Gary Coben Senior VP, Channel Sales at EvolveIP on Enabling Remote Workforce Solutions

In this episode, Max Clark talks with Gary Coben, Senior VP, Channel Sales at EvolveIP. Gary shares insights into how EvolveIP has become an established remote workforce solution provider. In addition, Gary explains how EvolveIP works with its client’s existing IT infrastructure and staff.

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Speaker 1: 00:03

Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm talking with Gary Kobin, who is the SVP of channel services for Evolve IP.

Speaker 1: 00:22

Gary, thanks for joining.

Speaker 2: 00:24

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Max. So, Gary,

Speaker 1: 00:27

what does Evolve IP do?

Speaker 2: 00:29

Well, isn't this interesting times? You know, as we think back, Evolve IP is, you know, really engaged in 3 businesses. The first being collaboration, which is primarily about, voice enabling Microsoft Teams, workspaces, which is really this next generation end user computing product that's really managing this migration from to SaaS and and legacy applications from any device, And, finally, contact center. In today's world, if you ask me what what we did, it's frankly, it's for the last at least for the last 12 years that I've been here, it's been about enabling work anywhere remote workforce solutions.

Speaker 1: 01:14

So when you give, like, your examples, collaboration workspaces, I mean, you're talking about, you know, voice communications, video communications, but then also in the workspaces, really the IT desktop. The desktop and the server infrastructure itself is something that you you handle. So what so how is that different from what a company might have today versus what they would experience

Speaker 2: 01:35

with Evolve? You know, when I think about traditional IT, I like to get everybody to, you know, get in the, time machine with me. Go back 6 or 7 years and remember when you went to work, you know, the guy with the long ponytail from IT came over. He handed you your PC and all the applications that you needed to do your job wasn't were installed on that PC. And if you had a problem with any of those those applications, you picked up your PC, walked over to the same guy with the ponytail, and said, fix my machine.

Speaker 2: 02:12

So what you basically had is a lot of legacy thick client, client server applications installed on a corporate PC out of a primary location. Well, let's fast forward to 2020, and things have changed dramatically. Right? 80 to 90% of those applications that had to be installed on your PC 7 years ago are now SaaS based applications that are available on the web. We're now using a multitude of devices, you know, from our phones to our tablets to our watches.

Speaker 2: 02:54

And, we're accessing those applications from a ton of different locations. So it's become something that's considerably more flexible but also something that's a bit more complicated as well. So case in point, on average, guys like me and you log in to 17 different SaaS based applications to do our job every day. And it's it's very simple for me. I use Salesforce for my CRM.

Speaker 2: 03:23

I use ADP to look at my paycheck. I use American Express to order my plane tickets. I use Concur to finish my expense report. And the secret that we all know in inside is that I use the same username and password for every one of those applications. Right?

Speaker 2: 03:43

That's the only way that I can remember them. Or I've got a piece of paper taped to the bottom of my PC, both of which represent a significant security breach. Before this call, you and I were talking about, you know, how do you really enable these remote workers to use any device at any location and not be subject to using a virtual private network to get into the company provided network. So I think our conversation will develop along those lines as I hope it does.

Speaker 1: 04:19

So I mean but this isn't about, like, just an access tool. You're talking about shifting the resource of what people are using. So instead of it being I'm running Outlook on my desktop, I'm connecting to Internet delivered or cloud delivered resource where I see a desktop and I see Outlook and the device changes. I mean, the the the reality of what the IT department is managing and how they're managing it, what the physical devices are, and what the user has to deal with, and then and then the ecosystem. That that'll shift pretty significantly with with Evolve.

Speaker 1: 04:49

Right?

Speaker 2: 04:50

Yeah. There's no question about it. I mean, listen. You think about statistically what's going on in the marketplace. Microsoft, which has dominated the desktop for 30, 40 years now, has now deployed Office 365 to 1,400,000 businesses worldwide.

Speaker 2: 05:13

Nearly 60% of every business in the entire global economy has migrated to Office 365. By the same token and that being the core business productivity application. Right? So IT's role right now is managing being able to securely manage employees that access a combination of web based applications, right, which is very, very difficult to manage, and what remains, which is the 20 to 30% or the 10 to 20% of those legacy client server applications. The real key here is that it's it can't be a device centric strategy.

Speaker 2: 06:03

It has to be a strategy that's really enabling somebody to log in one time and be presented all of their applications, whether those applications be legacy applications or they be SaaS applications. And to do it in a secure environment that allows for single sign on and multi factor authentication. That's how you secure it. That's also how when somebody leaves the company, you don't forget to disable one of those SaaS applications doing an enormous amount of damage in the process. Right?

Speaker 1: 06:42

So Evolve is unique in a sense that you, you know, offer the workspaces or, you know, people you refer to as DaaS or or VDI. Right? So you offer the workspaces. You offer the server infrastructure in an in an environment. But then you went farther and you have a voice, you contact center, and collaboration on top of it.

Speaker 1: 07:00

How did that evolution happen? Like, you know, was that natural? Was this customer driven? Like, what brought you into doing you know, because these are very different skill sets. Usually, we see a company that wants to do the workspace or the server infrastructure or wants to do the voice and the collaboration or the contact center.

Speaker 1: 07:14

Why both?

Speaker 2: 07:15

Well, great question and 2 separate answers. 1st, let's let's let's look at the trending in the communications industry. If I if I get you back in the time machine with me and we go back 10 years, what you'll find is a marketplace that was dominated by legacy PBX providers. And I'm talking about Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, and back then, Shoretel. Also, you had your big, you know, your big iron hosted PBX providers like BroadSoft emerging.

Speaker 2: 07:46

This is 10 years ago. 5 years ago, we saw a shift in the UCaaS space to the proprietary platform providers. These are guys like 8, RingCentral, Fuze, all have done a marvelous job. But they became more responsive to the changing needs of the marketplace. Today, the market for UCaaS is controlled entirely by work stream collaboration.

Speaker 2: 08:13

I mean, just take a look at what happened over the last 6 to 8 weeks with COVID 19. Right? It's all about video, like you and I are on right now. It's all about audio. It's all about collaboration.

Speaker 2: 08:28

So we've seen for us in the voice business migrate from being a big BroadSoft shop 10 years ago to BroadSoft's acquisition of Cisco to now our voice strategy is all about voice enabling Microsoft Teams. The compute industry is equally as interesting if if you get in the time machine with me and go back 10 years ago. It was all about infrastructure. Right? It was all about virtualizing servers.

Speaker 2: 09:01

You know, so everybody's done that. And now that market is dominated by your public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud. About 5 years ago, we saw that shift move to end user computing and that became the emergence of VDI or desktop as a service. Today, it's really being at what controls the compute market now is the management of and the access, the secure access to both legacy applications, the ones we haven't been able to get on the web, and all those web enabled applications. And that really so the so the when I think about where we've gone with being one of the you know, being VMware's largest DAS provider in the United States to our really core structure now is about identity and access management, which is for us is ClearLogin.

Speaker 2: 10:06

For many others, it's people like Optin Duo. Now what we do though is we can either virtualize just the application or if you have really complex requirements, we can just give you a full virtualized operating system. So we've seen this transition from servers to desktop as a service to now really, you know, one more level up in the stack, which is the application level. So that's where I think the big changes have been in both voice and collaboration and in compute.

Speaker 1: 10:44

So a 2 part question. We're living in a post COVID environment. So I would I would say I'd phrase this this way. Companies are already Evolve IP's customers. What has their experience been and how have you helped them navigate the shift into, you know, in many cases, work from home environments or distributed, you know, workforce?

Speaker 1: 11:04

And for companies that have come to you in this process looking for help, what have you been able to do to help them and and what does that look like?

Speaker 2: 11:12

There's certainly the the very first statement I wanna say that either, you know, which is really before whether they were or weren't an Evolve IP customer. The first thing that we all have to come to the realization on is that 6, 7 weeks ago, people were told, don't come to the office on Monday. Right? And they were given a choice, which was probably you can use your mobile phone to call customers back, which didn't make anybody happy. And you can dust off that home PC, and let's see if we can get a VPN installed, and you can get access to your corporate applications.

Speaker 2: 11:53

I think either way, we all have to understand that everybody did what they had to do just to just to get by. The real challenge now, which also is the opportunity for all of us, is that now this concept of I must have a remote first strategy, And I must have a long term strategy or or work anywhere strategy regardless if I have an office or not in order to be ready for the new normal, so to speak. Interestingly enough, Max, in your first question, you know, it's really easy to say, oh, we you know, it's workspaces, it's contact center, it's collaboration. But the truth is is that what we've really focused on for the last dozen plus years has been enabling remote workforces through our strategy. So for the most part, for the companies that were on our compute platform, they already made the step ahead of it.

Speaker 2: 12:53

So they didn't really make a difference. That's the whole premise behind workspaces and behind VDI. It's the whole idea of the device is no longer important. You just need an Internet connection and you can get on whether you're in the lobby of the Hilton or sitting with your PDA in the backyard watching the kids in the pool. So I think our customers fared really well.

Speaker 2: 13:20

I think, again, for folks that that really didn't put a priority on this strategy, they've got some work cut out for them. Whatever plans they had to deploy a collaboration platform like a Slack or a Teams or an Atlassian, that's gonna accelerate because, again, who knows? What are the experts saying? They're saying, okay, we'll catch a break in the summertime, and we're gonna get sick again in the fall. So we just gotta be prepared for the next time.

Speaker 2: 13:51

And I think that, you know, again, guys like me and you are gonna be really, really busy over the next 6 months helping customers to have a long term work anywhere strategy that meets three things. Right? Their voice requirements, their collaboration requirements, and their IT requirements.

Speaker 1: 14:11

Can you give me an idea of who your existing customers are? I mean, so industry segment size, profile, geography, how does that actually fit? And then the second question would be, you know, who what would what would be an ideal customer for Evolv? You know, if I was evaluating looking at these systems, where do you guys really excel?

Speaker 2: 14:28

Well, you know, I I think what's very interesting when I talk about that whole kind of the collaboration market and the workspaces market and the access management market, what that has really done over the years for Evolve IP is moved us a lot farther up the food chain, you know, where we are, I think, much more comfortable in the, the enterprise market than we would have been in the small business market. Segments that have always been really strong for Evolve IP is medical, legal. You know, we were really big on the certification requirements for HITRUST, for HIPAA, PCI because we're global, GDPR. I think when you look at what's a really good, you know, really good profile customer for us, I mean, it's certainly a widely diverse employee base. Certainly, people that are in a marketplace where there is there are compliance requirements.

Speaker 2: 15:27

Right? Whether it's especially PCI and HITRUST. I will say just because I have to say that it's 100 person companies and above. That's really, you know, the starting point for us. But what one of the things that I've learned recently is that where's where we're really getting a lot of traction is not just in the 100 plus, it's in the 1,000 plus market because a lot of our solutions are really tied and targeted towards the enterprise space.

Speaker 2: 15:56

So and I think that's gonna continue. I think that as we as, partners dig a little deeper into our customers' requirements, we're gonna find that those opportunities naturally lead us to to helping bigger companies.

Speaker 1: 16:11

So you mentioned briefly international. So you have capacity to service customers outside of North America and you are GDPR compliant, I guess, would be the question?

Speaker 2: 16:21

Yeah. You know, we've made,

Speaker 1: 16:23

I

Speaker 2: 16:23

think upwards of 20 acquisitions over the last 14 years. We have company out of, Wales. So we have Evolve IP UK. We have a company out of, the EU, which is located out of Brussels. That's Evolve IP EU.

Speaker 2: 16:40

We have a division out of Tel Aviv. So I'd say the dominant play for us is really Europe, the UK, North America.

Speaker 1: 16:50

It's awesome. So for a company that has operations in those markets, Evolve IP would be a great fit, and you could service desktops and workspaces and employees across those continents.

Speaker 2: 17:01

Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think we you know, not to oversell something here. You know, when you start moving data across the pond, so to speak, then then that's really where you start to have some, not only latency issues, but really GDPR issues. So our workspaces environment is stood up in Vegas and Philadelphia right now.

Speaker 2: 17:24

So that really, from a compliance perspective, really talks to the North American market. Our telephony platform and our Office 365 and voice enabled teams platform does expand into all those areas as well. So if you're looking truly looking for a unified voice and collaboration strategy in Europe and in North America, we've become a really great choice.

Speaker 1: 17:51

So we haven't touched on this at all. You know, as you look at workspaces or look at collaboration, you haven't really said anything that suggests you're replacing or or or displanting the IT department. So what's the involvement interaction between a company's existing IT infrastructure and their staff? What their onboarding to involve be like? How do you work together?

Speaker 1: 18:09

Who's responsible? What? You know?

Speaker 2: 18:12

So that that's a dynamite question and thank you for asking that one, by the way. So, you know, I have to I have to tell you this when I when I was thinking about this recently. And when you think about what we've just gone through with COVID 19. Again, 6, 7, 8 weeks ago, employees were told, dust off your PC and call the help desk. And it might be a an easy thing to say, hey.

Speaker 2: 18:39

We're just gonna slap a VPN on that old Windows 7 machine and you're gonna be good to go. Well, no IT guy worth their salt would enable some foreign machine onto the corporate network without doing a few things, which is have you installed and updated all those Windows updates you ignored for the last 3 years? Do you have an antivirus program that is not just some free program you found on Google? Right? Do you have enough resources on your machine to actually do your work?

Speaker 2: 19:15

And even after we get the VPN and the applications installed, do you have the latency to actually effectively do your job? Now those 3 or 4 things I mentioned is probably 2 to 3 hours worth of work. So to truly understand how big of an issue it was migrating IT to home devices. You take that 2 to 3 hours. You multiply it by the number of employees.

Speaker 2: 19:50

You divide that number by the amount of IT personnel personnel that you have. And what that equals is the magnitude of the problem. And help me with the original question, Max, because I I How how do

Speaker 1: 20:03

you work and interact with a comp with a company's IT department?

Speaker 2: 20:07

So and that's exactly and I'm I'm I'm glad you reminded me. I went off on a tangent. But the fact is is that, you know, IT's role stays the same, but there's not too many CIOs that I know that tell you that the most favorite thing that they like to do is desk side support for PC users. You know, as a matter of fact, when you start talking about access management, would you believe that 60% of the internal tickets that go into an IT department are employees that need their passwords reset? Well, all that stuff gets eliminated once you once you go with identity and access management.

Speaker 2: 20:48

So one of the things I always wanna say to everybody in IT, we don't replace IT people. In fact, we won't work with somebody that doesn't have an IT resource because those people are gonna be needed. I think what's really important that if you were to talk to a CIO or CTO is that that department is no longer an ops center. It's profit center now. And IT really is being leaned on heavily to really start doing the kind of work that generates business for for companies.

Speaker 2: 21:19

Not running around fixing people's PCs. So what we don't do is is we don't replace IT people. We replace IT people's mundane jobs that they hate doing.

Speaker 1: 21:33

I don't think, there could be a better quote. Gary, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 21:39

Max, always the best. It's great to see it's it's great to see you, on video. I really hope I get to see you in person soon.

Speaker 1: 21:47

Oh, likewise. Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business.

Speaker 1: 22:00

Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.