Podcasts about Flexera

Rational thinking might drive economics, but emotional behavior drives decisions. And no one understands that better than Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, a book that's reshaped our assumptions about how people make decisions.In this episode, we're unpacking key lessons from Dan Ariely's work with the help of our special guest, Leslie Alore, SVP of Marketing at Flexera.Together, we explore what B2B marketers can learn from setting the right expectations, why fewer choices close more deals, and how the power of “free” and fear of loss can drive serious retention.About our guest, Leslie AloreAs the SVP of Marketing, Leslie Alore leads Flexera's marketing strategy with an aim to create great experiences and outcomes for our customers.Her passion for people and technology—combined with more than 15 years of marketing leadership in the tech space—has established her as a successful, results-driven executive who enables teams to do their best work.Prior to joining Flexera, Leslie served as the Global SVP of Lifecycle Marketing at Ivanti. Before that, she held various marketing, operations and GTM strategy roles at Iron Mountain. Leslie is an active speaker and mentor in the GTM community, and has been recognized among “Top Women in Marketing” by Ragan Communications and “Women of the Channel” by CRN.Leslie holds a BBA in Management, and an MBA with a concentration in Strategic Leadership from Walsh College of Accountancy and Business Administration.What B2B Companies Can Learn From Predictably Irrational:Set expectations to shape reality. Great marketing doesn't just reflect value, it creates the conditions for it. Leslie highlights how expectations shape reality. When buyers believe something is good, they interpret every detail through that lens. This isn't about manipulation, it's about clarity and consistency. Leslie says, “The effect of expectations… believing beforehand something is good, therefore it will be or the reverse.” So stop hoping your audience connects the dots. Tell them what to expect, then deliver on it. Perception isn't a bonus, it's the foundation.Shrink your options to speed the decision. Too many options stall progress. The paradox of choice tells us more isn't better, it's paralyzing. Leslie urges marketers to curate the path forward: “You actually want to give people fewer options and take control of the options that they see.” Don't just join the shortlist, define it. When you narrow the frame, you speed up the decision for your customers. Turn “free” into staying power with loss aversion. There's magic in “free,” but the real power lies in what people fear losing. Once someone uses your product, whether it's a freemium tool or an ungated resource, they've invested. Now there's skin in the game. Leslie puts it simply, “People will overvalue something that's free and ignore kind of the trade-off costs associated. And loss is psychologically painful. We don't want to lose that, which we already have.” Whether you offer software, content, or services, create early wins. Then make the cost of leaving feel higher than the cost of staying.Quotes*“ There's many organizations that lean into that power of positivity…What's very interesting is that consumer brands do this a lot very, very well. B2B organizations tend to do almost the opposite. They tend to lean more into FUD. And that's a harder road to tread.”*“ If you're an organization that is selling software, the software is designed to provide a business outcome. It's designed to solve a business problem. Instead of focusing on, here's the business problem. Doesn't that suck for you? You can say, ‘here's the solution.*“You have the power, you can feel confident about your ability to achieve X, Y, Z because you've solved this problem.' It's saying the same thing, but orienting it in a positive way and being very, very, very consistent in that message. Beat that drum over and over and over again.”*“ Narrow down the competitive options for them. Your sales process will move faster. You will be able to take better control of the narrative if you say, ‘this is us and these are the two other vendors that look like us. And here's why we are different and better, and here's what you can expect from these guys.' And that doesn't mean saying negative things about them.  It's just highlighting your strengths and your virtues.”*“People are willing to accept trade-offs for something that is perceived to be free…This is the exact reason that PLG, product-led growth, is so powerful. Because if you can get people in the door with some sort of freemium offering, people will actually work harder to do the legwork to get a free product to work and interact with it, than they might be willing to put in for something that they have to go pay for. And then once they have it and they've put in the work, they don't wanna lose it.”Time Stamps[00:55] Meet Leslie Alore, SVP of Marketing at Flexera[00:56] Why Predictably Irrational?[02:20] The Role of SVP of Marketing at Flexera[02:47] Understanding Predictably Irrational[09:56] B2B Marketing Lessons from Predictably Irrational[37:49] Cognitive Dissonance in Buying Behavior[42:17] Emotional Marketing in B2B[46:18] Final Thoughts and TakeawaysLinksConnect with Leslie on LinkedInLearn more about FlexeraAbout Remarkable!Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. In today's episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Head of Production). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.

"We need to stop forcing marketing metrics on the business MQLs, click-through rates, web traffic and start speaking the language of pipeline, bookings, and revenue. When marketers align their reporting with what the executive team actually cares about, they stop defending their existence and start leading the growth conversation.” Leslie Alore, SVP of Marketing at Flexera Marketing Impact Unlocked: Prove, Scale, and Strengthen Revenue Contribution. A practical framework for aligning marketing metrics with the outcomes your executive team actually cares about. In this episode of Revenue Boost, Kerry Curran sits down with Leslie Alore, SVP of Marketing at Flexera, to unpack one of the most urgent challenges facing B2B marketing leaders today: proving marketing's value in terms that drive boardroom decisions. Too many teams are stuck reporting MQLs while the C-suite wants pipeline, bookings, and revenue. Leslie shares how to shift from tactical metrics to strategic impact with a marketing contribution model that reframes the role of marketing as a core revenue engine not just a lead factory. You'll walk away with actionable strategies to: Align marketing language with executive priorities Measure contribution across pipeline creation, acceleration, and bookings Navigate complex sales cycles and partner motions with smarter tracking Earn trust by demonstrating marketing's real influence on growth Whether you're a CMO, VP, or revenue-minded marketer, this episode gives you the tools to elevate your seat at the table and scale marketing's business impact without fighting for credit.

The power has shifted from organizations to people. How do you meet the new expectations employees have? How do you retain your top performers? My guest today is El Lages, Chief People and Culture Officer at Flexera, and we talked about how she and her team are strategically and creatively planning for a flexible work environment, while also not forgetting the basics. I'm glad you're here to listen in. And, then we'd love to hear from you. Leave a message in the comments about your lessons learned about working virtually or in a hybrid setup.Resources MentionedThe Inspire Your Team to Greatness Assessment (the Courage Assessment)How can you inspire our team to be more proactive, take ownership and get more done?You demonstrate and empower The Courage of a Leader. In my nearly 3 decades of work with leaders, I've discovered the 11 things that leaders do – even very well-intentioned leaders do – that kill productivity.In less than 10 minutes, find out where you're empowering and inadvertently kills productivity, and get a custom report that will tell you step by step what you need to have your team get more done.https://courageofaleader.com/inspireyourteam/About the Guest:Elizabeth Lages is a change agent. El, as she is known, has spent her time building operational excellence throughout the organization. She is known for increasing employee engagement, driving rigor in our sales processes, and building relationships with her optimism and warmth.She is instrumental in making Flexera a “top workplace” through performance management, manager training, and continuous employees feedback. El has been with the company since 2004 in various sales and operations leadership roles before moving into organizational effectiveness in 2017.Born and raised in New York City, El has a B.S. in communications at State University of New York.https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethlages About the Host: Amy L. Riley is an internationally renowned speaker, author and consultant. She has over 2 decades of experience developing leaders at all levels. Her clients include Cisco Systems, Deloitte and Barclays.As a trusted leadership coach and consultant, Amy has worked with hundreds of leaders one-on-one, and thousands more as part of a group, to fully step into their leadership, create amazing teams and achieve extraordinary results. Amy's most popular keynote speeches are:The Courage of a Leader: The Power of a Leadership LegacyThe Courage of a Leader: Create a Competitive Advantage with Sustainable, Results-Producing Cross-System CollaborationThe Courage of a Leader: Accelerate Trust with Your Team, Customers and CommunityThe Courage of a Leader: How to Build a Happy and Successful Hybrid Team Her new book is a #1 international best-seller and is entitled, The Courage of a Leader: How to Inspire, Engage and Get Extraordinary Results.www.courageofaleader.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/amyshoopriley/ Links mentioned in the episodewww.managertools.com Call to actionWe'd love to hear from you. Leave a message in the comments about your lessons learned...

FinOps has long focused on managing cloud spend—but that's beginning to change. In this episode, AJ Witt speaks with Jennifer Kuvlesky at Flexera about the March 2025 FinOps scope expansions and what they mean for SaaS and data center environments. They explore why FinOps is broadening its horizons, how this shift impacts ITAM professionals, and what organisations should expect next. "With cloud data, you can't do your job without understanding where and how things are being used—it's essential for managing spend and securing value." - Jennifer Kuvlesky at Flexera. Download Flexera's State of Cloud Report: https://info.flexera.com/CM-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud?lead_source=Organic%20Search

The economy is currently facing a challenging combination of slowing growth and rising inflation, which is impacting managed service providers (MSPs) and IT services firms. The Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index has shown a significant increase, indicating heightened inflation, while consumer spending is weakening. This economic squeeze is forcing businesses to reassess their budgets, leading to a potential increase in demand for MSPs that can offer cost-effective solutions and efficiency improvements. As organizations seek to navigate these turbulent times, the need for integrated security platforms and open-source AI technologies is becoming increasingly critical.A recent survey by Flexera highlights a notable shift in how organizations, particularly small to medium-sized businesses, are turning to MSPs for public cloud management. The percentage of small businesses utilizing MSPs has risen from 36% to nearly 50%, reflecting a growing trust in these providers to manage complex cloud environments. Despite the increase in cloud spending, cost management remains a significant challenge, with many organizations identifying it as their top concern. This trend underscores the importance of differentiation among MSPs, as the market becomes more competitive.In the realm of technology advancements, Amazon is set to launch its new AI-enabled assistant, Alexa Plus, which will introduce various features aimed at enhancing user experience. Meanwhile, Microsoft is rolling out new AI tools for Microsoft 365 Copilot, designed to improve research and data analysis capabilities. These developments highlight the ongoing evolution of AI technologies and their practical applications in business settings. However, as new capabilities emerge, it is essential for businesses to focus on enhancing outcomes rather than getting caught up in the hype.Security threats continue to evolve, with a new phishing-as-a-service operation identified that employs advanced techniques to evade detection. Microsoft is also transitioning to passwordless authentication methods across its platforms, aiming to enhance user security for billions of users. The Pentagon has issued warnings regarding vulnerabilities in messaging apps like Signal, emphasizing the need for caution in communications. As these changes unfold, it is crucial for providers to assist clients in adapting to new security measures and to educate them on the benefits of transitioning to passwordless environments. Four things to know today 00:00 Economic Squeeze: Need Smart Moves as Costs Rise and Growth Slows05:35 MSPs See Surge in Cloud Management Demand07:38 Alexa Gets Smarter, Microsoft Gets Analytical09:44 Phishing Gets Sneaky with DoH, While Microsoft Says Bye-Bye to Passwords  Supported by:  https://getnerdio.com/nerdio-manager-for-msp/ Event: : https://www.nerdiocon.com/ All our Sponsors: https://businessof.tech/sponsors/ Do you want the show on your podcast app or the written versions of the stories? Subscribe to the Business of Tech: https://www.businessof.tech/subscribe/Looking for a link from the stories? The entire script of the show, with links to articles, are posted in each story on https://www.businessof.tech/ Support the show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/mspradio/ Want to be a guest on Business of Tech: Daily 10-Minute IT Services Insights? Send Dave Sobel a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/businessoftech Want our stuff? Cool Merch? Wear “Why Do We Care?” - Visit https://mspradio.myspreadshop.com Follow us on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28908079/YouTube: https://youtube.com/mspradio/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mspradionews/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mspradio/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@businessoftechBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/businessof.tech

This week, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are shining a light on multicloud, a game-changing strategy involving the use of multiple cloud service providers. Joined by Senior Manager of CSS OU Cloud Delivery Samvit Mishra, they discuss why multicloud is becoming essential for businesses, offering freedom from vendor lock-in and the ability to cherry-pick the best services. They also talk about Oracle's pioneering role in multicloud and its partnerships with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services.   Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Multicloud Architect Professional: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-cloud-infrastructure-multicloud-architect-professional-2025-/144474 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -----------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me today is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi everyone! Today, we're moving on to multicloud. In our next three episodes, we'll be discussing what multicloud is and why there's so much of a buzz around it. With us is Samvit Mishra, Senior Manager of CSS OU Cloud Delivery. Hi Samvit! Thanks for joining us today. 00:55 Samvit: Hi Niki! Hi Lois! Happy to be here. Lois: So Samvit, we know that Oracle has been an early adopter of multicloud and a pioneer in multicloud services. But for anyone who isn't familiar with what multicloud is, can you explain what it means? Samvit: Absolutely, Lois. Multicloud is a very simple, basic concept. It is the coordinated use of cloud services from more than one cloud service provider.  01:21 Nikita: But why would someone want to use more than one cloud service provider? Samvit: There are many reasons why a customer might want to leverage two or more cloud service providers. First, it addresses the very real concern of mitigating or avoiding vendor lock-in. By using multiple providers, companies can avoid being tied down to one vendor and maintain their flexibility. 01:45 Lois: That's like not putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. Samvit: Exactly. Another reason is that customers want the best of breed. What that means is basically leveraging or utilizing the best product from one cloud service provider and pairing it against the best product from another cloud service provider. Getting a solution out of the combined products…out of the coordinated use of those services.  02:14 Nikita: So, it sounds like multicloud is becoming the new normal. And as we were saying before, Oracle was a pioneer in this space. But why did we embrace multicloud so wholeheartedly? Samvit: We recognized that our customers were already moving in this direction. Independent studies from Flexera found that 89% of the subjects of the study used multicloud. And we conducted our own study and came to similar numbers. Over 90% of our customers use two or more cloud service providers.  HashiCorp, the big infrastructure as code company, came to similar numbers as well, 94%. They basically asked companies if multicloud helped them advance their business goals. And 94% said yes. And all this is very recent data.  03:04 Lois: Can you give us the backstory of Oracle's entry into the multicloud space? Samvit: Sure. So back in 2019, Oracle and Microsoft Azure joined forces and announced the interconnect service between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Azure. The interconnect was between Oracle's FastConnect and Microsoft Azure's ExpressRoute. This was a big step, as it allowed for a direct connection between the two providers without needing a third-party. And now we have several of our data centers interconnected already. So, out of the 48 regions, 12 of them are already interconnected. And more are coming. And you can very easily configure the interconnect.  This interconnectivity guarantees low latency, high throughput, and predictable performance. And also, on the OCI side, there are no egress or ingress charges for your data.  There's also a product called Oracle Database@Azure, where Oracle and Microsoft deliver Oracle Database services in Microsoft Azure data centers.  04:12  Lois: That's exciting! And what are the benefits of this product? Samvit: The main advantage is the co-location. Being co-located with the Microsoft Azure data center offers you native integration between Azure and OCI resources. No manual configuration of a private interconnect between the two providers is needed. You're going to get microsecond latency between your applications and the Oracle Database.  The OCI-native Exadata Database Service is available on Oracle Database@Azure. This enables you to get the highest level of Oracle Database performance, scalability, security, and availability. And your tech support can be provided either from Microsoft or from Oracle.  05:03 Unlock the power of AI Vector Search with our new course and certification. Get more accurate search results, handle complex datasets easily, and supercharge your data-driven decisions. From now through May 15, 2025, we are waiving the certification exam fee (valued at $245). Visit mylearn.oracle.com to enroll. 05:30 Nikita: Welcome back. Samvit, there have been some new multicloud milestones from OCI, right? Can you tell us about them?  Samvit: That's right, Niki. I am thrilled to share the latest news on Oracle's multicloud partnerships. We now have agreements with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services.  So, as we were discussing earlier, with Azure, we have the Oracle Interconnect for Azure and Oracle Database@Azure. Now, with Google Cloud, we have the Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud. And it is very similar to the Oracle Interconnect for Azure. With Google Cloud, we have physically interconnected data centers and they provide a sub-2 millisecond latency private interconnection. So, you can come in and provision virtual circuits going from Oracle FastConnect to Google Cloud Interconnect.  And the best thing is that there are no egress or ingress charges for your data. The way it is structured is you have your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on one side, with your virtual cloud network, your subnets, and your resources. And on the other side, you have your Google Cloud router with your virtual private cloud subnet and your resources interconnecting.  You initiate the connectivity on the Google Cloud side, retrieve the service key and provide that service key to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and complete the interconnection on the OCI side. So, for example, our US East Ashburn interconnect will match with us-east4 on the Google Cloud side.  07:08 Lois: Now, wasn't the other major announcement Oracle Database@Google Cloud? Tell us more about that, please. Samvit: With Oracle Database@Google Cloud, you can run your applications on Google Cloud and the database as well inside the Google Cloud platform. That's the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure database co-located in Google Cloud platform data centers. It allows you to run native integration between GCP and OCI resources with no manual configuration of private interconnect between these two cloud service providers.  That means no FastConnect, no Interconnect because, again, the database is located in the Google Cloud data center. And you're going to get microsecond latency and the OCI native Exadata Database Service. So, you're going to gain the highest level of Oracle Database performance, scalability, security, and availability.  08:04 Lois: And how is the tech support managed? Samvit: The technical support is a collaboration between Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. That means you can either have the technical support provided to completion by Google Cloud or by Oracle. One of us will provide you with an end-to-end solution.  08:22 Nikita: During CloudWorld last year, we also announced Oracle Database@AWS, right?  Samvit: Yes, Niki. That's where Oracle and Amazon Web Services deliver the Oracle Database service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in your AWS data center. This will provide you with native integration between AWS and OCI resources, with no manual configuration of private interconnect between AWS and OCI. And you're getting microsecond latency with the OCI-native Exadata Database Service.  And again, as with Oracle Database@Google Cloud and Oracle Database@Azure, you're gaining the highest level of Oracle Database performance, scalability, security, and availability. And the technical support is provided by either AWS or Oracle all the way to completion. Now, Oracle Database@AWS is currently available in limited preview, with broader availability in the coming months as it expands to new regions to meet the needs of our customers.  09:28 Lois: That's great. Now, how does Oracle fare when it comes to pricing, especially compared to our major cloud competitors?  Samvit: Our pricing is pretty consistent. You'll see that in all cases across the world, we have the less expensive solution for you and the highest performance as well.  09:45 Nikita: Let's move on to some use cases, Samvit. How might a company use the multicloud setup? Samvit: Let's start with the split-stack architecture between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Azure.  Like I was saying earlier, this partnership dates back to 2019. And basically, we eliminated the FastConnect partner from the middle. And this will provide you with high throughput, low latency, and very predictable performance, all of this on highly available links. These links are redundant, ensuring business continuity between OCI and Azure.  And you can have your database on the OCI side and your application on Microsoft Azure side or the other way around. You can have SQL Server on Azure and the application running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. And this is very easy to configure.  10:34 Lois: It really sounds like Oracle is at the forefront of the multicloud revolution. Thanks so much, Samvit, for shedding light on this exciting topic.  Samvit: It was my pleasure.  Nikita: That's a wrap for today. To learn more about what we discussed, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Multicloud Architect Professional course. In our next episode, we'll take a close look at Oracle Interconnect for Azure. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 11:05 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In this episode of the Innovation and the Digital Enterprise, Shelli and Patrick chat about industry advancements and leadership with Deepak Kaimal, Chief Technology Officer at COMPLY. He was previously CTO at Exostar, and held that role when this episode was recorded.Exostar, founded in 2000 by industry leaders like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, provides secure collaboration and risk management solutions to the defense and life sciences sectors. Deepak shares his journey from an engineering student in Mumbai to becoming the CTO of this pivotal player in secure technology.We discuss Exostar's mission, the balance between secure collaboration and innovation, and trends in identity and access management. Deepak emphasizes the importance of curiosity, dealing with change, and leading teams in ways that foster a culture that balances trust, security, and innovation.(00:25) Meet Deepak Kaimal(02:49) Deepak's Early Education and Career Journey(07:05) The Founding and Mission of Exostar(10:40) Balancing Security and Innovation at Exostar(16:11) Trends in Identity and Access Management(18:17) Leadership and Technological (22:35) The Excitement of New Tech Advancements(29:13 Final Thoughts and Advice for LeadersDeepak Kaimal is currently the Chief Technology Officer at COMPLY, a compliance solution provider for global financial services firms. Previously, at Exostar, he oversaw the design, development, operations and evolution of The Exostar Platform. Prior to Exostar, Deepak served as CTO at ArrowStream and VP of Engineering at Flexera. Earlier in his career, Deepak held roles at Cars.com, JPMorgan Chase, Rolls-Royce, Capgemini, and Intiqua International. He earned a degree in Engineering from the University of Mumbai.If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to Innovation and the Digital Enterprise in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.Podcast episode production by Dante32.

Companies across industries will continue to scrutinize information-technology spending, looking closely at the IT assets and compute environments and their utilization, particularly as AI investments are set to rise. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Flexera CEO Jim Ryan joins Sunil Rajgopal, senior software analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, to discuss IT spending and optimization trends amid the ever-growing on-premise and SaaS software stack, and the platforms that help streamline costs. They also discuss Flexera's product journey, scale and how its solutions differ from the likes of IBM's Apptio. For more insights, register for BI's gen-AI Nov. 20 conference here. Find this and other Bloomberg Intelligence podcasts at BI PODCASTS .

Your agency will be attacked. Even if we look at the most conservative estimates, a company like Statista shows 32,211 attacks on federal agencies in 2023. The conclusion is obvious: you will be attacked and must have a way to remediate the problem. Today, we sat down with three experienced cyber professionals to hear suggestions on improving federal cyber security resilience. Russel Marsh from the National Nuclear Security Administration observes that federal employees may work 9 am to 5 pm every day, but malicious actors do not. The best practice here is to have a checklist of what to do in an “off-hour” emergency. As part of a resilience strategy, focus on device and asset attribution, as well as the ability to discard certain devices. Conduct tabletop exercises and simulations to assess incident response and communication processes. Flexera's Dylan Hudak has seen federal systems with unsupported applications still on them. Visibility and proper software lifecycle policy can remedy easy problems like this.

This episode is part two of two with Jeffrey discussing key aspects of the 2024 Flexera State of ITAM report Each week, Jeffrey will be sharing his knowledge on Service Delivery (Mondays) and Service Management (Thursdays). Jeffrey is the founder of Service Management Leadership, an IT consulting firm specializing in Service Management, Asset Management, CIO Advisory, and Business Continuity services.  The firm's website is www.servicemanagement.us.   Jeffrey has been in the industry for 30 years and brings a practical perspective to the discussions. He is an accomplished author with seven acclaimed books in the subject area and a popular YouTube channel with approximately 1,500 videos on various topics.  Also, please follow the Service Management Leadership LinkedIn page.

This episode is part one of two with Jeffrey discussing key aspects of the 2024 Flexera State of ITAM report Each week, Jeffrey will be sharing his knowledge on Service Delivery (Mondays) and Service Management (Thursdays). Jeffrey is the founder of Service Management Leadership, an IT consulting firm specializing in Service Management, Asset Management, CIO Advisory, and Business Continuity services.  The firm's website is www.servicemanagement.us.   Jeffrey has been in the industry for 30 years and brings a practical perspective to the discussions. He is an accomplished author with seven acclaimed books in the subject area and a popular YouTube channel with approximately 1,500 videos on various topics.  Also, please follow the Service Management Leadership LinkedIn page.

Being a Customer Success Pro is no easy job, but this podcast will help. Remember that Customer Success is not a destination, but a journey and I am here to help you on your journey.The podcast episode features Alex Turkovic discussing the integration of AI in customer success routines. Key topics include practical applications of AI, tools for customer success professionals, and tips for using AI effectively. The episode aims to provide insights on how AI can save time and enhance customer value, with a focus on real-world examples and best practices.00:00 - Introduction to the Podcast04:43 - Alex's Early Stages of Customer Success09:22 - AI Tools and Techniques14:03 - Daily Uses of AI in Customer Success Tools18:45 - Comparisons and Evaluations of AI Tools23:26 - Deep Dive into Useful AI Tools32:47 - Strategic Implementations of AI42:29 - Quickfire QuestionsConnect with Anika:LinkedInYouTubeTikTokWebsite: thecustomersuccesspro.comCoaching with Anika: CSM RevUP AcademyConnect with Alex:Alex's podcast episode about AILinkedinPodcastWith over 15 years of experience in customer success leadership, professional services, and customer education, Alex is passionate about creating and delivering impactful and engaging customer experiences for products and services. As the Global Director of Digital Customer Success at Flexera, he combines digital and scaled customer success strategies with customer education programs to ensure optimal customer lifecycle engagement and outcomes. Alex is the host of 'The CX Podcast', where he explores different aspects of building and maintaining world-class digital customer success experiences, with guests who are in-field and executing.Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/

The episode begins with a focus on AI-based patch management solutions, highlighting leading vendors like Automox, Flexera, and Kaseya. The discussion delves into how AI and ML-driven patch management can provide real-time risk assessments, helping prioritize critical patches and enhance cybersecurity measures.The episode then shifts to the evolving landscape of cloud infrastructure driven by generative AI advancements. The transcript reveals insights from an IBM study, indicating concerns among tech executives about infrastructure readiness for AI demands. Additionally, the discussion touches on the challenges faced by businesses in adopting AI quickly and effectively, with a prediction that 13% of businesses will adopt AI in the next three to four years.A significant development highlighted in the episode is the introduction of ChatIT by Commonwealth Bank, an AI-powered IT support chatbot built on Azure services. The chatbot, accessible via Microsoft Teams, boasts an impressive average response time of 14 seconds and over 13,000 employee interactions. This innovation streamlines IT troubleshooting, integrates with the bank's knowledge base, and hints at future enhancements to improve user experience and efficiency.The episode concludes with updates on technology advancements, including Broadcom's launch of VMware Cloud Foundation 9 and Microsoft's decision to phase out the Windows Control Panel in favor of the Settings app. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding Azure's true cloud consumption revenue and the implications of AI tools like Amazon Q on software development tasks. Overall, the episode provides valuable insights into the intersection of AI, cloud computing, and IT service delivery in the evolving tech landscape. Four things to know today 00:00 GigaOm Report Highlights Top AI-Based Patch Management Solutions, Featuring Automox, Flexera, and Kaseya04:49 Commonwealth Bank Launches ChatIT, AI-Powered IT Support Bot on Azure, Achieves 14-Second Response Times07:11 Windows Control Panel to Be Phased Out in Favor of Modern Settings App, Microsoft Confirms08:25 Microsoft's New Reporting Strategy Aims to Clarify Azure's True Cloud Consumption Revenue  Supported by: https://getthread.com/mspradio/https://www.huntress.com/mspradio/    All our Sponsors: https://businessof.tech/sponsors/ Do you want the show on your podcast app or the written versions of the stories? Subscribe to the Business of Tech: https://www.businessof.tech/subscribe/Looking for a link from the stories? The entire script of the show, with links to articles, are posted in each story on https://www.businessof.tech/ Support the show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/mspradio/ Want our stuff? Cool Merch? Wear “Why Do We Care?” - Visit https://mspradio.myspreadshop.com Follow us on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28908079/YouTube: https://youtube.com/mspradio/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mspradionews/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mspradio/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@businessoftechBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/businessoftech.bsky.social

On this episode of the Six Five in the Booth, host Paul Nashawaty is joined by Flexera's Kristian Dell'Orso, Vice President, Site Reliability Engineering & Site Leader, highlighting their collaboration with Nobl9 for a conversation on becoming an SRE-driven organization. This in-depth discussion explores the transformative impact of adopting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) over traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and how Flexera has shifted its approach to prioritize reliability and enhance customer experiences. Their discussion covers: The transition from SLAs to SLOs at Flexera and its impact on organizational key performance indicators (KPIs), including improvements in reliability and customer experience. The limitations of SLAs in capturing the full spectrum of service reliability and customer satisfaction, and the move towards a more proactive and accountable approach within organizations. How adopting SLOs has led to consistency in measuring reliability across different groups in the company, fostering a culture of accountability and transparency.   Learn more how Nobl9 and Flexera articulates its strategy:  Customer testimonial/webinar  SLOConf Presentation 

Welcome to ITAMantics, our monthly news podcast where we discuss the biggest ITAM stories from the last month. George is joined for this April 2024 edition by AJ Witt and Ryan Stefani. Stories discussed this month: 1. Flexera is first SAM tool vendor verified for Oracle E-Business Suite applications 2. Software Vendor Insights: What do the numbers tell us about the opportunities for ITAM negotiations? 3. Broadcom is removing expired VMware licences from its portal - take action now! 4. Who Loses When Broadcom Wins?

How are enterprises optimizing hybrid IT environments facing rising costs and security threats? Brian Shannon, CTO, Flexera and Niladri Ray, VP of Engineering, and Country Head – India, Flexera, sat with Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov to discuss key trends like cloud migration, IT cost management, and vulnerability remediation in this episode of our podcast. Hear insights on leveraging a data-driven approach to gain visibility and control over hybrid estates, driving innovation through global collaboration, realizing significant cost savings, and building an empowering engineering culture. Whether you're an IT leader looking to optimize your infrastructure, an engineer interested in impactful work, or anyone curious about how enterprises are transforming digitally, this episode provides an enlightening industry perspective. The discussion covers the challenges that organizations are facing an increasingly complex technological landscape and how leaders can navigate them efficiently. TIMESTAMPS 01:04 Emerging Technology themes 03:50 Current Innovations in R&D 05:50 Driving Innovation from tech hubs 09:30 Taking back control of the IT spend 11:40 Addressing cybersecurity 13:02 How GenAI is helping productivity 17:12 Managing and retaining talent

In this month's edition of ITAMantics George and Rich discuss another Quest audit ending up in court, a Slack customer falling foul of Slack's broken data migration tool (and facing the threat of their data being deleted), Flexera completing its acquisition of Snow Software, and "Chatbot Turbulence" - Air Canada's misguided AI which gave a customer incorrect advice.

In this bumper 2-month edition of ITAMantics, George, Rich and AJ discuss the biggest ITAM stories to drop during the last two months. Stories discussed in this episode are: 1. Flexera buying Snow! + our analysis 2. Rocket acquisition of OpenText's Application Modernization Business (formerly part of Micro Focus) 3. VMware stops selling perpetual licenses 4. Discussion of our interview with S&P Global Ratings 5. Microsoft Copilot general availability 6. 2024 ITAM predictions

In this Beyond the Deal mini-sode, Thoma Bravo Managing Partner Seth Boro and Flexera President and CEO Jim Ryan discuss stepping into the big role as chief executive, share memories from one of their beloved mentors, and deliberate about what they would've done if technology wasn't their calling. For more information on Thoma Bravo's Behind the Deal, visit https://www.thomabravo.com/behindthedeal Learn more about Thoma Bravo: https://www.thomabravo.com/ Visit Flexera's website: https://www.flexera.com/

Thoma Bravo Managing Partner Seth Boro gives an inside look at how the firm can hit the ground running after a platform carve-out investment. Thoma Bravo helped build out Flexera back in 2008, exited in 2011, and is now back for more with a controlling stake as of 2020.  Flexera is a company that provides customers with the ability to map their IT spend to better optimize their IT estate. In this episode, Thoma Bravo Managing Partner Seth Boro sits down with Flexera CEO Jim Ryan to talk through the initial carveout, surviving the Great Recession of 2008, and where Flexera goes from here. For more information on Thoma Bravo's Behind the Deal, visit https://www.thomabravo.com/behindthedeal Learn more about Thoma Bravo: https://www.thomabravo.com/ Visit Flexera's website: https://www.flexera.com/

This month Rich, George and AJ tackle the biggest stories to rock the ITAM World in November. Note that the BIGGEST story of the month happened the day after we recorded this, so there is no mention of Flexera announcing its intention to acquire Snow Software. We'll give that plenty of airtime in the December episode... Stories tackled this month are: - Atlassian buys AirTrack: Consolidation Down Under - AI Driving 2024 IT Agenda: Snow Software report - Draft of the ITAM Review Microsoft Certification - What ITAM can learn from contract management: Lessons from Schiphol Airport - Harnessing the power of Microsoft Copilot: A guide for business decision makers If you notice Rich go a little quiet when discussing his love of Australian coffee and the caffeine-based rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney, don't worry, he soon returns. He simply wanted to save your ears from his excessively loud doorbell...

Az átláthatóság az informatika minden területén jótékony hatással van a működtetésre  és a költségekre is. Az egyre inkább szoftverközpontúvá váló technológia korában a vállalatoknál használt szoftverek licenceinek megfelelő menedzsmentjével több területen is kedvező változások érhetők el. Az ITBUSINESS podcasfolyamának újabb epizódjában Benyovszky Balázs, az Inter-Computer-Informatika technológiai szakértője volt Mester Sándor vendége. A szakértő  semmi kétséget nem hagy afelől, hogy ha egy olyan megoldást használhatunk a szoftvervagyon-gazdálkodásunkban, mint amilyen a Flexera, akkor átláthatóvá válik az informatikai rendszerünk, kevesebbet kell költenünk a licencekre és az IT-biztonság szintje is emelkedhet.

Is it really possible to use technology to improve people performance?  Join Mike Horne in conversation with Jeremy Littlejohn, the visionary CEO and co-founder of Loopingback.ai. With a wealth of leadership experience in the IT sector, Jeremy recounts his professional evolution, tracing the path from his 13-year leadership at Risk Networks through its acquisition by Flexera to the founding of HR Data Solutions and Team Rocket. Can you predict engagement and performance in teams? Jeremy unveils a predictive analytics model originally crafted for sales teams. Boasting a 75-80% success rate in forecasting employee performance, he discusses the hurdles faced, particularly regarding data inconsistency and skepticism towards AI in HR processes, which ultimately steered him towards Loopingback.ai. This new venture, Loopingback.ai, promises a revolution in leader-to-employee communication, leveraging asynchronous video tools for a more nuanced and impactful exchange. Jeremy elaborates on its application in performance assessments, executive updates, and client relations, advocating for its less stressful and more personable approach. In wrapping up, Jeremy imparts two foundational tips for entrepreneurial spirits: the criticality of enduring commitment to one's vision, and the imperative for leaders to personify the attributes they seek in their teams. He champions the concept of leading from the front, challenging HR executives to instill this ethos at the heart of corporate culture. Quotes: "Today we're focused heavily on really helping both leaders for their employees, and also marketers for their customers, put their authentic selfs out there." (03:31 | Jeremy Littlejohn) “Performance reviews had become these things that were either solely so that I could remove an employee. I needed to do a performance review so that I can give you a bad review so that I can play a paper trail to move you out of the business. Or they were always tied to compensation. It was like, your performance review is really my decision about whether you're getting a raise or not, or a bonus. It wasn't really what performance reviews were designed to do, which was to say, let's have a talk about what the goals are and how we can improve or how I can help you.” (20:06 | Jeremy Littlejohn) “The concept of AI or machine learning making a prediction about someone's future is uncomfortable.” (18:31 | Jeremy Littlejohn)  “Whether it's being authentic, whether it's demonstrating core values for your business, whether it's being on video, it doesn't matter. If the leader doesn't do it, the employees are never going to do it. (33:14 | Jeremy Littlejohn)   Links: Learn more about Mike Horne on Linkedin Email Mike at mike@mike-horne.com Learn More About Executive and Organization Development with Mike Horne Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikehorneauthor  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikehorneauthor/,  LinkedIn Mike's Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6867258581922799617/,  Schedule a Discovery Call with Mike: https://calendly.com/mikehorne/15-minute-discovery-call-with-mike   Learn more about Jeremy Littlejohn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-littlejohn/       Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm  

The principle of ‘waste not, want not' was first declared 300 years ago. It is a reasonable idea, to avoid wasteful use of resources and provide for a more secure future. However, the principle has lost ground; the IT environment being one example. A spending study by Flexera reports underutilization or wasted IT spending of 36 percent for desktop software, 33 percent for data center software, 32 percent for SaaS and 32 percent for IaaS/PaaS.The study confirms that enterprises continue to spend needless dollars and use precious IT time, loading up their hardware endpoint devices with up to a dozen pieces of software – and required agents – before the end user can even work productively with the device. It also confirms some of this software spend never even makes it to the desktop.Host: Andy WhitesideCo-host: Chris Feeney

In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy Seidl interviews Steve Hershkowitz, the Chief Revenue Officer of Virtana Corp. Steve has over 30 years of experience in the tech industry, having worked for companies like HP, Pansando, and AMD. He is a customer-first, process-oriented, and results-driven sales executive who is passionate about sales and go-to-market strategy. Steve shares his insights on best practices for sales and business presentations. He talks about the importance of storytelling, preparation, and engagement in delivering effective presentations. He also highlights the role of technology in enhancing the presentation experience and the need for sales teams to adapt to virtual selling in the post-pandemic world. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY Navigating the Competitive Landscape: Achieving Gold Standard Status in Infrastructure Performance Monitoring - Steve: "We tend to see different types of competitors, Randy, depending upon which one of those platforms or products we're engaged in a sales effort with. So, for cloud cost management, it's the cloud health of the world, the Turbanomics of that world. There are a lot of companies in that space for infrastructure performance monitoring. We run it to Dynatrace, Flexera, those kind of guys. But we are the gold standard in that space, make no mistake about it." Find out more about Steve Hershkowitz in the link below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-hersh/ This episode of Tech Sales Insights is brought to you by: Sales Community: https://www.salescommunity.com/Sandler:  https://www.sandler.com/

Kenneth Rose, CTO at OpsLevel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how OpsLevel is helping developer teams to scale effectively. Kenneth reveals what a developer portal is, how he thinks about the functionality of a developer portal, and the problems a developer portal solves for large developer teams. Corey and Kenneth discuss how to drive adoption of a developer portal, and Kenneth explains why it's so necessary to have executive buy-in throughout that process. Kenneth also discusses how using their own portal internally along with seeking out customer feedback has allowed OpsLevel to make impactful innovations. About KenKenneth (Ken) Rose is the CTO and Co-Founder of OpsLevel. Ken has spent over 15 years scaling engineering teams as an early engineer at PagerDuty and Shopify. Having in-the-trenches experience has allowed Ken a unique perspective on how some of the best teams are built and scaled and lends this viewpoint to building products for OpsLevel, a service ownership platform built to turn chaos into consistency for engineering leaders.Links Referenced: OpsLevel: https://www.opslevel.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opslevel/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpsLevelHQ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, about, oh I don't know, two years ago and change, I wound up writing a blog post titled, “Developer Portals are An Anti Pattern,” and I haven't really spent a lot of time thinking about them since. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at OpsLevel, and they have sent their CTO and co-founder Ken Rose, presumably in an attempt to change my perspective on these things. Let's find out. Ken, thank you for agreeing to, well, run the gauntlet, for lack of a better term.Ken: Hey, Corey. Thanks again for having me. And I've heard, you know, heard and listened to your show a bunch, and really excited to be here today.Corey: Let's begin with defining our terms. I'm curious to know what a developer portal is. ‘What would you say a developer portal means to you?' Like it's a college entrance essay.Ken: Right? Definitely. You know, so really, a developer portal is this consolidated place for developers to come to, especially in large organizations to be able to get their jobs done more easily, right? A large challenge that developers have in large organizations, there's just a lot to do and a lot to take care of. So, a developer portal is a place for developers to be able to better own, manage, and run the services, they're responsible for that run in production, and they can do that through access, easy access to self-service tooling.Corey: I guess, on some level, this turns into one of those alignment charts of, like, what is a database and, like, how prescriptive you want to be. It's like, well is a senior engineer a database because you can query them and they have information? Would you consider, for example, Kubernetes be a developer platform, and/or would the AWS console?Ken: Yeah, that's actually an interesting question, right? So, I think there's actually two—we're going to get really niggly here—there's developer platform and developer portal, right? And the word portal for me is something that sits above a developer platform. I don't know if you remember, like, the late-90s, early-2000s, like, portals were all the rage.Like, Yahoo and AltaVistas were like search portals, they were trying to, at the time, consolidate all this information on a much smaller internet to make it easy to access. A developer portal is sort of the same thing, but custom-built for developers and trying to consolidate a lot of the tooling that exists. Now, in terms of the AWS console? Yeah, maybe. Like, it has a suite of tools and suite of offerings. It doesn't do a lot on the well, how do I quickly find out what's running in production and who is responsible for it? I don't know, unless AWS shipped, like, their, you know, three-hundredth new offering in the last week that I haven't, you know, kept on top of.But you know, there's definitely some spectrum in terms of what goes into a developer portal. For me, there's kind of three main things you need. You do need some kind of a catalog, like, what's out there who owns it; you need some kind of a way to measure, like, how good are those services, like, how well built are they; and then you need some access to self-service tooling. And that last part is where, like, the Kubernetes or AWS could be, you know, sort of a dev portal as well.Corey: My experience with developer portals—there was a time when I loved it. RightScale was what I used—at some depth—back in I want to say 2010, 2011 because the EC2 console was clearly not built or designed by anyone who had not built EC2 themselves with their bare hands and sweat of their brow. And in time, the EC2 console got better where it wasn't written in hieroglyphics, as best we could tell, and it became ‘click button to launch instance.' And RightScale really didn't have a second act and they wound up getting acquired by our friends over at Flexera years later. And I haven't seen their developer portal in at least eight years as a direct result of this.So, the problem, at least when I was viewing it purely in the context of AWS services, it feels like you are competing against AWS iterating forward on developer experience, which they iterate slowly, sometimes, and unevenly across their breadth of services, but it does feel like at some level by building an internal portal, you are, first, trying to out-innovate AWS, in some ways, and two, you are inherently making the trade-off of not using recent features and enhancements that have not themselves been incorporated into the portal. That's where the, I guess the start, the genesis of my opposition to the developer portal approach comes from. Is that philosophy valid these days? Not as much. Because I can see an argument for it shifting.Ken: Yeah, I think it's slightly different. I think of a developer portal as again, it's something that sort of sits on top of AWS or Google Cloud or whatever cloud provider use, right? You give an example for example with RightScale and EC2. So, provisioning instances is one part of the activity you have to do as a developer. Now, in most modern organizations, you have, like, your product developers that ship features. They don't actually care about provisioning instance themselves. There are another group called the platform engineers or platform group that are responsible for building automation and tooling to help spin up instances and create CI/CD pipelines and get everything you need set up.And they might use AWS under the covers to do that, but the automation built on top and making that accessible to developers, that's really what a developer portal can provide. In addition, it also provides links to operational tooling that you need, technical documentation, it's everything you need as a developer to do your job, in one place. And though AWs bills itself is that, I think of them as more, they have a lot of platform offerings, right, they have a lot of infra-offerings, but they still haven't been able to, I think, customize that, unless you're an organization that builds—that has kind of gone in-all on AWS and doesn't build any of your own tooling, that's where a developer portal helps. It really helps by consolidating all that information in one place, by making that information discoverable for every developer so they have less… less cognitive load, right? We've asked developers to kind of do too much that we don't… we've asked to shift left and well, how do we make that information more accessible?Regarding the point of, you know, AWS adds new features or new capabilities all the time and, like, well you have this dev portal, that's sort of your interface for how to get things done. Like, how will you use those? Dev portal doesn't stop you from doing that, right? So, my mental model is, if I'm a developer, and I want to spin up a new service, I can just press a button inside of my dev portal in my company and do that. And I have a service that is built according to the latest standards, it has a CI/CD pipeline, it already has a—you know, it's registered in PagerDuty, it's registered in Datadog, it has all the various bits.And then there's something else that I want to do that isn't really on the golden path because maybe this is some new service or some experiment, nothing stops us from doing that. Like, you still can use all those tools from AWS, you know, kind of raw. And if those prove to be valuable for the rest of the organization, great. They can make their way into the dev portal; they can actually become a source of leverage. But if they're not, then they can also just sit there on the vine. Like, not everything that eight of us ever produces will be used by every company.Corey: Many years ago, I got a Cisco pair of certifications because recession was hitting and I needed to be better at networking. And taking those certifications, in those days before Cisco became the sad corporate dragon with no friends we all know today, they were highly germane and relevant. But I distinctly remember, even now, 15 years later, that there was this entire philosophy of pretend that the entire world is Cisco only, which in networking is absolutely never true. It feels like a lot of the AWS designs and patterns tend to assume, oh yeah, you're going to use AWS services for everything. I have never yet found that to be true, other than when I'm just trying to be obstinate.And hell is interoperability between a bunch of different things. Yes, I may want to spin up an EC2 instance and an AWS load balancer and some S3 storage or whatnot, but I'm also going to want to monitor it with PagerDuty, I'm going to want to have a CDN that isn't CloudFront because most CDN these days don't hate you in quite the same economic ways and are simpler to work with, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, there's definitely a story wherein I've found that there's an—the interoperability of tying these things together is helpful. How do you avoid falling down the trap of oh, everyone should be multi-cloud, single pane of glass at cetera, et cetera? In practice that always seems to turn to custard.Ken: Yeah, I think multi-cloud and single pane of glass are actually two different things. So multi-cloud, like, I agree with you to some sense. Like, pick a cloud and go with it, like, unless you have really good business reasons to go for multi-cloud. And sometimes you do, like, years ago, I worked at PagerDuty, they were multi-cloud for a reliability reason, that hey, if one cloud provider goes down, you don't want [crosstalk 00:08:40]—Corey: They were an example I used all the time for that story—Ken: Right.Corey: —specifically the thing woke you up was homed in a bunch of different places, whereas the marketing site, the onboarding flow, the periphery stuff around it was not because it didn't need to be.Ken: Exactly.Corey: Like, the core business need of wake you up was very much multi-cloud because once upon a time, it wasn't and it went down with the rest of us-east-1 and people weren't woken up to be told their site was on fire.Ken: A hundred percent. And on the kind of like application side where, even then, pick a cloud and go with it, unless there's a really compelling business reason for your business to go multi-cloud. Maybe there's something credits or compliance or availability, right? There might be reasons, but you have to be articulate about whether they're right for you.Now, single pane of glass, I think that's different, right? I do think that's something that, ultimately, is a net boon for developers. In any large organization, there is a myriad of internal tools that have been built. And it's like, well, how do I provision a new topic in the Kafka cluster? How do I actually get access to the AWS console? How do I spin up a new service, right? How do I kind of do these things?And if I'm a developer, I just want to ship features. Like, that's what I'm incented to do, that's what I'm optimizing for. And all this other stuff I have to do as part of my job, but I don't want to have to become, like, a Kubernetes guru to be able to do it, right? So, what a developer portal is trying to do is be that single pane of glass, bringing all these common set of tools and responsibilities that you have as a developer in one place. They're easy to search for, they're easy to find, they're easy to query, they're easy to use.Corey: I should probably have asked this earlier on, but let's disambiguate for a little bit here. Because when I'm setting up to use a new service or product and kick the tires on it, no two explorations really look the same. Whereas at most responsible mature companies that are building products that are—services that are going to production use, they've standardized around a number of different approaches. What does your target customer look like? Is there a certain point of scale, a certain level of complexity, a certain maturity of process?Ken: Absolutely. So, a tool like OpsLevel or a developer portal really only makes sense when you hit some critical mass in terms of the number of services you have running in production, or the number of developers that you have. So, when you hit 20, 30, 50 developers or 20, 30, 50 services, an important part of a developer portal is this catalog of what's out there. Once you kind of hit the Dunbar number of services, like, when you have more than you keep in your head, that's when you start to need tooling like this. If you look at our customer base, they're all you know, kind of medium to large-sized companies. If you're a startup with, like, ten people, OpsLevel is probably not right for you. We use all playable internally at OpsLevel, and you know, like, we're still a small company. It's like, we make it work for us because we know how to get the most out of it, but like, it's not the perfect fit because it's not really meant for, you know, smaller companies.Corey: Oh, I hear you. I think I'm probably… I have a better AWS bill analytic system running internally here at The Duckbill Group than some banks do. So, I hear you on that front.Ken: I believe it.Corey: But also implies to me that there's no OpsLevel prospect or customer deployment that has ever been greenfield. It's always you're building existing things, there's already infrastructure in place, vendors have been selected across the board. You aren't—don't to want to starting a company day one, they're going to all right, time to spin up our AWS account and we're also going to wind up signing up for OpsLevel, from the sound of it.Ken: Correct—Corey: Accurate? Inaccurate?Ken: I think that's actually accurate. Like, a lot of the problems, we solve other problems that come as you start to scale both your product and your engineering team. And it's the problems of complexity.Corey: What do those painful problems look like? In other words, what is someone sitting at home right now listening to this, or driving to work debating whether want to ram a bridge abutment or go into the office depending on their mental state today, what painful problem did they have that OpsLevel is designed to fix?Ken: Yeah, for sure. So, let's help people self-select. So, here's my mental model for any [unintelligible 00:12:25]. There are product developers, platform developers, and engineering leaders. Product developers, if you're asking questions like, “I just got paged for the service. I don't know what this does.” Or, “It's upstream from here. Where do I find the technical documentation?” Or, “I think I have to do something with the payment service. Where do I find the API for that?”You know, when you get to that scale, a developer portal can help you. If you're a platform engineer and you have questions like, “Okay, we got to migrate. We're migrating, I don't know, from Datadog to Honeycomb, right? We got to get these fifty or a hundred or thousands of services and all these different owners to, like, switch to some new tool.” Or, “Hey, we've done all this work to ship the golden path. Like, how to actually measure the adoption of all this work that we're doing and if it's actually valuable?” Right?Like, we want everybody to be on a certain set of CI tooling or a certain minimum version of some library or framework. How do we do that? How do we measure that? OpsLevel is for you, right? We have a whole bunch of stuff around maturity.And if you're engineering leader, ultimately, questions you care about, like, “How fast are my developers working? I have this massive team, we've made this massive investment in hiring all these humans to write software and bring value for our customers. How can we be more efficient as a business in terms of that value delivery?” And that's where OpsLevel can help as well.Corey: Guardrails, whether they be economic, regulatory, or otherwise, have to make it easier than doing things incorrectly because one of the miracle aspects of cloud also turns into a bit of a problem, which is shadow IT is only ever a corporate credit card away. Make it too difficult to comply with corporate policies and people won't. And they're good actors; they're trying to get work done. They're not trying to make people's lives harder, but they don't want to spend six weeks provisioning an EC2 cluster. So, there's always that weird trade-off.Now, it feels—and please correct me if I'm wrong—once someone has rolled out OpsLevel at their organization, where it really shines is spinning up a new service where okay, great, you're going to spin up the automatic observability portion of it, you're going to spin up the underlying infrastructure in certain ways that comply with our policies, it's going to build the CI/CD pipelines around it, you're going to wind up having the various cost instrumentation rolled out to it. But for services that are already excellent within the environment, is there an OpsLevel story for them?Ken: Oh, absolutely. So, I look at it as, like, the first problem OpsLevel helps solve is the catalog and what's out there and who owns it. So, not even getting developers to spin up new services that are kind of on the golden path, but just understanding the taxonomy of what are the services we have? How do those services compose into higher-level things like systems or domains? What's the whole set of infrastructure we have?Like, I have 50 AWS accounts, maybe a handful of GCP ones, also, some Azure. I have all this infrastructure that, like, how do I start to get a handle on, like, what's out there in prod and who's responsible for it. And that helps you get in front of compliance risks, security risks. That's really the starting point for OpsLevel building that catalog. And we have a bunch of integrations that kind of slurp all this data to automatically assemble that catalog, or YAML as well if that's your thing. But that's the starting point is building that catalog and figuring out this assignment of, like, okay, this service and this human, or this—sorry—team, like, they're paired together.Corey: A number of offerings in this space, which honestly, my exposure to it is bounded simultaneously to things that are ten years old and no one uses anymore, or a bunch of things I found on GitHub. And the challenge that both of those products tend to have is that they assume certain things to be true about a given environment: that they're using Terraform to manage everything, or they're always going to be using CloudFormation, or everyone there knows Python or something else like that. What are the prerequisites to get started with OpsLevel?Ken: Yeah, so we worked pretty hard to build just a ton of integrations. I would say integrations is are just continuing thing we have going on in the background. Like, when we started, like, we only supported a GitHub. Now, we support all the gits, you know, like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, like, we're building [unintelligible 00:16:19]. There's just a whole, like, long tail of integrations.The same with APM tooling. The same with vulnerability management tooling, right? And the reason we do that is because there's just this huge vendor footprint, and people, you know, want OpsLevel to work for them. Now, the other thing we try to do is we also build APIs. So, anything we have as, like, a core integration, we also have kind of like an underlying API for, so that there's, no matter what you have an escape hatch. If like, you're using some tool that we don't support or you have some homegrown thing, there's always a way to try to be able to integrate that into OpsLevel.Corey: When people think about developer portals, the most common one that pops to mind is Backstage, which Spotify wound up building, internally, championing, open-sourcing, and I believe, on some level, turned into a product because if there's one thing people want, it's to have their podcast music company become a SaaS vendor, which is weird to me. But the criticisms that I've seen about and across the board have rung relatively true, including from people internal at Spotify who have used the thing, which is, well first is underestimating the amount of effort that is necessary to maintain Backstage itself, that the build versus buy discussion is always harder to bu—engineers love to build, but they shouldn't be building things outside of their core competency half the time, and the other is driving adoption within the org where you can have the most amazing developer portal in the known universe, but if people don't use it, it may as well not exist and doing the carrot and stick approach often doesn't work. I think you have a pretty good answer that I need not even ask you to elaborate on, “Well, how do we avoid having to maintain this ourselves,” since you have a company that does this, but how do you find companies are driving adoption successfully once they have deployed OpsLevel?Ken: Yeah, that's a great question. So, absolutely. Like, I think the biggest thing you need first, is kind of cultural buy-in and that this is a tool that we want to invest in, right? I think one of the reasons Spotify was successful with Backstage and I think it was System Z before that was that they had this kind of flywheel of, like, they saw that their developers were getting, you know better faster, working happier, by using this type of tooling, by reducing the cognitive load. The way that we approach it is sort of similar, right?We want to make sure that there is executive buy-in that, like, everybody agrees this is, like, a problem that's worth solving. The first step we do is trying to build out that catalog again and helping assign ownership. And that helps people understand, like, hey, these are the services I'm responsible for. Oh, look, and now here's this other context that I didn't have before. And then helping organizations, you know, what—it depends on the problem we're trying to solve, but whether it's rolling out self-serve automation to help developers, like, reduce what was before a ton of cognitive load or if it's helping platform teams define what good looks like so they can start to level up the overall health of what's running in production, we kind of work on different problems, but it's picking one problem and then you know, kind of working with the customers and driving it forward.Corey: On some level, I think that this is going to be looked down upon inherently just by automatic reflex of folks with infrastructure engineering backgrounds. It's taken me some time to learn to overcome my own negative reaction to it. Because it's, I'm here to build things and I want to build things out in such a way that it's portable and reusable without having to be tied to a particular vendor and move on. And it took me a long time to realize that what that instinct was whispering in my ear was in fact, no, you should be your own cloud provider. If that's really what I want to do, I probably should just brush up on you know, computer science trivia from 20 years ago and then go see if I can pass Google's SRE interview.I'm not here to build the things that just provision infrastructure from scratch every company I wind up landing at. It feels like there's more important, impactful work that I can do. And let's be clear, people are never going to follow guardrails themselves when they have to do a bunch of manual steps. It has to be something that is done for them. And I don't know how you necessarily get there without having some form of blueprint or something like that, provided for them with something that is self-service because otherwise, it's not going to work.Ken: I a hundred percent agree, by the way, Corey. Like, the take that, like, automation is the only way to drive a lot of this forward is true, right? If for every single thing you're trying—like, we have a concept called a rubric and it's basically how you measure the service health. And you can—it's very customizable, you have different dimensions. But if, for any check that's on your rubric, it requires manual effort from all your developers, that is going to be harder than something you can just automate away.So, vulnerability management is a great example. If you tell developers, “Hey, you have to go upgrade this library,” okay, some percentage [unintelligible 00:20:47], if you give developers, “Here's a pull request that's already been done and has a test passing and now you just need to merge it,” you're going to have a much better adoption rate with that. Similarly with, like, applying templates being able to [up-level 00:20:57], you know, kind of apply the latest version of a template to an existing service, those types of capabilities, anything where you can automate what the fixes are, absolutely you're going to get better adoption.Corey: As you take a look at your existing reference customers—which is something I always look for on vendor websites because, like, oh, we have many customers who will absolutely not admit to being customers, it's like, that sounds like something that's easy to say—you have actual names tied to these things. Not just companies, but also individuals. If you were to sit down and ask your existing customer base, “So, why did you wind up implementing OpsLevel and what has the value that's delivered to you been since that implementation?” What do they say?Ken: Definitely. I actually had to check our website because we, you know, land new customers and put new logos on it. I was like, “Oh, I wonder what the current set is out right now?”Corey: I have the exact same challenge. Like oh, we have some mutual customers. And it's okay. I don't know if I can mention them by name because I haven't checked our own list of testimonials [unintelligible 00:21:51] lately because say the wrong thing and that's how you wind up being sued and not having a company anymore.Ken: Yeah. So, I don't—I definitely, you know, want to stay [on side 00:22:00] on that part, but in terms of, like, kind of sample reference customer, a lot of the folks that we initially worked with are the platform teams, right? They're the teams that care about what's out there, and they need to know who's responsible for it because they're trying to drive some kind of cross-cutting change across the entire, you know, production footprint. And so, the first thing that generally people will say is—and I love this quote. This came—I won't name them, but like, it's in one of our case studies.It was like, “I had, like, 50 different attempts at making a spreadsheet and they're all, like, in the graveyard, like, to be able to capture what's out there and who's responsible for it.” And just OpsLevel helping automate that has been one of the biggest values that they've gotten. The second point, then is now be able to drive maturity and be able to measure how well those services are being built. And again, it's sort of this interesting thing where we start with the platform teams. And then sometime later security teams find out about OpsLevel, and they're like, “Oh, this is a tool I can use to, like, get developers to do stuff? Like, I've been trying to get developers to do stuff for the longest time.”And they—I file Jira tickets and they just sit there and nothing gets done. But when it becomes part of this, like, overall health score that you're trying to increase a part of the across the board, yeah, it's just a way to kind of drive action.Corey: I think that there's a dichotomy of companies that emerge. And I tend to see the world through a lens of AWS bills, so let's go down that path. I feel like there are some companies presumably like OpsLevel, whereas if I—assuming you're running on top of AWS—if I were to pull your AWS bill, I would see upwards of 80% of your spend is going to be on this application called OpsLevel, the service that you provide to people. As opposed to the other side of the world, which is large enterprises, where they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but the largest application they have is a million-and-a-half a year in spend because just, they have thousands of these things scattered everywhere. That latter case is where I tend to see more platform teams, where I start to see a lot of managing a whole bunch of relatively small workloads. And developer platforms really seem to be where a lot of solutions lead, whereas 80% of our workload is one application, we don't feel the need for that as much. Is that accurate? Am I misunderstanding some aspect of it?Ken: No, a hundred percent you'd hit the nail on the head. Like, okay, think about the typical, like, microservices adoption journey. Like, you started with, you know, some small company—like us—you started with a monolith. Ah, maybe you built out a second app—Corey: Then you read on Hacker News and realize, “Oh, if we want to hire people, we've got to be doing what all the cool kids are up to.”Ken: Right. We got a microservice all the thing—but that's actually you know, microservices should come later, right, as a response to you needing scale your org and scale your—Corey: As someone who started building some application with microservices, I could not agree more.Ken: A hundred percent. So, it's as you're starting to take steps to having just more moving parts in your production infrastructure, right? If you have one moving part, unless it's like a really large moving part that you can internally break down, like, kind of this majestic monolith where you do have kind of like individual domains that are owned by different teams, but really the problem we're trying to solve, it's more about, like, who owns what. Now, if that's a single atomic unit, great, but can you decompose that? But if you just have, like, one small application, kind of like the whole team is owning everything, again, a developer portal is probably not the right tool for you. It really is a tool that you need as you start to scale your engineer work and as you start to scale the number of moving parts in your production infrastructure.Corey: I tended to use to think of that in terms of boring companies versus innovative ones and I don't think that's accurate. I think it is the question of maturity and where companies lead to. On some level, of OpsLevel starts growing and becomes larger and larger in different ways and starts doing acquisitions and launching into other areas, at some point, you don't have just one product offering, you have a multitude of them. At which point having something like that is going to be critical. But I have to ask, given that you are sort of not exactly your target customer profile, what are the sharp edges been on using it for your use case?Ken: Yeah. So, we actually have an internal Slack channel, we call OpsLevel on OpsLevel. And finding those sharp edges actually has been really useful for us. You know, all the good stuff, dogfooding and it makes your own product better. Okay, so we have our main app, we also do have a bunch of smaller things and it's like, oh yeah, you know, we have, like, I don't know, various Hackaday things that go on, it's important we kind of wind those down for, you know, compliance, we have our marketing site, we have, like, our Terraform.Like, so there's, like, stuff. It's not, like, hundreds or thousands of things, but there's more than just the main app. The second though, is it's really on the maturity piece that we really try to get a lot of value out of our own product, right? Helping—we have our own platform team. They're also trying to drive certain initiatives with our product developers.There is that usual tension of our, like, our own product developers are like, “I want to ship features.” What's this security thing I have to go take care of right now? But OpsLevel itself, like, helps reflect that. We had an operational review today and it was like, “Oh, this one service is actually now”—we have platinum as a level. It's in gold instead of platinum. It's like, “Why?” “Oh, there's this thing that came up. We got to go fix that.” “Great. Let's go actually go fix that so we're back into platinum.”Corey: Do you find that there's often a choice you have to make internally, where you could make the product more effective for your specific use case, but that also diverges from where your typical customer needs or wants the product to go?Ken: No, I think a lot of the things we find for our use case are, like, they're more small paper cuts, right? They're just as we're using it, it's like, “Hey, like, as I'm using this, I want to see the report for this particular check. Why do I have to click six times to get?” You know, like, “Wouldn't it be great if we had a button?” Right?And so, it's those type of, like, small innovations that kind of come up. And those ultimately lead to, you know, a better product for our customers. We also work really closely with our customers and developers are not shy about telling you what they don't like about your product. And I say this with love, like, a lot of our customers give us phenomenal feedback just on how our product can be better and we try to internalize that and you know, roll that feedback into the product.Corey: You have a number of integrations of different SaaS providers, infrastructure providers, et cetera, that you wind up working with. I imagine that given your scale and scope and whatnot, those offerings are dictated by what customers say, “Hey, we're using this thing. Are you going to support that or are you not going to maintain our business?” Which is a great way to wind up financing a lot of product development and figuring out what matters to people. My question for you is, if you look across the totality of your user base, what are the most popularly used integrations, if you can say?Ken: Yeah, for sure. I think right now—I could actually dive in to pull the numbers—GitHub and GitLab—or… I think GitHub, like, has slightly more adoption across our customer base. At least with our customers, almost nobody uses Bitbucket. I mean, we have, like, a small number, but, like, it's… I think, single-digit percentage. A lot of people use PagerDuty, which you know, hey, I'm an ex-PagerDuty person [crosstalk 00:28:24] and I'm glad to see that.Corey: I have a free tier PagerDuty account that will automatically page me for my home automation stuff. Specifically, if you know, the fire alarm goes off. Like, yeah, okay, there are certain things I want to be woken up for, but it's a very short list.Ken: Yeah, it's funny, the running default message when we use a test PagerDuty was, “The server is on fire.” [unintelligible 00:28:44] be like, “The house is on fire.” Like you know, go get that taken care of. There's one other tool so that's used a lot. Datadog actually is used a ton by just across our entire customer base, despite its… we're also Data—we're a Datadog partner, we're a Datadog customer, you know? It's not cheap, but it's a good product for, you know, monitoring and logs and there are [crosstalk 00:29:01]—Corey: No other than cloud infrastructure providers, I get the number one most common source of inquiries is Datadog optimization. It has now risen to a board-level concern in many cases because observability is expensive. That's a sign of success, on some level. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, like, Date-a-dog? Oh, my God, that's disgusting. It's like Tinder for Pets. Which it turns out is not at all what they do.Ken: Nice.Corey: Yeah.[audio break 00:29:23]—optimizing their Slack integrations, their GitHub integration, et cetera. Or are they starting with the spinning up the servers piece of it?Ken: A lot of the time—and again, that first problem they're trying to solve is just get me a handle on everything we have running in production. You know, if you have multiple AWS accounts, multiple Kubernetes clusters, dozens or even hundreds of teams, God help you if you're going to try to, like, build a list manually to consolidate all that information. That's really the first part is, like, integrate Kubernetes, integrate your CI/CD pipelines, integrate Git, integrate your Cloud account, like, will integrate with everything and will try to build that map of, like, here's everything that's out there, and start to try to assign it to, like, and here's people that we think might be responsible in terms of owning the software. That's generally the starting point.Corey: Which makes an awesome amount of sense. I think going at it from the infrastructure first perspective is where I've seen most developer platforms founder. And to be fair, the job is easier now than it was years ago because it used to be that you were being out-innovated by AWS constantly. Innovation has slow down there. And you know that because of how much they say the pace of innovation has only sped up.And whenever AWS says something in a marketing context, they're insecure about it. I've learned this through the fullness of time observing that company. And these days, most customers do not use the majority of features available for any given service. They have solidified to a point where you can responsibly build on top of these things. Now, it seems that the problem is all the ‘yes, and' stuff that gets built on top of it.Ken: Yeah. Do you have an example, actually, like, one of the kinds of, like, ‘yes, and' tools that you're thinking about?Corey: Oh, absolutely. We have a bunch of AWS environment stuff so we should configure CloudWatch to look at all these things from an observability perspective. No, you should not. You should set up Datadog. And the first time someone does that by hand, they enable all have the observability and the rest and suddenly get charged approximately the GDP of Guam.And okay, maybe we shouldn't do that because then you have the downstream impact of that on your CloudWatch bill. So okay, how do we optimize this for the observability piece directly tied to that? How do we make sure that we get woken up when the site is down or preferably before that, but not every time basically, a EBS volume starts to get a little bit toasty? You have to start dialing this stuff in. And once you've found a lot of those aspects, being able to templatize that and roll that out on an ongoing basis and having the integrations all work together feels like it's the right problem to be solving.Ken: Yeah, absolutely. And the group that I think is responsible for that kind of—because it's a set of problems you described—is really, like, platform teams. Sometimes service owners for like, how should we get paged, but really, what you're describing are these kind of cross-cutting engineering concerns that platform teams are uniquely poised to help solve in an [unintelligible 00:32:03] organization, right? I was thinking what you said earlier. Like, nobody just wants to rebuild the same info over and over, but it's sort of like, it's not just building an [unintelligible 00:32:09]; it's kind of like solving this, like, how do we ship? Can we actually run stuff in prod? And not just run it but get observability and ensure that we're woken up for it and, like, what's that total end-to-end look like from, like, developers writing code to running software in production that's serving traffic? And solving all the problems [unintelligible 00:32:24], that's what I think of was platform engineering.Corey: So, my last question before we wind up wrapping this episode comes down to, I am very adept at two different programming languages, and those are brute force and enthusiasm. What implementation language is most of what you find yourself working with? And why is it in invariably going to be YAML?Ken: Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think there's, in terms of implementing OpsLevel and implementing a service catalog, we support YAML. Like, you know, there's this very common workflow, you just drop a YAML spec, basically, in your repo, if you're a service owner. And that, we can support that. I don't think that's a great take, though.Like, we have other integrations. Again, if the problem you're trying to solve is I want to build a catalog of everything that's out there, asking each of your developers hey, can you please all write YAML files that, like, describe the services you own and drop them into this repo? You've inverted this, like, database that essentially you're trying to build, like, what's out there and stored it in Git, potentially across several hundreds or thousands of repos. You put a lot of toil now on individual product developers to go write and maintain these files. And if you ever had to, like, make a blanket update to these files, there's no atomic way to kind of do that, right?So, I look at YAML as, like, I get it, you know? Like, we use the YAML for all the things in DevOps, so why not their service catalog as well, but I think it's toil. Like, there are easier ways to build a catalog. By, kind of, just integrate. Like, hook up AWS, hook up GitHub, hook up Kubernetes, hook up your CI/CD pipeline, hook up all these different sources that have information about what's running in prod, and let the software, let the tool, automatically infer what's actually running as opposed to requiring humans to manually enter data.Corey: I find that there are remarkably few technical holy wars that I cannot unify both sides on by nominating something far worse. Like, the VI versus Emacs stuff, the tabs versus spaces, and of course, the JSON versus YAML folks. My JSON versus YAML answer is XML: God's language. I find that as soon as you suggest that, people care a hell of a lot less about the differences between JSON and YAML because their job is to now kill the apostate, which is me.Ken: Right. Yeah. I remember XML, like, oh, man, 2002. SOAP. I remember SOAP as a protocol. That was a thing.Corey: Some of the earliest S3 API calls were done in SOAP, and I think they finally just used it to wash their mouths out when all was said and done.Ken: Nice. Yeah.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to do your level best to attempt to convert me, and I would argue in many respects, you have succeeded. I'm thinking about this differently than I did half an hour ago. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Ken: Absolutely. So, you can always check out our website, opslevel.com. We're also fairly active on LinkedIn. If Twitter hasn't imploded by the time this episode becomes launched, then they can also check us out at twitter.com/OpsLevelHQ. We're always posting, just different content on, like, how to be successful with service maturity, DevOps, developer productivity, so that you know, ultimately, that you can ship out to customers faster.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:23]. Thank you so much for taking the time, not just to speak with me, but also for sponsoring this episode. It is appreciated.Ken: Cheers.Corey: Ken Rose, CTO and co-founder at OpsLevel. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this has been a promoted guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment which, upon further reflection, you could have posted to all of the podcast platforms if only you had the right developer platform to pull it off.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Heute geht es um den jährlichen State of Cloud Report, in dem Führungskräfte und Fachleute aus verschiedenen Unternehmen zu den Trends, Themen und Herausforderungen der Cloud-Nutzung befragt werden. Der Report liefert wertvolle Erkenntnisse und bewährte Strategien, die Unternehmen dabei unterstützen, ihre Cloud-Strategie zu optimieren und von den Erfahrungen anderer zu lernen.Weiteren Schwerpunkte dieser Episode:Welche Strategien setzen Unternehmen zunehmend ein, um ihre Workloads in der Cloud optimal zu verteilen? Was sind die führenden Anbieter im Bereich der Cloud-Lösungen? Welche Bedeutung hat die genaue Kalkulation der Kosten bei der Nutzung der Cloud? Wie entwickeln sich die Ausgaben von KMUs im Vergleich zu größeren Unternehmen? Welche Trends gibt es in Bezug auf Cloud-Migration und Optimierung der Cloud-Nutzung in Europa? Was sind die Ziele der Unternehmen bezüglich der Cloud-Kostenoptimierung und der Cloud-First-Strategie?

Heute geht es um den jährlichen State of Cloud Report, in dem Führungskräfte und Fachleute aus verschiedenen Unternehmen zu den Trends, Themen und Herausforderungen der Cloud-Nutzung befragt werden. Der Report liefert wertvolle Erkenntnisse und bewährte Strategien, die Unternehmen dabei unterstützen, ihre Cloud-Strategie zu optimieren und von den Erfahrungen anderer zu lernen.Weiteren Schwerpunkte dieser Episode:Welche Strategien setzen Unternehmen zunehmend ein, um ihre Workloads in der Cloud optimal zu verteilen? Was sind die führenden Anbieter im Bereich der Cloud-Lösungen? Welche Bedeutung hat die genaue Kalkulation der Kosten bei der Nutzung der Cloud? Wie entwickeln sich die Ausgaben von KMUs im Vergleich zu größeren Unternehmen? Welche Trends gibt es in Bezug auf Cloud-Migration und Optimierung der Cloud-Nutzung in Europa? Was sind die Ziele der Unternehmen bezüglich der Cloud-Kostenoptimierung und der Cloud-First-Strategie?

When you're deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it's helpful to step back and get a broader view of what's happening in the industry. On today's Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. Our guest to help us unpack the report is Keith Townsend.

When you're deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it's helpful to step back and get a broader view of what's happening in the industry. On today's Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. Our guest to help us unpack the report is Keith Townsend. The post Day Two Cloud 194: Unpacking Flexera’s State Of The Cloud Report With Keith Townsend appeared first on Packet Pushers.

When you're deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it's helpful to step back and get a broader view of what's happening in the industry. On today's Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. Our guest to help us unpack the report is Keith Townsend. The post Day Two Cloud 194: Unpacking Flexera’s State Of The Cloud Report With Keith Townsend appeared first on Packet Pushers.

When you're deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it's helpful to step back and get a broader view of what's happening in the industry. On today's Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. Our guest to help us unpack the report is Keith Townsend.

When you're deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it's helpful to step back and get a broader view of what's happening in the industry. On today's Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. Our guest to help us unpack the report is Keith Townsend. The post Day Two Cloud 194: Unpacking Flexera’s State Of The Cloud Report With Keith Townsend appeared first on Packet Pushers.

When you're deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it's helpful to step back and get a broader view of what's happening in the industry. On today's Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. Our guest to help us unpack the report is Keith Townsend.

Adopting environmentally friendly measures is currently a central concern for all industries, and the tech world is not an exception. Mark Bradley walks us through what sustainability in IT really means, why it is our responsibility, and some possible next steps, challenges and opportunities, as well as the importance of getting educated on the subject and promoting collaboration between vendors. Mark Bradley is the Senior Product Manager at Flexera. He has over 20 years of experience in the IT Industry and has gone through different roles until diving into IT Leadership and Service Management. He has worked for companies such as Zurich Life Bank, JP Morgan, Motorola and HP.

Ulli Appelbaum has held senior strategy and account planning roles at some of the largest advertising agencies in the world, working with brands like Wrigley, Hallmark, Nestle, and Chrysler along the way. His latest book is The Brand Positioning Workbook, which we discussed this week on the On Brand podcast. About Ulli Appelbaum Born in Germany, raised in Africa and Belgium, and now living in the US, Ulli Appelbaum has held senior strategy and account planning roles at some of the largest advertising agencies in the world including BBDO Germany and Chicago, Leo Burnett Budapest, Frankfurt & Chicago, Fallon Worldwide in Minneapolis, and SapientNitro in Chicago, L.A., and Minneapolis. His insights and strategies have helped brands such as Wrigley, Nestle Purina, Harley Davidson, Hallmark, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Chrysler, and many more. In 2014, he launched First The Trousers Then The Shoes Inc. a brand research and strategy consultancy based here in Minneapolis working for clients including Siemens, Outlaw Energy Drinks, Post Consumer Brands, Angel's Envy/Bacardi, Flexera, Anchore, Double Good, Verve Credit Union and a few more. Ulli is the author of The Brand Positioning Workbook: A Simple How-To Guide To More Compelling Brand Positionings, Faster, the best-selling Positioning Development Method Cards, Aha!, The Ultimate Insight Generation Toolkit, and 26 Popular Children Games from Around The World, a set of game cards created to help promote cultural understanding and tolerance among children through play. Episode Highlights The strategy on the shelf. After a quick laugh up front, Ulli and I opened the show with a conversation about strategy. Often, when digging deeper with clients, Ulli found an old strategy “on the shelf” that no one was really using. How can you make strategy more actionable? This, like many things, comes to better understanding your customer. Ulli shared a recent client experience that reinforced the need for better insights and research. A workbook for the work of brand positioning. When Ulli embarked on his latest book, he found no shortage of existing books on positioning. However, as a seasoned brand builder, Ulli knows that positioning is a lot of work. That's why he set out to create not an encyclopedia of brand positioning but rather a simple workbook for setting this critical process in motion—The Brand Positioning Workbook. What brand has made Ulli smile recently? Ulli shared the latest work from McDonald's UK, where the brand has made the bold move of not showing the restaurants or food but rather their iconic (golden) arches as eyebrows. To learn more, connect with him on LinkedIn or check out his website for First The Trousers Then The Shoes.  As We Wrap … Listen and subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon/Audible, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeart, YouTube, and RSS. Rate and review the show—If you like what you're hearing, be sure to head over to Apple Podcasts and click the 5-star button to rate the show. And, if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review to help others find the show. Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you'd like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. On Brand is a part of the Marketing Podcast Network. Until next week, I'll see you on the Internet! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ulli Appelbaum's new book, The Brand Positioning Workbook: A simple how-to guide to more compelling brand positionings, faster, codifies for the first time his proven process for successful brand positioning. Born out of Appelbaum's previous work creating the Method Card Deck Positioning-Roulette, this clear and concise methodology challenges preconceived notions of strategic development, introducing a more effective and efficient process for branding. The book is immediately useful and surprisingly effective. In the words of one brand strategy professional, “…we were astonished how well [these principles] worked and how quickly we were able to hone in on a territory for the brand we were working on.”Drawing on over a hundred years of brand strategy culled from 1,200 case studies, The Brand Positioning Workbook is the definitive guide for teaching strategic processes to new brand strategists, as well as a useful resource for enhancing the abilities of seasoned veterans in the field.Jill Baskin, CMO, The Hershey Company says, “The book is packed with easy-to-follow exercises that guarantee a compelling brand positioning. Lots of helpful examples and blessedly free of marketing catchphrases.”The Brand Positioning Workbook is the definitive educational resource for guiding professional brand strategists into a productive and effective process for defining and executing modern branding efforts.Drawing from author Ulli Appelbaum's extensive career as a senior brand strategist and planner at some of the top advertising agencies in the world today, this book amplifies the role of a strategist as the primary guide on the branding journey. It introduces the reader to easily implemented problem-solving tools, proven territories for productive brainstorming, ideas for breaking down biases and group think, tips for more productive virtual brainstorming sessions and much more.This is the one book that every brand strategy professional needs in their library. Its hands-on, active-learning approach makes the material immediately accessible, while its concepts can be easily implemented in both new and existing branding efforts.ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Ulli Appelbaum is an award-winning marketing and brand strategy consultant with more than 20 years of experience creating brand strategies and building brands. He has held senior strategy roles at some of the largest advertising agencies in the world including BBDO Germany (Head of Strategy), BBDO Chicago (Global Strategy lead on Wrigley's), Leo Burnett Chicago (Head of Planning), Fallon Worldwide (Global Strategy Director on Nestle Purina), and SapientNitro (Director of Brand Strategy & Experience). In 2014 he founded boutique brand strategy shop, First The Trousers Then The Shoes, Inc. in Minneapolis, working with a global client roster that includes Post Consumer Brands, Land O'Lakes, Angel's Envy, Siemens, Flexera, Anchore and Cyber Risk Alliance among others. In addition to his new book, The Brand Positioning Workbook: A simple how-to guide to more compelling brand positionings, faster, Appelbaum is also the creator of 2 sets of method cards to help marketers be better at their jobs: The best-selling “Positioning-Roulette” method for stimulating and inspiring thinking when developing brand positioning platforms, brand positioning statements, value propositions, communication strategies, and product concepts; and “Aha! The Ultimate Insight Generation Toolkit”, designed to help mine for and uncover insights faster.Appelbaum is a blogger for the Huffington Post, a contributor to various trade publications in the US and Europe, a regular podcast interviewee and speaker, and is a member of the Practitioner Council of the American Marketing Association.Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/ulli-appelbaum-author-brilliance-business

Jim Ryan, the CEO of Flexera, is my guest on this episode. Jim has moved up in his career with intentionality and a great deal of self-awareness. He shares with us what it takes professionally – and personally – to step 100% into that next level of responsibility. About the Guest: Jim Ryan leads Flexera, a global, privately-held $400M+ software company headquartered outside of Chicago. He has been with the company since 1998, in roles that included Chief Operating Officer, SVP of Global Sales, and Managing Director of EMEA, where he lived in the United Kingdom for seven years. Jim has served as an Operating Advisor to the Private Equity Firm Thoma Bravo since 2014, specializing in the area of sales. Jim also sits on outside Boards leveraging his experience and track record of delivering results at Flexera. Jim started his career at IBM in sales and remains passionate about the sales profession. Jim was instrumental in forming Marquette University's Sales Program, which is designed to help students excel in their career as salespeople and currently acts as an Advisory Board Member to the program. He is frequently asked to speak on business topics, including Technology Value Optimization, private equity, M&A, sales strategy, leadership, and culture. Jim holds a BA from Marquette University, where he studied Political Science and French. https://www.flexera.com/ (https://www.flexera.com/)   About the Host: Amy L. Riley is an internationally renowned speaker, author and consultant. She has over 2 decades of experience developing leaders at all levels. Her clients include Cisco Systems, Deloitte and Barclays. As a trusted leadership coach and consultant, Amy has worked with hundreds of leaders one-on-one, and thousands more as part of a group, to fully step into their leadership, create amazing teams and achieve extraordinary results.   Amy's most popular keynote speeches are: The Courage of a Leader: The Power of a Leadership Legacy The Courage of a Leader: Create a Competitive Advantage with Sustainable, Results-Producing Cross-System Collaboration The Courage of a Leader: Accelerate Trust with Your Team, Customers and Community The Courage of a Leader: How to Build a Happy and Successful Hybrid Team   Her new book is a #1 international best-seller and is entitled, The Courage of a Leader: How to Inspire, Engage and Get Extraordinary Results.  http://www.courageofaleader.com (www.courageofaleader.com) https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyshoopriley/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyshoopriley/)   Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to The Courage of a Leader podcast! If you got inspired and/or got valuable leadership techniques you can use from this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have questions or feedback about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new The Courage of a Leader podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which helps us ignite The Courage of a Leader in more leaders! Please take a minute and leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.   Teaser for next episode Tune in next for “How to Fearlessly Focus Your Team to Truly Make a Difference” with Barbara Best, Founder of Cap Strat and Cap Strat Women's Forum

Multi-cloud remains the “de facto standard” among enterprises, according to Flexera's 2022 State of the Cloud Report, with 89% of businesses taking this approach. Yet, while many companies would love to follow suit, they don't know where to start.On this episode of IT Availability Now, host Servaas Verbiest and guest James Mora, Vice President of Engineering and Operations at Sungard AS, discuss what organizations should consider when developing a multi-cloud strategy. Listen to this full episode to learn:How to determine the right cloud strategy for your business and what this looks like in practiceWhy you must plan for how you will support and maintain these new environmentsWhat steps your organization should take to ensure it properly maintains and supports a multi-cloud environmentAs Director of Product Field Strategy at Sungard AS, Servaas Verbiest assists businesses and organizations in realizing the full potential of cloud computing by thinking strategically, deploying rapidly, and acting as an ambassador for the cloud ecosystem. While at Sungard AS, Servaas has worked with more than 1,000 unique clients across multiple industries on complex application deployments, re-platforming, public cloud integrations, private cloud deployments, application lifecycle, and hybrid cloud model development.James Mora is Vice President of Engineering and Operations for Sungard Availability Services. James has more than 20 years' experience in Product Engineering. In this role, he is focused on providing pre-sales solutioning, product engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, security operations and customer implementation support for Cloud and Managed Services. James joined Sungard in 2016, and has since transformed engineering into an Agile and DevOps organization delivering flagship Private and Public Cloud services.Listen and subscribe to IT Availability Now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Podchaser, deezer, Podcast Addict, Listen Notes, and more.

What's the most effective way a marketing team can help its company grow? The answer may be simpler than you think. Roy Ritthaler, the Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Flexera, talks about his first eight months at the IT solutions company and why getting back to the basics is essential for growth. Tune in to learn how to take your marketing team to the next level!Tune in to learn:What's the goal of a CMO in their first 90 days? (6:45)The importance of a getting back to the basics (16:50)The agile approach to marketing (35:30)Flexera's culture of “candor” (46:50)Mention:“Following the Money With Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera”Marketing Trends is brought to you by Salesforce Marketing Cloud. For more great marketing insights, sign up for The Marketing Moments newsletter. You'll get ideas to help you build better customer relationships, invites to upcoming events, and access to the latest industry research. Subscribe at https://sforce.co/MarketingMoments

The power has shifted from organizations to people. How do you meet the new expectations employees have? How do you retain your top performers? My guest today is El Lages, Chief People and Culture Officer at Flexera, and we talked about how she and her team are strategically and creatively planning for a flexible work environment, while also not forgetting the basics. I'm glad you're here to listen in. And, then we'd love to hear from you. Leave a message in the comments about your lessons learned about working virtually or in a hybrid setup. About the Guest: Elizabeth Lages is a change agent. El, as she is known, has spent her time building operational excellence throughout the organization. She is known for increasing employee engagement, driving rigor in our sales processes, and building relationships with her optimism and warmth. She is instrumental in making Flexera a “top workplace” through performance management, manager training, and continuous employee feedback. El has been with the company since 2004 in various sales and operations leadership roles before moving into organizational effectiveness in 2017. Born and raised in New York City, El has a B.S. in communications at State University of New York. About the Host: Amy L. Riley is an internationally renowned speaker, author and consultant. She has over 2 decades of experience developing leaders at all levels. Her clients include Cisco Systems, Deloitte and Barclays. As a trusted leadership coach and consultant, Amy has worked with hundreds of leaders one-on-one, and thousands more as part of a group, to fully step into their leadership, create amazing teams and achieve extraordinary results.    Amy's most popular keynote speeches are: The Courage of a Leader: The Power of a Leadership Legacy The Courage of a Leader: Create a Competitive Advantage with Sustainable, Results-Producing Cross-System Collaboration The Courage of a Leader: Accelerate Trust with Your Team, Customers and Community The Courage of a Leader: How to Build a Happy and Successful Hybrid Team   Her new book is a #1 international best-seller and is entitled, The Courage of a Leader: How to Inspire, Engage and Get Extraordinary Results.   http://www.courageofaleader.com (www.courageofaleader.com) https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyshoopriley/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyshoopriley/)   Links mentioned in the episode http://www.managertools.com (www.managertools.com)   Call to action We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message in the comments about your lessons learned about working virtually or in a hybrid setup.   Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to The Courage of a Leader podcast! If you got inspired and/or got valuable leadership techniques you can use from this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have questions or feedback about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new The Courage of a Leader podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which helps us ignite The Courage of a Leader in more leaders! Please take a minute and leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.   Teaser for next episode Tune in on May 31 to hear from my next podcast guest, Erin Lavelle, Chief Financial Officer at WittKieffer, as we explore the power of authentic leadership to improve relationships, retention, and bottom-line results.

In this month's episode, we talk multi-cloud. This is a challenging topic, even the first step—nailing down what the term actually means—isn't easy. How does it differ from hybrid-cloud or poly-cloud? Does the term refer to the deployment approach for a single application or an entire organisation? We discuss the challenges of creating a multi-cloud architecture, dealing with multiple cloud vendors, and why you might follow this path. Colin is joined by colleagues James Heward and Robert Griffiths to compare thoughts and experiences gained from many years of architecting solutions for the cloud. Links from the podcast: Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report – Brian Adler Decoder: Polycloud – Thoughtworks White Paper: Thinking differently - the cloud as a value driver – Scott Logic

For more than twenty years, Jim Ryan has helped shepherd Flexera, a global software company, into massive success. How has he managed to help keep core values in the midst of expansion? He stops by Business X factors to talk about scaling with integrity, following the money, and why bureaucracy might not be a dirty word, after all. Tune in to learn:How do you simplify complexity? (8:11)How is technology just like electricity? (10:18)What does it take to reduce IT spend? (11:50)What is the human touch you need when looking at IT spend? (13:00)How to bring technological innovation into your organization. (15:00)Where will the technological landscape be in 10 years? (17:00)Which scaling cliches actually have truth behind them? (18:50)Business X factors is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by Hyland. For over a decade, Hyland has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, leading the way to help people get the information they need when and where they need it. More than half of 2019 Fortune 100 companies rely on Hyland to help them create more meaningful connections with the people they serve. When your focus is on the people you serve, Hyland stands behind you. Hyland is your X factor for better performance. Go to http://www.Hyland.com/insights to learn more.Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at http://mission.org

While 92% of organizations have adopted multi-cloud, per Flexera's 2021 State of the Cloud Report, there's a strong likelihood many aren't optimizing this cloud strategy.In this episode of IT Availability Now, Leon Godwin, Principal Cloud Evangelist at Sungard AS, examines everything multi-cloud, including what it is, the advantages, what's driving mass adoption and tips to getting the most out of this popular cloud consumption model. Listen to the full episode to learn:What makes multi-cloud a worthwhile approach What businesses must consider when choosing a multi-cloud strategy, including cost, security and geographyHow storage, availability and network connectivity factor into the multi-cloud decision-making processHow organizations can decide what clouds are right for themLeon Godwin is the Principal Cloud Evangelist at Sungard AS. As a cloud evangelist, Leon balances the duties of a product marketer with being one of Sungard AS's direct links to customers. Building a critical mass of support for cloud technologies through thought leadership, enthusiasm and many years of experience, Leon aids customers with complex challenges and helps them adopt creative, robust and efficient cloud solutions.Listen and subscribe to IT Availability Now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Podchaser, deezer, Podcast Addict, Listen Notes, and more.

It's makeover time. In this live show, CEO and Co-founder of Directive, Garrett Mehrguth, and a SaaS marketing leader work together to build a strategy for a recognizable SaaS brand - as quickly as possible. The company will be randomly selected by spinning a wheel at the beginning of the show, and together, the two will craft a strategy for SaaS marketing leaders everywhere. Today's guest... Flexera's Former Director of Global Digital Marketing, Alexis Chiagouris!

Who is Jeanne Morain? Our friend Jeanne began her career in startups and made her first big splash when BMC Software acquired Marimba. Marimba was the company founded by Kim Polese, the original product manager for the Java programming language. It was a precursor to basically, everything we take for granted today: containers, orchestration, device management, patch management. It ended up being sold to Samsung and it's still in use at Starbucks powering everything from cars to fridges. Without it there's no continuous delivery, there's no DevOps. In working to integrate Marimba's software, Jeanne became a pioneer in the development of business service management, the foundation for what we now call digital transformation. From BMC Jeanne moved to executive roles with Thinstall, which was acquired by VMware, InstallFree and Flexera. In the middle of all this she also wrote the definitive books on desktop virtualization: Client4Cloud; and digital transformation: Visible Ops Private Cloud. She's a highly sought-after advisor to executive boards and CEOs and is now working on a digital transformation startup of her own. So join Jeanne and Rachel as they try to get to the bottom of why corporate innovation is hard.

The Four P's of Marketing, brand, buyer personas, ABM, empathetic messaging that resonates with your buyers, and networking, this episode has it all. A marketing strategist, thought leader, and the SVP Marketing at Flexera, Laura Luckman Kelber, shares the fundamentals of marketing and warns marketers about what can happen when you are not focused on executing the fundamentals at an exceptional level. This is one episode that will resonate with all marketers.   Takeaways: Being mindful about your branding is being considerate about what your communication conveys and the insight it taps into to be empathetic to your target market.  Your brand needs to be an emotional connection with your buyers. When you multitask, you diminish your focus ability. The four P's of marketing are product, placement, pricing, and promotion. To be truly effective at marketing you should be impacting all four P's, however, marketers today have been placed solely in promotion. ABM is personalization, focus, and prioritizing your top market. If you do this well, it will affect your time, money, and resources. Be focused in your marketing. Consider, what is the insight you are driving, who is the target, how do you create a message that resonates, and then how do you scale it? Conducting buyer persona interviews allows you to pinpoint patterns of messaging to use, that is empathetic to your buyers. Career advice from Laura Luckman Kelber - Create time in your calendar at least once a month to network. Build relationships with people that you instantly connect with. Have coffee, a drink, or lunch with someone from a different department. Extend your reach.   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauraluckmankelber/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/FreeRadicalSynd Instagram: @lauraluckmankelber Flexera: https://www.flexera.com/   Busted Myths: Branding is dead. - Branding is NOT dead. People have less attention and need more shorthand to make decisions. Branding is your shorthand.

"Marketing is not fluff." Or at least it shouldn't be, according to Laura Luckman Kelber, SVP of Marketing at Flexera. According to her, not enough marketers focus on how to make themselves useful to the people they are trying to reach. On this episode, Laura discusses how to be more useful as a marketer, as well as the power of aligning your entire organization around marketing, why good technology is essential for creating good work, how to rebrand a unicorn, and much more.   Links Full Show Notes: http://bit.ly/30RBIMv Laura's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauraluckmankelber/ Laura's Twitter: twitter.com/FreeRadicalSynd Flexera Homepage: flexera.com/   5 Key Takeaways - Marketing needs to be a lot of things. Most importantly it needs to be thoughtful and useful. It needs to share something consumers can learn from. - Failure happens when product, distribution, and pricing aren't aligned and communicated clearly. - Marketing needs to meet prospective customers where they are already at and speak to the pain points they're feeling at that moment. - At the same time, you need to stay ahead of what your customers are looking for. This means thinking about the future and what your customers will want down the road. - Over-communicate and never take for granted that your brand and your message are already known.   Bio Laura Luckman Kelber is SVP of Marketing at Flexera. Laura is a creative and collaborative executive with extensive expertise in building and leading high-functioning teams. Laura excels at creating strategic plans, articulating vision, and ensuring flawless implementation to transform businesses. Laura enjoys unraveling complex problems and connecting dots in unexpected ways to accelerate growth. Laura developed her unique approach through executive positions at a number of Chicago advertising agencies. Most recently she was EVP and Managing Director for Strategy at Merge. She has served as Chief Strategy Officer, Strategy Director and Client Service Director, applying her inspiring leadership and vision to B2B and B2C clients in a wide range of industries. Laura has a BS in Political Science and an MBA from the University of Illinois.   Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.