Embracing Change in Tech: From the AI Revolution and the Power of Adaptability

Embark on a journey through the dynamic landscape of technology with our special guest Dan, an IT virtuoso whose career trajectory is a testament to the field's limitless potential. Reflect upon the infancy of personal computing when unboxing a gateway PC was a momentous occasion, and discover how the role of IT professionals has evolved from hardware whisperers to pioneers of an automated future. Our conversation with Dan spans from the foundational importance of IT certifications to the pressing need for tech-savvy individuals to fill the shoes of retiring mainframe engineers, underscoring the tech industry's embrace of diverse talent and the imperative for continuous learning.

Imagine a world where healthcare professionals can focus entirely on patient care, unburdened by administrative tasks, thanks to the marvels of AI. In this episode, we dissect the monumental shifts AI is bringing to various sectors, especially healthcare, by providing real-time insights and streamlining operations. We delve into the spectrum of reactions from the medical community towards AI's growing presence and examine the changing landscape for IT professionals as automation surges forward. The narrative weaves through the importance of deep technical knowledge and how it remains relevant amidst rapid technological advancements.

As we wrap up our enlightening discussion, the spotlight turns to the essence of adaptability in tech careers and the excitement that comes with embracing change. From transitioning desktop management to mastering mobile device management, we highlight the critical nature of aligning one's skillset with the business world's evolving demands. Leadership within tech is also a crucial thread in our dialogue, as we explore the delicate balance a CISO must strike and the innovative strides EDB Postgres is making in the PostgreSQL community and cloud-managed services. Dan's story exemplifies how saying 'yes' to opportunities can open doors to growth and unforeseen paths, proving that agility in one's career is not just beneficial, but necessary for success.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

How's it going, Dan? It's great to finally have you on the podcast. I think that we've rescheduled this thing a couple times now, but I'm really excited for our conversation. I'm glad that we can finally get together to do this thing.

Speaker 2: 0:14

Yeah, and I'm happy to be with you today. And, yeah, I'm happy to get this one under our belt here. So open it up for questions and let's get going.

Speaker 1: 0:24

Yeah, absolutely so, Dan. I start everyone off with telling how they got started in IT, right? Maybe what interested you in the IT world that you were like, oh, I want to go down this path. And the reason why I start everyone off there is because I have a section of my audience that are in that situation, that are trying to figure out if IT is for them. Maybe they can make a career change or something like that. And I feel hearing everyone's background, everyone's unique story, just helps others to know that hey, maybe I can do this thing too. I've done over 150 episodes at this point and I haven't heard the same background twice, so that seems to be the case with information security.

Speaker 2: 1:18

I think for me, my journey was actually a state funded program for low income families where we applied. I had a summer job at 16. And I was a part of a place called Education Connection. It's been rebranded, but in Connecticut it is a regional educational system service center that provides at the time had provided educational technology services to school districts and I had that program for the summer. I think we built a website.

Speaker 2: 1:57

I'd be dating myself if I mentioned what we developed it in but, it was a fun exercise and at the end they asked if I could stay on for part time hours and I worked at that facility for four years. They were fantastic to me and from there it was all right. Well, I seem to be good at this thing called computers. This goes back to the 90s, right. So I'm like, yeah, I'll stick with it and see what shakes out of this. And between that kind of getting in, focusing initially my studies in computer science and kind of just you know, technology just became a part of the roles that I excelled in and I kind of stuck to it from that point forward.

Speaker 1: 2:42

So, so back, you know, back in the 90s. You know I mean I was a little kid, right, so I don't remember much. But you know, back in the 90s, in tech, what was the atmosphere like? Were people excited for the future of it? Was the skies, the limit? Was it potentially even limited? You know in your own vision, like, okay, I'll do this thing, and it's kind of just, you know tech support and that's what it is, that's where it'll be, you know forever. Because you know I look at it now and with the, you know AI evolving like it is, with the cloud being as predominant as it is, I mean it's constantly evolving, right. But was that the same vision back then?

Speaker 2: 3:32

You know back then you know, remember vividly when we received our gateway boxes of PCs right, I had the cow prints, if you're not familiar with the gateway brand. We also received what were the latest and greatest Macintosh, the iMac, that that little monitor kind of multi-colored thing. That was like all the rage. And when we talked about technology you had big players, novel as an example. We had a Novel infrastructure, cisco household name back in the 90s I think. When you look at Microsoft, even the MCSE was the certification de jure, like that's what you needed to have to have a successful career in IT. And I think when you look at the technologies and really how businesses applied those, you know that the scope or the vision was very much of like oh, we have these tools and we're going to make us more productive. Now that net is just casted even wider with what is considered, you know, business enabling technology. So it was, I'd say, a very different world. I think back then the focus is really on, especially on the engineering side, understanding. When you're in university you're going through understanding microprocessors work and my program was very specific for that. But a lot of my coworkers at the time I mean they just knew through experience and education how the really almost like lower level operations happened, how to support hardware technology at a very low level, and I think that the main difference that we're seeing today is that's become very commoditized. Very hidden below the scenes are certain individuals that I work with at EDB that understand just not a necessity from a post-grist perspective understand those internals. But you know the economy that has built on top of that low level understanding has really grown and I think you know individuals have an opportunity to excel in the field, technology field in general, even without that knowledge. Now, having that knowledge only makes you that much more proficient in understanding why things work the way they work. But I think, comparing the mid 90s and that ramp up tocom, yeah, there was a lot of web kind of growth there.

Speaker 2: 6:13

But I think you know techies were more techie back then, believe it or not. And I think, wow, some folks would cling to the laurels on whether they're as hardcore as some of the old engineers. You know you're not going to find many mainframe folks and if they do, they're making a pretty penny these days because it's just the level of knowledge and just institutional knowledge, especially in organizations that have those technologies, just can't be replaced. You know we studied this at MassMutual with the aging out of specific talent that would run our mainframe systems. We built cognitive knowledge systems that we're trying to solve. How do we get an L1 to an L3 in terms of proficiency and being able to address really hard problems? By cognitively modeling what a mainframe engineer kind of looks like and how they think through analysis. So this is kind of a large problem.

Speaker 2: 7:13

But in general, when we look at opportunity and I think you made mention your viewers often have, you know, a question is IT right for me? I think is technology the right world for you? I don't think there's plenty of jobs that technology don't doesn't play a strong part, but I think we're going to start to see industries being changed that have been isolated from that. When we look at the four or three prior stages of industrial revolution, right, we're going into a fourth and this is what AI is driving. This industrial revolution is going to change the way we work in ways that we're not even aware of today, but also change areas that traditionally haven't been in focus. So you know, farming for a while has actually benefited from technology advancements, right, but where does AI take a farmer of the future.

Speaker 2: 8:12

Do you have a love and passion right for agriculture, but also have an act for technology, where that intersection is going to become more interesting for you right? Or if you're, you know, a post grad and you have these skills and you're like, well, where do I want to work? Well, there's going to be these industries that are not really saturated and when we think of reskilling ourselves, it's where do we want to work, where do we want to apply ourselves? And ultimately, you know, we want to be successful in our career, but there's just going to be opportunity for individuals to kind of prove themselves and to kind of live a, you know, I'd say, successful career, but, you know, fulfilling life. I think it's really exciting right now and I don't know that is technology or IT. The right thing for me is like do I have a passion for this and a passion for some industry? Because those worlds are colliding right now.

Speaker 1: 9:08

Yeah, I think you know, in the near future or even right now, you know, we're going to see IT be involved into fields and into ways that you know we never, we never really imagined before. Right, like you mentioned, how AI and IT will meet for farming right, and how it'll augment, how farmers, you know, plant crops and you know, maintain them and things like that. I mean that's a whole, that could be a whole industry right there. That's a consulting firm of tech people that come in, deploy an AI, set it up with a drone and the drone does whatever In the autonomous mapping of property.

Speaker 2: 9:55

Some of these things likely exist today, but I think the catalyst for the more human aspects of how they engage, when you take a look at various industries and I'm not going to call it farming, but various industries right the service aspect naturally has this level of personal engagement with customers. Patients take healthcare. There are ambient technologies to give a really pointed example for healthcare, where AI is able to, in the background, listen. When you're walking in, you're having a conversation with the nurse prior to the doctor. You're having a conversation with the doctor, but in real time that conversation is being turned into insights. Those insights are building a profile of what could be wrong as the doctor is asking more probing questions, really getting into a potential diagnosis for the condition that you have and being able to automatically type out and have those notes being put into the EMR.

Speaker 2: 11:03

That's happening today. You think about how that experience can translate to other industries. It's going to enable productivity gains across population demographics, even skill levels, bringing up and allowing even entry-level analysts or whatever role it may be be able to perform at much higher levels than they are today. That's with the assistance of these technologies. It's going to be wild when you look at the prior stages or phases of these industrial revolutions. This one is going to affect our families, our kids and generations for much like the industrial revolutions of the past. It's very exciting, for sure.

Speaker 1: 11:55

I wonder. You bring up the doctor's office and I wonder how much of a doctor's, just a normal physician, how much of his work would be offset by AI? Potentially, because even with telehealth and telemedicine, they're not there touching you. Obviously they're listening to what you're telling them, they're putting your symptoms into a computer, checking the symptoms with an illness and then prescribing you something. That's all things that an AI could probably do at some point.

Speaker 2: 12:39

Yeah, I mean there are at least two camps. I'll put it that way. There is the camp that looks at this, as there's no way a machine knows more than me. This technology I've done this for years. I know when I see a condition there's going to be another camp. That's wow. I have this assistive technology. I'm still in the driver's seat for making decisions, but it's providing me real-time telemedicine, real-time information that makes my job easier.

Speaker 2: 13:13

When it comes to compliance, oh, the documentation and the potential for miss billing and miss coding.

Speaker 2: 13:21

That is also addressed with the ability to leverage these technologies. I think practices that lean into this are going to see much more time with patients where they need to, less time, which a good portion of time and overhead is spent on the compliance and governance of ensuring that records are kept. When that starts to become just seamless, and to the way this technology is being framed in ambient, it's around you, your work and what you dislike about your job. It starts to be minimized in a way that you get back to treating patients and paying attention to the actual patient rather than worrying about. I got to go to the next thing and figure out this next set of tasks that I have ahead of us. I'm bullish with the way that this is going to change industries, but certainly in the more regulated industries where compliance and regulation exists for protecting patients and protecting organizations and entities. That, overhead, I think, is where we're going to see a lot of initial gains, where we can get people back to being productive and compliant at the same time.

Speaker 1: 14:43

Yeah, it'll be a really fascinating time and work effort there. It's almost like a compliance check while you're doing it, while the new information is being added in. That's even offsetting some tech careers there. It's interesting how everything will shake out.

Speaker 2: 15:07

Yeah, yeah. I mean I think the replacement of roles will only go so far, because there's going to be companies at different levels and how they want to operate their business. But even in particular, like Chrome OS, when that came out, everyone's like oh you don't need a desktop anymore, you still.

Speaker 2: 15:27

Yeah, there are plenty of use cases where that's valid, Even to your point. Telehealth is going to benefit and is benefiting. There's a company called NABLA that has this. They just received their Series B With a verified product. It's getting traction.

Speaker 2: 15:45

But embedding this in the conversation and you can imagine we're having this dialogue remotely today but imagine next year your profile and seeing real-time updates to what the system thinks it might be in the areas to continue to probe into for questions, that augmented workflow, I think is really the exciting part, Whether it's doctor, whether it's agriculture even think of cooking chef. Maybe there's other applications that we can't even think about. It's happening now. That change is starting to happen. Now, If an individual in your audience does have some technical abilities but really has a passion for some industry that isn't technology-focused, that intersection is going to be the magic mix, because being able to bring those together are going to make any business more efficient. At the end of the day, You're going to have laggards that are going to be left behind. Sure, there's folks on the bleeding edge of things, but that wave is going to crest. You better be on the front side of that if you're a business, Many of the careers that you're looking for will be growing on that upswing. There's plenty of opportunity for sure.

Speaker 1: 17:03

You talk about how, back in the 90s, it professionals were a lot deeper in the space. You really had to know the underlying processes and systems that are running and whatnot, and what they're doing and how they're doing it. Even when I started out after college talking like 2010 period, it was still like that to a good extent. It wasn't as deep. I know what you're talking about.

Speaker 2: 17:42

It wasn't as deep as reading the kernel and understanding logic gates and things like that.

Speaker 1: 17:49

That was not a part of it, very thankfully. If it was, it might not be in IT right now. Is that method still beneficial? Where, early on in your career, you get this deep dive experience into a platform, into a technology, and you're learning the ins and outs of it as you progress throughout your career, you're going to hire tiers within the technology. You're not worried about the processes anymore, you're not worried about that app and things like that. You think that there's still some benefit with that.

Speaker 2: 18:30

I'll make sure to clarify my position. That background and that knowledge absolutely still extremely helpful, especially high tech Learning. That depth is a skill set that is needed today. I think the thing that I'd probably call out is the breadth of roles doesn't necessarily require you to have that fundamental knowledge because it's been abstracted. If you think of it as an inverted pyramid, you can start anywhere up above that, but for certain roles you definitely need that foundational pillar. To your question directly, I would agree and I would say, if you're fortunate to have work in an environment where you're getting that exposure, that you're understanding those internals, take the time and really, really absorb it.

Speaker 2: 19:27

I think that will pay dividends through the rest of your career and allow you not just operate at the operational level, but if you're trying to solve a problem that's unique to you, if your knowledge starts at this and you need to kind of Know about the internals enough to solve your problem, you're gonna be short-handed and you're you're gonna need help, and that's it's not wrong to ask for help. It just means you're just less useful in your role and how you want to solve a particular challenge. So definitely that knowledge is super valuable and and if you have an opportunity, you know comparing different job roles like money is valuable. You know the, the culture of a company's valuable. I would say also that the level of work that you're doing in complex systems, that that will pay dividends throughout your career for sure.

Speaker 1: 20:24

Yeah, it's. You know, looking back on my career a little bit, you know it's always interesting, the little nuggets of information that have stuck with me. You know that will randomly kind of pop up. You know, like, like now. You know like, for instance, you know, a couple years ago I was deploying a web proxy. It was the first time I ever did it. Never touched a proxy before, never really touched network security anything.

Speaker 1: 20:53

Before and years prior to that I had some experience with DNS registries and you know how it's stored and when it's refreshed and things like that. And we ran into an issue with the proxy. We're basically no one around me knew what was going on. They couldn't really figure it out. I'm like, oh, we need to reboot, you know, three times because it clears out this registry, that it's pulling this information from, and once we do that, it'll pull the right information, refreshes itself. And everyone thought that I was joking and I was like, no, like that's literally what it is, you know. And so we tried it out, one device and it worked. And like even my boss was like, well, surely it's not gonna work again, you know, and it worked again. He's like okay, I guess we need to do that everywhere now.

Speaker 2: 21:42

But yeah, I think three reboots is, you know, and that's sure a lot above.

Speaker 2: 21:48

Yeah, I think you know when I worked at Maskeet rule, you know I saw a lot of problems in the kind of personal computing, workplace technology area and More often than not you hear odd stories.

Speaker 2: 22:06

And it's really when you, you know, when you get into the troubleshooting aspect that you realize it's almost a miracle that some of these things work at all. But you start to appreciate, you know, now I'm an old timer but the old timers that are there and they're like I used to run token ring and you're like, all right, yeah, and I removed plenty of that At my day, but I was removing it, I wasn't responsible for its operation and, yeah, I was surprised at how many times during my career that would surface when I was on the infrastructure operation side where you know it always comes back to some legacy implementation or technology implementation that Was quirky. And if you knew the quirks your life was much easier. And you know supporting stuff without knowing some of those quirks and how, how we arrived to now Major, major role, definitely more hard. And you know you start to respect some of the folks that that you know Struggle through the pre golden days. Put it that way.

Speaker 1: 23:14

Yeah, yeah, you know, earlier out of my career I did a little bit of work with some government agencies and you know my, my company. They told me before I went on site they're like, oh, this is a very custom deployment, you know, you got to know the ins and outs of it and everything else. Like that I get on site. I started looking at our product and like how the hell does this thing even work? Like literally, how is this thing running right now? And it was so bad that it got to the point where I just had to, I just basically had to start over. I had to do a complete, you know, clean install.

Speaker 1: 23:48

But now they're actually on a supportable product because the company you know everyone at the company knows how it's running. Everyone in the company knows what should, what's the expected result and things like that. Because I mean, it was, there were, there was pointers In places that should not have existed, there was, you know, custom directories with custom scripts in it running and it was such a mess the only option was to start over. But you know, if you don't have that kind of experience, it's difficult to move along in your career. You know, because you're kind of building on all of these different Experiences and skill sets or whatnot, is that?

Speaker 2: 24:26

is that what you found as as well, looking back now as to see, so yeah yeah, you know, I think for me it was always a Bit of our how do I, how do I progress in my career, and I made it very much. While there's opportunity, it's up for me to seize that, but also me to be ready to kind of step into a role or an opportunity that Would require. So I did a lot of self-study, right, you know, first certification was a network plus, I think you know Was fortunate enough, after a little bouncing around between positions, to get to, you know, desktop position at a financial services company. And you know we had this thing at the time called Citrix, a presentation server that was just released, and you know we're moving to that and building on Just self-study. Moving on to more network access gateways that they had in their product line I always seemed to look for when, where next do I need to be ready to apply my skills? And Well, virtual desktops became a thing and a fad for quite a long time. That was displaced by this thing called mobile and now we need some MDM, all right. Well, now with MDM comes this challenge of identity and traditional ways of managing identity. We're slow and cumbersome and we have this thing called octa and these identity platforms that make it really easy. And, of course, there was new standards that facilitate that, like with Sam all and open an ID, connect right.

Speaker 2: 26:04

But I think the this, the salient point here, is Technology is going to change. If you want to make this career, you have to watch the trends and I always was mindful where the trends were. What could I bring value to my, my business and organization and then continue driving it? And security being thought that I would say the last stop because I'm still on that train, but I Think it was an opportunity. I spent close to 10 years Deploying technology that was used in the enterprise fortune 100, right, I now had to secure it, but it gave me the advantage of knowing how an end user connects To a system.

Speaker 2: 26:50

How are you in remote access? How are you servicing remote employees when they're in the office? What is the network layout and how are you securing connections on the network? Are we detecting threats and what's normal, easier behavior? Well, if you work for 10 years supporting an enterprise, you know there's a lot of abnormal, normal behavior that needs to be baseline. So you start to have a better appreciation of the challenge. But you're actually in a much stronger place than others, because you understand how these pieces fit together and ultimately how you have to secure them. So I Think you know, for anyone aspiring to kind of make progress in their career, you have to be motivated, you have to be a self-learner, you have to kind of realize where the trends are going. I've seen a lot of fantastic technical talent get stuck up on philosophical preferences of how they think the world should be. And if we just use this Flavor, I'm not gonna pick on Linux folks.

Speaker 2: 27:52

This flavor on Linux our users would be fantastic. I know no one in an enterprise is gonna use Linux as their primary device, except for handful of people, right? But there are situations where I think individuals are shorting themselves opportunity by clinging to a philosophical view of technology that they have no control over. And as much as you may love one technology coming in, if you're seeing its application struggle, well, it's probably losing its value at some point to the business that you're in, right? And at the end of the day, you're there to support a business, even if you're on IT or there to generate revenue for an organization, right? And I think that gets lost sometimes with some really, really talented engineers that I've seen over the years.

Speaker 1: 28:48

Yeah, that's a great point that you bring up. It's very easy as I guess, techies right To get attached to a technology as you know it. You understand it so well, you know, and it's like, okay, I can fix this issue. You know it does this, whatever it might be. You know, and this is even recently right, even recently in my career, I recommended a technology you know that is very well-known. You know everyone expects you when you talk about doing this project. Everyone expects you to go to this technology right. So of course I involve them in our discussions and everything else like that.

Speaker 1: 29:31

And I mean I was thrown off guard when they weren't really a fit, you know, just because of different variables in the environment and whatnot. And you know I could have taken these stance of you know, holding my ground right and trying to force it in and trying to make this thing work, when you know in all actuality it's not going to work for the environment, no matter how hard I try. And you know if I try and do that, it's actually going to lower my own reputation within the organization. You know people aren't going to look at my recommendations the same way. They're going to be like all right, well, there's an asterisk there. You know like we have to really kind of check on this thing. You know, it's interesting.

Speaker 1: 30:23

I've also experienced that from when, you know, my direct manager couldn't let go of a technology that you know he loved. He brought it in, he sold it internally and everything else like that, you know, and it's like, hey man, this thing does not work. I'm literally spending 60 hours a week just making sure that it's up. You know like, can we go with the market leader?

Speaker 2: 30:47

finally, I think that cuts both ways. But when you can't let go, it becomes a personal thing and yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:57

I think once it becomes a personal thing to you and you're not making mindful decisions based on context, and managers sometimes, especially if it's a seven figure kind of price tag, like their career is basically stuck. So there's some, you know, I'd say unhealthy motivation, sometimes at a leadership level, but you know, certainly at an engineer level, you know, clinging on to something and making it a personal issue that you're moving off of it or your philosophy because it's so personal to you is definitely a career limiter that folks should just be aware of.

Speaker 1: 31:41

Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, I wanted to ask you. You know, recently, right, I've been talking to a lot of different people and the concept of saying, yes, I'm figuring out how to do it later, you know, comes up quite a bit, and do you think that that still holds true at the CISO level?

Speaker 2: 32:04

Yeah, and it's not bad. And saying yes isn't bad as long as it's followed with, but we'll have to see at what expense. Right, I think, especially in the CISO role, we're balancing balancing depending on the type of company, right? You know, when you take a look at EDB Postgres company, we're delivering it via cloud. We have technology you can install and print.

Speaker 2: 32:33

Ciso's role is both protecting the environment, reducing the risk of a potential future incident, but it's also enabling sales. It's you can have a sales pipeline if you don't have a SOC2, you can, but it's very hard to close deals. You know, you look at PCI can't sell into cardholder environments, environments that have cardholder data. Hipaa can't sell into healthcare. So in information security, those, especially in a tech company, you start to have other pressures that when you're growing business. That's where the risk calculus comes in and there's always going to be trade-offs. We can do this, but by this date you need it by this date. All right, yes, but here is the impact and I think that's fine. I think people want to at least acknowledge that you're hearing them, that, yes, there's value in what you're saying. You don't say yes to everything, but if there's merit there, agree to the point.

Speaker 2: 33:29

This is a great idea but where is it going to fall? And one of the things I've learned in even prepping for my role and kind of growing into it setting expectations, especially with peers and leadership, is very difficult. But if you don't do that, you get into a situation where a yes but doesn't really mean much, right, like I think you really have to set expectations of the work that you have ahead of us. So when conflicts come, where changing priorities come, they know all right, there's going to be a trade-off we have to discuss.

Speaker 2: 34:05

I know I'm already asking these three other things. I'm kind of smiling because we I work pretty closely with our CIO and it's very similar conversation. He has dozens of commitments across his teams, right for the business areas, and I'm just another participant and he's very skilled at saying yes. But and I think that's a valuable lesson there's no shame in saying yes. There's no shame in saying no. But when you say yes, it generally should come with some conditions and I think everyone appreciates that thoughtful kind of response, especially when they're coming to you with a business problem that needs to be addressed.

Speaker 1: 34:48

Right. So you kind of touched on this a little bit, but let's talk about what EDB does, what you guys specialize in, and, yeah, we'll just start. We'll start with that.

Speaker 2: 35:04

Yeah, yeah, born in one of the primary, born around the Postgres SQL open source project, but have grown into an enterprise focused product that solves quite a few challenges that the open source project doesn't have. So we follow a similar advantage. We submit significant amount of code to Postgres over the 18 years that we've existed. You know recently, in the last three, four years, we've taken the technology and the know-how and developed the cloud platform that delivers true Postgres as a service versus Postgres compatible databases that you'll find in Azure, aws and GCP. And then we're building in really high value capabilities when it comes to encryption, active-active clusters distributed, you know, in different geos, and are starting down the path of including AI technology and really making this intelligence systems economy of the future a possibility using our product, and there's going to be more to share this year. But when we think about the value that we provide, which is what companies exist right, we're allowing really heavy transactional platforms some of the largest names, household names that you can think of that operate and leverage EDB's Postgres offering advanced server offering.

Speaker 2: 36:36

The sheer volume and scale of the processing on open source can be challenging for some companies and we provide that net of support, bug fixes, even performance optimization, where you can get the most out of the platform and do so in supporting our customer's journey, of kind of making Postgres the de facto database which, depending on your sources, you know is the number one most admired database Postgres for 2023. So it's an exciting period of time. I wish I could share a little bit more of the roadmap, but that will come in near time. We have recently landed on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the first time for our cloud managed database offering and you know I'll say very quickly, we'll be climbing up that ladder into the leader's quadrant over time. So I have faith in that.

Speaker 1: 37:36

Yeah, it's a. It's really interesting. There's so much to Postgres in and of itself. And then when you factor in trying to manage it right, like if you have an internal or an external facing application that's running off of a Postgres database, right, and you have to manage it for different customers and whatnot, I mean that is a feat in and of itself. And then when you start thinking about the fact that it's open source, you know, and it's you're using this so widely and it's so widely used, it's a really impressive piece of technology, I feel. But personally, you know, I've always had, you know, kind of a. I've always been a little partial to Postgres ever since I experienced it, because it's just so versatile, you know, and there's so many things that you can do with it and it's a lot easier to maintain in terms of you know, that individual solution. It gets complex when it's, you know, a lot more servers or whatnot.

Speaker 2: 38:46

but the scaling aspect, you know it works fine. I have a server you know you might have. You know the web app and the actual database on one server, and that could be fine for most environments. I think when you start scaling and running into performance, transactional performance issues or application experience issues, where you have folks on each coast and they need to have the ability to write to the database, that's really unlocked with what we're able to provide to customers. But to your point on its extensibility, you know you'll see a trend in.

Speaker 2: 39:25

Anyone that's familiar with Postgres knows this. They can go see the extension model. Postgres, though, and is extensible, and every time there's a new fad database that seems to creep up, it gets the attention. Dollars are pumped into supporting a vision and Postgres creates an extension and, from the majority of use cases for customers, that's gonna solve it. So, when you look at transactional kind of SQL based workloads, yeah, that's out of the box.

Speaker 2: 39:54

You take a look at graph database well, you know there's a graph extension. You take a look at vector databases with AI well, there's PG vector that satisfies that, and there's a handful of other extensions that we'll be bringing to the market that start to enable customers in particular, you know, business organizations to get the benefit out of the mixed mode database. The reasons why Colomer database technologies exist is for analytical purposes. The reason why there's graph is to understand relationships between entities. You can do all this on Postgres and, rather than having a portfolio of 10 different database vendors, you have one, you have one you need to support, you have a trusted vendor that you can go to and you have a performance profile that is scalable, that you don't need to worry about how a vendor implements. You know Neo4j as an example Great product but when you look at the majority of use cases that I've come across, the performance profile isn't anything you need. That is overly. It requires or demands a high performance. So you start to see especially the vector databases being huge Pinecone, maybe, eight things like that. There are definitely add value, add features there. But for those that just need a vector database, need the ability to tag metadata and they'd be able to query that at scale, postgres still enables you. So it's a really interesting technology. But yeah, it's something that we see, you know, every four or five years when there's some new database trend, eventually an extension will make its way into Postgres and everyone will be like. I will just use Postgres at this point. It's rinse and repeat. It's kind of entertaining, kind of to kind of like see the trend.

Speaker 2: 41:47

But you know, when you look at the strain, bringing in four or five different database technologies on an IT organization, you get the train everyone on Postgres you have the ability to, you know, not have to have a specialist skillset in one technology or another. You can have a set of Postgres generalists really handling the various needs that the business is gonna toss at you. And I don't think people recognize the value in that, especially with attrition and retention within engineering roles you may bring in someone. That's kind of the best. I'm not gonna pick on Neo4j because I actually like them, but Neo4j architect or DBA, they move on. Who's gonna support this thing? Well then you have three, six months where you don't have coverage for an expert, where you can really minimize the risk to bringing in technology into the enterprise. So you know there's a lot of indirect value that I think organizations many understand but many should kind of start to think about.

Speaker 1: 42:55

So does EDB act as like a management plane for your Postgres databases? That can be, you know, across a geolocation or across you know, several regions, and it will, I guess, replicate and submit the data that you submit to it across your databases. Is that what it's doing?

Speaker 2: 43:22

Yeah, so a big animal has two kind of key technology. I don't wanna say components, but the architecture has a control plane and a data plane. Now that control plane, as it sounds, is managing, you know, users, accounts, access permissions, kind of largely leverages the Postgres native structure for access management, but orchestrates the creation of projects, creates projects and orchestrates the creation of clusters. Those clusters could be AWS, gcp, azure, wherever you have a cloud account. And we actually have two models. We have the ability to host database for the customer.

Speaker 2: 44:09

So I'm a customer, I'm an indie developer and I just wanna spin up a Postgres cluster. I get my trial account, you have $300 of credits, you're able to spin up accounts and we host and can host the database instances in our environment. We also have a model called bring your own account, where you provide us an account, the infrastructure is deployed and orchestrated and managed in your cloud account and you're getting the billing through your cloud service provider of choice. So wherever you want to run your workload, go at it and you have the ability of setting up networking rules to ensure security and the like. We're moving towards some interesting models on how we might manage Postgres in general, but those are roadmap items that I think I can share, but in general you can think of that control plane being kind of that, that one pane of glass for a DBAs to be able to kind of manage their state and performance and secure their data. At the end of the day, yeah, it's really fascinating.

Speaker 1: 45:17

I feel like we could talk about this for a couple hours.

Speaker 2: 45:21

You know something like that it's fun area for sure. Yeah, I think keeping an eye out for EDB through 2024, a lot of exciting changes coming and really wanting to support the development of intelligence systems that are gonna change the economy. I'm not just drinking Kool-Aid, but I'm actually seeing industries being changed and I'm 100% certain the technologies that we're gonna bring to the market this year are gonna really start to enable a lot of organizations that have made that investment in Postgres, that are poking at the edges of these vector databases, maybe playing with PG Vector and wondering how do I get to scale? How do I do this the right way? Yeah, there's some really interesting things that are gonna be coming out this year and it's just everyone just keeping an eye out. But sure to that, trials are free. Go ahead, big animal. You'll be able to kind of sign up, get a trial $300 of credits decide what works for you and give it a little bit of a try.

Speaker 1: 46:37

Awesome. Well, dan, when you're able to finally talk about those new things, I'd love to have you back on and we can dive into this a bit more. But before I let you go, how about you tell my audience where they could find you if they wanted to reach out and connect, and where they could find EDB?

Speaker 2: 46:55

Yeah, yeah, so I'll start with EDB enterprisedbcom. For me, I'm on LinkedIn, so Dan Garcia I think it's the handles Dan J Garcia for those that just want to shortcut but EDB and Dan Garcia will bring me up, happy to connect, just say hey, listen to you on the show and happy to make the connection. And we do share developments both on LinkedIn. So feel free to follow EDB as well on social media.

Speaker 1: 47:25

Awesome. Well, thanks, dan, and I hope everyone listening enjoyed this episode. Thanks everyone.