(upbeat music)
- Hello everyone.
And welcome back to another
episode of The Late Night Brew,
where we talk brews first
and get around in the business second.
I'm Robert Buktenica
otherwise known as Buck.
And tonight with me on
the show is Jody Elkins.
In a previous episode,
I spoke with Mike Gray
on the technical side
of User Experience as a Service.
In that episode from it,
I realised there's a whole
other side to this conversation
that really should be talked about.
And Jody has some fantastic
insight behind that
and the truth behind
the monitoring services.
But first, before we get to that,
Jody, what are you drinking?
- Cheers Buck.
Those of you that know me well,
this will not surprise you
if it's Coors Light (giggles)
primarily because it's
109 degrees at the moment.
(both laughing)
- Gotta love that Phoenix weather for--
- Cheers.
- The, cheers.
For the non-Americans that's
well above 40 or about 40
and or above.
Tonight, I am drinking an
Abita strawberry lager.
- I've had that, that's amazing.
- That is phenomenal.
A typically steer clear of fruit beers
because they taste like
jam that has been liquified
and it's disgustingly sweet,
but this nails that
beautiful middle ground.
- Yeah, there's an awesome orange beer
from a local brewery
down by you in Phoenix.
I'll have to think of the name of that.
I can not think of it.
Yeah, awesome it is.
Yeah, orange, black and (indistinct)
That's an amazing fruit beer too.
- They are, they are.
It's a little on the heavy
on the vanilla side for me,
but it's, I can always
at least have a pine.
So, Jodi, what is your background
that gives you the insight
behind monitoring service
User Experience as a Service,
those type of?
- Yeah, for what it's worth
and sometimes at the plug nickel.
But I've been around the
industry for a number of years,
25 plus years at this point.
When I look first 10
years or so of my career,
I was very technical.
The better part of 20 years of my career
on the client side of the business.
So what that means is I
worked in organisations
in roles as, you know, way
back in the day engineer.
And then as time went on
in the last 10 years or so
on that side of the business,
I was in senior management roles.
So though as like VP of IT,
chief information officer,
those types of things.
So that was on the client side.
After about 18, 19 years on
that side of the business,
I made the switch to the dark
side to the partner community.
And so I ran a partner
in Southern California
and then ultimately a few years back
launched Insentra in the US.
So as that relates to
monitoring solutions,
what's interesting is on the client side,
I bought and used and implemented
and struggled with a lot
of monitoring solutions.
On the partner side,
I sold a lot of monitoring solutions.
And so I saw it from both angles.
And what I saw consistently
is really what I mean when I
talk about sort of the truth
about monitoring solutions,
there is a consistent theme
that rolls through that
for every user out there,
what's really only sort of one exception.
And that's in the enterprise space.
And the enterprise space,
this doesn't typically apply
because the enterprise space
has the resources, skills,
and people to be able to do
what ultimately you need to do.
And we can chat a little bit
more about what I mean by that.
- It's that economy of size.
They have the budget, the resource,
the manpower to say, this
is, you can monitor this.
This is your job.
- Yeah, they have teams of people
that can separate teams
of people, for instance,
that all that team does is monitoring
or data analysis for different
aspects of the business.
And so there's the resources, skills,
but resources, people
resources available to say,
yes, this group of people
or small number of people,
or even one person,
your entire job is to learn
this tool, know this tool,
know everything about the tool
and learn or have people in your team
that know every aspect
of your infrastructure.
So that networking, servers,
so that when you need that expertise,
you can go and find that.
- Right, right, exactly.
So, I mean, whether it's
small business in a monitoring
service solution or a large enterprise
that has these resources,
the ability to dedicate
what's the challenge
that they are trying to solve
with that monitoring service,
with User Experience as a Service?
What's that challenge
they're trying to tackle?
- Yeah, a great question.
So, we sell User Experience as a Service.
I talk about that all the time
and where we typically are
successful selling that,
is to organisations that
have been through the pain
that I'm about to describe.
And that is most small, medium
to midsize organizations
and even lower enterprise.
So, pretty safe bet any
organization serve 4,000 users,
is going to be familiar
with what I'm describing.
So let's, and I think to understand,
I think you've gotta go back
to sort of the beginning
and put ourselves in the
chair of an IT administrator,
a network engineer, a
server administrator,
assist admin, an IT director,
whoever happens to be
responsible ultimately
for performance of the environment.
- And I know that well (giggles).
- And I've been in that role,
it was a long time ago, but
I've been in that role myself.
So you're constantly fighting battles.
In those size organizations,
it is primarily a reactive job.
Your best days are days,
they're few and far between,
and they are days where you're
able to focus on something
more strategic, something new,
something that you know
is going to have a really
positive impact to the business,
to your IT organization,
to your user base,
whatever the case may be.
But something proactive,
something's not on fire,
you're actually able to learn something,
apply something and improve
something in the organization.
- Usually holidays (laughs).
- Right, usually, my
experience back in the day,
it was either holidays,
parts of the weekend,
and certainly typically between the hours
of about 10:00 PM and 3:00 AM.
(both laughing)
So looking at knowing that situation
and dealing with that every day,
you're in this reactive mode.
And so what is natural and
what makes perfect sense
and what monitoring solution
marketing keys in on is,
man, if I just had more information.
If I just sorta knew what was going on,
I could react faster.
I could solve these problems,
but what happens is, if a user call us,
if they call us and then
that gets escalated properly,
maybe from the help desk,
and it gets to me, now I've
got a user or set of users
that or in the worst case scenario,
the entire organization that
is not able to do their job.
And that is obviously a
high pressure situation.
It is 100% reactive
and I need something to
be able to help guide me
to solve that problem.
It's a very natural, it's
the right thought process.
It's a very natural thought process.
How do I get that information?
And so naturally you look
at monitoring solutions
and there's a plethora
of solutions out there
from very low-end, including
free for an IT admin,
that doesn't have anything, a
free tool is like a Godsend.
But there's all the way from free
to very high-end expensive solutions.
And so the natural progression is
that IT administrator
goes through the process,
looks at the tool,
learns a bit about the tool,
gets demos, gets pricing,
tries to sell that up,
and ultimately, maybe
they're successful in that
and they now buy a solution.
So now this IT admin, this
IT director, whoever it is,
is now sort of on the hook.
They've now invested in a tool
to help them do their job better,
and it's a great investment.
Everyone's excited about
it, including the IT admin.
And then they go to work the next day,
just like they do every day.
And they're in reactive mode
for all kinds of things,
not necessarily a technical issue.
They may be spend a day, day
and a half learning the tool,
and they'll configure alerts.
And they'll say, "I need to
know why the server's down?"
And so they'll configure
server down alerts
and they'll configure some basic alerts,
and maybe even though based
on some best practices.
And then they go about their job.
And or their 10 or 15 other jobs.
And it may be days, weeks,
sometimes even months
before they actually get back
to really working in the tool.
And that means a couple
of things typically.
One, you can't walk away
from any tool for two months
and expect to be very
comfortable and fluent
in the tool out of the gate,
right?
- Right.
- The other thing it means
is that during that time,
those alerts typically
have become unuseful.
You've probably heard the
term alert fatigues, right?
- Yeah, that alert noise
that says, "That's whatever it's there."
- That's right.
If you're getting a hundred alerts a day
and that's a low number
for a lot of people,
if you are getting a hundred alerts a day
and 85 of them or 90 of them,
or maybe even 70 of them are irrelevant,
not correct, not impactful.
How much attention are
you gonna pay to the,
how do you know?
So ultimately that becomes alert fatigue,
you don't get that information.
It's not being used properly.
In the event, in the first scenario,
now you have a problem.
Let's say there's an outage
that gets the help desk,
help desk escalates to you.
You've got an outage and everyone knows,
"Oh we've got a tool."
So the IT admin now spends
in a pressure situation,
the first five to 15 minutes,
just trying to figure out
how to navigate the tool
because they're not in it everyday.
They get there quickly,
to 10 to 15 minutes is a
relatively quick amount of time.
It's a freaking lifetime,
when you've got an organization
that can actually function.
It is a lifetime with
lots of heavy breathers
of, you know, breathing down
your neck, a lot of pressure.
And that's still a positive
thing, don't get me wrong.
It's still a positive thing
because you have more information
than you did two weeks ago
before you bought the tool.
But the reality is that
happens over and over.
And ultimately that tool
primarily becomes a
reactive firefighting tool.
You're not in it every day,
you're not gathering data every day,
you're not doing all the
things that need to be done
in order to make it proactive.
And that's because it is time consuming.
It requires a broad set of skills.
So it requires an IT generalist,
someone that understands servers,
someone understands desktops,
somebody that understands networking,
Wide Area Networking,
Local Area Networking,
somebody that understands
routers, switches.
There's a broad amount of information.
It's an IT generalist typically
have pretty good success
with these types of tools.
And so you find yourself in a situation
where you're not in it every day
and therefore it's a reactive tool.
Great, solves a problem
that everybody sort of saw.
But here's the business challenge.
Nobody invests in solving a
problem to create more problems.
The business challenge
is not actually that you
don't have visibility
into what's happening.
The business challenge is that
you don't have a way to
monitor productivity.
You don't have a way
to measure productivity
and you sure as hell don't have a way
to predict lack of productivity
or predict events in your environment
that then create lack of productivity.
That makes sense?
- Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, no one wants to
be the bearer of bad news of,
"Hey, this tool is just to
uncover $50,000 worth of shit,
"we need to fix."
I mean, that's rough.
No one wants to be in that position.
- Yeah, exactly.
And so at the end of the day,
the monitoring tool
becomes a reactive tool.
And so when you go to that
individual the next year,
and of course there are exceptions,
I'm making general statements here,
but this is an investment
for your organizations.
When you go to those
individuals the next year,
the renewal comes up for the tool
and you ask that individual,
is this a useful tool?
The answer to that is yes.
If you peel that onion back
and you collaboratively
and transparently analyze
what it is that tool's giving you,
it becomes very clear very quickly
that it's not actually
delivering the value
for which you purchased it.
The value for which you purchased it
is to ultimately reduce downtime,
which has a direct correlation
to improved productivity.
That's the business challenge.
And so when you peel that onion back,
and even that doesn't happen very often,
because it requires an IT admin
or system engineer or server engineer,
it requires that individual to say openly,
"Yeah, I know I recommended this,
"but, I'm so busy I can't get to it."
That is not something those
people tend to like to admit.
Number one, you gotta
get them to admit that,
and then their boss has to be
open enough and honest enough
and bold enough quite frankly sometimes,
to acknowledge that as well
to their superiors and say,
"Yeah, we kinda made a
mistake, a honest one,
"but we need to actually
solve the problem."
And that's where User Experience
as a Service comes in.
The problem with those tools
is that every one of them
provides a absolute mountain of data.
The trick is not collecting data.
There are hundreds,
literally hundreds of tools
to collect data, that's easy.
And that's ultimately what those companies
have just sold you.
They just sold you a way to collect data.
That's great, don't get
me wrong, it's great.
But you then have to do the heavy lifting.
You've gotta analyze that data,
but more importantly,
you've gotta correlate that data
because at the end of the day,
the data is meaningless,
unless you can turn it
into meaningful information
and that is, what does this actually mean?
What is the root cause of something?
What do I have to do to fix what's wrong?
What do I have to do to prevent
this from going wrong again?
That's where the heavy lifting is.
That is time consuming,
it requires a tremendous
amount of skill and resources,
and that is why it only exists
in the enterprise space.
That is why small to medium sized business
and even smaller enterprise,
they just don't have
the level of maturity.
It's not even maturity
sometimes, it's budget.
They just don't have budget
to be able to pour into that.
And so that was really
sort of the inspiration
for Insentra's User
Experience as a Service.
Let's take the tool out of the equation.
The tool is irrelevant.
Let's combine a tool and
that heavy lifting service
and ultimately provide information
and even action if they want us to.
But really UXaaS is about
providing the information
that's meaningful.
That all make sense?
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, that's fantastic.
I mean, you definitely
nailed that on the head,
I mean, I can tell you from
experience, report fatigue,
what do we do with all of this?
How do we handle this?
What are we supposed to do
with it as an email admin?
You get into the demark world
of how are people potentially
trying to spoof us?
And you get those reports.
And there's a lot of
information that comes at you
when you set up demark.
And there's the same reason
that we're talking now
about User Experiences as a Service
that companies will go have
your demark reports sent to us,
we'll correlate it,
and we'll give you the facts.
What you need to know,
what you care about.
- Exactly, right.
- X, Y, and Z, this is what you need.
- That's exactly right.
And so that's really,
when I talk to customers about UXaaS
User Experience as a Service,
that's really the secret sauce.
And what's interesting about that
is just about every customer
in the sales process
that we talked to just
about every one of them,
one of their key questions is,
okay, I understand that we're
not actually buying a tool,
we're sorta leasing the tool
to put it in your service,
what if I want access to that tool?
The answer is really interesting.
Some people want it simple.
You have complete access to it.
We don't hold anything back,
you can access that tool
in the same way that we can anytime.
So it's like you own the tool.
That's number one.
And every, just about every customer
at that point in the
process wants to do that.
And what we find continuously
almost without fail
is no customers actually
end up doing that.
Because they don't care.
It's a waste of their time
to go in and learn a tool.
What they need is to
your point, what do I do?
And so we provide real time
alerts that are meaningful,
we take out all of, we
filter out all of the alerts
that don't mean anything.
We look at those, we translate those.
And we send the alerts that
are actually meaningful.
This is an alert.
You get an alert from
us in the UXaaS service.
You know you pay attention to it
because you know every
time you get an alert,
something is wrong or
something is about to be wrong.
(both laughing)
That's the proactiveness of it.
So customers pay attention to it.
So you eliminate alert
fatigue, number one.
Number two, on a monthly basis,
we'll provide a report that
is, that can be quite involved.
But one of my contributions to UXaaS
was being a previous client executive.
I wanted to have an access
for my technical team,
when I put my CIO hat on.
I wanted my technical team to have access
to all of that data and all the analysis
and all the information
that they wanted to.
I wanted them to have access
to it, for multiple reasons.
But really the value in the services,
what do I have to do?
If I have an infrastructure
and applications delivery mechanism,
my environment, if it's
not performing well,
number one, I need to know specifically
in a particular pecking order,
what I need to do to improve that.
And what I mean by pecking order
is in the order of priority,
what's gonna be the biggest
bang for my buck in time
in improving that performance.
If I've got five things I need to do,
I don't wanna, my first
action shouldn't be the one
that's only gonna have 5%
impact on their performance.
My first action should be one
that has the biggest impact
on their performance.
So we're incrementally
as rapidly as possible,
increasing the performance
of that environment.
So that's one of the things that we do.
There's an executive summary that says,
here's a high level of what we're saying.
And here are the items
in order of priority
that you need to do in order
to improve that performance.
In an environment that is performing well,
we identify the same things
but with a different vein,
it's more proactive.
We have seen so, as for instance,
we have seen in the last 30 days,
your desktop logon time at
day one was 13.5 seconds.
That may for that organization
be an acceptable range,
but on day 30,
that was 14.8.
And there was an incremental
increase during that time.
So we're gonna point that out
and we're gonna identify
the root cause of that.
And we're gonna say here's
what you need to do to fix it,
that's the proactive,
it's not the really power
of a monitoring solution done right,
and that's really why we create
a User Experience as a Service.
- Definitely. Well, we've
done a fantastic job
of covering it and I've definitely
have unfortunately eaten up our time.
So Jody, thank you very much
for sharing a brew with me
and talking the other side of
User Experience as a Service.
So have a great night,
check out my other episode
with Mr. Mike Gray,
talking about the technical side of that
if you're interested in it,
but until then, take care
and feel free to reach out.
Cheers.
- Cheers Buck.
(upbeat music)
