Achieving Success With Help From the Front Row – Tech.Strong.Women. EP 21

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Techstrong Women, where we feature amazing women doing amazing things in tech. I'm Jodi Ashley, executive producer here at Techstrong.

I'm here with my co-host Tracy Ragan, creator and c e o of Deploy Hub. And you know, in her free time, she's busy working with the Linux Foundation, and I say the free time. I don't know where she finds it, but she does.

It's very impressive. Before I introduce today's guest, I wanna give you a quick update about what's going on here at Textron. ai, so be sure to go and check it out.

There's all sorts of great content interviews and, and, um, interesting articles out there for you to read and check out. We have a couple of virtual events coming up. You can also attend.

Um, August 16th is Data Ops Day, where we will take a deep dive into the world of data and data ops. You'll hear from data and business leaders who've adopted data ops to achieve their goals for quality, security, and speed. And on September 13th, we have a digital C X O summit.

Um, we're gonna have a bunch of industry leaders who share insights that they've gained from their own digital transformation journeys and tips on how to become future ready technology businesses that can sustain long-term growth. They'll also address common challenges that C-suite executives face in driving digital initiatives and provide practical strategies to overcome them. com and be sure to tune them in every day to Techstrong TV for great shows and interviews.

All right, Tracy, what's on your mind today? Well, first of all, I think I really need to sign up for the C X O conference. Sounds awesome.

I'll make sure you get the link. Ok. And, you know, in the, um, spirit of tech strong ai, I thought I would, um, touch base on ai.

You know, regardless of what we think, you know, I heard with on the news, AI is gonna take over humans, which could happen. Who knows, you know, stranger things probably. Um, but I, I really want our listeners to start learning more about, um, really about AI and the platforms out there to develop new software.

Um, we have, in past years, we've always been promised this kind of quantum computing environment with a quantum computer. We haven't really seen it yet, but we have seen changes in the way we process data, uh, beyond just CPUs or GPUs, which are graphical processing units. So I wanna, uh, do it, I wanna shout out to tensor processing units, TPUs.

These are essential. This is, uh, TPUs were introduced by Google. Um, they would call them custom developed application specific integrated circuits, but the purpose of them is to accelerate machine learning workloads.

Now, I first heard the term tensor spend quite some time that I heard that term, talking to some of my, my data friends, uh, my data engineering friends who really, really started telling me, oh, this is something you should really be checking out. And I, I learned about TensorFlow, which is a, a, a tool that helps you build these machine learning workflows. But as we progress in this area and as we wanna keep our careers frosty, uh, I I really wanna, uh, encourage our listeners and viewers since we're on podcast as well, to think about learning more about TPUs and understanding this new technology for ai.

It will be, uh, important in the future. And we don't know if we'll ever see that quantum computer at book. It may come someday, but in the meantime, learn about TPUs.

Nice. Awesome. I always learned so much from your, your, your moments on our show, so thank you for sharing that.

Um, well, I'm gonna introduce you all to today's guest, uh, Lynn Darty. Lynn, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're up to these days. Thank you.

I'm super excited to be here. Um, uh, I'm Lynne Doherty. I am the president of Go-to-Market and Worldwide Field Operations at Sumo Logic, uh, which means that I run our sales team, our pre-sales, engineering, our, uh, customer success support professional services.

So, so basically all things that touch customers here at Sumo Logic is what I'm responsible for. Uh, and, and just on Sumo Logic, we are, uh, observability and security, uh, in the cloud SaaS provider. So, uh, we ensure applications are secure and reliable as the world moves to a, uh, digital and cloud-based, uh, environment.

Well then we are super happy to have you. Um, you know, when I looked at your, your resume, I thought, well, I, you know, people think I'm busy. You have a very busy resume too.

And, you know, I want, I wanna start talking first about things outside of tech. Um, you, I believe are on some interesting boards. Uh, you know, we individuals who are kind of, you know, type a I guess personalities tend to do a lot of volunteering, and I see that you are a board member of the American Red Cross.

Yeah, yeah, I am. And I'm, I really passionate about it. Uh, a few years ago, uh, I moved to Washington DC probably 10 years ago now, and American Red Cross is incredibly active in Washington DC uh, because of both, it's a, a dense population, but also because of the service to military.

And so, um, I became involved with American Red Cross and it's, it's an amazing organization. Uh, I, I have a lot of passion around it and I think it's also, uh, super important for all of us who are so fortunate in so many ways to do things that we can help, uh, community and individuals, uh, and, and make sure that we impact the world in a, in a broader sense, not just in the, the day-to-day grind that we have with our jobs. Super for you.

Uh, that's amazing that you do that, cuz I know being on boards at the Linux Foundation, I know how how time consuming that can be and you really have to have a passion for this stuff to, um, to get involved. Uh, and so thank you for doing that. It's a, it kinda is a big deal in my mind.

It's a really big deal. Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, I I am super passionate about it.

I think there's, there's so many things that, um, we can take for granted. I mean, American Red Cross is, is the, um, largest responder to home fires, which is really, uh, something that people don't think about for American Red Cross. I think everybody thinks of when there's big disasters and, you know, hurricanes and tornadoes and all of that, which that's absolutely a part of it.

But, you know, on local levels it's people who have fires at their home and get displaced. It's, uh, you know, the, the blood supply that that saves lives is, is, you know, human blood is, is not something that's reproducible. We talk about ai, human blood is something that's not reproducible.

The only way you get that is through blood drives. And so, uh, without the American Red Cross, um, you know, all of that doesn't happen. So thank you.

Yeah, I, I was engaged with it a lot as a kid, and I forget about that until you brought it up. Like, I took babysitting classes and I took CPR r and first aid, and I was involved in a lot of stuff, um, when I was younger and I sent my granddaughter off to get a babysitting class at the Red Cross. Cause she's 13 and she wants to babysit.

And I, I didn't, I had no idea it was the, the largest organization for, for home fires. I mean, we think of giant disasters, right. And then we see it all over the news.

But what it does in the communities, it itself is really a lot. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't know that until, uh, my partner Steve Taylor is a volunteer firefighter, and, um, there was a pretty big fire locally, and I was like, what are they gonna do?

You know, where are they gonna live? And he said, I don't know, but the American Red Cross will take care of it. And I was like, what?

Really? They Step in and get him a temporary place to live and help them out, and thank God for that. Right.

Thank God for, uh, organizations that, non-governmental organizations that, that do that. Yeah. Yeah.

You're so right. Yeah. So tell us, you know, I have a, a niece that just graduated from, um, Iowa State with a degree in computer science, and this is one of my pet peeves.

It happened to a lot, happens to a lot of women, but it has didn't happen to you or it didn't happen to me, it seems is that as soon as they get out of college and university, they go into the workforce and oftentimes women are pushed into project management positions, which, um, are important. But you don't have to have an IT degree. You don't have to take all that time learning about computer science and programming to be a project manager.

In fact, others may be more suitable for that. How did you keep your career out of, from falling into that position? It's, it's a super interesting question and, and I, um, I, I, it's interesting you bring up the project management.

I think I've seen some of that. And I think, you know, I, I'm in this intersection of both frontline sales as well as tech. And so, so that Venn diagram gets even smaller when it comes to the representation of women in those environments.

Um, it, it's interesting. I came out of school not, uh, not in in kind of, anyway, in the field that I'm in. I was a math and computer science major, and I started my career as a developer, an application developer.

So, um, it, it sort of not the traditional path into becoming an executive leading a go-to-market team. Um, I, I think part of it is having a real passion for the technology. So, so, you know, having a passion for technology, um, you know, you don't want to get far from it.

It was actually sort of when I went into a sales role from an engineering role, became a really hard, hard part for me, was letting some of the technology go. So I think starting with having the passion for technology, I think there's so many things that go into how do you build a successful career? And for young women, you know, early on finding mentors and building a network and having role models and people that they can look up to and encourage them and, and sometimes give you confidence when you don't have it.

So, uh, I, I don't think there's a, um, a, a magic program for it, but I think it's a lot of, you know, I think I got very lucky in having support of people and having people around me in, in the jobs that I were in or in my life who, uh, helped me and who supported me. And, um, and I started with a real passion for technology. But, and I think that that grounds you when you come out of school And, you know, for every single, um, individual who's been on this program, I've asked that question, every single one will say they started as a programmer.

It is the foundation. No, everything we do. Yep.

And I would guess that if we were to look at most men that are in high level, uh, positions within organizations, they also started as pro as a programmer. It's the same learning to program and then taking a job as a programmer is as critical as learning tensor processing units today. It's foundational.

And you really, I don't really see how you can, uh, move up in any, uh, organization in, from a technology perspective if you don't have the basic understanding of programming and the problems that companies go through, because it's not just learning to code in like Golang or Python or Java or C or cobol, whatever it was. It's all about the process and the challenges. I mean, how could you possibly go and evangelize or talk to customers about observability if you didn't have that background?

Right? Yep. You're you're absolutely right on.

I think it's, it's two things. It's understanding the technology, but it's also the logic and thought process that comes along with being a programmer and, and really understanding, uh, how that happens. I think it's a really interesting part of being a programmer, or when I was a math major, I mean, a long time ago when I was a math major, it's around the logic and the strategy that you have to use that comes along with it.

So it's, it's, you're right, it's not just the tech, but it's the foundational skills that come along with the role that, um, I think it's a really, I, I didn't I ever think about that, that there are a lot of people who started as programmers, but that's interesting if it's what you guys see as well. Absolutely. There's another theme we see too, which you also spoke to was the successful women that we speak to all say they loved what they were doing.

Like that was very interesting. They might've started something, someone pushed them to another thing, but once they landed, they knew that's where they were meant to be. Tracy says that about herself all the time.

But the other thing is that, that you created a support system. You had mentors, you had people surrounding you, lifting you up that you would go to all the way to where you are now. And that's another theme that we hear a lot of is, you know, nobody's an island.

You can't do it all on your own and, and having, at whatever point you are in your career, some sort of, what did, what did Tricia called it, um, Tracy, she called it your own board of directors. Yes, yes. I like to call it my front row.

Yeah. The front row, the board of directors that we all need that like group to, to keep us centered and focused. People we can go to that don't necessarily work with us, but can, can be that, you know, voice to help, help support us.

So yeah, those are themes we hear a lot around here. So it's, it's really interesting. And then you're, you're not only on the board of the American Red Cross and you're doing a very important job for Sumo, but you are also on the board for CloudBees.

Yeah, yeah. So you're a mentor to CloudBees at the moment. Moment in my opinion.

Yeah. Um, and, and CloudBees, I've, uh, joined that board, uh, probably almost a year ago now, and it, it's a, you know, it's amazing company, amazing technology built on, uh, Jenkins to provide enterprise level c, cdi. And, and so, um, you know, as application development evolves, right, everything has changed so much.

If I look back from when I started to what it looks like today is such a different world, uh, you, you know, those foundational platforms, how do you deploy and how do you manage application development at scale is a really hard problem to solve. And so cloud based has some amazing technology, uh, to do that. So, um, you know, it's, it's also got something that I think I is really interesting in the space is that, um, you know, building on open source, and I think that's something that you guys probably see a lot is this, how do you have open source and also a version of something that is for an enterprise and has support and, uh, you know, bug fixes and resources and, and enterprise level features, and how do you, how do you, uh, exist in both of those worlds sort of a foot in each world?

And so, um, it's an interesting part of being on Cloud B'S board. I understand that problem very well, deploy Orillia product that's open source. We have followed the cloud B's, uh, sort of model because it really works.

It kind, it's sort of, it's sort of being a first responder, right? It's sort of like the American Red Cross open source, can o can offer solutions to teams that may not have funding, but they really need to solve a problem. They may not have budget this year.

And having an open source platform to start on and to be able to upgrade allows, you know, a a very fast on-ramp to solving problems. Uh, so I'm, I'm a huge fan of open source. I've been in open source communities since I helped start the Eclipse Foundation, so I, I love it personally.

I'm very passionate about that, and I am passionate too about it. First response, we need a American Red Cross for sec for open source security, right? We need a first responder there.

Um, why don't you talk to us a little bit about, you know, observability and security and what's going on, uh, today and having to address the cybersecurity that we, in a recent, uh, number, it was, uh, 742 is the percent, is the number of increases in cyber attacks over the course of the last two years, which is astronomical. How do we keep up with that? Yeah, well, and you know, organizations budgets aren't going up by 742% and their staff isn't going up by 742%.

So, you know, that's where we, and, and there's lots of players. Secur cybersecurity is, uh, in so many ways an incredibly fragmented space. And, and it's, um, I think as for the practitioners and customers that I talk to, it has felt for years, um, like you're playing whack-a-Mole and it's, you know, hitting, hitting the, the bad actors down and putting in solutions where you need them to try to address the problems, um, that you see and the threats that are changing every single day, because it's not like they're getting easier and less complex and, uh, you know, less radical on the things that are happening in environments.

Uh, for us here at Sumo Logic, we hear it from our customers all the time, is, you know, as we move more to cloud, as we move more to digital applications, as we engage with our customers and our partners and our employees, uh, more and more of that moving to, uh, cloud or digital world, the amount of data, the amount of vectors for bad actors to come in has risen exponentially. And so, um, I think it's, you know, for the customers that I talk to, it's about how do you stay ahead of them? And for us at Sumo, uh, what we really focus on is how do we bring some of those worlds together?

It's application observability and that lens as well as looking at it from the security lens. Because if you think about in traditional models, in a fragmented world, those two data sources and sets of insights are fragmented. It's, it's two different silos.

And so what happens then is, you know, I always say it's where the seams are that the, the cracks happen, right? And it's, and so you see something, and you've probably heard this and seen this lots from other people and over the years is it's, Hey, we saw an alert, but we didn't know it was an important alert. And so bringing those two views together so that you have an application view as well as a cybersecurity view, and having one set of data does a couple of things, gives you better insights because you are looking at it with two lenses and can look at it from two lenses, but it also helps you in the world where data is growing faster than budgets are growing.

Um, because this digital exhaust, as we move to the cloud, it allows you to have a single source of data that you look at. And so, so rather than having two sets of data, you have a single source of data which helps with your cost. And so, so it's a way to, you know, get a better outcome for the organization, but also do it in a way that's really cost effective.

Now, Sumo runs primarily on aws, is that correct? That's correct, yeah. Yeah.

We're entirely on aws. And how, how different is observability that whole space changing as companies move from more of a monolithic model, even though it may be containers to a decoupled microservices environment? What does that look like for customers?

Um, I think everybody, yes. As, as people are moving more and more to microservices, right? And I think that's this evolution that we're seeing.

I think every customer's at a different place on their journey to that. I mean, I think they're frankly a set of, and, and even I'll say different customers, but it's even within the same customer, right? Even within the same customer.

If I think of some of our big customers, they, you know, have to exist in a world that they have a monolithic system that they still maintain support, use as important part. They have sort of that intermediate and then the sort of the foot that they're putting in new microservices and this entire sort of digital born in a cloud situation. And so they've got to exist on everywhere along there.

And I think that's the real challenge for our, our customers today and for everybody is that it, it's not like you can start Greenfield and say, Hey, I'm gonna go into this new environment and we're gonna have an entire new, new way of developing applications and using and running applications. Nobody starts greenfield. Everybody's carrying tech debt with them.

And so how do you do all of those things well, um, and have tools that can support you along that journey, I think is, is what people are struggling with. And, you know, to bring the two together, it's a perfect storm for more security breaches because we are in a huge, we're we are going through a change in terms of technology that we haven't seen in a very long time. I, I, I like to equate it from moving from the mainframe to the pc.

Yeah. Which means that organizations are super busy trying to do this digital transformation. Oh, by the way, did you realize the security breaches are happening everywhere across from, from coding all the way to production?

So it, it's kind of a perfect storm, and it's super hard for organizations to balance those two because as you said, we, they may have mu budgeted funds for putting together or put pulling up a digital kind of transformation because they've got customers saying, we want things faster, we want your, you know, we want better response times, we want new features. And at the same time, they've gotta be figuring out what is in my open source. I, I have no idea what I'm consuming.

So it is a tsunami. It's a tsunami that has come together in an interesting way, but it creates great opportunity. That's right.

Yeah. Tracy is always top half full. I gotta be, it's, it's always been this way though.

It has always been this way. How does, how, how is, uh, Sumo or how, how are you guys looking at what the future's gonna look like and are, are you pivoting or are you, um, seeing a change in how your technology will serve your customers? We have, um, customers that, so, so I would say we are, um, not necessarily pivoting.

It's more trying to meet customers where they're at, at, we have customers who, uh, still have environments where their security operations team and their application teams are very different teams and use different tools and make independent decisions. And then we have a set of customers, especially those that are more, uh, cloud native and digital first, where they bring those together, the observability and security come together. And so, so we're trying to meet customers where they are because everybody's somewhere different along the journey.

Um, you know, I think we continue to think about, uh, not just features, but ease of use. And so, um, having tools, you know, there is no security practitioner that says, if I just had one more tool, I'd be secure. And so, you know, I think we recognize that.

And so we are trying to make sure that it's not just having the tool, but having a tool that you can use, that you can configure that gives you the insights that you need to really, uh, you know, gain insight into cloud infrastructures, gain insights into your security posture, gain insight into modern threats. And so, um, you know, that's where we're really focused is, is how do we bring that together to, to make that something that works for customers, that it's not just one more tool, it's a tool that they, um, you know, really feel like they're gaining value out of, on, on either front. And, and it's a shift in thinking too.

One of our, I guess was, uh, Lars is, that was it, I think was her last name. Mm-hmm. She wrote a, uh, a book recently on, um, kind of the culture around, uh, digital transformation and the struggle of getting developers to start thinking in new ways and realizing that they have more on their plate than maybe just coding, which is hard right now.

Uh, but, but don't you see that there's a, there's a pretty strong human factor in this process, in, in really shifting the way we think about how we develop software, how we deliver software, and how we monitor software. Yeah. Y you are absolutely right on.

And that's interesting. I haven't checked out that book, but I will, that sounds really interesting because I think there is so much of it that's organizational shifts and cultural shifts on how we think about things that for so many years, securing applications is an afterthought. It's like the application is developed and then thrown over the wall to a security team who then says, you know, is it or isn't it secure?

And how do we put the walls around it? And, you know, so many things. It's, it's the, you know, move to cloud, move to digital, move to devices that has happened that puts so many more points of threats.

And again, so many more seams in the system. It was, if you think about the old days when it was a big monolithic mainframe, it's sort of easy to put the wall around that when you're in the world that we're in today, there is no wall and it's impossible to put the wall. And so, um, you've got to think about how do you build it in from the ground up because it's not something that can get thrown to a security team and put the wall around it.

Exactly. Now you've got, You've gotta have the development team thinking about all of those different vectors in each of those different pieces that they're engaging with developing, um, putting together, you know, the pieces, whether it's something from open source that somebody's using, whether that's a microservice that somebody's bringing in, how do you put them together and have the pieces secure so that the entity is secure, but you've gotta build it ground up as opposed to, you know, sort of old model, throw it over the wall and put a box around it, And then reinforce the seams And then reinforce the seams. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a really good analogy. I'm gonna remember that.

And that book, tamales Lardy is her last name, and that book is called The Human Side of Digital Transformation. And she was really interesting to listen to cuz she talked about this, that that particular struggle of this cultural shift that we're going through. Yeah, it's, you know, from an application developer, again, I haven't been a developer in a really long time, but it's not the part that from a developer, there's sort of different mindsets, uh, coming at it from a security mindset versus an application developer.

And, and it's not part of what they typically, uh, want to do or think is the value that they bring is security's always, oh, that's gonna slow me down. And so I think that's gotta be the mindset shift that happens that, you know, you can't move forward without security. And how do you make that core to application development today?

That um, if we don't have that, it's gonna be impossible for us to move forward And, and, and a component driven architecture or microservices, we are shifting from application teams to feature teams. And a feature team could be one or two people to be quite honest. Yeah.

So one or two people could have a feature that's now treated like an application with its own workflow, its own road to deployment and its own issues in, you know, monitoring it in production. So from a developer perspective, it's no longer your part of a bigger team. You may have a lot of responsibility for one feature set.

So that's just one area that we, that developers now have to start thinking differently about if they're doing, if they're writing services. Yep. No, you're exactly right.

Well, and I've heard a lot back and forth, um, do some other security shows here at Tax Strong and we've actually run into the argument of in security of, I can make, you know, I'm gonna block everything. So everything is always secure. And the argument of, well you just have to accept that stuff's gonna happen and prepare to deal with it when it does.

And I've watched that shift from we can block everything to, we just need to prepare for the worst. Over the three and a half, four years that I've been part of Textron Group, I've seen it shift completely to, okay, we're kind of screwed, so we've gotta figure out what we're gonna do. We've gotta have plan B and C and D ready to go because we're, it's inevitable, right?

Yeah. And that is the whole theory about chaos behind chaos engineering, right? It's back to the American Red Cross, the first responders.

Mm-hmm. It's not about figuring out what occurred, it's figuring out how to respond to it as quickly as possible and then sort out what occurred later. Yeah.

Um, I think it's, I've seen the same evolution and I think it's interesting. It's actually moved at something. We, at Sumo Logic have something, uh, we were on t-shirts that says Fix s**t faster because that's what we, um, uh, that's what we ultimately believe we let people do.

Whether it's application performance and uptime and reliability or whether it's from a cybersecurity point of view, it's ultimately, there's a lot of things that help you with what's the dashboard, but it's ultimately what you really care about is getting something fixed and getting the application up and getting something secured. And so, um, to do that you need a foundation of, like, for us, where we really differentiate is in our log analytics. And so, um, you know, ultimately you can see something but actually saying, what did it happen?

Why did it happen? And how do I fix it? Um, so that it doesn't happen again is where we really differentiate.

But I think you're absolutely spot on. It's moved from, hey, we can do this. Uh, you know, I think the other thing that was a myth that I think has changed a lot in the past maybe five years is, well, I wouldn't be a target anyway, right?

Like that, that, oh, only if I worked for the N S A or F B I or some really big company Bank of America, maybe their targets, but like, I'm just a fill in the blank, small store doctor's office, uh, you know, whatever it is. And I think there was a time five years ago where there was lots of organizations that felt like I'm not a target. And I think we've moved into a world of, I'm thinking about shifts of, you know, everybody recognizes now it doesn't have to be, um, you first of all, you don't even have to be the target.

You can just be, uh, a side effect of, of a, you know, a, a bot or some kind of planned system that's coming after multiple, you know, pinging IP addresses and just looking for gaps. Um, so you don't even have to be a big organization. You don't have to be, uh, somebody that has something that you think is a valuable asset.

You Could be a school district, right? District and then you add the, the whole massive amount of remote workers. You know, people aren't sitting in an office where they can secure everybody's stuff.

You're like, now how do I deal with Jodi in her house and her computer connected to our system? Right. It just, that's added such another level of crazy to all of this as far as keeping things secure and keeping teaching people.

Don't click on that. Yeah, don't click on that download if you don't know who the email's from. Well, I mean that's like the biggest thing you need to teach people of all ages still click on it.

Yes. It tends to happen to the younger and the older and it's really, really horribly sad. And it does cuz it's can really mess them up and they're not equipped to fix it.

Uh, and you're right, it's of all ages and just on that point you talked about in your opening about ai and I think that's, if you think about that of, you know, don't click on that email, the quality and quantity of things like phishing emails like somewhere are only gonna get that much better because um, you know, I think something like a phishing email, it was always sort of easy to say, Hey, will you send me a million dollar check? I live in Ethiopian, if you just send me a million dollars, I'll send you $2 million. But it would have dozens of misspellings and dozens of things.

Like you could see the errors in it. And if you just think on a really basic level of, if you applied that same concept but shot it through an AI tool to generate that same email, all of a sudden some of those things that we're used to saying, oh, that's an easy flag, probably get resolved. And so it's a really basic thing to think about that example, but, you know, that is going to only make cybersecurity practitioners jobs harder.

I got one this weekend and my husband spent his entire career in security and we stopped for a second cuz it was so good and went, wait a minute, it was on my phone. And then we went, looked at it in my email, my pc and you know, he's taught me how to look in all the lines and be like, yeah, that's not real. But boy, at first glance, yeah, and I am, believe me, I am trained, I have 5,000 character double passwords for everything, which sucks, by the way.

But you know, I'm, I'm pretty good at noting, noting it. And I stopped and went look at this and he was like, wow, that's really good. So Yeah, he can solve us, I can help us on both sides.

He could make us look more professional. Thank God for Grammarly. I don't really consider it ai, but I don't know what I do do without it.

Uh, but at the same, at the same time, we can start using a AI to do better, um, pattern matching on these types of problems and in all, in all levels of security, whether it be from the beginning and pen testing or we start doing a better job of interrogating SBOs and, you know, making containers skinnier because we're not pulling in everything. So we, that's why I kind of started that conversation was saying we maybe should be learning more about tensor, uh, because it is it, this kind of technology will get us out of the hole that we're, we're, we're finding ourselves in. And there may be bad things about ai, but there's gonna be a lot of really, really good things.

And I think we're gonna see a lot of good things in this particular area in the future. It is, it is one way for us to get out of the problem. And tools like Sumo, which has so much data that it's collecting and I always have this conversation, I preach it all the time.

We can't be smarter unless we have data, right? I mean, without the data You're absolutely right. And I think you're absolutely right.

You know, if you don't have the foundation of data, um, you know, for example, there's lots of organizations who maybe get samples of data, right? And, and, but samples of data is not the data. And so, um, you know, when you need to do the forensics and retrace steps and figure out exactly how things happen, if if your data sample isn't the sample when you needed it, uh, you know, you're in a really bad situation.

So yeah, fundamentally it starts with collecting the right data. You're absolutely right on. And then putting the analytics over that data so that you can actually access it in, in real time.

And that it's not, Hey, I've gotta sort through this. Hold on, this is gonna take 10 hours to run. And so, um, the, you know, that's where, uh, we put a lot of focus on how do you do that?

How do you do it at scale? How do you do it in a cost effective way, uh, for, for customers? So you're spot on And how do you build start bu building those ML workflows so you know, it can learn, it can start learning on its own.

Um, it, it's a really fascinating area and in terms of, you know, DevOps, production control, whatever you wanna call it, I feel we have the biggest opportunity in this area if we can centralize the data, if we can get the data because it can't be a sample cuz the sample's gonna be old in two days. A new thing happened and that sample didn't have it. Yeah, Yeah.

You're absolutely right. We are in a very fast world right now and everybody's gotta be on their toes. And you know, I wanna ask you something about a lot of companies are afraid of, um, failing fast.

Talk to us a little bit. Cause I know that in the sumo world, failing fast is something that is okay, especially if you have observability tooling so you can see what happens. I can remember when I was, uh, working at a financial company, I will not, um, say the name because this is not a good story.

Um, we, we had a pretty bad production outage and you know, we were all drug into a meeting and they really wanted to know the root cause analysis. And I was like, and why it happened And I just was waving my hands, I was like, I did it, I did it, I did it. Let me go fix it.

Instead of sitting in here in this stupid meeting, it helps us done to be sitting in a meeting. Why don't we do that after the fact? Surprised I was a consultant.

Surprised I didn't get chased out of the place, but they were like, okay, go fix it. The feeling fast should be okay. You, we should trust our teams to be able to, um, try new things and push the envelope and fail fast and have the support of upper management to do so.

Yeah, I think it's something, I mean I think we try to embrace that as a culture, but I think you're even talking more broadly of how do you, how do you build that into the culture of organizations today? Kind of to our earlier conversation. It's not, it's not an if but a when something happens.

And so if you, if you adapt that mindset, it's not an if but a when, then it's really okay, how do I respond as quickly as possible? How do I, um, you know, put the guardrails in and, and so even if it's from an app development standpoint, how do you put the guardrails in that you can try things fail, fail fast, learn, iterate, and, and just like application development is now such an iterative process instead of a monolithic process. It's, it's kind of the same mindset but from a cultural standpoint.

And, and so it's bringing the culture to where the technology already is in so many ways. Yes, the culture and the technology have to marry up here really soon. We really need it.

We need to be able to fill fast. We need to be thinking about, you know, the practices of chaos engineering. Um, and we need to really get smart about what's happening in our DevOps pipelines and start thinking about AI ways to solve these problems and do some machine learning around data and how do we gather it.

Yeah. Something that I say a lot in our organization is AI makes cybersecurity more of a team sport. And if you think about organizations today, um, you know, every organization tries to solve this cybersecurity problem on their own.

And so, um, and that that certainly you've gotta worry about your organization. If you're a CISO of a big bank or something, you know, you've gotta solve that problem for your organization. That's your responsibility.

But bad actors are working together, bad actors, you know, are leveraging what each other are doing to get smarter every day. And I think AI is gonna help us make cybersecurity, the, the defense of posture, much more of a team sport, of getting smarter together, learning faster together, getting insights from each other, um, and putting them in, putting a us into a position that we can collectively defend better because we um, will get both the insights and the responses shared, um, much more rapidly because of ai. Yeah, I think we all, like, I panic about ai, I'm like, oh my god, all the things that people are doing, cuz you just hear the negative, right?

But that's, that's a great way to think about it in that AI might make, make security issues and everything happen more quickly, but it can also give us the opportunity to fix it faster too, right? It goes both ways. So that's, that makes me feel better Using It, using it as quickly to stomp something as you do to create something that's, that's really a, a true statement.

So that makes sense. And I know that's probably common sense, but to me it was kind of like, hmm. Yeah, the more you, uh, study or at least read up on things like what biopharm is doing, what AI's ch doing to change the medical world.

Oh, amazing. Um, just, uh, I uh, cancer screening test, you go in and get your mammogram and AI's gonna change the results. It's gonna be able to see a potential problem way before the human eye can way before and that's gonna be coming really, really fast.

Um, maybe by next year we'll all be getting mammograms using ai. Right. Well and one of the major universities just used an AI tool to create an antibiotic, um, against a strain of something that was resistant.

And when they were done and they were testing it on mice, on their skin, not in their bodies, um, they found out that not only did it kill the antibiotic resistant germ, it didn't kill all the other normal stuff cuz right when you take an antibiotic, they're like, eat yogurt, take other supplements cuz it's killing everything. Not just the bad thing. This actually pinpointed what it was and just zapped it and left all the other stuff alone.

And I thought, wow, that is a game changer. My father ended up passing away because he developed an antibiotic resistant strain of a, of a disease and you know, eventually they didn't work anymore. And so I think that's, that's an amazing thing when you think about what it can be used for, for good And we could do the same thing with security threats.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, We're getting there.

It's gonna happen. I believe in it. So today's, today's mantra is, tends are go learn about TPUs I to go to, so we should learn as a technologist, male or female for that matter.

So Lynn, is there anything you're working on work related or non-work, work related that you're excited about that's coming up and your world that you wanna talk about? Uh, I, I'm excited about lots of things. I mean, uh, you know, for us we are, um, going on the next phase of our journey as a, as a company, as an organization.

And so, uh, for us that it becomes all about refocusing, doubling down on the things that we really are differentiated and providing to our customers and bringing that, uh, forward to our customers. So I I continue to be excited about that. I think there are, um, you know, very few if any companies outside of us that can provide the solutions that we provide and, and really again, let people fix things faster.

Not just collect logs for the sake of logs. Not just offer analytics for the sake of analytics, but really with a goal of fixing things faster. So, uh, I'm excited on that.

On a work standpoint, I think that we have, uh, just so much that we can do. It's the tip of the iceberg here and I'm excited for what the future holds that. Um, personally I am excited cuz I'm going to Mexico next week.

Yay. Uh, I am taking a vacation, which is, uh, fantastic. Uh, and in addition to that, I just got a brand new e-bike, so Oh, Oh man.

Yeah, so, um, a couple of fun things on a personal level that I am excited about. The e-bikes are amazing if you guys have, I had never ridden any bike. Oh my gosh.

They're absolutely amazing. And, um, I make, I like to ride bikes, but gosh, I live in Denver, Colorado now. Some of the hills are, I Live in Denver too.

You're right. The hills will get you. Yeah.

So, um, so yeah, I'm excited about that. I'll be able to keep up with my husband more. There you go.

Well, thank you so much. Um, believe it or not, we've blown through our time here. Um, we really appreciated having you getting to, to meet you and, um, learn all about Sumo.

I, my, one of my favorite stress toys I got from one of your folks we work with was my little sumo guy and one of my dogs ate it and I was so sad. Oh, I bet Len could pick you up on that. I Bet, I bet we could hook you up with another one.

I Need another one. It was like the perfect stress thing. He's, and it's super cute.

I just have to hide 'em from the dogs. But anyway, thanks so much for being here. We really appreciate it.

And um, everybody stay tuned. We've got a lot more fun tech, strong content coming. There he is.

Yeah. I need little guy with it. Yeah, that's the one I had, so that's what I need.

They're the best. Thanks for sticking with us for another episode of Techstrong Women. We will be back in a couple weeks, so be sure and join us then.

Thanks everyone. Thanks Lynn. Thanks Tracy.

Thank you.