In this RedMonk conversation, Stu Miniman, Senior Director of Market Insights, Hybrid Platforms at Red Hat, shares his extensive tech industry experience and insights with Kate Holterhoff. Stu discusses behind-the-scenes stories from his time as an industry analyst at theCUBE. As a seasoned expert in networking, virtualization, and cloud computing, he also chats about how networking challenges are being addressed in the Kubernetes ecosystem, the impact of AI, and the future of the industry analyst role.
Red Hat is a RedMonk client, but this video is unsponsored and independent.
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Transcript
Kate Holterhoff (00:04)
Greetings, I’m Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk, and my guest today is Stu Miniman, senior director at Red Hat. Stu, thanks so much for joining me.
Stu Miniman (00:12)
Great to be here with you.
Kate Holterhoff (00:14)
All right, so excited to have Stu here. Last time we talked was at a event at KubeCon, which was in Atlanta where I live. So it was very convenient for me. Just be-bopped on down the road, got to have a slice of pizza, and it was great to catch up with you.
Stu Miniman (00:31)
Yeah, it was great to be in Atlanta and boy, I was wondering, are you gonna be joining us at Red Hat Summit, also in your backyard of Atlanta?
Kate Holterhoff (00:38)
yes, I got an email from your team I am absolutely gonna be there looking forward to it. It is, what, in May, is that right? Okay.
Stu Miniman (00:47)
It is in May and yeah,
you know, always, Atlanta is not a city that I’ve been to all that often, but I will take as much time as I can to watch the whale shark at the aquarium as I can get. So.
Kate Holterhoff (00:57)
You
Yeah, anyone who visits Atlanta needs to hit up the aquarium. It’s the thing to see for sure. I know my six-year-old is always getting to go on field trips there and I’m deeply jealous. I’m like, come on, why, bring your mom. This sounds like fun.
Stu Miniman (01:14)
quick on that, we actually, did a family trip, you know, through the South. I live in the Boston area and we went and we saw the whale sharks there and my son who was, I think he was 12 at the time, he loved sharks and stuff so much that we actually did a trip down to Mexico to actually swim with whale sharks, which was absolutely amazing. You know, it’s one of those like, you know, when you go to Atlanta and stuff, oh, this amazing, oh yeah, let me pull up the video of me snorkeling next to.
Kate Holterhoff (01:20)
Yeah.
What?
Stu Miniman (01:42)
the whale sharks out in the open water.
Kate Holterhoff (01:45)
man, well I’ve got new things to be jealous about. Although, I don’t know, I’m not a huge swimmer. I kind of like to be behind the glass where it’s dry. But hey, for folks who are into the snorkeling and the scuba diving and things, I can imagine that that’s probably a dream trip.
I invited Stu on here to talk a bit about his background. you legendarily know everyone. You’ve been doing this for a long time. So I’m hoping to get some of those stories here and also just have some fun chatting about what we’re seeing in the industry. So let’s introduce you to our listeners here. my sources tell me that you’re
most well known for networking, virtualization, cloud computing. Talk to me about what makes you such an expert in those domains.
Stu Miniman (02:26)
Yeah, so some of it is just living through some of the history. So I would not say I’m a historian like, you know, Stephen O’Grady on your standpoint, but, you know, I’ve been through a number of these waves that we’ve watched. So I’ve done a lot of different roles, too. So, you know, my background, I was an engineer by training. You know, I got a business degree for a master’s and, you know, was worked at EMC for a decade. And, you know, EMC, a company that really created
Kate Holterhoff (02:34)
you
Stu Miniman (02:55)
the external storage industry. And it’s one of those kind of boring things that we don’t think about in the infrastructure because I got it when I joined EMC as a product manager, it was at the end of the day, I care about my data. I care about my applications and we are where the data lives. So it’s super important that it works. And if something goes wrong, that’s really bad. And EMC of course was enterprise storage. And while I was there,
we had the birth of the cloud era. And it was funny, it was right around the same time I started getting involved in social media and was part of a small group online that some people called the “clouderatti” And there was about a hundred of us that kind of talked online about what was going on and there was only one cloud and it is the public cloud. And no wait, I was dealing with enterprise companies that had data centers and they were looking at the public cloud and everything. So, watch that wave.
And a few years later, I became an analyst for a decade. So I got pulled out of EMC by a small analyst firm called Wikibon. Around the time I started working with them, they partnered with a media company that started doing live videos at conferences called theCUBE And at theCUBE over a decade, I did thousands of interviews across hundreds of events. And so, yeah, as you said, I got to meet a lot of people. So it’s an interesting Rolodex where
I met founders, met billionaires, met, you know, VCs and authors and researchers. So it was really, really fascinating and sometimes really exhausting because I’m sure you and your audience can appreciate this. I would get all the time, my gosh, you know so much about these things. And it was like, my God, half the time I’m meeting with somebody, I know absolutely nothing about what they’re doing, but
if you ask the right questions, you can get them to explain things. So that was one of the things I said. Two things I think I did pretty well in my job. And it was not something that I knew at day one, but something I learned over time is, you know, number one, you get much more comfortable in front of the camera. I did an interview a month ago and they’re like, my gosh, you’re a natural. I’m like, yeah, when you do a thousand of these, the next one’s not that tough. And
As an engineer, one of the things I always had in the back of my mind is like, my God, I need to ask the best question or not say something stupid. And at the end of the day, it’s like, you you need to relax a little bit. It’s, it’s okay. You can make mistakes and you know, we, we, we work through those. But that journey of learning is so important. And the feedback I got from people is like, they said, Stu, you would ask the question.
that I would ask if I was sitting in that seat. And from the various roles that I’ve had, what I try to always do is you picture yourself into, know, what does the audience I’m trying to reach? What is their level of understanding? Because it’s great sometimes to be like, I understand this down to the, 500 level of detail and be able to ask some really nuanced question to understand where the next thing goes. But the audience that can appreciate that is really small.
as opposed to when I would have a startup that came and they’re like, we did this really cool thing. And we came off, it finished the interview and they’re like, my gosh, I’ve never explained it so crisply and clearly what we do in the value proposition of that. So a decade of that, doing that on theCUBE, as you mentioned, cloud was one of the big pieces I worked on. So went to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and many of the ecosystem.
around them, did tons of those interviews, and got into the cloud native space when containers and Kubernetes started, and went, going to the KubeCon shows for a bunch of years, and that actually led me to Red Hat. So they were a small client of mine, but had always liked them as a company and liked what they were doing with the technology, and was something that I jumped on and joined them a little over five years ago.
Kate Holterhoff (07:16)
man, that’s a whirlwind. I am excited to tease apart some of this background here. And I’m debating whether to start from the present and go back or from the beginning and move forward. But I think maybe it would make sense for us to talk about the distant past first. Maybe to lay some groundwork here. So EMC.
they’ve been bought out a few times. Like talk to me about the history there. Cause I feel like maybe some of the younger developers actually aren’t familiar with them. So yeah, who is EMC? I understand you were part of an important NDA there. Where’s EMC today? what? Yeah, talk to me about that.
Stu Miniman (07:48)
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s funny, Kate. So I actually live in this small town, Hopkinton Massachusetts. And Hopkinton, if you go on Wikipedia, is known for one thing. It is 26.2 miles west of the center of Boston. And those people that run might understand that, you know, hinting that it’s actually where the Boston Marathon starts. So it also was the home of EMC Corporation.
Kate Holterhoff (08:17)
Wow, huh.
Stu Miniman (08:22)
Fun fact, I worked at EMC for a decade. I had about a half hour commute because I didn’t live in Hopkinton because when I started there in my 20s, they didn’t pay me enough to live in this nice little town that I live in today. EMC, gosh, know, I joined EMC in 2000 as a product manager. They had been around for, I think it was like 15 years before I joined them, but they were…
Kate Holterhoff (08:29)
no.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Stu Miniman (08:47)
they were a storage company and originally, storage was for mainframe, but they really created the external storage business. So literally my former boss at theCUBE, Dave Vellante, was an analyst at IDC back in the early days of EMC and had met with them and they came and talked to him about mainframe storage. And months later they came back and they said, we created this.
and it was storage for the mainframe, but not in the mainframe. And that was the birth of external storage. So I worked with some of the people at EMC and then later working with some analysts that knew the storage industry from its start. And originally that was just how do I store data, but then how do I leverage data? And how do I take advantage of that data and make it shareable and those sorts of things. So my time at EMC from 2000 to 2010,
I worked mostly on the networking of it. So storage networking is this little niche that there’s a handful of us that know about it. So I worked on fiber channel, which a lot of people don’t know about, but it’s like how I connect all of these large storage arrays together. There was iSCSI, which was how do I do that over ethernet? I worked on some standards work for something called fiber channel over ethernet.
Kate Holterhoff (09:47)
Mm-hmm.
Stu Miniman (10:11)
which is kind of a joke in some circles, but really helped Cisco with their virtualization of how they built certain technologies. you know, down in the weeds technology, I mean, I worked, you know, down at the cabling layer and, you know, the transport layer of a lot of these technologies. But amongst the things that I worked on there, it was funny, I got handed as one of the junior product managers, they’re like, hey,
We’ve got somebody that works on Hewlett Packard and somebody that works on Oracle and somebody works on Cisco. There’s this weird stuff called free software that has this thing called Linux that just doesn’t work with enterprise storage. We hired an engineer, can you work with them to get this to work with storage? So I was working with a bunch of these small companies, VA, Debian, Turbo.
that all had these Linux solutions and it was a nightmare. We spent years trying to get it to actually work reliably. And in, gosh, was like, you know, a couple of years after I joined, this company, funny enough, Red Hat, came and said, hey, we’re actually gonna make an enterprise version of Linux. And we think, you know, we should partner with you on this. And that made our lives a lot easier at EMC.
And two decades later, I end up joining Red Hat. So small world and you never know the connections that you’ll make on these kind of things. Red Hat created Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And when I was working on that, the device drivers for that, we had another startup that we got pinged by a very large financial services company that said, hey,
there’s this other thing that we’re looking at and using and it’s not yet certified to work on your storage. Can you get that to work? And this was a startup about a hundred people called VMware. And so I had some calls with actually Diane Greene and Edouard Bugnion who were the CEO and CTO of VMware. And again, I’m a junior at that time. I was engineering as a program manager, had some calls with them. We started doing some testing.
I trained EMC’s customer support on what server virtualization was. And about a year later, EMC bought VMware. So when you talk about EMC, EMC started, EMC made a lot of acquisitions over the time I was there. They bought a company, Data General, about a year before I joined them. They bought VMware, Legato, Documentum, Smarts. I mean, it was like, I feel like it was dozens of companies that EMC bought in the time that I was there.
But VMware was a big one because VMware, course, most people, especially an infrastructure know, is a you know, transformational company that, you know, partnered with all the server vendors and really helped transform that space. So again, like I feel like I was an observer at some really important times and did play a small role in some of these things. I had friends at EMC that said some of the moves and connections that I made really are what
catalyzed the conversation that led to the acquisition of VMware. Claiming I did it, I wasn’t pulled into the due diligence on it, but my vice president at the time was. So VMware was an amazing technology, one that had an important impact on my career, one that I covered heavily as an analyst when I left EMC. yeah, EMC, a couple of years after I left EMC, EMC was bought by Dell.
Michael Dell wanted to really grow his enterprise storage business. Actually had a number of conversations with Michael leading up to and after the acquisition just because I not only had the history at EMC, but had written a lot about what they were doing when I was an analyst. And it’s an interesting one for me to be like, yeah, hey, know, Michael Dell’s giving you a call and wants to bounce some ideas off you and the like. And Michael’s a fascinating businessman, you know, obviously.
phenomenal career there and the thing I’ll share is he’s always looking for more input so he would want to talk to you for 15 minutes and then maybe have a follow-up question and like hey is there somebody else I should be talking to to get another viewpoint so it was a really interesting one that I had some interactions with so Dell bought EMC which included VMware EMC really is completely subsumed
The company itself for the most part is gone because it is just Dell but funny enough I I was just happen to be looking at my LinkedIn to see how many people I still know that work at Dell and I’ve got over a hundred connections mostly from My EMC days that are still there now. I mean we were 60,000 people I think when I left EMC so you know, I’m not surprised that there’s still plenty of former EMC people that are there but
A lot of them are gone, but it has changed and Dell bought EMC a couple of years later. They sold they spun out VMware who then Less than a year later was bought by Broadcom and that’s been a really interesting drama that I’ve spent plenty of time talking about over the last couple of years happy to talk about it if you want or or not, but yeah, so, know EMC is the most of the storage inside of Dell VMware is now separate and part of Broadcom. So
Yeah, some of the pieces on the board, you know, keep changing and some of the things change, but some stay the same. So, yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (15:51)
Got it, got it, got it. Yeah, so Rachel Stephens, another analyst at RedMonk, she’s written in depth about the VMware. movements and acquisitions and things. I feel like even if I don’t personally grock it, I feel like there probably is enough written about it that folks can dig in. So I don’t know that we need to rehash that particular drama because it does make my brain melt a little bit. But I do want to hear more about
I guess, At KubeCon, one of the things that I noticed was that networking just seems so important. was a new certification that’s coming out. A lot of the vendors that I spoke to were foregrounding this technology. Of course, there’s a lot of different projects in CNCF that deal with networking. If I could ask you to put your analyst hat on for a moment, like what is your sense of networking as it relates to, I guess the the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Stu Miniman (16:49)
Yeah, so I’ll tell you the quick history story on this. So I mentioned VMware. One of the wonderful things about VMware is VMware said we have compute and we can separate out so that you can run the operating system separately and have lots of instances and consolidate to get greater utilization of my underlying hardware. That was a phenomenal technology. The challenge was you broke storage and you broke networking.
And it took us from my early days of working with VMware, it took about a decade to get it from, okay, it kind of works to, oh, wow, we actually now can take advantage of storage and networking the way that it happened. In the early days of containerization becoming more prevalent, when Docker was really democratizing it, because containers had actually existed for a long time. There were Solaris jails.
other technologies that predicated it, but Linux containers had been around, but Docker helped democratize it. I remember meeting with Intel and they used to have a conference called the Intel Developer Forum and they were like, this is wonderful. We do all these stuff and things like that. It was actually a former colleague of mine at EMC that was at Intel, Nick Weaver. And I was like, I waited for all the questions to get done. I finished, I was like, hey Nick, we spent a decade fixing these issues.
for VMs, aren’t we going to have to do the same thing for containers? And he took a deep sigh. And he’s like, Sue, you’re totally right. Containerization is awesome because it does many of the things that are similar to virtualization. But it actually, I don’t even need a whole operating system. I just need the bins and libraries. It is much more flexible as to how we can do things much faster. It is at the core of what we today call kind of the cloud native architectures.
But again, if we change all of those things, the underlying storage and networking break. And what we’ve done is we’ve learned from what we did in the past and we’ve moved quicker. it talked about like, know, CNI and CSI for the storage, the networking and storage interfaces are a great help. But just like standards before them, the details as to how this is implemented.
you know, are a little bit different. you know, getting the networking pieces to all talk and work. And there’s, you know, not just, you know, the CNI, but there’s lots of things going on in the networking space. Like eBPF has been a phenomenal technology that’s been helping here. So, you know, just at a high level, you know, yes, networking has been a challenge, but we’ve been making some good leaps and strides on this.
And Kubernetes was built for large scalable environments. I mean, came out of Google and the like, we’ve got customers that have thousands and thousands of nodes and the like. networking is making progress, but in the cloud era and dispersed environments and today.
you know, most customers I work with, you know, where do they live? They live lots of places. They live in multiple clouds. They live in the data center. They have edge environments. And how do I deal with networking? You know, there’s overlays and underlays and projects like Scupper and Submariner that are helping in these environments. And in my day to day, I don’t spend as much time on some of these, but yeah, it’s, definitely reminds me of some of the previous challenges I had.
Yeah, I think back to like when the software defined networking came out and I was talking to a networking analyst that had been doing it for decades and he was like, he’s like, Stu, you know, the person coming out of college that has played with some of these technologies understands it better than somebody that’s done it for decades. And I was like, yeah, but you’ve also seen where it breaks and some of the challenges in adopting it. So, you know, I’m at the part of my career that, you know, those kinds of things, it’s like, yep, yep, understand.
the guidance I keep giving Red Hat engineers and product managers when they’re like, these are really challenging. It’s like, look, number one, look at how far we’ve come on the journey and how are we doing to meet our customer needs and compared to where everything is. you see at KubeCon, the community there just works so well together. And it’s not, I did some…
some standards work back in the networking world. And it was, you would have, you know, the two companies that had competing standards getting up and like, just like arguing and fighting in front of them. And you’d have factions as to how that happens. And you’d all go out in the hallway and be negotiating on votes and things like that. And boy, is that different than what I see in the open source communities. It’s, know, when you have companies that you’re like, wait, these four companies that all
really compete against each other on a day-to-day basis, but when it comes to the project, they’re all generally driving in the same direction.
Kate Holterhoff (22:07)
These stories they seem very extensible to many of the things that I’ve seen as well. So I appreciate that. Okay, since I’ve asked you to put on your analyst hat, let’s go ahead and keep it on. So one of the things that I get asked pretty often as an analyst myself is what the heck an analyst is. So I’m curious, what kind of analyst were you? Were you an industry analyst the same way that RedMonk is? Okay.
Stu Miniman (22:30)
Yeah, yeah, right. So
the first differentiates right is there are financial analysts and there are the technical industry analysts. And absolutely, I was in the second camp. You needed to understand enough of the numbers and the money because following the money is pretty important on a lot of technologies and where people are spending and share of wallet and all those sorts of things. But
Absolutely. I focused on the technology piece of things. As I mentioned, there’s certain things that I felt I had a solid background on. So, you know, good foundation in networking. Before EMC, I worked in Telkom some, you know, virtualizations, a technology that I understood really well. But it’s interesting. I think about the first half of my career, the technologies I work on, I knew how to program them, install them, troubleshoot them.
and explain them. And by the time I became an analyst, one of the things that bothered me some is I really was away. I was not like the RedMonk folks, very developer centric. Most of you have backgrounds or hands-on experience on there. My 10 years as an analyst, I didn’t touch any gear.
It’s funny, actually at the end, I actually like got my AWS like CCP, my cloud, you know, practitioner certification. And it was just because I talked about cloud for the longest time. It was like, cool. I’ve interviewed Andy Jassy a couple of times, but I’ve never been in the console itself. And it just felt weird to me with my background. But yeah, so, you know, I’ve been in the cloud and there’s something that
Kate Holterhoff (23:56)
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (24:17)
you miss if you’re not understanding, you know, not just talking to the practitioners, but having lived in their shoes.
Kate Holterhoff (24:24)
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. I mean, in our current AI era, kicking the tires is always the first thing I want to do. When vendors brief us, a lot of times they’ll have.
a demo and that gets you part of the way. mean, the absolute worst is just, you know, slides, right? And then I don’t understand what the heck’s going on. I’m like, least show me if you screen grab something that I can understand. yeah, nothing beats actually, you know, getting in the weeds and try to see how these these things actually work. mean, I’ve got so many different agentic IDEs on my on my computer right now. can’t even tell you. I’m like, which one am I using today? I don’t even know. Because, yeah, I want to try them all and they’ve all got new updates.
My goodness, the pace of things surely isn’t getting any slower. Are you finding that you’re also in the kick the tires mode with a lot of the AI stuff? Or is that something that you’ve moved past as a director?
Stu Miniman (25:18)
so yeah, first of all, when it comes to AI, if we’re not learning in deep in it, we’re, missing out. So, so that’s absolutely something from our leadership. everyone is using and hopefully mostly past the kick the tires phase and more into, you know, how am I helping it? you know, my team is more, you know,
Kate Holterhoff (25:27)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (25:45)
I myself am not in cursor and building things there, but there’s number of tools that I’m in on a pretty regular basis in using it. And nano bananas not high on the list for it. I don’t need image creation and the like. yeah, no, to the point, the joke’s always been in our industry. The only thing that’s constant is the rate of change. And
Kate Holterhoff (25:58)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Stu Miniman (26:12)
you know, it’s my math and engineering background. It’s like, no, no, no. It’s not constant. It’s always increasing. You know, our industry is a little bit more entropy and entropy, you know, always, you know, spreads and grows. And it was one of the things actually I looked at before I joined Red Hat. There was a presentation that our chief product officer had given, Ashesh Badani that kind of resonated with me.
Kate Holterhoff (26:19)
Wow.
Stu Miniman (26:38)
and just said, you know, if you look at Linux as an operating system, you know, there’s something like a million lines of code that change like every month. And if you look at Java, it’s, you know, similar order magnitude. If you look at, you know, Kubernetes, you know, how much change is going on and then how many additional, you know, projects and files and things that go into Linux Kubernetes and all of the spaces we have. And so, okay, if the world is kind of chaos and entropy and open source, definitely.
is a constant whirlwind of change. How do you keep up and deal with that is something that’s really challenged. It’s like, cool, Red Hat has 30 years of experience surfing and dealing with that and, you know, hopefully harnessing as much goodness and helping along the way as they can. But there’s a lot of companies that just are like, well, I’ve got a certain point of time and I’m doing things a certain way. And we know the biggest challenge right now is just like, hey, wait, the world has changed.
can you actually change along with that? And in the AI era, everyone needs to be understanding the impact. It’s not one, the only example I really remember in my career is the internet itself. And when we went from just the little corner of the internet that only a few people knew about to when graphical browsers came out.
which I’ll age myself and say I happened to be in college when that happened. And was one of those when I saw it, I was like, my God, this changes everything. And I talked to other people and they’re like, isn’t this a toy? you know, this and I’m like, no, no, no, you don’t, it’s gonna, I don’t know exactly where it’s going, but I saw the opportunity there. AI absolutely is one of those that not only does it have a huge impact, but unlike
Kate Holterhoff (28:09)
Wow.
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (28:32)
A lot of the technologies that we talk about in high tech, it’s one that I talk about with my kids and my cousins and nieces and nephews and the like because it has day to day impact on what they touch, which is transformational as opposed to something like cloud computing, which I spent 15 years talking about and it impacts them, but they don’t touch it.
Kate Holterhoff (28:55)
Yeah, huh.
Okay, yeah, I like your thought about the beyond kicking the tires because I think that’s such an interesting distinction to make because yeah, I tend not to use the Nano Banana, the sort of things that might be considered a toy in the same way that the internet was considered a toy in the past. But yeah, I I spin up all these apps that are online, you know, they’re out there. And so I feel like it’s kind of not a toy, but at the same time, I think
The problem with being an analyst is that I don’t get to, I don’t have visibility into large enterprise companies all the time except for what folks are willing to tell me. And so when I tried to kick the tires of Devin, I learned that I couldn’t.
do it because you actually have to have an organizational account. They won’t just let you have a hobbyist account. And I didn’t know this, right? These are the things that, know, one of the problems with being an analyst is you’re like, well, everything’s online. There’s documentation. No, no, no. You actually, you’ve got to dig deep and you have to reach out to developers who are complaining about a thing because you might think that there’s, you know, that the answers are out there, but they’re not always or they’ll be sort of discussed.
you know, under a folks breath. And so I, to pull myself out of this long example here, I think it’s interesting. I feel like we’re at this juncture with AI where trying to figure out what is a toy and what is real.
Like what is something that’s going to make us, I don’t know, actually have impact on jobs to actually change the way that we’re doing our own work in these fundamental ways? Are we gonna be able to replace ourselves or even just, I don’t know, have hobby projects? Like can this actually help me with managing my home life, helping with my kids, doing projects like that? Where is that line? When does it move from just kicking the tires or?
creating little hobby things or I don’t know what did folks do before this. Studio Ghibli, everyone Ghibblified themselves, right? Moving beyond that, to things that are actually real. And I don’t know. I don’t know that I can have that line. mean, it feels pretty real to me now, but maybe my whole life is, I’m an analyst, right? I mean, my whole life is an illusion of just hand waving and going to conferences and chatting with you Stu. I mean, this is…
Stu Miniman (31:16)
Yeah,
it is interesting because the industry as a whole, it felt like the ripple effect of when ChatGPT launched, which was over three years ago now. And it was one of those like, my gosh, in a year, everything will change. And I look back and I’m like, OK, we’re more than three years in. In some ways, everything has changed. In some ways, it’s like if it all disappeared tomorrow, I don’t think we would notice right now. We’re not that far along.
And the line always is, the futures here is just unevenly distributed because I meet with lot of enterprise users. a couple of weeks ago, I was down in New York City and we’d had a whole day that I didn’t actually go to, but a whole day event with like financial services companies talking about AI. And I got to go to dinner with a handful of them. And it was like, well, there’s the guy sitting next to me. They’re he’s, they’re
that bank is like the furthest along and he’s telling me all these examples of all these wonderful things that they’re doing internally. And everybody else at the table is like, oh my gosh, know, just learning everything they can and how do I build on that and everything. And it’s actually one of the biggest distinctions I’ve seen in the last like kind of, you know, 25 years of my career, because some of those same banks 25 years ago.
I was talking to them about like, you know, under NDA about like how to get some technology to work. and that was like, you know, their differentiation and you can’t tell anybody what their IT was doing because they’re putting millions of dollars in all these people. And then like, wait here, I’m out to dinner and they spend a day in a seminar, all sharing with each other’s because, you know, to the point you’d mentioned, like all of these things are online, you know, we all have access to the same cloud, SaaS and other pieces here. And.
That is not where the differentiation is. It is the things that are specific to your business, maybe certain usage of the data or the apps that you have that you get forward. But that’s been hugely transformational as to how we actually can all build together and move faster that I love to see. it is, I think if you talk about the participation, it’s usually like 1 % do most of it and then there’s the next 9%.
And then there’s everybody else. AI today, I think, is also very unevenly distributed. There’s some people I talk to that they’re like, I’ve got a digital twin. And they go off and do all these things. I’ve doubled my bandwidth to be able to do activities. Whereas to most people, it’d been like, cool, yeah, we’re starting to kick the tires, or starting to get access, or we finally got the CISO.
to be able to turn this on even though we’ve been paying for it for a year, that type of thing. it is, you know, we’re three years in and in some ways I’m a little disappointed as to how far we’ve gone in as an industry along these things. But yeah, it definitely is one of those that it feels were compared to six months ago, there’s been a lot of progress and I expect, you know, through 2026, it’s only going to accelerate.
Kate Holterhoff (34:08)
Yeah.
Okay, all right. So I’m so excited. We got the AI topic out of the way. Now we can return to more interesting things. I’m kidding. Awesome, yeah. All right, let’s talk about theCUBE. I am now a veteran of theCUBE. I participated in a cube interview, just one, not thousands, at the last KubeCon, which was very nice. I got the…
Stu Miniman (34:42)
Awesome.
Kate Holterhoff (34:58)
the feel of it, you know? I mean, this is like real production, they got the headphones on, very smart panelists. It all felt much more produced than what we’re doing right now on the MonkCast But I have so many questions after doing it, you know, maybe as a bit of an insider, as a bit of, you know, someone that’s, you know, takes an interest in filming and audio. So theCUBE you were there when it was founded, is that right?
Stu Miniman (35:21)
So yeah, was the first Cube event I was at. And you talk about production, like literally it was like, you know, we had webcams as backups because the regular cams weren’t working. We ran out of storage the first day because wait, HD video actually takes a lot of storage and we did how many hours of it and things like that. So the early days, and by the way, there was the guy that ran theCUBE for a few years. The line he had was,
Kate Holterhoff (35:24)
my gosh.
yeah. yeah.
Stu Miniman (35:51)
doing live video like at an event is a minor miracle every time it happens. you know, any even doing, you know, doing a podcast or, you know, things like that is like, we know how many failure points there are, you know, how many times it’s like, my gosh, why are we having a video audio sync issue here? Or, you know, wait, we have to deal with unions in this one city and they won’t let us touch the cameras, things like that. It’s, I could go on for days as to some of the stories that we had on things.
Kate Holterhoff (35:55)
You
Yeah.
Whoa.
Stu Miniman (36:20)
and the like, but yeah, was, yeah, that combination of, you know, as high quality production as possible and high quality content.
Kate Holterhoff (36:30)
man, that’s amazing. and okay, so help me out. Why is it called theCUBE and why is it capitalized the way it is?
Stu Miniman (36:36)
You know, that’s an interesting question. And it was just, it was always theCUBE. I don’t have a good answer for you. was never, when we did it, it’s not like we were in a box. It was just, I hate, know, camel case type things or weird capitalization. And it was constantly a nightmare because like, if I start a sentence with it, do I capitalize the T?
Kate Holterhoff (36:40)
Are you stalling? Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Stu Miniman (37:01)
And stuff like that. didn’t name it. I don’t think there was anything really behind it. And it didn’t even have the website when we first started. And I think they go by like theCUBE dot net actually rather than theCUBE dot com. So there was even I think there’s a game show in Europe called like the cube that has no relation. So it it was kind of a catchy name and it stuck. So.
Kate Holterhoff (37:17)
Huh.
Yeah, but not spelled like Kubernetes. Like it has no relation to Kubernetes, of course. Just, yeah. Way before it. All right.
Stu Miniman (37:33)
no, because it existed years before Kubernetes did. Even though the fun fact is there is, you know, the CNCF is really particular as to how you pronounce Kubernetes and KubeCon. So try saying, you know, the KubeCon, you know, so many times it was, yeah, that was an interesting one. Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (37:49)
jeez. God.
I yeah, what a tongue twister. man, would, yeah, that would tax my…
Stu Miniman (38:01)
Yeah. And I mean, Kate, like it’s funny. We were talking about like some of the toughest things about doing a video. Getting names right is something that we really tried to pride ourselves on because you’d guess, no, no. Like I had, there was a friend of mine in the networking space and I spent like five minutes with him trying to get his Slovakian name Peponjak spelled right. And I introduced him and I’m like, and here’s, know, Ivan Peponjak.
And we finished the interview and go and somebody goes, Yvonne, how are you? And I’m like, you didn’t correct me that I was mispronouncing your first name. it does not matter. And I was like, my God, I’m mortified because, know, Kate, you did a great job with Miniman, you know, coming and you asked me about that before we went on. Cause it’s like, look, Miniman or Miniman are both fine. Miniman is not okay. So.
Kate Holterhoff (38:35)
Ugh.
my god. It does though.
Mini
Stu Miniman (38:56)
And thankfully, I’m over six, I’m six two. And, you know, with that name and my kids got my height, so they’re okay. But I do have a couple of cousins that are on the shorter side and checking into hotels, they always get a smirk. So.
Kate Holterhoff (39:00)
Yeah.
no.
no. man. Yes. Yeah, you are anything but diminutive. well, I actually hadn’t really put that together, but I have learned to check. I know that there’s some podcasters who their strategy is to just let the guest introduce themselves. And I believe that’s Michael Cote, a former RedMonk Analyst.
Stu Miniman (39:32)
Sure, sure.
Kate Holterhoff (39:33)
Yeah, and I believe that’s how he approaches things. So there’s a lot of beauty to that.
Stu Miniman (39:36)
Well, would just like, Coté, you’re being lazy. Come on. You know, give your guests the appropriate introduction is something that I’m… Yeah. It’s all right. I hopefully see him in Amsterdam for KubeCon show and we can discuss it over a beer.
Kate Holterhoff (39:41)
Well, hey.
You tell him to his face. I love that.
Yes, no, I’m sure he’ll take it in good humor. Yeah, I can see it both ways, because then you let the guests kind of explain themselves the way they want, but I tend to think it’s a little awkward when I’ve heard folks do it, because nobody knows how to introduce themselves. I don’t know, especially the snippet one.
Stu Miniman (40:07)
Yeah, no, the only time I ever did that is literally in one of the one of the first times they had me host theCUBE solo. I feel like they might have even been hazing me a little bit because they were just like, we’ve got another guest and they put another guest no prep because like we have laptops and guest names and background and things like that. It was like.
Kate Holterhoff (40:16)
Yeah.
guys.
Stu Miniman (40:28)
Hi, and we’re back and here we’re here with, hi, why don’t you introduce yourself? and what do you do? And you know, very much that, and it was like, you had to ask like two or three, like very much like, hi, I have no idea who you are or what we’re talking about. And then we’ll get into it. But other than that, because yeah, like the little thing, it’s how much I prepare. Again, it depended on the guest and the topic. There are some guests that some shows that you just prep for the show.
Kate Holterhoff (40:41)
Ugh.
Stu Miniman (40:55)
and other guests that, you know, if you got like a big name guest, I’d spend two months talking to people I know and be like, my God, if I could ask one question of, you know, Pat Gelsinger, you know, what would you ask? You know, if you had the, know, James Hamilton from Amazon was somebody that I revered because he, you know, had built so many things and the like. you know, I had some really amazing guests that I got to interview. Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (41:09)
you
Stu Miniman (41:23)
I had, I like Walter Isaacson. I was one of my best gets that I ever got. So he wrote like the Steve Jobs bio and the Einstein bio that got turned into a TV show and like, so I’ve read like almost all of his books and he was speaking at an event. I’d reached out and they were like, he’s not going to have time and things like that. And I just kind of cornered him. I was like, Hey, we’ve got this other set right here and huge fans we’d love. And he’s like, yeah, I can give you like five to 10 minutes. No problem.
Kate Holterhoff (41:34)
Wow.
Mm-hmm.
Stu Miniman (41:51)
And you know got to do that. you know, it was interesting and those are the ones Kate I tell you the ones people like did you get nervous? I’m like, you know, what’s funny is some of the most nervous I’ve been is I’m a big football fan. I’ve been a Patriot season ticket holder for a long time we had a community event that would be held every year at the stadium of the Patriots and they bring a retired Patriot and I got to interview like four of them like one was a Super Bowl MVP and
you know, all these former players and you’d be like, well, Stu, you know, football and everything like that. I’m like, yes, but my audience is tech and half of my audience couldn’t care less about football. So how do I connect a, you know, retired football athlete with my audience? And that’s where I try to, you know, you know, one of them, you know, talked about, you know, his, he had injuries over his career and how did he come back from that? And that’s something that I think a lot of people can understand.
you know, another one heavily involved in charitable activities. And we just talked a lot about that, which is, you know, very there. yeah, a couple of them, just had fun with it. And that’s what you try to do.
Kate Holterhoff (43:03)
Yeah, that’s a good approach. I know everyone has an interesting story and you just try to draw that out of them. But I’m afraid I number among the people who really don’t care about football. So, you you’d have to ask some really interesting questions for me to jump on board. that’s exciting. I’m trying to, so I think what’s interesting about the
theCUBE too and the way that you have found yourself in this situation is that you attend a lot of conferences. And so theCUBE seems to attach itself to conferences, at least in my experience. So yeah, why is that?
Stu Miniman (43:35)
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that is if you look
on it usually says who’s sponsored by. And so a lot of the shows was just, you know, they bring theCUBE to help, you know, as part of the amplification and education of the event itself. So there was that. And then there’s some big industry shows where you’d get, you know, a number of people to sponsor it. And sometimes it was editorial, too. So there’s a couple of times where I’d be like, hey,
Kate Holterhoff (43:41)
Okay.
Stu Miniman (44:03)
I did a couple of serverless comps and it was stuff that was not funded. was just like, logistically, we think we can do it. Let me make sure I can get a production team, knew the people running it and had some really fascinating interviews that I got to do to help with my editorial agenda as an analyst and do some fun interviews. And even my last series that I did is during COVID.
Kate Holterhoff (44:11)
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (44:29)
when we were all like, couldn’t go to events anymore. And I was kind of like just losing my mind sitting in a studio by myself is I did a series where I would just once a week do an interview and have, it was called a cloud native insights and was digging into some startups in the space and some interesting technologies and the like. And when I’d finished an interview,
Kate Holterhoff (44:37)
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (44:54)
when we were done recording, we’d chat for a while. And oftentimes it was like, cool, and introduce me to two people that I should interview. And it was like, oh, I got like one of the serverless startups that was there. Well, it turns out they were, one of their VCs was, you one of the founders of GitHub. And they’re, oh yeah, sure, we can introduce you to him. And he’s a billionaire, but he’ll talk to you, a type of stuff. And it was like, cool, awesome. And you know, the communities are great as to how they connect.
Kate Holterhoff (45:18)
Yeah.
Yeah, so the serendipitous meetings that happen at conferences are really important to you. Yeah.
Stu Miniman (45:29)
Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, one of the things
I, I helped build out a bench, uh, when I was there. So, um, I mentioned like serverless conf. Um, one of the people that I’d interviewed a few times that I ended up having co-host with me is Corey Quinn. So I brought Corey Quinn to host theCUBE with me at an Amazon summit in New York city at cube con, uh, Barcelona in 2019, which is a funny one. Cause if you know, Corey, Corey is not actually a fan of Kubernetes.
Kate Holterhoff (45:45)
I do.
Stu Miniman (45:58)
And he a great job hosting. And it’s something that I was kind of really frustrated on is he did a really job hosting and doing this and after a week of it. And I’m like, how do you not get this? We talked to some very large users and some really interesting things and everything. And still he’s like, ah, it’s all forever. And I was like, come on, get beyond it, Corey. I understand the angry man shaking the fist at something works sometimes.
Kate Holterhoff (46:18)
you
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (46:26)
I felt like he had learned enough and participated enough that he would kind of grok it, but yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (46:29)
you
Right, he drank the Kool-Aid. That’s funny, I actually didn’t know that Cory was opposed to the Kubernetes thing. That’s interesting. I’ll have to ask him about that. Yes, I mean, he tends to come out for a of the RedMonk events, so we see each other pretty frequently. Well, that cracks me up. All right, yeah, friend of the pod as well. He’s definitely come on here. We’ve given him, you know.
Stu Miniman (46:40)
gosh yeah.
Yep. Yeah.
Yeah, he, it’s fun fact is I think he said, I think it was like an Amazon summit in San Francisco. I had him on theCUBE for the first time. And he told me like a year later that that was the first like video interview he’d ever done. and I was one of the handful of people that he called when he’s like, Hey, I’m thinking of starting a podcast. What do you think? And I was like, you know, aren’t there too many podcasts? And I’m like, yes. But the answer is yes, you should do it.
Kate Holterhoff (47:05)
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (47:23)
And my only feedback is, Corey, just be you. That’s what you have to be. And sometimes Corey is a little bit too Corey, but yeah, we have fun. he did actually, I was on his podcast and it was one that when you talk about like, when do you record it when do you publish it? He had been really busy and I think it was almost six months from when we recorded it to when he published it. The day he published it about my time on theCUBE was the day that I…
Kate Holterhoff (47:26)
Yeah.
There’s no such thing.
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (47:52)
shared that I was leaving theCUBE and joining Red Hat. So it was one of those. And it was funny because there was somebody else like the next week that had the exact same thing happen to them. And it was one of those like, well, 2020, remember, like everybody was changing jobs and, you know, out what they’re doing. So it was just funny that there’s the joke. It’s like, if I had a nickel every time this happened, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t that much. But, you know, it’s kind of funny that it happens, you know, so.
Kate Holterhoff (47:57)
my gosh, yeah.
It’s a curse.
yeah.
Yeah,
man, I love that. Yeah, the problem with doing the podcast and sitting on them for months on end is real because you wanna have the schedule, you wanna make things predictable. It’s also nice to have a backlog when you’re coming up to conference time. I don’t know about you, but Octobers are just gone. I’m not home in October.
Stu Miniman (48:43)
Yeah. Well, and when you talk about how much content is evergreen versus we mentioned AI, and if I watch this three months from now, am I going to be like, wow, was that done five years ago? Or because the robot masters said that that is not the way things are.
Kate Holterhoff (48:51)
Yeah.
Right on, right on, I know. I said, Agentech IDEs, and it was AI code assistants a year ago. you’re right on that. Okay, so Stu, I’ve got my, we’ll publish this sooner than I’ve been want to in the past. But yeah, I mean, it’s wild. The thought of Corey not having his megaphone on screaming in the cloud just.
Stu Miniman (49:12)
Yeah, AI factory is all the way.
Kate Holterhoff (49:31)
baffles me. mean, since I started at RedMonk, he’s had that pod. It was actually the first media engagement that I did working as an analyst was on his podcast. And I still didn’t know his whole thing. So the legend, you know, this is good.
Stu Miniman (49:45)
Well, and he was one that like I’d been going to reinvent since the second year that it happened. I’ve been to ten of them and was one of those, you you look back and you’re like, he kind of went from like nobody knew him to like everybody got his newsletter and paid attention to him in a very short period of time. So an interesting one. So, yeah, it’s funny. Like, as I said, I record.
Kate Holterhoff (49:53)
Okay.
yeah.
yeah.
Stu Miniman (50:11)
I recruited a whole bunch of hosts for theCUBE. I had a friend of mine, Keith Townsend, that hosted for us. Bobby Allen, who’s at Google, was a host of mine. The one I was really disappointed of is Forrest Brazeal was actually lined up to be a guest host of theCUBE, and then the pandemic happened. So because, you know, he is amazing and it was like just, yeah, love getting some of those people. yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (50:16)
Yes?
wow. my gosh.
I am such a fan of Forrest. wow.
yeah, he would have been good. I know everything just kind of came crashing down a way to rebuild ourselves after the pandemic. How interesting. Okay, see, I love these back room stories. This is good. I get to hear the ins and outs, the things that could have happened.
Stu Miniman (50:47)
Yeah, well, and if I’d actually probably gone to more RedMonk beers over the years, I probably would have just recruited more people as guest hosts because there’s always some interesting people there.
Kate Holterhoff (50:58)
yeah, we’ve got the best friends. That’s, you know, no question. I’m putting this out there. Anytime there’s a RedMonk beers, folks, folks who definitely come out. you know, we throw a good party and have, interesting folks like you Stu that come out and say hi. Yeah, awesome.
Stu Miniman (51:11)
Thank you.
Kate Holterhoff (51:14)
think one of the interesting things too about working at RedMonk is that I’ve been told that James is one of the original influencers. And there’s this whole question now about analysts becoming influencers and this line becoming fuzzy.
And so I think Corey is an interesting example of that, Where he’s, he is so dramatic and such a great influencer. And then, you have other folks who may be
preferred to not be influencers when they were doing the analyst thing. And so I feel like we’re at this another interesting juncture is where the analyst role is right now. not only have the fact that I could get a lot of questions that our clients have come to us for the past. Hopefully they’re putting them in Claude first and saying, hey Claude, how would you answer this question? some research for me before they talk to us. So possibly we’ll be replaced entirely.
But also, are we all going to become influencers the way that Corey or James have been happy being? How will that role change as trying to drag out these answers becomes easier, more streamlined? People talk about the privacy of it too, right? That you don’t have to admit that you’re asking these questions. You can just kind of quietly ask Claude for their feedback or codex or whatever.
whatever model you’re using. So I don’t know, what’s your take on that? Especially the influencer versus analyst question. Have you seen that too? do you think it’s a problem?
Stu Miniman (52:46)
Yeah,
you’ve hit a bit of a nerve on my side, definitely, with this question. And I have thoughts. So yeah, so it’s interesting. When I first became an analyst, I struggled a little bit. So it’s funny. Most of my peers, when you think about an analyst role, the question is, why should I listen to them?
Kate Holterhoff (52:51)
Oh, let’s hear it.
Let’s hear them.
Stu Miniman (53:14)
Why are they talking about the things that they are? And, you know, as I said, my background, was engineering, I did some sales work, I was a product manager. I was in the CTO office at EMC before I became an analyst. And my first interaction with analysts were I would write a white paper and the company would pay a third party to basically plagiarize my work and put it out there. Because I, as working for a vendor, did not have the audience. Now,
Kate Holterhoff (53:42)
great.
Stu Miniman (53:43)
That was painful because I was like, but I’m the subject matter expert. Why won’t they do it? I had, it was funny. I was, when I first became an analyst, there was a little bit of the, know, wait, why would anybody listen to me? I’m just some guy that knows some certain technologies and yeah, it’s the, God, why am I blanking on the term we always talk about is the, the. Like, I shouldn’t be here because, like, I don’t know anything.
Kate Holterhoff (54:15)
Imposter syndrome. Yeah. Yeah.
Stu Miniman (54:16)
Thank you. Thank you. Hate that. Yes. Imposter syndrome. So I had imposter syndrome. And what was really funny is I was at one of the first analyst events that I’d been to and there was an analyst that I bumped into and I was like, you know, getting to know the analyst world and stuff like that. And he’s like, well, you know, still, you’ll be fine. He had actually seen a presentation that he went to a presentation that I gave at EMC’s conference and he wrote a 40 page paper.
based on my presentation. And I was like, wow, I spent like three months working on that presentation to get everything that I knew into a 45 minute presentation to hopefully do it. But again, that was probably 10 % of what I knew on the topic. And if that could be turned to like a 40 page paper that they probably got paid to write and they weren’t paid by EMC to write it. They were writing it there for the in general and stuff like that. I was like, oh.
maybe I shouldn’t have imposter syndrome as much and maybe there’s areas I know. And as I said, I don’t need to be the expert on everything is what I learned, but how do I learn to analyze things, know, the scientific method, how do I break it apart, share, you know, as an engineer, like I was great at getting partial credit on things because I didn’t have all the answers. But if my thought process goes through and when you look at forecasting things, you know, how do we do things? But back to like,
Influencer versus analyst. So first the thing about analyst is the biggest struggle I have usually is You the difference between a journalist and an analyst is an analyst has to think a lot about Where they are paid and who their clients are as opposed to journalists will be like I have an editor and they keep me Firewall for it and all I do is think about the story Influencer is something that makes my skin crawl a little bit when I think about it because
Kate Holterhoff (56:00)
Hmm.
you
Stu Miniman (56:15)
I became influential through social media and then like LinkedIn and everything like that. And there were trends and technologies that I had an interest in and I shared what I was interested in and would have conversations. It was okay. I was not doing it because I wanted to be a thought leader or have followers or do all that thing. It kind of came. I even had
Buddy of mine, John Troyer, who created the V-Expert program when he was at VMware and did a, he had a company that actually helped marketing programs and the like, and I did advice for him, but we were at a conference once and I was there as an analyst and I got pulled into, it’s like, we’ve got a party, but it’s mostly for influencers and they’d go up and you’d meet somebody and they’d say like, hi, who are you? And you know,
What do you do? And I’d be like, hey, Stu, you know, I’m an analyst. I do this and I work on cloud and networking and this and that. And they’re like, no, no, no. What platforms are you on? And I’m like, are what? And they’re like, wait, you know, are you on Instagram and doing this or, you know, which things are you doing? And it was like, look, you know, in a day, you know, I was, I was a big deal on Twitter. I had my handle with Stu. I had 15,000 followers. I had one of those verified blue checks because I was media.
Kate Holterhoff (57:23)
Mmm.
Stu Miniman (57:42)
and everything like that. And I’ve been off that platform for a couple of years and never thought I’d get rid of it. But it was like that was how I connected with people in community and learned a lot. you know, trying to hang out on blue sky when I can and see many of your peers there and yourself there. But it’s not quite the same. But the influencer for influencing stake like
Kate Holterhoff (57:47)
you
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (58:10)
I hate it. It’s the, you know, even I’ve got, my daughter, when she was involved in, she’s into like cosplay and does like special effects makeup and stuff on the side. She’s her undergraduate college right now and she still works on student films. But in her early days of posting on TikTok and Instagram, she’d get inundated with like, hey, we’ll give you a discount or give you free stuff and things like that. And she was just like.
Kate Holterhoff (58:23)
cool.
Stu Miniman (58:38)
I don’t want that. I’ll use the products that I want and not do it. it’s tough. It’s an interesting balance. yeah, because analysts, a good analyst, there’s the research side of the things and there’s the how do I reach an audience? If I publish something and 50 people see it versus 50,000 people see it, there’s a big difference as to the impact I can have. So I hope that good content
Kate Holterhoff (58:44)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Stu Miniman (59:07)
can find a good audience and the community and the networks can help share them. It is a balance. So there’s definitely some people that have an analyst hat, but they’re much more of an influencer and some people that go between them. yeah, James is one that I met through the analyst community and always respected and always liked hanging out with the monks because it’s…
Kate Holterhoff (59:13)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (59:34)
Again, what is that background and everything? It’s like, well, you know, not all of us have a PhD and used to lecture at universities and the like. And we respect that of those of you that did that. But yeah, it’s the, know, what, how do you know what you know and how are you a reputable source? And the challenge, I mean, these days more than ever is like, my God, everything I hear or learn, I feel like I have to like, you know, check to find if it’s there. You know, my favorite AI tools, the ones that when it spits out a result, it shows all the work and it shows all of the references so that I can go and see.
Kate Holterhoff (1:00:10)
Yeah, yeah. All right.
Stu Miniman (1:00:11)
So hopefully I answered the question and not too off on it, but it definitely is one that is tough because yeah, like you’ll know another friend of mine, Aneel Lakhani who’s gone to Monktoberfest a bunch. I remember talking to him because Gartner, they’re a big analyst firm, he called me a couple of times when they were building their cloud business. And I was like, hey Aneel you know anybody that’s interested? He’s like,
Ah, analysts, know, analysts stink and everything. And it was like, well, he needed to change jobs and, you know, Gartner gave him a nice job and he spent that for a year. And it was fascinating conversations for him during his time there. And after that, because it was a great learning experience for me. But it’s funny, most people I know think of me as an analyst and I’m like, I spent 10 years as an analyst, but the rest of my career, I’ve been on the vendor side. And, you know, so it’s all like, where do you sit as opposed to like,
Kate Holterhoff (1:00:55)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (1:01:08)
I’ve never worked on the end user side, but in all of my jobs, I’ve done as much as I could to talk to the users. Like when I was in sales, I met with thousands of customers. When I was an analyst, I would go to a conference and I would like waiting in line or sitting at breakfast. I talked to as many people as I could and always, you know, I would badger the vendors that I worked with to like give me more users to talk to. the two best that I worked with were Amazon and Red Hat.
Kate Holterhoff (1:01:33)
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (1:01:38)
because you’d go to the Amazon show and they’re like, hey, do you want to talk to our product people or do you want to talk to the customers? And I’m like, yeah, just give me as many customers as you can because I can read about the product stuff anytime, but the customers all have their individual perspectives. So, and thankfully in my job at Red Hat, I meet with lots of customers. Our global briefing centers in Boston, I’m in there as often as I can and get to do a little travel to see them and go to some shows. So.
Kate Holterhoff (1:01:47)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (1:02:07)
There’s nothing like, you know, working and helping those practitioners, which is, it’s funny. I look at that balance of like, I feel like I did that some as an analyst, but it was indirect most of the time. And as opposed to like actually meeting and helping the customers has been something I’ve been loving doing again.
Kate Holterhoff (1:02:19)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah. And think you’re pointing to something that maybe suggests the job security for analysts, because ChatGPT doesn’t get to go to these customer meetings and hear what is actually happening, how these users are actually encountering products, right?
Stu Miniman (1:02:41)
Yeah, I definitely think there will be an adjustment. think, you know, RedMonk, I definitely understand the value proposition of RedMonk and how you can help them with the changes that are going on. And, you know, you said you all are plugged into how these things are going. And I know I’m reading lots of what you all are putting out as to the changes there. There are certain analyst firms that I look at and say like, wow, the business model that you have, I don’t know how sustainable it is.
Kate Holterhoff (1:02:53)
Yeah.
Thanks.
Stu Miniman (1:03:10)
because rather than, I feel like I keep getting an ad on LinkedIn that’s like, rather than spending six months and X thousands of dollars on this, I could just spend five minutes on this tool and get something that is close enough to do it. So yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (1:03:23)
Wow.
Yeah, well, I’ll leave that between them and their accountants, I guess. I cannot speak to that. But what I can speak to is how excited I am to hear how folks can keep up with what you’re doing. We have talked for an hour, Stu. We’ve got to wrap this up. This is an unheard of length of time for a direct folks to, you said you’re off the X. Where are you doing all your posting these days?
Stu Miniman (1:03:55)
Yeah, you know, easiest place usually is LinkedIn. know, Stuart Miniman is my full name on there. It’s just like in slash Miniman spelled like Miniman there and Bluesky definitely there. I actually got Stu on Bluesky. you know, it’s just the, know, so it’s just, you know, Stu.bsky.social is that page. So it helps to be.
Kate Holterhoff (1:04:13)
How do you keep doing this? That’s amazing.
Yeah.
Stu Miniman (1:04:21)
a little bit of an early adopter on those things. We can talk some time. I didn’t actually have Stu as my original handle on Twitter, but I managed to get it, but that’s ancient history. But yeah, it helped when we were limited to 140 characters, definitely. But yeah, those are there. I’m pretty easy to find and I have my own live stream. I’m always looking for topics and guests. So yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (1:04:23)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I’ll see you at the summit, correct? Fantastic.
Stu Miniman (1:04:48)
Yeah, Red Hat Summit and also KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam I’ll be at. So those are my two shows that I’ve got here in the springtime. Thankfully, I don’t have nearly as many planes and hotels as I did back in the Analyst Day. Events are fun. I miss seeing people as much, but I also love not having to travel as much and sleeping in my own bed and seeing my family. So, yay.
Kate Holterhoff (1:04:53)
Wonderful.
Yeah,
amen to that. All right, let’s wrap it up. Really enjoyed speaking with you. Again, my guest today was Stu Miniman. my name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.
