7-Eleven's Former CTO on the ROI of Reliability

At the executive level, reliability is not an engineering metric. It is whether the business delivers value to customers consistently, and whether the money spent keeping it that way is money well spent.

Observability is how most organizations buy reliability. It is also one of the few large technology investments that rarely gets evaluated like an investment. The spend grows every quarter, the link to business outcomes stays fuzzy, and eventually it gets treated as a cost to cut rather than a return to size. That is how good teams end up making bad trades.

In this fireside chat, Barry Carter, who served as CTO of 7-Eleven, sits down with Grepr's CEO, Jad Naous, to talk about how he actually thought about it: what reliability is worth to a business at that scale, how observability earns its place in that equation, how he would build the ROI case, where a tool like Grepr fits, and how he would price the risk of putting anything new in the path.

What You Will Learn:

• Reliability as a business outcome. What an executive is actually buying when they fund reliability, and how that differs from what engineering thinks it is delivering.
• How observability earns its budget. Why the spend grows faster than the demonstrated return, and what happens to the conversation once that gap is visible.
• Doing the ROI math. The inputs Barry would trust when pricing observability, and the ones he would not.
• Pricing the risk. How an executive weighs blast radius, lock-in, and reversibility before letting anything sit in the path between their systems and their observability platform.
• A better trade, shown live. Jad demonstrates cutting cost without cutting the data, so reliability and the budget stop pulling against each other.