Latest / You've Been Heard / 379- Submarine Commander Conquers Azure w/Kenon Bliss

Transcript

379- Submarine Commander Conquers Azure w/Kenon Bliss · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Welcome everyone back to dissecting popular IT nerds. In the future. We have this big, really big, exciting, exciting rebranding coming up. Because what I realized was is that we're short changing ourselves by just sounding like we're just dissecting people. And we, after 360 episodes, we no longer really need to be dissecting popular IT nerds anymore. Like, we've kind of become. And there's just, there's just so much that we're leaving out for you guys. And I think one of them is our connection with really freaking awesome people in the industry and really, really good vendors. And I don't do this that often because IT guys hate vendors. For the most part, they're not vendors. I think we should say salespeople and they have good vendors. We can't really. There's all this hype in the marketplace and we've got, we've, we've got this thing called zero trust in our language. So it's kind of natural to not trust anyone that shows up in our LinkedIn inbox. And there's, I think it people have trust issues. I don't know. Do you think they have trust issues, Kenan?
• 1:14
  Speaker B: I have trust issues. I don't trust my own children. So I mean, how would I trust a vendor?
• 1:20
  Speaker A: So I just wanted to highlight some really awesome people and what they can do. And I think when it comes to CSPs, which is a very broad term communication service provider, these are the guys that sell you your Microsoft licensing and then you call them the middleman and they piss you off. And I'm just going direct to Microsoft and then you end up with an EA agreement. And there's so many problems with all these things. They're not problems or better ways of doing things. And I just wanted to bring on someone that was awesome to talk about some really awesome things that we can do inside Microsoft and HeliumT. Your company happens to have some old friends that I, that are really my old bosses that came over to you guys recently and that's how we got introduced. And Donna, who I have trusted for years and worked for for years, I knew that I would be able to trust her and work for her when I came and we went through this whole interview and at the end of the interview she's like, you know, Phil, well, do you have any questions for me? And I said, yeah, why should I come work for you? And she said, phil, because we suck less.
• 2:27
  Speaker B: That's such a horrible thing.
• 2:29
  Speaker A: And. But that was my last corporate gig that was my last work in the corporate world. And I. But the thing is I was like, okay, I can trust this lady. And she jumped through rings of fire for me and did everything. And Mario, you're really cool too, Mario Di. But she kind of was like this middle, middleman between Mario and I having firefights and fighting for customers and always wanting to get everything done right and perfect for everyone, which is what we should have been doing. Anywho, here we are. It's almost like we're putting like the team back together again and they brought you in and we had a conversation and what's your title? And by the way, it's the Bliss. I want to call this like the Bliss Framework because your last name is Bliss. And that's really the, the ultimate like the dream. It's kind of like the station like I have arrived and I can now retire in life for any IT director is I can just put my feet up on the desk. Everything's automated. It all works perfectly. I never have to put out any fires. And so we want to call this the Bliss Framework and which is a step forward to getting to that maybe impossible dream effectively.
• 3:33
  Speaker B: I'm the lead for our overall infrastructure practices across the Microsoft stack. So it's going to include all of the bits and pieces that go with Azure infrastructure, security, financial operations, all those fun pieces. Networking being probably the most painful one that folks deal with. I also have our classic server systems engineering group that works with the Windows Stack, SQL Exchange, the classic Exchange and connecting all those pieces UP and our Microsoft 365 Modern Workplace Group. And then we sit in parallel with a desktop group and we provide top tier solutions to anyone who needs us.
• 4:18
  Speaker A: Wicked cool. So my philosophy when it comes to it seems more high def if I get closer to this microphone. My philosophy when choosing vendors is the special teams approach. I believe we should have special people inside companies that may suck less. And I'm not saying that you guys suck less at all because so far you guys are awesome. But everyone has to use AT&T@ some point in their life. And there's a lot of people out there that say AT and T sucks and oh, but they'd suck a lot less if you had the right people in the right places that you knew you could make a phone call to. And you are one of those people that is. Would be on my special team. So why helium? I mean you're, you're, you're purchasing your Microsoft licensing from someone else right now. This is the scenario. Anyone out there listening to the show, you're purchasing your Microsoft licensing from a company called Crayon or cdw, or you're getting it through IBM because it's freaking crazy cheap. Okay, cool. But what do they do for you? And I guess this is more like, why not buy your Microsoft licensing from someone that's going to do a lot for you and be really, really awesome? And one of those people that you get to work with is Kenan. And maybe we could just talk about a couple scenarios of what you do on a daily basis. Like, that's your. I think we were on a call earlier where you're like, well, it's not going to be the hardest work I do this week, but what is some of the hardest work you do in a weekly basis? Or what are some of the biggest problems and ways that we can help people? Is it Azure, Greenfield? Is it virtual desktops? I don't know. What is it?
• 6:02
  Speaker B: I mean, I think that the hardest thing that you have to work on, particularly when it comes to Azure, is the plan. Why am I doing this and what are my goals by leveraging cloud? I mean, everybody wants to go to the golf course and tell the other director of IT or the other VP that, hey, we're moving our stuff to the cloud. Why are you. Right. Why.
• 6:29
  Speaker A: I read about it in Time magazine.
• 6:31
  Speaker B: Right? Yeah. So, I mean, it's. It's. Why are you doing it? What are your goals? How. What services are you going to put up there? And how is it you think you're going to go about doing all of this? And are you doing it the right way? And that's the. You're looking at it from a bigger picture. What's. What's. Where are you at today? That's a. Where do you want to be? That's Z. Stop trying to fill in the blanks. Take a step back and look at those two pictures and then say, how do I make this flow so I do it the right way the first time so that all of my pieces fit together nicely and my Z is nice and pretty, not this toddler who threw a bunch of Legos together. Yes, it stands up. Is it. Is it right?
• 7:24
  Speaker A: I think that's great. But the reality is, like, every two or three years, we have mergers and acquisitions and we require ERP systems. And, I don't know, one company was on Google and then, you know, this company's on Microsoft, and now we've got to bring. Some of the stuff's on aws, some of the stuff's on Azure. Maybe you can just talk to a few best practices or, I don't know, rodents mapping things. You've seen something that would be exciting and, and something really sophisticated.
• 7:58
  Speaker B: And if you do it right, the answer to all of those things should be so.
• 8:06
  Speaker A: Right.
• 8:06
  Speaker B: I mean, it's like, okay, if I, if I built a core system that I did all my governance, planning for financial operations, got the right control people in place, I'm controlling my permissions the right way, and you come along and say we're buying this other company and we're going to fold them into ours. Great, let's migrate their stuff into our tenant. Which means that the rules are already in place, but have to follow the rules when it gets brought in. If I'm redeploying a new ERP system, the rules are there and so the pieces have to fit correctly from the get go versus coming in after the fact and trying to remediate something, because that's the piece that kills every single time because it's rework. Ooh, horror story. What?
• 8:58
  Speaker A: Have you seen any great horror stories lately? When, if we're speaking in, I don't know, metaphorical things.
• 9:05
  Speaker B: I mean, it was a small one, but for that group it was a horror story. They built out this environment, they were trying to do it as deep as possible. They stood up some storage and threw terabytes of data at it. And it turned out that it was incredibly high IO, there was a drawing system that was attached to it and it wouldn't keep up. And they complain and complain and complain and then they come back and say, well, we need to upgrade the storage, great, but we can't change the name of it, right? So whole long week process to copy data from point A to point B, blow away point A, create point C with the original name of point A, copy the data back so that their simplified process didn't need to be changed. And they burned. They burned a ton of consulting time on fixing something when they could have just designed it properly from the get go. Establish your criteria, figure out what the requirements are, build to the requirements, test it before you put it in production, and then everything would have been fine.
• 10:16
  Speaker A: I would say the majority, the majority of my listeners are directors of IT, VPs of IT, CTO, CIOs in the mid market space in construction, logistics, healthcare, the, the mid market space.
• 10:35
  Speaker B: Where.
• 10:35
  Speaker A: What do you see happening right now? I guess in the face of AI, other than maybe it's a big bubble and everyone trying to get involved and it's going to blow up and then everyone's going to realize that AI is just an assist to a human being. What do you see for those mid market people who are kind of just staring out into the blankness sometimes wondering while their CEOs under the pressure of being told by the board that hey, are you, are you guys AI ready? And then yeah, we're full, we're 100 AI ready. We hear this, I hear this every day. Yeah, we're 100 ATI, AI ready. And this details that we are. What do you see? I mean this is just for fun, but like what do you see happening over the next, I don't know, two, three years? And, and how does your role tie into that?
• 11:30
  Speaker B: Well, I mean the first thing that pops into my head is that meme where it says when somebody says they inserted AI into their legacy application and it's got the dispenser for one of the soft soap and it's just jammed into a bar of dial. Right. But we put AI into our. Yeah, I mean, establish the reasons why you want to use it first, because.
• 11:58
  Speaker A: Investors are asking, because if we aren't doing it, then the stock prices are going to go down. What other reason do you.
• 12:05
  Speaker B: There's nothing saying you can't use it, but make it a worthwhile investment. And then if you. And it's a garbage in, garbage out. So make sure your environment is first of all ready for it. Establish what your use cases are, then build for it. Don't just build it to say that, oh, we wrote this chatbot that'll answer XYZ questions about what color of ink that they use on a dollar bill. That's fantastic. But I mean, why do I need that? What value is that providing to me?
• 12:39
  Speaker A: Have you worked on any good use cases lately?
• 12:43
  Speaker B: Personally, no. I have a couple of good friends of mine who are very, very data savvy. One of them very data savvy. His wife is very, very savvy. She's in the Microsoft space. I can't mention her name, but sure, three of us get together and we go through all sorts of stuff. How would we build this environment? Based on the data requirements, based on tapping into those data, that data, making use of that data. And how would we secure it?
• 13:14
  Speaker A: I want to hear the security piece because that just, that's the big one. How do we secure that data?
• 13:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean from, in an AI world. Yeah, I mean I could drop all that data out there and somebody can scrape it. My source data has to be productive. Right. The things that I'm letting that model talk to and source information from and you're looking at healthcare finance financed. I mean that data has to be secure. Has to be secure. All of it does really for any industry. You got to protect yourself and getting all of those tools integrated with them. They want access to everything. Should they have it? What if somebody who's using that tool or gets access to that tool that shouldn't have access to that tool now gets access to all my data? The wrong configuration could give the wrong person the ability to go through and pull ups all sorts of patient information out of your healthcare system.
• 14:14
  Speaker A: I mean that's, I think there was a big news. Didn't that happen the other day? Wasn't there like a big news leak or something like that? I think I did happen.
• 14:22
  Speaker B: I mean it's pick. If you, you get the AI that's out there, that's indexing all the content that you read on the Internet and trust me, your news feed will change. I mean it's there, there's a ton of different ways that, that those tools can be used. I think it's a matter of getting the controls in place and understanding why you're doing something and what your audience is for that tool before you even try. If the objective is go tell the CTO or, or the CEO that hey, before tea time on, on Friday, go.
• 15:01
  Speaker A: We need to. When you have AI.
• 15:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, you need to have AI. It's like, okay, that.
• 15:07
  Speaker A: But that's the reality. That's really what's happening. That's literally what's happening right now.
• 15:11
  Speaker B: Yeah, you gotta protect yourself. Or if you're a C level, you could very easily put yourself out of a job.
• 15:19
  Speaker A: I read a statistic the other day. I should give a shout out to. Let me give a shout out to the.
• 15:24
  Speaker B: Where. Where were we?
• 15:25
  Speaker A: When I heard this, I just. Oh, I. Stephen Klein, he's a UMass grad. He's a UMass grad, but he's on, he's out in the west coast right now. The statistic is I've got to get here and he's going to send this to me for real. 70, 80% of CEOs basically, basically 70, 80% of the CEOs are out of a job in one to two years and they're basically walking around thinking that. And since 1980. So most of these CEOs are, are, are pretty much on the edge of their seat all the time. And one of the, the I guess, I guess conversation points or themes that come up on our show a lot is kind of the same kind of the same story with, like, the cto. So the CTO is like, okay, I just turned this entire company around. I forklifted everything. We migrated these Systems, we implemented three RP ERPs. Everyone was like, freaking great. We love you. It's so awesome. And then two years later, I get to notice that, you know, we're moving in another direction. We're just, you know, the company's taking a different, you know, whatever it is, whatever the excuse is. And I think that's less harsh than the CEO's role, which is you're constantly on the seat of, have we implemented AI yet? How is this affecting the stock prices and all of that? And the rumor on the street that I hear a lot of, and just saying it again, we've already said it three times in this episode, is that, yeah, we fully got AI implemented. And if they don't, if they aren't saying that, if they aren't, it's like, you know, drastically affecting, like, stock prices and stuff, just because it's a, you know, a bubble that we're sitting in. And they have to be on the edge of technology right now. So I don't know what that has to do with anything we're talking about. It's just the reality. And I think then the technology people in the background saying, like, what? It doesn't even really do anything yet. Like you said, like, I don't need it to tell me, like, the. How many candy canes like Marshalls sold last year. When we're the automotive industry, it's like.
• 17:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think that it's fair to say that we're evaluating or developing or whatever toward some sort of an AI implementation, inclusion in our process. But to just say that you have it for the sake of saying you have it. I was like, okay, I can put an extension in your browser that allows you to use chat GPT. We're using AI, you know, exactly.
• 18:08
  Speaker A: 100%.
• 18:08
  Speaker B: We're.
• 18:08
  Speaker A: We're 100% on 100%.
• 18:10
  Speaker B: 100%.
• 18:12
  Speaker A: The. Tell me about what's your process? When. When you. When a new customer or prospect, opportunity, whatever they want to call them in the sales world comes to you and they want to reevaluate. They. They don't like their current csp. What is, what are your initial questions that you ask them?
• 18:31
  Speaker B: I mean, it's. It's fair to ask, tell me why you don't like them. Are they just not providing value to you? Are they just selling you licenses and walking away and not Paying attention to what's going on, or do you think that they're actively trying to overcharge you for things? And it. They don't necessarily need to be specific, but understanding the pain points first and then being able to say, okay, this is one of the things that's causing the customer to suffer, always solve that problem first.
• 19:02
  Speaker A: I think the majority is what you said first, which is they're just selling us licenses and then walking away. And then when we need additional licenses and either the portal's clunky and hard to add on, or I've got to send an email to my rep that's changed three times over the last 12 months and I've got to wait for some. That's the real old school method. I've got to wait for my licensing to be. To go. Or if I do add it in a portal, there's still a manual process on the back end. Even though it seems like a portal and it should be instant. It's not instantaneous license ads. So I think that that's like kind of like the top number one complaints. And then they didn't, you know, earn their. Basically, yeah, they're. We're just buying licenses, so they're great for the first week and then they didn't kind of continue to earn their paycheck every month. So that's one. Hopefully not overcharging. That's just billing mistakes. Billing mistakes is a pain in the. Forget. I probably shouldn't be saying that.
• 20:05
  Speaker B: Is that a bad word?
• 20:06
  Speaker A: If my kids hear this. My kids listen to the podcast, so I should. Guys, I'm sorry, I apologize. That is not correct language. The.
• 20:14
  Speaker B: He was like staying on his, like, God for.
• 20:16
  Speaker A: They heard some of the people we have on the podcast. Wow, dad, that. So I, I guess, I think those are probably. What do you see? What, what are the number one complaints.
• 20:25
  Speaker B: That you guys see?
• 20:25
  Speaker A: And what.
• 20:26
  Speaker B: I think it's just. You're.
• 20:28
  Speaker A: Why are you better?
• 20:29
  Speaker B: You're just another reseller. That's the, that's the thing that I see out there the most is they've got a cloud solution provider who's providing them with licensing. They're not providing them with solutions.
• 20:41
  Speaker A: But it's so cheap.
• 20:43
  Speaker B: But is it. Please.
• 20:46
  Speaker A: Thank you.
• 20:46
  Speaker B: I mean, it's. I mean, retail costs are retail costs, but there's, there's ways to work with it. I mean, start off with, okay, this is what you have today. And, and when you make this change to use helium versus somebody else, we need to maintain the status quo. Right? So we're going to make that transfer because we have to, because your email needs to flow. But then taking a hard look at what you have, M365 is pretty straightforward. What features are you using? Which features aren't you using? This is the counts of X, Y and Z that you need. Can we change you to an annual versus a monthly pay plan so you get a little bit of a discount there? Are you using the right quantities of the right things and then fine tune that? But the M365 licensing is pretty straightforward. Right. When it comes to the Azure consumption, that can wildly vary. Somebody asked me for a quote and all they did was provide me with a list of 200 servers. Not even the specs, just the names. And they're like, we need a quote for this. And I'm like, okay, depending on the SKU that's involved here, this could be $2,000 a month or 200. Yeah, you got it. I need more than this. But you take those raw numbers, check the box, deploy the machine, it's got a Windows license, it's paying straight consumption rates. Great. You got a bill, you go look at that machine and say, if you're a proper csp, you go look at that machine and say for the last 30 days it's been running like this. You could reduce the skew costs half as much. And then you say, or your licensing agreement for your data center has this. Let's apply that license, drop that much off the top. We know this box is going to live for X amount of time. Where you have this much consumption over amount of time. You look at reserved instances, you look at savings plans and potentially you've first off cut it in half and then taken that price and reduced it by another 80%. So you went from spending $200 a month on the box to 20.
• 23:16
  Speaker A: Good example.
• 23:18
  Speaker B: Yeah. And that possible. And that's the kind of stuff that we want to do when we take those, those agreements.
• 23:24
  Speaker A: What's your favorite, what's your solution to work on? Is it, I mean, what is it like the most complicated, crazy thing like what's your favorite? If I could just bring you this every single day for the rest of your career, what would it look like?
• 23:38
  Speaker B: It's that it's taking that three to five year plan and starting with the entire, starting from the top and building down, construct the organizational components, construct the core networking, design everything from how it's going to plug in and create this modular moving forward environment. It doesn't matter. You bring another Microsoft product In, it plugs in and it works. And that should be how it always works, right? Designed properly. Greenfield. I sometimes, sometimes it's fun to go into a brownfield environment and say that's not how I would have done it. And somebody says, well then go do it the way you would have done it. All right, where's the keys?
• 24:25
  Speaker A: But realistically, how often should this be happening? Or you know, it's like not.
• 24:34
  Speaker B: The build should be. It should happen once, right?
• 24:40
  Speaker A: Once for every company. But if you had to guess how many people and then, but again, mergers and acquisitions, like you said, when you just find. We plug it in, great. So what are we going to call this then? I don't know. The Bliss Build.
• 24:58
  Speaker B: The Bliss Build.
• 24:59
  Speaker A: What are we going to call this thing? We want to do this. Anyone that wants to take part of the, the Kenan Bliss Build. Building blocks. The Bliss building blocks. There's got to be like an acronym that we make up for this. And I don't know, is there a reason why how many IT directors, VPs, CTOs are sitting out there right now just like, oh, I would love to do that, I just don't have time and we can't take things down and blah blah, blah. Like what's the excuses?
• 25:28
  Speaker B: All the excuses are it costs too much. Trust me, it's going to cost you. They're afraid, they don't understand it. It's technology. Most of them are, most of them are used to running in a data center. And that's not a criticism, that's just where they're comfortable.
• 25:45
  Speaker A: Okay, so talk to me. Let's go through the typical fear based, ran a data center. We're going to migrate to Azure, we're going to do whatever. Talk to me. Let's walk through a typical example manufacturing or construction or I don't know, logistics or something thing.
• 25:58
  Speaker B: Paul. Maintaining control of software defined objects, role based access control. Now I don't have control over that VM at the same layer that I did before. How do I manage all that? It's very overwhelming. It sounds too complicated.
• 26:15
  Speaker A: Okay, great. What's the answer to that?
• 26:16
  Speaker B: The answer is plan it. Plan it from the beginning. Identify the people who need to do those jobs and put them in the roles that they, so they can do those jobs. So define, understand people's responsibilities and define the role assignments before you build things, not build it. And then go back and figure out who to give rights to.
• 26:37
  Speaker A: You guys help with all that? Do you guys help out with all that?
• 26:40
  Speaker B: We do. I mean it's It's a fairly routine exercise where we've taken on the brownfield engagements and I'll throw a couple of folks at it and say, go through this entire thing and tell me what's wrong. Or not. Not necessarily what's wrong, what's not perfect, what. Where could improvements be made and how do we do that efficiently without taking stuff offline? Things should not go offline. They shouldn't.
• 27:09
  Speaker A: What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like? I mean the goal, you're speaking to all the fear based people out here like, screw that, I would never freaking do that. But they just got fired and now they're in another company and they have to do it. So what does it look like?
• 27:26
  Speaker B: You know, I mean the goal is really the hardest thing about using it should be accepting the fact that it's really that easy. That's where you want to put people. I don't want the IT staff, the directors. Their job shouldn't be slapping band aids on stuff and keeping it running. It should run. They should be able to be reading trade magazines, doing research. What's the next company talking to the people in a business unit that are struggling with something and saying how do we help the business?
• 28:02
  Speaker A: I love that you just said that. And that's the key.
• 28:05
  Speaker B: That's the freedom, making it happen. Right? Yeah. As a. Most organizations today, they're constantly in a state of reaction. It's fire, fire, fire, fire. And they have no opportunity one to, to implement projects like this. But also they don't have any opportunity to learn because they're constantly chasing fires.
• 28:29
  Speaker A: Do you think that's more in the enterprise space or mid market? I'm just curious.
• 28:32
  Speaker B: Yes, it's everywhere.
• 28:35
  Speaker A: I had a guy tell me one time, love you, Phil, look, I've got so many fires. I don't. Here's the metaphor, Phil. I was fire fighter. I'm in a massive, massive, massive forest. There's fires everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. The whole place is burning down. I'm only concerned with putting out the fire that's burning my leg right now. I can see your fire, Phil. You're coming to me. I can see that. This Microsoft licensing fire. But that's like a mile down the road. Like I'm concerned with this fire that's burning my leg right now, which is this. I don't know, who knows, Downed server, who knows, whatever the heck it is. Might even be a remote printer. What's the ROI on a type? You said it's expensive, but it's more expensive in the Long run. Like what kind of numbers are we talking about? You're saying simple from a standpoint of like, well, you just don't need two more. Two less staff or two less staff that can now go to R and D or actually sit like you said, cross functional departmental. Sit with sales and marketing and actually make money with technology versus just cut cost in a budget and be a cost center and blinky light manager guy.
• 29:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean if I could get paid to watch cat videos all day because I did everything right and I've automated everything, I would take that option. Right. There's always going to be something you have to deal with. There's always that user who hasn't figured out that the power button is what turns on their computer and you're going to have to deal with them and everything in between. There's the, you know, stuff happens, a bad patch goes through, you've got to remediate it. You need the staff to be able to handle things like that. You can't expect one person to know everything. You have to have a doctor plan. Nothing's perfect if, if you're running out of east US and somebody drops a nuke on it, you've got to fail over somewhere. So it's, you know, there, there's a non zero chance that there's going to be a problem and you have to be able to react to that. But your focus as someone in the IT department should be really driving value to the business, not just keeping the business afloat. And that's that guy. That sounds like such a cliche because you're a perfect segue.
• 31:09
  Speaker A: It's a perfect segue to your, I don't know, your, your hype and marketing stuff that you guys put out. I'm on your LinkedIn profile right now. So I just figured it's a perfect segue to go to one tool to rule them all. What the hell is that? I want one tool to rule it all. We all know that's a lie. Everyone's gonna have multiple tools. But what is your one tool to rule them all? Maybe I'm wrong.
• 31:30
  Speaker B: I mean you've got just about every capability that you could look for, assuming that you're running inside of Microsoft's little vacuum environment right there. The security tools are there, the analysis tools are there, the licensing tools are there, the compute's there. Everything you need. Now is that perfect for every company? No. Is it in the Microsoft documentation on how to set that up? Absolutely not. And that's where you have vendors that are out There like Keylant that we're familiar with CrowdStrike and we're familiar with Haiku for backup and we're familiar with Nutanix and, and Keep going, keep going, keep going. I want more. I want more. Yeah, keep integrating all of these pieces together because nothing operates in the Microsoft vacuum. Nothing, not even Microsoft operates in their own vacuum. They can't even, they eat a special brand of their own dog food, not the one that they put in the box. So you have to have multiple vendors because there's going to be multiple scenarios and you need somebody who can tie all that together and who's willing to put the effort in to know your company.
• 32:52
  Speaker A: Love it. And are you guys still hiring for a systems analyst? Just out of curiosity. You posted that the other day three weeks ago. We are hiring a helium managed services system analyst. Just in case anyone, because you're still hiring.
• 33:04
  Speaker B: My and my COO has not told me job opportunity.
• 33:09
  Speaker A: Everyone listening out there, if anyone wants to take a step down from CTO to system analyst or if there happens, you know, you never know.
• 33:17
  Speaker B: It's a lot less stressful.
• 33:18
  Speaker A: There's a lot of days where I just wish I could show up and yeah, can I just clock in and clock out and not think about work as I'm walking with my kids through the park at 7? Just would be so nice sometimes like you I want to live the dream. I want to live the dream like you blissful life. I want to hear the backstory for you. A military guy.
• 33:39
  Speaker B: Let's see. I got into the nuclear power business right out of high school with suffered through almost two years of education where they crammed more knowledge in my head than I was ever actually going to.
• 33:52
  Speaker A: So the nukes are real? It's a real thing. Yeah, because, because there's a conspiracy theory that the nukes aren't really real. That's just not real. Like they're like actors are real.
• 34:02
  Speaker B: I, I, I unfortunately had to use one to punch holes in the ocean for five of them.
• 34:07
  Speaker A: But the, what do you mean punch holes in the ocean?
• 34:11
  Speaker B: This is a, as we used to call it, you know. Okay, put the wire three degrees right and do five knots to nowhere.
• 34:19
  Speaker A: And then what was your longest stay underwater?
• 34:22
  Speaker B: Oh, longer stay straight because I think we surfaced once or twice in there but I think it was well, I mean out away from 128 days away from home in one stretch 120 because.
• 34:36
  Speaker A: My, my brother in law is a captain, he's a retired merchant marine guy but he was a Captain, like the massive biggest ship ever. He would be gone for like eight months sometimes at a time.
• 34:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you'll get port calls and stuff like that along the way. When, when you're on a. When you're on a run that's that long, you'll stop Italy, you'll stop anything.
• 34:56
  Speaker A: Really cool like that you saw or gave you thought to remember. Are you allowed to even say it?
• 35:02
  Speaker B: Or had some good stories? The kind of ship that I was on, we really didn't pull into port anywhere. And the stories I could tell you about Ketchikan, Alaska, are not appropriate for your children to listen to on the bar.
• 35:19
  Speaker A: Okay, now we just want to know it even more. And now my kids are like, who is this guy? What's the number?
• 35:25
  Speaker B: Honorary. I was on the USS Alaska. We had an honorary home port visit and it was.
• 35:32
  Speaker A: Okay. So enough said.
• 35:36
  Speaker B: And then I did a tour repairing, running a repair shop for subs.
• 35:42
  Speaker A: Are you a diver?
• 35:44
  Speaker B: No.
• 35:45
  Speaker A: Okay. No, I didn't know if you had to like dive, you know, pressurized suits or something crazy like this or.
• 35:50
  Speaker B: No, I made him bring the sub out of the water so we could work on the outside of it.
• 35:54
  Speaker A: Were you the one I asked if you had a fire underground or anything like that, like. Or did the subs leak water? Like, what's the scariest thing you've experienced?
• 36:02
  Speaker B: Oh, we were, we were pulling into San Diego and somebody had aligned a pump, set up with a valve, didn't realize that it had been done. Cranked up a pump really high, and it blew out a pipe. 3 inch pipe blew out the side of it, and it was run. The pipe ran along the hull. So as far as anybody could tell, there's this big rooster tail of water coming in the side of the ship. That was probably the highest my adrenaline got while I was on board the ship plugging the.
• 36:37
  Speaker A: Were you in charge of like, stopping the water on that pipe or were you just watching and like cheering people on?
• 36:42
  Speaker B: Please save us. Well, the, the worst part was, is yes, that was my watch. And we did all the things that we're supposed to do. I mean, your brain goes into automatic mode, so you start doing all the things that you're supposed to do to prevent water in the people tank. And it didn't stop. And, and that really started freaking people out. We thought there was a hole in the boat and. And then finally the lights came on for the operator that was on the other end of the ship. And then. But we, we knew what to do next, right? They burn that stuff into your head so you kind of go into automatic mode and, you know, water in the people tank. You got to make that stop and then move on.
• 37:27
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 37:28
  Speaker B: You don't have a choice. You can't just leave.
• 37:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's kind of like. Yeah. Kind of makes a Microsoft licensing seem a lot less stressful.
• 37:39
  Speaker B: Oh, managing a military budget's the worst. Trying to figure out. Yeah, we had. Somebody lost a receipt. We ate chicken for 90 days straight one time because it was the cheapest thing they could get.
• 37:51
  Speaker A: What happened? Wait, how did that happen? Wait, so what happened? Someone. Someone did.
• 37:55
  Speaker B: Somebody missed. Replaced a receipt when we were getting ready to do our stores after a refit.
• 38:01
  Speaker A: Do they know who misreplaced that?
• 38:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, they found it. Layout realized there's this giant hole in the budget that they didn't think was there. So when they're going to purchase all the food that we're supposed to take with us, this and that, and take this with a grain of salt. Right. Because this is like fourth hand how this all happened. But we really garbage tasting chicken for a very long time until we got to our next point work.
• 38:27
  Speaker A: Like. What do you mean? Like, like frozen chicken, like fried chicken. Like, what do you mean?
• 38:31
  Speaker B: Everything's gotta be frozen for the most part. It doesn't stay fresh for that long. But I mean, by the time there's just a lot of it, I think the closest. The only real beef that we had was hamburgers on Saturday afternoon. And then by the time we got back to our home port, I was ready to go into a KFC and go postal. I was done with chicken at that point. Point.
• 38:55
  Speaker A: Can you even look at it the same anymore?
• 38:57
  Speaker B: I. I don't. My wife still makes me eat it, but I still tell her, let's end.
• 39:02
  Speaker A: With I want you. I. Let's end with this. You speaking to any CTO CIOs out there. Like, what could you. It's. It's not the easiest role. I call it the loneliest seat in the C suite because you speak a language that the CEOs don't fully understand. And if you did speak that language, you might kind of freak them out. So you've got to speak in sports metaphors, business language and EBITDA and stuff like that. When you want to be able to speak in a language that they do understand, but you just can't. And then you've got your old team, which is still kind of your team that you're protecting below you, even though your new team is this. But you Want to coddle your old team and not make them freak out all the time like you and the C suite is because you want them doing their job the best they can without feeling like they're getting fired. What is your. How can you help that person?
• 39:55
  Speaker B: It's okay to ask for help. It is. There's so much tech out there. And I mean for. I mean, I've been working in the azure space for what, 10, 12 ish years. 365 for 18, 19. I don't even remember anymore. I remember working on BPOs. I started calling it Office 360. Nobody knows everything. Nobody does. And nobody can plan for every type of technology that you're going to use. Even bringing my team in, I'm going to bring multiple people and we're probably going to refer you to some other people for specific things. It's okay to ask for help. Start with a clean slate. Understand what you're getting yourself into and don't be afraid to say, these are my boundaries and I need you to help me fill in the gaps. And that will get you the easy path. It puts you in the position where you can defend your team. When I was a leader in the Navy, I was more focused on deflecting that ball that rolled downhill and taking care of my team and making sure that they could pass their issues up to me and I could run them forward and by. And. And it made the officers and chiefs that were above me respect that. That changed things went through me before they went to the blue shirts because they knew that I was gonna. I was gonna block unless they came to me with something reasonable. And you can defend your team and you can get them the time to get the training to understand the new technology that's being put in by bringing the right people to help you organize that and then they can train them. I don't want to walk out of a project and have the customer completely dependent on me to run it. I've got too much to do. I want to walk away from that project with. In regards to this specific thing that we did for you. Ideally you never have to talk to me about it again because I taught you what we did and I showed you the way. You might come back and ask me to do something else and show you how it ties into that. But if I did my job correctly, you don't need me anymore.
• 42:18
  Speaker A: Love it.
• 42:19
  Speaker B: Not for that.
• 42:21
  Speaker A: So if anyone out there would like to experience the. A blissful Microsoft Azure experience, I guess let us know. Well, we're gonna. We're gonna put you in contact with Kenan, but he's. He's probably, like, behind, like, 15 locked doors in a sub underground, so you're gonna have to find a way. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Any. Any final words of what.
• 42:51
  Speaker B: This is a passion for me, and I would probably venture to say that for my entire team, this is fun. We're getting paid. Don't get me wrong. We got to make a living, but we enjoy it. And that's the reason that we've been successful, is that if I have a team member that's miserable, they're not going to do good work, and I'll tell them that they should go look elsewhere. You know, we have a good time doing it. We're passionate about it, and we want. We want our customers to be successful, happy customers, really. I mean, if. If I save you a hundred thousand dollars a year, you're gonna spend a little bit of it in places where I can help you. So it's never bad for me, but I. I want people to be happy, and I want them to be successful with their technology.
• 43:44
  Speaker A: Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for being on the show is, yeah, a lot of fun, and we look forward to having a great relationship with you, with you and Helium in the future. Anyone out there listening? If you want to be introduced to Helium Technologies, then you can reach out to myself personally on LinkedIn. Like a. I think we have like a code or something. I guess we're going to do the. The. The. The. Like the. The special discount code, the special gift that we're going to be giving away. I can tell you right now that the. The disc definitely be Bliss. So if you DM me, bliss doesn't matter. You don't. It's not case sensitive. B L I S S okay, if you DM Phil Howard Bliss or our team at Dissecting Popularity Nerds. And the secret that's going to be. We. We're going to do something very nice and special for you guys and at least do a deep dive on your current Microsoft Azure situation. Greenfield, or what did we call it? Brownfield, whatever you want to call that, Brownfield, which is probably most of you, or migrations, maybe you hate AWS or something. We're going to do all that and at least give you, at the very least, a second set of eyes on your current situation. And that could be worth a lot of money or everything in the world. And maybe you'll go from being miserable to happy or blissful. So thank you, sir.
• 45:06
  Speaker B: My pleasure.