145-From Migration to Mastery: How to Dominate Google Cloud! With Koby Phillips Pt. 1/3
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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 BizTech.
Alright, everybody, welcome back. This week, we’re talking about migration to mastery, how to dominate Google Cloud and more in with the studio here, Mr. Koby Phillips, VP of the cloud practice at Telarus. Welcome in, man.
Amen. How would it be here?
We got a lot of exciting stuff. I haven’t brought Google Cloud onto this podcast much, but as people are going to hear, we get some some fun things to learn things people been asking for for a while. So we’re gonna get to that in a minute.
But you know, you’ve been on a couple previous episodes, we’re going to get to those and kind of build on some of those points. But as the leader of the cloud practice for anybody that’s not familiar, walk us through a little bit about what that means and what kind of some of the focuses are in your role.
As VP of the cloud practice, the real responsibility we have is to make sure that we’re always extending the reach of the advisors and to new technologies were available. So we’re always looking to explore that enhance what we already have working with our suppliers working on different tools that they can bring to the to the relationship for advisors, looking at just ways to make things ultimately better in our streamline and technology. So either, again, more access, better and enhanced tooling or education, expertise, etc. I mean, Josh, your team has grown leaps and balances. We started this thing in 2020, right? We was no cloud focus to now I can point and be like, I think everybody’s got at least a certification, if not multiple certifications, we have architects that specialize in this.
So just enhancing the depth of what we bring to the table, and continuing to keep an eye on like on the business while we’re working in the business.
So let’s let’s talk about new developments. So maybe kick us off just one or two. There’s a lot right? There’s there’s AI, all these things, but just walk us through maybe one or two new developments that are focus points for this year.
I mean, it’s gonna be AI, in all the spin off of AI. Just like anything else, like cloud has really been the one that has been the biggest example of, hey, this was like when we went to cloud, you know, 1520 years ago, for a lot of customers, the biggest developments have been what is it that I’m actually selling? And what are the what’s the actual opportunity? It was like, buzzword, buzzword, like new tech, all this really cool stuff, like, oh, there’s robot dogs now, all of these things to let what are we actually selling and what what can we take advantage of? And how can we help our customers and what their their needs are and getting a better, like roadmap and a lot more clarity around that has really been the emergence of, let’s say, in the last six months, I’m going, how do we take this really cool thing, and make it really, really valuable and usable for our customers and for our advisors.
So if we flashback, some of the previous episodes, we had you on Episode 89. All right, we talked early on about cloud modernization,
stack rank, and like the most viewed, just I mean, asking,
it’s actually one of the worst. And I’m hoping by suggesting it, people will go back.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Let’s like, let’s get the ratings
No,
what I love is that every time somebody listens to one, they come back and they listen to the previous the previous and we find that they really are building on it. And so we were talking, talk modernization and 89. And then in one on one, we kicked off at the beginning of this year talking about, here’s some great strategies that I think you laid out for everybody, how to go tackle some of these deeper cloud conversations, right? So excited to see people been putting those things to good use. Now, if we think about what’s changed since then, it’s been a lot obviously about AI.
We were talking a lot about data privacy and things like that. So if you take into consideration the llms, all of that, how does that change your story around data privacy, data classification and some of the additional strategies now?
sort of an analogy, right? Imagine you’re going to organize like your closet or better yet, we’ll do a pantry.
Data for a lot of customers is like an organized pantry, like it’s all there. We have so much stuff in the way you can’t ever find what you’re looking for. And so data classification or data readiness, if you want to start to utilize that that phrasing, is really this idea of cleansing out the stuff. So anything with an expiration date that I don’t really need, or it’s bad, or any of that kind of stuff, let’s get rid of that. I think we’ve all been there. Then, okay, I don’t really know where my peanut butter is, because I got it mixed in with like pasta and cereal and everything’s just kind of thrown in there. So how do I start to label it and clean it up and get it where I can find and access things quickly, and then restock it accordingly whenever I go grocery shopping, and everything starts to work together. And I can start to figure out what I have to cook my meals a lot better and get more innovative even in it. A lot of companies will have multiple streams of data coming in 710 plus streams of data and they’re not connected. And anyway, there’s no API is even internally, they’re not dropping into a data lake or data warehouse of any sort. And so to take advantage of like an LLM, and this AI technology that’s coming up the two biggest concerns right off the bat, data quality, which this addresses that and use case.
And so those are the two things that we talk about the most on our side of the AI fence. Of course, you have the three different flavors that we talk about mostly in our in our space, being conversational and predictive, which heavily dominates in the CX, but it pulls through into generative. Oh, man, I started with circles. Yeah, we’re just gonna call it gin. You want to hit me up with a correction really quick?
That was generative guys. That was generative.
Yeah. So we’re gonna go with Jin AI. So we don’t porky pig it on my end. And it’s only like the seventh on their time I tried to do that. That’s the word. It’s just one of those things. We’re just gonna move past it. And that’s the LLMs, right? Like that’s the that’s the part that set the world on fire in the last several months. And you’ve seen more adoption of like chat GPT and Gemini and all of these developments coming out and everyone’s like, how do I take advantage of that. And that is really the opportunity for advisors, it’s helping them give them a sense of like, okay, figure out what it is that you want them to do. And here’s a quick tip that I’ve done with customers on calls. When they don’t have their own use case, but they’re interested in AI, I use an AI engine and just literally type in the name of that customer and say, give me an AI use case, throw it out there, it lands so far 100% of the time. Because they’re just looking for some way to point their direction because the pressure they’re getting from like their executives or the competitive pressures or sales and marketing internally, on what are we doing with AI, we saw this really cool thing.
It’s blown up a lot of roadmaps, it’s grown up a lot of a like, CIOs like timeframes and what they’re looking to work on. And so like anytime there’s disruption or something cutting edge, there’s an opportunity, we just got to help bring in the right insights to how to guide that for a customer.
Yeah, and I think since since we had you on at the beginning of the year, right, we were laying out some strategies, we’ve gone and tested some of those strategies. And I think the cool thing that are kind of the new learning thing has been, this is one of those times where we really have the opportunity as advisors to tell the customer what we think they should do to tell them what their use cases they don’t know, they know they need to do it, but they’re not exactly sure. So I love the I love that, hey, go out there, use chat GPT, talk, you know, plug in your customer, and figure out a use case and start suggesting those. And I think if anything, that’s that’s helping them sell it upstream, that’s helping them consider the value, the ROI, all of those things, right?
Yeah, to me, coming up with the use cases and the win, the win is getting them that start to want to do the use case, right? So how you get it, I wouldn’t be, I think sometimes people look in there like, Oh, whether you use AI, and they’re almost, it’s almost like kind of like shameful or something. And in my head, that is a business tool that should be like utilized all the time. And if you can make your life easier, I think that’s what we use technology for all the time. So why not take that step? And then again, it’s executing on the vision that you’re helping them craft.
Think about this just from like a perception point of view as an advisor, here’s an idea of what you could do where I got the idea, I’m happy to tell you, you can use it to at least you know, I’m innovative enough to utilize the technology that you’re wanting to use, put it into place. And just like anything else in a cutting edge emerging technology, it’s not so much like the, you know, the idea that now it comes down to do you have the team that you can do this with? Do you have the right expertise in house? And that’s what’s exciting about the quick evolution of our portfolio, we went from having like a couple of suppliers that have like an idea to all of a sudden, like I look around and like, AI practice, and they have depth, and they do this, and they’re, they’re doing app development around AI, they’re, they’re building out infrastructure around AI. And all of these really cool things, relatively in a in a manner in which I haven’t seen like a product, so to speak development
and come to market that rapidly. So that’s also really exciting.
And I, you know, I do love the pantry example, because to play on that a little bit, you walk into the pantry at a certain point. And we all know there’s a bunch of crap on the top shelf that I’ve just been thrown up there, I’ve just been putting off, I’m gonna read, you know, I’m gonna take the time to restructure and lay everything out. But life happens, and you never do that story is the same thing from an IT perspective. They know they need to do it. But they go, Do I know how do I need help with that? When am I going to get to that? What’s the real like, what’s the real value of benefit? Now there is huge value and benefit of it.
Yeah, I mean, and these are still majorly helpful, but cloud optimized workshops.
Those were those were the big thing when people were trying to figure out how to go to cloud, give me my first steps. And again, those still happen all the time, extremely valuable. Now you’re getting AI workshops, like how do I get ready for AI? What am I looking to do? What flavor do I really want? And so you’re seeing more and more of that take place. I mean, I’ve seen some crazy examples to with this technology expanding the buyer’s footprint.
And talking to one of our suppliers, they’re talking about their AI, they are strictly what we would deem a cloud supplier work with with Microsoft only, they’re really just dialed in on that. And he’s like, Yeah, now I’m dealing with the CXO, the chief experience officer, and they’re not and that’s usually a CX conversation. So we’re also seeing this be a tremendous bridge to extend an advisor’s reach into multiple swim lanes of technology, and bring it all together. So it’s setting at the center point that is, and will continue to be a major conversation, just a matter of how much insight we can bring and like, how do we harness that opportunity?
So let’s, let’s shift this here. Let’s talk a little bit about Google. So, you know, this is a hyperscaler that’s been out there, right from a market share perspective, we think, you know, maybe once or twice Google, we think about AWS, we think about Azure, and now we got all this family of products available to us from a Google perspective. So I’m just going to throw a few out there. We’re talking about infrastructure, we’re talking about storage, we’re talking about BigQuery, Google Gemini from an LLM. And then, you know, when we talk about data privacy, Google’s got a product for that, right to feed into the LLM. So given all of those there, I mean, what does that what does that mean for the channel? What do you how do you want partners to think about that?
Well, I mean, you look at like, AI as a service, and you look at the biggest leaders in AI as a service, which is simply give me the platform in which I can build my eye on and utilize it and it can extend to and from that point.
AWS, Google and Microsoft happen to be like your top three, right? And then you see a lot of people building out their own. But just like with anything else, the ability to scale and build and develop product. AWS has been developing and turning on new products left and right for a number of years. Google’s doing the same in Microsoft. When I look at Google, and I look at like that competitive landscape, they all have tables, infrastructure, storage in this, but Google’s really been known as the place for developers to go. You had like Microsoft is like the enterprise when they came along and Azure came along. That was to follow suit with their course of like enterprise level businesses following them. And again, I think it’s the most genius marketing of all time. They gave their their products to schools for free. They get hooked on Excel and Word and all these other things at a young age. So of course, as you’re a professional, that’s what you’re used to utilizing, who wants to learn new stuff.
And so Microsoft and then there’s more conversations around, hey, I’m going to cloud, we’re going to Azure and you’re like, well, what do you go to Azure? And I like because I work with Microsoft. So Microsoft has their place AWS was the first and most innovative and getting all of these different products. And they were like the early adopters and the innovators for like cloud infrastructure and this and that will Google comes along a little bit later. And they’re like, man, I’ve got a we got to be a little different. And they just made their platform so easy to develop on. And again, like, think of like BigQuery and like the search and the data retention and all that kind of stuff. I mean, that’s their bones in their background. And so these companies built their clouds early on and then kind of continue to innovate. It’s no different than really look at like, it was a new market. And as they innovate, they all create new stuff and they dump more money into it and new products and Google, AWS and Azure, if you really look at it, they all have answers to pretty much all of their RIC products. Now it’s just more of like what they’re known for. That sound kind of familiar to an industry? Yeah, maybe like a TSD.
Yeah, right.
Yeah. You’ve got all these like emerging companies trying to do stuff and they all get tagged as like, oh, these guys are good at that, even though you dig in deeper, and maybe they’re equal or maybe maybe one’s better than the other. And I think that’s what Google’s seeing more and more market share. Plus, they took a page out of the Microsoft book and see more schools getting Google products in early and for free and things like that. So my kids are using it. Yeah. So you’re getting more like, you know, they’re running each other’s plays, they’re getting more innovative. But I think Google and don’t quote me on this, because I don’t have it in front of me, I think they doubled their market share still still third caught up, caught
up, they’re catching up.
It’s it’s important because here’s what happens. It’s you got the enterprise guys at Lien into Microsoft, you got the early adopters and like the stable guys that have that I hit on AWS, you kind of got these like, like you said, my kids are using this now, you got kind of the newer generation, I think that leans more into Google, and the ones that a lot do a lot more development. And for an advisor, I think they could care less. And I can understand why they just need it, they just need access. And who can do do most. And I’ll tell you this, the ones that we can spread across multiple ones in a private cloud and maybe some on prem stuff. That’s the ones we’re looking for, because those become extremely sticky, and extremely profitable for advisors and everybody involved.
So let’s think about the potential here, I guess, of I’ve got all these Google products available to me. There’s ways to monetize, right? There’s the pro serve component of it. There’s migrations, there’s, there’s so much to unpack there around all those products and other products. How do you want partners to be thinking about this, right? How do you want them to kind of walk away knowing, all right, understood Azure understood AWS, what should be maybe let’s just get into some of those strategies that we want them to walk away with and employ.
You don’t have to say no to anything. I mean, getting into the weeds of what they do differently is really what your team’s for, right? What the suppliers that utilize them are for. For them, it’s it doesn’t matter if a client wants to go to Google, they want to go to Azure, they want to go to AWS, they want private, they want like some on prem support, you have access to all of that, and not trying to oversimplify it. But that’s what I focus on. Focus on you could either dive into the tech and start to do the separations and all that. And there’s tons of information on this that you can go and digest. But ultimately, it’s really coming down to the fact that you can give a solution, no matter what the scenario is for your clients now. And that’s the really exciting part. Google is a bit of a hole, right? There was maybe one, two options for the channel. I’ve seen that extend, we’ve got more on boarding, that’s it’s an emerging thing for our channel to be able to access. And I think that that’s really the key is that there’s not not anything that they have to say no to anymore.
So as you’ve, you know, you get out and you get to see a lot of these strategies, you get to, you know, teach a lot of do a lot of role playing at the ascends and things like that. Any, any recommendations there as a partner walks away from a strategy perspective that you think, all right, if they’re gonna go out and tackle this right now, they’re gonna have some different conversations are going to open up these doors. What’s your what’s your guidance on that conversation? Anything different than before? Is it the same old knowing now you can confidently have additional products in the backbone?
Well, I think a lot of times we, we go and try to source what we’re asked for. And that’s a total, like normal cadence. I would say like, if there’s any, anything, I would just ask why, to start off. I know that sounds like really simple. And we’ve said that for a number of years. And I think there’s been not a training that I haven’t heard either a supplier myself or somebody say, just ask why and like, focus on the business conversations and things like that. And if you want to go down that road, I’ll do a quick spin off the business conversation that has the most like impact is really attacking the optimization of the use the applications and the resources that a company is utilizing. How do you do that? You really start talking about project completion percentage. How much of your projects are coming in on time? Are your resources available? And really kind of start thinking through what the force multiplier is that they don’t think about this, there’s an IT project for a reason. They don’t come in on time. What does that do to the organization? What’s the force multiplier? And how much does that set you back? Not just tech debt, but just overall production and things like that.
And when you start to have that business conversation, then it starts to kind of open up and go, well, what are you considering? Like, would you be open to other things? Because now you’re opening it up to a company if there’s really three ways to look at how to manage it, in source, co source, outsource, if they’re all in source, meaning, just do everything internally, might open them up to do co source. And if they’re already doing co source and outsource, now you might be opening their mind to go, hey, let me get the right player in here, that’s going to put you in position. And they might have some stuff in Azure. They might they might put your they might put some storage in AWS, or they might do some production level stuff in AWS. And they might do dev, and sandboxing in Google. And we’re also going to put some stuff in a private cloud and some stuff on prem, we’re going to build an architect it off of an edge, in which all of this stuff works on like within microseconds or milliseconds of latency. And oh, by the way, we’ll probably end up containerizing a lot of your environments, it doesn’t really matter to you where the app goes or lives, it’s going to perform to an optimal level, you start to have like that type of design and high level. And then you say, let me get my team involved to talk about the like the details of how we get there and what we got to do. And this also sets you up Mr. Customer, for that AI project that I know that you’re probably looking at. And this will get your data and alignment in as part of this conversation, which is a number one, you know, concern with AI is data quality. Yeah. So you just use that talk track.
And pieces of it, I’ve seen a high, high, high success rate, both personally doing it and then advisors doing it as well.
But
so we’ve got a lot of great resources out there. But I mean, for for partners, if they haven’t dove into this yet, they want to explore the Google side a little bit further, they want to dive even deeper into cloud. We’ve got a lot of ways to help out with that. And so what’s your advice for a partner at going, you know what, I haven’t made that transition into this segment yet, I want to get a little further into what would you advise?
I would always start with like, shameless plug on to Lairs University, right? So you’re going to have supplier updates here, where they’re going to be plugging in their Google plays and support, and products and how they go to market, and education sectors on that. If you want to go deep, deep dive, I’ll point you to the same place you pointed me five years ago
is like something like a cloud guru. And what’s the other one?
Cloud guru? Yeah, you to me.
Yeah, there’s like those type of resources. Simply, again, if you really want to just do quick down and dirty, throw it in an AI engine and say, give me the difference between GCP, AWS and Azure, and get at a high level and 10 bullet points or less. If you just want to have like that type of knowledge, if you want to go deeper, then again, utilize that that type of information has been available, you know, for years, these three get compared all the time,
as just big companies. And so it’s fun. And then products and breakdown. But I would say those would be like the sources I would use. And the reason I’d go into an AI engine anymore, it’s just a more streamlined Google. I know that’s kind of ironic, given the conversation right then. But now I don’t have to like click through articles, it just does it all for me. Yeah, it’s a nice, nice pretty bow on it.
Yeah, no, I like that. Another thought that that we talk about from time to time is there’s funding available for these projects. So Azure has their own.
AWS has their own. Google has their own. You want to talk about that for a second of just how people need to consider that? If they’ve got a customer that’s landed? Oh, by the way, could we look at it funding available for this?
Yes. All of these programs, right, are known by the suppliers that are in the middle. So think about it like AWS, Google, Microsoft, will take a supplier that they work with and walk deals over to them left and right. So if you can get tight with any of those type of reps, and kind of intercept those leads, and then register them for yourself, all the better. But this is something that happens like Google in particular, we’ll get a deal to the five yard line.
Discounts are easier for them to get if they push it towards a resale partner. And oftentimes, depending on the situation, more times than not, the rep actually gets caught more for pushing it through a resale partner that we would work with as a supplier as, as you know, there’s a middleman, right, we’re not going directly to the hyperscalers and working through them. So as they do this, there’s also funding programs with all of these guys that are well known at those suppliers of what levers to pull, how to pull that through. So as an advisor, simply just making sure that you ask and get the details of it. So you can be in the middle and understanding that for your clients, and just start to get your mind around how that works. But it could take like $150,000 migration and wipe it off the table what all three of these guys are driving towards is consumption. They just want to have everyone tied into it and their consumption levels go up. And try to if you do start to network with like a Google rep or Microsoft rep or any of these guys, understand what their levels are of consumption that are needed and see what clients that you have that can meet those.
Most of our like, traditional advisors have a unique superpower that these guys don’t quite understand. The networking and the connections to these clouds drive those consumptions. You know, there’s a cheesy saying, connections drive consumption, right? I think I was just tap dancing around it. So I was just went ahead and said it in here. But that means getting it networked, right and driving into the cloud from where the end user is, could be the difference in $2,500 of consumption for an Azure rep, or they’re quota of $5,000 on that client, just from like failed VPNs or networking or egress charges that go down. These are all things that like you can understand and make an impact on and start to bring in drive value inside of these deals as well.
Final thoughts, totally different topic, slightly different, but important. The Mike Tyson fight. So I’m sitting at home, I’m watching it with some friends, cuts out, sons watching it down the street, different city seems fine, never cut out for him. What can we learn? We’ve seen plenty of memes, right? But what can we learn about this great, amazing, huge provider that surely has all of their network and architecture figured out and should never have any issues? What can we learn about some of the outages, some of the, you know, some of the things that happened during that? What do you want advisors to walk away or help understand a little bit about what might have happened with some of some of the people that couldn’t watch the fight for a little while?
Technology is hard. Like, think about what they’ve built out from a CD and content delivery network and driving to millions of homes all around the world. If you start to think about all of the things that go into that, and then to still get oversaturated because of one event, and kudos to like, them for trying to do more live things, right? If you think of a way like Hulu live works, it’s really just taking what’s already streaming and then re platforming and handed it off with a small the smallest lag possible from like a live, more traditional cable feed. Netflix is bypassing that piece and just going live streaming just like you would on like a web platform and to a home built off their CDN and multiple CDN partners that they utilize. So traffic shaping and getting bottlenecked and all that kind of stuff. If that’s what it is, they haven’t actually publicly commented as of like, you know, a few minutes before this, I was just looking for any last minute things to bring on. But it, you know, they’re like, Oh, it’s a bandwidth issue. Well, yeah, it’s a ton of different bandwidth. But then are they saying it’s a bandwidth issue on the users or any of that? I feel like gamers, I’m not a big online gamer, but I feel like gamers go through this already. So they’re probably just like, this is my pain. But if you look at like some of the again, the reach that you have, you have clients that are any kind of a streaming service, you have multiple different options to secure that business and walk them through it.
CDN is, you know, content delivery is evolved in chains from years ago, like level three. When I was there, I was like discovering what it was. And they’re like, Yeah, we do content delivery for the World Series, which I thought was cool, just from being a big baseball fan didn’t understand what it was, but certainly told everyone about it. To now where I look at it in like the different style of it and the pops and how many connection points and how the traffic overflows and fails over, you can see a lot of like, ways that that could fail. And unfortunately, I don’t know that it was a complete failure, but it wasn’t as quality as like what Netflix has been associated with. Yeah, I think their stock took a hit for a couple of minutes. And that’s already bounced back up.
I mean, if depending on how you look at it, didn’t miss much of a fight anyways, based on what everybody’s saying. Sad, but true. Yeah. So but man, what a good job hyping it up. And for Netflix and for the individuals involved.
Yeah, no, love it. I yeah, if there’s, if Netflix can have struggles,
everybody needs help. I think that’s the walk away for sure.
I mean, you look at all of the major technology downfalls this year. Yeah, I think that just rings true. And you know, the other thing too, that immediately when you go to that, I mean, as somebody that’s in technology, do you think it was something malicious like a cybersecurity attack?
Cross your mind.
Yeah, 100%. It does. And then you’re like, wait, am I exposed now? Yeah, buffering? Yeah. What are they taking from me? Like, you just start to think these weird things. And you were like, did they come up with some new kind of buffering, like malicious pack?
Yeah.
But those are the things that go on. If we think those, and people are trying to figure it out, that means there’s opportunity for us to have conversations. And that’s why our channel continues to grow and thrive.
So final thought, I always like to ask this one is you just think 12 months out 12 plus months out, any innovations you’re looking most forward to anything you want us to be focused on more or less, just take us home.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, just the continued innovation and product development and insight into AI, you’re gonna see a lot more AI, you know, optimized workshops or AI checklist and this and that that’s going to be the overwhelming message.
I use this joke when we did a presentation, I think at one of our AI summits. And I was like, remember what SD-WAN just was everywhere and everyone talked about SD-WAN and it was like going to be the biggest game changer ever. And to the degree, I mean, it definitely reshaped network, right? AI is going to extend past that and it’s going to continue to innovate and change. I’m just interested in seeing where the road takes us and then how do we continually bring that back to our advisors and their clients and put that into successful use cases.
Cool. Alright, man, that wraps us up for today. As always, thanks for thanks for coming back into doing this with me.
Yeah, man, we’ll see if we can get those ratings up.
Let’s try it guys. Hey, get Koby these views and clicks, will you? Man. Alright, that’s it, everybody. Koby Phillips, VP of Cloud Practice at Telarus, migrations with Google. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. Until next time.