Stephen:
Welcome to Actions Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We live in an era where there's a lot of technological change and a lot of technology to manage even without that change. And many of you out there are possibly looking at starting your own business and wondering what can I do with all this technology? And it might even look daunting. It might even feel like another large task on top of everything else that you're looking into, whether you're looking into what product you want to sell, who you want to market to, how are you going to market it, and what you're going to use. So to help us sort through some of these technological solutions, technological advances and technological change in employment, even for those of you out there who are just looking at other employment options as well, I would like to introduce to you my guest today, Ryan Pollyloniak, who is a Cloud Transformation Executive. Ryan, welcome to the program.
Ryan Pollyloniak:
Thanks, Stephen, glad to be on.
Stephen:
Well, thank you for joining. And first of all, take us through a day-to-day. What's a normal activity for someone who's a Cloud Transformation Executive? As a lot of people are familiar with other types of executives, but this particular one is very specific to our time being that a lot of people are doing digital transformation and cloud transformations.
Ryan Pollyloniak:
Absolutely. And so if you ask my seven-year old's third grade class when she told them that I was a Cloud Transformation Executive, they all think I'm a meteorologist now, which is not the case. Actually working with companies, right? All different sizes of companies, small businesses, all the way up to smaller enterprise level businesses make that digital transformation, key buzzword you hear all the time, you just mentioned it, either old legacy on-premise systems and siloed data into the modern cloud. And there's so many things that go along with that from keeping your data secure to leveraging the future of AI and everything else. A lot of businesses are making that switch. And then you've also got startups of course, which are wanting to take the appropriate foundational steps as they create their initial business systems to make sure that they're setting themselves up for the future. So what I'm doing is typically strategizing with the leaders of these companies and pulling in teams of solution architects and project managers and consultants to realize the vision that we set.
Stephen:
So just to also orient our audience, in case anyone's not familiar, like you mentioned, cloud is a term that makes people think of clouds in the air, and I think a lot of people when they put something on the cloud, even anything on their personal computers probably think that their data just floats around in the air the way the clouds do. So what does the cloud actually mean? What is it?
Ryan Pollyloniak:
That's a great question. There are several different iterations of that. In general cloud is computing power servers that are not in a server on-premise on your office, in your server closet, in your back office. It is having your data really in a remote location and then accessing it over the internet, whether that's through a VPN or some other method. Now clouds, they're different. Let's say you have a business system on a physical server in your back office. Many companies want to make that move to the cloud so they don't have to manage that server so they don't have to do updates and manage performance and everything else. Well, you could pay a company or you could even do it yourself in something like Azure or AWS, Amazon Web Services and you could move that whole application, that server into the cloud and what's called a private cloud at that point. That's the middle of the road.
You no longer have a server in your back office, but it's still your server just virtualized, if that makes sense. And it's got some pluses, right? You don't have to manage it anymore assuming that you have someone doing it for you. Now, you could also have your own internal IT team just get rid of the physical machine and put that in a cloud instance, and then they still do have to manage it for you. Far end of the spectrum software as a service, SaaS. Everyone's heard that term or a lot of folks have if you're in the IT space, even peripherally.
So what that means is you're no longer taking Acme Company's server and putting it in a cloud. You are actually subscribing to a service from a Microsoft or a NetSuite or a Salesforce, and that organization is managing everything up to and including delivering that application to you via a web browser or an app on your phone or tablet. And that's all that you're doing is subscribing to that software literally as a service. So there's a nuance there, right? It's not the same thing as just putting your server on the cloud. So in general it's getting away from the physical servers, but there are varying degrees of that.
Stephen:
And you talk about working with both anywhere from startups to larger enterprises, and some of them are older enterprises or enterprises have been around for a long time. This transformation going on what people refer to as digital transformation. Do you feel like it's more challenging for companies that have a long history and maybe have a lot of data in other places or more challenging for that startup that's just starting up now that now needs to figure out what they want to do but don't have a history of where they've put their data for six decades?
Ryan Pollyloniak:
I think the established company's got a bigger lift because depending on how you grew up, and this is a lesson for the startups, depending on how you started, you want to make sure to be forward-thinking. How is my organization going to grow? What are my needs going to be in three years, five years or seven years? Not just how do I most cost efficiently manage my data processing needs here at the moment? And so companies that have grown up with disparate data sources in various on-premise applications, there's a bigger lift there because you've got to find a way to bring that all together. And so what I mean by that is let's say you've got, like you said, six decades or two decades worth of data in an old system and then you're saying, "Well, I want to move to a new SaaS application, a modern cloud-based application and let Microsoft manage it for me."
Well, what happens then? You're not going to bring all of that history into your new system, and that is best practice in the ERP industry, accounting system industry. You're not going take all of your data from an old on-premise system into a new system. The structure's different. It's very risky, it's very costly. You don't want to do it. So what ends up happening is then we've got all this data in the old system. What happens if I need to look up a transaction? What happens if I need to compare data year over year, like sales trend analysis, how is this product sold in 2024 compared to what it did in 2008? Take your pick. And so if you're going to gain those insights from your data and your data is a huge asset and the value of good data is increasing exponentially because of AI, which needs good data if it's going to make any sense of what you're trying to do.
So what you end up needing to do then is to create a unified data model, which is totally doable in today's day and age. And there are all kinds of organizations that have tools to do this where you're going to take all of that old data from your old systems and you're going to put it in a cloud-based data warehouse and you're going to map everything together. You're going to bring data in from your new production system to mirror that and to create what's called a unified data model, and then you can drive your reporting off of that. So to go back to your question, that is a bigger lift than being a green field startup with the world in front of you and saying, "Well, how do you want to manage your data from the ground up?" That's a little bit of an easier lift because the modern tools are going to be better equipped to handle that stuff out of the gate.
Stephen:
When you work with people, whether they be startups or people with say smaller businesses as they're selecting solutions, you talk about being forward-looking. Is there ever a situation where you'll advise a client to implement a solution that's expedient for the here and now just to accomplish a certain task knowing that later on they're going to have to make a transformation between one of your three categories of solutions because of what happens when the business potentially or likely scales up?
Ryan Pollyloniak:
First of all, you have to select a system that's going to allow your business to scale. I've seen many times where there are very early stages of a startup where decisions are made to get into a system because of the cost point, and then there's not a roadmap in terms of strategy there. You're going to run into issues very quickly. An example, without giving you a name, which I know most of the people on this podcast would know the name of this company, we were doing a project for them. There were about $15 million in annual revenue when we started the project. Nine months later we were done and they were on track for $200 million in annual revenue. They blew up and they're [inaudible 00:09:38] company nowadays. Some of the decisions they made back then, particularly around things like business productivity suite, they were using Google, Gmail and Google Docs and that which is very useful set of tools and it's very attractive to a startup because very simple to use, very simple to put in, inexpensive.
As that company grew, they started to feel a little bit of pain because they didn't have that long-term strategic roadmap. They realized for a variety of reasons, and I'm not slamming the Google stuff here because it's got its place, but for them in particular, they wanted to shift then to office. Well, there were so many processes that were so deeply ingrained on the Google side. This company to this day uses both. Creates a tremendous amount of problems and there's no way that it doesn't incur a lot of pain that they're going to be able to rip those processes out and harmonize those processes because it wasn't done in the beginning. It grew legs. It's everywhere in the organization now and here they are. So I would say my advice is think about your future growth and your scalability as you make these decisions. Take that into account just as much as you do cost benefit in the current moment.
Stephen:
When people make decisions such as we're going to shift from Google and Microsoft or even shift from AWS to GCP or anything like that, do you commonly observe where the people making the decisions are disconnected from the people who are implementing them and they oftentimes don't understand how much of a cost it's going to be as far as labor, how much of a headache it's going to be for their employees, just how tough that transformation is going to be?
Ryan Pollyloniak:
So the decision makers at the business, making sure they understand the effort involved and to properly translate to their employees, absolutely. So number one, when you're in the process of selecting a system, making sure that you're crystal clear on expectations with the vendor because you will run into salespeople. And I have spent a lot of my career in sales, and you'll hear varying degrees of the truth there. Let's just be honest. So you want to make sure that you are documenting what you need, what the costs are going to be, what the end results are expected to be. And part of that is making sure that you're articulating that information appropriately to the vendor. Because very commonly it's easy to forget X, Y and Z. You've got to be fair, right? It's a two-way street when you're working with a software vendor who has costs and has put a proposal forward.
But the other part of it is really important, which is what you mentioned is internal change management. What are your users expecting? And one big pitfall is to not include your user base on the plans and the roadmaps. And I'm not suggesting that you let everyone be a cook in the kitchen, so to speak. You can have an organizational strategy and you can make a decision without the buy-in necessarily or the sign-off of your user base. But what's important from a change management perspective is letting your users know that change is coming, your employees, the people that will actually have the fingers on the keyboards of these systems, letting them know why it's coming. Our company's growing, we have inefficient systems, we have security liabilities. We want to take advantage of AI. We're growing through acquisition, you name it. Whatever your reasoning is, make sure that everybody understands the why and that's important, right?
People deserve that. It's the same thing that I do to be honest with my kids. If I lay down the law on something, I'm making sure they're on the back end. I'm also explaining here's why we're doing it guys, and then here's how it's going to impact you, hopefully positively, right? We're not doing this to ruin your life. We're doing it to grow the company and to help your future and really to start that whole conversation early. Before you start a project, that has already got to be widely known. I've seen projects that are transforming business processes and some of the users don't know it's even happening until they're testing.
They're asked to test the system right before they flip the switch to go live, and then you've got change management on your hands at the wrong time. You already have this major business process transformation going, your people are asking why we're doing this when that should have been addressed before the project even happened. So my advice is to let key people know early on and back that up with some reasoning as to why the business is taking that approach and that'll land from a user adoption perspective much better than it will dropping it on someone right before you flip the switch.
Stephen:
Yeah, that makes sense perfectly because I think one of the most frustrating experiences that anyone has, whether it be an employee at a company or a user of any software package is not understanding why something is happening and you're being asked to do something. You're being asked to put a lot of effort into something without understanding why that could be somewhat of a frustrating experience.
Ryan Pollyloniak:
Sure.
Stephen:
So I want to speak a little bit to those people who are in the of deciding they want to start a business or maybe starting a business now and looking at the process of looking at all things data, no matter how data heavy your business is. Trying to implement the right system, worrying about all the data security concerns that we have right now because that can be really daunting. As well as just which one of these solutions could mean and could be right for your particular enterprise, how much effort it might take, how much decision-making was going to be in the process, how many people are going to be doing this, this, and that. It can be a real daunting part of a process, as I mentioned in the intro on top of people trying to come up with business plans, marketing plans, product life cycle plans and everything like that. What can people do to make it sound like something that's more manageable maybe?
Ryan Pollyloniak:
Yeah, I recommend engaging with your peers, networking, attend conferences, invest a little bit in talking to other companies who have gone through what you're going through. If you're a brand new startup, you may not want to go to a conference full of mature organizations. You want to go to a new business tech startup type engagement and talk to people in your industry about what works. Because look, these conversations, depending on what industry you're in, it can vary widely. Maybe you're planning on buying widgets from overseas and selling them at a markup, right? Very simple type distribution model, and there are a million ERPs that could handle that in their sleep. Maybe you want to connect to an e-commerce site like a Shopify or Magento or something like that. You can always do that thing with a lot of different solutions. If you're in an industry, however, with very specific needs, maybe you are a government contractor with all types of compliance needs or maybe you are manufacturing steel tubes that require a very specific thickness and diameter and alloy content, right?
In those cases, you may need to focus more on the features of the software. So what I mean by that is what does the software actually do? Am I going to be able to build a steel pipe and tell it what the diameter needs to be, what the thickness of the wall needs to be, what kind of coating it needs, what kind of alloy it's going to have? Because if the software won't do it's not going to be of any use. But on the other hand, if you're the widget manufacturer and there are a thousand applications that'll let you do a PO and buy your stuff and sell it, then you may want to be more focused on foundational technology and stability. This steel pipe software that might be a ten-person company that's built exactly what you need. There's some business risk there because that company may be out of business in five years.
There's not that backing of a Microsoft or a Sage or an Oracle or an SAP. But on the other hand, if you're the widget manufacturer, you say, "Look, Microsoft has something out of the box here for distributors." They host it, they secure it, do updates and disaster recovery. We know Microsoft isn't going anywhere. It goes beyond feature functionality. If you're brand new and you're saying, "How do I even start this?" You don't just want to go for the software that has your exact features unless you're in a very specific industry, like I mentioned, right? If you're the pipe manufacturer, you need something that'll do it. And so you've got this dichotomy of industry specific providers of solutions versus big box, secure, stable, integrate Office, handle AI and secure your data to the nth degree.
And data security is a big part of that, right? I mean, every single ransomware attack that I've seen over the years has been on-premise, SQL database. That's my number one thing that I'm telling CIOs and CEOs when I talk to them and they're on an on-premise system and they're saying, "Well, we may move to the cloud in a year, five years. There's a big cost to it and what we have works." And yeah, it does. The question you need to ask is who is actually securing my data? It is your IT director who I'm sure is very qualified, but one person or small group of people. Is it a third party IT? None of those options are going to be what you're going to get going with a true SaaS provider like a Microsoft. Dynamics 365 is secure as it gets.
You are never going to lose your data. The CrowdStrike issue that happened the other day. A lot of people probably know about that. It's a third party endpoint security solution didn't affect Microsoft's SaaS solutions at all. It's totally insulated from that. It's in Microsoft's back behind the black curtain, multi-tenant software as a service infrastructure. So your data's your most important thing going forward as a business. If you go to try to sell your business, you need to have aggregated data. If you want to take advantage of AI, you need to have clean data in a consumable location. So strategizing beyond features is a big important thing as a startup I would say.
Stephen:
Now, is there any type of organization that doesn't have to worry so much about data security? And I'm thinking about like you mentioned, a steel company, maybe 10 people where they're not really making money off of their data. Your data is primarily your sales, your leads, your transactions and inventory type of stuff.
Ryan Pollyloniak:
Well, that's all data at the end of the day. So let me give you an example. We were working with a company who's about a $400 million a year distributor. We were on an old on-premise system in the middle of an evaluation of moving to the cloud. One of the reasons they were wanting to move was data security. So when they were ransomware attacked, which they were, there's nothing we could have done about that. This was internally secured server. This is their legacy system. They couldn't ship, they couldn't invoice their customers, they couldn't pay their vendors, they couldn't run their business, and what the ransomware attack had done was to go and encrypt all of their backups. It was delayed, so they backed it up for 14 days and they backed it up with this ransomware every single time so they couldn't go back and bring back a safe copy.
They were done, dead in the water. I mean $400 million a year company with no system to operate. So they very quickly made the decision, okay, we need to switch to a new system and we need it up and running like tomorrow. Well, a system like that typically is four to six month implementation cycle, right? This was coming right out of COVID and we luckily had an all-star team available that could get them just functional in a couple weeks, which still took a couple weeks. They're operating on paper and buy bubble gum and duct tape for that period of time, cost untold amounts of money. If you're the pipe manufacturer and you can't buy your raw materials and you can't invoice your customers, still drives your business to a halt and