Highlighting xtype’s Preflight AI Agent with Ron Gidron

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. You know, this next gentleman, he reminded me when we were talking off, we first met maybe 10 plus years ago, back in the heyday when DevOps was DevOps, right?

And everybody was trying to figure out what is DevOps, you know, who should use DevOps? So he is, uh, you know, one of the early, early DevOps community members, but he's done so much more since then. Let me introduce you to Ron Gidron.

Ron is the CEO and founder of a company called X type in their websites, X type io. Ron, welcome to Text Drug tv. It's great to have you on here.

Thank you, Alan. It's great to speak again, and a pleasure. Appreciate You taking.

Absolutely. So, Ron, I, you know, I gave them a little bit of where I, you we first met, but give people a sense, maybe of your journey, some of the stops you've made along the way to get here today. Sure.

Yeah, I, I'd love to. Um, I, I, um, I've had a, I I've been in the IT industry for 30 years. I grew up on a farm and I, and I got my, my mom used to say he got hijacked by hi, by, by, uh, by home tech.

And I started my career in the nineties. I worked for, uh, one of the pioneers of test automation, a company called Mercury Interactive. I was very, very lucky.

Sure. I was, I was one of the lucky ones. I joined, I was employee number 27 and I left nine years.

Really? Yeah. And they were, you know, so I helped build test automation, uh, load runner and Win Runner and, and, and, and the likes.

Um, and ran into some people that we know in common way back when. And then, um, and then I spent, uh, the next 10 years after that in what is now called Observability back then was a PMI, I worked for a company called Precise Software Solutions. And we did, uh, Oracle and database monitoring, what the early days of, of transaction tracking your, you know, your, your AppDynamics of, of today and, and that early days.

Um, so spent 10 years working for that and, and another less lesser known company called Opt Year that was actually pioneering, uh, transaction tracking, um, uh, end to end sort of thing with the end user and stuff that today is just, just out there. And then I, uh, got into DevOps, uh, right around, uh, 2012 or 2010, I, I helped, uh, build a small company called Nolio that went to ca That's, that's, that was the context that we had met back then at, uh, one of the, probably the first or the second DevOps days. And I remember, you know, agile manifesto and what is this?

You know, we go from big to small things and all that stuff. Um, so spent, uh, you know, a decade there, got introduced to ServiceNow ecosystem right along the way. And I mean, you know, if you've been in it for that long, I remember ServiceNow from, you know, from, from the days of, of Fred's and, um, you know, saw it kinda, you know, do what it did to BMC and then go on to become, uh, you know, a a a true platform.

And, you know, I've admired it for, for the longest time, uh, started X type about four years ago with two of my co-founders, uh, Peter and Toby, and we set out to, uh, go and solve, um, some fundamental platform issues around ServiceNow that have, you know, some of it has to do with, with DevOps. And what we do today is we, we help, uh, companies maximize their ROI of ServiceNow with this thing called the multi-instance management platform. ServiceNow is an instance by instance platform, and we provide three main capabilities on, uh, on the ServiceNow platform.

It think of it like a control plane over multiple instances, and it provides visibility monitoring. It's a little bit of my background there and Sure. Go and governance through automation, which again, so it's, it's a, it's a combination of, of, um, you know, experiences and technologies in the past applied to the ServiceNow space.

So it sounds like you've taken your 30 plus years of experience and found the perfect situation where you can, you know, build on that with a, with a platform that is, you know, very much the industry standard. I mean, I, I know it was just last week or so was the ServiceNow event out in Vegas. Um, I think it was at the Venetian, and um, I'm sure you guys were there, but a lot of announcements.

It, it, but once again, it just showcased how dynamic the ServiceNow market is. You know, Ron, everybody wants to be a platform today, right? Everybody's a platform.

Correct. And I get why you want to be a platform from a money raising point of view, from a positioning point of view, but there are very few true platforms that support the whole ecosystem, right? Of, of partners who, who can build on that platform or can make the platform better like you're doing here with X type and, and are big enough where a company like X type can really focus on that ServiceNow ecosystem exclusively just about right.

And build a very successful business, right? You, you, you see it with AWS for instance, right? There are some cloud partners who only work on AWS, they don't do Azure, they don't do Google, just AWS 'cause that's there, it's big enough to do that.

Outside of the hyperscalers like that, there aren't a lot of true platforms. Not a lot, um, IBM's, uh, mainframe 'cause they're the only game in town, right? But even that is just not as dynamic, it seems as ServiceNow.

Yeah, well, well ServiceNow certainly is. And I, you know, as I said, I've, I've been, you know, tracking and living alongside and admiring ServiceNow for, for a very long time. So I, I recall, you know, um, I've been watching earning calls from ServiceNow for, for the last decade.

And it's not just the numbers that everyone knows about the numbers. I'm, I'm a product guy at heart, so I was tracking, you know, other metrics and, and there's very interesting slides. I I don't think they, they do them anymore, but they used to show 'em on every, on every earnings call, um, what the average number of, um, of, of applications from ServiceNow a customer was using.

Because ServiceNow started out as a, as an IT service manager, an IT SM platform. And it, and it, and for, for the very long time, it, it that that is what it was, and people saw it. Fred built a platform, but like you say, it takes a very long time for a, for a true platform to emerge.

And I saw that happening for ServiceNow when it was like, okay, now the average customer, I remember when I saw the average customer had three and a half, so more, more than three different products. And you really started to see how, you know, most companies started with ITSM and then they started bulking on other things. And you know, IT operations management and customer service management and later hr.

And, you know, we, we'll get to talk on AI in a minute, I'm sure, but, but ServiceNow has really emerged as a platform. And today we work with customers who you could, you know, number one, well still a, a majority still have ITSM, but some don't actually have not started there. And there are customers who don't have ITSM at all, and they're still using, uh, um, ServiceNow, uh, uh, very broadly.

Yeah. I always Thought that was like the kernel, you know, that, and they just, they all build off that. But that's interesting.

It is. And, and again, you know, just to, this is a shorter history lesson, but if you go back three years before, you know, before Chachi PT and the LLM explosion, which, you know, we, I'm sure we we'll get to in a minute, but ServiceNow's biggest advantage was always, you know, single database, single application stack, single model. There's an integration value to that that is just, uh, that is just, you know, very obvious for the techies, but takes more time for that to kind of emerge.

And then you need the leadership and, and, you know, in the success for that to add across everything and, and product, et cetera, for, for a platform like that to arise. And they are, you know, they're, they're an incredible platform. I, I will say something on the, the, the ecosystem and X type is a very proud, um, uh, advanced build partner.

So we built exclusively for the ServiceNow platform. We have a, a, a strong partnership with them. And we're, in fact, we're a portfolio company.

ServiceNow Ventures has already has also invested in us. And part of that is that big platforms grow big ecosystems around that. You look at Salesforce as a, you know, as a course, you, you gave AWS you look at Salesforce and you'll see companies have grown to be, you know, Veeva Systems was, I think was a $30 billion, you know, business, uh, yeah.

Only built on, on on Salesforce. And there are other companies in the space. There's a company called coppa out in the Salesforce.

Sure. Salesforce DevOps As DevOps, our own backup that became reach. So it's one of the defining factors of, of large platforms is that you, is that you can build large companies, uh, off of that.

And so you mentioned me bringing my experience to this, the, and that's certainly true, but the, the, the guiding fact was let's find a problem that is worth solving for the customer, for ServiceNow and for us. So in, so in other words, identify a white gap where we know, you know, we could bring added value to ServiceNow in a sense, take risk away from them, let them allow us to build this for the better of everyone. And so far it's just, it's working incredibly well.

Fantastic. Congratulations. It's, it's a great story.

But we mentioned AI a few times. You can't, you can't have, you can't talk tech today without mentioning AI a few times, but recently you guys de debuted something called a pre-flight AI agent. Um, tell us a little bit about it.

You know, well, let's start with ServiceNow. ServiceNow has embedded AI into its platform. That single database data model now has, you know, an underlying layer of, of, of ai, which has its own, uh, its own, it's not just training of, you know, there is obviously integrations with external larger LLM providers, but there's actually a, uh, an LLM that's based on ServiceNow.

There's context, there's a, a language, there's, uh, and this goes across, you know, the domains, uh, uh, customer service domains, IT service management domains, case summarization, et cetera. So there's, there's certainly a lot of data concentrated on the ServiceNow platform that is very specific to the users that now has this interface that you can, you know, do, um, um, let's call it redesign the, the, the, the interfaces, uh, for it. So allow these agents to do things that, that, you know, instead of having to go in and, and manually create things or, or build queries or create forms you can chat and interact with, with the platform on ServiceNow.

So that's just level one. What, what we're doing, and this is the next layer, is to say, while we can interface into this, so the, the key thing, I guess I assume about LLMs, it's not only that interface change that instead of clicking buttons, you can now chat. It is that the actual agents themselves, a, they, they can pro the LLM itself can provide insights into stuff that you just didn't see before.

So it can give you ideas on how to optimize processes that, you know, you, you just didn't have the data before. If you wanted to go get 'em, it, it would be very, very difficult. And you can then use that same interface to say, all right, well help me design this, help me build this.

Um, and, and, and the, and the final stage of it would be to, to just set it free that we're not there yet, but to set it free and say, I need you to go optimize for this company, for that company, for that company. And it will, let's say, let's, if you, if you really kind of think about it, you give it a task to optimize, you know, an entire release process or an entire, an entire, uh, uh, um, uh, uh, architecture of, of some app, and it just goes out and it does the research and it gives you all the information and, and, and, and tells you database changes or tells you, you know, and, and actually goes ahead and implement them. So I went from like just, hey, now we have an ability to chat with something to let's go in, put an entire organization on autopilot.

That's gonna be a longer term thing, the pre-flight AI agent. So we look at this as a three step process. Number one is integrate what we do around instance management with ServiceNow into a chat interface and allow customers to get proactive with some of the stuff they do.

The pre-flight agent is called pre-flight because it is a pre-release agent. It goes out and it automatically checks the work of ServiceNow developers, and it identifies deviations from best practices, naming conventions, you know, future collisions that may help. And it automatically proactively tells you, Hey, if you, you know, if you press commit on this, it's gonna do a, B, C, so it won't let you do that.

And it'll say, do you want me to go ahead and change that? And it will go ahead and change that. And then it says, you know, the naming the name that you have for this doesn't follow the naming convention.

Would you like me to change the naming convention? Those are, they might sound like minute problems, but they're problems that we know are very, very prevalent. So we just thought, okay, that would be a good place to start, hook X type into the ServiceNow AI tower and knowledge, you know, they, they debut debuted it on the stage and, and announced it.

Um, and yeah, so we, you know, this is our first step, but, uh, our plan is all in, I think everybody's just making first steps, quite frankly. Right? I, I think, you know, everyone says this is the year of the Gentech ai.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every year it's the year of Linux on the desktop too, right? But, um, but the fact of the matter is, we are really just starting almost baby steps.

And what we could do if agents and you, you know, you spoke about like, what, what, what could an agent do? Well, it gives you views into things maybe that you never really, it's not that you didn't have the data, you just couldn't put it, wrap your head around it, so to speak, and, and see what that agent can see. But it's also the idea of autonomously taking action, right?

That these things are programmed in such a way that it's not just reporting to you, it's, it's acting on the intelligence, right? Actionable intelligence. And I don't know if we're there yet, it's going to get, I'm an optimist, right?

I'm always, the glass is half full, it's going to get better, and these agents are gonna do more and more things, especially as you start getting into like, agents talking to agents, right? Right. And You mentioned, and that's part of that, I'm sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead. It's just you, you'd mentioned programmable and I, and I, I kind of clinging onto that because you're right, the autonomous part is where they're not programmable. They, they, they, they, they, it's, it's, you, you could look at it like, say, okay, one agent's gonna program the, either the other agent by prompting me.

Well, I don't know if we're there yet, but yes. And then the other agent, prompt the other agent. That's where they get autonomous.

But, and you're right, we're, we're, we're not there yet. And you said they're gonna get better. I'm like, you, I'm an optimist.

I can see that happening. I can, I can see that happening. Sure.

Yeah. It's not there yet, but I'm, I'm very excited for it. Look, you know, I always, people get, obviously, you know, in the tech industry, it's always the next shiny thing, right?

If people, I mean, the amount of money being invested in AI and everything else, but I always tell people we're at the beginning of the beginning. We're not even at the end of the beginning. A hundred percent, Hundred percent, right?

And so you, you gotta look at these things as we're, we're kind of just, we're making some bets. We're, we're laying some infrastructure, if you will, that this can build on going forwards. And, and I think we're gonna see, I think companies like ServiceNow actually, and, you know, companies like ServiceNow are building that, those pathways, those that are infrastructure for all of us to work on.

But if you look at ServiceNow as a company that always seems to have their thumb on the pulse of what the market wants, of what technologically is possible of, of successfully bringing the market, you'd have to say that, Hey, it's not a bad bet. Right? Bet on, on their, on their view of this, on their vision.

You know, obviously I'm, I'm on ServiceNow is one of ServiceNow's big. They, they have a lot of admirers. I've bet my, you know, my entire company on this.

I've bet my, my, my life on it. You know, I, I look at ServiceNow through the years and certainly since Bill has come, and, you know, and it is just, you're right. So, so I mean, I'm, I I've put, I've put my money where my you Are, right?

You already made your bet. I already made my bet. And yeah, I'm, I'm all in.

I, I remember the first knowledge I went to there was a, a, a gentleman walking around with like microphones and just, you know, asking people, uh, what they think, et cetera. And, and I, at the time, I thought I sounded stupid, but when he asked me, I was so exhilarated with some, you know, with some keynote or something. And, and he said, so what's your biggest take?

And I said, never bet, never bet against ServiceNow. There Was, that's a good bet. That's, that's a good philosophy.

Hey, Ron, let me ask you a question for our people watching this. If they're, assuming they're a ServiceNow customer, what's their best way to get started with X type to onboard to see how we can help them? Yeah, appreciate the question.

So the obvious best, the easiest way is just to go to our website. io. And if you're on ServiceNow, and in order to ServiceNow instances, you'll get it within a second.

Um, the other way that's, that's always the best way is to just talk to your ServiceNow team and say, Hey, you know, um, what is this thing? Or we have, if, if you are challenged with, you know, managing multiple instances and, and complex and lots of ServiceNow entitlements, and you want to accelerate and, and maximize the value of the investment that you've already made in ServiceNow, X type just helps customers do that with, you know, with, uh, with incredible results. I mean, you can see some of the logos behind my screen.

Um, and, you know, we pride ourselves. It's a fact. We have zero churn, no customers ever left.

And um, really, Yeah, good for you. Good for you. That's great.

And so, Um, Ron, I we're about outta time. I want to thank you for coming on. It was great seeing you.

Keep up the great work. io. Uh, check it out.

As you know, obviously, if you're a ServiceNow, uh, customer or a user, this is a great product for you to take a look at. Ron, until we meet again or talk again, let's not make it be 10 years. 10 years.

Yeah. We don't know what, 10 years of ring. I'll, I'll speak to you soon.

Okay. Take care, Adam. All right.

Ron Gidron, CEO founder X type io here on Tech Drunk tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back with more.