“Data is complex, it's messy, it doesn’t live in one place” — how Dynatrace leveraged its own platform to drive digital transformation

Steve Tack and Colleen Kozak of Dynatrace
(Image credit: Future - Benedict Collins)

At Dynatrace Perform 2024, the word of the day was observability. Having the power to look at business data and understand how it can be best utilized to drive business transformation.

Steve Tack, Dynatrace’s SVP Product, and Colleen Kozak, CTO explained in the opening hours of the Las Vegas conferences how the company leveraged its own platform to transform the business.

The main obstacle Dynatrace faced in pursuing their cloud modernization was in collating contextualized high quality data that could be trusted and shared between teams.

Purifying the data pipeline

The Dynatrace platform provides cloud and technology integration, giving businesses total observability over their data all in one place. As Tack pointed out, “Transformation is going to depend on that data being in the right hands at the right time at the right place.”

The first example that Kozak provided in how Dynatrace utilized its own platform is in combating disruptive fields, “that historically would cascade through all of your applications and all of your systems and impact many cross-functional users.”

By combining the power of Grail - Dynatrace’s cloud analytics application - with the Davis AI, these cascading events can be observed, tracked and stopped by automating the recognition of these disruptive events and preventing them from happening in the first place.

The second challenge restricting the Dynatrace digital transformation was the code to cache process, which Kozak said involves 15 teams, five systems and 10 integrations across those systems from start to finish. The length and complexity of this process was having a direct impact on the business, particularly in regard to the time to process quotes and transactions.

By once again utilizing the combined power of the Davis AI and Grail, they were able to identify exactly which processes within the chain were taking a longer amount of time than necessary, and identify the manual stops intermixed within them. The observability of the Dynatrace platform provided real-time data insights that could then be used to automate and optimize the process.

Kozak also provided a customer use case of the Dynatrace platform, whereby a European telecommunications company was able to map out an upcoming product launch to optimize not only the customer experience, but also the logistics and their internal business processes. Kozak concluded that, “the team was able to deliver the most successful Iphone launch in history. It's pretty amazing.”

“They were able to increase the overall traffic while at the same time lowering the bounce rates and having zero percent degradation, which ultimately resulted in an overall [increased] number of upgrades and an increase in their sales.”

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Benedict Collins
Staff Writer (Security)

Benedict has been writing about security issues for over 7 years, first focusing on geopolitics and international relations while at the University of Buckingham. During this time he studied BA Politics with Journalism, for which he received a second-class honours (upper division),  then continuing his studies at a postgraduate level, achieving a distinction in MA Security, Intelligence and Diplomacy. Upon joining TechRadar Pro as a Staff Writer, Benedict transitioned his focus towards cybersecurity, exploring state-sponsored threat actors, malware, social engineering, and national security. Benedict is also an expert on B2B security products, including firewalls, antivirus, endpoint security, and password management.