The burden of responsibility placed on MSPs (managed service providers) is huge. They not only must keep all their clients’ IT systems running and secure, but they also have to be proactive in data governance, backups, cybersecurity and much more. Plus, there are the small matters of internal HR, Finance, Marketing and the rest!

The ConnectWise ASIO platform is the go-to software that MSPs use to run their businesses, and on this episode of the Tech Means Business podcast, we talk to APAC Evangelism Director, Nick Moran.

Nick ran his own highly successful MSP business in Australia for nearly three decades, a company he started from scratch and built to a point where it was acquired last year. Instead of enjoying a well-earned retirement however, Nick soon joined ConnectWise to share his experiences and promote the capabilities of the company, plus he’s helping improve the platform further still, in line with feedback from frontline staff in MSPs across the APAC region.

Entirely developed from the ground up on cloud-native, containerised technology, and integrating AI functionality, the ConnectWise ASIO platform is the world’s first purpose-built platform for TSPs, taking ConnectWise ahead of its competitors in this highly specialised software space.

You can check out ConnectWise here:
https://www.connectwise.com/

Information on the IT Nation event in Sydney is here:
https://www.connectwise.com/theitnation/apac

ConnectWise ASIO platform:
https://www.connectwise.com/platform

Nick Moran’s LinkedIn profile is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmoran/

The show’s host, Joe Green, is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

The post Helping APAC’s IT Support Companies: ConnectWise appeared first on TechWire Asia.

Today’s utility companies face an ageing infrastructure, demand for better customer experiences, regulation and the need to digitise all areas of operations. Helping them achieve these goals is Wipro, the Indian multinational that’s revitalising companies’ methods, mindsets and technology infrastructure.

With specialist knowledge of the sector, and many years experience (our guests today bring c. 100 years in the industry between them), Wipro’s consultants, builders and engineers are bringing about the changes necessary to bring value to stakeholders and consumers.

This episode of Tech Means Business covers challenges, solutions and industry trends, with plenty of good old-fashioned advice for the sector and the professionals making critical decisions. With challenges from operational realities through to selling the business case for technology at board level, our guests guide industry stalwarts and outsiders through the complexities of the utilities sector in the UK.

You can read more about Wipro’s work with worldwide utilities companies here:
https://www.wipro.com/utilities/

Ajay Chandran, Regional Head of Energy, Utilities and Infrastructure for the UK & Ireland
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajaychandran/

Rebekah Docherty, Vice President, ENU and Telecoms Business
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebekah-docherty-0a04744/

Sampathkumaran Hariharan, Director of Digital Transformation
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hariharansampathkumaran/

Ankit Sharma, Account Executive
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankit-sharma-9864a46/

The post Facing the Utility Challenge with Wipro appeared first on TechWire Asia.

Getting hands-on with some of the most practical and impactful technology available today is what’s on offer from BMC Software’s “BMC Connect Singapore” event, November 2nd 2023.

Ahead of the event, we discuss with Brenton Smith and Gunal Kannan from BMC what’s on the agenda, who the event’s designed for, and what attendees might learn and experience.

The challenge facing many organisations in the APAC isn’t the understanding of or realisation of the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence; rather, it’s how the technology can be put into effect to give the best business outcomes. It’s here that a company like BMC helps.

With use-case examples, keynote and inspirational speakers, workshops and demonstrations, join BMC, its customers and prospects, for a day exploring the possibilities that machine learning offers business operations.

Gunal Kannan is from the technical side of the tracks, while Brenton is more business-oriented. Together, in conversation with our host, Joe Green, we go through both the detail of the event (and others on the company’s ‘world tour’) and discuss many of the issues surrounding the emerging technology of AI in the workplace.

REGISTER HERE

Learn more about BMC Connect, Singapore, November 2nd, 2023:
https://bmcconnect.bmc.com/connectsingapore/

Worldwide events where you can pick the team’s brains:
https://www.bmc.com/events.html

Brenton Smith, VP Software, Asia Pacific and Japan’s LinkedIn profile is here:
https://sg.linkedin.com/in/smithbrenton

Gunal Kannan, Associate VP, Technology Strategy and Advocacy’s page is here:
https://sg.linkedin.com/in/gunalkanna

Joe Green is here:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen

The post Practical uses of AI in the enterprise business: Singapore, Nov 2, 2023 appeared first on TechWire Asia.

The next generation of AI in the workplace is decision intelligence: the practical application of machine language in commercial settings. Applying AI in the workplace has, to date, being a slow process and one that involves a lot of resources. But that’s all about to change.

Peak AI is the company that’s driving decision intelligence in organizations, turning the typical 18 month wait between query and results into a matter of weeks or even days. Plus, there’s no need to hire more data scientists and invest in ranks of super-expensive graphics processors.

The Peak AI offering is cloud-based, and while no ML solution is plug-and-play and operate-able by anyone, Peak AI’s platform takes away the heavy lifting that’s usually placed on data teams. In addition, it actively reduces the gap between the data science function (who may know little about business strategy) and pure-play business functions (who, in turn, know little about data analysis).

Peak AI’s Decision Intelligence Index is drawn from its most recent survey of thousands of businesses that have begun an AI journey. We discuss the Index, the state of ML in the enterprise, and best ways forward to turn the “new oil” that’s data into insights that will have positive impacts in the workplace.

Learn more about Peak AI here:
https://peak.ai/

Ira Dubinsky, Head of Go-To-Market Strategy at Peak AI is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iradubinsky/

Your host, Joe Green lives online here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

The post Decision Intelligence is machine learning for business appeared first on TechWire Asia.

Show Notes for Series 02 Episode 07

This podcast is produced in conjunction with AppDynamics, a Cisco company.
Many enterprises run IT systems that are necessarily complex. So complex, sometimes, that the number and variety of services, applications and connections comes as a shock, even to the IT Department.

Finding the cause of an outage or slow-down, therefore, can be frustrating and time-consuming. Additionally, it can lead to all sorts of internal “politicking” (to put it nicely).

But even once there’s a coherent “map”, correlating what the business wants with what the IT stack can provide is another headache, and one that’s not easily achieved. Unless, of course, you happen to use AppDynamics.

In this talk with Jim Cavanaugh from the company, we look at how organizations are joining up business aims and objectives with the technical nitty-gritty of networks, clouds, connections and all the whirring boxes in data centers.

Connect with Jim Cavanaugh on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-cavanaugh-b3157a/

Joe Green, the podcast hostess with the mostest on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Full transcript available.
[showhide type=”transcript” more_text=”Click to read.” less_text=”Click to hide” hidden=”yes”]
Joe Green (host): Welcome to the Tech Means Business podcast. Now, each episode, I like to talk to interesting individuals from companies and organizations who I might feel have got something to say and to contribute to this space, where we can talk about this thing called technology that’s at the heart of every business.
Today, we’re talking about customer experience — I know it’s something of a buzz phrase — and how that customer experience relates to and is affected by issues like network infrastructure; the influence customer experience takes from choice of cloud provider, or even at the end of the day, even the choice of ethernet cables in the company. Now it sounds odd!
But here to explain all this, and let us know how we can effectively look at the effects in a business that technology can have, I’m delighted to be joined by Jim Cavanaugh, from AppDynamics. Jim is in charge of the APAC and Japan for AppDynamics. So Jim, please tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do and what AppDynamics does.

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): Thanks, Joe, for having me, I really appreciate it. I’ve had the pleasure of living in Singapore for almost five years now with my wife, and I have two young girls at home.
On the work side, I have the responsibility and pleasure of running Asia Pacific and Japan for AppDynamics. Really, the magic of where AppDynamics plays is providing the correlation between end-user behavior and business outcomes. So if you think about it in our personal lives, whether you’re using a mobile device to get online and leverage a banking service, order food delivery, maybe order a car, order any type of good or service, well think in terms of consumers have, what’s that experience like?
Now for the company providing that service, and for the IT group providing that service, that’s a pretty complicated set of things that happened behind that. So while we may push two, three, or four clicks on a mobile app, suddenly we have food at our doorstep, or we have a car waiting for us, so we don’t have to get in the rain, or we’ve moved money from one side of the world to the other. And we expect that to happen flawlessly! There’s a whole bunch of things that happen behind that application, that allow for those services to work in real-time. And AppDynamics helps companies to fix those and optimize those mobile apps in real-time.

Joe Green (host): So as you say, behind those services, behind the application that might be on your smartphone or behind the website, you know, there’s a whole stack of stuff isn’t there? There’s a database and the website server and, I don’t know, a kind of credit-checker. And all these different components, if you like, traditionally, have lived in a company’s data center. But as far as I understand it, that’s changed, hasn’t it? I mean, the topology of the network, the topology of systems are spread out over the cloud, you know, via API’s: I’ve got that right?

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): You nailed it! And the challenge is that many of the IT tools and systems were built to be able to monitor monolithic applications that were built pre-microservices, pre-cloud services. So all the things that you just articulated are things that many of the systems that IT people are forced to use, really weren’t built to go off and monitor and tackle.
And the second difficult thing for an IT organization is that most organizations have dozens and dozens of tools. So even if they find a tool that will work in one component of their environment, they then have to correlate across multiple tools to draw some analysis. And as we know, the world is so dynamic today, you may take out your phone, and you go to book that dinner or lunch. And if the application is at all slow, then you’ll just select another service to book that dinner or lunch.
And same thing in the ride service business. If you’re waiting, and you’re trying to beat the rain, most people have two, three, four different car services that they can potentially leverage. So the pressure on the IT group to be able to resolve problems in real-time is immense. Because from our personal experience, you and I and others are thinking literally in microseconds of: will that “application/service/ whatever I’m using” be slow? So I’m gonna go use something else.

Joe Green (host): Yeah, I think that’s a powerful analogy. And I think there’s more to it as well, I think that when you start using an app, or a website or a service, there’s a significant amount of buy-in, you know: you need to give people your email address, you need to create a password, and then you have to wait for the email to come back and confirm your account, and then you’re up and away on your new app or your new service. Now, if what you’ve bought into, if you like, through that process, this thing that you’ve committed to, if it doesn’t work, or if it’s slow? I mean, that’s incredibly frustrating. And isn’t that really what enterprises at the end of the day need to avoid?

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): Yeah, you’re right. And, you know, a couple of statistics to validate what you just said. The APAC tension index survey, 54% of consumers said they’d actually pay more for a good app or service that had a better digital experience. So in spite of all the work we go through to download that app and put in all of our information, and again, most people have multiple applications that would allow them to do whatever they’re trying to do. And consumers are acknowledging that they’ll pay more for that experience. Another interesting stat: 85% of consumers said that over the next three years, the digital experience will actually drive the selection of the brands that they choose.

Joe Green (host): So I guess that means that it’s the back end, as well as the GUI, the graphical user interface of apps and websites, that will drive decisions. And it’s those elements really, that are more effective in terms of customer experience and brand loyalty than say, you know, enormous ad campaigns. Because, we’ve all done it, we’ve switch to a new product or a new platform, because of a big an ad campaign. But if the experience that we get is, for want of a better word, fairly crappy, then we can certainly get turned off the whole brand. You know, it reminds me really of talking to my non-technical, if you like, family members, who will show me an app or show me a website and say, you know, this is rubbish, this is garbage, because I don’t know — I tapped here, and nothing seems to be happening. And actually, it’s just one element, you know, in what’s often a very, very complicated and complex back end, that taints an entire brand.

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): That’s absolutely correct. And the difficult thing for again, for that IT organization is being able to find whatever that one thing is: is it a third party service? Is it a service provider? Is it that line of code that was added in? Is it a security component, and there are hundreds and hundreds and many times thousands of different things that could go wrong in that stack. Meanwhile, the consumer literally in seconds wants that problem resolved, so back to, you know, what do we do? And how do we help customers, by leveraging our technology, which is inclusive of AI and ML. We can actually allow our customers to anticipate a problem before it happens. So they can go resolve the problem before you and I or other consumers actually have that experience.
So think about the concept of ordering car in the rain. And you’ve got massive load as everybody decides that they want to order a car as opposed to take another mode of transportation. Our technology in real-time can: number one, identify that there’s massive load, and that there’s going to be a potential performance issue. And then prior to that issue, actually being experienced by the end-user, [the AppDynamics customer] can leverage our technology to move a workload — as an example. So now we’ve remediated the problem prior to the consumer even experiencing that degradation, maybe even more impactfully, we can actually quantify for our customers, again, in real-time, what the financial impact of that was.
So it’ll actually it probably makes sense: if the mobile app for that car ride service is performing poorly in the rain, they’re probably going to lose some revenue. But wouldn’t it be nice if they knew in real-time exactly how many people experienced a performance degradation and then what those users did, and what the potential impact of that revenue was by those users. Either they’re abandoning the site, or choosing to do something else on that site that then book car.

Joe Green (host): That’s really got me thinking, actually about the rain issue. And it’s I know it’s a it’s a kind of silly analogy, really. But it’s almost like, you know, we’re quantifying the cost of rain, literally, to the business, we’re actually putting in empirical figures. I wonder if you’re the person to ask really, because it strikes me just while you were talking about that I was thinking about a weather app, which I was running on Android, and is now no longer available called Dark Sky. And it kind of taps into local weather radar. And I thought, wow, it’d be really powerful, wouldn’t it to be able to, you know, pull in that data that minute by minute view, from rainfall radar, and then actually be able to predict the financial impact of rain on a business, you know, talking about the ride hailing business there? Because essentially, we’ve got everything there at our fingertips, haven’t we, we know it’s going to rain. And we know our systems aren’t really capable, say, or are capable of coping with any peaks in demand. And, and we know, therefore, what will the next downpour literally cost us in terms of dollars. And it’s that type of intelligent big data, I think that has some really exciting possibilities.
It’s gathering this information together in a business sense, which is usually where things like artificial intelligence can help because, you know, computers are good at munching through big amounts of data, as you know.
So in AppDynamics’ case, you guys call it the Central Nervous System, tell us a bit more about that particular implementation, about how that works in a business.

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): Sure, some of it goes back to the real-time pressure that IT organizations face. As customers continue to want more services, they want them faster, they want a seamless performance in the delivery of those. And the back end is more complicated. As we talked about, IT organizations now have to deal with the challenges of cloud and microservices and all the other complex things that are in an organization that today deliver a service. In addition to that, customers are trying to make real-time business decisions.
So in your analogy of ordering a car, and the impact of rain and or other things on that, if we leverage human interaction, if we wait until humans actually have the time to go in and analyze all that data, then very likely the opportunity to leverage that is already passed.
So technologies like AppDynamics do provide customers with the ability to, in real-time, leverage AI, ML, to go off, and without that human interaction, go off and make tweaks or changes to that IT infrastructure, so that the customer doesn’t feel any degradation of performance.

Joe Green (host): Yes, given an infinite budget and 10,000 staff, of course, you can tweak your infrastructure, you know, based on data, because you’ve got 10,000 people sifting through endless Excel spreadsheets. But of course, who’s got 10,000 people at hand? And I think the point about AI is that it can do just that: it can munch through data at a much lower cost than an equivalent number of human beings. And of course, doesn’t need the bathroom and works all around the world, 24/7!

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): So if you think about it, in “the old days,’ people would have technology — monitoring technology — that would give them green, yellow, red, and they would have some level of performance for their application or service. And if things were green, then that was good. The interesting thing is that doesn’t tell them things are green. But if you increase the performance, if you actually gave your consumers a better experience, would you actually bring in more revenue?
So what AppDynamics can show is in real-time, where consumers are having a better experience than maybe was identified as green, or optimal in the legacy system. We can show how more revenue is coming in from those customers that are specifically achieving better performance.
So as an example, if the application is now giving [or] returning the experience to the user at 10%, then last time, we might all think all’s well. Then maybe more users will use the service, maybe they’ll click a few more times and the customer doing that can monetize it. What we can do in real-time is show the customer.
Think about a bank. We can show a bank in real-time, your users that have an experience that’s 10% better than your “green”; than your normal. Actually go through the online application to fill out for a mortgage, a motorcycle, a car, a boat, or in the food example, food delivery example. While there’s a baseline that says the performance of the app is fine, the customers that have a 12% better experience than the average normal, are actually ordering 17% more items.
So what the IT organization can then do is go to the business and say, instead of being a cost center, I could potentially be a revenue center. The data shows that we can increase by 17%, for this set of customers if we provide the application 10% faster. And then the CIO can go to the CFO, the board, etc. And, specifically say, here’s the investment that I need, so that I can provide that, because certainly there might be some investment associated with providing that faster service.
But in the past, that was guesswork: I’m gonna go build a battleship, my customers are going to come to my application, and I’m going to monetize it. So now we can actually think about it as a dial that you could “turn revenue up and down” based on the performance of your application, with the ability to quantify that in real-time,

Joe Green (host): Yes, gone are the days, if they ever existed, of course, when the IT function could go to the boss and say, “Look, there’s this new box that we want, and it’s got flashing lights on the front that light up and amusing colors. And we want it because it might work or, you know, it might help or at the end of the day, we just want it because it’s coooool!
But these days, what you really need to do is to have to go to the boss — to move up to the C suite, if you like — and say: purchase this system, this service or framework that we’re going to buy, it’s going to create an uplift in sales, or it’s going to cut costs here, and it’s going to cut costs here. And the point is, I guess, that the more figures, the more empirical data you can take to your boss, the more weight you hold, if you like, or the more weight your argument holds.
And in that way, you’re beginning to move it away from being a cost drain, and an endless succession of costs leaving the departments and actually turn IT into a more of a strategic function.

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): Absolutely. I had a CIO of a large retailer, say (his words), by leveraging your technology, you’ve changed my relationship with my CFO! So what does that mean? He said, I used to have discussions with the CFO that started with “I think”: “I think if you invest in this project, I can do that,” “I think if you give me this amount of money, we can deliver that.” He said, Now I go in, and the words that I use are “I know based on this data that I’ve leveraged from AppDynamics, I know that when our customers experience X, they spend Y. And that’s drastically changed that relationship, because he and the CFO are dealing with real data, as opposed to guessing based on extrapolation.

Joe Green (host): Yes, and you can, of course, dive deeper into customer experiences here, and begin to model customer behaviors and potential customer behaviors. And therefore, the quality of customer experience.
If for instance, we have a peak of 10 times in demand, say, at the end of Ramadan, or the beginning of a holiday season, or Couples Day or rain, as we talked about earlier on, or the train shut down because of a fault on the track somewhere up the way, on a particular day: then, we can extrapolate empirical data. (I love that word empirical, by the way!) You know, how that data affects infrastructure and how it affects resources, and therefore how we might get new infrastructure or changes in resources going forward. And that leads, of course, into this correlation between gathered data, or business activity and the physical infrastructure, and the physical facilities. How do we draw those strands together? What’s the best way of going about that?

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): Sure, there’s a couple things that orient on. The first one is this concept of a end-user journey, or a user journey. So as opposed to thinking about the IT organization from the IT perspective, thinking about the silos of physical gear, software connectivity, different data centers, third party services, we think about the world from the end-user’s perspective, even when approaching our customers.
So what our technology allows our customers to do, is look at the journey from the mobile application, or the website if someone’s coming in via a website, all the way back through that entire spaghetti web, that complicated web that the customer has.
And as I mentioned, the first thing that we provide is this correlation between what type of experiences the user have, and then what type of behavior, i.e., are they spending money or selecting a service, when things aren’t optimal, when something’s going wrong?
What our technology does in real-time is identify exactly where the issue is. So if you were trying to order ice cream, tonight, for your kids’ after dinner, and you went to the app, and it wasn’t working, we could tell that delivery service that it’s actually a specific line of code, or it is a service provider challenge. Or maybe it’s even your home situation, because you’re on your wifi and someone else is watching Netflix and someone else is working from home in the other room and the kids are studying in the other rooms. But, we can tell them in real-time exactly where the issue is.
Then in many instances I use the example of workload optimization, we can offload or we can remediate that problem in real-time. In the case where there are challenges within that IT organization that need remediation, they need to upgrade things, they need to put more storage behind something. Again, obviously, the customer would have to go off and action some things, but [it] will tell them in real-time exactly where the challenge is. So that they can go off and remediate that.

Joe Green (host): Yeah, I think that’s a good example. And let’s take it as an analogy, a contention ratio problem, if you like: too many people are on a limited connection. You used the example of being at home. And so therefore, it might be too many people on Netflix, I mean that the situation is the same.
But of course, the trick is finding out what the issue is. And its causes amongst not just a simple home, wifi network, and ADSL, but you know, amongst a wildly complex enterprise IT system.

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): The other thing is that people have, in the past, sort of guessed at what the consumer going to demand. So an app’s designed, and in theory, [the developer is] going to provide some type of SLA for that app, [and] it gets pushed out to the world. And then people love it, or they don’t. And sometimes they don’t love it, because there are some challenges with the app. Sometimes it’s the situation you just articulated, where there’s a bunch of contention at home. But sometimes, the company just might have missed what the consumer is really going to go and demand. That challenge is that consumers really wants that right away and resolved in real-time. If there’s an issue, the application might be performing as designed. But the company may be missing a big business opportunity, because people are looking at that application and saying, well, it works. But it doesn’t work at the speed that I want it to.
The other interesting thing; when we when we talk about applications and performances, three quarters of people say that if they have an application, and they don’t like the performance, and they delete that app: they’re not going to take the time to go tell anyone. So we think of applications in terms of, well, an application has a poor rating, or a poor score in an app store or online. But the reality is very few people will actually go and complain prior to deleting the application.
So the challenge, obviously for the app owner, is they create an application, they push it out, they start to get some data, but they may have a lot of people leaving or deleting their application or maybe they don’t even take the time to delete it, they just stop using it and start using something else.

Joe Green (host): Now in many cases at the lower end of the market, you know, losing 1% or even 5% of business for whatever reason, well, it’s probably okay. And part of that’s going to be that the cost of amelioration, the cost of fixing the cause of that 1% or 5% loss is going to be higher than lost sales.
Okay, so that’s, I think, that’s probably fair enough, I would say. But at scale a 1% loss, you know, due to poor customer experience, which is what we’re talking about here, that can spell millions in lost revenue.

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): Absolutely.

Joe Green (host): Now I want to touch on another issue. And that’s that of large systems, you know, bought and developed over time; that kind of [system] well rooted into an enterprise. We’re talking really about packages like NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce, and the like, you know, ERPs: enterprise resource planning software. Now, if it turns out that after our investigations that it’s those proprietary, more closed systems that are the problem, and I’m assuming there’s not much I can do about it?

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): The first challenge associated with applications, whether it’s SAP or another large application is very often the service, the app that is tied into that is leveraging more than just the core SAP application. So the first piece of, or, the first opportunity for us to help is identifying back, to if it’s an application that’s leveraging SAP. We can actually show the customer, what else is it leveraging, and believe it or not, [has the] IT organization become too complex?
One of the things that we provide is this end-user journey map, that’s documenting from the end-user all the way back through the complex systems. But very often, when we show that to an IT organization, their response will be, well, I didn’t realize that application actually calls our credit check application, I didn’t realize that application actually has a call to our external third party provider! I didn’t realize! And most of them say I didn’t realize how complicated our application was!
So the first part is just mapping the topography to allow a customer to figure out what components it is touching. And then the second piece is while there are tools (back to my comment before) there are tools that allow you to go optimize inside of SAP as an example, or optimize inside of Oracle or optimize inside of other areas. Because applications are typically going across a bunch of different components.
You really want to think about a tool that allows you to traverse multiple hops. In the past, what was happening is you would have people [who] would have their silo-ed tool. So there might be a database person that looked at their tool, there would be a server person or storage person that would look at it infrastructure tool, you’d have a networking person that would look at a networking tool, and they would all have a view of the world.
But back to you, you and I, and the consumer: what we really think in terms of is, well, how fast did that application work for me? Was I able to order that car in the rain in a matter of seconds? We’re not thinking about whether the network’s up, or whether there’s contention on the server, or whether the line of code inside the database, whether that’s a packaged application, or a custom written application, whether the line of code is perfect or not. So, it really goes back to having one tool that allows the IT organization to figure out in real-time, where is the issue. So that’s the first piece.
The second piece is baselining. So if you think about the concept, most businesses would have an appreciation that there are some periods of time where they have a stronger load on their environment than other periods. A dramatic example would be: we have a customer in Asia Pacific, it’s a large government organization, and they collect tax payments, and obviously give out tax refunds.
So as you can imagine, they have some acute pressure when it comes to the tax filing deadline of people using their application. So on their normal Tuesday prior to the deadline is different than their normal, regular Tuesday. What we can help them understand is the baseline: on tax day, over the past three tax days, the performance of the application has been X at this time of day with this number of people filing and this number of people hitting the application. That allows them to do some really dynamic things around anticipating, before issues come up.
The third thing that I talked about is the ability to dynamically, in real-time, kick off actions. So I gave the example of the ability to optimize workloads by moving a workload from point A to point B, so that you can remediate a challenge in real-time without an end-user being impacted.

Joe Green (host): Now, just to go back to that first stage, when you’re trying to pinpoint a problem. Now, there are going to be lots of different people involved in the IT function, and each of whom are carrying their own rattle bags of Bash scripts and tools and bits of software and methods that are designed specifically for their role: databases, or websites, or APIs, or DevOps, and so on and so forth. And of course, this brings us then to the concept of the war room, where everyone has to sit down in the war room and try and get to the heart of an issue or a problem. Let’s be honest about this, I think there’s a good deal of finger pointing that goes on. And of course, really, that’s the last thing that a grown up enterprise needs, isn’t it, this kind of blame game, this endless war rooming?

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): Yeah, you’re absolutely right. We had a customer that explained it. He said that AppDynamics was their flashlight. He gave the analogy: he said the war room was, in his words, people from different departments that were all in a dark room, and they were all positioning and talked about MTTI as “mean time to innocence” as opposed to identification! So his task in that room was to prove that it wasn’t his organization’s fault. And so if you think about that war room, and you think about this concept of a flashlight, what our customers can do very quickly is go identify the exact nature of the problem, and then go figure out what the resolution is in real-time.
What we see for customers is from an identification or MTTI, and from a resolution or MTTR, drastic reductions — very often more than 75% [in times to resolution].
And another example, we have a bank in Asia Pacific that (in their words): they’d spent more than three months, and they had a weekly war room where they had not just IT but the different components of the business; marketing, security. They would spend several hours every week trying to diagnose what they deemed a very critical business challenge. They installed our software and within 20 minutes, they were able to find the line of code. And that day, they were able to release the code. And the problem was then solved.
So, the ramification of being able to go identify the root cause very quickly, as well as the remediation, for many of these companies, is massive when it comes to increasing top line, but also decreasing the cost associated with remediating IT problems.

Joe Green (host): Now, if people want to go and have a look, and maybe get proof of concept for themselves, and see what the possibilities are, what are the next steps that they need to take?

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): People can go to the AppDynamics website, https://appdynamics.com, and they can download a free trial. We allow customers to use our technology for a couple of weeks as a proof point. In addition to that, we will work with the customer to help them identify the business value associated with remediating whatever the application is that they select.

Joe Green (host): Now, as ever on this podcast, we’re running out of time probably well before we’ve talked ourselves out. So it only really remains for me to say at this point, a big thank you to Jim Cavanaugh, from AppDynamics. It’s been a really good talk, and I think it’s going to appeal actually, to both business and IT professionals, which is of course, what Tech Means Business means — it’s all in the name, it’s what it’s all about. So Jim, thank you!

Jim Cavanaugh (guest): It was a pleasure, Joe, the pleasure was mine.

Joe Green (host): And I hope you can join me, you the listener next time we take a dive into the technology that underpins just about every business, from the one man band right up to the global multinational. Until then, take care and see you next time. Bye!
[/showhide]

The post Business insights from smart monitoring? AppDynamics joins the dots appeared first on TechWire Asia.

Show Notes for Series 02 Episode 06

We just can’t get enough Red Hat! After talking to Stefanie Chiras in S02 E01, we turn again to what’s now the core of IBM, the open-source juggernaut of RHEL and chums – here represented by Ben Henshall, General Manager for the Southeast Asia market.

The financial institutions of the area just about define conservatism, but Red Hat and open-source are changing the face of the industry: open, interoperable, fast, safe & secure, the solutions Red Hat is offering just wouldn’t be available in the proprietary world.

We also talk about Asia’s Generation Z, the expectation that stuff “just works”, and how China may not be the massive influence we in the West sometimes think it might be.

An Australian by birth, Ben’s lived in Singapore for 94 years – those are dog/cat/IT years, by the way – and spent most of that time at Red Hat. Listen out for the insights!

The Red Hat events page, for worldwide (virtual) goodness:

https://www.redhat.com/en/events

Your erstwhile questioner, Joe Green, on the LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Full transcript available.
[showhide type=”transcript” more_text=”Click to read.” less_text=”Click to hide” hidden=”yes”]

Joe Green (Host): Hello there, welcome to series two, episode six of the Tech Means Business podcast. Over the course of these podcasts, I’m talking to people who are at the forefront of technology in business settings. Maybe they’re part of a vending operation or an organization that’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with technology.
There are of course, very few businesses in the world today that aren’t in some way digital businesses. So that’s a broad subject area as you can imagine. Therefore, what we try and do is carve out specific subject areas and source people in that particular niche who can help and guide us through the issues that face them, our users and their organizations.
Now, back at the beginning of series two, we spoke exclusively to Stephanie Chiras of Red Hat, the general manager the RHEL Business Unit: RHEL being, of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the operating system that powers many enterprise desktops and servers right across the world.
Today we return to Red Hat, but this time in conversation with Ben Henshall. He’s the general manager for Southeast Asian markets at Red Hat. And he’s based in Singapore. We’ll be discussing the challenges facing business in the APAC (the Asia Pacific region that is), with particular reference to open-source software, cloud services, FinTech, especially business practices, and attitudes, and much else besides.
But first, welcome, Ben to the Tech Means Business podcast! And, as has come to be something of a tradition around these parts, please give us a little potted history of your career, a biography, an autobiography, I suppose, and how you ended up where you are at Red Hat today.

Ben Henshall (Guest): Sure, Joe, thanks very much. Yeah, so look, I have been working for Red Hat for over 12 years and in various roles, both in Australia and in Asia. And as part of that I’ve had the luxury, or the privilege, I should say, of experiencing a real diverse set of cultures that is the Asia Pacific, and particularly the ASEAN region.
In the last five years or so, I’ve been originally started out in Sydney, Australia, working for Red Hat and moved up to Singapore, and was there for five years in various roles, most recently looking after the Southeast Asian region, which includes effectively the ASEAN region, except for the Singapore country itself. And I think probably what’s most interesting about for your readership, or listenership, I should say that I could bring to this is the way that Red Hat has been what I call a “challenger brand”, in the software or enterprise software space.
Being this open-source, free, this idea of free, and Linux, and accessibility to now being kind of what I call a mainstay in enterprises and governments and , tier one and tier two institutions. It’s now kind of bread and butter – part of their IT components, and Red Hat is used pervasively across the Southeast Asian region. And the impact that that’s had, I think, is quite profound.
And the way that Red Hat itself has evolved, and I’ve evolved as an individual in trying to help organizations and governments and institutions apply these really fascinating IT architectures and software practices in this, brave new world of digital transformation has really, really kept me on my toes.
To sort of close it out, Joe with with regards to IT: for a person to work in an IT company for 12 plus years. It’s a bit like dog or cat years, one year equals seven years for humans so to speak. I think that’s quite akin to the IT world – if you stay at an employer for like that for that long, that is considered a long, long time. And the reason I’ve done that is because I just find it so fascinating and challenging. And it really, really keeps you on your toes and intellectually stimulating because you’re always addressing, really cutting edge challenges.

Joe Green (Host): Your enthusiasm about technology, or fascination, is something that I definitely share. And something that I find personally in the Linux operating system where it’s possible, of course, even on your desktop “daily driver”, to run the very much cutting edge in technology. Now as an open-source and Linux based company, is it that technology-first approach one that’s driving your customers’ digital transformation?

Ben Henshall (Guest): Ah, yeah, it categorically does, Joe. Jim Whitehurst, who, for those who don’t know, he was CEO, he joined about two weeks after I joined Red Hat in 2007, actually. And then he’s recently gone on to be president at IBM has because we’ve been actually recently acquired by IBM. And he described several years ago, with which I very much comprehensively agree, that innovation is the defining word of the 21st century.
And the rate of acceleration, accelerated innovation, is at levels that are unprecedented, and the digital or digitizization has exploded the facility, and the facilitation of innovation of “ideation”: ideas.
And because now, there are large swathes of the world that have access to internet, which is now the great leveler, that is driven by software. Software drives innovation, and that creative drives ideation and creativity. It drives interoperability and openness. At Red Hat we say openness unlocks the world’s potential, which then facilitates.
The other thing that Red Hat says is ideas are worth exploring. And that idea what we call ideation rise to the top, or the code speaks: the best ideas rise to the surface.
You have now this rapid conglomeration of intellectual property through the means of open-source, that the – what we call the traditional proprietary software world that is Microsoft and others – can’t compete with because now you have the world coming to the conversation and the way of innovation and contributing ideas, and then releasing that back out to the to the world.
Because open-source is accessible to everybody. The proprietory can’t keep up with that. And Microsoft, I just want to point out, is one of our best partners now. Because they, if you listen to the CEO, Satya Nadella is really behind open-source in the open-source model and ethos of ideation and openness and accessibility to software development.
So everybody can what we call “hack on the ideas”, and then that creates constant updates and new features and services.

Joe Green (Host): So despite the world coming to open-source, Microsoft included, do some areas of business, some particular verticals, shy away from the openness, the open aspect of open-source technology? One thinks of the financial sector, for instance, as being terribly conservative, small “C”, in particular. How does open-source “play”, if you like, in those sectors?

Ben Henshall (Guest): Honestly speaking, it’s a really, really good question to ask because there’s a lot of misunderstanding or just misapplication about the what we would call the brave new world of cutting edge, innovative innovation, openness, accessibility, rapid change, and where financial institutions are.
One of their core brands, goodwill offerings, is trust and stability and security. And so, how do you how do you have that contention of cultures and sort of brand affinities together that meet in the middle?
I can categorically say, in my experience, looking after financial services for some time at Red Hat and being based in Asia and traveling around and meet various Chief Information Officers from the various banks across the Southeast Asian region, whether it’s in Thailand or Malaysia or Indonesia or Philippines or Vietnam, what have you, is that the customer demand for and the market demand for ease of accessibility to financial service products. Their experience is predominantly driven through the digital front. So, if you don’t have that ability to provide a table stakes, a decent experience and accessibility to financial service products, through a digital means and effectively, that’s the mobile phone through your web and consent, it’s consistent, secure experience, then, you’re going to be left behind. And that requires the use and implementation of effectively what, say for instance, Red Hat provides: open-source, hybrid cloud secure architectures, software architectures and systems.
And that’s where this beautiful convergence happens with existing long-standing institutions in financial services, adopting this beautiful magnificent set of innovation of open-source software, but in a secure, reliable, stable, maintainable, certified way. And that’s, that’s, not not to blow Red Hat’s trumpet by any means at all!
But they certainly did crack the “special code”, if you will, or bringing the magic and the madness of open-source into a format that was consumable and usable by some of the most strictest and traditional and security-focused organizations being in financial institutions.
And we’ve been able to, sort of, bridge that divide, so that banks can reliably use this beautiful cutting-edge software that is open-source but in a secure, reliable way. And that has profoundly changed and enabled financial institutions and banks to do things that I would hazard a guess would take them…I mean, it quite conservatively, 10 to 15 years longer to actually do if they were continuing to implement IT systems in a way that they were doing before, with proprietary technology.

Joe Green (Host): Yeah, it’s almost as if Red Hat and similar companies are presenting almost a fait accompli to FinTech businesses. And I suppose there’s an enormous pressure on those, especially those old venerable institutions like the HSBC and Morgan Chase to change their ways. I’m guessing they’re under a lot of pressure from threats from new digital-only disruptive startups in, for instance, consumer banking, insurance, investment and so on. Is that a mindset amongst those older players: to transform using technology?

Ben Henshall (Guest): Yes! That’s a very simple answer, yes, they are. And they’re making some pretty decent headway, the global brands like the Barclays and the GA banks, the City Banks and those sorts of things.
They are categorically forging ahead with trying to accelerate and change the way that they deliver financial services in a digital-native, cloud-native (if you want to use that sort of word) way, and using a whole lot of Red Hat. And standing on stages! You can just search Google on YouTube for talks by Barclays Bank or Deutsche Bank, Banco Santander BBVA , one of the two legislative Spanish banks or Anza bank or Catholicon, Bronco, those sorts of institutions, using cutting edge technology and practices. What I call agile practices, so that they can change, and adjust, and deliver new services or banking products faster through the digital routes or multi-channel routes, as it’s called today.
Joe, if I can just quickly pick up on something you said about Google, for instance: they’re looking to [Google]. They are getting into financial services because they’ve got Google Pay. So I find that the banks are in this really interesting predicament where you have, upwards of 1 billion people in the Southeast Asia region who are unbanked, right? But you know, that’s a huge market opportunity and you’ve got rising middle and rising low incomes and middle income, income wealth going on, you’ve got this massive explosion of SME lending, and high GDP growth rates, obviously, pre-COVID and I think that’ll pick up in the new, post-COVID world.
So you’ve got this really rising aspiration in the Southeast Asian region, for instance. And they’re trying to figure out how do I get access to money, in a reliable way? The banks have all this money that they could lend out, they don’t have good credit risk, but they’re trying to distribute it through, different routes: that’s for digitization.
And so, when you have that model, and you have rising incomes, and the cloud companies are going, “Hey, how do I get access to that?” “…Actually, I’ve already got them as a customer through Gmail, or through, my Amazon account or what have you.”
They want to sell more products. So, there’s, this interesting co-operation and competitiveness where the banks are saying, “I want to partner with these cloud companies, but then also, actually tomorrow, they could be my direct competitor in some instances.”
So how do I adjust my banking services that protect me, but also means I can have this great ecosystem and partnership with the likes of the cloud companies? And I think that’s where that’s a really interesting existential issue for the boards of these banks to consider for today and tomorrow. It’s risk and having strong, what we call decoupled IT architectures that enable a bank to own and drive its IT strategy.
That means it can harness these these cloud providers, but also protect their intellectual property and their services so that they aren’t completely or wholly tied to, for instance, these cloud providers. It’s a very, very pertinent risk-adjusted issue that they need to face, or are facing. And I think, not not to blow Red Hat’s trumpet but I think it’s that we’re in the right place at the right time. If you don’t own an IT strategy within a bank that allows you can decouple yourself and have a broad ecosystem, then you are sort of almost on a one-train lane whether or not you like it.
You can adjust and move if your partner, who is a potential cloud company is now your direct competitor in what you’re trying to do, and if you need to adjust, then you’re kind of, challenged by being able to make those adjustments. And that’s driven by digitalization. That’s driven by IT strategy.

Joe Green (Host): It’s certainly led to an interesting situation, hasn’t it? , FinTech companies, in competition with big cloud providers, the big tech companies that people are in bed with already, through necessity. And the prize, of course, is the, as you say, the hundreds of millions of unbanked people across the APAC region. It must be difficult for banks, certainly challenging.

Ben Henshall (Guest): Joe it categorically is, and I can say this with, real, what I call pedestrian examples on the ground, examples of the constraints and the opportunity where, because financial services the prime mode of delivery and experience is now through digitalization, that if you have an IoT – and this sounds slightly technical, but just bear with me on this – if your IT systems are architected so that it means that you cannot move to different services. So, say you are to, use your words, in bed with one cloud provider, then if that cloud provider becomes a competitor too, that becomes so painful that you say: Right, they’re becoming more of a competitor rather than a cooperative partner. How do I move and shift?
And that’s where being agile or strategically agile comes into it. And if your IT architecture is very well designed for one particular cloud model, then it becomes very difficult to shift and move so that, you can, just how you want it to.
Now, I do want to preface this Joe by saying, the cloud providers in the cloud companies are wonderful partners of Red Hat and, they’ve been big proponents and big, big partners of ours and doing amazing things. So I certainly don’t want to besmirch what they’re doing. And they are continually expanding and offering new products and services, Amazon, and Google, it’s almost kind of like every month that they’re releasing something new or acquiring something new, whether it’s in pharmaceuticals or it’s in groceries, or it’s in content creation, or it’s in SME lending, or it’s in payments, or it’s in basic accounts, or it’s, whatever it is! Or music or streaming, from selling books, they’re continually growing and they’ve got 100 of millions to billions of customers and people are very comfortable with them.
So it’s kind of like: how do you have a good risk mitigation strategy that enables you to tap into their great innovation but then also pivot and shift to a new provider or move away from them if they become so much of a constraint or a competitor to what you’re doing? And that’s where having the right IT architecture or open architecture, as we call it at Red Hat, driven by open-source, really can help facilitate and de-risk are those those options for financial institutions. And we’re seeing that a lot.

Joe Green (Host): I wanted to touch on the fact that Red Hat has the old school juggernaut of IBM behind it, and the fact that you’re very active in Southeast Asia and across the APAC region. What’s the reception like for Red Hat, albeit with a big US company behind it. And what’s next for the region? As far as Red Hat’s concerned?

Ben Henshall (Guest): Thanks for that question, Joe, because I really just personally loved talking about Asia Pacific, and obviously, the ASEAN region or the Southeast Asian region, because that’s kind of where my heart is. And it’s certainly safe to say that the West, if I can use that term, had been more highly open and adoptive of, open-source and, applying cutting edge technology for the previous 20 years or so, or the past few decades.
And, if you look at what’s in everybody’s hand is an android or an iOS device, of some nature that’s sitting in everybody’s hand, right? And the commoditization of IT has made it accessible for a lot of people that wouldn’t necessarily have been there 20 years ago.
So it’s certainly so safe to say the West has been at the faster off. But that has significantly shifted in the last five to 10 years. And I’d say it’s more than the last decade, but it’s really accelerated in the last several years. With this rising GDP, the accessibility to transparency of services and systems, the implementation of decent 4G networks, some reasonable stability in governments in the Southeast Asian region.
And then the need for kind-of conservative fiscal policies, about the need to invest in infrastructure like education and roads and hospitals and obviously our networks: that has accelerated the adoption of digital services, which then have facilitated this rise of the small and medium sized enterprise and the entrepreneur.
So, now, that has been driven by a large degree, at least from an IT perspective, through open-source and through our partnerships and through great vendors like IBM and Microsoft and Google and, Adobe and others. They’ve been there hoping to do that.
And what open-source does, and what Red Hat brings to that is that ubiquitous access, and that very low-cost entry point to test an experiment, and trial, and then implement, and learn, and adjust how you apply these cutting edge architectures, and IT practices, and the open-source practices within, say, a large enterprise or a government agency or medium-sized entity. And that’s where I’d say, Joe, as a Westerner myself from Australia (which is what we call a mature market), the way that Southeast Asian markets and in particular financial institutions are addressing, open banking or banking to the unbanked at low cost services.
Going to your point earlier on, cash to mobile payments without having to go through all the different other stages: they’re addressing those those ways in faster ways than say, long standing institutions have done in more mature markets, because they have to, that’s the way that the market adopts and wants to adopt it.
And the only way to do that in a low cost way, really, is through, an open-source architecture model.

Joe Green (Host): And how about the the Chinese influence in the region. I’m thinking of Tencent and Alibaba? Chinese life is very much more dictated digitally by those key players then we in the West often realize. Is that influence from China being felt In the broader Asia Pacific area?

Ben Henshall (Guest): Look, I’d have to I probably answer it this way; Joe, I hear where you’re coming from. But I just want to make sure that I’m not speaking out of turn with regards to how the application and the mobile first, if you will, and the lifestyle app ubiquity, as being used in the West versus say in the more developing markets that that is Southeast Asia.
What I would say is that by far, definitely, the number of millennials or Gen Z’s that are within the radius of Southeast Asia market, the majority that live in that area, they constitute a greater level of people then are employed in Western Europe or that are in North America!
So they are a huge audience that are now pretty educated – highly educated – very aspirational, have access to a smartphone, and 4g, or broadband, and their expectations of their service providers or consumers or brands that they use is very, very high.
It’s on par with what me in Australia was used to, so that ubiquity of usability and security through your apps, and the frictionless experience, is considered, table stakes. And so, that’s where, again, as an example, financial institutions because it’s now pervasive, the way we use banks and transactions and p2p payments, and payment models, and NFC systems, as a first class citizen, as an experience is there in Southeast Asia.
And I wouldn’t say that so much driven by Tencent or Alibaba! Oh, what they’ve done is they’ve just, which is what China is famous for, saying “What’s going on in the West?” saying, “Hey, that looks really good. I’ll copy that. And then I’ll add some extra flavor to it or extra features, and I’ll do it a bit faster. Because, I don’t have potentially maybe the organizational political structures that slow me down from doing that.”

Joe Green (Host): There’s a certain amount of necessity, as you say, I might term that necessity, though, or at least the way I think… you might call that necessity leadership. Of course, after all in many ways, the Asia Pacific region is streets ahead in technology, certainly amongst the younger generations. I think and certainly we in the West look still to Asia to lead the way, but is it a generation Z? Is that what you’re saying?

Ben Henshall (Guest): Pretty much. Yeah. Just quickly to add to that, the way that, Southeast Asia that I’ve observed thinks about the problems and the opportunities they’ve got ahead of them, is how do I get ubiquitous, easy, frictionless access to financial services through a digital form? Where there’s sometimes very little credit history, where I would normally go to certify code to? What would we would consider in the West, possibly slightly remote or, Midwest communities, because there’s not a branch there.
Reliably, securely frictionlessly and that’s kind of the way they’re thinking about it. And because they can sometimes make a lot of these don’t have a whole lot of money, or purchasing power comparatively to, Western countries because the GDP per capita is considerably lower, but it’s growing fast.
They may not be a highly profitable customer, because of the amount of money that they don’t have, my gosh, you get them in early and you give them good experience. You get the data from those transactions and the interactions. That’s really, really interesting. And how do you do it at scale on the scale of 1 billion people that are unbanked? They’re the kind of problems and opportunities that they’re thinking about that the West doesn’t have to think about because it’s already got highly profitable customers.
Now, it’s, a “customership”, if you will, it’s attrition rates, all that sort of stuff. And it’s trying to keep it and come and steal customers from other banks or other institutions. Whereas in Asia or Southeast Asia, it’s not as much that of “how do I steal customers”, but “how do I take advantage of this great opportunity, but also do it in a way that’s really low cost and scalable?” Which is, of course, where Red Hat comes in.

Joe Green (Host): And what often people forget, is that if you’re a developer, you’re not standing alone. You’re one of 10,000 developers right across the world. So if your boss turns around to you one day and says, look, we need to produce an app, and it’s to pull in all the local insurance companies’ quotes and put them in one place and present the best quotes in this consumer facing app, there’s actually good chance that at least a decent chunk of the necessary work’s been done already by someone somewhere. And, the chances are, they’ve published it, so you can go and look, and download and contribute. However, anyway, I’ve got to stop infusing over open-source so much: my doctor says I shouldn’t get too excited at my age!
So I’ll turn now if I may, to asking you about any events that you guys might be running online or otherwise coming up, or any resources you can point our listeners towards.

Ben Henshall (GUEST): Joe, thanks very much for asking that. So two things I want to mention. Recently, we had our global Red Hat summit, which is a global event that we would normally host as like many corporations, in a physical space. That was in April, but we had to do it online and virtually. So that’s where people can participate. And we had upwards of 20 to 30,000 people that attended that online and people can go and watch those talks: they’re all recorded and people can go and listen to that. So that was recently done. And we had amazing talks from Verizon, BMW, and eBay and just a plethora of organizations that were talking about their journey, what they’ve done, how they’ve changed, lessons they’ve learned: those things.
So it’s one of those great, I guess, virtual events that you can go to and register and replay these these talks by these customers. It’s a little bit of a space where Red Hat can show off what customers are doing. And customers just tell their story, which is, I think, really, really wonderful.
The other one that I think is a little bit more interesting that’s coming up is we’ve got a Red Hat forum in Asia Pacific. And so this is not, again, where we would go and have it in lots of cities across Asia Pacific and in the ASEAN region, but that’s not going to happen physically, but we are going to be doing it virtually, online as well. So that’s something to go and look at if you go to redhat.com search in forum, and see how we’ve set up some dates as to when those events will happen.

Joe Green (Host): So unfortunately time’s run out on us, as usual. So on a personal note, my thanks go out to Ben Henshall who’s General Manager at Red Hat for the Asia Pacific region. Thanks, Ben!

Ben Henshall (Guest): Oh, that’s very nice of you, Joe, great questions, and thanks very much for asking.

Joe Green (Host): Thank you. And I hope that you the listeners can join us next time on the next episode of the Tech Means Business podcast. Bye for now.
[/showhide]

The post Open-source specific in Asia-Pacific appeared first on TechWire Asia.

Show Notes for Series 02 Episode 04

Every time you connect to the internet (you’re probably connected in several ways simultaneously right now), are you aware of the intricacies of what’s actually happening in terms of data moving across the worldwide networks? Most people aren’t, and that’s where Thousand Eyes comes in. It’s a company whose technology can tell you exactly what’s happening, where, and creates (literally) a picture of internet health.

There’s more to it, of course, than pretty illustrations of traffic flows. For instance, if the app you’ve lovingly crafted or website you’ve spent months designing starts running slowly, or even grinds to a standstill, how do you pinpoint the problem? There’s so much outside of our control, many problems exist “out there” and, in many cases, there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, we can’t even pinpoint where the issue might lie.

At least, we couldn’t until the people at Thousand Eyes gave us that ability. Their technical chops were recognized a while back by a certain Cisco Systems, who completed their acquisition of Thousand Eyes at the beginning of August 2020, in a deal rumored to be worth in the region of one billion dollars.

With knowledge comes power, and armed with the knowledge of where your organization might be providing a third-rate customer experience, you can do something positive about it: change to a more local CDN, invest in your streaming technologies, or start replicating services to better connected hubs. So, before you fire the CIO, listen to this episode of the Tech Means Business podcast, where Yogi Chandiramani (VP Solutions Engineering, EMEA at Thousand Eyes) will let you know what the practicalities are of today’s internet.

The internet connectivity report Yogi mentioned:

https://www.thousandeyes.com/resources/internet-performance-report-covid-19-impact

Yogi Chandiramani at LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yogichandiramani/

Connect with Joe Green on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/
 

Full transcript available.
[showhide type=”transcript” more_text=”Click to read.” less_text=”Click to hide” hidden=”yes”]

Joe Green (host): Hello there, welcome to the Tech Means Business podcast. This is a series of podcasts that explore the technology that underpins today’s businesses and organizations of whatever size. In each episode, I talked to a subject matter expert to their field who’s got something to say on that particular area: insights, expertise, and experience to share.

Today we’re looking at the subject of the internet. You can’t cover that in 24 to 32 minutes, I hear you cry! But wait! What we’re talking about is how the internet and the stuff “out there,” if you like, not your local network, can affect all the apps and services you use and offer. How can we stop issues beyond our control, having an impact on what we do? To help us explore this area, I’m joined today by Yogi Chandiramani of ThousandEyes.

ThousandEyes is a company whose technology is capable of mapping its way through the internet, plotting a course through the myriad routes, routers, cables, bottlenecks, and superhighways. And then with that route map, if you like, in hand, making sure your organization’s not affected by the issues that are out there on the internet becomes a whole lot easier. Now, ThousandEyes has clearly shaken a few cages recently. It’s been acquired, in fact, recently (that deal’s gone through this very month) by Cisco for an enormous pile of cash. So I was lucky enough to be able to speak to Yogi before he drove off in his Lamborghini. I’m kidding. Of course, although I do hope he got something from the deal!

I started by getting straight to the point with Yogi and asked him if an app seems to be performing badly, it besmirches the good name of the business, and it’s irrelevant, really, where the issue might be. In fact, the app itself might be firing well on all cylinders, and everything to do with the app also running perfectly: the internal networks, the connection to the cloud, databases, clusters, microservices, routers, whatever APIs, can all be working absolutely superbly. But if there’s a bottleneck or some kind of hold up, miles away completely outside your control, it still gives you and your application and your company a pretty bad reputation.

So how can a company like ThousandEyes get the message over that, that it, in fact, can help solve those issues?

Yogi Chaniramani (guest): ThousandEyes was built to empower customers to see the internet like it was their own environment. And as the internet is vast and composed of thousands of service providers that can interconnect and any of which can impact the experience of the users. The ThousandEyes platform collects all this different information from various vantage points. And similar to how you use your GPS to avoid traffic, ThousandEyes provides visibility into outages and bottlenecks. And that’s really what we are helping our clients to gain access to, which is giving them in the sense a Google Maps of the internet or weather map of the internet, so that can best decide where they should be connecting: from which cloud provider that should be selected in different regions.

There is an assumption quite broadly that the internet is the same everywhere you connect from. The reality is that the internet is different depending on your location, depending on the service provider you select, depending even on the time of the day, and depending even on the day of the year. And being able to understand all these different factors, how they could impact the user experience really enables organizations to use a GPS, which is a much smarter way than just looking at a static map of the internet.

How networks are connected and being able to connect through: this was even more important, I think during COVID-19, you know, under the new remote business realities that we all have been experiencing. We’ve actually been more and more dependent on the internet to deliver the mission-critical apps; everybody has been working from home. And it’s not only been business people working from home, but it’s also been students working from home and sharing the same router, the same router to connect to the internet. I’ve been working from home, and I’ve been sharing the same infrastructure as my teenage kids. So we’re connecting to the E-learning systems. And obviously, you’re fighting for bandwidth.

We were fighting for connectivity, as we all wanted to get real-time applications running, such as video conferencing and other types of apps. And I think what we really learned and what we at ThousandEyes, as we observed learned during this time, is that there were really big shifts of traffic that were happening overnight, while people started to work from home. They were relying much more on the local ISP and the local infrastructure. And as a result, where you would normally see traffic going from the corporate networks towards the cloud application, it shifted fundamentally going from the whole networks to the cloud applications. And as a result, put actually a lot of pressure, if you will, on to the infrastructure.

The internet did survive, you know, thankfully. But there were pockets of outages that occurred because of these massive shifts of traffic, which really explains or rather, which really tells us that it’s more a systemic change that can happen.

So if one service provider is being challenged, it would challenge other ones, as the connectivity would be backed up into other service providers. So that was absolutely interesting to observe during the last months, and how those shifts really impacted the traffic on the internet.

Joe Green (host): It is, of course, fiercely complex, isn’t it? That you’re talking about backbones, ISP routing tables… I mean, for me at least I think it’d be very tempting to overshare if you like, that technology information. Isn’t it, you know, kind of a better idea (or more difficult, I guess in some ways) just to show a picture and say, here are the hotspots.

Yogi Chandiramani (guest): The internet, you know, is really a technology or rather it’s very technical, right? There are so many things that happen when you’re connecting from a location to another one. Our job at ThousandEyes is to provide context and to provide intelligence into what it really means so customers can really make actions. Our job is to simplify the complexity that comes through all these different interconnections, OSI models, as you mentioned, and so on. But really, say you know the problem is actually happening at this side of the infrastructure, and it is impacting these and these types of applications. As a result, you may want to engage a third-party to help resolve this problem, as we live in an environment which is highly connected, not only in terms of connecting users to applications, and application to application but also highly connected in terms of service providers and different vendors we interconnect with.

So we rely on our local ISP, the local ISP relies on their own transit speeds, you know, the wholesale internet, if you will, side of the business. And then we rely on cloud providers and so on.

And also, typically, clients will outsource the operations to another vendor, and how do you ensure that everybody is seeing information exactly the same way, so that they can work to focus on solving the problem as it has been seen, than to not having all the data to truly look at it. So it’s more than just giving a map or just giving a picture or just giving a hotspot onto into a world map if you will, like the weather map; but it’s more about being given, what is the context around this outage, and why is it happening so we can solve it more fundamentally.

But also, most importantly, it is to involve the right people too, to solve it because we rely so much on the internet and on those cloud applications, that makes it even more critical to be able to effectively work together and make it really efficient for everybody to leverage the internet and the applications in the cloud.

Joe Green (host): Okay, so let’s say I’m running a startup business, and I’m offering it as a SaaS, Software as a Service, you know, the kind of thing that people pay for monthly say. But gradually, the metrics are getting worse that the application, or whatever it is I’m offering, appears to be slowing down — just as an example. And you know, if it’s retail, you might say something like you’re getting high levels of cart abandonment if you like. So how do I go about identifying an issue that isn’t inside my network, inside my control, and then start to actually ameliorate or address that particular issue?

Yogi Chandiramani: Indeed, and you know, what, what really comes is, first of all, is the problem within my network, or is the problem outside of my network? But at the end of the day, it is my problem I need to solve because it is impacting my business, and it is impacting my customers, my users, employees, and potentially as well partners.

And this is where you know, ThousandEyes can really help organizations gain those insights.

The first question that our customers ask us that, or rather, they want an answer for, is the problem with my environment? Or is the problem with the network or the application? Being able to give that answer first of all really helps to identify who we should be working with to solve this problem. And that is point number one but also giving them information about where the impact is happening. And it’s happening at this specific router, which has got this IP address. And this is where we are seeing outages occurring from a packet drop and higher latency and different types of metrics.

But identify precisely which equipment or which service is impacting the overall experience. Do this as being able to see and get the same visibility into the connectivity between the users and the apps, even if the connectivity is going on outside your control, outside your network, by being able to get that same level of insight. So you can actually ask the service provider if it is a network issue, to solve the problem and to be able to look into it.

And to make things a bit more complex as well, what we often see is that the issues are intermittent. They’re not like completely broken, or the application is completely broken or is working very, very well. It’s like, sometimes it’s working, sometimes it’s not working. And that becomes very, very complicated to understand and to resolve. And this is where we can see the different patterns with insight can really help organizations to pinpoint precisely what they need to optimize.

And you know, they need to bring more capacity because there’s one of the service providers that is having some capacity, some contention in the infrastructure, or if it is happening at the application level, because, I’m getting much more traffic and maybe I need to optimize my application infrastructure altogether.

Joe Green (host): Okay, so to swing this round to ThousandEyes itself. If once a problem has been identified, say, does ThousandEyes manage to remain neutral? Or do you suggest a partner company, you know, a new cloud provider or a CDN, something like that? Or you remain kind-of “Switzerland-like,” neutral and giving objective opinions, and just letting the enterprise make its own decisions?

Yogi Chandiramani (guest): We will provide insights to customers, and we provide them the data and the metric. At the end, it is going to be for customers to make the decision. If they want to make a change, or if they want to adapt the architecture, we will provide recommendations in order for them to follow and to leverage our experience and how we’ve seen this done. But indeed, it’s going to be more like, you know, providing this intelligence to our clients and then from there being able to leverage it. And in order to optimize their infrastructure as required. It would seem it is right because it’s important to align as well with their business goals and their business strategies and what they’re looking at, as well as doing it longer term, sometimes, can be a bit more complex when you’re working on a big digital transformation initiative and wanting to really implement specific initiatives or specific projects.

Joe Green (host): So I’m guessing then that bringing in a company like ThousandEyes can stop a good deal of the kind of finger-pointing, blame gaming, that goes on! I mean, if, for instance, I don’t know, our database team has a particular toolset, it can point out that there’s a problem somewhere else, it’s not their fault. But that kind of subjective pinpointing of an issue, I guess, can be dismissed as, you know, part of the whole blame-game. And it’s that objectivity, valuable to end war-rooming and escalation and that kind of thing.

Yogi Chandiramani (guest): Exactly. And I’ll share with you a story which happened to me last week. I was working with a client that was deploying a business-critical application for them in China. And China is a big growth market for them, and they were seeing performance issues with this application. And that in no way it was if it was the network if it was the application, which was poorly designed or needed some optimization. And they were really scratching the head about trying to understand what they should be looking at. And they implemented ThousandEyes in China. And they were able to see precisely what the problem that we’re having is, that it was more the way they’re accessing the CDN application, which was connected to the main application because today, applications are complex. It’s just not one side; it is multiple calls, which are happening through APIs or other types of services altogether and bringing everything together and packaging everything together into the browser.

But one of the applications which were pulling some information from the CDN was connecting outside of China, and obviously that was not mainland China. Obviously, that was not working very, very well. As we got in, we helped them get those insights.

We were able to tell them, look, the problem seems to be here as your application is being served, the content is being served, outside of mainland China. And that’s what is impacting the performance. Within hours, they were able to go back to that provider and say, it seems you’ve got a configuration issue, which they did. And it got it fixed. To your point. You know, if you didn’t have that insight, how long would it take to actually identify those types of issues? It would have taken war rooms; it would have taken escalation to FDA, taken a lot of frustration most probably, about where it is we’re not talking the same language, but being able to correlate all the different layers altogether and be able to see one single view. The problem is there. And that’s what you need to look at. That’s a context which turns into action.

Joe Green (host): So I’m intrigued. Who are the people who pick up the phone at 3 am to shout at people, shout at people like ThousandEyes, I guess, you know? Are they the systems administrators, deep in the bowels of the data center, are they the suits and ties, the application owners, the operations directors, the VPS, and the CEOs? Who’s actually on the end of the phone to ThousandEyes and companies like you.

Yogi Chandiramani (guest): It’s really two folds. Um, you know, the first one that we would typically get a call from is going to be from the operations team. It’s going to be the IT operations or network operations that are facing a challenge, and they just don’t know how to solve it. And they’re coming for help in terms of getting in those insights and being able to better understand what they need to do. And those are indeed, you know, the typically the teams that get blamed when a problem happens, right? They get finger pointed at, hey, please, you need to help me solve this problem! But also we do get a lot of CTOs, heads of infrastructure, and even digital officers.

They do understand the importance of being able to predict the digital experience, being able to take action before even there has never been a problem or even potentially an outage, and be able to really design, if you will, the infrastructure, and the operations in an optimum way. And as a result, we head into the process and work with the head of infrastructure, the Digital Officers, or even architects in order to integrate that this visibility is built-in into the project from the very first day.

Joe Green (host): Now is part of the challenge one just of language? If, for instance, you’re taking a situation that’s terribly complex and translating it or parsing it into “normal English” I mean? This is a situation that I find a great deal as, as technology permeates more or less every single area of life, never mind of business.

There are layers and layers of abstraction, if you like, layers and layers of making it easier to address technology, it becomes more and more complicated to, kind of, peel away those layers and actually explain what’s going on. I mean, is that part of the challenges as you see it?

Yogi Chandiramani (guest): Yeah, it is. It is very, very much. The fact and it is also even turning this into business KPIs. In order to achieve those business KPIs, what does it mean from a technical standpoint to make it happen?

If an organization wants to have a digital service all the time, operating at specific levels, what does it really mean? And how do you ensure that it’s going to happen? This is really where it comes in.

You know, more and more, in terms of discussions and being able to detail precisely about how the processes can be optimized and can really help the business get a competitive advantage. Really, your technical problems are going to happen; operational issues are going to happen. But the question is not if it is going to happen, but what you’re going to do with it, and how you’re actually going to solve it and how you’re going to react.

So you can be ahead of the problem, and you can stay resilient at all costs towards the service that has been provided to customers, to employees, and also to partners. And these are really the conversations that come in, come in more around resiliency, optimizing digital experience, and also optimizing about how customers will leverage those tools as a team.

Everything today in the world has become an app, and we use so much of those and become really a norm, so that experience becomes absolutely critical.

Joe Green (host): Is there a role do you think, Yogi, for teaching the basics of network infrastructure? I mean, it sounds terribly dry. I know. But take, I don’t know, my kids, for instance. You know, they’re very much shielded from network realities, by — well, I would call them abstraction layers. They probably think of them as, as things like, well, it’s just a point and click, it’s a GUI, you know, it’s a simple thing to do. But actually, what’s going on under the hood is incredibly more complex and complicated. And so is there a role, do you think for some kind of teaching of that kind of nitty-gritty of, of networks and network infrastructure?

Yogi Chandiramani (guest): Definitely, you know, I think everybody believes they know how the internet works in and out, you know, my teenagers as well, you know, they think the internet is just simply a network you get connected into, and that’s it. But the reality to your point is that it is so complex, and it is so sophisticated. And with the fact that we rely so much on the internet for everything we do, it’s absolutely fundamental to everybody to understand the complexities that go with it.

And yeah, just wanted to circle back something I mentioned a bit earlier is that the internet is not the same everywhere; it’s not the same at home.

Indeed, you know when you are going to be in your garden versus close to your access point and so on, because that the experience is going to vary. But also it’s going to be different in various parts of the regions; of the world. And also, it’s going to be different depending on the cloud provider; you’re going to select differently based on the ISP that is going to be selected as well. And being able to understand why that is the case is, I think, absolutely fundamental. Because everything relies we rely on this infrastructure, we rely on this network, which is key. And sometimes we just take it for granted. And taking something for granted is fine, but understanding why it is so, so we understand the dependency we have towards it. And the reason why it is so important to us is absolutely fundamental. And also, it gives us a better understanding of how to leverage it. If we understand it more deeply about how it really works!

It gives an option for our future generations, and even ourselves to better leverage the benefits that it brings and you know, how it works and how we can really use it at a much more optimal way and deal also with some of the issues with latencies and so on that could occur. So, for me, it is absolutely fundamental to understand it, at least at a broad level, how the internet works.

Joe Green (host): Now this year, ThousandEyes has been being acquired by Cisco Systems. And in fact, I think at the beginning of August, the last ‘I’ was dotted and ‘T’ crossed of that particular deal. What does that mean for ThousandEyes as a company, and what does it mean for your customers? Are you going to be subsumed into the morass of Cisco, or will ThousandEyes exist in five years’ time as a recognizable entity?

Yogi Chandiramani (guest): The feedback that we’ve been getting from our customers and partners is that this announcement is very, very exciting. By bringing, you know, the power and the strength and networking and application performance of Cisco’s portfolio, and also all the experience and all the partner ecosystems that they’ve been building across all these different years and alongside with the insights and the visibility that ThousandEyes provides.

The feedback has been that you know, it is very, very exciting for our customers in terms of seeing new use cases and being able to leverage the technologies and much broader ways than they had thought about it before. The feedback as well from partners is very, very exciting because they’d be wanting to embed a different type of you know, a different type of offering and packages, etc. I think it’s good to make things much more easy on that front. But indeed, the many many things which are being worked on as we are discussing today, and more will be shared in the coming weeks and coming months.

Joe Green (host): So Yogi, in pre-COVID days, it would be at this point that I’d give my guests the opportunity to promote or plug some event or you know, a slim volume of poetry! Now clearly, there’s nothing like that going on IRL as the kids say, in real life at the moment, but how is ThousandEyes at the moment getting its message over? Is there anything where you can, for instance, point our audience to go and get some more information?

Yogi Chandiramani (guest): Yeah, definitely, definitely we’d love to talk about it. So during the lockdown, when the lockdown rather started, what we decided to do at ThousandEyes is to provide a weekly report of how the internet is holding up. It’s called the internet report. And this is done through a blog and also a video on YouTube. And it’s really, really interesting to see how the internet evolves week after week and what are the different learnings we get out of, out of all the different analyses, and the insights we’ve been able to get.

I would definitely encourage our listeners, our audience, you know, to go and look into the internet report. And that gives you much more context on helping to better understand, you know, what is really happening on week by week. So that is some definitely learning which I think is key to get to.

And of course, we do have multiple virtual events like everything is becoming more and more virtual, but where we do have demos which have been shared, there’s one which is coming up next week, and which we schedule every two weeks every four weeks around different topics as well. And the goal is to provide insight into one topic, but also share it with a real use case and with a demo and with an example of how that could be implemented. So this could also help to better understand how this technology works into action and how it could help different use cases.

Joe Green (host): So as is all too often the case, I’m afraid as the music comes up, that’s the sign that time’s run away with us. As usual, we’ve got far too much more to talk about than we’ve got time for, unfortunately. So it only really remains for me to say Yogi Chandiramani of ThousandEyes. Thank you very much for joining us today. And I hope that you, the listener, can join us next time on the next episode of the Tech Means Business podcast.
[/showhide]

The post The internet is out of (your) control appeared first on TechWire Asia.

Show Notes for Series 02 Episode 01

In this opener to series two of the Tech Means Business podcast, we were delighted to speak to Stefanie Chiras, the Vice President and General Manager, RHEL Business Unit at Red Hat.

With a skew of qualifications that would make a recruitment professional weep (Harvard, Princeton, UCSB), Stefanie was a career IBM-er until two years ago, when she shifted up a gear into Red Hat, post-acquisition of the latter by the former. Now at the helm of the pivotal Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit, she’s in the business of making the case for all things FOSS at organizations across the world.

We talk about getting the message right, open-source monetization, and how it’s not about the details of the code, but the outcomes for the business that matter. As the world transitions to open, cloud-y, platform-agnostic solutions and services, we hear how RHEL makes its particular case among the Ubuntus, SUSEs, Salesforces and SAPs of this world.

Stefanie & Joe mull over upstreaming code, communities of developers, high-performance & supercomputing, microservices and monolithic applications: all in all, a substantial series two opener, with more food for thought than an open buffet at a rocket science convention!

Success stories a-plenty from household name companies and organizations:
https://www.redhat.com/en/success-stories

Stefanie’s LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanie-chiras-9022144/

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

The post The Business of Free Software: Red Hat appeared first on TechWire Asia.

Show Notes for Series 01 Episode 09

What’s the view from the top of a digital-first company? In this episode of the Tech Means Business podcast, we’re joined by Kirsten Wolberg, the CTO of DocuSign, whose stellar career included spells at PayPal and Salesforce.

Having lived and worked through the first dot-com bubble, Kirsten gives us her unique insights into how the technology services that businesses rely on have transitioned over the years, with a customer-first approach now dominant.

And speaking of transitioning, we ask about the steering of DocuSign from its initial position of “the digital signature people” to its current agreement cloud offerings. “Agreement management” sounds very niche, but in fact, businesses’ activities are dominated by agreements & contracts, numbering in their thousands.

Collaborating on agreements in a single space pulls in every business function, from HR to Finance, Operations and back again, and yes, there’s even an eSignature or two involved!

Here’s the DocuSign take:

https://www.docusign.com/products/agreement-cloud

And just for the complete-ests’ sake, the eSignature info:

https://www.docusign.com/products/electronic-signature

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

The post The view from the top of DocuSign appeared first on TechWire Asia.

Show Notes for Series 01 Episode 06

Mapping business processes and then developing software to suit those processes: that’s the ethos behind the open-source Camunda platform, which can be extended further by paid-for proprietary functionality.

Low-code, loadsa code and no-code development, robotic process automation, the cloud and the ways that companies are connecting and automating their legacy and new systems are just some of the subjects we touch on, as Jakob talks us through definitions and ways of approaching so-called “digital” transformation.

From the enviable position of always being profitable since start-up, Camunda’s platform is found in many of the world’s most well-known organizations.

Berliner Jakob on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakob-freund-a3a7a33/

Camunda’s web presence right here:

https://camunda.com/

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

The post Business process automation and RPA appeared first on TechWire Asia.