Speaker 0 | 00:04.743

Welcome everybody to Telecom Radio 1. This is your host, Bill Howard, the most bearded man in telecom. And today, we are continuing to talk about IT leadership in business-minded CTOs. Very happy to have Bill Klayman back once again to talk about enterprise migrations. Why the heck would we ever do an enterprise migration to begin with? Oftentimes very complicated, a lot of moving pieces involved. But with that being said, Bill, thanks for being on the show, man, once again.

Speaker 1 | 00:41.014

Hey, Phil. Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me on the line here. What a fascinating topic. I think that a lot of folks listening to this are going to hopefully personalize their conversation. Listen, it doesn’t have to be a major enterprise or IT or digital transformation or even migration. It could be little, it could be big. So a lot of the stuff that we’re going to talk about today is really good tips that you guys can take away. It’s going to happen. You can’t be stagnant or complacent. There’s going to come a point where you have to make some decisions and hopefully this podcast will help you out there.

Speaker 0 | 01:10.671

Awesome. Thank you. So the reason why I’m choosing enterprise though, is because in enterprise, there’s a lot of moving parts, right? There’s no hiding in the closet anymore. There’s no, the it ticket taker can’t hide away from this. When there’s an enterprise migration, it’s everything is kind of, I guess you would say multiplied even bigger. So you have a human factor, right? Because you’ve got thousands of people in an enterprise organization that are going to experience change. And we all know everyone loves change. We’re going to have baller figures where money is a factor. As much as people say that money can’t always be the decision-making factor, money matters. Speed matters. Patience and trust and ability. matter so much. So you have a lot of experience migrating all kinds of applications within the cloud to the cloud. Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about that seed that you planted last time, which is Google Docs, because you guys have done a bunch of enterprise. I mean, you’ve done a bunch of enterprise migrations. I just want to know, you know, again, why would someone move thousands and thousands of users? from say, from Microsoft to Google. And there’s obviously reasons why I know money’s a lot of times licensing can be one of the issues. But that type of migration is not an easy thing. So I’m just going to toss this one over the fence and let you talk about, you know, wherever you want to start with that is it is doesn’t start with money? Does it start with people? And then we’ll go from there.

Speaker 1 | 02:49.194

Absolutely. So thank you so much. And everybody listening. Take a seat. Hopefully you’re relaxing. Maybe you’re in the car listening to this. maybe you’re on a walk or a jog but we’re gonna go into an almost NPR like conversation without maybe quiet flute playing in the background so so enjoy this conversation a little bit I’m going to tell you guys a little bit of a story the journey that we went on it’s important to start with sort of the the motto that we have at MTM technologies it’s sort of what we do and our goal is to make cloud computing and technology utilization a natural human extension to both business and life And I want you guys to think about that people-centric approach that I’m going to be talking about here in just a little bit because, you know, these sorts of migrations are not easy, but they’re certainly important. I mean, you’re literally helping your customers navigate and chart these cloud waters, this digital transformation process to allow them to be successful and not just leverage technology, but impact people, life, process, and, of course, the business as well. But, again, remember that human extension to both business and life to make IT a natural process for people. So. Let’s back up and tell you a little bit of the story. Large, large organization, located out here in the Midwest, in a global company. So a part of the reason we started talking about this migration, this was specifically into a Google ecosystem, not just Google Docs, interestingly enough, but also Chromebooks, Chrome Pucks, those little devices, those pseudo-PCs you can attach to a monitor at an endpoint, as well as some Google Docs applications as well that they can run it. Now, there were several… thousands of users here and they’re all used to working with a Microsoft based operating system introducing a laptop PC so I’m sure everybody out here is listening oh my god how do you possibly take thousands of users away from an architecture you know that they’re so very used to and you know migrated over to an experience that you know it honestly quite a bit different so let’s begin with the with the actual use case and why we need to do this so An organization with a cloud-first mentality is aiming to create a simpler way to access applications, centralized content so that applications and even data points aren’t residing with the endpoint or so much as the user or with the user even. Again, that’s all centralized within a data center, for example. Furthermore, licensing costs have continued to increase, and that’s caused them, honestly, on occasion several million dollars extra spend they need to work with. And the other big element was the distribution of IT and most of all the distribution of connected people. So they were looking for ways to support salespeople, maybe manufacturing, traveling personnel, and honestly getting giving them laptops was a lot of times very kludgy, expensive in some situations, and then working with Chromebooks was a lot easier. So the end goal was pretty beautiful, right? Simple devices, really fast boot up times, nothing stored at the endpoint. And even the partitions on those Chromebooks are encrypted. So if they get stolen, the best the guy can do, the thief can do is maybe they’ll get a brand new Chromebook, but the lever will be able to access the content actually on that device. Now, getting to the end goal from the start of a journey was not necessarily an easy process. And it did take some time, a lot of planning and understanding the business use case and scenario. So the first thing, the first thing you can do, and I recommend this to everybody, is forget about the technology. Forget it. just forget about it. Immediately don’t think about the solution. Don’t think about what you need to put forward. Think about the person. And you need to understand individual user groups, whether it’s sales, manufacturing, finance, marketing, executive level, sales, whatever the case might be, think about the user and really approach that conversation easily. Remember that human-centric approach? Sit down with them. Go to their business leaders or go to these actual users and say, pretend like I’m not here. I just want to see what you do every day. Tell me how you log in. How many apps did you access? How far do you think it takes the long list to load? What are you missing from your experience right now? And then really understand the life of this person in the business environment, how they interact with their devices, what they do that’s productive and really take note of the stuff that’s slower, maybe koogee stuff that’s making them less productive potentially, and where you can find improvement. From there, you begin to architect the process. Now, in our situation, we certainly couldn’t just migrate. all of these applications into a Google type of architecture. Listen, there were going to be some apps that had to stay on a Microsoft ecosystem. So what we did was actually leverage a few of the technology there with application and both desktop delivery. But what’s a really amazing thing here is that this kind of architecture, it’s not dependent on the endpoint. And what’s really cool is it’s not dependent on a type of operating system sitting at the endpoint either. Now we can deliver the apps that they’re used to. even the desktops that they’re used to in a completely seamless fashion using things like HTML5 so no clients even unless we need some kind of a deep redirection leave my content redirection or a good physical device redirection we can deploy this entire experience using HTML5 so basically just a browser a browser on these Chromebooks becomes the quote-unquote operating system through which they can access their experience their applications and desktops. Now you dive a little bit deeper and you can do things like application pre-launching. You can make sure that their desktop is nice and ready and actually spun up before they actually even sit down. Maybe 15 minutes before we know a group of users are going to be sitting down at their Chromebooks, we set up their instances so that their architecture launches almost instantaneously as if those Windows desktops and applications are located at the endpoint. Now let’s back up a little bit right that sounds really awesome. lots of sunshine daisies people love their environment that’s not the case right you put a cold book in front of somebody and say good luck here’s your environment you’re gonna you’re gonna get some pushback so for an organization that’s an enterprise not a mess to be not a mid market we’ll talk about a larger one but remember listening to this in your mid market or a smaller shop you can take these points and pieces of advice I do some really cool things with them as well here’s what you can start doing pretty champions within your organization so within this company we actually created Google champions in the organization itself in their headquarters and some remote spots we put up banners we put up giant cardboard logos we put up these boxes showing different kinds of Google apps and what they can do we set up kiosks where Google was able to stand there with the Chromebook and say come on over check these things out take a look at how good this experience is and this didn’t happen over the course of a week it was several months of prepping and training the user so they really understood and became familiar through this natural process of computing that they were going to be moving into so we gave them ample time to get used to this kind of architecture and we made them feel and not just feel but really they were in charge of that migration So it was done at a pace that they were comfortable with. Then you have to create champions, internal departmental champions. Pick someone from HR, pick someone from marketing, pick someone from finance, maybe pick an executive leader and have them really understand this kind of environment so they can actually go back to the user base and champion the solution. Not going to work if you just have your architect or IT guy or IT director or super caffeinated CTO going out there and saying how cool this is. That’s not going to be enough. You need to create champions internally within the organization that are going to champion the solution and help you drive it forward. You’re going to have limited success and certainly limited levels of adoption. So these champions would actually have some of these devices. They would be thought leaders. And here’s what we did. The idea isn’t just to replace a compute architecture or to have a migration or enterprise migration plan to a new kind of environment. You have to make it better. You have to make the experience better. Experience better so all of a sudden it’s not just a new PC or a new way to access an application or a desktop It is a new and better way to compute so all of a sudden remember we talked about that people-centric Approach just a little bit earlier us sitting down with the user give them a couple of questions making sure we understand How they’re actually getting in their environment well now We’re not only replicating that kind of experience we’re focusing on the deficiencies that they used to have and incorporating that those improvements into this new environment and remember that as a good architect you take note of the feedback from the users to make sure that when you’re talking to that same group and saying hey you guys remember when you had to launch this application and it took a while guess what we did we set a timer and an actual policy that’s going to relaunch your application before eight o’clock in the morning so that you will never again have to wait for your productivity suite to load ever and we also make that environment seamless directly integrating with things like Google Docs Google applications all encompassed into one service portal and in that service portal side-by-side they can access some legacy applications so to them it’s all quote-unquote fast centralized in the core data center virtualization application and desktop virtualization allows us to deliver legacy applications or even ones that are virtualized on a Windows environment down to an endpoint right alongside applications that are only living in the cloud. We want to make this experience as transparent as possible to the end user to give them a really, really good experience. So when they’re logging in, it’s their portal. They’re familiar with this portal already. And side by side are both the applications that they used to use all the time and some of the new ones from Google Apps and Google Docs as they transition forward. So now… we were kind of building on the scenario right so you’ve got campaigns that have been hounding the message for a while you had the user who’s walked by these Google kiosks maybe pick one of these things up had a chance to trial them out you’ve done user acceptance testing with champion groups small numbers of pilot users to make the individual user group is actually optimized and it’s able to experience this kind of architecture efficiently and certainly very effectively now you start to move towards that migration plan and throughout all of this you’re doing obviously bug testing you’re making sure that the experience is always powerful you’re making sure that you’re always covering the questions and the challenges and users are having now obviously throughout this entire process you have to leverage little optimizations ways that you can continuously improve the experience because we’re leveraging cloud there’s a lot of really smart ways that you can make sure that whatever you’re sending down that pipe it’s truly a good a good way for them to compute and kick in these applications and desktops that they’re working with. Now, as you’re kind of piecing all of this together, you’re seeing an organization that’s been continuously talking the message down to the end user and with the end user specifically. Remember, it’s not just IT or executives that are designing it. A truly successful enterprise migration plan is actually one that allows the user to design a part of it, right, through their feedback, through their interaction with the technology, and through the way that they compute. and actually take this stuff in. Remember, our users today, even though they might be the same people we’ve known for years, they’re going to access and leverage technology fundamentally different. And that is a part of this digital inception point, I’m sorry, inflection point that we’re experiencing right now, is the connected user, the mobile user, and certainly those users that aren’t just using traditional technology to access various types of applications and resources. So these kinds of mobile users have to be catered to. Now, what we did then is we made sure that the transition happened. And again, this wasn’t like even a month process. It took several, several months. making sure that the message sunk in that we answered any questions that user groups were were accommodated to and slowly began the migration plan and process now we did this in parallel not everybody at once gets a crow book right we get certain divisions we might try certain different kinds of user groups and parts of the business just to see what happens and listen this is certainly not uncommon to what other major vendors do out there look at Apple right they have beta testers or even Android for example before they even release a major update. Now, I know it’s never perfect. I know stuff still breaks, the same thing with Microsoft, but they do have alpha and beta testers, groups of users that they know that they can deploy this stuff to, so they can get a chance to collect information, data, and see where all the bugs are. And I cannot stress this part enough. We learn so much from our beta users. We learn how to make sure sessions were smoothly roaming between devices. We made sure we understood what… to be compressed for example when there’s a latent connection we made sure we understood where all of the various users were actually coming in from it you can find out that there’s locations like for example more from home or more from out of band sort of sort of architectures where these users are actually coming in so wasn’t always quote-unquote on the network and it always wasn’t a place where we could control the connection right for example a Starbucks so we have to make the security obviously contextual who are you where you’re coming in from what kind of device is it and what are you what content are you accessing all the way down to an experiential uh sort of architecture where the experience is always positive but transparent and never deprecating the security so as we rolled out this solution right uh leveraging citrix technologies to make sure that the underlying ecosystem uh still supported some of those legacy applications and desktops that needed to be delivered remember not everything needed to or could move to a Google type of endpoint architecture, and then we closely coupled that with these cloud components in creating a transparent portal, a service architecture which empowered users to use technology to its fullest capability. Now, fast forward to this sort of phased transition plan, we’ve got groups of users that now know how to use this technology, and here’s the kicker, when you have champions and other user groups that have already deployed this, they can help out others. they can go back and say hey this is really cool here’s how it’s better and this level of continuous improvement just does not only happen at an executive or IT management level it happens within user campaigns as well here’s the thing you can incentivize users as well you can ask them hey you know what we’re going to give you a $50 Amazon gift card for every bug or every feedback point that you give back to us and at that point they become a part of the process and it becomes truly involved and feel like they’re making an impact not just in how they do their job but how the company performs and leverages technology in general. So slowly but surely all of these users began to consume their resources in a new way. They were given these Chromebooks and what was great to see is this almost seamless transition through all the teaching, all the educating, all the bug fixing, all of the understanding and again that human-centric approach where we didn’t experience a lot of you know we didn’t see a lot of users just just flip a table and say there’s no way I want this stuff. What we saw were people coming back and saying, this is a tool that makes my job easier. This is a tool that doesn’t complicate my life. And this is a tool that’s faster and actually better than what we had before. And listen, it’s not just a psychological approach here. It’s a pragmatic approach to make sure that we are literally making the user’s lives easier. And that is actually the definition of digital technologies and what we are actually striving to accomplish. It’s again that human centric approach and an extension to both business and life so that technology can be made Easier to leverage and consume in any instance. So this migration plan wasn’t easy There’s always a learning part and process in this we’re still learning and we’re still figuring out ways We can make this environment better. But the big point here is it’s not impossible and it doesn’t have to be painful through following good steps good architectural processes and remember Starting with the people and actually involving them throughout the entire architectural approach, the design, the testing, and then the final rollout, it’s going to make them feel important and it’s going to make them absolutely become a part of the process as well. So to become successful and actually do this properly, you really always need to think like an architect and see the big picture. Never let yourself get bogged down by the minutiae of a certain type of error or maybe a certain type of deployment. Always do your best to see the big picture and how a certain type of… maybe a setting or mode or deployment model might impact the rest of the user group or the organization. No way! You’re always impacting not just one part of the company, but rather everybody to make sure the entire experience is powerful. Going to Google isn’t easy. And if anything, going to any new kind of environment isn’t going to be simple. But as long as you take a good, steady, pragmatic approach, and again, focusing on the people that you’re trying to impact, you’re going to find success. My biggest pieces of advice and recommendation are find champion users. Ask what specific user group. Make sure you ask. those people-centric questions like tell me what you’re doing how can we improve your experience you know where are their potential challenges in how you come in every single day and leverage these kinds of solutions and you will see them open up you will see them tell you how to make their life easier and then from there it’s your job to deploy so these kinds of migrations don’t have to be hard but they do need to be meticulously planned out and certainly you need to involve various parts of the organization a good partner you and certainly, you know, people inside the organization that can help make a difference. So at a high level, that’s what happened and that’s what we did. Currently, we are still putting more and more users onto this sort of Google Chromebook ecosystem. Again, we started off with a pilot. We flew that pilot as we needed to. We learned so much from this kind of pilot. And again, we always make sure we involve the end user to make this kind of architecture and model ultimately successful. So. regardless of what you’re moving to you can do it you can be successful in doing it and again it could be done at a mid market in an enterprise level again focus on the people and make sure that the process is something that actually can make their environment much much easier so I’m gonna take a breath and a break here and see if you got any thoughts or questions all right definitely some questions the

Speaker 0 | 21:56.332

I guess my first question would be just some best practices for some of the other IT directors out there. How did you conduct the, do you have any tools or how did you conduct kind of like some of those interviews? Do you have any like best practices or little tools that you use, surveys, anything like that? And how did you go about dividing up via departments? I’m assuming like, you know, in an enterprise company, you already have departments. kind of divided up, but maybe give us some tools that would be like easy best practices for asking questions and kind of diagnosing.

Speaker 1 | 22:35.405

Sure. So, all right. So the bad news is that there really isn’t a quote unquote script for this. If you, and that’s kind of the hole you can go down, right? I would honestly try and create for architects and people involved in this project guidelines rather than maybe… specific questions you need to ask. The challenge becomes that, you know, if you treat everybody the same, you know, like an average, you’re probably not going to get very far, right? There’s this really, really fun story. During World War II, right, they tried the most efficient way to deliver uniforms to their soldiers. So what they did is they tried to take an average out of all of their GIs in the military and try to create a uniform. based on the average and what happened uniform didn’t fit anybody so in that same sense you can’t just take an average or script or you know just something out to make the process go by faster in fact that’s gonna probably hurt you my biggest recommendation is to actually take this piece by piece understand which business unit you’re working with and understand what’s important to that business unit sales is gonna be different than marketing marketing is gonna be different than finance finance you be different in the executive level so on down the line. My recommendation would be to take that approach pragmatically. Again, talk to each individual unit, business unit, understand what their requirements are. You can potentially ask the same questions. Hey, what do you do? What are some of the challenges you have? Tell me what you do every single day. How do you compute? What are the different kinds of tools and maybe systems that you use? And sit down and learn. Believe it or not, your job here is less about talking, more about asking and listening. Really, that’s the secret and the guideline I can provide. There’s no script. And again, I do recommend that if you are going to become, if you’re going to create templates or scripted questions, make them loose because you really are trying to create a personalized experience. That’s the only way you’re going to become successful is if, although you are trying to create, obviously, an approach that’s covering the entire organization, it’s really critical to understand individual business units and still individual business users as well. So, there are going to be tools that you can leverage, so network scans and monitors. You can see from, for example, if you’re using a load balancer. like a Citrix NetScale, you can use things like management analytics systems to see where people are coming in from, you can tell what their experience is, you can immediately before you even deploy anything and say, oh hang on a second, this one division of users connecting from remotely all have maybe somewhat of a limited connection and that as a result gives them maybe a limited experience. So for these guys, we’re going to have a separate policy to do high levels of maybe compression for example, you know maybe we’ll deprecate the performance of video if they’re downloading that just to make their overall experience a little bit better or you know what you might decide to deploy like an SD-WAN or a WAN optimization solution to make sure that their experience is on par with the rest of the organization. So you know other tools include you know user experience and workload monitoring for example that give you really good data points and data analytics to create an architecture that allows you to remediate issues that maybe the user doesn’t even know about or they can’t talk about it right. because a lot of times you know a user if there’s an issue or if there’s a problem they might not tell you about it or they might just ignore it and say you know I don’t care I don’t know what’s going on here I’m just gonna try and do something else and that’s really kind of like the worst case scenario because we want to know about it so some of these tools allow you to monitor the experience you can see how the connection is flowing you can potentially see why something is taking really long to load or if a user’s computers is bogged down with services and different kinds of applications. That’s all stuff on the back end you can do. But again, getting feedback from the user themselves is going to be a great way to approach the entire model and architecture. But remember the individual approach, the business unit approach, even though it’s one organization, the priorities of different divisions with that company are going to be certainly different.

Speaker 0 | 26:53.540

Yeah, I was thinking even simpler, just more along the lines of… Like, did you serve a monkey or did you have a Google Facebook group that was called, you know, the pet peeves about the new system group? What annoys me or what do I love? The kiosks is outstanding. Like, just having a live kiosk there is, I mean, all these ideas are great. I can’t, you know, I’ve seen both outstanding rollouts and I’ve walked into a hospital where there’s. They migrated or so-called migrated to a cloud EMR system, and there’s just a bunch of computers on wheels sitting in the corner unplugged. And in that situation, and that was just my dad got his hip replaced, and I’m sitting around looking at the computers and asking the nurses and various different people walking around like, hey, why is that computer sitting in the corner? And I kind of got an eye roll. And while that was the so-called. cloud rollout, which clearly none of the staff was involved and they didn’t have, you know, mobile kiosks or, you know, Hey, what do you think of the new, you know, system station, or they just didn’t have this whole, you know, very open-ended a rollout like you performed here, you know, where you could, you know, diagnose various different user issues and annoyances and stuff like that. It was just, Hey, we’re going to do it this way and we’re going to plug it in and it’s going to work, which clearly. does not work that way.

Speaker 1 | 28:26.577

Right, right, right. So, so pointing it in, right. And just hoping for the best is really not a great approach. So, uh, I love survey monkeys. Um, and my, my recommendation is that is not a bad way to approach it. Um, but, but please don’t generalize it that that’s the other really big piece of advice I can give everybody is getting a survey out in a digital format or asking questions around what is your best, what’s your pet peeve or, you know, what can we make better? Uh, that’s really important. My recommendation is to make it anonymous and make sure people know that it’s an anonymous survey because you are definitely going to get Really good data points and what what else is really good about things like survey monkeys that you can take things like aggregates, right? So you’ll understand what’s happening with the users sort of in a general sense But even in that point, I recommend that you don’t just send out a survey. I could do your entire entire organization Departmentalize it right focus on key specific user groups. And again even that sense maybe you use a survey monkey as an initial starting point they’ll go down through those end users and talk to them nothing will replace interpersonal communication and this is coming from a millennial guy who loves the text and I love digital tools and solutions I’m all about you know videos voice and collaboration but in some of these instances because you are in a way changing and I use this word lightly disrupting the way they do things you need to create an interpersonal communication level allow them to feel like they are truly a part of the process which they most certainly are okay next question

Speaker 0 | 30:02.682

how did you migrate people off of Microsoft Excel? And did you? And this is very specific, obviously. I’m just trying to think of like, you know, this is like going to be like the person that’s used Excel their whole life and you hand them, you know, the Google equivalent, they might go shoot themselves.

Speaker 1 | 30:24.714

Right, right. So in those situations, so Google, allows you know certainly multiple users to edit an Excel spreadsheet for example there’s certainly big benefits in terms of you know what you can do as far as as far as Google’s Feats versus Microsoft Excel and reality right you’re going to see Google continue to become more and more sophisticated to add more features to Feats you know while you know while Microsoft has also been somewhat keeping up Excel collaborative capabilities So, you know, in that kind of environment, there’s going to be situations, and I need to make this clear, where you’re going to potentially run both. And there’s going to be user groups that you simply can’t move. And you are going to have to make that kind of decision, right? In some situations, for simple users, you can use Google Sheets, but in some situations, you might still need to be able to operate and work with an architect that supports your office system. I’ll tell you what, Phil, we did that, right? There were definitely user groups that still needed to get traditional Microsoft Office deployed into their architecture. Now, our savings weren’t just with Office. Obviously, our savings were with the Microsoft operating system, the endpoint potentially, you know, obviously the lessening and the requirement of Microsoft licensing. And again, working with different kinds of solutions that lessened our reliance on the Microsoft ecosystem. But again, there’s going to be situations where you… simply can’t rip and replace and you know there’s there’s going to be typical spreadsheet users and they’re gonna be some business professionals that do some really advanced stuff right in a multi-platform world beautiful part here is that you can use both of these kinds of architectures even a web-based kind of scenario it allows you to run them side by side and even today your capability to import or export both different kinds of models into one or the other is fundamentally easier So some users can certainly be using Google Feets just to make it easier to have that online presence and those users that really need advanced formulas that have got all of these advanced Excel spreadsheets, they’re going to have to stay on there as well. Because listen, there’s going to be situations where you simply can’t transfer some of these advanced formulas, some of these really, really crazy Excel sheets that you know people have created. And again, to that extent, you just can’t remove that. If your organization is really sort of all or nothing, you’re going to have to take some really, really cautious approaches. And in that situation, you might need to hire Microsoft Office or even Excel experts who can potentially in some ways transfer those formulas down to Google Sheets. Now, those are going to be your accounting and potentially salespeople who have, like I said, advanced formulas in their Excel spreadsheet. that’s not going to be easy in those situations you might need to take a much more catered approach to that to that sort of a sort of migration and again it’s not easy in our situation you know there’s you know there’s there’s gonna be areas where when we just simply couldn’t move this stuff over and we had to keep a parallel architecture running now dad my next question is

Speaker 0 | 33:50.466

is I guess around mobile users, because you have a, what’s your feeling on like BYOD? Like, did you, did we have a lot of, you know, people bringing their own iPhones or anything like this? Was this, you know, iPhone versus Droid devices? How did that, how did that come into play?

Speaker 1 | 34:06.657

So, you know, BYOD was certainly a large part of the enablement process. And so as the endpoint is concerned, the actual computing device that was going to become like a Chromebook, right? And in Chrome, Puxo desktop. But from a BYOD perspective, listen, we certainly didn’t want to limit the users as well. You know, we’re going to continue to allow the support, you know, both Apple devices as well as Android devices, even Windows devices if needed. The beauty of this architecture is that the endpoint isn’t dependent on the delivery architecture. We simply point and position a service portal to the user, which allows us to become realistically endpoint agnostic. So a user can punch in that user portal and again the intelligence of the architecture behind it is able to contextually understand who are you, what device are you using, and even to the extent still that you can say whether it’s like a laptop or a PC or a mobile device so that when you launch an application it will automatically reskin. application to become bigger for example maybe use bigger buttons because you’re on a mobile device make it easier to read potentially maybe exclude some other menu options that you simply don’t need from a mobile device and allow that experience to be a lot more simple again the user doesn’t need to do anything here we don’t want them to do anything we don’t want them to hit a button we just want them to open up their device launch that portal and start consuming resources so to that extent BYOD bring your own device that’s not an issue because again, all we really need to do is have the user point to a specific portal and begin to be able to consume all the content that they require.

Speaker 0 | 35:51.442

I was going to ask the security question first, but I think it makes more sense to talk about the mobile first because you’re going to have people obviously travel. I’m assuming traveling overseas, internationally, all over the world. How You mentioned Starbucks, which I always like to say, you could log on at a Starbucks in Russia and you’d be fine. But how are we authenticating or what security policies look like as far as document sharing or accessing sensitive information from a public Wi-Fi at a Starbucks in Russia? Sure. Well, good example. So Starbucks in Russia.

Speaker 1 | 36:29.704

So. There’s going to be an access methodology, right? A centralized point of access that all of these users are going to be coming into. And that centralized access methodology gives us an extraordinary amount of control to interrogate and ask a lot of questions before the user is even given access to the environment. So in that situation, users coming in from a remote location, a different country, and an unsecure Wi-Fi, as soon as they launch the portal and they… try to sign in with a username and password the authentication and for example in this case it could be a load balancer is some very important contextual questions who are you like I said earlier where are you coming in from what device you’re using and how are you connected from there you can actually create geo fencing policies for example anyone connecting outside the United States or even within these certain countries will not get access to X resource or you know this database or this system you know we deployed a mobility solution for a healthcare provider for example where a user with a tablet can be continuously looking at their service portal in their environment as they leave the hospital doors their EMR system is no longer available period as just it’s just not available unless they’re coming in from a known device and we’re pre-launched a VPN session for them that can be done automatically as well but even in that sense we can create leveled context so if you’re coming in from a you know maybe potentially a known device but an unsecured location before I’m going to prove the location you know you can say that again you’re coming in from a known device and you’re coming in from an unknown location but you’re securing your architecture we can launch a sorry unknown location that hasn’t been a geofence for example, like Russia or some other country, you can pre-launch a VPN session to secure that entire architecture or whatever the user is actually trying to access. However, if they’re coming in from an unknown location that’s blacklisted potentially or geofenced, we can give them very limited access to their data sets and tools and even give them a message saying, hey, you’re coming in from a spot that we don’t feel secure. If you’d like to get access to more of this content, here’s what you have to do. Again, we don’t want to completely remove the user experience, but we are going to have to limit them, especially if they’re coming in from a spot that’s unsecured or certainly a spot that’s country or a location that we don’t trust. So in that sense, we can do it. It’s not hard. And again, it needs to be completely transparent to the user.

Speaker 0 | 39:09.975

Gotcha. That’s actually one of the reasons why I love Cato Networks has a global network and global SD-WAN product where you can access POPs that are all over the world. So I didn’t know if you had any thoughts on even just from a data center perspective, if you had… you know, international pops where you could, you know, maybe access a, you know, because speed is going to matter depending on where you’re at in the world too. I would, I would imagine on where you’re hosting various different applications. So I don’t know if you had any thoughts on that, maybe accessing even a, an international pop that backhauled traffic to the United States or anything around there, if there’d be other solutions around it, you know, to create that security aspect where, you know, people could be anywhere in the world yet still access data within a you know, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be this scenario, but be able to access data securely and, you know, internationally with speed being a requirement also.

Speaker 1 | 40:06.758

Right. And that’s an important point to understand, Phil. A point of presence is really, really critical when you’re designing this kind of architecture. So, you know, if you’re somewhere in Asia and, you know, you’re connecting to a data center that’s somewhere in the United States, that could be a problem because you are potentially creating a latent network. You’re potentially creating an architecture that, you know, has to traverse a very large pond to get to the end point. So for larger organizations that have people and users that are… located abroad and constantly acting in environments work with a good data center partner work with a good population You know, especially from a security perspective. It’s not just security. That’s the thing It’s also a model that allows you to to optimization improve the network connection for example Obviously gives you a much better ability to process data much closer to the user which is absolutely critical You do not want to create latency or a bad user experience. So today And I think that’s not only obviously for security reasons, but certainly for performance as well. If you’ve got a large number of users that are overseas or trying to act your environment, you really do need to think of a point of presence. That’s much more localized to them. I mean, that’s just a, a design consideration you have to undertake.

Speaker 0 | 41:24.379

This conversation has been outstanding. I think the whole, the summary at the end is a human cent, human centric approach. Um, certainly everything matters. It can’t just be a technical approach. If we don’t take the human centric approach, uh, not everything’s, we just can’t, we got to wrap it all together that way. Um, certainly money matters as well. I’m just curious around, you know, why would someone, you know, why would someone do this to begin with? Right. Like why, you know, how does, you know, just, let’s just talk about just money for a second. How does a migration like this, you know, affect. you know, affect costs on a large organization? Like, did this save money overall in the end? How do you see, like, a return on investment overall over time?

Speaker 1 | 42:14.758

So there’s obviously an intrinsic benefit here in an ROI that you can take a look at and affect on humans as well as the monetary one. So, you know, it’s certainly an undertaking, right? And in this situation, they were facing a Microsoft renewal that was quite large. And this was their ability to sort of alleviate that Microsoft tax, let’s call it, to be able to leverage Google Chromebooks and a very, very powerful operating system that required a lot less monetary support. Now, they understood this wasn’t going to be an ROI process over one year. There was certainly going to be a duration here. But doing an ROI study and analysis is going to absolutely help you understand much more clearly what that roadmap actually looks like. And in that. sense you are going to gain a benefit right if you’re facing you know for example a large renewal take a look at how Google Chrome for example to alleviate that from an endpoint perspective right you don’t have to license Microsoft desktop anymore you’re gonna have significantly fewer requirements around things like the productivity suite for example or the ones you might be getting is going to be significantly less expensive and it could be other situations where you know you’re seeing improvements in productivity potentially here as well So overall, working with the ROI, it’s going to be a process and it’s certainly a study in itself. In other situations, whether it’s a renewal, whether it’s a part of your infrastructure you’re trying to update, these kinds of models allow you to not only differentiate yourself, but differentiate your business and become more competitive. But certainly doing an ROI study is going to be critical. You’re going to need to understand how these kinds of solutions impact not just your organization in general. but fairly individual businesses as well. I mean, listen, this isn’t the only way to do it, right? We’re seeing organizations deploy things that hyperconvergent to get rid of that virtualization tax in some sense, because, you know, you no longer need a hypervisor. The hypervisor lives within a hyperconverged appliance. And it’s a similar approach here, right? You’re trying to get rid of that Microsoft tax with both servers and productivity and endpoint by deploying a much more centralized cloud-oriented solution. that impacts your users in a new and a different way. So it’s a study. It’s certainly an approach. And it’s one of the first things that you have to do when you understand this kind of architecture. Know what your monetary costs are, what your ROI is going to be, and certainly how it’s going to impact the users as well.

Speaker 0 | 44:50.051

So from a capital expenditure depreciation model in this particular situation, I mean… Would you say that the the equipment upfront purchase capex and depreciation of equipment across the entire organization was fairly reduced?

Speaker 1 | 45:13.987

Oh yeah, I mean absolutely. You know, you take a look at a traditional Chromebook device. Ones that are pretty damn good, right? You’re talking like between a hundred and two hundred dollars, you know, and you get yourself a really really fast sort of device and you can even do this sort of, you know, a tablet, Chrome tablet kind of architecture that just recently got released. from HP, I’d recommend you take a look at those as well. So overall, you’re talking about an investment in devices that are a lot less expensive to maintain and control. There’s fewer moving parts. They’re going to be faster. They’re going to be much easier to maintain. And here’s the other thing. If something happens to that endpoint, your time to go from zero to productivity is almost instantaneous. Because if an endpoint breaks, you can literally sit down in front of the user, give them a new device. the identical device all they need to do is open it up and connect and their session is exactly where they left it right with the same user personalization with the same setting literally everything right you transfer this to you know the same kind of a model with a Windows PC right you have all these applications potentially installed at your endpoints something breaks something’s not working right you have to send somebody to troubleshoot it you have to send somebody you know to do a ghost session to take a look at what’s going on with the end user and it takes time to troubleshoot that kind of architecture with things like Chromebooks remember everything is centralized so you can oftentimes troubleshoot directly from the data center your centralized virtualization ecosystem to see what the problem is and what’s impacting the user plus because of that level of centralization there are some amazing analytics tools that you can see maybe the users who you know having too many tabs open maybe there’s something wrong with a print service that’s actually going to the end user and again this is all centralized so you’re actually supporting these kinds of environments much more easily so it’s effectively less to manage it’s less expensive to manage and ultimately these devices themselves I mean are a lot less expensive and I mean honestly they’re gonna last longer again no moving parts in these Chromebooks they they open up and launch almost instantaneously and with things like three launching configuration as soon as the user opens it you know all they need to do is log in and boom their session is available oh I mean to that extent it’s uh you know you are working with less expensive devices that could potentially provide better experiences last

Speaker 0 | 47:42.450

question for this is more of a lead I guess here it’s a two-part question okay first of all for any IT director that has accomplished this or is looking to accomplish something like this? What would your piece of advice be? And after that, I just want to know, when this is all said and done, from an IT management perspective, is it easier to manage? Like move ad change requests. Is it all around for everybody just plain easier and faster? Susie Q quits. Mary Jane starts up. How easy is it to do a Mac request now as compared to the old days?

Speaker 1 | 48:30.704

Sure, sure. So first of all, it is going to be easier to manage, right? These endpoints are much smaller. They’re much more, we’ll call them simpler even. And again, using things like cloud and virtualization, you’re centralizing everything. So doing things like kicking in requests, being able to quickly log in to see what the user session is doing, being able to see what’s happening at the data center site, maybe with a LAN or LAN connection. that that all happens much more quickly and again what’s really cool about these Chromebooks is that it includes when you purchase them you can include this enterprise management functionality which I mean it makes managing these things just fundamentally easier right it’s basically a BYOD enterprise mobility management solution that allows you to control these devices what gets provisioned to them how updates are controlled potentially you know and you can do from that kind of environment So, I mean, it’s going to be different, right? Obviously, there’s really great solutions out there to manage Windows systems as well and Windows endpoints. But, I mean, you’re effectively managing a type of think client that’s extraordinarily robust. So what we saw as a part of this, right, is, you know, we have to obviously work with things like, especially ITSM and ITOM to do things like ticketing and troubleshooting, make sure that there’s a good process and flow around all this stuff. But you do have the capability to not just improve. improve the end-user experience, but the experience for the IT admin and the IT organization in general. I mean that was the beauty of it, right? We found it easier to manage faster, replace and fix devices. We found that we were able to deliver a much more robust experience mainly because we were able to control the experience from a centralized location. And then ultimately, the simplicity of these devices, yet still providing rich experience, made them easier to control and troubleshoot and manage and certainly deliver. I mean, we replaced a monolithic endpoint architecture with an environment that was much more agile and easier to control.

Speaker 0 | 50:28.741

Okay, part last question, part B. What about infrastructure upgrades? Internet. What about carrier services, stuff like that? Was there any internet upgrades or just bandwidth in general? Did we use up more bandwidth and we have to do any bandwidth upgrades?

Speaker 1 | 50:47.137

Sure. So we talked about this a little bit earlier, right? As far as bandwidth is concerned, right? Only a little bit because we saw that bandwidth requirements are, they’re still accessing the LAN or certainly the LAN. The requirements didn’t change too much, but the beautiful aspect here and what we could do effectively. was to manage that kind of environment, right? In those situations, using really good things like load balance, application delivery controllers, SD-WAN appliances, and WANOP allow you to control bandwidth and control your links as well. Plus, it allows you to learn a lot more about your environment, too, where you might need a secondary link. Phil, you talked about it earlier, maybe a secondary point of presence for remote or international users coming in. It’s not so much about bandwidth, it’s more about experience right and actually being able to control those links that are are coming into the user again it’s not that we saw more bandwidth being used if anything our solution was actually really efficient with the compressor levels that we were using the delivery of resources by a table I for example you know and still being able to deliver content rich experiences you know without overloading the WAN links and that’s actually a part of the project as part of the process maybe did that extent, you have to have good tools in place to monitor that, monitor your requirements, to make sure that if there are ebbs and flows, that you are very quick to remediate that and to accommodate to that as well.

Speaker 0 | 52:15.813

Bill, it’s been a pleasure as always, man. Anyone that would like to get a hold of Bill Klayman and have any, I guess, any help, certainly I am happy to make that introduction for anyone. Bill, any final words, piece of advice, anyone listening out there? What’s your final thoughts?

Speaker 1 | 52:36.021

You know, it can all seem very overwhelming. It can all seem extraordinarily daunting. It doesn’t have to be. And that’s a really important thing to understand. It doesn’t have to be a daunting or challenging process. This is something that, you know, you can absolutely undertake and certainly work with. Don’t rush it. Don’t try. to do everything in a short amount of time and if you have a customer that is blessing you to you know get it done in a very very quick time frame be a good partner or work with a good partner because I will be one of the first to tell you that a time frame is not reasonable or if you do this in time this time frame you’re gonna have some risk you’re gonna have you know potentially poor performance you might potentially have you know upset end users I’m not saying that you know take take your sweet time here But certainly understand that this is a process. It’s a journey. You have to navigate these waters. And that when you do this right, successfully, there are so many benefits to the user, the business, and the way they actually process and consume this information. Remember, these are digital, connected people. It’s not just young people or millennials that are consuming this kind of stuff. It’s everybody who wants to be competitive in this industry and in this space. And that’s what Pure Effectively is trying to create, is a migration and transition. into an architecture that can facilitate that. Take your time, plan it out, work with a good partner that can give you the steps to actually get to the state of migration. And absolutely, always, if the one thing you’re gonna take away from this webinar, make sure it’s a people-centered approach to everything that you do.

Speaker 0 | 54:14.172

So I could have you on numerous other shows. I’m sure we could talk about security forever. So thank you very much. You are welcome on the show anytime. One other piece as well. putting together, I am putting together an IT solutions think tank mastermind for any CTOs, IT directors, IT managers that would like to ask other colleagues questions and bounce ideas off of other colleagues. Bill is certainly going to be in that group. I will be, you can find that group on LinkedIn. I have an article that’s an article about IT leadership. I will put the group invite or the link to apply for the group on my LinkedIn page as well for anyone that’s interested to join the group and bounce various ideas off of Bill and other IT directors and successful CTOs that have done other complicated migrations or just dealt with. uh hard problems to solve in general so bill thank you very much have a great day sir thank you so much phil thank you everybody for listening uh it’s been a pleasure