The Evolution of AI and DevOps with Shlomi Ben Haim at JFrog swampUP 2024

This is Techron tv. Alright, everyone. Hey, it's time to wrap up.

Swamp Up 2024. It has been 10 swamp Up. This has been the best swamp up in 10 years.

I saved the best for last. It's my friend Shlomi Ben Haim. Shlomi, of course is the CEO and one of the three co-founders.

If you've been paying attention, we had all three co-founders on. So we've got Shlomi last. And first of all, mazeltov, congratulations.

What a, an amazing show. You know, I, I don't wanna embarrass you, but I tell people all the time, someone asked me, you know, companies you admire, I said, you know, do you know Jfr? They said, no.

It was actually a friend of mine who's a, they're not in tech. I said, you know, JFR, they said, no. I said, okay.

I said, J Rog to me epitomizes how you build a corporate culture. How you build a spirit in a company, and it extends beyond their employees. It extends to their customers.

It extends to their partners with their channel partners. It's just a, a feeling of good. Like, I don't know how to explain that good.

But, but anyway, congratulations, my Brad, Thank you very much. Thank you. And we are very excited.

Like it's not our 10, uh, swamp up. Um, this is our swamp up anniversary. 10 years since the first one.

Yeah. Here's the T-shirt of our Tap 2015. Um, and we are still very much excited about it.

We are very happy. I think it was a very smart decision to cap captive to up to 500 people, because this is how you build relationship and this is how you build the community. And when you see your customers speaking with each other, this is what you need.

So thank you for the compliment. Thank, Thank you. All The credit goes to the team, obviously, but I'm, I'm very honored.

Absolutely. We, um, Shlomi, we were talking for far too long before we started recording. Look, we've covered most of the announcements, we've covered all of that.

But I want to talk to you now as a CEO strategy wise. There's been a lot of layoffs in tech. A hundred thousand plus maybe more, 200,000 layoffs in tech companies, valuations, private companies, dropping terribly.

However, everybody's put a big bet, a big bet on ai, including jfr, right? AI is a big part of the, was a big part of the announcements this year. It feels like, like we're moving from the age of the dinosaurs to the age of the mammals, if you will.

Right? A little smarter, a little faster, faster, right? A little warm blooded from where you sit.

How do you see that play out? You know, first, let's be honest, I think that there are two groups. Group A is speaking a lot about gen ai because you have to mention it on every, on every topic, Right?

Mandatory And group B, understand that no, no matter what happened, we are not going back. We say in jfr, once you leap forward, you won't go back. This is the era of Gen AI and MLOps.

So at jfr, and that was part of the announcement that the keynote yesterday and today at Leapfrog, we saw it as the next logical step for us. Now, what is ML lops? ML Lops is a new technology bringing and introducing new persona.

Now we start to serve data scientists, but actually it's all based on the same Practices. Yeah. So once you ride the DevOps bike, you'll ride the ML lops bike.

But forget about Jfr for a moment. Let's speak about the community. Mm-hmm.

Few years ago, you and I spoke about it and we told developers, listen, if you are not adapting, and if you don't understand that security is part of your responsibility and it's on your plate and it's your responsibility, then don't be surprised that you will be part of this 100,000 and more layout. But if you do, then you understand that you have to change the language that you communicate with your managers, managers about your all. It's not anymore about building software, releasing software being cool and fast.

It's about bringing value. And what we see now is that MLOps is a very logical step for the developer's career. Like, if they don't understand that this is the next responsibility that they have to take over and provided the service to the organization, I think we will see a lot of developers becoming, uh, irrelevant.

So, uh, adopting is the key, But change is constant. Change is constant. If, you know, I had this conversation with Scott, Scott Johnston from Docker earlier today.

If you are not pa, if you're a developer and you're not passionate about your craft, right, because you're, it, it's, it's that kind of talent, then you shouldn't be a developer, right? You, you, you need that passion to develop the best applications, the best code you're going to, you need to be prideful in your work and passionate. And if you're not, I believe, I believe that, uh, some things have changed and you know, with more responsibility, I think it's the Batman quote, like, with more responsibility comes the, or the power comes with more responsibility with Tragedy.

Yes. And, uh, what happened? Now we say software is hitting the wall.

We say things are moving, things are changing. You have more responsibilities. But these guys started to be sounded in the bottle.

Yeah. And when they have to speak with the C-level, CIO, cso, C CIOs, CISO, CTOs, they have to understand what happened, what glance they need to have into the boardroom. They speak about consolidations and cost.

They speak about predictability of cost. They speak about efficiency and productivity of the team. They don't speak about binaries or soft code.

They speak about that. And they also speak about something that we never saw happening so much before. They speak about trust.

They see, can we trust this software pipeline? Because if not, we will wake up tomorrow morning and oh, the Headlines update. And I'm not just air quoting that it's happened just few weeks ago.

Bad things might happen to you And it could happen to good people. I know George very well, the long time. I know George.

Very Good. People and trust and, and software warranty are things that are repeated on every bold discussion now. So we wanted to be at the core of the discussion as developers.

We got there. Now you have to elevate your Language. Now.

You gotta walk the Walk. Exactly. Exactly.

Let me ask you a question. I thi and again, I I, I spoke about this with, yo there's 27 million developers in the world. Maybe we'll get to 40 million if things didn't change.

But with ai, we could have a half a billion developers in the next five years. 'cause everybody will develop, you could be a developer, I could be a developer, Home developers. It, it may not be the developer you think of as a developer, but nevertheless, they're developing software and the software they develop has to be secure.

It has to go into a pipeline. It, you know, it, it, it can't, it can't be shadow development or shadow AI or, or this kind of thing. How do you, as Jfr, you spent the last 16 years understanding your persona.

We announced this year you announced bi uh, data scientist as a new persona. You're following. What about these, I call 'em citizen developers.

What about the citizen developer? How do you, how do you bring them in the fold? It starts with embracing the change.

Mm-Hmm. And, you know, my generation, my parents' goal was that I will, as soon as they could, I will be educated good enough so I can read and write. Mm-Hmm.

Today's parents are thinking about read, write, and code. Yeah. And if you, if you are a student today in middle school, you already learned Java and Python.

And so this generation, 10 years from now in the industry, they're all coders, as you said, they're All coders. Now, if we cannot provide them with the infrastructure that is secure enough speed, enough automated enough to support whatever level of programming they will bring, then vendors will fail to deliver. And um, I'm, I'm very excited about the announcements here because when you look at the big picture, it's not just DevOps, which is in some places being siloed, it's DevOps with security, with MLOps.

And you concentrate on the practices and what's the end in mind and not what tool or feature should I build. Like what are you building for the long run? And there are two type of companies and you know, them all companies that are very well executing and companies that are setting the strategy and then executing.

Right? And, and I want to believe that this is what JO is doing. I, I agree.

Well, to be fair to those companies that are just kind of running out and executing, there's so much pressure at the board level to use ai, do with less head count, do less, do more with less at Cost. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. And, and I think what that does though, it creates unrealistic expectations. You sometimes you can't.

Right? And, and then, so now they feel more pressure and it's like, I'm up at bat in baseball and I know I have to hit a home run. 'cause if I don't hit a home run, we're gonna lose.

Right? And it's hard, it's hard to produce like that with that pressure. I can also only share with you what happens in our board.

jfo is a public company. We have a very serious board, amazing people, very smart. Some of them came here to swamp up to our user conference to know more about the community and to speak with our customers.

Very serious liability to our shareholders. And what they ask is, when are we going to see improvements in the operation? All the product in, in the world of ai.

So we took these two radars inside, out and outside in what AI gives us. And we got to a few conclusions. And some of them were announcing on the product side and also of what we want to adopt internally at JP o.

And I'll tell you what, there is no one, no one on the planet that knows how it's going to look five years from now, now. So we are all embracing the change. We understand that it happen and it will stay.

But we are learning regulations, security, adoption processes, data management, storage management, cost management. So many things are kind of a black hole for us that I think that we should be a bit more humble and relax for a moment and adopt the change and not push back on it, but not be too eager to do it all around AI now. Yeah.

I, I, you know, there's this, there's this Elvis song. Was it Fools Russian with Wise Men Dead or Tread or something like that. But that's, I think you can't be a fool in Russian.

Yes. But you've gotta tread in, right? You know, you've gotta go slow with that.

Take one step at a time. Make sure that you are passing up. Don't miss don't miss this train.

It already left. But don't rush because there will be a lot that rush and then crash And that don't complete. I want to discuss one other thing, then I'll let you go.

'cause they're tearing down the Yeah. Around us this year for the first time. I, I got the secret recipe from Jake Frog.

Tell me, No, I, you know, it probably, but I it really get home today. Like a show like this, this conference, right? It's a pretty penny.

You should tell the food is first rate. The entertainment is off the hook. Everything is first class.

People don't pay a lot of money to come here. It's captive 500. Why do you do it?

Here's why you do it. Because this show fuels your innovation for the coming year. Your, you, not you per well, you personally, but all of the frogs need the feedback from these customers who are here because they give you direction.

And that that's jfr. The, the culture's great. But j Frog's key to success is listening to its customers.

It sounds simple, but you've perfected that. Here. Talk, I'll tell you what, what things for my heart, forget about business and forget about vision.

And forget every, everybody want to be a visioner and a strategist. Like what walked for Jfr. And, uh, rule number one, don't tell anyone a story of building a relationship with the community when you bring 10,000 people to a conference.

Amen. It's not, this is not how it happens. If you think that you are more popular because of it, fine.

But at the end of the day, look at your pipeline and ask how many, how many of them actually came back. Uhhuh, I'm looking at our retention rate, 97% steady, sustainable as we go. 97% of our customers are staying with us and, and increasing their bet on us.

And this is for me, a vote of trust and, and they are honor on us with it. But to the team, and this is something that I'm, you know, we were trying to hide it today. I, I'm, I feel comfortable enough to say to the camera, JFR is a event driven company.

Swamp Up is not just about, we will announce this to market, Right? That First and foremost, we have this intimate relationship with our customers here. And as you said, there are no lunchbox and there are no thousands of people that you try to remember names.

It feels like a family reunion almost. Yes, it does. 500 people, family, but, Well, my wife's family, The second thing, everything, everything from the website, the branding, the pricing model, the sales team, the marketing team, the product team, the product lineup, the product roadmap.

And we have a rule that whatever we announce is available for you to use partnership. We, we, we partnered with GitHub, bringing it to be ready for Swamp Up. And by the way, to next month's GitHub universe first, Right?

We collaborate with Nvidia to bring it to the market. So, so many great things are happening when you put a day on the calendar that you will celebrate that. And this is, you know, we have our holidays that we celebrate with the family.

This is my Thanksgiving, this is my Christmas. This is my Oosh Hashanah. Yeah.

Soon, Two weeks that, that I'm celebrating with the community. So yes. And it's not a secret sauce anymore, but you have to be committed to it.

Yeah. 'cause faking it, 500 people fake easily say That. See through it like that fake And especially developers.

Yes. They get, and what you announced today is from what you learned from Last Swamp up and worked on over the year. And what you'll announce next year is the feedback you started getting from this year's swamp up.

And that's, that's a great thing for any startup people out there. That's how you build a company. Anyway.

Look, you know I'm a fan. I love you. Thank you.

I love the frogs. We're gonna wrap up our, uh, swamp up coverage for 2024. Have you announced 2020 five's location, Napa, Napa Body.

There we are coming back to Napa next year. Back to Napa next year in Napa, as they say during Sader. But until then, this is Alan Shimel.

We're outta here. I hope you've enjoyed our coverage. Stay tuned.

There'll be a lot of text on TV after this.