In this episode of Software Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Tom Elliott, founder of Ocuroot, a CI/CD orchestrator designed to streamline software deployment processes. Tom shares his journey in the tech industry, the challenges he faced in CI/CD, and how Ocuroot aims to enhance developer experience and productivity. The conversation covers the target audience for Ocuroot, deployment strategies, integration with legacy systems, data migration best practices, and the importance of collaboration among teams. Tom also discusses the cost-saving benefits of Ocuroot and its role in simplifying compliance processes for organizations.
In this episode of Software Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Tom Elliott, founder of Ocuroot, a CI/CD orchestrator designed to streamline software deployment processes. Tom shares his journey in the tech industry, the challenges he faced in CI/CD, and how Ocuroot aims to enhance developer experience and productivity. The conversation covers the target audience for Ocuroot, deployment strategies, integration with legacy systems, data migration best practices, and the importance of collaboration among teams. Tom also discusses the cost-saving benefits of Ocuroot and its role in simplifying compliance processes for organizations.
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Michael Bernzweig (00:02.083)
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I'd like to welcome everyone to today's edition of the Software Spotlight. I'm your host, Michael Bernzweig, the founder of Software Oasis. And this week we're being joined live by Tom Elliott. He is the founder of Ocuroot and joining us live from New York City. With that, Tom, welcome to the Software Spotlight.
Tom Elliott (00:28.814)
Thanks, Michael. Great to be here.
Michael Bernzweig (00:30.145)
Yeah, no, wonderful to have you aboard. And I can tell from some of the questions that have come in from some of the more technical individuals in our audience that this is a topic that a lot of people are excited to hear about. on that note, for anyone that may not be familiar with either yourself or Ocuroot I was hoping you could share with us a little bit about your journey career-wise getting to where you are.
And what's going on over there at Ocuroot what the company is all about.
Tom Elliott (01:06.286)
Yeah, sure, I'd be delighted to. So I've been in the tech industry since about 2006 when I graduated. And I've worked in a whole bunch of different roles since then spent some time at VMware doing like, you know, big sort of enterprise VDI solutions, a little bit of time at a small VPN startup, building consumer applications like desktop mobile apps. And then I spent about nine years at a company called Yext.
the initially working on some mobile products and then moved on to the backend. and I sort of found a niche for myself in, DevOps and developer tooling. I'd been building some tools just for sort of helping myself along, making it easier to run and test things and other people in the team started adopting them. and, sort of made me realize this is something I love doing. and from that I was asked to lead a group doing that. So I spent about.
five years running a group focused on DevOps and tooling. One of the things that we were responsible for was CI CD. So like managing builds and deployments and all of that kind of thing. And something that I noticed was like, as we were growing as a company, we were adding more and more production environments. We had a bunch of environments as like points of presence for serving consumer content.
Michael Bernzweig (02:13.903)
Sure.
Tom Elliott (02:32.494)
We had a European copy of our stack that was really big job to stand up and get running. And this sort of kept growing and growing, but it was always just as difficult to have these new environments and to maintain them. And as things got a bit bigger, we didn't know what was deployed where. It had come to the Friday demos, and people would be like, oh, is this in production yet? Not sure. Got to go and check. And you have to look in three or four different places.
I sort of saw like the tool that I wished that I'd had, had this sort of nagging idea at the back of my head of like what I would want out of a CI-CD tool. And around about last summer, things kind of lined up timing-wise and money-wise and I left to found Ocuroot and start building that solution that I wished I'd had.
Michael Bernzweig (03:13.573)
Sure.
Tom Elliott (03:27.466)
And Ocuroot itself is what I guess I would call a CI CD orchestrator. So works maybe with the existing tools that you have to sort of figure out where all your builds are, what needs deploying when, what stage in the process everything's at and give you a lot of control over the way that your applications get out to all of those different.
Michael Bernzweig (03:50.982)
I love it. mean, it sounds, I hear a lot of overlap in the founding story of your business and what's going on over here at Software Oasis. But I think some of the best solutions come from individuals like yourself that have experienced a challenge or some sort of problem that had not been solved, you know, for a...
for an individual or a user. I the whole concept of continuous integration, continuous delivery, development is a very exciting and important field in technology that has, I don't know if I wanna say been overlooked, but maybe never looked at from a user level in terms of.
coming up with a solution that solves a lot of the problems that I know your solution does solve. So as far as some of the challenges that you were really trying to solve with Ocuroot, what were some of the specific challenges that you saw that had not been solved for or that you felt that you could do better?
Tom Elliott (05:07.116)
Yeah, there were a few like pain points, I guess I would say that stood out during my experiences. was what, know, like working with a lot of environments, as I mentioned, you know, making sure that you know, that you've got like, you know, your latest version in all of your different production environments. That was a really big one. But alongside that, there are also things like dealing with compliance. Whenever we had an audit, we had to get a very, very senior member of our team to basically spend a day taking screenshots.
Michael Bernzweig (05:35.747)
Yeah.
Tom Elliott (05:35.95)
He'd get this long list of commits from the auditors and it'd have to go and like find when each of those commits was deployed and sort of track it through. And so one thing that I think Ocuret is going to be able to deliver with the data that it is maintaining and the state that it manages, it will be able to give you a complete audit trail of everything that happened for any set of commits. So right now there's like a button in the UI so you can just press export and it will just give you that as a CSV file.
Another challenge... sorry.
Michael Bernzweig (06:05.347)
You say that with such ease, there are some people that are like, wow, that is unbelievable.
Tom Elliott (06:13.038)
I think it's a question of focus. You can achieve this with a lot of different tools in some way, it's whether or not that's sort of a first class concept. And that's kind of what I'm looking at with Ocurate is what do I want first class concepts to be and what do I want you to get right out of the box without too much additional configuration.
Michael Bernzweig (06:35.173)
Yeah, and I think ease of use, having everything you need at your fingertips in one solution, you know, without having to go to all different kinds of places and band-aid a bunch of things together and kind of produce what you really want, just having everything in one space, I think, adds a lot of value and context for a user.
Tom Elliott (06:57.326)
Yeah, for sure. And I think that's like sort of a big part of what's been happening with IDPs, like developer platforms in recent years. You you're seeing things like backstage and similar products where people just want to get that big screen view of everything that's going on, where everything is and what everything is and who owns what. Yes, yes, exactly.
Michael Bernzweig (07:18.085)
kind of like command control, like your cockpit for everything that's going on, which, you know, in some organizations, you know, maybe spread amongst an entire organization. So you need one centralized view for everyone to be able to have access to. So as far as the types of organizations that would see the most benefit from Ocuroot, what types of organizations would that be?
Tom Elliott (07:47.95)
So I think that there's a point at which a company evolves in maturity and complexity where there's a solution that's going to become useful. So I'm seeing this as being mid-size companies, 500 to 5,000 employees. That implies that they've got a decently large engineering team. Maybe they've got a team dedicated to tooling or a platform team.
and, I tend to see the kind of problems I'm sort of, trying to solve very firmly within B2B companies. and I think that's largely because there are a greater set of demands on, the way that you provide your software to your customers. If you're B2B, particularly if you're dealing with like regulated customers in like finance or healthcare, who might be saying to you like, Hey, I want my data isolated. So you've got to deploy a completely separate database.
Michael Bernzweig (08:39.577)
Sure.
Tom Elliott (08:45.621)
and all those kinds of things.
Michael Bernzweig (08:47.937)
Interesting. So, you know, I guess what I would say is, you know, obviously, is a lot of different challenges that organizations are trying to solve for. And you've been on the ground level, seeing every one of those kinds of challenges, you know, in real life. But what do you see? Like if you were to bullet point, like
Tom Elliott (09:01.358)
Thanks.
Michael Bernzweig (09:09.667)
the most common challenges that you see organizations having in this space that you think the solution is going to be right in the crosshairs of solving. What do you see those as?
Tom Elliott (09:23.61)
so I guess if I were to, you know, pick a, pick a couple of handful, maybe like, top, top of line, I see, developer, satisfaction and productivity as being a huge challenge. Like, people don't want to be messing around with configuring their CICD tools or like, you know, setting up new pipelines for things, because they want to be building products. You don't want your engineers to be like contributing to things that affect the, the bottom line of the company.
And, you know, previous places where I've worked using other tools, um, you know, if you have like thousands of different services that you're trying to deploy, uh, with hundreds of engineers and if they've got to basically reinvent the pipeline almost every single time, um, that's going to eat up a lot of the time, especially when they have to maintain it. Um, so, you know, big goal is that developer experience with Ocuroot. want it to be, to be easy to reuse configuration, to be easy to see what's going on.
changes very, very quickly. Alongside that is the ability to test your configuration. People who use solutions like GitHub Actions or CircleCI that are totally in the cloud, they'll often have issues with having to push a commit every time they want to test a change to their pipeline. And then finding out they made a typo and they've got to do it again. It's a really, really slow feedback loop. So I want to make that feedback loop very, very tight for people.
another challenge that people have is, visibility and audit ability. As I mentioned with the, know, the audits and compliance and stuff, and just having all of that information available. I think is, is, is really key. and, there is the, the aspect that everyone always brings up. Like whenever you're talking to enterprises about buying new software, cost savings come up. And I think that there's a, there's an aspect there where, first of all, if you know what you have deployed and where.
Michael Bernzweig (11:17.295)
Ryan.
Tom Elliott (11:23.404)
very easily, you can figure out what you don't need anymore and you can tear it down. So you can be saving on your cloud costs there. And because Ocaroot is working at a different level of abstraction than a lot of pipelines, it can put optimizations into like the order of operations and sort of where everything runs so that you can reduce the amount of compute that you're using overall for deploying.
Michael Bernzweig (11:47.206)
And then for organizations that have a larger number of users, how do you deploy in that type of a scenario to obviously mitigate risk as you're deploying? What do you see in terms of some of the strategies that work best?
Tom Elliott (12:11.79)
Yeah, there's, um, I think first and foremost, like being able to have your deploys be as granular as possible is a really key thing. Um, you know, people talk about monoliths versus microservices and all that sort of thing. think one of the big things that microservices lend you is the ability to deploy just this very small thing, roll it back if you need to. Um, and you're minimizing the amount of changes that are happening at any given moment. Um,
think doing frequent deploys is really important. Similarly, controlling the size of change that you're putting into your system. And one thing that we really proud of when I was at Yex was that we were deploying like 200 times a day to production. And that meant that if something went wrong, it was very, very easy for us to pinpoint, it was exactly this change that caused that problem. It was a very small thing. We can just roll it back, try again.
Michael Bernzweig (12:45.444)
Where are you?
Michael Bernzweig (12:53.027)
Wow.
Tom Elliott (13:05.613)
And I think that there are also like rollout strategies that have become popular, like canaries. So you deploy to a small number of users or a small amount of traffic first, let that sit for a little while, make sure that everything's good before you roll it out to everyone. similarly, there's things like blue green deployments. So you will deploy to two copies of an application or a site, and then you'll just flip them around.
Michael Bernzweig (13:28.058)
Yeah.
Tom Elliott (13:34.766)
or like shape your traffic. maybe like one gets like 10 % of users, then 20%, then 50%, et cetera.
Michael Bernzweig (13:41.636)
Yeah, so just doing things gradually. And for organizations that are listening that are saying, wow, this is exactly what we need in this. These guys know exactly what they're doing in this space. Are there different scenarios in terms of getting up and running with Ocuroot? Can they deploy on-prem or maybe within their own cloud? Or do you have a managed solution?
Tom Elliott (13:44.078)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (14:10.125)
within the Oculus system where people can actually deploy in that way or what are the options?
Tom Elliott (14:18.894)
Yeah, yeah, so there's a little bit of both and probably a few things in between that. So I am running a hosted copy of OkiRoot for an alpha right now, just because that's easy for people who are hobbyists and they're experimenting with side projects, they can get up and running with that really quickly. Incidentally, I'm actually deploying OkiRoot with OkiRoot on that hosted solution. So it's sort of proving itself out and that's something I'm really pleased that I was able to do.
Michael Bernzweig (14:23.801)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (14:29.989)
Okay.
Michael Bernzweig (14:35.586)
Right.
Michael Bernzweig (14:42.98)
that's funny. Yeah.
Tom Elliott (14:47.622)
And then the other side of the coin, is self-hosted option. Ocuroot itself, the server is a single binary. So all you need is to be able to run that binary either, you can run it on bare metal if you wanted, but you're probably going to want to put it in a container and provide that too. And you just need a Postgres database for it to store state. And I want to keep that experience as simple as it possibly can be.
And then in the middle, you know, I can always deploy an instance pretty readily for a specific user.
Michael Bernzweig (15:22.753)
Okay, so there is some help with the onboarding no matter which route the organization takes. And what type, in terms of scaling, how many users can the system scale readily in terms of the number of users on the platform? Or is there some limitation or how do you?
Tom Elliott (15:46.162)
there's not an explicit limitation on the number of users because the, the concept of a user is actually like pretty lightweight. the, or the only thing that a user really is, distinct is like, Hey, can they log in and are we picking up their commits? Yeah. what, what I think it's the light bulbs down to is the number of,
Michael Bernzweig (15:55.556)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (16:02.622)
and permissions and all that kind of, yeah.
Tom Elliott (16:10.126)
the number of environments you're dealing with and the number of deployables, components, services, whatever you want to call them. And so this has been tested into the thousands, you you can deploy thousands of services with this without too much issue. Number of environments, you know, tested it into the hundreds and I haven't really spoken to anyone who's got more than 500 environments. If anyone has more than that, I'd love to talk to them.
Michael Bernzweig (16:37.401)
Right. I love them all. You know they're out there now that you threw that out there. Yeah. No, and it's interesting because this is a, it's a very specialized niche within the segment of the market, but it's such a massive need, you know, across
Tom Elliott (16:39.982)
And I always want to learn, right?
Michael Bernzweig (16:59.749)
so many different organizations and you know being early in the market you know I think is really exciting. think there's a lot of organizations both enterprise and global enterprise you know at all different levels and in all different kinds of spaces that could use this solution. I mean it touches every aspect of the web when you think about it.
Tom Elliott (17:28.279)
Yeah, yeah, I think like for me having seen these problems firsthand
It's been interesting to hear just how many people have similar problems and kind of how those problems manifest differently as well.
Michael Bernzweig (17:42.318)
Now, as you're rolling the solution out across different organizations, have you seen any integration challenges with some legacy systems? Because clearly there's a lot of organizations out there that are working in very split environments where they may have where they want to get to, but the reality of where they are is maybe not where they want to be. So what have you seen?
Tom Elliott (18:10.551)
yeah, like from... I, I, well, I think I get where you were going and I'll have a crack at answering it and if I've misunderstood we can address it then. you know, what I...
Michael Bernzweig (18:11.983)
Did I say that ultimately enough?
Michael Bernzweig (18:18.084)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (18:21.943)
Yeah, it may be more of a one-off answer for each environment, but...
Tom Elliott (18:27.278)
To an extent, yeah, but I think like, one thing that always I found to be frustrating in my previous role, like as a buyer, was when there were really great solutions that were very, very focused on a particular technology. And sort of there are two examples that the like, I always ran into one of which was like things that were GitHub only and things that were Kubernetes only.
And we didn't really use either of those. Yeah, very much. We use them a bit, but not a huge amount in production. And what I wanted to get to with Ocuroot was the ability to just kind of bring your own tools and give you a really straightforward and simple migration path. As straightforward and simple as you can get dealing with complex things like CI-CD.
Michael Bernzweig (18:57.498)
Sure.
Michael Bernzweig (19:19.791)
Right.
Tom Elliott (19:20.718)
Um, and so there's sort of like two, two things that I've focused on. One of which is that like Ocuroot itself is really just glue between your existing tools. So if you're using like Terraform, Helm, if you're, you know, using one of the big three clouds and using their CLI or if you're using a smaller cloud and using their CLI or hitting an API endpoint, like under the hood, Ocuroot is just calling shell commands or SSHing into things for you. Um, and so you can, you can compose all of those things together.
and just sort of put this wrapper around them and get really nice orchestration over a wide range of different things. In addition to that, you can run Ocuroot on top of your existing CI solution. So I'm currently running on top of GitHub Actions because that hooks into my Git repo without too much hassle. And it can handle things like running things on demand.
Michael Bernzweig (20:13.541)
You ready?
Tom Elliott (20:18.094)
which you can do with OkiRoot, but it's significantly quicker if you can tap into something you've already got. so, you know, those are, those are some of the things that I'm looking at to kind of provide a nice pathway to adoption and, and just like doing a simple POC. at one point I was considering focusing on Docker, as a platform here and sort of like running everything in Docker to manage dependencies. but you know, you mentioned legacy systems. There's so many.
Michael Bernzweig (20:47.013)
Peace.
Tom Elliott (20:48.014)
different environments that don't really lend themselves well to working with Docker. In particular, if you're gonna be using specialized hardware in Windows, or you wanna build something on a Mac, difficult to get that working when you're Docker first. So I wanna start from the lowest level and just allow you to lay your tools on top.
Michael Bernzweig (21:02.553)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (21:13.061)
Makes sense. And for anyone that's listening, because this was a question that came up from a few people in the audience, they'll have my head if I don't ask this question. So what do you see as like best practices for data migration and user adoption as you're doing a rollout?
Tom Elliott (21:24.171)
You
Tom Elliott (21:38.606)
Yeah, I think that deploying little and often is sort of the biggest goal for me. You know, if you can minimize the scope of every change that you're putting out, that gives you a lot more control if something goes wrong. I think data migration is a trickier one. If you're dealing with like schema changes in a database, for example, you've got to be making sure that you're getting the ordering of that right.
Michael Bernzweig (21:43.941)
Hmm.
Michael Bernzweig (21:54.917)
Okay.
Tom Elliott (22:06.09)
really big thing that I learned there is to keep that separate and make it its own thing. You you definitely want, you probably want to migrate your database schema before deploying the application that relies on that, that change. You also need it to be backwards compatible so you don't have downtime. And I've worked in systems where we sort of very tightly coupled the deployment of the application with the change to the schema.
And what that meant was it was sort of, A, you were changing two things at once. So if something went wrong, more to unravel. yeah, yeah. And B, was, know, sort of it kind of removed the meaning of what you were doing from that change. So you weren't as incentivized to make sure that things were entirely backwards compatible.
Michael Bernzweig (22:39.929)
Right. Hard to tell which caused the... Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (22:52.207)
Hmm.
Michael Bernzweig (23:01.413)
Great.
Tom Elliott (23:01.926)
and that you weren't going to cause issue with like, you know, it changes the schema and then it's like two seconds before it deploys the application. But someone made a request during that two seconds that it didn't like. and you know, then, then all hell breaks.
Michael Bernzweig (23:12.815)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (23:16.587)
Interesting. and obviously you have a lot of different stakeholders in all of these different deployments. What do you see as, you know, maybe like a hierarchy or like who are the typical stakeholders in these deployments within most organizations? I mean, obviously you've got
QA, you've got operations, there other different teams that you see typically involved?
Tom Elliott (23:49.134)
Um, I mean, my, my experience has been that it's tended to be anyone and everyone that touches the software, um, really sort of cares about these things. mean, there were, you know, there are, there are organizations that are still in that sort of like, um, the, model where you have the team building the software and the team operating the software and they don't really talk to each other that much. Um, that is less and less common in newer companies. Uh, think a lot of people would consider that to be like, you know, anathema to doing software development.
Michael Bernzweig (23:55.781)
you
Tom Elliott (24:19.334)
I mean, you know, there is also still the, the situation where you have people who are providing software to their customers and their customers are installing it, which, you know, creates that similar sort of a dynamic. typically like I'm seeing more and more anyone who is working with deploying, maintaining, or observing the software like has a vested interest in understanding what's going on with the deployment.
Michael Bernzweig (24:48.367)
Got it. do you see, obviously when you're working with humans, have a lot of variables, but do you see some ways to generate collaboration between teams that seem to work better than not when you're in an engineering type environment?
Tom Elliott (25:09.642)
that's a really great question. It's like, like challenge that every company has across every department is like, how do we all collaborate together? Well, I mean, I think like the biggest mistake that I've seen made is trying to restrict who can get information about what's going on to have a week.
Michael Bernzweig (25:12.479)
Hahaha.
Right.
Tom Elliott (25:30.382)
Um, and there are points where you have to do this, you know, there's like, uh, dealing with PII or dealing with sensitive information, you're dealing with like, Oh, someone could make a mistake here and bring everything down. Um, but in some, in, you know, as far as possible, if everyone has access to the information that's relevant to the operation of the business and the operation of the software, that's going to make everyone's life easier. Um, and if they can access that in roughly the same place, then they can be talking the same.
Michael Bernzweig (25:59.63)
Yeah. And I think, I think, you know, if you boil it down, I mean, it really sounds like the key is that you're helping engineers, you know, at a high level, reclaim a lot of their time. mean, really a lot of the things that they're doing to maintain a pipeline are, are automated and, and simplified and in one straightforward view. mean, everything from debugging to
deployments, all of that. this is, I think it's time that you're back.
Tom Elliott (26:34.002)
for sure. For sure. And like, there's a lot of ways that you can lose time as well. think one, you know, one thing that I think is always going to be the case for software developers is they want to develop software, then you know, they a lot, lot of them will be frustrated by all the stuff around the edges, which is why you have people like me who specialize in those things around the edges who really enjoy doing just that. And, you know, one of the
One of the things that I'm building in that I don't think I've really mentioned is that the configuration language that I'm using for Ocuroot is basically just a cut down version of Python. So you're an engineer and you want to write a for loop. Yes, you can write a for loop to configure this. It's one of the big frustrations that I've always had with these tools that are sort of like YAML based and they've got their own DSL on top of that. And any logic you want to build in is a real pain.
Michael Bernzweig (27:14.191)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Elliott (27:32.31)
So like not just the time actually spent working on something, but when you have to dive into it, like not having to contact Switch and look a whole bunch of things up, I think is a big advantage.
Michael Bernzweig (27:43.108)
makes sense. And, you know, I guess at the end of the day, I mean, you're helping teams release faster, you know, at the end of the day, and that's gonna save time and money. But, you know, I think that's an important... So I think those are the two things that I'm hearing here is really engineering time, deployment time, release time, you know, and saving money, you know, which is all...
all valuable in any enterprise.
Tom Elliott (28:14.902)
That is absolutely the goal,
Michael Bernzweig (28:17.527)
Now, one of the details that I found interesting, know, a lot of organizations are really, you know, their spend on compute and cloud computing is through the roof and growing. And one of the details that I noticed is that you're actually helping organizations reduce their spend in that area. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Tom Elliott (28:48.814)
Yeah, I think it's, um, it's mostly focused on awareness and control. So, you know, first of all, like, you know, if you were able to see that you've deployed, you know, 250 different things and like 50 of them aren't really being used anymore. Um, you know, and then you want to make it as easy as possible to get rid of those 50 things and to do it safely.
Michael Bernzweig (28:54.988)
Okay.
Michael Bernzweig (29:10.317)
So having the visibility into what should be deployed and what doesn't need to be updated or redeployed or just having the visibility.
Tom Elliott (29:17.356)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, having the visibility, but also like a certain amount of control. mean, there's like the functions that you use to deploy something in Ocuroot, we're pairing with functions to tear them down as well. So you can build an entire environment and tear it down on demand. obviously you control who can do that.
Michael Bernzweig (29:32.549)
and
Michael Bernzweig (29:43.119)
Thank
Tom Elliott (29:44.078)
Being able to get rid of some of these resources and kind of clean up after yourself is like a big thing in terms of cost saving. There's also like enabling complex workflows that may be difficult to do in other solutions. You've got control over the logic and the flow of your deployments. So you can do things like scaling up and scaling down really quickly. You can be...
When you're doing a deployment, know, you can add something just for the period of that deployment and then take it out later on and you can even have ephemeral environments that just exist for the lifetime of a particular commit So if you're a PR and you want to preview something and get that but it's only there while you need it the other side of the coin is the actual compute used to do the deploys and having
having the model that we're building with Ocuroot, gives you a much better understanding of when things need to happen. So you can minimize wasted work. It's very, very easy to accidentally build something twice when you really don't need to. So sort of taking that control so that the compute minutes that you're using are only what you really need to happen to get your work done and having that control over that spend as well.
Michael Bernzweig (30:52.141)
Right?
Michael Bernzweig (31:07.405)
Now for any organization that's ever been through an outside audit of any kind or has to adhere to standards in terms of compliance, which I think is just about every organization, it sounds like Ocuroot really shines in helping to simplify the whole process. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Tom Elliott (31:13.134)
I'm
Tom Elliott (31:19.278)
you
Tom Elliott (31:31.918)
Yeah, sure. And I guess I'll sort of go back to some of the motivation there. So when I was working at Yetstar, was responsible for just a small part of some of our audits. And I was dealing with SOCs and SOC 2 while I was working there. And what would typically happen is that the audit team would come to me with a spreadsheet and say, do these rows make sense for what you do? I'm like, yeah, sure. And then they'd come back during the audit.
and we'd have to do one of two things. we had sort of like two, audits that I remember significantly one of us like was auditing the actual, whether we were following our processes in getting software out, auditing the SDLC. And then there was a user audit that we did. and the, the SDLC auditing was basically like, Hey, here is a list of commits. Can you.
Can you go and look at all of these and send us screenshots of everything that happened with these commits? We're going to tie up someone who's being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for three days to get this done. And the other side of it, the user access audit, we actually got down to a place where it was pretty nice. So was like a little script that people could follow and a script within the script that they could run. And all they would have to do is take a, you know,
Michael Bernzweig (32:39.759)
Sure.
Tom Elliott (32:56.558)
45 second video of them loading up that script running it and then just opening the file that was generated and saying hey this makes sense and Those are two very very different processes and both of them perfectly acceptable to auditors so So I want to bring more of that that second process To the experience of working with the SDLC and like sort of just having the data on hand
Michael Bernzweig (33:13.334)
I love it, I love it.
Tom Elliott (33:23.98)
so that you can very, very quickly just do a quick screen recording of pressing a button and showing that the file exists and has meaningful data in it afterwards.
Michael Bernzweig (33:33.99)
Yeah, and I know you obviously can't, or I shouldn't say obvious, but I'm assuming you can't speak to specific clients. But are there some examples that you can share in terms of some stats or some studies that you've done with different deployments that you're particularly proud of that you think would be exciting for people to hear about?
Tom Elliott (34:00.43)
Uh, so I mean, still very early days. Uh, yeah. I mean, the thing that I'm the most proud of is that I'm using my product to build my product. Um, which is, which is, um, you know, it's been, it's been pretty good. Um, I mean, a nice thing is that like, can, I've done a number of onboarding calls with people. Um, and it's never taken more than like 15 minutes for someone to go through, um, the, quick start and get something working and actually being able to demonstrate, um, that stuff is able to do it.
Michael Bernzweig (34:07.599)
Sure.
Michael Bernzweig (34:21.669)
Until people can see the Yeah
So the types of organizations that will see the most benefit from the solution, are they in specific niches or is it really as broad as it sounds? I mean, it really seems like a deployment solution that just checks all the boxes for the different challenges that are experienced in the real world.
Tom Elliott (34:54.978)
Yeah, I think there's like, you you could say there's a little bit of something for everyone, but I'm really sort of trying to focus in sort of in these early stages on this multi-environment problem and making that as easy as possible. Cause I think that is a scaling challenge that a lot of companies will hit. And it's probably going to mean that they're going to have to change solutions, which is a real pain if you do it immediately when you need it.
Michael Bernzweig (35:06.34)
Right.
Michael Bernzweig (35:20.876)
Exactly.
Tom Elliott (35:22.222)
And yeah, so the, you know, the sorts of indicators that this, is a change that you're probably going to have at some point is like, if you're ever going to have a regulated customer of any size at any time. So if you're like, if you're looking to sell into finance, if you're looking to sell into healthcare, if you're to sell into government, this is a problem you're probably going to have.
Michael Bernzweig (35:36.75)
Right.
Michael Bernzweig (35:45.688)
Yeah, and it's so interesting, know, lot of organizations don't take compliance seriously until they actually get audited or are forced to do so. But then what I see day in and day out is that once
Tom Elliott (35:56.686)
and
Michael Bernzweig (36:03.595)
organizations, you know, go through the process and understand that it's really there to make them a better organization and to help, you know, for the security and the safety of all of the users and all of the clients and all of that. think, you know, while some organizations may jump into it hesitantly at the beginning, I think in time, I think a lot of the boxes are checked and it makes a lot of good sense. And at the end of the day, as organizations
organizations are going for funding and all of that. These are all the kinds of things that are important as you go through different rounds of funding or growth or any of these different stages. Well, with that, I'm really excited to hear about the solution and where you're heading. think a lot of users in the community will be reaching out to you to find out a little bit more and to get involved early in what's going on over there at AkiRoot.
and we will leave a link in the show notes for anybody that would like to reach out. on that note, there any other details that we want to make sure we share with the audience?
Tom Elliott (37:15.41)
I, I guess, you know, sort of a little bit about like where I am and, know, how, how I'm looking to help people at this point. so, you know, we're, we're in a, we're in a kind of a closed alpha at the moment, but I'm always willing to bring more people in. and I'm also like, you know, even if a company doesn't think Ocuroot is right for them right now, I'm always excited to talk to people about sort of their experiences with CICD and sort of the challenges they're facing.
Michael Bernzweig (37:20.591)
Sure.
Tom Elliott (37:41.55)
Because like one, I can learn a hell of a lot, but also I might know a couple of tips and tricks to help people out along the way.
Michael Bernzweig (37:49.241)
Very nice, very nice. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out to join us today. You sit in a very unique space at a very pivotal point in the industry in terms of having some very unique insight and I think pushing the envelope, which is really the key to moving technology forward. with that, Tom Elliott from Ocuroot, thank you for joining us on the Software Spotlight this week. And for anybody that's just
tuning in for the first time. also have two sister podcasts, the Consulting Spotlight and the Career Spotlight, both in the tech space. So be sure to check those out on Apple or Spotify or your favorite podcast player. And thank you for joining us today.
Tom Elliott (38:42.67)
Thanks, I had a great chat.