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Welcome to the ThinkData Podcast, brought to you by Dataworks.In today's episode, we're joined by Karthik, General Manager of AI at LogicMonitor, an AI-powered platform helping businesses manage IT across both cloud and on-premises environments.Karthik brings a wealth of experience, with 14 years at SAP and nearly 5 years at Aisera, leading innovation in AI and IT operations. We're excited to have him on the show!In this conversation, we dive into:Karthik's career journey and what led him to join LogicMonitor.How LogicMonitor helps businesses manage modern IT infrastructures.How companies can prepare for the AI era and optimize hybrid data center workloads.The latest updates to LogicMonitor's AI agent, Edwin AI, and how it's simplifying life for IT teams.Trends shaping the future of the data center ecosystem, and how LogicMonitor is positioning for what's ahead.Stay tuned for an insightful discussion on how AI is transforming IT management!
Emily Long is the co-founder and CEO of Edera, the pioneer of strong workload isolation technology for cloud and AI infrastructure. She places the highest value on people and bringing diverse teams together to build something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Emily is a tactical and strategic leader who’s proven in scaling operations, fostering strong company cultures, and driving strategic execution. She’s also an unapologetic people person who believes in the capacity of humor and human connection to motivate and empower team members to achieve more. Prior to Edera, she was the COO at Chainguard, where she built, scaled, and led core business functions that helped lead the company to its Series C and Unicorn status. Emily also served as Chief Operating & People Officer at Anchore, where she oversaw business operations and sales and spearheaded its DEI initiatives. She’s also held strategic operations roles at LogicMonitor and KPMG. Emily is based in Santa Barbara, California and holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
With an upcoming raise close to $1B LogicMonitor must be doing a few things right, right? Get the download straight from LogicMonitor's Chief Executive Officer Christina Crawford Kosmowski and hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman at the WEF in Davos.They discuss the future landscape of technology and how LogicMonitor is prioritizing innovation while making sure systems work as they should. Get their take on: AI as the dominant theme at this year's WEF LogicMonitor's recent $800M funding round and an exciting new partnership with OpenAI How LogicMonitor is helping organizations monitor and manage the performance and cost of LLMs Discussing the crucial role of observability and infrastructure monitoring in the age of AI and hybrid cloud Christina's vision for LogicMonitor in the coming years
The episode opens with President Donald Trump's announcement of a four-year initiative called Stargate, which aims to enhance the nation's AI infrastructure with a staggering budget of $500 billion. This initiative involves major tech players like Oracle, OpenAI, and Microsoft, who will invest $100 billion to expand computing capacity and construct large data centers. The goal is to address the current shortage of high-capacity computing infrastructure necessary for AI advancements.Host Dave Sobel highlights Microsoft's recent adjustments to its partnership with OpenAI, which now allows OpenAI access to competitors' computing resources while maintaining Microsoft's exclusive rights to OpenAI's technology for certain products. This change comes amid scrutiny from shareholders concerned about the pace of computing power provision. The episode also covers Logic Monitor's strategic partnership with OpenAI, aimed at enhancing IT operations through advanced AI technologies, emphasizing the growing trend of AI integration in IT service management.The podcast further explores Microsoft's authorization to use OpenAI's GPT-4 for top-secret government workloads, marking a significant milestone for generative AI adoption in federal spaces. This development signals an increasing trust in AI for sensitive applications, particularly within the intelligence community and defense sectors. Additionally, OpenAI's collaboration with RetroBiosciences to develop a new language model for engineering proteins showcases AI's potential to reshape research and development pipelines in biotechnology.Finally, Sobel discusses a recent Gallup poll revealing a disconnect between the pervasive use of AI products and public perception, with many individuals unaware of their interactions with AI. The skepticism surrounding AI, particularly among writers concerned about authenticity, contrasts with readers who often enjoy AI-assisted content without preference for its origin. The episode concludes by emphasizing the importance of implementing AI tools transparently and effectively, highlighting the opportunities for businesses to leverage these advancements in real-world applications. Three things to know today 00:00 AI Takes the Spotlight: Trump's Stargate, Microsoft-OpenAI's New Deal, and LogicMonitor's IT Push 04:15 AI Goes Top-Secret: Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google Push Boundaries in Defense and Science07:58 We All Use AI, Even When We Think We Don't—But Writers and Readers Disagree on Its Role Supported by: 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 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
Shahin is joined by ANZ Regional VP of LogicMonitor, Caerl Murray, to chat about the nuances of developing a go-to-market strategy in ANZ as well as how to approach building a strong, successful team. This episode also covers... How to achieve messaging alignment between marketing and sales teamsHow to stand out to your customersAnd how team sport can help you approach business resilience and motivation About Caerl... Caerl Murray is an accomplished technology leader with over 20 years of experience in IT operations, cloud computing, and sales management across various industry verticals. Currently serving as the ANZ Regional Vice President at LogicMonitor, he is responsible for driving business operations and strategic growth in the region. Under his leadership, LogicMonitor's observability platform empowers organisations to enhance visibility across their technological landscapes, enabling them to focus on innovation rather than troubleshooting. Prior to this role, Caerl was the ANZ Sales Director at Alibaba Cloud, where he led a team dedicated to helping customers navigate the cloud ecosystem, particularly in Asia and China. His extensive experience also includes serving as National Sales Manager at Ricoh IT Services, where he managed a team of 16 sales professionals, focusing on strategic planning and business growth. With a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Sydney and a Graduate Certificate of Management from the Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Caerl combines academic expertise with practical experience. His career is marked by a commitment to customer success and a passion for leveraging technology to drive business results. Resources mentioned in this episode: Mindset - Carol DweckThe Brutal Truth - Brian Burns _________________
This week, we discuss Intel's CEO “resignation,” the rise of custom silicon, and the biggest announcements from AWS re:Invent. Plus, some thoughts on the simple satisfaction of label makers. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pl48HWsZZA) 496 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pl48HWsZZA) Runner-up Titles re:Primitives Primitives, Re:invented Chatbots, Call Center Agents and Dev Co-Pilots. Thanksquitting Even the paranoid die Pardon me while I commoditize your business. Being paranoid has nothing to do with it This is a trailing indicator Robotic Cows. ARMchair Quarterbacking (that was funny!) Arm is going to get X86'd One Bill Rundown Intel Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241202016400/en/Intel-Announces-Retirement-of-CEO-Pat-Gelsinger) Intel CEO Forced Out After Board Grew Frustrated With Progress (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-retires-amid-chipmaker-s-turnaround-plan?embedded-checkout=true) Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Resigns After Struggling to Turn Around Chip Maker (https://www.wsj.com/tech/intel-ceo-gelsinger-retires-leaves-board-cb2478e6?mod=mhp) Intel CEO takes his leave as ambition meets reality (https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/02/intel_gelsinger_leave/) Are Intel's Problems Too Big to Fix? (https://www.wsj.com/tech/are-intels-problems-too-big-to-fix-442a7dd7) Nvidia Keeps Its Old Chips Selling Hot (https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-keeps-its-old-chips-selling-hot-2596f11e?mod=article_inline) AWS Re:invent 2024 Top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2024 | Amazon Web Services (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/top-announcements-of-aws-reinvent-2024/) CEO Matt Garman unveils the future of cloud with generative AI and agentic workflows (https://siliconangle.com/2024/12/01/aws-reinvent-2024-ceo-matt-garman-unveils-future-cloud-generative-ai-agentic-workflows/) Introducing queryable object metadata for Amazon S3 buckets (preview) (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-queryable-object-metadata-for-amazon-s3-buckets-preview/) Amazon EC2 Trn2 Instances and Trn2 UltraServers for AI/ML training and inference are now available (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-trn2-instances-and-trn2-ultraservers-for-aiml-training-and-inference-is-now-available/) New Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities include generating documentation, code reviews, and unit tests (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-q-developer-agent-capabilities-include-generating-documentation-code-reviews-and-unit-tests/) Build faster, more cost-efficient, highly accurate models with Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation (preview) (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/build-faster-more-cost-efficient-highly-accurate-models-with-amazon-bedrock-model-distillation-preview/) New APIs in Amazon Bedrock to enhance RAG applications, now available (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-apis-in-amazon-bedrock-to-enhance-rag-applications-now-available/) New RAG evaluation and LLM-as-a-judge capabilities in Amazon Bedrock (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-rag-evaluation-and-llm-as-a-judge-capabilities-in-amazon-bedrock/) Relevant to your Interests 1Password Interviewing Banks for Possible 2025 Public Offering (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-21/1password-interviewing-banks-for-possible-2025-public-offering) FTC reportedly opens antitrust investigation into Microsoft | TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/27/ftc-reportedly-opens-antitrust-investigation-into-microsoft/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky) This $89 Wi-Fi router is designed to let you run whatever firmware you want (https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/2/24310967/openwrt-one-wi-fi-router-available-price-software-freedom-conservancy) Some Simple Economics of the Google Antitrust Case - Marginal REVOLUTION (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/some-simple-economics-of-the-google-antitrust-case.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=some-simple-economics-of-the-google-antitrust-case) Modern Work Fucking Sucks. (https://www.joanwestenberg.com/modern-work-fucking-sucks/) Broadcom Announces the General Availability of VMware Tanzu Platform (https://blogs.vmware.com/tanzu/broadcom-announces-the-general-availability-of-vmware-tanzu-platform-10-making-it-easier-for-customers-to-build-and-launch-new-applications-in-the-private-cloud/) Gartner Identifies Top Three Priorities for CMOs to Deliver Marketing Excellence in 2025 (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-12-03-gartner-identifies-top-three-priorities-for-cmos-to-deliver-marketing-excellence-in-2025) Data resilience firm Veeam scores $15B valuation in $2B secondary sale (https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/04/data-resilience-company-veeam-valued-at-15bn-after-2bn-secondary-sale/) LogicMonitor's massive $800M raise shows AI is driving the demand monitoring (https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/20/logic-monitor-massive-800m-raise-shows-ai-drives-demand-for-data-center-monitoring/) Nonsense Drones With Legs Can Walk, Hop, and Jump Into the Air (https://spectrum.ieee.org/bird-drone) How Murderbot Saved Martha Wells' Life (https://www.wired.com/story/murderbot-she-wrote-martha-wells/) Conferences CfgMgmtCamp (https://cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/), February 2-5, 2025. DevOpsDayLA (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x/events/devopsday-la) at SCALE22x (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x), March 6-9, 2025, discount code DEVOP SDT News & Community Join our Slack community (https://softwaredefinedtalk.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1hn55iv5d-UTfN7mVX1D9D5ExRt3ZJYQ#/shared-invite/email) Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Follow us on social media: Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Threads (https://www.threads.net/@softwaredefinedtalk), Mastodon (https://hachyderm.io/@softwaredefinedtalk), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/), BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/softwaredefinedtalk.com) Watch us on: Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@softwaredefinedtalk) Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Sponsor the show (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads): ads@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:ads@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Recommendations Brandon: Apple AirTags (https://www.apple.com/airtag/?afid=p238%7CssctkrMBT-dc_mtid_1870765e38482_pcrid_593101533960_pgrid_120928559493_pntwk_g_pchan__pexid__ptid_kwd-836438321478_&cid=aos-us-kwgo-btb--slid---product-) Cloud News of the Month - November 2024 (https://www.thecloudcast.net) Matt: Factorio: Space Age (https://factorio.com/) Coté: Claude (https://claude.ai) is great for D&D. Platform Engineering and UK Digital People, with Abby Bangser (https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/88) Photo Credits Header (https://unsplash.com/photos/a-box-with-a-label-on-it-E_dvFxEX9XU) Artwork (https://unsplash.com/photos/intel-computer-processor-in-selective-color-photography-0uXzoEzYZ4I)
Significant developments in workplace engagement and productivity lead, focusing on contrasting strategies from major companies like Amazon and Intel. Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy recently addressed employee concerns regarding the company's return-to-office (RTO) mandate, which requires corporate employees to work on-site five days a week starting January 2025. While Jassy claims the policy aims to strengthen company culture, over 500 employees have signed a petition against it, raising questions about the true motivations behind the mandate. Meanwhile, Intel has reinstated free office coffee to boost employee morale amidst ongoing layoffs, reflecting a broader trend in the tech sector to support workforce engagement during challenging times.Host Dave Sobel highlights research from the University of Melbourne, which indicates that companies offering flexible work options tend to perform better in the stock market. The study found a significant correlation between high rankings for remote work opportunities and improved share prices. Additionally, a survey by Quantum Workplace revealed that over 80% of hybrid employees report being engaged at work, compared to 72% of on-site employees. This data suggests that flexibility in work arrangements can enhance employee satisfaction and productivity, presenting a compelling counterpoint to the office-centric strategies of Amazon and Intel.The episode also covers recent capital movements in the tech industry, with Logic Monitor raising $800 million to explore strategic mergers and expand its market presence. Enable Technologies has acquired AdLumen for approximately $225 million, enhancing its capabilities in security services. These moves reflect a growing demand for robust data center monitoring and security solutions, driven by the increasing importance of artificial intelligence in the tech landscape. Sobel notes that these investments indicate a recognition of the need for companies to grow and adapt in a competitive market.Finally, Sobel delves into the evolving role of artificial intelligence in various sectors, including creative writing and IT service management. He discusses the implications of AI's integration into creative processes, particularly in relation to National Novel Writing Month, where the use of AI has sparked controversy over originality and skill development. Additionally, Sobel emphasizes the necessity for businesses to adapt their IT service management methods to incorporate AI, highlighting the potential for improved efficiency and user experiences. The episode concludes with thought-provoking questions about the balance between AI and human effort, urging listeners to consider how they can effectively leverage technology in their own organizations. Four things to know today00:00 From Amazon's RTO Push to Intel's Free Coffee: Contrasting Strategies in Workplace Engagement and Productivity05:15 Capital Infusions and Acquisitions: How LogicMonitor and N-able Are Positioning for Market Leadership07:18 Sentiment Analysis, Microsoft Integrations, and Strategic Growth Events: The Evolving Tools Empowering MSPs09:27 AI's Expanding Role: Vectorization, Creative Writing, and IT Service Management Transformations Supported by: https://www.huntress.com/mspradio/https://tdsynnex.com/StreamOneIon 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/businessoftech.bsky.social
It's episode 37 of the MI&S Hot Desk Podcast! Join Robert Kramer & Melody Brue for a rundown of what's been happening on the road over the past few weeks with Cadence Fem.AI Summit, Microsoft, Miro, Zoomtopia, AdobeMAX, IBM, Infor, LogicMonitor, Teradate and AWS. Cadence Fem.AI Summit https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2024/10/10/cadence-launches-femai-to-close-the-ai-gender-gap/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melodybrue_last-week-i-had-the-pleasure-of-attending-activity-7250278006756106243-bQEs https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melodybrue_last-week-i-had-the-pleasure-of-attending-activity-7250278006756106243-bQEs https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melodybrue_cadencefemai-activity-7246928239212797953-cLkc Microsoft Industry AI Summit Miro Innovation Workspace https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melodybrue_miro-introduces-the-innovation-workspace-activity-7249426724726194176-YzUs Zoomtopia https://news.zoom.us/zoomtopia-2024-unveiling-ai-first-work-platform-innovations/ https://x.com/MelodyBrue/status/1844064035127558631 AdobeMAX Content Credentials Web App: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2024/10/16/adobe-debuts-free-web-app-to-fight-misinformation-and-protect-creators/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melodybrue_adobemax-activity-7251691142193262592-EWkr Infor https://www.multivu.com/infor/9277851-en-infor-targets-business-velocity-added-process-mining-esg-genai-capabilities Logicmonitor https://www.logicmonitor.com/press/topgolf-enhances-player-experience-with-logicmonitor-driving-to-50-billion-balls-hit-by-2025 Teradata https://www.teradata.com/press-releases/2024/teradata-possible-2024-los-angeles-brings-to AWS https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/game-time-tech/game-time-tech-ready-for-some-tech-driven-football-nfl-2024-2025-tech/ Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show. The contents of this show should not be taken as investment advice.
Ep. 190: Northwestern University Soccer shaped this executive who held leadership roles at Salesforce and Slack before taking on the role of CEO at LogicMonitor, which helps companies monitor, manage, and maintain IT infrastructure. Our BONUS RESOURCE for this episode includes Don's favorite quotes from today's episode and a reflection question so you can apply today's insights. Listeners seeking to engage their teams more fully will enjoy her varied and sometimes humorous approach to communicating this mission-critical knowledge, including: Using values-based recruiting methods to build strong cultures. Engaging product-sales-service teams to transform customer satisfaction levels. The Slack channel Kosmowski created called "Where in the world is Christina?" to present herself in a more personal way. -- Looking for a speaker for your next event? From more than 30 years of interviewing and studying the greatest winners of all time Don offers these live and virtual presentations built to inspire your team towards personal and professional greatness. Special thanks to Hannah Edwards and Jessi Wynn for making this episode possible.
Beginning her career as an analyst, Carol Lee honed her technical skills both in pre-revenue start-ups and a multinational corporation with over $10 billion in revenue. These contrasting environments, she tells us, equipped her with a unique perspective on what it takes to be both scrappy and scalable. Early in her career, Lee immersed herself in M&A activities, gaining insights from both the buy and sell sides. As an analyst, she was able to absorb vast amounts of financial information and build detailed models as she observed high-stakes negotiations from up close. These experiences were instrumental in understanding the end-to-end processes of M&A, from financial scrutiny to integration and synergy realization. This comprehensive view became invaluable to her as she emerged as a finance leader. Lee's tenure at 100-year-old Konica Minolta exposed her to large-scale operations and the intricacies of synchronized business processes. This period taught her the importance of structured, efficient workflows and the necessity of diverse go-to-market strategies. These insights became crucial when she transitioned to the fast-paced environment of Silicon Valley tech start-ups, where agility and rapid decision-making are essential. In her first CFO role at GoodData, a VC-backed company, Lee embraced the chaos and speed of the start-up culture. Her ability to balance structured financial oversight with the need for flexibility and rapid experimentation became a hallmark of her leadership. This balance, coupled with a deep understanding of various business scales and sectors, defines Lee's CFO mindset today. Lee emphasizes the importance of communication, storytelling, and partnership in finance leadership. By integrating technical acumen with strategic foresight and a collaborative approach, she navigates the complexities of scaling businesses while fostering innovation and growth.
This week, we discuss Kubecon EU, Nvidia's hyper growth, having 55 direct reports and the Worldwide Container Infrastructure Forecast. Plus, is “hello” a proper slack message? Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-SnxTaHhL4) 459 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-SnxTaHhL4) Runner-up Titles "Hey. Got a sec? Want to run something by you.” You don't want to scare you coworkers Eating bugs off your coworkers “Hi” has become a trigger word Rehabilitate the “Hi” 55 Direct Reports Everyone worked at one company, and that one company didn't want to do the work for everyone. The YAML hand off market Rundown Is Hello a proper Slack message? (https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1770411476022354075) Please Don't Say Just Hello In Chat (https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-in-chat.html) Kubecon “Designing for Success: UX Principles for Internal Developer Platforms,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rqe5Yc13-A) "Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking," (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_KCOcoliLI) “Sometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhloarnpxVo) OpenCost Introduces Carbon Costs (https://www.opencost.io/blog/carbon-costs) What if the CNCF was private equity? (https://www.thecloudcast.net/2024/03/what-if-cncf-was-private-equity.html) Nvidia Nvidia shares pop on Q4 earnings, generative AI "hits tipping point" (https://www.axios.com/2024/02/21/nvidia-nvda-earnings-q4-stock-price?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosprorata&stream=top) NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang - has 55 direct reports (https://www.threads.net/@1393985902/post/C4dsKakP97W) Video that tracks the trajectories of Intel and NVIDIA (https://www.threads.net/@briansolis/post/C4lZBcKsdtC/?xmt=AQGzp25jpaWtHUqgBJaBCIJrv22Ag5Q0bPRX3Q6xRh_S4Q) Nvidia's latest AI chip will cost more than $30,000, CEO says (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/19/nvidias-blackwell-ai-chip-will-cost-more-than-30000-ceo-says.html) Worldwide Container Infrastructure Software Forecast, 2023–2027 (https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US49244823&pageType=PRINTFRIENDLY) Relevant to your Interests Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug (https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/leadership-is-a-hell-of-a-drug/) Key OpenAI Executive Played a Pivotal Role in Sam Altman's Ouster (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executives-role-in-sam-altman-ouster.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) Who Still Works From Home? (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/08/business/economy/remote-work-home.html) A new TikTok ban gains steam (https://www.platformer.news/tik-tok-ban-bill-2024-bytedance-biden/?ref=platformer-newsletter) Sam Altman reinstated to OpenAI board after investigation clears him of wrongdoing (https://venturebeat.com/security/sam-altman-reinstated-to-openai-board-after-investigation-clears-him-of-wrongdoing/) More companies getting rid of free tiers: (https://x.com/planetscale/status/1765438197981708684?s=46&t=zgzybiDdIcGuQ_7WuoOX0A) 49% of founders say they're considering quitting their startup this year (https://sifted.eu/articles/founder-mental-health-2024) The WiFi at Google's new Bay View office hasn't been working properly for months: report (https://www.businessinsider.com/googles-swanky-new-bay-view-office-suffers-bad-wifi-2024-3) Moon Mission Could Redefine Computing in Deep Space (https://www.eetimes.com/data-centers-could-soon-break-lunar-ground/) Doctors Are Using the Apple Vision Pro During Surgery (https://gizmodo.com/doctors-are-using-the-apple-vision-pro-during-surgery-1851329884) Apple Buys Canadian AI Startup as It Races to Add Features (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-14/apple-aapl-buys-canadian-ai-startup-darwinai-as-part-of-race-to-add-features?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=240314&utm_campaign=author_19842959&sref=9hGJlFio) Python with braces. Because python is awesome, but whitespace is awful. (https://github.com/mathialo/bython) Europe's AI Act demands extensive "logs" of users (https://www.thestack.technology/bias-biometrics-and-black-boxes-europes-ai-act-what-you-need-to-know/) How The Cloud Is A Trap (https://schedule.sxsw.com/2024/events/PP1144808) Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky says more than 10,000 organizations are using Bedrock (https://www.axios.com/2024/03/12/aws-ceo-ai-bedrock-amazon-anthropic) Measuring Developer Productivity via Humans (https://martinfowler.com/articles/measuring-developer-productivity-humans.html) Snowflake Stock: Melting Faster Than An Ice Cube (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4678674-snowflake-melting-faster-than-an-ice-cube-snow-stock) Games Are Coming to LinkedIn (https://www.pcmag.com/news/games-are-coming-to-linkedin) Dell Says Remote Employees Won't Be Eligible for Promotions: Report (https://gizmodo.com/dell-remote-employees-eligible-promotions-1851347699) European Cloud Group Calls for Regulatory Scrutiny Over Broadcom's VMware Overhaul (https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-cloud-group-calls-for-regulatory-scrutiny-over-broadcoms-vmware-overhaul-28b7c6ed?st=6n4vd93zeqr9d0o&reflink=article_email_share) Analogpunk, or, Tools, Shoes and Misery (https://schedule.sxsw.com/2024/events/PP1145788) Platform Engineering Day Europe 2024 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj6h78yzYM2Me-TpMQFvCphDu_xm71ed_) Redis Adopts Dual Source-Available Licensing (https://redis.com/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-licensing/) Apple Is in Talks to Let Google Gemini Power iPhone AI Features (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-18/apple-in-talks-to-license-google-gemini-for-iphone-ios-18-generative-ai-tools) The MacBook Air gets an M3 upgrade (https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24089999/apple-macbook-air-m3-announced-13-15-inch) Walmart sells a Mac (https://www.threads.net/@parkerortolani/post/C4iaGaFuKS8/?xmt=AQGzjqrbQ8qCsg4UUGYIc8LbOh2c9MoMdzn7sXSwOehXkA) Apple Plans AirPods Overhaul With New Low- and High-End Models, USB-C Headphones (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-25/apple-airpods-plans-4th-generation-low-end-3rd-generation-pro-and-usb-c-max) AWS follows Google in announcing unrestricted free data transfers to other cloud providers (https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/05/amazon-follows-google-in-announcing-free-data-transfers-out-of-aws/) Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS | Amazon Web Services (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-internet-when-moving-out-of-aws/) Buyout Firm Vista Equity Explores Options Including Sale for LogicMonitor (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-13/buyout-firm-vista-equity-explores-options-including-sale-for-logicmonitor) Nonsense Airlines Are Coming for Your Carry-Ons (https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/flights-carry-on-bags-personal-items-3bcd3c2c?st=nx8npa3s7g8tm7f&reflink=article_copyURL_share) Clocks Change (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EUTMPuvHo) Costco CFO ‘voice' looks back on 40 years, $1.50 hot dogs and leadership (https://www.cfodive.com/news/costco-cfo-voice-40-years-150-hot-dogs-Richard-Galanti/709622/) Star Wars: Millennium Falcon 50p coin unveiled by Royal Mint (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-68594916) Delta's CEO says controversial Sky Lounge changes reflect the airline's status as premium brand (https://www.fastcompany.com/91060105/deltas-ceo-controversial-sky-lounge-changes-airlines-status-premium-brand) 3D Printed Full-Size Macintosh - The Brewintosh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N9oz4Ylzm4) Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/03/formula-1-chief-appalled-to-find-team-using-excel-to-manage-20000-car-parts/) Listener Feedback Chris tell us the Owala Water Bottle is on sale. (https://a.co/d/30B4wA1) Conferences Tanzu (Re)defined online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDvWDyd98hA), April 3rd, Coté Speaking. Tanzu (Re)defined (https://www.fig-street.com/041124-tanzu-redefined/?utm_source=cote&utm_campaign=devrel&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=newsletterUpcoming), April 11th, Coté speaking, Palo Alto. TEQNation (https://conference.teqnation.com), May 22nd, 2024, Utrecht, Coté speaking. NDC Oslo (https://substack.com/redirect/8de3819c-db2b-47c8-bd7a-f0a40103de9e?j=eyJ1IjoiMmQ0byJ9.QKaKsDzwnXK5ipYhX0mLOvRP3vpk_3o2b5dd3FXmAkw), Coté speaking (https://substack.com/redirect/41e821af-36ba-4dbb-993c-20755d5f040a?j=eyJ1IjoiMmQ0byJ9.QKaKsDzwnXK5ipYhX0mLOvRP3vpk_3o2b5dd3FXmAkw), June 12th. DevOpsDays Amsterdam (https://devopsdays.org/events/2024-amsterdam/welcome/), June 19 to 21, 2024, Coté speaking. DevOpsDays Birmingham, August 19–21, 2024 (https://devopsdays.org/events/2024-birmingham-al/welcome/). Open Source Summit North America (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-north-america/), Seattle April 16-18. Matt's speaking SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us: Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), Mastodon (https://hachyderm.io/@softwaredefinedtalk), BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/softwaredefinedtalk.com), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@softwaredefinedtalk), Threads (https://www.threads.net/@softwaredefinedtalk) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Brandon: The E-Gates Modality Will Now Be Implemented at Cancun Airport - Cancun Airport (https://www.cancuniairport.com/the-e-gates-modality-will-now-be-implemented-at-cancun-airport/) Global Entry better then ever (https://globalfinder-usonline.com/glofinderus/?utm_term=global%20entry&utm_campaign=5C1B-2023-04-07&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwte-vBhBFEiwAQSv_xZTL8mD-XjuwoT_Kqr6-YHaCUiyCITM5HugRhsRNLqm_50l3sSIJZxoC-jsQAvD_BwE) Mobile Passport Control (MPC) (https://www.cbp.gov/travel/us-citizens/mobile-passport-control) available in Austin Airport Matt: Duck Duck Go (https://duckduckgo.com) Coté: MacBook Pro (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-m3-max) Photo Credits Header (https://unsplash.com/s/photos/Hello) Artwork (https://unsplash.com/s/photos/Matrix-math)
On this episode of The Six Five – On The Road, hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead welcome LogicMonitor CEO Christina Kosmowski and CPO Taggart Matthiesen for a conversation on how their vision for the company and its product strategy has evolved to meet the critical needs of today's ITOps and CloudOps audiences. Their discussion covers: A look at the biggest challenges facing today's IT and Cloud leaders How the vision for the company has evolved over the years to address these challenges How LogicMonitor's product vision and strategy meet the needs of today's ITOps and CloudOps audiences Learn more about LogicMonitor, on the company's website.
Today, I dive into the complex and often nebulous world of data observability with a leading expert in the field, Taggart Matthiesen, the Chief Product Officer at LogicMonitor. With an impressive career trajectory that includes pivotal roles at Lyft, Twitter, and Salesforce, Taggart offers an insider's view on the challenges and opportunities of harnessing data for actionable business intelligence. The discussion opens with Taggart sharing his unique perspective on how data has evolved to become the heartbeat of every business. In a world saturated with information, how do enterprises sift through the 'noise' to identify that elusive 1% of data which can drive decision-making and business outcomes? Taggart elucidates on the growing potential in the data observability space, shedding light on why this has become indispensable for businesses of all scales. As AI continues to infiltrate every aspect of our lives, questions around data responsibility become increasingly pertinent. We explore the readiness—or the lack thereof—of using AI to contextualize data. They discuss the ethical and practical implications, offering a balanced view on the technological advancements and the cautionary tales that serve as important guideposts for AI adoption in data observability. The episode then shifts to explore LogicMonitor's AI ops tool, DEXTA, as a case study. Taggart recounts how this tool provided immediate value by pinpointing the cause of a network outage, thereby showcasing the utility of intelligent data observability solutions. What are the design principles that inform such solutions? And what safeguards does LogicMonitor put in place to ensure data integrity and security? If you are a business leader, a product manager in SaaS, or someone simply interested in the frontier of data science and AI. In that case, this episode offers a holistic view on where data observability is headed, why it matters, and how to leverage it responsibly for business success. Prepare for an insightful journey through the world of data, AI, and business innovation.
On this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's security news. They cover: Why everyone should pay attention to some recent attacks on Okta customers Why third party comms apps are risky af Why are Russian espionage opps using Tor for C2? Surveillance firms abuse Fiji Telco Digicel's SS7 access Much, much more! This week's show is brought to you by Gigamon. Mark Jow, Gigamon's EMEA Technical Director is this week's sponsor guest. Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Mastodon if that's your thing. Show notes Cross-Tenant Impersonation: Prevention and Detection | Okta Security BadBazaar espionage tool targets Android users via trojanized Signal and Telegram apps NCSC-MAR-Infamous-Chisel.pdf Ukraine says an energy facility disrupted a Fancy Bear intrusion Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach – Krebs on Security Telstra-owned Pacific mobile network likely exploited by spies for hire - ABC News CISA, MITRE shore up operational tech networks with adversary emulation platform LogicMonitor customers hit by hackers, because of default passwords | TechCrunch Barracuda thought it drove 0-day hackers out of customers' networks. It was wrong. | Ars Technica Why is .US Being Used to Phish So Many of Us? – Krebs on Security UK cyber agency announces Ollie Whitehouse as its first ever CTO Embattled consulting firm PwC swept up in global cyber breach of file service MOVEit by cybercrime group C10p ONLINE-SCAM-OPERATIONS-2582023.pdf Unmasking Trickbot, One of the World's Top Cybercrime Gangs | WIRED
On this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's security news. They cover: Why everyone should pay attention to some recent attacks on Okta customers Why third party comms apps are risky af Why are Russian espionage opps using Tor for C2? Surveillance firms abuse Fiji Telco Digicel's SS7 access Much, much more! This week's show is brought to you by Gigamon. Mark Jow, Gigamon's EMEA Technical Director is this week's sponsor guest. Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Mastodon if that's your thing. Show notes Cross-Tenant Impersonation: Prevention and Detection | Okta Security BadBazaar espionage tool targets Android users via trojanized Signal and Telegram apps NCSC-MAR-Infamous-Chisel.pdf Ukraine says an energy facility disrupted a Fancy Bear intrusion Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach – Krebs on Security Telstra-owned Pacific mobile network likely exploited by spies for hire - ABC News CISA, MITRE shore up operational tech networks with adversary emulation platform LogicMonitor customers hit by hackers, because of default passwords | TechCrunch Barracuda thought it drove 0-day hackers out of customers' networks. It was wrong. | Ars Technica Why is .US Being Used to Phish So Many of Us? – Krebs on Security UK cyber agency announces Ollie Whitehouse as its first ever CTO Embattled consulting firm PwC swept up in global cyber breach of file service MOVEit by cybercrime group C10p ONLINE-SCAM-OPERATIONS-2582023.pdf Unmasking Trickbot, One of the World's Top Cybercrime Gangs | WIRED
Join us on this week's episode of Security Squawk as we delve into the recent takedown of Qakbot malware, explore a concerning trend of cyberattacks on schools worldwide, understand who LogicMonitor is and the implications of its breach, and finally, unpack the aftermath and lessons learned from two massive cyber incidents.
Paramount, Forever 21, Blue Cross Blue Shield, LogicMonitor, Topgolf Callaway, ChatGPT, Japan and more are all having a bad week!
On today's show we're lucky to quiz Christina, CEO of LogicMonitor on both observability and leadership. Given the rapid expansion of the technology estate in many companies, how are you meant to spot the gremlins in the data? We also discuss sustainability, both in consumer tech and one way in which technology might save the lives of endangered animals. Check out these two articles: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jul/30/say-hello-to-longlife-tech-that-can-challenge-our-throwaway-culture https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/can-3d-printed-tiger-teeth-help-save-rare-indian-animals-from-extinction-aoe
In this episode, I'm chatting with Derek Dorsett, an Instructional Designer with LogicMonitor. Hear about his defining moment, higher education vs. corporate and the importance of a career roadmap. This was an episode to spark encouragement even in your struggles! Connect with Derek on LinkedIn Are you looking for a no-nonsense formula for creating engaging courses and training? Check out my new book, The Do It Messy Approach: A Step-by-Step Guide for Instructional Designers and Online Learners (IDOLs) on Amazon. Interested in learning more about IDOL courses Academy, the only trade school for Instructional Design and Online Learning see a full list of programs
Today, let's talk about integrations. Most software companies these days want to be a “platform”. Part of that play is to build APIs, document them, and facilitate other companies building integrations as well. But many of us have unique workflows and so have to build our own. In this episode we'll think about building our own integrations with various tools (e.g. LogicMonitor), and some things to consider when doing so. Hosts: Tom Bridge, Principal Product Manager, JumpCloud – @tbridge@theinternet.social Marcus Ransom, Senior Sales Engineer, Jamf – @marcusransom Charles Edge, CTO, Bootstrappers.mn – @cedge318 Guests: Selina Ali, Product Manager, LogicMonitor – LinkedIn Links: LogicMonitor SDKs Using LogicMonitor's REST API API Tokens | LogicMonitor https://developer.connectwise.com/ Bonus Question Links: Boat – Wikipedia History of email – Wikipedia Alpine Inn first email: The saga of Alpine Inn aka Zott's over the years – InMenlo George Mallory – Wikipedia Antikythera mechanism – Wikipedia Pesse canoe – Wikipedia – oldest canoe afaik Is This 10,000-Year-Old Carving Europe's Oldest Known Depiction of a Boat? | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine – one of the oldest boat depictions Selina Ali – LinkedIn Listen Sponsors: With Alectrona Patch you can install and update over 300 Mac applications automatically to keep your users protected with the latest security updates. Alectrona is a proud Sponsor of the MacAdmins Podcast and MacAdmins Foundation. Check out Alectrona Patch at alectrona.com/patch to learn more and to book a demo with our team. Patreon Sponsors: The Mac Admins Podcast has launched a Patreon Campaign! Our named patrons this month include: Rick Goody, Mike Boylan, Melvin Vives, William (Bill) Stites, Anoush d'Orville, Jeffrey Compton, M.Marsh, Hamlin Krewson, Adam Burg, A.J. Potrebka, James Stracey, Timothy Perfitt, Nate Cinal, William O'Neal, Sebastian Nash, Command Control Power, Stephen Weinstein, Chad Swarthout, Daniel MacLaughlin, Justin Holt, William Smith, and Weldon Dodd Mac Admins Podcast Community Calendar, Sponsored by Watchman Monitoring Conferences Event Name Location Dates Format Cost XWorld Melbourne, AUS 30-31 March 2023 TBA TBA Upcoming Meetups Event Name Location Dates Cost Sydney Mac Admins Level 6, 341 George St, Sydney 5:30pm 20th April 2023 Free MacAdminsUA MacPaw.Space April 19 at 19:00 Free Recurring Meetups Event Name Location Dates Cost London Apple Admins Pub Online weekly (see #laa-pub in MacAdmins Slack for connection details), sometimes in-person Most Thursdays at 17:00 BST (UTC+1), 19:00 BST when in-person Free #ANZMac Channel Happy Hour Online (see #anzmac in MacAdmins Slack for connection details) Thursdays 5 p.m. AEST Free #cascadia Channel Happy Hour Online (see #cascadia channel in Mac Admins Slack) Thursdays 4 p.m. PT (US) Free Sponsor the Mac Admins Podcast: If you're interested in sponsoring the Mac Admins Podcast, please email sponsor@macadminspodcast.com for more information. Social Media: Get the latest about the Mac Admins Podcast, follow us on Twitter! We're @MacAdmPodcast!
LogicMonitor is a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring and analytics platform that enables businesses to keep an eye on their entire IT stack, from cloud services and servers to networks and applications, all in one unified platform. Visit https://logicmonitor.com to learn more.
Hello UK Giant Robots listeners! Our next event allows you to hear from and connect with both Founders and Investors on all things Fundraising. The event will be 1 part panel discussion and 1 part breakout sessions. We hope you can make it! Register today at: tbot.io/fundraising-uk (https://thoughtbot.com/events/fundraising-uk-event?utm_source=socials&utm_medium=socials&utm_campaign=UK%20fundraising%20event) Göran Sandahl is Director of Growth at Airbrake LogicMonitor, frictionless error monitoring and performance insights for your entire app stack. Victoria talks to Göran about having a product-led growth engine, how Airbrake can help developers identify and solve errors and bugs in applications, and developing a product geared towards a specific segment of the market. Airbrake (https://www.airbrake.io/) Follow Airbrake on Twitter (https://twitter.com/airbrake/), GitHub (https://github.com/airbrake/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/airbrake.io), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/airbrakechannel), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/airbrake-io/). Follow Göran on Twitter (https://twitter.com/gsandahl) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/goransandahl/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Göran Sandahl, Director of Growth at Airbrake LogicMonitor, frictionless error monitoring and performance insights for your entire app stack. Göran, thank you for joining us. GÖRAN: Thanks for having me. VICTORIA: Wonderful. So just tell me a little bit more about Airbrake and how it all got started. GÖRAN: So Airbrake is, as you said, an error and performance monitoring tool. It was actually, funnily enough, started as a side-project within thoughtbot. So it's a little bit full circle here joining this podcast here. But I'm a recent addition to Airbrake, so I don't know the details of the time when they started over ten years ago. So talking about Airbrake and the journey since then, lots of things have happened with Airbrake. It has gone through multiple acquisitions since then, both from industry players on the infrastructure side to various venture capital investors buying the company. And now Airbrake is owned by LogicMonitor, who bought Airbrake somewhat like a year ago. And it focuses exclusively on the developer audience for LogicMonitor. And I lead growth, so I work with our growth team. We have a product-led growth engine. So we don't do a lot of traditional sales or anything like that, so a lot of it is word of mouth. And this is something that drew me to Airbrake was its strong kind of grassroots movement in Ruby and other web and application languages. So that's what I know about Airbrake's early days, which isn't a lot. VICTORIA: Right. It was the very first exception monitoring service in the world. And we grew it to have three people working full time on it. And then, like what you said, it was sold to someone else who went on to continue to grow it. And it has been through several acquisitions. And from your perspective today, where is this service originally called Hoptoad [laughs], and then now it's Airbrake? And what kind of scale are you seeing? What are your customers like today? GÖRAN: Obviously, I don't know exactly how the product looked like back then. But a lot of it, I think, has stayed the same. It focuses on simple error monitoring, simple performance monitoring, and simple deployment tracking. So it's pretty much the same focus I believe in the product. This is what makes it stand out still today. We can talk about observability, and happy to do that. This is my third company that I've been working for as a monitoring company, so I know fairly a bit about it. Airbrake today is heavily focused on...we focus on what we call lean dev teams. We focus on the teams that try to move a little bit quicker, maybe than what they may, doesn't necessarily have the backup of an ops team or a DevOps team. So we really focus on building a product that is fully self-service that you can get started within a minute on your own. So that implies good UX, good documentation, and also that we can meet our users where they are. So we're focusing today on things like community building and those things for supporting our users. So we have lots of customers, really good brand names. First and foremost, super interesting stories from many of our customers who navigate that art of building product quickly. VICTORIA: That's great. I like that you phrased it as your user experience, which is your development teams, right? And do you have more of a perspective around the developer experience and how to capture that and really create something that's useful when you're delivering in those high-velocity environments? GÖRAN: As I said, I've been working for three monitoring companies. The first one I founded was 12 years ago. We built a product that we tried to coin the market called algorithmic monitoring, that later turned into something called AIOps. Yeah, there are a lot of buzzwords around that, applying AI to identifying problems in software. We were really early on that. One thing that we learned from that journey...we ended up selling that company to LogicMonitor, which is why I'm eventually here. What we learned then is that you can have a really good monitoring product, but ultimately, the people that fix the problem that gets discovered is the most important person for a monitoring tool to get into true effectiveness. So when I came across Airbrake, when they were acquired by LogicMonitor, and I had the opportunity to join, that's what drove me to decide to join. It's really that simplicity in terms of I think there are two schools, right? Either you promote a tool that all your software engineers should use, and you try to build centralized, structured processes around that. You make the template thing and things like that so that everybody can get up and running really quickly with monitoring. Or you take the approach of something like Airbrake, where it's built to be easy. If you know the language, if you know the code, then you know how to basically instrument it. And these features are simple enough to get going on your own. So that's the path that Airbrake is on. So it's built to be simple from the gate, so to speak. Now, Airbrake and monitoring and observability is a complicated problem when you have software issues. They're not always easy to diagnose or get to the root cause of. So there's a lot of struggle for users to unwind the bugs and actually fix them. But we try to do the best to provide enough context so they can take the next step. VICTORIA: And maybe you have an example or something to illustrate how that tool can help developers identify and solve those errors and bugs in the application. GÖRAN: All software has issues, right? There are bugs in all kinds of software. I've always been fascinated with something called latent bugs, or dark death is another framing of it, which is essentially the bugs that are hidden in your code. And when we have an outage, something triggers that bug to happen, but that bug was there. So if we think about it like that, that all of our software, all the code we run, all the commits we do is probably adding a lot of value, but they're also adding fragility or potential for problems, then you need to be really good at identifying when those bugs get activated. And sometimes, actually in, the majority of times...so that's why you need error monitoring, right? Just the ability to see that there is an error, there's a new error in production or in our staging environment, or wherever it might be. So that's error monitoring. It turns out about 80% of outages are self-inflicted in a way. They're caused by the changes when we build software or when we reconfigure things. And 80% that means that you need to be able to track changes really well. So you need to understand how and when changes happen so you can understand if what you did worked or didn't, so that's why we have deployment tracking, to be able to correlate those errors with the release, the commit, the line of code you added to the codebase. And then, of course, performance monitoring which is the ability to see where you have bottlenecks, which is not maybe bugs but where you have poor performance or poor experience for users. And it could be in a shopping cart checkout job. It could also be a scheduled cron job that's supposed to clean up stuff that is late. It could be just a rendering time of something that is longer than usual, and you just want to be aware of it. So that is kind of performance monitoring. So those are the three main focuses for us as a product. We like to believe that it is easy to get going within a couple of minutes. And that's what we're kind of focusing on providing. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And your tool is able to just spin up quickly, be able to quickly get that insight into what's happening as you're deploying code and as you're pushing changes to production. Do you call that all observability? Or, in your mind, what is observability? And what are the really key things that you think that all developers should be watching? GÖRAN: That is a good question. Part of what fascinates me about the Airbrake userbase and what I've got to learn about Ruby and some of those languages which were a little bit foreign to me as a backend engineer, like an algorithm junkie, so to speak...so what fascinates me is how little monitoring is typically done by many teams that's working on web applications. So coming from the infrastructure monitoring side, that's where this term observability grew. And you have these metrics, logs, and traces kind of triad. And every web application, every web browser has had tracing built in the developer console or the web browser. So some of these tools that are available now to infrastructure monitoring teams in the form of observability have been available to web developers for quite some time, so I don't necessarily think observability is a term that explains a lot for applications and web developers. But for infrastructure, more infrastructure-oriented teams where you have lots of microservices and things like that, we needed a term to explain the full range of capabilities we needed. But I'm not so sure we need the similar amount of complexity because there is a lot of complexity in those tools and lots of data. But I'm not so sure we need the same complexity when speaking about monitoring on slightly more lightweight applications and web apps. That said, we're starting to mimic a lot of the architectural paradigms of the infrastructure, such as microservices, in terms of micro frontends. So a lot of that complexity is entering into the web as well. So, who knows? [laughs] MIDROLL AD: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it's easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn't looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops. VICTORIA: So the customer or clients for Airbrake are developers who are doing web applications and need that kind of just the information they need [chuckles] to be able to make sure their changes to code is not affecting the production and that your product is trending towards observability practices that might be a little overmatch to what you will need. GÖRAN: Yeah, that is what we're focusing on. But when you have a lot of customers and a lot of users, there's always this exotic, for us, exotic use cases. So I'm 100% sure there are really large customers that are using us in a more traditional DevOps fashion and not on web apps. I mean, we have support for most of the languages from Go to Python to .NET to Ruby. So there's nothing keeping Go developers from adopting something like Airbrake. But we do know that we're particularly strong within JavaScript and Ruby, and I think that speaks for the experience that it's easy to get going, et cetera, rather than something like Grafana or another more traditional observability tool that's a little bit out of reach maybe for the web or application developer. VICTORIA: So when you're developing your product towards this specific segment of the market, what other differences do you notice between who you're targeting or who you're expecting your customer to be versus the wider range of people you could be marketing this towards? GÖRAN: So I think everybody wants to go after the developer and the needs of the developer. This is, so to speak, trendy nowadays. And it's obvious because so much of the value and innovation happening is done [chuckles] in the editor. So it's natural that a lot of the focus is being placed there. We're focusing on where we're strong, and I think that's the best way to do it unless the market is small. And I see application development growing for the foreseeable future. I think we're seeing trends of things like no-code, or low-code, or whatever we choose to call it. The infrastructure is being abstracted more and more. So from that perspective, I think we have a good strategy for providing that simplicity that users come to expect when building modern apps today. We're pairing with other kinds of innovations on how you build code, basically from things like Vercel to Webflow to whatever it might be, right? VICTORIA: Right. And do you find that collaborative approach is more effective in business-to-business sales for this type of client? GÖRAN: We're very focused on this just try it kind of approach, so that's how we do most of our direct communications with our users. So we want to let the app speak for itself. And we believe that once usage happens, then additional needs will happen or will arise that we can maybe serve in other ways. So we do have a free tier, free forever free tier, so you can use Airbrake pretty much forever but in a small scale. And then, like normal, when you start adding colleagues or lots of errors and lots of projects, then you need to upgrade to a paid plan. And we're also launching some new tiers here in the foreseeable future as well. VICTORIA: Oh, tell me more about that. GÖRAN: As teams mature...I don't know if that's the right word, but at some point, a lot of these teams may want a little bit more structure when they do monitoring. So I mentioned that we're pretty much self-service, completely self-service. But at some point, when you start using a product a lot, you start to integrate it into your core processes. So new things start to matter, things like who did that change? Who reconfigured that? Who logged in the last time? Has anybody seen that thing? But also to things like payment things. The different issues that can arise change, right? VICTORIA: Mm-hmm. GÖRAN: So we're launching a pro tier in the future that will cater to a little bit more of the needs of the team that has grown into maybe having a manager that asks questions about how things are set up, et cetera, but also, where you can control teams and people a little bit better, where you can also control your costs a little bit. So one of the features is on-demand billing. So the more errors you pay on your tier...you can produce up to a certain set of errors and performance events, and if you go above that, you pay an on-demand fee. And there are some protections built in for that if you're on the pro plan and things like that. So it's about catering to growing needs of a little bit larger teams but still the team that wants to move fast. VICTORIA: Right. And I believe you said that you have plans to communicate and engage with the community, and that probably helps you understand some of those needs. And so what kind of plans do you have coming up that you'd like to share? GÖRAN: So one of the things we know is with all the Airbrake use, we probably have a lot of fans out there, but we might not have been the best to actually tap into that and serve that community. So we want to really invest in understanding, getting to know that community, and serving that in the best way we can. So we will see exactly which form that will take. But it starts with the basics, opening up a Slack community that we can allow users to join and ask questions or maybe hopefully get value out of their peers without talking to us maybe. But we can also serve them in various ways with support, et cetera. So it will start pretty basic, but I think it's a pretty standard playbook nowadays. But for us, it's really about we're genuinely...we think our users are awesome, and we would love to be able to share their stories and connect them with other peers. So I think that's the driving motivation. And then, of course, we have some data that also shows that it is a good investment in itself, that the stories our customers tell are much better than the stories we tell. So yeah, we're excited about that for sure. And it's connected to this bottoms up motion from where Airbrake grew from, that it grew as a solution that served the community really well. And we want to go back to those roots and be the best tool for that kind of user. VICTORIA: Oh, I love that. It sounds like a really great, full-circle journey for the product. And is there anything else you want to share about entrepreneurship and starting up products like this? What advice would you give to someone who had developed this type of product that served the community well and wanted to turn it into a product and a business? GÖRAN: So I think the community building is relatively new for us, so I'm not sure the advice there is so valuable. But in terms of entrepreneurship, I think this is one of the more important decisions you make as an entrepreneur or founder is how will you grow demand for your product and how will you distribute the product? And how will you ultimately monetize the product? And there are so many different ways. And depending on what your growth expectations are, you might be asked to go in one direction or another one. And my advice would be to really find product-market fit and that I think happens best by staying close to the end users, and then you can look at strategies for monetization, including direct sales or channel or, as Airbrake does, product-led freemium basically. But reach product-market fit first so you can decide with knowing how your product dynamics and adoption dynamics works, and let that influence the kind of strategy for the business strategy basically rather than the other way around. VICTORIA: Right. That makes sense. And then, if your product is geared towards developers, they're just like any other users. And you have to reach them and get their feedback and understand how the product fits into the market. GÖRAN: Yeah, exactly. VICTORIA: Yeah. Great. All right. Do you have any questions for me at this time? GÖRAN: Not really. It was a pleasure being on the podcast. I'm a fan so hope you can cover up my errors there. [laughter] VICTORIA: I think that if you want to go back and remove, we totally can. But are there any other major takeaways you want people to walk away with about Airbrake or, in general, about entrepreneurship? GÖRAN: That's about it, I think. VICTORIA: All right. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Göran Sandahl.
On this episode of The Internship Show, we speak with Dan Brodsky from LogicMonitor. Dan is a TA Associate for University Recruiting and discusses their growing early talent program and what it is like to work at their company.
What does playing soccer in your youth have to do with being the CEO of a high-growth tech company? If you're Christina Kosmowski from LogicMonitor then it has everything to do with how to coach a team for success. Christiana was an early employee at Salesforce where she helped to develop their customer success program, and later did the same at Slack. Her Twitter bio describes her as a customer-obsessed CEO changing the very role of IT with customers at the centre. She is a Wife, Mother, Engineer, STEM advocate, and Soccer lover. As CEO of LogicMonitor, Christina is responsible for accelerating the company's hypergrowth and delivering on its brand promise of helping C-level executives and their teams thrive through transformation. Prior to assuming the role of CEO, Christina served as LogicMonitor's President, leading go-to-market strategy, R&D, customer success and operations. Christina came to LogicMonitor from Slack, where she spent four years building and leading Customer Success and Enterprise Go To Market Teams and also spent 15 years at Salesforce, where she oversaw functions including renewals, consulting, support and customer success. This is s a fascinating episode to peek inside the workings of a successful Software as a Service company and understand how they delight customers. In this episode we covered: The difference between customer success and customer service The difference with a Software as a Service business Biggest learnings from Customer Success teams at Slack and Salesforce Becoming a customer-obsessed CEO Sharing insights across clients by connecting them Collaborating with clients Christina's authentic personal brand Lessons from the pandemic The “where is Christina” channel in Slack Adapting management styles due to the pandemic Analysing customer losses How Christina's engineering training has helped her career What Christina said “yes” to multiple opportunities Advice for secondary school students The influence of soccer on leading teams Why human relationships should be an industry priority Christina's Personal “board of advisors” Selecting mentors The best piece of business advice ever given Innovation at Logic Monitor Best practices to develop a customer success program Promoting STEM in schools Connecting the sales & engineering teams What's the future of customer success? Quickfire round Three Actionable tips to delight your customers Resources mentioned on the showThe Leader you want to be - Amy Jen SuMore on Christina Christina on LinkedIn Christina on TwitterLogicMonitor WebsiteYour Host: Actionable Futurist® Andrew GrillFor more on Andrew - what he speaks about and replays of recent talks, please visit ActionableFuturist.com follow @AndrewGrill on Twitter or @andrew.grill on Instagram.
Leading global tech analysts Patrick Moorhead (Moor Insights & Strategy) and Daniel Newman (Futurum Research) are front and center on The Six Five analyzing the tech industry's biggest news each and every week and also conducting interviews with tech industry "insiders" on a regular basis. The Six Five represents six (6) handpicked topics that will be covered for five (5) minutes each. Welcome to this week's edition of “The 6-5.” I'm Patrick Moorhead with Moor Insights & Strategy, co-host, joined by Daniel Newman with Futurum Research. On this week's show we will be talking: Amazon Graviton3 Launch https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/05/29/amazon-web-services-pushes-the-price-performance-envelope-again-with-graviton3/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/06/01/amazon-remars-is-the-place-to-be-if-youre-into-machine-learning-ai-robotics-and-space/?sh=5e88e4532306 https://youtu.be/vxttjN9gEEs HPE Fastest Supercomputer and Earnings https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/1531325678234107904?t=BTWtYCK7e6KsvDmZlHmFHQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/1532538515715670016?s=20&t=_lwQbZ88gEL2UhFIQUYl1w https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV/status/1532103793311109121?t=x_wOrSUAIRv6skeNBDxTFw&s=19 https://futurumresearch.com/research-notes/hpes-fiscal-q2-2022-earnings-remained-positive-despite-supply-chain-and-mounting-pressures-from-the-russia-and-ukraine-conflict/ LogicMonitor Elevate https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/06/02/logicmonitor-launches-its-unified-observability-platform-lm-envision/ https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/logicmonitor-wants-customers-to-start-asking-themselves-hard-questions-about-it-resiliency-%ef%bf%bc/ https://www.logicmonitor.com/resource/readiness-assessment https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/1532352650523582465?s=20&t=_lwQbZ88gEL2UhFIQUYl1w Salesforce Earnings https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV/status/1531778307594797058?t=dRoBOzpZE_NfDXm8pPbSzQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV/status/1531741258695196674?t=wMZq2QBu9yia5CrKIwpBjw&s=19 https://futurumresearch.com/research-notes/salesforce-q1-2023-revenue-up-24-yoy-as-subscriptions-gain/ HP Earnings https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV/status/1531742188144500736?t=T7RSVYV43qUeSoxqD2Xqqg&s=19 https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/1532533392394305549?s=20&t=_lwQbZ88gEL2UhFIQUYl1w https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hp-sales-earnings-beat-estimates-despite-volatile-macro-environment-11654028239 Pure Storage Earnings https://twitter.com/sr_mcdowell/status/1532119397166370817?t=CGVbsX87XsfqNPcP-pgq1Q&s=09 https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/1532542732907986952?s=20&t=_lwQbZ88gEL2UhFIQUYl1w Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show. The contents of this show should not be taken as investment advice.
Leveraging technology while maintaining personal touch is a challenge all CX leaders face. Rachel Sheriff, VP of Global Customer Success at LogicMonitor, shares how she balances efficiency with connection using her “tech touch” approach. Rachel also breaks some news to us: We're all in the business of sales. Though this doesn't often look like what we think of as sales. Listen in to learn how to sustainably differentiate yourself, which metrics to use as your North Star, and best practices for meeting customers where they are.
Welcome back to the Wine Down! This week on the show, co-hosts April and Laura are welcoming special guest Robert Hatcher, III to the recording booth. Robert is a self-described full-funnel marketer with a decade of marketing agency experience, and is currently the Global PPC Manager at LogicMonitor. Together they're breaking down the evolution of the modern marketing industry, from the Golden Age of advertising to today's data-driven approach to marketing and brand management. They also touch on Peloton's recent PR crises and share their thoughts on working with high-profile spokespeople. April and Laura then share some practical tips to master time-tracking at any level of your PR career, and read an Anonymous PR Horror Story from a listener who witnessed a company culture shift that went south fast. Read the PR News of the Week here: https://cnb.cx/3LZ2Q4p Learn more about Robert here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertlhatcher/ Connect with Trust Relations: Have an anonymous PR horror story to share or questions you want to be answered on the show? Email us at contact@prwinedown.com. You can stream the show live at 2:00 pm ET every Saturday, on ElectroMagnetic Radio: https://www.em-radio.com/ You can also connect with Trust Relations on our website: https://www.trustrelations.agency/ or on social media: https://www.linkedin.com/company/trustrelations/ https://twitter.com/trustPRelations https://www.facebook.com/trustrelations https://www.instagram.com/trustrelations/ Sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com. Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/prwinedown/message --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/prwinedown/message
Shelley Perry has 25 years of experience as a software executive, including with NTT, HP, and TicketMaster. She also spent four years as a Venture and Operating Partner with Insight Partners, and today works with Nexa Equity Partners and with us at Elsewhere Partners as an Independent Advisor. She recently held the Executive Chair role at Airbrake, an Elsewhere Partners investment, supporting the company's growth leading to its successful acquisition by LogicMonitor and also serves on the board of Chargebee, Bynder, AutoReturn, and Foresite.
In this episode, Mark Banfield talks about value-based selling and how to enable your sales team to succeed in value-based selling. Mark shares insight into his role as a CRO, his approach and framework to value-based selling, and why it's important to enhance not only the customer's experience but the seller's experience. Plus, he divulges the sales enablement tactics that he uses at LogicMonitor and the lessons he's learned from quadrupling his company in three years. Contact Mark Banfield | Follow us on LinkedIn
Dale and David worked together in a rapid growth, high performance environment where they often held conversations like the one in this episode on personal & professional development, communication, networking, and building trust. David's Bio: David Powell is President of Prodoscore, a software company that provides employee productivity insights. He comes to Prodoscore from ConnectWise where he was Senior Vice President of Growth at Connectwise and was primarily responsible for account management and cybersecurity partner programs. A 25-year veteran of the IT industry, David was named a CRN Channel Chief in 2017 and 2021, was listed in the Birmingham Business Journal Top 40 Under 40 in 2011, and has been named one of the “Top 250 People in Managed Services” by MSPmentor for more than five years. David was instrumental in the growth of the managed services business unit at LogicMonitor, leading up to their eventual sale to Vista Equity Partners. After LogicMonitor, David did advisory work for Inverness Graham as they acquired Corsica Technologies. David joined Corsica as CRO and played a key role in their growth and acquisition of four other MSPs. David joined Perch Security in 2020 helping them continue their period of rapid growth. Perch sold to ConnectWise, a Thoma Bravo company, at the end of 2020. David has extensive experience in high growth companies, has been involved in three successful exits, and seven private equity backed acquisitions. Connect with David: LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidpowellbham/ Website: https://www.prodoscore.com/
Dale and David worked together in a rapid growth, high performance environment where they often held conversations like the one in this episode on personal & professional development, communication, networking, and building trust. David's Bio: David Powell is President of Prodoscore, a software company that provides employee productivity insights. He comes to Prodoscore from ConnectWise where he was Senior Vice President of Growth at Connectwise and was primarily responsible for account management and cybersecurity partner programs. A 25-year veteran of the IT industry, David was named a CRN Channel Chief in 2017 and 2021, was listed in the Birmingham Business Journal Top 40 Under 40 in 2011, and has been named one of the “Top 250 People in Managed Services” by MSPmentor for more than five years. David was instrumental in the growth of the managed services business unit at LogicMonitor, leading up to their eventual sale to Vista Equity Partners. After LogicMonitor, David did advisory work for Inverness Graham as they acquired Corsica Technologies. David joined Corsica as CRO and played a key role in their growth and acquisition of four other MSPs. David joined Perch Security in 2020 helping them continue their period of rapid growth. Perch sold to ConnectWise, a Thoma Bravo company, at the end of 2020. David has extensive experience in high growth companies, has been involved in three successful exits, and seven private equity backed acquisitions. Connect with David: LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidpowellbham/ Website: https://www.prodoscore.com/
Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer at LogicMonitor, also a seasoned revenue leader with a strong history of developing successful go-to-market strategies for high-growth businesses joined in as our guest in this episode of the SalesStar Podcast, Key topics covered: The evolving role of the CRO during the Covid-19 pandemic Key learnings for revenue teams to keep in mind How customer facing reps should adapt to today's digital-selling and digital marketing world B2B tech trends to look forward to through 2021
This week we discuss LinkedIn’s new marketplace, Platform9, TriggerMesh and Event-based Architectures. Plus, are meetings always bad? Rundown LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace. What you need to know. (https://thehustle.co/02222021-linkedin-gig-marketplace/?amp=1) Microsoft’s New Gig: A LinkedIn Freelancer Market Rivaling Upwork, Fiverr (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-new-gig-a-linkedin-freelancer-market-rivaling-upwork-fiverr) Platform9 Raises Additional Series-D Funding (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/platform9-raises-additional-series-d-140000245.html) HEY World experiment (https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1363956784600281088?s=20) Relevant to your interests Clouds The Google Cloud Surge: 5 Slides from Thomas Kurian Tell the Story (https://cloudwars.co/google-cloud/google-cloud-at-goldman-sachs-5-slides-explain-surge/) HPE Acquires Cloud Assessment ‘Crown Jewel’ CloudPhysics (https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/hpe-acquires-cloud-assessment-crown-jewel-cloudphysics) Watson IBM Explores Sale of IBM Watson Health (https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-explores-sale-of-ibm-watson-health-11613696770) IBM Is Said to Consider Sale of Watson Health Amid Cloud Focus (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-said-consider-sale-watson-020948431.html) Happy birthday, Python, you're 30 years old today: Easy to learn, and the right tool at the right time (https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/20/happy_birthday_python_youre_30/) IPOs and M&A Airbrake has been acquired by LogicMonitor (http://bwhichard:grinning: 7:46 PM https://twitter.com/airbrake/status/1364214679569072130?s=21) TransferWise rebrands as Wise ahead of an expected IPO (https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/21/wise/) HPE Acquires Cloud Assessment ‘Crown Jewel’ CloudPhysics (https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/hpe-acquires-cloud-assessment-crown-jewel-cloudphysics) Security SolarWinds hack was work of 'at least 1,000 engineers', tech executives tell Senate (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/23/solarwinds-hack-senate-hearing-microsoft) SolarWinds Hack Grabs Senate Spotlight With CEO in the Hot Seat (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-23/key-lawmaker-prepares-for-first-public-hearing-on-major-hack) Apple Offers Its Closest Look Yet at iOS and MacOS Security (https://www.wired.com/story/apple-platform-security-guide-researchers/) New malware found on 30,000 Macs has security pros stumped (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/02/new-malware-found-on-30000-macs-has-security-pros-stumped/) RubyGems dependency confusion attack side of things - Running with Ruby (https://mensfeld.pl/2021/02/rubygems-dependency-confusion-attack-side-of-things/) Investing The GameStop Craze Was Mostly Just Crazy (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/gamestop-price-congress-robinhood.html?smid=url-share) Bitcoin Hits $1 Trillion Market Cap, Soars To Another Record High (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bitcoin-market-cap_n_602fee6bc5b66dfc101e4ac1) Chips Chip Shortage (https://twitter.com/anjani_trivedi/status/1364392820761522177?s=20) Biden signs executive order to address chip shortage through a review to strengthen supply chains (https://link.thehustle.co/click/23038968.125304/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuY25iYy5jb20vMjAyMS8wMi8yNC9iaWRlbi1zaWducy1leGVjdXRpdmUtb3JkZXItdG8tYWRkcmVzcy1jaGlwLXNob3J0YWdlLXRocm91Z2gtYS1zdXBwbHktY2hhaW4tcmV2aWV3Lmh0bWw/5f3be10f2c81bf6314610498B60246b50) IBM teases new AIX release – the first since 2015 (https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/24/aix_7_3_announced/) Salesforce is building a private CRM for the State Department (https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/salesforce-private-crm-state-department?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top) Overcast overhauls its Apple Watch app (https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/25/22300649/overcast-podcast-app-new-watch-update) As Power BI aces Gartner's new Magic Quadrant, what's the story behind Microsoft's success? (https://www.zdnet.com/article/as-power-bi-aces-gartners-new-magic-quadrant-whats-the-story-behind-microsofts-success/) Nonsense Fry's Electronics suddenly went out of business (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/24/business/frys-electronics-closure/index.html) New next-gen USPS delivery vehicle coming to your (https://twitter.com/samjmintz/status/1364321263439724544) Alexa Has No Place on Your Face. The Echo Frames Prove it (https://www.wired.com/review/amazon-echo-frames/) Sponsors strongDM — Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure. Start your free 14-day trial today at: strongdm.com/SDT (http://strongdm.com/SDT) Listener Feedback Cloudbees is looking for a Remote DevOps Consultant-Continuous Delivery (https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudbees/jobs/2928508) anywhere in North America. Conferences DevOpsDay Texas on March 2nd. (https://devopsdays.org/events/2021-texas/welcome/) SpringOne.io (https://springone.io), Sep 1st to 2nd - CFP is open until April 9th (https://springone.io/cfp). Two SpringOne Tours: (1.) developer-bonanza in for NA, March 10th and 11th (https://tanzu.vmware.com/developer/tv/springone-tour/0014/), and, (2.) EMEA dev-fest on April 28th (https://tanzu.vmware.com/developer/tv/springone-tour/0015/). SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Read this book we are going to discuss it: Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (https://amzn.to/3km4hMV) Brandon: I Care a Lot (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_care_a_lot) Coté: LoseIt! (https://loseit.com) The Golem and the Jinni (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golem_and_the_Jinni). Photo Credit (https://unsplash.com/photos/PqkuJqzghew) Photo Credit (https://unsplash.com/photos/ahi73ZN5P0Y)
Todd Riesterer, Chief People Officer at LogicMonitor, has devoted his career to helping leading-edge technology companies scale their business by curating high performance growth cultures. He has led large global human resources teams for iconic software companies such as VMware, McAfee, Business Objects, and Cadence Design Systems, while more recently taking the Chief People Officer helm […] The post Todd Riesterer with LogicMonitor appeared first on Business RadioX ®.
Todd Riesterer, Chief People Officer at LogicMonitor, has devoted his career to helping leading-edge technology companies scale their business by curating high performance growth cultures. He has led large global human resources teams for iconic software companies such as VMware, McAfee, Business Objects, and Cadence Design Systems, while more recently taking the Chief People Officer helm […]
We’re in the midst of an information revolution, and monitoring is at the center of it. Businesses are moving from asking, “What happened?” to predicting what’s coming, solving problems before they start and using data to unlock opportunities. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a change already well underway in customer experience – namely that the digital experience is now inseparable from the customer experience. An effective business strategy now relies on a seamless customer experience. Mark Banfield, CRO LogicMonitor, joins me on Tech Talks Daily to discuss what this looks like in a post-COVID-19 world and how effective monitoring is essential to maintaining the digital customer experience. Artificial intelligence and machine learning turn from sci-fi to everyday realities, LogicMonitor's technology is enabling businesses to see what’s coming before it happens. They collaborate closely with our customers to understand their risks and anticipate their needs, providing insights that unlock their vision. We discuss how effective monitoring is essential to maintaining the digital customer experience. We also discuss why it's more important than ever to ensure your applications, tools, and services are available for your remote workforce.
Monitoring unlocks new pathways to growth by expanding what's possible for businesses and advancing the technology behind them. LogicMonitor seamlessly monitors infrastructures, empowering companies to focus less on problem-solving and more on evolution. I wanted to learn more about how they help customers turn on a complete view in minutes, turn the dial from optimization to innovation, and turn the corner from sight to vision. Mark Banfield joins me on the reveals all on my daily tech podcast. We discuss the changing nature of today's work environment and how it is causing organizations to evaluate the best ways to monitor their IT infrastructure. I also learn the most common mistakes businesses make in IT performance monitoring. However, LogicMonitor is much more than just another SaaS-based performance monitoring platform. We also discuss how performance monitoring is also being used to help business growth and the migration of workloads into the cloud, etc. I also learn more about LogicMonitor's recent announcement around an early warning system for AIOps. Mark is a seasoned leader with a history of developing international go-to-market strategies for high-growth businesses. He comes to LogicMonitor from Autotask (acquired Vista in 2014 and merged with Datto in 2017), where he was most recently Senior Vice President and General Manager, International. In his previous role, Mark was responsible for establishing and operating all international offices and grew Autotask's international business to around 50% of the total company's revenue. Prior to Autotask, Mark held various sales management roles at Innopath and SmartTrust.
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Jie Song, co-founder and CTO of LogicMonitor, grew his business from a two man operation that coded in his apartment to become the premiere SaaS-based data center monitoring software service. The company grew to employ over 200 employees in the states and overseas in China. They acquired over $140 million in funding and had over 1,500 enterprise customers as clients, including the likes of Adidas, Netflix, PayPal, and Blackstone.
It’s been said that the enemy of execution is complexity. Nowhere has this rung truer than corporate data centers, where growing systems complexity threatens the execution of digital transformation strategies. How can enterprises successfully transition to this new digital business paradigm, without succumbing to the hazards that can jeopardize increasingly complicated IT environments? According to one expert, the answer is AIOps. In this episode, we speak with Gadi Oren, Vice President of Technology Evangelism for LogicMonitor. His company recently conducted a global survey of 300 senior IT executives and found that 90% of them had experienced a serious outage in the past 3 years! A shocking figure which LogicMonitor directly attributes to the rising complexity of IT infrastructures. Gadi shares with us how the emerging field of AIOps can counteract this negative trend, mitigate industry talent shortages, and ultimately reshape the future of data centers.
Join Richard as he talks to Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer of LogicMonitor, a SaaS platform that provides automated hybrid infrastructure monitoring and analytics. Mark talks about the role of performance monitoring for MSPs who want to grow their business, increase efficiency and improve all-round customer experience.
There is no question that our IT systems are critical to the operation of the modern enterprise, its ability to meet ever-changing demands and do this quickly means our IT stack continues to grow and evolve into an ever larger and more complex beast, which presents a constant challenge to Enterprise IT teams to ensure our systems continue to perform as needed, remain secure and available to deliver the outcomes our enterprises need. When we used to have half a dozen servers, a small network and some storage, monitoring and managing these systems was relatively easy, we could have the management platform of our choice, providing our IT team with alerts and data and using their skills and experience they could quickly turn this into useful and actionable information. However, today, when we have dozens of virtual machines, systems, complex networks that are not only in our datacentre but in multiple locations including of course the public cloud. The environments no longer generate a handful of metrics, they are generating hundreds if not thousands per day, how do we keep on top of them? pick out what is important and action it? That is the topic of this weeks show as we explore AIOPS a term and approach that is becoming increasingly important to modern IT management with my guest Gadi Oren, VP of Technical Evangelism at LogicMonitor. *How the size and complexity of our infrastructures are creating data overload. *Looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks! *The impact of alert fatigue. *More complexity doesn't mean more IT resources to deal with it. *The Shift in the perception of what we expect from monitoring. *The development of AIOPS. *How AIOPS can do our "heavy lifting". *How freeing our most valuable IT resources from the mundane, benefits them and the organisation. *The benefits of smarter monitoring. *Development of "opinionated" systems. I hope you enjoyed this show and as always thanks for listening. Full show notes with links are here :- https://wp.me/p4IvtA-1HY
My guest today is Gadi Oren, the VP of Product for LogicMonitor. Gadi is responsible for the company’s strategic vision and product initiatives. Previously, Gadi was the CEO and Co-Founder of ITculate, where he was responsible for developing world-class technology and product that created contextual monitoring by discovering and leveraging application topology. Gadi previously served as the CTO and Co-founder of Cloudscope and he has a management degree from Sloan MIT. Today we are going to talk with Gadi about analytics in the context of monitoring applications. This was a fun chat as Gadi and I have both worked on several applications in this space, and it was great to hear how Gadi is habitually integrating customers into his product development process. You’re also going to hear Gadi’s interesting way of framing declarative analytics as casting “opinions,” which I thought was really interesting from a UX standpoint. We also discussed: How to define what is “normal” for an environment being monitored and when to be concerned about variations. Gadi’s KPI for his team regarding customer interaction and why it is important. What kind of data is needed for effective prototypes How to approach design/prototyping for new vs. existing products Mistakes that product owners make falling in love with early prototypes Interpreting common customer signals that may identify a latent problem needing to be solved in the application Resources and Links: LogicMonitor Twitter: @gadioren LinkedIn: Gadi Oren Quotes from Today’s Episode “The barrier of replacing software goes down. Bad software will go out and better software will come in. If it’s easier to use, you will actually win in the marketplace because of that. It’s not a secondary aspect.” – Gadi Oren “…ultimately, [not talking to customers] is going to take you away from understanding what’s going on and you’ll be operating on interpolating from information you know instead of listening to the customer.” – Gadi Oren “Providing the data or the evidence for the conclusion is a way not to black box everything. You’re providing the human with the relevant analysis and evidence that went into the conclusion and hope if that was modeled on their behavior, then you’re modeling the system around what they would have done. You’re basically just replacing human work with computer work.” — Brian O’Neill “What I found in my career and experience with clients is that sometimes if they can’t get it perfect, they’re worried about doing anything at all. I like this idea of [software analytics] casting an opinion.” — Brian O’Neill “LogicMonitor’s mission is to provide a monitoring solution that just works, that’s simple enough to just go in, install it quickly, and get coverage on everything you need so that you as a company can focus on what you really care about, which is your business.” — Gadi Oren Episode Transcript Brian: Alright, welcome back to Experiencing Data. I’m excited to have Gadi Oren on the line from LogicMonitor. How is it going Gadi? Gadi: It’s going great. Thank you for having me. Brian: Yeah. I’m happy to have you on the show to talk about not just monitoring, but you’ve done a lot of work on SaaS, analytics products in the monitoring space, software for IT departments in particular. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re doing at LogicMonitor these days? Gadi: Too many years in different industries, I actually spent multiple industries starting from medical imaging. Let’s say in the recent 18 years mostly, some sort of monitoring solutions. I dabbled also a little bit with marketing data analytics. That was not a successful company but I might draw some examples from there. Right now, I’ve recently joined LogicMonitor for an acquisition. I was the founder and CEO of a company called ITculate here in Boston. That company was acquired in April by LogicMonitor and I’m now the VP of Product Management. What LogicMonitor is doing is solving a fairly old problem that still remains, which is monitoring is really difficult. Many companies, as they go, they reach the point where they realize how important it is for them to monitor what’s going on in order to be successful. Then they realize that it’s such a complex domain that they need to develop expertise. It’s just all around difficult. LogicMonitor’s mission is to provide a monitoring solution that just works, that’s simple enough to just go in, install it quickly, and get coverage on everything you need, so that you as a company can focus on what you really care about, which is your business. Brian: Obviously that’s a hard problem to solve and I’m curious for people that are listening to the show. I imagine a lot what this product is doing is looking for exceptions, looking for things that are out of bounds from what some assemblance of normal is, and then providing that insight back to the customer. Is that a fair evaluation? Gadi: It’s a fair evaluation. There is obviously the question of what is normal, but in general, providing that there’s many ways to define what normal is, then the answer is yes. It’s the ability to give you visibility into what’s going on, first of all, to just see that things work in general and work okay, and then when something goes out of what you define normal, to notify you on that and help you with getting things better. Brian: From your experience in this space, since in a lot of companies that are doing analytics, it may be difficult to define the boundaries of what normal is, such that you could do something like, “Oh, we’ve detected an abnormal trend in sales.” I can’t think of something off the top of my head but I like the idea that the focus of the product is on declaring a conclusion or driving an insight that’s probably derived from analytics that are happening in the background. I would put that in the camp of declarative analytics as opposed to exploratory where it’s like, “Here’s all these data. Now you go and find out some interesting signal in it.” Most customers and users don’t want the latter, they want the tool to go do that job. Do you have any suggestions for how companies that maybe aren’t quite in a domain where it’s black and white, like a binary thing, like this core is either connected or not—if it’s not connected, that’s bad and if it is, it’s good—is there a way, a kind of approach putting guard rails on things or what normalcy is? Do you follow what I’m saying? How do you move into that declarative space? Gadi: The answer is obviously, it depends. The problem is so difficult that you are even having a hard time defining the question. It is very, very difficult. By the way, you called it declarative, I like that. I actually call it in a different way that usually creates a lively discussion. I call it opinionated. Opinionated system. The reason is there’s some evolution, especially with regards to monitoring. But I think it’s the same for other type of systems that are analytic-based. Ten, fifteen years ago, it was so difficult to just gather all the data, that being non-opinionated or nondeclarative for your definition, was pretty good, because people just needed the data and they bought the context themselves. But there’s been a lot of changes since that time. First is the availability of computing. But the other is also the need is much greater now for giving the opinion, giving the bottom line. The system needs to be opinionated and then it can be a variety of things. It’s really multiple types of algorithms that can be used here. A small set of that is what people define today as machine learning and AI. But actually the domain is much larger than just AI. It’s the ability to look at multiple signals and develop in a certain degree of confidence, a conclusion that is derived from those multiple signals. To put it in the most generic way that I can, some of them can be discreet or binary, and some of them can be continuous. How do you look at all that stuff and say, “I think that this is what’s going on”? And even more than that, here is what we think is going on, here’s what you can do about it, or here are a few options for you to act on it. That is the ideal solution that we would like to have. Obviously, we have very, very little of that right now. I think it’s a journey that will take us years to get. Brian: I love that idea of opinionated because I think it softens the expectation around the technology and it also reminds people that it’s never different than when your plumber comes to house and you’re like, “Well, the shower hot water isn’t quite as hot as the sink water.” Maybe he tighten some things, he turns on some faucets, and he gives you an opinion about what might be wrong without actually tearing apart the whole system. We would tend to trust that. He might say, “Well, what I really need to do is X.” Then you make a decision whether you want to pay for that or not. But it’s not like, “If you can’t give me a 100% decision, then I’m unsatisfied.” We accept that opinion. What I found in my career and experience with clients is that sometimes if they can’t get it perfect, they’re worried about doing anything at all. I like this idea of casting an opinion. On that thought then, especially for example, you’re putting a data model in place or something like this is which is going to learn from the information, there may be insights gleaned from some type of computer-based analysis which may be unseen or unexpected by the business. That could be positive or negative. But there also might be some context of what normal or expected is from the end-users. For example, I expect the range to be between 32 and 41 most of the time. I know sometimes it goes up and I have this feeling about X, Y and Z. They have something in their head, you go and do all these technology and it says, “Well, the normal range should be 14 and so we flag the 16 here,” and he’s like, “I don’t care about that. It’s not high enough for me to care.” How do you balance that sense that maybe an end-user has, like, “I track sales,” or, “I’m doing forecasting,” and they have all these experience in their head? Gadi: A couple of things. It depends a little bit about the domain. In some situations where the end result is what’s really important, you can use black box-y type of things like newer networks or things like that, not always but most cases, they tend to be more like black box. It’s like, “Here’s the result. I can tell you why that happen. It’s based on all these training I did before.” In some situations, the result cannot be a black box. It needs to be explained. In those situations, you really need to give people an explanation on why things happen like they are. Monitoring, in many cases, tends to be the latter which is, I want to see the signal and the signal core strength on what was the shape and I want to see how it looked yesterday. If it looks the same, maybe it’s okay. In certain situations, maybe if you have a database and it has a latency of half millisecond which is very small, and then this morning it moved to one millisecond, is that normal? It’s not normal but I don’t care about it because before it gets to five milliseconds, I don’t need to know about it. In those situations, I don’t know if that’s what you refer to by cobwebs or things like that. While the system is learning and can automatically detect what’s abnormal, there is a range to what I care about. I’m going to put a threshold and say, “Only if you cause five millisecond and this is not normal behavior, then I want to see an alert.” Normal could be defined like the signal is two sigmas away from the same day last week. Something like that. There is a different level of approaches, both in terms of how consistent the data processing is and in what type of knobs you should provide to the user in order for the user to develop the right confidence level to use that solution. Brian: I would agree with that. I think there’s a balance there. Actually when we talk about our screening call, you made a comment. It was a good quote. It was something like, “The cutting edge UI is English,” if I recall. Gadi: Or any other language, yes. Brian: Exactly, whatever your interface is. But I would agree with that sentiment that I think the customers and from user experience standpoint, deriving that conclusion first or opinion as you said, then backing out from there, and providing the data or the evidence for the conclusion is a way not to black box everything. You’re providing the human with the relevant analysis and evidence that went into the conclusion and hope if that was modeled on their behavior, then you’re modeling the system around what they would have done. You’re basically just replacing human work with computer work. What I found over time was, some of these systems, with just watching customers, is they’re very curious about the beginning and if you can build that trust, they start to understand how to trust your opinions. They tend to not hold you responsible as much if an opinion is wrong because they know what went into the math and to the analytics and also what didn’t go into it, steps that they can fill the holes in themselves. Of course, this means you have to know your customer, you need to have some kind of interaction with them. Can you tell me about some of your customer interactions? You’d mention one of your KPIs for your team. Tell us about one of your KPIs for your team. Gadi: Over the years, obviously, you develop professionally and you change the way you approach to do what you do. I’ve been doing different ways of product management. I was a CTO at some point. But my basic attitude is doing product management and building the product from that understanding of what it is we want to build. What I’ve realized over the years is that there is a couple of really important points. One is the more you talk to customers, the more you understand the problem you’re trying to work on. A couple of years into working on a certain problem, you get to a point where you’re so familiar with it that you can pretty much, without talking to customers, generate a lot of really good product for some time. The problem is that this might diverge at some point or you’re going to miss something important. I think that talking to customers all the time is what grounds you to what’s going on. I’ve made my team of about 10 people. We are monitoring how many times they have interaction with customers. I’m going to chart it monthly. I started recently as one of the KPIs and I’m going to just check if certain part of the team is talking less to customers, then why is that okay or not. And then if you have a spike, some of these stopped talking to customers, then we’re going to have a discussion on why that happened because I think ultimately, it’s going to take you away from understanding what’s going on and you’ll be operating on interpolating from information you know instead of listening to the customer. Brian: Is it safe to say your team is comprised of primarily other product managers on certain portions of the product and then see up some design user experience reporting to you? Gadi: Yes. I have, let’s say, about 10 people. We’re hiring now all the time. The company’s growing very quickly. Let’s say around 10 people. Most of them are product managers and some are design people. We also have a variety of previous experience in the team, which is really something I liked. Some of them are from the industry and they have built-in knowledge. Some were in engineering before, which I think has also an interesting experience. One or two came from being sales engineers or sales, which has a different aspect of benefit to it. I don’t think I have someone that was a customer before, and if you can have that, that’s really advantageous. I might be able to do that at some point. Brian: I think that’s great. Do you involve your engineers or your technical people, data scientists, whatever with any of these interviews that you do and your customer outreach? Gadi: As much a possible, we will look at the multiple sides and a lot of engineers I work with right now are located in China. In terms of language, we might have sometimes barriers, but absolutely when possible, I know that when I transitioned from engineering to product management, the exposure to customers was very educational for me. Whenever I am able to expose people to customers, I take that opportunity. Brian: You have an interesting position. Maybe this is super common, I don’t know, but you’ve started out in a technical capacity, you have an engineering background, you were CTO, and now you’re in product. I’m curious. As someone that’s looking at holistic product both a business and also some kind of experience you need to do, you need to facilitate in order to have a relevant business. Are there biases that you need to keep in check from your technical background where the engineer in you says, “I want to do X,” and you’re like, “No, no, no”? What are some of those things to watch out for to make sure that you’re focused on that customer experience and not how it’s implemented? Gadi: The question of biases is a wide one. It’s not just about engineering. It’s bias in general. At some point, you obviously get excited about what you’re building and you see all the possibilities. “We can do something a little here, we could solve that problem or this problem,” and then you start developing a preference. It’s very natural. When you realize that this is the case, sometimes you try to just not have a bias, but you can’t. Everybody has one. The problem is, how do you make sure that this bias does not impact when you talk to a customer? It’s very easy to have a customer tell you what you want to hear. Probably the easiest person to deceive is you if you don’t pay attention. This is one of those things. With regards to engineering bias, it’s not very different than any other type of bias. Engineers and makers just really care about working on interesting things and new technologies. Sometimes, there’s a problem and I think the more advanced engineers start to think about, “How would I generalize that problem?” It might be a runaway process where they want to build more than required and that more may or may not be pointing at the right direction. That’s another type of bias. Again, definitely something to watch for. Brian: I want to move on to some other topics only because I can totally spend an hour talking about how important it is to do customer research. I love that you’re doing that and I think the theme here is you’ve actually turned that into a KPI for your particular reports and the product management division at your company, which says that it’s important to develop that habit. I would totally champion that. Gadi: It’s not that I would like it to be. I can tell you I would love it to be. Since you’re opening this, I’ll tell you what could be ideal. But it’s a lot to ask for so I’m not implementing that right now. I do check that people interact with customers and they have written down notes. Written down notes should not only be two lines. It should be telling something. Ideally, somebody can transcribe what the meeting was, but that’s almost impossible. I try but it’s very difficult. What I would have loved to do that we don’t do right now because it’s a lot to ask for, I’d love to have people repeat in their heads and in the notes the meeting and try and extract problem statements. In the past I’ve implemented that in some situations and it was successful. But you have to do it in a continuous fashion over a long time and then you see those problem statements. How many references do you have to every problem statement? It’s really giving you a good visibility into what’s going on. Now, asking that is difficult but clear notes is a good start. Brian: Just to tack onto that, it can be very hard to listen attentively and to draft notes. When I’m facilitating research sessions with a client, is you’ll have one person facilitating and one person taking notes, and then you debrief at the end. Sometimes, it does mean it’s a two-on-one instead of a one-on-one. It doesn’t need to be perfect. You can get better at this over time. That’s one way to get a little bit of a higher quality data. You can also just use something like an audio recorder on your phone instead of handwriting the notes. When that meeting’s over, you grab a phone booth or type room and just talk into a phone. Then you can just have the audio converted to text very simply and quickly with a machine. That way, you’ve got a nice dump of what the conclusions were from the sessions. Traditionally in the usability field and the human factors field, they came out of science background, so they would write these very long reports. Typically, what happens is, guess what, nobody reads the reports. So, you have to watch out for that. We’re doing all the stuff but we’re not taking any action on the information there. I like to highlight real concept, however you go about doing that, but that’s great. Can you talk to me a little bit about engagement with these data products? This is probably a little bit truer in companies that are deploying internal analytics, like non-digital native companies, non-product companies, but they’re having trouble with engagement. Customers aren’t using the services. Do you have any broad ideas on how we can increase engagement from your perspective? How do you make the tools more useful, more usable? What do you have to say about that? Gadi: How do you make the tools more useful? I think it’s a somewhat related question to how do you make your products successful to begin with? I’m going to talk about the new concept other than incremental. If you learn something incremental, I’m assuming you have enough data to place your bets successfully. If you learn a fairly new concept, what I would usually recommend is don’t code it. Try new simulations, Exceling, and modeling, whatever it is that you can to build it without building it. Prototype it and then have a few lead users. Those are users that are excited about this domain and they really care about solving that specific issue enough to work with you effectively. You need two, three, or four of those and you just start working with them. As much as possible, use their data. In the data domain, when we’re doing analytics-related product, part of the user experience in the entire cycle. It’s not just, “Oh, the user interface is the biggest expense.” No. It’s how the data is getting into the system, how is it being acquired, how is it being processed, and how is it being used on the other side when it’s producing meaningful insights. You can test a lot of that cycle without a product or with a very light sort of a product, prototype of the product. I recommend that as much as possible. If you’re going the right way, you will know very quickly and if you’re going the wrong way, also you will know quickly and you can either course-correct or eliminate completely the project and save a lot of time and money. That’s usually something that works really well for a new concept. Now, for incremental, it’s slightly different. Usually, you can use a similar type of approach but you can code something that’s kind of a prototype into your product, show capability, and then usually, you would have a lot more customers that are willing to work with you because it’s a small increment. You can validate early. I guess that’s the bottom line here. Experiment, iterate, validate early. Brian: How is it necessary to code? I don’t mean to use the word code, we’re talking about Excel or whatever it may be. It is necessary to get even into that level of technical implementation in order to do a prototype? I love the idea of working with customer data because that removes some of the classic example I’ve experienced like financial products where I was working on a trading system portfolio management. You’d have a bunch of stock positions in a table and you’re trying to test the design of the table. You have funny prices for, “Why is Apple stock trading at $12? Oh my God, what is going on?” That has nothing to do with the study but you’ve now taken the user out of the— Gadi: You will not get a meaningful […]. Brian: I love that but do you need to necessarily get into modeling and all this kind of stuff if, for example, the goal is to see, would that downstream user take action or not, based on what they’re seeing in the tool if you’re using a paper prototype or something like that? What would you do if it says it’s predicted to between 41 and 44, what would you do next? And you happen to know that that’s a sensitive range. Do you even need to have actual Excel or math happening behind the scenes? Gadi: I can see where this question is coming from. Nine-tenths is just putting a […] and mock-up might really give people a good feeling about where you’re going with this. But I do think that in many cases, not working with real data and even customer data—customer data is not a must—is not going to give you the right answer. I’ll explain when this can happen. There is the case that you mentioned, which I wasn’t even about to mention it, but it’s too late, is the data that you see doesn’t make sense, you’re emotionally detached. You’re not getting good responses from this person. Now, assuming the data is good and if it’s yours, you’ll even connect it much better to what you see. But certain type of problems, you cannot understand, you cannot get a meaningful answer if the data is not real. I’ll give an example. Right now, we’re facing a very specific situation where LogicMonitor is actually now in the process of redoing the UI and fixing usability. I’m told that this is the fourth time we’re doing it and there is a very specific problem of how to do search. We’ve been going back and forth on how does the search results should really show up because the search results are coming back in multiple levels. There’s data with dependency. Results are coming from multiple levels of dependency and need to show up on the same screen in a way that the user can use it. We’ve got to the conclusion that the problem is hard enough to answer and we need to prototype maybe one, or even two or three types of result presentation and just show it to customers. Obviously, we want to code as minimum as possible to do that, that this is something we’re going to do. We usually do it with just wireframes but in that specific situation, we are not only needing real data but we’re actually coding something very minimal, three times, to get the right answer. Brian: I think the theme here is, whether it’s code or whatever material you’re using, there’s a theme of prototyping. I would add that in the spirit of a minimum viable product or what I would call a minimum valuable product—I like that better—is figuring out what is the minimum amount of design, which could include some technical implementation like a prototype, what’s the minimum amount that you need to put out in front of a customer to learn something? To figure it out if it’s on the right track? That’s really what it’s about. In your case, maybe it does take actually building a light prototype, maybe you don’t actually query 30 data sources, and you just have one database with a bunch of seed data in it. You control the test, but at least it simulates the experience of pulling data from many places or something like that, then you can tweak the UI as you evaluate. Gadi: I think it’s a bit of going specific. I think that, again, in many cases you can do wireframes and you’d be fine. But remember, if you’re trying to test a complete flow, you’re testing a flow which may include 10–15 steps of the user for the user interface, and if you can do that with just wireframes where every step that they did produces result to makes sense, and you don’t have to model it at the background, then that’s fine. It’s probably better. But when we are talking about 10–15 steps, sometimes, the amount of effort that goes into the wireframe is big enough to consider a very light background Excel implementation. When it becomes comparable, if doing wireframe is 80% of doing a very light implementation where the background is Excel, or even 70%, then I’ll say, “Hey, let’s do a little bit more of an effort,” and then our ability to test opens up to a lot of other possibilities that are not rigid within that wireframe. So, something to think about. Brian: I would agree if you can get a higher fidelity prototype like that, with the same amount of effort. Absolutely, you’re going to uncover probably exceptions. You’re going to uncover information and an evaluation with a customer that you didn’t probably asked about. There’s so much stuff going on and there’s so much more information to be gleaned from that. The main thing is not falling in love with it too early and not overinvesting in it, such that you’re not willing to really make any change to it going forward. I find that’s the challenge with especially with data products. I’m sure you’ve experienced, there’s a tremendous amount of investment, sometimes, just to get to the point where there’s a search box and there’s data coming back. At the point, you can fool yourself and say, “Oh, we’re doing design iterations,” but in reality, no one really wants to go back and change the plumbing at that point because it’s so hard just to get to that first thing. I think the goal is to not build too much and be aware of that bias to not want to go back and rework what maybe a difficult, “Oh, it’s just a search box.” It’s like, “Yes.” But if no one can get from A to B, then the entire value of the product is moot and it sounds like, “Oh, it’s just a search box.” There’s a lot of stuff going on with getting them from A to B in the right way in that particular case. Gadi: I totally agree. I’ve seen a lot of managers do that mistake. I bet that I did that mistake once or twice in my career. “This is awesome. It looks great. Package it and let’s ship it.” That is a big mistake because then people are telling you, “No, no, no. This is just a proof of concept.” Managers sometimes cannot understand the difference, so it’s a communication problem, it’s setting expectations, and you’re right. Sometimes, the way to avoid it is just not getting to the […] at all and I agree if you can. Brian: Traditionally, from my work and the domain that you’re in, the traditional enterprise tools is that quite frankly, they can suck. The tolerances for quality was quite low, and I think that’s been changing. It’s a slow growth that the expectation that these tools can be hard to use, they’re supposed to be really complicated, and they’re for the very technical user, that’s changing. The customer and end-user is more aware of design. I’m curious. Do you find that that expectation is going up? And do you find that new technology is making it easier to provide a better experience? Or is that being negated by the fact that, in your particular domain, you’ve got cloud and on-premise? I can see the challenge is going up. Just as well as some of the tools might get better, the challenge might get harder, too. Is it net out? No change? What are your thoughts? Gadi: No. It’s not the opposite vectors that are actually pointing to the same direction, I think. What you’re saying is, I believe, no longer the case. I don’t know. Maybe in some old banks somewhere in Europe where they’re old-fashioned. I still heard that some banks in Germany are based on paper, no computers. That’s why I made this comment. But in my mind, this is long gone. It’s multiple trends of really pointing to the same direction. First of all, people are educated by Apple that you can in fact have a product that’s pleasant to use. Some young people in their 20s and 30s, most of what they’ve seen is really a lot better that what you and I have seen, being slightly older than that. Expectation is to have good products. They’ve seen that hardware and software and combination of those things can be done well. That’s one. The second is that the technology is evolving, especially in my space, there’s been virtualization, then there’s cloud, then there’s containerization, and so many big waves that are changing everything, that you constantly have to refresh your software and the ability. The users inside the enterprises are now replacing stuff much faster. They’re replacing the infrastructure much faster, and then with that, they replace software and adopted much faster. The barrier of replacing software goes down. Bad software will go out and better software will come in. If it’s easier to use, you will actually win in the marketplace because of that. It’s not a secondary. It’s one of the things people care about. They don’t care about the user experience specifically. They care about being able to complete their tasks. They don’t care how that happen. If it was easier to achieve what they need and it left them with a good feeling, it’s a better tool. That derives better usability. Everything is pointing to the same direction because you have to refresh as a vendor. You have to create software faster to adjust to the new waves of technology that’s coming in because that’s part of being competitive. While you’re at it, you have to take care of creating really strong usability because then you will have another advantage in the marketplace. I think those trends are only enforcing the same direction. You have to have great usability. By the way, usability is not limited to user interface. It’s everything. User interface is just a part of it. Brian: I didn’t want to bias my question to you, but I would wholeheartedly agree that the tolerance levels for really difficult software or software that doesn’t really provide the value clearly or quickly, the tolerances for that have gone down quite a bit and I think you’re totally spot on that consumer products have created an expectation that it doesn’t need to be that complicated. A lot of times, there’s a service to language like, “Oh, it’s ugly,” or customers will comment sometimes on the paint and the surface interface because they don’t necessarily have the language to explain why. It actually may be a utility problem or just a value problem. I think the importance here is, as you said, usability is important, but it’s not just about that. Ultimately, it’s about whether value is created. So, if you write a decision support tool, like a declarative decision support tool in your case, it’s probably often about minimal time spent using the tool, maximum signal when I do have to use the tool, and the best case scenario is probably never needing to go into the tool to begin with. That’s actually the highest business value. You can focus all day on UI, maybe it’s a one-sentence text message is really the only interface that’s required and you might deliver a ton of value with just that. Gadi: To add on what you have said, I totally agree. I actually see in the marketplace LogicMonitor is winning deals that are based on ultimately better usability. I can give you an example. A lot of customers that we see, companies are growing and they start monitoring using a few open source tools—there are so many of them—and when you’re small, like, “This is awesome. I’m going to use this open source tool and I have the problem solved.” The company grows and at some point, the open source tool, you realize that you spent so much time maintaining it and so much time on making sure that the tool keeps on working when you add another resource to the network, I think the old expression was, ‘Tool Time versus Value Time,’ or something like that. Brian: Tool Time versus Goal Time. Gadi: Goal Time, exactly. This is much bigger than user interface. This is about the whole experience, which means that in those open source tools, you need to have a team of five people that are chasing all the changes that happen in the organization and you’re never there. You never actually up-to-date with what’s going on. From a very high-level perspective, this thing just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because of usability. So, we come in and as I’ve stated what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to do something that just works, what’s well and quickly, and you’re able to deploy quickly, automatically discover the changes, and follows what’s going on. People are amazed by that and it’s part of the rationale, depending on the problems that they have. But in many cases, it’s part of what makes them buy our product. At the same time, part of our product had older user interface. I think that the comment that you said before, where you said, “Oh, it’s an ugly UI,” or something, I think there are situations where products that are a bit older might have pieces of user interface that are not as great, but their overall experience is so good that it carries the product forward. I think in organizations that have a choice, they might actually opt for a product that, on a first glance, might look not as great from a UI perspective but overall their experience is good. I’m not saying that this is the situation with LogicMonitor because we actually have pretty good UI as well, but I think that our UI reached a point where it needs to be improved and that’s what we’re doing now. Brian: May I ask a question on that just as we get towards the end here. If you’re able to share, what are the outcomes that you want to get from the new UI? There’s some business or customer impact you’re probably looking for, right? A business justification. Gadi: There is. It’s fairly complicated because it’s also a very expensive process. There are very qualitative things that you start hearing like, “Oh, your user interface looks old,” or people tell you things like, “Your customer X is much easier to do a certain task.” I like that better because it’s a lot more specific and they can explain why and all that. But in many cases, you just get like, “Oh, this other company has a new UI and it’s so much more pretty and cool.” That’s very hard to measure and very hard to act on. We have some of that but more specifically, I think, LogicMonitor’s also moving from the mid markets to more and more enterprise. As that happens, certain things that used to be okay are no longer okay. The amount of data that we’re dealing with on the screen, how we process and present it, when you have a couple of hundreds of items, you can think about a tree or a table. When you have hundreds of thousands, then the entire thinking process is different and you need a complete different method. Doesn’t mean all those changes like trends we’re moving upmarket in terms of size, we expect a lot more data in the user interface. People are telling us that the UI looks a little bit old. We want to refresh also the technology. We can do other things. If you’re doing things that are mostly server-based, then UI tends to be more static. It doesn’t have to be that way but it’s an engineering challenge. But if you’re moving to the more new frameworks like React, Redux or things like that, you can do a lot more dynamic. Every component can take care of itself, its data, its model, and update asynchronously. It opens up the product to do things that are a lot more responsive, like a one-page application, for example. A large part of the light business logic is actually done on the client side rather than on the server side, so it makes a much better user experience. All those multiple causes, multiple trends that lead us to the conclusion that we need to refresh. Brian: Was there a particular business outcome, though? For example, are you having some attrition and you’re looking to stop that? Or do you think this is the way to start facilitating sales, to close more easily with a better UI or anything like that? Or is it mostly qualitative? Gadi: No. Obviously, we try and quantitatively justify stuff, so we look at all the requests from the last two years and how many of them are related to UI and certain things in the UI that are very hard to do today. Yes, we do think that this will encourage sales for certain reasons that we will improve in the UI. I think that over the years, because there are so many people changing things in the product, I think that some of the consistency have dissolved along the way. In most cases, you do things the same way but in other cases, you do it a little bit differently. That is both in concept and the UI. That’s confusing for new users. Old users don’t care. They’ve got used to it but I think there’s some issues of consistency. Back to your question, we do expect that to increase sales. We expect that to increase customer satisfaction. We’re actually improving a lot of the flows that we went through and we realized that simple things are missing in the UI. Those are the gold nuggets that you find on the way. Really simple things that you could add or modify in certain places that would make flows a lot better. And I mean reducing 5–10 clicks in a certain flow. My favorite one is I look at a user, he ends up working on a product, and they have six or seven open tabs. I was like, “Why do you have so many tabs?” and he explains, “It makes total sense.” It shows that you’re missing something in the product. There’s a couple of things that are easy telltales if multiple tabs are open, or you have a sticky note on the side with text, or you have Excel on the side where people copy-paste. All those things are signs to problems with the product. We have a few of those and our product is going to come up the other side much more pleasant for the users and help them achieve things faster. Brian: Great. I wish you good fortune and good luck with that redesign that you guys are going through at LogicMonitor. On that note, where can people find LogicMonitor and where can they find you if they wanted to follow you? Gadi: You can find me on Twitter. The handle is @gadioren. I have a LinkedIn page. You can look me up and find me there. You can get to our website, it’s www.logicmonitor.com and that will get you started in you’re interested with that. Brian: Awesome. Thanks, Gadi. This has been really fun to talk to you and hear about your experience here. Thanks for coming on Experiencing Data. Gadi: Thank you very much for having me.
Perry Wallack of CornerstoneOnDemand talks with Kevin McGibben of LogicMonitor and Craig Nehamen
Russell Gray started his professional career as a litigation attorney. He was drawn to the practice of law to fulfil a desire to help people solve their problems. After a few years, Russell left the practice of law to consult with large law firms on software solutions for LexisNexis. In this position, Russell played a crucial role in helping attorneys utilise technology to streamline their practice and manage their e-discovery needs. As the practice of law moved into the digital age, Russell played a crucial role in educating his customers in how to use litigation solutions to manage and grow a successful practice. In 2016, with almost a decade of experience helping customers achieve their business goals through the use of technology, Russell transitioned this expertise to build a team of Customer Success Managers at LogicMonitor, a SaaS-based IT performance monitoring solution. At LogicMonitor Russell built a Customer Success program focused on helping customers achieve their business goals and eliminating the frustrations that come with adopting new technology.
Kevin McGibben – CEO of LogicMonitor – met up with me at the ConnectWise IT Nation conference in Orlando Friday. LogicMonitor is a “pure SaaS based IT infrastructure monitoring service.” We talked about what that means and why it is NOT an RMM tool. LogicMonitor discovers and analyzes everything at the hardware level and up through virtual environments and hosted services. As a SaaS model, there is no on-premise tool. And because they deploy to any location at once, you can monitor everything from database performance in hosted environments all the way down to hardware at your colo facility. The price is also very good . . . and very much in line with standard Managed Services pricing. Everything can be based on pure usage for you while you parcel out monitoring across all your clients. There is one master portal that you can customize. Kevin McGibben of LogicMonitor In case you want to take a closer look and see if this is something you can integrate into your managed service business, LogicMonitor is happy to extend a trial to partners. To get a better idea of the price point, please listen to the podcast: Download the Interview with Kevin McGibben from Logic Monitor here. For more information on Logic Monitor, visit LogicMonitor.com. – – – – – For more information on IT Nation, visit TheITNation.com. For more information on ConnectWise, visit ConnectWise.com