With the increasing use of software containerization, the gap between continuous delivery and entitlement management is growing too.

With more software producers moving to containerized deployments for their end customers to deploy in the Cloud or locally, there is a big market need to cover the full process – from provisioning to customer delivery – in a seamless process, making sure that software is only delivered to paying customers and revenue gets recognized in seconds.

Enterprise Strategy Group's Senior Analyst Paul Nashawaty and Revenera's Director, Product Management Scott Niemann discuss:

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00:07) - Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Michael Goff, principal product marketing at Revenera, and I'd like to welcome you to today's webcast Growing Cloud Native Application Revenue with Enhanced Entitlement Management. Today we're gonna be discussing the increasing use of software containerization and the gap between continuous delivery and entitlement management. With more software producers moving to containerized deployments for their end customers to deploy in the cloud or locally, there's a real need to cover the entire process from provisioning to customer delivery in a seamless way that ensures that software is only delivered to paying customers and that revenue gets recognized in seconds. Really excited to have two great speakers with us today. Paul Nashawaty is a senior analyst at ESG and covers infrastructure modernization and application modernization. Paul has extensive knowledge in digital transformation initiatives across front end and backend systems, as well as the supporting infrastructure ecosystem that supports these efforts.

Speaker 1 (00:01:05) - Paul brings more than 25 years of experience in delivering go-to-market strategies, including identifying new routes to market, expanding and developing partner ecosystems, and achieving positive business results through execution of strategic plans. We also have my colleagues Scott Niemann with us today. Scott is director product management for software monetization products here at Revenera. Scott's held key roles in Revenera's product management team for more than eight years, and prior to Revenera Scott held product management roles at IBM ILogics and TeleLogic. So before we get started with today's discussion, I'd like to take a moment to go over some housekeeping details. Uh, the boxes that you see on your screen are movable and resizable. Uh, you can maximize slide area and things like that. Feel free to, uh, tweak it to your liking. Uh, today's discussion will last about 40 to 45 minutes or so.

Speaker 1 (00:01:56) - Um, we are gonna have some time for q and a, so please add your questions, uh, and we may answer them as we go, or at the end if we have time. Um, some networks do cause slides to advance a little bit more slowly than others. So logging off your VPN is recommended. And if your slides are behind, uh, just push F5 on your keyboard and that will refresh the page. Uh, you can find additional answers to some common technical questions located in the help engagement tool at the bottom of your screen. That's the one that looks like a question mark sign. And finally, a copy of the recording will be available in the next 48 hours or so. So let's get started. So, Paul, cloud native microservices continue to get a lot of attention. And I know that you've done a lot of research at ESG on the growth containers, you know, what are you finding?

Speaker 2 (00:02:45) - Well, first off, Michael, Scott, uh, thank you very much for having me on this webinar today. Excuse me. I'm very excited about it. I'm very excited about what we, what we have to offer here and what we have to share in this presentation. Um, you know, we, we are really seeing an explosive growth in this area. Um, one of the things that, you know, really kind of, um, you know, we have to think about is there was this tremendous push in digital transformation, right? This digital transformation drove a lot of new digital initiatives, right? And those new digital initiatives really led to the optimization and trying to move, uh, information to really figure out how applications are best going to be deployed, right? So whether they're deployed on premises or in the cloud or some kind of hybrid approach, there's just different initiatives that have to, that have to be like recognized, right?

Speaker 2 (00:03:36) - So when we, when we look at this, um, you know, the optimization and utilization of these resources is really comes down to what's the best platform to use. And when we look at, you know, the cloud, the cloud has a way to give that ability to have, you know, burst capacity, growth capacity, um, but also have the ability to really start to expand and, and drive different types of, um, you know, portability around applications. So cloud native and application microservices are really starting to take off in the space, right? So, but the challenge with it is when you look at cloud native and microservices applications, it is incredibly important to understand entitlement management for the cloud, right? Not just for on-premises, but also for the cloud, right? And why is that? So when you think about it, and when we look at this, um, the, the area of area, you know, focus is without entitlement management organizations may not realize what they could be missing or what they could be, uh, maybe revenue opportunities or feature functionality or product growth.

Speaker 2 (00:04:46) - All these things really come into consideration when you, when we're talking about, you know, the growth of applications in the cloud. So, you know, but before we kind of get into the research, I do wanna qualify the research with, you know, some information about ESG. And just to kind of put it into perspective, when we look at our research overall, ESG, uh, has done 44 unique, um, primary research studies that have fielded, right? And, and when we look at those, uh, research studies, over 20,000 surveys have been in, in depth interviews are conducted over 29 different countries. So, so when we're looking at the data that we're talking about and related to, you know, cloud native and microservices, uh, this is a well, uh, a representation of a, a broad scope of, of respondents across various sectors in various parts of the industry.

Speaker 2 (00:05:38) - So we're not just looking at a monolithic kind of focus, we're looking at it holistically across the industry. So that's incredibly important to point out because, you know, we can certainly conduct a survey that's very focused, but that's, but that's not going to, uh, represent really what the trends are happening in the industry. So we're trying to understand what those overall trends are happening in the industry. So, you know, I mentioned the, the containers and microservices growth and, and and such. And, you know, what we see here is on this slide, you know, the, the growth of containers over the last two years have just been explosive. And that's the, and that's really the word that I would use is explosive. Because when we ask respondents this question of how long their organizations, or how long organizations have been using production applications in containerized technologies, 41, or I said, sorry, 41%, um, basically has stated that, uh, they've been doing this, uh, containerized production applications for about, you know, 12 to 23 months.

Speaker 2 (00:06:43) - Um, that, that's impressive because it's not back, you know, early on in containers and in orchestration and such, it was mainly about test and dev. Can we test and dev try stuff out, then deploy into production? Um, production may or may not have been in containers, but now what we're seeing is the growth of containers in per for production applications is taking off. And, you know, out of that, um, response, uh, the 35% of respondents indicated that they really use a, an agile software development extensively. So they're looking for understanding the feedback of their customer journey, understanding what's happening with their customers, using their technologies, using their, interacting with their applications, and then being agile about software development to incorporate those changes. So lots of lots happening there with regards to containers, especially in production environment with application modernization. It's tending to, it's driving more of these production applications to the cloud, right? And we're seeing this in our research, right? We're seeing that the cloud adoption's taken off and moving on. And then, you know, finally, Michael, I'd like to point out here that, you know, the last bullet on this slide indicates that containers use in, in production applications, uh, the respondents saying that 77% of the respondents indicate that they currently use containers in production environments. Just a significant growth. And we'll talk more about that research a little bit later in the presentation.

Speaker 1 (00:08:14) - Great, thanks. Thanks, Paul. Now, Scott, I, I know that, you know, when we talk about, uh, cloud native, a lot of people conflate cloud native initiatives with SaaS, but that's not always true. And I know that there are a lot more use cases to consider. Can you walk us through some of these use cases and, and sort of describe what those look like?

Speaker 3 (00:08:34) - Yeah, sure, Michael, uh, I would look at it like this, right? So traditionally you basically deliver, deliver updates, deliver patches, security updates, you know, through files, through installations. And that's been something that's been working, you know, in the industry for, for some time, right? Either that software is obtained by going to a website and pulling it down, or the application has some intelligence into it where calls home identifies who it is and what version it's running on and pulls down software. Now, really what we're really talking about here in terms of cloud native is supporting very similar, if not the same use cases. And that's because suppliers are, as they're changing their own internal processes and building more microservices and deploying containers and, and charts within their own organization, they want to take advantage of that to have the full end to end deployment to their customers, right?

Speaker 3 (00:09:33) - So it's a way for them to easily push out updates, not have to wait for the monolith releases and installation processes. They can give the benefit directly to their, to their customer. And in doing that, we're talking about use cases really where it's traditional software that they wanna deploy directly to a customer, that the customer may be managing themselves in their enterprise on a private cloud. Uh, it may be areas where they wanna deliver updates to software that's in an air gapped environment, right? So, and there's no direct connection for applications to connect to a registry to pull down containers, for example. But they may have something on site, a registry of sorts, which replicates, you know, information so that those containers can be easily deployed within, you know, clients and endpoints within the enterprise. And, uh, so then you get into the whole area of devices, right?

Speaker 3 (00:10:36) - So it's not just, you know, traditional, uh, desktop applications, productivity applications, it's actually software running on devices are also other use cases that we're seeing. So in that case, it's a little bit different challenges, right? Because you have a device, you don't necessarily have somebody executing Docker command lines in a, in a, in a GUI, pulling down images and looking at what they want. But, you know, you have a device that can interact with the system in a similar way. And that system also needs to know whether that device is entitled to receive those, uh, images. Uh, what should it, should it be listed and viewed in the first place? And then being able to authenticate to make sure that device is part of that organization, and then pull down those images. Uh, and then, and then the other one is really that, that we've seen in Revenera, especially under traditional software, is that a lot of our customers rely on the supply chain to basically service their customers.

Speaker 3 (00:11:40) - So that's not only, you know, delivering services, it's delivering software fully deployed software for their customers. So in that case, they're setting up, as, you know, through their CICD is populating images to their, their channel partners. And those channel partners are taking that software, loading it on devices, maybe just maybe going on site and actually doing the installation within the private enterprise themselves. So at bottom line, it's many of the same types of use cases that we're seeing today with traditional files, since more suppliers are taking advantage of containerized applications, they want those same benefits there also.

Speaker 1 (00:12:19) - Thanks, Scott. And, and I know that, you know, when a, when a lot of folks start moving to cloud native applications, you know, it's, it's complex and there are challenges that can arise. Um, if you don't plan ahead and, and, you know, don't anticipate some of the questions and some of the issues, um, you know, Paul, can you maybe dig into some of those questions that get forgotten and then Scott maybe offer up some examples of some of the things that you've seen in conversations, uh, or experience with customers and prospects?

Speaker 2 (00:12:47) - Yeah, absolutely, Michael. I mean, there's a lot of, a lot of things that, um, you know, customers look at or, or when, or, you know, people looking at, um, deploying to the cloud applications to the cloud, they're really looking at, um, basically it comes down to what's not known, right? Uh, they look at it in the, in the context of, okay, well we know we wanna move to the cloud, but we're gonna just go and they refactor their application and they don't really necessarily know what the impact is by refactoring their application. So by doing this, our research has shown that a, a number of people that refactor and move to the cloud often have these unforeseen costs that come with, uh, moving applications to the cloud, right? And, and by doing so, um, some of that really, some clients or some customers will actually repatriate back on premises because they, they just don't understand the impact of the cloud.

Speaker 2 (00:13:47) - They don't understand the impact of the cost, and they also don't recognize the full reward that the application can be driven by revenue, um, from that application moving to the cloud. And because some things are just not left on the table. So, Scott, I really like what you were talking about with regards to, you know, the, uh, the, the SaaS based deployment and such. Um, but, you know, a a lot of questions that kind of are left out there are, you know, what about the things that you just don't know, right? What about the things that, you know, you may think you have the full kind of picture of deploying in the cloud, but, and you, and you, as a lot of research has shown that, uh, that we can see that deploying in the cloud always has these kind of stones that are unturned that you run into that you may not actually know of, uh, at the point of delivery.

Speaker 3 (00:14:37) - Yeah. And that, that's a good point. Um, so what, what I see, and along those lines is what often suppliers aren't thinking about is how I'm going to potentially license that application, right? Because you're moving now to, to a new paradigm where traditional licensing is based on having some concrete unique identifier, right? Where you're going to bind a license to. And typically what happens then is that within wherever the client application is running, if it's on a device or a laptop, there's some type of, of, you know, what, uh, license rights stored on that client. And really in this new paradigm that a lot of that falls, falls apart for one. You know, one of the benefits of moving to containerized applications is you're, you know, you can spin 'em up, spin 'em down quite easily, you don't have the stability that you have, you know, with a traditional on-premise application, the buying, you know, use rights and, and, and monetized features as easily.

Speaker 3 (00:15:41) - Um, so, you know, sometimes what I've seen is that they think about this, you know, once they get on board and they're ready to start delivering the containerized applications, then it comes, you know, later in the process to like, okay, how are we gonna protect and monetize this software? What are we gonna bind it to? Because there's no, uh, you know, there's no Mac address or anything like that we can bind it to. So the good news is there are, there are ways to approach that, um, you know, a lot of different ways. But that is something I think you definitely have to plan upfront, which is pretty much obvious with on-premise applications, but, um, takes a little bit more, you know, thought in how you're going to deliver that for the containerized applications in the cloud.

Speaker 1 (00:16:26) - That's a great, great point, Scott. And you know, obviously, you know, and we, we have it up here as one of the questions that can get forgotten. You know, we always talk about entitlement management, you know, in terms of licensing and, and monetization, um, making sure that, you know, people aren't getting software, they're not entitled to, but also there are export control issues that exist too. And, and certain folks shouldn't be getting software as well, right?

Speaker 3 (00:16:47) - Yeah, a absolutely. That's the other thing that comes into play later, right? So in a traditional file based system, you know, most of our suppliers I know have some way to at least either define, you know, if they have to define eccn classifications for us, export controls, they have ways to do that, but they also have to ensure that, you know, potential software isn't getting into the hands of parties it shouldn't be getting into because they may be on denied party lists of, of, of, you know, some, some country. So, um, of course none of that goes away, they still all have to do that in this new paradigm,

Speaker 1 (00:17:27) - Right? So that's, I mean, it's, it is the same issues. It's, it is now just applying it to this, this new, uh, this new world we're in. So actually, speaking of the new world, um, let's, let's put a poll question up there. Um, let's see, make sure I'm doing this right. Hopefully everybody can now see the poll question. I wanna get a sense from the audience, um, you know, does your, your organization currently use containers or plan to use containers for production applications in the next 12 months? Um, and we'll give you a little bit of time to respond to that. Um, but, uh, Paul, I know that you've actually asked this question, uh, specifically, uh, what, what were you guys at ESG finding?

Speaker 2 (00:18:09) - No, I absolutely have. I did wanna address one, one other point on that previous slide, uh, that it's, it's, it's great to kind of bring up, cuz it segues in and you know, as, as, as you know, we're doing this research paper that people will have, uh, access to out, uh, as, as out of this webinar. Um, but this, the other thing to consider on that previous slide is the, the build versus buy model, right? And that build versus buy, and I don't wanna get ahead of myself here, but, but basically the build versus buy is also something to take into consideration with regards to, um, you know, entitlement. Because all those things that you mentioned, like, like I'll just take export rules as an example. If you don't know that can really prevent your business from, from really, it could really hurt your business moving forward.

Speaker 2 (00:18:52) - But specifically on this polling question, you know, I mean, I mean this is, this is a fun actually exercise because the results of this exercise were, were a bit staggering to me. Um, when, when I was getting the research back on, uh, the microservice based cloud native applications, um, we, we asked organizations and we pulled about 383 or so people, respondents, um, what organization, um, is currently using, like what in their organization do they currently use containers or plan to use containers in production over the next 12 months. Now we, it's a little bit different than the previous research that I shared, but on this slide I referenced the 77%, they currently use containers for production applications. But in, in addition to that, the 21% indicate that they plan on using containers for production applications in the next 12 months. So we look at this and we say, you know, we have 98% of respondents basically saying they're going to be using containers for production applications, and 2% basically saying they're not interested in containers.

Speaker 2 (00:20:00) - So if there's not a, a direction in your roadmap to be using containers and production applications, this researcher alone indicates that that's the direction that you really need to be you need to be thinking about, right? As part of your deployment models. Right? And, you know, and then when we look at the other, uh, architectural, uh, implementation design, uh, parts, you know, the, the thing that's important to kind of, kind of tease out of those data points is the really the focus that, um, software developers are looking to inject functionality, resources, libraries, um, processes into the container, um, at the, as part of their deployment cycle. So when we look at entitlement management here and we look at how things are injected in the container for software, how do you know that your customer that's purchasing your software is getting everything that they purchased or, or better yet, um, maybe they're getting, they're, they're not getting everything they purchased, or it's an upsell opportunity to sell them more, right? So these points are really important to kind of take into consideration when you look at delivering software, delivering, um, you know, containerized in those production environments. Um, it's not about test and dev anymore, it's about running real world production environments with real world consequences if those applications go down. So it's important to do it right the first time.

Speaker 1 (00:21:41) - Yeah. Thanks Paul. And, and I don't know if, uh, you saw the, the results of our poll flash up on the screen, not surprisingly, given the topic of, of this, uh, conversation today, 100% of people, uh, currently use containers or are appointing to use containers in the next 12 months.

Speaker 2 (00:21:55) - Good. Very good. So it aligns nicely to this. Yes. Yep.

Speaker 1 (00:21:59) - Um, but, you know, I thought it would be useful, Scott, for us to sort of talk about some of the, you know, the real world examples that we're seeing. Um, I know, you know, that we talked about some of the use cases, but maybe if you can dig in a little bit more to, you know, how we're seeing, you know, containers being used, uh, in an entitlement, uh, driven way,

Speaker 3 (00:22:22) - Scott? Yeah, sure. That sounds good. Oh, sorry, go ahead. The, uh, so yeah, let's take the first example in the, in the healthcare industry. So, you know, interestingly enough, I mean obviously healthcare has been, uh, you know, pretty, pretty active over the last, uh, a year and a half, uh, especially. And we see a lot of digital transformations going on in terms of really software delivery. Um, I would say two to three years ago, um, maybe a little more than that. I mean, a lot of what was going on here was coming from, you know, physical media. Uh, you know, oftentimes what would happen is that these medical device manufacturers would send, you know, installers onsite to the hospitals with CDs and they would do the installation and upgrades there, you know, very, very, you know, back in the day type of thing, right? And so they've started a transformation some time ago where they're starting to getting into more electronic software delivery, and now they're taking another jump.

Speaker 3 (00:23:29) - And really they're re-imagining on how they're, you know, uh, re-architecting their internal processes, but they wanna move to an approach where they can, you know, give the end customer the benefit of, you know, uh, of quicker updates, you know, more, uh, regular updates with new features and new functions overall to, to increase, you know, user satisfaction and being able to also update very quickly without having to send those installers on site. So that's a huge benefit for them if they could do this in an automated way. And so what we're seeing here with them is that they want to take advantage of, of entitlement management because in a lot of these situations, I just take example, in hospital, they may buy five MRI machines, but those five MRI machines may not do the same thing, right? They may have different features and functions enabled on each one of them.

Speaker 3 (00:24:28) - And so, you know, integrated with device and entitlement management, when those machines need updates, they know specifically what type of update and what features should be delivered to those machines. And now what we're seeing here is they're moving forward is they're, they have a way in which they can to, to some degree, to, to some degree, they're still sending out installers because some of these installations are very complex, right? Especially in some of the safety critical machines they have on site. But a lot of this they can do in an automated way. And so these machines, of course, in most cases, they're not connecting to the internet. Uh, some are, but in some cases, you know, you don't want some of these machines connecting to the internet and potential, you know, that just opens up a lot of security, uh, issues. And so they've come up with a way in which they want to deliver.

Speaker 3 (00:25:26) - Um, specifically the, this specific customer is sending helm charts, um, in the form of, of package distributions that get installed automatically. They are essentially have local container registries at these hospitals, which will replicate with a registry that has all the entitled rights of that hospital. So when it replicates the data to the hospital, it automatically has the helm charts and containers in which that hospital has been entitled to. And it also knows the different devices that are within the hospital and the specific packages of software that it needs. And so they've significantly, uh, reduced their overall overhead, uh, their speed to delivery because it's been much significant having an automated way to do this. Uh, and now, now taking advantage, you know, the microservice architecture and deployment of helm charts directly, it's a huge transformation, uh, for these customers and we see it happening more and more within, uh, the healthcare space as well.

Speaker 1 (00:26:37) - And Scott, is it, is it fair to say in that example, you know, you also wouldn't wanna have every piece of software that you made available, right? You want just those ones that they're entitled to, cuz that's gonna cut down on confusion on what gets installed where and updates like that.

Speaker 3 (00:26:51) - Exactly right. So what they have in this case is that local registry is able to sync with the entitlement system. So it, it knows what that, you know, in this specific case, what the hospital is entitled to because their use rights, what they bought, all the different devices as well as the products that fit on those devices are maintained within the entitlement system. And then when the synchronization happens, it only synchronizes what it should see, right? So it's not seeing a bunch of unnecessary information, which, uh, which is a problem, which is actually not only the healthcare industry, but in most areas of electronic software delivery, if you don't have that entitlement hook, you're basically giving them a laundry list software they can download. But especially if it's software that's running on a device, you don't wanna download the wrong piece of software. You wanna be able to download the correct software with the correct configuration on it based on what that device may be entitled to. And if you don't have that automated within an entitlement system, then it becomes very fragile and difficult to try to maintain that.

Speaker 1 (00:28:04) - Great. And Paul, I saw you jump in. Were you about to say something or um, was it just a, a weird on24 issue?

Speaker 2 (00:28:10) - Issue? No, no. I, I, I was actually, I, I really think that what's Scott's spot on? Um, the, the one piece I wanted to add to that was, you know, uh, there is a change in delivery from on-prem to SAS space, right? And it, and, and often this change in delivery, you know, creates, potentially could create a friction that, um, it will create challenges within your organization, right? And, and in order to make it frictionless, you really need to have a way to manage the, the, you know, the entitlement that goes for that application, right? So now was just kinda echoing a lot of what Scott was saying, and I think that those pieces, you know, we, we know that cloud native adoption is just taking off. We know that that change is happening. We know that there's a move in this, in this space.

Speaker 2 (00:28:54) - And, and what, you know, we're trying to echo on this webinar, what we're trying to show in the, in the research is that be, take into consideration. The, the, the fact that reducing the friction and providing what you need, what the client needs is going to enhance the client's journey, right? If that client's journey is happy, then you're going to be obviously happy, cuz it's gonna reflect in revenue, right? That they're going to buy more. But more importantly, it gives you the ability to, you know, understand what that client's getting and they're getting what they need, right? And it makes everybody, you know, the, the whole process flow better, right? But again, the frictionless pieces is key because the, I mean, you can cobble this together and kind of put it together, together and yeah, at the end of the day, maybe the client's happy, maybe the customer's happy, but like the bumps along the way are what you wanna resolve, so the journey is smooth, right? That's really what I was kind of thinking about when Scott was talking.

Speaker 1 (00:29:53) - Yeah, no, great point. And, and obviously, you know, in healthcare environments, manufacturing environments, you know, you wanna make sure that, you know, there are updates related to safety or security, things like that. Absolutely makes sense to make that as frictionless as possible. Scott, now I know you have another example that you want to talk about more on the enterprise software side.

Speaker 3 (00:30:13) - Uh, yeah, sure. This is a interesting example. Enterprise software provider of, you know, many, many types of applications that you would see within the typical enterprise, uh, large portfolio. And they are, they were a company that had bought definitely into the value of entitlement management years and years ago. Uh, their issue is that they're transforming from, you know, traditional file installation process to essentially delivering helm charts and containers. They want to improve that experience, uh, you know, tenfold. And it really, it also is also a buy kind of by verse build scenario here, because what, uh, they struggled with is when they started to move to this new paradigm of container delivery, there was no tie, uh, to entitlement right? In which they saw. And so they had a separate system that they were working on. I mean, there's a lot of, obviously CICB tool chains out there that do, uh, you know, integration and deployment very well.

Speaker 3 (00:31:23) - The issue is there's no hooks into those entitlement systems, right? So the first approach they did was to try to take these images and wrapping, wrapping 'em up in Tar balls, right? And then shipping them through a traditional entitlement based software delivery system, which kind of eliminates all the value that their end customers got, right? Because they have to download those tar balls, unzip them, and then actually do an install rather than to automatically sending updates, you know, to that customer in a very, uh, you know, user friendly way, uh, in cloud native, uh, application approaches. So that, that created a very bad end customer experience. But then it, it was about, okay, how can we integrate those external systems, um, with an entitlement system? So there's a lot of things they tried to do, but quickly, um, you know, very hard to manage that if you're trying to do that, uh, through integration, you know, trying to build your own middleware and integrations between two different systems.

Speaker 3 (00:32:27) - And so we got to talking to this customer, uh, quite a bit, who's been with us, uh, for many years. And, um, you know, that's kind of when we worked with them to talk about some scenarios and ultimately, you know, bridge that gap between container delivery and entitlement management to make it automated and to improve that customer experience. So now they're able to, you know, one, one big thing that they were, uh, very, very, uh, it actually, it's, it's not on here, but I'll bring it up, um, was very important to them was the export controls, right? They took advantage of that with, uh, entitlement, different, uh, entitlement delivery, and they wanted that same type of value. Uh, the trial process was very interesting. So they wanna base, basically give a container library to a customer and they can go down and start downloading images and try 'em out and then commit to buying something later, right?

Speaker 3 (00:33:23) - So this whole system and the trial process and the, and the, you know, the trial conversion, tying that to entitlement and getting all that data for reporting was very simple since they had the container delivery integrated with entitlement management. And so, uh, bottom line, they were actually able to leverage their whole existing end-to-end, uh, you know, fulfillment process. And what I mean by that is all the way from an order, you know, which is coming into their ERP or CRM system into the entitlement system, to the fulfillment system, the things that they already had architected years ago for traditional files, basically they were able to leverage all, leverage all those existing integrations for a container-based delivery approach.

Speaker 1 (00:34:07) - Thanks, Scott. And, and certainly, you know, you mentioned Tar balls, that does not sound frictionless. That sounds very,

Speaker 3 (00:34:13) - That's tar balls or that well, and then it's, these containers are so big tar balls, and then they were delivering these huge files that would take forever to download, right? So it was, yes, it was not pretty.

Speaker 2 (00:34:24) - Yeah. But, but Scott, I I, sorry, go ahead. I think, Scott, I think that one other thing that, you know, I I, I love this example because, you know, with enterprise software, one of the pieces that that, um, you know, we, we, enterprises are big, right? There's typically a lot of people in enterprises, and then when software gets deployed there, it's very often very difficult to understand licenses across different groups in enterprises as well. So, and, and you know, when you have the ability to do electronic fulfillment of licenses to other groups, now you have the ability to expand your sale, so your, or your footprint, because you can put that software in and bring that licenses, but also more importantly, you can do denial of validation and denial of services to groups that don't, that are not entitled, right? Then they don't have those, that, those licenses or those that validation. So, so I think it's important to kind of keep these pieces in mind as we, like, as we, you know, unpack a lot of these different ways to think about these examples, but it's also important for, for the audience here to think about what, when they go to deploy their software or when they go to deploy, it's not just about getting it out there and pushing the features out there, but it's about getting the right pieces out to the right people and based on what's, what's available to them,

Speaker 1 (00:35:43) - Right? Yeah. Great, great point, Paul. Um, and actually we did just get a question in that sort of ties into what you were talking about before, Scott, uh, person asks, uh, we're building our own container ecosystem. What are some of the pros and cons of building our own entitlement management functionality as part of that process? And I, I'd throw that out to both of you. I think you're probably both eminently qualified to answer that.

Speaker 3 (00:36:09) - Yeah. So I'll, I'll, I'll start off. Um, so, you want to make sure if, so you're, you're, you're building out your system. So the entitlement management system just needs to know what the, you know, in terms of what's coming in, in terms of orders, what they own, and what software goes with those particular, um, products, what upgrades goes with those products. You have to have a way to map all that out. And so that when the, you know, the difficult challenge is, is if an end customer is pulling images, right? Say you have a, a private registry or whatever you're doing right, to, to push your images up and you wanna present those images to your customer, um, you know, typically they're gonna log into that registry, they're gonna authenticate themselves and start downloading those images. And so unless there's a way to intercept those commands, right?

Speaker 3 (00:37:09) - You may be, you may be providing them a, a tool to do that. But if they were using a, a standard command line tool, you'd have to find a way to intercept the command line interface, determine who is making that call, what account they belong to, and what, and what products and services they own. So that once that docker pool, for example, or helm install commune is, uh, installs is executed from an end customer perspective, that entitlement system you have knows whether it should, you know, how it should act. Should I send back the, the information they've requested? Uh, do they have a valid entitlement? Is the subscription date still valid? Is there, you know, however it is, you know, in terms of what they bought, or should I just respond back that you're not entitled for the software, right? So there's just a lot of things you have to do with that system to integrate it with, uh, an order system so that you know, when those commands are coming into your local registry or your private registry, it knows how to process that information to determine whether those customers should be allowed to pull those images or not.

Speaker 2 (00:38:18) - Yeah. And, and Scott, I would, I would echo, uh, a lot of what you said, just, but with the, with the con, you know, the, the whole build versus buy conversation, it's, it's, it's a challenge, right? Because, um, you, you know, one way to kind of institute this is to kind of look at a build versus buy approach, but this also requires you to have a good understanding of what's happening in the industry, leading knowledge, you know, of what's happening around that, the knowledge, and also how to de-risk your project, have the guidance and, and architecture review that supports it. But the other thing around build versus buy to take into consideration, and, and Scott you touched on the kind of intricacies of how the architecture's laid out, and that makes a lot of sense. Um, but I also think having the insights for organizations to know what they need in order to build the application right the first time.

Speaker 2 (00:39:08) - Um, but keep in mind that if you build it, then you know, you also will own the support operations, 24/7 support, dedicated SLAs, everything that kind of goes along with it, as well as incidents that you may run into. And without having, um, you know, that knowledge or that maybe that expertise in house, you may be, um, you may be kind of focused on running the, the system that you're building versus running your business, right? And, and that's, that's something to consider. Um, if, even if you have the expertise in house, do you wanna own that process or do you wanna outsource that process? And, and that's a cost analysis that that businesses have to take on themselves to understand whether it fits their models. But just take all that into consideration when you're thinking about the build versus buy approach.

Speaker 1 (00:39:59) - Thanks, Paul. So we are sort of closing in on the end of our session. Um, lemme just check to see, uh, if we have any more questions coming in. But while I'm waiting for that, Paul, uh, do you have any final thoughts or takeaways? I know that we're finalizing the white paper, uh, on this topic that we're gonna be sharing with the audience as soon as that's ready. Anything you'd like to close with?

Speaker 2 (00:40:22) - Yeah, I, I mean, I think the, the main takeaways here is, you know, cloud native adoption and the growth of containers as well as Kubernetes, it's here, right? And this is what we, we need to be working towards. It's the new, it's the new normal. And having cloud native software and containerized applications, you know, the, it, it allows the acceleration of growth between, you know, the on-prem to the cloud, but also application deployment. Remember that your clients that are using those applications, their, their end users, their deployment, it really doesn't matter that it's transparent to them. So they, it needs to work the way the end users are looking at it. So I think that, you know, when you are looking at the change of delivery from on-prem to assess, uh, or the changes in your CICD pipeline, all these things are, are, are impacting modernized challenges, right? And these challenges really need to be considered in a different way than maybe a traditional approach would, deliver, right? So I think that, you know, uh, uh, the, the entitlement management really addresses a lot of those pieces, whether it's process or, um, or the functionality or the management or just an overall like wellness of the client. Um, the, the entitlement management piece really plays a, an integral part of that, of that solution.

Speaker 3 (00:41:45) - Yeah, I def definitely agree and, you know, as a product manager of an entitlement system as well as the software delivery system I've seen in the last couple years, this just shoot, you know, skyrocket. And the question I'm getting is how, how to tie these two together. Because the big concern is they're moving to, you know, delivering containers directly. They wanna know, you know, to ensure that they're not, you know, running in the situations of, of overuse or sending containers to customers that aren't entitled to them. They also want the information back, right? So they wanna be able to know, you know, of the customers that are entitled, they wanna have the audit trail, they wanna know who's pulling the images, who's, who's pulling that information, get that back into the entitlement system, reconcile that data and report it so they can, you know, get a 360 degree view of not only how they're deploying, but also how it's being consumed by their users. So it's, you know, in terms of software delivery, what, how I term it as a, as a product manager for entitlement management, it's actually really exciting times, um, in this area. For us, it's, it's really branching out into, uh, you know, a new innovative way. Um, and entitlement management is, is really, you know, making it even better, right? So that's my final word for me,

Speaker 1 (00:43:08) - . Well, thank you Scott. And, and, and my, my thanks to both of you, Paul Nashawaty from ESG, Scott Neimann, uh, product manager here at Revenera. And thank you to the audience for joining us today. Um, really good conversation today. Really good insights. Really appreciate it. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. Um, we will be sending a link to the recording, uh, within the next couple days as we mentioned earlier. And then as soon as that white paper is ready, you'll be receiving that automatically. And, uh, thank you again, gentlemen. Appreciate your time. Thank

Speaker 3 (00:43:43) - You. Thank.