Unlocking Productivity – Gary Hoberman, Unqork

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

We're here with Gary hoberman. Who's CEO for Uncorked and we're talking about codeless architectures in the impact that that's going to have on application development Gary. Welcome the show.

Oh, thank you for having me here Mike. It's a pleasure. It's not clear to me that everybody knows what codeless architecture means up front.

So maybe you might want to explain that concept and so we can just get everybody on the same page real quick. For sure and and Mike like the the Journey of technology has been on as you know, as a journey of obstruction and we obstructive way the hardware using software to create virtualization Cloud we extract away. The database databases is service and you abstract away the code to libraries and every every vision of an engineer has been and we deliver value faster with software.

And get its Market faster and the challenge. I had and Mike I grew up coding my entire life working on Wall Street Building trading platforms for Fortune 50 companies and what you start to realize very quickly is when you're creating software. The software is actually where all those vulnerabilities like the security vulnerabilities to Performance vulnerabilities the aspect of support and maintenance.

And what it really lies in is code so as much as we talk about abstraction, it actually all stopped like at a level before the applications themselves and these applications and these applications of what I'll consumers interface with what you and I interface would what our businesses interface would the applications itself is aware all the issues lie. That's what all the vulnerabilities lie. That's what we talk about migrating to the cloud and where devops plays in and that's what we test in cyber test.

And those applications are created using code. And code Itself by definition is insecure vulnerable and dependent on whoever created it whoever wrote it and it's an art form. Like you could be really good at it could be really bad at it and you could be critical of it, of course, but what I had seen throughout my career Mike and I grew up in Fortune 50 companies managing 10,000 Engineers what it seen was the code that we created 80% of it.

My budget was spend just keeping that code alive and running. Responding to vulnerabilities and Technical debt and end of life. And the 20% new technologies we were introducing to the market the game-changing technologies that we were so excited by the second.

It went live you'd get a report of technical debt. And that technical debt announced things you've introduced in the environment. So it's not 80% of your budget keeping lights on at 81% next year.

And there's less and less time and money to do the things that matter for the company and more importantly it's never ending cycle where all you keep doing is introducing Tech that to the point that the organization can't move forward can't change can't drive can't do digital the way they need to and I experience. This is a CIO and so what I set out to do is to create a new way to create software without code and what we call this is codeless architecture, which is you said it's it's a term most viewers probably don't haven't heard before. codeless architecture means number one no code generated.

You can't generate code just generating code. All that's doing is creating technical debt faster. It's creating vulnerabilities faster.

It's abstracting away more the ability to maintain it versus obstructing away the complexity. And then you the next principle of crow this architecture is you can't allow anyone to inject or write code or script inside of the platform. And specifically what that means is you could think of itself Excel is a great platform except when they introduced VBA macros and said now you can build anything.

You could look at Erp tools and CRM tools and ideas M tool sets and project management tool sets. And the reality is configuration is an attribute of those software. They're not a platform to create software.

They're all trying to do more by saying write code write script code. This architecture is a fresh view of software development and changes everything, you know, that's often development from the devops to the support to the testing the maintenance and we'll call the soccer says is by abstracting away all of your complexity into a readable open standard Json document that describes your application 100% We've basically created a container. Where the whole world around this container could change the interface is the devices the support the maintenance the end of life such that our team could take on the technical debt instead of the customer bearing that burden as they do today.

I'm curious if that makes does that make sense? Is that is that something you've seen before heard before? I'd love to get your your feedback as well.

So what exactly is the construct that I'm using to build the applications in my kind of connecting various graphical representations of cleaners containers together to make something that looks like a process or a workflow or what exactly am I building with? So Mike think about like I'll do two popular standards mere means that so you have a stackover as a database could be a nosql database like Mongo who I've been working with since 2011. You could say you're going to use angular or react as the framework.

You're going to have a service here the basically capture the request from the client talk to the database do some changes and come back your business logic get centralized if you think about that and we were building something as simple as give me your social security number and I want to run a credit check and you and then do some action. So in angular, you're going to code it. You're going to code it using HTML and angular framework.

And then the database is going to be created in our world. It's a Json document. And that Jason document would say something along the line.

I've got a field it's a text box. It's nine characters. It's obfuscated.

So no one could see what's in it. And it's protected only goes one way to the server can come back Social Security numbers. You have to worry about pii and then there'll be another field underneath.

It says it's a plug-in when I'm gonna watch for that social security number and when it's entered I'm going to go external to Experian and pull back a credit score. And then there might be another field described in the Json document that says I've got a business rule and that rule is going to fire it to basically score the risk of the customer. and when you think about what we described it had nothing to do with how is the data stored or presented to the user or orchestrated?

So that document you could open a VI editor email editor or text editor and you can just type it. And now you could load that document into our uncork operating system. And now we render that into a beautiful Experience mobile desktop tablet or API because what I described to you could be a simple way to replace the entire API tier of your firm the big API integrators, you know half our deployments today in production are just headless apis of Encore because it's a better way to write an API.

Now with that said when you think about that interface, you could then there's attraction there's object-oriented Concepts where you could bring it into an inherit into another module. You can now render that into a mobile experience, but the reality is we might render that today using angular but angular's ending life. So we migrate you to react you don't even need to test your software.

It's guaranteed to work. It's fully backwards compatible. Oh, there's a vulnerability.

We fix it of course all customers. So the benefit is our operating system is designed such that every customer is guarantly guaranteed to be on the same version as every other customer course industry. That's that when you think about it, it's you know Linux is an amazing content open source Linux, you know, there's about, you know, ten times less defects and Linux than any code written outside of Linux because of how many eyes are on and how many committers and reviewers how much attention it's getting Now reality is Imagine doing that at a level above it.

Touch that there's no code. All customers are benefiting each other the first time so if Goldman Sachs does a pen test of on cork in their apps their benefiting all the other customers Black Rock and everyone else. And if CVS doesn't benefit in Goldman technically that creates the environment where instead of an application being cyber tested once a year or twice a year applications are being tested multiple times a day.

And with that said it also needs an environment where performance is critical support is critical reliability is critical. And that's the areas where no software is ever tackle. And with that said back to what you said.

I created a text editor. I typed it in that's great. The reality is we created our own beautiful Dragon drop ID to create the software and we have about 15,000 creators certified and trained at a drug and drop them.

Let me drag in a text box. Let me drag and a plugin. Let me fill out these details now with that said what we've then built in is all the governance.

that you would expect an Enterprise software needs and has because I lived through this so you can't deploy it to uat until it goes through your chain process. with all the approvals needed You can't you have one click rollback one click diff between any versions. You can even like a time capsule go back in time and try an older version with older data and see how it worked.

So you don't need to go to Iron Mountain and pull paper and logs anymore. Everything's built in test management regression testings built in release management planning. All the aspects are built into the software.

You don't need GitHub anymore. You don't need that lazy in you don't now if you want to integrate that's great. We have that integration.

But the reality is you're able to create software instantly that would have taken months and years you do it in days and that's the biggest difference. We hear a lot about low code and no code or these kinds of an instance of no code or do you think codeless is different in a part from those architectures? You know, it's it's interesting.

So Low code no code if you look at the tools some of them have been around since 1983. Most of them were created in 2001. net code some generate me for code.

But my first platform for my bill was 1994 for Bankers Trust and I was a I was a kid at a college Mike and and I was I always say the best Engineers are also the laziest engineers and so they asked to like hey Gary, we need you to build this money transfer system using C++ talking to sidebase. And you know and I looked at this and I said pretty easy and if I do it well, all they're going to do is ask me to do another one of these and that's kind of boring. So I created a system in 94 which you filled out a series of tables and answered questions and it generated the entire application and in six months every transaction in the private Bank of these trustment students every trade every fixed income Equity trade every transaction.

And it was beautiful, but when I left there to join Smith Barney and going to brokerage and trading what happened was they had to replace me with seven Engineers because all that system did was generate code faster. It doesn't mean it's generated. Well, it doesn't mean it's easier to support so it's really interesting because the the first study that was just completed like what it really highlighted is what I've lived through which is if you're at technology leader and you care about your business value, you bring to your firm you care about your budget you care about doing more or less all the things you have to deal with.

You view code as a detriment to that because the more code the harder to support the more cost and so 70% of the respondent saying they're being burdened by the past by being pulled away from things. They want to do to support the code of the past and they view this codeless future as the future as we do but the reality is code generators just generate code faster. They should never be deployed.

They shouldn't existing this world. There's no question the other half of the low code no code tool sets. They allow you to script code.

So it's a mic the way I would say it is each of them has solved a very simple problem CRM is a simple problem like coded probably six CRM systems from scratch in my life and it's simple table structures itsm extremely simple problem set project management simple problem set. They all basically get you to a point and they say hey use this framework start here and get 75% there and then code the remaining 25% using custom scripting language, whatever that might be. And the second you write the code because I've done it.

I was the biggest customers of all the firms that you could name the second you write that one line of script you're locked in to a vendor locked into a version. There is technical debt that you've created up the Wazoo basically and there's no way to get out of it and every single time I've done it. I wish I never started it and the problem with that is if you and I were both Engineers sitting next to each other and I supported equities and you supported fixed income.

We both said let's start with name the local tool. Like let's use that tool. We're both starting from 20 years ago.

We're both starting from a 20 year old time machine and the reality is if you need a wizard in Europe to say next in previous and I need a wizard in my app to do next in previous. We're gonna code that from scratch completely different. So it generates a large amount of revenue for strategic integrators who basically could replicate that wizard for both of us and say hey Mike I could do this for you for a million bucks in Gara do a million bucks.

I think just replicating the same thing the second you say in a codeless architecture no code allowed. What it means first off is we need to be able to handle every single programming construct thrown at us from linked list through integrating to 320 Integrations back office. The main premium integration every aspect of Legacy integration.

You could dream up with Pixel Perfect presentation. Replacing your BPM tool replacing every aspect of what you do. That's what we've done the second.

We've done that you and I both starting with the last customer left off. as opposed to 20 years ago, so If you know one of the large investment houses or big Banks or health care companies or providers or federal government who uses on corkset? Hey uncork I really wish you had a slider component.

You know, I need it instead of a number of typing a slide of component the second we created that you and I would have that in our toolbox. And if tomorrow someone else came along and said, I wish that's lied or actually stopped at this level and had limits and starts and we enhance that the second you and I have so there's no more concept of what version of Uncorked you run on. There's no everyone's running on the same version and everyone's benefiting from each other in that case.

Does that it's it's my simplest area is I I'm sure you remember the days of of you know, I used to support my Traders with a server under my desk, you know janitor kicked the plug out trading stopped like simple, but that's you know, that's a bad thing. So, what do you do you pick up that serving you move it to a data room, you know, the engineers are playing doom on the network took down the data room. Great.

That's not gonna work moving to a Data Center and so the consolidation and abstraction and Hardware. Got to a point where you would walk in a Data Center and it looks beautiful with all the lights. But in reality every single machine was unique and different different CPU set up different memory set up different configuration different disk setup when my app would go down.

I would pray there was a part in stock. I would now the reality of cloud computing the beauty of what it did. Abstracts it away and says you the engineer you're creating the software.

You should never think again about is it in Tower AMD or Seagate a Fujitsu or whatever the devices are and by doing the subtraction we can now support secure maintain that data center at scale, of course 100% of the customers. We can keep the parts in stock and replace them instantly and move you over when there's issues. We built that at the application Level.

So we sit above the cloud and now you could build applications with that same abstraction concept and that's what unique about homeless. So what is the challenge getting people to wrap their heads around that because it does seem like we have all these folks using traditional tools to generate code and that keeps going on and on and on so from your perspective, what's it going to take to make that shift or what keeps them over there? Yes, so I was there in the days when when Java first came out I built the first ever Java system for city group and to 10,000 Brokers and I remember I also managed at that time of Mainframe group and we cross trained the Mainframe team on Java because we wanted them to actually learn and so I remember the days when Management program was In Cold Blood program was a Java will never take off.

There's no way you could do what we do and of course like that's and so with that said when we talked to the Business Leaders the CEOs that know why they want to do something and what how did and then you talk to the cios who managed their teams and say this is what's important to me time to market the business needs time to Market CEO's need cost efficiency. They need to be able to do that and say yes to the business at that level where we've been working. We get a hundred percent support top down at the top level of Executives you could you could dream up with the best names hundreds of customers.

So with that said that's how we've Drive big change transformation. It's a large change in an organization. So first off we have to convince you the customer.

We are more secure than any system and you should trust us to store your most confidential Pi data privacy data Social Security numbers data bursts. Absolutely and we do that And that's we are really good at actually explaining the how and why that makes sense. However, Mike as you know, if you go to the the new cobalt program is let's call them.

So the Legacy programmers who are hired to create code and they're being measured on how much code they output, which is a ridiculous measure. You know, they would basically look at us and say this is you know, I'd rather quote it. And so it's really interesting.

If the decision maker is pushed down to an engineer whose job it is the code. They will always choose a low-code platform that enables them to still do what they know is code. But when you look at the success, we're having with our customers.

It's the top down leadership approach. You're saying this is the game changer. This is what's going to enable me to create my next HR platform onboarding platform my next trading platform not this is how we shut down Excel completely.

So we have several customers who are migrating Microsoft Excel fully into Encore and shutting down Excel. For business purposes. It's a good excels a great tool but it should never be used in a business line of business.

And so with that said like it's that is exactly what we go against it is I will tell you like it's the largest transformation in technology is what we're driving because once you do it All the tools around the changes suddenly the at least into the security tools all the needs change. Once you actually break it down to there's only one rendering engine. There's only one way to build software and that's that's what we're excited to drive.

All right, folks. Well, you heard it here. We're not quite sure how sustainable the current approach to writing code is but there's definitely new approaches starting to show up out there Gary.

Thanks for being on the show. Awesome. Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you again. All right and back to you guys in the studio.