Speaker 0 | 00:09.607

Welcome everyone listening to Telecom Radio 1. We’re starting off here. I’m talking with John Larson today. And the conversation’s been so good just talking with you for the first five minutes that I really wanted to just tell you to shut up and let me record. But guys, welcome everyone listening to Telecom Radio 1. Today, talking with John Larson, he is the manager of Enterprise Infrastructure Services and Engineering at CHS, and in parentheses, Network Computer Storage, in short, IT stuff. So man, first of all, thank you for being on the show. We have a lot of great stories to talk about today. First, I’d like to know why you manage network connections on tugboats. Well, first, just tell me a little bit about CHS because it’s a great company, Fortune 100. You guys have a co-op or support a co-op model. So maybe just tell me a little bit about that.

Speaker 1 | 01:09.519

Sure. And thank you very much for having me on. It’s a first of all, CHS, like you said, great company. As far as, you know, a technologist to try to deliver services. This is this is a very, very interesting case and quite frankly, very challenging. in that this is very, or it’s atypical as far as organizations, because this is not a hierarchy in which we can kind of say, this is how you’re going to do it. This cooperative model represents 600,000 American or North American farmers. Our board of directors is comprised of farmers. You have to be a farmer, an actual practitioner, one of those 600,000 North American farmers in order to sit on the board. So it is a very… unique you know kind of model so when i say we’re gonna do this they can say yeah that’s funny and they go do whatever they want so um i need to build a business case that you know um captures you know their interest farmer yeah

Speaker 0 | 02:13.164

this is getting better is this is getting better by the minute well i first of all no i’m not well you don’t even grow like you don’t even have like i eat a lot like a tomato plant or something i mean you’ve got to have something that you’ve got to i have uh

Speaker 1 | 02:27.296

I have lots of weeds and I, I’m reluctant to mow the lawn when I should. So let’s just say, yes, I consider myself a farmer of all the wrong things. But no, I, having grown up in Minnesota, certainly, you know, agriculture is a big deal. This, you know, just being in that environment. That being said, until I applied to CHS, you know, a week. before I applied to CHS, I had zero idea what CHS was other than the fact that it is the brand that is displayed on the side of the St. Paul Saints Minor League Baseball Stadium. Well, that’s cool. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 03:09.496

So tell me a little bit about, I know a little bit about a co-op, but I don’t know kind of vaguely from like, you know, what the human mind can come up with, what a co-op is. But can you give us maybe just the general definition of a co-op? real quick. Even though it has nothing really to do with IT, I think it’s an important thing to know.

Speaker 1 | 03:26.644

Yeah, absolutely. And actually, it does intersect with IT pretty well. And we’ll explore that in a bit, I think. So the cooperative model, of course, is, you know, if you’re a farmer, and you’re, you know, getting really good at growing that one crop or two crops that you grow, you get to a point where, you know, you and your kids and that are sick of eating your beans, and you want to, you know, eat, you know, corn. And so you, you work out a deal with your neighbors that you, you give some of your beans for some of their corn. So now you’re cooperating. It’s like when I worked at,

Speaker 0 | 04:01.412

you know, the pizza place and we just were sick of eating pizza. And we said like, Hey, Burger King guy, can we trade burgers with you?

Speaker 1 | 04:10.199

Yep. And at 10 minutes before close, you dropped off your two pizzas and you picked up that sack of, of, uh, okay. That’s a really terrible analogy.

Speaker 0 | 04:18.106

That someone at your company is going to hate me.

Speaker 1 | 04:21.812

Well, no, the funny thing is I worked at McDonald’s and of course we did the same thing with the local pizza place. So, but yeah, funny stuff. But yeah, so that is indeed the cooperative model. And as you start to scale that, you realize, you know, beans and corn aren’t getting it done and you start to need other types of products. Well, so as you start to broaden out and need access to additional markets, you start to add. to that cooperative model in order to be able to access those additional markets. At the same time, you start to realize that through economies of scale, you can gain additional buying power. And so that is born, that local then regional kind of cooperative. And in North America, there’s about 2,200 agricultural cooperatives, of which about 1,100 fall under the CHS brand. And the C in CHS comes from Cenex, the HS from Harvest States. Those two merged about a decade and a half ago to become CHS, which isn’t actually an acronym, it’s CHS. But that comprises kind of this huge global cooperative that really is there to serve those 600,000 North American farmers so that they can best, you know, sell their grain. And what it does is gives them access to markets throughout the entire globe. Meaning that a bunch of those farmers, instead of them having to figure out how to get soybeans to China, know that they, through this organization that they are owners of, can fill up 110 cars of a train that goes out to the Pacific Northwest and gets loaded on a ship that is coordinated by this entity that they own and gets sent over to a port that they part own to get distributed to both state and country. private entities within China. So that model is played out across a bunch of different products.

Speaker 0 | 06:32.159

Really awesome. It must be great to go into a company every day that’s at least exciting and rewarding to work at. Not everyone has that. Not everyone has that. So good for you. Now that segues to the next point, which we were talking about earlier, which is you have to manage network connections. Now you said whether this matters or not, of course it matters. Every network, every end point matters. But you’ve got end points that are even on tugboats, which I thought was cool. I think after that description, you just told me now it makes sense as to why you’d have a tugboat. But when’s the last time you’ve had to troubleshoot a tugboat?

Speaker 1 | 07:08.852

Well, either my team is really good because they don’t tell me when they have to or really bad because they don’t tell me when they have to. But, you know, those are metrics I probably should be collecting. But to be honest with you. That’s one of the exciting things really for me about CHS is we are so large that there is problems that I and my team have to solve that I could not make up. And two years ago, it was, you know, we have tugboats that need, you know, access to these applications. How are you going to solve for that? And so that thrust us into the.

Speaker 0 | 07:48.388

you know is there cat six waterproof um you know i need 10 miles of it i mean you know what and and now what do we do um it’s not only it’s not great yet it wasn’t right yeah it actually is now now we’re seeing 100 meg downloads with some satellite stuff right

Speaker 1 | 08:03.994

so cellular was kind of just hitting its stride a little bit there and but then you have coverage issues and the lucky thing is you know those tug bolts do at least stick close to you know, certain areas of concentration.

Speaker 0 | 08:19.017

So hopefully with not many big buildings in between, unless you’re in New York.

Speaker 1 | 08:22.940

Right.

Speaker 0 | 08:23.380

But once you would have good cell phone coverage there. So gotcha. So it makes sense. So then we were talking about the cradle point, bringing in a cradle point, at least having two connections. So that makes sense. Any SD-WAN stuff like in the arena there? Are you playing around with SD-WAN yet for bandwidth aggregation and stuff like that?

Speaker 1 | 08:41.653

Yeah, we have. One of the challenges specifically with… being an agricultural co-op is most of our sites are in the most, you know, remote places that they could be. So getting any type of good service to them is hard. So early on, you know, we had a lot of providers that would come and tell us the story of, you know, you can get rid of your MPLS and, and get, you know, the same amount, you know, five nines through doing SD-WAN. And I would tell them, you know, if I could get two companies to actually provide the service, that would be a… That would be great.

Speaker 0 | 09:15.824

I could get something other than DSL and dial-up. Like, will DSL and dial-up work?

Speaker 1 | 09:20.306

Yeah, when I’m looking at, you know, 256 up and, you know, 3 meg down on a good day, you know, call me back. But so that being said, you know, quite frankly, things have gotten a lot better. And there’s been a lot of programs that have really driven fiber, you know, and Ethernet out to those locations now. So we’re really being able to take advantage of that. So yes, SD-WAN is something we’ve started to roll out here. The Bip Tele product is what we’re positioning. A lot of that because we were already, you know, a Cisco shop before that. And, you know, that is a… from what we’ve seen, you know, very compelling product. And quite frankly, I really like the B analytics and, and a lot of the, the what actually is going across the network. So I can have those conversations with the business to say, um, I know you don’t think that, you know, that’s driving a lot of costs, but it really is. Um, so,

Speaker 0 | 10:18.274

um, yeah, yeah. The, when you start to break down the, I guess if we’re going to get into return on investment, but really exciting mathematics there, that’s very complicated. But, um, I When you get into those ROI models, there is a ton of labor and various different things that factor in that really do make a difference. Absolutely. You have such a great history. I mean, you were with Target for 10 years as well. I’m sure we could talk a ton there. That might be fun. But what’s really exciting to me is your first experience with VoIP back in 1999. We were talking before the call. I remember the whole Y2K thing. my friend shut the breaker off at 12 o’clock on New Year’s to try and scare everyone that Y2K actually happened. But more exciting, 1999, I mean, VoIP has changed a lot since then. You’ve got some experience, you know, in the Marines with Cisco. And that story, that story, I think, is really what we need to talk about today, or at least a good portion of it. So why don’t we just go there right now? Because 1999 and VoIP. everyone hated Voight back then, but not you.

Speaker 1 | 11:29.478

Well, yeah, it was a great time. I, you know, joined the Marine Corps a little later in life than most. I was 28 when I joined. So when I got to my first duty station and I was kind of, when I joined the Marine, I just joined the Marines, I just wanted to be a Marine. So I didn’t really care about rank. So when I did get to my duty station, I was, you know, at, you know, very low rank. So I… was, you know, fortunate to be at least a little older and viewed as more mature and responsible. Also, it was beneficial that I wasn’t yet tied to anything. So they had a need, I guess, of someone to do something. And I just happened to be the right person in the right place at the right time. So they pointed me towards some boxes in the back and said, we need you to figure out how to get all this working. And here’s why. And what it was is boxes of a couple of call manager servers and two DT24 plus gateway cards for CRI.

Speaker 0 | 12:35.282

How did they think? Okay, so how did you get chosen for that? Like, what level of experience did you have for them throwing some boxes of Cisco call managers in the corner?

Speaker 1 | 12:44.626

Honestly. My heart was beating. That was, I believe. I made it in on time the first day, I guess.

Speaker 0 | 12:52.127

I look at Cisco nowadays when I look at Cisco and a call manager, I look at Cisco from a voice perspective. It’s not the, I wouldn’t say it’s like, you know, keep it simple, stupid. Right. I wouldn’t say it’s like, you know, the simple, the easy way. Right. Like I wouldn’t say this is the easy way to go do, do anything. So anyways, good. Go on please.

Speaker 1 | 13:11.362

Yeah. I’d like to be able to say that they saw some brilliance in me that, that showed them that I was, you know, I was Neil. So, um, Well, yeah, I’m not going to go ahead and agree with that.

Speaker 0 | 13:23.890

Do you know how to use a computer? I mean,

Speaker 1 | 13:25.871

did they ask you that? I had used phones before. No, so I did go to school for a small computer systems specialist, which interestingly enough in the Marine Corps is, here’s how to troubleshoot a sound card. Go at it. You’re good to go. Now here’s your rifle. Go win wars. So they knew that I was at least… trained in some form or fashion within, you know, this vocation, I guess. But at the same time, you know, that there, in retrospect, there is no reason that they should have trusted me with something this potentially important, but it is what it is. And I think, you know, the story turned out at least fortunate for me. So. So what’d you do?

Speaker 0 | 14:11.367

I mean, honestly, what’d you do? You open these boxes? There’s no instruction packet, is there?

Speaker 1 | 14:14.888

I mean. Yeah, well. Yeah, there’s some funny stories there too. So we broke it open and the intent was to have, so the Marine Forces Reserve, and so I was stationed in New Orleans, I was active duty, but the Marine or that particular location in New Orleans was the headquarters for the 184 remote sites throughout the country that were reserve sites.

Speaker 0 | 14:38.738

And so-And just to break this down before we get into the weeds here, how many phones did you have to deploy back in 1999?

Speaker 1 | 14:46.293

Uh, so a hundred, two to each of those 184. So what is that?

Speaker 0 | 14:50.193

So 300. So that’s pretty good. I mean, we would call that like a mid market company, not it’s government, but, but for anyone that says, you know, you know, you know, VoIP is like a nightmare and you know, we got to stay on our PBX, you know, forever. Right. that’s like, you’re doing this in 1999. So if the government’s doing it, that’s probably the best argument for VoIP that could be, especially if you’re doing it back in, or worst argument, I don’t know for our government. I don’t really know which one’s better, but you’re doing this in 1999, 300 some odd phones roll out. All right, continue.

Speaker 1 | 15:25.471

Yeah. And again, to the brilliance of the decision of me, I had no idea whether that was a lot or a little or nothing. So I went into it as a, well, it must be, must be rudimentary if they’re picking me to do it. Right. So here we are. Crazy. Yeah. So, you know, get the servers installed or, you know, the racked stack, get the media in there. Yeah. You know, installed, you know, basically next, next, next, because who am I to make a decision one way or another here? We have our, my Cisco SE was there to help. He, which I like to remind him because he had a, his CCIE. had a two-digit number, I believe, associated with it. So, I would remind him that he was, that was when it was an entry-level test.

Speaker 0 | 16:14.629

Two-digit number. I want to get him on the show.

Speaker 1 | 16:17.670

Well, he, I’d have to, I’d rack my brain to try to figure out, but it truly was prior to the CCIE really being a CCIE test that, you know, had that crazy level of respect to it, not saying that it shouldn’t at that level.

Speaker 0 | 16:30.636

I wonder who was number one.

Speaker 1 | 16:32.276

Yeah, I don’t, well, he might even know, but this was, again. at a time when he wasn’t that much help, believe me. And I can get into that more.

Speaker 0 | 16:43.280

More evidence as to why we don’t need these things. Well,

Speaker 1 | 16:50.862

I’ll foreshadow a little bit in the future, and that’s when we’re bringing up Unity a year or so later when they made that acquisition. And I’m struggling for weeks, and I’m telling him, I’m not getting anywhere. I’m calling tech. They don’t have any help for me. And a couple of weeks later, he comes back and says, I didn’t give you the second disc of the media. That’s why. I’m like, you’re killing me here. And nowhere did the first disc ever say, please put in the second disc at all. And, of course, it was just burn media that he gave me as opposed to anything with instructions.

Speaker 0 | 17:28.679

Like a carpe.

Speaker 1 | 17:30.380

Yeah, exactly. But, you know, hey, it worked. before with the other one well I didn’t work this time you know so okay but at any rate so yeah so we got a lit up and and I was immersed in you know route groups and you know route patterns and and all of that which I guess when you don’t have anything to compare it to or any bias towards any other type of way to lay that out seemed completely logical to me I had the benefit of going over to Plano, Texas where the Celsius, oh, and I was going to mention the labeling on everything was all Celsius. The boxes were still Celsius at that time because the acquisition had just happened earlier that year for Cisco. Maybe it was less than a year since the acquisition when we bought them. Maybe that’s what it was. But so the SP12 plus phones were the older style phones that Celsius had built or, you know, had created for this. And

Speaker 0 | 18:32.874

What was the model number on that phone? What were the model numbers? Do you remember?

Speaker 1 | 18:35.936

Yeah. SP12+.

Speaker 0 | 18:38.898

SP12+. I’m just looking this up. I got to get a picture of one of these for the… Anyways, keep going.

Speaker 1 | 18:44.502

Yeah, I can picture them pretty well. They look like really your boxy 2500 set of your old kind of phone. I mean, it actually looked like a hardened Stu phone in a DoD kind of world, except it wasn’t hardened in DoD. from the 1970s. It was truly,

Speaker 0 | 19:04.516

uh, I mean, I’m used to like 79 sixties and twenties that used to see on 24 forever that we’re on every television show, you know?

Speaker 1 | 19:11.361

So that’s a Ferrari compared to this, um, K car. Um, I would say so, but, uh, but these were, these were great. They, they absolutely did exactly what they, they needed to do. And, uh, so we got, I got them out to two to each of the 184 sites, one to the, the CEO, the other one to the. admin chief typically who I would mostly interface with yeah or the IT chief usually that’s the same person um and we were rocking and rolling and what kind of internet did you guys have at all these uh yeah good question we had a a frame relay network um frame

Speaker 0 | 19:48.930

really I haven’t heard forever yeah and it was uh

Speaker 1 | 19:53.093

I mean I was trying to think prior to uh our conversation exactly what the speeds were and it was

Speaker 0 | 19:59.852

you know pitiful i mean you only had two phones you had only had two phones at every yeah so you know you had at least like a meg you had at least like yeah right okay well no i think it was

Speaker 1 | 20:12.300

768k was it 711 where we’d run in like no actually we were running g723.1 which is the most compressed um okay so that was fine yeah it had a good mod score quite frankly at 3.6 versus you know 3.8 3.9 we were good with it

Speaker 0 | 20:28.932

uh these were you know these are marines they’re used to looking at the ratings you only have a couple calls going on at one time there’s like two phones in every location right so you’re looking at what like max

Speaker 1 | 20:38.119

70k you know what it would be 23 and 23 or something is that right yeah actually the g723.1 was i think only like an eight and so with overhead it was less than 22k per call or so um so yeah zero cir though so we learned kind of going into it um on the you know as we went that frame relay with no CIR might not be the best, you know, drafting packets isn’t the best thing for voice, but you know, good learning. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 21:07.942

So what was the call quality like when you, okay, so you roll all this crap out. What do you do? You drive, do you send the phones to all these places and say, Hey, plug this in this way? Or I mean, what do you guys do? Yep.

Speaker 1 | 21:17.509

That was exactly it. Send it out and say, all right, you’re going to do, you know, this key combination. It’s going to bring up this menu. You’re going to type in this IP address. Uh, we didn’t use DHCP on the phones at that time. Um, we did kind of, or at least in the beginning, we didn’t, we did as we moved farther along. Uh, but we didn’t really understand, you know, putting, um, you know, the DP option 150 and kind of all that. We weren’t that far advanced yet, um, in the early stages. Um, but.

Speaker 0 | 21:50.587

So. You get it all out. What about troubleshooting? What was troubleshooting like? Was there call quality issues? Did anyone ever complain or was like, that’s it, we’re done?

Speaker 1 | 21:58.532

Yeah, not really.

Speaker 0 | 21:59.133

Mission accomplished?

Speaker 1 | 22:00.574

Yeah. And so by, I think, early November of 99, they were all out there and people were using them. And quite frankly, call quality was fine. The network that we had was pretty well suited to the amount of traffic that we really experienced. Yeah. The chance that somebody would be on one of those phone calls when there was some kind of ingress or egress problem is pretty rare. So call quality was fine. People didn’t really have any issue. The caveat was it was just a call. There was no additional services associated at that time.

Speaker 0 | 22:41.850

You know what’s a deeper story and a more… even eye-opening story would be how did those boxes get into the corner where they told you to open them even just how those boxes got there to begin with is another whole story as to how some guy sold those boxes to somebody and they ended up in the corner and they told you hey go put them in so i know that answer too you do okay because there’s got to be some ridiculous that just is absolutely absurd it’s like hey you know Let’s be real detailed with the rollout process. Let’s make sure we get the right people involved. You know, like that’s normally what I’m talking about. You know, let’s make sure everything right ahead of time. Instead, it was like some guy sold something and threw some boxes in the corner. Then they told a random guy, you to go put them in.

Speaker 1 | 23:25.431

So the taxpayer union might cringe at this, but this was my understanding in this. So it might be hearsay. But my understanding was, you know, you maintain, especially if you’re the G6, which is the IT department of a headquarters element. you had this list of hey this would be cool to buy and play around with and we got money to spend we have to spend it well actually this was somebody else called up and says hey i have this left over my budget can you spend it yep and

Speaker 0 | 23:56.482

uh the trigger was pulled and uh yep i have never seen more i’ve seen and this is maybe i hope i don’t get like shot for this or maybe i’m dead or something you know but i’ve never seen more money spent when i lived in dc i mean i saw you Whole businesses exist just to help some guy that’s a butt in the seat in the government spend money.

Speaker 1 | 24:17.345

Right. So the headquarters element of the Marine Forces Reserve is in New Orleans. For the Marine Forces active duty is Quantico, Virginia. So the same rules apply there. It’s just less scrutiny, less brass, less press in New Orleans.

Speaker 0 | 24:35.070

Well, good for the Cisco guy finding.

Speaker 1 | 24:38.151

For sure.

Speaker 0 | 24:38.811

Oh. uh and it hey and look at and look at what it did it moved us forward in the world of technology okay so uh that whole the whole this whole reason for being is is what’s created technology to move forward and kept us ahead in the future that that’s gonna be our argument for spending that yeah that’s right um you know we could go we go along there now Um, what else did we have here? There was, there was something else that we had to talk about as to.

Speaker 1 | 25:08.315

So I think from that experience, so, um, I think the real, like, as you mentioned, kind of driving at least that industry forward. Um, so that was all for Y2K. So the reason was to get those phones out there. So in case Y2K created, you know, gridlock and, and a whole bunch of people on the phones or took down the traditional. PSTN, we had some other way to mobilize those Marines to help prevent, you know, chaos. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 25:35.935

disaster, disaster avoidance. Right. So we were selling, we’re selling on disaster avoidance during Y2K.

Speaker 1 | 25:41.339

Yeah. Somebody thought that the frame relay network would work even if the phone systems didn’t. I’m not sure about the logic there, but that, that at least was, was where it was coming from. So once we get beyond that point though,

Speaker 0 | 25:53.950

I mean, VoIP does provide a quite a wide range of disaster avoidance. and masters at the same time.

Speaker 1 | 26:02.235

Well, and your phone follows you wherever you are. That’s a huge DR benefit for that product set right now. As far as the industry moving forward, what came after that when we realized that, well, that was kind of silly. We now though started to think about this still is a very powerful kind of architecture in that it’s not… based on, it’s not tied to the copper that is facility specific. It’s now virtual. And what can we do with that? And for us, we had a problem where our remote sites, those units would up and just move across town for no real reason. And when they did that, we would have to abandon a key system we bought months before. And… buy a new key system at the tune of $25,000. Now,

Speaker 0 | 26:58.323

why would you buy it? Why wouldn’t you just move the key system? I don’t get it. And I’m playing devil’s advocate here. Like, why leave it? I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.

Speaker 1 | 27:05.367

Well, in a lot of cases, yeah, we’re co-located with a Navy unit that doesn’t leave. So now, yeah. So now we can’t take it away from them. So, um.

Speaker 0 | 27:16.193

And were you building VPNs for extension dialing or no one cared? It was just call a different number type of thing. Uh,

Speaker 1 | 27:21.376

so when we started rolling it out, we were doing. full service. And so that was kind of the next iteration. So what we did was at that point in time, say we can, we can do centralized hosted voice really with this product. The extending the network via this, you know, frame relay layer two piece means that it doesn’t matter if that phone is, you know, a thousand miles away or 10 feet away, the network doesn’t care. And so we We decided to move in that direction. It was interesting. The response we got back from Cisco was, well, you can’t do that, but we can sell you call managers at all these sites. Our answer to that was, well, that’s no different than buying key systems for all these sites. You’re missing the point.

Speaker 0 | 28:06.585

This is where we really get into the, yeah, this is great.

Speaker 1 | 28:09.467

Yeah. And so our answer to them was, you know, it was weird. We’re in a position to have to explain routing to Cisco. No, you’re missing the point. We’re going to centralize the call managers. put the phones at the edge and support them there. And they kind of said, well, you can’t do that. Telephony, you have to have remote survivability. And we said, well, let’s do that. I mean, there is a gateway that’s capable of terminating voice circuits at there. Why can’t the router provide that local survivability? And all of a sudden, Cisco started to do Cisco stuff. And… survival remote site telephony became a path. And I got the benefit of actually being a beta test engineer on Vespa, which was what grew into survival remote site telephony, or that was the code name of that code. And, you know, got input into that. And even prior to it being…

Speaker 0 | 29:10.934

We could call you like the father of VoIP.

Speaker 1 | 29:14.096

Well, I don’t know. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

Speaker 0 | 29:18.018

The father of centralized Cisco VoIP who told Cisco, like,

Speaker 1 | 29:23.001

I don’t, so I was part of the conversation. I don’t know that I was the only part of the conversation, but we definitely at that time, you know, I think influenced, I should say we definitely influenced what functionality went in there and how it went in there and kind of when and maybe the timeline. Because prior to it even being a general release product, we were. We were rolling out Vespa code when it was still code name Vespa code and given to us as beta. We were rolling it out to sites and… you know, hanging phones and using that as that military sites.

Speaker 0 | 30:00.260

So you guys centralized it. You guys centralized it. It worked. I wonder if you were like one of, were you guys one of the first to do that? Like, I mean, honestly,

Speaker 1 | 30:09.125

I would, I would guess. Yes. I don’t know of anybody within the DOD that beat us. And we actually went to Marine Corps headquarters and trained them on what we were doing. And We talked to, so that was in Quantico, and talked to a lot of other DOD folks that came and looked and kind of, you know, hung out with us from other branches. And that was new to them as well, what we were doing. They were familiar with the idea, but they weren’t doing anything, you know, remotely close to that.

Speaker 0 | 30:44.112

That’s just such a great story. You have another really good story, which is kind of when you… Just to kind of move into the leadership piece, fast forward all these years, all this experience, just to kind of turn the tables a little bit here. You came into a situation where you had a bunch of different groups. Maybe you can talk more about the leadership here, maybe not working very well together, everyone thinking they were going to be the right way to go. Sure. And you kind of had to manage that human aspect, that human factor and technology altogether. Let’s kind of… Maybe just give me a little bit of background on that one or tell that story.

Speaker 1 | 31:23.860

Sure. I think you’re alluding to CHS, my current role, and I came into it three years ago as the kind of converged infrastructure manager. And that role was created specifically because the server storage team, which at that time owned the collaboration tools of email and really kind of that communication piece, as well as the telephony team. And… the network team here at CHS and all three of those teams, you know, didn’t necessarily get along super well together. And so from an operational perspective, you know, there was, there’s some opportunities there. At the same time, CHS was at a point within its major, you know, headquarters campuses, but even at its remote sites where it had legacy, you know, technology and it needed to make a decision on that. And it had, you know, that incumbent manufacturer, as well as its network, you know, manufacturer and its productivity suite and desktop suite manufacturer kind of all saying, you know, we’re the way of the future. We’re, you know, the way to go with your new, you know, voice path. And if you don’t go with us, you know, you’re going to be left behind. And, of course, everybody has. great references, everybody has great stories and case studies that they can provide as to why they’re the best. And so CHS was really stuck in that analysis paralysis phase of who do we believe? And if we pick one way, how does that negatively impact this other major part and very important part of our technical ecosystem?

Speaker 0 | 33:10.690

What was kind of the overall, the overarching problem that really needed to be solved?

Speaker 1 | 33:15.773

Well, yeah, so the… The phone system that we had in the building, specifically serving our main campus, needed to be refreshed, needed a significant amount of money put into it. It was all still digital handsets mostly, so it either needed to be switched to IP, which was a considerable cost for like-for-like handsets, or switch out with a new manufacturer’s handset, which would… would bring in IP at that time or do something completely different. At the same time, you know, the desire to have things more integrated and be able to use, you know, some higher functionality was there. Also, disaster recovery, there were plans, but in looking through the plans, it was pretty easy for me to say, you know, as a telephony person, I see what you’re trying to do here. That’s not going to work the way that you think it’s going to work. And, uh,

Speaker 0 | 34:18.637

nice.

Speaker 1 | 34:19.238

Yeah. It’s a great example.

Speaker 0 | 34:20.859

What was one of the plans that was just, you know, not well, a lot of times we, a lot of times people sell like this, they sell like the dream, right. But right. Or people get sold the dream. And, uh, I don’t know what happens after the fact is a completely different thing. Or they get sold on features and benefits and no one ever talks about, well, now we’re going to hand you off to a project manager. And, uh, you know, something else happens. But anyways, what was not going to work?

Speaker 1 | 34:46.838

Well, it was, so, you know, what do we do for disaster recovery? So, okay, we’re going to rent this space. This space is going to deliver us phones and they’re going to, you know, give us phone numbers that we can dial into to bring these phones. Okay, great. You know, excellent. You know, what phone numbers are going to point to these phones? Well, we’re not sure. You know, what? Who’s going to make that decision? Who, at what point in time, you know, you know, who decides to flip the switch? Which switch gets flipped? You know, how are you going to flip the switch? Are you, are you forwarding calls in our PBX? What happens if your PBX is down? You know, where does that configuration lie? So all that stuff was, you know, I would say the predecessors, you know, just kind of doing their best to do what they thought was a comprehensive, you know, somewhat checking the box of, yes, we have our, our, you know, eggs covered in our basket. But, you know, when you started to, you know, say, all right, in this scenario, what happens if this happens? You know, there weren’t answers there. So being able to come up with something that solves all that at the same time as solving these other things were, you know, was kind of the… the to-do, if you will. And one of the first things that I concentrated on and what was great, at least when I came into this role at CHS, was I was easily able to recognize that it wasn’t that they didn’t know what answer to land on. It’s that they didn’t fully realize that their question had changed. The question was not what kind of phones you need. It’s… how do you really want to communicate with yourselves and your customers as a company? And is it time for that evolution? And it was. And they just needed someone to say, yes, it’s time and you’ll be okay. And so now…

Speaker 0 | 36:55.644

What do you end up doing?

Speaker 1 | 36:56.645

So we, you know, so Microsoft owned the desktop and we already paid for the entire Skype. you know, suite of,

Speaker 0 | 37:05.150

you went to the, you went Skype for business.

Speaker 1 | 37:09.254

Yeah. Skype for business. We already had E4 actually at the time. So we were paying for the phone system.

Speaker 0 | 37:15.479

Oh, you were paying for the phone system, $4 license or whatever that is nowadays. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 37:20.744

Yeah. We, we did the a la carte uptick on that and then spread in. Uh, so now we’re a mixture of E5 and E3, uh, but on-prem and, um, Again, the decision there was pretty easy because we had an on-prem instance already because I am, and they were doing screen sharing with it. So my decision, if you will, or at least my recommendation that was ratified was let’s just use what we have because it’s capable of doing what you want, and let’s not pay anything else. If that should prove to not be. sufficient, people will take our money and we’ll be able to do a lot of other things if we need to. But I’m betting that this will prove out to be more than capable of doing what we want it to do. And three years later, our 1,100 person campus is fully cut over with the exception of a handful of people that have some specific recording needs. And actually those will be moved pretty soon. And um, the entire, you know, everybody loves it. Um, you know, there is no hard phones anymore. Oh, really? Yeah. Acceptance of safety. And, and I, I don’t, I don’t want to sound like I was, you know, um, had this great vision. Uh, I was the Cisco phone guy at target who said, that’ll never work. People are never going to get rid of their phones. They’re never going to go with it.

Speaker 0 | 38:53.595

You can have a, you can have a public commerce Cisco phone on Skype for business. I no reason why you couldn’t do that. So you could have a Cisco phone. Are you guys doing, are you direct with Microsoft or are you using a partner, a direct partner?

Speaker 1 | 39:08.025

Yeah, for the most part, direct with Microsoft, you know, really good partnership there. And quite frankly, we’re big enough where we have, you know, good direct partnerships with almost all of our vendors. Certainly there’s a lot of vendors that go through VARs and we do purchase mostly through VARs. But at the same time, our relationship is almost always, through the manufacturer with paperwork a lot of times through bars. So we usually bring them both to the table. Again, just because we are at a scale where we can kind of pull that off. We know that that’s not always, you know, the case for others. But at the same time, we’re… We do love to partner with other companies to, you know,

Speaker 0 | 39:53.236

sometimes you’re sometimes depending on the size where you’re at. Sometimes you get the, you get the support that you want from Microsoft. And sometimes if you’re not big enough, you don’t get the support you want. That’s kind of why I was in there. And then so are you guys going to do the, the, are you on teams now? So are we fully, are we upgraded to teams and everyone’s using teams or what?

Speaker 1 | 40:16.280

So we’re dabbling with Teams. We actually do use Teams a lot for, well, I should say certain parts of the organization, especially the IT part, are starting to use Teams a lot. Certainly the writing’s on the wall that that is where we’re going to eventually get to. We’re so new on our rollout of, here’s Skype, here’s the new way to do things. that were reluctant to say, hey, I know we said this is the new way to do things, but guess what? There’s a newer, newer way to do things. We’re not quite ready to do that yet.

Speaker 0 | 40:55.080

Maybe the new thing should be changed. The thing that you guys need to be prepared for is that things are going to change all the time. That’s the new thing.

Speaker 1 | 41:03.203

Right. I think when the conversation is Skype is now called Teams, that’ll be a more consumable message. I guess we’ll do that then.

Speaker 0 | 41:16.617

So, hey, for anyone out there, for anyone out there listening, do you have any tips or tricks or any, I don’t know, secret weapons or anything like that, that, or final message that you would like to leave for anyone out there listening today?

Speaker 1 | 41:31.727

I would just say that, you know, when I came to CHS, there was a lot of fear around going down, you know, this path or, you know, kind of any path, especially with the modern, you know, weather. it be hosted voice or that, a lot of the negativity that people will bring about is, you know, three, four or five years old. And, you know, quite frankly, the world changes in two years or one year. So that stuff from five years ago, in a lot of ways, is no longer relevant. But really, you know, so I’m not saying there isn’t reasons to be cautious. E-911, you know. how you’re doing locationality, all of that is completely different in this world and you better understand it. That’s legit,

Speaker 0 | 42:18.540

but no one ever talks about it, right? People talk about like, oh no, VoIP is the enemy or VoIP is this, but that’s really not, E911 is a legit, is an absolute legitimate thing to get right.

Speaker 1 | 42:30.446

Yeah, for sure. And I’d be available and I mean, I don’t know what, I guess I should ask beforehand what your stance on this is, but I’m perfectly… willing to, uh, to have people reach out to me and talk about this or anything or, or come on again or, you know, whatever you want. But, um, E911 is something that I’m, um, super more versed in than I, than I would rather would like to be, I guess, uh, because of, uh, you know, certainly with, uh, designing systems for, for target, um, in several States and now in CHS with several States, uh, it is something like, like you said, it’s, it’s a legit concern that you don’t want to get wrong, uh, especially. when lives are at stake, it’s, that’s not the kind of publicity that any, any organization wants. So, um,

Speaker 0 | 43:17.644

I’ve never heard of a really bad E911 horror story, but I’m sure it’s happened before.

Speaker 1 | 43:22.607

Well, and it’s not, I mean,

Speaker 0 | 43:24.528

I have heard of them happening in the day when people would be on like a shared tenant server and they would take a phone home or send a phone and, uh, you know what I mean? Like just send it out to someone’s home office and they dial that. or someone dialed it, but it was usually by mistake that someone dialed 911, and that’s how they figured it out. But I’ve never had a real bad someone died E911 horse tournament. Obviously, it’s definitely somewhere.

Speaker 1 | 43:50.461

I think the only one that comes to mind is I think it’s Kari’s Law that is a legislation that says that you have to be able to just dial 911 as well as dial 9911 on any phone. for it to reach the PSAP because there was a child who kept dialing 911 and it wasn’t going through because she didn’t get an outside line. So that legislation has changed. But yeah, you’re right. Luckily, that hasn’t been thrust to the forefront, but that is something that I bring up at least once a week or so in conversation to say, be cognizant of this because this is not… this is not something we want hitting the front page in any community that we’re in.

Speaker 0 | 44:40.370

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 44:41.150

So,

Speaker 0 | 44:41.711

so back to the advice,

Speaker 1 | 44:43.592

uh,

Speaker 0 | 44:43.932

fear and negativity. So fear, four years old. Um, yeah, people are talking about it.

Speaker 1 | 44:49.275

Uh, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 44:49.855

As if it’s. As if it’s new.

Speaker 1 | 44:52.449

Right. And don’t be afraid to challenge the, do you really, do you really need the phone construct as you, as, as it’s been for, you know, 40 years or.

Speaker 0 | 45:03.178

I mean like a piece of plastic sitting on the desk.

Speaker 1 | 45:05.100

Right. Exactly. Is it, you know, take it up, take it up a step. Is it. Do we really need to buy a new mousetrap or can we start thinking about using a cat? You know,

Speaker 0 | 45:15.006

some significant end users there, though. I mean, so you made that argument to at least eleven hundred people to get rid of a physical phone.

Speaker 1 | 45:23.130

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 45:23.551

And how they deal with that. I mean, because honestly, headsets aren’t cheap headsets. I mean, my job or pro was at least two hundred fifty bucks when I bought it. You know, so.

Speaker 1 | 45:32.595

So, yeah, for sure. Well, and. And the thing is, the phones that they were displacing were already paid for and already depreciated and already off the books.

Speaker 0 | 45:40.120

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 45:40.800

Yeah. So it did pay for itself, though, because of, you know, the replacement costs. But at the same time, all the savings that came with it, the real pieces I’ve introduced or not I, we’ve introduced a work life balance flexibility piece that they’ve never seen before. Now that they can take that laptop out on the boat, and if they have signal, you take your calls there. There’s no longer a pause.

Speaker 0 | 46:12.865

That sounds like more work.

Speaker 1 | 46:14.666

Yeah. Well, that could be true.

Speaker 0 | 46:17.828

I was like, hey, now we can reach you everywhere.

Speaker 1 | 46:20.969

Now,

Speaker 0 | 46:21.730

while you’re sitting at home trying to watch, I don’t know, Game of Thrones or something, which just for the record, I’ve never watched a single episode. I’d probably get slaughtered for that.

Speaker 1 | 46:29.654

All right, we’re done here. Bye.

Speaker 0 | 46:33.976

But yeah, so yeah, how did that go over? I’m just curious.

Speaker 1 | 46:38.159

Yeah, we’re not forcing them to answer. We’re just saying that they get, no. So we’ve, you know, we’ll let the integration into email to, you know, kind of give the whole unified communications piece. But having them no longer have to be at their desk, being able to work in any part of the, on the campus, they can go outside and sit under a tree and work. They can. Again, be at home, be at a coffee shop, be at different other locations. They can go from facility to facility. And for a lot of our extended or for our sales folks or more nomadic workforce, that was a great boon because they would be missing stuff all the time. And what kind of hassle is it to have to remember four phone numbers for somebody?

Speaker 0 | 47:25.559

So what are they doing? pulling up their laptop, putting a headset on, or are they just using their cell phone and the mobile application? Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 47:32.324

a combination of both. It’ll simultaneously ring on two or three things, and they have the ability to go in and move ads and changes that have gone away completely.

Speaker 0 | 47:43.553

We call those the Mac attacks.

Speaker 1 | 47:45.355

Yeah, where we had to staff that before we don’t anymore. And people feel empowered to tailor their phone experience or their communication experience to how they want it.

Speaker 0 | 47:56.400

So awesome. So that’s how we, that’s how we get over the, I have to have my piece of plastic on the desk, uh, fear argument, I guess. Um, and been a great conversation. Thank you so much for being on the show. Uh, really has been a pleasure and I’m sure we have a ton more stories that we can talk about. So absolutely. I would have you on the show in the future. Um, and anyone that wants to reach out, um, to you, the best way to find you, at least the way that I found you was on, on LinkedIn. So, um, John Larson, LinkedIn type in target, uh, you’ll, you’ll pop up.

Speaker 1 | 48:31.301

Yep. And it’s, uh, L A R S E N, uh, on the last name J O H N and yeah, target CHS INC. Um, all of those will work and, uh, yeah, feel free to reach out and, uh, thanks a lot, Phil. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 0 | 48:46.874

Yeah, man. Thank you so much for being on the show.