Mark Szotkowski CSO at RapidScale on Mobilizing a Workforce
Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm talking with Mark Zekowski, chief strategy officer at RapidScale.
Speaker 1:Mark, thanks for joining.
Speaker 2:Hey, Max. I'm really happy to be here today. Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:Mark, what what does RapidScale do?
Speaker 2:So we're a managed cloud computing company, which, you know, a lot of people hear that and they don't understand what that means. So I guess the best way to describe it is we're a combination of what traditionally people think of cloud computing companies, which would be Amazon or Azure or Google Cloud, and their local or regional MSP. You know, in the Amazon world or or the hyperscaler world, if you would, those are all do it yourself. You've gotta bring large IT teams, and you're literally just leasing time off of their platforms and putting all of your applications onto their onto their platform. At RapidScale, we own and operate all of our own all of our own infrastructure.
Speaker 2:So we're we're the perfect fit for that customer who says, hey. I have a lean IT team. You know, maybe I've got 1 to 10 people, and I'm looking at moving into the cloud, but I need some help. I might need help with my implementation and installation of services, or I might need ongoing support and help with regards to how I'm gonna support this and my end users on a day to day function. So Rapid Scale fits a really unique void in that we provide a lot of managed services that customers could buy from a local MSP, but we also provide our customers with a cloud platform.
Speaker 2:So we're we're the ideal position for that mid market to small enterprise customer who's got a road map here in 2020 or or 2021 or beyond to move to the cloud and take advantage of everything that they get in the cloud.
Speaker 1:So when most people think cloud, you think applications being hosted in some sort of environment. In Rapid Scale, it's more than just a server application or server being hosted in your cloud. It's also the desktop in the workspace as well. Can you talk about what that is and and what that means?
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. I mean, obviously, in in what these new times that we've never been in before. Right? You've never heard more in the public sector about mobilizing your workforce.
Speaker 2:Right? We we've seen unprecedented times, and I'm pretty sure yourself, myself, and most of our viewers here were not around for the last pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1950. Right? None of us are that old who are still working today. And with that, you've seen this huge mobilizing your workforce.
Speaker 2:Right? We've all gone on lockdown. We can't work from our offices any anymore for public safety. So desktop as a service has been around now for decades. Most people don't realize that because it's been around in the enterprise space.
Speaker 2:It hasn't been in the in the mid market space or the SMB space until recently. And then the reason for that is it's traditionally was a very expensive solution. But the best way to think about desktop as a service or DaaS is you take what's on your physical laptop or workstation at the office, which is a c drive that holds all of our data. Right? It's got our RAM, our CPU, our on there as well.
Speaker 2:But we're also storing all of our data onto that laptop or that desktop. Just picture moving that c drive up into the cloud behind a firewall. Just by doing that, you've created a much more secure environment for your for your staff, for your company. We used to share stats with our partners that, you know, over what was it? 800,000 laptops get lost every year.
Speaker 2:That's a stat from, like, 2012. Imagine if you're a HR executive and you're taking your laptop on a trip and it gets stolen. You know, what's on that laptop? How much proprietary confidential information is there? We all hear about security breaches on a day to day basis, and most of those breaches are about personal information being stolen.
Speaker 2:And that's exactly what desktop as a service helps to solve for. Beyond that, to your point, Max, we also have infrastructure as a service. Right? Traditionally, hey. Put your application into the cloud and then access it from a traditional workstation or a traditional laptop.
Speaker 2:We we can do that for customers as well. Beyond that, our our additional core services that we bring to the table are disaster recovery as a service and business continuity. Again, a big uptake right now on disaster recovery, not the disaster we typically think about. Right? We typically think about some kind of a a, natural disaster when somebody has an earthquake and a data center fails.
Speaker 2:Right? How do I get up and get running? But this is a disaster in in many many senses of the word in that people are now saying, how how am I gonna work? How do I put my people to work? If I can't go into my office and everybody's working in the office, I'm now gonna find a way to allow everybody to work outside of the office.
Speaker 2:Right? Same idea, just a little bit of a different spin on it.
Speaker 1:Historically, disasters have been in Los Angeles, for instance, we talk about earthquakes. Or in Florida, you talk about hurricanes or you talk about tornadoes. You know, these sorts of natural events. But commonly, disasters are just a denial of of resources. You know, power's out, fires happen, somebody theft, you know, these sorts of things are are frequent disasters that people actually experience.
Speaker 1:And now, of course, we have the pandemic disaster that we're dealing with.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. And and I mean, on that same point, it's it we we used to ask this question of folks when we'd be educating and teaching them. You know, what do you think is the biggest cause of of disasters for disaster recovery from an IT standpoint? And something something unbelievable, like 47% of all IT disasters are caused by human error.
Speaker 2:Be it malicious or non malicious. Right? It's that guy who's working on the server who accidentally wipes out everything. It's gone. Right?
Speaker 2:No backups, no way to find it, and that is a disaster.
Speaker 1:With rapid scale, you end up still having some sort of appliance. You have something that looks like a laptop but doesn't have storage on it, or you have something that looks like a desktop but doesn't have a hard drive in it, and everything runs in your system in your cloud environment. So I mean, how I mean, you we talk about mobility and disaster recovery. I mean, how else are you making people's lives better? I mean, the migration from traditional IT, let's call it with equipment deployed into rapid scale, what what other benefits and advantages are you bringing to table?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean, if we if we start to look at this in the macro sense of the word, right, let's chain our optics a little bit. Traditionally, in the IT world, you had you were an IT director and and you were went out once every traditionally 5 to 7 years, now it's 3 to 5 years, to buy new equipment and new hardware. Right? Large capital expenditure has to come out of company coffers or you get into a large lease debt that you now are gonna carry for the next 3 to 5 years.
Speaker 2:And when you when you go to make that purchase, it's probably one of the hardest jobs in the world to do because you're making that purchase based off of forecast from sales, board of directors comments on where we're gonna go. There are a million moving parts on how do I buy the right amount of equipment to serve us for the right amount of time. And then inevitably, you're gonna buy more than you need in the beginning because you're you're gotta grow into it. And almost all the time in a in a high growth economy, which, unfortunately, we're now we've fallen out of, but you're gonna exceed your your breakeven point, right, where you now need to go buy more before your next refresh cycle. Cloud computing is we like to call it consumption of IT.
Speaker 2:So as a regular business owner today, be it a 20 person business or 2,000 person business or 4,000 person business, You can now go and purchase exactly what you need today to serve your people today. You got a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability in that. If the business that you're running IT for does extremely well and instead of doubling in size, they triple in size, not a problem. You just come to RapidScale or whoever your cloud computing company is and you add more resources. If in the other direction, the company is very worried that they may have a downturn in business.
Speaker 2:For example, just a year ago this is scary, but just a year ago, mortgage companies were freaking out because they were on this huge run and then the mortgage companies slowed down because the mortgage industry slowed down. They started to scramble and said, what are we gonna do if we hit another 2,008? Right? If all of a sudden the whole housing market drops out again. I've got all this gear over here that I'm never gonna be able to use.
Speaker 2:So cloud computing from a macro sense of the word allows you to consume what you want, when you need it, how you need it. It also allows for a very specific cost horizon for your your CFO and your financial people. Right? I can actually tell you what it is per user if you're in a cloud computing environment, what a cost of IT is per user, and you can budget yourself that way. So tremendous amount of benefits in cloud computing in general.
Speaker 2:The mobility of the workforce that you touched on, Max, I'll I'll just go there a step further. You know, we've got quotes today from Gartner and other places that 74% of CFOs believe that in the new normal, they'll have more people working from home than they did prior to this pandemic. That's a huge amount of people who are gonna be mobile and working from home, and they're gonna need a technology that can allow them to do that securely with the right level of performance and the right level of support. And that's really the piece of the puzzle that RapidScale brings in.
Speaker 1:So RapidScale wasn't really exclusively you had to be remote or distributed. You could be working out of an office and use RapidScale. You could be remote and use RapidScale. You could be international and reuse RapidScale. It was just using rapid scale, and the resources are not on premise, or you're not purchasing hardware that you have to replace.
Speaker 1:So I would ask you then, you know, for your customers dealing with and and now with the COVID pandemic, what's their experience been like with RapidScale if they've, you know
Speaker 2:It's been crazy, man. I I've gotta tell you. And and first off, I feel for every business owner out there, not only in the US but in the world, that that this pandemic may take their business from. Right? I I'm I'm empathetic for 30,000,000 people in the United States of America who've gone and taken on unemployment.
Speaker 2:Right? The biggest number since the great depression. It's it's crazy. At rapid scale, however, this is what we do every day. And our business when we had to mobilize our our entire organization because as you know, Max, we're owned by Cox Business.
Speaker 2:That's a division of Cox Enterprises. Right? Very large privately held company. And they sent word that everybody's going home. 60,000 employees are gonna go work from home.
Speaker 2:Pretty pretty amazingly large number. We did it at rapid scale the day they told us to because our technology is here. We have virtual desktops. We can all work from home now. So we sent every single employee home the next day, and we've been working from home every single day since that happened.
Speaker 2:A lot of businesses didn't have the technology to do that. Right? They're going to come out of this with the understanding that it may happen again, and we've got to be prepared for it when it does. One of the things that I didn't touch on before that I think is really important to share with you though and with your audience today is, the tremendous job that Microsoft has done. Right?
Speaker 2:Microsoft, we're we're a Microsoft gold partner as are a lot of our competitors. And, man, have they just gone out out there and delivered a tremendous amount of goodwill and good faith to the country, basically giving Teams away. It's a collaboration, application that comes with Microsoft Office 365. And they they haven't given away, but they've greatly reduced it in order for people to be able to collaborate and get on and get running with Teams immediately. So those are the other things that we're seeing our customers take advantage of, the software that's out there today.
Speaker 2:We're not in the UCaaS business as you know, but we've seen great things from our UCaaS brothers and sisters out there and just allowing people to, you know, we'll give you a no contract. Just here, take a take a softphone and go work from home, and and you can get up and just pay for what you need. So it's been crazy times, but I think from an IT supplier perspective, people have just really gone out of their way to be good corporate citizens.
Speaker 1:So since you mentioned competitors, why RapidScale? What is your unique secret sauce that you have?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I can answer that a 1000000 different ways, but I'll I'll take the corporate approach here for you, Max. I've been with the company for 10 years. And when we first I love to say this, and if you're not a country music fan, then you probably won't get this, but we were cloud when cloud wasn't cool. RapidScale was the first cloud computing company to show up to a channel partner show in Las Vegas.
Speaker 2:I I was not with the company at the time, but I I knew the founders, and I saw him there. And I'm like, what is a virtual desktop, man? And and they were trying to explain it to me, and I was just right over my head. I'm like, I don't get it. I'll I'll talk to you later.
Speaker 2:And, obviously, once I got it, I decided to become a part of the company. But what sets us apart? Really easy. We've been doing this longer than most of the competitors in the space that our partners work with. Unfortunately, some of those competitors have had some hardships in the last couple of years.
Speaker 2:We had our hardships. We just had them back in 2012 and 2013 when cloud wasn't cool. We built an incredibly strong company. And I know this is said by everybody, but we have a tremendous amount of focus on the customer experience. We have from the very beginning.
Speaker 2:It's in our DNA that if we don't have happy customers, we won't have happy employees. And you can invert that, right? If I don't have happy employees, I won't have happy customers. So they go hand in hand. We started to document that about a year ago with NPS scores.
Speaker 2:And I'm tremendously proud to say that our support group that is, bicoastal. We have them in the u we have them both in, Irvine, California and Raleigh, North Carolina. 24x7, 365, all US based. We put up an average score in the month of March. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:In the month of April while all this was going on of an 84. And an 84, that is apple ish. Right? I mean, that is people who are unbelievably committed to a brand. And that's serving every single customer that opens a trouble ticket.
Speaker 2:So I will tell you the things that set us apart, our commitment to the customer, commitment to the customer experience, our knowledge and experience. Right? We've got a we've got a world class leadership team, a senior leadership team that is put them up against any technology company out there. A lot of us have worked together for several years in past lives, and we brought some of the best talent to the market that we can. And, again, everybody having the same transparency and goal to serve the customer has served us very well for the last 10 years.
Speaker 1:So who is a target like, what's an appropriate customer size for Rapid Scale? What's the what's that profile look like?
Speaker 2:So corporate line, 20 to 2000. That's good. That's that's true. I mean, we can we can support, you know, on the low end, 20 users. And the reason we put that number out there, and that's just a guideline, but really when we get below 20 users and the technologies that we sell, primarily desktop as a service, the the price point is just too expensive for somebody to say, hey.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna go and move to desktop as a service unless they have a real compelling reason to get there. Right? So a compelling reason might be we had a customer. They did real time video editing for 1 of the big production houses. Only had 10 employees.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, 10 employees? Doesn't work for us. Well, when we looked at what they needed, the 10 employees was a no brainer. They're extremely technology focused. They needed very large super supercomputer virtual desktops because of the load that they were handling in real time video editing.
Speaker 2:And most importantly, they needed the security to be there because they were gonna be editing shows that everybody listening to this podcast knows before those shows got out. So those that content could not be breached. Matter of fact, and we've been through dozens of security audits, if not 100. This was one of the most intense security audits that we ever went through because of this the company that they did business with. But, really, our our our real sweet spot, a 100 to 500 users is where we make a really big impact, and there's a reason for that.
Speaker 2:Those IT teams are traditionally pretty thin. We're talking 1 to 2 people per 100 people that they're supporting, and and that's a load for anybody. And when you start to look at that, in that type of an organization, most of the IT people have become generalists. So they know a little bit about a whole lot of things, but they don't have the funding or or the requirements for a full time SQL DBA. Right?
Speaker 2:And and they'd rather just outsource that to somebody who could do SQL DBA services for. So we obviously do SQL DBA services. So a 100 to 500, we make a big impact on the IT team. We like to say we become an extension of their IT team. They generally take on some level of having rapid scale manage part of their network for them.
Speaker 2:So a great example, nobody in IT wants to do backups. It's the most mundane, worst boring job there is to go check backups every single day to make sure they ran and then go remediate them if they didn't run right, rerun the backups. Right? So I'd say 70 to 80% of our customers have us run their backups, and we're responsible for them. Right?
Speaker 2:Disaster recovery, another great example. You you ask a you ask a 100 user business if they have a disaster recovery plan, they'll tell you yes. You ask them when's the last time that they reviewed it, they might tell you annually. Tell them when's the last time they did a test, probably gonna get an answer of when the last disaster hit us. So that's an extremely important part of business today.
Speaker 2:As we become more and more reliant on technology to do all of our businesses. So disaster recovery and business continuity is something that we do for customers. They fully outsource it to us. We do it all. We do the testing with them.
Speaker 2:We do remediation if it fails. We do everything.
Speaker 1:So a big component of this becomes how much resources do you need, and you have the ability to scale up and scale down for your customers. I mean, you know, they need really fast computer desktops or average. Can you give me an average price point? What's the pricing range for the service, you know, in in average? Right?
Speaker 2:I will tell you this. At about 50 call it 50 to 250 users with full end user support. That's super important. We'll we'll give them end user support inclusive inside of this price. So they pick up the help desk phone not from an IT person at the company, but the actual users call us and say, hey.
Speaker 2:I lost this file or, hey. Can you reset my password or any of those traditional help desk things that they would call internally for? We take that on. You're about 90, $95 a seat. It depends on how much infrastructure we're bringing over with them.
Speaker 2:That's the one component that's variable on everything. So if they're a accounting firm and all they have is, you know, QuickBooks and they're running Office 365, they're running CRM in the cloud, etcetera, etcetera, then it's gonna be less than the normal price because we're not bringing a lot of applications. If they are a architecture firm, we may be bringing over a whole lot of CAD applications that are pretty heavy, very expensive applications to run. They take a lot of resources. So when you move those into the cloud, they're not gonna be cheap.
Speaker 2:And then you have to take that cost and spread it across all the users, if that makes sense to you.
Speaker 1:Sure. Of course. But the I mean, the the key though is this becomes a predictable expense. This isn't a time and materials consulting engagement where 1 month you spend 40 hours and the next month you spend 200 hours. I mean The
Speaker 2:price is the price and it's and to my point earlier and to your point just now, it's forecast them. Right? We've got we've got customers who are merger and acquisition guys. And they love the fact that when they're going and looking at buying a new called a new dentist office, we can tell them exactly what that cost per user for IT is gonna be when they bring that office over. And because they've made the choice to standardize on their applications as they bring over those dinner those dental offices that they buy, they they don't give the owner a choice to say, oh, you've used Dentrix for 20 years.
Speaker 2:You can use Dentrix. No. Use the application we're gonna give you when we buy. So what used to take them 6 months to absorb a new company, they're now doing in 6 weeks.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's incredible. Yeah. I mean, in terms of actual real world benefit outcome, you know, let's use the businessy words. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, forget the desktop or cloud or everything else. What do you care about? How long does it take you to integrate an acquisition? 6 weeks versus 6 months, that's a huge impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and, you know, you're getting into what what and how we sell our service, Max. And I I don't wanna be, yeah, I don't wanna be the sales guy on the call, but the reality is in selling cloud services, you you have to understand it's a solution set. And you've gotta know what is that customer's compelling event. Why are we doing this?
Speaker 2:Why are we doing it now? And finally, why are we gonna do it with rapid scale? And we teach our entire sales force and our sales engineering force to really focus in on that and help support our sales partners that bring us into deals because you hit the nail on the head. If I'm talking to a customer and they say, we wanna move to desktop as a service because we it's more secure than what we have today. Okay.
Speaker 2:That's a compelling event. Well, what's the business impact? Well, you gotta dig a little deeper. Right? So we asked the question.
Speaker 2:Okay. Was there a security incident that's happened in the last year, or is this just posturing your security? And lo and behold, there was an incident. It happened 3 months ago. It cost the company $25,000.
Speaker 2:And now we're talking and it and there's still a vulnerability for them. Right? So you want to talk about getting a customer in alignment with you to move forward on a project. When we find out those material impacting situations that they're in and we help them solve that situation, you end up with a customer for life, not a customer for the contract.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Mark, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it, Max. Look forward to doing this with you again, bud.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
