June 01, 2023

Shaping the future of Bare Metal-as-a-Service with Metify | Episode #66

In this episode, I'm speaking with Mike Wagner, Co-Founder & CEO of Metify, a visionary company taking the bare metal provisioning and automation industry by storm. Metify's Mojo Platform is an open-source solution that utilizes open hardware standards and a vendor-neutral stance, making it easier for organizations to manage diverse hardware seamlessly. We explore the uni…

In this episode, I'm speaking with Mike Wagner, Co-Founder & CEO of Metify, a visionary company taking the bare metal provisioning and automation industry by storm. Metify's Mojo Platform is an open-source solution that utilizes open hardware standards and a vendor-neutral stance, making it easier for organizations to manage diverse hardware seamlessly. We explore the unique functionalities of Mojo Platform, its emphasis on automation, and what the future holds for this transformative technology. Metify was created with a clear purpose: to simplify the interaction with diverse hardware, irrespective of the server manufacturer or cloud provider.

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Great Things with Great Tech!

Shaping the future of Bare Metal-as-a-Service Provisioning and Automation with Open Hardware Standards!

 

In this episode, I'm speaking with Mike Wagner, Co-Founder & CEO of Metify, a visionary company taking the bare metal provisioning and automation industry by storm. Metify's Mojo Platform is an open-source solution that utilizes open hardware standards and a vendor-neutral stance, making it easier for organizations to manage diverse hardware seamlessly. We explore the unique functionalities of Mojo Platform, its emphasis on automation, and what the future holds for this transformative technology. Metify was created with a clear purpose: to simplify the interaction with diverse hardware, irrespective of the server manufacturer or cloud provider.

 

The company is located in the Great Lakes region, Midwest United States.

 

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☑️ Technology and Technology Partners Mentioned: Mojo Matrix, Redfish API, Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), Edge computing

 

☑️ Web: https://www.metify.io

☑️ Crunch Base Profile: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/metify-io

 

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Transcript
RAW TRANSCRIPT
 
we're excited there's some big big stuff going on and so yeah Anything could happen here you know it's going to be a fun ride hello and welcome to episode 66 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 diving into a world of bare metal as a service and automation with a company that's breaking boundaries in managing heterogeneous Hardware spearheading the metal Revolution they're bringing the future of open
Hardware standards to the cloud that company is metaphor I'm speaking to the co-founder and CEO Mike Wagner welcome to the show Mark thanks very much it's a pleasure to be here Anthony excellent so Mike just before we kick on and talk about all things bare metal just want to remind the folks out there that if you love 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 jtwjt.
com to register your interest as a reminder as always all episodes of jhwgt are available and all good podcasting platforms Google Apple Spotify all the podcasting platforms out there all hosted and distributed by Spotify podcast and finally head to the YouTube channel at gtwjt podcast hit the like And subscribe button to follow to get all past episodes and future shows and with that out of the way Mike let's talk about metaphy um Bare Metal Company doing great things in the space it's it's kind of feels like it's there it's a time for bare
metal Cloud but before we dive into you know the founding humidifier and why you co-founded with your partner maybe a bit of background into yourself and how you came to found the metaphy yeah um sounds great so well I started many many years ago in Tech um on my own just kind of dug it um as a kid and then in college I started up with IBM as a college intern and I was already into Nobel networking at that point um and I did many inside careers at IBM so you know IBM is a wonderful place to just kind of explore and do all sorts of
stuff in Tech I kind of worked in almost every division that I think they have right um over you know 15 years or so 17 years and then jumped over to Red Hat I had some friends of mine that left IBM and went to Red Hat and convinced me to move over there and that was a really wise move and that exposed me to another whole segment of um of business specifically and importantly the channel side of the business which we leveraged at IBM but a lot of what we did was direct as well um you know I ended up um when I was a district manager for red
hat in the Pacific Southwest you know we had a probably about an 80 20 split of direct versus Channel business roughly um and um yeah so uh but red hat really got me uh deeply involved in the channel in fact the last thing I did there was kick off this um a new group of sis for North America called the Apex partner group and that group was specifically focused on partners that could Implement and provide value-added services around openshift which is their container application platform of choice so um so yeah that's uh that's and then you
know three years ago four three years ago now three and a half years ago Ian and I we were working on a bare metal provisioning solution Ian Evans is my co-founder and I met him because of the channel practice that we built and and the partner he was working at was actually one of our largest openshift partners and uh and also one of our largest Partners overall with a large Services practice so uh we were working on a solution uh he had an idea for a solution um years before he even joined that company and we were able to flesh it out
a little bit and we recognized that in order to do this right it required a startup um so that you know three and a half years ago we launched uh medify and and here we are now so what what what Drew you to you know leaving because obviously 15 years at IBM a fairly substantial chunk at Red Hat you know what what made you go yep I'm gonna go out and try and and start something was it was it the idea was was that compelling did you did you see the yeah a white space that was in the market for it yeah absolutely well you
know I was always sort of this concept of side gigging right I mean you know I think for the entrepreneur I think a lot of folks have a natural entrepreneurial Spirit you know and I certainly um have one and and that's kind of one of the cool things about um you know where we are now as a culture even and the tools that are available to everybody we can all kind of you know um uh go after things in in different ways and um uh so for me I I always wanted to start my own company I always envisioned myself as the CEO of
my own company and um you know there's a few close calls uh but it's a it's an alignment thing right and obviously um with a family and kids I wanted to make sure that uh I chose wisely um before I I dove into anything and I had a couple very you know really close calls from a um product and positioning perspective where I could have launched in other directions had a couple offers to do something along those lines um but um it just wasn't what I was looking for and and specifically what I was looking for was something that was a
niche software solution um that uh really had a chance at disrupting something big I didn't want to do it for a a hobbyist business or a lifestyle business or whatever you want to call it you know where you can kind of I wanted something that could actually you know find something that disrupted things and the cool part about working in um in in this kind of advanced channels position where you're working with the best sis around is that you really do get exposed to exactly what's happening at the application
Level as well as with with red hat of course all the way down to the OS and the difficulties that are yeah that are you know part of dealing with os's and and bioses and all those things that have to happen at the server level to make everything else work just before we get into that because I think that's obviously one of the problem statements that metaphors trying to trying to solve right is what you just talked about there and the whole concept of how hard it is to actually provision a server and
then what the public Cloud actually meant for that and how there's been a bit of a pullback back to you know having some sort of server that you control at that bare metal end but I just want to go back to the side hustle you mentioned an interesting thing there it definitely is the era of the side hustle right with the tooling that that we have available and I guess the thought the thought of a lot of especially the younger idea guys um around that their first sort of thought process is I'll do my day job and see
what I can do at night to get me to that side Hustle but you mentioned a good point there that you didn't want it just to be a hobby or some sort of half I could say half-assed sort of attempt to do it you really wanted to to make sure that it was going to be something that had reason and could change the industry and I think that's a very important sort of thing to consider when anyone's deciding to go into a side hustle yeah it's got to be yes you can do a bit of a play thing but don't expect it to be
putting you know like you said firm the table for your family that's going to be a consideration so you know what what was so pressing about the problem statement then that gave you that Spirit of conviction to be able to go and start it oh yeah so uh you know in in many ways um so Ian Evans uh my CTO uh and co-founder he's just uh he's a brilliant guy and uh so when he came to me with this solution um and I we started diving into it a bit I could see his passion first of all um and that's incredibly important and I
love Hardware as well so we were you know sort of double geeking out on the potentials of this solution right um and uh I mean he just I mean the first day I was just so blown away I was like oh my God okay this could be disruptively different because it brings so many um needs into a single very simple to use tool um and it's completely neglected uh so when I think about the things that I noticed so we have deep expertise in this area right I've been in the cold rooms and seen data centers and helped plan data centers of
you know some of the largest companies around as has Ian Ian's done it very directly you know I had Services teams that were doing it at IBM for Ian he he did it you know I mean he had to live it and and build it so he was the the lead principal architect on on a lot of these um so you know that's critical right having deep expertise in the area and and seeing feeling that degree of excitement because you know the area well enough to know holy crap everyone is going to get this and then we had validation of it
because we kind of built a uh an alpha version if you will um and that was in fact you know a big part of what I was working with Ian on was like an alpha what could we build because solution development this was something I was always um trying to push at Red Hat was it's more than our products what is the best solution what are we doing with the partners to build something that customers actually use beyond the operating system or Beyond ansible or you know beyond um you know any of our uh core products
that uh that our customers rely on um so and that's where uh that's where this idea of a bare metal provisioning solution leveraging Red Hat tools um came into place and and we had a chance to Alpha this this with several of the top 100 customers in North America um you know we're talking Fortune 100 customers uh the largest financial institutions some of the largest um Department of Defense groups manufacturing organizations um aircraft Builders You Name It We got to show it to them and they all literally were just like okay this is
great where can we buy it right okay there was no product you know so we were stuck and we're looking at each other like oh my God okay and then a lot of the guidance that we got from those customers who are they know their pains you know better than anybody right um so a lot of the guidance that we got we we knew we had to do this as a startup we just we could not show any um you know sort of uh uh any tie-in to any of the big players the HP Dell any of the big Hardware players any of the big software players we just had to be this
neutral Switzerland Mojo platform we had to be the Switzerland platform if you will that could allow that low-level magic to happen I think that's the point where you realize that it has to be something you go all in on and you kind of risk you know elements of your career on and and and your thing and what you're doing and if you know the family food on the table we went we go back to that I think a lot of people a lot of people don't have the spirit of conviction to be able to make that jump so the fact that you saw that and you
were able to go in and go all in and it's quite credible so let's talk about medifier you've talked kind of a little bit around about what what is metaphor like what is what is the product what are you guys achieving yeah um so well it's an award-winning um low level infrastructure and operations tool really like an old school utility platform I remember the days when you had utility programs or you know we still do but just don't use them as much um and uh so we created it just and we made that we wanted to make it
incredibly simple to use because currently um infrastructure and operations kind of got left in the dust frankly because of the proprietary nature of servers and the protective importance of monetization of the software um that you know the big oems relied on and still do rely on very important for them to shift that into subscription stream stream revenue of some kind right be it maintenance or software to to manage those servers right it's a very big part of staying profitable and we appreciate those guys and and believe me
the hardware platforms do have a lot of I mean there's a lot of gold in those uh oems with the things that they provide above and beyond white box servers especially For Less technically Advanced organizations um but um we were focused on simpleness and and the discovery provisioning and and really maintenance of any uh server platform regardless of the manufacturer uh regardless of where it was we could remotely um discover uh provision and enable um that device regardless of where it was which is which we actually call them
endpoints because it can be a server it could be uh some type of edge device it could be a sensor uh it could be a palm top you know whatever and that's you know with the um with the dawn of the edge if you will um and and the growth of that and all that's happening around the edge uh it turns out you know it's an incredibly important thing to be able to do um especially and I think the key to all this is it's in in a lights out fashion in other words it's out of band it doesn't matter all we need is a uh if
there's power going to the device right it's got a power and there is a uh some type of network connection that's you know that we can establish uh through um you know Ethernet or or Wireless whatever then we can low level you know update firmware update BIOS wipe out the hard drive put in a new OS load a new software stack update the OS whatever you can imagine from a low level maintenance perspective and this is a little it's still really because there's been a little bit of a move obviously we
it was a big shift there was a big shift to the public clouds right that was I talked about it also known as podcast the Panacea of what it was to say with we're moving everything to the public cloud on-premises is dead the cloud is where it is and we've we've definitely seen this concept of repatriation especially this year it's been a bit of big word this year like it's happening a lot there's been some very famous um posts and articles out there about some big orgs that are pulling back from
the public clouds and and going back you know to on-premises and back to buying servers and boxes and whatnot but you mentioned it earlier there's we've there's a bit of a dead patch or a dead zone between you know what it was to provision a server the operating system and then virtualization came on and kind of almost superseded the the hardware in terms of thinking about what we needed to do on the hardware if you're new to if you're new to computers and servers or computers and serverless or whatever
it might be today you don't really understand what it is to have a physical box right I don't even know let alone how to upgrade a bias or a firmware or anything still critical it still happens like even if we're in the public Cloud that that all still happens right so yeah that hasn't gone away but I think when we've pulled back so we've now we're now pulling back to on-premises bare metal has become obviously very popular I've noticed that in the last 18 months to 24 months the
bare metal clouds have become front and center and in fact quite a few traditional hosting providers that might have been doing virtualization infrastructure as a service have actually pivoted to offering bare metal as well so you know where does metaphy fit in in that world yeah so that's the the beauty of our our platform is that we we have um sort of a private label services so we work with hosters right to help them um monetize bare metal and create their own bare metal clouds for their customers as well as providing it
directly to Enterprises so they can DIY so and that all depends that's a skill set thing right so we we really having a channel-led business it allows us to cover all those bases um and um you know our some of our partners have bare metal as a service offerings now as well leveraging mojo as well as build Services leveraging Mojo because you can also just use it to build the servers and then ship them out to whoever to to their customers that's pretty cool so Mojo is the platform and then metifiers there's a company name so
where did where did metaphor come from I'm always interested in the origins of of company names yeah yeah so um metaphy is a portmanteau a combination nation of the words so it's bare metal metal and simplified and so metal metal simplified metaphied there you go that's awesome it's not made up it's actually it actually means something it means something yeah absolutely so uh and that was you know that was important too right we just uh we wanted people to know this thing is real and uh netify
made sense for us so yeah yeah and Mojo is is the actual platform or I guess you could call it a tool a tooling or tool set earlier yeah yeah it's a platform I mean uh because there's a lot that goes into it and there's a lot that we can do with it so we have a service catalog that's also a part of it dashboarding and monitoring um of of all of your endpoints so yeah it's it's truly a platform in that um you know there's a number of components to it and um you know there's there is a lot we we kind of LED
everything from a Security First posture um which is really required in fact we've got some uh work with the dod right now that's um specifically related to a new uh specification our new certification from a security perspective um a kind of this secure platform specification secure compute specifications so some really cool stuff coming and yeah all of this speaks directly to Cloud repatriation um and you know the ability to handle these things um on your own but in in a very secure way um so and you know the dmtf which is the
open standard that made all of this possible um the Open Standards group the actual standard is called the redfish specification redfish um yeah so uh redfish made it all happen um and uh you know once all of the oems got on board that's that's what enabled all of this to uh to occur and allow us to do our magic and and provide um Solutions both from a hosting perspective right so to tie this back into uh the question um you know having the ability to uh manage to discover provision and manage um you know at low level from any
manufacturer is uh incredibly powerful and that gives you that that bare metal solution if you will if you're a Hoster okay cool now you have the tool set you can use it and we have you know special pricing for that if you're a customer you can just download and install it into behind your firewall and then you have your own sort of bare metal as a service solution if you will and now it's just the uh it bare metal has become the dominant I architecture for containerized applications and there's a
number of reasons why that's the case but yeah it's 52 now of containerized workloads are actually running on barometrics okay cool and you would have had early you know if my containerized point of view working on openshift quite early in a red hat career right when it was kind of there there about so I know that openshift you know to a certain extent dominates a lot of the Enterprise containerization space these days um it's just a great solution very robust platform so okay that's pretty cool in terms of the open standard point
of view so I remember back is it's probably like it's got to be more 10 years ago I remember the open compute platform was out was out there Making Waves that was more about a data center in Iraq and specific specific sizes of the compute and the racks and the servers putting it in there and it was tied to hardware and software and whatnot is this an evolution of that in terms of redfish and the MTF and the Open Standards because it's all about low level apis right um is that an evolution or is that was
that a separate part yeah it didn't quite take off no it's it's definitely they work together uh very well they kind of evolved together so I wouldn't say that one is taking over from the other because the open compute project specifies a number of things that redfish is not does not care about right so you know the size of the rack and yeah you know different things along from a pure physical perspective now everything that's in that rack of course is uh interrogatable and usable and open
BMC also flows with the open compute project often and that's another standards organization that we work with that has also gotten on board with the redfish specification so they co-exist and uh and all of these are sort of backward compatibility or bilateral compatibility between the two of them they work very closely together so yeah it's all coming together really beautifully and and you know we get to work across the board with um with all of them including then there's others too you know snia has swordfish which is
the storage component um there's a Yang to redfish model for the networking stuff um you know there's just all of it is coming together right this uh this desire uh to be able to fix your own DIY and not be sort of proprietarily stuck with any one manufacturer has driven all this and obviously the use cases demanded so pretty cool so with in terms of the the value and the benefit of of the platform so when we talk about a complete life cycle Computing storage Network we've got the rest API there for
control we've got low level bias updating and rollbacks um is that kind of we talk about low level Simplicity is that really the major benefit of this platform it's that it takes away a lot of the pain points that traditionally have come with managing a server absolutely and and initially I mean that was the number one pain Point describing I mean we talked to organizations that had to put off and had major major outages and issues because they had to put off updating their servers because it was just so manually strenuous to be
able to update all the bioses of thousands of systems um you know we're talking the the hand Jam as um Kevin backman called it um from uh Major League Baseball uh you know so one of our really awesome customers um and uh there's there's no getting around um the manual process that's involved in doing low-level things like this unless you have a new tool and uh yes so that was uh one of the big things that that drove it in the beginning um and then it evolved from there because there's also we also recognized uh this
need for governance security maintenance audits right what's the reporting associated with uh who's touched that server right so we have a full chain of custody that's built in and so the idea of server life cycle management coupled with um a secure loggable auditable platform that's incredibly important and it just there was we we couldn't find anything like it and and Ian you know who's always saying God I wish you know I had this because it would make my life so much easier and you know just from an
audit perspective we talked to a few customers that it takes them it used to take them months and months to prepare for an audit and now you know with Mojo it just spit out a report and you know exactly who's touched that server exactly what bios levels are on it any changes that have been made everything is kept up um and and you know reportable that touches Mojo that that Mojo is is managing so yeah it's a it's a huge value added yeah Beyond yeah I was gonna say that hand jamming I've I've never heard of it
before it sounds kind of like dangerously it's a dangerous word right yeah it's a bit edgy but I um I get it because I I was one of those guys that for all my career would have to you know manage a fleet of servers and think about oh my goodness isn't a bias update we've got to pump it out to 70 80 servers now that's that's not an easy task okay let's roll through them um yeah and it was always a pain and to that extent because there was that pain associated with it sometimes you'd put
it off and put it off dangerously so right because I think this probably happens today potentially blessed because we've got a lot more regulations and compliances and whatnot but I know that my thought process was if it ain't broke don't fix and suddenly servers you know we wouldn't upgrade the femoral bias that's right it's too hard so you know with this platform now making that easy across the board um you don't have those problems and then what happens is those problems will will basically build on top of
themselves as well because if you've got an old firmware then you're going to have a new OS that goes on it the os's compatibility issues you're always playing catch up at that point so I feel like this potentially solves a lot of those roadblocks a lot of practitioners had back in the day yeah yeah you're describing sort of the cascading failure issues that come with putting off um low-level updates and uh yeah and then it becomes difficult to to know what you have in the field so we have uh
so one of the big use cases that we are finding ourselves working with large customers and in and mid-size as well on is we're getting placed in their labs so all the testing um of the architectural footprints that are in the field they get to make sure that everything is up to date and everything works perfectly before it gets shipped and then um and then shipped I mean you know downloaded and updated and everything working right um now that could include a hardware um upgrade as well but for the most part
it's it's software um so we get to update all those things and and inside the labs they get to test across all of the platforms usually and it can vary but then the important thing is what's in the field okay so having that remote ability to do a low level discovery of all of the BIOS levels all of the firmware levels so you essentially have a gold image if you will of what it's supposed to be and then you run a report against that within Mojo and then you you know look at okay here these are the boxes oh we
have one in Cleveland that uh needs to be that's on the old bio so we know it will bring break if we try and roll this upgrade out yeah um or you know similarly across the board you can you know do this with thousands of servers and that's incredibly valuable so especially with the with the growth of Edge and everything that's happening out there keeping track of um what's actually in those servers what's in those um you know small Edge devices uh is just critical um you know yeah I was going to say yeah
the sphere of you know what is compute today's has changed massively uh it's changing quickly um so what what defines the edge for you because I know that the MLB case study from well you know you're one of the customers you mentioned Major League Baseball they moved away from VMware and they've got this their stadiums and they had certain compute Platforms in there and they've shifted away to a containerized based platform and you know you guys are managing that low level aspect of that so how just talk a
little bit about that and effective what's happening out there and using MLB is a is a pretty good example of what's going on yeah um yes uh so thanks for bringing that Major League Baseball is a perfect use case um that is a true hybrid Edge Cloud solution as well as a tie back to their data center also um so they've got sort of uh you can almost view it as a hubspoken cloud perspective as an architecture um and uh yeah they were Kevin had this hilarious thing I'd never heard before called the hand Jam where you know
they'd have to fly around to the stadiums and their Edge pops you know their Edge points of presence were uh five servers inside of each Ballpark and depending on the ballpark it had uh it was a either you know slightly better or worse class citizen sometimes it was a closet sometimes they had a nice room yeah yeah yes you know exactly yeah because each of these gets the other part that's interesting right um all of the ballparks are owned by the you know by the individual owners so you're kind of
managing an independent and Fleet if you will that's amazing yeah yeah it's it's a harder deal than um uh like uh like retail you know and I'm surprised we still um we're in some um early beta with a few retailers but we haven't done a major retail roll out yet which is I'm I'm shocked by because the use case is perfect for us but I was gonna say I can think of one and I can think of a customer that is one of our customers that I work for that this would be perfect for it lends itself exactly to
what you're talking about maybe we should talk afterwards well as speaking of you know it's funny because this is why we actually took in the funding because we have to get our name you know people need to become more aware of what's going on even though you know we've had Major League Baseball and some other really big customers um there is uh there is certainly a competitive Advantage aspect so we can't talk about some of our customers um and um you know MLB was kind enough to promote um you know and and publish and they
actually have a tech blog where they published us and yeah you know put a graphic up with um I just quickly on that so the seating so 1.5 million a couple of months ago um so that's obviously pretty big and you're looking to kind of work work on that obviously you've just talked about a bit of maybe a bit of marketing bit of realization of the marker but also trying to improve the experience but that lends itself to the fact that for the best part of well four years you were bootstrapped right which is pretty impressive yeah yeah
three years three years of bootstrapping so and that's another reason why I had to be really sure uh that this could disruptively change things you know I I had uh saved up a few money saved up a few pennies and um and actually you know crypto because we're also working with um some players in crypto and um that made it possible for this right I made um I was a um an ethereum Miner I made you know had a couple of Rigs and made a few dollars extra along with my you know saving up cash over my professional career and
um that's also that yeah so you're you're you know I I've missed out in the early days of ethereum mining even though my old bossy said but very ethereum ethereum I didn't listen to it I missed out but anyway so so you've you've you're able to kind of Leverage a bit of crypto yeah foresight and use that to basically bootstrap that's awesome Yes it definitely helped it wasn't the sole contributor but yeah it was a they say it made me feel like okay I've got enough here that I know I can
give this a good run and um and yeah the goal was too I didn't want to give it away because we really were confident that we had a solution here that would immediately you know provide value for our customers so this guy back to the video so let's go back to the MLB use case and the quick transitions from VMware to what you guys are doing and what they're doing now yeah so in a nutshell um yeah that was kind of the uh the problem statement for MLB was um they were they felt they were paying too much for their virtualized
environments um and uh it also wasn't the architecture of choice so it wasn't money wasn't the sole reason but it certainly was I mean you know this this move towards containerization creates uh a much cleaner platform to deliver your applications on when you can do it with bare metal and you get better application performance you get uh lower latency you get uh better up times you know there's a number of positive benefits that outflow from getting your architecture right so this virtualization Not only was expensive
but it also um negatively impacted their application performance and overall uptime so what do you do to um now granted there's a ease of function benefit but when you're technically proficient and and capable and in this cable with Mojo platform um it makes it incredibly easy to do all the things you need to do and still save a bunch of money in the process so you get it's a win-win in in every way so yeah the problem state for them was okay let's let's try and be able to have a centralized point to manage and
provision just government and provision all of our Edge pops all of our Edge points of presence while partnering with Google to be able to upload all the data into gcp into Google Cloud platform running the applications on Google anthos which is a competitor to openshift and another one of the Enterprise application platforms that sits on top of that that you know is kubernetes based so yeah that was the you know the main problem statement right they had to get on bare metal they wanted a way to um you know ongoing in an ongoing manner
management provision without flying out and doing the infamous backman hand well Kevin backman's comp where they're the hand Jam yeah I'm doing it now yeah that's right so it was funny when I was at you know when I was a Novell engineer with IBM we called it sneakernet that's it that's what I need yeah sneakernet was the only term so it was hilarious I mean he's South African he's got some of the funniest sayings you've ever heard um that probably that probably actually makes sense now in terms of yeah it
makes sense in terms of where it came from okay it's absolutely awesome uh so um so yeah so it's uh so yeah it covered all the bases for him and um we were able to implement it very quickly and uh you know in a few weeks we kind of had it done in fact it was um as soon as they saw Mojo and this has been a very repeatable experience they just were like okay does it does it really work this easily you know and I'm like yeah and I'll never forget the VP said okay their VP of it was Kevin's Bossa Felipe
Negron um said to me is there any okay so is there anything it can't do you know kind of jokingly but kind of serious I'm like there's a number of things on our roadmap that we really look forward to getting in but yeah it can do all this stuff and um so it was uh like I said we uh they actually said let's uh skip the POC let's put it straight into production and we were landed and operating within a few weeks and had their ballparks up and going so and now we're in there we've grown every
year with them um and they've been a customer for I think they're in their third year so um uh now we're in their minor league Parks as well and um you know that continues to to grow they've got a lot of different minor league teams so makes their uh their lives much easier across the board now not just in the Major League ballparks but also across uh the other states it's full it's full automation isn't it so it's like it's the automation of something that is fundamentally
um a manual task the walk yeah the hand jamming all that kind of stuff so it's pretty cool quickly talk about the restful API and intersect with codes I know that you plug into your 100 rest focused obviously that's very important the tooling out there I assume plugs into also every infrast such as code out there that's possible it's popular So to that end anyone who would be using any type of terraform ansible whatever Chef whatever it might be they can plug into your system and basically do this thing
yes so and that was a that was a big Value Point and something that Ian was um really excited about he said okay we're not going to use any of these garbage old uh methods right now we want this to be modern and a modern tool that treats infrastructure and operations as a first class Citizen and really brings a disruptive level of simplicity to these tasks that infrastructure has to deal with so yeah the the restful nature of all of that and the API for everything um way that we built Mojo platform uh really enables uh that degree of
Simplicity as well as as security and um you know allows you to do things that just weren't possible five years ago yeah it allows everyone to consume it as a cloud and that's kind of the important thing I mean we moved to cloud and I think the end result of cloud is that people wanted to consume as Cloud but not necessarily necessarily like to deal with the public clouds so that lends itself to the service quite well hey just just finish off with uh where where are you guys going like we're going to
continue to innovate and disrupt the market moving forward yeah um so in the short term here the big thing is uh we're going to be downloadable um so that's one of the things that uh we've been getting a lot of requests for um because as it is right now you go to our website and it's you you know you can click for a demo but you can't just download the product and and kick tires on it and play with it right so um the downloadability is something that we should have online in a couple weeks two
weeks or so excellent so we're really yeah really excited about that and that's another reason um title Town Tech and uh um our VC investment is helping us get there because it's a significant um uh lift for us from a development perspective so um that's happening um we're also you know developing more on the on the network front which is which is really fun and on the wireless Broadband front so um we have another product um called Photon and that's a Broadband Wireless solution that is um Best in
Class it's just a really cool solution that we helped teachers out when kovid hit a couple years ago Ian helped out the local community and got these teachers online so they could teach their classes and uh the tech that resulted of that was really cool all right well Mike that was a great conversation I think what you guys are doing is amazing uh metaphys definitely you know riding this this awesome wave that we have at the moment with bare metal but you're doing it in a quite a unique way and you've obviously had some
great success so thanks for being on the show uh and just as a reminder if you love great things with a great Tech would like to feature in future episodes you can click on the link on the show notes or head to gtwgt podcast or gtwjt.com or go and find me at Anthony's pateri or at gtwjt podcast on Twitter and with that thanks to Mike and thanks to mattify for being on episode 66 of great things with great Tech pleasure being here Anthony thank you awesome thanks a lot mate all right man you got it have a good one