Nobody Owns Your Cloud Bill

Nobody in the building owns the cloud bill. Not IT, not finance, not engineering — and when a CEO finally gets desperate enough to set a hard ceiling, like getting spend below 9% of revenue or the business isn't viable, that's when everyone finds out the EDP they already signed made the target structurally impossible before the conversation even started. The problem wasn't technical. It was in the contract.

Max sits down with Robby Gulri, Field CTO at RapidScale, to trace how companies end up there. Nobody owns the bill. Nobody can read the bill. Engineering won't reprioritize to fix the architecture because it's not their KPI. Finance wants a magic pill. And the cloud's biggest promise — that you only pay for what you use — disappears the moment you sign a multi-year commitment to pay whether you use it or not.

If you're responsible for cloud spend, or you're about to sign a multi-year cloud commitment — watch this before you do.


What We Get Into

00:00 — The Daughter Analogy: Why Cloud Spend Feels Like Magic Money
01:30 — How RapidScale Evolved from DaaS into Public Cloud
05:00 — Why DaaS Never Became the Default (And Still Hasn't)
09:00 — What Killed Early VDI Adoption — And Why That's Changed
15:00 — The CapEx vs. OpEx Trap: You Escaped One Problem and Created Another
20:30 — Multi-Cloud in Theory vs. What Companies Actually Run
26:00 — Is AI Actually IT? The Question That Stumped a Room of CIOs
30:00 — Is IT a Cost Center or a Profit Center?
38:00 — Who Actually Owns Your Cloud Spend (Nobody Agrees)
44:00 — Why Companies Can't Read Their Own Cloud Bills
48:00 — Should FinOps Report to Finance or IT? (Still No Consensus)
51:30 — The CEO Spending 15% of Revenue on Cloud — and Locked In
55:00 — The EDP Trap: You Took the Discount. Now You Can't Spend Less.
58:00 — Why the Cloud Ephemerality Promise Disappears Fast
01:00:00 — Cost Tagging, Naming Conventions, and Why the Discipline Is Gone
01:01:00 — Cloud Is Not Cheaper Than Bare Metal
01:08:00 — Legacy Applications with No Source Code: The Migration Nobody Plans For
01:15:00 — Why ROI and TCO Are the Wrong Language for IT Decisions
01:17:00 — CFOs Blame IT. IT Says "It Depends." Nobody Moves.
01:22:00 — Microsoft Licensing: You Need a PhD to Understand What You're Buying
01:32:00 — Procurement Theater: The Magic 10% Was Already Priced In
01:45:00 — What a Mature FinOps Practice Actually Looks Like
01:59:00 — Agentic AI and What 2030 Actually Looks Like
02:01:00 — AI Won't Kill Jobs — It'll Shift Them (The CNC Operator Analogy)
02:05:00 — The Real Doomsday: Power and Water, Not LLMs


What we Mentioned

• AWS Enterprise Discount Programs (EDPs) and commitment lock-in
• AWS MAP (Migration Acceleration Program)
• Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
• FinOps as a discipline — cost tagging, naming conventions, resource classification
• VMware / Broadcom licensing changes and 3x price increases
• Microsoft 365 E1, E3, E5 licensing tiers
• Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD)
• Multi-cloud strategy vs. single-region reality
• Cloud-to-bare-metal cost comparison
• Nutanix, Red Hat as VMware migration paths
• Agentic AI and multi-agent orchestration
• RapidScale's assessment and FinOps practice

About the Guest
Robby Gulri is Field CTO at RapidScale, a managed cloud services provider owned by Cox Communications, with practices across AWS, Azure, GCP, and a dedicated FinOps discipline. He spends his time with partners, CIOs, and business leaders navigating cloud cost, modernization, and AI strategy — which means he hears the same expensive mistakes repeat across industries, company sizes, and funding stages. His job, as he puts it: make complex things simple.

Connect with Robby: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbygulri/
RapidScale on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapidscale/

About Signed
Signed is the podcast for buyers in a market built for sellers. Host Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, sits down with CIOs, CFOs, operators, and founders who've lived inside real enterprise tech deals. New episodes weekly at itbroker.com/podcast. If you're in the middle of a real tech decision and want someone in your corner, book an intro call at itbroker.com. 
Buy tech without regret. Follow: @itbrokerdotcom 

Full Transcript

Creators and Guests

Host

Max Clark

Founder & CEO of ITBroker.com

What is Signed?

The IT market is built for sellers, not buyers.

That's why 80% of tech buyers regret their last major purchase. Deals take longer than they should. Teams get locked into platforms that don't fit, contracts they can't escape, and vendors they wouldn't choose again. The pitches, demos, and analyst reports are built to close deals, not help buyers make the right one.

Signed is the podcast for the buyers. Host Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, talks with CIOs, CFOs, operators, and founders who've lived inside real enterprise tech deals — the ones who can explain what actually determined whether the deal worked.

Plus weekly Playbooks breaking down the moments that matter most: renewals, M&A, compliance mandates, office moves, budget cuts, and the specific plays that separate buyers who get it right from those who regret it.

If you're responsible for choosing, negotiating, or living with the consequences of enterprise technology, this show is for you.

New episodes weekly. An ITBroker.com podcast.

Robby Gulri: [00:00:00] They thought a few years ago that running it in the cloud was gonna be a cheaper option. Just taking, taking X, moving it into the cloud and calling it Cloud X, uh, is basically a rude awakening for them. For the most part, mid-market, you got P cards and credit cards floating around. It's easy. Easy is the gift and the curse.

It's so easy to turn up a VM on, uh, on AWS. Guess what? That's the same reason why you've got completely, uh, no visibility into what's your cost, you know, situation. It's like my daughter, turn up the music, turn up the lights, turn up the, you know, the air conditioners to fricking 62 degrees, right? Why not?

Why not? Like, she doesn't see that utility bill from Georgia Power. It's magic

Max Clark: money. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's, it's the same thing. Is this an IT problem? Is this a business problem? Or is this a communication problem? So what's the fix here? Just, uh, enough time or [00:01:00] pain or external pressure before people say, "We shouldn't be doing this this way anymore"?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

RapidScale started as a, really as a desktop as a service company. Yeah. Right? And then moved into managed IT services, and then has moved farther into public cloud. Absolutely. How much of that was, uh, opportunity driven? How much of that was customer driven? How much of that was just, you know, watching where the landscape was moving and, and what was going on?

Robby Gulri: I think a little bit of all of that, right? I think it was opportunity driven. Um, you know, I've been with the company four years. I'm the channel CTO, so I get a chance to spend a lot of time with partners, customers, you know, in all types of industries. So I find my job really interesting because I learn more than I frankly give, right?

So anytime you can get yourself in a situation where you are, like, learning from the people that are in that room, like, man, this is a, this is... And I get paid to do this? [00:02:00] This is not bad, right? So, uh, if you look at kinda historically, you're absolutely right. We're a DaaS company, uh, started in 2008.

Business industry, COVID has, has changed the game from an IT services perspective in so many different ways. And so up until about two and a half years ago, I'd get into a conversation, we'd get into a conversation or, on cloud migrations, optimization, security. "Hey, we need to take some of your on-prem workloads and shift them into a, kind of a managed services, sort of managed cloud environment."

And, you know, everybody really bought into that story, or at least the people we were talking to bought into that story. But inevitably, as we went up market, uh, organizations were like, "Well, that's great, but what are you doing for me in the public cloud?" Uh, and I know you spend a lot of time with your customers in the world of public cloud.

So those guys are now thinking through, "Okay, I need to shift, shift my approach, shift my strategy into- Into potentially some of these hyperscalers. I don't have internal teams and resources to be able to help [00:03:00] address the, some of the historical core IT stuff that I used to do, so I need a expert. And so what we did, um, a lot of folks who may be watching this may remember this, but RapidScale bought a, a company called LogicWorks.

And so what LogicWorks added to the portfolio is not only our core managed services, you know, on Broadcom, VMware- Mm-hmm ... uh, platform, data centers all over the globe. Uh, but along with that added a whole slew of, um, public cloud practices. So over the last couple of years we've developed that, built that even more.

So AWS, obviously, a lot of history, a lot of legacy, a lot of lineage there. Um, Azure, we've spent a lot of time, you know, thinking through migrations and optimization on Azure, and then obviously we have a GCP practice as well. So your question is, was that market driven? Yeah. Was it customer demand and question driven?

Absolutely. And then we also saw that, you know, you can't change... And I'll always say this, you cannot change inertia, right? CIOs are gonna make CIO decisions. I had a, a dinner last night with about 15 [00:04:00] CIOs in a, in a, in a really interesting, uh, restaurant called The Charles. Had a great time, but learned a lot.

They're like, "Look, we all have a FinOps practice. We all have, uh, workloads, uh, in the public cloud. Could we be more optimized? Absolutely. But, you know, we are sort of, you know, we're a financial services company. We're not a tech company." So that's where people like RapidScale and, and others sort of come in and bring, bring value.

Max Clark: Um, okay. So DaaS is... I mean, everything be- it became branded as a service, right? Yeah. So we ended up with desktop as a service. Yeah. And before that you call it like remote desktop- Sure ... or you called it VDI, or you called it... There's all these different terminologies. Yeah. But, but really even, even in that world, DaaS is not a new concept.

No. And, um, I mean, client server, you know, goes back to the, you know, beginnings of microcomputers and IBMs and terminals and, uh, I mean, I can remember, uh, Microsoft releasing Windows NT Terminal Server 1.0 in the late '90s. Uh-huh. You had Citrix back then doing it. Absolutely. Why, why was, why has DaaS never [00:05:00] become the default inside of the enterprise?

Robby Gulri: I think there's a misconception. And by the way, I remember those, uh- Mm-hmm ... NT Terminal Services days where I, I, I used to, early in my IT days, I used to find that fascinating. Oh my God, I can, I can remote into some other machine and I'm sitting at home, and I can manage that machine, and I can basically, you know, replicate that experience as I would f- uh, it was great, right?

Yeah. Uh, uh, so I do remember that. Um, why has it, has it not taken place? I think, I think it depends on the enterprise. Like what we see, uh, what we see, and let me te- uh, refute me or agree or disagree with me, is organizations where, um- You know, manufacturing firms, uh, call centers, healthcare organizations where you've got, uh, a-a-a-a shift worker, you've got people coming in at 9:00, you're basically utilizing a machine, a resource to do pretty much the same type of work over the course of the day.

You leave at 5:00, and you need to have access to a handful of applications [00:06:00] to be able to, you know, do your work on a, on a daily basis. In those industries, I feel like DaaS is still a, a pretty viable, uh, platform. Um, if you look at, uh, call centers, again, these days, there's no such thing really as a call center.

You got people working at home. Mm-hmm. But ultimately I need to deliver a unified, consistent experience to workers that are also, um, maybe high turnover. Um, so, you know, as an IT professional, I'm like, "Man, I need to... I don't, I don't, I don't need to worry about buying hardware, provisioning hardware, shipping hardware to these individuals who may not be with my company three months from now because of a seasonal shift in my business.

I'm basically gonna, you know, deliver those services." Yeah. So I think in those industries, there's a lot of those, uh, opportunities still to be, uh, to be had.

Max Clark: I mean, let's go back. Okay, going back, 1998, 1999. Okay. Right? I mean, so long time ago. This is not new. I mean, Microsoft's been supporting this as a platform for a really long time.

That's right. Um, and when I say it's, why it's not the default, uh, there are industries where, you know, IT leadership, [00:07:00] like, became... You know, adopted it. Yeah. They were believers, but it was like this, it's... But those are the exceptions, not the rule, right? That's true. That is true. And, and, you know, there are, there are places where, you know, once it becomes the default, it's the default.

And I've talked, and I've had- Yeah ... CIOs a long time where it's like, once you, once they see it, they're like, "Oh, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life." Yeah. And, and the entire... It's like, it's like wildfire- Yeah ... inside an organization. Yeah. But, but crossing over that-

Yeah ...

is it's a really, it's a, it's a really wide river for a lot of places.

I think so. And when I think about the average, you know, mid-market, so loosely defined, but like, like the average like thousand to two, three, 4,000 seat company- Mm-hmm ... you know, DaaS is not the default in those businesses. Yeah. They're still shipping PCs or laptops. And like, you get into this default of like, oh, everybody has to get a laptop, and we have to manage this asset, you know, this physical inventory cycle.

That's right. And I look at that, and that's, and that's... Y- you know, it's, it's, um, uh... You know, and the same, I guess, is true in like the Google Workspace side of the world, right? Yeah. Where, you know, the default is a Mac [00:08:00] laptop with Google Workspace on it. Yeah. You could run Chromebooks. And I'm, and, and so I'm, I'm always interested in this conversation of like, why is this not like the default?

Mm-hmm. You know, why do, why- Mm-hmm ... why is there so much resistance to this? And, and how do you counter that when you're, when you're actually getting into conversations? Because it is a better way of managing your systems, right? I agree.

Robby Gulri: I agree. I'm a big fan. I, I, I think... You remember the, um... I'm gonna date myself.

Uh- Oh, I've already dated myself. Don't worry about it. I'm gonna date myself. Remember this old adage, uh, it, it, it ain't your father's Oldsmobile? Oh, geez. Yeah. Right? Remember that? Uh, what I mean by that is, um- I think the early IT '98, '99, 2000, early experience with DaaS, VDI, call it whatever you want, um, guess what you needed consistently?

Bandwidth. Mm-hmm. You needed connectivity that was reliable, low latency, uh, you know, minimize your hops from, you know, point A to point B. And man, you know, we're in 2025, [00:09:00] 25 years ago, we didn't have that. You know, no matter what the telcos will tell you, we didn't have that. And so the early experience, I feel like, wasn't what it can be.

And I think a lot of people sort of turned their minds off of, of getting a true desktop-like experience, even though the machine is not necessarily mine, or, or it is mine, but I'm delivering a unified experience. So I think a lot of folks who tried DaaS 20 years ago never tried DaaS again, given some of the, uh, God, some of the advancements, the innovation we've seen on the connectivity and network side.

Max Clark: Today we've got, um ... The technology kind of forked a little bit, right? Mm-hmm. 'Cause you had, um, VMware, you have Centrix. You know, you have different approaches, different techniques. Microsoft has gotten back into the game in a big way. Uh, AWS supports, you know, um, a cloud workspace. Yes. Um, you know, Microsoft is signaling that they're gonna support, um, both full desktop replacement as opp- as well as, you know, virtual [00:10:00] remote apps- Yeah

which is, like, this other push that's coming down. It, as a, as a service provider, you know, and, and, and it ... I, I think good service providers are really a lot like it's consultancy- Mm-hmm ... plus, like, integrator- Mm-hmm ... plus, you know, you take technology that's everybody says is gonna work, and you actually have to make it work because now you're supporting it under a contract with somebody.

That's right. How do you, like ... How do you sh- how do you, how do you, like, manage these waters and these shifts? Because, you know, you f- people will show up and say, "Hey, you know, we can just go do this thing. It's magic. It works perfect. You don't have to do this." Right. Yeah. You know?

Robby Gulri: Yeah. You asked the question earlier about DaaS.

You, how do you, how do you have that conversation? When I try to have conversations with CIOs, IT leaders, even business leaders- Mm-hmm ... who are not familiar with, you know, the as a service model or may not understand the distinction between Citrix or AVD or whatever, forget about the tech. For- forget about the technology.

I knew that was gonna happen. Yeah. Uh, forget about the technology, but, uh, think through, [00:11:00] think through it from the angle or the lens of security management and, like I said earlier, the, the onboarding, off-boarding, the provisioning, deprovisioning of users. And if you look at it from that angle and you talk about security, well, I got, I got applications that I can deliver in a consistent, secure sort of sandbox.

I've got the ability to manage those applications and configure those applications any which way. And then like I said, I've got seasonality, variability, all kinds of things in my business that I can drive towards, you know, those outcomes. On top of that, you layer in the, uh, well, do you really wanna go through a hardwa- a hardware refresh cycle?

That's the conversation. And I think going back to your question, you're very astute, is, man, as a service provider, my job isn't to sell technology. You know, my job is to educate, enable, uh, paint a picture of a world that could be, uh, and still leverage technology to help, help elevate the business. I think the folks who do that well, do that really well.

They're able to, you know, [00:12:00] align technology to serve some of those business outcomes, whether we're talking about DaaS or VMware or public cloud. Uh, it's the p- folks that have come in historically and said, "Look, uh, I'm gonna sell you this thing 'cause I heard you have a backup problem. I'm gonna sell you Veeam."

Well, okay, uh, but there may be a bigger problem, right? And so y- y- listening more than talking, understanding what it, what triggers are leading to those decisions. Did you have ransomware that led to your change in leadership, which now is leading to a technology decision? If you're not listening for those things, you're, you're doing yourself a disservice and you're not being true to what a MSP or a managed IT services company is all about.

Max Clark: Um, I don't ... There's no good way of phrasing this. One of the things you see a lot with companies now is they'll go through, like, massive layoffs- Mm ... a big riff, and, and they're disposition like the, "Oh, you know, the employees can keep all their equipment," right? Like, "Oh, you have your laptop and you get to keep your laptop that was company [00:13:00] issued."

Yeah. And, and, and it's one of these things that gets pos- it's like unlimited PTO, it gets positioned as a positive. Like, "Oh, it's, we're such, we're so good that we're doing this," right? Yeah. And, and w- I ... And you're laughing too, right? Because it's like, well, the other side of that and what you actually know is going out and trying to figure out how to reclaim X thousand devices scattered all over the country or the globe- Yeah

is a really difficult problem. Like, like, you know, asset management across that fleet- Yeah ... is very difficult. And, and so, you know, there's this like, "Oh, you know, we did this layoff and people keep their equipment," but you know, on the other side you're like, well, the reason why you're letting them keep their equipment is because you don't go through the pain of trying to get the equipment back and then dealing with it.

Yeah. Right? Like, it's this weird thing. Yeah. And, and I feel like, you know, it's, it's ... Where I've seen DaaS deploy really successfully, it's like the initial thought process of, like, what people are buying it for versus what they actually get out of it are very disconnected, right? Mm. You know, you talked about, you, you touched on it briefly, where it's like- Um, intellectual protec-, um, property [00:14:00] protection.

Mm-hmm. Right? Where's your data actually sitting? Oh, it's not sitting on the remote device, it's sitting on a centralized device. That's right. You know? Um, who can access it? How do you control it? You have a, you know, you don't have to worry about somebody leaving a laptop in a car- Yeah ... and that laptop being stolen, what was on that laptop anymore.

Yeah. You know? Um, you know, rapid provisioning. Oh, you know, do you have connection to the internet and a device already? You, you, now you can start working.

Robby Gulri: Let's go. Yeah. If y- You're onboarded in day one,

Max Clark: right? If you've never shipped equipment to, you know, Latin America, you don't really understand why that's a big deal or not.

Yeah. Right? Um, but then, you know, now, uh, you know, I've, I've seen this from another angle, which becomes, it feels like there's always this constant, like, um, friction and pressure between CapEx and OpEx models- Mm-hmm ... especially within IT and, you know, companies, what they go through. And, you know, cloud, of course, pushed this big shift into OpEx, like s- Mm-hmm

get rid of all your CapEx and move to OpEx, but then OpEx introduces another problem, which is your subscriptions- Mm-hmm ... and now your contractual- Mm ... subscription cost. And, and, y- you know, when, when you're, when you're talking with a company about this and they're weighing it- Mm-hmm ... like [00:15:00] how much of that friction are you actually seeing, you know, bubble up into the surface of a buying decision of, we actually wanna own the stuff, we don't wanna own the stuff, you know, we, we, we're okay signing subscriptions, we're not okay signing subscriptions, you know, 'cause that's a whole nother dynamic.

Robby Gulri: That's a whole nother dynamic. Are we seeing it? Absolutely. We, we see it all the time, is old ha- habits are hard to break. You know, even, even me, I've been in technology, like yourself, Max, for a long, long time. Um, man, when I was running IT, I wanted to own the stuff. I felt like I needed to own the stuff. I felt like, man, that's how I show my, my value because I am now in control of whatever assets.

Don't... Forget about the fact that they depreciate rapidly over, uh, no pun intended, over the last couple of years, uh, uh, or over the next, you know, next couple of years. Forget about all that, but I wanted to own it because at the end of the day, I felt like if I had control, it was a control thing. I could basically unify, secure, manage those things in a much, much more, [00:16:00] uh, interesting way.

So I think a lot of the old school IT guys like myself who've been in, in the industry for 10, 20, 30 years, still have that mindset. You know, the shift is gonna take over, I think place over a little bit more of a, a, you know, a, a, a phased approach. Um, but yeah, we see that balance kind of sh- uh, conversation all the time.

Man, do I, do I, do I run this completely as a service or do I actually do it in some kinda hybrid way? I mean, we're seeing this for cloud. You mentioned cloud, right? I have not yet r- yet run into one organization that is truly what I will say cloud native, right? Meaning everything is in the cloud. I'm, I'm not talking about startups that- Mm

have five guys who are working remotely and they're running SASE applications all day long. I'm talking about a true mid-sized enterprise. There is a hybrid view. Some workloads lo- live locally or on some colo that they're running, and some workloads are- You know, on, on AWS or Google or whatever. Um, it, it's the same thing.

Like, that balance is constantly within the IT

Max Clark: organization. [00:17:00] You know, you mentioned, like, uh, like this old mentality of IT. I, I would consider my life, myself an, like, old IT guy at this point- Mm-hmm ... right? Mm-hmm. And I don't wanna have anything. Like, this was, that's what's really funny, is like I, you know, I come from, like, building your own PCs- Mm-hmm

building your own networks- Mm-hmm ... having, you know, console access to your routers- Yeah ... having data centers. Like, I've been through this. Yeah. Um, and, and my default isn't like, "Oh, I wanna own infrastructure anymore." Yeah, yeah. Right? Because you understand what comes along with it. What I wonder about a lot, and especially when I see companies going through, like, ebbs and flows of their- Yeah

of their life cycles- Yeah ... is, you know, when you, when you own infrastructure, um, and the company's under financial pressure or decides to make a, a strategic shift or realignment- Yep ... you own the infrastructure. And when you're talking about a subscription service with the cloud, any, any SASE application, right?

Yeah. Anything, and the company says, "Oh, uh, we need to..." You know, what happens all the time, right? You see the statement- Mm-hmm ... that's like, "Oh, we need to cut costs by 20%." Mm-hmm. And you're like, you look at that and you're saying, "Well, [00:18:00] uh, this is contracted."

Mm-hmm. W-

we can breach the contract, which has financial penalties, but we, we don't have anything to give up here.

You know? Right. In, in an owned equipment, you could just say, "Hey, we're gonna push out a refresh cycle further"- Right, right ... typically, is what happens. You end up with like... That's horrible, too. I'm not advocating for it. But, you know, in the subscription world and in s- in the cloud world, all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, what do we do here?"

You know? And, and so how, how, how do you help people balance? Like, that's what I'm saying, like this, like, friction. How do you help people balance those two, like, extremes? Because, you know, any, any... IT is a, like, a, a business enabler, right? So it has to help the business grow, it has to help the business realign.

You know, a- and, and that becomes another big, you know, it's a big problem.

Robby Gulri: I think the balance... We were talking about it last night. I asked a philosophical question in the room, and again, bunch of CIOs from fairly large organizations in the room, and I asked the question, "Is AI actually IT?" And they're like, "You know, nobody's ever asked me that."

The reason I asked it [00:19:00] is, um, it, AI leads to conversations around data- Mm-hmm ... uh, which leads to conversations around data governance, uh, at least intellectual property. It, it, it, it opens up all these other, uh, conversations and decisions that have to be made. I think the balance comes from... Yeah, I'm gonna, it's gonna sound very cliche, but man, if you don't start with the business outcome in mind, there, doesn't matter what you balance, right?

And what I mean by that is if you know that you've gotta onboard your users, let's go back to the DaaS example, really, really quickly because I've got, you know, I gotta get them productive, like, day one because of the nature of my, you know, fluid business, that's the business driver. Then it's pretty easy to go back to the decision maker, uh, the IT enabler and say, "Man- That's what your goal is, well, we've got three options.

You can go and procure hardware, you know, CapEx. You can provision hardware, uh, ship hardware. [00:20:00] Again, time, money, energy. Or you can go the other way. And so I always try to basically start with what we have to accomplish, uh, as a business, what those business outcomes are. And once we can frame that, man, it's so much easier to have those sort of call them balanced or, uh, you know, I think the word of the week, I've heard this word 17 times for whatever reason, you know, convergence, right?

Con- convergence. I don't know why this week, but I've heard it from 100 conversations. I, I know why,

Max Clark: but I'm not gonna get into it. Right?

Robby Gulri: But the... But to me, convergence, at least in the context of the last few conversations that I've had, is, is not, oh, we're converging systems or we're converging data points into a data lake.

No. It's literally balance. I think the word convergence can be replaced for balance, which is, hey, I don't know if this is necessarily the perfect path, but I know that I need to sort of, you know, build a, build an approach that, you know, I can, I can appease, uh, the, the old propeller head [00:21:00] guys, and I can also appease- Ah

some of my new modern sort of thinker guys.

Max Clark: Boy, you're just opening up a whole can of worms with this one. Oh, I

Robby Gulri: probably am. Yeah.

Max Clark: You know, you know, convergence is like this idea around, like, uh, unification and, and reduction- Yeah ... in tool sprawl and, like, e- you know, one platform can do everything for you.

And, uh- Yeah ... and, and it's countering this idea of, like, uh, best in breed point solutions. Like, you end up with, like, 15 platforms, which just sucks. And, and one thing can do everything for you. And, and, e- you know, there's a lot of times where you don't want one platform doing everything for you. No. Right?

Like, there's, it's... You know, and especially when you're talking about, like, this idea of, like, uh, the talking heads of like, "Oh, you know," and like you can... There was a dude, and he worked for AOL, and his title was, like, digital prophet, right? And if you haven't, if you've never seen this before, you gotta search YouTube.

Okay. And you have to look for the digital prophet from AOL. I, I will do that. And it is, it is- As soon as I finish up, I'll do that ... it is str- it is straight out of a movie script, right? Yeah. And I have no i- I don't rem- this guy was getting paid really well and, like... But i- it, it's like, so convergence for me [00:22:00] always, like, fits into that, that role of, like, is it reality or not?

And, and your question is AI IT is really interesting to me because, you know, um, I think the role of IT is really misunderstood y- you know- Mm-hmm ... in, in modern days. Mm-hmm. Right? And, and the problem that IT has, in my view, is majority of the time, they're not involved in the decision process of what applications are being run or what, you know, what the business is doing, right?

Um, uh, simplest example, "Oh, we signed a lease for this office. We're moving in two weeks. We need- We need ... we need to be ready to go." Yeah. Right? And you're like, "Uh, what do I do now?" Right? Yeah. That happens all the time. Yeah. Um, but if you take that into bigger levels, it's, like, decisions are being made by marketing- By r- by revenue and sales, by operations, and then it's like, "Okay, we've made this decision, now you have to run it."

And, and I see this as like a lot of, you know, pushback where it's like, well, in order for us to run it, because as soon as it turns into IT has to, have to run it, now they have to own a platform they didn't make the [00:23:00] decision around. Yeah. And if it goes down, they get yelled at, right? And so you get into this weird thing, and, and I feel like that's, like really the, the birth of shadow IT in a lot of ways.

Mm-hmm. Because it's like now you have all these applications that are running on your network that you didn't, you know, you really weren't involved with deciding. But when they go down, you still get yelled at and you're like, "I don't even run this thing," you know? Like, and then where's the data and where's the governance and, and so like, is AI IT is a, is a, is a interesting thought exercise because, is it a business application?

Is it, you know, is it a line of business owns this thing? Is it infrastructure that IT has to maintain? How does it integrate with, with, with so- you know, with data and sovereignty and governance and, and you know, there's some horror stories that, that are gonna come down the road here pretty soon for people, you know?

Oh,

Robby Gulri: yeah. Like- It... I, I don't know if there's a, a perfect answer is, of, of that question- Yeah ... is AI IT. Think I should write an article. What do you think? We should write an article together. Ugh. Uh, but, but I, I, you know, first, the first question you have to ask is, is IT [00:24:00] in your business a cost center or is it a profit center, right?

Well- Well? Uh, is IT looked upon as an enabler of the business or, you know, a necessary evil for the business?

Max Clark: Okay. Um, a friend of mine running IT for a large global footprint, and he is sharing a conversation he has with me one day- Mm-hmm ... which is, um, basically somebody in finance tells him that IT's really expensive for the business, and his response is, is, "We're not expensive at all.

We're cheap." There's th- you know, he's, he's got, like a handful of people working for him. Sure. He's like, "We're a lean org. We don't, we don't cost you anything."

Yeah.

You know? "I didn't buy this stuff." Yeah. "You hired these people." Yeah. "They need laptops. That's not my fault," you know? Yeah. It's kinda like this response.

Yeah. He had a much more elegant way of saying it. I'm- Sure ... I'm, I'm paraphrasing it for it to be a little funnier, but, um, but this whole thing of like IT being a cost center versus a profit center, how do we help companies [00:25:00] that are still looking at IT as cost centers suf- you know, become, like elevate into how do we actually leverage IT as an enabler or, or a profit center for the business?

Robby Gulri: I, I think if you look at, uh, I haven't been able to find anybody to refute this. Um, if you look at any business, any vertical, any size really, what are we trying to do as a business? Especially in modern kinda data-driven world with all this noise and hype around AI- Mm-hmm ... convergence, globalization, you can pick all your fancy words.

But number one is we are trying to, we're trying to do more with less, right? Uh, we feel like, hey, you know, again, all, all, all the technologies feed into this. Can I use technology to do more with less? Can I displace or augment my human, you know, uh, labor with technology to help me basically elevate the business?

That's number one. Number two is, hey, can we, uh, delight, uh, uh, connect with, uh, engage with customers [00:26:00] in ways that we've never thought about before, right? Before, you know, somebody calls your 1-8- 1-800 number, you've got people to pick up the phone, you go through, uh, an IVR, whatever. Uh, well, now the expectation from the consumer, the customer of our customers, is completely different.

Your Gmail just works for the most part. Your phone, your iPhone, Android, whatever, it just works. And so the expectation on the business community and the business IT community especially is, hey, this stuff has just gotta work. So whether I connect with you on Facebook or Instagram or your website or a chatbot that's AI powered, I don't care.

I want unified experience, so I need to be able to, you know, delight customers in different sort of modalities. That's number two. Number three is, we're all dealing with this, I deal with this, I know you do, is, is how do I secure, enable, and optimize work when work is no longer done in the four walls of my business, right?

So those are the three things that ultimately every organization that I've run into over the last 10 years is [00:27:00] trying to, trying to juggle. And so again, those... If, if, if, if I get in front of a, a, a business decision maker, not an IT leader- Mm-hmm ... and I kinda go through that, that sort of, uh, thesis, nobody can argue.

And then you're like, okay, well, if you're trying to delight your customers in ways that you never thought ab- about before, technology can help, and here are some examples. If you're trying to deal with remote, you know, uh, shouldn't pick on millennials, but, you know, people who don't, never wanna come in the office, um, well, here you go.

Here's ways technologies can help. SASE, vulnerability management, Edge, whatever. Um, and then like I said, if you're trying to do more with less, we've got some ways to generate efficiency. So if you start again at the business level and you start kinda digging down, I think it's an easier shift than people think on how to go from a thought of cost center to profit center.

Your

Max Clark: line of, uh, ex- the expectation is it just works- Yeah ... creates really interesting problems for IT. And- Absolutely ... um, you know, when you have a, uh, experience or education gap of [00:28:00] like what's on the other side-

Yeah ...

um, an example, had a client years ago building out an office, and the CTO's, you know, never experienced building, you know, like running physical infrastructure.

Mm-hmm.

And his idea was, "We don't need to have wires in our office. I just want everything to be wireless. It works just fine at my house." And, and you're in this conversation, you're like, "You're building out 50,000 square feet of space, you know? And you're not gonna probably get there, but at 200 square feet per person, you know, your occupancy of the space- is a lot of people, right?

Like, you're gonna have a lot of devices in here. So then you're like, okay, well, now you wanna have a laptop and a phone and a tablet, and then, you know, screens and all these different things per person. And all of a sudden you turn around and you start counting these things up, and you're like, well, you know, if you only have this many bodies in here, you have this many devices.

Now you want them all to be wireless. And like, and like, and you know, a- but, but the reaction on the other side of the table is just kinda like, "Well, of course, it should just work." And you're like, "It doesn't just work." Sure. You know? Yeah.

Robby Gulri: Yeah. On, on top of that, yeah, you [00:29:00] got... What, what did I, what did, what did I read recently?

An average of five devices per employee- Oh ... in general. Mm-hmm. So there you go. You got 100 employees, you've got at least... And that doesn't include, you're right, the projectors and the, and the smart TVs and all that in the office. Um, you got hundreds and hundreds of devices. And then on the other variability to that particular problem is the whole, uh, you know, these buildings are no longer two-by-fours, right?

These- Offices, yeah. Right? The concrete corners that don't have access and, and, and, and availability. Like, there's all these other drivers. And then you got, um, you know, we're in a beautiful studio here. We've got the sun behind us. We don't know what that does to- Well- ... to our day-to-day, right? What, what

Max Clark: happened in that office that was also very interesting was they, um, decided as a design feature that they were going to put, um, you know, glass.

It was, it was glass partitions for the offices and the conference rooms. And then they tinted the glass- Mm-hmm ... with this really cool tint, and the tint that they used, um, basically was an RF shield. Right. And, and they w- unintentionally, the designer built [00:30:00] little Faraday cages. Yep. So none of the executives had working wireless in their offices, and there were no wires that were in the, in their offices.

Right. So, you know, after they had moved in, then it turned into, okay, we now have to figure out how to pull wires into your offices, 'cause your offices are like these little Faraday cages with no electromagnetic signals coming in now. And, and, and you're like, you know, and again, but you're in this, like, whole thing.

It's like, "Well, it should just work." And you're like, "Well, I don't know what to tell you." You know? Like, you've, you've m- b- you know, you know, sh- And,

Robby Gulri: you know, and what do you do, right? You're like, you're in this- I shouldn't admit this, but working for a, a, a, a, a, a very good technology company owned by Cox Communications, I've got a beautiful office in Atlanta- Mm

that I rarely get to see because I'm constantly on the road. But, um, and, and the first... We moved in, we did a kind of return, return to office thing a couple months ago, so we had a couple of folks like walk in. We're like, "What do you notice?" And some of the young kids had no clue what I was trying to ask.

What do you notice at these desks in the offices and the cubes? They have no phones. Uh, uh, [00:31:00] you know, we basically operate off of our mobile devices. Mm-hmm. And then, and there's certain pockets of that floor where, you know, we gotta run into the corner to get to the closest window to basically pick up my AT&T or Verizon.

Everybody's having a problem. I'm not picking on AT&T. Everybody's having a problem with our cell phone signal on the eighth floor. Well, we can solve that for you. It's

Max Clark: called, uh,

Robby Gulri: a

Max Clark: distributed antenna

Robby Gulri: systems is what you need. Th- absolutely. Yep. I've already called, uh, Cox Private Networks. They're gonna- Yeah

they're gonna hook me up here. Yeah. Yeah.

Max Clark: It's, it's, uh... But this is, that's actually, you know, it's a, it's an interesting point where it's like- You know, um, what would you say, like the gray beards of like IT at this point, you know? Yeah. And how... It, it, it's, but it's not even like an age thing, it's just like an experience thing of like have you had any experience doing this?

Because like all these sorts of little weird things pop up all the time. Like, oh, you know, if you're building an open concept floor plan, you know, space, you know, and people have to have a phone call, where do they go and how far do they have to walk in order to get to a room that they can close and have a private conversation in?

And do you have, [00:32:00] you know, and the s- and the scary thing when you start talking about like larger office environments and campus environments, um, do you have cellphone service if people are calling 911 from their cellphones? Mm. And oh by the way, it's not just can they call 911 by their cellphones, but can, can the PSAP now identify what floor you're on and what grid of the building you're in?

And that becomes like a whole thing. Yeah. And, and depending on the jurisdiction you're in, you're either, it's, it's, uh, some laws are like if you know it's a problem you have to fix it, but if you don't know it's a problem, then you don't have to address it. Like you can plead like ignorance with it. Um, but then, you know, you have really scary outcomes where it's like, oh, somebody calls 911 'cause they need a ambulance- That's right

and they don't know where they are, you know? And, and, and again, is that an IT issue? Like, is that a facilities issue? Is that a legal issue? Like, who's responsible for that? And then if you go to the business and you say, "Hey, um, we can solve this problem that we've never had before, but it's only gonna cost us this much money," and then the business says, "Well, we've never had that problem before.

[00:33:00] Do we need to spend the money?" And then you're like, "Well, we should spend the money because we..." But not having, it's, uh, uh, you know, cybersecurity is the same thing for me. It's like we've never had a breach, but we shouldn't have a w- Like y- you know, you're kind of in this weird- Yeah.

Robby Gulri: Yeah ... you know? I think o- on top of that, I totally agree with everything you're saying about, uh, uh, you know, the misalignment.

I think where the misalignment also comes from, and I'm not pointing fingers, I mean, we've got some really smart young talent in IT who have gone through, you know, some AWS certifications. So they are now experts at, you know, migrating, optimizing, securing workloads in AWS. And I don't know how you, how you gain this knowledge if you haven't gone through the journey that you and I have gone through, and people like us in our, in our demographic.

Like you, I've built PCs. Like you, I was a cool kid who got my mom and dad to convince, I convinced them to get me a second phone line so I could run a BBS, right? And, and, and, you know, w- wiring things and- Mm-hmm ... setting up servers [00:34:00] and, you know, terminal ser- pick whatever technology. You know, we've gone through, I learned a lot of technology through the o- the old OSI model.

Yeah. I don't think I have run into, you know, a, a, a, a 20-something-year-old who's brilliant at DevOps, MLOps, understands all these amazing IDEs and tools to build these crazy applications- Who may understand the OSI model, right? So when you start going from foundational, physical, all the way to application layer and everything in between, you start, you ha- you just naturally think about problems in a different way.

And I don't know how we, I don't know the answer, it's just an observation that

Max Clark: I've made. The, um, public cloud, I'll use that because I hate the hyperscaler term. Um, you know, you talk about, like, companies, you know, established, tenured, like, mid-market, like, real mid-market enterprise businesses, you know, are in these kind of, like, states of some on-prem, some SaaS, some in a data center, some in a cloud.

Mm-hmm. [00:35:00] Um, and I agree with you completely on that, you know, and, and, but I'm starting to see... We saw with tech startups originally where it was like, "Okay, we're just gonna be 100% cloud. We're not gonna ever have physical infrastructure." And that made sense, right? 'Cause they were starting from scratch.

Mm-hmm. They were starting from scratch, post-AWS existing, post-Google Workspace, like, all these things. Mm-hmm. Like, you could actually make a viable decision from zero with that. Now I'm seeing enterprises make these decisions of, like, "We're just gonna go all cloud." Mm-hmm. "Like, we're getting rid of all of our physical plan."

Of course, Microsoft wants you to do this, you know? Sure. Like, like, look at program licensing changes of, like, EA into CSP models and everything else, right? Like, they want this shift. But, you know, funny thing happens when you f- like, still have all of your physical infrastructure, you know, desktops, laptops in an office.

Yeah. But now you remove all the resources that they're connecting to, and you move them over some network connection- Yeah ... and you put it somewhere else, you know, farther away from you. And, and I, I kinda, like, I, I've been watching this, and I'm, I'm really curious [00:36:00] about of, like, does this push now the next shift of this?

Like, if a company decides one day they're gonna wake up and they're gonna get rid of... I mean, forget, like, Active Directory, you know? Talking about, like, "Oh, we're not gonna file servers in our office anymore." You know, not, not to say that they haven't probably already gone OneDrive or SharePoint to some degree- Mm-hmm

but, like, you know, we're gonna get rid of all of our file servers and all of our data storage. It's gonna leave our office, and it's gonna go to the cloud, and maybe we're close to our region because we planned it out and we're only, like, 20, 30 milliseconds away from it.

Like, you know,

like, I tell people, like, "People are gonna notice a difference when you do this."

Yeah. Like, I don't know if they're gonna, like, be in with pitch for- pitchforks, but they're gonna notice a difference. And I've kind of had this thing in the back of my head for a while of, like, does this shift? And as more companies do this, does this now force the entrance back into DaaS of, like, hey, look, you wanna have your computing resources next to your data 'cause that's actually important to you?

Robby Gulri: You know, I th- I, I think if you look at Microsoft, I mean, they're betting, they're betting a pretty nice chip on, on Azure Virtual Desktop. You know? It's [00:37:00] still cloud, running in the Azure infrastructure, but it's enabling, you know, a, a level of service that frankly replicates what we were doing 20 years ago in, in a much more efficient way.

So I think there are situations, I still feel like it requires a lot of education You're not selling a piece of technology, you're selling an experience and you're selling security management and control, provisioning, deprovisioning. We talked about that a few minutes ago. Um, that's what you're selling when you're talking about DaaS.

So unless, whether it's an MSP or a consultant or an advisor, um, thinks through those drivers for those type of technologies, I think we're still gonna be, you and I will be on this podcast in a year, two years, and still be contemplating why we don't get more, you know, penetration across the whole DaaS environment.

Max Clark: Average leadership in IT, average tenure in IT leadership is sub two years. Yeah. So now you're talking about a churn cycle that's going on within these companies with [00:38:00] people that actually understand the decisions that are being made and why and what the lineage of that decision was. And as you pointed out, you have certification paths within these cloud platforms that are like, "Oh, you know, I'm an expert in this cloud platform yet."

And I still have da- I mean, daily conversations with somebody like, "Oh, we're on fill in the blank cloud, so we're secure, and we don't have to worry about backups, and, and we don't have to do this, and it's like all taken care of." And I'm like, it's 2025. Like, how do we still have this perception of it's just infrastructure that you're renting from somebody else, and you still have to do all this stuff yourself?

And, and but this perception is coming from people that are making decisions that are supposed to be the technical leaders in these companies that like have no idea what the, what they're talking about. And I look at that, I'm like, how do you, you know, like w- w- the st- I mean, the stakes are incredibly high with this, right?

Because if you don't have backups and you, you g- you know, a region goes down, you're down, right? Yeah. And, and what I, what I tell people is delete is a valid operation on a computing [00:39:00] platform, right? So if somebody goes through and deletes all of your data, the cloud looks at that and says, "Oh, that was a valid com- operation.

Like, we honor your delete." Mm-hmm. Um, i- is this, is this evolution that's coming just like collective scar tissue that has to build up, you know, with a bunch of bad stories or, or, you know, is there like another awakening that we're gonna see in terms of education of people understanding like what this actually means for them?

Robby Gulri: Yeah. I, I think, I think it's the latter. I think, um, we're betting the farm on agentic. Uh, you know, we ta- talk a lot about automation. We talk a lot about, "Hey, wouldn't it be amazing if I could run my entire company over two monitors, and, and I just sit there and, and I, through a small language model or through some kind of interface, I can basically, you know, magically control these environments?"

I think that's a lot of people's, especially the folks that did not go through some of that early learning, you know, in the IT sort of like layered ecosystem, um, I think [00:40:00] that's utopia for them. And so I think they're in for a rude awakening.

Max Clark: LogicWorks was a great acquisition from RapidScale and put you into the, like, AWS consultancy space.

Yeah. And since then has expanded into Azure, which of course makes perfect sense, and then Google Cloud, which is also very interesting to me in terms of platforms. How... From a customer interaction and people coming to you, how much of this now cycle is still in this, like, idea of this, like, digital transformation of we decided we're gonna, we've- we're gonna finally move our workload?

Mm-hmm. And how much of it is like, "Oh, shoot, we've done this, and we didn't really know what we were doing, and we were trying to manage it, and now we've had this surprise," right? And, you know, we see surprises of, like, uh, redundancy, resiliency, backup, security, cost. You know, like, we lost the person that actually knew what they were doing here, and we didn't realize, we didn't know it was still going on.

Like, how, how are you fitting as a service provider into your client engagements with these platforms?

Robby Gulri: The easiest [00:41:00] door opener, uh, for a lot of these engagements is, you mentioned the word cost, right? Uh, there's few, few variables in the world of cost. Um, most of these organizations have tried the public cloud in some way, right?

They've got applications, they're running some interesting workloads that are mission critical, you know, for their particular business. They thought f- a few years ago that running it in the cloud was gonna be a cheaper option. Just taking, taking X, moving it into the cloud, and calling it cloud X, uh, is basically a rude awakening for them, right?

Uh, we, we know the whole ingress, egress thing. Outside of that, very little due diligence and centralized procurement process enablement. So even today, I got organizations, more, more mature organizations are a little bit better at, at centralizing. You know, they've got a MLOps team or basically a cost, uh, enablement team or a FinOps team.

But for the most [00:42:00] part, mid-market, you've got P cards and credit cards floating around. So now I'm in marketing. You talked about shadow IT. Man, I'm just gonna turn up a resource. It's easy. Easy. It's the gift and the curse. It's so easy to turn up a VM on, uh, on AWS. Guess what? That's the same reason why you've got completely, you know, uh, no visibility into what your cost, you know, situation is.

So for us as a service provider, we come in and, and truly from a third party perspective, we're able to look through, you know, ultimately what's happening in your environment. The other thing that helps us as a service provider, giving... given our partnership status with the AWS' and the Azures and the Googles of the world, is the ability for us to, uh, get funding for projects that otherwise the customers themselves wouldn't be able to get, right?

Well, AW has a, AWS has a thing called a, a MAP program or Migration Acceleration Program. Mm-hmm. So if I can go get a dollar- For a project that, man, I know [00:43:00] I need to do to modernize a legacy application and refactor it into the public cloud, man, this is, this is my opportunity as a service provider to bring value.

Max Clark: I, I have such mixed feelings with these things. I mean, it's, it's, it's such a good thing for companies that if they're not taking advantage of, there's free money they should go get, right? Yeah. Like 100%, I'm not gonna argue with it, and it's wonderful that they do this, but at the same time it's like, it's like getting a goodie bag from a heroin dealer, you know?

Like, like there's just, you know, like... Yeah. You know? But- I'm gonna use that one, by the way. You know, like, let me- ... let me help you modernize your application and be completely dependent and integrated on top- Yeah ... of my cloud platform. Yeah. You know? Uh, which b- you know, and, and I mean, the, why, why, why are companies and why are people so misinformed with cost and the actual cost of going to cloud?

Like, why is that still happening today? Uh,

Robby Gulri: I, I think there's a lot of reasons, but it boils down to lack of understanding, lack of just, what, [00:44:00] what is the cloud? I mean, you know, we're talking about just compute? Are we talking about just storage? Are we talking about, you know, basically just data in, you know, in or out of the cloud?

What is the cloud? And I think that in itself needs to be answered. These days it's all, the conversation's all around data. I mean, I, it's my data, I need to basically protect it, secure it, grow it, uh, you know, need to create a, you know, a, a veracity model around it. Cool. Um, w- well, where are you gonna put it?

And, and, and those fundamental questions, at least from what we've seen, rarely get answered or asked to get answered to be able to then truly figure out, okay, let me actually do a true understanding over time, uh, what my cost structure's gonna look like. All these guys have amazing little calculators and tools and whatnot.

How many people do we know that actually use them and on, and use them accurately and effectively?

Max Clark: I find you say in, in talking with a CIO, and they've got a FinOps team. Yeah. I, I, I tell a lot of people that contracting [00:45:00] with a service provider for FinOps is probably the best thing you can do. Yeah. Just because if you've never tried to like take apart an, an, an AWS bill for instance and figure out what you're actually spending money on, like, it's crazy.

Like, how many companies are just paying these bills, and they have absolutely no idea what they're paying for, and does it even actually line up with what they're expecting to be spending? And- We,

Robby Gulri: sorry, uh, uh, last night, again, going back to a really interesting conversation, here's another, here's another one for you, right?

Yeah. Should FinOps report to finance, the CFO, or should FinOps report to- Robbie ... IT leader, right? Robbie. Robbie. Yeah. Now let, let

Max Clark: me actually take that a step farther. Who's actually responsible for cloud spend to begin with? Yes. Right? Yeah. And, and I've seen this play out, like, I mean, I see this play out like, like weekly, right?

Where you know, you, it's like, it's like the Spider-Man meme of all the Spider-Mans pointing at each other. Have you seen this thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, and what, and how does it always start? Finance tells IT, "We gotta lower costs in our spend on our, on our IT bill." IT goes, [00:46:00] "Okay, great. We don't actually control any of the applications that are running here.

Hey, other business units, you need to do, we, we need to cut costs 20%." And, and where I've seen this mostly is in, uh, is in tech companies, right? So in those cases, maybe you have finance and you have, um, you know, IT infrastructure, and then, you know, maybe DevOps kind of in that role. Mm-hmm. And then you have, um, engineering and software development teams, right?

And so, so finance will tell, you know, the IT DevOps team, "We gotta cut costs X%," and the DevOps team will tell the engineering team, like, "Oh, we gotta cut costs X%. We need an architectural change that we've already identified will solve this problem." The engineering team says, "Hey, it's not my KPI. I gotta build this thing for the business that I, I have in my OKR, this, this, you know?

And like, I can't, I can't... There's no cycle time for this." And so then, so they go back to DevOps, they basically say, "Nope," and put the hand up, you know, off with thee. And, and then you get this really funny situation with, with DevOps and, and finance of like, how do we actually do this? And then finance is always looking for like this magic pill that they [00:47:00] can swallow of like, "Oh, you know, how do we, you know, what do we do here magically to like, you know, drop our cost here?"

And you're like, "There is no magic pill." Yeah. Like, an EDP doesn't do this for you, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's, there's no RI or savings plan approach here that's gonna solve this problem for you,

Robby Gulri: right? Yeah. There was no consensus last time either. Uh, should FinOps report to finance or IT? You had, you had very smart people running very large organizations, you know?

Not one person had a consistent sort of view on it.

Max Clark: I mean, that's also like, where does IT report to? Right. Right? Right. Like, how many, how many, how many businesses are still putting IT into finance administration, and that's kind of quasi-reporting to CFOs as well. Yeah. Like- Yeah ... you know, a- I mean, again, is IT infrastructure?

Is software to the side? Is their CTO building platforms? Like, you know, the... And, and then, yeah, who owns it, right? It's-

Robby Gulri: Yeah, but I, I think you're right. I mean, you know, shameless plug, we've got a FinOps practice, and that's exactly our purpose is, as a third party, you know, I, I like [00:48:00] to use the word agnostic, but doesn't mean we don't have an opinion.

And, and we've got a lot of experience coming in and, you know, figuring out which workloads should sit where, where are opportunities to optimize, why are you utilizing SSD expensive storage for stuff that you have... I mean, simple things like that, that again, it's the forest and the trees, right? When you're in the business day to day, and you're just trying to keep the lights on and just go to the next problem and solve the next problem, having a third party, whether it's us or somebody else, come in and then, and, and look at it from a much more, uh, you know, kind of a higher view, it just makes, to me, a lot more sense.

Max Clark: You mean I shouldn't pick the most expensive compute resource possible- No ... to run my application on? Sure. Why not?

Robby Gulri: Why not? If, if... Well, maybe if, if, um- If you're not, um, if you're not paying for it- Well, that's the thing ... yeah

Max Clark: The people that are actually spinning these things up aren't paying for it most of the time,

Robby Gulri: right?

It's like my daughter who's no longer at home, she's at, she's in college. Uh, but when she was at home, she'd turn up the music, turn up the lights, [00:49:00] turn up the, you know, uh, the air conditioners to fricking 62 degrees, right? Yeah. And because- Why not? Why not? Like, she doesn't see that utility bill from-

Georgia Power. It's magic money. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. This- It's the same thing.

Max Clark: Well, but this is where I get back to and I'm surprised at, like, I f- I find very little movement to maturity around these practices within companies. And the amount of money that's being spent on these things- Yeah

is so significant that the lack of maturity around it is really interesting to me. And I don't think, you know, you mentioned procurement earlier. Procurement doesn't solve this problem, right? Like, procurement's role within organizations isn't like, how do we optimize, um, application consum- you know, s- infrastructure costs, you know, related to application consumption- Mm-hmm

right? Like, that's not a procurement function. Procurement, uh, you know, if, if you've... Dirty industry secrets, right? Like, any service [00:50:00] provider that has a practice of dealing with mid-market enterprise customers or procurement departments are inflating their costs going into the procurement cycle because they know- Right

at some point they're gonna have to deal with the procurement person who wants to get, like, that magic 10% off at the last minute. They just budget that in, you know? Like, you know, and so, like, not to throw shade on procurement, but, like, what you're getting out of it isn't what you think you're getting out of it, you know?

Yeah.

Robby Gulri: Like- Yeah ...

Max Clark: you know?

Robby Gulri: Yeah. We, we, you know, again, what we try to do is, again, going back to the, the business side, hey, if I can, I c- if I can get in front of the decision maker, the business operator, on the opportunity to leverage technologies in ways that they've never thought about before, all that, like, noise, you know, towards the contract signing and procurement generally is r- it's not, it's not, it hasn't gone away, but it's definitely reduced because we've established a true, you know, three Rs.

I always talk about the three Rs, you know, r- risk mitigation, ROI, revenue, or [00:51:00] revenue and ROI. Uh, if I can basically prove those three Rs on a, on a consistent basis with whatever I'm coming in, uh, from a technology perspective, you know, generally that business owner's got accountability and ownership to be able to go back to procurement and kind of sell the case, you know, for us, where we don't have to deal with those things.

Max Clark: I remember this vividly. I had a conversation with a CEO and, um, at the time they were spending 15% of their revenue on their cloud.

Hm.

And, and that's not what, uh, was so telling about the conversation. What was telling about the conversation was he knew he had to have that number below 9% or his business wasn't viable And it was interesting to me because it was one of the first times I actually had somebody that I was interacting with that had that number at that level of awareness of like- Impressive

you know, we are spending this, the business is not viable here, and, and they were trying to figure out how to get there. Mm-hmm. And, um, and the, and the unfortunate reality for them was it was a lot of pain. Like, it was a lot of changes that they had to make in order to even think about [00:52:00] rationalizing that.

And the biggest problem that they had was they were in a committed EVP, and they did not even have contractual... Th- there was not even a possibility of spending less money under their contract that they had. Yeah. Right? And, and this is one of the ones that's also really fascinating to me, watching, again, the non-technical teams executing cloud contracts, because it's like, "Oh, you know, sign this magic piece of paper and we'll cut your cost 10%.

But we're gonna require you to spend 12% a year on support, which you need anyways, and we're also gonna increase your cost 20% per year for the next three years under the terms of this agreement," right? Yeah. And then you get like, all of a sudden you're like somewhere around like month 18 and the company wakes up and they're like, "Well, how do we fix this?"

And you're like, "I don't know how you fix this. Like, w- why did you sign this?" Yeah. You know? Yeah. Like, what was, "Oh, we needed the discount." You're like, "Did... You know, like, nobody put this on Excel and, or Google Sheets and look at what these numbers actually meant to you?"

Robby Gulri: Uh, uh, very impressive that this individual actually had that [00:53:00] view.

I, I have rarely seen- Mm-hmm ... that in itself to say, "Okay, I need to get to 9%," or, "I have zero margin profile," or, you know, "My business is not viable." We don't, we don't often see that. I don't see that as I have these conversations. So that in itself to me tells a lot about this particular company. Uh, but I, I think, you know, you, you and I have talked about this.

You spend a lot of time with high growth, highly funded s- unif- unicorn kind of businesses that are literally focused on hypergrowth, user acquisition, customer acquisition. So the, the, the cloud spend side of the equation i- is, is just not time to think about, right? And this goes back to, you know, your, your business, our business, and as a third party to be able to come in and truly advise on, you know, what the potential is to go from 15 to 9%.

Max Clark: Many years ago when I was running data centers, um, and, and we'd hire people, [00:54:00] you know, one of the things I'd try to pound into people was there's no such thing as a temporary patch cord, right? You know, if you, if you run a cable and you plug that cable in both ends, like, you are never unplugging that cable.

Mm-hmm. Right? Like, it's just not happening. Mm-hmm. So do it right the first time. And, um, and the thing about cloud that's fascinating to me is this idea of like ephemerality, like the whole push of like you can spin up resources infinite, you can turn them all off whenever you feel like it. The ephemerality goes away really quickly for an enterprise, right?

It very quickly, you're in a contractual cycle, right? You lose the ephemerality to decrease your spend. Um, you know, or you're running applications you don't even know what are running where and what the dependencies are anymore. It's just sitting there. You know, um, we see all the time, uh, again, another reason why I advocate for FinOps so hard or, um, you know, automated applications, it's like- Yeah

you know, stale resources aren't being consumed, unattached resources aren't being consumed, and, like, this stuff adds up [00:55:00] really fast, you know? Like, quickly

Robby Gulri: fast. It's your, your analogy, I love it, the goodie bag, you know, uh, analogy- ... from earlier. But let's not forget the, uh, the commitments that organizations make because they're promised, you know, credits, discount, whatever.

Yeah. Right? That's another strategy, and again, I'm not blaming the- the- the public cloud companies because- Oh no, it's great for them ... yeah, right. They gotta run their business, right? Yeah, yeah. But we, I made a commitment today and- and based on, man, I needed to make sure that I align to some budget constraints from today, did not anticipate what- what my growth and my cost structure's gonna look like six, nine, 12 months from now.

Now all of a sudden, I'm looking at this commitment and I didn't... I anticipated my growth to be X, but it didn't really quite get there, and now I've got these commitments that I've made. So you got that variable on top of it as well.

Max Clark: See, my version of heresy on this one is trying to convince- convince our clients to get off their EDPs- Mm-hmm

and to also get off of the enterprise support tiers that they're paying for, right? And [00:56:00] that they can actually accomplish those two tasks. And it's, you know, um, I- I understand that I- I- I come across as the crazy lunatic in that room, but, you know, that's like my dream state, you know, of like, "Oh, we can actually now affect change for you- Yeah.

Yeah ... if you don't have these things." And, and- Yep ... um, a company's coming into the FinOps, right? We talk about cost as a big driver, and- and the thing, the problem with the cost as a big driver is it usually always starts out with like, "We wanna, we- we need to address our cost," right? "We're spending too much.

We've woken up and we've realized, like, this is untenable for the business." Yeah. And a lot of times that's like you don't even have awareness of what you're spending on. So how do you help, as an outsider, mature a business's understanding of what they're spending in cloud and actually get them to a point where you can help advocate for decisions or directions with them?

Robby Gulri: Yes. I mean, how do you establish trust, you know, when you just met somebody? Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a bit of a challenge, right? We- we, you know, obviously, excuse me, I come in with a lot of credentials, a lot of status with these [00:57:00] public cloud companies. Uh, obviously we're pretty well regarded in our, you know, ecosystem of companies that provide these type of FinOps and other related services.

So got some pedigree and some experience and some references I can bring to the table. Even that is not in it itself enough. I still have to be kind of proof of the pudding, right? And so for us, it's- it's- it's crawling before we start running- Yeah. And- ... and- and- and running a marathon, right? Is basically coming in with- You know, a, a, a, a step function approach.

Let's look at certain workloads, let's do an assessment. Let's not do a c- overcommitment to, to, to this assessment. Let's show you some, you know, absolutely impactful results that we can then leverage into some other, uh, you know, larger scope or larger projects or larger sort of managed services. Whatever it is, to me it's always a, "Hey, let's advise, coach, and, and go through a, a step function to get to the final product."

Max Clark: I'm... I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm still surprised with how many companies, um, are running cloud resources that don't have any sort [00:58:00] of cost tagging. Yeah. You know, inside of that environment, right? So you're like, "Oh, you know, we're spending a million dollars a month on fill in the blank." Yeah. "And we don't know...

We, we kinda have these, like, loose ideas of where we're spending money, you know? It's like a million bucks. We're spending, you know, half a million on compute. We're spending a couple hundred grand on S3. We- we got Dynamo. We have..." You know, like whatever the services are. Right. You know? Um, but they don't really know why.

Right? Or, like, what that actually relates to. And on the, and on... And it's like you start from that standpoint, right? Yeah. It's like you have no information about what you're doing. Yeah. And of course, I understand what the other side of this endpoint is, because I understand what best practices are, and I've seen companies that have gone through the pain to get all the way to the end state.

And the end state's like, "Oh, we're running this application, which generates this revenue for the business, and it costs us this much to run. Like, do we wanna stay in that business or not?" And then, and, and, and then they make decisions of like, "Yes, we're gonna invest in this," or, "No, we're gonna get rid of it."

You know? Like, okay, we'll get rid of it. It's gonna do X, Y, and Z for us, right? But there's a big delta between [00:59:00] those two states. And, and when people are coming to you and saying, "We have a cost problem," usually signifies that they're all the way over here, that they don't even know where to start. They don't even know where to start.

And, and what is... You know, from a practice standpoint, when you walk in with somebody new that's like that, that's like, "Oh, we don't even understand how to, how to read our bills," right? Like, that's just, that's more than just being like, "We're gonna ingest your bills and help you figure out, like, answer what you're spending money on."

It's like, how do you actually then, you know, walk them through that process? Because you don't have control over the entire environment. Like, they still have to do work. You can say, "Hey, we need this information." Yeah, yeah. "And you should do these things." But, like, you're in this kinda weird position now where in order to deliver what they want you to deliver to them, they need to do stuff for you,

Robby Gulri: right?

Remember, remember back in the day when you were building data centers, and you were running your own servers, and you had control of your... You took so much pride, I'm making an assumption, I know you did, took so much pride, 'cause I know I did, on naming these things. Right? Like, "Hey, I've got a, a, a process."

Mm-hmm. So when I see a resource... You talked about [01:00:00] cost tagging. It, it, it, it, it, it instigated this. When you see a particular resource or a list or a RV Tools report, whatever, boom, you have a very good idea of kinda what this environment looks like. Because it's so easy to turn up a resource on a public cloud, the discipline of naming, just simple things, naming conventions- Aren't what they used to be, and they've kinda gone away.

So you just sorta click through the process. You con- you configure your little VPC, you put it in a few VMs, you allocate some storage, boom, you're good. Your application's running now. Um, go back six months, how many of us really remembered what we basically did? So for us, as a, as a FinOps practice, uh, type of organization, the first thing is just discipline on what it is that we're, w- that we're doing FinOps on.

There's so much, uh, uh, to be, to be gained just from appropriate tagging, appropriate nomenclature, appropriate- Mm-hmm ... sort of classification.

Max Clark: Yeah. It's... I, I mean, the cat's out of the bag with cloud, right? Like, it's... What, what, [01:01:00] what concerns me and what confuses me is this idea that's still out there of, like, cloud is cheaper, or, like, cloud is secure, or cloud is this, or cloud is that.

And you're like, w- who gave you this impression that, that... It's like, it, it's like none of these statements are true, right? You know? Like, cloud is not cheaper. And a lot of... In most cases, it's more expensive. Um- Mm-hmm ... now, it gives you different flexibility. There's different reasons. I'm not saying it's not good.

Mm-hmm. I'm just saying, you know, if you told me that cloud is cheaper than running bare metal, I'm gonna tell you you're absolutely wrong- That's right ... and I can prove it to you, right? Yeah. Um, but I'm not a moron in terms of, like, why you run cloud versus bare metal or bare metal versus cloud. Like, that's, there, there's different...

There's layer eight issues. I'll use your OSI- Right, right, right ... right? There's layer issue, eight issues that come into those decisions, right? Mm-hmm. And all those are above my pay grade as, as an advisor, right? Like, I can't... Like, I can give you information- Yeah ... but, like, it's, y- your business has to make that decision.

And so, you know, I, I... You know, when [01:02:00] you, when... Where you guys sit, like, what's the other one that comes up a lot, right? Like, this idea of multi-cloud. Like, oh, you gotta run AWS plus Google Cloud plus Azure. And I'm like, I, I, I feel like 95% of the environments I know are still single region, single AZ inside of AWS.

Like- Yeah ... like, we're talking about multi-cloud. Can we just give people multi-region? This show exists because of what we do at itbroker.com. If you're in the middle of a real tech decision right now, new technology, vendor selection, a contract that doesn't feel right, an M&A event that just landed on your lap, and so on, we help buyers like you get it right.

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Robby Gulri: Yeah. You know?

Max Clark: Yeah,

Robby Gulri: yeah. Uh, it, it's a, it's a, it's a definitely a resource issue. Like, in theory, we've been talking about multi-cloud. We as a ecosystem, as an industry, as a technology, um, organization, we've been talking about multi-cloud since probably 2015.

We knew that, hey, it makes little [01:03:00] business sense to put all my eggs in one basket. I wanna be able to hedge, and I wanna be able to leverage, and I wanna be able to distribute. But- How many organizations have expertise across- Mm-hmm ... uh, you know, the, the multi-clouds? Just because I'm an expert at Bedrock, and I, you know, I was making that up, am I a, am I an expert on, at Vertex?

Probably not, right? Am I gonna be able to hire two, $300,000 a year engineers to basically align my applications across both of those platforms? Um, makes sense in theory, multi-cloud, but I also feel like, again, this is, this is our strategy as a business is we're not trying to change religion. We are trying to make sure you're basically, uh, if you're going down the path of Google and Amazon or just Google, we've got a team, engineering, processes, technologies, automation that can help you get there.

And so that's what we're trying to do as a business, and we continue to evolve that way. But yeah, most organizations that I [01:04:00] know that are, like, in the public cloud are not thinking, or they may be thinking it, but they're not implementing a multi-cloud strategy.

Max Clark: What's the right way for a company to engage w- with RapidScale as it relates to public cloud management, right?

'Cause there's lots of different things that you offer. Mm-hmm. You know, we talk about FinOps. Mm-hmm. You know, and, and, and there's, like, ideas around, like, what is DevOps, and what does it really mean, and what is support, and how does this work? And, and, you know, NOC or SRE functions or application modernization or just like- Yeah

"Hey, we know what we're actually doing, we can help you whiteboard this," you know, kind of stuff. Like, what's, what's the right way for companies to engage? And I mean, uh, yeah, I mean, look, people are in different, like, points of this circle, right? But, like, like, where do you guys fit in the best and people, like, can walk away and be like, "Wow, that was really awesome"?

Robby Gulri: I

Max Clark: think the

Robby Gulri: easiest call to action is get RapidScale to come in and do an assessment. Uh, let's get a lay of the land. [01:05:00] Let's understand. Talked about it a lot. Cost tagging, uh, classification, what resources, what storage is allocated, what compute- Mm-hmm ... is that. Just those simple things. Get us to come in, provide you an assessment or a nice report.

Um, and, and from there, whether you decide to continue to engage with RapidScale further and basically figure out a better optimization strategy or a security and governance strategy or both, that's on you. But at least you've got visibility into what's happening from a organization that's not so much in the business but can understand the overall architecture.

We start, we often, 80%, 90... I think I saw this number the other day internally. 92% of opportunities that start with an assessment end up in something larger where we can come in and, and help with, you know, data pipelines and extraction of data into data lakes. What... That's all after the fact.

Max Clark: Right.

Robby Gulri: Until you understand the [01:06:00] situation and your sort of, uh, environment- All that stuff is, is, is later

Max Clark: That's an interesting point that you just made, right?

Because data pipelines and data extraction is business process. It's not infrastructure, right? It's like there's infrastructure that has to be built in order to manage that data, that, that business process. But, like, there's a reason why the business needs that process to happen, and, and, and that's a big disconnect also when you, when, you know, talk about, like, the difference between IT and, and the relation to the business, cost center, profit center.

It's like what does the business actually need to do as a process in order to run, and then what do you do in order to run it,

Robby Gulri: right? Right. Right, right. It's the, y- y- you know, I'll, I'll... The question of is AI IT? You could say the same thing about data. Is the data pipeline, data governance, data extraction, data enrichment, uh, is that, is that part of IT?

Is that part of the business? Is that part of strategy? Is that part of finan- You know, these are the, these are the hard questions that need to be first asked to be able to then answer, to then [01:07:00] align. You know, I think, I think the real way to go about in managing IT... Like, again, back in the day when I was running IT, I'm dating myself, it was pretty, relatively speaking, it was easy, right?

Business was done in the four walls. My employees were- Mm-hmm ... in, in the four walls. They came in at 9:00. They left at 4:00. Half of them didn't work. They went home, uh, and we didn't really think about work until the next day. Obviously, that world, uh, no longer exists. So, so, so those challenges lead to IT having to think about remote work, security, edge, ransomware, SASE.

Like, there's a thousand things that IT people have to think about. Then you add the complexity of different types of infrastructure, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, um, you know, data. Now, y- you know, you got the whole layer of AI. Can't imagine what IT leaders have to think about on a day-to-day basis. The only way to do this, just like what I do personally with my finances, I've got an expert, just like I do with my accounting, I have an expert.

You gotta partner with people that basically can bring [01:08:00] some certain level of expertise.

Max Clark: I find a lot of suspicion with CSPs, you know, in, you know, like, like, um, uh, companies. Uh, it's, it's, really, it's odd to me, but, like, this idea that there's, like, you know, there's some catch. You know? Like, why d- why would I engage the CSP versus just work with Amazon directly?

Why do I need a CSP versus working with Microsoft directly? I mean, the Google one's ins- uh, easy 'cause, like, you can't talk to anybody at Google in the first place, right? You know? But, like, with these other companies it's, it's like this like, "Oh, why, why should I engage with a CSP?" Like, "Why shouldn't I just work with Amazon directly?"

And, you know, I have my version of the answer. I'm, I'm, I'm curious to hear yours.

Robby Gulri: I'll simplify. We've talked a little bit about potential funding. You know, the, the, the innovation funds available across these, uh, environments are... Again, they're no dummies. They're not just giving you free money. We know this, right?

But working with a CSP can help you get that money in ways that otherwise you wouldn't be able to do. Also, you know, [01:09:00] again, we didn't, we didn't buy these credentials Uh, we earned them through accreditation, certifications, uh, you know, all of our engineers basically going through a whole vetted pros- vetting process.

Well, that gives us now a right to basically, I'll call it the, the, the bat phone, you know, uh, into these folks. So yeah, good luck trying to, you know, go through your TAM or your direct interface into these environments. We can definitely, you know, help you there. That's probably the biggest reason. And then thirdly is, man, just as, uh, we're about to go to re:Invent coming up here shortly, right?

Uh, I'm not sure how many different microservices AWS is gonna launch just in the realm of AI. And

Max Clark: how many they're gonna kill off too. And how

Robby Gulri: many are they gonna kill off, right? Right. Just last year, I remember there were at least 15 that I remember- Yeah ... that they actually, you know, PR'd and, you know, a big, big, you know, to-do about these things.

Uh, well, how are you as a business who's a, you know, a, I don't know, a HVAC company or you're a logistics company or a supply chain business, how are you supposed to keep up with all this innovation that's [01:10:00] happening? That's as... That's what we as a CSP basically try to do. Again, we are incented to do so because the next time we get a project to migrate a legacy app into these environments, guess what?

It, it, it's advantageous for us to say, "Oh yeah, there's this, there's this new thing that AWS launched last year that we can leverage to basically make this business function happen." That's our job. That's not your job. And so I would say those would be my answers, kind of the top three on engaging a CSP.

Max Clark: We should talk about VMware. Uh-oh. Um, now...

Let me see. How do I wanna phrase this, right? Uh, VMware is acquired. Acquiring company has gotta m- make a return on their investment. Mm-hmm. Right? And, and there's been a lot of... It's, it's kind of almost like, um, I don't wanna say there wasn't a plan, but it was like the plan is definitely evolving as time is passing of like, "What are we gonna do and, and how [01:11:00] do we approach this?"

And I feel like with, with, with companies, they had one of a few options, right? If you had a VMware-based environment, it was, um, re-sign at whatever deal you were offered and punt the decision down a few years- Yeah ... and try to deal with it later. Or there became, like, these, you know, accelerated migrations, you know, VMware to Nutanix, VMware- Sure

to something else, you know, Proxmox, all these different platforms, right, that, that came up, and some people went down that route, you know. And I, I couldn't say, like, percentage-wise, like, what did what- Mm-hmm ... versus the other, but it, it feels like the punt the decision, the easiest decision to make is always to do nothing, just to spend more money, right?

Absolutely. You know? It has the least risk. Yep. We, we... We're just gonna do nothing, it's just gonna cost us more, right? Um, but now it's like those chickens are coming home to roost, we're seeing. Mm-hmm. And now, like, now we're getting into this, like, the, the... Anybody that made the decision to punt is now being forced to actually make a real decision.

Mm-hmm. And that real decision is do they continue to invest in this platform, and what does that investment actually mean, or do we use something else? [01:12:00] And- You know, we talk about like app- application modernization. Like, how many of these workloads were just pulled out of an on-premise environment and shoved into a cloud environment because they thought they were gonna get better economics out of that cloud vendor for X years, and, and then, like, they're finding out that maybe it's not there as well?

For those companies, there's a bunch of different roads you can take them down, right? It's just like, how are you running the r- infrastructure? Where is it running? But we, we haven't even really scratched the surface on, like, application modernization, 'cause, like, going from premise to cloud is not just like, "Hey, let's just take this box, virtualize it, shove it up into a cloud vend- you know, platform."

It's, what is this application actually doing, and how do you make it cloudy, right?

Yeah.

Um, and, and, you know, so how, how does... What is that conversation like when you're talking with a CIO, you're talking with, you know, fill-in-the-blank business leader of like, "We've got this application," and probably starts with cost again.

Like, "We've got this cost problem we have to address." Yeah.

Robby Gulri: Before it goes to the conversation around cost, uh, [01:13:00] this is so many examples in, in the real world where, uh, you go into an organization and they've been... They've built an application, homegrown thing that they ran- Mm-hmm ... built, you know, 15 years ago.

The person who was responsible for this application is retired, no longer with the business. Do you have any source code? No. Do you have any executables? No. Um, so beyond... Y- And this is, and I'm not making this up. No, I know you're not making it up. I'm just laughing because I have

Max Clark: all these, like, stories popping in my head, yes.

This is real. Yeah. This is

Robby Gulri: real, and so you're like... And then they're like, "Yeah, we need to get this thing in the cloud." So how do you cloudy, make it cloudy? Well, uh, uh, before you even start talking about cost is you gotta think about how to refactor this thing. What is it? What's the business process? How do you immerse yourself in those business process to be able to, you know, redo this application in a way that does make sense in the future?

So those are a lot of the first conversations that we have is, is, is, is the foundational, I call it the foundational side of the, uh, you know, the application sort of modernization bucket. [01:14:00] Um, once you're, once you get past that, then, yeah, you talk about VMware. Um, my God, like, uh, are you, are you, are you impacted?

Most organizations are. Um, you know, what does that look like? Well, we're s- we're seeing a 3X license, uh, increase. Um, w- we, we used to buy, you know, uh, we had a reseller that would sell us VMware licenses. Unfortunately, that v- that reseller is no longer part of the club. Uh, now what are my options? Mm. Uh, well, I've got some options, but it starts with two fundamental questions, in my opinion.

You know, where that, where is that application, and where are the people who are accessing that application? Once you can answer those questions kind of in a, in a, in a 50,000-foot view, then you can start mapping out a journey to Nutanix or native, you know, public cloud or Red Hat or whatever, whatever the different virtualization platforms are.

But before having those conversations, the rest of it is frankly just a, just a, you know, uh, I don't know, an academic exercise. [01:15:00]

Max Clark: Um, you know, being in IT for a long time, m- uh, two of my most hated acronyms are ROI and TCO. And I say that because- Mm ... it is s- the most disconnected way that you can actually go through a technology purchase related to what the business actually needs.

Mm-hmm. Like, y- you know, and, and we can talk about this in lots of different phrases, I can give lots of different examples, but it's like, you know, like what's the total return on investment for this thing? It's like you're buying a network for your office to connect people to the internet in order to do work.

What do you mean what's the ROI on doing a switch upgrade? Like- Yeah ... like, are we really having this conversation right now? Yeah. Like- Yeah ... um, what's the ROI on having electricity in your building? Like, I, I, you know, like there's, there's... Some of these things are just like so funny to me. But, um, but what I've, what I've been thinking about for a long time, and I wanna get your take on, is, you know, we, you, you use the phrases like is AI IT?

You know, where does IT respond? You know, who owns [01:16:00] cloud spend? Like w- it feels like we need a new language for IT to talk with the business and vice versa. Mm. And, and what should that look like? Like, what is the metrics, or what is the dialogue that a CFO and a CIO should be having in relationship to, you know- Mm

what the COO is doing, or what the CMO needs or, or what's going on?

Robby Gulri: Wow, that's an interesting one. What is the language? Man, IT people, um... You know, remember, remember again, I just see this today, CFOs constantly are blaming IT people because they're like, "Man, I, I asked for a budget." "And, and I got, and I got the typical, 'Well, it depends.'"

You know, that's... You, you talked about TCO- ... and, and ROI. That's a, that's a term I absolutely hate even though I use it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, "Well, it depends." Well, because that's what people buy, right? It depends. It depends on a lot of things. Yeah. Let me walk you through what it depends on. I s-

Max Clark: I say it depends on everything,

Robby Gulri: yes.

It depends on everything. Yes. Uh, so CFOs are constantly, uh, complaining [01:17:00] that IT leaders do not know how to budget, can never give a straight answer on what the budget is because often we don't know. Right. We don't know. I think that's the first bridge that has to be built, understanding the dependencies for the CFO to say, "Oh, okay.

I, I understand what you're saying by saying it depends because I realize that it depends on A, B, and Z." Um, I think that in itself, if we could somehow magically, you and I can craft a, a, a, a new bridge or a new paradigm where those, um, uh, lost in translation conversations happen less, I think that's a great start for us.

Max Clark: O- Okay. I mean, so the, the, the, the easiest example is in cybersecurity.

Yeah.

Okay? You, I mean- Yeah ... you've used some of the acronyms like SASE- Sure ... and this, that, and the next thing, right? Sure. And a lot of times- These platforms come into place because, you know, you've pointed out, like, you don't have it- you, you don't have people in an office anymore.

You need to have people remote. Those people need to [01:18:00] access your data. They need to do it in a secure way. You wanna have, uh, maybe you're in a, the compliance regime, so you need to have some sort of audit and oversight, right? And I find, like, a lot of companies im- implement ZTNA aren't doing it because they're really trying to figure out a better security model.

It was like, "Oh, we need all the actual, um, uh, user authentication audit," you know, capabilities that come out of ZTNA, and we just get all the security as a byproduct, right? Mm. But when, but, but that, it becomes an enabler technology of, like, we don't have people in an office anymore, and people are remote, and they have to connect to our applications, right?

Yeah. Not like, w- so what's the ROI?

Robby Gulri: To connecting to Salesforce, I don't know. Right? You know?

Max Clark: Or, or, like, um, uh, you know, there's some things that are become mandate, right? Yeah. Insurance mandates that you do security awareness training, right? Yeah. So, like, w- if it's an insurance mandate, do our, you know, security awareness training, is there an ROI attached to that one?

Or is it a requirement in order for the business to actually get insurance, which it needs to function, right? Right. Like, so how... So this is why I [01:19:00] say, like, it feels like there's a giant, like c- you know, like the, the, like the lines don't come across, where, um- Yeah ... you know, and I find this, you know, in s- in security, cybersecurity specifically, is so difficult because, you know, there's this, this idea and this, this perception of, like, we can pick a level between zero and 10 for how secure we wanna be, and that relates to some sort of cost model that then says, "I wanna be like a 6.25."

Yeah,

Robby Gulri: which is $6.25 million on a annual basis. Great. Right,

Max Clark: right. Yeah. But, and then we're gonna be at a 6.25 level of security, right? Yeah. You know, and you're like, and you're like, "Uh, it, it doesn't really work that way." Yeah, yeah. Um, you know?

Robby Gulri: It's the, it, you know, there's, there's a, a real, I spend a lot of time in cybersecurity and, and I follow a lot of these companies that are doing some interesting things.

One of the things that I continue to see is, again, leveraging of data to make, to help, uh, uh, you know, lost in translation situations, right? CEO's talking language A, talking Mandarin. Yeah. Uh, CSO, the security officer, is speaking, you know, [01:20:00] Russian. And, and, and what that looks like is CSO comes into the door, into the office, and says, "Look, we've got these number of vulnerabilities.

I have, I, you know, basically ranked from high priority to mid priority to low priority. Uh, I need $5 million to basically address these things. And by the way, I'm gonna focus it on the high, uh, uh, priorities." And then if you look at the list and the CEO looks at this list and, you know, it's, it's server patching and, and, and, and you've got, you know, lack of, like you said, you know, multi-factor is, is there, but it's not on.

Uh, there's all these things that the CEO has no clue to what, what he or she is basically reading. And so a lot of these organizations have now said, "Okay, well, I will utilize third-party data, uh, from companies, industries like mine, to be able to say, 'You know what? An example of a data leak that was a result of an MFA- Led to $5 million of damages for this company, that's the translation.

Right. That person's gonna pay attention to that one, right? And [01:21:00] so I think those are the, it goes back to honestly the money. Yeah. How do you take technology, align it, maybe not an ROI, but a risk, risk impact to the business? I think those are some, you know, simpler, simpler way- simple in theory ways to basically, you know, create that bridge.

Max Clark: So you've said two things I'm gonna come back to- Okay ... really quickly. The first one was you talk about, you know, budgeting and independence, right? And building financial models is not like the s- strong suit of most IT practitioners, right? Where you're sitting inside of an Excel spreadsheet and creating something where, where somebody can like change the f- you know, values of field, you know, A7 and like the whole thing trickles down.

It's like, oh, if we do this, this is what's gonna happen to us- Yeah ... in terms of cost. Um, so maybe like do we need to help like IT teams figure out how to build these things out? Or is this like the role of finance to help build a model for IT to then actually then implement and fill in some numbers on?

You know, and like does that help alleviate some of this, some of this issue?

Robby Gulri: I, I think in theory, [01:22:00] um, you know, we've been talking about this for a long time in industry is, hey, if, if I- if finance gives us a template that we can fill in to get a little bit more accurate on what our expenditures are gonna be in the realm of, of, you know, cyber insurance driven security best practices as an example, great, we'll do that.

The problem is, is that finance person who's putting that template together does not understand MFA or SSO or, or EDR, MDR or, or s- you know, end user security training. Mm-hmm. Uh, all of the things that are basically leading to technology decisions that IT people have to make. So I don't know. I, I really don't know how you create, you know, sort of a common language where at a high level the CFO is gonna be able to build a template to basically budgetize these things.

Max Clark: The insurance thing is an interesting point and example, right? Because as a insurance company, you're assessing [01:23:00] risk, and you know if the company doesn't have MFA in place, that they have higher risk. Mm-hmm. And then, and then, you know, there's some actuary somewhere that's actually trying to build out a model and saying, "If you have MFA, your, you know, your risk, your potential loss for us, risk decreases, increases," whatever it is, right?

And, and there's now becoming enough data where people are starting to actually build these models out. But now as a recipient of that, the company, if I don't have MFA, one of two things are gonna happen to me, right? Either my, I'm not insurable or my insurance premium is higher, right? And so now then the company gets to make a decision also, which becomes like, oh, if it's gonna cost us $15,000 to implement this program, that's gonna re- decrease our insurance by- $18,000 Mm-hmm Is it worth the energy to spend it to save the 3,000 right now?

Y- y- right? Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah 'Cause, like, that's also, like, it's- Mm ... I'm, I, I... This, by the way, this as a concept was a hard thing for me to learn when I was [01:24:00] still in-house IT with companies. Yeah. Like, just y- you know, even advocating for, like, we should do this because these financial reasons or risk or resilience or whatever the, the different things, of being able to be, say, like, "Okay, we've evaluated.

We've just decided not to do it- Yeah ... 'cause it's just not worth it to us, right?" Yeah. Um, 'cause that's also the big problem here, you know? Like, do you have MFA or not? Well, you should have MFA. It's the cheapest way to actually meaningfully improve your security posture. Like, I, I, I mean, it's, it's like it's crazy.

But, but then it's, it's like, what are you actually spending? How much does it cost to roll out? What do you have to do in order to support- Yeah ... it in help desk? Yeah. How do you communicate that effectively? Um- Yeah ... y- you know, like, can you actually quantify it and be like, "Oh, you know," you know, and there's no like, "Oh, we've implemented RFA, you know, MFA, and our risk score has gone from seven to six now," or- Yeah

y-

Robby Gulri: you know, like it's- There's no way to do that. I, uh, yeah, there's so many other variables. I mean, are we delivering, you know, uh, one-time codes to a phone? Who [01:25:00] owns those phones? Who's the carrier behind the... There's all these other ancillary things that you- Mm-hmm ... don't, maybe us IT guys think about, but the s- the finance folks don't have the, have that.

May- and maybe may- maybe that's the simple answer is you literally have, we used to do this, have, like, literally if you roll a cheat sheet of acronyms and things that are necessary for the business to, to sustain, survive, thrive, and be secure, and you literally have to... Maybe that's our job. Maybe we've done a poor job.

I, and, and sometimes we have, you know? We have... I know I used to get frustrated with, with the business side of the house when they would ask, quote, unquote, "dumb questions." They weren't dumb questions at all. What are you doing over there? What, what is MFA? And I'd be like, "Man, come on, man. You d- Yeah ... you got, you got Google like I do."

Instead of being patient and actually spending some time- Yeah ... with these folks that are, you know, basically trying to understand some of the words that, you know, these acronyms that we use on, on this side of the house. I mean,

Max Clark: but this fields, this, this, this fundamentally f- flows into so many things, right?

[01:26:00] Because DaaS gets evaluated against, what are we currently spending, right? I mean, this goes back to, like, TCRC, you know, like all these things. Mm-hmm. A lot of times IT purchasing is, you know, we are currently spending X on something. Mm-hmm. And now we wanna change that and spend it on something else instead, you know?

And, and it's usually well-intentioned, like we wanna improve things, but, like, it, it, that improvement cycle for an IT team gets cast against the what are we currently spending on that thing, and then can you explain or rationalize the delta of why the business should spend more? We currently spend, you know, what?

Uh, $700 a desktop, you know, in our environment. And we wanna m- we wanna move that from $700 a desktop on a four-year replacement cycle, and maybe we know how much we're spending to support that- Yeah ... and how many help desk tickets we've got against that asset, or maybe we don't, you know. And usually this is where IT needs to really invest a lot in e- energy, in my opinion, is, like, actually building out this case.

'Cause if you could say, "This [01:27:00] $700 desktop requires, you know, 40 hours per year of our time, and this $1,000 desktop requires four hours a year of our time," you know, like you can- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm ... you know, right? But, um, but, you know, then, then DaaS shows up, and you're like, "Well, how much are we actually spending on this desktop right now?"

You're like, "Well, it's $700. We s- replace it every four years, so it's only costing us this much per month, and we wanna do this DaaS thing instead, which is gonna cost us this much per month." And they go, "Uh, you know, why, why should we do this?" You know? Like-

Robby Gulri: Yeah. Oh, and there's a percentage of these devices that get lost- Yeah

uh, left behind in an Uber. Oh, oh, right. Right? So you put that into cost equation. Yeah, I mean, the... And, and DaaS is actually simpler to, to justify because they're pretty known variables in, in that equation, right? You, uh, you use 11 applications on average on an ongoing basis. Those 11 applications need to be supported on a Citrix environment or an AVD environment.

Uh, those applications, you know, need accessibility between the hours of... You know, this is, this is the exercise we go through when we're [01:28:00] sizing out or making decisions on, hey, this should be persistence desktop, or it should be a session-based sort of desktop environment. But, like, that's what we do, right?

To be able to say, "All right, you, Mr. And Mrs. Business Owner, don't need to worry about overspending, over-investing, over-engineering because we've done a little bit more due diligence on what your user profiles and personas are." Like, it's easier to do than, than some of the other... We've talked a lot about cloud today.

Um, you know, it's easier- ... to do on that side versus on the cloud side. I'm gonna push back on, on something here,

Max Clark: right? Mm-hmm. Where it's like at, at a core f- uh, really core selection process, persistent versus session-based DaaS, right? Mm-hmm. Um, I would, I would, I will tell you almost 100% of the people that are on the receiving end- Wow

of that conversation have no idea what either of those things mean. No. And they don't... And so now, you know, again, the easiest decision to make is to do nothing. So, like, now you're evaluating new [01:29:00] technology, and you're be given a, a- Yeah ... selection process of like, "Hey, we can do persistent or we can do session-based, you know, blah, blah, blah."

Yeah. And they're like- Uh ... "." Yeah. You know, "What does this mean?" And, and so then you're like, "Well, I don't know what this means, so it's scary. I shouldn't do anything in the first place," right? Because am I picking the right one? Am I picking the wrong one? The one that it gets me, that cracks me up the most when I talk about any sort of remote desktop-type technology is the init- immediate question of, "Well, what does it look like?"

I'm like, "Well, what do you mean, what does it look like?" "Well, what does it look like?" And I'm like, "It looks like exactly what, what you're looking like right now." Except it's not running on your computer in front of you. Yeah. It's running on a computer- Yeah ... in a data center, you know? But that's, but that's like, but that's where I'm saying, like, I have to push back a little bit on this because going through that con- that, that evaluation saying, "This is what you're actually running, and this is what you should do, and here's your options," I, it, it, I th- it, it, it, optionality almost creates a bigger problem- Yeah

in some way.[01:30:00]

Uh-oh. Uh, apparently they're doing work on the fire alarm. Okay. Hey. Hey, hopefully we edit that one out. That'll be funny. That was awesome. But you know what I mean? Like- Yeah ... if, I, I would be really curious if you actually, like, broke down your sales cycle, you know, into that conversation of getting to that point, like, as like a stage of like, "Oh, we got to the point where we're talking about, like, persistence versus session-based desktops," and like what actually happened from that point forward.

Robby Gulri: Yeah. Uh, I don't know if I can do that, but that's a good point. I mean, I, I, I pride myself, um, on making things complex in very simplistic ways. If I have one superpower, it would be that. He thinks- Is, is, is, uh, I, I try to give as many examples. Like, you, you, you actually said something that, that, that, that raised an interesting, uh, thought.

Um, what does it look like? Well, it, it looks like what it looks like. Mm-hmm. Well, you know, uh, an example of how you address potentially [01:31:00] that as well, have you, have you ever been into a doctor's office? Yeah. You know, when the nurse comes in or the PA comes in and they log into this thing, regardless of what office they're in, they're basically getting to their- Mm-hmm

their, you know, MyChart on, on, on Epic. Yep. Um, oh yeah. Well, there you go. That's what it looks like, is no matter where you are, no matter what machine you're on, no matter what floor you're on, you're basically in your environment. So th- that's a, you know, healthcare example. But you can give- Yeah ... give 100 other examples.

Max Clark: Well, I mean, this is, this is something I struggle with a lot, right? Because we are neutral ab- arbiters of, like, information for our clients, right? You know, you, there, you, you take any category of technology, it, you know, there's dozens or hundreds of, of people and s- uh, you know, service providers inside of that category.

And not, I mean, not even talking about, like, what Gartner is tracking, you know- Mm-hmm ... like 16 logos on a name. I mean, there's, there's for every, for every logo on a Gartner chart, there's, you know, 50 to 100 behind them- Mm-hmm ... [01:32:00] that, you know, are, are probably could be interesting for you, right? Mm-hmm. And I always, I always find this interesting e- especially when I'm having i- interaction with a technical counterpart, you know, a client, of like, is my job to provide you a lot of information for you to make an informed decision, and like actually run you through, like, here's all the things that you need to know in order to make an informed decision of, for the tech- you know, the, of the whatever differences between these three, you know, companies, or is my job for you to tell you, "This is the right answer."

Yeah. "

And if I was in your shoes, this is what you should do." And then of course, like walking that line really carefully of saying- I'm gonna give you enough information that you understand that you're coming into this and you're making an informed decision, but I'm gonna also tell you this is the right choice, right?

Yeah. And, and, uh, uh, you know, and, and that's kinda like the same thing here when we talk about, like, persistent versus session-based rep. You know, like, i- is the right answer being able to say, "Oh, it's just gonna cost you this much to run this application," not what actually, like a- Yeah ... another choice is that they have to make.

Robby Gulri: Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like, I don't know, uh, [01:33:00] M365 licenses. Oh, geez. Right? Uh, there are business reasons why you need an E3 versus an E1 or an E5 or whatever, right? But most organizations, you know, you need a PhD to understand some of these licensing schemes. Our job is the latter. I think you, you said it perfectly.

Our job is to not come in with, uh, an encyclopedia of options, cereal box aisle, you know, uh, at the, at the local supermarket. Our option, our, our job is to say, "Look, we understand what you're trying to accomplish, and in order to accomplish what you need to accomplish, here's basically two thing, two options or three options.

And for each of those, there's no perfect. There's a pro and a con. Let me walk you through that, and let me walk you through the implications of that." To me, that's the job.

Max Clark: I wish Microsoft licensing was as simple as E1, E3, and E5- Well, yeah ... and not, you know- ... like, what it actually is. 'Cause if it was just E1, E3, E5, it would be really nice, but then you're like Frontline, Enterprise, this, that, and the next- Business Basic, there's a, yeah

and

this.

You know, and then you get into, like, oh- ... there's, like, [01:34:00] variations of E1 and E3 and E5, and then there's add-on packages to each one of those things. Yeah. And then there's, like, are you buying it this way, are you buying it that way? What you... You know, and, you know, like- Are you

Robby Gulri: Intune? Do you have your own...

Max Clark: Yeah. It's, it, it's, you know, now we're gonna have teams split off in the EU and probably in the US as well. Like, that's, it's a... Yeah, it's like no wonder, like, people have no idea what's actually going on, you know? Like- You need an actuary to, to help you with that ... well, but, but, but I mean, but again, right back to the original point, which is it's, it's like, um-

you know, I, I, I wonder about this a lot, of just, like, are... Like, who, who's... I'm not saying, like, who's to blame, but, like, who can step up the most effectively to, like, solve this communication gap, right? And, and, you know, the, the frustration becomes, of course, if you're, you know, if you're in IT and you're trying to solve a business problem that you know, like, there's, like, this train wreck about to happen in front of you that you want to get ahead of.

But, like, if you can't communicate what that actually is to the person on the other side of the table, they're never [01:35:00] gonna see it. Like, "We need to do something," you know? Like- Yeah ... y- and, and, and the, and tech marketing makes this even worse, because then an acronym is created, and everybody piles into that acronym and like, "Oh, yeah, we do X, Y, and Z.

Of course." Yeah. "We're a fill-in-the-blank acronym company as well." Yeah. And you're like, "No, you're not." And, um, or, or they make it really easy to confuse you in terms of, like, what the feature set of this. Yeah. You know, it's like you get these, like, spec sheets that are like... You're like, "Oh, yeah, you know, we have the fastest firewall on the market, as long as it's 64-byte, you know, packets at, at, like, this frame size," you know?

And, and you're like, you're like- You're like, "Does that actually... Like, what does that apply to? Like, how do I evaluate this?" And I, I,

Robby Gulri: uh, it reminds me early days of, I used to sell email encryption, so secure messaging. Oh, yeah. PKI based, uh, basically a web service PKI based. We had a patent for it. And, you know, the first few years of that business, we were basically trying to sell, "Hey, my AES is bigger than yours," you know?

And, and it, and, and we could not figure out as engineers, like, why we weren't successful [01:36:00] selling it that way. It was only when we, uh, shifted to try to really sell it more like an insurance policy- Yeah ... where we started to see some success from a compliance angle- Right ... instead of coming in and talking about PKI.

People are looking at you like, "Sorry, what's a key? What's a key pair?" Yeah. "What's a key exchange? What's a this? What's a that?" Yep. And, and you're like, and you just couldn't understand. Again, math guys and, you know, cryptography guys and engineers are like, "We don't understand. Our technology's amazing." And it's, it's no different in any other realm.

Max Clark: I, um... It's, it is so, it, it, but it's so true, right? Because it's like you want your IT team to be... There, there's a, there's a, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna steal somebody's line. You want your IT team to be the turbo nerds of IT. But then the same time, like, if they're locked in the dungeon, you know, if you've got the turbo nerds of IT locked in the dungeon- Yeah

then, like, that are not socialized- Yeah ... and you don't know how to talk to them because you never, like, take them out of the dungeon and, like, talk to them. And, [01:37:00] and that's what I'm like. It's like, it's, uh, it, this is a weird, like, y- you know, how do we, like, line this up a little bit better? Because, I mean, again, I started this off by asking you, like, "Why is not every company on the planet running DaaS?"

You know? Like, that was, uh, one of my first questions I asked. Yeah. And, and I circle back around that, and it's like, is this a technology issue? Is this a positioning issue? Is this, like, an awareness issue? People don't even know this product exists, which I think is true. True. Um, what is it? How do we run it?

What does it look like? Yeah. What's the cost differential for it? How do I model what I'm currently spending? I've never actually done any sort of modeling of what it costs me to maintain- Yeah ... a PC long term, you know? How many of them I lose per year, you know?

Robby Gulri: It's a, it's an education enablement awareness issue- Yeah

for sure. It's li- it's, it's rarely... I mean, think about it. Is there anything that is in technology a technology issue? I, I don't know. I, I don't... I, I, I think about that all the time. I don't think anything is a technology issue. Technology is built, engineered. Again, some engineering processes are better than others.

Some technologies are better than others. But in general, you know, [01:38:00] technology's often table stakes. It's the, it's the education and enablement. And I think the pa- I spend a lot of time with, with strategic advisors, partners, consultants who are trying to elevate a business, their book of business. And, uh, man, the ones who do it well, the ones who are very successful, are not talking, you know, SKUs.

Yeah. They're talking outcomes, solutions- Yeah ... strategy, um, acquisition, valuations. Like, hey, if I, if I, you know- Can help you leverage technology for you to streamline your operations and your data flows to be able to serve more customers in the same amount of time, guess what that does for your valuations?

Yeah. Boom. That's the consultant right there.

Max Clark: Right. Or, right, the opposite side of that is if you're talking about, um, private equity or divestiture, can you meaningfully increase EBITDA, you know, because that affects your, you know, exit multiple, right? Yeah. Like, and, you know, that's the only place where I really see, like, drastic cost-cutting, you know, really, [01:39:00] like, have, like, a f- a massive financial out- you know, outcome.

Like the difference, right? Yeah. Like, you know, what does, what does a 10% reduction in cost really mean to a business? That's right. Well, you know, like, normal business, probably not that much, but you're like the 10% reduction in cost increases your, like, EBITDA X percent, which then in, you know ... And your exit multiple is based off that.

Yeah, you know, like, that, that matters. Matters. Um- Matters ... that matters a lot. Y- you know, it's ... You s- you say selling SKUs. You know, we're talking about AWS re:Invent coming up. Uh, we'll, we'll pick on Amazon. Amazon has several hundred products within their environment, which means for each one of those products, you also have the decision of whether or not you're gonna buy the product for Amazon, or if you're gonna buy the base compute and, and use one of probably five to 10 different packages- Packages

that fit within that product SKU as well. So now you're like, "Okay, there's probably, like, a thousand different ways of doing the base- Mm-hmm ... infrastructure within AWS." Mm-hmm. Um-

Robby Gulri: And do I go to the marketplace? Do I go to CSP marketplace? Do I ... You know, there's all these complexities and decisions that I gotta make around [01:40:00] that.

Max Clark: And when you're ta- And, like, you were at dinner last night and you were talking with CIOs. When you're in this conversation with CIOs that are trying to navigate this and really figure out, like, do we invest in this Amazon SKU that's gonna be around in five years? Is this the right SKU for us to go about?

We don't have capability in this thing right now. The business is telling us that we have to figure out AI. What is AI? Do we own it? Does somebody else own it? Mm-hmm. Um, how do you, how do you, like, shepherd and guide somebody down this, this path? Because now you're seeing enough companies over a broad swath of industries that are doing this, and some are successful and some are not so successful.

Robby Gulri: Yeah. Um, you know, and I think it... We, we talked about the CSP. Why go through a CSP or work with a CSP instead of trying to do it yourself? Uh, with the certifications, credentials, and the, the, the fact that our people sit in the same offices, uh, you know, with some of these public cloud companies gives us a lot of advantage and visibility and, and, and knowledge and [01:41:00] experience into what's happening.

So my approach is always the same. Keep it, keep it, keep it on the business side. Try to teach the team that. Make it, make it align to business outcomes and, and, and come in with use cases. Hey, here's a company like yours, same size, with these challenges that did this, and if we feel like ... and we helped in this way, here's an option.

I, I, I feel like talking in that- Sort of true activity or enablement in the, in the market outcome perspective. It just helps. Again, not about technology, about a process that we can basically help activate.

Max Clark: And there's a lot of the, like, variations in that, right? There's, like, what should we do? The... or, how should we do it?

Yeah. Or- Or why ... can you, why should we do it? Yeah. Right? Then there's, like, the, can you help me do it? You know, um, we did this, but now we can't run it. We've lost resources. Can you help me keep it up? Um, I had a CTO tell me once upon a time [01:42:00] that he was, he was traveling a lot, and, um, he was always, you know, his, his fear, like, he, like, I hate the question, like, what keeps you up at night?

Mm-hmm. But, like, he was, like, very straightforward of, like, "Every time I'm on a plane, I'm afraid that my, you know, our platform's gonna go down- "... and, and nobody's accountable to me about it." Like, even his team, it was like this whole thing, like, what would actually happen if that came, if it was push come to shove?

And it was like, you know, do I have a contractual obligation with somebody that has to look at this 24 hours a day, seven days a week for me, just so that way I know there's always somebody responsible for this thing, right? And, and, and you're like, "Well, you know, you, well, I mean, like, what about your, again, what about your team?"

It's like, well, you know- ... people like to go out and, like, World Series is on, and all of a sudden so and so just decides not to answer their phone in the middle of the night- Yeah, yeah ... 'cause they had a wild night. You know, what happens, right?

Robby Gulri: How many people have you run into, companies that you've run into, that have a, a run book, a playbook, call it whatever you want, that has never been [01:43:00] opened-

never been tested, um, and never been through the wringer, if you will, right? Yeah. And, and the first per- who's the first line of descent, uh, defense? Oh, that was John. John Smith with... Where is John? Well, John, you know, retired, like, 18 months ago, and, and g- we see it all the time. And then goes back to, again, how we go about and, and enable service-oriented approaches with organizations is, again, being the third party.

We al- we say this a lot, agnostic cloud view doesn't mean we don't have an opinion.

Max Clark: Yeah. I, I think this is one of the, uh, big misconceptions I, I find, and I haven't really found a good counter to it, but in order to be a good service provider, you have to hit scale. In order to hit scale, you have to have standardization, right?

You have to be a, you have to have a repeatable, standardized way of approaching things, right? Mm-hmm. 'Cause it's the only way you can scale and grow. Like, you can't... I mean, you can be a nice boutiquey, you know, have a dozen or two dozen clients, but, like, when you start talking about any, any sort of service provider that has figured out how to scale and grow, it requires standardization.

Well, you know what? [01:44:00] Standardization is actually good for you to be forced into as a company, because if you haven't already adopted standard processes, like, somebody else forcing you to adopt standardization- Yeah ... is actually really good for you- It's a good thing ... because, you know.

Robby Gulri: And it wasn't just standardization for the sake of standardization.

That standardization comes from the scale and the experience and being able to, you know, sort of take those, uh, those lessons learned and basically bring them to you.

Max Clark: US East 1 had a big outage, um, recently, and Azure had an outage shortly after that.

Robby Gulri: How come we're talking more about the AWS outage and not as much about the Azure outage?

Max Clark: Uh, I think because most people conception- like, under a... Well, like, let's just be real. Like, more consumer services are on Amazon- Fair ... than are on Azure, right? Fair. So, so when Azure goes offline, um, businesses are impacted, but it's not like the news is reporting about it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Like, it- it- it has a- Yeah

it has a different, like... Yeah. And I, I think, I think also with Azure, it was so close to the AWS outage that it wasn't like... [01:45:00] I don't think it, like... I just don't think they had the same impact- Mm-hmm ... for people. Like, it wasn't like, "

Robby Gulri: Oh, the Internet's down," you know? Like- That's a great point, though, uh, about more consumer services, therefore more people who are making more noise are impacted by whatever- Yeah

application they're trying to access.

Max Clark: I... So I was in a, I was in a conversation after AWS, after the initial outage of, like, what it wa- you know, like, all these different things, and- and- and the point that I was trying to make was two things. And the first one was, is this actually happens pretty often. Like, you can, you know, there's lots of very m- you know, major infrastructure outages- Mm

on these platforms. All in all, they're very stable, and they're very resilient, and they're, uh, really well operated. I mean, like- like, when you talk about, like, just what their effective real uptime is, it's- it's impressive, right? Like, um, it- it is awe-ing. But they have outages. Everybody has outages. Sure.

And, like, you will always have some event where it's like, oh, we pushed something. Like, something went, configuration happened. This happened. This weird thing happened. [01:46:00] You know. Mm. Early 2000s, we were getting bit flip from, like, solar flares, you know. That's right. On, on- That's right ... you know, like s- so-

Robby Gulri: DNS, uh, yeah, DNS outages, like we- Right

we saw, yeah.

Max Clark: And so then you immediately see this, like, frenzy of like, "Oh, we gotta migrate off AWS," and, like, all these, like, you know, I- I call them, like, the vultures. The vultures show up online of, like, doing all this different stuff. And- and- and I was in this conversation, and I was explaining, like, in two days, nobody's gonna remember this.

Yeah.

You know? Like, so- so when I think about that, what- what- what I'm f- what- what frustrates me about that statement of like, "In two days, nobody's gonna remember this," is that now, you know, you're a service provider. You've got a lot of customers- Mm-hmm ... on both these platforms who just had big outages.

When the outages happen, people are really freaked out. It impacts their business. They can't, they can't service their customers. They lo- you know, lose revenue. They have disruptions. They have backlogs that they have to fill. It's, you know, real problems happen. But then you have to go and tell them, like, "Hey, we should talk about [01:47:00] redundancy."

Yeah. And how few of them actually go forward with that, like, redundancy plan. How do we do a better job of, like, helping people help themselves and, like...

Robby Gulri: I, I think it- it's- it's reputation management. I think, I think, I think it boils down to that. Trying to convince people to- Enable a, a DR plan right after some major outage over a couple of days is, is asking too much.

I think coaching, enabling a, a, a, a, a future where, man, their future jobs, their future promotions, their future, uh, you know, sort of compensation packages are aligned to their reputation as a leader, as an enabler of technology, I think that's the way to go about doing it.

Max Clark: Okay, so, y- you know, nobody gets fired for buying IBM.

No. Right? Um, [01:48:00] everybody was offline. It wasn't just us. Yeah. Like, so you say, okay, reputation management- Yeah ... and, like, actual impact to your business, but you're like, "Well, everybody was down." Like, it wasn't, uh, you know, like, "I didn't do anything wrong. Everybody was offline," you know? You could argue

Robby Gulri: that if you had...

You- you- we said it earlier, right? We're, we're talking about multi-cloud, but let's just talk about multi-region. Mm-hmm. Right? So, um, let's, let's assume that that individual took the right contingency steps and did build regional redundancy into whatever application that they were running. That would have helped the situation.

It wouldn't have been just US East. It could've been, uh, you know, applications that fail over into US West or Europe or Canada, wherever. Um, you know, it, it- I still feel like there's a way to, uh, enable people through, through, you know, the things they care about. They wanna make their mama proud, right? Is this- And, and I feel like that's the, uh, that's the angle.

Max Clark: Is this an IT problem? Is this a business problem? Hmm. Or is [01:49:00] this a communication problem?

Robby Gulri: People aren't inherently smart. They're not inherently stupid. They're just lazy, right? I think it's a business and process problem.

Max Clark: So then what... So what's the fix here? Just, uh, enough time or pain or external pressure before people say- Hmm

we shouldn't be- ... doing this this way anymore?

Robby Gulri: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. External pressure. You think so? Ex- external pressure.

Max Clark: I mean, this kinda goes back into that, like, cybersecurity thought for me, which is, um, you know, we lock our doors, our houses, and our cars not because, like, we've been burglarized or robbed. I forget, you know, burglarized.

But because, like, you know it's, like, the likelihood of it happening is high, right? Right. So it's like, so, like, what's the ROI of having a door lock at your house? You know,

like-

Right? You know what I mean? Like, think about that for a second, right? Yeah. Like, so what's the ROI on having locks on your doors?

Yeah. But, [01:50:00] but then you say, like, okay, and, and I, I mean, I unfortunately know several people who have, have had, you know, uh, you know, home robberies. And, and so, like, then there becomes this, like- collective knowledge within the community of like, oh, you know, you have to be really diligent about locking your doors because unfortunately these other people had, you know, a break-in and, and this is what could happen if you don't, right?

Um, or, you know, having an alarm on or all these different things. And, and I'm curious your take on this because I've thought about and I've wondered is, you know, there's like we talk about insurance creating pressure on businesses to take security. Sure. Like, how much of this is just maybe we have to have enough collective knowledge of pain of like, oh, my friend down the street, his company had ransomware and they didn't have multi-factor authentication on, which was the cause of the problem, or they got phished or something happened and it cost them $10 million and like, it was terrible.

And so like, oh, should we do something instead?

Robby Gulri: Yeah, I think a lot of it is ... And, and think about the velocity and the, [01:51:00] and the, uh, personalization of these attacks now, right? The same AI tools that we use for productivity are the same AI tools that the bad actors are using, whether it's nation states or individuals or the combination, and we're

I, I feel like we're starting to see that more. Every day there's a new data leak and, and there's a public awareness. It's not just on some of those databases that you and I look at on the back end that have a, a track record and a history of all the leakages across the, across the internet or across the enterprise.

This is like on front page news. Uh, and so I feel like there is a collective- I, I'm gonna- ... uh, knowledge around that. I'm

Max Clark: gonna have free credit monitoring for the rest of my life. Yeah. Yeah. Like at this point, if you're not paying attention to getting your free credit monitoring ... I mean, the, the one that was really scary for me was Boston a bunch of years ago.

Yeah. And, uh, they dispatched the National Guard. It was a, it was a h- a hospital chain, hospital network, and the National Guard was there with fatigues helping them re-image computers to get them back online. And like the imagery of like [01:52:00] fatigue-wearing National Guard in the hospitals, like putting dr- you know, disks in computers to like, you know, get the computers back online because they just needed people.

Mm-hmm. Like, they ... It was like a, um, y- you know, it's, uh, it, it's still, it's, it's, it sits with me. Um, the ... We've, we've talked about a lot of different stuff, and I, I, I think the, the through line here becomes when you're talking with a, when you're talking with a CIO for the first time, and they're, they haven't had exposure- Yeah

to public scale and they haven't gone through any sort of ... It's unlikely that they don't have experience with MSPs, but let's say they haven't gone through any sort of CSP engagement, modernization, they haven't gone down these roads, um, what would you like them to know about before that conversation happens?

Like, it's like, what is, what is that like nugget of information that y- you know, I wouldn't say you wanna convince [01:53:00] them of or like educate them around, but like, you know, that, that should be implanted in the back of their head, you know? So when they're kind of moving around their day, it's just kind of there gnawing at them a little bit.

Robby Gulri: Yeah. Um, not try- number one, I'm not trying to sell them anything, right? I'm just, I'm just here as a resource. I'm here as a organization that has done the due diligence and is working with technology providers behind the scenes that have integrated into our platform. So where they get into a situation where they need help on ransomware pre- you know, prevention or MDR or even simple things like SD-WAN.

I've got, I've got a, I've got a, a, you know, an ecosystem that I've surrounded around myself where they can come to me for help. Um, sometimes it's not technology, it's just, "Hey, I'm thinking about shifting my business in this way." Mm-hmm. "RapidScale, can you help me with that?" And so we are, we, the [01:54:00] collective we, the industry, is shifting really in real time from selling individual products to much more solution consulting, advisory oriented services.

I want the CIOs to remember that along with the other big five and the SI, you know, the SIs out there, there's local regional resources they can come to and, and get some advice. You know, punching bag, uh, you know, throw some, you know, some stuff on the wall and see what sticks kind of thing. So just an opportunity to iterate.

And then once we do that, you know, we can come in with some recommendations of technology. And if it aligns, then guess what? We, you know... My dad used to say, "Never chase the, the dollar." You know, do the right thing, help the right customer, become the right, you know, resource and, you know, all that revenue and, you know, EBITDA and all, that'll, that'll all follow.

Max Clark: I think I'd add two things, right? Which is, um, you talk about, like, the big five. I mean, you have really deep pockets backing you. Mm. Right? So, like, [01:55:00] this isn't like a, uh, you know... I mean, this idea of, like, people boutiquey in size and stability and all that different stuff, right? You have, you have exceptionally deep, uh, pockets backing you.

Yeah. And, uh, I, I think the bigger one is it's... I, I think this misconception of it's, like, really expensive. It's not as expensive as people think. Right. Like, in many cases, it's not expensive at all. Like, you know, assessments or, you know, like, um, architecture reviews and, like, MAP programs and all these things.

A lot of this stuff gets funded, you know, by the organization they're already paying. That's right. And it just, like, becomes like, again, you know, heroin dealer goodie bags, right? You know? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But, but, uh, you know, like, knowledge is power in that situation, and if they can get knowledge for free- Why not?

Why wouldn't you do it, right? Why not?

Robby Gulri: And I think, uh, I think speaking of it's not that expensive, we get that misconception, especially around the w- the area of data and AI. Mm-hmm. Uh, man, I, I want... I've, I've got a use case. Is that gonna cost me 100 grand, 500 grand, three million? I, [01:56:00] I don't know. So one of the things that we did, we took- Uh, averages will tell you certain s- certain stories based on averages.

But what we did do is we call it, you know, T-shirt sizing, extra small, small, medium, large, extra large scopes broken up across the four sort of phases of our AI methodology, advisory sort of business alignment, you know, proof of concept, you know, delivery, implementation, and then optimization. And then literally, X number of hours associated with each of those little T-shirt sizes, right?

So now I can come to you and say, "You know what? Based on our experience, we've built 100 of these, 200 of these sort of different use cases. Um, we think that's gonna be a 200-hour project at whatever our, you know, weighted, uh, you know, hourly rate is. Here you go." And, and man, when you explain it that way to people, they're like, "Okay, that gives me a...

I'm not gonna take your word for, you know, exact dollar, but it gives me a rough order of magnitude of what this thing is gonna cost me." Yeah.

Max Clark: Um, last [01:57:00] question, what are we gonna be talking about in five years? Hmm. God, man. I mean, uh, that's, that's... I gave you a, I gave you an intentionally what seems like not a lot of time, but in the world of tech and what's going on right now, like, that's like infinity time, right?

So I, I use that s- I use five years really intentionally.

Robby Gulri: So '20... Let's go back- 2030. Let, let's go back in time- Okay ... five years.

Max Clark: Five y- I mean, so- Yeah ... so five years ago was COVID. Yeah. 2020. Right. So that was work from home. There is no office. We're never coming back to the office. Yeah. Um, you know, uh, the rush to the cloud.

Robby Gulri: Rush to the cloud. Hey, I'm just gonna be SASE only. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, I got to Zoom, you know? And, and, and, and, and Zoom became a verb. Yeah. Um, and, and, and, and that was five years ago. So if you would've, if we were sitting here in 2020, virtually probably because we probably wouldn't have been able to do a studio.

Right, right, right. Uh, and you asked, we asked, we went through that conversation, what would 2025 look like? Man, [01:58:00] some of the things that we're talking about, I, I don't know about you, I didn't anticipate the explosion of AI and data and, and, and ChatGPT and, and Anthropic and all of that. I mean, s- maybe if, for those of us who closely follow, but not at all the fact that OpenAI has a billion users around the world on a regular basis.

Never could have predicted that, and if somebody tells you that they predicted that in 2020, man, uh, don't believe it, right? So same thing. Now let's fast-forward to 2030, five years from today. I feel like this agentic thing, as hyped as it is, is, is not hyped enough. I feel like there's opportunities to enable business processes with technology, with data in all aspects of life, business, health.

Um, so I feel like if I had one prediction to make over the next five years is the immersion of agents that look upon other AI agents to be able to accomplish these, [01:59:00] these, these, you know, tasks that we're- Historically arduous and doing it in a much more efficient way.

Max Clark: So AI doomers will take your agentic conversation and be like, "We're gonna l- everybody's gonna lose their jobs."

Mm.

Um, I, I don't believe that. I don't believe that either. But I, I wanna hear your view on it.

Robby Gulri: I don't believe that. Uh, there are certain industries, there are certain jobs. I think there's an opportunity to augment, reallocate, and re- repurpose. Um, we have so many use cases where we've taken, you know, image recognition as an example.

Mm-hmm. You know, humans used to look at images, literally PDF files or JPEGs or whatever, and have to put them in buckets. Oh, that's, that's a electrical diagram. That's a, that's a plumbing diagram if you're an architect. I got machines that can do that way faster and more efficiently than humans can. So can I take those, those resources and make them more customer-facing, make them more, and, you know, [02:00:00] revenue-facing?

Can I make them more enablement-facing? Um, that's, I think, the shift over the next five years is replace some of the laborious, boring work and, and give that to the machine to be able to then, you know, hand something a little bit more engaging and interesting to us, to

Max Clark: the humans. My, my view of it becomes like it's a very pessimistic view to say that this is gonna result in job losses because that means companies are gonna take efficiencies out of it and not decide to grow, but just to stay exactly the same size, replace people with AI, and just, like, exist there.

And, you know, and my experience has always been if you give somebody the idea that they can do two or three or four times the amount of what they're currently doing at the same cost structure- Yeah ... or maybe a little bit more of a cost structure, but you can disconnect that and widen that gap of cost versus, um, revenue, you know, increase your margin, it's like that's where businesses run.

Right. And, and, um, and I... and, and, like, I think about it in terms of, like, um, you know, there's this, this idea, this [02:01:00] myth that, like, manufacturing in Southern California is dead, you know? But, like, aerospace manufacturing in Southern California is a huge industry, and what happened was you just had a shift from, like, I wouldn't say unskilled, but, like, a manual lathe worker- Yes

on a machine shop into a CNC operator. And the salary of that lathe operator, the machinist, into a CNC operator is probably like five times greater. Mm-hmm. And if you trained into the CNC role, you reap the benefits, and if you didn't, and you, you know, like, you didn't, right? And, and, you know, and I... so I kinda wonder what that's gonna look like with agentic and AI and how these things actually shift and what's the shifting role of people, but I d- I'm not a, I'm not the, the doomer.

I'm- I'm not- I'm not, I'm

Robby Gulri: not a doomer either. I mean, just look at our, in our lives, you know, the last 50 years, right? Uh, I remember as a kid going into a Kmart with my mom, and, you know, you had 20 registers all manned by, you know, good human beings doing the good job, right? I still prefer people over the automated [02:02:00] machines.

You go now, you go to a Target or a Walmart, and you've got 30 aisles and one human being, you know- You- ... kind of overseeing all of them.

Max Clark: You know, there's one exception, actually. The, the, the exception to that is I pref- um, the reason why I prefer people is because the amount of time it's gonna take me to go through a self-checkout and scan it and bag it, I'm very inefficient 'cause I don't, you know, it's like I don't...

This isn't, I don't know what I'm- It's not my thing ... I, I don't know what I'm doing. I have no skills in this, right? Yeah. Um, but when you go to a retailer that's invested in RFID and actually has per item RFID tagging, and you can just literally take your shopping cart and just run it through the thing, and, like- You're done

in one motion the entire thing is done, that's an awesome experience. That's right. Um-

Robby Gulri: Or you go to Amazon Go, you pick up a thing, you walk out- Mm ... next thing you know, you got a thing. You know, it, it, it- That freaks me out a little bit, but I get it, you know? Yeah. Like, no, I get the RFID thing. It, it makes... It, it's a great experience.

Yeah. I don't like that experience. But, but my point is, is that there's a lot of, of those examples- Yeah ... that we've seen, continue to see in our lives. [02:03:00] Um, you know, uh, McDonald's drive-throughs manned by, you know, AI, and they're manning, manning, you know, overseeing 30 drive-throughs at one time, right? See, this is...

Max Clark: So that example ex- explicitly is so funny to me because drive-throughs, especially anybody that was operating multiple drive-throughs, fast food, you know, they went to a centralized contact center environment, you know, with a camera, with a person in a, in a cubicle with a camera, with a headset on- ... you know, like a long time ago because you could get more cars through the line faster.

And if you're in fast food, the number one metric you track is, like, how many- Yeah ... cars per hour. That's right. You know? Re- restaurant fast casual, it's how many turns do you have per table per hour. Right. Like, that's your, your, one of your primary KPIs. And, and so it's like this idea of, like, oh, there's not a person in, in the, in the window anymore taking your order.

It's like that hasn't been the case for a long time. That's right. You just didn't know, right? Yeah. And, um, I, [02:04:00] uh, I, I want... You know, it's, it's fas- I mean, I, I, you know, I, I worry about, um, again, this, like, awareness gap of what AI is, what LLMs are, data sovereignty issues, data protection issues. You know, we're seeing examples of, you know, you can have data leakage really easily on these platforms.

You know, how do you create, you know, like finance can see this, other people can't, you know, kind of rule sets in a lot of these things and, and I, um, I, I don't, I don't know how much people are really thinking through the long tail issues here.

Robby Gulri: My, my, my long tail issues are less about the LLMs and the application layer.

Uh, we're starting to see this power talk, energy consumption talk-

Max Clark: Oh,

Robby Gulri: geez ... water cooling data center talk on kitchen tables during the holidays. When your, when your mom, my mom, who's an immigrant, you know, [02:05:00] um- asking about, "Hey, what's, what's a data center? What, what, what, what does that mean?" Like, w- and what, why are they, why does a data center use as much water?

And like, like, that conversation is percolating. At that level, you know we're headed into... That's my doomsday.

Max Clark: Um, my first, uh, data center that I was, that I had equipment in, um, a 2.4 kilowatt rack, 'cause two-post racks were the common. We weren't in four p- you know. A 2.4 kilowatt rack was a pretty dense power footprint.

You know, these, these facilities are built out at 50 watt per square foot for the entire floor space. Mm-hmm. You know, so they g- so you get a little denser in terms of the actual machine space, but 2.4 kilowatt. Um, for the bulk of my, um, bulk of my time operating data centers, like- Mm-hmm ... whether it was in-house or, you know, average, average footprint was probably 6.24 kilowatts.

It's a, it's a [02:06:00] dual 30 amp to 8 volt, you know, primary AVs or, you know, 12 and a half kilowatt, right? 'Cause you've got to do a circuit dens- uh, a socket density. A, a CPU socket, like, normalized out at about 200 watts- Sure ... per socket, you know, in a footprint. And, you know, when you look at a cabinet, you're like, well, you know, there's other things you have to deal with.

Like, how many ports does your PDU have on it? Mm-hmm. How many ports does your net- your, your top-of-rack switch have on it? And so, like, you k- kind of got into this, like, equilibrium of, like, this much power per rack actually made the most sense- Yeah ... based on all these other factors. And then, and then we do, um, you know, GPU-based, um, deployments, and people are like 200, 200 wa- um, kilowatt per cabinet.

Yeah. And, and I f- I f- you know, it's like I have these moments where, like, I feel like the old guy in the room where you're like 100 times the power in the same footprint of space in a span of 20ish, 25 years. Years. 25 years? Yeah. 25 years? Yeah. And, um, and, and, you know, I think it'll slow down. I mean, the GPUs are gonna [02:07:00] have to become more...

I mean, at some point it, it, they, they, they just have to become more efficient on a per watt basis, right? Well- Like, you're gonna see a different

Robby Gulri: curve. And you, and you're starting to see a lot of innovation into RDU-based chipsets and non-GPU driven- Mm-hmm ... uh, inference-only- Right, right ... kind of things going on, right?

So there, there, there's a lot of money and, and, and innovation, and really smart engineers kind of thinking through that problem. I agree with you, but to me, if I had a doomsday scenario, it's that. Man, I can't turn on my faucet and get a glass of water and, because the water's being al- allocated into, uh, into my ChatGPT prompt.

Uh, yeah, that's a problem. I have zero

Max Clark: connected tech in my house. I'm sorry. I'm that guy. Really? I... No. I have, I have nothing. I mean, the most... I mean, that's not exactly true. I mean, we have Apple TV. Okay. You know? Okay. Like, right? You know, because I have, I, like, my, you know, age of our kids makes, makes the most sense, right?

You know, you can- Sure ... you can do what you need to do with it. But, like, my TVs aren't connected. Like- Y- you know, but I also had, like, a design [02:08:00] case where it was like, i- if I'm not home and something breaks, like, can I walk my wife through troubleshooting this thing remotely? Yeah. And as much as I would wanna have, like, the most sophisticated environment possible at my house, and, like, switch stack and everything, it's like if I can't...

If the instructions aren't, like, my- Yeah ... you know, telling a second grader, "Go in and find this box, and unplug it and plug it back in," like, I failed, you know, in terms of like,

Robby Gulri: I, I just wanna be able to, whatever stack I've got, my Bose and my LG TV, I just wanna be able to say, "Hey, turn on the TV." Yeah, push a button.

And, and, and not even push a button. Just turn on the TV to, to ESPN and find me the, you know, Monday Night Football game. Yeah. To this day, with all this amazing technology, if you think about it, if we wrap it up, like, think about all this amazing technology we've talked about in the last, last hour or so, and all the cloud innovation.

I still can't do that, really. I'm sure I can talk to Alexa and what- A- I'm sure I can create, [02:09:00] create, you know, those, uh, what if, you know, whatever. Mm-hmm. Yeah, what is it? The, uh, if then, then that. You know, those, those little protocols- Yeah ... whatnot. I can do all that. But that's me, that's me as a nerd, not as a, you know, consumer.

Max Clark: There you go. There's our prediction. So in five years from now, in 2030, Apple- ... will have fixed Siri, and Apple Intelligence- Yes ... will be an actual thing. Yes. And you'll be able to sit down in front of your TV and say- Yes ... "Turn on ESPN." I wanna

Robby Gulri: watch The Morning Show, episode three, at minute 34, because that's where I left off this morning, and go.

Max Clark: Oh, amazing. Right? Robby, thank you very much. Thank you, Max. So much fun having you in here.

Robby Gulri: Absolutely, man. Had a really good time. Can't wait to do it again, hopefully not in five years. No,

Max Clark: much sooner.

Robby Gulri: All right. Thank you.

Max Clark: That's it for this episode of Signed. If you got something out of this, share it with someone in your world who's staring down a tech decision, a CIO, a CFO, a founder, procurement lead, whoever.

That's how the show grows. Everything from today lives at itbroker.com/podcast, show notes, transcript, links to anything we mentioned. If you're in the middle of a real tech decision right now and you want someone in your [02:10:00] corner without the vendor bias, that's what we do at itbroker.com. Schedule a call on our website.

Buy tech without regret. I'm Max Clark. Thanks for listening. See you on the next

one.