Cloud Therapy: EP 016 – Growing Infrastructure without Money Creates IT Heroes

UnitedLayer sales engineer, Saad Saleem tells Mike a customer story from six months ago, where an IT team became heroes by expanding their IT infrastructure without spending money.

Mike also offers a huge time-saving, free gift to our podcast listeners.

Want more Cloud Therapy? Subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Researching enterprise cloud infrastructure providers? Click below and skip to the best 3.

MY TOP 3    

Transcript:

    Mike:     Welcome to the program, IT Nation – episode 16. We’ve got a great show for you today that I know is going to help you increase your knowledge just a little bit, which will help you get a little bit better in IT, which is always the goal – getting a little bit better every single day.

Today, I have a special guest. His name is Saad Saleem. He is a top sales engineer for a company called UnitedLayer, which is hybrid cloud company. Today, Saad is going to tell us a really cool story of a client that came to them. It was a business that had, pretty much, everything in AWS. They were growing like crazy – it was actually a solar company. If you guys are like me, I get hit up from solar people every single day. Even if I’m at Home Depot, people are walking up to me in an aisle asking me how much my electric bill is and all this crazy stuff, so we all know that solar is growing like crazy.

Well, this company was going to double their cloud environment in size. They wanted to double everything, but they didn’t want to spend any more money. All of you guys know that if you have a bunch of stuff in Amazon and you want to double it, it’s going to be linear. You’re going to double your cost. So, that team was faced with a situation like, “How do we double our server environment in size, yet not double our cost?” That’s the challenge the IT team had when they came to Saad and his team at UnitedLayer.

So, Saad is going to tell us that story. I don’t want to give away the secrets, but Saad’s going to tell you what they did and they actually ended up saving money, yet doubling their capacity. It’s a really cool story that I know you guys will get a couple of good takeaways from and I can’t wait to share it with you.

Before I do, I wanted to, again, remind you about our awesome free gift that we’re giving all for podcast listeners this month. What this is, it is a quote template for anyone who is going to be quoting Cloud DR, or DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service), or cloud backup, whatever you guys want to call it. If you’re going to quote that within the next, I don’t know, year or so, or if you see it might be on the horizon, jump on this free gift.

What this is is an Excel spreadsheet where you can compare pricing for multiple providers on the same page. If you’re going to go out and get a quote for DRaaS from a bunch of different providers, the last thing you want to do is be comparing all these multiple pages from different providers and trying to make sense out of it all, and make an apples to apples comparison with different pieces of paper floating over your desk. You don’t want to do that. What you want to do is stick them all in the same Excel spreadsheet and have one provider in every single column, and then have, in the row section, all the line items that are being priced out so that you can compare who has what feature, who doesn’t, how much that extra feature costs. You can remove a feature if your boss decides, “Hey, you know what? Let’s take that off the bid and all the pricing readjusted.”

That’s what I did for you. We do this all the time for companies. We help them compare pricing from multiple providers, so we have spreadsheets like this. I went ahead and created a custom spreadsheet just for our podcast listeners that are quoting Cloud DR. What it has is it’s got spots for multiple providers, so it’s got open provider spots in the columns. Then, in the rows, it’s got all the questions that you will need to ask DRaaS service providers. I’m sure you don’t know these off the top of your head and it will probably take a long time for you to figure all these out, so you, kind of, cut a big corner by taking this quote template and bringing it to the meeting with these different providers and just, kind of, filling in the blanks.

This quote template is going to save you a lot time from creating it yourself. You don’t have to create your own Excel spreadsheet and you don’t have to think up all the questions – the questions are on there. For instance: RTO estimates, RPO estimates, what the cost is of their computing when your servers are idle in the cloud, when they’re active in the cloud, if they charge you for software licensing, for Veeam, if they allow Hyper-V, if they’ll back up physical servers, what kind of compliance do they allow. How is their testing, do they test your back up servers just when they install or do they test ongoing? What’s their customer portal like? There are all kinds of different questions on there that you want to make sure that you ask in order to do a thorough perfect job of quoting the service with multiple providers.

I’ll give this quote template to you for free. All you have to do is text the word “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222. Again, just text the word “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222 and we will email you your free gift, which is a free copy of this Excel spreadsheet quote template.

Alright, Saad, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us today.

Saad:     Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here.

Mike:     Fantastic. Tell us a little bit about yourself personally and professionally.

Saad:     Today, I am the director of customer engineering, which is a fancy way of saying “sales engineering” here at UnitedLayer. I design private cloud solutions and hybrid cloud solutions for our customers.

It’s a funny little story since I spent twenty years being an IT guy and, for the life of me, couldn’t talk to somebody without having a service ticket open. To have transitioned to a sales-y role where you have to talk to people on a daily basis just to make a living, it’s an interesting transition. I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint of heart.

Mike:     Yeah, absolutely. Having been in sales, in the industry, for sixteen years and working with a lot of sales engineers, that’s definitely something. You’re in front of customers every day and, from the side where you’re at, yeah, you’re pretty much hanging out with the IT team on a daily basis for twenty years prior – that mush have been pretty tough.

Saad:     Yeah. It’s certainly been an interesting three and half-year ride.

Mike:     So, I have to ask, what made you want to go from working as an IT professional to working for a service provider?

Saad:     You know, always, in Silicon Valley, there’s a bug that bites you from time to time of wanting to do your own thing. I had tried that in ’08. ’08 wasn’t a good time with the crash and stuff, but I quickly realized that I could not sell. I wasn’t comfortable reaching out to people and talking to them. If they called me, I could talk to them, but I couldn’t… The most amazing person could be sitting across from me at the bar and I’d look at them, but I wouldn’t have the confidence to go and talk to them.

Mike:     Right.

Saad:     It was a funny thing that happened last week, having transitioned into sales, for such a long time, we were at Phoenix airport coming back from a customer meeting. There’s a wine bar there and we’re sitting there, me and my colleague, Jim, and there’s a lady that comes in and sits a few seats down. She’s wearing this beautiful charcoal dress, and she’s carrying herself with amazing grace and just class.

Obviously, just like any other IT person, I’m looking at her and I noticed her. She’s drinking a beer and watching sports. Three years ago/four years ago, that would have been it. You stare a couple of times, and then you go back to your laptop and you’re configuring something. She was walking away and I stop her and say, “Excuse me. You carry that dress with amazing grace and class.” She looked at me, she smiles, and she said, “Thank you.” I said, “Enjoy your flight.” I don’t want anything from you or anything, but that confidence, you have to have and I didn’t have that.

Having transitioned into sales has given me that – personally too. It helps me coaching baseball. It helps me doing all of the things in everyday life that you do. It’s just a different perspective, so it’s been a lot of fun. But, really, the bug that bit me was I wanted to do something on my own and I needed the confidence and the ability to sell, which were two things that one of my mentors said those are the things you have to develop and this was the best way to develop it.

Mike:     Absolutely. I can so relate. For me, I may not have started in IT, but growing up, I was, kind of, a naturally shy person. I just got right into sales as my first job right out of the gate. That is one of the most difficult things in the world – to start talking to people and initiating conversations. That’s really difficult. I guess for a few, super loud, crazy people, it’s normal and it’s fun, but it definitely was not fun for me. I think it gave me a ton of anxiety at first. I mean, that is just a really hard thing, so I can really relate to that a lot.

Saad:     Yeah. I needed a few shots of scotch before I could get there and that’s just not the way the world works.

Mike:     Yeah, exactly. Gosh, my first job, I was at NextLink Communications. I was, literally, knocking on doors, like, fifty doors a day and then peppering these people on the phone the next half of the day. I was probably calling you, Saad. I was calling IT people or, back then, CFOs whoever I could try to sell local phone lines to. But, gosh, if I could have drank in that office, I would have been doing it. That was brutal.

Saad:     Yeah. You know what? I can absolutely relate.

Mike:     Yeah. What about personally? Tell us a little bit about what you like to do for fun and that type of thing.

Saad:     Golfing. But, mostly, I have two kids. My son is eleven, my daughter is six, and they both love playing baseball. From February to July we’re just doing Little League and All Star Tournaments, and things like that. My son is doing great. He’s eleven and he’s almost in the Major’s for Little League. My daughter, who is six was supposed to be playing softball, and refuses to play softball and wants to play baseball. She wants to play Little League and I get to coach every time she plays. So, it’s a lot of fun having six year olds, and five year olds, and four year olds running around. You’ve got to get them excited about something and they come back the next year to play, you feel really, really good.

When I’m not doing that I’m either working or trying to find somebody in IT here who would let me touch a server, or a switch, or a firewall, or something, “Hey, I could do this. I used to do this.”

Mike:     Yeah, that’s cool. You definitely hit another commonality. I have a seven-year-old son who is obsessed with baseball. We just finished up Little League about a month ago and I coach his team. I couldn’t agree more, I love that – just getting out there, away from the office environment and working with the kids. Despite a couple of crazy other coaches or some of the weird stuff that goes on in Little League baseball in the United States, I love it. In fact, if I could just coach the kids and let somebody else deal with the games and all that drama, that would be my favorite.

Saad:     Yeah. I hear you. I’ll tell you a funny story real quick. One of our coaches works directly for Larry Ellison. He’s a VP, but he’s a techie. He runs a team for Oracle and the competitiveness that you see – in a very good way. He has taught these kids to want to win, to desire to win, to compete to win. It’s not okay to lose as lose as long as you give your best effort. It’s a lot of fun with those, but we do have a couple of crazy coaches who we call it the “daddy ball.”

Mike:     Yeah, absolutely. This year was the first year we played in Minor C, so it’s the first year they’re really keeping score and doing all that stuff. Man, as soon as they start keeping that score, holy moly, developmental went out the door. It was like lie, cheat, steal, do everything you can with a couple of these guys. I’m sitting there shaking my head going, “Man, this is going to be a rough ride if we’re going to do this for a long time,” but, like I said, working with the kids is great – it’s the parents and the other coaches. Sometimes you’re like, “Wow. People are crazy.”

Saad:     Yeah. We could share stories on that all day.

Mike:     Yeah, no kidding. Well, cool. Today, I know you’ve got some good stuff to talk to us about. Saad has a great customer story that he’s going to run through with us that has some great takeaways. It’s regarding doing more with less, but it’s all framed around a specific customer story.

With that, Saad, I’ll just hand it over to you and let you run with it from here.

Saad:     Thanks, Mike. This is not very long ago. This is within the last six months. These guys came to us working with a partner. The technical team was doing a lot of stuff. In fact, they started off on Amazon, they stayed on Amazon, and, today, they have $45k a month they’re spending on Amazon out of which most of it is DynamoDB at almost $50k insert implementation.

Mike:     Jeez.

Saad:     Data transfer of about 28Tb a month. It’s just crazy. They’re paying a lot. They’ve got Kinesis, and Lambda, and RDS, and so on and so forth. They just came back and said, “Look, we’re projecting to double this.” The product team says, “We’ll be doing 100,000 inserts in about six to nine months, so you’ve got to scale this thing. In Amazon, that’s really easy. You go from $25,600 today to $51,200, and you’ve scaled. The business said, “No, you can’t do that. We’re already spending too much.”

This is a solar-related company, and we all know how competitive that’s become and costs have to be controlled, and so on and so forth. They came back and told the IT team, “Look, we need to increase productivity by 30%. We need to scale this thing a 100% and you’ve got to do it without spending more money. You can’t double the spend.”

After the initial reaction of like “You’re out of your mind,” the IT team got to work and we got to work with them. What they came up with – a lot of white-boarding and so on and so forth, looked at what needed to be done, and they said, “Look, Amazon, we can do it. We could just let it scale, but that’s not an option because that’s going to make the cost go through the roof.”

There’s no way to cut on a public cloud where everything is neutered, so we want to bring this in-house. Bringing it in-house is, again, spending a lot of money, but there’s a lot of value in it because the team that’s the experts can get it done the way the product teams, and other teams, and business teams want it done. We can deliver performance.

Business is saying, “Go to a cloud, but the cut the cost. Scale it.” The team is saying, “We can scale it, but we need control.” A lot of times, and in this case as well, my experience working with a lot of companies, this company not being an exception, is the business really doesn’t realize that the value is not in the cloud that they had picked or in the logos that the boxes have, but in the people. You could have the fastest box, you don’t know how to configure it, and use it, and deploy it, and manage it, it’s not going to work.

Mike:     That’s a good point.

Saad:     I truly believe that performance is truly a function of the people that manage it. High-performance IT teams that have control over the application delivery infrastructure, the network infrastructure, and so on can deliver the right solution and drive the performance that the CFO, the business and the development team, and the software team… People deliver performance, not systems.

In this case, too – these guys, very smart, very capable, got some help and, luckily we got to get involved and work with these very smart people. What they came up with was like, “Look, we’re going to build a cloud. We’re going to build a private cloud of our own. It’s going to be OpenStack. We’re going to replace the Dynamo with a Cassandra cluster. If we do six nodes of Cassandra, we can easily scale this to a $100,000. Oh, by the way, we could go to an eight-node Cassandra cluster and go to a $150,000 without any issue.” We’re like, “Okay. We can do that.”

And, instead of putting all the constraints in, the whiteboard sessions were sessions, or multiple sessions, to come up with the design was really “Let’s see how to build this right.” How can we do this so we can get it done today and then scale it?

Mike:     Sorry to interrupt. As you’re bringing that up, I’m thinking in my mind, is this something that… Why was this not thought of prior to management putting some constraints down? What would be the first objection to a thought like that – to start building some of this out internally?

Saad:     You know, that’s a great question. What I’ve seen happen, especially in the Bay area, where there’s startup after startup after startup, the infrastructure becomes an afterthought. When people start this, they used, over the last many years, at least since 2008/2009, you use the credit card, you get started on AWS, and you got your server and you got your storage. Then, you run your demo off of it, now you’ve got funding, and now the business is growing and that thing keeps scaling because you don’t have to buy any hardware, you just pay them. Then, they start metering everything.

So, the infrastructure, because it has been an afterthought, continues to run and scale at Amazon. It works except for two things. (a) You’re always going to be impacted by what the lowest common denominator is – what other people are doing. (b) That cost scaling is linear. You can have two, three, four, seven, ten IT people that can build better processes, learn stuff, and grow, and scale it not linearly, but much more efficiently versus doing it in something that is metered. You buy one, it’s $1. You buy two, it’s $2.

Moving off of that becomes an afterthought. You’re developing products, and so on and so forth, and infrastructure is not coming into the conversation until you go into a point where, oh, my God, the amount of money we’re spending is ridiculous. The growth that we’re seeing coming, that’s not going to work because we’re going to start losing money as opposed to making money.

Mike:     Right. I may be jumping ahead with this question, but how did they… A lot of the stuff you described, a lot of the technical terms. I know our audience really gets them, but I didn’t understand half that stuff. In terms of what they had, how did they really decide what to bring in-house versus what to keep in Amazon? What did that decision process look like?

Saad:     Well, they haven’t yet, right? They’re designing this solution and they come up with, “We need 10gig networking,” and it has to be stacked because this is production, it has to be high-availability. So, 5548 CISCO Nexus switches, and then CISCO 5515 ASAs, you’ve got servers running, let’s see, the Intel Xeon V4 processors, the latest and greatest, and terabyte plus of memory on the private cloud.

Once the design’s completed, they can deliver all of these stuff with high performance SSDs, combination of SAN and NAS storage. They have all the access to be able to deliver all the applications, but the bill is about a million plus just in Capex to buy all of these stuff. That’s where providers like UnitedLayer and others can help out, but to design and do everything that the business wants them to do, and do it right and in an efficient manner, the team there, at the customer, came up with an OpenStack Cassandra 10 gig everything, high-availability networking, and high-availability compute.

You bring up a good point. There are still certain things like Lambda and stuff that works really work at Amazon. Burst capacity is really great at Amazon. If we build everything in-house, you’ve got to build for all of it. You’ve got to build for a 100% peak capacity. That doesn’t make a lot of sense from a cost perspective and just from a management perspective, so having an AWS Direct Connect allows them, allows anyone, to actually leave some of this stuff in a public cloud like Amazon. That’s what these guys were planning to do.

The issue became, really, that the business said no or, “We like the cloud model. We’re not going to spend $1.5 million just to buy all of these gear. You’ve got to find another way. You’ve got to find a way to increase productivity by 30%.” Then, the IT team is saying you’re being unrealistic because you want everything. You don’t want to give us the money to do it. Frankly, we as IT people have heard that. I’ve heard that all my career. No, you can’t have the EMC or you can’t have pure because that’s going to drive the performance. Make do with what you have. But, yeah, what we’ve got is an old Penguin chassis. That’s not going to do it.

So, these guys, in that sense, ran the numbers and came up with a solution. In fact, what they ended up, what got the business going was they came up with, “Look, we’re also going to need… Because some of this is compliance-heavy, there’s an additional cost to doing that compliance in addition to all of this stuff.” You need SOC 1/SOC 2 compliant, sort of, audits every year, and some of the data was also PCI, had to be protected under PCI.

So, these guys, they leveraged that to go back to the business and say, “Look, this is all that needs to be done. Since this is protected data, we’re going to need to do some DDoS protection,” and so on and so forth, and potentially create a solution which was not readily available at Amazon. They’ve got the business thinking, okay, they have to buy these stuff and build it themselves and gave the team a little more leeway to put more effort into the self-built, self-managed private cloud solution. The only thing that the team wasn’t able to do is say, “We’re going to build all of these in-house, we’re going to need a couple more people. You can’t add all these infrastructure and make do with two people.”

Mike:     Right. So, did they get permission to add more people or no, they couldn’t?

Saad:     They actually didn’t. The CFO wanted to cut cost or keep it at the same level. So, one of their new executives, they knew somebody one of our executives here, that’s how we actually got involved. When they looked at it and this entire solution that they had built, that they had designed themselves, most of the providers… You go to RackSpace and SoftLayer, they’re all great companies and do great stuff, but they have a certain model. You fit into that model or you go somewhere else.

We’re not the only ones, there are other people too. We build and maintain stuff that were agnostic to all this so we can be flexible. They knew that from a previous experience, so they asked us to get involved. We took a look at their entire stack of their design and said, “Yeah, absolutely. We can build this for you. We can give you root-level control on everything. We’ll buy it, build it, and you can have it.”

The team actually ended up “Yeah, I’d love to fix this,” but this is a real-world example. If they scaled at Amazon, they would have ended spending close to $80,000 because just the database piece was $51,000 plus the support, and so on and so forth, on the EC2, and they spent, like, $89,000 at AWS. We did it for $29,000, I think? They got the exact open OpenStack Private Cloud, multi-10 gig connectivity to the internet, internet exchange data center, tier-3, all of that stuff.

Someday I’ll pitch you the solution, but, literally, the team was able to get the entire thing that they wanted. They saved money and, in the end, they looked like heroes. They went to the CFO and they pitched this. The biggest hurdle they had was, “What’s the catch.” They said, “There isn’t a catch.” We spend quite a bit of time convincing them there wasn’t a catch.

The beauty of the whole solution is these guys got exactly the design they wanted. They have proven that giving control to them was the right thing to do and they are now driving that performance and scaling that solution. That team is doing an amazing job at this customer. They have hit every milestone that they had asked for. They had actually over-built it, so they’re actually getting better performance only because the team knew exactly the applications and how the people were going to use it. Had they stayed with Amazon, or gone to others, or just bought something off the shelf, they wouldn’t have gotten that.

That company is doing well because their IT team got the control of what they wanted, designed it right, and they’re heroes. It’s one of the rare situations where people notice IT without having everything go down.

Mike:     That’s fantastic. Can you give us a little bit of a pick under the hood in terms of what they kept at Amazon and what they built out with you?

Saad:     Yeah. Most of the stuff that, right now, that stayed at Amazon, they’re keeping their peak capacity and it’s pretty much EC2. They replaced the S3 with object storage on their OpenStack Private Cloud using Swift. They didn’t have to buy any of that, we did, but that’s a story for another time. The only thing they have, really, is some scalable compute which is AWS Direct connected, so they don’t get that part of the design. The biggest cost at Amazon is moving data around. Being in a carrier-neutral facility (that was one of their requirements) that had an AWS Direct Connect saved them, like, 85% bandwidth charges, but they used ECs… Mostly, it’s EC2s instances and a couple of other things, and they can, literally, consume any of the AWS services without paying the data premium for it. I think that they know they have to sustain, they run it in the private cloud.

The beauty of putting it in a private cloud, they have absolute control, so they’re not stuck to the M2 medium or the R3 extra-large. They can do whatever they want with their VM instances, spin it up, spin it down, make it bigger, make it smaller and react. They’ve got the right systems, monitoring, management, so on and so forth, where they’re doing right-click, command line change, in an instant scale, gut it down, spin up new environments for new development, and they also have the ability with the Direct Connect to go straight to Amazon and do it there because they only need it for… They need 200% capacity for a two-day project, they can do that at Amazon. They’ve got control. These guys are very, very smart. It’s a lot of fun to work with them.

Mike:     When you say “Direct Connect,” for the audience members that don’t know what that is, can you describe a little bit about what that is?

Saad:     Sure. It’s a layer 2 connectivity straight into Amazon. They’ve got points of presence in certain data centers and you have to either be in the data center or run fiber to it. They offer it at different commit levels and different speed levels, but it basically gives you a direct local LAN access to the AWS infrastructure. Other than performance, there’s also the business impact of being able to do it, the data transfer, for a whole lot less money. CFOs love that.

Mike:     Right. I think that’s something more and more providers are starting to talk about, but I still don’t think that a lot of IT professionals really know what that is or understand that it’s out there when I’m talking to people, so I always like people to explain it a little bit. Yeah.

Saad:     You know what? From my perspective and my limited perspective, it’s about control. You give the smart teams control over stuff AWS Direct Connect, or any of this, is no different. These guys and this customer, they took control of the entire infrastructure and said, “You know, we can do this at better scale than AWS.” Not in a global scale, but for what their company needed, they had the right scale. Where they wanted AWS, they can do that. In fact, now they’re working with us to migrate their RackSpace footprint and also bring in some Azure stuff as well because they’re doing some Microsoft-specific stuff. They think Microsoft Azure is going to do better and we’re going to do the exact same thing.

It comes back to, like I said earlier, it’s about the people. The technical teams, given the right set of resources, given the right flexibility and control, people do better things than systems do. I can get you crappy performance out of a pure storage because I configured it versus Ed over here. Ed can go drive better performance out of an OpenZFS server running normal drives than I can out of a pure.

The right people – people drives that and it’s very, very fun to work with a company where the business, the management, and the development teams, and the support teams see IT for the value that they bring as opposed to, “Oh, it’s IT. They’re only notice them when something goes down and somebody’s yelling.”

Mike:     Right. If a sysadmin sitting here live, obviously, excluding you… I know that was your profession for a while, so no disrespect there. If a sysadmin was sitting here live and hearing the story, what do you think would be one of the first objections or questions they would have hearing that? What things would they be talking about? What big questions would they have, do you think?

Saad:     I think any sysadmin knows, at heart, that they can do everything, this whole movement to the cloud, they can do that in-house. From my experience, the objection we get the most is there’s no way you can cost scale this. So, there’s no point in me going down this path because I will never get approval.

Like I said, when I was an IT guy, one of the most difficult things for me was to reach out to somebody and try to sell them something or convince them something. As IT people, we had to do that all the time. We had to go struggle for approval for projects where we knew we could do something better than what was being presented or what the options were being presented because we understood what the people around us were asking us for. But, the inability to go and sell that internally, it’s a scary, daunting thing. It becomes unbelievable, “No, you can’t do it this way.” I think we can.

These guys proved a lot of people wrong, these people we worked with, that, yeah, it can be done. It can be done in a very scalable manner. We can absolutely do 10gig networking, dual stack, so on and so forth, and do it in a much more efficient, controlled manner. I think every IT person knows that they can drive the best performance out of it. It’s whether they can have the resources made available to them. These guys here, in this example, they proved it that they absolutely can.

Mike:     For you guys to build something like that out – I’m not asking for the exact cost. You talked about the monthly differentiation in cost, but what about the one-time bill? Did it cost them anything to build it out with you guys? Did they sign a long-term commitment and all that cost is waved? How does that work?

Saad:     Yeah, they signed on private cloud. That’s the one thing. They signed a three-year contract for the entire footprint where they would have paid $80,000/$82,000 at Amazon, they paid $25,000 on our setup fee, which is roughly about one month’s worth of monthly cost, and at $29,000 a month, they’re scaling. So, yeah, there is some upfront cost, but not a lot. It’s miniscule compared to what they would pay in one month at AWS for the same infrastructure.

Mike:     Right. Or, building it out. I mean, the astronomical cost of building all that stuff out in-house.

Saad:     Yeah, absolutely. In this, we buy the hardware, but, again, what I’ve learned… When I started in this business it’s like, hey, the server costs $10,000. On a thirty-six-month contract, you take $10,000 divided by thirty-six, but that’s not how it works because that completely fails to keep in mind that you have to have smart people with the right skillset around that in order to make the services work. The cost is more than just the cost of the hardware. The true value is not on the hardware, it’s in the people.

So, we certainly have a cost advantage because we buy in bulk, and so on and so forth, but the hardware is… We have really, really good people who can help our customers do a lot of stuff with the right hardware and we can build a service around it. That’s how we can scale the cost with the expertise. It’s less of a function of hardware than it is of people. When you get the right set of people on the customer side, that makes it a whole lot easier.

Mike:     I bet. One question that pops to mind for me, Saad – you’ve been in both sides of the fence. You’ve been an IT professional for twenty years and then, obviously, you’ve worked for a service provider for a few years now. What things do you see differently now? If you were to go back as an IT professional, how would you look at things a little differently now? What things have you learned?

Saad:     That’s a great, great question. I think, as an IT person and now… I started in the early 90s. Everything is going to change. The hardware is going to change. Performance doubles every two years. As long as we the sysadmins, the network admins, the storage, security, so on and so forth, as long as we’re scaling our skill set, we’d have been above and beyond the curve.

I would have, just personally, I would have spent more time not being scared of change and doing something different as opposed to… I was very tied to CISCO. I had CISCO PIX firewalls, and, yes, I’m dating myself, and LocalDirectors, and load balancers, and 6509 switches. I had my design and it was scary to move away from that design. Having worked in a service provider, we get to work with just about every kind of technology – software-defined storage, software-defined networking – the whole paradigm has changed in not a lot of time.

In a very short amount of time, a lot of things have completely changed. Just believing and being willing to step outside the comfort zone really, really has helped me to just grow as a person and then also in the career too. I think, technically, too, if I was starting over again, I would not… For the first two years of my career, I would not do the same thing twice, I don’t think – resources permitting, of course.

Mike:     Right. Some of the things I’m hearing, correct me if I’m wrong, I would agree that, as an IT professional within an organization, be someone who’s always looking at new things and better ways to do things, and advising the management team of how things can be improved as opposed to just keeping the lights on, keeping the lights green and making sure there’s no down time, and just keeping everything the same. More always looking for what is going to be the next change because it is going to change and, kind of, being that advisor that the management team is looking for.

Saad:     Absolutely. You got it exactly.

Mike:     I see that a lot too. We work with a lot of IT professionals at AeroCom getting quotes and stuff. You see a lot of really, really smart people, but there is a divide and that communication gap between the management team and them. A lot of times, I think it’s just a little bit of trepidation in terms of trying to communicate what they know to them without coming across too brash. I think there’s just a little bit of a gap there that I think that’s hit on the beginning of the conversation too. It’s just, kind of, like how do you approach them? How do you be that advisor with confidence and say, “This is what we should do”?

Saad:     Perfect. That’s the thing. I think back and there are so many times where I have gone and pitched something or asked for something and said, “There are three options. We could do it this way. We could do it that way,” and I knew what the right option was. All I have to do is say, “This is what we should be doing. This is why. This is why it will work” with confidence as opposed to, “We could do it this way. This is what maybe we could be doing.” It’s how you present. People respond to that level of confidence. When you believe in yourself, say it with confidence. Had I done that, I probably would have still been in IT and been more successful than I was, but, again, that’s a story for another time.

Sales does allow you to do that. I love the fact that now I can go in and see for myself that, yeah, I knew what I was talking about even back then. I just wasn’t saying it with the same conviction, the same confidence that I do now because my livelihood depends on it.

Mike:     Right. I think there is a lot to be said for that attitude. People want to be led a lot of times. That’s why they’re hiring an IT staff because they’re not technical, but they want that IT staff to lead them. When the IT staff is, kind of, wavering back and forth, they take the lead, the other management team takes the lead and says, “Okay, let’s do this.” But, if the IT staff has a strong opinion one way or the other, they’re scared to object to that because they’re going, “Well, this person knows what they’re doing. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Saad:     Yeah. My last IT gig, I deferred so many times to the CTO who is a really, really, really smart guy and knew coding and stuff, and had some background in infrastructure, but I knew what I was doing. He was the CTO, I was the IT director and part-time sysadmin, he obviously had to know more. In fact, no, he didn’t. He didn’t. He and I are good friends now, and we yack about it, and he goes, “Yeah, all you have to do is say it.” We did, so I got what I wanted.

Mike:     Right. Well, cool. I think those are some interesting conversations. Kind of, switching gears a little bit, on a lighter note, what I always like to do, Saad, is have you share a funny story or a cool story about the most interesting things you’ve ever experienced or one of the most interesting things you’ve ever experienced in the workplace.

Saad:     I’ll try to keep this brief. At my last company where I was IT Director, I had done a… It, kind of, ties in here. We needed a hundred machines to do something and we wanted to do it on Amazon because it was cool at the time (it still is). I went in and figured out how to do this with Spot Instances and On-demand Instances and it was going to be $1,500.

Well, our CFO was a surfer dude. It’s a small company, 120 people, everybody knew everybody. So, I’m sitting with him and he’s going, “Okay, $1,500. That’s good. Every sales person gets their own demo machine, and appliance, and blah, blah, blah. Go do it.” I do it and I’m really, really happy. Three weeks later, I have everything set up and automated, and that’s $1,500. He’s a happy… Actually, $1,400, so he was, “Okay, that’s good. Good job.” We go out, have a drink, and didn’t realized he’s not supposed to be drinking.

Anyway, this guy had a reputation for punching walls. A month later, I got to see it because all the sales people started using it. Our bill was, like $10,000 – $10,843.62 – and he punched the wall. Luckily, it’s not a brick wall, he’s hand went through it. He punched in a way where the next door over was the lawyer. That was not fun.

I learned the hard lesson about better cost estimating at Amazon. But, literally, the CTO and the VP of Operations, who was my boss, they came into the office and they dragged me out before his next punch would have landed on me. I kid you not, there were people standing around his office because the walls were glass, and they’re looking in and was like, “He’s done. Saad’s done. He’s going to get decked. If he’s lucky, he’ll only get fired.” That’s how pissed the guy was.

It was not funny at the time, but after a few drinks right after it at Kate Obrien’s in San Francisco on 2^nd Street, it’s a great place to be (there’s my sales pitch). Kate Obrien, we went and, then, my boss was like, “Drink this. Shut up and drink this. I will help you fix this, but right now, he can’t see you in any which way possible because if he does, you are going to get decked.”

Mike:     Oh, my gosh. It’s funny now as you’re talking about it, but I was just thinking, “Man, that guy’s out of control, dude. What’s up with that?”

Saad:     Yeah. The amount of pills the guy took was funny, but great, great, great guy, just don’t go over budget by 10x.

Mike:     Yeah. Those are the things that… I’ve owned our company now for about thirteen years. Those are the things that go on in these big companies that I, sometimes, miss coming home and talking to my wife about some of the drama that goes on in these companies – you deal with all these people and different personalities. We had a thriller one time at a company I was. He was picking up a phone and throwing it across the room and you’re going, “How do these people do that?” Like, I don’t know. That’s crazy. It’s hilarious that he’s punching the wall and he has to have someone come and repair it.

Saad:     Yeah. The lawyer who is a very, very good friend, she came running and she says, “Get him out of here.” That was funny.

Mike:     Well, good story. Thanks for sharing. Okay, so, now that we’ve talked to you about a bunch of the technical stuff, tell us a little bit about where you work at UnitedLayer. Tell us about UnitedLayer, what you guys do and what you’re excited about that you guys are up to over there.

Saad:     We’re a techie’s techie company. We’ve got a great team here. People know their stuff. Being an old sysadmin and data center guy, it’s a lot of fun working with these guys.

We’ve built private clouds. Where currently deployed private clouds and six data centers across North America – East Coast, West Coast, both the U.S. and Canada. We are now going into every one of Equinix’ data centers, which is about 160 of them globally. What we do is we build and support solutions that are… This example that we talked about – you have a solution, we can help you optimize it, we can help you build it, and we can help you deploy it and manage it, and we’ll give you control and performance. So, I get to do a lot of the fun stuff that I used to do as a techie. I get to do it as everyday business.

Mike:     Fantastic. What do you think you guys do really well as opposed to a lot of other cloud service providers?

Saad:     We do really well at integrating stuff. We’ve got an amazing team that can support people. We understand infrastructure. We understand applications. If you’ve got an Oracle application running, an Oracle database with Exadata or SAP and you want to integrate a bunch, and you’ve got Rackspace, and Softlayer, and Amazon, Azure, you name it, and you want it all to be brought together under your control, we do a really, really good job of building the right infrastructure, private cloud, in our data centers and, then, integrating that with everything else on-prem, disaster recovery, and so on and so forth, that you’ve got running in various different places, and bringing it under one, controllable umbrella that you can run easily, and efficiently, and effectively. It doesn’t hurt that we can do it more cost-effectively than a lot of other people and using private deployment that are not neutered.

Mike:     That’s cool, yeah. I think what’s really cool about you guys and the story that you brought up, most service providers these days that I’m talking to are talking about moving everything to the cloud. It’s really unique that you got a story about moving something out of the public cloud right now.

Saad:     Anyone who has ever built a server closet or put some stuff in-house. That’s a cloud, it’s just more private, it’s more dedicated, and you can scale that. We can help you do it. It’s a lot of fun what I do and it’s a lot of fun to work with the technology and the solution, and I get to work with you, Mike, and other people like you, and lots of customers, your customers. That’s always fun.

Mike:     Yeah, exactly. You don’t get threatened to get decked, but absolutely, that’s great. Well, it’s been great having you on, Saad. I really appreciate the conversation. I think there are some good takeaways for all the listeners in there. It’s just been a lot of fun talking to you. I appreciate you coming on.

Saad:     My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity, Mike.

Mike:     Alright, have a great day.

Saad:     You too. Take care.

Mike:     So, that was a cool story, wasn’t it? I really like the part where you have a cloud service provider who’s actually, for once, advocating taking some of the stuff out of the cloud as opposed to cloud service providers telling you that everything you do should be in the cloud. I thought that was really interesting and a great balance to what’s going on in our industry right now with this huge movement to the cloud. So, I thought that was really cool.

I also thought it was cool that the IT team ended up looking like heroes because they actually saved money yet doubled their capacity. I thought that was pretty cool. So, cool story. I hope you took a little bit away from that and learned a little bit today – that was the goal.

Before I go I wanted to, again, remind you about our free giveaway. It is a quote template that you don’t want to miss if you are quoting DRaaS service providers across, obviously, multiple providers. If you’re quoting that service sometime in the near future or if you’re even thinking about it, don’t miss out on this great gift.

Go ahead and text the word “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222. Again, text the word “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222 and we will send you a free gift that’s a copy of this great quote template that you definitely want to use. It’s got all the questions that you should ask. A lot of them that you probably never think of, but will really help you differentiate providers. It’s got the Excel spreadsheet all perfectly done for you so you can compare providers side by side on the same line items. This Excel spreadsheet alone will take you at least an hour to make, so right off the bat you’re saving time, let alone all the questions that are included there.

So, jump on that free gift. It’s a gift to you for being a podcast listener. Again, text the word “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222 and we’ll email it right on over to you.

Alright, IT Nation, have a great day and we’ll catch you next time.