Welcomed by a spectacular Star Wars themed introduction, Dynatrace really did take spectators to a galaxy far far away on the first day of its annual conference Perform 2018 in Las Vegas.
Dynatrace was quick off the mark to set the bar high, with Dave Anderson, VP of Marketing, opening the keynote saying: “At Dynatrace, we love perfection and we’re here because we need software to work perfectly.”
Achieving perfection in both software and customer experience is the ultimate goal for the application performance management software company this year – a somewhat bold proposition. By taking customers on a completely new journey, enhanced every step of the way by real-time capabilities, Dynatrace aims to help customers manage all applications across one agent.
The newly announced platform and initiative for the future is somewhat of a game changer for both Dynatrace and the market as a whole. Research from the company found that 73% of customers had microservice troubles, with just over half (53%) finding problems with visibility.
Dynatrace wants to see a significant decrease in these numbers, pitching an ‘all in one’ solution that will put all the capabilities a customer needs in a single location. Driven by the company’s own trial and error on it’s own servers, the company has created a full stack solution offering a one agent approach with real-time analytics and automation at the core.
“We aim to give customers a single holistic view, with a single product, single platform approach to look at everything in a modern way. It gives you a view across all the areas you have, with the ability to use the same analytics and more,” Steve Tack, SVP of Products at Dynatrace, said.
“We are bringing an analytics mind-set to that as well, with an AI approach to solving problems. When we have all that information together, all the right materials, we can then present back the answer.”
AI is the golden ticket to Dynatrace’s market differentiation, giving them the edge in the competitive performance market. The new platform is very much dependent on the use of AI, boosting the customer experience and finding the route cause of problems much quicker than any other capability has before.
“We want to disrupt the industry to gain the competitive advantage by offering the best of the best performance management solution.” Anderson said. “User experience is critical to us. It is an area where we see AI and automation as a single differentiation between the competition and us. We’re not just focused on troubleshooting, but finding the best solution.”
As AI seemingly takes over every industry, questions emerge regarding the reliability and trustworthiness of such technology. Reassuring customers, Dynatrace pointed out that the AI capabilities are only fed with information that is ‘pumped’ into the system.
Florian Ortner, Chief Product Officer at Dynatrace, said: “We don’t use machine learning and it’s good that we don’t. At Dynatrace we capture data at the highest fidelity possible, not just sampling. We look at the good and the bad points and incorporate that into our AI.”
As well has having the holistic view of every area of the organisation, Dynatrace pushed forward one of its crucial capabilities, its real-time analytics and feedback. The goal is to enhance performance experience and resolve issues as and when they happen, to get performance back on track as soon as possible.
Echoing what Anderson opened with, Tack outlined Dynatrace’s goal to make software work perfectly and create the ultimate customer experience. Tack said: “It simply has to work. We want to bring more to our customers, to make their job easier so customers can spend more time innovating and less time troubleshooting. It is not all about the back room information and service but about what the customers want and need and listening to that.”
Tack concluded and said: “It would be a mistake of ours if we just brought things forward, doing things in the same way. We have to do things differently, not just better.”
