 From New York City, it's theCUBE covering New Relic Futurestack 2019. Brought to you by New Relic. Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage here of Futurestack 2019. New Relic's seventh year they're doing the show. It's the U.S. show. They actually bring these to a few locations around the globe, right next door to Grand Central Station, and about 600 in attendance. And I've been really excited to kick off with a number of the users here at the show, and happy to welcome the program's first-time guest, Glenn Nethercutt, who is the technical fellow and chief architect with Genesis. You've been at the event a number of times. You're speaking at the event today. That's right. But Glenn, let's start with Genesis. Customer experience is something that I think a lot of people have been hearing about, and that is the product that Genesis has. Tell us a little bit about the company itself first. Sure. Yeah, so Genesis, a brand that maybe not everybody knows, but they certainly, transitively, know us. We're a customer experience platform. We like to say that we're a technology company, but we power the experiences. About 25 billion customer experiences every year for 11,000 plus customers, about 1,000 different countries around the world. So we are all about having a connection between brands and their customers, and we enable that. Yeah, so not only some of the cloud shows. I was at Enterprise Connect earlier this year and definitely was something I heard a lot about CX. It's really important not only how customers interact with the brand, but internally how we treat the employees and that interaction is something that is raised up. People are kind of important inside of business. They are. But we're not going to talk too much about the people here because we're going to talk about the technology. So as the chief architect of this, give us a little bit about what you have your arms around and are responsible for. Sure. So for me, the project Pure Cloud was the name for it for a long time. Genesis Cloud as of yesterday. So we are a public cloud offering as ACX platform. And I say platform because we made the transition from just being a product to a platform, in my opinion, last year. More than half of our API work is actually code we didn't write. So I think people using you as a programmable thing is when you become a platform. So I'm responsible for things like cloud architecture, for understanding, let's say, industry trends, what technologies we're going to use, a lot of AWS service design, technical vetting, general cat herding, that sort of thing. Right. So you said you're a public cloud, but you said it sits on top of AWS, but it's a platform that your customers can then build on top of. That's right. That's right. So we like to think of ourselves as CX as a service. We've had some that use us still like a product, all shrink wrap ready to go. Others that want to extend us, either writing their own UIs, writing their own back ends, their own integration points, we make all of that possible. All right. So I'm expecting you have a bit of an opinion when it comes to that platform. As Lou said with a capital P. I do. And it's got to be programmable. It's got to be open. Tell us what your thoughts about New Relic kind of entering, you know, the New Relic one being, they said today, the first and only is their claim of observability platform. So give us your thoughts around that. Absolutely. So I like to think that we have been using New Relic as a platform for a while, whether they knew it or wanted it or not. We have a fairly rigorous continuous delivery pipeline and we are very big believers in infrastructure as code and DevOps principles. So for us, the engineering teams don't just own the code that they write, but they own the infrastructure definitions. They even own alert definitions, dashboard configurations, and we push that information directly into New Relic as our deployments happen. Live hundreds of times a week around the globe. All right. So, Glenn, how do these modern architectures enable you to run a team? I can't imagine trying to manage 350 plus microservices in production, which is roughly what we have today, over a thousand Lambda functions. We can't improve what we don't measure. Everyone likes to say that, but it's true. I have a little bit of an APM background from places past. So I was a firm believer that you need to invest early in observability and metrics. So we've been a day one kind of New Relic subscriber in the peer cloud space. Everything from understanding how the infrastructure parts work, now to serverless. It's all been about moving up the value stack. Like commodity metrics of servers is great and still needed, but transactional information and now trace information is absolutely essential. Okay. In the keynote this morning, they walked through there's metrics, events, logs, and traces. Where are you with all these various sources of data and harnessing the value of that? So we, I would say, went fairly early towards the tracing part before New Relic had it as a managed thing. They had cross app tracing, I'm sure you're familiar with that. Sort of the prior incarnation of distributed tracing. And we leverage that pretty heavily, but it obviously doesn't have quite the same utility as what the new open tracing standards provide. So we do things like having correlation IDs that let us tag and follow things around. Now we just get to offload that from our teams being as responsible for it, and now the platform gives it to us. Glenn, is open source important to your organization? Absolutely. We try to give back some ourselves. In fact, one of the nerd packs that Lou mentioned on stage was one that our team wrote. So yeah, we believe not only that we need APIs and programmatic access to do our jobs, but we like to kind of enable and help other people with the same. Eric Spence got a shout out on that, but keynote was that the thing that you were talking about? It is. Expect to see us probably release two or three more nerd packs before the end of the year. We are eager to do that rather than just investing in all of our own UI that we had glass over the top of New Relic. Now we actually just get to put those components deeper inside of New Relic proper. Okay, is there anything else from the announcements this morning that you're looking forward to leveraging? So I think there's definite changes in the APM space. You'll hear a little bit more probably in the deep dives. One of the talks I'm having later with Nadia Boone. She will be talking about some of those things. We're definitely interested in that. Open telemetry has some value. The greater genesis definitely has investments around things like Prometheus and other sorts of monitoring. So if I'm not talking about just the public cloud side of it and other aspects, there are definitely things we can leverage. Glenn, share a little bit if you can about what you're talking about here at the show. So one of the big bits is entity-centric observability. The idea, again, that we're not just looking at servers and static infrastructure. We're looking at things that are very ephemeral. We have a lot of dynamic scale on our platform. We need ways to actually frame what we're looking at at the level of microservices but often at the level of business applications. So even when we're creating some of these extension points, like the one you just mentioned, we frame that within the context of a service that does a particular vertical slice. And that's kind of where we like to invest. It's where we like to live. Okay. What's on your roadmap of where you're going with your journey and is there anything that you're looking for beyond what was announced today from New Relic or from the ecosystem at large? I think there's lots of refinements of what was announced today that will help us. The AI ops side, I think, not just for noise reduction but also for early signal detection. It's a pretty fascinating space. We'll likely invest some of our own dollars in time trying to help that along. Definitely a lot of distributed tracing and more investment there is a big piece for us. I think the APM space, there are areas that I'd like to see APM vendors invest in that goes beyond what now, I guess, is becoming more traditional, like transaction information. We have a lot of AI and machine learning ourselves. And I think monitoring those types of workloads is going to be very different, as big of a paradigm shift as it was to go from classic monitoring to transactional. I think we're about to see that happen again in the industry. Can you share some of kind of the AI journey that you're going through at Genesis, where you are, what the maturity level is of the solutions that you're using? Sure, we have a fairly robust AI team and products range from in the WEM space back to the people that you mentioned at the first part of the talk. We have workforce optimization, workforce management and we brought AI algorithms to that. A lot of time series forecasting that uses certain machine learning techniques. We've invested a fair amount in NLU, NLP, NER, so everything from sentiment detection to live transcription that we built in-house to our own bot engines that do dialogue management. So we have a fairly robust bit there and some on the management side, on the operational back-in that we use to try to improve our quality of service and reduce any sort of incidents on the platform. All right, it's your third year, third time coming to this show what brings you back? What are you excited about to kind of dig in and take away from the event this year? I think New Relic's always been a partner in my stance, not just a vendor. We believe so deeply in the observability message that, one, I want to be part of shaping that narrative. So coming to FutureStack, actually talking to a lot of other executives seeing where they're going and kind of sharing that use case but also trying to be a little bit of a lighthouse to the New Relic team as well is what brings me back every year. Yeah, observability is something that I've heard a number of startups talking about in the last couple of years. Where, in your opinion, does New Relic fit compared to the marketplace overall? Obviously they just kind of announced the observability, you know, full suite with the New Relic one. But, you know, what's your viewpoint as to how they're positioned? Where do I think they're positioned? Yeah, I think they are best of breed for what we are currently seeing on observability. There are other things I think where we could cobble together bits from multiple vendors but frankly having application performance monitoring along with infrastructure, along with data being culled from the cloud platforms that we're on like AWS, they've got a unique place. I think the power of their agent technology has proven itself over time as well. My guidance to most other companies that I speak with about this subject is don't just trust that it's all magic, invest, and I think they make themselves easy to invest in. And I think this platform play is a good one for them. All right, well Glenn Nethercutt, thank you so much for joining us, sharing your journey, what are you doing and best of luck on your presentation today. Thank you, sir. All right, be back with lots more coverage here from New Relic Future Stack 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.