Steve: [00:00:00] Here we have an amazing lineup of speakers and participants in today’s tech share around creating better technology with open source. We’re going to start out our tech share with Lalitha Krishnamoorthy, co-founder and CEO of Open Teams Global, who’s going to discuss how to improve legacy systems with open source. Following Lalitha, we have Dharhas Pothina, who’s going to come back and talk to us about environmental lifecycle management across teams with Conda store. Very excited about this talk. Dharhas and team will be announcing a new open source project very shortly and we have the inside view and the insight into that today and maybe some early announcements. Then we have one of the founding leaders of Hakaru, probabilistic programming language. Rob Zinkov, senior software engineer at Quansight, will be discussing probabilistic programming and different models we can use to do our data analysis and then to finalize the tech share today we will have with us Davit Buniatyan, the CEO of Active Loop, who is going to take us into deep dive into deep data lakes and technologies there.

[00:01:34] So the kick off the second tech share, we have Lalitha with us, and she is the CEO, the co-founder and CEO of Open Teams Global. She’s also the executive over these tech shares and building out this network of open source, professional network of open source architects. And I’d like to give Lalitha some time to describe tech shares, what it is, and tell people how they can get involved. So, Lalitha, why don’t you start there and then we can go into our first topic.

Lalitha: [00:02:09] Awesome. Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everybody. So the concept of tech share started off, you know, from a very simple line of thinking. There’s a lot of questions from clients and partners and folks that we talk to related to not specific only just to open source. But in general, there’s a lot of questions across the different industry domains about how do they navigate through this entire digital transformation that almost every company is at some point in their journey today. So the seed for this thinking was what if we as a community come together and start talking through some of these topics and share and have this mind share and this thought leadership that we start sharing with folks through common forums and provide that input and share that knowledge.

[00:03:08] So that was really the very fundamental thought process behind starting this series. And we’ve been very excited about the reception that this messaging has had from the community and from customers and partners. Like Steve said, we actually have, you know, a folks joining us in this tech share event today that represent different domains and various levels of expertise. And they’re coming in to share their perspective and their journey. And this helps us all elevate our understanding and share best practices in a more open way. So that’s the thought process behind tech shares.

Steve: [00:03:51] Well, appreciate it, yes. And we’ve had a great, great turnout so far. Great involvement. And thank you for all the organizations wanting to participate in these tech shares. So now we’ll get started with our first topic. I think Lalitha is perfect at this topic. She has been working in IBM for a long time, helping many companies transition from their legacy systems to a more modern architecture that helps them cope with the large sets of data, better customer improvements. And we’re talking about 80% of our companies are still faced with legacy systems which are costing them a lot of money. And so with that being said, Lalitha, why don’t you explain to us a little bit of what’s going on in these companies today and what impact is digital transformation having on their current infrastructure and budgets and strategy?

Lalitha: [00:04:48] Sure thing, Steve. And I think this is a question that comes up almost in most of the client conversations that we’re in today. First of, let me start out by kind of defining what a legacy system is, because sometimes when we talk about legacy systems, people think it’s like this, you know, a system that doesn’t function, right. But that’s really not what it is To me, when someone talks about a legacy system, what computes for me is that it’s basically outdated computing. It could be software, hardware, middleware, right. And it doesn’t mean that the system is not usable. The system is usable for the original design and the business use case for which it was designed. So it’s still functional. It could be a mission critical workload or an application or a system. But what the challenge here that our customers are having is that using these legacy systems limits their ability to grow and scale. Why? Because now you have a system that does not interact and work well with systems that have already evolved and applications that have evolved and other technologies and product stacks that you need to integrate your legacy system with. But you’re unable to do it because it limits your scale and growth.

[00:06:07] So that is the challenge that people are trying to solve because now they need to find ways by which they can actually make these mission critical systems that they still need function, but in a more modern architecture. So that’s one. Now, how and what is the driver for this? Why are we talking about this topic? Why is this become important more so in the last few years where digital transformation has taken front seat and there’s about 48% to 50% of CEOs that we spoke to in the fintech industry say that open source and adopting open source has become a key driver for them to have a successful digital transformation. Then the question becomes what are the benefits that they’ve seen? So we’ve spoken to some of them the three very specific reasons why they’re doing this. The first one, according to them, is because it helps them reduce their overall IT costs. I think everybody understands and is having this challenge of how we’re going to keep and minimize our overall development in IT and infrastructure costs. So that’s one thing where they’ve seen proven value by adopting open source to reduce their overall IT cost. The second reason they want to do this is because they’re seeing a higher development team efficiency. They’re finding that their development teams are focusing more on building capabilities and functionality that they need to elevate their business and provide higher value back to their clients and less around fixing things and trying to keep things stable. So they’re starting to see that this helps with overall development, efficiency and running a more efficient development organization. And finally, the most important reason why they want to do this and need to do this and invest time and budget into doing this is because it makes it easier for them to migrate their I.T Workloads to cloud as everybody is making their journey to cloud and AI.

[00:08:06] So three key drivers, why customers are asking us for help and guidance on how they make this successful journey happen. So having said that, there are specific areas within your entire technology stack where we’re seeing this adoption of open source as they make this legacy system migration and modernization. And I’ll just call those specifically out because if you are in a position in your company where you’re trying to understand what pieces of my tech stack should I actually explore and think about adopting open source? Here’s a tip for you. So the first area where we’re seeing a lot of this movement happen is that on operating system, no brainer there. The second one that we’re seeing this conversation and a lot of chatter in social and other places is around moving databases. The third one is around monitoring tools and advanced analytics tools. There’s the DevOps tooling is another very prominent area where we’re seeing a lot of adoption of open source software. And finally, we’re seeing a lot of this happening in areas around your containers and microservices architecture.

[00:09:26] So again, five different areas where we’re seeing extreme amount of open source adoption as our clients and partners are starting to look very seriously as modernizing their legacy systems.

Steve: [00:09:38] I appreciate you sharing that with us. From what you said later in Tech shares, Davit Buniatyan is going to share with us how he bumped into a problem when he was doing his PhD at Princeton where they were doing computing. They were doing all this big data computing of images and video files, and it was costing them millions of dollars to process that data. So they needed to take it from the old structure and create a new one that could allow them to be able to faster process that data at lower costs. So that it could cost organizations a lot. Like he mentioned Dharhas is going to talk to us about next is from DevOps perspective where from taking Conda store where people are trying to manage their data science environments on their computer to the cloud and then managing across multiple users, how do you keep everything in sync that could cost a lot of time to Organization, pain and how open source is helping them use that faster. So, those are great opportunities. So as people are looking at open source, how do they decide on what kind of open source technologies should they use you? You mentioned there’s six different areas where companies are investing. Is there a framework where people can look at it and say, how do I find the right open source for the project I’m looking at moving forward?

Lalitha: [00:11:10] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can provide some best practices and some tips here on how you make that choice. Now, it’s not one size fits all like we know because everything goes back to what is the business use case that you’re trying to solve for. That is your driver. And again, depending upon your domain, depending upon the industry that you serve and where your client bases that will differentiate the path that you take. However, there are some certain very guiding principles, if you will, that you need to think about before you jump all in. The first one that you think about is obviously your business use case. I would say focus also on your data strategy. It is extremely critical for you to understand before you pick, you know, snowflake framework or if you pick data bricks framework, there are several frameworks and options for you. But before you go all in on those, the important thing to think about yourself is what is your overall data strategy look like? And that’s a key component for you to make that decision on which way you go.

[00:12:19] The other few things to think about as you start going through this journey, and trust me, it is a journey. It’s not something that you just kind of jump in and say, I’m going to go forward and do it. It has to be methodically thought through. Some of the things to think about obviously your business use case. You want to understand the agility of the team that you have. You do want to understand is this going to be a company backed, open source product that you’re going after or are you going to be adopting a community driven and backed open source project? So those are some decisions that you need to make. Clearly, the size of the project, the budget you have in hand will matter and the nature of how you manage your overall infrastructure, your IT and like I said earlier, it’s around agility of your teams as well. And then the most important thing to think about is talent. How are you going to staff a team of experts who are going to help you through this journey because the team is going to be super important for you. They need to have the expertise and the community or the knowledge base so that they can actually build out the solution architecture that will underpin your business use case.

[00:13:44] So you need enterprise solution architecture level thinking and a focus on project success overall so that the delivery of the project happens and then that will bring with it the agility and the talent and keeping your budget, you know, so it’s not blowing off your budget. Here, I want to add that because there’s just so many options. What we have from open teams is something that we call a health score or a risk score because of our deep rootedness in the open source community and our visibility to several projects that are happening, both ones that are very mature, ones that are up and coming, emerging ones like you’re going to hear some of our speakers later talk about the new things that are coming in the community. And and then there is things that are extremely innovative. That you can adopt today. And so what we have is something like a health score or a risk score, which you can take advantage of and leverage before you make these decisions on which vendor to go with, which way you’re going to go, because this will help you understand how trustable and reliable that open source product is before you go all in. So and I know there’s a talk where we’ll talk more about how we identify that risk score and health score in a different talk, I think. But that’s another way by which you can go and understand how you make that decision. But there’s a lot of factors to think about before you jump in.

Steve: [00:15:25] Thank you for sharing those and we look forward to hearing more about that risk score and health score from the community that you have. Now, specifically with open teams Global, You’re very well, you’re very you have a great practice at identifying and finding that talent. So once an organization decides upon an open source project, as you mentioned, and they said, look, we’re going to go and invest all this time into Databricks or NumPy or others, How do you find that talent? It’s the talent game is really tough one to find the good talent for that open source project. What’s your experience? What is the best way? So that a company who has great engineers, enterprise architects now that needs this expertise within this area, how do you find that? Where do you start? Is it a job posting you make? Give us some insights into that. And I think, we had some technical difficulties, I think. There we go. Are you?

Lalitha: [00:16:37] Yep. I’m back. Can you hear me?

Steve: [00:16:39] Okay, perfect. Thank you for joining back. My question was around, How identify the open source project, how do you find that talent? Right. Where do you start? Is it a job posting? How do I get that talent? Because it will speed up the way your project goes. It will help you have insights into building relationships with that community. So maybe share some light with that.

Lalitha: [00:17:04] Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that we do at Open Teams Global as well, is finding that right talent to make that project success happen. And it’s not an easy problem. I’ll be honest with you. It is not easy to solve because if you look at the overall open source developer population globally, we’re at about 30 to 40 million developers. So it’s not a very, very huge community. And that’s one of the reasons why we have our open source professional network that we launched a couple of months ago at SciPy conference. And what this requires is obviously working with experts in the field, in open source, who have very deep roots in the open source communities, because we understand the maturity level of some of these projects and these open source products that are out there. One of the things that’s important for you to think about is when you look for talent is if it’s a community backed project, do you have enough maintainers on the project? Do you have enough contributors there? Do you have a strong enough community that will take your requests for functionality enhancements or new features that you want to put in to the product and quickly turn that around. So that you can continue to make progress on your roadmap towards delivering your customers value. And if it’s a company backed open source product, you want to think about sustainability. You want to understand serviceability options. You want to make sure that the company continues to thrive so that your project and your dependence on them is not ending sooner than you want. And then you have to look for another plan.

[00:18:47] So, I think I would say the number one thing to do if you’re looking for talent specifically in open source, is reach out to the experts in the space. Definitely connect with the communities where you’re interested in adopting those technologies. Again, the beauty of open source is you have a lot of eyeballs on the problem, which really minimizes how much time you will have to spend your development team on solving these defects. So I would say reach out to the experts. These tech shares are an extremely great forum for you to know who to reach out to and get guidance and so use that. And again, go back to the community that you’re interested in for that product to understand a little bit more. Do some research there and you will find people there that can help you. And that’s what I would say. Like I said, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to finding the right talent for your project.

Steve: [00:19:52] Yeah. And I think you mentioned, you know, people can reach out and try to find those experts individually through Githubs or job postings. They can network their way. And when you’re a large company, you have multiple projects you’re working on. What does open teams, what’s the value opening is global and how does it help you interact with all these partners and these people so maybe it reduces your time and makes it faster. What can you provide and what’s the process that you work with companies on?

Lalitha: [00:20:27] Right, Right. So, from an Open Teams global perspective, I think I mentioned this earlier. What we’re trying to establish and the vision here that we have is to create an exclusive community, a professional network for open source developers. So remember that 30 to 40 million developer number I gave you for Global. And I think the idea here is two folds. One is we have to grow and make open source thrive for generations to come, and that effort needs to be more intentional. And by having a professional network where we can connect as a community, as a professional network, it allows us to share our skill sets more openly. It allows us to upskill ourselves. It allows us to support community backed projects and sponsor those and highlight the talent that our open source developers have and market their skill set. So to address the question about talent that you asked earlier, this is going to be very foundational, in my opinion, for how we are going to help our open source developers talk about their projects, talk about their contributions, and elevate their game when it comes to building their careers in open source. So that’s number one. That’s where Open Source Global is focused in launching and really getting this professional network out.

[00:21:56] From an open teams perspective. Where our focus is around the other point I made earlier is you can pick the right vendor for your project. You could have the budget, you could have the agility, you could understand your business use case. But one of the very important tenets is making sure that you have an enterprise solution architect that can visualize what this should look like in the future to allow you to grow and scale. So going back to your fundamental question, which was what’s the legacy system? It’s outdated computing and why are we talking about this? This is the exact reason, because you have to tie this back to the high level solution architecture that underpins your business use case. And that’s the value proposition. What are the value propositions that open teams provides is being able to connect you to our enterprise Solution architect network and helping you get the right guidance at the right time from a technology perspective. So you’re starting off on the right foot when you build out the solutions and architectures. So that’s kind of how I look at Open Teams and Open Teams, global going hand in hand.

Steve: [00:23:12] Perfect. And both of them working together can help you architect and find the right talent in the open source community to help you with your projects, accelerating your projects and helping you reduce the cost and speed of looking for that talent. I’ll open it to community. We got only a few minutes left here, but for anybody, have a specific question for Lalitha around, open source. Open source migration. How can you get started with a community? Please feel free to post those and then we’ll have we’ll ask her those questions. For those community members that want to get started. And they say, Look, I’d love to offer up my talents to be part of this community. What is the process that they need to go through, Lalitha? What can they do and how can they participate? And if they want to work on a project today, how can they engage with you? What would your response be.

Lalitha: [00:24:10] Sure thing I would say, I mean, come see us that openteams.com/global we have our network registration process up and going I would say in true open source since we’re in beta but we’re open for business. So I would say come and join our network register and it allows you to get your profile page built and this allows you to share your own interests. If you’re looking for opportunity, if you’re looking for a mentor, you’re looking for some additional training or upskilling yourself, or if you’re just looking to network, right, connect with other people in the community. You’re curious about Panda, you’re curious about NumPy, you’re curious about what’s going on at PI data. The conference is coming up next month. Then there’s ways for you to network and with like minded people and understand where they’re headed from a community perspective. So I would say definitely look into our open source professional network and think about registering yourself and being part of it. And, and again, we’re running the professional network in a very community driven way. So you have opportunity to and provide us guidance and input on how we should build this for all of us. Right. It’s free. It’s a free membership platform and a network. And so what you put in is for all of us to know. And we leverage each other’s skill set and expertise. And we have experts there that actually are the maintainers of some of these very large communities that we work with. So they’re able to give you advice if you are a junior developer that’s trying to figure out how I do this, or if you’re an intern trying to find a full time career in open source, we offer those options and choices so you can reach out. So that would be the way I would say, for you to start engaging with us from an external standpoint.

Steve: [00:26:24] And please go to openteams.com/global to sign up and we will on up and we’ll post a link here on the on a comment section for you. And we appreciate your time Lalitha and for sharing insights into how companies are going from legacy systems to open source some best practices, how to find talent. It was a privilege to have you here and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out directly to Lalita through LinkedIn or contact her through open teams.com. So thank you for your time. Lalita We will take a quick break before Dharhas gets on stage. Talk to us about Conda Store. Thanks, Lalita.

Lalitha: [00:27:11] Fantastic. Thank you for having me. Bye bye.

Steve: [00:27:13] Bye.