This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.

 

Emma: Hello listeners, it’s your host Emma Peet, and I’m excited to be joined by a fellow Tricentix, as we like to refer to ourselves. It’s Jason Secola, Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Tricentis.

 

Jason, you joined Tricentis in March this year after the development that Tricentis acquired Tx3 Services, and with that came Tricentis Vera, with the goal to help health and life science orgs adopt best practices where compliance is concerned. In recent months, you’ve been rolling up your sleeves strategizing on an upcoming Tricentis event which takes place very soon; the Tricentis Roadshow.

 

In a nutshell, could you introduce the Tricentis Roadshow, tell us what and when it is?

 

Jason: As travel is still probably a little bit tricky for a lot of organizations, and budgets are getting tightened, the initial idea was to do a single city event. Instead, we decided to break it down a little bit and take it out to three different locations to make easier for folks to get to who are around some of those areas.

 

“Tricentis has really accomplished a lot over the last year, and even has accomplished a lot since our Virtual Summit took place in April. So, we want to make sure that we’re communicating all that information out to our clients and other folks in the software testing and software quality world—and our partners—in a structure that’s a bit more interactive than doing another virtual event.“

 

Jason: We really wanted to make it a point to be able to do a fall event in person, and that’s why we decided on doing the three-city Roadshow. We going to be kicking it off in Chicago on October 20, and we’re going to be live-streaming the morning keynote and customer panel sessions, and recording the afternoon sessions to make them available on demand. Obviously not everybody’s going to get a chance to get to these three cities, so we still want to make sure that people have access to the information and to all the sessions that we’re going to be doing.

 

After that Chicago event, we’re going to pack up the crew and head down to Dallas on October 25, and then we’re going to head to New York City to close out the US Roadshows on November 2. We’re also planning some dates and events in Europe, as well. So, check that out, get registered, and try to attend some of these events if you can.

 

There’s really going to be something here for everybody. In addition to all the customer-oriented content that we’re putting together, there’s also going to be a Client Advisory Board, and Simmi Kaur and the channel team over here have been doing a great job at organizing a Partner Day component along with this, and then, Gina Kawalek and Charlotte Reeves, and the events team have just done a great job overall in coordinating across all these three cities, getting speakers, getting presenters, and driving folks to attend. So, a big thanks to the whole team that’s been involved in putting this together.

 

Emma: Brilliant! Tricentis is on tour, and it’s really cool to see this approach where there are various locations. We did Accelerate a few years ago, which was always one city, and then we spent the last couple years pretty much solely virtually. So to come back with this new format is really exciting, giving folks the opportunity to sign in virtually as well. So, it’s of the best of both worlds. I did have a sneak peek at the agenda, it looks really, really great.

 

One of the headline messages around the event is around digital business and the statement that “the fast and the agile will thrive.” So, how does the event feed into that overall statement?

 

Jason: Well, you know, organizations really need to be adaptable and quick to move these days, and that can be tough. It’s a really complex landscape out there. And, you know, as far as the digital business side of things, every company really needs to be able to provide not just good, but excellent digital experiences to both their customers, as well as to their internal users. So, when we’re thinking about the customer side of things, obviously, there’s stuff like traditional eCommerce sites, or registration pages, for things like benefits or enrollment—all those things that you would think about from a customer-experience perspective that really need to perform and drive great experiences to help your digital businesses.

 

But then, there’s also internal systems and services that employees need to use to help drive innovation and drive business value at their companies, and drive those customer experiences or to help develop new products, or whatever it is. So, more than ever, there’s really just a ton that goes on behind the scenes to supporting all of that, and the landscape, like I said, is really, really complex. So, every company has way more applications to support across their lines of business; everything is expected to happen way faster. You’re going through cloud migrations while there’s still on-prem installations, and then hybrid environments, and custom apps, and packaged apps, configured apps, enterprise apps, and on and on. And then, to add a layer of complexity, development is also happening at an extremely high velocity, and releases are subsequently happening at an extremely high velocity.

 

“Testing and quality needs to not only not be a bottleneck, but really needs to add real value to the business. So, what we want to showcase to you, our clients, that we want you to be able to deliver that value. We want you to be able to deliver quality all the way from development, through when those systems or those products that are being pushed into production are available on market.“

 

Jason: We want executive teams to be able to see that value. We want managers to be able to make that value possible for their teams to deliver. And then, we want to make life easier at the practitioner level so that those folks can quickly deliver those types of results.

 

At the Roadshow events, we will spend some time showcasing all the hard work that Tricentis has been doing to grow our technology portfolio to support that stuff; both through organic development and then through acquisition. Like you mentioned, I came to Tricentis through an acquisition in March of this year, and we really want to show how our products and solutions are making those things possible across the Software Development Life Cycle.

 

Emma: Great! There’s just such a tremendous amount of activity that’s gone on the last couple of years that’s going to be great to showcase in person. And to your point, just to look at Tricentis in terms of our internal processes, and then the customers that we serve, and the digital pace the DevOps world demands. We’re showcasing some of those customer stories, for example, I see partners like Accenture, and awesome customers like ABC Supply on the agenda. Those customers are great examples of embracing change, moving away from legacy software.

 

Can you give us a flavor of what to expect at some of the sessions at the Roadshow?

 

Jason: Interestingly, Accenture, although they’re a partner of ours, they’re actually going to be there showcasing, and presenting, and discussing, more from their customer experience side of things. So, it will be sort of a different flavor to the presentation and their involvement.

 

To give everybody a rundown of what the agenda is going to look like, and what we’re going to be covering across these cities.

 

“At the Chicago event, our CEO Kevin Thompson is going to be there. And then for our subsequent cities, some regional VPs are going to be taking over the slot. We’re going to kick off with the keynote highlighting all the things that Tricentis has been able to accomplish recently to really establish ourselves at the front of the pack in the software quality world, and also give a look at where we’re going, and what we’re doing to stay there, and how we plan to continue to innovate and deliver value to our clients.“

 

Jason: We’re also going to be having our Chief Product Officer, Grigori Melnik, deliver a keynote, along with a few other supporting cast members of Tricentis technology leaders. They’re going to be highlighting some of the new solutions that we’re launching. We’ve got some big feature developments coming to the existing products that our clients are very familiar with, but then we’ve also got a few brand-new products that we’re going to be launching. So, this is just going to go to show all the hard work that, like I said, Tricentis has really been doing to continue to deliver innovation in the products that we’re providing to our customers.

 

You mentioned a couple of customers that are actually going to be there.

 

In each city we’re going to be doing a customer panel that will be hosted by our Chief Customer Officer, Chris Collins. I think it’s always important to be able to get some actual customer voices mixed into these types of events so we can get a chance to have some real-world experiences, and highlight some real-world use cases and insights that might directly resonate with some other folks in the audience who are maybe going through similar initiatives, or they’re currently maybe facing some of the same challenges that these panelists have already overcome. So, there’s a good chance to be able to learn through other customer experiences.

 

Jason: And then in the afternoon, we’re going to be doing a variety of sessions to cover another breadth of offerings that we provide on the technology, process, and best practices side of things. The idea is, in all of these, we want to be highlighting use cases of how we can help make things easier for our customers, how we can help them thrive in this fast-moving digital environment. So, we’re doing presentations around the importance of data integrity, and automating data integrity testing to mitigate costly bad data issues. We’re going to be highlighting Tricentis Test Automation for ServiceNow; what that looks like, and how customers can leverage it to evolve, how they handle their DevOps change automation with ServiceNow. And then on a more holistic view, we’ve got some great speakers at each of these locations that are going to talk about and walk through how to really establish quality at DevOps speed, and to remove traditional quality assurance type bottlenecks, and to get to that next step in DevOps maturity, and how our solutions are helping facilitating that.

 

“You know, we’ve done a lot of work around SAP in the past, right? So, that’s been a major enterprise app that we’ve put a lot of focus around, but we also want to highlight everything that we’ve been doing to support Oracle, and how we’ve been dedicating expertise and focus with our solutions so that our clients can cut time, and costs, and risks associated with delivering and maintaining Oracle apps, as well as tackling modernization initiatives around Oracle apps.“

 

Jason: TestOps is also a big area that we will to focus on, and why being able to scale end-to-end testing is really crucial today. So, when we’re talking about TestOps, we want to think about it more than just in terms of having collaboration between Testing and Operations, but to really take it a step further. We want to demonstrate what that means and what that looks like with some of our latest TestOps-oriented features to drive more of a continuous improvement model and quality in highlighting some tools like Testim and qTest, for example.

 

And then going back to Accenture, you know, this will just be in Chicago, but Accenture is going to be presenting a really interesting use case around their transformation journey to more of a Quality Engineering model from a Quality Assurance model. So, what they’ve done to remove some of those traditional quality assurance bottlenecks with this Quality Engineering model to really effectively support things like cloud migrations, enterprise-scale test automation, and test data management. Then even looking at things like Test Infrastructure as a Service, and how they’ve leveraged some Tricentis tools to help facilitate that.

 

Emma: Excellent. An absolute raft of reasons to attend there! There’s something for everyone, for folks working with critical apps like SAP, ServiceNow, Oracle, or simply those that want to tune in exactly and see innovative partners like Accenture, on the cutting-edge of innovation from quality engineering perspective.

 

So, that was the long form version. In short, why should you attend the Tricentis Roadshow?

 

Jason: If we were to distill it down to one reason: whether you’re a Tricentis customer, or you’re a partner, or you’re someone that’s out there, just looking at some of the offerings that we have; I would really stress, come and see everything that we’re bringing to the table in 2022 and beyond.

 

“Come and see how our solutions can make your life easier, and everything that we can do to ensure that your software testing and software quality initiatives provide real business value end-to-end.“

 

Jason: So, come see how far and wide our solutions have come—from not that long ago when Tricentis was really a one-tool company, right? It was Tosca with test automation, and that’s something that we still do extremely well; it’s still an amazing product. But there’s so much more that we offer to support organizations in their overall software quality initiatives across the Software Development Life Cycle.

 

Emma: Great! I can tell your head has been in this for a little while and you’re excited to get out there and run the event.

 

The countdown is on!

 

Be sure to sign up for the Tricentis Roadshow, either by attending in person or virtually on October 20. See you there!

 

Check out the latest podcast episodes for more insights from thought leaders like Jason.