The Bridgecast with Scott Kinka

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2022 End of Year Recap with Scott Kinka Jan 19, 2023

Show notes

This is a SPECIAL EDITION of the Bridge Podcast with Scott Kinka. Over the last 6 months and 14 episodes, Scott has gotten the opportunity to ask some of the best minds in technology a plethora of questions, including "what is your favorite app" and "tell us where you were and what you were doing when the pandemic started". In addition, he's gotten favorite actors, favorite sports teams and shameless predictions from all of these interviews.

Well, on this episode, we get to ask the same questions of Scott. We learn a little about his past, his previous IT roles and maybe even a nugget or two about being in the popular cover band, Split Decision.

Producer Gene Volpe gets the opportunity to ask Scott all of the tough questions and have Scott dig back on his favorite moments from our episodes so far.

This one was an ode to 2022 while looking forward to 2023. We hope that you enjoy this interesting look into the Chief Strategy Officer of Bridgepointe Technologies and tech evangelist, Scott Kinka.

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Dennis Weikle & Scott Casson of PPT Solutions Jan 09, 2023

Show notes

Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. On this episode, we meet PPT Solutions, Dennis Weikle, who's the CEO, and Scott Casson, the Senior Vice President of Delivery. So, why PPT Solutions? Well, in full disclosure, Bridgepointe Technologies, as you know, the sponsor of this podcast, recently acquired PPT, which stands for People, Process and Technology considers themselves a CX as a service provider. That doesn't mean they're a technology service provider or a SaaS provider. In fact, it sort of means the opposite. They are a services firm that operates in and around those software as a service and platform as a service providers. They deliver consulting, implementation, and managed services around CX. Importantly, they're also a BPO or Business Process Outsourcing Broker. We'll get to what that means in a minute. Everyone is talking CX these days, like it was just invented. Acronym of the year.

We spent some time talking about what CX is, what it isn't. We debated it. We talked about the differences between CX and CCaaS. Without spilling the beans here: CCaaS, really technology platform. CX, a business strategy. Why now? Why is it all about CX today? Is it the pandemic, the changing expectations of consumers? Is it finally now the year of the consumer? Isn’t every year? Why are we constantly reinventing what we call the technologies and platforms that support our engagement with clients? I've said this several times in the pod in the past year, and I'll continue to say it, contact center and CX implementations don't go bad because of broken tech. They go bad because of poor strategy or implementation or unclear objectives, and that's really the gap that PPT Solutions, now Bridgepointe, is filling for businesses. And they give a few really good examples of that on the pod. We talked a bunch about outsourcing agents, getting back to that. What has come to be known as BPO and, and how in some business lines it was taboo before the pandemic. You know, you don't want to call and get somebody overseas. But once everyone went home, businesses realized that they needed more flexibility in staffing and costs, businesses are questioning not only whether they need full-time staff in their contact center, but they're also looking at how technology, or in this case, the broader CX portfolio, can actually serve customers without agents, right? How do we eliminate calls coming into the contact center?

Of course, we ended with our predictions section. We got some great predictions about the Bengals winning the Super Bowl. We talked about Dennis's dream of being a member of an eighties hair band. Don't miss that part. Either way, this was a great conversation and one that I hope you find as thought provoking as I did. So let's get to. Here we are with this episode of The Bridge.

About Dennis Weikle
Founder and Managing Director

Dennis Weikle is a JD Power award winning executive with over 20 years of experience leading small to large contact center organizations, outsourcing engagements, and customer lifecycle transformations. He brings diverse and thoughtful expertise to each client engagement helping create solutions that solve real business problems. Most recently, Dennis was Chief Operating Officer for Direct Energy Residential and prior to that served as Vice President of Prepaid Care and Consumer Account Services at Sprint where he led the organization to three JD Power Awards. He has a track record of success having developed high performing teams, strategic partnerships, and innovative technology solutions.
About Scott Casson
Senior Vice President, Delivery

Scott is a 25-year veteran of the Contact Center/Customer Service industry and had held every possible position within the contact center from starting on the phone as an agent up to, and including Senior Vice President. Throughout the past 15-years, he has focused all his efforts on helping corporations, both large and small, on-shore and off-shore, improving their contact centers by delivering engagements that significantly enhanced productivity, reduced expenses, and improved their overall Customer Satisfaction. While Scott is considered a contact center generalist, he has become a Subject Matter Expert in the areas of productivity improvement through Outlier Management, Workforce Management, IVR and ACD redesign, Outbound Dialing, and Knowledge Management.

Contact Dennis & Scott

PPT: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ppt-solutions/

Dennis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennisweikle/

Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcasson/

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/pptsolutions1

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Sanjay Srinivasan of Vonage Dec 19, 2022

Show notes

Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. My guest on the pod this week is Sanjay Srinivasan. He's the Senior Vice President of Solutions Engineering for Vonage. In his distant past, he served as the Chief Architect for Simple Signal. They were acquired by Vonage to be their business arm about a decade ago.

And because of that, he and I have a long history together at the early stages of UCaaS. Back then we called it hosted PBX. We were sort of early innovators around the broad, soft switch platform that powered a lot of the early providers in the space and that platform would later come to be purchased by Cisco.

We broke a lot of the same regulations. We figured out a lot of the same problems. We broke a lot of eggs together. Scaled some session border controllers for service providers together, and we did all that work along with our great engineering teams. But I can tell you, I don't think it's bombastic to say, that this is a conversation with one of the early pioneers of hosted VoIP and a close friend for nearly 15 years.

We joked that for 10 of those years at various industry conferences, and every year we were like, this is going to be the year of video. Of course, all it took was a pandemic for that to happen, right? And now we feel like we have to have a formal 30-minute meeting to accomplish what we could have covered in a five minute phone call.

Because you know, nobody wants to make phone calls anymore, right? We always want to get on video. Here we are though, both former CTOs, in the VoIP business talking about how humans need face-to-face interaction and how we need to learn to take breaks between our meetings. He shares some insights on the blurring line of who is actually in customer service in the business, a theme that we've heard multiple times in recent weeks.

He also said something that I found incredibly interesting though that and I've added it to my lexicon, “happy agents create happy customers”. Seems obvious, but customer experience always starts with the agent experience. And something we really need to think about if you're redesigning your contact center.

This led us to conversations about communications, APIs, supporting unique business cases, and needing to stop worrying about tech and start worrying about the problems that we're trying to solve before we get into wiring APIs up. Lastly, we wrapped up with soccer becoming popular in the US, the availability of high quality 5G everywhere, how a book reader could eventually become the most important app on your phone and lastly, and most importantly, how the judge in my cousin Vinny, is possibly one of the most underrated roles in modern cinema. So, time to get to it. This is a podcast I've really been looking forward to. My longtime innovation partner and peer, and all around great guy, Sanjay Srinivasan, Senior Vice president of Solutions Engineering for Vonage.

ABOUT SANJAY

Chief Architect, GM, SVP, Business Services, Vonage

Sanjay has over 24 years if experience in the areas of VOIP, UCaaS, Cloud/Hosted Services, SD-WAN, Software Development, Telecommunications and IP networking with time spent on Product Development, Marketing, Telecom Service Provider, IP MPLS and launching businesses. He has launched services in the telecommunications and managed services arena using ground-breaking technologies in the areas of VOIP and Cloud Computing. He has led and coordinated large teams to build disruptive business models and services challenging status quo in the areas of telecommunications.

He has built successful businesses offering Cloud Communications, Hosted VOIP, SD-WAN and IP Networking Services.

Specialties: Specialize in the area of Hosted Services - CaaS & PaaS.

CONTACT SANJAY

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasrinivasan/

Web: http://www.vonage.com

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

D.R. Carlson of Equinix Dec 13, 2022

Show notes

Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm Scott Kinka. My guest on this episode is D.R. Carlson. He's the Director of Segment Marketing for Equinix. We joked a little bit, I asked him what D.R. meant, he said “disaster recovery”. D.R. has been at Equinix for two different stints. He's about to have his second fifth anniversary with the company and is a father of four, 10 to 18 years old, from Ashburn, Virginia. Kind of right where colo all started.

Equinix started as a peering provider. I sort of threw out, hey, I know them as colo and he sort of corrected me. They built colo around their peering network and from there became one of the larger network service providers in the world.

They consider themselves, given their interconnection strategy, an on ramp to the digital economy. I'll describe that a little bit more in a few moments. What I really loved about this conversation, is that D.R. is both a technologist and a marketing guy. He had some really polished answers around some of the things that we talk about on this podcast.

Here's an example. He compared the pandemic to a health scare. Interesting, right? The things that you should do to get healthy aren't really any different than the things that you should do before you're sick. Right? But now those things are more important. He applied that to the pandemic. He used that to explain sort of the impending event that the pandemic became.

If you were doing the right things, you are generally fine. If you weren't, you were sick and you needed to react quickly. We talked about how to think about the digital transformation in 2023, and he made it really simple. The way that Equinix talks the digital economy is that businesses need to focus on three things.

First, interconnecting their core. Second interconnecting their digital systems, and then third, interacting at the edge. Now, I'm not going to describe each one of those things in detail here, and I couldn't do it as good as he does, but generally speaking, if your initiative doesn't fit into one of those categories, don't do it.

I'll let him break that down a little bit more on the pod, but I do think it's a useful way to break down your technology roadmap. He also describes the cloud hangover and what he means by that is running into clouds and looking at them as destinations, when really they're just a portion of an overall network strategy.

Data center, core has moved, but app strive traffic edge is largely now in the home. So consider how people, traffic and patterns flow and that should really be the root of the IT conversation. And this is what in his mind in some cases, is driving customers away from a hundred percent cloud infrastructure into hybrid architectures.

We've heard that repeated quite a bit on the pod so far this year. Everyone is trying to do the same thing; connect more people in more locations with more devices to more information in a secure manner. The lesson I took from it, stop buying tech, and start supporting use cases, understand the users. We wrapped up with his love of Spotify and his desire to play Steven the Irishman in the movie Braveheart. You'll love that.

This chat was a lot of fun and I definitely stole some nuggets that will become a part of my speak going forward. Here is D.R. “Disaster Recovery” Carlson, the Director of Segment Marketing from Equinix.

ABOUT D.R.

D.R. is the Director of Segment Marketing for the Americas for Equinix focusing on joint messaging and go-to- market strategy with Equinix’s largest partners. D.R. has also worked as VP, Sales and Strategic Partnerships for Neovera (Equinix New Partner of the Year 2017), and Oratium a company that built sales messaging for companies, trained Ted speakers, and prepared Executives for Keynote speeches.

CONTACT D.R.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/d-r-carlson-b6431a1b/

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Ashish Seth of RingCentral Dec 05, 2022

Show notes

Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm Scott Kinka. My guest on this episode is Ashish Seth. He's the Vice President of Product Management at RingCentral. Ashish is a recent addition to RingCentral. He's got a legacy and contact center and that's his charter at Ring. Mind you, focusing on the Ring Contact Center product. He was the former Chief Product Officer at LifeSize who if you recall, acquired Contact Center vendor, SerraNova. He was also at one point the Vice President of products at Nice in Contact. So, this is a contact center guy. He's been in Silicon Valley, at the cutting edge for 20 years.

Interestingly enough, he changed jobs twice during the pandemic. I asked him, like I've asked some of our other guests, if he considers himself part of the “great resignation”. He had a really interesting response; he said he “was part of the great opportunity”. And one other thing he added there was breakdowns lead to breakthroughs, a quote that got our producer Gene jumping out of his chair a little bit. He echoed a theme that we've heard from several guests that the pandemic was an accelerator for cloud communications and customer experience technologies. Frankly, we've had security networking data center vendors say the exact same.

I asked them to explain RingCentral's strategy in light of the pandemic. And you know, it was kind of interesting. I mean, you said what you would expect. You see CC one that connect them, but for them it was about intelligent experiences, right? Phone, video meetings, contact center agents, together in a single application. And to him, he felt like the opportunity was very real because of hybrid work, not sort of in conflict with hybrid work, right? How he sees it, you know, what RingCentral's customers are. You know, when most of us talk about hybrid work, we talk about this happy medium between being in the office, being on the road like I am today and being at home and it's really more of an option based scenario.

Ashish's thought was that it's really about work styles, about cognitive enablement, about enabling the styles of work. So in in his mind, some people should always be at home. Some people should always be in the office, and the key is to equip each one of the work styles with the tools that work for them and enable them to have their place in this, sort of, connected workforce. Function-based as opposed to option-based hybrid work, which was just a really interesting way of looking at it.

Since we've both been in the business of developing contact center software, we were talking a lot about where the agent sits going forward which he believes will fall into remote work now more than ever. Given the transiency of the labor force and, you know, and the fact that it's just easy to stand up an agent that way, but we talked a lot about what would be lost in that environment. And the real thing is peer to peer engagement. You know, tap tapping someone on the shoulder, getting help or, or even just therapy after a difficult interaction. Also missing really when you can't sort of tap the shoulder is the role of the subject matter expert in the contact center. Much harder to engage them now.

And that really brought it back for me to this idea of the connected experience, right? Some of these SMEs are not agents, and regardless of who you escalate to, those escalations need to be seamless. You know, the contact center solution in a business has historically sort of sat alone, it's been its own island, but now you've got this blend of mobile video meetings, traditional calls into the contact center. That led us into an interesting conversation about the lines of really who is an agent in the modern customer experience. Those lines are blurring because customers want to interact differently. The information workers never really thought of themselves as agents, and now they're in these workflows. It's really a shift of how we think about customer experience, not sitting off to the side of the business. And of course, look as a UC provider. I asked Ashish about Teams, about Zoom and where he sees RingCentral sitting, how the market sees them. And his answer, you know, was that they're a compliment. They believe they deliver the connected work experience where a truly voice centric is going to focus on a voice centric provider like Ring, where other business will you choose a collab first experience, but integrate it with their quality, their five 9s, their international reach on the backside. So, they are a Microsoft partner, as an example.

So we had a very interesting discussion on direct routing as a result. We talked about hybrid hosted PBXs and kind of what that means going forward and really how all that works. And then lastly, at the end, we had a great chat about virtual reality in the workplace, which you know, not here yet, but certainly I said to him that I would bring him back on the show when these workplace technologies start to get there.

So, looking forward to that in a year or so, maybe two, maybe three. But in the meantime, this is my conversation with Ashish Seth, who is the Vice President of product at RingCentral.

ABOUT ASHISH

I like to think I’ve had great success helping large organizations and senior IT executives drive efficiencies that have led to exceptional results for over 30 years. Essentially, we help them do more with less. But what I am most passionate and proud of is the company and staff I have built at Cannon Group.

Our mission statement is “Building long-term relationships with clients by over-delivering on value and exceeding their expectations.” I feel we do an amazing job at that, and its reflective in the long tenure of our client relationships. Clearly, our staff is doing something right.

My role has evolved into one that focuses on client satisfaction and new solutions we can offer that provide great value and the long-term vision of the firm. Most importantly, I am also focused on motivating and empowering our team by providing a supportive work environment that encourages a healthy work-life balance. It’s a challenging role that I have welcomed and has paid off--this past year we were recognized as a 2018 Top Workplace by Philly.com

My expertise includes: Information technology, telecom strategy, contract negotiation, cost containment, vendor management, new product innovation, business growth and partner alliances

includes his own entrepreneurial venture - CloudSquads, Inc. - that helped enterprises build online customer communities.

As Vice President of Customer Experience at RingCentral, Inc. I am responsible for product strategy, go-to-market plans and roadmap execution for the RingCentral Contact Center and Customer Experience portfolio. My expertise spans CCaaS, UCaaS, CRM Systems, social media engagement and online communities. Prior to RingCentral, Inc. I was the Chief Product officer at Lifesize, Inc - leading strategy and execution of the Lifesize Suite of Contact Center, Meetings and Collaboration solutions. I have held leadership roles in Product Management, Consulting and Engineering at large public companies such as NICE Systems, KPMG Consulting, Oracle as well as startups. My career journey includes my own entrepreneurial venture - CloudSquads, Inc. - that helped enterprises build online customer communities.

CONTACT ASHISH

Web. https://www.ringcentral.com/
Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ash.seth
Twitter. https://twitter.com/ash_seth
LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashseth/

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Emil Sayegh of Ntirety Nov 28, 2022

Show notes

Hello and welcome to The Bridge. I'm Scott Kinka. My guest today is Emil Sayegh. He's the CEO of Ntirety, and a really interesting guy, Lebanese guy, Austin, Texas, UT grad, four kids, two of whom were in college, one at his alma mater, the other enjoying watching a spectacular football season at TCU. Emil is a well established executive in product and cloud role, having spent time at Rackspace, Dell, Codero. His last role was as CEO of Cero and eventually he was tapped by private equity to lead Hostway, who, if you remember, was a leader in shared hosting. Eventually, Hostway merged with hosting.com, a company with a similar history in shared hosting. Which is why I was surprised to hear about the trajectory of the business today.

Ntirety is entirely a different company than you might expect. Yeah, I did that, I guess I'm feeling it coming out the holiday weekend here, but as far as Emil, he, he strikes me as a professional change agent. He led cloud at Rackspace. He's taking companies public. He's been tapped for business turnarounds and exits, and currently in pulling together two similar companies and turning them into something wholly different, centering around managed services and cybersecurity.

In talking about that, he leveraged the old Wayne Gretzky moniker of “skating to where the puck is going”. Really an essential discussion to think about as a technology leader. We can't know what's next, but we do have to consider it. Marking conditions, end risks will change, and being prepared and even taking some chances on what might be next is an absolute requirement for technology leaders, and what frankly makes discussions like those we have here on The Bridge really important. Emil oversaw the merger of Hostway and hosting.com in 2018 with a vision of focus on managed services, but particularly cybersecurity and backup and recovery.

They were rewarded frankly, for that vision when the pandemic struck. We also had an important discussion about security, compliance, and governance, and the expectations on businesses. Making a great discussion short for this intro, no business is expected to be perfect, but you are expected to follow documented best practices. You are expected to have a plan, and most importantly, you are expected to be able to recover, which Emil pointed out is too often not part of the security provider playbook. We talked about the importance of security training, both internally and with a stance towards the supply chain. Supply chain being sort of that uncontrolled partner inside of your four walls.

He mentioned that 40 to 60% of mid-market companies that get hacked do not recover inside of a year. There's a clear ROI to cybersecurity investments, but it's often confused, or in some cases ignored, in favor of actual insurance or cyber insurance. A very important discussion for business executives to listen to.

I challenged Emil to answer the question, or the objection, I should say, of Emil, I'll just increase my cyber insurance. Something that you may be hearing from your executive team or even considering yourself as a technology leader. Emil writes extensively about cybersecurity, but specifically about this topic, in Forbes Magazine.

We'll make sure that we include the link to that in the show notes. Even if you don't have time to listen to the entire pod, please jump to about the 26 minute of the interview portion. I don't want to steal his words, but real lessons to be learned about cyber insurance and how that differs from actually having a real IT governance and compliance policy internally. So, I won't steal his words. Time to jump in. Here we go. My talk with Emil Sayegh of Ntirety.

Contact Emil

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilsayegh/

Forbes article that Emil referenced in this episode:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilsayegh/2022/01/25/the-imminent-death-and-rebirth-of-cyber-insurance/?sh=462279907080

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Chris Cannon of the Cannon Group Nov 22, 2022

Show notes

The Bridge Podcast - Cannon Intro

Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. This episode was a special one. First, because it was in person. I don't get to do a lot of those. And second, because it was with one of our own from Bridgepointe. My guest today is Chris Cannon, founder of the Cannon Group, recently acquired by Bridgepoint Technologies.

Chris is now serving as the managing director of Lifecycle Services for Bridgepointe. That’s why I'm all decked out in my Bridgepointe gear today. Cannon Group is a 20 plus year old MSP. It focuses on technology, expense management, mobile management, transition projects, and strategic sourcing. They're located right here in the Philadelphia market, not too far from where we're filming.

Like most of our episodes, we started talking about their business during the pandemic. They have an inbound contact center for mobile support that needed to be transitioned. They were already on Teams and Teams Voice, which is something we don't hear often. So that transition was seamless and that includes their call queues, an early adopter there.

What was not seamless was Chris's work. He lives only a few miles from the office. He found it easier to work there. He sort of walked around in a surreal, dystopian future, empty office, kind of wanderer model there. Must have been really, really interesting. What also didn't transition well though was the mobile deployments out of the business.

What I mean by that is kidding, as they call kind of mobile staging has to be done in person, right? I mean, he shares a great story about original convenience store chain, that we hear in the east know very well; Wawa. For those of you who don't know, Wawa is a convenience store, sandwich shop, and gas station combo, all over the place. And they're a customer of Cannon Group. They moved from an iPad based, for doing online ordering, to a 4,000 iPad rollout, basically overnight. And, as the mobile desk for Wawa, that meant receiving, unboxing, staging, apply screen protector test, put it back in the box, ship out all, hands on deck, everybody that could be involved from the company working through that.

And if you think about it, this again, challenges that definition of essential. That's become a theme through some of our past episodes on data center and things like that. Workers you wouldn't normally consider to be essential. But, you know, think about it, these were people literally provisioning the tech necessary for people to be able to order food during the pandemic.

I'm not sure it gets any more essential than that. That discussion branch starts over into supply chain. First for laptops being poor and, you know, as a mobile support organization, Cannon was getting calls for laptops, frankly, because customers were trying anything. They didn't have access to those.

But something you don't think about is that mobile devices weren't a problem during the pandemic. And it was because we were in an iPhone refresh cycle at that time. You know, new devices were dug into return to work. We dug into what that means. We talked about work-life balance, culture, committees, type job markets, online, happy hours, what worked and what didn't work.

Something's going to be interesting in there for you, I'm sure. You've got similar stories and could get a chuckle out of some of that. And finally, we talked quite a bit about the economy, the looming recession, the macroeconomic environment that we're walking into and Chris's belief and backed up by research.

He shared some of that research at our tech summit in September, that tech budgets will remain firm during the recession, but that money will move over towards more efficiency and cost containment types of initiatives. He shared that there's usually room in an IT budget, if properly managed.

New IT projects in reality, expense management is not a job that IT people focus their time on. Tech leaders don't have time to focus on mobility, as an example. Mobility is a savings every year on new plans, if properly done, but it just falls into that also job category for IT and tech and even businesses that have formal procurement teams who are supposed to be focused on that are not generally mobile plan experts.

That is just something to think about as you're trying to figure out how you're going to fund your IT initiatives in a compressing economy right now. But either way, it was fun to talk to Chris in person, fun to create an interesting bookend to some of the provider focused conversations that we've been having and really interesting.

To think about the idea that funding, uh, you know, it, new IT initiatives is still out there and available, it just might be buried in your existing expenses. So let's get to it. My discussion with my friend Chris Cannon, Founder and CEO of Cannon Group here in Philadelphia, and now the managing director of Lifecycle Services for Bridgepointe Technologies.

ABOUT CHRIS:

My expertise includes: Information technology, telecom strategy, contract negotiation, cost containment, vendor management, new product innovation, business growth and partner alliances.

CONTACT CHRIS:

Web. https://www.cannongroupinc.com/teams/chris-cannon/
eMail. ccannon@cannongroupInc.com
LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherccannon/LinkedIn

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Craig Patterson of Aryaka Nov 13, 2022

Show notes

Hi, and welcome to the Bridge. I'm Scott Kinka. In this episode, I speak with Craig Patterson. Craig is the Senior Vice President of Global Channel Sales for Aryaka. He’s an interesting high energy, great guy, hockey dad, technologist. He runs his own podcast, incidentally, called Dreamers and Doers. He's invited me to be on that podcast. I've started listening, really good. So check that out. And joining him on his pod might be fun, Dreamers and Doers. But the fact that he's a pod show host should give you a little bit of perspective on this guy's personality. We'll get back to that in a minute.

But in terms of Aryaka, he joined during the pandemic, and he said he is the "great resignation". I don't want to steal his thunder about why he did it and what he was doing; he talks about that in the pod. I'm sure you'll find it interesting, maybe even a little bit personal. Maybe you've thought about it. Maybe you were part of the great resignation.

Maybe you were swept up in some of the fall of 22 tech layoffs. Just interesting feedback from a serious technologist, and somebody who's been very successful in this industry, about the decisions he made during the pandemic. In terms of Aryaka, interesting name, right? It means noble or truthful in Hindi. Aryaka is a global SDWAN.

Winner of Gartner's voice at the customer award multiple times, they generate about 90% of their revenue through partners like Bridgepointe. I asked him how his business changed as I’ve asked most of my guests during the pandemic. And his answer was interesting and it was immediate. “Fundamentally” was his answer.

As an SDWAN provider, Aryaka was, in his words, in the business of connecting big, shiny buildings. And then everybody went right, so they needed to sort of adjust the product. They quickly added VPN as a service offering, and integrated it into the same network fabric.

Ultimately, that became a security and application optimization fabric, and, really became the trappings of what would become a SASE service for them. And, you know, we talked a lot of this sort of conversion, even on the network and data center side. As you've heard from some of our recent guests around having to change their entire strategy to be around applications during the pandemic. A big selling point for them is that they've optimized something like 3,500 applications for delivery, allowing their customers to decide what's important and what's not in terms of delivering access down to their end users.

They feel very strongly because of that influence on some of the success that some of the SaaS companies had during the pandemic. His belief, one that I hold as well, is that the pandemic accelerated technology projects that didn't have an impending event, like tearing down traditional WANs in favor of next generation networking or shutting down local data centers and applications in favor of cloud. It's not like there was a lot of question that these applications or these conversions or these digital transformations made sense. It was just that there wasn't a good reason to just start doing it at that moment, and frankly, the pandemic brought that along.

Aryaka is betting on businesses leaving people at home and unifying that experience with the office. Their belief is that 29% of businesses are deploying SASE today while, another 50% will do so in the next 12 to 24 months. I wonder what that means for the future of former next gen networking technologies like MPLS.

And, in fact, that was a fact that he doubled down on in the shameless predictions sections. Again, his words, not mine: “legacy networks are dead”. That's a direct quote and I'm sure the Bridge production team is going to have a lot of fun with that quote in post production. We bantered a bit about how business travel is back. We talked about Oktoberfest. We mopped up with a little bit of Apple music, eighties hair bands, beer league hockey. His desire to be the third line center on his hometown avalanche. Craig's a high energy guy. It was early in the morning for me. It was two hours earlier for him, but he's a 5:00 AM hockey dad getting to the rink early in Colorado, so he wins that battle.

Let's get to it, my conversation with the very energetic Craig Patterson SVP of Global Channel Sales for Aryaka.

ABOUT CRAIG:

Craig Patterson is an award-winning, results-driven, and motivational sales leader, currently serving as Aryaka’s SVP Global Channels. In this role, Patterson is responsible for Aryaka’s global Channel Strategy, market growth, and mobilization of channel sales and marketing teams across North America, EMEA and APAC. He is credited with launching Aryaka’s Accelerate Channel Partner Program which earned the prestigious 5-STAR CRN Award in 2022. Patterson is also a recipient of the 2022 CRN Channel Chief Award and 2022 Channel Futures: Circle of Excellence Award for dedication, industry stature and accomplishments as a channel advocate. Prior to joining Aryaka, Patterson was the West Division Vice President for Lumen’s indirect channel, where he led the global sales and revenue strategy for a $1billion organization within the Lumen Channel Partner Program. Patterson is a passionate supporter and contributor to philanthropic efforts, and currently serves on the board for the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA). He resides in Colorado with his family.

CONTACT CRAIG:

eMail: craig.patterson@aryaka.com
Web: www.aryaka.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/globalchannel/

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Chris Sharp of Digital Realty Nov 07, 2022

Show notes

Hi, and welcome to the Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. My guest on this episode is Chris Sharp. He's the CTO of Digital Realty. It's not that often that I get to meet someone for the first time on the podcast, but here we were meeting on camera for the first time. Chris has spent seven and a half years at Digital Realty, Equinix before that. Couple tours of duty with traditional network carriers. We commiserated on that a bit. I had some of my own but if you're not familiar with Digital Realty, they are one of the largest colocation operators in the world, and he had some really interesting perspective on approaching the pandemic from a global level.

They got a jump on their US plan, because frankly, they had already experienced some of the hotspots, Singapore in particular, being one of their larger data centers that they had to contend with. So they sort of made their mistakes there, sort of had their plans already in place.

For the US a lot of it was about how to ensure you had talent in physical locations that you didn't get stuck overseas. While sending information workers home, a really interesting way of thinking about sort of the people aspects of that. He also talked about how they had to evolve pretty quickly in COLO because let's face it, the, the digital economy was driven by people in these large data centers during the pandemic. So, you know, increased demand increased install timeframes all based on the pandemic. Even thinking about things like the fuel for backup generators, not being guaranteed from a delivery perspective, were all things they had to contend with. We did get into a discussion about what he thinks is not returning to normal and what they think and what's interesting, you know, Chris shared his feelings about how the internet has fundamentally changed in terms of its traffic patterns. In particular, the flow of traffic from sort of centralized office hubs out to the cloud. Now it's sort of a thousand points of light in the home out to various cloud vendors. All of the sudden, customers were seeing traffic change from a handful of giant nodes to a million users at home on various ISPs.

And here I am thinking about them having real estate challenge. When in reality Digital Realty spent a lot of their effort in the pandemic just figuring out how to re-architect the network based on this new flow and, and based on the way that their customers were interacting with services and interacting in some ways with each other.

It really forced them up the stack as a real estate company to think about application use of their customers. So not just a power pipe and ping business in a lot of ways. I guess that's the digital part of Digital Realty. You know, he shared some trends around what they're seeing with customers.

Moving out, maybe not moving out, but moving some workloads from hyperscalers back into COLO and settling into hybrid architectures, taking more COLO as a result. I shared a blog from the CEO of Basecamp on my LinkedIn last week and, and got a little, I riled up some salespeople online, but it is a real conversation about which workloads belong.

As we're beginning to optimize our workloads to our new reality. And, you know, the move to hyperscale while elasticity and capacity are immediate, not every workload fits very well in the sort of coin operated model of usage and hyperscale. So just a real conversation, one we're having very, very often at Bridgepointe with our customers.

He also talked about capacity being the new currency of the digital age. If you think about it, the big hyperscalers are also consumers of COLO, right? So as they expand, they're competing with customers who are looking for their own data center space, planning your digital footprint is essential if you are buying services really at a real estate level to support your business. Supply chain challenges are not going away. Availability of data center space in your desired geography is not assured and it's one of the things that sort of planning ahead working with organizations like Bridgepointe are really important. In our fun know, shameless predictions section, we talked about personal media, algorithms, what we get served, who owns curation you know, maybe more transparency coming from those providers in the future about how they're delivering content to you. It was an interesting and kind of fun departure from the rest of the conversation, but it was really thought provoking. At a high level this was a different conversation. We've talked to cloud company service providers, collab, VDI.

We've talked to network and security execs, you know, but here in this conversation, I got the opportunity to take a deep dive down into a real estate business in a lot of ways that found that it too is climbing up the digital transformation ladder to build and grow based on their customer's application use.

So, you know, here we are, a great chat with a self-professed technologist in a real estate business. This is my conversation with Chris Sharp, the CTO of Digital Realty.

ABOUT CHRIS:

Chris Sharp has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, with an extensive background in developing technology strategies in global markets. He has a deep knowledge of the data center sector and is well positioned to expand technical innovation at Digital Realty. Most recently, he was responsible for cloud innovation at Equinix, where he led the development of innovative cloud services solutions and developed new capabilities enabling next-generation, high-performance exchange and interconnection solutions, facilitating broad commercial adoption of cloud computing on a global basis. Previously, Mr. Sharp held leadership positions at top network and colocation providers, including Qwest Communications, MCI/Verizon Business and Reliance Globalcom.

CONTACT CHRIS

Web: https://www.digitalrealty.com/about/leadership/chris-sharp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislsharp/

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Chris Jones of AT&T Oct 31, 2022

Show notes

Hi, and welcome to the Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. My guest this week is Chris Jones of AT&T. He's the AVP of channel sales. For AT&T and ACC business. Chris has been with AT&T for 28 years. We laughed a little bit about one or two little breakups they had where he tried something else, but he's, he's been there almost straight for 30 years.

He's been in multiple roles there. Channel sales, marketing. Strategy, even spent time in wireless. Just a different story than what you hear about folks in this fast moving tech space where we're jumping all over the place. We talked a bit about the start of the pandemic. He was on vacation in Mexico.

His son called him from college to let him know that you know, they were canceling classes. He got back into the US right before things shut down to walk into the news that our biggest show of the year in our industry is called Channel Partners. It was. AT&T was the title sponsor that year. Just a surreal thing.

I'm sure they had 20 or 30 people going and he was on vacation and walks into the fact that that was canceled. Jumped straight from vacation to the lockdown. Kind of a surreal story. He said that they were very prepped as a tech company. Most of the workers, you know, were able to work from home. You know, but he did talk about how you know, look, they're in the wire line business.

They had people who had to go in were, were running fiber to buildings. They were considered essential workers. Really kind of the heartbeat of the pandemic response. And it's funny, you know, we talked about what the pandemic would've looked like in 1990. If not for those essential workers focusing on connectivity.

You know, we didn't have the internet if we didn't have this level of access. You know, our belief, my belief certainly is that the economy would've shut down. He shared some interesting stories about what AT&T calls tabletop exercises. It's, it's sort of a methodology where the execs in the business get together and sorta.

You know, throw the chess pieces on the table. They zombie apocalypse plan, if you will, and talk about how they would do it. So they felt more prepared than most because frankly, we, we had that level of you know, pandemic emergency, if you will, and they got to test some of those plans. Something I've haven't heard from many other vendors and, and haven't seen in a lot of other businesses.

That was a really interesting. We spent quite a bit of time talking about virtual desktops and how they are used internally at AT&T to support bring your own device. He did say though that the tools were available, but people really didn't understand it, really didn't see the value until the pandemic push adoption forward.

And now today most people inside of AT&T will not live without the convenience of flexibility of their BDI. Of their virtual desktop. But it is an interesting parallel that we, we've seen with some of the other pods that we've had lately where we've talked about the pandemic, sort of forcing people to learn how to use the things.

They already have. We did talk a bit about culture what was lost in the pandemic and for Chris, it, it really focused around new employee onboarding. He's, concerned as I am and, and many others are about sort of a potential generation of workers without sort of the, having had the ability to interact one on one.

A really good example he gave, and I haven't heard this yet I wrote it down, I took it as a note. I'll use this again, but we talked about small. You know, you get to know people in small talk and when you walk into a conference room, you sort of pair off. That's when you can talk about your kids and, you know, taking your kids to school and what happened that weekend and sports teams.

But that's really hard to do when the entire room is sort of flat and in a web conference together. You know, he felt, and I, and I agree that it creates a much more mechanical relationship, because you can't do that small talk, You can't do those breakouts, and frankly, people just feel like it's easier to be mean online.

He, already felt that everyone in the business needs to start thinking like a cto, at least in terms of thinking about the business, how it uses, the tools it has, why it has them, you know, everybody being a good consumer, if you will, of the technical capabilities that the business is. And then of course, listen, he's been there for 30 years.

We talked a little bit about AT&T pre pandemic. They were already thinking about sort of refocusing the business on its roots, a little less entertainment, you know entertainment networks, television, and more around what was at the basis of AT&T being a connectivity company. Really that essential work that he was talking about in the pandemic.

And of course now, you know, it's become essential that security is tied to the hip of every connectivity conversation we have. So, look, I'll skip right to it. This was a compelling conversation with a seasoned executive from one of the titans of the industry. And you'll, you'll see that even at that size, Chris and and his peers, they've dealt with a lot of the same concerns, had to make a lot of the same kinds of tough business decisions that you've had to make in your business, regardless how large or small you are.

So lots to learn. I hope you get as much out of it as I did. Here's my conversation with Chris Jones from AT&T.

ABOUT CHRIS

Chris leads the AT&T Alliance Channel Technology Distributors organization, focused on growth for AT&T Business and ACC Business. His organization is solely dedicated to supporting Technology Distributors, Channel Partners, and their customers. This includes organizational strategy & evolution, sales production, operations, process automation, and sales effectiveness. Chris has been instrumental in implementing innovative strategies and thought leadership to shape and transform the program. His efforts have led to significant YOY revenue growth in the segment, and his efforts have led to vastly improved Channel Partner experience.

CONTACT CHRIS

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-jones-47392b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cj5075alliance

The Bridgecast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

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