Brainwave Podcast: Steve Rodda, Cherwell – Cloud-Native Poster Series

• Listen to the podcast on your favorite player here: https://anchor.fm/intellyx/episodes/Cherwell—Steve-Rodda-Cloud-Native-Poster-Series—Intellyx-Brainwave-ehhnj8/a-a2rbn9o 

• Watch the video version on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/aHidLKSTfDs

About Steve Rodda:

Steve Rodda serves as Cherwell’s Chief Operating Officer. He joined Cherwell in 2017 as Chief Product Officer, and has previously served in a variety of leadership roles relating to product development, support, professional services and strategic business planning.
At LogicNow, a cloud-based ITSM solution provider for managed service providers, he led the MaxFocus development team, as well as the team that built AppControl, a cloud services management console. Prior to that, Steve served in key development roles at Webroot, Stanfield Systems, Jel, and Deloitte. With more than 17 years of experience, Steve’s strong leadership and ability to establish strategic business priorities, as well as his knowledge of product development and engineering, is a strong match for Cherwell’s vision to create customer-friendly, innovative service management solutions.

About Cherwell:

Cherwell (@Cherwell) empowers organizations to transform their business through the rapid adoption and easy management of digital services. Cherwell’s adaptable platform has enabled thousands of organizations to modernize their business operations with customizable service management, automation, and reporting across the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.cherwell.com.

• Visit Cherwell Software: https://cherwell.com
• Get your own copy of the PDF of this poster now: https://intellyx.com/cncposter
• Listen/download the Podcast on your favorite channel or player here: https://anchor.fm/intellyx/episodes/Cherwell—Steve-Rodda-Cloud-Native-Poster-Series—Intellyx-Brainwave-ehhnj8/a-a2rbn9o
• Watch the YouTube version here (audio interview only): https://youtu.be/aHidLKSTfDs 

Transcript of the podcast:

Jason English: Welcome to the Intellyx podcast. We’re here today, discussing the Cloud-Native development poster that we’ve put together.

And Cherwell is one of the proud sponsors of this new asset that we’ve put out. I’m joined today by Steve Rodda, the chief operating officer of Cherwell. he joined Cherwell in 2017 as chief product officer and has previously served in a variety of leadership roles relating to product development, support, professional services and strategic business planning. welcome, Steve. Thanks for joining me today.

Steve Rodda: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason.

Jason English: I think a lot of our audience might already be familiar with Cherwell, but can you give us a little background on what you do there?

Steve Rodda: Yeah, sure. Sure. Cherwell is a enterprise service management tool, working in the IT / ITIL type of space.

We provide service management for our customers, allow them to automate their business, their workflow. , ultimately for, for all of their customers, whether that be internal or external.

Jason English: Yeah. And I’m kind of curious, how do you see Cherwell fitting into the cloud-native vendor landscape right now?

Steve Rodda: Yeah. you can think of Cherwell as the space in between, , all of the different kinds of tools that a company might use, Cloud-Native or otherwise, and they all need to talk to each other, and they all, eventually end up with a human in some sort of form.

And that’s really where Cherwell takes over — amalgamating all the information that comes from the various tools, that are used and, putting those into something that a human can take action on, or down the road audit, validate and check down the line as the workflow kind of goes on.

Jason English: Yeah. And I think a lot of people in the space right now, they, they look at cloud-native and they just immediately think, okay, I need to do Kubernetes, or I need to adopt AWS or something like that. Right. They just think I’m going to move my systems to cloud, to a cloud computing type paradigm.

That it’s really not that simple as that. Right. No.

No.

Steve Rodda: And it’s a problem that’s played technology for awhile, right? It’s the — I have a hammer, now what do I do with this type of thing? When really, you should be asking, what are you building? And, how are you going to get there?

Jason English: Yeah. And what’s interesting about Cherwell is you have this aspect of the ITSM but you’re also kind of building workflows. So can you describe how application-style workflows are being built with yours?

Steve Rodda:  I probably overuse this example, but if you think of onboarding in a company and traditionally the way that companies have gone about this, right? They think of onboarding as one department or one area that happens in, but that’s simply not true. Right? Like it happens all the way throughout the business. Like when a new employee gets hired, you obviously have recruiting, then there’s the paperwork that happens.

So there’s legal involved with that. And then obviously equipment gets provisioned and things like that. So yeah, we at Cherwell, we’re trying to think more about, how do we solve these problems horizontally as opposed to vertically and departmental-based solutions, and all that starts with the workflow and the actual business process of what people are trying to accomplish.

Right. So, from the onboarding perspective, it’s simply how do we get that employee at the company, as quick as humanly, as possible as efficient, and as happy with their customer services going in there, and then we allow you to build on top of that.

And as far as it relates to Cloud-Native, I mean, there’s many, many different solutions that are going to play a part of, that onboarding process as well. You have the Workdays and ADPs of the world; you can provision hardware from many different Cloud-Native types of applications these days. Cherwell kind of is that layer, that glue in between that stitches all of those things together, from an automation perspective and from just a tracking perspective as well.

Jason English: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of, in addition to the real assets that are involved, there’s a lot of virtual assets and it’s all become sort of munged together into one management view.

And that creates a lot of challenges. I mean, what would you say are some of the other challenges that you’ve seen your customers facing on their journey to the cloud?

Steve Rodda: Yeah, I think, some, some of the bigger ones are, a lot of our customers are in a transitional phase, kind of that digital transformation buzzword that you hear out there.

So, so they have a bunch of, tools, cloud-native tools or otherwise, and then there’s gaps within the process because they might not have started from, what is the workflow or what’s the best way I can provide the service to my customers. So, how do you get across those gaps?

Right. And how do you, how do you bridge those two things? That’s the thing that, our customers run into a lot, as well as, maybe there’s some historical preference to how these things actually get done and accomplished, the mentality of this is how I’ve always done it,’ those types of things.

These are things that really, really hang up our customers. And I think anybody trying to go through that digital transformation.

Jason English: Yeah. so, what would you say are some of the challenges in trying to support, these newer architectures that you’re coming across now, that are different the old legacy days that we used to support?

Steve Rodda: Yeah, for sure. So many of our customers still have legacy and new ones. And so that, again too becomes the gap that they have to cross from these things. Right. But, , I will say, , it depends on business, right? If you’re a software development shop, there’s extra challenges with trying to support, , the  Cloud-Native, scaling up, scaling down kind of approach to things.

but as, as it pertains to most businesses that are out there, , really the biggest challenge is, how do you get data from one system to the next? And then how do you relate that data across to answer your actual business problems that you’re going to come across with. So, with anything Cloud-Native, you give up control, right?

You give up control of versions, accessibility testing of your own ability to scale or not scale, and all that’s kind of just baked into the subscription price that you’re paying right? So, , that’s one thing I would, I would recommend to most folks is as they’re, making that move to make sure you know where your, where your data is, the privacy of that data.

Can you get access to it? and then more importantly, how can you piece together all of those parts to, to answer something and, propel your business forward.

Jason English: Yeah. what would you say is unique or different about Cherwell, your approach to this modernization process that we’re, we’re seeing today?

Steve Rodda: Yeah. So I think, the unique part about Cherwell is the fact that, I don’t know if it’s lowering the bar or raising the bar, but a person that can actually do very complicated tasks with Cherwell is different. you don’t need an army of developers or data scientists or these things to actually piece together, various Cloud-Native services.

and then provide real results or. whether that be through a dashboard or reporting mechanism or, working that into your actual workflow. So, it’s all codeless, no code, low code. These are all terms that are out there that, apply to our, product for sure.

And then I think, the technology is only as good as what it enables you to do. Right? And some of the things that I’ve been talking about prior to this, Cherwell really enables you to, to focus on your business processes and essentially, throw away the tools for the time being, and how you need to run as a business and be most effective and provide the best service services to your customers.

And start from there, with the confidence that a tool like. or Cherwell will, will allow you to layer in all of those tools and then accomplish what you set out to do in the beginning. So,

Jason English: Hmm. and what would you see as some of the trends to look out for in the next one or two years?

Steve Rodda: well I think it’s, it’s already out there, but, there’s Cloud-Native and then, serverless stuff is I think really gonna change the game as, as well, too. and especially once more and more products, start to be built. In that way it’s going to amplify some of the stuff that he Cloud-Native started, so it’s in a good way and in a bad way, it’s definitely going to be something to watch out for coming up.

Jason English: Yeah. We’re definitely seeing a lot of customers in our space right now seem to be, they’re taking on an early form of serverless addiction and then they’re starting to  throw a bunch of workloads over there and now. Okay, how’s that going to merge with the rest of their application suite, that remains to be seen.

Steve Rodda: Exactly. And, back in my programming days, if I didn’t have access or couldn’t see where things were going wrong, it made troubleshooting extremely hard and, , Cloud-Native stuff has done some of that, but I think serverless is going to amplify that too.

So there will be, there will absolutely be some challenges to, debugging and trying to figure out where, where things went wrong, but Hey, when it goes, right, the stuff is beautiful? And, and all of our businesses run well.

Jason English: Excellent. Thanks for joining me, Steve and glad we could have you on the show.

Steve Rodda: Thanks.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Intellyx podcast. If you have any questions or ideas for future episodes, feel free to drop us an email at PR@Intellyx.com. Until next time, keep on transforming.

 

©2020 Intellyx LLC. All dialogue in this program represents the expressed opinions of the hosts and guests, and are not necessarily the official position of Intellyx, or any company mentioned or included in this podcast audio or video. Intellyx publishes the Cloud-Native Computing Poster, and the biweekly Cortex and BrainCandy newsletters.