Cloud Desktop Solutions for Businesses with Evolve IP (Gary Coben & Kevin Sullivan)
Technology is cyclical. And over the last 60 years, one of the big cycles we've seen is the conversion from centralized computing with mainframes into distributed computing on desktops and back into centralized computing with cloud. And so most consumers and most people think about cloud is really this this, you know, this this movement back into centralization. But as it relates to IT systems and desktops, the actual end user experience of what they interact with on a day to day basis, terminal services, now what we recall DaaS, VDI, virtual desktop, these sorts of things have been around 20 plus years. And in had the pleasure of talking with Gary Kobin, Kevin Sullivan with I, Evolve IP about their DaaS platform and how they're enabling and helping businesses.
Max:We talk about the 4 pillars. I actually think there's a 5th pillar of things that they actually really enable with their DaaS platform. And and really how DAS is a tool to solve business problems and how many business problems really can be addressed and solved with DAS that aren't actually even really considered a lot of times. It's a very fun conversation for me. I hope you get something out of it as well.
Max:Gary. But, you know, other than that, you know, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Oh goodness. Yeah. It's, I mean, nowadays, if, like, you're not used to just talking blankly into your computer screen, you know, it's just that do people actually exist anymore?
Max:I'm not really sure. So we're in we're in we're in that world.
Gary:We'll start it that way, hon. So my name is Gary Coben. I'm the, senior vice president of the channel here at Evolve IP. 2023 marks year number 15 for me at the at the helm of the channel at Evolve IP. And, so, always excited to talk to my good friend, Max Clark.
Kevin:Yeah, Max. Kevin Sullivan. I am the director of solutions engineering here at Evolve IP, specifically focused on our compute practice. And, may not have the the tenure of Gary, but I am working on year number 7 here at Evolve, and have been in the cloud space since, around 2012 or so. So I've, definitely been around the block a few times, but not as many as Gary.
Gary:Well, he's a lot smarter than me. So it it, you know, take it took me twice as long just to to get the way out. I wanna
Max:actually segue on this for a second because, the other day I was in a conversation, and the average tenure now for senior executives at a company is right around 2 years. CISOs, I think, is 18 months. CIOs is, like, 20 to 24 months ish as, like, when you look at stats, that's the average tenure. And, you know, 17 15 years 7 years is, I wouldn't really equate it to tribal knowledge. But when you start when you talk about, like, longevity of, you know, experience and roles and leadership and just like that arc of, like, watching the business evolve over that period of time.
Max:That says a lot. I mean, that's a that's a pretty I don't I don't know how you, like, leverage that or talk about that more, but a a lot of what I've started talking about with companies is, you know, if you're expecting your staff to turn over to every 2 years, like, how are you onboarding and training and bringing people up to speed? And is an MSP a good place for you to be looking at anyways? Because that MSP is gonna give you that, you know, that that continuity, you know, of operations that maybe you can't you can't get yourself anymore.
Gary:So, you know, I'll I'll throw a comment in there because, oddly enough, I have a 31 year old daughter that also works for Evolve IT.
Kevin:She
Gary:she she runs our account management group. So the the the interesting thing, of course, is when we get into the technology, you know, when you reach my age, 60 plus, you know, my expectation is if is that if my PC breaks, I expect my company to buy it. Her expectation was, I'm not using it anyway. I have my I'm using my MacBook. I just want access to your desktop.
Gary:Now when it comes to longevity, what I remind her of, and I would remind all young people, is that the guys and gals making the decisions to hire people are in my generation. And we value tenure, and we value seniority, and we value time. We don't value people that have, you know, 5 different jobs in 10 different years.
Max:So, of all IP, I mean, this is not a new business, obviously. It's been around for a while. How did let's let's let's, let's put it this way. Like, how did all Evolve IP start? Like, what was its what what was the problem or the focus at inception?
Max:You know, what was what did it see in the market? What was the like, we're gonna go out and tackle this problem? And then, fast forward me to, like, present day. You know, what is what is the the the service, you know, you could say either verticals or or segments that you're focused on?
Gary:So so I would say that one of the themes about Evolve IP that has always been common back when I started in 2008 to the to to the present is we wanted to meet more than a single threaded provider. When I think back to 2008, it was a completely different market. We were, you know, one of the original BroadSoft shops for UCaaS in its infancy. We had a contact center play. We had, hosted applications in terms of things like exchange, and, we had a security, practice too that was based on things like antivirus and hosted firewall.
Gary:We knew that that thematically, if companies bought one solution, they were more apt to continue to buy additional solutions. And that has, you know, truly been the cornerstone of what we've tried to do over the years. Now, as Kevin will tell you, when he joined the company was in the beginning of virtual desktop. We were as as far as I can tell, we we had to be one of the very first people that went out in the marketplace talking about hosted VDI. And so when I look at what the company does today, you know, we're focused in, you know, primarily 4 core areas.
Gary:Right? You know, we know what's happened to in in the UKAS market, so we are, you know, from a voice perspective, focused entirely on Microsoft Teams enterprise voice and Cisco Webex enterprise voice. And but I think a big focus for us these days is in hosted desktops for for a lot of reasons. One of them being you can't get PCs in bulk now even if you wanted to. So, you know, the the continuation of geopolitical forces and global chip shortages, and the ability for IT professionals to do more with less, we think, is driving the market for virtual desktop.
Gary:As contact centers begin to move their people remote, right, there there's you know, when they're working in their living room, they no longer have access to an on-site supervisor, hence, they continue proliferation of collaboration platforms like a Teams, like a Zoom, like a Webex. More importantly, though, the last person you wanna buy a $2,000 PC for is for an employee whose average tenure is less than 6 months. So we are really starting to see that be a big lift for us. So still in the contact center space, but but we also we have our own intellectual property for contact center. And I would say that's pretty much fundamentally for customers that are heavily embedded in Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex.
Gary:But we also have the ability, which I'm sure Kevin will share later on, is we have the ability to stand up any UCaaS or contact center platform inside of our desktop because of you know, again, you know, when when when you when you like in the what VMware and Citrix has done relative to enabling real time audio video, our ability to run a 59 client or run, Zoom or run an Avaya client inside of our desktop is really making is really making is really driving things from a virtual desktop perspective for us. So I think, again, just to summarize, when you think about where we started and where we are today, it's still very much the same thing. We wanted to be, a multifaceted supplier that offered multiple solutions for the for the primary reason of driving more revenue and retaining customers for a longer period of time.
Kevin:Let me
Max:share something here really quickly, which I wanna talk about here. So this is your website. This is your home page. You have some really small logos listed on your landing page. And and this is what I have I find with a lot you know, and Evolve I put into this category.
Max:Right? Like, you know, I walk down the street and I said to somebody, hey. You know, do you know Evolve IP? You know, probably not gonna say yes. Right?
Max:You know, it's a very you're you're you have a very specific niche in terms of the market and and who you're going after. But, let's see here. Madison Square Garden, Nike, Ford, Marriott, Chick Fil A, a pre I'm sure everybody has heard of at least 4 of those companies, if not all of them. And what you're talking about you know, I mean, terminology and I I I hate the marketing mumbo jumbo that technology gets into. So, like, UCaaS and CCaaS and this, that, and that CAS.
Max:But, you know, when you talk about hosted desktop and you talk about UCaaS, I mean, you're talking about really the the core computing collaboration and, you know, and base, like, foundational for work for a company. Right? A company needs if they have people interacting with a computer, they need computers. They need desktops. They need to communicate with each other.
Max:They need to communicate internally. They need to communicate externally. You know, not every company would say they run a contact center, but almost every company runs some sort of interaction with either clients or vendors calling them, customers or vendors calling them. And, really, that's contact center functionality for most people. You know?
Max:Like, do you need to record your phone calls? I mean, that's a contact center. Do you need to do agent training? That's a contact center. So, but, anyways, you know, the the virtual desktop thing is always kinda interesting to me.
Max:And and I'm and I'm I wanna dig into this because you guys see this as a service provider. So, obviously, your your customers come to you in part because they're interested in virtual desktop. And so we have, you know, VDI. We have DaaS. We have hosted desktop.
Max:I mean, there's all these different terminologies that come into, you know, what is what versus the other thing. But this isn't like I mean, at this point, I remember seeing my first Microsoft based virtualized desktop, I think, in 1998, you know, which, of course and this was on Microsoft NT 4 Terminal Services 1. And that concept of having resources centralized and then a screen display remote goes way back to the birth of everything with the original mainframes, the original, you know, microcomputers, and and birth of the Internet in the sixties. I mean, you're you're it's it's like it's new it's like this is the new thing, right, for companies to be looking at that's really, like, 60 plus years old. Right?
Max:So, and and and I wanna hear actually your take on this because when I start talking about this with somebody that doesn't have experience with it, they'll say something to me like, well, what does it look like? And I'm like, well, what do you mean what does it look like? What happens when you turn your computer on? That's what it looks like. It's just your computer is not on your computer anymore.
Max:It's, like, over here in this other place instead. So walk me through that conversation of somebody who I I think there's you you touched, Gary, you touched on a on a on a business problem. Right? Like, how do we get equipment to to an employee? How do we buy the equipment, source the equipment, deliver the equipment, manage the equipment?
Max:What do we do if the employee turns over? Right? I mean, there's there's there's more problem statements in that I wanna dig into. But, you know, so, you know, somebody that's going out to solve this problem You know, let's talk about that interaction of, like, you know, how do they what's the journey look like for them?
Kevin:Yeah. I was gonna say, if you don't mind, Max, you you touched on a couple interesting things there. Right? So first and foremost, I agree with you. Right?
Kevin:We live in a a cyclical industry, and I feel like IT in general has been a constant pendulum swing from distributed to consolidated computing. Right? We constantly go back and forth. Right? Mainframe virtualization, distributed computing, edge computing.
Kevin:We're constantly making that that variation. So on that point, right, remote desktop capabilities have been around. I mean, the protocols that we leverage to connect to them are almost as old as I am. Right? It has been around since the nineties.
Kevin:And interestingly enough, that technology, for the most part, hadn't really fundamentally changed throughout that time. So a lot of the same ways that folks were envisioning connecting to those desktop resources back in that early 2000 era was still the way things were done a year or 2 ago. And in some organizations, still the way things are done today. The big thing that has been a game changer for the industry is now the ability to do optimized real time audio and video in a desktop. Right?
Kevin:And just like yourself, I'm I'm not a huge fan of terminology and buzzwords because I feel like we tend to set ourselves up for failure a lot with that because a lot of times you say a word like optimization. Right? And it means different things to different people depending on who it is that's receiving the message. So, really, what we're talking about now is, receiving the message. So, really, what we're talking about now is, you know, historically, you think about VDI.
Kevin:You think about desktop as a service. You think about remote remote desktop services, terminal services. Those things always had one thing in common. They always fell down with anything that was a media rich user experience. Right?
Kevin:Audio, video, it just weren't flat out good enough to to handle that from a user experience side as far as performance went. Mostly, that was a combination of 2 things. Right? The protocol that you use to deliver the desktop. Right?
Kevin:So, again, we're still using RDP, which has been around since the 90. And the fact that virtual machines that we're connecting to in in our modern iterations of of desktop and VDI just aren't good at doing that work. Right? Like, a virtual processor is just not good at doing audio and video. So, you know, how do we address that?
Kevin:Well, that technology hasn't changed. Those virtual processors still aren't good at doing that. But what has changed is now the DAT delivery solutions are now intelligent enough to make use of a client's local resources. Right? We don't wanna get too too far into the weeds on this from a technical perspective, but what that ultimately means for us is now true mobility and portability.
Kevin:Right now in that virtual desktop, no matter where you're connecting to it ability. Right now, in that virtual desktop, no matter where you're connecting to it from, you can do all of the things that you need to do in order to function as an employee. So your your voice calls, your video calls, you know, you name it. And you you hit on another great point. Right?
Kevin:I think the challenge in selling this and talking about this and and going into the market with this is it's underwhelming by design. A desktop is a desktop is a desktop. Right? We don't want it to be complicated because we understand users have all different levels of technical aptitude. So it then becomes more what are the business challenges that a desktop solution, if it's well formed and well articulated, allow us to solve?
Kevin:And I'm a huge fan of, like, making things overly simplistic and mnemonic devices and things like that. So, you know, the the way I approach it is DaaS is simple. Right? And simple kind of tying back to security, mobility, performance, and logistics. Those are the 4 main key areas from a business challenge perspective that a well formed DaaS or desktop solution can help an organization solve for.
Gary:May I add something to that? Because what I think is very interesting is that there has been a fundamental shift between the conversations that were going on in boardrooms in 2022 to the conversations that are going on in boardrooms today. And here's what I mean by that. Last year, we were talking about, okay, the pandemic is over, but remote work is here to stay. How do I make my user's experience that works from home the same as my user's experience that works from the office?
Gary:Now all of a sudden, we've come into 2023. There isn't a news feed that I don't get on a daily basis that announces a new slew of layoffs impacting all companies, all sectors, all geographies. So all of a sudden now, the thing that's on your customer's mind is, I have to do more with less. I'm gonna have to have you know, I'm not concerned about controlling my budget. I'm concerned about the fact that my budget will be cut.
Gary:I'm concerned with the fact that my headcount will be reduced. I'm concerned over the fact that I've got significant constraints going on within IT. The the the thing about the whole concept of the PC process, I gotta procure it, I gotta provision it, I gotta secure it, I've gotta manage and support it, I've got to refresh it, and now the one that's concerning everybody, I gotta go reclaim that asset. So all of a sudden, in 2023, we are looking at a very, very different marketplace, and we believe that that marketplace will drive the largest adoption of desktop as a service for two reasons. The first being that the business is going to demand it, and the second being is that the user experience, per Kevin, is as good, if not better than it would be, by going to Best Buy and buying a brand new PC.
Max:There's a lot to unpack. Right? So going back to Kevin's four things. Right? So 2 of the things that you touched on, security, mobility or actually three things.
Max:Security, mobility, logistics. What was your 4th?
Kevin:Performance or productivity.
Max:Okay. Performance. So, like, real world horror stories, I've experienced personally. Somebody, has information in an Excel spreadsheet that they probably shouldn't have in an Excel spreadsheet saved to their desktop and leaves that laptop in their car and their car is broken into, and all of a sudden that laptop walks off into who knows where. And then you find out that that laptop contains the a spreadsheet detailing the personal information, salary, Social Security numbers, home addresses, and, and maybe bank account information for every single person in the company.
Max:And then you turn into a oh my goodness. Let's just pray that they don't turn this laptop on and poke around in here and that they're just trying to harvest it for parts and what do we do about it. So that was, I've I've experienced this more than once. I haven't been the one losing a laptop, but I've experienced this this phone call. Logistics, logistics I mean, the last 2 years, it's been a I mean, there's a how do we ship equipment to people at their houses and get them working and connected to our network, which then exposes a similar experience, which is how do we, what's the push?
Max:It's how do we have how do we ensure that we don't have corporate owned data on personal devices? That's usually the request that comes across. It's like the coded for you know, I have a mandate for my supply chain for my customers. In order to do business with them, I need to ensure that their data doesn't end up on a on a non corporate owned endpoint. And how do we ensure that?
Max:Right? Or, you know, how do we onboard a person in a location where they can't drive to our office? My personal favorite. Hey. We're, we're augmenting with a team in pick a country.
Max:Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, somewhere in Europe. I mean, like, basically, pick put a pin on the map somewhere and say, okay. We are now gonna spin up, you know, a 100, 200, 300 employees in this market. And and and that ends up being an interesting thought exercise where you're like, okay. Well, you know, we're gonna now ship equipment into that market.
Max:So we need to ship, let's just say, as a as a company profile or or a risk profile, you said it's it's totally okay for us to to ship $2,000 worth of equipment to somebody in Colombia or in Brazil or or Indonesia or whatever. Right? Because, I mean, you say reclaiming these assets, you you do that knowing you're never gonna see that box again. Right? But it's okay for you.
Max:It just it just fits into your profile. And and I've seen I've seen people do this. And then they discover this this horrible thing called customs. And let's just say that they found a place to ship the equipment, then they ship the equipment, and then this equipment goes on customs hold for for importation taxes and who knows what else reasons just because it got lost in a loading dock. And it's sitting on a loading dock for 3 to 6 weeks where you can't touch it.
Max:Now you're you've got people you can't onboard. Right? So, I I don't I don't think a lot of people really connect a there's another way of doing this. So I wanna I you know, I really like I said, I wanna unpack this in terms of, you know, real world, what kind of problems are you know? Because when I hear it, like, okay.
Max:We're gonna ship equipment to, you know, some market. Right? Or how do we ensure it's not you know, like, traditional, you know, MDM or UEM solutions come up. You know, mobile device management or your unified endpoint management come up. It's like, oh, okay.
Max:You know, we can secure this device by saying you can't you can't, you know, we're gonna we're gonna create a profile in the UEM that says you can't copy data onto your USB drive. But it's you know, like, it shifts a lot when you start talking about what does this mean for DaaS. So I don't know who wants to bite into this over there if if Gary or Kevin. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll always have to start.
Kevin:Yeah. Always happy to take a a first pass here, Max. And Gary, Gary is always good at the color commentary over the top. So certainly open to Gary interject at any point if you if you think you you know, it's helpful. But so those are all great points.
Kevin:And and there's a whole other side of this too that we didn't even touch in that, which is let's assume for a moment that none of the things that you just expressed or concerns actually go sideways on us, which is a heck of an assumption because odds are at least 1, if not several of them are going to. But now there's a compliance problem sprinkled into this as well. Right? So depending on the location where we're we're sending that equipment or where those users are working, what if there's a GDPR requirement that, you know, they're required by their government to work exclusively on data that's in the location from which they're connecting? So, you know, just just a whole other complexion that that gets added into the myriad of potential issues with distribution of equipment out to remote users in other locations, especially internationally.
Kevin:So all of that said, right, the the foremost part of this is how do we extend out to remote users, wherever they may be, this idea that, hey. I have these 4 logical walls that I've built of my data center. Right? And, historically, all of my servers, all of my data, all of my stuff is there. But when people need to work on that stuff, we're breaking containment.
Kevin:Right? We're taking things out of that protected environment to do whatever we're going to do to it, and then we put it back when we're done. So the argument that, you know, we make or or any DaaS provider makes is, hey. Why not take where your people are doing their work on that stuff and put it directly next to where that stuff is? Right?
Kevin:So now those 4 logical walls from a security perspective, from a compliance perspective, apply not only to your data, not only to your servers, but where your people are working as well. Because now they're just connecting across the Internet into that environment to do whatever it is that they need to do as part of doing their job. In addition to that, right, just by virtue of having those things in that 4 watch 4, you know, wall structure, we now make manageability of the environment easier too. Right? Because now we don't have to worry, you know, you know, if you're an an IT admin, I'm an IT admin.
Kevin:It's hard enough managing all of the devices, the desktops, the laptops that are in our office and our branch locations. The last 2 years have now, you know, exponentially increased the challenges of dealing with these devices that are everywhere. Right? So if we can control where those devices are and have a single management pain into them, one single location where we can do things, I mean, human nature to me says that when something's easier to do, we tend to do it more often and better. Right?
Kevin:So things like patching. Right? Like antivirus definition distribution. So it becomes easier to manage our environments. And when we manage our environments, our environments inherently become more secure as well.
Kevin:So again, I know we're kind of jumping between some of those different things that we siloed out, but all of these things are interconnected. Right? The logistical problems go hand in hand with the security problem. Because if folks are taking that laptop and we're shipping it out to Columbia and they're pulling data down on it locally and that laptop goes missing, like you said, very problematic depending on what the nature of that data is. And, sure, you have to worry about the liability of personal information, but especially in, like, the health care field as well.
Kevin:Now even if no one ever acts on that data, does that constitute a breach? Do you have to report that? Are there fines that are levied onto your organization? Does it become increasingly more challenging to get cyber security insurance going forward too? Which is, a whole other financial consideration that goes into this as well.
Gary:You know, I I gotta add some color to this because as I'm sitting here and I'm I'm thinking about this, and I'm looking at everybody's background. So I live in Philadelphia. My office is in Philadelphia. Today, I am working from home. I see Kevin's background.
Gary:He's working from home. I see Max's background. He's work working from home. So you got 4 guys with a lot of tenure. We're all working from home.
Gary:The last time I checked, most of the people in my IT department, they work from home too. And that further add an element of complexity to this when those 350 machines show up in King of Prussia or show up at my IT's employees' apartment building on a pallet. Right? Like, I think we're all forgetting the fact that we still need to do 3 to 4 hours of work on a factory PC before it's even ready to be sent to an employee to use. Again, last time I checked with Kevin, the average time, you know, not you're not doing a lot, but the average time to provision a new brand new PC is probably 3 to 4 hours.
Gary:Of course, what do we love about virtual desktop? I can provision 300 virtual desktops in 10 minutes.
Max:And and and your example is not an exaggeration of let's ship 300 devices, and our IT person lives in an apartment because and, like, okay. We're gonna have a pallet delivered because it has to be you you know, like, this is I I feel like I feel like DaaS gets I feel like a lot of things in tech. People immediately go to it from a you know, how do we quantify cost and cost reduction and cost savings? And you say, okay. What's our current IT program, and how does that map up against going into a DaaS plot?
Max:And, by the way, you guys offer different versions and flavors of of remote desktop, so we should talk about that too. But, you know, when you when you line those up, you'd say, oh, you know, I'm going to Best Buy, and I'm buying a PC for $300, and it's you know, that's it. And I run this PC for, you know, 20 years. Right? But, that's not really the mentality of what you're solving with DaaS.
Max:This isn't like a, hey. We're gonna find you a cheaper way to run a PC versus going to Best Buy and buying it. I mean, you're you're talking about real business problems of how do you manage users at scale? How do you provide logistics at scale? How do you solve compliance issues at scale?
Max:How do you solve cross border data domain issues at scale? You know, like, this is, you know, how do you how do you manage an efficient IT operation at scale? You know what I mean? I started in IT. I think ratios are 65 to 1, so 65 employees to 1 IT person.
Max:And, you know, last one last stat I saw was, like, a 165 to 1, and I'm sure that stats going up. And, you know, so it's it's I I think the mentality around DAS has to shift a little bit in terms of, like, this isn't competing with buying a $300 PC. And, also, when I saw this the first time, again, 1998, we were talking about MTBF on devices. Right? So a PC maybe had a had a usable life of 2 to 3 years, you know, just with with technology advancement and and, you know, manufacturing quality.
Max:But the thin devices at that point had a 30 year MTBF estimate. I mean, there was no fan. There was no moving parts. There was no hard drive. There was nothing.
Max:I mean, you you know, one of them had a demo where they would come to your office and, like, literally put thing in a bowl of water and take it out with a hairdryer and then plug it in. And I mean, really impressive. But, you know, we we get into this conversation also around, like, what does the device look like? Well, what device do I use? What device and and it's in many cases, it's just it's the device you already have.
Max:Right? Like, I mean, how you know, somebody's onboarding into your platform and is gonna use Evolve IP, you know, it it it you don't see very many, like, 1,000 person like, we just materialized out of thin air with a 1000 employees. Right? Like, there is there is a leg it's legacy and a lineage of that IT program. What does that conversion look like?
Max:And and then what does that onboarding, you know, really entail? And and then how does that evolve as time passes? Right? Like, there's, like, today's state, tomorrow's state, next year's state. And and how does that change?
Gary:I want Kevin to talk about that. I just gotta jump on to a previous comment because it's 1 seller and 2 engineers. So, and I say that, you know, with much love. I can tell you that in the beginning days of selling for us, for selling DAS, you know, in 2012, 13, 14, 15, we would invariably get the well, after 18 months at x amount of dollars per month, I could go buy a PC. I learned as a seller that if you don't understand the soft cost, don't understand the cost to procure and provision and support and manage and maintain and reclaim and refresh.
Gary:If you don't if you don't get that yourself, I'm walking. I'm out the door. And and I guess in in the successes that we've had, you know, when a when a CIO or a CTO says, I wanna go virtual. I wanna be out of the data center business. They will do everything in their power to prove out those financials.
Gary:Right? When when you start thinking about 500 PCs at 3 hours, you know, per PC, 1500 man hours, that is a lot, a lot of money. So from a financial perspective, you know, is it the cost of the device? It's never the cost of the device. It's the cost of the of the of of the of the desk side support that really counts.
Gary:So I just wanted to get that point out, but but let's get to Kevin. Also
Max:also on that thought, Gary, if you've ever been in IT and have to go into a procurement function or your finance function and say, we need to purchase 500 desktops at this dollar amount, that conversation devolves into something else very quickly as well. You know? And and a lot of that conversation turns into, you know, what's the depreciation schedule? How do we how do we depreciate this asset? Are we purchasing it?
Max:Are we not purchasing it? Are we leasing it? Are we not leasing it? Is it an FMV lease? Is it a dollar cost buyout lease?
Max:There is so much conversation around that asset that just deals with how that asset gets booked into you know, onto your balance sheet and dealt with on the balance sheet. And I've seen companies, depending on where they are in their life cycle, that wanna don't wanna put more stuff on their balance sheet. And that just becomes a, like, sure. We know where these species need to be replaced because 3 years ago, we agreed that at 3 years, they were gonna be replaced. But now we don't wanna do it because we can't we we don't want this on our balance sheet.
Max:Or, you know, like, there there's so that opens up a completely different discussion where it's like, oh, yeah. You know, we had this original aging cycle of, like, at 3 years, we're gonna refresh our PCs because that's what we're supposed to do. But, like, what happens if we don't? Like, let's not refresh our PCs for, you know, for another 2 years. You know, like, can we do that?
Max:Can we get away with it? And, you know, when I was, when I was starting in IT, I had a a mentor who basically explained, you know, what people experience in terms of, like, you know, your your end user experience and, like, impact a culture of, like, sitting down at a desk and turn your computer on and, like, what enraged your your your, you know, your team and what actually made them, you know, be able to do their work. But anyways, it's I I I think there's it's never an I mean, Gary, your point's actually it's it's perfect. Right? Because it's just never an easy decision.
Max:It's never just like, hey. Go and buy computers. Right? Like, buy computers from where? Where where you what's your competitive bid for computers?
Max:Are you gonna bid delegates to HP in today's world? Are you you building your own stuff? Are you not building your own stuff? Who builds their own stuff? You'll be crazy to build your own stuff.
Max:Right? But, you know, that that, like, layer 8 decision and determinations, you know, really, even in the best laid plans, once that comes into play, it changes the equation a lot.
Kevin:Yeah. And that that doesn't, Max, touch on the soft cost side of things at all. Right? So especially for organizations that are looking to, you know, operationalize those expenses. Right?
Kevin:Move that move that hardware purchase to that more of an OPEX model than a CAPEX model. But, you know, you guys both touched on this. I'm sorry. You got me to the point now that I'm taking notes as we're going because there are so many things I wanna circle back to. But you guys touched on this already.
Kevin:Right? If you just take the cost of a device and divide it by 36 months, that's gonna win every time because that's just not paying any attention to the root of the challenges that we're looking to solve. Right? So industry averages, and this is probably from a year or 2 ago, I'm sure they've changed, but with a DaaS solution, you're looking at potentially up to a 30% reduction in costs of your administration for your desktop users. Right?
Kevin:So that's just all the systems admin, you know, adding users, MACDs, keeping the lights on from an infrastructure perspective. Add to that, you're looking at potential up to 60% reduction of costs around help desk support of those users. Right? So just by simplifying the fact that, hey, regardless of who you are in the organization, regardless of where you are, you now access everything the same way, so you're supported the same way and it simplifies that support process. Also, again, just having that higher manageability helps with that too, because now your users will tend to need less support than they did previously, and the nature of their problems are that they do have when they have them are going to change.
Kevin:But that all ties into the device aspect of this. Right? So just so we talked about being cyclical in terms of distributed and consolidated computing, I'd argue we're seeing that same kind of cyclical approach within itself. Right? Track record on DaaS historically was always the client device doesn't matter.
Kevin:It's a dumb terminal that you're just using to get to your resources. Still true. Kind of. Right? There's a caveat on that now.
Kevin:Right? If we're talking about optimization of audio and video in a desktop, that client device top, that client device starts to matter again. Right? It doesn't necessarily matter as much as if you were doing everything locally, but it needs to be a supported operating system. It needs to have at least the resources to run whatever audio and video program you're looking to optimize if it's going to be doing the heavy lifting of that audio and video encoding and decoding.
Kevin:So, yeah, we're still in a position where thin clients are an option, right? Especially thin clients that run things like Windows 10 IoT that have a fully formed operating system that run on them. 0 clients, we see some. We don't see as much as I would have expected that we would have a few years ago, but I feel like that market hasn't really massively taken off. But the biggest piece is exactly what you just said.
Kevin:Right? Allowing folks to continue to utilize hardware they already have in hand that otherwise depreciated to the point of no longer being relevant in the organization. Right? Long, fancy way of saying, Hey, we bought this thing 6 years ago. If I were going to go out and buy you a computer now, there's no way I would ever buy you that one, but it still works.
Kevin:So until it stops working, use it to connect to your desktop. And now your client device has cost us $0 for this next budget cycle.
Gary:You know, it's so it's so interesting. You think of how many IT departments have stacks and stacks of 4 gig machines that, one, nobody has the heart to throw out because they still power up, but they're just too
Kevin:Well, they're also afraid to throw it out because they they may have corporate data on them to, you know, to to tie back to our earlier part of the conversation. They might be terrified.
Gary:Right. And someone and and someone from the EPA is gonna come over and find them because of all the Yeah. You know? So so all of those all of a sudden become relevant all
Max:over the place. Is a is a problem onto itself, I mean, with these things. And how many how many IT departments have stacks of computers? Every single one. I mean, have you ever walked into a building and asked to see their IT storage closet and it's not just a complete disaster of stuff stacked to the ceiling?
Kevin:You guys don't want me to pan my camera around right now.
Max:No. I mean, it's terrible. You know, Kevin, you talk about, like, reduction of of admin costs and reduction of help desk costs. You know, this isn't like going out and, you know, saying a reduction of admin or help desk costs by saying you're gonna lower your headcount. It's just when we start talking about these ratios of, like, how many people what are they doing?
Max:What else they can do? I mean, IT teams are already trying to do too much. There's too much stuff to do. And the whole, like, I can't turn my computer on. I can't print.
Max:I can't sign in. Like, I can't you know, like like, there's there's something amazing about first off, I mean, I'll go back to a thin client for a second. There's something amazing about a thin client device because it doesn't do anything. And if for some reason it breaks, you just replace it with another device and the device costs you almost nothing anyways, And your troubleshooting cycle just changes. It's like, oh, here's a new box, you know, on the desk.
Max:And, you know, and I I think there's also a, a mistake that gets made or a, misconception, which is a migration to Microsoft 3 to Microsoft 365 to Office 365 and consumption of cloud services, you know, saying, hey. We're gonna be on SharePoint and OneDrive and and, you know, and, of course, you know, hosted Exchange, hosted Outlook now through it. That doesn't alleviate these processes and these costs. Like, you still have help desk and you still have configuration and you still have user assistance and you still have onboarding and you still have all this stuff that you still have to do. So moving into Microsoft 365 doesn't doesn't alleviate this stuff for you.
Max:It just changes what your problem area is. Right? Like, it's like, this isn't like, you know, there there's not like, oh, we flipped the switch and we're on SharePoint now. We don't have to deal with this anymore. Right?
Max:Like, that's that's not the case.
Kevin:Yeah. Correct. Right? And and, you know, I I've had the luxury of having been on both sides of this equation. Right?
Kevin:So I you know, prior to working on the cloud side of it, I was an IT director for consolidated back office for a number of real estate investment firms. And, you know, one of the things that we struggled with was was, you know, budgetarily, like you said, right, how IT's always been asked to do more with less. And, you know, as Gary mentioned earlier, the state of things right now in the world, IT is being asked to do more more with more less. Right? Like, budgets probably have never been tighter than they are right now.
Max:More more with more or less. We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna caption that. Trademark.
Kevin:Right? I gotta I gotta get that on a t shirt somewhere. But I'm a huge proponent of if you're ever talking to a service provider and they start to tell you about how you can reduce your staffing and your headcount, eject from that conversation. Because having been on that side of it, it's no one's to me, it was never anyone else's business when I was dealing with vendors of how I managed my team. You can tell me all the ways that I can augment my team and the ways that I can help them, but what we should all be driving towards isn't reduction of staff.
Kevin:It's how do you better utilize the resources that you have to be seen as more of an asset to the business than a cost center. Because in my experience from the corporate IT side, that was always the struggle. Right? IT was always seen as this bottomless pit that organizations just threw money into and never saw a return of. So if we can simplify a lot of the admin, the administrative parts of the job, all the keep the lights on stuff that, frankly, most of us don't enjoy doing anyway.
Kevin:Now we can free ourselves up to be more of an asset to help with line of business applications and productivity enhancements and developing new processes and workflows, and IT can now start to actually impact the business in a meaningful way as opposed to just being something that a business spends money on.
Gary:You know, Max, you know how how we how we hope this recording will help us? With all of what we're talking about here, we still don't think CIOs wake up in the morning, say, I gotta go shop for a DAS solution. They wake up in the morning pulling their hair out saying, I got a security problem, a logistics problem, a productivity problem. I've got I've got all of these issues that I don't know how to solve, but yet the solution exists.
Max:It's so funny you say that, Gary. I what I do for our clients is translate it's just I I mean, it's just that business problem to acronym in the technology stack that solves that business problem. And that's 99% of it. It's just, you know, it's it's impossible. I mean, I have a lot of friends in the military, and it is funny.
Max:I mean, you know, of course, you can never rival the military in terms of acronyms. But when you start talking about, like, cybersecurity, for instance, I mean, they're really trying. But, you know, Kevin, you you had, like, 4 pillars. You you like the 4 things. Right?
Max:Security, mobility, logistics, performance. And, Gary, you were just talking about something, and I think there's really, like, a 5th part to this here, which is and and, Kevin, you talk you said you used the words, you know, like this, like, bottomless pit or, like, black hole of budgeting. Traditional IT is a variable cost center and unpredictable. Right? And that's a really bad thing when you start talking about if you're trying to model or budget from a finance standpoint or if you're trying to, on a on a c suite level, senior executive level, forecast and create predictable inputs and outputs for a business.
Max:And sometimes, you know, at a certain scale, that's what we start talking about. Right? Can we have a predictable input or output? You know, are we doing a merger or acquisition play? Is this a roll up play?
Max:Do we have predictability in how we do these roll up plays? You know, I don't know if they're publics or I won't if it's public knowledge, but I won't I won't use their names. But there are PEs that are rolling up companies that are customers of yours. And how much of that is just being able to say, this is what you're gonna spend per device or per desktop or per endpoint or per user, and this is just what it is? Like like, you know, how much of that conversation are you getting into with companies around, you know, this isn't like we're gonna make it cheaper than this $300 PC that you Frankensteined yourself.
Max:You know, we're solving these other problems. But, hey. Guess what? This is your number going forward. And, you know, do you see a lot of that?
Kevin:Yeah. Tons. And, honestly, health care was was the leading edge of that because I feel like it with the way health care organizations did their m and a based growth 3, 4 years ago even, predictable cost model for per user expenses was was massive. They're out there acquiring practices. And, you know, I think one of the companies that we dealt with said when they did a new practice acquisition of a clinical health care organization, it was taking 4 to 6 months to get them transitioned to their in house systems.
Kevin:So granted, that doesn't mean that everyone's just sitting there waiting while, you know, their their keyboards collect dust for 4 to 6 months, but you're certainly not operating at the level of efficiency that you want to. So Mhmm. By having the predictable cost model and by having, you know, an easily scalable system that correlates to that, now you can add those users and, you know, if it's 1 user, if it's 5 users, if it's 5,000 users, it really doesn't matter because now we can break it down to, hey. A DaaS seat costs this from a licensing perspective. You're gonna license that person for Office 365 at this version.
Kevin:You're gonna add in this security additional, you know, features for message filtering, whatever whatever those add ons may be, and come up with x number of dollars per user for y users, and that's now your your growth trajectory. And, again, it's true of adding a single seat or adding an entire practice. It doesn't matter. There's no real variable there. Yeah.
Max:And if you're dealing and if you're dealing with a an industry that has a relatively predictable application base. Right? So, like, dentists use Dentrix. Right? Or if you're in health care using this, or if you're a a veterinarian, you use I mean, like, there's, to a certain degree, you know, insurance.
Max:Right? Like, there's there's only so many primary applications that are inside those, you know, places. And if you look at it from, like, a rinse and repeat in this roll up or or merge you know, like, now it becomes a really easy selection process. Okay. We're looking for a target that fits this profile and runs one of these 3 applications, and we know we can go acquire them and integrate them in 30 days.
Max:Right? Like, this isn't like a a you know that's the other part of it, right, where you now have predictability of integration and not just, it's not just predictability of cost. It's predictability of integration and how quickly can you, you know, actually affect what you're trying to do from a strategy. Right?
Kevin:Yes. So if you're at Peddle
Gary:You said something earlier, Max, that, I I was just so fascinated by. You talked about the black hole of IT, the unpredict unpredictability of IT. You know, in in recent years and I'm thinking about how many nervous IT professionals are walking into the boardroom right now in fear that the CFO says you guys are a cost center, not a profit center. You know? That you know?
Gary:And, again, if this was 2021 or 2019 or whatever, maybe it wouldn't make a difference, but this is the year of the recession. So the worst thing in the I mean, the worst curse word in the world now is to be is to be told you're the head of a call center, not the head of a profit center.
Kevin:Max, if I may, I'm I'm kinda curious for your perception on this because one if you take an outside looking in view, right, I would think that what we all dealt with as an industry through 2020 and into 2021 would have started to change that perception. Right? Because every organization out there leaned on their IT team to, you know, turn lead into gold as it were. So I get now we're we're, you know, heading into some economic downtimes and and, you know, potentially in or on a looming recession. You know?
Kevin:But why if that last 2 year stretch didn't help organizations see just how much of an asset their IT team can be? If that didn't happen, how do we make that happen now? Because that that to me is, like, you know, multiple exclamation points, triple underline, showing the value that IT could bring to an organization.
Max:I can answer for that in in 2 different examples. I'll make I'll make 2 different examples. The first example would be let's just use Internet access. You know, at this point, Internet is the 4th utility for every organization. Right?
Max:Like, you have to have network connectivity, Internet access in order to function. But when it comes down to it and you look at, okay. Well, what Internet do we need for a building? Like, for the majority of organizations, the actual logo delivering that circuit doesn't matter to them. Like, there's no strategic value or difference for most people of saying, we have logo a versus logo b versus logo c.
Max:It's just who's available. When you when you when you decide to purchase a house or move into an office building, very few people are actually looking at that and saying, who's the utility provider of strategic value? Now when we do data center work, absolutely 100%, that's part of the equation for us. We wanna know who the utility provider is. And given, you know, strategically, 2 locations, that that utility provider makes a big difference in the actual success of that project and the strategic value of that asset.
Max:Right? But that's not normal. And and at the same time, the other example I would give you would be you know, this would be traditionally an office space. You know, is an office space an asset for the company and the business, or is it just something that you have to have so you have a cubicle for people to go work out of? And some companies use their office space as an asset for the business to develop and maintain culture for the company or or, you know, as a as a recruiting, you know, and retention strategy or as a client acquisition play.
Max:Right? And they really invest in their facilities. And a lot don't. A lot so IT fits into that same thing where it's not for most people, they don't most companies don't view IT as a you know, it's a cost center. It's like we have to have this thing because, yeah, we have to have a computer and we have to have email.
Max:But we don't really value this thing as an enabler. Now and, again, that that comes down to you know, this is a culture issue that starts, I think, top down. Right? You know, it's could be very hard if you were hired in as an IT practitioner or one of those, you know, organizations to really change the culture going bottom up. You can change the conversation and you can start pushing people in that direction, but it's it's it is a a big hill to climb.
Max:But yeah. I mean, have you ever heard let me back up a second. American Airlines is touting their technology for the reservation systems and how sophisticated they are and how they can keep track of their crews. Before, Southwest had a complete and total meltdown of their 30 year old scheduling platform that completely clear you know, crippled their operations for a week, would American have ever been out there being like, we have the best technology. Look how great our business runs, and we can manage planes and crews.
Max:I mean, that was an American story. But now it's a competitive differentiator for them because their competitor had such an issue. And and and it's I feel like it's it's like that. You know, when you say it's like from an outsider looking in, you know, it's that that that's partly outsider, you know, true and partly insider just, you know, going through this for so long. Technology is a big differentiator between companies.
Max:Like, you can move faster, you can do things faster, you can be more efficient, you can generate more leverage. We talk about, like, you know, hiring people in Colombia. And I don't wanna make this like a wage issue, but, you know, the cost of US labor versus Colombian labor is different. The cost of Indonesian labor is different. And, you know, when you're, you know, competitive on a global basis, if you're not taking advantage of global resources right?
Max:And, like, these are all things that technology gives you the ability to do. Right? But, anyways, hopefully, that kinda gives you some sense. So we we you know, Like, I get asked, like, how much Internet should we have? Well, you should buy as much as you can afford, and and that's what you should run.
Max:You know? Like, what's your budget? You know? Should should every office have 10 gig? Yes.
Max:Absolutely. I want 10 gig in my house. I need it. I want it. I can't afford it.
Max:I don't have it. But, you know, like, I have a GigE circuit instead, but I also I'm one of the weird ones that shop the neighborhoods based on who had, you know, real GPON based fiber to the home so that way I could get phenomenally fast fiber optic in its surface. But how many people buy a house based on that selection? Nobody. Like, that would have never been on my wife's selection criteria.
Kevin:No. On the grid, I think means a little bit different to to folks like you and I than it does to other people where it's like, yes. Water and power, we're good.
Max:There's a more awareness to it. Right? You know, if you had to go work from home in 2020 and you had horrible Internet at your house, you were very aware of it. And I had clients that you know, executives at companies that were, you know, that had horrible experiences, and they knew exactly what times of the day they could not work because virtual schooling was going on. And the neighborhood was just being crushed with kids on, you know, video conference with their schools, you know, doing schooling from home.
Max:And I mean, again, senior executives running large companies that shifted their working hours to the point where they were working like vampires because it was the only time they could be on the Internet. You know? And and and we solve those problems for them in different ways. But but
Gary:You know, it is it is amazing. You know, just to shift a second here, it is amazing when you think about the change in, you know, tastes. You know, I mean, our days are consumed with going from a Teams meeting to a Zoom meeting to a Teams chat to a 1 on 1 Webex meeting, whatever the case may be. And, of course, these days now, if I'm not looking at you, something must be wrong. You're probably not dressed.
Gary:And and, you know, and it's and when I think about this and I think about, you know, that the the you know, what what we you know, what was the global PBX market has turned on its turned on its head because of the pandemic. Right? And how that you know? And I'm not sure it's the pandemic that's going to cause this meteoric rise in the use of virtual desktop, But I do think it's the economy that's gonna do that, and I think it's gonna take people like you, Max, to be to be telling, you know, to be telling clients, you you know what the problems are, but yet you haven't reached the conclusion on what the solution is.
Max:Let's talk about this. Right? You know, you talk about, like, the the four things you solve. I really I I think you solve 5 things. Okay.
Max:Right? So the 4 things the 4 core things that you solve. And there was a comment of no CIO wakes up in the morning and goes, oh, I need to deploy a DaaS solution to solve my problems. Right? So what are the entry points?
Max:You know, we we've talked about a few examples, but, like, let's I wanna let's talk about this really. Like, what what do, you know, what is a CIO trying to solve? What is a CEO trying to solve? What is a board trying to solve that creates this? Like, we have to go find a solution, and hopefully, they, you know, figure it out and plug the pieces in or have somebody that they're working with that can tell them, like, here's how you solve this problem.
Max:But, you know, what are the trigger points of people? I don't wanna say the whole, like, what keeps you up at night, you know, kind of question. But, you know
Gary:Well, I think I think it's funny. You you you already said the first one, the client of yours that was told cut your costs by 50%. That's that's a big trigger. Once they start realizing how much of their of their cost from a time perspective is doing things they they hated doing for the last 20 years anyway. No one wants to help Mary Lou launch Excel.
Gary:Right?
Kevin:Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of them. Right? You know, the the problem is we know in the industry that, you know, DAS is a great hammer. How do you get everyone to see the problems that they have for nails?
Kevin:Right? So that that's that's always the struggle. And a lot of other things we already touched on. Right? Security, business continuity, compliance, the auditability of an organization.
Kevin:Right? Having that higher degree of security and control. And the other big one in the last 2 years has been workforce hybridization. And, you know, frankly, people are probably tired of hearing about it because I know we're getting tired of talking about it. So I can only imagine it's exponentially worse being on the receiving end.
Kevin:But even for organizations that have every intention of bringing a 100% of their workforce back in house and I hate to think about this. Right? Because I don't wanna I don't wanna manifest this into the world. But what happens if 2 months from now, you decided you're bringing everyone back, everyone's back working in the office, things are humming along, and we find ourselves right back where we were in March of 2020. Right?
Kevin:You have to then send everyone home. So even those organizations that don't think that they need this still need a contingency in the back of their head of what happens if we go down this same path again and we have to fully hybridize our workforce or fully mobilize our workforce. So, you know, that's a big one. The security piece is always a huge one, and and compliance goes hand in hand with that based on whatever industry you're in and the regulatory bodies and the alphabet soup that govern it. Right?
Kevin:You know, if you're health care, HITRUST, HIPAA, if you're, you know, financial services, FINRA, FFIEC, SEC, you name it, GDPR, we already talked about for for international organizations. Like, how do we things that when you attempt to deal with at the board level or the CIO level, you're not going to necessarily associate of, hey, I solve my compliance issue with a client computing solution. Hey, I solve my business continuity problem with a client computing solution. So drawing those lines of, you know, understanding that DaaS is more than just client computing, it's client computing in a way that allows us to sustain being remote, that allows us to sustain continuity of operations in the face of adversity. And then, obviously, the cost pieces, all that Gary mentioned, kinda sprinkled into that with the reduction of effort around supporting an environment.
Gary:Ken and I talked about this a couple weeks ago, and I I sure hope I can communicate this the way we were talking about it. Yeah. In our industry, everybody's always been talking about the impending event, the impending event. People are not searching for security solutions after they've been breached. Of course, by the same token, so many of the security companies are selling FEAR.
Gary:Right? There's only 2 types of companies, those that have been breached and those that haven't been breached yet. We find it very difficult to wanna talk about things like that. We also know that if we talk to a client that is in the midst of making a huge PC procurement and all of a sudden wants to check the box and get a quote for desktop as a service, it is really just to justify the decision that they've already made. So it's just that we think that there has to be a change in the thought process with you know, that it can't be based on the impending event.
Gary:I am opening up a new location that will have 300 people, and I need to supply them with something. Or same token, I love the security elements of DAS. Right now, I'm locked out. Can you get it installed on Monday? Kevin, is that a fair statement?
Gary:I'm gonna go to you real quick because I know we sort of talked about that if if we start talking about desktop as a service from the perspective of the impending event, we may already be too late.
Kevin:Yeah. I mean, I think that's fair. Right? Like like you said, if an organization is scrambling in the wake of a problem, then it's not so much a conversation around the business challenges that you can address and really looking to stem the the loss of blood from that particular wound. Right?
Kevin:So so that's always a challenge. And, you know, yeah, you're not gonna walk into an organization that just had a network security breach as a result of a laptop or desktop that was out there in the world that got compromised and get them to seriously commit the time spent around the table to talk about, well, we can put in this desktop solution that, you know, has a lot of components to it and a lot of conversation that has to go around it. Right? That's like telling folks, like, you know, I'm going to help you avoid getting hurt instead of putting a bandage on where you're hurt now. So, yeah, it it definitely should be more proactive than reactionary.
Kevin:But, you know, even in organizations like that, there's still an opportunity for us to talk about ways that this solution can help them. They're probably just going to be looking to pull the trigger on something that's a bit more, point in time reactionary to the specific nature of the problem that they had.
Gary:And it's funny. The the last component on that is, I am sure the wounds are still are still wide open on the immediate panic that set in in March 2020 when everybody said, get out and don't come back. That my guess is that most IT professionals wanna try to avoid what they had to do during the pandemic, which adds yet another element of, you know, having this be a much more proactive conversation.
Max:You know, I had this is I mean, it's so relevant to what you asked earlier in terms of, like, the relationship between IT and companies. And I have a client who had done a team's voice deployment. I mean, in January of 20, I think is when it went live. December of 19, January of 20. I mean, something right there.
Max:It was fresh enough that there was organizational resistance coming back of, like, what do you you know, where's my physical phone? And I don't have my my speed dial button anymore to call, you know, to call my wife's cell phone or or what you know what? Just anytime you forklift a major piece of technology, like, what comes out of it on the other side? And and then shutdown orders came in, and everybody was forced into a work from home. And, and within 2 weeks, the conversation had completely shifted where you know, just just just by happenstance and by by timing and luck, you know, the IT team had deployed, you know, something that became massively business enabling for the company, and they were ready to go.
Max:And it just it timing. I mean, you talk about, like, preparing for the event. I mean, I spent 20 years in Southern California talking about the 10 point o earthquake that we have to prepare for. And it took me I feel like a decade to actually understand that most companies just wanted to talk about it. They didn't actually wanna do anything to really prepare for it.
Max:You know, like, let's let's see. What do you wanna go to next? You wanna talk about, like, deployment and integration and administration? Or do you wanna talk about should we talk about flavors of of DaaS first? What do you think is is is a better place to start?
Max:Let's talk about flavors of DaaS. And I think this is also surprising for people. Because when you talk about, you know, this this thing that is desktop as a service, now you're really talking about hosted application, application delivery. You're talking about session hosts and, you know, shared desktops. Not shared desktops isn't the right word terminology, but I use that crudely.
Max:You're talking about VDI, virtual desktops. You're talking about you know, so how how does a company that's looking at this make sense of I mean, because, you know, technology is new in the first place. The concept is new. And then you start talking about the options become complex and then there's a depth of them. You know, how do you walk somebody through that decision process and help them figure out, like, you know, this line of business and this user, you know, user base is here and this line of business and this user base is here.
Max:And and, you know, is it all for or or nothing, or is it individualized? You know?
Gary:So so I I've got some I've got some thoughts on that. But, Max and because you you you know the audience of people that I sell to, which is the indirect channel, that these are not people that traditionally have sophisticated IT backgrounds. I always start with you're all good consumers. And there was a day when you went into Best Buy, and there was 10 machines all lined up. They looked identical.
Gary:Right? They all had a clamshell design with a keyboard and a screen. And you started looking, and there was one that was $399 and one that was $2,599. So as a good consumer, you started to look not at what it looked like, but what the little card was that was underneath it. And you still then began to realize that it all comes down to 4 components, CPU, RAM, disk, operating system.
Gary:There's the cheap ones, and then there's the ones that are so that that's the my first place is to make sure that people understand that when they are buying the PC, they are not buying the keyboard and the screen and the clamshell. They're buying CPU, RAM, disk, and the operating system. So when they begin to think of flavors of virtual desktop, think of it in terms of CPU, RAM, disk, and the operating system. And I think people people leverage that. They get it they they can understand that because that's what I'm gonna deliver to you over the Internet on the device of your choice.
Gary:So now it becomes the element of, well, do you want this hosted privately in my data center? Or mister Microsoft, do you want this installed in Azure? And, of course, Kevin had pointed out there are reasons why you would wanna install it in Azure. Right? And, you know, especially if you've got an office in London where they have a GDPR requirement that that data cannot leave London, We don't want that traffic to hairpin back to the United States.
Gary:It has to stay built in a day you know, a public cloud data center that's housed right there in the UK.
Max:And this is important. So I wanna dig into this a little bit. Evolve has its own infrastructure. You have your own data centers. You have your own servers and your own storage and your own platforms that your clients can connect to and and run on top of.
Max:And Microsoft has come out with Azure Virtual Desktop. And, of course, Azure they well, they wanna push everybody into Azure because go figure it makes them a lot of money. And this isn't an an either or for you. This can be a and and. This could be a one or the I mean, it's you know, companies that after talking to you decide, okay.
Max:It makes sense for us to have these users connect to Azure in this region. Right? Because they're wherever they are. This is something that you still help them with. This isn't a, oh, we can't talk to you anymore because you decided to be on Azure.
Kevin:Correct.
Gary:Right? Yeah. I mean, so Yeah.
Kevin:If you don't mind. So the one thing that I I would wanna put out upfront. Right? When we talk about virtual desktop in Azure, the natural connection that people make is Azure Virtual Desktop. Right?
Kevin:At this point in time, we actually do not sell Azure Virtual Desktop. Right? We take the same DaaS solutions that we offer out of our private cloud environment and offer those solutions in Azure just with Azure as the underlying data center provider. There's a very specific reason, Max, that we do that, and that is what we talked about earlier, right, with RDP and and the protocol being nearly as old as I am. So with Microsoft's Azure Virtual Desktop solution, when that first really started to to come onto the scene, one of the limitations around it was that it was still primarily using the RDP protocol for remote access to those desktops.
Kevin:So where that left users is, a lot of the same challenges that we historically associate with VDI of, you know, the fall down of audio and video and and media rich applications, That stuff was still prevalent in those solutions because of the protocol limitations. Now in their defense, Microsoft has worked to address that and change that. But we have a very good track record with the VMware Horizon and Citrix solutions that we leverage that specifically enable us to offer the best user experience that we can with optimizing that audio and video capability in their DaaS platform. And at the end of the day, anytime we're talking about any form of client computing, the most important aspect of that is the user experience. Because if users can get into the platform and work in a secure fashion, but they're not working in a way that's conducive to the to how they want to work, it doesn't matter how good the solution is.
Kevin:They're never going to adopt it.
Max:How active are are companies or, you know, are your customers on an average and saying, you know, this should be on VMware Horizon or Citrix. Right? Like, is this something that even gets exposed to them or just something that you go through, you know, a questionnaire and and sizing and and technology and stack, and it just ends up being like, okay. This belongs here and this belongs here, and it's just completely transparent to the customer?
Kevin:It's a little bit of both. Right? I'd say the the vast majority of our customers come to us and say, hey. I need to be able to get to to the grocery store, to church, and to the office, and they don't really care how they get there. And then we get some folks that come in specifically and say, I'm a Ford guy.
Kevin:I wanna buy a Ford. I'm a Chevy guy. I wanna buy a Chevy. Right? So it's it's those same kind of battle lines that are drawn there with brand loyalty to one solution versus each solution has its merits.
Kevin:Right? Each has some things that it does a little bit better than the other. The vast majority of our customers at this point in time are on VMware Horizon and Horizon Cloud on Azure for our desktop solution. But we do have some customers for whom, DaaS via Citrix is the better fit, whether that means they want to do some stuff with published applications, whether they're layering in some additional, like, app protection features or something that, you know, ascribes to more one solution than the other. But for us, we're we're really agnostic in that process.
Kevin:Right? We wanna work with the customer to go through a pretty detailed discovery process that will allow us to offer our suggestion for what we think the best fit is. But if that customer comes to us and says, hey. We wanna do it this way versus that way. Okay.
Kevin:No problem from our perspective. We're we're happy to construct it in in either design.
Gary:You know, it's it's interesting, Max. I I would add to that that when we talked about the predictability from a from the cost perspective, especially as it pertains to private equity roll ups, Once companies have determined that, you know, they have 2 flavors of desktop. Right? They have, you know, they have this group of employees that uses, you know, 6 gigs of RAM and, you know, and 16, you know, and and 2 CPU and so much storage. And then they want them to have this level of licensing with this voice package that's tied to their instance in Microsoft Teams, then they have for a $122.14 per employee, that is an incredibly predictable cost model.
Max:The other surprise that I I think comes out of this is at some point, there was a standard that was made. Gary, you touched on this for a second. Right? Like, an organization decides IT decides, okay. We need to have this CPU and 16 gig of RAM RAM and this this hard drive, and this becomes our fleet.
Max:But when you you move that off of physical hardware and you go into a virtualize based platform, which ultimately, you know, what we're talking about here, the resource consumption changes. You don't necessarily need to have 16 gig of RAM per desktop. You don't need to have a 10 core CPU. You don't need to have a terabyte of hard drive for each user. So the efficiency actually can change.
Max:And, also, if they're still doing rich voice and video, and we're talking about leveraging a desktop, you know, in either reclaiming the existing fleet, you know, this is the I have this right now with a with a organization. They have 4 gig. They have laptops with 4 gig. Right? But you're still gonna push, you know, voice and video processing down to the device.
Max:So that's also coming off the platform. So how do you how do you walk through that sizing exercises saying, you know, like, I I know you've got this much CPU and this much RAM and this much hard drive now, but, you know, you don't need it anymore. I mean, is this just they have to deploy it and see it, and then you resize their environment for them? Or, you know, is this something that that comes out upfront?
Kevin:Yeah. Some of it is is just pretty evident just through the conversation of understanding what the application load looks like, right, and what the use case is for those users. Some of it's done through testing. So we have demo environments that we can spin a seat up into to let them see that performance firsthand. With our private cloud based solution, we can really limit the options to 3 different designs.
Kevin:Right? There's a 6 gig of RAM, an 8 gig of RAM and a 16 gig of RAM C. CPU is consistent throughout. So 8 gig of RAM is going to be the minimum for anyone looking to do any form of unified communications or collaboration in their seat. So now the options come down to 2.
Kevin:Collaboration in their seat. So now the options come down to 2. The great thing about public cloud is the world is your oyster. Right? You have so many possible permutations and combinations of resources.
Kevin:The hard thing about public cloud is you have so many possible options and permutations of resources. Right? That's the challenge. There, literally, the list goes from this long if you're doing a private cloud to this long if you're doing it in the public cloud for how many different seat types are available to you.
Max:So And now analysis paralysis too. Yeah.
Kevin:Yeah. And like you, right, every client is is overprovisioned if you're still in a traditional compute environment where you're going out and buying hardware resources. Right? So to be a bit of a nerd and and apply the same car analogy to it. Right?
Kevin:Why does every consumer vehicle have a speedometer that goes up to a 170 plus miles an hour if we're not allowed to drive it over 65?
Max:Because it looks cool is the answer to that question.
Kevin:Exactly. Who
Max:wants to drive a
Kevin:So it's the same thing when you're going on buying a laptop that has, you know, 16 gigs of RAM and an I seven multi core processor that you're only running Chrome and Word on. You know? It it's just it's overkill a lot of times because it's easier to provision things that have more than you need than less. And you can charge more.
Gary:The question that I have back to you back back to you 2 engineers is, I think the obvious question is if they have 16 gig machines, do they really need 16 gigs once everything's virtualized? Probably not. Conversely, how many people have bought undersized machines that all of a sudden are trying to figure out if they can get 4 more gigs of RAM on their machine, which, of course, in the virtual world is a, you know, is is is is a toggle.
Max:Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna
Kevin:say I would add to that too. Not even just how many folks bought undersized machines, but resource and applications requirements change over time. So if your company just went through a procurement cycle a year ago, and now all of a sudden you guys introduced a new financial modeling application that needs more than what you bought a year ago, are you going to go through and now expedite your next hardware purchase 2 years early? Probably not. But in a virtual environment, it's easy to just increase those resources on a user by user basis for only the people who need it, and it can be done immediately.
Gary:Quick side story, Max. One of the major, CCaaS contact center providers recently just endorsed the VAWB IP's DaaS solution to work on their platform. And Kevin and I both both worked on that. As you know, and initially, when the conversation started, it was, yeah, we think we can run your client in the virtual desktop, but the voice must run locally. And, of course, we were like, well, that is not necessary.
Gary:So, you know, so right away, of course, the engineers from this rather large contact center company were like, oh, no. No. We we can't run the voice through the desktop. And we're like, well, you can, and we're gonna prove it to you because it's critically important from a compliance perspective that the voice does run through the desktop and does not run locally. Now the way I translate that is every application, whether it's QuickBooks or it's some high graphic audio video, they all every time you install an application on your machine, they all have the same requirements.
Gary:It needs so much CPU, so much RAM, so much disk. So while, of course, we wanna test everything, as long as we understand that we have the resources, we can run the application.
Max:Let's talk about administration, you know, and and what the actual let's I I guess, let's say let's talk about the nerd stuff. Right? This is the stuff that we we get into of, like, how does this actually work? And what I mean by how does this actually work, like, what is the process for a company that's onboarding with you to, like, figure out, create, deploy desktops? And then how who is responsible for maintaining them?
Max:Who changes them? We talk about help desk function a little bit. Gary touched on this earlier. You know, where where do the lines like like, what is Evolve doing? What is the core what is the company's IT department doing?
Max:How do you work together? Who's responsible for what? And what does this life cycle look like?
Kevin:The the cop out answer, right, the quick knee jerk reaction answer is it's variable, per customer. Right? Because we offer a full spectrum that you can kinda fall anywhere on there in terms of managed services. If you want us to be the platform provider and you bring your own tools, your own licensing, your own management, fantastic. We're more than happy to do that.
Kevin:You want us to provide our remote monitoring management and antivirus tools into your environment and you manage it? Also, perfect. No no problem for us. We're happy to do that. You want us to provide our own tools and do the management of those tools for you from an RMM and an AV perspective and do your Windows patching, we can do that too.
Kevin:So, really, there's a little bit of a sliding scale there. The only caveat that we have on all of that is if you expect us to do the management, and this would really be true of any provider, we have to leverage our own tools in order to do it. Right? So you can't say, like, hey. I have this antivirus application that I know and love, that I've always known and loved, that I wanna continue to utilize.
Kevin:I'm gonna toss you guys the keys. If you wanted your provider to manage it, the provider really has to use the applications that their teams are administration side of desktop as a service is pretty straightforward. I'd say this all the time when we're doing demos in the environment, and I'd say 5050 people roll their eyes. But, you know, DaaS to me, if we take the technology out of the equation, DaaS is a relationship. Right?
Kevin:All DaaS boils down to is the all the spinning gears and levers that allow us to associate an operating system and the applications that we have with the users that we wanna deliver it to. Everything that happens in the middle is just enabling that relationship. So if we look at it that way, all administration comes down to is managing our underlying templates, associating those templates with resources, and then assigning those resources to users. So the only times that a customer or their IT team, whatever, will even have to go into the DaaS admin portal, is if they want to make changes to their images. Right?
Kevin:If they want to provision a new operating system or push new applications or they want to update their underlying templates to have the latest revisions of their, you know, antivirus definitions or their Windows updates. If you structure the way you build that relationship in Daz well enough, you can do things like like leveraging active directory security groups for all of your user provisioning. So now, presumably, the same way you do all of your permissioning for everything else in your organization, like file shares and access to servers, you can now just simply add or remove users from groups to provision desktops to them. So if I had an accounting group and I have an IT group and for whatever reason, you know, Joe in accounting moves into the IT department. We simply remove him from 1 group and put him into the other.
Kevin:And the next time Joe logs into the platform, he's now presented with the the appropriate desktop that is mapped to that security group. So the user administration side of things is really easy. The other piece that I do want to really point out is from a platform support perspective, we're there 247, 365. Right? Anything that that is an issue at the platform level as far as the infrastructure to support the DaaS solution, that is a 100% on us, you know, as an escalation point or a first responder.
Kevin:The piece that we do not specifically do in Evolve IP is we are not end user facing help desk in these environments. And, frankly, if I'm the customer, I wouldn't want us to be. Right? Because we're never gonna know your line of business applications as well as yourself, your team, the vendors with whom you already work on those things. Right?
Kevin:Like, we're not going to be QuickBook x QuickBooks experts to Gary's point earlier. They can tell you how to go in there and close out your your yearly books for last year. You know, we don't want Gary answering the phone to tell someone how to do a mail merge in Excel. I don't think that would be in anyone's interest.
Max:And this goes back to the whole, like, this isn't a you're after this isn't a job displacement transition. I mean, you're still your help desk is still your help desk. The just what they're doing, you eradicate stuff that they shouldn't probably be doing anymore. Right?
Kevin:Yep. IT augmentation, not replacement.
Gary:That is the the ultimate misnomer that typically happens at the, you know, at the supervisor level. We don't replace IT people. We just we just get better utilization out of them.
Max:So let's talk about the, you know, our favorite, 10 letter word, ransomware. And, you know, the the poor story for an organization usually unfolds something along the lines of somebody got an email and clicked the link and it did something horrible to the computer and then it replicated itself throughout the organization and it sat dormant for some period of time. And then people came and turned on their computers one morning and they get a wonderful blue screen that says, pay us if you wanted your data back. And now they say, pay us if you want your data back and you don't want us to release your data. Right?
Max:So, now DaaS as a technology doesn't, you know, like, you can still things still happen on desktops. Right? Like, they're still desktops, but the cycle of this changes somewhat. So how, you know, companies that have, you know, I wanna say, like, had the experience of ransomware and are looking for preventative measures to keep that from happening again. But, like, what what you know, talk me through this, and and let's let's talk about ransomware and and DAS and and and how this shifts and what this means.
Kevin:Yeah. So the most obvious one, right, the the easiest line to draw is that if we limit remote access into our environment, right, that every single external user who's connecting back to internal resources, their machine is not becoming an extension of our internal environment. By default, we've now halved the amount of potential threat vectors that we have into the organization. Because now all of those devices are just, again, dumb terminals. So if my personal machine here that it's sitting on my desk gets compromised, it's my concern, but it's not Evolve IP's concern because that's not going to be able to propagate ransomware into Evolve's environment.
Kevin:As you said, though, Max, right, a desktop is a desktop like we talked about earlier. So is there potential for the DaaS seat itself to get compromised? Absolutely. Just like there's potential for any desktop to get compromised. But the thing that we have to remember is, since it is easier now to manage our desktops because we have all of those desktops in one place with a single management structure over them, it's now easier for us to apply patches to them.
Kevin:It's easier for us to update our antivirus definitions in a proactive manner. It's easier for us to have network security components that are constantly evaluating that entire client computing environment to make sure that there isn't a breach or there isn't an issue. And if there is an issue, that that issue doesn't easily and quickly propagate across the network. So, again, to me, it's just that that human nature thing of we made the job of securing the environment easier. So by default, the environment should be more secure as long as we're doing the job.
Max:In the worst case scenario, and I've seen this where you turn around and you say we have a 1,000 PCs infected with this thing that we have to go out and touch and clean and reinstall by hand. I mean, there were hospitals. And the the the the imagery of these hospitals were the National Guard on-site in these hospitals doing the reinstallation and helping the hospital chain trying to come back online. Terrifying to to think about, actually. In in your platform, you're not spending that time touching every computer by hand.
Max:You're deleting and recreating virtual instances at scale. And, you know, how long does that take? I mean, if you had a 1,000 desktops that you said we wanted to delete every single one of these things and just recreate them, how long does it take a company to do?
Kevin:Yeah. I mean, navigate to where your desktops are, isolate the ones that you want to, change or get rid of, select them, right click, delete. Next time a user logs in, the DaaS platform is going to see how many licenses you have allocated for that specific image type. They log in, new images provisioned to them, and they're off and running. So, I mean, that work that would have taken a massive effort of calling in the National Guard and and probably realistically days, right, to to go through and reformat or reprovision physical hardware on-site.
Kevin:Now you're down to minutes. I mean, depending on the size of the organization, maybe say hours just to to add a little buffer in there for, you know, a a vast number of seats to repropogate all at the same time, but certainly a a significant decrease in the level of effort required.
Max:But this isn't IT touches every seat. This is IT you're talking about deleting the affected desktop affected desktops and letting users re log in and the platform do what it needs to do automatically by itself without additional user intervention. So in theory, wait. If you had a 1,000 desktops, you decided to do this. One person could delete a 1,000 desktops, and that would be the extent of what they had to do in order to have this happen.
Gary:And and let's just make sure just for clarity purposes that one administrator can do all this without having to leave their desk. Nobody's going to visit anybody. So, I did I did want to I I've got to kind of get to the get to the end of the time on this one.
Max:I mean, we're we're right there anyways, Gary. I was gonna actually offer you the second to last thoughts. I'm gonna let Kevin go first.
Kevin:Yeah. If you can't tell by now, Max, I would literally talk about this all day. I mean, I do talk about this all day, but I would talk about it with you guys all day in this, this venue if I could. But no. Really, you know, appreciate the opportunity for us to get on here and and talk the technology and tell our story.
Kevin:And, to me, like, we said it multiple times. Right? But it just it boils down to the biggest challenge is we know that this is an amazing tool. We know that this is a force multiplier for IT departments everywhere. We know that this can solve so many different business challenges that organizations deal with on a daily basis.
Kevin:It's just the challenge of how do we help folks out there understand what those challenges are that this solves for. Because I I can conceivably say you can come to me with virtually any IT problem, and I can tell you a myriad of ways that DaaS can help you solve that problem. So we need to get out of that fundamental thinking of desktop as a service as being a client computing solution. And think of it more as being an IT Swiss army knife. Right?
Kevin:Like, it can it can help us do so many of the different things that we need to do on a daily basis. We just have to start seeing it that way. Right? We we fall into this trap of, like, yes, DaaS is a remote access solution. And it is, but it's so many other things too.
Max:And then for the question of what does it look like, it looks like exactly what you're using right now.
Kevin:Correct. Yep. Underwhelming by design.
Max:Underwhelming by design. Another t shirt. More with more more more less underwhelming by design. There you go.
Kevin:It's more or less underwhelming by design. There we go. We can really simplify that message.
Max:You know, we've we've talked we've we've we've gone around the horn with us. Right? But, I mean, you've you've been selling, supporting, deploying, maintaining, involved with DaaS now. For companies that have transitioned into this platform understand what they're getting. And, you know, I I mean, I can't imagine they would it's it's one of those things that when you make this change, you can't imagine life before that change.
Max:So what do you what would you say to somebody that's stumbling across this for the first time and thinking about this and kinda wondering about, you know, could we do this? Does this work? Would this make sense? You know, like, the the usual question chain. Right?
Max:Like, is this appropriate? This is really gonna help us at all. Like, why should we change or, you know, not do what we're doing today anymore? You you know, the the simple answer, of course, is, like, no. It just works.
Max:You should just do it, of course. But, you know, what would you actually say to them, and and how do you help them through that, you know, journey?
Gary:You know, it it it's interesting. There was a time not too many years ago where if I didn't have a PBX with phones and paging systems, I would have lost my mind. Right? And, of course, in the last decade, nobody buys a phone system anymore. You know?
Gary:Then then, of course, it's this whole concept of if I don't have my servers in the in the in the closet behind me, I will lose control of the business. I'd say AWS and Google Cloud, Azure would have a thing or 2 to say about that. I think the last of the late great things that you just gotta give up on is is having control of that desktop environment. So I think the thing that I would say is is that, invariably, you're gonna do it. Just like invariably, I needed my, you know, my 85 year old mother to give up her Motorola flip phone and get an iPhone.
Gary:K? So you're gonna you're gonna get there at some point anyway? I think, again, it it's just a matter of it's just you know, it's Nike had it right. Just do it.
Max:It's an it's an inevitability. But the faster you get there, the more you can take advantage of it and leverage it and, you know, excel and and reap the benefits of it. So
Gary:You had a story earlier that I absolutely loved, and I'll leave you with 1. We have a client that implemented virtual desktop in, I think, October of 2019 because they were required to do a full pandemic test. Imagine this. Right? I so they deployed it, did the pandemic test, sent everybody home, and then all of a sudden, it was no longer a test.
Gary:So there's an I there's an IT professional right now that, you know, is being hoisted up for he's a jolly good fellow. And there's a lot of other
Max:Mhmm.
Gary:CIOs and CTOs and CFOs and CMOs and CISOs that are out there that will get the same accolades for making the move now.
Max:What a I mean, what incredible timing. Gary, Kevin, it's been a pleasure. Always a pleasure talking to you, Gary. Appreciate these very much.
