Keynote Opening with Mike Rothman and Mitchell Ashley – Predict 2023

Good morning. Oh my God, it's predict. We're here everybody talking about this forever.

It's great worth predict is here. I think it's finally here. We've been talking about it for so long the morning.

Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever it is that you are in the world on my groffman general manager of tech strong research. I'm joined by my partner in crime who we're usually, you know kind of together in some way shape or form Mitch Ashley Mitch.

Good morning. How are you? Good morning principal with texturing research.

Also CTO and take strong group. Great to be with you Mike and great to be here at predict with with everyone we are and and as Alan had said we're doing predict a little bit differently this year what you'll see through our conferences, you know, as we move through 2000 and 23 is we have a lot of topic driven conferences. We have a lot of input from the sponsors and all of our List, what we wanted to do with predict was something that was a little bit different really highlighting.

What we think is gonna happen in 2023 really under an agenda research agenda that Tech strong research is putting out today actually. So somewhere in the event Hub, you'll see a number of different Trend documents which really kind of talk about how we're doing and what we think is gonna happen this year. But what we wanted to do in the keynote is really give you a better sense about what texturing research is about highlights.

Some of the trends at least the high level track descriptions and give you a sense of some of the cool stuff we have on deck for 2023. So without further Ado Alan went over this, it's not a secret right text wrong research really reflects, you know, kind of deep proprietary perspectives on the areas that we cover a tech strong devops cyber security Cloud native digital transformation. So that's really kind of the Drop of what our coverage Universe would look like so we're gonna do projects in all of those different areas as we move forward but a lot of you probably thinking well, you know, you do these reports what the hell you're just making a bunch of s*** up and it's just like no we actually do rely on you folks, right our audience in order to drive our research positions.

So what we wanted to do all so is kind of give you a little bit of sense about who you folks are right and and where you fit into because anything that we're driving out of text wrong research is really driven by you right we do a bunch of polls every time you come visit one of our sites. We usually have some kind of poll that we're asking will email you multiple times during the year to ask you to participate in our surveys you are influencing where we see technology going what we hear about and what we're really publishing as the trends, right? So what is our audience look like?

Last 60 days and this I think went through early December holidays are a little funky. So we wanted to kind of normalize outside of that. You know 90,000 unique companies, right 650,000 unique visitors almost a million page views.

So a lot of folks are checking out our stuff. Right? Most of you are decision makers 58% of the audience decision makers in terms of areas of Interest devops cicd kubernetes, right API security SRE get Ops, I mean, so we've got a list and and it's actually kind of nice we have some instrumentation now so we can actually figure out who you are what you're interested in in order to better Target a lot of the editorial and research driven work that we're doing a lot of you tend to be from Global large companies, right 50% or greater than 1,000 employees, right 47% greater than 200 million in Revenue.

So again me you know, yes, we do have a percentage of folks that are if not single practitioner smaller and midsize. Businesses, but a bulk of where we get our perspectives from come from the Leading Edge come from larger companies that are making an investment in this digital transformation driven environment. And finally many of you are thinking about different products as you're moving forward 80% of folks that come visit our sites have buyers intent, right so they really want to start thinking about how are we going to figure out and solve these problems 60% of visiting domains are an active or in-depth buying stage.

So again, when we're doing surveys it's folks that are interested in that topic when we're doing polls. It's folks that are looking for different solutions. So when we're talking about our research positions and really where we derive a lot of the trends that will start to talk about in a second.

Um, it's really from you guys right? It's really from you folks who are large companies for the most Part decision makers and really looking to solve problems and that's what tech strong and that's what text strong research is really about and what we are going to do. So now let's talk about today's conference.

Now that you know a little bit more about what we're doing at Tech strong research our Main conference theme is Stand and Deliver, right? We've spent the last couple of years with all sorts of innovative types of solutions. Some of them really implemented under duress who covid happened and really change a lot of what it was that we were thinking about and and what we had to do but now it's time to actually deliver on the promise of all of this Innovation that we've kind of undergone over the last couple of years.

So I've been talking a lot Mitchell. What's your perspective on on Stand and Deliver kind of when we ideated this and and decided this was going to be our conference team. Yeah it we all had to do what we had to do over the last three years, right?

You took the necessary steps within a week to support people working remotely. And of course that's sustain with it. But also people going back to the office but we've you know, some people say we've seen five or ten years worth of trans.

Happen in two or three there's some data to back that up and today's environment were much different economic conditions as well. And so that's that's why our theme is driven by that is we're now at the point where we've made some huge advancements. We really progressed in our devops skills and other skills, and now it's got to deliver and we were delivering before but now the business knows we can deliver and they're counting on us.

And so that's why these four Trends in our areas, we're gonna talk about specific transmit those but that's why this theme of Stand and Deliver kind of going back to the movie. I think when the 80s there was in the 90s, you know, it's our time. It's our time to we've proven we can be excellent partners and deliver for the business and be a strategic Advantage for companies both offenses and defensive great.

That's what we ask for. We got it. So now we got to deliver.

Yeah you bet and that's another one. Be careful what you wish for right for many years. We're sitting there, you know trying to be marginalized and and really trying to get the rest of the organization on board with a lot of the initiatives that we had been thinking about not a problem anymore.

Right? And as you mentioned I want to really highlight this in an error in in a time of economic uncertainty right being able to prove the value of what it is that you're doing being able to ensure that customers, right and other major shareholders understand kind of what these Investments really do. Right?

I mean, that's what we're gonna be really focused on in 2023 because again, it's not one of these go go grow things. And you know, hey, I'll take one of everything right for the you know, really for a large portion of the last couple of years. It was yeah, I'll take it right.

I'll try it right, you know, I don't want to miss anything right that the the downside of missing an innovation was much more severe than potentially spending money or having something that that didn't work out as well as you would hope that is not the case anymore. Right? We are all going to have to tighten our belts and that means we're gonna have to get a lot sharper in terms of the Way, we really communicate the value of a lot of our technology issues.

You know, my origin said what you think too that we carry through from these past few years is sort of the agility the nimbleness that we had to exercise then we still need to bring that forward to it's not you know lock into the site of one thing and go. Yes, we need to focus on those things but we're gonna make changes, you know, we know but this economic time looks like nobody knows what the competitive threats are going to be necessarily sick to 12 or 18 months down the road. So keep that agility.

Keep that nimbleness. Not only use the pivot word, but there I used it. But so we've got to focus and get things done and and bring value to the table, but also be able to move quickly and make decisions quickly and respond as we need to That's right.

And and I think that's really the key thing. So as we've been, you know beating on already in the first, you know, a couple of minutes of the keynote, right? We've got four areas that will how will represent four tracks in today's conference and we've got four Trends documents that you can access right now, right and and what you'll see and and I'll bring those up in a sec.

You'll see kind of our main, you know kind of trend or for that theme area and then we've got a set of different discussions underneath that with some sub bullets. They were again really should give you a sense of where we think things are going. Um, What You Won't necessarily see is a specific Trend about data management, right?

Because that's everywhere right? No matter what it is or they're talking about digital transformation secure your Cloud native. We've got scads of data we have to deal with right and the other major Trend that really kind of weaves into everything that we're doing is AI and and a lot of that has to do with the The reality that we've got to get smarter, we've got to get more efficient.

So regardless of what it is that we're doing. We're really looking at AI as a means to help us do that. So, you know, we don't necessarily call that out but there is certainly something to be said about those major trends.

So here somewhere in the event Hub. I'm not exactly sure where it is. I'm right above the gender is where those are right about the agenda.

Right right above the agenda are all the trends documents. This is what is driving our conference today. This is what's really going to be driving a lot of what we do with extra research this year.

So we've got again one page for each or one document for each of our specific coverage areas. Check those out look at them digest them tell us where we're wrong. Right?

I mean that's part of this too is that we really want to hear from you about things that you disagree with right areas that we can refine. These are going to be living documents. So we're gonna be supplementing we're gonna be doing more research on each of the different sub Trends in there.

We'll be doing polls throughout the year to get a sense of of where folks are from a buyer intense standpoint and and what is important to you as part of those initiatives so they will be kind of harping on these things over and over again both in the text wrong. To review as well as a lot of our events moving forward through the year. So with that Mitch, let's dig in right?

Why don't you take a cut at kind of explaining really the top level theme of the devops trends? Well it you know devops may be new to some folks and just getting started other folks may have been doing devops, you know, since the mid teens or so kind of backwind the Phoenix project book came out which is when I got started with it, you know, it's interesting you you know, you're doing something right when someone says, oh that's dead now and here's the next thing devops is dead. This is what's cool in you know oftentimes that's usually click bait.

I think that's what this was some of those articles but I think that our theme around devops is it's here to stay and not only is adhere to stay it is a transitioning and evolving practice of how we create software and you know, it also is having a big effect and organizations when others want to co-opt it in their domain we want to do deaf set cops. We want to do data Ops we want to do. Yeah, so we're gonna do asterops.

Whatever it is people see something that is beneficial. happening and working in the organization and in the industry and they want to adopt that they want to apply it to their work and the cool thing about it is it does come back to the technology organizations because those moves those changes across the company across the different functions those all help us work together too because we're all kind of working on Automation and how we do things faster How We Do smaller units of work all of those kind of things so it's our theme around Long the devops is We need to focus on devops as a way of doing things and not a technology. And yes, there's lots of Technology.

Lots of great tools many of them are sponsors of this and other events and if we talk about in our inner sites and research and things like that, they support what devops it is, which is about how we create software or how we do work in those domains. So it's it's to me it's it's fantastic it to be part of it. It's cool when you adopt something and then it becomes bigger than what anybody imagine it could be and I imagine Mike from your perspective coming in is this from a security angle on debt set offs, and it's transform security work, too.

It has and and we've been struggling for years and years to try to figure out how to integrate Security in with developers how to make it much more of a core capability of our operations group and really by breaking down those silos to the degree that we have. Through the devops, you know, really philosophy and again philosophy right? Not technology.

I don't go down the CDW or Best Buy and and buy a devops, right? You know, it really is a process a way of doing things. It really starts to enable better collaboration across all these different groups and to highlight what Mitch said before we move on a digital transformation again, the more we aren't talking about something the more it's actually happening in kind of the real world.

So I think we have kind of starting to ride down if you use Gartner mentality, right, you know ride down that, you know kind of into the trough of disillusionment and then we kind of move up to the plateau of productivity devops are still probably still pretty high but you know, we're starting to hear enough of you know, kind of folks poking at it that you know, again, it's it's following the, you know, typical adoption curve within a lot of companies. So digital transformation our topic and our big theme Here is the day two is now right and we kind of talked about this up front Alan talked about this during the opening of the session right five years of digital transformation over the last two right but we're in a different world now. Right budget pressures, right?

Some folks have buyers remorse because you kind of just had to do stuff in order to keep your business running, especially in the early days of the pandemic, right? But this is the year to really reset right? This is the year to learn from our past environments reassess make changes to our environment.

But ultimately we have to focus on tangible outcomes, right? What is this stuff do for the business? How does this make the customer experience more beneficial?

How does it improve your ability to and serve customers and other stakeholders? We're gonna see what's gonna be a fairly darwinian type of pruning of a lot of these initiatives that got started. If you can't show that tangible value, it's gonna be hard.

It's gonna be hard folks have to tighten their belts. Some companies are gonna make big bets in order to make sure The bed is one thing that you're working on again reassess do not have sacred cows in terms of the technology platforms that you have there and I'll go through all of the the sub Trends in my session a little bit later this morning Mitch anything to add about digital transformation. It's part of that agility, right and The Crucible of Financial and difficult challenging times to say that just helps this hone and fine-tune what we're doing and so don't don't be you know, don't be too locked into what your projects are.

Yes, you believe in those things but you also mean you need to transform yourself and kind of adjust and with where the business is going and what's needed. Maybe it's too early for that project. We need to do the couple other things first.

So jump on the things they're gonna help the most and make the biggest difference for your customers. You're the business your partners and employees. You bet 100% now security security is job one and and for somebody actually two guys right who have been doing security for a lot longer than we care to admit part of this is really gratifying and the other part scares the crap out right?

In fact, you know and Security's been front center very high profile for for the last couple of years. So it's not that that's new. It's that we're finally at the point where folks take security seriously enough and a lot of cases to really start to expect better activity.

Right expect better results expect better outcomes, right? We've got to protect data regardless of where it's stored and who accesses it so our world has gone a lot more complicated the more SAS Services, right the more platforms the more Cloud infrastructure providers that we bring in right? We've got data sprawl all over the place and it makes it harder to do security.

But the one thing that Tech strong research is going to focus on we've got our panel this afternoon. It's a major theme of the keynote panel that's happening. Also this afternoon is about software supply chain security, right?

And of course that plays into what we do with tech strong, you know, devops and Cloud native and you know kind of securing, you know, that kind of environment really plays into this whole software supply chain and making sure that we can secure that but that's gonna be a major area of focus for our research this year because it's critical right? You know, we how many times do we have to allow, you know, some company some component some vendor that we have to get compromise it then kind of flows through the rest of the ecosystem and creates just huge problems for everybody. So that's A key priority we're gonna spend a lot of time on that and ultimately the other kind of area Focus that we'll have from a security perspective is really how do we protect the cloud native infrastructure?

What kind of tooling is in there? How are we going to ensure that kubernetes and our pipelines and and all the other environments that we have that drive modern, you know kind of technology and and the technology Stacks how we're gonna make sure those are protected and and by the way, if you're sitting in a room with a bunch of security folks, the answer is not in that room, right? We have to continue to get out there.

We have to continue to work with a lot of our partners. We can't just sit here and go no, no, no, right. We can't be those folks anymore.

We have to collaborate with the rest of the organization. What did I miss Mitch? you know my personal sub theme for this is Something's got to change.

You know, I've been in security for a long time and I've also been working in software World in you know, a lot of the same things have evolved in kind of tuned up over the years and some Innovation here, but you know what, you know slack just got compromised. Who knows what happened with the FAA database the last path you name it our data is getting compromised left and right something's got to change and it isn't the security team's fault. It's about our ability to work together to make all of this secure working with soft proteins.

All of our our four years aren't silos. They are they're interrelated. And that's a lot of what our themes are going to be touching on this year and Beyond.

That's right. Now Cloud native. Let's wrap it up Mitch.

Take it away. Tell us what we're gonna see for cloud native in 2023. All right.

Well Cloud native is hot kubernetes is hot not news to anyone here. I'm sure we also go through these Cycles too. We know that there's hot technologies that really really increased very rapidly in their adoption.

But we also know it's a journey to get to a lot of applications and a lot of platforms that are using those Technologies in kubernetes and Cloud native microservices Etc. Well, we'll go through that same process. I'll be at we think at a much more accelerated pace.

Give take the lamp stack for example, right because most the internet was built on still around with us today app still being built that took a while to be adopted something maybe 10 years or more. Kubernetes been certainly in Cloud native me certainly have faster than that, but I think the focus around it is. Okay.

Yeah, the newness of it is maybe worn off a little bit. We're all say that's where we're going to use on most of our new applications. So what do we focus on?

How do we really do this effectively? It's a more complex environment both to devote understand develop configure operate All of the Above Performance cost. All of those are questions you go any conference you're hearing those questions.

How do we say money? I don't worry these complexity. How do I how do I expand this knowledge base to my team and the teams across my organization.

So that's a lot of what our focus in in Cloud native. It is really the adoption process, you know things that will help us get the best and the most out of cloud native, but I'll help each other as we learn those lessons and we gain that experience along the way. That's right.

And and I think that again we are going to see a real focus on a lot of those capabilities around the edges, right? How do we start to scale this stuff up? It's not a matter of getting the thing up and running anymore.

Although that's hard kubernetes is hard but it's really how do we start to do this in a much more consistent systematic and operationalized way. It's maturity folks and that's what we're gonna start to see in 2023 within Cloud native is a lot of the maturity that we expect when we want to run truly Enterprise class workloads in a specific environment. So those are our Trends you will hear in each one of our tracks.

You will hear a broader discussion. So Or what you can really start to focus on is starting to dig a little bit deeper. That's a high level little taste in each of the tracks.

You'll get a much deeper drink and then throughout the rest of the year will really be Excavating to use our little archeology analogy there. We'll be Excavating these these Trends to some great degree. So where were we in 2022, right?

We did a bunch of reports you may have seen our devops in the public Cloud series. We're actually in the process of wrapping up Q4 at this point. We've got a webcast in a couple of weeks to focus on those findings.

We did a bunch of work into Ai and how that impacts devops. We focused a little bit and Mitch. This report will be hitting in the next week or so that we did with our Pals at stack State about observability and and really where that's going in, you know kind of through 2023.

We did a bunch of pulse meters. So those are our two three page infographics that are based on polls. That we have we did a bunch of webinars from the standpoint of again, whether we're guests whether they're focused on the pulse meter information, whether they're you know, again workshops or editorial that we're driven.

So that's kind of how you experience. Of course. We didn't mention the tech strong research review.

So mention I in the last, you know, three four months. I did a weekly little chat where you were inviting you into our research meeting every week and and kind of shooting the breeze and figuring out what it is that we're thinking about. So that's kind of what we focused on in 2022 when we think about what it's gonna look like in 2023.

It's more right what we're doing is really we're going to be doing more stuff. Right New Pulse meters new surveys will actually have three or four pulse meters hitting in the next two or three weeks some of them driven by predict others that you know, kind of we worked on at the end of last year. We've gotten new surveys.

We've extended our agreement with our Pals at linode. So we'll be continuing with our devops and the public Cloud series with them. So very excited about that.

We've got another couple of other survey initiatives that are cooking from that perspective. We're gonna overhaul our Tech strong research site that is long overdue, but it'll be a lot easier to find out what we're doing really interact with us and and be much more focused in we're kind of a video company. So we're gonna do more research driven video.

So we've got the text growing research review, you know all about that but we've got devops on bound and see so talk. Those are two that Mitchell Drive. From RN.

I'll be launching a security Ops show at some point. I'd say q1, maybe Q2. Mitchell's gonna do another Cloud native show.

So we've got again a lot of really cool stuff that we're doing. We're gonna be very visible. We're gonna be driving a lot of the research that we're focusing on today in order to make that happen and I think most exciting, you know, certainly to me is a new offering that we're calling the text wrong research success map.

So one of the things I've been doing research for close to 30 years at this point, right one of the things that's very frustrating for me is that it only takes you so far and really to the shortlist, right, you know you focus on your quadrant graphs or your wavy things or what have you and it helps you identify who you should talk to. What about the rest of the process, right? What about the POC?

Right? What about the implementation plan? What about communicating value over time?

So this map is an initiative that we're going to launch in Q2, and it may be around RSA. Um that that we will launch other people is running certain technology area and takes you from establishing your problem. Um to really identifying who you should be talking to to taking it through that entire process to sustainable value within the organization.

So we're really excited about you know, kind of everything that we have going on a text from a research. We're really excited about the rest of the agenda and the day within predict. So enjoy it come see all the different sessions.

We're recording everything. So if you miss something you can get into it after that and I will leave Mitch with the last slide and you can wrap stuff up Mitch because I've got to get into my next session chapter your email and we are almost out of time. com the website text wrong that TV and our our social media.

com kind of get a theme right? Thanks growing research something so Right, either that sign in front of it or not something at the end of it. So check us out.

A lot of free content that are available to You video audio podcasts all kinds of good stuff in the documents that we talked about today. So Mike jump you go to your job. Enjoy the day guys.

We will see you in another session. Join Mike on the next session. Thanks everybody.