Guest Speaker 1 5:38
Majority of those non place dependent anybody’s feelings, they can be more productive for a home, there are some employees because they feel that they’re more productive.
Guest Speaker 2 5:55
Their employees work to what they’re dubbing a hybrid work model, a mix of remote, and in office work,
Guest Speaker 1 6:02
which essentially gives the employees choice around where and how they get work done.
Guest Speaker 2 6:08
The feedback is big three companies getting productivity is up among employees working remotely overall. But the plan is still in its infancy. How many people will choose to work from home and how often so open questions for brands to survey workers again in the next few weeks to get a better idea.
Rolando Rosas 6:25
All right. Were you able to get some of that?
Charinna Kushnir 6:28
I was and it’s very relevant.
Rolando Rosas 6:31
Okay, so So tell me, what do you what do you think about what have you heard, just just give me your thoughts on what Ford is planning on doing?
Charinna Kushnir 6:37
I think that that is the wave of the future. I think that COVID accelerated the timelines Rolando on that hybrid work environment. And I think a lot of companies and organizations didn’t even know they had the capacity to have the hybrid approach to working. But now they do because they were forced into it when everybody was sent home. I definitely think that the ability to use technologies like Microsoft voice enable teams has helped to revolutionize and streamline the way that we interact. But I will continue to say that there is something to be said for face to face interactions. We hear a Data Canopy are working in a hybrid environment, sometimes in the office and sometimes remotely from home. And we find that the mix of being in the office together as well as working remote has kind of given us that that happy place of both?
Dave Kelly 7:38
Yeah, absolutely. So you know what, you kind of answered it already. But on that video clip Ford, they did mention that mentioned the productivity gains, as a result of remote work using tools such as Microsoft Teams, or the organizations that you’re talking to? Are they seeing similar trends using collaboration tools, like teams?
Charinna Kushnir 8:00
Absolutely, Dave, we are a we actually use Microsoft voice enable teams here as an organization ourselves at Data Canopy. And, you know, I won’t tell you that it’s the perfect product all the time, because that that wouldn’t be true. But it is a great collaboration tool. To do voice, video, video conferencing, audio conferencing, it works perfect in those environments. I will say that, for companies that have large, maybe call centers or contact centers, it may not be the perfect tool for for that particular environment. But for conference calls for audio conferencing, for video conferencing, it’s a great tool.
Rolando Rosas 8:45
And use and so it’s a great tool. And one of the things that we’ve been trying to communicate with our audience here, especially for those folks that are still using Skype for businesses, there are a lot of organizations that are still on Skype for Business and look at the clock, there’s 130 days left, until Skype for Business is retired. What should businesses be doing or organizations not all businesses, but organizations that are on Skype for Business? What should they be doing to get ready for that transition to teams? Which is the replacement for Skype?
Charinna Kushnir 9:15
It’s a great question. Well, so the good news is, is that Microsoft gave us a lot of time. So as a Microsoft partner here ourselves where our CSP at Data Canopy, we’ve been working very closely with a lot of organizations to to help them transition. So initially, when Microsoft came out and said that they were going to shift from Skype to teams, they said that they weren’t going to allow any other providers to get involved in those transitions. But what they very quickly realized is that they’re really good at what they do, but not necessarily great at voice. So now they have a lot of partners coming in to work with them on the enablement on the voice side.
Rolando Rosas 9:57
Talk about where it Charinna let me just sure for one Second, because some folks may or may not understand this bifurcation between the voice and the data side and the collaboration tools, and the voice tools, if you could take just about 30 seconds, just just to sort of folks to get an essence for what you’re saying about voice versus the other part of the Skype for Business or Microsoft Office Suite?
Charinna Kushnir 10:19
Absolutely. So it’s a great question, Microsoft, if you go on their website, and you try to enable what we call PSTN access, which is dial tone, you will not find that to be a simple process. I think that they purposely made it complicated. It’s better to bring in an expert on voice. And there are a lot of organizations out there who are experts on voice and know how to voice enable teams. From there, you still need a Microsoft partner like Data Canopy, to take over the Microsoft licensing, to have that second component. So you need a voice provider, as well as a CSP to have a successful deployment. What Microsoft realized pretty early on and what we saw, especially Rolando, in the beginning and Dave, of COVID was, they weren’t great at reporting. That was not their area of expertise. And they didn’t have enough phone numbers for the demand that they had for voice enablement in the beginning, right. And that’s where we saw them fall down. Microsoft has one network operation center for voice, where organizations that are experts on voice have multiple, three and four network operation centers. That’s kind of what separates them from going to Microsoft directly to do a project like that, you’re really better off using somebody that’s an expert on voice, and then somebody like Data Canopy, that’s an expert on the Microsoft licensing site in combination to have the successful teams deployment.
Rolando Rosas 11:53
And I would imagine, the larger the organization, the more complex the whole project can be. Because if you’ve got multiple sites, different departments, folks that are have different responsibility, you really need somebody that that understands how to navigate that voice component as well as data and put it all together. So it works seamless for for organizations that may have multiple offices.
Charinna Kushnir 12:14
Yeah. And it it sort of leads me Rolando into into sort of my next point here, which is a lot of organizations have servers on their prep. So when COVID occurred, what happened was everybody was scrambling to figure out to figure out how we’re going to send people home to work. So as a Microsoft partner, we are able to leverage Azure, we are able to leverage AWS. So we helped customers not only successfully deploy voice, but we were able to help them with their data migrations. A lot of companies that were not ready for total cloud data had to get ready at a pace, maybe that they weren’t necessarily prepared for.
Dave Kelly 12:56
Yeah, you know, so there’s obviously a lot of organizations that have adopted and migrated towards the cloud. I know that there’s a lot more than half. And so what are what would be the benefits for those folks that haven’t moved to it? Or aren’t even really looking? But what’s the benefit for the businesses that are migrating from an on premise solution to a cloud based solution?
Charinna Kushnir 13:18
It’s such a great question and sort of a very open ended question Dave. Because there, there’s a lot of benefits. A lot of organizations who still have Prem based equipment are utilized in a way that is not efficient, they may have servers that are over capacity are under capacity that are pulling a lot of power. Maybe the servers are out of space. So when we start migrating our customers to the cloud, we are just seeing this enhancement in their workflow, that they’re getting their data faster, it’s more secure, it’s, they’re able to put more applications into the cloud. So they’re all of their cost advantages to moving to the cloud. So there are so many different reasons that a customer should move to the cloud. It’s very much like what we saw early on in the voice migration, right, or customers still had a PBX on their premises. And then we saw the adoption of Hosted Voice. It’s the same thing with servers, we saw a lot of customers that were keeping their servers in their IT closets. But then what was happening, the closets would overheat. Sometimes we saw them flood, sometimes they weren’t secure. So then all of these things became reasons for customers to start migrating their data to the cloud. So then we have a full end to end migration solution voice and data.
Rolando Rosas 14:44
interesting. And one of the things that you said a lot you for the cloud and the cloud, although it’s a generic term for essentially, infrastructure or data or even this case, or voice that can reside in the maybe a hosted environment. There. Different types of clouds aren’t there Charinna. And I think for us, for some customers that the private versus public cloud and different clouds, they may mean something different to them. So the word cloud, let’s define cloud a little bit for those folks that are maybe not yet moved to the cloud, and don’t may not know exactly what a cloud is, because there’s different folks at different stages of their journey to the cloud. So let’s talk a little bit about what it is and what it’s not.
Charinna Kushnir 15:28
Yeah, in 2013, Tina Fey did an ad during the Superbowl for BestBuy. And during that ad, I think she said, it’s so much better than anybody else. If you see the hour, she says, Where is the cloud? What is the cloud? Can I touch the cloud? And I think that in general, a lot of people still are in that mindset of the cloud is just something that they that they don’t 100, it’s an abstract concept almost. Right? Right. So when we start talking about public clouds, we are talking about the AWS is, the Alibaba has the Azure wars, the Google, these are all public cloud environments, and almost every end user has either heard of them, or is starting to think about our migration. Again, not a not a simple thing to go alone, there are a lot of components that go into a cloud migration. There are costs associated with cloud migration, like egress fees, getting your data out of the cloud, what’s in there, these are all different parts of the journey, that Data Canopy works with customers on now in our private cloud environment, which we built on VMware, that is hosted in our data centers, with our hardware. We don’t get things like egress fees when we’re in our own private cloud environment. But that’s sort of where we start to delineate. Some applications require public cloud. Some applications do great in a private cloud environment. Where we shine as an organization is asking the whys of a customer, why are we trying to do this? What are the benefits? And then from there unraveling what the customers needs are? Well, I can do maybe a little case study that might help some customers understand a little bit better.
Rolando Rosas 17:20
Absolutely. And go ahead, jump into it. Awesome. stop you. Were on a roll, right? So go for it.
Charinna Kushnir 17:31
So we have a rather large customer, that, that that worked with us for about nine months, trying to unravel what was best for them, the company’s called I tivity. And they deal in the microseconds of stock trading. So if you’re using an application like a Robin Hood, or fidelity, they’re the software that drives that those types of high frequency stock trading. There’s only five organization like that in the world. So their goal was to figure out how they could be the first company to put their applications in the cloud, which for somebody like them, could be very risky, rather than having all of their servers on their premise where they could theoretically control them. But they saw the value in making sure that their data was protected. And in the correct environment. We spent eight months working on understanding every application, where is the best spot to put it? What are the needs of those applications? What are the needs of their employees? What is the best for their remote staff, because as the we were in the midst of COVID, as we’re unraveling this project with them, in the end, we are doing a hybrid environment for that. So they’re partially some of their applications are in the public cloud. And some of them are in the private cloud. And that combination, gave them a very robust solution.
Rolando Rosas 18:57
Well, it’s so it sounds like there’s no one size fits all, when it comes to the cloud. For organizations, it’s really on a case by case basis, some organizations are going to be able to move all to everything to the cloud, and it’d be a public cloud. And in some cases, that’s not the case at all, where they’re going to be doing that from what you’re telling us, right?
Charinna Kushnir 19:17
Yeah. And the reality is, is you need a partner that’s agnostic, you need a partner that listens, and isn’t trying to put a round peg in a square hole and understands because 100%, you’re correct. It is not one size fits all in any way, shape, or form.
Rolando Rosas 19:34
And so I want to ask you to touch on that one size fits all. There are so getting back to a little bit of the stuff that we were talking about with Ford. A lot of companies now are looking at returning to the office. Right? And there is no one template for everybody but I wanted to get your thoughts on, on a little bit of what they said about return to offices. I want to also put Have your brain about what you think companies are doing as well. With this migration back to the office and how it relates to the services that the Data Canopy offers, go ahead Ori roll that
Guest Speaker 1 20:12
scene and with some other measures that have been put in place we want to test if that response is still the same.
Guest Speaker 2 20:18
Before the pandemic head, Ford had been pretty open about their facility upgrades, the 30 acre site plan for Michigan, Central New Detroit, where 5000 employees had been slated to work helping to boost the surrounding neighborhoods, namely Corktown, and transforming the Research and Engineering Center in Dearborn into a high tech efficient campus for 1000s of designers, engineers and product development workers. What’s that going to mean? When those those businesses shops, restaurants, Airlie mall, perhaps were hoping that those employees would be coming back?
Guest Speaker 3 20:50
We’ve had multiple conversations with the city of Dearborn around the concept of hybrid and potentially what that could mean. And quite frankly, they were all excited, because it’ll evolve, you know, what your Warren can actually do in the future,
Guest Speaker 2 21:06
Ford envisions collaborative workspaces with upgraded displays where 75% of office space could be shared, or we space employees reserving locations to use and much more investment in collaborative technologies, which employees have already been using much more during the pandemic, viewing this
Guest Speaker 3 21:23
war through the eyes of hospitality than traditional office, right? Because when people come in, they’re gonna book a space that best suits their needs, if you provide employees that flexibility and the freedom to work, where they want to work when they want to work. And then you give them this great workspace to be able to come in and collaborate and innovate and do things with your peers. I think it’s going to be phenomenal for for talent, attraction and retention.
Rolando Rosas 21:48
All right. So I want to get your thoughts. I don’t want to say anything, what do you think about what you just saw?
Charinna Kushnir 21:54
I think it’s the way that almost every organization is going to move forward. I truthfully, do I think we will find that more and more, there’s some fatigue, people have been at home for a long time. I think there is an overwhelming need to be around people. I will say for myself, I was a little shocked yesterday to get on an airplane and see that it was at 99% capacity.
Rolando Rosas 22:20
Where are we going?
Charinna Kushnir 22:21
I came back from Florida from sunshine and happiness, as I call it. Sunshine, and, you know, I think I was a little shocked to see that many people in a closed in space. So to Ford’s point, they’re making it easy for their customers and their employees to decide that it’s okay to and safe for them to work from home, as well as from their office, which then in turn helps the economy. So it’s a win win for all parties involved. And I definitely believe that almost every organization is going to have some kind of hybrid approach. And it’s going to be imperative that the cloud solutions that they have in place, both from a data standpoint, as well as from a voice standpoint are solid.
Rolando Rosas 23:10
Right. And so what you’re seeing is customers. So basically one of the things I want to ask you, are you when you’re talking those customers, are you hearing that they’re going to this type of hybrid approach like Ford, because you’ve got companies like Google that are announcing actually they’re they’re getting more buildings constructed, they’re going to put in more office space, rather than less. And so we just wanted to see what because you talked to a variety of folks out there, what are they telling you they’re taking kind of the Ford approach? Are they going down the route of a little more like Google where they’re actually getting more office space, or less office space?
Charinna Kushnir 23:49
So the answer is it depends on what part of the country, so we work nationwide, as well as internationally. So for example, in the UK, our partners are telling us that it’s going to be summertime, probably the end of summer, before they have enough people vaccinated that they feel comfortable to even delve into a hybrid work type of environment. If you talk about the East Coast Rolando and Dave, you’ll see more companies moving towards that type of work quicker. The West Coast is slower. So my answer to you is it depends on what part of the world that you’re in will depend on how quick that adoption is.
Rolando Rosas 24:27
So you saw us on the east coast where were a little happier.
Dave Kelly 24:32
So whether it’s whether it’s East Coast or West Coast COVID COVID has forced folks to find a new way for their workers to work, whether it be 100% work at home hybrid model 100% back into the office, once things change and time progresses and back people are vaccinated, etc. So COVID is obviously affected workers with where they’re doing their business, but how is COVID impacted the way that businesses are migrating to the cloud? Is it a matter? Is it a mad rush? Is your phone just ringing off the hook? And it’s it’s just a flood of interest? Or has anything really changed?
Charinna Kushnir 25:13
It’s a such a good question. So when this started in March, I will say it was a breakneck pace for us to literally get people migrated to the cloud, literally as quickly as we could. Now we are going back and looking at customers who migrated on their own. And now we’re looking at their bill saying we didn’t have the budget maybe to do this and the way that we did it. So they’re asking us to go back and reevaluate how they have migrated and the cost associated with migration. So in the beginning, it was the Breakneck let’s get it in there. Now, specifically for customers who did it on their own. They’re now asking us to reevaluate their costs, and looking at ways to optimize their environments, and making sure that they have the correct migration path. Because there are that’s two very, that’s two very different issues and problems.
Dave Kelly 26:11
So what I’m hearing is that some clients, they rushed it, because they had no choice. They’re looking at what they’re spending. And now they’re dialing it back saying, Listen, we need an expert here that can help us find our path to success. Correct?
Rolando Rosas 26:26
Wow. Well, that’s that’s so exciting. Imagine like when, when the when people were told to go to work from home, and some are late February, some March, some April, everybody, pretty much all of the big companies and the middle sized midsize companies all started doing it around the same two to three weeks. And they realized, Oh, we got problems, NASA. And as you’re talking about how things are changing, that’s one of the things I wanted to see what what your thoughts were on? Where is it going? So 20 and 21. And beyond what’s down the road for not just the cloud, but let’s just say Infrastructure as a Service, and how companies what companies should be looking at, or any, or any organization should be looking at if they’re thinking about what’s coming down the line that maybe it’s not available today.
Charinna Kushnir 27:21
So here’s sort of my stance on it, I think that we’re gonna see a big change in our colo business. So I think we’re going to see a lot less companies putting their infrastructure, putting actual hardware in colos, and many more moving to straight cloud environments. And a lot of that has to do with security. Customers needing to feel comfortable around the security evolved with the cloud, and putting their applications and making sure that nobody is going to touch them. So I think that we’ll see a big shift in our colo business, more of a shift to the public and private cloud environments. And then a big, big uptick in our DR Practice, and making sure that the recovery time on on applications is is quick and efficient. People don’t want to be down. And I think that we’ve seen especially over the last few months, we’ve seen some some pretty terrible things happen in terms of weather, like what happened in Texas? Yes, that affected a lot of customers.
Rolando Rosas 28:23
Yeah, and I think those weather events haven’t gotten any milder, they’ve gotten more severe, if anything the last several years, and more frequent. And folks like Data Canopy and yourself can help, you know, organizations that want to have the right tools in place, should those weather events occur, to know that their infrastructure resilient and will withstand those types of impacts?
Charinna Kushnir 28:51
And I will say this, you know, Dave and I talked about this a little bit before the show started today. You know, when that weather event happened in Texas, some colocation sites were not prepared for that type of weather event. And they lost their generators, oh, lost generators
Rolando Rosas 29:12
Are you talking about like, the whole data center went dark..
Charinna Kushnir 29:17
Correct. Oh, my God. Wow. And we were moving customers into our colos at rates that we could barely keep up with, because our data centers were lit.
Rolando Rosas 29:27
Wow. Wow. So So what the moral of the story is check out who you have as a partner when you’re co locating and that maybe not all the eggs are in one basket, essentially, on the east coast, or the West Coast or in the south, where, you know, a couple years ago, we had the different storms that came up the East Coast and basically knocked out a lot of stuff in New Jersey and New York, and a lot of and actually remember a customer I won’t say their name of very large customer in Manhattan that has politicians in it. Let’s put it that way. They, their servers flooded and whatnot. And they were out because they were basically on prem for everything. And so knowing who you’re using, like data canopy that maybe has their eggs in several different baskets geographically, who will benefit them? Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome. Well, the I love all this stuff. Charinna, we could talk for like, at least two hours, because there’s like 500 Other things I want to ask you. But I don’t want to keep you too long here. And what I want to say, just kind of in summary is that if you’re looking for additional solutions in the way of infrastructure as a service, you need guidance in this journey. Folks like Charinna? And what what how should folks follow you or get a hold of you? If they if they want to follow up? Where are they? Okay, I want to hear more about that.
Charinna Kushnir 30:58
LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn, Charinna Kushnir, and you can follow Data Canopy on Facebook and on LinkedIn.
Rolando Rosas 31:06
Awesome. Thanks for letting us know. And before we wrap, Dave, do we have an answer to that trivia question?
Dave Kelly 31:15
I have the answer. The question is Does anyone else have the answer or a smart enough guess? Ori alright, let’s pull it up. All right. So black and white, or blue and white? Who was the first one which car had the full version of CarPlay? Was it? The focus? The FF, the Model S? The S Class? Charinna? She’s? She’s a car gal.
Rolando Rosas 31:39
She should know this one.
Charinna Kushnir 31:40
I think it’s Ford.
Dave Kelly 31:42
Do you think it’s the Ford?
Charinna Kushnir 31:43
I do think it’s the Ford.
Dave Kelly 31:45
All right. Well, we’re gonna throw up the answer. We’re going to show a picture. If so, I thought this was pretty interesting. You know, I’m a I’m a car guy myself. The four Ferrari FF, very unique car, and that it’s a front engine v 10. Naturally aspirated. But the Ferrari FF, that was the first car to have the full version of CarPlay. I was almost expecting it to be Tesla.
Rolando Rosas 32:12
But I would have thought there was Tesla because they’re more techie oriented.
Dave Kelly 32:16
Right. But I’ll tell you, you know what my Mazda has, has CarPlay I didn’t care for it. When I first got it really wasn’t a requirement of mine. And now, I don’t want to go anywhere without it. So there it is. early adoption.
Rolando Rosas 32:33
early adoption is Well, there you go. You’ve you’ve got to enjoy that. You know, funny story. The first time Dave, you remember when you got in my car? I picked you up? Yep. I thought this guy is so big. He doesn’t fit in this car. And I don’t have a teeny car like you do. Shereena a little Sportster convertible type of car. This guy is a he’s a, like a football player. sighs Yeah.
Dave Kelly 32:58
Do you know what it’s so funny if you saw the car, or the cars that I’ve driven, I don’t know what it is. I love small, tiny cars.
Charinna Kushnir 33:09
They’re like in the seat. And I was like, we’re in an SUV. This is not a teeny little you know, roadster car, you know, one of these old Porsches where you know, you’re almost down to the ground. And he fills up the whole seat and and all the way back. I’m like, I don’t think I’ve ever had invited to speak get on in this car.
Dave Kelly 33:28
I’ll take that as a compliment today.
Charinna Kushnir 33:33
Well, let’s tell the folks Ori what we’ve got coming up. All right. So on the 30th, we’ve got an unbelievable feature at of new J link devices, we cannot wait to bring those to you. We’re going to do it up global textile, what the textile and we’ll bring you heard the latest around those. So stay tuned, mark those on your calendars. And I want to remind you, if you love this content, you want to hear more about it. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. Let me just tell you why you want to do that. Because we come out with content that is not on the live and we push it out to our audience. So if you follow subscribe, I don’t know what platform you’re on, hit all those bells and whistles, hit all the buttons, you will get these little tidbits that we we sneak out of the air and boom, let our audience know. So make sure you join and be part of the community. Yeah, Dave, right. Be part of the club,
Dave Kelly 34:33
be part of the club. You know, we bring a lot of different things for different types of users and different types of markets. It’s not just what a headset what not just what a speakerphone can do. It’s really, how can a product that we offer, how can a service that’s often from one of our partners, benefit your business that’s very successful in the future.
Rolando Rosas 34:54
That’s right. And it’s Charinna any parting words before we wrap up?
Charinna Kushnir 34:59
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really have enjoyed my time. We really appreciate being part of this podcast today and getting to spend some time with you guys.
Rolando Rosas 35:09
All right, well, thank you everybody. See you the next time.
Outro 35:12
Thanks for listening to What The Teck?, be sure to check out our other episodes featuring awesome tech and amazing guests. Find them on circuitloops.com or wherever you consume your favorite podcasts.
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