Features as a Service – Shiva Nathan, Onymos

This is texturing TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Shiva Nathan who's CEO for autonomous? And they are provider of a platform known as a feature as a service in we're gonna explain that to you in a minute, but she will welcome the show. Thanks so much Michael for having me glad to be on the program.

We've been talking about features and management within software development life cycles for a long time. Now, what is it that's driving the need for this feature as a service approach that's more of a platform dedicated to that specific task. Our traditionally Michaels Enterprises were building.

This features in-house are using Consulting companies to build it for them in either case. Every company was spending time and resources building a feature like login or a chat or a notification or a payment. What be it if you want a company building if you're uber Building application to bring drives and passengers together.

What is the effort that you're spending on to build login feature or a payment feature contributing to your core business? The answer is such. Right.

You should be having your engineers focusing on the Core Business aspects. And that's where we figured that all of the world's companies and Enterprises are wasting the time on building the same exact features war and over again that we felt that there can be a company that builds a platform of features that pushes the technology envelope to the next level that companies can take use of and build their Core Business Logic on top of these features. How do I integrate that with my existing workflows in my devops processes of their set of apis that I just invoke to pull it in or how does that work?

Um, the way that I explain it to CET was is that imagine your engineers went to bed one night and woke up the next day morning and all of this code of a feature is magically checked in it's as if you are developers build it we of course offer it as a binary with a set of Rich set of apis that they can use or at a much higher price tier. We actually licensed the entire source code not open source, but actually licenses source code that your engineers can now look and change if they wanted to and stuff. So that's what we provide a platform of features.

Do you think also that feature management is being used beyond the software development lifecycle or businesses start to separate different capabilities to different end users using feature management Platforms in this whole Space will evolve Beyond software development life cycle. Definitely so the line between software and the user experience and software and Hardware are blurring right. Would you call Apple a hardware company or a software company or an experiences company is a big question mark so the aspect of feature Management on how your end users experiences your offering.

I'm trying to use the word offering rather than a software or a hardware product or experience product. Right? So that's gonna all blur out.

The feature is going to go evolve into much larger than what is today that which is currently a software feature. Do you think then as we go along are we experimenting on end users maybe and there's a lot of people who are starting to use features to show people different capabilities and just to see how that subset responds to this whole program and that's part of their core digital business transformation strategy. Yes to no.

So the company's today are kind of things in terms of I have to build an application or I already have an application and there's this one particular part of my application that is sucking up a lot of new resources. Right? And so now they look at okay.

Is there a company you're a product that I can go to to do to take advantage off and people have all been looking at SAS. So I'll give you a specific example. So access our login or authentication companies try to build it in-house and then they figure out maybe five 10 years back that hey, you know what OCTA can do a much better job than I can do so, I'm gonna go integrate OCTA into my application for password management for the users, right?

But very soon. They realize that after Halloween doesn't cut it. I need to integrate with the twilio to send out notifications.

I need to integrate with other cyber security offerings along with OCTA to make my what I call the access feature. Right, that's a lot of apis in Integrations that engine individual engineering team has to put together to create this access feature. Right.

So animus comes in and says hey. Enterprise vice president or CTO? Why are you having your team focus on this access feature, which doesn't add any value to your business.

How has to handle it not just the initial part of it initial building of it. But also continue maintaining it after changes every day Apple changes. It's a security practices every day and or changes in security practices Trulia changes it but we will keep this access feature maintained.

That's the yes part of the answer right the no part of the answer is will all the features that you need an app be provided by animals. Dance is not There are a set of basic features that is core or what you call Basic for the app like login chat notifications payment. That's what we'll want to be productive animals.

They'll still be some business specific features that makes your app your app that your engineers have to build it. And that are the core to your business. What is your sense of the number of features and capabilities within an application that are pretty standard from one to the next and I can just keep reusing them across multiple applications and or and have we made the whole process more complex than we needed to be.

Um, we actually have a road map of 50 to 60 features to build but depending on the application if you're building a tic-tac-toe application that just looks at one simple thing like login for your users for example versus if you're building a more complex application like Facebook or Uber you probably have 30 or 40 features. So the gamut changes from one to two features to 430 your product features, but take any two apps. So this what I ask people to do take to any two apps on your phone and then look at what are the common features and any knob is user someone that's not even exposed to technology.

Like my grandma will be able to take a look at it and say yeah, they both have login they both have to chat for example, the one in starting to customer service now that you're chatting with other social users and they both have geolocation. They both have camera video support the like 20 or 30 things that even novice is not technologist can point to and say hey there those are features that are common to these two apps. And why are these two companies spending time and effort building them individually?

Next week iOS 16 is going to come up guess what every interesting team in the world is going to go they're all gonna go and look at apart from beta any new things have come up and say what are the apis are duplicated? What are the new apas that have come with just iOS and then I have to update my app. Yeah, either a guy that's sitting in a garage building an app or the world's largest app development companies want to spend time to do the exact same thing.

Right? So based off do sources and arguably software Engineers are the most brilliant people in the planet and there's a huge demand for them and still we are wasting software engineering Talent. I'm doing the exact same thing.

Everyone is the emitting the wheel in their own real house. That's all I see here. Do you think there's a lot more focus on developer productivity today than there was a year ago this time and that kind of lends itself to this conversation that you're trying to have around features management because people are looking for more ways to get more out of their existing developer pool.

Bingo, right. Yeah pretty company. I don't know who said this but every company is a technology company.

There's no company. Like even Pepsi is a technology company, right? Every company is technology company and guess what every company needs now, they need more and more software engineering Talent engineering talent.

And when you have any other huge need for soft engineering Talent like Anonymous we struggle to hire new Engineers, right? We are struggling to hire Engineers all across the world. Our open job requisite are sitting open for three four five weeks before we find the right person, right and because of the demand for engineers and yeah, we have wasting this very valuable engineering talent and doing the same thing.

I take the example of uber and Lyft Uber engineers and lift Engineers. Next week are going to do the exact same thing when I was 16 comes up and that's not just what I was 16, right? Android is going to come up two months later and they're not just Operating System payment systems are going to change their apis over and left are going to change that.

There's going to be a new security vulnerability good it's gonna come up from God knows which country's hackers and everyone is going to go do the exact same thing to the app. Right? And that is nothing to do their Core Business logic.

So developer productivity is extremely important in terms of and platform like animals making the engineers not do the grant basic work, but go do value at work. What is changed to make it possible? They use this approach?

Because we've been kind of struggling with these issues for years. So what is it that allowed you guys to come up with a platform more approach to the problem? And what's the underlying Tech that makes it all work?

So I'll tell you when I thought about starting this company animals. I was set into it as a head of platforms and Services. I was thinking if a company came to me today and gave me a platform like this what I use it and initial answer was no my I would not use it.

And I have to think in terms of why that objection. And it finally dawned on me that. If I have my Engineers building something April 14 the day before tax deadline if something goes wrong, I can actually go put on my thousand Engineers.

I am in control of my destiny and fix that problem if I trust another company's platform, even it could be from Amazon that are Google or Aid or Azure. I don't trust another company's platform to work at the same priority that I want Engineers to work. Right and the Animus is First Leap that we did was we said.

Can a company like come a company build this platform and licensed the entire source code to an Enterprise? And then I said wow, that's my IP which stupid CEO in the planet will build all this and give all the source code to a customer. And then I had my second leap of faith, which was I said the code that you developed today is useless in 18 to 24 months.

And then we figured that hey, you know what if I get a company to use my platform and I promised them that I'll keep this platform continuously updated. Freeing them from this grunt work. I can make a business out of it.

That was my second jump and a third jump was to developers really want to work on this grunt work. You bring a new engineer on board and you tell them hey new engineer, you know, what take this existing code update to the next version. Versus work on the school new feature that your senior vice president or your CEO is kind of pat on the back and say attack boy.

Good job. Which one do you think you need someone to work with? right So that's all the Animus idea came about and that's why I started the company and the market is proving us right that this platform with license source code continuously maintained doing the code basic stuff that the engineers don't want to work on is a great new thing that pushes the technology envelope, right?

And I give an analogy to the people in my family that are not in Tech saying that that used to be a time of our ancestors used to do farming. Each of us had our own farmer went and did our own hunting. We don't do that anymore.

We do that give to someone else there used to be a time in late 90s when everyone was writing device drivers and then operating system came up and then everyone was writing code for every operating system. And then Java came up right technology is all about pushing it to the next level. Anonymous is pushing into the next level.

It kind of sounds fairly simple. So what's the biggest challenging getting? It leaders to wrap their heads around what you guys are doing?

But yeah mindset right not inventory here mindset. So when we go to the leaders the leaders understand it very quickly saying, oh that's a great value. But we go to the rank and file in a Engineering Department rank and felt people go.

Oh if this platform is going to do everything that I'm spending 80% of my time on what am I going to be working on and that's where the leaders of the coming and say. Hey, you know what? We have so much more business features that we have to develop that just because you get this platform doesn't mean that you're gonna be out of a job, right?

There's always this worry in the engineering community that the next cool thing that abstracts something is gonna get me out of a job. And guess what the number of software Engineers the continuously increasing that mindset shift is what you're working against do you think we've been kind of artificially constraining the number of capabilities and an application because we didn't have an effective way to manage all the features as we were building them. So this could open up all kinds of interesting possibilities.

Yeah, absolutely. Right so you go into the backlog of features that a company wants to build and when I was managing an organization in my previous job, right my director of products and the director of engineering always but like button heads in terms of the data product wants the next cool feature to build a data featuring was saying I know I need to get all these updated. Otherwise someone have a backlog right?

I'm gonna have a tech backlog where I'm gonna fall behind. So I'm gonna put 30 40% of my engineering team to catch up. It's like writing in the escalator and opposite direction, right?

If you don't update your technology stack, you're up you're going to vicious cycle where your app is no longer the coolest app in the planet is going to go down right think about think of printing to face ID if you're a tech leader, and if you did not update fingerprinting login to face ID login on iOS right on Apple devices. The people the app is not cool anymore for users using it. Would Uber engineer work on face ID enablement or Uber engineer work on the next coolest Uber feature?

Right, so that's the struggle that you're trying to mitigate. Conversely you also make it easier to deprecate Features because not everything works out as well as we had hoped and maybe there's a simpler way to pull stuff out. Um, the biggest advantage that we don't out as much as when things get shut down like Google shut down.

The APA is all the time or when companies go under right? So, let's say you're dependent on a particular company SAS services for a feature on the company goes under right? It's anonymous's responsibility to make sure that we pick the next best choice and still continue providing that feature.

Right without naming names. There was a huge company that provided a API that got acquired by Facebook and got shut down, right? every app developer better now go back and say what is up to for that?

If only they use animals then anyone was around then four five years back not to worry about the next best feature. and next best service and without put in the future automatically, right the for example, let's say this year our next year you're using on Apple comes Android comes up with a very cool way of doing a brick of blurred and doing a DNA sequencing to log you into the app, right? Your app doesn't have to your app developers don't have to worry about that because animal success feature will already provide you that.

On the same way that something is duplicated. We automatically update through the latest and greatest API that your engineers don't have to worry about. All right, guys, you heard it here first features are becoming disposable.

We can swap stuff in and out as we see fit. Hey Shiva. Thanks for being on the show.

So much Michael having me really appreciate your time. All right back to you guys in the studio.