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🎙 Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service, a podcast that takes you on a journey into the DNA of InterSystems. I will be your guide as we explore how our unparalleled commitment to customer service fuels limitless human potential.
🤝 Join us as we dive into the culture of InterSystems and share the stories of the people who make it all possible - our customers, partners, and employees. From helping healthcare providers improve patient outcomes to powering the world’s most important institutions, we’ll show you how our dedication to customer service excellence is in rarified air.
John Paladino (Host): Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service. I'm your host, John Paladino, Head of Client Services at InterSystems. Join me as we explore the past, present, and future of service, from AI's promise to the enduring power of the human touch.
We live in a world where customer needs are constantly evolving, and the pace of change is accelerating. So how do leaders and businesses navigate through these challenges to drive meaningful innovation? I think we have the perfect guest to dive into this topic with us today, Mr. Jeff Fried. Jeff Reed is a Director of Platform Strategy for InterSystems.
Prior to joining InterSystems, Jeff worked for Microsoft. He was the Head of Product Management for Fast Search and Transfer at Microsoft. Previously, he was a CTO for BA Insight, and Jeff holds three degrees from MIT, all in Applied Math and Computer Science. So Jeff, you've come back to Cambridge, full circle, you're back next to MIT.
Jeff Fried (Guest): It's ironic and very fun, and I want to say first, John, I'm a huge fan of your podcast and of you. I'm delighted to be here and coming back to Kendall Square where I look out at MIT Sloan School right out of my office window. It's heartwarming after so much time here.
John: And you've had a lot to do with innovation. So in terms of customer needs, I have my own views, but how have you seen the changes in terms of what customers need and what they expect, especially across all the inflection points and changes in technology and continued innovation?
Jeff: There's some things that haven't changed at all. I think there's good old-fashioned providing value to customers and being of service to them and building wonderful products. The principles have not changed, but the pace, as you mentioned, is so much faster. It used to be the average time from an idea to a first product introduction was seven years. Now it's under one.
John: That's true. And it's, it's shrinking even from there.
Jeff: Yeah. So the other changes, I would say, go along with the megatrends. The cloud and now AI and generative AI have changed the way that our customers work, and that's changed their needs and their expectations. They're looking to us at InterSystems to help them with those transitions and to be not just with the times, but just a couple of steps ahead of them. As you know, I now lead a thing called the Innovation Acceleration Group.
John: Oh, tell us about that.
Jeff: It's just a group of people within InterSystems whose job it is to catalyze everybody's creative juices and to have a process around innovation. And I counted really five different processes that we use. My favorite, which I think is near and dear to your heart, is what I call customer-driven innovation, where we're working sort of hand in hand with customers and partners as we, as we figure things out and experiment.
John: That's the best way to innovate. I think we've been talking about the pandemic for so long in a way, I get tired of talking about it, except it really did prove that the pace of innovation can accelerate and lessons we've learned from COVID, I think we're still learning from those two to three years that we went through that. Tell us about what your perspective is on the pace of innovation during COVID and maybe some stories about how we helped customers.
Jeff: I think the number one lesson for me during that was just speeding up. We power so many healthcare things around the planet that it seemed like we were involved in every hotspot. Our software was in the EMRs put up in the Wuhan pop-up hospitals. And they built in two weeks a whole hospital from the ground up, including all deployment of processes and software, things that would have taken four years.
John: That's incredible. It really highlights the importance of agility and innovation during challenging times. How has InterSystems adapted to meet the changing needs of its customers, especially in terms of support and managed services?
Jeff: As the number of applications and customers using our services grows, we've had to provide a more diverse set of support options. We've also expanded our managed services to help customers manage their environments more effectively, whether it's in a public cloud or our private cloud. We're seeing a trend where customers, including startups, are asking us to manage their environments so they can focus on building solutions.
John: That's a significant shift in how services are delivered. How do you see generative AI shaping the future of innovation and customer service?
Jeff: Generative AI, particularly large language models like ChatGPT, has immense potential to drive innovation. These models, with their billion-scale neural networks, are capable of producing remarkably human-like text. However, they also require careful management due to their opaque nature. InterSystems is actively working on using generative AI to build models that help customers predict outcomes more effectively, such as predicting no-shows in healthcare settings.
John: It's clear that innovation is key to meeting the evolving needs of customers. Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast.
Jeff: Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure.
John: And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. If you have any questions or would like to hear from a specific guest, email us at InspiredService@InterSystems.com. When you're ready to unlock the potential of your data and experience support done differently, visit InterSystems.com. Until next time, remember, it's great to have a successful past, but it's even more important to have a bright future ahead.