LiveView Technologies: Digital Orchestration in the Physical World | New Automation Mindset Ep. 32

LiveView Technologies: Digital Orchestration in the Physical World | New Automation Mindset Ep. 32

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others who have just been living off of the way the security industry has work for decades they either got to catch up or they're just going to get phased out because the world is moving on and I think it's moving on in a really good direction we just got to continue to execute on that you can't manage an enormous Fleet globally by on Prem Solutions thinking that you're going to remote desktop into those and manage it all you've got to be able to do that at a click of a button otherwise you're just hiring a whole bunch of humans to do work on every location and that's just not scalable and so when we think about orchestration we broke it down into Data Gathering orchestration into deterrence or action orchestration and then what we call data validation orchestration and so we built that logic and capability within the actual security unit itself now we didn't deliberately do that because we wanted to build an orchestration platform we did it because that's what made sense to solve the problem but in learning that we became aware of the value of agility and flexibility that you have when you can change the workflow rules decoupled from the connectivity itself welcome to the new automation mindset where AI Automation and integration come together I'm your host Marcus zern and as Chief strategy officer and part of the founding executive team at rato it is my mission to find these top innovators in AI Automation and integration and share their Journeys with all of [Music] you so today I have with me Steve Lindsay uh CTO and one of the founding partners of Life View Technologies or short lvt um so maybe you guys have seen one of these blue blinking Towers you know it has a solar cell it's on a trailer and typically you find them in a big box retailer parking a lot and that's the lvt security uh system fully integrated TurnKey Hardware iot Cloud software security system uh really one of a kind and and Steve and his team they architected it um so it's a true honor to have you here on this uh this podcast um maybe to kick this off Steve just tell us a little bit I mean you built this system it's kind of like life's work in a way tell us a little bit about your core product how it's built what what makes it so special yeah well thank you for having me on Marcus um yeah as you described a lot of people recognize the product by the blue flashing light in the parking lots but really what's happening behind the scene is is quite uh complex but you know to to understand what it is I think we have to understand what the physical security market and and some of the challenges they have you know to date uh we've had a lot of antiquated Technologies us usually what we call passive Solutions where maybe cameras are recording if an event happens you you go back and hopefully the recording was there right because a lot of times these systems are down and nobody nobody even knew um but then you're searching through just footage and footage trying to find well who did it right and and a lot of times um uh it's blurry and you don't have a lot of success in finding that but what what we have found is that what a lot of customers really want is is preventative type security they want to prevent the thing from happening instead of trying to catch the person who did it um it's whether they caught them or not it's really expensive um you know if they're stealing copper out of sewer Farms you know if they're if they're even from a life safety P perspective you know every life is precious and so trying to prevent those types of of uh of life safety issues from happening is really important so the approach that we took was how do we take technology and take it to another level where it becomes a force multiplier of of typical Guard Services right so the only way that we've really been able to solve the problem is to put a guard in place but guards are very expensive right paying paying by the hour um not a lot of it's not the greatest pay so you don't find the greatest individuals you know who are trying to do this work uh one of the one of the running jokes that we had you know 10 years ago when we started this was um a lot of companies will hire a guard to then watch their guards because sometimes the guards are in on the problem so it's just always been a problem when it comes to physical security so the approach we took was can we PR can we take technology and some of the advancements we've seen to date and try to prevent the issue from happening which means that we have to be way more accurate detecting threats and then we have to be very effective in how we deter them from proceeding the plan that they have um so what we came up with was this solution which we call the D3 system detect deter and defend and the idea is that with artificial intelligence we should be able to accurately detect that there is someone there whether it be a human or a vehicle and that they are essentially intending to do something wrong based on some behaviors uh that that we H that we can detect which are really trained by previous incidents um let me give you an example if somebody gets out of a car to retail parking lot two people get out of a car and they both Go in different doors that's not a normal behavior most people go in the same door together right so or if someone gets out of their car and they start to Serpentine in between cars that's not a normal behavior that's typically someone who's casing a parking lot trying to look for a car to smash and grab right so those are the types of things that I'm talking about so when we can detect that now the question is what do we do to deter it um and so we were one of the first companies that was able to take these deterrence ideas where whe whether it's be visual indicators or audible indicators that are more personable and and be able to essentially make an announcement in the in real time hey we see you you in the blue shirt uh you're being watched and recorded the authorities are on alert uh just kind of a a notice right and and what we found is that the majority of the time in fact statistically it's usually around 70% of the time most people will leave um that's just all it takes um anything beyond that typically will take some form of a human to be involved um and we call that an escalation so if the system can't deal with it then we escalate it to a human who then tries to to take more action on that whether they deploy a Manu guard service to go deal with the incident maybe they call the police um or maybe they'll get on in live on the two-way talk down and and and interact with the person and just kind of let him know don't don't proceed so um that's really how the solution Works um again it's a force multiplier uh deploying these types of Technologies is typically 1/4 of the cost of what a human guard would be so you can see from a from a cost perspective it's it's way it's way cheaper to do but it's also more effective and it and it helps uh in that Force multiplier with Guard Services so that's the fundamental core of the of the technology um and uh I guess the other differentiator with this is understanding that it's Rapid Deployable um so security is typically an emotional decision so a lot of our customers don't have the time to engage system integrators to engage um you know your typical trenching of power uh installing Communications even the friction of trying to get the it departments and infos departments Within These companies to be able to test and make sure from a security perspective it's not going to introduce a vulnerability onto their networks so we don't have to deal with any of that with our customers because this thing literally can just be wheeled up to the location where they want it um within 15 minutes it's up and it's now running security full turn key as you mentioned and and it doesn't touch any of the it systems um of that particular Enterprise and then from an Enterprise scalability perspective um you know we built this thing to deal with thousands tens of thousands of locations that an Enterprise may have to secure and to be able to do that at a click of a button you know managing a user life cycle of employees you know when we're talking about identity and access management um and what we'll be talking about more today is that integration and orchestration of this types of system with other Technologies with within that ecosystem of security so yeah no this this is really cool I mean listen I'm I'm listening to this I'm actually learning a lot I that that I didn't know I mean it seems very impressive it seems like you guys really improved on what physical security used to be you made it like really easy to deploy right you know there's a lot of parallels with Rado to be honest like you know we tried to improve on the integration industry I mean we had done it we were actually part of what it was before and we knew where we kind of like why it was so complicated and and and and you know you know all the intricacies that that you know from physical uh security and we wanted to change that we also you know ease of use and speed and and and so on on was was very important we felt that was a downfall of what was there before an integration uh and uh lot of parallels now seems like you guys have an impressive product uh you know we obviously feel very proud of Rado and what we have now you've been just like me you know we both have been part of this from the ground up you got an impressive product you got a kind of almost like disruptive solution and then often it's harder to sell this than you think right almost feels like you know why wouldn't you I mean why wouldn't you go for this and then it's a lot harder talk talk to me like you know how was the lvt journey like what was the ups and downs and how did you now obviously you're you're a very successful company but you know what was the friction on the way I'm just curious yeah it I mean every entrepreneur probably has very similar stories um we we took a very unique approach though in that as a technology company we didn't seek uh seed funding or you know your typical Venture Capital funding out of the gate it was mostly friends and family and your own lines of credit um was how we started so I wouldn't say that that was necessarily intentional but it was just kind of we didn't see what we would become and I don't think a lot of companies do I mean you see a problem that needs addressing and that's what we did we jumped in and we saw an opportunity in the early days where live streaming video Outdoors was a very unique thing um again this is back in the middle of 2000s uh live streaming was mostly for uh situations like this where we're doing uh video conferencing right but to take a camera outdoors in a rugged environment anywhere on the planet was unheard of at the the time and one of one of my uh co-founders and my other co-founder they were both in in finance and they thought well how do we get people to convert from a construction loan to a 30-year mortgage which is where a lot of loan officers make their money and so they just had this idea well what if we put a live streaming camera on their house getting built and and provided them the ability to get in and see the progress of their home right so it's it was kind of a a naive but yet very innocent idea as a motivation to a different end and when they set up the first system again they didn't really know what they were doing they just kind of asked some friends and family like how would you do this and luckily IP cameras were were a thing finally um had they tried this a year before they probably wouldn't have had any success but they they what they learned was that it wasn't the homeowner that cared about the live camera was actually the home builder because they could use it as a project management tool instead of driving to every construction site they could just get into the camera and all of a sudden they started having all these construction companies calling them and and next thing you know they were like hey we should just start a business doing this and then you know long story short when they got into it they needed some technology experts um and so somehow I got you know introduced to them I saw it as a unique problem and I kind of joined on board so the reason why I'm telling you this is we started off not really to be a security company we started off to just live stream video Outdoors CU we knew how valuable it was but also how how unique of a technology it was as well as how difficult it was and so that's how we set out to do it and so again kind of organic growth in the business we didn't really think oh this this is a venture capital idea so let's go get some money so we just started growing the business now what was unique about us um was we never saw it as a selling of a product we saw it as selling as a service and so we always had this service subscription model as part of our business which was very valuable to us at the time because as you understand as you get customers who are paying for the service that you can continue to build upon that right which is a lot easier than onetime sales um so as we continue to build the business um what happened is we we evolved into security naturally people think cameras they think security and so for the longest time we fought that off but as we developed new technologies to solve problems it led us down this road to security so when we think about the problems that we had to solve in the early days with no money it was just a grind and and with placing cameras in remote areas I spent weeks and a lot of my business partners we would spend weeks at a time just driving lonely you know lonely in a car throughout North Dakota fixing DOT cameras for them or Wyoming or Colorado you know in Utah um and just late nights uh it was always a cash crunch you know I I remember we would come up to payroll and we would be like all right well where's the money coming from to make payroll today you know and somehow the next day somebody would pay us a check and hey we'd have payroll or a lot of times we would just say all right well hey don't cash your check you know to the founders don't cash your check we don't have money we just got to make sure the money do have is for the employees that we have you know it was just a constant grind um and so yeah I mean I could I could tell horror stories time and time again but it's funny now because you look back on it and you're like oh laugh laugh laugh but man at the time you just didn't know you had no clue what the company would become and you just continued to to work on it and to put the hours and the effort into it make the sacrifices needed um in hopes that something great what happen um and and I I will also say this we never thought of ourselves as being this big business we always thought that maybe this would be a lifestyle business for us if we could just get the subscription up to this amount of money then hey we could just live off that the rest of our lives but but as the technology continued to improve and the Innovations came and the problems that we were solving be became a really good product Market fit you could just see that growth in the business and so it was like we had to recalibrate our our brains around well now we got to rethink this way um so yeah it's been a it's been a very interesting um Journey along the way of sacrifice but we like to just call it grit guts and determination um because that's really what you have to have to make it through uh a lot of that stress so one of the one of the details right so I mean you guys obviously do some very sophisticated detection when you started to explain I mean this isn't just like you know someone appearing on a video this is a lot more than that and I think um one of the ways how you architected that from the beginning was with a cloud service which was unique right which I think back then in physical security was always local yes typically um you know we had that at orado you know when we started this we were like well if we want to simplify integration if we want to make this scalable uh if we want to like take all the deployment hassle out I mean there really isn't another way than to make it Cloud uh and so that's how we designed our solution in the beginning and then we ran [Music] into lots of adversity I tell you I mean you know we we uh we always were kind of I think we there were these couple years where it felt like we would always be among the last two uh to to be evaluated people really like the solution they said like oh you're a cloud service like yeah maybe maybe not uh does that sound familiar I me you familiar yes yeah yeah and then how what how did that um how did you guys overcome that again for us I mean looking backwards I do believe I mean you talked about this like the solution being uh designed for like I mean you you you said I think tens of thousands of locations right you know for us you know how would you even do that without being a cloud service I mean when you have uh workato is this like serverless kubernetes based service that you can scale up and down and and and it is really really scalable and and also reliable because of the architecture um it's it's kind of the difference between having like a nuclear power station or having your generator in the backyard right I mean one of the two kind of does scale better than the other um how does how did you guys uh uh uh get through uh those challenges that people maybe didn't appreciate that yeah I we I think we did out a necessity to start with um when you think about us starting the service we we in the early days we got involved very heavily with Department of Transportation so again we were providing a service for them to live stream cameras and the way that it would work with them is they would say they would point at a at a location on the ground and say this is where I need the camera to be now they didn't care about infrastructure there may have been no power there may have been no Communications there they just said this is where the snow drifts typically happen and so I have to have a camera right here to watch it and so we're the ones who had to figure out how to solve that problem and in and in one of the key components of that was the Enterprise management of that entire fleet knowing what the Telemetry is knowing what the configuration settings are um like all of that had to be decentralized from the location and when you think about the typical uh Security Solutions they're all on Prem right and when we in fact we still use the term closed circuit television which basically indicates right cameras wired back to a recording device on Prim um that wasn't going to work for us we we had to think about how to how to manage this globally and so we inherently were solving problems and innovating with a decentralized approach because of of necessity so as we developed the solution for that it became the enabler for scale for our business and it was the only way that it was going to work so when we applied this now to security and we started selling to these security industries again they had the same mentality in fact we we joked that they would say that the cloud was a four-letter word and they didn't want anything to do with it but we what we told them was can you imagine a thousands of these things in your Enterprise and you have to manage all of that and keep it up and running the system is no good if it's not up and running it's like a guard falling asleep so the importance of the uptime the importance of the security of the unit itself even from a cyber security perspective was absolutely critical and so by having those discussions with them you could tell in their minds they were kind of reluctantly agreeing with you even though they probably had concerns about data right where's the data living and what's the security of that data because if it's not in my little Fortress I don't trust it and I think that's that's where a lot of these entities had had that hard time dealing with but but the the interesting thing was we could see like a hockey stick growth and acceptance of cloud services I would say from like 20152 16 up to the pandemic and and really the pandemic I think is what really unlocked it for a lot of people they were realizing that the cloud actually is way easier to deal with than just these on Prem systems and so that I I don't think we're seeing the friction now like we used to back in the day but yeah in the early day it was extremely difficult and the only way that we got around that like I said was to help them understand that you can't manage an enormous Fleet globally by oness Solutions and thinking that you're going to remote desktop into those and and and and manage it all it all has to be inherently Cloud native both in the Telemetry and the monitoring of those systems as well as the the configuration and management of those systems and especially when you start thinking about workflows and how all of that is managed uh on on either a regional at a location or even an Enterprise level you've got to be able to do that at a click of a button because otherwise you're just hiring a whole bunch of humans to do work on every location and that's just not scalable right so that that's that's our experience with it yeah no I think we had a similar experience no we with the midsize like lower end Enterprises that we dealt with you know I think it was starting 2 2015 I think is kind of a similar uh and then with the very large Enterprises it was really the pandemic that unlocked the potential because some of them had like I remember one of our customers had their sap system set up so it could only for security reasons so it could only be used in the office yeah might get like where this is going not a good idea I mean we also have some some um some retailers International retailers that were uh fully uh uh just brick and mortar until the pandemic happened and then like very very quickly had to uh scramble to get something up online and you you know they needed something fast like a orado to get there so let's talk aot a little bit I mean so very impressive service it's it's really cool to also hear the other startup uh stories but then somehow we we found each other and so what I understand is that you guys actually saw value in orchestration um that you actually tried to build your own workato also tell tell tell me a little bit like what got you there what what did you see as requirements or something like how did you what did you sense require uh sorry orchestration could uh unlock or increase the value of your solution and then what uh um you know what was your experience trying to build an orchestration uh uh uh solution yourself yeah so our journey into this building an orchestration platform um really begins with the The Edge component of our of our solution so I I mentioned that there is a deterrence capability of the system and really at the heart of that is a localized orchestration engine that knows how to take data from various cameras or or RF sensors you know there there's a whole bunch of sensors that are on this thing that's kind of measuring the environment and they're I they're all isolated iot devices if you can imagine right cuz each one of these systems could have like three cameras on it they could have a radar they could have an RF sensor and so they were all all of these sensors were built as a standalone black box right it doesn't understand context of anything else around it and so we had to be able to bring that data in and and make sense of what it's seeing right and obviously AI helps with that but then when we start thinking about well now that we know we've got a problem that we've got to deter how do we deter that and so when we think about orchestration we broke it down into Data Gathering orchestration into deterence or action orchestration and then what we call data validation orchestration and so we built that that logic and capability within the actual security unit itself so that that thing with the blue lights flashing inside of that its brain is this orchestration engine so um now we didn't deliberately do that because we wanted to build an orchestration platform we did it because that's what made sense to solve the problem but in learning that we we became aware of the value of the agility and flexibility that you have when you can change the workflow rules um decoupled from the connectivity itself um now as we started to look at um how do we handle the scaling of the software Services both that have to run on the edge and in the cloud services especially as you start scaling that across multiple data centers you start getting into these concepts of microservices now I'm coming at this from a product development perspective um but I will relate it back to an IT business perspective too but from a product development perspective you know there's a there's a big push around microservices in distributed computing because of this very problem and it really comes down to where is it running the amount of developers that are working on it and the potential conflicts uh and breaking of code that they can each do to each other and then the speed at which you've got to develop right and all all of these things relate to each other and so when you look into the pattern the development patterns of microservices you start seeing things like event driven architectures right that can help solve these problems and so we were starting to implement a lot of those in our cloud services and our Edge Services again to help the business scale from a product development perspective but as I mentioned before we were a very cash strapped company with no VC funding so we literally had no salespeople up until 2020 we ran the business for 15 years with no salespeople um we had no It Business Systems um we had happened to adopt a cloud native email service in the early days and so we were just you you you're running email that way but everything was spreadsheets and and whatever else as we ran it so when we we finally got our first round of of money to help pour gas on the speed that we were growing we finally actually needed to put in it Business Systems and when we did that I was very very intentionally first of all trying to avoid on-prem software I wanted everything to be Cloud native as an IT stack we also didn't want to get locked into a monolithic solution um so it wasn't my intention to go buy some of the big boys who supposedly could do it all in one box I knew that I wanted to be able to take the best inclass Services across the board and I started taking the patterns that we were using in our software development for that event driven um uh architecture and saying there's got to be a way to do this in it um because each one of these Services you know are basically a microservice from a developer perspective right they're just this thing that does a CRM really well or an Erp really well and so we thought well let's just apply the same Concepts that we did in product development to the it stack and that's where we started building our own or trying to using you know the the this the methodologies that we were using in product development the problem with that is it's extremely um complicated to build these systems and from an IT perspective the business doesn't have patience for that I learned um so I I if there's one regret I have back in the day I wish I had known workato existed back when we when we got that seed round of money and we were making that decision um let me tell you why I think this is important and I'm telling you from a a program developers perspective not from an ITP professionals perspective when we think about Integrations we think about it where if I have an API in this service and I have an API in this service well it should just be easy to write the the coupling between the two and when you're writing a service like that you're building essentially the what I call the connectivity right and the protocols to talk but then there's business logic to know what to do once that connectivity is in place right and what tends to happen is we over think how simple it is to first of all build the business logic in there but more importantly the ongoing maintenance of that business logic and what we fail to recognize is that businesses have to be agile they have to be very flexible and they have to be quick in how they change business logic because uh the business is constantly changing and and you'll hear horror stories from an IT perspective around well we're locked in the system was built to do this and it's going to take one year to change it over to this right the businesses don't have time to think that slow anymore they they have to be able to to to switch that and so from an IT perspective I always wanted that ability to separate business logic from which I call orchestration from the connectivity at itself and and what's beautiful about ricado is the fact that yeah I can build these connectors but then separate from the connectors I can now build business logic in the recipes right and in the workflow so I can get the outcome I want and if and if something has to change I can change it very quickly I don't have to go back to a developer or even back to the company that built the integration and say hey will you please change your logic to do this um right and so anyway I I I I really am a fan of asynchronous connectivity of event-driven architectures and the separation of that so as we look forward security now that security is becoming more of an IT problem than it's ever been before um in fact let me stop here it sorry Security's I've always joked that security is technologically like 10 years behind the rest of the world um and so they're they're learning lessons that the rest of the world has already learned before and one of those lessons is understanding integration understanding workflow and understanding ecosystems and so no longer are we in the security industry cameras Network coupled to an NVR we are cameras that are also working with access control which are are all which are working with other sophisticated systems that now have to be interchange events with each other and there has to be ways to orchestrate how that data is moving how command and control works between all those things and it has to be decoupled from connectivity to the business logic and so we are trying to apply those patterns to our customers who are who are dealing with these problems you know in their security ecosystems and as I see them trying to solve them I see them going down the roads of 10 20 years ago that we've all learned don't work can we try it a different way and that's where I'm trying to come in and say this is a better way to do that and so we've been using workato to be able to teach them how you can separate connectivity from work flow in your ecosystem and have that agility and flexibility you need as the business changes and especially with security the Bad actors are constantly changing their tactics to be able to compromise right and so the the the Security Professionals have to continually adapt to that as well as what the business initiatives are right so they kind of hit get hit twice uh on the problem but that's that's kind of our story and journey of why we why we built the platform and and kind of where we are now and how Rado plugs into that well first of all thank you there's there's a lot to unwrap I mean I'm what's going through my brain at the moment is at least three completely SE separate threads that I wanted to Deep dive a little bit in let's let's start with the first one um first one and that's how you started off you said like hey I'm coming from an engineering perspective look I'm a I'm I studied electrical engineering so I I appreciate what you guys build like uh the iot stuff and so on that's that's super exciting um now very interesting like you know in workato we we said like we built this we wanted to get more people involved than just like very few integration developers all right because we felt like okay I think we need a lot of this integration and workflow and there's just not enough people there to actually do it so you got a bottleneck and so we wanted to be part of the solution to unlock that bottle neck uh now you being in engineering being in development I mean you could argue you're maybe not the one who has the bottleneck because you got developers right you got actually people who who can do this stuff yet you actually appreciate you know what Rado has done to make it maybe low code and uh uh and and and make it easier to do uh tell me tell me more about this because I think there is something there that you said which was actually very profound and we see this all the time um yes people do think when when there's an API right they think like oh there's an API so integration challenge solved and that always seems to be at the end tends to be a wakeup call in a in a way I mean so we built like at workato so we sell to to multiple ways you guys lvt you use rado in your Business Systems also right and now you're you're talking here about maybe okay so how can we use workato with the lvt core product also uh we actually sell both ways we sell uh direct to it uh people and then we do sell to software companies who uh who kind of embed us into their products yeah okay so what what I wanted to say was that a lot of the software companies who pick us uh to then build that build us into their soft Ware stack typically the they tend to have tried it before and had some bad experience you know they said like ah there's an API it's done and then it ended up oh oh my God it's a lot more difficult to do or maybe oh then you have to hire like very expensive system integrators uh to actually use these apis so it always they had bad experience and then they come to to work Cado tell me a little bit like like what what gets you uh even though you have the resources to use these apis and so on and people you have people who could code against it why why do you feel like something like orado is really uh is really important yeah I think it goes back to the difference between event-driven architectures and which I which are asynchronous I think it's part people understand the asynchronous component of that versus a synchronous integration or or what I call point-to-point integration um where where people don't understand the difference is when they don't understand the difference between the development of it and the ongoing maintenance of it and and what the problem we're trying to solve is really for the ongoing maintenance because that's where it becomes a problem when we think about resourcing in a company product engineering is is a great example of this you've got all these high paid engineers years and you're trying to keep them busy working on creating value for the company but as you're continually innovating and creating value you have historical products and services that you have to continue to maintain and there's still a demand and a call for those services to be updated as well and as you're continuing to in innovate it also puts pressure on the historical software services to also be updated as well so as as you continue over time to develop software you're just creating this cobweb of mess that continually gets bigger and bigger and if you think about it from a point-to-point integration um that that's where things start to Break um and so that's where event-driven architectures are really really awesome because what you can do is you can separate the um well what you can do is you can take take a black box as a service that does its job really well again in in development we call that a microservice but it doesn't matter if that thing is just a little microservice or if it's a big macro service it's still a black box to the rest of the system so if that service can just publish things to a common bus that says I did this and it doesn't care who got it then you can start getting into a an area where you can start decoupling services from each other now that doesn't mean that there aren't still important factors to what do the data models look like um what is the schema for those models those things are still important but you're able to do it in a passive asynchronous way and and one service is no longer so tightly coupled to another that if you make one code change it's going to break this one and so you have to bring both of those services along the journey together it allows you to develop all these various services and just let the couple of that live um asynchronously right so when we think about it systems they're no different um you've got all these systems which which which if you think about they're being sourced by different vendors and so they're all on their own development schedules anyway and they're all going to release and update their services at their own schedule without any um consideration of any other service that might be within the ecosystem and and and businesses end up taking the brunt of all of that so the the problem is again a decoupling problem you have to be able to effectively decouple services from each other but then allow them to work and exchange data and that's where I believe event-driven architectures are the answer to that and then orchestration on top of that is what solves the problem so it doesn't matter if you're developing your own product or if you're running software services in a business stack there're the problems are exactly the same it's the ongoing maintenance and Agility to change down the road that becomes expensive and let's just look at it from a resourcing perspective if everyone sat around twiddling their thumbs looking for work to do it wouldn't be a problem but because we usually utilize our engineering resources a lot when we come back to them and say hey will you stop what you're doing and hurry and make this change over here and you keep doing that to them every day you never make progress right and and that's really the problem we're trying to to describe here and that's why you can't assume that by building it it works great and it will always be great on ongoing maintenance because it won't they're off doing something else and so now you have to have the agility to deal with it in in a faster more agile way I mean I can tell you I mean so so just to stay on that point of of the maintenance aspect I can tell you I have seen it organization uh that have been completely bugged down by just doing maintenance I mean you have I mean they they started all these projects s some time back and thought it was a project and it would be time bound and done and then realized that it just was dragging these incredible maintenance streams uh to the point where at sometime they wake up 10 years later they wake up and they realize oh my God we actually do 80% of what we do is maintenance and maybe maybe maybe 20% I mean if you're lucky is you can do something new you're basically completely bogged out Yeah by by the whole thing um the other thing is that what what I've seen then people basically wave their hands up when they get to that point and say like ah let's just Outsource that and then what they do is they they hand it over to someone and another five years later they wake up and they go like oh my God we lost complete control of what we can do it's like we're now at the mercy of someone else like 10 hours around the world that we can't we only can talk to at 10: p.m. at night and uh and nothing is happening and actually that that speed of innovation is is further gone down yeah and then there there yeah yeah and to add to that like when we think about technology and business they they've traditionally been um on separate Innovative or separate initiative paths I I guess is the best way to put it um the business thinks that it is a project in a cost Center and they don't see it as something that helps them be a force multiplier right in scale and then it sees the world as well we're just trying to build these Technologies and we want them to be built um perfectly right as Engineers think we we like to make sure they're perfect and and those two worlds don't work together um because the business has to be agile and it needs technology to get its initiatives done and so everything has to be faster and the only way that that work you can't Outsource faster right you you can't say that I'm going to put all the maintenance of my it stack in someone else's hands when every single day the business is making decisions that could impact the it decisions and so you're not going to you're not going to be able to deal with that in a statement of work with a contractor um right they're just going to do the work that you told them to do but a month later when you need need to change it it's not as flexible as you think that it was and so yeah it all comes back to Speed and Agility in the maintenance of the systems themselves and the only way you can do that is to again separate connectivity from orchestration and and that's where I believe this whole event thing is moving um and and I I I see a lot of potential for workato moving forward as more businesses understand this this uh this problem of it and business working together to accelerate instead of being at odds with each other so you kept saying event driven like multiple times now so I want to I want to Deep dive onto this one a little bit and and I very interestingly you you described the it and the business world I couldn't agree more by the way so I was I started off my career actually on the Business site I was in a in a consulting company strategy consulting company boelen and I did process mapping so I basically I was on the requirement side of of of these Transformations and the odds that it and the business was I mean back then was just mind-boggling um so here's the thing event driven um in wado we created this thing called a trigger which is basically an event that kicks off an orchestration uh and a lot of people I don't know why but a lot of people or maybe maybe I guess it just makes sense which is a good thing in a way but people don't understand why this is actually an innovation because in in our old world of uh integration you really didn't have that trigger in modern systems now like and I think it comes back to this point of like uh over uh um kind of like kind of saying like Okay well I got an API so integration problem solved or thinking of like I got an API now the event driven problem is solved it it actually isn't so modern systems sometimes have web Hooks and so that's that's event driven that's good uh there's other challenges with the web hooks that sometimes uh you know they maybe not uh uh you might lose some and if it's like a finance system you don't want to do that so so so we do backup polling for these kind of things but in workato the trigger event basically takes an API which often is just a request of give me information but it doesn't give you an event and and the trigger kind of almost creates the illusion like there were events and and the entire infrastructure is is not even visible in Rado it's just there uh people take it for granted and they don't understand what it actually takes I mean there's like a queue below I mean again there's like millions of these uh uh events happening and you got to maintain all of that you canot cannot lose a single one and you know all of these kind of technical uh uh things but what um what I thought was interesting is the event the event trigger in it is so powerful to bring the business and it together because if you think in it uh or if you think without Events maybe you attempted your integration by the good old uh batch Integrations like at midnight move data from here to there right that's it thinking no no events once you say like okay well there's a new order now do this and this and that that I think that's how the business thinks and so once you have that event triggered there I think you're bridging it and business does that make sense yes yeah exactly in fact what's unique about lvt is we have a actual manufacturing division so we actually have an assembly line and I like to liken this analogy to an assembly line when you think about it Business Systems they're like workstations on assembly line right each station is is responsible to do some task um like an assembly line you want to sequence that as smoothly as possible so that so that the TAC time in each one of those right progresses evenly when we think about Business Systems they're no different if I have a CRM system that let's say I closed one an opportunity and that now needs to create either a fulfillment in manufacturing or a turning on of a service subscription again those are just events those are things that say this is now what I need you to do service down the line in the assembly line and so um you know item potency is is very important when we think about integrity of data uh we we also have to think about slas between each one of those Services Sometimes some Services take longer than others and you can't have a an hour glass spinning waiting for that to happen so you know events are extremely important for handling all these various types of scenarios and and when I talk about Pub sub right in the product development world that that's exactly what it is is is is event here says hey I'm publishing this and we're waiting for these other sequences to take place within the workflow and I may want to see what the response is so I can update my system that all this Downstream work's been done right I mean all that can be easily handled with with events and it can be handled in a way that can account for a service going off online which is a real thing um and you've got to be able to catch it up to speed when it does finally come up you know come online so yeah there's there's all kinds of great benefits you get from it but with that said we talked about a lot of great things let me let me throw in some gotas though like Event Systems are inherently more complicated um because of the nature of that and so having a platform that can address a lot of those complicated things simplifies it I mean that's one of the reasons why when we went down the road trying to build our own we realized this is just getting more complicated um and and it's just slow for us to build this and so again buy it versus build it uh it was was kind of what we came down to so um again I think rado's done a great job of of of not only bringing a platform but bringing a platform that inherently adapts to all the varieties of historical software interfacing that we've had to deal with you mentioned web hooks you mentioned apis you know if you got a more advanced event broker like ricado's been great at at at adapting that and then bringing almost almost enabling a more Legacy system to now be modernized because now it can play right in this orchestrated event world so again kudos to workato for you know thinking about that as well on on bringing uh a myriad of different interfaces together and and AP I type Technologies and messaging and web Hooks and whatever into this modern world that now can orchestrate it all thank thank you for that I mean I I I actually really liked the the factory analogy I mean in a way um I mean this is decades back uh you know the car manufacturers they would you know make a whole bunch of parts and stock them somewhere and then make a whole bunch it was all batch oriented in a way right and then Toyota came around and they said like no just in time yeah I think today I don't think there's anyone who doesn't do just in time anymore this is kind of like universally the standard I mean event driven architecture that that's it I mean it's the the exact same same thing so but it is it is interesting and I I really appreciate your kind of the engineers take on on on on what it takes and appreciation of the platform and so on uh that's uh that's really cool so so tell me maybe last question here um cuz I'm really curious so you're in you're in physical security um you know I've been here almost 10 years at workato before that my last job was actually I was the head of product at a company called Splunk so cyber security uh and um and it at Splunk you know what we saw is you had the Sim the security incident event management right and then a new category would come and it was called sore security orchestration and Remediation which kind of a little bit was a warish in in a way it was kind of connecting in the in the security Center it was connecting multiple tools together and so on how do you um what do you see in your physical security world how do you if you add something like Rado to it how do you see that evolve what other system can be combined where where do you see that going in the future yeah when we think about physical security especially in today's um environment where we're just seeing a lot more Brazen activity by criminals um and and really more more than that it's becoming way more organized and when we think about legislation um you know there's legislation out now that you know police can't even really uh arrest or prosecute if the if the am the amount of theft let's say is under a certain dollar amount right and so it puts a lot of pressure on we'll just say retail establishments and others where a criminal literally will go in and only steal just under that dollar amount because they know they can get away with it right and so the way that we have to prosecute now is being able to aggregate over time how much theft a criminal has done and especially when we think about organized crime right you have to be able to relate individuals to a similar organization so when we think about a modern physical security ecosystem what it looks like is the apparatuses that are detecting the the incident then there's a concept called a case management where where you have to over time now associate incidents to cases that hopefully will allow you to see patterns that it is the same person or groups that are doing it and then you've got to work with law enforcement to be able to provide that as evidence which hasn't been tampered with right there's a chain of custody that that goes along with that so this modern physical uh security ecosystem has to account really for those three things and there's very much a tight coupling uh that has to happen between those at least from a from a moving data around um and so again the the thought is well do you build one monolithic system that does it all well you can't because Police Department have to use their systems there's compliance and governance things that they have to deal with right retailers on the other hand um they can't just open up all of their systems for the police to get in and look at any time right and so we we have to rethink how a lot of this works and and and luckily the the physical security industry and some big players in the in the in this space including ourselves and you'll see some announcements coming out with Partnerships that we have where we're all trying to address that we understand what what our core competencies are in each one of those pillars and and the value we bring and now the challenge is again what does that integration and workflow look like between each one of those systems and then how do you do that in an open way so that you're not trying to be monolithic to everyone and then how do you do that where you can continue to maintain the Integrity of the data the the the loose coupling that's needed to maintain the data flows between those again everything that we've been discussing here is is applying to this new ecosystem the security industry is is looking at in physical security so um you know I I think that mimics similar to the sore um idea that you have um but yeah I think that's how the industry right now is starting to to to move but again there's a lot of thought leadership and there's a lot of like trying to get people to think this new way and luckily there's some big players that are are sophisticated enough to understand these Concepts and can lead the way um and and I would just say others who've just been kind of living off of the way the security industry has worked for decades they either got to catch up or they've got they're just going to get phased out because you know the the world is moving on and and I think it's moving on in a in a really good direction we just got to continue to execute on that um but to me it is around a lot of this event and orchestration and being able to move data around you know look this uh this was fascinating I mean I really you know first of all really appreciate you took the the hour here to uh to talk to us you know probably you know our audience is like it folks um they probably at the beginning thought like okay where's that going know physical security uh but um but I think it was so special you know when you started from your engineering perspective on on why this matters uh I think it was really special at the end where you said like hey this your physical security word and some of the syst system world is coming together right it's like not just system World from these case incident systems that the the your your customers might have and you want to connect those and then you want to connect to another entity in the ecosystem like the police and so on and I think that's interconnected world I think is is just fascinating we had a we have a a car manufacturer electric car manufacturer uh that's our customer and uh you know they used us with their backend systems they're typical it and then we started talking and talking and they're like you know the the uh uh U lights went up and they said like hey wait a second you know we're also building these cars and we're having like things we need to orchestrate there in the factory like you know let's let's think about what we can do there so so hopefully what we app uh we we managed to do with this episode is really to show people here show the audience what else is out there what what other things are there where orchestration really it's not just the backend it systems it's important there of course but then there's a lot more when you get iot involved when you get security involved we have a couple of customers that use workato as a sore engine uh uh out there um so it's a it's really fascinating so so Steve thank you so much and uh uh yeah I hope this inspired the audience here yeah thank you for the opportunity I I love talking about this stuff thank you so much for tuning into today's episode please make sure to rate today's episode leave us a comment with your thoughts and subscribe to the show so you will never miss an episode I'll see you next time [Music]

2024-10-30 19:52

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