Chris Menier - GM Digital Transformation at Vitria

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Chris, the General Manager of Digital Transformation at Vitria, and we discuss the intersection of DevOps and AIOps, what a successful pivot looks like for a well-established organization, and how to get your team on board using empathy and enrollment. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) Hello, hello.

(Chris at 00:00:38) Greetings. It's a pretty good-looking studio you got there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) Thank you so much. It's official. You know it's a legitimate studio because we have a fake wall I'm not supposed to talk about.

(Chris at 00:00:50) Yeah, you got the shiplap thing there on the side. It's nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) Yep, yep. You don't have a fake wall. What's going on?

(Chris at 00:00:57) I don't know. I need one. It's the in thing, I guess. I don't have the cool palm tree in the background either or anything like that. This is stripped down. You get the bare bones Chris here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) It'd be so cool, though, if we pan your shot out and you were like on a movie set in a fake bedroom.

(Chris at 00:01:14) Yeah, right, right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) Oh, man. I was so excited when I was researching you, and the thing I thought was really cool right off the bat was that you founded an ISP when you were 19. What was that like?

(Chris at 00:01:29) Yeah. The story started out—my dad called me. I was in college. I was a computer engineering student, and he called me up, and he was a travel agent in a previous life earlier before he semi-retired. And he said, "I ran into this guy and he told me about this online travel agency, and I could be an online travel agent." And he goes through this thing. And he says, "I need you to help me set that up." And the first funny question was, "Dad, do you know what online means?" "Uh, no, not really." And so I went researching it and started to see what it cost to build a website, what it cost to host a website, what it cost to get people connected and all these other things. And I said, "You know, the real business that you want to be in is the internet service provider. You want to be on the other side of this transaction and not just the application or the online travel agency." And he says, "Well, go investigate what that means." And so I put together a business plan and said, "You know what? I've been thinking about this, and I think there's a real need here." And my mom and dad supported me and helped get the initial funding and things to go start an ISP.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) And where was that located?

(Chris at 00:02:43) Jeez, not far from where you are. Southwest Florida. Bonita Springs, Florida. One of our claims to fame is Bonita Springs was unincorporated at the time, and we hosted live online the first mayoral debate of Bonita Springs, Florida, for the first ever mayor of Bonita Springs, Florida.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:02) Very important. To this day, one of the most critical elections of our lifetime.

(Chris at 00:03:07) Oh, geez, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Kids will read about it in history books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:12) So how did you get the financing to build this business?

(Chris at 00:03:15) Yeah, so my parents are entrepreneurs at heart. My mom was a nurse and then left nursing to help my dad when he started video stores. And so this is pre-Blockbuster. And so they always had that entrepreneurial spirit. Like I said, they semi-retired down in Florida. And when I came with this idea, they said, "Okay, well, we'll help you get started." And so they gave me the initial loan to start that business. And the unique thing about Bonita Springs at the time—this was shortly after the Telecommunications Act, and they broke up the various phone companies, and they said you have to lease your lines back. And so there were these telecom islands that existed in Florida at the time, and unlimited internet access was just making its way. AOL was kind of just changing the game there a little bit on unlimited service. But a lot of towns inside Florida could only call their jurisdiction locally, and everything else then was this intralata call and was very expensive and so on. And so what we decided to do was connect those telecom islands, if you will, and offer unlimited internet to places that just couldn't do that before. They were racking up phone bills. And if I can tell you a little story about this, speaking of mayors, I got a phone call one day from the mayor of LaBelle, Florida, and it's a little town sort of more Central Florida. And the mayor said, "So how much can you support if I brought you a couple hundred clients?" At the time, a couple hundred clients is huge for my little business at the time. "Could you turn them on in a day?" And I said, "Well, sure. Yeah, I guess we could. But a couple hundred clients, Mayor, like, that's quite a bit." She said, "Well, we've never had unlimited internet access. And if you can truly deliver that, we would get you those clients. I bet everybody in the town would switch." And she lived up to her word. We got space in the Chamber of Commerce building to host the equipment, and she let us do that for free. We held a big barbecue out there and invited the whole town to introduce them to the company. And sure enough, we got about 225 people that signed up for unlimited internet access. It was probably the biggest hit we had in terms of one-day signups. It was a great day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:39) That's amazing. That's such a cool story. I know LaBelle. Yeah.

(Chris at 00:05:43) There's—sorry, please go ahead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:45) Oh, I didn't have much to offer. Just I'd been there a couple times because my sister used to keep her horse out there.

(Chris at 00:05:53) Oh, okay. Yeah, okay. So you know the area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:54) Yeah. Small town. There's a couple small towns like that with LaBelle and then there's Myakka and Bonita Springs and Wellington. And, you know, yeah. It's an interesting thing because most people, when you experience Florida, you go to a beach, right? And all the population is within 10 miles of the sea, right? But then 90% of Florida is not the ocean.

(Chris at 00:06:22) Yeah, yeah, no, that's right. And there's—you know, we're all learning it together too, and I enjoyed it. I mean, I can recall so many conversations trying to visualize what was on someone's screen as you're talking through because you can't download a browser at the time. It was just, you know, one, you're not connected probably. And two, if you are, it was so slow to download it. So we would be shipping CDs. And, oh my gosh, if someone called and had a Mac—I mean, I had special cheat sheets on how to set someone up who had a Mac because that was just so foreign to me. It was one out of every 50 people who would call. But yeah, we're all learning together at the time, and that wasn't so long ago when we think about it. This was 1997. And, you know, we're all learning together. And now here you and I are having this beautiful video chat while we're recording this podcast. And, you know, I have, what, 250 meg at my home now, and we were fighting for 56K. It's quite an accomplishment over the last 20 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:21) Yeah. I guess, I actually remember—so my dad, he would take me to work with him in his startup. They put these screens inside of golf carts. So you could, when you're at the pro shop, you're at the golf course, you could order food and the cart would know where you are, GPS, and bring it out to you. And this was in the mid-'90s. And the most difficult thing is, you know, you'd have to fly a group of people out there to do maintenance on the carts and all of that type of stuff. And then the pro shop people would sometimes have problems resetting it. So they ended up building this software that was essentially like a PC Anywhere type software because the engineers were so frustrated with walking them through these prompts and trying to see what was on their screen and not getting it that they ended up just building some software that allowed them to connect and screen share. And I just remember being—you know, seeing that happen and seeing them build the software and then watching them actually go from being on the phone to staring at their computer screen, seeing what the other person's screen was. And it was like a frame every three seconds.

(Chris at 00:08:27) Right, yeah, right, yeah, yeah. It's been incredible what we've been able to do, and it's what's kept me very interested just in the space in general. I mean, I wouldn't have thought—and it's funny that I recall the conversation now, but it was probably one of those throwaway conversations when one of my dad's friends was over, and I was in high school sometime, and he just said, "Hey, Chris, what do you want to do when you grow up?" "I have no idea." And he said, "Well, you should do something in the telecommunications world or something with computers, because these two areas are just exploding." And he was a video game tester at the time, which was just super cool to have a dad's friend be a video game tester. But, you know, I think about it now, and that was very—he was forecasting my future a little bit because, you know, you take those two industries together and you get the internet. And, you know, I've been involved in it since its infancy, basically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:28) And so what was the conclusion of that business? Do you still have it? Did you sell it?

(Chris at 00:09:33) We sold it. So there was a company doing rollups on behalf of EarthLink. And so it was actually a Canadian company that was doing rollups, and so they were buying, you know, small ISPs, local ISPs like ours—you know, sub-10,000 subscriber kind of things. And they went and did a big rollup strategy, and we were part of that rollup strategy, and then they ended up, I think, flipping that to EarthLink was their eventual strategy. But that really launched my career. I mean, it was four years, and that's what helped me get grounded in business. Obviously, you know, my parents being entrepreneurs, we helped out at the video stores and things like that. But this was really where payroll became, you know, my thing to worry about, and what do you do when a customer can't pay their bill, but you know they're a good person because you talk to them and you start to get to know them as you help them troubleshoot. And, you know, do you give this guy a free month just to kind of get him through hard times? And all that was very humbling and just taught me a lot about not just business, but just about, you know, how you serve your customer and what are the real important things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:44) And so what projects are you working on today?

(Chris at 00:10:47) Yeah, so I really, really like the analytics side of the business. And so when I could stay close to analytics and more from an operational standpoint, those are the type of projects that I get really interested in. So as digital transformation came about, what I really liked about it is trying to find those opportunities where, if you think about a Venn diagram here and the three circles that create the Venn are customer experience, the digital transformation itself—just, you know, the softwareification of whatever is going on in the industry—and then finally the operation side of the business. Finding myself in the center is really the stuff that keeps me interested because the operational side of it can be a real challenge. But what I like about it is it requires you to be engaged in the business all the time, and it requires you to really get down to the granular pieces of how the technology interplays with other pieces of technology. The revenue side is fantastic, obviously. But when you're in that operation side, it forces you to learn every bit of the business. So I try to find myself in opportunities where those three things converge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:00) And so this new company is called Vitra?

(Chris at 00:12:04) Vitria. Yeah, so yeah, so Vitria. It's—I've been with the company for about three and a half years. And it's a company that has some great, great, great roots. They grew up in the '90s. The founding team of JoMei Chang and Dale Skeen are still involved with the business, which is great. And they've gone through several iterations of the business. And this last one, I was brought in really to help them point this technology that they had developed and honed and the skills that they had from this engineering team with some great tenure, and really point it at a direction. You know, formulate the go-to-market strategy. And so when I started looking at what we had here, you know, I realized that they'd built up 20-year history on being able to handle high volumes of data. Complex event processing, you know, was in their roots. And being able to handle a big variety of data—you know, all that formula that goes into big data and analytics—they had the piece parts there. And then they had a lot of the workflow automation. And so when you tie that together, you know, it starts to look like the component parts for what we see now in the AIOps space or the artificial intelligence-powered operation space, or some people call it autonomous operation space. And so they had the piece parts there. You know, we had the components there, and we had the engineering team there. And it was really just pointing it in the right direction. And it's truly a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, right, in this situation here. So that's what I've been spending the last three and a half years doing. And we formally launched the product just at the end of last year. And so far, we've had, you know, great early success in a nascent industry of AIOps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:00) What's the difference between, like, AIOps and DevOps? Like, how do you differentiate between those?

(Chris at 00:14:08) Yeah, so in the DevOps space, actually, the two come together so nicely as well, just because the DevOps space causes so much trouble. So the DevOps space—it starts to bring in some of this CI/CD lifecycle that you start to see, right? This continuous integration, continuous development, and continuous deployment, I should say, that we're seeing come out of a lot of more things turning into software, right? Whether that's your infrastructure as a service, or whatever it might be. We're starting to see a lot more CI/CD. And what that causes is quite often a lot more change than we're used to. And so when you look at change, whether that's, say, deploying a new container because you're pushing an update of code or something like that, that can have unintended consequences. And what you see when you're trying to deliver an application in, say, a cloud environment—there's a lot of moving parts that are talking to each other, right? You have a host, which is, you know, where the software is generally. You have a client, which may be on a mobile phone, which may be on cable modem, which may be in a browser or somewhere, and you're trying to connect those things over a really, really complex network. And it resides on some virtual infrastructure which is underpinned by some physical infrastructure. So you have a lot of layers and a lot of moving parts. And sometimes when you just push one little small change, you can disrupt the customer experience, tying back to that Venn diagram I was talking about. So in the DevOps space, you're pushing change. You're kind of rapidly, you know, getting updates out there. You're putting new features out.

(Chris at 00:15:52) You can much more quickly deliver a new service or application to your customers, but you could break things at the same time. And so AIOps is really taking the signal from those different layers that I'm talking about and trying to fuse them together to really understand where the root cause may be and to really understand, when I push that change, did that disrupt the customer experience? Now can people not close out their shopping cart transaction? So the two of them converge actually quite well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) That's interesting. I'm trying to wrap my mind around this. So the purpose of the software is to understand if the customer experience is interrupted post-deployment.

(Chris at 00:16:34) Post-deployment or just because of a failure. So right now, in the normal sense, in the traditional sense in the IT operation space, you have a very siloed way that you're looking at your service delivery. There's a team that's focused on, is my infrastructure okay? Right? Do I have to replace a hard drive because it failed?

(Chris at 00:16:57) Is the CPU spinning out of control? Am I overutilizing memory? Is my I/O wait too long? Things like that. Then you have another team that's really focused on application performance.

(Chris at 00:17:09) Right? Are my API calls successful? Are my exits of my transactions happening in the right timeliness and things like that? And then you have finally a team that's focused on what's happening from a network perspective. Do I have congestions through a switch or a load balancer or a router?

(Chris at 00:17:28) Am I dropping packets somewhere? Something like that. And they're each independently monitoring those pieces. And when something breaks, you get a ton of these alarm storms or event storms that happen, and each of them are sort of in their silos trying to understand, why am I getting this alarm or an event? Is it part of a bigger thing?

(Chris at 00:17:48) Do I need to take some action? I better create a ticket or get someone engaged on it. And then finally, it gets to a point where everybody is together going, hey, wait a second. That might be related to me, and that might be related to me.

(Chris at 00:18:00) And, you know, the congestion that I'm seeing on the port is because of these memory exception errors that were because of this bad code that was running. And then finally the problem gets resolved, right? And at the same time, you know, you stripe it across the customer experience and you see frustration start to build. I can't use the application the way that I want to.

(Chris at 00:18:21) Maybe you engage with customer support or maybe you just quit and go somewhere else and find a competitor, right? And so that could be caused by change in the DevOps space, tying it back around, or it could just be caused by some failure that's happening in that network layer, in that infrastructure layer. So the purpose of our software is to detect what's going on, to correlate across those different layers, to analyze and discover what is the probable root cause, and then to get that to the right action, whether that's prescribing an automation—run some script, back out a change, reboot some device, deploy a new, open up a new port, you know, whatever it might be—or get it to the person who can fix it, right, and get it to the right person. And so that's really the purpose of the software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:11) That's pretty cool. I like the fact that it's focused on customer experience too, right? Because that's so important, because just like you said, if something's not working, I'm clicking a button trying to make a purchase on my phone, and it's like I can't buy it from here. It's not working.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:29) I just will go somewhere else. Like, I don't really care why it's not working. It's like that's over on them. I just need to do this, and I'm trying to complete my checklist, and I've got eight other things. I need to move on, so I'm going to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:42) And that happens. It happens from time to time. And I could see it could be costly for a company.

(Chris at 00:19:49) Well, absolutely. And we're trying to change the conversation inside of the operations teams as well. You know, a lot of the times you hear things like five nines of availability, you know, which means that the system has to function 99.999% of the time, or things like throughput or things like, you know, are all the lights green on their particular piece of equipment? And we're really at Vitria with our Via AIOps platform or application, we're really trying to change that conversation, change the way that the operations folks speak.

(Chris at 00:20:29) And you really want the first thing that they're thinking about is, are my customers having a bad experience right now? Is this red light or is this failure of this component—is this impacting the customer experience? And that's really what they should be first and foremost focused on. Because a lot of times there's resiliency and there's noise and there's all kinds of things that happen in a network. You know, hard drive fails, that's fine.

(Chris at 00:20:54) It's virtual, and something else is going to pick up its workload. But you really want to be focused on, is my customer experience negatively impacted right now? And if so, what's causing it and how the heck do I fix it as fast as possible? And that's really that focus change we want to make.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10) And I agree, right? It's a great place to start. It's like the beginning. So I'm curious to know, so inside of Via, that's the name of the product, correct?

(Chris at 00:21:19) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:19) Correct. So you have to, in order to tell if it's not working, you have to know what the working scenario looks like. So you define the customer experience inside of Via, and then it's monitoring that it's operating and running correctly. And then if something goes incorrectly, it's alerting and connected to all these other services to figure out how this incorrect—or how the failure happened.

(Chris at 00:21:47) Right. Right. So one of the differentiations is, you know, we're not just looking for these binary events—on, off, and things. So there's, that's a solved space in my opinion. That monitoring style of monitoring space is a solved space.

(Chris at 00:22:03) We're going beyond event correlation. Those are being known as an event, right? Some threshold was crossed or something, it's an event or an alert. We're going beyond the event correlation business, which was a huge business several years ago, which said, hey, all of these events are related. Okay, let's eliminate that noise. Now we're bringing in time series data as well, and we're generating our own anomalies and our own events, if you will, from that type of data as well. So we're not just seeing that a CPU cross some threshold.

(Chris at 00:22:36) We're not just seeing that an API time cross some threshold. We're actually baselining the normal condition, right? So we're baselining what the login rate would be. That's from a customer experience standpoint. We're baselining what the login failure rate could be. They happen. We're baselining how many times someone gets their password rejected. We're baselining things like how many times you buffer when you're watching content, or is your bit rate downshifted because you have network congestion. Those sort of baseline the customer experience, and we understand things like seasonality that occur.

(Chris at 00:23:11) 8:00 at night is different than 8:00 in the morning. Saturday is different than Tuesday night. All of those things go into really, really complex analytics that have to stripe across, you know, billions of dimensions at times. And so once we can understand that, we get that baseline condition. And that sometimes for us is the starting point.

(Chris at 00:23:30) When we see a change in that baseline condition, we take a top-down approach. Now we can drill really deep to find if there's some CPU that's gone wonky that might be causing this problem, versus right now you're trying to gobble all the data at once and you're trying to look for every CPU spike, every memory spike, and trying to make a decision of whether that's important or not. We've really flipped the problem on its head, and we start from the customer experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:55) I really like that. I think that's smart. I especially like this concept of like the dynamic baseline or like the intelligent baseline, because one of the biggest frustrations for me as an engineer, you know, scaling, was understanding—and the tools when we were setting them up, you know, there's a, you know, here's enter the threshold and there would be a little question box and you'd hover over it, and it was like a standard—it's like, well, who are you talking to? Are you talking to like Salesforce-size company?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:21) Are you talking to me, right? Like, you know, this tool can be used on shared hosting environments. It can be used, like, it could be used across an entire spectrum of use cases. I don't know what this threshold—I don't know when I should be alerted. That's what you're supposed to tell me.

(Chris at 00:24:37) Well, that's right. And what you see, and it sounds like you've, you know, you've been at the console doing these things, and you look at your trend line and you say, well, what's the highest point that looks normal? And I'm going to set it somewhere above that. And so if it goes somewhere above that, I want to know about it. Well, what happens when that spike, you know, only occurs once a day and every other time you're sort of living below that spike, but you have something that's between those two points and it persists for a long period of time?

(Chris at 00:25:08) You will miss that. And so by dynamically understanding what those baselines, by pulling that seasonality out, we can get down—let me give you an example here. We go down to the granular dimension level with these metrics. So I don't just want to know when login failures are occurring at a higher than normal rate.

(Chris at 00:25:28) I want to know when login failures for customers who are on a Roku device, in Georgia, who've authenticated from, you know, behind a known IP address, right? So now we've taken the millions and millions and millions of customers who are logging in, and we've narrowed it down to a population of maybe just a couple thousand. And we're looking at their individual behavior because then you can pull out those very nuanced issues that make up your baseline. So if we chunk apart that baseline even to those granular dimensions and combinations of dimensions, that's when you can pull out that real customer impact.

(Chris at 00:26:06) Otherwise, you're going to miss it. It's all going to be lost in the noise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:10) So, you know, I like that you're an entrepreneur as well as a technologist. I'm curious to know, like, how do you sell into the company? Are you selling into like user experience groups? Are you selling into DevOps, like, you know, technology engineering, SVP of engineering? Like, how do you present the value prop and get your foot in the door so that people can see this technology and understand how it can help them?

(Chris at 00:26:35) Yeah. Great question. And, you know, part of it is the entrepreneurial side, I think, helps a bit because you need to understand the business. And you really need to understand the business. And, you know, there's a lot of similarities between a bank and a cable company and a gaming company and things like that.

(Chris at 00:26:56) There's a lot of similarities in the way that the companies are structured and all the component parts that have to go together to deliver that service. So you need to get an understanding of that. And then, obviously, it can help if you get an understanding of, you know, that particular subject matter. But what I like about Via is we have a lot of entry points because we don't have to be monolithic. We're very non-disruptive in the deployment.

(Chris at 00:27:21) So we can start with the DevOps team and say, look, 30 to 50% of problems on the customer experience are generally related to change. Okay? And it's a reported fact that we see over and over and over again. It's unintended consequences of change, right?

(Chris at 00:27:38) And it could drive 30 to 50% of those experience issues. So we can go to the DevOps team and say, we can solve this one use case for you. And if you're already using certain tools, you're already using Chef and Puppet and others for automation, you're already using, you know, you're using Kubernetes in an environment to manage your containers, great. We plug right into those technologies. We're not creating this new workflow for you.

(Chris at 00:28:05) We're just going to plug into your workflow, and we're going to make it more efficient. Or you can go over to customer experience side and say, hey, look. You're looking at your big board right there about new signups and how much consumption is happening and so on. When you see the blips, you now are wanting to understand why, and that's a dynamic that we're seeing change.

(Chris at 00:28:28) And we're bringing that buyer, that business owner, onto the same page as the person in IT who's trying to fix that, you know, failed CPU. And so we can start from the customer experience folks and say, see that blip right there? We can help your team understand why and we can get it resolved for you faster. Or, of course, you can really go into the IT operations or the network operations teams. So we have multiple entry points where we integrate with existing technology, existing workflows, and then we can expand to other use cases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:58) That's pretty cool. I'm kind of getting this concept of like AIOps analytics, right? Because once you connect into the pipeline, because I'm familiar with all of those things like deployment tools, and it seems that there's more and more services that are now plugging in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:13) Like, the other day I was talking to a security company, and they do like static code analysis from a security perspective. They've got like the whole library. You are already doing static code analysis to make sure that it met like your developer criteria for how code should be styled. But now you can also use that same technology to go check for security. And then there's all of these things being plugged in, and it makes sense that there would emerge a utility that would plug in that would capture data on all of this and develop analytics and allow you to filter and sort and search and do all of that type of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:45) That's pretty cool. Is your model set up to where developers can go and like install this into their pipeline and start gathering analytics right away? Or do they go through—

(Chris at 00:29:57) Yeah, it is. We have integrations with hundreds of different tools, like you were mentioning there, as well as, you know, just grabbing raw syslog or, you know, tapping into a Kinesis feed in AWS or whatever it is and just capturing raw data like that as well. And so the turn-up's really quickly. I mean, we deploy in minutes, right, as as you'd expect a lot of things do today. And you can start seeing value as soon as the, you know, the data is to a point where you have enough of it to be meaningful or not. And so sometimes it takes, if there's historical data and you can grab a few weeks, well, great.

(Chris at 00:30:35) Your models are trained right out of the bat. You know, if not, your models will get better and better and better. We bootstrap them such that right out of the box, you're going to start to get some impact. You're going to start to get some benefits. But after, you know, three weeks' time or so on, those models just get better and better and better.

(Chris at 00:30:51) And the approach that we take is, you know, we're not just trying to be—let me try to make a parallel to when big data first became a thing and Hadoop was first becoming a thing. You know, there was this rise and desire to hire data scientists, and there still is, and I'm glad. I love it. Some of the best people I work with are data scientists. It's a lot of fun.

(Chris at 00:31:16) But, you know, there was this utopian sort of thought that if I get all the data and I put it all in the same place, and then I point some data scientists to it, magic is going to come out the back end. And problems with this is wonderful. All the problems are going to be solved. We're never going to lose a customer again. And this is what we need to do.

(Chris at 00:31:36)
And I see a bit of that with analytics as well, which is let's analyze all the data in real time as fast as we can, as much as we can. But a lot of times that just creates more noise than you want. So going back to, you know, like you said, security doing basically just code checks and things like that, that is information that may come to play when it's necessary, but maybe not all the time. You may not need a live stream of some of this kind of stuff. You may want to keep it and get to it when you need to.

(Chris at 00:32:09)
So developers can plug it in. They can have it there. We're going to capture stuff at that experience layer, but then what we allow you to do is get to that raw data as fast as possible as you need to. So we're going to tell you, this is important. You're having a customer problem right now.

(Chris at 00:32:25)
We think it might be related to a security breach. Here is the information we have available based on the security breach. We think this is the root cause. And if the really smart person needs to get down to the log file or down to the code level, just follow the path and we're going to get you right there as fast as possible. But we don't need to necessarily be analyzing all that stuff all the time.

(Chris at 00:32:47)
I hope the point's coming across.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:49)
It is. Yeah. I mean, I remember about two years ago, I was talking to Yasser. He's a CTO over at Williams Sonoma. And he was sharing with me these stories about these concepts of data lakes turning into data swamps because they don't have intention. And my big takeaway from him was this discussion he had with me about focusing on the outcome and working backwards from the outcome. And if you know exactly what you want, then you go grab those pieces of data in order to test that hypothesis or figure out if that's the correct thing. And then you just keep going down that list versus he was noticing this trend within the industry where people were just being obsessed with collecting the data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:32)
Like everyone turned into a TV show Hoarders or something. Right?

(Chris at 00:33:35)
Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36)
They just want all the data in one place because it's better than not being in one place. And it's like, what's the purpose of it?

(Chris at 00:33:42)
Yeah. Yeah. No. You're absolutely—it sounds like he and I will get along quite well. But yeah. And our purpose, you know, is that customer experience. And I know I'm sort of beating on this, but I think that's so key right now. It's such a differentiator in the market when technology has allowed us to provide very, very similar products. Sometimes the differentiator is that customer experience. And, you know, so that is our purpose.

(Chris at 00:34:07)
And so when we go out seeking to make that the best for our customers' customers, that's our purpose. And then what we understand is, great, the first things we need is this, and then sometimes we need this, and then very minimally we'll need this, but I'm going to get you to it when you need it. I'm not going to waste resources, time, energy, dollars, make a bunch of noise just because it's available to us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29)
If people want to go use it, how would they do that? They want to go experience it.

(Chris at 00:34:34)
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So we love to show off our stuff. And so, you know, obviously, just come to our website at vitria.com, and you'll see availability to get demos. You'll see availability to do pilots, and you can get there, and you'll get hooked up with some of our folks who can get this launched for you really quickly and let you stretch its legs a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58)
Excellent. From the business side of things, I was interested to know more about—I was reading and I saw that the company was private, public, and then back to private. How did that happen?

(Chris at 00:35:12)
Yeah. So the initial public offering was at a great time. It was in the late nineties as you may have read there. And we had a very, very successful go in the BPM space. And, you know, we were probably one of the founding companies of that space. And that was a great, great product for us. Businessware was a great, great product for us. But as that industry matured and commoditized, the founders actually came back and took the company private because they saw the vision of the technology components that were there. They saw the vision of the team that they had been really, really successful with before. And they said, look, we're going to go into a place where we're going to kind of go back into stealth mode here a little bit, and we're going to come out the other end, and we're going to participate in this big data analytics space.

(Chris at 00:36:07)
And so they took the company private to allow themselves to focus on that. And after a few years of development, you know, we first launched as an AIOps application. And we got initial user base on there. We did some very large scale deployments for big retail companies, big utility companies, telcos, and things. And the common thread that we were able to pull out was operational intelligence, and now what has sort of turned into AIOps, that space was very new at the time.

(Chris at 00:36:41)
And then we realized, you know what? The platform business, there's a lot. There's a lot of competition in that space, and there is absolute white space in the AIOps space here for what we do around the focus on customer experience, around our ability to go beyond just event correlation and consolidation, and bring in the time series analysis, bring in the anomaly detection piece, and really look across the entire ecosystem. So we did that. We brought in some explainable AI, and we said, let's launch this as an application. And that's the sole focus of the company at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:19)
And so you weren't one of the original founders of this company. Correct?

(Chris at 00:37:25)
Correct. Correct. I joined them about three and a half years ago. The founding team did come back, and so it is the original founding team. JomMay is the CEO and Dale is the CTO. They invited me in, you know, three and a half years ago to go on this journey to really put this go-to-market strategy in place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:44)
And so you as a person, why not start your own company again? Like, what caused you to want to come work and do the job here?

(Chris at 00:37:55)
Yeah. A lot of it was speed. When I first sat down with Dale and JomMay, we got into talking about the product really, really quickly, kind of what they had. And they invited in one of their senior engineers here, and we started playing around. And it sounds a little ridiculous now as part of an interview process, but I said, well, I got some data. If I gave you that, do you think we could maybe do something really quick? And I ended up spending the day at the office with one of these senior engineers, and we had a prototype built by the end of the day. And that's when I said, okay. I got to do this. I mean, just the speed at which the technology assets that were available to me at Vitria would allow us to get to the end state was really exciting.

(Chris at 00:38:44)
And it just made the decision easy for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:46)
I feel you. Like, being able to work with people who have the product, they're there, they have the energy, they have the speed, they have the resources. It's like a very attractive opportunity, especially if they're going to empower you to just run with it.

(Chris at 00:39:01)
Yeah. Absolutely. And they've given me nothing but support. It's been a really great journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:05)
So from a leadership perspective, how do you view leadership? Like, when people talk about it because it's such an ambiguous term. Right? Everybody's discussing it. Like, what pops into your head when people start thinking about leadership?

(Chris at 00:39:19)
Yeah. Two words, empathy and enrollment. And the empathy piece is, you know, candidly something I've had to learn over time and I've sort of matured into more. And it's really, you know, you have a vision in your head and a direction you want to go and, you know, you have to really empathize with the different personalities that you're working with. And when you come into a company that has a lot of history like Vitria did, you know, to go to a team and say, hey. This is the way that I think we want to point the company, and this is the direction we want to go. To remember that they've made investments in technologies and directions and other things there. And, you know, it's sort of stepping back for a second and understanding that you need to now converge to that other word I used, enroll. You know, you need to enroll these guys in this first, but you need to first understand their perspective. You need to first understand, hey, what have you been doing here for the last five years, ten years or so that you've been at the company?

(Chris at 00:40:24)
What's been successful for you? Maybe we can tweak this concept. You can certainly help me strengthen this concept. And, you know, that's leadership is not just coming in and saying this is it. This is the way we're going to do it, but it's really, really putting yourselves in a position to open yourselves up to the accomplishments and the ideas and the personal positions that these other folks are in and how they can help you achieve that vision.

(Chris at 00:40:49)
So that's one big part. And the enrollment part is when you do lock in on that, you know, you want these folks to go on the journey with you. You don't want to pull them along. You want them to—you want to be in their wake. You want to get them so excited and enrolled in what the possibilities are and enrolled in what the end game is that you're riding their wake instead of the other way around.

(Chris at 00:41:11)
And that's one of my favorite parts about it is I try not to do it. I tell myself when I'm—try not to be too much of a cheerleader when I get in some of these meetings, and then I find I've just been talking for fifteen minutes about nothing but how excited I am about, you know, this new feature that we just rolled out or something. And, you know, it's just that you got to keep people up to—you have to, sorry. Let me just ground this in part of the conversation that we had before about the IT staff who may not know that that red light means that people can't close a transaction, people can't book a flight, people can't log in to their video application. It's the same thing.

(Chris at 00:41:51)
The engineer who you're asking to build a feature for you, they need to know why. They need to understand how is my customer going to use it? How is this going to improve our product, and what is the use case at the other end? Oh, wow. They can find this thing faster, and that means that their customers, you know, their revenue will go up.

(Chris at 00:42:09)
Whatever it might be, that's the enrollment piece that you need to bring down and across all levels of the organization. And that's when I think we can get in the wake of the organization versus dragging them along with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:20)
I like it. And as you're describing this, it's what I've seen talking with all of these different leaders is some of the best companies that have the best cultures, leadership, things like that, it seems like they have a steady stream of people coming there because of their reputation to want to grow themselves and become better leaders. And at the same time, they have the leaders leading constantly. And it's because it's like they have this flow, and they've created a process or a system, this environment where people just come through to do their best work. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02)
And—

(Chris at 00:43:03)
Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:03)
Then they're constantly bringing up people, learning, maturing, growing, doing their best work, and then going on to the next thing. And it was interesting because I first started with this, you know, from like I was talking to some HR people and it was all about retain, retain, retain. How do we keep them from leaving? And then, like, you know, you're watching a movie and you're like, if you love it, you got to let it go. It's like, how do these ideas mix together?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:27)
Right? And for me, it's—I really—I think Walmart Labs or Walmart or Walmart Labs, one of those, I had just noticed, like, a lot of people I was talking to were there, like, ten, fifteen years ago. And there were people that were consistently impressing me. One of them actually to touch back to it was Yasser from Williams Sonoma. And so I went back and asked him because I had him on the show, and then a year later, I went out and gave a talk to his whole IT organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:58)
And so I was asking him. He's like, yeah. There's just a bunch of great people. There was a bunch of, you know, excellent culture, and that environment is just like producing great people now. And so I'm always asking myself, you know, how do I help create an environment that yields great people versus an environment that tries to hold on out of fear of leaving?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:20)
And so that's just a question I'm constantly asking myself and learning from.

(Chris at 00:44:25)
Yeah. And it is—I think it's a continuous journey. Right? Because, going back to the empathy part, people's needs change over time. And gosh, like, you know, everything we're going through now with COVID and how much that's changed, just working environments and working from home.

(Chris at 00:44:42)
People's needs change, and, you know, great companies can understand those, can adapt quickly to them, and, you know, can say, look, I understand what my employees are going through right now. So, you know, how do we change maybe some of the policies that we have? How do we change some of the working environments that we have to best support and lift up our employees? And, you know, that's one of the easiest things you can do, but a lot of times not all companies do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:17)
Well, it's hard. It's easy to snap back at somebody. It's hard to deliver something in a palatable way or a way that, you know, doesn't lose the relationship. Right? Like, I heard this one quote once, and it was you can win the argument and lose the relationship.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:36)
And I was just like, whoa. That was so much truth for me because there was a long part of my life where I just cared about proving that I was right because I was right, but you can lose the relationship, and it's not about that. And so, you know, it's interesting to like look at yourself on a timeline of the different mindsets you've created or you've experienced over the course of your career. But I'm always—the thing that gives me sort of like comfort there is I'm consistently getting better. I'm not playing that part.

(Chris at 00:46:11)
And, you know, you need to check in with yourself like that as well. And I think if you can have an honest discussion with yourself, I think that's really important to continue to do that and measure yourself. I was talking to one of my classmates. I'm currently going through an MBA program. I was talking with one of my classmates the other day, and he mentioned he was on a podcast or not a podcast. It was a video conference or something with Magic Johnson. We throw that in. And an interesting takeaway that he had is he said that Magic Johnson does a SWOT analysis of himself twice a year. You know? And he checks in with himself constantly about how to be a better person.

(Chris at 00:46:54)
I just thought that takeaway, you know, resonated with what you just said is this is something he does on a regular basis. He checks in with himself and making sure I'm making improvements. And, you know, I think it's a great practice and we certainly have to sit back and ground ourselves. Nothing grounded me like having kids and then as my kids get older and you can communicate with them and as my kids are going through the struggles they're having. Wow.

(Chris at 00:47:16)
Did I learn a lot in the last six months just about, you know, how kids process all of this stuff and what it means for them not to be at school and, it's—and that gives you an opportunity to sit back and check in with yourself. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:31)
What ages?

(Chris at 00:47:33) 11 and eight. So a middle schooler and a third grader. And, you know, at first they would, you would think that, oh, this is great. We're not going to school. It's really fun.

(Chris at 00:47:44) And boy, oh boy, you know, they miss it and the frustrations of technology and everything else, you know, sort of makes you realize what do you talk about at dinner is a bit different. Instead of how was school, how was this, we're kind of done talking about that a little bit. Let's just, you know, how are you? And it's been an interesting shift that we've seen because just the nature of everything that's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:07) Yeah. I have a three-year-old girl and a 1.5-year-old son.

(Chris at 00:48:12) Alright. It could go, I know everyone has said this to you. It goes by fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:18) And that's what makes it great. Like, I'm like, thank you. Those are words of, you can't tell me. No. It's definitely getting easier, I'd say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:27) Like, it feels like it's getting easier. You know, once they can feed themselves and walk around and go to the bathroom by themselves and start forming five-word sentences so they can kind of tell you what they want, you know. It's definitely, it's wild. Yeah. It's a crazy ride.

(Chris at 00:48:43) And it only gets better. I can tell you. I mean, every age has its great pieces and it only gets better. I was, the presidential debate, and I'm not going to get into politics for sure, but the presidential debate for my daughter won. She had a journalism class, which I just thought, this is cool. It's not just reading, writing, arithmetic. Like, you have special classes now.

(Chris at 00:49:00) And, you know, she had to sit, and part of her project was to take notes and come up with a thesis or come up with some statement at the end of this. And that was such an interesting experience, not just because of, you know, tying it into politics and what's happening now, but just the fact that, my gosh, you were just forming five-word sentences, and now you're forming an opinion on a presidential election. And boy, it happens fast and you look over to that and that just makes you really proud and just, you know, again, it grounds you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39) Did you catch on Netflix the Social Dilemma documentary?

(Chris at 00:49:43) I did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:44) How do you feel? You have kids. They're getting to that age. Like, what, how did that, did it change anything for you about how you think about it?

(Chris at 00:49:52) Well, so it excelled. Being home, online school for them accelerated the use of technology quite a bit. You know, they're on Teams and their teachers actually, you know, strongly advocate for them. Like, email is so ancient and who uses that anymore. And so communicate with me on Remind, communicate with me on Teams. And so, while we have been, like, hey, we're not going to let them on social media for this, you know, these sort of normal discussions you have with yourself as a parent, this is just what it is. And so they now have email addresses. Now they have technology that they're always connected to, and now they are on social media. Now, again, it's a different form of it through school, but they are. They're with 600 or so classmates, and they can all communicate with each other.

(Chris at 00:50:43) And all of that happens so much more quickly than we were expecting. So we didn't get that opportunity, I think, to sort of, you know, go through what's the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it. And so what we're doing is really just trying to see how they're engaging with it and, you know, see those parts where you may have to think about a different strategy. But for right now, we're letting them sort of learn on their own a little bit. But the Social Dilemma, watching some of those, being in the technology space like you and I are, you know, maybe some of the shock isn't as much as is watching it with somebody who's not in the technology space. We're kind of nodding our head going, yeah, we knew they were doing that. Yeah, we knew they were doing that. So perhaps that's why we're planning on being a little bit more guarded, you know, with our kids with social media. But it's not going away. Right? It's going to morph.

(Chris at 00:51:38) It's going to change. It's not going away. There's a lot of positive that's come out of it. There's a lot of good if we look at the Arab Spring and movements like that that have popped up and been enabled by social media. You know, there's a lot of real positive things that have happened. And so I think a part of it is just teaching responsibility. And if you can take that, you know, concept of bullying in the classroom and you can bring it digitally, you know, that's going to go a long way. So there's just a lot of things that we can do to be mindful of how it's being used. But I think it's silly to sort of, you know, think that it's going to go away because I just don't see that happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:16) Yeah. First, when they were talking about how the girls, specifically, the females with, like, those social interactions and how they're using it versus how the boys were using it, it was, you know, with me having a daughter, I was like my first reaction is obviously just, like, fear. Right? Like, oh, no. Never letting her have that, period.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:37) Yeah. And then, you know, looking at the graphs that they showed of how it was impacting, you know, the children and things like that. But then after sort of, like, thinking about it and mulling it over, I said, you know, parenting, being a good involved parent is just going to become more important. Like, you know, your kids can be going through this stuff. They can be getting bullied, and you can either not be involved in their lives and not even know that they're getting bullied, or you can be coaching them through their ups and downs and, you know, understanding who they are and, you know, stepping in when you need to step in and letting them fall when you need to let them learn and grow because the environment's definitely not going to go away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:22) Right? So it's not like this messaging environment or this connection environment is going to disappear or be a fad like if you were back in the day. Right? The kids, they were listening to a certain song or album. You could take that album away. There was no iTunes. There was no internet. They just couldn't connect into that source anymore if you didn't like what it was doing to them. But now they can connect. They can get VPNs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:45) They can get around stuff and they can do whatever they want if they have enough desire to figure it out. And us being technologists, we know that to be true. Right? So it's just going to put a premium on the importance of being an involved parent. And, you know, maybe, you know, people, you know, partners, husbands, wives type feel like maybe they don't work two jobs. Right? Or maybe one works less so they can spend more time with the kids and being involved as a parent because it's just, I see a lot of chaos happening in the world, and when I see that, I'm like, okay, and then I see some people sort of, like, giving up and being like, oh, it's, and I'm like, no, you have to, it's just putting more importance on being a responsible individual, which is, you know.

(Chris at 00:54:35) You have to double down at that point. You can't walk away. You've got to double down on the interactions. And you said it there is, being there is the most important thing. And then the second piece that my wife and I, you know, certainly push is really teaching them to be strong independent people.

(Chris at 00:54:53) And, you know, that goes for them having responsibility to turn their homework in and them having responsibility to, you know, if they have the ability to redo the assignment and get a better grade, to want to do that and redo that assignment. It's teaching that independence, which I think will pay off in spades because I think it's all related. If you can teach them that independent thought and that empowerment, they will push that forward into their communications on social media, into their decision-making as they get older. And I think they'll leave, you know, our house in a stronger position to face a really, really hyper-connected world. And so, yeah, those are two big things.

(Chris at 00:55:36) One, we're there. We're engaged. We know what's going on. But two, really teaching them independence is an empowerment, is the biggest lessons that we can do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:47) Yes. And I just learned so much too. It's like all the leadership lessons and things that, you know, when you see it, it's like it's one thing for it to happen at work. Right? Because it'll happen and you'll have that experience. But when you have to deal with these extremely emotional, you know, animals at your house that are hungry and they don't understand that the food's coming in five minutes, it just for me, it was just like rapid fire. It's like every month, you know, new, like, every interaction, essentially, I'm like, oh, I get it now. I just, reinforcing these understandings of how people work because you're just, it's like if I were to take a computer person, like, today. Right? A lot of us write software, and we don't, you know, do the hardware down low.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:32) Right? And we're just sitting up in the stack. And if you try to go down today, it's near impossible because all of these chips and everything, they're cut with lasers, and it's, they're so microscopic. But if you take someone back to, like, the fifties when the computers were, like, the size of a room and you could show them the tubes and stuff and they're, like, the two or three components interacting, it's, like, very, very simple. And so I feel like there's an analogy back to, like, the kids when you see the humans at these very early stages with these very simple drives and desires, it's really easy to understand how they work. But when you get them on their way more mature and complex in advance, it's like, what is going on under the hood? What software update did they get? They need some software to track back some of those poor user experiences in that human.

(Chris at 00:57:17) Yeah. What happened that broke? What is the root cause of this behavior? Yeah. Yeah.

(Chris at 00:57:22) Well, if that comes out, I'm in. I'm going to be an early buyer of that for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:28) We'll get you to make a Via app for the Neuralink App Store once that thing comes out.

(Chris at 00:57:34) That's right. That's right. I like it. I like it. It'll be my next venture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:37) Chris, this is fantastic. Is there anything we want to get out there to the world that we didn't cover yet?

(Chris at 00:57:43) No. I think this was great. I mean, honestly, we're there. Like I said, we love to show off our stuff. So, you know, come give us that opportunity. I think that's what we want to put out there is, if you're a company that is just laser-focused on the customer experience and you think that's your differentiator, then we have like minds and we should talk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:05) And we'll put the website in the show notes. But for people who don't have it, how did, is it your website slash demo or?

(Chris at 00:58:11) It's vitria.com, vitria.com. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:15) Amazing. Boom. We did it, man. We made a podcast. You feel good?

(Chris at 00:58:19) Alright. Yeah. That was great. Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:21) Excellent. And you have a fantastic day, my friend, and we'll talk soon. Okay?

(Chris at 00:58:24) Alright. You do the same. Thanks. Thanks, everybody. Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:26) See you, Chris. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected].

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:48) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.