VMblog:  Can you give us your elevator pitch?  What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year?  What will they take back to help sell their management team and decision makers?

Bob Quillin:  ControlTheory helps organizations regain control of their observability, cutting costs, accelerating understandability, and maximizing results. We started ControlTheory because observability is broken. Organizations are struggling with the rising costs of their logs, metrics, and traces - from ingest to indexing, to retention to custom metrics and cardinality. Everyone has a story to tell from surprise overages to embarrassing monthly bills.  Platform teams are spending valuable time tracing down log and trace spikes and custom metric charges to determine where they came from and why - and then trying to explain what they find to management and finance. Technology leaders complain about siloed data, spiralling complexity, vendor lock-in, and annual renewal nightmares. To make matters worse, observability is not even delivering a return on all that investment despite the cost. Where's the ROI when mean time to repair (MTTR) is still on the rise, root cause analysis and incident management continues to frustrate, and key business KPIs remain hidden? The ControlTheory platform is the solution.

VMblog:  As a sponsor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, what level of sponsorship have you chosen, and what motivated this investment?

Quillin:  ControlTheory is a Silver sponsor at the conference because KubeCon is the epicenter of observability change. That change starts with OpenTelemetry (OTel) - a CNCF project - building out an open observability framework and toolkit for the generation, export, and collection of telemetry data including traces, metrics, and logs. This is a fundamental disruption of the underlying source of observability value, and is the first domino of many that will snowball into a reimagination of observability as we know it. ControlTheory is an OTel-powered platform - built on this first disruption, ushering in a second wave of change based on new levels of intelligence, feedback, and control.

VMblog:  Where can attendees find you at the event? What interactive experiences, demos, or activities have you planned for your booth?

Quillin:  Come check out ControlTheory at booth S732 at KubeCon Europe 2025. Meet all four co-founders at the booth where we'll be demonstrating our platform to help customers regain control of their observability. See how to cut costs and optimize outcomes without changing your existing tools - including Datadog, Grafana, AWS CloudWatch, Dynatrace, NewRelic, or Cribl. If you are rolling out OTel, see innovative fleet management and governance. If not, see how you can start on OpenTelemetry now and move faster.

VMblog:  How has your company's presence at KubeCon evolved over the years? What keeps bringing you back?

Quillin:  ControlTheory was founded in 2024, so this is our second KubeCon. The founders of ControlTheory have been coming to KubeCon from the beginning, originally as StackEngine, the last startup we founded. StackEngine was a container management startup founded in 2014 and later acquired by Oracle Cloud. As early innovators with Docker and Kubernetes, the co-founders of ControlTheory saw the rapid rise of container orchestration and Kubernetes and the role CNCF and KubeCon played in that growth and platform maturation. We see a similar path for OpenTelemetry and are building ControlTheory on many of the scalable patterns we utilized in building out Oracle Cloud's Kubernetes Engine (OKE) which today is running some of the industry's largest and most complex workloads.

VMblog:  Can you double click on your company's technologies?  And talk about the types of problems you solve for a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendee.

Quillin:  ControlTheory at Kubecon Europe 2025 solves 3 key observability challenges:

• Cutting Observability Costs
• Maximizing Observability Outcomes
• Adapting to Change - improving on simple 1-way, static telemetry pipelines

The ControlTheory platform detects and manages log volume spikes and custom metric cardinality. It de-duplicates, filters, tail-samples, and enriches logs and traces. For logs and traces you don't immediately need, ControlTheory routes and stores telemetry in cold storage like AWS S3, rehydrating that telemetry later if and when it's needed. For sensitive or private data, you can mask, obfuscate, or redact logs for compliance and secure data sharing. ControlTheory tracks offending developer and engineering deploys, PRs, and commits, to correlate telemetry behavior changes to dev-side causality. Customers control costs and avoid proprietary vendor lock-in with the ControlTheory OpenTelemetry powered solution.

VMblog:  In an increasingly crowded cloud-native and Kubernetes market, what makes your solution stand out in 2025? What makes it unique or differentiating?

Quillin:  Simple. With ControlTheory you can cut observability costs, sharpen operations, and respond to changes without replacing the observability you already have. Fix your observability now and prevent future issues while moving towards an open, OTel future. With the power to migrate or consolidate observability based on your needs and your timing, not your dashboard vendor's.

VMblog:  With AI and machine learning becoming increasingly central to cloud-native applications, how does your solution address these emerging needs?

Quillin:  AI is coming, creating more code down the pipeline and less and less understanding of that code. There will be new stacks to manage, with more data-hungry AI apps creating more and more demand for data. It will be essential to intelligently, securely, and efficiently control the flow of observability data from code to cloud. Users are taking more agency of their data versus giving up that control to repositories they have no control over. A control plane managed by the user will be mandatory. 

VMblog:  Which technical tracks or sessions at KubeCon 2025 align most closely with your company's vision?

Quillin:  Check out Observability Day on April 1 as a co-located event. ControlTheory will be attending so meet us there!

VMblog:  What's your elevator pitch for a CTO or CIO? How does your solution impact the bottom line?

Quillin:  How do you control observability costs today? It's the question on the mind of every CTO, CIO, and engineering leader. A majority of observability cost optimization issues are related to problems that include high cost of custom metric cardinality or undetected log volume spikes and cost overruns. Many teams are wasting money on ingestion, indexing and retention of unnecessary logs or overspending on log storage for rainy day compliance or audit requirements.Then comes the observability subscription renewal surprises due to being locked in with your current vendor due to a proprietary, closed solution. Affordability can only come with control. Get costs under control with ControlTheory and prevent future observability cost issues.

VMblog:  Can you walk us through a typical customer journey? What specific pain points do you address?

Quillin:  The first step in the observability control journey focuses on establishing proactive telemetry cost controls in flight, to immediately get observability spend under control. Initial pain points include soaring observability bills and vendor lock-in, siloed and inaccessible observability insights, unanswered business KPIs like health, capacity, and CoGs, and recurring projects to reduce observability costs.

VMblog:  How does your technology integrate with the broader CNCF landscape? What role do you play in the modern cloud-native stack?

Quillin:  ControlTheory integrates with your existing observability sources and destinations. As an OpenTelemetry-powered platform we are open and able to meet customers where they are - improving their current technologies while positioning them for the future.

VMblog:  Are you launching any new products or features at KubeCon? What can attendees expect to see first at your booth?

Quillin:  See us at booth S732 to learn more and check out our website for news and updates!

VMblog:  With the rise of hybrid operations, how do you help enterprises balance cloud-native and on-premises deployments?

Quillin:  More and more organizations are taking control and ownership of their data opposed to sending it off to vendors who may use it for LLMs and AI training. ControlTheory lets you decide what data goes where and for whom. Some telemetry data should always stay on-premises. Other data may get routed to off-site "cold-storage" and only rehydrated when needed. With ControlTheory you decide what goes where, versus observability solutions that want to store all your data and at the same time charge you for that.

VMblog:  What booth activities or giveaways have you planned to engage with attendees?

Quillin:  We'll have some great "Control Freak" T-shirts and giveaways at the booth - come on by!

VMblog:  How do you see the cloud-native landscape evolving post-2025? What should organizations be preparing for? What big changes or trends does your company see taking shape for 2025?

Quillin:  The observability stack is changing - starting with OpenTelemetry at the foundation and building up from there. For organizations, we recommend that all new applications and new instrumentation should leverage OTel and older apps should begin the transition release by release, feature by feature. Teams should get familiar with the power of OTel and the freedom and flexibility it will give them. There's a steep learning curve today to be honest, but OpenTelemetry meets you where you are and integrates with what you have - and that's where you should start. Similar to the K8s learning curve and adoption cycle, this requires a top down commitment from leadership combined with bottom-up technical experimentation and learning from developers and platform teams.

VMblog:  What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon?

Quillin:  Meeting old friends and colleagues and making new connections and insights. Talking to folks at lunch, at our booth, in line, at the pub, at breakfast, or over coffee.

VMblog:  What's your top piece of advice for attendees to make the most of KubeCon 2025?

Quillin:  Take time to learn from the presentations, keynotes, and early adopters to gather best practices and build community. Talk to vendors like ControlTheory to stay on the latest trends and tech - keep us honest and tell us what you want and what you need. We can all learn from each other.