Chuck Price Chief Operating Officer at Effectual on the Future of Cloud Environments
Welcome to the tech deep dive podcast where we let our inner nerd come out and have fun getting into the weeds on all things tech. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm talking with Chuck Price, who's the COO and cofounder of Effectual. Chuck, thanks for joining.
Chuck:Thank you, Max. It's great to be here.
Max:Chuck, you've been in the Internet industry for for quite some time. I won't say exactly how long. But Thank you. You know, your your path on you know, as as LinkedIn reports, it's, you know, it's traditional IT and and, you know, corporate IT. I mean, you've got a actually, I think the one note that I saw that was more interesting was the CIO for the SANS Institute for a while and, you know, a security practitioner that, of course, you know, stands out to me.
Max:But, you know, data centers and and different professional services organizations. I mean, can you can you give me a a quick kind of background for context of, you know, how you've how you've ended up, you know, cofounding Effectual and and and what led into that?
Chuck:Sure. It's it's been a long and storied path, you know, prior military, 1st Gulf War, and then, did government contracting for about 10 years after I got out, writing software, c plus plus programming. And, so, you know, ended up writing software that flew on the space shuttle and for Tomahawk missile systems and saw some fairly detailed, you know, technology stuff. I worked on weapon systems in the military, sort of double e sort of stuff, and then became a CTO managing agile software delivery of products globally. And then moved from that CTO sort of software product, SaaS product development world into infrastructure and, started managing data centers and, larger teams, you know, built professional services companies along the way and, ended up at CoreSite.
Chuck:CoreSite's probably a a data center provider that, lots of folks will know about. And, I joined them to help them do a an IPO. So we we did the IPO there. And then right about that time, you know, 2010 or so, the cloud was really starting to take shape. That's not an oxymoron.
Chuck:But, you know, the data center industry was worried about the cloud industry eating its lunch. And I said, that's not going to happen, right? The clouds live in data centers at the end of the day. And so really saw this vision for building a cloud services company that was by CIOs for CIOs. You know, I had lots of pure CIOs that were struggling with the same challenge.
Chuck:And that's how I got into the the industry really, and then kind of went on from there and, you know, ended up working for, the Sands Institute, which was an amazing opportunity for me. I really, really enjoyed that team, learned a ton being a part of that business, you know, the world's largest cybersecurity training company. We trained about almost 50,000 students globally every year. So it was that was a great ride. And then ended up working for a cloud service provider that was an AWS partner.
Chuck:And, so really started learning a lot more about IaaS and hyperscale infrastructure. Not too long after that, was introduced to the founder of Effectual, Rob Allen, and also Michael Parks, our CTO. And, those guys built DataPipe. I think a lot of your listeners will probably remember DataPipe, 2nd largest privately held business, when they were acquired by Rackspace back in 17. And, you know, 29 operating locations globally and the first AWS premier partner and just a fantastic reputation in in the business.
Chuck:Of course, I knew them, you know, from competing with them and getting beat by them. And, so really hit it off with Rob and and Mike and and, many of the other team. The the leadership team from Effectual came from that team that Rob and Mike built, over 18 years. And so really feel fortunate to have, met those folks and, you know, we're birds of a feather, and so super excited to be a part of the Effectual team now.
Max:Let's talk about Effectual. I mean, this isn't DataPipe 2 point o. I mean, so what is Effectual? And and where do you guys see yourself fitting in this, you know, world as as, you know, over the next couple of years?
Chuck:Sure. Yeah. Effectual was founded to be cloud first. Right? We're an innovative cloud first professional and managed services company.
Chuck:AWS is our our alliance partner, our key alliance partner, and VMware is also another alliance partner of ours. And we work with VMware to for VMC on AWS. So we help companies move to AWS using VMC. But, you know, we, Rob and Mike and and the others saw this opportunity to to build a business that is more innovative, cloud first. If we never have to own another physical server in our life, that's our goal.
Chuck:Right? Our goal is to help companies figure out how to make that a reality, and, we're fortunate to get to do that, every day. And so we do that across not just commercial businesses and and large businesses at that, but public sector. So, we're growing organically. We're growing acquisitively.
Chuck:They can look at some of the press release action there. Our first round, the a round, you know, a lot of companies a rounds are, you know, like, 2, $3,000,000. Our a round was a $50,000,000 a round from a couple of key private equity investors. So, you know, just the experience, the depth of expertise from the whole team, you know, from the deck plates ground level infrastructure, technical, all the way up to, you know, Rob is our our CEO is just incredible.
Max:For a while, the the presence of the cloud was, okay. We can go to the cloud. We don't have to own servers anymore. Right? I mean, there's that there's that sort of angle to it.
Max:Mhmm. And it feels like a lot of companies also went to Intuitive, like, oh, we're at the cloud now. We don't have to approach IT the same way, or we we don't need as much IT, or we don't need a, I mean, a managed services provider overlay. And that really hasn't been the case at all. I mean, cloud has become its own incredibly complex animal.
Chuck:That's right.
Max:You know, that that that's kind of like off I mean, it's it's it's in it's really it's incredible. So I'm I'm curious, you know, how you would really, you know, describe that and and what this means for you as a professional service organization with AWS and and what you're doing for companies and your customers now?
Chuck:Yeah. For sure. More and more companies are moving to the cloud. Right? Gartner is estimating that by 2024, 50% of cloud services deals will include everything from application development services, Cloud native, Cloud infrastructure using professional and managed services, 50%.
Chuck:And that's up from about 10% from 2019. So 90% of organizations that don't use professional services assistance for cloud infrastructure as a service and migrations for more agility and efficiency, 90% of those organizations have challenges in doing that. And then 90% of Fortune 100 companies use a partner to leverage AWS services. So if you look at some of those trends, right, and we say, what are larger companies doing that per for for perhaps you have more resources and sort of better insight, can afford the the Gartner, analysis type, vision. They're leveraging partners to do this.
Chuck:And so it is more complex. It's not as simple as a lift and shift. You know, let's take my VMDK on VMware in my data center and just drag it over to an EC 2 instance. Now certainly, that's how companies can do that and get started in cloud infrastructure very quickly. And we do recommend that in a lot of cases.
Chuck:Right? Because the other side of that coin is, well, we can't move to the cloud because we've got to redevelop our application to be cloud native. We've got to rearchitect our database. We've got to rearchitect the whole network. And, we don't have the skills associated with operating in a in a cloud environment.
Chuck:And actually doing a lift and shift migration is a very rapid way to decrease cost, physical on prem type cost or colo cost, to get into an infrastructure as a service platform like AWS. And then from there, you have a lot more tools available to transform and modernize. So our modernization engineers are, you know, skilled and and passionate about helping companies transform that infrastructure, to more cloud native. And the reason you need some more expert experience, right, is because AWS has over 200 services that are available. So imagine a toolbox of 200 tools that you can put together.
Chuck:Or I I use Legos. Right? Imagine all these different Legos and somebody comes in your office and dumps out a bucket of Legos and says, somewhere in that pile, there's a Millennium Falcon. Build it. And if you're not a master builder, you could just kinda look at that pile and go, oof, that's gonna take me a while.
Chuck:Right? So we've got a company of master builders, and, we love, you know, taking all the tools and all the services, and and they're changing at a rapid pace. I think you know this. Right? Every quarter, they're releasing more and more changes to those services.
Chuck:So we have over a 150 certifications in the business. So we really enjoy coming alongside our customers and being a partner to them, not just being a vendor. Like, we hate that word vendor because if we get looked at like a vendor, like, we're we're failing. Right? We really wanna be a part of our customers' teams and, understand their business, understand their business challenges from go to market to finance, all those things, and and be a part of their team and be the part that says, hey.
Chuck:We understand how the Legos work. We can help you build it, it, migrate, and operating in a cloud in a secure and compliant way.
Max:What is that like for, you know, a company as they onboard with with Effectual? I mean, how do you actually embed and integrate with them and go through that evaluation of these are your business processes? And, you know, this isn't just a a lift and shift from, you know, VMware on-site to VMC and AWS. Like, let's let's actually get deeper into this. I mean, how how do you guys approach that?
Chuck:Yeah. That's a that's a great question. So we if you look at companies' cloud journeys, right, they happen in these phases. Over time, we've learned that, you know, as companies start to try to adapt, adopt, to cloud infrastructure, they start out in this phase where they need to do a strategy, a strategic engagement, or, do an assessment. Right?
Chuck:Cloud readiness assessment. Maybe they have compliance needs for PCI or HIPAA or FedRAMP in the government space. They wanna do a TCO analysis. So our professional services team can engage with them and guide them through that process from a strategic analysis. What are your business goals?
Chuck:What are your business outcomes you're looking for? What are your cost dynamics of your business? Some companies that we meet, they say, we just need to get there really fast, and we have a bit more capital to go faster. And some companies say, we're a little more risk averse. We wanna be a bit more deliberate about the process and, sort of meter it out over over time.
Chuck:Some companies we meet, however, are in this sort of modernization and migration phase. They've already said, we're in the cloud. We're either doing proof of concepts or we have one application that's a production application, and we need to scale up. We need better DevSecOps automation. We need infrastructures code.
Chuck:We need, to expand and scale our business. So that's in this sort of modernization and migration life cycle of a of a customer adapting or adopting the cloud. And then there's companies who say, we're kinda all in on the cloud. You know, we just need to some assistance in managing our infrastructure, our database footprint's going. How do we leverage more of the 200 services to optimize our environment?
Chuck:And then that last phase is companies who have born in the cloud and, how do they optimize their environment further with cost optimization? So we do immersion days with them. We do well architected reviews with them on their workloads. We can put together various scalability architecture. We can help them transform more to infrastructure as code, leverage rather than EC 2 instances all the time, containerization.
Chuck:Right? So how do we leverage containerization? And our, you know, again, our modernization engineers really like this. Hey. We appreciate you using EC 2 instances and you have auto scaling and that works great.
Chuck:How about Kubernetes? How about Docker? And how about ECS and Fargate? And how do we help you get more performance and agility out of your existing infrastructure? So that's the broad picture from a phase of life cycle that the customer is in and how we would engage them in those different life cycles.
Max:You know what I think about when you say that? I mean, it's it's all these questions on the surface seem very simplistic, but each one of them is a very deep conversation. So, I mean, e c 2 to containers. Right? So are you gonna run containers on e c 2 instances?
Max:Are you gonna run Kubernetes on your own e c 2 instances? Are you gonna run ECS or EKS or Fargate? You know, are you gonna run Rancher? You know, you know, and, like and and that the the depth of each one of those steps of question, I mean, you go really deep pretty quickly. You know, are you running Dynamo, or do you wanna run Cassandra or a cycla?
Max:You know, are you gonna run? And, you know, back to your Allego analogy, which I actually loved. I I mean, how you piece these things together have you can get to the same end result in lots of different ways. Right? But how you get there, what it looks like, and how much it costs become very different as well.
Chuck:They matter. Yeah. And, yeah, that that's exactly right. So, you know, we had a customer who was trying to transform, you know, they had, 3 data centers, about a 1000 servers, and it was a very highly optimized environment and for high transaction volume processing. And so they said, look, we've purchased these servers.
Chuck:We built these servers. They're specialized. You know, there's no way we can move to the cloud. Like our CFO keeps pushing us like, hey, everybody else is doing cloud. Why aren't we doing cloud?
Chuck:And we just you know, we said there's no way. Right? It's not possible. We've optimized it, cost efficient, you know, for this physical environment. So they worked with other folks and, they even worked with AWS.
Chuck:And and AWS's economics team put together a a model for them that said, yeah, we're not really saving money here. So they came to us and and, we said, well, you're not using containerization. Right? You could drop those 1,000 servers down to a handful tens of very beefy I three instance, EC 2 instances on AWS, and you could get a lot of performance in containerization. And they're like, no way.
Chuck:We can't containerize this application. There's just no way. Well, long story short, we worked with them over about 4 months to build out a model, prove the model, and not just the performance of it, but the economics of it. And, we knocked their cost down by almost 2 thirds. And, you know, these are sharp guys.
Chuck:I mean, they've been in the IT industry for a long time, and they were like, hey. Show us how. And, so they they learned some new tricks, and, we got to build some cool new, innovative stuff. And, it was it was awesome.
Max:That story is it's so repetitive and so familiar in terms of, you know, we're gonna move an existing application, and we're just gonna migrate it as is into a cloud platform. And, oh, surprise. It maybe is more expensive than what they were operating beforehand. Or we have this existing application that's running in AWS, and it's and it's expensive. And, you know, if you if you change it a little bit, you get a massive cost savings.
Max:I mean, you you see our stories, you know, on almost daily basis of people, you know, of of big SaaS companies saying, you know, hey. We rearchitected our data pipeline, and we save 70% of our monthly bill. I mean, it's, you know, now I it's almost like I assume every company has a 30 to 40% waste in their AWS environment without even talking to them. You just you you start that conversation off with, yeah, you could probably save 30 to 40% if you just look at your architecture. I I mean, are you seeing the same kind of generality starting to apply as you engage?
Chuck:Yeah. There there's, there's always opportunity for improvement. Right? And and, we're a part of a program at AWS called the well architected program. And, part of the well architected program was we do these reviews, and, we look at different, we'll we'll we'll analyze a workload, and we'll look at different pillars.
Chuck:So we'll look at cost, we'll look at performance, security, operations, and we dive deeper in you know, there's, like, a hundred questions in these in in each of these different areas. And so if a customer is wanting to if they're more concerned about cost, then we can focus more on cost optimization. And to your point, you know, they're probably doing the first level things. Like, yeah, you know, we've right sized our instances based on performance. And we say, okay.
Chuck:Well, what about these dev environments or these QA environments? Do you have it built so that it automatically, you know, spins up and spins down when spins up when developers come to work and spins down when they go home? Or do you have them auto scaling, or do you just have them the same size all the time? Or are you leveraging RI instances in the background to optimize the cost of that? Or, you know, there there's a number of cost strategies that we can apply when we look at a particular pillar going through this Well Architected review.
Chuck:And to your point, as we look deeper in each of these pillars, we continue to find ways to optimize and enhance their security. I remember when I was at SANJ, you know, we had a lot of conversation about the cloud is not secure. Right? And, look, it's a set of tools. You can build insecure infrastructure in a data center with physical equipment, just like you can build and secure infrastructure in the cloud.
Chuck:So it takes, you know, sort of skilled artisans to to know how to put the the Lego blocks together who've done it before and understand how hardening works and, immutable infrastructure, and all those sorts of things. So we do find opportunities to improve. And AWS actually recommends we, that customers go and look at this, work on a workload basis, do well architected review every quarter because the set of tools, the set of Lego blocks, the set of services are continuing to grow so rapidly today. They can continue to adapt and adopt new, architecture and capabilities.
Max:And counter to what would be, like, conventional wisdom, Amazon and AWS, in some cases, incentivizes customers to go through these processes. I mean, they want people to improve their infrastructure and reduce their cost and and be more efficient. I mean, it's it's it's kinda you know, like, it it sounds a little crazy, but they they want people to be improving their infrastructure and and decreasing their cost.
Chuck:It's true. And, you know, it to be a part of the well architected program, you gotta have a certain number of, you know, certified engineers and all that sort of thing that, to to even make it over the hurdle. But part of the requirement is we do Well Architected reviews for customers for free. That's a requirement of the program. You can't charge for them.
Chuck:So so, you know, if a customer wants us to come and do an assessment of a particular workload, and we can do it in, in a few hours in a day. And then sort of the next day provide the the recommendations back to this red, yellow, green road map of improvement ideas,
Max:how
Chuck:they can improve that environment. So it's a very rapid way to engage. It's a very you know, AWS is encouraging people sort of lowering the bar, lowering the hurdle to be able to leverage, their infrastructure and their services. And so they you know, we do those assessments for free. We turn them very quickly, and we always find opportunities.
Max:Mentioning SANs and talking about the cloud is not inherently secure. I mean, nothing's inherently secure. I mean, that's right. You you you talked about that. The cloud gives, I think, more opportunities to make bigger oops.
Max:You know? And that's you know, you have more opportunities to configure and, you know, I'm incorrectly and have a security key, a root key that gets out into a GitHub repository or, you know, whoops, we've exposed the database to the Internet or s 3 buckets exposed to the Internet. You know, these sorts of things can happen very easily. And and and you find out about them because there's a horror story that hits the Internet of, like, somebody's s 3 bucket was was public, you know, and like, oh, we have all of our medical transcription files for, you know, a 100000 patients on the Internet. And that's kind of a problem in the HIPAA world.
Max:Right. You know, there's, you know, these these sorts of things apply. And when you look at the service depth and the amount of change and flux in these infrastructure, I mean, how do you help customers go through this and make sure that, you know I mean, this isn't it it it's not your infrastructure. I mean, in in the old data center hosting worlds. Right?
Max:A service provider owned the infrastructure and kind of set boundaries of, you know, hey, customer. You can only do x, y, and z, and you don't have root access to your servers. I mean, in in the cloud world, you're helping them support their AWS environment, but it's their AWS environment. You know, what's what's that like working with these, you know, larger enterprises and and helping them, you know, helping the organization protect itself, but at the same time, it's still owned by that organization.
Chuck:Yeah. It's, that's where that partnership comes in. Right? And, and we really wanna be a part of their team and have that conversation. So, like you said, in a physical environment, you you can have security vulnerabilities.
Chuck:And the thing about it is the response time oftentimes is longer in a physical environment. Right? So from the time you detect something to the time you can remediate it often is a longer period of time than you're able to do in cloud infrastructure. And the way that you achieve that in cloud infrastructure is to automate things and to have specific architectural patterns from the beginning. AWS has, this sort of modern architecture view now called landing zones, and they they have a new capability.
Chuck:I mean, not super new. It's been out for a couple of years, but, AWS Organizations. So there's a way to architect at scale enterprise environments from the beginning to bake in security and bake in compliance from the very beginning. And it's not, you know, most people when they think about AWS, like, oh, I'm gonna go open an account, an account. Right?
Chuck:So most companies have, you know, tens or hundreds of accounts. And it's important to do that now because it decreases the blast zone, the blast radius of an impact of a of a security flaw or something like that. So that's just one of the architectural tenets that we apply when we build out a new environment for a customer is these built in security things, built in guardrails, built in checks with trusted advisor and, you know, a number of AWS security services that we can leverage. But the automation piece of it is another thing that people don't quite grasp right out of the gate. I mean, imagine building, you know, a multi rack infrastructure in a data center of servers and network and storage and all of the security firewalls, but, you know, everything that goes into that and how long it would take you to do that just from a if everything was available, forget the procurement process.
Chuck:Everything is there. You just gotta turn it on, configure it, and, you know, put it on the Internet. It's weeks, months. And
Max:We used to calculate 20 minutes a server to rack. I mean, it would you know, to to, you know, to break down pallets of boxes with servers in them with, you know, the the math was basically, you know, 20:20 minutes a server to put it into a rack. Yeah.
Chuck:That was
Max:yeah. That wasn't the OS load and everything else. That was just getting the machine physically mounted and and cardboard dealt with.
Chuck:Yeah. There's human, you know, physics involved. Right? Like, you can only go so fast there. In the cloud world, we can literally automate infrastructure as code, and you say that and people kinda sometimes roll their eyes like, oh, it's infrastructure as code.
Chuck:But imagine that a server is a piece of code, and you can version it. And I can spin it up in seconds or minutes. And now imagine I can string together an automation script, if you will, but infrastructure's code that literally builds out multiple accounts associated with multiple organizations with the proper IAM roles and guardrails, security, compliance checks, reporting, monitoring, dashboards. I mean, everything that you would think of that you would wanna wanna build in an in a data center enterprise environment in an o and m, you know, to monitor and manage that system, we can literally build in hours. Like, not kidding.
Chuck:I could start the script and you could have, you know, 50 servers, with a full enterprise architecture in hours stood up. And then we get to start doing the business value stuff, like what applications do we need to run? Where does the data need to live? How do we expose it in, to the customer? But all that guardrail stuff is built in now.
Max:How does this evolve the role of the IT department within a company? You know, traditionally, IT departments are very physical. Right? You have to go touch a mesh just a machine under a desk, change a monitor, fix a printer, go install a server, change tapes. I mean, how when you when you look at and we talk about, okay, over 200 services in AWS and specialization of those services.
Max:Right? I mean, that's a big shift in, you know, in in IT and how IT functions for a company. So, you know, what what's what's actually happening here?
Chuck:Yeah. We see it as really providing more tools and capabilities to our customers' IT teams. We're not replacing them. Right? We're, again, being a a partner to them.
Chuck:We're augmenting their team, and we're providing new skills and tools and capabilities. So a development team that used to in order to deploy code had to, you know, as a big long deployment process, you got a blue green deployment. You gotta take the server offline, deploy some code, test it, you know, this whole process for deployment. Today, we can build continuous integration and continuous development pipelines where a developer can write some code or a marketing person can develop some content for a website, drop that content into a repository, into a git repo somewhere, and we can have automation watching that and automatically deploy that to production where it's not patching. You you don't have to do patching in that world.
Chuck:Right? Because you just delete the software version of the server and rebuild the new one with the new code already in it, with the new patches already in it. And so we're giving them new tools. They can go back to their business now and they can say, hey. The marketing team wanted to deploy changes content changes to our marketing site faster.
Chuck:We could never do it because our development process, our deployment process was just sort of physically this long. Now we can empower them, enable them, almost self-service. Like, they just drop the content in it and it flows to production. And so those type of tools free that IT team up to focus on their road map things. So now their company can come back to them and say, wow, these additional capabilities for our product we've been wanting to build out, we suddenly have human capacity to go do this.
Chuck:We've just effectively hired a half a FTE or another FTE or 2 FTE because they have this, capacity back to do more value adding work, for their business.
Max:A stat that you mentioned earlier I wanna touch on for a second. I mean, Effectual Audit Core is a professional services organization, and you're focused on AWS and and VM. Sorry. VM, we're in the cloud, so VMC. Mhmm.
Max:A $50,000,000 raise. So that is I mean, so you you have acquisitions, you know, that come into that.
Chuck:Right?
Max:But when you say a $50,000,000 raise, it's $50,000,000 of money being raised to build out human capital to support professional services in a specialization for AWS. You know, I don't I don't care how big of a company you are. You know, you're you know, you know, the budget to invest $50,000,000 in IT and and and and people to go out and build out an expertise around a w I mean, that that makes no economic sense for anybody. You know? So when I hear you and, you know, like, listening to all this and kind of coming back to it, it's, you know, why why wouldn't you you you know, why would you try to do this yourself?
Max:I mean, you can't replicate the skill set. I mean, there's there's a company has no shot. And, actually, I mean, I mean, also, I'm a assume, you know, just a talent pool, you know, it's like security. It's not competitive for companies to try to hire security cap you know, practitioners because it's it's hard to keep them motivated and engaged and and present. You know, the turnover is so high.
Max:I mean, it it it I mean, is AWS specialization going that same way where it's just gonna be harder and harder for companies to hire, train, and reach and retain, you know, staff to support these environments for themselves? I mean, especially when you start talking about not necessarily application development or business enablement, but really that, like, how do you actually support and manage the actual AWS platform itself?
Chuck:Mhmm. Yeah. There's definitely a, a challenge for talent today. And, you know, we we see that in, our bar is pretty high as you might imagine. But, you know, we we still see the kind of the war on talent going on.
Chuck:Right? It's a supply and demand thing. Right? As companies understand that the capabilities exist to have faster times to market at a more cost effective rate if they invest in people who have these skills, then that will be the demand. And IT folks will I mean, we're lifelong learners, you know, just by our profession.
Chuck:Right? So, and we love learning new things. We love building. And so I think there, you know, there there continues to be we see it continues to be a pipeline of, engineers that are getting trained and, you know, doing more and more training, getting more and more certifications. And so I think, the the the supply of of skills available will, at some point here in the next few years, you know, start to provide less of a stress on the system.
Chuck:You know, whether you're us trying to hire skilled people or an enterprise company trying to build their own teams. But what you can't forget about is it's one thing and, you know, we know this. Right? It's one thing to go out and get a cert. Right?
Chuck:So we can go take the test and get the AWS associate solution architect cert. And you can take that and you can go work for a company and work on an environment and work on an application or a set of applications, and you'll learn and you'll grow at a certain rate. You know, Andy Jassy says there's no compression algorithm for experience. There's no way to shortcut that. You know?
Chuck:And so what we get to see because of the nature of our business is we see so many different, you know, challenges and opportunities and and ways to solve problems. Like, it's an accelerated path for our team. Right? Because we see so many different ways to solve problems. And that's part of the benefit of partnering with another service provider, right, is your team can only go so fast.
Chuck:They're only gonna get exposure to a certain set of problems that they need to solve. Whereas you could, you know, bring a partner alongside that said, these guys have seen this 10 times. They've tried it 8 ways that haven't worked as well. We might have gone through those 8 ways for 2 years before we figured that out. So it accelerates their, again, their time to market in a more cost effective way by leveraging the experience of our team.
Max:Hi. I'm Max Clark, and you're listening to the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. With thousands of negotiated contracts, Clark Sys has helped hundreds of businesses source and implement the right tech at the right price. You're looking for a new vendor and wanna have peace of mind knowing you've made the right decision?
Max:Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call. AWS is a is a massive, massive business by itself. I mean, when you look at the numbers of it, it's staggering. And the other part of it that's just absolutely mind boggling is how fast it continues to grow. Yeah.
Max:We're nowhere near peak cloud adoption. I mean, this is I mean, it feels like we're still this is, like, infancy, like, early nineties Internet adoption, you know, worldwide in terms of what's actually going on to the cloud. And, you know, for a while, it was okay, I think, transition existing IT infrastructure, or we have this data center that's renewing, or we have to you know, we're aging now. We've we've depreciated all of our gear, and we have to replace it because we're at life cycle. And so, okay.
Max:Let's take that to the cloud. And that that was those were, like, very low low hanging fruit kind of tactical project realities. And, you know, what we've seen with machine learning and data lakes and these sorts of things have become, you know, how do you actually now, you know, utilize your data and information that you're collecting already just by nature of being in business and now create additional value and uniqueness and, you know, competitive nature for an organization out of this out of this information that you're already have. It's, you know, we already have it. Now what do we do with it?
Max:And and and you guys are helping people figure these things out. I mean, this is something where how do we get into machine learning? And what does, you know, this mean for us? And what does a data lake? And and how do we how do we build these pipelines?
Max:I mean, how do you what what, you know, how do you help companies when they say, oh, we've we've never heard of this thing before, but we wanna think about it. What is that like? Yeah.
Chuck:Yeah. So, you know, just your first point about how fast the business is growing on AWS. You know, 451 Research estimated, a while ago that hyperscale providers are gonna grow at a CAGR of 56 46%.
Max:That's insane.
Chuck:And eclipse a $106,000,000,000 in annual revenue by 2021, by next year. Right? And AWS represents 56% of that. So, you know, there there's still the you know, others are catching up. Right?
Chuck:But, you know, they're they're still the the leader for sure in that. And so, you know, the way that we help customers sort of introduce these new concepts is, you know, we, we're doing this with the company now. Right? They're in a data center. They were in a colo environment, with with another large provider, and, you know, they weren't in a true cloud environment.
Chuck:And, they said, we've got this application. This application, we have very large customers, banks, etcetera. We're a bit risk averse. How do we take advantage of cloud infrastructure? And so we said, well, you know, there's this technology out there that's called Hadoop.
Chuck:Right? And there's these clusters, and they're like, woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Chuck:We're risk averse. Like, let's be careful here. Right? And so we said, well, let's do some sort of proof of concept stuff. Right?
Chuck:And so we'll we'll do things for customers that are very fast, I mean, within a few weeks time to market to test these things called minimum viable clouds. So you've heard of, like, MVPs. Right? Minimum viable products. So we'll build a minimum viable cloud.
Chuck:And we'll say, look. We'll we'll automate it and we'll iterate on it. Right? So because it's automate automated, we can make, revisions to it and rerun it again. We can do it over and over and over.
Chuck:Did this work? Blow it away. Boom. Let's run it again. Make some changes.
Chuck:Boom. Run it again. And so we were able to build this, sort of minimum viable cloud, to prove out this idea of this new technology that it that it's you know, the cloud empowers or enables that this company hadn't been able to you know, didn't know a huge amount about. Of course, it heard about it and everything, but we were able to prove it out in a way that was about their business with their data and, you know, with their application in this minimum viable cloud sort of approach. And so that's what we do.
Chuck:We'll build these, proof of concepts for customers that exemplify some of these capabilities and make it about their problem set, you know, their their market, their customers, their environment, and we can do it very rapidly with them.
Max:What's your experience been in terms of, integration and interaction with the business? You know, are we still seeing this dominated from IT teams and CIOs and CTOs leading the charge? Yeah. Or CFOs, CMOs, CROs. Like, what's actually happening, you know, over the, you know, last year in terms of what's driving these conversations and and applications coming down the pipe?
Chuck:Yeah. That's that's an interesting, question. So it used to be, I think, that, you know, there's a lot of talk around, well, our CFO is driving this. You know. But, frankly, what we see is we see it sort of equivalent across the board.
Chuck:Like, we there's no heavier like, we always get it from the business side or we always get it from the IT side. What's been different about it, I think, is that there's support on both sides. So it used to be, like, when when the IT team would wanna play with some new toys and try out some new cool stuff in the cloud, the business is like, hold on a second. You guys, you know, just wanna spend more money or whatever. Right?
Chuck:Or when the business side would say, hey. We need to figure out a way to save more money. The IT team are like, we're doing the best we can. You know? This is what you've given us kinda thing.
Chuck:But now there seems to be more partnership, frankly, between IT teams in the business. And, they, you know, there seems to be more sort of support, from both sides. They say, yeah. We understand there's benefit there. We understand the benefit is financial.
Chuck:We understand it's security and performance. How do we sort of work together to get there? So, you know, you talked about what is our process. I mean, part of that experience is, you know, we have an engagement model that we call the effectual way. And this engagement model with customers is a project model that that helps sort of take our customers through a process that involves members of their business team.
Chuck:It involves members of their IT team. We have an executive sponsor on our side that comes alongside their executive sponsor to make sure we can have that business conversation. And, we have architects and engineers on the technical side. And we have biweekly meetings with our executive sponsors to make sure that we're focused on the business outcomes and the financial goals and they're hitting their strategic goals. And, of course, we're having daily tactical sort of meetings with the technical team to achieve the the milestones or the deliverables.
Chuck:But one of the things that we do, I think, that that seems to be our customers tell us is competitively differentiating anyway is we have a client collaboration portal, and we actually invite everybody into the portal. We say, here's the plan. The plan's out there because customers hire us to be prescriptive. Right? They say, we hired you guys to to tell us how we're supposed to go do this.
Chuck:And so here's the plan. Right? We put it in the portal. We invite them into the portal, and then they're a part of the process. So it's kinda like I don't know if people know what, sort of Salesforce chatter looks like, but there's like a threading sort of threaded discussion capability in this platform where you can actually talk about tasks or milestones or or upload documents and collaborate together as a customer and a partner and a business team.
Chuck:And that's very you know, the transparency is builds a level of trust, and confidence, and, it really works well.
Max:Late, you know, 2000. Right? So a decade plus ish ago, when AWS first came out and the cloud started, I think it was a lot of fear in terms of IT and traditional IT of what is this gonna mean and how does this how does this evolve. And it's actually been really exciting for me in watching this shift and this transition because companies are looking at IT now as strategic assets for their business. And it's it's less about, you know, cost and expense centers that have to be constrained and more about how are we leveraging IT as a strategic enabler for our employees and for our customers and to accelerate our business.
Max:And that's, you know, in the in the sense of IT and people getting into IT now, I mean, it's a very exciting transition and and change, you know, versus what's historically been the case for the last 20, you know, 20, 25 years. We we talked about onboarding and migrations and application architectures and reviews. We haven't really talked a lot about ongoing management and interaction and support. And and this becomes also a very important thing in terms of maintaining and supporting a a a well functioning cloud environment. You know, if you have an issue with AWS, what do you do?
Max:You you open an email ticket and you wait on hold or, you know, that's not really a fantastic pathway for a company that needs support and especially if they don't have a lot of exposure to it. So, I mean, how do you fit into that and how does Effectual help an enterprise, you know, with the, you know, let's say, the more mundane day to day of the support cycle, and then, of course, the what becomes the exciting events, you know, with with support any other support issues. Mhmm.
Chuck:Yep. That's great. So the core of what we do is manage services. Right? So these these other, you know, professional services are are to help get people into an operating state.
Chuck:Right? The professional services side of things is sort of a temporal thing. Right? We've gotta migrate to the cloud. We gotta build something on the cloud.
Chuck:But at the end of the day, you need to operate your business. Right? So that's where the sort of core depth of expertise is and the focus of our business. And you can think about all these different aspects of operations and maintenance around patching and or just broadly security, compliance, monitoring. You know?
Chuck:And then you dig deeper in those, and you have backups and patching. And then you can go more broad, like, what about workspaces or virtual desktops, that capability and to enable more of the business users in a business? And how do you maintain that, operate that, be responsive to your customer base around that? So we have, you know, I talked about how automation is helpful and, to customers. Automation is helpful for us as a business.
Chuck:So we're always looking to automate, some of those more mundane things. So how do we automate a patching process? How do we or do we even need a patching process? Right? Because if you have immutable infrastructure, you actually don't even need it, right?
Chuck:So
Max:Right. Containers change that equation very quickly, right?
Chuck:Right. So, that's another one of those sort of innovative, you know, modernization engineer introduction of, hey, I know you your business has talked to you about patching for a long time. I mean, here's another idea. What do you what do you think about this? So, you know, automating things that are more mundane, sort of the housekeeping things in an environment like patching and backups and monitoring and some of the, you know, sort of guardrail type security things and the automated monitoring and remediation automated remediation of things around compliance, protecting HIPAA data or, you know, PCI.
Chuck:So we automate those things to as much extent possible. We have a runbook that we develop with a customer, and we say, here's all the ways that we're gonna automate these things for you. Here's our engagement model. And it's not just a ticketing platform. There is a ticketing platform, of course.
Chuck:But we also use Slack, and we use, you know, more interactive models for to be a part of their team again. The goal is to be a part of their team. We've seen this in our history. Right? Some providers will say, yeah.
Chuck:We have a new managed customer, and you sign a 3 year deal. And you kinda don't hear from them unless there's a problem. So if there's a problem in your infrastructure, you send a ticket, and then somebody will call you maybe. But, you know, you hear about them again when the contract comes up for renewal, right, in 3 years. Like, hey.
Chuck:Your contract's up for renewal. You should renew for another 3 years. And you're like, I haven't heard from you in 3 years, like, unless there's a problem and I call you. And we we just flip that on its head. We're like, we can't be a partner unless we're engaged with them on a regular basis in their business.
Chuck:So we have monthly service reviews. We we have a service delivery manager who that's their whole job is to make sure that we are partnering with our customers well. So they conduct monthly service reviews and quarterly business reviews where they drag the executive sponsor out there and say, hey. We're gonna share what's going on in our business also. Not just what's going on in your business.
Chuck:Let us tell you what's going on in our business. And I think the model for our engagement of managing customers in a more automated innovative way, in addition to the human engagement aspect of it, right, is is a big differentiator for us.
Max:Runbooks are interesting animals, you know. And when you and you look at it from, you know, infrastructure as code and CICD pipelines and and constantly changing environments, you know, as you're getting into these things, you're and you're turning up and turning off, you know, infrastructure inside of a cloud. You know, there's a lot of change to that. And so a runbook, you know, it's not in the sense of, like, the old monolithic static application of, like, you know, if this happens, do this. It changes a lot.
Max:But I think what's great with runbooks is the process of going through and establishing it. And in a lot of cases, just for an enterprise of saying, here's an area of responsibility, and here is a process that we're going to to, you know, take if sir and a lot of times that discipline hasn't existed yet, and especially the migration to the cloud. So having a partner actually walk through that process, how you develop a run book to help operate your environment. And it I mean, it really reminds me of a CTO, you know, a few years ago, and he was traveling back and forth. I mean, he was on a plane a lot between offices for this company.
Max:And and every time he was on a plane, he realized that he was completely stressed out, not because he had this fear that AWS was gonna collapse on him while I was on a plane. It was more of the, you know, what would happen if AWS did we did have an outage in US East, and this took down infrastructure and what would actually occur. And and he, you know, and he was really looking for and interested in a partner to help provide that structure and, you know, supervision almost to know that there was somebody responsible to make sure that things happen in an ordered and defined way, you know, in in case that goes along. So when you say runbook, I go to that thought pretty quickly. But I wanna talk about containers.
Max:You know, containers give a lot of advantages in in development pipelines. They give portability. They give the the ability to migrate from, you know, one cloud platform to another cloud platform pretty easily or run on a desktop versus running on a on a cloud environment. But, I mean, at this point, is containers the right place to go? I mean, should you be talking more you know, is is serverless I mean, serverless, you know, are we should we just skip this entire container conversation now within with with companies migrating applications?
Chuck:That's a great point. So serverless is obviously a more, a more modern architectural capability and is kind of the next evolution beyond, containerization. So there are a number of ways that serverless is is beneficial, and it's not always the answer. It's not a silver bullet, you know, like a lot of people wanna say, you know, find the one one ring to rule them all. Serverless is not quite that, but there are a lot of ways you can, leverage serverless.
Chuck:So in the data lake example for example. Right? So you could have a containerized architecture to do analysis of data and data lakes or you could have triggers that have serverless, you know, API calls, if you will. So server serverless functions that are triggered on a change in the data in the data lake that's more responsive. So rather than setting up sort of an ETL process, that might be normal and run a sort of an ETL batch process on a particular time for data analysis, you can use serverless architecture to be more responsive in real time and trigger on events that change in the environment in the data lake itself.
Chuck:So if a new file gets dropped in a certain place in the data lake, you can have a serverless function to respond to that and do the ingestion or the transformation or the loading aspect of that. So we see serverless changing in data lake architecture and and large scale data processing architecture. There's a there's a good architecture paradigm there for serverless. And there have been cases where companies have said, we built our website using serverless, with static pages and s three buckets and things like that. I would say those are probably smaller scale websites and not really enterprise class SaaS applications, if you will.
Chuck:There are pieces of that that can be enabled using serverless, but it's not a panacea for everything.
Max:I mean, you get into a pretty big debate pretty quickly of monolithic versus microservices architecture and software development. And, you know, and and there's a lot of passions that come out and everybody, you know, is pretty entrenched at this point. So it's I I think it's, I I I like how you respond to that. I mean, it's not I don't think that there's one right way. It's just that there's there's and but it feels like every week there's just more options.
Max:Mhmm.
Chuck:And as
Max:That's a
Chuck:good way to say it.
Max:More as and and and and when you and when you take that and you and you say, okay, every week you have another new option now of what to do. How do you make those decisions and decide, you know, what's the right path forward? I mean, everything becomes a good option at some point. You know? And how do you actually decide?
Max:You know, this is the best option for me.
Chuck:Well, I I think people should talk to you about that. I think that you do a a fantastic job. I think your customers are lucky to have you as their strategic adviser because you do understand that they're they're not these silver bullets or, you know, one rings and, you know, there's a a a different, solutions can be applied. And and, you know, you do understand the breadth of cloud services and and physical infrastructure. Again, in your case, you know, there's no compression algorithm for experience.
Chuck:And I think your customers benefit from that, and we benefit from that as a part of yours because, you know, we have a very high bandwidth conversation about ways that we can help you and your customers, and it's it's very effective, relationship with us. And so we we we really appreciate your partnership.
Max:Oh, I thank you for the nice words. I really do. I appreciate. I I wish I had a crystal ball to look forward 10 years. I don't have it.
Max:I'm curious if you have it, and let's make it a little bit shorter. Let's let's not make it, you know, 10 years. Let's talk about, you know, 1 to 2 years. I mean, you've you've got you Effectual has made a huge bet. I mean, you've you've made a huge bet on this.
Max:Mhmm. And so what is your vision over the next, you know, 1, 2, 3 years? You know, beyond that becomes, like, plan and ideals, but we know that changes. So I mean, what what what does this look like over the next, you know, few quarters?
Chuck:Yeah. There there are continue to be larger companies. The larger companies are, adopting cloud infrastructure, but there's a bigger opportunity there to impact those businesses. And that's where we wanna be. Right?
Chuck:We wanna be at the center of the hard problems, the center of security and compliance problems. We don't shy away from those things because we know there's proper solutions with cloud architecture that's that they can be automated and cost effective for businesses. And so, you know, our goal is to continue to do that upmarket for larger businesses and, work with their teams to solve more interesting challenges. That's, you know, that's that's where our expertise is historically. We've been able to do that for some very large brands, you know, in the DataPipe days as well.
Chuck:So I think, you know, where do we where do we move? We'll continue to see more automation. Infrastructure as code will become more of a of a normal vernacular, and people will understand it. You know, IT professionals will understand how to leverage that. What does infrastructure as code mean?
Chuck:Are we talking about Ansible and Ansible playbooks? Are we talking about Terraform? Are we talking about, you know, they'll they'll start to understand how to put those pieces together to automate their own infrastructure, CICD pipelines for not only infrastructure deployment, but content deployment where IT professionals don't even have to touch a server to get codeeployed to a WordPress website, for example. Those things, we're doing them today, and I think those things gain momentum. They gain more prevalence in in the future.
Chuck:So, yeah, that's what we're we're excited to do, just drive that adoption more and more. And and, you know, we we hope to operate our business in a similar way as AWS does in terms of it's always day 1. Right? We're always innovating. Our engineers are always training, always learning, always getting certifications.
Chuck:And we're we're you know, it's always day 1. We're always hungry to figure out ways to help our customers, and we wanna stay that way.
Max:So when we talk about, you know, briefly the market with the other cloud platforms, you know, and and AWS is the largest and growing the fastest. Right? But so Microsoft Azure and GCP. I mean, these are both also, you know, very good cloud platforms.
Chuck:Sure.
Max:Yeah. I mean, do you think that this is gonna turn into, like, a Coke versus Pepsi debate? Are we talking about hyper specialization where you're now kind of looking at it? Like, oh, we've decided we're an Office 365, so that automatically means that a certain x percentage of our business ends up in Azure even if the majority of our infrastructure is in AWS or, you know, vice versa with Google? Like, how I mean, how do you guys see this playing out right now?
Chuck:Yeah. AWS has a lead, but there are certainly, you know, some particular services that are, have better implementations or for a particular use case, they're better on other platforms. It depends on the use case. You know, my dad used to say use the right tool for the right job. Right?
Chuck:And there are and it makes the world of difference. And so I think we will see more parity among the cloud platforms as they continue to grow. They'll still have some of their strengths and weaknesses, but I think those strengths and weaknesses over the next, you know, 5 3 to 5 years will become sort of less obvious and more esoteric almost. Right? And so I think you you you know, you will be able to solve similar problems on all the platforms as you can today.
Chuck:There may be a more natural move toward one platform over another given a company's history. But just to say that, you know, because a company is a Microsoft shop and they have, you know, Microsoft EA, then they've gotta move to to Azure is not is becoming less and less of a valid argument. Is I'd say it's not a perfectly valid argument today. We're certainly seeing that. But, you know, there there are commercial aspects of that, not just technical aspects of that.
Chuck:So, yeah, I think you have to take into consideration the commercial pieces with pricing and, you know, incentives from those different platform providers for those customers as well as the technical specialty things that a company may need over time.
Max:An interesting stat that came out recently was that more than 50% of the compute on Azure was running Linux. And Yeah. You know, I mean, it it and there's there's
Chuck:2 ways Finally. Right?
Max:I mean, I I mean, god I've got blessed them. It's amazing. Right? But, I mean, it's you can kinda look at that a couple different ways. When I read that stat, you're like, okay.
Max:This is incredible that, you know, Microsoft has really adopted and and has has really embraced a a a pretty amazing shift in what they were focused on historically over time, and acquisitions and focuses and developer enablement, all these things. But at the same time, you know, you the flip of that is you'd think that number would be much higher if this is, like, Microsoft is incentivizing or pushing Microsoft environments into Azure, you know, that, you know, it feels like I kinda wonder about that too. And AWS, you know, has, you know, there's there's some really interesting things AWS does around, like, instantiating and starting up Windows environments. You know, having machines, VMs effectively ready to go. So that way, you don't have this big build delayed if you wanna go into Windows.
Max:I mean, there's it'll be fun to watch as these 3 competitors evolve and mature. I I think, you know, it'll be harder and harder for upstarts and new cloud vendors to get into the market unless they're extremely specialized into something. But the efficiency of scale and the cost economics and, you know, they're all building their own hardware. They all have, you know, a lot of resources available to do that. And, you know, AWS, what Amazon's doing with their Nitro platform, it's it's incredible when you actually dig into the hardware of it.
Max:I mean, we should we should spend another hour later Let's talk about Nitro. But, you know, it really is amazing. And and to go back to something you said originally that I I wrote down here my note notesheet. You know, a couple years ago, I racked what I hope is gonna be my last Cisco ASR 9,000. I mean, not that I don't like Cisco ASR.
Max:I actually love the box. But but, like, the actual concept of of, you know, literally having a forklift, you know, a several 100 pound device into a cabinet and then bolt it down and then wire it and and configure it. And it's cool. I mean, there's a sense of, like, even thinking about it, like, oh, it's so exciting to, like, configure a big router, you know, when you have, like, you know, on your but, you know, it's like it matters if you're a network service provider. If you're actually building network infrastructure, having network equipment matters.
Max:And if you're a data center company, having data center space matters. And if you're a cloud provider, having cloud infrastructure matters. But for an enterprise, it doesn't matter so much. It's like, what are you actually trying to do? And that's what you should focus on.
Chuck:Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And and, you know, helping broaden that thinking or realize that thinking for customers for our customers is really the exciting part for us. Like, introducing them to these new ideas that they didn't know existed before with containers or whatever it is.
Chuck:Right? And then doing a proof of concept to sort of prove it out. Right? And it's, it's awesome to to see them go, wow. This is an innovation that we had no idea how to do.
Chuck:Thanks for helping us figure this out. And, it's really cool. We love that that, you know, you mentioned the physical sort of, tangible satisfaction of looking back. I mean, I I felt it. I felt it when you were saying it.
Chuck:Right? Like, yeah, you look at a rack and you go you look at the beautiful wiring in the back of it, and you go, I did that. That's good. I'm gonna go have dinner now. And that was you know, there's there's a sense of satisfaction about that.
Chuck:Right? So, yeah, I I I get that, but, we get that kind of satisfaction, you know, from from look watching a customer go, wow. This is amazing. Right? We didn't think we could do this, and look.
Chuck:There it is. You know?
Max:Chuck, thank you so much for your time. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. And I I I feel like every time I walk away with it, I've I I, you know, I'm I'm gonna be jazzed up for the rest of the day. So
Chuck:Hey. Thank you, man. It's always great to spend time with you, and, I look forward to doing it physically when we can. You know? It'll be good to get together again.
Max:Like likewise. Thanks for joining the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At Clarkes, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business.
Max:Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
