Liquibase Secure 6.0 Puts Guardrails on AI Database Changes

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Techstrong TV. I'm happy to have my next guest.

He hasn't been on in a while, so we'll get a good catch-up with him. Introduce you to Ryan McCurdy. Ryan is VP of marketing over at Liquibase.

And Ryan, it's good to have you back on Techstrong TV. I hope you've been well. Thanks, Alan.

It's great to be back, and things are going great. Good. Good to hear.

Ryan, I don't know, it's not that you haven't been on a lot recently, but even people may not be familiar with you, and they may not be familiar with Liquibase. Let's start with you. Give them your background of where you take to sit at the VP of Marketing chair here.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm currently VP of marketing at Liquibase. I've been with the company for a little over a year and a half.

Before that, I was leading marketing over another open-source company called Astronomer. I've spent a lot of time in cybersecurity. But here at Liquibase, we're talking to a lot of developers and platform engineering leaders.

And the business is really good. We've made a lot of big changes over here at Liquibase on how we're helping customers automate their database deployments and really shoring up for this wave of AI. So, it's a really exciting time here at Liquibase, and I couldn't be more thrilled to be at the company.

Very cool. Well, now you opened Pandora's box here. You're going to have to tell us about all these exciting changes.

0. That's right. 0.

It was our annual release. And there are some really big significant changes and value adds to our platform. A lot of this is our answer to what we see happening with AI.

We see developers, we talk to developers every single day, and they're using these different types of AI authoring tools, whether it's to generate more code or to have agents push even database deployments. And they're finding that they need a different level of control and visibility over these changes. So with the rising amount of code that's being generated and the downstream impact that has on the database, we're really acting as this control layer for them to really automate change across all their different databases.

We find most enterprises have 10-plus different database types and sometimes hundreds or even thousands of instances of those database types. And when those operate in silence, that's really hard to maintain and control and ultimately scale. So, we're helping these large enterprises really bring everything under the Liquibase secure control plane and automate, govern, and really understand those changes.

And the new capabilities we announced really helps with the governing and understanding of these changes. Kind of our newest module that we introduced was something called Change Intelligence. So if you're in platform engineering today, you have all these developers you're trying to have on a golden path or whatnot.

Well, you have all these different database deployments, and really being able to understand all those deployments. Did one fail? Is there any risk?

Did they all adhere to policy? Is there drift? And of course, let's say something breaks.

We now have a capability for them to remediate anything that breaks. So we're able to tell them, "All right, this is what's broken, and here's how to go fix it," so they can get everything back online. So that was one really big introduction that we had that we're really excited about.

Our customers are really excited about that. The other one is under our change governance pillar, where we completely reimagined our governance experience. So we were able to take our policy engine and really scale that now, whether it's just being able to easily create policies, scale policies, have exceptions for those policies.

Before what we had was, it wasn't as easy to scale, and we just introduced a brand-new visual experience that makes that really easy, and that's certainly more important now more than ever as AI's kind of introduced in the mix and you have all these changes and everyone's trying to get their arms around what those changes are. So that's been a key addition. And then lastly, we introduced role-based access control.

And that's a key enterprise feature for our customers. So, whether you're trying to prove separation of duties or what have you, this is just a really key element to keeping your databases secure, access secure, and scaling for the future. So we couldn't be more thrilled to bring these features to market.

0. Again, we announced that yesterday, and the response has been overwhelming. So we're excited to keep talking to our customers and the community about this.

So Ryan, I was down at the other end of our studio doing Techstrong Gang earlier, and one of the things we were talking about is we're in this awkward adolescent phase where, look, people are being told, or they were being told, you got to use AI. Let's see what AI can do. Let's save money and headcount, everything with AI.

From there, we go to what's happening. Well, let's get some pilots going. Let's experiment.

And then, the logical next step is we go from experiment to production. Mm-hmm. And so our next piece of this is, what do you see?

Are companies making that leap from experiment to production? Because depending who you talk to, some are saying, "Well, going slow on the production. " Mm-hmm.

Some are full speed ahead. What do you see? Yeah.

We're in a really unique position because we work with customers at all different levels of maturity and really their AI adoption. Some, and you could argue most, are at the stage of where they are using your Claude, your Cursors, your Copilots to generate more code. I think that's kind of the baseline today.

But as companies mature, this notion of agents taking action is becoming more of a commonality across the SDLC. So you think about agents creating changes, they test them, they can initiate deployments. And that's a new concept, and everyone's trying to get their arms around that concept.

And then externally, you kind of get these stories where like, oh, well, these agents went rogue, or they deleted this production database, or they hacked into XYZ company. And I think we all have to assume that agents are only as good as the governance you have around them. They're not going to govern themselves.

So it's what are the paths you put in place, the guardrails, if you will, to make sure they're not necessarily going off the track. We know agents are going to make errors, but we have to ensure that they have the right guardrails, especially as they're starting to get involved with production, and that, of course, creates risk. But I think naturally, just with agents, they're all working off of things.

It's based on probabilities. That's how the decision-making is working. And when it comes to production and really the SDLC, how do you make sure that these changes are more deterministic?

And that's really where Liquibase Secure comes in and how we're helping our customers really adopt AI safely, ensuring that they have these guardrails and that the agents can't necessarily go rogue. So this becomes more and more important as companies are saying, well, we want to be fully agentic by 2030 or 2032. We have all these public announcements out there that are happening.

So- Again, we see this maturity curve happening. Companies are at different stages of that maturity, but we're there to meet them really at every path. And it's been huge for LiquidBase, honestly.

It's been a tailwind in our business. Absolutely. We're at a really unique time just in technology history here with what AI is doing to the market and specifically to development.

No doubt about it. Very exciting. " Brian, you know what else I find interesting about the LiquidBase story, though?

Is historically, at least for a long time now, databases have not been at the forefront of cutting edge. You know what I mean? Some of the cutting-edge stuff, it comes to the database a little later than to the developers or some of the other pieces of the pie.

But here with AI, database, mainframes, everything, it's all happening at this. We're all on the edge with it, if you will. Right?

Database is not taking a backseat to anything here. Everything we're doing with AI is finding its way into how we use our data, how we use our databases. Right?

And that's a change than what we've seen in years past. Absolutely. I think one of the key challenges, I think, when we talk to prospects in the community, in the market, is they have a lot of databases.

I've mentioned, there's a lot of database types. Every database type has its own nuance, and the way you manage it has its own nuance. Right?

And I think one of the great things with LiquidBase is you don't have to standardize your databases to standardize how a database change is managed. And that's really important in this new world, is you can adopt these new databases and having them on a control plane where you're managing that change and you're standardizing that change, and more importantly, the controls are standardized, that visibility is now standardized across the entire estate is really key. We help companies really bring their database into CI/CD and have that level of automation and allow developers to self-service or data teams, for example, with these guardrails and the visibility of all that change and is it compliant, for example.

That's so important as we move into this agentic world, whether it's a human making a change or an agent making the change, where we're really helping, you could say, companies have their databases be AI-ready regardless of the database type. And that is really important as our customers enter into this new future. Excellent.

Let me bring it back to where we started. 0 is officially launched. It's GA.

People can go to LiquidBase now. They could download it. They could see it.

They could call and get information, work with your team. Right? This isn't a future sell or anything like that.

It's real. We're live. 0 is fully GA.

And one of the benefits of coming and talking to us is we work with some of the largest enterprises in the world, from financial institutions to retail. Our professional services team has a ton of great experience to helping companies scale, and we'd love to talk to you. com.

We'd love to have a conversation. I love it. Hey, Brian, thanks for coming here on Techstrong TV.

Don't be a stranger, man. Come back and see us soon. Absolutely.

Thanks, Alan. I appreciate it. Always.

Brian McCurdy, VP of marketing at LiquidBase. 0. It's available now.

We're going to take a break on Techstrong.