Ten years in business! We are a dinosaur in terms of tech years but we are running strong and planning for the next ten. As AI has disrupted the industry we have been pushed to figure out how opsZero lives in this new world. While there has been messaging that the recent layoffs are due to AI, we don’t ascribe to that. The period of low interest rates caused a spike in hiring for a growth that never materialized and the layoffs are the culmination of a failure of that bet. The CapEx on AI doesn’t help but AI is becoming a convenient reason to perform layoffs.

While we are bullish on AI in the long run, the AI currently is still in the 90s dotcom phase. Who the winners will be are still up in the air and there is a massive amount of investment money sloshing around so the eventual winner may come out of left field. However, the recent Iran war will push energy prices up leading to the unit economics of AI being disrupted. This is not to say AI will not be used, it just means that it will be used within specific fields: defense and healthcare being the two primary areas. With energy prices going up due to the Iran War, datacenters and their consequential increase in energy prices will not sit well with citizens.

Further, the SaaSocolypse, attributed to the increased effectiveness of AI, has pushed down the value of SaaS companies which are also loaded up with an immense amount of debt due to Private Credit. We will see if this leads to a crash in the market, but this does fundamentally changes the nature of American SaaS. The gulf countries are a massive investor in the technology industry in the US investing heavily into AI through private equity, private credit, and the public markets. With these countries now questioning the value of the petrodollar, the future of investments from these countries is looking wobbly especially when these countries can invest in other countries with a potential for higher returns. This is also based on a notion that these countries will return back to normal once the war is completed.

It is this economic environment that opsZero finds itself trying to plan for its second decade. It is when the World Order changes that one can find immense opportunities. As the structures of the old order cease, new ones are formulated with new rules in play. And the place we find ourselves in at this particular moment is the collapse of the dollar.

All signs point to the American dollar losing value, scarcity of resources, and stagflation. While we have seen the first order effects of the Iran War which are higher gas and diesel prices we haven’t seen the second and third order effects. From an American standpoint, food prices will go up, medicine prices will go up because nearly 40% of medicine in America comes from India, there will be metal and aluminum shortages, if Hormutz stays closed and Helium doesn’t get through there will be microchip shortages. These shortages can be temporary, a year or two, or can be extended. It all depends on the extent of the damage that results from an eventual ground invasion.

opsZero never became a SaaS company preferring the path of services. While this limited our upside in terms of revenue, it has made us nimble and able to change directions as the winds of the economy change. We believe that many SaaS companies will convert to being services companies in the future. With AI, SaaS will need to customize for a particular customer, not just sell a one size fits all. This will be, ironically, a return to the traditional business model of Oracle, IBM, or SAP that focus heavily on customizing their offerings for their Fortune 500 customers.

As AI changes the nature of the game on how quickly companies can be formed, we have moved to a world where small efficient companies will be the norm. Companies with fewer customers as there will be more competition, but customers with deeper focus. In a sense, future SaaS companies are going to become traditional businesses with a large service components, they will not be traditional VC hypergrowth companies. We can say that this is caused completely by AI, but with less capital to go around this will become more the norm in terms of business.

So opsZero is going to double down on our services model as it is the model for the next decade. We are doubling down on our investment in India. As the cost of capital goes up, the inevitable outcome is a lowering of costs and India provides a better cost structure compared to the West. The recent layoffs in America have not lead to any mass layoffs in India, for example. Lastly, we believe that services will be accelerated with technology being in support. So whether there is a Human or AI being the frontend there will still be technology in the backend.

The outcome of this is that organizations will want Human, AI, and Software as part of their expected interaction while being provided that value at a lower cost. How we deliver this will be a blog post a decade from now.

As noted before all of our existing SaaS tooling has been merged back into opsZero. This table includes the existing businesses and their new opsZero location:

Our goal is to provide more value by incorporating each of these into core opsZero.

We have merged our different products into eight solutions that are under the opsZero umbrella. We have always been a DevOps Agency and while we wanted to move towards a SaaS model we realized that we just enjoy the services business model. It allows us to get more involved with our customers versus just trying to optimize for cash flow, and we really just want to help our customers in a broader way than what a pure SaaS model would entail.

Further, we believe that SaaS has become saturated. There is a SaaS solution for nearly everything and we are getting to a point of diminishing returns. We missed the boat on the SaaS train, but honestly we are not super worried about it. We think embedding deeper with customers and becoming long term partners is more meaningful for us.

So we are largely deprecating our existing SaaS tooling and moving back to what we are at our core: a DevOps Agency.

Our focus is not high growth, but sustainable growth working at a steady pace helping our customers throughout their growth. This model is antithesis is complexity. We actually want to reduce the complexity of our offering.

• DevOps. The basis of our go to market. We do all DevOps with OpenTofu/Terraform as the basis.
• Kubernetes. Kubernetes is our bread and butter. We will focus on making this the core of our value. Moving Windows, Linux, etc. workloads to Kubernetes is a primary goal.
• Identity. Setup and manage identity solutions.
• Compliance. Focusing on HIPAA, SOC2, PCI-DSS, etc.
• Datasets. Build and host core datasets for companies that want to use these for their own specific use cases.
• DBA. Database and performance tuning to lower the cost of compute for companies.
• AI. Low cost AI compute solutions such as running workloads on Macs, etc.
• FinOps. Resale business, but we will likely limit to just the Cloud.

Introducing DBAZero!

We are launching a database and performance tuning service designed for startups and small businesses. We found that many companies struggle with database performance tuning and management and we want to help them focus on their core business while we handle the database side of things.

As part of this we are launching our service with a focus on the following:

• DB performance improvements.
  • Database Performance Tuning
  • Schema Review
  • DB Modeling
  • Table Design
  • Query Review and Tuning
  • Indexing
  • Transactions and Locking
  • Concurrent Query performance
  • Read vs Write Tradeoffs
  • Stored Procedures
  • Views
• Outside of DB performance
  • Data Analytics
  • Data Science on tabular data
  • time series modeling
  • Python/R programming

We will be sharing more details about our services and how we can help.

We’ve updated our sales process to automatically create AWS ACE opportunities — a system that allows us to seamlessly collaborate with AWS sales representatives on opsZero’s opportunities.

This integration means we can now work directly with AWS account managers from the very beginning to identify the best solutions for your needs. It also enables us to bring in AWS Solutions Engineers early in the process to address technical challenges more efficiently.

While this change happens mostly behind the scenes, it significantly enhances our ability to problem-solve and deliver better outcomes for our customers during the sales process.

We have revamped our support task management system to improve clarity and efficiency. One of the key changes we have implemented as part of this new system is a deprecation of Notion as our task management tool and a migration to GitHub Issues and Github Projects internally while ensuring that our customers can continue using their existing project management tools like Notion, Jira, Linear, Github Issues, etc.

Github Issues is what we use anyways for our product development tasks and this change allows us to simplify our internal processes and have a single source of truth. Further, we can now also leverage Github Actions to automate many of our routine tasks.

Lastly, we are in general improving out task management processes to ensure that tasks are completed in a timely manner and nothing slips through the cracks as part of this setup we have standardized our processes into a global Kanban board that tracks the changes that affect our customers and the internal development of tasks so that work can be completed in lockstep.

This has been a long time coming and we are excited to roll this out.

We now have a variety of AWS offerings on the AWS APN Marketplace and have made it easy to add new offerings. These offerings allow us to get in front of AWS account managers with our products and services so they can recommend us to their customers.

opsZero now has a full CI/CD setup for all our products and services. These are setup on Django for the API and Docusaurus for the frontend with Cloudflare Pages for hosting. Previously we only had CI/CD setup for some of our applications which made consistency of releases a bit problematic.

It is ironic we know that a DevOps company didn't have a full CI/CD setup for our apps. However, I don't think CI/CD is necessary to get things going and we can make a lot of progress without it. We needed to prove our products had value first before we invested time into setting up the CI/CD pipelines and other tooling.

Now that we have a standardized process in place we can focus on releasing our products more frequently and with more confidence.

opsZero is getting a large refresh across both opsZero as well as on our various brands. As we stated before we are splitting apart our business to have their own identities. As part of this we decided to structure a common design across all our businesses. This allows us to create new businesses in the future with a common templates. While this work is ongoing we are quite excited to announce it now as a significant portion of the sites have been updated to use these new templates.

opsZero will release products and grow our business through mutually beneficial partnerships. Our business is Cloud Infrastructure and our long term plan is to become a Platform for Cloud + AI. However, each vertical has domain specific knowledge we lack and do not have a large team while limits our reach.

Partnerships​

When I look at opsZero's failures it has been largely around going into new verticals alone. If opsZero goes at a vertical alone we had to figure out the market, the marketing, and sales. It creates the onus on us to deliver and sell and learn a new industry. Even if we move horizontally within an industry we will still need to context switch as we sell from startups to governments to healthcare. This prevents us from focusing on a single vertical making our growth feel haphazard and lacking focus. We need teams single threaded focused on each vertical.

Traditionally, a company that wants to grow its business either hires people with expertise to build that business or buys a business that has those relationships. The problem with that is it becomes a capital expenditure where a failure means a total loss, partnerships allow us to make entering new verticals an operational expenditure. This reduces the cost of launching and testing something new and attacking it with people who are already knowledgeable.

Our goal long term with opsZero is to build a bazaar style platform servicing the needs of multiple verticals cobuilt with partners. We will become a distribution focused company with the current services becoming another “partner” within the ecosystem. Our buckets are Cloud and AI. All our products and services should live within these two buckets. And each service we release should have a partner who is responsible for servicing it.

This changes the organizational structure of the company to be like a startup studio or incubator. While we should sell a cohesive whole to our customers, behind the scenes it can be our partners who service the end result for a particular vertical while we complement them with our value add.

Solutions​

Our release methodology will change to the following:

• Figure out the service we want to create for a vertical.
• Find partners who could be good fits for coselling that product. Figure out ways we can partner with them.
• Cobranded and create a joint venture and cosell with partner. Focus on distribution and support the partner with data and sales resources.
• Continuously work with partner to more effectively reach customers and service the work for the customers.

The things we can do with a partner are three fold:

• Comarketing such as content, webinar, videos or other.
• Build new products that combines our strengths.
• Emails or other joint collaboration.
• Products