Software Automation – Kevin Thompson, Tricentis

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another text drug TV segment. I am really really happy to have my next guest on here.

For those of you who watch Tech Strunk TV, you know, one of my favorite kind of reoccurring series is our devops Unbound series and if you haven't caught it catch it, we've been doing it now for almost two years and every two weeks or so. We we explore a new area of devops and we've had some amazing. Yes some amazing discussions every four to six weeks.

We do it with a live audiences around table that you can participate in and some of those have been off the charts. We're really blessed and lucky to have our friends at tricentious sponsor devops and down from day one. They've been with us partnered with us through the whole thing and continue to do so, but I've never been able to get this guy on before he's the CEO of Trey scientist.

Let me introduce you to Kevin Thompson Hey Kevin, welcome to text drug TV. Thank you for having me God pleasure. So Kevin.

You've been CEO of Trace dentist now, I guess for a little more than a year right maybe a year and a couple months two three months. Well almost a year and a half now time flies. Yeah.

Wow well in covid you lose track of time, right? Yes, you do groundhog day. But anyway, For those people who are familiar with Kevin Thompson, why don't you give them a little background?

And while you're at it a little tricentice background? Sure, so maybe I'll start with a little background about me. I've been in tech for a really long time now starting my career in Tech back in public accounting so many years ago, we won't talk about how many and then I was one of the early management team members at red hat back when we were a brand in search of a business model trying to figure out why would anyone pay for free software?

I was part of the team that figured that out. I went to South Institute for a couple of years, which is one of those very private software company that a lot of people wonder, you know, what's real what's not was a great experience for a couple years as it was the COS solarwinds for almost 15 years before I came to try send us about 18 months ago. So I've had the great Good Fortune to being in a lot of very unique stuff for companies.

I haven't been in a I guess what I call a normal software company yet, and I would say tricenis is another one of those very unique opportunities and you know, when I when I bumped in to try sentence and I met the company back in 2021, there was a lot of opportunity that got me excited about what we might be able to create if you look at our history. We've been involved in testing and test automation for almost 15 years. Now we started out as a services company that then Wolfgang and prawns turned into a software company that really was just in Europe for a really long time and then we began to expand globally and you have created a whole lot of momentum and I think we have Today a very broad set of capabilities, but I think the opportunity is even so much larger.

I think we've scratched the surface of ultimately what we can become and what we should become a lot of it being driven by a lot of the topics you talk about on your series around devops changing how we build technology how we deploy technology how we think about using and interacting with technology and when you step back and say okay, there's testing which we're the best in the world at so we have the broadest set of capabilities and into win continuous testing from functional unit testing to load and performance to test management and a number of other capabilities around that to make our offerings unique. We're all so I think incredibly well positioned to think about the next Version our next generation of what does it mean to deliver a very high quality piece of software to a user whether that user is an internal customer or whether that's an external customer that you're trying to serve and you know, that's what we're focused on doing and what got me excited. The market rent is great.

I want to be number one in that market today. We're number two measured by Revenue number one measured by momentum in technology coverage, but that market is just the beginning. I think of the opportunity.

We will address over the next. Two three ten years. So I think it's it's a really interesting space to be in because the way we build and deploy and use software is changing.

So rapidly and many of our customers don't have all the tools. They need to be able to make sure they're delivering that very high quality piece of software to their business that only delivers the intended business outcome increase the business value. They believed it would when they invested Yep.

So Kevin. Anyway, you're preaching to the choir man. You're talking my talking.

You know, when I've also been around the corner a couple times. I think in the software business being normal is overrated, right? It's I agree.

It's a little bit boring anyway, right it really isn't it. It's not exciting. It's about excitement.

com eight nine years ago, right there was talk of QA is going away. We're gonna automate testing. There'll be no more testers.

There'll be no more QA as we know it but nothing ever goes away, right? It just evolves. But tricentes early on and you're at Wolfgang the team in Austria and then, you know coming here to the US and globally you guys really became the leader in automated testing but not automation for the sake of eliminating humans.

Automating for the sake of going faster. Improving. I mean it's kind of counterintuitive.

I'm going to improve your quality by going faster through automation. Almost like wow, let me wrap my head around that right going faster. I'm gonna have higher quality, but that's what it did and I think that was the that was the the secret sauce right?

I'll take a lot of the thing that Wolfgang in France and team really understood is it's about understanding where your risk lies. So where does my risk lie as I'm developing deploying buying deploying upgrading a piece of technology. Where does the risk lie?

Where do I need to Make sure I'm doing a phenomenal job of ensuring that the application is working the way it was intended to work into the user experience is what it needs to be in order to deliver that business outcome. So by taking that approach based on risk first then automation to allow you to address that risk, very very quickly. I think that was a big change in the way.

We thought about testing workflows and testing applications, right? Absolutely. So Kevin you and I both seen these before.

kind of Cycles in periods I think you touched on it. Let's be really clear. I think we're at another inflection point in our technology Cycles where man the future is really exciting.

It's there's exciting stuff going on. We we've kind of wrapped our heads around the cloud, but just as we wrapped our heads around cloud. Does this new frontier of Edge and and iot devices and do anything from anywhere kind of stuff, right?

Testing of course is part of that but really what's driving. It is our ability to do more which brings software. It hasn't been brought before through automation quality software doing new ways of thinking about it.

It's an exciting time tell us kind of your vision and I guess extension I sent this about you know, what this opportunity is out here. Yeah, we've been spending a lot of time over the last 18 months. I've been at triceps really trying to grasp the Opportunity that's beginning to unfold not just for us but for a lot of other software companies because we think about the way we've changed how we build technology and you and I've been around a long time and a lot of our viewers are probably been allowing around a long time.

We remember the waterfall development methodology and I remember prior to Waterfall when waterfall was new. I remember when we implemented waterfall in my you know, one of my first early software companies. So I think that you know the number of changes and not just how we build technology now, my dog has joined the video not just how we build technology but how we use technology in the speed at which we want to put new capabilities in the hands of our users.

That's what has caused us to step back and say what is it we should be providing to our customers. How do we make our customers successful when they're building technology in a full devops model but also still building technology and some of the more traditional waterfall models that we build technology before and in the side to say organization. We have different development methodologies that ultimately we have to bring Together we have this explosion in custom apps SAS apps or cloud-based apps still a whole lot of on-premise applications that are now connected together.

We have to make sure we're not just testing an individual application, but we're testing across the entire application environment and that environment is in a lot of different places. We've got to test a different rates of speed now. So if you think about continuous development and continuous deployment, how do we enable that while still testing because if you don't test really well, which we've not been testing very well in the devops world the last several years you end up letting the users be the testers you end up with a lot of problems.

You're trying to fix on the back end. You really should be fixing in the development process. So as we think about testing I think The approaches we have today are phenomenal were great at it.

We've added a number of capabilities. We've added Technologies really aimed just to developers. They're using those those testing Technologies inside of the cdicd pipeline as they're building and deploying continuously.

Hopefully, I don't think even that's enough. I think we've got to think about things like error monitoring. We got to think about areas like security we have to think about The way we allow you to test and move quickly based on different applications.

And so the vision we have is no matter what type of application You're Building no matter where it's deployed where it's being built how it's being used that we need to be able to provide you a suite of capabilities that allow you to make sure that entire application environment is working the way it's intended to work and that we can move at your speed not at our speed and that's a challenge right? I think if you look at all of the vendors that are in the test automation space, I don't think any of us are where we ultimately need to be I think we're ahead but we know we're not delivering all the capabilities our customers need yet. And in some cases our customer don't even fully recognize what it is that they need.

They know they have a gap. They don't know exactly how they want to solve the Gap. It's we're spending a lot of time thinking about that problem.

So that indicated we've added technology. They're really just aimed at developers and devops teams. We are taking a lot of the capabilities we historically had we're moving those capabilities to the cloud well, Same time not we're not porting.

We're rewriting from scratch brand new products that solve a lot of the problems our historical products are solved but solve them in a fully Cloud native context without losing all the knowledge. We have a very specific application environment. So it's a really big opportunity.

Our challenge is going to be more one of prioritization think about, you know, all the big applications. We all rely on today very few of the testing tools out there have deep contexts, even those package dance much less all these custom applications, which is 70% of what businesses run today, they build or have built for specifically for them. So there's you our goal is to cover all of that today.

We have some ability to cover it all we want to cover it all very very deeply with a lot of context and knowledge of the environments that we are trying to I'll use a word for second testing. But I really mean the environments that we're doing work where we're doing work to ensure that high quality piece of software is being developed and provided to the organization. Yep, and tell you I think the other thing that is not a fly in the ointment, but but just a requirement that has to be factored in scale.

Right. We're not an hour. People are building applications today that the scale boggles.

Are you talking about early on at Red Hat? Look right out. I mean, yeah, right Atlantics that was you know that That was what we built scalable applications from an OS perspective.

The guy I interviewed a company before he right before this interview, you know, they're taking the OS out of it. It's this no Ops thing and they handle all the Ops for you in the OS and all of that but because it's like scales, you know widely distributed applications in tens of data centers at the same time. The scale is is just mind boggling.

How do you I mean just I mean think about building. So this company had 36 minutes of downtime in 10 years in 10 years. It's impressive.

Think about that, right? That's nuts. But you know, I was in the data center business that doesn't have, you know, we used to worry about four nights and five nights anyway.

But this is a challenge, right? Yeah scale is a huge Challenge and it's you know, we've got a you know a number very very large custom. That to be frank are using our Technologies today in ways that we didn't dream they would use those products even three years ago.

They are stressing our ability to scale to both large application environments large number of users that need to access the technology the level and speed of reporting that they need in order to really have visibility that their business demands. That's I think it's been a challenge for a lot of us as we move to This Cloud first world and we move into this Cloud native world that ability of an organization to take an application and blow it out globally so quickly. And we've got to all be able to keep up with that.

It's something that we spent a lot of time working on the last 18 months. We've invested tremendous amount of engineering effort in that issue of scale. How do we allow you know, I really large customer virus and financial services or in distribution or in healthcare or health and life science.

How do we allow them to leverage our technology across thousands tens of thousands. We have a customers got 40,000 developers in their organization. And if you think about the number of applications those 40,000 developers are building.

And the test all of that and make sure it connects and works together who would have dreamed that's what we would be doing 10 years ago five years ago. Because it happened without a heck of a lot of automation man. That's the only way I see it being able to how you survived in, you know in it's interesting.

You mentioned early on things don't go away they evolve and change and even if you look at the testing market today, it's still mainly manual which actually surprised me because this is not a market I've lived in before I got to try send us. It's always been 18 months learning as much as I could possibly learn and one of the things that surprised me the most is how much manual testing we're still doing and when you think about the speed at which technology is moving today manual testing simply can't keep up just right. it's like a recipe for for failure is what it is.

But anyway, Hey Kevin, I you know for people who want to get more information about tricentes, of course, it's tricent to start calm t r i c e n t i s anything other don't say anything that's gonna get us in trouble. But any other big news on the horizon from tricentes you wanted to share with the audience. You should definitely be watching because we're gonna deliver a whole lot of new technology this year.

We're gonna release more new product this year than we've released in the last five years combine a lot of great new products that are going to really go to the point we've been talking about is the way we build deploy youth technology has been changing. We want to make sure we're keeping up and staying in front. So we have a number of new products that I'm really excited about that.

We expect to release between now and the end of the year. com look for these new technologies. We're focused on developers and devops teams.

We have several new products. At the market specifically aimed at those users and then we're also doing a lot of work work around this concept of scale and Reporting and visibility. So a lot of great new things coming so definitely keep your eye out for our announcements and follow our website because we've got some great new products that I think a lot of your viewers gonna be really interested in seeing fantastic Thank you so much for coming.

Tech strong TV thanks to you and all of our friends that I sent this for sponsoring devops Unbound. Some great stuff there and continued success to you in the whole team that keep doing what you guys are doing here. We love it.

Thank you very much. All right, Kevin Thompson CEO of tricentes here on texture on TV. We're going to take a break.

We'll be back in a moment with another great guest here on Tech strong.