CAST Highlight’s Green Software Insights – Greg Rivera, CAST Highlight

This is texturung TV. Hello and welcome to Tech strong TV. I'm Bonnie Schneider today.

Our guest is Greg Rivera vice president of product for cast highlight. Greg has over 20 years of Technology leadership experience and he's passionate about applying technology to improve business and our everyday lives today. We'll be discussing topics that are becoming increasingly important in the tech industry.

It sustainability green software and ESG. So let's get started Greg. Thanks so much for joining us.

Awesome. Thanks for having me Bonnie. I'm looking forward to it.

Great. All right. Well, I'd love to hear more about your background.

It sounds like you have already quite a bit of experience in this area. But let's talk about how you got to the point that you're at now with cast and then we could talk more about the technology there. Yeah, sure.

So I've been a test for about five years. I lead one of our products at the company called cast highlight. I know we're gonna get into that a little bit.

But basically we are in a business where it's called software intelligence. And that's the business that we're in and we're helping organizations just See inside their software and understand its inner working so they can make better decisions about lots of things. And today we're going to focus on one of those specific types of decisions and how to make their software greener.

That's great. And it's definitely an important topic people are talking about what not now, so tell me about specifically cast and what inspired cast to develop this technology that analyzes application source code for Green impact. Yeah, so good question.

I mean to answer that. I actually need to share a brief story about this concept. I mentioned of software intelligence and cast so You know take a step back is we all know software essentially runs the planet today, right?

It's become overwhelmingly complex more challenging to control challenging to transform and frankly. It's no longer possible for humans to keep up on their own. So cast has pioneered a category called software intelligence.

And basically we sell software products that understand custom-built software and provide insights on that software's inner working. So we do that by analyzing the software source code and automatically the artifacts the files that are all used to basically create a software application and what this does is it enables organizations to make smarter decisions and more effectively control their software application. So we've been doing this for many years.

So one of our products which is called cast highlight it acts as a control tower for an application portfolio. So provides insights across lots of applications, very fast things like health of the software application. What is it made?

How ready is it to go to the cloud if an organization is looking to migrate a piece of software to the cloud are there any open source risks inside the software because there's open source components being used things of that nature. So about a year ago. We realize that some of the insights were able to generate using cast highlight correlate to excess resources being utilized by the software and ultimately translating into more energy being consumed by a software application.

Right? So, we basically when we realize this we decided to build it as a new capability into the product and complement the other types of insights. We already have and we call it green software insights.

So we launched it in early February of this year. It's about a month later and we're excited to see how it does on the market. Is great.

Can you walk our audience through the process of how it all works? Yeah sure. It's actually pretty simple.

So our product has this analyzer. It's a component of the product that basically organizations plug directly into their application source code repositories. They're called and it analyzes the files that make up a piece of software automatically in a few minutes, right and what it does is it actually produces a result.

We call it a results file. It's just a file that includes metadata or stats. So there's no source code actually in this file because all the analysis of the source code and the pieces of the application happened locally inside the organizations environment.

So once that results file is produced that's uploaded to our SAS portal our web portal and then various reporting dashboards become populated with insights and how to make software Greener. And we also augment that by asking a few survey questions about each application, you know to capture more my qualitative information that we can't automatically capture by analyzing source code. So for example asking a question like is the development team working on this application remote because that has an impact on sustainability if they're traveling things of that nature.

So once we have those two inputs first the source code analysis then of answers to a few survey questions, we calculate what's called a green impact score. We do that for each application and then we roll it up all the applications at a portfolio level and we identify ways to improve that green impact score and that's essentially how it works. That is so great.

And what kind of feedback have you gotten so far, it seems like this would be a program that people would be very interested in because everyone's looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So what kind of response and have you gotten so far? So the response have been very positive right?

It's still very new companies organizations. They're looking at various ways to support their ESG initiatives. This is one piece of the puzzle obviously.

So there's a lot of excitement around this but there's also you know a thirst for knowledge and understanding how it works and how to use it in all of that stuff. So but so far the response has been very positive and a lot of excitement around it. That is that's great.

And let's talk a little bit about green it. So does it equate to software that's also economical so because I think everybody wants to be green but they're wondering well, how much is this going to cost me? And also will it last as a resilient inefficient?

Can you address those issues? Yeah, so Great question to answer that. Let me first take a step back and tell talk a little bit about how organizations are actually using this information.

So one of the things that the product cast highlight automatically identifies inside a software is what we call these these things we call Green deficiencies. Right essentially. These are patterns coding patterns that development team is using that essentially translates into more resources being used that are probably necessary.

So I'll give you a very simple example, right? So using a sequel or a database query inside of a loop. This is something that could happen inside of the code of a software application.

There are other more efficient ways to do this in most cases not always but in most cases there's probably more efficient way to do that that will use less Computer Resources and consume less energy, right? So that's what essentially the product is looking for. So and it's also going to recommend like privatize actions to take once it finds that so it Identify quick wins, you know applications that maybe where there's a great opportunity to improve the green impact score, but don't require a lot of effort.

It'll also identify other things like on the other end of the spectrum what we call role model applications, you know, these are applications that are already very green right and not using excess resources. So the development team's already using good practices. These practices are maybe good best practices to share across the organization.

So it automatically identify these different kind of segments of applications and make recommendations and provide guidance and then allow users to monitor the trends over time. So take that now back to your question. There's obviously when you think about it a high correlation with green software also being more economical more resilient and Performing better.

So I gave that example of database according inside a loop. That's not the most efficient way always to do that type of thing. They're often is a better more efficient way to do if you remove that deficiency and use a Efficient approach not only is that going to translate into Greener software and lower energy consumption, but it's also going to probably translate into list bandwidth being used lower cost better performance.

So ultimately a lot of these green deficiencies do translate into more economical more resilient and more efficient software. Absolutely. Well, you mentioned that cast is still relatively new what challenges have you faced when organizations are trying to implement green software into their actual practice.

I'm sure there are things that have happened along the way that you've learned from and maybe made some tweaks as well. Yeah, well, it's a good question Bonnie but first it's important to understand like the scope of what's happening out there. Right?

So most of the work done today by other technology vendors like us that are trying to help organizations improve green. It has been focused on a side of the technology landscape that's more around infrastructure, you know, so helping organizations, you know, identify how to make their Hardware more efficient use less devices things of that nature. So the next logical step is to look at the software itself and the opportunity huge.

So just to give you put it in context right according to the green software Foundation, which is an industry organization dedicated to this. They had a recent report that basically said that greenhouse gas emissions from data centers that run Enterprise software systems are on par with the entire airline industry, right you right pretty significant and according to Accenture, you know to give you one more Extent as much of 85% of the carbon emissions generated by software can actually be impacted by the software's design and development. Right?

So beyond the hardware infrastructure all that kind of stuff, right? So there's opportunities huge. So the challenges we're seeing are there's a couple of them all mentioned first just gaining visibility right organizations.

It's very hard for them to see inside their software, especially and scenarios where they can have hundreds or thousands of software applications running their business just being able to have that visibility inside the software to understand. What's there? What are those deficiencies?

Where are they things of that nature? So that's the first challenge just gaining that visibility and then the second challenge is once you have the visibility. What do you do about it?

Right and how are you ensuring that you're making progress? So that's really what we're aiming to to help organizations solve. We're aiming to address this by providing automated visibility inside software guidance on how to improve the practices that development teams are.

And make it Greener and then monitoring of the progress to demonstrate that you know progress is being made in support that ESG reporting requirements that a lot of organizations are being faced with now, that's another question. I just wanted to throw in there about ESG. This is obviously a big initiative globally.

How does changing over to kind of monitoring that your software is green and that you're implementing these practices using cast for example, how would this fulfill ESG requirements? For example? So obviously ESG is a very broad initiative right with lots of different things that go even Beyond technology in a lot of cases.

And and even when you take just the the it side of it the green it side of it the software is one piece of the puzzle, but it's an important piece, right? You know, the other elements of green ideas. We talked about are things like Hardware the sources of energy the geography of where software is running or Hardware is running the time of day applications running just to name a few so green software is obviously one piece of the puzzle, but it's a very important one again.

Just thinking about those statistics. I shared the opportunities huge. So what we're essentially trying to do is just our part to provide automated insights and guidance to help make software Greener and contribute and I kind of our piece of the puzzle to that broader ESG initiative which Falls onto kind of the green it subcategory if you will of the ESG.

Us work in the tech fields and they may be looking to do more green practices in there and devops and then software that they use. So what role do you think technology companies and Industry leaders should play in driving the adoption of green it practices. Well, it's becoming a big initiative.

We have a number of Partners in different categories that we work with one of them in particular that we work with is a category of partners that are doing advisory work for their clients or private Equity firms that are looking to invest in companies particularly technology companies in a very interesting thing that I've been hearing in meetings with some of these Partners is that the number one priority and initiative when technology company Investments are being evaluated now has become ESG initiatives. Wow, it's bubbled up to the top of the priority list for investors. So it's become not just something that we should do because it's better for the environment for our planet for all of us.

It's becoming a business priority as well now so I think companies and organizations just need to recognize that this has now become a priority on the agenda. Or companies c-suite Executives investors across the world. It's better.

It's the right thing to do but also does have some additional benefits economic benefits. It's a priority if you're looking for an investment, but also as we saw from a technical standpoint, there's some additional instillery benefits like making your software more performant more economical, you know, more resilient which you know benefits other parts of the organization and obvious ways as well. It's really interesting.

And it's also interesting just in the past several years how this is sort of come up and level of importance with the c-suite that you mentioned. So thanks for pointing that out Greg. I appreciate it and Greg Rivera vice president of product for cast highlight.

It was a pleasure to speak with you about such an important topic and one that's really trending in the headline. So I'm glad that we had you on to explain it. Awesome.

Thank you so much. Bonnie, really appreciate you giving us the time to share and thank you again. Great.

All right. Well stay with us on Tech strong TV. We'll be right back.