Managing Tech Audits with Oomnitza’s Arthur Lozinski

This is Text Drunk tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. I am happy to have a co-founder, CEO here, who I haven't had the pleasure of interviewing before, but I think you might've been on Tech Drunk TV a couple years ago, even.

Excuse me. Let me introduce you to Arthur Lozinsky, and he is the co-founder and CEO of, um, TZA. I hope I got it right.

Arthur did. Is that good? You got it right Alan.

Thanks for having me. Perfect. Hey, man.

Pleasure to have you here. Thank you very much. Um, Arthur, I always like to start off by letting our audience know who it is we're talking to, beyond their name, obviously, and title.

If someone wanted to know, who is this guy, Arthur Lozinsky, how did he get to be co-founder, CEO, what would you tell him? Well, it's, uh, thanks to the great team that I work with. You know, Trent Ramin and I started this company, uh, so almost basically right outta college.

Trent and I actually didn't even finish college. We're so excited about this opportunity and the opportunity that we see in the market is for a new category to be created. We think that the IT ecosystem has been managed with tools that have been outdated, that have been used for a different world that we live in, and there's been a clear paradigm shift in the amount of technology that has come online, and there needs to be a new way to manage that technology.

And so we couldn't give up the opportunity to, uh, to, to, to make this happen. So let, let's talk about that. How long ago was it that you kind of dropped outta college to, to follow your dream and your passion here?

Yeah, um, it's been a while now. I mean, we've been at this for, I wanna say almost, almost, uh, 12 years, 14 years almost really the first few years. Yeah.

I mean, the first few years were really around manufacturing execution software. We were looking at the world in terms of everything is gonna be connected, everything is gonna be a computer. We still think that that's the future, and we think that that's gonna be a really exciting opportunity for this company down the line.

What we realized pretty early on, working with various manufacturing companies, working with various industrial equipment that we're on, as you know, PLC scada, that, that type of stuff, we were exposing it over internet protocol. And what we realized pretty early on was that this isn't just a problem for industrial machines. This is a problem for all computers Yeah.

That we see today. And our customers are managing. I would say probably 80% of the technology is, uh, what we would consider traditional compute, infrastructure, networking, uh, point of sale systems, end user compute, but the other 20% is industrial machinery.

And that's a trend that's continuing to happen, which I think is a huge market opportunity for both our company and for our customers. Yeah. Well, when we look at industrial machinery too, a lot of them, you know, I, I forgot what company it was I had interviewed, but you know, you could look at industrial machinery that was built to be connected versus industrial machinery that was not built to be connected, but nevertheless is being connected.

Right? And so you have sort of an i OT type of, uh, environment where you are grafting on in some cases, uh, connectivity, monitoring, management to these devices that quite frankly weren't even designed for that. And, but no, but you know, it, it's, it's mission critical.

A and if you're gonna do manufacturing and factories and, and monitoring that, you have insight into these machines. And it is, it's a tremendous opportunity both in terms of the greenfield, you know, new stuff coming online as well as the brownfield, this entire base of machinery that, you know, some, some of it's really old, right? And, and some not.

Maybe not as old. Um, I think Alan, you know, you, there's a distinct, as you mentioned, I think you're absolutely right between, there's a distinction between embedded technology and then augmented technology. Like, you know, fridge that gets a computer attached to it versus one that comes OEM out of the box with it.

But time things like, uh, medium time to resolution and those types of things are, they're true in both the manufacturing aspect and in the IT aspect. It's not like mm-Hmm. Your computer is in some ways embedded.

And I know we don't necessarily think about it that way, or we didn't think about it that way, but it's becoming more obvious if you get into a car today. You know, some of them are really iPads with wheels on 'em. I mean, they're, you know, it's, it's hard to, They're more than iPads there.

There's hundreds and thousands of CPUs in today's cars. And I mean, I interviewed, I think it was a guy from, uh, Jaguar. Just the steering and suspension system is I think 4 million lines of code.

Right. That's, that's crazy when you think about it. Crazy.

Hmm. Anyway, um, so let, let's hear. So how, how does, how does Zoom nisu kind of make it better?

How does it solve? Its the problems here. Well, this is a really great stage that you say here for why there's the need for new category.

The challenge that most companies are facing today is that there's just too much influx of this technology. And the way that we've been managing this technology has been in a very antiquated sort of way. When you think about service management, just that concept, what it really is, is humans doing work.

When you think about a work order, whether it's in it as a ticket or shop floor as a mm-hmm. Work order, that's syntex for human execution. If I want a human to do something, I create a ticket.

I create a work order. If I want a machine to do something, I write a line of code. And if we plan to manage the influx of technology with a code-based system, then we're gonna need a new architecture.

We're not gonna be able to do it on a service management system. We're not gonna be able to do it on A-C-M-D-B. Those are antiquated technologies for the world we live in today.

Sure. Are sure are. Um, Arthur, I want to turn to this, uh, research and report and stuff that you guys, uh, recently put out, but before we do, I just wanna get it out of the way.

Now, um, Nitza, for those of you out there, it's spelled OO double O-M-N-I-T-Z-A. And I'm sure there's gotta be a story behind that. You wanna share that today or another time?

No, of course. I, I'd love to Alan. Um, the word umm is almost like ether.

It's kind of like the infinite intelligence. Umi is somebody who has that intelligence, and Uma is like a ification. It's something that you would say to a kid if they got a really good grade, you'd be like, oh, you're such an uma.

And the idea behind it is that this is the next generation of enterprise software specifically for this problem. And we think that that is a very suitable name for, uh, the ambition of this business. All right.

I love it. All right. Let's, let's to turn now to this recent research and report that you guys, uh, put out.

Give us some background. Sure. Well, we talked about the influx of technology and some of the problems that it creates, and there's problems in multiple vectors.

There's of course, a major security problem with this. There's a financial planning fp and a problem with this. There's a experience for the customer and also for our internal employees that comes with this.

But one of the major issues is the compliance and audit that this creates. And this is a major topic today for a lot of businesses. Mainly the inventory control requirements for compliance frameworks are growing, and our ability to manage the technology is shrinking primarily because of the inadequate and old school technologies that we're trying to use to manage this.

Sure. Um, so what, well let, let's, before we get into a specific finding, let's say, give me the background on how did you go about doing this research? Did you, was it strictly your customers?

Did you solicit others, or, you know how, I know it was conducted by u gov was your partner on this, but if you can give us a little kind of set the stage there. Yeah, sure. We've actually done a few of these with U gov, and we've seen their philosophy and their process work really great.

There are a number of customers of ours that have participated. There's also companies that are not customers of ours yet, um, that have participated in this. The, uh, pool of companies is rather large.

Most of 'em are enterprise companies that participate in this. And their ability to suss out what the pain points are are very strong. As you can see in the actual report itself.

Some of these things were new findings for us. We do this partially for our own understanding and for our own learning, but we like to share it and we like to share it with the, uh, the broader, the broader teams. I think that you mentioned, what, what are the findings?

The high level executive summary is that audit and compliance are a major problem on the technology side, and the report doesn't really go into why. And I'd like to talk about that a little bit with you because I think it'd be interesting for your audience. Sure, sure.

But the major challenge that companies are facing around the audit and compliance is really a database question, if you think about it. Because what is an audit is a snippet of your data set in the inventory controls fortune. The question comes down to what devices are, where, what is the purchase order information about it, where has it been, depending on the compliance framework.

And not having that information is a direct correlation to not having the data. And so if you're having compliance problems or you're having problems being audit ready, you know, what does audit ready mean? It means we're going in to clean the data, we're going in to clean the database.

So there's an underlying question of why are we having problems with compliance? Why are we having problems with this data, and what can we do about it? Absolutely.

So let, let's dive into some of these results. I always like to say, what are the three biggest takeaways here? And, and Arthur lined that up to, you know, concrete metrics that the report showed.

Sure. Yeah, if you can. So I, I would say that, look, the, the number one thing, Alan, is that we are dealing with way more technology than we ever have before.

There's not gonna be less technology. I mean, you talked about the, uh, Jaguar car, right? Like the lines of code is incredible, but also the amount of sensors that is in those cars in the new Porsche, uh, tacan, like, there's something like, you know, 6 million different sensors.

I mean, it is insane how many, how many of those are in the car. And our IT departments are not any different. You think about the SaaS applications, you think about the cloud infrastructure, you think about the on-premise infrastructure, end user computing point of sale systems in retail environments, managed services that, you know, our teams have to manage.

It's, there is a number of technologies today that traditionally didn't exist. And what this report shows and maybe is already intuitive to a lot of your audience is that the way we've been managing this technology is not gonna scale. And the underlying infrastructure that we use to manage this technology is just adequate.

And so what we need to do, we think as a, as a company, us specifically as a, as a, uh, SaaS service provider, but we think the broader market as a whole is to start looking at the different technologies that we have and find a way to manage it all in one single database. Because what ends up happening is you have these fragmentation of technology, like where do you manage your cloud infrastructure? That's more separate database.

Where do you manage your SaaS applications? That's a separate database. Where do you manage your end user compute?

That's a separate database. And the problem that arises from that is a business process. Something simple like a refresh or an offboarding, an employee or even onboarding employee.

These are processes that every company goes through. What are the challenges there? Well, those are all separate systems stitched together with tickets.

So you end up having an IT professional jumping into your infrastructure system to try to remove somebody's access. You have somebody jumping into the SaaS system and often multiple SaaS systems to try to remove access and try to repurpose even some of that. There's a whole financial aspect.

And on the compliance side, you then get to ask a simple question like, where is this? And you can't answer it and why? It's because there's so much manual work sticking this all together.

And so the need for a new category, the need for a new enterprise technology management system platform is becoming more and more evident. And so when we publish this research, we're doing it to make sure that we're on the right track. But what it's exposing is not only are we on the right track, but that this problem is getting bigger and bigger and it needs to be solved today.

And it's not gonna be solved with IT service management. It's not gonna be solved with A-C-M-D-B. You need a standalone technology management database.

And that's what we provide Technology. Repeat that for me. A standalone technology environment database.

Yeah. We, we call it a technology database, and it's really a technology management problem. And we like to use the term enterprise technology management because the enterprises are the ones that are hurting from this the most.

The bigger the company, the bigger the problem. And the solutions today that exist, like the CMDB or IT service management, they're not tools that are built for this type of environment. They're not built for this amount of sa, they're not built for this amount of infrastructure.

They're built for a world where you had on-premise services where you're running email in-house. That's not the case today. Not only do you have a license to a subscription, maybe it's Microsoft 365, maybe it's Google, whatever it may be, the number of companies running email in house is shrinking, and the number of services in house are shrinking and the tools they're using are not built for the type of world that we live in today.

Agreed. So if you wanna manage your technology, technology management, if you want to be ahead of the game, you need to start thinking about a technology database, not a service database, not a ticketing database, but a technology database. Where are you housing your enterprise technology?

Hence the name Enterprise Technology Management. Got it. Good stuff.

Author for people who maybe, I know there's a great, uh, infographic that goes with this report. I, I had a look at it earlier. The report itself, people who wanna get ahold of it, where, where did they go?

Just to the straight to the regular website. Is there a specific URL? Where can we send them?

I, I would love to add one to the description of this video if you allow us to Sure. Write on the front page of our website. com and you'll see the report right on the front page.

We always post the newest, latest reports that we do. This one was on audit and compliance. We're planning on, uh, multiple other ones.

We mentioned security. We mentioned the experience portion, the financial portion, the fp and a portion related to this. com.

Excellent. And again, that's O-O-M-N-I-T-Z-A dot com's. Hey, Arthur, I appreciate you coming on and talking with us today, man.

Best of luck with, um, um, NITSA, and we hope to have you back on soon. Thanks, Alan. This was a pleasure.

Thank you so much for inviting me. A pleasure. All right.

Arthur Luzinski here on Techstrong tv. com. We're gonna take a break.

We'll be back in a second.