It’s that time of year again at ThousandEyes where we take a look back at all we’ve achieved over the past year, and get excited about the opportunity ahead. This year’s company-wide kickoff focused on the theme Innovation at Scale, and now that we’re part of the Cisco family, this phrase has never felt more appropriate. And, of course, with it being an entirely virtual event, we took full advantage of Cisco’s unparalleled collaboration technology to ensure all employees had a front-row seat to the sessions.
On day 1 of kickoff, we heard from the ThousandEyes leaders on company-wide performance, we heard about our product vision for the year, and each department gave a great overview of their contributions that led to our team’s success in 2021. Day 2 was designed with specific tracks for Sales and Engineering teams to gain the tools and excitement they need to start the next year off right.
In this blog, I wanted to share my thoughts on the Engineering track and express my sincere gratitude to the amazing guest speakers who joined us.
With Cisco, It’s Innovation at Scale
With more than a full year under our belts as part of the Cisco family, the tone of this kickoff certainly felt more enthusiastic and optimistic than ever—and for good reason. Many of us joined ThousandEyes on a mission to improve the quality of the Internet so that we can improve the quality of life, both for the enterprises we serve and the users who depend on them. We have done just that. This year, we announced several key integrations across the Cisco portfolio that will expand ThousandEyes visibility on a massive scale, such as with the Cisco Catalyst 9000 Series switches, Cisco SD-WAN routing platforms, AppDynamics Dash Studio and more.
These integrations mark an important milestone in taking the industry-leading visibility platform you know and love to a whole new level. But we’re not stopping there. During the kickoff, we shared our plans that will scale our platform even further over the years ahead. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot to be excited about.
Our Guest Speakers
This year, we were honored to have an incredible roster of guest speakers come and present to the Engineering team. I wanted to thank them below:
Serpil Bayraktar: Serpil Bayraktar is a Distinguished Engineer and Director in Cisco’s Cloud Security group responsible for leading teams delivering Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) services. Serpil joined the ThousandEyes kickoff and was kind enough to share her own personal and professional journey. She faced quite a few challenges but always came out stronger. She has been a huge advocate for diversity and inclusion within Cisco and has led a variety of initiatives, including a very successful program called “Women In Tech.” It was refreshing to hear about her mission, and we are eager to join hands with Serpil and be part of her continued efforts.
Fangjin Yang & Gian Merlino: Fangjin is a co-author of the open-source Druid project and a co-founder and CEO of Imply, a San Francisco-based technology company. Gian is a co-author of the open-source Druid project and co-founder and CTO of Imply. Gian and FJ shared with us the past, present and future of analytical databases and how Apache Druid solves the challenge of making real-time analytics a reality. It was amazing to see how Imply is making this vision come alive.
Jonathan Heiliger: Jonathan started boutique venture firm Vertex Ventures US, previously led Facebook’s infrastructure, and was COO of Opsware. Jonathan joined our fireside chat to share how he has always challenged the status quo by being a rebel. He was an early believer in the vision of ThousandEyes, and it was interesting to hear his side of the story. It was an engaging discussion, and our teams learned how Jonathan thinks about building high-performance teams and how to continue to focus on scaling the business.
Mark Porter: Mark Porter is the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of MongoDB, where he is responsible for crafting the long-term technology roadmap and vision for the company. Mark broke down his talk into three parts, which covered the history of databases, engineering for engineers and (my favorite part) things Mark worries about. The insights shared by Mark were eye-opening, and he always makes every discussion fun with his humor and candidness.
Again, I wanted to express my gratitude for your time and for your wisdom — Thank You!
Did you hear? We’re scaling up our team.
This year’s kickoff really highlighted for me just how much opportunity lies ahead. Yet this opportunity won’t just manifest itself; it needs to be earned through hard work and collaboration. We recognize this, so we are actively hiring talented software engineers to join our growing team. Do you dream of solving challenges at Internet scale? We’d love to hear from you. Check out our Engineering Careers page to see all our open roles today.