89. What are the top 3 ways to help your customer modernize in the cloud? with Koby Phillips

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Don’t miss Koby Phillips, VP of Cloud at Telarus joining us as a return guest to the show. This time, we’re diving into cloud modernization. Koby talks about some key strategies and secret sauce to leverage moving an opportunity from discovery to implementation to growth. It doesn’t matter if your customer is cloud adverse or already in and wants to innovate further, we chat about multiple ways you can help!

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We’ve got a new track for you this week. We’re back into Cloud, and today we are talking about something hot on everybody’s mind, modernization. Specifically, they were talking about what are the three ways to help your customer modernize in Cloud, albeit Azure, Private Cloud, anything.

Today, we’ve got on with us, Koby Phillips, VP of Cloud Practice at Telarus Koby welcome back on, man. Hey, Josh. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Koby before we dive into it, I know we had you on before, we heard the backstory. We’re going to go into that just a little bit, but I’m going to try a new question out here. I want to know if you could spend an hour picking the brain, any influential tech leader living, deceased, who would you choose and what’s the question that you want to ask them?

It’s a great question. It feels like one of those when we’re traveling, we go to dinner just to get people talking type of question.

I think a lot of people say Elon Musk right now and all of the things that he has. I’m going to go with Steve Jobs. It’s just another obvious answer for all the great things he did.

I believe he’s been asked this a lot, but I still just want to hear it and see if there’s anything different. But it was, how did he rebound from the failure that he personally had, right? When he lost control of his company and went and started off another competitive organization and to see how he would answer that. And what are the key things that he thinks that he’d learned from that experience? Because I think a lot of times we learn more from when we bottom out than when we’re having success and to see how much of that fueled and what he did next. So that would be the question I’d ask him, just because I think that’s one of the coolest things about his story is it wasn’t just like a straight line of success or up and to the right. It was a lot of turmoil, a lot of conflict and things that he had to do to drive to be that successful. Historically, Winston Churchill is one of my favorite figures as well for similar reasons. Like he had some pretty epic fails and then came through in a big way whenever his country needed them the most. So I think that’s another person I know is not a tech leader, but another person I’d love to have a conversation with. Awesome. Yeah, I got to sit down at an event once with Steve Wozniak. And you know, you’ve heard some of the answers and you know some of the things that they’re talking about, but to be able to just sit there and ask and collect and listen and just soak it up and figure out how to apply it, I think those are two awesome choices. I think that’d be great.

Yeah, what about you? I thought about this one, too, actually, and my I mean, you and I are pretty similar. My answer was Steve Jobs, because I just think that, you know, the way that he conducted himself, the way that he approached things, he’s got a lot of great design things out there, simplicity, less is more. I think that product release from the iPhone from 2008 was one of just the most compelling, effective product releases ever. And it was it was so simple. So I just I know we’ve heard a lot of those things, too. And we’ve read a lot of those and we’ve seen people, you know, retweet him and talk about him. But just being able to be surrounded by somebody like that and what you could gleam out of their knowledge, just the way that they look at the world is just so different. And I think hearing that approach is it would just be so cool to see it real time. Yeah, I I I’m a little afraid that we are now like kind of like a basic situation with our responses like we are the pumpkin spice latte tech responses on who we want to chat with.

Like, oh, we love fall. But in all reality, I think I mean, I thought about a lot of different people. But that was when I kept coming to the top of my list as well. So we’ve had you on before. We know a little bit of your history, but for anybody that didn’t get to listen to those previous episodes yet, can you give us a quick snapshot, your role and how you’re focusing to really shape our approach at Dolores to cloud? Yeah, so in the current role, VP of cloud and managed services, which is an important caveat, that second part, really focused on the education platforms, the supplier alignment, making sure all the resources are aligned with the partners and driving the right conversations, jumping into a lot of customer facing conversations as well, more like that executive round table setting and things like that with a few few of our key partners and helping craft some thought leadership and open up new new conversations that they haven’t been having with those clients of theirs. I originally came as Josh, as you’re well aware, I’ve been around to Laris for a number of years, going back to when I was an SPM. Then an RVP, then left and then came back in 2020 to start the practice. And all of the things that I just mentioned have really led to us having a tremendous amount of growth in the space. I think anytime you put focus on something that’s going to drive results organizationally, you put a lot of focus and resources into helping our partners understand the cloud and all of the the environment ecosystem that it really opens up for customers. And we’re seeing an acceleration of partners selling into the space that just once we’re a customer will come and ask them about it. But we’re seeing more partner sell multiple deals per year now than we’ve ever seen. And I think we’re just right for the for this to continue to take off. If you look at the trend lines, I think we’re just we’re still just at the very beginning of what we’re going to see as a huge adoption rate both by our partners because their clients are adopting the technology more and more and putting it into place more than they ever have. And you’ve heard that story with cloud for 10 plus years, but it continues to be true. Right. Now everybody’s getting comfortable with it and you’ll you’ll keep seeing those trends go that way. So if we think about broadening the perspective a little bit with modernization and you know, you’re out there, you’re meeting with partners, you’re training, you’re teaching. How do you help partners envision this art of the possible? Any key strategies with that? Yeah, first and foremost, awareness, right? Awareness of this conversation is welcomed and needed within their customer base, most likely. If you have customers that have already moved to the cloud, the likelihood that they really just did what we refer to as a lift and shift and they’re just running the same type of infrastructure, data sets, et cetera, from when they had it on prim in the cloud. It’s highly likely. I I’ve used this analogy. I beat it to death, but it continues to be the best one.

Not modernizing your environment when you move to cloud is like moving your family from one house to another neighborhood to get your kids into a better school. So you move through all the pain points of moving and get it, you get everything settled. But then you still send your kids to the old school like you moved, but you didn’t really accomplish what you’re looking to accomplish. Past that, I tried to not get too high, too deep, sorry, and stay high level because there is that order of the possible in every situation is going to be slightly different. Some customers might be further along and a modernization of some of their applications, but their infrastructure is still legacy. And so there should be an opportunity there. And there’s different layers and levels to modernization projects that that once you get into the weeds, you’ll understand where that where that’s going to go. And it could be all three. It could be one of the three, et cetera.

But that’s ultimately.

It’s just the awareness that the conversation needs to take place.

So if I’m going down this road, let’s say I’m a customer, I’m thinking about hyperscaler, I’m thinking about private cloud. Regardless, I want to modernize. What do you see in there from a commonalities or just any factors in driving the customer’s decision? Is there one that really has been leaning them one way or the other? Well, again, awareness, right? A lot of companies that come in to come in to get help from partners or partners bring opportunities to us.

They’ve a lot of them have started with like my clients looking to move to Azure. And then when you ask why, they said, oh, well, we’ve been given a cloud initiative or the executives or the board want to do more. They don’t want to invest in hardware anymore. They want to move to the cloud. And we work with Microsoft to Azure makes sense or it’s AWS. And so the idea of utilizing a hybrid environment where they use private cloud or in a combination of one of the hyperscalers, public cloud is something that’s not even on the radar. So by simply bringing that up, a lot of times it helps position our partners in a very strong point of view where they can bring in some expertise and bring additional insight in. Now, historically, I would say I think it’s like 93 percent are utilizing a combination of multi-cloud or hybrid cloud, utilizing a couple of public clouds or a combination private public, et cetera. And you sell some on-prem stuff there. Everything’s going to be a bit of a snowflake, if you will, as far as a uniqueness to that opportunity. I’ve never seen one cloud deal look exactly like another cloud deal.

But at the same time, there are some kind of framework standards that you could rely on. And it’s going to be true about 90 percent of the time. There are some variants here. But if you’re a large organization, mid-market to small enterprises, utilizing the public cloud for their production environment, there’s a likelihood that they’re probably going to be overspending. Right?

I don’t know if I put enough variable words in there to say that there could be a change with probable and likelihood and all that kind of stuff. But long and the short of it is it’s a conversation starter to get you involved in that opportunity. When you talk about modernizing, again, it’s just not taking what you already have and putting it somewhere else and letting it run that way. If you’re in a heavily traditional infrastructure environment, you’re not utilizing containers or you’re not utilizing serverless or infrastructure as code or function functionality as a service or function as a service. There’s all different methods and names for all of this stuff.

Then that’s something that a supplier with a deep bench of resources and skillset can come in and really make a big impact on that organization. You’re starting to see companies point to like, “Hey, we have tech debt. We have a ton of problems here because we just don’t have the right people involved and not in the right skillset.” That’s where having that conversation to position managed services and bringing in companies that can really accelerate that is something that we’re seeing take off.

If we think then, if we’re getting those words of then realizing that there’s a possibility we could help them. If you think then about metrics, how do we help the partners? Let’s say we’ve got those prospects where, “All right, I want to go to cloud, and I see a lot of the value in it for us as a business, the tech, the products, the stack, the management of it.” What are some of these ROI metrics? If you see them trying to report up to the leaders on why we should make this,how do you advise people on just some of these foundational ROIs and metrics as they’re trying to go, “All right, we need to modernize.” What do we look for?

You’re going to look for the same things. Again, it’ll be unique in what the exact results are because of the situation.

We’ll start with an easy one. You’re trying to move your data center from on-prem to even a third-party data center and move to cloud. You start to take in all the variable costs of power and cooling and all of that stuff that you’re getting rid of, the headache of having to manage it yourself and freeing up valuable resources to go do other projects, especially if you have in-house resources, which I just alluded to that a lot of companies don’t. So now it becomes a conversation of value around getting my company from point A to point B and having the timeframe completed on time or project completion percentage.

What does that look like? And what’s the bigger overall business goal that this technology is going to move us forward or the problem it’s going to solve? Then how do we keep it flexible and scalable in a way that we can change or move it whenever we need to or add to it? Those are all the traditional benefits of cloud. Those haven’t changed. Now when you see the additional services and additional technology that’s available to manage applications and data and manipulate those in a way that it gets to the organization and through the organization much quicker than it ever has been able to, that’s where you start to see the legacy impact. And then you start to see when you look at the metrics though, right?

A lot of times you’re going to look at it and the business are going to look to save money or do some cost reduction off the top. And when anytime you’re going from a capital expense to an OPEX expense, there’s going to be some math that needs to be there. And a lot of times it’s not going to add up for the number of years that on a line by line, this is an apples to apples, which it’s really not. But if you’re trying to make it apples, apples comparison, this is what it’s going to allude to. But it’s all those soft costs in big value pieces, all the things I just alluded to that you want to start to put into your scale. And so again, not to try to dodge the exact question, the metrics are going to be business agility, time to market.

There are cases, a lot of cases where there is enhanced cost reduction right off the bat. And especially if you size it, right? You have suppliers that will come in and they’ll say, “Hey, you’re going from on-prem, traditional to cloud. What do you think you need?” And they’ll just take a snapshot and go, “Well, here’s what we have now. Here’s what we need over there.” And they’ll run a tool, right? And there’s multiple suppliers that have these tool sets. They’re like, “Actually, you’re over sizing by three to four X.” So you don’t need all of that space. And if you do that without… And that’s one of the biggest benefits to a private cloud company coming in and doing a lot of things is they’ll be able to size it, right? Not to say that the companies that are the suppliers that support the hyperscalers don’t do it, but I have noticed that’s much more of a conversation that’s happening in the private cloud for that portion of it, and then utilizing the hyperscalers more for advanced sandboxing and DevOps and things like that for those types of companies.

Good points. I want to take that maybe even a step further to if I’m a partner and I’m understanding so me of the ROIs, some of the benefits, the journey, what about now where maybe a customer or previous customers of mine only saw me as I could help them in this technology discipline? Now I’m trying to walk through a conversation with this customer to say, “All right, I can help you in this from a cloud perspective in a different way that I’ve helped you before.” How do you guide that conversation just with the customers alone to help understand where we can add value in that and really just maybe they thought they could do it on their own. How do you help them see that they could value from all of our expertise?

In our trainings, we have a lot of data points, right? My biggest thing is I’m like, “Hey, I’m not giving you data points to try to sell you on being in the training you’re already here, and this is with our partners.” The data points are to turn into talk tracks. If I’m talking to a customer, I’d simply ask them, “Hey, if they’re already in the cloud, when was the last time you looked at a modernization project?” If you’ve done one, how did it go? If you’re looking at doing one, what are the resources? It gets you into business conversations, which is what we’re really wanting everybody to focus on because it just opens up more opportunity. If you’re going to say, “Hey, I’m going to solve your disaster recovery and just point at that,” now you’re selling point products to a degree and you’re cutting off that art of the possible or you could have 20 different conversations.

The other thing too is to just make sure that they’re aware of the resources that you have.

Your team is tremendous in how we bring that up though, right? We’ll take a step back. If you’re a partner who’s traditionally sold network or UCAS and you’re looking to go have a conversation and try to expand it, asking about the things that I… About their cloud and modernization is definitely one way to do it. Getting them talking and say, “Hey, I work with an organization. They have great insight to a lot of customers that are going through similar things or have gone through that. Would you want to set up a meeting just to have a conversation with those guys and I can bring them in and we can talk through what you’re looking to do and help put together a roadmap of what it’s going to take?” There’s a lot of stuff that goes into this that a lot of companies don’t discuss, right? You’ve seen the cloud center of excellence. You’ve seen the footprint and the layout of what can make the guy that both Microsoft, AWS, and other organizations have put together going, “Here’s the steps to a digital transformation.” They talk about getting the other stakeholders involved and all this stuff and it can be a little bit overwhelming. When you can come in and you can bring in some insight and say, “Hey, here are some things that have happened. Here are the resources that we have. We can make this easy.” I was just on a call earlier. It’s a company that’s looking to get off some legacy infrastructure, very strong tech leader, right? The VP understood, but he’s like, “I just don’t get this networking piece of it. I don’t understand this. I could use some help and quite frankly, I don’t have the resources and staff, so let me get you… I would love to get positioned with someone that can just take this over for us.” Understanding that is going to be the biggest piece of it. We’re the fourth person they met with and we’re the only ones that let them talk and didn’t just pitch products the entire time on the call. Yeah, we got to call that out. That’s a really good point. Just let the prospect, let the customers talk. So many times we get into these and we ask the question, “Nobody wants to wait for the answer. We’re all excited to go to the next thing.” It’s one of my favorite things to do to try to be better at is just let’s ask the question and then let them talk. But we can drive home on that same point. “Hey, are you struggling with this?” “Yes, I am.” “Oh, how’s that going?” “How do you see that going?” “How do you see yourself scaling that?” “How do you see that working when your business is five times the size?” And we just get so much information, bring up a great point. Just listen and allow them to talk. That’s a gold point. I think my favorite question to ask now is, “What’s your biggest concerns?” Not like, “What’s keeping you up at night?” But on the project, what’s your biggest area of concern is? Because that’ll open up, maybe it’s 13, maybe it’s the failure or the metrics in which they’re being held accountable to. Understanding all that really helps give you insight into what you need to do to position yourself, to bring that across. And a lot of times, the reason why we have a failure rate of partners getting into these opportunities is simply they’re just not even approaching the conversation because they’re intimidated. And that’s where I’m like, “Hey, you don’t need to be the expert in all things tech in this space.” Nobody is. There’s just too much ground to cover. But be an expert facilitator. Understand the resources you have and understand the few key talking points that you want to target when you’re going into that conversation. I love the movie Inception. I love that movie. And so that concept of planting a seed of an idea and letting it grow within somebody else’s head is something that I’ve always just like, that’s what we essentially see partners doing now. They’ll just plant the seeds of like, “Here’s this, here’s that.” It’s not an immediate need or opportunity sometimes that they’re aware of going into it, but it triggers conversation and they walk out with four, five, six different things. That’s the other nice part about this. Once we get suppliers in there, and it’s pretty much all of them are really good at this. They get into an opportunity. And before a lot of times, they’re even done with a scope of work. There’s four other things that have come out that the customer needs help with just because there’s so much opportunity with the lack of resources and skill set again in this space that’s driving those conversations. And going back to the point.

I’m going to steal a story from Sean Kane, our AVP of the East. So shout out to Sean. He tells a story and he does it much better than me. So if you ever get to have his version of it, totally take it. But it was a pretty big aha story for me. Tell the story about when he was starting out in a sales career and he goes out with his boss and they go to a customer. And he’d went through all the training. He had all this talking points. He did this and this. And he walked out and he was like, “Crush that meeting.” And so he’s telling his boss, “How do you think it went expecting the, oh, you did great.” He goes, “I think you told him everything that you know.” And he kind of pauses and goes, “Now imagine if we knew everything that he knew and you still get to know everything that you know.” So it just highlights the ability to listen more in these meetings. You pick up so many things and it’s just, again, a key question of what are you guys doing in this space? Who’s running the projects? Just keep high level questions and it opens the door. And then you have the resources to bring in. Josh, you know your team stats on certifications and everything better than I do. So feel free to bring those up as we talk about this. But there’s not a better equipped TSD to step in and help drive those conversations. And what I really like about our methodology, that conceptual architecture is we’re driving to a bigger conversation. We’re going to solve the key issues that we’re brought into, but along the way, there’s going to be other conversations that happen and your team’s well equipped to handle this. No, it’s good. You bring up a good point, right? And not that I’m keeping track, but it’s roughly 330 plus certifications, at least at the time of recording this podcast. But why does that matter? Why do partners care about that? They care about it because we have to do that. We have to stay right at the front of it to know exactly what AWS is doing with Elastic Container Services or what Azure is doing with this or what this private cloud provider is now expanding their offering to add security and add WAF and add DDoS or add firewall or whatever it might be. And I think that’s just, we love that stuff. We love to be able to learn and hopefully bring that value out when we’re talking to partners and customers to know we understand we’re empathetic to their environment and what they’re going through. And ideally help solve that to get back to your questions, the answer, what are the concerns that you have with this project and see if we can really make those two together. Yeah. And you asked earlier, what my role is here. It’s to make sure that we have the right alignment with the suppliers that can solve those needs, right? Technology-wise, we’ve had the most reach of any time we’ve ever had in the channel as far as what all technology we can get to. That speaks to the evolution of the channel as much as anything else. But that’s one of the things that I personally look for is, hey, who can we add into our supplier portfolio? But there’s also a fine balancing act, right? We are a consumer-driven channel, meaning we’re not selling it unless the consumer is buying it. And we’re also very much relationship-based. So if you look at our partners and what they bring to the table, the biggest thing that, and we understand this as well as anyone else, your relationships mean everything to you. And the thing about this space is there’s a lot of bleeding edge tech, right, that can be talked about. The adoption rate is still not very high. It’s usually about a two to four-year arc. Something comes out, we start to see it trickle in a couple of years in, and then about four years in, we start to see it accelerate and take off. That’s the same if you look at Collab, you look at CX, you look at every SD-WAN, right? SD-WAN was talked about in 2018 and 2019 all the time. It is now accelerating because now it’s becoming, it’s adopted more and more by customers, and everyone’s looking for it because it’s been out there so much. Same thing with cloud. And what we understand too is that we’re protective and we’re like, “Hey, your relationships mean everything. If you’re bleeding edge and you make your customers bleed, that’s going to be great for your relationships.” And that, again, just understanding the ecosystem and who to bring in, and our suppliers are doing a tremendous job of understanding that as well. And all signs point to this continuing growth and comfort for our partners in adopting these conversations. Can you walk us through a case study or just a use case example? We talk about this a lot of generally what happens is we end up selling something that is dramatically more or opening up more opportunity than when we started. But walk us through an example, somebody that did a transformation through modernization, how it started, how it finished. Key takeaways. Yeah. So the biggest, there’s a couple of big, big ones, so I’ll give you one of those and I’ll give you more of a smaller snapshot too. So the biggest one is still an AS400 migration. So it went through, company had to move out, had to be hosted somewhere else, while it was being hosted. The company ultimately doesn’t want to be in that business anymore. These are some legacy applications. They weren’t quite sure how it was going to work if they moved them into a different infrastructure. So to level set, some of the stuff is 30 years old. If I move it, I don’t think it’ll work on this piece of machinery as is. So I need to refactor it and try it out. And they didn’t have the right skill set or the resources to do it. Continuing theme of the conversation that’s happening in my world. So they had a company come in, do the hosting, drive through refactoring, and then ultimately split it between a private cloud and a hyperscaler. So within the hyperscaler, once they set it up, there was an additional modernization project that’s going to be kicking off soon to put it more into a containerized environment, along with the rest of their stuff that’s now over there. So they’re now, they were about 80% on-prem, 20% cloud-based. Now that’s flipped to the organization’s flip. They still have some legacy stuff on-prem. They just collectively, everybody ran the number of trying the metrics. The stuff that’s on-prem is much more cost-effective on-prem because not everything’s meant to go to the cloud. There’s some stuff that’s going to work. So they’re in a third party data center. They’re networked correctly. So it’s a quick, low latency ecosystem between all the different infrastructure environments, but there’s some additional modernization that can happen. And that’s the other, so this will kind of kill two birds once down. The other example I have was pure hyperscaler. The company went in, sort of to take a modular data set approach, more of a DevOps approach to how everything was structured in the application layer and even the data layer, and started to chop away at it. And it cut down the bill from about 300K, down to about 50K. And the efficiency and the optimization of the organization that came out of those applications and the ability to get to them and to get updated and things like that enhanced tremendously as well. So it saved a ton of money on the front end, but it also had a ton of soft benefits on the back end that turned into hard values for those two examples. Smaller example is simply getting off company, taking some on-prem gear that was outdated, moving over and deciding that after going through about a year of being in a traditional private cloud environment, they started to look at some advanced infrastructure as far as containers and things like that. And again, shrunk the space, shrunk the need, and then approved the ability to get to things faster, which is ultimately the biggest goal here for every organization. How can I get faster, quicker, and more efficient at everything?

Yeah, you know, what’s fascinating to me is that when we started doing cloud years ago, it was common that people, we’d get them to a spot where they’d spend tens of thousands a month. And now we’re talking to people and we’re in conversations with partners and customers that they’re not tens of thousands, it’s tens of millions. And so I think that shows a true testament to the growth of the practice, the growth of the customers needing to lean on the partners, the partners getting themselves into these insane conversations. So it’s exciting to just see that grow and see the size of the opportunities continue to grow and grow and grow and really accelerate off. Yeah, and it’s easy to tell a partner, hey, just bring it over and throw it over the fence, we’ll take care of it. That’s not any most partners, that’s not going to fuck, right? So I don’t tell them to just throw it over. It’s like, hey, you still have a huge responsibility here. The sales experience through this is going to be one that you’re going to learn a lot if this is the first one or two or three of these that you’re going through. So pay attention as much as you can, because it’s duplicatable, right? It’s a methodology, it’s a process that you can take and have different conversations. And now you have your own personal insight to bring into those conversations. The second thing that I would tell you is the customer is generally going to continue to lean on you. And don’t get too freaked out about that. That’s where you can lean in, we’ll back in conversations, we’ll give you all the tools that you need to guide it. But some of these are so specific that the elimination process is a couple of key questions and then, okay, they start to zero it in and it’s going to be this supplier or that supplier. Once those suppliers get in, again, they do a tremendous job of running their processes. And we have been so lucky with some of the suppliers that we have in our portfolio to come in and we’re seeing 40, 50, 60% growth within the account. The partners obviously stay whole, but the ones that I’ve seen repeat it are the ones that are staying close and learning, and then they’re going and they’re getting those conversations going and all these other accounts that they have. So it’s a force multiplier. Yeah. And to wrap up that thought, if I look back globally over the last five years, probably some of our largest deals, to give partners a glimpse into this as to why be so persistent, some of our largest deals, I would say started out with the customer saying, “I’m not really sure I need any help here. I think I kind of have it figured out.” And as we just get deeper into the weeds, more and more and more, it might just be patient with the process, I guess I would say it will result. So in some of those executive roundtables that I’ve been having, I bring up this slide from Gardener and it shows in pilot and process monitoring and deployment, right? All of these things. It’s broken up into six areas, like digital workplace, infrastructure, security, and some others. And there’s dots all over the place. And then they’re color coded and the bigger the dot. And this is something that I show a lot in trainings because it shows the world that executive has either VP or C-level that’s running an IT organization. And where I’m going with this is they have a lot on their plate. So to your point, they think they have a handle on it, but they’re not aware of some of the viewpoints that all of us have and seeing all of the different things that we’ve seen to bring other ideas up, right? And here’s how you can go about it. And here are some steps. And again, it’s a world that we’re collaborating, not competing with your internal teams. We’re extending them or we’re making them better and starting to have that conversation with executives around managing to an MSP contract versus managing to an internal team or doing what I refer to as a hybrid IT viewpoint as far as how they’re approaching it. Some stuff will go over here, some stuff will go over there, but organizationally, I’m going to have my operations optimized throughout, right? No matter which side I’m going to go to, I’m going to have the skillset to manage over here, or I’m going to backfill it. A lot of the conversations we have is if you lose a key person on a project, what’s the reset time to get it back and going? So you lose a lead or somebody that’s crucial. Every executive I talk to and I’ve talked to a lot, we all agree it’s about three to six months on the short end, you get somebody higher, you get them in, they get their feet underneath them. And that’s 90 days on the short side, six to nine months on the long side. Or if you have an MSP and say the MSP struggles, and you decide you have to switch, you have another one ready to go, it’s about a 30 day change, right? You let this one go, and you bring in the other one. And the 30 days is them getting up to speed, picking up the project. 15 of those days, it’s probably them just taking shots at the other one going like, “Oh, I can’t believe those guys did it this way and fixing it,” and things like that. But it’s generally a shorter timeframe. And now that project completion percentage conversation stays intact. And whenever you start to have a conversation around that, like organizationally, are you moving forward as quickly as you want to? And is those timelines being hit in a manner that you would consider to be proud of? Or are you continuing on your way? Because 70%, and this goes into Gartner’s still think that they’re overspending or they’re not optimized in cloud, right? So there’s some opportunity there. Another 70%, according to Forbes, feel like they’re being held back by skill set and tech resources, and they’re not getting to their completed or their stated goals. So there’s two very large, and 70% on both of them, so it’s easy to remember, two very large data points to talk to your customers about and frame that conversation in the right way. Final couple thoughts as we wrap this up. So if I’m a partner, I’m excited, I’m going to engage, I’m going to talk to my prospects.

Sum up for us, partners that are engaging on that. What are some of the key messages you want to see them having in conversations to help develop these opportunities? You know, just to kind of reiterate, stick to the to the business landscape, like, Hey, what are you guys looking to accomplish? What are some of your biggest pain points? The more that you can understand their environment of their internal teams, do you have the right resources? Do you have the right skill set? You if they don’t, that’s, that’s a road that you can travel down and say, Hey, let me get some people involved, I think we can come in and help. And if they’re continually having to hire and rehire or fire, etc, or losing people, that’s that’ll open that conversation up. If they have a great, you know, the team, but they don’t have the vision, that’s another great conversation to come and have. It’s not generally, again, we, we get paid on the management of. So when you get into that, and they have internal teams, you have to be aware that there might just be looking for point products to bring into their environment and manage themselves. So it’s not as exciting, in my opinion, as the other one. But there’s still some room there. And again, a lot of companies think they have a handle on something until there’s a conversation that happens. And they’re like, Oh, I didn’t even realize we could do that. And that triggers a lot of a lot of good goodness for us as well. All right, if we round this off, let’s, you know, we’re in a spot in technology where things are changing more rapid than ever, of course. But if you just look out over the next 12 months, any predictions here fromKoby or trends that you want everybody to kind of keep an eye on to look for? Keep an eye on bare metal. It’s been out there. It hasn’t taken off in the channel. I mean, there’s, there’s spot deals you hear about them. I think when you hear about big deals hitting in a technology, that’s when it still hasn’t been completely taken off. Because imagine when we used to hear about deals in cloud. And we talked about this before. Oh, we’re like, dude, that was a big deal. We heard about it closing here, closing there. And when we look at stuff now, and what comes in, the number of large things that are coming in, it’s you almost get used to it. And you have to stop and go, we used to celebrate a 10th of that, just that one deal. So but bare metal is one that I’d say keep an eye on. There’s some large deals that have hit, there’s a lot of good use cases. What’s going on in data center right now is like super interesting, you’ve seen a huge cost increase, because a lot of the AI companies came in, they took a lot of space and power up. And it’s a it’s a real estate play. It generally is, I mean, a lot of these guys are real estate investment trust. So it’s a sellers market, the cost is really high. Companies are going to be looking at alternative options and bare metal is one that they can do in certain situations. Awesome. Good stuff. All right, lots of golden nuggets in there.Koby thanks for coming on again, man. Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate you having me. Okay, everybody, that wraps us up.Koby Phillips VP of the cloud practice atTelarus We talked about three and a lot more ways to modernize as your customer trying to move the cloud. Till next time.