Hello, and welcome to this episode of For the Journey. This is IP Fabric's podcast where we're hearing from practitioners and experts who are tackling our next generation network operations issues head on, really learning from their experiences. Now, today we're joined by a very special guest. He's actually an IP Fabric customer with a really great story to tell. Guru, how about you introduce yourself to start us off?

Oh, Dan, thank you so much for bringing me to your podcast here as it's exciting to be here today. I've been a great follower of your podcast and the community fabric, and, you have been, bringing the best of the best, from the industry and, helping the community and the, the community fabric, grow in, in bringing that intelligence together, and, it takes, village to do that and, kudos to you for doing that, consistently. With that, I'm Guru Prasad Ramurthy, go by Guru, in short. I lead the, global network for S&P Global, a combination of architecture, engineering, and operations function. And, I've been in the industry for over, 18 years now and have led all these functions.

And today at S&P Global, I I I lead this global team of over 100 people, building, managing, maintaining the the world class, network infrastructure for a for a leading company. Awesome. In fact, thank you for introducing, and thank you for those very kind words as well. We I think it's an important thing to to say before we we start really. It's it's part of the way that that the IP Fabric approaches the community generally is that it's all about us working together, to to build build better network operations.

And so we're really super pleased to have you with us. Thank you for joining us. Now when I was preparing for this, I was obviously reading your CV and it struck me You've got a very rich networking background. You, you know, first hand all the problems with with network operations, with engineering, and and we'll have a really good handle as as most people do in your position, as to what makes a successful network operations organization. And I guess the first step for that is defining strategy.

Is that fair? Oh, yes. Absolutely. The the the strategy plays a key role. Before I I talk about the strategy, let me let me introduce S&P Global a little bit.

Oh, please. Who we are, what we do. Right? S&P Global is a leading provider of, independent ratings, benchmark, analytics, and data to capital and commodity markets, worldwide and to many businesses. What we do at S&P Global is continuing to powering the markets of the future.

Many world leading organization, governments, and the businesses, they rely on our essential intelligence to make the decision with the conviction. To do this, we are a company of about 35,000 strong people operating in about, 48 countries. And, if you simply convert that into a engine room of S&P Global, that consists of an infrastructure that runs in 4 cloud providers, 20 data centers, over 100 offices, which runs over a world class, product. And if you further translate the infrastructure of this scale into a simple networking statement, we are again talking about, multi cloud hybrid cloud network across the cloud providers, across the data centers, across the office WAN backbone, and all of this have to be built, maintained, and delivered, with greater availability, greater security, and, greater user experience. It comes with a greater responsibility of doing all of this, and, the the network team does this, with time and again, at S&P Global.

To do all of this, you you need a stronger strategy of where we are going. I mean, historically, all of us have done this architecture engineering and operations. And, when I when I when I first came in, it is important to understand the mission statement of how do we connect ourselves to the company's, the the statement of powering the markets of the future. And, to power the markets of the future and to provide that intelligence, the essential intelligence, to thousands of our customers worldwide because the opportunity is moving in nanosecond speed. The world is moving in nanosecond speed.

And post COVID, all of us are dealing with that speed and agility and whatnot. Enterprises of today are no more that enterprise network. Right? It's it's no more that one single MPLS network. You no more have that Internet as a network.

Your boundary has grown. If you are an enterprise who are already connected with AWS and Azure and Oracles and Googles, you're already a network of a network. Yeah. And there goes the mission statement of, my strategy. You know, we are a network of a network, but with an with a with a goal to enable a secure and seamless connectivity and experience in order for our business to deliver the essential intelligence anytime, anywhere.

Right? And with that comes with that, undertaking of leading a 6 pillars of our bigger transformation strategy, which means in order for us to deliver the data, in order for us to deploy the application anytime and anywhere, the network needs to be flexible on demand and globally interconnected. Like I said, enterprises of the past used to be that private MPLS and, few Internet breakouts and whatnot. And to meet the new demand globally and to meet the expectations of the business to deliver the data globally for a company like S&P Global, we are we are built that flexible on demand global network, which means ability to build infrastructure quickly, ability to build a new site quickly, ability to deliver a new, cloud region quickly. True.

But to do all of that, the second biggest pillar is, can we do all of this manually? Can we put hands on keyboard with thousands of engineers and all of it? You need to have that programmable mindset of, taking that, the historical mindset of software as a code and, infrastructure as a code and looking into network as a code and how you can make things as a more consumable way, self-service way. And, industry has evolved over the last 2 to 3 years with quite a lot of tools ecosystem, which we will talk about it in the later part of the session, and, bringing that capability and joining them. And what hap isn't and when you when you when you do all of this, you build a global interconnection.

Great. And then you tell your services in a programmable way. Great. Then where are your users? Right?

Things changed in the last 2 years significantly where the users are no more in the hundred offices. The users are probably everywhere. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Which is why that that focus on edge is extremely important post COVID. You're dealing with users, sitting in tier 2 cities, tier 3 cities, small towns and everywhere. And, the understanding of the edge and and, delivering that user experience at the edge is the key. And when you kind of again, going back to building that global network, made it programmable, and then, okay, you focused on your user edge. Yeah.

Now you're basically expanding your security exposure a lot. Right? And we took that shift left approach in building that security of of building that security at the edge and focusing on the edge security where things like 0 trust 0 trust models are evolving, as we are all hearing. How do we make sure we adopt those principles and apply, in our infrastructure? And we took that approach.

And we constantly looked at how do we strengthen our core. Right? Where does our core critical services live in? Where does our crown jewel business live in? Where does our services are living in?

We constantly looked at improving the availability of our core services. But for a for a operations team, they need a world view. Right? They are no more in the NOC. They are no more in a, in a big world class network operation center looking at, like, a a 100 different panels, and they can quickly swift through what's happening.

They have all gone back to their, working from home, hybrid work from home model. And, we have to give them that ability to have that world view within that 17 inch monitor in simple words. Right? How do you do that? Right?

You can have Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Send them, like, a 65 inch panels to their home and, build their NOC in their home. We have to figure out the what's going to be the NOC of the future Yeah.

And create that worldview operations. One of the 6 pillars of that is the is the worldview and operations. Sure. Sure. And and, I mean, there's an interesting point there, isn't there?

Because you've already mentioned the fact that you're talking about multiple different networks basically and and different vendor environments, different domains of of responsibility, I suppose, to to, at the engineering level. But you need to have a view of all of those and how they're interconnected, how they work together, to to get that observability. So a single vendor approach or a single tool isn't going to be enough, I suppose. So so you've tackled that in a very specific way with your observability platform. Right?

Absolutely. Like I said, I'll I'll talk about, the operation side a little bit about the world view in operations and why it is important. In order for us to build that visualization capability, and, create that intent behind that capability because you cannot kind of log in to 4 different panels. Yeah. One is your constant service now dealing with tickets, and then you're logging into the SSH doing a routing, switching, and firewalling, and then you're dealing with SaaS tools, that are SaaS based network tools to do that.

But how do you kind of predict what's happening in the network almost in real time? Right? What what gave us is the the software development industry, over time, have laid the greater foundation to what is happening in the network world today. They did c I they did they brought agile. They brought CICD.

They brought DevOps. They brought SRE. And, it's a great learning that we should just piggyback on and figure out how to apply these principles in a networking world. Right? If if you essentially look at the networking business, it's always been that the black box monolithic teams.

And, the future is going to be the continuous everything practice. Sure. Which means you wanted that continuity in everything that you do. You build something, you need the continuity. You maintain something, you need the continuity.

Right? It's a it's a simple user experience of, how how every business, operates. So what we did is we took that continuity everything in approach as a best practice, and we took the best practices from the agile world, CACD world, DevOps world, and SRE world, and combine them as a continuity of everything and, started doing our operations. And, in in and if I further simplify that, we are no more in that world of one can build the house and somebody else will leave the house. Sure.

At Essent Global within the network team, that's something we made it very clear. That is not somebody who is building the house. That is not somebody who is living in the house. Sure. If you are building the house, build it for yourself and if and figure out how to live in that house so that you experience your house.

Right? Historically, when there used to be this gray walls between this, architecture engineering and operations team. Yeah. I build the house and then somebody else is maintaining it. There comes that, the the the difference in understanding of how do you build the house, you did not build it right, and I'm maintaining it because of what you built.

We are we are that brings a unified team of one who builds it is who is living it is the one who is maintaining it. That brings it a cozy force of how we achieve things in our strategy. Which which yeah. I'm thinking back to my time, as a as a network engineer and the idea of having to go in, do complete a project to build some network and then create all the documentation and the handover process and all the rest of it to then give it to someone else to then maintain. And there was always confusion and and and difficulty in that flow.

And and what you're describing there is is removing that basically, isn't it? Because you're creating this continuity, right the way through. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Exactly.

And we can I'll also answer your point about, the multi vendor approach Sure. Sure. Continuity approach. Right? If you if you look at the larger network ecosystem, it has evolved over the 3 years, in the last 3 years, essentially.

Yeah. If and any network world, we are dealing with over 30 to 40 products doing different things in the network. You have a router to do routing, switch core switches, the riverbeds, accelerators, load balances. You can just keep counting on if one has to pull their inventory in your CMDB, I can guarantee that you would find at least 20 different products. And, and if you simply look at, the top players in the market, we are talking about 30 to 40 key products.

Right? And if you if you look at is there a one vendor who can come and stitch this ecosystem together to deliver that observability? Is there a one vendor who can basically stitch that APIs together to create that network automation? And, of course, one can decide to do native Ansible, native Terraform, and native development. But there comes a challenge of how do you scale, how do you maintain, and how do you evolve.

Right? You don't when enterprises are not in the businesses of creating network products. Those are the those are the responsibilities of the networking companies to do that. But enterprises are on the consumer side of consuming the best of the breed, and, and doing all of that. And what we did is we decided let's take the best of the breed.

And, and if you essentially see over the last 2 years, those network tools that are evolving, which is fairly low code tools, which is which is very I'm very happy to see that because we don't want to hire we don't want to have, like, a 20 Java developers and c double c sharp developers sitting in programming. Rather, these are low code tools which nicely fits that knowledge gap between a network engineer and a software engineer. Yeah. I don't need to write code and do a QA testing and all of it. I'm building workflows.

Workflows are being converted into the core. And each of these vendors are specializing in those areas. You can find a vendor who is very specialized in load balancer. Maybe they're picking up on, IPAM. There's another vendor who is very specialized on, firewalls.

Yeah. I'm picking up on load balancer now. But there there's there's 2 roads to go. 1, you can wait for 1 vendor to kind of take that the leader board. We don't know how many years it's gonna take.

Yeah. Or you make a decision to pick the best of this breed and create an ecosystem to connect all of them. Yeah. Right? That way, we reduce the time and effort to build everything by ourselves rather by the right tools, and then figure out a way how to connect them together.

And, that created the greater observability of bringing the data together, bringing the platform together. And, IP Fabric played a critical role in the overall process of connecting the data, connecting the data points, and and and whatnot. And that is where this is taking us as an S&P Global, as a company, and that our network strategy to the next level. Yeah. Which which is, as you say, that that ecosystem approach is something we're seeing more and more.

And and you've you've rightly pointed out that the IP fabric is a part of that approach, but but it's not the only element by any stretch. Right? We we see it all the time with our customers, with our partners, where we're talking with them about exactly this, about sharing the data, not just not just between tools but between teams and between making, you know, making sure that data is always available, that it's deep, it's rich, but it's but it's there and and available to whoever needs it. But but you mentioned that IP fabric plays a sort of key part in the observability piece for you. I I tell me a bit more about that if you can.

I don't know if Sure. Let's talk about how did we how did we accomplish that data sharing within that ecosystem. Right? We have a tool here doing load balance or automation. We have another tool doing firewall automation.

We have another tool doing maybe routing and switching automation. That's fine. Every vendor has has their own strategy. Some vendor wanted to have a repo of a data, and some vendor don't want to have a repo of a data. I just wanted to have give you the canvas and the platform and the adapters to code, but you figure out where to bring the data.

Sure. Right? And, when we when we when we created this ecosystem of network tools, we have to figure out who has this best of the best data. And if you simply take a running configuration of a router, we are probably talking about over a 1,000 lines. Yeah.

Right? And then when we deal with this data, who has the ability to deal with this 1,000 lines of configuration, quickly passing the configuration and breaking them into smaller pieces of the configuration. And then we can consume that in runtime. And when we've kind of evaluated the process, IT fabric came, handy that time, who has the ability to kind of take a snapshot of all this data very accurately, almost in real time because of your snapshot feature. Right?

That minimizes the effort that I need to parse and read all this configuration and say, hey, listen. I'm only modifying, interface in the router. Why do I need to read 1,000 lines? In the in the in the process of automation from IP fabric, I'm able to fetch that interface level configuration Sure. Very accurately and just deal with the change rather than the change has to deal with a 1,000 lines of configuration.

Yeah. Yeah. Do the right thing. That's where that, that ecosystem and the integration and the data sharing really, really helps. I'll also talk about another great example of, a a VIP change in a load balancer, which is a common change, that we have to do is because if you look at our developers, our developer runs applications.

And as you can assume, any classic application consumes a load balancer. Of course. Right? And the load balancer requires constant, caring and feeding of, maintaining that with configurations. Yeah.

Right? In the past, it used to be a network engineer's job of maintaining the web, maintaining the members, maintaining the configuration, maintaining the methods and the SSLs and whatnot. And what we have done within SMP Global is we have made that entire process as a self-service okay. With the with the objective to make developer productive with an with a mission to empower the developer with the data that they need. Today, our developers have the ability to maintain and manage their VPs and make decision on what changes that they would like to induce at their VIP level.

And those automation runs with the support of a data that's coming from IP fabric. If they decide to change a VIP configuration, the the the automation tool needs to know where to pull the configuration from Yeah. Yeah. That is coming from the IP fabric. And the tool handles the data in a run time.

And, the developer can make the decision in the run time of, his CICD changes. And say, I have 5 members in my web, and I would like to remove one of them Yeah. Because it's a bad server. Right? And then they can look at the data and run time, execute it.

And then at the end of the change, they can still go back and fetch if my change went in successfully or not. Sure. Sure. Again, in the same process, the automation is calling IP fabric and saying, can you go back and check if my configuration is good? So the the the source of truth and the accuracy of data through the snapshot that's coming from IP fabric is keeping the consistency and accuracy in our data.

Yeah. That's making our self-service network automation of enabling our, users, empowering our developers to, deliver services at most at a at a very good user experience. It's it's really interesting you you brought that particular example up because that was I I remember I won't say how long ago, but, I I spent a long time working for a big bank in the UK, looking after f 5 load balancers and and is a really interesting point that you make because if a network engineer is responsible for that, they have to know a lot more about the applications and everything that are running. There's a real issue with the, whose responsibility it is to maintain the validity of those of those that load balancing configuration because is it the application? Is it the network?

That's always a problem. And and our traditional siloed approach does not help help situation there at all, does it? So you by creating this automated approach whereby I suppose you I guess you have templates for those those VIPs. You have default configurations for the the load balancing algorithms and all those sorts of good things that you can then put behind that self-service portal, but then use the real data from the network to validate that that that configuration is as you expect it to be and then to validate that it is going to work the way you expect it to, brings all that together. Right?

Absolutely. Right? I think, if if if you recall, the continuous everything approach, with a with a with a mindset where we wanted to enable our developers to deploy code almost same day. Yeah. Which means, if a salesperson meets a customer in the morning, finishes his meeting, comes back to the technology team and say, hey.

Listen. I met with a customer. He would like to see this button from a blue to a red. How long does it take to make a change? Can we deliver this change, same day, by end of day so that the salesperson can walk in to the customer and say, your change is ready to go.

Right? And that's CICD in simple terms. And, now it's about how fast you are able to do that CICD process. But those changes also comes with, with the infrastructure changes that needs to happen. Of course.

Right? Not I I gave you an example of a button, but now if you kind of multiply that at at a scale of a bigger, use case, then that comes with the cost of a network change. Yeah. But if we, as a network team, if you continue to say, oh, it's a traditional ITSM process, you put in a ticket, I'll take 3 days to do this. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Because then the customer is not not gonna have them. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. It's it's So that is why we wanted to empower our developers. Yeah. By giving them that ecosystem where they can manage their changes through self-service model. Yeah.

And this this this integrated ecosystem of network tools, with the with powered by the data, is enabling the developers to do the work with utmost confidence because they also need to have the confidence in the process and the trust in the process. Fine. I'm calling out for a whip change, but what if if I break things? What if I break my product? Right?

That worry is always there. We also kind of build the confidence and the trust in the process by showing them, in a single pane of glass, saying, hey. Here is a whip change you're making. The pre change, the post change. And the developer has the trust and the confidence saying, hey.

Yes. I'm inducing the change in the right place, right direction. It is not going to break my product. My product is going to be available 100%, and I can still make my change successfully. I think it's very important to emphasize the trust and the confidence Yeah.

When you do the self-service model because you are basically passing the key to a developer who would like to do this change. Yeah. And and that, again, if you've got the appropriate, the appropriate mechanisms in place to validate that those are exactly as they should be once they've been executed, you're just cementing that that trust and that confidence, aren't you? It's it's really interesting. You'll notice I'm taking notes as we go here and I've written very large trust and confidence as the as the points of the query because that's exactly what it's about.

Quite right. Now, I know Guru that you guys are super busy with loads of projects on the go at the moment and of course you've had, some merger activity recently as well which I'm sure proved pretty challenging. I believe you've got a bit of a use case around how having all of this this available to you and the observability platform that you put in place has helped you with that merger activity. Yeah. Well, I'll start with a little bit of how, it initially helped S&P Global, when we when we first brought that, brought the IP fabric.

And one of the key feature that our folks were enjoying, and this is as recent as the last night conversation I had with one of my lead engineer about, the feature that came out as a part of your 4 dot 3 release. Okay. You were able to discover, partitions at a f five level and produce that information very quickly. And, I asked them, why are you so excited about it? Is it like, if I were asked this information prior IP fabric, I would probably ask for a week to produce the data.

That's right. And, he was able to produce the data in in about 10 minutes, which is exciting to hear, how the tool is not just empowering the developers in the automation process. It is also saving a lot of time with the network engineers. Not have to deal with the data in a in a CLI mode. They can just go and take the templates of configuration that IP fabric's already slating it in the right direction.

Anytime when you kind of deal with a large network, of an enterprise such as SMP Global, You're always dealing with this big flat with your diagrams, with hundreds of devices and blue lines, red lines, green lines. And, and then you had to put your lens to the details and understand. And, at many times, the devil in the details is probably the engineer who knows what he is doing with. And then 24 hours later, if you look at the same diagram, there's a high possibility that the diagram is obsolete. Then what changed?

Oh, somebody else changed something. Then why is the diagram not up to date? If you from I'm sure from your experience, you'll figure out, every time why is a diagram not up to date. No. They're not up to date.

Do that? Never. Right? I think I think the biggest benefit IP Fabric brought to us is that modeling capability. Sure.

Right? And, taking our data, converting our snapshots, and the ability to model the the infrastructure either by an office or a data center or a cloud or or probably a host to a host. Right? That kind of gave us that real time data. Somebody induced a change last night, and, it changed the behavior of, how the network works And how was the network routing last night and how is it routing today is the biggest feature.

I think over the last 6 months or so, I have never seen my team coming with coming to me with the Visio diagram. They always came to me with an IP fabric model, the diagram, and say, every time I used to ask them because it's important for me in my role that I understand, am I enabling my team? Am I giving the team the tools and the technologies and the capabilities that they need to do their job better? Are and that's the key aspect of my role in enabling and empowering them. In that entire process, it was it was it was extremely happy I was extremely happy to hear that they never have to go and produce this diagram manually.

They went to IP Fabric, clicked on a site, somewhere, in the continent and, said produce the diagram. And then they produce the diagram, and they have a trust and the confidence that diagram is accurate and, which is where this underlying trust comes in. Yeah. I was gonna say I can't afford trust. That that that gray area of, what have I missed in this diagram that I don't know is completely eliminated because the tool is taking a snapshot.

It is producing layer 3, layer 2, layer 1 information, and the team can make an a decision with a very good conviction and say, this is accurate diagram that I'm dealing with. Yeah. That's the biggest, benefit that S&P Global adopted. And then as you can see, a merger of this scale and this big can always get complex. And, typically, any merger, network guys first in the line.

Right? We are the 1st in the line to get stuff done. Right? It's always in with any merger. And, what it enabled us is it is you we we are dealing with the network team of the SPGI and IHS colleagues and, sitting, visualizing the diagrams in the Visio.

And it is very hard to understand. And it is extremely important when we use this IP fabric tool, we were able to quickly model the the behavior that we needed to build a day one experience for our employees. Yeah. Right? Without that, you are dealing with a bigger WAN architecture of independent companies and, with a limited understanding of the risk and the security and the posture challenges.

But IP fabric enabled us to understand what is a model that we would like to see and, converting that modeling capability into a real outcome. And then when you convert it, then you again have IP fabric discover the model, finished outcome to confirm, did your model behavior worked very well or not? Yeah. And then what changes that you need to make in the due course. It has it has it has been a perfect window that we brought IP Fabric to enable S&P Global.

It also came handy at the right time to help us, in a critical time of our merger to achieve the day one experience for our combined company. And now we are all, chartered, putting together the day 2 and, and the future experience of a combined company and, with the with the largest charter of, having S&P Global continue to deliver, bigger datasets and bigger outcomes and bigger results, in the coming years. And and being able to bring that that self-service and and automated experience to to all of your, your employees, I guess, rather than just just the, you know, particular group. So Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

That's a that's a that's a great way to say that. We are today a, globally strong 35,000 employees company post merger, And, taking that, tools ecosystem and the technology ecosystem and the automated ecosystem, and understanding the strengths of the both the companies, what we have done independently in the past, and, appreciating and combining those, technologies ecosystem, is going to be the the the success for us. And, and the the work that has been done historically in both sides of the companies and bringing their capabilities together is going to take us to the the next level. Yeah. So I mean, it's it's a great great to hear how you've been able to increase that agility in the network to really support.

And and I guess it goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation to to support the business requirement. Ultimately, it's it's it's modeled model the business requirement, understand what needs to be done to achieve that, and then to bring the agility into the network infrastructure to match what folks are already doing, I suppose, with with cloud and and all those other good things in the infrastructure space, to be able to match that and to be able to work that into those big picture workflows, I think it's absolutely fascinating story. Gaurav, I'm conscious I don't want to take too much of your time today and you've already given very generously, but are there any and I realize I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here. Are there any any particular takeaways that you would like people who are listening to to understand from from the conversation we're having today? I think, couple of things.

The the the network of the future is going to be the network of the networks. Enterprises are, enter the the perimeter of the enterprises is exponentially growing, and, it is important to keep a eye on that, the exponential growth and exponential exposure that brings, the complexity, that brings the security challenges, and that also brings the speed and agility challenges. Yeah. So the one has to continue to understand what the what the future of an enterprise and what the future of networking looks like and how to deal with this multi cloud ecosystem and, how to deliver the same consistent experience no matter what, where the user is and where they are on the planet. And, enabling and empowering the developers and giving them the right datasets to deal with and building that ecosystem, of tools and technologies.

Because if the evolution of the entire networking space is happening at a rapid speed Yeah. Which I have not seen in the 5 years before. Yeah. If you if you look out look at our network there and, any any network 5 years before, the way it used to be is not the way the networks are today. That's very true.

That's very true. So so to deal with that, change that's happening in the industry, the network teams, the network leaders, have to make a decision to deal with the change. And, one cannot build it all, one cannot buy it all, but it's a it's a perfect blend between the build versus the buy approach. Yeah. And find the right players and the right tool sets.

You build what you need to build, buy what you need to buy, but find the right balance to kind of, connect yourself and connect your teams to the larger organization strategy and the mission, and align your strategy and mission to the larger organization strategy. Yep. And, at S&P Global, when we built our mission statement for network team, we were very focused on how do we connect ourselves and continue to keep ourselves connected to the powering the markets of the future strategy, and which is why, we are connected to our strategy and the company's strategy enabling us to deliver faster. But yeah. I mean, that's that's the, the ultimate goal, I suppose, in in what you would hope that all engineering and and network engineering teams would be able to achieve.

But, I guess what you've shown us here is that by having that focus on the on the ultimate business goal allows you to to understand exactly what is required of the network and and as you say the network of networks in order to deliver that which is often overlooked I think because of often because of the structure I guess of of organizations and the way they work. But what you've described in terms of those having those flows which flow between teams and and and really where you've got gaps potentially in knowledge and skills. What you're doing is you're filling those gaps, aren't you, with data, and and and allowing that data to flow between, between the tools, between the teams in order to to to provide that agility. Absolutely right. I mean, one of the one of the important learning, having working in S&P Global, we are we are a data company.

Yes. Of course. In my role, at S&P Global, when I sit with the business team and the technology team, for us, it is we get we get an opportunity to understand the importance of the data. Yes. Because that's what our business is dealing with.

It's a it's a great experience how our business are dealing with the data and how they are delivering their intelligence. We took that fundamental principle and said, as a company, we are we are dealing with a large data set. And as a network team, we are sitting on that gold mine of data. Absolutely. And how can we just take that fundamental principles of converting the data into intelligent that S&P Global is doing and take the same network data and convert that into a intelligent data that one network team can use it for our own changes.

2nd, empower the developers to do their changes and enable the application operations team to manage their infrastructure and application challenges. It creates a perfect blend, and, S&B Global is is kind of helping laying the foundation of of of how to kind of deal with the data, and I'm pleased to be, part of that, part of that journey. Yeah. It sounds sounds exciting times there. So, and you know, obviously we're lucky to be involved as well.

So we'll, we're looking forward to staying engaged and talking more with you about that as we go. I appreciate your time today. I realize we've run over a little bit but I hope this doesn't cause any problems to your schedule. But it's really, really good to talk to you Guru. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your insight. If people would like to contact you further, are they okay perhaps perhaps connecting with you on LinkedIn or do you do you have a preference for? For I'm very much available on LinkedIn. I'm very responsive. My LinkedIn profile is up to date, and my contact is up to date.

So, please do reach out if you have any questions and answers. And, Darren, thank you so much for hosting. And, it's a great conversation. I enjoyed talking and great questions and, look forward, continuing working together and, and, taking the network transformation to the next level. Yeah.

Awesome. We'll no doubt speak soon. Thank you for your time, Gary. Thank you so much.