When I showed up at SREcon this year, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s a conference built for practitioners—site reliability engineers, platform teams, infrastructure leads. Not exactly the first event you’d promote in your new VC job…but boy am I glad I went.

Surrounding yourself with practitioners helps you truly distill not only what users care about today, but what’s garnering their interest about tomorrow. Yes, we learned a ton about how buying decisions unfold at these companies—but we also got deeper insight into the reality of being an SRE: how everything falls on your plate, how you’re gaining more authority in tooling decisions, and how you deeply need software that augments your day-to-day. Here’s what stood out:

Reinventing On-Call

SREs are over getting pinged for every little alert. They don’t need more noise—they need smarter curation and faster resolution. That’s why booths in this space, like Rootly, were swamped. Even newer teams without booths, like Oilcan, were getting serious word-of-mouth buzz around the expo.

These on-call tools are starting to take on a bigger role. They’re not just about incident response anymore—they’re quietly edging into full-stack observability. Most people aren’t paying close attention to this shift yet, but based on the chatter, they probably should be.

Turns out, PagerDuty isn’t cutting it anymore!

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Needs a Human-in-the-Loop

There’s growing demand for tools that help SREs understand incidents and give them a substantial head start on resolving them, not just surfacing them. Deductive AI and Causely both had incredibly busy booths —offering RCA with context, clarity, and collaboration built in. SREs aren’t asking for magic, they want tools that accelerate their work, not replace their judgment.

AI is in Demand, but skepticism is still prevalent

Interestingly, the quietest booths were often the ones overpromising what AI could do. While booths that highlighted using AI as an augmenter drew crowds, those that overextended what AI could do for SREs drew skepticism.

The general SRE sentiment reminded me of the Egg Theory : when instant cake mixes first hit the market, they initially flopped because they were too easy. People didn’t trust something so effortless. But once the instructions required adding a fresh egg, sales skyrocketed – suddenly, it felt like real baking. SREs seem to be at that stage with AI today. They want to be involved. They don’t fully trust fully automated incident resolution, not yet. So while the intent behind these tools is strong, the positioning matters.

The appetite for AI is absolutely there—but SREs still want to crack the egg themselves.

OpenTelemetry Is opening up the observability world

Everyone was talking about Otel. It’s flexible, open, and eliminates the vendor lock-in that’s plagued observability. Even Datadog is leaning into support for it, despite it competing with its own proprietary model. But implementation is still hard—especially in large enterprises. Whether it was in speaking with people on exhibition hall or overhearing conversations in the courtyard, the sentiment was common: OpenTelemetry is everything people need, but implementing it and extending it is far from trivial.

SREs Are Becoming Influencers and Stakeholders

While developers know their own workflows and platform teams often oversee broader architecture, eREs are the ones with both a wide-angle lens and a deep technical grip on the entire stack. That breadth and depth puts them in a unique position, and increasingly, gives them a louder voice in tooling decisions.

At Jump, we always outline four key roles in software buying: the user, the problem owner, the authority owner, and the budget owner. SREs may not hold the purse strings but they’re often two to three out of four, and when that’s the case, you’ve got a quicker path to yes. More and more, the SRE landscape seems to be moving in that direction.

There’s a Talent Crunch—and a Tooling Opportunity

Companies like Meta, Apple, Bloomberg, and Jane Street weren’t there to pitch tools—they were there to hire. One Bloomberg rep put it clearly: “As our systems grow more complex, we need more SREs to collaborate with our 9,000+ software engineers—but they’re hard to get ahold of.” In a world where there’s an SRE shortage, tools to augment them will only grow more important.

If you’re building software for SREs, please reach out to me at [email protected]!

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Aqil Pasha is a Vice President at Jump Capital. Views expressed represent the opinions of the author and Jump Capital. Jump Capital may have investments in or pursue investments in the technology sectors and companies discussed. References to specific companies do not constitute investment recommendations.