LIVING ON THE EDGE:
Transcript
Steve:
Today, I’m joined by Jay Rolls, an IT leader with an impressive track record in the cable industry. He was most recently CTO at Charter Communications, and some of his earlier roles included a 10-year stint at Cox Communications where he was a senior VP of technology. Jay is also a board member of the University of Virginia Engineering Foundation.
Steve:
Thanks for joining me on Living On The Edge.
Jay:
Happy to be here.
Steve:
So let’s kick off with a bit of background. I know you’ve worked for a number of communication companies both here in the US, and I believe you spent some time in Germany as well. So maybe you can talk us through your path from a design engineer through to becoming CTO of one of the world’s largest cable providers.
Jay:
Sure. I’ll try to keep this short, but as you mentioned in the intro, you probably pieced together I went to the University of Virginia, and got my electrical engineering degree there, at the engineering school, and my first job out of college was actually working at the CIA, and, in typical fashion, they contacted me. I did not contact them. And in that job it was interesting, some of the funny things that happen in your career. I was working on cryptography, and I’m going to show my age a little bit here, because that was back in 1983, and I just remember thinking, “Oh my gosh. This is the most archaic thing. This is not going to be my career and be good.”
Flash forward, of course, and cryptography is critically important to the security of so much of our communications these days. So you never know the skillsets that you’re going to come upon in your career, and how they may apply later, and if there’s any theme that I would emphasize to perhaps the younger listeners, and that is you career can take some quite random paths, pretty random, and really, it’s about taking advantage of opportunities when they come along.
I spent my first third of my career in defense and intelligence, and I joined a company, BBN, which I think now has been absorbed as part of Level 3, which is actually now CenturyLink, I guess. And so we, back in the 80s, were doing the defense data network, which was interconnected with ARPANET, and that was the very early days of the internet. And again, randomly, I happened to start working on the internet in 1986.
So that obviously set me up well from a skills standpoint of everything that emerged from an internet perspective, and I worked over in Germany, as you said, for nine years, working mostly on the defense data network, which was an X25 packet switched network, and then I came back in ’95 to the US, and joined Cox, and joined the cable industry, and have spent the last 25 years in a really, really fun career in the cable space, as cable got into broadband, and then eventually found digital video, and everything that cable operators have done as service providers here. So that’s a quick snapshot of my career.
Steve:
I got a little bit of a Forest Gump sense that you are quite modest and saying, well, you just happened to be around the early days of cryptography, and just happened to be working on the internet early days. (laughs) So you’ve obviously been in some interesting situations.
As CTO, I can imagine you don’t get to do too much of the hands-on work, your day to day is managing some large technical teams. So can you talk about some of the challenges you find with managing that large team of technical staff?
Jay:
When you get large teams, you have no choice but to focus more on leadership, focus more on strategy. You’re not doing the engineering anymore, the day to day type of hands-on engineering. It’s about a sense of mission, aligning your staff, figuring out where is this work headed, trying to be as clear as possible about what that looks like, obviously aligning with your overall organization’s path. And then, helping lay down that roadmap of, what do we need to do to get there, and to make sure that we’re being smart about the things that we’re doing today, are accretive and are going to help us on that roadmap of where we’re trying to head.
So a lot of different strategic choices that you make along the way. I would say I’m a very big believer in pushing decision making down, and listening to your staff. I’ve seen some incredible innovation come out of my teams, and was always so proud to help support them, and give them an environment that allowed them to be creative, and come up with their own ideas.
Steve:
That makes sense. You know, people think of artists and graphic designers being creative, but there’s a lot of creativity in the network side of things as well.
I appreciate, as you mentioned, a lot of your work is being at the strategy level, but this is the Living on the Edge podcast, and I think a lot of networking folks have this in common – that they feel like they’re living on the edge, and there’s always something about to happen. Any story you’d like to share, your living on the edge moment?
Jay:
Generally speaking, I was always amazed that we were a large – I worked for large providers, but I always was amazed how often we broke people’s equipment. I like to say getting anything to work on a lab bench, quantity one, a lot of times can be pretty simple. Making it work at scale is a whole different challenge. And so, I was always amazed how often I saw equipment break, and vendors say, “Wow. We’ve never seen that happen before.” I did have one notable – well, I have probably a bunch of stories – but the one memorable one was an issue that happened in one of the cable properties, I’ll leave names unnamed here.
In essence, back in the early days, Toshiba was making cable modems. They don’t do that any longer, and we managed to somehow brick – and I’ll define that term for those that might not know it – brick tens of thousands of Toshiba cable modems. And when I say brick, we managed to send codes in a certain way that disabled those modems, and turned them into something that was no more valuable than a brick, or completely useless.
And there was no way of resuscitating them online. So you can imagine how unhappy our customers – or couple of tens of thousands of customers were – and the magnificent effort that had to then take place to quickly set up a distribution location, so that we could have customers drive by with their modems, and swap them out. Weeks and weeks later, it turned out we figured out there would have been a way possibly that we could have resuscitated all those modems, but of course, by then, it was too late. So, that’s one of those stories that a lot of network engineers will have in one kind of flavor or another, and that’s your worst nightmare, and so, you spend a lot of time trying to make sure you never find yourself in those situations.
Steve:
For sure. That’s some expensive bricks that you were left holding. But it also brings out your point about the creativity of the network teams, right? Because I’m sure, at that point, everybody was huddling and trying to work out what’s the quickest way to get this back up online.
Jay:
Right.
Steve:
So let’s talk about the strategy side of things. You’ve obviously seen a lot of changes, throughout your career. What do you see over the next five years, as being the biggest changes going to impact network engineering?
Jay:
Well, the delivery networks are evolving. They’re evolving very quickly. It’s interesting to follow, and you’re seeing an increased use of fiber, even a cable operator has a lot of fiber in their infrastructure. And so, what I’ve noticed here in the last couple of years is we are seeing – it used to be we would think of it in very simple terms, three sort of boxes. You had the services that often lived in the data center, or in the cloud, you had a network that connected that, and then you had the home connected to that network.
But if I dive into the network piece, that was typically lots of routers and switches, and interconnects, and could be hub and spoke, it could be ring architectures, but what I’m noticing is we’re with more and more fiber, and how fiber is being used in the, not the last mile, necessarily, but in the general metro access network. I’m noticing that we’re… I think we’re going to see more passive use of fiber. We’re going to see more point to multipoint use of fiber, where you don’t have as much intermediary equipment in the path, and that hopefully will simplify things.
The flip side of that, though, is I’m seeing more and more drive towards intelligence at the edge, smart edge equipment, even maybe services served at the edge of the network, and it’s proliferating in much larger numbers, and so managing that’s a more complex topology, and managing that is going to be a challenge.
Even on the cloud side of things, where you may have had a server in the past that you had to worry about, as you know, those services are morphing into micro-services that may be running in VM, in containers, and while those micro-services are made to be resilient, and to be able to spin up and spin down very easily, that nonetheless can complicate your service delivery, and you’re going to have to think really carefully about how you manage the health of that ecosystem.
Steve:
That’s interesting. So the first part of your answer was about simplifying things, right? Pushing more through fiber, and then it switches immediately to the complexity of the cloud, and micro-services, and all of that good stuff. One thing you mentioned there, you used the word resilient. Network resilience is a topic that I hear a lot of people talking about right now. So how would you define that idea of network resilience?
Jay:
For any service provider, network provider, resilience is obviously very important. You need to be reliable, and have really incredible uptime and service availability that’s always there. And so, it’s sort of the generic definition of what you’d expect for resilience, but what I’d say I’m seeing beyond that is, with this proliferation of services in smaller chunks, whether it’d be a micro-service and a data center, or an intelligent piece of edge equipment, providing some kind of termination or services out at the edge, that’s resulting in an exponential proliferation of the number of endpoints that you have to worry about for service delivery.
And so, in the future, things like autonomy and self-healing are really going to be more critical, when it comes to looking at an overall network resilience picture, and I see the industry starting to focus on that. But I still think there’s a maturing process that we’re going to need to go through there, to get to a sort of robust level.
Steve:
Yes. That makes sense, and certainly, as the complexity increases, the resilience just continues to expand, and become a bigger issue. So another big change, we’ve talked a lot about 5G in the past, but I’m curious how you think that’s going to impact the cable industry specifically.
Jay:
It’s one of those friend or foe type questions. I think it’s a little of both. It’s an opportunity, but it also could be a threat, from a cable provider perspective. First of all, as you’ve seen in North America, the cable operators are getting into the mobile service. So 5G is a tool in the tool belt for mobility and mobile services, just like any other mobile operator. So you’ll see them using that in the same way. And then, secondly there’s a pretty healthy cell backhaul business that the MSOs, the cable operators, take advantage of, and so, 5G, as you can imagine, is just going to be really driving incredible demand for backhaul services. So that’s an opportunity.
And then the question is how much of a fixed wireless type threat does 5G pose to the cable operators. We could do a whole one-hour podcast just on that topic. So I don’t really want to dive on all the bullet points on that, but that’s being looked at pretty hard. There’s a lot of thought going into what could that look like, how much of a threat is it. I think there are certain scenarios where it could be a threat. I don’t yet see it as a broad threat, but I think it’s something to keep a close eye on for sure.
Steve:
Yes, I think it’s going to be an interesting one. I know a couple of years ago, when 5G first came out, and everyone was just focused on “what you could do with your cellphone.” But obviously, 5G is going to really change the landscape, I think, in a lot of ways, beyond being able to watch a video on your iPhone. So we’ll keep an eye out. See what happens.
Changing tack a little bit – over the years, I’m sure you’ve worked with a lot of people, and learned from a lot of people. Just curious, anyone – a mentor or an influencer that you’d like to give a hat tip to, and maybe share some of their advice?
Jay:
When I was younger, and living in Germany, I had a boss who was in the US, Bob Bartlett, when I was at BBN, and he was probably the best boss I ever had. He was phenomenal. He pushed me really hard, but in a very fair way. And so, some of us are lucky enough to have had bosses like that along the way, and unfortunately, Bob’s no longer with us, but I just have such positive memories, and he was an early influence.
Within the cable industry, I’ve had some great bosses. Alex Best and Chris Bowick, both over at Cox. Adam Grosser, when I was at the startup @Home, during the dotcom boom, in the 2000-2001 timeframe, when I was out in Silicon Valley. It’s one of the things you treasure about a career is these just incredibly inspiring people that you can come across. Those are memories I definitely cherish.
Steve:
Absolutely. It’s nice to hear. So for folks that are maybe still working their way through, and looking to find out more about networking trends, or keeping up with things, where do you go to keep up with trends, whether it’s websites, podcasts, whatever it may be?
Jay:
I’ll look at websites like Light Reading, I get the daily digest from them, other kind of publications, obviously standard groups like SCTE, we have SCTE expo coming up here soon, and there are a ton of papers, like 100 papers, I think, that will get published as part of that process. Occasionally, IEEE… Spectrum Magazine, the IEEE Spectrum Magazine is amazing. That’s more general reading that’s sort of wider, and higher level, but always inspiring. Those are a some of my go-to’s for finding information, and staying on top of things.
Steve:
All right. Thanks for sharing those. The Spectrum Magazine for IEEE, it would just amaze me that it would appear in the lounges, at the United lounges at airports, and I could never understand why they would think that was a good place to have it, but anyway. I agree, it’s an interesting magazine.
So just wrapping up here, you mentioned you’re advising some tech companies. I know you’re on a couple of boards, for some volunteer organizations. If people do want to get in touch with you or find out more, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?
Jay:
Well, the reality is probably LinkedIn is the best way, but there’s a funny story there though. I never had a LinkedIn account until this year. (laughing) And there’s a reason for that. I always thought, when I was working as an operator for this past 20+ years, I always was afraid that if I have a LinkedIn account, it would be just a huge honeypot for the vendors to bombard me with information, not really recognizing that there’s some pretty good tools on LinkedIn for filtering out some of that. So I never was on LinkedIn until the pandemic hit, and I created a LinkedIn account. And so, now I’m a convert. It’s like, “Wow. This is a pretty good tool.” And I do like it. And have connected with a lot of people.” So LinkedIn is probably the best way to get in touch with me.
Steve:
It’s funny how it’s evolved. I remember the early days, people were suspicious if you were on LinkedIn, because they thought you must be looking for a job, right? It was really just an online resume service, and I think for a lot of people, that’s the way you get a lot of your industry information, and actually just keep in touch with people.
Jay:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Steve:
Thank you, Jay. And thanks for sharing your thoughts with us on the Living on the Edge podcast.
Jay:
Great. Well, thanks so much for having me, and I look forward to listening to your future episodes talking to other people.