Sowmya Sundararagavan
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Sowmya: [00:00:00] the key to a successful M& A, is the product legacy, but also you need to balance the demands of the acquirer's strategic goals and keeping the customer's demands and respect what worked in the past. Because that's how you bring the team members to different cultures .

Be open to change, carefully manage the transition to ensure that both short term stability and long term growth should be honored. And how do you keep that spark alive? 

Jeff: Welcome to Launch Pod, the show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're talking with Soya Sundara Govin senior director of product at FreshWorks, an AI customer service IT and CRM software platform. 

This episode with Soumya was a masterclass in product leadership post acquisition. She explains the worst thing you can do as a product leader post acquisition her process to successfully integrate two different product visions and how to bridge the gap between old teams and new teams.

Jeff: So check it out, learn from this, and here's our conversation with Soumya Sundararagavan.

So, um, Yeah, Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining.

Sowmya: much, man. Pleasure to be part of this show [00:01:00] and so excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Jeff: Yeah, this is gonna be a blast. we know a lot of people in common, it turns out, despite living halfway around the world from each other, but, I want to dig in. You spent, what, 15 years plus in banking, rose up through the ranks of product, produced a lot of functionality for clients for internal people.

And then about six years ago, you decided, you know what, let's change the whole thing up. Let's go into software and tech. And you moved into seemingly what was a, maybe accidentally fell into a series of roles where you were turning around or, helping integrate post acquisition technology. 

you know, You does series of post acquisition integrations, right? Cloud health and VMware Flexera had some integration stuff. And now you're at Freshworks where they recently acquired device 42.

Jeff: But the thing we have in common mostly is cloud health. You came in post acquisition right after VMware acquired. I left when it got acquired you came on and you basically jumped in to go. Tell us about that career step from banking into.

Software [00:02:00] first and then let's dive into integration stuff.

Sowmya: Ah, sure. First of all thank you for having me here. I appreciate it. It's crazy that we know so many people and have so much in common. So yeah, my world started my corporate world or entry into corporate world started with stints at some of the top tier financial institutions like Goldman and JP Morgan.

And then I relocated to India. And started working at Morgan Stanley. I was there for close to a decade or so, like nine, nine and a half years. And then it was through word of mouth that I got pulled into the VMware world and. At that time, Joe Kinsella, who was the founder, was recruiting folks in product management at CloudHealth got rebranded a couple of times.

Now it's Tanzu CloudHealth. I was fortunate to be part of that team. I think the transition was basically moving more towards SaaS platforms across cloud computing, financial management, [00:03:00] data intelligence. And as I had experience in that area, I was sought after, and It was a marriage made in heaven.

I would say VMware was one of the best tents that I've had. And it was a pleasure to work with a high performing team, such as VMware and CloudHealth.

Jeff: It was funny. Cause I remember talking to Joe probably about the same time that you were coming on, it was funny because like you can run into this problem in post acquisition where, and we had a guest Eric Matelka, he's now the head of product over at EPO which is like an AB testing platform, but earlier in his career, he came into a company called power reviews that had been acquired.

And then basically the Justice Department decided that the newly formed kind of conglomerate company was too, it was too much market share. And so they've actually forced the acquiring company to spend them back out. So he came in post that and was in this product management role in this company that had lost.

All context, all history and all connection to that fundamental. How did they get there and get successful? And they really flounder because [00:04:00] that kind of original team was gone. I remember talking to Joe at this time at cloud health when he was saying it's great, post VMware, they have this just massive ability to help him scale and help cloud health scale at a faster rate.

But on the flip side there, you're coming in and. What we're seeing is, a similar thing potentially where Joe's still there, but a lot of the PMs that helped build the company had been phasing out. Maybe some kind of, transition of people across the org and you were brought in to really help fill that gap.

I guess what did you walk into there and how did you start to look at that?

Sowmya: Oh, that's a great question. Somehow I always get into a situation where I'm brought in for a post acquisition

Jeff: Yeah.

Sowmya: merger.

Jeff: Accidental specialty.

Sowmya: if you will. I think navigating a product an M& A where the original founders or key players are no longer around is a delicate balancing act, right?

So you're dealing with the legacy of [00:05:00] what made the product successful, while also ensuring acquirer's strategic goals, in this case VMware. So I think. The way you can approach transitions similar to this is first things first, you need to understand the legacy of the product, right? So you should Start by talking to the remaining team members.

In this case, JM, Ineo, Joe, Purcell, they were all there. So even if some of the folks weren't there, there were likely people who understood the product's journey, the core customer base, and having deep conversations with them about what worked, what didn't work, customers core needs that gave me insight into the heart of the product.

I think the second thing was analyzing customer feedback and success stories. One of the things that All of us did, and I did particularly, is looking at testimonials, case studies, customer service tickets, to see what customers love about the product that's been acquired by VMware, and where do they feel the pain [00:06:00] points.

This helps you really understand what to preserve and what to potentially improve. You need to really study the product data, so any available analytics, user behavior data, adoption trends, patterns for success. You need to look at all of those features that. drive or drove the engagement or areas that resulted in, success or churn.

Because once you understand the legacy of the product, then you go on to the next thing as to how to keep the spark alive, right? That's the most important thing. 

Jeff: I'm curious here. Cause I talked to John McLaughlin, who we both know again sadly, just to warn listeners there's gonna be a lot of this people we know in common. We realized there's just a massive, despite the fact that you live in India and I'm here in Boston, we know a ridiculous number of people in common.

So apologies in advance. But I talked to John and he, a couldn't speak highly enough of you to get that out of the way which is always, wonderful

Sowmya: I'm honored.

Jeff: But he talked about basically over the time you were there, there was a [00:07:00] lot of phase out of these kind of O. G. Probably people who helped it. us build the company originally paint a picture for us a little bit. What did that look like? My, my understanding is not, it was just binary. They were all gone.

So over time they phased out. So how did you work with this team that maybe grew and shrank and what that looked like as you came in and, , how do you work with these people who have been there for so long? How do you integrate those new teams and old teams?

And then, he credits you actually for filling a lot of gaps as that team phased out and really. Rising through the ranks there. So how did you take on more and more of that? And how do you look at, Here are the things we need to continue, but also probably the toughest thing for people who have been there a long time, was like, what are the things that work that maybe you need to stop or move away from because there's a new macro vision for this new kind of acquired

Sowmya: sure. I would say that the key to a successful M& A, like I said, is the product legacy, but also you need to balance the demands of the acquirer's strategic goals and keeping the customer's demands and respect what worked in the past. Because that's how you bring the team [00:08:00] members to different cultures and two different value sets.

Be open to change, carefully manage the transition to ensure that both short term stability and long term growth should be honored. So some of the things that are very important and you and I spoke about this the last time is how do you keep that spark alive? So bringing people together when the OGs are gone is one of the main things that you should.

Strive towards is keeping the spark alive and balancing the existing customers and acquirer strategy and one few ways by which you can do that is you respect the product's DNA. You find those unique selling propositions, the USPs that made your product really successful and ensure that these elements remain integral to the product's future development.

When you do that, the people are going to come in right because customers. Often form strong attachments to a specific feature, aspects of a particular [00:09:00] product, and so on. So when you preserve the customer centric focus, you ensure that the product continues to meet the needs of the existing customer base, even while considering new growth opportunities.

Some of the things that you should stop doing is You should not pigeonhole yourself and saying this is the product and this is it. You should continuously innovate yourself and you need to be mindful that what brought you here is not going to take you there. Which means that in an M& A you might inherit a customer base that has developed a strong loyalty to the product but you also have these new logos coming in.

So you need to be mindful of this. Don't make drastic changes too quickly but do understand your brand that Got you here, but also your acquirer strategy so that you segment your customer base. You align with the acquirer's vision, and then you start prioritization framework for all the key focus areas.

When you [00:10:00] do this, you have to be transparent with your customers, right? You need to tell them that I am doing this because I want to have a clear communication plan for existing customers. I want them to understand how M& A will affect them, especially in terms of roadmap. Pricing, support and all of that.

So when you are able to preserve this customer centric focus and respect the product's DNA, be mindful of the acquirer strategy, brand and culture considerations, and last but not the least, prioritize the framework for focus areas, you will be able to balance those incremental improvements with innovation.

Because ultimately you. are being acquired by a firm. You want to innovate and some features might need to be refined or retired. Some might need to be scaled while other needs to be completely overhauled because in the new product market fit new ICP you might no longer need it. Maybe it's a way for you to improve upon it.

So you need to strike that balance between [00:11:00] stabilizing the core product while preparing for the broader changes required by the acquiring firm 

Jeff: I have a question for you here, because we've both been through acquisitions, both on the acquirer and the acquiree side. I remember I was at a company called Dynatrace early on, which is a kind of application performance management solution, like , backend performance solution for software.

And I remember we were acquired by a company called CompuWare way back in like 2011 or something. And. We had our user conference shortly after that, and one of our competitors, I won't name names, but they may or may not have had a superhero as their mascot at the time actually rented one small hotel, like a meeting room on the floor we were holding our user conference at, and tried to basically create some FUD around people being worried about, vision and innovation was going to stop because we were acquired It didn't work luckily.

And I saw, I came back to the company several years after the [00:12:00] acquisition saw just the huge amount of movement, the product had, and just the complete incredible exponential increase in coverage that the product had, but it was something that I feel like is recurring here is people always worry a little bit when you're acquired by a huge enterprise, like a VMware or a CompuWare that it's going to stop that.

How do you quell those fears with existing customers while at the same time? Helping them understand things are going to change, though.

Sowmya: Yeah, I think navigating any challenge and balancing existing customer, it's very important to understand who are those high value customers. You need to segment your customer base, right? You need to understand who are your ICPs. You need to sit with them. Start small, start slow, don't get jump into everything all at once, but help prioritize what's important to them while considering your future product developments.

You always need to think about your broader market expansion. The example that you gave, [00:13:00] just sitting into a room and not addressing the elephant in the room doesn't take us anywhere, right? So it's very important to adopt a very phased approach and have data driven decisions. So use data from both customer feedback and business goals.

So you decide where to double down on innovation or enhancements. I think it's extremely important to Be in constant touch with customers, right? You need to really make them understand why have you been acquired. And if you're on the other side, then why did we acquire this firm? It's important to address the important USPs of the firm and ensure that you're having that balanced roadmap.

The first six months are going to be challenging, right? As you navigate culture, roadmap, vision, ways of working, tooling, there are so many things, right? And I know we discussed about is there a checklist of sorts, right? A checklist that keeps growing as I keep learning in every acquisition. But 

it's important for us to [00:14:00] ensure at the end of the day, you can do all of this, but product quality and customer needs. Should always be in your mind, right? You should never fall short of their expectations. It's very important to have the expectations set out straight, clear with clear communication and be very clear with what type of customers you're targeting using segmentation and customer profiling as well as looking at PMF of a target product and so on.

Jeff: So do you remember, I know it was a little while back, but do you remember after you came into cloud health, like what were the first big. Deltas the product or this new product or was looking at and realizing was something that you're going to have to address as you brought it up to the new vision that VMware was looking to utilize cloud health in.

Sowmya: I think we were going full throttle, right? I think we were a bunch of really high performing team members. We were able to communicate transparently with our customers. We had a very good [00:15:00] revenue, solid. Set of product features that we wanted to go ahead, but as we were integrating with VMware, as well as getting into the multi cloud and the hybrid and on prem cloud visibility and so on, it was important for us to get into the cadence of what is the overall vision of VMware and Are there new directions for wider audience?

Do they want us to integrate with few more products within the VMware suite of applications, right? Because you want to be able to integrate with and collaborate with other products. So understanding those requirements and finding the intersections where you not only preserve your key customer relationships, but you're also able to meet the collaborative aspect of.

Expand and land motion so that ultimately you want to get more logos. So how do you do that with the broader perspective? So to understand that it took me [00:16:00] some time because we were not just in the middle of post acquisition phase, but we were also trying to move fast with our own roadmap while trying to understand our acquirer strategy.

It was a little bit of a learning curve for us before we could stabilize as to what we needed in the Tanzu world.

Jeff: I know we've referred to this idea of a checklist on acquisitions throughout our conversation here. But just to wrap that all up in a bow, it seems like you've really talked about, you want to do that thorough due diligence coming in, right? Like how do you have clear communication with customers with the team itself that came in partners, maybe in this case, like even ISVs or other kinds of like partners in that world.

How do you look at integration planning? What's, what does this mean for the broader, the acquiring org? How are you integrating in the acquired product and teams as well? Not just product, what is that culture or that

Sowmya: yes, that's very important.

Jeff: operate? How do you 

Sowmya: Yeah, that's very, 

addressing potential [00:17:00] culture clashes while maintaining your brand consistency and compliance is so important because, we don't want to be in a situation where the product suffers and the integration suffers because of this. And you need to, like you said, constantly have a detailed integration plan, go back and forth on it, monitor the product performance throughout the transition period.

That's

Jeff: exactly. How do you make sure that you're delivering a great product while this is? Because integrations are chaos that even the best acquisitions are going to throw a wrench in a perfectly well machine on. And most companies are not perfectly well machines. So that can. Like, how do you ensure that the product stays great throughout this and you don't You know, end up the victim of one of these, potential FUD campaigns that sometimes competitors will try and position as how do you keep the brand going and keep connected people who care about what you're doing while still transitioning?

You brought up, I think previously, there's always like regulatory stuff you have to worry about still as well. And how do you proactively look at that? [00:18:00] But then I like that you talked about also like, how do you look at. Product roadmap planning and where was this original company going? Where was the acquiring company going?

And how does that roadmap enhance each other, right? Like, how do you take advantage and make a situation where ideally, one plus one equals three, because so many acquisitions result in negative equity value, that, how do you be one of the few top that is, is accretive to the company.

And then all the platform stuff, right? You have a great framework here that seems like you go through as you go through these. , now you're at Freshworks and you guys acquired D42. I know Freshworks is a public company and it's probably less we can go into in detail because it's recent, but can you maybe just give us an overview of how you've looked at this and how you've thought about this acquisition as you've been here in the ITAM space now?

Sowmya: I think device 42 Freshworks is a great partnership. I think it's it's putting us, way ahead of a lot of our competitors. I think it [00:19:00] leverages the strengths from both the companies with this technology integration. We are looking to have a unified platform. I think the vision is Yeah.

and roadmap is pretty solid and our customers as well as the internal folks are extremely excited about this acquisition. We have a great partner with device 42 teams. So in this case, it really helps us because we all are moving towards this common goal of. Maintaining and leveraging the strengths from both the companies.

I would say it's a solid post acquisition phase so far and really enjoying the transition phase. Like I said accidental career path. So I'm happy to be part of this and it's going wonderful. And in any post acquisition phase, you are going to hit certain challenges, but.

I think we are doing it very well using that checklist where we are consolidating tools, we are migrating data to this platform, keeping in mind the compliance [00:20:00] factor on both sides. And we did that even with VMware and cloud health because VMware has those epic two values and it didn't take us long to basically adopt those values and cloud health had its own brand, but I think the people were focused towards a common goal.

Jeff: And as long as you have the mindset of the people and the culture and values are the same, it's people over process. And that's what the agile framework says. So we were, I would say I was fortunate that way in both these acquisitions to have great set of people to work with. 

I want to maybe zoom out a little bit more in just from a general sense, right?

Jeff: MNA. Yeah. I think I touched on for a second. Generally. Is not, by the, by Wall Street is not seen as an accretive thing. Typically, the acquiring company usually takes a hit in the stock value. , how do you think about evaluating kind of an MNA opportunity or a target for MNA and how do you look at that and what's your thought process for like, how is this going to work or is it going to work?

Sowmya: [00:21:00] Evaluating a product before considering any M& A deal is very critical step to ensure that your potential acquisition aligns with the strategy goals and it delivers value. That's very important, right? So the first thing I would say is you need to really understand your PMF, your product market fit.

So you need to determine if the product has achieved the product market fit. This means it should solve a real substantial problem for its target audience and the customers should be willing to pay for it, right? So you need to look for strong evidence that the product has a loyal user base, high engagement and consistent demand.

And I saw that, in the world of Flexera when they acquired Snow, I saw the same thing in VMware when they acquired Cloud Health. And now when Freshworks has acquired Device 42, right? That is very important. And then few other things that you should look at is you should examine your customer retention rates, churn rates, and [00:22:00] CLTV, so the customer lifetime value.

High retention rates are a very good indicator of PMF. So you need to look at customer feedback, satisfaction, testimonials, et cetera. So you understand how well the product meets the user needs and. The growth metrics, right? So you need to assess the product's growth trajectory. Are sales, user adoption, and market penetration growing?

Slow or stagnant growth may signal PMF issues or lack of scalability. In my case, I was fortunate that all these products showed very good growth and they didn't have PMF issues. They were very performant and scalable in the, target market. You need to evaluate the product's competitive position also.

You need to look at competitive landscape, hey, similar products in terms of feature, pricing, performance, and differentiation. How does this product compare? So you need to look at that because is the product well positioned to defend itself when you want to expand into the market share? And what are those differentiators?

[00:23:00] What makes this product unique or competitive? spelling in the market. So you need to identify the key differentiators, whether that is technology advantage, a unique customer experience, ease of use, you have a great UX design, intellectual property, market niche, whatever that might be, right? And the last two things that is very important is you need to look at the product's overall technical health, underlying technology stack and infrastructure scalability, the code quality and all of that, and the financials.

You need to look at the revenue and profitability, right? Because reviewing the product's revenue stream is very important because is it generating consistent and predictable income? Are there any signs of financial instability? Any negative cash flows? Low margin? Lack of diversification in revenue source?

You need to look at all of that and look at unit economics. So all of these things is extremely important apart from your regular table stakes like net promoter scores and customer [00:24:00] feedback and customer satisfaction and market trends and all of that. It's very important for us to evaluate the PMF based on all of these considerations and see if the product has achieved the PMF.

And I think that's how I would probably start evaluating any product.

Jeff: I remember talking to a CEO, a company I worked at years back, who was one of those, every day at work was like a master's class in SAS metrics and how to use those to evaluate opportunities. And one thing he brought up is that his prior company, how they had looked at, Kind of acquisitions in M and a, and they had done quite a bit of it.

He was part of that. And one of the big things that people always missed was, you can look at top line growth and like you said, you look at a technical proficiency and does the platform do what you need it does perform in a high way and deliver a great experience. But one place that he found that companies often fell down was they would show great top line growth and the numbers all looked good until you dug in and [00:25:00] looked at.

a combination of CAC and churn. And he found so many companies had this kind of great early traction of just really inflecting up, but also had 30%, 40 percent churn. And that's great. And you can cover it early on, a lot of top line growth can cover that sin, but very quickly, that's going to catch up with you.

And , if you can't get ahold of that, you're going to stall pretty fast. And it was interesting to always hear like all the things you need to look at. For these M and a considerations and, it's one thing I love here, but it's just how more and more people think through this is because, I think there's so many dimensions is always great

Sowmya: Yeah it's, there's so many dimensions, so many aspects that you need to consider, right? I think PMF is one part of it. When you look at your time, when you look at your brand strength, you look at roadmap and everything, right? Even the legal and regulatory considerations, right? Sometimes you need to even look at patents and everything.

Yeah. Trademarks and copyrights. There's so much that goes because it's the product protected from [00:26:00] competitors. Are there any IP risk? Do you have GDPR for data privacy? Do you have contracts and agreements? There are like so many things that goes behind as part of the due diligence. It's crazy.

So yeah, as

Jeff: As Eric Botelco found out, do you have to worry about the Justice

Sowmya: yeah.

Jeff: denying the merger after you do it?

I'm curious to, to move on from this cause I think you have had this fantastic, second part of your career here in, in turnarounds in MNA and how do you like work with post acquisition technology?

There's another thing that you seem to be really passionate about, and it is related to cloud health and IAM work that you're doing at FreshWorks now, but it is a super set there and that's your involvement with the finops Foundation. And I think this whole, your whole story of as of late makes sense where you're, cloud health is cloud cost management.

FreshWorks is in the IAM space, but can we take a step back maybe and can you just explain even what is FinOps? I feel like the term gets Around quite a bit right now and not everyone outside of me, the foundation is exactly [00:27:00] how this fits into like how they should be looking at things.

Sowmya: So FinOps is nothing but a cross functional discipline, and I would say it's like a cultural practice. It brings together finance, technology, and business teams. And the reason why they need to come together is that's the best way for you to optimize cloud spending, you maximize your business value, and You do it through collaboration and data driven decision making.

That's what FinOps is. And the purpose is the FinOps Foundation JR, when he laid the foundation for it, the purpose was To aim the aim and the purpose was to enable organizations to understand, control and optimize their cloud cost so that the cloud investment they deliver very good or a tangible business value, right?

So the focus was, hey, Do I have the financial accountability? Do I have the data to make informed decisions? [00:28:00] Can I work with teams and disparate locations to address this complex cloud spending that my organization has? And It's very important for organization to understand that at the end of the day, the customer wants the total cost of ownership, right?

And I think this is seeping in a little bit in the SaaS management space, apart from just the cloud cost side of it, but also on the ITAM, ITSM side of it. And I keep telling everyone that it's not going to be long where customer comes and says, give me a single pane of glass where You, by adopting a FinOps approach, you extend that to on prem hybrid and also the infrastructure management so that you get proper accountability and chargeback showback mechanism and you gain better visibility into all types of infrastructure spends.

It's not just the asset management, but also the services, the cloud. Data [00:29:00] center, hybrid environments, it could be even a set of end user compute devices, but ultimately a finance guy wants to know where is my cost going in, right? And the technology leader wants to know how many machines is my team spinning off?

What's the cost? Where is it going? So it all ties in into that. If we are able to use and extend the FinOps framework to inform, optimize, and operate, I think we will be in a better place to justify the cost that we have in the IT world.

Jeff: So you're in more of the item world now, which to me seems just like a superset almost of a fin ops or cloud spend management. Is that an accurate way of looking at it or are these kinds of separate with maybe a small venn diagram overlap or it seems like they all have the same rough.

Goal, which is you're spending money on technical assets and technical spend and tools and the supporting infrastructure of how you deliver the thing that is your business. Are [00:30:00] these really just the same general thesis maybe slightly separate

Sowmya: Yeah, I would probably say they all fall under the umbrella of, Making an organization smarter with value driven technology investments, whether it is cloud, whether it is other assets that you have, and essentially align your goals with financial performance. And modern IT asset management has also evolved beyond just merely tracking assets, right?

Previously, it used to be asset management was just, oh, Track the list of assets in an Excel spreadsheet. Tell me how many laptops are being assigned to all the folks on this floor, right? Use a barcode scanner to say that I have these many desktops, these many laptops. It goes beyond that because today, in today's day and age, we See organization that want us to provide comprehensive insights that help them to optimize cost and improve overall efficiency, which you're doing in the cloud world as well.

So the basic theme behind [00:31:00] all of this is organizations want to optimize cost and improve overall efficiency, right? So even in case of item, they want to be able to optimize license management. They want to improve the cost visibility and reporting with Centralized financial insights. Many item tools now also allow for cost allocation, linking specific assets or services to particular department teams or projects.

And you're also able to say that, hey I can track and manage not just the cloud assets like virtual machines, storage and database, but also with businesses sometimes repatriating away from cloud too. They want to look at both cloud as well as the data center environment to understand underutilized overprovisioned resources have better life cycle management, as well as integration with other tools as well.

For example, I want to be able to track [00:32:00] better pricing trends, vendor performance, contract terms. I want to do batch management or, have better log intelligence of the list of assets. So at the end of the day, the problem statements and use cases are pretty similar, right? You want to be able to Have the proper budget, optimize it, forecast it, and be able to manage your cost.

And it goes far beyond tracking assets. So ITAMIC also incorporates a lot of FinOps principles and practices by providing visibility into the asset performance, usage patterns, financial implications, and so on.

Jeff: Yeah. It seems like there's a world we could run into down the line where there's a platform that kind of helps you manage all of

Sowmya: Absolutely.

Jeff: all at some level a finance team looking at how we spending money on technology, be it, cloud infrastructure, maybe physical servers that you have laptops.

Like you said, or desktops or all the way to SAS license. Like I know I've been at so [00:33:00] many companies where we've audited the several, even a marketing here, we have 20 SAS tools probably. And I've been at companies where, we've had 30, 40, 50, and just in marketing and you audit that and you realize we have 10, 15, 20 percent of licenses not being used and no plan to grow into them or other things.

So there's just so much ability to like. Make sure you're being efficient with how you're investing these things and are you getting the

Sowmya: Yeah.

Jeff: that you could, but that. I think brings us to like another interesting point where people are spending a lot of money right now is the idea of AI and you've also talked a lot about AI and how it can fit into autonomous IT ops or ITAM and what's your vision for where AI can play into this whole world and just how it's going to help product in

Sowmya: Oh, I think AI driven automation will revolutionize your routine IT tasks, right? Because that will help you to intelligently manage and streamline your processes, such as, incidence response or system monitoring, [00:34:00] resource allocation and so on. So by leveraging machine learning and predictive analytics, I think AI will Proactively identify and resolve issues, which is very important, right?

Because in this day and age, you want things automated so that you can focus on strategy while You have an AI driven automation that helps you making decisions with real time insights, right? So I think AI driven automation will help you with optimization of that asset utilization and. This will be a very intelligent way of, way forward, where I see this reduce a lot of operational cost.

It'll really help you improve your system reliability. It'll ensure that your assets are efficiently managed. And not just in one part of it, right? Throughout your life cycle of your asset, I think it'll be a real game changer is what I feel. And the potential of [00:35:00] machine learning in the areas of Predicting incidents and auto discovering network assets is going to be humongous.

Jeff: Yeah. I can only imagine how much this is going to take on. And the nice part will be, I think teams here are always so thinly stretched. It's probably not displacing jobs. It's allowing people to do the human things that, that maybe an AI isn't quite at yet, but automating a lot of the drudgery that isn't maybe the most

Sowmya: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's going to help you make it better. It's like I started off with no phones now with a smartphone. It's made our lives easier and better. We need to embrace the technology. Human element is never going to go away, right? It's only gonna as long as you realize what's the value.

If you're going to limit your value to be just this much, then it makes you feel that, oh, AI is going to come and take my job. But when you make the value as endless and limitless, then you see that AI is going to come there and help [00:36:00] you be more strategic and have more time to do the things that you really want to be doing rather than doing manual stuff.

That will be where it help you. Yeah.

Jeff: It's interesting. I don't know if you've seen or played with lovable at all. It's a new, it's one of the new, like hot AI, coding tools, but we have a whole growth engineering team here that is set about how do we, create things that we need for go to market whether it be, tooling we need on the growth side or API integrations or a whole bunch of, they're fantastic engineers who are really able to do a broad set of things.

And we had run into a problem where we were trying to create a very simple application, but just didn't exist anywhere that we, that did exactly what we wanted. We could have spent this team's time on it and they could have built it, spent a month building it. It's pretty straightforward and lovable.

I was able to sit there and do it in two or, I think three hours in pretty much of effort. And it's done at this point. And it's got a login, it's got, user management and it does all the things I need to do on our end. But the nice thing is it's not getting rid of our need for that growth engineering team.

[00:37:00] It is allowing them to do the really. hard things, the things that are really good differentiate versus this small operational thing that, that we can do it. So it seemed to be that kind of mindset is going to happen across a lot of functions of how do you arm people to self serve on simple tasks that you just had to be an engineer for before that now we can, less technical people can self serve and free up.

Those people who really are strong in that sense to do the difficult things that need to scale, that need to be done with a very high level of precision versus just, it needs to

Sowmya: For example, I completely second that, right? Like routine IT tasks like incident detection, root cause analysis, performance optimization. All of these, you have so many people focusing on it and they really want to be doing strategic stuff. So freeing up the teams to focus on those strategic initiatives, that becomes the core focus.

That's where AIOps comes in. can help you, right? So for example, AIOps can automatically resolve cloud resource scaling issues, right? So when you have peak traffic or you want to identify and fix like [00:38:00] network performance bottlenecks, so it really helps you. In that sense that you don't have for support people working on this when they can be doing some of the more cutting edge innovative technology solutions and focusing on that.

So I will give you those real time insights and it will help you with those proactive issue resolution so that you know you can. improve that system reliability and reduce the manual effort. So absolutely, I completely agree with you to free up time for strategic work.

Jeff: It's the same way for product teams. I got to get the plugin that, you know, on the log rockets that we built. AI that can watch your sessions for you and basically surface, where are you users having trouble? Where are they running into problems? Not just events driven, but actual experiential, where are they struggling?

How do you create a better experience? And you don't need to have product people trying to, spend an hour or two or three on a Friday, manually parsing through as many sessions as they can, which is gonna be a small fraction. But how do you actually just deliver these insights without having to spend the time in spreadsheets or otherwise?[00:39:00] 

Digging through what you hope to find. How do you just find the most important stuff? Yeah, I think this is a great place to stop on AI. It seems to be a great vector that we're all looking towards to. Delivering a better experience for people and up leveling the work we can do. I do want to make sure that we circle back and, maybe a year out and have you back on and we can talk more about our friends in common and how the D42 integration is gone and all this stuff.

We can unpack more of the stuff we didn't get to, but thank you so much for coming on. This was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about evaluating and dealing with the post acquisition, world of product and how do you continue to drive value there? Plus it's just fun to talk about some people we knew in common.

So thank you so much for coming on. If people want to reach out and, ask you more questions to get to know you or, meet or talk what's the best way LinkedIn, a good 

Sowmya: LinkedIn is a great channel. I'm very active on it. And yeah, please buzz me, ping me on LinkedIn. I'll be happy to connect. And I think in this AI world, we are all in this together. We are all learning. We are all making things better. We all go through the whole acquisition post acquisition [00:40:00] phases.

So I think we should not lose Site of the bigger picture of value. I would say that would be my parting phrase and always focus on the value and your customer. And I think you will be in the right place. And thank you so much for this engaging conversation. It made me think a lot, I came here unprepared because we have a lot of things in common and thanks a lot.

I appreciate your time and we'll circle back a year from now. I truly appreciate the 

Jeff: hopefully it's not, hopefully we don't take a year to talk, but we'll bring it back on in a year. Thank you so much. It was great to have you on. Have a

Sowmya: See you.

Jeff: your day.