Have data, will travel

Welcome to Runtime! Today: How Expedia balances the tech needs of its consumer travel business and B2B customers, Cisco takes a step back, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Pro vision

While most people are familiar with Expedia as a place to compare flight prices and showcase Ewan McGregor's talents, behind the scenes the company is both a consumer destination and a business-to-business SaaS provider. Rajesh Naidu is responsible for maintaining a tech infrastructure platform that can meet the needs of both lines of business.

"It's an interesting model. We are serving not just our own base, but also our B2B partners," Naidu, senior vice president and chief architect at Expedia, said in a recent interview. "That makes us unique in that regard of consuming SaaS as well as providing a SaaS service."

Expedia has been a predominantly AWS shop since 2012, but like many companies with a market cap around $18 billion, has a "small presence" (as Naidu put it) with other cloud providers and operates a data center simply to run Oracle's ERP software.
And like many companies that have grown through acquisitions over the years, one of Naidu's jobs has been to integrate those acquisitions onto a common tech stack, which requires taking a hard look at the SaaS applications used by those companies and deciding whether or not it makes sense to bring them forward.
"We are always looking at minimizing the footprint in terms of not proliferating five different SaaS providers for the same capabilities, because we were in that situation as we acquired these brands," Naidu said.

Those acquisitions also required Expedia's tech teams to consolidate a lot of different policies and services related to data.

"We have more than 70 petabytes of data that we have acquired over the years," Naidu said, but Expedia separates consumer data from the B2B data and therefore needed to architect what he called "the right guardrails" to prevent that data from mixing while still being able to leverage it for analysis on the back end as it integrated those companies.
"I think the big shift around data has been being able to serve up the right data, being able to govern and measure the data, (and) do rapid experimentation," Naidu said, and it's much easier to accomplish those goals when data isn't scattered across the company.

Like most companies in 2024, Expedia is turning its attention to generative AI and the possibilities it could unlock for its business.

The company is using ChatGPT on the consumer side of its business to help customers book travel through a text conversation, and it also launched an internal pilot of GitHub Copilot that one-third of its developers are currently using.
"We're looking at generation of unit test cases, code refinement, improving productivity and pushing new code every three days into production." Naidu said. "We're starting to see some good productivity gains."
But as a big Microsoft Office shop, Expedia is waiting to see how Microsoft Copilot for 365 evolves before shelling out for its new generative AI features, which have seen mixed reviews in the first few months they've been available.

And when it comes to another tech product that has seen mixed reviews in its early days, Naidu is personally excited about the potential for developing Expedia applications for Apple's Vision Pro and how that could transform the travel-booking experience.

"I wonder what use cases there could be for travel down the road with that, right? Especially from a discoverability perspective; what if you really want to go see what a location looks like?" he said.

Read the full report on Runtime here.

A MESSAGE FROM CANVA

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Network effects

Enterprise tech companies of a certain age are very hard to kill, although Broadcom is certainly giving it a try. They do, however, tend to fade away unless they can reinvent themselves for a new era, which became a clear and present danger at Cisco this week.

On Wednesday the venerable networking company lowered its forecast for the current quarter by nearly $1 billion below what analysts were expecting — a staggering sum for a fiscal quarter that ends in about six weeks — and announced plans to lay off 5% of its employees, which amounts to about 4,000 people. It blamed the state of the economy for its troubles, which is a little puzzling after January's earnings cycle, during which the cloud providers sounded more optimistic about the overall health of their businesses for the first time in about a year.

Cisco has moved to bring modern technology into its product portfolio, placing a big bet on observability tech last year with the proposed acquisitions of Splunk and Isovalent. But absent a true push to repatriate cloud workloads back into self-managed data centers, it's hard to see how Cisco will be able to turn things around.

Enterprise moves

Joe Levy is the new acting CEO of Sophos, after former CEO Kris Hagerman stepped down Thursday without a clear successor in waiting.

Shailesh Shukla is the new CEO of Aryaka, joining the cloud security startup after stints at Google Cloud and Cisco.

Mark Chamberlain is the new CFO of UserTesting, and the press release noted that "he has a track record of guiding companies through periods of accelerated growth and has navigated several successful exits."

The Runtime roundup

Apple is testing a GitHub Copilot rival, according to Bloomberg, which would make the runaway market for generative AI coding assistant tools even more interesting.

OpenAI terminated the accounts of five users believed to be associated with nation-state hacking groups from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Amazon unveiled "the largest ever text-to-speech model yet," although it does not appear to be ready for enterprise consumption just yet.

AWS and Microsoft are planning to invest in new data centers in Australia and Germany, respectively.

Neo4j is testing the IPO market, which could open the public-market window for a number of enterprise tech companies that have sat on their heels over the last year waiting for a better market.

SuperMicro bought the San Jose property that was home to one of the most iconic buildings in Silicon Valley once upon a time, the Mayan-themed Fry's Electronics store.