The Network Disaster You Don’t See Coming - Ryan Williams Reveals How SD-WAN Solves It

Max: 00:03 Welcome to the tech deep dive podcast where we let our inner nerd come out and have fun getting into the weeds on all things tech. 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. Today, I’m chatting with Ryan Williams. Ryan is a senior director of North American Channel at Cloudgenix. Ryan, thank you for joining.Ryan: 00:25

Yeah. Max, thanks for having us. We’re excited.

Max: 00:28 So, I mean, let’s just get right into it. What is Cloudgenix, and why are you different?

Ryan: 00:34 So Cloudgenix is the, mid market and enterprise leader in SD WAN. And what makes us fundamentally different from all the other SD WAN solutions out there is our architecture. It’s the core of what we do. It’s it’s it’s our DNA, so to speak. So we are an application defined fabric, meaning we’re a session and flow based architecture defined at the application layer at layer 7 in contrast to being a router, a marginally better router.

Ryan: 01:00 Right? Packets and protocols defining the network. We like to say we define networks around applications and the user experience associated with those applications.

Max: 01:10 So to make this a little bit more, you know, let’s say, layman’s English speak, the comparison would be an SD WAN appliance that’s taking and making decisions on this network link perceives more latency or some jitter or, you know, has more throughput versus Cloudgenics where you’re looking at how fast is this application across link a versus link b.

Ryan: 01:34 Yeah. I think that was a great summary. I would even go one step further. How do we guarantee the performance of any application over any transport at any time? Certainly, we take into consideration link A and link B and how they’re performing.

Ryan: 01:49 But there’s other things that if you’re only looking at link A and link B, you can’t account for, things like application response time from the cloud. That’s really challenging, virtually impossible to account for in a router based model. So for us, we live and breathe applications, we understand applications, and we can, you know, make path selection decisions based on application performance truly, natively.

Max: 02:12 So Cloudgenics, you have an appliance, and the appliance gets installed on-site. This is what makes the decisions and determination of how to actually pass traffic between the branch and whatever central resource they’re getting to, whether that’s back to a data center or if that’s back to a cloud. So how do these things integrate? I mean, are you guys in front of, behind, next to a firewall? Are you a firewall replacement?

Max: 02:36 What does this look like for somebody that’s looking at SD WAN and and, you know, thinking about a Cloudgenix?

Ryan: 02:41 Yeah. It’s a great question. So first thing I would kinda point out there is just a a minor correction. Cloudgenix is software. Right?

Ryan: 02:48 Now, to your point, a vast majority of our customers consume us also with hardware. Right? Because at the end of the day, an SD WAN appliance is typically aggregating multiple links. It’s one of the major values of the product. Our core of our product is a software based product, meaning we can deploy in an X86 box.

Ryan: 03:09 Actually, when a customer does choose to consume us in terms of hardware, it is an X86 grey box, it’s not proprietary hardware. That also gives us some advantages in terms of standing up in a multi cloud environment or in, you know, a branch CPE type model.

Max: 03:25 So how much of the software intelligence is actually running in what’s being deployed, whether it’s the customer’s you know, cloud instance or the the branch and how much of that is actually running, you know, in in your orchestration layer? Like, what does this actually look like in terms of communication between the software and the decisions the software is making running the branch and the central environment?

Ryan: 03:47 Another terrific question. I feel like you teed up awesome questions today, Max. I love it. But it’s a great point because it does differentiate us. If you look at a lot of our competitors, you’ll see that they have an orchestration plane and their SD WAN takes place in a pop, a point of presence or a multi tenanted plane where many customers live in that space.

Ryan: 04:08 CloudGenix, our SD WAN actually takes place at the branch. So our software at the branch is where the SD WAN takes place. The only data that we send to and from the branch to what we would call our orchestration plane or our control plane is metadata. It’s completely stripped of any headers associated with private customer information. That’s really, really important when you think about customers that are compliance driven.

Ryan: 04:34 One of the largest banks in the world, as an example, wouldn’t let a lot of our competitors sit at the table because if you’re going to take data from this bank at the branch and then route it to any point of presence, any multi tenanted plane, that’s a complete non starter for an organization like that that’s so heavily compliance driven. We would argue that’s a pretty significant advantage for us. So to put a button into the answer of your question, the SD WAN takes place at the branch, and we leverage aggregated intelligence in the cloud, and we leverage the ability to run analytics in the cloud and make good decisions there. That’s where the scale comes from, but there’s no customer data that ever gets into our control plane. Religious separation of church and state between the customer plane and our control plane.

Ryan: 05:18 So what key I mean, we talk about application performance. I mean, is

Max: 05:22 that the key problem that CloudGenics was started to solve? I mean, what was the really the inception and the idea behind what Cloudgenics is and where it came from? I mean, what’s the background and what was the starting point?

Ryan: 05:31 Yeah. So our guys from a product leadership standpoint, right, come from just a tremendous amount of pedigree, Much like some of our competitors, they are Cisco based guys that have spent careers developing branch routing products. Where the idea came from was how do we they saw an immediate opportunity for the WAN, they saw the ability to provide scale, so ease of use and ease of deployment. Because managing a large enterprise WAN, which is really where we play the mid market and the enterprise, managing a very large WAN infrastructure is extremely time consuming. Much of your audience probably has done that for much of their careers, including you Max, I know that.

Ryan: 06:09 So you know the time and effort it takes to actually get networks deployed and then maintain large enterprise branch networks. So the first thing that was a catalyst for the idea is how do you provide scale? Then second, we saw 2 paradigm shifts coming. The first one was bandwidth was becoming commoditized, less expensive, highly available, and it was going to drive customers into this commoditized bandwidth model. The second was that applications were increasingly delivered in the SaaS world.

Ryan: 06:39 Users were consuming applications from everywhere and they’re being delivered from everywhere in a SaaS model. When those two things happen, traditional hub spoke router architecture just starts to break down, it becomes really problematic. As we started seeing those trends, at least I put myself in the we category, but I’ll give full credit to our product leadership team who started this thing, they started seeing the trends there in terms of those 2 major paradigm shifts, and then looking at the problems their own customers were facing, right? Remediating problems with applications. The network team is always blamed, right?

Ryan: 07:12 Whenever there’s a problem with an application who gets blamed, it’s the network team always in forever. And now you call any major SaaS provider, and I won’t pick a one you’re laughing at me Max, but I won’t pick on any major SaaS provider. But when you call them and you say, hey, I have a problem, the response every time is, it’s your network. Right? So we always say IT is kind of the dumping ground and they’re always getting blamed for application issues, and the reality is that that’s not always the case.

Ryan: 07:36 And we wanted to give users the ability to build networks and manage networks the way it should have been done in the first place. Right? And that that that’s our story.

Max: 07:45 I’m laughing because, you know, for 20 years plus now, as a network engineer, I mean, you can never escape the it’s a network problem when you’re troubleshooting something. What does that mean in practice, though? I mean, what is reporting actually available? How does this actually come come from a mediation standpoint of fill in the blank cloud hosted SaaS application is slow and it’s your fault? What does that actually mean for somebody in practice in troubleshooting and managing that?

Max: 08:08 Perfect example because that is

Ryan: 08:09 the example. Right? It’s the reason we exist. IT gets a trouble ticket and it says, my phone doesn’t work or my ABC application doesn’t work. Then we go through the series of things we’ve always done as network practitioners.

Ryan: 08:22 We start to try to duplicate the issue and we spend an enormous amount of time digging into potential issues, and half the time by the time we try to figure out what the issue is it’s resolved itself, and then do we just stick it to the back of the pile and pretend it never happened, or are we going to try to prevent that in the future and and then life gets in the way, and and that’s just a vicious cycle. So what it means to us in practice is kind of twofold. So first, we don’t just provide historical analytics and that’s really important because that is what a lot of competitors do and what IT is traditionally relegated to is this idea of historical reporting and then dumping that data that you get into some tool that can help you aggregate different datasets and then go hopefully figure out what the problem was and course correct in the future. It’s very reactive by nature, it always has been. In our world, the first thing we do is try to remediate the issue in the first place.

Ryan: 09:12 By making better path selection decisions, by understanding the applications, we can many times remediate the issue in the first place. It’s nice when you’re in IT and you get an alarm that says, Hey, something’s broken, but don’t worry, your users aren’t sending in tickets, Let’s just go back and fix it when this link comes back up or this application server starts responding from ABC SaaS provider. That’s really nice. The second thing is in our dashboard, in our GUI, we have the best GUI on the planet. I’ll put that right here.

Ryan: 09:40 I’m putting it on record. We have the best GUI on the planet. When you dig into it and you really see it in practice, we present a lot of data in real time. We do so in a very dynamic manner. You can look at specific windows of time both in real time and historical up to 7 days standard in the gooey so you can rewind your network to look at particular issues or problematic times.

Ryan: 10:04 We present that information in a very consumable way And actually one of our best customers, customer number 1 for us, mister John Spiegel at Columbia Sportswear. So you’re on the West Coast, you probably know that brand. John actually is on record stating that we provide time to innocence for his team. Right? And I love that term.

Max: 10:21 I I I’m gonna I’m gonna start to use that time to innocence. That’s that’s fantastic.

Ryan: 10:25 Steel, I give John credit though, but we love that and it’s such a compliment because what he’s really saying is, okay. I have a problem. Let me dig into this GUI and let me look at, the physical layer stuff which most SD WAN providers being FAIR can demonstrate here’s what your links look like. That’s not rocket science, right? We’ve been able to do that for many years as network practitioners, but in the context of the application layer it’s always been very, very difficult.

Ryan: 10:46 We can present things like server response time from SaaS providers or round trip time issues between the branch and the destination. We measure very specific application heuristics like the three way handshake from a user to an application and did that even complete and what’s the status of that part of the transaction. So we can look at that in a really interesting way and present that in a very consumable way to our clients.

Max: 11:10 So actually, let’s back up a second. I want to dig into that a little bit more. So you’re talking about being able to measure and report on the actual application itself in a three way handshake between the client and the server. So this is not just that you’re looking at, is a server responding to a ping fast? This is, is the server or the destination actually responding to the client and actually serving data back to the client in a fast way.

Max: 11:34 So not is a network performing Exactly right. But is the application performing?

Ryan: 11:38 That’s right. It’s not can I see you? Right? I can see the front door of somebody’s house, but I don’t know what’s going on inside. And it’s really challenging to do it in the way we do it where you don’t have to be bookended.

Ryan: 11:48 Because some of our competitors, which you know Max, will offer a bookended solution and provide a little more context to how those applications are behaving. We can do so just by understanding the nature of how applications behave. So we’ll stick with the three way handshake example in this case, then we can understand how much data is passing back and forth. Is it a reasonable amount of time? Because reasonable is relative, you know that, I know that, network engineers know that.

Ryan: 12:13 We apply context based on what application it actually is, Reasonable is going to be different if I’m a let’s use a real time voice video call like we’re on right now. Reasonable is a lot different than SharePoint, as an example. Right? So you have to be able to understand things on a per application basis to apply context that makes reasonable effective. So let’s talk about, like, deployment models

Max: 12:35 a little bit. Actually, but before we get into that, I’m curious what you’ve seen recently. You know, a a lot of SD WAN was targeted around this idea of eliminating MPLS in private circuits. And, you know, in your view, I mean, is MPLS going away? Are we seeing a a variation of MPLS in private circuits?

Max: 12:51 Is there some other future state that we should be preparing for? I mean, what what has been happening with Cloudgenix customers, and and what are you seeing coming down the pipe?

Ryan: 12:59 That’s a great question. So I think when I started my journey in Cloudgenix almost 3 years ago, and I would say then the message we were delivering was exactly that. Right? Reduce significant costs and get off your MPLS. It’s not a 100% needed anymore.

Ryan: 13:15 It’s interesting what we’ve seen. A lot of our enterprise customers still maintain some private connectivity for many reasons. Right? There’s a huge host of reasons why. So I wouldn’t say MPLS is dying.

Ryan: 13:25 I don’t think that’s the right way to put it. I would say the relevant use cases for MPLS is certainly declining. As applications leave the customers’ 4 walls, I think you are seeing a declining use case. What our customers love, again, many of them would keep some private connectivity. What they love is that we’re not forcing them one way or the other.

Ryan: 13:46 We’re allowing them and providing them rich application behavioral statistics around how each application is performing over private and public connectivity, and we’re doing so and allowing them to make really good decisions on what type of connectivity they actually need, how much of that connectivity they need. I think it gives guys like you, strategic advisors in the space, a huge advantage. I sat on your side of the fence for a few years running an MSP practice in the past, and one of the things I always struggled with was that bandwidth educated guess would make an inference. Right? What kind of circuits do I need?

Ryan: 14:22 I don’t know. How many users do you have? And what are your applications? And then we make some arbitrary kind of math equation. Honestly, there were good educated guesses.

Ryan: 14:30 I would argue most of us get pretty close, but it wasn’t real context. It wasn’t here’s exactly what you need and how it’s behaving. So I think that’s an interesting thing. So I guess to come back to your original question, I wouldn’t say it’s dying. I would say the relevant use cases are definitely declining.

Ryan: 14:47 I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of providers really embrace SD WAN as their go forward strategy, right? They see it too. But it doesn’t mean it’s dead. There’s still certainly use cases.

Max: 14:59 Hi. I’m Max Clark, and you’re listening to the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At ClarkSIS, 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. With thousands of negotiated contracts, ClarkSIS has helped hundreds of businesses source and implement the right tech at the right price. You’re looking for a new vendor and wanna have peace of mind knowing you’ve made the right decision?

Max: 15:18 Visit us at clarksis.com to schedule an intro call. So let’s let’s talk about the branch or the edge or what was the traditional edge. Let’s talk about, you know, what does a deployment model look like? I mean, are enterprises deploying Cloudgenics and keeping firewalls? Are they removing firewalls?

Max: 15:36 What actually happens to the branch when you guys start getting into the picture?

Ryan: 15:41 So I’m assuming that just given the word firewall, I’m assuming you want this answer in a security context. Right? Is that a fair fair statement?

Max: 15:48 I’m I’m kinda curious. I mean, let’s say a bank would have probably a very different security posture and compliance posture than a large retailer or, you know, distributed enterprise. So broad strokes, what does it actually mean? We see some, you know, some SD WAN advocate for, you know, you put our box in and you don’t need a firewall anymore. We can coexist with the firewall, but the firewall goes away.

Max: 16:09 And I don’t think that’s a an all or nothing conversation with a lot of enterprises. It’s, people are a little more specific in how they want things to work. I’m just kinda curious what you’re seeing and how you actually deploy and and what, you know, a typical CloudGenix customer looks like, you know, day 1, you know, day 90, day 500. You know, what what’s what’s that evolution?

Ryan: 16:30 You’re exactly right. It is not the conversation we’re seeing in the distributed enterprise. In any of those examples that you mentioned, large retail distributed enterprise, I personally wouldn’t want a SD WAN provider being my security enforcement provider. I would want my SD WAN provider defend the edge, so become the edge of the security posture. Let’s put it this way, we look at distributed enterprises, I’ll give you an example, what we see with most customers is they have an existing firewall architecture obviously.

Ryan: 17:03 We typically insert in line with them, we typically sit behind them, we allow them to maintain that existing architecture. But what we do see at a huge margin is that all of them are moving towards some sort of like CASB type solution. They’re all moving towards the Cloud delivered security model. I think we’re all seeing that. Gartner’s out there broadcasting and many analysts are out there discussing and we’re big proponents of SASE.

Ryan: 17:27 This idea of the secure access service edge, the idea that there’s a convergence taking place between the wide area network and security from the Cloud. There’s a number of advantages to that. There’s a lot of scale there. You get a lot of intelligence in the aggregate, there’s less branch CPE to manage. So our story there is a product we call Cloud Blades.

Ryan: 17:50 So we never really touched on this, but another advantage of our core architectures that were based on an open API, and that’s allowed us to develop next generation API integrations into best of breed providers across what we define as the 5 key areas of the branch. So I’ll just quickly touch on those, that is the WAN obviously, which is where we sit. Collaboration, so think UCaaS and contact center as a service. The multi cloud world, so that’s your GCPs, your Equinix, your AWS, your Microsoft Azure services, branch operations, so that’s your Splunks of the world, ServiceNow’s of the world. Then the biggest one that we’ve seen in the quickest adoption of all of this, I would argue the quickest too would be UCaaS and certainly security.

Ryan: 18:32 So as we see security move to the cloud, the biggest problem that all the security providers have is how do I get my traffic securely to the enterprise edge in the network and back? What creates that connection? Most of our competitors’ solution is nail up a VPN. I’ve reduced a little bit of the value of that cloud security platform if I’m now single threaded and I have really no visibility into what’s going on on the security provider side. What am I actually doing other than just nailing up a tunnel?

Ryan: 19:01 Our solution is very different. It’s NextGen APIs and some of the world’s leading Cloud security providers, and many of the names you already know, and I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but literally 4 of the top 5 that exist today in our platform and there’s no cost to our customers to use it, and it’s an automated deployment mechanism. So the idea is if I’m a distributed enterprise and we have many, many in the Fortune 500 that are actually leveraging this across big providers like Zscaler or Symantec or Palo Alto. They have found that they started with that security posture of sitting behind the firewall because that investment may already be there. But what they’re looking forward to is that cloud security platform and they’re trying to solve for what does that migration path look like.

Ryan: 19:43 So we insert seamlessly in line, we can work with the existing firewall and then we can start migrating branch locations as maybe those devices sunset or as the customer decides they’re no longer relevant, we can create via API a direct connection into any leading cloud security provider and then become the enforcement point at the edge of the network. So the security posture is still on the cloud, but we become that enforcement point at the branch, and we become a single piece of CPE that manages all 5 of those areas of the branch. So operations, multi cloud collaboration, security, and then obviously the WAN.

Max: 20:18 You know, about 5, 6 years ago, I had a customer and we were in a conversation and he was relating you know, his remote locations as fancy Starbucks. And his view of the world was, you know, our office locations are a place for our employees to come and work and congregate and have meetings and have community. And my responsibility from an IT infrastructure is to give them very fast, very stable perform Internet access with access to our resources in a way that was better than what they had at their house. So they wanna come to the work because we’re screaming fast. But I don’t wanna have anything at the office.

Max: 20:53 What is the bare minimum of equipment that I have to have at the office to support this goal of just being a fancy Starbucks, and how do I manage that as as easy as possible? And it was a very interesting, you know, eliminating conversation for me, and it’s it really helped push me down this path farther. And I’m you know, coming from a network engineering standpoint where I was building networks and typing on keyboards and plugging, you know, fiber into into devices. Yeah. I look at the world now, and I can’t imagine that anybody who’s ever actually built any of this wants to maintain this going forward.

Max: 21:22 It’s like No doubt. It’s no doubt. Seems to be, like, the worst idea ever is to, like, have more things you’re responsible for versus, you know, really the scale and efficiency of leveraging service providers that are cloud based that, you know, can be elastic and scale up and scale down. I’ve always loved the CloudGenics story with Cloud Bread blades, the integration that you offer there. I think it’s way more powerful than a lot of the security competitors and telcos that are coming to market was saying, we have a single big firewall box on the West Coast, and all of our customers that were within this donut of region have to tunnel into this firewall in order for them to, you know, have, you know, this this managed instance.

Max: 22:05 I think all of those things are I think they’re although I think all those platforms are already DOA. It’s just how long before people really actually understand that and make that change. And and you mentioned this earlier. It’s it’s, I do feel like it’s it’s a lot of what is your maintenance and subs support, you know, subscription schedule. You know, as maintenance starts tailing off and comes up for renewals, it becomes a very big point for companies to evaluate, say, are we doing something we wanna change?

Ryan: 22:32 I’ll just tack on what you said because I agree with everything you said, and I appreciate your perspective because you you were out there actually doing the work. You know, I think I think we’ve been trying to solve for this as an industry for a while. Right? I look at NFV and deploying to the branch and saying, Okay, I’m going to get away from 5 boxes and I’m going to get to 1 box, right? And I’m going to virtualize everything there.

Ryan: 22:52 Well, the problem is that that becomes really dense, expensive, bulky CPE that is really hard to manage. I would think most network practitioners would agree that NFV hasn’t quite lived up to the promise, right? So in principle, think about it in some fashion the same way. I mean Cloud blades is actually a really interesting marketing term that we use Max, I don’t know if you know why the name is derivative, but it comes where we got the name, but it comes from the idea of in the old ISR router model, you would add blades for individual applications. So the idea is deliver these services.

Ryan: 23:27 It’s a service creation model to the branch that is efficient and again we’re running on an X86 box, right? So we’re just this software edge of the network that allows for really interesting integrations. Then we haven’t even touched on the fact together, we haven’t even wallowed in the fact that even if you have this unicorn deployment and you’re a distributed enterprise and you go deploy this minimalist approach, let’s argue you got NFV right at 1500 locations, I think we could all debate that all day, but let’s say you did and you did so in a cost effective manner, as soon as any of those providers change up something in the cloud there’s a lot more manual intervention and integrations, it is impossible to keep up with that. I think that’s really the downfall of NFV is this inability to keep up with dynamic service creation from the providers, and I think that we solve for that really well because of the API integrations. It just happens.

Ryan: 24:21 So if one of our UCaaS providers releases a new definition, it’s just applied. It’s instantaneous. There’s no manual lift there. I think that’s really important to highlight.

Max: 24:32 So let me actually I’m gonna unpack a little bit of this. So NFV, network function virtualization, is really a a technique. And, well, in my opinion, it’s a way for hardware manufacturers. They’re selling to telcos and specifically telcos that are supporting metro Ethernet, so the MEF functions. But the telco to them say, we’re gonna create additional services, and we’re gonna use NFV as the gateway to deliver the service.

Max: 24:56 And then in many physical boxes that deploy NFV, they’re you know, think of it like a switch or a router that has, you know, some sort of hypervisor and virtualization running on it so that when you can put an application on the edge in this box, and now you can orchestrate it and you can manage it. But this isn’t really NFV isn’t really solving a customer centric problem. It’s solving a service provider centric problem. How does a service provider sell additional things to that customer? And, you know, we don’t have a firewall strategy, so we can use this NFV to create a firewall strategy for the customer.

Max: 25:29 And I think part of the reason why NFV never really, you know, hasn’t materialized what you’ve said is it’s not a customer centric solve. It’s a service provider solve. So now you have a customer that has a need, an enterprise that has a need, saying we wanna solve this problem, and a service provider can say, oh, we’ve got this solution, but the solution might you know, it doesn’t really line up with what the customer wants, what the enterprise really needs.

Ryan: 25:52 It’s really, really well said. And it and it’s it’s the most relevant, obviously, in the large enterprise environments, right, at scale, to your point. But I I think that was said really well. Completely agree.

Max: 26:03 We should talk about we’re living in a a a post COVID world now, and we’re still waiting to see what this actually means for business and for the planet going forward. You know, roughly a month in in the US here, what are you seeing changing with with your customers? What’s the effect of this? How has Cloudgenix responded to it, you know, as as this massive shift to work from home has taken place? Where do you think this is going?

Ryan: 26:33 God. That’s a deep question, and I love it. I I think it’s really important. I think it’s really relevant. So I’ll tell you what.

Ryan: 26:40 I’m gonna I’m gonna stay completely away from a lot of the the business implications here with the exception of of kinda one statement. Right? When everyone moves to working from home, you’ve introduced a tremendous amount of security risk, operational lift, inefficiency that maybe had been solved for in the past. I think that a lot of organizations are really struggling for that, Right? And they’re struggling with ways to solve that.

Ryan: 27:03 I think guys like you are critically important to helping them navigate that. Now, I will say we’re being extremely cautious at Cloudgenix. We are not opportunistic here. We’re not trying to be opportunistic. We don’t want to be opportunistic.

Ryan: 27:17 This is not the time for that. In our view, and I can say this is leadership from the top down. I work for some of the best people on the planet. They’re very human leaders that really recognize the human element of this problem. I think that we as an organization are doing that very well.

Ryan: 27:33 We’re being there for our customers, we’re talking through, looking at distribution, making sure we can take care of our customers, number 1. But number 2, as an example, we’re prioritizing gear shipments and distribution for healthcare and healthcare related providers of customers of ours. So we’re making sure that if we have a customer that is helping solve health challenges, we’re going to prioritize that customer at any cost. And we have put several of our large enterprise customers on an inventory hold and shared with them that we are prioritizing other healthcare related customers and prospects that are really asking us for that. They have responded Max with warm hugs and smiles, honestly.

Ryan: 28:11 It’s been really touching It’s not an easy thing to do, right? Make that call. I think it’s a testament to how great our customer community is because they’re right in line with us. Some of the things we’re doing internally that I’d love to share with you and with the world because I’m really proud of it is as a team we are embracing the body, the mind, and we have created Slack channels for our entire team. We have a workout of the day channel and our entire team posts something that they did for that day working out.

Ryan: 28:42 Obviously people have varying levels of what they’re doing physically, we have guys and gals that are incredibly fit and do these insane workouts that just make me so envious, and mine might be wrestling with my 4 year old. That could be exhausting, he’s a big boy. So there’s certainly a sliding scale. We have an Eat Healthy channel and then we have a book club channel. So we’re just sharing with each other in real time things that we’re doing to stay sane.

Ryan: 29:09 We’re doing town hall meetings and daily kickoffs just to keep the team feeling like there’s a sense of community and that everyone’s got your back because I think we’re all a little scared right now. I mean I’m a father of 2 and this hasn’t been an easy thing, forget the adjustment and forget the work thing. I think people are pretty understanding. I bet you’d laugh right now if my 4 year old came up here dressed like a ninja and jumped on my back because that’s the reality of the situation we’re in. I think people are pretty understanding of it.

Ryan: 29:34 For me it’s on a personal level, I’m scared as a father and I’m sure other people are and we’re trying as an organization just to remain very human here and listen to our customers and what they need and what our partners need and just answer calls and be empathetic and help do anything we can to make this easier on somebody else. And that’s that’s genuinely what what we’re trying to do.

Max: 29:56 You know, I hate reading people refer to this right now as as, you know, as a work from home, you know, work from home experiment because it’s it’s really, it’s not. You know? It’s, you know, as you just pointed out, I mean, most people that were in a work from home beforehand, you know, with children, their children are at school. There’s activities. There’s daycare.

Max: 30:17 There’s, you know, other other, you know, other structures. I mean, there’s not this this pressure. Finding the balance and and maintaining exercise and and fitness and, like, mental health. It’s been a challenge for me. I mean, I was you know, I came into the year.

Max: 30:32 I’d started my new year’s resolution early. You know, I was a 4 day you know, 4 day a week gym guy going into March. And it’s been full stop. And trying to figure out how to replace that’s been very I haven’t been very successful yet. You know, hopefully, this week, we get through this.

Max: 30:49 People stay home. We flatten the curve. We see treatments come out that are effective. We get to a vaccine, and we can all go out and eat sushi and or not again, but, you know, you know, depending if you like fish or not. Right?

Ryan: 31:03 Well, you’re a California guy. I know you eat sushi. That’s what we’re that’s what we’re gonna eat when I come see you. But we, listen, I I appreciate you sharing that. I mean, that’s a that’s a that’s a personal thing to share, and and you’re right.

Ryan: 31:13 Keeping that balance in mental and physical health, and we are I’ll tell you what, I’ll commit to sending you a couple of the workouts of the day. I think you’ll like it. We have a really fit organization and you don’t need anything other than a box for some of them. They’re designed that way. People are sharing all you need is a 5 pound weight in each hand and you can do this, and you need a box jump for this.

Ryan: 31:34 And and I’ve tried some of them, and I’ll tell you, I almost died on a couple of them. So I may not be able to keep up with my whole organization. They’re pretty pretty rock solid, man. But, I’ll commit to sending you some of that, and I appreciate you sharing that with me. That was that was a nice thing to share.

Max: 31:48 So before we wrap here, is there anything we haven’t touched on that that that you’d like to talk about?

Ryan: 31:55 You’ll see some big announcements coming. So we’ve publicly announced that Palo Alto has an intent to purchase Cloudgenics, which is a really exciting time for us. A large part of what we talked about was Cloudblades and next generation cloud security paradigm and I think everyone understands the market is going to a SaaSy type model so that’s really exciting to be a part of. So I can’t really comment on anything other than what you’ve seen so please check that out. But in general, the last thing I’ll leave with is we believe in solving for business outcomes.

Ryan: 32:26 I think the thing that’s most reflective for us is how our customers have responded to us. So I’d love you to encourage your listeners and you to check out Gartner Peer Insights, which is a forum for customers to go discuss how their experience has been with any particular vendor. It’s the good, bad, and the ugly on everybody including us, and you’ll see that some of our early customers had issues with global distribution because global distribution is really hard when you’re a young company, and that’s a fair assessment. It’s all out there, and we’re so proud of the responses we’ve gotten. We recently won the Gartner Customer’s Choice Award for the SD WAN marketplace, so we felt very proud of that, very humbled by the response from our customers, and, it was just absolutely outstanding.

Ryan: 33:08 And I would encourage everyone to go take a look at that because it’s something we we certainly wave that flag very proudly.

Max: 33:14 Well, Ryan, thank you very much for your time. It’s always a pleasure chatting with you.

Ryan: 33:18 Yeah. Enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me, and stay safe and keep the family safe. And we’ll I’m sure we’ll have a chance to eat some sushi soon, man, when we’re all allowed back on airplanes.

Max: 33:26 Looking forward to it. Thanks for joining the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At Clarkesys, 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.

Max: 33:39 Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.