 Welcome to the AWS startup showcase new breakthroughs in DevOps, data analytics and cloud management tools. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got Jordan Sher here with me next, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at OpsRamp. Jordan, welcome to the program. Lisa, it's great to be here. Great to talk about some of this stuff. Thanks for having me. Yeah, let's break this down. Tell me first of all about OpsRamp. How is it facilitating the transformation of IT Ops, helping companies as your website says, control the chaos. Sure, so OpsRamp is an availability platform for the modern enterprise. We consolidate digital IT operations management into one place. So availability, as you can imagine, is a consistent challenge for IT operations teams and large enterprises. Maintaining service assurance, making sure that services are up, available, performing. OpsRamp is the platform that powers all of that. And we bring a lot of different features and functions to bear in driving availability. I think about AI Ops. I think about hybrid infrastructure monitoring, multi-cloud monitoring. That's all part of the OpsRamp offering for the modern enterprise. Talk to me about back in 2014, what the founders saw of OpsRamps. What were some of the gaps in the market that they saw that thought this needs to be addressed and no one's doing this? It's a great question. So OpsRamp was originally founded as part of an MSP offering. So we were a platform serving managed service providers who wanted to consolidate the infrastructure of their clients onto one multi-tenant platform. What they noticed was that these enterprise customers of the MSPs whom we served really appreciated that promise of being able to consolidate infrastructure, being able to visualize different alerts, different critical incidents that might arise, all on one platform. And so that's when we decided to raise around and take it directly to the enterprise. So they could have the same kind of visibility and control that MSPs were delivering back to them. That visibility and control is essential, especially if your objective is to help control the chaos. Talk to me about some of the trends that you've seen, especially in the last 18 months, as we've been in such a dynamic market, we've seen the rapid acceleration of digital business transformation. What are some of those key trends, especially with respect to AI Ops that you think are really poignant? Yeah, you know, we like to think over here that the pandemic didn't really change a whole lot, it accelerated a whole lot. And so we started to see, at least within the past 12 to 18 months, this acceleration of movement to the cloud, Gartner forecasted that IT enterprises, large enterprises are going to be spending upwards of 300 billion in the move to the public cloud. So that has really facilitated some of the decisions that we have made and the promises that we offer to our customers. Number one, number two, with the move to remote work and the adoption of a lot of different digital tools and the creation and implementation of a lot of different digital customer services. It has forced these enterprises whom we serve to really rethink how they provide flexibility and control to their larger enterprise IT teams that might be distributed, might be working remote, might be in different locations. How can they consolidate infrastructure as it gets more and more complex? So that's where OpsRAMP has really created the most value. So we think about two things. Number one, I want to consolidate my multi-cloud environment. So services via AWS, for example, or other cloud providers. How do I bring that control within my enterprise, within the context of maybe additional private cloud offerings or public cloud infrastructure? Number one, number two, how do I get control over the constant flood of alerts that I'm getting from these different digital services and tools all in one place? So we are responding to that need by, for example, implementing a really rich, robust AI Ops functionality within the OpsRAMP platform to both be able to consolidate those alerts that are coming through and really escalate the critical ones to allow IT operations teams to be a little bit more proactive and understand how incidents are happening and giving them the ability to remediate those incidents before they become business critical and can really shut down the enterprise. Speaking of the enterprise, I'm curious if your customer conversations have changed in level in the last 18 months as everything has become chaotic for quite a while. We're still in, we've been in a hybrid cloud world for a while, we are in a hybrid workforce situation. Have you noticed an escalation up the stack in terms of the C-suite of going, we need to make sure that we're leveraging cloud properly, financially, responsibly and ensuring that we have visibility into all the services that we're delivering? You mean are they sweating more and are they coming to us when they're sweating more? Yes. Yeah, for sure. The short answer is yes. So let me give you a great example. One of our recent customers, they manufacture chips, microchips and what they've noticed is that number one, demand has grown due to the increase in digital transformation. Number two, supply chains have become more constricted for them specifically. So they're asking themselves, all right, how can we equip our IT operations teams to maintain the availability of different logistics services within our organization so that they can both maintain service availability of these different logistic services and be able to stay on deadline as much as they possibly can during a supply chain crisis that we're facing right now. And number two, how can we, as we move to the cloud and we see a distribution of our workforce, still be able to maintain IT operation services regardless? That is a need in particular, the supply chain constraint issue, that is a need that has arisen only in the last 18 months. And it is a perfect use case for ops ramp or a platform that allows you to consolidate IT operations to one place and give flexibility control across a distributed environment with a number of different new digital services that have been implemented to solve some of these challenges. Talk to me about AI ops as a facilitator of that availability, that visibility in this hybrid world that is still somewhat chaotic. Yeah, great question. So originally it was algorithmic IT operations as coined by Gardner. Today it's artificial intelligence in IT operations. So the notion there is simple, right? There's a lot of data coming in throughout the IT operations organization. How can we look for patterns within that data to help us understand and act more proactively from an operational perspective? Well, there are a lot of promises that go along with AI ops that it's gonna completely transform these IT organizations that it's gonna reduce headcount. We don't necessarily find that to be true. What we do find true though is that the original promise behind AI ops still exists. We need to look for patterns in the data and we need to be able to drive insights from those patterns. So that is what the AI ops feature functionality within ops ramp really does. It looks for patterns within alerts and helps you understand what these patterns ultimately mean. Let me give you a great example. So we have different algorithms within the ops ramp platform for co-occurring events or for downstream events that help us indicate, okay, if a number of these events are happening across one geography or one business service, for example, we can actually look for those co-occurring patterns and we can see that there may be one resource or set of resources that is actually causing a bunch of these incidents or a bunch of these alerts upstream of all the actual alerts themselves. So instead of the IT operations organization having to go in and remediate a bunch of different distributed alerts, they can actually look at that upstream alert and say, okay, that's the one that really matters. That's where I need to pay most of my attention to and that's where I'm gonna deploy a team or open up a ticket or escalate to ITSM or a variety of different things because I know that these co-occurring alerts are creating a pattern that's driving some insight. So that's just part of the overall ops ramp AI ops promise or there's tons more that goes along with AI ops but we really want to take some of the load and reduce some of the alerts that these IT operations teams are having to deal with on a daily basis. So let's talk about how you do that from a practical perspective. I was looking at some of the notes that your team provided and according to IDC, this was a report from Asia Pacific excluding Japan that 75% of global 2K enterprises are gonna adopt AI ops by 2023 but a lot of AI ops projects have been bolt on and haven't been successful. How does ops ramp help chain flip the script on that? Yeah, so it really comes down to the quality of the data. If you have a bolt-on tool, you have to optimize that tool for the different data lakes or data warehouses or sources of data that exist within your operational organization. I think about multi-cloud, AI ops across a multi-cloud environment. So I have to optimize the data that is coming in from each of those different cloud providers onto a bolt-on tool to make sure that the data that's being fed to the tool is accurate and it is a true reflection of what's going on in the operational organization. That's number one. If you look at ops ramp and the differentiation there, ops ramp is a big data platform at its core. So you bring ops ramp in, you optimize it for your overall infrastructure mix and then the data that gets fed into the AI ops feature functionality is the same across the board. There's no further optimization. So what that means is that the insights that are being driven by the ops app AI ops platform are more sophisticated, they're more nuanced, they're more accurate representation and they're probably driving ultimately better insights than sticking a tool on top of five different existing data warehouses or data lakes. So if you've got a customer and I'm sure that you do enterprises, as we said, going to be adopting this substantially by 2023, which is just around the corner, how do you help them sort through the infrastructure and the ecosystem that they have so that they're not bolting things on, but rather they can actually really build this very intuitively to deliver that availability and the visibility that they need fast. Yeah, so a couple of different comments on that, ways that we try to help. Number one, I think it's critical for us to understand the challenges of the modern IT infrastructure environment across different verticals, different industries. So when we walk into any of our clients, we already have a good mix of their challenges. Is it IoT? Are they dealing with a bunch of different devices at the edge? Are they, you know, a telecom with critical incidents in the network that they need to remediate? Number two, we try to smooth the glide path into understanding the OpsRAMP platform and promise early. So what does that mean? It means we offer a free trial of the platform itself. At try.opsramp.com, you can set up up to 1,000 resources for free with an unlimited number of users for 14 days and kick the tires, particularly on multi-cloud monitoring and see what sorts of insights you can determine just within those two weeks. And in fact, we put our cards on the table and we say you can probably see your first insights into your infrastructure within 20 minutes of setting up the OpsRAMP free trial. And if you don't wanna bring your resources, your own resources to it, we'll even provide a collection of resources preloaded onto the platform so you could try it out yourself without having to get, you know, a bunch of approvals to load infrastructure in there. So two pieces, number one, it's this proof of concept, proof of value where we try to understand the client's pain. And number two, if you wanna kick the tires on it yourself, we can offer that with this free trial offering. So what I'm hearing in that is fast time to value, which in these days is absolutely essential. How does that differentiate OpsRAMP as a technology company and from your customer's perspective? Yeah, so I appreciate that. And the mean time to insight is one of the critical aspects of our product roadmap. We really want to drive down that time to value coefficient because it's what these IT operations teams need as complexity grows. Really, if you take a step back, right? Everything's getting more complex. So it's not only the pandemic and the rise of multi-cloud, but it's more digital customer experiences to compete. It's the availability. It's the need of a modern enterprise to be agile. All of those things translate basically into speed and flexibility and agility. So if there's one guiding light of OpsRAMP, it's really to equip the operations team with the tools that they need to move flexibly with the business. There is a department in any modern enterprise today. If they need access to the public cloud and they have a credit card, they're getting on AWS right now and they are spinning up a host of services. We want to be the platform that still gives the central IT operations team some aspect of control over that. With the ability, without taking away the ability of that siloed operations team somewhere in some geographic region, we want to empower them to be able to spin up that AWS service. But at the same time, we want to just know that it exists and be able to control it. How can AI ops be a facilitator of better alignment between IT ops and the business as you just gave a great example of the business getting the credit card, spinning up services that they need for their line of business or their function. And then from a cultural perspective, I'm just curious, how can AI ops be a facilitator of those two groups working better together in a constantly complex environment? That's a great question. So imagine if IT operations did more than just keep the lights on. Imagine if you knew that your IT operations team could be more proactive and more productive about alerts, incidents, and insights from infrastructure monitoring. What that means is that you are free to create any kind of digital customer experience that you would want to drive value back to your end user. It means that no longer do you think about IT operations as this big hodge podge of technology that you have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in network operations, teams, and centers, and technologies just to keep control of. By consolidating everything down to one place, one SaaS-based platform like this, it frees up the business to be able to innovate, take advantage of new technologies that come around and really to work flexibly with the needs of the business as it grows. That's the promise of OpsRAMP. We're here to replace these old appliances or different management packs of tools that exist that you consistently had to add and optimize and tune to empower the IT operations team to act like that. The truth is that everything is SaaS-based now. Everything is SaaS-based. And when you get to the core of infrastructure, it needs to be managed via SaaS. And that's OpsRAMP in a nutshell. I like that nutshell. That's excellent. I want to know a little bit about your go-to-market with AWS. Talk to me a little bit about the partnership there and what's your go-to-market like, essentially? Yeah, so we're included in the AWS Marketplace. We have an integration with AWS as the de facto biggest cloud provider in the world. We have to play nice with them. And obviously the insights that we drive on the OpsRAMP platform have to be insights that you need from your AWS experience. It has to be similar to CloudWatch or in a lot of cases, it has to be as rich as the CloudWatch experience in order for you to want to use OpsRAMP within the context of your different other multi-cloud providers. So that's how OpsRAMP works. We understand that there's a lot of AWS certified professionals who work at OpsRAMP, who understand what AWS is doing and who consistently introduce new features that play well with the services, the service library that AWS currently offers today. Got it. As we look ahead to 2022 and hopefully a better year than 2020 and 2021, what are some of the things that you're excited about? What are some of the things on the OpsRAMP road map that you can share with us? Yeah, so the other big aspect of the new landscape of IT operations is observability. We're really excited about observability. We think that it is the new landscape of monitoring. The idea of being able to find unknown unknowns that exists within your operational stack is important to us to be able to consolidate that with the power of AI Ops so that you now have machine learning on top of your ability to find unknown, unknown issues. That's gonna be super exciting for us. I know the product team is taking a hard look at how to drive hybrid observability within the OpsRAMP platform. So how do we give a better operational perspective to on-prem public cloud and private cloud infrastructure moving forward and how do we adjust alerts before they're even alerts? I mean, that's observability in a nutshell. If I'm getting in and I'm checking the OpsRAMP platform every day then that's a workflow that we can remove by creating a better observability posture within the OpsRAMP platform. So now the platform is gonna run unsupervised in the background and AI Ops is going to be able to take action on predictive incidents before they ever occur. So that's what we're looking at in the future. Everything is getting more complex. We've heard this story a million times before. We wanna be the platform that can handle that complexity on a massive scale. Finding the unknown unknowns, converting them into knowns, I imagine is gonna be more and more critical across every industry. But last question for you, given the culture and the dynamics of the market that we're in, are there any industries that OpsRAMP is seeing as really key targets for this type of technology? Yeah, the nice thing about OpsRAMP is we are really vertical neutral, right? Any industry that has complexity and that's every industry can really take advantage of a platform like this. We have seen recent success, particularly in finance, manufacturing, healthcare, because they deal with new emerging types of complexity that they are not necessarily prepared for. So I think about some of our clients, some of our friends in the finance industry, as transactions accelerate, as new customer experiences arise, these are things that their operations teams need to be equipped for, and that's where OpsRAMP really drives value. What's more is that these industries are also somewhat legacy. So they have a foot in the old way of doing things. They have a foot in the data center. There are many financial institutions that have large data center footprint for security considerations. And so if they are living in the data center and they wanna make the move to cloud, then they need something like OpsRAMP to be able to keep a foot in both sides of the equation. Right, keep that availability and that visibility. Jordan, thank you for joining me today and talking to us about OpsRAMP, the capabilities that AI Ops can deliver to enterprises in any industry, the facilitation of the IT folks and the business folks, and what you guys are doing with AWS. We appreciate your time. Absolutely, Lisa, thank you very much. Thanks for the great questions. If you ever need a job in corporate marketing, you seem like you're a natural fit, so. I'll call you. I appreciate the time. Awesome, thank you. For Jordan's share, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS Startup Showcase.