Transcript
Hi Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data and we are here once again talking with Axoniq. Or they're going to say Axoniq. Are they going to tell me how you were supposed to say this? Now, Jessica, how are we supposed to say this? Axoniq! Axon-ic. Yes, uh, I like the IQ part. Um, we are looking, of course, at, uh, some unique ways to leverage AI for organizations. And, uh, they're going to give us a demo. Now, you guys had us. You guys just had a launch here on Halloween, which is pretty scary, isn't it? There was no ghost that came out, which is great. So yeah, the launch went well, learning a lot. And, um, really excited to see how enterprises are using the platform. Okay. Now you've got just to get dive right into you've got a demo for us today. So probably, uh, a little different than some of the other things we record. Let's just go right into that and show people what you've done or what you've got for it. Yeah. Great. Um, well, thanks for having me back. Really appreciate it. Last time we talked, kind of high level of what we were up to. It was kind of behind the scenes of the platform itself. As you can see, we have a beautiful platform. It's a unified platform that really has that explainability and context baked into every single thing you do, whether you're building an application from scratch or refactoring old code and spitting that out into event centric architecture, analyzing what your applications are doing, and then, of course, monitoring the performance and the infrastructure behind the scenes. And again, all of it is not a bolt on to what you're doing. It is inherently kind of woven in the fabric of your application. Is that explainability and context, which is important for obviously compliance, having that single source of truth, but also really important for AI of you want to make the best decisions or your AI wants to make the best decisions. And you obviously need all of the context of the history of the data in your platform. For. All right. So with that said, this is the iconic platform. Um, it really tries to think about the journey itself, where if you just want to get started, you know what is. Let's just download the framework. The framework is all of the gnarly underbelly of event sourcing that powers all of this today. But if you just want to download and get started, you can do that. There's Academy courses on the um, University Learn component. But I really wanted to talk to you about the build component. So when you go to build and what I love about this is I'm not a technologist by trade or education, but I can build applications myself. And I also can build super complex applications that are event centric. Um, under the hood. So it shows you what I've done in the past. It also shows different public projects that the community has built. But you can start up a new project. You can see there's different templates that already are ready for you. And but let's say I just want to build a create a sales development application, um, that tracks leads. So I go ahead and do that. And you can see that it starts generating a title and icon. Let's say I'm okay with that. It also lets you pick your journey. So if I'm more technical and I want to figure out the requirements myself, I can go that way or I can vibe code the application for this, I'll vibe code it. You can see that you have a development agent right here. Um, that helps me through it. So it explains exactly what is happening versus just doing it yourself. I think a lot of times with some of the, um, chat GDP types, rappers of the world, they're like, ask me your question, and then I'll go behind in a dark corner and then I'll tell you the answer versus this shows the work, hence the explainability aspect of the platform. So you can see here that it cuts it up into journeys and it shows you this is what we believe your application needs to do. So it needs to view the leads. It needs to update, it needs to change the lead status etc. so you can approve them. You can remove them, you can suggest something new. And you can see here that for sake of time, I'll just approve them all. But you can go into each journey itself. So you should really talk about this, this kind of language of vibe, coding and journeys as something interactive someone can really understand as they're going along, rather than, you know, tossing a requirement or prompt over the wall and then taking back whatever comes back and then putting it into production and going, I don't really know what it's doing. It did. Exactly. I think it did what I asked it to, but we'll see when somebody actually uses it. Right? Right. So this is explaining all of that even to the structure of it. And again, you always have your agent that you can ask questions to that shows you even the component parts underneath it. Right. So what is the model structure. What are commands, what are events, etc.. Um, you can approve. You can remove there's related journeys as well, which are all color coded into um, different queries, commands and events. Again, it's really trying to teach you how to fish as well, not just fishing for you so to speak. So for the sake of time, I'll approve them all. We'll complete the phase here. You'll see. You can, um, pick other technical pieces of it. Do I want Maven? Do I want Gradle? Do I want the axon server itself that's pre baked in? Or is there something that I want to use that's different than axon? Um, different languages etc.. So I'll continue there. And then again it shows you everything. So it shows you all of the code, but also the API files, the build files, the test files, and it shows you all of it. And then from there you can tweak and um, edit depending on what you see fit. Can you just you just tell me. I hate to derail you, but can you just tell me a little bit? You mentioned test files, how this might fit into some organization that already has this concept of CI, CD and pipeline release and workflow and testing. Uh, how would someone fold this into that? Just just at a high level, given that there's producing test files here? Yeah, I think that, um, to your point, there's how we think about like we have brownfield or greenfield. So I just showed you is very greenfield of I'm creating an application from scratch. Um, what you can do in coming releases is actually refactor what you already have. So that can be your CI, CD setup. That can be actual files of code. It will then go through this machine to say I am going to basically add this explainability layer to it. How we do it is event sourcing architecture, right? And then in the end state, it will refactor per this architecture to give you this great, um, you get module kind of setting so you can really understand what's going on. What I love about the platform as well is not only does it show you code and assist you with that, both greenfield and brownfield, but also you can analyze it. So when I'm analyzing data as you start your free trial, I'll do this here. Um, I have preloaded right now a bike rental application. Um, you can see that I typed in what's the trend in Q2 and what caused this? Not just what happened, but why did it happen? Um, you can see that it shows the schema and it shows the work beside it. Again, it's the explainability piece of it's just not voila, here it is. It's like, hey, as a business analyst or your business intelligence, folks might actually want to dig into the SQL that it's producing. So it shows its work there. And then you can quickly show from here. Um, one thing I love about this as well, it has a business ontology layer where you can feed in different documents, or you can just feed in a VIP, which means a very important bike. You can say this is an important aspect to the ontology here of the application. And then it will take that and fold that in. So this is the analytics part of it. Um and then if you go back you can see that there's a monitor side of it. So if I wanted to set up the environments for the application that I just, that I just refactored or just created, you can see I can simply set it up. Um, you can simply install. But what's great is you can see in this example, the bike rental, you would then be able to see the different statistics between the handlers, the timing, um, and be able to get proactive kind of alerts of any abnormalities that are happening today. So really. Uh, not taking DevOps out of your hands, but giving you a real direct channel into being able to see what's going on and, and fix things. Again, within this same environment. It's kind of interesting. We do believe in human in the loop right now at the stage of AI in that we're not just autonomously being like, go away, we've got it. We're saying we've got it, but we want you to be a part of the journey with us. Is this right? Have we got it wrong? Have. Is there any more context you want to give to it? Per the ontology layer that I just showed you? Um, you know, eventually I do think the worlds the size we will be more comfortable with autonomous AI that will have different triggers of. Do you want this to run autonomously or not, but we really have a focus on making sure that the developer has a part of the journey as well. Uh, and is this something you might see teams actually using and communicating with and the artifacts that you have here that it's creating, uh, is that help or is it hard to pass things off? I mean, how does that work? Yeah. So I'm showing you right now the individual plan, but we have team plans available that you can upgrade to where if we were at a company, I could start my sales lead or bike application. Um, and then I can invite you into it, Mike. And then you can kind of party on it and collaborate it with me. We can have the same console of different monitoring of the infrastructure. So you can invite all of the DevOps team to take a look at that. You can invite your whole buy team to the analyze features and functionality. What's lovely about this? It's the same kind of front door right where sometimes I think Enterprises can get in trouble with a lot of siloed, different aspects of the organization. This brings it all together into a single platform that's really rooted in that explainability and event sourcing architecture itself. Yeah, and by the way, I probably hijack your app and start making tandem bicycles, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure it'd be the right person to invite into your project on bike bike rentals, but, uh, I mean, there's there's there's other things that this looks like it would be helpful for us as we start to really collect. Like I mentioned before, all the artifacts of of a single application starting from the the rationale, the explainability parts. Exactly, uh, together in one place. And, you know, I used to be a capacity planner, so there's some scaling and cost concerns that I always have, uh, when I'm looking at application. But I know people are also looking at security, and compliance is a big thing today. What what are some of the kind of system management things that this might, might help people that are struggling with those. Yeah. No, that's a great question. Um, so Rbac is built into this. So for example, if we have a team plan, I'm like, I don't want Mike touching my bikes in the US, but he's allowed to touch them in the Netherlands as an example. Um, I can then control the segmentation of the application itself in terms of what your team members have access to change can manipulate. So there's definitely safeguards involved there. Um, also from the compliance aspect, having event sourcing as I call explainability fabric in your applications, um, very easy to then go to the analyze aspect and then pull out the different data and reporting that's needed for some of the more compliance, um, slanted use cases itself. Yeah. It seems like, you know, auto instrumentation. Right. It's like the platform itself is the way you're creating the application is based upon the idea that it's just inherently instrumented because it needs to be explainable, which is which is something way too often in the past, gets tries to get added in afterwards and doesn't. After the fact, right. Doesn't do the job right? And it's really. Important for those regulated industries, right? In our first interview I mentioned we have 65,000 companies. That's increased to 72,000, I believe last time I looked that are using our technology and a lot of which either come from regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, insurance, um, but also very highly complex industries like e-commerce and fulfillment, etc.. Um, I think what is the common thread of that is that explainability piece, whether it's an auditor saying, why did you decline Mike's credit card? Right. Being able to not just say, oh, well, we declined it on November 3rd at this time. But the historic lineage of well, it's because Mike had a huge dip in credit score three months ago, and then he tried to open up 20 accounts that were declined. And, and and of course, that's not you, Mike. But, you know And I'm just tried to buy potato chips at scale. That's all I was doing. And there wasn't anything. There's nothing going on. That's why it's important that explainability and that single source of truth and lineage across the, the platform itself. All right. And when you when you look at those 70, 70,000 companies doing this, who's picking this up uh, first and being most successful with it within an organization, is it a developer? Is it DevOps people? Is it like who's sort of the champion that we find in these organizations? I think historically, it's definitely been the very technical, even architectural group of it starts with the architecture. Right. Because that's your foundation and the framework of what you're doing. I do think that as AI, as the catalyst, you're going to see more and more people outside of that group of a chief AI officer, the AI group, or even the business intelligence group being like, hey, we really need to understand what is the data and context we're feeding our autonomous systems or distributed systems. Right? Um, at scale. And a lot of times that will then kind of flow from the business case down to the technical, how do we do it versus what we've seen historically. So I think you're going to see it both ways throughout the organization moving forward. All right. Uh, just sort of a final thought here on looking at this, uh, where where would be the best place for someone. I know there's a Get Started box here, so I'm guessing this, but but I wanted to ask where the best place for someone to sort of get started with, with the idea. There's a lot of concepts here to grasp at once, even though what you're trying to do is make make it all easy with the vibe kind of coding approach and have it help you as much. It still seems a little daunting to just look at this and say, well, here's the way I was writing stuff in Python before and doing checking code in. And now here's this. Where would you suggest that people start to do this if they're bringing it into their organization? I'd say start with a. Platform so you can see that it's platform SonicWall IO. And I think depending on how, um, how familiar you are with event sourcing, you can go to our kind of university, the learn aspect. And there's different, very consumable bite sized pieces of content to bring you up to speed. Um, but I will say, I do think our build capability and the more so vibe coding as well as the requirements, because I actually interviews you, um, in terms of what you want. And actually, if I show you really quickly, um. It will show you and help you build a bike rental app. Let's just say that I know you are trying to wrap up mike, but I've got more to show. I know. No, this is fascinating. I asked the question. I deserve the answer here. The requirements. Codeine. You can see it literally asks you questions and you can answer it yourself. Or you can, um, literally pick kind of a model answer. You didn't tell me you were getting rid of product managers, too. No no no no no no. I do think that this will be very helpful to product managers to even more quickly clarify what we're building. It does seem. Like it does seem like the entire team here would have fun with this. Uh, yeah, this this alone probably needs a whole nother demo. We talk like talking about how how it's going to meet the needs of design as well as just implementation. Uh, because that is a whole nother framework. Uh, just one last question. So you mentioned, uh, you know, the platforms that. Dot dot dot. What was the URL again? Platform dot dot io. I'm circling it right here. Sonicwall io. That's great. Uh, just hammer that home. Uh, and, uh, you know, what does it take to get started? This is, uh, something anybody can do and just download it and get going. Get going. Yes, there's a free tier that we encourage everyone to kind of kick the tires and see what you think. There's also a feedback thing right here that give us feedback. We want to know what's working really well, what you wish was on the platform so we can incorporate that into our roadmap. All right. Thank you so much Jessica for showing us. And I know again, we just scratched the tip of this because there's a lot going on here. Both uh, what we see with the solution you're actually offering, but also the sea change it's going to cause or can foment within an organization as they start to learn to do things very differently. Uh, and with that, I'd say one just as a as a as a takeaway. Jessica, should someone think of this as an AI tool or a development tool? Or if they were going to just sum it up for their their leadership, what would? Because they're not building necessarily AI with this. This is an AI augmentation to what they're doing with development. So how would you just sort of describe that? I would say it's um, it's fueling AI. It's building the trust to enable AI. When I talk to a lot of people in the market, the biggest bottleneck is the trust factor of I'm not sure what the model's doing, I don't know what data it's feeding, etc. to me, this is getting people that comfort of you can have somewhere to go. That shows all of the work. You can go back and see exactly who did it and what sequence, how, etc. and it has that fabric inherently woven in. It's not bolted on. It's not an afterthought. It's before you even get started, we think about that. So to me, it's a catalyst of AI. Yeah. I mean, you've got this acceleration of what you're doing, but you've also got the built in documentation of what's been done. And that corporate IP grows in this case instead of disappears, even if people move along like this, that you've really helped people encapsulate, I think as a final thought, their IP, uh, and over time I think it gets even more valuable. But we'll see, though 70,000 companies come back next year and be like, look what we're able to do now. Um, now that we've spent a year and we've got a lot to show for it, and, uh, we didn't lose any of it when people left or when things changed. Exactly, exactly. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jessica, for showing this to us today. Thank you so much, Mike, for having me again. All right. Take care.
