Hey channel insiders, I'm your host Katie Bavoso and welcome to this episode of Partner POV brought to you by Port, the software engineering nerf center that helps companies ship better software faster with a smarter internal developer portal. If your developers are slowed down by scattered tools, repetitive and tedious processes, or waiting on the DevOps group who is buried under tickets, Port can streamline their workflows, reduce errors, and give them back what they need most, time.
To explain how it works and why it matters now more than ever, I'm joined by Zohar Ay, co-founder and CEO of Port. Welcome, Zohar. >> Hey, thank you so much for having me today. >> Hey, thank you so much for being here. I'm excited to learn more about port. So let's start with just that. Before we dig into port itself, let's paint a picture of the internal developer portal space. I want to get to know this environment. What's currently impacting internal developers day-to-day operations and dragging down their productivity? >> As the industry of software evolved so much in the past few years, the landscape of developers became very very complex, right?
They have Kubernetes, GitHub, GitHubs. They need to take care of vulnerabilities, incidents, it's all over the place. So developers needed something that will enable them to be the true owners of the applications, right? Uh so developer portals were created in order to solve the chaos that developers live in and providing them with one uni unified interface where they can interact with. So they can manage incidents, they can provision cloud resources, they can um create secrets, they can know who owns a service without relying on tickets to DevOps or scattered information or tribal knowledge or pinging someone on Slack, right?
They get everything that they need in a way that is consumable for them. >> So tell me, why do your customers choose port over building their own portal from scratch or maybe using a competing solution and what makes your approach more scalable and sustainable? Yeah. So just a bit of a background about what got us into starting port. Uh we were platform engineers for a very large enterprise both me and Yonathan my business partner and we started by building a developer portal from scratch.
We realized that we have a few use cases. We have um a community of 2,000 engineers. Um so we started building this for them and what happened as time goes by is we got more and more teams showing interest in the developer portal and suddenly we had to establish an entire team an entire group of 30 to 40 people maintaining this developer portal with everchanging needs and more and more stakeholders coming in. So we realized that the fact that the developer portal is a huge project for the organization, there is a very amazing opportunity to create a product that enables every company to adopt the developer portal and still be agile and solving the pains that they uh that they need and have. >> Zohar, as the co-founder of port, what did you personally see missing in solution tools already on the market to help with these issues?
So we learned that every company is a snowflake, right? Every company has their own tech stack. They have their own requirements. They have their own architecture. And what's missing in the market both from building your own and purchasing an off-the-shelf tool is the ability to customize the experience to your DNA as a company. And this is why as sport from when we designed the product with our experience and our knowledge as former platform engineers, we created a platform that actually allows you to customize and build the experience for your specific organization.
By the end of the day, it looks like as if someone built it in-house. This is the experience that you'll get and we give you the tools in order to build that and we enable you to be the true owner, the the true product manager for your developer portal. So we know that AI is transforming how developers work obviously. So how is port helping your customers stay in front of the AI native wave that is sweeping through engineering right now? So what we see right now in the market which is very uh exciting is how AI is helping engineers to code faster right like we have tools like GitHub copilot and cursor that helps developers produce more code and deliver more features to production but what we learned is that the coding time is actually 10 to 20% of developers day-to-day life >> and the opportunity that we see for port is helping the developers with the remaining ing 80% of their day which is complying with standards, fixing vulnerabilities, managing incidents and the way that port is designed to the AI era is helping engineering teams solving those 80% of their day-to-day life with a AI native experience insideport.
It means that we envision a world where developers are not investigating an issue on their own. They are getting a proactive root cause analysis report to their dashboard. So they can review the AI analysis and understand what should be the step to remediate an incident. So basically we are building port to create AI native developer workflows that enables them to move much faster on the 80% of their day. >> Really important to do now considering that AI is running so rampant across every industry.
We're seeing it touch almost every vertical. We have to consider that obviously we know that port isn't the only company using developing or integrating AI tools. So how is port evolving to stay ahead of competitors who are also integrating AI into their platforms. >> So what we are seeing in the in the market right now is that that the platform engineering teams are adopting AI to solve the the developer community problem that they have internally.
And one of the issues that we see and the risks and the pains with adopting AI is the risk of an agentic chaos >> where you start putting AI agents making decisions connecting them with MCP to all the different tools. And we see teams starting to struggle with the visibility into the agents decisions. They struggle with the ability to create highquality context for those agents so they can make the right conclusions and the right decisions and also setting up the guarders for those agents to make what's right for your business.
So we want to let AI be creative but we also want to set the right guarders for them. So we see port evolves as an enabler for AI to gain the visibility to the AI decisions to provide the agents with the high quality context so they can make the right decisions and setting up those guards in order to give the creativity space for the for agents while you can stay sleep at night knowing that agents will not release a major version to production on a Friday night.
Right? So this is where we see port evolves as an enabler for AI adoption to gain high quality decisions alongside garbils and uh security and compliance. >> I just have to say agent chaos great possible band name I think we should consider that maybe make some t-shirts. Yeah, we we just see, you know, we had the tools, we had the people, and now we have agents. We just like added so much more complexity into into the landscape of development and someone needs to make sense of this chaos. >> How does port fit into a company's existing tech stack without adding more of that complexity that you were talking about?
And how quickly can teams be up and running with the platform? It's all comes down to the mindset that we have for for the product and the mistakes that we did in the past both me and Jonathan building a developer portal in the past. We realized that in order to build a product that can fit into every company's DNA, we have to provide our customers with a set of Lego parts that they can assemble in order to build a developer experience of their of their organization.
So I will give a few examples. The data model for our software catalog allows you to bring your own data model. It means that you can control the schema, you can control the object and you decide how you want to architect your life cycle of development. So it will reflect your your decisions and your tech decisions. I will give another example for the self-service actions inside port. You can fully customize the way the interface looks like and the inputs that you give to port.
It means that you can curate the experience to the specific stakeholders within the organization. So they can use it directly from port or if they use cursor or GitHub copilot using our MCP they can make an ask from the prompt and behind the scenes it will activate the right self-service actions with a set of parameters that you've decided that you want to implement. So port is built as a platform that can be fully customized and we give you pre-made templates so you can get up and running with the use cases that we see.
So for example, GitHub is one of our largest customers >> and we learn from those companies on what are the engineering best practices and we bake them in our templates. The average time to get up and running with port would be anywhere between 30 to 60 days to get up and running with a few initial use cases and launch it for hundreds of engineers. So, as I go back to thinking about AI, I'm considering how that's accelerated some skill levels on some teams, but haven't quite put them through all the training that other teams have gotten.
So, what if you have multiple teams delivering software, but each of those teams have varying skill levels? How does port allow those teams to better collaborate? The idea of having a platform engineering team inside the organization is allowing us as a solution to build specific experiences to different stakeholders within the company. So we see the platform engineering team as a as a product manager and their role together with us is to build the right level of experience to the different teams according to their skill set and according to their needs.
So we empower those teams, those platform engineering teams to build exactly what their team needs. So this is how we overcome the variance of needs inside the company with different teams and different skills and they will get exactly what they need inside port and tailored to their level of understanding and level of needs. Can you share a specific example or success story that shows how port helped a customer improve productivity, reduce friction or scale more efficiently? >> Absolutely.
Um, so we have one customers a customer and their name is AMCS. They are a very large organization. Um, and they heavily relied on tickets that they had to uh to address. Developers would file a ticket and the DevOps would have to um to address the tickets. And unfortunately DevOps team do not scale in a linear way as and as developers does. So every ticket creates a massive amount of work for the DevOps team. So together with port they created a layer of self-service actions that developers could use on their own.
They are self-sufficient. They can go into port instead of creating a ticket and waiting for a couple of weeks for something to be addressed. They could click a button inside port. And the platform engineering team made sure that all the best practices, the guardrails, the security principles are baked in those golden paths that they created for their engineering. So they eliminated the amount of tickets in dozens of percents that help the DevOps team focus on strategic work and not repetitive work and help developers move much faster and be more autonomous.
For organizations that might think they're not big enough for a developer portal, how do you make the case that port is for them too? And generally speaking, who is the ideal user of port? >> This is a great question. So first of all, port um is relatively um a small company. We are almost 200 people compared to the enterprises that we work with with tens of thousands of people and we are using port internally. So the first case that I would make is we are getting a lot of value of using port uh within port.
So our developers make their deployments from port. All the security and standards are baked into their processes. The way that we uh access production is via port to ensure compliance and audit as we are under a compliance working with enterprise companies. So we believe that developer portal um should fit every company with a few dozens of engineers already and it's becoming one of those main building blocks for for engineering team. So you have git provider, you have cloud, you have CI/CD and you have a developer portal and this is the right way to build a scalable engineering organization from from day one.
So we believe a developer portal is a non-negotiable product that you have to adopt to scale your engineering while software is is accelerating forward. >> Zohar, I know that Amazon web services is a partner of port. So how does AWS help support port's mission and how does it give you a competitive edge? >> So we work with AWS on many different levels. Uh first of all we we run our infrastructure on AWS. um we work with our solution architects to build the right foundation for for our for our customers and for our production.
We also have built in the past few months a very interesting motion of uh going to market together getting access to the AWS customers working with their gotom market team which been fabulous and we are really excited about the opportunities to collaborate with AWS and they keep coming with more and more ideas which we love and we we we feel that we build a great relationship. so far. >> Oh, that's great to hear. So, tell me why is now an ideal time to adopt port? >> I think that what we are right now seeing in the era of AI where engineering teams are starting to build much faster and they expect to reduce the load from developers on tasks that AI can take for them.
So, what we will start to see over time is a world where we have an autonomous life cycle of development. It means that systems will be self-healing. AI will remediate the incidents. AI will provision infrastructure according to what they see fit to complete a feature. Um, and AI will basically help you perform code review on pull request because you'll have much more pull requests to review and you need some scalable way to review them and the developers will become an oversight layer, a governance layer that will and a management layer to those agents. to enable the autonomous life cycle of development where we have more and more things happens on their own.
Right? So the the way that we see port evolve two to three years from now is becoming this autonomous SDLC layer that helps engineering platform engineering teams to define those autonomous flows and make sure they have human in the loop. They enable those agents to access high quality data and context and they put the right guardrails to to avoid destructive operations by AI. So port becomes this operating system for autonomous life cycle of development. >> Very well put.
Well, if I'm an interested user who would like to learn more about port, where can I go? >> So, first of all, we have a live demo. You can go into demo.port.io. You don't have to give us your email. You don't have to sign up. This is just a product. uh you can play with it. Alternatively, you can sign up for a meeting with our experts. Uh we have platform engineers working for our go to market that can walk you through the best practices that that we see in the market and show you what port is all about.
And we also have a Slack community uh that we would love to to engage there. Uh you can you can join today. >> Zohar, thank you so much for your time today and thanks to you at home for joining us. For more episodes of partner POV, check out channelinsider.com. Once again, I'm Katie Bavoso and I'll see you next time.
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