Centralizing DevOps Workflows with Harness’s Gleb Brichko

This is Techron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Glenn Brico as Vice President of Marketing for Harness, and we're talking about the recent raising of an additional $150 million in funding by the company at a time when, well, there's more changes going on in the land of DevOps and CICD, then a recent memory.

Hey, Glenn, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks Mike. Thanks for having me.

Normally, of course, you know, the folks on, uh, wall Street and venture capitalists are all watching this space pretty carefully, but if I'm running a DevOps environment or I'm a senior level IT executive, what should I be taken away from this raising of $150 million? What does it means to them and what are your plans for it? The landscape is changing quite a bit, actually.

Um, going back to about, you know, let's say 10, 12 years ago when, uh, uh, the DevOps space really started and took off, uh, to really support the new, uh, modern software delivery, uh, practices, the, uh, landscape has changed quite a bit, right? So the original version of DevOps, uh, that we were promised was, um, um, uh, it did not pan out as planned, right? A lot of the point solutions that we've seen in the market, and we've kind of like seen 'em come and go, uh, required a lot of sort of maintenance and, um, uh, sort of duct tape in and integrating things together.

Uh, and, uh, the original intent for a lot of those solutions was to really improve developer productivity and reality is when you're spending most of your time integrating and connecting things together, you're actually, uh, losing a lot of the gains that you're hoping to, uh, to achieve. And so the landscape of changing in a way where, uh, the platform solutions are really the leading story, right? The platform solutions have an advantage of having best in class, um, modules like we do at cars, uh, that are highly interoperable, work really well together, and at the same time integrate with a lot of other solutions that are out there in the ecosystem.

And so I think the funding announcement is a clear nod to, uh, our progress as a company, uh, that the sort of like big market that we're going after, the problem that we're trying to solve, and just the company performance overall, uh, since inception of the business. Do you think that the overall size of what we would call the DevOps marketplace continues to grow? Or is it more we've kind of established within, I don't know, the Fortune 5,000 that these are the folks who are gonna be able to execute on this level of engineering?

I mean, are, are we getting to a point where the platforms are simpler and more people can play? Um, that's a, you know, I'd say that's a fair statement. The reality is, look, harness is going after what we're calling a trillion dollar problem, right?

Uh, there are roughly 30 million developers in the world, you know, average, uh, uh, salary for a developer is, you know, give or take a hundred k uh, per year. And the reality is roughly 52, 40 to 50% of developer time right now is spent on what we're calling toil, which is essentially mundane repetitive tasks, integration tasks, um, that are not actually producing code. And so if you can achieve, you know, a gain of, you know, 10, 20, 30%, right?

Like we've seen in a lot of our customers, you're actually recouping a material amount of developer time, um, uh, back towards actual, um, uh, productive code creating activity. Um, and then there's also an issue of, uh, developer experience, which is another problem that we're really going after, uh, that prevents developer burnout, attrition, uh, and just overall sort of, uh, satisfaction with their job. And again, the whole point is, um, you know, this isn't just a, uh, a software industry problem.

This is a world problem. Most of the innovation in the world today comes from software. And, um, um, you know, being able to accelerate that, create efficiency, create increase productivity, is really helping the world at large, uh, as opposed to just, you know, uh, uh, helping the company's bottom line, which we're also doing.

How easy is it for somebody to switch if they have a legacy platform that they've been kind of stitching together and nursing all these years, and now suddenly there is this modern platform alternative, um, you know, and I are feasibly due that, or how, or is that just too big a heavy lift for some organizations? Probably. We've actually made it in Incre incredibly easy, right?

We've created, um, uh, migration paths, automated migration paths throughout most of the, uh, open source solutions, other, uh, point solutions and even other platforms in the market. Uh, so it's actually incredibly easy. It's a very low lift.

Uh, we have a very strong, um, uh, technical team here, solution architect team, that helps, uh, the customers through, you know, let's say like the last, you know, five to 10% of their migration if needed. Uh, and to your earlier point about, you know, large companies adopting platforms like this, we're actually seeing an increasing, um, number of, uh, mid-market size companies, or even early stage startups who want to get it right from the get go so that they're not dealing the pain with the pain, you know, three, four years from now when they're actually lar running on a larger scale. Are we at some sort of seminal moment here in terms of picking our platforms for DevOps?

Because of the rise of ai? We're starting to see all this, uh, developers are using tools to write more code than ever. The pace at which we may be building applications is starting to increase.

I don't feel like the DevOps side of the house has exactly the same level of, uh, AI capability as the developers do. So where are we? You know, it's interesting you say that.

So, you know, I'll, I'll address the two points separately. So in terms of appetite for platforms, uh, a couple weeks ago we released, um, uh, our inaugural state of developer experience report. And one thing that came where we went out and we surveyed, um, uh, roughly 500 practitioners and, uh, engineering leaders, uh, in, uh, north America.

And one of the themes, one of the many themes that came across very clearly is that, um, uh, in increasing numbers, executives in particular, uh, technology executives, engineering executives, are very much leading toward the, uh, platform, uh, path to again, kind of like get ahead and address or get ahead of, and address, uh, some of these inefficiencies that they're seeing and, you know, their past established processes. That's kind of part one, uh, on the AI front. Um, you know, I think that AI sort of like has been the theme of the day, uh, across many industries.

Um, you know, engineering and DevOps included. We at Harness took a very practical and pragmatic, um, approach to how we're leveraging ai, uh, in our platform. You know, there's a stat that's slowed now, there, there, like a very high number of AI projects in a lot of companies and AI initiatives doesn't actually pan out and lead to productivity, right?

And so, rather than going after, uh, sort of like some ephemeral AI idea, we've actually practically integrated AI into our platform since day one. So practical features like, uh, code rollbacks, right? Identifying that code, um, code creation to sort of, uh, eliminate a lot of the mundane and repetitive tasks, uh, or scripting that the developers have to do.

All of that is innately built into our platform, right? Uh, our cost management solution, for example, has AI that identifies, uh, is powered by AI that identifies, um, uh, sort of inefficiencies, um, uh, you know, instances that are sort of like, uh, left out to die and then, uh, you know, collect spend, uh, and accumulate spend that's costing the company a lot of money. Uh, we're able to identify those, uh, auto stalk them, automatically shut 'em down, uh, and, uh, recoup a large number of, uh, budgets that right now is kind of, sort of, uh, going to waste.

And so, you know, for us, AI is, uh, again, like at the very foundation of our platform. And, um, you know, we're, we're continuing to invest. In fact, you know, a a lot of the funding that we just, uh, uh, uh, secured is actually gonna go into expanding and building on more, uh, AI initiatives.

But again, we took a very practical approach in making sure that, um, our customers are getting the most value, uh, out of their investment by virtue of leveraging AI and spending, again, less manual, um, investing less manual effort into, um, uh, making their developer teams productive. On a separate note, we seem to be experiencing something of a existential crisis in the land of open source. So a lot of folks are trying to figure out how their, their business models should evolve, and there's consortiums that are leading things.

Um, how does harness kind of view this whole space? 'cause I know you have an open source platform, but what is the best way to kind of engage everybody? You can still make some money for somebody?

Absolutely. Uh, harness has always been, uh, a huge proponent of the open source space. Uh, we're involved in a number of, um, uh, open source projects like, uh, litus chaos, like tofu, uh, uh, just to name a few.

Uh, reality is, is that at some point, you know, folks are sort of like evaluating the dollars and cents, right? Whether it makes sense, um, to continue with their open source, uh, approach, or whether they need specific enterprise level features, large scale features for scalability, um, to, um, uh, you know, to really sort of, uh, take their, um, software delivery life, so cycle to the next level. Um, and so we're seeing a lot more customers kind of like, to your point, go back and evaluate where they are with their process.

And, um, uh, a lot of customers are starting to make the choice to, uh, move over to a platform and again, recoup a lot of the, uh, manual effort and toil that's introduced by having to like stitch different things together. Having said that, our platform is, uh, highly interoperable with, again, point solutions in the market with, um, uh, with a lot of open source solutions in the market, right? Some companies have a lot of time and effort and invested, and they feel like they have their process dialed in.

Uh, we make it very easy to integrate. We make it very easy to adopt not just the entire harness platform, um, but our, you know, customers can get started with very specific modules, all of which are best in class modules, um, to start in their jo journey to, uh, efficiency, innovation. We've used the word platform, uh, more than a few times here, and we've seen the rise of platform engineering.

How do you think this will play out? Because some folks are like, well, this is the revenge of centralized it, and we created DevOps to get out from underneath that in the first place. But other folks are saying, to your point, uh, we're inefficient.

Things don't scale as well as they should, and there's a lot of duct tape. So how do I get to the middle of this conversation? You know, a lot of companies today are really leaning in and figuring out, uh, what is the best process and what are some the best practices for their individual teams and lines of business.

And that's actually the beauty of our platform, is that we're able to operate in, you know, a highly controlled, uh, centralized level, um, especially in, you know, some of the regulated industries, uh, like financial services, you know, a lot of our customers in the financial services industry. And, uh, um, but at the same time allow enough customization and flexibility, uh, for lines of business and individual, uh, engineering teams to do what's best for their flow and their process, but still, um, be able to deliver the level of, um, uh, governance, security, uh, and, uh, uh, productivity across the board. And you mentioned security, and again, it seems like there's a debate here about where to shift the responsibility left towards.

Is it all the way to the developer or is it somewhere between the developer and the security team? I feel like we're struggling for balance yet again. Yeah, probably.

And so this is where, you know, on our, uh, um, uh, security test and orchestration solution help, uh, comes in and a lot of our customers are starting to adopt it on top of their CICD um, uh, pipeline design. Um, because the reality is, you know, again, developers wanna write code, right? They don't want to go and, uh, have to manually run a bunch of scans and tech, uh, uh, and checks with a bunch of different disparate, um, uh, security, uh, solutions out there.

And so the way that we've solved the problem is we automatically integrate with over 40 scanners, security scanners out there, um, that are essentially running across the entire, um, software creation, software testing, software delivery process. And so, again, the, the goal and the mission of our company is to offload as much of this manual toil and uh, uh, uh, manual task, manual intervention that takes away from what developers love to do, which is to write quality code. All right, folks.

Well, you heard it here. There's been multiple phases of DevOps over the years, and unlike this time, we didn't recognize those phases till after they were well started. This one.

We seem to be right on time, and we're all on the same page. Hey, Glenn, thanks for being on the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Mike.

All right, and back to you guys in the studio.