FastForward

Abby Kearns has spent more than a decade in the open source world, starting at Pivotal before going on to lead the Cloud Foundry Foundation and later serving as CTO at Puppet. Today she is CEO at ActiveState, a company that focuses on keeping the open source software library supply chain safe. In the last few months, there have been several major open-source software supply chain attacks.

At Pega World earlier this month, the company announced it was ditching tokens in favor of outcome-based pricing, a system where the company only gets paid if an AI agent produces a favorable outcome. What's driving this change?

As many of you know, I'm a Boston sports fan, especially the Red Sox. This year they are among the worst teams in the league, and it seems their story is a case study in how difficult transformation around AI can be. Ownership brought in a hardcore stats geek in Craig Breslow in Fall of 2023 to reshape the ball club.

Hi everyone. Thanks for reading. I appreciate each and everyone of you. Just a heads up, that I'm headed on vacation at the end of next week, so there will be no FastForward for the next couple of weeks. Just a reminder, if you need a professional moderator for your event, drop me a line at moderate@fastforward.blog. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition with a friend, and encourage them to subscribe, it really helps.💌 Sign up here.

Alex and I joked on the phone recently that we’ve been covering Databricks for 10,000 years. It has seriously been a long time. My earliest TechCrunch piece wasthe company's 2014 Series B, the year I joined the publication, so I’ve been on the Databricks beat since they were puppies, and they’re big dogs now.

Disclosure: I was paid by Zscaler to moderate a video interview with Zscaler executive Swamy Kocherlakota at the company's Zscaler Zenith Live 2026 earlier this month. The quotes from Jay Chaudhry come from two interviews, one in April and one in Las Vegas at the conference. Both were separate from the paid engagement. Zscaler had no input into or review of this piece before publication. My editorial guidelines apply the same regardless.

Back in 2021 when money was still cheap and interest rates were low, companies weren't all that concerned with controlling cloud costs, but as the economy worsened in subsequent years and interest rates rose, management became more interested in finding ways to save money. Enter FinOps tools, which help set up cost guardrails and shut down orphaned projects that can add up to significant costs.

Disclosure: I was paid by Pax8 to moderate a fireside chat with CEO Scott Chasin at the company's Beyond 2026 conference, and some of his comments from that conversation are quoted in this piece. Pax8 had no input into or review of this piece before publication. My editorial guidelines apply the same regardless. Maybe you’ve seen the Microsoft commercial where a pizza parlor owner is puzzling over whether to bring back the $1 slice.

Hi everyone. There was no newsletter last week as I was moderating a CEO fireside at Pax8 Beyond in Salt Lake City on Monday, then flew to Vegas on Tuesday for the Zscaler Zenith conference where I recorded a video interview with their EVP of the Agentic AI Security Startup division. Both of these were paid gigs. If you need a professional moderator for your event, drop me a line at ron@fastforward.blog.

In 2023, Salesforce was reeling. The company was under attack from activist investors with as many as five different firms circling the CRM giant. As activists do, they felt the stock was undervalued and among their demands was to stop spending money on acquisitions. The company had made a slew of them in prior years including three major ones from 2018-2020, each coming with an increasingly large price tag. Those three deals alone were worth around $50 billion and the activists were fed up.