Speaker 0 | 00:09.564

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we have Jonathan Clark on the line, senior IT manager at Richardson Electronics. And every time I get an IT leader on the phone nowadays, it’s a different story. And it could be anything. I have insane stories coming in. I wish I had like a live stream, some kind of, you know, like I should have like a help desk for dissecting popular IT nerds of all these different IT directors and some kind of maybe like a venting platform or some sort of conglomeration of help that we should provide. We should have like a, you know, since you guys are the, I don’t know, you guys are the savior department, a bunch of stuff gets kind of, dumped on last minute, at least from what I’ve seen the past couple of days. What do you guys have? So anyways, Jonathan, welcome to the show, man.

Speaker 1 | 01:04.304

Oh, you know, I’m glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Speaker 0 | 01:08.627

So tell me what, you know, you started out when we, when we first got on the, on the phone and I said, Hey, how’s everything going? He said, well, pretty much everyone’s, you know, freaking out as usual across the world here. But what does that mean for you? What’s the, um, we’re, we’re talking coronavirus, obviously we’re talking, um, and it’s not A lot of people kind of take this as a joke, and I don’t take it as a joke because my father’s 84 years old, and he’s scheduled to go in for radiation and chemotherapy next week at a hospital where there’s active cases of coronavirus. So obviously, if he catches it, just being 84 alone could kill him, but now after getting radiation and chemotherapy, then being in a state of really highly… compromised immune system, it’s going to make it, it would make it even harder. Right. So I’m not, I’m not taking this as like, this really isn’t like a joke as much as we see all kinds of stuff get thrown around. And I think people even lightheartedly based on what they’re dealing with in general in life do, do make a joke out of it as a, you know, some sort of like stress relief. But in reality, can you paint a picture of what, what’s the timeframe been like for you and what’s happened? And we were going to talk about something completely different, which I don’t even remember. I probably had some sort of idea, but all of this has happened in the meantime. So let’s talk about this.

Speaker 1 | 02:28.390

Yeah. So, I mean, the coronavirus, it’s like evolving day to day, right? Things are just rapidly progressing to more extreme. Companies are shutting down and they’re sending their employees to work from home where they can. This seems to be a case of now, okay, this is what we’re doing, but how long is it going to be? you know,

Speaker 0 | 02:53.460

I think what will help, and this is my fault for not asking you this ahead of time, but I think what will help is to as much as a degree as you’re allowed to, or you can give me like a general topography of your network and your end users and how things are spread out for your company. Cause I think that, that will help kind of, it’ll be, it’ll be nice when we hear what you’re doing and how you’re putting together, you know what I mean? Like what, what kind of responses are we making to things, you know?

Speaker 1 | 03:20.816

Yeah, yeah. So in terms of the global network, so we have about 30 offices worldwide. You know, we do have offices in China and Asia Pacific and in places like Italy, too, and Europe. So, I mean, these are the countries that I think have been hit the hardest. It’s only creeping into the USA now and starting to get more of a bigger issue. But in terms of the network, you know, we’re pretty much a Cisco platform. Although we’ve been slowly migrating off Dell firewalls, the NSA firewalls, and moving to mainly Meraki, to be honest. I don’t know how familiar you are with Meraki, but it’s all cloud-based. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 04:06.899

I mean, I’m definitely familiar with it from a hardware standpoint and kind of like an, I call it SD-WAN light, if you’re using kind of like some of the SD-WAN features of it. Yeah. Yes, but yeah.

Speaker 1 | 04:17.626

Yeah, we’ve moved to that, and we did have that. So we had dedicated SD-WAN provider before for some of our bigger sites. And when I say bigger sites, we’re talking like 30 plus people. Most of the smaller officers range between three to 10. But we’re pretty much a Microsoft job. We use a lot of Microsoft products. And there’s been a lot of…

Speaker 0 | 04:43.521

And what do you guys do? I mean, like, what do you guys do? I mean, are we in manufacturing, right? We’re not, you know, we’re not… It’s not Burger King. Like, what do we do? No. You know what I mean? Well, it makes a big difference because, like, you know, you can’t send Burger King employees can’t work from home. They just can’t.

Speaker 1 | 04:57.165

Right.

Speaker 0 | 04:57.858

So do I mean a lot can at the corporate office, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, uh, for the most part, if we’re making burgers, man, we’re making burgers or we’re out of business or we’re shut down. Um, so what, to what degree, you know what I mean? Does that affect you?

Speaker 1 | 05:12.145

I mean, we, yeah, it’s hitting us hard right now because we do manufacture products. Um, we do things a lot to the, uh, department of defense, you know, military contracts. Uh, we do some, we do a lot of semiconductor products. Um, which are used for Intel and Samsung and all those processes that those companies do. But we’re also doing a lot with the healthcare industry because our company’s been solely based on tubes, right? Power tubes. And within the last five years, we got into tubes for CD scanners. So we’re moving into the healthcare industry for that. And we have an Ulta tube, it’s what we call that. and it’s basically a direct replacement for the takiba ct scanner tube the power tube that goes in there um so these are all manufactured here in illinois uh but with the way things are right now you know production’s kind of halted you know we can’t expect the manufacturing people and the shipping people to come in when there’s this national pandemic going off so so what

Speaker 0 | 06:22.194

what kind of messages, what kind of help desk tickets, what kind of, I guess stuff has just been, I don’t know if it’s thrown your way or have you been proactive about, or what’s the communication lines of communication that you’ve provided to say upper management or, or what kind of, you know, proactive, I don’t know, work from home stuff if you had to do.

Speaker 1 | 06:44.583

So, I mean, we’ve just thought over a large infrastructure migration last year. And we’re now in the process of basically trying to update a lot of the software. And the biggest issue we’ve seen recently is like, well, alright, we’re working from home, but we need to do invites and stuff for meetings. And the platform that we’ve been on for quite a long time is Link Server 2013. And it’s, you know, getting to the point where Microsoft doesn’t even support that very well anymore. Yeah, yeah. And we’ve been trying to… get things along. We did have something in the pipeline to move to Skype for Business 2019. But just over this weekend, actually, I got the go-ahead to move users into Office 365 and put themes out to everybody. So that’s literally working all weekend, getting that set up, Azure AD and everything synced up. And now we have users. using Teams and there’s no latency issues like we had before because Link was not a point of communication server.

Speaker 0 | 07:59.841

You went from version 1.0 to 5.0.

Speaker 1 | 08:03.262

Yeah, pretty much. So the general reception has been great. People are using it and feedback has been all positive. But yeah, I mean, these are the kind of things we’ve always had a good setup, I guess, for remote workers. Because we have something called Microsoft Direct Access implemented into our infrastructure. Yep. Or I think the new version is always on VPN.

Speaker 0 | 08:34.891

Yep.

Speaker 1 | 08:36.772

And so most of the remote users have instant access to all of our domain systems. So we’re pretty good for that. But in terms of help desk support, it’s really been troubleshooting any sort of remote work issues, Outlook, the Teams portion, which was linked. That’s really been it.

Speaker 0 | 09:05.155

Okay, nice. What about, do you see any issue, and just in general, do you see any issues from… I don’t know. Do you see any issues with other companies, you know, other than yourself that, you know, with possible security posture, issues like that during times like this?

Speaker 1 | 09:25.522

Oh, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, for a company to send all of its employees home all of a sudden, it’s going to definitely open up gaps in the infrastructure setup, I would think, where, you know, things come up unexpectedly. you just can’t connect to certain things even through a VPN or direct access. I think it just helps really just make your infrastructure a more solid platform because then you have that ability. and everything’s just set up, ready to go. Like I said before, you know, we do have a lot of remote workers or single-person office staff. So we have a pretty good setup for remote workers already. But it’s definitely shown us the weaknesses in our environment, such as, like, Link 2013. You know, it had to go.

Speaker 0 | 10:22.884

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about bandwidth issues? Just curious. since I do internet. I mean, is there any type of upload drains or anything like that or any type of cloud applications that are suffering or anything?

Speaker 1 | 10:34.949

Well, we have a pretty good setup for that. So our main production environment is handled in our headquarters in Illinois. In fact, we just recently reversed that. We originally had our production environment in a co-location data center, but we have all a dedicated server room and everything in our… headquarters so we have dual internet service providers uh with 300 megabyte connections megabit connection sorry uh and it’s load balanced so really using both pipes at the same time unless one goes down for bandwidth wise you know unless the home user has a really slow internet connection we’ve not really seen any issues on that side um i think it’s fair to say that most people

Speaker 0 | 11:26.063

now have at least 100 mech connections you know if they’re comcast or at&t yeah yeah or they’re sending their house or they’re selling their house and moving somewhere right which is like something i almost did i just got a gig fiber like like run i had like i live in like a very small town with like a local municipality so we only had dsl up until like a year ago and uh i was considering moving because of that you just really keep doing my business and have dsl you So the second they ran the fiber loop and I was like, yes, please deliver me. That’s the fastest that you have probably way, way overkill for my household. But aside from that, at nine years old, at nine years old, this is, and this is completely moving off subject here, but at nine years old, you built a Pentium, which ages you, by the way, does not make you old, does not make you old. But when I think of my nine year old, let’s see, my nine year old. Could she build a computer? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. But, you know, they can run tablets and all kinds of other numerous things. But, you know, what were you doing at nine years old building? Was that your first computer? What was your first computer?

Speaker 1 | 12:39.633

So that was actually my dad’s first computer. Back in 1994, I think it was when he got it. And I basically just took the thing. I stripped it down. I started, you know playing around with the ram configurations and At one point I even actually I think I got another processor for it. I think it was I want to say 150 megahertz Ntm and yeah, it really just went from there. But I mean even at a younger age um my parents always told me I had this talent or gift call it for technology and just being able to disassemble things and reassemble them, you know, in perfect working order. I guess that’s where my passion for it grew from one thing to another.

Speaker 0 | 13:32.262

So back then we had to buy Ram and like Ram sticks, like little like cards of Ram that we would like install on the motherboard and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 | 13:41.786

Right. Yeah. I mean, I’m,

Speaker 0 | 13:44.167

and you still go into like, I still like every now and then you’ll open up a drawer somewhere or you’ll be somewhere, you open up a drawer and there’s like a bunch of old Ram sitting in the drawer or something. Or someone has a five-gallon bucket full of them that they’re going to melt down and recycle the copper or whatever. Yeah. Nice.

Speaker 1 | 14:03.400

I still have a few ISA cards hanging around and AGP graphics cards too. Nobody really ever talks about those anymore, but that’s what started everything really.

Speaker 0 | 14:16.170

My dad thought I was smart just because I could make the VHS. and the like beta max and the two VCRs work together and link them together with audio video cords and make one record to the other one and also still make the TV work at the same time, plus any other numerous things. And if someone unplugged one thing by mistake, it was, you know, he would just go nuts, like, come on, fix this, you know, and like that. It’s like, look, it says out in, out here, in here, out here, in there. But it was, you know, it’s confusing. It’s confusing for other people.

Speaker 1 | 14:50.623

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 14:52.687

But that was my, that was my simpleton that he called me. He thought I was smart because I could do that, that simple stuff. Um, so anyways, how do you, you know, How do you get from there to where you are now?

Speaker 1 | 15:05.104

I mean, one thing leads to another, right? So, I mean, I went to college for computer science. Yeah. I did a lot of other courses. I’ve done Microsoft courses. And then, you know, when you start to get into the bigger stuff in IT infrastructure, you start looking at virtualization and networks. And I’ve done a lot with VMware and Hyper-V.

Speaker 0 | 15:28.596

Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 | 15:31.258

I’m starting to get more into the software side now with Office 365 and all that portion. But yeah, I mean, I’ve been in different jobs, different areas of IT. I’ve even done the manufacturing side of electronics. I worked for a company years ago where they used to do HID controllers for the military. You know, trackables, keyboards, mice. did all of that and then got into the analyst side of IT, messed around with a lot of SQL, did a lot of system reports and then from there it kind of evolved into more of the administrative side. Again, pretty much similar role to what I’m doing today but a little bit more smaller scale.

Speaker 0 | 16:26.070

Of all of this stuff, what do you think was the hardest, the biggest learning gap or the biggest learning curve?

Speaker 1 | 16:31.678

Biggest learning curve?

Speaker 0 | 16:34.819

It might be something completely different. It might be like the leadership portion or it might be the, I don’t know, working on a team or communicating. I mean, it could be anything.

Speaker 1 | 16:44.223

You know, the part that I’ve always had, I guess, problems with is the network side of things. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years understanding, you know, the way that everything interacts. and starting to catch up with ITV6. But yeah, I would say that’s probably the area that I most struggled with in the past.

Speaker 0 | 17:11.816

Okay. And I guess what was the solution?

Speaker 1 | 17:18.100

I just, you know, digging into books, doing classes, and just really learning as you go. I mean, I’ve done a lot with the… with the Cisco stuff and the CLI and then, you know, the Meraki stuff is completely different, obviously, because it’s all cloud. And then Dell switches, you know, they all have their own type of CLI.

Speaker 0 | 17:42.957

Let me ask you this. I’m just curious from like a leadership standpoint, because I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of some place where I haven’t had experience for like two years. I’ve literally gone down a rabbit hole and then for like two years, it’s trial and error and learning and reading. courses and traveling and all of that for, you know, just like a piece of the, like just a piece of knowledge or a piece of the business that I didn’t have access to. And in hindsight, now I’m thinking back, like, could I have, am I too much of a control freak? Am I too much that I need to know myself? Um, why didn’t I just, you know, hire somebody else to do it? Why didn’t, like, why didn’t I just hire the expert to do it? And a part of me says, Well, you didn’t have the knowledge base enough to know who the expert would be to begin with. Or you should learn it yourself. There’s kind of like a double-edged sword there. Like you need to have enough information to know who’s really good at it. As opposed to I’ll just hire someone and hope that they’re the best. Does that make sense? Right. What would you do now? I mean, like, do you have like a network jockey now? Like, do you have like your network guy that’s like knowing? Do you have different specialties? You know what I mean? Like, what do you do now?

Speaker 1 | 18:55.897

We actually… stole somebody from sears uh headquarters i don’t think you had to steal him you know i don’t think you had to do much to steal him away anyways go ahead he’s a cisco certified guy uh really smart uh-huh knows how to document everything well and figure it out well i mean the maraki portion was a little bit of a learning curve for him but he’s gone on board with it uh but like you said you know for me it’s It’s been a case of I needed to know enough about networking to be able to do the stuff that I can do very well, which is the server side. You need to have at least a basic understanding, I guess is what I would say, to be able to work with the rest of the infrastructure. It’s all connected. Your storage, your server, your compute, and then your network. They’re your real three big Ds. be key parts of any infrastructure.

Speaker 0 | 20:02.656

Yeah. Okay. So on, on the flip side, what has come very easily, I guess, I guess, yeah, again, on the flip side, what’s come very easy to you in this whole, this whole job where we’re managing multiple different silos that support various different aspects of the company to support different departments and end users and, and their jobs and the ability to create, you know, efficiencies and all that. what would you say is your biggest strength? This sounds like a job interview. We’re not really interviewing you for the job. I’m just trying, you know, I’m just, this is what’s coming to my mind right now.

Speaker 1 | 20:41.713

My biggest strength has always been the understanding of hardware, right? I know how all the components work together and therefore I know which components, you know, for a custom server build or a custom computer to purchase, you know. We do a lot with SolidWorks. So we have a lot of custom CAD stations built in-house. And that’s the other thing as well. Although I manage the department on the top level for the company, I do a lot of hands-on stuff still. I have a team of eight people, which for the size of the company isn’t bad, but there’s definitely strain sometimes. But I still get heavily involved in projects. Like I said earlier, we did a big… hardware refresh last year and I Led back from start to finish, but I was you know hands-on throughout the whole project

Speaker 0 | 21:39.791

Yeah, what did you guys run into any roadblocks on when you’re rolling stuff out you’re running into roadblocks on that?

Speaker 1 | 21:46.733

We had a few issues Nothing major. Uh-huh. We we did do a big change in the sense that we went from Intel dual-prox to AMD And AMD actually did a case study. I don’t know if you saw that or not on the migration that we did VMware played a big part in that too. We went from a converged infrastructure to a hyperconverged Okay, and that’s that’s given us a big boost in performance Not just from that but we went from one gig to ten gig on the network and we went full NVMe all-flash

Speaker 0 | 22:25.740

So, okay. So what happened, like what kind of measurements and statistics did you guys, you know, from, I guess, like a return on investment and productivity from a productivity standpoint, obviously if you’re dealing with CAD documents and different things, I’m assuming there’s a lot of areas where that could have happened. This is, you know, I’m not muting out my kids in the background. Sometimes I mute my kids out in the background, but because everyone’s working from home, like I’m, I’m ready to open up the door and just let the kids scream. So you can hear all the, all the craziness that’s been going on in the back of the house. I don’t know if people are going to hear that. Maybe it’ll come out in the recording. But anyways, back to what’s important is productivity. What kind of, you know, do we have any kind of presentations that we made to board or executive directors or anything like that where people, you know, what kind of productivity increases did we see?

Speaker 1 | 23:14.433

I mean, the time difference in just applications loading was so different, not just for the user base. for us in IT. I mean, we used to load, you know, remote desktop into our domain controllers, and it takes 30 to 60 seconds just to load the server manager. And then, you know, it’s painful. We try and get into the directory and load that up. And it’s just the limitations of spinning disks, you know, it’s old technology. So we were not getting anywhere. And we did a lot of benchmarks with the new stuff.

Speaker 0 | 23:54.181

Yep.

Speaker 1 | 23:55.942

We had a tool recommended by VMware for the hyperconverged statistics that we ran. But I mean, just from the disk read-write speed that we tested and did present to the board, you know, we were talking going from 100 megabyte read-write speed to I think it was like 4.6 gigabytes.

Speaker 0 | 24:21.556

Which is obviously a massive increase.

Speaker 1 | 24:24.057

Massive increase. You know, yeah, so for our SQL applications, you know, our CRM, Fairpoint, all that, you click on things now and it’s instant.

Speaker 0 | 24:34.079

Did anyone send you emails like, thank you so much, like, this is great now? I’m no longer, like, wanting to kill myself.

Speaker 1 | 24:39.561

No, we didn’t.

Speaker 0 | 24:41.281

Classic. Good, you did your job. What’s next?

Speaker 1 | 24:48.323

In terms of…

Speaker 0 | 24:50.460

There’s an infrastructure project or just in general, I’m assuming like anyone, anyone accessing a SQL server, I just know the pain from past experiences of having, you know, just data entry and stuff like that. Um, you know, how many end users touch your, touch your SQL database on a daily basis.

Speaker 1 | 25:08.326

On a daily basis, I mean, probably at least 500 people. I mean, it’s not, again, we’re not a huge company, but it’s very heavily and intensely used.

Speaker 0 | 25:21.077

Uh-huh. Gotcha. And how many of those, of all those end users, how many were working somewhere like physical in an office and are now working at home?

Speaker 1 | 25:33.328

I’m going to say at least 95%.

Speaker 0 | 25:35.958

And did you have like, so did we have some kind of like dynamic VPN or like, was it just fairly easy for them to switch from at home to like, what was the learning curve for people going from in the office to at home?

Speaker 1 | 25:48.867

Well, again, it goes back to us having a direct access. So it’s part of group policy. All the computers in our domain have it already. So if they do go outside, they,

Speaker 0 | 26:02.916

It’s seamless to them.

Speaker 1 | 26:05.098

It’s seamless for them, yeah. And if we have experienced issues in the past, then that’s where we implement the, we push out the Cisco VPN so they can turn on the client and they can still connect. So we have plenty of backup systems too. You know, anything doesn’t work.

Speaker 0 | 26:24.806

Okay, that’s outstanding. And the, I mean, are you guys prepared for this for like the next, you know, six months or whatever? What is this going to look like for your company over the next six months where people are working from home?

Speaker 1 | 26:37.269

I mean, from my perspective, I think we could be okay. If I talk to other companies, I think we’re actually doing better than most, I think.

Speaker 0 | 26:48.098

I would say so, for sure.

Speaker 1 | 26:51.021

Yeah, I think where it’s going to hit us most is the manufacturing side. Okay. I think the companies that we supply to are suffering just as badly. Yeah. It’s really a time thing now. This virus has just got to go.

Speaker 0 | 27:06.307

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, just general, like the general feeling across the company. Is it like people are like, well, great, we’re working from home now, or is it kind of like a little bit doom and gloom, or what’s the general kind of consensus?

Speaker 1 | 27:24.912

It’s a little doom and gloom for sure. I think people are unsure of the near future. what’s going to happen. Are we going to be back in the office next month or is this going to go on further? Just from my wife, my wife works in the social work in schools and they’re all shut down. It talks about them being shut down for the whole school year.

Speaker 0 | 27:50.962

For sure. I think it’s going to be six months minimum. That’s just me thinking. I’m not even trying to be negative about this. I’m just… trying to be realistic. I think even if China starts sending people back to work, it’s gonna you know, it could reignite like another, you know, another spread of cases, if that makes sense, you know. At least that’s kind of like what some of the CDC guys are showing and predicting, right? Like even though the cases are going down in China right now, maybe that’s because everyone’s still on lockdown, right? But when we open up factories again and thousands of people are like close to each other on the street. you know, on the subway, you know, et cetera. Um, that’s, that’s a different dynamic. So, um, uh, I don’t want to say like interesting. I don’t know if that’s really the word. It’s just, um, I’m kind of in like a, in like a, a weird kind of emotionless state, I think, uh, a day to day. But, uh, do you have any kids? Do you have anyone that you have to like, do you have kids at home or anything like that?

Speaker 1 | 28:52.670

No, not yet. Uh, I want to say, you know, thankfully, but you know, we would like kids.

Speaker 0 | 28:59.014

some point but i think parents with kids right now have the extra worry so i got eight kids at home so i have eight kids at home but they’ve always been homeschooled like we started homeschooling like years ago so it’s kind of like i don’t think our kids even notice like to them it’s just like like another day um so there’s not this kind of like weird kind of taking out taken out of like their entire social atmosphere and everything like that it’s just um uh i don’t think anyone in my household really kind of at least the kids don’t the kids don’t really recognize it. So that’s kind of different. But then I see all kinds of other parents are like, well, you know, what do I do now? Like we got homeschool. So it’s like, you know, okay, we got recess followed by lunch followed by recess. So, well, yeah. So anyways, for any other, anyone out there listening, any other it directors, like any words of advice or anything like that, like anything super helpful to you. So again, you know, this show is for I mean, this show is really for mid-market IT directors. It’s for IT directors that manage, you know, hundreds of users. Like you said, you have eight people. Out of how many employees?

Speaker 1 | 30:09.914

500, pretty much.

Speaker 0 | 30:11.315

So you have a great ratio. You have a, you know, like IT staff to end user ratio that is significantly better than most. The average that I’ve seen is at least like 100, is at least like one to 133. So you’re like one to what, 80 or something? I don’t know. I can’t, I’m not doing that math in my head. You’d probably be able to do that math better than me in my head. So you have a pretty good, but yeah. You have a pretty good ratio there. So what’s your biggest learning, Ben, or your piece of advice to anyone out there listening right now? Is it going to Microsoft Teams? Should we plug Microsoft?

Speaker 1 | 30:47.819

I mean, yeah. I mean, you know, Microsoft sometimes has a love-hate relationship.

Speaker 0 | 30:53.983

Why is that? I need to ask why.

Speaker 1 | 30:57.065

Because, you know, if I’m going to criticize anything of Microsoft, it’s the support.

Speaker 0 | 31:02.636

There we’ve had, you know, I didn’t say I have to have, when I say it, it’s like skeptical when you say it, it’s true. Right. Because I help people migrate to Microsoft teams, right? Like that’s like one of the main things I do that most people don’t know is I help, I help people migrate off of old phone systems. And, um, you know, if they, God forbid, they still have a, you know, an email server on site. But I help people migrate to Teams and even take their voice services over to Teams. And people think, now, Teams, it’s not fully baked yet. And they don’t realize that there’s Microsoft direct routing partners that will provide a full help desk for them for free. So they don’t have to call what I call 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN. What you’re saying is support. So anyways, please, please, I need you to go on about this. why is support their downfall? And why can’t you get better support for them? Because don’t they have their enterprise next tier up kind of gold and white glove thing for you?

Speaker 1 | 32:08.820

So yeah, I mean, we have an EA agreement with them. Obviously, we buy everything Microsoft for the most part. But then they’re restructuring right now in the background for the support. And they’ve got something that used to be known as Premier Plus. And now it’s… It’s called unified support, I think.

Speaker 0 | 32:32.769

Maybe we consolidated people. Right. Anyways, I know how this works, but anyways, keep going. Wait, what is it called now? You went from Premier Plus to what?

Speaker 1 | 32:45.453

Well, we still don’t have this. We’re still on the EA agreement to the 24-7 problem request. Part of the reason for that is because they want you to sell right. kidney just to pay for the unified support. I mean, the cost, especially in the situation right now, it’s just astronomical for one year.

Speaker 0 | 33:09.503

How much is it?

Speaker 1 | 33:11.464

I mean, for us, I think it was a little $130,000 for the year.

Speaker 0 | 33:17.607

And what does that get you?

Speaker 1 | 33:19.969

So that gets you a dedicated account manager for support and various other things. They also offer deep dives into your Active Directory structure, basically doing health checks across your systems. And it gets you supposedly better support from an employee in Microsoft in the USA.

Speaker 0 | 33:46.614

Where do you need support the most?

Speaker 1 | 33:50.477

I mean, for us, it’s usually been SQL. these weird anomalies that come up in Microsoft products. We recently just had one where process flows were failing in SQL, and we literally had a case open with Microsoft for three months, and they still couldn’t figure out what the issue was.

Speaker 0 | 34:15.017

I’m taking notes. This is the most you’ve made me write. This is the most you’ve made me write throughout this entire thing. Just so you know, we are publishing this episode on LinkedIn, a Microsoft-owned company. I do love Microsoft. I have nothing wrong with them. Again, like I said, I do help people migrate to Teams. We’re just trying to better this process. This is feedback. We call this positive feedback. Yes, go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 34:41.339

I mean, the products are really good. I mean, Teams is fantastic. It’s only going to continue to evolve, so that’s great. They’re 365. platform has really come a long way. I tried to set it up five years ago when it was fairly new. And it was…

Speaker 0 | 34:59.178

Try and fail. Okay. Now, the philosophy that I’ve heard, and this might be how do we say… not urban legend, but what’s the, you know, what, what do we call it when we say like, you know, the one percenters are ruling the whole world and there’s this whole secret society and everything. Why can’t I think of the word right now?

Speaker 1 | 35:18.655

I think I know what you mean.

Speaker 0 | 35:23.837

You know, so there’s this, uh, can maybe like, you know, maybe hidden understanding that Microsoft charges you $130,000 a year for a dedicated account manager because they actually don’t think you’ll buy it and they don’t want you to. they actually want you to go to a premier partner or someone else because they just want to sell you the licensing. They don’t want to be a support organization. They want to be a software organization. They want to deliver, they want to make their products and let someone else support you. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1 | 35:54.798

I think that’s a pretty accurate statement. And I think a lot of companies are doing that. Um, a lot of the big software companies, at least it’s kind of similar to, what we just had to go through with HP. So, you know, for managed print services, they pretty much told us, go to another provider for your support. We just want to sell you the printers. And that’s pretty much it.

Speaker 0 | 36:22.321

And this is like my argument every day. I try to tell people this every day. Look, you really don’t want to buy your dedicated internet service and your access to the public switch telephone network directly from the providers. Because their entire goal is to sell you, get you into billing. and did billing and their level of customer support is always going to be a call center. Even if it is a call center and people always ask me, is the call center in the United States? Who cares if it’s in Manila? If it is in Manila, it could be drastically worse. Okay. So, all right. So it’s still a call center. You understand? Like you are still calling a call center. It’s still going to be an hourly employee. How, um, what are the chances that that person is going to have the same level of technical experience that you have as an IT leader with eight to nine, 10 other people on your team with a, you’re calling into support most likely of somewhat of a highly technical issue. What are the chances that you’re going to get that person on the phone that can actually help?

Speaker 1 | 37:25.716

I mean, in my experience, it’s been 50, 50.

Speaker 0 | 37:30.200

Can you transfer me to the knock? Transfer me to the knock. I need to speak with Jim. He sits in cubicle, whatever. He works Monday through Friday at this time. Jim doesn’t work here anymore.

Speaker 1 | 37:41.379

We’ve definitely been ping-ponged around different support agents. Look,

Speaker 0 | 37:46.721

some companies are great. Some companies are great. I’m not knocking that. I’m just speaking in general because you brought it up. So anyways, how did we even get on that subject? I was asking you a piece of advice for anyone out there listening, and somehow we got on Microsoft and support and that being a pain point. Don’t ask me how we come full circle here. But to our listeners out there, what can you give back? What could you say that might be very helpful to people?

Speaker 1 | 38:18.896

I would say to any company out there, any IT director that’s looking at hardware refresh or different solutions, whether it’s moving to the cloud or whatever, to seriously look at hyper-converged environments. Converged environments are just… going the way of spinning this, basically, is the way I look at it.

Speaker 0 | 38:41.084

And why would they not, though? Why would they not, I guess, is the question.

Speaker 1 | 38:45.106

I mean, I guess maybe fear of the new technology. It’s still, I don’t want to say it’s still new, but it’s still definitely in development in the case that it’s still evolving. Definitely with the VMware forces. And I guess sometimes there’s a fear in there, you know, you’re making this drastic change where you’re taking out a portion. We’re not really taking anything out. You’re molding it into one solution.

Speaker 0 | 39:13.559

Let me ask you this. Why not create like a little small test environment first? Why not do something to give you that level of confidence?

Speaker 1 | 39:21.165

Well, I mean, a lot of hardware providers offer you that. You know, Dell did that for us. They set up a virtual environment for us and we played with it. And that’s how we came to the conclusion, you know? Yeah. But yeah, I definitely would say there’s a huge amount of cost savings right now that can be done with a hardware refresh, especially with what AMD is bringing to the table. And I will give them a lot of credit and kind of a shout out if you like.

Speaker 0 | 39:54.615

I wish they’d give me at least a gift certificate to the Outback. Whoever your guy is over there, can you say, Hey, there’s this dude. His name is Phil Howard. He’s got a big beard. He’s on LinkedIn. I was on his podcast. And I just want to let you know that I gave um, you a shot, a shout out and you should probably contact him. So whoever your guy is, have him call me so that anyone that listens to this show, I can refer them to him and he can send me a gift certificate. You know, I didn’t make money somehow.

Speaker 1 | 40:27.711

Well, I mean, I was supposed to go over to their headquarters this June, but I guess that’s, that’s got the hell right now. Oh wow.

Speaker 0 | 40:36.586

Yeah. On the backend, you know, send me this on the backend. We’ll make like, you know, um, well let’s go. He’s a sales guy, right?

Speaker 1 | 40:45.628

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 40:46.348

What’s his name?

Speaker 1 | 40:48.389

Uh, you know what? You’ve got different name. I’ve been talking to so many people, Andy.

Speaker 0 | 40:53.971

Okay. You find, let’s find it. We’ll put it in the, I’ll put it in the summary of the show. First find out. Well, maybe, maybe just, you know, maybe it’s like we shouldn’t just name them just because we’re on the show here. but find out, ask his permission. I’ll put it in the, I’ll put it in the subject line of the show. We’ll be like, call this guy. And let’s see what we can do for him. Maybe he’ll be really happy. Um, man, uh, been great having you on the show. Um, really appreciate it. Uh, keep me updated on anything that happens. Like, you know, if you have any interesting stories or anything, I kind of want to track this from like an it director standpoint on how, um, the, you know, the world is changing. Life is changing right now. I kind of want to, I want these stories of what people are running into. So really appreciate you taking the time today.

Speaker 1 | 41:34.198

No problem. Appreciate you having me on.

Speaker 0 | 41:37.740

Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 41:37.921

man.