Episode Hosts: Pete Wright
Panelists: Kevin Jackson, Jan Myklebust, Usman Mir and Steve Weinert
Pete Wright:
Hello everybody, and welcome to Trilio Insights on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright, and today we have a special preview episode ahead of Red Hat Summit 2024 in Denver with our own Kevin Jackson, Jan Myklebust from Red Hat, Usman Mir from Accenture, and Steve Weinert from Dynatrace. And they’re going to be teaching us a bit about their upcoming presentation on Achieving IT Service Continuity Through Ecosystem-powered AI Ops and Event-driven Automation. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me on this podcast. I’m very excited to hear what you have coming up in Denver bringing all of you to my fair country and a fantastic time of year to do it. Let’s talk a little bit first about who you are and how this collaboration came about. Kevin, home turf advantage, you want to give us a start?
Kevin Jackson:
Yeah, I’ll start. I love being on this call with this group of people. So obviously from a Trilio point of view, I’m a senior director of product management, just for your information and for everybody listening, recently promoted. I’m not the only recent promotion on this call. I’m sure Jan might hint at something in this call as well. So I own all the products now at Trilio, but that said, as we get into this call, we’ll talk about how this group formed. But before we get to that, I think Jan, do you want to introduce yourself?
Jan Myklebust:
Yeah, thanks a lot Kevin. So this is exciting. As we were talking right before we started the podcast, this is my first podcast, so thrilled to be here and thanks for the opportunity. Jan Myklebust is my name, based out of France and been with Red Hat for a little more than two years. So I am an associate principal essay looking after Accenture at EMEA level, and I’m also recently appointed ecosystem med team lead for all the eco essays in that region. Previously was at Accenture for 10 years, so know the guys very well. Worked with Usman before that, and I’ve had the privilege of continuing to do so and build ecosystem family further. So with that, maybe over to you, Usman.
Usman Mir:
Yes, thank you Jan. So my name is Mir Usman. I’ve been with Accenture for two and a half years, and before that, I came with a wide variety of IT consultancy background, everything from Java development to DevOps to operations to automation. And once I landed at Accenture, I was quickly integrated with the Red Hat business group there where I met Jan. And he was leading a very interesting project, a project called Navan, which stands for Navigate Anywhere. And I got to be one of the first pilot testers for that project. And through that, well, I slowly became part of that team and soon after Jan left for, well, better pastures. And luckily we didn’t lose him because he became our contact on the Red Hat side. But I was so fortunate to inherit a brilliant young team who I have the pleasure of working with till this day. Yeah, so the project Navan is the center of our little collaboration and through that I got to know the rest of the team and our newest member of our little collaboration is Steve. So over to you, Steve.
Steve Weinert:
Yeah, thanks Usman. Well, hi, my name is Steve and I’m located in good old Germany. So I’m with Dynatrace roughly five years now, and I’m a partner cloud evangelist. So my job is to spread the word and together with the other three and maybe and the team, so roughly five to seven people, and geniuses all of them, spreading the word for Dynatrace to work together and present a really nice solution in Denver.
Pete Wright:
That’s fantastic. What a wonderful way this came about. I think it’s the biggest claim to fame of Navan still that there is a blimp. I believe there was a blimp. I think that was a very exciting part of the…
Jan Myklebust:
We don’t know where it is, but it’s still-
Pete Wright:
Oh no.
Usman Mir:
The last I heard it was brought to some event where it was flying around and maybe it’s still flying around somewhere.
Pete Wright:
Rogue blimp.
Usman Mir:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Oh no. Well, this brings us to the origins of this collaboration, right? This Denver presentation in 2024 isn’t the first time that you have been doing things together. Let’s talk about how things started a few years ago.
Jan Myklebust:
As Usman put it, this all centered originally around the thing called Navan. So what is Navan? In essence, it’s a hybrid multi-cloud environment that aims to drive co-creation and innovation for joint customer opportunities. So it’s an innovation environment where we can collaborate, co-create use cases from both a business and technical perspective with ecosystem partners that are relevant to specific clients we work on jointly. So I was already leading this in my days at Accenture. We had this vision about how to actually bring more clients in, co-create with partners, et cetera and so on.
And this kind of grew over time to become a platform where we wanted to involve partners to co-create relevant use cases and spread the good word about them. So I knew Trilio from my days way back when working on OpenStack. So naturally, they were a good fit. When we started to think about use case around digital sovereignty, that’s what we ended up presenting at Summit last year. And it all came together around Navan and building those right use cases and bringing in more ecosystem partners into the collaboration to show new innovative stories. And that’s what we’re trying to do again this year. But that’s just me. I want to hand it over to the other guys so they can say a bit about their point of view on this.
Usman Mir:
As Jan explained, this is something that sprang out of our little project Navan… or it isn’t that little, to be honest. It has grown, I would say, quite a bit, both with the people on the team, but also all the partners that we’re then directly involved with on different use cases and presentations. But in particular to the use case that we are talking about here, it actually sprang out of a sovereign cloud use case that we were doing for a German municipality. And we have had some funny names internally because it is in German and only Steve is German, so once in a while we call it a little bit different things, but between us it became the Fisherman’s Friend app, which is basically to have an application where people could go in and apply for their fishing licenses.
So yeah, this originally started as a sovereign cloud use case where we as Accenture were tasked to figure out an architecture so that if, in any event, some regulations came and say, “Hey, you can no longer host this application on a public hyperscaler or cloud because of privacy reasons and data protection and so on,” well, you need to be able to very quickly move this application to somewhere that is something where regulations can say, “All right, you can host it there, here your user data is safe.” And what we do in Accenture is that we have a lot of really good brilliant people who can work with a lot of different types of technology. But another benefit is that we have a lot of contacts within the larger technology ecosystem.
And since with the Navan project we were heavily invested with working on Red Hat technology, we of course reached out to Red Hat to say, “Hey, we have this problem here. What would you suggest that we do about this? How should we build our architecture based on what we’ve already heavily worked on with container-based platforms and automation? How can we enhance that?” And with that, we had Red Hat come in and help us with some of their guidelines. So we added in things like advanced cluster manager, and initially that was a really good use case that we then started to present to clients in our sovereign cloud center as well as Jan and myself started to go out to various conferences. So we had a very nice one in Slovakia that was… is it two years ago now?
Jan Myklebust:
Two years ago, yeah. Open slot.
Usman Mir:
Open slot, but yeah, where we actually had our first live presentation in person. And since that we decided, “Well, this is a really good use case,” not particularly because of the application itself, but it had a very good foundation to actually build out and enhance as well as move on from just the sovereign cloud use cases to more of talking about IT resiliency and operational resiliency. And the next step was that we wanted to enhance that with these kinds of features. So we approached Trilio and after some time we brought Kevin on board and yeah, Kevin?
Kevin Jackson:
Yeah, enter stage left Trilio. So yeah, at that point we were the component that were able to obviously take applications and the data from one cloud to another, so in this case from OpenShift to OpenShift. So yeah, it’s really good here in this evolution of their journey. You get to a state where they had a problem, they clearly saw a variety of solutions available as you do in the IT world, and then it’s just nice to see them grow from two to three. So that’s where we were up to in 2023. I’d say the three of us, we were on stage presenting over in Boston, and then obviously behind the scenes there was engineers doing all the other side of things as well.
Usman Mir:
I have to interrupt there, Kevin, because every time when we take the credit and present something, we have to mention, there is a brilliant team who’s actually doing most of the hard work and ensuring that whenever we are on stage, everything is working as intended, and if it’s not working as intended, they’re making sure that it will work as intended.
Kevin Jackson:
Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it? So yeah, we’re on stage. All of us will be on stage in one form or another and we do the PowerPoints, we do all the talking points around this. But yeah, behind the scenes, obviously there’s the actual technical stuff and obviously we’re all very intelligent people on this call, but yeah, we wouldn’t be able to do this without the people who actually tap at the keyboard and actually do the work of actually moving the pieces around. But in terms of the evolution, two became three in 2023, and weirdly in 2024, we became four. We brought on Dynatrace because essentially, Jan and Usman, we took the… I say “We.” I’m part of this journey, I’m one of the wheels in all this. But basically we decided to iterate on that original design.
When we were over in Boston we discussed what’s next, because this was a very successful collaboration. Red Hat, Accenture, Trilio, that combination for this type of solution worked really, really well. But we knew the fact that there was going to be more to this. Moving an application is moving an application. At Trilio, we can do that day in, day out all day long. We wanted to see what was next. And what was next was arguably a variation on a theme, but it was around operational resiliency was about ensuring application uptime, availability, and making sure that applications can be used without in effect manual intervention. So at that point, that the team brought on Dynatrace, and we were very lucky to bring in Steve.
Steve Weinert:
Yeah, thanks guys. Well, a car only drives with four wheels, so that’s why I’m here. No, just kidding. The thing is, when you have a great solution nowadays, that solution consists of, I don’t know, a quadrillion of microservices and also maybe another 2, 3, 4 clouds also in the game. And what you need to know is you need to know is it all working as designed or do I need to change something? What happens while I’m scaling from three to five nodes just for my front ends? Is it all working, or what am I doing when three of them are running on an old version of the front end? What’s happening? So you need to take care of that, and that is when you need a enterprise-ready observability solution. And that’s what Dynatrace… or let’s say a part of Dynatrace is that where we came from is the APM area, so application performance monitoring.
And with the new set of stacks, with OpenShift, with Kubernetes derivatives, with microservices, you need to make informed decisions. And that means you need to know who belongs to what, which method is calling which other method. Do they all behave as they should? And if not, who is the root cause? Who’s the problem, whom do I need to take care of first? And that’s the same with the Fisherman’s Friend app. You need to know when there’s a problem because the fishermen cannot go fishing if they don’t have a permit for this. So we need to take care that this software is working perfectly and when it’s not the case or if we have problems with the sovereignty, we need to migrate.
So what is needed is a trigger, and to be an informed trigger. So now we really have a problem that need to be solved or why we need to migrate. And that is where we as Dynatrace are more or less the first ones in the game when it comes to we need to change something, but it’s more or less as we use it here, it’s the trigger for the next steps.
Jan Myklebust:
If I may, I just want to pivot back on what the guys said there in terms of how this all came to be. I think open source is also something that’s very important and at the center of this, right? It’s all about partners that have more or less the same vision, the same understanding of the value and power of open source or we wouldn’t be here. But also of course, the importance of the ecosystem. I think we can all agree to that. Without the ecosystem, there’s no good solutions for the clients. No one can do it all. So I remember us in the hallway after our session last year. We were already hungry. We were already talking about, “Okay, what are we going to do next guys? We need to pivot our story. We need to find something new that’s going to resonate.” And just Steve’s point, enter Dynatrace, right?
That was one of the missing ingredients that made the story whole, although we shifted, as I said, from a sovereign cloud focus more towards IT resiliency… IT service continuity, excuse me, operational resiliency and the results will be shown at Summit shortly. But the amount of effort it took to drive this as a project, we did design thinking-based workshops, sharing ideas as to what would be the next great thing. We’ve used Agile methodology driving this as a project with the folks here and all the engineers in the back end, so there’s been a big amount of work put into this all together.
Pete Wright:
I think it’s fascinating and I’m really glad you said that, Jan, because I was thinking about it as I was coming into this show today that really would it be possible with other large platform players to work in such a cohesive team without the genetic underpinnings of open source? There is a certain ideology that brings these pieces together, this puzzle together, and shows that open source and ecosystems can coexist quite effectively. So as you have been working through these ideas, what is the current state of uptake, and looking forward to Summit in Denver, what are your expectations for uptake? What do you want to get out of it as others start to see and experience what you’ve been putting together?
Jan Myklebust:
That’s a great question. So I’ll go first quickly. To us, finding the right idea, making such an ecosystem collaboration successful, rests on several pillars. As I mentioned, having same vision, same ideals, understanding open source, all of that good stuff, that’s the foundation. Having other key ingredients such as a co-creation environment like Navan, it obviously makes things a whole lot easier. Having sponsors amongst all the players at the C-level that actually believe in what we’re doing, are supporting us, and are confirming, “You guys have good business use case here,” is also another key ingredient.
And the rest is about putting together the right diverse team, skilled folks, brilliant folks that can actually deliver such a project. So I don’t see any barriers to doing this with other ecosystem players providing there’s a will, there’s sponsorship, it should be feasible. In my experience, I will say it tends to be more difficult, more challenging rather, if you want to do this with some very large ecosystem players like a hyperscaler for example. But it’s certainly not impossible. You look at a company like Microsoft, they’re fully bought in on open source. So that’s the first part. And then to what we’re expecting from Summit from my perspective, so obviously raise awareness and tell our good story and hopefully the live demo Gods will be with us. We’ll see.
But then talking to a lot of people an Accenture’s side, Dynatrace, Trilio Red Hat to raise awareness around this, see what we can do more about it. We’re vending some ideas such as a roadshow later on potentially next year or later this year, I mean. We’re thinking about finding other clients where we could scale this with or drive a larger conversation around what these ecosystem players can do together because this is one use case. There’s a lot more we can do. So ultimately, develop business contacts and find new opportunities and ideas as to where we go next.
Steve Weinert:
And also from my point, the important is to raise the awareness for the problem itself. I think there are many people around, they think, “Well, the cloud is up and running 24/7, 365 days a year.” But that’s definitely not the case. We talked about it recently, Usman, right? You found out a few timeouts for Azure, for GCP, for AWS. How long has it been?
Usman Mir:
Yeah, and that was one of the… I would say, to be honest, from my point of view, I’ve seen that happen every single year ever since the cloud has been there because I’ve been working with cloud at some point with one or the other. So those stories has always been there. But last year, it really came to the forefront that the cloud isn’t always up. You might have a large hyperscaler not available for half a day simply because they pushed up a wrong update. It shouldn’t be able to happen that the global hyperscaler is down in all regions. But it happened, and it didn’t just happen to one hyperscaler, it didn’t just happen to the biggest one. It also happened to smaller cloud providers. So this is an actual risk and how many companies can say that, “All right, it’s okay if we’re down for eight hours with everything that we have in our production environment?” Yeah, that’s going to cause a lot of harm depending on how much resiliency you’ve set up in regards to spreading your workloads around.
Pete Wright:
I think Usman just gave us the clickbait title of this episode. “The Cloud Isn’t Always Up,” and we’ll find some sort of egregious thumbnail to go with it. Kevin, your thoughts on what to look forward to, what you expect out of Red Hat?
Kevin Jackson:
Yeah, I always love going over to the summit because one of the things about where Trilio fits is obviously, we don’t exist, really, without the likes of the platform and one of the biggest platform in the Kubernetes world is obviously OpenShift. And as I expect as we go through the years, not to pick up Red Hat or OpenShift or anything, but clearly it’s a strategy where it’s going to underpin quite a lot of the future there, so it’s a very important summit for Trilio. It’s a very important platform for us at Trilio. As I say, we can’t exist without the like-minded people that attend those kind of events.
We can espouse all the virtues in the world around how the way we do backup and recovery and migration of cloud-native workloads, but without the support of an ecosystem that has to portray that same mentality to their customers, so Jan’s customers, Usman’s customers, Steve’s customers, we all have the same thought process, but if not everybody in the room is bought in, then the value prop for various products and solutions go out the window. So it’s very, very important for us attending these type of events. What I want to get out of it, certainly there’s going to be lots of events there around orchestration and automation. We fit into that category with our own summer talk on the… is it on the Wednesday, Thursday? Wednesday.
Usman Mir:
Wednesday session.
Jan Myklebust:
Wednesday.
Kevin Jackson:
Wednesday. Thank you. Yep. I’m glad somebody knows. I just rely on my calendar.
Jan Myklebust:
I got you.
Kevin Jackson:
Yeah, no, thanks. I’m glad everybody’s got my back. So Jan and Usman, you’re going to have to remind me the night before. That’s all I’m saying.
Pete Wright:
Boots on the ground reminders. That’s good. It’s good.
Kevin Jackson:
Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, we’re part of that automation and orchestration story. In fact, at the heart of, we pull in the likes of [inaudible 00:24:31] advanced cluster management, a great service that governs multiple clouds and make sure it’s set up in the right way. We touch on Ansible for orchestration, we touch on event-driven Ansible so we can respond to events from Dynatrace monitoring. So we bring all that together and I just expect to see a lot more of that. If I don’t see that, I’m going to be quite disappointed. We’re in this world now where our use case is around applications and ensuring they’re running more or less 24/7.
As Usman said, the cloud isn’t a complete panacea. It’s 2024 and people still treat it as if these clouds are a hundred percent available. That’s how they’re marketed, but you’ve got to put the effort in. You’ve got to have the understanding to actually take advantage of all the properties of these clouds, and you’ve got to fill in the gaps and we fill in those gaps. But it’s crazy to think that people think you can just throw applications up there and expect it to run 24/7. It’s almost disappointing, really. So I’m expecting to see a lot more orchestration. A lot of AI has to be in there. But yeah, I think it’s going to be a great summit and certainly we’re going to have another hallway conversation of what’s next, what are we going to do next?
Pete Wright:
Are we going to be meeting in 2025 with a number five? Who’s next? I think Steve gets to pick the next person. Isn’t that how it works in a boy band?
Kevin Jackson:
I think so. Yeah, I that makes sense.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think that makes sense. Okay, last question as we wrap up here. Jan mentioned his hope that the live demo Gods are going to be on your side. I don’t want you to give me the live demo, but I’m curious, how many people are involved beside you in making sure that the demo comes off successfully on the back end in Denver?
Usman Mir:
So in regards to that, we have at least two to three people who will actively be… well, they’re the ones who are putting in most of the work to actually develop the various integrations with the various technology platforms. So they have, of course, also volunteered to just keep an eye on things because in the end, it is up to us to present this story and their hard work the best we can.
First of all, I have full confidence in the team that, hey, this will of course go well. And I know I’m jinxing it right now, but I do have confidence in the team. Second of all, everyone who has ever been to one of these conferences and seen live demos, whenever they see live demos, they do have an expectation of something will go wrong. And as I always say to the team, it’s always most fun when it’s burning. And that’s where the three of us on stage, we simply have to address the issue as it comes because like we said, if the cloud is not perfect, that just means that we have to be better than not perfect. And hopefully, everything will actually prove us right.
Jan Myklebust:
Amen to that.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah. Even Steve Jobs had to ask 5,000 people to turn off their Wi-Fi once, so demos go south. But the point that I want to get to is back to yours earlier, the number of people who have come together to make this thing work and who are behind you supporting you to make sure that this event comes off successfully is non-trivial.
Jan Myklebust:
Yeah, I think if you look at the broader team, all partners included here, we’re around probably 10 or so people that have contributed in different various ways to this. And live demo gods, we’ll see how that goes, right? But we’ll have a plan A, we’ll have a plan B, we’ll have a plan C to be able to tell our story someway or another. So yeah, I share Usman’s confidence and that this will go well no matter what.
Steve Weinert:
And if not, it definitely makes sense to have some jokes in the pack. [inaudible 00:29:02]
Jan Myklebust:
We’ll say it’s Steve’s fault because you’re monitoring from afar.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Kevin Jackson:
I was about to say, yeah, it’s all going to be Steve’s fault regardless. So yeah. Yeah, sorry Steve.
Pete Wright:
Steve’s going to be legendary after this thing. No matter what, Steve is the winner.
Steve Weinert:
I guess that’s the thing. What I really liked about this team and all the 10 people I’ve never met before, I know for a few months now, whenever you had a question, whenever you had a problem, it just took, let’s say, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, then you had an answer or a hint, or let’s say at least something. No one let you wait. And that was really nice experience for just meeting a few people for the first time working together at the same thing. That was great.
Kevin Jackson:
We all work globally and we put all this solution together and it’s going to be this summit where we meet face-to-face. We don’t meet face-to-face at any other time. In fact, it was only last year when Jan and Usman myself met face to face. It was literally the day before we were going to present on stage, and that was very successful. But I just love the remote collaboration. And to echo Steve’s point, it worked extremely well. It’s just very interesting when people talk around this office culture, et cetera. And I know that’s not what this call is all about, this talk is all about, but this global collaboration works really well, effectively, and it’s a great team that we work with. So hats off to everyone.
Usman Mir:
To add to that, none of the 10 people involved share an office.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, there you go. You make it work. You make it work. Outstanding. Well, gents, thank you so much for sitting down and sharing a little bit about both the ideology and the what’s in house of the upcoming presentation. It is officially Wednesday, May 8th, 11:15 AM Mountain Daylight Time, local time in Denver. Achieving IT Service Continuity Through Ecosystem-powered AI Ops and Event-driven Automation. Put it in your calendar and go see these guys. It’s going to be a great presentation and as we’ve discussed, a flawless demo, I’m sure.
So thank you everybody, Jan Myklebust, Usman Mir, Kevin Jackson, and Steve Weinert. Thank you for your time. I thank you everybody out there listening to the show. Thank you for your time and your attention. We encourage you to learn more. Just swipe up into the show notes for the episode and you will see links to all the resources to the event to… I’m going to put all their LinkedIn pages on there. You want to go connect with them? I’m not even asking them if that’s okay. I think that’s going to be okay. And you can connect with them and meet up with them in Denver if you’re going to be there. On behalf of our fantastic guests, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll catch you next time right here on Trilio Insights.
