AWS for Software Companies Podcast

LaunchDarkly CPO Jonathan Nolen breaks down how teams can build, validate, and ship software at agent speed, without losing control.Topics Include:Jonathan Nolen explains how LaunchDarkly helps 3,000 enterprises manage change.Target features down to individual users and toggle them without redeploying.Customers range from startups and government agencies to airlines and pizza delivery.Why LaunchDarkly sells cultural change, not just a developer tool.Engineers are creatures of habit, so adoption takes real evangelism.Instant rollback means you hear about incidents next morning, not at 2 a.m.We’re living through a rebirth of the software development lifecycle.Ramp is building its own software factory powered by autonomous agents.A healthcare insurer is building its agent factory on just three tools.Start agents on bug fixes, then features, then whole projects.Why Nolen is retiring the term “vibe coding.”Code written at agent speed must be validated at agent speed.There are two levers: invest in testing, or shrink the blast radius.Progressive rollouts move from internal users to synthetic tests to beta cohorts.No single safeguard is enough; layered techniques build real confidence.The key metric is valuable software shipped per unit of human attention.Automate everything, and bring humans in only where judgment matters.LaunchDarkly is on the same AI journey as its customers.Why LaunchDarkly sees itself as critical infrastructure, not just SaaS.It designs for failure, so customer apps keep running during outages.Two questions to ask: how fast, and how granularly, can you fix releases?Big-batch rollbacks hold every team captive to the slowest feature.Turn off just the broken feature, fleet-wide, in under a second.Nolen’s biggest recent lesson: first ask AI how to solve the problem.Inside LaunchDarkly’s culture: one team that wins or loses together.Ownership, smart bets, and using risk to your advantage.Radical transparency means less time spent agreeing on what reality is.Cheap code creates new bottlenecks, like humans trying to review everything.The future is learning by building and testing ideas directly in production.The organizations that close this loop fastest will see compounding advantages.Participants:Jonathan Nolen – Chief Product Officer, LaunchDarklySee how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

Discover how Veeva transformed a free clinical research platform into a sustainable freemium business, balancing with their mission through transparent communication, fair pricing, and smart migration tooling built on AWS.Topics Include:How Veeva builds industry cloud software for clinical research sitesWhy clinical trials sit between healthcare delivery and life sciencesHow a free platform grew into a self-sustaining businessBalancing monetization and mission: free tiers, fair pricing, annual true-upsGiving 15 months' notice and over-communicating the whyBuilding migration tooling to move users from multi-tenant to enterpriseHandling edge cases and migration issues through radical transparencyNavigating customer pushback amid 2025 NIH funding cutsWhat a strategic AWS partnership looks like beyond infrastructureGetting more from AWS by sharing long-term goals, not transactionsAdvice for SaaS leaders: set boundaries, prioritize fairness, own the messagePreparing teams for change without gaming out every objectionParticipants:Nick Frenzer – General Manager, Site Solutions, VeevaSee how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

Go inside a massive, still-in-progress migration of 1,500+ servers out of two Canadian data centers, with candid lessons on what works, what was surprising, and what to do differently.Topics Include:Inside a live migration: 1,500+ servers leaving two Canadian data centers.How BlackBerry became a secure communications and QNX vehicle software company.Decades of legacy systems, and why standing still became costlier.Three converging forces: VMware licensing, hardware end-of-life, and FinOps gaps.The goals: close data centers, exit VMware, modernize only what matters.Choosing partners and funding programs that work as one team.A five-week assessment with parallel workstreams and five key workshops.Rehost, re-platform, or refactor: pragmatism over migration ideology.Early lessons on discovery, cost transparency, and over-communicating.Building the landing zone: accounts, networking, identity, and security.Discovery, right-sizing, then migrating, validating, and cutting over workloads.Wave planning: start simple, save the most complex workloads for last.Day two: cost tagging, observability, and AI-assisted modernization backlogs.Final advice: business case first, migrate now, modernize later.Participants:Jason Whissell – Vice President, IT & Business Application Solutions, BlackberryMehran Najafi PhD - Principal AI Architect & Head of AI Solution Architects, AWS Canada, Amazon Web Services  See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

From data-center chaos to billion-dollar acquisitions: the real story behind Clio's cloud journey, compliance battles, and rapid AI-driven transformation.Topics Include:AWS-Clio partnership: migrate, modernize, add AI, then co-sellLegal industry ran on WordPerfect, mainframes, and homemade billingClio launched 2008, same year as AWS's first databaseNow serves 400,000+ legal professionals across 130 countriesLanded legal tech's largest-ever acquisition, raised $500M Series GShips code 50-100 times daily in a regulated industryStarted split across a data center, Azure, AWS, some GCPNine years of acquisitions, fundraising, and rapid team growthSharded databases, added regions for compliance and low latencyEngineering team grew from 40 to over 650 peopleLawyers once feared cloud security and data ownership questionsThree principles: data security, system resilience, data regionalityStage one: survival, learning EC2, RDS, S3 basicsStage two: earning trust through SOC 2, PCI complianceAWS became a compliance partner, not just a hostStage three: AI reshapes coding speed and company cultureIntegrating acquisitions scattered across Heroku, GCP, Azure, othersVLUX deal added a billion-document legal case-law databaseRapid acquisition-to-launch playbook: some products shipped in daysStrategy: avoid single AI vendor, preserve maximum optionalityParticipants:Jonathan Watson – Chief Technology Officer, ClioMartin Bazinet – Director of Technology, AWS Canada, Amazon Web Services  See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

Experts from Pegasystems and AWS reveal how AI-powered tools now modernize decades-old mainframe systems in weeks instead of years—unlocking trapped data faster than ever.Topics Include:Session covers accelerating mainframe modernization using AWS Transform and Pega BlueprintAgenda: challenges, joint solution, value prop, customer story, rollout mechanismMainframe costs rise 20-30% yearly, straining IT budgets significantlyMonolithic systems create long time-to-market, hurting competitiveness against newer rivalsMainframe data stays locked away, blocking AI adoption and innovationRetiring mainframe skills outpace new workforce training, compounding the problemAI now enables analyzing decades-old code bases within weeks, not yearsAWS Transform extracts business logic; Pega Blueprint visualizes modernized target applicationsFive-step journey: Transform, Pega Foundry, Blueprint, then deployment via Infinity platformThree Transform agents handle code, data, and activity analysis separatelyData analysis covers data lineage and data dictionary schema extractionOutputs feed a knowledge graph, enabling natural language queries anytimeTransform deterministically identifies distinct data paths from mainframe systemsData paths get grouped into business functions, each modernizable independentlyFinal steps extract business logic and generate plain-English requirementsBlueprint agent enriches Transform outputs, enabling intuitive workflow designBlueprint offers runtime previews and is publicly accessible at pega.comPega Infinity platform handles both batch and online mainframe workloadsInsurance company Unum modernized 1.5M lines of COBOL in three monthsExperience-Based Acceleration program delivers modernized, working code within four-to-six weeksParticipants:Surender Kumar – Director, Mainframe Modernization, PegasystemsUjwal Bukka – Sr Partner Solutions Architect, Business Apps, Amazon Web ServicesSourav Sarkar – Sr Worldwide Specialist Solutions Architect, Mainframe & Legacy Modernization, Amazon Web ServicesSee how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

Katherine Shealy, Zuora’s AI monetization specialist, explores why traditional SaaS pricing is buckling under AI’s dynamic costs. She discusses usage-based and hybrid models, cross-functional alignment, and tracking LLM expenses down to individual engineers. She also details Zuora AI’s governed, multi-agent architecture on AWS Bedrock and AgentCore, including secure persistent memory.

Sophos CSO Simon Reed reveals how attackers now operate like leveraged businesses—and how AI is making both sides of the cyber arms race dramatically more sophisticated.Topics Include:Intro: Simon Reed, CSO at Sophos, joins Kamil Davidov.Sophos defends 625,000+ organizations with AI-native Fusion platform.Sophos MDR runs the world's largest agentic SOC.Simon's journey: cybersecurity since 2001, from graffiti to warfare.Cyber threats framed as constant toxicity, not occasional lightning strikes.Sophos spans small business to enterprise, giving unique threat visibility.Attackers now operate as leveraged, ecosystem-driven businesses, not lone actors.AI dramatically increases attack quality, speed, and sophistication.AWS Local Zones cut latency for Sophos's threat intelligence cloud.IntellX connects every product to real-time global threat data."Good day" means finding novelty before attackers exploit it.Worst days: sudden, unpredictable supply chain compromise scenarios.Sophos updates protection across 600,000 customers within minutes.Decisions made fast, on incomplete data, balancing speed and risk.Sophos has pursued AI and deep learning for eight-plus years.Agentic AI's next phase reduces laborious human security work.Simon prioritizes class-based, automation-scale defenses over budgets.Sophos cut data platform costs 30%, migrated ahead of schedule.Advice: hyper-engage AWS account teams, push for more.Closing story: Sophos helped stop ransomware hitting hospitals during COVID.Participants:Simon Reed – Chief Security Officer, SophosKamil Davidov – Sales Leader Israel ISV-BizApps, Amazon Web ServicesSee how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

Vibe coding is accelerating code development within the Enterprise, but at what cost of security? Retool’s CEO shares how you can accelerate software development while managing the risks effectively.Topics Include:Internal software runs pharmacies, grocery checkouts, and airport check-ins dailyRetool manages and de-risks environment from insecure codeAI has driven a 10x surge in code volume since 2025More code plus less human review means falling code qualityNon-engineers can now build working apps in minutes flatBut deploying and securing those apps remains genuinely difficultMultiple CIOs found private company data exposed on the internetUncontrolled model choice is quietly driving up company costsAttackers now deploy automated agent swarms, not lone hackersDefense is asymmetric: one flaw in, everything must holdRetool runs inside customers' own cloud, often on AWSA single data choke point enables logging, audits, authorizationGuardrails, not their absence, actually let teams move fasterSecurity audits reveal major gaps in nearly all companies checkedNearly all companies may face a serious hack within 18 monthsParticipants:David Hsu – Founder, CEO, RetoolSee how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

Eran Ashkenazi, SentinelOne’s strategic growth and AI security leader; Deirdre Toner, Couchbase’s commercial chief and former AWS executive; and Matt Wood, AWS’s AI and technology chief, explore the agentic AI inflection point. They discuss adoption barriers, AI-ready data, trust and safety, workforce readiness, customer-facing use cases, and partnerships that accelerate enterprise growth.

Chad Holdorf, VP of Product at Demandbase who led a major AI rebuild, tells the story of scrapping a complex, failing architecture two months before launch. He explains rebuilding with a single Strands agent, the jump in pass rates and retention, and real customer wins like cutting report time and tracing ads to closed deals.