Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Are you guys ready? Yeah.

Steve McDowell  0:05  
Another data centric podcast with more insights and strategy analysts, Steve McDowell and Matt Kimball. I'm Steve, I'm at Hey, Steve, how are you, buddy? Doing well, so here on this podcast, we talk about all things data center, and more obviously data center than others. Why don't you talk? Tell us about what we're going to talk about this week.

Matt Kimball  0:24  
Yeah, so you know, you guys hit on this on previous podcasts, we kind of hit it hinted around the, you know, with COVID and Corona and all this talk about you know, supply chain and you know, pharmaceuticals and everything else. We thought it'd be interesting to talk about, from an infrastructure perspective, what supply chain, you know, what that looks like, and how companies deal with it. In today's world, and, you know, whether, you know, there's some rethinking that goes on around around supply chain and how that ties into security, so we're able to go out and get The man at HP john Grasso, Vice President of global operations engineering and global supply chain. He's going to join us and kind of talk through supply chain from his perspective and HP E's perspective and some of the things they do. And I think one of the things that we'll hit on which is going to be really interesting is, is the fact that you know, HP has this great security story and cybersecurity story. But really, you know, security starts way back and kind of sourcing of raw materials, believe it or not, and that's some of the stuff we're going to hit on. So it should be fun. So, so, so john, thanks for thanks for joining us today. If you want to give a little background on yourself kind of where you come from and how you got to be the the king of supply chain at HP.

John Grosso  1:54  
Well, thank you for the for the introduction and overstating my my role and capabilities. I appreciate that. Um, it's interesting. I joined HP about three years ago next week as a matter of fact, and my introduction was a week in Las Vegas at discover. So I got to meet the entire team, which was very unusual face to face and see all their products. And I jumped right into the game leading at that time, supplier quality, strategic early engagement and early engagement engineering. And over the years, my role has expanded a bit and is the role is expanded. There are some very specific areas that I've really taken view towards what our customers need and you know, just making sure that we've got a high degree of customer obsession because we want to make our customers happy. And with the ongoing scenario around penetration hackers getting In two systems, the volatility of counterfeit products coming into supply chain and just the growth there, criminals are getting Smarter Every Day. We, we started a center of excellence around secure supply chain, September 2018, is when I kicked off the initiative. And it's been building ever since as we learn and we grow, and we establish features that really, really make it a primary part of our offering. You asked me where I was I before coming to HP, I spent five years at Amazon. I was with a lab 126 running quality, lean and balm for that company. And then prior to that I was with Dell for nine years, five of which were spent in Shanghai, China. I ran operations for Dell in the client and consumers case. And then I ran global quality and priority That, you know, I had some very interesting opportunities to learn about RND and other engineering and PCB PCB, a types of environments. So I've been very lucky, great mentors great opportunities along the way, and have really learned a lot from others. And you know, you always want to thank those that helped to get to where you are today.

Steve McDowell  4:24  
So, john, so just to level set, right, because when we talk about supply chain, I think we all talk about different things, right, as an IT guy, HP is my supply chain. So just to kind of level when we talk about supply chain in the context of what we're going to talk about today and what you're responsible for. What does it mean what is supply chain,

John Grosso  4:45  
supply chain is the it's the end to end journey all the way from raw products to the customers data center. And once they turn that on, and get it Operational that we have to make sure meet all the specs and requirements of how do you bring in a reliable, trustworthy Data Center Operation or server storage device, whatever. You know, it's interesting when I look at supply chain, take a battery, for example, batteries are used in just a number of different products even in our servers. Well, lithium that goes into a battery is dug from the ground. And as you're watching lithium get produced, you've got to ensure the purity of that lithium. So it gets delivered to a manufacturer and you know, the supply chain and a battery basically starts in the ground with whatever machine they're using it to dig it out and does that the theme meet spec is it pure? Same thing when it comes to plating in a circuit board. You're bringing copper out of the ground, and that copper has to have a certain percentage of phosphorus And again, you're looking for purity, you then build from there. So in our supply base, we've got approximately, we'll put a rough number of about 250 different suppliers, with approximately 500 different manufacturing sites that all build components or sub assemblies that deliver to our factories that we then put together to build a product and ship it to our customer.

Matt Kimball  6:29  
And so so with that said, right, is the is the concern that you have or the stuff that keeps you up at night, you know, we talked about security starting women in the supply chain, and really even the sourcing of materials, but is it just security is there are there quality issues or is it just kind of all of these things that you know, you have to you have to kind of run around and manage on a day to day basis?

John Grosso  6:56  
Well, you know, you're always concerned about quality because first All products have to be in spec, we put specifications that start with engineering and r&d into place. And if something goes out of spec, it could impact signal integrity. It could be a mechanical part that doesn't fit. So you can't build something and meet a ship date. So quality is always, you know, very, very much in the forefront of what we do. This secure aspect really starts coming in. Where can people penetrate a supply chain and do something nefarious that you don't want in your products. And I mentioned it earlier, but you know, criminals are able now to do counterfeit parts. And it's really, really hard to detect what's counterfeit, and what's real. So we put a lot of effort in ensuring that we're not getting counterfeit parts. The other penetration point is whenever you're loading firmware, code can be put into silicon. Consider an EEPROM or any other any other product that carries firmware. Hard Drive solid state drives NICs, I mean everything you can penetrate by getting a malware into position. So, I mean, there's no place you can't shut your eye, you've got to be aware of everything that's happening. And those that trust and don't verify or don't have measures in place or not, you know, they're touching and validating through other systems are the ones that get burned.

Matt Kimball  8:41  
So with that said, right, I'm gonna ask you this question and kind of go off on a different tangent, but so, you know, that that sounds kind of like a well, let me let me let me rephrase that. How concerned you know, Joe, IT admin that's racking servers. on a day to day basis, right? What should his or her concern level be when when they're receiving those, those servers? In general kind of industry wide? And then, you know, with hp, I don't want this to be kind of promotional. But, you know, I'm kind of curious to, you know, understand the, you know, the more stringent approach he takes to to, to ensure the integrity of the components and the servers.

John Grosso  9:26  
Yeah, I know. I believe that the IT professionals that we work with in the customer segment, have set up some very rigorous standards and they ordered us just like we ordered our suppliers. And the first thing that any customer has to have, they have to have trust in their supplier and it doesn't matter what you're buying, right. Geez, cell phone, car, toothbrush, I mean, you name it, you want to ensure that who you're buying from a knows what they're doing is meeting specificall And then where you can you audit what they're doing. And you follow up to ensure that their processes and mechanisms, the certifications they have in place, their quality management system, their governance, is meeting your expectations. Once our customers have established that they do periodic audits on us, and they continue to have a trust level without that trust, then any IT person should have a higher level of concern if they haven't validated HP has gone out of our way. I mean, you know, we we do a lot of products for banking institutions, social media companies were well ingrained in the federal sector. And this is on a global basis. This just isn't in the United States or North America. So over the years, because establishing trust doesn't happen in minutes, it happens in validation on an ongoing basis. Over the years, HP has been very fortunate that we've been able to establish a strong level of trust with our customers. Even with that said, they continue to audit and it's the right thing to do.

Matt Kimball  11:19  
Sure. And, you know, obviously, you know, we talk about banking, media, government, you know, there's going to be, you know, there's going to be a probably an extra level of scrutiny, they applier or, you know, vigilance they have around kind of security, but, you know, do you find that this is pretty universal across all your customers that maybe with heightened a little bit with COVID, but that there's this you know, 35 to 3500 to 4000 components in a server coming from, you know, 250 suppliers, you know, do you find that you know, pretty much all your customers are really are asking the question of, you know, You know, how can I How can I ensure the integrity of this? And how do I know where these you know where all these parts are coming from and so on and so forth? Or is, is it really kind of limited to you know, those those usual suspects, you know, God, etc, etc?

John Grosso  12:13  
Now, that's a great question. And it's, it's pertinent number one, within our company. We do not have a different standard for different customers. I mean, everything that we do is at the highest standard of expectation. So when we're buying solid state drives for fed use, versus for somebody that's going to put it into, you know, a standard consumer product, there is no differentiation in product oversight, product quality or product deliverable. Now, our customers over time, have been changing a bit, and they change based on what's happened to them and their environment. Yeah, have they been hacked? Hey, They seen their data become public. And all of a sudden, you know, they come under the scrutiny of, of not only government regulatory agencies, but their customers. So I do believe that we're seeing in general, across the board, the raising of standards and expectations for all of our customers, and is the right thing for them to do. You've got to be diligent. It's quite interesting. As you look at what's happening with cars, cars are becoming more and more technical, so to speak. And you know, I expect to see a server in every car soon. And with that happening, cars can be hacked. So there are companies I've talked to that are really building up cybersecurity for your automobile. Geez, that would not have been thought of 10 years ago, right. So yeah, there's a huge momentum shift and people really appreciating what a secure support Play chain is, what secure development is how you're building in security features and how you guarantee it to their data and their door.

Steve McDowell  14:09  
triggers a couple of questions for me with the top of mind. Question is, you know, this is a challenge that HP is facing, but but also all of your competitors. This is really an industry wide, an industry wide set of issues, right. And as you said, It spans the gamut from authenticity of materials, right? All the way through cyber security concerns, or their industry wide activities, where you're working together with, you know, your common suppliers and maybe your competitors to ensure that we're all approaching this in a holistic way as an industry.

Unknown Speaker  14:46  
You know, wild west out there,

John Grosso  14:47  
we all want to improve equally, and get the same level of output. You know, frankly, the differentiator becomes an execution and what you're doing from a governance model moving forward But it's imperative to have consortia and standardization. That way you're driving common desires that that really benefit

Unknown Speaker  15:13  
all of the communities.

Unknown Speaker  15:16  
So that that's where that's where we're at.

Matt Kimball  15:21  
So, so with that said, right, and I know that you know, we, you talk a lot about kind of how HP, the from end to end, you talk about kind of from inception to end of life of that server. And you've talked about your, the way you audit your suppliers kind of boots on the ground, ensure the authenticity of the components that are going in, you know, as HP manufactures a server many times it doesn't ship directly to a customer, right? It goes to a distributor goes to a reseller, or some var who who maybe has A component to it maybe maybe just sits in the warehouse until you know the inventory moves. Is there a way or can you explain john when when when the customer purchase that server and receives it from either HP or from a reseller racks it, you know how what the process is for assuring that you know that that server has been unaltered, it's authentic and components are, you know, it's a pristine environment essentially, sir.

John Grosso  16:31  
It's what we call an attestation and certification. So when we're building a PCB, a printed circuit board assembly, that's when we take the raw printed wiring board. And then we take the bill of materials and we're putting all of the components onto the board. We have the ability to trace every single component every real to every supplier. We are loading and locking that data. So that we know by serial number by roll number, what component where we follow that through into what we call l 10. l 10 is when we're actually building the server or building a rack, we ensure through our tests and diagnostics procedures, that that same PC ba and all the other components going into that server, that network or that storage device are the same that we put in at L six. And then once we do a final cyber verification at the manufacturing site, when we ship it to our customer, when they turn on, we essentially call home and we validate again, we attest that what we put in is still what they received. And I mean it's just a it's a closed loop system that ensures it continues. use our services division called point next is a major part of our secure supply chain as well. So in services, we're ensuring secure operations, secure data and secure spares. things fail, I mean, you know, nothing is perfect in life, right. So whenever we put a spare into a into a product, we want to ensure that that spare as it goes in is a tested as well. Now there are backgrounds to that that I should briefly touch on. We have very defined partners that we work with through our trade agreements. And we're going to secure suppliers that we validated. And then there's the defense federal acquisitions, requirements as well that we ensure we're adhering to so our secure development at HP uses a very unique attribute which we call the silicon Root of Trust. And in the silicon Root of Trust, from our development standpoint, all the way through an operations to get to the back end, the silicon Root of Trust goes on top of the total element of attestation. And certification. Our own subsystems go in and revalidate. Is this system whole? Is it what we sent? Is it what we expect. And if anything looks, you know, out of place, a system will not connect into the end of the data center. We get immediate our customer gets immediate notification that there's an issue. And boom, we pull it and we go deep dive into failure analysis to figure out what's happening.

Matt Kimball  19:50  
And I like the fact that if I could, one of the things I learned as I was kind of digging deeper into silicon Root of Trust and capabilities, The integration that you have hp has into ILO and, you know, the recovery capabilities that can be, you know, automated essentially, in the event of, you know, that malware being detected or that that fault being detected in the end, that pristine image. Talk about closed loop, it really does tie it all together.

John Grosso  20:24  
And you know, it's it's a great differentiator and you've really got to give kudos to our r&d teams over time as they've invented ideated and brought this to life. It's something that you can really be proud of within our company. And look, let's let's also not not diminish the fact our customers in their software premise. They're also protecting themselves and they run their own oversight through their entire software realms. So on top of what we do, there's another layer of protection because You know, they've got to have firewalls in place, they want to make sure that nothing's coming into their systems as well. So it's a multi layered system.

Matt Kimball  21:09  
Let me ask it, you know, you have this. So you know, I think about a server and a server environment, you have your hardware, you have firmware, you have software, and as the supply chain, the guy, right, that's overall supply chain. You, you know, you you kind of oversee all of this is there, you know, do you find it harder to manage the supply chain from a hardware perspective versus a software perspective? Are they all unique in their own ways? Or what are your thoughts on that?

John Grosso  21:40  
Well, I've been well trained over the years, by by all the software people that I work with, because they tell me that and I know you know, from learning that hardware is nothing more than a vehicle for software to do its job and the hardware part of this is ensuring you know, the things that we've talked about specification does it fit? Are we meeting the speeds and feeds that the software needs to perform? Um, so I, you know, I always kid with my team, I say, look, everything's easy, just some things are easier than others. And when when we're dealing with what we know, in the hardware space, and we're doing our jobs, I find that we can be repetitive. And we can have excellent processing from the hardware perspective. What changes and as you start getting into software, is the execution speeds that they're running at. And the demands coming on the number of cores that are in the system. It's amazing to see compute power change and as compute power changes, it obviously has a back feed into into hardware that could get into IO. It's getting into line in space. It's getting into impedance values which gets in the materials. So there is absolutely no way you can separate or diminish hardware, firmware and software, they have just got to live in an environment. And you've got to understand backwards and forwards. I mean, this is just a complete circle. And you've got to stay on top of what's happening in software to know what to do with your hardware.

Matt Kimball  23:23  
Yeah. Hey, let me ask you another question going kind of off the reservation a little bit, you know, is we listened to the story you tell around kind of how he approaches securing supply chain, you know, if I were listening as an IT guy, one of two things would come to mind either a HP is super vigilant about you know, ensuring you know, every server meets certain quality and security standards. And or be, I need to be worried about you know, those components that are coming in is it You know, we talked about counterfeiting or, you know, governance or you know, in the such is, have you you, in your experience, have you seen, you know, either at HP or just across the industry that, you know, is the instances of, you know, the gray market and, you know, secondary parts going in under the guise of a prior part. Do you find that somewhat prevalent out there or?

Unknown Speaker  24:29  
That's just a general industry question, not an HPE question. Really?

John Grosso  24:34  
Yeah, well look at it, frankly, it's spotty. We've seen people faking ponents in a myriad of places and then finding ways to get them into the system. We do tear downs. We do. You know, obviously, incoming checks. We're looking for watermarks. We're looking for very specific labels. But we've also instituted And are very, very adept at signal injection, looking for certain characteristics in performance, and we X ray quite a bit. You know, you just can't allow yourself to go to sleep and think, Well, we've done enough work here. It's not going to happen. You know, if you just look at the look recently, in public domain, you know, there was a gentleman that was introducing fake transducers and those fake fake transducers coming in, we're so darn close to the real thing that without the diligence that the industry was able to, to accomplish in HP specifically, we would not have uncovered that and who knows without or would have led to? Yeah, so yeah, I mean, you know, all of the companies that I've worked with are very diligent in that space

Unknown Speaker  25:59  
and You just got to keep that up.

Matt Kimball  26:02  
Yeah, it's I you know, it's funny I was in it for a while I know Steve you know Steve is always installing new hardware and messing around with with technology. And I have to tell you I mean I was even in state government I never it's funny I never once really thought about if I you know, if I were putting a bid out whether it was with hp or hp at the time or Dell or whoever the server company may have been, I never once really thought about you know, the integrity or the the genuine or the authenticity of you know, what was sitting inside my server which is either a strong testament about kind of the word HP does or you know, and say it signals a real lack of, you know, lack of, or ignorance if you will, on the part of me as an IT person. Getting the server's gonna, because I don't like to beat myself up. I'm gonna see you done such a great job. Oh, there you go. But you mentioned, you know, you mentioned joining HP in 2018. I know that security has been a an issue for HP for a long time and supply chain as well. So, you know, it sounds like this has been a focus of the company for quite some time, certainly long before COVID. And, you know, all of the spotlight went on the pharmaceutical industry. It sounds like you've you know, at HP, it's been something that's been kind of, you know, part of the culture and organization for for a very long time. Is that a fair statement to make or?

John Grosso  27:37  
Yeah, that that's a very fair statement to make. And, and like I say, I really think that the the lead in, in prevention and oversight was coming out of the r&d teams as they were looking forward and how they would, you know, approach secure development. We, you know, Steve mentioned ILO previously and you just look at the silicon Root of Trust and it's grown Over time as as things have become much more fluid in the ability for people to try to penetrate in the supply chain scenario, we were working on this prior to the Bloomberg article that opened everybody's eyes to, you know, the what if the art of the possible what could happen? And let's face it, you know, there's been a lot of tension within supply chain with some of the countries of origin. Sure. And, you know, as that's happening, and, you know, these these, these spy stories, you know, tend to tend to gravitate into, we know they really could do that. And if they could do that, how do we prevent it? So, when I take a look at, you know, our operations, and we start looking at our supply chain risk mitigation scenarios, our sourcing strategies, our material Handling, how we're doing rogue port inspection. You know, in in some factories in some areas, we've got secure personnel that we do background checks on that are validated. We have secure manufacturing sites. You know how we look and we replace and reflash firmware secure tests going into platform certificates, secure logistics, we want to make sure that once we put something on a truck that we know that it was good secure installation. These are things from the supply chain that have just grown and developed because we're looking at the art of the possible and the what if what if, what if this happened and we want to risk mitigate everything?

Matt Kimball  29:43  
So it sounds like strangely enough, you know, supply chain is a insecurity in supply chain it's a it's a constantly evolving moving target involving practice within within the company as Are you did you look, you know, down the line and say No, this is a state we're evolving to and, you know, kind of what's I guess what's next right in the evolution of security and supply chains? The question?

Unknown Speaker  30:09  
Oh, I mean, I mean, absolutely.

John Grosso  30:12  
We're, we're looking out a minimum of five years always trying to predict, you know, what's going to happen. And there are so many influences. I mean, none of us had ever expected this COVID-19 thing. I mean, I've seen a lot of different things in my life in my career. I the impact here is just unbelievable. The geopolitical situations are something that you work with your your government representatives within HP that sit in Washington DC, trying to understand what's happening geopolitically. We do the same thing in Europe. We do the same thing in Asia. So there are so many moving parts. I was I'm responsible for social and environmental, regulatory oversight. And HP as well. And we are always looking at what are the hot buttons? what's changing in this scenario? How do we react to that? What does it mean to our suppliers? So you're spot on. It's always evolving. You know what it was that thing about being a dinosaur? Yeah, you don't want to be a dinosaur?

Unknown Speaker  31:23  
Sadly, at my age, I think I technically may be a dinosaur.

Matt Kimball  31:28  
You know, I would, I would say, you know, for for the listeners for you know, all you IT folks out there you know, it's it's worthwhile kind of spending a little bit of time Yes, it's funny because security is one of those topics that you know, if you think it's pretty simple, right, initially, it's firewalls and it's it's building moats and building and building big walls, but it goes a lot deeper than that, you know, protection begins. To what you're saying, from a server perspective, security begins, you know, way, way back into sourcing materials through the building through the, you know, deployment, transmit moving and then deployment and then end of life and, you know, it's worthwhile I for it, folks to really kind of take the time and think about kind of the infrastructure that's sitting in their data centers or server rooms and, you know, kind of the, how secure those servers really are and how protected they really are.

Steve McDowell  32:30  
And it goes it goes beyond it goes beyond just security and cyber security those what I'm hearing here, and it's more about a surety right there was some coverage on Hacker News yesterday as we record this about, you know, vendor identification and power supplies so that you know, I'm stopping counterfeit stuffs, getting what I need to get to operate my equipment.

John Grosso  32:52  
No, that's an interesting point, Steve, I remember the world of power supplies when all they did was this thing called power and and now when you look at a power supply, man it's communicating it's doing thermal validation it's right tied into the CPU the power supply today is the desktop and we've got miniature desktops that actually regulate power sitting inside of our devices

Steve McDowell  33:23  
right in the in the last thing you want is a counterfeit power supply telling you it's one thing but delivering substandard services just gonna you know,

Unknown Speaker  33:31  
not be good for my equipment. Let me see Oh,

Unknown Speaker  33:33  
absolutely. Yeah.

Steve McDowell  33:34  
And it's it's not a you know, you read some of these more consumer oriented threads and things and they see this as you know, DRM HP is trying to stop me from you know, buying what I want to buy, but it really goes well beyond that. It's really about the integrity right of my infrastructure. Yeah.

John Grosso  33:50  
I I want to go security as your for just a minute. I'd lead consortia through the IPC many years ago. We were looking at at power and power supply. And what we did is we created a couple of documents in power supplies that put together an industry standard on power supply oversight. We also did one for what we call air moving devices, aka fans, and

Unknown Speaker  34:27  
the power supply standard

John Grosso  34:30  
was well received and put out. And that was IPC 9151. And it got into process capability quality and relative reliability. well attended for many of the primary users of power supplies around the globe, in the air moving devices was 9591. So, you know, across the spectrum of, you know, going back to your initial question, are we sitting in consortia even in the component Level there's an opportunity for people to drive standards that become industry wide that tend to minimize opportunity for there to be system failures.

Matt Kimball  35:14  
Yeah, hey, john, you know, kind of bringing all of this, you know, kind of around to kind of something we talked about a few minutes ago, which is, you know, these constant evolution of supply chain. You know, I suspect Steve suspects and I'm sure you know, that you know, COVID has had an impact on supply chain and in the way companies are looking at it. Obviously, it's been a focus of HP for a long time anyway, we would love to over the next couple months or so or sometime not too distant future kind of check back in with you and see, you know, kind of any updates that he may have or you know, anything interesting that you've you found as well a result of COVID or otherwise, that is going on around securing the supply chain securing infrastructure as a whole. would you would you mind coming back with us, I think would serve our audience quite well.

John Grosso  36:12  
Yeah, no problem whatsoever. And you know, there's a key word that I think we're all we're all taking away from this. And that's resilience. And our business continuity plans, have all have all changed, frankly. When you think of nuclear winter, I think of COVID as being the epitome of nuclear winter. We just never in our lives thought that everything would stop simultaneously. Yeah. And, you know, if you have to sit back and take a breath and try to sit there and go up, you fumble for a while, but we've done a great job of getting ahead of the curve. In reacting to the entire premise of what happened and how do we approach it? We'd love to share that story.

Unknown Speaker  37:09  
That'd be great.

Steve McDowell  37:11  
That's an interesting conversation. It's something that is it people we all need to think about. Yeah, right. So no great conversation. I'm anxious to see what comes up in a few weeks at HP discover, I guess, virtual discover this year.

Unknown Speaker  37:25  
Yeah, we're, we're excited about discover.

John Grosso  37:29  
We've actually got some more interesting things that we're going to be announcing specific to this topic. So I invite everybody you know where it's open. It's, it's something that everybody's going to attend virtually. And so stay tuned, because I think we've got some more interesting news coming up.

Unknown Speaker  37:50  
Excellent. Excellent. Thanks, john, for joining us today, Matt.

Matt Kimball  37:54  
Yeah, thank you, john. I really appreciate it. It's gonna be I will certainly talk to you in a few weeks.

Unknown Speaker  37:58  
My pleasure. Thank you gentlemen have a great day.

Steve McDowell  38:01  
summit. So I gotta tell you supply chain is not something that you know, I think about but it's just it impacts everything that we do and everything that we touch.

Matt Kimball  38:11  
It really is it's funny because there's it's so relevant to what you said it's so relevant to to it. But it folks never think about it. They don't think about what's going inside those servers and, you know, forget about getting hacked, right. I mean, are these things coming in competent coming in the back door front door compromised to start with never think about it, but it's important to important discussion.

Steve McDowell  38:38  
It's important discussion, and maybe it's an IT guy, I don't want to think about that. I want to work with a vendor who takes care of that for me, right? I mean, the analog that comes to my mind is right, it's our, you know, our food supply. I don't think a lot about downstream safety at food. I imagined that by the time I go and buy it from my grocery store, that they've done, the due diligence and I kind of look at You know, it's it's interesting to become aware of this, but I kind of look at HP as a gatekeeper for when I buy HP products. It gives me comfort and I know they've worked. And we talked to Bob Moore a few months ago. And they've worked with some insurance companies and things like that to, you know, provide that extra level of protection because of the work that they're doing. Yeah, and even Intel's jumping in with the secure route of trust and some things like that, that we're starting to see adopted across the industry. But HP is really really kind of taking the driver's seat here

Matt Kimball  39:33  
they are think think about this dude. 4000 components 3500 to 4000 components in a two u server. HP has to track all 4000 components coming from 250 suppliers across their 500 manufacturing sites through the channel to the end user end of life. That's about as close to rocket science as you're gonna get without being rocket

Steve McDowell  39:57  
science. Oh, I know I know and integration Recently these are not dumb parts, right? These are there are so many microcontrollers in a modern server. You know, even even my MacBook has ARM processors to control. You know, I might touch bar and everything else. The power supply is just yeah. So the more intelligence, the more competent we need to be. Anyway, we're great conversation with john. So I don't know what we have next week, but we will be back. We will be back. We're going to talk about I'm sure. Working from the home office. I think next week, we're we're going to do our first ever pop culture podcast.

Matt Kimball  40:36  
Yes. I have so many topics to bring up so I'm ready for them.

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