In The Arena by TechArena - Exploring Advanced Internet Monitoring Solutions with Mehdi Daoudi of Catchpoint Systems

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

In this episode of the Tech Arena podcast, Allyson Klein interviews Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint Systems. They discuss Catchpoint's leadership in internet monitoring, their latest advancements in observability solutions, and the impact of AI on automation. Mehdi shares insights on the importance of performance in network monitoring and the company's recent innovations, including Internet Sonar and Internet Stack Map, designed to enhance user experience and reduce mean time to repair.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein. Today, I'm joined by Mehdi Dayoudi of Catchpoint Software. Welcome to the program, Mehdi. How are you doing? Good. Thank you so much for having me, Alison. So Mehdi, Catchpoint's a leader in internet monitoring and very well known in the industry, but it's the first time that you guys have been on the program. Can you provide some background on your solutions and how they fit into the tech arena? Absolutely. So we've been around for 15 years. Before that, I was at DoubleClick and

Google where we were doing basically the same thing, except I was mostly on the buying side and implementing side. So I've always cared a lot about monitoring from where it matters the most, which is always the end user perspective. Long story. And so what Catchpoint focuses on and has been focused since 2008 when we started is really about bringing some visibility from an end user perspective to the technology monitoring stack. And so we focus on what is called synthetic monitoring, proactive monitoring. So we do that really well from over 2,500 locations worldwide.

But now even more on the real user monitoring. And we made an acquisition last year in the observability space with a company called Tundra. And we are now being able to extend that monitoring all the way from the end users, all the way to the applications through open telemetry and tracing. Now, you just announced a major update to your global observability network. Can you walk us through the improvements delivered and why you delivered these new capabilities? Sure. So again, you have to take a step back and everything we do is really about helping our customers reduce the mean time to return,

because that's what we're all in here for. So everybody, all the customers we have the pleasure of servicing have realized that every millisecond counts, every minute of downtime counts. And so everything they do and everything they ask of us to do is help them detect an issue, identify an issue, help them escalate. Of course, we can't help them fix, but then we can help them validate that whatever they did took the problem away. So with that in the background, the things that we've announced are a solution called Internet Sonar that basically using AI and also the data that we have, we collect about 50 billion data points a day around the internet. So we can basically tell them, hey, is there an internet outage happening in the world? Is there a fiber cut? Is there something on the internet that is a third-party

provider having an issue in Adobe or DoubleClick or whatnot, having an issue on the internet that could impact their end-user experience? So Internet Sonar is one of them. The other thing that we've announced is what we call Internet Stack Map. So the same way there is an APM player or APM players that basically give you an application stack and visibility, we want to give customers the ability to understand their Internet stack. So the Internet is complex. You know, if you deliver an e-commerce or an application to your customers, you're typically using a third-party hosting company

or cloud vendor. You're using a CDN or multiple CDNs. You use a DNS vendor, et cetera. So Internet Stack allows you to also understand

the ecosystem that you rely on to deliver that customer experience. And we basically allow you to do that. So those are the two major updates. Of course, tracing is another one, but more to come there. Now, automation is always a huge topic,

and it has been since the dawn of cloud computing. AI is accelerating automation capabilities and really delivering new tools in terms of the operation of network and workload monitoring. Can you comment on why this is a key capability for customers? So I think with the dawn of AI, Alison, one of the key things that we're going to finally be able to do, and again, this industry has existed for the past 40 years, right? And everybody has been selling a pipe dream of automation. to be able to connect the dots at high speed between infrastructure, databases, applications, microservices, like all this amount of data, being able to connect the dots

and be able to then deliver the knowledge to do automation. So we're not there yet. I think there's a lot of AI voodoo stuff being thrown at customers out there, so I don't want to play that game. I think we're in the phase where the data is going to become knowledge. Knowledge is going to become wisdom and AI is going to allow to give us that ability to do automation.

So the network intent based stuff, all the things that some of the key cloud vendors are working on is going to, I think, see the light in the next year or two. But automation is going to be the final, if you want, the cherry on the cake when it comes to how can we go from monitoring to observability to the next stage, which is like waking up in the morning and having a cup of coffee and knowing that something took care of the outages that were happening while everybody was asleep. It wasn't an admin alert anymore. It's just something that self-healed. Correct.

Now, as I read through your announcement, one of the common themes that really struck me was the performance, whether it be a time to detect or sub network, excuse me, sub second network testing. How are you achieving these gains in terms of the solution? Yeah. So that's a, that's an awesome point you just made. I'm in Maryland and I met with a customer yesterday and a very large network company. And one of the things they said is like, Mary, are you guys seeing performances becoming a big thing? And it is. So when you think of maturity models, the majority of our customers were mostly caring about availability.

Are we up or are we down kind of thing? Today, most of the conversation I'm having with customers is like, are we slow? Because slow is the new down. And I think we have Google and Apple to blame for that because they've set the standards so high when it comes to responsiveness and just like pure performance. Not everybody's playing catch up now.

Everybody cares about performance. We live in a world where today's consumers and today's users, Alison, have no, I mean, I look at my kids, they have no patience for like a second. You know, everything has to happen yesterday. So performance is literally becoming a huge performance, a huge business differentiator. I think performance is the new fifth P of the marketing mix. If you remember your marketing 101 classes. And so it's literally the thing

that is going to drive the makers of the future digital retitles. So everything we do is also now geared toward performance. So you mentioned sub-second testing, because again, we want to catch performance issues and performance performance as quickly as possible to help customers reduce that shrink that means time to repair.

And so performance is going to be key for the SaaS application. Performance is going to be key for just like e-commerce. Of course, those guys have been on the forefront of latency and performance, but all the other industries are catching up to that, ISPs, et cetera. And you also look at Apple and what they're doing with their Vision Pro application device.

All these companies are literally demanding superb performance and superb latency because the applications of the future, the third act of the engineering I like to call, has to happen in less than a millisecond. And everybody has to jump on that bandwagon. There is no, oh, it's happening next year. No, it's happening today. Now, it seems like everyone uses Catchpoint for something in their network. What has been the market response to these new solutions? And what do you see customers valuing the most in terms of your new capabilities? I think at the end of the day, we are just responding to the demand of some of the customers

that we've been working with over the last 10 years, to be honest with you, Alison. I wish I could tell you that, you know, I mean, don't get me wrong. We do a lot of innovation ourselves, but I'm just so lucky. And I think everybody at Catchpoint knows that we're just so lucky to be working with some of the most incredible companies out there that are literally telling us where the market is going. We just maybe do a good job at listening and delivering on what problems they're trying to solve. The feedback has been very positive. Some of them is like, what took you so long? Because they always want to solve. The feedback has been very positive. Some of them is like, what took you so long? Because they always want stuff yesterday.

But so far, things have been good. I think the other thing that we try to emphasize because software is one thing, building all these features is another thing. But we spend a lot of time also making sure that we have an awesome team

that can assist customers in adopting some of these technologies and some of these things. So we think of service like software as a service. The service world at the end is very important. So we invest heavily on making sure that we can accompany these customers through this journey of achieving better availability, performance, et cetera. So what's next for Catchpoint and how can folks engage with you to learn more? Oh, thank you.

So they can obviously engage with us through our website, our social channels, et cetera. Send us an email. It's mediatcatchpoint.com. I'm happy to answer any question people have. I think for what's next is really delivering on our AI strategy, the things that we have worked with some customers on and

this year is going to be very big on that, helping customers again reduce this mean time to repair. That's literally what we wake up every day thinking about. The other thing is helping them understand the internet because I think the industry has matured a lot.

You don't see a lot of major outages because of application or cloud vendors going down. I think the stability of the internet has become really, really good. Knock on wood, I don't want to jinx it. The things that, as you mentioned spot on is performance right i think the next journey or the next evolution that a lot of companies are going to to wake up to and realize that they don't do a good enough job on is performance and that is going to be the big thing we acquired the company called webpagetest.org two years ago it was a webpagetest.org has been a great resource for millions of people over the years.

So we've had the immense privilege of being able to become the quote unquote owner of that solution. We're incorporating that in Catchpoint. And so we're investing heavily on webpagetest.org because, and everything that comes with it, because we want to help customers understand performance. And that's a very nebulous thing. There are very few people on the internet that really understand what makes a page slow

or fast. And obviously, Google is changing the game on a weekly basis with some of their rules when it comes to performance. So we want to play a big role and help customers achieve better performance in the future. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. It's been really interesting to learn more

about what Catchpoint is delivering in the marketplace and how you are advancing your solutions to meet your customer requirements. Where can folks find out more about the solutions that you've discussed today and engage your team? Sure. Thank you again, Alison.

So I think www.catchpoint.com is one of the best places. Also, our blog is an awesome resource. We publish a lot of, in my opinion, awesome content to help educate people. So I think those are the two best places. And of course, on LinkedIn. Awesome. Well, thanks for the time today, Mehdi. It was a real pleasure.

Thank you, Alison. Likewise. Thank you. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.