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Josh Lupresto (00:03)
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus And this is Next Level Biz Tech.
Hey everybody, welcome back. We got a new track for you here. A lot of things to cover today. We’re talking about Azure at the Edge, IBM in the basement and databases and how we kind of move through some of these changes on back with us. Returning guests Mr Mike Kowalski, Solution Architect, Data Center and Cloud at Telarus. Mike, welcome back on buddy. Well, you didn’t screw it up last time, so we thought we’d have you back on. the people what they want.
Mike Kowalski (00:38)
Yeah, what’s going on Josh? Thanks for having me.
Thank
Josh Lupresto (00:47)
And who better to talk about all this good stuff man data center cloud Azure IBM. Dude, let’s we got a lot. Let’s let’s jump in.
Mike Kowalski (00:47)
Fantastic.
Yeah, let’s do it.
Josh Lupresto (00:57)
So, ⁓ you started out here just for a little bit of color and background in this kind of regionalized engineering role. You’ve morphed into this real data center and cloud solution architect, and that’s a full-time thing. Walk us through a little bit of your background, but what sparked this focus around data center and cloud, and how do you stay tight with all these solutions, Azure Database, IBM? How do you lock it all in?
Mike Kowalski (01:28)
It’s an ever changing market and it’s an ever changing technology. So you just have to kind of keep up with it. I always tell people when they get into the business, we, get a lot of new TAs that come into the space. say, you’re never more than six to eight months behind. Just get caught up as fast as you can. And then you’re going to be an expert in no time. Particular for me, I really like being in this data center space because I started off in a physical world. I started off in an old school world of where.
The only computers that were 64 bit were very expensive workstations. They were Silicon graphics. They were HP. They were Sun Microsystems and of course IBM. X86 didn’t catch onto the 64 bit bug until Linux came out and started becoming a little bit more powerful. So me being in the role that I’m in now, it’s very comfortable for me to talk about this historical data, this legacy technology.
because some of it is still applicable to today’s marketplace, right? They still need a place to put it, house it, cool it. Back then it was just regular servers or big IBMs or big sun boxes. Now they’re highly condensed, very powerful, ultra high density type of deployments, but there are still a fair amount of companies out there that are running this technology. And they’re also trying to figure out how can I take advantage of modern technology?
So this role at Telarus especially allows me to be very nimble, cover a lot of different types of use cases, cover a of different types of ground. And it keeps me young, keeps me going. I’m kind of like the IBM in the basement sometimes, right? I got to get myself to the gym at 4.30 every morning so I could keep up with these young technologies, right?
Josh Lupresto (03:08)
You
It’s funny too, ⁓ if you think about kind of how full circle this has come. I we talk about this a lot in the team chat, as part of just the broader cloud team of, we all started out in some capacity. Many of us have mounted servers in a data center, been in the data center space, and then the big run to hyperscalers 10, 15 years ago, a lot of that coming back and being hybrid. now we’re talking about looking at the next Nvidia and the next Blackwell chip, and these guys are trying to stuff.
And everybody’s trying to stuff 100 Kdub, you’re hearing three, four, 500 Kdub into a cab. It’s about making the data center as efficient as possible. So it’s just, I guess what’s just changing is just how people are paying for it and where they’re paying for it and who wants to own what, but not at the core. There’s still so many similarities though, right?
Mike Kowalski (04:02)
There are, there are lot of similarities. I think there’s a lot more as a service today, whereas before you were kind of locked in to buy your own hardware, host your own hardware, manage your own hardware, and really the MSP market hasn’t really, it really didn’t show itself. And if they did, it was really, really big, expensive companies that would come in and start doing some of this management for you. Then we moved on to now cloud service providers, which are also MSPs. So you kind of get that flexibility of
maybe I want to own my own, maybe I don’t want to own all of it. And so we can start walking through that pathway to what’s the strategy of best, what’s best for your business.
Josh Lupresto (04:41)
So maybe walk us through that just a tiny little more before we kind of get into some of these three topics that we mentioned. ⁓ Walk us through in your role, how do you help partners and maybe what do you feel sets us apart, how you’re approaching some of these data centers and cloud conversations and how you’re guiding partners from, don’t know what I have to the closed deal.
Mike Kowalski (05:03)
I’m gonna use a terrible analogy. I use it from time to time based on my audience. I’m just, know, bear with me on this. I’ve been through one marriage, but before I got to that marriage, I had to do a lot of dating. And I was always focused on how I could do a better job at making them happy. Go through a little bit later on in life, technology evolves, we get a little bit wiser. And now when I re-entered the dating pool, I’m thinking, how can I make them
a better person. How can I contribute to their life? How can I not just sit here and talk about me all the time? How can I talk about them? How can I address their needs, their concerns? Because if, if, if I just sit there and go through that process, it’s kind of psychological process, you build a little bit deeper relationship, you build, it’s a little less offensive when people are just going in and blowing up, hey, we sell this technology, it’s the best and sliced bread, let me tell you why.
I apply that to what I do here because we don’t just sell one service or one technology. These businesses want to be heard. They want to be understood and they want to be taken care of. So if we go in there and just talk about ourselves the entire time, they’re going to get turned off and they’re not going to see that connection. If we go in there and ask them some questions and have them get talking about their baby and how their baby needs some help and how we will care for their baby.
we’re going to get a lot further. And so we build these relationships that once we kind of break the ice and we start connecting on a level that’s past selling, I always like to say, I don’t, I don’t sell anything. I’m here to inform, educate, and most importantly, listen, get them talking about what they think is the problem. And they’re going to say things that ultimately lead to other opportunities and other problems that we can solve and other services that we can sell. So take your time.
build that relationship. Don’t be the guy that just goes in there or gal that goes in there and just trying to sell, just connect with the person and have the technology conversation second.
Josh Lupresto (07:13)
Love it. Love it. We’ll do Telarus relationship advice after dark. If we run out cloud topics. I love the, it’s a lot of parallels though. I mean, it is, it is a very psychological sales process. It’s, we’ve all been, I think, riddled back in the day with the engineers that come into the conversations that are just there to tell the customers, no, you’re dumb and this is the wrong way to do it. Like nobody wants to be talked to like that in life, let alone in a business conversation. So I love the,
Mike Kowalski (07:42)
That’s right.
Josh Lupresto (07:43)
I love the thought process. Let’s talk about an example here as we lead into a moment in time maybe where there’s a deployment or a customer pivot or just something that happened out in a deal or in the field that maybe just reshaped how you approached the design or how you approached how you were helping on that opportunity.
Mike Kowalski (08:05)
working on a new client, building that rapport, building that relationship, took a little bit of time, and they told us what they wanted to tell us. But when they first, when they then started to trust us, they started telling us a little bit more and a little bit more. And that led to the ultimate design and the win for this particular client. And what it is, is they run political websites. They are a safe haven for political people to host
their environments. And as you can imagine, some of those may be controversial and maybe some of them aren’t well liked and maybe some of them would draw the wrong attention. So they wanted to build a safe and secure environment to host these different websites. They were doing it within a multi-tenant managed environment that is not unsecure.
But they didn’t have a good grasp of their costs. They didn’t have a good grasp of who their neighbor was. They didn’t have all of these different pieces that lined up. When I offered to them to do a dedicated private environment, they were kind of a little bit hands off because they didn’t want to do this themselves. They didn’t want to do anything except for run their software platform and advocate for these different political websites.
When we came in there with one of our infrastructure as a service suppliers and they provided a dedicated physical environment that is in their own cage, that is in their own data center, it really kind of flipped a switch in them saying, we’ll have full control over the hypervisor. We can plug in anything that we want to into that hypervisor. We can manage it any way that we want. We can open or close any of the capabilities that we want to our users. And
by the way, it was 35 % less than they’re paying on their regular bill. They got really excited. What they didn’t get excited about was it has a finite capability. Now we overbuilt it just a little bit to account for some of that growth, but they’re saying, Hey, during a political storm, if this thing takes off and gets really busy, we don’t want to be cramped and stuck into this. So we built into a hybrid model. They have that dedicated footprint that has a dedicated cost.
And then if they’re needing more capacity, they’re making more money. They’re there. They feel free about, okay, let’s bring in other resources. So dynamically it grows. It grows into not only a VMware based hypervisor, but it also can burst into any other AWS Azure types because then it’s unlimited. And once they had that safety net and their investors saw, Hey, if something goes viral on our site, we’re not going to get, we’re not going to get shut down. ⁓ From a capacity standpoint.
We sold it. The installation went great. They’re up and running. It’s been a fantastic opportunity to kind of showcase what hybrid can do for you.
Josh Lupresto (11:01)
Let’s move into then, let’s talk a little about this whole Azure local things. Let’s jump into a couple of these topics. Azure local had a few different names throughout the years. ⁓ Microsoft, like others, loves to change these names. For anybody that’s not familiar, it’s this platform that allows you to say, okay, I’ve got my Azure portal. I can command and control from the Cloud, however I want to do it. But I want to take that infrastructure that is used in a Microsoft data center and drop it on-prem.
for X, Y, Z, whatever reasons, right? But still control it to your point, like you mentioned before in the other example. where do you see that really shine or maybe any story where that was that solved for? Is it a latency thing? Is it a compliance thing? Is it a data thing? I mean, walk us through where that fits.
Mike Kowalski (11:47)
it’s all the above really. It’s all of the above. ⁓ And it’s also the Broadcom thing. Hey, I don’t want to drop another VMware based node into my environment because I don’t want to pay Broadcom the money. I’m not getting the support. I’m not getting the value out of it. And I think Azure has been a very, ⁓ they took a little time to catch up to AWS, but now they’re there at parity and they’re doing some very cool things. And I think Azure local is one of them. Hey, I have deployments within the Azure clouds.
in regions where I don’t want to have data centers in regions where I don’t want, where I don’t have people, but I’m an established business and I have co-location and I, or I have a dedicated facility that I host my own equipment and I want to be done with hyper V. want to be done with a broad common VMware. Let’s, let’s federate all of this into one mesh where I can control where my pops are because maybe my application is latency sensitive.
And it’s just not good enough to be in a region within a hyper by a hyperscaler. I actually need it in Topeka, Kansas, and that’s where I’m going to build it. And I need one in Cleveland, Ohio, and that’s where I’m going to build it. And so it really gives them that capability of sniper like strategy of addressing where their, their trouble markets are and where they need to perform the best.
And you’re right, it has gone through some iterations and it’s going to continually go through iterations, but hopefully for the better, hopefully it draws down price, performance goes up, ⁓ usability goes up, accessibility to some of the bolt-on applications goes up, right? It’s just going to be an evolving thing.
Josh Lupresto (13:27)
Let’s shift gears then. Let’s talk about, I think, one of the hardest things in tech to do in databases. And so, you know, I got excited. I think we all got excited when we had a supplier to pop into the ecosystem that said, you guys know we do database as a service, right? And I think we’re, at that point, we were so preconditioned to go, people barely touch anything beyond infrastructure. Nobody wants the application at the time. Nobody wanted the database at the time.
You know, so we started seeing things like patch management for security and stuff come in. That was amazing. So here comes database ⁓ as a service. I think we don’t we don’t we haven’t seen people conditioned for years to be talking about this in the same way that they have about other things. So ⁓ before we get into maybe like just some of the complexities of why databases are so hard, I can come back to that. But how do we how do we just help partners help the TAs enunciate this play more? How would you?
How would you guide them to uncover these and just talk about this a little more? ⁓
Mike Kowalski (14:28)
Yeah, and I really
like this question, Josh, because there’s a theme here. You’re used to doing something in this space. If you’re a telephony person, then you’re used to talking about UC and then you got a little bit crazy, started talking about CC and now we’re talking about CX. If you’re a circuit person, you’re slinging circuits and that’s still a great business. It’s the lifeblood of any infrastructure.
But then you start talking about, what are you doing for redundancy and what are you doing for diversity and what are you doing for failover? ⁓ what are you doing? And then they start having the SD-WAN conversation. They start having these sassy conversations, right? So it’s an evolution of getting comfortable enough to ask that one more question and be unafraid to see where it goes. If you’ve moved from telephony and circuits and you’re starting to talk about infrastructure and you’re start talking about data, data centers,
get a little bit more comfortable and start asking about workloads. Workloads is the over-compassing word of, I’m running this application, I’m running this database, I’m serving these clients, right? That is a workload. And part of that is a database. There are very few things that are common within environments around every business, but database is probably in 90 to 99 % of all of the applications that are being run by your clients.
extending them the ability to help offset some of the skillset required to stay in front of that is, yeah, it’s pretty hard to do as an employer. They might have their dedicated team or dedicated person for database, but it is a person or it’s a team, right? It’s expensive. They take vacations, they take 401k, and I’m not advocating to get rid of these folks. Not at all. What I’m saying is maybe you’re a business that can’t afford to have this type of infrastructure.
but you’re paying for it, move it as a service. Get in a company that can do those types of services for you. So you get that 24 seven reliability. You get the ever scaling knowledge base of a business trying to stay competitive in the marketplace by offering the latest and the greatest in database technologies. And as you move it to a service,
you can customize it. You can get yourself aligned with the supplier that best fits your business size, your budget, your requirements, and that will stay consistent throughout your business. And then your, your, the TAs out there, if things change within the business and you need to scale up from SMB to enterprise, they will either keep you in alignment with the right supplier or they will go find you that supplier that will seamlessly transition your business as it grows from one step to the next. So get comfortable with having
an application conversation in a database is more likely to get you a response of, yes, I use a database. Well, how are you supporting that today? Is it a drain on your resources? Are you getting a good value out of the investment that you’re making now with that? Or do you feel like you could do a little bit better?
Josh Lupresto (17:37)
I love that. Yeah, I want to keep expanding on that. think to your point, you try to build an application today and you make it about five minutes and then you realize, yeah, I can’t store this stuff in the browser. I need a database in some capacity, whether you’re going to cloud, whether you’re in a data center, whatever you’re doing. I think you could probably start this conversation by saying, ⁓ hey, do you like to breathe air? my gosh, I do too.
Let’s talk about your database, because you probably have one. I that’s about the same reality to your point. And I think just to give people a little more color, where databases get really hard is scaling them. In infrastructure, if I need more compute cycles to process an incoming request to do whatever my application needs to do, can just throw more and auto scale that up. And I can scale that ⁓ horizontally.
pretty easily. But then when it comes to a database, you think about the complexity of database. can read a lot, but I can only write once. So what do I do then? Well, I just have this one server, and I’m speaking from experience, have we struggled through this. I have this one server. Well, I guess I could add more RAM to this one server because I can’t change the table structure because it’s already mounted to this disk.
I guess I could put more CPU in this one server and I could scale it up that way. So what you find yourself locked into is this horizontal scaling debacle to go, crap, ⁓ I don’t know how in the world I’m gonna scale this thing. And what if this one HP Blade server takes a crap? I’m kinda screwed. So you do certainly get into this thematic of.
databases and backup and you get into a backup and DR conversation. And there are lot of great ways. And this is where I think the as a service component comes into one, certainly backup and replication because this is your crown jewels, right? We talk about this a lot, but it seems like, ⁓ you know, augmenting, hey, you know what, maybe we can put less, we can, I’ve seen this a lot in some of these database conversations is we can say, you know what, let’s use this as the right source for the database.
and let’s read from many. Let’s propagate and kind of replicate that read out and let’s read from many. So you can start to get a little bit of horizontal with it. And I think those are the complexities. And I guess maybe to put a bow on this, seems like you correct me if I’m wrong here, but it seems like the security conversation that we have where we found who’s doing security for you, what’s that focus? Well, it’s this person that’s also got these 19 other responsibilities and they’re also doing security. It seems like we joked in the beginning that, you know, this is the dude in the basement conversation.
But it seems like there’s kind of a person because databases are really freaking hard. So I love your your segue of who’s handling it. How is it managed? How are you scaling? How resilient is it seems like that’s the best angle. Yeah
Mike Kowalski (20:35)
Yeah. And as,
as you got to keep track of sprawl and sprawl means costs. even though you’re able to, to meet the demand, is it getting, are you getting a good value on that? Because once that demand is gone, are you, are you ratcheting it back down? And those things take a lot of focus and they take a lot of effort to make sure that costs stay in line with, with the, the effort that you’re putting into it. So performance and costs needs to come at some sort of.
price of technology and set up and continually monitored. It’s not easy. And this is why having that conversation, getting that conversation started, you might hit a couple of golden spots there with the client. Their ears might perk up and they might say, I didn’t know you did this service. I didn’t know.
Josh Lupresto (21:23)
We had a
ding ding ding buzzer. Yeah, I love that. Like that’s the best question to get an answer to or the best statement to kind of hear back, I think, in a deal.
Let’s put the third point on this. Let’s talk about our favorite three letters, IBM. IBM workloads, still cranking, still tricky. ⁓ I think the reality is, we were just sharing an article this morning. IBM, I remember it powering the checkout of Kmart when I was eight, getting my childhood school shopping put on layaway.
maybe never to be seen again, different conversation. Power Series 11 just came out. And so here we are, we’re talking IBM’s always, we’re talking AS 400’s, this kind of monolithic monster that just ran and still runs, I think what like 75,000 of them still out there. So.
Mike Kowalski (22:03)
Yeah.
It runs. Yep.
Josh Lupresto (22:27)
You got IBM coming out with power series 11 that’s now AI chips. When we think, my gosh, this tech is never gonna die. What’s your feedback, current state, IBM workloads, ⁓ and maybe just modernizations that have won and kind of how we’ve gone through some of these conversations.
Mike Kowalski (22:43)
It’s the technology that just won’t die. And I think that if a business has something that’s been fully depreciated for 20 years and they’re paying a small fortune to keep it up and running with maintenance, and that is good business for them, they’ll be around a much longer time as well. ⁓ When we first started this conversation, I mentioned IBM in the basement because that’s kind of the thought that you get when someone says they have an AS400.
It’s like what we’re dark corner of the computer room is this in because they just simply build around it. It’s, it’s, it’s part of the infrastructure. They’re not moving it. It’s just going to stay in place and that’s okay. ⁓ at what price is that okay? Well, it kind of doesn’t lend itself well to being very relevant in how, how is, ⁓ all of these services interacting with the rest of your infrastructure.
How is it working as far as optimizing a DR failover plan? Because IBM’s failover plan is let’s have another IBM. Well, maybe that’s in the other corner of the basement, right? And surprising enough, they are innovating. IBM is still innovating. They’re coming out with new technologies. But I think that’s part of the bell curve where we’re trying to get people that have their AS400s or trying to get them to the top.
Are you ready to replatform that into a virtual IBM platform? And what are the benefits of that? Well, let’s walk through the electrical savings that you’ll have in your business. Kidding aside, ⁓ there are so many options now. There are more now than there ever were for you to engage with these clients about their AS400 strategy. These things are getting old. The people that are supporting them,
are retiring out. I don’t know anybody that’s coming out of college with a computer science degree saying I want to learn all about the IBM legacy as 400i series, right? Their I series are staying relevant, but it’s the old ones that stay in place. ⁓ So we were talking a little bit earlier, I saw this ad while I was at the gym this morning of a per is a cartoon, the guy went for the heavy weights, and he’s got a really
really buff arm, he’s doing all of these lifts, well then they focus out and the cartoon is of a guy that just has one really big bicep and the rest of his body is skinny. And the commercial was actually for IBM and I think this is a great analogy because the AS400Z’s legacy IBM platforms are that one big muscle
And it keeps the rest of your body flat, keeps the rest of the organization flat, because you’re putting so much focus into this one body part. And I think if you can start again, having those conversations about the new capabilities of replatforming off of AS 400 while still running your legacy apps is completely possible today with our portfolio services. And they are going to gain so many things by moving in this direction that
they don’t even know yet. And those are really cool conversations to have.
Josh Lupresto (26:08)
Yeah, I like that. What I walked away from that is IBM is still relevant. ⁓ I was just pulling this up while you were chatting or while we were chatting. ⁓ It’s still a mega stock. It’s a 280 billion dollar market cap as of July of 2025. And so I can’t imagine we’d have to look this up to see how much of that revenue is still kind of stuck into that infrastructure side. But I imagine a lot of that is driving that. And it sounds like
I’m still okay to skip leg day, feel like is what.
Mike Kowalski (26:39)
you can skip leg day. Every once in a while you can skip leg day, but don’t just
work on one arm. Don’t just work on the IBM arm. The IBM doesn’t run the entire business.
Josh Lupresto (26:50)
It’s a great comparison though. And if you think about it, in these conversations that we’ve been in to your point, like we always talk about, bring us in, we’ll help you, we’ll find more opportunity. We see that because it just happens expectedly and unexpectedly because we’ve seen deals where the partners and the customers think nobody can help. And we think, yes, we have IBM modernization.
vendors in the ecosystem, we know how to do this, whether they want to lift and shift, whether they just want to start with some backups to just decide it. And lo and behold, what happens is it gets migrated, PowerSiri stays up, somebody else hosts it and manage it, and slowly but surely they start to application refactor, fire that up into some x86 infrastructure, so there’s more MRR in that. And then it’s just a gradual growth component from that because
the organizations can’t afford the downtime because this is like, you know, it’s, it’s the, I don’t know, it’s the aorta, I guess, of the heart. I mean, it’s it’s the heart and it’s the you can’t do without either at the end of the day. So ⁓ just there’s still so many of these out there. It’s baffling to me.
Mike Kowalski (28:02)
Well, one of the things that the operators of these IBM platforms are doing is they’re experiencing decay and that the decay of the equipment is forcing them to spend more money on it. It’s forcing them to put more investment of time and energy into it. And you don’t want to be with a platform that is necessarily just decaying day after day after day. You want to be on the other side. You want to be with applications where new versions are coming out and new feature functionalities, capabilities, efficiencies are coming out.
So you want to be on that growth side of things. And it’s just not going to be possible on some of these older platforms until they pull the trigger, see the value in moving, and then start doing so. And that could be, these are not small installations in most cases. It could be a humongous opportunity for our TAs to get in there and address some of these conversations.
Josh Lupresto (28:53)
Let’s wrap up maybe kind of, guess, final couple of thoughts here. So I think we’ve weaved in, we’ve woven in some questions specifically, but I mean, just take, let’s walk everybody out with a few key questions that you still love, go-to ones to just uncover infrastructure pain, uncover Azure opportunities, uncover IBM opportunities, any kind of final ones we haven’t talked about ⁓ that you.
want to see people saying more or seeing success with?
Mike Kowalski (29:25)
Going back to my original statement, I think, ⁓ again, this is a great question because if we can challenge those that are watching this today to go in to maybe one of their trusted clients and start asking uncomfortable questions, I think they can then learn to take that and apply that to everybody in their database, their customer base. And some of those things are, if you’re not an infrastructure guy, start talking about the infrastructure.
We have all of the, what workloads do you have going right now? Which ones are you struggling with? It’s a very broad question. And they may say, well, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Well, are you running databases? Are you running web services? Are you running ERP? Are you running? So you can just say workloads. What workloads are you running right now that you’re, kind of challenging and why are they challenging to you? you can’t keep up with the demand because your infrastructure is fixed. ⁓ I can help you with that.
I can’t keep up because I’ve been trying to hire ⁓ a system administrator for my team for the last six months. ⁓ I can help you with that. The workload question leads to so many different things. It can lead to security questions. It can lead to connectivity questions. Hey, I bigger fatter pipes in my building. And if you have that conversation and they start saying things, that’s great. If you don’t know what they’re saying, that’s okay too, because your next word should be.
Let me get you on the phone with one of my solution engineers so that we can really capture this information and start formulating your next steps in a plan to move forward and overcome these obstacles in the business. So I think if you could just get the courage to ask about workloads and let it be a natural conversation, don’t sell anything. Let’s see what that leads to. And hopefully it leads some really good conversations further where we get involved and we start selling more services.
Josh Lupresto (31:23)
Love it.
The edge is constantly moving around, right? It used to be hub and spoke MPLS and the edge was at the center. Then, you know, we started getting resiliency at the branches. You’ve got an AI and big data centers, all of these things. It seems like we’ve gone through so many cycles, right? And there’s always a good news story, a new news story about this evolution, that evolution. As you think forward about this over the next, you know, I don’t know, six, 12, maybe 18 months, hard to look past that. What are the trends that you’re
most excited to kind of pay attention to that you’re watching for.
Mike Kowalski (31:56)
Going back to the bell curve response I gave earlier, I feel like a lot of a lot more of our, these companies that we work with are a little bit higher up on the bell curve. Now they understand that the technology is here to stay. They know that their peers are implementing these technologies and that could be anything from infrastructure as a service to database as a service to moving to containerization, right? These things have been proven out and each use case is based, is a good fit for each business.
the AI conversation is still in full effect. I think this adoption of AI is starting to get a little bit more reasonable and people are starting to understand the capabilities and how it can address their business. So instead of going in there and trying to sell them or tell them all of the different capabilities, we’re starting to get a lot more responsive inquiries saying, hey, I want my business to implement AI and do this.
I’d like to use this on my infrastructure so that it can dynamically scale and it monitors this. I want it in my security so it can monitor and it can respond in this fashion. ⁓ On the data center side, we’re still getting these big power requirements for those that have learned enough, but know how to monetize it and like to build it themselves. So it’s really hitting all of the facets of the business. I don’t want AI to be necessarily the oval
overarching conversation, but it’s hard to not realize that during this process, we’re getting got a little visitor today. We’re getting this as more common conversation, it is not as ⁓ controversial as it was before businesses are seeing a real return on this. They’re seeing a real savings on this when they implement it correctly. And RTAs
are starting to have a lot of these conversations just in general, where we’re getting pulled in and it’s leading to opportunity after opportunity. So I’m most excited about that because it includes every facet of a company. And it’s not just isolated to CX or it’s not isolated to connectivity, right? It’s an overarching conversation.
Josh Lupresto (34:10)
I it. I love it. It’s a good place to wrap it my friend, Mr. Kowalski. Thanks for lots of nuggets in here. Thanks for coming back on doing this again, man.
Mike Kowalski (34:19)
Yeah, you’re welcome. If anybody has any questions about this or anything going forward, feel free to reach out to me. If you got Josh’s contact information, he’ll put you in touch.
Josh Lupresto (34:27)
Awesome. All right, everybody that wraps us up for today. As always, wherever you’re listening to us from, Spotify, Apple, remember when these drop on Wednesdays, do subscribe so you can get these as soon as they pop out. But that wraps us up for today. This has been Azure at the Edge, IBM in the basement and databases everywhere. Mike Kowalski, Solution Architect, Data Center and Cloud at Telarus. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Engineering at Telarus.