AWS for Software Companies Podcast

PagerDuty SVP Rukmini Reddy explains why AI is making software operations exponentially more complex — and why the companies that learn and recover fastest will be the ones that win.
Topics Include:
PagerDuty powers critical digital operations for enterprises and AI-native companies.
Founded by early AWS employees who experienced always-on system failures firsthand.
The platform evolved from simple alerting into a full operational intelligence platform.
Complexity exploded with microservices, cloud-native infrastructure, and multi-cloud environments.
Reliability must be a core value — not an operational afterthought.
PagerDuty's culture champions the customer above everything else.
Employee recognition extends beyond sales to celebrate the whole business.
AI is accelerating software creation but making operations far more complex.
AI fails differently — silently, unpredictably, with a much larger blast radius.
Enterprises should leverage their operational history as a competitive AI asset.
AI-native companies must build operational resilience early, not bolt it on later.
The winners won't build fastest — they'll learn and recover fastest.

Participants:
Rukmini Reddy – Senior Vice President of Engineering, PagerDuty

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From cracked data foundations to multi-agent AI, Starburst Data's co-founder shares hard-won lessons on getting the right data, not just more of it.
Topics Include:
Matthew Fuller, co-founder and VP of Product at Starburst Data, joins the show.
Starburst is built on Trino, a fast SQL engine for federated data queries.
Their platform lets users query data across lakes, stores, and databases seamlessly.
Governed "data products" give organizations access to their full data estate in context.
A strong data foundation is essential before any AI use case can succeed.
AI doesn't create data problems — it exposes the cracks already there.
Common mistake: assuming everyone in an org defines "customer" or "revenue" the same way.
More data isn't always better — getting the right data is what matters.
Customers include HSBC, Comcast, Zalando, ZoomInfo, and DBS, many running on AWS.
AWS partnership spans technical support, SLA reliability, and proactive product briefings.
Advice for product leaders: always anchor new technology back to the customer problem.
2026 will be defined by specialized multi-agents working together autonomously.

Participants:
Matt Fuller – Co-Founder, Vice President of Product, Starburst Data

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Find out why the world's largest banks and enterprises trust CockroachDB for mission-critical infrastructure, and what a decade of AWS partnership means for the future of cloud-native data.
Topics Include:
Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built for resilience.
It delivers cloud-native consistency that legacy relational databases simply cannot match.
The name "cockroach" reflects survivability — it's designed to never go down.
Target customers include major banks, trading platforms, retailers, and gaming companies.
AI is forcing enterprises to accelerate database modernization from the board level down.
AWS has been a foundational cloud partner for Cockroach Labs for a decade.
The CockroachDB-AWS integration spans EC2, S3, Bedrock, and Amazon Q-Transform.
AWS partnership shapes both product roadmap decisions and go-to-market execution.
New partners should educate themselves first — AWS programs are deep and extensive.
CockroachDB now supports native vector search for RAG and generative AI applications.
Agentic AI could mean trillions of digital agents demanding real-time data infrastructure.
Database modernization and AI adoption will only accelerate dramatically through 2027.

Participants:
Cassie Zimmerman – Senior Director, Global Strategic Partnerships, Cockroach Labs

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Greg Murphy of Vectra AI explains why no single security tool is enough in 2026, and how AI is transforming overwhelmed security teams into lean, highly responsive defense operations.
Topics Include:
Vectra AI helps enterprises detect and respond to cyberattacks before they become breaches.
CISOs face millions of alerts monthly with dangerously understaffed security teams.
Vectra pioneered AI-driven triage to prioritize only the most critical threats.
The result: analysts act on two or three alerts, not thousands.
Generative AI is now actively being weaponized by sophisticated bad actors.
The first fully AI-orchestrated cyberattack by a nation state has already happened.
Vectra and AWS Bedrock are building autonomous agents to fight back.
Agentic AI can investigate thousands of incidents and surface only what matters.
Over-reliance on single tools like EDR leaves dangerous gaps in defense.
Modern attacks move fluidly across identity, network, and cloud environments simultaneously.
AI stitches cross-surface signals together, revealing attacks hidden in isolated events.
Best practice: assume breach, expand your network definition, and layer best-of-breed solutions.

Participants:
Greg Murphy – Chief Business Officer, Vectra AI

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If you're betting on agentic AI, hear directly from the builders navigating the challenges, innovating pricing models, and creating the coming reality where every employee manages thousands of agents.
Topics Include:
Four panelists represent the full AI stack: build, run, secure, monitor.
Agentic AI moved faster than anyone predicted just 18 months ago.
Writer AI's no-code agent builder missed both its target personas entirely.
Non-technical users now just prompt agents instead of building workflows.
Fireworks AI processes over ten trillion tokens daily across open models.
DeepSeek's Christmas release tripled Fireworks' capacity needs almost overnight.
Okta identified agent identity as a security problem from day one.
91% of organizations are already using AI agents in some capacity.
Datadog evolved naturally from dashboards to autonomous investigative agents.
Bits.ai agents now diagnose production incidents before engineers wake up.
Trust requires explainability — black-box agents stall enterprise adoption cold.
Human-in-the-loop remains essential; risk tolerance varies wildly by organization.
Writer AI compressed a four-month retail workflow down to one week.
Multi-provider inference consistency is one of the hardest unsolved infrastructure problems.
Agentic pricing models are fundamentally broken for enterprise budget planning today.
Agents managing agents means every employee becomes a manager of thousands.
POC data gaps are the most underrated blocker to production deployment.
Security must be designed in from the start — retrofitting is painful.
Build evaluations first so you know if you're actually improving anything.
Find your uniquely differentiated data and build your agentic bet there.

Participants:
Yannick Guillerm – Regional Manager, Sales Engineering, Datadog
Ray Thai – Director of Product Management, Fireworks AI
Andrew Yu – Vice President of Engineering, Okta
Matan-Paul Shetrit – Director of Product Management, Writer AI
Moderator: Carol Potts – General Manager, North America ISV Sales, AWS

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/