IGNW CTOs Phil Taylor and John Wynkoop

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to John and Phil of IGNW, and we discuss ways to put servant leadership into practice, the exciting future of truly distributed computing models, and why the cloud is a pattern, not a place. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(John at 00:00:20) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:21) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Dude, I am excited. I saw the name and I love the Mario characters you've got going on behind you. You got posters, like paintings. Did you do those paintings?

(John at 00:00:43) No, my son actually did those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) Your son did? They're unbelievable. They're like perfect. They're like the actual designer would, that's how it should look.

(John at 00:00:51) Yeah, I think he got the idea from when he saw pictures on something, and he said, I'm gonna make these for you. He made them for me for my birthday, so it's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:01) My wife does some paintings. She's got, she did a galaxy painting for my room, and it's pretty cool. And then I have, I had a rule, like, all the art that's up has to be art that we make.

(John at 00:01:12) I like that.

(Phil at 00:01:13) Nice. I like that too. We do a lot of furniture building, and we've got some art that my wife's created as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) Have you guys ever done the, like, you buy something off Craigslist and redo it up?

(Phil at 00:01:24) Oh yeah, for sure. Our console that our TV sits on is one of those pieces. We completely remade it. You know, it was kind of just a bookshelf, and we ended up fabricating doors for it and putting doors and stuff on it and some wine racks in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) Oh, nice.

(Phil at 00:01:36) Yeah, so I've done both.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:38) I told my wife, I was like, I think you spent more time taking the Instagram photos than you did doing the restoration.

(Phil at 00:01:44) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) But this is a tech podcast. We're supposed to be talking about being modern CTOs and stuff.

(John at 00:01:51) That's what we're supposed to be talking about. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) You guys have two CTOs at the company. I want to talk about that. How did that happen?

(Phil at 00:01:58) Yes, we actually have four now. It's kind of, yeah. So because we're a consulting company, you know, and I'll let John give his perspective. But, you know, about a year ago, we came up with the idea to create an office of CTO. Right? And so I took over the role of CTO for the entire company, but that really wasn't cutting it. What we're realizing in our business at scale is that we need domain expertise within each line of business that we run within the overall business. And so, you know, you can think of them also as consulting CTOs. You know, John's the best of the best when it comes to talking cloud and cloud native. Right? But he also has a depth of knowledge that goes all the way to the data center. And then he has a peer that's on the data center side of our business. So we've got, you know, cloud, then we've got what we call software-defined infrastructure, and then we have modern software. And their other peer is Brian, who runs our modern software business from a technology perspective. And so they kind of run an overlay. Right? And they partner with the business owner in each line of business. So John owns the technology story for cloud. Right? And he owns quality and output of any projects we run with customers for cloud. So more than likely, he's teaching me or teaching our customer how to build the right, you know, design for their environment. But I'll hand it over to John, let you give some color to that too in perspective, you know, from you. I know we moved you over to that role probably, what, eight months ago now? It's changed slightly.

(John at 00:03:13) Yep. So yeah, it really is about driving business focus. And because our customers and our partners expect us to be experts in every functional area that we consult in, what we found as a business is that it's just too broad to maintain that deep technical expertise at a, you know, from a single position. And so by adding in, I guess, you know, some people call them field CTOs. We call them CTOs of a different functional area. There's several different ways to refer to that in the industry. But what we found is that it really allows myself, Roger, and Brian to focus on the technical expertise, and then allows Phil to focus from a strategy perspective on the business as a whole. And so that division of labor is really important to keep our engineering teams and our technical teams sharp, while still making sure that we're not losing sight of the strategy that's necessary to run a consulting company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:18) So that's your primary line of business, consulting?

(Phil at 00:04:22) Yeah. So heavily, it's professional services or what people will call a systems integrator that sits in between their technology partners that they're consuming technology from and their engineering field teams that don't always understand how to apply modern patterns. Right? We get set in the way that we do things, and years go by and we accumulate a bunch of technical debt. And so most of what we do in our professional services business is we come in and we help consult on that. You know? How do you go from what you're doing today to a modern delivery approach to either software development, DevOps, SRE, you know, or just operations of running a cloud. You know, what's important from a governance perspective, security. How should you architect these systems?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:01) Yeah. And you know what? You're the person who put together the notes for this conversation, but it's so detailed, amazing. And I went through and I was picking out the things I liked and what caught my attention. And something really stood out to me that I want to know about. Cloud is a pattern, not a place. That feels good. It feels right, but I want to know, I want more words behind that.

(Phil at 00:05:27) Yeah. So I do some speaking, and I've kind of realized we're in a digital revolution at this point. Right? And people are grasping, and we always do. We grasp the tools or the technology that we think is gonna solve our problem. But generally, it all boils down to patterns and practices, you know, of how you consume and how you build and how you design. And so that's one of the things that I thought about hard, and you can create private cloud environments that are as effective and operational as your public cloud environments. People just struggle to do that. Right? They tried OpenStack. That was the end-all-be-all for this type of solution, you know, about, what, ten years ago when it came out, but you needed to be NASA or Rackspace to implement it. And so what John and I have realized over, you know, three years of building this business is it's really a mindset and a pattern and practices mode. And so we're able to, you know, Roger is able to leverage ideas and concepts coming out of cloud and apply it to our software-defined infrastructure business, which, essentially, you could have called it private cloud business. Right? Because, essentially, that's what we're doing there is we're taking the concepts that are being pioneered in the cloud that are easy to do, and we're making them available to implement within the data center, which is a bit more challenging, but it's really about this pattern of practice and how do you make that work in concert without cutting off so much of the pattern of the practice due to a technology constraint that you cripple it, and it's unusable. But, John, what is your perspective on that as well? Because I always say cloud native anywhere.

(John at 00:06:45) Right. So cloud native anywhere is probably the best way to describe it. We're really focused on helping customers apply the tools that they've come to expect from the public cloud to the data center and to what would typically be called traditional infrastructure. So instead of thinking of a stack of servers sitting in a room in your building as on-premise, what we try to do is shift the conversation and say, that's really just a hybrid cloud endpoint or an on-premises cloud endpoint. And you should think about your applications and your workloads the same way regardless of where they're being deployed to really become a cloud-native enterprise. And that's where, you know, IGNW is really focused on helping customers understand what those patterns and practices look like for cloud native and how we can transform traditional or heritage applications to be more modern and to take advantage of those new patterns.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) So I was talking with Clay over at Oracle, and he was responsible for this business unit that helped older or companies that still had, like, physical racks and mainframes, move to the cloud. Because often, you know, you get with a bunch of SaaS companies and they're built in the cloud by default. But then I heard some crazy statistics that, like, 75% plus still aren't in the cloud. They're still on these, they're still making the transition. And that they were focusing on building a suite of tools, and Oracle was building around that segment of the market. And then I saw in the notes about Anthos. Am I saying that right? Is that how you pronounce it?

(Phil at 00:08:33) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) Yeah. And so then I read up on what that was, and I said, oh man, this looks like exactly the conversation I was having with Oracle about building tools that will allow to make that transition smoother. Am I grasping this concept correctly?

(Phil at 00:08:50) Yeah. I mean, there's 80% of companies are gonna be in a hybrid cloud state effectively. If you think about taking a company like Oracle and saying, alright, the board has said we're cloud first. What does that mean? Well, it means we need to move everything into the cloud. We need to build everything for the cloud, but we have 15 global data centers. How do we do that? Right? It doesn't happen with the flip of a switch. Right? So you're gonna be in this hybrid cloud state for a period of time. We come into customers that are three years into that journey, and only 2% of their workloads are up in the cloud. Right? And they thought they would be cloud first and move to the cloud by the end of that third year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:23) I'm sorry to interrupt you because I like to talk big, but I also like to talk small. And I keep hearing this, and I want you as, like, because you guys are experts. You're in it all day. Tell me, like, why? Like, what? Three years and 2%? Like, tell me the nerd. Like, why is it, I'm a, I've got 17 years of engineering experience. Tell me why it's not going.

(Phil at 00:09:43) So I'll give my thoughts and then pass to John because I know he can add a lot of detail around these problems. He's worked on both sides of the equation and so have I. But a lot of it, you know, comes down to business first. Right? So some businesses are more traditional and it goes all the way to the board level that they're uncomfortable putting their data in the cloud, and so they need more of a hybrid solution. They're okay saying, let's throw a server out there, but my data can't leave my network. It needs to be protected in private. And they still have this belief that they can do that better than public cloud. Right? They can protect it better. They can meet compliance better. So that's a big aspect of it. It's a cultural thing within the organizations themselves, but then you get into technology challenge problems. Right? Most customers we get into still run IP addressing off spreadsheets. Right? That's not a viable solution in the cloud. So you've got to retrain those networking teams to think about building networks in a different way. Right? Because the way they build them today are very bespoke. And then from that point, now let's talk server automation as we go up the stack. Right? So the way we build our servers is very much a manual process today on-prem. The way it needs to be done in the cloud is much more of an automated process. At least that's how the benefits come out of using cloud. If you build it by hand in cloud, what you've done is you've lifted and shifted your problem into the cloud and now you're still operating the same way you do on-prem. That's not generally the desired business outcome that you're looking for in operating in cloud. So you've got to learn all these new cloud constructs to be able to correctly model your server workloads, right, and then all the way to the applications here. Right? So a lot of application owners, especially if it's third party software, they're configuring it by hand. And those software vendors are old, so when our teams come in to actually configure that in an automated way, it's us writing software to automate their configuration. It's us having to reverse engineer the database that stores all the configuration for this thing so that the users don't have to go through a manual screen to click all the options versus modern products that allow us to hit APIs directly, right, that are automation-friendly. So those are some of the high level challenges. And then, you know, from building servers, it can be as simple as, you know, config management a few years ago was a great thing and we're building these, excuse me, pets. There's a great thesis in the market, pets versus cattle. Well, what we've landed on is that we want our infrastructure to be cattle. We want to be able to replace it at any given point in time, not treat it like this pet server that's running out there in the world that we want to keep in a consistent state. Instead, we want it to be able to be resumed anywhere in the world at a consistent state. Right? And so that's much more of an immutable pattern. So tools like HashiCorp, Terraform, and Packer have spun up to solve that problem, but customers don't necessarily always understand the difference between running Puppet and running Terraform and Packer. Right? To build their workloads. They don't understand that immutable design pattern change. But that's a lot of information. I'm gonna hand it to John because I know he can go a little bit deeper on each one of those problems and talk about specifics or maybe even examples where we've gotten, you know, stuck with a customer on a specific pattern.

(John at 00:12:21) Sure. Yeah. Thanks, Phil. So, as Phil said, you know, I think that there are several contributing factors to why some larger enterprise and maybe more traditional enterprises haven't begun or haven't made significant progress on the cloud. I'll call it a cloud journey or digital transformation. Right? Some of that is that, you know, some of these systems have been around for 30 years, and modernization of those systems just takes significant investment. And companies are having to do the cost benefit and figure out where to make investments. Right? And you can't modernize all at once. I've got limited resources. I've got a limited team that understands cloud and cloud-native patterns at my company. How do I best make use of that? And that's where we start to see those emerging, you know, net new things that are being built in the cloud or those 2% that have been migrated that are high value, maybe low hanging fruit. And what we're really starting to see is companies looking for help around building frameworks for cloud migration. So one of the patterns that we help a lot of companies with is building a cloud center of excellence, helping them determine migration candidates. Right? So there's more than one way to move to the cloud. We can just move it. Right? We can do a lift and shift where we just pick it up and drop it in the cloud. Little benefit there. We can do a move and improve where we get some marginal benefits. We take advantage of cloud-native services when they're available, but we still kind of reduce our risk. Then we can go all the way up to, you know, replatforming or completely refactoring an application. And one of the options that often gets overlooked is just completely replacing something. So even helping customers determine where services on-prem can just be outsourced to, like, a SaaS company. And so building that framework is really what I think companies are struggling with. And there are certainly companies in the market that have got it, that have got it down.

(John at 00:14:16) They've done this. They're well on their journey. But a lot of companies don't even know where to start. And so we can come in and help with that. And we've done that for several large companies.

(John at 00:14:26) There's a large manufacturing company out of the Northwest that we've helped do that exact thing. We can also help with understanding where your staff needs maybe upskilling or some additional tooling. You know, we can build the automation for your team. We can help with training. And all of those things, I think, are becoming—you know, executives are starting to see those as barriers and looking for ways to mitigate them and to overcome them.

(John at 00:14:51) And then, of course, the last one is just risk. I think there's still a lot of perceived risk in many organizations in moving to the cloud. And as Phil said, you know, they've been running it on premises for a while. They believe that, for whatever reason, that their on-premises deployment is more stable, more secure, more affordable, more cost effective. And so it's really sometimes it's just about education and making sure that we communicate the value, the true value of a cloud provider.

(John at 00:15:27) And then there's always going to be a use case where, whether it's edge computing or, you know, extremely sensitive data or, you know, other use cases where companies are going to need some amount of infrastructure on premises. Right? We have lots of customers that build in the cloud, but for whatever reason, whether it's connectivity at the edge, whether it's they want the resiliency, should they lose connectivity—they need some level of computing on premises, and they need to be able to run the workload even if they lose connectivity to the cloud. And so that's also another use case. Now with Anthos specifically, as a migration tool and as a hybrid cloud platform, what we're seeing is it provides the ability to not only migrate legacy or heritage workloads—you know, I've got a bunch of VMs running in my data center and I want to move those to the cloud.

(John at 00:16:19) But it also provides a way to take containerized workloads to the edge in a stable and secure way, the same way we would deploy them in the cloud. And that is really where Anthos is proving to be transformative for a lot of businesses—giving that same cloud experience, that cloud-like experience that we have in public providers such as Google, and sharing that or bringing that down to the edge.

(Phil at 00:16:52) Yeah. So we talked a minute—oh, sorry. Joel, I was adding a little more color on that.

(John at 00:16:55) I know you're a software guy like me. Right? So my background started in software engineering about 13 years old. So I think, as I read in your bio, you know, started coding at a pretty young age. And so we've both grown up through all of these transitions, or a lot of them, right, as we've been software engineers.

(Phil at 00:17:11) And so if you think about the old DLL hell problems, right, that was solved through, you know, these namespaces and packaging and being able to install multiple copies of the same application sources into a machine. Right? And then that has evolved now into, you know, containers where, if you think about boiling that down for the audience, it's really a packaging unit for software that combines the operating system and all runtime aspects of the software requirements together. So rather than the way we build today where we might build a server or a VM independent of applying the software to it, we're doing all that as one operation. And so that's what's really made it take off and hit the industry as a whole as the holy grail for this multi-cloud or hybrid environment.

(Phil at 00:17:49) If you can get your applications containerized, it solves 100 problems for you, right, that you would have to build as a software engineering team in building a distributed system to manage that infrastructure. And we saw this happen in the past through PaaS-based platforms, right, like Pivotal's Cloud Foundry. Great solution, but when you're building such an opinionated platform, you're always going to have areas where your consumer, your software engineering teams get locked into the solution in some way in terms of inability to solve their problem or so dependent on the solution they couldn't migrate it anywhere else. Right? And what that Kubernetes platform gives you is the ability to get portability.

(Phil at 00:18:23) You know, the container provides the true portability. The Kubernetes layer provides the orchestration portability across environments between private cloud, public cloud, multi-cloud environments. What Anthos does—you know, we started this business three years ago. We were deploying Kubernetes from vanilla upstream. These were huge consulting projects.

(Phil at 00:18:41) Right? Lots of engineering power behind just standing up the platform itself. You know, I think the team we first had was about six people just building the platform, writing the Terraform, deploying Kubernetes. Right?

(Phil at 00:18:51) And then we had software engineering teams with about 40 engineers that were converting the applications on top of it. Right? And so very large. What Anthos has done is boiled all that down and said, well, as we've seen this increase, now we have a distribution of Kubernetes, right, that's supported, that has a company backing it that you can call, that's going to provide expertise and support when you go wrong. And that's both available as a managed service in the cloud, but now it's available in your data center, as John mentioned, on the edge, which I'm a huge believer that data center's not going away.

(Phil at 00:19:20) It's being disintermediated by cloud and by edge. And so what that means is your central data centers may move to the cloud, but if you're a retailer like Chipotle, you still have thousands of branch locations that need mini data centers. And so rather than applying traditional branch patterns to them, I think you can apply this more modern approach where, you know, we deploy Anthos to the edge and it's running a miniature Kubernetes data center out there. And that could be running on an Intel NUC at an individual workstation, or it could be running in a cabinet, right, with a Cisco-type HyperFlex box that's paired down for edge-based compute. And Anthos just makes that easier, so it bridges the gap of standing up the platform to the distribution, but then also consistent 3C through Anthos Config Manager allows you to push out common security policies to all clusters under management.

(Phil at 00:20:05) Right? And if you think about that, that's where it starts. But that tool really can push out any Kubernetes artifact. So I can tell it to stand up security rules. I could tell it to deploy core applications that are required in every data center or every application, like my monitoring platforms and things like that.

(Phil at 00:20:20) And so it's a very powerful tool. Before that, we were writing this all in CI/CD pipelines. Right? We were having to build bespoke systems to push out these things. And so you're seeing a shift in the market now to higher-level orchestration leveraging Kubernetes.

(Phil at 00:20:32) And, you know, Google just released Cloud Config, which is like the next evolution of this. And we're seeing startups in the market also attacking the problem this way where, if I have a Kubernetes cluster out there, so I spin up a GKE cluster in Google, I can now orchestrate the rest of my cloud via that cluster through what Kubernetes calls a custom resource definition, a CRD. That gives your application teams the power to spin up, you know, Pub/Sub services they need, database services they need, everything they need via one artifact and tool that they're describing it in, which is that Kubernetes artifact. So that's really the power and the portability of it. And then, as John mentioned, there's lots of other tools in it, like for workload migration.

(Phil at 00:21:10) If you want to move a VM into a container, that's something the tool that the Anthos platform supports doing. As well as, what becomes very problematic is, how do you bridge old applications into these new applications as you're migrating them? So things like Istio and multi-cluster Istio within what I think Anthos calls their Anthos Service Mesh is what it's actually called. So it's a layer above the core, like, open-source Istio product, but it has the capability then to bridge in services from other data centers or cloud data centers into a single fabric. Right?

(Phil at 00:21:40) Service mesh type fabric.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:42) I like the Chipotle reference because I want my tacos. I want them secure, and I want them fast. And that could be like an Anthos marketing campaign.

(Phil at 00:21:52) Exactly. And there's a disclaimer here. I'm not saying Chipotle is a customer. I have no idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:55) Saying what is it? Yeah. So.

(Phil at 00:21:56) All I'm saying—that's clear.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:59) Chipotle actually sounds like an app that would be like on Anthos, like Chipotle by Anthos.

(Phil at 00:22:04) Totally. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) Right? Better tacos faster.

(Phil at 00:22:07) Yep. Everybody loves tacos.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:09) All right. So the company name, your company name, IGNW, and then you guys remember, like, there's no reference—and I see the games over here. There's no reference to like IGN. Like, what does IGNW stand for?

(Phil at 00:22:23) Yeah. So that's an interesting one. So because we bought the original business, it came with a brand name. Right? And so that was Info Group Northwest.

(Phil at 00:22:30) And so the traditional business that Andy Cadwell came in and acquired before he recruited us to help him build this next-generation solution provider was really a contract software development business. Right? And what he noticed was the business had great recruiting talent and great ability to staff resources, but it was being delivered to customers in a way that wasn't a modern, consultative-type business. And so he wanted to take that layer in consultative approach that worked well with vendors. And so that's the point at which we took the company national is when we said, "Hey, let's convert this to an acronym and disassociate the brand from being Pacific Northwest." Right?

(Phil at 00:23:05) And so that's where it became IGNW, or some customers like to say Ignu, which is my favorite pronunciation. Ignu. But it's essentially just the acronym for the original Info Group Northwest.

(Phil at 00:23:22) Oh, nice. That's the brand. But so what that means is we don't just help customers with consulting. Right? We'll come in, and a lot of customers really appreciate this because when you're making this pivotal shift in your business, you have to think of it as like a 10x change.

(Phil at 00:23:36) Right? So we define, you know, in the startup world, a new product has to be 10x different than the last product to hit the market for it to really hold on and take the market over and convert customers. Right? Use 10x improvement. That's what we're doing in this digital transformation process that we're bringing out to customers and the consulting that we do.

(Phil at 00:23:53) It's really a 10x shift in the way they think about how they build their software, how they deliver their software to market. It's a huge change for those organizations. So it's really nice for us to be able to also help them recruit the staff and place that staff within their organization for the longevity of their company as they make that transition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:08) Oh, nice. You guys do recruiting too?

(Phil at 00:24:12) Yeah. So we have a huge talent pipeline, and that's due to the fact that we have dedicated recruiters that are constantly recruiting for the top 10 job roles that we actually do within our consulting business. Cases like a customer that we're doing in California where they're moving really, really fast. They've got a team spun up to work on the cloud-native approach, but they still have to support their legacy solution or their classic solution. And so we're helping them move that into GCP so they can reduce data center provisioning times from, you know, six months to about three to six weeks.

(Phil at 00:24:42) But in order to do that, we're moving really fast, right, to hit their timelines, and their team is not going to keep up with adjusting all the knowledge they would need to operate that environment or on that environment. So as part of that agreement, we're bringing in two additional resources to that project that are actually left with the customer after we leave. So after our consulting project is done, they have two domain experts now that understand all these modern patterns, practices, and tools to support their environment going forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) John, what are you most excited about right now?

(John at 00:25:12) I'd say, really, what's got me excited and what I think is really going to be interesting for the future is the potential that the truly distributed computing model—so things like 5G, as it becomes more widespread, things like edge, you know, as edge devices get more powerful, smaller, lower power consumption, the ability to push things like computer vision or, you know, deep data analysis out to more and more devices and decentralize the processing of data, I think, is going to open up a lot of possibility and a lot of really cool tech that we haven't yet really, as an industry, haven't really wrapped our brains around. And you start to see this. I mean, we got some cool companies out there. There's a, you know, there's a laundry list of companies that are starting to investigate this space. But as we start to see more practical applications, I think the trend towards a more distributed ecosystem in our industry is really going to open up some cool, interesting use cases, and I'm excited to see what's out there.

(John at 00:26:13) I mean, you know, we talk about—you hear self-driving cars, you know, drones, autonomous vehicles in general. That's obviously an interesting use case. Talk about how we can help consumers better, how we can help healthcare patients better at the edge, personalized medicine, things like that. All of that, I think, is just going to be completely revolutionary. I think we're just at the tip of that technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:38) Yeah. And I like it. I actually look into a lot of like the personalized medicine. I got a bunch of doctors in my family, and I just happen to be interested in health-related things. And we know so little.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:52) Like, we feel like we know—we do know a lot, but at the same time, there's so many unanswered questions about our biology and our physiology. And that's like a real popular area. And, you know, like, just the other day, I went—and my parents own a wellness center, weight loss and wellness and health and medicine center. And I got a bunch of different blood tests. Like, I got a macronutrient blood test.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) I got a general labs work, which is like testosterone and blood cell counts and different things like that. And then I got an allergy one, which like tests me against like 96 different foods to see like, what percentage—like, it's like a spectrum. It's not like you're allergic or not. It's like, what percentage does your body react to these things? And so I'm still waiting on those results.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:41) Right? They're going to be back in like a couple weeks. But I got really interested in that, and then I was looking for software and things to start. At the beginning of this year, I started tracking every single thing I'm eating, weighing all my food. Somebody asked me the other day, they said, "What's the biggest piece of technology that you use that's not your phone?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:55) And I said, it's my scale, my food scale. I use it all the time. Right? And because it's amazing, like, how many calories you're consuming and when you start actually weighing it out to the gram, understanding that. And what this all brought up was this idea that, you know, tracking the changes in your blood and everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:15) It's a very difficult thing. Like, we have such little data on our actual fluctuations of health. I mean, it's such a laborious task to get all this blood drawn, send it off. It's like $1,000. You get your test results back, track your stuff, and then, you know, you have to do that again, like, a month later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:32) You're not even going to do it, like, on a daily basis. I think we're going to see a lot of these devices improve and get—go from huge, big devices that are inside of these labs that process your biological matter, and I think those are going to shrink and come and be more personal. And then I also like what you were saying about the future. Like, in all the movies I see, it's like it's a device that's like ambiguous. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:57) It's like a sheet of glass or like a screen. There's no branding on it. Any screens around you in the room, you just toss your screen onto. It's like we don't own the things. They're very interchangeable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:11) You could just smash it and pick up another one and enter your ID. I think that's the future. And when I see that, I think, well, then the data would have to be all processed like off the device.

(John at 00:29:23) Well, yeah. And I think what we're gonna see is, to your point, is the democratization of data processing, and it's gonna become more distributed. And service providers are gonna look at ways to get services, right? Whether the, um, I guess today we would call those cloud services. I guess in the future we'll probably call them something like near edge or, uh, you know, or I think fog has emerged as a way to describe that.

(John at 00:29:49) But there'll still be central processing or central storage. It'll just be much closer to the consumer. Connectivity will be there. The processing power will be there. And I think that's gonna enable some of those really cool use cases where, you know, I look at what's happened with glucose monitors, to your point about blood testing, right? It used to be that glucose testing was extremely labor-intensive and extremely time-intensive. And now a friend of mine has a son with diabetes, and he gets alerts on his phone if his glucose is off. And to me, the power of technology like that to really improve people's lives is what's, uh, that's what I'm really looking forward to. It's a cool time that we get to live in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) Yeah. I think there's a lot of space, like white space. I'm always looking for where's the—I have that issue of, like, being entrepreneurial, and it's like I don't wanna boot up a business that there's 10 of them. That's a proven market. That's the safest place to do it. So it's a big house.

(Phil at 00:30:51) A blue ocean.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:53) You want a blue—there you go. You've read the book. Yeah.

(Phil at 00:30:56) So what—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:56) What's your blue ocean then at IGNW?

(Phil at 00:31:00) Yeah. I think that's a good question. We're always riding the wave, so we're definitely not the consulting company that's a fast follower at all. We're always on the edge. So you talk about these problems, and what's emerging in my head is, you know, and that's part of what we own, conjoinedly with John and I and the OCTO, is really understanding where we're at on that wave and what's the next wave that's coming in. And so you think about some of the problems we're talking about in health care and distributed data and stuff, and we've already seen that technologies like blockchain can help to solve that, right? It can provide security. It can provide the distribution models.

(Phil at 00:31:30) But there's a lot of engineering that has to happen to move, like, a health care solution off of its proprietary back-end database systems onto a solution like blockchain, where every clinician is providing data into the system, right? So that when you go from one doctor at Providence to another doctor at another health care provider, that data is shared, and there's no integration directly between those two entities. You know, that the fabric is taking care of the integration of that data, and that the data really belongs to you and follows you, right? So it may be sharded up and distributed to all those different places, but it really is being tracked back to you, and it floats around with you. So when you talk about that idea that you can have this device and just throw it away, I think it's a similar technology to that. I don't know if, you know, blockchain is the right technology. I haven't done any expert-level research in these problems in that space. But I would say when I look at it from a macro viewpoint, it surely starts to show signs of the technology could handle distribution, could handle chain of custody, you know, for both manufacturing and problems like in health care or finance, right?

(Phil at 00:32:27) And obviously its go-to-market was the Bitcoin and finance markets. But in reality, I think you'll see it pivot, and it'll probably be attacked in more of a health care market or something else that has a very high level of sensitivity to data. Um, but that's essentially, you know, we're constantly looking for that next wave and building our business in that way. So we're not essentially building products at IGNW. We're building consulting products that help customers build their products better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:54) So you guys haven't outsourced or, like, spun out one of your internal projects yet?

(Phil at 00:33:01) No. I think we're still a little early in the life cycle. If you look at our business, we really look at ourselves as three years old. And so in the last three years, we've seen, you know, I wanna say around 200% growth or something in our actual business overall, both from a staff perspective and from a revenues perspective. And so, you know, today's challenges are figuring out how to better operationalize what we have in market for us and for our customers, and then what's the next thing that we're gonna go after. And I think those ideas around products start to emerge on things like Kubernetes. You know, I think the teams have plenty of ideas that could be pulled into product. It's a matter of timing for us. I think, you know, if we were to do that, when we would do it, how we would do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) Yeah. It'll come obvious. At some—I mean, you guys are growing fast. I saw you had, like, over a couple—you had, like, 150 people plus on LinkedIn. I know it's probably not official, but, like, yeah. I saw you guys were growing really quickly, and I love what you were doing. And then I also saw you guys were big nerds with your Google Fellow. I wanted to just call it Google Nerd, but they call it a nicer word. They call it Google Fellow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:59) What's that? How are you—like, the—you're—there's—you're two of the 20 people in the world that are—

(Phil at 00:34:03) Yeah. John, do you wanna give them your opinion what that program was and what we participated in?

(John at 00:34:10) Sure. So, yeah, the Google Cloud Certified Fellow is the actual title that Phil and I were lucky enough to earn. And we were selected among all sorts of Google partners and customers to go to Redwood City and participate in this—the first round of examinations and to really help Google develop that program early on. And it was a pretty big honor. And really, what that—what the program is, it's not just—and this is where it's different from traditional technical certifications or traditional certifications—is, yes, it's a certification that Google has. There is an exam requirement, but there's also an interview panel, and there's some criteria that you have to meet to even be considered. And it really focused on the business aspects of helping customers and helping your organization. So for customer end customers, helping their organization, and for partners like IGNW, helping our customers to achieve digital transformation using Google Cloud.

(John at 00:35:35) So, you know, when we think of traditional technical certification, you think, okay, I go in, I sit down, I take a multiple-choice test or maybe a practical test, and I have to nerd out on some technology. I have to enter some commands. I have to maybe design some stuff. This was—you know, obviously there was that component of it. There was a lot of technical challenge. It was very difficult. I think Phil and I probably spent a combined total of about 12 to 15 hours in labs building out solutions using Google Cloud. But there was also the—like I said, that business aspect of it, and they asked us questions, tough questions around, you know, how would you do this from a financial perspective? How would you handle the staffing side and mentoring and up-leveling a business, not just, you know, deploying tech? And so that's what really, for me, really cemented that this certification and this program—this was different from others in the market. And it really puts it as, I think, a step above, of course, Google's own professional-level certifications, but also some certifications from competing companies in that space.

(John at 00:36:28) And that is—that was really cool. So, again, it was an honor to be selected. You know, we were two of the first round of folks that got invited to come take the certification. I anticipate there's gonna be a lot more people that are very—you know, they've had a lot of interest in it. Google's done a great job with the program. They're continuing to improve it. Phil and I have both made commitments to help them, help the Google team, improve that certification and improve the program through mentorship and feedback. So it's a great—yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:01) So I—I wanna know the answer to the—like, how do you answer that question? Because, you know, we happen to build, like, an entire business off of leadership and managing, you know, training new managers and tech teams and growing leaders within organizations. And so, like, outside of this podcast, I eat, sleep, and breathe that. So I'm curious, like, what's your perspective when you were talking with Google and you were going through a certification about how you mentor and grow the people on the team?

(John at 00:37:27) Yeah. I think it was—and I, you know, it was obviously a long day, so I'm not gonna have the answers verbatim. But, you know, obviously a large part of that is, um, you know, Phil and I have both been in the industry a very long time. We both have the experience. We've both been there, done that. And I think empathy goes a long way when helping to grow an engineering team. Looking obviously—looking for technical ability, but also looking for skills, you know, and trying to find ways to identify skills that are not purely technical. So we look for folks that are, you know, that have a strong ability to learn, have a strong desire to learn, that are—I don't say easily—that are easily integrated into the team or that are part of a team, right? So it's not just about building a strong technical team. It's about building a team that works together cohesively, bringing diverse skill sets together.

(John at 00:38:11) And I think that's oftentimes in our industry—it's very easy to underrate the value of a diverse team. So oftentimes we hear, "Oh, all that matters is technical ability," and that's not true. Having—especially on a larger team—you know, when you start talking fairly large technical team at any of these large organizations we work with, it's not about just technical ability. It's about diverse solutions to problems and thinking—you know, people that think differently and can bring different skills to the table. So looking for those skills are key, and I wish I had a silver bullet or the magic answer for how to screen for that. Unfortunately, um, for years and years of trying, my answer is still you just gotta develop a knack. And ultimately—and I know you know this, Joel—but you're gonna make some mistakes. And so you have to acknowledge when you make a bad hire or a person's not a good fit for an organization, and you have to be committed to coaching and be committed to helping in that regard as well. Phil, you wanna elaborate on that?

(Phil at 00:39:26) Yeah. I mean, I think it's 50%, you know, finding the people that have the technical expertise, the experience, the acumen. The other 50%, as John was hinting at, is really your—what is your ambition? What is your aptitude to learn new things? You know, are you the engineer that has three side hustles going on, right, and you're working all the time? And that, to me, is always a sign that—you know, they always say give the hardest problem to the busiest person because they're the busiest because they solve all the hard problems, right? And so you just keep loading them up. So we kinda look for that in a certain way.

(Phil at 00:39:56) But I think in terms of addressing, like, how you grow this, it's really having good onboarding, you know, having good training programs, having good mentorship programs. Because even though you train somebody on something, you know, if I take somebody out and say, "Go build the Anthos architecture for this Fortune 50 company," and this is their first time doing it, if I don't enable them with John or myself or somebody that has the experience of doing this so that they have, you know, a direct upline to expertise to help them alleviate a political issue happening within the organization—it's required. Train up that leadership team so that they understand it, but do it in a way that's non-technical, right? Because part of that is being able to speak about very complex things in non-technical terms so they can understand the business value and the drivers of doing that, right?

(Phil at 00:40:40) And so I think it's those types of key components. I know when I did a short stint at Nike, one of the things we did was communities of practice. And I think those were hugely valuable for both engineers and leadership to join because you could attack it from a theory or from working on the project problem that you were trying to solve within those meetings. And so I think those are good ways that you can foster that growth and mentorship. So I think having a formal—you know, formalizing your mentorship program is key. Formalizing a training program and an onboarding program is key.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:10) So do you guys have a formal program at IGNW?

(Phil at 00:41:13) It's funny you should say that, right? That was one of the struggles we came into this year with. And so John and I took the rest of the team off-site for a week, and we went through our top 10 problems in the business that we believe that the Office of CTO needs to solve. And, you know, that was one key aspect of it—is how do we continue to keep this velocity? Well, we can't do it unless we have those formalized programs. So our teams are putting those together, and then they'll be packaged also in a way that we can deliver that as product to our customers, right? So it's the same. The beauty of our business is we experience that growth, the same problems our customers experience that growth, right, or at transition if they already are large trying to get into these modern practices.

(Phil at 00:41:47) So a lot of what we're out in field doing, we already have content on. We're already out. We've got experts speaking on agile, right? You can't do DevOps if you don't understand agile layers on top of it. And so you can buy all these tools and try and put them in place, but you don't get the value of those tools if you don't understand the underlying people-process changes that need to happen to leverage them. And so we've got a lot of this that we're doing. That's been chiefly done by a bunch of experts, right, that are domain experts in their field. We're now formalizing that, right, so we can bring people into the organization, train them up quickly. And as John was saying, you know, realize that, hey, they're an expert in VMware and on-prem, but they've done a few automation projects. They're not an expert in automation. How do we get them to become an expert in automation? We need training programs and mentorship to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:28) You guys got some—when you went and visited Google, you became two of the 20 people, and then I heard you've got some treats or you've got some special things for us today.

(Phil at 00:42:40) Yeah. So we put together an offer for your audience of the podcast, and, you know, a lot of getting to a point where you can even leverage something like an Anthos or a Google Cloud is really understanding at first, you know, what's your environment look like, where are you at today, where do you need to go. And so we put together kind of an environment assessment offer for the people that go to ignw.io/moderncto. To go to the podcast, the first 10 customers will come in and give them an environment assessment and kinda help them understand what the next step is in their journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:14) That's pretty cool. So they go—we'll put that in the show notes because people are driving and stuff. Yep. But it's ignw.io/moderncto. And—

(John at 00:43:25) I'm—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:25) just gonna fill out like a form, and you guys are gonna talk with them about it?

(Phil at 00:43:29) Yep. They'll fill out a form. Actually, Casey Bleecker and his team. So Casey is the one that's responsible for advocacy enablement for our Quad programs at IGNW. So he runs this. He's actually the one that put this together with you. I think you've been working with Casey on getting us on the podcast. But essentially, he runs a program for Google to help customers understand what their journey would look like to get into Google Cloud, and he does that for IGNW.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:55) Have you guys gotten to the point where you're like making IGNW hats or hoodies or anything like that?

(Phil at 00:44:00) We do. We've got hoodies. We've got swag. We've got these cool water bottles here. Oh, that's awesome. The Earthwell ones. They're really, really fun. And then, yeah, we all have jackets and hoodies. But, yeah, we're definitely the t-shirt technology group. We're not the IBM business suits. I'm a big Peter Thiel fan of his statement when he said that, you know, "I invest in t-shirts, not suits." I believe you have to be a technologist first in any of these businesses to really drive value and understand the problems that the customer is going through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:34) Every morning for 14 years, I wake up, do my exercise, put on my tuxedo, and write code for 12 hours.

(John at 00:44:41) Exactly, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:44) Said no one ever. The visualization of me in a tuxedo writing code is just like—it's funny. It tickles my mind.

(Phil at 00:44:53) Yep. We should do a hackathon for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:56) The tuxedo hackathon. We should find a way to partner with like GitClear or somebody, measure the lack of productivity.

(Phil at 00:45:05) Right. Totally. Everybody stretching their collar constantly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:09) Can you buy your stuff online? Like, can I buy it?

(Phil at 00:45:13) Interesting question. You can't buy it, but I'm sure we can get Casey to send you something. But we don't actually sell it. We give it to our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:21) See, that's the thing. Everyone I come across, they'll have like cool brands. Like, I had Alubo. He has this one called Strive, like S-T-R-V. And dude, really cool looking graphic brand. And he had like a hoodie and I'm like, "Can I go online and buy it?" He's like, "Oh, no. We can—we have marketing. Maybe ship you one or something." But I've become a fan of companies. Like, when I like the brand, I like the way it looks, and then I like the person, I'm like, "Dude, let me go buy a hoodie." I'll spend 60 bucks to buy a hoodie, and I'll wear it around and stuff. Because then I'm wearing a hoodie that has a story. Like, if I went to the mall and bought a hoodie, it's like, "Yeah, I bought the hoodie that everybody else bought at the mall."

(Phil at 00:46:03) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:04) But if I'm wearing this, I'm like, "Dude, I talked to Phil and John, the two best people in the world of the Google program." Right? These other 18 people we're not even gonna talk about. Just kidding. We love the other 18 people. What else do you guys wanna talk about? I'm excited. I'm having a good day.

(John at 00:46:23) So I think we're excited to engage with your listeners. And as Phil said, we've got that offer out there. But, you know, at a broader sense, just in general, how do you even get started? I'm sure some of your listeners are just—how do I even get started with Anthos and Google Cloud in general? And if that is something that's interesting, obviously, IGNW is here to support you on that journey, but they do have evaluation licenses available, and it is available to existing Google customers. Just reach out to your sales team. But it's pretty cool, and they've got some neat stuff coming down the pipeline. So I'd encourage everybody to take a look at it.

(Phil at 00:47:08) So who—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:08) who should—who's like the most ideal? Everyone does—at least, you know, me being a founder, I'm really heavily involved in marketing. You guys are too, especially being the CTOs. What's your ideal customer profile? Like, who should—we've got a huge range of people listening. Like, who should perk up and pay attention and say, "Maybe I should talk with these guys"?

(Phil at 00:47:27) Yeah. I would say we work with all customers, but if you looked at the majority of our portfolio, it's the Fortune 2000 around the globe. Within the US, it's the Fortune 100. And then, you know, it's what Cisco, I think, used to call select customers as the next level, which is kind of the upper end of the middle market. And so I would say if we were shying away from any customer group, it'd probably be SMB unless that customer is a startup with high growth, high velocity potential. And so when it comes to working with startups, we're probably working with startups that have raised—you know, classically a Series A. It's so nebulous these days to talk about different round terms. But, you know, if you've raised a substantial amount of money—$20 million—and you're deploying capital to create efficiencies and create efficiencies in your product development delivery process, then we're definitely on board. And so we've got a number of customers like that in our portfolio. We're helping them where they've reached kind of that product market fit and maturity, and they're moving to the next step. Outside of that, it's generally large enterprise is where we're helping solve a lot of problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:29) Yeah. And as your business is growing, so is ours. And like, I'm starting to develop new ways of how we see it. And it's like, okay, you can hire pretty well for known repeatable processes that are cash flow positive, that yield a result. We know we offer this line of business. We know that this is the sweet spot of the market, and we know that we could hire this type of role, or we could train this role into this role. So we've got those. But to get that outside-the-box thinking, that gave me a new perspective of how consultancies can work. Like, if you need top-notch, in-the-know people who are ridiculously brilliant with massively bright ideas, and you just—if you want basically clones of yourself, but that have different experience, that aren't eating and breathing the same air you are and have the same views, because it's so valid to get someone from outside to come in. And they can just look at it for one second and say, "Oh, you probably wanna do that, because I've seen 50 companies do it." Right? And so it's really, really useful to do that. And so I'm always keeping my Rolodex chock-full of those people. I'm like, "All right. This is my AI people. These are my consulting people. These are my—" So I'm gonna put you guys as like my cloud people.

(Phil at 00:49:41) Yep. Yeah. I would say we probably need to give you a bigger picture of the company. We're talking a lot about cloud today. But, you know, if you look at our company, we go to market full stack just like our customers, from the data center to the cloud. So, you know, we do on-prem data center modernize in place, private cloud. We do native software development—cloud native software development in the five popular languages like Java, .NET, React, Node.js, Go. And actually, that becomes an important piece of the journey for most customers. They're not going to carry their legacy platforms forward without rewriting them. Right? And that's actually a shocking statistic. IDC has something like 400 million apps will be rewritten in the next four years. And that is pretty shocking, but the reality is, it's gonna happen in small bites. Right? It's this microservices pattern that enables this heterogeneous capability that you need in your company to allow teams that are running product to make decisions about the entire stack. Right? And so as customers start to implement those patterns, and we do a lot of consulting coaching on software development in those patterns, they start to hit true velocity, which is then underpinned by a lot of the other things we do in our business like DevOps and SRE. Right? Without that, you really can't apply microservices because now you went from building one monolithic application that you deliver twice a quarter to shipping 40 independent microservices a couple times a day in some cases, or even hundreds of times a day in the case of a company like Netflix that's reached a maturity on these types of concepts. So there's lots to this puzzle. And then the last piece is big data and AI/ML. And so we have a practice around that as well, but it's much more around the data custody, the design, the pipelining, how we build it. We don't have a huge team of data scientists sitting there to write your algorithm for you. What we have is a huge team of people that really understand this from a software engineering, computer science background on how you get efficiency in building and training models and delivering those models. How do you build it and train it in the cloud but run it on your edge device on a Cisco HyperFlex box that's built for the edge, where that machine learning model needs to actually run? So that's kind of where we add expertise in that. And I would say in that market, you're seeing a huge shift. It's another 10x shift between how we built big data systems, how we thought about data in the past. Right? Fourth normal form and all these super rationalized data models to now, let's flatten it out and store it everywhere and distribute it and converge it back together at the time at which we need to do analytics or reporting on. And so those are different ideas. Right? You throw away things like OLAP cubes and you move to things like BigQuery to ingest and store that data, and then you use machine learning on top of it to actually do something with it rather than a dashboard that an executive's gonna look at and eventually make a decision. We're putting those algorithms out there instead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:16) How are you guys growing the business? Are you like spending time with CTOs or, you know, engineering-type people and you're building those relationships and then it's coming up naturally, like, "Oh, we're having conversation about these problems," and then you say, "Oh, we might be able to help with it." Like, help paint a picture of how you actually grow this business.

(John at 00:52:34) Sure. So one of the things that we obviously do a ton of evangelism about modern practice and patterns and practices. We're out there speaking to our peers in the industry, to customers, to partners, you know, finding out what challenges they're experiencing and then helping them overcome those. And that's—typically, you know, we'll have a conversation. A lot of our engagements, you know, we're not a real sales-heavy organization. We don't have a fleet of salespeople out there pounding the ground. What we do is we do have some sales folks, obviously. But really, it's about relationships and trying to build that relationship, that trusted advisor relationship with our customers, and then delivering on the promise to help them with their challenges and bringing in the engineering talent to bear. And we have some really, really good engineers that work for our company. And we can talk a little bit about how we've built that engineering organization and why our culture helps us keep top talent and recruit top talent. But really, it's like you said, it's about building that relationship. It's about getting into a customer's environment, understanding their challenges, understanding that while we may have some opinionated approaches and we may have some solutions that we can apply across the industry, that it's probably not a one-size-fits-all, and the customers are gonna have unique needs, and then designing a solution to meet those needs. And we find that really builds a rapport with our customers, and that shows them that we're invested in their success. So we're not typical—you know, if you think of like consulting companies from 10 years ago, the typical consulting company would come in and they would put somebody up, what we call a butt-in-seat, and they would just be there for years and billing away. And they weren't really invested in your success, and we've built a business around being invested in our customer success. So it's mutually driving a desired outcome, and that's what really delivers value to our customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:35) So how do you get that engineering culture? Like, how do you get it to be good? How do you get it so it's cyclical and constantly feeding itself with top talent?

(John at 00:54:43) So the first key is obviously top talent begets top talent. So, you know, if you hire A players, they're gonna bring other A players because it's an exciting place to work. Everybody likes to work with rock stars. And so the more rock stars you can bring to the table, the better off you're gonna be. The other thing we do is we try to focus on challenging work. So while, you know, in any industry, there's always gonna be things that are more mundane, if we tackle hard problems, what we find is, as Phil had said, you know, busy people are the ones that are good at solving—are usually good at solving hard problems, and we like those people. We like people who are interested, who are naturally curious, who go after solving hard problems. And then we take those to the customer, and the customers like us because we like solving their hard problems. So we don't shirk away from solving the next hard thing.

(Phil at 00:55:40) Yeah. That's actually in our mission statement. So it's at the core values of the company. You know, we're engineering-led, not sales-led. We have a handful of salespeople that help support some of our older go-to-market functions from the original business as well as help with some of the inbound-related sales. But we're heavily what I recall as our reverse channel model. So, you know, we're partnered with the Googles and the Ciscos of the world at an OEM level, and they're driving leads into our business. And then we're also partnered with their partners that are driving leads into our business. And so, you know, where they have hundreds of thousands of people in their sales forces globally, they can drive that top-of-funnel demand, but they don't always have the engineering talent at this level to go deliver on those outcomes for their customers. And so it's a great way for us to partner with them. We can focus on engineering. They can focus on sales. And so that's how we've gone to market, which is what's created this velocity in growth. In terms of how we're continuing to grow our field, I think John did a great job of explaining that engineering field. You know, if you're trying to put Kubernetes on satellites, engineers wanna come work for you. Right? If you're putting health care applications or working on something like VDI and Kubernetes or something that's not even a thing yet, where there's some experimental stuff going on, engineers wanna come talk to you. Whether that's a good idea or a bad idea, they still are interested. Right? You're on the cutting edge. You're doing things that nobody else is doing. And a lot of the reason probably, Joel, you and I got into creating startups is—I personally, what do I get excited about? Any business problem, any technology problem. Like, I like solving problems.

(Phil at 00:57:08) Right? That's what I found out about myself. I'm just an inquisitive, creative thinker, and that's what I enjoy most. So whether it's solving this problem of how we scale our engineering talents, or whether it's, you know, like I was doing this week, writing code with my team to help them solve problems with dynamic content from a headless CMS system that we need to render dynamic pages in their React framework. Like, I live and breathe both ends of the spectrum, and we've built our teams in that same way.

(Phil at 00:57:32) Right? So our leadership team, I would say, you know, 80% of them are under that same guide and breed. And for sure, everybody on my team is that way. Like, John can't just speak about the tech. John's one of our best engineers.

(Phil at 00:57:42) If you're running into a hybrid network problem, the chances are John solved it in the past. Right? And we can pull the Andon cord and say, hey, John, can you come in and help this engineer on this project? They're kind of stuck.

(Phil at 00:57:52) So we're definitely much more technical CTOs and technical as an organization to the fact at which I think Google has called us their most technical partner at times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:00) Oh, I love it. That's exciting.

(John at 00:58:03) Yeah. Another thing that's really key is, obviously, we value our employees quite a bit, and the business does demonstrate that through different methods. But the other thing that's been really helpful in growing the talent as quickly as we have is that we don't just hire in one geography. So even though, we're headquartered in Portland, we have a large number of customers in several geographies, but we'll hire somebody anywhere. We don't hire for location, and we don't hire for a specific role necessarily. What we recruit for is talent, and then we figure out how to fit that talent into the business. So we look for talent when the talent's available. We look for people when they're ready to make a move and when they're interested. And regardless of where they live, regardless of what we need at this very moment.

(John at 00:58:52) And so if, for example, if we're not hiring a, let's say we're not hiring a cloud engineer. We don't have an opening right now for a cloud engineer, although that never happens. But let's say, for instance, that was the case, but we had a rock star cloud engineer, that was their experience. You know, that person's going to be able to adapt and they're going to be able to do what our customers need. So we're going to look for that caliber of individual. And again, regardless of geography, regardless of kind of those other factors that are sometimes constraining for some businesses.

(John at 00:59:28) And a lot of our engagements, most of our engagements are remote led. So unlike traditional consulting companies, we don't necessarily, although we do for some engagements, we do have on-site staff. But most of our engagements are entirely remote. You know, we'll do a couple of trips to the customer site, and then we've got amazing technology. We have Webex, Hangouts, we have G Suite collaboration. We have all that stuff.

(John at 00:59:55) Right?

(Phil at 00:59:55) Zoom. Yeah.

(John at 00:59:57) So we have all of those things available to really make sure that we can get the right people engaged to solve a problem. So it's the right person, not the person that's closest.

(Phil at 01:00:08) Yeah. You make a point on the technology. Right? Like Zoom. So you go into a Nike. They get to choose what their conferencing platform's going to be. Because we're consulting, it's more important for us to understand how we interact in this distributed nature, not necessarily what tool we're using because I'll have to take Skype calls, Zoom calls, Google calls, Hangouts calls, right, Webex calls. We tend to use the technology our customer's most comfortable with because then it gives them the best experience because they're comfortable using that online technology. But at the end of the day, what we've realized is it's around that distributed culture, and the tools can be interchanged, but it's how your team communicates and interacts with each other. You know?

(Phil at 01:00:43) Being comfortable to say, hey, John, let's throw up a Hangouts right now and whiteboard this problem that I'm experiencing. Right? The same way that I would just walk down the hall to his office and say, hey, can I drop in and talk to you?

(Phil at 01:00:55) So it's really about empowering the workforce to leverage those things and creating a culture that makes that successful.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:01) Yeah. And all softwares are equal too. So we learned today because of this, because of the virus and everybody, we're pretty distributed as it is, but we still have some people in the office, but then we went fully distributed this week. And we usually use Slack. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:15) And we noticed that the experience, like, calls were dropping and stuff and connections were dropping. And so we said, alright, let's do it this morning on Zoom. And with all the faces and everything, and I haven't used Hangouts a lot, so they may have that too. But the way the faces were organized on the screen actually makes a really large difference in the quality of the experience of the call.

(Phil at 01:01:40) Yeah. That's huge. And that's one of our core values in the way we do internal meetings. A hundred percent of them, we want video on. You know, we want to see each other. We want to interact. And what I've noticed, and I'm just horrible, if you do give me a conference call, I'm spending half the time in my brain trying to understand who's talking because it's generally always a new audience for me. Whereas if we throw it up in a Zoom and I can see the faces, after they've talked once, I kind of know who's talking because I visually map their face to their sound, and then I remember, oh, yeah, that was the VP of engineering or that was the director of DevOps or who they were in the room. So I think it adds huge value to use that technology.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:12) Yeah. It's like my GPU is creating the visualization of everybody versus just consuming it. It takes way more brainpower. It's way more distracting for me. I always have this, like, mental image of a table and, like, circles and people going around. And in my mind trying to track that on a call, it's just like, this is ridiculous. And then you get the box with, like, the J in it. It's like, how impersonal is that? Right. I don't care if you're at home, you got cats around you, or whatever. Like, just flip it on, man.

(Phil at 01:02:41) Yeah. You know?

(John at 01:02:41) Yeah. Video has definitely transformed remote work, the, you know, and the just the prevalence of, there's a camera in almost every laptop now. You know, everybody's got, almost everybody's got a webcam, at least most engineers I know. It's not always the case. But definitely on our team.

(John at 01:02:58) Right? As Phil said, video first. We actually have a communication hierarchy that we sort of preference-wise. We say, look, video is best. And it's not just the association and mental association. It's also subtle cues, as you know. Right? There's subtle cues when you're talking to somebody about facial expressions and things like that that are just lost in audio-only conversations. And it just makes the collaboration experience that much more efficient, that much more effective when we have more tools to communicate. So that's definitely a big part of our culture and a part of retaining the talent that we have is that not just in-person communication, but also strong remote culture and strong supportive tooling to do that.

(John at 01:03:46) And so even at our headquarters, every room has a telepresence or a video conferencing system in it. It's got cameras and giant screens and decent microphones. And what we find, and strangely enough, what we find is we go to some customer sites and you've got four or five people huddled around somebody's cell phone, and it's a terrible experience. So we actually have an entire part of our business that's devoted to helping customers improve communication and collaboration. That's actually a big thing for us is, look, we know how to do this. We can help you do it better too.

(Phil at 01:04:22) Yeah. It's also pretty relevant this week, right, with everybody. I think everybody on this call is probably at home, you know, in self-quarantine working. And so the market, yeah, pretend you are. The market is being forced into this mode. Right? So I would say for ten years, my wife's asked me, why can't you do everything remotely? You're a software guy. Why can't you do it all remotely?

(Phil at 01:04:41) And the answer has always been, it's really, it's a business-by-business thing. You know, it's been difficult. And that's the reason that our model is blended. You know? Like John mentioned, I'm sure the work's done remotely, but we're still dropping in to give the customer the comfort that they need at the beginning, at the end of projects.

(Phil at 01:04:56) And so until they invest in the UC technology that we support and we use and the way that we use it, ideas of doing interactive whiteboarding sessions with a customer, we just haven't had a lot of success. I think this may go down in history as the moment in which the light switch flipped, right, in digital workforce. And it flipped over, and it's unfortunate that it's had to be something like coronavirus in the U.S. and around the globe that's forcing companies into this mode. But, you know, we're in a place where technology is there. It's the cultural norms that have to be broken down and changed.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:26) And before I get a bunch of angry letters, everyone is out of the office. I'm just in the studio in the office. Everybody's at home, but I just drove in ten minutes because we have, like, the lights and the microphone and everything.

(Phil at 01:05:38) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:38) And, you know, some people, like, I sent out an email and we're sharing different things about how different CTOs were coping with it, about what they're learning, moving. And at the end, I put, and if you have your favorite meme from COVID, like, because everybody was sharing all these memes and talking to me about, oh, did you see this meme? I'm posting it. And it was, like, hilarious, and it was fun. And then I got, you know, you always get that, like, one person that's like, this is inappropriate.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:07) And I'm just like, look. You know? Like, I was making jokes at my mom's funeral. Like, everybody internalizes and deals with life in their own way, and I can't tell you, either of you, like, what's right or wrong for your internal dealing with the situation.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:23) But I am curious, like, what's your big takeaway? You had some people that were in a general headquarters, and then they went remote. What did you learn from the transition?

(Phil at 01:06:33) That we're already set up for it. You know? If you look at our business, we're set up for it. If you talk to some of our partners, they're shipping hundreds of thousands of laptops out to customers because they're not set up for it. You know, so they're sending out devices reconfigured for remote access because their corporate policy has still been very limited remote access. So I think, by and large, the market is struggling with it. You know, IGNW, it's a natural motion for us. Like John said, we hire talent where talent lives. That means if you're in Tallahassee, Florida and you've got a laptop and you got a great Internet connection, you're a potential employee.

(Phil at 01:07:03) Right? And we're not going to tell you to move. We do focus our geographic areas of where we put density of workers. But if the best AIM-LI expert lives in Alabama, we're probably going to hire him, right, or her, or regardless of race, gender, or whatever. You know, we're interested in that diverse culture, and part of that is diversity in the local culture you live in, the local environment you live in, where you're living.

(Phil at 01:07:27) Yeah. We don't believe that all the talent always lives in one of those popular destination cities.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:33) Yeah. I hire based on skills and as we need it. It's like I post a job, we have something, you know, I put out to my network, and the first qualified person that comes through that, like, makes sense, like, gets the job. It's like, this isn't a game. It's like, who's qualified, who can do the work, who wants to work, and, like, let's just move the business forward.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:53) And I love the fact that, like, everybody I come across in my network has, like, you know, they're similar. We're, I think the world is becoming a way better place way faster. You know? Like, the amount of bad people, I think, is so small. They get amplified a lot, but, like, it's not cool to be egotistical in engineering anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:16) That's my favorite thing about the past decade. Right? It's like that person that comes in and can do it and can stay up all night and, like, you know, they want all the praise. Like, that is not popular anymore. It's like, how can you help? How can you, like, servant leadership. Like, how can you grow your team? How can you help everybody? How can you make sure you have a quality of life while doing it? Those principles being popular is the thing that, like, warms my heart about, like, the progress in our industry and the world.

(John at 01:08:40) Yeah. Part, as our managing partner, Andy, would say. That's part of it. You know, we're a big family here at IGNW. We internalize those things. We care about our employees. We care about our partners. You know, you try to respect those things. I try to respect people's personal time. You try to respect their, the differences in and how each, what each person brings to the table.

(John at 01:09:05) So much so that we've actually had a couple instances where we have a strict policy against that. Right? We have a strict no jerks policy at IGNW. And we've had to act on that. We've had to, even though the people may be technically rock stars, if they're not a good fit, you know, from a societal perspective, if they're too egotistical or if they're not willing to work in a group, you know, we're not going to hire somebody that we can put in a room and slide pizzas under the door and they'll churn out code.

(John at 01:09:35) Right? We need people who can work in teams and who can help our staff, you know, help their fellow IGNW employees and help our customers. If you can't do that, then it just doesn't work. And we've had to act on that a couple of times. We've had to let folks go.

(John at 01:09:51) And we always, you know, we always try to place them. We always try to do right by everybody. But we've had to help people find employment elsewhere because they weren't a good fit from a, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:01) And that's good for them too because what will happen is they'll hear that a lot and then that'll signal eventually for them to reconsider their choices and habits and behavior patterns and then they'll come back to you ten years later and be like, thank you. Because this was a huge part of my, like, this was you started the chain of events that was responsible for my personal growth. Like, the thing, like, I used to not be awesome. I don't believe it or not. I—

(John at 01:10:30) I don't believe it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:31) And it was the—

(John at 01:10:32) Fake news. Fake news. Fake news.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:35) It was the frustration. I heard this quote. It was, like, a very meaningful moment for me. But I heard this quote, and it was a guy saying, the most frustrating thing in the world is expecting above average results without being an above average person. And when I heard that in my early twenties, I was just like, oh my gosh.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:59) That is my problem. I want above average results, and I'm not working to be an above average person. And so if I put in that work, you know, it removes the mystery. It's like you put in the work, you become better, you learn, you gain the experience, right? You let the right people go, you let the wrong people go, you let people go too slow, you let people go too, like, you make all of these mistakes, and they're, it's like an AI algorithm without any mistakes is usually pretty poorly trained.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:29) Right? Like, you have to know what not to do to get that experience. And so when people make mistakes, I just look for, like, are you making the same mistake over and over and over, or are you making that mistake and then adapting and moving forward?

(Phil at 01:11:46) Yeah. I think by and large, that's somewhat adopted within the industry, this fail culture. I think certain people have been criticized for doing too much fail, you know, like Facebook, something like that where their customers complain that they're doing too much, pushing out too much disruption, right, in their product via that. But I really do believe that's it. You know, we come into a lot of companies where failing is not an option. And so, you know, by and large, where we recruit our talent is out of the field. It's not from consulting organizations. We'd rather teach you to be a consultant and have a great technology leader and somebody that's done this in real accounts, done the work. And so a lot of what we're teaching them then is just the art of being a consultant. How do you be a little less opinionated at times where you need to convince an architect that your opinion matters, you know, at a customer, those types of things. But by and large, I think it's our servant leadership and the respect that we understand that you have to fail to succeed, and that's a key learning initiative within any technology project or any software development project. You know, you're gonna do it wrong the first time, and that's heavily what Agile is built around. Right? Just fail fast, fail early, fail often, fix, and move on, and that's core to what we're out teaching customers how to do. You know? Because sometimes it's a slice of it. Just come help us build our CI/CD pipelines. We kind of get the ideas and we understand what, and we've changed our Agile culture, but we just can't get over this one technical hurdle. You know? We don't know what to put in these pipelines. We don't know how to deal with this because, you know, you're saying we need 100% test coverage to do completely automated deployments. Well, we've got 10 million lines of legacy code. How do we deal with that problem? You know, do we need to invest $100 million and rewrite it? Or is there an approach that works for us to do both, right, start new projects out of this paradigm and do old projects under another? So I think it is key, you know, and at IGNW, everybody in the leadership team is a servant leader. You know, we work for our teams and not the other way around. So we like to say task me, don't ask me. You know, if you're struggling with something, task me, don't ask me. I'll go help you fix it and solve it. Right? Whether that's lack of knowledge within your own expertise or a challenge with a problem on the team or a challenge with a customer, you know, and potentially a disruptive, you know, one of those non-jerks out of the customer site, right, where that customer hasn't really adopted what we believe and what I think, by and large, the technology industry has started to adopt and believe in.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:57) I love this. I love the long form. I love how long form is getting more popular. It's less about being at a conference, being on stage with five people, and getting a twelve-second response. And it's more about, like, having these discussions about, like, yes, failing fast is important. You can interpret the sound bite incorrectly and be like, oh, we can't fail. We're not—you can fail fast and then also have a leadership perspective of we're not gonna fail. Like, you can say, we're going to solve this problem and we're not going to fail at that. But the mental map you need to have of how we're going to solve this problem is we're going to look at it like running a series of science experiments, and we're not attaching ourselves to the individual experiment. We know we're gonna run this series, and some are going to do better. We're gonna run ten. Three are gonna do best. We're gonna take the top three, do variations of those, and we're gonna ultimately get to a refined product. But I find that, like, the people who don't spend time learning on the human side of the business or being involved in the community—there's people that are, like, they're in there, they're writing code, they might say, okay, I'm a Rubyist. So then there's people that are like a part of the community. And I find that when you join the community, you get all of these additional benefits of learning these types of concepts. Because if you disassociate from the experiment and you just let it be, but know it's on the path of a proven process to achieve an outcome, then you have confidence in the fact that, okay, we can execute this. It can fail, but we will learn and we can execute this. And then you don't get emotionally pulled down. And that was something that, like, you know, I see a lot of people struggle with. They'll not have success trying to accomplish something on their end. They'll have tried, like, I tried. I tried my hardest. I worked twelve hours. It's like, yeah. But, like, if you step back from a macro, you did one thing. Like, you beat yourself to death with one thing. You didn't, like, try different methods to achieve the result. You just went and—and so, yeah, it's tough.

(Phil at 01:15:55) Yeah. We actually address that. You know, we have that problem internally a lot because we pull these consultants from the companies that they've lived in their culture. In that culture, the I-can't-fail culture for so long that, you know, we bring them in and we tell them, leverage your team, you know, but we didn't give them a great way to do that. And so they end up being little remote individuals out working on their own problems and their customers, and some days, they're beating themselves up for twelve hours on one problem. And so just recently, we implemented something called the Andon cord, right, which is a scrum Toyota philosophy on pulling that cord when anytime you need help. Right? And it's a value that we truly believe in. Right? Like, not every engineer is gonna have every answer, and sometimes you just need somebody else if you've been struggling with it for thirty minutes or an hour. And you may even have the expertise to solve the problem. You just need somebody to look over your shoulder, and I've done it a hundred times or a thousand times in developing software where I'll struggle for two days trying to solve it myself. And within five minutes of explaining it to another individual, I'm like, oh, I got it. That's the problem. Okay. And I fixed my own problem. And it's just that collaborative nature of just bringing somebody else in to give you a sanity check. You know, it's so important sometimes. So we had to give our workforce an easy way to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:04) What did you call it? How do you name it?

(Phil at 01:17:06) Pulling the Andon cord. So if you read Toyota's books on scrum and the scrum methodology, you know, it was the cord that they pull on the manufacturing floor when they needed to halt the entire manufacturing process.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:16) Can you spell it?

(Phil at 01:17:17) A-N-D-O-N, Andon.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:21) Andon? Okay. That's a word I didn't know. Pulling the—

(Phil at 01:17:23) Andon cord. It's correlated like scrum. Right? So scrum is a Toyota philosophy that came out in manufacturing and, you know, really took to become the standard Agile method for a very long time in software engineering. But one of the key things that they don't talk about in a lot of scrum training and process for Agile is that Andon cord. You know, what do you do when when the team is stuck or when there's a risk, you know, in a project or something? It's the idea that the whole thing comes to a halt and you bring in everybody and you swarm the problem and you come up with a solution. You know? And so in the case of Toyota, that means physically stopping the manufacturing floor. Right? And for them, it was a sign if it didn't stop at a certain rate, they knew that people weren't enabled or they weren't feeling empowered to say something. And so then what they noticed was quality goes down at the other side because people are just letting things go through the line that aren't to the standards that they want or accidents happen. Right? The accident rate goes up or something like that because people aren't empowered to say, I think this is unsafe. Let's stop for now. And so what they noticed is in plants where they had a high pull rate on the Andon cord, they had a better correlated success coming out the other side. And so that's one of the things that, you know, we had an engineer passionate about this, and he brought this to us in our all hands. I said, this is a missing piece of our business. Why aren't we doing this? You know, he got really infatuated and excited about this idea because he's used to doing scrum now and stuff, but this is a piece of the process that wasn't really dealt with or talked about much. This is something that we implemented it internally at the beginning of the year, and it's already getting some great traction, getting some great feedback from the field that they enjoy that process and the ability that they're feeling now empowered to just bring in anybody to help them solve, whether they're allocated to that project or not.

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:00) Nice. Dude, this is awesome. I love it. Anything else we didn't cover?

(Phil at 01:19:06) You know, I would say our entire business, if you boil it down, is digital transformation, which is an overhyped, overused word in the market, which is why we don't typically talk about our business in the form of digital transformation because this encompasses everything from people, process, and technology changes to accomplish a transformation. But if you look at, you know, outcomes where CEOs have run a digital transformation initiative within their businesses and had success, they see a 56% improvement in revenue output. Right? Like, there is a true value proposition happening here. But from a technology perspective, what we're seeing is there's a new class of individuals out there. Right? And I think, you know, we're still young enough that we've experienced this in these transitions, but by and large, the millennial group is probably driving the majority of this change in behavior. And it's really that 60% of Americans don't wanna deal with a call support agent or a phone person. They want an app that they can solve their own problems without picking up the phone or talking to anybody. And so you've seen a huge growth in that. And then about 15% of those interactions are being handled or will be handled by AI by 2021, which, according to Gartner, is a 400% increase in adoption of AI. And that's something personally I had my heartbeat on it. You know, we started this business, like, should we be in the AI? And the answer was no three years ago. Right? It was like, this is something people are talking about. This is not something people are doing. And what we saw in 2019 is it really flipped over, and we started getting projects that were real material projects with big, large companies that were using AI and ML algorithms, but they were struggling to operationalize them. You know, they have the scientists to do the experiments, but they couldn't figure out how to make their experiments run at scale. You know, how do you get running an experiment down from two weeks to two hours? And so we came in and helped coach them on how you build pipelines for that type of work and how you automate moving that data around so that I can say, pick this dataset for this experiment and run this algorithm at this time and then ensure that when I'm running in production, I know which versions of data and which versions of algorithm are being used on that dataset to inform that product development lifecycle. So that's a huge area. I think you're gonna see growth and expansion. Obviously, the IoT market as well, you know, Gartner's expecting more than 75 billion devices to be deployed to the edge by 2025. That's not that far away. You know? That's a lot of improvement. We have a number of accounts internally that, you know, came to us with plans, and they have, like, 50,000 devices. And one of them wants to scale that to a million within eighteen months from when we started the project a year ago. So they're getting ready to expand heavily in that. So we help them replatform their solution to handle that volume of traffic with their IoT devices as well as, you know, moving them into a cloud-based operating model. That's pretty cool. So that's where, like, my viewpoint in saying that the data center is just being disintermediated—this is being backed up now by statistics that I was able to actually go out and find, you know, when I had to put together a presentation for a partner of ours and go speak on these topics. I had a lot of theories and ideas in my head that I see from our customers, but I was able to actually pull the statistics out of market insights like IDC and Gartner that really back up those thesis statements.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:58) And I want John to talk a little bit about you guys have a customer that has, like, floating data centers.

(Phil at 01:22:06) Oh, yeah. That was the first project I gave John. I was told I had to run that project. As soon as I hired John on my team, I said, John, how do you feel about running this project?

(John at 01:22:17) Complicated. Alright. Yeah. It's an interesting use case. So we have a customer that we did some modern application modernization and replatforming for that—it's a perfect use case for edge. So they have facilities that are afloat. Right? So they're out at sea. And while they do have really good connectivity, unfortunately, you know, mobile floating data centers, as you can imagine, aren't always in the coverage areas. So we helped this customer build an application platform. And I wanna emphasize, it was truly a platform that they could deploy applications to in these facilities. And data center's probably a bit strong. So when you talk about, you know, things that are floating out in the ocean, it's more of a closet with air conditioning. But, you know, it's—I just don't wanna set the expectation that there's this massive raised floor space out there just kinda bobbing around in the ocean. It's, you know, as you can imagine, there's a lot of constraints when you're talking about maritime use. And so we helped this customer, you know, do some application modernization and replatform their application to run inside of Kubernetes, got them some real big wins. But there's a lot of challenges when you're designing a solution from the bottom up, you know, from the ground up to be used at sea, specifically, even hardware considerations. You know, you've gotta have ultra-reliable hardware. Things like mean time between failure on hard drives really starts to matter. Mean time between failure on power supplies really starts to matter because if it fails, you know, while the vessel's at sea, you're not getting that replaced until at very soonest when it hits port somewhere. And depending on the deployment, that can take a very long time. Right? So depending on where that application or where that hardware stack is deployed. So we worked with our partners to design resilient hardware, you know, reduce—don't put any spinning disks in it, reduce failure components, make sure that everything was redundant, talk about what components needed to be hot-spared. And then as we started to work up, we had to take that same approach to the software stack and to the platform. Right? So we had to build self-healing into this because you don't always have the most skilled engineering team aboard a ship. Right? You're space-constrained, you're personnel-constrained, you're power-constrained. Everything is a constraint. So building application platforms that would allow developers to deploy self-healing applications that could tolerate loss of components. So if, you know, if we lost a node in a cluster, wasn't the end of the world, the application would heal, making sure that we had redundant copies, making sure we took into account the way that ships are built from a zone perspective. So ships are oftentimes broken into different zones, whether they're flood zones or fire zones or HVAC zones. Right? The ship is compartmentalized, and you have to design all that into the system.

(John at 01:25:15) It was a really cool challenge, and I think we delivered some pretty compelling results for the customer that ultimately were able to do some good for them. So it was a cool project, but yeah, it was wild.

(Joel Beasley at 01:25:30) That's awesome. I'm looking for, so like next time you guys are all together, like do a company event or conference, ping us and let us know what you're doing. Maybe we'll come out and see you guys. I know you're in Florida, right, John?

(John at 01:25:41) I am, yeah. Yeah, I'm in North Florida.

(Joel Beasley at 01:25:43) Yeah, we're like an hour south of Tampa.

(Phil at 01:25:46) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:25:46) So yeah, so right there. And then you're in Oregon?

(Phil at 01:25:50) Yeah, I'm just outside of Portland, about an hour out in wine country on the way to Lincoln City on the coast, which is, you know, if you look at the map, it's probably a little north of midpoint in Oregon on the coast. So little highway that runs out there called 99. So we're just on a little city on the way out to the coast.

(Joel Beasley at 01:26:07) Yeah, I've been hiking out there. Yeah.

(Phil at 01:26:08) Oh, have you? Oh, awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's Dundee. So the town is Dundee. It's an epicenter for Pinot Noir production if you trace it back to wine in Oregon.

(Joel Beasley at 01:26:17) Yeah, there's a bunch of little, like some small ridges out there, and then there's some places to hike. I spent some time out doing some work about ten, ten, twelve years ago when I was going out to Portland. I don't know, a couple times a year for a couple weeks. And it was pretty cool. It was interesting. There's lines. There's lines everywhere. But it's, I thought I had seen it on a show, and I was like, I didn't even think twice about it. And then when I got there in person, I was like, oh wow, this is like a thing. I live in a retirement town, so.

(Phil at 01:26:50) Oh, gotcha. Yeah. I know there's great lots of outdoor activities here. You know, an hour to the mountain, an hour to the ocean. So it's really fun. And then four hours to High Desert, you know, somewhere like in Northern Arizona or something, in Bend, Oregon, which is where actually a lot of Silicon Valley people have taken up primary residence there and are now commuting back and forth. You know, there's some direct United flights, an hour to San Francisco. So we're getting an influx of technology in that area, which is really nice.

(Joel Beasley at 01:27:17) Yeah, one of the first Ruby, or I think, no, not Ruby. One of the first PHP frameworks I had used was, dang, I can't, CodeIgniter. I don't know if you guys remember that thing, but they were, I think they were built out in Bend, Bend, Oregon.

(Phil at 01:27:35) Bend, Oregon. Yep. That's what I'm talking about. Yep. Yeah. And you got Seven Peaks Ventures now, and they've got their own tech center. And I think DocuSign or one of those guys, the signing companies, had a space there for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 01:27:48) Dude, this is great. We did it. We made a podcast. How do you guys feel?

(Phil at 01:27:51) It was great. Thanks for having us. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:27:53) Yeah. There's no virus that's gonna hold us back. We're doing it. And then we've got the show notes. Get your free consultation. Get your free credits, right? Put people in the show notes, and then we find you guys on, we'll put your LinkedIn profiles on there, and then we'll find a careers page. I'm sure you guys have on your website somewhere. We'll put that in there. Get lots of links for everybody to connect, and then it's gonna be great.

(Phil at 01:28:19) It'll be great. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 01:28:20) Awesome. Thanks for hanging out.

(Phil at 01:28:22) Joel, it was nice meeting you. And if you're in Portland, look me up, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 01:28:25) Absolutely. Talk soon, guys.

(Phil at 01:28:27) All right. Take care, Joel. Thanks. Bye.