Greg Stock kicked off the Zenoss Galax17 user conference in Austin, Texas yesterday. Austin is known as the Live Music Capital of the World, and as Greg pointed out, Zenoss has also made it the Live Monitoring Capital of the World. The entire presentation had a theme of being customer focused. It started with a recap of the Customer Advisory Board (CAB) session from the previous day and continued through a discussion of Zenoss forging a future of true partnerships with customers — more than 500 of them in attendance from 13 countries around the world.
With a peek at the intelligent IT service assurance vision and road map, Greg teed up the conversation for the keynote speakers, serial entrepreneur Zorawar Biri Singh and Broadsuite Media Group CEO Daniel Newman. The three speakers combined for a riveting morning that walked through society’s journey from the Industrial Revolution through the technology revolution and then pontificated on what lies ahead.
Greg also recounted the Zenoss timeline, from its inception in 2005 to him joining the company nine years later, through today. He saw such promise in Zenoss that he registered the ticker symbol ZNOS with NASDAQ his first week on the job. He summarized the changes that have made such a dramatic impact on the company’s trajectory — aligning on a vision, defining the company’s core values, and building the right team to execute the plan. In an IT monitoring market with no shortage of heavyweight incumbents, in 2014, the team agreed the path to success was not to build a better mousetrap but to disrupt a stale market by reinventing IT monitoring. Instead of just monitoring more things, the team looked at the fragmented IT ecosystem and recognized that what customers needed was a central platform to bring order to the chaos.
He cited the quote from JFK speaking about traveling to the moon:
We do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
John F. Kennedy
Rice University, Sept 12, 1962
Anyone can solve easy problems. The technology companies that will succeed are those that solve customer problems so difficult that the value cannot be denied. Thus was born service-centric monitoring and intelligent IT service assurance.
Each speaker today touched on the already-understood revolution of big data. Greg pointed out that Zenoss collects 72 million metrics every five minutes, and that number increased significantly between the time he put it in the presentation and when he delivered it. He described the journey of Zenoss becoming a leader in a world of IoT, massive quantities of data, and elastic computing instances. This world that is engulfing enterprise organizations requires predictive analytics, self-healing data centers and intelligent service assurance.
Greg finished his presentation with an exclamation point on the statement of being customer centric. He said the letter Y changes everything. When talking about Zenoss, he said if you take our journey, our mission and our vision, and add the letter Y, they become Your journey, Your mission and Your vision. It was a poignant statement that perfectly describes why customers simply love being at this conference and love being Zenoss customers. When they became Zenoss customers, they entered into a true partnership with a vendor who believes they can only succeed if their customers succeed. They became customers for life.
GalaxZ17 sponsors included: SOPRIS Technologies, LayerX Technologies, ServiceNow, Cascadeo, Big Panda, Higher Logic, SaltStack, VictorOps, Verinon, SoftServe, NTT DATA, Everbridge and Broadsuite Media Group.
