Ted Elliott Podcast Transcript
Ted Elliott joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ted Elliott. Ted Elliott is the Chief Executive Officer of Copado. Before joining Copado in November 2018, Ted spent 18 years as the CEO of JobScience, one of the first five ISV partners to Salesforce.
Until the company’s acquisition by Bullhorn during his time with job science, Ted experienced the challenges of releasing on the Salesforce platform and now strives to transform customers DevOps processes with Copado, the leading AI power DevOps platform for business applications.
Well, good afternoon, Ted. Welcome to the show!
Ted Elliott: Thanks!
Brian Thomas: Appreciate you jumping on, Ted. This is awesome. Get to talk to someone out of New Orleans, Louisiana today same time zone, but I do a podcast somewhere in the world just about every single day. And this is really, really exciting. So, Ted, I want to jump right into your first question.
If you don’t mind, talk about your experiences as the CEO of job science gives you unique insight into the Salesforce ecosystem. How did that experience? Shape your approach when you joined Copado. What challenges did you encounter transitioning from job science to Copado?
Ted Elliott: Yeah, so great question. Actually, Job Science was the third ISV partner in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Job science before it was a third partner in the Salesforce ecosystem was a startup in 1999 and it pivoted a couple of times. And the last pivot was to the Salesforce ecosystem and really helping get it started. I sold that company in 2018. When I sold it, one of my friends asked me if I’d like to meet the two founders of Copado who were in from Madrid, and we’re starting a DevOps company on Salesforce.
And I said, Hey, I’m going to Australia for a month on vacation, but if it means we can get together and have a beer, I’d love to come over and have a beer. So met the two guys and really a lot of the experiences we had at Job Science. That were around building software for the first time on Salesforce led me to really appreciating the value proposition of Copado, which was making it so that things didn’t break.
You could do successful releases. You could manage development environments. And those were a lot of challenges we had in the early days of the Salesforce ecosystem. And so, I started off actually as an investor in Copado and after a couple of board meetings. The founders and the board said, Hey, do you want to get more involved in the business?
And so, there was really a tight tie in between job science and Copado. And in fact, I even hired a lot of people who worked for me at job science to come over and join me at Copado because we had had this kind of shared experience of building things on Salesforce and facing a lot of, let’s say first time challenges because it was such a new thing.
And so, Copado is kind of a natural next chapter.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I love the story again. It’s all about people and networking, right? You know, people in the business, you get together, you talk about some things and you find out that there’s some synergies or some mutual visions that you share. So, I think that’s awesome.
And obviously, you’ve brought a lot of experience to Copado. So, I appreciate the share. And Ted, Copado was described as an AI powered DevOps platform for business applications. Can you elaborate on the role AI plays in enhancing DevOps processes and what benefits this brings to business leveraging platforms like Salesforce?
Ted Elliott: So, our core business has always been being a layer between applications. So, if you’re using Git and Jira and Salesforce, those tools are not natural mates. And so, Copado really started off when I first got into the business 6 years ago, really solving that problem of those systems not necessarily working well with each other and smoothing out the process of doing true agile development.
About 2 years ago, we decided that we thought that AI was going to be a big deal, and we actually launched an initiative internally called AI First. And that initiative was about, we’re not going to sell anything to our customers that we don’t use ourselves first, and we’re going to try and figure out every possible way we can leverage AI.
And one of the things that we did is we said, geez, what is the key to AI? And we believe the key to AI is context. If you listen to Sam Altman, he talks about AI being predicting the future by looking at past data. So, the best source of past data around development is looking at your past Git repositories, your past codes you’ve deployed, your past errors that you’ve had, and figuring out how to create.
Planning, coding, testing, releasing, and ultimately documenting your products. And the beauty of AI is all that work I just described, that’s what everyone hates to do. Like, no one likes to come up with a plan. No one likes to go into detail about their solution architecture. No, no one really likes to do documentation.
People hate testing. Like, do I really have to build a test? Come on, it should work. I know my work’s going to work. Oh, I have to train people on how this works. And the beauty of AI is we can take your collective work. And all the work you’ve done in the past, and we can use it to help you rapidly do the work you don’t want to do.
So that all of a sudden massively improves the whole development process because we’re stepping up all the work that’s critical to agile development, but then no one likes to do right. So, when you talk about AI power DevOps platform, what we’re really doing is taking the traditional DevOps platform we’ve had and taking all the work in that platform that people didn’t really like to do and make it really easy to deliver.
And when you do that, that steps up
Brian Thomas: the entire process. Amazing. And I appreciate you highlighting the fact that you kind of, you tried to get into it early. So, you could get in and start to leverage some of the power of LLMs and machine learning. And what’s great is I like your philosophy, right? You’re going to eat your dog food before you sell it to the customers.
Right. So, I really appreciate that. That was amazing that you’re sharing some of the kind of the growing pains when you first started into the R& D process of. Leveraging a power DevOps. So, thank you again. And Ted, next question I have for you with the increasing importance of continuous integration and continuous delivery CI/CD in DevOps.
What unique features does Copado offer that make CI CD implementation more seamless for business applications?
Ted Elliott: Yeah, so we’ve always been around pipeline management. How do you manage your pipelines? How do you manage your branches? How do you have a strategy to make sure that you can roll forward? You can roll back that you can operate at scale.
And so, I think the real advantage we bring is that there’s a little level of nuance that the Azure DevOps or traditional products, they’re not going to solve for you. Jira is not going to solve for you and what a lot of our customers use us for. Is to go into a lot more detail about the user stories and the documentation and the branching strategy they need.
And what we do is we help them set up a governance infrastructure for managing multiple salesforce orgs. We help them keep all their different systems in sync. And ultimately, I think the greatest piece of value that we brought to the DevOps process is really testing to give you an example. We have 1 client that’s a major television network.
That is managing all their reporters nationally and internationally using something called field service. Lightning is actually a product that was built for people gone and reporting when they’re fixing your washing machine or making a house call to fix some equipment. Well, this network uses it to dispatch all their reporters to all the sports games around the world.
They can’t afford to have that product go down. So, they actually use quality gates like testing a robotic testing solution. Within their framework to make sure that anytime they make a change, they’re running thousands of minutes of tests to make sure that nothing is breaking. And I think that sort of combination of having a very solid agile framework with a great branching strategy that then ties to a testing methodology really allows people to move a lot faster because when you’re not breaking stuff and you don’t have to go back and fix it again, you’re able to move a lot faster.
I think my favorite quote from a customer Was that they had tracked the number of divorces that were going on in their team, a very large software and hardware company in Silicon Valley. They were literally having so many people are so frustrated with their jobs before Copado that they were tracking divorces.
And he said, his proudest accomplishment using our system was that people were able to go home for dinner and they were seeing the divorce rate go down on their teams. And I thought that was really cool because we don’t usually say DevOps and divorces, right? Those aren’t usually common thoughts that you have on the top of your head, but really giving people a solid agile development process and application lifecycle management process that allows them to document their work without doing a ton of work to do that.
Let’s them follow a process that they can stick to. That really leads to predictability and leads to quality. And once you have quality deliveries that are going out on a predictable basis, it leads to a much happier workforce, but a much happier set of users. So, I think that’s the core value proposition that we’re consistently delivering to over 1700 companies that are the largest customers of Salesforce.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. And early on in this, your response to this question was about the focus you put, the effort you put into quality assurance and QA. I think that was important, but, but I love the examples you shared, Ted, really do. I know this helps your customers tremendously, even if it isn’t divorce rates.
Right? So, um. Yeah. So, Ted, DevOps is continually evolving, especially with the rise of automation and AI. Where do you see the future of DevOps heading and how is Copado positioning itself to remain at the forefront of this transformation?
Ted Elliott: So first off, we talk about the White Walkers. I don’t know if you’re a Game of Thrones fan, but we believe that AI is the White Walkers for all technology as we know it.
Everything we do today, you’re going to be able to reduce a massive number of steps. And it creates a lot of challenges, actually, for software vendors. First off, you’re going to be more efficient, you’re going to need less users, and you’re going to probably use the software more than you’ve ever used it before.
So how as vendors do we deal with that? And I think what we’re doing is saying we need to be on the cutting edge of this technology and almost make our existing technology obsolete with our new technology. Right. We’ve been committed to this concept of a new way of work because we, we really do believe that we can make people even more efficient and that there’s no reason they have to click around in their applications as much.
There’s no reason they need to do a lot of the manual work that’s required to complete DevOps today. So, what I think you’re going to see from us, especially around automation and ai, is how many steps can we remove from every process while at the same time having step level improvements in documentation, step level improvements in development days.
To just give you an idea, Brian, we have reduced the number of days it takes for us to build a new feature from 42 days to 21 days. Using AI to help us automate our development process at the same time, we’ve reduced the number of dollars we have to spend to solve a support case by half. And we’ve seen our NPS score go up by 20 points.
So that is what happens when you all of a sudden use AI to completely change the way you’re delivering business. And we’re just getting started. So, what that tells me is that in the very near future, everything we know about how we build software, we deploy software, we use software, we operate is about to change.
So, you can either say, oh, well, let’s wait and see how it goes. Or you can say, let’s be leaders in that field and let’s drive, drive the change ourselves. And I, I think that’s kind of what we’ve decided is essential for Copado is how you drive it. One last example I’ll give you of this is that Salesforce has released a new initiative called Agent Force.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. But it’s, it’s Salesforce using AI and we said, okay, well, what’s the future of if Salesforce is a CRM is changing to more of an automation framework where you’re talking to bots. Is there a place for doing development? And what we determined is there absolutely is.
And I literally took all the videos and audio files I could find online of every discussion of agent force all the documentation we could find. I was on a plane flying from London to Newark. Yeah. I uploaded all those files in our AI, and by the time I landed, we had Copado’s DevOps tool building code for Agent Force, relying on that information that you could deploy.
So, that is just a fundamental change. Projects that took 16 weeks, 18 weeks to deliver, you’re going to start delivering them in 3 or 4 hours, at least a first cut, right? That’s going to really change how we think. And we have to be really careful that we still have process in the background, because every time we have a step level improvements of how to do work, sometimes we forget the rules of how to do the work.
And that’s when all of a sudden everything starts to break. Because if you’re in heavily regulated segments of the government or healthcare, you’ve got to have process and you have to have auditability and you have to have, here’s how we did this. And here’s where the work started. And you can’t sacrifice that.
And sometimes when you go into next new technology, because you have people who haven’t done this before, because they’re kind of breaking the glass. That gets lost. What we’re trying to do is build all those fundamental best practices into the background of the software we’re building so that we’re not falling backwards on the progress people made and how to deliver.
We’re building upon it. So, I don’t know if that answers your question, but hopefully it did.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely really do appreciate you sharing some of the examples. Obviously, we need to embrace change. And if we can be part of that transformation, that is really important. You know, you talked about we need to get in there.
If it Take some leapfrogging iterations, that sort of thing, but we are making a difference in this space. And as you know, technology is moving at the speed of light, it seems these days, or speed of AI anyway, but Ted, I really appreciate that. And I want to let you know, it was a pleasure having you on today.
And I look forward to speaking with you real soon!
Ted Elliott: Thank you, Brian, for your time.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Ted Elliott Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
