 Hi, this is Yoastabli Bhatia and welcome to another episode of Tifa Let's Talk. Dynatris recently of course are host at its annual user conference and as expected they made a ton of announcements including the expansion of real data lake house, automation edge, App Engine and a lot of other announcement there and to go deeper into these announcements today we have with us Bob Vanbak, VP of product marketing at Dynatris. It's great to have you on the show. Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Let's talk about the event. How was it because due to COVID there are a lot of restrictions and now events are opening up people cannot travel so talk about what was the experience like? I think the energy at the event was amazing. Everybody was happy to be in person again so you could really feel that excitement, you could feel the energy. The first day we offered a hands-on training and that was sold out and people were super excited to just be there working with other people, learning with other people so we did have a slew of great announcements at the show but I think part of what people were just customers talking with other customers and sharing best practices, challenges, talking about the macro-net economic environment so just the ability to get out there and network I think was huge for a lot of people so it was a fantastic show. You folks made a lot of announcements there can you share? It was the biggest set of announcements in the company history so from a technology standpoint last October 2022 we introduced Grail Data Lakehouse that's a massively parallel processing lake house that takes advantage of the economy and scale of public cloud resources so significant enhancements to that to consolidate observability security and business data with custom and exploratory queries that was a very big announcement especially since Grail has been so well received by the market and then we also announced some other technology enhancements including automation engine, app engine and then industry partnerships to unveil a new generation of applications on Dynatrace so it was a very packed conference with announcements. You folks made a lot of announcements there can you just pick and choose hey these are some of the major announcements that you made there? I think the most timely announcement was the Grail Data Lakehouse enhancements and the reason why is customers today there you know it's no question everybody is moving to cloud for agility and for the perceived cost advantages but in the cloud things can be much more complex especially if you think about Kubernetes implementation where you have additional layers of abstraction so you have a lot of flexibility but it introduces even more for many customers even more monitoring tools and now you have this rapid expansion of monitoring tool sets that show you a fraction of the whole story where you're not getting a complete end to end observability of and understanding of what's really going on so Grail Data Lakehouse takes that really you know that challenge and addresses it specifically by consolidating all the data with full topology and dependency mapping context so you know instead of doing you're trying to correlate information from different tool sets you really can consolidate all of these tool sets or many of these tool sets at your own pace and customer decision down to a single platform that all the users for all use cases can use to simplify collaboration and sharing and it it has embedded smartscape topology and dependency mapping so now you have causality between events you actually know what was the root cause how that may have cascaded to other items so it allows people to quickly identify issues or identify you know issues before they become major outages so to me that was really the most timely announcement because everybody's trying to do more with less nobody's asking for additional tool sets they're typically looking to reduce the number of tools that they have which of these announcements were kind of most timely looking at the current market situation where companies are trying to focus on cost efficiency smaller teams and they are looking at things like automation to to help their teams well I think if you start with the basic thesis of of it's really um you know revolutionary and disruptive to a number of adjacent industries to have all the data in a single place with full context think of that as like there's this gold mine of information with context that you never had before how do you unlock the value of that data and that's really what automation engine and app engine are all about it's making it easier for people to collaborate easier to bring that information and insights to other platforms that are central most large companies have it service management solutions that that dictate the processes for how you make changes or they may have orchestration platforms like redhead ansible and with the value that we have using automation engine you can bring these insights to make these other solutions even more powerful you make ansible more powerful if you're bringing a bunch of answers from your data to it to be able to automate more workflows and do that better you mentioned earlier about this migration to cloud in the cloud you do have agility but what you really want in the cloud is a balance of of resilience performance and efficiency or cost and in the cloud as people rush the cloud if you don't have the right observability into your applications into your underlying resources what you tend to do is over allocate significantly and you are therefore overspending perhaps not even assuring your performance levels of resiliency that you need but you're wasting a bunch of money that could be preventing you from investing in other areas or slowing down cloud migration as a whole so i think this automation engine and then app engine and we introduced a couple of apps on app engine including site reliability guardian and carbon impact that will precisely help you make things more resilient or carbon impact being able to measure all your carbon impact and then you also have the utilization levels how much performance you have it allows you to reduce your carbon impact but that also means that you are generally spending less money when you're reducing your carbon impact so cloud optimization all of these things become much more ai driven when you have access to it through things like automation engine and app engine. As we're talking about these different personas you know SREs DevOps platform engineering how do we look at these tools or how do you perceive the things which are changing in the market so that as you earlier said to help team no matter where they are in their journey i would also talk about the role of automation and AI but let's talk about like that from engineering and DevOps a bit. Yeah well first i think that shift left is a real thing and it's a real important thing. If you look at the role of platform engineering of DevOps, DevOps becoming dev sec ops and becoming biz dev sec ops all of these things are expanding so the role of SRE in my view has never been more important but it's involving more stakeholders and bringing more ownership into pre-production into the application development cycle so that you are able to prevent bad code or security vulnerabilities from actually getting into production by identifying them earlier so in my mind these roles are actually becoming a little bit more broader a little bit more influential and able to address a greater number of use cases and it all comes with you know what's the you know it's there's no longer i do observability you do security maybe you do business analytics all of these things really are converging right so this is what i i think is so exciting about the future that we're we're heading toward is it allows everybody to collaborate more to learn more about different disciplines to share information more easily and to drive better business outcomes through technology can you talk about the the importance of you know intelligent platform solutions AIML you know all these things which help also the fact is that we also talk about bringing back the developer experience here developer will solve creative problems in creative way they don't want to do mundane things and mundane things should be handed over to AIML and they are not going to take our jobs AIML they will just take over a lot of things that are boring we don't want to do that so talk a bit about the role of you know intelligent platform solutions as you're talking about you know moving the whole thing forward what do you see there i think that what we find in our install bases we've gone through is that is that employees um who embrace change embrace AI make themselves more valuable to the company they have more rewarding work they get more opportunities um and their job satisfaction increases right we i mean this is one of the you know i would say consistent things we saw from analysts and journalists reports is that the dynatrace customers that perform uh really enjoyed being dynatrace customers the longer you are a dynatrace customer the more you like dynatrace and that's not always true of of some companies some companies longer you're you're a customer the more you wish you weren't a customer so i think that's i think that's the the number one thing is everybody as an individual is thinking what's in it for me and i do think that the role of AI has an important role to play and and making our our lives better and of course there is there's a lot of potential downsides to AI especially when you think about how it's used in media how it can be used in advertising but when we talk about end to end observability um you know machine learning is is uh understanding the past to predict patterns and that has a role it's very important but in very dynamic environments um where you are constantly changing the environment you're encountering things that you've never seen before and that's really where causal AI um which is really fundamental to to dynatrace i think gives customers a leg up on understanding things that they've never seen before and knowing what to do about it so that to me is uh one of the most exciting things about the path forward at the event as you said you know last i mean different players of the whole ecosystem they came there you had a lot of discussions with them what are some of the pain point that you still see customers are facing of course beyond the economic condition situation that we are going through like in general with the adoption of clouded technologies what are the challenges that you think that hey they are still facing which are also that are our dynatrace that hey we have to solve these problems for our customers i think if you look at our number one competitor is still do it yourself all right and what is do it yourself it may be that you're you have a bunch of teams that want to do their own monitoring they want to you know um do bespoke you know for for specific applications and they're very siloed organizations and in some cases they may be using um what are considered platform companies but those platform companies really have siloed data um or if they've consolidated data it's all based on correlation and they can't do what what is commonly referred to as needle in the haystack queries or ask me anything without you know re-indexing rehydration so what i see is common pain points is i am so busy now how do i save myself right how do i get time to save myself how do i get everybody on board and that's not a simple answer because at its root it's uh it's a leadership and cultural thing amongst customers you have to have really the the willpower to change and frankly there's the reason you have early adopters early mainstream late mainstream and laggards is companies move at different paces and i think what what you've seen over the last few years is that companies that are more aggressively adopting technology and this is bearing out with with um Gartner and a bunch of their reset resources is is the more you adopt these and then observability solutions the better it is for your business so i i think it's just a a natural thing of how quickly can we change what's the right pace for our company bob thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about the larger ecosystem the challenges and how dynatrace is helping and also how perform is kind of bringing as you said you know different you know players of the ecosystem together to reconnect and to also talk to each other and sometimes bringing them together solves a lot of problem either way so thanks for sharing all those insights and i would love to have you back on the show thank you thank you so much for having me it was great uh it was great getting to know you better and would love an opportunity to come back at another date