Speaker 0 | 00:09.643
All right, everybody, welcome back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we have John Walker on the show. He is the IT director at H&M Bay. But you have… special talent as well you deal with not only are you a software dev guy but you also deal with software development guys so welcome to the show john thank you yeah and i don’t know this yet but i’m asking you right now and normally i talk about this first but i never asked you last time how did you get started in this uh technology world uh anyways to begin with and or what was your first computer or experience with technology of any sort you
Speaker 1 | 00:52.076
That’s actually a good story. All through high school, I was college prep, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I wasn’t really that enthralled with math. I just really didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. The one thing I was good at or thought I was good at was arguing with people, debating things, using logic against other people. the only thing that made sense for that was a lawyer and i a didn’t know everyone talked terrible about lawyers back in the late 70s they still do but okay and then and then uh and and then on top of that i you know i came from a fairly low-income family with the the prospects of borrowing all that money to become a lawyer just was really daunting so i had really no idea And then my father, who had a fifth grade education, he had to quit school to work on the farm when his father came down with polio. And he read the Reader’s Digest, which was a monthly thing that came out of like almost a book, a magazine. But it was pretty thick. And he read it cover to cover every month. And in there, he read this article about. software developers and how in 1979 when I was going to graduate high school and this was in 78 that there were going to be two jobs for every programmer that came out and that there was going to be a high demand and these people were going to make tons of money and he’s like uh you ever thought about that and I’m like no I’ve never seen a computer don’t know anything about any computer
Speaker 0 | 02:45.388
I remember that being in the bathroom when I was a kid, to be honest with you. My mom always had that Reader’s Digest sitting on the back.
Speaker 1 | 02:51.130
My dad read them book cover to cover. I mean, he loved them. I mean, there was a bunch of stuff. And I read things that he gave me. Yeah, a little square magazine. And so I was like, I just, you know, I didn’t act on it. I just stuck that in my brain. I was like, that was really weird. I read it and I’m like. what the hell we don’t have any computers at school well when it came time to sign up for classes the next time when i’m down looking at math classes voila computer programming high school this is in high school yeah absolutely so in 1970 yeah well it was 79 and so i sign up for this thing not having any clue really what this was going to be all about you And so I sit in the class and, and it was the most boring teacher I ever had in my life, which I’ve had, had had her several times, Mrs. Dunning, her and her husband, both math teachers, so boring, so monotone, super mathematicians. I mean, really were great at math. I took them for trig and, and, and, and some other classes out there. He started talking and this was overhead projector days. He froze of overhead projector up there, going this program and starts to talk about it. And I knew exactly what it was doing within minutes. I couldn’t wait to write a program. Do you remember what it was doing?
Speaker 0 | 04:26.917
Like, do you remember that? Like what was it?
Speaker 1 | 04:28.357
I do not. I do not. I do remember that there were 14 programs to write in the semester and I had them done in two weeks. And he ran me out of the, out of the lab. Because she said, I know you keep taking all your study halls and coming here, and I know you’re really into this stuff, but we have so many people that are not being able to keep up and failing. And you need to stop coming to the thing. And it was like heartbreaking. But I had to quit going. Yeah, I couldn’t go in the lab unless no one else needed it. And I had to wait till like the last minute. And like, if I had a study hall, I could go there during my. the break between classes and see if anyone was signed up. And if not, I could go in there, but otherwise I couldn’t.
Speaker 0 | 05:06.423
You know, that’s, that’s amazing. Let’s just talk about that for a second because from a leadership standpoint, a lot of times leaders spend 80% of their time on the bottom 80% of their people. Right. And then they’ve got in the people that really need, and then they just, you know, the star players. Well,
Speaker 1 | 05:24.410
let’s see, here’s what you missed. I hear where you’re going with this, but I imagine you’re younger than me. So you don’t know that. This was one, I’m going to call it a teletype. It was one computer in the back of her room in a closet. They built a special room around it, and it was a freestanding computer that had a keyboard, and it had paper. It did not have a monitor. It had paper. And when you typed a line of code and hit enter, it typed out on the page. It was basic. It was basic language. And you would say list, and it would list the whole thing. And then you would have to retype the entire line if you made a change. I had a dupe key, but you’d have to do kind of like a card punch, but it was printing on paper and it was stored in memory somewhere. I don’t know. The computer that actually processed the program when you ran it was in University of Delaware, two hours away in Newark, Delaware, and I was down in Seeper, Delaware. And there was no, I couldn’t hang out there and help. It was no room. It was just a one person thing. It wasn’t like a lab like you would think of. Like, so anyhow, after that class, it was a closet. It was an early IT job,
Speaker 0 | 06:50.519
hiding in a closet.
Speaker 1 | 06:52.480
You got it. Exactly. But the thing that was cool about it was my old man was the one that actually did it. And he never, to the day he died, he never typed on a computer or used a computer. So, you know, but it was his doing that got me to consider it.
Speaker 0 | 07:11.877
That’s awesome. And then, okay, so I’m just curious. We got to move on from here, but I got to ask one more question. Do you remember your first kind of like real computer or purchasing a computer that…
Speaker 1 | 07:25.261
that um what was that well yes i do i mean as far as what i purchased but i will say that after i went to dell tech after that this technical college close by and i was able to hands-on run a an ibm 360 computer which was a mini computer back in that day and then they got a 4331 the second year and because it was a small school basically you went right in a computer room and put your cards in a card deck or uh you know pour your paper off the printer. So I got to use a real computer right away. But after, I guess it was my second job. So I was in the mid 80s or early, mid to early 80s. I bought a Commodore 64, or actually I was given one. I won an award at Citibank for this system that I wrote. And you got to pick a prize out of a book and I picked the Commodore 64. That was the first one I ever owned.
Speaker 0 | 08:21.760
That’s pretty cool. And what did you write to win the prize? What was that all about?
Speaker 1 | 08:30.463
Well, Citibank Delaware was a tech processing center. So the reason they moved-It’s always banking and money that pushes it,
Speaker 0 | 08:40.127
huh?
Speaker 1 | 08:41.588
Well, they- They moved to Delaware, number one, because Delaware, a lot of banks did, because Delaware changed the laws in the 80s about credit cards so they could charge, you know, 22% interest. I’m not saying 22, I don’t know, but the laws were much more lenient on what they were allowed to do. So all of them moved to Delaware. Pretty much all banks made a presence in the Wilmington area. New York’s just a little bit south of that, which is close to Philadelphia. Uh-huh. They moved to this particular spot because it was really very close to the Philadelphia Fed. So the whole reason for this processing center that was there was that they had their own truck sitting at the Philly Fed to get our checks and run them quickly back to the bank. And then they would scan them in and had people call the account owners to tell them how much money they owed us to cover their checks that came through for that day. And that’s pretty common in commercial banking, or it used to be. You know, so no one kept money. You know, you don’t keep millions of dollars in a checking account if you’re a corporation. And they would move the money from where it was the least expensive for them to move it to cover their expenses. So if you could call them. By noon, that was great. And we were calling them by 10, 11 o’clock. That was the main thing that was going on there. So the system that I wrote, I actually had gotten through a project and didn’t have a lot going on. My boss got promoted and went to New York. We had no leadership. We had a guy in there that ran the CPCS equipment. So his big thing was programming these machines that sorted through the checks and collected the checks. data. And he says, hey, these things are putting out micro-seeds, and then we have these seed readers here, and they supposedly can be hooked up to what was called CICS. That was the online environment in IBM mainframe. So between him and me and the manuals and a guy that was in systems programming back then, you had computer programmers, then if you needed anything done from an engineering perspective, you had systems. programmers that you would go talk to and then you had operations which ran all the programs you know this is a very complicated large group of people but between the three of us and manuals we came up with a system and it was in cics where someone could go find this check click on it and it would tell the they would tell them what role microfilm role to put on the machine on the microfilm reader microfilm reader and then it would spin it to that check image so that they could quick make a copy and send it or whatever the customer was asking them to do look for signature or whatever so we just kind of did it on the side and when then someone saw it and put it up for this service excellence award and the two of us got it and pretty cool they took us up to New York to the main office and had a big to do and gave me my Commodore 64 that’s cool so
Speaker 0 | 11:55.704
But ultimately, what you did there was shave off hours of time. Am I understanding that correctly?
Speaker 1 | 12:01.346
Yeah, because otherwise people, yeah, they had to actually scan through the micro and stop and see what frame it was on. The machine didn’t even have a way to say, like, go to this spot. They would run it and stop and go ahead. I mean, like you see people do when they used to do in, like, libraries where stuff was on microphones. So this would just go straight to it. All they had to do is hit the button. print button and print a copy.
Speaker 0 | 12:30.359
It’s just time and productivity. There’s so much data around time and productivity that we could track. I’m just wondering how we got anything done sometimes back in the day, even when you used to have to literally get on a horse to deliver a letter two days away or something like that. Amazing. Again, the theme there just being technology and software development and… In general, I’m always talking about IT guys trying to create more efficiencies, more productivity, because it makes a big difference at the bottom line. And when we were talking the other day, you said, well, I hear a lot these days about IT guys having to be the creative business leaders, and I don’t agree with that. But ironically, you seem to be the king of that and seem to be a person that actually makes a fairly big difference from what I can tell. And… all the places that you’ve gone in your history of making a pretty big difference in the bottom line.
Speaker 1 | 13:30.013
Well, yeah, you got me a bit wrong on that statement. What I was saying is that, you know, I read a lot and, you know, my job is not here now. It’s not just application development. I run an infrastructure team. The entire IT is on my shoulder. So I read a lot and can keep abreast of all areas, IT. And one of the big things that… everyone’s talking about is that as to be a good IT leader, you need to be thinking about how you can generate revenue and not how you can cut costs, but how you can generate revenue. It’s huge. I mean, it’s written, I read it all the time. And depending on what kind of, you know, business you’re in and how big your company is, that may very, very well be true. But in the case of this company that I work for, it’s really not, you know, we’ve, And we got into that discussion because we were talking about the project that I’m on now, which is actually going to be generating a substantial amount of revenue per month, where we’re basically leasing our software, a version of the software that we use for the warehouse management for another company that’s going to pay us on a monthly basis. But that kind of fell into my lap. Here, the main goal for me is just to make the company more efficient. And create less errors and basically save money.
Speaker 0 | 14:56.543
Well, as they say. The harder I work, the luckier I get, and I don’t believe in luck. But let’s just talk about that then. How are you making all of us idiots rich and keeping us from failing? What’s the situation right now? What’s this project that you’re working on right now? Maybe give a little background on what your company does. And I mean, obviously, you’re IT director, so it’s not just software development. It’s the network, and it’s end users, and it’s probably how big is your team?
Speaker 1 | 15:28.929
I have three infrastructure people. I have a telecom guy who does funds and network stuff. And I have two programmers.
Speaker 0 | 15:40.712
Okay. And how many end users entirely?
Speaker 1 | 15:47.055
Full-time, we have about 200. And then we have another 200 or 300 part-time people.
Speaker 0 | 15:53.609
Okay, gotcha. All right, so a little background. Let’s just talk about this significant development in cutting-edge technology that’s going to make the world better, or at least your business produce better. It’s really that Unix example, I guess, that we were talking about back when it’s already gone.
Speaker 1 | 16:12.419
Yeah, the company was really stretched. They were using two different Unix-based products, one for accounting and one for… what’s called a TMS transportation management system. We’re a trucking company. So they,
Speaker 0 | 16:27.796
they just the general first thing you guys are, you’re a trucking company, like kind of just give like a general 50,000 foot overview of what you’re doing.
Speaker 1 | 16:37.283
Yeah. Yeah. We’re we have regional docs around the country, 10 of them that pick up freight in the area around the dock, bring it into the dock. unload it and then reload the trucks and send them outbound so we pick up regionally and then deliver nationally and drop so you’re drop shipping for other companies is that correct yeah yeah it’s all none of it’s all shipping for other companies it’s largely food because it’s refrigerated and frozen less than truckload which there’s not a lot of companies that do that yeah so we you In the day before this company came around, if you were here and you were on the water, so if you wanted to sell soft crabs to Boston, you needed to buy a whole truck and send it to Boston. The owners were farmers who also had trucks, and they were going around and using their truck to pick up freight from different people here. One of them was running to Boston, and one of them was running to Florida, and they met each other. And They said, hey, I can give you some freight going to Florida. I can give you some freight going to Boston. And so they started doing that, and then it got built up to where now we have about 600 trucks a week on the road doing the same thing on a much larger scale. So we have these docks that have, like the one here in Federalsburg, Maryland, is 50 doors, 55 doors. And we bring in 150, 200 trucks, unload them, and reload them, and send them out all over the country. And they’re not our trucks. So it’s more of a lot of it is closer to banking than it is to trucking in that during the week, if you go over here now in the main office, there’s a bunch of people sitting at a custom system, you know, building loads, figuring out how much to pay the drivers, putting money in, giving the drivers advances, talking to the drivers that are on their loads about where to go and what their appointments are and helping them. making sure the freight gets delivered on time and that we get paid. Nice. And we do it, like I said, 10 different areas around the country.
Speaker 0 | 18:54.694
So what was the problem that we were dealing with back in the day?
Speaker 1 | 18:59.758
Well, when they hired me, they had two Unix-based systems that were 20 years old and they had customized them and no longer could move them to the next version of Unix. So the way it worked back then is… your software was coded to the operating system so they couldn’t move up to the next version of the operating system the hardware was also built around the operating system so they were stuck on really old hardware and they had no choice but to go to a new system and the guy that hired me told me that they had looked at all the options out there and decided that they were going to build custom software And I took the job. When I came in, I asked them for their requirements document for their system, and they didn’t have any. So I really don’t believe that they fully looked at packages. But again, being a custom software developer, I didn’t really care. I got to work, and we built a system, and it now runs a comp. So that’s the accounting back end, Microsoft Dynamics and the Vision accounting back end, but the rest of it is all custom. And we only have those two systems. We don’t have any other kind of stove pipe system that’s it.
Speaker 0 | 20:13.153
So was there a problem that we solved? Was there an efficiency that was gained from this upgrade or needing to upgrade?
Speaker 1 | 20:21.035
Oh my gosh. If you’re a software developer and you come to a company that tells you to build them with a custom system and they’re using something. 20 years old that was glued together from two other packages. If you can’t, if you can’t make magic, you really could just find something else to do for a living. I mean, the low hanging fruit was ridiculous. I mean, we,
Speaker 0 | 20:43.036
I want to hear this. I want to hear the low hanging fruit because maybe I’m going to start, you know, maybe we should start like, you know, I don’t know, software.
Speaker 1 | 20:50.640
Oh my God.
Speaker 0 | 20:51.680
It’s not for co-op.
Speaker 1 | 20:52.781
I mean, I’m almost embarrassed. say because you know i don’t know if i should bear our dirty lawns that way but never mind well 15 years ago no i’ll go some of it i mean it’s all good because it’s all been put behind us it’s history now but well it just shows you guys are on the cutting edge i mean you guys are not it’s not like you were sitting around some people sink the ship some people just sink the ship that’s true so i mean you guys yeah the ship we did not think that we built a new ship and our cruise and yeah all right so so what did we do well They had the two systems. So the logistics package, you know, you have your orders and you have these manifests, which are the list of all the orders that go on the truck. And after the thing gets delivered, all of the information is built into the orders and the manifest. And they did something that we still call a transfer. And you say, this is good, fill it. And it sends it over. So at that time, it went from our McLeod TMS to OSAS, which is the accounting package. After that, if any changes were made, dispatchers would walk over to accounting. So that was made when it was done and delivered. Now the customer starts to receive bills and they start saying, this is not right, this isn’t right. If they had to make any changes, they would walk over to accounting with an invoice in hand marked up and accounting would make the adjustments in the accounting system to give them a credit or a debit and then type out. corrected invoices that’s what was happening pretty ridiculous today today when dispatch determines that something has needed to be fixed on the invoice they click a button that will credit the order credit the invoice completely make all the changes that they need to and then rebuild it without leaving their desk so that was huge um the the The COD process is where proof of delivery from the trucks come back into us, and we have to go back over those bills and see if anything is wrong, because that happens before the customer actually receives an invoice. Then they would put all these invoices on their desk, go through it all, make up all the notes of what was wrong, put it in a folder with the documents, and give it to the dispatcher. dispatch manager that would need to fix it and wait for those documents to come back and then process them again until they thought it was right and then release the truck pay the truck and send the invoices to the customer and then maybe the customer comes back again and then it’s physically walking so there’s multiple deployment issues of right yeah gotcha and now all of the all of these pod’s that come in instead of there being folders running around in accounting and in dispatch that all gets scanned and imaged in and actually now 90 i’m trying at 90 maybe 70 percent of the the truckers are going to the truck stop and using a a system called transflow imaging where they scan the documents and email them into us so they are electronic from the very beginning but either way they all all end up as pdfs they have dual screen systems where the invoice comes up on one or the pod comes up on one screen The data from our system is on the other. They match it up. If anything’s wrong, they drop it down and say this needs to go to claims for them to work on it. They say this needs to go to dispatch, and they process it, and they move on to the next one. Once dispatch for claims does what they need to do, which would be in claims process, what’s called an OST, overage, shortage, or damage, and process it. automatically brings the document back into their queue for them to rework it. So we went from, I think we had like 22 people in our truck pay department. We have like four now. Isn’t this amazing? And the whole goal wasn’t really in my mind. My goal, your goal should never be to eliminate people to save money. It should be this process stinks and I’m going to fix it. If that means less people, fine. If it means the same people get it done very quickly and sit around on their hands, that’s not my issue. To me, that’s a backwards goal is to reduce labor. You should look at the processes and fix the processes. And that’s what I did. They work. pretty agitated with me probably at some point because it took me, to write the specifications for what we did, probably took me seven or eight months. They might have thought it was only going to take a month. And then I’m telling them, hey, I’m not done talking to all these people. You need to hurry up and do it. Well, you can’t rush this.
Speaker 0 | 25:41.670
Talk to me about that. I don’t know if you’re talking to people. You’re a software guy. You were talking to people.
Speaker 1 | 25:47.092
You don’t have any choice. You have no choice. So how’d that go?
Speaker 0 | 25:51.350
How were you talking to people? Like, what were those conversations like? Just like, hey, why are you doing this? Or why do you walk over here? Or how do you?
Speaker 1 | 25:58.452
No, I sat with them. No, I sat with them and watched them do their job. And I asked them, why do they do that? Every time they got up and walked away, where are you going? Why are you doing that? You know, and there were lots of documents that they were faxing, like load confirmations to drivers for good factors. Now they get. They’re on the manifest. There’s a little drop-down box. They hit confirmation. It comes up, and they hit send, and they fax it, or they email it from their desk. They don’t have to get up. I mean, all the file and cabinets could be eliminated, in my mind. All steps people are making and going and using some kind of MFC, you know, a fax or a copier, that needs to be eliminated. You need to let people focus on thinking and doing their job and not mechanics. The mechanic stuff is low-hanging fruit. That all was eliminated on day one.
Speaker 0 | 26:56.284
You say that’s easy, but you sound like a very special guy to me. That’s not what most people would. I mean, just that whole idea of going and sitting down. This whole thing, it’s actually pretty mind-blowing when you start to think about business and how everything works in America and the fact that everyone makes all this stuff work. I’m a simpleton. I sell phones and internet. I know a lot about phones. I know a lot about how they work, but this is pretty mind-blowing, to be honest with you. to sit down and go through all that. So you sat down, you asked him, why are you walking over there? And we were talking the other day about, I wanted to ask you if coders could talk to people, what would that conversation look like just in general?
Speaker 1 | 27:35.358
Well, I mean, in the day I did quite a bit of that. I mean, when we built this first system, I did a lot of the coding. So in this case, a coder was, but that’s one of the things that sets me apart from some of my counterparts. I mean, I’ve got one guy working for me right now that’s been working for me for 35 years, probably. He’s great. He is the best programmer I’ve ever met in my entire life. But he would not go through all of that. He’s not a good, he’s not great with people. If he thinks that they’re, you know, when he starts thinking that they’re. uh below him in mental capacity or don’t understand why they don’t get what he’s talking about because very frustrated and i’m not going to say i don’t i just have a way of okay i got to get this done and this is the only way to do it right because otherwise you do something and turn it over someone to go what in the world are you doing here why this isn’t what i wanted that’s not how that doesn’t make you know that doesn’t make you feel good when you or wouldn’t make me feel good i like blowing people away by giving them things that make
Speaker 0 | 28:42.634
their life so much easier and better and to get you know here thank you instead of looking at you like where what planet do people come from and that’s how it can be done if it’s done in a vacuum yeah why are there not any more i mean why are there not more billionaire coders that you know if we’re if we’re so smart we can do all these things it’s it’s like you know It just seems like there should be someone that’s going to come out of the woodwork here at some point. Maybe that’s the Bitcoin thing or something like that.
Speaker 1 | 29:10.718
Well, yeah, but see, that’s all different. I mean, the ones you know about that everyone knows about, they build things for everybody. They build, you know, let’s go, when you talk software, let’s talk SAP, right? This thing is built to handle everything everyone ever does. It’s a whole different ballgame. And then companies, you sit down with anyone that does. that has these systems, the SAPs, the Oracles of the world, they’ll tell you what they do. And there’s going to be things about it that don’t work exactly like they would want to. When you get to build them something from the ground up, you make it work the way you want it to. I don’t care about the company next door. No one else is using this stuff. It’s a completely different paradigm. I mean, you know, it’s amazing that these owners of this company, and I told you they were farmers that had trucks and started all this, were willing to make this kind of investment. But it was, you know, it changed this company entirely.
Speaker 0 | 30:13.641
Well, the mindset to begin with was two guys coming together trying to be more efficient. So why would they not do that? It’s like, it’s like. what started the company multiplied to like a 10x factor. So I don’t, to me.
Speaker 1 | 30:28.667
Well, I guess you’re right. And then I guess on top of that, they decided to go the package route and that didn’t work for them. They had to modify it. And then in the end they had to throw it away. So I guess.
Speaker 0 | 30:38.970
What’s the package? Explain that.
Speaker 1 | 30:40.950
What’s the package route? They bought them a cloud transportation management system, you know, I don’t know how many years ago now it would be 35 years ago and outside of the County. and then had them customized. Those were the old packages that they couldn’t get hardware to run them on anymore, parts for the hardware they had. So that kind of failed them. I mean, it did last them several years, but it didn’t get them where they wanted to be. So they saw that part fail. So I guess that would make it easy for them to comprehend that maybe the route to go would be to build something as well. I’m trying to follow your line. You say, you know, they, their whole idea was to become more efficient, help each other get bigger. And so it would be logical. And then they went to initially went with, you know, computer packages. I mean, initially they did everything on paper and then they went to this package and then eventually they had to get away from that. So I’m saying that it’s maybe I, maybe it does make a little bit of sense that they would. be willing to invest in software development. But it’s a big thing to take on. I mean, when you talk about the magnitude of this, I mean, it was probably four years in the making.
Speaker 0 | 31:59.170
Well, you had to be trusted. They had to say like, look, show us the light, bring us to the light, you know, like, you know, fix this problem or whatever. And you sat down, you sat down with people, watch what they did and really, I mean, that’s like, it’s a big deal. And we were talking last time about how sometimes upper management kind of makes decisions and hands them off to IT to implement, and it might not be necessarily the right decision. I don’t know if there’s a fine line between where does IT director or IT leadership or technology leadership kind of put their foot down and say, hey, man, I don’t think this is the best idea. And I run into it pretty much every day. I run into some IT directors that say, hey, look. The CFO says we can only look at people on the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which is a pay-to-play model in my mind. And you said the other day, well, you know, Time Magazine says we need to move to cloud, so we’re moving to cloud. So what’s your general thoughts on that? I mean, as we move forward in the future, I would say that IT definitely needs a seat at the table. Um, but what kind of seat, I guess, or, you know, what kind of role should we be taking and any advice for any advice for other guys out there that might not be in the situation where that you’re in, where, where people trust you to, you know, and trust your creative ability or, you know, your ability to fix a problem that’s better for the business.
Speaker 1 | 33:30.023
For my, for my, for a business person and my boss, he’s a really, he’s a great boss, super smart guy. Um, really. things through things but for him to come and tell me we’re moving to the cloud or uh for our next next voice over ip provider it needs to be one of these three people in this little corner would be akin to me going over there and telling him we need to open a dock in cleveland ohio it’s it’s ridiculous because you don’t know this stuff and it doesn’t make any sense and thank goodness i don’t have to deal with that because i don’t know how well I would be received when I gave my answers back of these things. I mean, it’s just you need to have a bit. To me, a good superior in anything could be giving you a goal based on something they understand. So, you know, if they don’t want any downtime, if they want to be able to. in a disaster scenario, be up and running in X number of hours. Those are all legitimate things to ask. But when you start making mandates of how to get from here to there, that’s when you get into trouble. And I was telling you that I just recently went to a CIO summit. And I ran into several people in some of these boardroom discussions about the cloud where their boss just told them, you know, I read about it and we need to go to the cloud. Everyone’s moving to the cloud. We need to move to the cloud. And that’s just a very short-sighted, dangerous thing to do to make a mandate to change technology for technology’s sake. Even new, cool stuff. You know, I’m very interested in AI, but there needs to be a business case for it. Will you just go start buying it and hiring people and doing what? What artificial intelligence to figure out what? You’ve got to have a business case. Everything should be based.
Speaker 0 | 35:41.875
Now,
Speaker 1 | 35:42.055
you have to remember, man, I’m super logical, and I have a certain way my mind works. And if you don’t like it, you’re probably not going to like me. But if it says, let’s get. Let’s make this place better. So how can we do that? Let’s not waste time. You know, I could move us to the cloud, move everything to the cloud, cost a little bit more money, and you have the same crap running in the cloud. Didn’t change a company one bit. We already have a deal. We have, you know, redundancy through our virtualization. We have a disaster recovery site of our own and replication, and we test it. Okay, now we move to the cloud. We got nothing out of that.
Speaker 0 | 36:20.116
Well, your voice is in the cloud. And by the way, you chose Evolve IP, which I highly recommend. Evolve IP has been a great partner of ours over at CNHG for a very long time.
Speaker 1 | 36:29.279
Exactly. That was a business case, though. That wasn’t a mandate to do it just to do it. I understand.
Speaker 0 | 36:35.602
What was the business case?
Speaker 1 | 36:36.783
I was throwing out a negative. Okay. So in that case, you know, we had an on-prem system and a Viya system, voice system, and it worked great.
Speaker 0 | 36:46.767
Did you have a PRI? I highly want it. What’d you have going in there? PRI, what’d you have for the trunks?
Speaker 1 | 36:51.026
Yeah. Okay. All right.
Speaker 0 | 36:53.088
Was it paid for or were you paying a lease? Was it paid for or were you paying monthly lease?
Speaker 1 | 36:57.211
No, it had been paid for in the first file.
Speaker 0 | 37:00.033
All right. So definitely the OPEX CapEx model was obviously a big jump going over to Evolve IP. So how did you sell that one?
Speaker 1 | 37:11.923
Well, there were two business reasons. One is that people were forwarding their phones to their… cell phones and getting calls on their cell phones and then couldn’t forward them on to other people and people were finding out people were calling them from their cell phones and they’re calling them back on their cell phones during the day instead of calling into the work phone so i i wanted to give them some something like an app on their phones that they would be able to still
Speaker 0 | 37:36.985
conduct just to play a devil’s advocate i’m just playing devil’s advocate here because and just so you know obviously i am a big promote proponent of of
Speaker 1 | 37:45.508
cloud pbx voice over ip business ways i’m repeat so but i’m just going to play devil’s advocate here uh so what that is that worth the big i mean so is that worse than the money one more there was there was one more reason that i that i pushed for hard and i’ll say and it still isn’t done but because we just went to evolve ip here recently but that’s i’m waiting for them to get back to me now and that was to be able to do use click to dial in our system these guys are on the phone constantly calling shippers, calling delivery locations and pickup locations and setting appointments. And they’re looking at numbers on their screen and they’re dialing their phones. And that’s just crazy. It’s a big waste of time. It’s error prone.
Speaker 0 | 38:29.612
I love that you said that.
Speaker 1 | 38:32.053
And so that was more the bigger one. And then I think really, as I got looking into it, I found out, oh, it also, you can have these apps and your cell phone rings, just like your desk phone. You actually can. have a phone call going, then pick it up, the call on your cell phone, hang your death phone on up and walk out. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 38:51.224
And I seen all switch over a twinning, a twinning switch. Yeah, I gotcha.
Speaker 1 | 38:56.988
I love that you say that.
Speaker 0 | 38:59.470
I believe it if you say it, because you’re a, you’re kind of like a, you know, we’re not going to the cloud just because, you know, time magazine said we’re going to the cloud. Like you went to the cloud and you really do see a return on investment there. Like you said, error prone.
Speaker 1 | 39:10.918
Absolutely. Well, we, we really, it was, it was, It was a win to win for us because once I started looking, you know, well, first, first off, it wasn’t a win because I trusted our, our Avaya rep and our, our, I’ll call them partner. If you will. And after several $30,000, $20,000, $40,000 upgrades and projects, we still weren’t there. And then a hundred thousand in upgrades. Oh, offline, man. I will get to the details of it if you would like, but I kept going through these. I only wanted online. And in the end, we didn’t get there. We still couldn’t do what I wanted to do. And the way that I work is… You threw me over. You’re either going to make it right, in which I asked for all the money back, and they said no, of course. And then, okay, you’re not going to get any more money from me.
Speaker 0 | 40:07.796
I’ve been wrestling.
Speaker 1 | 40:08.457
I’m going to be perfectly honest that we left them because they needed to be left, and that’s the same thing that happened with our previous voiceover IP vendor. You don’t treat me right. I’m not going to just stay with you because, oh, I’m stuck. That’s not, I’m going to do all I can. But we really made out like a bandit when we left Avaya because once we went to a hosted VoIP provider, their pool of minutes is so much bigger than ours that our long distance came down so much that it was basically a free.
Speaker 0 | 40:43.030
Anyone paying long distance, it’s just such a joke. The fact that I run into it now, it’s like, I know there’s a ton of people out there still doing it because I know it exists because I know that there’s like, you know, 14,000 businesses in America that are still on a… Whatever the statistics were in 2018, they’re still on a prem-based PBX, so I know people are still doing it, but it’s just absolutely ridiculous. I ran into someone the other day. It was just POTS lines. It was just hotels and POTS lines. We’re like, okay, how’s $20,000 in savings a year sound? It was just so stupid. It was stupid stuff. I know people are doing it. We’re totally off on a tangent, but this is because I really love this stuff. I saw a… And I’m still debating on whether, is it okay if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all. And quite frankly, I don’t know if I care. But the Avaya slash Mitel possibly coming together merger, and obviously Mitel bought Shortel, and then Rackspace, like their conglomerate somehow acquired Mitel. And now we’re looking at a Avaya slash Mitel kind of like… merger type of thing. But is that just, in my opinion, that’s just the inevitable, like how long can we keep, how can we keep blocking the holes that are like blown the ship, the phone system equipment ship, and we’re just trying to stop water from coming in and stay afloat that much longer. That’s how I see that. I don’t know. I’m just curious what you think of that from an IT vendor’s perspective that went from a prem-based PBX to the cloud.
Speaker 1 | 42:20.441
I’m not real sure what you were asking me there, but… Okay.
Speaker 0 | 42:23.664
Well, here’s the scenario. You paid $20,000 in upgrades. Then you paid another bunch of upgrades. And it’s all CapEx. It’s all a CapEx thing. It’s all for this prem-based, server-based system. And you said, we didn’t get there. Right? We did not.
Speaker 1 | 42:40.473
We did not get there. My two goals did not get met. Right, right.
Speaker 0 | 42:43.435
And I’m not going to be stuck. So now you’ve got two major equipment vendors coming together to basically save, you know, they’re both for like, kind of like… at a bankruptcy stage or even going through bankruptcy, um, kind of just coming together. And I just see it as the old equipment, prem based PBX vendors trying to just, you know, like slip off the oxygen tank before they die.
Speaker 1 | 43:07.116
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 43:07.956
Um, anyways,
Speaker 1 | 43:08.557
the case of Avaya, they deserve to die because they just weren’t keeping up with, with the rest of them. They weren’t. I mean, it was crazy.
Speaker 0 | 43:15.903
Up with a cloud. If they can somehow come up with like a real cloud, you know, offering, but I think there’s just so much, There’s so much equipment sitting out there. It’s just like one of those things. It’s just like a sinking ship. I guess Nortel got the quick death. But it has been.
Speaker 1 | 43:32.358
Well, unless they cut the crack out of their staff and just collect their annual revenue until these people all move. Because I bet you those advice systems are in tons and tons of places still.
Speaker 0 | 43:46.784
Uh, yeah, there are people are going to like people get all up in arms when I bring this up. And then definitely I’ve got people that are like, just die hard Avaya people like die hard. And I’ve got, um, you know, I’m like, okay, if you want to keep it and let’s, let’s keep the PBX there until it kicks, you know, because all you guys need to do is make phone calls and extension dial. Like, okay, like let’s, you know, put a new PRI in or, you know, convert to SIP trunking that makes sense. And so you can avoid long distance. Okay,
Speaker 1 | 44:12.298
fine.
Speaker 0 | 44:13.419
But, um, It has been an absolute pleasure talking with you. And for anyone, you know, this show pretty much is listened to by IT directors in the mid-market space. So any piece of advice, any final words for anyone out there listening?
Speaker 1 | 44:29.205
No, other than just keep your eye on the ball. To me, it’s all about making your company run better. And as long as you focus on that, you’re going to do fine.
Speaker 0 | 44:40.193
Excellent. John, been a pleasure, man. Have a wonderful afternoon.
Speaker 1 | 44:44.880
You too. Thank you.
