PurePerformance - Perform2020 Digital Business Analytics with Mark Kaplan of Barbri

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

We catch up with Mark on his latest adventures at Barbri, what he has planned next and how he gets business answers from Dynatrace using Digital Business Analyticshttps://www.dynatrace.com/perform-vegas/

Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Pure Performance! Hello everybody and welcome to Pure Performance and PerfBytes coming to you from Perform 2020 in Las Vegas. Mark Tomlinson, Mr. PerfBytes, how are you doing? I am great, Brian. I'm very excited to be at Perform 2020. This is, I think, our fifth year. We started in 2015, I think. Right, and I think we joined you doing it, the Pure Performance side joined you doing it the year after so yeah yeah yeah it's this will be our third year at the uh where are we at cosmopolitan and then we had that one it's not just a drink right and then we had that one off year at the bellagio um but that was more i think just our setup where we were and yeah a lot of things

going on there but when i go back i don't believe that there is a bellagio drink there is a cosmo drink though right sure yeah just saying sure oh i i hear someone chuckling in the background does that mean we have a guest with us mark that's right we do it's another person named mark so how are you hey mark caplan why don't you introduce yourself, Mark? Mark Kaplan from Barbary, a long-time Dynatrace customer, customer number one, I believe. No. Yeah, actually I am. So way back. I am number one for a build customer. You don't mean like you're number one, like ranked number one.

You mean like the first customer? Yeah, the very first customer. They might also be ranked number one. We're approaching our, actually in February at Perform, at our Perform, I'm celebrating our fifth anniversary. Fifth anniversary. Oh, you mean, so you're getting me confused, because Dynatrace to me started back in 2005 with Capital.

To me, it started with Dynatrace, to me, started back in 2005 with capital. I mean, lowercase d, capital t. To me, it started with Dynatrace SaaS, Dynatrace One. Ah, yes, exactly. Right, right. What was the product formerly known as Ruxit? Yes. I've been told not to say that names, but I'm glad you did. Well, just historically.

Yeah, no, no. And I'm sure Dave Anderson will be here if he says that. I'm just saying that as reference to when it was. Yes. Because, yeah. It was previously known as Rexy. Okay. Okay.

So that makes sense then. Because I thought you meant way back. Because I was going to say, man, I was a customer in like 2009. I might have run into you. All right. Yeah, yeah. No, well, that's awesome. I did not know that.

So I learned something today, which is awesome. It's already a great day because I learned something. This is not your first performance, obviously. You've presented. You've been on stage with the – Mark, I think your hair was purple at the time, or was it pink? Oh, it's pink, and it's pink right now, actually. Yeah. Yeah, just in honor of our Mark and Mark show.

Mark and I were main stage the year before last, I think. My first one was orlando yeah oh you went to that one yeah that was like the weird one it was yeah that's where and i think that's where the new product got announced oh yes see all these things i don't know i didn't start going to perform until i think three years ago or something like that three or four years ago but yeah the the orlando one was the one that was like in a different time and every time even when we're looking at analytics we always like okay we just that was at a different time of year we don't compare anything to that one that was it's like the the bastard stepchild but uh obviously it wasn't because it introduced what's now dynatrace uh mark you were mark

tomlinson i cut you off, though. That's true. So, Mark, I was going to ask you, I mean, it's apropos that people make New Year's resolutions and we're in a new decade completely. One of the things that you and I talked about on stage, I think Steve was asking us about kind of the future innovations

and where we see things going. We talked a bit about AI, and I'm just curious in terms of where you're at with, at Barbary, employing some of the things that we learned two, three years ago about Davis and where things have gone with AI. Yeah, so AI has really had an impact on the product

and our experience with it. Its ability to, when you're not reliant on fixed algorithms and you actually have a true AI analyzing all of your data that's coming in, you really get some suggestions and recommendations from the intelligence to act on and to mitigate or prevent problems from manifesting to the customer. Different than relying on your historic knowledge or something you read on a blog or hear somewhere in training somewhere else, right? Well, we have a saying, or I have a saying saying here where I go by my gut quite a bit. And if I, if I see a trend building on the dashboard, my gut tells me what I need to do now. I'm usually right, but the AI confirms that for me now. Yeah. Uh, Mark, I was going to ask, how has it changed your team structure and how you guys operate? Like if you're seeing stuff and shooting from the gut, have you seen other people sort of learn differently and grow differently in the team?

Yeah. What I've seen for my team is we have become more, and I hate this word, but I'm going to use it, ubiquitous. And what I mean by that is the walls between departments are pretty much gone. So network systems, they have become one. And they work together now. They're not segregated. And that's the goal for most people, right? I said that's a huge goal for a lot of people is to get that.

It's always been my goal to have not a vanilla group, but a group of experts that work together as a collective. Maybe I sound like the board, but in this case, this is what I need. I need all of our people to be connected and think, not necessarily alike, but in sync where they're learning from each other. It's kind of like you have the real life team of what gets described in say Gene Kim and Company's Phoenix Project or the Unicorn Project where it's the experts of all those areas working together

and making magic happen. And it sounds like that's what you've achieved to a degree or to a large degree. It's critical when you're operating a small team. We're all being asked to do more with less and that includes human resource. So I have to maximize what I can get out of the resources that I have. Yeah. How big is your team? I've. Yeah. Wow. And that includes me. So if you think about, yeah, yeah. Uh, I, I think about team and similar,

like we have probably, um, we're a very small startup, um, at freedom pay and it's probably maybe eight people that expands, uh, including sort of not just production IT, but also kind of H2 home office. I'm just referring to systems people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, but still I, the thing that I find interesting is we used to be much more siloed just because of the complexity of learning just storage or just network or just, you know, admin operating system kernel. And you had to go so deep that you tuned out. You became a T-shaped person, right? You became deeper and deeper on your discipline. sort of, you had to be a senior person to finally really be like an M or W or a, I don't know, some weird Cyrillic character person. I don't know. Uh, but you know what I mean? Like now with

something, I think about the way Dynatrace presents the information as you can see across all of the architecture as you're diagnosing problems, uh, that a team member joining right today saying, hey, I learned how to do systems, learned how to do operations from Dynatrace, it was the primary product, you're always learning in a expansive way, right? Everything is presented to you as a way to say, well, this connects to that, connects to this, connects to that. And I'm thinking that's an interesting impact for smaller teams as well. Yes, very much so. Cool. It's interesting you say that, Mark, too, because my background was performance testing.

I'll even say I'm not going to even say I was a performance engineer because the idea of being a performance engineer was very, very new when I moved to Dynatrace. My background was television and film before I got into computers. But what was interesting is as I started using Dynatrace more, and this is even the old Atman product, right? That's where I started. And then as you move into Dynatrace, that's where I learned how, like, you know, I'm not a developer. I'm not going to sit down and write a bunch of code. I can do little bits here and there. I can read and understand things. But by looking at all this stuff that Dynatrace presents

and the way it presents it, I was able to teach myself how all this stuff works, right? So it really is kind of amazing in what you're saying there because that's exactly how it happened for me. You know, looking at the data and saying, oh, look at this, it's all starting to make sense now. there because that's exactly how it happened for me yeah you know looking at the data and saying oh look at this it's all starting to make sense now cool um hey mark caplan a question i had um you know you you all have done quite a lot with dynatrace with your monitoring with your automation

with everything else going on there what are you what's on the horizon for you all any any plans or anything any cool new things you're working on any new goals you're setting for the we are working on uh rebuilding our stack actually um we are in the middle of a dynamics deployment so we're changing how we do our crm and dynatrace is helping us to understand the systems that will be retiring, what I'm going to be saving, and how much resources I'll be able to reclaim when we do that. That's the big project going on right now, come to fruition before the end of the year. That's awesome. Cool. And again, if people don't remember, Barbary is pretty much 100% running in the cloud. So your Dynamics deployment would be in Azure on SaaS, the SaaS deployment.

And do you also, from security perspectives, you use cloud-based security solutions then, of course? Yeah, so we tend to go first party wherever possible. So we're deploying Microsoft ATP, Advanced Threat Protection. We've done that already in O365 and are doing it currently within Azure. It's helping us also with our GDPR and privacy law requirements because we can now tag all of our assets

and grade the information accordingly. Yeah, very cool. And is the Barbary stack primarily just a Microsoft stack, or are you using some of the other new stuff they have now in Azure for all these other services and messaging just a Microsoft stack or are you using some of the other new stuff they have now in Azure for all these other services and messaging and all these kind of, well, even non-Microsoft stuff? On the backend, yes. It's primarily Microsoft stack with the exception that our web apps are all Java and JavaScript. But other than that, it's all Microsoft. And we've integrated now machine learning.

It's not a whole lot I can talk about with that, but we're using AI to guide our students on an individual basis and adjust their course based on performance. Wow. That's very cool. It's proprietary, though, so I can't. We won't talk about the thing that we think is very cool. I wanted to put you on the spot for a moment with kind of a stupid question, but you mentioned you're doing a security project

and you're running in Azure. So Andy and I recently had Mike Kavis on the show. Yeah. And he's very, very much into cloud architecture and all this. And one of the things he mentioned during our episode was that if you're not moving to the cloud because you have security concerns, then you don't understand security

or something along the lines of that. Basically, what he was saying is you can get absolute security, and he was even saying possibly even more security in the cloud than you can in your own data center. With you all living in the cloud and obviously having some experience probably being in both areas, I was just curious as to your take on that. Do you see any – what kind of concerns do you still have about security, or do you feel like someone like maybe a financial or even government

shouldn't have concerns like people tend to have on security in the cloud? I would tend to agree with the statement that people that have security concerns in the cloud don't understand the cloud. I have yet to run into a situation where I can't architect what I need from a security perspective in the cloud that I could have done on-prem.

I have yet anybody to show me anything that I can't do. I can create a private cloud within Microsoft. I can create a private cloud. Well, a data center is a private cloud. That's what you've created. There would not be government classified services within the cloud if it wasn't, and I hate using this term as an example, but the government has the biggest vetting of all for security. And to reward a contract and give highly sensitive information to areas of Azure.

That indicates to me that there is security presence unmatched. What I've seen from Microsoft by visiting their NOC and their headquarters in Seattle is the amazing amount of money that they spend on security. They have DDoS protection that I have yet to see matched by anybody. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah, I think there's always hurdles people look for to maybe as an excuse or maybe something real concerning, but before moving to a cloud not that you have to move to a cloud necessarily right but a lot of times it's are there benefits to it and someone will pipe up and be like well there's this reason you know which is maybe something like security so i think it's something people need to need to explore and it's it's interesting

to hear a second person saying that because when mike said it on that episode i was like oh i never heard that before and you know in in my experience with just companies in general being breached, every other week getting an email, sorry, your data was stolen, or seeing things in the news, you just have this impression that, yeah, it's not safe. But apparently, it doesn't sound like that. So pretty cool. Thanks for your insight on that.

Yeah, I think we're hybrid as well we're part part of our stuff uh runs in the cloud part of it runs on premise and i think a lot of people um as they move everything into the cloud there they would perceive uh okay all the physical security properties you know someone absconding with a hard drive and, oh my gosh, are we encrypted at rest? Do we have any data at rest on that machine? Is it set up in a way that if they take one drive, they can get a complete copy of the data? And then there's physical access to the cage and the facilities. And do you own the facilities?

Is there a third party involved? Well, with the cloud, I mean, you're trusting, to Mark's point, not just electronically for things like DDoS or the advanced threat protection stuff that you see running in the service layers or in what I would say the software layers of the cloud. But you greatly reduce, instead of having hundreds of people that may be passing through, you have a single person managing a data center. And if you've ever visited any cloud vendor or any of those data centers for years, they're harder to get into than your own. I mean, the social engineering, these guys are all very well trained. Like I don't care who you say you are.

So there's some amazing physical security benefits. But then electronically, the way they don't configure a subnet the way you and I would on a managed switch here at home. They have like elaborate mechanisms for actually deploying those things completely hands off. No humans get involved except for you saying, I want a subnet X. So we all know, I think from my perspective with security, a lot of what you see where there's more human intervention, that's where we see more risk or vulnerability. And one of the major advantages of being in the cloud is a great portion of everything you do doesn't really require human intervention outside of the operator sitting in your home office. Right. And also, if you think about it financially, the cloud is much more

financially invested in security than you would be because if, let's say, AWS or Azure or any of the players had a major security breach, that's it for them. They have thousands of customers, not just you. That's it. They're done. You know what I mean? Like, no one's going to go back to them. Everyone's going to leave. So, like, that is probably one of their number one priorities. It's not one of the sexy things they do. But, yeah, and it's also interesting, too, because just as you know, Marks, you know, we have both the SaaS and the managed offering.

And I think the managed offering is more for the people who have a lot more of those security concerns. But, you know, oftentimes, even when they meet with our security teams and they start talking to them they're like oh actually we i think we can't run it in sass so yeah anyway um mr caplan what are you anything you're are you going to be staying after perform for any fun leisure activities i am not i plan on departing the day after the evening event at the end you're not going to go i think i saw in the hotel not in the evening event at the end. You're not going to go? I think I saw in the hotel, not in the hotel, but in the airport, there was like advertisements for you can go in a helicopter and shoot an AR-15 in the air. I would love to do that, but I have promised my wife I will return this time since she's not going.

Speaking of risk and security, shooting an AR-15 up in the air while you're in a helicopter. I think it's just that. It depends where the AR is pointed, right? Yeah. I really think the things that are keeping you in, you don't want to point up. I just think that's amazing that that's a tourist thing to do. Like, oh, look, yeah. Oh, okay.

That's a first. I have not, outside of maybe a safari i have not heard of doing something like that yeah so mark mark caplan you uh just performed this week you have a talk at a breakout session how did they go they went very well uh the breakout session it was on analytics uh which is something that is by dynatrace is doing a lot of work on. Very good reception, good Q&A, and the main stage went well too. Dave asks very good questions. Well, exactly. But anything in particular that you get in good questions

or things that you're thinking you'll take home with you? The biggest reception I got was on the executive dashboards that I produce. I make a lot of dashboards, both for myself and for my board and executives. And they're each tailored to provide information that would be relevant to them. Yeah. So things like cost or scalability or other problems? No, more on performance. or their performance. So how's the site doing? How many people are on the site? Where are they hitting the most? What's the click rage rate? Do we have, you know, everything to do with how the students relate to the site

is identified in that dashboard along with system performance. And you probably have some critical like KPIs around business growth or a new feature usage of new features. Yes. And that's some of the things that we're, we're trying to build in is, is showing the where we projected versus where we're at. Um,

which is more of a manual process right now until I can design something a little more in depth. But we'd like to show, for example, we recently launched a new product site and we're tracking the visits to the site, how long people stay, what areas of the site they go to and so forth. Cool. So it really ties back into sort of the, the, the products team or the business management team at an executive layer. Yes. But in addition to that, we're, we're also using it within operations and sales. Operations uses session replay quite a bit. So when we have a dashboard for them that shows that there's click rage, let's say,

they'll go in, find the users that are having the rage, look at the session replay and reach out to them. Yeah, before anyone gets hurt. Correct, right. I think this is interesting because I think a lot of people

don't think of your APM tools or platform as something more business-oriented. Obviously, if you're capturing your real user data, you have some of that insight. You hit a spot with me there because I don't consider Dynatrace an APM. It's way more than that. Exactly. And that's the point I was getting to, right? But please, explain that then.

You know, an APM to me is just what it says. It's an application monitoring system, okay? Dynatrace is far beyond. That's just a small piece at this stage of what Dynatrace actually does. Because along with monitoring, it takes that monitoring information and gives you actionable information and actionable data. Yeah. Or data that can be confidently extrapolated to an understanding of the real world, of your real customer. And to the point where you trust it enough to auto-remediate.

Yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah. Very cool. And the integrations, we've seen a ton of amazing integrations with it. But the other thing too, and Mark, I'm sorry,

I'll let you go in a second. But the other thing I was going to say is, you know, a lot of times with APM tools, like that only specifies, you know, stay in their APM lane, even when they're doing RUM, it's mostly performance related with the user. When you add the session replay, when you add the synthetics and you can see everything that's actually going on with the user, that really starts getting into the business insights.

You were mentioning the rage clicks. You know, if you're seeing a drop in conversion and you don't see response time slowing down, you don't see errors going on, you don't even see rage clicks going on necessarily. Like, hey, go watch and see what it looks like. And suddenly you see somebody going through like, you know, four or five different pages for a login you're like oh my gosh this of course they're not finishing it takes too long you know so yeah and mark you had some point mark thomason that is no i was just thinking in terms of if i were to if i if i grew up but really uh and became an executive receiving one of Mark Kaplan's executive dashboards. It's also information that you would never expect to come out of a monitoring system.

Like I can think back to someone presenting to the coroner office, hey, here's, well, our CPU usage, memory usage, and here's the systems. And then we deploy. And it was very technical. And they were trying to say, well, a a lot more there's more people on the site and i'm like you can't you couldn't even see like clicks or sessions or they didn't try to make any of that leap uh and now of course that's natively you can put in a dashboard which feature which objects what pages what business and like what business use case is happening uh and describe the session as you walk through it.

Look, here's one of the new students on the new site. Here's what their session looked like. And it's like, wow, that's a real person walking through real stuff. So yeah, I agree with Mark. It's way beyond what APM was. And speaking of that, one thing I want to get off my chest,

and I'm probably going to be saying it a lot during perform this year, is my pet peeve nowadays is observability. Because everyone's treating it like this brand new thing, right? We've been doing observability since like what, 2005, 2006. I mean,

the generally accepted term, unless you guys correct me, of observability is tracing, metrics,. Right? All on your systems together to inform you. That's been around forever and now suddenly, oh, now we have this open source project and we're going to explore this new thing of observability. It's like, there's been vendors providing this for you as experts for years. Stop reinventing the wheels. If I have to use some new jargon,

I'll use new jargon. Yes. I was just going to say, I'll take advantage of that. If somebody thinks it's new, yes. It's the newest thing since sliced bread. Oh, it's great. It's great. It's awesome. We love it. But to me, the pet peeve is, and I have nothing against

OpenTrace or OpenTelemetry being helpful in using things but it's when people like give presentations and like oh this is this new world of observability and we're going to show you the amazing things that you can do if you all hand code it by hand and i'm like this is not new and we've been doing this and hey you turn it on here just stop stop wasting your time doing yourself anyway if an ap if an apm tool was not making things observable 20 years ago they wouldn't be in business today yeah yeah completely anyway i only mentioned it because the apm platform and it's been bugging me because i

watched a couple of presentations on some of those things and i'm like where have these people been living but anyway yeah but i i do think it does get to the heart of people in what I'll say pure digital business where like you look in the brick and mortar in a commerce space where it's like I've actually met real customers. Or if you worked in tech support, you actually maybe had a phone conversation, actually heard someone's voice. Like if I really think about high touch interaction and observability of the customer experience, there's a generation of new people in digital businesses that they've only been through a chat session. They, they, their whole world is, I don't actually hear, see, but touching a customer like you would, um, you know, in terms of like you go to Nordstrom, it's very important for them to hand you the bag at the end of the transaction. It's a cordial part of their culture in terms of conducting business. new digital business where they really have never interacted with, in Mark Kaplan's case, actual students and what is it like for them to get on the site and have, you know, focus groups

and actually meet them and things like that. So maybe observability has more importance as a term. So I'm okay to use it if it helps people think, wow, I really want to reach out to actual customers and figure out what their experience is. I agree. Anything you can do to generate interest or pique someone's interest enough to dig into the product or look further into a solution is beneficial. At the end of the day, too, at least people are interested in it. I think it was more to me the, hey, this never existed before

aspect so i'll have to revise what my pet peeve about observability is it's not specifically brian no one's ever done load testing until we came along and came up with this uh uh traffic multiplier uh you don't do traffic multiplication do you did you just make that term up or is that one that's floating around i just made it up there. There you go. But it's the new thing. There's a whole new generation. I'm going to get on stage and do a presentation on traffic multiplication. Traffic multiplication, yeah. There you go.

Anyway, Mark Kaplan, we hope you enjoyed performing this year and enjoy the rest of the time. I have enjoyed it tremendously. Awesome. Perfect. Looking forward to 2021 now. Yeah. That's right. And hopefully, let's see what all the different final announcements of new products are.

I'm sure they're going to be all exciting. Yes. And we'll get to find out next year how you leverage them. And I'm sure you're not doing the AR with the goggles. I think that's actually getting... No, I did not do the... That was kind of fun, but yeah. The minority report of performance.

Anyway, thank you very, very much for taking the time with us today. And we'll see you around the floor. Swing by. Thank you. All right, thank you. Pleasure. Nice to chat with you.