Dave Rubinstein, Editor in Chief of IT Ops Times, discusses with Becky Trevino, Chief Product Officer at Flexera, the challenges organizations face in managing AI spending and ensuring value. Trevino explains the shift from traditional cloud and SaaS pricing to outcome-based pricing, driven by the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. She highlights the need for organizations to revert to traditional metrics like cycle time and business outcomes to measure AI's effectiveness. Trevino emphasizes the importance of aligning AI investments with business goals and using tools like FinOps to manage costs effectively, comparing AI agents to temp workers that incur ongoing costs.

Dave Rubinstein and Christopher Robinson discussed the sustainability gap in open source package registries, which poses a threat to software supply chains. Robinson highlighted the exponential rise in compute costs and security demands, exacerbated by AI and malware proliferation. The Open Source Security Foundation formed a working group to address these issues, focusing on security technologies and community challenges. Robinson emphasized the need for responsible download practices and financial support for critical registries.

In this episode, Dave talks with Elad Koren, VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks, about how organizations rushing to implement AI without thinking about the security implications that can arise from that.

Among the topic they discuss are:

--The risk of proliferating unvetted agents

-- How vulnerabilities are being weaponized

-- What organizations can do to improve their security postures.

In this episode, editor-in-chief David Rubinstein discusses AI in the Security Operations Center with Jimmy Mesta, co-founder and CTO at RAD Security. Among the topics addressed are:

• How AI amplifies existing SOC strengths rather than inventing new capabilities from scratch?
• Why foundational elements, like signal hygiene, clear workflows, and documented context, must be in place before a SOC can benefit from AI.
• Lessons from past SIEM and SOAR deployments that security teams should apply to avoid repeating the same mistakes with AI in the SOC.
• The steps SOC leaders should take now (e.g., cleaning alerts, mapping workflows, documenting incidents) to ensure AI becomes leverage instead of liability.

In this episode, Dave interviews J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation about some of the challenges related to managing AI spend.

They discuss:

• The mismatch between increased spending on AI and a lack of clarity on that spend
• Similarities and differences with managing cloud spend
• How AI can actually be used for tracking AI spending

In this episode, Dave interviews Austin Parker, director of open source at Honeycomb and a member of OpenTelemetry's governance committee.

They discuss: 

• The increase in OpenTelemetry maintainers this year
• How prevalent OpenTelemetry has become across the cloud native ecosystem
• AI's impact on the need for observability 

In this episode, Dave interviews Jason English, director and principal analyst at Intellyx, who attended KubeCon last week. He shares what he learned from the event, the latest trends in cloud-native computing, and where he sees the industry heading. 

In this episode, Dave interviews Jeff Collins, CEO of WanAware, about the company's recent ITAM survey.

They discuss: 

• The growing confidence gap between IT and other areas of the business on ITAM data accuracy
• How "ghost assets" are becoming more of a concern
• The most surprising finding of the report

In this episode, Dave interviews Brendan Hannigan, CEO and co-founder of Sonrai Security, about privilege management in the cloud.

They discuss:

• The current state of privileged access management (PAM)
• WALLy, Sonrai Security's PAM AI agent 
• Why traditional privilege management is insufficient in dynamic cloud environments 

This episode was sponsored by Penguin Solutions.

In this episode, Jenna interviews Rudy de Anda, head of strategic alliances at Penguin Solutions, about the benefits of using VMs and containers together.

They discuss: 

• Why VMs and containers go well together
• Challenges of making this convergence happen
• Use cases where VMs and containers are better off separate

This conversation is based on a recent webinar, which can be found here: https://assets.itopstimes.com/penguin-solutions-webinar-september-2025