Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from Dynatrace

Innovation is accelerating in the IT world. At the centre of these advancements is Dynatrace, a software intelligence company helping organisations across the Asia-Pacific region keep pace with digital transformation. Rafi Katanasho, Chief Technology Officer for APAC at Dynatrace, recently discussed the company's latest developments and its strategy to support business and government as they navigate an increasingly complex technology landscape.

"Dynatrace helps organisations deliver flawless and secure digital interactions," Katanasho began. "We have a platform that we label under 'software intelligence' to ensure that we observe all their operational models and help them manage the software across that lifecycle." At a time when every organisation is becoming digital, this means providing the tools to ensure everything is running smoothly, securely and cost-effectively.

One of Dynatrace's significant recent announcements is the launch of Grail, a breakthrough in data management. Katanasho described Grail as a response to the rising tide of data that modern, digitised organisations must now handle.

"We see that there's a huge amount of new data that's being generated as people digitise and leverage cloud or hybrid cloud," he said. "There's a new need for this data to be ingested and stored to be leveraged against governance, resilience use cases, business optimisation use cases and so on." Katanasho explained that, looking five to ten years ahead, Dynatrace didn't see any solutions able to meet this need in a cost-effective way and provide the real-time answers organisations require. "We've been working on this for the last three or four years, trying to come up with something that is like a data lakehouse with massive parallel processing."

In simple terms, Grail offers a highly cost-effective and highly scalable way for enterprises to deal with observability, security and business automation use cases, with artificial intelligence at its core. "Our mission as a company is to help provide precise answers and intelligent automation from data, and this enables that mission by having the data and AI in a limitless, highly scalable way," Katanasho said.

Why launch now? According to Katanasho, the timing is perfect because so many companies are accelerating their digital transformations – moving legacy environments into the cloud and digitising processes at speed. "In the APAC region that's about three or four thousand customers. In the ANZ market, we're talking about the top 500 companies and these have spent a lot of money and effort over the last 50 years building their existing environments," he explained. As these environments are now being transformed, the challenge of managing the resulting explosion in data becomes ever more critical. "The volume of data and the cost of this data is going to become an even bigger challenge for these organisations," he added.

To help customers "future-proof" these transitions, Dynatrace focuses intensely on providing data with context. "What it really means is – if you think about the different stakeholders in this IT business, every business is digital, every business now is learning to become a software company," Katanasho said. This means application owners want to improve time to market and digital experiences, DevOps teams need operational and production visibility, and site reliability engineers (SREs) must maintain secure and resilient platforms. A common challenge is that different teams use different data and speak different "languages".

"We like to think of that as a common lingua franca – common language, common metrics, with a common platform to help better collaboration from the same source of data, as opposed to business using their own data, development using their own data, SRE teams using their own data and everybody's talking different things," he said. By aligning data in context to the stakeholder, organisations can derive precise answers and automate intelligently. "We don't want people to be waking up unnecessarily or making decisions that can be automated, so the business can focus on innovation and scaling," Katanasho added.

The idea of scaling is vital, especially as digital services grow. "It's impossible to think that you can scale your business at the human scale – you can't just add bodies to deal with these additional digital services, it's just not going to work," Katanasho warned.

AI, naturally, is at the centre of Dynatrace's platform. The company's Davis AI engine has been a fundamental part of its offering since 2016. "That was the first and only AI engine that's built into the platform from the ground up and we've kept innovating and enhancing," Katanasho said. The new version of Davis takes advantage of the boundless, cost-effective data storage provided by Grail, allowing users across disciplines – from business analysts to SRE and DevOps teams – to interact with Davis in real time.

"Sometimes you know these create a need for businesses to ask questions of the data and they need it in real time, so that is where we've enabled them to ask Davis intelligently and help them answer some of these questions – potentially not just known questions but unknown unknowns," he explained, citing recent high-profile security issues as examples where rapid data analysis was critical.

Looking to the future, the company is investing further in supporting partners and customers. Dynatrace maintains a partner-centric approach, working with major cloud and technology providers, and continues to expand its regional teams. "We've got a team distributed across ANZ, and actually across APAC, with maybe about 200 plus team members here and growing – we're growing roughly at about 30 to 35 every year so to be able to address this demand," Katanasho said.

He concluded with a focus on Dynatrace's commitment to delivering secure, flawless digital experiences: "Exciting new opportunities to help the ANZ market to be able to deliver highly secure and flawless digital experiences to all the citizens and the constituents and the employees and users at the back end of it."