Tucker Callaway, Mezmo | RSA Conference 2023

This is texturung TV. Hey, we're back. It's after lunch here, Tuesday RSA.

In Moscone West people are just like a train ride going up that escalator right something important up there. Well this sessions, I think that the Keynotes are down here, but we're here with Tucker Calloway and Tucker. Welcome back.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Well, yeah time we spoke was a few months.

I think it's a few months ago. Yeah, probably Zoom though not it was definitely not in person. It's good to have you.

Yeah Tucker. Well, we'll get you coffee. Let's talk about Tucker first.

Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks share with our Roy.

I feel like Oprah. Yeah. It's a car for you in a car for you.

But you're asking now. Yeah so Tucker, so I'm the CEO of mesmo. I've been with the company for about three years.

Now. Most of my past has been spent in devops. I spent about the last 10 to 12 years in devops before devops was that was devops great opportunity to work in the early days of that with some of the founders of devops.

So that's really been a big for me like formational part of my career. So you brought it up we got to In here, so what'd you do with devops? And what leaders did you work with?

Yeah, so I worked with I worked at Chef stop. Yeah. I was a big Pioneer and Adam Jacob.

No progress Chef. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, there's always be Chef to me exactly.

But yeah, so I work with Adam Jacob really? Yes some of the some of the great guys. Sure.

Yeah. We're good Jarred God Willis. No, I didn't.

Yeah, I was I came in after him so I ran sales there for about four years. Okay, very cool. Yeah, so we went through trying to beg people to listen to what devops was to having just show up and fill out, you know thousands of people in a room so judge was good for that too bad.

Yeah, you know I missed I miss having judge these kinds. Yeah just spoke and I think it was a very first deaf said cops event here eight or nine years ago. Is that right?

Yeah. I had jazz in the cold. Do you panel or a session John David Edwards?

A lot of devops people. Yeah, then we were trying really hard to get people to understand that there was a place. Devops and security to work together.

Yeah wasn't always easy. Yeah. Now, of course, you know like the chef what it is today.

Security is a big part. I mean Chef kind of pivoted it it. Yeah, absolutely that was around the time that I left but they did a really nice job living into some security capabilities.

I sure and what was funny yet yesterday's defic observent here. Theme was devops is now devsecops. Yeah, because the whole devops industry has pivoted that's right to death second.

That's right. Right security has become that important. I had a panel with like five cpos.

From Jay frog get get lab Cloud bees the glassian and then that check marks. Yeah all talking about that. It's a Natural Evolution because devops is always about culture and alignment and interoperability.

We're excited for the world that we'll play we'll get to that but we're outside like when you think about it's really horizontal Solutions. Yeah, and and for us we're all about the Telemetry data which again we'll get into but like the data is the underpinning for the common language of anything. I I yeah, so we're excited to play a role in that as it go later.

Yeah Ai and horizontal and how that's kind of play. But I had a feeling you're gonna ask about no no, no. Well if we have time we got a lot to talk.

All right, so Tucker let's get to the company. Yeah. So like I said mezmo, we actually change we're originally found it as log DNA and that might be the name a lot about our audience.

Yeah, probably a lot of devops a whole lot of cyber. Yeah, Cloud native digital transformation. So they probably heard of log DNA.

Yeah, absolutely. And so I started there three years ago as I mentioned earlier. And quickly took over a CEO there and one of the things you know, my whole career has been very customer focused.

And so we've got about over 2,000 customers that range from some of the biggest companies in the world to some of the smallest, you know, most Innovative companies in the world. Yeah, and as we've worked alongside them trying to solve their problems there was like a very clear problem that was recurring and recurring and it was actually somewhat reflecting inside ourselves as well. And that was at they had too much Telemetry data.

The Telemetry data wasn't in the right format and it wasn't in the right location. No, I did anyone character. They were so damn descent to ties by the sheer bone.

Yeah, and as you see that volume grow and grow over the last couple years and so we recognize there was actually a more strategic angle for us to take in the market and that's to focused on the Telemetry pipeline. I wanted to jump into this. But yeah before we do I want to make sure people get this name right?

It's medsmo. I'm mesmo. That's what you shared says.

You got to open. Yeah right here. Okay show it you want to prepare for that.

I Goodies, or anything but but give him one and he's easy or m e z whatever everybody went into that. Okay. Thanks to Bruce Bruce is watching and Lisa's actually from look left.

Very cool. Like to put it the brand together. I'd have a little fun.

com cool, man. Yeah. All right.

You know and quite frankly. This has been a problem in the whole logs space. Not just with logged DNA or any other company that has login the name of this.

Yeah, Splunk and everyone else. It's You know, we went through a period of wow, gee we could collect that data to wow. Gee, why do we gonna do it?

All this God damn date. It's expensive to keep that expensive care. Now.

We hadn't thought deciding. Well, what data should I keep and want should I not keep and the ones that I should keep where should I keep it in prime or should I put it in a class C Warehouse? So yeah.

Yeah and and I may never be able to access it. Well, I do when I need it though. How do I access when I need it?

Right? Yeah, and this is been a an evolution I think. you know, I call it a big data problem and in the Just because she can doesn't mean you should world, right?

Yeah, I mean we grew we grew up out of devops and we grew up out of observability. But the problem we're solving was fundamentally a data problem. Yeah, it wasn't so much an observable.

I mean the log management the visualization and Analysis which were actually very supportive of all the different analysis Solutions charts and graphs and stuff. That's out there today. There's a lot of great ones but what the problem that's unsolved right now is a problem managing Telemetry data and giving customers ownership and control over it.

They don't have ownership in control today. It's like stuck in these silos. It gets collected by an agent ingested by a pipeline put into a data store of a dedicated vendor and the momentum that we see that we saw with our own customers is a desire to put this data and multiple locations in multiple formats and to enable more Downstream consumers of the data.

I get it I get it. you know, so I'm just Crying out. Yeah, Amsterdam.

Yes, we could. Yeah sold out show crazy. It was all observability.

It was so much more Ops and what I call Plumbing related. Yeah then developer related. Would you different for kubecon but again You know observability is real.

I'm not here knocking observability. So yeah get me wrong, but I think some of the issues you just highlighted. Are really some serious issues here and when I know we could say we have Solutions and we know about just because you know, well knowing a problem is the first step towards.

All right, I don't want to I think would foolish to say we solve this problem. No, I think we're a long way for solving. I think we're the very early Innings of solving the problem actually, right and I think it shows up especially acutely insecurity too because you have there's kind of a duration there's a duration of Data, retention difference between observability and Security in the observability world not to say that they it isn't valuable data for an extended period of time, but when you're out of an outage situation, it has less relevance, right when you're in a lot of security use cases that we see six months later.

You might it might be some really hard later and I don't think we play the average time to Recognizing a breach that's right. Could be up, you know a year. Same thing Amsterdam damn cute corn again as much as was about observability plumbing and arms security front and center.

Yeah. Now in my mind is security consume observability. Because isn't that the most important thing for us would it maybe not RSA so I can't say that I gotta be careful but throwing stuff that kind of be careful.

Yeah, but but no seriously look security is front centered everything. We I I have a bit of a maybe not my mainstream but a bias view on this and I think that I think there's two sides, you know, I think there's two size of it. I think there's a data side and then there's a consumption of data side right actually if you want to fully break it down.

I think there's a collection of data storage of data and a consumption of data and I really like some of the models that are evolving especially in security around like a snowflake as a data store or a customer's own their data and then they start to take applications and put it on top of the data that they own and a lot of the solutions today. If you put all your data into a vendor solution, it's not really yours anymore. You can't get it out or it's you can't elegantly get it out.

And so I really like what snowflakes doing especially the security space around that and but our hand in that is is facilitating the collection normalization and putting that data into that data store. And so I think that becomes I think I think there is a collision of security and observability. Probably not the right person to pick a winner.

I don't know if it's a collision I think. It's it's a it's an amoeba thing observability is great. You're gonna use it APM.

That's not going on. Call me old, right? Yeah APM and now we call it AI Ops or ml Ops and all that stuff and what data dog does and those kind of people well valuable stuff really what's security has become primary right now.

I'm in front of friends that it's front and center. The threat environment is real and it's escalating. You know, the other thing I will tell you, you know, some of these Mega open source projects, like open Telemetry for instance and Prometheus are enabling it creates like that Rising tide, but it also creates a Level Playing Field.

Yeah, because the kind of Telemetry that we get, you know from from these open source projects It'll when you have that is your base and now you play off like commercial entity like Omega playoff that right? Yeah. There's so much.

There's so much variation. It's like a Cambrian explosion. No it is.

Yeah. Okay this what I could do. This is what I can and I'm thankful for standards like open Telemetry because it at least gives us a common core to start from that's true.

You know that level Platform that's pretty damn good right. It's the second largest open source project in cncf behind kubernetes now right by far. I think it's gonna grow faster.

Yeah. I I don't disagree. Let's turn yeah medsmo.

Now you guys had some announcements here. There's stuff going on. What do we got?

Yeah. So we we launched our we launched our product really and Ernst yesterday. com and click on the free trial for pipeline.

Of course. Our log management product is still there, but you can click on the pipeline free trial now try it out for yourself set up a pipeline put some data through give us feedback and let us know. So how did they do that?

com and click on the button. It's that simple. It's downloading.

We're done. Yes. It's all SAS based so you can do it.

We have pre-canned, you know sources and destinations and stuff and you can go play with it. You can put your own data in there do whatever you want. It's ready to roll.

So we did when we last spoke we've done kind of a soft launch kind of a closed a closed launch and we've been working with energya now, it's Jay. It's out and ready to go. I love it man.

So bring us your data bring us some problems. We're ready to go. I like to great.

It's a great take good for you guys. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me pleasure to have okay.

Hey, it's medsmo. M e z m o Comm check it out. We're gonna take a break.

We're gonna be live. We are live here at RSA. We'll be back with another guest in just a moment.

Okay.