Guest: Rosalind Whitley (LinkedIn)
Company: Kentik (Twitter)
Show: 2024 Prediction Series

Kentik provides network-first observability for infrastructure and software up the stack starting with the network layer. The company provides observability for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, across all the public clouds and in data centers. Rosalind Whitley, Director of Product Marketing at Kentik, shares her predictions for 2024. This year may be the year to cut through some of the hype around AI as enterprises are starting to take it seriously. Kentik just launched Kentik AI to troubleshoot complex networking issues. “I think we’re headed into the real AI era,” says Whitley.

Distributed applications have been on the rise for several years and enterprises are now doing multi-cloud at scale. However, as more companies have apps distributed across multiple public clouds and data centers, they need a network layer insight to help them cut transit and egress costs, cloud costs, or speed up their mean time to resolution. Throughout 2024, we will likely see companies prioritizing observability further down the stack.

While industry professionals may have been skeptical about how AI could become particularly useful, we are now seeing generative AI being used daily to help professionals do their specialized knowledge work faster. We are starting to see enterprises take it seriously and do the data governance work they need to do to take advantage of AI. During the coming year, we will see AI lowering the barrier to entry for knowledge. In observability, generative AI is being used to enable people who are not subject matter experts to ask questions of datasets in plain English. This will help organizations derive more diverse insights from the datasets, leading to more democratized decision-making.

2024 may also be the year for enterprises to be more realistic that platform engineering is not going to solve all of their infrastructure technical debt anytime soon. Many companies have set their sights on building custom IDP with their company’s bespoke blueprints and security guardrails. This year they may realize they are better off investing in their ability to observe and fix everything throughout its lifecycle rather than buying into the IDP hype.

Infrastructure sprawl and technical debt are going to continue to be huge challenges for organizations in the coming year. As companies grow, this has consequences on the infrastructure and working through these consequences can be slower than the business processes around them. Kentik will continue to work with customers to help solve these pain points.

Kentik’s focuses for 2024 are letting infrastructure and network engineers answer any question about their networks and looking for new ways to help their customers correlate data faster. The core ideas of this include how companies can turn data into instant understanding, and from there, how to turn the understanding into solved problems while making it more automatic and accessible.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.