Passionate about fulfilling the promise of Continuous Application Reliability. Placing human empathy at the center. Key contributor to three successful SaaS exits
I’ve spent a lifetime in the application performance management space, now part of Observability. I prefer to call it application resiliency, a term I learned from David Lewis, as his vendor at Dynatrace and his employee at BNY Mellon. Some years ago, after many years with industry pioneers like Mercury Interactive, Compuware and Dynatrace, I made a bold move to the customer side. When BNY Mellon asked me to oversee performance for all applications across the Bank's LOBs, I was both excited and daunted. There, I invested heavily in vendor technologies. Despite multi-million dollar investments in tools, it took us hours and hundreds of people in war rooms to determine the root cause and remediation steps. Then, we had the tough job of explaining the penalties and next steps. It’s not that these technologies failed—they offered unprecedented visibility into application tiers we didn’t have before! However, they weren’t designed to instantly separate root causes from symptoms. They provided data, but we still needed my talented team—almost 70 brave souls I feel so thankful for (I couldn’t have done it without them!)—to interpret and act on it. And now it is more difficult than ever due to cloud native environments and microservices. I dream of something better—continuous application service assurance with no disruption, at all! When I left the Bank, I joined Shmuel Kliger to tackle this issue at the infrastructure level for virtual and cloud environments, which we did, at IBM Turbonomic! And now, enter Shmuel, once again! I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve joined Causely to tackle the problem I’ve been gearing up to solve my entire career: ensuring continuous application reliability without disruption. At Causely, we aim for our Causal AI, not humans, to consume observability data, ensuring seamless service performance and business continuity. A huge thanks to Shmuel Kliger, Ellen Rubin, Aaron Holiday, Peter Bell, Daniel Karp, Endre Sara, Enlin Xu, Christine Miller, Akhand Singh, Brandon Kearns and the entire Causely Team for believing in me and giving me this chance to 'come back'. And to my friends out there, stay tuned! I also want to express my gratitude to my friend and mentor Mark Treschl, and to Mario Ciabarra, Glenn Trattner and Quantum Metric for allowing me to grow and learn over the past 4.5 years in one of my best professional experiences ever, where I was inspired by translating technology to human empathy, and working with the single best Customer Success Team I know of. I couldn’t be more excited to join this team I fully trust - the same thought leadership that addressed this in network management at Smarts (now EMC) and infrastructure and cloud at IBM Turbonomic. This has been ~30 years in the making! And it is NOW here. I changed my entire life and my career to come here - if you are curious about it, send me a message and let’s chat! https://www.causely.io/ 🙏🏽 #Causely #CausalAI #SRE #DevOps #Kubernetes
Hey Francis, one last thought (and then I promise I'll quiet down!) Many of us on this thread likely know each other, and I understand the common desire to expand our knowledge. A couple of weeks ago, I published an article Beyond The Blast Radius about the challenges of managing service disruptions in Cloud Native Environments + a video to promote this. It explores how seemingly simple issues can snowball into widespread service disruptions (CHAOS) with significant business impact. The article also dives into "Causal Reasoning" as a unique approach to mitigating these challenges that minimizes disruptions and the business impact. Here's the connection: As you interact with customers and suspect they're facing similar problems, consider mentioning this concept (Francis and Causely) as something worth exploring further. It might be a valuable resource for them. Link to video - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-mallaband-88b1b7_sre-devops-platformengineering-activity-7209163018562105346-hwen?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-mallaband-88b1b7_platformengineering-observability-incidentresponse-activity-7213944748724662272-mlxQ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
So excited to see everything you build here! They are so lucky to have ya! Isildur knew, man. <3
So happy for you and excited for Shmuel and team. You joined a great team who’s proven in delivering enterprise software that solves real issues. Excited to hear more. You’re the perfect fit!!!
LEGENDARY
Huge congratulations, Francis Cordón - Causely is lucky to have you!
The dream team!
Congrats Francis!
An amazing journey. Your heart is in this and you'll do great. All the best, my friend.
Helping Tech Leaders & Innovators To Achieve Exceptional Results
1moYou knew all along this makes sense! The world of Cloud Native Applications & Real Time Data introduced a whole new level of complexity to operations. A single service with a problem can have a big effect, impacting many other services, end users and customers. In many businesses today even a minute of disruption as the website says can "cripple your business". It clearly makes sense to exploit the capabilities of Causal Reasoning to transform the labour intensive task of triage and troubleshooting into an automated process. Looking forward to working with you to exploit the opportunity that lies ahead. 🚀