Welcome back to Let's Get Digital.
I'm Keri Charles, your host, and today I'm joined by Robert Bai.
He's the founder and president of Zenture Partners, a company using data and automation to change how enterprises source and manage their networks.
Today we're talking about why telecom still runs on spreadsheets, how AI fits in, and what it takes to modernize a legacy industry.
So let's jump in.
Robert, thanks for joining me today.
No, thank you and Kerry, thanks for having me on.
Yes, yes, well let's start with you.
Tell me all about you.
How did you get to this incredible place called Zinscher?
Oh, I appreciate it.
It's kind of scary when you start using the word like 20 years now of being in technology, the technology industry.
2005, I started off at Exo Communication, student voice and data networks.
And as I built up that business, I did extremely well.
I wanted to transition to continue to learn to be more of that advisor for these large enterprises.
I went to work for World Wide Technology, which is one of the largest.
bars in the world today.
They're amazing.
I look up to them and I really got to understand what a bar is and what they're doing today to grow their business.
And then from there, I transitioned to go build out a service provider practice for another reseller and really got to understand supply chain things with the suppliers.
And this is when things started clicking in.
uh I was working with large enterprises, working with the service providers, and one of my former clients had made the decision
to go to Verizon for network as a service.
And I picked up the phone, I called them.
I won't mention who they are, but they're a large retailer that is, I don't know, they're very frugal when it comes to how they spend their money.
And I was shocked by this decision.
And I spoke with the VP of IT and I said, can you help me understand?
How did you guys come to this conclusion?
And I said, I am involved because I'm supplying the hardware for all the Versa.
software that's going out for their SD-WAN environment.
And he shared with me, he's like, Rob, we honestly want to be out of telecom.
Like we're sick of trying to manage it.
We're sick of the finger pointing.
We just wanted to shift it off and we really want to focus on our core.
I was like, wow.
And, you know, as you start looking at it, like they had just gone to one of their two suppliers and the light bulb went off that enterprises are really now starting to look for
new ways of handing certain things out there, you know, of their business off.
including telecom.
And I saw this huge gap that there's not information out there for organizations.
You everyone kind of is reactionary to telecom and there's no one that's really trying to help change it because it's not, you know, this branded AI or the CX customer experience
thing.
It's telecom, which is not, you know, the sexiest thing in the world to talk about.
So I decided that I wanted to go out and found Zensure to really help bring clarity and control.
and access to data for enterprise clients so they can make informed decisions.
And that journey started just almost four years ago now.
So you don't call it a platform, you call it a capability.
That's it.
know, much like the internet wasn't a solution, the internet created capabilities, right?
AI is not uh a product, it's not a service.
It's just creating capabilities.
And we wanted a platform that created capabilities for our clients.
And the platform itself can do a lot of the basic things, know, inventory management, know, carrier access, know, access to fiber tools and other carrier tools that are great.
Customers are always challenging us with like, could you guys do this for us?
Could you create this dashboard?
Can you integrate with this?
And so we literally look at the platform as this true capability to kind of help transform how enterprises are looking at managing their telecom today.
Okay, so let's say that I know nothing about telecom, nothing, I'm brand new to what you're talking about.
I want you to describe Zinscher in detail about what you do and how you do it.
No, absolutely.
you know, I make the joke 20 years ago when I started at XO, I had no background in telecom.
I came from a finance background.
I was a trader in Chicago.
ah And when I made the transition, trying to understand the basic things around telecom was it took me a little bit of a period of time.
But for all of us that are out there, telecom today is traditionally voice and data, right?
And we're going to focus primarily on the data side.
So we all live in a world where we have access to the Internet.
We have internet at our homes, we have internet on our cell phones, and so everyone's aware of what the internet is.
The biggest challenge is that for enterprises today trying to manage their global telephony environment, there isn't a single source solution that's been made available
where they can just go out and buy Comcast globally.
So these enterprises that need internet, they look at it as a pure utility.
It's kind of like electricity.
You need it in order to work.
but no one really thinks about it.
But with internet, it is what gives you access to all your applications, be it up in the public cloud, in your data center.
It's what's allows you to speak across your entire global network via Teams or other collaboration tools.
And so the requirement is telecom is the lifeline for all businesses.
And when we look at where telecom is today, it's a much different animal than it was 20 years ago.
When we started looking,
You know, in 2010 and MPLS was becoming this new area.
And for you that don't know what MPLS is, it was a managed wide area network, which meant that you had selected someone like an AT &T or Verizon or whomever to go out and purchase
circuits to connect all your locations.
And it was the responsibility of that partner to connect all your locations to provide that network for you.
Well, as we've shifted into SD-WAN, the ability to leverage internet,
as these applications have started moving up to the public cloud.
And again, another question of what is the public cloud is we can get into it.
It then shifted the need from an MPLS network to this, we just need internet circuits.
And because businesses rely so heavily on it, they wanted to have a primary and a secondary circuit.
Well, if you're a global company that operates out of the US, you're operating in 60, 70, 80 countries, hundreds of locations, they're...
There are so many providers around the globe that how do know who you can use in a location?
You know, we don't have access to things like an Amazon or a Zillow where we can go on and say, here's where I'm at.
Here's what I'm looking for and what's available.
You're kind of left to either ask your primary provider in the U S who has no facilities over there.
Like who can I use?
Or you start asking your local teams to like, Hey, you're my operations manager for our site in Germany.
need an internet circuit.
Well, also we have one internet circuit and a secondary internet circuit.
Things are getting mixed up.
No one's managing it from an inventory standpoint.
No one's capturing circuit provisioning details.
And also now this internet that's at all your sites that is working has really caused a lot of risk because we don't have the true diversity and resiliency between primary and
the secondary circuits.
No one's capturing what the spending cost is and how it's being allocated.
Things kind of just renew.
And we built ourselves to be just very reactionary where it comes to, you know, telecom and internet.
So, you know, if it's working, no one makes a phone call.
Things go down, everyone screams.
And that reactionary, you know, effort is caused tons of pain, right?
If you're a manufacturer and you have a manufacturing site that's down for a day or two, it could cost millions of dollars in delays and just that manufacturing segment and what
it creates downstream in the supply chain.
So,
We set out to go out and create the first global telecom marketplace.
A location for a customer can go in, put an address and say who is available, right?
So for the first time, they just want to know who can deliver service at that location.
And then next, what is that global benchmark pricing, right?
When we look at internet pricing, it is so great across the board, you know, for a...
a gig circuit in the United States, maybe you're paying $700, $800, know, on average, you know, in tier one cities.
If you go to Dubai or Saudi Arabia, that same one gig circuit could be 18 to $26,000.
And that's a significant difference.
And everyone, you know, is an understanding of, I being taken advantage of because we don't have local resources in sourcing or procurement?
Or, you know, what should that actual price point be?
And the only tools that sourcing procurement
IT leaders have had is I need you to sharpen your pencil.
But you had no data, right?
And so we set out not only to provide access to who are those providers in there, but what is the current market rates in a trend pricing those out?
And then, you know, just adding to that, you if you look at what we were spending for Internet three years ago, it's down 30 % year over year for the last three years.
So, you know, everyone's using their pricing from three years ago to go, is that a good price today?
Well, it's pretty close what we have on this other circuit.
So yes, well, you do that over three to four years.
Also, you're recognizing that you're spending today two to three times over what the market conditions are buried.
So we look at, you know, internet and telecom as a commodity, right?
Just, they're just an internet circuit.
Customers are asking for three things.
Who's available?
How are you delivering it?
What is your cost and how long will it take you to deliver it?
That's all I really need.
And we don't need someone to kind of help shape
you know, the customer and what you need for a con activity or bandwidth needs.
These customers are very intelligent.
They're very smart.
They know what they need because they have similar facilities.
So I don't want to get into the sales games.
Just give me that access.
And we all live where if we want to order paper towels or batteries, we can go on Amazon and have it in two seconds.
And in fact, if I'm on Amazon, Amazon is going to say, hey, here's Braun, but here's some other paper towel goods that people have bought and other price points.
And so we live in a world that we want access to data to become informed buyers.
It just doesn't exist in telecom.
And if you try to rely on your primary provider, who's great fit in the US, they're just not the best fit for your needs globally.
So we want to inform our customers.
There's this massive gap and we've seen people jumping on and adopting, leveraging us faster than we can give them the attention they need.
So it's interesting because I'm hearing that telecom sourcing and management is still very manual, right, for many enterprises.
And you talked a little bit about some of the things that were broken.
Is there anything else that is fundamentally broken or not working in this area that you're able to solve for?
Oh, well, you know, I first look at what's going on with enterprises today is, know, we're, you know, every enterprise is being asked to do more with less.
And when they start looking at what is truly transforming their business, what's enabling them, right?
They're focusing on their AI.
They're focusing on their enterprise software.
They're focusing on, you know, security, you know, are those main things that they're focusing on.
And telecom is as they look at it, it's just utility.
Right?
So it's, it's not transforming.
It's not impacting their business.
It's, it's just there to kind of meet those needs.
Um, and so they're not putting any resources like they once had, right?
There used to be telecom sourcing managers and telecom procurement teams and telecom, you know, network managers that took over those responsibilities, but it's kind of all gone
from a team of 22, like a team of one.
And that individual does not have the time or experience to go out there and suit those things.
ah And so as we look at trying to manage how telecom works with, you know, auto renewals, you know, how do you get information from your sales teams?
Who do you actually reach out to?
You know, the constant sales pain points that we see with the average sales team having a life expectancy of only seven months for an enterprise customer.
That means every seven months, you're getting a new account team who's now needing to relearn your business to understand.
what opportunities were in the pipeline are real or fake.
it becomes a painful environment when I should be able to at nine o'clock at night go onto my computer and say, here's the two sites I need, what's an option and I should be able to
make a quick decision.
ah So capturing that is key.
But then I look at what we're really trying to do is taking them from those spreadsheets, right?
Where this customer has had a spreadsheet that they've worked off of.
We're taking that, we're visualizing it.
But then we're applying our
our dedicated account teams, our customer success managers, along with our oh AI to really go in and pull the data from the carriers for the data that's missing.
So everyone knows I have a circuit with provider one at this site, here's my circuit ID, but they never captured the actual contract date.
They never captured how that circuit was provisioned from the last mile.
And it's not stuff that you can just instantly pull from your carrier portal or from an invoice.
And so,
Collecting that data is a lot of effort from our teams, but it really starts to provide visibility.
And our entire focus around telecom is to go from this reactionary world where we react to, know, something's on fire to let's be proactive.
Let's start looking at your environment.
Let's start understanding what the other stakeholders are doing to create business outcomes versus just relying upon that.
ah The driving down costs is simple, right?
We're helping companies save costs and...
know, telecom spend, you know, for most enterprises about five to 8 % of their overall IT budget.
So, you know, having a 5-10 % reduction isn't really driving that much innovation.
And so we really focused on the day two support model, right?
How are you managing this?
What is your cost if a site does go down?
What happens when a new, you know, IT stakeholder comes in and says, we want to deploy this new PLM solution and it's going to require that we have a change in our network.
Well, how do you plan for that?
And how do we start getting ahead of understanding what those capabilities are?
And we want to be able to provide that.
And because no one wants to deal with salespeople, right?
We've gone where I can get 90 % of the things off of the app is we're letting our platform provide this data to our customers.
Here are the actionable insights that we recommend that you take, you know, this month or this quarter, and you can work with our teams, but it makes it very simple to say, here's
a site you have, here's what you're spending, here's your utilization.
you're up renewal in three months, we recommend doing a renewal and here's the cost that we recommend targeting for that renewal.
Okay, we can take that on, you can take that on, it's up for the customer to try to leverage us the way they want.
ah And so in there, we look at an industry where, again, there is no access to data, no one's hiring resources to manage it, where we can build this platform to create all these
capabilities to say, how do we become an extension of your team without driving additional costs while we're actually driving costs down?
So you mentioned when we talked earlier that you save companies sometimes millions, right?
I mean, millions in actual recurring costs.
Absolutely.
I mean, we look at, you know, the challenges we have with telecom.
And I was the salesperson, I can admit to this.
But, you know, when clients have services, and I talked about the fact we're 30 % year over year reduction in cost per met cost, is clients who had a one gig in 2020, let's say
they're spending $2,000.
Now they want to move to a 10 gig.
Well, that 10 gig cost is probably the same cost that they're paying for the one gig circuit today.
However, the sales team only gets compensated on revenue increase.
And because sales, for the most part, aren't doing their jobs, right, they're going to now try to make up for their shortfalls and charging three, four X over market rates.
But for the customer, they're going, I'm going from a one gig to a 10 gig and I'm only doubling my costs.
Right.
Seems like a win.
And so you keep doing that.
But the problem is you're
end up paying three to four times over that market rate.
And it's only because of the sales commissions.
And customers have said, there's no way this is possible.
Right.
And I'm like, well, challenges use our platform to pull pricing from AT &T or from Verizon.
Right.
And just sample it.
And they're like, they're like, well, you must be providing a different solution.
Right.
I'm like, this is not Zenture.
This is coming directly out of the pricing tools of Verizon or Lumen or AT &T.
So you see that.
And then we look at what just happened in December, Verizon laid off 13,000 people in the United States, 50 % of the direct sales force.
And it's because direct sales teams, I mean, they come with a large salary, there's no guarantee to what they're selling.
And it's this constant change of revenue replacement and the goal of the salesperson from a commission revenue perspective versus what is helping drive the customer's needs.
All this change has caused us more pain on the customer side.
You can look at the net promoter scores in telecom.
It's the lowest out of all, you know, B2B industries, right?
Healthcare has got a higher standard, insurance has got...
Telecom is the lowest out of all.
And it's because we look at it as a utility.
No one is actually helping drive innovation.
Everyone's doing what's best for themselves.
No one is putting what's best for the customer's needs.
And I think they just finally got, they threw their hands up and says, why isn't there a better way?
Why can't I just go to a site and look up something like if I want to buy an airline ticket?
mean, like there's nothing in this world that we can't just go out and quickly identify, be it a car, a home, travel.
It's all available.
Telecom?
There's nothing.
There is nothing that's available.
And so that missing piece that finally someone can go, well, how'd you find out who's available there?
Well, I I asked my rep, right?
Did you ask anyone else?
Like, I wouldn't even know who to call.
And so our goal is just really helping the customers understand what's out there, what are those possibilities, and then aligning to their goals um that meets their needs, not
centuries needs.
So, you know, we're talking about telecom is legacy heavy as an industry, uh typically at some points resistant to change.
We talked about that.
So what's been harder?
uh Building something disruptive.
I mean, this is textbook disruption with technology or getting customers to trust and adopt a new way of operating.
oh Well, wow, which one is more challenging?
um So our Zenture focuses primarily on large global enterprises and in there, those are organizations that have always worked directly with their account teams.
And so they felt that's the way I get the best pricing.
And we've had to educate our customers.
So the education piece on that side has been a challenge.
the model that we provide is there's no cost for them to use the platform, right?
Like it's, you're not buying through us.
It's not like you're buying things through Zensure.
You're buying them directly from these carriers.
And they're still scratching their head of like, well, how do you get paid and how is our cost down?
And we go through it like, I'm like, I'm going to show you, I'm going to tell you how, and you're to move forward.
And the next time you're like, is this going to be like this every time?
And I had to kind of educate them where the markets
moving to, right?
And with Verizon's layoffs last month, it's just another thing that says they're moving towards automation.
They're looking for self-service.
This is all the things that telecoms are trying to build towards.
And if you're a global company, you're going to be forced to try to manage through 50, 60, 70 different portals like that, which isn't efficient.
On the other side is what we're trying to create in disruption.
I look at it as the blockbuster versus Netflix, right?
We all are used to operating on
If I want to watch a movie this weekend, I'm going to go to Blockbuster.
I'm going to hope the movie I want is in stock.
We're going to rent it, maybe one more.
And then on Sunday, we're going to freak out and try to return it before 11 o'clock.
So no good hit with late fees.
Thankfully we do.
And then Netflix came up and they didn't change the movie, right?
They said, hey, here's there's a better way of getting that movie experience at your home.
And that disrupted that entire supply chain because you had groups that were all about
you know, DVDs and DVD.
Like there's so many things that are tied to it.
And when we look at what we're doing, it's it's now telling a carrier, we want to be the exclusive partner for this enterprise.
I'm like, but you do realize enterprises are smart.
They're they're going to challenge you.
They're going to go ask for other quotes.
Customers want access to the data.
So if you're fit, great.
If you're not, you should understand you're not a good fit for delivering services in this market.
you shouldn't try to deliver services in that market because there's no value there.
And so the challenge of them, of us changing it, where we're giving the customer like the leverage, they don't like that.
Like how do I fight with renewals?
How do I start changing things?
So, you know, the entire history of like, I'm going to give you a pricing schedule.
Well, like I said, you know, over the last three years, pricing's down over 30 % year-over-year.
So that pricing schedule from two years ago.
is 60 % over rate than it should be.
And they're like, well, we need commitments in order to provide these resources for you.
Well, that was true until you started charging for dedicated resources and then you offshored all these resources.
So the entire model is so broken that it's like trying to push water uphill.
And so we've had a few carriers who have adopted with us that are 100 % lock in.
Like this is a model where we can deliver the services that we want to deliver.
we can deliver them at the margins that we want to keep, which is helping keeping costs down to the customers.
And it works great.
And then we have others who, you know, it's back and forth.
So as the customers, you know, go through and do, I call it a proof of value and testing us and leveraging it, it starts clicking, right?
And then they're like, why wasn't this available a year ago?
Right?
I'm like, well, it was, it took you, but.
You know, but we say the same thing about Netflix.
can I, mean, Mike, my kids, you know, lot of the people we work with industry never went to a blockbuster, right?
It's very difficult to say this is how we used to do things.
Right.
And so it will change.
And I believe over the next 12 to 18 months, it's going to change even faster than we're thinking about because the adoption to how customers are bringing in AI to do basic
fundamental roles inside those businesses.
They're now looking for smarter ways to do everything.
And if this is a platform that provides the AI that does the automatic reviews, analysis, invoice reviews, provides them the guarantee and visibility to that data they're looking
for, they can now shift and put more focus in other areas.
And because we're not trying to charge an upfront heavy fee to work with us, that's the hard part.
Like, why don't you guys charge for us?
I'm like, I could, we absolutely could charge for you.
I just don't believe we should.
Like you don't pay Amazon maybe for Prime, but for the most part, we don't pay for those services, right?
We get paid by the providers.
Our goal is to provide a better experience for our customers to help grow that business with all those carriers.
And that's why they're paying us on the back end.
But they pay us a small fee to provide that reoccurring ongoing support.
And it's again, it's just that transition from the way we've done things for the last 20 years to transition to something new.
especially with something new that's massively disruptive to the customer.
All those circuits that are being built globally, 50,000 invoices, it's fine.
It's not going to change anything.
Maybe it makes life of AP simpler.
Maybe it makes life of our NOC simpler to do some things, but it's working.
They're focusing on these bigger projects and that's our goal to say, fine, don't put any more time or effort in.
Let us go out and just provide the data, the access and
Here are the outcomes.
And for you, Mr.
Customer, you can say yes or no.
I don't know why you would say no, but it's up for you then to take that action.
So I talked about, you've talked about AI a few times, how does AI really fit into your capability, your platform?
So uh there's two pieces of it.
with regards to platform, the way we ingest data, right?
if someone was, if I were to ask the typical customer, where's all your data set, right?
Where's your inventory?
It's going to be on spreadsheets or invoices.
Maybe someone's got it in some dashboard, carrier portal.
We can ingest all that.
And we ingest using tools like Gemini, right, to convert.
an Excel spreadsheet to a Google doc to ingest that data, which allows us not to do it manually, but through AI to ingest that data.
Once the data sits in there, we've taught certain agents to do specific tasks within our platform.
So one is looking at sites, right?
So we have an agent that reviews services at a location to identify are there any challenges or risk scores, right?
So do we have diversity at a last mile?
Do we have diversity that pops?
Now, AI is just reviewing it based on what's there.
At the same time, if we don't have that data, the AI is coming out and saying, hey, we're missing data at this location.
The bigger piece, though, is when we look at the global marketplace is creating a Agenic AI between venture and the carriers.
And this is where we're to see how communication really transforms and how do we communicate with the carriers to get quotes, to place orders, to manage things.
ah And so when we look at Agenic AI,
It's having individual agents that have specific tasks, right?
And then an overarching management structure that can build that out.
So when we create a Agenic AI communications with say a GTT or Lumen, it's allowing us to have an agent that can pull pricing.
has an agent that can place orders.
has an agent that can pull data.
So that streamlines that approach.
Well, I'm no longer now having to go to a sales team and saying, Hey, here's this site.
Here's the spreadsheet with all the sites.
Can you quote this out?
Well, all they're doing is taking my spreadsheet and putting it into their system.
So we can remove that individual.
That individual, I mean, isn't delivering it much of a value.
So it allows us to help the carriers provide better margins on their services.
Better margins means they can provide better support.
We're getting quotes that are faster.
We're also evaluating those quickly.
So if we see something come back and it's outside the typical parameters,
we're flagging it and it's requesting updated pricing.
All of our quote requests are providing all those additional documents that typically get missed, right?
Like how is this being delivered last mile?
So the communication between Zentra and the carriers in this global marketplace, I think is what is going to just truly benefit the edge customers.
uh And this allows again, like a Verizon who just cut off 7,000 salespeople to say, how do we continue to support our customers without it being painful?
to get something as simple as an internet circuit, right?
And so that piece of leveraging AI and how we communicate between the carriers, how we communicate with other procurement systems, how we use AI to do a lot of the reviews of
services, to flag things, to start creating these actionable insights for our clients, takes it away from someone like our dedicated CSMs, who now are meeting with our customers
not to pull out those things, is to say, how do we help make telecom a better experience for you?
How do we create a better experience?
We're not here to sell.
We're here to help make your life easier.
And that leveraging AI to do a lot of the tasks that would have been very heavily from a manual entry, data entry piece uh has been simplified.
It's becoming smarter.
Every three months, we're looking at what the capabilities of the AI agents we're using.
And I don't want to say where I think it's going to be in a year, but one year from now, we believe
our AI agents that reviews invoices, we'll be able to review it and tell a customer within seconds of that invoice being published, what's on your invoice?
Are there any discrepancies?
Are there new orders that are on there?
If there are, do we have access to those orders just to let you know, like here's the order you placed back in June.
It was now on your invoice in December.
It matches up for what you agreed to.
Where a customer now has a quick sheet that comes in, here's the invoice, here's what's on it, cause written in a telecom invoice.
you know, is, it's challenging, you know, unless you can do, you know, know, lot of manipulation and that piece just helps simplify the workloads for those customers.
So I believe it's driving down costs, it's increasing ability for innovation.
It's allowing customers to really focus on their core capabilities and moving from that reactionary to, you know, proactive type environment.
So let's talk a little bit about the future, more about the future.
Looking ahead, how do you see enterprise telecom management changing over the next few years, maybe 10 years or so?
And what role do you see that Zensure is gonna play as that industry modernizes?
Well, so, and I think this is going to happen even faster, right?
So I look at what the cloud has done to telecom, right?
We've shifted all of our applications from our data centers, know, to our, you know, wherever we were housing our applications to now open the public cloud, you know, our
emails up there.
And so that shift was one, right?
As we look at what AI is doing and what it's going to be doing from
PLM solutions and IoT, you're going to continually need more bandwidth.
And so getting ahead where things are now looking at how do we start creating this better way of using telecom.
I want to use it more as a utility.
So I want to be able to have access to up to 100 gigs at a location, but I want to use it like a utility.
So if I'm using it, charge me for it.
this new, I call it network as a service where things are going to be automated.
Things are going to be able to be dialed up instantly based on internal requirements that can be all set by AI.
So instead of us having to call in and say, this customer's got this site, we need to increase their bandwidth by 200 % or whatever that factor is, the AI is looking at it and
it's doing it automatically.
So the network of the service, which is kind of like a cloud, it's this very broad
thing, but the way we look at it is I need a network that's a pure utility, right?
So I need to be able to make things, changes immediately on the fly.
Technology is being adopted and changed.
I mean, so fast.
mean, we, know, AI three years ago was, you know, doing some basic things and what it's going to do next year is going to be greatly different.
So as customers want it to, or enterprises want to adopt new, new technologies, they need a network that can support that.
instantly.
And so as enterprises start leveraging, you know, AI to do things, so are the carriers, right?
The carriers are building smarter networks that are going to be allowed to open up additional ports and streamline these things.
And this world of automation and AI for the service rider to deliver a better connectivity to the customer.
And then for the customer to have built that and getting those reports that helps keep them honest, right?
Because the very next challenge comes kind of like
using the public cloud is sprawl, billing gets out of control.
How do I know what I'm using?
And that's where we're going to come in say, hey, we're managing this for you.
We're going to keep it in line.
We're going to help make sure that nothing's being done out of incorrectly.
So we're here to have your back.
But you now have a network that can allow you to scale and be as elastic as you need, much like the public cloud allowed you to do back 10 years ago.
Your network can now enable that for you for the future.
So Rob, one more question.
When was the time where you had this idea and you thought, wow, I got something special.
And when did you know that it was gonna work?
When did you get that feeling?
So there is a large partner of ours uh who had reached out, this is probably four years ago, and they were looking at trying to connect to a data center and they were like, I
need two circuits, right?
m And I was even their partner.
They were like, do know who has access to that facility?
Now, thankfully, most large tier one data centers provide a list of all the carriers, right?
But this site didn't have any information.
And this is
an organization with over a half a million employees, right?
So it's not like they're a small group.
They might be one of the biggest IT organizations out there, but they don't have access to this.
And I was just shocked that we live in a world with 15,000 ISPs in the world at $3 trillion industry, that there isn't any space for a customer to go to collect that data.
And again, I think that transition on the cloud, we had an MPLS network.
I had one vendor.
you took care of my global environment.
Well, now we don't need that same vendor to do that global network.
And it's just shifted.
And so you kind of rely on different things.
And the fact that this group came out to me they're like, where do we go?
Cause no one wants to send out 500 emails and wait for responses.
Right.
And then, you know, I've, I live on apps, you know, I've bought cars through Apple, I bought a home searching through apps.
Why wasn't that here?
Like it's just everything's had a touch of our fingertips and it's something I don't wanna say so simple, it's again, it's not the sexiest topic in the world, right?
If we're talking AI and AI platform, everyone wants to have the discussion.
You say telecom, people wanna fall asleep and just move on to the next spot, but it becomes that concern.
And so because it's an important aspect, the way we look at telecom in the future is like air, right?
We need it in order to breathe and function.
But you and I aren't thinking about breathing this entire time we're on this phone unless I tell you to think about breathing, right?
That's how the network needs to be.
It is something that works and functions that you don't think about.
It just delivers.
How many times do we all?
I mean, everyone who's listening to this podcast right now, how many times do we think of something and we think, gosh, why is it happening this way or couldn't it be better?
That's really strange.
It really needs to be this way.
But we don't take action on it.
We don't create from that and design and innovate and create a company.
You're talking about all these people who were laid off and I mean, it's just unbelievable over the past couple of years what's happened to tech and telecom.
And so I'm encouraging
these people to say go start a company.
know look look at what you feel like is being done inefficiently and create something.
So I think this your message is so inspiring Rob.
You and from the moment I met you I was so inspired and and I just think I hope that everybody listening to this is inspired about whatever that idea that you have.
Go do it right.
There's a place in the world for it right.
You know, and I appreciate that.
And, you know, had I tried doing this 10 years ago, the cost to build this would have been astronomical, right?
But because of now how technology is built, low code, no code platforms, we were able to spin up the initial version in a matter of three months, right?
That would have taken three years and a massive investment 10 years ago.
So for all those who are listening, they're like, I don't think I can afford to out and build something.
You're absolutely wrong.
Like there are needs out there.
People are looking for ways to facilitate them.
And again, I'm happy I met my CTO, Grace Schroeder, who told me that there was a pathway to build it without having to go try to drive up millions of dollars in venture capital
funds.
So ah it's out there and I appreciate that.
How can we learn more about Zenture?
Well, you can go to our website, you know, www.centrapartners.com.
We have a TikTok page because we're trying to do, yes, because we have a new group of individuals who are moving into the workforce who are used to gathering data in different
ways, right?
ah So we're on TikToks.
There's media publications that are on our website, but, you know, there's a house of videos on the Centra Partners YouTube channel.
I mean, what?
However you wanna get data, you wanna read, go to our website, you wanna watch videos, check out TikTok and YouTube.
Thank you, Rob.
This has been incredible.
I really appreciate you coming on the show.
You've inspired me.
Well, I appreciate it and I thank you for giving me the time and the platform to speak with you and your audience.
Bye.