Does every company need to offer a “platform”? – Techstrong Research Review EP 3

here Alright, it's Mike Rothman again. We're here for the text wrong research review. I am GM of texturong research to strategy officer of tech strong group since I keep forgetting to introduce myself at the beginning of each of our reviews.

So now that we've got those formalities out of the way. Let me also introduce my partner in crime Mitch Ashley Mitch. First of all, who are you you know, and that's why you doing this morning, but I'm doing really good day man.

He's good to talk to you love working with you. Yeah, I'm both principal analyst working with you Mike and also CTO with tech strong group. So kind of have a hand in that camp and hand in that cap.

So yeah, it all sorts of different stuff. So we try to keep focused on, you know, in terms of the the research stuff where you can have the biggest impact and today, you know, we've kind of you usually started off with the news Peg and you know doing this and you know, we were just chatting and honestly, it's been a really busy week for me. As well as for me.

So, you know, we kind of were just chatting about you know, what the different topics are. What do we really want to talk about? And we kind of got around to this concept of a platform right and and you know, a couple of different Acquisitions that you can talk about a conversation you had with you know company that we do some some work with we can kind of hit those as an examples.

But you know, the whole platform thing has been you know the goal. I mean really since we kind of started right I mean back when we were doing mainframes, right? You know, the Big Iron was the platform and I'm down came out and they wanted to be you know, what competing platform and yet many computers and they wanted to have their own platforms and really what it is.

It's about control right? It's about, you know, kind of having all of the pieces of the puzzle so that you kind of have the customers this active audience so they don't have to go elsewhere and then because you have that Customers that you're bringing forward you build an ecosystem right in the ecosystem around your environments leveraging, you know interfaces that you publish, you know partners that you have to qualify and a lot of cases they pay right for the privilege of being your partner and that's where you start to accret the benefits of the platform right Windows was you know, kind of maybe the most popular platform that we've seen, you know kind of in our world but you know, they're in in our kind of spheres of influence, right, you know devops security Cloud native infrastructure. There are lots of different examples of us, you know, kind of companies that have you know, straightened or strong I guess so would be the word um with you.

Yeah, follow me. I you know to be that platform player and right now I think a sense of we nobody would really argue with you know, Palo Alto networks really having positioned himself as you know, kind of a Any platform you have crowdstrike coming at it from the endpoint side of things is again another platform back in the day. It was right it was McAfee and and McAfee's partner program and originally it was checkpoint right in checkpoints opsec that really had these partner programs driving, you know kind of these Partnerships that really established the company as platforms and I guess the question that that we got to and you can use examples of devops as well.

But the questions we got to is does everything have to be a platform now right? There is the room for companies to do Niche type stuff or they all just sit in there waiting to you know, be acquired by the platform player and and it's kind of like a big game of musical chairs where if you're not, you know, kind of aligned with one of these platforms and ultimately, you know, kind of want to they required properties, right you are you sitting there, you know kind of standing up with the Music Stops. That was a lot of words may try me what would you You know some of those Concepts I threw out there and in Non-Stop rambling format.

That's pretty good. I'm not sure if you took a breath or not, but that's pretty awesome. I'm scaring you, you know, it's kind of like we've used to think about things of product Suites, right, you know Excel and Word and PowerPoint and whatever and that, you know, whatever security products or whatever but I think the thing that really changed the mindset and yes, they're in platform companies before today, of course, but I remember first working with AWS and this is 2008.

Kind of time frame pretty a fairly early pretty crude. Actually. It's I mean, they're interface was let's see their command line.

We had set up your keys or used a browser plug-in for I remember the name of it for Firefox Zone. Only thing that worked on anyway point being is that really assured in the air for the cloud of the portal and that's the place where you do everything and you get everything right the marketplace. Is there the services from that company is there the things I do with their services are all there and that's that's kind of this same platform strategy that a lot of folks because because they're in the cloud already.

They have an interface that UI for you to you know, log on and use their stuff or sometimes, you know, it is on-prem and not in the cloud yet or it's both but that sort of pushes you to do that, but I think it's all so that You know, you can solve any one individual problem, you know observability tracing or API gateways or picture, you know, your your preference of specialty and they're definitely is an opportunity to specialize but I think there's a real tendency to diversify or to couple with that complementary. Products and services and I know I'm doing my ramble bed here. I know from my own experience.

That's a double-edged sword because it can all it can make you very attractive but it can also limit you who's gonna acquire you because company is looking at requiring you but they have three of your four things already. They don't value that they just want the fourth and maybe you sell it for the fourth, but you kind of like I got all this other stuff what I do with that too. So it's in we can't all be on everybody's platforming.

No, just everything everything can't be I think that's the answer right everything can't be a platform. So so I think and really what it is, it's incumbent upon customers and this is kind of a whacking thing right the customers end up having to figure out which of these aspects are they doing? What is their tool chain gonna look like, you know how they can integrate all of these pieces together and you know, I think the larger the Enterprise the more capability they have to you know, really mix and match and and do Through best of breed right?

Whatever that means Concept in terms of the the capabilities and the technologies that they bring, you know to the table where smaller companies I think do have to you know, look for more prepackaged integration and that's again in the world of security, right? That's where when you get to Market rapid 7 has a very interesting approach because it's all cloud-based and you know all very integrated starting obviously the vulnerability management that's where they came from but you know Sim security analytics. They've got automation.

They've got application security. They've got Cloud security right all under the auspices of one platform and they have services so, you know MDR and our managed detection and response and Pen testing and it's response and a lot of these things under one umbrella, right? So it makes the customers job easier and I think the the lower, you know, and the less Soph Gated customer the more app they are to really kind of buy Hook Line and Sinker into you know, a specific you kind of companies approach, right?

So I'm doing an assessment or in right now doing some Cloud security work for a company and you know, they've kind of bought into everything from AWS, right? So their platforms they use only to be a security stuff. They got that you know, and and they don't use third party capabilities.

Yeah, right. So what I'm in there doing is trying to help them understand how mature their process help them understand both from a process and a tooling standpoint. You know what it is that they need to look at and the reality is they do have to start looking at some external tools because the platforms gonna give you a certain amount of stuff but nobody's gonna sit there and say AWS is best of breed in terms of a lot of these security things and you can look at a variety of different I think devops tools, right, you know where yeah, they've got tools that are there, but they aren't necessarily They going to be you know, topping each one of their specific disciplines again for a certain class of customer, that's fine.

Right but, you know kind of as you get more sophisticated I Think You're Gonna Want More robust capabilities and a lot of these different areas. I think again, one of the things about cloud is that also has its own lock and right if you're so tied into as your Amazon Google whatever services that makes it hard to say. Okay, let's move let's add a second or move to another you know, so if I if I kind of turn The Coin to the other side look at it from the software perspective but a developers are very independent bunch and they don't like you to say, oh we bought everything from this company.

So here you go. Here's all your stuff and maybe so not everybody is, you know, turn that down but they want some flexibility. They do like best to breed.

But then you have to watch out you don't get yourself into the tool integration business, but there's a there is I think a crossover point in the in the Enterprise Market Where it's we have too many vendors, we we can't afford to spend all that money with everybody. Let's try to pull our number of vendors to reduce that and that might be where you know, a gitlab kind of approach where it is sort of the full life cycle of yeah development to deployment because there's you know that take that kind of approach or moving in that direction. So so it's it's kind of both.

It just depends on the philosophy of the organization and how much the purchasing department has control over, you know, whether we're going to add another vendor or not in part at least part of it, but it's it's an interesting dynamic because one platform company buys another platform company which platform wins You know, which how do you make that part of the same one? And that's always right. And how do you help customers migrate to whatever the new thing is, right and that tends to be where it gets both very complicated and and fraught with Peril, right because he you know, and in some cases they don't make a choice and and then you just kind of end up with with a couple of different Walking Dead platforms that it's not clear where the investment is and they haven't made the decision.

So, you know, those are things when you when you do get some of these big, you know Acquisitions and it's not clear or a little bit nebulous in terms of what the product strategy is be very wary, right because that usually doesn't end well it's very difficult for organizations to you know, migrate that right, you know and to not have clear communication from the companies becomes, you know, very challenging but unfortunately it's hard right because you know, you've got a certain centralization of folks that are on one platform. You've got other folks on another platform. Who do you tell Is wrong, right and how are you going to get them there without you know opening up the whole environment to competitor coming in and of course me to change it's good just that's right.

I mean if you're gonna force me to change I'm gonna take a look at everything right and and making sure that you kind of keep those folks. You know in the family becomes becomes a challenge, right? So this is you know, and this gets to be higher level, you know, kind of vendor and and product strategy stuff that I find, you know specific, you know, very compelling and interesting and it's a lot of the work that I've done specialty of years it um, but the reality is at the end of the day customers don't care what they want is I need something to solve this specific problem.

I want to do it in what I hope to be a strategic way. But I've been doing this too long and not be specifically but most customers have been doing this too long to really have trust that you know, kind of yeah, it's all gonna work out great and they're gonna do exactly what they say and they're gonna actually fall asleep because that just hasn't been there experience that hasn't been my experience and that's what anybody's experience. I mean, you know integrating these platforms that you know, high level, you know, while the cars speeding down the mountain, you know tends to be again a very difficult function.

So so what Numbers do right. They really have to focus on the problem that they're trying to solve and they have to understand that flexibility is critical and a lot of what you just said. It's right apis and and micro services and modern architecture and devops, you know, pipelines gives you much greater ability to swap out a lot of these tools, right if you're in a big monolithic environment, if you build a set of applications on top of you know, or in AWS using predominantly serverless infrastructure, right?

How do you move that? How do you I mean it would be very difficult if not impossible if you're building everything within Lambda so understand that that's a decision as well. Right?

You know that platforming decision becomes an error, you know, they were vocal type of situation. So you need to go into both sides, right? You know, it's interesting because if you're in the you're using services in a cloud You obviously don't have the effort of okay.

I've got to go figure out what Hardware I'm gonna put it on and set all that up and then I can figure it for how I'm going to use it. You're gonna start right there. But so there's I think a natural advantage of being in the cloud makes it easier to maybe move because now I skip that step still it's not easy, but there's also to your what you're talking about is more and more we think of our environment as a declarative environment.

In other words, it's built by Script. It's done by terraform. It's done by scripts that are in in get and I can build an environment with the you know, push of a button or you know, executing a pull command from getting running running some code and you know in theory it's maybe easier to swap out some technology like, okay.

I want to change, you know this solution I'm using for, you know, I am or for for Dr. Or whatever it might be. It you could script that and test it and do all of that and not have to go through the whole brain dead part of it and figuring out how to set all this up.

Now. I don't know that all our environments or that neat and clean if they're that, you know, really because you know, you're using native services in some way shape or form, right? Because the the overhead it really building application environments that are truly portable and a lot of cases is not worth.

Mhm. Well, it's interesting just the difference. Is that a like a cloud platform vendor take so here's an example in the certificate Market.

Certificate Authority AWS is view is on you know, hey, that's no big deal. Right well issue certificates to whoever whatever kind of the identity of proving who you are who you are your customer. That's good enough for us go set up your here's the ca service you can generate certificates to your desire because the thing about it from a software perspective, but also end user whereas, you know, beginning of the traditional ca's in whatever form they are these days.

Yeah, that's a very different you know, who you are invalidating that and looking up your, you know, a standard of course code or whatever they do. You know is it's a different approach and it's kind of a threat to that market note that it's you know picking it away from them, but their software people they're thinking about it as a much different kind of service than a security company would think of it. That's interesting.

That's right. You know that one things that sparked our conversation too was service now acquiring aerosoftware, which apparently they're going to make part of the the light step. That's right.

A business unit or product organization which we work with them. Also. A matter of fact, I do a show with them called the SRE show.

So check that out on with Austin Parker and his team anyway. The thing of service now is that you know workflow automation management company. It's kind of like jira going from tickets into workflow.

Right and now the service now has moved into other spaces with observability. And and I think if I remember at the aerosoftware, it was aluminum Cloud native focused. Yeah, so it's you know to me it's kind of confusing in a way like are the workflow people gonna buy observability stock.

Where is it? Just make that single vendors think about it this way, right and and I think you know kind of it being Affiliated and and the plan being the folded into light step is is pretty illustrative of what their plan is, right? And that's you know, again if white step is really focusing on you know, SRE your platform engineering right, you know kind of getting and being able to analyze Telemetry is part of your, you know, platform management and platform, you know, kind of instrument.

Asian capability you gotta have the ability to do analytics on top of that. So so I think it's more matter of understanding that they're trying to build solutions for a specific constituent within that business group right. Now.

How does that impact you know and and how does lightstep fit into you know a huge, you know kind of work management tool like service now that's a different discussion, right? But, you know kind of looking as if if one step we're doing this as a standalone company, we wouldn't bad on eyelash, right? Yeah don't get distracted by the wrong things right now.

So it's like it makes sense given, you know, kind of the, you know, kind of Target that they're looking at but you know and again service now building that and they've made a number back positions on the security side to you know, trying to get in that's right in town trying, you know, kind of build it, you know more automation, which is really, you know, kind of something that would lend itself to what it is that they do but do they sell to the same folks, right? And that's kind of where you start to, you know, kind of see Are there are some limitations to this Uber platform concept and that you know, if you have to start traversing along buying Dynamics, that's a different buying motion, right? That's a CIO type, you know, CTO type of buying motion and this serves now have that relationship they do right?

You know, are they gonna you know, but when it gets pushed down to those functional leaders, does that type of company become credible and you know, that that's really the question I can tell you in security. It hasn't been at successful is you know already so much stuff you bet right? There are huge company, but are they perceived to be one of the big players in you know, kind of automating or instrumenting, you know kind of security emotions not really, right.

Can I get there? I don't know. I've been so much money.

They want to spend too establish themselves, you know in that space. So yeah, even platform companies have to pick their place, right? You know, they have to pick their constituencies.

They have to build Solutions specifically to make those folks. Easier because honestly unless you're pretty much Microsoft and nobody else has the breath of you know, kind of solutions that they do to really kind of Traverse. And transcend a lot of these organizational boundaries and they get to Microsoft's credit.

They've done a great job of managing, you know that process. Yeah, and their Trend transition to cloud services has been pretty astonishing frankly. That's one way to put it.

Yeah. So yeah, that's a it's a that's a big lift today and you can have your woes or your Pros with with Microsoft but it's pretty impressive what they've done. Alright, I mean how they transition the business and really what's interesting is is how they've you know, how they've avoided becoming the villain again, right, you know back in the day when they were mowing over, you know, tool companies and folding everything into Windows platform and an Anti-Trust and you know, they were the village, you know, they would there was no question about you know, kind of a company that folks, you know didn't really like and you know, they had folks that weren't necessarily lovable, you know running the company whether it was Bill Gates or Mom or I mean obviously have tremendous respect for what those folks did but you know, nobody said, oh I love these guys.

Oh philosophy it's you know, we own windows and if you want anything to do with it, yeah, that's right here, right and and you're gonna pay whereas where's what such has been able to do there is You know really kind of just stay out of the wars right? Let your go after Google right? Let all the retailers and everybody else go after AWS and we'll just stand out here on the side going.

You know, we're here guys. We have Azure, right? We have offers their Microsoft 365 we have you know, all these Security Solutions we have, you know devops tooling that we're starting to build in we're folding all these companies, you know into our platform but they're not being, you know, kind of douchey about it and and that again, you know one that's a huge culture Microsoft.

Oh, yeah, that's their place. You're 70 years at this point. So yeah, you know, it's not necessarily new but if you compare them to the Microsoft of 20 years ago, it's certainly it's and and again, I think it's appreciate when you talk to customers.

Yeah, I mean Microsoft is nickel and dying and dining them and and they don't love, you know, kind of I they constantly I gotta buy 50 Solutions, but you know, then they'll package it up as any five and five or whatever, you know the packages that gives you all the stuff. That you pretty much need and they make it very easy and financially, you know attractive to do more with them. And that's how much hour of the platform right they're still not fun to deal with when it comes the licensing and their programs it is I mean, you have to they have to hire third party specialists, you know to help you figure out what to buy in that track of course and that's you know, any platform has always had, you know, kind of the cost management folks coming in, you know, in order to help get your arms around that stuff that that's been on a true-ism.

I mean, but again, the reality is anytime you're spending ten to hundreds of millions of dollars with the company. You're gonna want somebody taking a look at that. Right just from the diligency.

I thought we thought of it as it doing our taxes. It came to renewing her like no. Yeah.

That's right. What do you do and it's really tracking because everything is usage base now, I think that you know kind of adds another Of complexity which is one of my you it was pretty you know kind of discreet before it's like am I using the tool? Am I not using the tool?

I'm not using the tool. Do I have to pay the mates right now that everything is a subscription and everything is is you know, he's the cloud a lot of things are our usage based. You really have to get a sense of how much of this am I using, you know, can I get to another volume tier?

What's the impact gonna be? So it's it's a far more complicated type of environment and and you get such more granularity or such additional granularity over what it is that you're doing from an activity standpoint, you know again getting on top of that is brutal, right? I hardly do anything on my AWS account right just more lab stuff and I play around, you know now and again and and I'll teach every so often out of those accounts and the reality is right, you know getting on top of that what we're spending.

I mean I get a 30 page Bill and I'm not even doing anything. Yeah, I don't leave those servers running until the next class, right? Oh, I did that.

Yeah, and that one with Microsoft and and my problem was I couldn't remember what account I was using. So I got this bill and I'm like wow that was this bill for and I'm like running through all the accounts I use and there are not, you know few of them. Yeah that gave me heartburn.

I burned up a bunch of time, you know, trying to find that out. will be interesting as we I mean, we could go so many places with this conversation, but he may be interesting to see you know, we talked a lot about sort of software and security integrating overlapping merging they put the also kind of have their own disciplines to and devops in the center of that, you know, as a you know devopsis of tools. No, it's how you create software but there are tools that help you automate through a devops process and that you know, that's evolving.

By the way. There's a great debate going on. Someone wrote an article.

The devops is dead. Like okay, there's some click made articles. Yeah.

I mean that's done but you know to again pick out some of our our stuff. I mean, you know kind of understanding a lot of those interactions and overlaps. That's a lot of what we're gonna be doing it for today.

Right? So we're gonna be both doing research in each of our different coverage area is and we're really gonna come forward with a vision of how a lot of these pieces fit together that's gonna drive a lot of what we do at Tech strong group in 2020. Very excited about that.

I'm going to be you know, kind of traversing along the you know, a couple of nice areas in Europe over the next couple of days and it's gonna give me some time to think right as I'm hiking between different places and you know kind of enjoying the scenery but you know, and again like you're one dimensional I get it right, you know, but I I will be thinking a little bit about how a lot of these pieces, you know kind of coming together because Now's the Time right? We're in Q4 folks. We got to really start thinking about, you know, kind of what 23 looks like.

So this idea of selecting your platforms strategically understanding how a lot of these pieces fit together, but ultimately making sure that you as the customers the consumer of these Services is making those decisions right that you are in charge of your infrastructure how you're gonna put this together what your cool chain looks like and how you're gonna you know, really support the emerging Requirements of you know kind of your business users and and consumers within within the environment. I mean, that's what we have to be focusing on as we start looking towards 2023. By the way, so we're talking about predict 2023.

It's scheduled for January 12th Market on your calendars. I know it's a few few months out there, but it'll be here quick and the the theme that's emerging is kind of Stand and Deliver. It's like yes, you had to deal with stuff in the pandemic.

And yes, we accelerated to move the cloud. Yes. We did these digital transformation projects and we did move to devops and yes.

Yes. Now you got to make it happen. We are counting on you to deliver soccer you're counting on you to be secure in the cloud or in Mobile or and whatever environment we're in our customers in and so it's you know, we have to execute when when Financial conditions get tough.

It's about performance. Right? I mean the Narrows you in here right on how we doing.

Let's get results. For sure for sure, so great this, you know again fantastic conversation a little bit off the coffin and I think that's when we do tend to do our best work is really just, you know, kind of brainstorming pulling on threads and and really seeing where we go coming to some conclusions, you know for listeners and and customers out there about the stuff that you should focus on. com everyone.

If you want to kind of focus on any bid on what you're doing or kind of share some of your experiences that would certainly be appreciated. So until next week Mitch be well, and we'll see you guys soon. Take care of many.

Thanks, Mike.