Q&A with Mehdi Daoudi, CEO & Co-founder of Catchpoint

Most of your prospects or potential buyers do the vast majority of their research about your product online before they even talk to you.

MEDIA 7: Could you please walk us through your professional journey of over 25 years and what made you choose this career path?
MEHDI DAOUDI: I believe the monitoring fates chose this path for me versus the other way around! When I was a Sales Engineer at DoubleClick, I had to rely on a system that was known for having its fair share of reliability issues. When I raised the problems to my CIO, they said, “Congratulations, you are now in charge of monitoring!” That’s what prompted me to set up my very first monitoring agent in my garage, in 1998! Over time, I grew to run the entire quality of service team (a precursor to their Observability team). When I continued to see the positive impact this type of monitoring had on our business, I decided to start Catchpoint because of how much we had all learned. Fun fact, I once made a mistake and took down the entirety of DoubleClick’s ad services for three hours!


M7: Catchpoint’s mission is to ‘build a better observability platform and help companies deliver on their promise to their end-users’. How do you execute this?
MD: This execution starts with a direct, maniacal focus on ‘What is the Digital Experience?’ – which is an interaction between a client (be them human or robot) and an organization that is possible only because of digital technologies. Once you establish this anchor, work backward from there: How do we empower teams to confidently own the user experience? Establish your corporate beliefs and value system, take the time to prepare for what’s needed, and then ensure teams have the correct tools to execute. As part of this, don’t be afraid to ask questions, say when you don’t know or don’t have an answer, and take chances to stand out from the crowd. Because no matter which tactic you choose to execute for your strategy, there is always room for critique.

These new normals placed front and center the need to re-think monitoring and observability strategies to now be as distributed as the users who digitally interact.

M7: Could you please give our readers an insight into Catchpoint’s latest release, Hercules?
MD: We firmly believe that monitoring tools and observability frameworks form a powerful ecosystem, and the right tools and frameworks foster better communication and collaboration. For this release, we executed on this belief and built out-of-the-box integrations for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana – the ELK Stack. Customers also now have more options for correlating performance events thanks to the Octopus integration. Last, we further extended troubleshooting capabilities all the way to endpoint desktops by capturing additional metrics based on customer feedback. But none of these new data or integrations would be as valuable if we also didn’t give customers the option to explore and make default, the new UI. The usability, quality, and performance of the new portal UI and agent are sure to streamline daily operations.


M7: Could you please share your perspective about how crucial is ‘Digital Experience Monitoring’?
MD: Even before 2020 (read: the pandemic), more than 80% of purchases started or ended digitally. Fast forward more than a year later and think about the types of digital interactions or transformations that were accelerated: more virtual doctor visits, home delivery services usage skyrocketing, remote teaching via Zoom since the classroom was unavailable, or a sudden strain placed on home ISPs. These new normals placed front and center the need to re-think monitoring and observability strategies to now be as distributed as the users who digitally interact. Sure, there is a daily operational need that needs to be dealt with. But to truly mitigate transformational risk – and stay in business – digital experience monitoring is required for healthy IT teams and digital businesses to stay relevant.

Establish your corporate beliefs and value system, take the time to prepare for what’s needed, and then ensure teams have the correct tools to execute.

M7: What do you think is essential to stay competitive in a market that is going through constant digitalization?
MD: When I think about competing in a constantly evolving digital market, the best piece of advice I can give to anyone is most of your prospects or potential buyers do the vast majority of their research about your product online before they even talk to you. This is the start of their buying journey and their impression is nearly wholly formed by the first time you get them on the phone. So, if and when they do become customers, it’s important to establish a feedback loop to take those learnings from the later stages of their journey and improve the early stages of their journey for the next prospects doing their research.


M7: What do you read, listen to, or watch, to stay on top of your game?
MD: I’m still a geek at heart. I follow a ton of people in this space. I read my competitor's blogs. I do a lot of experiments. And I still build hardware to monitor from my own home!