Disrupt or Be Disrupted, The Story Behind The Dynatrace Reinvention. Bernd Greifender - Founder, CTO

Tech Seeking Human

The story of Dynatrace is a remarkable one. If you listen to this podcast in the entirety you will hear the evolution, from early days, to success, to reinvention, to new scale.

But what if the board didn't agree to let the company pivot, right when it was in the midst of leading the market? To allow itself to basically disrupt themselves. What if the team didn't come up with the idea that it had to reinvent itself?

For those that don’t know, Dynatrace monitors the performance of applications, the clouds they run in, and the users accessing and using these apps for nearly every enterprise out there. The tech 'heads' call it observability, in that their software can observe all the inner workings of all these applications, services, infrastructure, networks, and everything else in between.

And given the world is run on apps, and they are increasingly complicated, it’s a fairly important observation. A single line of code is wrong, and the software stops.

And with it, … that companies ability to transact. You’ve seen examples of this, almost weekly, on the news, when airlines are forced to shut down flights, point of sale systems go down, or heaven forbid Facebook goes down.

Thankfully the systems that run these systems are getting smarter, with AI, and the likelihood of whatsapp being down is less and less. What a relief.

So how on earth do you come up with the monitoring software that debugs the software that runs the world?

Where do you start?

Why?

And given how quickly the world changes, and with it, tech changes, how do you keep pace with all the latest tech, scale, and modern systems.

Not easily.

Bernd Greifeneder is the founder of Dynatrace. His role now is CTO, visionary leader, and honestly cultural identity of Dynatrace. I was lucky to work with him, and see first hand, not only his ability to grasp what’s next, but to inspire teams to be ready, and to execute on the changes needed to be the best. I joined as a marketing leader in the first wave of APM, I was part of the transformation you will hear about, as well as the successful IPO. Leaving not long after this, in the middle of covid to come home from the US with my family, that’s where I left the story, and I was so keen to find out what has been going on.

Turns out … quite a lot.