Sedai 2023 Year in Review

Introduction

As we close the chapter on 2023, it's a time for reflection, celebration, and forward-thinking at Sedai. Our journey this year has been nothing short of remarkable, embodying our core mission to revolutionize cloud management through autonomous technology.  At Sedai, we have always been driven by a singular vision: to simplify and enhance cloud operations for organizations worldwide, leveraging the power of AI and machine learning to deliver optimized cost, performance and availability while freeing up teams.  Our suite of autonomous cloud management solutions is designed to tackle the complexities of modern cloud infrastructures, delivering unparalleled efficiency, cost savings, and performance optimization.

In this 2023 Year in Review, we delve into the milestones that have marked our journey. We highlight the expansion of our autonomous cloud management capabilities across a broad spectrum of technologies and nurturing meaningful relationships with our customers and industry partners. The stories told this year of transformation and success from our valued customers, such as KnowBe4, Palo Alto Networks and Belcorp, underscore the real-world impact and value of autonomous management.

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Sedai's 2023 Product Development Milestones

Sedai expanded its autonomous cloud management capabilities to span compute, storage and data technologies.  

In compute we were able to extend support across a range of traditional and modern applications:  

• Kubernetes: We announced general availability of autonomous management for Kubernetes (including EKS, AKS, GKE and On-Premises), which became the most popular technology by year-end.  This includes support for EKS running on Fargate.
• ECS: We also announced support for AWS ECS, further building out our partnership with AWS; we now have, to our knowledge, the only tool of its kind for ECS users.  Fargate is also supported.
• Virtual Machines (AWS, Azure): We also had repeated asks from customers to provide autonomous capabilities for traditional virtual machine apps and we announced limited availability for VMs on both AWS and Azure.

We also made our first moves into storage and data in 2023.  Typically compute is the largest single area of spend for customers but storage and data are typically second.  

• Storage: In storage we announced limited availability for AWS S3 for which we provides storage class management and intelligent tiering enablement. We also announced limited availability for AWS EBS for which we optimize utilization while ensuring performance.  
• Data streaming: Following customer requests we also announced limited availability for GCP Dataflow.

Recognizing the growth in FinOps as a method to manage cloud spend, we also announced the limited availability of our Augmented FinOps service. 

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Autonomous Community Growth & Customer Success Stories

We hosted the second annual conference for autonomous cloud management, autocon/23, with 3x growth in live attendees from last year’s event.  A range of industry experts from companies including PayPal, RingCentral, TalkDesk, GSK, Paylocity and more shared their insights on the impact and importance of autonomous cloud management (see all the sessions here).  These sessions provide real world examples of what can be achieved with autonomous management and provide the autonomous community with thought leadership and together discover best practices.

Here are a few of the perspectives on autonomous adoption:

• “Autonomy is a competitive advantage .. and that competitive advantage allows you to take great, smart engineers and allow them to focus on being artists and not having to be mechanics” - Sri Shivananda, EVP & CTO, PayPal
• “I think autonomous is not the future. It's actually something teams should be thinking about using today. For cost, for value to customer, for speed.  To me, it's a no brainer.” - Siddharth Ram, CTO, Velocity Global
• “I can actually embrace Sedai and get to Level 5 [100% autonomy] in a very compressed timeline. That means the people who work on these systems would be free to work on better tasks that will help contribute towards better business. That means we get to put more towards R&D and not just towards running the business.” - Rachit Lohani, CPO & CTO, Paylocity

We also put the spotlight this year at autocon/23 on implementations within cybersecurity, a fast growing vertical for autonomous management.  Below is a summary of results from two key companies who have adopted Sedai as part of their autonomous management approach:

We were also delighted with some of the feedback we received earlier in the year including this Sedai customer comment “In the past few years, I have been part of countless demos and trials with various vendors. This has been probably my personal most successful vendor that we've signed up with".

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Industry Recognition for Autonomous Management and Sedai in 8 Gartner Hype Cycles

Gartner plays a key role in guiding their more than 15,000 customers and especially large enterprises on emerging technologies. Gartner had already predicted in 2022 that "by 2026, organizations performing real-time cost or performance optimization of cloud-based workloads will rise from less than 20% in 2022 to 50%".  Gartner further developed their perspective on autonomous cloud management in 2023.    

Gartner identified “autonomous workload optimization” as a new category in their 2023 Hype Cycles, and included Sedai as a vendor.  Gartner also defined an “AI-Augmented Software Engineering” category, and included Sedai.  Gartner considers this latter category Transformational, and it includes both development centric tools like Github Copilot and OpenAI’s Codex as well as operations driven tools like Sedai.  

Overall we were included in 8 Hype Cycles, very rare for a company at Sedai’s stage (see the full list and links to the reports at the end of the blog).

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Conclusion

We’re delighted with the headway we made in 2023 in making autonomous cloud capabilities available to cloud users in so many new product categories.  Seeing autonomous users like KnowBe4, Palo Alto Networks and Belcorp benefit by adopting autonomous management was the highlight for our team.  We're excited with Gartner's acknowledgment and pleased to be expanding our partnership with AWS.  We’re looking forward to 2024 with confidence that autonomous cloud management will make further strides in improving cost, performance and availability for cloud users while reducing their manual toil and freeing up their teams to do their best work.  

We’d welcome your feedback on where we landed in 2023 and where we should head in 2024 so please feel free to reach me on LinkedIn or contact our team via email.

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Sources

Predicts 2023: Observing and Optimizing the Adaptive Organization, 17 November 2022 By Gregg Siegfried, Jim Scheibmeir, Mrudula Bangera, Bjarne Munch, Matt Crossley

Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2023, 2 August 2023, by Arun Chandrasekaran, Melissa Davis

Hype Cycle for Software Engineering, 2023, 1 August 2023, by Dave Micko, Joachim Herschmann, Mark O'Neill

Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps, 2023, 27 July 2023, by Keith Mann, Joachim Herschmann, Akis Sklavounakis

Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2023, 21 July 2023, by Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Mark Driver, Anne Thomas, Nitish Tyagi

Hype Cycle for IT Management Intelligence, 2023, 20 July 2023, by Cameron Haight

Hype Cycle for Site Reliability Engineering, 2023, 7 July 2023, by Hassan Ennaciri, Chris Saunderson, Daniel Betts

Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability, 2023, 10 July 2023, by Pankaj Prasad & Padraig Byrne

Hype Cycle for Generative AI, 2023, 11 August 2023, by Arun Chandrasekaran & Leinar Ramos