Chief Technology Officer, Qlik Technologies Inc. (QlikTech)
Mike Potter, Chief Technology Officer for Qlik, at Qlik Connect 2024
We caught up with Mike Potter, Chief Technology Officer for Qlik, while at Qlik Connect 2024 in Orlando.
Press PLAY and tune-in to this conversation where we discussed:
Overview of how Mikes exciting role as CTO functions throughout the Qlik ecosystem
Impact of acquisitions to Mike's CTO role & how he and his team manage to deliver success every time
The recent evolution of the role of CTO as AI becomes “baked into the DNA” of everything we use
Mike's thoughts around the key announcements, Talend Data Cloud, Qlik Answers, overall GenAI story at Qlik Connect 2024
Advice Mike can offer you...
Transcript (19 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
We are here at Qlik Connect 2024. I have the pleasure of being joined by Mike Potter. Now Mike is the Chief Technology Officer at Qlik. Mike, great to see you. Thank you so much for making time to join me and welcome to the show. Well, we're still at the tail end of the second day of an amazing, huge event, and I imagine by now you've had so much come at you from different angles with your partners, your integrators, your resellers, your overall integration ecosystem, and your own team that you often probably don't get to see. Then there's been some very big announcements, whether it's your relationship with AWS taking the next natural evolution step, or the completion of the Talend integration with Data Cloud, and your more recent smaller acquisitions with regard to what's essentially evolved into Qlik Answers. I wonder if you could maybe just walk us through not just so much your role specifically, but sort of the types of challenges you've had to face as Chief Technology Officer over the last 12 to 18 months with one of the bigger acquisitions for a long time and then some of the smaller ones, and what sort of challenges that presents beyond your normal day-to-day CTO role.
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Mike Potter1:08
Well, I mean, there are lots of different types of CTO, and sometimes the type of CTO you have to play really depends on what's needed at the time, right? And so when we joined forces with Talend, it not only represented the single biggest acquisition that Qlik has ever done, but it also represented a new level of complexity, not only in terms of how do we integrate the product, but how do we integrate clouds, how do we integrate all the functions, ways of working, etc. And so my role was really about ensuring that as we started to formulate the new business units around data integration and data analytics, that I provided a level of consistency across the portfolio, making sure that the architecture, the platform, how our cloud operates at scale, and then the production as well as design and just how we build and deliver software on a continuous basis has a consistent approach. Working very closely with the BUs so that they could really focus on being productive while ensuring that the guard rails and the safety nets are there around quality and around making sure that we don't actually break our production environment. So a lot of things to juggle, a lot of things to consider, and also the fact that we're learning how each other's worked, new cultures involved, new people, and so it made for a very busy year.
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Interviewer2:33
It would indeed, and congratulations on pulling it all together on all of those fronts. Yeah, I imagine there's also though you've got a slightly unfair advantage in that you are a data company, you are a technology company, so in many ways you're your own first customer, using your own tools to implement some of those. Is that fair to say?
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Mike Potter2:51
Yes, yeah, I think for us it's a big part of what we do is actually measuring ourselves. And one of the things that I'm particularly proud of over the past year is we really took a lot of effort around cost-based architecture in the cloud. You know, we want to maintain a high margin value for what we deliver with our SaaS offering, and every time you change the cloud you run the risk of breaking that. And so we've developed a real discipline throughout the organization to understand not only where our costs are today but what changes occur to help us reduce costs versus increase costs. And I'm really proud to say that while we have had nonlinear growth across all 13 workloads that we have, at the same time we reduced cost by 10%.
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Interviewer3:37
Wow, so that's a non-trivial dollar figure. Yeah, somebody's getting a bonus somewhere there, I hope. When we were off camera a moment ago, you mentioned that you've got a broader remit than just within Qlik and the various organizations you bring together, but also within your ecosystem of partners, integrators, and resellers, and your customers. I wonder if you can just give us a sense of kind of what that feels like as far as the CTO function goes, liaising with them, working with them, integrating with them, and I guess in many ways supporting them.
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Mike Potter4:10
Well, so one of the things that is really important is making sure that we are customer-first in our approach. And in fact, I actually have a team in my group called Customer First, and they work very closely with our support organization, our field teams, our partners, to make sure that the customer orientation is always at the top of the priority. And at the same time, dealing with it both proactively, ensuring customers are set up for success, but also when there's an escalation, really shortcutting the turnaround time and helping the R&D teams get right to where the problem is, get a fix to the customer, and managing and supporting the teams in the field and support to make sure that happens. And so on top of that, I have lots of great opportunity to sit down and talk to customers, speak with partners as well, just to make sure they're being heard and making sure that that translates into what ultimately will land either as requirements on the product, requirements in the architecture, or requirements in terms of supporting them. And then internally we also have to do the same thing, right? Because our customer success team often needs things from the product so that they can do their jobs. And so having a close liaison with them as a form of customer also is important.
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Interviewer5:28
Yeah, you are your own first customer anyway. And all of what you said there speaks directly to I guess what has been the core of Qlik as an organization, which is just listening to your customers and implementing what they require as opposed to trying to build something that they may or may not need. I know last year a lot of the messaging around this event was that very thing of bringing everyone together and listening to those customers, having those conversations. And this year has built on that yet again, so many people meeting together, having conversations, talking about what they're doing together and how they can build each other up, and then Qlik is being at the table able to listen to that and figure out how they can then take those learnings away and build on to that. I wonder if I can get you to maybe just share also some of your thoughts around how you see the evolution of CTO evolving as AI becomes sort of quote-unquote baked into the DNA of everything we use.
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Mike Potter6:15
Well, I think the advancements we've made with the advent of gen AI and technologies like ChatGPT has really changed a lot around our relationship with our customers. That technology I think really opened up the aperture to a broader audience of varied skills and being able to interact with systems in a new and novel way. And I think that's had a real ripple effect in terms of how we approach building software moving forward. There's going to be an expectation that not only being able to interact with unstructured data, but also being able to interact with structured data in a similar fashion. And we've always had that capability through our Qlik interfaces and things like that, but now what we're talking about is the world of structured and unstructured together, and that's a new way of looking at it from an AI perspective. More importantly, I think what AI is doing is it's also forcing us to rethink the way we even build software. So being able to leverage co-pilots in terms of empowering developers to be more productive, being able to use the technology to help with generation of test cases and building test data, synthesized data for building and testing. So it has an impact on the product we build, it has impact on the way we build it, and then last but not least, I think it also has an impact on the way we look at how we scale, right? And how we perform in a production environment, because these technologies can be very expensive if done badly. You have to be very smart about what use cases we go after and how we solve for them.
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Interviewer7:55
Yes, things break very quickly when they move quickly. I was talking to Chris Poell, your associate who's your Chief Marketing Officer, and he was saying that a lot of the change in his world has been things like having a junior copywriter that's a gen AI. And I imagine eventually we're going to have a point where there's like a junior coder who's a gen AI, and a junior log checker, and so forth. And do you see that sort of then bringing a substantial, what's the word I'm looking for, an additional breadth to the team, where if you have one subject matter expert, if they can have 20 or 30 gen AI tools, then expanding that, it's almost like adding a fifth and sixth finger or what it might be to your team, without necessarily the human cost of another job?
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Mike Potter8:37
Yeah, I think we've always had the benefit of code generation, and it's been around for 30 years, 40 years, right? I think what's different this time around is really just the level of accessibility for developers as they're doing their jobs. And I think the goal of it is to make sure that developers start working on really producing novel code, code that is really the core IP, that is really the secret sauce, while more routine development activities become progressively more automated. However, it doesn't take the developer off the hook. If they leverage a technology like this, they are ultimately accountable for the code that gets produced by it, and they have to understand how it works because otherwise it can't be maintained. And so I think there's still some time to go by to decide how much of a productivity gain we'll ultimately get. It'll definitely change the landscape, but I think there's going to be some wins and some losses as a result.
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Interviewer9:39
Yeah, there's always that risk as you just alluded there to something becoming a black box, and we know how we build it and we know what we feed it, but we then generally don't know what's happening inside it to put out the stuff we're thinking we want from it, and therefore we have questions to ask around that.
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Mike Potter9:53
Right, well, and if you have a situation where you have a defect in this generated code and your developers don't know how it works, you're going to extend your turnaround time for resolution because they've got to learn the code, right? Particularly if they haven't taken the time to learn it upfront. And so there's some really interesting challenges there with that. At the same time, there could be some huge productivity gains if you do it the right way. And so it's really about building that culture and reestablishing that culture around development with this type of technology.
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Interviewer10:25
And that's in essence what Qlik has been offering for now 31 years, isn't it? The ability to figure out what's happening in your data and make it sensible and usable, then do the analysis on it and then get some sort of insights into it. And listening to what you're saying there now, a lot of that sort of baked into the DNA, what you're doing with regard to how you approach not just the challenges of acquisitions that are Herculean challenges, but also your day-to-day tasks and working with your customers. I wonder if you could wrap us up with some advice that you might offer your peers in the sort of CTO role and the associated roles with regard to where Qlik can help them address the very same types of challenges that you deal with on a day-to-day basis, particularly not just so much the data aspect but also how they approach their adoption of AI. And often people are saying that AI is happening to them faster than they can cope with. What sort of advice would you give to your peer CTOs as to how they approach not just the data element but also now the adoption of AI?
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Mike Potter11:22
Yeah, I think the simplest message I could offer is that AI, generative AI, it's not a quick fix on a good data strategy. It's not a quick fix on an analytic strategy. It's not a quick fix on the skill sets and the types of employees that you need to be successful. In many respects, it actually emphasizes the need to have those things in place because you need good data in order to build good analytics in order for the AI to really be a force multiplier. And so where I worry about is sometimes you see decisions getting made where they're hoping AI is a replacement for that, and that's shortsighted.
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Interviewer12:04
Yeah, it sort of comes back to a lot of messaging this week as well, which is that humans should still not only be in the loop but actually be overseeing and governing and directing, putting guard rails around it to ensure that it's going the direction we want.
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Mike Potter12:16
That's exactly right.
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Interviewer12:18
Well, Mike, fantastic to catch up with you. Thank you so much for making time. It's been great to have you on the show, and hopefully we'll have you back again soon. But congratulations on an amazing event around here. It's been fantastic to be part of it.
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Mike Potter12:26
And thank you very much for having me here, and safe travels getting back home.
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Interviewer12:30
And in the meantime, I hope you have a fantastic evening at the wrapping up event. Great, thank you. Thanks, Mike, appreciate it.