PurePerformance - Dynatrace Perform 2017 Nightclub Highlights

Episode Date: February 8, 2017

Brian Wilson takes time from his feverish disco dancing to have several interviews with attendees at the Tuesday evening party at Dynatrace 2017 in Las Vegas.

It's time for Pure Performance. Get your stopwatches ready. It's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Hello, everybody. This is Brian Wilson with Pure Performance. Last night we were at the Dre's Nightclub in Las Vegas with Dynatrace Perform 2017. Myself, along with Mark Tomlinson and James Pulley of PerfBytes, went around and recorded many people. And this show that's following has the results.

So we hope you enjoy what you hear, and we'll see you again soon. Hello, this is Brian Wilson. I'm here with Andrew Hiddle. I got your name right, correct, sir? You got it. Excellent. And Andrew, what is your role within the company Dynatrace? I'm the chief customer officer for Dynatrace. Excellent. And so today's first day of perform. How did you feel about today? And what were the two biggest things you took away from the presentations today? I thought today was

absolutely awesome. I mean, the amount of energy and the amount of focus and the amount of just excitement that was coming around, around the stories of our new platform was just off the charts. The amount of outgoing conversations we've had with all of our customers about the cool things they plan to go back and do is awesome. In fact, we were having to cut short our dialogues because customers wanted to keep going on and on and on about what they plan to do on Monday. And when I hear that, I know we've touched a great nerve, a positive nerve that's going to drive them to do great things.

Great. And as far as some of the announcements and things that were presented today, were there any things that really struck a nerve with you? And obviously in a positive way, anything that stood out or that you might be most excited for coming up in the next few weeks? Yeah, I think the big push on artificial intelligence in Davis is just a huge step forward. I mean, when people start understanding the hyper complexity, the hyperscale, and just the hyper dynamic environments that they're dealing with, having a digital assistant that can help really bring down a very simple dialogue about where they need to focus is something that everyone has been trying to figure out over the last two or

three years. And we finally put it in front of them. They said, ah, that's it. It's not just a gimmick. It's something I've been waiting for this opportunity to take advantage of to help advance the APM space in my company. The thing that I was really impressed about was at the end of Al's presentation, he showed Davis remedying the situation, which I had not seen before. Self-healing. Yeah, the self-healing. What do you think the potential for that is for all of our customers? Oh, I think it's tremendous. I think the first thing customers have to do is kind of suspend their state of disbelief because they're like, is this real?

Is that really capable? It's true. So I think once they get over that, the endless possibilities for how they can bring about automation to self-heal these things on so many platforms for the automation, for the build, for the distribution is unlimited. Well, thank you, Andrew. Appreciate you taking the time to speak to us. My pleasure. Thanks.

All right. I'm here with Eng Keung of Dynatrace. And, Eng, what is it that you do in the company? I run the RD for Dynatrace in ASEAN region, which comes from six active countries, mainly Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Philippines. That's quite a territory. Yes, six countries. The whole ASEAN region has actually ten countries, but the six are the active ones. And about today, today was the first day of PERFORM, and I was curious of what your impressions were,

and if you could name two things that really stood out the most to you, what would those be? I think the key area is that Dynatrace, three years ago, has already projected and looked at where the future will be and invested the solution. And we see it live and working today with monitoring redefined, where AI is built in, machine learning is built in, which is something that's amazing. And I think as a company, we are heading in the right direction in order to assist where IT organization as well as business is seeing the new transformation where they will face new challenges, new solutions to handle that. And that's where I want a key area when it comes to monitoring that we can help them. Excellent. And is there anything that you're looking forward to for the rest of the trip while you're out here?

Maybe more use case, more customer reference, and just see how things are being done in the rest of the world, and then possibly take it back into ASEAN and then share it with our customers so that they can then benefit out of that as well. Excellent. Thank you very much, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us tonight. My pleasure. Thanks. Hello, I'm here with Jeremy Spencer of American Express. Jeremy, what is it that you do at American Express? Right now, tooling and configuration manager,

supplying all the different performance analyst tools. Our team takes in any new add-ons, new onboards, builds dashboards, SOPs, alerts, sets it all up to be configured for the NOC. Great. And so today was the first day to perform. And I was just curious what you might have seen today. If you were to name maybe the top two things that really impressed you or gave you an impression, what those might be. That's actually pretty easy.

The first one was open agent. That hit me pretty hard. We have had many scenarios where we wish we had something like that available to us. As a financial services, we actually have a lot of custom stuff going on behind the scenes, a lot of black boxes per se where you can't just touch it with a regular Java agent. And so having the option to do something where we have access to our own source code to change our own, I can already tell you developers are going to be lining up for that one. So that one for sure. You said two. Second one, we had a sit down with a group that was

representing Humana. And we had a conversation with them about their practice and what they do for APM and how their approach is in terms of DevOps and all of the good buzzwords in the world today. And the thing that rang home that's different from us, they have a NOC, they have a configuration team like we do, but what was different was they spoke of an APM room where they actually have a rotation where they require team members to spend seven days in this room experiencing APM and experiencing fixing their

app and living through it. That's not 24-7, is it? No, no, yeah. But they do almost lock them in there where they say they're there for the entire week with their team and they're surrounded by dashboards just like a knock, but it's only for their app, and they just talk about their app for a whole week. And I think that's really cool. It creates what my team calls metric champions, which is people that are unable to do that type of config work. And they said there are up to 120 teams now certified in that room. Excellent.

And, you know, not necessarily Dynatrace related, but in terms of technology and things on the edge, it may be in your future for your organization. From a technology point of view, what's kind of the most exciting and what do you have your eye on the most? Yeah, we can't get too much into the secret sauce, but I could just say that American Express is definitely going to make a move in the AI world. We've got our own version. As you know, that is definitely the trend right now, and we're jumping right into that. So we've got a few plans up our sleeve for that one. And then we also have a few plans up our sleeves in terms of going to that digital wallet, digital money. Not so much anymore about just doing your simple charges, but having more control over it, where it's going and

how you're sending it and access. It's going to put it more in the palm of your hand. So we're moving that way. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Picture it this way. You go out and let's say you want to purchase something with your phone using your Amex account. And then later you come to this club that we're at, this awesome club, and you can turn around and those points you just used, use on your club entry fee.

And there's no delay. There's no waiting. You just swipe your phone and keep moving. We want to create that whole experience that it's no longer, there's no waiting. You just swipe your phone and keep moving. It's really awesome. We want to create that whole experience that it's no longer worrying about what's in your account or about your money, but more just the entire day is taken care of. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk.

I hope you go back to enjoying the party, Jeremy. Thanks a lot. Will do. Thank you. All right, this is Brian. It's still day one of Perform, or the first night after the open session. I'm here with Tom Dippin and Eric of Banking America. Sorry about that. And so we'll start with you, Tom. Today, what

would you say were two of the things that had the most impression on you? Well, I actually enjoyed all the sessions I was in today, but I think the kickoff at the beginning of the day and the closing at the end of the day, the speakers were just phenomenal. And I got a lot of information. I really enjoyed the speakers this afternoon in the theater. Yeah, I think I enjoyed the AI aspect of where Dynatrace is going with the new technology. Have you seen any of that before? No, this is groundbreaking.

I've never seen it. I mean, outside of what Google does and what Amazon does, but I've never seen a tech company like Dynatrace or other companies do anything like this. So that was cool. And the breakout sessions were awesome as well. I particularly liked the one with the IBM Watson guys. They talked about performance engineering, which was really awesome.

The guy Rick who ran it, he used to work for us. Oh, okay, yes, that's right, Rick. Yeah, I've talked to him a few times. And Eric? I like the fact that I have a lot of experience with them as being more of a partner than just trying to sell stuff. And I like to see that they're doing it with other customers, and it looks like they're going to continue to do that,

because we get a lot of value out of not just trying to work with it to make it as successful as well as the tools themselves. And in terms of, and I'll start with you, and we'll go back around, in terms of general technology coming in, future prognosis and all that, what excites you the most in the whole technology world in terms of practices or technologies or anything like that? Well, I'm looking forward to doing the one platform, trying to bring that all stuff in, simplifying the dashboard. Because we have challenges with operations, too much data, not knowing what to do with it.

So hopefully we can bring that back and simplify it for you. All right. What about you, Dibin? Yeah, I'm really looking forward to how Dynatrace is combining a lot of tools together. So it started off with just monitoring. Now Dynatrace is a combination of so many useful tools. So I'm just looking forward to them just packaging everything together for us. Excellent. And Tom? Again, it doesn't have to be Dynatrace. It doesn't have to be anything. Well, I actually, I've been involved in an effort looking at trying to tie together metrics and data from applications along with our virtual environments.

And I'm very interested in the direction that Dynatrace is going, whereas, as Eric mentioned, kind of bringing that all together under one umbrella is actually something that we're looking at right now. Excellent. Well, guys, I appreciate you taking the time tonight, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. This is Brian again. I'm here with Mike Rodenberg from KLM.

And, Mike, we were just chatting three seconds ago, and you're about to dive into this idea. So what you're doing with KLM is, if I understand correctly, you're putting the JavaScript agent on all the terminals for KLM. Is that correct? Well, it's not completely correct, but I can explain it a bit. The problem was that the kiosks is hardware, but not owned by us, but by a third-party vendor. And that hardware is by law, by the IATA, we are not allowed to do a lot about it.

So you've got two problems. We cannot install an agent on it, but we could also not change anything. And that was the problem that we had. And with Dynatrace, it was the only possibility that we build up a construction where we inject a small piece of Java code within the browser software so it could run on the kiosk and give us all the information we want and more

and monitor them. So that's a great thing about this solution for us. And has that been going yet? Yes, it's more than a one-year live. What we did, we put in 20 kiosks worldwide. We put them live, and we call them flight leaders. So we've got a bunch of kiosks with the same configuration. And we put one or two on the dynatrace in that bunch.

And that's live for a long period of time. And without giving in any way any secrets or anything else, what would you say is one of the most interesting things you might have observed from this solution? Well, I also explained it a bit during the session this afternoon, but specifically the non-working kiosks and that we did not know why they failed and the ability of Dynatrace that we could analyze why it failed and that we could solve it, that was the biggest benefit we had. And because previously we saw with our other tools that it was failing and we heard it from all kinds of people complaining that for a half an hour the thing was not working and so on

but we did not understand why and now with the Dynatrace tool we could exactly analyze what happened in what sequence and it also pinpointed us to the right piece of code where something was wrong and then we fixed that and we also fixed the problem. So that's cool. Excellent. And in terms of perform,

we're at the end of day one, we're over here at the Deus Vec Club in Las Vegas. What have you seen today? Has there been anything that you've come across or seen today outside of your own presentation, which is quite incredible, that left an impression on you? If there's one thing or two things maybe. Yeah, the afternoon session on Main Stage.

That was cool. Seeing Klausen as the hero. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And riding on a pink bike with flowers. And that was really cool and impressive. And I saw more here also on stage. And I wait for the deep dive in the pool today. That will be the highlight.

Then I think I'll make a picture of it or something. Yeah, that will be cool. All right, well, thank you so much for taking some time to talk to us. I appreciate it very much. You too, thank you. Bye. All right, here I'm at the Day's Nightclub in Las Vegas with Allie Reardon. From Graybar.

Allie, what is your title and what do you do over at Graybar? I'm a digital marketing analyst at Graybar and mainly help out with our paid search and SEO efforts. Excellent. And also, nobody can see this, but Klaus of Dynatrace is right here next to me and he was like, you have to talk to Ali. You have to talk to Ali. No pressure, Ali.

But the general idea is we've had previously in some of our podcasts some operations and technical folk who started bridging that DevOps gap and including marketing and sharing that information from the technical side to marketing so they can be better informed about their promotions and everything else. And now we're finally getting to talk to somebody from the marketing side who has admittedly used, did you call it the rich client or the thick client, which is all perfectly fine and accurate. I think there's a million names for it. But you were actually driving down into PurePads as marketing, correct? Yes, I was. And so what are you using information from Dynatrace in order to do? Currently we use, actually, I use Dynatrace on a daily basis

to compare a lot of the click data that we receive from Google and Bing and compare it to the session and load data in Dynatrace. We use it for a lot of other stuff as well. Bot traffic. Bots are very big. We track all of our paid search landing pages through there. So Don has it broken out by PPC or PLA, so the different

types of ads that we show through search engines. Can you help us understand PPC? PPC would be a basic text ad through Google or Bing while PLc would be a basic text ad through google or bing while pla would be a shopping ad so it has an image with price so this is helping you track the marketing or am i getting that because again i'm just i'm just a stupid techie who doesn't understand marketing and i say that no joke because i don't it's a whole people will

look people like look at oh check i don't understand but i don't we don't. It's a whole, people will look, people will like look at, oh, tech, I don't understand. But we don't understand anything about marketing, right? That's a whole foreign world to us. Yeah, well, for us, there are discrepancies between like a click and a load or a session. So for us to be able to compare the two and get accurate data, I think accurate's the key word, is really, really useful. And we've been able to solve a lot of issues with the Dynatrace data that we've found. Klaus is taking a picture. So while he's taking a picture, let me ask you. So I'm not sure if you're aware,

but I'm setting you up to push your Dynatrace admins on this. Oh, yes. Perfect. Dynatrace has the ability to also export this user data. Elasticsearch. Are you using that? Yeah, we utilize Kibana as well. If you weren't, I was going to push that to you.

Yeah, no, we are doing that, and we have a lot of dashboards if you guys want to come tomorrow to our session. So, anyone, so, this isn't, unfortunately, we're not broadcasting live right now. If we were, this is recording, we're going to end it later,

but if we were, we can tell people to do that. But if you want to swing by the booth tomorrow and tell people that, just really briefly. Live session.

Anyway, yeah, that's really, really interesting. It's awesome to hear that marketing. Yeah. I'm going to put you on the spot right now

and say we would, Andy and I would probably love to have you on the longer format show to talk more in depth, which you can prepare for more and everything. But if that's interesting, we'd love to have you more talk about that. Yeah, absolutely. Of course you'll say that now on mic. I'll ask her for a webinar as well. Yeah, you guys want everything.

You have to queue. Well, thank you very, very much for your time. I hope you're having a good time. I am. Thank you. Thank you so much. Do you need anything else, Dave? All right.

Once again, I'm here at the Days Beach and Nightclub in lovely Las Vegas. We're with Laura Stack, who's working with Diana Trace. And, Laura, I'm not exactly sure your title in the role, but you had a lot to do with at least us being here with podcasting and all, and I'm sure a lot with the setup and perform here. So what is your role with all this? I'm the event manager, so I plan and perform. I'm basically the project manager for all of perform.

Perfect. And I should have known that, I'm sure. Day one is done, or almost just about done. Yes. Seems like it's been a pretty big success. One of the biggest turnouts, actually the largest turnout so far. It is, yep. It's our fourth year during Perform, and it is our largest turnout.

We almost double the people that we have here every year. We have about 1,100 customers here this year. Excellent. And anything from today that struck you as cool, awesome, or just made you really happy? Well, for me, I look at the sights of everything. So I think the main stage, the visuals are really cool. The screen looks really cool. This nightclub looks really cool.

Just having all these customers here at once is awesome. I think our speaker lineup is better than ever. So I think everything just is bigger and better than ever before. And what I found interesting as I was talking to people, it seems like a lot of people have never been to Vegas, which is understandable, but it's also a lot of people from other countries coming in, and they've always heard of Vegas, and just giving them that opportunity for a Diner Trace event

to also experience Vegas has been pretty cool, and that's an awesome idea. It's amazing because people that have never been here, just to see the people walking around and the interesting sites and the different things that go on here have been very interesting for them. And I've been here a bunch of times as a lot of Americans, but the Europeans are finding this very interesting, which is cool. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you very much for taking some moments to talk to us. Anything, any, any last words or anything you're looking forward to for the rest of the event today? The Perf Fights, guys. Thank you all for being here.

I'm for your performance, though. But today, you're part of it. Mark and James have been awesome. They've been, yeah. I would not have been able to pull this off. Yeah, you're merging this week. We are merging, and I'm learning a ton from them, and it's been awesome.

So thank you for having us all do this. Thank you for being here. Thank you. All right, we're back here at the Andreas Club with Andreas Winkler of SAP Hybris. Andreas, so let's start with first, what do you do

over at Hybris? I'm a principal consultant for Hybris expert services and I typically help the client to make sure that the implementation is successful. Sometimes we come in pretty late, but then we take advantage of Dynatrace and really help the client to make it to the finish line. So I'm sure you're familiar with our own Reinhard Braunschweider.

Yes, I'm familiar with him. Of course, he's always a legend on our side. So you just arrived this afternoon, so you didn't get to see too much of day one. What are you looking forward to in your time here, first of all, in Vegas, and also in your time at the Planet Race Performing Games? What I'm looking for for Vegas, I think what has happened in Vegas stays in Vegas,

so that's nothing what we have to discuss. And what we are looking for is all the new stuff from Dynatrace, how it moves further to the cloud, how do we integrate with the cloud, and how do we make deployments with Hybris and Dynatrace much, much faster to come easier to the point to provide benefit for the client. Excellent. And in terms of Hybris, what's going on in Hybris? Not talking in future, giving away secrets.

What's going on in Hybris right now that's got you really excited for the Hybris platform? What is exciting for the Hybris platform? That's a good question. So all the moves to the newer technologies, especially which is related to YaaS, with microservices, which makes it easy to add new functionality to your on-prem installation. Are you saying the microservices are final? Not at all.

That's maybe a long-term future. It is starting to add microservices, which makes it much, much easier and faster to deploy just maybe pop-up storefronts for certain events that you just spin them up without really touching your core enterprise business solution. That's really helpful because this way you can keep that core component stable and add everything on the outside. It adds flexibility and extensibility without taking the risk of compromising your business. Right, it's really your velocity or your speed to bring out new features, new stuff, especially for companies which do a lot of marketing-driven activities.

If you have a big event, make a pop-up store, show the products, like a new product introduction for everything, and done. Don't expose everything. Just focus to a certain capability and bring all the information back to your enterprise system and then take care of the day-by-day business. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for taking a few minutes to talk to us.

Really appreciate your time tonight. Thank you. Hi, we're here with Charlotte from Dynatrace. Charlotte, would you like to tell us what you do with Dynatrace? So I'm marketing director for EMEA. All right. And we're in our first day of performance. Well, outside of the hot day.

Yeah. We're sitting at the Degas Nightclub in Las Vegas. Is this your first time in Las Vegas? It's not, actually. Excellent. And where are you based out of? Paris. Oh, bonjour. The most beautiful city in the world.

Bonjour. It's about all he knows, all right. Or, j'aime boire du vin. Je bois du vin, yeah. All right, anyway, so today, what have you seen today? So, I had the chance to be a track captain for the Leading Your Digital Transformation Expedition track.

And what I've seen today on the four presentations I've seen from Ulta Beauty, from Scotia Bank, from Marie Kay, and from... You know Louis from Marie Kay. Sorry? You know Louis from Marie Kay.? You know Louis from America. Yeah. He's been coming by the podcast station a million times. Yes, go on. So funny. Then, and IBM Watson and Watson Health was the last

one. What is amazing when you're in that kind of event is seeing how much people love Dynatrace. The first slide was why I love Dynatrace. Ulta Beauty, the first slide was why I love Dynatrace, and that's amazing. And as a marketing person,

that's the best guest. And the best guest, yeah, the best presence and the best recognition. Excellent. Anything else you're looking forward to seeing while you're out here in Vegas? Either just in general or at Perform?

She's thinking. It's kind of like radio. I want to meet as many customers as possible. Today we've heard many new things, manyues about the new products, about Davis. By the way, I've tasted Davis, and this thing, I was about to say this guy, is able to understand my free English, French English, right? He has all his trouble with Austria. Oh, yeah.

I've never heard French before. So I was really happy. It made my day. I really meet customers, understand their needs, talk with them, make them meet together and share the best practices. That's the best part of this event from my point of view. Excellent. Well, thank you very much. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your stay here.

Thank you very much. Merci beaucoup. Merci. And let's transition over to Luca from Boviri. Buongiorno. Buongiorno. So where are you based at? Yeah, we are based in Milan, so we are Dynatrace partner from Italy. Excellent. I went to Italy on my honeymoon, I know it sounds cliche, but I was over in Capri, Firenze, and Roma. We are almost in the north on Italy.

I'm enjoying it. It's the first time to be a performer here at Dynatrace. It was great. Especially, I enjoyed the main stage this morning with all the announcement and new things that Dynatrace is bringing to the market. Have you seen any of the Davis stuff before? Yeah, because there were special partner events locally in Italy that I attend, but see I was also able to join the workshop on Davis on Monday. It was very, very cool. Also using the Amazon Echo Dot.

It was great. Yeah, yeah. Hands-on session. Put hands on the technology, see what happens. So for us as a partner, it's very important to have the feeling about the technology, how it works, every new thing in place in order to bring this kind of new technology and innovation to our customer. So that's great.

So, yes, for me, when I saw the presentation this morning, you know, I work for Dianatrace, so I know about Davis, obviously. What I didn't know, though, was the remediation phase, where Alois was up there, broke his sight, and Davis fixed it. That, to me, that... You know, I wasn't expecting too much of a surprise, because, you know, I have some inside information about what's going to be going on, but that, to me, just kind of blew my mind,

the idea of a smart AI approach to fixing it, instead of just like every certain threshold is breached, they can actually, this is like an AI taking a look at what's going on. That to me is what blew me away. Now AI reaches the capability not only to understand what's happening in our system, but to have the capability to automatic change something on the system to remediate if an issue was the technique. And this will be the real innovation of disruption

on the monitoring staff, everything that is related to automation in monitoring is something that is bringing, it's a request for the customer and it will be probably the best thing this monitoring tool can do. And are you familiar with the Terminator movies? With them? The Terminator?

No, not so much. Alright, alright. I was going to ask you a jokey question about the Austrians and Terminator, but we'll skip that then. Anyway, thank you so much for your time. Anything you're looking forward to for the rest of your time here? So, other roadmap chess session.

That was very, very cool in order to be what we bring to the market. So, that's what I'm expecting to see. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.