 Hi, this is your host Apli Bhartiyar and we are back with our yearly production series. And today we have with us Rosalyn Whitley, Director of Product Marketing at Kentic. Rosalyn, it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, it's great to be back and still be part of this community. Excellent. Before we ask you to pick your crystal ball and share your predictions, quickly tell us what Kentic. Kentic is the network observability company. And we provide network-first observability for infrastructure and software kind of up the stock, starting with that network layer. And we provide observability for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, so across all the public clouds and in your data center as well. Excellent, thanks. Now it's time for you to pick your crystal ball and share with us what predictions you have for 2024. I have three predictions. My first prediction, the network-first approach to observability is going to become much more ubiquitous in 2024. So the way I'm thinking about this, distributed applications have been on the rise for several years. And we're now seeing more enterprises actually do multi-cloud at scale, not just talk about it, whether it's because of acquisitions or developer productivity initiatives. And at the same time, bare metal repatriation is also a strong trend, particularly in enterprise. So more and more companies are ending up one way or another with apps distributed across multiple public clouds and data centers, and they are needing network layer insight that they don't have. And, you know, time is money, also money is money. So whether they need to cut like transit and egress costs, cut those cloud costs or speed up their mean time to resolution. So just incident response times to improve the ROI that they're getting from their software, more companies are feeling this pain around the lack of deep insight into the network. And I think they're gonna be looking for observability further down in the stock and making that a priority in 2024. My second prediction, AI hype is gonna give way to like real useful generative AI. And I think we've all seen that coming, right? So before 2023, many of us working in tech were very, me included, were very skeptical that AI could become a real useful thing like anytime soon. But now, guess what? We're regularly using generative AI to help us do our specialized knowledge work faster. I know I'm doing that on an almost daily basis. So as generative AI is getting smarter and also enterprises are starting to take it seriously and doing the data governance work that they need to do around it, I think we're headed into the real AI era. And so I think like the, maybe my rosy prediction around that is like I think we're gonna see AI lowering the barrier to entry for knowledge and kind of smoothing out knowledge bottlenecks, particularly in the observability world where I work when you can ask questions of datasets in plain English without needing help from a subject matter expert to do that that really democratizes the lessons that you can derive from the data. So I'm hoping that's going to mean more than just like quick answers to quick questions but it's also going to bring more diverse insights into our important conversations and it's gonna lead to better more democratized decision-making as well as those silo walls come down from real AI. So that's my prediction around AI. And the last one is, and maybe this is a bit of a contrarian bet but I've really been thinking about this a lot lately particularly after going to KubeCon. I think lots of companies are gonna be facing the fact that platform engineering is not going to solve all of our infrastructure technical debt anytime soon. I think this is a hard truth. So for a long time I think the dream has been building a custom IDP with your company's bespoke blueprints and security guardrails. But I think that today's golden path is like tomorrow's legacy app. And I think that happens faster than we think. Infrastructure comes and goes even though it's basically all still Linux under the hood. And I think with this economic climate, enterprises are gonna be more realistic in 2024 about what the real ROI is from their heavy investment in IDPs. Like after all of these years, I see this every day, troubleshooting is still the biggest pain point in software operations. And so that's why the whole choose boring tech phenomenon that's been around for years, I still, that's still usually the best path as long as you can observe your boring tech, right? So I think companies are gonna realize that they're better off investing in their ability to observe and fix everything throughout its lifecycle so they can realize those investments across their full term rather than buying in so much to the IDP hype. Excellent, thanks for sharing these predictions with us. Now let's also look at what kind of challenges you see will be there in 2024, not only for users, customers, the whole ecosystem, but also for Kentic to help users navigate through them. I think that, I think like infrastructure sprawl and as I mentioned before, technical debt are really still huge challenges. And I think as companies continue to change and grow, that has infrastructure consequences and it's always slower to work through those than the business processes that are around them. And that can create a lot of pain points for customers. And I think we're gonna keep seeing that and at Kentic we're gonna be continuing to try to help folks with that as they go through it. And really our challenges, my challenge is personally at Kentic, it's really just so much to do in so little time. I've worked at places where we really just were not releasing enough product to keep the market interesting, which was always challenging for me in my role working with open source communities and also on the marketing side. And at Kentic we really have the opposite problem, we're building so much as our customer based scales that the challenge is really catching up to that. And I wanna make sure that we're telling the story about how customers are using Kentic to operate their infrastructure and what that means for efficiency and getting that story out to the world. I think the network layers can be intimidating to some engineers. And I certainly was one of those folks. So it can be a challenge to open that world up to people if they haven't encountered it in an accessible way before, especially with all the abstraction that we are building in right now. And if you look at these challenges, of course some of them, these challenges also create a lot of opportunities. What is going to be the focus of Kentic in 2020 for? I think we're still building on our promise of letting infrastructure and network engineers answer any question about their networks. We have some really exciting releases that are coming up early next year. In January that I cannot wait to talk to you and everyone about. We're always looking for new ways to help our customers correlate data faster and kind of like how do we turn instant understanding of their network? Well, first of all, how do we turn data into instant understanding? And then how do we turn that understanding into solved problems and just make the flywheel spin faster for our customers too? So I think this year is going to be building a lot on making that correlation even easier, making it more automatic and making it more accessible. Rosalind, thank you so much for taking time out today and share these predictions with us. I would love to have you back on the show next year, not only to check how many of these predictions turn out to be true, but also to get the next set of predictions. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much, Wab. Always a pleasure.