AWS for Software Companies Podcast

Ashish Arora, Head of Engineering & Machine Learning, Product Analytics at Autodesk, shares how personalized AI-powered experiences and real-time data can drive product adoption, featuring insights into Autodesk’s transformation journey, leveraging machine learning, and delivering actionable recommendations to millions of users.

Topics Include:

• Real-time data description and examples
• Leveraging AWS for real time and generative AI services
• Autodesk’s journey leveraging AWS to transform architecture and deliver personalized insights
• Overview of Autodesk and product portfolio
• Utilizing data gathered for customers
• Personalized data-driven insights for customers on Autocad and other products
• Descriptive insights: providing usage data for customers
• Prescriptive insights: Making recommendations to customers based on their workflows
• Predictive insights: Using ML to recommend products and features
• Autodesk processes 100+ billion events across all products, delivered 350+ million insights to customers, served to 3.5 million customers
• Example walkthrough – Rachael
• Architecture of Autodesk data and insight process
• Leveraging LLMs – Sagemaker and Bedrock
• Bringing it altogether
• Session wrap up

Participants:

• Ashish Arora – Head of Engineering & ML, Product Analytics - Autodesk
• Brian Slater – Principal Solutions Architect – Amazon Web Services

A panel discussion on presenting on security and data to Boards of Directors, focusing on metrics, ROI, generative AI, securing intellectual property, and strategic board engagement.

Topics Include:

• What security metrics are most valuable for Board of Directors
• Articulating ROI of security program
• Quantifying benefits of security program
• Sales enablement of the security team
• Driving efficiencies within the business with generative AI and more
• Quantifying business and template-based reporting to Boards with Diligent software
• Leveraging consultants and 3rd parties to leverage messages to Board of Directors
• Managing and communicating data posture and risk management
• Working with data leadership, securing intellectual property
• Challenges of labelling data
• Educating boards on software architecture principles and generative AI
• High focus and techniques for securing IP
• Enrolling Boards with generative AI use cases and innovation
• Creating communities of excellence
• Gamifying security and generative AI to increase internal knowledge
• Q&A 1: Taking action on a summarized document
• Q&A 2: Mental model for evaluative SaaS partners
• Q&A 3: Using the board to influence budgetary decisions
• Session wrap up

Participants:

• Satheesh Ravala - Chief Technology Officer, Diligent
• Josh Blackwelder – Deputy CISO, Sentinel One
• Robert Huber - Chief Security Officer, Head of Tenable Research, President Tenable Public
• Karen Henlsey - Principal WW Data & Generative AI Strategist, AWS

Lacework’s VP and Head of Engineering Arash Nikkar, and Product and Security Software Engineer Teddy Reed, discuss their work with generative AI and Amazon Bedrock, focusing on threat detection, chat interface improvements, and the rapid development of AI-driven solutions.

Topics Include:

• Introducing Lacework with Arash Nikkar
• Working with AWS and Bedrock
• Focusing on threat detection
• Lacework ingests over a trillion events each day
• Composite alerts for detecting anomalies
• Developing and improving the chat interface
• Teddy Reed talking chat interface improvements
• Reviewing the architecture
• Fast engagement with generative AI / AWS Bedrock
• The rapid delivery with Bedrock – took 20% of expected time
• Best practice – build in time to review and verify responses
• Measuring customer’s engagement and return frequency and feedback
• Understanding customer sentiment and topic analysis
• Achieving 60% completed results and feedback
• Transparency of source, response
• Enabling assistant to have more access to data from LLM
• Using AWS’ model evaluator, raising the accuracy scores
• Moving everything over to Bedrock for multiple reasons
• Familiarity of AWS tools helpful for all development and security teams
• Always challenging assumptions – is chat interface the right interface?
• Q&A 1: Using vector database for analysis, using results as system prompt
• Q&A 2: Approaching cost-optimization and balancing ROI
• Q&A 3: Using as automated remediation for findings
• Q&A 4: Data source Bedrock in leveraging

Session wrap up

Participants:

• Arash Nikkar – VP, Head of Engineering – Lacework
• Teddy Reed – Product and Security Software Engineer - Lacework

Massimo Ghislandi from AWS interviews Frank Contrepois, Chief Innovation Officer of Strategic Blue and Dvir Mizrahi, Head of FinOps for WIX sharing perspectives and best practices for FinOps, implementation, challenges and future FinOps trends for software companies.

Topics Include:

• FinOps is a new approach to managing cloud finances, bridging the gap between finance, engineering, and business stakeholders
• The implementation of FinOps can take a top-down or bottom-up approach, requiring collaboration and a common language across teams
• Shifting the conversation from "costs" to "investment" and "efficiency" has been an effective strategy for driving cultural change
• Focusing on automation, governance, remediation, and anomaly detection can have a greater impact than just cost observability
• Educating finance teams on technical cloud concepts and vice versa is crucial for building trust and alignment
• The future of FinOps may involve expanding beyond just cloud to encompass all IT assets and aligning with a company's overall values and business objectives
• Potential changes in legislation or accounting practices related to cloud could drastically impact the FinOps landscape

Participants:

• Frank Contrepois – Chief Innovation Officer, Strategic Blue
• Dvir Mizrahi – Head of Financial Engineering (FinOps), WIX
• Massimo Ghislandi – ISV Marketing Leader, EMEA, AWS

We feature a panel of executives from ASAPP, Glean, Smarsh, Socotra and AWS sharing essential strategies, including the role of Generative AI, trust-building, and addressing legal challenges to secure executive buy-in for transformative initiatives.

Topics Include:

• Introductions to panel
• Example of ideal Executive Seller
• Depth of business acumen and problem solving are important skills for Executive Sellers
• Framing a customer problem and create the argument
• Making selling to a C-Suite a team sport
• Keeping sellers and produce C-suite relevant
• Revolution and renaissance positioning
• Trust with the C-suite – do salesperson have a texting relationship w decision makers?
• How is Generative AI driving customer’s satisfaction and dissatisfaction?
• Data is the new oil
• Defining the business problem for insurance industry
• Helping customers reimagine business with Generative AI
• 80% of customers report the chatbot makes them mad
• The data journey is the precursor to the Generative AI journey
• The top unique legal challenges with Generative AI
• Legal now brought into early stage of sales process
• Turning legal concerns into an opportunity
• The book “Never Split the Difference” by Christopher Voss
• Calls to action from each panellist
• Session wrap-up

Participants:

• Daniel Rood – Senior Vice President Marketing, ASAPP
• AJ Tennant – Vice President Sales & Success, Glean
• Neva DePalma – General Council, Smarsh
• Ekine Akuiyibo – Chief Business Officer, Socotra
• Lauren Larscheid – Sr. Sales Leader, Business Applications, AWS

Today Anthropic’s Zach Witten takes us on a deep dive into Anthropic’s cutting-edge AI models—Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus—exploring their safety-first approach to generative AI and sharing essential tips for prompt engineering.

Topics Include:

• Introductions, about Anthropic
• 3 models: Haiku, Sonnet and Opus
• Scaling laws for hardware, data and compute
• Competing to be safest AI solutions, safety-first organization
• Leader in jailbreak resistance
• Interpretability features and breakthroughs for AI models
• Basics of prompt engineering
• Improving prompts with Claude
• Details matter – small changes to spelling, context will greatly improve results
• System prompt – role setting will improve results (i.e. “You are an expert mathematician…” for math query
• Be clear and direct – use XML tags where possible
• Encourage Claude to think step-by-step – answering fast comes with accuracy risk
• Use examples to provide additional clarity to Claude
• Bonus tips for image-based prompt engineering
• Q&A 1) Who wrote the meta-prompts in the cookbook?
• Q&A 2) Guidance for writing prompts for prompt generator
• Q&A 3) Best practices for tabular and structured data
• Q&A 4) Maintaining “tone” across hundreds/thousands of responses
• Q&A 5) Reverse engineering a prompt

Today, Dr. Ratinder Paul Singh Ahuja of Pure Storage takes us through how his organization is leveraging Amazon Bedrock to enrich the digital experience for end users and increase returns for the company.

Topics Include:

• Introductions
• Generative AI activity within Pure Storage
• Ownership and expertise of team, role of generative AI
• Rapid changes require dedicated team reporting to office of CTO
• Where Pure Storage is investing – Productivity gains, Customer Experience, R&D
• Vision starts with the needs of the business users
• GenAI Ops – Content, Voctor databases for ingestion, query strategies & security
• Example – Purchase Acquisition Process
• Features for a mobile experience
• Configurations and logs are getting more enhanced with generative AI
• Defining schema and improving large language model for more accurate responses
• Security models and deployment
• Summary and session wrap up
• Q&A 1) How did the team get trained to use the generative AI tools and systems?
• Q&A 2) How did the team reduce the hallucinations?
• Q&A 3) How did you decide on which foundation models to use?
• Q&A 4) The ROI of this particular use case
• Q&A 5) Models working with poly-morphic evolving inputs
• Session conclusion

Federico Torreti and Tom Sly of AWS discuss how application developers can leverage Generative AI to enhance cross-app experiences, minimize custom integrations and increase the value-add of enhanced communication features.

Topics Include:

• Federico Torreti intro: What is AWS’ vision for applications
• Focus of Machine Learning & AI
• Ability to build rapid prototypes, experimentation
• Cambrian explosion of SaaS applications
• The challenge of toggling of multiple applications
• Bringing the world of disconnected apps
• Data and focusing on the primary value for customer
• Generating more content will raise number of alerts and potential of burnout
• Tom Sly intro: Being delighted by businesses
• Customers expect personalization from businesses
• More than 150,000 customers leverage AWS for communications strategy
• Leveraging messaging to increase customer delight
• 2 examples: restaurant and medical need
• Session wrap up

Participants:

• Federico Torreti – Head of Product – Amazon Q, Amazon Web Services
• Tom Sly - Director, Special Projects, Amazon Web Services

Sara Yamase, Partner at Simon-Kucher & Partners, Head of Software, Internet and Media Practice shares guidance and industry examples on generative AI pricing and GTM strategies.

Topics Include:

• What percentage of companies are developing Gen AI features for customers
• Projected returns on Gen AI investment
• Articulating the value is 1st step in building pricing and monetization strategy
• Almost half of VC funding in last 5 quarters were for AI solutions
• Getting through the hype cycle and trough of disillusionment
• Education, Marketing, Food industry examples of companies clarifying value of generative AI to customers
• Having strong data sets for identifying trends
• Pricing tenets for generative AI
• Indirect monetization – more usage, faster, greater productivity, etc
• Standalone Generative AI software with bespoke pricing
• Ability to scale pricing per customer usage
• Subscription selling for generative AI software
• Choosing pricing model for generative AI solutions
• Summaries and session wrap up

Today Nicole Eagan, Chief Strategy and AI Officer and Michael Beck, Global CISO of Darktrace AI Research centre share experience, predictions and guidance on the future of AI and Cybersecurity.

Topics Include:

• A brief history of Darktrace
• Applying AI to the challenge of cyber security
• Changes and evolution of cyber security threats
• What are the key security challenges business are facing?
• Generative AI provided a seismic shift with threat actors
• Best practices for managing and scaling security teams
• Guidance for leaders for baking AI into workflows
• Responsible AI best practices for building trust
• Trends of Generative AI on the security landscape
• Leveraging Generative AI to transform the customer experience
• Predictions for emerging technology trends over the next 10 years
• Recommendations and parting wisdom for security and AI
• Keeping a workforce trained and relevant for technology trends
• Interview wrap up

Participants:

• Nicole Eagan – Chief Strategy Officer and AI Officer, Darktrace
• Michael Beck – Global CISO, Darktrace
• Phil Le-Brun – Director, Enterprise Strategy, Amazon Web Services

A panel discussion with executives from ActionIQ, FloQast and Wiz on experiences and best practices for working and selling to customer C-suites.

Topics Include:

• Panel introductions
• Keeping products and sellers focused on C-Suite outcomes
• Customer C-suite focus, identifying internal champions
• Keeping sales motion concise for key C-Suite
• Connecting value for enterprise space
• Impact of Generative AI and inventing on behalf of customers
• Customer impressions of GenAI and going beyond the hype
• Helping customers reimagine / hack their business
• C-suite concerns about Generative AI
• Flipping objections into selling points for C-Suite
• Building confidence for security, data and GenAI for Executives
• Final thoughts, Session wrap-up
• 
  

Participants:

• Justin DeBrabant – Chief Product Officer, ActionIQ
• Stefan van Duyvendijk – Accounting Operations Evangelist, FloQast
• Rick Kickert – Senior Vice President of Revenue Growth & Strategy, Wiz
• Veronica McCarthy – Senior Sales Manager, ISV, Amazon Web Services

We feature a conversation with Yuelin (李玥琳)Li, Chief Product Officer of Onfido and Phil Le-Brun - Enterprise Strategist, Amazon Web Services, about the pivotal role of AI, machine learning, and generative AI in fraud prevention and security in the identity verification industry.

Topics Include:

• Yuelin Li career journey
• Overview and mission of Onfido
• Use of AI and Machine Learning at Onfido
• Successes in reducing fraud with identity verification
• Challenges faced and overcome with Machine Learning
• Secure rapid iteration and constant experimentation
• Working with customers in highly regulated industries
• Hot topics and ethics with Generative AI
• Training, managing bias and maintaining accuracy of models
• Staying aligned with customers
• Skillets required, creating development paths for staff
• Creating a culture of learning in the organisation
• Deciding how to place bets on technology advances
• What excites Yuelin Li most about Generative AI
• Advice for other companies setting out on a similar journey
• Session wrap-up

Executive Leaders from Proofpoint, Sumo Logic and Zendesk share their experiences and best practices for collaboration with AWS to deliver transformative impact to their business using Generative AI.

Panelists:

• Patrick Wheeler, Director, Product Management, Proofpoint
• Bashyam Anant, Senior Director, Product Management, Sumo Logic
• Patrick Copeland, Chief Engineering & Product Officer, Zendesk
• Olawale Oladehin, Director ISV Solutions Architecture, North America, AWS

Topics Include:

• Introductions of Panel
• Where each organization is doing with Generative AI
• Designing data strategy around business outcomes
• Making subject matter experts within the business
• Defining what success metrics and value to focus on
• Metrics and KPIs and framework for experiments
• Thinking and leveraging partnerships for Generative AI
• Developing skillsets, retraining teams and managing resources
• Lessons learned, what would you change, advice for others
• Session wrap-up

Jimmy Hillis, Head of Engineering at Airtable, shares examples, guidance and major themes for how businesses can successfully build and leverage AI within their enterprise applications and workflows.

Topics Include:

• Introductions and Airtable overview
• Challenges businesses have articulating how AI will add value
• Core insights: AI needs to leverage your own data
• AI functionality needs to live within existing tools and workflows
• Have workflow and business experts building prompts for the desired function
• AI presents a new set of fears and restrictions
• Examples for successful implementation of AI
• Airtable AI field examples and automations feature
• Example of leveraging technology to reduce manual activity
• Data governance, training data for use
• Network governance and Flexibility
• Recapping the themes, session wrap up

In this highly informative episode, we share strategies and best practices for driving growth for SaaS companies featuring Kulwinder Kalsi, head of UK and Ireland Enterprise Software and SaaS Architecture and Johan Broman, Head of Solutions Architecture for Independent Software Vendors for Europe, Middle East & Africa.

Topics Include:

• Discover the main expectations end customers have of SaaS companies, including frictionless tenant onboarding, instrumentation/monitoring, pricing transparency, and focusing on core innovation.
• Explore key trends shaping the SaaS industry, such as the shift towards consumption-based pricing models, complex pricing strategies that align packaging with customer segments, and leveraging other software partners to remove undifferentiated heavy lifting.
• Learn how AWS can help SaaS companies with its global infrastructure, robust security measures, and rich ecosystem of services and partners to accelerate growth and innovation.
• Get insights into monetizing data strategies that SaaS companies can adopt to unlock additional revenue streams from their tenant data.
• Understand the different ways AWS partners, including systems integrators, professional services, and other software vendors, can support SaaS companies through their journey.
• Receive practical advice on approaching cloud migration and modernization, including aligning leadership, assessing growth vs. retention goals, and choosing the right mix of lift-and-shift or full modernization.
• Gain a nuanced perspective on developing AI solutions, covering use case identification, model selection, deployment techniques like prompt engineering and fine-tuning, and the importance of monitoring and management.
• Hear expert tips on navigating the rapidly evolving generative AI landscape, leveraging AWS services like SageMaker and Bedrock, and utilizing specialized AI chips like Trainium and Inferentia.

Business applications are catalyzing profound transformations across industries, streamlining operations, enhancing productivity, and fostering innovation. Leveraging advanced technologies such as generative AI, these applications are reshaping traditional business models, driving agility, and fueling competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

Panelists:

• Neboysa Omcikus - Head of Strategy, https://www.linkedin.com/company/gleanwork/Glean
• Steve Antonakakis - Divisional COO, Enterprise Productivity, PDI Technologies
• Shiv Sehgal - Executive Vice President, Audience Analytics, RSG Media, a Naviga Global company
• Karen Hensley - Principal Data Strategist, AWS

Topics Include:

• Panel Introductions
• How did you decide where to focus with Generative AI?
• Quantifying the value of projects with customers
• Delivering the value and capability for customers
• Do customers care deeply about the technology or the experience?
• How did you move from “test and experiment” phase to production
• How did you reevaluate your data strategy when developing software?
• Working with customers on their data safety, security and ethics
• Driving innovation within data regulatory and compliance requirements
• Looking into the future – What’s the next wave of transformation for industry specific solutions?

Nicholas Marwell, Member of Technical Staff of Anthropic, shares predictions for Generative AI models as well as guidance on safely training and scaling them for the near future.

Topics Include:

• Where are Generative AI Models heading
• About Anthropic
• Claude Opus, Claude 3 Sonnet & Claude 3 Haiku
• Scaling laws impact on models
• Training models for text, images and multimedia
• AI Safety, high stakes and stewarding through potential dangers
• Constitutional AI and interpretability research
• Benefits of Features – combinations of neurons
• Final thoughts – high growth and pace for coming months and years

Daniele Di Mattia, Partner at McKinsey and Company and Miguel Alava, General Manager of AWS for software companies in EMEA, discuss strategic software industry insights and trends in Europe, Middle East, Africa and beyond that will shape the future of investment, product development as well as opportunities for regional and global expansion.

Topics include:

• Macro environment challenges and focus on cost optimization for software companies
• Generative AI's massive impact and expanding total addressable market
• The need for increased R&D investment in Europe, Middle East and Africa region
• Leveraging cloud elasticity and optimization for cost-conscious environments
• Impact of generative AI on product development and developer productivity
• Embedding generative AI in sales, marketing and customer operations
• Importance of data strategy and prioritizing high-value use cases
• Being bold and courageous in investing during technological inflection points
• Opportunities for software companies to lead in their respective market segments

Frank Della Rosa, Research Vice President of SaaS, Business Platforms, and Industry Cloud at IDC, shares the recent trends of the software industry and how some successful software companies are adapting their strategies to best take advantage and create value.

Topics Include:

• The worldwide forecast for SaaS and cloud software
• Major growth stats for SaaS and Cloud software
• North America growth deep dive
• Top businesses investing in generative AI
• Co-creation with individuals, teams and machines
• Criticality of roadmap for generative AI
• Monetizing generative AI’s impact on demand
• Data’s role in the “Year of the Platform”
• Purpose built platforms
• Enterprise generative AI use cases
• Opportunities and challenges of generative AI
• Informing ISV and SaaS partners on tech buyer focus
• Impact of software architecture from edge infrastructure
• Generative AI and application modernization services
• Enhanced productivity, operational excellence, Hyper personalization
• Domain specific models and vertical SaaS companies
• Where are we going? What’s ahead?
• Reiterating the final points

Mark Billige, CEO of global consultancy firm Simon Kucher and Miguel Alava, General Manager of AWS for software companies in EMEA, discuss strategic software industry insights and trends that will shape the future of data, generative AI and cost optimization.

Topics Include:

• Shift from Growth-at-All-Costs to Profitable Growth Models
• Monetizing the Value of Generative AI Offerings
• Treating Data as a Monetizable Asset for Software Companies
• Strategies for Expanding into the U.S. Software Market
• Rethinking Software Pricing and Revenue Models
• Organizational Changes Required for AI-Driven Innovation
• Avoiding Undervaluing Software Offerings and Leaving Money on the Table
• Balancing Cost Optimization with Investing in Growth
• Leveraging Partnerships/Acquisitions for New Market Entry

Ep035: Today's podcast features panel discussion from the "AWS for Software Companies Generative AI and Data Executive Forum" featuring leaders from Anyscale, Qlik and Rapid7 sharing insights on data models, policies and optimization for Generative AI applications.

Panelists:

• Zhe Zang, Head of Open Source Engineering, Anyscale
• Brendan Grady, EVP & GM, Analytics Business Unit, Qlik
• Laura Ellis, VP - Data Engineering and Platform Analytics, Rapid7
• Sherry Marcus Ph.D., Director, Applied Science, AWS

Topics Include:

• Introductions of the panel
• What big bets are you making with your companies and why?
• What have the learnings been with data preparation?
• Balancing present needs with the future of AI – growing data literacy
• Cost optimization for AI and Data platforms
• Constraints of hardware and growing expense
• What models and solutions have customers been asking for?
• High stakes risks for AI and Data
• How customers are reacting to different compute models
• Guardrails, filters and risk-mitigation best practices
• Data and AI pain points
• New global policies challenging data and AI development
• Challenges with data quality
• How has AI changed and evolved with digital natives?
• Open and closed models in the market
• Metrics and selection for models
• Biggest lessons learned in the AI and data space
• Session conclusion

A panel discussion from the AWS for Software Companies Generative AI and Data Executive Forum featuring leaders from DatologyAI, Gretal.ai and Zscaler sharing insights on data analytics, AI/ML and cost optimization.

Panelists:

• Ari Morcos - CEO and Co-founder at DatologyAI
• John Meyers - CTO and Co-Founder at Gretel.ai
• Sanjay Kalra - Product Management at Zscaler
• Andy Perkins – General Manager, Data, Analytics, GenAI at Amazon Web Services

Topics Include:

• Top 3 keys to success integrating insights, AI-ML, generative AI
• Big business opportunities for data curation, data analytics to reduce costs
• Recent ML innovations for solving problems with data
• Balancing utility and accuracy with synthetic data for privacy
• What is the role synthetic data plays in AI/ML Ops
• Benefits of synthetic data
• Cost optimization existing data in AI/ML platform
• Reinvesting cost savings into innovation with data and generative AI
• Insights and predictions for data, AI/ML, generative AI to transform user journeys

Phil Le-Brun of AWS speaks to Brad Porter, CEO of Orion Health about the exciting future healthcare, communities that have adopted a “Digital First” strategy and improving the healthcare experience through data and technology.

Topics Include:

• The ambitious mission and vision for Orion Healthcare
• Improving the clinician and patient experience through data
• The role of data in healthcare
• Opportunities for digitization and innovation in healthcare
• AI and data for improving healthcare predictability & efficiency.
• Using technology to “join the dots” for health trends of the population
• Examples and benefits of communities that have a “Digital First” strategy for healthcare
• The patient experience with their healthcare data
• Building trust with personal health information
• Learning about digital opportunities from personal experiences with healthcare

In this podcast we’ll hear from Stephen Manley, CTO of Druva, about the problem of data sprawl, and how AWS customers like Druva have prepared, orchestrated, and unified petabytes of data to analyze and perform at scale.

Topics Include:

• Generative AI has flipped a lot of legacy AI in last few months
• Overview of Druva / a SaaS backup company
• How do we use generative AI to help customers get more value?
• What problems did we not expect with generative AI?
• Curating data to feed into LLMs
• Integrating security and privacy into the product
• Measuring performance with generative AI
• AWS team helping solve the issues
• Betting big on AWS Bedrock
• Ingesting data into S3 with 5x performance improvement
• Unified view of security, aggregating data for efficiency
• Walking through an example query
• Summary recommendations

Today, in collaboration with Business Insider India, Raviteja Dodda, Founder and CEO of MoEngage shares the story of how MoEngage is shaping customer engagement and provides guidance for other software leaders wishing to make the same journey.

Topics Include:

• Jeff Klaus and Raviteja Dotta Introductions
• How has the Customer Engagement Space evolved in recent years?
• How has SaaS help automate AI-driven personalization?
• Maximizing existing customers
• Steps and best practices for growing to multiple markets
• Developing GTM approach for Asia, Europe and North American markets
• Creating a “flywheel effect” by leveraging customer communities
• Innovating to stay ahead of the curve in the software industry
• MoEngage implemented AI in 2016 – how had that AI strategy evolved through to generative AI?
• Recommendations and Lessons Learned

Today, a session from the AWS for Software Companies Executive Forum at re:Invent, Jeremy Schnieder, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, shares some mega trends of the software industry.

Topics Include:

• Software is growing significantly.
• Total value of Enterprise software industry has doubled in the last 5 years
• IT spending rising, SaaS now over 50% of software revenue
• Opportunities & major growth drivers with GenAI
• Shifts balance of internal development and commercial software due to GenAI
• GenAI influenced changes in various market segments
• Tactics that product led sales are using
• Productivity benefits from generative AI-assisted software development
• Productivity metrics for generative AI

Gabriele Lasauskaite, Head of Growth & Community Programs at AWS, speaks with Luke Anear, CEO and Founder of SafetyCulture as he shares the story of SafetyCulture, becoming a critical app for businesses, supporting 75,000 customer globally and the plans for 100x growth in the coming years.

Topics Include:

• How did SafetyCulture begin? What problem were you trying to solve?
• Who are the customers of SafetyCulture?
• Australian Open using SafetyCulture for their events
• Airlines relying on SafetyCulture
• The role of technology on SafetyCulture
• The importance of User Experience
• Growing the SafetyCulture business 100x by 2032
• Interview wrap up

James Hunt, Vice President of Product Management of eGain shares the story of how eGain Analytics is helping Amazon Connect customers to measure, manage and optimize their contact centers.

Topics Include:

• Overview of eGain
• eGain Solution hubs: Knowledge, Conversation & Analytics
• Why enterprises choose eGain Analytics
• Contact Center Analytics: Buy vs. Build
• Navigating a migration from On-Premise to Amazon Connect – Best Practices & Pitfalls.
• A real customer migration experience
• Building trust with large enterprises and government clients
• How eGain leverages AWS services
• The Amazon/eGain partnership
• Advice for other software executives
• Find out more: eGain.com and eGain on AWS Marketplace
• Navigating the migration from On-Premise Solutions to Amazon Connect – Best Practices & Pitfalls.

We feature a panel discussion from the AWS for Software Companies Executive Forum at re:Invent, featuring software leaders, founders and co-founders from Cohesity, HashiCorp, Postman and SentinelOne sharing how they grew their software business, software trends they are seeing and growth plans for 2024

Panelists:

• Mohit Aron, Founder and Chief Technology and Product Officer, Cohesity
• Armon Dadgar, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer, HashiCorp
• Ankit Sobti, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Postman
• Ely Kahn, Vice President of Product for Cloud Security and AI/ML, SentinelOne
• Carol Potts, Director ISV Sales, North America, Amazon Web Services

Topics Include:

• Software trends being seen in the market today
• Introductions from each panellist
• Seeing a market opportunity and the founders’ journey
• The evolving vision of software companies
• Involvement & impact of AWS
• Reactions to present day market conditions
• Changes for various sized customers
• Strategies for delivering value and staying nimble
• Where are software companies pushing for growth?
• Impact and approach to generative AI
• Software and growth strategies for 2024
• Session wrap up

We feature a panel discussion from the AWS for Software Companies Executive Forum at re:Invent, featuring software leaders from Appen, Coinbase, Rapid7 and AWS sharing strategies and best practices to optimize their businesses to free up budgets and enable further software innovations. 

Panelists:

• Bobby Smith, Vice President of IT and Engineering, Appen
• Sumanth Sukumar, Vice President Engineering, Coinbase
• Elaine Hardwick, Director of Engineering, Rapid7
• Sree Ratnasinghe, Director, NAMER Tech, Amazon Web Services

Topics Include:

• Potential future market and impact of driving optimization
• How optimization drove innovation
• Using optimization to free up budget & time for growth programs
• Optimization becomes part of the organizational culture
• Lessons learned through optimization
• Running internal competitions to drive innovation and modernization
• AWS’ “Experience Based Accelerator” 3 day hackathon-style optimization program
• Leveraging AWS to help optimize to invest in generative AI
• Investment returns in Bedrock and Code Whisperer
• Ensuring team alignment for optimization focus
• Making roadmap trade-offs – features v optimization
• Final thoughts, panel wrap up

We feature a panel discussion from the AWS for Software Companies Executive Forum at re:Invent, featuring software leaders from Canva, Databricks, Okta, PagerDuty and AWS discussing modern data strategies for software companies.

Panelists:

• Fawaz Ahmed, Senior Director of Engineering, Canva
• David Meyer, SVP of Product Management, Databricks
• Bhawna Singh, CTO, Okta
• Tim Armandpour, CTO, PagerDuty
• Barry Morris, GM, In-Memory and Emerging DB, AWS

Topics Include:

• Sharing approach to data strategies
• Canva providing and leveraging user analytics.
• Databricks data strategy and architecture
• Processing data with minimal latency
• Governance and challenges with generative AI
• Beyond the chatbots - fundamental shifts in data strategy with generative AI
• Managing data for generative AI verification and trust
• Training and fine-tuning data models
• Prioritizing data integration and evolution
• How will generative AI evolve data over the coming years
• Can providing insights be monetized?
• Technology requirements for driving data-based decision making
• Predictions for data and generative AI

Description:

Today, a fascinating panel discussion from the AWS for Software Companies Executive Forum at re:Invent November 2023, featuring software leaders from Anthropic, Freshworks, Genesys, Snaplogic and AWS discussing the disruption, impact and opportunities of generative AI for software companies.

Panelists:

• Matt Bell, Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic
• Siddhartha Agarwal, Senior Vice President, Product Strategy & Operations, Freshworks
• Glenn Nethercutt, Chief Technology Officer, Genesys
• Jeremiah Stone, Chief Technology Officer, Snaplogic
• Sherry Marcus Ph.D, Director of Applied Science, Generative AI, AWS
• Andy Perkins, Director ISV Sales, AWS

Topics Include:

• Observations of the current state of generative AI
• How will AI continue to disrupt industries?
• Agents and bots to help employers scale
• Impact of generative AI on retail and support
• Leveraging generative AI and automation to become lean and reduce waste
• Risk management for generative AI
• Ethical concerns – Security, data accuracy and privacy
• Managing/reducing “jailbreaks” – users attempting to break the models
• Developing leadership clarity and in-house expertise for large language models
• Increased power of Product Managers, evolution of engineering departments
• How SaaS companies work with generative AI
• Leveraging AWS Bedrock for acceleration
• Advice for Software Executives going into generative AI
• Partnering with AWS for POCs

We present a panel discussion with software leaders from Contrast Security and Tenable sharing guidance and best practices for security in DevOps practices. Panelists are:

• Mike Clausen - Director of Product Management, Contrast Security
• Phillip Hayes - Director Information Security, Tenable
• Temi Adebambo - Head of Security Solutions Architecture, AWS

Topics Include:

• The significance of introducing security into the DevOps processes for Modern Architectures
• Balancing need for speed & agility with need for security
• Common challenges in security in DevOps
• What does “Shift Left” mean to the panelists?
• Considerations & guidance for “shifting left”
• Best Practices for security testing & vulnerability management
• Suggested metrics for organizational leaders 

Enjoy our panel discussion with executive leaders from ChaosSearch, Sentra and ZeroFox and discuss some best practices for secure data management and compliance in the cloud.

Speakers:

• Thomas Hazel, CTO & Chief Scientist, ChaosSearch
• Yoav Regev, CEO and Co-founder, Sentra
• Mike Price, Chief Technology Officer, ZeroFox
• Mark Terenzoni, Service Leader, AWS, Amazon Inspector and Amazon Detective

Topics Include:

• Customers concerned about size of data
• How AWS manages large amounts of data
• Challenges of compliance with data storage
• People challenges with data security
• Getting security info from customers isn’t always easy
• Complexity of security options still challenging to many customers

Today we have a panel of software industry leaders from Braze, N-able and Rapid 7 discussing how to use security as a strategic advantage

Speakers:

• Mark Shasha, Head of Security, Braze
• Ulrich Dangel, Director of Engineering, Rapid7
• Stefan Voss, VP of Product Management, N-able
• Clayton Smith, Global Startup Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

Topics Include:

• Thesis: Security is good for business
• Is security a differentiator and lead to sales?
• Is your customer base being more educated on security issues?
• How have you built a culture of security?
• How do you hire for a security culture
• Are security teams involved in sales discussions?
• Is security risk communication easier with the cloud?

We feature a roundtable discussion with several software industry leaders on how their organizations leveraged Kubernetes for their AI and ML workloads as well as lessons learned from the experience.

Featuring:

• Amreth Chandrasehar - Director of MLOps, SRE and Observability, Informatica
• Úlfar Erlingsson - Chief Architect, Lacework
• Murli Thirumale - General Manager of the Cloud Native Business Unit, Pure Storage
• Barry Cooks - VP Kubernetes, AWS

Topics include:

• Huge amounts of AI/ML workloads at AWS
• What is the path from data to value for customers?
• What were challenges with leveraging Kubernetes?
• What were the top wins, biggest regrets & lessons learned from leveraging Kubernetes?

Register for AWS reInvent: NOV. 27 – DEC. 1, 2023 | LAS VEGAS, NV

Today we feature a roundtable discussion on organizational adoption, benefits and best practices for deploying serverless containers featuring Skylar Graika, Product & Engineering Leader of Smartsheet and Jeet Kaul, Senior Vice President of Jumio, moderated by Banjot Chanana of AWS.

Topics include:

• Serverless session intros
• Where does “Serverless” start and stop?
• How did Serverless get adopted within the organization?
• Reaction of developers and Operations teams to Serverless
• Any unintended benefits from adopting Serverless?
• Cost structures of shifting to serverless
• How to approach 3rd parties with serverless
• Obtaining executive sponsorship for business case
• Session wrap-up

We share a roundtable discussion on Generative AI featuring Chris Cholette, Agile VP Engineering and SRE for Navan, Swapnil Paranjpe, Senior data Practitioner at Persistent, Gregor Stewart, VP of Artificial intelligence at SentinelOne and all hosted by Matt Thompson of AWS.

Topics include:

• Intro to Matt Thompson
• 4 Pillars of Generative AI for AWS
• Introductions of panel
• How much is your day is GenAI?
• How much retraining for techniques for data science or engineer teams?
• Why are you incorporating GenAI?
• How do we test for quality of output?
• When to use an ML model or a foundation model?
• Session wrap-up

Register for AWS reInvent: NOV. 27 – DEC. 1, 2023 | LAS VEGAS, NV

We feature a panel discussion featuring Michael Brown, VP of Technology at Auvik Networks, Rob Woolley, VP of Technology Operations at Benevity moderated by Jeff Klaus of AWS sharing best practices on global expansion. Topics include:

• The most successful AWS customers are on multiple continents
• What are the goals for wanting to expand overseas?
• Going global through acquisition
• Copying services to various regions with AWS
• AWS helping to establish beachheads in new markets
• Managing challenges of data residency
• Best practices for staffing in a new market
• North American marketing often doesn’t work in other markets
• Working with resellers in a new market
• Session wrap up

Sign up for AWS reInvent: NOV. 27 – DEC. 1, 2023 | LAS VEGAS, NV

This week we’re sharing a panel discussion featuring Mohan Rao - Vice President, Cyber Security Platform at Arctic Wolf, Ramon Pinero - Vice President of Product and Services at BlackBerry AtHoc, Cuneyt Karul - Senior Director, Information Security and Product Privacy at Hootsuite and Wayne Duso, Vice President of Engineering and Product at AWS discussing security models and organizational best practices.

• Management of the security function in various organizations
• Security risk register and process best practices
• Going from the “Department of ‘No’” to “Department of ‘Yes and..’”
• Helping teams become security champions
• Transformation of the AWS security organization
• Security visibility of CxOs & Executives
• Building security governance & compliance structure
• Impact of generative AI on security practice

Barry Morris of AWS discusses Modern Data Strategies with Riaz Raihan, President of Products & Engineering at Alida, on how they have designed their data strategy to manage through the extraordinary complexities of handling large volumes of data.

• Barry Morris introduction
• Building modern data strategies
• Data-driven product design
• Riaz Raihan, President of Products & Engineering at Alida
• Collecting large volumes of data
• Managing security of large volumes of data beyond standard compliance
• Rebooting Alida – focusing on customer outcomes
• Driving growth, profit and enabling speed
• Scaling Voice of Employee program for 225,000 employees in 2 days
• Executive alignment is crucial for success
• Management, security, protection of data in fundamental

Juan Sequeda, Principal Scientist and Head of AI Lab at data.world shares case studies and best practices for creating cultures of enablement around data quality and behaviours.

Topics Include:

• Juan Sequeda introduction
• Foundation of knowledge & data graphs for AI
• 2 million users in the OpenData catalogue, 40% of Fortune 500
• OneWeb Case Study – data from satellites
• The Culture of Enablement to empower your organization with data
• OneWeb using AWS Sagemaker
• Prologis Real Estate logistics data case study
• Tying staff rewards to data quality and behaviours
• Developing a culture of change
• Session wrap up

AdPredictive’s Ali Levitan, EVP of Business Development & Growth, and Laura Crossley, VP of Experience, join us to discuss how AdPredictive’s partnership with AWS Clean Rooms is empowering marketing teams with data-driven tools. Topics Include:

• Introduction to Ali Levitan & Laura Crossley
• Solving the big problems for Marketers
• The challenges marketers are facing in current environment
• The partnership of AWS Clean Rooms and AdPredictive
• Use Cases and Success Stories
• Expanding the power of data to non-technical marketing teams
• Overcoming challenges throughout the integration
• Innovating and staying focused
• Advice for other software leaders
• AdPredictive is passionate about supporting marketers
• Accessing the AdPredictive solution
• Interview wrap up

Free Trial of AdPredictive's tools are available here.

Tim LoGrasso of Kickdrum and Matt Thompson of AWS host a roundtable sharing best practices for software mergers and acquisitions.

Topic include:

• Karthik Krishnamurthy introduction
• Tim LoGrasso, Kickdrum introduction
• Maturity model for calculating risk in M&A
• M&A changes and challenges in 2023
• Matt Thompson, AWS introduction
• Is architecture a focus when considering M&A?
• Most M&A struggles due to product team misalignment
• Containers, APIs in compute infrastructure easier to integrate than Monoliths
• M&As are often driven by Finance and Business Development, not so much Product Teams
• Time metric to measure success and failure for M&As
• Building a case for M&A vs build
• Preethi Srinivasan (Druva, DataStax) on due diligence for M&A considerations
• Pre-integration Proof of Concepts increase the success rate
• 90 day and 12 month plans with funding models to deliver the joint opportunity
• Understand the ‘white space’ to address with the combination of products
• What can product teams do to accelerate value?
• Identify potential friction points and how to address
• Access to cheap compute power is important
• Guidance on managing customer data during M&A
• The customer data to review
• Managing people risk during an M&A
• Session wrap up

Deepak Thakral, VP of eCommerce at McAfee and Bob Page, SVP of Product at Tealium discuss Software Data Architectures and share best practices in a roundtable hosted by AWS’s Denise Zelt.

Topics include:

• Deepak Thakral of McAfee introduction
• Bob Page of Tealium introduction
• Bob Page on helping customers with their end users and creating business value
• Setting up priorities for data architecture and roadmap
• Lessons learned from Tealium
• Deepak: How McAfee manages high performance & security with increasing data
• Shankar Venkataraman of Jivox on scaling and processing 10 times data volume in past 3 years
• Steven Tiell of DataStax on performing real time AI of time series data
• Bob Page on adoption of microservices and best practices
• Tradeoffs of transitioning from monolithic to micro services
• Yuan Liu of Stripe on service oriented architecture vs microservices
• Amit Pande of Dhruva providing SaaS based data protection
• Final thoughts and recommendations from Bob Page and Deepak Thakral

Grady Summers and Marty Bowers of Sailpoint share how their partnership with AWS resulted in their product running 1800x faster at 1/50th of the cost.

• Grady Summers & Marty Bowers introduction
• Automating access and recertification
• Leveraging Infrequent Access Tables in Dynamo DB for cost reduction and autoscaling
• Guidance and lessons learned

Sam Lakkundi, Vice President of Innovation and Head of Innovation Labs at BMC, share insight on the roadmap and massive benefits applying the power of data and the cloud to the Manufacturing industry.

Topics include:

• About BMC Software
• Moving their stack to AWS
• The rapid change of the manufacturing industry
• Predicting and simulating downtime w a digital model
• Creation of BMC Helix
• Leveraging AWS Sagemaker and Twinmaker
• Simulating manufacturing changes to identify opportunities to action
• Presentation wrap up

Dr Lou Kratz, Principle Research Engineer of Bazaarvoice, shares how his organization generates value from data, cutting time to value by 6x and leveraging AWS to save big on cloud costs.

Topics include:

• Making smart decisions automatically from data with machine learning
• Bazaarvoice business model
• Understanding value is the most important part of any machine learning project
• Leveraging AI/ML for content moderation
• Leveraging AWS Sagemaker
• Being cost effective with serverless options
• Cutting time to value by 6x with savings of 82%
• Investing in ML Ops
• Final recommendations for data and ML Ops

Tom Godden, Enterprise Strategist with AWS and Executive advisor shares his experience as both a CIO and CTO on how to drive higher value from data strategies.

Topics include:

• About the Enterprise Strategy team
• Learning from customers using data to go from vision to value
• Speed and agility is the only differentiator
• What it means to be a data-driven enterprise
• How companies like Disney, Formula 1 and Amazon use data as a differentiator
• “Data is the new oil” – CIO Magazine
• 79% of the challenges around the adoption of data are cultural
• 4 “Es” of data – Engage, Enable, Educate, Eliminate
• Insist on having the data
• One way and two-way doors & Two pizza teams
• Decentralize data producers, distribute throughout organization
• Be prepared to re-evaluate your metrics
• Govern to enable, not to restrict
• Building tenets for data policies and procedures
• A data asset is not successfully deployed until it is fully automated
• Think big and execute small
• Building a smarter organization leveraging machine learning
• A mission statements needs to mean something
• Work to eliminate biases
• Avoiding “The Frozen Middle”
• Be clear on the “why” for implementing machine learning
• Start small and think big with AI
• Presentation wrap up

Jonathan Barouch, CEO of Local Measure, joins us to discuss their journey of leading and innovating through a major business disruption.

Topics Include:

• Intro to Local Measure
• The pre-Covid business model and customers
• Impact of Covid
• Losing 75% of their revenue within months
• Teams navigating the early months of Covid
• Reinventing the business
• Testing, iterating new business models
• Leveraging AWS APIs for Amazon Connect Cloud Contact Center solution
• Balancing the former focus and contact centre pivot
• The importance of a call centre in lean times
• Migrating call centres of airlines and banks within 30 days
• Change management and the Local Measure solution
• Leveraging AI/ML for additional customer efficiencies
• Shaving seconds off calls equate to huge savings
• Leveraging AI/ML to turbocharge agents
• Additional industries for the Local Measure solution
• Transforming data for tangible benefit
• Proactive, predictive and outbound engagements
• Guidance for other Software Executives going through disruption
• What’s next for Local Measure
• Interview wrap up

Multiple software industry leaders speak about their journey in building a resilient SaaS business.

Speakers:

• Adrian Deluca - Director of Solutions Architecture – AWS
• Ashley Kramer - CMO, CSO, Acting CTO at GITLAB
• Kochira Okamoto - CEO at Yayoi
• Tendü Yoğurtçu, PHD - Chief Technology Officer at Precisely
• Mathias Golombek - Member of the Executive Board and Chief Technology Officer at Exasol
• Akshay Patel - Principal SaaS Business Development Lead at AWS

Topics Covered:

• Introduction by Adrian Deluca
• Balancing growth and profitability Q/A by Tendü Yoğurtçu
• Building and keeping both Exasol’s product lines running Q/A by Mathias Golombek
• What do Enterprise customers value most? Q/A by Ashley Kramer
• Balancing growth and profitability in Japanese countries & pivoting the company in a new direction Q/A by Kochira Okamoto
• What strategies are used through SaaS factoring engagements Q/A by Akshay Patel
• Favorite Metric for growth and profitability Q/A by Kochira Okamoto and Tendü Yoğurtçu
• What were you unprepared for, when you were releasing your SaaS products? Q/A by Mathias Golombek and Tendü Yoğurtçu and Ashley Kramer
• What sort of attributes do you look for in your developer you hire? Q/A by Ashley Kramer and Kochira Okamoto and Tendü Yoğurtçu
• How is diversity playing out particularly in your business? Q/A by Tendü Yoğurtçu, Ashley Kramer and Akshay Patel
• What do you think about Re-skilling? Q/A by Mathias Golombek, Kochira Okamoto, Ashley Kramer, Akshay Patel and Tendü Yoğurtçu
• What do you do to invest in yourself for personal growth? by Mathias Golombek, K, Ashley Kramer, Akshay Patel and Tendü Yoğurtçu
• End – Conclusion by Adrian Deluca

Alessandro Maoggi, Senior Manager of Engineering at Veeva Systems, shares their journey and lessons learnt developing AI/ML tools with AWS Sagemaker.

Topics Include:

• Intro to Veeva Systems
• Background of Veeva TMF Bot
• Leveraging AWS SageMaker
• Scaling horizontally with smaller instances

Kanishka Mohaia, VP of Engineering (Data and Machine Learning) at Rokt, shares their journey and lessons learnt in developing AI/ML teams.

Topics Include:

Introduction: Kanishka Mohaia, VP of Engineering (Data and Machine Learning) at Rokt

Machine Learning focused on improving eCommerce

Why 85% of AI project fail

Hiring, structures & best practices for AL/ML teams

Rokt architecture overview and AWS Services

Machine Learning is critical for software teams. Adam Starr, Senior Global Engineering Manager, Data Science at Proofpoint, shares their journey to successfully building and deploying AI/ML solutions using Amazon SageMaker.

Topics Include:

• Adam Starr, Senior Global Engineering Manager, Data Science at Proofpoint Inc
• How Proofpoint leverages AI in security model
• ML Ops leverages AWS SageMaker
• AWS Innovation – Going from idea to prototype to production (Sagemaker Studio, Ground Truth, GitPush, Sagemaker Pipeline, Sagemaker Endpoints)
• Critical success factors and which AWS services to use
• Partnering with AWS on Machine Learning Operational platform

Listen in as Industry Leaders from Coupang, Snowflake and Wiz discuss strategies for using data as a business driver and share their experiences. Topics include:

• Intro by Barry Morris of AWS
• Yinon Costica of Wiz - introduction
• Elise Bergeron of Snowflake - introduction
• Seshu Adunuthula of Coupang – introduction
• What is the biggest opportunity going forward using data in developing software products?
• Integration of disparate data and power of combining it
• Elimination of data silos and focusing on how to use it
• Culture gaps in data analysis
• Deploying AI to address data requirements
• Centralized and decentralized data models
• Team structure for data management
• Graph data model
• Technology enablers for data management
• How can customer data be leveraged?
• Building a data-driven culture internally and w customers
• What lessons should customers avoid?
• Staying close to customers and ensuring alignment
• Building roadmaps with customers
• Data monitoring & management tips
• Advice for software companies on data platforms