Did You Choose Cloud for the Wrong Reason?

Jeremy Pease (00:00)
Interestingly enough, it's probably like 75 to 80 percent the latter that turns into 50-50 by the end of the day. Meaning that they come in very convinced on what they want to do, and then we have to have a real conversation, right? We talked about that earlier. It's just it is they come in convinced that this is this is what we got to do. So this is what we're looking for. And then you have a conversation with them and you ask them what they're trying to accomplish, and you realize.

Jeremy Pease (00:27)
This is gonna be a difficult conversation, but I've got to tell this customer, what you're looking for is not the right solution for you. Right. It's it's interesting because I've watched it happen from a customer coming in, sure they were gonna do colo and purchase all this gear, and that colo is only gonna cost them about 10 grand a month.

Max Clark (00:53)
Colo, bare metal, bare metal becomes like infrastructure as a service, back to managed services, back to like bare metal, infrastructure as a service. You know, like there's just been this constant, you know, iteration. I don't want to say, I don't want, you know, like like back and forth. So a common thing that's happened now, you know, people have become really centric. There's, there's this like trend of everything has to be cloud migration, cloud transformation.

Max Clark (01:17)
You know, and then it became multi-cloud, and then it became cloud repatriation, and then we've got these other terms, and it's like workload specific. And and what I'm what I'm what I'm curious to start with is, you know, how do you approach this when you're talking with a new company, a new customer around

Max Clark (01:38)
You know, and I'm trying to I don't wanna I'm gonna I'm trying to force you to get out of an it depends answer here. Right. Okay. So like how do you have this conversation around like public cloud versus private cloud versus bare metal versus private infrastructure in today's world?

Jeremy Pease (01:53)
Yeah. I mean, as you said, I've been doing this for twelve, thirteen years, and that's on this side of the house, which I always joke you know, I came to the dark side, right? and so so yeah, when I when I've been on this side of the table, because I sat on the other side as a customer of trying to decide what cloud what type of cloud platform are we gonna use, what are we gonna run through, what are we gonna put the application on? And this, you know, again, this is 14, 15 years ago. So the trend back then was

Jeremy Pease (02:22)
Usually what happens is you build the infrastructure and then you put the application on top. Mm-hmm. And that has changed dramatically over the last fifteen years to where now the application dictates the infrastructure.

Jeremy Pease (02:34)
Right. And so that's why, you know, over the last 12 to 13 years on this side of the house, what I've been focused on is what is the right solution for the customer's environment? Right. Based on that application, there really is an infrastructure that's right for what you're trying to accomplish. And how do we make sure you're on the right infrastructure, tuned and pro programmed to be able to meet the latency requirements, the compliance requirements, your cost requirements? There's so many pieces of it that a customer's got to figure out depending on what type of workload it is. And I

Jeremy Pease (03:04)
You said I don't want it to be an it depends answer. No. Yeah, absolutely. And and it is, you know, QA testing, a lot of that is done in the public cloud because they can scale it up, they can scale it down, they can do whatever they need to do. and that's really where you look at volume of of scaling up and scaling down. And it look a lot of production is out there, obviously, as well. When you're doing the billions and billions of dollars that AWS and Azure and and Google are doing, obviously there's a lot out there. but

Jeremy Pease (03:33)
What I'm talking to a customer about is what are your compliance needs? Are you are you a banking customer or or are you like a video streaming customer? And latency is your biggest concern. What is your biggest concern first? What are we what are we trying to solve for first? And I think that's the real question is what are they trying to solve for? Because a lot of times a customer will come and try and sit down and say, Well, this is what I need. And I go,

Jeremy Pease (03:57)
It's not the conversation we need to have. Because I get it. And and a lot of these people are smart and at the end of the day, they may be right. And sometimes they are. But the real question is, what are you trying to solve for? What compliance needs do you have? What type of pricing do you need? What type of latency do you do you need to deal with? These are the questions we've got to ask.

Max Clark (04:16)
Okay. Boy, there's a lot there. there's a lot of myths, misnomers, incorrect information, assumptions that go along with with infrastructure today. And you know, you talk about compliance. I mean, so let's just talk about this, right? Like I I still have conversations today where people are like, we want to put this in the cloud because then it's secure and it's compliant. And I'm like You know that's not true, right? Is is and so it's

Max Clark (04:46)
It it feels like there's still such a giant misconception about what the differences between these platforms are and what you actually get out of them by going to one versus the other. you know, what's the other misconception I deal with all the time? it's cheaper to be in the cloud. And I'm like, Yeah, y you know, you're actually paying like four to five times more than if you had your own private infrastructure. Right. Like it's it's so

Max Clark (05:12)
you know, and and the what's what's become interesting for me in that part is like we don't actually tell people up front what the real number is because it it feels too insane. Like if you tell somebody, hey, you can cut 72% of your cost structure out based on your current infrastructure sizing, you know, like they think you're nuts, right? So so so it it it becomes so it's this like dialogue between like where things should run. I mean, web scale internet platforms

Max Clark (05:41)
that are consumer focused are very different from a B2B SaaS application are very different from an internal application facing an enterprise. So if you're looking at a customer that has an internal application facing their enterprise, even if they're a large enterprise,

Max Clark (05:59)
That's not like we need ephemerality because we're going to scale up and scale down instantaneously because we've got a dynamically shifting workload. Right. Maybe you do you have some process that runs once a month or once a quarter that requ you know that does scale up, but but that's still not that big of a deal. Right.

Jeremy Pease (06:15)
Yeah, I think again, as you said, some many things to unpack there. But I think that the thing around compliance, and this is where, you know, when you look at public cloud providers, right?

Jeremy Pease (06:28)
It's going to be shared workloads. They don't have dedicated options for customers to go in and be able to do that. And that's where compliance and security becomes an issue. You can put all the security products around it, but you're never on a dedicated infrastructure. You're never on a dedicated environment. And to me, that's where, you know, especially because we are doing environments in Canada, UK, United States, a lot of a lot of the talk today is data sovereignty as much as

Jeremy Pease (06:55)
Yes. And so and so the point is is that do you know where your internet traffic is traversing on cloud infrastructure? Right? Because you can put it in a fully dedicated environment in a you know a cloud services provider that you can make as compliant.

Jeremy Pease (07:17)
You know, it's gonna have SOC2, ISO 27,000 one, all the all those bells and whistles. But I mean, even those can can create a dedicated Fed ramp type of environment, like to that level of security, compliance, and structure. So, but it's not that everybody needs that, right? And it's not not that they have to have that. So it's a matter of again, what is the application and what are you trying to solve for? because that's where

Jeremy Pease (07:45)
As you said, not everything has to scale up and scale down, which is a big part of the public cloud and what it does, and the ease and the access of getting to it. But then the ease and the access of getting to it then becomes highly complex when you're trying to build that environment. Right. And so I when when I came to Aptum, because I again I've been doing this for 12 to 13 years in in different flavors and and forms within what I call a cloud service provider space, right?

Jeremy Pease (08:11)
I basically said there are five C's that are the main five problems we're trying to solve for a customer. Cost, compliance, customer service, complexity. And and at Aptum, with our overall portal, the Aptum Prism portal that we we have recently launched, it is cohesity.

Jeremy Pease (08:30)
And that is meaning that basically we're able to see all of their environments in one place. So whether they have a portion in AWS, they have a portion in Azure, they have a portion within ours, they have a portion of on print, they can see it all through the same portal and they can manage it. And they know what their cost looks like. And they know what all so I think that that visibility piece, where we can remain truly agnostic. And I think that's

Jeremy Pease (08:55)
That's the phrase, truly agnostic. Some will say, no, we're agnostic and we can put you wherever, but but we really can. And we manage a a portal with visibility and capability to see all of that because we are truly agnostic. So we really do want to have that conversation of what are you trying to accomplish so that we can put your application and workloads in the right place. And we might put different applications in different places for you, but you will be able to see it all and manage it all in one place, with that always great phrase of one throat to choke with us as the service provider.

Max Clark (09:27)
I went I went field you know consultant, like network engineer to in house to then you know like contract hired gun mercenary to running a service provider to then doing this, right? Meeting the advisory side of it. I'm and an and a and a thing that's been very interesting across that line and like now

Max Clark (09:54)
You know, you talk about like trying to find like what's the right place for things. Part of that becomes gently explaining to somebody that they're just wrong with what they're trying to do.

Max Clark (10:12)
So I've I've gotten you know, I tr I try to like it's it's really an interesting fan you know, it's like a dynamic, right? Because most of those questions really aren't technical issues anymore. Right. You know, we talk about like layer eight issues, right? You know, in the ne in the in the network engineering world, right? You know, it's a layer eight eight issue, you know. And but it's but it's true because a lot of these decisions really aren't even about the technology anymore. So as you're going through, you know

Max Clark (10:42)
You know, you've got a I mean, I don't even know the definitions anymore. Like a mid-market company now is like call it like 5,000 employees. We're like, you know, they're actually on keyboards, not manufacturing. Let's say it's a 5,000 employee, so mid-market slash low enterprise, right? Yep. If that company comes to you and says, we've got a you board mandate that we're gonna migrate all our stuff to the cloud this year, and because it's gonna be less cost for us and less complexity for us and and you know, more secure, right? And like that's our mandate, and like, okay.

Max Clark (11:11)
y you know, like I I I feel like this becomes like you know almost like the do no harm now from a service provider saying, I will help you migrate to the cloud, but you're not actually getting what you think you get, so can we just be clear on like our objectives here, you know?

Jeremy Pease (11:27)
Yeah, I think that's you know, I wanna say two thousand fourteen, two thousand fifteen, I saw it so much in terms of companies coming to us, who was their cloud cloud service provider at the time with VMware environment, some some s form of co-location. so we we had the cloud, we had co-location, we had options for the customer, but they were like, I had a board mandate that I had to go to the public cloud. Right. Because it's gonna save me money, all these things.

Max Clark (11:56)
Because everybody else is doing it and it's cool.

Jeremy Pease (11:57)
Exactly.

Jeremy Pease (11:58)
That j they just said that's the way everybody's going, so we have to have Yeah.

Max Clark (12:02)
Yeah, that's right.

Jeremy Pease (12:04)
And and we would try to have that conversation with them. Look, there's some things about this

Jeremy Pease (12:08)
That are not what you think they're going to be. it doesn't matter. That's they've they've told us we gotta go that way. And that's when you saw a lot of clo cloud service providers kind of come up with this mindset of, okay, if you can't beat them, join them type of scenario, right? Of I I can't beat AWS or Azure at the end of the day in terms of the scale, right? Yeah. and so we're gonna start to support them. Well, that came with its challenges. I mean, I I've watched this evolution of well, let's help them. Now we're to repatriation because we realize.

Jeremy Pease (12:38)
That egress fees are so ridiculous, right? and and so you watch the evolution of the back and forth as it goes, it goes like this is the way we gotta go. wait, no, we gotta come back out of it. no, we're gonna go here, you know. and I think it is. It it's it's hard to have that conversation with a customer, but it again, we can look at their on-prem stuff and we can help them manage their on-prem stuff. I think for providers like us, and there are

Jeremy Pease (13:04)
so many of them still at this point in time. A lot of consolidation has happened, but there's still plenty of them out there. I think the key is, you know, we try and make sure that if it's on-prem and it makes sense.

Jeremy Pease (13:17)
Usually what we're dealing with is IT groups that are too small to be able to manage all the things that need to happen. The 24-7, the patching, the monitoring, all of those pieces where you may be a 2,000 to 5000 person organization, but you have like 10 IT guys, right? And they're trying to manage 50 to 60 applications. and they've got a dev group and a DevOps group and all these people doing all these things. And they go, We just don't have the resources to be able to manage all of this and

Jeremy Pease (13:47)
And do all that.

Jeremy Pease (13:49)
If you're a truly agnostic and you go, No, honestly, on prem is probably the right piece for you, but we can manage that and do those pieces that you don't want to do. We can monitor it, we can patch it, we can, you know, take care of that environment for you. But if it does make sense, this is how we do that. But you're right. A lot of them go, Okay, well, if that's where you have to go, let's just go. and look, to be honest, at the end of the day, that is still where margin is, you know, for a business like ours, if we're able to put it on our infrastructure, right? Paid for most of that infrastructure.

Jeremy Pease (14:24)
What I talk to the team about and what our solutions architects are pretty good about is what is the right solution for the customer. Because if we do that, then it's going to build a relationship for the long term. And I can tell you by the forty, fifty plus customers that I've talked to in my four months here, they talk about the people and how it they've taken care of them. And that's why a lot of them have been here for ten, fifteen, twenty years, all the way back to the Pier one days, because we take care of the customer the right way. And so I think that's that's truly the key is

Jeremy Pease (14:54)
is like you said, don't force them there, but if it's the right the right option, help them understand why it is the right option for them.

Max Clark (15:03)
You know, you say patching, right? Like you still have to patch when you're in the cloud. Like somebody still has to do this for you, right? They're still

Jeremy Pease (15:09)
Yeah.

Max Clark (15:09)
Well, hey, you know, and and very few companies do the migration then go actually true to cloud native. Like if you're you know, and I see this

Max Clark (15:15)
change with you know web n cloud native companies, usually tech startups, right? Where it's like we went cloud native and you're like, okay, it's a different environment, right? And then it's really funny talking to service providers that are trying to sell into those companies and they sell in and they start with like, we're gonna help you patch. And you're like, patch what? They're on containers slash, you know, serverless. There is no patching, right? the the trend, you know, you see this, you yeah, I mean AWS of course is the the the behemoth of the market.

Max Clark (15:46)
and then, you know, we we can go on a complete tirade about Google Cloud, but I'm I'm gonna try not to get there. Okay. but so then you have you have Google and you have Azure. Yes. And they and they start pushing this idea around multi cloud, like, you should be in multiple clouds because you get redundancy and resiliency and this and then the next thing. And and and most of it's a we know we can't compete head to head, so let's just try to get the table scraps kind of approach, then maybe we'll win more into the business, right? Mm-hmm.

Max Clark (16:14)
Or when they decide to do a consolidation, they'll they'll they'll win into us. And as a result of that, I saw a lot of cloud service providers go into multi-cloud environments.

Max Clark (16:26)
And try to support this idea and this marketing pitch, because of course that's where their MDF money is coming from to go support and pitch this to market. Right. And it feels like one by one, they've all kind of like ended this like relationship with trying to be multi-cloud and have picked one and and and consolidated. Now you're still very much in this like we will support you wherever you are role. And I'm I'm curious if you can we can talk about that a little bit of that dynamic because now you have triple the amount of expertise that you have to

Max Clark (16:56)
maintain. Correct. You have a lot more cross-training. You have different environments, even when you go to infrastructure as code kind of things, like there are nuances between these platforms. And how many of your customers are actually in multi-cloud versus just we have a customer that's Google and a customer that's AWS and a customer that's Azure.

Jeremy Pease (17:16)
Yeah, I I wouldn't know the percentage of customers that are multi-cloud off the top of my head. so I wouldn't be able to answer that one directly. But what I will say is yes, it definitely takes you know, a more more staff to be able to manage multi-cloud, right? And so there is a decision point there. And obviously we're, you know, we're private equity backed, so they're always always looking at the numbers in every, every which way possible. but what I what I will say is

Jeremy Pease (17:46)
being able to be and I, you know, said this word, I'm probably sure anybody listening is gonna say if he says agnostic again, it's gonna turn into a drinking game at some point. but

Jeremy Pease (17:56)
We want to really be able to help the customer wherever it is they need to be. And the thing is, is that it's driven as much by existing customers that have started to go into these different areas, right? You know, we we've had a specialization for many years assisting ad tech customers, right? and there are certain things in terms of the applications they want to run that they want control over. And there is no way they would ever put it in the public cloud. But yet they have other applications where they go.

Jeremy Pease (18:25)
Absolutely, I'm only putting it at the public cloud. And I think, you know, whether they choose AWS, whether they choose Azure, for whatever reasons that might be, we we have just wound up with this dynamic of having having both of them to a point where all right, we really need to be able to support both and we really want to be able to help continue to manage these customers' journey along the way. and so yeah, it's I don't think it's as much, hey, let's just

Jeremy Pease (18:55)
Force of direction as it has been, it kind of, it kind of came organically as an organization. And I can say that somewhat from personal experience, because I was there in 2019 to 2020 as the COO as we started to make that evolution. You started to see it happen. and we started to focus more on being able to support those customers, those journeys, started working through those certifications. We really focused on the Azure side, then we acquired acquired the Cloud Ops company, which was the AWS.

Jeremy Pease (19:25)
So we really brought both sides of expertise to the table, really focusing on those two. And then we have a dev team that's put a lot of our stuff on your favorite Google Cloud, you know, just to be able to get some expertise and some understanding there as well, you know, when it is necessary. What I would say is that is the smallest portion of our business. And so we don't spend a ton of time and effort there. but AWS and Azure, I mean, companies still really need support and direction on that. Like you said.

Jeremy Pease (19:55)
Even if it's, you know, serverless and and and you know, we we do trainings on Kubernetes and different types of containerization platforms to be able to help the customers with that. So there's just multiple pieces to whatever that cloud platform looks like that our customers have kind of taken us in this direction of all right, we're we're gonna support both because we want we want to show you that we are here for you along that journey. And so I think some companies have said, All right, I'm gonna go straight this way. but

Jeremy Pease (20:25)
we've allowed our customers to kinda drive a little bit of of what we what we are gonna be as an organization to ensure we could continue to support them. And that continues to resonate with the market as well.

Max Clark (20:38)
This is like a subjective question. Okay. How much of infrastructure decisions do you think are driven just by a toxic relationship with IT teams for these companies? Let me let me let me give you- I'll give you a more context here. because this is a phenomenon I've I've witnessed a lot and I I've become more attuned to. Where and it was explained to me, not in the tech world, but

Max Clark (21:04)
this sensation of quote noting not wanting to be yelled at. Right. And so in a lot of companies, IT, a lot of almost all companies, IT is a support function for the business.

Jeremy Pease (21:13)
Right.

Max Clark (21:14)
So now you have an organization that does usually does not have a seat at the table. They're not making decisions. They're told the decision. Right. they are the redheads, you know, stepchild, where they struggle to get resources and budget. Correct.

Max Clark (21:29)
They run on budget cycles that if they're lucky is five to six years, right? So every five to six years, now they understand it's like this feast or famine, where when something comes up, I have to oversize this as much as humanly possible, which then becomes bad for the business because then the business sees these really large bills and doesn't want to pay them, right? And you're kind of in this like circular, you know, pain cycle that just goes back and forth. And and you know, so that

Max Clark (21:56)
it feels like almost the decision to outsource, whether that's outsourcing the cloud or outsourcing to a service provider, allows that service provider to right size the infrastructure down and take a lot of these toxic conversations out of the organization. Everybody's like, it's their problem now, you know, and and do that sort of thing.

Jeremy Pease (22:15)
well, I can tell you from personal experience, that absolutely happened. So before I joined this this side of the table, I was running all the infrastructure for a SaaS company that was in the mortgage space. and it was just me. I I was the only one running infrastructure, and we were supporting six of the largest banks in the United States. and we were spending $130,000 a month in cloud infrastructure space.

Jeremy Pease (22:44)
spend and we were all of maybe 35 employees. that's how big those environments were. And when I walked in the door, they go, this large bank, I almost said the name, and then I I thought, nope, nope, don't do it. This large bank probably

Jeremy Pease (23:03)
One of the top three largest banks in the United States, their infrastructure continues to go down. And we have a dedicated environment just for them, but it continues to go down in the afternoon every day. We don't know why. What's going on? What's happening? And I was like, Okay, well that sounds like a fun, fun thing to solve. So again I

Jeremy Pease (23:22)
I couldn't do it by myself. I had to work with that service provider to be able to go in, build the monitoring, put all this stuff around. And it wasn't just monitoring like, are we up or down? Or or what's our what's our packet speed? It it was none of that. It was literally getting into the database and and database metrics and all of that kind of stuff. and we finally found it, exactly what it was, and we were able to solve for it. But to your point, I got no budget on that side of the house other than.

Jeremy Pease (23:50)
These environments already existed and and we had to pay for them, but I wasn't getting a team. I wasn't getting anybody else. I also had to act as the CISO in this organization. Okay. you know, so it is. It you I relied on them heavily to be able to deliver what which was very mission critical infrastructure. Cause then even the the banks are going to come into each of the data centers where you're running this cloud and the audit process they're going to go through. I mean, it's hundreds and hundreds of questions that you're going to have.

Jeremy Pease (24:20)
answer and the service provider had to help me answer those each year and I would walk you know through the environments with them when they came down and all that kind of stuff but all that to say yeah that there is a lot that goes on they are the cost center of the organization to what you said. You're not going to have any say in how it goes. And especially nowadays when, as I mentioned earlier, the application dictates the infrastructure. Right. So they basically tell these guys this is what you've got to support. This is the type of infrastructure you got to build for us and they go

Jeremy Pease (24:51)
how in the world are we going to do that with the team that we have today if you want to do that in-house? It's it's nearly impossible. And so yes, I think there is this the infrastructure and IT team.

Jeremy Pease (25:03)
within a lot of organizations goes, there is no way I can manage this. I have to outsource it. And on top of that, you think about these budgets that they get and they go, I'm never going to get the CapEx to be able to spend to put all the servers, the networking gear, all that kind of stuff. But if I give them a monthly number, then they'll be able to digest that a whole lot better. And that is technically at the end of the day where service providers such as ourselves help the customer is we do actually save them money in the long run. It's not that it's

Jeremy Pease (25:33)
cheaper than than them building it out themselves, but they don't have to staff a number of resources that they would have to staff that they can't get approval for. But you tell them it's cloud infrastructure spend that they have to have to be able to support the applications. That's amazing how that gets approved over an extra four to five ed count.

Max Clark (25:50)
It's it's a fun it's a fascinating dynamic to watch, right? And you talk about banks, like my favorite thing is like walking to a data center, you're you're you've gone through a secure parking lot, you've gone through the man trap, you're like five, six, seven badge reads deep into get whatever for like floor space you get to. And then it's like the bank, the bank stands out. You know exactly which one's the bank on that floor, right? You're like,

Jeremy Pease (26:11)
Badged

Jeremy Pease (26:12)
Kjax.

Max Clark (26:12)
For some reason we've decided that we need a cage that goes all the way to the wall and then like goes over the top and then goes on the floor and there's all badgered and we're gonna have like, you know, we can't see any of the stuff, you know, and you're like you're like what are we doing here, you know?

Jeremy Pease (26:21)
Cameras all around it. Exactly.

Max Clark (26:25)
the I I'm gonna I'm gonna come back to part of this. let's let's let's talk about you application specific, right? You you mentioned ad tech and ad tech's a fun one, Bright, because

Max Clark (26:37)
You if you're running a DSP or SSP, right? Or if you're running an exchange, you're doing real time bidding, you know, all these different things, right? Like lots of different dynamics that go along into like each one of those seg you so like ad tech is not one thing. It's like are you which where are you in that thing, right? Right. And

Max Clark (26:56)
And so that's that's always like this interesting but you but that takes me back to egress. And you talk about egress a little bit in the beginning here. And I've got you know, I have a lot of content that I I scream into the void about with egress, but I'm I'm I'm curious if you can expand on this in in your view of the world.

Jeremy Pease (27:13)
Yeah, I I think look, if you look even as a trend over the last five to six years, even in the data center industry, and you look at Interconnects as a piece of the business, big companies, digital realty, Equinex, if you look at their reports on a quarterly basis before AI, okay, we're gonna say before AI and they start building these massive facilities.

Jeremy Pease (27:44)
Their colo business, even at the size and scale that they were at, was was growing high single digits. Okay. But internet connectivity, cross connects, all of that was growing in double digits. Yep. Okay. So internet connectivity has become

Jeremy Pease (28:00)
More so than infrastructure in a number of cases, the cost to these businesses because latency sensitivity is so critical to so many lines of business, right? And so I know a number of colo customers that pay 4x in internet costs than they do in infrastructure costs for the co-location that they're providing. Now.

Jeremy Pease (28:25)
That doesn't include all the Cabex they to spend to put all that stuff in there, but just on a monthly spend perspective, right? Based on these types of companies that you're talking about that are highly latency sensitive. So one of the things about the public cloud was, look, look how cheap the servers are, look at all these pieces, look at all the things we can do. And then they get the bill after a couple of months of running on the platform and they go, What is this number and where did it come from?

Max Clark (28:51)
Yeah, if

Max Clark (28:51)
you've actually been able to figure out your bill in the first place.

Jeremy Pease (28:53)
Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Pease (28:54)
Exactly. you start then you start going into that software, like all these software platforms that were built, like help it will help you understand your business.

Max Clark (29:02)
Yeah,

Max Clark (29:03)
FinOps isn't about cost control, it's just about explaining the actual.

Jeremy Pease (29:07)
Exactly. But then it then it nine times out of ten. You know, yes, there were times where it was like, the infrastructure team built this and they forgot these servers were running. We were supposed to shut that down, right? That's a whole nother thing, right? Like the oldest time. It it expanded so fast that we did not manage and we did not control it. Yeah, that happens maybe one or two times out of ten. Eight and the other eight or nine times.

Jeremy Pease (29:32)
it was egress fees. Right? Especially again, a number of the companies that went to the public cloud were so data intensive. I mean, Netflix w right, I mean it was

Max Clark (29:43)
T

Max Clark (29:43)
there's a reason why they don't host any of their content on AWS.

Jeremy Pease (29:47)
Right. But it

Jeremy Pease (29:48)
but it was what was it, 10, 12 years ago when they were basically begging everybody, please get us out of here? Like we've built this whole thing and we we've gotta get out. Right. because it's just too much. And and ad tech companies, as you say, when they're doing bidding bidding type platforms and stuff like that, I mean, they're pushing it fast, intense, and on a on a heavy basis on a regular basis, right? So

Jeremy Pease (30:13)
Egress fees wound up being the thing that really started that this is not what we thought it was. And that started repatriation, I think, more than anything. I mean, you mentioned that word earlier, but I think companies really understood, wait, these other cloud service platforms

Jeremy Pease (30:31)
They actually don't charge for those fees. Now, they will at a certain point. Trust me. Nobody nobody's giving that away for free once you start getting to these massive, but nowhere close. And if you look at the server costs, they've become more in line where AWS and Azure is not that much cheaper in turt in terms of server cost. So companies are starting to realize, wait.

Jeremy Pease (30:53)
I can't really manage everything and all the compliance that I thought I wanted to over here. It's so much more expensive because these e-gress fees I never realized before. There is another option out here. And those conversations are real and we have them on a consistent basis. It's amazing how many companies also like

Jeremy Pease (31:11)
put DR environments out there. And I know that's different than egress fees, but I'm like, you put your DR environment out there. That's really where you thought that was the best place to put it. I because then you're then you're going on non-reserved instances and you don't even know if that's going to be up and available when it happens. Like that's a whole nother rabbit hole we could go down. I could tell. but it's it just I I I think a lot of companies, like we said, they got pushed that way.

Jeremy Pease (31:39)
They realized a number of things that happen. Drawbox was another one, right? Dropbox was like got out of there as quickly as they could. and so there's a number of those stories. Repatriation is real. Now look, those companies are still growing at an amazing pace. So

Max Clark (31:54)
The

Max Clark (31:54)
thing about that, you know, those examples of like Netflix and you know Dropbox is is you had a either a founder or a leader inside of that organization that like put their foot down and said like like this like this is the future of the business. Like we have to do this. Right. And they had

Max Clark (32:14)
They had the vision, but they also had the ability of saying like we're doing this. And when you start talking about like the average buyer can committee is like fourteen, sixteen people at this point, right? Like you're you're not gonna get any of these like like weird like we're gonna leave the cloud because it's you know, like it's the right thing to do for the business, because it becomes the unsafe decision to to make. Right. Because everybody else is doing it. Like why are we gonna be the weird ones?

Max Clark (32:37)
You know, for me, I I have this I have this like line that I talk with with companies now. It's like if you're spending over a hundred thousand dollars a month on your cloud, then then we should talk. You're probably still not gonna move. When you cross a million dollars a month in the cloud, you know, then we should start talking, right? It's I'm I've and almost because

Max Clark (32:56)
You know, people forget it's like finance wants the easy button of like make our stuff cheaper and you're like, well, you can buy RIs or savings plans or like really, you know, do the worst thing possible to yourselves and sign an EDP and then you're really hosed. You know? EDPs are the devil. But agreed.

Max Clark (33:14)
y you know, but like what's funny about that is

Max Clark (33:17)
You know, this this is one of those like organizational issues that I've noticed all the time where it's like somebody's screaming like we need to cut costs and then everybody else that ha you need you need in order to cut costs are like, So what? You know, like, I'm I'm really happy that the CFO wants us to like lower money. Get the board to tell me to end my product roadmap for the year so that way I can do this migration for you, you know. And then it's like, let's just pretend like we didn't have this conversation until next year again, you know.

Jeremy Pease (33:42)
Well, I you know, and that that that leads into a whole nother place when you are dealing and sitting in the shoes that that we sit in in our organization and that's nobody ever wants to do that migration and again they don't have the resources to do it. So then once server gear starts to get to a legacy point, they're like, Well yeah, can't we just make that work for another year or two years?

Max Clark (34:08)
You know, I'm not

Max Clark (34:08)
arguing for repatriation onto like owned on premise equipment anymore. You know, 'cause the the also the realization there is is like the the price differential of being on a bare metal, you know, hosted infrastructure service provider versus like owning your own stuff, you know, like th th you can squeeze more drops out. Yeah, you know, but like is it is the juice worth it? You know? And in many cases the differential already leaving the cloud is so astronomically high that like getting that like last few drops out of it doesn't really matter anymore. You know, maybe GPU changes this but we'll we

Max Clark (34:38)
can we can get to that in a in a bit. you talk about you talked about you know obviously regions right and and data sovereignty and this has been a really interesting conversation as well with people because you know what Europe is doing around around data sovereignty I mean so we we we we had China that was like the ultimate like

Max Clark (35:08)
Like thing. Yeah. You know, you want an ICP two license? Like, okay, great. Like like whoops.

Max Clark (35:18)
But but data sovereignty has become much more than just let's use the AWS European cloud region blank, you know, and put our infrastructure there. So how are you how do you help companies through this conversation and then wake up one day and realize like, we have European customers

Max Clark (35:36)
Which means now we're subject to European data sovereignty rules, and but all of our infrastructure is here, and now what do do?

Jeremy Pease (35:44)
Yeah, I I think for us, obviously the US Cloud Act is like the thing that everybody points to. Like, am I affected by that? Right. Right. Whether that's Canada, whether that's the UK, many other countries, that's the question that we're constant constantly getting asked. And basically I say, look.

Jeremy Pease (36:02)
We have a Canadian-owned entity, we have a UK owned entity, and we have a US owned entity for a reason, right? To give protection as much as possible in each of those areas. but you also have to do that with a there's also a legal and judicial piece to this that's gonna happen no matter what's happening, and that's between those two countries. So can I promise you, even as a Canadian-owned entity, that it your data will be safe if the US wants to come after it?

Jeremy Pease (36:30)
I I can't promise you. I the courts are gonna decide that.

Max Clark (36:33)
Well this is part of the thing though, like if you if you say, Okay, you know, let's just use we'll just use we'll s we'll stick to Amazon 'cause they're the biggest, right? Yeah. we have we we want to go into an Amazon an European region with Amazon, right? So now we have data sovereignty in a European region. And like, you know, a Amazon doesn't have access to our data, but they host our data. So now does that meet the requirements that we have to have in region data sovereignty or not? And and the I think the

Max Clark (37:01)
The big conversation that you that that comes up then is is like what level, you know, there's like what the four levels in European, you know, digital services, not digital services act, it's CATA or whatever. The I think it's CADA. I don't know. I'll this this will be a great, you know, fact check, right? Like okay, if anybody wants to like really like light me up in the comments, right? You know, correct correct my European law related to diamond. But there's four tiers of it, right? And you know, once you hit two.

Max Clark (37:27)
You cannot be on infrastructure controlled by US companies, even if the infrastructure is in region. Right. So how do companies then fig what do they do at that point, right? 'Cause

Jeremy Pease (37:36)
Yeah,

Jeremy Pease (37:36)
I mean that again, that's where as I was talking about, you know, the different owned entities, right? Because at the end of the day, Aptum UK is its own incorporated entity within the UK. Now each of them owned, but technically we're if you want to say it at the end of the day, we're Canadian owned. Okay. Because we're headquartered, the overall company is Canadian owned. So the Canada discussion is a little easier, but

Jeremy Pease (38:03)
The data centers obviously have to be there, right? The employees have to be there. And the only access to that data can only be by employees, to your point, that work there in that UK region. and so there's a lot of lines of having to delineate, you know, systems, access, controls, all of those different pieces to make sure that we are remaining compliant, depending on the level that the customer requires from us. and I will say ones that are gonna be like government entity to

Jeremy Pease (38:33)
that you know to that top level, we're not gonna be for them. But if it is data's here, data's not gonna be touched by anybody in any anything other than the UK with a UK-owned entity.

Jeremy Pease (38:47)
we can help you in that that scenario. And so again, Canada's a little easier for us because again overall our company is owned by a Canadian entity at the end of the day. and that's honestly as much as we hear that in the UK, we are hearing it in Canada a lot. yes. Yes. Especially right

Max Clark (39:04)
imagine a lot right now too. Right now nothing

Max Clark (39:08)
in the news going on about the US and Canada

Jeremy Pease (39:09)
No, no, no. And and and I will tell you, like, we're headquartered in Montreal, and Montreal's even like another level beyond Toronto or Vancouver or any of that. Even within their own walls, they want to know that they're in Montreal. They don't want to be in Toronto. Like they won't even be in it, you know.

Max Clark (39:27)
People don't really understand. You know, Canada's like thirteen separate entities. yeah. You know? I mean it really it's you know Yeah. The US is fifty states, but it's really kind of one thing, right? And you go to Canada you're no no no, there's thirteen different things with different trade arrangements between the thirteen different things and they're not like one thing, you know, it's correct.

Jeremy Pease (39:48)
U Yeah. And and and I feel like each time I go to Montreal I'm like I I feel like I'm in a foreign country because everybody's speaking French. French, yeah. You know? and so it's it's interesting 'cause I mean my entire executive team is there in Montreal and we've got a huge team that that speaks French and so I I jump on conference calls all the time and I'm I'm like, there goes the French. I have no idea what they're saying.

Max Clark (40:12)
So is is data sovereignty the what's what's the word I'm looking for? It's like the I don't say Trojan horse. Maybe Trojan horse is the right word. The Trojan horse for real true repatriation into some sort of private infrastructure. You know, and and I'm you know, we we can talk about like flavors of private infrastructure here. Right. maybe that's or or maybe it's not even

Max Clark (40:33)
you know, it's still hosted, managed private infrastructure, you know, for companies. Is this is this the actual killer app that forces this to happen?

Jeremy Pease (40:42)
I mean,

Jeremy Pease (40:42)
we're seeing it. I mean, it it it is driving a lot of dedicated infrastructure. And, you know, to your point, we could talk about multiple levels of what that means, but like truly dedicated servers, routers, switches, I mean like firewalls, like the whole thing, right? Dedicated to a specific customer environment. And even some of them want to be able to control that entire environment, even though we're managing it for them, right? They want to be able to have controls at all levels. And this is this is creating a conversation that

Jeremy Pease (41:10)
really hadn't happened in the last ten years. There were customers that were trying to get at that before the and service providers have held a really fine line, but it is starting to change the dynamic of at what level does the cuss customer want to own it. Because again, this is still their way of not having to pay Capex for the infrastructure, be able to have it all on a monthly bill that's easy for them to consume, but they still want a level of ownership that's

Jeremy Pease (41:35)
different than what's been happening over the last ten years because data sovereignty to them means even more. and in some cases they don't even want our employees to be able to have access to the data in any way, shape or form, which creates another level of complexity.

Max Clark (41:54)
Okay. I I first off I hate this term. You know, there's like it's like it's like all of a sudden we start calling clouds like hyperscaler. It's like it's like where's the committee that comes up with these terms and can I go slap somebody?

Jeremy Pease (42:10)
Right. you want neo clouds now?

Max Clark (42:12)
geez Louise. anyways, so so the the now this idea of like

Max Clark (42:19)
Some companies actually went from on prem and like older enterprises went on prem to cloud, maybe are coming back on prem, right? And you and you s and you see a lot of these numbers that are crazy. It's like, we were running two thousand data centers. And so we had to get out of two thousand data. And you're like, okay, is the closet in the third floor really a data center? You know, like, okay, I know, you know, like you've we've classified it as okay, great, but you know, let's be real here. Right. but this this idea of this movement off of public cloud.

Max Clark (42:49)
you know, large scale public cloud back into, you know, I I'm gonna say let's call it like infrastructure as a service or bare metal infrastructure, right? Like

Max Clark (43:02)
Our average is seventy, seventy two percent cost reduction. E even accounting for EDPs, RIs, like all this different stuff. Right. You know, so I I kinda use like the seventy two number. I think your website says seventy five percent. Yeah.

Max Clark (43:18)
When you're in a conversation with somebody and they're they're repatriation curious, right? Walk me through that conversation of what this looks like from like an initial phone call, initial contact to, you know, this is how we're gonna model out your your differences. This is what we're gonna figure out your level of effort necessary to do this, this is how we're gonna build out infrastructure selections for you. Okay, we've gone through this whole thing, and here's a thing and here's a piece of paper to sign. Now sign it. Like w what if

Max Clark (43:46)
What what is this like, you know?

Jeremy Pease (43:48)
Yeah, I mean it it you know, it starts as as an initial conversation, as you said. Like, you know, what do you guys do? How do you manage this? they want to know more about us and our their our options, right? What is is it a dedicated environment? It is a shared environment, depending on what they're looking for, does it have any ability of self-serve? Because that's a big thing, right, for these customers. And that's that's why we launched, you know, our newest self-service platform, so that

Jeremy Pease (44:17)
As they make that move, if they want to be able to have flexible resources to move up and down like they did in the the public cloud, you don't get that in a lot of cloud service providers today that aren't some of the big guys, right? The digital oceans, the OVHs, Linotes, stuff like that. You don't have a lot of self-service. You can't can't really move your environment. You got to contact a sales rep. You got to get somebody to be able to do that, right? And so they wanna understand what are the options and flavors that you've got that are gonna give them some type of comparison.

Jeremy Pease (44:47)
you know, some type of of likeness to their public cloud experience, right? And so that's the initial conversation is what is this what is this? Right. and

Max Clark (44:57)
What does look like?

Jeremy Pease (44:58)
then we have assessments and basically there's seven structured assessments, which I I imagine you would have seen on the site, but

Jeremy Pease (45:06)
Clearly stating, like, what are you trying to accomplish? And you know, repatriation is one of them, right? So this is the exact assessment we do with customers to evaluate their environment. What does it look like? and how do we actually move that, right? Like you said, there's a migration progress process, all the things that come along with that. And so we assess here's what it looks like, here's what a migration would look like, and here are your cost savings at the end of the day, right? This is this is us validating that.

Jeremy Pease (45:35)
you have a standard monthly amount that you're going to see versus these bills that you've seen that kind of fluctuate but continue to go in this upper right direction, these are going to stay you know static for the next two, three years, you know, based on the contract and all that kind of stuff. And so

Jeremy Pease (45:52)
As we do that, then it is, you know, level of effort for that customer. It's really understanding because that's that's what they want to know. As much it is the cost savings, that migration plan and that level of effort that's gonna be on them versus us, right? you know, everybody loves a racy. We're all we're all here for a racy, right? And so what is what is it gonna look like for them versus us in terms of who's accountable for what to be able to make this happen? Okay. And once you can get them comfortable with what their level of effort.

Jeremy Pease (46:21)
is going to be and that they, you know, they know the pricing is going to be where they need to be, then you're there. But I think one of the points you made before is does that mean they're putting their product roadmap on hold for the next six months because they've got to do a migration and that's the only thing they can handle? They can't really they can't move anything else forward. And so it's another conversation we have to have with them around we know this is how much is on your plate.

Jeremy Pease (46:46)
Do you need us to bring somebody in to take stuff off of your plate because there's other things you've got to do? So there's just multiple flavors to that conversation based on what their team is looking like. And, you know, I'll be honest, some of that sometimes what we found in these customers is they have some people that are really, really, really specific to that public cloud provider in terms of their skills and abilities. So

Jeremy Pease (47:13)
that cost savings is is that person gonna exist in your organization or another organization or are they not gonna be I mean personnel comes into this conversation as well because it it totally shifts the dynamic of what's necessary to support the environment. So that I think those are all the things that come into cost that a lot of people just don't don't think about. They go, well how how could the infrastructure be that much more affordable? Well egress fees is a big one and it's already helping us usually like 50% of the way. but it's the resources necessary to support once we're being able to manage it over them managing it.

Max Clark (47:43)
It's

Max Clark (47:49)
You know, you you go into a public cloud, right, which is about really being able to punt decisions. I mean, for me it's like we don't ha we we could just kick the can down the road usually. We pay a lot more money for it, but we get to kick the kick the can down the road. So we get to kick the can down the road of what our r infrastructure looks like. We you know, what our what our sizing looks like, you know, we get to defer all this stuff and so

Max Clark (48:11)
I think cloud is like the ultimate expression of tech debt for companies at this point. 'Cause it's like yeah, and there's a misnomer of what tech tech debt really is. It's just like, you know, like you you have to maintain your house. You know, at some point you have to paint the walls, right? 'Cause you have kids running around like on skateboards. but but the th the the part of it that's I mean, so egress in intra region or intra A Z data transfer, like I don't I don't think people really have any understanding of like how expensive this really is for them. Correct. And

Max Clark (48:37)
Did they accidentally deploy inside of one region, but then end up in multiple AZs and have like data flowing back and forth between different AZs? It's like just murdering them, you know, and their costs. but also, you know, it's really easy to go into, you know, Aurora or RDS or Dynamo DV or Kinesis or you know, like any of these managed services on top of managed services, and you're like, you know, how much of this like assessment load just turns into

Max Clark (49:07)
Hey, you're paying a fortune to run Dynamo and you can run Cycla or Cassandra instead and we'll just help you run it. And by the way, it's still in the cloud. Or, you know, you're running Kinesis and you should just run Kafka because it's the same flipping thing, and we can help you run Kafka instead of Kinesis and save you eighty percent of your bill, you know? This show exists because of what we do at IT Broker.com. If you're in the middle of a real tech decision right now.

Max Clark (49:31)
New technology, vendor selection, a contract that doesn't feel right, an MA event that just landed on your lap, and so on. We help buyers like you get it right. Independent strategy, sourcing and contract negotiation. No kickbacks, no sales quotas, just someone in your corner. Schedule a call at itbroker.com. Back to the episode.

Jeremy Pease (49:50)
Yeah, I mean, look, again, I think a lot of it came down to the complexity of building this and they felt it was necessary. and you kind of mentioned this sitting in here in this room with these other technologies, inclusive of Cisco, right? Nobody ever got fired for choosing Cisco, nobody ever got fired for choosing Oracle. And so these resources were like, Well, let me get the best of the best and let's go with it, because we're already spending that money being in the public cloud, but technically we're saving some, right? So let's go spend on the on these.

Jeremy Pease (50:20)
things. you know, the databases, the applications, all these things that run on, you know, on top of the basic server infrastructure that there are better options for out there. But AWS and Azure aren't gonna push that. They're not gonna push you towards that type of stuff. They want you to spend on that stuff. That's that's great margin for them at the end of the day, right? But

Max Clark (50:38)
And this goes back to the EDP as a devil thing because as soon as you have an account team assigned to you, your account team is incentivized to grow your account with them. Yeah. Not to make your account less expensive with them.

Jeremy Pease (50:50)
N R

Jeremy Pease (50:50)
R, let's go. Yeah. It's all about net revenue retention at the end of the day. And yeah, so they always want that hundred and two, hundred and four percent growth and constantly pushing it. So that's where it goes.

Jeremy Pease (51:03)
You see this continue growth. There are so many opportunities to help a customer save money at the end of the day. I mean, again, as you stated, whether it's applications or different databases or things that they're putting on top of these you know, this this infrastructure, the egress fees, the people that are necessary to be dedicated to be doing all that. I mean, there's so much money invested into that. now, is it easy to move? No.

Max Clark (51:31)
Right. Right.

Jeremy Pease (51:32)
And and that's as you pointed out, like you kind of keep kicking that can down the road because you don't want to deal with it. But finance is saying you need to be able to find a way to save some money. And this is a truly significant savings, nine times out of ten. I mean, again, whether that's seventy two percent, seventy-five percent, whether that's sixty-five percent, you could save on a monthly basis for a lot of these customers that are spending hundred and fifty, two hundred thousand dollars a month. It's real money.

Max Clark (51:56)
Yeah. No, it's it's real money.

Max Clark (52:00)
I had a CEO tell me once, I won't use the exact numbers to out them, but it's he we were in a conversation and he told me he's like we were spending this percentage of our gross revenue on our cloud. You know, and and it was like and that's how it was explained, right? We're spending this percentage of our gross revenue on cloud and the business is not viable unless we get it below this number. Right. And

Max Clark (52:23)
It was it was actually in some ways it was an encouraging conversation for me because it was one of the few times where they actually came into the conversation knowing what their actual numbers were. Right. And like why it was significant to the business. And then but then you have to have the other conversation, which is, you know, what does it actually take you to make this change? Right. And are you willing to go through that exercise?

Jeremy Pease (52:42)
Yeah, I mean and it's there is not only a significant effort, but there is some cost associated with a with making that change, right? and so but it is a one time cost for a long term savings that is significantly impactful.

Max Clark (52:56)
Yeah. I mean I had another I had another company and they had, you know, on premise they're actually they're, you know, they had an on premise Hyper V environment. They decided to migrate to Azure and the quote was we didn't want to be in the the you know, the data center server business anymore, right? Right. So we wanna we wanna go to Azure. And I'm like, I'm I'm and you and as soon as you have that conversation, you're like, Man, I c I just know what the next conversation's gonna be, right? You know, like six months, a year later, right? 'Cause it takes it takes, you know, a long time to do these things.

Max Clark (53:27)
It's gonna be okay, now we're spending too much money here.

Jeremy Pease (53:31)
Yeah, I I mean I I

Max Clark (53:33)
Finance teams hate the cloud. Like people don't understand this. Like it's it and it's for two reasons. It's really expensive. They don't have direct control over the cost. Correct. Right? They can't they can't freeze the cost. they

Jeremy Pease (53:44)
No. Not pay the bill.

Max Clark (53:47)
can't not pay the bill, correct? and you also, you know, there's a lot of variability in costs as well. And so I've I've seen it a lot of times where it's just like you if forget the sixty seventy percent savings, just being able to say this is exactly what you're gonna spend for the next period of time.

Max Clark (54:02)
becomes a a big win for a lot of companies.

Jeremy Pease (54:05)
Yeah, and I think that's why a lot of times, and I I imagine you do sitting down with CEOs or CFOs or CTOs, whatever it is, you know, that is a relationship I try to have within customer organizations is with the, you know, with the CFO, right? Because that never happens. Like a lot of them don't don't want to be able to have that conversation. That's technology. You just deal with the CTO. but I try to try to walk a fine line of having that relationship with the CFO to go, these are these are those benefits.

Jeremy Pease (54:35)
Benefits. And then, you know, a lot of times the CTO is going to be one to have that conversation, but it's giving them all of those pieces to be able to go to the table and get things approved and get things done. But I mean, even going back to what you were talking about just before that, that inbound and outbound between zones and regions, that's why when I was talking to that customer, I'm like, you built a DR environment. You're now pushing prod on a constant basis into another region. And beyond the fact that you already are a highly transactional business.

Jeremy Pease (55:05)
business pushing data out, do you understand why your egress fees are astronomical?

Max Clark (55:11)
I spent twenty years of my career in Southern California. So I had a DR conversation often. It was always the ten ten o earthquake was gonna hit and we have to have this DR plan, right? Yeah, not I I not a single w single DR plan that we had to design was actually ever implemented by a company because they were expensive. Right. Right.

Max Clark (55:28)
What do people get wrong about DR and cloud? And how do you build sane DR for them? Because this is also a thing with a service provider, right? What do we get to experience? We get to see the fallout of people having data loss, right? And you're like, so so you're trying to stop the train wreck, but how do you actually help people with DR, you know, in today's cloud, cloudy world, right?

Jeremy Pease (55:50)
Yeah. I look, I've experienced this again from the customer end of it. I used to have to do annual DR tests for a government entity. with and we actually had like a physical test where we would move everything, do everything, all the people assigned to it and whatnot to make sure that it was working twice a year. Right. And I think that's the one piece of it. And then in that SaaS company that I was at, I was responsible for making sure the DR worked because obviously

Max Clark (56:23)
I mean the major banks actually have a checklist that requires DR, right?

Jeremy Pease (56:26)
Exactly. So

Jeremy Pease (56:27)
I had to make sure that it worked. And at the time I'll call VMware out because, you know, everybody likes to call VMware out right now. Their their replication tool for DR was horrible. We could not get it to work. Okay. So we went to Zerto. Zerto was finally like on the market utilizing it. It was great. and and Zerto's actual, you know, RTO, RPO capabilities, phenomenal. And I'd

Jeremy Pease (56:53)
It's what I've used in every company I've been in since. because like I my cloud infrastructure guy at each organization, I'm like, all right, where's the app on your phone? Or where is a customer RTO RPO right now? What is going on? Can you see it? Can you have the visibility? And that is where we really help customers is okay.

Jeremy Pease (57:11)
We can build it, we can put all the infrastructure together, but you've got to test it with us. And we've got to link your data into the data replication to make sure that we are meeting the RTOs and RPOs that you've got as an organization. And you have to test once or twice a year to ensure that it's going to work because that's that's the biggest thing. A lot of these people are gonna go, we did a test and it's good. But you

Jeremy Pease (57:33)
You know how many things you change to your environment over, you know, a quarterly, semi-annual, annual basis, and you think all of a sudden it's just still just gonna work at the end of the day? and so it's helping those customers understand what type of changes are gonna impact replication between your production and DR environments. And, you know, w a lot now is these prod prod type environments, right? Yep. But then the next question becomes, all right, well, if you're running prod prod here, what happens?

Jeremy Pease (58:03)
If you actually get hacked? What's the security implementation, you know, implication if one of these environments then it's immediately there? Yeah. Right. And there's there's no stopping that. And so how are you wrapping security around that? So there's so many layers to DR, prod prod, security, compliance, just to make sure that you're thinking about all the implications of what works between these two environments.

Jeremy Pease (58:29)
But I think that's where we really bring expertise to the table and make sure that we can help a customer understand what it really means and what you're going to do. Now, for us, like yes, you you actually have dedicated instances, but because we're not like basically turning up all those instances, you're paying a portion of that, right?

Max Clark (58:48)
I mean there's infrastructure costs, but then when you you know, like what what what do we have to ha I mean, you cloud versus the on-demand or whatever, right? But but then but RPRTO is a is is a is a sliding scale in cost. How

Jeremy Pease (59:00)
Right.

Max Clark (59:01)
you you the initial conversation of course is we wanted instant, right? Yeah. How walk me how do you walk people through the like, okay, here's instant and here's the cost, and like like we're gonna keep backing this number down until we get the number that you're okay with, right? Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Pease (59:16)
I mean, and that and in all honesty, that really is the conversation of what is your DR requirement? What truly is driving your DR decision? We all understand we don't want to go down. We're living in a world of everything's gotta be 24-7. But what is the requirement of this application? Right? How critical is the data and how quickly and synchr you know, how quickly synchronized is that data and its critical nature, right? because

Jeremy Pease (59:45)
Everybody says yes immediately, but you really kind of gotta walk them through the logistics of, okay, if I lost fifteen minutes worth of data, what would that mean to my application and my organization? They don't think about it that way. and so but then you get the price tag and they go, well, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Like we could deal with this level of

Max Clark (01:00:10)
Right.

Jeremy Pease (01:00:12)
Exactly. 'Cause yeah, you just it's you try to you try to speak through them logically to them logically through those steps and try to help them understand, but it nothing nothing changes that conversation quicker than the price tag. Right. Just honestly at the end of the da

Max Clark (01:00:27)
It it's like you know, we help we help companies like f Fiber, right? Like Internet Access Network. Yep. And and after doing this for a really long time, I've learned that the real question you want to ask people are is do you want to spend more or less than five hundred dollars a month on this location? Right? And that's all you need to really ask. And you can you and every 'cause it's you know, everything else is r is is is a is a byproduct of that. I had a CTO and this was a funny conversation. I had a CTO, we were in a conversation about their DR, right?

Max Clark (01:00:55)
And it was specific because they were running AW US East One, right? They're like the center of the cloud universe. And they were having issues with it. And and we were talking about DR and replication and different strategies. And what finally came out in that conversation when we got into like the brass tacks of like what needs to happen was they were in AWS US East One. So that way when US East One went down, they w everybody, the entire internet was offline. Right.

Max Clark (01:01:21)
And so therefore it wasn't their problem. It was like Netflix is down, you know, like this this whole thing, like the entire internet's offline right now. It's not just us. See it's not us, right? Yeah. And and it was again this like layer eight issue, right? Of of like I'm I'm choosing to be here even though I know I'm gonna a problem with it, because when I do have a problem with it, it's not my fault, you know? Like Yeah.

Jeremy Pease (01:01:45)
Well, that's you know, when you're talking about fiber and connectivity and all of that, it's amazing how many times you know, I've been at companies where our our idea was we weren't gonna be in the carrier hotel, but we were gonna be in a facility where we could have dark dark fiber to a carrier hotel. So we could be a little less expensive, but we could give you that really low latency to a carrier hotel and get you wherever you wanted. but it's amazing how many of these companies that

Jeremy Pease (01:02:12)
are super sensitive to latency that still don't understand how if if your data is gonna c traverse the public internet, there is nothing we can do about that. Yes. Like we cannot guarantee any portion of that.

Jeremy Pease (01:02:30)
But how many of them don't understand like you are now traversing the public internet because of the decisions that you've made. You want dark fiber, you want direct connect? I can give you anything you want. We're a great mega port partner. Like we I could throw you anywhere you want and I can give you dedicated anything and I can even just give you a a portion of it. I can give you, you know, I can give you a hundred meg. I can, you know, I can give you ten meg if that's all you want. I can give you any slice it any way you want. But

Jeremy Pease (01:02:55)
They still and they still get frustrated. Well, what's happening here? Well, your uplink is going through the public internet and you didn't want to pay for a direct connection. Well, I g I can't have this, and okay, well, here's what it costs. Well, I can't do that either. I well, what do you want us to do? You it it putting the customer in a decision point of these truly are the cost to do the things that you want to do.

Jeremy Pease (01:03:21)
because they've come to us because they want to be less expensive and at the end of the day, they wanna be able to have some cost savings. They want us to be able to manage it, but then they have expectations of us that we can work some magic in scenarios like that. And I go, We just can't. I I

Max Clark (01:03:36)
Yeah.

Jeremy Pease (01:03:37)
I'm here to support you in every way that I can, but sometime it costs money. And we're not talking even significant amount of money. We're not even talking to egress fees if you were in the freaking public cloud. but you don't want to pay.

Max Clark (01:03:47)
My version of that that I've been having all lately is trying to explain T C P window sizing for, you know, default stacks and the Yes, you bought a ten gig circuit and you've got two hundred milliseconds of latency and there's a reason why you're not getting ten gig across it, right? You know, like there's there's you know, you have to do s you have to do some more work. Right.

Jeremy Pease (01:04:09)
Yeah, internet the whole internet piece is only gonna get more and more complicated. I mean AI is already starting to push it into a complicated realm and I feel like it's f for people to truly understand how to maximize their internet capacity for low latency applications is only gonna it's one of those things you think is going to get more s s simplified, but I think it's only gonna get more complex.

Max Clark (01:04:33)
I'm

Max Clark (01:04:34)
I'm really curious about what this looks like from a skilling standpoint, right? Where you know, we talk you know, it when when I was starting it was it was the whole like the COBOL pro programmer was a dinosaur and we and they were aging out, but we'd already crossed that inflection point where COBOL wasn't going away and whoever was left around that could program COBOL was like could could dictate their I mean they were like, I want a private jet, you know, and I like, Sure, we'll give you a private jet 'cause you we have to fly you out or

Jeremy Pease (01:05:01)
Do

Jeremy Pease (01:05:01)
you know D B two? 'Cause I'm pretty sure your cobalt's running with D B two.

Max Clark (01:05:05)
I

Max Clark (01:05:05)
I mean but but that was a thing and and I kinda feel like I'm the cobalt dinosaur a little bit now because, you know, I know how to build a network. Right. You know? And or it's like I know how to build out a data center. And you and these things are like really you know, like what does it actually entail to take equipment out of cardboard boxes on pallets and put them into a rack and turn them on and put an operating system on them and do that at scale. Yeah. You know, we we've done this with infrastructure with with thousands and thousands of nodes, right?

Max Clark (01:05:32)
And and and you see this like trend is like coming back around again and and it's like what is going to happen as the capacity continues to like I mean we're going like just just going vertical. Right. But there's no skills now because everybody's just like, I just expect the Wi-Fi to work perfectly and and we don't have wires in our office and like we've just always been in the cloud and we don't know what that means, you know, and and that that kind of conversation.

Jeremy Pease (01:05:57)
Well, it's you know, my twins just graduated high school. They're starting college, but I told my son, I said, You're gonna go get your electrician's license. Smart. And I'm just telling you right now, like i in this data center world, like guys that were doing electrician work which were already in high demand just in the

Max Clark (01:06:16)
Yeah. Most expensive circuit you've ever seen in your life.

Jeremy Pease (01:06:19)
Yep. Right. And

Jeremy Pease (01:06:20)
and and then and now they're going into the data center world. And the guys that are specialized on the data center world side of it as an electrician are making even sometimes double that. Right. And so I said, son, I I understand. Right now you think you want to be a lawyer, but I could tell you if you understand where AI is going, mm, that legal practice is gonna be a hard one at the end of the day. and we could go at a whole nother realm on that. But it but it was this is a legitimate skill.

Jeremy Pease (01:06:47)
that is gonna be needed, that is in super high demand, that you just I'm telling you, you you wanna make good money out of school. And I'm gonna tell you right now, this is the way you do it. And so he did. So now he's going into electrical engineering. He's getting his electrician's cert and I'm like, I promise you son, this is this is this is gonna work out for you in the long run. So internet's the same thing.

Max Clark (01:07:09)
He's

Max Clark (01:07:09)
gonna do very well. Yeah. It's okay, marketing question for you, right? So traditional marketing wisdom is, you know, riches in the niches. You know, focus on one thing, have one persona, you know, like like how narrow can you get down? Right. You guys are doing the exact opposite.

Max Clark (01:07:29)
So how much pressure is that internally and you know, also when in when you get into a board conversation, because there is value in being an expert generalist and being able to take people, whether it's a migration from on prem to cloud or migration from cloud and repatriate back to prem or or you know, supporting, you know, five different hypervisors for an environment or three different cloud platforms, right? There is value to that, but it makes a very disjointed marketing pit, you know, conversation at the same time for customer acquisition and customer com you know.

Max Clark (01:07:59)
communication. So what's what's the pitch there? What's the value?

Jeremy Pease (01:08:02)
Yeah. So I I think that's what I've spent a lot of my time other than talking to customers and and getting out is being very, very focused on what our messaging is. I've spent so much time with Vicky, who you know, and our marketing team. I I actually went in and built the the customer problem.

Jeremy Pease (01:08:26)
journey, what does that look like? What are the customer problems? Definitions. What is the competition in the market and where do we differentiate? What is the ICP? What is what is it that we do that sets us apart? Right? Where do we differentiate? and what I don't want to be is everything to everyone. Right. Okay. So that's what I that's what I try to be clear to the team. Yes, we are agnostic.

Jeremy Pease (01:08:50)
But we have to be clear about what agnostic means. It doesn't mean we will just do anything and everything for everyone. There is still a very specific thing that we do when we manage a cloud environment versus when it's an on-prem environment versus when it's a public cloud environment. And there are there are distinct customer problems that we are solving for. And that's what we want to drill into. What is it that the customer is looking for? And those five C's that I talked about earlier, that's that clarity that I'm gonna try that I'm trying to drive to the organization as a whole and to our messaging is the

Jeremy Pease (01:09:20)
These are the problems that we're trying to solve. This is the ideal customer profile that we really need to go for. and it becomes a little complex more to your conversation with the board. They always want to know what vertical are you going after, right? Like that is the word that I've heard from in board meetings for the last decade that I if I never heard it again, I would be super happy. It doesn't mean that it's not appropriate. At my last company, there were four

Max Clark (01:09:42)
Four

Jeremy Pease (01:09:43)
very clear verticals that we went after. That was our space.

Jeremy Pease (01:09:46)
That's what we did because we were very, very siloed and direct about what we were doing and what we're going to accomplish. And you can be very successful that way. When you are doing what we are doing, which is being more agnostic, it's around making sure you're understanding the try and the try the type of problems you're trying to solve for a customer. And

Jeremy Pease (01:10:06)
What are the ways that the customer engages with us? Right. Being clear about the assessments that we do or being clear about the infrastructure solutions that we provide and who that is meant for. So that's what I've spent. I mean, we've had a weekly meeting. I've gone in. I'm actually like building out this documentation to help the team because I want to provide as much clarity around it as possible. because the organization had kind of been in this.

Jeremy Pease (01:10:36)
lack of clarity for a period of time around what it was that we did and what we were direct on. So I'm doing that not only for our customers, for the channel, but for our employees as well. Like we created an employee training that each employee will go through so that they understand what we do and and who we are. I think that's that's the key is you have to be specific about what you're trying to solve for the customer. And

Max Clark (01:10:59)
If

Max Clark (01:11:01)
you say like we're gonna focus on healthcare, you're really saying that you're gonna like verticalize around Epic, you know? Not like and but not infrastructure, because VMware is VMware is VMware, regardless of what application's running on it, you know. we should talk about that next. But it but you know, but but then it becomes really disjoint at the same time because when you go into infrastructure, you know we went through this exercise recently. I think we identified

Max Clark (01:11:29)
A little bit over a hundred different solutions. We were at I I think we narrowed it narrowed it to eighty two that became like our primary like IT estate solution set. Okay. Across almost a thousand service providers. It was nine hundred and sixty-seven different logos when we did this. Okay.

Jeremy Pease (01:11:44)
No doubt.

Max Clark (01:11:45)
And and and people are like, Well, what do you do for a living? I'm like, I don't know how to tell you the answer to this question. You know? Like like and and you know, and and we talk you know, I talk with you know, I've I have some I've some

Max Clark (01:11:59)
excellent marketing talent that that I get to talk to and it's so funny because you know you get they go through those like you know like niching exercises and I'm like okay totally 100% on board believe to you on this and then you talk to our really fantastic customers our clients that we have really strong partnerships with that become like our our like persona you want to duplicate. Yeah and they go, I love working with you because you can do everything for me. And it's like wonderful. You know you know like you're like

Jeremy Pease (01:12:27)
One stop shop for everything.

Max Clark (01:12:28)
I would never

Max Clark (01:12:29)
tell anybody that we specialize in door access controls, but when we had a client with an issue with door access controls in an office in New York, we figured it out for them, you know, like it's it's it you know, cracks me up, but

Jeremy Pease (01:12:40)
Yeah. I mean it it's amazing how you know, the technology spans of the things that you can solve for exist, right? Like you know, especially when, you know, you're going in with what is the overall technology piece, but that can span to door access controls or you know, and I I and even internet, I it's just there's so many ways to solve for the internet problems now. the internet challenges I should say that a company has.

Jeremy Pease (01:13:10)
And whether that's internal, whether that's managing the fact of I mean locking down applications at the desktop level and what you do. And are you wiping the phone? And are you like there's so many control levels to everything that happens in an organization now? That's why I say like the IT expanse that happens with this limited IT team that's confined to a budget, it's so much to manage.

Max Clark (01:13:38)
be really controversial.

Jeremy Pease (01:13:40)
all right. I like it.

Max Clark (01:13:41)
And again, this is gonna this is gonna come back to haunt me. IT is a solved problem. When when I when you you know it's it's 2026. When when if you look back 30 years and we talk about like what was the state of IT in the late 90s? You know, when we really were like in t you know in T4 comes out, there's this migration from netware onto Microsoft Windows, you know, and like

Max Clark (01:14:05)
You know, everybody's running an exchange five five. And then like you come forward. And what I mean by that is like, you know, we went from a situation where you had ratios of of, you know, one IT help desk for like like 60 person average, employee average. And it, you know, we're not solving new problems in IT in most cases. Like there's very it it it becomes expressions of a similar problem that's just surfaced in new ways, right? The GPU.

Max Clark (01:14:32)
The GPU is still physical hardware that requires power and and and a network connection. Now, it wants a whole lot more power.

Max Clark (01:14:45)
Fuck, but.

Max Clark (01:14:46)
You know, in nineteen ninety eight, when we were solving how do we connect an office to the internet and get them proper bandwidth, right? Yep. Versus how do we connect an office and get them proper bandwidth today, like back then it was a modem and today it's fiber, you know, like y you know, there's there's more there's more similarities than not, you know, for me. And that's and that's what's and a lot of times, and this is this is the controversial part of it, is the overwhelming majority is self inflicted wounds for companies. Yeah. Right. It's it's

Max Clark (01:15:16)
Either it's either staffing that's just does not have the expertise that's trying to run fiefdoms, or it's the company trying to push some like really crazy idea down where they don't actually listen to the people that they've hired to listen to, right? It's like

Jeremy Pease (01:15:32)
well, so local company here and talking about IT, especially late nineties, early two thousands. And I remember the day I was working at Microsoft in Seattle at the time when wireless when they came in and set up wireless networking. And I was like, what he's like, no, you're you're connected. I'm like, no, there's not a there's not a wire plug-in here. They nope, it's it's wireless internet. And I was like

Jeremy Pease (01:15:59)
This is insane. We're

Max Clark (01:16:00)
Okay.

Jeremy Pease (01:16:01)
getting we're getting there. but you know, also to the same point, it's you know, when I was working, I wasn't in IT, but I l at Nima Marcus, I was working at Nima Marcus at the time, 2001 to 2006. And I worked for the call center division, I worked for the marketing division, I worked for the buyers division, I worked for all these different entities building VBA on the back end of Excel and Access.

Max Clark (01:16:28)
Yep, yep. The real the this is the real stuff. We're getting into it now.

Jeremy Pease (01:16:32)
I I was building these applications because IT wouldn't touch it, right? Yeah. IT wouldn't touch it at all, but they needed problem solved. And so like in the call center, like I I had the, you know, I had basically all the phone systems directly feed into this reporting. Cause like they were they were

Jeremy Pease (01:16:50)
God, it's just crazy to to think about it these days. But they had somebody who printed out all of these reports of all these call statistics and then entered it into a spreadsheet who then printed out like a 70 page

Jeremy Pease (01:17:04)
packet of data and information and printed out 30 of them and handed them to the different managers, ship supervisors, blah blah blah throughout all this place. And they were, they were keen that in and I I automated the process to do that, gave them an email that automatically shot up all the data and information. they were building scorecards and these people couldn't figure out how to do the report cards. And I was like, seriously? Like

Jeremy Pease (01:17:30)
You want to do a scoring based on a range, like this is it. Boom, done. Access database. Everything. All your report cards for all your employees here and like that. Right. And it to me it was fun to build those solutions. I mean, it w it was fun, but it it was all the stuff that IT didn't want to do. and I think the problem is, you know, shadow IT

Jeremy Pease (01:17:53)
has been, I think, the real thing that causes more organizations heartburn than than just about anything else because people are just out there doing whatever they need to do to solve the problem because IT doesn't have the time to help them do it.

Max Clark (01:18:07)
Well, it comes back to and I have sympathy. I mean I I my entire career is in like in IT. Yeah. You know, if somebody comes to you with a requirement of like you have to solve this problem for us and now it's your problem, now it's your problem. Right. And if it doesn't work, it's your problem. And if it goes down, it's your problem. If it's not backed up, it's your problem. If it gets if it gets compromised, it's your problem. If you need to upgrade, it's your problem, right? Like like y you know, so you know, I get the reluctance and the pushback from the IT teams because

Max Clark (01:18:36)
You know, the people making the request do not a understand like what they're really asking in terms of like like the heartburn and nightmare that the IT team now has to solve for, right? So I'm not I'm not unsympathetic to IT at all. Like it's it's just, you know, we start talking about like, you know, you walk into these environments, you're like, my my network is slow, and you like start digging into it and you're like

Max Clark (01:19:01)
What you know like who did this to you? You know, it's like it's like it's like I'm it's

Jeremy Pease (01:19:07)
Yeah.

Max Clark (01:19:07)
like I am sorry. It's like that kind of thing. Yeah. Let's we should talk about we brought up VM VMware. I wanna talk let's talk about VMware. Yeah, let's talk about it. It's it's it's almost like people are surprised that like VMware is still a top of a conversation.

Max Clark (01:19:27)
You know, because again, like companies what what's the default? Like if you don't have to make a decision, you can just punt it and kick it down the road a little bit, right? And now it just feels like that like we've kicked it down the road enough that people are now like, okay, now we have to do something about it and and and

Jeremy Pease (01:19:41)
Special

Jeremy Pease (01:19:42)
with April of twenty twenty seven coming up, right?

Max Clark (01:19:44)
You know what's gonna be great about that is every single person's gonna know that it that's a date. Everybody. And how many people are gonna completely forget until March of twenty seven that this is an issue for them?

Jeremy Pease (01:19:56)
Hey, we're working through it right now 'cause I'm not getting to that point, not having it happen.

Max Clark (01:20:01)
What Nutanix just announced that they acquired, you know, n three thousand new logos into this. And you know, as a as a VMware service provider, it it feels like there's a few different games in town, right? There's the like can we become big enough that we can still maintain continuity for our downstream? And whether that service providers underneath of us in distribution or it's

Max Clark (01:20:30)
whatchamacallit, or it's our customers. We're gonna be a home where customers can then come to us because we're we're big enough that we exist here.

Max Clark (01:20:39)
Or like you've got to figure out how to get off of this thing. Right. And I mean it it feels like br you know, like they're just pushing the Oracle playbook on this one, which is we're just gonna keep raising the numbers until whoever is stuck staying here is here, and then everybody who's not stuck leaves. And that just seems to be the corporate strategy with this. Yeah.

Jeremy Pease (01:21:01)
Yeah, I mean, look, I Broadcom has has done some interesting things in the three, four years. and pretty much everything they promised the antitrust agency they wouldn't do. Right. You know, to be able to get the deal to go through. and and it's interesting because you know, I I have some understandings of the background. I mean, the amount of churn they actually anticipated for this.

Jeremy Pease (01:21:29)
For what they wanted to accomplish and what that would mean for the actual like margin and capability of the business is more is more astronomical than you would think. Like they they anticipated, like they wanted the churn because they were going to make this thing really, really like just throwing the money out, right? Like it's just money, money is flowing over there. The margin that's coming through is is insane. And so

Jeremy Pease (01:21:57)
Yes, they've put everybody in this position of, okay, well, either we're big enough that we're gonna just stick through it and and roll with it, or we're not, and now we gotta find a solution, and there ain't a whole lot of great solutions that stack up.

Jeremy Pease (01:22:13)
And those that went to the recent VMware announcement, you know, those that are still drinking the Broadcom VMware Kool-Aid are like, Man, now now they've changed the game. Now they've invested heavily in the in the application and the things the nine dot one are doing are phenomenal. Look, I think if you're a cu if you're a company that's gonna have to kick the can down the road and you're gonna have to keep going down the VMware path, you can do it. It's just gonna continue to cost you more and more. And it's unfortunate.

Max Clark (01:22:43)
Okay, so like this is an old thing in in business, right? Where you look at an organization, you say, if you increase the cost to your customer thirty percent, as long as you churn lower than this percent, right, it's a good thing for you. And then you do it again and you do it again and you do it again, and you find your you find your point where you churn higher than what you know is profitable for you, right? Like and and it doesn't feel like they've found that number yet in terms of how tight they can they can dial this screw just yet.

Jeremy Pease (01:23:11)
No, no. So I think, you know, come April twenty seventh it's gonna be interesting to see how how much more that that screw tightens, to be honest.

Max Clark (01:23:19)
I mean so for the record, you know, for people watching, right, what's April 27 mean?

Jeremy Pease (01:23:23)
it's basically when Broadcom came in and and reset all of the VMware contracts, they reduced the number of pinnacle partners, premiere partners, scaled that down, they basically signed three year contracts with everybody. They made everybody lock into a three year contract. And that was from April of twenty twenty four to April of twenty seven. So everybody's in the same contracts. Now, to my understanding, some people were smart and locked that in for a longer period of time. So there may be some other providers out there that have other options.

Jeremy Pease (01:23:53)
options, but for a majority of the providers that are able to still license VMware as a partner, April 27th is that date that a lot of those contracts are coming up. So whether it's the end customer, whether it's a service provider in the middle, whatever it is, April 27th is that three year date that everybody locked in on contracts at the same time.

Max Clark (01:24:12)
And what percentage increase do you think people should be anticipating come come May of twenty seven, right?

Jeremy Pease (01:24:18)
I'd be surprised if it's not at least twenty to twenty five percent. And it's already I mean, if you already look at the numbers of what they are charging for it, I

Jeremy Pease (01:24:29)
I I can't wrap my hand around it. Now look, that's why we have a couple of different options for our customers that want to move off of the platform, right? Hey, we've got a Proxmox solution here if you if you want that. We've got a KVM solution over here. We can make that work for you. And we've actually helped a custom couple customers. We've gotten it off of it ourselves. Like we used to use it internally for some things and we got off of it and moved away. and so we're trying to do that because we're not bought into it, but we have customers that are gonna want it. So we continue to support it.

Jeremy Pease (01:25:00)
Yeah.

Max Clark (01:25:00)
Okay, so we have in the VMware world, you have the hypervisor. Yep. And then you had vSphere, which was most like corporate environments are running vSphere, and then you end up with a service provider of vcloud. Yep. By by the way, I did an evaluation of vCloud for my for ourselves or a previous previous entity, previous life, and I I could not rationalize the cost structure of vCloud of why anyone was signing that deal. Like it it made

Max Clark (01:25:27)
I was not smart enough to figure it out.

Jeremy Pease (01:25:30)
No, you were smart enough to.

Max Clark (01:25:31)
I'm not figuring it out. I was not smart enough to figure it out because there was a lot of people that were doing it.

Jeremy Pease (01:25:36)
'Cause it

Jeremy Pease (01:25:36)
was VMware and as the only game in town.

Max Clark (01:25:38)
But my my question comes into like you you look at these things and there's a lot of stuff that VMware does, right? And when you get into, you know, the platform itself of all these capabilities it has for you, like VM migration, you know, between point A and point B, I there yeah, there's a lot of really cool stuff that the only way they do. Right.

Max Clark (01:26:01)
What percentage of people actually use this stuff that makes VMware unique and and ha they have to stay there, right? Like, I mean, we're we're very much in like nobody gets fired for buying IBM territory with this. Right. You know, but you know, knowing the solution set, the difference between being on a Proxmox or on a Nutanix or on a Pyper-V or, you know, like basically every other virtualization platform known to mankind, right? Like, how many people actually really need VMware today?

Jeremy Pease (01:26:26)
large scale enterprises. And I think that's what Broadcom knows. Right. I think that's why Broadcom continues to push everything up to the biggest customers. Right. Everything they're doing on virtual cloud foundations, on on everything, and the cost rise is because it it's all targeted towards the big enterprises. That's what they want. They don't they wanted to eliminate this low long tail as fast as possible. And they've done they've done a lot of it. but to your point,

Jeremy Pease (01:26:56)
There's so many that aren't using all these things that really differentiate VMware, which is what you think you're paying for, but they're not really using it at the end of the day. There are other solutions that have the virtualization capabilities to do the things for probably 90% of that long tail.

Max Clark (01:27:16)
Fortune hundred or bigger, right? Like you know, you're not like you're you're talking about like a a rounding error percentage c you know on their cost structure, right? Of course. So in what size company is it you know, malpractice for them to stick at this point to stay to stay with us? I mean, this isn't really like you know, part of this becomes

Max Clark (01:27:40)
you know, like we're on a VMware service provider, so we made this choice without realizing we're on this choice right. Yeah. Like that could be an issue. But the other side of it is, you know, there's a there's a s there's a tier where it's just like, you guys know this is coming. Like what do you what are you really doing here, you know?

Jeremy Pease (01:27:54)
Yeah. I if I was to based on my semi educated just because I've watched a number of companies operate on VMware for well over a decade now, if you're if you're under a hundred million in revenue as an organization

Jeremy Pease (01:28:18)
I I'd really think anything under that, and it's probably even like fifty million in revenue to be honest with you. But like you I like if you're under a hundred million in revenue, like there's no reason. Now you could you could start scaling that up more, but it's just the things that differentiate it and make it special.

Jeremy Pease (01:28:39)
are are just so so high up and it and and maybe that's five hundred million, maybe that's a billion. I don't know for sure, but like there's there are a significant number of companies running it that are not getting the value.

Max Clark (01:28:53)
I I go I'm curious also, like what applications are you running that still have to exist in this kind of world today?

Jeremy Pease (01:29:01)
Even better question.

Max Clark (01:29:02)
Right?

Jeremy Pease (01:29:03)
Yeah. Even better question. What are you what are you really running that has to be there? and again, it's that that virtualization capability of being able to manage all that and and move these workloads. I mean, it's a lot like scalability of public cloud, right? I mean, so you have that, but again, it's usually much larger organizations that are doing something like that.

Max Clark (01:29:31)
A company comes to you and they're running VMware on premise, right? So now you have a couple of very distinct different paths that they could go forward. Right. You could you could talk about, you know,

Max Clark (01:29:47)
you know, migration from VMware to another hypervisor. Right. Right. Whether that stays on premise and you you manage it for them or it comes into your environment and you manage it on your environment. Right. Right. And I'd imagine the overw overwhelming majority of that's probably going on to Proxmox today. You know, if you just look industry wide is probably the majority is going to Proxmox. or you've got, you know, your traditional digital transformation, cloud transformation into a public cloud. What you know, like what percentage of companies are taking

Max Clark (01:30:16)
fork A versus fork B and how much of that is just like we don't we're trying to kick this can down the road even farther and not me making a decision that we probably should have made five years ago.

Jeremy Pease (01:30:26)
Well, I I think a lot of companies, in all honesty, I mean, you know, obviously Nutanix is numbers, we've seen the numbers, talking with a number of other providers in the space. I mean, a number of companies once the April twenty two thousand twenty four contracts hit, a lot of companies are like, That's our clock. We got three years.

Max Clark (01:30:47)
Right.

Jeremy Pease (01:30:48)
We need to figure it out in the next three years. and a lot of already made those moves, right? I think the ones that haven't made those moves that are trying to make them by April of twenty seven have kicked that can down the road as far as they can.

Max Clark (01:31:03)
We're six months out. I mean like this is yeah, you know, like six months goes by in a heartbeat.

Jeremy Pease (01:31:07)
It does. And and and and migrations, as we talked about earlier, are usually complex. They're never simple. now you've got some great tools that can help in that, but I mean, even even for customers of decent sized environments and I'll say, you know, 300, 400 VMs, like we will we will tell them it is at least a four to six month process to be able to do that. So that's once you've made a decision and we're actually going to work towards a migration. So

Jeremy Pease (01:31:36)
Yeah, you're you're you're in those final stages. And if you don't make it by April of twenty twenty seven, you're gonna get locked in for minimum a year, but probably another three years.

Max Clark (01:31:49)
Well, that's also one of those things you probably want to be locked in for three years at that point. Right. Because you know

Jeremy Pease (01:31:54)
'Cause you need the time to make that decision the next time around, right?

Max Clark (01:31:58)
So you've got now this other dynamic that flows on top of this, which is, you know, average executive leadership tenure is two years. Right? So so how much of your you know, like what percentage of leadership do you think has just kicked the can down the road and knows they're just gonna be able to walk out the door before that it's even right. I I mean, you know, like

Jeremy Pease (01:32:15)
The decision has to be made. Man.

Jeremy Pease (01:32:19)
I I don't like thinking that way, but I mean look, you can look at my LinkedIn and see see my tenure and places and realize that, you know, two to three years is about the average, right?

Max Clark (01:32:28)
Yeah.

Max Clark (01:32:28)
I mean a CISOs are I think eighteen months, seventeen, eighteen months right now for a CISO, right?

Jeremy Pease (01:32:32)
Yeah, and it's it it's as much, you know, CEO changeover is is about that two year average and usually they want to bring in a new team and that's that's what you find in a lot of it. Yeah. and that's you know, which is why I try to avoid that as much as possible, to be honest with you.

Jeremy Pease (01:32:49)
I don't I don't like that stigma of, I've got to bring this team because this is the only team that can execute and make it happen. Does that make it a whole lot easier? Sure it does. They know how you operate. It's it's it's super easy. But I think that's unfair to the team that you come in on. But all that to say, yeah, I think that's a here, I'm gonna go controversial. That's a lazy mindset. It

Jeremy Pease (01:33:09)
I I am a competitive person. When I did strength finders, like my number one strength is competition. Like I'm just competitive at the end of the day. Right. So to me, it's always driving to accomplish something. So that's not my mindset. But I know that there are plenty of people out there that are like, yeah, no, why why would I make that decision? Why would I force myself to do that, go through those pains? Because in all likelihood I'm not here in a year, and then I don't have to deal with that. and I just

Jeremy Pease (01:33:39)
I don't I don't have that bone in me.

Max Clark (01:33:43)
To some degree, customers are now deciding between, let's call it on-premise virtualized, colo, maybe still virtualized, bare metal, right, which could be either dedicated infrastructure or really like, you know, shared infrastructure, public cloud, right? There's there's a wide variety around that line. How how much of that is really a consultative approach of

Max Clark (01:34:08)
We know we need to make a change, but we haven't decided what change we wanna make. And how much of it is we've already decided we're gonna make this change. Now we're looking for somebody to execute this change for us.

Jeremy Pease (01:34:19)
You know, interestingly enough, it's probably like seventy-five to eighty percent the latter that turns into fifty-fifty by the end of the day. Meaning that they come in very convinced on what they want to do, and then we have to have a real conversation, right? We d we talked about that earlier. It's just it is they come in convinced that this is this is what we gotta do. So this is what we're looking for. And then you have a conversation with them and you ask them what they're trying to accomplish, and you realize

Jeremy Pease (01:34:49)
This is gonna be a difficult conversation, but I've got to tell this customer, what you're looking for is not the right solution for you. Right. and I've done it multiple times. And it's it's interesting because I've watched it happen from a customer coming in

Jeremy Pease (01:35:04)
Sure, they were going to do colo and purchase all this gear. And that colo is only going to cost them about 10 grand a month. And then we had a conversation with them, and we said, based on the size of your IT team and what you want to do with a Capex budget, the only way you're going to accomplish what you want to is to go into this environment. And and and FYI, that's going to cost you 80 grand a month. And

Jeremy Pease (01:35:24)
That is an extremely difficult conversation to go through. But at the end of the day, we walked them through it and they were like, Yep, nope, that's that's actually what we gotta do. we were we were dead set here. So all that to say, yes, I think most come in with the idea and mindset that they know exactly what they're going to do. and then there's a small percentage that go,

Jeremy Pease (01:35:47)
Okay, we need help. We need guidance, which is really, you know, as much what we do the assessments for is to help them guide them towards what they really need at the end of the day. but even then for a decent percentage of those that come in knowing what they want, we kind of gotta walk them towards what's right for them because they need to understand the problem they're really trying to solve.

Max Clark (01:36:14)
I'm I'm trying not to get you in trouble here.

Jeremy Pease (01:36:18)
Well

Jeremy Pease (01:36:18)
look I do that pl I do that plenty on my own, so you know you just you could add to it, that's for sure.

Max Clark (01:36:23)
It's

Max Clark (01:36:29)
It's hard because y you know, we start talking about w something that I've I've I struggle with. And I wanna say I struggle with this. I'm aware of it, right? I'm a I'm a nerd. I love technology, right?

Jeremy Pease (01:36:44)
Yeah.

Max Clark (01:36:44)
Nobody cares about tech outside of us tech nerds when it really comes down to it, right? And so you know, you know, like

Max Clark (01:36:50)
A company doesn't care about their internet speed. They care about their application being fast when they're trying to do something. Right. Like nobody cares about their phone systems. They want to talk to, you know, their customers, right? No, you know, it's like it's like this this disconnect is always really funny where it's like we want to do the thing that the technology enables us to do, but we don't actually care about the technology doing the thing that we need in order to do it, right? Right. You know, you're like, okay, great. Like, can we how do we how do we like line that stuff up? Right. and

Max Clark (01:37:20)
And you see within that though, then decisions be abdicated inside organizations, you know, where it's like an executive own like there's no executive ownership or they abdicate the decision down down the stack to somebody that's has competing priorities, you know? And you're like, you're like, why is this person in this role making this decision that's gonna dictate what the next five to seven years of this company is gonna look like?

Max Clark (01:37:47)
And who's really in charge of this thing? And and and and and that's that's the part that I I think I have the hardest time with over and over and over again is when you see that and you're like, oof, you know, like can I subversively help them through this decision making process and try to not like have the you know, this this disaster happen.

Jeremy Pease (01:38:10)
Yeah, I think that's you know, I have found we have built more presentations for IT leaders over the years for them to be able to deliver to their leadership than anything

Max Clark (01:38:21)
Probably very common.

Jeremy Pease (01:38:23)
else, right? Because giving them all the components of ROI and all these these different pieces in terms of what the comparisons look like, that's that's what we're there to do, right? And and

Jeremy Pease (01:38:38)
the another phrase that I I feel like's out there all the time and I'm sure you get this one all the time is trusted advisor, right? Are you really a trusted advisor to that customer? and and and trust is an interesting thing in terms of this business in this space, right? What does it take to actually build trust with somebody that they're going to believe you that you are doing what is right for them.

Jeremy Pease (01:39:00)
Right. and helping them through this journey, not just to sell them something, but to actually help them through this journey so that they are successful with that with that. So I I I that's something I try to

Max Clark (01:39:12)
You talk about a comparison in a presentation. Like we're gonna build the compare the the presentation where the I the IT team has come. Somebody's told the IT to do something. Correct. Right? Or the IT team has seen a tick ticking clock and they're trying to get ahead of some disaster that they see, right? So now you're gonna help them build like, you know, stay where we're at, migrate to this, migrate to that, migrate to this thing, you know, here's the comparison, here's how much it costs. We try to, you know, equate this down to ROI or TCO. And I hate both of those terms. but that's that becomes

Max Clark (01:39:42)
I what I f what I find that's lacking a lot of the times is how do you then communicate that to the other owners inside of the business? When I say that, like IT doesn't talk finance very well. We we've we've we've been trained to talk ROI and TCO and those are just made up numbers. you know, but like I've I see very few times where IT can talk marketing or IT can talk sales or IT can talk, you know, CEO or IT can talk board, right? Yeah. How do you help the IT team actually

Max Clark (01:40:12)
expand that conversation into like the board's gonna make this decision. Do you want to influence the decision that's being made or not? You know, and and this is how you actually talk board. Because now you're sitting in a position, right, where you've got to talk marketing and sales and customers and operation and board. And I've I've I think about this more more lately as now, you know, like when you have a CEO that's running a service provider, like what's their real job? It's like almost like their real job is to take their experience and help other IT teams

Max Clark (01:40:42)
You know, cross these cross these gaps, right?

Jeremy Pease (01:40:44)
Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's I mean, look, we're going through it right now with what is a a sizable customer for us and and a sizable project that we're trying to win. And each time the team is bringing that presentation, they they send it to me to go, what is it that they need to be thinking about in that conversation? What else besides this data and information shapes that conversation for them? But then it is that's why I try to as much as I try to engage directly with those people.

Jeremy Pease (01:41:14)
Obviously, I'm trying to engage with leadership as well. Like I said, trying to get in with the CFO or the CEO, right? Or the CTO. Like trying to get in with leadership who can have that conversation and help in the background so that that person is supported when they walk into that room by someone who can speak to that. but yeah, I mean I it is one of those things where my team comes to me and goes, Hey, you've sat in the seat of these customers and had to have these conversations and had to pitch these types of things. and we helped a customer pitch an

Jeremy Pease (01:41:44)
approve this this whole thing and now now it's going well it's between us and and one other competitor yet we were the ones that got it approved by the board for it to come in but yet there's this other guy who sits in this other seat who is but he loves these guys and he only wants to use these guys. an FYI that's the platform you're actually going to run on. But

Jeremy Pease (01:42:07)
We don't want to use their consulting services because they're like two to three times as much as what you guys are gonna do. And you guys will actually walk us through the process and be there when we call and all of those things and show up. so I'm sure you can get a little bit from from from what I'm laying out there. Yeah, yeah. But there is, there's so many pieces to it. It's you try to get in at every layer. one of the customers that I just met with last week, you know, one of our board members knew the CFO really well. And so he just reached out to the CFO, they had a conversation and and you know, we helped kind of lay

Jeremy Pease (01:42:37)
some of the backtracks of that. So it is all about try to help that person and and and prepare them with everything you can, but also you gotta s try to build the relationship within that organization to the key decision makers. I mean

Max Clark (01:42:49)
What is your ICP today? Like who is it? What's a no-brainer, slam dunk? We're gonna crush this engagement. This there are there, this is our customer.

Jeremy Pease (01:42:57)
Yeah. Yeah, it it is about one to three thousand employees as an organization, and but usually only about five to ten people on the IT team. Okay. Right? It's like that type of ratio and in it there's so many out

Max Clark (01:43:13)
I know, I know, I'm laughing because you know, I said like thirty years ago it was like one to sixty and you know and you're like, you know, three thousand employees, five IT people IT's a solved problem.

Jeremy Pease (01:43:20)
And it happens. I mean it

Jeremy Pease (01:43:23)
But but to your point, back then it was one to sixty and I remember because I'd I sat on help desk before I, you know, started doing my very cool VBA programming in the background, right? But you know, I sat on the help desk and helped companies, but these these companies now, IT ratios like the IT to to overall people in an organization ratios

Jeremy Pease (01:43:47)
are off the charts.

Max Clark (01:43:48)
Yeah.

Jeremy Pease (01:43:48)
The only ones where they're realistic are in massive enterprises and that's why they're building on these massive public scale clouds and doing all that kind of stuff. Yep. And so that's why it's a it's our I C P and that's why I say to my board it's not a vertical.

Jeremy Pease (01:44:02)
Right. It is a type of customer that has these application needs and a lot of them, a lot of time is compliance is one of them, right? We've got to help them through that compliance journey because you're already stretched on resources and I need PCI compliance or I need HIPAA compliance, right? And I've got to do all these things that are going to be even more beyond that.

Max Clark (01:44:22)
How much of that is is migration work and professional services around migrations, and how much of it is more, you know, we've realized we just can't operate this environment to the level that it needs to be operated. And and the and the phrase that I like that really becomes is, you know, the value of having a good service provider in is so that way you can be an expert on your business and the service provider can be an expert on running whatever piece of that thing is, you know, like you're not you're not, you know, like doing waste management for yourself. You're not you're

Max Clark (01:44:52)
Not hauling away dump tr you know dumpsters, right? Like that's not valuable for your business. So not to equate IT to like the trash, but you know what I mean? Like it's

Jeremy Pease (01:45:01)
Yeah. Well

Jeremy Pease (01:45:02)
it's what we say, you know, working on the business, not in the business. Right. I use that as a like a CEO term myself. But like for those IT resources, it's I've got so many things to do that are going to move the business forward. And these this is the thing that just needs to run in the background as a managed platform. I and I think that's the way they think about it is this is a managed platform that if I ran it on my own, I would have to spend so much time and I've got to think about overnight's

Jeremy Pease (01:45:31)
weekends, all that kind of stuff. If something happens, I gotta be able to manage that. And I think that's as big a component is okay, I can take that completely off my hands. And I can I don't have to try and fight for extra resources. Again, that conversation with leadership to get

Jeremy Pease (01:45:47)
This is what it costs to run our application on an infrastructure is a lot easier than I need three or four heads to do that. Right. Right. and because again, they're gonna look at that as annual salaries rather than okay, that that infrastructure is gonna cost me twenty thousand dollars a month.

Max Clark (01:46:04)
It's

Max Clark (01:46:06)
Until people have run environments, like they don't understand like a twenty-four-seven shift cycle is seven people for one shift. Correct. That's one shift minimum. That no, that's one desk. Yeah. One seat. Yes. Seven people in order to fill one seat twenty-four hours a day. Correct. And and then you start evalu and then you're like, well, how many seats do you actually need filled at what interval? Right. And you're like, all of a sudden you're like, you know, I need thirty people. You know, and that's not realistic for a lot of places.

Jeremy Pease (01:46:34)
Right.

Max Clark (01:46:35)
It's just it's just not.

Jeremy Pease (01:46:36)
It's just not. And that's that's why I say, I mean, you know, five, ten, fifteen IT people for people that you know, thousand people organizations, thousand to three thousand, those are the types of resources that need someone like us. 'Cause they're not they're not gonna get the people that can build stuff on public cloud. And you know, unfortunately, someone who's sat in an organization that had this even when I was running systems on the other side and not infrastructure, you know

Jeremy Pease (01:47:04)
that that server infrastructure in a closet somewhere. Like, you know, it still exists. It still happens. Right. Right. And there's there's no redundancy to that. There's no, you know, it it it brings all sorts of problems. So it this is really a matter of simplifying and I think to your initial question.

Jeremy Pease (01:47:25)
It's not migration is a major challenge, right? Because most time you're gonna have to re-IP and nobody ever wants to hear those words ever in an IT organization, especially if they're limited in resources. but

Jeremy Pease (01:47:37)
but it is they want to know that it's something constant that's managed in the background that they don't have to worry about anymore. And as much as I had to interact heavily with my service provider because it was so critical, a lot of these guys want it to just run and they wanna be able to the customer I sat with last week. He's like, We only open like two tickets a month, but when we open those two tickets a month, they're critical.

Max Clark (01:48:01)
I look at it also around efficiency and specialization. Right. You know, there's there's a s you know, the South Park decades ago talking about coffee, right? And it's like the reason why some some companies get big is because they can deliver a good product or at at scale more efficiently than somebody else. And the more the bigger you get, the more efficient you are. Right. Right. And and so like there becomes a point where

Max Clark (01:48:29)
it's it's actually more efficient for you to selectively outsource certain components because their their efficiency at their scale is just better than what you could hope to achieve internally. Right. Like there there is that line. But now I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm wanna I wanna end here. so you you mentioned self-serve at the beginning of this.

Max Clark (01:48:46)
Self-serve is scary from a service provider standpoint. And and I've noticed that this comes out because usually it's a we had a bad relationship with somebody. So therefore we want to have a new relationship, but we still want to have control. So now we've decided we want control in the new relationship. So we want this co-managed or we want this self-serve environment where we can be in control of it because that's going to solve the problem from our previous bad relationship, right?

Max Clark (01:49:13)
But now if you're a service provider and you have a contractual relationship with a company to do certain things.

Max Clark (01:49:21)
How do you how do you give people co-managed or self-serve without violating the you know the obligation that you've created with the company at the same time as their service provider?

Jeremy Pease (01:49:36)
Yeah, I mean it's a it's a fine balance to say the least. But I would say, look, we we're trying to help the customer accomplish what they need to as quickly as possible at the end of the day, right? And it it's still two very different customers. The one that wants to self serve, the ones that wants to do all this, most of the times, as you said, they want this co managed type of situation. They don't want us managing some of that, but again, they want a a constant, you know, like monthly amount. This is what it's

Jeremy Pease (01:50:06)
Going to be. and so even then when they self-serve, they can build this dedicated environment that gets them a certain amount of resources they could spend up or down, but it's a still a constant cost structure for them, right? So it's accomplishing a number of things. but it's still, again, at the end of the day, the infrastructure is all managed on the back end where they don't have to touch it, right? Where they don't have to they don't have to deal with that. They can just deal with the resources inside the pool of what's available to them, right? And so there still is a point of us supporting them, giving them that constant.

Jeremy Pease (01:50:36)
Constant monthly structure within a data center that's that's structured the way that it needs to, and they don't have to touch that gear at all, but they have the flexibility that they want. And I've said this now as I think the thing that differentiates certain companies in this space, and it's what I call automation when they want it, service when they need it. And it I find that very few providers do that well in this space.

Jeremy Pease (01:51:03)
For the hundreds, as you mentioned, that are out there doing this, they either have put a lot of money to be able to do automation like a Linode with Akamai or a a DigitalOcean. They try to do that, but they don't provide the service on the back end. And you want to throw the hyperscalers, the public cloud out there with them as well, right? They don't want to serve anybody unless

Max Clark (01:51:23)
Nope.

Jeremy Pease (01:51:23)
right? They don't want to do that. or you think about these small managed service providers that have built a whole relationship around service. And that's everything that we do. We are service. But most

Jeremy Pease (01:51:33)
Most of those don't have really good technology behind everything that they're doing, right? They can build good infrastructure and they can manage it for you, but they don't have great technology. And so I think that's where we are trying to be able to be that both parts to differentiate ourselves, is that we want to have really good technology in our apt and prison portal where a customer can self-serve, be able to do those components. But

Jeremy Pease (01:51:58)
When they need to call and they need to talk to somebody and they need service, they've got us. And if somebody wants to send me an email, I'm gonna respond to them. Or if they call me, like I I was on the road between Dallas and Austin in one of my mini trips and a customer called me on the phone, hey

Jeremy Pease (01:52:14)
I need help with this. This is going on. And I immediately pulled over, called my IT team. They took care of it. Immediately done. Right. And so we're trying to walk that balance of being able to be both of those things to companies because the more we go down this future of

Jeremy Pease (01:52:30)
I really have to every time I want a couple of VMs, I've got to call you and I've got to put in a service order and I gotta sign that every time. Really? That's what we gotta do. We're still in that world. I go, No. If you want that, we can provide that for you. And we will still manage the infrastructure and it will still be tied to all this. And you can still see it through the portal like you can all your other infrastructure. But that's what we're trying to solve for at the end of the day is showing customers that

Jeremy Pease (01:52:57)
They can have the best of both worlds. It doesn't exist much in this space, but we want to be that provider that can do that for us.

Max Clark (01:53:04)
Jeremy, this is fantastic. I appreciate coming in and chatting with me for a couple hours. I got I got fifteen more pages of stuff we can talk about. If I can g convince you to come back and do this again.

Jeremy Pease (01:53:15)
Yeah, no, Max, I appreciate it. It was great talking to you. I really appreciate the time today. Yeah.

Max Clark (01:53:19)
Thank you very much. Yeah.