Speaker 0 | 00:09.582

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today, there’s not much that we can do to avoid this subject. But today we have Pierluigi Stella on the line, who lives in Houston, Texas right now, but has family and is… and is Italian. So I think that’s a something that we can’t really avoid talking about this, the coronavirus thing. And we had planned today to talk about migrating applications to the cloud and Pierluigi is a CTO at NetworkBox here in the USA, you know, and briefly, yeah. So just briefly before we, you know, we were talking about how the United States is, you know, from your perspective ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and migrating things to the cloud.

Speaker 1 | 01:00.356

And so,

Speaker 0 | 01:02.477

which I think is interesting, uh, cause I think European countries in general tend to be ahead of America. Me being a telecom and internet guy, we tend to be ahead, uh, behind the curve when it comes to infrastructure in delivering internet services and IP services in a very efficient manner because we spent so much money on infrastructure, uh, years ago. Um, I mean, do you agree with that? Yes,

Speaker 1 | 01:26.770

but you need to take the. you need to separate the two things. The U.S., if you go back to Kohler TV, the U.S. was the first to adopt Kohler. When we were in Europe, we didn’t even know what Kohler TV was. But by the time we finally got it, my father got the first one in 1982 because of the World Cup soccer. We had systems that were working with a much more advanced technology.

Speaker 0 | 01:54.473

Which, by the way, just a side note, did we even have a good soccer team back in 1982? Didn’t even have soccer. Did anyone even care about soccer in America? Didn’t even care. But anyways, go on. That’s a subject that will take you, take an Italian forever to talk about.

Speaker 1 | 02:14.721

No, yeah, I know. And nobody cared about it yet either. But going back to that, that’s just an example. The thing is, because Europe wasn’t behind the curve when they finally got to it. They got with a much better technology. The power and second system that we were using in Europe were much more advanced, right? I remember coming to the US in 1999 and looking at the color TV and saying, I thought in the US they had better technologies than this. It was really awful.

Speaker 0 | 02:41.763

Yeah, what is it? What is up with America inventing absolutely almost everything?

Speaker 1 | 02:47.487

Everything, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 02:48.708

What is that? It’s crazy.

Speaker 1 | 02:51.450

It’s the amount of… It’s just the environment that is suitable, I guess, for everything. You can do, you can fully do whatever you want. People say, make American dreams again, and they make a dream. You need to come here from abroad to understand it. It’s not that elsewhere they put rods in your wheels, they start to stop you. It’s just that the environment around you isn’t the same as it is here. Somehow. Here, things happen more easily because the entire environment is created for business. Now, let me ask you this. Around the business.

Speaker 0 | 03:31.762

Let me ask you this because even Howard Schultz went to Italy, stole your coffee culture, and turned it into Starbucks. Okay? So, you know, it even took an American to go steal Italian culture and form it into some kind of thing that’s now this ridiculous thing where we all pay $5 for a cup of coffee. What? So it’s easier here, and we are going to get to coronavirus, which is a very suitable subject for you and everybody listening. And I wish I could have recorded you cursing at your older son for going out into the environment. It sounded similar to some kind of reprimand that I would give my children in the background. Lock yourself in your room. And anyways, why? So it’s easier here in America, maybe from a technology or just, I don’t know, capitalistic, this mentality. Is it easier to live stress-free here, though? I just want to know from someone that came from another country where, you know, you might have higher unemployment and maybe a more relaxed. This is me completely stereotyping your culture, by the way. Maybe a more relaxed. cafe style culture where you know maybe it’s more family oriented maybe we’re more together maybe we see our in-laws on a daily basis to a very truncated okay go ahead

Speaker 1 | 05:02.932

You’re putting in a lot of variables to this question. Let’s focus on the question. Is it less stressful? Yes. Is it because the culture there is more in the U.S. It’s less stressful.

Speaker 0 | 05:17.820

You’re saying it’s less stressful in the U.S.?

Speaker 1 | 05:20.442

Absolutely. And it is because life, at least in places like Israel. Now, keep in mind, I’ve always lived in Jerusalem. I’ve been here 21 years. So my… But… perspective may be a bit skewed by the fact that Houston is an amazing city, very cosmopolitan, extremely accepting where life is very easy and the prices are very low.

Speaker 0 | 05:41.291

Houston is cheap, man. It is cheap.

Speaker 1 | 05:44.351

Yeah, it is. And because of that, maybe my point of view isn’t valid in California or New York or in Chicago. But in Houston, life is easy. It’s convenient. It’s just organized in such a way that Heck, you don’t even need to get out of the car to go get groceries anymore. You need to get out of the car to go get a coffee or your medicines, right? Yeah. In Italy, and that’s literally, I don’t know the rest of the country, the other European countries, but they’re not that different. Life isn’t so convenient. You live in apartments, crammed up with thousands of people in the same place. You don’t know where to park your car. That’s your first- the stress in the morning. You don’t even know if you’ll find your car if somebody stole it when you get out of the house in the morning. And then you fight traffic there. If you think the traffic is bad, you need to go in Milan or Rome and see how bad it is with unruly drivers who don’t know the traffic is horrible, they just run you over. And then it is, it makes, it’s organized in such a way, so archaic in many ways. and bureaucratic that makes your life inconvenient. Even to pay a bill. When I left, maybe things have changed now. I’ve been away for 21 years. But when I left to pay my bill for the electricity, I had to go to the post office and get in line for an hour at the post office to pay a bill. How terribly, not just inconvenient it is, but what a waste of labor in the economy for such a thing, right? It’s just much more clear. First thing I get, where I get here, I get internet in my home in 1999. And IBM tells me you can work 40 hours a week from home. Come to the office only if you have, if you have, I was working at IBM at the time. It’s so much more, so much easier. Everything is much easier. And at the end of the day, it was there I relieved the stress. By the way, it’s not true that Americans work more. When I was in Italy, I was working from 8am until 9pm every single day at IBM. Here, everybody goes home at 5. And okay, I am where I am in my company, so maybe I work a little bit more than everybody else because I’m using up my character. But my employees at 5pm, they put the pen down and they leave. And the rest of the evening is theirs. Nobody deserves them. And we and I, we need to stack there. privacy in their life after hours. So they have a life after hours. I don’t remember having their luxury when I was little.

Speaker 0 | 08:34.712

Okay. I worked for an Italian pizza place when I was in college and Biagio was from, I think he was from, I can’t remember where he was from, maybe it was Naples.

Speaker 1 | 08:47.203

Biagio probably, Biagio sounds more from Florence or something there about.

Speaker 0 | 08:53.304

So he told me that a lot, and I just don’t know if this is true, he told me a lot about kind of like this mafia-type structure where if you have a very successful business, the boss will come in and you need to pay him a certain percentage of your business earnings, and that kind of gets pushed back out in almost like a public service tax or something like this. Does this still exist over there?

Speaker 1 | 09:20.362

I guess the guy was from Naples.

Speaker 0 | 09:25.042

I don’t know man, I just you know, it was kind of a movie. Like talking to him was like, I felt like I was in a movie.

Speaker 1 | 09:31.187

Yes, things have not changed very much. I had the recent conversation with my friends and my sister about a public investigator in Calabria who has put 5,000 people in jail and the whole public is just waiting for him to die. The opinion is, this guy has brought too many boats. It’s a very, very difficult topic. in many ways. Difficult because it involves politics aside from crime. It’s also difficult for me because it has actually affected my life. The place where I’m from, the south of Italy, is in very poor conditions. It’s probably the poorest region in Europe, mostly because of this. Because you can’t do anything. People give up.

Speaker 0 | 10:26.458

Why try?

Speaker 1 | 10:28.538

Imagine this. I was there in 2017. Yeah, he was trying to make a living by purchasing a number of the little boats to rent out, they’re called pedal boats. And after a few days, they were all burned down on the beach because he refused to pay the protection. And this is 2017, so these things are still happening. It’s very unfortunate and disheartening. And that’s, by the way, one of the reasons why business never develops. because if you don’t comply you don’t go anywhere and if you comply you still don’t go anywhere because they’re sucking this up your life it’s not um conducive for business and for as long as situations like this don’t get resolved nothing is ever going to change I thought we were talking about the U.S. business.

Speaker 0 | 11:24.956

I know, man, but this is, you know, I don’t get this opportunity that often, you know. You never know how my brain works. It can fly off into, you know, anywhere. So let’s talk in general. The, you know, technology and the coronavirus concern, you know, combined. I’ve had numerous stories over the past, you know, two weeks or so. I’ve been rushing to upgrade. you know, people’s internet connections. I’ve had people, Hey, we’ve got to quickly convert our entire workforce to a mobile workforce. And we’ve got five days to do this, um, numerous different things. So I would, and you have a different, you have a perspective, you have kind of a more worldly perspective because you have family back home and I get everything from this coronavirus is a bunch of fear mongering. It’s, um, you know, it’s really not that real. You don’t have to worry about it. Um, to. absolutely it’s 100% real because my sister works in the hospital and you know what’s your general perspective I guess from like a technology standpoint how you feel it’s going to be affecting technology and business?

Speaker 1 | 12:34.213

So first of all, anybody who tells you like my son just stated that it’s fear mongering and it’s bogus doesn’t see the news from outside the country. I read a very long article from some skeptic guy from Italy, by the way, who was going on statistics to show how car accidents kill more people than the coronavirus. What the guy failed to recognize is that right now in Italy, they don’t have enough beds in the hospitals to put these people that are sick and take care of them. They had to. They had to use a center like, I don’t know if you’re from Houston, if you’re in Houston, Houston is a very large center called the George R. Brown.

Speaker 0 | 13:21.036

I’m in Massachusetts, so not far from the hospital. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 13:26.221

Yeah, so. Okay. Right here we have the George R. Brown Convention Center. It’s a very large convention center in Milan. There is a center that’s even bigger than that. They locked up the entire thing and are using it as a hospital only for the coronavirus. They didn’t have enough respirators. They had to buy them from China in an emergency. They didn’t have enough doctors. They had to beg China to send doctors. This is what these people are not understanding. It’s not that it’s… Yes, it is probably only 1% or 2% deadly and only for the people that are very old. But it’s happening as an epidemic all at once. Therefore, it’s affecting the medical system so much. They’re not doing subjects. They’re not doing… They’re not… You go there for an emergency, unless you’re about to die, they don’t even take you in anymore. That is how the medical system is. Now, obviously, Italy is a small country. But make the proportions. The therapists in the U.S. were already talking about California getting overwhelmed in their health system. Because at some point, you run out of beds. You run out of doctors. You run out of materials. Because it’s too many only at once. That’s the problem. It’s not the moral. mortality percent. It’s how quickly this thing is happening and how widespread it’s becoming. And if we don’t do anything to lower the spread, we’re going to have a million people in the hospital that we can’t take care of. And they’re going to end up dead because we simply cannot take care of them. And I don’t know, I might be one of them. I’m sorry if I am concerned. Now, from a technology standpoint, what is the change? The change is, I sent out a blog post about a month ago, we learn only when things happen and it’s a mecca to do things. We never thought of a data center as a serious alternative to our little computer room, because data centers are too expensive, until 9-11 happened. And when 9-11 happened, and a lot of companies were out of business because they didn’t have a data center with their data, then data centers became a thing. And now data centers are everywhere, and then the cloud is everywhere, and then the public cloud is everywhere. And then nobody that I know of, that I’ve ever talked to, has ever considered the possibility that it’s not the computers that are broken, it’s the people. Because when you design a disaster recovery plan, what you are planning for is deep. inability to get to your data or to your application. It’s the data lost. You lost your office, your service, something of the nature, right? When have you ever seen anybody saying, what if I’m losing my people? How am I going to run my company if 10% of them are in the hospital? How am I going to run my company if I can’t get to the company? Yes. The solution to I cannot get to the company seems simple. Get a VPN. Well, in many cases that is true. Sometimes you just need to pretend. There is work that you need to do. If you’re an accountant and you’re looking at my paperwork for the taxes, unless you’ve spent a month scanning all of them, you probably have to go to the office and do just that. That’s an example. There are situations of technology where you cannot necessarily… work from home all the time, but at least you should get to a position where most of your people can work from home. So you can implement what the media are calling social distancing. The other day, me and another colleague were in the office. We literally avoided each other all day long. We talked from the two opposites of the aisle. It’s social distancing. It looks ridiculous in normal circumstances, but right now we all know and understand why we’re doing that. Yes. So what happened to us specifically is that for a month now I have been begging my clients via proper communications like direct mailing, blog posts and similar to prepare because it’s coming, because I have first-hand information of what’s happening elsewhere and I know it’s coming. And be prepared to work from home, create the BPMs. Guess what? No one answered until three days ago. Three days ago, I think in the last three days, we must have created 400 VPNs. We were doing that, all of us working from home, all of us, all hands on deck, working, creating VPNs for the client.

Speaker 0 | 18:06.309

And how did you do that?

Speaker 1 | 18:07.269

All of us. What do you mean? Our devices are, one of the things that our device does is terminate the VPN concentrator as one of the functions. So we just… you don’t need to implement it but you know there is technical work to be done it’s not like you push a button yeah of course that’s kind of why i was asking yeah yeah you have to complete you have to configure it you have to create and now obviously one thing we don’t want to do it is open up the possibility of then be hacked because we are creating everybody on a vpn you’re putting users that are normally not there are no technical users on the vpn working from home yeah the first thing that i recommend to all of them is to use a two-factor authentication That’s another step in the configuration that takes time. Because the user can’t even scan a QR code to get the authenticator to work. It’s little things, one on top of the other. When you file them up and then you multiply them by 400 or 4000, it becomes a mountain. It becomes a portion.

Speaker 0 | 19:07.748

In general, this is like a disaster avoidance conversation. And it’s interesting how people are always thinking, well… I mean, a hurricane is not going to hit my location. Something like this is, I don’t, no one could have predicted this. I don’t think. No.

Speaker 1 | 19:23.654

And I can tell you that I was the first one three years ago. An auditor asked me for a disaster recovery plan in case of a pandemic. And I myself pooped with him. I just like, where is this guy? What is he doing? He’s just trying to find something wrong because he didn’t find anything wrong. Well, three years later, here I am. I’m thinking, well, the guy was. has foresight yeah right he was asking for something legit and i and i and i dismissed them yeah we need to learn to be prepared for the unpredictable because things like this are don’t happen every day, but they do happen, and when they do happen, they can cause catastrophic situations for the company.

Speaker 0 | 20:09.519

Well, I would say they could definitely shut you down indefinitely.

Speaker 1 | 20:13.082

Indefinitely, oh yes, completely,

Speaker 0 | 20:15.663

absolutely. There are some companies that will not come out of this. They’re probably… Well,

Speaker 1 | 20:22.248

smaller companies, a lot of small companies, like small restaurants, for example, in the eastern area or anywhere else.

Speaker 0 | 20:27.331

Yeah, they’re done.

Speaker 1 | 20:28.873

If they are not castrate… I don’t know how they’re going to do it. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 20:36.203

Because they definitely don’t get enough. Yeah, no, they’re not. Just to give you a short example there, just for example, there’s a guy in my jiu-jitsu class that’s in the, you know, whatever our jiu-jitsu Facebook group is, and he basically posted a picture of his restaurant completely empty. And basically the quote was, could someone come down here, put some mats down, please. And you can start by just punching me in the face with like about 70% force. And I mean, because that’s it. What’s he going to do? How long can he survive like that? How long, you know, if you don’t have cash flow, if you’re not cash flow positive for at least like, you know, a year, if you don’t have something like that, what are you going to do?

Speaker 1 | 21:15.777

The other question I said, the sad part of this is that I don’t think people are realizing yet how long this will last. In China, it started in the middle of December and they’re still dealing with it. We’re almost April here. Well,

Speaker 0 | 21:32.074

some people say it’s going to come back in China. Some people say it’s going to come back again once…

Speaker 1 | 21:36.795

It is possible because in reality, this is the kind of stuff that goes away forever. This is now part of our life. So it’s going to stay. It’s here to stay.

Speaker 0 | 21:47.498

Once people go back to work and they open it back up again…

Speaker 1 | 21:50.819

Yeah, we’re going to go back to it. The only hope is that we get a vaccine or we get a cure so it doesn’t become… It’s no longer a threat like it is today. But in reality, this is… It’s a new virus that’s in the environment. You can’t kill it because it’s a virus. It’s not a bacteria. You can’t eradicate it. The only way to do it is if we manage to provide a vaccine. But that vaccine will take another 18 months, according to what I hear in the news. So we are a long time away from being safe from this thing.

Speaker 0 | 22:19.615

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 22:23.318

And therefore, as a business, we are not doctors, so I don’t want to sound like a… I’m pretending to be an officer, but I’m talking as a business person. From a business perspective, we need to learn to live with it. And living with it means that we have to adopt measures of social distancing for the long term. That’s what we have to do. And it is what it is. I haven’t gone to the gym for a week. I go every day. What I’m doing now, I’m going to the park. I’m running in the sun. I’m getting sun. I’m getting out there. Find a way, if you will,

Speaker 0 | 23:01.257

to make the best of it. Yeah. Well, hey, at least you’re going outside. I don’t think I’ve gone outside. I’m in kind of a minor depression because the only way that I exercise is by doing submission grappling, so to speak. So I’ve got a bunch of guys that I roll around with on the ground and we try to break each other’s arms and choke each other out. Uh, so it’s like a, it’s like a, you know, I’m going through like a depression, you know, and one of the guys in our group is, uh, a, um, and he’s like a U S air Marshall. So we can’t roll with him now. Cause he’s been traveling on the airplane. You know, another guy is like, you know, the president of a massive multi-location, you know, home healthcare facility. Uh, so he’s out, you know, he’s done. Um, so it’s pretty much, yeah. So I probably need to start finding a way to exercise somehow, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 23:53.566

Go running. Now that the weather is getting better, go running.

Speaker 0 | 24:01.291

So you said you’re on the Forbes Technology Council as an official member. What advice would you have or maybe a plan of action for other IT leaders out there, IT directors, technology directors on what they should… Maybe they weren’t prepared, maybe they are prepared, but any advice for anyone out there that’s dealing with, you know, hundreds of end users and preparing them for, you know, a work at home for the next six months? What should their thought, what should their mentality or thought pattern be, maybe planning strategy?

Speaker 1 | 24:36.169

I was thinking about this yesterday, actually. One of the lucky things, I would say at this point I was lucky, because I felt that I didn’t think of this happening. But that’s not why I did it. But, you know, the… year we moved absolutely everything to the amazon cloud yeah i i literally don’t have a single server in house anymore my office there’s only workplaces mostly linux workstations because of the kind of company we are but that doesn’t matter towards this. Today, I can have my team scattered across the world if necessary, and we can still provide support to the client. The only thing we may not be able to do is physical products because we have to be in the office for that. But other than that, we can do everything. Everything we do is in the public cloud. I stress public because Before that, we had our own private cloud. And in that case, I would still cater to a computer. Yes, it was in the data center, but it’s still mine. And I still need to take care of it. I still need to babysit. And I still need to be worried that if the guys that take care of that are elsewhere occupied because they’re getting sick, I have a problem. With a public cloud, the infrastructure is so big. And the number of people they have at this point is so small. that hopefully they’re not gonna have a problem and therefore i don’t have a problem right so all all the people that continue thinking that the public cloud is not a good idea i have a little mess i sleep better at night i’ve gone to the public cloud and by the same another way i have saved an enormous amount of money it’s not true that the public cloud is not safe if you do it properly And it’s…

Speaker 0 | 26:31.749

So what are some of the… So why would people think it’s not safe to… There’s so many questions here anyways. I mean, like how…

Speaker 1 | 26:39.036

This is a very, very long…

Speaker 0 | 26:40.978

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, why don’t we just cut to, you know… Forget the why it’s not safe. People can figure that out, I guess. How about…

Speaker 1 | 26:49.986

Actually, no. I personally don’t know why they say it’s not safe. We’re doing it. We set up our own system. as the front end, the firewall IP for everything, and everything else is behind. Nothing that we have on the public cloud is phasing the internet, except our own system, which we turned the same, that we’re protecting our network before anyway, except that the resources are physical. That’s the only difference. So I really don’t see how it’s not safe. I can’t figure it out. Every time I read about the cybersecurity for the cloud, I scratch my head, it’s really not that big of a rocket science. The only problem is misunderstanding. The people don’t realize the sharing of responsibility. They don’t realize that infrastructure is a service, which AWS provides. I say AWS because it’s the one I use, but there’s Google, there’s IBM, there’s Microsoft, there are so many others, right? I don’t want to sound like I’m a billboard for AWS. What they are providing is physical security. They are providing, nobody can get to your computer. Other than that, they don’t give you anything. Everything about cybersecurity is your responsibility. Do it just the way you were doing it in the land, treat it the way you treat it in your environment, and keep your computer safe. Don’t think that they’re doing anything for you because they’re not. That’s the only thing that really needs to be understood. And after that, if you do things right, you’re just as safe there as you are in the office. Okay. in many ways, I think you’re safer because your data is scattered on so many different hard drives that nobody can physically feel it because you don’t know where it is.

Speaker 0 | 28:32.278

I got you. So, well, let’s use this maybe then, just maybe this coronavirus opportunity, maybe this can be looked upon as a technology leadership opportunity. over the next six to 12 months to, it’s almost the perfect opportunity to take advantage of any type of migrations or changes to internal infrastructure because if you’ve got things on site or you’ve got a hybrid environment or you’re thinking of migrating things, it’s almost like this is the perfect opportunity to actually make those changes.

Speaker 1 | 29:14.024

And make it happen because now you can go to the board and give them ideas of what you need to make it happen. By the way, you will find that you will end up saving money in the long run. And definitely, that is a very compelling reason to make that happen. But think of it, if we change our workforce and the way we organize our life because of this, and these people that are working from home today find out that it is actually better to work from home. Have you seen the pictures of the pollution over Italy and over…

Speaker 0 | 29:46.779

I’m definitely seeing it over China.

Speaker 1 | 29:48.259

China? Yes, although Italy is the same, the same idea. Pollution disappeared from the north of Italy. Aside from the technology, right, there’s a lot to gain in our… in the in other aspects of our life in a place like houston people travel 20 miles in every direction as they go to work and spend the 90 minutes a day if not more in traffic every day it’s ridiculous how much exactly you know how much life you regain i i did this for myself in 12 years ago i sold a very large house i led at the edge of houston and I bought a very tiny townhome because the proportion of the cost was that nature, right? That much, a little tiny place, 10 minutes from my office. Those three hours a day that I gained, I spent in nurturing my family, nurturing myself, going to the gym, doing a lot of things. I gained back life, right? So, consider this situation as a way that is forcing all of us into considering and leaving in a different way. So we don’t all get in traffic in the morning, headed to the same direction.

Speaker 0 | 31:01.961

I mean, I did it years ago. I did it years ago. And it’s not only just the traffic. It’s not only just the hour and a half commute because I was in Washington, D.C. at the time, which has got, I think, the third or second worst traffic in the United States. But not only that, it’s the standing meetings. It’s the water cooler talk. It’s the gossip. It’s the… It’s the, I just want to get home, so what do I need to do to, you know, kind of, you know, spin things for the rest of the day.

Speaker 1 | 31:33.784

Exciting from there.

Speaker 0 | 31:35.865

The other thing is it changes you to a results-oriented business.

Speaker 1 | 31:42.208

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 31:42.848

It’s about results. It’s not really necessarily about clocking.

Speaker 1 | 31:46.870

You’re not walking in a day to leave in a fight. You are, you have 20 things to do today. Get it done. If you get it done in three hours, good for you. Yeah. Go have fun. And that’s it. That’s how, by the way, I don’t want to sound like a nag, but this is how I’ve been running my company for all these years. To me, I never ask anybody, you have to stay here, be here at 8 a.m. You have to do this. This is what you need to do today. If you do it by 3 p.m., you are a leak. Fine, go. And that’s how it is. If they want to do it from home, fine, go. We were already organized in this way before the coronavirus. Everybody had the VPN to work from home. So the… But it’s a mentality that can change and the technology will be, as it should be, the tool of the change, right? To allow people to embrace a different way of living. By the way, you stay in the company, you save a lot of money because people are working from home. You don’t need an office. You don’t need to rent 3,000 rooms downtown Houston at $50 a square foot when your employees can work from home.

Speaker 0 | 32:53.118

Or even a portion of them, because obviously it doesn’t work that way in manufacturing. It’s not going to work that way for every company.

Speaker 1 | 32:59.141

No, it doesn’t.

Speaker 0 | 33:00.362

But there’s definitely a percentage. There is definitely a percentage of employees that, I mean, really could be working from home. And, you know, I don’t know if you can necessarily put together, I’m sure there’s some data scientists that could go and measure psychological freedom and all kinds of other things and different bullet points and everything. I’m very sure.

Speaker 1 | 33:17.991

But just understand in the morning. there is an highway in Houston called Highway 10. It’s got six lanes in every direction. In the morning, the highway is a massive parking lot. And if even just half of those people could work from home, everybody else could go get to work in half the time. Those that had to go. Because downtown Houston, there is a medical center that’s the largest in the world. I believe it has 100,000 employees. Those people can’t work from home. The nurses have to go to work. Right? Yeah. So, but if they don’t find the highway, that’s completely clogged in the morning, their life will be easier too, because they don’t have to stress over that. Now, I know this is not technology. And these never thought about technology. No,

Speaker 0 | 34:06.299

but it is. I mean, because the technology guys make it happen.

Speaker 1 | 34:09.921

Exactly. Exactly. That’s why I mentioned it. I think it’s because this is, we as technologists need to make it happen. We need to show the companies that we work for, that there is another way. If you can trust your people to work for a moment, be productive, and clearly now, okay, now it opens up a conversation with HR about how to make sure the people make sure they’re productive, they don’t go playground, whatever. I don’t even want to get into that because it’s not my field, right? But I can only contribute to the technology. I can put you in a position where you can do that if you want to. And we have the technology today. I pay $50,000 a month for… 600 megabits per second for my housing. And yesterday I got AT&T offering me fiber, one gigabit for the same amount of money. So why do I want to get out of my bedroom in the morning? It’s just a fight to traffic if I leave outside of Houston. There is no reason. If your work allows it, this is the moment when we need to make this as a rebel district to make it happen for everybody. Because it will have a beneficial effect in so many other ways. And measure. I mean,

Speaker 0 | 35:20.822

the other thing is we got to start measuring.

Speaker 1 | 35:24.426

Yes, of course.

Speaker 0 | 35:26.087

You know, take this time to measure. See, the other theme that happens a lot is a lot of IT directors get stuck in the taking orders, peon, almost slavery part of technology where they just become, you know, I don’t know, the cost center, you know, guy, IT dude, you know, running the systems. And I get a lot of complaints always that it’s, you know. People don’t respect IT or we don’t get the attention we deserve. We don’t get the money we deserve in the budget. Obviously, security guys, it’s always about we don’t get enough money to implement, you know, XYZ until we get hacked or until we have, you know, some massive security breach or, you know, a ransomware attack, whatever it is. And then when it happens, now all of a sudden, you know, we get the money. So, well, guess what? It’s happening. And this is an opportunity for you to keep. to kind of jump in and, I guess, insert yourself into the executive leadership standpoint, start measuring the data, and provide a new alternative to grow the business. Because right now, if the business is losing money, and you can save the business from losing money or even show increased growth during this time period, that would be amazing.

Speaker 1 | 36:42.509

There are a couple of things that I want to comment on. I want to be a little harsh. intensely here if people are if your leaders are not paying attention you’re not doing a good job and making the main thing at that in 2020 if your model directors doesn’t give you the money to do security because you haven’t been able to show them that they need to is today in today’s world i will not do business with you if you don’t do proper security in your company So cybersecurity is no longer a cost center, but it’s become an existential part of a company. Without cybersecurity, there is no company. If you can’t explain that to your board, get them to give you the money you need to create the cybersecurity that you need, then you probably need to change the way you are approaching cybersecurity. It’s not a matter of technology anymore. You can’t just go to there and ask for $10,000 for a firewall. You need to go there to save. Without this firewall, Paraget isn’t going to buy your products anymore because you get them at risk. Because they’re doing vendor management and they’re looking at us and they’re saying, we don’t have proper cybersecurity and therefore they’re not going to buy our products. And by the way, this has already happened. A lot of my clients are banks. I’ve had situations where we were rejecting their vendors’connections because… the vendor was compromised or appears to be compromised. The cybersecurity wasn’t proper. Instead of saying, telling me, no, allow them anyway, the bank went back to the vendor and told them, if you don’t fix your cybersecurity and get your act together, we’re not going to do business with you. The parameters have changed. I’ve been doing this for 16 years. 16 years ago, my client would have told me, allow them in anyway, because I need them to come in. Today, They have a completely different attitude of, no, no, no, this isn’t happening. They’re going to fix themselves or I’m going to, there’s plenty of other companies I can use to do the same thing. There is always somebody else that can provide you a product or service. And if you’re not properly set up with cybersecurity, you create a danger for the company you’re servicing, they’re going to drop you and go somewhere else.

Speaker 0 | 39:09.406

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 39:10.827

Yeah. And there’s a very important point. So I’m sorry if I… somehow, but with these people that continue to complain, I don’t get the attention I deserve, it’s because you don’t know how to get the attention you deserve.

Speaker 0 | 39:20.955

I don’t know why you’re the first person to say that. I don’t know why you’re the first person to say that because that’s such common sense that other companies won’t do business with companies that are insecure.

Speaker 1 | 39:35.888

Yeah. Yes, exactly. My clients have been doing vendor management for 15 years. vendor manager meaning they scrutinize our company to see if we are viable for their business right and they’re doing that with every one of the clients now what one thing i’ve found in the course in the course of these 16 years is the banking industry is very much ahead of of the curve compared to everybody else. If we only did in cyber security everywhere what banks are doing today, we’d be a much, all of us would be in a much better place. Vendor management is something the banks have been doing for 15 years. And it’s not just the economic viability of the company, it’s also how safe is the company, how secure is the company. Are they going to get attacked? And then through them, we are going to get attacked. Right? And they have, their vendors need to provide all these statements that they are doing things properly. We should be doing this everywhere. And everybody should understand that if you don’t do this, you may not be able to provide your services or sell your products anymore, because you’re not going to get a buyer.

Speaker 0 | 40:55.490

And it may come out of left field. The other thing though is it may come, that’s back to disaster avoidance again, because it may come out of left field. It may come out of nowhere. They may meet with you. We might have like a quarterly business review, let’s just say, with our client. And our client asks us this question. We can’t answer it. And they say, sorry, we can’t do business with you anymore. Out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 | 41:19.691

That’s very well, very much possible. The way it’s being done now is more of a standardized way by checking certain audits once a year. But yeah, what you said is very much possible too. It’s just that you cannot be the weak link in a supply chain.

Speaker 0 | 41:36.866

Now, let’s take it the other way. Let’s take this to another level. Because this is where an IT manager, leader, CTO, whoever, can… maybe go to the sales department or business development manager and say, hey, I have a special secret tactic that may allow us to, I don’t want to say steal, but take over, be more aggressive in getting new business. And maybe we should preemptively show our clients or potential clients how secure we are and have them ask our competition. If they are said secure companies.

Speaker 1 | 42:24.164

You sound like a salesman now.

Speaker 0 | 42:27.366

Yeah. My very first Gmail account was IamASalesmanAtGmail.com. Anyone can send me an email to that. Anyone can send an email right now and I’ll get that.

Speaker 1 | 42:40.573

I’ll find a way to do that.

Speaker 0 | 42:45.676

So no, but everyone’s in sales. Let’s be honest. The security guys are more in sales than they would like to be. Security guys hate salespeople. They hate vendors calling them, trying to sell them blinky lights and the next fishing product. They hate that.

Speaker 1 | 42:58.222

Oh, you have no idea.

Speaker 0 | 43:00.003

But they are the ones. They are the ones that have to be in sales more than anybody else.

Speaker 1 | 43:05.888

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 43:06.569

Selling yourself. Selling yourself.

Speaker 1 | 43:09.871

I see this in two different ways. If you are the cybersecurity, whatever you are inside the company, that’s completely different things. you know the type lines whatever it is yes you feel like you just said you’re correct you’re the correct you see this and you can do exactly what you just said right give a use this as a technical advantage because it’s uh uh it’s a business advantage compared with your competition I see the same from my point of view in my own company. I end up, I have nothing to do with sales. I end up being the one that gets called into the sales call all the time because the clients want to know, the clients want to know the…

Speaker 0 | 43:59.853

They want to know how you turned up 400 VPNs, whatever it is. They want to know how you turned up 400 VPNs due to the coronavirus, okay? Let me do the job for you. I can do it. Let’s go. You know, you’re just going to be like, hey, did you know our guy, Pierre Luigi, just turned up X number of VPNs due to coronavirus, turned everyone back up,

Speaker 1 | 44:16.302

saved the company.

Speaker 0 | 44:20.045

That’s why RingCentral stock is up right now. Last I heard. This is a rumor. I don’t know. I should probably go check the stock ticker. But a lot of the UCAS providers are up.

Speaker 1 | 44:30.712

Because I can use it. I’m using it right now. Well, I’m not using it right now. I called you direct, but I could have. This morning, I was on the phone with my team. using RingCentral, right? And we have the phones already directed completely out. If you call right now, it just rings one of us. So outside.

Speaker 0 | 44:47.733

And you use RingCentral for Zoom also. Zoom’s built in. We’re recording this entire podcast on Zoom. Done.

Speaker 1 | 44:53.318

Oh my God, you’re recording me. I forgot about that. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 44:58.202

I want some money from RingCentral after this call. Every time I plug them, I better get like a… Can they at least send me a $50 spot, like a gift card or something, you know?

Speaker 1 | 45:07.089

Okay, yeah. No, but it is. We’ve been preparing for this in a way because 9-11 unfortunately taught us the need to work from home, but apparently not enough. So we set up the unified communications, we set up some kind of formal cloud, some kind of VPN, but I don’t think anybody ever realized that at some point we may have to move the entire company at home. It’s something that we truly want.

Speaker 0 | 45:40.039

prepare the food. It makes a good point because every time I’m in New York and in Manhattan, I do ask myself how many of these businesses actually have to be here on this island. How many businesses have to be in Manhattan on the island? It doesn’t make sense to me. As opposed to if you really have to have a place of business, I don’t know, somewhere with cheaper rent like Houston.

Speaker 1 | 46:05.426

Some people consider that a state of symbol. Yeah, yeah. I have some friends in Houston that have another public security company. Yeah. That is…

Speaker 0 | 46:18.472

It’s in a closet in Manhattan.

Speaker 1 | 46:22.254

No, recently, they just recently moved to downtown Houston. And I have been wondering why. Because downtown Houston… is five times more expensive than anywhere else. Houston, I don’t know how other cities are, but Houston is organized in a district, right? We, our company is in a district called the West Face, which is on the west side of Houston, outside of the Beltway, which is the second largest loop around the city. So it’s a lot less expensive. And the closer you go to downtown, the more money you pay, right? If you go by what we call the Galleria district or downtown district, the prices are few, isn’t it?

Speaker 0 | 47:00.862

It should almost be a deterrent. It should go back to, again, we’re not going to do business with you. You’re stupid.

Speaker 1 | 47:07.807

It should be. You’re making the life of your employees miserable because getting downtown is a real pain at any time of the day and night. Escaping downtown after 4 p.m. is like you’re trapped in a mousetrap. And then you’re paying 10 times, 5 times more for square footage. What is the real business advantage of some kind of movie?

Speaker 0 | 47:31.678

If you’re in Austin, if you’re in Austin, I don’t, you know,

Speaker 1 | 47:34.260

at least you got that. The only reason why you do that is like the reason why lawyers do that. It’s a state of symbol, right? The big office full of glass in the high rise downtown, full of marble and glass, so it’s power. It’s a display of power. That’s all it is. Yeah. It doesn’t add anything to that knowledge and that ability to win a lawsuit. That’s a betrayal of power. And the same for this other company, which I just don’t see it. I don’t see why I would rather use the cash for my company to do something more serious for the company than to spend money for rent. We’re going into a different kind of conversation here, but I don’t even know how we got to that.

Speaker 0 | 48:17.029

Because technology makes that happen. Because technology is the one that makes that happen. And technology leaders are the ones that need to be pointing these things out and showing some of this. Not to mention perception, which is what you basically went over, which is perception is reality with the law firms, the perception of the big firm. That can be quickly magnified online, whether it be success stories or number of followers through social media and numerous other things as well. Because now it’s almost about, you know, where do you pop up? Where do they see you? How are they seeing you? They see you everywhere. They see you in a Facebook feed. They see you on LinkedIn. They see you this website here. They see you there. And. they may not be driving through downtown Houston and even care about the marble, the marble, you know, the big law firm sign anymore. Yes. So there’s other ways through technology to do that.

Speaker 1 | 49:07.997

I see that the internet is a great equalizer though, because on the internet, a tiny company can appear to be very large.

Speaker 0 | 49:15.239

And me, myself, I mean, realistically, if I want to live in Italy, I could. I could take my American. I just have to be born with this American mentality, I guess. before I go there. I can’t go from Italy. I could go from Italy to America and then back to Italy. But I can’t go for, you know, I can’t just start out in Italy and just realize this. I must leave first, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 49:36.127

Yes. To see the difference, you have to. The city of Antalya isn’t difficult to acquire. It’s just that it is here.

Speaker 0 | 49:48.274

It’s knowledge.

Speaker 1 | 49:48.914

Here it is in the environment. The thing that, I’ll give you a very simple example. Just, to prove how things are done here. The guy demos my loan, he’s organized with a business. He’s got an email, he makes the appointments, he has my text. Yeah. It’s a business. Yeah. Anything like that. Nothing like that. You know, you go, you can call somebody to cut your trees. You have them at $20 or $50 and then God knows where they are and who, if they answer the phone the next time. That’s the difference. It’s not, they don’t, people don’t work, don’t organize themselves with a business mentality here. Anything they do, even the child that sells lemonade on the street already learns a business mentality. Yeah. And I’m not saying capitalistic. Not the difference. Because this has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. This has to do with knowing how to set up a business. And the reason why Starbucks succeeded is because it comes from a city in the US where there are a lot of people who know how to set up a business. Seattle, after all, is the city of Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing. So there’s plenty of people there. Look at the centers that create the vitality of this country. Atlanta is another one. We all talk about California all the time because California is California, but outside of California, Seattle is an amazing center. Boston is another amazing center. Atlanta is one of the centers where we have seen the vast majority of, or at least a lot of security, cyber security companies come up. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 51:30.810

I call Atlanta like the telecom capital. Atlanta is like the telecom capital of the United States.

Speaker 1 | 51:34.973

There are. But there are a lot of people in Atlanta who apparently know how to set up a telecom and cyber security business.

Speaker 0 | 51:43.898

I think they’re setting up a sales business and putting security in it.

Speaker 1 | 51:46.139

That’s right. Whatever it is that they’re setting up, they know how to do it. It’s that basic know-how that, in my opinion, is missing elsewhere. Here you find the people that have already done it and know how to do it. It’s not just the money, which, by the way, the size of the economy in the West is mind-boggling huge. compared to the rest of the world. But it’s also the fact that these people know how to use the money and know how to make more of it. And you set up a business with them, very quickly the business goes from zero to five million dollars in a couple days. You don’t even know what happened.

Speaker 0 | 52:24.078

I wish I could figure that one out. To me, it’s more like, you know, five years, and I wish it was five million dollars. At least, you know.

Speaker 1 | 52:34.278

Palo Alto? Yes, sir. Went public in five years.

Speaker 0 | 52:39.681

Yep.

Speaker 1 | 52:40.561

Oh, yeah. From zero to public in five years. You need a lot of people who know how to do business to achieve that kind of speed, right? You can’t just start to invent yourself out of college with a little NDA and think that you can do it. You might be able to, but you might get lucky.

Speaker 0 | 53:01.493

No, you need to surround yourself. You need to surround yourself with other successful people that have done it and you need to be right in the trenches with them doing it. After you’ve sacrificed and you’ve, you know, after you’ve sacrificed and been through the, that grind with other people that successfully have done it before and you’ve seen the modeling and you can take that model, you can copy that model and insert another, another business and then you go grind it out. I know the hard way. I mean, I know the hard way of starting a business, which is building a sales force and grinding it out that way. I mean, that’s what I know. But I definitely know, I definitely believe in it. And I know that if for whatever reason, whatever my business disappears overnight tomorrow, I know I can pick another one, take that model, insert the model and go out and do it all over again.

Speaker 1 | 53:56.090

because also because you are in the US.

Speaker 0 | 53:58.670

Yeah, there’s a simplicity too. There has to be a simplicity in the model. You can’t be all over.

Speaker 1 | 54:02.351

There’s a simplicity. I was reading a statistic of the United Nations about how easy, how long it takes to set up a business. In the US, I think it takes a couple hours or a couple days, I don’t know. It was the shortest in the world and then simple. The second one was Germany. It takes at least a couple weeks.

Speaker 0 | 54:22.358

I could set you up, I honestly believe, I honestly believe that I could set you up with a business in a couple hours. In one hour. Yeah. Absolutely. Just an agency. You know, whatever it is. Like a reseller agency of some sort. Like, you want to resell Comcast Internet? Done. It’s over in like an hour.

Speaker 1 | 54:42.066

In Germany, the equivalent. This is a studio that you end, but we’re not some stuff I’m making up, right? I believe it was one or two weeks in Italy. it was a moment. It was like 90 days.

Speaker 0 | 54:54.511

And that’s because you got to apply for some kind of business license or some sort of a thing.

Speaker 1 | 54:58.994

exactly. You apply and then it doesn’t connect and then it doesn’t. I don’t even want to know.

Speaker 0 | 55:03.356

The bureaucracy of some other person that doesn’t care about you pushing paperwork. Yeah, yeah. Crazy.

Speaker 1 | 55:10.433

And by the way, to this, you have to fear the laws. When I came here, to me, it seemed extravagant and hard. But I do see how they work now. Here in Houston, Texas, they call it a right to work. And I come from a socialist environment, from a socialist country. Something like the right to work would be unthinkable. Here people can be laid off without reason, right? Yup. Turns out that that doesn’t actually work to the detriment of the people. It works to their advantage because now as much as they can be laid off, they can also leave with only too rich notice and run around somewhere else very quickly. So the good ones that you want to keep, you got to keep them. You got to make a matter because they too can leave. In Italy, you end up, you hire somebody, you are married for life. And when the government has tried many times to change things and things do have things, but it’s a slow process because you’re fighting against a mentality of 60 million people who have always seen, done it in a different way. My father worked for one company in his entire life. That’s it. The idea was you were hired, you got a job and you stick with it. The moving mentality of the U.S. where people change, even change countries. sorry, state or city, they just pick up and go because they got a new job. That is just not part of the culture of the people over there. People there consider themselves immigrants when they go from the south to the north. Heck, it’s the same state and country. They go from the south to Milan and they’re immigrants. That’s ridiculous. That is completely ridiculous. It tells you how the mentality is different. Why change it? What kind of going around this?

Speaker 0 | 57:14.319

The whole point of this is that you’re in technology leadership. You are, I mean, you’re a CTO. You’re a technology leader. And the point is, is most… The point is you have to have a, if you want to become a CTO, if you want to get into technology leadership, you can’t just be the nerd that walked out of the server room. You must have business experience. You must understand the business world and it can’t be same thing. If you want to be a CISO, same thing if you want to be a chief security officer, right? You can’t just be the nerd against everybody else. It’s a, you really have to. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 58:01.935

Very. You need to read the economic magazines a lot more than you read technical packages.

Speaker 0 | 58:12.681

What have you had to do to overcome any sort of, and we got about five minutes, we got about five minutes left here. I’m always saying that. But what have you had to do to overcome immigrant status as a technology leader in the United States? What have you had to do? Do you feel that you’ve had to fight more than the average, the average person to stand out or no?

Speaker 1 | 58:32.496

No, absolutely. I have lived in Houston for 21 years, so it is the single place where I’ve lived the longest. My hometown of Catanzaro in Calabria, in the south of Italy, I left when I was 18 to go to college and I went back. After that, I lived in college in the neck, and then I went to Milan, and then I went to Rome, and then back to Milan, and then I finally ended up in Houston. I have never… felt at home as much anywhere else as I do in this town. I’ve always been felt very welcome. Houston is an environment where people are always welcome and it’s amazing or it’s just unbelievable. I am happy to be in Houston because it has given me anything and when I took the seat of the fit naturalization in 2009 I was a bit I felt a little bit awkward because I was feeling like i was betraying my roots but today i i carry that with pride because not because i’m proud to be an american that’s not the point i am proud of the fact that this place i am grateful more than proud that this place has been me so much has accepted accepted me from the beginning with the welcoming arms and with the respect that has given me anytime today i can’t be a winner as an employee of IBM. And then IBM said, okay, you’re going to go back or you don’t have a job because I was here in assignment for two years. I decided to stay and I basically was unemployed in 2002. And yet from unemployed to where I am today, I don’t think I could have done it anywhere else in the world. It’s just that it’s been, it’s made my life so easy. It made the things possible. Never, ever for a single moment have I ever felt as an outsider. I had many meetings with where everybody was a foreigner. I’ve been in meetings where I was the only coordinator. A texting meeting.

Speaker 0 | 60:42.551

You’ve been in a texting meeting.

Speaker 1 | 60:44.732

Yes, I have. I have. And I have never ever been made to feel like the outsider, like you don’t belong here. Absolutely never. It’s just amazing how welcoming people are in Texas. But I know that elsewhere in Texas is the same. The mentality in Texas, at least, and I keep saying Texas because I think you don’t know. how it is elsewhere, but the tendency in Texas is as long as you do, are a productive contributor to the society, you are, everybody welcomes you. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 61:23.611

Hey, if you’re smart, if you’re smart and you can help run my business better, I mean, that’s pretty much the American dream.

Speaker 1 | 61:31.794

Sometimes I get even emotional because I feel much more at home here than I ever felt in Milan. And that, Milan, in theory, is my home. It’s Italy. And I never felt as welcome there as I am here. I have neighbors that are from all over the world. I have employees and colleagues that are all American. And friends that are from all over the world. And this is such a kaleidoscopic… I’ll be quick. place that is just it’s also beautiful for the kind of experience it gives you and the way it opens your mentality i’ve met people from probably 50 different countries and i’ve learned so much about the world that i never could have learned if i had stayed back to where i was well it really has changed me completely as a person completely but completely pierre luigi uh it’s beautiful It is. If America is all like this, I would do it again and over again. I’m just sorry I didn’t come here earlier because I’m really happy to be here. And now I am really happy and proud to carry the passport. Well,

Speaker 0 | 62:49.697

from that standpoint, please keep, how do I say, barraging your son with, please keep your son in quarantine. for all those good reasons. Until then, again, I really wish I could have recorded that at the beginning of this call because it would have been…

Speaker 1 | 63:07.513

I could call him and we can do it again if you want.

Speaker 0 | 63:12.957

Sir, thank you so much for being on the show. If you’ve got updates, if you’ve got any special stories of things that happened over the next six months that unfold, please let’s share them again, okay?

Speaker 1 | 63:24.825

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thanks for watching