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Part2: Craig McLuckie, Founder and CEO of Stacklok and inventor of
Kubernetes, discusses his latest venture: Stacklok, an Enterprise MCP
Platform that makes developers and AI agents more productive.

• 00:12 The 2-min Stacklok Pitch
• 01:47 An Enterprise-grade MCP Platform
• 06:28 The Case for Smaller Models
• 07:09 Are Clients Ready?
• 11:36 The Winners and Losers
• 14:20 Stacklok's Major Competitor
• 17:48 Craig's Objectives
• 18:56 Open-source and the Red Hat Machine
• 22:22 The Father of Kubernetes
• 24:22 AI Ethics
• 26:10 For Fun

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmcluckie/
Website: http://stacklok.com

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at almartintalksdata@gmail.com and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

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Craig McLuckie is the Founder and CEO of Stacklok and one of the original inventors of Kubernetes — the open-source container orchestration system that became the backbone of modern cloud infrastructure. After leading Kubernetes into the CNCF and navigating VMware's pivot under Broadcom, Craig made a sharp turn and founded Stacklok: an Enterprise MCP Platform designed to make developers and AI agents dramatically more productive in secure, enterprise environments.

In this episode, Craig and Al Martin explore what it means to build again after building something that changed the industry — and what the next wave of enterprise AI infrastructure actually requires.

In this episode:

• 01:14 Meet Craig McLuckie — background, Kubernetes origins
• 10:08 Tanzu and Broadcom — what that chapter looked like from the inside
• 11:28 Stacklok and the Big Pivot — why MCP, why now
• 19:57 I Don't Know! — a rare founder moment of intellectual honesty
• 21:32 Success is a Poor Teacher — what winning can hide from you
• 23:36 The Future Developer — how AI changes what developers do
• 26:38 Hiring Developers — what Craig looks for now

Connect with Craig: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmcluckie/ Website: http://stacklok.com

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at almartintalksdata@gmail.com and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

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First Aired Apr 23, 2025

If you've been following the AI space lately, this episode hits differently the second time around.

When Al sat down with Ruchir Puri — Chief Scientist of IBM Research, IBM Fellow, and the architect behind Watson and watsonx — the conversation covered ground that's only gotten more relevant since: the death of prompt engineering, the rise of agentic AI, and why 2025 was always going to be the year agents broke through in the enterprise.

Ruchir doesn't deal in hype. He deals in systems — real ones, running at scale, in industries where a hallucinated number has consequences. In this masterclass, he walks through inference scaling, memory in AI systems, and what it actually means to build AI that's useful rather than just impressive.

If you're new to the show, this is the episode to start with. If you've heard it before — trust us, it lands differently now.

Key moments:

• 12:21 — Why prompt engineering is already fading (and what replaces it)
• 13:39 — Inference scaling: the frontier that's not about training anymore
• 16:26 — Why AI systems that "forget" are failing us
• 17:56 — The full agentic loop: Think, Plan, Act, Execute, Observe, Reflect
• 23:45 — Why enterprise AI agents are no longer a future state

Making Data Simple is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM.

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Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at almartintalksdata@gmail.com and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.