Radically Transforming Observability with Tony Davis & John Balsavage from A&I Solutions

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Tony Davis and John Balsavage from A&I Solutions about the radical advancements in observability, and we're finding out what's in the box.

(Tony Davis at 00:00:12) What you saw was that inside the box was glowing. Okay? And so I'm going to show you what's in the box in a minute.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:19) You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) So you both been on Modern CTO. You, I think, were episode like 300. You've been on more recently, but what's going on in your world today?

(John Balsavage at 00:00:35) The biggest thing is we, A&I Solutions, work with some of the Fortune 500 and just trying to make things easier for people to get stuff accomplished, get things done. Everybody's got a huge stack of work to do. Right? As we focus in on enterprise monitoring, kind of boring. I don't talk about it at parties, but as you talk about it in business, people have more and more to deliver, and it's got to be faster. It's got to be now. And we're doing some fun things to try to make it easier.

(John Balsavage at 00:01:07) And so we're going to talk a little bit about Scout.ai and how that really kind of evolved from a six-month implementation of enterprise software to just something that can really get up and running in a matter of days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) But so I know you both independently. I didn't know you knew each other. Maybe when did you meet?

(Tony Davis at 00:01:25) About a year ago. Yeah. So right after the last time when I was on your show, and by the way, you know, Joel, he knows that I've been talking for many years now about the concept that there could be a single score for reliability. Right? And so I've been with other companies. I met you with Broadcom. And but then I left Broadcom and came to work for John.

(Tony Davis at 00:01:46) And he's got a long history, sort of like me, veteran type IT guy. You know, I pitched the idea to John and said, hey, I really believe in this. And I told him the history. Right? I started working on this formula 15 years ago and just had a lot of hiccups along the way, but it's finally there now. And when I pitched it to John, I said, because he had the platform. Right? So he has the Scout.ai. And I was like, what would it mean to people to be able to see this reliability score inside of that platform? And so that's how we got together.

(John Balsavage at 00:02:19) You know, and what's amazing about it is, like, we're both just like, I don't know, kind of like old farts. You know? It's just like, and people have been talking about this stuff for over a decade easily. Right? You know, the single pane of glass, you know, and how to make sense of things. And then we was talking about the reliability score. That so much makes sense. Right? If you talk about data loss or latency or path indexes, you know, it's just like, no. Can we talk about reliability? Does it work or doesn't? How well does it work? Right? And I was like, yeah. That makes sense, and it's easy. Right? And I can actually talk to people about that. I can talk to my wife. I was like, look. It's reliable. She's, well, I get that. That means I can, you know, make my purchase on Amazon in the middle of the night. Right? And that's the whole, that's, you know, it feels like things are actually coming together today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Have you shown this to Adam Barat? I think we did that panel with him. I haven't. I know he's going to want to see it. He's going to want to see it.

(Tony Davis at 00:03:14) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:15) He's an observability nerd, a reliability nerd. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:03:18) Yeah. Yeah. It's been under, we've done a pretty good job, I think. I think John would agree. We've done a pretty good job of keeping it sort of under wraps while we finish development. But, you know, we're learning more and more every day that we build this thing. And we wanted to wait till we could get with you to unveil.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:36) Thank you. Was Scout, so it's Scout.ai.

(Tony Davis at 00:03:39) It's Scout.ai now. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:41) Was it Scout.it? Was that already an existing product and you saw that and then you came in with the AI component? Yeah. Okay. So you already have customers on it. It's already in use.

(John Balsavage at 00:03:50) Yeah. So Scout.it really kind of just started around Scout.it monitoring. Right, and how to get the monitoring, again, from a six-month deployment to just a couple of days or a couple hours even. And then working with Tony, he's like, yeah, I love this. As you're focusing on cloud application monitoring, you know, the networks related to it, the network monitoring. He goes, but the information that you're getting, we got to make it even easier, more consumable. And that's where the Reliability Index came into play. And then we just added in, as he was like, okay, what about AI?

(John Balsavage at 00:04:24) And now we're like, okay, well, how do we leverage it? How do we get the customers to use it, and what are they going to get out of it? Right? And all of a sudden, we're putting AI against what I consider really boring data, but getting some really interesting results immediately. We're not having to do, like, a three-month study or, you know, hire another consulting firm or do anything crazy like that. It's just, it's happening like now and like in front of you. You're like, oh my god. That is powerful. And it's actually kind of fun.

(John Balsavage at 00:04:54) I was, you know, it's like the first time, you know, like, we've been dealing, people have been dealing with this stuff for decades and decades and decades, and, you know, who wants to talk about networks? Right? No. But nowadays, like, everybody's getting re-energized about, we're doing some fun cool stuff with network information and reliability and optimization, and it's, it's kind of fun. It's reenergizing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:16) Yeah. Well, those data centers are growing at 500, a thousand percent. The compute is just taking off.

(John Balsavage at 00:05:22) For sure.

(Tony Davis at 00:05:22) Yeah. The power it takes to even be able to run GenAI is amazing. So that's why every time I see a press release, like, from the big companies like Broadcom or NVIDIA or whatever, I realize why they're getting this much business is because to build the stuff like we're trying to push out to the market now takes a ton of power.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:42) Oh, yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:05:43) John actually gets the credit on the AI piece. I've always been focused, as you know, on the score, right, and that algorithm. And I told John one day, I think this is before we talked AI, I said, you know, I can do analysis on this score and do backtests and all that kind of stuff, right? And it take me, I can get it done for any company. I can get it done in a couple of days.

(Tony Davis at 00:06:05) And he says something like, man, it's a shame that we can't use AI for that. And he has contacts at Amazon. Right? And so next thing you know, he's got his meetings with Amazon. They have Anthropic, which is their big, you know, foundation model for, or one of their foundation models for GenAI. And sure enough, it was that moment that I've told you about before, that crystal moment. And when we saw what we could do with it, it blew us away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:29) So Amazon has Anthropic?

(Tony Davis at 00:06:33) That's one of their foundational models if you sign up with, they call their platform Bedrock.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:38) Oh, okay. And so, but that's not to be confused with Claude.

(Tony Davis at 00:06:42) Anthropic makes Claude Sonnet 3.5.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:45) Oh, okay.

(Tony Davis at 00:06:45) And we've turned Sonnet 3.5 on for our product. And the reason that was important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:50) Oh, so you can, the Amazon self-hosting? Three five, that's not hosted at. Oh. Yeah. I didn't know that they were doing that.

(John Balsavage at 00:06:58) So it makes it really, really powerful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:01) And private. Right?

(John Balsavage at 00:07:02) Private. Yeah. Easy, secure. Right? And, you know, obviously, we're totally focused on, you know, trusted AI. You got to believe in it. But the power that we're able to, you know, to push the data into the AI model, it really is impressive. And then, you know, as we get into optimizing that, we're working with, you know, AWS, you know, and Gartner is really also providing some guidance strategically around it as well. Yeah. So we really think we are just getting started, and the power is really going to come soon.

(Tony Davis at 00:07:35) Yeah. And this is, Scout.ai is cloud native. So it's born in the cloud, feet have never touched earth. I mean, this is a cloud native app, and that's from the data structure to the AI to the storage, everything, application.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) What are all these buckets? I'm glad you brought that up.

(Tony Davis at 00:07:53) Ever since the films came out, and I know you know about this, ever since the films came out on Sunday, we dropped every day. Okay. And people have been blowing up our inboxes with, what's in the box? What's in the box? I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it, but I'm going to have to spoil it. At the end, spoiler alert.

(John Balsavage at 00:08:13) Spoiler alert. Right. Okay.

(Tony Davis at 00:08:13) Yeah. So, but the film is called 13, so you'll see it under our name or whatever. But it was sort of loosely based on the movie Seven. And so if you've seen it for those people maybe watching and they saw the short film, you know at the end, John Doe had this box delivered to Agent Mills.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:34) Okay.

(Tony Davis at 00:08:34) Okay? And Agent Somerset opened the box with her knife. And what you saw in the final scene, which just aired an hour ago, what you saw was that inside the box was glowing. Oh. Okay?

(Tony Davis at 00:08:47) And so I'm going to show you what's in the box in a minute after I explain what is the glow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:54) Okay.

(Tony Davis at 00:08:54) How's that? Okay. So I worked really hard to put this graphic together and it only lasts about 20 seconds. But if you look at that, what you see are the 13 buckets of degraded performance in some, you know, form or fashion. We call them deduction buckets.

(Tony Davis at 00:09:11) And so just the way that radiation, if it hits your body, your human body, it degrades your body until eventually what happens? You die. Right? Well, we believe that the degraded deductions that we get from these 13 indexes that are part of the Reliability Path Index, we believe that it's the same effect on your application. All right.

(Tony Davis at 00:09:33) So if you have an application that you've launched to the cloud or maybe it's an internal business application, either way, if you've launched that application, but you are receiving radiation deductions from all of these different indexes that are part of the RPI score, we believe that eventually your customer will get so sick of dealing with you because of your poor performance that your application will eventually die. So it will eventually cease to be important in the market. So I'm going to pause this right here so I can talk to it. So just a quick explanation, and then I promise I'll show what's in the box.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:10) I want to know what's in the box now.

(Tony Davis at 00:10:11) What's in the box?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:11) Right. Come on. When he showed up for the interview, he had this box. Like, I said, you steal the Amazon box off my porch.

(Tony Davis at 00:10:17) Yes. Yes. I'm a porch pirate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:19) I'm a porch buyer. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:20) Yes. Now I want to know. I didn't want to know what was in the box at first. You said it so many times. It's working.

(Tony Davis at 00:10:25) That's right. It's working. Yeah. So basically, it's our Reliability Path Index. People refer to it as just an RPI score.

(Tony Davis at 00:10:33) And we have customers that are using it. And believe it or not, already, they're sort of addicted to working with it. But what it is, it's 13 indexes, as I mentioned, that are bucketized. So I learned, I'll give you an example. Back, this would have been about 2008. I was running IT operations for FedEx.com, and I had a big command center. Actually, I had several big command centers, like NOCs or whatever. You may remember this story because I've told it to you before. But we had the executive that I reported to at the time come into the command center and look around, big dark room, you know, like the NASA rooms and everything, big dark room, looked around at all of the monitoring that we had on the walls, which I think we spent millions of dollars for. Right?

(Tony Davis at 00:11:16) And we were in the middle of a problem, like a degraded performance scenario. And he looked at it, and he said, this is all really interesting, Tony. Can you, from all this, can you tell me how is our customer experience on FedEx.com? And, you know, all I could really answer him with is, well, we've got a lot of problems both on our network side and our application side, so I imagine it's pretty bad right now. That's not a good answer. Right?

(Tony Davis at 00:11:41) He had clearly asked me, what is the measurement of our customer experience right now? And I didn't have that answer. So this is a way for us to provide to customers the ability to have a relative index that lets them score their own service, not FedEx.com, whatever they have. Right? And they're able to put a number to it, and it's backed up by those 13 buckets, which are quantified buckets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:05) Nice.

(John Balsavage at 00:12:06) So it's one of those things where all of a sudden it just makes sense. Right? You see the very top bucket right there, Network Wobble. If you go back to your VP and say, hey, let me tell you about your Network Wobble. You're like, you know, leave the office. You know what I mean? That's fine. Just make sure it's not bad. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:19) Email it over. Right?

(John Balsavage at 00:12:22) And then, or you got the NOC with all those dozen screens because you got dozens of applications. This is, you know, kind of really bringing back that idea, you know, this single pane of glass. Right? And you've heard that term for, you know, a hundred years. But this is bringing it into a solution and putting it on steroids.

(John Balsavage at 00:12:38) And then providing somebody where it actually makes sense. You can send it over to the VP of Marketing and say, hey, our e-commerce site has a reliability score of 95. Well, you know what? 95 might sound great, but if we need 98, because I can see people are dropping off. Right? They're going somewhere else. And, you know, Kim Kardashian drops a new lipstick. They're either going to buy at your site or somebody else's. And if they miss, you know, they're going to go somewhere else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:02) I'm so impatient as a consumer.

(John Balsavage at 00:13:03) Oh my gosh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:04) If that page doesn't load, if they haven't figured out how to compress everything correctly, like, yeah, I'm out of there. Gone.

(Tony Davis at 00:13:09) Yeah. That's a little bit more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:10) Sometimes I leave because I'm frustrated. Sometimes I just forget to actually continue to go back later.

(Tony Davis at 00:13:17) So for this index, for this Reliability Scoring Model, it's exclusive to us for the Scout.ai platform. And the algorithm is patented, so it's very, I would call it very specialized. Right? So it's the only way you can get this particular index, relative index, is through Scout.ai. A pretty cool thing is it's integrated with ITIL's continuous improvement process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:40) What's that? What's ITIL?

(Tony Davis at 00:13:42) Yeah. Basically, ITIL is what basically any IT operations team would follow as the model or the framework for how they run IT operations. So it would be everything from how they ticket and how they, when they find problems, how do they correct them, and how do they make sure they never happen again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:57) Got it.

(Tony Davis at 00:13:58) And so the sort of the end-all-be-all for ITIL is what they call their continuous improvement process. So our engine, our AI engine, which is built on Anthropic, we've trained it so that it understands how this index ties in with ITIL.

(John Balsovich at 00:14:14) Very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:14) And—

(Tony Davis at 00:14:14) So if it discovers something in the index that it really doesn't like and it's telling you, if AI is telling you, you really need to work to fix that, it won't just tell you that. It'll say, "And, oh, by the way, here's how you do it if you use the ITIL framework."

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:29) That's amazing to me. You're saving energy. It's efficient. Right? It's like, hey, here's the problem, and here's the problem in the context of the framework for how you solve problems.

(Tony Davis at 00:14:37) Well, I'll tell you what, at a company, not FedEx, after FedEx, there was a company where we followed ITIL and we did the continuous improvement programs for IT operations. And we had a group of five people that all they did was work on that. Now, our AI engine does that work.

(Tony Davis at 00:14:55) Nice. So, I mean, that's a great efficiency.

(John Balsovich at 00:14:56) And, again, you know, companies were working through these processes. Right? And you improve, and you got ideas, and you put it in place, and you have a committee, and it takes, you know, two weeks or a month to put it in, and you see it's a little bit better. Now you can do these kind of things in, like, twenty minutes.

(Tony Davis at 00:15:12) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:12) You know what I mean?

(John Balsovich at 00:15:13) Can I implement it tomorrow? Right? No. You know, somebody's out. We'll implement it in forty-eight hours. You know? But it's like—and that's what I go, oh my gosh. Yeah. And then just put it in that cycle. It's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) One of the things I think is pretty neat is, I mean, we were talking three to four, maybe even five years ago when we were at different companies about this. And you're like, I've got this idea. I've got this thing. It's coming. I'm working on it. Like, gonna make it happen.

(Tony Davis at 00:15:37) You've heard that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:38) Yeah. Right. Like, a lot. Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:15:40) Yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:15:41) I wish I had this ten years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:43) Well, it wasn't here ten years ago. Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:15:44) Yeah. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:44) But it—the seed of the idea was planted. And so for me, it's really cool because a lot of the companies that I'm talking with or have a show or see a product on, it's like I'm meeting them for the first time. And for you, I've gotten to see, like, the evolution.

(Tony Davis at 00:15:58) Evolution. Yeah. And the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:58) Fact that you've spent—your, without exaggeration, you spent your entire career in this space working on this problem at scale. And then finally, you get to, like, say, okay, of all my experience, this is what I think the world needs. Right. And then you link up with somebody I already have had on the show before. Right. And now it's here.

(Tony Davis at 00:16:15) I mean, it's an amazing thing to think back at. The way you put it makes me feel incredibly old. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) Well, good. That was the goal. Oh, but new.

(John Balsovich at 00:16:24) But I, you know, I talked to Tony. He's like, oh my gosh. It did it. You know? And it's—and it literally could be at, you know, a call at 8:30 in the morning, or it could be like, hey. I'm just, you know, watching TV, and I just discovered something at, you know, 9:30 at night. You know? And it's just—it's exciting. You know? And then you kinda think, okay. Alright. What's next? And, right, is this part, right, has been, you know, building over the last ten years, like you just said, and absolutely love it. Right? We're like, oh my gosh. What can we do over the next six months? Yeah. And we're really just starting to, you know, as we lock this down, this piece is then, okay, really build out that road map of what's really gonna be fun coming up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:14) Well, let's see it work.

(Tony Davis at 00:17:15) Yeah. Sure thing. Oh, one last thing I wanted to tell you is that it includes Kaufman's adaptive moving averages. And the reason that's important is I learned a long time ago that once you create a metric, it's not enough to have a single metric. Although that's wonderful, it's not enough to have a single metric and say, "Well, this is what my score is." It's more important to compare what you have today against your past and see if you're making improvements. And so one of the best ways to do it that I did by hand before AI came along is to use Kaufman's adaptive moving average, which is part of our AI. So in other words, our AI engine is not just programmed to use a formula for Kaufman's moving average. It actually has studied the original formula created by Kaufman. So it understands completely the formula.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:06) Yeah. Just tell it you are Kaufman.

(John Balsovich at 00:18:08) Right. Need a picture.

(Tony Davis at 00:18:11) Right. So, anyways, that was our little spill there. But I, yeah, I'd love to show you some.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:15) Yeah. Let's take a look.

(Tony Davis at 00:18:15) Okay. So we don't have anything staged. And when I was talking with Josh, I had said, "Hey. Let's break it." Yeah. No. There's nothing staged. This is actually in production. So we're not on a test system or anything. So it's just flat out my account in production. And we have something called universal observability. So like if a customer just wanted to try this out to play with it a little bit, and they didn't wanna go into the point where they're starting to monitor their own indexes. Right? But they just wanna say, what are you talking about with this whole index thing? How does it work? Well, they can just get our, I guess, you'd call it our basic version where there's nothing customized for them, but they're able to come in here and play with the interface and look at 10 business apps that everybody pretty much uses in the corporate world. And if you're an IT operations person, you have to support these 10 apps. But they get a chance to look at the RPI score for each of these apps, and then they're able to sort of see the problems or the degraded performance. Now, you know, I mentioned 13 buckets. Right? Well, they actually exist inside the product. So all 13 buckets are here, and then they come together to create one final RPI score. So on the right-hand side for the score, it will always rank them from best to worst. So right now, ServiceNow is doing great. So if you're a ServiceNow customer, our locations, which are in Amazon, East Coast and West Coast, our locations are telling us that of the 10 business applications that we're monitoring with RPI, ServiceNow is the best, and no offense Salesforce, but today, Salesforce is doing—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:47) We gotta call up Parker. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Parker. What's going on?

(Tony Davis at 00:19:51) What's going on, man?

(John Balsovich at 00:19:51) What's going on, man?

(Tony Davis at 00:19:52) But anyways, we try to rank them. And then what you can do, we like for you to be able to see the whole score straight up against the deduction so you get a sort of sense of how bad the deductions are hurting you or if they're not hurting you much at all. But we give you the ability to simply turn off the total score, and then what you do is you get to zoom in on just your deductions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:12) Let's talk about Zoom.

(Tony Davis at 00:20:14) Alright. Let's roll over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:15) Yeah. So you're monitoring not your own applications that you've written. You're monitoring the applications you're a customer of. Because I see Zoom, Salesforce, Dropbox, HubSpot. How do you actually monitor? I'm a customer of Zoom, HubSpot, and Dropbox. Those three are very real to me. Sure. What are you monitoring?

(Tony Davis at 00:20:31) Well, in the trial, what we do is we give any customer the ability to use this with five of the 13 buckets. So in other words, we don't populate all 13. We populate five because five is the minimum to produce an accurate score. Now if they had all 13 buckets, right, you would get a better score. But we do five right now. John, I don't know what you wanted to share as far as the tools or what we use under this as far as, like, how we monitor.

(John Balsovich at 00:20:53) It's, I mean, it's really—it's all about cloud-based application monitoring. Right? So you can either use monitoring points that are provided by AWS in their various locations, or if you wanted to try to set up a monitoring point even right here out of your studio. Yeah. And see how your studio is interacting with the cloud-based applications here, or if you have your own cloud-based application that you're monitoring in conjunction with all the others, you just add it to the list. So you can—and all of that, you can set up a monitoring point literally, well, with an Amazon account in a matter of minutes. Right? Just pick the location. This is where I want it to go. Or you can set up one here. It could be either a virtual device or a physical device. If it's a physical device, you get it shipped here in a couple days, and then it literally takes twenty minutes to set up and, like, you can get the wife and kids to set it up. It's plug it in, plug it into the router. It appears because it comes pre-configured. And it's—you don't have—it's so simplified. And then all of a sudden, you get immediate results. Um, and then you just try to show it to you in a couple of different ways. The thing is, is you get the reliability score. How am I doing? Which one do I need to look at? But then you get the underlying data underneath it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:07) So this is really good for IT teams who have to, like—so I've always sold my companies before I hit, like, 30 people.

(John Balsovich at 00:22:13) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) Right?

(John Balsovich at 00:22:14) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:14) So I haven't gotten to, like, big, man. But for a while, my first successful project was in real estate. And so I got to work with the customer service that served all, like, the 2,000 agents and, like, their IT teams. Yep. When we deployed software with them, they had all these dashboards and all these things to make sure that the experience was good. So are you telling me that, like, when I see Zoom and HubSpot, you're actually monitoring the experience of using those?

(John Balsovich at 00:22:37) Mhmm. Yes. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:38) What are you—just sending post requests to check? Or, like, what are you looking at?

(Tony Davis at 00:22:41) On the universal, it's a very simple form of monitoring. Okay. Just simply trying to do that, but, you know, to give people a chance to play with the interface.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:48) Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:22:48) Yeah. But for a customer who signs up to get their own stuff monitored, we can go as complex pretty much as they would wanna do. So in other words, not just heartbeat or endpoint type monitoring, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:00) To the application. Like New Relic. You can go into methods and see which things are failing.

(Tony Davis at 00:23:05) Absolutely.

(John Balsovich at 00:23:06) Well, no. No. No. So, I mean, we would bring in APM data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:09) Okay.

(John Balsovich at 00:23:09) Okay. So that's what Corell does. Right? Right here. Yeah. Yeah. Application performance management monitoring. Yeah. Something like that, whatever they call it.

(Tony Davis at 00:23:17) We'll figure it out.

(John Balsovich at 00:23:17) Right? Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:18) It's one—

(Tony Davis at 00:23:19) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:19) You guys can Google it.

(John Balsovich at 00:23:19) Yeah. Exactly. But the, you know, so the core of the product is really kind of focused on cloud application monitoring with, you know, pulling back the network metrics and related information to that as we fill in the other 13 buckets. We're also just working with customers as they have, you know, all those other tool sets. Do you have other networking monitoring tool sets? Do you have an APM that you need to feed in that also populates part of this? Do you have, you know, anything else that kinda fits? Right? Logging or, you know, and those kind of things. So—

(Tony Davis at 00:23:53) Yeah. Actually, John's right because we have a current customer. Can't name, of course, but that customer is a large global. And they actually—I don't think Broadcom on my mind is saying this—they use a Broadcom product to create, like, a operational single pane of glass. Okay. But they ingest from all their other products into that Broadcom product. It's called OI. So, anyways, they ingest into that product. That company has all 13 buckets now, and they expose that to us. So they expose the metrics that we need to fill the buckets with radiation. And then we know from their environment how much radiation their applications are being bombarded with. So the cool thing is they have all the data, but they send it to us for real analysis. That's what I love. So we score their data because I learned a while back, I think I told John this at the very first, I tried originally to do scoring based on individual metrics. So I'll just say latency because we all look at latency, or application response time or page load. I tried doing analysis and scoring just on individual metrics, but it gets lost in context. So in other words, actually, John said a few minutes ago something about, well, he couldn't tell his wife about latency or loss. She'd be bored. He wouldn't talk about it at a party. But if you talk about reliability, which is a derivative of all of these different buckets, then it becomes interesting. And what I learned is that if you do this type of calculation, and especially the AI piece, if you do that against a derivative, an index, far more valuable than just saying, "Oh, well, we've analyzed your latency and you need to make improvements in your latency." That's great, but who cares? I mean, you know what I'm saying?

(John Balsovich at 00:25:35) Yeah. One of the biggest feedback things we're getting back, and again, as you simplify. Right? Now the IT group is saying, this provides value to the business unit. Right? The marketing team wants to know, does my internal ecommerce site have high reliability? Right? Does my—does my sales team working with Salesforce, is that system always up? Because I need them to put everything in the system. You know? So you're pushing it, and they can—and that makes sense. They don't need the 13 buckets, network wobble. Yeah. Forget about that. Right? Is it reliable? Can my people really use it? Is anybody slowing down? Do we need to do anything to improve it? Right? And that's—and that all of a sudden, it's like, okay. That works.

(Tony Davis at 00:26:18) So I guess I could show you a little bit more about it. I'm gonna put the RPI score back. I'm gonna switch over to locations just so you can see it because you had mentioned that earlier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:29) Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:26:29) So we not only provide scoring by your business application or your service that you're providing, but we also do it if needed by your sites.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) So that—I got multiple offices.

(Tony Davis at 00:26:41) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:41) You can tell if the Zoom's working versus—that's right. It's not working on East Coast, but West Coast. Right.

(John Balsovich at 00:26:46) Where the different LANs are working. Yeah. You can get into, you know, your software, SD LANs. Right? Your virtuals. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:54) Oh, you can track uptime of your own routers.

(John Balsavage at 00:26:56) Yeah, all that kind of devices. And, you know, as you extend, right, the core offering is around monitoring cloud applications. But the big thing is, again, I'll go back to that single pane of glass. We can accept data from almost any application that's out there.

(John Balsavage at 00:27:13) And then pull it into whether it's going to be used in the reliability score in the 13 buckets or have it analyzed by the AI engine.

(Tony Davis at 00:27:23) Mhmm. Yeah.

(John Balsavage at 00:27:24) And all of a sudden, you're like, man, that works. And what does it take to integrate it? And it's all really, really clean. We got some click-ins. Right? So if you go back to the universal observability, right, the other tab, and you click into the tile. Right? Go back to application, click into one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:40) Pretty cool.

(Tony Davis at 00:27:41) So this is the same thing. It's just a different view.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:43) It's the only one that's eating it sucks.

(John Balsavage at 00:27:45) Right. So just hit on one. Right? And all of a sudden, we're showing the different—

(Tony Davis at 00:27:50) This guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:50) Okay. He sucks.

(John Balsavage at 00:27:52) But all of a sudden you're seeing it with both East Coast, West Coast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:55) It's real? Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:27:55) So you guys are—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) Are you a customer of Salesforce?

(Tony Davis at 00:27:59) Oh, no. We can monitor them without being a customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) Oh, how do you do that?

(Tony Davis at 00:28:04) That's part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:04) Part of it? Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:28:06) Yeah. Now all cloud, I guess you'd call it cloud synthetic companies can do that. It's actually a pretty cool trick. It's been around for many, many years. Like, back in 2008, we did the same thing with our competitors at one company I worked with.

(John Balsavage at 00:28:18) So it's fascinating, though. Right? As you just drilled into it. Right? Different views, same sort of data.

(John Balsavage at 00:28:24) And East—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:25) East is doing okay.

(John Balsavage at 00:28:26) Right? East is doing great. West Coast, you know, what's going on there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:29) It's a latency issue. It's like they're scoring zero on all these.

(Tony Davis at 00:28:32) Quickly you solve the problem just from this one screen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:35) Yeah. I don't even know what I'm doing. That's my wife. She'll confirm. Right?

(Tony Davis at 00:28:40) One customer we talked with said, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna give our business users a login to this, and they can come look at this instead of bothering me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:47) Oh, so now you're gonna be, like, a status page.

(Tony Davis at 00:28:49) Yeah. Give it to them. Do you follow up on the—

(John Balsavage at 00:28:51) And that's all of a sudden, that's when I heard that. Yeah. And we didn't even think about that. We're like, yeah. That makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:57) Does this track over time?

(Tony Davis at 00:28:58) Mhmm. It does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:59) So it shows this average over time?

(Tony Davis at 00:29:02) Yeah. You're able to do that by changing. Right now, we have the time picker turned off. But if you use time pickers, you can just set the time to be six months and look at what happened over six months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:11) Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:29:13) And the nice thing is with the AI component, you don't even have to worry so much about finding a chart to do that. You can just have the AI engine figure that out for you and tell you, which is really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:22) I want a little button here. It's like email me when this is fixed. Yeah. Exactly. You know? Just give me a status that way.

(John Balsavage at 00:29:27) When is it better? Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:28) When is it better? Yeah. Because I'm trying to use Salesforce. It's not working. I come in here. Okay. Well, at least IT knows it's not working. Right. When's it better?

(Tony Davis at 00:29:34) When's it gonna be better is what I assume.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:36) Yeah. Close that loop.

(Tony Davis at 00:29:37) Yeah. It's fine. And like John said, we've tried to provide it in different formats. We even have a little table format because a lot of people live by tables. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:45) Right. No. I'm a— Yeah. Yeah. I know. Right?

(John Balsavage at 00:29:47) So and again, this first chart just is a real easy rank order.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:51) I like this view as a default.

(John Balsavage at 00:29:53) And so we started with that. The problem is, if you have, like, 200 applications. Mhmm. Yeah. So you're working with the really big companies. Right? They got tons and tons of locations and applications and, you know, offices, and it just really is wild.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:10) Yeah. This is great.

(Tony Davis at 00:30:12) It's a lot of fun. Fairly interactive and everything, but to John's point, we try to keep it simple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:16) Let's talk to it.

(Tony Davis at 00:30:17) You wanna talk to it?

(John Balsavage at 00:30:17) Yeah. Let's do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) Hey, Siri. Okay.

(John Balsavage at 00:30:21) Right. So not too far away, actually. We're also working on the app related to this. And, again, the whole idea is just how do you make data accessible, usable. Right? We're actually working with a Major League Baseball team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:38) Oh, nice.

(John Balsavage at 00:30:39) And as they, you know, walk around the stadium, I mean, talk about an enterprise that goes from, like, zero to a million right away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) Yeah.

(John Balsavage at 00:30:46) Right? You know, the stadium's empty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:47) Which screen is—

(John Balsavage at 00:30:48) And then all of a sudden, boom. Right? Sixty, seventy thousand people in there, you know, TV networks, you know, press boxes, all that kind of stuff. And they were like, you know, things seem to be working, but the press box went slow, and the people up there couldn't get their tweets out or their information out. And everything's, like, real time and passionate real time. And so they're using this to help within the stadium and that kind of monitoring inside and out. But we also kind of, we've been working to really kind of even bring it to the app. So as they're walking around, they can have— you don't have to carry around a laptop. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:30) So who would buy that at the stadium, the IT people that run the stadium?

(John Balsavage at 00:31:33) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33) Oh, cool.

(John Balsavage at 00:31:33) Yeah. So be that group.

(Tony Davis at 00:31:36) It's a different view if you're an IT team for, you know, a baseball team. Mhmm. You get a totally different view of the metrics to run a baseball game or a playoff series or whatever. Now they can look at what's the reliability of our turnstiles? Hey. What's the reliability at concessions? What's the reliability? And you stack that up and you see where your weak points are. Guess what you start doing, making improvements.

(John Balsavage at 00:31:56) So if you bring down monitoring point into, like, your localized area. Right? So you bring it into this office or you bring it into that stadium. You can track, like, their, like, face recognition software where people can go in. It just becomes really powerful, like, the wireless experience. You know? You're talking to another customer around cruise ships, and cruise ships are literally just a floating data center.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:24) Yeah. You know what I mean?

(John Balsavage at 00:32:25) And you can give them that information, what's going on real time. Right? Because either people are signing up for an excursion, or if they're not, you just lost out on a bunch of money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) They need to get some Starlink on the cruise ships. Right. You know? Exactly.

(John Balsavage at 00:32:39) I hear they're finally doing it on airlines. Thank goodness. Right? Right? But just as we're, you know, we never really would have thought to do work with a baseball team. Mhmm. Right? And then all of a sudden, we were— I was at a concert, and we're like, you know, everything there is wireless. Yeah. Right? The microphones, the guitar plug-ins, the, you know? And it's one of those things where they gotta set it all up in a day. Mhmm. Do a couple performances and events, and then they gotta break it all down. And you have to have huge reliability, right, during that two, three hour period. Yeah. And you gotta figure out what the issue is and all that kind of stuff. And we're really, you know, that's actually we think that's gonna be a really fun industry to work with, and we're really just trying to look to tap into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:22) What's your go-to market? Are you using partner model, direct sales? How are you approaching the market?

(John Balsavage at 00:33:28) So we're not really big, but really a lot of partner, partner models. So we're working with the people that are actually doing the delivery and making sure that they have everything that they need. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:38) And I—

(Tony Davis at 00:33:38) I was gonna mention something before I talk a little bit about the AI piece. Mhmm. I had this problem early in my career, so I started really in IT in this field in 1990. And for the first, I don't know, fifteen years, the biggest problem that we had as an IT operational team or an SRE team, the biggest problem that we had is that we were told and programmed to be strategic in our thinking so that we would make things better. But what really ended up happening is we would end up fighting fires every day, go home exhausted on Friday, come back in Monday, start fighting fires again if you didn't have to work the weekend. Right? So even a strategic IT operations team can get bogged down in fighting fires. We wanted to put this together to take care of that other piece. So the other piece is, what if you really thought about, yes, you gotta fight fires, you gotta keep things going. But what if you were able to concentrate on how to make things better over the next year or so? So that next year, you're not fighting as many fires. And so the way that our AI engine has been programmed, like I mentioned earlier, is, yes, you can use it for triage. You can ask it, hey. What's going on? The house is on fire. Tell me where the problem is, and it'll do its best to figure it out. Right? But the real value comes when you ask the AI engine about your history and what do you learn from those patterns, and what could you predict for my future? So that's what I wanna focus on as opposed to, like, fighting fire stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:03) Yeah. So— And you kind of glossed right over that, but that's usually what happens.

(Tony Davis at 00:35:07) It is what happens. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I worked for CA and Broadcom for a few years. And during that time, I spent a lot of time as a consultant on the road, and my specialty was IT operations. Mhmm. And I think I met with over 60 companies out of the Fortune 500. And in every case, no matter what company it was, the real issue was loss of efficiency and never making any improvements. They felt like they would finish their career, a good career. Right? Mhmm. That they would finish that career never really making things that much better. A little bit maybe, but not that much. And certainly not measurable.

(John Balsavage at 00:35:44) And that totally goes back to the whole world just being, you know, having more to do than you can do.

(Tony Davis at 00:35:49) Mhmm.

(John Balsavage at 00:35:49) You know? And then the fire of the day, you get the right phone call or the wrong phone call. Right? And you're 100% consumed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:58) And then you're—

(John Balsavage at 00:35:58) Even when you then come back, you're like, hey. I got an idea. To be able to put the idea into practice is just such a long cycle. It's almost more painful than not. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:11) Yeah. My operating model is— I mean, they're figuring out how to get more meetings. Yep. Right. That's, like, my core baseline thing, figuring out how to grow the audience. And then that's pretty much it. But, like, 80% of my work ends up being whatever the thing is happening that day.

(John Balsavage at 00:36:28) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:29) You know? The marketing team got a new director, so now we have to resell essentially to them relationship-wise even though we have a contractor. Like, whatever the thing is coming at us, this person's leaving, this person's coming in. Well, even though there's this, I—

(Tony Davis at 00:36:42) What I'm gonna show you is cool. And this is what I started with when I talked with Josh about it. And I think it was really what made him see and go, oh, wait. This is different. And so the first thing I wanna talk about, you may remember in a little bucket thing that I said that it's important that we use Kaufman's adaptive moving average because, in theory, Kaufman's, that moving average actually has three, although it has more, it has three really good indicators and they're predictive indicators. So, for instance, if you take what you are at right now and you compare it against the first indicator is ten days back. If you compare where you're at right now against your ten day moving average from Kaufman, what you end up with is an indicator if today is going to be a bad day or a good day in a triage fashion. So if I were back in my seat as a director of IT ops, I would ask every morning or maybe have it proactively tell me, today is either equal to or better than your ten day moving average. That tells me that I'm probably gonna predict a pretty good day unless something, you know, catastrophic happens. But if it tells me that today is below my ten day moving average, according to the Kaufman theory, basically, what you're saying is something has happened recently that has really started to make an impact. Now your customers may not be calling, complaining at this point, but it would tell me to get all hands on deck. Let's see what's going on. Okay? So the other two are 30 and 100 day. I'll explain that in a minute. But if you notice, all I did was ask something simple. I did this before so that we could have it ready to talk about how is ServiceNow doing today versus its ten day. So this is gonna tell me how my day is gonna be with the ServiceNow product. And you can see that right off the bat, it tells me that the RPI score today has been 99.30, and the ten day moving average is 99.59. So that's gonna tweak me a little bit because you should always be at or above your ten day moving average. If you're below it, doesn't mean something bad's gonna happen. But I'm gonna be extra sensitive today. Now, back in IT operations time, that was something that I always wanted to know. Do I need to be sensitive today? You know, we do have something going on and I need to be watching it. And you could see that the AI engine actually goes through and gives you some analysis or the AI engine's thoughts. Like, here's what I'm seeing and here's what's wrong. So nothing is staged here, and I actually didn't write down any questions because Josh and I had decided that today the goal is to break it. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:05) I got it. I got it. Alright.

(John Balsavage at 00:39:06) You wanna ask—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) Change how is ServiceNow?

(John Balsavage at 00:39:09) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:10) Just change is ServiceNow to are we?

(Tony Davis at 00:39:13) Got it. How are we doing? Yeah. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:15) How? Because that's what I really wanna know. I'm the IT director. I get in there. I just wanna know how we're doing today versus a ten day moving average.

(Tony Davis at 00:39:22) Ten day? Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:23) And, again—

(Tony Davis at 00:39:24) Let me give a disclaimer, and I'll put a timer up there. And the reason is an AI engine is a little bit different because for our applications and let's say that somebody wants to be a trial customer. Yeah. Well, they're gonna look at those ten business applications. Right?

(Tony Davis at 00:39:38) Well, just to look at our ten business applications, we currently have over 35,000,000 rows of data going back for a year. So our AI engine is literally, to answer this question, because it's gotta look at our ten day moving average, but it looks at it historically. So it's actually going through pretty much all 35,000,000 rows to come up with the analysis. So in general, that's a disclaimer to keep talking and keep stalling so that you're not noticing the timer.

(Tony Davis at 00:40:05) But in general, when we ask a complex question that will massage all 35,000,000 rows, it's usually between fifty and sixty five seconds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) Oh, okay.

(Tony Davis at 00:40:13) Yeah. So that is a good rule of thumb.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:15) The smartest person at the company programming LLMs?

(Tony Davis at 00:40:19) Oh, he's not here today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:20) He's not here today.

(Tony Davis at 00:40:21) Yeah. But he's a great guy. He actually lives, what, not twenty minutes from here?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:25) Yeah. Oh, here we go. We got it, about a minute and twelve seconds here.

(Tony Davis at 00:40:29) I'll let you read that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:30) Based on the data, here's how the applications are performing today compared to ten day moving averages. Most applications are performing close to their ten day averages with small variations. Standard Performa is a very long domain name with a current RPI of 99.57, higher than its ten day. Several applications are showing slight improvements. Some applications are performing below their ten day average, and it's listing which ones are and what the variances are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:59) And then three applications show more noticeable lines.

(Tony Davis at 00:41:03) Yeah. Zoom is down 6.6 points today, which makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:07) Now why don't I get this every morning as an email?

(Tony Davis at 00:41:09) That's right. We talked about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:10) Yeah. It's like, give me my update for today. What's the day gonna be like? It's like my weather forecast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:15) I want

(John Balsovich at 00:41:15) a weather app. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:16) You know, sad face,

(John Balsovich at 00:41:17) happy face. Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, and it's, you know, I love that. Delivering the information, right? It's to me. So first we're thinking, okay, what can we provide them? We're still learning. What are, you know, what are all the questions that everybody wants to ask? And now we're, it's even gonna go, we know it's even gonna go more and more out to the business teams, to the business units, because that's what we heard. And we're like, okay. This is really cool. And this is, again, is we're now, I consider it like phase one A. And we're already like loving phase one A. And the people that we show it to are loving phase one A. And they're like, okay.

(John Balsovich at 00:41:54) Now can you take my two questions? I'm gonna ask them every morning or every afternoon and just send it to me. You know what I mean? And just give me, you know, answer number five or, you know?

(John Balsovich at 00:42:05) And so that kind of customization, that's, you know, something we're definitely headed towards. You know? How do you really become even easier? Right?

(John Balsovich at 00:42:16) But this thing, again, he's been working on it for fifteen years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) Right. Yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:42:20) And we got the reliability score, and it's working. Now we can analyze it

(Tony Davis at 00:42:24) Analyze it.

(John Balsovich at 00:42:25) in a really strong way. And okay. And then now what? Right? There's all kind of automation you can do. There's all kind of predictability we can do. And the road map around that, that's what I'm saying. If we get, I can't wait until we start thinking about, you know, phase two

(Tony Davis at 00:42:41) Mhmm.

(John Balsovich at 00:42:42) You know, phase three, and those other kind of things. And that's kinda where we're working more with, again, easing it if we go back to the larger partners that we're working with, the Gartners, the Amazon, you know, and when they see it, they're like, okay. This is where it's going. Let's go. Yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:43:04) Let's go. And as they start thinking about what's possible, and we talk to them about what's possible, everybody in the room just all of a sudden gets more and more excited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:18) Yeah. So now Tony is asking, please predict what the Salesforce RPI score would be by the end of this year if my focus on improving latency and loss.

(Tony Davis at 00:43:32) So this is real. This I would have asked this when I got called out at FedEx for not being able to answer that one question because I didn't have a measurement for

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:42) Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:43:43) I would have killed to have this question asked. Tell me how good I'll be. Don't give me like a fluffy, you know, oh, you'll be better, you know, nebulous type answer. Give me a metric. If I have my team, because it costs money to take your team and refocus them.

(Tony Davis at 00:43:57) Right? Yeah. So if I take my best network engineers, and for two months, I have them focus on better latency within our network and less loss, how does that affect my current score?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:11) Alright. Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:44:12) It's a real scenario, and that's why we tried to design it that way. What would somebody really want from this? John always says, I love this. He says, we're sort of past the point where AI should be about writing your term papers. Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:44:25) You know? It was cool to see that. And it's cool to see it create some Python scripts. That's all cool stuff. But what we need are business questions asked to it that give you answers that make money for your company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:37) Yeah. Which you can do. You just had to be creative and trial and error.

(Tony Davis at 00:44:41) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:41) Yeah. We've set our own prompts for our business and built some custom stuff to make our lives easier. Okay. So we asked it to predict Salesforce RPI score by end of the year if we focus on only two of the buckets, latency and loss. There is a summary at the very bottom that says, you know, over the year, this is the average RPI score.

(Tony Davis at 00:45:00) So we could go from 88.92, I think that's it. Yep. We could go from that all the way up to 94 to 96 if we concentrate our team for the next two months on latency and loss. Yeah. So think about it this way, budgeting process or going to the CEO and saying, I'd really like to divert my people away from building this new cute whiz bang.

(Tony Davis at 00:45:22) And instead, I'd like to improve our reliability for the next two months. And here's our score now. It's 89. But I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna go ahead and put some skin in the game. I'm gonna tell you at the end of the year, we're gonna give you 94 points.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:35) Yeah. And

(Tony Davis at 00:45:36) you go ahead and call me, and let's look at it on the end of it.

(John Balsovich at 00:45:38) And then if you go back to your ecommerce team, right, you can say, okay. What does that equate to sales? Right? If I got people that are dropping because I got 88 or 85% reliability score, and I'm gonna bring it up from 85 to 95.

(John Balsovich at 00:45:51) Right? I'm gonna keep X more customers. Yeah. I'm gonna process more customers faster. You know, those kind of things, and that equates to real money.

(John Balsovich at 00:46:00) And the beautiful thing, we brought it back, this information, right away. There's no way anybody would have been able to bring that back a year ago.

(Tony Davis at 00:46:08) I'm gonna try something I never tried before. How's that? Alright. Promise I've never, I've never even tried this. I have no clue what she's gonna say.

(Tony Davis at 00:46:15) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:15) Oh, the computer is now on fire, team. Yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:46:19) So every time he does this, I get a little nervous, a little scared. Right? He's like, hey, I got an idea. I was like, oh, boy. Let's do it.

(John Balsovich at 00:46:25) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:26) Question says, I am worried that my applications are about to crash. Do you see any evidence of that happening soon?

(Tony Davis at 00:46:34) Think about that question. Now it may not be able to answer it. I have no clue because I've never tried it. But I would ask that question. I've been feeling lately that our applications are wobbling.

(Tony Davis at 00:46:44) Right? Yeah. And so my gut tells me, since I've been in this business for a while, my gut tells me that we're walking on thin ice. Can you tell me, do you see anything in the data that tells me I'm right, or am I just off base? That's what I'm really asking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:57) Yeah. Look at that. There's no evidence of immediate concern regarding your applications crashing. However, there's some areas that warrant attention. Here's overall performance, applications of concern, and so on.

(Tony Davis at 00:47:11) And so on. Yeah. This is valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:13) It's got some positive trends there too. Mhmm. Yeah. This is really interesting.

(John Balsovich at 00:47:18) Well, you know, and this goes back to, you know, you got a big organization. They got a product launch. Yeah. Everybody's nervous about what's gonna happen on the weekend. Right?

(John Balsovich at 00:47:25) Or it's about to hit. And, again, you know, you're out there. You're, you know, you're out, I don't know. You're just at the end of the night.

(John Balsovich at 00:47:35) Product launch is the next day.

(Tony Davis at 00:47:37) Mhmm.

(John Balsovich at 00:47:37) And you just throw out this question. You know? Is anything really gonna happen? Is anything new happening that I didn't see earlier? And again, you can see how now the business user can do that as, on his own stuff, and get an answer that says, no.

(John Balsovich at 00:47:51) You're pretty safe, but keep an eye on these three things.

(Tony Davis at 00:47:54) Mhmm.

(John Balsovich at 00:47:54) So now you can call the CIO and say, alright. What are your thoughts on these three things? Or, you know what I mean?

(Tony Davis at 00:47:59) Just

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) I just need you to be proactive, so when I log in, it tells me, hey. Right. We should take a look at this today. Right. That's what I want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:07) I want it to come to me.

(John Balsovich at 00:48:09) So that kinda takes that notification to the next level. Right? Because people are just like, like Tony just said, I've never asked this question before. Here's an idea. So, you know, as you figure out your questions, you know, and you take in your set of three questions that you wanna hear maybe every day or get the answer on.

(John Balsovich at 00:48:28) Right? I do love that idea about putting that automation in there, and just say, hey. Give me the answer. You know?

(John Balsovich at 00:48:34) Shoot it to me once in the morning or twice a day and, yeah, let me know how we're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:38) Right? For sure.

(Tony Davis at 00:48:40) These are things I've never asked, believe it or not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:43) How can

(Tony Davis at 00:48:45) I trust your analysis on RPI score? No clue what it's gonna say.

(John Balsovich at 00:48:50) I love it when he does that. Like, oh, okay. I hope that works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:54) Data volume, time range, consistency. It's got some good answers, by the way. Like, in general, I don't wanna bore everybody with reading everything verbatim, but the answers seem pretty solid. I see this like a weather report. Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:07) You know?

(Tony Davis at 00:49:07) You get addicted, to be honest. Yeah. Matter of fact, one of our customers has, what I call an insatiable curiosity. His name's Dan. Lives up in Connecticut.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:15) Shout out to Dan.

(Tony Davis at 00:49:16) Shout out to Dan.

(John Balsovich at 00:49:17) Hi, Dan. Hi, Dan. Hey, Dan.

(Tony Davis at 00:49:19) And he and I talk pretty much every day because he does have insatiable curiosity about this. Some of the questions he has come up with to ask are simply amazing. I mean, deep analysis. And he's one of the people that, even though he does use this for his application level, the number one thing, since I haven't named his company, this won't matter. The number one thing is he has probably ten sites that are around the world that are critical

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:45) for

(Tony Davis at 00:49:45) his operation. Okay? And so, he actually, I think, uses the RPI score less for, he does use applications, but he uses it based on the site. So, I'm just gonna name like Paris or Singapore or Sydney, Australia. These are important to him.

(Tony Davis at 00:50:01) He actually asked AI every day several questions about each site compared to the other site.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:07) Mhmm.

(Tony Davis at 00:50:07) I thought that was brilliant. And I, to be honest, I hadn't thought about it much, to do that. But, yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:50:13) I like that customization. Yeah. Yeah. And he's

(Tony Davis at 00:50:16) That's a great idea. And, of course, AI, everybody knows that the more that you work with a specific AI agent, even if it's well trained, it begins to learn a little bit on its own. Not saying self awareness or something, but, you know, it learns.

(John Balsovich at 00:50:28) Yeah. And then when you get an answer to your one question and you find out that that actually worked, right, then your brain is like, okay. What's the next question? Yeah. Right?

(John Balsovich at 00:50:37) And that's, you know, so as we're just and, again, as we're talking about, you know, Dan. Right? Dan's been around for a while, very educated, but he's like excited. Yes. Right?

(John Balsovich at 00:50:48) All again. And that kind of feedback is just awesome. It's invigorating. It really is.

(Tony Davis at 00:50:55) And we figured that if anybody can break it for us, Dan will do it. Dan will break it. Yeah. I'll get a report from him each day that says, hey. Check this out.

(Tony Davis at 00:51:04) Check this out. So I love it. We love it. Yeah. Yeah.

(Tony Davis at 00:51:07) But, anyways, obviously, we could go on and on for days because I'm so addicted to this, but we did wanna just sort of launch it, right, with you because the little films, little silly films and everything, were really meant to make a point that people like, and I'll speak for myself. After over thirty years in this business, what I feel like I've chased my entire career is how do you take your, whatever your business service is or your application, how do you actually make it truly reliable so that customers never stop using it? And the goal of the film was to sort of create a little bit of a buzz that shows that if you don't address these things, that eventually,

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:46) Oh, we got the box.

(John Balsovich at 00:51:48) I almost

(Tony Davis at 00:51:49) forgot about

(John Balsovich at 00:51:49) the box.

(Tony Davis at 00:51:51) So I know people have been asking, and the end of the movie was a cliffhanger. But you may remember that at the very final scene where John Doe is on his knees on the ground, and detective Mills and detective Somerset are saying, you know, you can't do this. And Mills says, come on, you gotta tell me, man, what's in the box? What's in the box? We may remember that John Doe, at that point said, I've already told you what's in the box.

(Tony Davis at 00:52:22) I tried to live the life of a simple IT operations manager. So I made a visit today to your pretty little app. He tried to live the life of an IT manager. And so, at the end, he says, I became degradation. And so, the reason that you saw red when Somerset sliced open the box was because the box was filled with degradation surrounding detective Mills' pretty little app.

(Tony Davis at 00:52:53) By the time we got the box here, the app is gone. Yeah. The user experience was destroyed, and that was the end of the movie. There's nothing left. His app is gone.

(John Balsovich at 00:53:04) So that is the scary part. Right?

(Tony Davis at 00:53:06) Yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:53:07) Don't let your app die.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:09) Yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:53:09) Right? Work on your reliability. Make it work for your customers. Make it work for your

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:16) internal customers. Like, Clippy in there. Right? Some old data technology. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:20) Like, old

(John Balsovich at 00:53:22) Clippy would disc.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:23) A floppy disc. Or something with like dead eyes on it. Yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:53:26) Right? Anybody got a three and a half disc?

(Tony Davis at 00:53:30) It's been a while since I've had one of those.

(John Balsovich at 00:53:31) Somebody know.

(John Balsovich at 00:53:32) To your reliability screen. Yeah, of course. He's made a Halloween version of this, right? So as Tony would do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:36) Of course.

(John Balsovich at 00:53:37) Of this, right? So as Tony would do.

(Tony Davis at 00:53:40) Yeah, that's the—when you see our LinkedIn, if anybody hasn't seen Th1rteen yet, the movie, then when you see our LinkedIn, you'll see that same 13 buckets and everything, but it's all red. So it's still radiation coming from the buckets, right, but anytime you see that, you can click on it and get one of the five episodes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:58) Okay. Yeah, yeah. Josh can put links in the show notes for people who want to watch the episodes. Cool.

(Tony Davis at 00:54:04) So what do you think? Is this interesting to you guys? I mean—

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:07) Oh yeah, I mean, it's actually interesting to me from, you know, what I said earlier, watching the progression over the couple years. Yeah, yeah. And it's smart. You're smart enough to find somebody who's talented and had this vision to come in here and do it, and I think that's great.

(John Balsovich at 00:54:23) It it is a great vision, and it really kind of goes back to just being able to work the companies that we work through, but also to kind of simplify where it actually makes sense. And really just to see the excitement. Like, I mean, been at this for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:41) Yeah.

(John Balsovich at 00:54:42) Right? We've all been at this for a while, and it definitely can get dry. You know? Yeah. It's like, you know, to see people getting fired up, I'm like, yeah, let's go. Yeah, right? And then all of a sudden, then ideas come out of it. You know, like, and then, you know, I want to say six months, but literally in three months—you know, as these ideas come pouring in, it's like, what's the next three questions? Right? It's just going to be a really fun couple of years.

(Tony Davis at 00:55:08) Yeah. John said one time—this was a couple weeks ago when we were in a meeting and we're talking about what could be. Like, what's next? What's next?—that we're accelerating. You know, just in our little space, right? But in our little space, we've gone, what would you say, maybe in 90 to 100 days, 120 days, we've gone from a walk, a good walk, to more of a jog. And now we feel like every day we're running, we're sprinting down the path of this kind of thing.

(John Balsovich at 00:55:32) Mhmm.

(Tony Davis at 00:55:33) And, you know, we're actually—we're actually not considering, John has already seriously got us down the path of actually not just providing what you saw today, but even consulting on GenAI business applications related to this. Yeah. So we have lots of customers out there that might actually want to, for instance, if they like the formula but they don't need the interface, you know, we're thinking about providing the formula as a service, an external service.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:00) Oh, you should absolutely.

(John Balsovich at 00:56:01) Yeah. Customization, you know, to that relative to their system. A lot of them have built internal tools.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:05) Yeah. And like, I want to pipe stuff in. Well, this is very cool. Thank you guys for doing this.

(Tony Davis at 00:56:12) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:12) We made a podcast. How do you feel? All right.

(Tony Davis at 00:56:14) This is awesome.

(John Balsovich at 00:56:15) How fun is this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:16) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague that 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]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.