379- Kenan Bliss

00:00:09 Phil Howard: Welcome everyone back to dissecting popular IT nerds in the future. We have this big, really big, exciting, exciting rebranding coming up. Because what I realized was, is that we’re shortchanging ourselves by just sounding like we’re just dissecting people. And after three hundred and sixty episodes, we no longer really need to be dissecting popular IT nerds anymore, like we’ve kind of become. And there’s just there’s just so much that we’re leaving out for you guys. And I think one of them is our connection with really freaking awesome people in the industry and really, really good vendors. And I don’t do this that often because IT guys hate vendors. For the most part, they’re not vendors. I think we should say salespeople, and they have good vendors. We can’t really there’s all this hype in the marketplace and we’ve got we’ve we’ve got This thing called zero trust in our language. So it’s kind of natural to not trust anyone that shows up in our LinkedIn inbox. And there’s I think it people have trust issues. I don’t know, do you think they have trust issues? Ken?

00:01:14 Kenan Bliss: I have trust issues. I don’t trust my own children. So I mean, how would I trust a vendor?

00:01:20 Phil Howard: So I just wanted to highlight some really awesome people and what they can do. And I think when it comes to CSPs, which is a very broad term communication service provider, these are the guys that sell you your Microsoft licensing, and then you call them a middleman and they piss you off. And I’m just going direct to Microsoft, and then you end up with an EA agreement. And there’s so many problems with all these things. They’re not problems or better ways of doing things. And I just wanted to bring on someone that was awesome. to talk about some really awesome things that we can do inside Microsoft and healing alienate your happens to have some old friends that I that are really my old bosses that came over to you guys recently and that’s how we got introduced. And Donna, who I have trusted for years and worked for for years, I knew that I would be able to trust her and work for her. When I came. And we went through this whole interview and at the end of the interview, she’s like, you know, Phil, well, do you have any questions for me? And I said, yeah, why should I come work for you? And she said, Phil, because we suck less. And it’s such a horrible thing. And but that was my last corporate gig. That was my last work in the corporate world and I. But the thing is, is I was like, okay, I can trust this lady. And she jumped through rings of fire for me and did everything. And Mario, you’re really cool to Mario. But she kind of was like this middleman between Mario and I having a fire fights and fighting for customers and always wanting to get everything done right and perfect for everyone, which is what we should have been doing. Anywho, here we are. It’s almost like we’re putting like the team back together again. And they brought you in and we had a conversation. And what’s your title? And by the way, it’s the bliss I want to call this like the bliss framework because your last name is bliss. And that’s really the the ultimate like the dream. It’s kind of like the station, like I have arrived and I can now retire in life for any IT director is I can just put my feet up on the desk. Everything’s automated. It all works perfectly. I never have to put out any fires. And so we want to call this the bliss framework, and which is a step forward to getting to that maybe impossible dream.

00:03:32 Kenan Bliss: Effectively, I’m the lead for our overall infrastructure practices across the Microsoft stack, so it’s going to include all of the bits and pieces that go with Azure infrastructure security, financial operations, all those fun pieces, networking being probably the most painful one that folks deal with. I also have our classic server systems engineering group that works with the windows stack, SQL exchange, the classic Exchange, and connecting all those pieces up and our Microsoft three hundred sixty five Modern Workplace Group. And then we sit in parallel with the desktop group, and we provide top tier solutions to anyone who needs us.

00:04:19 Phil Howard: Wicked cool. So my philosophy when it comes to teams more high def, if I get closer to this microphone. My philosophy when choosing vendors is the special teams approach. I believe you should have special people inside companies that may suck less. And I’m not saying that you guys suck less at all, because so far you guys are awesome. But everyone has to use AT&T at some point in their life. And there’s a lot of people out there that say AT&T sucks Socks and ball, but they’d suck a lot less if you had the right people in the right places that you knew you could make a phone call to, and you are one of those people that is would be on my special teams. So why helium? I mean, you’re you’re purchasing your Microsoft licensing from someone else right now. This is the scenario. Anyone out there listening to the show you’re purchasing your Microsoft licensing from a company called crayon or CDW, or you’re getting it through IBM because it’s freaking crazy cheap. Okay, cool. But what do they do for you? And I guess this is more like, why not buy your Microsoft licensing from someone that’s going to do a lot for you and be really, really awesome? And one of those people that you get to work with is canon. And maybe we could just talk about a couple scenarios of what you do on a daily basis, like that’s your I think we are on a call earlier where you’re like, well, it’s not going to be the hardest work I do this week, but what is some of the hardest work you do on a weekly basis? Or what are some of the biggest problems and ways that we can help people? Is that Azure Greenfield? Is it virtual desktops? I don’t know, what is it?

00:06:02 Kenan Bliss: I mean, I think the the hardest thing that you have to work on, particularly when it comes to Azure, is the plan, why am I doing this and what are my goals by by leveraging cloud, I mean everybody wants to go to the golf course and and tell the other director of it or the other VP that, hey, we’re moving our stuff to the cloud. Why are.

00:06:27 Phil Howard: You.

00:06:28 Kenan Bliss: You know, right. Why?

00:06:29 Phil Howard: Because I read about it in time magazine.

00:06:31 Kenan Bliss: Right? Yeah. So I mean, it’s it’s why are you doing it? What are your goals? How? What services are you going to put up there, and how is it you think you’re going to go about doing all of this? And are you doing it the right way? And that’s the you’re looking at it from a bigger picture. Let’s, let’s where are you at today. That’s a where do you want to be? That’s Z. Stop trying to fill in the blanks. Take a step back and look at those two pictures and then say, how do I make this flow? So I do it the right way the first time so that all of my pieces fit together nicely. And my Z is nice and pretty. Not this toddler who threw a bunch of Legos together. Yes, it stands up. Is it? Is it right?

00:07:25 Phil Howard: I think that’s great. And but the reality is, is like every two or three years we have mergers and acquisitions and we we acquire ERP systems. And I don’t know, one company was on Google O or um, and then, you know, this company is on Microsoft, and now we’ve got to bring some of the stuff’s on AWS, some of the stuff’s on Azure. Maybe you can just talk to a few best practices or, I don’t know, road mapping things. You’ve seen something that would be exciting and and something really sophisticated.

00:07:58 Kenan Bliss: And if you do it right, the answer to all of those things should be so. Right. I mean, it’s like, okay, if I, if I built a core system that I did all my governance planning for financial operations got the right control people in place. I’m controlling my permissions the right way. And you come along and say, we’re buying this other company and we’re going to fold them into ours, great. Let’s migrate their stuff into our tenant, which means that the rules are already in place. So it has to follow the rules when it gets brought in. If I’m redeploying a new ERP system, the rules are there and so the pieces have to fit correctly from the get go versus coming in after the fact and trying to remediate something, because that’s the piece that kills you every single time because it’s rework.

00:08:56 Phil Howard: Oh horror story what? Have you seen any great horror stories lately? If we’re speaking in, I don’t know, metaphorical things.

00:09:04 Kenan Bliss: I mean, it was a small one, but for that group, it was a horror story. They built out this environment. They were trying to do it as deep as possible. They stood up some storage and through terabytes of data at it, and it turned out that it was incredibly high. I oh, there was a drawing system that was attached to it and it wouldn’t keep up. And they complain and complain and complain, and then they come back and say, well, we need to upgrade the storage rate, but we can’t change the name of it, right. So whole long week process to copy data from point A to point B. Blow away point A, create point C with the original name of point A, copy the data back so that their simplified process didn’t need to be changed and they burned. They burned a ton of consulting time on fixing something when they could have just designed it properly from the get go. Established the criteria, figure out what the requirements are, build to the requirements, test it before you put it in production, and then everything would have been fine.

00:10:16 Phil Howard: I would say the majority, the majority of my listeners are directors of IT, VP’s of IT, CTO, CIOs in the mid-market space, in construction, logistics, healthcare, the mid-market space. Where what do you see happening right now? I guess in the face of AI, other than maybe it’s a big bubble and everyone trying to get involved and it’s going to blow up, and then everyone’s going to realize that AI is just an assist to a human being. What do you see? For those midmarket people who are kind of just staring out into the blankness, sometimes wondering, well, their CEO is under the pressure of being told by the board that, hey, are you are you guys AI ready? And yeah, we’re full. We’re one hundred percent AI ready. We hear this. I hear this every day. Yeah, we’re one hundred percent AI ready. And the CTO says we are. What do you see? I mean, this is just for fun, but, like, what do you see happening over the next, I don’t know, two or three years. And and how does your role tie into that.

00:11:30 Kenan Bliss: Well I mean, the first thing that pops into my head is that meme where it says that when somebody says they inserted AI into their legacy application, and it’s got the dispenser for one of those soft soap and it’s just jammed into a bar of dial.

00:11:47 Phil Howard: Right.

00:11:48 Kenan Bliss: Like we put AI into our. Yeah. I mean. Establish the reasons why you want to use it first.

00:11:58 Phil Howard: Because investors are asking because if we aren’t doing it, then the stock prices are going to go down. What other reason do you need?

00:12:05 Kenan Bliss: There’s nothing saying you can’t use it, but make it a worthwhile investment. And then if you and it’s a garbage in, garbage out. So make sure your environment is first of all ready for it. Establish what your use cases are. Then build for it. Don’t just build it to say that oh, we wrote this chatbot that’ll answer x, y, z questions about what color of ink that they use on a dollar bill. That’s fantastic. But I mean, why do I need that? What value is that? What value is that providing to me?

00:12:39 Phil Howard: Have you worked on any good use cases lately?

00:12:42 Kenan Bliss: Uh, personally, no. I have a couple of good friends of mine who are very, very data savvy. One of them very data savvy. His wife is very, very savvy. She’s in the Microsoft space. I can’t mention her name, but.

00:12:59 Phil Howard: Sure.

00:13:00 Kenan Bliss: three of us get together and we go through all sorts of stuff. How would we build this environment based on the data requirements, based on tapping into those data, that data, making use of that data and how would we secure it?

00:13:14 Phil Howard: Mhm. I want to hear the security piece because that’s just that’s the big one. How do we secure that data.

00:13:20 Kenan Bliss: Yeah I mean.

00:13:21 Phil Howard: From in an AI world.

00:13:23 Kenan Bliss: Yeah I mean I can drop all that data out there and somebody can scrape it. My source data has to be protected. Right. The things that I’m letting that model talk to and source information from. And you’re looking at healthcare, um, finance, finance. I mean, that data has to be secure, has to be secure. All of it does really for any industry, you got to protect yourself and getting all of those tools integrated with them. They want access to everything. Should they have it? What if somebody who’s using that tool, or gets access to that tool that shouldn’t have access to that tool, now gets access to all my data? The wrong configuration could give the wrong person the ability to go through and pull up all sorts of patient information out of your healthcare system. I mean.

00:14:16 Phil Howard: That’s I think there was a big news. Didn’t that happen the other day? Wasn’t there like a big news leak or something like that? I think that did happen.

00:14:22 Kenan Bliss: I mean, it pick if you you you get the AI that’s out there, that’s indexing all the content that you read on the internet. And trust me, your newsfeed will change. I mean, it’s there’s a ton of different ways that that those tools can be used. I think it’s a matter of getting the controls in place and understanding why you’re doing something and what your audience is for that tool before you even try. If the objective is go tell the CTO or the CEO that hey, before tea time on on Friday.

00:15:02 Phil Howard: We need we need to have AI.

00:15:03 Kenan Bliss: Do we need to have AI? It’s like, okay.

00:15:07 Phil Howard: But that’s the reality. That’s really what’s happening. That’s literally what’s happening right now.

00:15:12 Kenan Bliss: Yeah, you gotta protect yourself. If you’re a C level, you could very easily put yourself out of a job.

00:15:18 Phil Howard: And I read a statistic the other day I should give a shout out to let me give a shout out to the where were we when I heard this? I just oh, I Steven Klein, he’s a UMass grad. He’s a UMass grad, but he’s, um, he’s out in the West Coast right now. The statistic is I’ve gotta get here and he’s going to send this to me for real. But seventy eighty percent of CEOs. Basically, basically seventy, eighty percent of the CEOs are out of a job in one to two years. And they’re basically walking around thinking that. And since nineteen eighty. So most of these CEOs are pretty much on the edge of their seat all the time. And one of the, the. I guess, I guess conversation points or themes that come up on our show a lot is kind of the same, kind of the same story with like the CTO. The CTO is like, okay, I just turned this entire company around. I forklifted everything we we migrated these systems. We implemented three ERP ERPs. Everyone was like freaking great. We love you. It’s so awesome. And then two years later, I get the notice that. you know, we’re moving in another direction. We’re just, you know, the company is taking a different, you know, whatever it is, whatever the excuse is. And I think that’s less harsh than the CEO’s role, which is, you know, constantly on the seat of have we implemented AI yet? How is this affecting the stock prices and all of that? And the rumor on the street that I hear a lot. And just saying it again, we’ve already said it three times in this episode, is that, yeah, we fully got AI implemented. And if they don’t, if they aren’t saying that, if they aren’t, it’s like, you know, drastically affecting like stock prices and stuff just because it’s a, you know, a bubble that we’re sitting in and they just have to be on the edge of technology right now. So I don’t know what that has to do with anything we’re talking about. It’s just the reality. And I think then the technology people in the background saying like, what doesn’t even really do anything yet, Like you said, like I don’t need it to tell me. Like the how many candy canes like Marshalls sold last year and where, um, the automotive industry. I don’t know. It’s like.

00:17:40 Kenan Bliss: Yeah. I mean, I think that it’s fair to say that we’re evaluating or developing or whatever toward some sort of an AI implementation, inclusion in our process. But to just say that you have it for the sake of saying you have it, it’s like, okay, I can put an extension into your browser that allows you to use ChatGPT. We’re using AI, you know.

00:18:07 Phil Howard: Exactly one hundred percent, one hundred percent on one hundred percent, one hundred percent. The tell me, what’s your process when when you when a new customer or prospect opportunity, whatever they want to call them in the sales world comes to you and they want to reevaluate. They don’t like their current CSP. What is what are your initial questions that you ask them?

00:18:31 Kenan Bliss: I mean, it’s it’s fair to ask. Tell me why you don’t like them. Are they just not providing value to you, or are they just selling you licenses and walking away and not paying attention to what’s going on? Or do you think that they’re actively trying to overcharge you for things and they don’t necessarily need to be specific, but understanding the pain points first and then being able to say, okay, this is this is one of the things that’s causing the customer to suffer. Always solve that problem first.

00:19:01 Phil Howard: I think the majority is what you said first, which is they’re just selling us licenses and then walking away. And then when we need additional licenses, either the portal’s clunky and hard to add on, or I’ve got to send an email to my rep that’s changed three times over the last twelve months and I’ve got to wait for some. That’s the real old school method. I’ve got to wait for my licensing to be to go. Or if I do add it in a portal, there’s still a manual process on the back end, even though it seems like a portal and it should be instant. It’s not instantaneous, license adds. So I think that that’s like kind of like the top number one complaints. And then they didn’t, you know, earn their basically. Yeah, they’re we’re just buying licenses. So they’re great for the first week. And then they didn’t kind of continue to earn their paycheck every month. So that’s one hopefully not overcharging. That’s just um billing mistakes. Billing mistakes is a pain in the ass. I probably shouldn’t be saying that. Is that a bad word? If my kids hear this, my kids listen to the podcast I should. Guys, I’m sorry, I apologize. That is not correct language.

00:20:12 Kenan Bliss: The do as I say, not as I do.

00:20:16 Phil Howard: If they heard some of the people we have on the podcast. Wow dad, that so I guess I think those are probably what do you see? What what are the number one complaints that you guys see and what?

00:20:26 Kenan Bliss: Um, I think it’s just your.

00:20:28 Phil Howard: Why are you better?

00:20:29 Kenan Bliss: You’re just another reseller. That’s the that’s the thing that I see out there the most is they’ve got a cloud solution provider who’s providing them with licensing. They’re not providing them with solutions.

00:20:41 Phil Howard: But it’s so cheap.

00:20:43 Kenan Bliss: But is it.

00:20:46 Phil Howard: Please.

00:20:46 Kenan Bliss: Thank you. I mean it’s I mean retail costs or retail costs, but there’s there’s ways to work with it. I mean start off with okay, this is what you have today. And, and when you make this change to use helium versus somebody else, we need to maintain the status quo. Right. So we’re going to make that transfer because we have to because your email needs to flow. But then taking a hard look at what you have m365 is pretty straightforward. What features are you using? Which features aren’t you using? This is the count of x, y, and z that you need. Can we change you to an annual versus a monthly pay plan so you get a little bit of a discount there? Are you using the right quantities of the right things and then fine tune that. But the M365 licensing is pretty straightforward. Yep. Right. When it comes to the Azure consumption, that can wildly vary. Somebody asked me for a quote, and all they did was provide me with a list of two hundred servers. Not even the specs, just the names. And they’re like, we need a quote for this. And I’m like, okay, depending on the skew that’s involved here, this could be two thousand dollars a month or two hundred.

00:22:08 Phil Howard: Yeah.

00:22:09 Kenan Bliss: You got it. I need more than this. But you take those raw numbers, check the box, deploy the machine. It’s got a windows license. It’s paying straight consumption rates. Great. You got a bill. You go look at that machine and say, if you’re a proper CSP, you go look at that machine and say, for the last thirty days, it’s been running like this. You could reduce the SKU cost half as much. And then you say, well, you’re licensing agreement for your data center has this. Let’s apply that license. Drop that much off the top. We know this box is going to live for X amount of time. Or you have this much consumption over a amount of time. You look at reserved instances. You look at savings plans and potentially you first off cut it in half and then taking that price and reduced it by another eighty percent. So you went from spending two hundred dollars a month on the box to twenty.

00:23:15 Phil Howard: Hmm. Good example.

00:23:18 Kenan Bliss: Yeah. And that’s possible. And that’s the kind of stuff that we want to do when we take those, those agreements.

00:23:24 Phil Howard: What’s your favorite? What’s your, uh, solution to work on? Is it? I mean, what is it like the most complicated, crazy thing? Like, what’s your favorite? If I could just bring you this every single day for the rest of your career, what would it look like?

00:23:38 Kenan Bliss: It’s that it’s taking that three to five year plan and starting with the entire starting from the top and building down, construct the organizational components, construct the core networking, design everything from how it’s going to plug in and create this modular, moving forward environment. That doesn’t matter. You bring another Microsoft product in, it plugs in and it works. And that should be how it always works, right? Designed properly Greenfield I sometimes sometimes it’s fun to go into a brownfield environment. So that’s not how I would have done it. And somebody says, well, then go do it the way you would have done it. All right. Where’s the keys?

00:24:25 Phil Howard: Um, well, realistically, how often should this be happening? Or, you know, it’s like, not.

00:24:34 Kenan Bliss: The, the, the build should be. It should happen once.

00:24:38 Phil Howard: Mhm.

00:24:39 Kenan Bliss: Right.

00:24:40 Phil Howard: I mean once for every company. Um, but uh, if you had to guess how many people you know and then, but again mergers and acquisitions, like you said, we just find, we plug it in. Great. So what are we going to call this then. The, the the the the I don’t know the bliss build the bliss build. What are we going to call this thing? What? We want to do this. Like anyone that wants to take part of the the canon bliss build building blocks, the canon the bliss building blocks, there’s got to be like an acronym that we make up for this. And I don’t know, like, is there a reason why how many IT directors CTOs are sitting out there right now and just like, oh, I would love to do that. I just don’t have time and we can’t take things down and blah, blah, blah. Like what’s what’s the excuses?

00:25:28 Kenan Bliss: All the excuses are it cost too much. Trust me, it’s going to cost you. Um, they’re afraid they don’t understand it. It’s new technology. Most of them are. Most of them are used to running in a data center. And that’s not a criticism. It’s just where they’re comfortable.

00:25:45 Phil Howard: Okay, so talk to me. Let’s go through the typical fear based. We’re in a data center. We’re going to migrate to Azure. We’re going to do whatever. Talk to me. Let’s walk through a typical example manufacturing or construction or I don’t know, logistics or something Paul.

00:25:58 Kenan Bliss: Uh, maintaining control of software defined objects. Uh, role based access control. Now, I don’t have control over that VM at the same layer that I did before. How do I manage all that? It’s very overwhelming. It sounds too complicated. Um.

00:26:15 Phil Howard: Okay. Great. What’s the answer to that?

00:26:17 Kenan Bliss: The answer is planet. Planet from the beginning. Identify the people who need to do those jobs and put them in the roles so they can do those jobs. So define understand people’s responsibilities and define the role assignments before you build things, not build it. And then go back and figure out who to give rights to.

00:26:37 Phil Howard: You guys help with all that. Do you guys help out with all that?

00:26:40 Kenan Bliss: We do. I mean, it’s it’s a fairly routine exercise where we’ve taken on brownfield engagements, and I’ll throw a couple of folks at it and say, go through this entire thing and tell me what’s wrong or not. Not necessarily what’s wrong, what’s not perfect, what where could improvements be made, and how do we do that efficiently without taking stuff offline? They should not go offline. They shouldn’t.

00:27:09 Phil Howard: What is the light at the end of the tunnel look like?

00:27:15 Kenan Bliss: I mean, the goal.

00:27:16 Phil Howard: You’re speaking to all the fear based people out here, like, screw that. I would never freaking do that. Um, but they just got fired, and now they’re at another company, and they have to do it. So what does it look like? You know.

00:27:27 Kenan Bliss: I mean, the goal is really the hardest thing about using it should be accepting the fact that it’s really that easy. That’s where you want to put people. I don’t want the IT staff, the directors. Their job shouldn’t be slapping Band-Aids on stuff and keeping it running. It should run.

00:27:48 Phil Howard: Mhm.

00:27:49 Kenan Bliss: They should be able to be reading trade magazines, doing research. What’s the.

00:27:54 Phil Howard: Next.

00:27:55 Kenan Bliss: Company talking to the people in a business unit that are struggling with something and saying, how do we help the business.

00:28:02 Phil Howard: I love that you just said that. And that’s the key. That’s the freedom.

00:28:07 Kenan Bliss: Making it happen.

00:28:08 Phil Howard: Right. Okay.

00:28:09 Kenan Bliss: Most organizations today, they’re constantly in a state of reaction. It’s fire, fire, fire, fire. And they have no opportunity one to to implement projects like this. But also they don’t have any opportunity to learn because they’re constantly chasing fires.

00:28:29 Phil Howard: Do you think that’s more in the enterprise space or mid-market? I’m just curious.

00:28:32 Kenan Bliss: Yes. It’s everywhere.

00:28:35 Phil Howard: I had a guy tell me one time, love you. Um, Phil, look, I’ve got so many fires, I don’t. Here’s the metaphor, Phil. Forest fire fighter. I’m in a massive, massive, massive forest. There’s fires everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. The whole place is burning down. I’m only concerned with putting out the fire that’s burning my leg right now. I can see your fire. Phil, you’re coming to me. I can see that that this Microsoft licensing fire. But that’s like a mile down the road. Like I’m concerned with this fire that’s burning my leg right now, which is this I don’t know. Who knows. Downed server. Who knows whatever the heck it is. Might even be a remote printer. What’s the ROI on a type? You said it’s expensive, but it’s more expensive in the long run. Like, what kind of numbers are we talking about? You’re saying simple from a standpoint of like, well, you just don’t need two more, two less staff or two less staff that can now go to to R&D or actually sit, like you said, cross departmental, sit with sales and marketing and actually make money with technology versus just cut costs in a budget and be a cost center and blinky light manager guy.

00:29:52 Kenan Bliss: Yeah, I mean, if I could get paid to watch cat videos all day because I did everything right and I’ve automated everything, I would take that option right. There’s always going to be something you have to deal with. There’s always that user who hasn’t figured out that the power button is what turns on their computer, and you’re going to have to deal with them and everything in between. There’s the, you know, stuff happens, a bad patch goes through, you’ve got to remediate it. You need the staff to be able to handle things like that. You can’t expect one person to know everything. You have to have a plan. Nothing’s perfect. If if you’re running out of east us and somebody drops a nuke on it, you’ve got to failover somewhere. So it’s, you know, there there’s a non-zero chance that there’s going to be a problem and you have to be able to react to that. But your focus as someone in the IT department should be really driving value to the business, not just keeping the business afloat. And that’s that guy. That sounds like such a cliche because you know what.

00:31:07 Phil Howard: A perfect segue. It’s a perfect segue to, um, your, I don’t know, your, your hype and marketing stuff that you guys put out. I’m on your LinkedIn profile right now, so I just figured it’s a perfect segue to go to one tool to rule them all. What the hell is that? I want one tool to rule it all. We all know that’s a lie. Everyone’s going to have multiple tools, but what is your one tool to rule them all? Maybe I’m wrong.

00:31:30 Kenan Bliss: I mean, you’ve got just about every capability that you could look for, assuming that you’re running inside of Microsoft’s little vacuum environment right there. The security tools are there, the analysis tools are there. The licensing tools are there, the computes there. Everything you need now, is that perfect for every company? No. Is it in the Microsoft documentation on how to set that up? Absolutely not. And that’s where you have vendors that are out there like Helion that are There were familiar with CrowdStrike, and we’re familiar with haiku for backup, and we’re familiar with Nutanix and and.

00:32:17 Phil Howard: Keep going, keep going, keep going I want more, I want more.

00:32:19 Kenan Bliss: Yeah. And keep integrating all of these pieces together because nothing operates in the Microsoft vacuum. Nothing, not even Microsoft, operates in their own vacuum. They can’t even they need a special brand of their own dog food, not the one that they put in the books. So you have to have multiple vendors because there’s going to be multiple scenarios, and you need somebody who can tie all that together and who’s willing to put the effort in to know your company.

00:32:52 Phil Howard: Love it. And are you guys still hiring for a systems analyst? Just out of curiosity, you posted that the other day. Three weeks ago, we were hiring a helium managed services system analyst just in case anyone because you stole.

00:33:04 Kenan Bliss: My and my CEO has not told me.

00:33:08 Phil Howard: Um, job opportunity. Everyone listening out there. If anyone wants to take a step down from CTO to system analyst, or if they’re happy, you know, you never know.

00:33:17 Kenan Bliss: It’s a lot less stressful.

00:33:18 Phil Howard: There’s a lot of days where I just wish I could show up and yeah, can I just clock in and clock out and not think about work as I’m walking with my kids through the park at seven? Um, just would be so nice sometimes. Like you, I want to live the dream. I want to live the dream like you. Blissful life. I want to hear the backstory for you. Um, military guy. What?

00:33:39 Kenan Bliss: Uh. Let’s see, I got into the nuclear power business right out of high school with, um, suffered through almost two years of education where they crammed more knowledge in my head than I was ever actually going.

00:33:52 Phil Howard: So the nukes are real. It’s a real thing. Yeah. Because. Because there’s a conspiracy theory that the nukes aren’t really real. That’s just not real. Like they’re like, the.

00:34:01 Kenan Bliss: Reactors are real. I, I unfortunately had to use one to punch holes in the ocean for five of them by the.

00:34:09 Phil Howard: What do you mean, punch holes in the ocean? This isn’t classified.

00:34:12 Kenan Bliss: As we used to call it, you know.

00:34:13 Phil Howard: Oh, okay.

00:34:14 Kenan Bliss: Put the.

00:34:15 Phil Howard: Rudder. Ah, I got it.

00:34:17 Kenan Bliss: Three degrees. Right. And do five knots to nowhere. And then.

00:34:20 Phil Howard: What was your longest stay underwater?

00:34:22 Kenan Bliss: Uh, longest stay straight. Because I think we surfaced once or twice in there, but I think it was.

00:34:28 Phil Howard: Well, I mean, out away from O.

00:34:32 Kenan Bliss: One hundred and twenty eight days away from home in one stretch.

00:34:35 Phil Howard: One hundred twenty eight because my my brother in law’s a captain. He’s a retired merchant marine guy, but he was a captain of, like, the massive biggest ship ever. And he’d be gone for like eight months, sometimes at a time.

00:34:45 Kenan Bliss: Yeah. I mean, you’ll get port calls and stuff like that along the way when when you’re on a when you’re on a run that’s that long, you’ll stop Italy.

00:34:54 Phil Howard: You’ll stop anything really cool, like, um, that you saw or gave you thought to remember. Are you allowed to even say it or.

00:35:03 Kenan Bliss: Had some good stories. The kind of ship that I was on. We really didn’t pull into port anywhere. And the stories I could tell you about Ketchikan, Alaska are not appropriate for your children to listen to on the podcast.

00:35:17 Phil Howard: That’s okay. Now we just want to know it even more. Now my kids are like, who is this guy? What’s his phone number?

00:35:25 Kenan Bliss: I was on the USS Alaska. We had an honorary home port visit, and it was. Um.

00:35:32 Phil Howard: Okay.

00:35:33 Kenan Bliss: So.

00:35:34 Phil Howard: Nuff said. Uh.

00:35:36 Kenan Bliss: And then I did a tour repairing. Running a repair shop for subs.

00:35:42 Phil Howard: Are you a diver?

00:35:44 Kenan Bliss: No.

00:35:45 Phil Howard: Okay. No, I didn’t know if you had to, like, dive, you know, pressurized suits or something crazy like this or.

00:35:50 Kenan Bliss: No. I made them bring the sub out of the water so we could work on the outside of it.

00:35:55 Phil Howard: Were you the one I asked if you had a fire underground or anything like that? Like. Or did the subs leak water? Like? What’s the scariest thing you’ve experienced?

00:36:02 Kenan Bliss: Oh, we were we were pulling into San Diego and somebody had aligned a pump setup with a valve. Didn’t realize that it had been done, cranked up a pump really high and it blew out a pipe, three inch pipe blew out the side of it, and it was running. The pipe ran along the hull. So as far as anybody could tell, there’s this big rooster tail of water coming in the side of the ship. Mhm. That was probably the highest my adrenaline got while I was on board the ship.

00:36:36 Phil Howard: Plugging the. Were you in charge of like stopping the water on that pipe or were you just watching and like cheering people on. Please save us.

00:36:43 Kenan Bliss: Well the the worst part was, is yeah, that was my watch. And we did all the things that we’re supposed to do. I mean, your brain goes into automatic mode, so you start doing all the things that you’re supposed to do to prevent water in the people tank. And it didn’t stop. And that really started freaking people out. We thought there was a hole in the boat and and then finally the lights came on for the operator that was on the other end of the ship. And then, um, but we we knew what to do next, right? They burned that stuff into your head. So you kind of go into automatic mode and, you know, water in the people tank. You gotta make that stop and then move on. Yeah. You don’t have a choice. You can’t just leave.

00:37:31 Phil Howard: Yeah, it’s kind of like. Yeah, kind of makes a Microsoft licensing seem a lot less stressful.

00:37:39 Kenan Bliss: Now, managing a military budget is the worst. Trying to figure out. Yeah. We had somebody lost a receipt. We ate chicken for ninety days straight one time because it was the cheapest thing they could get.

00:37:50 Phil Howard: Wait. What happened? Wait, how did that happen? Wait, so what happened? Someone. Someone did.

00:37:55 Kenan Bliss: Somebody misplaced a receipt when we were getting ready to do our stores after a refit.

00:38:01 Phil Howard: Do they know who replaced that?

00:38:03 Kenan Bliss: Yeah, they found it later.

00:38:04 Phil Howard: Oh, God.

00:38:05 Kenan Bliss: I realized there’s this giant hole in the budget that they didn’t think was there. So when they’re going to purchase all the food that we’re supposed to take with us, this and that and take this with a grain of salt, right? Because this is like fourth hand how this all happened. But we really garbage tasting chicken for a very long time until we got to our next port.

00:38:27 Phil Howard: What do you mean, like like frozen chicken? Like fried chicken? Like. What do you mean?

00:38:32 Kenan Bliss: Everything’s got to be frozen. For the most part. It doesn’t stay fresh for that long. But I mean, by the time it was just a lot of it, I think the closest, the only real beef that we had was hamburgers on Saturday afternoon. And by the time we got back to our home port, I was ready to go into a KFC and go postal. I was done with chicken at that point.

00:38:52 Speaker 4: Ah.

00:38:55 Phil Howard: Can you even look at it the same anymore?

00:38:57 Kenan Bliss: I, I don’t and When my wife still makes me eat it. But I still tell her.

00:39:02 Phil Howard: Let’s end with I want you. Let’s end with I saw you speaking to any CTO CIOs out there. Like what? Could you. It’s not the easiest role. I call it the loneliest seat in the C-suite, because you speak a language that the CEOs don’t fully understand. And if you did speak that language, you might kind of freak them out. So you’ve got to speak in sports metaphors, um, business language in EBITDA and stuff like that. When you want to be able to speak in a language that they do understand, but you just can’t, and then you’ve got your old team, which is still kind of your team that you’re protecting below you, even though your new team is this, um, but you want to coddle your old team and not make them freak out all the time like you and the C-suite is? Because they got you want them doing their job the best they can without feeling like they’re getting fired. What is your how can you help that person?

00:39:55 Kenan Bliss: It’s okay to ask for help. It is. There’s so much tech out there. And I mean, for I mean, I’ve been working in the Azure space for, what, ten, twelve ish years? Three hundred sixty five for eighteen, nine, seventeen. I don’t even remember anymore. I remember working on Bpos. I started calling it office three hundred sixty. Nobody knows everything. Nobody does. And nobody can plan for every type of technology that you’re going to use. Even bringing my team in, I’m going to bring multiple people, and we’re probably going to refer you to some other people for specific things. It’s okay to ask for help. Start with a clean slate. Understand what you’re getting yourself into, and don’t be afraid to say, these are my boundaries, and I need you to help me fill in the gaps. And and that will get you the easy path. It puts you in the position where you can defend your team. When I was a leader in the Navy, I was more focused on deflecting that ball that rolled downhill and taking care of my team and making sure that they could pass their issues up to me and I could run them forward and by. And it made the officers and chiefs that were above me respect that. That changed. Things went through me before they went to the blue shirts because they knew that I was going to. I was going to block unless they came to me with something reasonable. And you can defend your team and you can get them the time to get the training to understand the new technology that’s being put in, by bringing the right people to help you organize that, and then they can train them. I don’t want to walk out of a project and have the customer completely dependent on me to run it. I’ve got too much to do. I want to walk away from that project with in regards to this specific thing that we did for you. Ideally, you never have to talk to me about it again because I taught you what we did and I showed you the way. You might come back and ask me to do something else and show you how it ties into that. But if I did my job correctly, you don’t need me anymore.

00:42:18 Speaker 4: Love it.

00:42:19 Kenan Bliss: Not for that.

00:42:21 Phil Howard: So if anyone out there would like to experience the. A blissful Microsoft Azure experience, I guess. Let us know. Well, we’re going to we’re going to put you in contact with Ken. But he’s he’s probably like behind like fifteen locked doors in a sub underground. So you’re going to have to find a way. Um, um, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Any any final words of wisdom?

00:42:50 Kenan Bliss: I just this is this is a passion for me, and I would probably venture to say that for my entire team, we’re we’re. This is fun. We’re getting paid. Don’t get me wrong. We gotta make a living. But we enjoy it. And that’s the reason that we’ve been successful, is that if I have a team member that’s miserable, they’re not going to do good work, and I’ll tell them that they should go look elsewhere. You know it. We have a good time doing it. We’re passionate about it. And we want we want our customers to be successful, happy customers. Really. I mean, if I save you one hundred thousand dollars a year, you’re going to spend a little bit of it in places where I can help you. So it’s never bad for me. But I want people to be happy and I want them to be successful with their technology.

00:43:43 Phil Howard: Thank you sir. Thank you so much for being on the show. Is, um, yeah, a lot of fun and we look forward to having a great relationship with you, with you and helium in the future. Anyone out there listening If you want to be introduced to helium technologies, then you can reach out to myself personally on LinkedIn like a I think we have like a code or something. I guess we’re going to do the, the the the like the, the special discount code, the special gift that we’re going to be giving away. I can tell you right now that the discount code will definitely be this. So if you DM me bliss be it doesn’t matter. You don’t. It’s not case sensitive bliss. Okay, if you if you DM Phil Howard Bliss or our team at dissecting IT nerds and the secret that’s going to be we’re going to do something very nice and special for you guys, and at least do a deep dive on your current Microsoft Azure situation. Greenfield, or what do we call it, brownfield, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, brownfield, which is probably most of you, or migrations, um, maybe you hate AWS or something. Uh, we’re going to do all that and, um, at least give you at the very least, a second set of eyes on your current situation and that come that could be worth a lot of money or everything in the world. And maybe you’ll go from being miserable to happy or blissful. So thank you, sir.

00:45:06 Kenan Bliss: My pleasure.