David Smith - Cloud Operations at T-Systems North America

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to David Smith from T-Systems, and we discuss their new offering in future cloud infrastructure, the concept of FUD, and how T-Systems is positioning themselves in the cloud market. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) How are you doing today, David?

(David Smith at 00:00:33) I'm doing great. Thank you very much. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) Good. I like what you got in the background there.

(David Smith at 00:00:40) It's actually part of my dining room, part of the wonderful strange times we live in right now with COVID-19 and working from home and sharing my office with my wife. So, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) Yep. That's enough. That's it. That statement stands on its own.

(David Smith at 00:00:59) The boss.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) I went up to my parents. They own a medical clinic, and so for wellness and health, people who want to improve. And I went up there to visit them today and get vitamin IV. I don't know if you've ever done that. Have you ever done that?

(David Smith at 00:01:17) I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) It's pretty interesting. They put all these vitamins into an IV bag, and they just give you an IV. And I did that, but on the interstate, it's like an hour away. There were a lot of people. Like, you would be surprised. It did not look like social distancing was happening. It looked like we're all back to work.

(David Smith at 00:01:38) Wow. Wow. Strange. Yeah. What part of the states is that in?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) So that'd be Tampa, Florida area.

(David Smith at 00:01:46) Ah, okay. Okay. Yeah. And I'm in Phoenix, Arizona. So a little bit more—I should say—getting closer to back to normal, although we're still distancing and doing our work from home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) What do you and the wife do for date night? Like, how have you managed to deal with that?

(David Smith at 00:02:02) Oh my gosh. I love it. So we have a—in our backyard, we put up a television, and it's a good sized television. Sit outside, turn on the fan. Phoenix is starting to heat up. But for date night, we'll get to go, bring it outside in the backyard, turn on the fan, turn on the television show that we're watching and just watch it out there. For regular night, we'll watch our inside TV. So that area is kind of our special go-to place for date night.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:30) Nice. Yeah. It's always interesting to see how that happened. We ended up getting a babysitter because we got two little ones, and then we came to the office to just watch in the break room just because you need the change of venue. Right?

(David Smith at 00:02:44) Yes. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) You do. And my office happens to be five minutes from the house. And since everyone's been gone, it's just empty. There's just no one here.

(David Smith at 00:02:54) Oh, that's great. Good. Good. Good call.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) This is exciting. You know what? I should ask more people how they're dealing with date night and stuff. That's it. It's an important part of the relationship. Right? We talk a lot about relationships and leadership on here, but I've found there's a lot of parallels between the relationship I have with my wife and my kids, and then I learn a lot from that with managing people.

(David Smith at 00:03:16) Yes. Absolutely. Listening. Learning to be a good listener. Probably number one management aspect. Hardest to learn if you're not good at it. If you are good at it, it really helps you succeed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) Well put. Now I am curious to know, the logo looks very T-Mobile-y. I don't know if that's a word. Is there a connection there?

(David Smith at 00:03:37) We are T. I don't know if you could see. Okay. Shirt. So T-Systems and T-Mobile are both wholly owned by Deutsche Telekom. So that's another T. It's a German T, but they're all the same magenta T.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:55) You guys have some strong culture.

(David Smith at 00:03:58) Strong culture. Deep and rich culture too from a telecommunications perspective. The company is really an interesting company to work for, especially because all the architecture is kind of centrally driven out of our German location. So the German engineering, the GDPR privacy laws—security is probably absolutely one of the most important tenets in our protection.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:26) And so then there's some separate divisions. You obviously have T-Mobile, which I know Cody over there. Have you ever gotten to meet him?

(David Smith at 00:04:34) Not yet. Not yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) Okay. He is a fantastic human being, Cody Sanford. I think he's the CIO or the CTO of T-Mobile. He's a pretty cool guy. So there's them, and then you guys are—what's your business?

(David Smith at 00:04:47) Okay. So we are the IT branch of Deutsche Telekom. T-Mobile is what they would refer to as a national telecommunication provider, just like they have other national telecommunication providers, and they all roll up into the Deutsche Telekom brand name. Maybe that'll help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) Yeah. And then what is your division or sub-business do?

(David Smith at 00:05:11) So we do the operations. We do the IT support management, infrastructure, capacity planning, deployment, and I'm specifically responsible for the North American cloud area—cloud storage, backups or data protection. And, yeah, just keeping the lights on from an infrastructure perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:33) That's pretty interesting. What's going on in cloud right now?

(David Smith at 00:05:38) Cloud is an interesting beast. You know, it's funny because everyone has their own idea what is cloud. But what is cloud? Cloud is different things to different people. Some people think that just means I put everything out of my data center and let somebody else manage it, partially. Some others think that it's only somebody who hosts a hyperscaler—Google, Azure, AWS. There's different definitions of cloud. There's hybrid cloud, private cloud, public cloud. It just depends. Right? A lot of it depends. And what I'm seeing in the industry so far is people are starting to dip their toe into their idea of the cloud, but they kind of don't know where to get started. And that's always one of the challenges. Where do you start? What do I know? What part of my business can I put into the cloud? It's an interesting and complicated thing to go through because not everyone has the same challenges. They have different regulatory requirements. They have different strategic goals. They have different policies on CapEx, OpEx, cash position. So it's really a difficult solution to provide something that is a one-size-fits-all, and that's where we don't. We offer choice. I think that's one of the things that I'm excited most about our infrastructure. We're offering a choice. It's not necessarily just a platform. It is a multiple-use platform. It's a platform that supports companies who are just getting their feet wet, putting their toes into the cloud, understanding what parts can go into a cloud and what can't, as well as supporting off-prem or private hosted data in another provider's data center or helping our customers get into the public cloud. And I'll tell you, Joel, we are not trying to compete with AWS. We're trying to facilitate AWS as customers need it. We offer what I like to think of as the choice and how to get there. We have special relationships with cloud architects and engineers and help customers understanding which parts of their environment they can cloudify, as an example. Putting in, as an example, putting something that they want to hold really tight and close to their belt because of privacy. Maybe there's a HIPAA requirement, and they want that to stay right on-prem, right in their own data center. But they want something that looks and feels like a cloud because it's agile. It's something that can be readily stood up. It has a very simple infrastructure that you push a button and systems are created. Right? There's a lot of need for that, especially in the health care industry. And then we also have the other extreme where we have companies that have massive amounts of data, but they don't want to be in the data center business. They want to focus on their core business strengths and move that stuff somewhere else. Then they have a mix of between the two—companies where you have a company that has some private data, but then they also want to enjoy the burst capability that a hyperscaler offers. And one of the things we're offering with this new platform is the ability to move those workloads and communicate between those various platforms—the AWS Azure hyperscalers, the private off-prem hosted in, as an example, a T-Systems data center, and then an on-prem solution—and have that all have the same look and feel and managed service OS. So it's really a solution, a suite, if you will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:44) Oh, that's cool. And so you build that tool?

(David Smith at 00:09:48) We do. So we're in partnership with VMware. We're also going to be creating an Azure Stack flavor of that as well as an OpenStack flavor. So there'll be three different types of core infrastructure or hypervisor infrastructure. But on top of that, all of the API sets and the glue—that's what we're putting together, as well as the—the other stuff that we're making. I'm using these highly technical terms. It's the REST-based APIs. And we're going to be allowing our customers to engage in those APIs so that they can use their own service solutions. If they, as an example, if they had a—I'm forgetting the other service—oh, ServiceNow. ServiceNow. If they had ServiceNow, they wanted to use that to deploy VMs. They push a button, it interacts with the T-Systems future cloud infrastructure, and that goes and starts the things are churning. Right? So that's one of the things that we're going to be providing for our customers. We already have version in place right now. We are not yet offering those APIs, but that's next on the floor plan.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) That's exciting. Now I'm curious. I've been thinking a lot about cloud. I obviously get to have different discussions. It's from my parents with their HIPAA stuff to business owners of all different shapes and sizes. And then I hear stats about maybe 15 or 20% of the world's on the cloud. So there's a huge chunk of pie of people that's still making that transition. So I was curious, what's the hesitation? Is it a human behavior thing? What is it?

(David Smith at 00:11:42) It's FUD. Fear, unknown, and doubt. They are, realistically, they don't know what they don't know. And they're afraid that if they put something into the cloud, they're gonna lose control of it. When, in essence, what we're offering is the ability to control it even more tightly. Even though you might not own that hardware it's running on, even though you might not have that data in the same state you're in, it still allows you control over the application and the functionality of that application. So those things can all be hosted in the cloud, but you retain control as the customer of your data. That data belongs to you. We just are protecting it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:28) Is that the biggest hesitation that you see out there?

(David Smith at 00:12:33) Yeah. That and also not knowing what to put into the cloud. So an organization decides, strategically, I want to go in the cloud and I want to put 20% of my business in there next year. How do I determine what that business is? That's where we offer our strategic services, our cloudifying services. Basically, it's an assessment tool and groups that come in, offer their expertise, learn the business, and provide some information to the customer about what to put into the cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:06) Now, so I'm curious. A lot of people that, subjectively, a lot of people I interact with are part of companies that are, I guess you'd say, cloud native. Right? They were built on tools or whatever they may be—built on AWS or services that are just scalable, and that's just what they know and that's how their companies were built. Now, I was trying to think, what are the benefits of them having awareness of what other companies go through? I guess they'll have customers. Right? If I have a CRM that's cloud based, right, and I'm that provider, knowing that some of my customers are in this transition, there might be some value there. But I was just curious, is there any value to these cloud native companies understanding this process that these other businesses are going through?

(David Smith at 00:13:57) They have to. They have to. Because if they don't understand the struggles that those customers are going through, how are they going to design something to help them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:08) Mic drop. Right?

(David Smith at 00:14:10) That's the—exactly. Look. That was the—you gave me a softball, so thank you. That's right. That's the business we're in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:18) I'm legitimately a curious person because, you know, I just—I think I would just leave it at that. I'm just a curious person. So in that vein, beautiful transition. Right? I'm curious to know, how did you end up joining this company?

(David Smith at 00:14:37) Oh, it was a strange road, I'll tell you. I was originally employed by Deutsche Post DHL, the shipper. And this was back in the day when DHL wanted to become a US player on the overnight express delivery business. And they hired me in to consolidate workloads from Europe into their Scottsdale data center of all places. Why DHL? What are Scottsdale? I don't know. But it was a lot of fun. Enjoyed the work. And when the international—I'm sorry—not the international, but the express US business was a little too tough for them to compete in. FedEx and UPS just pushed them out of the market. They decided to move everything back into Europe that I had just put here. So T-Systems was given a contract to come in and do a lot of the DP DHL management outsourcing. And so by way of some different turns, I ended up coming back to T-Systems. Part of it was just really enjoying the structured approach that these companies have offered. Part of it is enjoying the way they take care of their employees. I'll say that. I've been very pleased working at both companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:02) And so is DHL the shipping company? Is that what you were talking about?

(David Smith at 00:16:06) Correct. Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:07) You said they got pushed out, but they're still a household name.

(David Smith at 00:16:10) Right? International only. Yeah. Long haul. So they just don't do the overnight delivery in the US.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:17) Oh, okay. I get it. But yeah. And I like them as a brand. I've used them a couple times. I don't know for what, but I do remember interacting with them. When you see that logo, it's like, yep.

(David Smith at 00:16:28) Yellow mustard always stands out. That's for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:33) Now you had some entrepreneurial projects too?

(David Smith at 00:16:37) Yeah. So we've had a couple of things. Recently we created this new offering, and one of our customers really said it was a good thing. We used our private cloud infrastructure in tandem with one of our business partners to help a radiology department put all of their data up in the cloud and protect it. So it's one of these really great stories because they have this massive amount of data that radiology departments do, and we developed a solution offering that lets them keep the hot data local and send the cold data off-site into our object store. So it's working hand in hand with our solutions and our sales team who identified a real opportunity. We're taking that now and offering that in other locations for other health care businesses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:32) That's actually pretty cool. Speaking of the cold data stuff, I like to research emerging technologies, things that are right on the bleeding edge. And the other day, I came across they're using DNA for long-term storage. Have you heard about this?

(David Smith at 00:17:51) I've heard of that. Yeah. That's crazy.

(David Smith at 00:17:55) It kind of blows your mind when you're thinking along. It's kind of like thinking of going from binary storage to tertiary storage. First, right out of college, I met with an IBM engineer, the chief engineer, and he said they were—he was kidding, of course—he said they were thinking of changing their storage to use try or tertiary instead of binary because they have some special bacteria that they shine a light through and it goes through three distinct phases. He said, "You imagine how good that would be if we run out of storage? We just add some water and grow some more."

(David Smith at 00:18:27) Good guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:28) I was digging deeper into it about how much data they could read and write in a given day, and they said that the current business case was companies that had these long-term, I think, tape storage that they wanted to convert because the tapes actually degrade over time, and they were going to use those to convert that. But once that accelerates to the point where you could read and write to it in real time, the storage capacity—I think the example they gave was a football-sized stadium could fit into, like, on a dime or something.

(David Smith at 00:19:04) Yeah. It's unbelievable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:05) The future's going to be pretty crazy.

(David Smith at 00:19:08) It is. Exciting to be part of it too, and really enjoy this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:13) So how do you look at technologies like that or quantum computing? Do you get in your job, do you get to spend any time playing with those, or do you have an R&D team? How do you approach that?

(David Smith at 00:19:24) We do have an R&D team. They're based in Germany, actually. And our chief engineering team's already working on high performance computing and GPU-type computing. So we do have a division that's working on that area. In fact, there was a recent customer potential engagement that we looked at where this would be deployed.

(David Smith at 00:19:47) And we were happy to find out our data center provider has GPU-ready data center. So very happy to see that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:55) That is pretty cool because I heard the Microsofts and they're coming out with the GPU stuff. And then they're also coming out with—I talked with Rob, I think Robert Suter over at IBM—there's actually quantum computing in the cloud now.

(David Smith at 00:20:10) Yes. You can rent it. And I hear the cycles are a little pricey. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:16) Right. You don't want to bill for that. Right?

(David Smith at 00:20:18) No. No. That's not something you want a week for the billing to accidentally flow through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23) But I saw a picture of one, and it reminded me so much of in the '80s when a computer would fill up a whole room. Because they were saying, "Oh, this had 10 qubits or 20 qubits," and it looked like the size of a room. It was huge.

(David Smith at 00:20:39) Wow. Wow. Yeah. Cool. That's neat stuff.

(David Smith at 00:20:43) Right now, we are looking at an opportunity that is potential exabyte. So its initial proof of concept is somewhere in the 60 petabyte range. They said they have multiple customers, and this is a similar type deal where you're looking at converting tape into primary storage and object storage back end. So there's a lot of fun stuff going on in this industry right now. This would be on a private hosted-type cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:14) It's interesting to me because my perspective is pretty narrow and that's why I always try to widen it. I actively try to widen it. But just to imagine that while everyone's solving problems, you know, like the Ubers and the Airbnbs of the world type deal, there's those series of problems. But then there's also these series of problems of actually just moving tape to longer storage. And there's huge markets in all in these areas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:48) And I don't really know exactly—this is a good question. Have you ever come across magazines or places that write about these different business verticals that are these opportunities, I guess, I would call them, market opportunities? Have you ever come across executive content that discusses market opportunities?

(David Smith at 00:22:12) If it's what I'm thinking of that you're talking about, we have a couple of groups that we work with specifically for that. They help kind of identify emerging trends and opportunities and customer opportunities specifically before they hit the street as an RFI or an RFP. Is that where you were going with that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:34) What are those specific groups?

(David Smith at 00:22:36) So there are a couple of different—I mean, obviously, information is the thing that people are really jumping on right now. I'll tell you right now, health care business is booming. I had mentioned health care in the past. Oil and gas is a little tricky right now because of things that are going on overseas, but, you know, eventually, that will, I'm sure, confident that that will come back. Automotive, you know, it's strange times right now because the opportunities are a little longer sell right now until we get through this pandemic thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:12) But what if I wanted to start educating myself on markets and opportunities, what are good sources of content?

(David Smith at 00:23:23) Yeah. So there are certain vendor certifications that I would look at. I would look at data analytics. I would look at cloud architects and engineers and cloud business analysts. The reason I'm saying that is because data analytics and cloud are going to go together like hand in glove.

(David Smith at 00:23:45) There's so many opportunities in the future for people out there looking, "How do I get started? Where do I jump in?" It's really educating yourself on what is data analytics and how it's kind of an actuary on steroids, if you will. It's somebody who knows how to manipulate data and turn out information and sell information. So, enriching raw data sources and turning it into, monetizing that data source.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) I like it.

(David Smith at 00:24:15) So if you can get that oil—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:17) Or the gold.

(David Smith at 00:24:18) Exactly. Exactly. Mining the ore. That's kind of what it is because you go dig up a bunch of rock raw data, and you mine it out and enrich it and show how that data fits together, and then it becomes information. And then there's somebody that wants to buy it, and that's where you monetize it and you figure out how to package it and get it done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:43) That's interesting. In my head, I'm visualization of a marketplace. I can just push all my data, and people could mine it up and then offer it back to me insights. I think that's what will happen in the future. How it plays out, obviously, will be unique based on privacy concerns and whatnot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:00) But to have an army of data scientists—I find that a lot of businesses want to do things with data, but they don't know how to connect with the data scientists, especially in the SMB space.

(David Smith at 00:25:12) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:13) You know, they'll have a business maybe doing, you know, $20 million, $50 million a year, a couple hundred people. But to invest into a whole data science team just to play with stuff, they don't really have a specific vision or to bring in that executive that will. It's big investments. I think in the future, it'll become more accessible.

(David Smith at 00:25:31) Oh, I completely agree. In fact, you hit on the really neat thing. I'm hearing so many acronyms now: as a service, data analytics as a service, information as a service. You know, these things are going to be keeping on growing. The number of offerings are going to keep growing like you wouldn't believe.

(David Smith at 00:25:48) Alone, we have a lot of our IoT practices bringing in new things. Being able to find a lost kid at Disneyland, that was one of the use cases we had on our video as a server or video analytics. Really neat stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:05) That is. That's actually totally doable today with our technology.

(David Smith at 00:26:11) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14) Do they have that? Do we know if they have that?

(David Smith at 00:26:16) We did. We didn't—yeah. They ended I think they end up going with a solution. We did not get that solution or that contract, but I've heard that that solution is in place.

(David Smith at 00:26:29) I know they have this kind of application in place in a lot of the sports venues, being able to whitelist people, finding people, knowing their seats, and saying, "Oh, this person likes to use this type of beer. They go buy this kind of beer, and then they like this hot dog, and then they like to go to the sports store," and they keep track of that person. So that is all part of the data analytics that they do have in this deployed in several of the stadiums right now, which are empty, by the way. Maybe when they get filled again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:04) That is so—you know, it's cool, and it brings up data privacy questions. But for the most part, it's really cool. I've also found that what they're doing—one of the things that opened my eyes that was new for me was finding out that there are these companies that collect—they just collect and connect data. And so they'll know that this device has a unique ID, and they'll have a pretty good guess that I still own it. And then they can connect what this device does, where this device ID comes up from, even where some people even have location things in store, so they can tell when this device walks into a store.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:42) It's just so fascinating of all the things that are available and happening with technology. I tend to be optimistic about it. Right? Because usually, it's people trying to take the data and figure out how to be more useful to you.

(David Smith at 00:27:59) Right. Exactly. And, you know, the IoT practice alone is so big. It's so important right now. T-Systems does have a really great offering.

(David Smith at 00:28:10) We have a product. It's basically a bunch of sensors. And these sensors—this is one of our offerings—these sensors are sensors that you can put in container shipping containers that can sense temperature and location and, you know, if you had something that was really highly coveted and prized and temperature sensitive. They can put those there. They've used those kinds of sensors in the container shipping overseas.

(David Smith at 00:28:40) So coming from China, and they're able to track where the shipment is at any given time and making sure that each one of those containers are in place, the environment hasn't changed, it's still the right temperature. It's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:54) Ray Dalio would like to get his hands on that data.

(David Smith at 00:28:57) Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:59) It's amazing what they've been—I'm a fan of his and researching him as what he's done in his career. And it's amazing how they make these bets based on rainfall and shipment status, and it's just unbelievable how these basic predictions completely affect the markets.

(David Smith at 00:29:20) Yeah. Exactly. But then you know these little sensors and you know where he's getting his information maybe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:27) I actually read about this company that built these little—they're size of maybe two shoe boxes—these little satellites that they—you know, you pay $10,000 a pound, you can get a SpaceX lift to near Earth orbit. And they're putting them in there so that they could read the vessels, the freight containers to figure out when they were crossing the seas and when they were going to show up and be late. And then they were selling that data as financial data to the financial people making financial decisions. Like, they were the intermediary OCR-ing the ships and then taking that data in their locations and basically just observing. And that's such an interesting business model.

(David Smith at 00:30:10) Yeah. It really is. It really is. Lot of upside on that, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:15) What's the culture like on your team?

(David Smith at 00:30:20) It's very distributed. Even before the work-from-home order, I've got guys US-based employees, one here in Arizona with me, another in Texas, and another in Indiana. I've got, basically, our pop teams, our application or infrastructure support teams are in Slovakia and Malaysia and India. So it's very distributed. We do a lot of Webex.

(David Smith at 00:30:51) We do a lot of team kind of, you know, face-to-face is very limited. Let's put it that way. So whatever we can do online together, we do. And I think that helps a lot. From an overall culture perspective, it's a lot of trust and working together, working within the teams, and building trust.

(David Smith at 00:31:16) So there's a lot of good things there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) You guys typically do larger, bigger projects?

(David Smith at 00:31:24) Yes. Yeah. But we've also been known to do some smaller ones too. So it just depends. We have a couple of very large multinational corporation companies.

(David Smith at 00:31:35) I think I could say Shell Oil. It's one of our largest accounts. Heineken. I like the beer. And, yeah, I mean, we have large companies like that. We have smaller companies, pharmaceutical companies up in North Boston area, uh, New York area, I should say. We have a couple of smaller yet companies than that. And a lot of times, what'll happen is we'll have business partners that we'll use to host and manage them, and then that business partner is then the consolidation point for us. So if that makes sense. The multi-tenant power solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:15) Okay. So that's how they find you?

(David Smith at 00:32:18) Yeah. The smaller ones. Yeah. And then the bigger ones were—we're usually engaged with those as much as possible. Always looking for more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:28) Yeah. We'll push them your way.

(David Smith at 00:32:31) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:33) So did you ever start any of your own businesses?

(David Smith at 00:32:36) I did. I did through necessity. This was before T-Systems. This was before DHL. I was working for a small IBM business partner as an architect, and I managed their—I don't know if you've ever heard of a system called an AS/400, IBM, what it's called now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:54) Yeah. How else did I change my high school grades?

(David Smith at 00:32:59) Perfect. So, yeah, I was working for a small IBM business partner, and they went to chapter seven bankrupt, leaving me with all their customers. And I sent emails out to them and said, "I'll charge you the same rate I was billing before," and I kept about 20% of the customers. And that lasted me for nine years. So self-employed, you're responsible for marketing, bill collecting, delivery, and customer satisfaction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:26) That's amazing.

(David Smith at 00:33:26) So you know what I'm saying? About entrepreneurial. Yes. Absolutely. And I was lucky enough to marry a CPA, so that helped too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) Oh, yes. They are actually—they're a requirement. They can sometimes be an adversarial relationship, but it's usually a pretty healthy one.

(David Smith at 00:33:48) So when you're quarantining with them, you got to make sure that they're out of your shot, but no. That's just awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) Yeah. My—no. I love it. My wife's amazing too. She, speaking of entrepreneurial stuff, she had to make a transition because she got furloughed from the coronavirus. So she started instantly—yeah. Instantly day one, she just started redoing our cabinets and then posting pictures, and then she redid the neighbors, and then that grew into three, and then she formed an LLC. And it's been a couple weeks now. And she's got customers and deliveries and just reacted and responded. Yeah.

(David Smith at 00:34:25) That's such a good story to hear. Wow. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) I was pretty impressed. She had dabbled in some other things previously, like wedding planning and some other event management things that she was pretty good at. But it was that necessity of I have to do something now versus I just like a side hustle.

(David Smith at 00:34:45) Exactly. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:50) You took some of that experience from your entrepreneurial adventure for the decade. And then did that set you up pretty well to...

(David Smith at 00:34:59) It's what got me into DHL. So I went into DHL as a contractor, independent contractor, and they had me doing their iSeries workload consolidation from Europe. It was the European Express business unit, and we were taking all of those individual, like the Nordics and Italy and so forth, and moving their workloads from Europe into Scottsdale. Apparently, the latency wasn't something that was gonna kill them because it was about a three hundred millisecond increase in latency jumping across the pond. But it was mostly transactional data.

(David Smith at 00:35:35) We got it over, and it was a lot of fun because I got to go all over Europe on the company dime. But it was a lot of hard work. I think the entrepreneurial spirit there was that we were selling a solution to the folks in Europe and having them come into Scottsdale into what was then a global data center for DHL and upgrading their equipment for them. So they were excited because they were getting out of the data center business, and they looked at this as a cloud, which brings us full circle back to where we started. Getting out of the data center business, coming into a cloud, and having your infrastructure managed in a professional global data center so that we don't have to worry about it. It's all technology lifecycle managed for you.

(David Smith at 00:36:30) The service is up. You're responsible for your application because it was all Norwegian or Italian or whatever the interface was. But the infrastructure, the infrastructure as a service, was there. It was iSeries at that time, System i, but now it is... The cloud concept is the same for open systems, Linux, Windows, AIX even.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:58) Do you find when you're talking to new customers or potential customers, do they find comfort in the fact that you guys are as big as you are and that you provide services to T-Mobile and things that they know and understand?

(David Smith at 00:37:16) Yeah. I think part of it is the size. One of the big things that we're known for overseas is our SAP hosting. We're one of the largest SAP providers in the world, but that's what we're known for in Europe. When we go to get over here, people say, oh, you're T-Mobile.

(David Smith at 00:37:33) Well, no. We're not. We're related. They're our sister company. But the fact that they know we have such big, large global backing, global processes and procedures, and more employees to leverage.

(David Smith at 00:37:52) We have 33,000 employees worldwide within the Deutsche Telekom T-Systems part. Right? So we have a lot of resources we can use and lean on, and that's one of the things that really helps too. So if a customer says, what if I run into a challenge in the cloud? Well, okay.

(David Smith at 00:38:12) We've got many different people who we can leverage to help you. I think that really helps them come at ease as well because we are such a large company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:23) Have you achieved fluency in any other language?

(David Smith at 00:38:30) Well, I knew some German, but I can check. And I...

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:36) You learn Czech first. Yeah.

(David Smith at 00:38:39) Absolutely. I speak Spanish a little bit. Used to speak a lot more, but I think age has limited my vocabulary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:47) There'll be no test today, my friend.

(David Smith at 00:38:50) Thank gosh. Thank gosh. Yeah. No. It's good.

(David Smith at 00:38:56) It's good. I really enjoy the traveling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) Has the coronavirus directly impacted your business?

(David Smith at 00:39:05) Well, one of our key accounts is a hospital. So I would say it has made our business really grow fast for that account. They've grown even faster because for obvious reasons, this particular healthcare group, they had to add an extra hospital, extra beds. They had to expand their VPN because they sent 80% of their staff home. Their normal VPN workload or connection supported maybe 800, and they had to expand to 2,500 overnight.

(David Smith at 00:39:39) Things like that. And yeah, our company's been really amazing to work with that. They obviously, we all have to work from home as well, and it was an easy transition for a lot of us because we have such dispersed teams anyway. Working on Webex, working virtually and doing team management virtually is something that we've been practicing for quite some time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:10) That's a theme that I've gotten from a lot of people is that the CTOs are like, well, we're pretty used to working remote. People are pretty comfortable with it. But I've also heard that other parts of the business, like head of sales, have been consulting with the CTOs within the organization about going remote because they already, they're so comfortable with it, and they have so much experience with it.

(David Smith at 00:40:36) Yeah. Absolutely. I think so. I think you're absolutely right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:41) So what's going on? Like, your team's pretty happy, and they've been keeping positive. And how have you helped the mindset with your team during this time?

(David Smith at 00:40:53) I'll tell you. One of the things that I've really appreciated is the way that my company in general has handled the mindset. They have this weekly meeting where everybody is on the Webex. And this is like a meeting of 20 managers, 30 managers. And they insist on the face shots, you know, the camera so that everybody can see.

(David Smith at 00:41:15) Long hair. You don't have long hair. You got a buzz cut because you asked your wife to cut it. Beards that were just not trimmed in two months, and the whole... It ranges the whole gamut. That's awesome, man, by the way.

(David Smith at 00:41:28) It looks good. It's the whole gamut. But that way, the senior leadership can really assess are people smiling? Are they happy? What are their thoughts?

(David Smith at 00:41:39) What are their feelings? And then we're responsible for reporting in about all of our teams and saying, yes, my team is doing well. Our data center team, case in point, because they have to work in shifts. They still have to go on-site.

(David Smith at 00:41:53) For obvious reasons, they have to be there to support an infrastructure that's backed out. But the question is always, how are they doing? You know, are they healthy, et cetera, et cetera. I'll say the senior leadership has been phenomenal with T-Systems doing that. Just the way they've managed the fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

(David Smith at 00:42:13) I use that word too much. But...

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:15) I've never heard that, and I love it. It's great. I'm gonna take that and spread that. Yeah.

(David Smith at 00:42:20) Please do. Please do. It's, you know, they do a great job at eliminating, reducing that. You can't eliminate it, but reducing it. They check in.

(David Smith at 00:42:30) What do you need? Is there anything you need? You know? How are your teams doing? Is everybody well?

(David Smith at 00:42:36) I think that's one of the most important things an organization should do right now is to make sure and touch point, touch base, maybe not literally, virtually reach out and touch people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) Yeah. So to keep it a little bit light here as we start to rev up, I am curious, what do you do for fun? What type of hobbies do you have?

(David Smith at 00:42:58) Cycling. I like cycling quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Road bike, mountain bike. Snow skiing, but it's a little warm right now here in Arizona.

(David Smith at 00:43:08) Supposed to be 107 today, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:12) Oh, wow.

(David Smith at 00:43:12) Yeah. We're not gonna ski today. But sports in general, I like for fun. I do like going out to take my wife out to the movies, you know, hanging out with some friends, things like that. Recently started playing guitar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:27) Yes.

(David Smith at 00:43:27) I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how that goes. Yeah. Six weeks in and three chords later, fingers are starting to get calluses, but work in progress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:40) I promise you, it gets so much more fun after your fingers figure out their thing. I've been playing for like five, six years.

(David Smith at 00:43:50) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:51) Yeah. So, I mean, I was in my late twenties, and I just said, you know, I've thought about this a hundred times. I'm just gonna buy a guitar. And yeah. YouTube is amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:01) There are so many great free lessons. And the biggest thing I found with that is just, and Jake plays guitar too, our producer. He's actually really, really good. Just finding things to constantly keep it fun. Like, working through a book is great, but like, having a portfolio of, like, okay, I'll spend, you know, a third of my time on like book or lessons or some sort of formal thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:23) A third of my time on like learning something that I wanna learn, like a song or whatever you can do to keep yourself excited and learning, that's the right way, at least from my experience.

(David Smith at 00:44:35) Yeah. Absolutely. And that goes so far even beyond guitar is just keep yourself learning. You know, keeps you young. Yeah. Keeps you young.

(David Smith at 00:44:45) Keeps...

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) That keeps that energy inside of it. So as we start to wrap up, what's the call to action? How do we get people to you? What's the reason that they reach out to you and do business with you?

(David Smith at 00:44:57) The call to action is if you think you wanna get into the cloud, you need to start, and we can help you start. We can help you start with a small footprint in your own data center to give you that feeling of control. And from there, it gives you a gateway. That gateway is into hyperscalers, to private cloud, off-prem, all kinds of solutions. And we can help you decide what goes where.

(David Smith at 00:45:23) That's probably the most important part. It's not just getting into the cloud. It's getting the right things into the cloud, and it's getting the right things into the right type of cloud to keep your business running properly and safely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:40) Boom. Another mic drop. That's great. So we'll do the animation. I love it, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:47) This is great. So when they reach out, LinkedIn, what's the best way to do that?

(David Smith at 00:45:55) Yeah. LinkedIn. I'm certainly on LinkedIn right now. So certainly one way. I will also have them reach out to our... Sorry.

(David Smith at 00:46:06) I'm trying, it's... I think it's hashtag T-Systems North America on LinkedIn, on Twitter. I might need to have Aaron get you that information after the fact.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) We can put it in the show notes.

(David Smith at 00:46:18) Set up on a slide. Yeah. Yeah. Because I just didn't have that upfront. Sorry, Aaron.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:24) No. It's okay. This is what's real about what we do. Like, I don't want things like overproduced. I just kinda...

(David Smith at 00:46:31) You know...

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:31) I wanna spend my time getting to hang out, talk to cool people about technology, share, learn things that we don't know. Like, I have no shyness on asking questions that I don't know or trying to feel the question out, because it's like, great people like you. I mean, you can just roll with it, and you did. This was a fantastic episode, my friend. I really enjoyed doing this.

(David Smith at 00:46:54) Cool, man. It's my first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:56) Not... oh, this is your first podcast?

(David Smith at 00:46:58) First ever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:00) Oh, man. This...

(David Smith at 00:47:01) Is exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:02) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(David Smith at 00:47:03) I would go have a beer after this, I think. Oh, wait.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:05) For sure.

(David Smith at 00:47:06) Later after business hours.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:07) Later after business hours. Yes. Well, next time, after the social distancing's over, I actually have some friends out that own a couple businesses out in your town. You're in Scottsdale?

(David Smith at 00:47:19) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:20) I got some friends in Scottsdale. I got some friends in Tempe. I don't know how close those two places are. But...

(David Smith at 00:47:26) Drivable. Yeah. Drivable. Within thirty, forty minutes. No big deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:29) Yeah. So next time I'm out there, I'll let you know. Maybe stop by and say hello or grab tea or beer, something. Something. Heineken.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:37) A Heineken beer.

(David Smith at 00:47:39) Hi. Right? Heineken.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:40) There you go.

(David Smith at 00:47:41) Our customer. Yes. Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:45) Then it'll be a business expense.

(David Smith at 00:47:47) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:49) Thank you so much, David. You have a wonderful day.

(David Smith at 00:47:51) Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Bye. See you guys.