 We're starting a monthly series here called TFIR topic of the month or T3M The idea of the series is to take a pulse of the ecosystem of the industry and then bring together experts To deep dive into these topics. I sit down with C-level executives analyzed engineers and experts To explore these topics and then bring these discussions to you and once again We have with us Rob Hirschfeld CEO of Reckon Rob. It's great to have you on the show fighting to be here We've got a lot of fun things to talk about today. What are you seeing? What kind of trends you are seeing in the market when we talk about? Cost-cutting or companies becoming more cost efficient. So let's hear your take. I'm glad you're distinguishing between cost cutting and cost efficiency You know, there are definitely times when people want to control costs, but a lot of times those efforts backfire And cost efficiency is a much much better way to to run that that system You know, it's interesting because a lot of what we see is Limitations where people have hiring, you know People are really one of the biggest bottlenecks with this and so when we see people looking to manage costs a lot of times That translates into them not hiring people or trying to put more more on on a limited staff And that in itself is a challenge our customers frankly haven't been able to fill all the wrecks they have open So in a challenging economic times, that just means that the the wrecks get they go away They never get filled at all and then more and more comes on people or if they do actually do layoffs Now you have the challenge of you know more falling to the operators teams and potentially them having to figure out how to force multiply And in operations, that's a recipe for disaster a lack of slack in an operation system actually translates into Cascading failures. I think we saw a really interesting example of that with Southwest Airlines over the holidays Where their lack of slack in the system really translated into a catastrophic failure and operations should always consider You know, do you have enough slack to recover? From from a problem. We're also seeing massive layoffs What impact is it going to have on companies because the fact is Last year or we have been regularly talking about a huge gap in supply and demand of talented people Now with these layoffs, does it also mean that companies who could not Earlier afford to get all these talented people on the team. They now have enough talent pool For their own needs. What does it mean for the market? We haven't seen the the the hits really in the operations ranks as much as we we would see them in other ranks Because a lot of those positions are already short-staffed so That that isn't an expectation I have that we're going to be a wash with Develop the vet DevOps people, right? We're we're distinctly looking at infrastructure if you when you talk about Linux with people with Linux skills, there's such a shortage of of Talent in this case that those are not the positions that I'm looking at flooding back into the market and suddenly being available I do think that there's a very big challenge here around toil and and The type of work that those operators are doing and I think one of the things to think through here One of the reasons why those jobs are potentially more secure than they should be If you want to look at it from that perspective is because a lot of times these operational roles have very They've programmed Automation they've programmed systems. They've built systems that have a lot of bespoke knowledge baked into those systems And then those jobs become very hard to separate from the company that the people become very hard to separate from the company That actually is not a good pattern for any anybody, you know doing either doing the work or Hiring people into these roles. It's actually You know it should be a management incentive if you're looking especially around cost efficiency to find ways to reduce toil And by toil I mean work that isn't actually adding to the bottom line. It's not advancing. It's really maintenance technical debt it's Maintaining systems that should be self-maintaining and so to the extent that you have those systems they require a lot of specialized skills and knowledge of your systems and We really should be working to eliminate that You know when we want to talk about cost efficiency if you have people who you know if they're if the knowledge in their head is essential to your operations You have a you actually that's a cost efficiency problem from a toil perspective Because if that person wasn't working or wasn't available, you know You would your systems could fail and you might not be able to recover them and as you earlier pointed out that there is a clear difference between cost-cutting and cost-effectiveness Can you talk about what are using water companies doing to become more cost-effective one of the things and this is a little bit counterintuitive so Companies are very concerned about the complexity and technical debt of the systems that they have and You know so when they look at how to become more cost-effective Sometimes they look and see wow. I've got a lot of different systems. I have a lot of redundancies in the systems I have some old systems that I can't maintain. Well You know, there's sort of a joke in industry, you know legacy systems Some people call them legacy and then that means they need to get to the garbage heap Some people that say legacy is you know mature stable systems that that are proving their value in either case that the paradox here is That the danger is really in systems that aren't exercised very often And so when people want to look at cost efficiency One of the things that I would suggest is to look for systems that aren't Exercise very frequently automation. That's that isn't used very commonly The thing that we find is that when our customers have what I call a high turn rate on their infrastructure or fast cycles Like running running setups running constant streams of automation the more often it's used Typically the more efficient it is and the more maintainable it is And so I I I really see that you know, there can be very complex systems But if they're used a lot then they're they're they actually aren't carrying a lot of technical debt And so for companies that are worried about cost efficiency One of the simplest things to do is to identify systems that aren't used very frequently Or automation that's not used very frequently and in those cases you can either eliminate it Or you should review it because it's potentially a You know a cost center lurking in the background that you're not even aware as a cost center That so does that does that help explain it's it's a little bit of a paradox in a concept because That the things that you're spending the most time and money on the most the high the high turn things The most frequently used components. Those are actually the cheapest From a maintenance ongoing longevity ROI the place where you're you're throwing money down the the toilet is where you've got something that People almost never use and they don't necessarily understand those are very expensive systems to maintain How are rack and solutions helping companies to become more cost-effective? You know, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to help customers you know really maximize their ROI the how fast they get time to value on infrastructure and universally it comes back to how often They turn over systems and how confident they are in that automation So when they are very confident their automation is reliable then they're going to be able to tune adjust Optimize right change things out We see customers they get tremendous value if they have reliable automation then be able to say I'm not going to spend time Troubleshooting or figuring something out. I'm going to run it through the process and make it go We just had a customer Who pushed? Their hardware vendor their server vendor to use our software to verify that things worked out of the box Changes were made in the operating operating environment And the vendor side that would have broken things when they showed up at the customer side And so the customer is getting faster time to value because they're insisting that the ship the Infrastructure they get already works within their their operational environment And that same work would would apply to a hundred percent to every other customer we have that's tied into that OEM It's it's incredibly high ROI from that value perspective. So you're looking at all of our customers use our software use a digital rebar to Improve how confident they are in the automation they use and that translates into faster Time-to-value better response less human intervention more cycles where they actually turn things over faster You know and and people underestimate the value of having automation that's reliable It's it is really a high ROI component to have your automation work the way you expect it to people people Don't assume don't think about that. But that's an important component in Building reliable systems robust systems is how well the automation works the unique position that you are in is that you build your own Business you run your own company and you're also helping companies. So what advice do you have for companies? So that they can become more cost-effective the simplest one is to find KPIs that makes sense for Judging your effectiveness and and it can be a little bit weird because you might not have been tracking some of the information That you need to actually make make all that go and I don't think that Having tracked KPIs should keep you from thinking in the terms of KPIs So for example, I think if you look at your systems and say how many times do I have human intervention in a process? Or how many times does this process? fail to complete when I run it Even if you have trouble coming up with an exact number I think that you can ballpark in What you want that to be and what it is today? So, you know in some cases it's an obvious answer You want zero human interventions? That's not actually even a realistic number What you want to be able to do is say alright I want to go from 10 interventions in these systems to one intervention in these systems and and your teams can actually give you pretty good Feelings for how those work or they can give you a feel for how how long a system Would go before it needs some type of maintenance or repair what I would call the half-life of your automation So if your team thinks that they could leave automation in place for six months and and not touch it Then you know that that might be a decent goal It could be that they have to tweak things every week and that's not acceptable so I think they're very concrete ways that you can talk to a team and Find out where they're spending a lot of time And where they think they could improve Without without even looking at it. I will add one thing that we we really started tracking is an interesting metric From a composability and reuse perspective is we actually provide Users of our software with a simple metric of how much of the software they're using is out of the box Meaning straight out of Racken's libraries and how much customers have managed to add or customize And then they can even look within their own Editions to see how much of that is going on and so right our target and just to give people you a feel for it Our targets are over 90% of the automation that customers you should be out of the box standard libraries Most customers when they're using things like Ansible or Terraform writing their own plans. They're down in the 10 or 20 percent Reuse and shared maybe even lower than that depending on how things work And so, you know that type of reuse is really a toil indicator Where where people are reinventing things or adding components that they have to maintain And so for us this this KPI of standard libraries This is a huge Component in success for how well people use automation Rob. Thank you so much for taking time out today and Discuss this topic today and as usual I would love to have you back on show. Thank you Thank you my pleasure