Ep. 178 Azure at the Edge, IBM in the Basement, and Databases Everywhere. Ron Colbert

What do latency, legacy gear, and local cloud have in common? Everything—if you're Ron Colbert. In this episode, we explore how a data center expert turned cloud strategist is helping customers decipher the signals for change. From real-world wins with Azure Local to uncovering hidden gold in IBM workloads, Ron shares the discovery questions that close deals, the database traps to avoid, and why RLM’s approach is rewriting the partner playbook. If you’re selling cloud, this is the edge you’ve been looking for.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success selling
technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lopresto,
SVP of Sales Engineering at Delaris, and this is Next Level
Biz Tech. Hey everybody, welcome back.
We got a a hot track here for you today.
We're talking about a whole whole bunch of tech stack here

(00:23):
today. It's Azure at the edge, IBM in
the basement, which is where they always are, and databases
everywhere talking about the signals to change on with us
today we got Ron Colbert of RLM.Ron, welcome on man.
Hey thanks a lot for having me. Excited, excited to get into
this. These are these are some fun
tracks, you know, and it's not stuff that we could talk about
in the channel, you know, 5 plusyears ago.

(00:46):
So let's let's jump in maybe before we do a little bit about
who you are, your background, right?
You spent a lot of time in this space.
You just tell us, just you personally, we'll get to RLM
here in a second, but just you know you and your experience
personally. Yeah, sure, sure.
So I, I started out in a small engineering firm in Atlanta, GA.

(01:09):
At least you know, this, this mypart of this career in, in 2001.
And I was working for this really talented group as a, as a
sales professional, just kind ofgetting started in my career and
really talented leadership and really, really great delivery

(01:30):
team, about 35 employees at the time.
And we had a small little data center facility that we would,
we would sell into. We had a professional services
team and a support organization.And I think the first, the first
sale I ever made, there was a hosted division server running

(01:53):
with Citrix and I was a couple of servers running in the data
center. And, and we didn't call it
cloud, we didn't call it managedservices.
But you know, I was, I, I was ina, a, what you'd consider a VAR
reseller. But the, the, the services and
things that I really gravitated toward were always in the

(02:16):
recurring services programs. We had a, we had a, a few
channel relationships. We were a Bellsouth agent and we
were also an AT&T alliance channel partner.
And so, you know, I was sort of,I, I had quite a few things that
I could work with as far as, youknow, providing solutions to

(02:38):
clients and, and having, having such a, a talented group of
engineers, I really got a good education on, on how to, how to
work through, you know, project.It was an engineering LED
company. And so I, I really gained quite
a bit working with that team. And I think my, my I, I worked

(03:01):
with a couple of clients, you know, straight channel
opportunities probably in 2004 to 2006 time frame.
I brought a couple customers over to AT&T and, and I got a
pretty good understanding of that and that background, but I
really combined that sort of VARprofessional services when the

(03:24):
economy just fell apart in 2008 and 9 and nobody was really
buying anything. I remember I, I spent a lot of
time training for, to, to learn the Cisco call manager platform
and I, I was really, I was really invested in that.
I was spending a lot of time at the Cisco office and, and nobody

(03:44):
wanted to buy it because, you know, the economy was such trash
at the time. And I, I started looking at, you
know, redesigning re architecting telecom services
for clients. And like, OK, remember I had a,
a big moment with a, with a customer in 2009 that I, I, I

(04:09):
looked at their, their spend. They had AI don't want to age
myself here, but they had an IP enabled frame relay network and
they had PRI and they had all this, you know, just just things
that give you, you know, shiversand, and I, I looked at all of
it, put it all, organized it alland, you know, came back to them

(04:32):
a week later and said you're spending about $40,000 a month
with your, with your current services.
If we redesign this and had a blank sheet of paper, I can
bring that down to 20,000. But you got to buy this call
manager solution that I want to sell you.
I put it into a monthly lease and let's call it $10,000.

(04:52):
I'm going to pay you $10,000 a month to give you a brand new
phone system and a brand new network.
And I started doing that and sort of combining these, these
two worlds and, and I got, I gotthe sale and, and I got to, to
do the thing that I wanted. But it really planted a seed in
my head of the potential, the capability and the, the sort of

(05:17):
the opportunity that exists in the channel industry like that.
That background really helped shape kind of where I took
things into the, into the, the, you know, the later part of my
career journey with that organization.
I love it. And and you know, you take into
consideration now where the TSD channel is to where maybe back

(05:39):
then maybe you had, you know, 20products to sell, now you've got
400. So the rules have not yet been
fully written on what you can combine, what you can bundle,
how that would cost, save. So now it's just, you know, open
up. It's, I guess for better or for
worse, it's like The Cheesecake Factory of menu options.
So now the possibilities are even bigger, right?
Yeah, it is. It's it's and it feels like it,

(06:02):
it gets bigger every quarter. It's really exciting.
I love, I love some of the, the,the organizations that have
entered the channel and you know, it's, it is really sort of
determine what areas do you wantto focus on and there's a a

(06:23):
dozen or more legitimate competitors and in each of those
areas that could fit any client need.
You know, it's, it's, it's really that's I was talking to a
customer yesterday. It's you almost become a
professional shopper for for what a specific set of needs
are. Yeah, that's a new, I haven't

(06:44):
heard that one. I like it.
Yeah. So let's let's let's look at
RLM, right. You know, you've got, you've got
this org. Help us understand a little bit
about who RLM is. You know, what's different, how
you approach some of these cloudand infrastructure sales?
How do you engage? Just give us a little bit of an
RLM commercial. Sure, sure.

(07:04):
We so we all came from from the data center side of the world
and we focus on almost exclusively on enterprise
organizations. So we take on only a few clients
per year. A lot of us have you know, I've
got 25 years in selling IT solutions.

(07:25):
My two partners are both 30 years each veterans.
So we do have long standing relationships with our clients,
but I think the, the key that ofwhat we do is really fully
immerse ourselves to understand what is, what is a challenge
that, that a client is, is up against.

(07:46):
Like what are they, what are they trying to achieve?
I've sat on, I've sat on probably 10 different IT
steering committees for customers, sitting alongside
them, helping them to develop strategies that will inform
decisions as we go into different project areas.

(08:08):
You know, what are we trying to,where are we today?
Where are we trying to go tomorrow?
How are we going to get there? Is, is really, you know what,
what informs the strategy and you know, we'll, we'll get
e-mail addresses with our on ourclients domains will work truly
like within there. If there are resources needed,

(08:30):
we provide the resources like it's, it, it may sound a little
bit much, but this, this true partnership model requires that
we have, we make investments that we, we sort of win and lose
together with the customer. And, and if you, if you go full,

(08:52):
full immersion into it, you know, it's, it's often rewarded
where we don't really have competition.
We, you know, we, we've helped sort of shape the strategy.
I've run RF PS that I've written, I facilitate and I make
my recommendation. I certainly give the client the

(09:13):
opportunity to, to make a decision.
I've, I've never had a circumstance where they've not
taken that guidance. You know, it's if you go through
that whole process, there's a trust there, you know?
Yeah, you put the work in the high.
I mean, I want to say it's high risk, high reward, but it's but
if you're being selective on whoyou take on to your earlier
points, then it's just risk equals reward.

(09:36):
Right. Yeah, it's, you know, your, your
time has cost and certainly you want to make sure that you, you
have a, a shared set of goals and, and you can sort of qualify
and vet that out, you know, on the front end.
But a lot of times it's, it's, it's kind of a no brainer for us
to, to, to dive in with our client, you know, and, and you

(10:01):
can do the math. It's it, it's, it's rewarding
over time. Yeah.
All right, one, one more quick question and then we're going to
get into some of these kind of Azure and database and IBM, you
know, tech stack here. So just a lot of good
experience, lessons learned. I always love this question.
Give me an example of, you know,something that you learned along

(10:22):
the way, either from a great mentor or some major mistake
that you made, you know, and that's what's something that
you've tried to carry with you throughout.
Oh gosh. So, yeah, it's I, it's, it's
always, it's always tough. I mean, we've, I've made so many
mistakes along the way. It's you know, a lot of times

(10:44):
what I try and what I try and, and do as we go into a project
is, is really set the goal and then work backward from that,
you know, whatever that timetable is.
But just with everything today is so interdependent on other
other service providers, there'sso many factors to to

(11:06):
transitioning a client. And as, as you've spoken about
in some of your previous episodes, the software rules
everything. And, and you know, I'm, I'm,
I'm, I weigh out business goals and, and certainly contracts
that clients have. And you know, all of those

(11:30):
factors can, can impact when a decision has to be made.
And as you go past those timetables, it, it puts things
at risk. I mentioned that call manager
example earlier. I built this entire thing
around. One of the early lessons I
learned in that project was sometimes when you're ordering

(11:53):
fiber services, it can take a long time to get installation
and a few couple things wrong. It can kill all the momentum of
a project because we're waiting on this one little thing.
I actually got us into a Star Link early because of a network

(12:13):
projects about 3 years ago that went sideways when we had a we
had to cut open a parking lot for a customer to install some
services. And I went ahead and just bought
a Starlink kit, you know, business grade Starlink kit, put
it on the roof and just gave it to the customer for six months
while they while they waited forthis installation to occur.

(12:36):
And that's, that's a, you know, somewhat recent example, but how
are we addressing those problemsthat have come up, you know,
along the way? And it, it's, it's creativity
that, you know, we had to come up with and, and work around,
but definitely had some lumps along the way here.
Fair all right, let's let's shift gears here let's talk

(12:59):
about Azure right I mean you think about you guys have I
loved the angle that you have coming from the data center
side. So, you know, Microsoft comes
along, Microsoft over the last number of years has built up the
Azure cloud infrastructure and all.
I mean, that's a big, it's a bigthing, right?
There's a lot of products in there.
So specifically, they come out with Azure Local.
And so for people that aren't familiar, Azure Local is the

(13:21):
same AWS as this. They have AWS outposts.
Azure Local is, hey, you're going to get the same tech stack
that Azure uses in their cloud that you normally get on your
layer of orchestration. You get into your GUI, you
command the interface, you buildout, you get IPS, you get apps,
all that good stuff. Take a subset of that and for a
better use case, a Better Business case, maybe it makes
sense to put a little bit of that on Prem.

(13:42):
And so, you know, things like that are out there now that this
stuff like this wasn't availablein the channel in years past.
And so as you think about how you're helping people build out
infrastructure, sometimes it's Azure, sometimes it's Azure
local, is it hybrid? Is it full private cloud?
Give us an example where you've gone through something like
that. What were you solving for?

(14:02):
Is it latency? Is it compliance?
Is it resiliency? Just walk us through kind of how
you think through that. Yeah, sure, sure.
It's interesting. You know, Microsoft is the king
of of repackaging a product and and sort of they they have these
major enhancements and they'll almost re release the same
product. They went through it with LCS
into OCS into Link into Teams and they went through it with

(14:27):
Terminal Server into RDS and andtoday we have what started out
as Azure Arc became Azure Stack,HCI became Azure local, some
derivative of Hyper V coupled with Azure.
But it's this really, really neat alternative today to

(14:49):
running Broadcom, you know, where a client might be dealing
with some of the challenges thathave come from Broadcom if they
need to run low latency workloads.
You know, manufacturing is a is an easy example to share where
you might have a workload that has to be on premise within a

(15:12):
facility that's driving, you know, machinery or equipment and
and those, you know, sub five millisecond while workload needs
or whatever, whatever crazy fastconnections are required is one
thing. One of the one of the projects
that we recently did was to helpa client figure out a path to

(15:35):
upgrade their domain version. So they were, they had these old
custom applications on the plantfloor that had to continue, but
they're running on Windows Server 2003 and their domain
version is 2008 R 2. And you can't, it's like a boat
anchor. You can't, you can't escape it.
And So what, what we came up with was can we put Azure local

(16:00):
on premise and then create a bubble domain around that micro
segment into it, which would really isolate that that old
server off of the, the enterprise network and give them
a path to upgrade the the domainversion.
And, and in doing so, we, we were able to give them a

(16:21):
hardware refresh. We were able to solve this, this
this domain issue and allow themto, to enhance their security
posture. And, and, and so that's a that's
a not an uncommon thing is how do you address, you know,
Broadcom quintuple the pricing of their licensing?

(16:44):
They've, you know, they've done what they've done and that's
great. It's that's their business to,
to, to make those choices. But you know, clients that are
Microsoft centric may be apprehensive to train up on, you
know, a Nutanix or Simplivity or, or some of the, the more

(17:06):
obscure hypervisor platforms. They're comfortable and familiar
with the Azure portal. The features like you mentioned
those some of those past features like managed sequel
instance, I know we'll get into database here in a SEC, but like
being able to extend down some of the Paas capabilities from

(17:29):
Azure on premise can greatly reduce the administrative
overhead and burden leveraging some of the backup capabilities
that that come with Azure. Once you once you deploy this
Azure local workload, you have, you have a lot of capabilities
that you didn't previously have when you're running just the
stand alone island of compute. And it's it's, it's a it's an

(17:52):
interesting development. I think Microsoft certainly
they're in competition with AWS and Google all the time.
I do think they might have a a slight jump on those two as far
as you know where they are rightnow with this this local
deployment. Seems like it, Yeah.

(18:13):
And it seems like too. It's just been, it's been
productized and enunciated a little bit better, right?
And you know, they're chasing after all these kind of buckets
of marketing funds to help play out some of the costs of the
Pocs. And so it's interesting to see
everybody kind of run against each other.
But yeah, I'm with you. Microsoft's done a good job
there. I will say you mentioned a GUI.

(18:33):
They don't have a GUI installation process yet, which
I, I look forward to seeing thatat some point.
It's a tricky process to get a piece of equipment certified and
transitioned into production. But as Microsoft keeps
developing updates, maybe by thetime this episode comes out,

(18:55):
they'll have something. But it's, you know, today it's,
it's, it's a lot of command lineand a lot of trial and error to
get A to get a new workload built.
Get get real good with PowerShell, all those days of
Linux and Ubuntu and all that stuff.
It pays off one way or another. That's the that's right off the
memory it all, it all translates.

(19:15):
You learn a language, it translates a little bit over to
another language, so. Right.
All right, let's talk about database.
You and I were talking a little bit before we started recording.
I mean, this database as a service.
This just wasn't even a thing inthe channel years ago.
We, we, you said, Mr. Mrs. customer, we can help you with
infrastructure. This is great.
We got a lot of private clouds. We can help you with VM Ware,

(19:37):
you know, all these things. Now here we are with database as
a service, right? So just like it seems like
everything else, customers struggle to find and keep good
people. They, you know, lose some of
that talent OR they're how do they scale and scaling
databases? That's it's own monster, right?
Walk, walk me through a little bit of a now this is a thing.

(19:58):
It's been a thing for a little while in the channel.
Where do you see people needing help from a database
perspective? And then how do we assist?
Here, Sure, sure. Yeah.
I mean, a huge problem within Enterprise America today is, is
for all it's, it's, it's a security risk, it's an
administrative burden. Spinning up a new database

(20:21):
server to spin up a new application is costly and
licensing. There's there's so many
compounding challenges with adding databases within an
organization that you really do need to to look at, you know,
building a single cluster or multiple clusters or leverage

(20:42):
these these platform as a service, these databases of
service platforms that kind of build in that automation, the
monitoring, the backup, the administration.
A lot of those things sort of come naturally when you get into
a platform as a service where where if you're running a stand
alone, you know, database server, the, the cost in

(21:02):
licensing, the cost in administrative burden and DBA
services to, to ensure that thatis performing and functioning at
all times. It, it, it's like I, I look at
how companies used to run their own Exchange Server and it was
just sort of the way you debt it.
But then, you know, Office 365 comes along and it doesn't make

(21:26):
any sense for anybody to run a stand alone Exchange Server.
Unless you've got really specific regulatory needs or
some specific use case where, OKthrew an exception, it makes
sense to do this. I think you know 5-10 years from
now there will be far fewer stand alone databases because of

(21:47):
all the risks and all the costs.Yeah, it's, it's interesting,
you know, to, to be able to say,Mr. Customer, what are you
working on? Right.
What's, what's the project that you have?
Is this an infrastructure project?
Is this a software and application RFQ or you know,
who's managing and maintaining the database?
And to be able to just come backto that and say like we've got

(22:08):
SQL or we've got Aurora or we'vegot, you know, Postgres or
whatever. Great.
How are you managing it? How's it going?
How's that scalable? How do you do that in downtime?
How do you do that after hours? We can help you with that.
Can we augment that? It's so it's so refreshing to
just see this portfolio continually expand to your point
because it's it's getting harder.
It's getting harder and hard to find the right people.

(22:31):
Right. All right, let's get to
something that maybe we're just going to be talking about this
for like the next 50 years because I'm so surprised that we
still even talk about IBM. But was I, I had heard that
there are roughly 75 to 100,000 A S4 hundreds still out there.

(22:51):
So first of all, this maybe thiscould even be it's own episode,
but talk to me about the state of IBM workloads in the
enterprise and just, you know, any stories that you've got
about modernizing and kind of what what we've learned, what's
possible, what we can sell, you know what all that good stuff.
Sure, sure. Yeah.
I mean, Speaking of databases, talk about a rock solid

(23:13):
platform. You know IBM the AS400, which is
now called Power I at some pointin the middle, it was called I
series. But it's the same, the same
thing, right? But it's, it's a piece of server
hardware with a purpose built operating system that was
designed for it, right? And in fact, IBM has been using

(23:38):
the same name. It's IBM operating system or iOS
and it's very similar to your your Apple iPhone in that it's
hardware with a purpose built operating system.
And it's, it's extremely stable.You see the green screens at
retail facilities. They're interacting with that
that, that IBM gear back in the data center.

(24:02):
And most, most organizations still operate these.
And a lot of times it runs the database for the most important
business application that they have.
A lot of the equipment is, you know, sitting in the back of the
server room and it's run by the guy that nobody ever talks to

(24:22):
and he just does his job. The challenges with all of these
things are, you know, IBM hardware and software
maintenance continues to get more expensive.
That workforce is largely retiring.
There's a ton of, there's a ton of those IBM administrators that
are, are reaching the end of their career.

(24:44):
And so it's, it's a challenge that many organizations face.
We're running, you know an ERP platform and the database
happens to be you know on an IBMmid range it's on a AIX Unix
machine or it's on an IBMI series and they need to find a

(25:04):
home for it you know cuz the hardware reaches the end of its
life and So what what options are there There are lots of them
in the market. A lot of times this, this
conversation starts with build me a disaster recovery system
cuz you used to just buy 2 systems and mirror them and, and

(25:26):
you can do that with, with backups or you can use
replication software, but it would be a 1 to 1, you know,
relationship. Just buy two of them and and
stand them up. Well, disaster recovery becomes
sort of low hanging fruit. You can you know, in the world
of X86 you have virtual machinesin the world of IBM, you have L

(25:50):
pars or logical partitions. And so you you have these these
virtual slices of a larger IBM system and they just a provider
would make them available. And so it's like you don't have
to go fully cost burden your workload into a stand alone
piece of equipment. All the maintenance costs are

(26:12):
are lower when you divide it outacross a larger system.
And so you know you can begin replicating from a stand alone
physical machine into just an LPAR at a provider environment.
And then as time goes on, you know, you can easily, we have
several providers that offer the, the managed services and

(26:34):
administration, so that can address that, that sort of
retiring workforce challenge. And then, you know, certainly
the production hosting. But in almost all cases those
are you're, you're moving into modern hardware with just a, you
know, whatever the sizing needs to be.

(26:55):
And it's, it's no different thanyour your infrastructure as a
service play. But as you, as you probably
know, moving a database into oneof another data center, you got
to move what's along with it. And you know, I've gone through
we just finished a project to migrate a JD Edwards

(27:17):
environment. It had, you know, an IBMI series
production, a dev test. And then there were about 60
Windows servers that interacted with that one I series right
all. Mapping baby.
Oh yeah, that's. Terrible.
And then at each of the remote sites, there were a sequel

(27:38):
server that was also connected into this environment.
So we had this huge orchestra of, of servers and services that
were, you know, all of them wereinteracting and it took about
nine months of planning. We migrated it, everything
tested out successfully and we got to abandon this old piece of

(28:00):
equipment that was, that was a big win.
And you know, but it's, it's it,it can be a challenge for, for
all the reasons and you know, it, it, all of those
conversations need to involve what are we, what are we trying
to solve here? And in that case, that was EOL

(28:21):
equipment. It was, you know, everything was
in the support and we had to, wehad to modernize and, and so we
abandoned a Power 8 system and we moved into a Power 10 system
it and, and in doing so, we, we took a pretty big step up in
the, the hardware infrastructure.

(28:45):
Yeah, maybe, I don't know, maybewe'll still be doing this 5 plus
years, 10 years. We're still cranking on IB, Ms.
man. It just won't die.
They, it feels like, I mean, they, they've still got a,
they've still got a relevant market position.
I don't know if people are are jumping into buying IBM out of
the gate, but you know, if kicking the can down the road

(29:06):
means market opportunity. Yeah, it's, it's, it's funny how
many people in some of these IBMdiscussions are like, OK, yeah,
we'll move this, we'll lift it, we'll shift it.
Help us with that. That's scary.
And then, yeah, we've got these 200 applications.
We're going to do application refactoring over time.
And then you snap back 24 monthslater and you're like two things
have been refactored and they'rejust ready for another refresh.

(29:27):
And you're like, I got it. It's application and dependency
mapping is hard and scary and production equals revenue.
So don't screw it up so. Yeah, every time I've ever been
asked if if I can host an IBM workload for two years while we
refactor to Linux. I'm in 100% of the time, yes, no

(29:49):
problem. Yeah.
All right, you know, get to the,the final couple thoughts here.
I, I want to maybe wrap US one or two ideas here.
First off, just discovery calls like as you're, as you're
getting into things that you think might, you know, you want
to get to what's the Azure situation you want to get to?
What's the database you want to get to?

(30:10):
Is there IBMI mean, what's you doing specific kind of discovery
calls and processes and discovery questions related to
that or what's what's Ron's favorite approach here that's
worked well? Yeah, sure.
I mean, I don't want to sound, Idon't want to sound like I'm up
on a soapbox or anything, but it's like I always start with

(30:31):
why. There's a great book called
Start with why. And you know, you just want to
understand what, what it is we're trying to solve.
I, I, I've probably asked the same question 10,000 times.
What problem are we solving? And I'll ask it to challenge
people. I'll ask it to open up a
discussion. But really, if, if you, if you

(30:53):
distill down all these wonderfulthings that we can offer all of
the, all the services that we can provide, they're just tools
in a tool bag. And you know, at the end of the
day, it's, it's really on, on usto decide to, to decide what's
the right tool for the job. But what is the job like?

(31:14):
What, what, what are we trying to achieve?
And, and I've spent a lot of time with clients trying to, and
sort of coach them through, you know, don't everybody likes to
shop and people love to, to, they, they read an article.
I, I don't know how many CIOs have read a industry magazine

(31:34):
article and gotten excited aboutsomething.
I, you know, VDI was a thing in every magazine for 10 years
straight and it just didn't, it didn't have its moment until
about maybe five years ago at the beginning of COVID and we
finally got passed some of the licensing challenges of
Microsoft. But it, you know, it's like,

(31:57):
okay, well, what problem are we solving?
Truly understand that. And then if we can take a step
past that, what are the, what are the like?
What are the measurements of success for a project?
And, and how will we, how will we evaluate ourselves as we go
through this? And I've spoken with clients

(32:20):
where we've, we've started down a journey and you know, maybe,
maybe the provider we chose initially wasn't the, the
perfect fit two years later. That's OK.
That's a we're, we're maybe taking, taking your maturity
level 1 up to a maturity level 2.

(32:40):
Your expectations have changed. You're, you're now, you're now
seeing this a little bit more clearly.
And, and it's OK to, to in this journey that we might need to
evolve what, what we're, what we're shooting for.
And so that's that's it's alwaysbeen around being client

(33:03):
focused, really trying to understand what what the
business is up against. Love it.
Final thoughts here. You know, we we put a bow on
this with the modernization. You know, we're, we're doing all
this modernization and then along comes AI and says we're
the new greatest thing that's going to solve everything and
everywhere. I mean, how do you how do you
factor in some of those trends? How do you do you think about

(33:26):
your deals and your conversations with customers and
you're in infrastructure and beyond, How do you get excited
about that? How do you kind of ground people
to that and, and you know, what's, what's the most
important thing here? Yeah, I mean, there's so many,
so many areas that AI is, is influencing the world right now.
And, and there's, there's a lot to be excited about.

(33:49):
I've got several projects right now that are trying to automate
or, or, or provide better accuracy for, you know, of
various business functions. I think AI OPS has a lot to, to
offer, you know, in the future. I, I do think that there,
there's companies today that areadvertising root cause analysis

(34:13):
on every single ticket, you know, and, and, you know, the
world of, of, you know, operations is going to be
impacted by, by AI. And it's not the sexy chat bot
stuff. It's, it's really just looking
at numbers and, and, and ticket notes and, and pairing things

(34:33):
together. And it's, there's, there's a lot
to it. I think it's, it's always
important to distinguish AI versus BII know a lot of
executives have had these, you know, grand ideas about how can
I see my, my data and, and really understand, you know,

(34:56):
where my organization is trending.
And, and I think some of that crosses the boundary line into
business intelligence. And it's, you know, as we go
through this evolution, it's, you know, to my, to my earlier
comment about maturity, I had a client this week say that
they're, they're deploying a, a new RFI for an AI project that

(35:20):
started a year and a half ago. They rolled out a, an HR chatbot
and the CEO of the company logged into it, looked up his
own name and it didn't know anything about him.
And he said, give me a new AI platform.
And, and it's like, you know, well, maybe that wasn't part of
the criteria. Maybe it was, but it's, it's

(35:42):
the, the expectations are certainly evolving in this space
so quickly and the line is, is going to continue to increase.
I, I do think that it's going toinfluence every, every one of
our provider options. You know, it's like how it's
going to evolve. I I think there's a lot of good
things that are coming from it for sure.

(36:03):
It's a fun time to be in tech, man.
Holy cow. You just with, with all this
complexity, we just keep more and more value.
People just need more help. And I think we, we take for
granted, I mean, I, I have to self check on this that, you
know, we take for granted some of these decisions that we help
people make. This might be the first time
that they've ever made it or ever will make it in their
career. And we've done it, you know, 10

(36:24):
times by 4:00 PM. And so that's so much help.
I think it's all about help. We can help people through these
decisions. So I love that love, love the
path. Appreciate you coming on, man.
I'm I'm I'm questioned out. It's been a lot of a lot of good
stuff that that you've shared. And thanks for coming on and
dropping some knowledge of this man.
Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on.

(36:45):
This has been great. Awesome.
All right, everybody, that wrapsus up for today.
As always, these drop every Wednesday.
So wherever you're coming to us from, Spotify, Apple Music,
wherever it is, make sure that you're you're subscribing so you
get these notifications as soon as they pop up.
Until next time. That wraps us up for today.
It's been Ron Colbert, RLM solutions.
I'm your host, Josh, the Fresco SVP of sales engineering and

(37:07):
Telaris. We've talked Azure, IBM and
databases and the signal to change.
Until next time. Next Level Biztech has been a
production of Telaris Studio 19.Please visit telaris.com For
more information.