Three reasons why I joined Dynatrace: a killer AIOps tech company

In a short summary, this post alludes to the importance of following a framework and listening to your gut & intrinsic motivations when making personal & professional choices. Furthermore, the post also provides a quick tour of my experiences and inner workings that motivated me to join a market-leading Observability & AIOps brand called Dynatrace. At my previous company, we looked at Dynatrace as a serious rival and last thing I could expect is joining their local Team. :) In colloquials, things (s***) happen.

On a more serious note, if you are facing a career dilemma and struggling to making a choice between few great brands, read on. I am certain you’ll be able to mimic my approach and find your nirvana like a boss.

The Backstory

To me personally, this article serves as an autobiography of my experiences that I will fondly look at sometimes in the future. Mid-way in my sales engineering career, I faced a huge dilemma that turned challenging to untangle and digest. However, I’m super stoked about the subsequent outcomes and the journey that led me here. Today, I joined Dynatrace APJ Family as a full-time Sales Engineering member.

In hindsight, when making difficult choices between fantastic opportunities, I tend to look at these things:

1. People you’ll work with everyday (your human ecosystem)
2. Total addressable market (I casually call this the “potential scoop”)
3. The platform or technology (what you represent & sell)

I didn’t have a recipe per se, but, during retrospection I realised that the above framework acted as my north star.

In the next section, I will provide a deep-dive into each of these reasons which acted as the core tenets which helped me make an educated judgment. Trust me when I say that I tried my best to find a reason(s) to not join Dynatrace purely out of concerns of joining a competitor, but after all it didn’t matter because historically I’ve been married to my customer problems the most.

Pandemic Revelation — First Reason.

This was the day when I first realised that I need to look for a new career. The seed was sown and I had to curb the curiosity by exploration. I was overwhelmed with the response. Almost, all competitive Observability brands were keen to onboard me. Many start-ups launching in APJ were on the look out for experienced Presales Leads, and even companies outside my traditional pool were keen.

It goes without saying, 2020 was a crazy year for all of us, we were forced to coop into our echo chambers, shunned from public gatherings, and the local business district went eerie quiet. On a positive note, there is a lot to be excited about the forthcoming autonomous future. To talk about a few things — robo-taxis, genome engineering, hyper loops, satellite delivered internet, modern software development, and code-less development are just a few things to look forward to. When I first read American Inventor Ray Kurzweil’s book — The singularity is near, it all started to make sense. The current buzz and hype around AI applications in every aspect of our lives, both personal & professional, is completely justified. The above discovery was the first opportunity for me to start thinking about a career outside New Relic. I had to look for a ML/AI vendor with a large serviceable & obtainable market. My early contenders were Traceable, Lightstep, Google Cloud ML & AI services, Dynatrace AIOps Platform, and Planet.

1 point for Gryffindor (aka Dynatrace).

With Dynatrace, I found the best of both worlds, I get to continue sharing my passion for Digital Transformation, Site Reliability & Intelligent Observability, plus, dabble with AI & ML on a daily basis. A lot of you may have heard about a huge demand for real-time protection solutions (DevSecOps) — from user down to the last-mile system at the tail-end of the micro-services or modern software architecture. Quite impressively, Dynatrace showed an intention to penetrate that market. Furthermore, many new startups and even Jyoti Bansal who founded AppDynamics had made significant investments on a brand new startup Traceable.ai in this space. This was a proof that DevSecOps or in more words — Automated & Intelligent Observability with Real Time protection is going to be prime time.

Second Reason.

Even though, I could have worked with the leadership at New Relic and created a new role that fit the purpose, I had a higher purpose to serve.

Don’t exploit, explore.

It was time to explore. During my Master Degree in Entrepreneurship At HEC Paris (No. 1 B-school 2020), I learned that overarching all the technology & business, human-to-human connection is key. It’s a people’s business you see, hence, one of the most important criteria for me to finalise a new opportunity had to be the people at this organisation. I started researching several platforms like Crunchbase, Capterra, G2crowd, Reddit, Ycombinator blogs in order to understand the wisdom of crowd. I read about everything ranging from support resources, field teams, product talents, sales leadership and customer success. Secondly, I started analysing the length of service of leadership and key contributors at the companies I had shortlisted including New Relic.

2nd major win for Dynatrace

Dynatrace was once more in the lead, with extremely stable leadership across the globe, and long tenures by advocates, PMs, propeller heads, presales advocates etc. To my surprise, when ~8 years ago, I was offered an Engagement Manager role at Compuware ASEAN division — several executives & heavyweights I met in the interview process (Eng Kiong, Eng Khoon, Mark Fetroll, Steve Apostolou, Rafi, Shabbir, Andreas, and Rob Vollum) were all still at the company. My mind was blown. I thought to myself what are the odds that all of them are still at the company. I concluded that there’s something special going on here.

Just want to clarify that there are always room for improvements, and I am not naive enough to assume that everything is perfect at Dynatrace :)

Third reason or the finale — the de-tangler of clusterf***.

One of the other mission-critical criterion for me was the technology itself. For many people — technology comes first and foremost and I totally get it, I’m not far from living that mantra. However, in my humble opinion, even the most ubiquitous and cutting edge technology requires certain key attributes in its favour. Some of those attributes for me and my past customers are:

1. Low operational toil: It the technology easy to onboard?
2. Does it solve more than a singular problem?
3. Does it create a rapid return on investment?
4. Does it enhance the day-in-the-life of my prospect at various level — personal level, organisation level, department level, etc.

In order to evaluate the options at hand, I started posing my qualifying questions at several APAC customers of the prospective companies. Next, leveraging publicly available knowledge and free trials I evaluated the use-cases delivered by the platforms I considered.

Not to my surprise, Dynatrace quickly shone at the top. I wasn’t surprised because in a few field opportunities, the competition I saw most difficult to take out was Dynatrace.

I know the alternatives were also great for my personal growth, on top of that some of the mentioned companies had a decent strategy to secure hyper-growth, or at least that’s how I saw it. But, at that stage, they didn’t meet all my key criteria.

After all my research, I knew I was ready to jet off my lily pad and take the leap of faith with Dynatrace. Most importantly, many thanks to Rafi Katanasho for keeping in touch over the years and humanising the conversations that led to my joining DT.

I hope you enjoyed reading through my experiencing and inner working, and hope that my framework will help you to solve difficult career situations that may arise at the next junction in your life.

Please leave your comments or narrate your personal experiences in the comments section below. Also, hit the applause button, if you liked my article.

Who am I?

My name is Nik Jain and I have been nicknamed as “Monitorjain” by my clients and former colleagues with whom I had a great run as an Observability advocate in the APAC Market. I love exploring new technologies, sales processes, and learning new skills from time to time. I’m a father, a husband, and a Observability specialist who knows a thing or two about modern software development, cloud adoption, digital transformation and site reliability.