Challenges Facing IT Leaders – Ramin Ettehad, Oomnitza

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstrong TV. I got another first-time guest here on Tech strong TV for us.

His name is Ramin and Ahad he is and I hope I got I got that right. He's the co-founder of a company called omnitsa, and I hope I got that one right too, but he'll correct us. If not, but hey Ramin, welcome to techstroke TV.

Nice to meet you Allen great to meet you. Thanks for having me on and you nailed it. Thank you.

Did I okay? Perfect. but I guess we should let's hear a little bit about Ramin first and and we'll be your journey.

That wound up seeing you as a co-founder of this company. Sure. Yeah.

We're about 100% company and I lead a few of the go-to-market Motions here for the business. We founded the company about eight years ago or actually closer to 10 years ago now. On the key Insight that enterprise software sucked and we wanted to make it a lot better.

I'm actually relied to the place that we are today and I'll tell you more about that as well. But my my past and the whole founding teams passed we all came from SAP with deep insight into highly configurable enterprise software, but we wanted to build it to be more internet and Native more mobile native and kind of to take a part of the wave of the API culture that existed to make Enterprise apps better for all of our own users. So that's a great.

Mission, right? Look you're talking to someone old enough to remember when Salesforce displaced siebel. Yeah, right.

When SAS it was just it was time. It was time for a new. Everything a new platform a new way of delivering it a new way.

I hosting it a new way of selling it a new way of paying for it right a new way of working into working with an echo system of other. Providers as well, and I think it's probably high time in the Enterprise space as well. What I love though is having co-founders on here from companies that I am not personally familiar with who are like, you know, I call them 10 year overnight successes, right?

I'm doing this text wrong thing here for 10 years now. right, it's hard day in and day out building building and you build something and it's you know something to be proud of as well, but it's it's not easy, you know doing it, especially when you're trying to take on. Yes IP worlds.

Yeah, right. These are these are well funded big big companies Oracle and the rest of them but you got to be agile. You got to be nimble.

You got to be innovative. I think that's the biggest advantage of younger companies right and luckily. These are not zero-sum games.

They're positive some game. So Rising actually everyone can win Yep, so I want to mention the name of the company again because it takes three times for people to remember right also, Nitsa. What is omnit to do?

How you doing? This great question. This is an Enterprise technology management platform.

Enterprise technology management is a category that allows you to track and manage the common it workflows around all of your Technologies your endpoints your applications your Cloud infrastructure virtual infrastructure on premise infrastructure in any other technology types. that join move around and eventually leave your Enterprise and actually the lead-in that you mentioned around Salesforce is a really nice way to think about this if we rewind back to the 80s or even early 90s your CRM was your Rolodex. Yeah, and then it eventually became a list of customers and contacts siebel systems early CRM Salesforce have the idea to move it to the cloud that was kind of the great Insider breakthrough, but it was still just a list of customers and and contacts there and eventually it became the system of record and then the system of Engagement and action such that now basically every single Business workflow from lead to cash happens through Salesforce and its composite or adjacent applications that tie into it.

The same thing is about is effectively happening in the technology management space now the CIO and the other stakeholders CFO and and so on need a system of record and system of action for their technologies that started with this underlying Foundation of asset management, which is just a list of laptops a list of SAS applications a list of software applications. That doesn't really get you anything right you need workflow automation. So you're automating key workflows because they're just too many technology items for the amount of people.

We have to oversee their workflows today. You can't do this with service tickets or manual tasks. So if you think about what we've done and where the category is going in general it's to take the list of customers model the list of laptops list of software assets and move it into a workflow automation Suite that allows you to have prepackaged applications for very specific it workflows as an example secure off boarding allowing you to say, okay anytime a user's off ported in HR System have all of these processes automatically kick off so that we're securely recovering access securely reclaiming all the endpoints and making sure that we have a nice tied off process with Not an IT project not a third party like Deloitte coming to have to implement something but prepackaged app.

You can take off the shelf that sits on top of a no-go platform that's very easy for you to configure the last mile of we have many of these prepackaged applications ready to roll and it's all build on top of this no good platform. So if you want to do something else with the system, of course you can Excellent. You also mentioned apis.

Yeah, really great to a hundred and today we integrate to 150 different systems. That number is continuously growing because we have our core product roadmap and we have an Integrations roadmap that lives parallel to that where we're constantly delivering value by integrating bidirectionally to kind of every API available across Business Systems it systems and security systems. Love it because just to take a step back the world today.

There's no good silos. I mean you look at the Enterprise and it's like there's stove pipe Solutions everywhere that don't communicate really well. So I have 30 40 50 hundreds thousands of stove pipe solutions that Kind of are in their Lane and very focused.

But then to try to get any sort of collaboration or workflow done across teams and systems. What do I do? I say if this happens over here go create a ticket for John over there to take action in his stovepiper his system.

And once that's done stage gate another ticket gets created or that same ticket gets updated and pushed on and we think of that as automation because we're automating the creation of tickets tickets are written in human syntax. So effectively they're just tasks for humans to do. We're automating the creation of tasks true automation is system to system and it speaks in computer syntax or API and that is true automation.

That's where the world's had. It not only from us. I mean, this is like a wave of automation.

I know. com and we are digital cxo and you know digital transformation and you know, the API this whole API thing is is driving it right because it's allowing us to You know, I don't want to say bust out of silos. But as you mentioned stove stovepipes, if you will, it doesn't last I mean so many of these systems.

First of all, it was much more homogenous, right you were managing your Oracle sap, Microsoft and IBM and Adobe licensing and they were behemoths of recharging you. I mean, there's still behemits that are charging millions of dollars a year, but that was in they were their own walled Gardens and they didn't want to expose data externally because that was their competitive Advantage. Now you have thousands of minute long tails ass services and cloud services that you use that just to be competitive.

They have to expose and have to make their data available externally and that makes the world a lot easier to live in from an Automation and workflow perspective across silos, but we're now into the second phase where we have Tech on Tech. building that automation layer Yep, you know back in the com days. I helped found a company with interliant but we were in early ASP application service provider and there was no Cloud yet.

Right. We didn't have the kind of virtualizations that we do now, but we back then we will hosting like Lotus Notes Oracle essay. Not sap is much Oracle Onyx was a CRM tool people soft was big in those days and it was crazy.

And I knew I saw first hand how You know, these stove pipes worked and it and it created. Not only with the software itself pipe, but it creates stove pipes in your personnel right this team. Does that that team does this and they don't they don't even like each other right?

Because there's that Constant friction. We do live in a different world. We live in a world as you mentioned where if you're not open today.

You you know, if you don't open, you ain't getting it with Healthcare and fin serve. I think that's correct. Yeah, but you know what I'm going to tell you something I interview a lot of financial.

providers and financial firms here They're not. I mean they're buttoned up, but they're not. I mean they some of them more let's say enlightened ones.

They may not be publicly available information. But the way they function you know behind the curtain is there's a lot of information passing now. sensitive data is sensitive data, and there's just nothing you could do about that, but they're working really hard to automate and and to create better processes, you know, and it's I think they get a bad rap.

I think in a lot of ways the finance the fan Ops speed will not fair enough. That's a whole different thing. But the finance industry leads the way in a lot of times on these kinds of things.

I mean, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you. You can't throw a stick without running into Chad GPT inner Innovative AI this AI that ml. What effect is this having on your business?

You think? Oh we'll have well, I think there's there's a lot of noise right now about if you're doing a lot of annoyances of your product, then you'll be left behind. So I think there are major opportunities for us to bake and large language models are more General AI.

Into our suite of solutions and we're looking closely at that. But today I think we're already on the kind of bleeding edge from a technology perspective because we have the no code capabilities with the prepackaged apps that integrate into all of the existing services. So when we talk to a CIO or when we talk to a it leader like a VP of it about a project they look at it and they okay.

I can do an IT project over here on this older platform that's going to take sticks to 18 months to roll out with a lot of third party services and ownership. Or I can take this off the shelf deploy three applications that are going to make impact in 90 days or less. And then I'm still future-proofed because there's still a platform.

I'm still able to do more with this platform. But today I can stand up use case one onboarding use case two refresh use case three offboarding gain value right away. Check those boxes and move forward.

So I think this is just the way Computing is going and enterprise software or the Enterprise leaders are going to be able to consume enterprise software in this much faster more agile quick time to Value approach now for us to bake in AI or specifically to bake in conversational AI is on the reporting side. We can do really cool stuff. That's like hey, am I currently in compliance with CIS control?

One, two, three and four and then the system is going to know the type of controls available and it's gonna know where your existing hygiene level is at in your Enterprise tax stock and say yes to two and three no to four here's some recommendations on what you can do. That's a great example of how we can use some of these large language models within our solution. But again all that today, I believe is a nice to have we're all kind of trailing in that direction that Absolutely.

Absolutely. Let me ask you another question. Remain is platform a dirty word to you.

Do you consider omnitzer a platform or don't don't go out. Don't pay me. Yeah, great question great question.

I mean we are positioning Solutions as prepackaged applications that you can rapidly deploy. Now with that said it's built on top of a no-code platform. The reason I do think the platform is becoming a dirty word now or at least it's harder for systems like us there's no CIO wants to do another it platform that just sounds like an 18 month project.

That sounds like a lot of work. That sounds like a big switching cost. In a time when efficiency matters more than anything else right?

We just came out of it 10 plus year run growth run mostly in a almost zero percent interest rate environment where it was like growth growth growth. So anything you have that you could take and you could run with sure you could have multiple it Platforms in the same Enterprise. But the notion, you know starting a year ago or so and all the way through for a while.

Now, I believe will be efficiency and how to do more with less. So we're going to see consolidation of platforms consolidations of Bob's consolidations of services and You don't want to be selling a platform in that environment in my opinion. Actually, you know what?

That's that's a great insight into it remain. We're almost out of time but you know what for people want to get more information. How do they engage with omnitsa?

com take a look at some of our Solutions learn more about the Enterprise technology management category and opportunity in general. It's really a way for cios and Enterprise leaders to manage and oversee these very very tough. But very common it workflows that today are handled by service tickets manual tasks their error-prone.

There's massive security gaps, and we're just overspending in it. So if efficiency is important if security is important, we solve a lot of the daily challenges in terms of tech management and it management. com.

Alright, here's the hardest hardest question. You're gonna get yeah go home. It's a forest.

Oh website. Yes, of course. com yes, sir.

And so we wanted to have hey remain I thank you for coming on textrung TV with us today and telling us all about omnitzer and a little bit about yourself continued success me the next 10 years be twice as successful as the last time keep doing. What you doing. Thank you, sir.

You're an inspiration. Thanks for having me on all right a pleasure mean and hard. At the heart co-founder omnitzer here on techstrong TV.

We're going to take a break. We'll be right back.