Bob talks about Plutora’s new “Test Environment QuickStart Bundle”. It provides an easy, immediate fix to the Achilles’ heel of software development: environments that cause delays, produce bugs, and waste time and effort. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.

Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another Tech Strong TV segment. I’m really happy to be joined today – I don’t know if he’s actually been on Tech Strong TV with us, but I’ve spoken to him many times; it’s my friend Bob Davis from Plutora.

Step 1 of 7

14%

Which of the following best describes how you currently monitor and manage systems across your hybrid cloud environment?(Required)

Multiple separate tools for different environments

Multiple separate tools for different monitoring and management functions

Single consolidated dashboard

Custom built monitoring and management solution

No full monitoring and management solution

Don’t know

How valuable would it be for your monitoring and management solution to incorporate predictive analytics to help you identify and address system issues that are critical and not waste time or effort working through all the data and “noise” that is not critical?(Required)

Extremely valuable

Moderately valuable

Somewhat valuable

Slightly valuable

Not valuable

How do you most typically address potential system issues BEFORE they impact your operations?(Required)

Automated workflows and playbooks to remediate potential issues as soon as they are detected

An orchestrated response process that leverages automation, AI, and human expertise to rapidly respond to potential issues

Advanced monitoring tools such as predictive analytics and anomaly detection to proactively identify and address potential issues

Respond to issues as they arise, using manual processes and troubleshooting techniques

A combination of automated remediation, orchestrated response, and/or proactive monitoring to address potential system issues

Don’t know

Other

What methods does your organization use to control and monitor cloud/IT spending?(Required)

Centralized procurement processes

Pre-approved budget thresholds

Automated cost monitoring tools

Department-level spending controls

Regular cost audits and reviews

Cloud cost optimization platform

Approval workflows for resource provisioning

Native financial operations tools provided by the cloud provider

No formal controls in place

Don’t know

Other

Please specify:

Which methods do you rely on most to detect security vulnerabilities in your systems?(Required)

Automated scanning tools

Manual assessments

Vendor notifications

Threat modeling (for early detection)

None of these

Don’t know

Other

Please specify:

What are the TWO most common ways you prioritize vulnerabilities to address within your environment?(Required)

Based on potential impact

Based on exploitability

Regulatory compliance requirements

Based on CVSS scores

Risk-based analysis of multiple factors

First-in-first-out approach

No formal prioritization process

Don’t know

How do you typically handle system updates and security patches?(Required)

Automated updates and patches

Manually review and apply updates and patches on a regular schedule

A combination of automation and manual review

Apply updates and patches on an as-needed basis.

Outsourced update and patch management

No defined process

Don’t know

Other

Δ

Hey, Bob, how are you? 

Bob Davis: I am great, Alan. It’s so good to be here. I haven’t had the pleasure of being on the Tech Strong TV spotlight and it’s great to be here.

Shimel: Fantastic to have you. So, Bob, our audience has been fed a steady diet of Plutora for years already, right? So most of them know Plutora, one of the leaders in the value stream management space, a DevOps pioneer leader. But I don’t know if they really know you. I’d like to introduce them to Bob Davis. 

So why don’t we start there? Give them a little bit of your history, Bob.

Davis: Sure thing. Alan, I’ve got a few years under my belt, and I started in the semiconductor business back at Intel as a chip designer. And I ultimately said, “Gee, you know, I think I understand why I want to build things bigger, better, faster and cheaper, but I don’t understand the business.” So I went and got an MBA and I moved into more of a product marketing orientation, and from there became a serial entrepreneur. 

This is, Plutora is my tenth startup. I never joined another large company after I joined Intel, but I found my way into some through acquisitions and so forth: Novell, CA. Always on the software side, always on the, you know, typically the infrastructure, you know, a lot of enterprise IT, networking, compression, security, a lot of that, and ultimately back up in recovery and continuous data protection and those kinds of things, which ultimately led me to really understanding, wanting to understand more about the developer side. 

And so about five or six years ago I found my way into Plutora and I became chief marketing officer and away I went. Along the way I became a pilot, I play golf, and love the water. So I’ve got a lot of things. And six grandchildren, so good stuff.

Shimel: Six children. God bless you, man. Whoo. You know, I’ll tell you off camera; I don’t even want to get into it now.

But anyway, that’s great, man. It’s great to have you here. And it’s interesting, ’cause you know what, a lot of people will hear “Bob Davis, CMO Plutora” and say, “Ah, he’s a marketing guy.” Well, yeah, but you’re a marketing guy who started off designing chips at Intel when a lot of people watching this were playing computer games, not even computer games, Show & Tells or whatever the heck they were. Right?

Davis: Yeah. Well, I’ve always been on the product side and I’ve always been more on the “What’s the next idea?” In fact, the best example of that was right around 2000 – you know, we started Kaseya. 

Shimel: Oh, I remember that.

Davis: So I was the original founder of Kaseya and started that in my kitchen and it’s …

Shimel: Really?

Davis: Yeah. To being what it is today. And there wasn’t even a managed service provider market at the time.

Shimel: No, I remember that early on. Because I had started a company called StillSecure and in 2005 we pivoted into MSSP. ‘Cause I just thought MSSP was the way to go. It was too hard for too many companies; they needed an MSSP. Actually Kaseya bought friends of mine, Carl and Billy Austin, they’re serial entrepreneurs as well. They were acquired by Kaseya. And then of course Kaseya was acquired, what was it, a year or two ago maybe? 

Davis: Yeah, Inside Venture Partners bought Kaseya in 2013, which is when I left actually.

Shimel: Right. Oh, okay.

Davis: That’s when the new management came in. And we sold the company and kind of went off on our own journeys. I went to a company called Atlantis, which we were doing hyper-converged storage, and then ultimately Dalibor Siroky, CEO of Plutora, found me and brought me over to Plutora in 2017. 

Shimel: Very cool. So, Bob, we were talking off camera a bit. We’re at an interesting sort of boundary layer here again. I think many of us are let’s call it cautiously optimistic that we are going to emerge from our kind of COVID cocoons and venture out again en masse. 

Davis: Yes.

Shimel: Many of us are already.

Davis: Yes. 

Shimel: The interesting thing is the world we left two years ago is a different place today than it was two years ago. We’ve learned a lot of things, we’ve experienced a lot of things. Digital transformation – no pun intended – has transformed many a business – many a business model. For us in the tech industry, for our audience, you know, the way they shop for products, try products, use products, measure flow in terms of value stream and stuff like that, it’s really changed in two years. They’re different. You can’t put your foot in the same water twice, right? And so companies like Plutora – someone once said that, I’m pretty sure. 

But companies like Plutora, they’ve had a change. You’ve had to adapt. And you guys have. You have that sort of a whole new program you’re coming out in market with. Let’s talk about it.

Davis: You bet. You know, in the beginning, right in the beginning of the pandemic, early pandemic, early 2020 we saw as the world was trying to find its axis again we saw an incredible increase in people wanting to learn. So they spent the first part of that 2020 just in this learning mode. And value stream management was one of the things that people were really focused on learning. And the notion of being able to say “Wow, if I could really see a pipeline, a value stream from the beginning to the end and understand if I’m getting better.” And that was really the question that the CIOs were asking, “I’ve spent millions of dollars on these tools. Am I getting better?”

The point I’m making is that everybody was trying to understand how they could tell if they were getting better. And all these flow things became almost an MBA project or a PhD-type project to really understand all that’s possible. And that was awesome and we got a lot of interesting traction from that. 

What we found, however, is that that transformation is a daunting transformation and the world changed around everybody. We went from distributed teams to distributed teammates. So now that autonomous team was distributed in and of itself, and the communication and collaboration became very difficult to achieve. So processes, organizations were changing. So many things changing all at once that people were really slowly doing like they’d be happy to go to an event, sit on a virtual show. What do I need to understand to get better?

That’s not what’s happening today. Some of it, sure. Some of it still happens. But people are moving to more execution. They want to get value. They want to start seeing the value of that journey and they want to see the value in real-time. They don’t want to see it a year from now; they want to see it right now, this year. So we have seen our customers struggle with saying “How can I get started in value stream management? I may not even want to go all the way to the end of the value stream management journey, depending upon my specific tastes.”

So we’ve developed an entire program around doing just that. How can we get people into a value stream process mentality, into a value stream platform, and do so quickly so that they can value right away. And so we have this program called the Quick Start Program and we released in January the first of several Quick Start products. This one is on environment management, which is a core component of value stream platform that Plutora sells. And in so doing we’re able to provide people solutions to a very complex test environment problem in three or four weeks, whereas today it can take 30 days just to configure and make an environment available on some of the prospects that we’re talking to.

So in the time it takes to get an existing manually configured test environment ready for a test event you can have a full test environment management program and go from manual management of test environments to an automated process very quickly. Now I see value. Now I can see value in terms of the efficiency of utilization of expense and test environments. I can see better quality. I can see saving tons of money. 

We find that people with average levels of releases, well UMA did a study and they came out and said the average number of releases in an enterprise environment was 76 a year. That was in a survey. They did a survey and they came back and said that was the average. There was certainly a distribution, but that was the average. And if you’re manually managing your test environments you’re losing money. They determined based on all the issues of managing these things almost $1.5 million a year you’re wasting. 

And so we can save you that with a product like this. So imagine I’ve got a bottleneck in my DevOps tool chain, the Achilles’ heel of my tool chain is waiting for test environments as I shift left and try to test earlier. I solved that problem, I removed the wait states there, I become more efficient, I save money, and I can do that in about three to four weeks worth of setup. And now I’m rolling. Wow, I’m getting value. Now I go to the next problem and so forth. And I get quick starts, I can come into the platform pretty soon. I’ve got a full value stream management platform down the road. I’ve gotten value every step of the way and I never had to really think about the prospect of doing the whole thing. It’s like one step at a time; every journey is one step. So it’s like let’s give people the ability to get value in that same way, one step at a time. 

And that’s really, it’s been met with tremendous success already. We’ve seen a lot of responses, a lot of people wanting more information, and our SDR team is very busy fielding calls on it. So it’s been a real successful launch so far.

Shimel: That’s great. You know, Bob, I think part of the reason for its success is there’s two kind of trends you’re riding there. First of all it’s this, I call it “deliver delight,” but I mean that’s just two words, right? It goes to when I was an entrepreneur founder of companies we were hiring enterprise salespeople who sold to the C-levels and all that stuff. In today’s world we hire DevRel evangelists, and the idea is get the software into the hands of the people who are going to use it, deliver delight, and if it works they’ll tell their bosses and so forth to buy it. So it’s a different sales model. But it’s become dominant, especially in DevOps cloud native, you know, the kind of markets we play in. So this really is kind of playing into that. 

Davis: Totally.

Shimel: It’s delivering delight. Because synonymous for delivering delight is delivering value. 

Davis: Yes. Well, that’s the point, right? Now it’s the whole point of value stream management in the first place. You know, it’s interesting; it’s really an agile approach to delivering the value stream management solution. There’s a parallel there. You know, saying “I’m going to buy a value stream management platform and implement it” is a little like deciding I’m going to build a waterfall process. ‘Cause it’s everything at once, this is what I want to do.

Shimel: No, it’s like trying to eat an elephant.

Davis: Exactly. 

Shimel: You’ve got to eat it one bite at a time. [Laughs] That’s the only way you can eat it.

Davis: Right. Well, you’re crossing – you know, by the very definition value stream management embraces both, you know, everything from the ops person on the far right to the strategic planning office on the far left, and so you’ve got lots of people, you’ve got lots of moving parts. It’s hard. We actually have found hard when we market the product we get the interest from the pain point, I’m having trouble. In this case I’m having trouble managing my environment. If you’re selling the entire platform that environ manager, in order to take advantage of that feature, has to sell the platform to the planning person, to the ops person, ’cause they’re all going to get affected. 

There’s value there, but they’re like, “Show me.” Now we’re giving them a tool they can do that. It’s an on ramp into the platform, a smaller bite of the apple, as you said, an agile approach to delivering value stream management and value at the pain point level. And so we’re doing everything around it to make it super-clear if you have this pain, this is what it looks like in our product when you solve it, and you can get there by the end of the month. Does that sound reasonable? And it’s way cheaper.

And so that’s the other thing, these platforms can be expensive. But what if I can buy something that’s in my sign-off authority, so it’s more approachable to me? The whole notion of S-a-a-S is all about product life growth and let me get something in my hands for free and try it out and then I can grow from there. That’s the beauty of what so many people have enjoyed with S-a-a-S-style software products. 

Value stream management is hard in that sense, ’cause it’s complicated. There’s integrations into the tool chain, there’s process changes as people evolve from more legacy processing to DevOps tool chains and DevSecOps tool chains and so forth. There’s that. There’s organizational change, budget-holder changes, people moving from silos and project-oriented things to product-oriented things. So we’ve run into prospects that get so frustrated, they want the solution but there’s a lot going on in the organization. We’re answering that question.

You can each have had a success, show the value, and go from there. It’s a great on-ramp. It’s a freemium approach almost in a complicated environment and its value stream management, and we think it’s really going to be awesome when people can have multiple. We’ll do probably deployment, we’ll have a quick start for master deployment plans. You know, Jeff was on in November talking to you about our progressive release management and some of the new stuff that we did with the Insights dashboard. That’s another screaming for of Quick Start, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you could get this up and running very quickly?” 

So all of those things is where we’re headed. We started with environment management and it was made available on the 18th of January and it’s already in the market, so we’re excited about it.

Shimel: So no pun intended, but where can we get a quick start on this Quick Start? [Laughs] Where can we go, Bob? 

Davis: Well, we have, there are online demos. You know, there are all kinds of spots on our website. We have a spot where you can say “Talk to me and you can sign up for that and have it by the end of the month.”

Shimel: So just go to Plutra.com and check out the stuff for Quick Starts. 

Davis: Yep. There’s a banner right on the top of the home page that will take you right to the information on it.

Shimel: Love it. Good stuff.

Davis: Yep. It’s all right there.

Shimel: Hey, Bob, we’re about of time. I want to thank you for coming on and telling us about the Plutora Quick Start program. You know, the first one, as you mentioned, came out the 18th. Any timeframe on subsequent quick starts?

Davis: We’re going to bring out the next one in the beginning of the next quarter, so right around April. 

Shimel: Excellent, man.

Davis: So you heard it here first, Alan. 

Shimel: Well, that’s why we’re here. Thank you for letting us know. We’ll be watching. Good luck with this one. Maybe we’ll see you show up on one of the Plutora webinar workshops that you guys do with us so often. Love to have that.

Davis: We’re going to do that.

Shimel: Cool stuff. All right. Bob Davis, CMO Plutora here on Tech Strong TV. We’re going to take a break right now. We’ll be right back with our next guest.