What is Connectivity as a Service? The CTIO's fourth utility? Full Episode

Connectivity as a service (CaaS) is a model in which businesses outsource the management and provision of their network connectivity to a third-party provider. The promise is to free up companies from the burden of managing their own network infrastructure and allows them to focus on their core business operations.   Like making beer or generating electricity - but no need to do both.

CaaS providers offer various services, from basic internet connectivity to more advanced networking solutions like virtual private networks (VPNs) and software-defined WANs (SD-WANs). CaaS might be a cost-effective and flexible solution for businesses looking to improve connectivity and keep up with the ever-evolving digital landscape.  Is it right for everyone?

Transcript

Andy: 0:00

ultimately connectivity, as a service is providing. The entire end to end technology that a business uses to connect to the internet and provide it as a monthly subscription service

Malcom: 0:09

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Jon: 0:20

Andy, we're gonna do as a service, and, uh, it might be worth exploring a little bit, uh, as we go through that. I don't wanna use the word traditional, but the sort of the, some of the areas of technology that CIO is very familiar with, it

Andy: 0:34

Yep.

Jon: 0:34

remained the same for quite a few years. So I think this is,

Andy: 0:37

Yep.

Jon: 0:37

know, we hear the word disruption a lot. It gets banded around a bit like digital.

Andy: 0:41

much a buzzword. Yep.

Jon: 0:43

I see this is something that is

Andy: 0:45

Absolutely.

Jon: 0:46

uh, a big change.

Andy: 0:47

Ultimately connectivity as a service is providing. The entire end to end technology that a business uses to connect to the internet and provide it as a monthly subscription service. So, you know that that is the fundamental of that, of that product. Right. And I think, I think there's two kind of key areas that you call out from that. Um, there's obviously the, you know, what does that actually mean in, in, in principle, You know, if you think about a corporate user on site to connect to the internet or cloud application or whatever, it will be, you know, it's WAN LAN wifi security. You know, I I in a, in a nutshell, there's four key technology areas there. Um, this just takes all of those services from, you know, one supplier and delivers it as a subscription, um, per user, per month service. So very akin to your cloud consumption model type offering. That, that's kind of the first kind of layer of that, if you wanna call it that. The kind of second layer on top of that is because of the standardization of that deployment, ie. One supplier. Delivers end to end that entire tech stack in a really standardized way. There is software orchestration on top of that that essentially means it reduces the overhead and management burden on the consumer. So, um, if you think about that in today's world, um, and this is kind of the other service and the disruption piece that you wanna talk about. You know, if you think about the journey of as a service service, you know, AWS is your, IaaS know, took it from onsite into the cloud. You got the same software as a service. And connectivity as a services is a very, very similar principle. Um, and when we talk about disruption, um, obviously if you think about the way it's done today, it's still very much siloed.

Jon: 2:33

Andy, I was just thinking, so the episode that is live now on the channel, um, is, uh, cloud, uh, strategy. describes 10 platforms

Andy: 2:44

Yep.

Jon: 2:44

of, you know, if you look at a business, it's got 10. and this is definitely one of them.

Andy: 2:49

Mm-hmm.

Jon: 2:49

In fact, you know, going connectivity as a service, you may have, uh, actually moved two into one. You know, so there's, the point is, is this could be part of your platform strategy.

Andy: 2:59

Yep.

Jon: 3:00

going to be a lot of cloud strategy considerations for connectivity as a service, you know,

Andy: 3:06

Yep,

Jon: 3:07

it's more of the, as a service

Andy: 3:09

yep,

Jon: 3:10

risks, you know, the sort of control and, what's the resilience the rest of it. And then the answer comes back is, well, actually you are using someone who's got scale,

Andy: 3:22

yep.

Jon: 3:22

going to be better than you doing it yourself. And that's your patching and your resilience. And, you know, well, hang on a minute. And the, I don't wanna have all of this going through one supplier. Maybe, you

Andy: 3:33

Yep.

Jon: 3:33

that me relying too much on you? And you might say, Well, yeah, but you only have one supplier for teams.

Andy: 3:38

Yeah.

Jon: 3:38

you only have one

Andy: 3:39

And

Jon: 3:40

You know, it's, it's, you've got, That's, is that kind of the space of the, of the initial discussion that

Andy: 3:46

yeah, I think, I think so. But I think there is, as I kind of mentioned, there is a mindset, you know, if we're talking about the types of customers that we see adopt connectivity as a service, there is a mindset and a commonality within those organizations. Right? So, um, have you ever heard the phrase, making your own electricity, What make your beer taste better? Have you, have you heard that phrase before?

Jon: 4:07

have, I haven't,

Andy: 4:09

Okay,

Jon: 4:09

haven't. That's, that's brilliant.

Andy: 4:10

I won't, I won't say that I have, you know, coined that phrase up, but I'll tell you kind of the story and where that comes from. Um, that,

Jon: 4:18

before you do, before you do, can I just say how interested I am in that statement

Andy: 4:22

Yeah.

Jon: 4:22

my own beer,

Andy: 4:24

Okay.

Jon: 4:24

and, you know, my whole career's based off of the, the, uh, the magic of electricity. So, uh, yeah,

Andy: 4:32

It,

Jon: 4:32

is,

Andy: 4:33

it,

Jon: 4:33

really intrigued.

Andy: 4:34

it, it's, it helps, it helps sets, set the scene as all as a service, you know, models is basically where we're going. And essentially the story behind that is 19th century brewers, you know, so obviously way back when, this was before there was a national grid. A lot of brewers used to make their own electricity, you know, and there is a story that obviously those who first adopted a stable national grid for electricity soon flourished above the competitors that made their own. And the reality was those brewers were wasting internal resource and time and cost on something that actually didn't make their end product taste better or their customers enjoy it. And actually the launch of that, this is actually a phrase that, um, Jeff Bezos off used in the very, very early days of AWS. So, and as a service kind of mentality, Um, and that that is, that is so similar to the conversations that, you know, from a connectivity as a service, you have to see and make a decision as a business is, is spending internal time or resource on this going to have a beneficial outcome as opposed to outsourcing it?

Jon: 5:41

I would imagine apart from kind of, so farms and solar,

Andy: 5:45

Yep.

Jon: 5:46

topping up on their electricity uh, brewers have, have,

Andy: 5:49

Yep,

Jon: 5:50

that, that, that leap. So we're not in the business of making electricity. Yeah. We're in the business of

Andy: 5:56

Yeah.

Jon: 5:57

or, it's the, in, in the phrase I use in the podcast is it's, you know, the thing we've decided to be famous for.

Andy: 6:03

We're talking to organizations and I see it in the, you know, general market in discussions for connectivity as a service where, you know, a customer will have procured the WAN from someone three year, five year contract managed service. Got a couple of guys internally to manage it, got technical account managers on the other side, professional services, ads, move changes, all this kind of stuff. The LAN equipment, they're then going, buying themselves. They're setting up the managing themselves. They might have another MSP to call'em for that. The wifi, exactly the same. And before you know it, you know, across four or five areas, and this could be one site or a hundred sites, you are increasing your management overhead, um,

Jon: 6:40

Yeah.

Andy: 6:40

across the delivery of that service because you're just piecing it together.

Jon: 6:45

And Andy, what's not visible to the Board, or to the non-business technologist, is that Nine times outta 10. The consequence of that is your kit goes out of date, it

Andy: 6:54

Yep.

Jon: 6:55

as much as it should. That can give you security vulnerabilities or just kind of activity problems. You

Andy: 7:01

Yep,

Jon: 7:01

walk into an office and you can't connect because you know, the certificate's not up to date or, you know, all the, all these things that you, it's like this sort of, you know, you've invested in this amazing, um, you know, theme park, you know, and on day one it's, it is incredible. But, you know, within a year, you know, things just don't quite work because there's,

Andy: 7:22

yep.

Jon: 7:23

sort of maintenance. It's a really strong theme that comes out in the cloud strategy as well, which is just all these different components require so much feeding and watering, updating, keeping ready. So, yeah,

Andy: 7:34

Exactly.

Jon: 7:35

to scale on your own, isn't it?

Andy: 7:37

Yeah. And, and if you think about the, the, the, the experience for the, the, the organization and the consumer, if you wanna call that as the, you know, the staff on site, no one is internally going around high-fiving each other on the quality of your wifi or the fact that you've got SD WAN. You know, they open the laptop, they connect, that's all they care about. Right? So, you know, we, we fundamentally, it's kind of why would you layer on so much resource and technology and multi silo, you know, vendor management

Jon: 8:04

Yep.

Andy: 8:04

what is essentially, I, come on, you know, I connect and I'm, I'm off we go.

Jon: 8:09

agree. Andy, on the, um, on our transformation episode, uh, we were talking about those elements. I mean, this, uh, this guy called Maslow. 1950s,

Andy: 8:20

Hierarchy needs. Yep.

Jon: 8:21

Yeah. The hierarchy of needs and

Andy: 8:23

Yep.

Jon: 8:23

right of the bottom, they, someone put wifi. Yeah. And it's that, uh, it's that sort of squeaky door. You know, you go in somewhere, you haven't got wifi, you're

Andy: 8:30

Yep.

Jon: 8:31

hang on, what sort of place is this? But if you've got it, you just don't blink. It's, it's, you're absolutely right. Um, and it's just expected, uh, to be correct, uh, and working. Um, and no, no board is going to spend an hour talking on, you know, unless it's not working

Andy: 8:48

Yeah,

Jon: 8:48

how great the wifi

Andy: 8:50

but

Jon: 8:51

Yeah.

Andy: 8:51

it, it's a commodity, you know, It's not, it's not sexy, it's not decent technology anymore for an organization, you know, it's just, it is a commodity in the sense, um, you know, back to the kind of electricity analogy, um, with that. And I think connectivity is a service really doubles down on that mentality. You know, it's not, and that really comes through. We, we'll know, we'll dive onto the whole how someone progresses it and the things they think about and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, this is, this is a service that gets out of the minutia of the detail. You're not talking bandwidth, you're not talking speeds, you know, ups and downs, access, point, location. You're just talking about an outcome. Um, very much akin to the other service model.

Jon: 9:33

If I'm putting a business case together,

Andy: 9:35

Yep.

Jon: 9:36

you know, there's sort of elements that I might want to draw in, you know, so we can sort of folks that are listening to this thinking, Okay, this is sounding interesting, but you know, what, what, what are the sort of business case elements? So I'd wanna just run a couple of things past you.

Andy: 9:49

Yep,

Jon: 9:50

We wouldn't use it.

Andy: 9:51

yep.

Jon: 9:52

is what I've imagined, um, researching. So you, you know, correct me or we can debate it, but basically you've got an organizer, any organization and you, you are trying to provide your day to day connectivity. This is, this really sits really right in the middle of the, of the target for that sort of thing. However, if I'm a company and use my data center networking to provide. Real time. There's no such thing as real time, but you know what I mean, Real time

Andy: 10:23

Yep.

Jon: 10:24

as best as you can. Uh, I don't know, data feeds to the financial services markets and

Andy: 10:30

Yeah.

Jon: 10:30

milliseconds really count there in terms of updating and all the rest of it. And actually that is part of what I'm famous for. In other words, it's core revenue. Would you say that, um, connectivity or services is mature enough to take on that kind of connectivity? So literally I'm giving you the keys to all my connectivity, Andy,

Andy: 10:50

Yeah.

Jon: 10:50

say? Well, actually where it's at, it's, it's a bit like, I suppose the analogy would be you're using, um, you know, a, a a, a famous stack from a cloud provider for all your word processing. Yeah. you still might have something very bespoke that's still technology based.

Andy: 11:06

Yeah.

Jon: 11:07

companies, you know, that, that, that how fast they can do their network is, is, is actually very material to their, uh, results. Does, does that make

Andy: 11:15

It does. Yeah. Yeah. So I think if I was to think about the types of, you know, the, the types of organizations who I can see, wouldn't, you know, not adopting this technology, I, I don't think it's necessarily as much use case as it is emotive and kind of where they as a business. So what I mean by that is, you know, connectivity is a service fundamentally is underpinned by enterprise level services. So, you know, if you think about that, um, you know, inspire level one, you know, the latest kit across, um, land wifi, you know, up to date security, et cetera. But really what this does is as a mindset is it completely changes the way an organization looks at connectivity. So, for example, if I was to think about an organization that wouldn't want to adopt this, you know, if you are, if, if there's a cto, for example, who has a team of 60 people in it, you know, 15 people managing a network, and we are, you know, and, and someone's coming along from a connectivity as a service and saying, This can, you know, streamline the whole operation, and by the way, it'll do 70% of your day to day network management tasks. You know, there is a decision to be made at that point, which is what I've already invested in, is that now kind of, you know, do I have to go to someone and say, I know we, we sunk 2 million quitting kit and I know we did this, and I know we've,

Jon: 12:29

where are you on that? On that business case? Cuz if you're a year in,

Andy: 12:32

Yeah, yeah,

Jon: 12:34

are year nine of 10 years, it's like, okay, well this is what we're gonna do next. Yeah. So where they are in the cycle.

Andy: 12:40

yeah. So it's an infrastructure piece, but it's a people piece. You know, this is a, this is very much focused around people. So, you know, we, if you think about the scenarios that, that we've seen, you know, we have, I'm seeing organizations adopt connectivity as a service because they've got, you know, multiple 10, 15, 20 sites and they've got three people in IT. And you know, all day, every day they're spent firefighting and they just need this off the plate. You know, you can really see the use case for that there. Similarly, we've seen, you know,

Jon: 13:08

Andy, sorry on that one. I think you're absolutely right. That's where you're really playing more of a

Andy: 13:14

Yep.

Jon: 13:14

Element because, know, network engineering skills aren't plentiful.

Andy: 13:19

Yep,

Jon: 13:20

three individuals that are in that team,

Andy: 13:22

Yep,

Jon: 13:23

you, uh, I bet you a few quid, got a backlog of other stuff they just can

Andy: 13:28

yep,

Jon: 13:28

to,

Andy: 13:29

yep,

Jon: 13:29

So there is a bit of a, in that, in that scenario, there's a little bit of an automation kind of work shift. Yeah. It's, you know, you are, you are getting a lot of benefits out of being up to date and, and, it's not so much on the labor side.

Andy: 13:41

yep,

Jon: 13:42

so there is that one other one quickly, Andy was, uh, if you take cloud adoption, Yeah. a couple of areas, uh, that kind of hit the, hit the buffers pretty quick, and now, now I think, have kind of matured to the

Andy: 13:54

yep,

Jon: 13:55

they, are being used. So governments. very keen on cloud,

Andy: 14:00

yep.

Jon: 14:00

uh, and, and military weren't very keen on cloud for, for really obvious reasons. Cuz it's like, well, where on earth?

Andy: 14:07

Yep.

Jon: 14:07

earth is all this kit Andy that you've got our stuff on? But the way, um, the big players resolved it is they sort of said, Well, we're gonna create dedicated enterprise architecture for government,

Andy: 14:18

Yep.

Jon: 14:19

you know, in the geography that you want it in. So connect as a service. Is it anywhere near that or it, or do you think governments would be still, you know, a little bit

Andy: 14:30

Yeah.

Jon: 14:30

thinking public sector.

Andy: 14:32

Yeah. I think, I mean, you know, if you think about this as a, this proposition as a, as a, as a technology, you know, it's, it's two years old, you know, probably if you think about the, where, where it's at the minute, is that considered two bleeding edge for certain organizations, particularly in public sector. You know, I, I've personally seen certain elements of public sector housing trust, for example, you know, adopt. Um, CaaS. Um, you know, I think as we all know, there is a bureaucracy and red tape anyway within the public sector space that very much differs from, um, from the private sector, which, you know, I think, I think the use case is there though. There's absolutely fundamentally use case of

Jon: 15:11

I, agree, Andy. I think there is a use case there, and I think what you should look at, what everyone should think about watching this, given that it's only two years old, is that, um, one of the things that was rolled out early on was, well, we're really worried about security. Um, but the argument was only one sided. It was only looking at the security of the cloud provision. There was no kind of really careful look at what current security was like. You know, when you can't patch everything, when you basically, the service you're providing is outgrown,

Andy: 15:44

mm-hmm.

Jon: 15:45

your ability to support it, that's not a great situation to be in either.

Andy: 15:50

We've gotta think about the technology that we're talking about. You know, this is, this is, this is essentially a commoditized service, right? This is, this is the, the double down nature of connectivity as a service. Um, you know, in that sense of, it's more around trying to standardize and simplify this solution than kind of layer on levels of technical complexity. So, you know, a prime example of this, um, if you think about in today's spaces, kind of organizations looking at and activities of service versus looking at something like SD WAN, you know, they're looking at SD WAN because SD WAN is the buzzwords throwing about, there's a load of benefits and use cases, and they might have a team in skill set of 6, 7, 8 people internally who just wanna play with the toys and get on with it, you know? And that's, that's okay for them. But, but they're not, what they're not doing. Is seeing connectivity as connectivity talks about it, which is basically we, you know, connectivity can do all of those things, but it's gonna mean, you know, you're gonna relinquish a little bit of control on that and actually you're not gonna be spending resources on that.

Jon: 16:52

But Andy, don't you think, uh, looking at software defined networks, um, As being really one of the big enablers for what you are providing.

Andy: 16:59

Yep,

Jon: 17:00

I, when I looked at it, uh, I thought, this is incredible. This is really cool. You know, it is definitely very, very powerful move forwards. But, um, there's still a huge amount of skill and responsibility and, and, you know, uh, thought that needs to go into

Andy: 17:16

Yep.

Jon: 17:17

your network. And if you def network is now software defined, you're just opening up if you're not careful. Another really rich seam of, of legacy debt and misconfiguration and

Andy: 17:27

Problems.

Jon: 17:28

all sorts of problems that you might have. so I, I have a sort of a similar view to, uh, what they call low-code. Um, it says, if you look at low code, it's not really something that, um, you know, our, our mythical five year old could use or a business user could use without having any knowledge. You've still got to know how to craft, you know, an application. You've still gotta understand your business processes and everything else. So, so for SD WAN, I would've thought that is something that is more of enabler, um, uh, for, for, you know, for your technology. But, in this case, you remember we talked about that. You mentioned the guy or girl who's in year two of their business case and they've got a big networking

Andy: 18:09

Yeah.

Jon: 18:10

Do you come across sort of TUPE considerations and outsourcing? You know, do you have a, uh, an approach that says, Well actually, you know, we will take some of your people in, or does He does. I mean, we can't about specifics obviously, but TUPE apply in some

Andy: 18:26

Um, I wouldn't necessarily say TUPE, but I think one of the conversations that we see come up a lot is kind of retraining and, and skill. So, so, you know, as an example, um, and this is, this is, you know, if, if you think about the kind of second fundamental benefit of Kaza talked about was the, um, the software that sits on top of it, which is not software in a sense of. Uh, SD WAN, it's software that monitors and manages the whole tech stack and connectivity service as a whole, um, which reduces the management overheads on organization. So by, you know, by default, CaaS will reduce the internal capacity and resource needed on the IT team to, to manage the end to end service, particularly compared to if that service previously was multi silo, multi-vendor, multi contract refresher, all that kind of stuff. Um, so, you know, in the instances that we've seen, there have been some, uh, you know, in some, in some examples, it's not a, it's not a huge consideration because you've got a team that is just on the resource, right? So, you know, let's think about, I dunno, network engineer 35, 40, 45 grand. Probably, you know, you, you'll probably know better than me. Um, a year at the moment. You talked about skill shortages. We talked about, you know, this is just generally never minded. It, I think, um, network engineers were something like the second most desirable. It role as in what was, you know, people were looking for in today's market, behind, behind, um, developers, just because it's, you know, less and less people are training in that little, they're moving towards the technology that seems to be more of a, you know, an attractive and really springboard a career. So if you're talking about an internal cost of 40, 45 K, 50 k when it's fully loaded, you know, p y cetera, you're kind of looking at that and saying, you know, what's my total cost of ownership here versus doing that? Or can I get that person, and this isn't going to replace their role, but it's gonna free up their capacity to do X, y, and z. And that, that is the fundamental, um, outcome that we. With CaaS, you know, it's kind of not, not, I'm going to take these three or four people out of the business. It's now what can I do with this resource? Or if it's an FD or it's CTO or cio, how does this impact my budget more widely? And what, you know, what can I do? But the, the TCO piece is massively important.

Jon: 20:47

It's just one of those areas which you very rarely question the number of people that you need in your network space, particularly if it's um, if it's a global network. Um, and, uh, you've got lots of, you know, private lines dotted around various data centers, uh, in the world.

Andy: 21:05

Yeah.

Jon: 21:06

it becomes, you know, you, you do get this sense that you're a sort of trying to be a telecoms provider. you know, but, but, but never, ever, ever tipping the scale of,

Andy: 21:17

Yeah.

Jon: 21:17

of skill and number of engineers to actually do it.

Andy: 21:21

But if you think about, you know, total cost of ownership as, as an overall here, I think, you know what, what we see day in, day out when it comes to connectivity as a service is obviously, you know, there's a really simple clear pricing commercial model on CaaS that could not be more simple for, for an organization to adopt. And, you know, I'm sure we'll dive into that when, you know, when you are looking at that as a, as an overall service versus almost what have I got today? It's very simple to say, Well, okay, you know, what's my annual cost of my WAN? What do I spend yearly on budget for CapEx for kit refresh? You know, you add those three or four things together and you say, Well actually, you know, that's what I pay here. That's what I pay here. But, you know, it's everything else on top of that that's not hitting. It's the, as I said, the time taken of a 45 grand engineer. It's the, you know, the downtime. It's the inflexibility around the purchasing decisions that you've made. Contractually, it's early cancellation charges. It's, it's a whole myriad of, um,

Jon: 22:16

Yeah.

Andy: 22:17

stuff

Jon: 22:17

Load balancing. Uh, it's all the software configuration, it's the updates that then lead

Andy: 22:23

procurement.

Jon: 22:24

potentially quite

Andy: 22:25

Tendering. Yeah.

Jon: 22:27

yeah, understand. So, so, uh, just a, a couple, um, of points. So if I, if I, if I go for it, uh, what, you know, on security, you

Andy: 22:37

Yep.

Jon: 22:38

things like ransomware or these sort of, you know, really, really significant events, what's gonna assure me, I mean, obviously don't give away anything, um, that we shouldn't discuss, uh, publicly, but what's gonna assure me that actually, Andy, you, you know, going with you, I'm not, you're not gonna ring me up and say, Sorry, Jon, we're, you know, we're completely out. You know what, this is, this sort of, know, um, I'm in charge of my own network, my own destiny,

Andy: 23:01

Yeah,

Jon: 23:01

handing over to you.

Andy: 23:02

yeah.

Jon: 23:03

what, what sort of, uh, what's the, what's the discussion there that convinces the cio, cto, or head of networking that actually this sounds like it's got legs

Andy: 23:11

Yeah. I mean, ultimately if you think about if, if you think about security within connectivity to service, it kind of comes back to what, what I mentioned earlier around how this is actually underpin underpinned as an enterprise service. Yeah. So I think if you. In the same way an organization may go out today and procure a WAN and securities provided on the perimeter part of that with the supplier. You know, this, there is no difference with this under, with connectivity as a service is still very much a commercial model plus a software management wrap that six on top of what are, essentially traditional connectivity services. So I think if anything, from a, um, from a security perspective, because of the way that CaaS is delivered and the fact that, um, all of this is effectively API into vendors, you know, software patching, updates, you know, file, all these things are always constantly updated by the supplier. So supplier of CaaS. And it's not like you've got, you know, onsite with firmwares expired or on the, the latest version or the wrong version. All of this is actually done on behalf, almost just like a managed service. So like what a lot of MSPs would do, but it's going that layer above with the fact that the self served through the software and ultimately the end to end management piece of that. Um, I think obviously there's always organizations that go deeper, you know, and, and we see it today where, um, you know, we see customers taking connectivity service on the, still add in their own firewall solutions on top of that, if that's due to certain protocols or procedures within their business. So, um, you know, I would say whilst the, the, the service as itself is still two years old, all the technology that sits underneath that is, you know, traditional Exactly. Established

Jon: 24:55

It's

Andy: 24:56

services.

Jon: 24:56

to do with the way you've configured it and presented it. That's the new, it's a new

Andy: 24:59

It it's the standard.

Jon: 25:01

tech,

Andy: 25:01

Yeah. It, it's, it's the standardization of the control.

Jon: 25:05

just gotta stop you for two

Andy: 25:07

No problem.

Jon: 25:07

a, um, a do a dog scratching on

Andy: 25:09

No problem. That's fine.

Jon: 25:11

say honestly, you can make it up.

Malcom: 25:13

This episode is sponsored by Fairmont Recruitment, Hiring Technology Professionals Across the UK Europe

Jon: 25:18

It doesn't like shut doors, so it, it scratches to get in. You open the door, it walks in, then walks out again, and if you

Andy: 25:24

Yeah.

Jon: 25:24

it kind of, you know, Anyway, sorry about that. Um, so, uh, just wanted to, uh, use a, discuss a particular use case with the Andy one that I think, um, we're all extremely familiar with.

Andy: 25:37

Yep.

Jon: 25:38

I can talk about my, my own experience as a consumer of this rather than as a CIO.

Andy: 25:45

Yep,

Jon: 25:45

Uh, and that's work from home.

Andy: 25:47

yep,

Jon: 25:49

uh, in the, in some sectors, um, there's still a very, very high prevalence of 32 bit, uh, applications.

Andy: 25:58

yep,

Jon: 25:59

and folks are on 64. Desktops. So if you, um, if you want to present, you know, one over the other, uh, from a networking point of views, these 32 bit apps also were designed to be on the same network.

Andy: 26:14

yep.

Jon: 26:16

when, when, when it? Uh, 10 megabits per second was, was impressive. Uh, I remember token ring, uh, networks and, and all sorts and revealing my, um,

Andy: 26:27

Yeah.

Jon: 26:27

a bit there. Um, but, um, But the point is those, those applications, you know, they're, they're expecting to be directly connected. So is extremely important. Um, uh, because the, you know, you take something like odbc, it, it, even the latest version isn't particularly error tolerant. So we found if you got more than sort of north of 40 milliseconds latency, you started to get problems. then those can be compounded because that latency, um, can then lead to blocking and locking. Cuz the other point is, is that your 32 bit application is designed for things being dealt with quickly and therefore blocking and locking wasn't really a factor in the design. Now

Andy: 27:12

Yeah.

Jon: 27:12

all of this goes away when you don't have a 32 bit app if you decide to present it within terminal service, you know, But there are lots and lots of challenges with the terminal service because when you add a terminal service, you're adding another. Um, desktop, you know, you're adding more surface area to your patching. People don't kind of realize that. Uh, and you, and you've got a extremely expensive laptop, uh, and you're running so, and you're just running, you know, hardly anything on it.

Andy: 27:41

Yep.

Jon: 27:41

Chromebook, uh, which is by the way, not a bad thing, but, you know, And then, and then obviously, you know, the experience sort of wanes a bit. So, um, what I have, I have a firewall appliance at home,

Andy: 27:54

Yep.

Jon: 27:55

um, which I don't think, you know, most consumers would have. I think, you know, it's definitely not something my, you know, my mom could have set up

Andy: 28:04

Yeah.

Jon: 28:04

were. Uh, and I've, I've mesh wifi and when I'm doing anything kind of office related or, or like this, I'm wired, I have a wired connection directly to, you know, to the router. So this is like the wild west, you know, But it's a really big part of experience I get because,

Andy: 28:23

Yeah.

Jon: 28:24

You know, a lot of, a large part of my experience is through my ISP down to, you know,

Andy: 28:29

Yeah.

Jon: 28:29

and the entry point. So I was just wondering, Andy, if you had a thought on that, because I suppose an is a bit of a connection as a service provider.

Andy: 28:39

Yep.

Jon: 28:40

sense that not most people have folks at home with a computer science degree and a interest in networking. Um, what, What's, what's your thoughts on that, Andy?

Andy: 28:49

I think

Jon: 28:50

that's a massive problem. That would be great to be solved

Andy: 28:53

I think where the interesting part about working from home when it comes. Connectivity as a service perspective is if you are sat there as an organization and saying, Right, you know, we've got, I dunno, 300 staff in an organization. Uh, we've got two offices and we expect staff on site to be circa, I don't know, you know, 50% of our total headcount at any one time. What, what connectivity service will allow you to do is right size like infrastructure for that type of setup. And then obviously as, and when you make more decisions around that, I e bring everyone back to site, or we're gonna acquire, or we're gonna close. You can just scale that up and down on a monthly view. User subscription service. You're not investing in the hardware. The other adoption that we've seen in light of, um, particularly covid and working from home is the office environment becomes hot desk, you know, and that then means wifi throughout as opposed to perhaps hard wiring and cabling. You know, that, that is also a clear theme that we saw, which is actually, instead of it needing to be patched in and. You know, um, always sat next to an ethernet cable. We just want flooded wifi across the whole of the, um, the whole of the site. And again, that's an area where

Jon: 30:03

Yep.

Andy: 30:04

can just really simplify that.

Jon: 30:06

There's a, there's a huge place for wifi, um, you know, that genie's out the bottle and it's extremely convenient for all sorts of applications. Um, but I, I am a little bit old school

Andy: 30:19

Yep.

Jon: 30:20

I'd much prefer a wired connection. Um, the frequency of wifi, I think is similar to, uh, the microwave frequency, which means that kind of have a relationship with water.

Andy: 30:32

Yep.

Jon: 30:32

And so, um, there is some articles, and I don't think this is in the flat earth space. I think this is getting, know, this is still in the computer science space that

Andy: 30:41

Yeah.

Jon: 30:42

if you've got damp conditions or it rains, it can actually affect your wifi connectivity if you've got yourself a lovely, you know, um, as a service presented core system.

Andy: 30:53

Yep.

Jon: 30:54

know, great, you know, provided through a web browser, you know, like, you know, your sort of your, your Google setup or, um, all, all those things and actually got a lot of resilience, you probably wouldn't even notice it. And. Mesh wifi makes a lot of sense in that scenario. But again, I'm going back to this, this persistent, uh, problem child of the 32 Bit app

Andy: 31:13

Yep.

Jon: 31:14

that just doesn't like any kind of, know, drop in connectivity, even to the point where on a Windows device, if you get up and hot desk and close your laptop and, and walk, you know, that can actually break the connection.

Andy: 31:27

Yep.

Jon: 31:27

You wouldn't notice it with a, you know, with. A web session cause it would just pick up, you know, But, but that would be a disconnect on your odbc. So there is a, there's, there's, there's, there's a, there's I think, as much a consideration about your application stack as there is about, you know, your networking stack when you put the two together. But if you take the direction of travel that everyone should be going in, everyone should have on their legacy list, anything that starts with the number three and two

Andy: 31:57

Mm-hmm.

Jon: 31:58

be up there for, for replacement. Because it really is blocking all of this utility,

Andy: 32:03

Yep.

Jon: 32:04

that you're describing. And Andy also, were you saying about um, you know, reducing their physical footprint, you know, and you're seeing cancellations and you're thinking, Okay, this is interesting.

Andy: 32:13

Yep.

Jon: 32:14

What's, coming next? Actually, that, that kind of environment, um, sort of throws you. Perhaps propels you more towards as a service, connectivity as a service, the, because you, you are even looking at certain connections between point A and point B that you don't want

Andy: 32:31

We do do, do a quite a bit in, um, in legal for example, where, you know, acquisitions, consolidations is, is quite common and, you know, it's almost a case of number one, what have they got? You know, we've just acquired that firm, what have they got and how do we bring that in? Similarly, kind of, um, what does that mean in terms of office strategy and, and where that's getting to. And I think if you think about the way contractually and commercially all this stuff currently works, you know, you are professional service project management, three year contract for WAN. Traditionally, you. Quite rigid contract is a contract. If you're canceling, you know, it's, it's the end of the term. Your line is an investment that you sink in over a period of time, similar to wifi, you know, and obviously then there is a person cost and people cost that's associated with that. The, the, the benefit of CARSs and where we talk about it being available as a consumption model, like into cloud, it's perhaps less volatile in its consumption, peaks and troughs. But the point of that is you would get every single part of that infrastructure we just talked about delivered on a per user, per month subscription service. So for example, you know, if you had a site that had 50 users in it and that site needed to decrease to 25 users or 20 users based upon, you know, market pressures, business strategy, whatever, that will be your price point just dropped by the amount of users you canceled off. Similarly, it will scale similarly. If you need to remove it altogether, you cancel it off. So you kind of are removing, and this is back to the tco, right? Because you know. in the legacy way of doing it. What does that give you in terms of lack of agility and hindrance? Ability to move, ability to react quickly to things. Particularly when we start to get into the, you know, economic and social climate that we are facing in the next

Jon: 34:19

Yes,

Andy: 34:20

12 months. Having that ability to completely remove CapEx from the equation, but also be able to move and scale in line with those types of pressures, you know, is, is fundamentally a key agility advantage.

Jon: 34:34

Yeah. I mean, so in the business case, uh, uh, the legal sector that you mentioned, uh, I would've thought joiners movers and leavers, which is a massive.

Andy: 34:42

Yep.

Jon: 34:43

Headache and activity for any law firm. It's a constant flow of people coming in, going out and moving position. And in the legal space, as with many businesses, uh, particularly with a mover, you know, they've got different, um, access and there's, there's a lot that goes into that. So the automation there and being

Andy: 35:00

Yep.

Jon: 35:01

in, I think is, is key. and also, uh, uh, I'm sort of my sixth, sixth year I think of the legal sector. And I'm just astounded by the number of office moves there are. I mean, I just really, that was a big surprise to me. Um, and they are, and, and the other sort of odd thing is, is it always seems like people are slightly in denial about it. Like, you know, this will be the last one, or this is very unusual, but actually they're just all the time.

Andy: 35:25

Yeah.

Jon: 35:25

think that's, that's key. But when you talk about resilience, think there. There's another point that you need to really carefully consider, and that's not really, um, a risk directly related to connectivity as a service. It's more about the CIO, uh, CTIO, taking a look at the whole portfolio of, in quotes as a services that you have, because whilst it's great not to have a big sort of CapEx uh, investment, um, mean, but there is a place for CapEx investments because it gets, um, um, depreciated, you know, over the life of the deal and doesn't have an impact on, on profit in quite the same way. So that, you know, you have to sort of work that out. the main, uh, risk you have is that anything to do with opex is drawing from cash

Andy: 36:09

Yeah.

Jon: 36:10

flow, but it's not just drawing from cash. It's also has a, a pretty amazing, uh, consequence if you don't. So you have a business that has this, you know, less than perfect, um, internally organized setup, there are services that will sort of be extremely resilient in terms of switched off.

Andy: 36:34

Yep.

Jon: 36:34

They might not be as secure or as up to date, et cetera, but they won't be switched off. Um, if you are on a, as a service, you know, and you have a cash flow challenge, um, which let's think about the resilience that everyone's going to need coming up, know, that can be a problem because it can be, you know, you're asked, you know, what's the, how do we prioritize these,

Andy: 36:58

Yep.

Jon: 36:59

these technology payments? And you say, Well actually all of these, if any one of these stops, you know, you don't get to X, Y, Z. The network stops. It's pretty much.

Andy: 37:10

Yep.

Jon: 37:11

Imagine

Andy: 37:12

Came over Doomsday.

Jon: 37:13

imagine your, your worst scenario that we need to put another 50 P in the meter. So, have you thought about that, Andy? for the, because I, I know what you're saying. What you, what what, maybe what we're saying is the overall cash requirement might be less because of what, how you're implementing it and what your, what costs you're moving out.

Andy: 37:31

Yeah.

Jon: 37:32

still be a net gain. Yeah. But if you do a business case, I've read a lot of business cases that if you add up all the, the FTE savings, you know, of all the business cases that have been approved, uh, it actually adds up to more people than you employ in your technology team. And there's a lot of business case, uh, process that goes on where people see it, but they don't execute some of the harder savings.

Andy: 38:00

So,

Jon: 38:01

uh, yeah. So I, Andy I'm just trying to,

Andy: 38:03

yeah,

Jon: 38:04

probably where people are gonna be at, you

Andy: 38:05

it,

Jon: 38:06

what they're gonna be thinking.

Andy: 38:07

there's a couple of interesting, Yeah, there's a couple of interesting points in that. So I think, I think, you know, interestingly, connectivity, the servicing CaaS, you know, because it's sold and procured as a subscription license, you, you can actually capitalize that cost. So, you know, there is a CapEx option of delivering this service first and foremost. So, you know, there, there are, there are scenarios and accounts and s that can, can help accommodate that. I think ultimately it is, it's kind of like anything with this, particularly in the WAN space, because whatever you do, you are always going to be consuming your. WAN an ongoing service. You know, no one is buying a one or buying an internet service front, it's coming from a service provider. So there are always gonna be ongoing cost and charges. That's just the fundamental reality of it. So, so I think I, I don't think that's ever a scenario you're going to, um, you're going to avoid. What I would say is with CaaS, you are not locked into a three year contract and someone is saying to you, you know, tough, you can't do this. Or, you know, you can't benchmark because you're already in a service or you've got something that you signed five years, four years ago that's, sorry, a year ago. That's got a long left time left on it. So, you know, I would argue you will never have more agility then you will with CaaS there's some problems. You'll never be able to overcome it. Go. Sorry.

Jon: 39:27

Andy. Having, having your cake and eat it.

Andy: 39:29

Yeah.

Jon: 39:30

So, uh, and this is often the way, you know, you speak, uh, about, uh, people wanna fixed price deal and you, you put a fixed price deal together and they say, What's this cost? And you say, Well, this is the risk I need to put in

Andy: 39:40

Yeah.

Jon: 39:41

you know, some things happen. And then they go, Well, they, he's really done his homework.

Andy: 39:45

Yep.

Jon: 39:45

go tnm. know, I don't want fixed price anymore. I only wanted you to do fixed price so I could see

Andy: 39:50

Well,

Jon: 39:51

I'm prepared to go tnm I in the same sense. if I wanted to have a three. Arrangement with you for a lower unit charge, You know, some, Does your model afford that, or is it basically No, it's, uh, it's no contract or it's

Andy: 40:08

I, I I think, I think we're willing, I think we're willing to work with, you know, there, there's always flexibility in terms of commercially what that needs to look like. I think the fundamental, you know, The fundamental approach with it's a, you know, certain value per user. That base is based upon the amount of users that you believe will need to use your corporate environment. And that can scale other when it needs to go. You know, there's fair use, there's all sorts of stuff in there that, that we can talk through. And, you know, if someone was to say, Well, actually I'm gonna categorically fix this for a period of three years or five years, you know, can that, can we do anything different? I mean, ultimately the, the, when you dive into the commercial and the build of this, you know, we CaaS isnt itemized, you know, it's a price per user and you buy an outcome for that user, which is essentially water wall, internet access so, you know, this is where the, this is where, back to the mindset adoption of the cio, CT I t manager, network manager, whatever it is. You know, when we, and when, you know, organizations engage in a CaaS discussion, it's not, you know, it's a gig there. It's a hundred mega there, you know, there's a primary circuit there. It's a different supplier for the backup, but you know, this is the access point. We're gonna need to sell you PS to go and manage it. It is how many sites, how many users, There's your cost per user,

Jon: 41:27

it.

Andy: 41:27

you know, that that is it. So you're not, you're not stripping it back to that level. And in terms of that adoption of CaaS, you know, we, and the way it works from a, um, in terms of a pricing perspective, you know, you could have a one site network, you could have a hundred site network, you know, realistically that can be quoted in minutes because it's a, it's a per user. You know, there's obviously software, the software on the back on that, that, that underpins that. But, um, you're taking yourself out of that traditional detail conversation because you've, you've basically said, We're paying this supplier to do this because it will just work. Obviously there's SLAs and all sorts of associated with that, but, um, it takes it really out the.

Jon: 42:08

So, so that's, that's making me think about scalability.

Andy: 42:12

Yep.

Jon: 42:12

Um, so the first question would be, you know, is your sweet spot or the service that you're providing aimed at the larger company, or can the startup. Benefit from,

Andy: 42:26

Yep.

Jon: 42:26

you know, is it a price point that a startup could,

Andy: 42:30

So,

Jon: 42:31

in? When I say a startup, I don't mean a p back startup with 5 million

Andy: 42:36

yeah.

Jon: 42:37

and 30 people

Andy: 42:38

So

Jon: 42:38

a profit for three years. I mean, like a genuine, you know, five, 10 person organization kind of thing.

Andy: 42:43

yeah, so I think, I think I would say kind of the real kind of, uh, range of client size is probably 50 users to about 1500 users. You know, that, that feels like sme. You know, mid-market, small enterprise, you know, probably more SME, mid-market, um, just based upon the things we talked about before around large IT teams. The bigger the business, the more layers of like you've already got involved as a potential obstacle. So, um, you know, I think with that, and, and, and this same problem exists across all of those organizations, which is, you know, how do I manage my network today? How many people have I got to manage my network today? I'm still dealing with underperforming suppliers, typically across that silo stack. And how do I consolidate that and, and simplify the management of it And the, I guess the real, um, one of the real advantages of the software associated with that is because of the software orchestration. And standardization of the deployment. The software's pretty much acting like a 24 7 knock in-house. You know, it's someone looking at your network 24 7, and if there's a fault, the software diagnosis, it raises a ticket. So there is still a human interaction at some point in that journey, but we're kind of taking the human requirement or dependency or limiting that, should I say, within that scenario. So, um, that, that exists, you know, with organizations that are 20, 25 users in the same way it can exist with 500, a thousand users. It's just a sense of scale.

Jon: 44:13

Okay. Well, look, I think, um, we've, um, we, we, we tee things up nicely to talk about, a bit of an overview

Andy: 44:20

Yep,

Jon: 44:21

you know, how, how you'd typically adopt this, you know,

Andy: 44:24

yep.

Jon: 44:25

the, stages you might go through. Now, before we, we start, maybe we should say, um, that there's an assumption that we've already worked through the business case.

Andy: 44:34

Yep.

Jon: 44:35

So, um, I'm gonna assume, uh, if it's right with you, Andy, that we've kind of covered the business case, you know, um, uh, in terms of the, you know, what, is it a fit for us? Is it the right thing to do, the savings, et cetera. But obviously another big part of the business case is implementation,

Andy: 44:52

yeah,

Jon: 44:52

you've gotta know how you're gonna adopt it because then that tells you when your benefits and your disbenefits will, will, will flow, and therefore when you're gonna start to break even on the business case and then, then, and then make your money. Um, so, so if, if, so we're still building the business case, as it were, but we're now sort of trying to think about sequencing and timing

Andy: 45:11

yeah,

Jon: 45:11

you know, considerations, that sort of thing. so Andy, so we've, we've, uh, put, we've put a lot of the commercial and financial elements, risks, et

Andy: 45:19

Yep.

Jon: 45:20

The sort of the strategic alignment, all that's in the business case now. now we're thinking, okay, we've gotta think about timing, uh, you know, how, how, how risky or how long, what are the challenges of adopting this so that we know when we can start to actually,

Andy: 45:33

Yep.

Jon: 45:34

switch off some costs, switch on some benefits, that sort of thing. So could you kind of talk us through the

Andy: 45:39

Yeah,

Jon: 45:40

um, broadly, uh, you know, and maybe just give us a, a for instance, we could take one of the SME customers, you know, in

Andy: 45:47

yeah, absolutely. So,

Jon: 45:49

idea.

Andy: 45:50

absolutely. So I think, I think there's a few things just to consider as part of kind of the, the, the global pitch at the minute, and that is kit. Um, and, and I'm sure you are, have exposure to this, um, in terms of chip shortages, kit availability. You know, it, it doesn't really matter who you are or what. You know, you are, you are working with, So, you know, as an example, connectivity is a service, um, for most specifically is, you know, it's pretty much all built on fortinet with Cisco and Extreme options. So, you know, we are kind of going after, you know, lead vendors of LAN, WAN, uh, land, wifi, CP equipment, and it's, you know, just getting hold of care is a challenge. So, you know, you're talking five to six months at the minute just to, to get the delivery of the kit. Now, obviously, if you think about connectivity as service as a premise, you know, we, you know, it is essentially treated like a greenfield deployment. So within your CaaS solution, you are getting essentially brand new equipment delivered across every single one of your sites. So, you know, that is a complete infrastructure refresh. That is, you know, it's um, kit volume surveys, you know, mapping, all that kind of stuff is done by the supplier of. Um, so that's a head, a headache removed from the consumer, but, um, but you've almost got to work back to that time scale. So historically, as you're probably aware, the bulk of the lead time deploying anything like this was the time it took to get ethernet circuits delivered, which,

Jon: 47:15

Yes.

Andy: 47:16

can be 3, 3, 4 months probably at the best of times. Really?

Jon: 47:20

that.

Andy: 47:20

yeah.

Jon: 47:21

internationally.

Andy: 47:21

Yeah. Nightmare.

Jon: 47:23

it's not, it's, it's a nightmare. And, um, you know, and then when you get there, you know, you, I've seen people get, pull out, um, blueprints of, of, of buildings,

Andy: 47:32

Yeah.

Jon: 47:33

literally to try and work out what, what the duct ducting route will be to get to the end floor. I

Andy: 47:38

a minefield. I mean, it.

Jon: 47:40

hands on

Andy: 47:41

Yeah. It, it, it's a mind. And you know that that's the world I've lived over a decade, you know, in terms of dealing with, dealing with the, the, the ISPs, the tail providers. So, you know, you always had that ethernet consideration around your lead times. But, but actually now Kit is, is probably surpassing that. So, you know, kit availability and to be frank, it's probably not gonna get any easier. Um, you know, it's probably gonna be worse first, you know, I think, I think really the next six, 12 months you're gonna be looking at a similar kind of cycle. And so I think, I think really you've got to take a step back and say actually, you know, what is the, the end state and the end goal for this, you know, is their dependencies? Is it a site move? Is there contracts with existing supplies that potentially gonna end is the kit that's end of life? There's a whole bunch of compelling events that, you know, put a line in the sand that you need to, to work back through.

Jon: 48:32

Andy, is it says to me that this is very much a strategic move.

Andy: 48:36

Yeah. I.

Jon: 48:37

it's not a, We have a conversation on Wednesday and on Thursday we switched.

Andy: 48:40

Yeah.

Jon: 48:41

This is a, this is, this is part of a, know, if you took your, So we're doing an event coming up, which is a hundred day plan.

Andy: 48:48

Okay.

Jon: 48:49

Uh, and, and it's, it's, it's pitched at either you've just started a new role, uh, in a business technology leadership role. So is literally your first 100 days,

Andy: 48:58

Yep.

Jon: 48:59

it can also be taken as 100 days of your strategy of a particular phase, you know, that sort of thing. So that sort of lead time, would say it is in the strategic space,

Andy: 49:10

Yeah.

Jon: 49:11

I think your problem, I don't wanna, um, uh, steal your thunder, but I'm, I'm guessing there's still a lot you can do in the design and planning, which is gonna use up a lot of those months in any case. So it

Andy: 49:21

Well,

Jon: 49:22

the, the longest thing you wait for, but sorting out where you're starting from

Andy: 49:27

yeah.

Jon: 49:28

else in existing contracts and, you know,

Andy: 49:30

but, but that, that comes as part of your tco. So if, if you're understanding that from your TCO perspective, you, you know, you've already got a sense of, you know, I've got this, I've got this in terms of cost to third parties and I've got this in terms of cost of people, you know, that's where I'm at. I've got this that saves me X, Y, and Z and gives me a bunch of agility benefits and takes away my management, um, headaches. You know? So I think what I would say is fundamentally from a deployment perspective, you are talking about installing awan, you're talking about refreshing equipment across your sites. You know, it's not something that, that CTO CIOs, you know, won't have been through before. You know, the difference with this is it is the complete consolidation when we're delivering the kit as part of the solution. It's the complete consolidation, um, of that with one provider. Now, obviously because of that, yes, it's potentially bigger in its scale. But there's a standardization around how that's going to be delivered, managed, and deployed. That you would be basically, if you were doing it separately, you'd be running three different, I mean, a prime example, I digress slightly, John, but you talk about public sector, so ccs, crowd, commercial service. In terms of the tender framework,

Jon: 50:43

Yeah. Yep,

Andy: 50:44

uh, there's three lots. One land and wifi. So if a public sector organization wanted to consume cars today, in theory, they're bidding three different tenders for, for one outcome. So, you know, that's a scenario that we are talking about changing. And in some instances, you know, the organizations we, we work with, they're right in waivers. easier.

Jon: 51:02

It's a service revolution. Well, revolution might be a little bit strong word, but definitely it's a, it's a disruptive way of delivering the service, but it's using, um, ex established technology. but due to your scale, you are able to, you know, to, to get, not bleeding edge, but the, you know, the

Andy: 51:20

Yeah.

Jon: 51:20

bleeding edge

Andy: 51:21

And

Jon: 51:22

So it's stable, but you can patch it cuz you've got the scale,

Andy: 51:25

yeah, and the software, the software, you know, is, is a really key part of that. And, you know, the, the, the, we are very looking that we've, we've deployed this software, it's our software in terms of, um, what sit on top of connectivity as a service. And, and that is the software that, you know, someone within an organization's going in. As I said before, it's a software that Diagnosises faults on the network, raises tickets on behalf. It's software that provides drop down for, you know, changes. As you know, there's no free text field of a junior,

Jon: 51:55

that's your portal,

Andy: 51:56

Correct? Yeah. Yeah.

Jon: 51:57

of IP

Andy: 51:58

Correct.

Jon: 51:59

and it's the, I can log in

Andy: 52:01

Yep.

Jon: 52:01

the view of my account. It's

Andy: 52:03

Yep.

Jon: 52:03

the customer portal. And daresay you've probably got some supplier elements to it, but

Andy: 52:07

Yep.

Jon: 52:08

I mean, that is my, uh, stricter sense of the definition that is your digital transformation

Andy: 52:14

Absolutely.

Jon: 52:15

at the boundary between you and your customer, your supply chain.

Andy: 52:18

Yep.

Jon: 52:18

Uh, and it's hooking into, to everything underneath it. Sustainability. So the, the significant cost of a data center has always been power.

Andy: 52:30

Yeah.

Jon: 52:31

I mean, I just dread to think what that's, you know, the next year or so. It's, you know, anyone who's managed to land a. A fixed price, you know,

Andy: 52:40

Yeah. My, in my previous company, John, we used to run one, so we owned a data center, so we're we're, Yeah. Yeah, exactly Yeah.

Jon: 52:47

Um, so it's a huge cost. Um, there's obviously a cost element to it, but there's also sustainability. And, um, you've got, um, you know, as a, as a prof, as a you know, technologists use a lot of electricity

Andy: 53:02

Yep.

Jon: 53:02

therefore we have a, Is there anything that you guys do in that space? Is there anything that you're planning to do, you know, from your portal point of view that gives me a view of whether you are fossil based or, you know, just the, that whole sustainability element?

Andy: 53:18

Yep.

Jon: 53:18

that something you guys are, are looking into? Cause it is, I think it's, it is becoming increasingly, uh,

Andy: 53:23

I think,

Jon: 53:24

element.

Andy: 53:25

I think it's something for us to consider. I think it's, it's how we're able to. How we are doing that in a manner that kind of builds confidence and and transparency with, with the customer. I think, I think if you take the concept of CaaS and kind of how you know what that actually means, um, as an example, so we talked about infrastructure. So you know, an organization that may have invested in a bunch of kit three, four years ago that still sat there and still has a balance sheet value as part of the transition to cars. An option that, that we do in particular is, you know, we can actually buy that kit back off them for the current balance sheet value as part of the service. So we are deploying brand new infrastructure, but we are taking that kit away to then either recycle or use as part of the deployments as part of our, our bigger group. So it, it's a, it's an eye on us trying to do something. Um, I think the, the wider kind of sustainability part around, um, fuel and whatnot is, is something that we, you know, we're thinking about, but it's, it's an area we, we, we would probably need to develop a bit.

Jon: 54:29

a.

Andy: 54:30

Um,

Jon: 54:30

it's, I think it is a really sort of a new category at this level. Um, again, going, just referring back to the cloud, uh, strategy episode, um, there was talk of having, um, some APIs whereby, let's say you've got two or three cloud providers, um, and you have got an element of workload that's portable. There isn't a lot, but let's just say you, you have, um, you'd be able to work out where their power is coming from and therefore send more workload to the,

Andy: 55:00

you okay?

Jon: 55:00

know, to the sustainable power.

Andy: 55:02

Yeah,

Jon: 55:02

starts to become a,

Andy: 55:03

yeah, yeah. Definitely.

Jon: 55:05

and then that starts to drive behavior because greener energy then becomes more, um, popular. of course that's gonna drive, you know, it'll all sort of work itself out with prices, but I think everyone's really sort of thinking very seriously about,

Andy: 55:18

Yep.

Jon: 55:18

we can do in that space. We've built a, we sort of discussed a business case. Um, we've talked about where it would apply, uh, we've talked about adoption, the sort of the process you'd go through to get this up and running. Um, just, top of your mind the sort of things that you'd want, the folks watching this who are really interested in moving to

Andy: 55:38

Yep.

Jon: 55:38

connectivity as a service. What, what are the kind of the, the takeaways that you'd leave them with in terms of just having something to, if anyone is gonna write anything down,

Andy: 55:47

Yeah,

Jon: 55:47

maybe they take some notes now. What, what would be your kind of summary view?

Andy: 55:51

I think I would probably say, and this is part of the kind of deep dive in the conversations we'd have with customers and potential customers, which is kind of just fully understanding the impact that this has on, on, on the business today. Right. So I think, you know, we, we've talked a lot about the what impact the day to day management of a network and the suppliers and or multi vendors of that network has, and how efficient that looks like, you know, and. You know, what time is that taking away or could be taking away from making your beer taste better, as we kind of talked about before, which is, you know, really is that the skill set? Have you got the right skills? Um, and is there another way to do that? Because when you look at this from a TTO perspective, you know, 99 times out of a hundred we, you know, cars will save, save a business on tcl. So you know that we fundamentally we'll offer them a reduction in the total cost of ownership of this infrastructure in this service. It's more where they are as a business in terms of being able to adopt that. So, you know, as a, as a similar takeaway, if you've got an organization that is soon to embark on a kit refresh or a site move, or the types of things where they would typically go down the rabbit hole of the legacy way of thinking. you know, that would be a good time to say, Well, actually what would it look like if we went down connectivity to service? And, and I'd also say ask you staff, because you know, we, we see it day in, day out where there are IT teams who are, you know, they are, um, bending over backwards to keep the lights on from a connectivity perspective. And actually that's the taken away from some things that would be considered more strategic for their business.

Jon: 57:35

And, and Andy, just on that point, uh, quickly, so the, the size of company you describe, um, often some of the individuals that are, are involved in networking, it's not the only thing they do.

Andy: 57:46

Yeah,

Jon: 57:47

be infrastructure engineers rather

Andy: 57:49

a hundred percent. Yeah.

Jon: 57:51

And, uh, so I've, um, had teams set up in the past, uh, for doing technology automation. So a business technology automation team isn't just someone who can, you know, Code, uh, you know, replace whatever's being done code, it normally has to transverse infrastructure. There's, there's all sorts of

Andy: 58:13

Okay.

Jon: 58:14

So of the, one of the ways this slots into creative automation is individuals are just spending all their time keeping the lights on. They're able to move into that automation

Andy: 58:26

Yeah,

Jon: 58:27

So that gives you a double benefit because obviously there is the benefit we've been describing. But then you've got, being able to move those resources into tactical automation, can make a massive difference. You know, manual processes, highly repetitive processes in your core ERP or case management system be transformed with some simple automation. But you do need a cross-functional team and those infrastructure engineers that also understand you. They understand how everything connects. You know, they, they're really valuable. So I think there's, I don't want people to, to, to, to come away to say there's, um, you know, there, there, there's a number of ways that you can transform that

Andy: 59:07

Yeah,

Jon: 59:07

and, and, and set that business case on fire.

Andy: 59:10

a

Jon: 59:10

Um, and, and remember, um, you know, this is definitely in the, as as with all networking, uh, there are lead times involved. So it needs to be part of a strategy, not part of a, Andy, can you get this done by next week please?

Andy: 59:24

Yeah,

Jon: 59:25

Andy's good, but he can't, he can't, uh,

Andy: 59:28

meal calls. Yeah, absolutely.

Jon: 59:31

Brilliant. Uh, okay, so Andy, thank you very much

Andy: 59:34

Thanks Jon.

Jon: 59:35

your time.

Andy: 59:35

Cheer.

Malcom: 59:37

My name is Malcom and Im wondering when everything as a service will become available one single price per user per month for absolutely everything It's probably closer than we think. CTIO 1 O 1 Business Technology Simplified and Shared. Subscribe now. Sponsored by Fairmont Recruitment, Hiring Technology Professionals Across the UK Europe