Ahead of the Dynatrace Perform 2024 event taking place in Las Vegas from Jan 29 - Feb 1, 2024, VMblog reached out to Bob Wambach, VP of product marketing at Dynatrace, to get a behind the scenes look at the upcoming event.

VMblog:  Can you give us a quick overview of Dynatrace?  What should folks know? 

Bob Wambach:  IT teams face significant challenges managing complex multicloud and hybrid environments due to a lack of visibility and control. To solve this, Dynatrace provides deep observability insights and runtime application security combined with predictive, causal, and generative AI in a unified platform to deliver answers and intelligent automation from data. Dynatrace analytics and automation capabilities enable teams to modernize and optimize cloud operations, deliver software faster and more securely, and ensure flawless digital experiences.

As organizations continue to innovate in the cloud, the volume and complexity of data and applications make it impossible for them to effectively manage using traditional tools and strategies. AI-driven analytics and automation are key - and to be successful, organizations need modern observability platforms, like the Dynatrace platform, that can continuously and automatically discover, map, analyze and manage applications at scale. 

VMblog:  What can attendees expect at Perform 2024?

Wambach:  Dynatrace Perform 2024 is a premier event for cloud observability and security, AI, DevSecOps, and more, taking place from January 29 to February 1, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Attendees can expect mainstage sessions with Dynatrace leaders and executives from some of the world's most well-known brands, networking opportunities with professionals across the globe, inspiring keynotes from tech leaders and game changers, an event expo highlighting industry and workforce best practices, and live breakout learning sessions designed to help them explore the latest trends in observability, AI, DevSecOps, and more.

You can find more information on Perform 2024 on our website.

VMblog:  Will this year's event have any online/digital components?  Or is it strictly for in-person attendees?

Wambach:  This year's event will have both in-person and virtual components, so attendees can choose to join us live in Las Vegas or virtually at home.

Virtual attendees will be able to livestream keynotes, watch mainstage sessions, and receive access to all on-demand content.

You can register for in-person or virtual attendance by following this link.   

VMblog:  What should attendees take away from Perform 2024?

Wambach:  The explosion of data in modern cloud environments, combined with the rapidly changing competitive landscape brought on by generative AI, has left many organizations scrambling to keep up with the staggering pace of innovation. They are also facing difficult decisions as they strive to balance investments, risks and costs.

Organizations are seeking ways to drive digital transformation while managing cloud costs and business risks, and they're also determining the best approaches to harness AI and automation to drive productivity and innovation. Empowering teams to innovate, drive efficiencies, outpace competitors, and thrive in tomorrow's cloud will require a transition from legacy monitoring solutions to modern observability architectures. With more than a decade of AI leadership, Dynatrace has become the platform of choice for the world's largest enterprise and public sector environments. Dynatrace combines causal, predictive, and generative AI to solve application and environment complexity that's beyond human ability to manage.

VMblog:  Without asking you to give up too much information, what plans do you have for this year's keynote?  What are some of the hot topics you'll cover?  What type of announcements can we expect?  Which executives plan on taking the stage?

Wambach:  We have some exciting plans for this year's keynotes. Rick McConnell, Dynatrace CEO, will present our opening keynote titled ‘A vision for a cloud done right,' and he will be joined by Colleen Kozak, the company's Chief Transformation Officer. Rick will provide an in-depth look into the state of the industry, the market insights he's gleaned over the past year, and what's on tap for 2024.

One of the highlights for attendees will be ‘The Dynatrace difference' presented by Rick, Bernd Greifeneder, Dynatrace Founder and CTO, and Steve Tack, SVP of Product. During this keynote, they will underscore the challenges organizations face and explore what makes the Dynatrace platform radically different from alternative offerings.

In terms of announcements, we'll showcase new innovations that will extend our AI, observability, and security leadership to help organizations keep up with today's rapid pace of innovation.

VMblog:  What trends do you see shaping 2024 that attendees should be aware of?

Wambach:  We are expecting several trends to come to fruition in 2024. Some of these include:

The world will go composite in its approach to AI. 

In 2024, generative AI enters the later stages of its hype cycle, and organizations will realize the technology, while transformational, cannot deliver meaningful value by itself.

Findings from our recent survey, "The state of AI 2024: Challenges to adoption and key strategies for organizational success," reveal that while 83% of technology leaders say AI has become mandatory, 95% say generative AI would be more beneficial if it were enriched and prompted by other types of AI. As a result, they will move toward a composite AI approach that combines generative AI with other types of artificial intelligence and additional data sources. This approach will enable more advanced reasoning and bring precision, context, and meaning to the outputs produced by generative AI. For example, DevOps teams will combine generative AI with fact-based causal and predictive AI to supercharge digital innovation by predicting and preventing issues before they occur and generating new workflows to automate the software delivery lifecycle. 

Data observability will become mandatory.

In 2024, data observability will become mandatory as organizations seek to drive more intelligent automation and faster decision-making.

The volume of data continues to double every two years, and organizations seek to ingest and analyze it faster and at a greater scale. However, the cost and risk of poor-quality data are more significant than ever. In a recent survey, 57% of DevOps practitioners said the absence of data observability makes it difficult to drive automation in a compliant way. As a result, organizations will increasingly demand solutions that provide data observability, enabling them to rapidly and securely ingest high-quality and reliable data that is ready for analytics on demand.

Increased data observability will enable users such as IT operations and business analytics teams to understand the availability of data and the structure, distribution, relationships, and lineage of that data across all sources, including different platforms in distributed hybrid and multicloud environments. This understanding is essential to generating insights that users can trust by ensuring the freshness of data, identifying anomalies, and eliminating duplicates that could lead to errors. 

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