Speaker 0 | 00:09.520
Welcome, everyone, back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We have definitely one nerd on the call today, and his name is Darren Ward. And I say that, and I mean that with all respect, because if I called myself a nerd, that would mean that I would be calling myself smart somehow. And he does believe that we landed on the moon. And I’m not saying that we didn’t not saying that we didn’t. And I just like talking about this subject because it’s, it fascinates me. And, uh, we, we ended up like, you know, one of my last episodes, um, we, it took all the way to the end of the episode to start talking about this, but let’s just start with a statistic. Okay. Um, two 23 assault rifle. Try the, the bullet leaves the muzzle of the gun at 3000 to 3000. 500 feet per second. The reason why I say that is because that is the speed of a bullet. And we’ve heard this term before, faster than a speeding bullet. What else is faster than a speeding bullet? I think it’s the F-15. Fastest airplane goes maybe something like Mach 5.2. That would be 5,200 feet per second. How fast was the lunar… triangular, we don’t call it the command capsule, when it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere after doing a 440,000, can I speak English? You got 440 and then three more zeros mile round trip around the moon, re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. How fast was it going? The reported number is a little bit more. It’s 36,000 feet per second. Again, Mach 5.2, 5,200 feet per second. Capsule blunted backwards triangular object entering the Earth’s atmosphere, a little bit under 37,000 feet per second. That is, the exact number, by the way, is 121.01 football fields per second. 121 football fields per second. We’re just going to leave it with that. We’ll start with the conspiracy theories. Do you believe them or not? I went down a dark hole recently of reading about space travel and landing on the moon because it is quite insane when you really break it down math-wise and science-wise on how we did that and the fact that it was in 1967 or 69.
Speaker 1 | 02:53.055
I was thinking 17.
Speaker 0 | 02:54.668
what kind of telecom i think 69 and since we’re both x well not really x you’re never an ex telecom nerd but since we’re both telecom guys and what started this whole thing was i saw a picture of president nixon what started my whole like you know i’m because i’m not a big conspiracy guy i’m a you have to take what is a parent and you know and you know you don’t start with conspiracy you know what i mean like you take what is impaired what is apparent apparent as we were told we landed on the moon okay now let’s break it down but what started this whole thing was a picture of president nixon on a telephone speaking to people on the moon and that was 1969 and me knowing being in telecom you being in telecom we know that we play with things like jitter and latency now that we’ve got voip right uh back in the day certainly back then and who was it that made the um Who was it that reached out and touched someone as, as you’d like to say, I believe, which was AT&T, right? Was that, was that their thing? Reach out and touch someone?
Speaker 1 | 04:02.514
Reach out and touch someone. I remember that.
Speaker 0 | 04:04.355
Whatever it was, it’s AT&T, right? Was the one that switched that phone call from the Oval Office to then, I don’t know, to Houston and then to the men on the moon. So what kind of technology did we have back then? And how did that phone call get made? Any clue?
Speaker 1 | 04:20.987
Analog only. Right.
Speaker 0 | 04:22.940
Fascinating.
Speaker 1 | 04:23.940
It is.
Speaker 0 | 04:24.761
We’ll leave everyone, leave everyone with that. The, this is a, well, we’ll dedicate this episode to, um, to telecom. How many end users do you manage a phone system for?
Speaker 1 | 04:37.046
Uh, we, the company has, uh, 30,000 employees or so we’ve got like 10,000 in the U S um, not everyone has a phone right now. We’ve certainly got, uh, you know, shop floor workers and that sort of thing. So. I’m not finished with my centralization project just yet, but I think we’ll land somewhere between $6,000 and $8,000.
Speaker 0 | 05:01.785
I like how you said that centralization. the centralization not unification right because there’s all these buzzwords we could play a telecom acronym we should do a telecom acronym section of things that probably a lot of it guys that are listening to the show have no clue when they telecom guy and we talk all a different level of acronyms but
Speaker 1 | 05:22.112
what’s a move ad changes like in your organization you get a lot of those so absolutely and and i’ve seen a significant reduction in those types of activities since moving to the cloud. We certainly still have, I think I’ve got about 30 systems left that I need to migrate. 30
Speaker 0 | 05:44.175
PBX?
Speaker 1 | 05:48.277
I have about 15 or so. I’d say about 15 legacy PBXs.
Speaker 0 | 05:56.661
MyTal, Avaya, Toshit, Yala.
Speaker 1 | 06:00.482
I’ve seen… I’ve seen them all. Yeah. Nortel, Northstar. Ooh, nice. Avaya. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 0 | 06:08.314
Microwaves sitting on the wall.
Speaker 1 | 06:10.575
Yeah. And some of them are refrigerators, huge, you know, three stack refrigerators, you know, with a big power supply in the bottom.
Speaker 0 | 06:19.701
Dare I say, so IT silos, silos, we call them silos. I think they still exist and they do doing a, I’m actually, I’ve been putting together a, a telecom training program behind the scenes offline. And I have to do like a history, like a little bit of history of telecom and stuff that you, you know, you probably won’t run into anymore, but you know, I have to basically go through a glossary and a definition and, you know, key systems in there, PBX, how do you describe what a PRI is and SIP trunking? And in my head, I’m thinking, is it really worth even spending a lot of time teaching someone what a key system in a PRI is. Yeah, but they’re probably going to run into it. In your case, how many old North Stars do you still think are kicking around out there making phone calls, extension dialing?
Speaker 1 | 07:13.594
Outside my organization? You know, I would imagine, because the old mantra is, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And there’s still a lot of the older generation that says, show me the value. Of migrating to something that I suddenly have to stress over, you know, the network is down all the time, guys. I don’t want to put my phones on the network. So that old guard is still out there.
Speaker 0 | 07:42.602
It’s hard. Well, it’s hard and easy to hack one, right? Easy, meaning you could, if you know a little bit about star codes and, you know, admin resets and things like that, you could probably hack a North Star phone system. probably fairly easily. But if you did, what could you do with it? Forward calls to a calling card server? You know, here’s no calls. What could you do?
Speaker 1 | 08:08.840
About 10 years ago, about 10 years ago, I read an article about a guy who was facing charges. This guy was blind. He was born blind and he made it a career of hacking phone systems. That’s all he did. And he hacked phone systems back in the day to basically create calling cards. The calling cards were expensive. Yeah. So he’d create a calling card and sell them. And that evolved into social engineering. And he got really, really good at being able to read somebody’s tone and convince them to do something for him, whatever it was. So he was up on charges. Okay. I think he had. kind of come clean in order to reduce those charges yep what was he doing with all the money i wonder i don’t know i don’t know i don’t know i think he had a brother and a couple of friends helping him um by the end you know once he proved he could be successful so we can still hack so there’s a reason to change you’ve got an old pbx but then it’s also just as easy to hack probably like the newer it’s
Speaker 0 | 09:17.512
probably just as easy to hack a new voicemail system and i know this because I am friends with, work with, and know the kind of true story behind the scenes inside the telecom industry. And you’ve called customer care many times. I know a lot of the IT directors, managers, CTOs, CIOs have called customer care as well. And how easy is it to get someone to just give you information when you call your vendor?
Speaker 1 | 09:41.732
Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 09:42.773
I need my IP address. Can you give that to me real quick? Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1 | 09:46.316
Depending on who you get, you know, I’m Banks have rules as well. You know, you do not share this information or whatever. And I know somebody who convinced a bank teller over the phone to put her name on somebody else’s bank account as joint owners, and then she drained it.
Speaker 0 | 10:05.480
Oh my Lord.
Speaker 1 | 10:06.801
And this was just a couple of years ago.
Speaker 0 | 10:08.722
That reminds me of Microsoft calling my dad and telling him that his computer has been compromised. And Steve, Steve from Microsoft, uh, eventually my dad, he doesn’t, he has, um, dementia. So he forgets fully functioning 87 year old man, right. Um, can still drive like passes the driver’s test, like flying colors. Right. but then won’t remember where he is. So that’s the problem with the driving is you can fool the DMV and they’ll pass you. But what they won’t test him is drive him somewhere, go back to the DMV and have him come back to the DMV. He’ll forget and he’ll drive somewhere else. So he actually had someone convince him. he remembered one time as a dad, Microsoft never call you. Don’t give him any information. Stop paying him $600 to clean up your computer and make it faster. There’s nothing wrong. Like, don’t know people aren’t, you know, there’s just, there’s no reason to do this. But so he eventually remembered one time when the guy called him, he’s like, no, my son told me like, you know, like, you know, like whatever. And the guy was like, oh, well, fine. Um, how about this? Then I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you, Dr. Howard. to um 500 600 a month i just need a bank account in the um united states to be able to receive payments and if you do that for me i will pay you 600 a month sure sounds great sounds great so what happened was and you know you know I’m not, this is, I don’t want to, I love my father and all the respect in the world. You know what I mean? This is just, this is for learning, for learning, you know, purposes, I guess. The, he, he did, we did end up, he did, he got lost on the way to the bank. He got to the bank, but he was opening up an account, but then he couldn’t, he, he forgot why he was there or something. And, you know, the police called the house and they said, Hey, you know, we’ve got Dr. Howard down here. He’s, you know, he’s trying to, he went to like a bank. Normally he goes to the bank that’s like half an hour away. Well, he drove by that one and ended up like an hour and a half away at the next, you know, Bank of America trying to open up an account. Yeah, he said he’s going into business. He’s got to open up an account for this guy. And we stopped him in time, but he was about to give the accounting number and routing number to this guy. And I’m sure the guy would have paid him, but then he would have been, you know, caught for money laundering or something.
Speaker 1 | 12:39.737
Right.
Speaker 0 | 12:40.078
Because I look at where, so basically we changed my dad’s phone number. right so the guy can stop calling him because yeah human what did you call it earlier like human hacking social engineering social engineering right so the guy is very good at calling and me being the telecom guy i eventually entered the phone times hey how you doing yeah yeah i’m glad that you’re helping my dad out i tried to like you know a sting operation you know i’m glad you’re helping my dad out it’s great you know oh where are you at oh you’re over here right okay what do you you know i’m in telecom what are you doing vonage you know and come to find out no he’s not in texas he is in india he is using vonage to sift through numbers then he started asking me well i’m having troubles with some sip providers can you help me do this oh yeah i’m trying to like you know what’s your address in india i was literally going to get on a plane and go over there and strangle the guy um and then i realized well no i might be part of a different you know more corrupt organization and then i end up you know disappearing somewhere in a dumpster um this is where my mind goes uh anywho the that’s a slight telecom social engineering story. So I told, we changed the phone number so they can’t call the guy. What does he do? He sends them certified mail from Microsoft.
Speaker 1 | 13:50.009
Oh, wow.
Speaker 0 | 13:51.130
Call us right now. Your computer has been, we’ve been trying to get ahold of you. We’ve been trying to get ahold of you. You’ve been compromised. Give, give Microsoft a call right now. Here’s the toll free number. So then when he calls him back, now he’s got his number again, then I got to change his phone number again. So it’s, this is the cycle. This cycle. So we literally have people like at the house, if you see anything coming from Microsoft, destroy it immediately. Do not let him open the envelope.
Speaker 1 | 14:17.081
Right.
Speaker 0 | 14:18.582
Because you know, the troubles of changing a phone number and I mean, to a degree. So talk to me, what let’s, let’s go down the tails from the 66 block tails from the 66 block worst telecom nightmare that you’ve ever experienced somewhere in the near future. probably has something to do with a provider screwing something up.
Speaker 1 | 14:39.274
The worst. Early. So there’s a few to choose from, right? So I don’t know that this ranks among the worst, but early in my career, we had pure analog services and we wanted a PRI circuit for quite a long time, but they weren’t available on our side of the railroad tracks.
Speaker 0 | 15:03.602
Yes.
Speaker 1 | 15:03.862
Finally, they became available.
Speaker 0 | 15:06.243
There’s T1 pairs now.
Speaker 1 | 15:08.225
Right. Right. So we had like, I don’t know, eight or nine DID trunks and then our outward trunks, outbound trunks. And so I finally partnered up with a SEALAC, gave us great pricing, put the whole project together. Right.
Speaker 0 | 15:27.238
Who was the last mile? AT&T last mile?
Speaker 1 | 15:31.381
I believe. West at the time, US West.
Speaker 0 | 15:35.643
Yes.
Speaker 1 | 15:36.844
Yeah. So this was in Colorado. So we’re coming up, you know, so here we are, this week, we’re going to actually turn up, you know, we’ve got the hardware in place. I don’t think it’s a TN 2224 or something like that. And unfortunately, the carriers break up an order. into several orders so there’s an order to take down the dids there’s an order to install the span there’s an order to turn up the span there’s an order to take down your old outbound trunks you know it’s all broken up they do them out of order so they take down my dids before porting my did phone numbers over to the t1 and we’re down for an entire week oh and
Speaker 0 | 16:30.902
Wait, was it, they couldn’t, is it because they restore them?
Speaker 1 | 16:34.684
What a reasonable question, Phil. Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 0 | 16:38.907
Thank you.
Speaker 1 | 16:39.928
Reason because the IDs were, um, a premium product at the time, the DID trunks and the DID trunks at the central office had already been assigned to a new customer.
Speaker 0 | 16:54.178
Oh, snap back, please. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 16:59.650
people don’t i wonder if anyone obviously you know we’re working with the c-like at the time and they scramble you know their vps they come drive all the way to greeley colorado and talk to you know my director and really um yeah you know apologize profusely but they cannot you know they cannot accelerate the timeline of the rest of the orders with us west and get our pri turned up
Speaker 0 | 17:29.454
Yeah, nice. You know what? All of that, there’s a couple things that come up. I went to CSU, so right next to Greeley. There’s four common memories that you have in Greeley. As you’re driving to Greeley, you roll up the windows, and it does nothing. It does absolutely nothing because you see that brown cloud coming. You see that brown cloud coming. Anyone that knows, knows. Most people that live in Greeley, and I remember my friend who lived in Loveland, Colorado, it was right next door. He’s like, oh, we knew the Greeley kids in the school bus because that’s where they slaughter all the cows. And it smells. It’s just manure. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 18:07.786
Some people call it dinky town.
Speaker 0 | 18:09.768
Second thing is Children of the Corn, I believe, is where that was based. So it goes hand in hand with your telecom nightmare.
Speaker 1 | 18:18.035
It was filmed there?
Speaker 0 | 18:20.057
I don’t know if it was filmed there or based on that location. I just heard something about. of the corn and where it was now i need to google this because it could be an urban legend i could just be making stuff up and then you know i don’t know yeah you do that dissecting popular it nerds gets taken down because they misquoted children of the corn being filmed somewhere um and then there was something about the chupacabra i believe where i used to work because i worked for a quest wireless back in the day doing um premiere support was which was one of the best uh most fun you college jobs ever um children of the corn so anyways keep going so well no let me ask this what kind of phone calls were coming in to your desk or office or what kind of things were people saying to you what was going on yeah
Speaker 1 | 19:12.284
so everybody was fairly nice about it except for my boss my boss unfortunately i uh you know kind of ruled with an iron fist and you know her her way of managing people was to slam her hand down on the desk louder than last time uh so it did not go well um apparently i was told many years later that she actually went to hr to try to fire me and hr said you cannot do that this was not his fault you know once they got uh you know the entire story you Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 19:53.454
So movie history, 1989, a movie that held great promise, but fell apart was entirely filmed in Greeley. in Weld County using North Colorado Medical Center. Now, I’ve got to make sure that this is the correct movie. I could just be filming any other thing. Nope, this was a water war in Spudville. This is from Die Hard 2. Anywho, I believe it ended up being Nebraska. Anywho, I know that it supposedly took part in Nebraska anyways, which is where my wife’s from, and I’m learning a little bit more about this. which is great because now I can tell her, great, you know, what’s in Nebraska. Well, we have something now. So you got tried to get fired for telecom. So we still, no one has gotten fired for choosing AT&T. Is that true or no?
Speaker 1 | 20:47.885
That is still the fact, for sure. There was, yeah, you completely.
Speaker 0 | 20:54.512
don’t people hate at&t or i mean and i’m not saying and i have a lot of at&t um friends a lot of at&t circuits out there that are live right now probably doing perfectly well uh yeah uh of
Speaker 1 | 21:09.902
another telecom engineer and i put together an rfp and our boss at the time was getting her mba so she was learning all about you know scoring and rfps and you know the entire rate And then she learned weighted averages. So, you know, we evaluated a solution. I don’t even remember what it was for at the time. But another vendor clearly won out and AT&T ranked third on our scorecard. And then she sat down with us and suddenly, you know, as any good statistician can do, uh started assigning different weights to different scores and halfway through i could tell that she had already done the exercise and so she asked us all the leading questions and well you know does this particular feature meet the minimum requirement um are you saying anyway the rfp numbers she she totally made at&t come out on top and then a couple of years later she admitted that she was um
Speaker 0 | 22:23.548
politically motivated to award it to a really wow no serious that never happens in telecom there’s that never happens in telecom there’s no there’s no pockets being lined or whatever we call that telecom’s still the wild wild west it’s like back in the day that used to happen in pharmaceuticals and then they realized that they were playing with people’s lives and wonder if that’s still you know there’s we’re not going to go down that route Um, yeah,
Speaker 1 | 22:53.364
we’re better not,
Speaker 0 | 22:54.264
we’re not going down that route because of where this podcast gets mostly distributed. And, but that in, in telecom, it’s a little bit different. There’s still, um, sales reps. There’s still, there’s still, you know, maybe some over embellishing of facts from time to time. There might be a, we have, this is the latest and greatest and best, but in it’s in reality, maybe, you know. Oh, here’s what I heard one time. I think you’ll get a kick out of this. We’re not voice over IP. We’re way ahead of times. We’re beyond voice over IP. We are voice over PI.
Speaker 1 | 23:34.095
Voice over PI?
Speaker 0 | 23:35.595
We heard voice over PI. And you know what that was? We’re not voice over internet protocol. Because voice over internet protocol is not secure. That’s going voice over the internet. In other words, voice over the public internet. We’re voice over PI. We’re vo-P. We’re vo-P. voice over private internet oh your internet’s private now and really what that was was is we can’t deliver our um uh what was it uh gen band we can’t deliver our our version of remember gen band it’s remember the name gen band was like before like broad soft so a lot of the broads providers before had gen band okay and you’ll know it you’ll you’ll always know if you hear the gen band hold music um i wish i could just play that i can find it probably um gen band hold music anywho so what basically what they are what they were selling and over hyping was All of our servers are in one data center, and we have to sell you an MPLS circuit or an on-net VPN circuit, aka T1, back to the data center, aka private internet. We’re voice over private internet so that your phone calls stay up. But in reality, you’re now single threaded. If that T1 goes down, all of your voice goes down, all of your traffic has to first travel to that data center, then go out to the PSTN. But the way that it was being sold was… Really just kind of a crock of crap. I mean, like we’re voice over private internet. We’re not voice. You know what I mean? Like that was like just a couple of hilariousness.
Speaker 1 | 25:16.581
Is that the product that they put on the AT&T OneNet bill?
Speaker 0 | 25:21.484
No.
Speaker 1 | 25:21.604
Are you familiar with the OneNet? So I have an AT&T bill. It used to be about 2000 pages long. I’ve got it down, you know, as I migrate my systems over. I’ve got it down to, I think I’m somewhere around 400 pages now. But they sold us, and this was actually, I think, before I was on the team many moons ago. They sold us something that sounds just like it. It echoes what you’re saying here.
Speaker 0 | 25:54.181
Well, I’m sure many people did the same thing.
Speaker 1 | 25:57.524
Every time we turn up an office, we order phone numbers. We give those numbers to AT&T. They put them in their database. They deliver a dedicated T1 and they give us on net to on net pricing, you know, from site to site.
Speaker 0 | 26:13.015
I’m sure a lot of people were doing it and selling it in this fashion because the internet had not been built for QoS yet. This was back at the beginnings of voice over IP. Right now they build the internet for QoS, right? You don’t, you can’t even get a home, even just at home. You can turn on your QoS settings on your… Comcast router or whatever at home, right? The internet’s built for this type of stuff now. Back in the day, it wasn’t. So, and everyone was skeptical of VoIP. Remember back in the day, it was like, no, VoIP is the enemy. You’re going to call quality was bad. Everyone would always talk about no way, call quality, this, that, and everything else. You don’t really talk too much about that anymore. And that might be because people don’t even care too much about phones anymore. There’s a whole, we could debate over, you know, why do people, you know, whatever, just you know not care so much about it anymore but um it was they had to deliver these point-to-point t1s so they could make sure that their customers you know had quality phone service but it ended up being way overpriced um it certainly was not redundant or did not carry with it a disaster avoidance type of i mean you could just order a secondary t1 i guess but we know that in their rack in the data center which i you know right where it is that that could go down or you know these are the things that you used to experience back in the day so oh the local engineer made an update or a change took down the entire voice network all customers are down right so that’s one thing that could happen that would go wrong uh the t1 could go down that could go wrong the the provider could go down that would take you out then there could just be over subscription or they didn’t do the math right and you’ve got you know 50 people on a 1.5 or 1.2 megs of voice quality. So now we’re going to, I don’t know, what was it? G711 and G7. I don’t even remember the old codex, right? Yeah. Okay. So now we’re-722,
Speaker 1 | 28:16.674
726.
Speaker 0 | 28:18.654
So now we’ll compress voice to get more phone calls on it. So it was actually, back in the day, there was a lot of things that could go wrong with your voice and people really started to hate telecom. because of all of that but yeah look up the gen band hold music everyone will know are you still run into it and then you call the you call the you know the i don’t know some airplane provider or something you know you’ll hear that you’ll hear the uh you’ll hear the hold music but i’m sure i’ll recognize it so what did you do um before the invention of the internet as a child i was a poor country boy um well those are the ones that have the most fun
Speaker 1 | 29:00.318
So yeah, I was a poor country boy, but my dad had the foresight to get me a Commodore VIC-20 in the 80s. Nice. He just knew that, you know, one day, I remember him telling a friend, one day, every home will have a computer in it. Oh, no, Ronnie, you’re smoking crack. No, one day, every home will have a computer in it. So he wanted to give his boy a head start.
Speaker 0 | 29:27.616
You’re not the first person to say that. You’re not the first person to say, I was a poor country boy that my dad bought me a Commodore. And I believe that everyone’s first computer, at least within our age, I mean, the people that are above the… The people that are one step above punch cards, but one step below 386, well, we’ll say Pentium. Pentium. If your first computer was a Pentium, it doesn’t count. Okay? 80% of you guys either had… You either had a Commodore or you had…
Speaker 1 | 29:54.976
Or a Candy.
Speaker 0 | 29:56.537
Yeah. Or an Apple, I would say. You had an Apple IIc, Apple IIe. That was the computer, though. That was the computer. Okay. But what did you do before that? Did you bail hay?
Speaker 1 | 30:10.012
I actually did.
Speaker 0 | 30:11.353
I bailed hay too. This is so weird.
Speaker 1 | 30:13.994
I did. So one of my first jobs, I get a call from some stranger. He’s like, I got a truck of hay. I’ll pick you up tomorrow. And so-and-so gave me your number. I’m like, yep, you got it. So I met him. I unloaded a semi-truck.
Speaker 0 | 30:33.638
of hay in an afternoon he paid me four bucks an hour that’s pretty good actually that’s not bad thinking um i i i thought it should have been more i thought i got well yeah because you were doing this hey you weren’t sitting there you know data entry you were unloading a semi truck right i mean this
Speaker 1 | 30:55.366
guy got a low boy i mean this low boy was stacked unloaded for 24 bucks And I walked away thinking, I’ve just learned my first lesson on negotiations.
Speaker 0 | 31:10.199
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 31:10.940
Figure out pricing up front.
Speaker 0 | 31:12.641
And I will not do this for a living growing up.
Speaker 1 | 31:15.904
Yep. Yeah, it really motivated me. I mean, now being a country boy, though, I mean, most, I don’t know a country boy who’s, you know, not afraid of work. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I did not know what I wanted to do. So. I joined the Navy and told the detailer, this is what I want to do, and this is where I want to go. Send me far, far away. So he’s like, Japan? I’m like, sounds good.
Speaker 0 | 31:43.593
That sounds kind of cool.
Speaker 1 | 31:45.173
Yeah. I actually enjoyed it. Yeah. So I was stationed for two years. I was stationed out of Japan on an aircraft carrier. Got my Japanese driver’s license, learned a little bit about the language. You know, just enough to ask for directions and get around. I didn’t really have a knack for it.
Speaker 0 | 32:06.366
Have you ever gotten to fly in a plane, like a real fighter jet plane?
Speaker 1 | 32:10.990
No. Okay. No, but I did get to ride in a helicopter.
Speaker 0 | 32:16.213
I’m just trying to tie it back to 37,000 feet per second. I’m just trying to tie it back to, have you traveled at 5,000 feet per second? Because… 37,000 feet per second. Trying to tie this all back together, but it didn’t happen. So let me ask you this. There’s other organizations out there right now that are struggling. And I can think of a few of them off the top of my head that are near and dear to my heart because I know the VP of IT. I know the directors of IT. And they say things to me like this, word for word. Phil, I want you… to imagine my job like this. I’m a forest fighter. I’m a forest firefighter. And I’m fighting a forest fire. I’m in the midst of a forest fire right now. There’s fires everywhere. I mean, I am in the middle of this thing. I can see fires a mile away. I am only concerned with the fire that is lighting my leg on fire right now. I’m only concerned with putting that one out right now. So that’s their life. And… They have, would you say 30,000 end users that you have? These guys have around 60, I would say 60,000. They have, no, no, no. Globally, like 300 to 400,000 users. Sure. But within the United States and Mexico and Canada and stuff like that, I would say 100 to 120,000. Okay. PBX is everywhere. Right now. ringing there’s a pbx somewhere ringing right now there’s an avaya phones handset ringing somewhere right now there’s probably a mitel one ringing there’s an nec there’s a toshiba there’s a come on give me some more there’s a north star and com dial and panasonic dial i love it some other weird ones that you run into yeah and um they’re all working they’re on they’re getting a weird bill probably sent to them in a on a on a uh on a pallet you know gets forklifted off a pallet that’s their phone bill um and um yeah they’re managing all of that and they’re just going about it and they’re they’re they’re asking i would say every two to three months i get a phone call that’s like okay what about this what if we did it this way what if we did it this way what about microsoft teams what about This, what about that? How do we do it this way? What if we do one, then this, and then that what’s the, for how would you begin that? And because you’re in the midst of it right now and you’re almost done centralizing, which I like, we like to say unification, UCAS, but you’re almost done centralizing. Why would we centralize, by the way? Don’t we want to kind of universal, like we don’t want to centralize, do we? Or do we want to really, don’t we want to be able to like make changes and move ad change requests non-central like anywhere? That’s a, don’t let me, don’t let my brain take us off topic here. Where would you be doing with that project?
Speaker 1 | 35:29.468
Yeah. So, I mean, not to nitpick on words, you know, centralization is not the best terminology, but it’s what I use because for me, my administration is in a web portal. For me, it’s centralized. I have access to it.
Speaker 0 | 35:44.681
There we say single pane of glass. We can’t say single pane.
Speaker 1 | 35:47.923
Okay, we could do that.
Speaker 0 | 35:49.064
No, no, don’t. I hate that term,
Speaker 1 | 35:50.666
but people say it a lot.
Speaker 0 | 35:53.728
Anyways, go.
Speaker 1 | 35:54.269
Yeah, yeah. um i would i would you know i would certainly ask the organization uh you know what is your ecosystem you know are you a microsoft shop or you know are you are you married to google or whatever but the second follow follow-up question is do you think that may change anytime soon changes
Speaker 0 | 36:17.710
because changes in that way but but if you’re a microsoft shop chances are you’re a microsoft shop are you listening bill gates Are you listening, Bill Gates and everyone on LinkedIn that is owned by Microsoft? If you’re with Microsoft, you’re with Microsoft. Although I do know someone that migrated a ridiculous number of users, but we won’t talk about that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 36:38.205
Keep going. I know a couple of companies that have said, you know what, I’ve had it up to here and they moved away. Yep. So, I mean, it happens. But then the second question is, do you want your product to be, to streamline in with Microsoft, or would you prefer it to be independent? Because that can position you to be more agile in the future.
Speaker 0 | 37:03.196
Do you really think a massive enterprise company would not want unification with Microsoft though?
Speaker 1 | 37:08.560
I think it depends on the culture.
Speaker 0 | 37:10.381
Okay. Let’s just say the culture is, no, we want to be with Microsoft. We definitely want integration with Microsoft. We’re a Teams organization. Everyone chats on Teams. Everyone uses Teams. We’re- Don’t take my Excel away. Don’t do this. We’ve got all these crappy phone systems. And the problem is Nebraska. The problem is always Nebraska. Okay. Or it’s South Dakota.
Speaker 1 | 37:37.854
Or Iowa.
Speaker 0 | 37:39.154
Yes. Or it’s, I don’t know, some weird area in Montana. Or it’s, you know, yeah, I don’t know, the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas.
Speaker 1 | 37:52.130
So what are you hinting at here? Number portability?
Speaker 0 | 37:55.531
I’m hinting at maybe we don’t have good internet or maybe number portability could be one, but that’s rare. It’s very rare.
Speaker 1 | 38:05.693
Well, I’ve run into it three or four times already.
Speaker 0 | 38:08.774
Yes, three or four times in a lifetime.
Speaker 1 | 38:11.935
No, in the last year and a half.
Speaker 0 | 38:14.016
Okay, then it does happen.
Speaker 1 | 38:16.136
I mean, it really is the cornfields of Iowa. So I mean, if you’re not in… If you’re not building your manufacturing plants in low labor geography, low cost labor geography in the cornfields of Iowa, then you probably don’t have an issue with that.
Speaker 0 | 38:31.462
That’s the problem. So that’s one of the problems is locations. In other words, in location internet. Sure. Right? So there’s just no fiber there yet. We’re back to T1s. And T1s are okay, I guess. I mean, it’s just funny that we’re… We’re… We’ve come full circle and we’re back to your nightmare story of, yeah, we got to bring a T1 in to run team’s voice. And then people are like, don’t fix it. What’s the point? Well, we’re a modern company and we need to be unified. That’s why.
Speaker 1 | 39:08.501
So let me recount a story I had with a director literally last week. All of us are on a video call. Now think about the payload that comes with video. We’re all on a video call. And he says, and so we’re evaluating, we’re doing what we call the cut sheet, right? We’re evaluating his site.
Speaker 0 | 39:29.890
Love the cut sheets.
Speaker 1 | 39:31.352
Yeah. And so we did a data dump of the old Avaya PBX and it had 80 rows. So he had like 80 telephones on his old system. And he’s like, we don’t need this anymore. Phone calls are not a critical part of my operation. but we need phones for 911 and production and this and that. So at the end of the day, he needs like 25 phones. And he says, okay, Darren, yeah, this is the final cut sheet. We’re kind of good to go, but I’m not going to let you install VoIP yet. And I’m kind of using his words, right? I’m not going to let you install VoIP yet. And I’m like, okay, what’s your concern? And he goes, well, our internet’s not very good. And we’re all on a video call. And so I said, you do realize that this video is taking up a whole lot more bandwidth than… a 32k phone call well no he doesn’t like he doesn’t realize darn it where’s your empathy so i wasn’t and don’t get me wrong i wasn’t quite as snarky with him so uh anyway i kind of broke it down a little bit and i’m like look you know these days you know we prioritize our our uh our conversations and um you know we know how to streamline this for you so it’s going to be a smooth transition it’s a very very lightweight um and so i kind of do the math for him and and anyway uh i alleviated his concerns and he understood some you know because at the at the end of the day i got him to realize that you know when he has these video calls with his teams he’s got you know 18 or 20 people all on video calls in the office some
Speaker 0 | 41:28.956
How many PBXs would you say that you had disparate PBXs in your environment before you centralized?
Speaker 1 | 41:40.219
That’s a great question. Because when I put a bow on this project, I’m going to go back and pull some numbers.
Speaker 0 | 41:46.701
Over 100?
Speaker 1 | 41:47.161
How many systems did I move? And then how many different types of systems? How do we want to define that? Because I had, you know… a via system 75s you know all the way up to communication manager 5.2 i think i don’t think we had anything newer than that by the time i tackled the project um but i would say at least a good off top my head different brand names i’m sure yeah i mean it’s just 35 how many uh 35 different brand names how
Speaker 0 | 42:22.018
at least what kind of um you savings and efficiencies were gained, do you think? And you laugh, but why wait? My question is, again,
Speaker 1 | 42:36.649
I think-That’s a great point.
Speaker 0 | 42:38.930
I spoke with this on another episode, okay? So what happened during COVID? You had a lot of people, and I said on the last episode, you had a lot of people just click the button. IT managers just clicked the button and they just- voice enabled their team. They just voice enabled teams. They literally clicked the button and started paying $8 for their little phone system skew and another $12 per for a voice enabling team. Some of them even had internet. I think this guy had international as well. And I had a large, not need to mention campus style, uh, organization with, it was, I may could have been 60,000 licenses. that voice enabled at at least $20 per license, that’s 60,000. I’m doing this math again, because this is similar to the reentering the earth’s orbit at 37,000 feet per second times $20 is $1.2 million a month. $1.2 million a month when we could have just, I don’t know, done something called direct routing and something called, I don’t know, separate voice call paths versus individual one-on-one microsoft teams voice enablement but still have all of your into and we could have probably paid fifty thousand dollars a month versus 1.2 million a month so there’s a huge savings there but at the end of the day there is when instead of paying 1.2 million dollars a month instead of paying fifty thousand dollars a month they said no screw it we’re gonna pay 1.2 million dollars a month because we don’t want to do that right now right
Speaker 1 | 44:20.124
We don’t want to do that right now. We don’t have the bandwidth. So I’ll tell you.
Speaker 0 | 44:25.286
$0.2 million. Excuse me. Please pay me and five other people. We’ll take that $1.2 million. I’ll bring five guys in. We’ll hire five guys. Pay us $1.2 million for two months. You don’t have to pay for 12 months. Just pay us for two months, $1.2 million, and we’ll take care of it.
Speaker 1 | 44:43.194
Let me put it to you. Let me put it to you this way without giving you precise numbers. My budget this year is now 31% of what it was only a few years back.
Speaker 0 | 44:57.226
So they gave you a bonus, of course.
Speaker 1 | 45:00.258
You’re funny.
Speaker 0 | 45:02.459
It’s like when I, the reason why I quit my retail job back in the day is because we absolutely blew this little like, like sales contest. It was, I worked at Starbucks. Okay. Let’s just face it. Okay. The truth that works at Starbucks, we had a machine sale. I said, why don’t we just try? We’ll just to put a little effort into it. Do a little sales training with the guys. We’ll warm up all the machines. We’ll sell a bunch of espresso machines. I taught my. I went and bought this thing called Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar at the bookstore. I taught all my baristas how to do a demo on an espresso machine. And then we asked everyone if they wanted their drink for free. And then we made it on the espresso machine in the store. And then we said, so do you want the stainless steel or the copper? And they laughed. And they said, no way, I’m not buying that. It’s way too expensive. And I said, well, yeah, but just do a return on investment for them. How many times did you come into Starbucks? Oh, I come in twice. And then my husband comes in twice a day. And then my kids, oh, you pay $600 a month at Starbucks. The average person spends like $300 to $600 a month at Starbucks. That’s a Mercedes. The machine pays for itself. Just come in half the time and have a Starbucks at home. They’re like, okay, we sold, we blew it out of the water. I mean, we sold like $30,000 worth or $70,000 worth of espresso machines in a couple weeks, like three weeks. And they’re like, congratulations. Here is your $50 gift certificate. $50 gift certificate. Yeah. Uh, no one’s heard that story before, but so of course, I mean, you got a bonus for saving. for dropping the budget by 66%.
Speaker 1 | 46:26.820
What’s the point? You would think. Now, some of the benefits that came out of that exercise, it isn’t just reducing the phone bills. It’s identifying a lot of other opportunities. Oh, we’ve closed this site. We’ve moved this site. Oh, AT&T is still billing us at these other 18 closed sites. Or now that we’re looking at the bills more closely, wait a minute, we’re not getting our… you know, the rate that we negotiated on these circuits. There’s so many other benefits. One of the other projects that I thoroughly enjoyed was… It’s true.
Speaker 0 | 47:03.050
There’s a lot of stupid stuff out there. I look at people and I say, all you need to do, I’m not going to charge you anything. This is part of, please just promote my podcast and tell everyone to listen to it. If you get on a phone call with me for 15 minutes and you bring all your bills to the phone call, I absolutely… guarantee you and this is for only for my it directors that have that show and this type of stuff i guarantee you i will blow your mind and show you some very stupid stuff it’s just people don’t do it they don’t have the time to do it because we’re all managing fires we’re back into the forest fire again we’re just putting out the fires that are burning our leg and um at&t’s laughing because um they’re still charging you and they know that they’re not laughing they just they’re just waiting for you to say hey raise your hand and say can you charge me less oh yeah okay sure right yeah again we go out on at we’re picking a lot on at&t i’m sorry at&t i do love you for for things that you do and yes we have a yes there’s a ton of at&t fiber circuits out there and one thing that you do very very well is you freaking install them pretty darn quickly unless there’s an issue you install fiber circuits in my opinion my
Speaker 1 | 48:19.390
personal opinion what i’ve seen faster than i would say everybody but go ahead uh if if a company decides to migrate their infrastructure you know their legacy infrastructure over to a cloud-based solution one thing they’re going to discover are all of the other unexpected benefits um you know such as identifying lines that you’re paying for but aren’t physically connected to your pbx some of those might be fire alarms and that sort of thing those are going to have to be addressed you know the the analog services are being replaced or being retired you know one or the other so there’s a lot of other opportunities out there that um you know those pots a lot of my pots lines right now that i’m in the middle of replacing um i can’t replace them fast enough they’re 1400 a month now you remember when a pos line was 15 a month
Speaker 0 | 49:15.862
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a stupid thing.
Speaker 1 | 49:18.723
I love $1,400.
Speaker 0 | 49:21.104
I have some really good POTS line guys, POTS line, plain old telephone line people out there. I have a lot of guys that just, that’s all they specialize in. Hey, give me your spreadsheet of POTS lines and we’ll just, you know, we’ll convert them to a different billing structure and then we’ll help you convert to ones that are like just being turned down. Windstream was great for just saying, hey, we’re cutting you off. Done. And or not saying we’re cutting you off. And then just one day that stopped working.
Speaker 1 | 49:50.013
Right. And they’ll all do is you need a POTS line for. say a burglar alarm system you’re going to get that pots line with all of the extras tacked onto it you’re going to get voicemail on it you’re going to get three-way calling call forwarding features that you don’t need um remember centric non-published listings you
Speaker 0 | 50:12.455
got any centric signs out there oh yeah i still have a lot of centrics what was that other thing the ring uh i’ll think of it in a second oh well um so to not diverge too much If you look back at your centralization project of taking over 35 different providers and hundreds of different PBXs and centralizing them and cutting your budget back by 66%, what else did you notice? What was that budget, by the way? Are you allowed to say that or no?
Speaker 1 | 50:43.305
I could share with you privately. It’s in the millions. Easily. Well, well, well in the millions. So tens of millions. Okay. Tens of millions.
Speaker 0 | 50:51.367
Cut down by two-thirds.
Speaker 1 | 50:53.167
Yeah. And here’s the funny thing. Our executive leadership still recently brought in a third party auditor and they’re going through all of the, you know, internet circuits and that sort of thing.
Speaker 0 | 51:10.428
Sounds like a circus provider.
Speaker 1 | 51:11.449
The wire line and mobility.
Speaker 0 | 51:15.250
Carousel or, or anyways, I’m not going to, anyways, keep going.
Speaker 1 | 51:20.231
So, yeah. Anyway. They’re finding everything on the, you know, a lot of opportunities on the data side, but they’re not finding much on voice. Just some.
Speaker 0 | 51:29.976
Again, we’ll do that for free. Those guys take money for that stuff.
Speaker 1 | 51:34.198
They absolutely do. Yeah. 25% is kind of the industry average.
Speaker 0 | 51:39.821
Yeah. Cool. That sounds like fun. I have a little bit of a bias towards RFPs and waiting and stuff like that. I do think there’s a place for them. I do think it’s helpful in certain places, but I also think it’s handicapping certain areas as well. Is there, should RFPs be as strict as they are? Should they be more flexible? Or when you do an RFP, are people looking at them? And because I know that a lot of providers will look at an RFP and they’ll just say, no, screw this. I’m not answering this and have fun. Everybody else. And you may actually miss a vendor that would be a better fit for your company or a better provider for your company. But they’re just not going to play that stupid, we have to answer every thousand line item on this RFP and respond to this. Because you almost have to have a professional person to respond to RFPs sometimes to even kind of get in that game. And I think there’s a negative. at least in the government world, I think, with the whole 8A and the government bid boards and stuff like that, and having lived in DC for a while, there’s just kind of a negative connotation when it comes to RFPs and responding to them.
Speaker 1 | 52:49.507
Right. I think they should be customized because an RFP for, say, a healthcare system is going to be very different than somebody in automotive manufacturing. No,
Speaker 0 | 53:02.214
for sure. We’re going to write this RFP and someone’s going to have to reply to it. But- They may not be able to hit every bullet point.
Speaker 1 | 53:08.289
I think there’s nothing wrong with an RFP being just two to three pages. It doesn’t have to be 37 pages.
Speaker 0 | 53:14.411
General overview. Gotcha, general overview. Because I’ve written RFPs for people before, but I leave it a little bit flexible so that you can get providers that, well, we don’t do it this way. We actually do it this way. So it’s a little bit different, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1 | 53:28.597
But there’s certainly some value in it to allow. Allow you to compare three different, you know, providers and, you know, look at it through, you know, apples to apples.
Speaker 0 | 53:43.060
You know, the scoring is very important. The scoring of an RIP is important. Well, this has been very fun. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about or a piece of advice that you have to any IT leaders out there or people out there, infrastructure leaders, network guys? What’s your number one piece of advice that you would have for someone?
Speaker 1 | 54:03.624
I would say don’t lose sight of the big picture. Most of us in IT support are not a profit center, unless we’re Salesforce or Facebook or Amazon. We’re not technology companies. We’re here to support the business. And unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues tend to lose sight of that. And as a result, they feel like they need to tell the business exactly how to… how to run the business and that’s really not the case. As a cost center, we’re here to support the business and I like to think of it, you know, our creed should be the three P’s. The first is preservation, preserve data. And I know this is, we’re in the telecom world, but there’s a lot of data in the telecom world. A lot of times we might retain a lot of customer client information in those phone calls that we capture. The second one is presentation. We’re here to make the lives of our colleagues easier. We’re here to help the business be streamlined and more efficient. Does that make sense?
Speaker 0 | 55:16.304
It’s true. I mean, I believe all these things help the company make more money. So I just disagree with the cost center thing a little bit because… The old mantra is that IT is only a cost center and that we don’t help make the company money. When in reality, there’s this whole thing called digital transformation going on. All of that helps the company be more efficient. And you just got done saying that we cut our budget by two thirds. So yes, that’s saving money. Yes. Yes. That’s taking the cost center and making it better. But at the end of the day, like you said, there’s all the extra things that people didn’t recognize that might help them be more efficient and do their job better. So. to a degree there’s not a single um aspect of the company there’s not one department in the company that doesn’t do their job better without technology yeah completely agree with you and i guess what rubs me the wrong way this is maybe
Speaker 1 | 56:07.148
a pet peeve of mine is um you know some of the attitudes that i see along among some of my colleagues um you know i think it’s kind of important to understand that you know we are essentially we’re servants supporting the business in in a support role and so when they ask a question we need to be there to help collaborate with them and provide those and so for me it’s more of a of an attitude than anything else so you know partnership absolutely so you know the my three p’s are you know preservation of data right yeah um and presentation you of data trying to make things easier and then production automation. We do need to don a business hat and understand the business side of the house and then look for you know areas where we might have redundancy or opportunities for automation that sort of thing. And you know just because we’re in telecom doesn’t mean that that really doesn’t apply because it does.
Speaker 0 | 57:16.354
It absolutely does. And even saying telecom, it’s not even really like a term anymore. It’s like technology. I guess telecoms like voice and data and numerous other things that are all unified one. And you end up talking about APIs and software development and all these other things. If I want to offer this and if anyone out there, IT directors that are working VPs of IT, IT director, CTO, CIO, if there’s anyone out there that would like myself in. Darren to help you evaluate your pile of crap, AKA bills, telecom bills, multiple PBXs that might still be out there. Calm dials, Merlin, they had a Merlin magic just out of that one. You know, whatever it is, you’re unhappy with your voice provider. You’re trying to microwave, you know, you’re trying to figure out how do we migrate all this junk to teams? What about all of our stuff in Iowa and Nebraska and in the middle of, you know, nowhere. um how do we do all that if you would like to get on a 30 to 45 minute call with me and darren and have us um help you with that all you have to do is um dm one of us here on on on um you know linkedin or get a hold of us via the podcast there’s a lot of different ways you can get a hold of myself and the team and we’ll help you map that out sound like fun absolutely all right um thank you so much for being on the show it’s been thanks for having talking about doing this for a while and we should we could just uh talk more horror stories and it’d be a lot of fun you know like being down for a week without any phone calls yeah i probably have a few more dozen stories i could share with you all right thank you sir
