Shaping Sales and Partner Engagement with JFrog’s Tali Notman at KubeCon Paris 2024

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. We're back here, live in Paris on the busy buzzing show floor of Q Con.

I am really happy to introduce our next guest. com. March is 10 years.

10 years already. Oh, yeah. And if you've watched us, we always have on Shlomi Beha, uh, my friend who's the CEO at Jfr, we've had Y Laman many times.

My good friend Fred Prince, the three, those are the three co-founders. We've had Steven Chin, we've had countless people from J ffr, but this is the first time we've had this woman right here. And I will tell you a dirty little secret.

She's really the power behind J ffr. She's their CRO. Her name is Tali Notman.

And we are, I'm thrilled to have Tali here with us. Hey, Tali, welcome. Hey, thank you so much.

I can get used to it. All these compliments. Yeah, no, don't let it go to your head.

We'll keep you about. So, Tali, let, let's start with kind of your Jfr journey, right? You've been with Jfr, what about 11 years?

12 years? Well, you won't believe it. It's been 14 years now.

14 years, Yes. Yes. Almost from the beginning.

Right? Since the very beginning of the commercial, uh, the Go-to market journey. This is where I joined.

Absolutely. Yes. And, and your journey from Jfr has seen you kind of take you and your family from Israel moved to the Bay Area, though.

When are you ever home with running around, but Right, right. I mean, you more as much as any of the other people I mentioned symbolize really the success. Thank you.

Thank you for that. Bill Jfr, I'll tell you the first thing that it symbolized is that, uh, I'm a follower. I'm a follower of my co-founders, my CEO and for the good reasons, uh, you know, the success comes second.

The first thing that comes is, uh, really the people Yeah. And their values and what they bring. And I follow them from the previous company to Jfr.

And not only that, as you mentioned, right. I follow them between, you know, moving from one country to another. Um, and 14 years later who would believe that this is where we are at an amazing journey.

It's been an amazing journey, an amazing Journeys. Definitely. Definitely.

But I've, I've always told Shlomi this, you know, I have a good seat. Not today, this is not as comfortable, but I have a good seat of the DevOps world. Yes.

And I get to talk to a lot of all the companies in DevOps for my money, JFR G's culture that they've built. And, and it starts with Shlomi and, and comes down the, the culture at Jfr is really when, when they talk about the frogs right. They talk about that feeling of we're on a mission together.

Yes. It's very strong there. And, You know, uh, my personal story is a little more unique than you can find in the market, because I actually moved from HR to sales first time with J Rog.

Really? That's really the story. Yes.

And, um, I think that one of the special thing about it is that, uh, it's all about people. So I'm here now at Q Con following a few weeks of events, as you mentioned, right. Traveling quite a lot.

But the last weeks I was, uh, hosting our top customers events in Europe and in the us uh, speaking with our top customers, hearing what is it that they have to share with us? And it's all about relationship building. Yes.

But from there to last night, frogs and France hosting the, uh, community leaders Yeah. Together with you. Definitely.

That Was an amazing event. Thank You. Yeah.

And it's really, it's all about here getting the opportunity to share the highlights of our roadmap, hear the feedback from the audience, and now here in this, uh, exhibition hall to hear the, uh, the, the pains and the challenges of the users is something that drive our growth. This is what really fuels our growth. So it starts with this value of people to people Right.

And their relationship and being a good listener to what are your pains? What are your needs? And then from here, put the investment in the right areas to meet your commitment to your audience.

Absolutely. But that's, that's kind of the secret sauce behind it. Jfa, you're not supposed to tell anyone.

Oh, yeah. But, um, but it, it's true because it, it is a very community led, customer focused kind of organization. As part of that, you guys recently did a study Yes.

Of kind of what were the priorities? What were the, the, the, the aims, the goals, the technologies that customers want to do, you know, have more success with, more involvement with Yes. Tell us about it a little.

Yeah. So there are, you know, I mentioned before, being a good listener and collecting the feedback and understanding the needs. Uh, one of the, the additional things that we've done is that we met with CIOs, of course, our customers, but we then we actually reached out to our, uh, partners on the, uh, banking side, the, uh, research side of the bank here.

And, uh, we asked them to share with us the survey of 2024 of what is, uh, CIO's top of mind, right. And the amazing thing. And we set, again, my team analyzed the, uh, the, the results of the survey, uh, by six or seven different, uh, banks.

And part of what I was looking is to figure, you know, eventually the audience that we have here at CubeCon will get priorities from the top as well, right? This will come from the C 11 CIOs. We wanted to understand what is top of mind for them.

And Alan, this was music to my ears. Everything that Jfr put the investment in the past five years is in full alignment with what is top of mind for these CIOs. And I'm talking about the platform play, right?

Yeah. The end-to-end, um, uh, DevOps solution, the end-to-end software supply chain management solution. I'm talking about the cloud and multi-cloud strategy of the CIOs.

Mm-Hmm. I'm talking about security is the key. Definitely a key for their success.

And now these days, Ai Ai, right? Definitely Everything is ai, you know, we are, and, and I haven't announced that here, but we're working on a big project, uh, Mitchell Ashley, who's right off camera heads our research, uh, a, a research study on what we're calling DevOps next. Yes.

And it's exactly what you are saying is 10 years ago when I started this, 12 years ago, 13 years ago, when I first got involved in DevOps, there were a lot of point solutions that were cobbled together, right. To make it kind of work. But it, it didn't work seamlessly.

So you had Artifactory and you might've been using Maven, and you might've been using Jenkins, and you know, all of these things. Yes. What we're seeing now is the maturation, the maturing of the space where you need that end to end platform.

Correct. People don't want to cobble together like, um, uh, you know, uh, a mishmash. Yeah.

And, um, this, this is the state of the art. And now on top of that, you get this whole cloud native. Oh, yeah.

But you know what's interesting, the interesting thing that is coming from this survey, and what we also hear from the field is that they know these CIOs. They know that they are going to adapt even more tools, especially by the way, in the domain of infrastructure and security. Yeah.

But here's the, the amazing thing. 95% of them are saying that they are going to adapt more, but search for ways to how to consolidate, right. If you are, and looking at the security space as an example, if you have a security platform that you are able to provide me the end-to-end solution on my DevSecOps journey.

Great. And part of our, again, support to this, uh, community, to this, uh, customers, is really to give them this end-to-end solution. Definitely.

So what they want is more functionality, more feature set, less Vendors, But less providers. Yes. Right.

Providers we don't want Yes. It it because it, it just introduces too much complexity into the whole, the whole system. Yes.

And look, again, this is part of the journey. I talked at RSA in, uh, two months, we're gonna be discussing this at the DevSecOps thing, which is DevOps is DevSecOps. Yes.

DevSecOps is DevOps. Yeah. Um, So you mentioned CIOs.

A lot of people at home may, they, they think of Q Con, they think of a lot of DevOps software, open source. Some of it is free, it's downloadable. I get my hands on it and I use it.

And that kind of lends itself to a bottom up right. Kind of sale. Right.

But the truth of the matter is, in talking to people like you, is these platform sales and stuff are much more top down. Correct. But here's the thing, Ellen, and you, you know, last night when I attended the Frogs in France, right?

Some folks ask me, well, you are Jfr, CRO, why are you here? What's in it for you? The community, the developers?

And my answer is, uh, very simple. First of all, as we mentioned at the beginning, I was raised by open source people, right. At Rick Mon, and you have Landman, Uhhuh that first and most of, but it's really eventually, even if I'm not looking at it as a, what is the right sales motion for me, going back to people, if I want to enable the right solution for those who has the pain, I need to be able to open the doors for them from the top down and bottoms up.

Right? And this is how I look at it. And therefore, you will see that Jfr is investing in the platform not to just be able to bring the, a good pitch for, oh, we have an end-to-end solution.

Each one of our teams, each one of the solutions, we are looking at them as best of breed, making sure that they are top in the industry. Yeah. And with this approach, you are able to bring, to answer the need and the concern of the sea level, but also provide solid products for the field.

It works together, in my view. Absolutely. So it's top down, bottom up, it meets in the middle, and it all goes hopefully well.

Yep. Yep. Speaking of that, look, I, I am sure our audience knows Jfr was one of the first public DevOps companies.

That's right. Right? That went public.

That's right. How has that changed your job? Well, whew.

Um, I mentioned before that this is a 14 years, uh, journey, but the last three, now almost four years since we went public, um, I would tell you that I think that number one, number one thing is the fact that, you know, that everything, that the responsibility you had so far, and I always took, don't get me wrong, I always took my responsibility very Seriously. Oh, I know you did. But at this point where you have all these investors that are actually trusting you, and you are responsible on a quarterly reporting, on a quarterly commitment, this makes the level of, uh, my commitment to jfr, to the success, to the success of the customers, even, even definitely higher.

Uh, but it also brings, part of what I find is that to our customers, it actually bring more trust. You know, Ellen, these days, everything is about trust. Yeah.

And the fact that you are not anymore a private company, and you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow, they know that we are, we are there to support them in this journey for, in Every Way to ride to infinity. So this is the privilege that I have when I know to say to, to tell again, our users, our customers, Hey, JRO has a really good, uh, back definitely a great experience actually. Yeah.

I wanna ask you another area. Yeah, sure. So you mentioned you weren't always a salesperson.

Now with salespeople, there's, there's different schools of thought. Yeah. One is, salespeople are born not trained.

Another is salespeople are trained. Right. Anybody could be a sales person.

Can you guess me, My type? No, You're not gonna get, You're to break the mold. I, I think you're born, my personal opinion, you're born.

All right. But you did it, you were an HR person as you mentioned. Yes.

Switched over to sales. And it's one thing to be a salesperson, just because you're a good salesperson as a born salesperson, sales doesn't mean you're a good sales manager. Yes.

That's also a different set of skills. Right. How has that been for you making that switch to sales and also managing a global sales team for a public company?

Right. Right. So I'll tell you a little secret.

When Shlomi offered me my CEO to John Jfr at the beginning, I told him, you are five people. Why do you need an HR manager? Right.

What do you need me for? And then I joined him to really support him, uh, with some leads he got from Java one, back in the days, um, when finally, you know, he made the formal offer of, uh, me staying in this, in the in sales. I told him, no, I'm not.

And the reason was because for me, it was a no-go to, uh, be in a space where, um, you know what they, you know what many people think when you say salesmen or saleswoman, right? And this is not so much aligned with my, my values. And then when I told him that, he said, why do you think I want you for this role?

That's exactly the reason why, you know, Ellen, in our codex, we have our codex is the set of values of J Rog. Mm-Hmm. One of the values is, uh, community and customer happiness.

Yeah. And when we, when we chose this value, it took us really time, okay. And it was, by the way, raised by the, uh, the team, by the frogs as we told them.

I remember. And when we were, uh, looking for what is it that we feel, it was not about customer success or customer satisfaction. It was about customer and community happiness.

And for me, this is the only reason that I managed to take this move and move from HR to sales, was because I knew that this company, these people are treating first of all the people and only then the business. Right? Now you are right.

It's one thing to be a standalone, right. Uh, An individual contributor, Right, right. In this role, it's a different thing when you need to manage the entire organization, and especially as the level of complexity is definitely right, uh, rising with, uh, becoming a public company.

But, um, if I wouldn't have, that's the truth. The support and the ecosystem of all frogs around us, and the connection from the understanding of the commitment from the product side all the way to the financial side. I, I, I will be very honest to tell you, it's not a one men show.

No, not at all. It takes, it takes a, it takes a whole bunch of frogs. Oh Yeah.

A whole bunch Of frogs. A village of frogs. Right.

But when I'm sitting with our product team, and I know that when they plan the roadmap, it's not about, oh, we know best. It's about collecting the feedback, right? Getting the, uh, the, the, the information and the need from the field, from our customers that I know that they feel the pain that my customers feel.

I know I'm in good hands. I know I can manage it. I know I can go through this challenge.

Well, if you're a Jfr customer, you're in good hands here with Tali Tali, I want to thank you so much for coming on. I know you're busy. It's a crazy, crazy event here.

It's a great one. But you Know what? As they say in Jfr, may the Frog be with you.

May the frog be with a song. Thank you, Ellen. Thank you.

Thank you for that. Tali Nachman, uh, CRO Jfr live at CubeCon. We'll be back in a minute with a, another guest.