theCUBEd Awards | Copado (Most Innovative Solution for DevOps)

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Sanjay Gidwani

COO

Copado

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Artificial intelligence is reshaping DevOps, making it more proactive, data-driven and efficient. Copado Inc. plays a role in this evolution with its Copado AI platform, which offers tools to boost productivity, reduce errors, enhance security and accelerate software delivery, according to Sanjay Gidwani (pictured), chief operating officer at Copado.“A couple of years back, as AI was starting to get more press, with the advent of ChatGPT, we took a serious look at what we’re doing internally,” Gidwani said. “We had a beta program around what is now the Copado AI platform and our agents. As things kept moving forward, it really became about the five specialized DevOps agents

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play_circle_outline Trailhead DX Event Unveils Copado's CI-CD Platform Features: Agentforce and Salesforce Events in Focus

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Copado (Most Innovative Solution for DevOps)

Sanjay Gidwani

COO Copado

After his company won the Most Innovative Solution for DevOps at theCUBEd Awards, Copado’s COO Sanjay Gidwani joins theCUBE Research’s John Furrier to discuss what sets their platform apart. Copado’s AI-powered DevOps solution is transforming the Salesforce development process by automating every key phase — planning, building, testing, releasing and operating. By streamlining these steps, teams can accelerate deployments, boost efficiency and minimize downtime, making development faster and smarter.

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Copado (Most Innovative Solution for DevOps)

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>> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host here in our Palo Alto Studios. We are celebrating the CUBE Tech Innovation Awards, the CUBEd Awards, and our CUBEd winner here is with Copado. They won the category, and you're not going to believe this. It's a highly contested category. Most Innovative Solution for DevOps, as we know have been covering DevOps. It's been driving the industry and their award-winning entry and the innovation behind it took the prize. Sanjay is here. Sanjay Gidwani. Sanjay Gidwani, right?

>> Gidwani. Yeah. You got it, John. Thank you.

>> Sanjay Gidwani is here from Copado to discuss their award-winning entry. Good to see you.

>> Great to see you, John. Thank you so much for the introduction and the opportunity for us to showcase what we have and what we're doing. I mean, it's really a humbling honor to win in the inaugural awards, the most innovative solution for DevOps. Thank you.

>> It was one of our most submitted categories. Obviously, it's hot. Cloud-native platform engineering has been around, we can cover every CUBE consensus that existed. It's really setting the foundation for this next wave of data layer coming on top of it. Obviously, all the semiconductor activity, a lot of AI infrastructure. That's going great, getting better every day. New benchmarks are coming out, people are popping out great numbers. But as the cloud-native foundation gets set, it brings in the conversation around what is DevOps as the apps start rolling out with data. You guys have a great relationship with Salesforce, lots of innovation. Let's get into some of the central pieces of your innovation that won the awards. Can you share some examples of how you guys and your company approached the challenge in an innovative way? What was the impact?

>> I think it's really worth noting the entire story of how we got here. A couple of years back, as AI was starting to get more press, with the advent of ChatGPT, we took a serious look at what we're doing internally. What we decided to do was, "Hey, you know what? Let's go and take all of our information that we have about our software and about Salesforce and let's just put it into a Vector database. Let's just start there." What we began doing was really looking at our own internal processes and figuring out where have these internal processes can achieve the most impact by leveraging AI. We thought our support processes was a good place to start. It's information, how do we handle our customers? Really looking at our customers to begin with. That began our journey, and as we started to iterate on that, we thought, "Hey, why not release this to all of our customers?" We had a beta program around what is now the Copado AI platform and our agents. As things kept moving forward, and what we kept the pace, and really for us, it's really about the five specialized DevOps agents. It's about planning, building, testing, releasing, and operating the entire DevOps process. For us, it was more about how do we take those phases of a DevOps process as we've built up all this knowledge, seen success internally, and democratize that into our DevOps platform.

>> Talk about what you guys do, set the table because you guys have a relationship with Salesforce. Talk about the system that you guys are in now with... How do folks would use you guys? What is the product?

>> Our product is a DevOps product. We have end-to-end coverage in the entire DevOps life cycle. Like I said, plan, build, test, release, and operate. We embed AI at each stage of the process. What we've recognized is that there's so much development going on in the Salesforce ecosystem that the Salesforce ecosystem was right for this. 10 years ago, our co-founders realized that this was a problem in the Salesforce ecosystem and what we've been able to do over time is build this DevOps platform that was tuned to help Salesforce teams deliver faster. We've been able to have 20 times more frequent releases, reduce downtime by 95%. What we've most recently done is infuse AI into the process to help accelerate our Salesforce development teams to move faster.

>> This is for Salesforce developers?

>> Correct. Salesforce developers, Salesforce implementers, people who are working with Salesforce at scale. We've got large enterprises that are looking at, "Hey, how do we have 10 Scrum teams developing on Salesforce and being able to deliver the solutions straight to their customers?"

>> Sanjay, not to get off track a little bit, we'll come back to some of the awards. I want to get into some of the secret sauce. But if you look at Salesforce over the years, it's such a powerful force. One, they have a huge install base, they got a core product that everyone uses and loves. It's got a lot of data. It's rich with data. Then they went on an acquisition spree and started buying a bunch of companies. Now they're integrated together. Some of the complaints, not necessarily from us, but in the field was, I got to put it all together, AI is like a dream scenario for Salesforce if you think about. Because all the successes are abstracting away functionality that requires integration, for instance. They have MuleSoft, they got cloud, they got everything going on. They're perfectly positioned. Talk about that because I think a lot of people don't know how well-positioned Salesforce is relative to what they could unlock because it's just super valuable to know that the software trend is their friend.

>> Exactly. I think Salesforce, it's a large complex ecosystem, and it's perfect for demonstrating the power of AI. The direction that we see them going in terms of Agentforce is really enabling the data that they already have with the development platform workflow and being able to add that conversational layer to it to really be able to drive the agenting future. Salesforce is very much poised to be a leader in this because of, as you mentioned, John, their customer base, and the data that they have access to. Most recently with their Data Cloud offering, the ability to bring all that together is important for enterprises because it's the data that drives really success with AI.

>> You mentioned workflows and processes, you mentioned processes, but you're seeing success today. I'd like to get your reaction to this where the successful phase one of generative AI and agents or pre-agents, however, you want to call the status of where we're at, is companies that understand they have domain expertise and the workflows or processes end to end with data. It's a huge business transformation intellectual property base. What's your reaction to that and what would you say when someone says, "How does my business process turn into value?"

>> I think it's really taking a look at two things. It's the internal, right? What are your internal processes? Where do you have an internal operating strength, maybe over that, your competitor? Being able to pull that together to accelerate, whether that's access to certain knowledge, whether that's the ability to take a certain role and the job that you're doing in that role and being able to compress that. You don't have to have... For example, one of the things that we've been doing at Copado is, as I talked about before, really looking at our customer success team and how can we accelerate the research that our customer success team has to do before they jump on with the customer. AI can really help accelerate that. It's looking at those internal things and then also looking at your customers and looking at what you can provide your customers that might be the ability to leapfrog in incremental technology innovation. That all relies on all the data that's within your organization.

>> Data quality is huge too. I mean, you can get sometimes stuck in the mechanism of data entry, data management. All that goes away with agents and good data management with AI. I have to ask you, every successful company has their own secret sauce. What would you say is the most distinctive aspect of your approach has enabled you guys to push the boundaries and achieve this recognition?

>> Well, I think for us, our secret sauce is our people. We have access to data and we have the processes. But what we've realized with leveraging AI internally and externally is that it helps us eliminate the manual tasks. It helps us eliminate the tedious nature of certain parts of a job. Because what we really believe is it's the human brain that's the greatest computer ever. So how do you unleash the human brain to do what it's really good at, which is creative, right? How do we eliminate the tediousness? Number one. Two, really it's about pushing tasks to where people are already working. Instead of finding one application and saying, "Hey, now you need to go to this application to leverage AI," it's infusing that into the business process. We're really focused on our people, and as we start to take the other side of that, our customers, it's how do we help our customers focus on the most important things that they need to solve and not worrying about the tediousness and doing it in the applications that they already are using today, such as Visual Studio Code such as Slack. Really, those are the areas that we're injecting our AI to because they're already places where people are working.

>> Paul Nashawaty, one of our analysts on theCUBE Research side covers AppDev, and we've been talking about this for months and our internal meetings around how if you get the data right, the AppDev cycle can go faster, which everyone's pushing more progress into the data layer, which you guys have recognized. You guys are innovating, your price been recognized for this approach. Could you walk us through some specific examples or example of how your customers are using the solution specifically to solve the problems that weren't even possible to address before? Can you give a use case? Can you name a customer? What would be that example?

>> Yeah. I think the direction that we're going is really around making sure that we're looking at first those five different areas I talked about, plan, build, test, release, and operate. Those become the areas of the process. Then what we're doing is we're breaking down the job to understand what are the jobs to be done within those parts of the process. Then with our customers, like take planning, for example. Where do people communicate the most? They communicate in their chat apps. Business analysts will leverage a meeting, they can record the transcript, upload that transcript into Slack. Then with our Copado Plan Agent live in Slack, what you're able to do is now be able to take that transcript and actually create the user stories. What are you doing? You're eliminating the tediousness of having to go into a system and type up the user stories. You're taking the transcript, the conversation, putting it in a Slack channel where people can converse, and you're not having to waste time of entering the system. The conversation that people are having is not about, "Oh, when do I enter the data into the system? Or where do I enter the data in the system?" It's, "Hey, what's the business problem that we're trying to solve, and is this next phase of a project or some program going to achieve that?" That's planning. Building is another area where we're focused, where we have an integration with Visual Studio Code. That's where the developer lives. You can set up our build agent within your development environment and be able to quickly create a test class, quickly create the things that you need. Then the human can focus on, "Hey, how do I make this better? How do I improve it without having to do the tedious parts of the process?" Those are the types of use cases that we're trying to nail.

>> It's great that you guys are doing that. Of course, the cloud-native world needs it moving fast. Again, platform engineering has been advancing very quickly. Great to see that work go on. Let me ask you a question, where can people find you guys next? What events will you be at? Obviously, you'll be at all the Agentforces, participating in those, Dreamforce is coming up. What other events you guys going to be at? Where can people find you?

>> That's great. What we're really excited about is Trailhead DX next week in San Francisco. I think it's Wednesday in San Francisco, California. We'll be showing off a lot of the stuff that I've been talking about. We have a new version of our CI-CD platform, which we've got a lot of awesome features that we'll be debuting. So come visit us at Trailhead DX next week in San Francisco, and you get to see a lot of this stuff at our booth.

>> KubeCons at all other events you guys will be at?

>> Yeah. We're really focused on the Agentforce, the Salesforce events right now. That's our primary audience. We're open to doing other events. We participate in Google Cloud events and the Amazon events, those types of places where you can find us as well.

>> Salesforce is partnering with Google, IBM, AWS, all the top clouds. Of course, they're harmonizing that data layer. We hear from Salesforce all the time about that harmonization. They got the Data Clouds booming right now over at Salesforce. What's your take on Salesforce right now? You're in the middle of it.

>> Yeah, we're in the middle of it, and I'm very bullish on Salesforce right now. What I believe is the company has done a fantastic job of jumping on this bandwagon. They've had all the technology there. Salesforce is a very innovative company, and I believe they're hitting at the right time where people are taking a step back. But they have Salesforce that's got a great customer install base. I believe a lot of what they're doing with Agentforce, and specifically as you mentioned, Data Cloud is going to help accelerate a lot of enterprises. We're already seeing it. There was a commercial at the Super Bowl for Heathrow. I don't know, did you see that one, John, with Matthew McConaughey running through Heathrow Airport?

>> Yeah, I did in those commercials.

>> I mean, they're a customer of ours and a lot of that was enabled through Copado, but at the same time, it just the innovation you're seeing is incredible.

>> Yeah. The smart agents are going to be booking all the right tables. I love that one where he is in the rain. Great stuff. Again, this is really where, I mean, I think Salesforce has an opportunity. This is a theme of unification. Unify those disparate systems, make them faster to talk together, get that data harmonized. That's the trend. Again, the Data Clouds are coming. You guys are doing great work. Congratulations on winning the honors, top honors for the Most Innovative Solution for DevOps, big category. Thanks for participating and congratulations, Sanjay, and the whole team.

>> Thanks, John. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us on. Hopefully, we'll get to see you next week at Trailhead DX in San Francisco.

>> Cool. Cheers. Thanks for coming on.

>> Thank you.

>> I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in our Palo Alto Studios. Of course, the Palo Alto Studios in Palo Alto. There's our Silicon Valley region. Of course, the new studios and the show floor, the NYSC is our East Coast CUBE region. Check it out. Of course, more coverage coming from all the award winners that have been CUBEd. Copado's been CUBEd for the Most Innovative Solution for DevOps. Thanks for watching.