Devonte Sykes | Customer Success Manager & Architect

Luke Schantz: Thank you for joining us for our 10th episode of In the Open. Our guest today is Devonte Sykes. Devonte has a background as an IT manager and a tech specialist. He's a graduate of the IBM Summit program, and currently a customer success manager and architect. But before we welcome Devonte, let's say hello to my co- host, Joe Sepi.

Joe Sepi: Hey, Luke.

Luke Schantz: Well, hello Joe. How are you today?

Joe Sepi: I'm all right. How are you?

Luke Schantz: I'm doing well. I can't complain.

Joe Sepi: Nobody likes a complainer.

Luke Schantz: I always say I could complain, but no. Yeah, no one wants to hear that. They got their own problems.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. How's the weather been by you?

Luke Schantz: It's been rainy, but I don't mind that. I like the rain, I like it cloudy. I'm always hiding from the sun anyway. Less sunscreen.

Joe Sepi: Yep, yep. Yeah, it's been a little bit stormy out here. It's actually sunny right now and nice. But lots of big puddles and hot. Not like Pacific Northwest hot, but close. 103 feels like kind of stuff, and that's hot.

Luke Schantz: That's hot.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Yeah. But anyway...

Luke Schantz: Let's welcome our guest from Hotlanta. Devonte.

Devonte Sykes: Hey, how you doing?

Luke Schantz: Good, how are you?

Joe Sepi: Good, how are you?

Devonte Sykes: I'm doing great.

Joe Sepi: How's the weather down there?

Devonte Sykes: It's not too bad. It's actually been raining more than normal here. It's usually pretty dry during the summer months, but yeah, it's been raining almost every day, so it's been kind of dreary and gloomy outside, but you still have to figure out ways to stay engaged, stay happy, and just enjoy life.

Luke Schantz: Yeah.

Joe Sepi: The plants, all the flowers and the trees and the plants love the rain. That's what I always remind myself.

Devonte Sykes: Right.

Joe Sepi: Well, I used to live in Olympia, Washington and it rained like eight or nine months out of the year, but summer was gorgeous and just lush, and so nice.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. So why don't we start things off by, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself, Devonte?

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, so I can give a brief introduction and once again, my name is Devonte Sykes. I'm a customer success manager at IBM. I've been at IBM now for almost three years, but before coming on board, I always grew up interested in technology, interested in computers. My father, he was an IT architect for CSX, the transportation company, railroad company. So a lot of his teachings and the things that I learned were from him, and just being introduced to it very early on, and it developed into me going off to college, the University of Central Florida, graduated with the Bachelors of Science in IT. From there I worked for startups, I worked for other large corporations, and I also worked in the public sector for a school district down in Jacksonville, Florida, which is home for me. And there I gained a lot of experience, and I had the ability to be my IT manager, where I was in charge of about five or six technicians, and we went out and handled all hardware, software and networking issues for the schools that were assigned to us. Just learning continuously throughout my life. Technology was always there, and it developed into me coming onto IBM.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's really interesting. The school stuff I find fascinating, because I see a lot of schools and other similar institutions, just really a lot of them have trouble with tech.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, you're seeing that as well?

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, absolutely. Because I think a lot of people from the generations a little bit older than mine have some difficulty adjusting to technology because of the speed that it's being developed at, and the amount of technology that we have today. It goes back to Moore's law. Things get faster, quicker and things improve almost every two years. So, it's pretty hard for those who haven't grown up with technology to be able to adapt to it. And I think that was one of the biggest things that stood out to me, when I was in that role. At the lower level or at a very foundational level, I realized that I was essentially helping people with technology, and that has always been my life goal, is just to help people, and any avenue that I can take to do that is my mission. So once I realized what I was doing at a very foundational level, it made everything else so much easier, because I can put myself in those folks' shoes and really empathize with them and say, " Yeah, it's really not that hard to understand. So, let me break it down to you in layman's terms," and not the technology jargon that we use every day where it's these big terms and acronyms, and stuff like that where the common person is not going to know any of that.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, especially in a school setting. Obviously there's probably some computer science teachers here and there, but it's actually an interesting analog for the real world in that you have customers who really don't care about how it's done, but they need that service. The other thing that comes to mind right now, there's so much in the news about ransomware against even relatively small school districts, and with the public sector stuff, they have to publish all their financials, so they really get targeted. They say like, " Hey, we know you have this money, we can see it on the books."

Devonte Sykes: Exactly. And that's one of the biggest things. So, someone coming in with a technology mindset can help out in these instances, and really help the people making the decisions, make a proper decision based on what's happening and what's occurring. And I think a lot of people have that misconception. " Technology folks don't know how to communicate. They're awkward people," where I don't think that's the case. I think what we need is an opportunity to really express ourselves in our space. And that's why I go back to really honing in and figuring out like, " Hey, I'm essentially helping someone and this is what I love to do," so it makes it easier for me to be engaged, be social, be active, and things of that nature.

Luke Schantz: We have a question from one of our friends and colleagues, Steve Martinelli. He wants to know what's your favorite, most memorable example of helping someone with technology?

Devonte Sykes: Oh yeah, that's a great question. Honestly, it ties back to the kids, right? So my favorite and most memorable experience to this date is while I was working in Duval County Public Schools, I was a robotics teacher for Lake Forest Elementary. And in that course, I was helping kids learn the basic foundational skills and information around robotics, and we built little figures out of Legos, and built motors and things of that nature. So it always goes, like I said, it goes back to helping people. And then I really want to bridge that gap, especially in the communities that I come from where these kids aren't scared to venture off into technology, and really dive deep into it and understand, " Hey, I can make this one of my passions, along with whatever else that I want to do." Like for myself, I work in technology day to day during the day, but also at night I produce music, and I know Joe, we talked about that a little bit. You have a band, and I think it's just cool to see that people are multi- dimensional and not just one thing. And that's what I really want these kids to understand. You can be cool and you can be smart, and that's the best thing that you can give to them.

Joe Sepi: And I find that fascinating too, the multi- faceted, multi- dimensional kind of aspect. We're all humans, and I feel that's one of the things at IBM, I mean at most places that I've worked, but particularly it seems at IBM that it's a great way to get to know your colleagues and to bond further, and to really develop that rapport. And then it works great when you need help with something, people are there for you because you've got this bond already, because you find out more about people and dig a little deeper, and get to know people more.

Devonte Sykes: Exactly. Because we're not robots, we're not just working IBM-ers 24/7. We have our own lives, we have families, we have other interests outside of our day- to- day job. And it just, like you said, it makes you more human to other people, and having that experience working with the kids, having that experience working in the school district, it translates directly into what I do right now and helping clients, because I don't open the conversation up with, " This is what IBM can sell you and this is what we offer." No, I open the conversation up with, " Hey, how are you doing? What are you interested in? This is what I'm interested in. Do we share some similarities there? How can I relate to you?" It's very much more of a relationship type of management, and really understanding emotional intelligence is a big part of what I do.

Luke Schantz: Just to echo back to the kids. From my own experience growing up, it's amazing how even if they don't necessarily go into the technology, just having that exposure, it takes away that fear.

Devonte Sykes: Right.

Luke Schantz: Because especially now, even if you're not a developer or a technician, your job is going to touch this in some way, technology. And if you're scared of it and you don't know and you can't have, if you're not savvy, it's really rough. So, I feel the more we can do to expose those who are coming up in the educational system to all these things and feed those interests, and I try to do this with myself as well, is when you have that interest, you need to feed it, because even having that interest and that excitement about something is, that in itself is a prize. Because you don't always have that about everything.

Devonte Sykes: Definitely. And I like that the point that you were making about feeding your interest, and it kind of ties back to, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Pharrell Williams, but he has this term called kidult, so kid and adult. So it's like feeding your inner child. And I feel as a child, I was very adventurous. I wanted to figure things out, I wanted to learn new things all the time. And just cultivating that, and keeping that same energy as you progress to being a grown adult is very important, because your interests are important. They keep you alive, they keep you engaged, they keep you moving forward, and you're always more inclined to share the information that you learned from being super interested in a certain subject. One of those things for me was like blockchain. I stumbled upon blockchain around 2016, 2017, and I looked at it and I said, " Wow, this is something that can really help the world and not just a certain group of people." And that childlike curiosity developed in me to dig deeper and find out what cryptocurrencies are, and Bitcoin, and then look at more open source technologies like Ethereum, and just continuously dive deeper in investing and stuff like that. Being a kidult is something that I refer to myself as.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I keep thinking back too, Luke and I did a livestream with John Cone and he is like an amazing kidult. His curiosity is just overflowing, and just always making stuff and building stuff, and blowing stuff up and really, really interesting character. Yeah.

Devonte Sykes: It is a learning process. It's that cycle. So, we don't learn by just sitting down. We learn by actively doing. We learn from our mistakes, our failures, we learn from success as well. We learn from looking at others fail and others succeed. So, I think that's a very important topic to even talk about with people, because it's one of those things where I think people may overlook the fact that you can still be a kid in your current job. You can still be super interested in the things that you've always dreamed about doing. You can still do those things, and still have your day job. So there's no clear distinction, or you don't have to choose a side. I say do everything that you possibly can while you're here because if you don't, you are going to regret the fact in the next life or whatever happens after that, you're going to regret that you didn't take those chances.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's interesting. As we were coming up to this live stream during the week, mentally preparing and stuff, I was thinking about how I'm an open source engineer and developer advocate. I've been doing kind of developer advocacy for a long time, just drawn to that community engagement, and learning and sharing. And Luke does a lot of content production, but is also developer advocate. And I've heard you describe yourself as having developer advocacy tendencies as well. Sorry about my noise, but I think that's really interesting that we're all doing different things, but we all relate to that developer advocacy mindsets. And I think it really does get back to the curiosity, learning and sharing what you learn. I think it's really important. And I think whether you call it developer advocacy or not, it would be great if more companies encourage that curiosity and that learning.

Devonte Sykes: Absolutely. Because for IBM, I support cloud, public cloud technologies. One of my focuses is to put myself in the shoes of a developer. What are their pain points? What are they looking to achieve? What are they looking to build? And even, what are their interests outside of their job? So a perfect example of that would be when I had the opportunity to go to QCon back in 2019 for the Kubernetes Open Source Foundation. So there I met so many people, so many developers, programmers, architects, systems admin, executive people, and it really opened my eyes to this community, specifically for Kubernetes. But overall, the open source community, I didn't know beforehand how huge it was. My first introduction to open source as a kid probably was Firefox, but I didn't understand the community that was underneath that. I didn't understand open source until Ethereum, where I see all these people committing and engaging to build a platform that could later be usable by big corporations and big businesses and startups, as well. QCon really opened my eyes into this huge network of people that are also interested in other open source projects, and I was introduced to other things after that. And I think if I didn't put myself in a developer's shoes and say, " Hey, I'm going to go to this conference where I know these people are going to be there," then I probably wouldn't have had that experience. I wouldn't be open to what I do today, and how I engage with them now.

Luke Schantz: I'm a big fan of the QCons and I can't wait till we come back to in- person. I mean, I've enjoyed the digital experience, but there is something to be said for building those personal relationships and like you're saying, expanding your horizon. You had mentioned when we were doing our prep call, you had built a chat bot and it was part of the Summit program, like your final. And so maybe we could start with that, and then you can back us into what was the Summit program, and what was that experience like?

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. My final project for the IBM Summit program, which is a sales training program, I came into the program as a technical specialist. So I was the technology expert on the team, and I was tasked to build a Watson chat bot for the team. And what I utilized in my research and trying to figure out how am I going to tackle this feat? I've probably never really dug too deep into development work, into programming work besides my courses in college. So I stumbled upon the IBM developer website, and doing some research there, I looked at just tutorials, I looked at videos, I read articles, and then I found this space on this site called code patterns. And inside of that space, were the code patterns that I used for the Watson chat bot. So, I used it as my starter kit basically. So it was a web- based chat bot with voice input and output. And I leveraged it, I figured out how it worked, there were steps on how to use it. And I deployed that chat bot to the IBM cloud, actually. And this was before I ended up joining IBM cloud team. And that chat bot was used to onboard brand- new summits into the Atlanta hub, specifically onboard them. What do you have to do in the first three months, the first six months of being in the Summit program, where do you find your HR resources? Where do you find interesting groups to join within inside of IBM? How do you find out about travel rules and regulations? Back when we could travel. And just those types of things were embedded in that chat bot. And all of the people that used it said that it was super helpful for them, because if they couldn't get in touch with the manager, they could use the chat bot 24/ 7 on demand. And that was the type of value that I wanted to bring to the program. And I actually helped and advised a few other summits to building chat bots as well for their hubs. So it was a cool experience. I'm thankful for the code patterns, because that made my life so much easier and I'll definitely be using them in the future. Absolutely.

Luke Schantz: I love that story. And we actually, we have another question from coming from YouTube here. Devonte, where did your love for sharing knowledge derive from?

Devonte Sykes: I think that's a really interesting question. I think it really comes from family, especially my family. We have a tendency to share knowledge through stories and experiences, and this is where that interest developed. I learned from my grandfather who had just received an award from the state of Georgia for an exceptional school employee. He was only one of two people to receive that award for the whole entire state of Georgia. He'll go on to get national recognition, hopefully as well. So learning from him, he's super hardworking, never scared to learn new things. From my father, same type of mindset going in and getting after it. Never settling for no, never settling for, " I can't." And he kind of lives by these 10 two- letter words and he says, " If it is to be, it is up to me." And I live by that for sure. And then my mother, she's probably the most hardworking person that I know. She obtained her bachelor's degree a few years ago. She's moving up in her role right now. She works for the Jacksonville Transportation Authority. And just having these types of people around me, and my extended family too, just having those types of people around me really molded me, and they taught me the importance of giving back, sharing knowledge and that's why I decided to participate in the robotics teaching course for the kids. That's why I always send the stuff that I learned through my role or through independent study. I send it to my friends, I send it to my family, because I want people to be aware of what's going on. And even things like when it comes to data privacy, I have a sense that a lot of people don't understand what's going on behind the platforms that they're using. And I want to educate people on that, so they make educated decisions on how they use those platforms, and make it to their benefit and not to their detriment.

Joe Sepi: That's interesting. I'd like to dig into that a little bit further. I feel like though, Luke, should we do some housekeeping and mention podcasts and stuff like that, and then get back into it?

Luke Schantz: I think so. That's a great idea, Joe. We're here live streaming on video, but you can catch all of our past episodes on IBM. biz/ InTheOpen. And then all of these episodes are also published as podcasts on your favorite podcast platform. And you can find the link is on that other page, as well. But there's a direct link to the podcasts, and we also have a variety of other interesting podcasts on IBM developer. We've got special series on app modernization, on Tech for Good initiative, call for code. And we have a data science podcast that's been dormant for the past year that we're about to reboot, I'm really excited about that and as those episodes come out, we'll be sharing those here as well.

Joe Sepi: Don't forget to smash the subscribe button as the kids say, right?

Luke Schantz: Yes, please smash that like and subscribe button and yes, thank you.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Always got to promote. So yeah, I'm curious. Security is really an interesting topic these days. How does that fit into your work and what, I don't know. Tell me more.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, absolutely. When we think about cloud, essentially all cloud is having someone else manage your infrastructure, manage your platforms, manage your software. When you explain it that way, there's a security concern that comes into play. So if I'm having someone else manage my infrastructure for me, what does that mean? How do I secure it? Who has access to it? Where is it, for one? Companies and people alike are very interested in how they can secure the information and data that sits on these systems that are not on- prem. And we categorize this as cloud security. Very broad, but there's a lot of different pillars that fall into cloud security, where you have key management services to protect your keys. You have different types of things like firewalls obviously, but the benefit with cloud is the fact that you can stand these things up in an automated way, without having to have the skills on prem or inside of your organization. And we always have to have conversations around GDPR, even though we know that is a European regulation. There are similar regulations coming forth within the entire United States. So, California has a data privacy act that people should be familiar with, and the companies that operate out of California are familiar with that. But I believe that similar regulations will come forth from other states, once they figure out, how do we tackle this? And my job is to help companies get ahead of that. So we just saw this hack that happened with Colonial Pipeline that affected the Southeast region, and especially my territory because they operate here, and how detrimental that was. And there's been other attacks. Since then, security is super important. I understand that some of those hackers were able to get information, but whether it was usable or not, it's just the fact that they were able to get it. So, data privacy is super important.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, there's so many angles to that. The data breach stuff, there's access to the controls and whatnot. And I'm even reminded too, the whole GitHub co- pilot thing, which is really fascinating, and I think a really interesting product. People obviously have questions about it, and I saw somebody was able to write some code in a way that prompted the GitHub co- pilot thing to output somebody else's secrets and inaudible and everything. And I was like, "Okay," there's just so many different ways that your security can be opened up and it can be vulnerable. It's really interesting.

Devonte Sykes: Exactly.

Joe Sepi: So, that's definitely a place of people are looking to get involved in technology, if that's going to be more and more important every day. I'm curious to hear more about kind of day- to- day work and you're a customer success manager, obviously I think you'd wear many hats as a technical specialist, but I'm curious what your day- to- day is like, particularly working with customers and particularly around the open source angle as well.

Devonte Sykes: My main focus is to help IBM clients deploy IBM Cloud Paks. So, these are pre- packaged software collections that sit on top of Red Hat OpenShift. And we know that Red Hat OpenShift is really just Kubernetes under the covers. So, these Cloud Paks can be utilized and in a multitude of ways. So we have a Cloud Pak for security that gives you a collection of security products. We have Cloud Pak for integration, which helps you with messaging and really putting your systems together and integrating them in a well oiled type of way. We also have Cloud Pak for data. So, these are more of the AI types of solutions really being able to collect data, digest it, determine insights from them, and really build out a deeper understanding of your customer, of your products, and how do you develop new products and new services for your customers? So that's my main focus. Underneath that is understanding IBM Cloud and the other cloud vendors, AWS, Azure, and GCP. Obviously we know that Cloud Paks can be deployed on- prem, IBM cloud, competitor clouds. So I have to be able to understand and communicate these types of things to the customer. And one of the main things with IBM Cloud as far as open source goes is understanding DevOps. This is something that I talk about with developers all the time, is utilizing our CICD pipelines, utilizing Jenkins, understanding how to deploy, how to edit your code with inside of the IBM cloud is super important. And I don't think a lot of people realize the fact that IBM was a very heavy contributor to the Eclipse platform, which was utilized for programming and development and just giving them a history of the fact that we understand where you are, we just want to help you get to that next level. And that's pretty much what I do every day. I'm talking to developers, I'm talking to the systems guys, infrastructure, and I'm even having those types of conversations with the executive suite as well, more of the strategic direction and the future direction of the company, as far as just the technology goes. So finding out any type of future use cases they have, whether they want to infuse AI into what they do more to get more value, and maybe they don't have to hire as many people to get things done if they have AI. There is just full breadth of understanding the technical stuff, absolutely. But also understanding the strategic side. So that's where the business skills, soft skills, interpersonal skills come into play.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's really interesting. And there's so much there we could dive off into all sorts of different directions. I never hesitate though, to just reiterate that I feel having joined IBM like five years ago, people are always surprised at how much we actually do an open source.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah.

Joe Sepi: And I feel like, we do a lot and we've been doing it for years. So, I always encourage folks to check out that link there and see some of the backstory, some of the current work, IBM Cloud is built on top of open source technologies as you were mentioning before.

Devonte Sykes: Exactly.

Joe Sepi: I'm curious though, you had mentioned working with executives and such. Do you find that people have some hesitancy to open source at times? And if so, how do you approach that conversation?

Devonte Sykes: I would say it definitely depends. There are organizations that are well on their journey, organizations that have people who have those skills, those open source skills. I guess they're not scared to go down their journey because they have the expertise and the people on board to handle the project. I do see a little bit of hesitancy from the people who don't have the skills on hand, and that's where they can lean a little bit more on IBM and our full breadth of solutions and services. So, we have teams of folks who can help you out in doing deployments, and getting you up to speed and enabled on certain technologies as well. So that's part of what I do is continuously teaching, I do presentations, I do demos, I do proof of concepts to prove out hypotheses and getting to a success point. Like I said, I see more of the hesitancy from the organizations that don't have the skills, but we always alleviate that concern by expressing what we can provide from an IBM standpoint to help the customer. And we go back again to essentially, I'm just helping people.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, for sure. Go ahead, Luke.

Luke Schantz: So I was going to say, we have a lot of activity in the chat. Thanks for that. I'm doing a little bit of that correspondence, but if anybody has any other questions, feel free to forward them on, but I thought I would just bubble this up here. We have a thank- you. The folks are really enjoying this and they love digging in and learning how the world works. Thank you. That's how I view this too, I'm always, even if it's something that's not my core interest like, " Oh man, this is how the world works." There is about mainframes or high performance computing or the food trust, the food security, like blockchain. Oh man, this is actually, we can peer under the covers. Enterprise tech is actually very interesting.

Devonte Sykes: Absolutely. And it has a foundation in the community, right? So like Joe said, IBM has a long history of being very large contributors to these communities, and really fostering that. And the fact that that's the case for IBM, I think it allows us to stand out in the marketplace, and stand out as a whole, as an organization. So just continuously keeping that mantra when I interact with my clients, developers, even people I don't even communicate with or sell to, I always try to network on LinkedIn. I always try to go to conferences and meetups locally, just to hear what people are doing. I'm interested in and people, and just learning about what they do, what they're interested in. And I feel like taking those tidbits of information as I go just makes me a better person, and it makes me better in my role.

Joe Sepi: I'm looking forward to having in- person conferences again. I know the US is different than elsewhere, so understanding of that fact. But I may be down in Atlanta later this year for the Connect Tech conference, so if I do, I will definitely look you up and want to hang out.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, absolutely. I would love that.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. So, what are you excited about in terms of the work that you're doing and the near future of what's going on in tech?

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, I think I'm really excited at about really making my brand and my name known here. Right now I'm working on trying to prove out some controls with some of our industry leaders for energy and utilities, trying to prove out some controls around NERC CIP compliance, so working on that and doing some interesting things around that. This is a side project, this isn't even my day- to- day job, but I was called upon by the ENU industry leaders to help out. And I'm having fun with that of staying interested, staying engaged, and figuring out ways that I can add value to the organization, because I know that it'll come back to me tenfold. So that's that type of thing or stands out to me. I'm super interested in NFTs right now. So trying to understand that, how do I add value? Because I create art as well. So, how do I take advantage of the NFT platforms? And mentoring my work and being able to distribute it that way from independently. So a lot of producers, they go down the major label type of approach, or they do work for hires and things like that, which I've also done. I have credits with Vice Network, the TV channel. I've had some productions on there, as well as Dateline NBC, but I also want to distribute my own stuff just with my name on it. That isn't attached to anything, and I think NFTs can be something that I can utilize. And then outside of that is really just going back to eventual becoming a well known teacher and educator within the technology space, where I really want to bridge that gap and show people that, for one, it's cool to be smart. And then two, just showing them that you can have your day job and have your passions there, but you can also pursue your secondary passions and goals as well, while you're doing your day job.

Joe Sepi: That's great. Yeah, it's funny because we're all musicians, Luke as well, and I'm compelled to talk to you more about that and ask you about what you're using, and what your process is and stuff. But I don't know if we want to go down that route, but that's where my brain's going.

Luke Schantz: Let's time block it. Let's just give ourselves four or five minutes to go down that route and then we can, we'll come back to enterprise tech.

Joe Sepi: What are you doing? What are you using? How's it going?

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, so I mostly produce R& B and hip hop type of records. So I use FL Studio, and I use Ableton Live, those two platforms, pieces of software, they're relatively different, but they all do essentially the same thing. Just the buttons are in different places. But the cool things about that is the fact that I'm actually marrying both of my skills. So, you have to have some type of technical prowess to use those pieces of software, because they're technical and they were developed by developers, obviously. Being able to understand that and still exercise that skill while also creating art is the best of both worlds to me. And I've gotten a lot of value out of it. That was probably my first time ever, first starting out whenever I was younger, a teenager, that was probably my first time ever figuring out how to hack something. Utilizing those software, and being able to continuously utilize them is super important to me, because it offers me some peace and it offers me a way to express myself outside of what I do every day.

Luke Schantz: I also use Ableton Live. I'm a big fan of it and prior to using Ableton, I was using the MaxMSP. So if folks are not familiar with this, it's like Node Red or Simulink, a data flow visual programming language. But for audio, MIDI, video, 3D and Ableton, it's kind of cool it Ableton bought that company even though they already had a relationship and it was good because it was a small company, it probably wasn't going to be able to go, I think it was run by the guy retired, he wanted to retire, so it needed a home. And you can build custom modules within Ableton, your own audio video, MIDI plugins or instruments. So I'm a huge fan of that. And I'll cut this short, but my story is I used, so there was this thing from Tribeca Film Festival a couple years ago called Watson Beat, which we used machine learning.

Devonte Sykes: Oh yeah.

Luke Schantz: You could submit a little MIDI clip to this algorithm and tell it, you're like, " Hey, here's a melody, I want a beat, I want a baseline and I want a harmony," and it'll give you back this stuff as a MIDI. So I built a little tool in Max to process that, and then it would create all these different tracks and I call it Lukernetes. And then our colleague, I was showing it to our colleague Mark Mattingley- Scott in Germany and he's like, " Oh, I know the guys at Ableton, you should go show them." So we went over to Ableton, I got to present this whole little project I did to them. We went out for beers and stuff and it was just a cool day. And they were like, I told them the story because actually the way I met my wife was, we were both involved in the same sort of college program and she wanted to do an art project and then she needed to use MaxMSP for it. I was like, I know how to use MaxMSP let me, and that was our first date was me tutoring my wife and the folks from Ableton were like, " That is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard, that you made the move on your wife with MaxMSP, that was your line." Oh, I could show you that MaxMSP. It worked. Happily married 10 years.

Devonte Sykes: Exactly, exactly. That's the value you get out of teaching people, right?

Joe Sepi: Building connections, relationships, all that stuff.

Luke Schantz: Yeah.

Devonte Sykes: Exactly.

Joe Sepi: That's great.

Luke Schantz: How about you Joe? What's your doll of choice?

Joe Sepi: So, I'm like a musician with guitars and bass and drums, and hands- on stuff. And so I grew up in recording studios with two inch tape machines, and the old school stuff. And so I naturally made the jump to Pro Tools, and not to knock Pro Tools, but I got tired of needing to really upgrade all the time and buying something. And then a year later I'm like, 'Oh, now that's old. I don't know," and I need a specific machine to run it. Anyway, so I just started using Logic and especially as a singer songwriter person to be able to jump in there and just throw things together pretty quickly. That's been a comfortable space for me, but I'm fascinated with sequencers and building more electronic music. So I've been dabbling with that, but still just more in the Logic pro space. But it's fun. I love it. Love it.

Luke Schantz: Last point, Logic has also, they've basically copied Ableton's model now too, by putting the sort of sequencer/ timeline model. So I feel like, I don't want to say they copied it. Sometimes these things, it's just the natural. They did copy it, but it's the natural evolution of it's a good way, it gives you that real time, but then also the linear. Let's parlay back into our enterprise tech conversation unless anybody has any closing thoughts. Bruce Bradley here commented, he loved the aspects of security we were discussing, and he wanted to maybe delve into and learn more. And what I just wanted to mention there was from our last episode, we had a Chris Ferris on and he had mentioned this, the Open Source Security Foundation because it is a big concern. Open source people contributing to projects that are then being used downstream for in companies, or in products. And security's a big issue with open source, and we've got to monitor that. We've got to make sure... Oh, we got more comments. I think you're our most popular guest as far as activity in the chat, this episode.

Devonte Sykes: I see a comment from my aunt. Hey Tiffany.

Luke Schantz: Hey Tiffany.

Joe Sepi: Oh that's great. But yeah, it's interesting. It goes back to the question earlier too, of how do you talk to executives and a variety of folks at companies about open source because I think they get worried about that right out of the gate, security. And if I put my code online, then everybody's going to know how to hack me. But that's not really the case. But I think having security in mind is really very important.

Devonte Sykes: Absolutely. Even just think about the fact that we have a Kubernetes service that we manage for our customers on the IBM cloud. And we go back to the fact, just like you said, Joe, the security concern. So, if IBM is managing the service for the customer, and the customer is just utilizing it, IBM has the expertise to do patching, to handle any of the security concerns for the customer, and just allow the customer to focus on building with the service and utilizing the service, and consuming the service. So these are the types of concerns that will obviously continuously be there, but there are ways that we've alleviated them, and there are solutions that we've come up with that address those specific types of issues.

Joe Sepi: And I think that gets back to the OpenShift thing, too. OpenShift is essentially a managed Kubernetes platform, but it's built using battle- tested conventions, and techniques and stuff. And so that's I think one of the benefits that you get from using a platform that is, not that you don't have to worry about security at all obviously, but some of the basic stuff is already baked into the platform overall.

Devonte Sykes: Exactly. And then, you also get the support factor as well. So when something does happen, there's a team of people there that can help you out in your time of need. Wrapping all of that together is super important, and I think that's why companies are understanding that they can take that leap of faith, because there's some cushion there for their fall, if there was a fall to ever happen. So yeah, it's definitely just getting into the psychology of people, and just making them feel comfortable.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, so we've got another question here and from our buddy Steve, I'm not sure if you're allowed to say which customer is your favorite to work with, but that I'm curious as well, and any open source project you think that's exciting for the future of the space?

Devonte Sykes: So I think my favorite company that I've worked with, or a customer that I've worked with so far was probably Delphix. So Delphix, they're over in California and they actually have a service that they've built and put onto the IBM cloud that can be consumed by other groups of people. And they're an interesting bunch, they have a pretty solid team, and they were consuming things like our virtual servers on IBM cloud, and doing creative things with them and utilizing them for their infrastructure and things of that nature. So, that was probably my favorite customer because I learned a lot from them, even just from interacting with them as far as what they do, what they're interested in, and how they see it in their company moving forward. I guess as far as any insight into an open source project that I think will pop next, right now I'm pretty big on Ethereum, to be honest. It's just the fact that yeah, it's a blockchain platform, absolutely, but they just released not too long ago, their 2. 0 platform and the ability to have faster transactions for their platform, but also the fact that people are developing applications on Ethereum as well, which they call the Dapps. So the Dapps, and I think that's a cool thing because it's not just a one purpose or sole purpose type of platform, it just allows people to really get engaged and be a community, and really build the entire Ethereum platform up together. And we know blockchain is super focused on going back to security, that trust factor, being able to look at the transactions that happen on the platform from end to end, and knowing that the whole journey is secure from end to end as well is super important. Just going back to the security concern and addressing that, I think Ethereum could be one of those types of technologies further down the line that has a big impact on what we do.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I really think blockchain gets a bad rap. It's been around for a little bit and there's a lot of hype, and everybody likes to hate on blockchain.

Devonte Sykes: Because of the cryptocurrencies, what happened with that type of stuff.

Joe Sepi: I really do agree with you though. I really feel like it's still something that's coming into its own and is going to really make a large impact in the future, for sure.

Luke Schantz: And I think when it was just securities in the beginning, and then you got into that sort of second wave with Ethereum, I feel like the stuff that's happening now from a developer's standpoint is so interesting because sure it's tokenized and they can have value, but you're like, they're these whole development projects that are made to do these very specific things. I'm going down Cardano and Polkadot and all these rabbit holes. It's really interesting. I think it's worth looking if you're interested in tech and development, because these things are not just securities, they're entire development projects which have these use cases. So it's a lot of fun to dig around and I would say Steve said thank you, he enjoyed your answer.

Devonte Sykes: No problem.

Luke Schantz: As well as the session.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, it's my mom. It's my mom. Hi mom.

Joe Sepi: That was great, yeah.

Devonte Sykes: Even to go back to your last point on the fact that these are development projects, we have things like smart contracts, so these executable contracts that people can join in on at each milestone, so basically the contract is code, it's just software. So at each milestone the contract executes itself and moves on to the next milestone automatically, without having to go through so many different hands of people, so many different teams of people. And I see people using smart contracts for real estate. So, these are the types of things that are the future. The next wave is just being able to speed up the home transaction process, which we know it can be pretty lengthy at times. For instance, myself, it took me three and a half months to get my home, and I was just sitting there every day, " Man, this is crazy. I have to talk to this person, that person, I have to wait on documents to get sent back." I wish there was something, an easier process to this, and smart contracts can be that thing.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I've been through that process as well and I will go get that piece of paper and bring it to this other person for you.

Devonte Sykes: Exactly.

Joe Sepi: No, that's interesting. And I think that smart contracts and everything is really going to continue to come into its own. I have a friend, and I can't say too much, I'm not sure where his product is, but he's working on smart contracts essentially for creative credits, working on projects together and collaborating, and making sure people get credits for the work that they're doing, and being able to share in profits and all that sort of stuff. And I think it's really, there's a lot that we can still be doing there, that I think will really kind of modernize some of the work that we're doing.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, absolutely. Because it goes down to transparency. I think people want more transparency in everything that we do in society now. People want to know what the government is doing, what are the social media organizations doing, what are other people doing? What are they doing with my data? Everyone wants more transparency, and I think as we move down that path, it'll be a better place. Absolutely.

Luke Schantz: I also wanted to mention the other day, and I'm hoping to get him on as a guest soon, but I had a chance to converse with the executive partner of IBM's Go To Market Blockchain. So it's Shyam Nagarajan, and I was aware IBM is deeply involved in Hyperledger Fabric, but then from speaking with him, I became aware that from a financial services and blockchain standpoint, we do whatever our client needs to do. So we're doing Ethereum contracts, we're doing lots of things, even if it's not necessarily an IBM product or a project that we're directly contributing to, our financial services covers the gambit. So, just thought I'd mentioned that.

Devonte Sykes: Yeah, absolutely. And even the service that we have that is utilized for the global payments, I can't remember exactly which currency we're using for it.

Luke Schantz: Stellar, I think we're using

Devonte Sykes: Stellar lumens. There you go.

Luke Schantz: Yep.

Devonte Sykes: So, we're using that under the covers to do global transactions and payments and permittance. We learn from our customers and they learn from us, and I think that's super valuable. We want to do whatever the customer wants to do, and we are here to help the customer, and that's how we create this positive image of IBM to everyone else because they can go back and say, " Hey, IBM really helped me get to the finish line, and this is why I appreciate them."

Joe Sepi: Maybe that's a good place to wrap.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, that was fantastic conversation. We really appreciate your time, Devonte. And yeah, if you're catching this on replay, I'll have all of our contact info in the show notes. Feel free to send more questions through, and we thank everyone for tuning in.

Devonte Sykes: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Luke Schantz: Thanks for tuning in, inaudible.

Joe Sepi: Yep, cheers.

Devonte Sykes: Yep. Have a good one.