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 Kevin Smith, who’s the chief revenue officer at Entirety.
Speaker 1: 00:22 Kevin, thank you for joining.
Speaker 2: 00:23 My pleasure, Max. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: 00:25 So, Kevin, before we get into the Entirety story, I think it’s important to point out that that prior to taking the CRO role, that you were in charge of customer success. And that’s that’s an interesting track for people. You don’t see very many, you know, customer success moving into, you know, sales and marketing and and CRO typically within companies. So I’m curious, you know, how that applied and and what that means for entirety.
Speaker 2: 00:48 Sure. When I first joined entirety, as you said, I was, I was in charge of customer success, and my main charter was to improve our client experiences so that we could retain our clients longer. And not long after being in, our CEO at the time who had hired me asked me what my thoughts were. You know, I was maybe 90 days in, and I told him that I thought the company implied too much disparity where none existed between sales and retention, that providing a great client experience is how you sell and how you retain and that there was there was too much disparity in the company between those 2. And he said, okay, well, you can have sales then also.
Speaker 1: 01:27 Be careful what you wish for.
Speaker 2: 01:29 Exactly. So when he asked me about marketing, I kept my mouth closed.
Speaker 1: 01:33 So I so in that context, what does Entirety do? I mean, what is what is Entirety’s focus with your customers?
Speaker 2: 01:39 Sure. We secure and manage cloud environments, Be that public cloud, hybrid cloud, Azure, AWS, even some mix of clients that have built their own clouds, we secure and manage them.
Speaker 1: 01:53 So it’s interesting to me that you start by saying you secure and then manage. And I think a lot of, you know, presentation from companies is almost opposite. We help migrate. We help manage, but, you know, security seems to be an afterthought. So is that a dominant focus for entirety?
Speaker 1: 02:08 Is that something you guys are leading with?
Speaker 2: 02:10 Yeah. Absolute absolutely, it is. The migration piece, we’ve gotta be able to do. Management, we’ve gotta be able to do. If you do all of that and then your client gets breached, you’ve done them no service.
Speaker 2: 02:21 So security is always at the forefront of of our focus.
Speaker 1: 02:25 You know, as an enterprise is making a transition or has transitioned into a cloud or is somewhere within that journey, what is it that would attract them to an entirety or how you know, what problem are you solving for that company?
Speaker 2: 02:39 Sure. It depends at what stage we engage. Some clients attempt to take themselves to the cloud, realize that maybe they lack the expertise to do so. Some clients get themselves to the cloud and and are not realizing the benefits thereof. Some clients bring us in early enough, and this is where we’re best able to engage and and drive positive outcomes, is in the decision making process.
Speaker 2: 03:03 Should we go to the cloud? What cloud should we go to? What applications should go to the cloud? How should we get there? Should we lift and shift or or replatform the the application prior to moving, how to go about it?
Speaker 2: 03:18 So if we’re our our optimum point of engagement with anyone is early on in the process so that we can help them take a look at at the business decisions that they’re making more than the or as much at least as the technology decisions that they’re making. You know, often, if you don’t start with a definitive goal, and and that goal needs a a high level of specificity as to why you’re making moves to the cloud or what you’re trying to accomplish in the cloud that you’re failing to and why you need outside assistance. We really drive into the business decisions there to make sure that we can that we can drive positive outcomes.
Speaker 1: 03:56 I I like that. So what are business drivers that are pushing people onto the cloud, and how are you helping them, you know, accomplish that?
Speaker 2: 04:07 Sure. There there’s quite a few, and and we like to start there. You know, there’s there’s technical decisions that people are making. There’s financial decisions. There’s life cycle of the business type decisions, factors that people are considering.
Speaker 2: 04:20 Right now, there’s business continuity and security. Decisions are pretty heavy. Some examples of those, a lot of it’s modernization. Folks feel like they need to modernize. And modernization, though, can take a lot of forms.
Speaker 2: 04:33 Are you modernizing your application? Are you modernizing your staff model staffing model? Are you going to more of a DevOps environment? Are you modernizing your equipment? Is outdated?
Speaker 2: 04:45 Is it just the fact that you’ve hosted your own applications for a long time, and now you’re at a point where you have to do an equipment refresh so it’s a good time to make that build versus buy decision almost again? Do I spend capital to purchase new gear, or is that the right catalyst to move to an OPEX model and move to the cloud? Or they’re making technical decisions, you know, application that needs more scalability, trying to improve self-service. Some people, you know, want to, retire technical debt to kinda common post merger and acquisition. You know, an acquisition occurs, and all of a sudden, I’ve got these legacy applications.
Speaker 2: 05:25 I need to keep them around, but do I wanna service all that equipment, or is now the time to move that to the cloud? And we’re seeing a lot now of, you know, of financial decisions, right, on on operating expense versus capital expenditure. Do I have cash on hand? We see some companies that make financial decisions based on corporate value. Is my is my SaaS company worth more if my if my application’s completely on the cloud than if I’ve got a if I’ve got a service, infrastructure?
Speaker 2: 05:54 And right now, we’re getting a lot of business continuity decisions being made. You know, do can I get geographic diversity by going to multi availability zones in the public cloud? Should I do my disaster recovery? Should I replicate to the cloud off of my current gear? Should I split between between clouds so I’ve got diversity even at the hyperscale level?
Speaker 2: 06:14 And really nailing those business decisions, I think, is, is important. You know, typically, a lift and shift, I’m just gonna take my application as is. I’m gonna move it from some sense of hardware or from a private cloud environment or even some folks still on premise, right, their own data centers, some large corporations or collocated equipment someplace. If I just take an application and move it to the cloud, I haven’t accomplished much. You know, am I going to be able to take advantage of the myriad of technical advances in on the public cloud, auto scaling, ephemeral devices, infrastructure as code, really all of the true technical benefits of the cloud.
Speaker 2: 06:54 Or I may just want to be like we said, I want to be diverse. I don’t want to buy new equipment. I might take an existing application and move it to Azure an existing Microsoft application, move it to Azure so that I I free myself of managing technical debt. You know? I I free myself of having an IT person having to blow out dusty fans, you know, in the the old day references.
Speaker 1: 07:15 This this conversation is interesting to me because when you talk about it, I mean, it sounds like their part of it becomes your, you know, a tactician implementing a decision that’s already been made by a company. But the the rest of that thought really sounds like you’re helping enterprises actually decide what business drivers they should be focusing on and how do they imply technology and cloud services and infrastructure management around that for them as well. I mean, where do you sit in that conversation with your with your customers? Well, with our existing clients, we certainly sit in that conversation early.
Speaker 2: 07:42 You know, our genesis was as a a hosting company. Right? We still manage data centers. We’ve got quite a few here in the US. We’ve got a Canadian presence.
Speaker 2: 07:57 We’ve got a European Union POP. We’ve got APAC, POP, and SOL. So we still manage a lot of private cloud and even colocated equipment. So those clients were partnered with them already, and we’re early in those discussions trying to help them get to the cloud. I think one of the things that attracted me to entirety early on somebody had said to me, hey, you should move into the hosting business.
Speaker 2: 08:19 Three and a half years ago, I’d say, that’s not a great idea. But I was speaking to the folks then, leadership and the private equity firm, and they were early on making the cut and not playing defense against the cloud. They were saying, let’s help our clients get there. You know, some of the old data center companies would try to resist that. I wanna keep them kind of that client where they are and keep that revenue stream.
Speaker 2: 08:41 And and tiredly early on made the cut to where the where the puck was headed and and instead of where it was. And and so we’ve we guide our clients, and we’re in early. But some clients, you know, and prospects come to us midstream. They are they’re attempting to do it on their own. They’ve made a decision.
Speaker 2: 08:57 They just want somebody to execute it, and that’s fine with us. We’re happy to do that, and we can still add a lot of value there. We’re probably going to go into that with a security bent and a security focus and say, absolutely. We’re happy to help you. First thing we’re gonna do is look and say, you know, how secure is that environment?
Speaker 2: 09:14 Because as I said earlier, you know, man managing somebody managing an environment for somebody without concern to security is a disservice. So we’re gonna have that conversation early on. But we’ll do straight migrations if somebody wants to manage it themselves, and we look at it and kinda say, how involved does the client want to be? Do do they wanna be hands off? Hey.
Speaker 2: 09:38 You guys migrate this. You guys manage this. You guys secure it. I’m gonna put all of my horsepower behind app development. And we say, okay, well, that’s a great client for us.
Speaker 2: 09:47 We’re happy to handle it. But a client comes in and says, hey, I just need somebody to do cost optimization and keep an eye on this thing so it doesn’t it doesn’t, you know, auto scale and blow my budget. We’re happy to do that as well. We can you know, our our offering is expertise, and clients have different gaps in their expertise. And we can fill those gaps.
Speaker 2: 10:07 And and if they want if they have 0 expertise or don’t wanna hire that or in this environment, the environment we’re operating in currently, Max, there’s folks that have had to make very difficult staffing decisions, and some of that expertise may no longer be on the team, and they’ll be forced to make a decision as we rebound. Is that a rehire, or is that you know, when in doubt, sub it out? You know, if if, security is a great example of that. We do a lot of just security for people, secure their cloud environments. And in my mind, security is something somebody else should always do.
Speaker 2: 10:44 If you’re doing your own security, you’re it’s like proof proofreading your own writing. Right? You’re gonna make you’re gonna miss because you think you know it’s there. You know? Somebody else proofreading is always better.
Speaker 2: 10:56 And with security specifically, there’s there’s good reason to have it outsourced and, you know, allow somebody who focuses near near exclusively on that to to have that consideration.
Speaker 1: 11:07 The managed service space or the CSP space around public clouds is getting very crowded. Why entirety? What’s your secret sauce that makes you stand out in this crowd?
Speaker 2: 11:17 Sure. The security piece is certainly a big part of that. We also do a lot of data, modernization, data optimization, you know, classic DBA work, and being able to weave that into cloud discussion is excellent for us. One of the things that really differentiates us, Max, is we contract guidance level agreements, and it’s a concept that we’ve come up with. We took a look at service level agreements, the old SLAs, and by nature, they are reactive.
Speaker 2: 11:47 If something bad happens, then we will do this. And we flipped that script and said, we’re going to be proactive, and we’re going to guarantee that we’ll make 5 actionable recommendations. We document them every quarter, at least 5 actionable recommendations with our clients that will impact security, performance, availability, or cost. So in those four areas, right, that we say we’re we’ll either make a recommendation to save you money, to be more secure, to get more performance out of your out of your existing environment. And what it does is it lets us run-in parallel with our clients.
Speaker 2: 12:22 To make actionable recommendations that are sensible, you have to know the business objectives, clients’ desired business outcomes. So it raises that level of conversation. You know, it’s easy to come in and say, you should purchase a reserved instance to save some money. Well, if you don’t know that that client’s got massive scaling plans in front of you, you’re gonna purchase the wrong reserved instance. You’re gonna make a recommendation that’s unreasonable to them.
Speaker 2: 12:44 Cutting costs might not be their concern. Growth might be their concern. Rapid growth might be what they’re most focused upon. So these guidance level agreements that come with our with our higher tiered services are a real differentiator for us.
Speaker 1: 12:57 Entire also is cloud agnostic. You’re not a focus provider just on AWS or GCP or Azure. You have your own environment that you still maintain. It’s an option for customers. But as well, you’ll you’ll help manage a customer in any of the public clouds.
Speaker 1: 13:10 And that’s somewhat unusual also in the CSP space where people try to hyperfocal you know, focus. How do you find that? I mean, operationally, that’s gotta add some overhead. But in terms of customer value, was that customer driven, or is that something that you guys looked at and said, hey. We’re gonna drive into the market, and we wanna be, you know, cloud agnostic?
Speaker 2: 13:28 That’s that’s a great question, Max. It was really customer driven because our customer base had different business goals and should be on different clouds. They were making decisions, and our existing customer base was who we were taking care of first and foremost. So as they said, I’ve got this this large Microsoft environment that I wanna migrate, we took them to Azure. As they said, hey, my my SaaS company is really growing, and I’ve got spikes and I’ve got spikes and valleys in my usage.
Speaker 2: 13:59 We took them to AWS for auto scaling. When the clients came to us and said, hey. We’re we’re an online marketing company, and we’ve outgrown our current environment. We took them to to Google. So, you know, that’s how it kind of originated.
Speaker 2: 14:14 For us, I think one of the advantages there is we can provide, monitoring security across those clouds management across those clouds so you’re not, you’re not having to deal with multiple providers. Or if you are managing your own portions of that yourself, you’re not managing multiple monitoring systems, for example. So our ability to to kind of provide security and management across hybrid cloud environments has proven pretty valuable. But to answer your question, it wasn’t born out of us saying, what’s gonna be most attractive to the marketplace? It was it was born out of how can we be the best partner for for our existing clients?
Speaker 1: 14:54 Who are your customers? I mean, is there a profile? You you are you vertical orientated? Are you industry? Are you, you know, geography?
Speaker 1: 15:02 Are you size? Like, who who becomes a good fit for entirety and vice versa? You know, if I’m an enterprise of a certain, you know, profile, like, how would I know that entirety would be a good fit for me?
Speaker 2: 15:12 Sure. We certainly have some, you know, some Fortune 500 clients, but that’s not our target. Good size clients for us, and we are more sized than than vertical, clients that are running mission critical applications in compliant verticals, and that now obviously spans a long way. But clients that need, to meet specific compliance requirements, be that HIPAA, PCI, HITRUST, you know, everybody now on on GDPR, the any compliant driven minded company running a mission critical application, average size for us, clients that are sub-two billion in total rev, somewhere between maybe $150,000,000 and $2,000,000,000 It’s pretty wide range for us. We work with a lot of private equity owned clients.
Speaker 2: 16:04 We work with a lot of private equity firms and manage their, their portfolio. So private equity firms will bring us in to take a look at the companies that are within their portfolio to see where we can drive value specifically in and around security. Clients with technical debt, you know, you hate to say it, but an ideal client profile for us, company that’s been in business more than 15 years. A company that’s been in business 5 probably was born in the cloud, probably has some expertise, probably has grown in the cloud, but a client that was or a business that’s been up, you know, 15 years, they were not. We do a lot of manufacturing.
Speaker 2: 16:43 We do a lot in oil and gas, industries. We do a lot of financial services companies and a lot of SaaS providers. Some of our largest clients certainly don’t wanna drop names, but, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of smart televisions in homes that when they update, that update is calling back to an application that we are managing and securing.
Speaker 1: 17:05 Compliance is a very difficult thing to do well. I mean, you can you can support compliance, but anybody who’s been through a compliance audit or, you know, even PCI. PCI is a relatively easy, you know, straightforward thing. I mean, on the surface, I should say that at least. But it it it tentacles out and touches a lot of things very quickly.
Speaker 1: 17:25 And when you get into HIPAA HIPAA and HITRUST and and deeper and deeper into more and more stringent compliances, I mean, those become very, you know, animals of to themselves. And so saying that also that you’re focused on compliance and regulated industries, I mean, that really is a pretty big differentiator to say, you know, if if you have a compliance requirement and you are looking at a business objective that’s driving you into a cloud platform or or driving modifications to your cloud platform. I mean, the intersection of those two things is is is relatively I mean, the intersection of those two things is is is relatively specific. You know, that’s a that’s a very unique kind of customer, and it makes you a very unique offering for that customer. Yeah.
Speaker 1: 17:57 It certainly does. And that’s
Speaker 2: 18:03 the that’s the start of a lot of engagements for us. Clients will come and say, we’ve got a compliance need. We do offer compliance as a service, you know, kinda not to use the the cliche, but we’ll take a look. Our compliance team will go in, take a look, do gap analysis, make recommendations specific to technology and protocols surrounding those technologies. And then often that drives us providing assistance and clients meeting those, filling those gaps and and meeting those obligations.
Speaker 2: 18:34 Ultimately, compliance is a it’s a it’s a big matzo ball. It’s a sticky that you know? It’s a it’s a big matzo ball at times because it does. It touches so many things, including including items that are that that by nature have to be the client’s responsibility. You know?
Speaker 2: 18:52 Ensuring protocols are met in offices, we can’t do that, but making sure that all of the standards are known, that the technology meets all the standards, and then us providing assistance at audit time is a big part of what our compliance service does. You know, if you wait until I mean, most folks that are listening have probably been there when 60 days before a compliance audit, it’s a fire drill. Right? And then 10 months go by, and somehow we’ve forgotten all about this. And then 60 days before the next year’s compliance audit, it’s a fire drill.
Speaker 2: 19:27 So what we do is just try to keep those those points from getting too divergent. You know, lines that are only a couple degrees apart over time are are spread a long way out. Right? So our service just kinda reconnects those points as you go so that when you come around to audit time, it’s it’s not the it’s not the fire drill.
Speaker 1: 19:44 Awesome. Kevin, thank you so much for your time this morning, and, I really appreciate it. I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Speaker 2: 19:51 Likewise, Max. Always appreciate you. Good to talk to you, sir.
Speaker 1: 19:55 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. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
