What if the future of software could break down the silos that have long hindered true digital transformation? In this riveting episode, we sit down with Dave, a veteran in the software industry, to uncover the story behind Enterprise Web. Inspired by his frustration with traditional software, Dave innovated a dynamic architecture that leverages agents, graphs, and serverless functions to enable real-time, personalized, and data-driven interactions. Discover how Enterprise Web’s no-code solutions are trailblazing across sectors like telecom, finance, and healthcare, providing flexible, end-to-end automation and centralized policy control that empower organizations to be more agile and responsive.
Listen as we highlight the groundbreaking capabilities of Enterprise Web's no-code platform, which proudly boasts 21 awarded patents. Dave explains how this platform seamlessly designs, deploys, and manages services across diverse environments such as Cloud, on-premise, and Edge. Partnering with industry giants like Red Hat, Intel, Microsoft, Azure, AWS, and Fortinet, Enterprise Web creates an ecosystem that simplifies the integration of different systems. We also delve into the company's commitment to customer success through proof of concepts and delivering credible, scalable, and secure solutions, emphasizing the value of trust and gradual growth over rapid scaling in the software industry.
Finally, we explore the future of generative AI and the importance of platform architecture in integrating both legacy systems and future innovations. Addressing crucial concerns like security, energy consumption, and intellectual property, we draw parallels between mainframes and modern enterprise web, illustrating the power of distributed systems in combining data and code. Dave underscores the necessity of a human-centric approach in technological advancement, advocating for technology that enhances human capabilities and improves lives. Tune in for an insightful discussion that not only sheds light on Enterprise Web’s inspiring mission and vision but also offers valuable perspectives on the future of no-code solutions and digital transformation.
What if the future of software could break down the silos that have long hindered true digital transformation? In this riveting episode, we sit down with Dave, a veteran in the software industry, to uncover the story behind Enterprise Web. Inspired by his frustration with traditional software, Dave innovated a dynamic architecture that leverages agents, graphs, and serverless functions to enable real-time, personalized, and data-driven interactions. Discover how Enterprise Web’s no-code solutions are trailblazing across sectors like telecom, finance, and healthcare, providing flexible, end-to-end automation and centralized policy control that empower organizations to be more agile and responsive.
Listen as we highlight the groundbreaking capabilities of Enterprise Web's no-code platform, which proudly boasts 21 awarded patents. Dave explains how this platform seamlessly designs, deploys, and manages services across diverse environments such as Cloud, on-premise, and Edge. Partnering with industry giants like Red Hat, Intel, Microsoft, Azure, AWS, and Fortinet, Enterprise Web creates an ecosystem that simplifies the integration of different systems. We also delve into the company's commitment to customer success through proof of concepts and delivering credible, scalable, and secure solutions, emphasizing the value of trust and gradual growth over rapid scaling in the software industry.
Finally, we explore the future of generative AI and the importance of platform architecture in integrating both legacy systems and future innovations. Addressing crucial concerns like security, energy consumption, and intellectual property, we draw parallels between mainframes and modern enterprise web, illustrating the power of distributed systems in combining data and code. Dave underscores the necessity of a human-centric approach in technological advancement, advocating for technology that enhances human capabilities and improves lives. Tune in for an insightful discussion that not only sheds light on Enterprise Web’s inspiring mission and vision but also offers valuable perspectives on the future of no-code solutions and digital transformation.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Speaker 1:
Hey everybody, intriguing chat today, diving into the world of no code with Enterprise Web. Dave, how are you? I'm great, ed, how are you? I'm great Living the dream, but really excited to chat about your mission and vision at Enterprise Web. You've been in this world of no code for gosh longer than I know, but maybe introduce yourself and what's the big idea behind your mission and how it's evolved since its inception.
Speaker 2:
All right, I'll try and respond to that clearly. So, yes, I've been around for a little while. I've spent my career building, turning around growing starting companies and I'd run a couple of software companies and I sort of just kept on running to this wall with software right, and I came up with this conclusion that the software in the 20th century was getting in the way of what I wanted to do in the 21st century, right.
Speaker 2:
The kind of interactions that everybody wants right Is to be much more data-driven, real-time, contextual, personalized right. Those are the things I wanted, and I found it super frustrating as an executive that IT kept on telling me I couldn't get what I wanted. So I said you know what? Okay, I'm going to start my own business and I'm going to figure this problem out and I'm going to come up with a much more dynamic kind of architecture that uses context to personalize user interactions, optimize transactions and synchronize operations. And it took me a little while. I had to do a lot of research, I had to bring in some really smart people, but now we're doing quite well and I think we're respected for pioneering no code and I think we probably pushed the envelope on no code as well. We're not trying to do sort of citizen developer light or simple applications where any mildly complex integrations or functionality require IT. We're doing the hardcore distributed, real-time, distributed systems, data-driven applications for engineers and solution architects.
Speaker 1:
Great, and so break it down a little bit. What are some of the core technologies or enabling technologies behind Enterprise Web and the solutions you're building? What's sort of the big idea?
Speaker 2:
Well, it turns out that we did something pretty good and maybe that we didn't realize sort of in advance of its time, in the sense that our technology is based on agents, graphs and serverless functions. We're using graphs as an efficient source of context for agents that discover, dispatch, configure and coordinate serverless functions, and that might be a lot from a technical perspective, but what it really means is that we're actually able to bind things in real time using the graph for context. As I described. The agents are then able to interpret events, automate decisions and take actions in that sort of personalized manner, and we did that for that kind of real-time, no-code, intent-based orchestration automation. But it turns out that architecture is exactly what people want for AI and Gen AI too, and it's sort of funny Anybody working in the Gen AI space.
Speaker 2:
Now they're talking about agentic automation, they're starting to think about agents and how graphs can be used, and I've got 21 patents on that. I've spent a decade building that enterprise-grade infrastructure for doing it, whereas a lot of the Gen AI things that you see are very early days, very experimental. So some loose scaffolding to allow developers to rapidly experiment with Gen AI and Gen AI is cool. But the problem is, enterprise has complex problems and it needs rich solutions that can make Gen AI easier to use, more secure, more correct. Right, because Gen AI is fallible, let's say right, and so that's sort of our arc.
Speaker 1:
Fantastic, and let's talk about the impact you're making, looking to make. You know, digital transformation is still the name of the game, but sectors like telecom finance healthcare still very far behind. What impact are you trying to make there and how exactly?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so for us, you know, we focus on the companies. That honestly, because transformation is a journey for everyone and this has already been going on for several years. And, let's be honest, companies struggle with transformation and sometimes they get a little jaded on technology as far as they keep on hearing the next technology that's going to solve all their problems, and I respect that.
Speaker 2:
Actually, it's actually for us it's actually better to do a call with a group of people that sort of understand their problems, have really thoughtfully looked at a lot of technologies and are sort of ready to think about something new, and so then that's an entree for Enterprise Web. So we usually come in to help enable transformation, coming in with chief architects, vpit, the C-suite sometimes, but usually folks that have cross-organizational responsibility, right, Because they're the ones that are going to look for global visibility, end-to-end automation, centralized policy control management. They're the ones that want to get over the top on the silos, and that's the real 21st century problem the top on the silos, and that's the real 21st century problem. Set aside Gen AI and AI that's actually being held back by the same silo problem. If you can't share data and capability freely, then anything you want to do from an enterprise-wide initiative is stalled or held back by that fundamental problem.
Speaker 2:
Enterprise web. If you just think of the word enterprise web, when I coined that, the point was to say you know what, as an executive, I'd like to be, or an engineer, an architect, I'd like to be able to look down on my business. I'd like to be able to see the people, the information and the capabilities that comprise it as a graph, and I'd like to be able to flexibly compose those people and information capabilities for business purpose and then recompose them as my needs change and as technologies change, so that I'm fundamentally much more agile and responsive. The world's largest companies tier one telecoms, one of the largest telcos in the United States, amongst others you probably use their self-service I can't mention them, but they've been using us for years as well as we talked to a lot of major manufacturers and enterprises life sciences, iot, et cetera and the problem is the same. They want to be able to connect things across the organization right much more flexibly, and that idea of an enterprise web gives them this sort of umbrella abstraction, this way of looking down on the enterprise and sort of being able to see what it's made up of and then connect it and then the enterprise system does the all the runtime integrations. That that's so.
Speaker 2:
The the platform, the no code platform is handling the implementation complexity and that's a. That's sort of the big deal with no code is to be truly no code. What is what it is is it's transferring, it's making it easier for the developers in the business to focus on business problems, requirements and policies. And by making it easier, what you're doing is you're transferring the complexity to the platform, and the platform has to figure out how it gets done, and that's what Enterprise Web really is the master of is taking. Let the customer model a complex domain come up with a complex requirement and Enterprise Web in real time will translate that, all implement for them and then show them exactly what the system did so they can feel comfortable and trust the system, know that it's secure and accurate.
Speaker 1:
Wow, sounds impressive. So, as you know, the world of AI, gen AI and even low-code, no-code these days is dominated by quite a few tech giants and unicorns. There was another one, funded yesterday to the tune of 100-something million, that I hadn't even heard of. So how do you see yourself on this landscape as a small company and your position therein?
Speaker 2:
Well, they don't make it easy for me, evan, but I will say that I had a call with one of those big players just this morning. Funny enough, they don't have what we have. The fact that we have 21 awarded patents is not only that. We have the capability, not only that, we have the customers and the use cases. Literally, with Enterprise Web, you can talk to our platform and say I want to design this service with these elements, I want them to come together with this service level agreement, these policies, and I want it to deploy in this Cloud or on my premise or at the Edge, and Enterprise Web will literally do all the work for you. It literally is that fast. You could literally say do this, this, this and this and this and this, and it's like Star Trek right, you know, make it so right, and we're literally doing that.
Speaker 2:
So, if you think of it, and it just makes sense, innovation tends to come from the outside. Right, big corporations build up big product lines and they try to monetize it right All the way to end of life, and they hold on to those things as long as possible until they're about to be disrupted by other, more innovative technologies. And that's what we are and we work with partners. So we're Red Hat partners, intel partners, microsoft partners, azure partners, aws partners. So, plus a lot of other specialized telco and secure Fortinet is one of the leading security partners or Fortinet partners. So we're partners with some of the biggest technology companies in the world. We've won we've helped them win a lot of awards, so they tend to like us and we look at it as an ecosystem play.
Speaker 2:
The thing with a no code platform is it's your platform, it's not the use case itself, it's the thing that delivers your use cases. So we're not the end all of everything. We can work with other tools, existing systems, existing services, existing endpoints, and the point that Enterprise Web's doing is making it much easier to connect those things for purpose declaratively in a no-code environment. That's industrial grade, so you can trust it for scalability, performance, security, identity, because only then can the enterprise use it right, like Gen AI, you know, last year everybody jumped on board. You see a lot of use cases are sort of around customer service and things like that. You know, helping guide people on summarizing documents and things like that.
Speaker 2:
Those are pretty light use cases and you know if you get something wrong you're not, probably the patient's not going to die. But when you talk about mission critical automation, when you talk about your bank account being accurate, when you talk about flying planes and directing traffic or the telecom network, famously is five, nines, 99.99999% reliable is five nines 99.99999% reliable.
Speaker 2:
Well, that's a high standard. So you can't just say, hey, gen, ai, run my network. You need a system that grounds. You want to leverage those AI capabilities for inferences and predictions and things like that, that's awesome. But you want to ground it in a knowledge-based system that has domain knowledge and facts, that can take probabilities, ground them in a deterministic way, connect them to the real world so that you can act safely, confidently and progressively in a very advanced kind of way.
Speaker 1:
Fantastic. So talk a little bit about. You know customer success, what it means. You know we're in this age or era of doing more with less austerity. I guess you'd call it, of course, no code. Low code plays a huge role in that. But you know customers want business outcomes, they want ROI, they're spending money very carefully. Now how does that play into your proposition?
Speaker 2:
Well, I think part of the way we run our business is to focus on because we go to market through channel partners, ecosystem partners right, Because we go to market through channel partners, ecosystem partners right, and whatever we do, we do a lot of industry proof of concepts that are high profile, very public. In fact, we have a YouTube channel. If you just look my name up, Dave Dugale, on YouTube, you should find my YouTube channel. There's a lot of public demos that we've done with all those partners I mentioned and we have to take it very serious, right, Because we're making big claims and if you don't make big claims, you got to back it up. There's nobody that lets me off the hook lightly. Nobody says, oh great, a magic wand, Come on in Somehow. It does seem that they let other people work that way, but I never get that. My next life has to be much easier than this one.
Speaker 2:
I don't have to prove myself. My next life has to be much easier than this one. And in this life I'm always working in brownfields, I'm always having to do proof of concepts, I always have to prove and you know, actually I like that because ultimately, especially software fundamentally is an abstract product. People are trusting in you, right, they trust in the service, they trust in the person communicating to them, they trust in the reliability, the responsiveness. Credibility is really king. So the good news is I never took any VC money, so I own this company and that should be comfortable to everybody. I haven't been forced to rush the market. I haven't been forced to rush the market. I haven't been forced to pivot. I could focus on doing the right things for the right people and satisfying each customer, each partner, because I see a lot of companies get well-funded and then they explode right, they race the market. Even if they get $50, $100 million, they burn through it in two, three years.
Speaker 1:
In fact, they're encouraged to try and scale out as quickly as they can.
Speaker 2:
But the problem is some things are just fundamentally hard, Some things take time, Some things require a lot of thought and just chasing aspirations and throwing technologies together is actually sort of a silly person approach. You know, I might be I'm a little bit older and maybe I'm wizened and you know old school, but you know we built this from the ground up to deliver enterprise-grade next transformative experiences, both for business applications and infrastructure applications and IoT applications. So you know, I don't mind doing this rigorously, I don't mind when customers push me. You know, show me right. It's like everybody's in the show me state Everybody needs to believe it, see it before they believe it, and I think that's a good thing. That's evidence of a mature environment. And you know I recognize the challenges of steering a big enterprise, moving a ship and transforming it. That's not easy. And so what it takes is, you know, being thoughtful, planning things out, proving your base technology. We usually come in with a POC and say give us a POC with reasonable indicative complexity, Just give us a use case, whether it's integration in ETL, which pretty much every business has to do, or if it's like Intel codes. It's like standing up a 5G edge network and doing that with voice commands and doing it in 30 seconds. These are the kind of things that we do and ain't nobody else really doing it, so we're willing to prove it.
Speaker 2:
We are about to release a YouTube video on how you can now talk to our system to do advanced enterprise application integration and ETL. You can say take these SaaS apps, Salesforce, whatever it is, take the CRM, take this ERP, connect it to my ERP, connect it to my supply chain management system. I want to see these products and offerings being connected between and, when they fall, fully synchronized, and the system literally will go out read the endpoints, translate the interfaces, create an abstract model of all of that, with no tight coupling, and it'll say okay, I can now communicate between all these things and I'll start synchronizing them. And so those are the kind of use cases we do, but you can take the technology and really apply it to any. If you think of it this way, every, every company in the 21st century is a distributed company to the extent that they use at least one cloud, they use at least one service, one SAS app, right, I mean literally everyone.
Speaker 2:
But you, you do Evan, right? Your your business, right, I'm sure? Oh, yeah, More than I can count. Yeah, More than I can afford, actually. So my SaaS sprawl is off the hook. Yeah, Exactly, and it's a problem for everybody.
Speaker 2:
And the thing is like okay, well, you're paying for all those things, so you want to use them. You sort of want to use them in a targeted way, too right, Because individually they put a lot of add on things that you don't necessarily want. You really just want to use them. No, I'm going to use you. You're great at this. I will use you for this. I want to use this for this because it's the best thing for that. What you really want is an enterprise web to provide this abstraction. You can come in there and say, okay, I want to go to my catalog, pull these elements together, I want them to work together in this way with these policies and run it on Azure Cloud, Run it on and connect it back with my enterprise ERP running on-premise, and you'd sort of like no code to be able to take it that way.
Speaker 2:
If you really think of it, that has really been the vision of software since the 1940s, right? You know, sometimes we forget, because you know we start with machine code and then you know, we got punch cards right and then we get languages that can increasingly friendlier right, but still technical, still required to. But we forget that the whole journey of it has to has been a journey to slowly create human natural language, human computer interaction. That's been the entire arc of the last 80 years of software. To say hey, so it's not like this is by accident, this has happened. It's been a journey and that journey has been hard because, you know, originally compute infrastructure was expensive. The network was expensive, right? I remember when you had to put coins in a phone to make long distance calls. You know like all these things used to be much more harder to do.
Speaker 2:
Now compute, network and storage are commodities. Oh, that's game changing. Now I can do as many things on my on-premise and at my edge as I can do in my cloud. That's game changing. Now we think about everything as APIs and just endpoints. That's game-changing. So it would be useful as a business to have an enterprise web where I can say, hey, you know what? All these endpoints could just be objects in a catalog. I can flexibly compose them for purpose and for any real business use case I want, because at the end of the day, that's all I'm doing. I'm connecting people, information and capabilities based on events and policies to drive processes. That's what every business in the world does. You know, they have their unique particulars, they have their unique domain knowledge, they have their unique policies and complexity to them, no doubt, but at the end of the day, that's what everybody is. It's just people, information, capabilities moving through flows to transform. You know, data from A to B and move product around the world.
Speaker 1:
A fantastic approach and you're a trendsetter, but you're also a keen observer of future trends. What are some of the key trends or technologies you see as most influential in shaping your vision and mission and the general future of enterprise software?
Speaker 2:
That's a good question and it's a hard question, I think, when you're in the moment, and right now, we live in interesting times, right? So this of a time where we're constantly told you know, this is it. You know we've achieved nirvana? I would tell people probably not, right? Gen AI is not the end state of AI, and some people just think that, oh, this is what I'm being told. Well, yes, by companies that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they also happen to have a few billion dollars for marketing too. So, you know, there's a lot of money being spent trying to get people to think that this is just one thing. What I would say is no, actually, the technology is going to continue to evolve.
Speaker 2:
Generative AI has evolved over a long history.
Speaker 2:
Generative AI has some great strengths to it, great strengths to it, and so it has some concerns that come with it Accuracy, consistencies, hallucinations, security, energy consumption, resource consumption, ip, copyright right All those things need to be mitigated, and I think the most important thing that the platform, that the enterprise can do is sort of think about platform architecture just in general, not just enterprise web, but just think about platform, think about how you connect elements and try to organize yourself in more of a capabilities type architecture that allows for you to model all your existing things and your legacy things and your physical things, which you're not going to replace tomorrow, and, if you think in a capabilities way, it should also provide for a way to onboard future innovation, because we're not at the end of history.
Speaker 2:
Things are going to continue to change and the number one thing you could do for yourself is create a platform for yourself, create an environment, deploy an architecture that allows you to compose things flexibly so that you can onboard innovation. You can be forward, future, forward in the looking forward, but also backward compliant too, because that's another big part of the story, evan, that nobody talks about. They just think that all the old stuff just goes away. I mean, we still have mainframes, right, and they're still going to be around. I guarantee you, let me predict, there will still be mainframes in five years from now, maybe even in tech.
Speaker 1:
And there should be. There's some amazing price, performance, compute benefits of mainframes. They're not your grandfather's mainframes anymore, so maybe that COBOL can go away. But you know, maybe keep the mainframe.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, the ADA and all this. Yeah, so there's actually very few people say that, but you're absolutely right. The thing is the reason that technology is around because and actually there's an interesting parallel, if you don't mind me taking a tangent here, between the mainframe and enterprise web the mainframe was super powerful because in the mainframe it was much closer to computer science. Right, it was data and code lived together. They were just zeros and ones with addresses and your data and code was essentially your mainframe was a big catalog of everything. Right, it was the mainframe and the power of that.
Speaker 2:
In computer science there's something called homoiconicity. It means when data and code are part of the same language. It means that code can efficiently reason over data and data can efficiently configure code. And when you put those two things together you can almost create like a flywheel effect, right, where code, logic is interpreting, is being contextualized by data, and then that's driving the next functions and also you're getting these very dynamic pipelines, very dynamic data flows. So the problem with the mainframe was well, it's the ultimate monolith, it lives in one place. It's not distributable. They were originally very closed, limited to whatever was inside it. They weren't built for distributed systems. Enterprise Web is sort of a distributed mainframe right, where we actually in our graph we treat data and code and policies and contracts and temporal history. We put it all in the graph and that allows the functions in our graph to reason over data, to interpret, to reason over data, data and then the data to configure the code to create those pipelines. The real difference in our innovation is that we're doing in a fully distributed way, that's, you know, very low latency, high performance, elastically scalable, and so enterprise web has sort of been uh, it's almost like a back to the future type approach.
Speaker 2:
We looked at the, the way the. We went to computer science, first principles, looked at what was being done right, then reviewed that in a completely modern context and said, well, if I took the original math of these really smart guys Milner, mccarthy, malone, strachey, right, these are all the greats of computer science. If I took their thinking and their maths and I applied that in a fully modern context, it would look like Enterprise Web. That's what we strove to do and so, yes, I think, being future forward, things are going to get only more exciting and experiences are going to get more interesting. We're going to get more powerful as people, as individuals. If we do it right, and if we do it right, it won't be about just dumbing down people, it'll be about really aiding.
Speaker 2:
You know, I might be a technologist but I'm pro humans, and so I think technology should serve people. I don't really want to serve a machine. I think technology should serve people. I don't really want to serve a machine, and so I think some of our technologists in this modern era are scarily anti-human and I think we should be channeling technology for human good, to improve the human lot in life, not just for corporate efficiencies. We should get that too, but we should be getting corporate efficiencies, improving the lives, experiences for IT and business people, for customers, consumers, citizens, providing protecting security and privacy. So you know, I think Enterprise Web is and our company, I feel very much is part of a greater fabric of technology, and I think technologists today have a big responsibility for what this future is going to look like and we should treat that seriously.
Speaker 1:
Well, wonderful sentiment, amazing insights. Thanks so much for sharing just a bit about the mission and vision, and I appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:
Oh, thanks so much for having me on Great to be with your audience. I hope everybody enjoys it.
Speaker 1:
Thanks so much, david, thanks so much everyone for watching. Take care.
