Speaker 0 | 00:09.546
All right, welcome everyone to Telecom Radio 1. And we are continuing our series titled Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we are talking, we’re talking SD-WAN. But before we get into this, I want to introduce our two nerds, Jason Gintert and Doug Edmonds. I hope you guys are okay with me calling you nerds because you’re popular. And guys, I’m going to give you a chance to really introduce us, introduce yourselves and tell us why you’re so popular. But Jason, I know you like potato chips. You’re the potato chip connoisseur. And we’ll get to that in a second here. But Doug, why don’t we start with you? Doug, just give us kind of where you started, what your title is and what you do today. And we’ll go from there, man.
Speaker 1 | 00:53.344
All right, sounds good. Hello everybody, my name is Doug Edmonds. I’m the Director of IT at Summit Design and Engineering Services. We are a mid-sized but very rapidly growing firm based here in central North Carolina, sort of in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area. And I’ve been with Summit as IT Director since October of 2017 after a 20-year career at UNC where I… Served in multiple roles in IT throughout my career there, starting off as a sort of a lowly IT temp at the School of Education, working with the Mac LC computers in our little resource lab, and then working my way up as the campus network steward, became a system admin, and then director of IT before becoming the assistant dean for IT at the law school at Carolina Law for the last 11 years of my career there. So I had a long run in this game, but it was, it was. It’s a big jump out to the private sector that I made with Summit in 2017, and I’ve got no regrets.
Speaker 0 | 01:55.154
Awesome, man. So just for other people listening out there, one of the key themes of the show that I like to touch on all the time is business acumen and how you grow in IT. But first of all, how did you get into IT to begin with? And I guess what was it? Were you… Was it a problem as a kid that made you want to get into technology? Was it something really cool that happened to you? What’s the story there? Is there any cool stories?
Speaker 1 | 02:21.478
Well, it’s funny. I’ll tell you that at UNC, the central ITS and also the different professional schools, IT departments are heavily populated by both working and frustrated or both musicians.
Speaker 0 | 02:36.611
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 02:37.272
And I count myself among those. I’ve been a lifelong musician, a rock and roll guy. I played in bands since I was 14 years old. And when I started my so-called career in IT at UNC, I was touring in a band. And that was really my main focus. So I had gone through a lot of, you know, even though I went to college and excelled at UNC and got a degree with highest honors, blah, blah, blah. I really was investing a lot of time and effort in, you know, making music and performing and writing songs. And the job in IT. To be honest, I just kind of stumbled my way into it after taking a lot of service industry jobs and dead-end jobs that allowed me to go on tour. And when I started at the University of IT, part of what I loved about it right from day one was that it was a constantly changing environment. I never wanted to be like a desk jockey or somebody that was doing something repetitious. And I think IT has always appealed to the creative part of my mind. And so I think that’s why a lot of musicians and creative types end up. in technology, frankly, because it sort of plays on that sort of instinct and also the creative impulses. I’ve learned a lot, obviously, since those early days when I really didn’t know anything because I was not a kid who grew up with a computer in the house. And my dad was a biologist. We didn’t have a computer back in the day. And so it’s been a real interesting trajectory for me career-wise. But that’s kind of how it all came together.
Speaker 0 | 04:06.764
That’s nice to know that you didn’t grow up with a computer because a lot of people, their stories are, no, I grew up building computers. I grew up doing this. I grew up that. So the fact that you didn’t, that’s actually really awesome. You’re the first person that’s actually said that, that I grew up without a computer. So awesome. Now, so fast forward, we’ve done, the company that you’re heading up right now in the IT department is growing really fast. We’ve done some big changes and Jason’s been involved in one of them on the SD-WAN piece. and really kind of connecting all your locations together, making sure that we can communicate effectively. And what was the, I guess, where was the bottlenecks there? What was the problem that we were dealing with on the network as far as maybe just give us a general, like the landscape of the network and what was going on and the problem that we needed to fix?
Speaker 1 | 04:56.485
Yeah, well, it was kind of twofold. I think when I first reached out to you, Phil, we had a situation where our existing phone system was isolated to two locations and it was connected through an old-fashioned you know point-to-point bridge and it was an aging system and we were as a company growing so rapidly and had so many other field offices some of which had upwards of you know 20 people in them but they didn’t have phones so I know that part of my initial outreach to you is for telecom purposes and just moving to a VoIP platform that was that, you know, both cost-effective and easy to use, easy to set up. And we made that vendor selection first. And then we started talking about problems we were having with site-to-site VPNs that were built out through our existing firewall infrastructure and the latency problems we were experiencing with our engineers and designers and architects trying to open large CAD files. So that really became the primary problem that I was really trying to solve in my first year. year here. And in order to address that problem, I knew that we needed to sort of, you know, pave the highway, so to speak, and get a better network infrastructure in place that would decrease those bottlenecks and really allow us to communicate office to office much more effectively. So that was when we started talking about SD-WAN.
Speaker 0 | 06:27.068
So enter Jason. So we talked, we actually went through quite a few different things. iterations and our providers and looked at a bunch of different solutions. You know, not all VeloCloud, but then really kind of niching down getting into a more niche VeloCloud, VeloCloud, please, which is, which is why we have you on the, on the call today, Jason. So why don’t you give us, Jason, give us just, you know, I want your background story as well. Did you have a computer growing up?
Speaker 2 | 06:54.667
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Phil. And I did have a computer growing up. Actually, that was my… I had a Commodore VIC-20 was my first computer. And I remember… The funny thing is that there is a little bit of a parallel with Doug because I’ve always been into music too. The first thing I tried to do with that VIC-20 was write a song with peak and poke statements and basic.
Speaker 1 | 07:16.376
That’s so nice.
Speaker 2 | 07:17.896
On the VIC-20. And I actually remember like I… The… basic program got so long a vic 20 had five kilobytes of ram and so i i spent hours writing this song right and it was all done and ready to go and then the i just got an airbag out of memory and that was it like there wasn’t enough memory to save it there wasn’t enough memory to do anything and i was just so distraught but i spent a lot of time on that on that box and uh and you know i came from a house where technology was was was part of that the household culture. Like my dad, he was a field engineer for a company called Honeywell. And I always kind of grew up around it, but I kind of took, you know, like Doug said, I actually spent my high school years and what should have probably been college years skateboarding and playing in punk rock bands. And then I landed a job at a dial-up ISP in 1999. So I was doing dial-up tech support. And just kind of stumbled into IT and took it from there. So I started working with that ISP, doing dial-up tech support. And I think I learned how in a lot of… You make your way into a career and you learn all the things to do. I think I learned more. The more important things I learned was what not to do in late 90s telecom. And I learned a lot during that era and took those skills forward. Worked in the ISP world for a number of years until three years ago, we founded WAN Dynamics and became a managed services company. So we provide managed SD-WAN, managed security, and really help folks manage cloud connectivity. Apps are moving to the cloud. Doug’s is a good story of trying to make their IT and communications environment more efficient, more effective. So as folks are moving those services to public cloud-based services, the connectivity models have to change. And a lot of the traditional telecom connectivity options like MPLS, they’re migrating to a more fluid and more modern type of connectivity like SD-WAN. And that’s our job is to help guide folks like Doug and Summit into those new paradigms and make sure that… that it’s custom built for their environment. I think a lot of the things that get missed with a lot of offerings these days is they’re too cookie cutter and they’re not built to fit the organization. So we focus, we’ve spent a lot of time with Doug and his group and great people to work with. And I think we’ve collaboratively built a pretty cool solution for them. Well,
Speaker 0 | 10:13.187
let’s rewind just a second there because you hit on a lot of, I think some that are very, very important. They’re important to distinguish specifically in the telecom world, because when you say managed service provider, a lot of times people think managed IT or outsourced IT. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about, but not really. What we’re talking about is a telecom provider, which when we say telecom, most people don’t know this. It means voice data cloud, right? But when you say telecom provider and the fact that you work for an ISP and you learned what not to do, all of this thing culminating together into what you’re calling as managed service basically means we’re really giving you support that’s not dumb in response. Because in the telecom world, I don’t know what the statistics are, but it’s something like 33% of America says that telecom has the worst customer service. Now, whether that be mobile devices, whether that be calling… I won’t name any names here, your local cable company and asking them to help you or whatever it is, the support’s not quite there. And that’s really where you come in and have made a big difference. Now to address the cookie cutter piece too, and the MPLS, I’m not going to go out there and say MPLS is dead, but from a small business perspective or a mid-market perspective, MPLS really is as a site to site on net VPN or managed VPN or whatever you want to call that version of MPLS, in my opinion. is dying very fast for two main reasons. It’s too expensive and it’s too slow.
Speaker 2 | 11:41.499
And I would add a third one. Their apps don’t live on a private network anymore. They’re in the cloud. So their apps aren’t in an MPLS network. They’re on the internet. So that’s what I would say is a third and huge driving factor, at least with a lot of our customers, is that they’ve got an initiative to move to Azure or they’ve got an initiative to move to AWS or Google Compute Platform. or maybe it’s Office 365, they don’t need that MPLS, that wholly private network, as much as they used to. Now, that said, I agree with you. MPLS is not dead. And there’s many, like we’ve come across many organizations, like, for example, call centers. A call center that says, you know, I’ve got an on-prem phone system, and I’m going to be doing that for the foreseeable future. Say they’ve got a call manager, or Mitel. Avaya-based system. And they say, we’re sticking with that for the foreseeable future. And we want to go all in with internet circuits everywhere. I say, no way. There’s no way you should do that. You should keep at least one MPLS circuit at every single one of those key locations. And maybe you don’t need dual MPLS anymore, which is what a lot of those call centers utilize today. But you can go to one internet circuit and one MPLS circuit, but still layer SD-WAN over top to figure out the best path to take you. and make sure your performance is maintained end-to-end. But completely agree.
Speaker 0 | 13:02.651
Plus resiliency, plus disaster avoidance, plus uptime, plus all those other things you’re going to get from what you just said.
Speaker 2 | 13:09.858
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 13:10.858
Okay, sweet. We got a little nerdy on that. That was great. Okay, so back to kind of the problem we were dealing with. You said CAD documents, you had site-to-site VPNs. So obviously, when we’re dealing with CAD, you know, a three meg MPLS circuit point to point is just not going to cut it, right? We’re not going to share files of significant size on a three meg circuit. So we did a little bit of a different solution where we really upgraded to 50 or 100 meg fiber at each site and then connected to them. And I’ll let you maybe, Jason, just speak for a second about what, or Doug. Either one of you, it doesn’t matter. When you first saw the solution, what was the initial kind of, what was the initial thing, the initial thoughts, and how we kind of, I guess, attached that problem?
Speaker 2 | 14:07.168
I can take that. I mean, and then I can hand it off to Doug. I would say that we noticed that it was a high bandwidth utilization environment, and they exchanged a lot of data around locations. So that was a very important thing to them. So some of the… The bandwidth aggregation properties of SD-WAN seemed very attractive. And then the whole voice component and tying that in, making sure that voice was prioritized and worked appropriately. I mean, we saw that as being a prime objective here to make sure that all of that, all of those pieces fit together and really help them make the most of their infrastructure.
Speaker 0 | 14:52.270
Okay, cool. So how did we do it?
Speaker 1 | 14:56.669
Well, I can speak to the strengths of working with WAN Dynamics on implementation and planning. We had determined, first of all, sizing, correct sizing of the VeloCloud devices that we were going to be deploying at different sites. And we identified… where we needed high availability and where we didn’t for smaller much smaller satellite offices um and then it was just a matter of working through you know the geographically dispersed locations that we’re talking about because we’re really spread out now over the entire state of north carolina which is you know pretty broad from from the tennessee border over to the to the sea to the to the atlantic ocean because we’re all the way down in wilmington and all the way out into ashville and then heading north up into parts in Virginia, southern Virginia, and central Virginia, the Richmond area. And that’s pretty much the area that we’ve got covered right now with future plans to expand down into South Carolina and maybe up into West Virginia. I mean, again, I wanted to pave the highways and get the bandwidth in place so that once we, so that A, we could have better capacity. I mean, that’s just the bottom line is that we needed more capacity. We had to. you know, maybe single circuits at all these locations and mostly just broadband. And I think that it was just the company was growing so fast and since nobody was in an IT director role, there was nobody really driving the strategic planning of IT and looking at it from 30,000 foot view of where do we need to be three to five years from now. It was always, you know, plug your finger in the dike and stop the latest leak and put out the latest. fire over here and over there. And, you know, that was, that’s no knock against the people that were here before me. They were just overworked and there weren’t enough IT people.
Speaker 0 | 16:49.528
Well, that’s,
Speaker 1 | 16:50.149
let’s stop there because that is a key,
Speaker 0 | 16:53.511
a really, really key piece for people out there listening, right? Because a lot of, I find by whatever it is, even now, like this year, right? There’s a certain percentage, and this is in Gartner was quoting this, you know, percentage of… of IT directors, IT managers, definitely CTOs, obviously, that are, it’s something like 95% of them are going to have to have some level of business acumen proficiency by now, basically. I think they said 2020, but we all know that that’s immediately right now. So a lot of people get stuck in the engineering mindset and they think, well, I’ll just go to Cisco, I’ll buy this Meraki device, it’s got SD-WAN built in. I will be very tunnel vision about this and I will link the sites together and, you know, we’ll do it this way. And I’m not necessarily always knowing where to begin and what are all the options out there. When dynamics was not the only option we looked at, I don’t need to talk about all the other proofs of concepts that we went through and fired to the curb that just didn’t work. But we ended up going with, we ended up going with land dynamics for, for an X, for a certain number of reasons. A, the, you know, the, the cost structure was, the same and or similar plus you get you know jason and his own his whole team to support you so you ended up with a whole level of resources to support you um and and you know doug you not being you know the arrogant it leader that’s very tunnel vision that says my entire team has to have our hands on it and do it ourselves you’re you know very open to allowing other smart people to provide you free support free support you know what i mean um because that’s that’s a benefit is you know Just, you know, more people that you don’t have to pay for. You don’t have to hire anyone to do this.
Speaker 1 | 18:36.316
Right.
Speaker 0 | 18:37.196
But there’s some other pieces out there for SD-WAN and people that might not be familiar with it. Jason, why don’t you kind of just walk us through the different flavors, right? Because there’s obviously equipment-to-equipment SD-WAN type of thing, like a hardware solution. There’s cloud solutions. There’s 100% cloud solutions. There’s, you know, a mix. There’s various different… you know, software types and maybe just break us down real quick, the various different ways you can do SD-WAN and, and, you know, why you think the solution here was the best one.
Speaker 2 | 19:07.052
Sure. There’s a lot of flavors. I think last, last time I looked, there’s, there’s somewhere around 60 different vendors that claim to have some sort of SD-WAN. And I would, I would implore anyone who’s considering an SD-WAN solution, really do your homework. Not all, all SD-WAN solutions are created equal. And there’s a lot of marketing hype. Seeing as this market is expected to explode over… Right now, we are seeing the beginning of the hockey stick growth curve. It is really just exploding. And there’s not a single company out there that doesn’t have some sort of SD-WAN initiative out there to explore it and start to do discovery. And actually, I think I saw somewhere that… Around 30% of domestic companies now are either deploying or exploring an SD-WAN solution for themselves. So there’s a lot of options out there. We selected VeloCloud early on. We’ve been a VeloCloud reseller for coming on four years now. And early days were rough, I’m not going to lie. It takes a long time for these things to come along and for the software to develop. But it’s really a mature product now. And with it going mainstream, if the timing is right, for it to really succeed and do well. But in Doug’s case, the VeloCloud solution seemed to be… be the best because of a lot of the cloud service options they were going with. And in particular, I think that VeloCloud handles voice the best. I mean, they really have thought long and hard about how the technology works over the wide area network and with cloud applications and spent a lot of time fine-tuning the actual, what’s called SD-WAN overlay itself, to present WAN remediation techniques. that overcome packet loss, that overcome jitter buffer, you know, has jitter buffers to overcome jitter. And really very quickly steers around performance problems on networks. So for voice, it is just, I still think it’s the best solution you can find. As far as the types of flavors you can find out there.
Speaker 0 | 21:24.986
And just to kind of get a little granular there, I mean, you’re talking about things like forward error correction and… duplicating packets so that if one got lost, the secondary packet is there. So you’re not getting in talks and weird things while you’re talking on the phone and stuff like that. Correct?
Speaker 2 | 21:38.416
Precisely. Precisely. And VeloClub was one of the first to the market with that, that type of functionality. So they’re really good at it at this point. I mean, there’s a few other vendors that do some of that as well. And then there’s others who just, you know, they have basically a WAN failover and they call it SD-WAN. A WAN failover with a controller that, you know, centralize the… centralizes control.
Speaker 0 | 21:58.732
In other words, glorified glorified load balancing. Correct.
Speaker 2 | 22:03.636
Yep,
Speaker 1 | 22:03.796
that’s right.
Speaker 2 | 22:05.938
There’s a lot of those out there.
Speaker 0 | 22:06.978
Now, Doug, just from your perspective, just logging into the VeloCloud portal, obviously WAN Dynamics is really the white glove VeloCloud support, right? Anyone could go out and do this, but like you said, do your research. You’d have to learn. It would be like a whole other go back to school for a year to do this whole thing. That’s why JSON exists. But Doug, just from your perspective as an IT director, logging into the portal and some of the tools that you have, what are you using it for? You know, just, I guess, for information and stuff, other than just making sure your network stays up and, you know, your engineers can, you know, work and employees and end users can work and be efficient. But as far as the portal from your perspective, what do you think?
Speaker 1 | 22:50.448
Well, first off, One of the things that sold me on WAN Dynamics was the user interface and just, well, not to mention the collegiality and just the sort of collaborative support that they provided throughout the implementation phase. They were always very flexible. We had a lot of rescheduling due to some personnel issues on my side that needed to be worked through, and they were always very accommodating with that. They were always very knowledgeable if we had technical questions. But for me as an IT director, I’m jack of all trades, master of none. I’ve never gone down one path to be certified CISC or whatever. I have a broad overview of what I want to accomplish and I need to hire people or have people on my team that have the requisite knowledge to make those things happen, whether it’s a network engineer or a classroom AV guy when I was up at UNC or whatever. And so with WAN Dynamics, what I felt I had was almost like an additional team member who wasn’t on our payroll. You know, it’s like you say, it’s value-added services. And I didn’t see that as much with some of the other companies that we did a proof of concept with. And their technology just wasn’t as good. I think we all agreed. So what I use it for on a day-to-day basis is, I’ll give you a real-world example. When we first had… When we first set up the dual circuits and the high availability locations, and Jason, or rather one of Jason’s employees was working with my guy, my network engineer, also named Jason, they had to work through some things of routing phone traffic. We have a different provider for our VoIP platform, and the way that they work is they’re looking for phone traffic to be coming from specific IP addresses. And by, you know, fitting together the Velo clouds and creating a high availability network, we had to be thoughtful and mindful about what IP address was being advertised to, you know, the phone vendor and where that traffic was coming through, whether it was coming through the fiber circuit or the cable circuit, the broadband circuit. And not being a network engineer, I could still immediately wrap my mind around all that stuff and set up a business policy. It was really easy when I watched Josh from When Dynamics do it. There were several occasions where we had some issues with phone traffic because of a business policy not having been set. And I was able to go in there and pretty quickly duplicate a business policy rule from a different site or create one from scratch, knowing what kind of routing needed to happen. So… Again, if the user interface were clunky and difficult to manage, then I wouldn’t have been able to do that without my network engineer. And so to me, it’s like having an additional team member in a way that’s doing a lot of the thinking and lifting a lot of heavy weight without me having to watch over it every single day.
Speaker 0 | 26:00.934
That actually brings up a really good, kind of like a ninja. ninja tactic or point that you get through cloud and SD man and this is where you come in Jason just the ability to turn up you know what are some of the like I guess just the I guess what are some of the secret tactics what are some of the benefits of of you know your platform that you can do like turning up a VPN for example or turning up a new site um maybe just speak to that for a second Jason sure yeah I think the Veloclub platform is really really good at
Speaker 2 | 26:33.556
Creating dynamic VPNs, dynamically controlling traffic and the policy across it. And, you know, it is excellent for that. And I think that what Wayan Dynamics brings to that is, like Doug said, is a more concierge-based approach. So identifying what the business needs and translating that into the configuration and policy building that we’re building into the VeloCloud. And we also have gotten really good at custom reporting. So actually, Doug, you don’t know this yet, but… There’s a new performance report that’s coming out in May that you’re going to get every month. It’s going to tell you the bandwidth utilization at each of your sites, the top talking applications across your enterprise, your top bandwidth users, if you’ve had circuit outages at locations and which ones. So it’s that kind of value that we bring. It’s squeezing more out of the VeloCloud platform than you have natively. So building up… scripting and knowing it inside and out. We have guys that are actually, we just went to the VMware Empower event on SD-WAN and it was kind of funny because our guys were actually stopping the presenters sometimes and correcting them on things that they were wrong about on the VeloCloud platform and so much time on it. So, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 27:54.865
So not only that, it allows you to just clean up your network. I’m assuming a lot of times, When you don’t know what you don’t know, you throw more bandwidth at the problem. And that’s not always the solution. So, I mean, you guys, you’re going to provide actual visibility into every user and how they’re using applications and actually give them the ability to shut down application use as well or control it at least to clean up your network and provide a more efficient network.
Speaker 2 | 28:25.030
There are some customers that they don’t even so much care about. the win remediation or the load balancing or the failover. Believe it or not, those aren’t the driving factors. It’s the fact that they can, on a dashboard, see what is happening in their network. And we had one customer. Here’s an example of one customer. It was like a one-visit close. And the customer saw it. We put it in one of their sites. They realized that 60% of that site’s bandwidth utilization was YouTube. And the way they found out why, it’s because they’re… They’re… It was a factory. Their users would come in in the morning and they would build their playlists and let it stream all day. And there was hundreds of people that were doing that all day long. Wow.
Speaker 1 | 29:11.456
I was going to use the term. That’s a great anecdote because I was going to use the term visibility earlier. And I don’t think I said it out loud, but I was thinking about that when I was speaking to the strengths of the user interface and how easy it is to navigate. I mean, having greater visibility into our network. was a huge win for me once we implemented because before, you know, we had all these individual switches, you know, Zyxel switches, some Meraki switches, some were smart, some were kind of dumb. And I couldn’t really have any kind of visibility into traffic and bandwidth utilization and quality of service. And, you know, with the solution we have in place now, again, since I don’t have a deep… bench, I don’t have a big IT team, I can quickly and easily kind of log into the orchestrator and see what the network, how the network is behaving. and sort of quickly identify problems as they arise or as we get a ticket. If we get a ticket that seems to be related to a bandwidth issue or some sort of SMB bottleneck, I can kind of rule out several things before wasting too much time. And in the past, I would have been chasing my tail trying to find just the visibility into the network.
Speaker 0 | 30:31.768
Awesome. I want to ask you this, Doug. just for everyone else out there listening to, and because this is really supposed to be a peer-to-peer podcast where IT directors are sharing various different tactics and or best practices, I’ll ask both of you guys this. What do you think is the single most important factor to your leadership success as an IT director? And that could be anything. It doesn’t have to be tech. Obviously, it might not have anything to do with technology whatsoever. based on, because hey, you didn’t have a computer even growing up. But no, honestly, what’s the single biggest, most important trait you would say that contributes to your success?
Speaker 1 | 31:16.463
I can answer that immediately and very easily, and that is one word, communication. I have found throughout my career that speaking in clear sentences and not talking technobabble at people who don’t understand it is a huge differentiator for me. And… And one of the ways that I’ve excelled in my career from the time I was just a lowly sort of tier one tech or technician, I shouldn’t say lowly, but that’s where I started, you know, was just in the trenches, you know, and doing break-fix kind of stuff. But from there to the point of being promoted to assist admin and then fairly quickly into a director role, a lot of that was because I’m a people person. Now, I’m not saying that every IT director has to have, you know, be a people person or be outgoing, but it sure doesn’t hurt. But what helped… me tremendously is my ability to think clearly, to think creatively, and to communicate upstream and downstream. I mean, you’ve got to have it going in both directions. If you’re good at talking to the C-level people, but not to the people that you manage, then it’s not a good equation. If you can manage up and be a good leader to the people who are on your team, but have lacked the skill set to communicate your solution ideas and your vision to the… C-level people, then you’re also not going to be in a great position. So I think it goes both ways. And you’ve also got to maintain a sense of humor to just keep your own sanity intact. I mean, it’s an incredibly stressful position for a lot of people that are in a director role in IT. You’ve got security concerns, you’ve got end users pounding their desks for help, and it’s like you’re always taking bullets. So you’ve got to have a thick skin, but… But communication for me is really, really the key.
Speaker 0 | 33:04.828
You’re always taking bullets. That’s a good visual. Or not a good visual. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 33:10.212
Not a good visual, especially in this day and age. But I mean, not to be too literal about it, but you really are. You take a lot of flack and you often hear more complaints than praise because when everything is going well, you don’t hear about it. But when something’s broken, you hear pretty loudly from your end users. So, you know, that’s…
Speaker 0 | 33:29.446
Give me a, come on, give me, there’s gotta be some trick. There’s gotta be some, do you have one line that works really good for you? Do you have any like one liners or, or anything to make people smile? Cause I used to tell, I was a sales director for a long time and I got out of direct sales. Um, but I used to always tell. my direct sales reps are scary. I mean, it’s a scary job. Like going out, when you’re in direct sales and you first start out in college, you got to go talk to 50 strangers a day. And most of them are going to say no soliciting to you. Most of them are going to slam the door in your face, get the hell out of here. You know, I hate you. You get a lot of that. So I used to tell my sales reps, just get them smiling. That’s it. You just got to remember like that we’re all humans out there. Just get them smiling. Do you have any like one-liners or anything that works really well for you? I mean, I find, you know, can I ask your advice on something? with end users works really well. Like an IT director goes, hey, can I ask your advice on something? People love to give advice. So, I mean, that would be my one trick, you know, just ask people, can I ask your advice on something? But do you have any one-liners or anything that works really well?
Speaker 1 | 34:30.089
One of my favorite go-to one-liners is I hate technology. That immediately takes the air out of the room. Because when they think, oh, the IT director’s coming in here, he’s going to tell me how to do something. He thinks he knows better than me. And I totally deflate the situation by saying, oh, I hate technology. And then they laugh and I’m like, so what’s the problem? And then if I get to know the people, which I often do, as I get to know my end users and my customers, because that’s what I consider all my fellow employees. They’re our customers. But when I get to know them, then I’ll often tell that story of, look, I didn’t grow up using a computer. The first computer I used was… I wrote an honors thesis as an undergrad at Carolina and I hired somebody to tape it. That’s showing my age a little bit, but, you know, it’s like we were just getting into having computer labs on campus when I graduated as an undergrad. So, you know, and when you’re whether you’re dealing with a young person or an old timer who hates technology, it makes them it gives them some comfort level knowing that the IT guy is not going to sort of lord over them and say, well, this is the way you got to do things. I think that really helped.
Speaker 0 | 35:39.276
Great. I’d love to hear what you say to the millennials. Um, like just saying, you’re smarter than me. Um, could you help me out with my job?
Speaker 1 | 35:50.466
Yeah. Yeah. There’s other one-liners you can use. Then I hate technology with that, with the, uh, millennials, but, uh, it’s a different conversation for another time.
Speaker 0 | 35:59.891
I mean, what about you, Jason? You got any thoughts there? Any tips or tricks or, I mean, what do you think?
Speaker 2 | 36:05.695
I totally agree with Doug. I mean, I, uh, so often try to, to There’s so many people who try to solve business problems with technology when the fundamental root cause of the problem has nothing to do with it. So it’s usually a cultural or a process-based issue or a lack of communication, to Doug’s point. It’s taking that step back and really looking at what problem are you trying to solve? And maybe technology is part of the solution. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just a simple procedural change internally. You just change a simple direction on a flow chart for how this process goes, and you solve the problem overnight. So I think objectively looking at the problems you’re trying to solve, I think that that’s key. And my one-liner would be, culture eats technology for breakfast. And I have seen this time and again inside of organizations where they say, we’re going to go spend $5 million on technology. technology X, and it’s going to solve all our problems. But fundamentally, that technology does not fit inside their organization because their culture will not allow it to fit.
Speaker 0 | 37:19.121
Yeah, because their culture is making long lists of YouTube video streams. Right.
Speaker 2 | 37:24.246
Or their culture goes, you know, it’s so siloed that they try to bring this solution in, and the network guys brought it to bear, but the security guys hate it. And they’re never going to let it happen. You know what I mean? They’re going to do everything they can to shut that project down and kill it. And it will never be successful because the culture inside the organization is not unified enough for them to all get on the same page and all work together to solve the problem. And that is what I mean by that, that culture eats technology for breakfast.
Speaker 1 | 37:57.003
I think just to follow up on that, I mean, that’s right in keeping with my experience over the last 20, 22 years or whatever. I mean, there are so many situations where. it’s all about process change and organizational change and even personalities with the people involved in different roles. If the communications director hates the IT director, you’re not going to have a good time implementing new solutions that involve both parties. And if you have a workflow issue, like you said, if you just change one little piece of a day-to-day workflow that’s not even really technology related, it can make a huge… difference. And so part of having business acumen, getting back to that point, Phil, is knowing when to throw some technology at it and when not to, frankly. We all have plenty of work to do. It’s not like we’re going to be jeopardized in our position by not implementing something when there’s 10 other things we got to solve on any given day. So sometimes it can be a simple human personnel change or a suggestion to do things slightly differently that really doesn’t even need to involve technology.
Speaker 0 | 39:05.994
Technology can screw so much up. I was on the edge the other day. I was ready to jump off. I almost was ready to get rid of everything and go back to carrier pigeons of communication. I was going to sell carrier pigeons and just go into a whole offshoot of just that and get rid of telecom altogether and just say, you know what, I’m just going to become the niche carrier pigeon guy and just teach everyone how to do that for fun.
Speaker 2 | 39:34.930
Did you know that there’s actually an RFC for that? IP transit by avian carrier. I forget what the RFC number is, but it does exist.
Speaker 1 | 39:46.633
That’s hysterical.
Speaker 0 | 39:50.674
And then I found out it’s only one way communication. I was like, I was thinking about it. How does that work? It must be one way communication. They must just fly home. And then of course that was it. I like telling you my intelligence level here. All right, guys, I think this was great. I really appreciate it. I would ask you what your final message is, but I think that is culture eats technology for breakfast. I hate technology. And let’s see, end users are our customers and communication. So those are like the four main bullet points of this entire podcast, other than the fact that we made everything easy with SD-WAN.
Speaker 1 | 40:29.603
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 40:32.165
Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on the show and have a wonderful day.
Speaker 1 | 40:39.250
Thanks a lot for the opportunity.
Speaker 2 | 40:41.211
Yeah, thanks, Phil. Have a great day.
