AWS for Software Companies Podcast

Front CEO Dan O’Connell explores whether customer experience should be AI-first or human-first, and why unifying siloed teams onto a single platform transforms the customer experience.
Topics Include:
How customer-facing teams manage complex relationships across email, chat and voice
From headsets and green screens to today’s modern customer service
The defining question: AI-first or human-first customer touch points?
Why siloed support, success and sales tools fragment the customer experience
Automation versus experience: deciding what your customers actually want
Why experimenting with AI now protects you from faster competitors
Customer support’s clear metrics make it prime territory for AI ROI
How a shared inbox idea evolved to suit an agentic world
Unifying support, account management and customer success in one place
A logistics workflow turning plain-text emails into app-like quote comparisons
Seamless handoffs between AI agents and humans on a single platform
Why email and voice are critical infrastructure where downtime costs revenue
Scaling from startup credits to enterprise without a major rewrite
Moving upmarket and why customers’ cloud commitments matter
Bringing telephony into the unified thread via Amazon Connect
Is voice dying? Generational and company-size differences explored
Why AI adoption moves at different speeds outside Silicon Valley
Choosing AI models: balancing quality, latency, price and innovation
The ultimate test: not knowing whether a human or agent helped
Spotting the warning signs: teams coordinating problems instead of solving them

Participants:
Dan O’Connell – Chief Executive Officer, Front
Matt Rivron – Account Manager, 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/

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, LaunchDarkly

See 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 sites
Why clinical trials sit between healthcare delivery and life sciences
How a free platform grew into a self-sustaining business
Balancing monetization and mission: free tiers, fair pricing, annual true-ups
Giving 15 months' notice and over-communicating the why
Building migration tooling to move users from multi-tenant to enterprise
Handling edge cases and migration issues through radical transparency
Navigating customer pushback amid 2025 NIH funding cuts
What a strategic AWS partnership looks like beyond infrastructure
Getting more from AWS by sharing long-term goals, not transactions
Advice for SaaS leaders: set boundaries, prioritize fairness, own the message
Preparing teams for change without gaming out every objection

Participants:
Nick Frenzer – General Manager, Site Solutions, Veeva

See 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, Blackberry
Mehran 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-sell
Legal industry ran on WordPerfect, mainframes, and homemade billing
Clio launched 2008, same year as AWS's first database
Now serves 400,000+ legal professionals across 130 countries
Landed legal tech's largest-ever acquisition, raised $500M Series G
Ships code 50-100 times daily in a regulated industry
Started split across a data center, Azure, AWS, some GCP
Nine years of acquisitions, fundraising, and rapid team growth
Sharded databases, added regions for compliance and low latency
Engineering team grew from 40 to over 650 people
Lawyers once feared cloud security and data ownership questions
Three principles: data security, system resilience, data regionality
Stage one: survival, learning EC2, RDS, S3 basics
Stage two: earning trust through SOC 2, PCI compliance
AWS became a compliance partner, not just a host
Stage three: AI reshapes coding speed and company culture
Integrating acquisitions scattered across Heroku, GCP, Azure, others
VLUX deal added a billion-document legal case-law database
Rapid acquisition-to-launch playbook: some products shipped in days
Strategy: avoid single AI vendor, preserve maximum optionality

Participants:
Jonathan Watson – Chief Technology Officer, Clio
Martin 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/