Speaker 1: 00:03 Welcome to the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast, where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. Hi. I’m Max Clark, and I’m talking with Rick Ruskin, who is the chief sales officer with Effectual.
Speaker 1: 00:22 Rick, thanks for joining.
Speaker 2: 00:23 Good to be here. Thank you, Max.
Speaker 1: 00:25 Rick, what does Effectual do?
Speaker 2: 00:27 So Effectual is a professional and a managed services company, and we’re totally focused on client’s journey to the public cloud. Now going to the public cloud is not unique or nichey. Basically, everybody’s doing it. It’s a massive market. So we’ve taken the approach of being able to be almost a full service company in terms of helping them determine where to go, how they migrate from their traditional data center colo environment, even a hybrid environment, and and how they should operate once they get there.
Speaker 2: 00:59 So we help them make some determination. We help them get their strategy to migrate, which is not trivial. And then once they’re there, because being in the cloud is different than being in their own data center, we offer managed service that basically we can manage and operate the entire environment for them.
Speaker 1: 01:16 Where they go? I mean, that’s an interesting question because that’s not an easy answer. Right? I mean, it’s not necessarily only one public cloud versus another. I mean, how how do you help an enterprise go through that selection process?
Speaker 1: 01:28 And what does that look like, or what does that entail?
Speaker 2: 01:30 So, you know, obviously, there’s 3 giant ones, and then there’s all sorts of other ones as well. Frankly, we’re very focused on the AWS environment, and, and we’ve done it, you know, for many reasons. They are the dominant player in that business. Upwards of 75% of, public cloud workloads are running in AWS. You know, occasionally, they’ll ask us about certain aspects of their infrastructure, and there may be things that are better suited to be in Azure, you know, or or Google that is possible.
Speaker 2: 02:00 But, by and large, when corporate enterprises are gonna do a wholesale migration, which is what we’re involved in, AWS has typically been the, the environment that we recommend. And the other part of that is also, you know, most enterprises have virtualized their environment. Be very rare to find a a large corporate entity anywhere that isn’t highly virtualized using VMware. So there’s VMware in the cloud, VMC, which makes migration, you know, from data center to the cloud very easy. So, frankly, our our sweet spot as a company is companies that want to migrate virtualized workloads.
Speaker 2: 02:36 It doesn’t have to be all virtualized. We do native. But moving from the data center in a virtual environment to the cloud, that’s our sweet spot, and that’s actually majority of the work we do.
Speaker 1: 02:45 Is this something where, you know, a board mandate of cloud migration or an executive team says we want to migrate our CFOs looking at data center expense and saying, I no longer wanna operate on premise gear. I mean, what drives that decision now in terms of let’s go to a cloud and this is the direction we wanna take?
Speaker 2: 03:04 Obviously, there’s all different aspects to it and different reasons to go. You know, at the end of the day, if you look long term, the economics can be are are extremely compelling. You know, it’s not just getting out of my data center, but, you know, there’s a there’s a management aspect to it, and you still need your people to manage the cloud environment. The cost of buying all that CapEx, as opposed to now basically having it as a as an OpEx. It’s huge with the balance sheet and the financial of these companies.
Speaker 2: 03:33 And, frankly, most companies have said, I’m a bank. I’m a telco. I’m a manufacturing company. This is what I do. This is my specialty.
Speaker 2: 03:42 I have a massive investment in my IT infrastructure. It’s not core to my business. What’s core is my main business. So let me have someone who does nothing but that. And, obviously, AWS and these other companies, have done a great job of building that out.
Speaker 2: 03:56 Let me focus my resources on my core business, and let me have someone who does nothing but Dish run my IT. There’s a subjective component to it, and there’s a very significant financial objective component.
Speaker 1: 04:07 AWS is a very complicated animal with lots of services inside of AWS. Yeah. For a company that’s that’s looking at a migration and saying, hey, we have an existing IT team. Why wouldn’t we just use our existing IT team to manage our AWS environment for us? And what is Effectual providing for that enterprise in a layered service on top of their existing IT staff?
Speaker 2: 04:27 Yep. It would be very rare for the IT operation staff to not be involved in in managing the environment once they go there. But, you know, there’s there’s 2 pieces to this. So first of all, you know, we have a team right now of about a 100 cloud consultants between their time and effectual and where they’ve been before. Literally, we’ve done 100 of these migrations.
Speaker 2: 04:48 And, you know, big corporation is gonna do one big migration. They’re not gonna do it all at once. They’re not gonna switch light off the data center. The next day, they’re in the cloud. They do it in phases.
Speaker 2: 04:58 They do it by divisions. It it takes time. But for the most part, their staff, this will be the first one they do, the only one they do. So, you know, we make a pretty compelling argument, that, you know, we’ve done 100. We have a massive amount of experience.
Speaker 2: 05:11 It’s not just moving workloads. There’s all the security wrappers that go with it. There’s a lot of compliance work that goes with it, and we have expertise and certifications and all of that. So we can make a pretty compelling case to do the migration. Now if you look at an SOW we write for these migrations, it’s very collaborative with the IT staff of these companies.
Speaker 2: 05:32 We don’t have the background, the history. A lot of time these applications are old. The people who wrote them, no longer there. So it’s a very collaborative work together effort to get the migration done. Then once we’re in AWS, again, there’s a lot of work for the IT staff to be doing.
Speaker 2: 05:47 They’re gonna be developing continuing to evolve their business. But there are a lot of tools that are in AWS that you use to manage an AWS environment that they would not have been familiar with before. And, again, we have, you know, experience with 100 of companies with these tools and with these processes. So it’s never you don’t need the IT staff. You wanna take over completely.
Speaker 2: 06:13 The migration is totally collaborative, and the when the and the management of it, we need all the expertise and all the involvement in the application world, the infrastructure world to properly manage their environment. But, again, our expertise is with all those tools and operations that come with being in the public cloud.
Speaker 1: 06:30 A lot of this sounds like this is risk mitigation where you’re talking about a company looking for a cloud trans you know, transformation or migration. That’s a big unknown project. So they can leverage Effectual to lower risk or in in either speed time to market, lower the amount of time, increase the likelihood of a successful migration where it doesn’t come back. I mean, these are the sorts of things I’m kind of hearing you you say when I’m, you know, reading between the lines a little
Speaker 2: 06:53 bit. It it is. I mean, the you know, Max has thousands of gotchas, you know, in terms of the sizing, making sure the performance is right, make sure the workloads are spread out properly. There’s so much that goes into it. You know, a lot of times, you know, we’ll meet with a client and they’ll say, you know, we’re gonna we’re gonna migrate to the cloud.
Speaker 2: 07:10 We’re like, great. You know, what’s your plan? Well, we got some smart people here. And, you know, not to be flimped at all, but, you know, 90 days later, hey. Could you guys come back in here, you know, and help us out?
Speaker 2: 07:22 And, you know, and sometimes we’ll do, an assessment for them, and we’ll help them kind of outline what that project will be. You know, we file a very typical professional services methodology where we always do an assessment, and then we do an architecture, and then we build it out, and then we run it or or manage it for them. So we could be called in at any step along the way. Obviously, you know, a very successful project is get us involved early. Let us help you, you know, plan out where you’re gonna go.
Speaker 2: 07:51 Let us architect it. You know? And then, you know, you pick up where you think is is best for your team. So we’ve done any one of those components for the customer. Sometimes we’re just involved in someone who’s already in the cloud, and they just want us to manage it because they don’t wanna learn all these new tools and things like that.
Speaker 2: 08:07 And sometimes we do the entire project for them, and those can be some significant projects.
Speaker 1: 08:12 Managing a cloud environment is very different different from managing a physical on premise or data center environment. Now you start talking about cost control, governance, security, you know, the different things. Right? It’s very easy to make an oops and create a a very significant bill for the organization. Exactly.
Speaker 1: 08:28 How do you help enterprises around making sure that all of a sudden they don’t have their database exposed to the Internet or their object storage exposed to the Internet or, oops, you know, we’ve just spent a lot of money and we weren’t planning for it.
Speaker 2: 08:40 Well, there’s a couple aspects to that. So first of all, you know, I talked about migrating to the cloud, managing the cloud. But if you look at our skill set, you know, we have a team of people who are virtualization specialists. They’ve done a lot of migrations. I mean, maybe in the 100, some of these guys have done 100 all by themselves.
Speaker 2: 08:57 But our security team is one of the biggest teams we have. We have an entire networking team because the network infrastructure that you need when you’re in your own data centers versus when you’re in a cloud is totally different. And if not architected and designed properly, it’s gonna be a miserable failure, frankly. So, we have those kind of teams. We’ve invested very heavily in some of this compliance stuff you mentioned.
Speaker 2: 09:20 So we have a big public sector team. We’ve done business with some of the biggest government, federal and SLED organizations. We are we have contracts to run the public cloud for some very large US states, partnered with AWS. So FedRAMP, which is the highest level of government certification you can have in a compliance aspect, you can’t even compete for that business. You can submit, you know, bids and proposals without it.
Speaker 2: 09:47 We are FedRAMP compliant. Actually, it’s a timely question because on Friday afternoon, got a message from one of our security people that has security practice that we just, got our PCI compliance. So payment card industry. So retail organizations, anyone who’s, you know, dealing with that kind of stuff, doing commerce over the web, in the public cloud. So, again, it’s not just migrating the workloads and managing them, but, you know, part of the assessment and the architecture is what exactly is your business.
Speaker 2: 10:17 We have quite a few just business consultants on our team. Are not gonna be the ones who are gonna be pushing the button to the migration, but they’re gonna understand all the requirements and exactly what, you know, what the client needs, what’s required once they get into the cloud, and then make sure we apply the proper certifications and techniques for doing that.
Speaker 1: 10:36 Effectual, let’s talk about your your background a little bit because Effectual has a rock star team, you know, in terms of its core nucleus of executives and founding. Can you tell me about the background of Effectual and how you start?
Speaker 2: 10:47 It’s a very interesting company. So Effectual was founded by the core team that originally founded DataPipe. And if you’re familiar with DataPipe, they grew to be one of the largest colo and then managed service companies, you know, in the world. Rob Allen is our CEO. And, after the company was sold to Rackspace, a pretty large transaction, took some time off, thought about what the next step was.
Speaker 2: 11:11 Data pipe had built a pretty big managed service with AWS. Actually, the first external company to order managed service, in in in the AWS. So he knew that the days of the data center were coming to an end, and people were not investing in new data centers and new colos. In fact, just the opposite. So he basically built a a company focused on migrating, you know companies from data center from colo from You know physical managed service into the cloud and applying the same practices they had with data pipe First thing he did was he brought on his CTO, his CMO, his chief people officer.
Speaker 2: 11:47 So these were guys who have been there. They’ve done that. They built out a company. They understand what it takes, and they started building the team from there. Very quickly, a lot of the core technical leads that have been within DataPipe, they wanted to join the company.
Speaker 2: 12:00 So the core foundation of the business are guys who have been doing this for a while, been successful, and we’re doing it again now except in the cloud, not in the data center.
Speaker 1: 12:09 So, I mean, you mentioned FedRAMP. FedRAMP is a really serious government certification that gets you into government entity entities. But who are your customers right now? I mean, is this are you are you targeting specific verticals? Are you looking at specific sizes?
Speaker 1: 12:23 Are you looking at geographies? Like, who’s a good fit for effectual and vice versa?
Speaker 2: 12:27 So I’m always asked that question, you know, what’s our vertical focus? And I can tell you where a lot of our customers are, you know, financial services, actually, media and entertainment. We’ve got a bunch there, some big ones, some telco related companies, and the public sector, which actually is is our biggest aspect. But, you know, Max, go to the public cloud is not a vertically focused thing. Everyone’s going.
Speaker 2: 12:50 So no matter what you’re doing so we get calls on a daily basis, you know, from companies in all aspects of of business that they wanna go. Obviously, if you’re, you know, if you’re a government organization and and as I mentioned, we’re managing really large environments for a couple of big states. Not sure I can say which states they are, but they’re the big ones. We’re doing business with a number of federal organizations, you know, from the Bureau of Prisons and US Geological Survey to a bunch of DOD. And we’re we’re doing the cloud for them.
Speaker 2: 13:21 We’re helping them migrate to the cloud, make decisions, getting them involved in AWS and VMware, and then managing the environment. So it’s it’s it’s all over the place. I’d like to say we’re gonna be more vertically focused. In fact, we are bringing people on board with a lot of expertise, like in financial services, because there’s some particular, you know, aspects of migrating those guys. You have to be able to speak their language.
Speaker 2: 13:44 But, you know, for the for the foreseeable future, we could be doing big migrations and management with with almost any kind of company right now.
Speaker 1: 13:53 So this is a big it depends question. Right? And and and we’ll start with, you know, as you’re evaluating a migration, you know, what’s an average timeline for somebody if they’re already let’s say they’re already in a good place. They’re already virtualized. They’re already on a Hyper v or VMware.
Speaker 1: 14:05 Right? You know, what does a migration project look like in terms of time? Like, what would be an expectation in terms of cost around that? Like, what’s the components of that knob? And then when you talk about, you know, ongoing management of those environments, like, how do you you know, what’s the determining factor that comes up with that?
Speaker 2: 14:19 Okay. So I I think the best way to answer that is I’ll give you an example of something we we’ve just completed. So in your neck of the woods company, in your, very close to where you live in Southern California, they had to evacuate a data center that they’ve been using. And, you know, the data centers don’t typically go month to month. They make you sign long term commitments because these are big companies.
Speaker 2: 14:43 So they had a, an expiration coming up. They had signed a 2 year contract to be there. Tremendous amount of money to be in this location. You know, world class data center and everything that goes with it. And they don’t wanna do it.
Speaker 2: 14:56 They’re already making plans and doing a little bit of migration. So they came to us. In fact, I can say that, you know, our partners, AWS and VMware came to us because this was a a VMC on AWS migration, which is one of the quicker ways of doing it. And they said, look, 90 days, these guys have to get out couple of 1,000 workloads. If we miss the deadline, if we’re one day over, they’re gonna get that bill and that contract is gonna gonna kick in.
Speaker 2: 15:25 So the 1st month or so, we did the assessment of the environment. You know, looked at all the infrastructure, the applications, lot of stuff that goes into the assessment. We put a very high level team onto it. The next 30 days, rough and tough. We architected it.
Speaker 2: 15:40 You know, where is it gonna go? Which workloads are gonna go, you know, from the physical to the to the, cloud? Everything goes with that, make sure the network is right, make sure the security procedures were all in place. The last 30 days, we hit go, basically, and all the workloads went over. And rough until for the couple days to go, you know, we’re able to send a note to their their landlord that said, thank you very much.
Speaker 2: 16:02 We appreciate doing business with you. We’re gone. And so we got the project done. So that’s typical. Now that was a big project.
Speaker 2: 16:09 They did put a good amount of money towards it because they needed a lot of horsepower. And, again, I’m I’m almost simplifying the assessment in the architecture phase. People from all of these different disciplines in our company were involved to make that happen.
Speaker 1: 16:21 And when you get into ongoing management yeah. And I now we’ve migrated, you know, our environment. We’re on, you know, VMware or we’re on traditional computer. We’ve gone serverless because our architecture and infrastructure supports it. At that point and when we have effectual engaged to provide ongoing management, what does that mean?
Speaker 1: 16:37 Like, what are you actually doing for companies, and what would that, you know, what is that cycle that you’re helping alleviate with for them? And and how do you structure your contract and your your fees with
Speaker 2: 16:46 them? So what we do is pretty much manage all of the infrastructure. So that means that we’re monitoring it. You know, we’re taking first call when things go wrong. We’re, you know, we’re escalating if escalations need to be.
Speaker 2: 17:00 You know, we’re making sure that they’re in compliance. There’s a lot that goes with that. We’re even doing things like backing up the environment for them. This is all part of the overall so so think about, you know, an operations team going into a traditional data center. What are all the things that have to be done from day to day?
Speaker 2: 17:15 Make make sure it’s operating properly, escalate, you know, problems when they occur, make sure it’s backed up, you know, do the Doctor when when appropriate, things like that. We usually draw the line just getting deep into the applications, which is again why this becomes a collaborative effort. You know, we’re not gonna be the expert on homegrown applications or deep what’s inside their Oracle databases. Now we have a database practice, and these guys are really rock stars in database world. You know, when we do a migration like the company I just mentioned to you, you know, there’s some easy stuff that goes.
Speaker 2: 17:46 There’s always kind of a green, yellow, red. Green is, you know, no big deal. Let it go. Red is, you know what? We’re gonna have to think about we’re gonna do this stuff, you know, long term.
Speaker 2: 17:56 And then yellow is the stuff that’s gonna, you know, we’re gonna apply, you know, some of our smart guys to and and work on. Very often, the database is where a lot of the problems occur. They’re not just Oracle or SQL databases. They may be Sybase and old stuff like that. And, they’ve gotta get them go.
Speaker 2: 18:12 These are core applications to run-in their business. They weren’t designed to run-in the cloud, so we put our smart guys in database world. We figured out a strategy to get them into the new environment. In terms of you you asked twice about the, about the fees and the, economics of it. So so, typically, and, you know, everyone’s gonna be a little different.
Speaker 2: 18:33 But, typically, we have we have a formula we use to figure out what what a service would cost. And, roughly, it runs about a third of the cost of their their their cost to be in AWS or to be in the cloud. It’s that’s a that’s a a guideline. If it’s a bigger environment, we get some scale out of it. The percentage might be lower.
Speaker 2: 18:51 If it’s small, it might be slightly higher. But as a rule of thumb, that’s a that’s a good estimate.
Speaker 1: 18:55 Right. And then you’re enabling the IT teams to focus on enabling the internal business, and you’re enabling the IT team to to what they’re supposed to be doing on a day to day basis. Exactly. Exactly. Awesome.
Speaker 1: 19:07 Rick, this is great. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: 19:10 I appreciate it, Max. Great talking to you today.
Speaker 1: 19:13 Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visitus@clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
