Speaker 0 | 00:00.276

Thanks for Telecom Radio 1. This is Phil Howard and today we have Randy Jeter and Andrew Lauder with us from Rapid Scale. Welcome gentlemen.

Speaker 1 | 00:10.220

Good morning, good morning, good morning.

Speaker 0 | 00:13.061

I’m excited to have you guys on. I know it’s called Telecom Radio 1. We should probably call it Telecom Cloud 1 today. But you know there’s a lot of talk going on about the cloud. The cloud is everywhere. Everyone’s hearing about the cloud and you guys are specifically… cloud company you called rapid scale why don’t we just start off with you know who rapid scale is how you got started and where you came from and Randy CEO we’re gonna start with you hey my name is Randy G I’m the CEO and co-founder of rapid scale blessed to be on this call thank you very much for having me on the call so I appreciate it you

Speaker 1 | 00:50.093

know rapid scale started as a company that was looking for a path through consulting so my background I was a paycheck for seven years I was a part of that great run there with the Renis CEO and then rolled into a consulting role and I was lucky enough to hit the big deal and I became a very large agent in a quick amount of time frame in the United States and through that experience I realized I wanted to build something in the cloud space. In the late 2007, early 2008 time frame we really started to see a push to cloud. in the sense of what people are doing on the voice side. And then we started to see cloud start to become an interesting conversation. I always say interesting because people had no clue what it was. And luckily for myself, I had met a gentleman in 2004 on some projects that I ended up partnering with and co-founded Rapidscale with. He was 22 CIO Magazine, you know, once to watch, working at a multi-billion dollar, you know, cloud multi-billion dollar company and building out their infrastructure by the time of 2060s running projects for the dod on a global basis uh through a consulting project and so through our partnership we were able to found this company i felt like everything was going to move to the cloud eventually um how do you basically it was there before i mean if you look back at mainframe it was already there so really the goal was to actually build this cloud platform and provide a hands-on touch i felt like you know most people wanted to especially with amazon’s the googles and before software was even acquired by IBM, and especially before Microsoft started pushing Azure, felt like everybody was either going to buy from an IT standpoint through the cloud, or somebody was going to deliver, kind of like a self-driving car. Who’s going to own the self-driving car, and then what are the companies that are going to build that? So, a self-driving car, somebody has to be behind the technology, somebody has to be behind the system, somebody has to be behind the mainframe, and then in many cases, businesses shift all the time around their applications, around their needs. somebody has to be there all the time managing and overseeing that and managing the end user experience. So really when we found a RapidScale, we came up with this idea that let’s bring together the sense of what a VAR is, what an MSP is, and then build our platforms on a global basis and interconnect everything and then provide really this global application delivery platform in a managed approach. And so that was the vision, that’s what we built, and that’s what we’ve been lucky enough to build upon. expand, get great investors behind us, and then keep growing at a rapid pace.

Speaker 0 | 03:30.347

That’s great. It’s awesome and very, very exciting. Now, Andrew, we just got flooded with a ton of high-level information, and you’re kind of like the translator, I would say, for Randy, the customer. We’re the sales guy. Let’s translate. How does that translate to the customer? Can you give me… Because obviously we’re going to have all kinds of people listening to this show. How does that translate to the customer? What are you seeing right now as the most basic kind of out of the box? What are people moving to the cloud right now? And can we be very specific and keep it simple, keep it simple, stupid? For any customers out there listening, what does this mean?

Speaker 2 | 04:16.185

Yeah, so it’s a lot of things, right? So, I mean, essentially, if you look at the foundation of our company and the solutions that we offer to do a particular thing. we do disaster recovery as a service, we do infrastructure as a service, and we do desktop as a service. So really there’s no limitations around the hosting and delivering of applications. Now where we’ve seen the market go, and when Randy was talking a little bit about the kind of our MSP alignment, where we’ve seen the market pivot to over the past few years is around the management on top of the platform, right? So when you’ve got the AWS’s out there and the users that are offering essentially compute, raw compute. The way that we’re really differentiating ourselves in the market and becoming great at what we do is around the level of touch and management that we do. Not only on the infrastructure side of the computer side with the patching and updating and supporting of the applications, but also on the ongoing account management side and the backend support. So there’s not a lot of things that we won’t do for a customer. We really want to be that kind of one-throat choker, for lack of a better term, or one-handed mistake whenever it comes to everything. IT for a customer.

Speaker 0 | 05:25.034

So without mentioning any specific names, can we go over an example? Because we’ve done a lot of medical together. Let’s go over maybe one of those medical examples and you give me what did we do for them? Where were they? What did we do for them? And why was that a benefit to them? And how are they doing now?

Speaker 2 | 05:48.172

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, in healthcare, the healthcare space is our most predominant. vertical and not so much because we’re specifically focused on it it’s more just they were early adopters to the space right mostly because they’re you know a traditional healthcare company is going to be very lean on IT and and also within the IT direction of the business so we had a gentleman come to us out of New Mexico who essentially he was running a mainstream EHR application you know he was looking for a way to give his workforce the mobility that they’re looking for in terms of working outside the office but at the same time be able to keep up with the standards and regulations that work by hipaa as well as the other security practices that are needed to be put in place for his business so um you know we were looking for him he was you know very very traditional where he was running an on-premise infrastructure um he has his his normal limitations that everybody does you know very lean on it so he came to us through a partner of course because we worked with together with you phil you know essentially The way that we were able to come together with this solution was just like most of the other mainstream EHRs, EMRs that are out there, the Amazing Cards, the Next Gens, the Epics, the McKessons, we’re very familiar with these applications because we’ve done a lot of work in this space before. So based on our familiarity, we’re able to understand and we’re able to tell him what he needs and how it should be done and what our experience has been in the past. You know, long story short, we ended up virtualizing it. We obviously did it through a Citrix delivery protocol, also known as desktop as a service, fully managed it on the back end. And, you know, now he’s super happy. He got exactly what he’s looking for. He’s a good reference from us. He’s actually a reference of somebody that we just recently used today where there’s a doctor’s office that was actually looking for this particular solution. So John actually reached out to him personally and said, this is my experience with RapidScale. This is my experience with… with the solution and how it’s working. And this is why I highly recommend these guys.

Speaker 0 | 07:52.194

And just to take it a little bit further, again, it’s hard for us technical guys sometimes, or even technical sales people that might not actually be able to build this themselves, but understand it very well. From a really simplistic customer’s point of view, what does that mean? It means I had a box on site before and I used to log into a desktop and now I still log into a desktop. It’s just the boxes and on site and my software is in the cloud. What does it mean from a very simplistic, you know, Neanderthal point of view to move to rapid scale?

Speaker 2 | 08:32.284

Yep. So that’s exactly right. So, you know, they are, they were just like a lot of them are, they’re running their servers on site. So that’s where they’re. their Active Directory is, that’s where his EHR was, that’s where his file services are, that’s where everything, all of his core line of business applications are residing on a physical server at the office, right? Could also be co-located, in this case it was at the office like it is for a lot of places. So what we do essentially is we’re building out a virtual environment, a dedicated logically separated virtual environment on our side, within our infrastructure that resides in one of our five data centers. and we’re essentially standing up those VMs and then we’re building out what’s called a, we’re using the delivery protocol of Citrix, which is what we do, which is desktop to service, which allows for us to deliver a full desktop image to him and to all of his employees that’s showing which applications they need to be working on within that image. So it’s very simple. It’s actually, it’s not a cutting edge technology. I mean, it is in some sense, but. People have been doing this for a while. Enterprise Space has been doing this forever. This is just more of the outsourced model where we’re the experts on the back end. They don’t have the experts on site. But yeah, that’s essentially it. We’re eliminating the physical infrastructure, so there can be no more servers on site. At a minimum, there’ll be, or maximum, there’ll be like a domain controller for authentication. But yeah, we’re eliminating all these physical servers and virtualizing them out and moving them into our platform.

Speaker 0 | 10:05.198

If they wanted, could they access their desktop from anywhere or say from an iPad if they wanted?

Speaker 2 | 10:11.720

Yeah, and that’s kind of the beauty of the Citrix Deliver protocol is that you’ve got a… storefront not to get too technical but you have a storefront kind of delivery so you have the ability to access it through the public internet it’s also you’re not limited to a Windows operating system or Mac operating system device so for a tablet from an iPad from your iPhone from your laptop from your home PC there’s no limitations on where you can access it as long as you have a an internet connection okay I was waiting to I was waiting to bring Randy back in because I know this

Speaker 0 | 10:45.514

This may be a long answer. It may be a short answer. I don’t know. But from a security standpoint, from how your network is built, if I was a highly technical person and I wanted to come in and just start putting holes or trying to put holes in your network or find holes or find security gaps, I guess my question is, Randy, how secure is this? And how can I trust your team on the back end and the data centers, wherever they may be?

Speaker 1 | 11:13.694

you know geo redundancy i just kind of want to open up that bag so i’ll stick with the security i mean we can get into the redundancies um what quite often are you know we get asked these two questions all the time you know what how are you guys meeting compliance and what’s your security and your platform look like and then number three is is what’s the um you know how do you what are your redundancies in your overall network tied to your cloud facilities on a global basis what do those look like and so i’m not gonna i won’t go too deep here but From a solutions engineering standpoint, we design that for every single client. There’s different levels of security within an environment than there’s a platform security. So I’ll just talk briefly kind of what we’re doing. So the CTO I founded the company with, William Hyatt, in his projects has actual secure access for the government. Part of that security access for the government was tied to a project he did. Understanding how to build an environment and deliver an environment both… for global companies to the government to now, kind of what I would call the SMB mid-market, lower enterprise space, which is our core space. When you look at that, basically, we are delivering an advanced platform around security as it sits today, the way we separate everybody logically within our environment. So we’ve passed tests for three of the top five cable companies in the United States. We’ve had security tests done. They’ve analyzed it. We’ve gone through audits and information research. And we’ve taught. three of the top cable companies. One of those which we’re launching to market here in the near future which we’re in contract with right now and we’re doing some proof of concept with. Not only from them but from larger clients of ours they often have audits done on on how and what we’re doing to deliver it. We have PCI companies come in all the time and check our environment, analyze what’s going on, talk to us. HIPAA you know from the sense of you know companies potentially getting looked at by the government or whatever entity in the sense of you know owing money we’re providing audited data and information quite frankly on a consistent basis around what our platform looks like what we’re doing to keep them secure so when it comes down to compliance and security we’re extremely secure i’m not going to try to be the engineer here and give it the details of every aspect of what we do from a security standpoint but bolt on security and compliance that is probably one of the most important areas of delivering cloud. If you’re not built with a team of security people or a leader and a visionary in the area of security and compliance, you’re never going to be successful as you grow out and as a cloud starts to hockey puck up, which it is right now. And so in a managed space you really have to provide that, you have to secure that, and you have to deliver it, and you have to create a level of confidence. When we’re talking to an enterprise IT team, we have to be able to sit down and design, go over, have them test, have third party auditors come in and test and do pen testing as well and analyze what’s going on. And so when we get to that level of testing, we had to be built in a way to where all of our facilities globally are actually standardized around security compliance so we can deliver to some small companies to some of the largest companies. And so that’s really what we did around security and compliance. We keep building upon that. One of our investors is the former COO at Aramark, Marvin Wheeler. He’s been working on an analytics tool company called Cybrex. And so we’re also looking at using additional analytics. to go way above and beyond the norm, the norms of security and compliance to get in what I call the global space of security and compliance with digging into you know that that level of security analytics or analytics and uh research uh needed um both from ourselves uh as well as third parties doing it too and utilizing additional tools to provide advancements around security and compliance for the platform. So we keep basically innovating in within that area. and tying that to our platform. And then also you’re going to see a security as a service product set launched here within the next six months at RapidScale. We’ve been working on it diligently. We don’t want to launch one product. We want to have multiple products around analytics and as well as security. So our engineering team and our CTO, William Hyatt, have been working diligently on finding solutions to build a security as a service product set. Not our platform, but layered into our platform. for the environments too as well.

Speaker 0 | 15:45.708

Certainly security is a concern. Everyone likes to talk about security. They also like to talk about cost. I’ve seen all kinds of white papers and articles, and I don’t know if it’s fear-mongering by the general equipment vendors or how much truth there is in this because there’s a lot of marketing white noise out there. But from a cost perspective and in return on investment, Andrew, you’re seeing these deals every day. Do you have any comments on the cloud being more expensive or less expensive or is it a wash and is it the benefits far outweigh any extra cost? What are your comments there?

Speaker 2 | 16:23.950

Yeah, I mean overall we see a positive kind of TCO model from it. Obviously each business varies according to how that maps out, but especially once you start getting into the desktop service, kind of some of the soft costs that we see. and then we kind of factor in or you know they weigh heavy on the ongoing expenses for a business I mean everybody now at this point you know it’s attractive to them to move to a an operational expenditure from the capex you know the capacity planning and the tech writing the things that go into that that kind of legacy style of business is not what they’re looking for right they want a monthly fee they want to have a fixed cost per employee Any business that’s in an M&A or merger and acquisition type phase, they want to be able to get down to a single headcount per cost per head of their business. If I’m going to go acquire this business or merge with this business, how much is it going to cost? So, you know, outside of the strong total cost of ownership and the ROIs associated with it, I think the benefits of the transparent costs and the predictable IT expenses is… is very valuable for a business.

Speaker 0 | 17:39.808

Excellent. Guys, I really appreciate your time today. Obviously, if anyone wants to get a hold of Rapid Scale, CNSG is a triple-dipped platinum partner with them. Please feel free to reach out to philhowardsales forward slash contact. You can always give me a call, 202-903-4728. And then Andrew as well, if anyone’s listening to this podcast and they want to contact you, why don’t you give them your contact information? and then we’ll be good to go.

Speaker 2 | 18:09.530

Yeah, you can go and just leave me an email at andrewlauder at rapidscale.net. So that’s andrewlauder, L-A-U-D-H-T-E-R, at rapidscale.net.

Speaker 0 | 18:22.384

Guys, have a great day. I really appreciate it.