Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Moneyball for IT: Mastering SaaS Apps (w/ Dave Wagner)

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Moneyball for IT: Mastering SaaS Apps (w/ Dave Wagner) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome it, Change Makers to the Deck show with Tim
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Flower and Tom McGraw. Let's get into it.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Hello, change Makers, Welcome to Reality Bites. It is, as
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: you well know, this show within a show within a
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: show where the Reality Bites team gets to welcome to
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: the show and talk to some of our favorite and
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: most fascinating Next thinkers. And I have to tell the
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: audience that I was I was going to pick my
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: car up from the garage on the bus, I think,
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: very very early this week, and I thought, we have
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: to get a new guest on the show. And I thought,
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: who haven't we spoken to before on the show? Who
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: would be a great guest? So that it hit me
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: there and then listeners that we never invited onto the
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: show before one of my favorite Next thinkers to talk
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: to one of the best speakers and talkers we have
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: at Next Think and that is none other than senior
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: product marketing manager Dave Wagner. Dave, what a pleasure to
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: welcome you to Reality Bites. How you doing today?
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: Wow? I guess I'm humbled, but I am curious. How
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: did thinking about repairing a car pop my name in
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: your head?
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: There's got to be all I was on the bus,
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: and I was thinking, oh, you know, you know when
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: you just sometimes you're on the bus, you're not driving,
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: you have a chance to think about things you haven't done,
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: you know, and oh, my goodness, we need a we
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: need a great reality by its guest. And that was
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: how that was how it came.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: Out, Okay. I was just wondering if it happened to be.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: I was on holiday two weeks ago and I was
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: out in Arizona and I posted a picture of my
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: first dream car, like when I was twelve, I wanted
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: this car. It was a nineteen sixty seven Pontiac Firebird
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: in bright blue and it was mint and I was
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: just like oh, And I shared it with the team
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: on on on yammer and teams chat with some of
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: my friends, and it was I wondered if you had
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: seen that, and so that's how you made it the car.
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: But anyway, yeah, anyway, you know, it's it's it's a
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: bit of our reality, right.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: So I think so. And we're joined with Sean. He's
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: also got some questions for you, and we're hoping to
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: be joined by Oriana Dave and I know Orianna was
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: particularly excited to talk to you because she really wants
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: to discuss Bismarck a little bit.
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: Oh okay, Yeah, Unfortunately he's not here with us, but
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: he might. He might show up if he does want idea.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: To have a dog, join the joint, join a podcast
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: to be honest with you.
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well he does have that ability.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah so, but but Dave, maybe a way to introduce
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: yourself to the listeners. You have had a singingly intriguing career,
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: and a brief history to begin.
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: Would be great. Oh, I have really got to keep
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: it brief. Okay. So it started out in the seventies.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: I was an original hacker. So I would literally break
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: into digital time sharing machines during the university in the seventies,
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: and then I'd go upstairs and report to the operators. Here,
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: here's how I broke it. You better, you know, put
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: a problem ticket into digital. So there were a group
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: of us that did this back in the late seventies,
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: and there was a group in Arizona where I was.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: There was a group in Massachusetts. There are other groups,
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: and they all became known as the hacker community. Long
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: story short, Digital ended up hiring me and some of
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: my friends right out of college to be operating system
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: engineers to go in and code the operating system, fix
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: the operating system, and in my case, make it more performant,
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: make it more efficient. And so that's been a common
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: theme throughout my entire career, whether OS engineer, whether in
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: product management, product marketing. I did two startups in the area.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: It's always been about making computers more responsive to people
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: using them, and so in a roundabout that way, that's
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: how I ended up here at next Think because Next
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: Think was starting to get into the concept of how
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: do we manage applications. It's one thing to manage device
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: in your desktop and all that's good, but you know,
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: the reality of the world is and this is something
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: I learned very early on. Applications make the world go around.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: If you don't have applications, you don't have a reason
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: for a computer. And the reason to have any application
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: is to boost productivity. Well, to boost productivity, the application's
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: got to work, and everything else the employees doing has
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: to work. They have to work together. And Next Thing alone,
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: from my experience, was doing that. I've worked with APMs,
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: I've done two startups in the APM space, but Next Thing,
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: you Know, offered a really exciting opportunity for me to
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: apply that decades of experience in performance optimization to optimize
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: in the performance experience of employees using applications. So that's
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: that's how I came here. I've kind of like jumped
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: in and sort of tried to evangelize application experience as
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: we continue to enhance it, because that's been my background
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: for literally decades.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: Excellent, and I'm glad to say Oriana has made the show.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: We already we already shouted out Bismarck on your behalf.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: I said, you know how much you wanted to to
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: get that opportunity, but.
• 4:46
  Speaker 4: Is wonderful.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah. One, for those who don't know, Bismarck is our cavalier,
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: King Charles Spaniel, and he basically runs our family and
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: and any human whose eyes he makes contact with for
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: five seconds he then owns. We call it being absorbed
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: into his borg. So hence everybody talking about them.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: But excellent, excellent, So we are we are, as you
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: might have heard, Oriana, we are. We've already got stuck
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: in a little bit too application experience. So and I
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: know you had some questions about that, so over to you.
• 5:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I was super interested to hear from day's perspective,
• 5:16
  Speaker 4: how you would say the rise of SaaS solutions have
• 5:19
  Speaker 4: changed the way it is managed, and just sort of
• 5:24
  Speaker 4: getting your perspective on that longitudinal change in employee experience
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: with applications and also more generally with digital tools at work.
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: Okay, it's interesting you mentioned that because I sort of
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: alluded to that in the history of my career. But
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: you know, when when distributed systems and I'm talking after mainframes,
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: So when Unix servers and Windows servers client server computing
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: first started coming out, we saw the rise of a
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: class of applications that could not be measured as to
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: how they're performing. Is experienced by users with mainframes, everything
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: that computer did was transactionalized, and you had to mmetry
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: inside the operating system kernel. You could literally measure how
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: long it took for someone to do a form submission
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: on an IBM terminal and for the data to come
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: back piece of cake. Okay, But when distributed systems Unix
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: and Windows servers client server computing came in, it created
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: a new class of application for which there was no
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: way for it to measure the performance of the experience.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: And so the industry responded as it often does creating
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: new types of applications. Standards bodies arose to measure all
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: of that, and so you started seeing the rise of
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: APM tools right about the time when custom web apps
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: were created. And so when people create custom web apps,
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: they pre instrument the code so that the people who
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: write the code can see if it's performing well or not.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: Now that's still not the totality of the user experience,
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: but at least it was a step. Okay, So, as
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: our industry always does, the nouns continue to change, but
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: the verbs like virtualization and abstraction layers and and things
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: like that, APIs and all the rest, all of those
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: things stay the same. The nouns are different, right, Okay,
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: So the noun today is an application is SaaS hosted
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: on the web out there in a cloud. It's immensely
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: horizontally scalable. It offers innumerable price, performance and cost benefits
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: to all involved. But once again, it's a new class
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: of applications. You can't actually understand how they're being experienced.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: You can't measure it from the technology side outward. Same
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: problem they had needing APM tools, same problem they had
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: back in client server days. And so you know this.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: It creates a whole new exposure to a class of
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: blindness that had been solved once before, and it's time
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: to solve it once again. Now. The challenge with SaaS
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: apps is they're packaged and commercial. You can't change the code,
• 7:50
  Speaker 3: so you can't use APM tools for them, and yet
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: the need to understand the performance is still there. And
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: so that's where we took real user monitoring, which is
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: an awful shoot of a PM, and we married it
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: to that deep, full stack visibility that next thing already
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: had to deliver that complete solution, and so that's why
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: I'm excited about it, and that's why I think the
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: rise of SaaS applications is just literally an unstoppable force
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: behind the demand for needing that comprehensive visibility.
• 8:22
  Speaker 4: So when you're mentioning the sort of need for visibility,
• 8:25
  Speaker 4: I think one of the big challenges for a lot
• 8:27
  Speaker 4: of I TEA leaders is just keeping up, especially with
• 8:31
  Speaker 4: the increase in the number of applications being used. This
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: has been a really hot topic recently. The numbers are
• 8:37
  Speaker 4: really exploding with how many different tools almost any employees
• 8:42
  Speaker 4: is using at this point. So I'm wondering if you
• 8:44
  Speaker 4: can talk a little bit about with that explosion, how
• 8:49
  Speaker 4: does this tool help leaders keep up?
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: Well, it's really there's really two angles that we take
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: with Application Experience. One is to literally put any and
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: all application telemetry in one place for consumption in one
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: integrated workflow. So that's how we can literally look at
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: the performance of for example, Microsoft Office three sixty five,
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: whether you happen to go through a browser client or
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: whether you're going through the desktop client. We have visibility
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: into both aspects of that in one place. So that
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: is a critical capability is to literally put it all
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: in one place. The other one is, and again this
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: can only be done by a very comprehensive and deep
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: and rich cloud back end like we have with next
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: Think Workplace Experience and the Infinity platform, is that we
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: have telemetry that allows you to then as a leader
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: filter on ask what if questions based on other dimensions
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: then necessarily just the application. You correctly mentioned Oreana that
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: you know employees are using dozens or hundreds of applications
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: every day, and guess what, They're all using them with
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: different versions of the browser, on different operating system environments,
• 10:02
  Speaker 3: with different configurations, via different network connectivities, all of which
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: are multiplying effects, multiplying factors on that complexity equation. And
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: so by literally putting it all in one place with
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: one consistent workflow, that helps leaders then prioritize. We have
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: dashboards that literally you can sort rank which are my
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: applications that are performing the worst over the last period
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: of time. You can get alerts on it looks like
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: performance for these applications is degrading. It hasn't yet hit
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: critical levels. Your technology metrics don't say anything's down, but
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: you might want to go look at this area. And
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: so it's that visibility across everything in a rank ordered,
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: prioritized fashion that gives leaders the capabilities they need when
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: they're faced with you know, dozens or hundreds of apps
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: that are being used in thousands of different possible combinations.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: And oh, by the way, the vendors are constantly rolling
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: out new changes. Right, let's all think that cloud strike
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: rollout that wasn't properly test. That was a bad change
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: to a web application that had downstream implications on that.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: So applications are important. Sometimes they can actually bring everything down,
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: and so you need that visibility into all aspects of
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: how they're performing.
• 11:16
  Speaker 4: Right, And I really like how you're stressing the multiplicative
• 11:19
  Speaker 4: factor because, like you said, it's not additive, it's multiplative.
• 11:23
  Speaker 4: Because all these factors create so many different intersections of
• 11:27
  Speaker 4: possibilities exactly.
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: And the reality is cloud providers cannot test every possible
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: permutation and combination of other configurations outside of their environment.
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: They can't know, and so it behooves everyone when using
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: SaaS and web applications. It behooves them to follow best practices,
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: to always roll out things in a pilot, you know,
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: fashion before rolling out more broadly, and to test those
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: pilots with complete visibility. And that's where appex comes. In
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: test things with complete visibility, you now have a performance
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: baseline and then you have a target to roll out
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: against as you roll these things out when they're tested
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: for your combinations. And had people done that with CrowdStrike,
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: they wouldn't have had this problem. We would have seen
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: a very rapid increase in the crashes of a particular
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: application when used in combination over the web with this
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: particular version of the client stub with a DLL. And
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: you know, we can't stop the actual problem the first time,
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: but what you can do is get very quick visibility
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: into it and put a fence around it, right and
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: prevent it from spreading. And so again to do that
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: you need complete visibility, and only with appex do you
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: get that complete visibility.
• 12:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes sense. So tell us more about appex
• 12:44
  Speaker 4: and especially what's new and exciting that's coming out now
• 12:48
  Speaker 4: in twenty four.
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: To me, the most exciting thing this last year we've
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: I mean, we're up over four four hundred and fifty
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: customers now globally with appex, tens of millions of browser instrumentations.
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: It's massively successful. But what's really been encouraging to see
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: lately is the adoption by more and more application support
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: teams and application owners. In addition to the EUC team
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: solving their issues right, it's these teams are now seeing
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: the value of it, and with the most recent features
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: that we've added, things like that we call waterfall or
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: resource metrics, where we literally now can see inside an
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: applications slow performance to say what resources are being loaded
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: that are causing it. Is it a call off to
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: another web server, is it a really big PNG or
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: MPG file that's getting downloaded as part of an application?
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: And so what it allows people to do is literally
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: now they can use appex as their frontline operational monitor
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: of choice for all applications. And then when it says oh,
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: because we can with appex, it says, oh, look, the
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: problem is in the back end. That's when you hand
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: it over to the application team to go either fix
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: the code if it's a custom app or a customized
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: Marcial SaaS platform, or go back to the vendor and
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: have them fix it. But it's that ability to rapidly
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: focus that really I think, you know, is really cool.
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: And we've added enough features in the last few point
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: releases to where it is now a very robust, full function,
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: full stack application monitoring tool, and so that use case
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: I think is now increasingly being adopted. It's increasingly resonating
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: with people because the reality is nobody can afford to
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: deploy an APM tool for every application. They're incredibly expensive,
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: a B. They don't work with many SaaS applications again
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: because you can't inject code into the code stack for them,
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: which is how server side instrumented APM tools work. And
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: see any other operational monitoring tools that they're using are
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: monitoring the technology of the web app. They're doing synthetic
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: transactions to see if the website's up or down things
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: like that. Okay, again not aligned to experience. So to me,
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: you know, our ever increasing alignment to the totality of
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: experience of performance when employees use applications is really the
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: game changer. And now that we're adding things like AI,
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: where we're going in and doing correlative analysis and helping
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: come up with instant diagnostics that say, look, these transactions
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: are slow, and these are the shared traits of why
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: they're slow. You might want to investigate over here. This
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: is huge. This is huge. So if you can tell
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: I'm excited about it, it's because I've been doing performance
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: for a long time and this kind of visibility is
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: just very compelling. It's really about getting people to see
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: the art of the possible.
• 15:36
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really great to get your legitaminal perspective on that.
• 15:41
  Speaker 5: Great answers, Dave, you actually answered two questions I had.
• 15:43
  Speaker 5: One was on the CrowdStrike and MS outage and the
• 15:46
  Speaker 5: other about the impact of AI, and I think you
• 15:49
  Speaker 5: kind of.
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I get talking and I can't stop because the
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: enthusiasm just pours out right.
• 15:59
  Speaker 5: I had one further question, though, maybe just to step
• 16:02
  Speaker 5: back for just a second from app X in the product,
• 16:05
  Speaker 5: but and more generally, what do you think the future
• 16:07
  Speaker 5: holds just for application experience and management in terms of
• 16:12
  Speaker 5: like for it, for user experience and importance of des tools.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: Hmm. Okay, So I'll start by flashing back to something
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: I said at the very beginning, and that is, if
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: there's one thing I've learned over my career, it's that
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: applications exist. They only exist, they're only justified, they're only
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: ever purchased if they can demonstrably improve the productivity of
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: some human process. Okay, that's given that. Okay, then it
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: really comes down to I don't know if many of
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: you remember the movie and the book Moneyball, Okay, where
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: you know, people that thought about math came in and said,
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: you know, we're going to manage and measure sports success
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: by what matters, not by what we've always measured, and
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: they you know, and it literally revolutionized things. And dex
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: is very much like Moneyball. We're measuring the only thing
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: that matters. We're monitoring it, we're looking at it for
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: drift invariance in a proactive fashion, and we're solving problems
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: in ways that impact the experience in the best way
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: possible for the most people possible because it totally aligns
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: with what productivity. Okay, and so it's it literally, I
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: mean I get goosebumps thinking about it. I've done two startups. Okay,
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: they weren't as wonderfully named as Next Think. Next Think
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: really is a different way of thinking about technology reality.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: It's about measuring what matters. With Billy Bean and the
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: Oakland A's and then right after that, the Red Sox
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: adopted it and won their first World Series in like
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: ninety years. Okay, they stop measuring batting average and how
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: many home runs and you know those kind of statistics,
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: and they started measuring how often does this score a
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: run and why because that's how you what win games.
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: And that was the metric that mattered. And that's simple.
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: Change changed everything. Okay, changing to a dex centric way
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: of managing and optimizing your IT environment is very much
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: like moneyball to me. It's it's measuring what matters. Because
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: here's the reality. If your SaaS provider's back end is
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: crashing fifty percent of the time, but every one of
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: your users using Salesforce or Oracle Financials or Genesis or
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: pick your favorite SaaS app, if nobody's being impacted. Do
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: you care? You don't. On the other hand, if all
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: their metrics are green and that all their data centers
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: are up, and you've got employees in an entire department
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: or an entire region who can't work, that matters, right,
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: So you've got to measure and manage to what matters.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: And to me, that's des plain and simple. And the
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: fact that we now have decks with our dexscore v
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: three and it's moments of experience integrated into that, so
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: we'd literally know every hour what Dave's experience, Tom's experience,
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: Oreanda's experience, Shawn's experience is with every app you're using.
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: That's huge.
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: So again, Dexcentricity, great answer, Dave, and I do want
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: to circle back briefly to CrowdStrike, because I know you
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: touched upon it, but I mean in terms of learnings
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: from CrowdStrike and implications for other applications and for application
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: management in general. Is there anything to add to what
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: you've already said. Is there anything to flesh out there?
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah? What I would say is just follow best practices
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: when you're deploying and rolling out changes. Okay, if a
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: SAS vendor is going to roll out a change, make
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: sure you roll it out in a you know, private, firewalled,
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: dedicated testing environment a b. Make sure you do that
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: with any application, whether it's a binary or you know,
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: updates to web applications, test them, pilot them, manage that ruthlessly.
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: Don't just trust the vendor. So that would be one
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: overarching thing. The other one would be sometimes these things
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: are going to happen. It's there's a history of these,
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: these kinds of disasters. Having have a fallback plan for
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: when something like this happens, you know, So for example,
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: I read somewhere that a lot of times these not
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: every system that got affected by CrowdStrike went into that
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: boot loop. Okay, there were differences between them, but for
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: the ones who did, they needed to manually enter a
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: BitLocker key. Well, maybe you should have a proactive process
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: in place, using something like next think to make sure
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: that every employee always has a current version of their
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: BitLocker key and some written instructions so that they can
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: do it themselves when it can't remote in and just
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: little things like that would have significantly reduced the impact
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: and the scope and reach of what happened with CrowdStrike.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: So it's funny. I have family members that work for
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: some some of the airlines that were and weren't affected,
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: and it was really interesting to see the differences in
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: the way they approached it from an IT perspective. So uh,
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: and they aligned very much with some of the concepts
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: that I've just talked about. I don't want to get
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: into naming names, but if you follow best practices and
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: you proactively enable recoveries, you can you can really mitigate
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: the inevitable problems when they do occur. You can prevent
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: most not all. You can't prevent everything. You have to
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: be a realist here, but you can certainly mitigate and
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: you can certainly minimize what the impacts might be.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: Glad I asked Dave that I followed it up. Dave,
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: we have like a corny end question. It's kind of
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: a tradition here on Reality Bias, but we haven't done
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: it for a couple of weeks, a couple of episodes.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: What is your favorite thing about being a next thinger.
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: I'll give a funny answer that I'll give it. Yeah, No,
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: it's it's literally like to hear somebody like you invite
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: me as one of the most fascinating and interesting. Guy.
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: I love that because here's what it says about our culture.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: Right, We're all fascinating.
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: We're all interesting, we all bring a wealth of passion
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: and knowledge to this moneyball for it, and to me,
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: it's that shared culture and passion. Every next thinger I've
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: run across has so I've been doing it a long
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: time and it's it's unique here, it really is, and
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: so that's it.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: I always appreciate a colleague. I can get music tips
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: off Dave, and I did. I have given Rush a
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: couple of listens, you know, following your you're almost as
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: passionate about RUSS as you our Application Experience.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: And Lavia stiata.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: I am making the occasional dip into the Rush discography.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: So thank you for that.
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: Okay, I do like it anytime anytime. Pink Floyd is
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: pretty good too.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: But I'm already a Floyd guy time. Dave, absolute pleasure
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: to have you on, and you speak so eloquently and
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: passionately about Application Experience. You're a wonderful evangelist for that product,
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: and it was great to talk to you about it.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: Really appreciate it's good to see men.
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me let's not be strangers.
• 23:15
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