 Hi, this is Yoosaf Nubhatia and welcome to a special edition of TFR. Let's talk here at CubeCon EU in Amsterdam. And today we have with us once again, Mike Kelly, CEO of ObserveIQ. Mike, it's great to have you on the show in person. Yeah, it's great to be back and great to meet you in person. It's exciting to see folks in person, how tall, how short you actually are because Zoom, Mindo makes everybody the same height. Let's talk a bit about since we are here at CubeCon EU. And if I'm not wrong, you said it was your first CubeCon in Europe. So I want to hear from you what kind of, you know, experience you or what kind of audience, what kind of interest you have seen here. Yeah, I mean, it's it's been a great conference so far and just getting started. But, you know, for us, Observability Day is always a great time to meet folks that are working on the same projects that we're on that are focused on observability, open source observability and open telemetry project as well. So getting to meet some of the people that we haven't seen before and in person, right, but work with almost every day or at least every week. So I love to see the momentum continue from last CubeCon and some of these core projects and observability like open telemetry. There's just building more and more interest and I think momentum behind the project, which has been exciting for us. And also interest in observability pipelines and unified telemetry concepts that, you know, really a year, two years ago, didn't have much understanding and still are still fairly new. But seeing those kind of gaining more mind share is great. Yeah, so true. Any announcement that you folks made here? Yeah, actually, so at this CubeCon, we announced the cloud version of Buying Plane OP. So we started out, we launched an open source version late last year, self hosted and then our enterprise version and now the cloud one quick on the hill. So excited to have that out there as a quick way for people to get started with Buying Plane. So what was the driver behind, you know, Buying Plane for cloud? It's interesting because in earlier versions of Buying Plane, we always went, we always started with a cloud version, but we heard from customers, you know, they really, especially larger customers wanted something that they could self host. And so that's where we started, but it always intended to follow with the cloud version as well. And it's just an easier experience always, you know, fast to get started and Buying Plane OP is easy to use to begin with. But but you add a cloud version and it lets people get started in minutes, right, which is exciting and allows more people to use this and try it out. Any difference between the functionality of the two or the same, just it runs on a cloud versus self hosted? The functionality is the same. And we've been really intentional about keeping those on the same versions. So it's the same as Buying Plane Enterprise, except we're we're hosting for you. You don't have to worry about that. Can you talk a bit about, you know, since we are here in Europe, when it comes to observability, it could mean different things depending on different spaces. You know, you can also talk about also have the security, it can also have the compliance. And when you are European Union, they are very strict when it comes to data privacy cloud. So talk a bit about what kind of difference you have seen when we talk about observability here versus observability back in the States. Yeah, yeah, it's I think, you know, understandably, there's more of a compliance focus, right? We need to know where the data is, make sure it's staying within bounds, within regulations. And that's something that we have a focus on regardless. So we tend to work with with organizations that have high compliance needs because that's what that's one of the things that Buying Plane OP is really good at is making sure that we're shipping data just where you need it to go and making it easier to control the flow of your telemetry data, logs, metrics, traces and other data. And so we have worked with a number of European companies that are looking to just keep data within a certain bounds and within regulations. And that's what they're using Buying Plane for. So certainly more of a focus on that on compliance than you might see in the States, although, of course, we see that in everywhere. But yeah, I would say that's that's a notable difference for sure. When we look at the cloud, public cloud, cloud native in general, in European market versus the US market, European, it's a lot of, you know, like DTK, they have their own cloud, they use OpenStack and everything else or in other parts of the world as well. So do you see the market is also different because when they look at these projects, the way they approach is a bit different than we approach, because in the US, it's like hyper scalars are everywhere. Here, a lot of companies are building their own clouds as well. Yeah, I mean, that's been interesting to see. But we're even seeing a shift back from cloud now, which no one would have thought of a few years ago. And so I think that the gap seems to be closing in a lot of ways. But I've seen that there's more interest and more, I think, a faster adoption of some of these projects in the EU than there has been maybe years in the past, which is interesting. And a lot of, you know, we come here and a lot of the core contributors to these projects are based in the EU. You know, they're the core developers and the development teams. And so you can see that there's traction based on that. You know, in terms of cloud, cloud specific, that just tends to run the gamut at this point. It's and it's almost a requirement that you need to be able to support everything, anything and everything. That's where, you know, Kubernetes tends to level the playing field where you can. It doesn't matter what cloud you're using. If folks are on it and a lot of people in this conference, obviously are, it can be easy. Can you also talk about the whole evolution because you're talking about meeting the telemetry community as well? You know, the multiple project opens and says, and, you know, from Google and flyers, they merged to create, you know, open telemetry as well. We're talking about the evolution that you've seen of the telemetry layer itself. Yeah, no, it's been, I think it's been really exciting for the space in the last few years. One of the most exciting things is with the open telemetry project and others really vendors coming together. So folks that in the past maybe had competing standards, really deciding that, yeah, we want to go forward with a couple of core standards, including open telemetry, but others as well. And so seeing that evolution and the shift in platforms to support it. But also a need for not just a way to collect the data, but also to control the flow of data. And we're seeing that shift really rapidly. So vendors adding a observability pipeline or control layer, you know, our own version of Bineplan OP, but others in the market as well, just recognizing that there's a need for a unified telemetry layer. And that was something that didn't really exist before, but with the amount of data now, the number of platforms that people are using, whether it's for security or compliance or application monitoring, there's an emerging need for something to control all that data and to control the flow of it. You folks are relatively new. I mean, actually, everything is lately new in the clouding Kubernetes space, you know. Now, when we look at Kubernetes, you're like, oh, my God, is that old? Right. So talk a bit about the company. What is going to be your focus? And as you said, this is the first European KubeCon you're attending when you look at this audience. I just want to understand, you know, what kind of plans do you have for the company? It's amazing how quickly things move, but we've only been around for a couple of years. This is our first KubeCon Europe, but really we're focused on is developing this unified telemetry layer. So what that means is focusing on the agents, the integrations and the control of those, the control plane for those. And that has a lot of benefits, right? It's something that people are recognizing. If you can standardize how you're collecting all of your telemetry data and if you standardize the way that you're controlling it, then you no longer have to instrument applications and code five different ways for five different platforms. Just do it one time and then that feeds all of your analytics. And this is a newer concept and I think it parallels what folks have seen in the development community. So if you think about the way developers started to iterate and release quickly, the CI CD revolution that completely changed how development got done, that's coming to observability, right? And if you have some control over the data, you can iterate faster, you can control where your data flows and doesn't require a, you know, five month effort, six month effort to redeploy agents to support a new platform. Earlier, we were talking about the whole evolution of the telemetry layer. Can you talk also about, you know, unified telemetry layer and also what were you folks are doing here? Because, you know, as the technology is evolving, there are a lot of, you know, pain points are still there. So there are still things to further improve. So talk about that. That's a good question. When we started, we were really focused on how to make management easy and make configuration management easy. But there's been more and more focused, especially over the last six months, on how do you reduce the data? And so we've added a lot of functionality like log deduplication and metric statistics. And what all of these do is they let you reduce the data that's flowing without impacting your visibility. So you still have the same results. You're still able to diagnose, have the same security alerts, have the same application performance indications, but with far, far less data. And that means a lot less cost. So that's been a big focus in the product in the last several months. Since you brought up the point of cost, we are here and cost cutting is becoming a big topic, cost efficiency. Talk a bit about not just telemetry, but how you folks are helping organizations, you know, because sometimes this also adds to the cost, but sometimes moving to a specific product helps you with cost cutting. So talk about the role that you folks are playing in helping companies control cost. Yeah. Our big focus is on reducing observability costs. And that is through reduction of data. And once you have a pipeline, once you control the flow of data from the source to the destination, you have a lot of tools in our tool box to reduce the data that's flowing through it. And so with Buying Plane OP, one of the biggest reasons people would adopt this is they're looking to reduce, say, their log data that they're sending to a security solution, or reroute data so that they have log data, say, in a low cost storage for compliance purposes, but then all their critical information is going to their security analytics platform. And these are things that people are starting to do as they're getting more cost conscious. And they realize that this is something that the amount of data is scaling too quickly to manage. We need to find ways to reduce it, but keep the value that we're getting from the security and application analytics. Mike, thank you once again for taking time out today and talk to me. And it's really great to see you in person. And I would, you know, as usual, love to talk to you again soon. Thank you. It's great to see you again and have a great rest of your show.