AI at DevSecOps Summit with OpenText’s Rita Patel Jackson

This is Textron tv. I have the great pleasure of being joined by Rita Patel. Jackson.

Rita is SVP Product Marketing with OpenText Welcomes. Good to be chatting with you. You too, Mitch.

Thanks for the invitation. Happy to be here this morning. Fantastic.

Well, we're gonna be talking about a conference coming up that I'm really excited to hear more about. Yes. We're, but first, tell us about yourself.

And also if someone doesn't know who OpenText is, tell 'em about OpenText. All right. So, I'm, uh, Reed Patel, Jackson.

I'm actually based in, uh, Southwest Florida, just for anybody that's, uh, in the us. And, um, I am the SVP of Product Marketing. So basically I manage product marketing across all nine of our business units.

And a little bit about OpenText. We are an enterprise and a global, international, uh, company, uh, based in, uh, Waterloo, Canada. And we are focused on, um, information management.

So we actually, basically take care of all of your information needs, all the way from security to content, to business networks, and, uh, what we're gonna be talking about right now, DevOps and, uh, and how we can help you with a lot of your AI and security needs. Fantastic. Matter of fact, I think that's a big part of the DevSecOps Virtual Conference, by the way.

It's an international conference, multiple time zones coming up. Maybe you first wanna say a little bit about kind of AI and how, you know, OpenText sees AI fitting into Dev, DevOps and the tool sets and products that you have. Oh, Absolutely.

Yeah. So, um, well, we all know that DevOps, or DevSecOps is, you know, one of the biggest topics around, um, and there's a lot of challenges around this space as well. You know, we face challenges around scale, security, and speed, right?

And a lot of it is based on the fact that, um, we all know that there's a shortage of really highly talented, um, engineers and, um, you can never get enough done fast enough, right? So, what, you know, what I, we think about is how AI is gonna help in all three of these areas. The first one is about scale.

Uh, think about, you know, how can you automate your workflows and have intelligent workflows leveraging AI so that you can actually have ai, um, do some of the work that's mundane so that your engineers and your developers can actually focus on the tasks that are, um, you, you know, more meaningful, more thought leadership, more focused. Um, and then you think about the AI managing the code base, uh, automating the code review, uh, being able to test security. So doing a lot of things that, um, around code management is another one.

Uh, and the one that I really like to think about a lot is being able to do predictive analytics and insights. Being able to leverage AI to predict security risks, you know, throughout your development life cycle, um, so that you can optimize your decision making throughout the cycle. We like to take a look at and think about DevSecOps as a cycle.

You know, we all know that, uh, and ai, just like security is embedded in every phase, all the way from, you know, planning, operations, testing, optimization, performance, all the way to implementation. One i things that's interesting about your description of how you're incorporating AI is, you know, uh, we all sort of hear the fear statements about, Hey, we won't need developers anymore. Right?

Like, it's just like, we don't need ops people anymore for DevOps. Not true. Yeah.

But, you know, all the things you're talking about are really about augmenting and enhancing. Yeah. And also maybe taking things a little bit deeper into different parts or aspects of developing software, testing software, securing it, scaling, yeah.

Et cetera. So it really is a, a, an aid and augmented kind of enhancement to what we're doing, right? I Say that I do, I always tell people it's, um, it's, think about your best friends.

Remember what every now, a lot of people are remote now, right? Or they go into the office X amount of days. Um, back pre covid, a lot of people went into the office, you know, the water cooler talk of you had your best friends, you get a challenge in whatever you were doing, uh, whether it was the testing performance and you could collaborate, uh, think of this as your best friend sitting over your shoulder or on your shoulder, you know, next to you helping you, uh, in a way that is non-threatening and being able to do it because the humans are never gonna go out.

They, they just aren't. But there's a lot of tasks that are really mundane and, and really are just repetitive that can be automated with supervision, right? You think of it.

And I always think of ai. I been in this AI space for decades. Um, and it's still in its infancy.

I think it's, I think of it as a, I don't know, it's passed the toddler phase. Mitch, do you think, has it passed the toddler Phase, maybe awkward teenager phase? I've been in AI I think too, for a long time too.

There've been a lot of, so You need to kind of still coach it and guided, you know, driver's seat. You know, I don't know if you would put a 15-year-old or whatever to drive the car by itself, right? You need to kinda help it, guide it, coach it, but you wanna give it a little bit of freedom.

So I think that's how AI is today. Mm-Hmm. I don't feel that the field is going away.

I actually feel that, uh, people should welcome AI so that they can focus on things that, you know, that really challenge them, the creativity. And we all know there's not enough time in the day. There just isn't Very much is.

And we even have some research that we've done around that, that people are using AI and it's in, in those kind of AI augmented types of ways. Well, let's talk about the DevSecOps Virtual Summit that's coming up. You have some friends of mine, some people that are pretty well known in the, uh, DevOps space.

Alan Shimmel, who's CEO of, uh, tech Strong, and also editor in chief. Of course. Our, our good friend John Willis, friend of the community, one of the original group that met in Gen Belgium to uh, kind of get things kicked off the first DevOps day, I guess it was.

So, oh, that's awesome. Well, notary. Yeah.

We do not names in addition to everybody else. There's some great folks there. Yeah.

It's a great opportunity to learn, uh, and network with your peers. I mean, if you, um, one of the things that we tried to do is bring some of the subject matter expertise and make it very collaborative versus, you know, a death by PowerPoint. We're gonna be introduced, um, Sando, who's their CMO is gonna be kicking everything off.

And as you talked about, um, I, I, I have the, uh, unique pleasure of, uh, talking to Alan where we actually have a kind of a, a fireside chat kind of a discussion talking about the tips and trends of what's happening in the, in this space. Um, and as you said, John Willis. So I highly encourage everybody to listen in, not only on the keynotes, but we also have, um, breakout sessions.

Um, and it is an international conference. So what we tried to do, Mitch, is make it so that you can dial in at whatever time. There's three different time zones to dial in so that you can listen in and we'll have chats going on throughout.

So we hope it's a, a good, uh, a good, uh, virtual summit to, to collaborate with and get the thoughts going about this space. 'cause there's so much to learn, uh, to, uh, from each other. The nice way about doing that too, with, uh, three different times during the day is you kinda hit those different regions.

So people that are chatting and commenting, and maybe they're more likely to be in the EU with you or other parts of, you know, Europe and that, that part of the world. Yeah. Versus in Asia or, or the, the Americas.

So that way, and we did it on program, we get some regional continuity, right? Yeah. Well, we did it on purpose because as I've been navigating this field, and Mitch, you and I talked about this, I started out as a programmer and engineer.

I wish we had these tools, especially AI and automation back when I was programming. 'cause I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. But what I've also learned is, uh, over the last year, two years as I've been in this role, was the global nature of what we really need to listen to.

Because there's parts of this, of this beautiful world that we live in that are progressing faster than others and leveraging ai, um, and embedding security. And the security risks are not just in certain regions, it's global in nature. So I think we can learn from each other.

And that's why I'm really excited to hear from John. I mean, coming from Gant, it's feels like a hub of where a lot of creativity happening across the, the world here right now. So, um, that, that's kind of the reason that we did this.

Yeah. For folks that have, don't follow John, he has taken all of his DevOps experience and kind of focused it on ai. How's that gonna help us?

And he's done a lot of really good work there. So I'm sure there's some great stuff gonna be shared. You know, talking about security, um, one, one of the trends that's happened in security is we used to think of security and software as code scanning or API security or this thing.

Exactly. And the security world has gone through this transformation of, it's not just a set of, you know, boxes you tick off. It's really, you have to think about it systemically.

And we're, we're sort of at that stage too with software, right? Right. Whether it's in the design or in the code or in the, in the tool chain in the CICD process or, you know, whether testing in production, all kinds of aspects.

It's really kind of thinking about it end to end is, and that to me, fits really well with an open text. And what you all do Well, we like to look at, um, you know, everybody talks about the security and the shifting left, especially in this space. And we'd like to talk about it and think about it in the thing of shipped everywhere.

Mm-Hmm. So security. It, we, we also have a really great security product that is embedded with our, you know, with their DevOps, uh, platform as it is.

So it's DevSecOps, but we like to think of security has to be embedded in entire, in the entire lifecycle. And I know everybody's seen that infinity loop and security is literally all the way from planning to implementation, testing to performance. It's everywhere.

And it has to be, because if you don't, it can't be an afterthought anymore. I think that's like way back that was, you know, I don't know what the millennials say. So last year, something, I don't know.

I'm so not with it, but, uh, but it does, it has to be embedded everywhere. So like we, we like to think of the, the shift left to really the, the shift everywhere. And you know what, listen, Ellen, and I think I had a, we had a pretty in-depth discussion about his opinions on how it is everywhere.

So I, I'm not gonna give you any more tips and tricks 'cause I, uh, Mitch, 'cause uh, Ellen I pretty in depth conversation about the, the shift everywhere. Great. I, I, I'll add to it, I doubt he brought this up, but I like to say, um, adding airbag airbags onto your car after it rolls off the factory line is probably a little too late.

So it's gotta be designed in. I like That one. Secure.

Yeah. No, he didn't talk about that one. We stopped, we didn't stick to that.

And, and I do like that one. And I always like to tell people, um, I, going back to the AI side of the house just for a second, um, we, we, AI is everywhere and, you know, there's a, there's been studies in Mitch, you guys have done quite a bit of studies. It's like over 55% to 60% of DevOps communities have been already using ai.

Um, I, I like to think of it as a hype scale. You know, it comes and goes, it comes and goes. It's back up again.

Uh, this time it's more focused on automation versus a lot of the other things that we have. But AI has been embedded. And going back to real world examples, we've been using it all the time.

You know, since Google has been around, since we typed into the search engines. Every time we open up a a, a MAP app, whether you're using Waze or Google or you know, the Apple Map apps, it, it's ai and we're not threatened by it. So I think one of the takeaways that you'll get, hopefully coming out of the conference, how AI is going to really help shape and reshape this space to make it even better and faster.

'cause speed I think is a, is important. Uh, it seems to feel like especially in this space, more and more things are needed and there's not an abundance of time and resources. Mm-Hmm.

I was thinking too, as you talked about the Infinity Loop, just like security is in all parts of it. So is ai, it's being used today and being it Isly used across It's synonymous Sdlc? Yeah, I, I think, think so too.

And I think people are, uh, the engineers and developers are thinking about it. It's just talked about it more. Mm-Hmm.

Well, we're definitely in the hype cycle. You know, we are of generative AI systems. They Come and go, it'll come back again.

It's just kind of where it is. And I think the beautiful thing about this space is you have two hypes coming out at the same time. You have AI and you have security and they're kind of like tied together.

And that's why when I look at the Infinity Loop, I like to think about both of them embedded in, into all of it. That's an exciting time for this space. I'm, I'm really excited about it.

Fantastic. Very much so. Well, the, the conferences on September 26th, correct?

Is that the date? 24th. 24th.

Glad I checked with you. Okay. September 24th.

24th. Three different time zones. Okay, great.

Alright, thanks. Well, fantastic. We'll include a link to, uh, for folks to register in the description so, um, you can find out what time zone, you know, works for you, for your location, wherever you are, wherever you're working, or might be at that point in time.

So, well, Rita, it's been fantastic. A lot of fun talking with you. I'm excited to hear your fireside with, uh, with Alan and all the other great speakers.

It'll be a great conference. Awesome. Yeah.

But we had a lot of fun. So I hope you guys joined, uh, come listen to some of the thought leaders and learn a little bit more about this space and what, um, open test could do to help you as well. So, and I look forward to hearing all your feedback.

Feedback is a total gift. So thank you, Mitch. It's been great.

Fantastic. Take care. We'll, we'll talk to you again soon.