CloudBees’ Hope Lynch on the Forrester Total Economic Impact Survey

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

I, I've said it before, I'll say it again. One of the things why I love doing what I do is I get to speak to my friends. We talk shop, we talk about, we talk about everything trips, birthdays, and we do a decent amount of talking about technology and what's going on in the market.

Let me introduce you to one of my friends. She's been on with us before. Also a frequent guest on a lot of our video shows.

It's Hope Lynch Hope is a senior director of platform over at CloudBees. Hope it's great to have you on. I hope all is well.

All is well. Great to be here with you, as always am Absolutely. So hope before we jump into our topic of discussion for today, Mm-Hmm.

Let's, you know, not everyone knows hope. Like I know hope. Um, why don't we give them a little of the hope story, a little bit of hope's journey.

That's great. And we'll start with that. Sounds great.

Uh, so I've been in technology many, many years. If you, if you name a role in tech, I have probably done it even to the point, as we discussed along one of our, uh, our conversations. You know, I've pulled and punched cable, I worked in server rooms.

I've written code, I've worked on platform engineering teams. Right? So now at CloudBees, uh, I have the privilege of being in product marketing, working closely with product teams, and understanding a lot about our customer pains and, and how CloudBees can help solve those.

Great. And, you know, speaking of CloudBees hope, look, I, again, I said it on this show several times. com, uh, first published March of, uh, 2014, over 10 years ago now.

And I think CloudBees was the second sponsor we ever had, right. Right. Outta the gate.

com ever since. But the CloudBees of 10 years ago, 10 plus years ago, is very different than the CloudBees of today. Back then, look, Jenkins, Jenkins is still, you know, widely, widely used, but Jenkins was the dominant, probably 85% or more of CICD, uh, use cases were using Jenkins.

Right. And, and for a long time, CloudBees was the, the Jenkins company. Right.

Uh, it really, and, and to this day, it still does support though Jenkins is now part of the, uh, CD foundation. Mm-Hmm. CloudBees is a major sponsor of that.

I know Sasha's on the board there. And, um, they still support Jenkins and a good chunk of cloud B'S customer bases running Mm-Hmm. Some form of Jenkins, whether it's the pure open source or the enterprise CloudBees, uh, versions of Jenkins.

It, it's still there, but, but CloudBees is, is so much more than that today. Yes. Right.

Yeah. Tell us. So as you said, roots in Jenkins, but CloudBees has advanced to embrace, uh, feature flags, feature management.

That's still something that's very new for some organizations. Um, but for those who are taking advantage of it, they see the power in beginning able to, uh, control releases, run ab tests, do other, uh, functions that future flags make possible. Um, we also have release orchestration, release automation.

If you have a big enterprise and you need to control things across teams and have that visibility, um, those products come in. We have value stream management for when you want to understand bottlenecks, clear those up. We even have a product cloud-based compliance.

So for those highly regulated organizations that are having trouble figuring out where their compliance gaps are, what are the things we need to fix? Where's our exposure, we have a product to suit that. So now CloudBees is a comprehensive, uh, DevSecOps solution for the majority of enterprises out there, But Great.

And most recently, hope I I I wanna say maybe it was last September or August, maybe a little before, CloudBees released sort of a whole new SaaS based platform, right? Yes. Had a lot of DevSecOps in there.

Yes. Yes. That platform, uh, going strong, it has taken some of the best pieces that we feel and that our customers feel of our platform over the years, and we've brought it to the cloud.

So if customers are interested in cloud native deployments, we can now support that. Um, if they still need though a blend and they are saying, you know, we're not a hundred percent cloud. We need a hybrid approach, we're here to still support that hybridized approach, but we can now meet customers, uh, where they, not only where they are, but help them with where they're going.

Love it. Love it. Um, and I guess hope that brings us to our topic of discussion, actually.

Mm-Hmm. Which is, there was a recent, uh, report out of a Forrester based on a survey they did, uh, total economic impact survey. I guess, what, what was the title?

Um, and, and that report, you know, sent out to detail what, and, you know, what were the economic benefits, if any, uh, for customers that are being, uh, realized by utilizing this CloudBees platform? Yes. Uh, I guess we should start off by saying, Hey, anyone who wants to get the full report, I, I'm assuming CloudBees makes fit available.

We do. We do. Uh, if you visit our website, you can find it very prominently.

Um, it's also all over social media right now, and if someone wants to be, uh, a little more proactive, they can contact me. I will make sure they get a copy of it. Absolutely.

Get it off the cloud B site. And look, in the interest of full disclosure, we should mention this was a Cloud B'S commission study. Right?

It wasn't just for us that said, Hey, let's go do a cloud, be economic impact today. Right. Right.

Cloud commission study. com/i believe it's Evidence slash Forester. And I can't tell the last couple of words there, but if you see it, hope mm-Hmm.

Feel free, uh, in chat, Barster, T-E-I-T-E-I. Okay. Yes.

So that's it right there. We'll include that in the notes on, on our text drunk TV thing on our text drunk TV segment. Anyway, but enough hope.

Let's talk about the results of this darn thing already. Yes. We've set the table, tell me, share the results a little bit.

Enlighten us. Yes. So, uh, some of the great things about it, um, the customers in the, the assessment, they were there so we can understand what are the benefits, what are the costs and the risks associated with, um, an investment in cloud B software.

So those representative organizations were aggregated and on average, um, they saw savings of 30, more than $38 million over three years, uh, return in investment. This is, this is a big number, but validated third party validate 426%. So bringing in CloudBees to the organization for every one of these customers made a big difference to them and to, uh, to their development teams.

And, and when we talk about return of investment, let's just be clear, we're comparing the cost of the cloud lease CloudBees platform to the savings generated as a result of doing it. Yes. So if you have, if you have a developer working on low value tasks, working on things that probably could be satisfied with a, an enterprise scaling solution, right?

Um, we have come in and, you know, everyone says shift left, but we have shifted those off of the developer. We've shifted it off sometimes even, uh, the platform engineering teams, right? Some of those repetitive things, but also, uh, some of the scaling challenges, um, the problems that they've had with availability, we have solved those.

So instead of spending time, um, on downtime, spending time, you know, tinkering, fixing, monitoring, we've taken that off their plates. So that return on investment is if your developer was spending an hour on that type of work, which is not producing customer value or innovation, now they can pivot to that and those organizations can reinvest those hours. Love it.

Love it. Um, you know, DevSecOps is a big part of the CloudBees platform. Anything specific in the forest to study regarding that in terms of, you know, improving security or making Yes, it's security More effective?

It's more about, um, in our study, it, it has been about speed that has given some of the teams, right? Um, the automation of the security in the pipelines. One of the, one of the challenges that a lot of organizations still have is how to integrate security into their SDLC.

How do we integrate it into our pipelines effectively? And because they brought CloudBees in and we have already solved some of those problems, they were able to move on to different, different problems, uh, that weren't around security. Mm-Hmm.

Excellent. Um, and you know, you mentioned earlier about the whole shift left thing, and that's such an integral part of DevOps and DevSecOps, but you, you said something that I think is really important for a lot of folks and for a lot of organizations, when they shift left, they're shifting it onto the developers' backs, right? And you've already got, you know, plenty of studies that say developers only spend 30 to 35% of their time actually writing code.

Yes. So every time you give them these other tasks to do, that's less time they're writing code, you're paying them a lot of money to write code, they wanna write code, but we put all these other things on their backs and it makes them less productive. Yes.

So what we could shift left and at the same time take things off. Exactly. The developer's back, that's like a, a double, you know, double bonus.

And I'm sure that has a lot to do with the, the ROI returns on it, right? Because It does. Yep.

When Develop developers Are coding. And, and one of the points I, I want to mention, which is, it, it even amazed me. I don't say, um, there is a 99% reduction in lost developer hours across the board, right?

So, so much of the repetitive work, you know, I can't say it enough, the repetitive things that aren't bringing value, um, we, we've been able to take care of. So, uh, yeah. Yeah, that shift left, but not shifting it onto the developers is something we have become very good at.

Absolutely. Absolutely. What else in the survey and, and report Hope, what else should we highlight?

Um, so some of the highlights, um, some organizations saw their time to deploy applications decreased by two to three times. Now, if you are trying to get work out and you know, that application deployment is slow, um, but you speed it up by that much, you are now also freeing up time from developers. Those dollars get reinvested, uh, in other places.

Um, some of the other big ones, downtime. Downtime is the bane of most organizations' existence. You don't want downtime, but downtime happens.

It, it happens to everyone. But one of the benefits, um, one customer said is, um, downtime isn't zero, but their words, the blast radius is now a lot smaller. Outages only affect certain teams versus going across the entire enterprise.

And, um, restarts for them are now automated. So if their controller is down, that restart is happening automatically, it's happening in 10 minutes or less, and it's only affecting Wow. Big stuff.

That is big stuff. It's, you mentioned platform engineering. So where does, where's the intersection between the cloud bees, uh, platform and, and the platform engineering teams?

So the way, the way I describe it, um, to a lot of people is the, the platform engineering team is the team that is bringing in the, the catalog of tools to make available to the rest of the organization. So we are making it easier for those platform engineering teams to scale it across large enterprises. So for those that maybe have, uh, we look at implementations, you know, from, from 500 customers, 30,000, 40,000 customers, if you have 40,000 developers that you need to scale a tool across, make sure it's configured properly, um, you, you know, that your admins will have repeatable processes, golden paths, uh, we have all of those things be in, so for the platform engineering teams, instead of spending an exhaustive amount of time with the configuration in order to roll it out, we make it a lot quicker for them to be able to do that.

Love it. Good stuff. Um, oh, we're, we're coming on the end of time here.

What else now in the report, should people kind of key in on you think? Uh, I think one of the, one of, one of the benefits, um, that we also have is a lot of savings from, um, deployment automation. There, there is a need to automate automation around deployment sometimes is, is tricky for certain organizations, but again, um, we, we make it a lot easier, a lot simpler.

And they've seen on average 27 and a half million dollars in savings from having us automate deployments for them instead of the manual processes that if, and I'm sure you've been there. I know I have. Uh, if you have a really tricky deployment, it, it is a time, uh, it's very time consuming.

And one of the other customers said, instead of having, you know, a hundred people in a meeting for an hour, they don't need those meetings any longer. Right. So, so people are getting their time back.

That's the, that's, that's the whole thing around what we're doing. We are giving valuable time back, uh, that people can use in other ways. Right.

And people don't use that time sitting on their hands. They use that time being more productive. Exactly.

And I'd like to have some of that time back I spend in meetings too. Yes. Um, Anyway, Wolf, I want to thank you for coming on and, and sharing with us today.

com/evidence/forrester dashen TEI, right. Total economic impact. And, uh, you can download the report from there.

Hope he bump the great work. I, I should also, if I could do a quick plug on the DevSecOps stuff. RSA is coming up in a few weeks, a month or so or less even now.

And, uh, I'm doing a panel there on Wednesday of RSA week I believe, or Tuesday. Tuesday or Wednesday, I forget now. Um, but it's in the afternoon.

And, uh, shorter med chief product officer at CloudBees is on the panel with me, along with some other DevSecOps, DevOps, rock stars. It's gonna be a good panel. And we're gonna be looking at DevSecOps next.

What's next on, on the agenda there. So if you are add our, if you're add RSA, do check that out. If you wanna go to RSA, we also have our DevSecOps event on Monday of RSA week at the Moscone Center.

And we have, uh, free codes for expo passes. com, you probably can get 'em on there. Um, we might have some more news around platform engineering and, and DevSecOps and DevOps next, including CloudBees coming up.

But for now, I'll leave that as a dangling uh, thing out there. We'll come back to it. Hope always a pleasure to have you on techron tv.

Keep up the great work. Say hello to all the bees for me. I will.

We'll see you soon. Thank you, Alan. All right.

Hope Lynch Senior Director platform from CloudBees here on Techstrong tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back with rate new content in just a moment.