salesforcedevops.net. Mhmm. And invite everybody to come by there. Like I said, I'm, I'm also on LinkedIn, Vernon Keenan. Altogether is my is my thing on LinkedIn. And I would just my pick is I I want people who are complaining about Salesforce DevOps or have, complaining about the pricing models and things like that to contact me because I'm trying to gather input. Right on. You

Jillian [01:10:31]:
could start like a support group. That could be that could be your. It is. It You know, it's just we're gonna get all these people, and we're all gonna have, like, snacks and fuzzy blankies and just

Vernon Keenan [01:10:44]:
It is. That's what I'm trying to create. It's just a a a comfort group where we can all complain and and give each other, let let us know that Salesforce is not paying attention to us in this thing. So here's but it'll start out with a fine counseling session with, me to get your all your complaints. But yes.

Will Button [01:11:07]:
Can we get them off the list of them?

Vernon Keenan [01:11:09]:
Yes. Yes. So try to, you know, be the trailblazer whisperer here. So, the more trailblazers who contact me to tell me about their problems with data cloud and agent force, the better.

Will Button [01:11:21]:
Right on. Awesome. Alright. My pick. This might be one of the wildest things I've ever picked. But with the holiday season coming up, if you're looking for a gift for someone, and they are a male, I'm gonna suggest ShineStay Underwear, which alright. It's hard to get excited about underwear, and I was pretty skeptical at first. But I used these I ended up with some and used them extensively a year or so ago when I was training to run a 100 k ultra marathon.

Will Button [01:11:54]:
So the ones I had were I was I was about

Jillian [01:11:58]:
to say that is crazy. A 100 okay. Anyways, carry on. Carry on.

Will Button [01:12:02]:
So I'm just gonna say my Shinesties are battle battle tested, and they have performed well. So yeah, that's my pick, and that's probably the one that's gonna get me kicked off of this podcast. But you'll have a pair of Scheinsteys to to take it or take away.

Vernon Keenan [01:12:18]:
Scheinsteys, boxers or briefs?

Will Button [01:12:21]:
I like the, I like the long leg briefs. Just the the support factor. Mhmm.

Vernon Keenan [01:12:31]:
Okay. We're getting into the the chafing aspect of the

Will Button [01:12:35]:
Yeah. Of the of of the podcast. A 100 k?

Vernon Keenan [01:12:41]:
Really anti chafing.

Will Button [01:12:43]:
Absolutely.

Vernon Keenan [01:12:44]:
Hey, Will and Jillian. This is fantastic.

Will Button [01:12:47]:
Vernon, I really appreciate having you on the show. This was great. Thank you so much for for joining us, and, feel free to to come back and chat with us again at any time. We can, we can do this later and see how our predictions went.

Vernon Keenan [01:13:03]:
Yes. Yes. Yes. We'll see how my little mission to, fix agent force pricing goes.

Will Button [01:13:10]:
Right on.

Vernon Keenan [01:13:11]:
That's my current mission. Nobody knows how much it costs.

Will Button [01:13:15]:
Right on. Look forward to it. That's

Vernon Keenan [01:13:17]:
a big problem. Okay, great.

Will Button [01:13:20]:
Yep. To the listeners. Thank you guys all for listening. Appreciate having you support the show and we'll see you all next week.