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September 1, 2014 Issue

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Enterprise Release Management and Test Environment SaaS Solutions

 

About Plutora Inc.

www.plutora.com

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Plutora provides enterprise release management and test environment SaaS solutions to clients in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Leading companies across a variety of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, retail, pharmaceutical and media, rely on Plutora’s SaaS solutions to orchestrate releases and environments faster and with integrity.

 

Dalibor Siroky

Co Founder


Dalibor co-founded Plutora in 2012 with the vision of solving enterprise release management and test environment management challenges within large organizations using Plutora’s Enterprise SaaS solution. Prior to co-founding Plutora, Dalibor had 20 years experience in technology leadership, management consulting and business development roles in highly competitive markets in the Asia, US and EMEA.

 

Dalibor holds an M.S in Software Engineering with distinction from the University of Oxford and an M.B.A with honors from the University of Chicago. Dalibor is also a graduate of the Royal Military College of Australia and served as a Captain in the Army.

 

Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – September 1, 2014
 

CEOCFO: Mr. Siroky, what is the concept at Plutora?

Mr. Siroky: Plutora is an enterprise software company that enables organizations to manage their software releases, test environments and deployments with transparency and control. The value we provide to organization is accelerated time to value, reduced probability of release failure, and greater productivity through automation and collaboration.

 

Plutora operates in a niche segment that impacts everyone. As there is a technology component to most things companies do, any enhancements need part of a release and move through a number of environments, so Plutora can help.


CEOCFO: Would you give us an example of a common engagement you have with a company and maybe something more unusual so we can get a feel for your engagements?

Mr. Siroky: A common engagement at Plutora has a number of defining characteristics. To start with the organizations are large and complex. Organizations typically have more than 500 people in their IT function, manage more than 25 core applications with a lot of interdependencies between those applications, have distributed delivery teams, and also have elements of delivery that are dependent on outsourced partners. Superimposed over this complex landscape is the desire to increase the velocity and frequency of releases in order to delivery software releases to market faster but with integrity. Companies are struggling to deal with this situation using existing processes and tools so they approach us to help them strengthen their processes using Plutora’s enterprise SaaS suite. Across our financial services, telecommunications, retail and energy clients, the story is very similar. We can have Plutora up and running and adding value within a company within a matter of days.

 

CEOCFO: What does your system add? What kinds of issues are you able to address and make easier for companies?

Mr. Siroky: The mantra is that we provide transparency and control for a company’s enterprise releases and test environments. This is typically a very chaotic and uncontrolled function for most companies as they are trying to manage a complex multidimensional problem on spreadsheets or with other siloed information that is completely inadequate. With Plutora, companies are able to mitigate release failure through improved decision making based on superior information and control mechanisms whilst actually going faster. Companies can also make better decisions around the environment landscape that supports their release pipelines. This is a significant benefit as a late or failed release can have significant financial impacts on a company. We also provide benefits to companies through the customizable processes and collaboration capability that underpins Plutora. This makes the people who work in or with release management functions and test environment management functions significantly more productive.

 

CEOCFO: Do many companies come to you early on before changes are being made or do they typically come to you when they are in trouble?

Mr. Siroky: We have a combination of both, but typically they come to us before things go completely off the rails. The majority of our customers have come to us saying that there existing process and tools are failing and that they need to do something about it before it is too late. There are a few customers that have come to us to get out of trouble when they are trying to execute a large program and just don’t have the process or tools in place to support it. Most of our customers are quite forward thinking, well structured and well planned to see that this is going to be a much bigger problem for them in the next three to six months.

 

CEOCFO: How do prospective clients find you?

Mr. Siroky: We have clients in North America, Europe, the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, so we are a truly global company. Most of our customers find us through our published insights, website, at webinars, or from other customers that like our solution. We compete with IBM Urbancode uRelease and our customers are looking for an innovative solution and responsive provider. We are unique from our competitor because we take a top down view to release management and environment management and are intensely focused on the space rather than having the baggage of other products.


CEOCFO: How have you ensured the user friendliness?

Mr. Siroky: Plutora is based around producing software we would want to use ourselves. That is the test of every release in our software. Does it improve the user experience? Is it something that I would be comfortable sitting in front of every day myself? If it passes that test, we release it, and if it does not, we go back to the drawing board and make refinements. These refinements are often small but frequent. It could be how I reach this with the number of clicks between doing this action for a user. Will it drive this user crazy if they have to do this every single day? We take that in to account because it is a software that I use, and I only use a software that I like to use. Our software needs to meet that criteria.

 

Plutora’s solution is market driven and users love using our software. We incorporate most of the customer feedback into product development so release managers and environment managers that have never used the software before find it highly intuitive to the way they work and can become proficient very quickly.

 

CEOCFO: How did you decide to enter this arena and how are you confident that it was going to be a profitable and interesting place to be?

Mr. Siroky: Plutora has a very strong founding team with a lot of depth in large scale technology delivery and operations. We experienced first hand the pain points our customers are feeling. There was no solution on the market to deal with these complexities so we founded Plutora, started building a product, and it has been a great journey since then. Our view was that if we built a solution and support structures customer’s loved then profitability would follow. We have been bootstrapped and profitable right from the start.

 

CEOCFO: Plutora was recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor. Would you tell us about that acknowledgement?

Mr. Siroky: We never set out to be a cool vendor. We set out to be a provider of enterprise software that people want to use every day. More importantly we wanted to provide innovative software that we could see ourselves using everyday as in the past enterprise software wasn’t that exciting and people were forced to use it. We bring a culture of innovation and excitement to enterprise software.

 

I think in large companies it is becoming harder and harder to innovate and also to stay responsive. We see our competitors telling customers how to run their processes because that is the way their software is designed. We provide innovation and customer orientation to ensure our software accelerates the way our customers work. I guess has been recognized as doing something cool, innovative and different in this space.

 

CEOCFO: Tell us about some of the things that have changed over the years the last couple of years at Plutora. What do you offer now that perhaps you did not earlier on?

Mr. Siroky: The product that we offer now is by far the best product on the market. Every company is going to tell you that, but from our perspective and the feedback that we are getting from clients, we have a comprehensive solution that addresses every part of release management and test environment management. We started off with release manager and we added the test environment and we added the deployment manager, so we have a comprehensive set of those products. The key thing that has changed is the way that we engage our customers on the future road maps. We have a very clear vision on where we need to be one to two years out and where the market is heading and where the industry is heading in this space, but we also incorporate valuable feedback from our customers. Our community is very strong and they relish being actively involved with the road map. We are still building software that they want to use, not the software that we think they want to use. There is quite a difference in that.

 

CEOCFO: With all of the changes in technology how are you able to help a company plan down the road at least a couple of years when something could change almost overnight?

Mr. Siroky: What we do is we help them come up with their process for managing that change. We typically say you need to have a defined structure on how you release to your IT environment, and they set up typically three to six months or maybe fortnightly, weekly or daily releasing those. The output or the release that you are producing is a function of the process that you do. If you have a good process, then you will end up with a good release, so we can help them with making a quality process and making sure that that process is consistent over time. Part of having that consistent quality process is incorporating the ‘what if’ analysis and scenario analysis for customers to understand the impacts of things when they change. This is a core strength of Plutora.

 

CEOCFO: What surprised you as the company has grown, developed and prospered?

Mr. Siroky: We are surprised at how well some of our clients have received us, embraced us and asked us where we have been. Traction has been rapid and we now count some of the largest companies in each industry sector as customers. We have been overwhelmed with the support of our customers in the marketplace and how well they are willing to engage with us to help them solve their release management and test environment management problems.

 

CEOCFO: How do you handle the growth? What are you on the lookout for so you can take advantage of opportunity, manage the growth and maybe give up some control as you go along?

Mr. Siroky: We are growing rapidly and we are growing in multiple regions. We have recently opened a larger office and headquarters in Mountain View. Our Sydney office is starting to get tight, and we are scouting a permanent presence in London or Amsterdam to service better our European clients. My core focus is making sure that we are playing the game with the best and the brightest people and ensuring we continue to bring the best talent on line. That is the number one mission. The infrastructure, the offices, all those things are quite deterministic and can be solved quite easily, but the people and culture and making sure that we have the best and the brightest on board is the number one thing for me.

 

CEOCFO: Why should the business community take notice of Plutora?

Mr. Siroky: Plutora is the only product on the market that provides a truly integrated release management and test environment management in a software as a service offering to the largest companies in the world. We have proven implementations across multiple continents, and the feedback from all those companies is that we can save them time and money on the release process and we can help them go faster.




 

“Plutora is the only product on the market that provides a truly integrated release management and test environment management in a software as a service offering to the largest companies in the world.” - Dalibor Siroky

 

Plutora Inc.

1043 N Shoreline Boulevard

Mountain View, CA

650-646-9709

www.plutora.com




 


 

 



 

 


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