How Morpheus is Transforming the Hybrid Cloud Model with Brad Parks, CloudOps and Private Cloud Leader at HPE

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Brad Parks from Hewlett Packard Enterprise about how he and his team are transforming hybrid cloud. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) Morpheus is a huge part of this conversation. Can you just give me the 30,000-foot view on what Morpheus is?

(Brad Parks at 00:00:22) So I actually worked for HP for like a decade and then left and joined Morpheus about nine years ago, and then came back in what they would call a boomerang here inside HPE. One of the reasons I joined Morpheus, I love our origin story. Right? Like a superhero nerd. Right? Love my comic books. Morpheus was born to make IT easier to consume. And if I kind of use a typical day in the life of an IT director, the stakeholders of IT, right, the people tapping IT on the shoulder saying, "Hey, I need my database deployed, my virtual machine deployed." If we think about why public cloud exists, they automated the heck out of IT and put it behind a portal and called it Amazon. If you look at a big, complicated on-premises data center, it's a lot easier said than done.

(Brad Parks at 00:01:19) Morpheus helps integrate all of the tools, the technologies, the processes, the handoffs, so that same end user of IT can go into a portal, hit a line of code, hit a Terraform provider, and say, "I need my database deployed. I need my application stack deployed." And I don't want to care if it's going to live on VMware, KVM, Kubernetes. They get what they want on demand. So we really bring the cloud experience on-prem, but we also can wrap our arms around public clouds and bring in governance. So it really is the software platform layer that big enterprises use to make hybrid cloud real, and that's certainly one of the reasons HPE did this acquisition last year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) Yeah. I think cloud did a really good job of making things easier, you know, because I'm cloud-native, but I had customers that were on-prem situations, so I kind of got to learn. And when I saw the on-prem tools about fifteen years ago, I was blown away by how archaic they were and how difficult it was to get stuff going in provisioned on-prem. And what would be normally just a button you click in an interface for me as a SaaS cloud-native person was like tickets and permits. Like, it was just a whole lot of stuff.

(Brad Parks at 00:02:40) I think you picked our first fight, Joel. I think you, because you said cloud as something different than on-prem. Right? I'm old. Right? If you think about NIST, I define what makes a cloud a cloud eleven, twelve years ago. It's not a place. Right? It's an operating model. It's being able to have elastic resources, meter-based, accessed over a network. They're shared. And the fifth element is usually where I insert a Bruce Willis joke—is self-service. Right? Being able to, on demand, get what you want without waiting on IT to do their job. That transcends locality on-premises or in a Jeff Bezos data center.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:20) Oh, I love it. And then so HPE saw Morpheus growing, being a really great solution. They wanted to include it in their portfolio, so they just purchased you guys?

(Brad Parks at 00:03:30) It was that simple. Yeah. Actually, we've been working with HPE for, I'll say, eight years. You know, when I left HPE, one of my first calls was back to my old team and said, "Hey, look. I know where HP is trying to go with unlocking the value of on-prem infrastructure and making it easier to consume. That's this company I just joined." So we've been actually co-engineering. HPE has been embedding our software in their solutions. And actually, Morpheus, when we were standalone, HPE, Dell, Lenovo, big systems integrators like Accenture, Kyndryl, and others, all were using our software to make hybrid cloud a reality. So about a year ago, HP said, "Hey, we want to double down and just bring it into the fold," and it was actually shortly after HPE had acquired OpsRamp. So the investments in platform software have really kind of doubled up here in the last eighteen to twenty-four months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) All right. Well, they've been buying a lot, HP. Did they basically let you guys just operate in your own bubble or did it go full—like, how did the merger go down? Are you guys in your own little culture, in your own little bubble, or you all integrated?

(Brad Parks at 00:04:45) You know, I joke I got my comeuppance because when I was actually at HPE before, I was on the acquisition team for a couple of storage technologies. We acquired 3PAR and then Nimble Storage, and I was part of a acquirer in merging those in. Now I'm getting acquired, so I get to see what life's like on the other side. But one of the things I think I learned when I was on the acquisition side is a lot of acquisitions look good on paper, but they don't ever come to fruition. And sometimes that's because, you know, a company will kind of wrap bubble wrap around an asset. With HPE, we really ripped the band-aid off and just said, we are going to go mainstream with this thing. And it's been exciting because we now have kind of released new products like Morpheus VM Essentials. We have embedded that software inside some of the private cloud products that HPE has, like Private Cloud Business Edition. We've already done integrations with Juniper. So we are really helping to transform a good chunk of HPE into a software-led hybrid infrastructure conversation. So it's very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:07) How does that work? I'm a little bit of a nerd with the business stuff. Does the larger parent org set goals and then like, you would work with Juniper? Or is this teams within each that are just trying to build? How does that actually get, like, happen?

(Brad Parks at 00:06:21) Big companies. Like, drawing org charts at big companies is tough and a little mind-numbing. But if you think about it at a larger level, Antonio and the Board of Directors has set out, "Hey, we need to make profitability goals as a public-facing company." You know, think about things like free cash flow. Think about the business of HPE. And as part of that, obviously, how are we helping customers that are investing in technology? Right? Where those two meet is how you create a business. And so the big macro areas are, you know, networking, obviously huge push with the acquisition of Aruba many, many years ago. And then bringing in Juniper, we now have a massive networking stack. Well, what's connected to those networks? A whole bunch of servers. We sell about 800,000 servers a year underpinned by storage. And then where software comes in, really, it's kind of the glue that helps, like I said, unlock all of that.

(Brad Parks at 00:07:23) So each of those kind of hardware or product business units are entities in and of themselves, but we have a lot of cross-functional working teams where we're threading the intellectual property across each other. So networking works with compute. Software works with everybody. You know, it all kind of comes together in how we show up for customers. Right? They shouldn't have to wade through a catalog menu of a thousand choices and assemble things in a data center. We want customers to think about, you know, how am I getting to a cloud operating model? How am I taking advantage of some of the innovations happening around AI? How do I transform how I think about infrastructure? Those are the big macro trends that then we, you know, inside the tent, are working together to make sure we're showing up and helping customers and kind of tackle their big projects.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:19) Is HPE and HP, are they all under the same umbrella? Are they separate? How does that work?

(Brad Parks at 00:08:25) Oh, HP and HPE? That was, uh, I am dating myself. I'm going to get the date wrong. I think it was about ten, ten, eleven years ago. I think we just hit our ten-year kind of standalone company anniversary, actually. So HP, you know, was a stalwart in Silicon Valley. Right? I mean, one of the first big companies that Hewlett and Packard pulled together. But about ten years ago, HP and HPE split. So the personal systems, PCs, printers, laptops, all of that went with HP Inc. All the business systems, compute, storage, networking, and the software we're talking about today, as well as the services with that, went with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So we are on our own, but share a lot of that core DNA with our brethren over on the HP Inc. side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:20) Awesome. Thanks for clearing that up for me. So let's talk about you did some stuff with Daniel's company, Futurum Group. You did a Tech Field Day.

(Brad Parks at 00:09:29) I have known those guys before they were Daniel's group. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:32) I know. Stephen and—

(Brad Parks at 00:09:33) Stephen Foskett and team. I look at Futurum, and it's like some of my best friends. The Evaluator Group, CTO Advisor with Keith. I know Keith. I've known Keith for a long time. I've known Stephen Foskett for a long time. So, yeah, I know that crew well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:51) Small world, man. This makes me feel good. So what did you talk about at the Cloud Field Day?

(Brad Parks at 00:09:58) What it really was kind of taking that portfolio that I mentioned and bringing it to life with the participants in the room. Right? The delegates. Actually, one of my best hires ever was a guy I met as a delegate. He was a cloud engineer, Martez Reid, who was one of the delegates in one of my first Cloud Field Days and spent many years with him. So I love the delegate interaction at Cloud Field Day because you get a lot of good kind of real-time feedback from either actual practitioners and customers or folks on the analyst front who kind of see laterally across the industry. The way we unpacked Field Day, really kind of a few chapters. We broke our ninety minutes into, I think, four segments. One was just setting the table, talking about how these acquisitions have manifested themselves in a coherent software stack that spans on-prem environments, colocation environments, and public cloud with assets like Morpheus, OpsRamp, and Zerto. That's what we think about as the Cloud Ops software suite.

(Brad Parks at 00:11:05) We then kind of dove into how we're taking that software and bringing it together inside easy-to-use, pre-engineered private cloud systems. So we spent some time doing that. Then we actually unpacked a lot of the work we've done in the runtime environment. So one of the assets that Morpheus has had is the ability not just to connect to VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, you know, other hypervisors. We actually have our own built-in KVM-based hypervisor and our own CNCF-certified Kubernetes layout. So we can unlock the power of existing third-party hypervisors and Kubernetes technologies, but we also have our own that we've now brought to bear with products like HPE Morpheus VM Essentials. So there was a little discussion around, you know, what do we do around our VMware workloads? How do we navigate that conversation? It's certainly one that a lot of customers are going through as they think about their relationship with hypervisor companies, container companies like Red Hat, public cloud companies like AWS and Azure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:21) How would you explain a Tech Field Day to somebody who doesn't know what it is?

(Brad Parks at 00:12:25) Nerds of a feather? A little bit. Right? It's—I love it because having been a practitioner for the kind of first decade, when I was an IT guy, wrote software, was a DBA. Second ten years, I was on the vendor side as a product manager. Third decade, went to a little bitty startup, Morpheus. I think sometimes in large companies, corporate marketing gets a hold of things and it gets up-leveled for outbound consumption. Why I've always loved Cloud Field Day is it just gives technologists a chance to talk in context. And I liken it to the Budweiser Hot Seat of old for the Super Bowl viewers from the Americas. Right? It gives folks like myself, our engineers, a chance to talk to actual practitioners, talk about what we have, but get real-time questions and feedback in an unfiltered way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:25) That's pretty cool. I think this was recorded too. Right?

(Brad Parks at 00:13:27) Yeah. Yeah. You can go to the Tech Field Day channel and get the Cloud Field Day assets. And I think it's broken into four chapters.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:38) Can you read off the URL to me? No, I'm not—okay, again, Josh will look it up.

(Brad Parks at 00:13:43) Stephen Foskett's like, "Come on, Brad." I know it's out there somewhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) Josh is going to hunt down that Tech Field Day recording from YouTube and post it in the show notes if you're interested in learning more about that.

(Brad Parks at 00:13:55) We could do the little—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:56) Like and subscribe. Yeah. Because you talked a lot about like the Cloud Ops suite, the private cloud portfolio. You covered all of that inside of the Tech Field Day.

(Brad Parks at 00:14:04) We went deep. We did, I think we did a little show-and-tell demo. I had some, you know, some friends who are much smarter than I who are going a little deeper on the tech. And so I think we can unpack some of those topics here on the podcast, and then it would be great if folks wanted to go over to Field Day to kind of go down a notch and actually see some product demos and see some of the questions from the delegates.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:26) The real question is like, how do the practitioners that are having this—how do they communicate this to their senior people? Is it a cost thing? Is it like, "Hey, this is going to help with cost"? How do they make that business case?

(Brad Parks at 00:14:40) Yeah. From a software perspective, if we start at that layer, I think it's all about helping IT be both more effective and more efficient. So you hit, you know, you hit two sides of it, which is always the case when you're doing this. When I think about Morpheus's origin story, right, we actually were created by a bunch of application developers who were transforming the application stacks at dozens of companies. They actually built the core DNA of Morpheus to get their job done. It was only after running for a few years as an internal project that they said, "Hey, I think there's some big companies trying to do this hybrid cloud thing, trying to do digital transformation. We could probably build a company out of this." So, you know, if I look at that, they had to be very effective at doing their job. Right? They had to deploy new applications very quickly, independent of where those applications were going to live. But also, they were part of a very large private equity firm which liked making money, didn't spend a lot of money to actually make that money oftentimes. So they had to do it with 25 developers and one IT guy. So they had to be very efficient in how they thought about cost, how they took time out of the equation to reduce the amount of full-time employees that it took to manage their environment. So those are the two sides of the coin, effectiveness and efficiency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:10) I like it. And then you've had T-Mobile as a customer. What did you do with them?

(Brad Parks at 00:16:14) I think our use case for—we have a lot of large customers in a variety of industries. Right? Morpheus, and Cloud Ops, kind of the software conversation, has done very well in highly regulated industries where there's some data or application gravity where those workloads and the data associated with those workloads still need to run on-prem for a number of reasons. But those same companies have some of their applications and some of their product teams working in the public cloud. So you think about folks like T-Mobile and, you know, in technology service providers.

(Brad Parks at 00:16:52) Right? They're trying to do software development to help their company, obviously, delight their customers, be worth money, operate more effectively. Other industries we've done very well in, health care. Similarly, pharmaceutical. AstraZeneca is one we've talked about for a long time. Their users are doing things like genome sequencing models, need to deploy databases for analytics, right, internal applications.

(Brad Parks at 00:17:16) Federal government, another one where, you know, they're not running a lot up in the public cloud. They've got very highly sensitive information, yet those organizations want to operate in a cloud native fashion to steal what you said. But they have to do it with their on-prem resources. So across those industries, you get a common denominator of IT kind of trying to get out of its own way. And I say that as a guy who did turn wrenches and, you know, bang a keyboard and run an IT shop once upon a time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:47) Oh, we could talk badly about nerds here on the show because we are with them.

(Brad Parks at 00:17:51) You know, I think if I look at the demands on IT over the last decade, two decades, right? The demands have increased disproportionate to the humans that are running IT. Right? That very simply. Right? If you look at that curve, the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Right? I need to provision new apps. I need to provision new resources. I'm doing internal app development as a, you know, everyone's a software company now if I go back to software eating the world. Right? The needs of IT to move faster and to enable their internal stakeholders has, you know, has hit a critical threshold. And one of the things I think standing honestly in the way of a lot of companies taking advantage of AI—right? That's, you know, that's one of the next waves—but there are a lot of big companies still just trying to get to that cloud operating model. So, you know, you can't build the next thing if you don't have a good foundation. So there's a lot of interest in helping, again, helping IT kind of get out of its own way so that they can move faster at a lower price point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:59) What challenge was the University of Utah facing?

(Brad Parks at 00:19:03) University of Utah. Yeah. Universities and higher ed in general is an interesting one. When I was graduating uni years and years ago, I was an intern inside the College of Business. Right? Higher ed is an interesting one because it's a lot like a service provider for these little fiefdoms. Right? You've got central IT trying to help the university system, but you've got a lot of autonomy with the College of Engineering, the College of Business, the liberal arts group. They each kind of want to do their own thing. So service providers is a big market for us where you want centralized control, centralized shared infrastructure, but you also want to kind of enable autonomy. And that means you need a platform approach. You need things like multi-tenancy, role-based access, guardrails so that central IT can kind of set that paved road, then get out of the way and let those fiefdoms kind of have their playground while still staying in the rails. So that's a common, honestly, in higher ed, but also the other use cases we've talked about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:20) That's pretty cool. Yeah. I was surprised. I did some work with, like, Harvard, and I remember talking with their IT team and finding out they had over 200 people. And I was like, whoa. I was like, really? Okay. Yeah.

(Brad Parks at 00:20:32) There's big and a lot of universities. It's not just, you know, one campus. Most of them have a, right, you know, an online campus. They might have branch campuses in different cities. And so you take that kind of central hub and spoke fiefdom model and then multiply that by other geographies, and it can get complex pretty quick.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:51) Also, every employee is like a customer to them. Yeah. Right? Because you're—

(Brad Parks at 00:20:56) The end users often are, you know, except AstraZeneca might be a genome sequencing data scientist who's doing work. At higher ed, it could be a grad student doing a project for a professor on the weekend that needs a database cluster stood up. They shouldn't have to submit a ticket, wait in line, and then get what they need two weeks from now, you know, after IT ends up wiring everything together. They should be able to, you know, go into a portal, hit a button, get what they want two minutes after they asked for it, whether that's on-prem or in the public cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:35) So and I'm just trying to wrap my mind around it personally. So I'm going to say some stuff. You tell me if it's wrong or right. It feels like what it does is it gives you the same interface and then basically on-prem or cloud ends up being like a drop-down. And so I get to provision and have all my experience and learn the UI and get really fast. Option's an afterthought.

(Brad Parks at 00:22:02) It's an abstraction model. Yeah, it's an abstraction model. We've abstracted a number of different concepts. Not just cloud. Right? Meaning where those workloads live, but also the other dependencies. So things like your IP address management system. Right? Your ITSM systems, your networking stack, your Git repos where all your automation tools live. Right? We've set up service interfaces around all of those technologies, and then we're orchestrating the handoffs so that the underlying technology becomes less relevant or at least less one-dimensional. And so to your point, you know, I've been on a lot of planes over the last few years, you know, with whoever's sitting next to me when they ask. It's a little like Google Translate for IT. Right? You should be able to, you know, write to Morpheus, call our API set, call our Terraform provider, and then come independent of where that workload lives, we will provision the VM, get an IP address, register a DNS entry, configure it behind a load balancer, set up a backup job, install a monitoring agent. Right? All of the orchestration that it takes to bring an application to life, that's what we orchestrate in an agnostic way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) And so you're just out there making people's lives easier. What's the next thing on the radar? What do you—what nut are you trying to crack right now as far as making lives easier?

(Brad Parks at 00:23:32) I think one of the biggies that's been, you know, been popular for the last few years, right, is the concept of eliminating lock-in. I think whether you're with a specific hypervisor company, a specific Kubernetes flavor, a specific public cloud. You know, I've talked with hundreds of CIOs and customers over the last handful of years and things are messy. And hybrid cloud is an inevitability more than a strategy almost, I think, for many, many customers, whether that's because teams have an affinity to a certain stack. M&A happens where a company buys another company and they're using x public cloud versus y public cloud or hypervisor A versus hypervisor B. So being able to think about the workload, the actual database, the web service, the application stack, and then eliminate some of the hard-line dependencies to the underlying runtime, where that workload lives, has been a big effort. And one of the things that we brought to the forefront as part of HPE is our own built-in KVM runtime and our own built-in Kubernetes flavor. I've always said that Morpheus didn't have a dog in the fight because, you know, we want to make those other third-party technologies better. And if I pick on VMware as an example, right, Morpheus has won Best of VMworld multiple times for turning VMware into the private cloud, you know, that it should be. But as costs have risen, as people's licensing agreements have changed with different vendors, we've had a lot of people say, hey, we already use you for upstack orchestration. You know, we see that you have your own KVM-based runtime. You know, can we start landing some of our workloads on that? So that's something HPE invested in, and we actually released a version of Morpheus called Morpheus VM Essentials, which is kind of packaged for a virtualization-centric customer. And it integrates with both VMware, but also HPE's native KVM hypervisor. So we now have, I'll say, we have a dog in the fight, but, you know, overall, our goal is to focus more on the workload and make the underlying runtime much less relevant. Because the application is what delivers value back to the business at the end of the day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:08) That's what I want. I want all the companies working together, being friends, and competing to make my life better.

(Brad Parks at 00:26:14) Yes. You shouldn't have to care as a customer. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:17) That's good because I don't. Like, and then I saw your post on LinkedIn about you being in the top right of the, like, for the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

(Brad Parks at 00:26:28) Yeah. That's a good one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:29) That's worth a dance.

(Brad Parks at 00:26:30) Yeah. For sure. So, yeah, I could talk a little bit about that. So, you know, the Magic Quadrant has been around for a long time. Right? Gartner's built a full business stack around how, you know, how they, as an example of an external analyst, will provide guidance to customers on how to make different investment choices. They do it for storage, for compute, for virtualization. This particular one you're referring to is around integrated platform consumption services, which is kind of a mouthful. I don't know a lot of IT directors that have a budget center for that. Right? As opposed to storage or compute. But what it was was talking about this move for customers to start thinking about how they acquire infrastructure in a different way. As opposed to buying a rack of servers and wiring it up with storage and buying a bunch of networking switches and assembling that inside a data center. They don't want to think about it to our point. They just want to access platform services, whether that's storage as a service, networking as a service, or, you know, VMs as a service. So things like HPE GreenLake, Dell Apex, Lenovo TruScale, Pure has one, Cisco has one. Right? The vendor landscape has shifted in this direction as customers want that kind of cloud approach to acquiring infrastructure. So the most recent MQ was about that set of services. And, yeah, HPE was about as far into the right as you can get, which I was very proud of. And that was really a reflection of HPE GreenLake and the investments and innovation we've done with some of the underlying software like Morpheus, OpsRamp, and Zerto, which we've most recently brought out as the Cloud Ops Suite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:23) You seem to have a lot of product knowledge, pretty smart business guy, but you also have a CMO title. Do you do marketing too?

(Brad Parks at 00:28:33) One of these days, I'm going to write a blog, like, expect more from your CMO. I've joked that I'm an engineer with low social anxiety who has carried a sales quota. So I have had multiple jobs. I like to have the illusion that I'm still technically relevant, but it has been a long time since I've sat in front of a Linux command line. But I, you know, got a CS degree. I have done the work for about a decade, but really am focused more on how do we bring these products to life in a way that's meaningful for customers. But, you know, when I look across the vendor landscape, and I've worked with all of them, another reason I love HPE is it really has its roots in engineering. Right? It is an engineering company at its heart. Right? It still has an invested labs function where we do pure R&D. You know? That's important as a guy who used to buy IT. Right? You're not buying from a supply chain company or the world's best marketing company. At the end of the day, you need these products to work. So even though I've had that CMO title, I'm still grounded in what the technology does and have some degree of depth in how it works. And so, yeah, I like to sit at that intersection of marketing, sales, go-to-market, engineering, product. I've found my—I'll be the most extroverted introvert in the room.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:01) I love it. I love the way you described yourself. No, that's—you got a high level of self-awareness. But, yeah, I, uh, do just software engineering, like, hands-on keyboard for twenty years. And then when the podcast got popular, I felt almost like a—like I betrayed my people. You know? Like, I just got dirty.

(Brad Parks at 00:30:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:22) I'd write a little bit because I'm not sitting there, you know, writing Ruby all day or whatnot. But, yeah, it's fun. Now every time I'm talking about that stuff, I always add that little prerequisite. Well, like, I'm not—I've been hands-on for, like, seven years, but I did it for twenty. So—

(Brad Parks at 00:30:38) Yeah. My credibility with every year maybe goes down from engineering. I have a good phone-a-friend, you know, Rolodex. But I'm—you know, when we were building up Morpheus as a standalone, it was just kind of the best nine years of my life because some of the smartest software developers on the planet that I've ever had the joy of working with. And now as part of HPE, that team of 20 or 30 engineers is now 200 or 300, and HPE is investing heavily in the software stack and the underlying runtime. So it's exciting to see that come to life inside a much bigger stage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:18) Well, I'm going to ask you a couple leadership questions, and then we can wrap up. Is that okay with you?

(Brad Parks at 00:31:22) Yeah. Please.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:23) Okay. So since we're both nerds here, I'm going to give you some constraints. I'm going to ask you for leadership advice, but it's going to have some constraints to it. Okay? The constraint is somebody must have told you this advice. You put it into practice, and it's been with you for a long time. It worked when you put it into practice, and you've carried it with you to today. What advice is that?

(Brad Parks at 00:31:48) I will steal a line from one of the best TV shows to come out of the pandemic, which was Ted Lasso. Right? The dartboard scene. Right? For those who've seen the show, our CRO and I have used, you know, as we're out talking to different sales teams, different customers. But be curious, I think, is one of those core principles that I think we can all appreciate and involves, you know, listening, asking better questions, you know, having some empathy. There's a lot to unpack in that scene if you go and Google it on YouTube. But be curious, definitely a piece of advice. I think the other side of that, you know, particularly for those dumb enough to ask me for career advice, but on the vendor side is have an opinion and don't be afraid to voice it. Make it informed and be curious and, you know, do the diligence. But there are a lot of people who have great ideas and don't get out of the shadows and actually bring them to life. So roll up sleeves and go, you know, go make your voice heard and be the change you want to see in the world if that's not too ambitious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:07) Get it done. Now do you think that you're just naturally like—I'm naturally like that. Like, that's just part of who I am. Is that something that you were born with, or do you think that's something you've developed?

(Brad Parks at 00:33:20) I think I developed it. I worked for a little startup in the early days and then inside a big company. I do think I would encourage everybody to do time at a startup. Well, even if that's a Skunkworks project inside a big company, right, there are a lot of kind of startups inside big companies. But, you know, when I first joined Morpheus, I think I was number—I was in the teens of employees and I had come from a, you know, obviously, $4 billion portfolio inside HPE where my team was 25 people.

(Brad Parks at 00:33:51) You know, mentioned a couple of ideas to the founding team. I said, yeah, those are great. You should go do that. Like, look in the mirror.

(Brad Parks at 00:34:00) Like, there it was a very skinny team. We ran extremely lean. So, you know, I built the website, put up the trade show booth, you know, did the hands-on, you know, back to rolling up sleeves and working for a living. I think everybody should spend time, you know, where their decisions have an impact on making payroll, you know, the next two weeks. Puts a certain amount of urgency and accountability into the work that we do.

(Brad Parks at 00:34:29) And so the closer you can get to getting the work done, I think the more appreciation you're gonna have for, you know, how it gets done and what the impact is for the customers that you serve. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:42) Well, Brad, we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel? Woo. Thank you so much for listening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:48) And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.