Speaker 0 | 00:09.605

All right, welcome everyone back to Telecom Radio 1. We are continuing our series, Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we’ve got a great nerd on the show, Paul Olson. Paul’s coming from Krangel Technologies. And we’re going to be getting real niche here in a moment. We’re going to niche down. We’re going to talk about IBM today. We’re going to talk about… all of you that may still have old AS400s sitting around, anything in iSeries. And we’re going to talk about what you can do to modernize, migrate things to the cloud, and keep all of this wonderful technology that you’ve been running for years anyways in the, well, really the heart of your business if you’re running AS400s. So, Paul, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 | 00:55.018

Thanks, Phil. Pleasure to be on.

Speaker 0 | 00:56.659

So, Just to start off, I’ve been asking this question lately. It’s just a fun question. Did you, well, let me ask you this. What was your first computer ever?

Speaker 1 | 01:07.057

Yeah, so my first computer was kind of a family computer, and it was a Macintosh 2, which at the time, the big functionality that I remember just being blown away by was able to record our voices and then play that back.

Speaker 0 | 01:22.625

Did you have the two floppy drives? We did. All right, two. You can do that. really you guys are really up to date there then really you really spent the money if you had the double drives um oh do you remember any like were you playing oregon trail on that could you play oh yeah every kid did man that was that was the thing to do and

Speaker 1 | 01:42.814

what about logo you remember logo i had a couple buddies that are really into it but i kind of stuck to oregon trail that was the thing i knew well you know i don’t really even know what we did with logo other than make the little like

Speaker 0 | 01:56.104

arrow or turtle or whatever they called it go like a thousand times a diagonal across the screen it would be like right 90 uh anyways um so awesome give me a little bit of uh give me a little bit of your background so we have apple too but how’d you get to where you are today um did you decide that you know hey i always want to be in technology i always want to do this or did or did something happen to you in your life yeah no that’s a great question so

Speaker 1 | 02:20.908

In general, I think I’ve always had a passion for technology and specifically around computers. I remember even in middle school and high school thinking, you know, I want to do something long-time career-wise with computers. And that kind of morphed when I went to college. I was actually a math major. I was planning on going to secondary math education and didn’t love that. And anyway, long story short, jumped in with a company. I’m kind of doing some cross-promotion here called Workiva. It was actually called Web Filings at the time, based out of Ames, Iowa. and it was financial reporting software specifically. Ended up in their solutions architecture department and kind of from a user experience side was making sure that we were taking on and tackling these different use cases outside of what the original software was designed to do. From there, moved up to Minnesota with my family and from there kind of necessitated a job change as well. We actually moved up for my wife’s job. I started looking around and ended up at Kringle Technology. They are on the IBM i platform, which is different from the software company I was working on. But one thing that I was excited about jumping into was how centric these IBM i systems were to business. If you look at the core of most businesses, they are running off of sometimes referred to as an AS400 or i-series now, but they’re referred to. that’s really the heart of their business. So if you’re talking about a distribution company, financial company, more times than not, if you look beneath the covers, they’re running on an IBM iSystem. And so kind of took some of the things that I had learned from this financial reporting software into this industry and kind of launched from there. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me and my background and how I ended up where I’m at.

Speaker 0 | 04:11.461

So it’s great. So, and that’s why you’re here today so that we can talk IBM because. When we talk about migrating applications to the cloud, a lot of people are going to look at that. IT directors, CTOs, CIOs are going to look at that and say, yes, that’s great for small business and running smaller applications in the cloud. But look what we have. We’ve got this large manufacturing facility. We’ve been running our ERP system or whatever it is. Like you said, we were talking earlier about just… printing labels and doing inventory in the warehouse and stuff like that. And we’re running this on these AS400s. Maybe they’ve upgraded by now, but is it really realistic or is it even realistic to think that we’re going to move this technology to the cloud?

Speaker 1 | 04:58.709

Yeah, so that’s a great question. I’m going to give a little bit of context as far as what we do at Kringle Tech first. So what we kind of offer, we have three main product lines. Our biggest one is our RPG XML suite, which is really a product for web developers to be able to process, consume, and offer web services around XML and also JSON. Our second one, which we’ll focus on more today, is called Litmus Spaces. And if you’re… In the IBM iCommunity, you’ve probably heard of us before. And where our niche is, is offering an easy on-ramp to the cloud. So specifically for developers that are looking to have smaller testing environments at not a huge cost. Because a lot of times, if you’re a business and reaching out to IBM, and maybe you have an AS400 or iSeries on-site that you’re managing and maintaining, that’s a big purchase and a big investment. And one of the nice things about the IBM i Platform is they are tanks. They don’t break down. They last forever. And something that is just crazy cool about this particular platform compared to others is they’re backwards compatible. I’ve talked with customers that literally have programs that were written before I was born, and they’re still being used in production today. That’s insane to think about in our modern day technology, but that should tell you how these things were built to last. They don’t go anywhere. Now, because of that big cost, it can be a little… let’s say intimidating, to jump to the cloud and say, do we want to really move everything over? And so again, Litmus Space is that on-ramp to say, all right, we’ll take a very small system at a monthly cost that has no startup fee whatsoever, that you’re able to jump on, do a testing of, let’s say, a new program or a new language, for example. Our biggest customer base are really those developers that are trying to test out new languages. So Node.js, Ruby, for example, to build some of these programs in a space that they know is theirs, no one else is going to touch. And they have complete control over.

Speaker 0 | 06:56.995

The price tag that you mentioned earlier. Well, first of all, why was IBM making servers that lasted so long, didn’t break, and were unhackable?

Speaker 1 | 07:08.479

Yeah, so, I mean, really, it speaks to…

Speaker 0 | 07:13.101

This goes against, I would think, like all normal marketing departments’ideas. Well…

Speaker 1 | 07:21.705

And I don’t mean to throw Apple on the bus. I have an iPhone, a Mac, like I’m all about Apple’s products. That being said, they’re kind of built to last two, maybe five years max. And then from there, it’s kind of understood you need to buy something else because it’s going to be outdated, which is fine. And that’s a typical business model. And so what IBM does, and I’ve heard a lot of their kind of keynote speakers talk about this, is that really it was almost a bad business model. The saying, hey, we’re going to build something that you’ll never need to replace. or last a really long time. That being said, that’s a huge selling point that when you buy something, this is going to be a core capital purchase that’s going to last for years for you, that is backwards compatible. So as you’re modernizing, you don’t have to worry about breaking things that you made previously. One of the things that we’re seeing kind of industry-wide, which is really interesting, is a lot of these programmers are starting to reach retirement age. And as they do… these companies or organizations aren’t necessarily replacing these developers. They’re just throwing it over to the IT team and saying, well, these things are built to last, seems to be going smooth, you guys can handle it, right? And what’s happening, though, is a lot of that knowledge is also being retired out and not being transferred to the rest of the IT department because they don’t have all the training or knowledge or just business knowledge that’s needed. Another kind of aside is that these developers that are coming out of these technical colleges… um, aren’t having business courses typically, um, for whatever reason, it’s very technical in nature, but they’re not taught the really core business knowledge that’s needed to run these environments. So, so yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I’m getting off on a tangent.

Speaker 0 | 09:07.109

That’s actually really, really good. Just can you bridge the gap there? Like, so for sure.

Speaker 1 | 09:12.451

So that’s one thing that, um, we’re really passionate about. And as actually,

Speaker 0 | 09:16.372

well, no, I mean, I want to go back to, I want to go back to this. to the business college thing. Yeah. Go back to, so like, just paint the picture a little bit clearer. Are you saying we’re ending up with technical folks, but with no business acumen skills and why do they need those business acumen skills or what’s the, just a little bit more clarity on that piece there?

Speaker 1 | 09:36.783

Yeah. So, um, long story short, yes, they, they are coming out of these schools without the business knowledge that their predecessors had.

Speaker 0 | 09:45.909

And what is that particular business knowledge that they need to be successful in this particular environment here where we’ve got old IBM infrastructure?

Speaker 1 | 10:00.145

Yeah. So a lot of times that’s how typically does a distribution company operate? How typically does a financial institution operate? Because a lot of these programs that they’re working on were built specifically to handle that core business. I know I’m being fairly generic, but in essence, what they’re taught is the actual coding themselves, how to read it, but not necessarily the business logic behind it, if that makes sense. And so As these guys are retiring out, these new guns that are coming in are needing some help along the way. And so what’s great about IBM and the IBM iIndustry is there are resources available. And this is kind of the third prong of what we do, which is consulting and modernization to help bridge the gap, so to speak, as these new developers are coming into the industry. And part of that is then saying, okay, also… So learn your current environment, but you still have a lot to offer this company. You know these new languages that are probably going to modernize your environment. And if that’s the case, then start testing that out on a smaller space like Litmus Spaces, where you’re able to bring to your superior, hey, how about we test the waters for this cloud-hosted environment without moving everything over right now? Let’s just try this out. You’ll be able to see how it works. And then from there… Let’s move forward to potentially fully cloud. It’s where the industry is going in general. I mean, everyone used to have landlines, right? And now everyone has a cell phone in their pocket. It’s very similar to cloud-based. It’s almost to the point where it’s archaic to say, yeah, we manage and host our own system. Why aren’t you going cloud? Why aren’t you going to a place that’s going to have that entire production system for you? You don’t have to worry about SOX controls or all the other regulations that are coming out specifically. Kind of… getting ahead of myself a little bit, but it’s a great way to test the waters before making the plunge into fully cloud hosted.

Speaker 0 | 11:58.310

Okay. So before we dig more, dig more into the testing piece, I’m really fascinated by these, by these old school guys that are retiring and sitting in their house or on the ocean or their boat somewhere fishing where they could be charging some ridiculous amount in consulting fees to help fix broken. Where are some of the mistakes you’ve made? What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making? So do people give up on IBM ever and just say, hey, we’re going to migrate everything to this completely new infrastructure? And is that a big mistake? Because I can imagine that being one.

Speaker 1 | 12:32.600

So what’s, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 0 | 12:34.500

Just, you know, maybe hit on the top mistakes, challenges that you’re seeing.

Speaker 1 | 12:40.142

I would say, and this is a very general statement, but when people, you’ll hear a lot of people say, oh, this is archaic. We’re getting off of our IBM system. And then they try. and then realize how many tentacles are attached to it and how many other places this is actually tied to. And eventually it comes to the understanding of, actually, you know what? Let’s stay here and modernize because this is working for us. And we get back to how things were built to last. Nothing else compares to the longevity of an IBM iSystem. There’s nothing else out there that’s going to last that long, which means you’re not having to recompile your code. You’re not with the backward compatibility. you’re able to have confidence that what you are building is going to last long-term, which gives your customers confidence in your business.

Speaker 0 | 13:27.385

So we have something that doesn’t break, that lasts a long time. Backwards compatible, that blows my mind a little bit. So we’ve got backwards compatible and open some level of open source. Maybe, and I’m assuming that this… Just the fact, the knowledge base alone, there must be some level of security there where it must be secure just due to lack of knowledge that most people have. But maybe just talk, is there any other layers of security that we haven’t touched on?

Speaker 1 | 14:03.700

Yeah, so I guess security in general, when you’re managing your own on-prem system, you can control that pretty heavily. I guess the biggest question that I get when we’re saying, hey, we’re moving to the cloud. Uh, what about firewalls? What about like how, how secure is this cloud hosted environment? Um, what’s nice is you are able to control that firewall completely, at least with, with our environment and most out there, you have the keys completely. I mean, I, we, we have countless customers where we manage the hardware, but we can’t access anything because they hold all the keys. And so really the onus is on you, but it shouldn’t be any different than your current process as far as security is concerned. Um, yeah. everything’s encrypted nowadays. As long as you’re really having those controls in place in-house, it’s no different than what you’re currently doing for an on-prem system. I know it’s a very general, very…

Speaker 0 | 14:54.823

Well, let’s touch on a use case then. And if you can… can you think of a manufacturing example or a logistics example of some sort, specifically in that manufacturing space? Because we were talking about label printing and quite frankly, I work with a lot of mid-market companies that are in manufacturing. So if you’ve got a good example there, we can take it from start to finish and maybe kind of compare contrast. That would be great.

Speaker 1 | 15:23.518

Yeah. So a specific use case, I guess, for a cloud hosting environment, an environment. Yeah, you might have a label that needs to be printed, for example, for a particular order. Somebody is ordering something that then sends a ping to a warehouse of some kind that says, all right, I need to pull this off the shelf. I then need a label printed for it that our packaging department is going to then put on that package and then ship it out. That doesn’t just happen automatically, right? Somebody has to write that out. And from a security standpoint, that is all happening. via your firewalls that you are in control of. It’s just a matter of the data going to this off-site location where a data center is hosted. But that communication back and forth, the keys are all handled by your IT department specifically. I don’t know if that answers your question specifically, but that’s… No,

Speaker 0 | 16:20.342

it does. It doesn’t. Talking about the WAN and internet and all that stuff would be another conversation that I absolutely love talking about. but we’re not going to go there right now. I’m thinking more, give me an example of like the big example. Like someone comes to you, hey, we’ve got these AS400s. We’re thinking of replacing them and we’re thinking of not replacing them. We’re thinking of migrating to the cloud. What does that look like with you guys?

Speaker 1 | 16:47.541

Okay, fair question. So typically it depends on their current environment. Hopefully some of your listeners will know what I’m talking about. But- I’m amazed by how many customers will come to us that are on an old AS400, and they were on 5.4 specifically, so that’s an operating system number. So 5, just to compare that, IBM, this is pretty hot news, just released, or announced rather, that they are releasing version 7.4. So to go all the way back to 5.4 to now be like, this is where we’re at, 7.4. And by the way, IBM stopped support. on anything older, 7.1 or older. And some of these companies are still hosting their production systems on 5.4 is insane to me, but they can still do it because again, they were built to last. Now, if something happens, you don’t have support from IBM, but that’s where they were hosted. So in that case specifically, because we have a lot of those, we’ll say, okay, you send us your tapes specifically. So just duplicate and replicate everything you have and mail those to us. From there, we’ll actually do the conversion for you. from 5.4 to 7.3, because that’s the most up-to-date version. Sometimes that’s 7.2, depending on what you’re trying to do backwards compatibility-wise. And then from there, we’ll do what’s called a slip upgrade. Again, we’ll migrate that to 7.2, make sure everything that’s working properly. And then from there, once we’re set and good to go, we say, all right, here’s your credentials from logging in. And then you just basically flip the switch and now your production system is run on that cloud-hosted environment. It’s a way to modernize your current system without having a huge capital cost of buying a completely new system. Another example for that, if you’re trying to test the waters, would be a developer says, hey, I actually just want a smaller environment. For us, we’ve made that process super, super easy. You can actually go to our website, www.litmus.com. That’s L-I-T-M-I-S dot com. And specifically there, you can see exactly what your cost breakdown would be for a smaller machine. Typically, the smallest partition that we have is 480 CPW. I’m sure some of your listeners will know what I’m talking about. Two gigs of RAM, 250 gigs of disk. And from there, that’s enough to have a small enough sandbox environment to play around with. You hit accept. Two days later, we give you credentials that have full QSEC offer authority, which is absolutely mind-blowing. With a month-to-month commitment. And then we have a lot of customers that they’ll do a testing environment for about six months. And then from there, say, all right, I’m done with the system. Turn it off and we wait for the next person that needs it.

Speaker 0 | 19:29.044

Awesome. So very easy to do, a proof of concept, a safe, not overwhelming migration.

Speaker 1 | 19:38.392

Yep. Without a huge cash influx to make sure it’s going to work.

Speaker 0 | 19:41.755

Okay, awesome. What else you got? What are we forgetting here?

Speaker 1 | 19:46.912

Yeah, so I guess my charge out there would be, all right, if you’re waiting to go cloud, a lot of times this is timing, right? If someone just bought a system like three years ago, you’re going to want to wait until, all right, we’re ready to move. And so the biggest thing that I hear is a matter of timing. So let’s figure out a time that works for you to move over to a cloud environment. There are a multitude of vendors in the iView MySpace that have cloud hosted spaces available. For us, again, our big niche is that smaller, hey, let’s test the waters, or for a developer that is wanting to try out a newer language or compile code that they’re working on, they don’t necessarily want in their production or even testing box in their company specifically. So that’s my biggest charge is give us a look for sure to test it out. And I’d love to talk further to anybody else who’s interested or has very specific questions.

Speaker 0 | 20:40.778

Awesome. So we’re going to do just that. So anyone I asked Paul to give away something on the show. So what we’re going to do is a free one-hour, so free one-hour one-on-one consultation directly with Paul and myself, if you really want me there as well, because I can help with fiber optic internet, the WAN, the connection to data centers, stuff like that, speeding up network in the cloud, at least between locations also. Eliminating MPLS, if any of you are still paying. drastic amounts for MPLS, we can help with that as well. So we’re going to do a free 60-minute one-on-one consultation. You can go to krangletech.com. You can reach out to me via LinkedIn. Very easy to find me on LinkedIn as well. Just search the most bearded man in telecom on LinkedIn. The most bearded man in telecom on LinkedIn. Message me. We’ll give you that free one-on-one. I have a calendar set up for this. Uh, Paul is very happy to sit down and talk with you guys for an hour. Um, no cost. He does this all day, every day, every single day. And, uh, we’ll go from there. Paul, it’s been great to talk with you, man. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 21:52.842

Likewise, Phil. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.