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March 01, 2023
Modern, Cloud First Managed Services with Effectual | Episode #60
Effectual focus on one thing.. .and one thing only! That is AWS Managed Services. In this episode I talk with Richard Dolan , CMO and co-founder, and John White , Chief Innovation Officer, at Effectual. Effectual provides sup...
Effectual focus on one thing.. .and one thing only! That is AWS Managed Services.
In this episode I talk with Richard Dolan, CMO and co-founder, and John White, Chief Innovation Officer, at Effectual. Effectual provides support to commercial enterprise and public sector customers in their IT modernization journey. The company has a unique philosophy of combining operations, development and automation to deliver positive outcomes and unlock the power of cloud to maximize technology investments. Richard and John discuss how Effectual modernized itself through past experiences and focuses solely on Amazon Web Services. A deeply experienced and passionate team of problem solvers apply proven methodologies to business challenges across Amazon Web Services and VMware Cloud on AWS.
Effectual was founded in 2019 and is head quartered out of New York..
☑️ Support the Channel by buying a coffee? - https://ko-fi.com/gtwgt
☑️ Technology and Technology Partners Mentioned: AWS, VMware, VMware Cloud on AWS
☑️ Raw Talking Points:
- End-to-End Modernization Services
- Business Outcomes
- Digital Innovation
- IT Cost Optimization
- Cloud Migration Services
- Modern Cloud Management
- What is a Chief Innovation Officer
- Cloud Service Provider,
- What is Born in the Cloud?
- Cloud Native
- On-Prem to Cloud
- State of VMware?
- Migrations and Natives Services
- new breed of service provider with experience
- multi-cloud vs AWS Only
☑️ Web: https://www.effectual.com/
☑️ Crunch Base Profile: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/effectual-inc
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Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/great-things-with-great-tech-podcast/id1519439787,
☑️ Music: https://www.bensound.co
Transcript
RAW TRANSCRIPT -
I never have a problem talking myself if anything so we can go there hello and welcome to episode 60 of great things with great Tech the podcast highlighting companies doing great things with great technology my name is Anthony spiteri and in this episode we're talking to a company where the philosophy built around the desire to support commercial Enterprise and public sector customers at every stage of their It modernization Journey a company started with a shared Vision to evolve the traditional MSP model even further
combining operations development and automation to deliver positive outcomes and unlock the power of cloud to maximize technology Investments that company is effectual and I'm talking to two people today I'm talking to Richard Dolan the CMO and co-founder and also John White Chief Innovation officer at effectual welcome to the show excellent so yeah two people on the show which has only happened twice uh including this one in 60 episodes but you know like everything here we we adapt on the Fly end because it's going
to be a really great and interesting episode and actually funnily enough as a side note John and I actually had one shot at this already back in December at AWS re invent and something went horribly wrong with the recording so we're back better than ever for episode 60 a nice round number so before we get into it I just want to say that if you like great things with great Tech and would like to feature in future episodes you can click on the link on the show notes or head to gtwgt.
com you can head to all the popular podcasting platforms anchor Google Amazon wherever it might be whatever podcasts are found or on the YouTube channel at gtwgt podcast hit the like And subscribe button and also again a reminder you can go on the website and register your interest now with that um Richard let's start with you first because you're obviously a co-founder at effectual so I'm really interested in just you know the background of the company you know where you came from where the team came from and how
effectual actually started as a company ah you got it uh it's a great story and it's very relevant to how we're approaching Enterprise organizations today and helping them to modernize in some ways we kind of modernized ourselves in the iteration of the the executive leadership here at effectual uh a good number of us were all part of another MSP called Data pipe uh had a great run I ran marketing at data pipe for 17 years uh grew to be a global organization a global data center footprint as well as
one of the first to ever offer managed services on top of AWS wow on top of azure on top of gcp and even Alibaba in Asia so we had a really strong reputation in that space and ultimately in 2017 uh data pipe was acquired by Rackspace so that's a truncated version of that story but what I want to like to tell um I did spend some time at Rackspace myself and then ultimately presented with the opportunity to uh start something a little bit different we saw an opportunity to really double down and focus solely on AWS we learned
so much from managing and operating a global data center footprint from from managing multiple clouds that having the opportunity to just focus on one and with the division of being the elite provider of services on top of AWS that's where we wanted to to create this story um and and that really started in motion Christmas Eve of 2019 when we got our our first round of investment right so timing wise there I mean obviously you know not notwithstanding you know the the interesting and I think very um you know Brave decision to put all your
eggs into the AWS basket obviously that timing lines up pretty well with a little thing called covert so you know you know what what was that like just as a side note trying to sort of start up a company and have it started and basically January of 2020. it was uh for the vision that we had laid out remarkably it actually impacted us very little uh we already knew that we were going to be a remote focused company going to where the talent is uh if you look at our even our Workforce now we have employees in over 30 States across
the U.S well okay uh we want to go to where the skills are you know not necessarily have people in the office it's great to meet people in the office I did miss that and I love having time in the office now uh but that's that's a really important factor and when we look at the way that it covet itself didn't cause a hindrance to how we grew a factual that's another great story that we're trying to enable for our customers if you build your business in a certain way it's not going to matter remote access
is there everybody can work Zoom functions phenomenally and we can get things done uh so yeah it was interesting there is an anecdote story you know we did grow by a couple Acquisitions uh one a company based out of DC called GHC technology and the second a an application development firm in Oregon in the acquisition process there I was actually a few of us were on our way home from Oregon as the airport started shutting down wow that was that was a little nerve-wracking yeah it's going to be scary I was buying I was buying a house
back then so I kind of understand you know the the elements of a financial um contract when there's all sorts of uncertainty in place so obviously not the same exact same level as an acquisition but I kind of understand that that level of uncertainty in any financial transaction at the time was was worrying so well done for getting through that thank you hey and just before we we dig into the company a little bit more John do you want to just introduce yourself um because I nearly forgot about you even though I can see you on the screen
oh yeah this this three-person thing um no but hey just a little bit of an introduction to yourself obviously you and I have known each other for a very long time through the VMware Community it's part of the story here right in terms of what we're going to touch on transitioning from traditional VMware to on-prem and on-prem to Cloud so give a little bit of a background about yourself sure yeah so John White Chief Innovation officer at effectual I've been in the managed Services space as you mentioned
for a long time I was with a company called expedience where we had a lot of parallel story to data pipe uh just a little different size and scale but we were the same thing coming out of the data center world into virtualization into Cloud all that fun stuff so I've been with the company for over a year now but I've been tracking a factual since they got their funding back in 2019 which is kind of interesting so I was bopping around a little bit I spent some time at AWS and then I reached out to Rob and I said hey I'm interested in
kind of doing the next the next thing here I want to focus on you know AWS I love it I'm I understand the tech so much better now you know spending time there um hey I'm really interested in what you're up to so we started talking in I guess 2021 and uh put something together so I could join and jump on the team so I've been focused on all kinds of fun stuff in my first year but probably the biggest one is you know helping grow the managed Services side of our business and understanding and adopting you know
kind of what this modern Cloud management that we talk about what that really means and and how we can kind of set a future path a little bit different than the rest with some of the learnings that we've had in our past yeah exactly and we'll touch on you know the fact that there is maturity in the group that lends itself to this this new wave um of matter service provider but I just wanted to ask as well in terms of You Know Chief Innovation officer like that's obviously it's it's not a common
position I suppose so well done on trailblazing you know that as well but how do you I mean in all honesty how do you kind of come to that I mean obviously I kind of I would understand what it is right but for the folks at home like what exactly does it entail in that role yeah I think the the difference in in this kind of Chief uh role is it usually where we wear a lot of different hats and so I'm starting to see it become a little bit more common um and it's almost you know it's a strategic kind of role as well so
um Innovation we focus on anything from internal to product to um process to um you know a special Focus for the company that we're we're seeing a lot of action uh from our customers and so a lot of our our world is trying to listen to the customers see the trends uh and the tea leaves from analysts from you know what's going on inside of the market inside of the world and then help us position to be in the right place at the right time right yeah interesting answer that's good I think we'll see more and more of
the of the role kind of flourishing right because I think great Technology Innovation it goes hand in hand so hey Richard just um walk through the mentality of of we talked about you know the AWS focused so just roll through you know what goes because we the whole prevailing thing is that we we live in this this world where we've got on-prem we've got the public Cloud we've got elements in between the edge and whatnot and then and a lot of different providers so how do you sort of bet bet the house or the business on AWS moving
forward I mean clearly they're the biggest cloud provider out there um you know John and I are at reinvent we understand you know the the movement towards a lot of their services but how does effectual sit there and say this is it AWS is it it's it's a really good question uh I was there at re invent this past year as well and there was some interesting changes in conversations from RE invent in the past I didn't I've been at every single re invent since the start um to be able to have the confidence to go
all in onto a single platform is a you know it takes a it takes a bit of Bravery it takes a bit of Courage um but it was also so much opportunity that we saw in that ecosystem you know that it was it's been the leading platform for a while sure that the others are competing there um but as a to found a startup you know being able to put all of our resources into the the training and experience and expertise of one platform then splitting resources across multiple that was a function of efficacy you know it made us
a heck of a lot more efficient to be able to just be you know you know what this is this is our playground this is where we are the de facto experts and and that was important to us um we also you know from multiple past lives whether it's it's from the data pipe days or at the other uh people on the executive team that have joined us we have a tremendous amount of very strong relationships within the AWS world as individuals that's can you bring us together you know the Voltron joke you know everybody comes together
from these different walks of life do you know did you know that I'm a massive Voltron fan is that uh I was hoping I was hoping if we were filming back in my home studio you'd see uh Voltron on the Shelf so here you go there you go but yeah I mean it does you get you get these uh these views of the AWS World from you know from John's past experience there from our CEOs past experience working inside the halls of AWS and and you know there's just an incredible amount of opportunity within that World
um it's there's definitely you know to have to pick one um that was the platform where we saw you know from our past experience the best use of our skills and how to build a a company that was on the Leading Edge of where the the cloud space is going yeah and the addressable Market that you can tap into is tremendous as well right and I think it only get bigger and you know we'll talk a little bit about it after but I think you know the fact that we're saying this this fairly significant migration and transition to
Modern data platforms you know you're there to basically trap that as it moves to the biggest addressable Market Cloud that existing I just caught wind a little bit of you said efficient is it yes where did effectual the name come from is it drawn from there or I'm always interested in where the names come from on the show it's in this day and age where startups are inventing their own names you know if actual is a real word in the dictionary so that's that's something that we were pretty
happy on the choice if you think about what it means too we we want to be effective in the way that we engage with our customers and we treat our customers as a partner it's it's not a vendor type relationship where they're coming to us asking for you know software license or your typical type of old school Hardware buy they're looking for a partner and and you know and the marketing person put on the the our marketing phrases here we focus ourselves on what we call our threees as the experience expertise and
the ability to execute um so that that's where we focus our everything that we do from from the moment we engage in assessments through all the way through migrations through managed Services you know that is something you know you kind of think of that old insurance commercial where we've been there we've seen it we've seen those pitfalls before you guys can go this alone or you can rely on on us as an extension of your team to help navigate some of those pitfalls and it's it really helps in the way that we we
engage and go to market so efficiency back to your question there it's a lot faster for our customers to engage and know that they can lean on us as an extension of their team and to really accelerate how they're achieving their business outcomes yeah and I think to make a little bit of a joke about the um the startup if you were a true sort of Silicon Valley startup it would have been effectually hopefully we get out of that Trend very soon um so so John I think let's let's go over to you and talk a little bit about
you know the type of customer that you guys have because for memory if a customer comes to you and says hey you know we've got some on-premises workloads typically you guys will go no sorry we don't do that sort of stuff right now you guys do do work around VMware cloud and AWS which is obviously you know AWS and VMware in the cloud so I know that you guys do migration Partners or just general partners with them so what is the typical customer that you guys are interested in yeah that's a it's an interesting kind
of a tricky question because we like to look at the customers on where they're at kind of in their Journey um most if you think about it from a timeline perspective a lot of a lot of the customers right now and companies are out there they're trying to get out of their data center hosting provider whatever it might be get it into AWS so they can start you know getting all the big Promises of cloud so we come in we help do the migration whether it's the ec2 and AWS native or inside of vmc and that's a lot of our customers are kind
of starting there from there we go into you know doing work with data intelligence and we can go and create app developments and so if customer wants a new app created we can do that if they want an old app uh maybe a mainframe system modernize we do that as well so our ideal customer is one that's you know the executive team is truly committed into the cloud because that's the one thing that that I saw when I was at AWS is like the team that I was on was helping to get the you know because the executive team committed so they can
actually get everybody behind them working on it and so we look for for those exact teams that are aligned they're ready to go and it's all about trying to achieve their outcomes whether it's they're trying to save money or reduce you know Capital whether they're trying to get a better security posture whether they're you know trying to grab Better Business insights on their data and they want data intelligence I mean we're looking for somebody to kind of partner with on specific Journeys to
then you know help us kind of bring them into the cloud and then kind of transform their business with technology we talked about the new breed of service provider right so typically at the moment most disabled providers have their Roots deeply founded within traditional I.T and even more so we're not just talking about virtualization we're talking about some msps that started in the 80s and 90s I've had a couple on the show where their history we started in 1990 right um and that's obviously a very different
time to where we are so my thought is there's there are some companies out there that are claiming to be pure born the cloud but you guys are not ashamed of saying that you've got all this experience the data pipe experience what's the biggest differential that you guys offer from being that mature you know heads experienced and then how do you translate that to the modern MSP which is now handling workloads that are in the cloud different types serverless Edge whatever it might be yeah that's a that's a big question I'll
take the first little stab at it and then Rich can jump in um you know we are we right we're taking what we knew about being an MSP um I myself have been working in an MSP for almost 20 years and so been learning how to manage and operate for our customers um it's a lot of the same but also very different I mean this time you know we're working inside of something that is truly scalable where in the old days we you know we kind of you know it was more the Pet's first cattle conversation right we were managing pets now we're
managing cattle at scale which is a completely different mindset than concept so how you handle you know simply you know monitoring and logging and you know understanding all the different security vectors inside of the cloud um it's just taking on that traditional knowledge and expanding it and basically you know making it a lot bigger and broader and having to think about infinites instead of uh very finite work sets so it's it's something where we're picking in exploring tools and vendors to kind of help us on this journey that
that think in that same that same concept that it's uh on an infinite scale and it's it's multi-vector so for instance we just changed out a vendor that was doing vulnerability assessments for us and they could only see virtual servers and for me that wasn't that wasn't good enough I needed them to see the container registry I needed them to see Lambda to get a complete picture into it so we changed them out so now we're thinking about it from all three vectors first of compute inside of AWS
instead of just one vector inside of AWS and so I have lots of different stories about that from like how we choose backups to how we're doing other monitoring to look at all kinds of different Services instead of just one thing but that's really the gist of it is you've got to think a lot broader than you have in the past interesting yeah because it's so much more many services that we're talking about so many different types of services you've got different types of personas as well
haven't you um so back in the day you know John and Richard you would have just been dealing with the virtualization um guy you know or a backup guy or we never really because obviously my roots and service provider land to not so much managed service provider but service provider land you know the personas you were dealing with but we never talked to a Dev very often we never talked to Those Behind the Scenes guys and I'm guessing you know I I from memory one of your Acquisitions was a company that assisted you guys to be in that devoppy
space as well right so I guess you're tooling yourselves to be able to handle those conversations no matter which angle they come from yeah right we're not talking just to the I.T infrastructure engineer anymore it is across the board it's even Business Leaders especially on some of the data intelligence the stuff that we're looking at I mean it might be the CMO or the CSO on their side that's driving what we're building so that they can have the dashboards whatever they need to run their business
yeah we definitely I think the old old MSP world I guess would be a lot more static than our world is it's a lot more Dynamic and you know we're innovating creating tooling that will you know automatically adjust the services for our customers based on policies instead of you know static you know installs on every one of their instances so it's pretty neat having a good time doing it yeah I can imagine so so just maybe work us through the process there because you know obviously you've got a development arm that
basically will one-to-one go into a customer and sort of get their requirements and then are you handling the or you're interfacing through whatever you guys are developing um the deployment of an application or the ongoing pipeline management of an application so is that what you guys are doing from a Services point of view or you know you do migration you've got you know the VMware cloud and AWS part I'm interested in what at the moment is the bulk of your services you know what's more Niche and where do you see it
potentially going um in the future I think every customer is bringing over some some servers um from you know their their hosting provider their Data Center and so like that's probably our biggest bulk and focus I mean we have a lot of ec2 instances and then the vmc instances that are under management yeah very you know traditional style management except for where there's Auto scaling and that kind of stuff and then we have a you know a good percentage of our customers and it's growing rapidly that have
started to make switch from virtual servers into containers inside of Lambda inside of native AWS services and we're helping them along the way but you know we have we serve also a different customer I mean when we develop we're developing on our standard sets and so we have a heavy partnership with Hoshi Corp with snowflake with a handful of other isvs that then we're developing you know with the customers uh recommendations on specific isvs into a platform and inside inside of a set that's maybe a little bit different than
a traditional so we'll work and you know create devops pipelines and operate those for our customers and we'll do application monitoring pretty deep where you can you know integrate it with x-ray or New Relic or Dave dog whoever you have running and you know get true insights all the way from the application down to the infrastructure so it's it's evolving and changing almost every day but I do start to see you know a big Trend and this is what what got me excited to even join a factual of customers saying okay let's
do the cloud migration and then as soon as we get there modernize wow we're working on a deal right now where we're literally going to lift and shift them into um a vmc platform and they they plan to spend six months there because they want to just hammer down on modernization as soon as we get there so it's our team working with their team utilizing shared tools to like make sure that we're staying organized and just driving towards you know better outcomes of utilization of cloud I was going to say
I've got a couple of questions I've thought of during that I'll try and remember them but I think the first one was do you guys have any repeatable IP that you deploy from say from a one-to-many sort of multi-tenant point of view or is it all Point solution per customer now we got a lot of repeatable Ip and we're building that database every day um whether it's how we connect to data libraries or how we handle automation um it's something that we we have a pretty decent uh War chest right now
that's making our lives a little bit easier so we can speed up our customers uh Excel and accelerate their outcomes yeah right and Richard just wrapping that sort of conversation up as a yeah as a CMI um you know handling those the relationships at different levels how do you handle the transition that these companies are going you know through from a relationship point of view but then also your messaging because I think one thing that I think needs to be spot on in this time of transition is that is the messaging
um and not because it's so easy to say oh yeah we're going to take application a we're going to shift it from a VMware environment on-prem we're going to stick it in AWS in its modern it's Cloud native um yeah so yeah so your job is to kind of make the messaging you know sort of clicky but realistic as well I suppose there's a couple different aspects I'm going to tie it back to an earlier question there and it almost goes even earlier than that whether you're used to the word efficiency
um we really get the benefits of being a born on the cloud company in in the way that we can be agile in our approach you know we're very fast and we're fortunate that we as a company don't have any of that technological debt that so many Enterprises and even those traditional Legacy msps have we don't have systems to manage physical infrastructure that's not who we are yeah we're managing AWS and AWS alone and to enable that type of efficiency for our customers that's a story we can relate to and where that
experience part of what we have really feeds into all of this while we don't have the systems to manage physical infrastructure we have teams that were there they were managing it and understand exactly what that landscape looks like so that when you want to move it into an AWS World it makes a lot more sense another from the messaging standpoint too we had a big shift you know being able to move fast and this really came to fruition this past re invent where so many conversations on the Expo floor re invent were not asking about specific
individual AWS Services the quality conversations that we had on the floor were all business decision makers that were looking to solve a challenge I had so many conversations where you know they came up and talked to us hey you know your booth has some messaging around um data and analytics or or business insights tell me how how can you uncover that for me and these were the meaningful conversations uh they're really approaching you know at least that the modern Enterprise leader is looking at approaching these problems
by solving for a specific business outcome you guys handle the technology you're the experts there this is what I want how do I get that and that that's yeah that's key in the messaging that's really interesting because it parallels a bit of my takeaway from the last ran event where I felt it was the first time that I could have real conversations with a whole breadth of technologist people there around not just the geeky technology around it but the business outcome as well and maybe that's a sign that we've
passed the um on that sort of adoption wave where you know everything's a buzzword and whatnot we're very much firmly on that stable sort of path of just everyone is effectively calling it day to day and everyone accepts that the cloud is here and it's now like okay it's not a buzzword I sort of understand it's what we need to be doing let's talk about how now this can help my business be you know more effectual see what I did there thank you I like it I like it well done very good I think our q1 sales
have showed that I mean like register saying I mean the conversations we were having at Ram event it was more like okay and we we'd look okay okay what well let's get started let's get going let's get moving and I think finally that was a big transition point that I saw is because people were always sitting there inside of like these development labs and like okay we're testing we're testing we're testing now to the point where it's like okay let's go we you know we trust in the cloud we trust in
you you have the backing um uh just go and start start working on this we need to get it done and uh q1 sales have showed that for us and uh the engineering team has definitely felt that effect as we are just uh you know super busy just really helping our customers right away instead of them sitting waiting and putting it off and you know waiting for a rainy day they want to get it done right now yeah and you clearly you're clearly doing something Rob because as I look at the Knights here three is running in the CR
and MSP 500 you know Stratus award for cloud computing 20 21 22. four actually now we just yeah four years running so there you go ahead and update that mentions in two Gartner quadrants you know Forester wave VMware cloud services and AWS growth partner of the Year 2021 22 as well potentially I I don't know but you know maybe maybe you could get there so you're obviously doing something right which tells you you've captured the right area of the market that addressable Market we talked about plus the conversations that you have all
lead to the fact that you know like you say you're booming this year at the same time absolutely absolutely you know for make sure uh we stay in the good graces of the analyst Community there the uh data pipe was named in Magic quadrants but effectual has been named in multiple Gartner reports I should have got that right as well yeah there I I know a lot of them so we should be okay with that oh yeah that changed hack a little bit and talk about just the fundamentals of the shift um from on-prem to the cloud so
it's interesting because I know that it was happening on mass maybe 10 years ago from a top-down approach you know everyone was like oh the Cloud's here it's it's more effective it's cost effective it's the future and the CEO would go to a conference and see an ad and they'd just go just do it and then it got actioned on and then it was a lift and shift and then all of a sudden the architecture wasn't correct the organizations are moving wrong workloads if it's costing them more money
um performance issues all that kind of jazz right so um we know that it's settled down into this sort of hybrid sort of scenario more horses for courses the workloads and the application dictate where it lives to a certain extent what services it runs on um but yeah I mean where do you see the on-prem world sitting today and then the follow-up question is because of obviously you know John's got lots of you know sort of roots in the VMware world as well where do you see VMware at the moment and how that's kind of
contributing to a potential increase in the move to the cloud that's a good question John you want to start with the VMware part of that so I think um you know I I guess that I still see a big you know there's there's a there's been a migration over the last few years into AWS and I think I see that increasing um every day and I think there's multiple catalysts um inside of why that's happening I think the VMware broadcom acquisition might be some part of it for some companies I think that's out there
I think they're they're nervous about it I think um you know the increase is the price that they had in the last 12 months from the hosting providers as well as then you know from from the professional licensing themselves I think is uh is a part of it but I also think you know some of this is timing um and if you notice like things come in and always there's these waves and you know you're starting to get to the three to five year mark for some of these people that put pretty big investments
into hardware and they're getting to the point right now where they're they're they're they're the CFO is sitting there do I stroke another check for you know multi-millions dollars or do I start to move this into a service which I think is pretty much you know I still think we're early days but in there people aren't laggers yet but I think it's pretty tried and true we're kind of in that middle of the middle of that uh that Trend cycle and so you know the one customer that we're migrating into our
world right now that's that was their decision I mean their CFO just looked at it from a dollars and cents perspective was like you know I just don't want to keep spending multi-million dollars every few years this doesn't make sense to me anymore let's go let's move it let's transition this thing out so we can focus you know more on our business instead of just sitting here maintaining this Hardware all the time yeah yeah to that point I think Innovation is a key part as well um you know when you've got Legacy
infrastructure physical infrastructure does it there's a limit to how much Innovation that you can do there the the service the new services and features that AWS is pushing out enable that Innovation and and this decision that that John touched on where you know the CFO is sitting there I can write a check to refresh my Hardware which I know then I'm going to use for at least the next five years if you do that you're pushing back all of your Innovation initiatives to not even start until five years from
now interesting yeah that's a big question yeah and when I was at AWS one of the things we did was we walked through this this Cloud adoption framework with the executive team and in almost every executive team that we were in you know this the the business person the sales person was like we can't support our customers what they're asking for with RIT systems today that's a constant problem and so you know to go to Rich's point they can't sit there and say okay three to five years we'll kick the can
down the road and see where the world is we just got smacked in the face with covid where we couldn't get access to our facilities we couldn't get access to our servers you know we had more people coming in online and remotely that hurt our business we can't go through another one of those let's make a change now let's make the shift now yeah because there has been a little bit in the news with regards to you know a cloud costra and you know there's been some good examples and good articles out there
where a few of the Articles weren't a very particular one now I can't quite remember the name but it basically he had a massive rant about the fact that he was able to save seven million dollars by moving off the cloud right yeah I think you know the one that I'm talking about I got quite a bit AirPlay so how do you do you get do you get questions around that so you know is this really cheaper I mean there's there's the there's the pundits out there calling repatriation a thing I have a struggle with that I haven't seen
many repatriate um that have truly done you know cloud in the right way um yeah I can't remember who that article is it's some messaging service but if you look at the subsequent of the following articles now they're having issues with how expensive the hardware is how long it takes to get the hardware how they can't find the engineering people to stop it so it's like all the things that's like yeah it's cool you can look at it on one on a one sheeter and say man this makes sense to go back
to our data center and then when you look in all the variables and all the factors it's like oh maybe that was a bad decision it's like I've read that book before right yeah yeah right I've I've been there done that so you know that's something we get proactive with our customers right away as soon as they come into like our modern Cloud management we're putting cost tools on there to make sure that uh you know they're killing data that's not being used and servers that aren't being used
and right sizing everything you know that's that's that's all it is it's hygiene it's like anything else I mean we we experienced that when we had data centers too I mean you have these servers sitting there running you know doing lab something but the guy that was running the lab left six months ago but it's still sitting there you know spending money but it looked different because it became under building management expense instead of a an I.
T expense and so you know it's all the it's all the same problems it's all about hygiene and we focus on our customers as soon as they come on board as soon as they start working with us to make sure that they're in the right hygiene not only for cost but for security as well yeah I use this um I've learned this term in the last episode but I'm sandbagging right so you know effectively there's lots of sandbagging that does happen in cloud computing because there's a number of different
people all wanting to sort of make their pad their application to make sure that it's going to work yeah and just you know it's almost like a bit of insurance as well right so that leads itself to you know this concept of green I.T and efficiency around that as well so I'm guessing that part of what you guys do in that optimization space is is you know it's twofold it's one to make sure that they don't have a bad Cloud experience because if you have a bad Cloud experience it's very easy to
justify repatriation but also just to make sure that they're spending the right amount of money as well yep yeah and something I mean we know the AWS well architected framework that's something where we have a tool that's running on our customers environments all the time so we see where the exceptions are and sustainability is one of them and uh if if there's something there that we we could optimize for them we make sure we get it done and put them in a better place awesome okay maybe just a couple of we
said this would go quick didn't we and it has gone very very quickly um so a question to Richard around what do you feel you know what was it how did effects will come in and disrupt the market to start with because you've been very successful you've had a number of different um you know funding rounds you've got all those Awards so what was the Innovative piece that really you know started you guys off I think the ability to focus only on AWS is differentiating we're not the only ones doing that but but it is
differentiating it does narrow our competitive landscape quite a bit um but you combine that with that past experience of managing a monster Enterprise data center infrastructure and we do have a unique set of uh I guess maybe a unique outlook on how modernization can happen if you look at that story from the beginning of the the talk here we modernized ourselves through the iterations of the company that you know and the companies that we've all come from you know we're in a space now that we're trying to enable
for all of our customers the same way that covid really had minor impact on how we grew a brand new startup we want to enable that for all of our customers it shouldn't you know that in this world and the Technologies that's available to us today that should not have a detrimental effect um and and we've proven that that's possible by the way that we've grown so it's a I think our own story is the same story that we're trying to enable for uh for our customers which is a unique and
disruptive thought awesome great way to finish off uh well articulate and well-rounded for the value prop of effectual so hey guys thanks a lot for being on the show just as a reminder um if you are new to show And subscribe please head to jtwjt.com head to the YouTube channel please like And subscribe you can find me at Anthony spiteri or at gtwgt podcast with that thank you very much Richard thank you John and we will see you next time on great things with great Tech thanks for having us see ya thank you awesome guys we've got 20 seconds left
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