Ep.119 Managed Services Unleashed in 2024 Pt.2/3 with Jon Lloyd of CBTS
Welcome to the podcast that’s designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech.
Everybody, welcome back here. Today we’re talking about managed services, managed services unleashed, and really how this is going to transform the business landscape this year. So on with us we have the one, the only Mr. John Lloyd, Practice Principal at CBTS John, welcome on, man. Oh, Josh, thank you so much. Long-time listener, first-time caller. I’ve been a big fan of the podcast, so this is a call to a business goal of 2024 was to join you on here. So thank you so much for having me. Love it. Honor as well. Love the partnership with you guys. Can’t say enough good things about the crew. What you and all your peers over there have enabled us to do. So let’s, we got a lot of stuff to cover. Let’s jump in, man. So first of all, let’s hear your backstory. How did you get into this space? Windy Path, Direct Path, any stories, any good blackmail? What do you got? Yeah, so I would say Windy Path, right? I think like most people came out of college with like an arts and science degree, which means sales, right? Like, wasn’t going to be a doctor or lawyer and so you go into sales. And I got my start with Cincinnati Bell, but I always grew up just kind of a tech nerd was always kind of into that. So I started selling technology for a tech company and that transitioned into really needing to know our products to be able to solve customer challenges, right? Novel idea. And so I got deeper and deeper and then that led me into, hey, maybe I want to go into an SE career path. Started doing some Cisco certs, cracking those books. Did that for a while for Cincinnati Bell and CBTS, you know, kind of two joint companies at the time. And then that led into doing it, you know, before networking, right? Not talking to people, but talking to boxes. So ran our networking team for a while. And now currently sit in what we call strategic pursuits. So a field CTO role for the channel and practice principle of strategic pursuits, really large, complex things. So it’s really kind of combining that windy road, a business acumen, sales acumen, technical acumen, and saying, hey, we can be an easy button for our partners, for, you know, trusted advisors for large companies where me and my team can come in and really reduce that sales cycle of having to have 20 different meetings to talk about five different technologies and 10 different buying models. Right? We’re the easy button for sales. Love it. I love that, you know, whatever path anybody’s taken, it’s the right path. But I love that very, very little is it often a quick linear path. I just love hearing everybody’s windy path, right? We were talking about this before. Nine years of school, not a doctor. So I love the, I love arts equals sales. That’s awesome. Good journey there. So talk to us about CBTS for anybody that doesn’t know, or they may have only heard of you is Cincinnati Belt. You guys do so much more than that. So many different advanced services. Walk us through, you talked to us a little bit about your role, but who is CBTS and really what are you guys bringing to the table? Then we’ll get to uniqueness in just a second.
Yeah, I would say, you know, CBTS is whatever you’re looking for. Yes. Right. We do a lot of things, which we’ll talk about that uniqueness, but we’re a managed service provider. We’re a managed security services provider. We always talk to, when we talk, whether it’s with TSTs or with trusted advisors, we’re your multi-tool. Whether that’s you’re looking for it to get into an account and you have an opportunity for a value added resale, right? Just a var, put some hardware, put some points on it. We can do that. If you’re looking for professional services, hey, we’re going to sell the hardware. We really need help implementing it. CBTS can do that. We can do assessments, one-time work, helping us understand where should we go? Where are we at today? What does future state architecture look like? And then really our bread and butter, and what we’re talking about today is managed services. So managed voice, managed network, managed data center, managed backup, managed security, you name it. Anything in that IT space, we can deliver, you know, soup to nuts from selling it, implementing it, tuning it, managing it. So let’s take that a layer further. I always equate to this in the frame of OEMs, right? There’s a lot of OEMs out there. We walk into customers and they have a zillion different buying cycles and timelines and depreciating equipment and new stuff they bought that maybe they don’t know how to use or somebody left, you know, Timmy and IT left. Talk to me about two things. Talk to me about the uniqueness that you think you guys represent in the supplier landscape. And then dare I ask, how many OEMs? Too many. Now, so the first thing what I think is unique is CBTS is a puzzle piece. We would love to come in and take over managing a company’s entire environment. We also understand that’s not realistic. And we see a lot of managed service providers say, well, we need this. This is our flavor. This is our recipe. We really tailor it, right? So we start with, I say we’re 50% baked, meaning we have our tools, we have our processes that we’re going to bring to the table. The other 50%, we’re going to work with you to tailor what does your runbook look like? What do you want us to do for your environment when something happens? And I think that’s really unique. I have a lot of customers that I manage their network environment, but not their server environment. They still use my monitoring platform to monitor their servers. I just my runbook says, don’t do anything with it other than create a ticket and alert the customer. So I think that flexibility and us being a puzzle piece is really important. And then when you talk about OEMs, the simplest way to think about it, I always say if it’s enterprise class, if you can go to Best Buy or Micro Center and buy it, we’re not going to be managing it, right? And that’s really the end. If it’s outside of that, if it’s business class, if they have, you know, as long as it’s under support, right, we got to have whether it’s smart net or whatever your OEM support is. Your typical big ones, I’d say people think most of CBTS in that Cisco, VMware, now Broadcom, Microsoft, Palo Alto, HPE slash Aruba slash Juniper slash whoever they buy next week. By the time we air the podcast, those are really your traditional big players for us. But we see more and more, especially in the SD-WAN space popping up, you know, whether it’s Ford and that, the cados of the world. So we continue to evolve and evaluate. If it’s an enterprise class technology, we’d love to take it on. Yeah, I think that’s that’s part of the reason is, you know, you guys, you guys do so well in that is because you’re just willing to meet anybody where they are. Sure, certainly. We’d love to take over and book and support and manage everything that they have. But timing is, you know, timing is everything in this. And so I love that you guys don’t force a solution down anybody’s throat. But you’ve got this whole subset of OEMs and all the different advanced solutions that you can create a runbook on. And that’s huge for customers, right? As you’re talking to them about where they are now, they’re probably assuming they’re going to get force fed something in some instances, I’d assume. Yeah, I mean, there’s and I think we’ll talk about it, you know, throughout the podcast, but managed services is growing at a clip that we haven’t seen in a decade. And I think that’s a lot of it is for us anyways, it’s understanding that customers sometimes in the past, maybe were resistant to managed services, because they, you’re not going to understand my environment, my network, you’re not going to do it my way. And we get to come in at CBTS and say, that’s fine, help us understand, right? We’ll meet you where you’re at. I think that’s a great analogy. Yeah, let’s talk about that. I always try to dig in and understand the why here, because you know this, right? When we started doing this years ago, people would say, you know, get off my lawn, you’re not, you’re not touching my security appliance, you’re not touching this, just do this one thing that I need you to do. So over the time of the years, I agree that that certainly has changed. That’s one, you know, one of the biggest growing parts of our business. Why is it that customers need so much help? And why is it more and more? I’m not going to lead the witness. So I want to hear your opinion first. Yeah. Yeah. So we could be here all day, I’ll hit kind of what I think are the biggest ones. In the network managed, traditional managed network space, I think it’s simply the people changing jobs. I think COVID, I can now live anywhere, work anywhere, we used to call them server huggers, I need to, you need to come into my office to look at the light blinking. If you don’t see the light blinking, we’ve got an issue. Over COVID, people moved all over the country, all over the world. So some of that, it also wouldn’t come into the office as much. Some of that office centric went away. Two, that opened, you know, what they think they called it the Great Recession, but really it was, well, now you can work remote. So people started job offers were easier to get, and they were for more money. And I think people started to see some of their tribal knowledge walk out the door. So all of a sudden, wait a minute, the guy I trusted that came in every day, isn’t coming in every day and went to another company. Oh, I’m in a bad spot. We then started to see, you know, for the last engineering, especially the application space, there were folks going to Netflix for like $700,000 a year, right? Now it’s unsustainable. It’ll be like two years, and then that’ll come back down to earth. But all of a sudden, it became really expensive to build and staff your own team and there became an economy of scale. All right, well, if my guy moved from New York to Seattle, isn’t coming into the office, average 10 years, like two years on my network team, I’ve got to have a contingency plan. So I think economy of scale and having a trusted partner in the network space became really important. In the security space, there’s a lot of CYA, right? It became, I need to be able to point the finger at somebody when, not if, but when I deal with a breach or, you know, sensitive data gets leaked or a ransomware. I need to be able to show not only publicly for PR, but for my cybersecurity insurance, I need to be able to show I’ve got experts to do it. And so in the past, something like a security operations center, right 24 seven SOC was either really, really far up market and they built it themselves, or it was enterprise and they partnered with somebody. Now you talk to a mid market customer, even SMBs, I mean, SOC is, it’s a firewall. Like it’s an assumed you have a SOC, you have a MDR platform, you have somebody looking at it. So I think those two things, and I had, this was years ago before COVID, I had opportunity to have breakfast with Chuck Robbins, the CEO at Cisco. And somebody asked him a question about living in Silicon Valley. And how do you compete with all that for talent with all these other tech companies and our generation not being loyal, right? Leaving every two years. And he made the comment, he said his dad worked for FedEx or UPS, one of them and worked there his whole life, never made a ton of money, but retired at like 55 and had a pension. And then that stopped. And he said companies, you used to work for a company for life and be taken care of for life. And it was the companies that changed that, not the employees. And so he always talks about how at Cisco, they need to make it that people want to be there. They need to create the environment and understand companies killed that loyalty first. And that’s one thing when you’re at Cisco and have a lot of money. It’s another when you’re at a smaller company. And so I think a lot of managed services, you’re seeing that spike because that generation of working for a company their entire life, that culture doesn’t really exist anymore. And there’s a lot more transient employment. Yeah. I guess the great thing about this for the partners that are listening, when I maybe asked this question, I think I know the answer to this is, when does that talent shortage end? I mean, you think about just in security alone, I don’t even know the analytics off the top of my head, but just in security alone, we’re still just at millions of unfilled jobs and climbing, tack on now, infrastructure, tack on AI and prompt engineer expectations for companies to have and things that they need to build out, large language models and all of that. I just don’t, I don’t see an end in sight for this. And not even being naive here. I don’t, the rate at which technology is changing, the rate at which people are moving all over the place. I just don’t see an end to that, right? It’s a great spot, I think, for folks like yourself and our partners to be in, because it doesn’t seem to be getting any better, right?
Yeah, it’s the economies of scale, right? If you think about like a security operation center, like your average company might have a thousand alerts, 30 incidents in a day and eight that you need to take action on, right? So for you to pay somebody for those eight, like you’re paying for a lot of downtime. But also what about on the days where it’s not eight, it’s 40? Well, now you’re understaffed, it becomes a math problem. You are a cost center, you’re a sunk cost to go and hire all of these security engineers whose time may not be 100% utilized. And that’s where managed services and MSSPs come in, its economy of scale. And for that talent, by the way, an MSP, you’re a revenue generator, right? So think about, you know, the income to go work for an MSSP, where you can support 10, 15, 20 clients, as opposed to being hired by one client to support their environment, which even as a full time job isn’t always full time. So I think that math problem has really led to people looking at managed services. That’s fair. All right, so we’re going to get into an example here in just a sec. One final thought in this before we get deep into the weeds, any, you know, throughout the years in your career, any great lessons, any big mentors that have kind of taught you something that you’ve taken with you as you’ve gone down this journey? I think a big one is I have a mentor, a leader in our organization, he’s no longer with our company, but he’s a senior leader in another organization. And he always told me, inspect what you expect. And going through whether it’s internally in our organization, or if it’s trying to help our customers or build programs to help our TSDs and trusted advisors, you pull a lever, right? You go, this is broken, I need to go fix this, and I pull this lever. And it might take two years to find out what you broke when you pulled that lever to fix this one thing. And so we kind of get sometimes on a path of comfort, and going, it’s working, and we continue on. And so inspect what you expect, make sure that things are operating to the level, don’t take for granted. And I think that becomes, we look at that internally of our lens, but really for a customer. I actually just recently know of an account that put out an RFP. And we’re obviously answering it, and we hope to earn that business. But in it, it says that they’re unhappy with their current managed service provider, they don’t think they have their best interests in mind. And I actually know somebody that works at the current MSP, and they were blown away to read that in this public RFP. They didn’t know, nobody had a conversation. And it was kind of running on easy street, right? And they thought things were going well. And they weren’t having that conversation. So that’s something that stuck with me. Inspect what you expect, and make sure that you’re delivering those outcomes for your customers every day. If you haven’t heard from them in a while, it doesn’t always mean it’s a good thing. Yeah, good. Good. All right, so let’s get an example. So let’s talk about, get into the weeds here, talk to me about a deal that you got brought into, let’s put it in this kind of managed network security SD-WAN area. What was the business problem? What was the tech stack before and after? And kind of what are some of those outcomes?
Yeah, so specifically, I mean, we’ve got over 10,000 SD-WAN locations on, right? So some of them could be global, giving you a very specific, we have a retailer get 800 locations across the US. And for them, the challenge was, look, they’re staffed Monday through Friday, eight to five. What does retail, when do they make their money? Money, right? Friday through Sunday, and it’s not eight to five. So for them, the concept was really twofold, the business challenge. One, we need constant refresh. We need whether that’s refresh, could just be refreshing software, could be patching, right? But we’re never going to patch 800 locations at the same time.
What if the patch is bad, right? We’ve got to have this staggered rollout. Also, financially, for an organization with 800 locations to stay up to refresh lifecycle, they’re never going to go to their business and say, I need 800 sites worth of tech stack, right? That’s going to be a problem. And so we’ve built, you know, what we always look at and we consider, it’s not about the OEM that’s in the tech stack. We’re selling people and process, right? We refresh a third of their sites every year. We have a rolling patch window with each site that we’ve pre-planned for an entire year in advance, that is approved by their cab that has a backup window, that if for some reason we have to back it out or unavailable to do at that time, whatever, we were already preset to make sure we don’t fall behind in a patch window. And so they have this kind of predictive model of this is what every year I buy this much in hardware, it costs this much for CBTS to go and install it and implement it. I have my nights and weekends back, I’m not getting a phone call, you know, at Saturday night at six o’clock, because we’re hemorrhaging money, because of site sound. CBTS is handling that, whether that’s working with our ISP, whether that’s doing an RMA from the provider. And I think that’s really the huge benefit is having this fixed, predictable,
not getting behind, right? Once you fall behind, you have a really big financial burden on your hands. So it’s kind of that end of obsolescence. And so that’s why I always say, there’s a lot of smart companies out there, right? A lot of people can hire an engineer, people process, make progress. And that’s really the value that we bring in a managed service world is that people in process, they don’t fall behind, they have a kind of a well oiled machine of lifecycle management. Like it. Good example. Awesome. All right. Let’s talk about misconceptions. We talked about, you know, customers that love to hug the equipment and kind of the old model and how some of these things were. What’s a misconception that you see from the customer’s perspective about, “Ah, I like doing it myself. Why are you bringing me a managed provider? Maybe it solves my problem.” What’s the misconception? And then help us dispel that a little bit. Yeah. So the first thing I would tell you, there’s two. The first is you’re never going to care about my network the way I do. That’s not a misconception. That’s a true statement. It is right. There is, I totally get it. You built it. However, it also doesn’t scale, right? Like nobody’s going to love your kids the way you do. You still send them to school and their teachers do take care of them, right? Like at some point you can’t do it all yourself. So it’s not that that’s a misconception. It’s that that shouldn’t be a barrier because those people spread themselves too thin. They get burned out. If you’re an IT leader and you have somebody on your IT team that has that mentality, that’s a big risk for you because you don’t want them to get burned out. You want them to have work-life balance. The second misconception. So the first one is, you know, you’re not going to care about it the way I do. The second is, well, if they’re not, you know, 24 seven sitting in the US, it’s an issue. That we have, we have a follow the sun model. So our network operations center, we have Cincinnati, Ohio, we have Toronto, Ontario, and we have Chennai, India. And then we also proved over COVID, mine, my knock and sock can work 100% remote from wherever they’re at, right? All of our tools and things like that. There’s always a, you know, some of our customers we do have to build only in the US for different government or FedRAMP regulations. So it is possible. There’s also a cost and a premium to that. Our Chennai, India office is up over 400 full-time W2 CBTS employees. It’s not outsourced. There are folks, they have their, you know, a local management team that rolls up into our corporate management team. A lot of our senior leaders just actually went and spent 10 days over there two weeks ago. There’s a lot of really, really, really talented people in that organization. And they allow us to deliver enterprise world-class services at a much lower rate to our customer. And so I think that’s a huge misconception is, oh, I don’t want anything offshore. Well, offshore and outsourced aren’t the same thing. And I think that’s something that, you know, at some point, cost versus delivery, right? I mean, they have to meet in the middle. And I think that’s a huge misconception is my service won’t be as good if our partner uses an offshore model. It’s just not the case. It allows us to deliver world-class service at a lower price point. Yeah, I love it. Love to hear that stack of employees. Love to see you guys scaling and growing. And yeah, myth dispelled, myth busted. Walk us through now an example. You showed some of that breadth and depth on the other tech stack. Walk us through managed cloud, data center, things like that. Business problem, tech stack before and after.
Yeah, so here’s one of the things we’ve learned, you can why kind of my team and strategic pursuits exist. You used to have the network team, the voice team, the database team, the application team, the server team, right? That doesn’t work anymore. Everything is move it to the cloud, move it out of the cloud, we got to connect the network to it. And so all of those roles are kind of getting compressed into one. We deliver a lot of different services, whether we have our own infrastructure as a service, our own cloud, a lot of people don’t know that we offer private cloud, public cloud and hybrid. Those are CBTS facilities, data centers, hardware. We also are a Microsoft CSP, we have all the certifications and credentials. We’re also an AWS well architected framework partner, right? We continue to partner with folks around GCP, we try to continue to grow that out. As I mentioned earlier, people are getting $700,000 a year for certain providers, that makes that a challenge. But we had, we have a customer, we had an opportunity that became a customer, all of their workloads were in their own data center, they wanted to get out, they wanted to move to the cloud. They had aging hardware, they had facilities issues, they had power issues. And they didn’t want to move to a colo. But one of the unique stories that CBTS brought to the table, we signed a five year agreement with them, for committed revenue to CBTS. Not to CBTS data centers, not to a specific cloud. And so we in about 30 days, we did a vMotion lift and shift from their data center into CBTS, we actually did a hybrid cloud, we use public networking, we did a verf, and then a vDOM through a multi tended at Fortinet, and we gave them their own VLAN into their own private cloud, right? They did a lot of ecommerce, and so they that all needed to be private. Then we started going to work, we do a PS engagement, 40 hours a week, they get app dev resources from CBTS, we built a CI CD pipeline forum, we started doing application assessments, application dependency mapping, cloud readiness assessments, moving workloads that make sense, things that are maybe internal use that you’d have to pay transit for if they sat outside of Microsoft, we moved those into Azure, and we manage that tenant for things that are maybe public facing ecommerce, we move those things into AWS, and we manage that tenant for them. And so it’s a really great story, because for them, they needed to get out immediately. And their concern was, I don’t want to get locked into a colo provider, that’s going to hold us hostage for five years, because we know long term, we want to do something in the cloud, but we don’t want to blindly jump into the cloud and have apps that aren’t ready. And so I think that’s why I talk about our puzzle piece, and our customization or tailoring, the ability to go, yeah, I’ve got my own thing built on VMware, let’s be motion this out. Now let’s take time to think about what makes sense to move to the cloud. Let’s do cost analysis. And by the way, we’ll move it whenever you want, because our again, it’s five year contract is revenue to CBTS, it’s not to our data center. So it’s a really great story. And by the way, that was a channel opportunity. That was a channel partner of ours that brought that in. And we’re really excited because CBTS, we’ve been had great relationships in the channel. But our first five, six years, we were kind of route switch voice in the channel. And we’re really starting to change we’re complex cloud, we’re complex managed services in the channel. Yeah, love that example, calls on to so many different components of the tech stack. And it’s interesting too, to see that that vision that people have sometimes they, you know, sometimes there’s a strategy is what you do versus what you don’t do. And sometimes people don’t do those things, because they’re not sure how all those components are going to get executed. I’ve got so many of these applications, the dependency mapping its own on its own, seems to keep people from wanting to do that. So to have a have a team like that to do app dev and redesign and build out, I think it probably showed a really good picture of over time, right, if we need to do some application building and redesign, great, we can do that, we can move this application wherever you want. And that’s, that’s powerful to have as part of your migration path, because it gives people options. I love that example. That’s a great one.
Yeah, I think you hit on it, we call it, you know, paralysis by analysis, having to make a decision for the next five years, in the next 90 days, nobody’s going to do that. But no decision is a decision, right? I mean, you end up you made the decision to not act. And so you stay where you’re at with your current business challenges and your current problems. So for us to be able to kind of create this safety blanket for customers to go look, we were playing the long game. We’re in this journey together. Obviously, we have to make money, we can’t just do willy nilly sign contracts and lose money. We owe we owe answers to people above us too. But we want to build something that is us being your partner for the long term. We have an insanely low churn rate. We very rarely when we bring customers on, do they they leaveCBTS as a partner. Now they may have a big shift in their organization, we have a massive customer, global fortune 10 customer that went to a complete insourcing model. So that hurt a lot of the impact ofCBTS But also, you know, who staffed all those people for them,CBTS to our staff augmentation, right, because they knew we were going to be there to really look out for them and put their their needs before ours. Again, making sure contracts were honored and those sorts of things. So it’s something we really hang our hats on and we’re proud of.
Final couple thoughts here. So if I’m a partner, and I’m listening to this, and I want to dive deeper into this, I’ve got a embedded base of customers that maybe I haven’t tackled this with yet, or I’m just I’m out there prospecting. What’s that talk track? What’s the what’s the questions? What’s the killer discovery questions that john Lloyd loves to hear? What do you got? Yeah, so a couple things. The first is I think we spent a lot of time over the past few years, focusing on how a tech stack may not have been meeting the customer needs.
Hey, you shouldn’t have this SD WAN, you should have that or move from MPLS, right? And those those were the hey days, right? The moving from MPLS testy WAN and saving money and getting better performance. That was great. We’re seeing more and more that it’s a business the business outcome to solve isn’t I don’t care if it’s Velo or Silver Peak or, you know, cloud genics. Most of the SD WANs have a lot of great feature parity, they do a lot of great things. We’re starting to solve the challenges not of the network, but of the user experience. And a lot of that user experience is response time, it’s proactive monitoring, it’s, you know, AI ops, it’s being more prevalent in the beginning first being reactionary. And the great thing for that for our partners is, let’s say you partner with CBTS for a 900 site SD WAN deal. It’s a great win and we all high five. And then it takes the next six months, 12 months, 18 months to roll that out. And, you know, the MRR starts to slowly creep up that same customer with their existing tech stack, you know, the questions we ask is what are your challenges today? And is that a process issue? Is it a people issue? Or is it the tech stack? And I think that got confused in the past. We just recently this year brought on a new retailer 900 locations took over management in place. There was a 30 site pilot. And then we hit a button and we ingested 870 more stores. And that billing was day one at full ramp. That’s a really powerful win. Another one at the end of last year that was 1100 locations. They were on a Meraki stack. We wrote a bunch of Python scripts against their API. We onboarded 1100 sites in under seven minutes. That first bill was full killed. Right? Just ended there. Yeah. Right. I mean, like, you’re used to like, you celebrate some massive win and then you get like the first bill and it’s like 1% of that contract, right? So I think that’s the why for partners listening and watching is there’s a lot of great revenue to go get today and start billing the immediate impact. The questions to ask are really what when you have your normal, what are your challenges? Is it the people in process versus the tech stack? The other thing I always encourage people to ask, we get excited, right? We get giddy. We go, what are your challenges? And they say, oh, my network isn’t performing well. Great. Let me talk to you about SD-WAN. Let me go and get all we get very excited. I encourage everyone stopping. Okay, your network. What else?
Is there anything else? I will continue to ask that question. I will make the customer tell me, no, that’s it. Or if that’s enough for now. So as you have those conversations and are uncovering needs, the fact that CBTS was able, you know, that cloud example I gave you, it wasn’t we need to get out of our data center. Great. We could have migrated them over. And that would have been it. What else? We ultimately would love to go to the cloud, but we don’t, our apps aren’t ready. So that became a 40 hour a week PS engagement. Right. Anything else? Well, yeah, we want to go to Azure, we want to go to AWS. But if we sign this contract with you, would you be interested in us managing that? Well, yeah, we don’t. So that’s the other thing. It’s not just the line of questioning. Make the customer tell you that’s it. Gold. Love that. Alright, final question, then let’s look into John Lloyd’s crystal ball, right? Technology’s moving fast. Seems like every day it’s faster. Just look out over the next 12, 18, 24 months, right? Do you see us doing anything different? Are we doubling down on kind of what we’ve already talked about? For partners listening that are just kind of teeing up some of these opportunities and building that out? Where do you see this going? What’s your perspective there? Yeah, so I’m going to avoid the AI and machine. That’s all real. And that’s all true. There’s also, we could talk for days about how bad guys are using it, how good guys are using it. It’s unregulated right now. So this may not age well. Anything I would say could be different in two months after laws actually get. So this, that’s not to say that stuff isn’t happening. It’s not important. Where we’re looking at and having real conversations and impact with customers is the idea around edge compute in bringing together different types of connectivity. So private 5G, CBRS, Wi-Fi 6, now moving into Wi-Fi 7, what that’s going to do around like augmented reality, internet of things, OT, what that creates in security. So we could talk AI and security all day. And sure, there’s a lot to talk about there. But we see organizations going, does it make sense we went multi cloud, right? We went from this cloud first to multi cloud. And now we’re at cloud smart. Does it make sense to move to the cloud? Is it doesn’t need to be elastic? Does it need to be available everywhere? Maybe not. And so as we’re seeing or a lot of organizations go, I need to build compute at the edge. Because I have a lot of IoT, think of manufacturing with robotics with self pickers, handheld scanners, that’s moving more and more into retail, self fulfilling inventory, smart shelves and retail. As there’s more and more use case for IT connected devices, people are building compute at the edge. And then they’re going, all right, well, if I bought a server, and I’m running compute at the edge, could I run domain services on this and not pay to have that up in the cloud? Let me do that locally. What else can we do? Right? And that’s where we’re starting to see 5g private 5g can be a lot cheaper than Wi Fi, it can be more secure than Wi Fi. Doesn’t mean it replaces Wi Fi. That’s another common misconception. But I think that’s really where we’re helping larger enterprises call it 1000 employees and up is understand what needs to stay in the cloud, what should move to the cloud, what should come out of the cloud. And a lot of the come out of the cloud conversation is really around having to build these micro compute services, running containers running, you know, whether it’s Red Hat, OpenShift, Kubernetes, whatever your your control is, kubefort, whatever you’re running there. We’re seeing more and more of that I had to build compute at each site. So why am I paying for the cloud? That’s where I think the future is going is what does my connectivity need to be per site? And what applications need to run locally? Love it, man. Well, there we have it. That wraps us up. All right, Mr. Lloyd, thanks so much for coming on, man. You dropped you dropped, I think 74 nuggets today, if I counted them all right. A lot of a lot of great stuff on there, dude. Really appreciate you coming on.
Thank you for having me. We appreciate the partnership withTelarus I appreciate you having us on to the podcast. Like I said, it’s been a it’s been a goal of mine since I saw the first podcast like 18 months ago. So it took us a while, but I’m glad to get here. I love it. I love it. Good stuff. All right, John Lloyd, Practice Principal at CBTS. And as always, be sure so you can get these alerts as soon as they come out, whether you’re listening on Spotify, Apple Music, anywhere else, go subscribe, go like you’ll get these as they drop every Wednesday. But that wraps us up for today. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus Mr. John Lloyd, this has been Managed Services Unleashed, Unleashed, transforming business landscape in 24. Next Level BizTech has been a production ofTelarus Studio 19. Please visit Tilaris.com for more information.