Moderator: Murali Suriar, Snowflake
Panelists: V Brennan, Slack; Dave O'Connor; George Kargiotakis, Elastic; Richard "RichiH" Hartmann, Grafana
Software as a Service (SaaS) products have revolutionized the way businesses operate. However, as organisations increasingly adopt multiple SaaS solutions to cater to diverse needs, a significant hurdle emerges - the lack of seamless integration and harmonious coexistence among these platforms. This panel event aims to shed light on the intriguing question of "Why SaaS products do not play nice with each other?"
V Brennan, Slack
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/brennan_v_200x230.jpg?itok=0qI8MukG)
V Brennan is a seasoned leader with a career in infrastructure management, currently serving as the Senior Director of Infrastructure at Slack in Dublin, Ireland. In this role, she oversees global teams specialising in Traffic, Service Mesh, and Datastores. Additionally, she bears the critical responsibility of managing Slack’s incident response efforts within the region, holding the position of one of Slack’s most tenured Incident Commanders. Prior to her role at Slack, V contributed her expertise as an Engineering and Product Manager at Spotify, stationed in the vibrant tech hub of Stockholm, Sweden. During her tenure, she led projects involving internal infrastructure and the development of internal services. A significant achievement was orchestrating the migration of this infrastructure from on-premises systems to Google Cloud. Beyond her technical accomplishments, V is passionate about leadership and the cultivation of high-performing teams. Her unwavering commitment to reliability and resilience serves as a constant backdrop in her endeavours, particularly when dealing with the challenges of scaling operations.
Dave O'Connor [node:field-speakers-institution]
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/oconnor_dave_200x230_2.jpg?itok=Zky2dlz3)
Dave O'Connor is an SRE Leadership practitioner and Coach based in Dublin, Ireland. Dave spent 16 years as an SRE at Google, failing to prevent and even being complicit in the development of the function of SRE from its inception. He has also spent time leading the SRE/Production efforts at Elastic and Twilio. His interests include organisation and team development, leadership coaching, and gently telling you about problems you didn't know you had.
George Kargiotakis, Elastic
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/kargiotakis_george_200x230.jpg?itok=n6ZVPQ93)
George is a Linux enthusiast and a Tech Lead for the Infrastructure SRE team at Elastic. With a passion for ensuring the reliability and scalability of complex systems, he has been helping Elastic design, implement, and maintain highly available and performant systems. George thrives on the adrenaline of network troubleshooting investigations, always ready to rise to the challenge and untangle the most intricate tech puzzles. Beyond the realm of ones and zeros, he's equally passionate about exploring the mysteries of the underwater world through scuba diving adventures.
Richard "RichiH" Hartmann, Grafana
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/hartmann_richard_200x230.jpg?itok=AXYtSt58)
Richard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs, a member of the Office of the CTO of Grafana Labs, a Prometheus team member, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, CNCF Governing Board member, and more. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendees, including KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch.
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/all/modules/usenix/usenix_files/images/usenix-locked.png)
author = {Murali Suriar and V Brennan and Dave O{\textquoteright}Connor and George Kargiotakis and Richard "RichiH" Hartmann},
title = {Panel Discussion: Unraveling the Interoperability Challenges Among {SaaS} Products},
year = {2023},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}