♫ Rock Music ♫
Robert Chatwani: Hi everyone!
I'm Robert Chatwani, Chief Marketing Officer at Atlassian.
Welcome to the next set of our ITSM World Tour, Customers Unplugged!
Now in this set, we have the pleasure of welcoming our customers to the stage to share how
Jira Service Management is unlocking high velocity teams across their organizations.
For this session, please join me in giving me a rockstar welcome to Bruce Kozuma and
Dave Treff from Ginkgo Bioworks.
Bruce and Dave, thank you for joining us today on tour.
Dave Treff: Great! Welcome to be here.
Bruce Kozuma: Yeah, thank you.
Dave Treff: Thank you.
Robert Chatwani: All right!
We're going to unpack a ton of detail!
We're going to hear your story!
But before we get into any of those details, I have two really important questions for you.
The first one is who's your favorite musician or band?
And the second question is, do you remember the first concert that you went to?
Bruce Kozuma: You?
Dave Treff: Oh, me first?
Okay.
Well, obviously the king, Elvis Presley.
The first concert I went to, rock concert, was The Lovin' Spoonful at the Coast Guard Academy
in New London, Connecticut.
Although I did go see pianist Ivan Davis at Carnegie Hall several years before that.
Bruce Kozuma: My favorite band actually is the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
And that was one of the first concerts I went to.
I'm fortunate enough, non-pandemic times, to actually sing in the chorus for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
So that's my home orchestra.
It's great fun.
Robert Chatwani: Oh, that is epic!
Well, both great responses and answers and quite different from each other, so I love that.
But hey, you're a team, so let's learn a little bit more.
I'm going to start by really big picture asking you about Ginkgo Bioworks.
I had a chance to learn a little bit about the company, and you guys are doing some incredibly
innovative work!
To me, it sounds a little bit like science fiction.
Help educate us.
Most of our audience may not have heard of the field that you guys are in, and I think
it's extraordinarily fascinating.
Tell us about the company.
Dave Treff: Ginkgo Bioworks was founded in 2008, 2009
by four recent MIT PhDs and their professor, Tom Knight, who was already a famous
computer engineer from way back who decided, "Hey, maybe we can program DNA like we program computers."
So he started it and between him and George Church at Harvard, they invented the concept
of synthetic biology.
At Ginkgo, the way that works is this: a paint company, one of their scientists says that
they can get rid of a really nasty chemical that they use to make paint that's sourced
from petroleum.
It's brewed from yeast, but they can't do it because they're not synthetic biologists.
So they come to us and we say, "Yeah, we can do that."
And so what we do is we, with artificial intelligence, we figure out how we can make a yeast, if we change the DNA.
So, put new DNA in that yeast.
When we feed it air and sugar and water, instead of producing beer, it will produce paint.
And so we do that for cannabinoids.
There's building products, there's creams and lotions, cosmetics, food, on and on.
Robert Chatwani: Well, that is incredible!
and I was going to say maybe the elephant in the room, but more appropriately the dinosaur
in the room, probably indicates to us that this has relevance well beyond just some of
those early examples that you shared with us.
But the idea of programming DNA to create substances that can advance capabilities across
so many industries is fascinating!
Naturally, my next question is, okay, you're on the frontier of science.
What's your guys' role, both of you, in helping to bring this to life, this incredible technology to life?
Dave Treff: All right!
Well, I am the Head of Digital Operations, which means I'm like the CIO-ish.
So it's all the IT, the help desk, the networks the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Bruce Kozuma: Yeah. I'm a Product Manager, and I do what Dave needs.
I conceive of the products and services that digital operations has as discrete products.
One of those examples being enterprise service management, which we'll get more into as we talk.
Dave Treff: Yep.
Robert Chatwani: Got it.
Okay.
So you guys have scaled incredibly.
Obviously the company has gone through incredible amounts of change.
You are providing the capabilities for transformation.
Let's jump into service management.
Bruce, you mentioned it earlier.
Why did you guys need a service management solution?
What are some of the challenges or opportunities that you're trying to solve for?
Bruce Kozuma: Yeah, there's something called Knight's Law,
which is actually David mentioned him earlier, Tom Knight, one of our founders.
He observed, after a couple years of watching Ginkgo Bioworks and having it grow, is that
we could triple our output and cut our cost in half every year.
Dave Treff: We actually do that.
Bruce Kozuma: Right.
Dave Treff: We triple our output, no matter how it's measured.
So whether it's strain tests or DNA that we order or whatever, we triple our output every
year, and we cut the cost per strain in half.
So cost per strain used to be like thousands of dollars.
Right now it's, here it's $11.
And we're going to cut that in half next year.
Robert Chatwani: And in terms of service management, how has
service management played a role to also drive process improvements or to connect teams
across the company?
Maybe give us some examples of the types of teams that are using Jira Service Management
to kind of advance this ability for your company to get work done.
Bruce Kozuma: Yeah, so we started looking at service management
when I got here and I noticed immediately that we had two separate tools for service management.
There was the software teams, like the DevOps team that he also manages, all using Jira Software
because they're essentially developing software, so that's the right tool.
The operations teams were using Freshservice.
And so if there was a ticket in one queue in one system, the other people may not see it,
because they're used to keeping their eye on the sprints and looking at their Jira queues.
So we took a look around at the marketplace and said, "We really should just be on one platform.
We should just be on Jira Service Management, and it just changes its name from service desk.
And we put it in specifically for the help desk.
And we launched that, we went through a great process.
We found a great partner for that.
We launched that process.
And within days, we had other teams coming to us and said,
"Hey, I need to manage my requests in the same way you guys are."
Dave Treff: Right.
Well, yeah.
The thing to know about Ginkgo is we are really a collection of services.
There's like 20 different services in the lab: sequencing, high throughput screening,
proteomics, protein, blah, blah.
They all... Depending upon the customer, they are all using each other's services.
And all my stuff is services, all of Bruce's team is all services.
And so it was very obvious to people that what we were putting up for the help desk
could help them because there's so many bottlenecks, obviously, when you have 20 different services
and then there's finance and legal.
And everybody needs some way to manage it because we can't grow the business by hiring people.
We run incredibly lean, so we automate the crap out of everything basically.
Robert Chatwani: Yeah.
Well, it sounds like you started with one team and then rather than push, there was
this pull that actually drew you across the organization.
Bruce Kozuma: Very much.
They build it and we didn't have to wait for them to come.
They were there immediately like, "That, please, now."
So we have groups, like environmental health and safety now is using it as well.
We have lab operations teams who have to keep all these labs working are now using it.
We have automation teams.
Dave talked about people who build robots.
Well, that's the team who builds the robots, they're using it.
The software teams are using it slightly differently.
They're doing sort of upfront request management that then, once they approve the request,
then goes into their boards for software development.
We have business development groups, program management groups who are also using it to
take in requests.
And we've got ambitions to tie this enterprise service management layer into our CRM systems,
into our portfolio planning systems, into our operation systems, into our finance systems,
really to be the hub of a lot of activity that's going to go on.
Robert Chatwani: Let me ask, why did you choose Jira Service Management?
You mentioned you were using Jira software, so maybe it's for the connectivity.
But what got you excited about Atlassian specifically and JSM?
Bruce Kozuma: Well, I had used Jira previously, but Jira was here before I got here.
Dave Treff: Right.
But for me, having run IT at a bunch of different places, I've looked at service management software in the past.
And I can talk about all your competitors, but they're all much bigger.
They'll come in and show you a demo where, "Look you go clickity, clickity, click, and
you get a pencil."
Right?
"I want a pencil, so clickity, clickity, click.
Pencil gets delivered."
Well, the problem with those is that the list price starts at about half a million dollars
and goes up for a...
And then you need an army of consultants and it's one of those typical enterprise things
that may or may not work.
And we needed something that would scale with us.
When we saw that Jira Service Management was really much more general purpose than just
a help desk software, we were like, "Wow."
And then we started talking to you guys, and you said that you were actually interested in
getting into the general purpose service management market.
I mean, that was perfect for us.
We love to partner with ventures that are just starting and growing the same that we are.
Bruce Kozuma: And the value out of the premium subscription
that's got Insight included with it, and it's got Opsgenie.
That's what we needed because we had an existing implementation of Opsgenie that we needed
to sort of bring into the fold for that incident response.
We also, as you can tell, we have a bit of an asset management, configuration management challenge.
So we needed to fold that in as well.
And so now we're taking this concept of an asset and applying it to software assets,
applying it to not just the IT stuff.
Because our processes, as you might have guessed, are very, very integrated.
So if we're making changes in one area, I actually need to track that change across
software, across instrumentation, across people and potentially even to environmental conditions.
So now we have, with a general platform of service management, a change management platform.
Dave Treff: Correct.
One of the things to note is that, unlike most other biotech companies, about half of
the pieces of equipment get moved every year from lab to lab because to support some program
or some customer.
We currently don't have a way of figuring out where did it go?
I mean, we literally have equipment that scientists will just move.
We're hoping to be able to integrate with like Device42 and some other software that
we'll be able to actually have a change control for laboratory instrument movement.
Robert Chatwani: Yeah, yeah, just like any other equipment.
Now what you've accomplished just sounds so incredible.
You work with a partner to help you in the implementation and rollout, which we see across
many of our customers who need some added partnerships to sort of drive scale and drive implementation.
And that partner was Praecipio Consulting.
Dave Treff: Correct.
Robert Chatwani: Is that right?
Bruce Kozuma: Yep!
And they've been a fantastic partner.
Dave Treff: Definitely.
Bruce Kozuma: We've had a couple separate engagements with
them since then.
We're in the midst of negotiations for another engagement for next year.
And it was an interesting SOW to write, because we pretty much said, "Help us do stuff, because
we're not quite sure what's going to come out."
We know we have this as our scope, get us off of Freshservice and get
us onto a common platform.
But then we think we might do this.
We might do that.
We might do this other thing and 16 other things we don't know about.
And that turned out exactly the right approach because again, who thought that EH&S was going
to come through the door?
Who thought that a business development group was going to come through the door?
Dave Treff: Quality control!
Bruce Kozuma: Quality.
We have a huge effort right now in quality.
Now I've done quality management systems and I don't think of Jira as a quality management
system, but we've used it effectively as the system to raise that there is a quality issue.
All the statistical stuff that a real QMS brings you is done separately, but tracking
that we have quality issues, that whole thing was able to come up within about a month and
that felt long for people.
They don't know how long QMSs usually take to go up.
So that was great.
Dave Treff: The other thing about Praecipio is that they,
not only do our development, but they also do our operations.
So we're not involved in operating our service management or Jira or our Confluence instances at all.
We have them doing it and they're doing a great job.
Robert Chatwani: Oh, that's fantastic!
So the relationship with Praecipio is truly a strategic partnership between the company.
Dave Treff: Definitely.
Robert Chatwani: You mentioned quality management, there are
some operational use cases for Jira Service Management that you talked about.
And I also know that it's very important for there to be tracing, tracking, auditability.
Ginkgo played a role in COVID vaccines, right?
So there's a lot of compliance type issues that need to get addressed within the company.
What role and value does Jira Service Management provide as you get into these more complex,
often more technical compliance centric use cases?
Bruce Kozuma: So, we're now a public company.
And so the US regulation Sarbanes-Oxley now applies.
And so we are using Jira Service Management as a key platform for us to track who's got
access to what, when did they get access, when was their access removed?
Also, as I mentioned earlier, change management.
We're going to make a change.
Let's say we want to change how we do our strain counts, which affects our finances.
So how is that change authorized?
How is that change reviewed?
How is that change implemented?
All that, we're tracking through Jira Service Management.
Dave Treff: Yeah. The reporting is great, and that's one of the things I've always liked about, even way,
way back, the old Jira and Confluence platforms, is that the reporting was really great.
All of my teams have dashboards.
And everything that we need for Sarbanes-Oxley is there.
There's a simple matter of programming the report, but we've got Praecipio for that.
So we're actually in very, very good shape for our first audit in March.
Bruce Kozuma: And we're doing further integrations.
Our software teams are integrating with their CICD pipelines and we use GitLab.
And so that is a fairly simple thing for them to do.
And once one team figured it out, like six other teams figured it out very quickly, just
that's what you do with good code.
Robert Chatwani: On that note, what is on the roadmap for Ginko Bioworks
and Jira Service Management? Whats ahead?
You have measurement, you want to get some of those productivity and quality measures out.
Bruce Kozuma: We want to make the data available. So for example,
Jira Data Lake, we're very interested in. To have common platform.
Further integration, and migration from the server to cloud products in terms of functionality in Insight is very interesting to us
because we can tie that further into Device42.
Something we're calling ChatOps v2, which is we need to meet our users where they are.
So, if they want to do everything through Slack -- fine...
We'll use plug-ins and then they can essentially open a Jira form within Slack
fill out the information. The thread pops up and they can do their interaction
and they don't realize that all that data is going back to Jira Service Management. Which I can then use Jira Data Lake, to do reporting on.
Dave Treff: Right, and if we really want to throw real hard-core stuff at it we
already started moving some of the Jira data into Snowflake. Where it can be really munged
and split, and hacked, and everything, three ways from Sunday.
Our company has -- every employee has a Tableau account.
So dashboards are huge in this company! The best Tableau programers is one of the founders.
So... We'll be [laughter] using that with some of the Jira data for the stuff that we know that you'll be moving into your product after we do it in Snowflake.
Robert Chatwani: Fantastic! Well, it just sounds to me that you guys really democratize service management and empowered end users.
I like how you put that, Bruce, which is to meet users where they are.
They don't have to necessarily change their behaviors in dramatic ways, but
Jira Service Management in the backdrop is really able to capture all those interactions in a way
that is useful.
Dave Treff: Yeah! Well. You, Know.
One of the things is, about those big monolithic solutions, the service management solutions
that come from the different big guys, you have to change your business in order to use them, right?
We're not changing our business to use Jira Service Management.
We're bringing it right in, plugging it right in where we live and using it.
That's really different from the rest of the products on the market.
Robert Chatwani: I love that, which is we adapt to you.
We don't force you to adapt to the software.
Dave Treff: Right!
Robert Chatwani: Bruce and Dave, thank you so much for sharing
with us, not only the story of Ginkgo Bioworks and how the company is scaling, but how you've
deployed Jira Service Management throughout the organization to unleash the potential
of teams throughout your company.
Really appreciate you spending time with us today.
Dave Treff: Oh, no problem.
This was fun.
Thank you for having us.
Bruce Kozuma: Thank you very much.
Robert Chatwani: Absolutely!
♫ Rock Music ♫